● 09.28.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 28/09/2022: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.7 and 9.1 Beta; SpiralLinux 11.220925

Posted in News Roundup at 6:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

•  Millions of people use Linux every day, but we rarely stop to think about how the operating system feels about it. Wouldn’t it be nice to know what Linux really thinks about open source, Windows, Macs, and the command line? Until now, this has impossible. But thanks to a new AI chat tool, we’re able to find out.

• Below is a transcript of a conversation between Ars Technica and Linux, the operating system, as embodied by one of Character.AI’s large language model chatbots. It should go without saying, but this interview does not represent the opinions of any real individual or organization. It’s an experiment with an AI chatbot. The interview has been edited for brevity, but the answers have been preserved as delivered by the bot.

Desktop/Laptop

• System76’s Oryx Pro laptop was just updated this summer with a 12th Gen Intel Core “Alder Lake” i7-12700H processor, as well as NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti and 3080 Ti dedicated graphics, but the US-based Linux hardware vendor decided to give it another cool update.

• The new Oryx Pro model comes with a 4K OLED display, and that’s a big thing! Customers can choose between the new 15.6-inch OLED UHD glossy finish display model with a 3840×2160 pixels resolution or the previous 15.6-inch or 17.3-inch Full HD (1920×1080) matte finish displays.

• System76 has been selling laptops and desktop computers with Linux in mind for years. The Oryx Pro is the company’s most powerful laptop, and now it has been updated with even better hardware.

• The Oryx Pro has the specifications of a high-end gaming laptop, and even though you can play games on it, the laptop is primarily intended for productivity work that requires a lot of graphics power. It has a 12th-generation Intel Core i7-12700H processor that runs at up to 4.7 GHz, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti or 3080 Ti graphics card, up to 64 GB RAM, Wi-Fi 6, USB Type-A and Type-C ports, Thunderbolt 4 support, Gigabit Ethernet, and a backlit keyboard.

• Available with both Intel and AMD processors, the StarFighter Linux laptop from Star Labs will be up for pre-orders in less than three weeks. Sadly, with prices from US$900 to US$3,000, interesting hardware specs overall, and quite a few configurations, this laptop comes with non-upgradeable memory.

•  A fully open hardware and software laptop is already intriguing but what if it could be folded to fit in your pocket? The MNT Pocket Reform does exactly that in a 7-inch clamshell that comes with Debian GNU and supports other Linux distributions. You can wow your friends with this mini computer’s mechanical keyboard, 1080p display, and modular design that invites you to adapt and expand it to meet your own needs.

• To be fair, you’ll need a somewhat roomy pocket to be able to fit the MNT Pocket Reform inside. The original plan was for a 5-inch screen but the MNT team told IEEE Spectrum this size made the keyboard too cramped for comfort so it was scaled up a bit to make typing easier.

• MNT Research, makers of the Reform open source laptop, has released details of its newest project: the MNT Pocket Reform. The retro-style mini computer features a seven-inch screen with a clamshell design.

• According to the website, the Pocket Reform is fully featured, modular, upgradable, recyclable, and reusable, with fully open source hardware and software. “With Pocket Reform, we’re building a small, portable computer that is transparent about what it’s running and that gives control back to the user, control over operating systems, updates, and software,” the website states.

Audiocasts/Shows

• If you’ve ever wanted to dive into Arch Linux – there are a bamboozling amount of options to choose from.

• Mike has spent just over a month living in Linux full-time, and Chris wants to check in and see how he’s doing. Plus we both have the new Thelio from System76 in-house, and our takeaways might surprise you.

• A Quick Overview of Manjaro 21.3.7 Gnome Edition

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Archcraft 2022.09.16.

• OpenStack is awesome! Using this amazing open-source project, you can build your very own private cloud. But what are some other considerations for using it? How do you get started? In this foundational video, LearnLinuxTV and OpenMetal team up to give you some valuable information on OpenStack.

• If you are the kind of Linux user that spends a lot of time in a terminal, you have probably asked yourself, “What are the commands that I run the most?” Well, using the “history” command and a few of the GNU core utilities, we can get a list of our most used commands and how many times we’ve run them.

• First up in the news, AWK gets Unicode, GIMP out, Firefox improves its memory, Nitrux released, Unity is a Flavour, Microsoft drops Linux, Makulu adds to the confusion, and Debian wrestles with firmware;

• In security and privacy, 8 Year Old Linux Kernel Vulnerability Uncovered, and Plex gets exposed;

• Then in our Wanderings, Moss reconfigures again, and Norbert contradicts himself.

