● 08.15.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 15/08/2022: First RC of Linux 6.x, Linux Lite 6.0 Reviewed

Posted in News Roundup at 12:01 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• We had another full week in the world of Linux Release with Ubuntu 220.04.1, SparkyLinux 6.4, ExTiX 22.8, Voyager Live 22.04.1.1, EndeavourOS 22.7, and Garuda Linux 220808.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Our garage Linux server has died, and this time we’re looking at data loss. We attempt to revive our zombie box and reflect on what went wrong.

• **sbotools** shasum

• Josh and Kurt talk about our lack of security and some of the data bias problems that can emerge. A lot of what we think is security data is really just biased data. This is OK as long as we understand the data is broken and know this is the first step in a longer journey.

• I rely on OBS for all of my videos and OBS 28.0 is going to be a massive update to the project swapping over to a new QT 6 UI and finally shipping the websocket plugin as a first party plugin

Kernel Space

• Linus has released 6.0-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release.

• Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for Linux 6.0, but doesn’t mind what you call it.

• “After I had already decided to call this kernel 6.0, a few Chinese developers piped up and pointed out that ’5.20′ is a more wholesome version of the Western ’4.20′ internet-famous number,” he wrote in his announcement that Linux 6.0 rc1 has been released.

• “4.20″ is a reference to a day on which some celebrate marijuana, while “5.20″ does likewise for magic mushrooms.

• “So if you want to call this ‘Linux 5.20′, go right ahead,” Torvalds wrote.

• “Because the kernel version numbers really are entirely made up and have no intrinsic meaning.”

• That this week’s release has the 6.0 label is still nice to know, as discussion on the Linux kernel mailing list in recent weeks used 5.20 and 6.0 interchangeably.

• As The Register has already reported, the release does not make major changes to the kernel but does include many useful updates – such as more RISC-V support, code to drive Intel’s Gaudi accelerators, and improved ACPI handling.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Docker on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Docker CE is a free and open-source containerization platform. Docker uses the Linux Kernel to create the containers on top of an operating system. Which is used to create, deploy and run the applications.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of Docker containers on Rocky Linux. 9.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Wire Desktop on Pop!_OS 22.04.

• Today we are looking at how to install Tecknix Client on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• In Windows, services, tasks, and processes can be viewed using the task manager application. Similarly, in Ubuntu, you can view all the services using the command line. If you are a beginner or using ubuntu for general or personal use, you may not have felt the need to check the services.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Opera Browser on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Opera is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Opera Software and used web browser based on the Chromium browser project. Some users love Opera for its security features such as an ad blocker, battery saver, and free VPN offering for secure internet access.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of an Opera Browser on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

Games

• Nvidia’s new R515 driver will provide an open-source driver for the community for the first time, hopefully giving the Linux community a way to more easily use Nvidia graphics cards in their systems, and Nvidia providing more open-source technology standards has many benefits. Unfortunately, open-sourcing software has not been a staple with Nvidia and, as such, has caused a bit of an uproar in their community. But with the new R515 driver, this may be changing for the better.

• People have been begging Nvidia to be more open with their driver software, similar to companies like Intel and AMD, which provide open-source drivers for their products. But Nvidia has, until now, been closed-source with their drivers, which doesn’t cause too many issues for Windows users, but for the Linux community, it has made using Nvidia GPUs more challenging to optimize. Since Nvidia drivers are not open-sourced, developers are unable to look at the source code of a driver and develop their software with the full knowledge of how the drivers were coded, unlike with an AMD driver, for example, which is open-source, allowing for developers to see how the drivers were coded completely.

• [...]

• Overall, the announcement of officially providing open-source Nvidia drivers is a huge boon. This will give developers much more information about the drivers they are developing software and games for, as well as provide the community to help develop new drivers since they are now open-source. The Linux community will also benefit over time as Linux has a good chance of becoming more compatible and reliable with Nvidia GPUs as they are with AMD and Intel, which will help with performance and efficiency, as well as with gaming. With Nvidia going open-source, it may continue to put more pressure on other tech companies to be more open about their technologies which will also help support a more free and open technological future.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

• It has been two years since a DistroWatch review of Linux Lite. There are at least 93 distros on DistroWatch that support the Xfce desktop environment, but the out-of-the-box configuration of Linux Lite is pleasing, simple to use, and straightforward to most computer users. Linux Lite describes itself as, “… a ‘gateway operating system’. Your first simple, fast and free stop in the world of Linux.” Does it meet the muster? Can it truly be a strong first stop in the world of Linux?

