● 12.07.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 07/12/2022: Kali Linux 2022.4, GNUnet 0.19.0, and Pgpool-II 4.4.0

Posted in News Roundup at 12:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• The Linux command line is a powerful tool that scares many casual users. But there are ample reasons for people to fall in love with the terminal.

• Many people are afraid of the command line. They see it as the realm of software developers or computer geeks. But the command line is merely a different way of interacting with your PC, and there are some tasks so easy to do with a CLI that you will be glad you got over your fear.

• Yes, you. Even if you need to call a family member for help with app installations, you can still use the command line without breaking your machine. Even if you’re getting by just fine with your PC already, here are some reasons to consider learning a few commands regardless.

• An automated patch-management system helps keep your server infrastructure patched and maintained in a timely manner.

• Second, Linux is highly customizable, which means that it can be easily tailored to meet the specific needs of your website or web application. This allows you to choose the right combination of features and capabilities to support the unique requirements of your project.

• [...]

• Overall, Linux is a powerful and versatile platform for web hosting, and it offers many benefits over other operating systems. Whether you are a small business owner, a web developer, or a large enterprise, Linux can provide the stability, security, and flexibility that you need to host your website or web application successfully.

• Arm-powered laptops and desktops are appearing on the market, but external appearances are deceptive. These are very different from familiar x86-based PCs, as the accounts of those experimenting with them reveal.

• Compared to x86 machines, which have the widest range of interchangeable, modular hardware in the history of computing, devices such as phones and tablets are almost polar opposites. A fondleslab is a relatively sealed unit, with a known combination of main processor, graphics processor, various networking interfaces and so on, designed and built to run a single OS that is customized for that hardware. If you’re lucky, several versions of that single OS.

• When it comes to the inexpensive highly integrated Arm device you are probably holding in mid air, the problems start with booting: there’s usually no standardized firmware able to load multiple unknown OSes in the typical ad hoc PC way. There’s no need if you’re building it to run just one specific payload, meaning that, from the vendor’s point of view, it’s cheaper to do without.

• We’ve crafted an enormous range of articles showcasing the finest free and open source Linux software. We cover games, graphics, education, multimedia, security, and tons more. And there’s other computer related areas that we also regularly dive into such as programming, hardware, Android, and more.

• Many of these articles are published in a series. It therefore makes sense to collate all of these articles to a central location. This helps you to quickly find what you are looking for, as well as introducing you to a profusion of interesting and informative material.

Audiocasts/Shows

• This week’s episode of Destination Linux, holiday gift guide for everyone . . . this is the episode you want your spouse to listen to. Then we discuss some new happenings with the Cosmic DE from System76. Plus, we have our tips/tricks and software picks. All this and more coming up right now on Destination Linux to keep those penguins marching!

• A Quick Overview of Ubuntu Budgie 22.10

• I have no plans to daily drive PopOS but System76 has got some crazy features planned for new rust COSMIC desktop, features that I thought I wouldn’t see on the Linux desktop any time soon

• Today we are looking at Linux Mint 21.1 Beta, XFCE edition. It is based on Ubuntu 22.04, Linux Kernel 5.15, XFCE 4.16, and uses about 800-900 MB of ram when idling.

• In this video, we are looking at Linux Mint 21.1 Beta XFCE.

• In this video, I am going to show how to install Rocky Linux 9.1.

• If you spend time in the tty, especially on systems where multiple users might be logged in, there are a couple of useful commands (‘write’ and ‘wall’) to know that allow you to message the other users logged in. I also show you how to change the console font (the tty font) using the ‘setfont’ command.

Kernel Space

• Not that long ago, the idea that another major language would be supported in the Linux kernel would have been laughable. Linux was C’s poster child. Sure, there have been efforts to introduce other languages into the kernel, notably C++. They failed. Badly. As Linux’s creator Linus Torvalds once said, “C++ is a horrible language.” So, why is Torvalds now welcoming Rust into the kernel? Listen, my friend, and I’ll tell you.

• Rust began as a Mozilla Foundation project. This then new scratch-built language’s purpose was to incorporate the expressive syntax and flexibility of a high-level language with the fine control and performance of a low-level language. In particular, it was meant to improve performance, parallelization, and memory safety.

• After waiting in the Linux-next integration tree for about 18 months, the basic Rust infrastructure will finally land in the mainline Linux kernel with the imminent release of v6.1. While this will not include any any real device drivers and only a few toy sample modules, further subsystem-specific bindings with real drivers should be added in the future.

• During the 2022 Linux Maintainers Summit in Dublin, Linus Torvalds asked CI systems to start testing the new Rust infrastructure. So, with that in mind, we are excited to announce that as of today, Rust testing has now been added to KernelCI!

• Here is a very brief review at the current state of Rust on the kernel side (which is already well documented on LWN.net, i.e. in this article or this v6.2 focused article) along with a look at the current status and future plans on the KernelCI project side, with some examples.

• Over on the Collabora blog, Adrian Ratiu writes about the addition of the kernel’s Rust code to the KernelCI automated kernel testing project. The blog post looks at what it took to add the support and on some plans for future additions, as well.

