● 11.22.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 22/11/2022: Release of DietPi 8.11

Posted in News Roundup at 1:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Star Labs has been creating Linux laptops for some time now and recently they announced a new addition to their fleet of options, the StartFighter custom laptop. This beautiful piece of technology features a true matte display that uses a protective coating to defuse ambient light so colors can shine brighter. The display offers up to 3840×2400 4K resolution, a 16:10 aspect ratio, and 600cd/m² of brightness at a 165 Hz refresh rate and 178 degrees of viewing.

• Other features found on the StarFighter include a removable webcam with built-in storage, a kill switch to shut off wireless when needed, a backlit keyboard with media keys, international layouts, and LED indicators. The StarFighter also includes a haptic trackpad, and a Plasma Electrolytic Oxidation coaching for a textured finish that is stronger than steel and fingerprint resistant.

Audiocasts/Shows

• I absolutely adore tiling window managers they now my preferred way of using my Linux system so I thought I’d go over what my workflow looks like after all this time.

• using rm to delete files does nothing under the hood. the files data remains on your system and any forensic tool can recover it easily. on unix/linux there is a command line utility to securely delete files called shred, this program will overwrite data making it much harder to recover data that was deleted.

• Curious how to properly say “GNOME”? Linux? GNU? Ubuntu? Mozilla? Let’s walk through exactly how to pronounce some of the Open Source & Linux world’s most challenging words… the Lunduke Way ™.

• We dig into Shufflecake, a tool that lets Linux users hide data with plausible deniability, then let our live stream SSH into our server and see if they can discover our secret data.

• Plus, we follow up on Brent’s never-ending desktop distro search and Chris’ new Linux rig.

Kernel Space

• The Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) has made a decision, and declared that the world can do without leap seconds.

• Leap seconds have occasionally been added to official timekeeping records to reflect changes in the Earth’s angular rotation and a way of measuring time called UT1.

• While UT1 is valid and correct, the world also measures time using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) – a time scale produced by BIPM.

• Adding leap seconds to satisfy UT1 messes with UTC, and that makes time’s overseers unhappy.

• Leap seconds are also painful to promulgate in the digital realm. The Linux kernel’s inability to handle added leap seconds caused plenty of crashes in 2012. A 2015 leap second also caused issues and in 2016 Cloudflare stumbled when confronted with the need to add a second.

Graphics Stack

• We’ve just released an extension that I think will completely change how engines approach descriptors going forward.

• tl;dr version for the busy graphics programmer: Descriptor sets are now backed by VkBuffer objects where you memcpy in descriptors. Delete VkDescriptorPool and VkDescriptorSet from the API, and have fun!

Applications

• Mimic 3 is a neural text to speech engine that can run locally, even on low-end hardware like the Raspberry Pi 4. The software speaks over 25 languages with over 100 pre-trained voices. Mimic 3 uses VITS, a “Conditional Variational Autoencoder with Adversarial Learning for End-to-End Text-to-Speech”.

• Mimic 3 is free and open source software.

• Let’s take you through the installation steps first before demonstrating the software.

• SAS/STAT provides tools and procedures for statistical modeling of data. It includes analysis of variance, linear regression, predictive modeling, statistical visualization techniques and a lot more.

• SAS is proprietary software. What are the best free and open source alternatives to SAS/STAT?

• Apple VoiceOver is a screen-reader that tells you exactly what’s happening on your device.

• VoiceOver is proprietary software and not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

Instructionals/Technical

• We are going to have a look at the EX180 exam objectives for Podman, review commands for Dockerfile and perform 4 hands-on tasks to get familiar with an image creation process.

• In this guide, we will download and install Metasploit on Ubuntu systems

• The Metasploit Project is a computer security project that provides information about security vulnerabilities and aids in penetration testing and IDS signature development. It is owned by Boston, Massachusetts-based security company Rapid7.

• Its best-known sub-project is the open-source Metasploit Framework, a tool for developing and executing exploit code against a remote target machine. Other important sub-projects include the Opcode Database, shellcode archive and related research.

• The Metasploit Project includes anti-forensic and evasion tools, some of which are built into the Metasploit Framework. Metasploit is pre-installed in the Kali Linux operating system.

• Linux Mint Debian Edition is, as most users that install it would know, based on Debian. By default, Debian does come with support for Nvidia drivers over the open-source nouveau drivers, which depending on the type of graphic card you have installed, would most likely work and improve the performance of your system, especially for games and users that do graphical design. But, for users with newer cards, even the default repository Nvidia drivers can often fall behind. Luckily, there are options for LMDE users to install the latest drivers using the Nvidia CUDA repository.

