● 11.30.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 30/11/2022: Plasma Mobile Gear 22.11

Posted in News Roundup at 1:59 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Let’s be honest with ourselves. As much as we’d like the products we purchase and invest in to be with us for the long haul, any product is a risk. Especially a new one, by someone untested. And when you invest in a product through a crowdfunding site, you may not necessarily know what the final result is going to look like—after all, that’s part of the “fun,” I guess. Sometimes you don’t get a device at all. Sometimes, you get that device, but then all the people that were going to support it have essentially disappeared from view. I have one of those things, I reviewed it in this newsletter, and I’d like to talk about it—but I’d also like to talk about what comes after it. Today’s Tedium looks back at the JingPad experiment, one year later, faded dreams and all—and talks to another creator with big dreams and a Linux-friendly tablet with lots of potential.

• [...]

• So, my general rule with reviews is that if something significant changes I try to do updates, if possible. With the JingPad, I decided I wanted to give myself a little more time to see how things played out. And rather than just updating the piece, I thought what happened probably deserved something closer to a retelling.

• Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote a review of the JingPad in which I highlighted the good and bad of the device, which took a full month and a half to land on my doorstep when delivered directly from China.

• It took a long time, but even after many delivery issues, including extended gummed-up delays in customs, it appeared, and I spent about two weeks playing with it before I wrote my full review. (I gave my first impressions over this way, in which I described the JingPad as “The Great Linux Tablet Hope.”)

Audiocasts/Shows

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of PCLinuxOS 2022.11.20 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• This week, Linux Out Loud chats about low-power device options.

• Welcome to episode 41 of Linux Out Loud. We fired up our mics, connected those headphones as we searched the community for themes to expound upon. We kept the banter friendly, the conversation somewhat on topic, and had fun doing it.

Kernel Space

• It was only a matter of time before somebody found a way to inject BPF into the CPU scheduler. This patch series, posted by Tejun Heo and containing work by David Vernet, Josh Don, and Barret Rhoden, does exactly that.

Graphics Stack

• If you are using a high-resolution display, then you may have noticed issues like blurriness, jaggedness, and lag when using a program.

• This issue is caused by the fact that many programs use a default screen resolution (usually 1920×1080) to display their contents. This makes for a bad user interface experience on HiDPI devices.

• But you might be wondering, is there a solution to this? Yes, there is, in fact, a solution.

• It’s called ‘Fractional Scaling’. This method uses fractional values to scale a program’s interface according to your display’s resolution, resulting in a consistent look and feel.

• So, it would ensure that you had the same experience on any HiDPI device, regardless of the program you were using.

• Moving on.

Applications

• SAS Institute Inc. (“SAS”) is an American multinational developer of analytics software based in Cary, North Carolina. The company has around 14,000 employees.

• SAS started as a project at North Carolina State University to create a statistical analysis system used mainly by agricultural departments at universities in the late 1960s.

• SAS is the name of their software suite that can mine, alter, manage and retrieve data from a variety of sources and perform statistical analysis on it. It has more than 200 components covering areas including statistical analysis, econometrics and time series analysis, an interactive matrix language, data mining and much more.

• [...]

• SAS Enterprise BI Server is proprietary software and not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives to Enterprise BI Server.

Instructionals/Technical

• If you are using SSH frequently to connect to a remote host, one way to secure your SSH server is to use a public/private SSH key so that no password is transmitted over the network. It can prevent against brute force attack too.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Bitcoin Core on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Bitcoin Core is an excellent tool to create and manage your Bitcoin wallet. Bitcoin has massive volatility, and the best part is that you can manage your Bitcoins from your Bitcoin wallet where you can easily buy and sell to anyone anonymously. Bitcoin works on nodes connected to the blockchain to verify each transaction to the digital ledger.

• 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 Bitcoin Core 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.

• There is hardly any need to extol the benefits of having your own server. From storing and sharing your data to self-hosting useful web applications, a server is a versatile platform that can make your computing life easier. Opting for a network-attached storage (NAS) appliance that comes with pretty much everything you need and requires very little tinkering seems like a no-brainer. But running your own server on a local network is not without drawbacks. To access the server from the outside world, you need to punch a hole in your network, which leads to a whole new set of problems you have to deal with. Plus, your Internet connection may or may not be up to scratch in terms of reliability and speed.

• If you are only interested in running web-based applications, shared web hosting might look like a sensible option. Most providers have plans that include a web server, PHP, and a MySQL database – all configured and ready to go. Some providers even offer easy-to-use installers for popular web applications. However, ease of use comes with serious limitations. Can you Install PHP additional libraries? No. Can you run non-PHP applications? Forget about it. Some providers don’t even offer SSH access.