• One of the most anticipated new features of Linux 6.1 is the merging of the Rust infrastructure code. However, support for the Rust programming language is only very limited, so it will not be able to be used practically for the time being. If you want to try 6.1 before the stable release, you can download the candidate release from kernel.org. Just remember not to use it in a production environment.

Applications

• Audacity 3.2.2 comes two months after Audacity 3.2.1, which was a small update fixing a startup crash, a crash when applying Waves Berzerk Distortion Mono to a mono track, and a freeze that occurred when playback was started or stopped very quickly, and two and half months after Audacity 3.2, the major update that added support for VST3 and real-time effects, FFmpeg 5.0 and WavPack support, and much more.

• The Audacity 3.2.2 update is here to enable real-time capabilities for VST2 effects and to add support for additional plugins that you can download from plugins.audacityteam.org. Moreover, Audacity no longer quietly discards changes in real-time effects, asking users if they want to save their work before quitting instead.

• Visually, G4Music bears more than a passing resemblance to Amberol, a minimally-minded GTK4/libadwaita music app I’ve written about a few times this year. That’s no bad thing. But where Amberol focuses largely on ‘play-as-you-go’ listening (ergo, less focus on library browsing) G4Music provides extra features that enable it.

• Inkscape 1.2.2 is a maintenance and bugfix release that offers several improvements. It includes four crash fixes, over 25 bug fixes, five fixes for extension bugs, and 13 improved user interface translations.

• The OpenClipart import feature is now available to all users, regardless of the selected packaging format or operating system. In addition, spellchecking now works on macOS, and performance has been improved (in exchange for dithering being disabled by default).

• Additionally, extensions that modify colours can also modify colours in patterns again. We’ve also fixed some issues with the measure tool, the DXF14 export, and hairline strokes for our maker community.

• While looking into detail about the fixes, notable bug fixes include export options fixes bugs related to export area catering to four issues. Also, the raster images now open on the visible canvas, not in the bottom left corner.

• The import and export module gets some minor yet important fixes. The TIFF export now supports transparency, and JPG/TIFF raster image files preserve the DPI attributes while exporting them.

• The free open-source Inkscape vector graphics editor got a new maintenance release for the 1.2 series.

• The is the second update for Inkscape 1.2, which finally makes OpenClipart import available for Windows and Linux user using AppImage. And, Color extensions works on patterns again.

• For macOS, spellchecking finally works and undo/redo options are back in the menu. For Linux, the snap package is no longer possible to install with –classic option. Meaning the snap won’t be able to access data outside of user’s home directory.

• No doubt that Evernote is a good app to take notes that can be used across Windows, macOS, and other smartphone OS such as Android. The only problem it caters is that it does not have an official Linux note-taking app, that is sad I know! It too has ignored it like many others. You might use it in the browser but it does not provide offline capability.

• As it decided not to entertain users of this platform, it does not mean you are left out! Today I have put together a list of the top 8 best Evernote Linux alternatives for 2022 that are both open-source and free to download just because of that.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we are going to explain how to configure PHP-fpm with Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04.

• Nginx is a web server used for serving web requests on our website. It can be used as a reverse proxy, mail proxy, HTTP cache, or load balancer. Nginx is a free and open source software that can be configured with the PHP module PHP-fpm and improve the website loading and handle a huge amount of traffic in no time.

• Configuring PHP-fpm with Nginx on Ubuntu 22.04 is a very easy and straightforward process that can take up to 15 minutes. Let’s get started!

• Claws Mail is a simple yet powerful e-mail client for the Linux desktop. Its developers designed the program as an intuitive graphical client that can act as a general task organizer. Like Emacs, Claws Mail can work as your mail reader, news aggregator, and RSS reader.

• This is a complete beginner’s guide to using the make command in Linux.

• ERPNext is a free and open-source ERP software used by manufacturers, distributors, and services. It is built with Python, JavaScript, and Frappe Framework. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ERPNext on Ubuntu 22.04 server.

• A simple tutorial demonstrates how to find a running process ID and kill it using the terminal and GUI method for various Linux distros.

• The running applications in your Linux system can slow down your system, especially if you have a low-end system. In Linux (plus all OS), programs or apps contain a specific PID (process ID) by which you can identify them easily.

• However, as a beginner, many Linux users don’t know how to find a running process in Linux and kill it. So in this guide, we will explain different approaches to kill the currently running processes in Linux. That includes the terminal and GUI methods.

• Remember, you should only kill the process when it is not responding, or you are in a situation where the normal application closing is not working (for GUI-based apps).

• Using the pthread library, you can perform low-level thread management for high-performance programming.

• On Linux, you can create and manage threads in C/C++ using the POSIX thread (pthread) library. Unlike other operating systems, there is little difference between a thread and a process in Linux. That’s why Linux often refers to its threads as light-weight processes.

• Using the pthread library, you can create threads, wait for them to terminate, and terminate them explicitly.

• In the previous article, we have covered what is LVM and how to create Volume group and Logical volumes in Linux. This article will teach you how to resize LVM partitions i.e. extend a Volume Group and Logical Volume’s size and reduce/shrink Logical Volume’s size in Linux.

• When you want to increase the size of your logical volume, you should check if there are any unallocated spaces in the free pool (i.e. Volume Group).