• Installation

• Linux Lite 6.0, code name Fluorite, was released on 31 May 2022 at 16:23 (it’s unclear if that was local time for me or for the server). The installation process is very simple, and it uses one of the most straightforward installation wizards. Even a completely new Linux user could likely click their way through a Linux Lite install. The live environment boots to a Lite Welcome splash screen with such options as Install Updates, Install Drivers, Set a Restore Point, etc. While some of these features may be useful, the most obvious choice is Install Now, thus beginning the installation process. WiFi worked out of the box, which is always good news. The installer then gives the user the option to download updates while installing and we can opt to install third-party software for WiFi and graphics drivers.

• [...]

• Out of the box, Linux Lite is an easy step into the world of Linux computing. It has useful features, it is not overly bloated with unnecessary software, it has great defaults that a user coming from another operating system could learn to love. With the help of Internet searching, any specific issues with Linux Lite can be easily solved. Would I recommend Linux Lite to a user coming from a different operating system? Yes, I might. If the user was coming from Windows and was very apprehensive about using unfamiliar interfaces, Linux Lite has a great theme and a very solid base.

BSD

• I explained that once I’d assembled the VPNs and basic tooling I needed, I realised none of it required a graphical environment at all. I uninstalled Xorg, and since then have been using tmux as my “window manager”.

• I’ll admit, I left out that I’d eschewed (gesundheit) a desktop environment for my old friend fluxbox first, but even that seemed redundant given I was only using it to spawn a single terminal window with tabs. Removing xorg entirely was the logical next step.

• [...]

• It sounds so obvious in retrospect, but not having a wall of distractions in front of your face is fantastic for writing. I’ve made so much more progress in my various silly sci-fi novels, technical writing, and many of the posts I’ve since published here.

Debian Family

• Spiral Linux makes it easier for Linux newcomers to adapt to the operating system by providing a stable, Debian-based environment.

• Debian is one of the most widely used, trusted Linux distros. It wouldn’t be wrong to say that it is a base distribution for many other OSes, making it one of the most in-demand Linux versions.

• Spiral Linux is one such distribution that owes its roots to Debian. Its focus lies in fostering simplicity and providing out-of-the-box features and functionality to the end users.

• If you are new to open-source operating systems and want to make an acquaintance with an easy-to-use Linux distro, it’s time to turn to Spiral Linux.

• [...]

• Many users are questioning the need for yet another new Debian-based Linux distro, considering plenty are already available in the market. You might find Spiral Linux an easy OS to install and use if you are a new user.

• In short, Spiral Linux works, and it works well. It gives you everything you might need to ease yourself into the world of Linux. You can easily migrate to another OS to try your newly acquired skills when you are a little more familiar with its various nuances.

• To make the most out of your Linux usage experiences, you should always keep your requirements in mind and then pick and choose an operating system that suits you best.

• The SparkyLinux team has announced the release of SparkyLinux 6.4, the latest stable update in the project’s 6.x series.

• Sparky is a fast, lightweight, and fully customizable OS built on Debian that offers a few versions for different users and tasks. One of the distribution’s distinguishing features is that it provides versions based on both the stable (SparkyLinux Stable) and test (SparkyLinux Semi-Rolling) branches of Debian.

• The SparkyLinux 6.4 ‘Stable’ version features ISOs with three different desktop environments – LXQt, Xfce, and KDE. At the same time, the distro ‘Semi-Rolling’ version, which is based on Debian’s testing branch, features more up-to-date packages and comes with the same desktop environments as their ‘Stable’ version plus MATE desktop environment added.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• These past couple of months I have been working to bring debuginfod to Ubuntu. I thought it would be a good idea to make this post and explain a little bit about what the service is and how I’m planning to deploy it.

• [...]

• With more and more GNU/Linux distributions offering a debuginfod service to their users, I strongly believe that Ubuntu cannot afford to stay out of this “party” anymore. Fortunately, I have a manager who not only agrees with me but also turned the right knobs in order to make this project one of my priorities for this development cycle.