• In our Innards section, Mint and Gnome have lots to show us;

• And finally, the feedback and a suggestion or two.

Kernel Space

Applications

•  Writing is one of the essential skills in modern society. Being able to communicate effectively is paramount both at work and at home. It makes your thinking visible to others, and is the main way in which work, learning, and intellect is judged by others.

• At first glance, the trusty word processor might seem a good tool for a novelist. After all, in days gone by, budding authors would tap away using a typewriter, and a word processor is the modern day equivalent. Linux has some excellent word processing software such as LibreOffice. However, word processors are actually not the ideal tool for some forms of writing, particularly novel-writing. In fact, it could be said that using a word processor for novel-writing is a recipe for disaster, and actually a retrograde step from a typewriter. Word processors are a general application software that are perfect for constructing business documents, letters, batch mailings using templates, etc. However, many word processors are too obtrusive and distracting for writers. What is needed is software that helps concentrate on the content of the novel, sketch out the chapters and scenes, work out the best structure, import research, add locations, characters and objects, and so on.

Instructionals/Technical

• It is a good practice to update software, especially when you get new features and/or added security in the new updates.

• In this article, I will show you how to enable automatic updates for the containers managed by Podman.

• For demonstration purposes, I will use the caddy image from Docker Hub.

• Several features of the Android platform can be accessed only through paths and methods that are hidden away from the average user. These have generally been done with the help of some command line Android Debug Bridge (ADB) commands, a tool that Google offers for developers to debug various parts of their applications or the system, but which we can use for all kinds of neat and hidden tricks. A prerequisite to these tricks is installing ADB on your computer. So, in this guide, we will show you how to install ADB on Windows, macOS, and Linux in quick and easy-to-follow steps.

• Learn how to set up the Blocky DNS server to filter and secure DNS queries on your network.

• The Domain Name System (DNS) puts you in a position to contain the spread of malware and prevent suspicious activities within your corporate network and, with appropriate filters on your DNS server, prevent user tracking and advertising on websites. Moreover, researchers at the University of Bonn have shown that almost 20 percent of HTTP requests load advertising content and that blocking these ads reduces the power consumption of terminal devices.

• Blocky, a DNS proxy and ad blocker for local networks, has been under active development by German developer Dimitri Herzog since January 2020 and is available on GitHub. The tool lets you effectively filter domains on the basis of blacklists and whitelists or regular expressions. The filters can differ to match the groups on your local network (e.g., different filter rules can be implemented in different departments).

• “The shuf command is helpful for randomly shuffling input lines to standard output. The shuf command takes input from files or the standard input, randomizes the input, and gives output. It works like how you shuffle cards and pull a random output or randomly arrange the cards depending on the options that you give it.

• The shuf works in three ways. You can use it as range, list, or file shuf. Let’s see the various ways you can use the shuf command.”

• shuf is part of the GNU Coreutils, and you can open its help page to see the various options you can use.

• “As the title says that the read system call must be reading something from a particular location. Linux provides us the read system call to read data from any file and display it on the console, and the kernel of the Linux system should be involved in this whole process, i.e., to open the file, read from it, write data to another file, etc. This guide will be a bonus to every Linux and C user who wants to learn to use the read system call while coding. Before having a glance at the C code snippet, we are going to create a text file and a C file. The text file will contain random text data that will be used by the read() function. Both the files are created by the same “touch” query one after another, and the “ls” query shows them in a home folder.”

• Bash pattern matching is an indispensable concept that comes in handy when selecting different filenames from a directory and checking if a string matches a given format. Whether you are starting out with bash pattern matching or looking to brush up on your skills, this guide covers the various ways and tips for pattern matching.

• “Fail2ban is an open-source log parsing application that prevents your system from brute force attacks. It parses log files and blocks IP addresses that have too many authentication failures. This usually happens when a user attempts to log in using the trial-and-error method. Fail2ban then takes action like updating the firewall rules to ban that IP address for a specific time period which is by default 10 minutes or 600 seconds. The banned IP address is automatically unbanned after 10 minutes to avoid locking out any legitimate users who might have mistakenly mistyped their passwords repeatedly.”

• In this article, you will learn how to change ban time in fail2ban as well as how to ban an IP address forever if desired.

• Sometimes your Linux distribution doesn’t detect your laptop’s Bluetooth hardware. Or perhaps you want to add a USB Bluetooth dongle to a desktop computer. Either way, here’s how to get Bluetooth working.

• Jack Wallen shows you a GUI that takes the complication out of creating and using chroot environments on Linux.