• If there is no space left in the free pool, then you have to go with any of the below steps to increase the space.

• Check if any volume group has space that can be utilized. In this case, add the space back to the volume group and increase the new volume size. Add a disk, initialize it as physical volume and add it to the volume group using which you can extend the logical volume size.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ISPConfig on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ISPConfig is an open-source hosting control panel for Linux distributors. It features a wide variety of options to help you control your server and allow other users to maintain their websites. ISPConfig supports Linux-based operating systems like CentOS, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu.

• 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 ISPConfig control panel 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.

• While writing shell script, you might get stuck in the situation where you want to redirect a block of lines from your script to an interactive command like sed, cat, ssh, or ftp.

• The purpose of this redirection might vary from situation to situation.

• For example, you want to copy the block of lines from the script to a new file, replace the word, or the block of lines are commands that you need to execute in the remote system via ssh.

• There is no doubt you can achieve this manually; however, “here document” will make this process way easier than you might think.

• Learn how to mount an ISO file in the Xfce desktop environment GUI on Linux.

• Chromium is a free and open-source web browser developed in collaboration between Google and Microsoft.

• Jellyfin is a free and open-source media server that allows you to stream content that can be accessed from anywhere.

• Chrome is built upon the open-source Chromium Project. For those who have not heard of Chromium before, it is a free and open-source software project developed by Google. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Android and works well on Ubuntu-based distributions. Google Chrome web browser has been downloaded over 1 billion times and praised for its speed among its top features. Most users familiar with Linux know that Google Chrome is not installed by default on Ubuntu-based systems, but with a few easy steps, you can install the famous browser.

• In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Google Chrome on Ubuntu 22.10/22.04/20.04 Linux in three alternative ways: stable, beta or unstable versions using the command line terminal with cli commands, along with how to remove the browsers.

• Quarkus offers libraries, development tools, and a testing environment for modern Java applications, particularly those aimed at containers and the cloud. This article demonstrates how to implement a Quarkus application that runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and connects to a Microsoft SQL Server database. With the help of Podman (a container-building tool similar to Docker), we will also containerize the Quarkus application to become more portable and ready to be deployed on Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift.

• Firefox is a great alternative browser for the Android platform that offers plenty of options, such as the customization of the homepage. Find out how you can make Firefox even better with this option.

• Chromebooks are great devices that have long software support lifetimes. When your Chromebook reaches the end of its life, it’s probably time to take a look at one of our favorite Chromebooks and recycle your old device. However, what if there was a way to use ChromeOS Flex to breathe new life into your Chromebook? Or maybe you want to turn an old Windows and Mac computer into a Chromebook. Let’s dig in.

• Today we are looking at how to install JetBrains Pycharm Community on a Chromebook.

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

• Please use the video as a visual guide, and the commands and links below to install it on your Chromebook.

• Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.

Games

• A lot of good work this month with the highlight being that we have started working on our AVX implementation and started optimizing our IR to be more efficient.

• We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much? see ratings) perfectly with Proton since they were released in November 2022 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks…

• This list will help you recognize, get and play FOSS games on Ubuntu. By FOSS we mean no Valve Steam, only Free/Libre Open Source Software ones. Among them are widely known such as Freedoom and Super Tux Kart, and some of them also need more introduction such as Speed Dreams and Tux Math. Most of them can be added to Ubuntu via Software. We include both categories of educational and recreational ones here. This compilation is hoped to be helpful for teachers in teaching computing with FOSS including the games. Happy reading!

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• digiKam 7.9 is here about three months after digiKam 7.8 and it’s a maintenance update that only brings some improvements to the core functionality of the software. For example, it improves importing of coordinates from image metadata and improves the performance of album management from a remote database.

• It also improves the management of faces location from image metadata, fixes Google photo login and remote album management, improves ISO date format support from image metadata, improves importing and merging of tags from image metadata, and improves backward compatibility for database schema migration.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Coming almost four months after Kali Linux 2022.3, the Kali Linux 2022.4 release is the first in the Kali Linux 2022 series to add support for the latest and greatest Linux 6.0 kernel series. This means that Kali Linux should now work on and support more hardware if you use the latest ISO images.

• While Kali Linux sticks to the lightweight Xfce desktop environment as its default graphical session for the live ISOs, the Kali Linux 2022.4 release also brings support for the latest GNOME 43 and KDE Plasma 5.26 desktop environments.

• We are now including a QEMU image with our pre-generated images. We hope this makes it easier for the people who use self-hosted Proxmox Virtual Environments (VE), virt-manager, or libvirt!

• On that subject, elrey (alex) from the community has added libvirt support to our kali-vagrant build-script.

• In Kali 2022.3, we have produced a Generic Cloud image. The idea of this image is that it should work in “most” cloud providers This is coming from our kali-cloud build-scripts. So if you are self-hosting OpenStack, this is a great way of getting Kali loaded up!

• Offensive Security has released Kali Linux 2022.4, the latest version of its popular penetration testing and digital forensics platform.

• [...]

• Kali NetHunter, the distro’s mobile (Android) pentesting platform, now has internal Bluetooth support and added support for some devices, as well as other improvements.

