● 11.28.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 28/11/2022: OpenRGB 0.8 and Introduction of KIO AFC

Posted in News Roundup at 8:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• In the forty-fourth episode of the WordPress Briefing, our host Josepha Haden Chomphosy highlights the role of major and minor releases in the WordPress open source project.

• From a new stable client update to Nintendo attacking their biggest fans, we talk about the biggest news in the Steam Deck world this last week… or 10 days. Whatever.

• An alternate universe of what a smartphone OS could be like. Not iOS. Not Android. Not even your various flavors of Linux phone. This is something totally different. A Smalltalk-based phone with roots in the Xerox Alto of the 1970s. And it works.

• Chris ditches the iPhone and switches to GrapheneOS, a security and privacy-focused project that lets you take control back from Google.

Applications

• As a content creator, you may need to screen record for creating video tutorials, broadcasting gaming guides, or any other purpose. Here is a list of the Best screen recorders for Linux users. Applications mentioned below have options to either record the screen as GIF or as a video. Also, the whole list contains open-source (FOSS) and free software.

• Tip: Before you start with the list of screen recorders for Linux, you must know about asciinema. A desktop tool that enables you to record terminal sessions and further upload them to its website.

• The catch here is, you can copy its URL and send it to your friends. Also, All of the commands during the recording session can be copied. So, when there are lots of commands, you won’t have to enter them manually.

Instructionals/Technical

• Use open source GPG key pairs and Keyoxide to prove your identity on Mastodon.

• Have you forgotten the root password in Fedora? Or do you want to change the root user password in your Fedora system? No problem! This brief guide walks you through the steps to change or reset root password in Fedora operating systems.

• Using sudo program, we can elevate the ability of a normal user to run administrative tasks, without giving away the root user’s password in Linux operating systems. This guide explains how to add, delete and grant sudo privileges to users in Fedora 37 and 36 desktop and server editions.

• I’ve divided this guide in three sections. The first section teaches you how to create a new user. In the second section, you’ll learn how to give sudo access to the existing user. And in the last section, you will know how to remove sudo access from a user. I’ve also provided example commands in each section, so you can understand it better.

• Learn how to download and install Teamviewer in Ubuntu Linux using Terminal without using a browser or any kind of external application.

• Teamviewer for Linux works similarly to Windows, however, the installation of it on Linux would be not easy for everybody. Nevertheless, not much difficult as well.

• This remote maintenance & assistant software is free for personal use. And allows sharing of a desktop between two computers.

• When you start learning Linux sysadmin, one of the common tasks you’ll come across is installing the LAMP server.

• LAMP is a tech stack that refers to the collection of the following software required to run a web application: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

• While these days, you can deploy servers preconfigured with a web service or run services in containers, installing the LAMP stack is classic.

• It may seem complicated at the beginning but it gives you a good way to test and practice your Linux knowledge.

• The best thing is that you don’t need a cloud server for that. You can install LAMP on your own computer to create a local development environment.

• In this guide, you’ll get a LAMP stack up and running on an Ubuntu 22.04 machine. At the end of this process, you will have a web server running with a MySQL database backend and the PHP programming language to write dynamic content.

• For Debian users, the default repository for Nginx might not install the latest version. However, for most users, this is satisfactory, especially for Debian users that usually install the distribution due to its stability for the most part. Meanwhile, more often than not, users who seek performance and keep up with the latest security bug fixes would look at installing the Nginx mainline over the stable branch.

• Depending on your needs, one or the other might be a better choice for you. If you need the latest and greatest, go with the mainline. If you need a more stable release that’s been thoroughly tested, go with the stable version. In most cases, the stable version of Nginx will suffice. However, for those who need the newest features or more performance, installing the mainline version is recommended by Nginx.

• The following tutorial will cover installing Nginx mainline on Debian 11 or 10 Linux desktop or server utilizing the APT package manager with Nginx official APT repository. The tutorial also demonstrates for those that may not want to install mainline but the latest stable branch, this is covered too.