• A virtual private server (VPS) provides a middle ground between managing your own server and opting for shared web hosting. A VPS is a virtual Linux server system that you can manage yourself. Because you are the admin for your VPS, you have more control over it than you would with a basic web hosting arrangement. And, because the VPS is a virtual machine that shares the hardware with other VPS systems, it is much less expensive than leasing a dedicated server.

• Steps to install Brackets Code editor on popular Debian 11 Bullseye Linux to start coding and having a live preview in the Chrome browser.

• “Brackets” was developed by Adobe and can be considered a successor of AdobeEdge Code. However, later Adobe discontinued support for Brackets in 2021. Nevertheless, the project was on GitHub, hence was picked up by the open-source developers and is still active as a fork.

• With the same functionality as Adobe Edge (not active anymore), “Brackets” is available to run on Windows, Mac, and Unix).

• So you are dealing with a critical server where you have to maintain security at any cost. And closing ports to block unwanted traffic is the first step you’d take.

• By default, it is impossible to read Linux partitions (filesystems) on Windows. Microsoft doesn’t provide the drivers to do this with the Windows kernel. However, there are ways to read these partitions. In this guide, we’ll show you how you can read Linux partitions on your Windows installation.

• Tutorial to install FileZilla client on Fedora 37 or 36 using the command terminal for transferring data to the FTP server from your Linux.

• FileZilla FTP client is free software available for all popular OS such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. Users can use it to copy files and folders via the Internet or local network from one PC to another computer. The FTP client is easy to handle and offers user interactive GUI with numerous special functions such as the continuation of interrupted transfers or the support of various transfer protocols such as FTP, SFTP, or FTPS.

• Automation allows you to apply compliance and security policies consistently across your servers, verify compliance, and remediate servers.

• Welcome to the first part of my syslog-ng tutorial series. In this part, I give you a quick introduction what to expect from this series and try to define what syslog-ng is.

• Before introducing you to syslog-ng, let me introduce myself in a few words. I am Peter Czanik from Hungary, syslog-ng user for about two decades. I work as an open-source evangelist at One Identity, the company behind syslog-ng. I do syslog-ng packaging, support and advocacy. Syslog-ng was originally developed by Balabit, which is now part of One Identity.

Games

• Between 2022-11-24 and 2022-12-01 there were 18 New Steam games released with Native Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 181 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 9.9 % of total released titles.

• Linux users never had it so good. In the past, they typically had to make do with a limited selection of free-to-play titles, many of which lacked the polish and depth found in their console or PC counterparts. But all that has changed in recent years – the open source movement has led to an explosion of fantastic free Linux games, both casual and hardcore. Here are 30 of our favorites!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Plasma Mobile Gear 22.11 is packed with all sorts of changes to improve the scrolling performance of the Homescreen in the grid app list on low-end devices and fix support for the Meta key, improve the performance and contrast of the lockscreen, as well as to add support for device panel orientations.

• This release also brings an updated design for the power menu that now includes a logout button, a new action drawer feature that lets users open the audio source app window by tapping on the media player, and updated Quick Settings to always open the mobile settings app and correctly display the marquee label in the Wi-Fi quicksetting.

• We have decided to migrate the releases of Plasma Mobile applications to KDE Gear, starting with KDE Gear 23.04. This means that Plasma Mobile Gear will be discontinued in the future, and Plasma Mobile applications will follow the release schedule of most other KDE applications, simplifying packaging. To prepare for this, an ongoing effort was made to ensure all applications have proper Bugzilla categories created.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• small team of Arch Linux enthusiasts from Egypt is developing Exodia OS based on BSP window manager (BSPWM). The primary use case of this distribution is to be a perfect distro for wire & wireless penetration testing by providing all the necessary tools by default (similar to Kali Linux).

• Here’s a first look.

New Releases

• This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian bookworm. As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from previous Grml releases.

• More information is available in the release notes of Grml 2022.11.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• The future direction of openSUSE distros is firming up and has ramifications for its business-focused offspring SLE and Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP).

• It’s not all that often that specific sub-versions of the x86-64 spec come up, but you can expect it to happen a lot more often as the 64-bit x86 platform reaches 20 years old next year. So far, there are four revisions of the x86-64 spec, appropriately enough just called v1, v2 (2008-2011), v3 (2013-2017) and v4. More will doubtless emerge in the future.

• Back in July we covered the debate about CPU requirements for SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). For a rundown of the differences between the revisions, refer back to that article.