• There’s also the new Kali NetHunter Pro – “a ‘true’ Kali Linux on the mobile phone” – supporting the Pine64 PinePhone and PinePhone Pro open source smartphones, which allow the user to have full control over the device.

• “First of all we make available SD card images for the PinePhone and the PinePhone Pro to dual boot alongside the main OS. Soon we will release alternative versions with Plasma Mobile as well as installers so you can install Kali NetHunter Pro onto the internal flash memory,” the devs shared.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• Audacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. Audacity is free, open source software.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• After yesterday’s deployment, we faced a downtime on our reference server. In the lines below you will find a detailed explanation of what happened.

Fedora / Red Hat / IBM

• In November, we published 14 posts. The site had 8,371 visits from 5,444 unique viewers. 1,971 visits came from search engines, while 1,222 came from Fedora Magazine and 116 came from Distrowatch.

• Week 48 (November 29th – December 5th) # packit propose-downstream now uploads all remote sources (those specified as URLs) and the source specified by spec_source_id (whether remote or not) to lookaside. Previously, only Source0 was uploaded. Source0 is no longer treated specially, but as spec_source_id is Source0 by default, Source0 is still being uploaded by default unless spec_source_id is overriden. (packit#1778) A VM image build can be triggered inside a PR via a comment command /packit vm-image-build (the job needs to be defined in the configuration).

• The Fedora Project is a great organization to gain experience no matter the team you are in. I am currently a part of the Fedora Websites & Apps team improving my technical writing, communication and design skills.

• With all the things the Fedora Project does well, there are several places that, in my opinion, need to be improved. I’d like to go over some key areas where we could improve Fedora Linux from a user perspective without breaking the Fedora Project’s core philosophies.

• IT transformation, similar to the lifecycle of a living creature, is complex and often evolves through different stages. As an IT leader focusing on transformation at the enterprise level, you must consider multiple factors that may arise along the way, keeping in mind that digital maturity doesn’t happen overnight.

• Consider these three lessons to ensure your company’s IT transformation is ready to take off.

• In this article, I will cover the current implementation approach for atomic wait/notify, as these are basis operations required to implement the remaining coordination primitives introduced with C++20. Subsequent articles in this series will cover the details of the other types.

• In case you missed it, Red Hat Summit is coming back to Boston, Massachusetts on May 23-25, 2023 and we’re excited to announce that our call for proposals is now open!

• There’s a whole family of Red Hat Enterprise Linux variants, each with its own users. We’ll break down the family tree and explain what’s suited for dfiferent needs.

• The year is coming to a close, and we’ve rounded up some of our favorite Kubernetes and OpenShift content from 2022, including stories about microservices and container optimization, as well as top announcements.

Debian Family

• SparkyLinux 2022.12 updated its LXQt, MATE, Xfce, and KDE rolling editions, featuring kernel 6.0.10 and an updated package base.

• SparkyLinux is a Debian-based lightweight Linux distribution that aims to be easy on system resources to breathe new life into aging computers.

• One of its distinctive aspects is the wide range of editions available. So, they can easily confuse a new Linux user, so let’s list them quickly.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• If you were reading Neowin at the weekend, you may have seen that the Linux Mint 21.1 Beta ISOs were undergoing testing before release. For those eager to try out the Beta, the wait is now over. The Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions are now available for download. While they should all be pretty stable, they are Betas, so you may encounter bugs, which you should report.

• The main change in this update is the theming used. In this update, the Mint team has opted to make colours more vibrant but reduced where they are used, making sure they’re not too distracting. In this update, accent colours have been removed from the panel and in menus and folders are now yellow. Controversially, the Mint team has also opted to use the blue Aqua theme by default, taking away the familiar mint colour.

• The Linux Mint developers are targeting Christmas as the release date for version 21.1 of the operating system. Before Santa Claus delivers the stable version, however, we will first need a BETA to test for bugs. And so, today, that is exactly what we get.

• Code-named “Vera,” Linux Mint 21.1 BETA can be downloaded immediately for testing with your choice of three desktop environments – Cinnamon (5.6), MATE (1.26), and Xfce (4.16). Vera is based on the rock-solid Ubuntu 22.04 and comes with Linux kernel 5.15. The stable version will be supported until 2027.

• Much of the excitement surrounding Linux Mint 21.1 is simply on the surface. The developers share that there are refreshed icons, a new default mouse pointer, more vibrant accent colors, better wallpapers, and new themes.

• Linux Mint is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions around, and version 21 was released earlier this year. The next update, a minor release, is now available for beta testing.

• Linux Mint 21 was a significant update, with an Ubuntu 22.04 core platform and major changes to all the desktop environment options. Linux Mint 21.1, nicknamed “Vera,” is a smaller-scale upgrade based on the same release of Ubuntu. The system requirements also remain unchanged — 2 GB RAM (4 GB recommended), 20 GB of disk space (100 GB recommended), and a screen resolution of at least 1024×768 resolution.

• The main improvement in this release, at least for the Cinnamon desktop variant, is the inclusion of Cinnamon 5.6. It has a new Corner Bar applet in the panel enabled by default, which hides all windows and shows the desktop when clicked — similar to the desktop button in the Windows 7 and Windows 10 taskbar.