• Secrets pervade enterprise systems. Access to critical corporate resources will always require credentials of some type, and this sensitive data is often inadequately protected. It is rife both for erroneous exposure and malicious exploitation. Best practices are few, and often fail.

• SQLite is a natural storage platform, approved by the Library of the U.S. Congress as a long-term archival medium. “SQLite is likely used more than all other database engines combined.” The software undergoes extensive testing as it has acquired DO-178B certification for reliability due to the needs of the avionics industry, and is currently used on the Airbus A350′s flight systems. The need for SQLite emerged from a damage control application tasked for the U.S. battleship DDG-79 Oscar Austin. An Informix database was running under HP-UX on this vessel, and during ship power losses, the database would not always restart without maintenance, presenting physical risks for the crew. SQLite is an answer to that danger; when used properly, it will transparently recover from such crashes. Despite a small number of CVEs patched in CentOS 7 (CVE-2015-3414, CVE-2015-3415, CVE-2015-3416, CVE-2019-13734), few databases can match SQLite’s reliability record, and none that are commercially prevalent.

• SMPlayer is free, open-source software that can be used on any operating system. It has been localized in more than 30 languages, making it easy to enjoy your favorite videos no matter what language(s) are spoken around them! A front end called SMplayer offers graphics tools from Mpv (a forks version), along with its interface widgets provided by qt. This player also falls under the terms given out through GPL v2 or later versions which ensures freedom while providing access via financial means if desired so long as copyright restrictions aren’t violated during use. The best media players are also portable, so you can carry them around on a USB drive and use them without leaving traces behind. SMPlayer is worth trying for this reason alone!

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install SMPlayer Rocky Linux 9 using one of the two third-party repositories RPM Fusion Free or Flatpak package manager, with the command line terminal.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install InfluxDB on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, InfluxDB is a time-series database (TSDB) that is designed to handle high write and query loads. It is written in the Go programming language for storage and retrieval of time series data in fields such as operations monitoring, application metrics, Internet of Things sensor data, and real-time analytics.

• 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 the InfluxDB on Ubuntu 22.04 (Jammy Jellyfish). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 22.04 and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint, Elementary OS, Pop!_OS, and more as well.

• Learn how to use a custom JSON data source, Mockoon, FastApi, and Prometheus to customize your Grafana dashboard.

• NixOS is a declarative Linux operating system. Users create their operating system from the ground up with a configuration file and the use of an excellent package manager. But did you know it is possible to use the Nix package manager on any Linux operating system? Here’s how to get it working on your Linux PC.

• “Working with shell script is something any Linux user should be at home with. However, how you learn to execute commands plays a big role in your understanding and working with shell scripts. This guide explains all details about executing commands within a shell script. We will cover everything from creating a shell script to defining variables to executing the shell script. Let’s get started!”

• .CRT file extension represents an SSL/TLS certificate to secure communication between a web server and a browser.

• Today, we will explore how to generate a certificate using the OpenSSL tool on Ubuntu 22.04. Before getting started, ensure OpenSSL is installed on your system with good libraries and dependencies.

Games

• A few days after the previous interview of Valve representatives in Japan from Nikkei that we covered, here’s another interview from the Japanese publication Automaton-Media this time with Ricky Uy, President of KOMODO, the distributor in Japan, Lawrence Yang, UX designer at Valve, and Erik Peterson, Steam business manager. If you use the below translation please link to Boiling Steam.

• We released Godot 3.5 in early August, and like any release, there are few rough edges to iron out which warrant making maintenance “patch” releases (3.5.x). Such maintenance releases focus on fixing bugs and not on integrating new features. This helps guarantee that the overall production readiness of the stable branch keeps increasing.

• So this 3.5.1 release fixes a number of regressions that users reported after the release, as well as various other fixes to pre-existing bugs and usability improvements.

• This is a safe and recommended update for all Godot 3.5.x users. It should have no major incidence on your projects, even complex ones in production, if you’re already using 3.5-stable.

• Today I got the opportunity to review The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, a point and click folk horror story set in Victorian England that runs well on Linux. Besides the steam description and being on some friend’s wishlist, I didn’t know much about. A web search led me to its former name Incantamentum, but I decided to postpone my investigation to not spoil the fun.

• And, oh boy, I was ready for some nostalgia. Some of the first games I played on PC were point and click adventures. In a time when I didn’t know English well and would proceed the story with guesses and trial and error. It taught me give, pick up, look at and many others just by figuring out what the character would do at each command.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• On Wednesday 28 September 2022 Okular, a Free and Open Source advanced document reader that allows you to read, sign, and annotate PDFs, ePubs, MarkDowns, and many other types of documents, was officially celebrated for becoming the first software product to receive the Blue Angel eco-label.