• The OpenSSL utility is used to have secure communications with authentication and even lets you encrypt connections.

• Sounds cool, right?

• The traceroute is similar to the ping command but offers more detailed output. It traces the route from the origin to the target system.

• If you didn’t know, when you connect to a remote system, the data travels through several intermediate nodes (your router, your ISP’s router, etc.).

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VSCodium on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, VSCodium is a fork of Microsoft Visual Studio Code Editor modified to have full open-source access. The source code for this product is available on GitHub under an MIT license, making it accessible to anyone who wants to use it.

• 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 VSCodium 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.

• Python, version 3.8, comes with several new features and improvements. One of the most notable is the inclusion of a parallel filesystem cache for compiled bytecode. This can provide a significant performance boost when working on large projects. Debug also builds now share ABI as release builds, which should help reduce debug builds’ overall size. Additionally, f-strings now support a handy = specifier for debugging. This can be used to insert the value of an expression into the string, making it easier to track down errors. Finally, continue is now legal in finally: blocks that can be useful when dealing with cleanup procedures that may need to be interrupted. For the official Python 3.8 rundown notes, visit the official Python webpage What’s New in Python 3.8.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to download the latest Python 3.8 on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish LTS and 20.04 Focal Fossa LTS Linux using the command terminal and how to download and compile as an alternative method. The tutorial will also demonstrate how to change alternative Python versions for those who have multiple versions installed, such as Python 3.12, 3.11, 3.10, etc.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• While there have been several projects like this for both KDE 4 and Frameworks 5, this one has been written on top of the latest KIO classes and will be officially part of the next KDE Gear release. It is now part of the kio-extras module, which also houses the Android counterpart for transferring files over the MTP protocol.

• Thanks to prior work in Solid, KDE’s hardware abstraction Framework, an iPhone plugged in to the computer will be shown in the Disks & Devices applet and Dolphin’s Places sidebar like any other external storage medium. I also submitted a small fix to UPower so that the device’s name rather than vendor and type is shown in the battery applet.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• The first stable Voice (gnome-voice) 1.2.0 release is now available at https://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-voice/1.2/gnome-voice-1.2.0.tar.xz with Voicegram streaming and recording in Ogg Vorbis.

• Voice 1.2.0 is a new Public Voice Communication Software being built on GNOME 44 and published as GNOME Software as well as in the Bachelor thesis in Programming – Aamot, Ole Kristian: Public Voice Communication (NTNU, 2025).

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• A mitigation plan for a microarchitecture level change and information about advancing openSUSE’s rolling release Tumbleweed to an x86-64-v2 microarchitecture kicked off a significant move forward for the project this week.

• Tumbleweed and openSUSE other distributions are built for old x86-64-v1 hardware and transitioning to x86-64-v2 will require community efforts to support users with hardware that can’t make the transition to the microarchitecture.

Red Hat

• There’s general agreement among business and IT leaders that true digital transformation (DX) is a continuous and adaptive process – there’s not necessarily a finish line or endpoint.

• That certainly doesn’t mean digital transformation initiatives shouldn’t have strategic goals and milestones – and clear ways of measuring your progress and outcomes – along the way.

• Yet developing, tracking, and acting on digital transformation metrics can be tricky. Digital transformation is an inherently broad term, and its continuous nature may at first seem like it doesn’t lend itself well to measurement. Measure you must, however, and there are indeed good approaches for doing so.

• Anyone who’s ever been through a transformation knows that change is hard. And IT is a driving force in organizational change. According to Notion Consulting’s new Change Report, at least 50 percent of changes in the workplace are attributed to technology changes.

• As change agents, CIOs help their organizations by inspiring, influencing, and truly leading others. With most individual contributors in an organization claiming to be openly skeptical or completely disengaged, CIOs have their work cut out for them.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The E25 also provides access to up to 26x GPIOs supporting protocols as 3x UARTs, 2x SPI, 1x I2C, 1x I2S/PCM, 1x CAN, up to 6x PWM, 1x ADC, up to 17 GPIOs, 2x 5V pins and 2x 3.3V pins.