• The following tutorial will teach you how to install Nvidia Graphic Drivers using default repositories and to install Nvidia drivers directly from Nvidia repositories on Linux Mint Debian Edition, with both open-source and proprietary drivers available.

• MariaDB is a widely used database in Linux systems. In this guide, you will explore how to install the database on Ubuntu 22.04 with the help of a few easy-to-follow commands.

• Once you’ve installed and configured MariaDB, you will learn how to interact with it through the MariaDB command line. In the end, you will also see a command to uninstall the database from Ubuntu.

• Today we are looking at how to install Blender on a Chromebook.

• If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!

• Please use the video as a visual guide, and the commands and links below to install it on your Chromebook.

• The Vim editor (and its predecessor, vi) is a command line editor for Linux systems. It has a long standing reputation as being the most powerful text editor on Linux. After mastering it, many users will even claim that it is far speedier and more convenient to use than a typical GUI editor packed with lots of features in its menus.

• Vim has a staggering number of features and functions, but they are all hidden behind keyboard shortcuts and commands. There are no menus or hints in Vim, as users are expected to have enough of a grasp to navigate around on their own. And this is where Vim’s learning curve turns off most new users from bothering with it. Many novices would rather stick with something simple, like nano, than deal with all Vim’s depth.

• Did you know? You can dock colour palettes in many places in LibreOffice Draw. Here’s a quick video from Harald Berger, from the German LibreOffice community…

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Yes that’s right folks, it’s happening!!! KDE is growing up, joining the big leagues, and cooking on all burners!

• The KDE e.V. recently dipped its toes into the waters of technical hiring by contracting with longtime KDE contributor Ingo Klöcker to maintain and improve KDE’s packaging infrastructure for non-FOSS platforms. Now we’re at it again with a new open position for a “Software Platform Engineer.”

• This is an open-ended development position, with responsibilities for work on KDE frameworks, Plasma, Qt, middleware like Pipewire and Wayland protocols–basically, the same things that a lot of people are already doing. But… on a consistent work-work basis, for money, with your KDE friends as professional colleagues and supervisors!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Internet Radio Locator for GTK 4 version 4.8.3 is now available with Free Radio from the Earth.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• The November 19th, 2022 release of DietPi v8.11 comes with a new image for the NanoPi R5s, the new software option Homer and a couple of improvements and minor bug fixes.

BSD

• With the release of helloSystem 0.7.0 and more internal work, helloSystem is moving towards stability for an “open” alternative to macOS.

• The helloSystem is a FreeBSD-based lightweight operating system aiming for an “open” alternative to macOS. The primary objective of helloSystem is to provide an easy-to-install and use FreeBSD alternative with a truly “open” system. In addition, the team also aims for macOS switchers who can feel comfortable with a similar desktop without a lockdown system or the complexity of a Linux distribution.

• Making such an operating system takes time, considering the hardware support in the BSD system. The team is working on creating a desktop – “hellodesktop” from the ground up. Written in C++, the hellodesktop and other improvements are coming along nicely.

Fedora Family / IBM

• The Oracle Linux team is pleased to announce the availability of the Oracle Linux 8 Update 7 release for the 64-bit Intel and AMD (x86_64) and 64-bit Arm (aarch64) platforms. As with all Oracle Linux releases, this release is 100% application binary compatible with the corresponding Red Hat Enterprise Linux release.

• Notable changes are in the areas of security and high availability and enable customers to manage their systems more efficiently by simplifying administration tasks and operations at scale.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 was originally released in May 2022, and the new 9.1 version, now generally available, will bring customers a variety of enhancements and capabilities including SQL enhancements, Red Hat Smart Management with Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Insights and Workstations.

• Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Migration Toolkit for Applications 6, based on the open source project Konveyor, aimed at helping customers accelerate large-scale application modernization efforts. The toolkit enables customers to better assess, prioritize and modernize their applications across hybrid cloud environments on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading Kubernetes platform.

• Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Siemens has used Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, to improve the availability, performance and security posture of mission-critical applications at its Amberg production facility.

• Red Hat and Intel today agreed to take their relationship to the next level – out of the datacenter and out to the edge.

• The IBM-owned Linux giant and the x86 titan see an opportunity at the network edge: Internet of Things devices and industrial sensors can generate a significant amount of data that maybe isn’t best shipped back to a central server, cloud or otherwise, for cleansing and analysis.