• Linux Mint 21.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

• Linux Mint 21.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

• Linux Mint 21.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

• Ubuntu needs no introduction. It’s the most popular Linux distribution for home users, hands down. It’s the distribution many Linux users cut their teeth on. Regardless of what distribution people might be using nowadays, chances are they started on Ubuntu, or at least detoured onto Ubuntu at some point in the Linux explorations.

• Canonical is delighted to announce that it is joining the Scalable Open Architecture for Embedded Edge (SOAFEE) Special Interest Group to contribute towards a safe, secure and software-defined automotive future.

• “As the demand for computing from car to cloud is rapidly growing, the automotive industry is looking towards standardisation to reduce development complexities and spur innovation. The SOAFEE initiative is perfectly positioned to address these challenges“, said Gordan Markus, Director Silicon Alliances at Canonical.

• “Canonical is excited to bring subject-matter expertise in managing complex open-source software at scale, and empowering automotive companies to shape their software-defined vehicle strategies around safe and secure open-source solutions. Contributing with its unique insights in cloud-native computing, Canonical will be working with SOAFEE initiative members to unlock agile innovation and improve time-to-market across the automotive industry.”

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Sipeed M1s DOCK is another RISC-V-based single-board computer (SBC) that runs RTOS or Linux-based software. Sipeed sells the M1s DOCK for US$11 or as the M1s module for US$7 without a carrier board.

• Lighting is the single most important factor when it comes to capturing good photos. For a conventional setup, you probably want diffuse, indirect light in a natural color. But you can get more creative with the use of colored light. RGB box lights let you set whatever hue you want, but they aren’t cheap. Arnov Sharma’s color mixer box is both affordable and versatile.

• This is a relatively small light box and so it alone isn’t suitable for lighting an entire scene, unless you want a dark and moody feel. But it is perfect for adding colored highlights or illuminating small objects in close-up photos. Three knobs let you adjust the color channels, so you can dial in the exact hue you want. An OLED display shows each channel’s set brightness and that makes it easy to reproduce colors that you set in the past. Power can come from either a USB cable or a battery pack.

• With the demand for PLC programming rising due to the spread of automation in a wide range of industrial fields, we felt we had to step up for our community of budding and experienced engineers!

• That’s why we have just launched a dedicated Arduino PLC IDE, which supports the five languages defined by the IEC 61131-3 standard: Ladder Diagram, Functional Block Diagram, Structured Text, Sequential Function Chart and Instruction List.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• The anime world is growing daily, and many new viewers are joining the active anime-loving communities. So, anime-watching apps are in high demand; most of them are using mobile devices to consume them daily. Here, we have come up with some of the Best anime streaming apps for Android for your convenience.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• In my daily reading, I came across three product roadmaps from Proton, developers of several open source, privacy-centered products. These include products like Proton Mail, Proton VPN, and Proton Drive. The product roadmaps shared by Proton play a tactical role. They inform consumers and engaged customers about exciting changes yet to come. It gets people excited about the product’s future. Additionally, it builds an engaged user base that is more willing to experiment and try new features.

• Product roadmaps are something many projects struggle with. It fits into the communications and outreach umbrella, which unfortunately is typically an underresourced part of many open source products. They are one small part of a larger strategy around openness and transparency. If customers and stakeholders know what to expect, they gain more confidence in the product and company mission. For instance, this is especially true when the company continuously delivers on its roadmaps and meets its ambitions. As a result, delivering on those ambitions leaves a strong impression.

• There’s an old story about someone in the dark feeling the trunk of an elephant and believing it’s a snake because they can’t see the whole animal. It’s happening again, as people spooked from the Twitter crash try to feel their way around the Fediverse.

• [...]

• This is the most important dimension of the Fediverse, and the one we need to develop. We need ActivityPub federated software tools of all kinds, cutting the link between my choices and your choices without also cutting our ability to interact with each other.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Pgpool Global Development Group is pleased to announce the availability of Pgpool-II 4.4.0. This is the first stable release of Pgpool-II 4.4.x.

GCC and FSF

• Here are the latest modula-2 front end patches. Since the posting in

• https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc-patches/2022-October/603161.html

• I’ve rewritten the python3 documentation scripts (feedback from patchset 16) and applied all the suggestions from the feedback in patchset 15 (gm2-lang.cc).

• 2022 Fall “Free Software Foundation Bulletin” is here! Read about how to protect your privacy, a reflection on this year’s GNU Hackers’ Meeting, what’s new in Trisquel 11, and more!

• As the seasons change, and those in the northern hemisphere prepare for the cold of winter, we continue our annual cadence of software freedom advocacy. Sent from the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) cozy Boston office, the physical printed pamphlets have been mailed out to supporters around the world, and issue forty-one of the Free Software Foundation Bulletin is now also available online!

FSFE

• Member states, the European Parliament, and the Commission have reached a consensus on the Declaration of Digital Rights and Principles. Although it aims to serve as a reference point for the digital transformation of Europe, it instead descends into murky waters, causing ambiguity. Its wording is unclear and it overlooks existing good proposals.

• [...]

