● 10.17.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 17/10/2022: Kdenlive 22.08.2, Libcamera 0.0.1

Posted in News Roundup at 4:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• It’s never been easier to find a laptop to install Linux. But given the choices available, it’s indeed overwhelming to choose the best of the lot.

• The choice of laptop operating systems can no longer be boiled down to Windows vs. macOS. Linux is growing into a major player in the laptop space and today, there are more laptops than ever that work with Linux. There are even companies that make laptops designed to be Linux exclusives.

• With this new wealth of options, how can you choose the best laptop to install Linux?

Server

• The word on the street – and that would be Wall Street we are talking about – is that Nutanix is “exploring a sale after receiving takeover interest,” and that private equity and industry players are either poking around or being shopped the idea.

• Kubecost today announced limited availability of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) edition of a Kubernetes cost management platform. The Kubecost Cloud platform is based on the open source OpenCost software originally developed by parent company Stackwatch.

• A recent article explains that Kubernetes is now within reach for SMB adoption, and it got us thinking: What are the primary barriers to adoption for Kubernetes? Given the extraordinary popularity of the project, what are the issues that arise when a software engineering team looks to start using Kubernetes?

• Don’t ‘push’ files, commands and/or charts to Kubernetes using the CLI. Instead, automate your operations by having ArgoCD ‘pull’ your desired state, and keep your apps up to date and in sync. ArgoCD is a better way.

Videos/Shows

• What is the bus factor of Linux, as in what happens to the project if the project founder and current leader were to suddenly die. Maybe this was a major concern a few years back but nowadays isn’t as much of a concern.

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Xubuntu 22.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• In the forty-first episode of the WordPress Briefing, peek into the upcoming WordPress 6.1 release with our host, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and the release’s Editor Triage Lead, Nick Diego.

• LibreOffice, an office suite from the Document Foundation contains all the features you’d expect in an office suite, including (but not limited to) the ability to create text, spreadsheet, and presentation documents.

• Content Warning! Beware of spooky jump scares and Egee actually screaming! This is quite a bit different from the usual videos I make and if you are used to “chill & relaxed” Egee, this will be a trip for you! I really enjoy it when games freak me out like this. I grew up with the Alien moves (basically just 1 & 2 tbh) and I played a lot of early Alien games so Mr Xenomorph, however terrifying he is, is actually rather nostalgic and soothing to me 🤪 So, don’t worry about me when I scream and freak out – I’m having a great time. I promise!

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds releases Linux Kernel 6.1 RC1 for everyone to test. And bringing the much-awaited Rust support.

• Following the Linux Kernel 6.0 release, the merge window is now closed for Kernel 6.1. And it’s time to test those new features.

• While releasing, Linus mentioned that this release is fairly small compared to the prior ones. However, some of the major long-pending items eventually merged into this. However, he is not really happy with the late pull requests in the traditional two-weeks merge window.

Graphics Stack

• The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA®) announced today that it has released DisplayPort 2.1, the latest version of the DisplayPort specification, which is backward compatible with and supersedes the previous version of DisplayPort (DisplayPort 2.0). VESA has been working closely with member companies to ensure that products supporting DisplayPort 2.0 would actually meet the newer, more demanding DisplayPort 2.1 spec. Due to this effort, all previously certified DisplayPort 2.0 products including UHBR (Ultra-high Bit Rate) capable products – whether GPUs, docking station chips, monitor scalar chips, PHY repeater chips such as re-timers, or DP40/DP80 cables (including both passive and active, and using full-size DisplayPort, Mini DisplayPort or USB Type-C connectors) – have already been certified to the stricter DisplayPort 2.1 spec.

• This month I’ve done a lot of cleanup and bugfixing in wlroots, especially in the DRM backend, the Vulkan renderer and screencopy protocol implementation. There are still a few DRM backend bugs which need to be ironed out, but we’re getting there!

Benchmarks

• Ever since the original Windows 11,version 21H2, was released last year, we have been following the performance of Microsoft’s new OS and how it compares against its rival Linux. While Windows held the advantage initially, Linux gradually caught up and now generally seems to outperform Windows 11. You can follow the saga in its entirety here.

