● 12.29.22

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 29/12/2022: siduction 2022.1, MariaDB 11.0, and RISC-V Proliferation

Posted in News Roundup at 9:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• PNY, NVIDIA, and System76 have teamed up to give away a System76 Thelio Mira Workstation! Check out the Watch2Win contest for details on entering. There are 16 ways to enter! Deadline for entry is January 31st.

Google

• Kubernetes v1.26 includes significant advancements in network traffic engineering with the graduation of two features (Service internal traffic policy support, and EndpointSlice terminating conditions) to GA, and a third feature (Proxy terminating endpoints) to beta. The combination of these enhancements aims to address short-comings in traffic engineering that people face today, and unlock new capabilities for the future.

• Ahead of the new year, Google has been making preparations for more of its developers to work with the Fuchsia operating system.

Audiocasts/Shows

• There are some stories so big they need a little more air time.

• I talk a lot about free and open source software on this channel, and much of that software are actually forks of other projects. I’ve noticed that many in the FOSS community view forks as a negative thing…

• When it comes to patching, were you aware that there’s more than one type of patch? In this episode of Enterprise Linux Security, Jay and Joao discuss the various types of patching that’s performed today.

• Cmatrix is a cool tool that you see in the background of many YouTube videos.

• We’ve looked at some weird file managers on this channel but I have to say that this TUI file manager aptly called TUIFI Manager takes the cake, this for some reason is designed like a GUI file manager.

Kernel Space

• With only a few months passing since our last new joiner update, it should come as no surprise that the Collabora crowd has expanded yet again. Our flexible disposition affords us an exceptional bunch to onboard when opportunity knocks, but also leaves room to hear new voices as we shape our path forward.

• We’re fortunate that our newest team members will be able to bring fresh eyes to the departments of Core, Collabora Productivity, Graphics, DevOps, Multimedia, and People Operations. Their skills and innovation will help advance our many projects within the pipeline. Without further ado, let’s meet our new teammates!

Applications

• As I’ve gotten more into FOSS, I’ve noticed a lot of FOSS projects, like KDE, use Matrix protocol.

• A protocol that lets you use any client you wish to chat with each other. Basically, it’s IRC but with more features.

• And I’m into that! So I decided to move my Aks_Dev community from Discord to Matrix. Just to support the project in general but also I do not want my community to be tied to one client. In fact I’ve been using Matrix-Discord bridge for a while, but it is not the optimal way to chat, IMO. Some things just drop out, like replies from Discord side. It works but.. It would be better if everyone was just on the Matrix side.

• On top of the bridge being Very Good but Not Optimal, Discord being proprietary platform can easily follow the path of Twitter. Who knows when Discord decides to add cryptocurrencies or other meaningless crap? Who knows where your data is going to? And if you want to use different client, Discord just can easily ban you because it’s their walled garden and you’re the prisoner of convenience.

• HandBrake 1.6 open-source, free, and cross-platform video transcoding application is now available for download as a major release that introduces support for the AV1 video codec and numerous other new features and improvements.

• HandBrake 1.6 is here almost a year after HandBrake 1.5 and it finally adds the long-anticipated AV1 video encoding support through the implementation of SVT-AV1 (software) and Intel QSV AV1 (hardware) video encoders, along with 4K AV1 General, QSV (Hardware), and MKV (Matroska) presets.

• People often tell me that I seem to have a very busy life. They ask how I keep it up, and whether I should relax once in a while. And even though I really make room in my life to watch tv series with my wife every day, listen to some music, discuss a good book together, or just talk and think together about life and the world, nevertheless I also have a creative and productive side that I want to give attention, just because it gives me pleasure and energy. In addition to my daily work as an IT Solution Engineer, I have many creative interests, like photography, drawing, writing books, and writing articles for my two websites. I cannot balance my day job, all these interests, and normal life activities in a healthy way without some kind of productivity system. In this article, I want to give you a look into how I implemented a combination of BASB (Building a Second Brain), GTD (Getting Things Done), and Scrum, to manage my productive life. This article will also be the foundation for future articles in which I will fill in this productivity system with a diversity of productivity tools.