• As announced in March (read more here), Okular has been recognized for sustainable software design as reflected in the recent Blue Angel award criteria for software eco-certification. Introduced in 1978, the Blue Angel is the world’s earliest eco-label and the official environmental label awarded by the German government. With this award, Okular is the first and currently only eco-certified computer program within the 30 organizations of the Global Ecolabelling Network, which represents over 50 countries.

• We launched our first Kdenlive fundraising campaign one week ago and we already collected almost two-thirds of the goal! We would like to thank everybody for their massive support. Moving forward, we will keep you posted on our progress and the development of the new exciting features/improvements we’ll be adding to Kdenlive with the funds.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Red Hat / IBM

•  Fedora is a popular Linux distro that caters to users who want cutting-edge tech on their workstations (and servers).

• It doesn’t ship with any proprietary components and sticks to completely open-source repositories by default.

• While that can be inconvenient for some already, now it seems another change may bother users looking forward to Fedora 37.

• A recent commit to Mesa on Fedora tells us that the Video Acceleration API support has been disabled for H.264, H.265, and VC-1 codecs due to legal worry.

• This is likely to be backported to Fedora 36 as well.

• We are excited to announce the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.7 and 9.1 Beta. RHEL provides a more flexible and stable foundation to support hybrid cloud innovation and a faster, more consistent experience for deploying applications and critical workloads across physical, virtual, private, and public cloud and edge deployments.

• RHEL 8.7 and 9.1 Beta brings new features and enhancements that deliver greater consistency and a stronger security posture to the open hybrid cloud’s foundation, with the ability to deliver workloads, applications, and services faster with less effort across various environments.

•  Once upon a time, I remember getting thoroughly excited about Red Hat Enterprise Desktop (now Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Both of those products are still around but have mostly taken a backseat to their respective company’s server operating systems.

• And for companies that eschew the costlier Linux variants, what business-class desktop operating system is there? After all, there’s a good reason why so many businesses opt for the likes of Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux over RHEL and SLES: cost.

• That’s why I found myself revisiting the thrill of those bygone days when I found out about Eurolinux. Eurolinux hails from Poland and like both Red Hat and SUSE has focused on their server-based distribution for nearly a decade. With the release of RHEL 9, Eurolinux has introduced a desktop variation of their operating system.

• For many, the five-day in-office work week is dead. McKinsey reports that most people working in computing and mathematical jobs have remote work options, and 77 percent say they’re willing to work fully remotely.

• Red Hat is excited to announce the general availability of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17 at MWC Las Vegas this year. Red Hat OpenStack Platform 17 is designed to help service providers as they build out massive, modern networks with an open hybrid cloud vision in mind. With this latest version, service providers can benefit from the delivery of new services and applications to meet changing demand, advanced networking and improved operational security features for their 4G and 5G networks.

• It’s been over a decade since the creation of the OpenStack project. Since then, Red Hat OpenStack Platform has become a leading technology for service provider cloud environments that propels innovation and is one of the top NFV infrastructure for service providers with over 30% of the paid production LTE deployments. Today, Red Hat service provider customers running Red Hat OpenStack Platform are estimated to have more than 2.5 billion mobile subscribers.

• Serverless Workflow is a standard from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kogito implements the Serverless Workflow specifications to define workflows for event-driven, serverless applications using a DSL-based model.

• Serverless Framework is an open source framework that builds, compiles, and packages code for serverless deployment. The framework provides implementations for different cloud providers, including Knative.

• Growing up in Pelotas, Brazil, I did not have access to a computer until I was 9 years old. Nobody in my family worked with technology, so it did not occur to me to consider a career in this field until high school, when a friend encouraged me to try a course in electronics.

• The course introduced me to programming logic with C and C++, and it was exciting to see logic, math, and technology come together. That inspired me to pursue a bachelor’s degree in Analysis and Development Systems at the university level.

• I am very proud of my Brazilian heritage. However, there are relatively few females in this profession, especially in Latin America. Women are still forced to overcome obstacles and stereotypes. Despite my superior grades, for example, it took me longer to land my first job than my male colleagues.

Debian Family

•  Starting from now, all the binary images for the new versions of QSoas will freely available from the download page. You can download the precompiled versions of QSoas for MacOS or windows. So now, you have no reason anymore not to try ! My aim with making the binaries freely available is also to simplify the release process for me and therefore increase the rate at which new versions are released.