Applications

• What’s the free and open source subtitle editor for Linux? Well, we’ll reveal it to you. A subtitle editor application lets you create and edit video subtitles on your own. Most of those movies and shows come overlaid with primed subtitles. However, some don’t contain any subtitles. For this reason, you need to use a subtitle editor or subtitle software.

• The subtitle editor tool, no doubt, will make adding files to videos much more accessible and enjoyable! But first, let’s find out what the tool actually does.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Guacamole on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Guacamole is a clientless remote desktop gateway that supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH and use HTML5 for remote connection. It allows a user to take control of a remote computer or virtual machine via a web browser. The server runs on most Linux distributions and the client runs on any modern web browser.

• 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 Apache Guacamole remote desktop application 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.

• CPU frequency is one of the best indicators of your machine’s overall speed and performance. It determines, along with CPU threads, how fast a program can run its instructions on the silicon die. Your base CPU frequency is also a good indicator of how much power your computer consumes, with a higher base frequency pointing to more electricity consumption.

• PostgreSQL also known as Postgres, is a free and open source object-relational database system that runs on Client-Server architecture. It is one of the leading database servers used for production servers. DevOps use it as an alternative to MariaDB.

• Snort is an Open Source Intrusion Prevention and Detection System (IDS). In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snort on Ubuntu 22.04.

Games

• One of the problems with developing games with large game worlds is that objects start to jitter and teleport around as you move away from the world origin. This post is about how we overcame one challenge in particular and what we did.

• The Problem

• By default Godot uses single-precision floating point numbers to store things like object positions. While GDScript typically allows users to do user-space calculations with double precision, those calculations get truncated as soon as they are stored in Godot internal objects (like Vector3’s).

• This has been a problem for users who want to do things like make games that take place in a to-scale solar system. Users quickly hit floating point precision errors and noticed that movement becomes jittery and objects become scattered.

• As an example, take a look at this simple scene, we have a bunch of Godot’s scattered randomly and a person running back and forth across the screen.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• The second maintenance release of the 22.08 series is out with many usability and bug fixes. Some highlights include fixed pasted “ghost” keyframes, effects overlay now properly scale on monitor zoom, loopable image sequence clips are working again and VP8 alpha renders don’t crash anymore. This version also comes with some quality of life improvements like when pasting a clip the cursor moves to the last frame and remembering the effect’s keyframe status. We’ve also added Pixabay videos to the online resources module.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Debian Family

• Version 5.5 of the Tor-centered Tails distribution is out. The biggest change appears to be a significant update to the Thunderbird email client.

Devices/Embedded

• Linux kit shifter, Juno, has a new gadget available for pre-order: a $425 x86-64 tablet with a choice of Linux distros on it. In the UK, that’s £449 including VAT.

• The promised device looks decent. It will have a quad-core “Jasper Lake” Celeron N5100, a 1920 x 1200 10.1-inch touchscreen, 8GB of non-upgradable RAM and a choice of SSD capacities: 256GB, 512GB or a terabyte. The CPU runs at a not-too-rapid 1.1GHz, but can turbo-boost up to 2.8GHz. The basic tablet is all you get, the stylus is an optional extra.

• Juno Computers brings to market one of the first commercial Linux tablets that could be consumer-friendly and a viable option for those wanting an open source mobile device.

• The promise of a Linux tablet has been one so many in the community have been holding their breath over. Every so often a company will make a promise, only to fail on the delivery. If Juno Computers has anything to say about it, that all changes with a Debian-based, Mobian Linux/KDE Plasma device.

• The new tablet has a 10.1″, full HD touchscreen that also has an optional stylus pen, which is an extra $22. The new tablet is powered by an Intel Celeron N5100 4 Core CPU that runs at 1.1 GHz and includes a 2.8GHz turbo and 8GB LPDDR4 RAM. Internal storage is 256 GB and is upgradeable to 1TB. The display features a 60HZ refresh rate and an FHD IPS touchscreen at 1920 x1200.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Google, one of very few tech companies willing to experiment with new operating systems, has unveiled KataOS for embedded machine learning devices.

• KataOS was announced along with Sparrow on the Google Open Source blog. KataOS is the operating system design and Sparrow is the reference implementation, as the Weston display server is the reference implementation of Wayland.