• Around the middle of the year, SUSE was mulling making version 3 of the x86-64 instruction set a requirement, which would cut out a lot of relatively recent kit that was well under a decade old. That isn’t going to happen, at least for now. There was some controversy over this quite high requirement, so it’s been taken down a level. Instead, SUSE’s next-gen enterprise distro, the MicroOS-based Adaptable Linux Platform (ALP for short) will mandate x86-64-v2, the same baseline required by Red Hat’s RHEL 9.

Fedora Family / IBM

• This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

• Software engineers are among the most sought-after employees today. And they’re some of the most difficult employees to get in touch with.

• To get the attention of software engineers, your recruiting strategies need to meet these professionals where they are while also laying out what you’re looking for in a candidate. It can be a delicate – and stressful – balancing act.

• Here are four proven strategies to help your organization attract and hire the right IT specialists without spinning your wheels or wasting time on the wrong candidates.

Debian Family

• The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Abraham Raji (abraham) Phil Morrell (emorrp1) Anupa Ann Joseph (anupa) Mathias Gibbens (gibmat) Arun Kumar Pariyar (arun) Tino Didriksen (tinodidriksen)

• The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Gavin Lai Martin Dosch Taavi Väänänen Daichi Fukui Daniel Gröber Vivek K J William Wilson Ruben Pollan

• Congratulations!

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• As awesome as the default Kinetic Kudu desktop is, we know many Ubuntu users love to customize their workspace. If you count yourself among that crowd, you’ll be pleased to know that Ubuntu 22.10 comes packed with some incredible backgrounds from our most recent Wallpaper Competition.

• The community was given the difficult task of reviewing nearly 50 amazing submissions from their fellow community members and choosing their favorites. The initial plan was to include the top 5 into the Kudu release, but due to a surprise tie, a bonus 6th wallpaper was included!

• Enterprises are looking to capitalise on the new wave of small form-factor computing and navigate the shift to the edge. Device manufacturers across the world are racing to build embedded, connected devices that will deliver on the promise of the fourth industrial revolution. Many of them are looking to explore data-driven value-chain optimisations, predictive maintenance and or new digital customer experiences.

• However, keeping devices in the field up-to-date is a full-time job requiring dedicated kernel engineering teams. When choosing their deployment strategy, device manufacturers must decide whether to roll their own embedded Linux distribution or rely on a commercially-supported OS.

• [...]

• In this extensive primer on choosing an embedded Linux distribution, we will directly contrast Yocto and Ubuntu Core on the most pressing challenges facing any developer working on an embedded device: board bring-up, maintenance, updates, security, and many more.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Google has unveiled its choices for the best apps and games for Android, Wear OS, and Chromebooks in 2022.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Eugen Rochko just reported that the social service Mastodon had “hit 1,028,362 monthly active users […] 1,124 new Mastodon servers since Oct 27 and 489,003 new users”. Known mainly by open source developers, Mastodon has suddenly become mainstream, promising to take inclusive, open, and free values to social media. If Mastodon was sustainable, it is now thriving, attracting both users and developers, and able to launch more than 1,000 servers in a matter of days. How can this increase in users and infrastructure be explained? In this article, we want to suggest that there are different kinds of sustainability in open source and that these can have interesting interactions.

• Software Freedom Conservancy: Why do you care about software freedom? How long have you been involved?

• Justin Flory: My trajectory in life and career for the last eight years was molded by the Software Freedom movement. As a teenager, I used Linux and Open Source software to run my own multiplayer game server for Minecraft. This exposed me both to open source as a concept but also the communities responsible for the production of great things made together with others. Fundamentally, my interest and passion for Free Software come from a human-centered perspective as a method to build more responsible technology for and by society.

• This is an almost too good of a release this close to v3.0: floating selections out, outlined text in, Align tool rewrite, pasting multiple layers as a single one, and more. I published a review of the most important changes the same day, and there’s official release notes that cover even more changes.

• Grist is a free open-source web-based app that allows you to create, edit, manage and manipulate spreadsheet files with your team and group.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

• Hi everyone! We’ve just released Chrome Dev 109 (109.0.5414.23) for Android. It’s now available on Google Play.

• The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 108 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.

• Chrome 108.0.5359.71 ( Mac/linux) and 108.0.5359.71/72( Windows) contains a number of fixes and improvements — a list of changes is available in the log. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 108.

Mozilla

• The run-up to December is always my favorite time of year at Pocket. It’s when we sift through our data (always anonymous and aggregated—we’re part of Mozilla, after all), to see which must-read profiles, thought-provoking essays, and illuminating explainers Pocket readers loved best over the past 12 months.

