● 11.27.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 27/11/2022: Rocky Linux 9.1 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 3:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• We cover events and user groups that are running in the US state of Oregon. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Bill, Brandon, and Neal get together to expand on why corporate contributions to open source matter and the unintended benefits or consequences. Make sure to check out Destination Linux 300!

• JetBrains Fleet is the newest editor in the editor arms race. It’s paid though, but also pretty good, so who knows, maybe it’s a good option? My thoughts in this video.

• This week in Business News, Mercedes plans a subscription for acceleration and Tesla wants chaos on the roads. Also, Alexa is losing money, iCloud photos leak into other people’s accounts, and San Francisco looks to use robots capable of deadly force…what could go wrong?

Kernel Space

• The Phoenix APUs should end up being known as the Ryzen 7040 series, while Dragon Range APUs will be the Ryzen 7045 series. The former will be aimed at mainstream laptops and ultrabooks featuring a 35-45W TDP, and the latter will feature a 55W TDP (or higher), aimed at gaming laptops and portable workstations. Another difference between the two types of chips is memory support. While Phoenix will run alongside LPDDR5 memory, Dragon Range will be paired with DDR5 memory.

• Some rumours claimed that the RDNA 3 iGPU in the Phoenix APU could offer RTX 3060-level performance, which would be impressive, to say the least. We don’t know when these APUs will be officially announced, but CES is right around the corner, so we might hear more on this during the event.

Applications

• Coming more than ten months after qBittorrent 4.4, the qBittorrent 4.5 release appears to be an exciting release for fans of this open-source BitTorrent client as it introduces a new icon and color themes, new color palettes for both dark and light themes, better startup time when using many torrents, support for custom SMTP ports, file name filter/blacklist, and port forwarding option for the embedded tracker.

• This release is another release with a focus on improving existing functionality. The reason for this is simple: it works just fine. True, there is always room for improvement, but also to build upon what is there, so maybe, read on …

Instructionals/Technical

• I have remote systems that only have /home as encrypted partitions, the reason is it ease a lot of remote management without a serial access, it’s not ideal if you have critical files but in my use case, it’s good enough.

• In this blog post, I’ll explain how to get the remote system to prompt you the unlocking passphrase automatically when it boots. I’m using OpenBSD in my example, but you can achieve the same with Linux and cryptsetup (LUKS), if you want to push the idea on Linux, you could do this from the initramfs to unlock your root partition.

• Last week I attended the Ubuntu Summit 2022 in Prague (Czech Republic) and as for other conferences I shared some moments live on Mastodon.

• At the start of day three Noah Alorwu animated the audience with a fun little dance which I filmed, but when I tried to upload the file to a post, Mastodon gave me an error message.

• Ubuntu 22.10 is out, and with it comes Gnome 43, Linux 5.19, new drivers, patches, fixes, and more. This guide will show you how to upgrade your Ubuntu system to the latest release.

• DNS servers are one of the most basic yet crucial parts of the internet infrastructure. Whenever you type a domain name into your browser, a DNS server translates that name into an IP (Internet Protocol) address. Your browser then uses that address to locate and connect to the site you want to visit.

• Although your internet service provider automatically sets your DNS servers when you connect to the internet, their servers might not be the best choice for your needs. Here’s how you can change your DNS server on Linux.

• Having access to thousands of Linux commands is great for the command-line interface, but it’s difficult for users to remember them all. In this case, a cheat sheet would be extremely helpful in providing quick guidance on completing everyday tasks. Although the Linux commands cheat sheet doesn’t have much detail, it is still a great resource for newbies who want to learn the ins and outs of the Linux Terminal commands. Collect these PDF files of the Linux commands cheat sheet so you can be a pro in no time!

• As a system administrator or a regular Linux user, there are times when you need to transfer files between two servers or two Linux desktop systems.

