● 08.22.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 22/08/2022: Mozilla Firefox 104 and public-inbox 1.9.0

Posted in News Roundup at 3:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Star Labs, hardware vendor with some really lovely looking laptops with first-class Linux support have announced the StarBook Mk VI with Ryzen 7 or Intel 12th Gen.

• [...]

• For models currently in production (sold out), they give you a 5% discount if you pre-order. Pricing usually £1,062.00 with a current discount to £1,008.90.

• Meanwhile, they’re also working on the bigger StarFighter laptop which will be a 15.6″ beast that has a 4K IPS matte display and 45W Intel / AMD processors. It will be their biggest and most expensive unit yet, with Star Labs mostly targetting low-mid ring previously.

• It may not be every day, but there will be times when you need to mirror your Android screen to your Linux desktop. You might want to give a presentation from your phone, check the app you are developing without touching your Android device, view photos and other media on a bigger screen, etc. No matter what the reason is, it is actually really easy to cast your Android screen to Linux.

Server

• Since the very beginning of Kubernetes, the topic of persistent data and how to address the requirement of stateful applications has been an important topic. Support for stateless deployments was natural, present from the start, and garnered attention, becoming very well-known. Work on better support for stateful applications was also present from early on, with each release increasing the scope of what could be run on Kubernetes.

• Message queues, databases, clustered filesystems: these are some examples of the solutions that have different storage requirements and that are, today, increasingly deployed in Kubernetes. Dealing with ephemeral and persistent storage, local or remote, file or block, from many different vendors, while considering how to provide the needed resiliency and data consistency that users expect, all of this is under SIG Storage’s umbrella.

• In this SIG Storage spotlight, Frederico Muñoz (Cloud & Architecture Lead at SAS) talked with Xing Yang, Tech Lead at VMware and co-chair of SIG Storage, on how the SIG is organized, what are the current challenges and how anyone can get involved and contribute.

Audiocasts/Shows

• The five most common problems when trying out an immutable Linux distro like NixOS. Plus, why one Linux dev says just target WINE.

Kernel Space

• Just a week after announcing the first Linux 6.0 release candidate, Linus Torvalds is back with the second release candidate for the Linux kernel.

• What’s Changed in the Linux 6.0 Release Candidate 2?

• Torvalds once again downplayed the significance of the release.

• “Nothing particularly interesting here, rc2 tends to be fairly calm with people taking a breather and not yet having found a lot of bugs,” he wrote in a message to the Linux Kernel Mailing List

• Still, the release candidate does come with the usual round of bug fixes. Torvalds noted updates that smoothed out problems running tests on Google cloud virtual machines.

Graphics Stack

• I was planning to write this Friday, but then it was Friday, so I didn’t.

• You know how it is.

• I’ve been doing a lot of work on CPU optimizations in zink lately. I had planned to do some benchmarks of this, but now it’s Monday and someone has already done it for me, so I won’t.

• Sometimes it’s like that too.

• But the overly-technical, word-heavy, bullet-point-laden blog post still needs to be written, and now it’s Monday, so here I am.

• Speed: How does it work?

• [...]

• Descriptor set allocation was another bottleneck. In order to avoid blowing out heaps on heap-based hardware, I’ve capped descriptor pools to only contain 100 sets at a time. This means that even if a set isn’t fully utilized, it’s not consuming a huge amount of resources. It also means that allocation is faster when cmdbufs (and their associated descriptor pools) get reset.

• Remember when I said that there were N descriptor pools for N cmdbufs? Obviously this was a lie. What I meant to say was there are N * O descriptor pools for N cmdbufs, where O is the number of times the descriptor pool has overflowed because it had to allocate more than 100 sets. In this scenario, the overflowed (full) descriptor pool is appended to an array which then gets freed upon cmdbuf reset. Since the pools are relatively small, this recycling operation is pretty fast.

• After a year in development, the open source “Asahi” driver for the Apple GPU is running real games. There’s more to do, but Neverball is already playable (and a lot of fun!).

• Neverball uses legacy “fixed function” OpenGL. Rather than supply programmable shaders like OpenGL 2, old OpenGL 1 applications configure a fixed set of graphics effects like fog and alpha testing. Modern GPUs don’t implement these features in hardware. Instead, the driver synthesizes shaders implementing the desired graphics. This translation is complicated, but we get it for “free” as an open source driver in Mesa. If we implement the modern shader pipeline, Mesa will handle fixed function OpenGL for us transparently. That’s a win for open source drivers, and a win for GPU acceleration on Asahi Linux.

