● 11.29.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 30/11/2022: Gaming on GNU/Linux With Mac PCs, onak 0.6.2 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 7:33 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• A Quick Overview of Ubuntu MATE 22.10.

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu Unity 22.10.

• If you told me a year ago Tumblr would become relevent again I wouldn’t believe you but here we are, Tumblr has decided to join the Fediverse and implement activitypub to connect with Mastodon and other platforms

• Vim has this built in feature that helps you keep your notes private

Kernel Space

• In order to handle all these moving parts in a reasonably safe way, modern GPU drivers are split into two parts: a user space driver and a kernel driver. The user space part is in charge of compiling shader programs and translating API calls (like OpenGL or Vulkan) into the specific command lists that the command processor will use to render the scene. Meanwhile, the kernel part is in charge of managing the MMU and handling memory allocation/deallocation from different apps, as well as deciding how and when to send their commands to the command processor. All modern GPU drivers work this way, on all major OSes!

• Between the user space driver and the kernel driver, there is some kind of custom API that is customized for each GPU family. These APIs are usually different for every driver! In Linux we call that the UAPI, but every OS has something similar. This UAPI is what lets the user space part ask the kernel to allocate/deallocate memory and submit command lists to the GPU.

• That means that in order to make the M1 GPU work with Asahi Linux, we need two bits: a kernel driver and a user space driver!

• Asahi Lina gives a detailed update on progress toward a graphics driver for Apple M1 hardware.

• Even though the M1 and M2 chips in modern Macs are based on ARM processor designs, they aren’t like any other ARM designs. That has made porting Linux to new Macs a difficult challenge, but there has been some impressive progress recently.

• Much of the work around porting desktop Linux to Apple Silicon (M1 & M2) Mac computers has been under the Asahi Linux project, which already offers a desktop distribution that can boot natively on many models. Even though Linux has supported ARM chips for years, largely due to Google’s use of Linux for the Android kernel and devices like the Raspberry Pi, making everything work on Apple Silicon has been a challenge.

• The core operating system and desktop experience has been working on Asahi Linux for a while now, so some developers have moved onto proper graphics support. Alyssa Rosenzweig helped reverse engineer the GPU in the M1 chip to create a user space driver, based on documentation work by Dougall Johnson. However, a kernel-level driver was still missing — a task taken up by VTuber Asahi Linya.

• Asahi Lina explained in a blog post, “just like other parts of the M1 chip, the GPU has a coprocessor called an “ASC” that runs Apple firmware and manages the GPU. This coprocessor is a full ARM64 CPU running an Apple-proprietary real-time OS called RTKit… and it is in charge of everything! It handles power management, command scheduling and preemption, fault recovery, and even performance counters, statistics, and things like temperature measurement! In fact, the macOS kernel driver doesn’t communicate with the GPU hardware at all.”

Applications

• Over the weekend I released a new version of onak, my OpenPGP compatible keyserver. At 2 years since the last release that means I’ve at least managed to speed up a bit, but it’s fair to say its development isn’t a high priority for me at present.

• This release is largely driven by a collection of minor fixes that have built up, and the knowledge that a Debian freeze is coming in the new year. The fixes largely revolve around the signature verification that was introduced in 0.6.0, which makes it a bit safer to run a keyserver by only accepting key material that can be validated. All of the major items I wanted to work on post 0.6.0 remain outstanding.

• For the next release I’d like to get some basic Stateless OpenPGP Command Line Interface support integrated. That would then allow onak to be tested with the OpenPGP interoperability test suite, which has recently added support for verification only OpenPGP implementations.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Kafka on Rocky Linux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Kafka is open-source software that enables the storage and processing of data streams via a distributed streaming platform. It’s developed by Apache Software Foundation and written in Java and Scala. Apache Kafka is used to build real-time streaming data pipelines and applications that adapt to the data stream, especially for enterprise-grade applications and mission-critical applications.

• 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 Apache Kafka distributed streaming platform. on Rocky Linux. 9.

• Caddy is a modern web server built in the GO language. It is a simple, user-friendly, lightweight, and commercially supported web server.

• RabbitMQ is a free and open-source message broker.