• Some work went into improving the fit interface, in particular for the handling of fit trajectories when doing parameter space exploration, for difficult fits with many parameters and many local minima. The fit window now features real menus, along with tab a way to display the terminal (see the menus and the tabs selection on the image).

• SpiralLinux 11.220925 adds smoother two-finger scrolling, Firefox ESR 102.3, and disabling bitmap fonts to avoid poor font rendering.

• SpiralLinux is a new Debian-based Linux distro focusing on simplicity and out-of-the-box usability in all major desktop environments. It covers all the most popular desktop environments in Linux, including GNOME, Plasma, Cinnamon, Xfce, MATE, Budgie, and LXQt.

• Three months after the initial version of the distro was released, the updated SpiralLinux 11.220925 is here. So let’s have a look at what has changed.

• The developers of the Debian offshoot SpiralLinux have announced a new version, 11.220925. The release offers a number of improvements to increase hardware support and make the system more user-friendly.

• [...]

• The new version of SpiralLinux is based on Debian Stable 11.5. The distro has several desktop systems available but there are changes that are common to all versions. Among them are an updated version of Firefox, improved two-finger scrolling on trackpads, and tweaked Wi-Fi drivers. The developers mention that support for the Realtek r8168 Wi-Fi adapter is “theoretical” and that they appreciate reports from users who actually have the device installed.

• They also fixed a bug where an “annoying beep” was heard while booting the live system using the EFI firmware standard in new PCs.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

•  Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu” will be released on October 20, 2022, which isn’t that far away — though you don’t have to wait that long to try it as the Ubuntu 22.10 Beta will be released on September 29, 2022.

• In this post I round-up and run-through new features in Ubuntu 22.10, as well the most notable changes, app updates, release info, and more.

• Ubuntu developers gave Ubuntu 22.10 “Kinetic Kudu” as its codename. As codenames it isn’t the most revelatory. “Kinetic” is an adjective related to motion, whilst a Kudu is a species of African antelope, the male of which have some impressive spiralled horns.

• The team behind the unofficial Ubuntu remix with the Deepin desktop has rolled out an updated version based on the current Ubuntu long-term support release.

• The Reg FOSS desk took a look at UbuntuDDE at the start of the year and came away impressed. The Linux Deepin desktop environment is bright, colorful, and easy to use, but some Western users might be reluctant to use an OS from the People’s Republic of China. When we looked at the resource usage of the other unofficial flavors last month, we mentioned that, sadly, UbuntuDDE 22.04 hadn’t surfaced. Well, now, here it is.

• UbuntuDDE Remix is an unofficial & community-contributed Ubuntu spin featuring the Deepin desktop. Deepin desktop (DDE) is the most beautiful Linux desktop by default which brings a well-designed desktop with its native applications.

• This distribution is fairly new, with the first release during Ubuntu 20.04 LTS released a couple of years back. And now, with the release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish, this distro emits another great release. Here’s a quick review of UbuntuDDE Remix version 22.04, released a few days back.

• Since November 2021, Canonical and Microsoft have been offering a jointly supported Microsoft SQL Server on Ubuntu Pro solution. With this offering, you can set up an optimised configuration of SQL Server on Ubuntu in a few steps.

Devices/Embedded

•  Sphery vs. shapes is an open-source 3D raytraced game written in C and translated into FPGA bitstream that runs 50 times more efficiently on FPGA hardware than on an AMD Ryzen processor.

• Verilog and VHDL languages typically used on FPGA are not well-suited to game development or other complex applications, so instead, Victor Suarez Rovere and Julian Kemmerer relied on Julian’s “PipelineC” C-like hardware description language (HDL) and Victor’s CflexHDL tool that include parser/generator and math types library in order to run the same code on PC with a standard compile, and on FPGA through a custom C to VHDL translator.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Today we’re going to be taking a look at the new ArduCam Time of Flight (ToF) Camera. This is a new camera by ArdCam that gives your Raspberry Pi 3D vision by adding an IR laser illuminator alongside the camera lens.

• A common problem among owners of multiple pets is how to feed them separately. If one animal needs special food, is on a diet, or likes to eat from another’s bowl, it becomes difficult to control each pet’s consumption. That is especially true when one pet doesn’t like to finish their bowl of food immediately and leaves it open to theft by another. To solve this problem and prevent one cat from stealing another cat’s special diabetic diet food, Tomas built a selective pet feeder.