• Today, we’re delighted to bring you Pocket’s Best of 2022. This year’s honor roll is our biggest ever: a whopping 20 lists celebrating the year’s top articles across culture, technology, science, business, and more. All are informed by the saving and reading habits of Pocket’s millions of curious, discerning users.

• The stories people save to Pocket reveal something unique—not only about what’s occupying our collective attention, but about what we aspire to be. And what we see again and again from 40 million saves to Pocket every month is the gravitational pull of stories that help us better understand the world around us—and ourselves.

Programming/Development

• Since the very first release of Qt for MCUs, your feedback and requests have been driving the development of Qt for MCUs. Today, we are happy to announce the release of version 2.3, which includes several of the most requested features and improvements. This new version adds the Loader QML type to Qt Quick Ultralite, support for partial framebuffers to substantially reduce the overall memory requirements of your applications, support for building applications using MinGW on Windows, and much more!

• In programming, iteration is an important concept because code often must scan over a set of data several times so that it can process each item individually. Control structures enable you to direct the flow of the program based on conditions that are often established dynamically as the program is running. Different languages provide different controls, and in Lua, there’s the while loop, for loop, and repeat until loop. This article covers for loops. I will cover while and repeat until loops in a separate article.

• The gsignal package is a new signal processing library ported from Octave. If you use Matlab or Octave, gsignal contains many of the signal processing functions you would expect to find. In this post, I’m going to compare filterComplex function to the gsignal::filter function.

• Replace the first non-missing value in R, to retrieve the first non-missing value in each place of one or more vectors, use the coalesce() function from the dplyr package in R.

• A few weeks ago, I introduced a forecasting API (Application Programming Interface).

• This is the first post of our interview series “Meeting the stars of the R-universe”. We aim to introduce the working groups and people behind the development of software and packages many of us use and which are available through the R-Universe. We want to highlight and explore different teams and projects around the world, the work they do, their processes and users. We begin our journey in Argentina with a team that uses R and develops R packages for the Argentinean State. Be sure to watch the video at the end with excerpts from the interview.

• 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.

• In this tutorial we are going to learn how to perform Create, Read, Update and Delete operations in a FastAPI application. In our previous post, we saw how to install and create the first application using RESTful FastAPI.

• In this tutorial we will create an API to fetch your favorite songs from the database. We will be implementing the database using the MYSQL.

• In my previous article, I introduced the open source test tool JMeter and used a simple HTTP test as an example to demonstrate its capabilities. This article shows you how to build test scripts for complex test scenarios.

• The user interface displays a JMeter test script in the “tree” format. The saved test script (in the .jmx format) is XML. The JMeter script tree treats a test plan as the root node, and the test plan includes all test components. In the test plan, you can configure user-defined variables called by components throughout the entire test plan. Variables can also thread group behavior, library files used in the test, and so on. You can build rich test scenarios using various test components in the test plan.

Perl / Raku

• The German Perl/Raku Workshop takes place from February 27 to March 1st 2023 in Frankfurt/Main, Germany.

• We are looking for your contribution in the form a talk (20 minutes or 40 minutes), a lighting talk (5 minutes) or a workshop (2-4 hours). Please submit your proposals using this online form.

• The theme in 2023 is Perl Futures – of course the two developments of Perl, Raku and Perl as well as the reference to the financial metropolis Frankfurt am Main. Presentations with these emphases are especially sought after, but all contributions on Perl, Raku and software development in general are welcome.

Leftovers

• One of the things that makes me angry about the world today is frivolous lawsuits. Today, I was reading a story about a Florida woman that is suing Kraft Heinz for $5 million, because her Velveeta microwave Mac-N-Cheese takes longer to make than advertised on the package.

• No matter who your audience1 may be – admins, developers, decision makers, or anyone else – they’re not obligated to read your content. It’s all about “what’s in it for me?” If you need to communicate something to an audience, you have to write what they want to read and not what you want them to have read.

• One of the things I see over and over again in writing is an assumption that the reader is going to find and read something from start to finish. It’s someone else’s job to put the content in front of the reader and assumed that once it’s there, the reader will just start with the first sentence and dutifully read through to the end, soaking up the messaging like a sponge.

Linux Foundation

• Bosch is one of the world’s leading automotive suppliers. Bosch solutions combine automotive software know-how across all domains with expertise in electrical/electronic architecture of large integrated systems, complex real-time software, IoT, and automotive hardware. Their middleware offers functional safety, real-time behavior, and reliability under automotive requirements, combined with cyber-security. The Bosch experience and formal membership in ELISA fits well within the project goals and mission.