• It is also not clear if the declaration is consistent with existing frameworks. According to its text, it is built upon previous initiatives such as the Berlin and Tallinn declarations. These aforementioned frameworks already refer to Free Software when it comes to digital sovereignty and interoperability, while they also require more use of Free Software, and strengthening the requirement for its use. However, when it comes to interoperability, Free Software is not explicitly mentioned in the Declaration of Digital Rights and Principles.

GNU Projects

• We are pleased to announce the release of GNUnet 0.19.0.

• GNUnet is an alternative network stack for building secure, decentralized and privacy-preserving distributed applications. Our goal is to replace the old insecure Internet protocol stack. Starting from an application for secure publication of files, it has grown to include all kinds of basic protocol components and applications towards the creation of a GNU internet.

• This is a new major release. It breaks protocol compatibility with the 0.18.x versions. Please be aware that Git master is thus henceforth (and has been for a while) INCOMPATIBLE with the 0.18.x GNUnet network, and interactions between old and new peers will result in issues. 0.18.x peers will be able to communicate with Git master or 0.19.x peers, but some services will not be compatible.

• In terms of usability, users should be aware that there are still a number of known open issues in particular with respect to ease of use, but also some critical privacy issues especially for mobile users. Also, the nascent network is tiny and thus unlikely to provide good anonymity or extensive amounts of interesting information. As a result, the 0.19.0 release is still only suitable for early adopters with some reasonable pain tolerance.

Programming/Development

• Hotspot 1.4.0 has been released!

• Hotspot is a replacement for perf report. It’s a GUI for the perf profiler that takes a perf.data file, parses and evaluates its contents, and then displays the result in a graphical way.

• This feature release contains close to 400 commits since the last stable v1.3.0 release. It comes with its usual assorted list of bug fixes and performance improvements along with new features.

• This adventure started with an issue where a user pointed out that the libcurl function for base64 encoding actually would allocate a few bytes too many at times.

• That turned out to be true and we fixed it fairly quickly.

• As I glanced at that base64 encoder function that was still loaded and showing in my editor window, it struck me that it really was not written in an optimal way.

Perl / Raku

• So, I’m a programmer and I work for a government TI “e-gov” department. My work here is mostly comprise of one-off data-integration tasks (like the one in this chronicle) and programming satellite utilities for our Citizen Relationship Management system.

• For a little compiler I’ve been writing, I felt increasingly the need for immutable data structures to ensure that nothing was passed by references between passes. I love Perl and Raku but I am a functional programmer at heart, so I prefer map and reduce over loops. It bothered me to run reductions on a mutable data structure. So I made a small library to make it easier to work with immutable maps and lists.

• Recently I had the experience of playing with Ruby and its tools. One of the tools I liked to learn about was factory_bot.

Python

• Among the most widely used machine learning (ML) technologies today is the open-source PyTorch framework.

• Introducing PyTorch 2.0, our first steps toward the next generation 2-series release of PyTorch. Over the last few years we have innovated and iterated from PyTorch 1.0 to the most recent 1.13 and moved to the newly formed PyTorch Foundation, part of the Linux Foundation.

• PyTorch’s biggest strength beyond our amazing community is that we continue as a first-class Python integration, imperative style, simplicity of the API and options. PyTorch 2.0 offers the same eager-mode development and user experience, while fundamentally changing and supercharging how PyTorch operates at compiler level under the hood. We are able to provide faster performance and support for Dynamic Shapes and Distributed.

• PyTorch developers have announced version 2.0 of the popular open source machine learning framework, with a major new feature called torch.compile.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• The shell is nothing more than a program that carries the user typed commands or instructions from the terminal and converts them into something that the kernel can understand.

• If you’re using popular operating systems like Ubuntu, Kali Linux, Fedora, or Manjaro, you’re already interacting with Shell, knowingly or unknowingly.

• But before deeply understanding the shell, you must understand the workings of the kernel.

• If you have been using Linux for a while, then you have definitely spotted this “#! /bin/bash” line at the beginning of an shell script.

Leftovers

Hardware

• In the past three decades, there has been no shortage of companies with interesting ideas to solve very specific data storage and retrieval problems associated with high performance computing in some form or another. Many of them raised tons of money, and most of them got eaten by platform incumbents such as Dell, IBM, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise who desperately need something new to sell every couple of years.

• What we have not seen, however, is one of these companies break away from the pack and do what EMC did with its Symmetrix RAID 5 disk arrays or Network Appliance did with its eponymous NFS network storage back in 1the 1990s. And that was to make a lot of money reasonably fast and then pull a fair amount of it down to the bottom line fueling further growth and acquisitions that kept them relevant.

• As 2022 wraps up, the impacts of the pandemic and supply chain issues are still being felt, but the outlook for the chip shortage looks better in the coming years.

• The pandemic slowed semiconductor production and contributed to the subsequent chip shortage. From consumer goods to auto-making, a lack of semiconductors has stymied production and held back innovation. However, legislative developments this year such as the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act (also known as the CHIPS Act) have begun to alleviate that shortage and pave the way for greater innovation and emerging technologies here in the U.S.