• The deployment of this service will be made in stages. The first one, whose results are due to be announced in the upcoming weeks, encompasses indexing and serving all of the available debug symbols from the official Ubuntu repository. In other words, the service will serve everything from main, universe and multiverse, from every supported Ubuntu release out there.

• This initial (a.k.a. “alpha”) stage will also allow us to have an estimate of how much the service is used, so that we can better determine the resources allocated to it.

Open Hardware/Modding

• We’ve shown you before how to send sensor data over WiFi, but this time we’re taking it a step further. Our newest tutorial shows you how to use this WiFi data connection to then visualize your data in real time on an IoT Dashboard.

• If you’re in need of high precision positioning, look no further than utilizing the power of real time kinematics (RTK). We now have a full page of resources for all your RTK questions!

• Ever wondered what all the hype is with RTK and why your positioning project could use it? Ever wanted to know the specs of our different RTK receiver boards at a glance to see which one is right for your project, or been curious about the applications of our RTK products?

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• This is the platonic ideal. We’re not there yet, but the all signs point to this rather than specialization.

• Applications and their infrastructure (functions, queues, permissions, runtime) have always been closely intertwined. Fewer handoffs mean quicker deployments and less context loss.

• I changed how I format my blog posts. I’ve been testing this new format for a while and I like it so much I retroactively went through previous posts and re-formatted them too.

• In this way, the purist in me has beat out the practical guy. But hey, it’s an eternal struggle. The practical guy will be back when the purist gets knocked over the head by the complexity of the real world and suddenly realizes the value of the practical guy’s argument.

• [...]

• Now when I start a blog post, I have a blank editor staring at me and I just start writing, not worrying about the technical details I’ll have to add later.

• Specifically, there are some things which we are good at teaching people to do, like calculus or playing the piano. We have well-tested syllabi for these types of things. Then there are some things we just don’t know how to teach people, like software engineering, solving crossword puzzles, flying helicopters, and noticing improvised explosive devices in urban environments. Some people get really good at them, and others don’t. If you ask an expert what they are doing so well, they will shrug and go, “I don’t know, but it felt right at the time.” These are the types of skills Accelerated Expertise deals with. Anyway. These are a few of my notes from the book. These points are, to the best of my recollection, paraphrasing what the authors wrote. Most of it was backed by at least somewhat solid research. My personal experiences don’t always agree with this, but it’s still worth keeping in mind.

• [...]

• It is important that training also covers conceptual models and abstractions. Giving the learner the right language, so to speak, helps them communicate with the instructor and gives them tools to reflect on their own.

• When you design a system of decent size, whether it’s software or something else, you are going to have to decompose it into subsystems, or modules.

SQL

• In the first part of this series, I showed how to replace characters in a string using SQL and regular expressions. This time, I’ll show other regular expressions that are available for us to use. The regular expression functions I’ll show are REGEXP_COUNT and REGEXP_LIKE and the examples come from production programs that I’ve recently implemented.

• In the first example (Figure 1), I want to get a count of the number of occurrences of a pattern within a string. To make this more interesting, I’m searching for two different patterns within a sting. To accomplish this objective, I used REGEXP_COUNT to get a count of how many times the pattern appears in a string.

Leftovers

• From unleashing creativity to mitigating risk, Ben Stokes of Tiny Projects shares some of the main reasons why developers are building so many side projects.

• I’ve been in a melancholic funk for a couple of years now, as I’m sure we all have been. I’ve felt rudderless, tired, distant, and depressed to tears. Travel has been out of the question, and it’s been difficult to find joy in the things I usually love. Some days are easier than others, but frankly I haven’t felt it this bad since my mum died, bundled with all the regret that I couldn’t save her.

Education

• The appointment of a lobbyist to lead a Sydney university only emphasises the tightening grip of business on higher education. And as humanities courses are jettisoned and academics laid off work, the salaries of university chiefs have leapt into the stratosphere, writes Michael Sainsbury.

• If there was any doubt about the undue influence that the corporate sector has played in the country’s universities it has been put to bed with the appointment of Business Council of Australia chief Jennifer Westacott as Chancellor of Western Sydney University.

• Westacott will retain her role at the BCA as well as continuing her nine-year-old board tenure at former coal miner and retailer Wesfarmers. At the BCA she has pushed for lower wages and lower company taxes, and in 2014 celebrated the Abbott government’s repeal of the carbon tax which set Australia back almost a decade on climate change action and helped set up the current energy crisis.