• Like most of us would, Tomas first thought of using NFC tags on his cat’s collars to grant access to their food bowls. But NFC has a very limited range, which makes it hard to use in a situation like this. After considering other solutions, Tomas realized that one of his cats weighs quite a bit more than the other. If they were a similar weight then this wouldn’t work, but because the difference is substantial, he figured he could use a scale to grant access to the special diet food.

• ELECFREAKS Pico:ed V2 is a Raspberry Pi RP2040 board heavily inspired by the BBC Micro:bit with an edge connector exposing rings suitable for crocodile clips, a 17×7 LED matrix display, and designed for the classroom.

• We’ve seen several BBC Micro:bit clones – or rather adaptations – over the years with boards such as the SiFive Learn Inventor, Elecrow Mbits, and HiHope “Big Brother” board. The Pico:ed V2 adds to the list, and the main differences are that it is based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller instead, and does not come with wireless connectivity relying on a USB interface only.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

FSFE

• We continuously work to promote Free Software in Europe. In 2022 we addressed technological sustainability, advocated in the DMA and AI act on European level, and defended Router Freedom in Europe – among other activities. To reach younger people, we organised a coding competition for teenagers and published a children’s book on software freedom.

• “Software Freedom in Europe” is the yearly report of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), your charity organisation which empowers people to control technology. Every year we refine our manifold activities to address the current needs of software freedom in Europe. This yearly report covers the FSFE activities from November 2021 to August 2022.

GNU Projects

• The backers of the GNU Toolchain Infrastructure Project, which was the subject of an intense discussion at the GNU Tools Cauldron, have finally posted their plans publicly.

• Linux Foundation IT services plans for the GNU Toolchain include Git repositories, mailing lists, issue tracking, web sites, and CI/CD, implemented with strong authentication, attestation, and security posture. Utilizing the experience and infrastructure of the LF IT team that is already used by the Linux kernel community will provide the most effective solution and best experience for the GNU Toolchain developer community.

• Two weeks ago, some of us were in Paris, France, to celebrate ten years of Guix! The event included 22 talks and 12 lightning talks, covering topics ranging from reproducible research on Friday and Guix hacking on Saturday and Sunday.

• If you couldn’t make it in Paris, and if you missed the live stream, we have some good news: videos of the talks and supporting material are now available from the program page!

• If you weren’t there, there are things you definitely missed though: more than 60 participants from a diverse range of backgrounds—a rare opportunity for scientists and hackers to meet!—, impromptu discussions and encounters, and of course not one but two crazy birthday cakes (yup! on one day it was vanilla/blueberry-flavored, and on the other day it was chocolate/passion fruit, but both were equally beautiful!).

• [...]

• Organizing this event has certainly been exhausting, but seeing it come true and meeting both new faces and old-timers was a great reward for us. Despite the occasional shenanigans—delayed talks, one talk cancellation, and worst of all: running out of coffee and tea after lunch—we hope it was enjoyable for all.

• For those in Europe, our next in-person meeting is probably going to be FOSDEM. And maybe this will inspire some to organize events in other regions of the world and/or on-line meetups!

Programming/Development

• The open build service publisher has a configuration variable in BSConfig.pm, where you can define a rsync server to publish the built repos to.

• Unfortunately, the documentation apart from the actual code (in src/backend/bs_publish function sync_to_stage) seems scarce, so let’s document one non-standard usage here.

• Arguably SmartGit rates about the best GUI Git client. My opinion anyway, having played with a few over the years. I first discovered SmartGit in 2016…

• As we disclosed a few days ago, the roll-out of the SCM/CI feature was not the end. The proof is that we are here to announce another important milestone regarding the OBS SCM/CI integration. Starting today, Gitea is available for you to be integrated with OBS!

C

• When we evaluate any expression that involves the usage of different operators in it, we are obliged to solve the expression to compute its values based on operator precedence. Precedence is the term for assigning a priority or weightage to some value/term, so the operator precedence assigns the priority to operators in an expression. To understand this, assume any expression, e.g., 8*3+2, and the answer to this expression could result in two different values, “26” and “40”, respectively. However, we will choose the result of the expression as “26”, since the multiplication “*” operator has more operator precedence as compared to the addition operator “+” hence, the expression will first compute the multiplication between 8 and 3 and the result will be then added with the 2. Many operators in the programming language C have more priority over the other operators.

• We need to declare and initialize the values, either changing or fixed in some places, to give a value or assign a weightage for the reference or the manipulation of the specific information while writing a program. For these assignments of the values, we store these values in variables and constants. Constant is the type of that variable whose value remains unchanged/fixed throughout the entire program. Primary constants represent the integers, real numbers, and character constants, whereas secondary constants represent the structures, arrays, unions, and pointers. When we initially declare a constant in a program, we cannot change its value to any other value afterward. We are obliged to use that value as it is in the entire code.