• In 1990, 80% of the world’s semiconductors were produced in the U.S. and Europe. Today, 80% are produced in Asia, where countries provide substantial incentives to domestic semiconductor industries. The CHIPS Act is one of the most significant competition and innovation policies in a generation. Investments made possible by the CHIPS Act will allow the U.S. to once again competitively pursue the production of semiconductors — decreasing our dependence on global supply chains during a time of geopolitical uncertainty.

• [...]

• With more companies turning towards semiconductor production here in the U.S. and abroad, there will likely be an uptick in lab-to-fab (research to the design and manufacture of semiconductor products) supply chains. There will also be support for innovation in the industry through partnerships similar to the U.S. National Science Foundation and Intel’s collaborative efforts to train and build a skilled semiconductor manufacturing workforce. To see continuing success, the U.S. semiconductor industry will need to better handle long-term investment in R&D as well as talent acquisition, training, and retention.

• This landmark investment in U.S. competitiveness in the semiconductor industry has sweeping benefits not only for the semiconductor industry, but also for the tech industry at large. Semiconductor production drives competition and innovation not only around the production of more chips but the many industries that chips support. From consumer goods to automaking, a lack of semiconductors has stymied production and held back innovation. A greater emphasis on supplying our own chips will support the creation of new technologies and foster a culture of innovation here at home.

Proprietary

• Our experts have discovered an attack of a new Trojan, which they’ve dubbed CryWiper. At the first glance, this malware looks like ransomware: it modifies files, adds a .CRY extension to them (unique to CryWiper), and saves a README.txt file with a ransom note, which contains the bitcoin wallet address, the contact e-mail address of the malware creators, and the infection ID. However, in fact, this malware is a wiper: a file modified by CryWiper cannot be restored to its original state — ever. So if you see a ransom note and your files have a new .CRY extension, don’t hurry to pay the ransom: it’s pointless.

• Kaspersky is reporting on a data wiper masquerading as ransomware that is targeting local Russian government networks.

• CryWiper shares a separate commonality with ransomware families known as Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Xorist and Trojan-Ransom.MSIL.Agent. Specifically, the email address in the ransom note of all three is the same.

• A previously undocumented data wiper named CryWiper is masquerading as ransomware, but in reality, destroys data beyond recovery in attacks against Russian mayor’s offices and courts.

• [...]

• CryWiper is a 64-bit Windows executable named ‘browserupdate.exe’ written in C++, configured to abuse many WinAPI function calls.

Linux Foundation

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Ubuntu (binutils and ca-certificates).

• The Xen Project has released one or more Xen security advisories (XSAs). The security of Qubes OS is not affected. Therefore, no user action is required.

• The Beta channel is being updated to 109.0.5414.29 (Platform version: 15236.27.0) for most ChromeOS devices. This build contains a number of bug fixes and security updates.

Privacy/Surveillance

Finance

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• It’s a toss-up between Elon Musk’s management misadventures and Twitter’s technical troubles as to which will cause the most damage.

• Twitter is in trouble. I mean, who blunders his way into a fight with Apple only to later claim it was all a misunderstanding? But, as idiotic as that is combined with alienating advertisers, Elon Musk’s wreaking havoc with Twitter’s technical staff may end up causing more damage in the long run.

• True, Twitter is still up and running, but some people have already seen smaller failures. For example, Twitter’s SMS-based Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) has already failed for some users.

• As a reminder, the Titanic didn’t sink immediately after hitting the iceberg. It took its own sweet time. And, many passengers still thought all would be well until their feet were awash in the frigid North Atlantic waters.

• Mastodon is an odd beast. This has been discussed a lot from the user’s point of view, but not so much from the organizational point of view. Specifically, should organizations provide users with branded/hosted instances, and what kind of policies apply for this new breed of social media?

• (Note: I’m going to use “Mastodon” here, but this really applies to any kind of federated social media over ActivityPub or similar where users are identified in the “@user@organization.tld” format.)

• Most people think of Mastodon as a Twitter replacement, but organizations don’t provide users with Twitter accounts. In fact, it’s not uncommon for people to state on their Twitter profile that their opinions are their own. Organizations do provide people with user@organization.tld accounts for email, but (generally) email isn’t “social media” and not meant to be posted publicly.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Thanks to all donors donating a total of 3253 € and sponsoring servers DDNet is now fully funded until the end of 2022!

• I’m happy to announce we don’t take donations any more until next year! Thanks to everyone for donating money and time to make DDNet better!

Monopolies

Software Patents

• Cisco has managed to avoid a $2-plus billion payment for patent infringement on a technicality that has nothing to do with the patents.

• The case has its roots in 2018 when an outfit named Centripetal Networks alleged Cisco had stolen tech Centripetal described to it under a non-disclosure agreement.

• Centripetal sued and won. US District Judge Henry Morgan described Cisco’s behavior as “willful and egregious” and slapped it with over $2 billion in fines and royalties.

• Then came a twist.

• During the conduct of the case the judge learned that his wife held $4,688 worth of shares in Cisco, a potential conflict of interest. The judge and his wife moved those shares into a blind trust. He then ruled for Centripetal and said most of his thinking in the case had been done well before he realised the shares could be a problem.