• As discusse in a previous post, I use nebula to create a VPN connection between the various machines I use. Usually what I really care about this setup is the ability of consuming services those machine expose on my nebula network.

• When I travel, I prefer to proxy my data through my nebula network. This allows me to not have to care about the limitations imposed in those networks, as long as I’m able to open my tunnel. The second advantage I have, is that I can choose the location where my traffic leaves my VPN, since I have multiple machines in multiple nations. Another advantage is that I can be sure that no data is visibile by the network manager, even if this is becoming less and less relevant, since the majority of the traffic is encrypted nowadays.

• Take GNOME desktop customization to the next level by accessing all the hidden desktop settings with Dconf Editor.

• As the default desktop environment for many distros, GNOME is popular in the Linux desktop space. Its consistent design principles and large app ecosystem make it attractive to many Linux users. But GNOME also has a reputation for lacking custom settings.

• To streamline the desktop experience, the GNOME team has had to make compromises on user customization. These compromises do not mean the end of GNOME customization. A lot of GNOME settings are actually present, though hidden out of the box. Users can access these hidden settings with a powerful app called Dconf Editor.

• My daily workflow includes taking tons of screenshots. I’m constantly relaying views of different data or results of various work between different chat systems and emails. As with all things that I do often, I look for ways to optimize them as much as possible.

• Call me a dinosaur, but I still depend on email. I use it for personal and professional communication every day of the year. Because of that, my inbox can get scarily full. Within a span of sixty minutes, I’ll have received hundreds of emails in multiple accounts.

• Today we are looking at how to install Pinegrow web editor on a Chromebook.

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

• This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Want to measure your application launch time in Linux? There’s an extension can do the job for GNOME desktop.

• Meaning Ubuntu, Fedora workstation, and other Linux with GNOME desktop can easily tell how much time it takes for launching an application, which is useful for benchmark and/or software developing purpose.

• With the extension enabled, every time you launching an application, an on-screen display pops up shows the loading time in millisecond. Not only for native .deb/.rpm, but also for Snap and Flatpak applications.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• In this article, we’re not going to set out to tell you which operating system you should use—they’re both excellent!—but we’ll lay out their remaining OpenZFS differences, to help anyone on the fence decide which OS to use beneath our favorite filesystem.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Oracle Linux 9 Update 1 for the 64-bit Intel and AMD (x86_64) and 64-bit Arm (aarch64) platforms is generally available today. This release is 100% application binary compatible with corresponding Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Update 1 release. This Oracle Linux 9 release includes the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 7 (UEK R7). UEK R7 is based on the upstream Linux Kernel 5.15 and is supported on both Oracle Linux 9 and Oracle Linux 8.

• Today, one very cool video recording, coming from Steen Schmidt, Principal Sales Consultant, based in Denmark and part of Oracle Linux and Virtualization Sales Consulting Team.

• After the announcement of new Oracle Linux Automation Manager 2.0 Release, Steen shares with us a quick demo on how to upgrade an existing installation to the latest release.

• I’ve decided to create this blog entry just to share Oracle Linux and UEK releases, how those are associated and which UEK releases are available on different OL versions. So, maybe, this article could be useless for many people who already know which UEK releases are available on each OL release but, at the same time, could be helpful for many others approaching Oracle Linux:

• Industry-leading open source solutions, including Red Hat OpenShift Data Science and Red Hat OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka, are now publicly available in AWS Marketplace

Devices/Embedded

• While Shenzhen Xunlong Software has released numerous Orange Pi-branded single-board computers (SBCs) over the years, such as the Orange Pi 5 and the Orange Pi 800. However, the company relied on third-party operating systems like Debian and Ubuntu rather than a first-party alternative. Shenzhen Xunlong Software has sought to change this with Orange Pi OS, which ships first in the Orange Pi 5 and is already available to download for the Orange Pi 800.

• According to Shenzhen Xunlong Software, it has based Orange Pi OS on Android 12, but Arch Linux ARM and Open Harmony variants should be available in 2023. Despite its origins, Orange Pi OS looks like Shenzhen Xunlong Software set about copying Windows 11, with its File manager and Control Center both facsimiles of the ones that Microsoft now ships in its desktop OS. Similarly, Shenzhen Xunlong Software has integrated classic Windows shortcuts, as well as familiar Settings and Start menus.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Automated weaving machines are one of the most important (and underappreciated) advancements to come from the industrial revolution. Prior to their invention, most people only owned a few garments that were woven and maintained by the family. With the introduction of machines able to churn out textiles, affordable clothing suddenly became available. As an expert in the industry, Roger de Meester was able to construct a fully automated weaving machine controlled by Arduino boards.