• The plan is that KataOS will be “a provably secure platform that’s optimized for embedded devices that run ML applications.” Google is working with Antmicro, which created the seL4-sys crate. Currently the OS is being developed on the Arm64 instruction set, but the plan is to run it on openTitan, which uses RISC-V.

Programming/Development

• I make a lot of plots, and the fragmentation of tools in this space really bugs me. People writing Python code mostly use matplotlib, R people use ggplot2. MS people use the internal Excel thing. I’ve seen people use gtkdatabox for GTK widgets, rrdtool for logging, qcustomplot for qt. And so on. This is really unhelpful, and it would benefit everybody if there was a single solid plotting backend with lots of bindings to different languages and tools.

• Intel has published new patches for the GNU Compiler Collection or GCC, that will assist with support for upcoming Meteor Lake and Sierra Forest CPUs.

Perl / Raku

• Elizabeth Mattijsen has published an introduction into the Raku Programming Language by means of the grep functionality, called Don’t fear the grepper! (Part 1), the first of hopefully a long series of easy to read, yet in-depth exposition of Raku features. And they also published the second instalment of the It’s time to rak! series, about the rak utility.

Leftovers

Security

• What appeared to be one simple Linux Wi-Fi networking security problem was soon revealed to be five different nasty Wi-Fi security problems. Fortunately, the patches are on their way.

• Attackers can use tampered WLAN packets to insert malicious code into a vulnerable Linux kernel. This pops up from an email from SUSE employee Marcus Meissner. So Sönke Huster of TU Darmstadt discovered one of the gaps.

• Medibank says access to some systems restored after breach The Medibank Group, which announced on Thursday it had suffered a data breach, says it has now restored access to its ahm and international student policy systems.

• In an update, the company said on Friday an investigation into the incident was still going on.

• In its initial announcement, the company said it had isolated some customer-facing systems after it discovered a breach of its systems.

• Medibank chief executive David Koczkar said: “We apologise for the disruption this incident caused some of our customers yesterday, but we have made good progress with our systems overnight.

• [...]

• Medibank was initially hosted by Telstra, first on Linux and Apache, and later moved to Microsoft’s Internet Information Server.

• The article doesn’t say how the hacking tool got installed into cars. Were there crooked auto mechanics, dealers, or something else?

• Version 2.3.8 of the GNU Privacy Guard is out. It contains a few new features but the real purpose is to fix CVE-2022-3515, an integer overflow vulnerability that can be exploited remotely for code execution via a, for example, malicious S/MIME attachment. Note that the actual vulnerability is in the libksba library, which is normally packaged separately on Linux systems.

• If you have been following the IT security news, you might have come across these headlines: Earlier this year, Russia creates its own TLS certificate authority to bypass sanctions, entering production in September. On July 6th, digital security giant and root CA operator Entrust informed its customers about having been breached by a ransomware gang. Both news have seen a decent amount of attention, but one thing they tell us in common has received considerable less coverage: That the global PKI ecosystem, which virtually all internet users (have to) trust, is actually not trustworthy at all.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Ok, so, I’ve basically resolved myself to quit this job and do something else. There’s nothing for me here, and I’m not interested in dealing with my boss anymore.

• This ‘QI’-style factum results from the notion that fish do not all belong to the same genus (or ‘family’, or ‘phylum’, or some other Biological category). If we take one genetic branch of fish as the real fish, then we miss out a lot of animals which everyone calls ‘fish’. But if we broaden our definition and include the other fish, we must include foxes in the same gene-line.

• Simply put, fish split early in the genetic line, and now we can’t name them according to their genetic classification.

Politics

• In a prosperous municipality nearby they have concentrated all art galleries in a small area. While visiting one of the galleries, I overheard a conversation while looking at the paintings, clearly designed for the bourgoise home, some of them reminiscent of Utrillo’s street scences, but with all his quaint charm replaced by fluorescent colours with a hint of street art and abstract expressionism, and another painter with sombre figures in soft grays with a dash of sepia for coloristic highlight, all done in delicate textures and washy semi-transparent layers. A culinary experience, as Adorno would say; something that doesn’t offend the eye as it hangs over the sofa.

Technical

Programming

• An explicitly implicitly renaming macro transformer.

• Ok, so this is define-er-syntax*. Pretty much the closest thing we’ve got to the Common Lisp, Emacs Lisp style defmacros.

• 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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