Hardware

• This is fifth part of our in-depth coverage of the entry and midrange Power10 machines that were announced on July 12. This week, we end the hardware deep dives with a look at the Power E1050 midrange machine. This is one of the best and most capable servers that Big Blue has ever designed, and it is a damned shame that it does not run the IBM i operating system.

• It’s not often we come across an Intel Xeon SBC, but that’s just what AAEON EPIC-TGH7 single board computer offers thanks to a choice of Intel Tiger Lake H processors up to the Xeon W-11865MRE octa-core/16-thread processor.

• If you have been waiting to use the new release of PowerHA SystemMirror for IBM i 7.5, then we have good news for you: IBM has finally completed the paperwork necessary to enable customers to actually get it.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• The “American Prosperity Alliance” does not exist, except as an anonymously controlled bank account that has paid for the production and dissemination of a slick ad that spreads the falsehood that the Democrats have cut $300b from Medicare:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xCep6NvbhE

• Let me repeat: this is a lie. What “American Prosperity Alliance” is talking about here is a provision in the bill that allows Medicare to negotiate drug prices, rather than simply paying whatever Big Pharma wants to charge. This practice is why Americans pay more for their drugs than, say, Canadians:

• https://personalimportation.org/dramatic-drug-price-differences-canada-vs-us/

• To be clear: the new bill will curb the eye-watering public price-gouging that Big Pharma enjoys, and halt the transfer of $300b in public money to pharma companies’ shareholders, by allowing Medicare to bargain to get prices similar to those paid by other governments in countries like Australia, Canada, and the UK.

• There is no universe in which this a $300b cut to Medicare. It’s like the Dems have pledged to halt $300b in fraud and the American Prosperity Alliance went to the country’s elderly and sick and screamed: “They’re cutting your benefits!” In fact, it’s not like that – it is that.

Defence/Aggression

• Britain’s military knew that fighters from an Al Qaeda-linked terrorist organisation were benefiting from the overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, but continued to support Nato airstrikes in Libya for another two months.

• The revelation raises serious questions about British foreign policy and whether the UK’s then prime minister David Cameron misled parliament.

• In early September 2011, Cameron updated the House of Commons about the situation in Libya, telling MPs: “This revolution was not about extreme Islamism; al-Qaeda played no part in it.”

• However, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) had assessed the month before that: “The 17 February Brigade is likely to be an enduring player in [the] transition” away from Gaddafi’s regime and had “political linkages” to Libya’s rebel leadership, the National Transitional Council.

• The 19th century rebellion actually began as a movement against exploitation by Indian ‘upper’ caste zamindars, moneylenders, merchants and police officials who had come to dominate the economic sphere of Santhal life.

• [...]

• One such popular act of ritualised remembering is that of the great Santhal rebellion that took place in mid-19th century in British India.

Environment

Energy

• To shore up their crumbling legitimacy in the face of growing and justified scrutiny, blockchain advocates are on a rebranding exercise that’s as cynical as it is transparent!

Finance

• Well, most textbooks talk about industrial capitalism as if the function of banks is to make loans to factories to build plants and equipment and hire more labor to produce goods and keep the economy going, and that’s what everybody expected banks to do in the late 19th century

• Not every negotiation is open to integrative bargaining. For example, in car buying negotiations, the buyer wants to pay as little as possible, the seller wants to charge as much as possible, and it’s often not a repeated transaction. But some are.

• On its way to electoral oblivion, the Morrison government kept the dollars flowing to select beneficiaries, in defiance of the 70-year-old parliamentary “caretaker” convention, writes #Mate.

• On May 16, five days before the election, the then Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, announced a $30 million grant to Boral to “explore the feasibility of developing a carbon capture plant in the Southern Highlands.” Given the energy policies of the Labor and the Coalition were very much at odds, this grant appears to have been a breach of the caretaker conventions. (Curiously, Taylor’s facebook video about it has since been deleted, but the announcement features proudly on the Boral website.)

• Call them the $600,000 (an hour) men (and women). That’s how much taxpayer money the Morrison government lavished on grants every hour during the six long weeks of the election campaign.

• There’s money in influence peddling and paper shuffling. KPMG just announced a 16% jump in revenue to $2bn in the wake of EY’s recent 18% jump. Top brass at both Big 4 advisory houses are swimming in bonuses. What’s the scam?