• Unlike the early weaving machines of the industrial revolution that could only produce patterns inherent to their construction, de Meester’s desktop weaving machine utilizes sophisticated computer control to produce a huge range of patterns on demand. A new pattern can be completely different from the preceding pattern and the machine can even adjust the pattern on-the-fly during the weaving process, meaning it can create rich tapestries.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Open source security initiatives might prevent large-scale vulnerabilities such as Log4j, but smaller projects pose risks without more maintainer support, industry experts say.

• One bit of accepted wisdom in some cloud circles is that OpenStack, the open-source Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) cloud, is declining. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s alive, well, and growing like crazy. According to the 2022 OpenStack User Survey, OpenStack now has over 40 million production cores. Or, in other words, it’s seen 60% growth since 2021 and a 166% jump since 2020.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• The company is aware of an existing in-the-wild exploit for the vulnerability

Mozilla

• When NASA’s Webb Space Telescope team and artist Ashley Zelinskie wanted to bring space exploration to everyone, they chose Mozilla Hubs, our open source platform for creating 3D virtual spaces right from your browser.

• Ashley told us that they “didn’t want to cut people out that didn’t have fancy VR headsets or little experience in VR. … If we were going to invite the world to experience the Webb Telescope we wanted everyone to be able to attend.”

• That’s exactly why Mozilla has been investing in the immersive web: We believe that virtual worlds are part of the future of the internet, and we want them to be accessible and safe for all.

• That means each Hubs user controls access to the virtual world they created, which is only discoverable to the people they share it with. Hubs users and their guests can also immerse themselves in this world right from their desktop or mobile browser – no downloads or installations required. And while you can use a VR headset, you can access the same spaces through your phone, tablet or desktop computer.

SFC

• Today is Giving Tuesday, and I’d like to share part of my story that brought me to Software Freedom Conservancy. Having started as a donor over 5 years ago, I find myself now with even more passion for our mission as an employee.

• I’ve been using software for close to 30 years; I wrote my first program around 25 years ago, and I’ve been working in non-profit free software for over a decade. Over all that time the thing that keeps bringing me back is that software is for people. Made by and for people.

GNU Projects

• An update from GNU Guix co-maintainer Maxim Cournoyer on the impressive work they did in 2022.

• The Free Software Foundation (FSF) supports the work of several important free software projects through fiscal sponsorship through a program we call the Working Together for Free Software Fund.

• Donations to any of the Working Together for Free Software Fund projects directly benefit the work that can be done. Too often, these sorts of projects are underfunded, and developers put in a lot of personal time and effort to keep the project moving forward. With the FSF’s fiscal sponsorship, projects can receive donations, apply for funding, and enter into legal contracts, all enabling them to spend more time on their work.

Programming/Development

• One hundred seventy-four new packages made it to CRAN in October. Here are my “Top 40” selections in sixteen categories: Astronomy, Biology, Business, Computational Methods, Data, Ecology, Finance, Genomics, Mathematics, Machine Learning, Medicine, Pharma, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities, Visualization.

Perl / Raku

Leftovers

• Let’s say you are playing a game where you need to meet someone in New York City. You can’t communicate with the other person to agree on a meeting time or place – where would you think to meet, and at what time?

Hardware

• CrowdSupply recently featured the EsPiFF SBC designed for multimedia, firewall and NAS applications. The EsPiFF combines a ESP32-WROVER module for wireless connectivity and a RP2040 chip functioning as a coprocessor.

• The ESP32-WROVER module featured is likely to be the ESP32-WROVER-IE-N16R8 since it provides up to 16MB of Flash memory, 8MB of PSRAM and a connector for an external antenna.

Security

• CISA released seven (7) Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on November 29, 2022. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.