• Other peripherals present in the E25 include one USB 3.0 OTG, up to 16x status LEDs and one USB Type-C used for power and serial console.

• Documentation for this device can be found on Radxa’s Wiki, similarly Debian 11 and Ubuntu Server 20.04 images are located under Downloads. OpenWRT firmware for the E25 mini-router can be found in this GitHub from ophub.

Devices/Embedded

• PICO DEV M3 is a round-shaped development board based on a Raspberry Pi RP2040 dual-core microcontroller and serves as a magnetic rotary encoder with a few 3D printed parts.

• Designed by Ahmsville Labs, the board comes with 2MB QSPI flash, various through holes for GPIOs, a USB-C port, and the magnetic rotary encoder supports up to 36,000 steps per revolution and comes with 18 individually addressable LEDs.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• We strive to use as much open source technology as we can with PhilTel! Each payphone site that we will set up has a router running OpenWRT and WireGuard to get a secure VPN connection to our server. Our Linux-based server runs Asterisk, an open source PBX (private branch exchange) toolkit, to connect our phones to the PSTN and other internal services or hobbyist or collector phone networks. We are very fortunate in that my co-founder has an in-depth knowledge with Asterisk as he is a regular code contributor.

• Finding good quality, open source audio samples can be a challenge. I’ve been getting increasingly into composition and creating music in my spare time, using the open source tool Ardour and the creator-focused distribution Ubuntu Studio. I’ve been looking for samples of specific sounds or loops to include.

• I’m familiar with many tools to find images, but until recently, I hadn’t come across a similar option for audio resources.

• Earlier this year, Elon Musk tweeted that Twitter DMs needed end-to-end encryption like Signal.

• Even back in 2016, Edward Snowden asked Jack Dorsey, former CEO and Co-Founder of Twitter, to add something similar to the platform.

• But, it never came to be. It was probably tested but never implemented.

Programming/Development

• Airtable is a popular low-code web service that allows you to manage your data with your team. Moreover, customize your workflow, work on complex data sheets.

• Here, we provide you a simple open-source alternative for it, that allows you to do almost the same, with more control of your data.

• Mathesar is a free open-source data management and low-code platform that allows you to import/ export your datasheets, control your database columns/ fields, search with full-text search support, and more.

Leftovers

Civil Rights/Policing

• On Nov. 9, Singapore’s Parliament passed the Online Safety (Miscellaneous Amendments) Bill (Online Safety law) to “improve safety” and “combat harmful content” online. This law, along with two related regulations — the Content Code for Social Media Services (CCSMS) and the Code of Practice for Online Safety (CPOS) – will likely be implemented in 2023 to address content that incites violence, sexual abuse, self-harm, and harms to public health and security.

• Singapore’s efforts reflect a global trend towards governmental content regulation. In proposing these measures, it referenced similar efforts in Germany, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and Australia.

• However, these initiatives must not sacrifice the rights to freely express, share, and receive information online under the guise of safety. As former U.N. Special Rapporteur David Kaye has noted, “even rules designed with the best of intentions” can violate the rule of law if they are not clearly and comprehensively grounded in the principles of legality, legitimacy, necessity, and proportionality.

Gemini* and Gopher

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• First and foremost I transitioned during my hiatus. It was really hard on me personally but a LONG time coming. I finally worked up the self courage to actually accept myself for who I was take the plunge.

• While its all very fresh still I won’t inundate everyone here with queer stuff too much – that’s mostly on mastodon. My HTTP and gemini blogs are very much music and tech related primarily.

• But doesn’t rule that style content out of course! This has been a pretty safe space

• Much of Mastodon and the greater Fediverse enjoy and employ their ability to block people and instances en masse. It’s a great feature on Mastodon, unrivalled by any proprietary walled gardens. However, I take a step back when it comes to someone demanding that we must defederate.

• [...]

• Avoiding bigots is usually a good idea, but telling others they cannot speak with them is not.

• 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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