• The scam is the Big 4 are secretive partnerships, not companies, and they don’t have to disclose where their money is coming from, even though they are the most powerful private institutions in the world. Most of the income growth comes from governments. It’s our money, public money, and the Big 4 have shown a lot of flair in recent years getting their hands on it.

• In prescribing cures for inflation, economists rely on the diagnosis of Nobel laureate Milton Friedman: inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon—too much money chasing too few goods. But that equation has three variables: too much money (“demand”) chasing (the “velocity” of spending) too few goods (“supply”). And “orthodox” economists, from Lawrence Summers to the Federal Reserve, seem to be focusing only on the “demand” variable.

• Governments are backing more preschool places even as the sector grapples with staff shortages and industrial unrest. The plan has been linked to the ambition for massive productivity gains. Are the under-fives of Australia the latest conscripts in our seemingly endless neoliberal push for higher productivity? Mark Sawyer examines the evidence.

• It’s been touted as a radical revamp of the education systems of Australia’s two biggest states. From 2030, all children in NSW and Victoria will be able to access play-based learning for free in the year before they start kindergarten.

• “It’s a game changer and it’s exciting and there is big money behind it because we have to do well for our kids,” NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said when the program was announced in June.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• I couldn’t write an article on parliamentary procedure without talking about alternatives to majority voting. One of the flaws of majority voting is that in effect, it’s the majority deciding what’s best for the minority, with very little consideration for what the minority thinks.

• There are two possible reasons majority voting can work. One of them is less sinister: if each participant chooses to selflessly accept the majority opinion regardless of what it is for the greater good of the group, the majority vote will work.

• The other reason is that the majority outnumbers the minority and can, hypothetically, threaten them with violence if they don’t comply with the majority decision. I suspect this is the historical background behind the idea of the majority vote. 50 % is simply the smallest number you can have while not risking having the vote overturned by force.

• Former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman, Rod Sims is continuing to try and spin the myth that the News Media Bargaining Code, which was put in place last year, can be used to dictate things to either Google or Facebook.

• In Sims’ world, the code, which allowed news organisations to negotiate payments with Google and Facebook for content use, was put in place “despite threats, widely publicised around the world, to remove Google Search from Australia and to take all news and more off Facebook”.

• The quote comes from a piece Sims wrote for The Conversation, coincidentally one of the two eligible sites with which Facebook has refused to negotiate a deal. The other site spurned by Facebook is SBS.

• But Sims has forgotten to provide the context that the code was only passed after the two technology firms listed a number of conditions, which the government had no choice but to accept.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Telecommunications company Ooredoo must put the safety of millions of people in Myanmar first, and not abandon control of the country’s last internationally-owned telco to the junta. The Qatari-owned provider has reportedly informed Myanmar regulators of its plans to exit the country. There are indications that it will likely sell its operations to companies with links to the military and potential ties to sanctioned actors and entities, likely leaving Myanmar with a telco sector entirely dominated by occupying forces.

• Access Now and four other organizations reached out to the Ooredoo Group’s CEO on August 11, 2022, to push for constructive engagement and dialogue with stakeholders to address and protect against imminent human rights risks of this sale. This was a follow-up to a first letter sent by Access Now to Ooredoo Myanmar’s CEO on July 21, 2022. The company has not responded to, or acknowledged, either communication.

• “The Myanmar junta’s brazen brutality is evident from its recent and planned executions of pro-democracy activists. The military will ruthlessly track using any technological means it is allowed to access and target people to crush any resistance,” said Raman Jit Singh Chima, Senior International Counsel and Asia Pacific Policy Director at Access Now. “In this environment, all stakeholders, especially businesses, must conduct heightened due diligence to ensure that their actions will not facilitate the junta’s plan to eradicate dissent and destroy every platform for protest.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• The Peoples’ Action for Employment Guarantee (PAEG) has opposed the rural development ministry’s May 13 order discontinuing manual attendance at Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) scheme worksites with more than 20 workers and replacing it with the National Mobile Monitoring System (NMMS) app.

• Terming the decision as a violation of law that will be regressive to the gains made in efforts to strengthen worksite transparency and exclude women, the PAEG—a group of academicians and activists attempting to ensure better implementation of NREGA via research, advocacy and public intervention—said that the move is fraught with technical challenges.

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