• The Mako Server provides a compact and efficient Lua web framework and non-blocking asynchronous sockets in a tiny ready to run application server package. The Mako Server is a good fit for embedded Linux systems such as the Raspberry Pi. Lua is a powerful and fast programming language that is easy to learn and use.

• To prevent unauthorized access, you can show a security warning message to those users (ex: hackers) and let them know the aftermath.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Firewalld on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Firewalld is a firewall service daemon that provides a dynamic customizable host-based firewall with a D-Bus interface. In addition, the program offers a variety of other features that make it a valuable tool for keeping your system secure, including the ability to create custom rules and view detailed log files.

• 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 Firewalld on Rocky Linux. 9.

• Learning to use an SD card module with Arduino and store the data on SD card. The write and read with the SD is performed.

Games

• Between 2022-11-20 and 2022-11-27 there were 89 new games validated for the Steam Deck. We use numerous features to come up with this Best Steam Deck Games list, such as popularity, ratings from reviews and more! Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones, separated in Verified and Playable lists…

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Well, a brand new GNOME extension allows them to EXACTLY that!

• It’s called ‘Dynamic Calendar and Clocks Icons’ (sic) and adds dynamic, updating app icons for the GNOME Calendar and the GNOME Clocks apps. The Calendar app icons updates daily to reflect the day, month, and date, while the Clocks icons convey’s the current time through an easy-to-read analog face.

• This extension works with both any icons set, including Ubuntu’s Yaru icon set. While the ‘dynamic’ icons are NOT the same as the icons they replace, they don’t look that out of place with Yaru of the Adwaita icon set. Against more stylised icon packs I imagine they’ll look more conspicuous.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

• We are pleased to announce the general availability of Rocky Linux 9.1. This release is currently available for the x86-64, aarch64, ppc64le, and s390x architectures. Please review the release notes in the Rocky Linux Documentation – These notes contain important information including known bugs and more comprehensive details about changes in this version.

• A private registry can be useful for storing Linux container images for your applications in an internal, controlled (and potentially more secure) infrastructure.

• Linux containers are technologies that allow you to package and isolate applications with their entire runtime environment—all of the files—necessary to run. This makes it easy to move the contained application between environments (dev, test, production, etc.).

Open Hardware/Modding

• As part of his ongoing PorscheKart project, YouTuber Wesley Kagan wanted a better way to steer his V12 custom-built race car, as the previous wheel was simply a mechanical linkage to the front steering. Instead, this new version would closely mimic the layout and functionality of an actual Formula 1 wheel, complete with all of the buttons, dials, switches, and the central screen.

• The base of the wheel was formed from a laser-cut sheet of aluminum while the surrounding grips were painstakingly 3D-printed out of TPU filament. For the electronics, Kagan decided to use a pair of Arduino Micros, which were split between handling button inputs and driving the display, while an Arduino Mega 2560 gathers sensor data and sends it as a string to the two boards. Because of the limited number of pins, he wired each of the three rotary switches’ output pins to a differently valued resistor, thereby letting the analog input on the Micro know which position is selected by the incoming voltage.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Events

• GDG DevFest Pescara brings together the world class experts in Android, Web, Cloud, Machine Learning technologies to Pescara for 2 days of sessions, workshops and showcases.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• The latest version of Firefox could be, quite possibly, their most boring release they’ve ever had. Especially considering how ridiculous and amusing their previous version was.

Programming/Development

• I have three weeks left at Recurse Center. This last week was significantly less productive for me than usual, because I’ve been pretty fatigued and just recovered from a cold. But I still got some work done that I’m proud of. More than that, I’m excited for the coming three weeks!

• This week I was mostly fatigued all week, so I didn’t do very much coding. In spite of that, I made some really good progress on IsabellaDB through some pairing sessions! A friend reminded me that a few years ago I was deeply skeptical of pair programming (I knew it worked for some people, but I was convinced I was not one of those people). This week cemented what I learned earlier in batch: Pair programming is a highly effective tool for getting work done. It’s not an all-the-time thing for me, and it’s highly dependent on having the right pair for the right problem, but it’s a great time.