Applications

• GMPC (GNOME Music Player Client) is a audio player based on MPD (Music Player Daemon) that I’ve been using as my main audio player for years now.

• Unfortunately, it’s marked as “unmaintained” in the official list of MPD clients, along with basically every client available in Debian. In fact, if you look closely, all but one of the 5 unmaintained clients are in Debian (ario, cantata, gmpc, and sonata), which is kind of sad. And none of the active ones are packaged.

• [...]

• For now, I guess that ymuse is the most promising client, even though it’s still lacking some features and performance is suffering compared to gmpc. I’ll keep updating this page as I find more information about the projects. I do not intend to package anything yet, and will wait a while to see if a clear winner emerges.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WineHQ on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, WineHQ can be used to run Windows software and games on Linux natively without dual booting windows with Linux or without using an emulator. Wine is not only supported on Linux but also on BSD, Solaris, and macOS.

• 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 WineHQ on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

• I self-host some services on virtual machines (VMs), and I’m currently using Debian 11.x as the host machine relying on the libvirt infrastructure to manage QEMU/KVM machines. While everything has worked fine for years (including on Debian 10.x), there has always been one issue causing a one-minute delay every time I install a new VM: the default images run a DHCP client that never succeeds in my environment. I never found out a way to disable DHCP in the image, and none of the documented ways through cloud-init that I have tried worked. A couple of days ago, after reading the AlmaLinux wiki I found a solution that works with Debian.

• Every OS has in-built dependencies to function smoothly. In short, these supporting programs are often required to compile software and ensure all dependent software is available when needed.

• Ubuntu’s build-essential meta-package includes several such packages, which ensure your Linux experience is as seamless as you would like it to be. These packages are a part of Debian and contain all the components you need to create a Debian package.

• There was a time when computers on the net were accessible via the Telnet protocol. Since this protocol did not offer encryption, recording passwords became a trivial matter.

• To secure remote access, Tatu Ylönen wrote a suite of programs in the mid-1990s – consisting of server, client, and utilities – which he called ssh (secure shell).

• Later he founded the company ssh.com and offered version 2 of the SSH suite only commercially. As a result, developers of the OpenBSD operating system forked the public source code of version 1. They further developed the program under the name “OpenSSH”. This OpenSSH suite became an integral part of virtually all Linux distributions.

• Ansible makes it much easier for busy admins to manage a large collection of servers. Instead of having to remote into each server to handle a task, you can take care of much of it from a single point of entry. One reason why I prefer Ansible over similar tools is that Ansible doesn’t require you to install clients on remote nodes. Instead, Ansible uses SSH to execute all tasks, and YAML files hold the definitions of the tasks to be run.

• Although Arch Linux is great, its installation is a show-stopper for many people. But now there’s a straightforward GUI-based installer for Arch. And you already know how to use it.

• The ImageMagick tool is a library with which you can create, edit, compose, or convert digital images. It supports many available formats and is presented for Linux without a lot of fuss.

• ImageMagick can resize, flip, mirror, rotate, distort, shear and transform images, adjust image colors, apply various special effects, or draw text, lines, polygons, ellipses, and Bézier curves.

• One of the best things about this tool is that it is open source and free, and it has excellent support for Linux.

• New: The LearnLinuxTV Nextcloud guide is now updated for Ubuntu 22.04 with this video! It’s time to install Nextcloud! Nextcloud is the best platform for building your very own self-hosted collaboration platform, complete with features such as online document editing, file synchronization, calendar, contacts, and countless plugins. In this video, you’ll be walked through the entire process, and by the end you’ll have your very own Nextcloud server that’s completely set up and ready for action by the end.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• A bug report filed by Ubuntu developers this weekend describes the new device security feature as “confusing and unhelpful” in its current guise.

• “A default Ubuntu install only gets us “Security Level 1”. The highest level is “Security Level 3”. There isn’t anything an Ubuntu user can do to get to a higher security level from the Device Security screen,” the bug report reads.

• “If a user attempts to get their system to a higher security level, I think they could break their system since this isn’t something we currently support. We can work towards better integrating this screen for Ubuntu in future releases”.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Screenshots/Screencasts

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of SparkyLinux “LXQt” 6.4 and some of the applications pre-installed.