• The two companies are thus launching an Intelligent Edge Solution Center in Houston, Texas, which unfortunately can’t be abbreviated into anything snappy, just IESC.

• Red Hat, Inc., a provider of open source solutions, is offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1, the latest version of the enterprise Linux platform. Along with the recently announced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.7, these minor versions add and refine capabilities for a wide range of enterprise IT needs, from helping to streamline complex infrastructure environments to improving the security stance of containerized applications.

• Regardless of the environment, IT system security remains a constant concern for nearly every organization. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 and 8.7 keep these needs front and center with operating system images that are pre-configured to meet organization-specific system security needs, according to the vendor.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Zinc is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution featuring the XFCE desktop, a new package manager, and out-of-the-box AppImage support.

• Zinc is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that goes beyond the idea of simply mixing in an alternative desktop environment. Zinc’s developers have gone under the hood, tinkered, tweaked, and fiddled with some of the fundamental Ubuntu functionality, and come up with an experience that challenges users to rethink exactly what Ubuntu can be.

• While users love Ubuntu for its stability, many find the user experience to be somewhat underwhelming. If that sounds like you, Zinc just might be the distro that brings you back.

Devices/Embedded

• The LinkStar-H68K is a tiny computer that’s positioned as a router thanks to its four Ethernet interfaces. But it’s also basically a rugged mini PC that could be used for network-attached storage, digital signage, or other applications.

• Available now from Seed Studio for $89 and up, the system is powered by a Rockchip RK3568 processor and ships with Android 11 software pre-installed, but also supports OpenWRT, Ubuntu, and Debian.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

FSF

• Today, on 21st of November 2022, the GNU Image Manipulation Program turned 27 (cf. the first release announcement on 1995-11-21).

• Our Thanksgiving gift: four more days to submit your session for LibrePlanet 2023! The call for sessions will now close on Monday, November 28, 2022, at 10:00 EST (15:00 UTC). We thought one last reminder, and one more weekend, just might be the last push you need to bring pen to paper (or finger to keyboard!) and submit your idea for a presentation, workshop, panel, or instructional video at LibrePlanet 2023: Charting the Course. The event will be held on March 18 and 19, 2022 and will be offered both in person and online. Sessions may be conducted either in person or remotely.

Programming/Development

• A maintenance release 0.9.14 of the RcppClassic package arrived earlier today on CRAN. This package provides a maintained version of the otherwise deprecated initial Rcpp API which no new projects should use as the normal Rcpp API is so much better.

• The changes is. CRAN was reporting (for all four macOS builds, and only there) that an absolute path was embedded, so we updated the (old …) call to install_name_tool use on that (and only that) OS. No other changes were made.

• Qt for MCUs provides a lighter version of the mainstream Qt to be able to effortlessly run on devices having lower RAM, Flash, and CPU availability. That being said it would imply developers coming from the Qt mainstream world may have to work with certain limitations while implementing HMI for MCUs.

• Even with limitations when it comes to HMI we still want to see something fancy and give our users a smooth experience and as developers, we want to challenge ourselves and develop smooth HMI with the constraints of the HMI framework and the obvious hardware constraints of MCUs.

• Lists being common in the various HMI designs, the same stands for MCU designs, but, unlike the Listview feature of mainstream Qt with functionalities like Cachebuffer, highlight, highlight begin & end, currentIndex, currentItem, are not available in Qt for MCUs. What is available out of the box with lists in Qt for MCUs is model, delegate which helps us create a basic view.

• Usually I avoid post titles / headlines in the form of a question, but I’m genuinely curious: Have you found a good note-taking app that’s ultimately better than just plain text files in Markdown with Vim (optionally synced with Git)?

• I’ve tried lots of apps like Joplin, Obsidian, and services like HackMD, but tend to get frustrated with them quickly. It may just be my impatience, if I stuck with one longer than a week or two I’d get the hang of it. I learned Vim as a job requirement (long story) and had to stick out the learning curve.

• I wanted to write down how I made the enemy characters in Artificial Rage rotate towards the player, since I couldn’t find a simple answer.

• Most things I found was math. Now math is fun and good, but when you’re tired and want to get one thing just to work at 4 am, it’s not gonna help you.

• Especially since I’ve never learned linear algebra at any school I’ve went to (or I just likely don’t remember), and double especially since all the math lingo is in English and I have no idea what any of it means!!!

• Getting Gooder at math is on my eternal to-do list, but anyhow, for those like me who just need to get something done, here’s how I did it.