• That judgement was appealed, not because of any error in reasoning regarding payments but over the issue of whether hanging onto the shares represented a “harmless error” that could be excused, or a conflict of interest that could not be ignored.

• Patent trolls are the bane of companies large and small. So, it should come as no surprise that Amazon and Amazon Web Services (AWS) have joined the Open Invention Network (OIN) — the world’s largest patent non-aggression consortium.

Copyrights

• One of many problems with the upload filters that Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive will bring in is that they are likely to overblock. That is, they will stop perfectly lawful materials from being uploaded because of flaws in the filters’ algorithms. Among those blocked lawful materials will certainly be public domain items.

• The public domain is often merely defined as where copyright materials end up after copyright has expired, or where a creator expressly chooses to place a work without copyright (as with Walled Culture the book). That definition of “not in copyright” is hardly something that can be used reliably in upload filters.

• Mighty Mikko contains twelve stories loosely based on Finnish tales, illustrated with vibrant block prints by Jay Van Everen.

• With the assistance of his Finnish speaking friend Lydia Tulonen, Parker Hoysted Fillmore (1878–1944) wandered “through the byways of Finnish folklore”, glossing his volume Mighty Mikko as “the traveler’s pack I have brought back home with me filled with strange treasures”. Rather than translating the folklore in a manner faithful to their original language, which, he thought, could sound “stiff, bald, and monotonous” to English ears, Fillmore retells these stories in his own idiom. Like Russian formalist Vladimir Propp, who would author his “Morphology of the Folktale” six years after Mighty Mikko appeared, Fillmore recognized that these tales shared a deep structure with stories told the world over. They are nevertheless “dramatic and picturesque”, colored “with a wealth of charming detail which is essentially Finnish”. Yet unlike, for example, the European literary cycle of Reynard the Fox, where beasts are substitutes for political and legal figures, Fillmore believes that his creatures are “plain downright Finnish peasants, sometimes stupid, often dull, frequently amusing, and always very human”.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I read many technical documents, from man pages to textbooks to reference works, but in the last several years I’ve read precious little fiction. I bought an e-reader at the start of 2022 partially to change this. However, for the first several months, I only used it to reread a few childhood favorites, then I largely stopped using it. My wife, on the other hand, is an avid reader: almost every tie we stop at a book store together, she leaves with at least one new title.

• Around April my wife and I stopped at a used book store as usual. I used to read quite a few Star Wars books in what is now knows as the “Legends” canon, so I decided to peruse the fantasy and sci-fi section of the store. I picked up a copy of the Thrawn trilogy, some books from the New Jedi Order, and one book unrelated to Star Wars at all: a fantasy novel called The Stone and the Maiden, written by Dennis Jones.

• This is my second post on the blog, still testing things and always polishing them. In other website news, I’m troubleshooting issues with how the site displays on different devices and resolutions. Things seem to break enough now, so if you’re one of the five people at most using this website, feel free to leave me a comment about it in Site Chat.

• I haven’t seen that topic earlier in the Geminispace, despite it’s connected with an overall retro and nostalgic theme, which I think is near the Gemini origins. Probably many of us prefer to read paper magazines or newspapers rather than their electronic versions. There is some kind of magic, which is connected with the smell of paper. Not that real one, although sometimes the smell of printing ink is a catalyst for memories, but that feeling that we can read the real paper thing held in our hands.

Technical

• Is OpenBSD an option for gamers? How do I squeeze out the last bit of performance? I have noticed questions in that vein coming up, maybe more than there used to be since gaming of OpenBSD has become a little more visible. Let’s examine the current state.

Internet/Gemini

• A short note regarding Mastodon. I know everyone and their cousin has already weighed in with their opinion on the recent matters of Mastodon and Twitter and all this Musquerade, so why not add my own perspective to the pile?

• I’ve been a Twitter user for a year or two I think, several years ago. Then I got fed up and removed it. Of course, I’ve been interested in Mastodon, so I registered an account this March just so I had one, wanted to look what it’s like.

• Not from the front door. Nor the one that’s in the back, if you go through the kitchen past the sink. This door opened up from a completely nondescript section of the wall. You’d hardly know there was door here, if I hadn’t opened it.

• I verify that this is the Midnight Pub I know. I see the familiar face of ~bartender, and Smudge is curled up on an armchair. No, this is definitely the Midnight.

• Hi gemspace, this is my first log post, kind of as a test. It will remain to be seen how often I update this, but I think everything should work fine, and I’ve created a second log for when I want to write one in toki pona. Hopefully it motivates me to practice?

• I’ve been eyeballing Gemini for a while now and originally wanted to host my own server on a raspberry pi, but it hasn’t panned out that way yet because I’m dirt poor… but in a fit of maybe mania (maybnia?) I committed myself to a KVM VPS for like $8/mo maybe a month ago. I got it so I could run my own Pleroma instance and, incidentally, my own personal site. It’s definitely been a learning curve since I’m ~passively techy~ but have never done any kind of server admin before. But everything’s been running pretty smoothly for a while now, and I’ve been spending my spare time (re: unemployment; all of the time) working away at learning PHP and stuff so that I can use my personal site to host all my own art with minimal effort and in a user-friendly way.

• 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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