Arch Family

• Arch Linux is not a distro for the typical user; it’s common knowledge that Arch is one of the most challenging distros to install, especially if you don’t follow the proper procedures. Its rigid installation and tedious setup procedures haven’t deterred developers from creating alternate versions based on Arch Linux, though.

• If you are an Arch aficionado and want to make the most out of your Linux installation, then you should consider EndeavourOS and Manjaro: two of the best Arch-based distros. Here’s a detailed comparison between Manjaro and EndeavourOS.

• [...]

• EndeavourOS and Manjaro are spin-offs of Arch Linux and both of them are geared towards making the lives of newbies easier. There are plenty of differences, right from installing the OSes to managing the packages on your desktop environments.

Fedora Family / IBM

• This blog post was rotting in my queue since November of 2021, but the info is still helpfull for someone, so I post it now.

• I had a long time ago a look at docker when just version 1 was released, but I never really used it that much for my own production setups. I used it for playing around. I hated that is runs as root and even Docker itself had problem making it secure.

• I really liked it when podman was released, I’m a fan of Dan Walsh from SELinux times and I really liked the idea of splitting it up and running it as non root (I know docker can do it now as well). But I did not have the time to play with it. But because my RSS Feeder (ttrss) does not support normal installation anymore I was forced to try it again. I started with bitwarden_rs and now ttrss.

Debian Family

• SparkyLinux 6.4 is here. Based on Debian Bullseye, this lightweight distribution ships with plenty of updates for packages like Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, LibreOffice, LXQt, Xfce, Openbox, and KDE Plasma and makes it possible to install a number of those applications from Debian unstable (to enjoy more recent releases). The latest release is updated from both the Debian and Sparky stable repositories (as of August 11, 2022).

Open Hardware/Modding

• We don’t need to tell you that Star Wars is a wildly popular franchise. If you include all of the movies, video games, novels, theme park attractions, and so on, it is the fifth-highest-grossing media franchise of all time (somehow just behind Winnie the Pooh). Because of its popularity, Star Wars themes find their way into every facet of life. But fan Kutluhan Aktar took that in a surprising direction when he built this Bluetooth®-enabled, Star Wars-style weather and gas station.

• We don’t mean a gas station for pumping fuel, but rather a system that monitors indoor environmental gasses, like methane and carbon monoxide, along with climate information like temperature and humidity. Aktar chose to design the device with a Star Wars look and feel, which includes a Millennium Falcon PCB and a 3D-printed Yoda bust, but that theme has little to do with the functionality. In addition to gathering environmental data, this device can illuminate a pair of light bulbs, control RGB LED lighting in the room, and spin a pair of fans. Those outputs are configurable as indicators that correspond to the environmental data. A small E Ink display shows relevant data, which is also accessible via a smartphone.

• While our recent news has been all about Librem 5 USA, we also have been steadily shipping through Librem 5s from previous production runs and it has been gratifying to share in the excitement of customers who have gotten the Librem 5 they have been waiting so patiently for. While the remainder of you have been waiting for your own Librem 5, we have also been busy continually improving the software on the Librem 5 so that the Librem 5 you receive today is significantly better and more capable than one we shipped a year or even six months ago.

• Now that the Librem 5 USA has hit shipping parity, our mass-produced Librem 5 customers are all likely wondering the same thing: “Where is my Librem 5?” As we mentioned in a previous post, the supply chain challenges over the past few years have caused to to rethink how we approach “Just In Time” manufacturing, and as a result we have made massive investments in components, accessories, and other supplies so that we can not only catch up on backorders, but maintain sufficient stock so that once a product reaches shipping parity, we have ample inventory to absorb any future supply chain issues. It is very much in our interest for all of our products to be in stock with short lead times, and all backorders to be fulfilled. As I mentioned in my A Vision on Focus post, one of our goals is to hit, and maintain, stability for all our products with future products being developed internally and announced when they are ready to ship, instead of relying out pre-orders and crowdfunding.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Open source projects are all about creativity and collaboration, and the process really shines when the project itself supports teamwork. Working together to create software for working together might seem very meta, but the results are quite tangible.

• Here are eight open source projects that can help boost your team’s collaboration, whether you are working in a distributed team, from your home office, or onsite in one of the newer hybrid workplaces.