• Through pairing this week, I was able to finish out both a basic move explorer (show the list of legal moves, click one to make that move) and finish out my sparse bitmap implementation. This lays the groundwork for the more interesting features I am building with IsabellaDB. Next up is displaying win/loss/draw percents in an opening tree so you can explore openings. After that, building some filters to explore openings for a certain subset of games (played in the last 12 months, etc.). And then after that, I’ll generalize it to be a query engine over all the games so you can do things like search for sequences of positions (want to see how often the Caro-Kann transposes into a French Defense?) or features of positions/games (want to find all the Botez Gambits?).

• How to do Pairwise Comparisons in R, To evaluate if there is a statistically significant difference between the means of three or more independent groups, a one-way ANOVA is utilized.

• “openEO is an open source, community-based API for cloud-based processing of Earth Observation data. This blog introduces the R openeo client, and demonstrates a sample analysis using the openEO Platform for processing.” https://www.r-bloggers.com/2022/11/processing-large-scale-satellite-imagery-with-openeo-platform-and-r/

• openEO is an open source, community-based API for cloud-based processing of Earth Observation data. This blog introduces the R openeo client, and demonstrates a sample analysis using the openEO Platform for processing.

• The noblest of human endeavours is to enlighten the uninitiated consciousness; to bare its awareness before the endless and terrifying vistas that lie beyond darkness and ignorance.

• In pursuit of such necessarily painful revelations the Oxford Internet Insitute at the University of Oxford — the unwitting host on which the investigations here parasitise — recently hosted an inaugural Halloween lecture. This oration drew on several years of dark explorations chronicled in this blog, to inculcuate into a new generation of unprepared and curious minds the horror and necessity of subjecting our reality to the insidious power of statistical science. Through what seems a dangerously careless oversight, this brief glimpse of truth was recorded and made available for posterity.

• I recently shipped CodeGuessr. It’s like GeoGuessr .. but for code. Given a random code snippet, you have to guess which popular open source project it belongs to.

• When I ported my website from Go to Rust back in 2020 I needed a library like Go’s html/template to template out the HTML that my site uses. At the time there were many options I could pick from, but I ended up choosing ructe because it would compile the templates into my application binary instead of having to ship those with my website. This also means that the optimizer can chew through my templates and make them even faster than html/template. Native code will always be faster than interpreted code.

• This worked for a while, but I started running into ergonomics problems as I continued to use ructe. The great part about ructe is that because the templates are compiled to Rust anyways, you can use any Rust logic or types you want. The horrible part about ructe is that your editor autocomplete and type checking logic doesn’t work. Debugging compile failures of your templates requires that you understand how the generated code works. This isn’t really as much of an issue as I’m making it sound like, but it’s a papercut nonetheless.

Perl / Raku

Rust

• Typically, you’d want a production application to use a stable version of Rust. At the time of this writing, that’s Rust 1.65.0, which stabilizes a bunch of long-awaited features (GATs, let-else, MIR inlining, split debug info, etc.).

• Back when I wrote this codebase, warp was the best / only alternative for something relatively high-level on top of hyper.

• I was never super fond of warp’s model — it’s a fine crate, just not for me.

• One thing I didn’t really announce (because I wanted to make sure it worked before I did), is that I’ve migrated my website over completely from a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to an ADN (Application Delivery Network), and that required some architectural changes.

Leftovers

• I’ve been reading Walter Isaacson’s biography on Leonardo Da Vinci. A master at marrying observation with imagination, Da Vinci would mindfully notice and observe things that most people gloss over. Soaking them in, his imagination would alight with what other people deemed the minutiae of everyday life.

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

• If you were unfortunate enough to e-file your US tax using HR Block, Taxact or Taxslayer, your most sensitive financial information was nonconsensually shared with Facebook, where it was added to the involuntary dossier the company maintains billions of people, including people who don’t have Facebook accounts.