• First off, I just wanted the character to rotate around it’s Y-axis: If you would stick a.. well stick in a grape and twirl the stick in your fingers, that’s the Y-axis of the grape. This means the following snippet does not take account the other axises. But I’m sure it could be used for it.

Perl / Raku

• This year has seen a lot of migrations. In the real world sadly, but also online: the FreeNode fiasco comes to mind, and now Twitter appears to be going the same direction. So it was a good opportunity to start an official channel for the Raku Programming Language on Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@RakuLang, run by members of the Raku Steering Council. This will replace the two Twitter accounts that were run by Moritz Lenz and Roman Baumer.

• Yours truly found out today that you can actually “follow” a tag on Mastodon. To follow the #RakuLang tag, the relative URL is /tags/RakuLang on your local Mastodon instance, so e.g. https://fosstodon.org/tags/RakuLang. Why the CamelCase? Aren’t tags case insensitive? They are indeed, but by camelcasing them, you make it easier on the people that need to use screen readers, as screenreaders take the capital letters as hints for pronunciation.

• Juhuu, released Kephra 0.401 in the spirit release early – release often. It is the start of a complete rewrite. So it’s back to zero: now it can only edit one file at a time and has only Perl highlighting and UTF-8 or ASCII encoding. But some of you will still want to use it (beside vi, emacs, VStudio or atom – I know) because of the comfort in basic editing it provides. The following article explains what I mean by that.

• Basic editing means writing, crafting, forming a text without big IDE features like refactoring, linting and such. It is surprising how deficient, especially big IDE are in that field, where a little coding and much attention to details works wonders.

• It starts with tiny things like: in Perl $ @ % are word character because part of an identifier. And when you navigate the next you want skip a whole var at once or select it, without additional key twiddling. You want also navigate between matching braces, from block to block or from sub so sub or just easily return to place you just wrote something (Ctrl+E). All that by just holding Ctrl for minimal finger movement.

Leftovers

Hardware

• So I was a little late to the game on mechanical keyboards but I tried my best to catch up in 2022 and so I could try to make it into 2023. The first one I got was the Ducky-Mini with Cherry MX Brown switches which offers a bit of a quieter/smoother version of a tactile switch or a rougher/scratchier version of a linear.

Proprietary

• VMware Workstation is a popular virtual machine software available for Linux and Windows.

• It isn’t open-source but works quite well. Used by enterprises, individuals, and educational institutions alike, it offers a lot of utility with support for various Linux distros.

• Sometimes, it might prove to be a better option than VirtualBox. However, that should be up for debate as per your use-cases.

• VMware has refreshed its desktop hypervisors, adding native support for Apple’s Arm-based CPUs as well as Windows 11.

• The virtualization giant offers three desktop hypervisors: Workstation and Player for x86 machines, plus Fusion for macOS. Workstation and Player have reached version 17, and Fusion is at version 13.

• The big addition to both is a virtual trusted platform module (TPM) – an essential requirement for running Windows 11 as a guest OS.

Linux Foundation

• Rancher Government Solutions, a company focused on delivering secure, open source technology to the public sector, has teamed with the Linux Foundation, an open source technology consortium.

• AGL is the only company proposing to cover all software in the vehicle, including the instrument cluster, heads-up display, telematics, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and autonomous driving, while having initially focused on in-vehicle entertainment (IVI).

Security

• The Linux Foundation recognizes the value of this, with Executive Director Jim Zemlin observing that “SBOMs are no longer optional,’’ and its research has revealed that 78% of organizations expect to produce or consume SBOMs in 2022.

Finance

• I first arrived in Silicon Valley in 1977 — 45 years ago. I was 24 years old and had accepted a Stanford fellowship paying $2,575 for the academic year. My on-campus apartment rent was $175 per month and a year later I’d buy my first Palo Alto house for $57,000 (sold 21 years later for $990,000). It was an exciting time to be living and working in Silicon Valley. And it still is. We’re right now in a period of economic confusion and reflection when many of the loudest voices have little to no sense of history. Well my old brain is crammed with history and I’m here to tell you that the current situation — despite the news coverage — is no big deal. This, too, shall pass.

• [...]

• I could easily argue that AI in 1987 looks very similar to the metaverse in 2021. Meta (formerly Facebook) is losing $10 billion per year betting on its metaverse strategy. Recent layoffs suggest that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reevaluating his expected timeline for success.