• Anytime you upgrade software, you risk something breaking. This is the nature of the IT beast. The purpose of patches is usually to fix a bug or, worse, a security vulnerability. That said, sometimes good intentions lead to bad outcomes. For example, you hire a plumber to come and fix a leaky pipe. He patches it but inadvertently breaks the toilet in the process—good intentions with bad outcomes. That doesn’t need to be the case with Linux patching, though.

• To make Linux patching easier, you can use some tools known as patch managers to help you save time and money. A patch manager tool also helps you avoid the bad patch that could accidentally break your toilet. In this article, I’ll cover why patch management is important. I’ll also discuss its benefits, problems, best practices, and strategy. Let’s first talk about why patch management is important for your business.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• In 2018, attending the UN forum on business and human rights, I blogged a photo of the Afghan president and made some brief comments about the possibility of Twitter falling into the wrong hands.

• The full video is available from UN Web TV. There is an extract below where Bennett Freeman of the Global Network Initiative gives some interesting responses to my comments.

Censorship/Free Speech

• The crowd was hard to make out at first, a dark mass huddled along the Beijing riverbank after sunset. The people stood quietly, almost nervously, dozens bundled in thick coats beside yellowed willow trees. At their center was a small altar, strewn with candles and flowers, for the 10 people who died in a fire in western China last week.

• Two hours later, that crowd had swelled into the hundreds, a mass of people marching and chanting for freedom, rule of law, an end to the three years of coronavirus restrictions that have dragged life here to a near standstill. Temperatures were frigid, but people stayed for hours, even outlasting a shift change in the police officers who monitored the whole event Sunday night.

• In Shanghai, a vigil grew into a street protest where many held blank sheets of white paper in a symbol of tacit defiance.

• In Beijing, students at Tsinghua University raised signs showing a math equation devised by the Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann, whose surname in Chinese is a homonym for “free man.”

• And on China’s suppressed internet, where positive messages abound and negative ones are scrubbed, protesters resorted to irony: They posted walls of text filled with the Chinese characters for “yes,” “good” and “correct” to signal their discontent while evading censors.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Twelve years ago, on November 28, 2010, our five international media outlets – The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel – published a series of revelations in cooperation with Wikileaks that made the headlines around the globe.

• “Cablegate,” a set of 251,000 confidential cables from the US State Department disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale.

• In the words of the New York Times, the documents told “the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money.” Even now in 2022, journalists and historians continue to publish new revelations, using the unique trove of documents.

• A delegation from Wikileaks is on a tour across Latin America to drum up support from various social movements and progressive governments in the region to call for Julian Assange’s release. The delegation consisting of Kristinn Hrafnsson, editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, and Joseph Farrell, journalist and Wikileaks ambassador, are set to finish their Brazil leg of the tour on November 30.

• The duo had already completed a visit to Colombia between November 22 and 24, before coming to Brazil. There, they met with the leftist president Gustavo Petro and Colombian foreign minister Alvaro Leyva Duran as part of their larger campaign to organize international solidarity for Assange.

• In a press release Hrafnsson stated that they were “content with the outcome of the meeting” and that Petro and Duran showed “their commitment and support for Julian Assange’s freedom, and strongly recognized the implications for press freedom worldwide that Assange’s extradition would set.”

• Publishing is not a crime: The US government should end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets.

• Twelve years ago, on November 28th 2010, our five international media outlets – the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, El País and Der Spiegel – published a series of revelations in cooperation with WikiLeaks that made the headlines around the globe.

• “Cablegate”, a set of 251,000 confidential cables from the US state department, disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale.

• In the words of the New York Times, the documents told “the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money”. Even now in 2022, journalists and historians continue to publish new revelations, using the unique trove of documents.

• For Julian Assange, publisher of WikLeaks, the publication of “Cablegate” and several other related leaks had the most severe consequences. On April 12th 2019, Assange was arrested in London on a US arrest warrant, and has now been held for three and a half years in a high-security British prison usually used for terrorists and members of organised crime groups. He faces extradition to the US and a sentence of up to 175 years in an American maximum-security prison.

• The open letter warns the indictment “threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”

• [...]

• The Times is joined in the letter by The Guardian in England, Le Monde in France, Der Spiegel in Germany, and El País in Spain. They were the five media outlets that in 2010 published many details of the hundreds of thousands of confidential cables from the U.S. Department of State about hidden corruption and diplomatic scandals.