• “Within the C language, memory allocation is a very known concept, and we have many functions to allocate memories to different mutable, i.e., dynamic memory, static memory, etc. The malloc() function of C is one of those functions that not only allocates memory to a specific mutable but also returns an address pointer where that memory has been stored. This article would be helping you with the use of malloc in C while using Ubuntu 20.04 system. Make your system up to date before jumping on the implementation of C code because it will help you smoothly run your codes at the shell. Thus, we have updated it so far, and it asked us to add the password for the user that is currently working. We provided it with a password, and the process was finished in a few seconds.”

• “While driving on the roadside, what do you do when you have an encounter with a red signal? You stop driving for a while to wait for your turn until the signal turns green. Similarly, when a signal has an orange color, you continue to drive and never stop. POSIX Signals work the same as the traffic signal works. The POSIX Signal library came up with a very simple function to be utilized in the C code to generate signals, make your programs wait for their execution, and many more. This article would be demonstrating all those signal functions. We have been starting our examples with the creation and opening of a C file.”

• The typedef is the predefined keyword, which instructs the compiler to assign the user-defined types to the predefined types of C, i.e., int, float, decimal, double float, etc.

• Typedef can be used when it is difficult to type multiple times in a program. For example, multiple-time use of “unsigned int” increases the complexity of the program. To reduce that complexity, we can define a user-friendly name for that type. For example, if we are using it in student ID, marks, etc., then we can simply name it “student”.

• In simple words, we can say that typedef reduces the complexity of the program and also provides clarity of the code.

Rust

Leftovers

• The idea of selling out has kind of lost all meaning in our modern culture, but there are still moments where the cringe comes on a little strong. One of those moments hit this week when it was revealed Beck had covered Neil Young’s “Old Man” to promote an NFL game that Tom Brady is playing in. Now, Young is very famously not a fan of selling out, but then again, he kind of sold his right to not sell out earlier this year. (He wasn’t alone.) But Beck, a man who I’ve never seen play football, seems like an unusual choice to have anything to do with the NFL or Tom Brady, and I’m sure he was the one that came up with the idea of adding additional meaning to “24 and there’s so much more” that the NFL is claiming. In honor of this new, more esoteric attempt at selling out, today’s Tedium talks about the nature of sellouts.

Hardware

• After nearly six decades of getting smaller, faster, cooler, and cheaper, transistors are getting more and more expensive with each generation, and one could argue that this, more than any other factor, is going to drive system architecture choices for the foreseeable future.

• Either the reticle size of fab equipment is going to limit us, or the internetworking between components, whether they are on a single socket in 2D, 2.5D, or 3D configurations, is going to limit us. We find chiplet architectures perhaps unavoidable as well as interesting, and we admit that chiplet approaches have the potential to increase individual component yields and therefore reduce semiconductor costs, but the use of chiplets also increases package manufacturing costs and there is a price – and potentially a very large price in computational efficiency and thermals – of not having monolithic compute elements very close to their cache and main memories.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• OpenLogic by Perforce and the Open Source Initiative (OSI) announce the second annual collaborative survey and report on the state of Open Source software.

Linux Foundation

• With a view to offering new insights into the European dynamics of open source, a dozen members have come together to form the new Linux Foundation Europe.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (gdal, maven-shared-utils, thunderbird, webkit2gtk, and wpewebkit), Fedora (firefox and libofx), SUSE (dpdk, firefox, flatpak, grafana, kernel, libcaca, and opera), and Ubuntu (ghostscript and linux-gcp-5.15).

• Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has told Optus that it must pay the costs for customers who want to replace their passports if their data was caught up in the breach that the telco announced last Thursday.

• Albanese said Australia’s security and privacy legislation would be updated, adding that big data breaches would result in penalties.

• He added that Optus, not taxpayers, should pay for the new identity documents because the breach was caused by the telco’s failures, and expressed surprise that the Opposition was asking the government to pick up the bill.

• The Delhi HC has issued notice in a petition filed by SnTHostings challenging the legality of Direction No. 20(3)/2022-CERT-In dated April 28, 2022 (‘2022 Directions’) by the The Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (‘CERT-In’). SnTHostings provides hosting, Virtual Private Network (‘VPN’) and Virtual Private Server (‘VPS’) services. The 2022 Directions presented an existential crisis to SnTHostings as they mandated it to collect a range of personal data and share it with CERT-In on demand and / or on the occurrence of a cyber-security incident. Mr. Samar Bansal appeared on behalf of SnTHosting. Justice Yashwant Verma of the Delhi HC heard detailed submissions from the counsel and directed CERT-In to provide a response to the Petition, stating that the issue requires consideration. IFF provided legal assistance.