• How long can Zuckerberg afford to continue dumping billions into metaverse development? Given Meta’s corporate structure giving Zuckerberg personal voting control of the company, that question comes down to how long Meta will have enough excess cashflow to cover the costs. IF Meta is cutting its burn rate in half with these layoffs (a good argument I think) Zuckerberg can continue spending at this rate… forever. This assumes Meta continues to make lots of money with current products, but it also identifies Zuck as probably the only person in the history of tech who could make this bet pay off IF the meta verse actually becomes the next big thing.

• It will be interesting to see what happens with Meta. Zuck might just run out of energy or — more likely — some competing next big thing may come along to distract him. I’m not sure it really matters much.

• What does matter is that in high tech change is the norm, flux is nearly constant, and what we are seeing in the current weakness is probably change that should have happened years ago but for all the cheap money.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The University of Melbourne is surrounded by three well known bars. We can join the dots to make the Golden triangle or perhaps the Bermuda triangle. Students who go for a drink at lunchtime might disappear for the rest of the day.

• Now we have a second triangle sharing one point, the Prince Alfred, with the first triangle.

• The bars are Naughton’s on the Royal Parade, the Clyde Hotel in Carlton and the Prince Alfred’s (PA’s) bar on Grattan Street. If you want to walk in the footsteps of the late Peter Eckersley, PA’s is closest to the computer science labs in Bouverie Street.

• Recent blogs began to explore Prince Alfred. When Julian Assange was apprehended in the UK, he gave an address barely 50 meters away at 177 Grattan Street. When Novak Djokovic was apprehended by Australian authorities earlier this year, he was detained in the nearby Park Hotel, formerly Rydges Carlton.

Moderation

• We are two weeks past the 2022 midterm elections and this year’s election advanced state leadership on a number of issues. States have become the new battleground for policy making and influencing, especially with regards to content moderation. But before we preview how the content moderation debate could play out in 2023, we first have to review past and ongoing trends.

• State lawmakers began their own initiatives to regulate online content moderation around 2018. Since 2021, states have introduced over 250 bills to regulate content across digital services’ platforms, though often with the intent to target leading tech companies alone. Many states are considering or have enacted content moderation legislation. However, much of this legislation risks conflicting with federal law, including Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which, as our resource page elucidates, is integral to the function of the Internet.

• Many states are changing to one-party rule in this election cycle and state legislation will therefore be much easier to pass. Over the past year, legislators have pursued multiple kinds of content moderation measures (more deeply covered in CCIA’s Content Moderation Landscape), the most problematic of which often center on perceived “censorship,” the establishment of an oversight body, disclosure and auditing or testing requirements for algorithms, increased content removal, and resolutions calling on Congress to amend or repeal Section 230, among other foci. Certain states to be aware of are California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Copyrights

• Back in the 1980s, a photographer named Lynn Goldsmith took photo portraits of Prince. (Yes, that Prince.) She licensed them to Vanity Fair to be used as artist’s references for article illustrations, got paid, and went along her merry way. Vanity Fair turned around and commissioned Andy Warhol (yes, that Andy Warhol) to do a silkscreen illustration of Prince, based on Goldsmith’s photos, for an upcoming issue. Warhol completed the commission, and then some; although he was only paid for one (“Purple Prince”), he made another 13 variants, just for funsies. These were not published, nor were they part of the agreement with Vanity Fair. Vanity Fair ran the article with “Purple Prince” in 1984, and Warhol died in 1989.

• Three decades later, Prince died. Vanity Fair approached Warhol’s heirs (The Warhol Foundation) and asked if the publication could use another image from the Prince Series as the cover for their commemorative edition. The Warhol Foundation agreed, and another print from the series (“Orange Prince”) ran on the cover of Vanity Fair.

• Goldsmith – who had, to this point, been unaware of the other 13 Prince prints (try saying that ten times fast) – sued, arguing that her initial license to Vanity Fair only covered the creation of the initial print. According to Goldsmith, the silkscreens amount to nothing more than unlicensed colorizations that infringe on her copyright. The Warhol Foundation countered that the prints were a transformative fair use, as (among other things) they substantially altered the “meaning or message” of the original work. The trial court agreed with Warhol; the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I once witnessed a discussion in which, on two opposing, mutually exclusive scales, the discussants placed deriving energy for action from pursuing a goal and deriving it from experiencing (consciously) the moment.

• Why these two sources should be mutually exclusive is something I did not understand and do not understand to this day. Is it not possible to draw energy from both, whether alternately or even simultaneously by consciously experiencing the process of pursuing a goal?

• 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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