• The letter includes a paragraph critiquing Assange’s judgment in releasing unredacted copies of these cables in 2011. It says “some of [the outlets] are concerned about the allegations in the indictment that he attempted to aid in computer intrusion of a classified database.” This is in reference to Assange allegedly helping Manning attempt to crack encryption on classified military files, according to the Justice Department indictment.

• In other words, the editors and publishers are willing to acknowledge that Assange might not be just a passive recipient of classified information but deliberately sought it out. But many major media outlets (particularly the five that signed the document) have recognized the public value and public concern of the information that Assange illegally obtained and published it.

• The New York Times and four European news organizations called on the United States government on Monday to drop its charges against Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, for obtaining and publishing classified diplomatic and military secrets.

• In a joint open letter, The Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País said the prosecution of Mr. Assange under the Espionage Act “sets a dangerous precedent” that threatened to undermine the First Amendment and the freedom of the press.

• “Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists,” the letter said. “If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.”

• Twelve years ago, those American and European media released excerpts of the revelations obtained in 250,000 documents, which were leaked to WikiLeaks by the then American soldier Chelsea Manning. Following that leak, Washington began proceedings to indict Assange under legislation designed to put World War I spies on trial.

• “Publishing is not a crime,” said those outlets, emphasizing that Assange’s prosecution under the Espionage Act sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the U.S. First Amendment.

• “Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists… If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker,” the letter stated.

• Media unions, independent journalists, and civil libertarians have for three years argued that Julian Assange must not be prosecuted by the US Department of Justice for obtaining and publishing classified materials that revealed the extent of US wrongdoing in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, as the WikiLeaks founder fights extradition from the United Kingdom to the United States, they’ve gotten some powerful allies.

• In a letter dispatched Monday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, The New York Times joined four major European publications—The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País—to argue that the attempt to go after Assange using the Espionage Act “sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.” The concern is that, by prosecuting Assange under the draconian law that was written in 1917 to prohibit interference with military operations or recruitment during World War I, the Justice Department could create a new tool for intimidating investigative reporters who simply seek to inform the American people about what is being done in their name but without their informed consent.

• [...]

• Yet the letter also acknowledges that, for Assange, the publication of the 251,000 confidential cables “had the most severe consequences. On April 12, 2019, Assange was arrested in London on a US arrest warrant, and has now been held for three and a half years in a high security British prison usually used for terrorists and members of organized crime groups.” Assange now faces extradition to the United States and a 175-year sentence.

• The prospect that such a sentence could have a chilling effect on journalists is the overarching concern of the joint letter.

• “Holding governments accountable is part of the core mission of a free press in a democracy,” it explains. “Obtaining and disclosing sensitive information when necessary in the public interest is a core part of the daily work of journalists. If that work is criminalized, our public discourse and our democracies are made significantly weaker.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• TL;DR: To convert, add or subtract 16 to DCs or contested rolls, multiply/divide distances by twelve, multiply/divide carrying-weights by sixteen, divide torchlight by four or multiply it by three.

• One of the reasons Fudge RPG was invented was actually… fairies! SOS was working on a GURPS Faeries book but it turns out that GURPS’s 3d6 roll-under system is super difficult to get to work for anything other than normal humans. The bell curve makes things difficult to scale and the roll-under-nature makes things difficult to move. Fudge’s zero-centered, dice+adds system is perfect since you can just have different “scales” for different things. Faeries and bunnies can have one scale, normal people another, and kaiju yet another.

Technical

• It goes without saying that accessibility in design is extremely difficult. So many different ability sets need to be taken into account and so many tools need to be provided. At a base level, all UI designs must follow web accessibility guidelines, all UX copy must follow best practice, and all tools must be considered for assistive technologies. This is a huge overhead, so it’s unsurprising when startups feel like they can’t focus on it while building their core offering for the market.

• I installed snac, a simple, minimalistic ActivityPub instance, written in C. I hate C, but it’s small, it uses JSON files (like Epicyon), and it seems to work. I think I finally figured out what kept GoToSocial from working. But instead of going back, I’m going to wait and see how much I like this one as a fallback. I’m @alex@social.alexschroeder.ch.

• 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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