• CISA has released three (3) Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on September 27th, 2022. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.

• A new, multi-functional Go-based malware dubbed Chaos has been rapidly growing in volume in recent months to ensnare a wide range of Windows, Linux, small office/home office (SOHO) routers, and enterprise servers into its botnet.

Defence/Aggression

• There are a number of unwritten rules in the world of espionage. These practices of the profession — though quietly accepted universally as “fair game” — can engender haughty rhetorical denunciations when an offending state is caught engaging in them.

• We have long read about sophisticated Russian spying operations—bugging the Moscow embassy, bugging Selectric typewriters in the Moscow embassy, bugging the new Moscow embassy. These are the first details I’ve read about the US bugging the Russians’ embassy.

Monopolies

Copyrights

• With its otherworldly woodcuts and ornate descriptions of imagined architecture, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili brims with an obsessive and erotic fixation on form. Demetra Vogiatzaki accompanies the hero as he wanders the pages of this quattrocento marvel, at once a story of lost love and a fever dream of antiquity.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I received the reflector which my friend offered to loan me. It turned out to be a Celestron PowerSeeker 127 with manual German equatorial mount. This instrument has a five inch aperature. I had been wanting a six-inch system or higher, but I’m hoping it will be an improvement over my 60mm refractor, as far as light-gathering power. I really wanted to try an equatorial mount, so that is great.

• Had to go into ‘the office’ today and due to having a new car I had to take the train. (Where I work cars have to be registered for access.)

• Judd Karlman was talking about character backstory on the latest episode of his podcast, Daydreaming about Dragons. I decided to write up how I got my latest character’s backstory.

• I want to write more. I need to write more. It’s boiling inside me.

• But each time I turn on my computer to write, something very strange happens: I do everything but writing.

• I want to check if I received some messages. I want to check some random news. I want to reply to the messages in my inbox because they are now filling my brain given that I saw them. I want to share or react to the news I’ve seen. I want to upgrade my software. I want to tweak some configuration in my setup. When I did all of this, I check again for messages and for news.

• Going offline only partially solved the problem. Instead of checking random news, I started to play some good old games thanks to Scummvm and Dosbox. I started to write more code than text (resulting in Offpunk).

• Two years ago I wrote about writing. I thought the main barrier that kept most people from writing was environmental distractions. I claimed “stress, anxiety, sleep deprivation, or other mental issues” played a role, but often the issue was “whether or not you chose the right font, whether that section should be in italics, or if that paragraph should be colored red for emphases [sic]“. Those might have been my excuses for not writing then, but its far from my main inhibition now.

• [...]

• Like with most things, the ideal spot is between those two extremes. Where? I’m still figuring that out.

• I value honesty and vulnerability, but I haven’t been able to practice them the way I’d like. Fear and anxiety stop me from doing the things I love, from caring for those whom I love, and from being honest with myself and others. It’s devastating.

• Jesus said not to worry. That’s good advice, but it first requires grabbing hold of one’s emotions. Without that control, avoiding worrying is vanity.

Politics

• A lot of essayists wanting to push the square peg of open source software into the round peg of quid-pro-quo market capitalism.

Technical

• Within operating system kernels, at least for Linux and the BSDs, there is a mechanism called “out of memory killer” which is triggered when the system is running out of memory and some room must be made to make the system responsive again.

• However, in practice this OOM mechanism doesn’t work well. If the system is running out of memory, it will become totally unresponsive, and sometimes the OOM killer will help, but it may take like 30 minutes, but sometimes it may be stuck forever.

Science

• My take is that the biggest error Lemoine did when saying that LaMDA was sentient was refusing to learn how it worked and how neural networks work generally. It seemed to me that he deliberately wanted to stick to “Turing test”-like conditions. That makes as little sense as if a doctor would want to smash up X-Ray machines. If you can look under the hood, or if your team members can, that’s a huge boon that you shouldn’t squander.

Internet/Gemini

• I saw a post on the Cosmos Aggregator by Remi Noulin about their terminal gemini browser Telescope. I’d been using Amfora for so long I thought I’d give Telescope a shot. I’m really digging it so far. I used the dark mode configuration and was able to easily add a few of my own colour changes. The commands take some getting used to but it’s already starting to sink in.

• 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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