● 11.28.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 28/11/2022: Snal Linux 1.24 and Thunderbird Android Update

Posted in News Roundup at 1:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Linux Magazine

Audiocasts/Shows

• Yes, the title is correct, I’m switching to Ubuntu. Don’t you hate snaps and GNOME? Yes, but I always say change your Linux install to what you want. Don’t like something? Change IT!

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

• Welcome to LearnLinuxTV’s brand new complete course on Bash Scripting! In this 18 episode series, you’ll learn everything you need to know in order to start writing Bash scripts. Each video builds on the previous one, with additional concepts added as the series progresses. Examples will start off easy with shorter scripts, and by the end of the series you’ll be able to write more complex scripts that will actually come in handy while maintaining Linux servers.

Graphics Stack

• Highlights of the NVIDIA 525.60.11 release include Dynamic Boost support on laptops powered by AMD processors, support for the EGL_MESA_platform_surfaceless extension, performance improvements for PRIME render-offloaded apps, as well as support for OTA (Over-the-Air) updates in the Proton and Wine NVIDIA NGX build.

• Another interesting change in the new NVIDIA graphics driver release is the fact that NVIDIA updated the open-source kernel modules to add support for Quadro Sync, Stereo, rotation in X11, and YUV 4:2:0 on the NVIDIA Turing GPU architecture.

Applications

• qBittorrent got a new major release this weekend. Here’s the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu 22.04 & Ubuntu 22.10.

• qBittorrent 4.5.0 features new icon theme, new color theme, better startup time, and export torrent support. And, it now uses libtorrent 2.0.x in the default binary packages.

Instructionals/Technical

• Elasticsearch is a distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch has quickly become the most popular search engine and is commonly used for log analytics, full-text search, security intelligence, business analytics, and operational intelligence use cases.

• Want to add a custom icon to replace the GNOME Activities button in the top left corner? Here’s how to do it with ease.

• The GNOME desktop environment adheres to its philosophy of user interaction, which is focused on maximum simplicity. However, some of its components do not always meet user expectations and preferences. Fortunately, GNOME extensions allow users to extensively customize almost every element of it to their liking.

• This tutorial will show you how to replace the GNOME Activities button, which is placed in the upper left corner of the GNOME desktop, with a predefined custom icon or one you create.

• Got an application, but you want to make it in-visible from start menu, app grid, app launcher search result, and dock launcher?

• It’s easy to do the trick by adding rule NoDisplay=true or Hidden=true into the ‘.desktop’ file for that application. And, here’s how to do it step by step.

• This guide covers the ins and outs of FFmpeg starting with fundamental concepts and moving to media transcoding and video and audio processing providing practical examples along the way.

• FFmpeg is an indispensable tool for working with audio and video streams, but it can be challenging to learn to use well. FFmpeg — The Ultimate Guide, posted by Csaba Kopias, can help. “This guide covers the ins and outs of FFmpeg starting with fundamental concepts and moving to media transcoding and video and audio processing providing practical examples along the way.”

WINE or Emulation

• The Wine development release 7.22 is now available.

• What’s new in this release:

• 32-on-64 thunks for both Vulkan and OpenGL. OpenLDAP library bundled and built as PE. Support for the RAW print processor in WinPrint. More progress on the long types printf format conversion. Various bug fixes.

• The source is available now. Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

Games

• You Suck at Parking (aka YSAP) is about making you park cars inside tiny rectangular parking spots. The extra difficulty comes from the fact that you have to time things right to stop exactly inside the parking spot at once (drawn on the road as a small rectangle). If your car stops at any point on the way before reaching your goal, you are in for a new retry from the start.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Gnome Shell Extensions are a great way to personalize and enhance your Gnome desktop environment. They can be used to add new features, tweak existing ones, or completely customize the look and feel of your desktop. With a huge selection of extensions available in the official repository, you’re sure to find something that meets your needs.

• Gnome Shell Extensions are easy to install and manage. Just open your Gnome Shell Settings window, click on “Extensions,” and toggle the switch for each extension you want to use. You can also find additional extensions in the official Gnome-Look repository or even create your own.

• Once you have installed an extension, it will appear in the top bar of your Gnome desktop. This allows you to access and manage your extensions quickly or even disable them when they’re not needed.

• Gnome Shell Extensions can be a great way to customize and personalize your Linux experience. With so many available options, something is bound to fit your needs. So why not give them a try? You might just find your next favorite Linux feature.

• Well, wonder no more! Here is a list of the best Gnome Shell extensions for your desktop.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Snal Linux 1.24 is an update of Snal Linux [Home]. It was released on November 27, 2022.

• Snal Linux 1.24 brings a few new features including some commands written in rust…

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• Youtube music for desktop is a beautiful application for playing youtube music on your desktop without ever opening your browser. Now available in the PCLinuxOS Software Repository.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Once again, we worked on the request workflow. This time we have delivered a renovated interface to show the build results, ready to be consumed by the most demanding palates. Besides that, we have cooked up a couple of additions arranged on several tabs for the hungriest. Just keep reading, help yourself and enjoy.