• [...]

• The team at NextCloud gathered up some of the best open source projects for supporting group collaboration with email, chat, and calendaring.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• Firefox 104 entered public beta testing at the end of July, during which it offered a long-anticipated feature, namely the ability to swipe left and right on web pages using a two-finger horizontal swipe gesture without holding down the Alt key.

• Unfortunately, just like Firefox 103, Firefox 104 is missing this long-anticipated feature in the final release, which now appears to have been postponed for the next release, Firefox 105. Of course, you can still navigate back and forward with a touchpad using a two-finger horizontal swipe gesture while holding down the Alt key.

Programming/Development

• When it comes to programming, the best way to test one’s skills is to implement their knowledge into projects. While this is true for every programming language out there, our focus today is on C++ specifically, and there are plenty of C++ projects/ideas for beginners to talk about.

• Projects can also challenge you to broaden your horizons and also help you get ready to work on real-time development jobs for your career. So, hopefully, you’ll get some C++ project ideas today to expand your portfolio as a beginner.

Perl / Raku

• This will send a notification message with the title “compile finished”, and a body of “success” or “failure” depending on whether the command completed successfully, and allows you to minimize (or otherwise hide) the terminal window while you do something else, which can be a very useful thing to do.

• It works great when you’re running something on your own machine, but what if you’re running it remotely?

• Steve Roe blogged about the union of Raku and Rust in: Option-Some-None, which also touches on a lengthy debate on the essence of nothing (/r/rakulang comments).

Leftovers

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (jetty9 and kicad), Fedora (community-mysql and trafficserver), Gentoo (chromium, gettext, tomcat, and vim), Mageia (apache-mod_wsgi, libitrpc, libxml2, teeworlds, wavpack, and webkit2), Red Hat (podman), Slackware (vim), SUSE (java-1_8_0-openjdk, nodejs10, open-iscsi, rsync, and trivy), and Ubuntu (exim4).

• The beta of Red Hat Insights malware detection service is now available. The malware detection service is a monitoring and assessment tool that scans Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems for the presence of malware, utilizing over 175 signatures of known Linux malware provided in partnership with the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence team

• CISA has added a new vulnerability to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise. Note: to view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow in the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates.

• “Recently, the open-source ecosystem has been under siege,” said David Wheeler, director of open-source supply chain security at the Linux Foundation.

• This year, Black Hat and DEF CON events marked a return to a time before the pandemic. However, in many ways, it represents the effort that has been made despite these substantial challenges to innovate and grow within security. It has made us more willing to trust our abilities and also not to forget the details, especially when it comes to the software we use every day.

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

• CISA and the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) have updated joint Cybersecurity Advisory AA22-228A: Threat Actors Exploiting Multiple CVEs Against Zimbra Collaboration Suite, originally released August 16, 2022. The advisory has been updated to include additional detection signatures.

Environment

Wildlife/Nature

• I was driving through the Jura on the weekend and I saw an interesting sign about Festi-Cheval on the road between Pontarlier and Houtard. Cheval is French for horse.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

Programming

• Alright, this post will explain the various updates and changes added to The Camplog[1]. For those of you that have a keen eye, you might have seen that the source code was released yesterday. You can just grab it from The Camplog index page, served off right Gemini.

• Firstly, I am a Common Lisper and know very little Scheme.

• First question: what is the purpose of alist-let? As I understand it (confusedly scanning the code and comments), you can bind symbols specified as keys to their corresponding values. If you don’t know ahead-of-time what the symbol names are, you cannot use them in the body of the let, unless you somehow define local macros that contain those symbol-names… Otherwise, it’s just let with a weirder syntax…

• In Common Lisp we have another basic kind of a list, a PLIST, which takes a little more space but is a pretty generic datastructure. An alist ‘((a . 1)(b . 2)(c . 3)) may be converted to a plist `((a 1)(b 2)(c 3))…

• If you’re a Lisper, even if you’re not a Schemer, please don’t skip this post!

• Almost two years ago I wrote a macro to make it easier to work with values of an alist (“association list” i.e. list of key/value pairs; Scheme’s “default” dictionary-like structure). It was called let-aref at first and it could be used to introduce a single variable with the value associated with a key of an alist — sort of like let but for alists and for a single variable. Soon I realized I could use it for several variables if I changed it only slightly, which became alist-let.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

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