• The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and RISC-V International, the global open hardware standards organization, have announced the immediate availability of the new RISC-V Foundational Associate (RVFA) certification exam, which is designed to test foundational knowledge of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).

• This month, we’ve got great news to share across the Linux Foundation. Here’s a roundup of must-read updates, including the release of Sylva, LF Europe’s first project, a new report from LF Research, community updates, Cyber Monday deals from LF Training & Certification, and so much more. We’ve also got a preview of what’s coming up in December!

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (krb5), Fedora (galera, mariadb, and mingw-python3), Red Hat (389-ds:1.4, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, krb5, and usbguard), Scientific Linux (krb5), Slackware (kernel), SUSE (binutils, dbus-1, exiv2, freerdp, git, java-1_8_0-ibm, kernel, libarchive, libdb-4_8, libmspack, nginx, opencc, python, python3, rxvt-unicode, sudo, supportutils, systemd, vim, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (bind9, gnutls28, libsamplerate, linux-gcp-5.4, perl, pixman, shadow, and sysstat).

• Does Ubuntu need anti-virus software? The general answer is no, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use one to run a check every now and then, especially if working with Windows files.

• Most folks’ go-to is open source anti-virus ClamAV, an app dedicated to ‘detecting trojans, viruses, malware, and other malicious threats’. ClamAV is available for Windows, macOS, BSD, and Linux systems, making it especially well suited to those who regularly work cross-platform and want some degree of familiarity.

• And a rather special new version was released this week.

• With the ClamAV 1.0.0 LTS release, developers move the Dockerfile and related scripts from the main repository to a new one.

• ClamAV is the most popular free and open-source antivirus software. One of its most common use cases is scanning emails on mail gateways or keeping files stored on NAS solutions virus-free.

• let’s encrypt privacy problems

Privacy/Surveillance

• Facebook—Meta—was just fined $276 million (USD) for a data leak that included full names, birth dates, phone numbers, and location.

• Meta’s total fine by the Data Protection Commission is over $700 million. Total GDPR fines are over €2 billion (EUR) since 2018.

• Ireland’s Data Protection Commission fined Meta $276 million following an investigation into an April 2021 data leak that exposed the information of over 533 million users.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Elon Musk is finding out that buying one of the most popular social networks isn’t everything he’d dreamed it would be. He brought changes to Twitter shortly after buying it and has now claimed in tweets that Apple “threatened to withhold Twitter” from the App Store.

Censorship/Free Speech

• There is “no timeline” for restoring internet access to the embattled Tigray region, the Associated Press reported a senior Ethiopian government official saying.

• Tigray’s internet service will be restored along with its phone and electricity services, though no timeline has been set for those goals, Belete Molla, Ethiopia’s minister for innovation and technology, said on Tuesday at the UN’s annual Internet Governance Forum in Addis Ababa.

• Tigray, home to more than 5 million people, has been mostly without internet, telecommunications and banking since war broke out between federal government troops and forces led by the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in November 2020.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Open letter to the Foreign Ministries of Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, and to the European External Action Service

Monopolies

Copyrights

• To mark Lost Species Day, images of 39 recently extinct animals and their stories — from the aurochs to the ivory-billed woodpecker.

• Our End-of-Year Fundraiser is now live! Running from 30th November to 14th December, this is a vital two week period in which we raise most of the funds to keep us going for the next year. We don’t have big sponsors, we don’t do intrusive advertising, instead we are kept alive by donations from you, our wonderful community of readers. If you like the project, and would like to see it continue, then please do consider donating. We need your help, now more than ever.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I decided to do this hike again with better weather, with much more success. The route up through the pass to the summit was pre-post-holed by other hikers, making it much easier going than before. There was a bit more exposure than I was necessarily comfortable with one point, but that section was thankfully quite short before opening to a nice flat field before the summit. The view from the top was spectacular, with views of Pilatus, Grosser and Kleiner Mythen, Gross Aubrig, and Chaeserrugg (and a billion other peaks I don’t know the name of and will have to get around to hiking eventually).

• This is how we’ve been doing initiative for the last few months. It’s fast and it gives a varied result with a lot of back & forth instead of first all on one side go, then all on the other side goes. Best of all, your parry goes immediately into your own attack.

• One way to play exploration games like D&D is as a resource game. Spells, HP, food, water, and light. But there’s one resource I rarely see other DMs talk about.

• 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

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.