• The request redesign is part of the beta program.

• We started the redesign of the request workflow in August 2022. Then, in September 2022, we focused on the support of multi-action submit requests. We continued in October 2022 with improvements regarding the Build Results tab and superseded conversations, and now we present build results with a pinch of salt.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Red Hat on Nov. 16 announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1, the first minor release of the RHEL 9 platform. The new version comes with various enhancements, tweaks, and new features.

• 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. A key benefit is helping to streamline complex infrastructure environments to improve the security stance of containerized applications.

• The latest versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux continue to make hybrid cloud computing accessible and successful at global business scale by pairing reliability and stability with features designed for innovation and flexibility, according to Gunnar Hellekson, Red Hat vice president and general manager for RHEL.

• Dr Frederick Phillips Brooks Jr, leader of IBM’s OS/360 project and the man chiefly responsible for the prevalence of the eight-bit byte, has died at the age of 91.

• Fred Brooks was the project lead for OS/360, IBM’s flagship OS for its vastly influential S/360 line of computers. His experience on this project led him to write probably the most famous book about project management, The Mythical Man-Month.

Debian Family

• In my last blog about the DebConf6 assault, I looked at the way the entire DebConf6 population was fooled to believe a dentist was a prostitute.

• As it turns out, at least one person felt it was acceptable to walk up to this female dentist and simply ask her if she was a paid dinner date.

• The email below also demonstrates the manner in which at least one member of the women’s clique, Amaya Rodrigo, was trying to convince Ted’s date that Ted might be dangerous. This is a hideous example of backstabbing and sabotage.

• While this was 16 years ago, Debian hasn’t changed. We can see how easy it was to hoodwink developers with the false accusations that Jacob Appelbaum is a rapist. In 2018, at FOSDEM, the OSI president used her speech to promote a “whisper network”. Amaya’s email shows us what the “whisper network” really means, soul-destroying tactics deployed for purposes of wrecking a man’s personal life.

• If people are so gullible and if an organization has no checks and balances in grievance procedures then the organization is putty in the hands of manipulators. These cultural flaws have serious repercussions for the quality and the security of the Debian operating system.

Open Hardware/Modding

• In Secure Kali Pi (2022), the first blog post in the Raspberry Pi series, we set up a Raspberry Pi 4 with full disk encryption. We mentioned that we can leave it somewhere as a drop box. This brought up the question, “If it is not on my local network how do I connect to it to unlock it?” So we will now answer this by showing a few different ways to connect to our secure Kali Pi drop box.

• Going for a hike outdoors is a great way to relieve stress, do some exercise, and get closer to nature, but tracking them can be a challenge. Our recent collaboration with K-Way led Zalmotek to develop a small wearable device that can be paired to a weather-resistant jacket to track walking speed, steps taken, and even the current atmospheric conditions.

• At its core, the tracker can be split into having three main functions: weather prediction, step/climbing activity, and a way to gather and send raw data over Bluetooth® Low Energy to the Arduino IoT Cloud for additional processing and training machine learning models. Performing these tasks is a Nicla Sense ME board, which contains an advanced six-axis BHI260AP IMU, a three-axis magnetometer, a pressure sensor, and a BME688 four-in-one gas sensor with temperature and humidity capabilities.

• Back in the 1980s, there existed a piece of hardware called the “TVGuardian,” which would attempt to censor incoming video in real-time. As recently covered by the wonderful YouTube channel Technology Connections, the TVGuardian reads captioning data as it’s sent and then replaces the bad word(s) with an alternative phrase and also mutes the audio.

• Upon learning that the internal dictionary of offensive words is not listed anywhere in the manual, Ben Eater had the idea to extract it himself. After a quick teardown, he discovered a single 93LC86 EEPROM chip functioning in 8-bit mode for a total of 2,048 8-bit words. He then connected an Arduino Uno to the EEPROM’s SPI bus and read 16-byte chunks before dumping the contents to the serial monitor for further investigation.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• In this blog post, we will cover the many ways open source has influenced the high-performance computing industry and some of the common open-source solutions in HPC.

• [...]

• The [GNU/]Linux operating system, probably one of the most recognised open-source projects, has been both a driver for open source software in HPC and been driven by HPC use cases. NASA were early users of Linux and Linux, in turn, was fundamental to the first beowulf cluster. Beowulf clusters were essentially clusters created using commodity servers and high speed interconnect, instead of more traditional mainframes or supercomputers. The first such cluster was deployed at NASA, which went on to shape HPC as we know it today. It drove Linux adoption from then onwards in government and expanded well outside that sector into others as well as enterprises.

• HPC workload reliance on performance has driven a lot of development efforts in Linux, all focused heavily on driving down latency and increasing performance anywhere from networking to storage.

• My Mastodon network is picking up nicely. It’s not quite reached the same level or variety of activity from Twitter, but it’s getting there. I wonder if there’s a chance we can revive actual blogging as well? I’m giving it a shot with a 100 day blogging “challenge” for myself.