• A blockbuster investigative report from The Markup and The Verge reveals that major tax-prep services illegally embedded the Facebook tracking pixel in their sites, configured so that it transmitted as much data as possible to the surveillance giant.

• Beyond academics having to rely on food-stamps, students going into lifetime debt to enrich predatory textbook monopolies, and the other horrors of financialized higher ed, there’s the special evil of college sports.

• Like all finance-bro motivated reasoning, college sports are sold as a way to do well by doing good: “Look! We’re giving poor people a chance at a great education based on their physical prowess, and we’re racking up tons of money for the university!”

• But – like all finance schemes – college sports is a self-licking ice-cream cone that destroys the lives of the people who generate value for it, even as it devours its host institution from within.

Environment

• The people of the Torres Strait Islands may soon be forced to leave their homelands if nothing is done to stop increasingly frequent catastrophic weather events and rising sea levels, writes James Fitzgerald Sice.

• When the time comes, Jennifer Enosa wants to be buried with her ancestors on her home island of Saibai. She wants a headstone that future generations can read. But with rising tides, she knows this might not happen.

• Enosa is an Ait woman from the Koedal (crocodile) clan of Saibai in the Torres Strait Islands. She is a senior broadcaster at the Torres Strait Islander Media Association (4MW) and has worked in the media industry for over 30 years. Enosa speaks with pride of her connection to Saibai. To her, it is more than a place: it’s an integral part of her identity.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The media covered the firebombing of Jordan Shanks (@friendlyjordies ), though they doxed him. Then the story was pretty much ignored in this morning’s press.

Censorship/Free Speech

• He was suing YouTuber Jordan Shanks in a high-profile defamation case at the time and was soon to be embroiled in the scandal over the New York trade commissioner post – a role he created, then subsequently filled with none other than himself.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Protests have erupted at the world’s biggest iPhone factory in the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, according to footage circulated widely online. Videos show hundreds of workers marching, with some confronted by people in hazmat suits and riot police. Those livestreaming the protests said workers were beaten by police. Videos also showed clashes. Manufacturer Foxconn said it would work with staff and local government to prevent further violence. In its statement, the firm said some workers had doubts about pay but that the firm would fulfil pay based on contracts. It also described as “patently untrue” rumours that new recruits were being asked to share dormitories with workers who were Covid-positive.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Today, tech archivist Jason Scott announced a new website called Discmaster that lets anyone search through 91.7 million vintage computer files pulled from CD-ROM releases and floppy disks. The files include images, text documents, music, games, shareware, videos, and much more.

• The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever Discmaster opens a window into digital media culture around the turn of the millennium, turning anyone into a would-be digital archeologist. It’s a rare look into a slice of cultural history that is often obscured by the challenges of obsolete media and file format incompatibilities.

Monopolies

• It’s not just you. US healthcare, already a bureaucratic nightmare of buck-passing and price-gouging, has gotten far worse. Private equity firms have created regional health-care monopolies that don’t just rip patients off – they’re killing us.

Copyrights

• I saw Nelly Furtado at some venue that I don’t think exists any more. (I looked it up, it was The Quest.) The club was probably First-Avenue sized. It was one of those “book a ticket, then she blew up, now the venue is way too small” situations. There were lines around the block to get in. My memory says she was sick for the performance, but she still performed pretty well.

• Same as Nelly Furtado, I picked up a pair of Mumford & Sons tickets at First Avenue before they exploded. By the time we saw them they could have sold out an arena, I think. My wife was seven months pregnant with our third. She generally hates going to standing club shows as she’s short and claustrophobic. Luckily we found a place in the balcony where she could somewhat see, we weren’t crowded, and she got a back rub from me for the whole show. Other memorable things included the couple next to us dressed up for Halloween/their wedding that night, another older couple seemingly there because their recently-deceased son was a huge fan, and the PA system going out mid-show with the band handling it amazingly well, singing several a cappella songs with the crowd supporting.

• 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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