• A few years ago I did a 100 day challenge for my favorite albums. This time around I’m being a lot more free-form with the content, though I will probably throw some music blogging in the mix over the next few weeks.

• I’ve also been sprucing up my long-neglected set of feeds in The Old Reader and culling bookmarks. A lot of stuff in there that hasn’t been updated in more than a year.

• This tutorial shows you how to install Teddit on Ubuntu. We are using the domain “yetanotherteddit.xyz,” though you can use your own domain name or the localhost.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• In what feels like the blink of an eye, four months have passed since announcing our plans for bringing Thunderbird to Android. The path to bringing you a great email experience on Android devices begins with K-9 Mail, which joined the Thunderbird product family earlier this summer.

• As we work towards a modern redesign of desktop Thunderbird, we’re also working towards improving K-9 Mail as it begins its transition to Thunderbird mobile in Summer 2023.

• Later this week, we’ll share a preview of K-9 Mail’s beautiful Message View redesign. Today, though, let’s talk about the newly released version 6.400.

Programming/Development

• I recently wrote about yet another lisp I’d been having fun with.

• Over the past couple of years I’ve played with a few toy scripting languages, or random interpreters, and this time I figured I’d do something beyond the minimum, by implementing the Language Server Protocol.

• In brief the language server protocol (LSP) is designed to abstract functionality that might be provided by an editor, or IDE, into a small “language server”. If the language-server knows how to jump to definitions, provide completion, etc, etc, then the editor doesn’t need to implement those things for NN different languages – it just needs to launch and communicate with something that does know how to do the job.

Leftovers

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, commons-configuration2, graphicsmagick, heimdal, inetutils, ini4j, jackson-databind, and varnish), Fedora (drupal7-i18n, grub2, kubernetes, and python-slixmpp), Mageia (botan, golang, kernel, kernel-linus, radare2/rizin, and xterm), Red Hat (krb5, varnish, and varnish:6), SUSE (busybox, chromium, erlang, exiv2, firefox, freerdp, ganglia-web, java-1_8_0-openj9, nodejs12, nodejs14, opera, pixman, python3, sudo, tiff, and xen), and Ubuntu (libice and shadow).

• A few notes. One: this is a very small study—only twelve laptop repairs. Two, some of the results were inconclusive, which indicated—but did not prove—log tampering by the technicians. Three, this study was done in Canada. There would probably be more snooping by American repair technicians.

• The moral isn’t a good one: if you bring your laptop in to be repaired, you should expect the technician to snoop through your hard drive, taking what they want.

• If you’ve ever worried about the privacy of your sensitive data when seeking a computer or phone repair, a new study suggests you have good reason. It found that privacy violations occurred at least 50 percent of the time, not surprisingly with female customers bearing the brunt.

• Researchers at University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, recovered logs from laptops after receiving overnight repairs from 12 commercial shops. The logs showed that technicians from six of the locations had accessed personal data and that two of those shops also copied data onto a personal device. Devices belonging to females were more likely to be snooped on, and that snooping tended to seek more sensitive data, including both sexually revealing and non-sexual pictures, documents, and financial information.

• [...]

• Half of the laptops were configured to appear as if they belonged to a male and the other half to a female. All of the laptops were set up with email and gaming accounts and populated with browser history across several weeks. The researchers added documents, both sexually revealing and non-sexual pictures, and a cryptocurrency wallet with credentials.

• Technology, in many ways, has changed the way people do business. Modern society is highly digitalized, thanks to technological advancements in the Internet of Things (IoT).

• Along with it, cloud computing has garnered much attention, too. More and more cloud-based solutions emerge on the market; in fact, businesses worldwide are looking to or have already invested in cloud-based storage solutions.

• Cloud storage is an effective way of streamlining a business’s operations. It’s also relatively secure in some respects. However, this doesn’t mean that cloud systems are infallible. Their exposure to the IoT and the Internet makes them vulnerable to cyberattacks, which are reported to have drastically increased recently. So, businesses need to bolster their cloud security. Fortunately, this is something with which cybersecurity experts can help you.

• Data is now a major asset for most companies. Therefore, some companies can’t afford to have a data breach at any point. This is especially true for any company that handles a lot of personal customer information. That said, here’s a guide on how businesses can strengthen their cloud and data security.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

Technical

• Lithium is a precious resource so it interests me and friends at la Bidouille to find ways to reuse dead laptops batteries. In particular I brought a laptop that got killed by spilling coffee on it back in 2014 even though it was only a few months old — absolutely un-solarpunk, I know, but at least it’s fun to disassemble it completely and research how to reuse its parts.

• [...]

• Reusing unhealthy cells can be problematic or outright dangerous in the long term so you should be a bit cautious and not blindly reuse the cells you managed to gather.

• [...]

• Our hackerspace had to move out of our place and we’ve been without a neat place to undermine our electrical safety for some weeks now, so I’m publishing this note even though the cells have been resting in a box instead of being used for something. I would like to try salvaging laptop speakers to make a portable speaker using one of those cells, and maybe a solar lamp. Stay tuned!

• 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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