• In 1997, directly after University, I started as an IT specialist and have been working in this area ever since in different roles. During these more than 20 years of being part of and later also leading IT related projects, our teams were using several methods and supporting software solutions to plan our projects in the best possible way. Not all were equally successful. Currently our teams are working in a Scrum approach which is part of the Agile methodology. To support this way of working we use among others an Microsoft Azure Kanban board to plan and monitor our daily work. Kanban is nothing new but seems extremely popular at the moment. It is not only a great approach for large and complex projects, but also on a smaller scale for your study and your personal projects. In this article I want to explain three topics: What is Kanban, Why should you use Kanban to be more productive and what are some of the best Kanban apps available.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Mattermost on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Mattermost is an open-source, self-hosted chat and collaboration platform that is designed for modern teams. It is similar to other chat platforms like Slack, but it is designed to be more flexible and customizable, with a focus on security and privacy. One of the main advantages of Mattermost is its flexibility and customization options. It can be easily integrated with other tools and services, such as GitLab and JIRA, and it can be customized to meet the specific needs of a team. It is also highly scalable, with support for large organizations and distributed teams.

• 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 Mattermost 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.

• Most of us keep important notes, login credentials, and other sensitive information in text files. However, it is unsafe to keep this information in plain text. One of the ways to protect sensitive information is to use encryption.

• I’m migrating some self-hosted virtual machines to Trisquel, and noticed that Trisquel does not offer cloud-images similar to the Debian Cloud and Ubuntu Cloud images. Thus my earlier approach based on virt-install –cloud-init and cloud-localds does not work with Trisquel. While I hope that Trisquel will eventually publish cloud-compatible images, I wanted to document an alternative approach for Trisquel based on preseeding. This is how I used to install Debian and Ubuntu in the old days, and the automated preseed method is best documented in the Debian installation manual. I was hoping to forget about the preseed format, but maybe it will become one of those legacy technologies that never really disappears? Like FAT16 and 8-bit microcontrollers.

• When transferring files to a remote Linux server, you have a few options. One of the best way is to use a program called Secure Copy, or SCP, that runs over the SSH protocol to quickly transfer files over your network to a remote system. This tutorial shows you how to transfer files securely using SCP in Linux.

• osTicket is an open-source and one of the most widely used ticketing systems by small and medium-sized businesses. It is a simple and easy-to-use web-based customer support portal that helps you to manage and track all tickets.

• In this tutorial, you’ll install Mastodon, a decentralized microblogging platform on a Debian 11 server. With this guide, you’ll set up Mastodon with PostgreSQL as the database server and Nginx as a reverse proxy.

• It’s easy to disable the apt awareness message that appears each time you run an apt update on Ubuntu 22.04 Why is it needed at all? We discuss inside.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gradle on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Gradle is a build automation tool that is used to build different applications, from mobile applications to microservices. It is flexible and helps developers’ teams to automate and build easier and faster software. Gradle is written in the Java programming language and is widely used in the development of Java-based projects, particularly those that use the Java Developer Kit (JDK).

• 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 Gradle 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.

• MooseFS is a distributed file system that aims to be a fault-tolerant, highly available and performing, scalable general-purpose network distributed file system for data centers. In this article I’ll show how I’ve started working with MooseFS.

• HandBrake video transcoder and DVD ripper announced new major 1.6.0 release today. Here are the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu Linux users.

• HandBrake 1.6.0 is a big release with new AV1 video encoding support. They are SVT-AV1 (software) and Intel QSV AV1 (hardware) video encoders.

• This release as well introduced high bit depth and color depth support to various encoders and filters, including VP9 10-bit, NVENC HEVC 10-bit, and VCN HEVC 10-bit encoders.

• Declustered RAID decreases resilvering times, restoring a pool to full redundancy in a fraction of the time over the traditional RAIDz. We look at OpenZFS, the first freely distributed open source solution to offer a parity declustered RAID feature.

• Fault tolerance has been at the forefront of data protection since the dawn of computing. To this day, admins continue to struggle with efficient and reliable methods to maintain the consistency of stored data, either locally or remotely on a server (or cloud storage pool) and keep searching for the best way to recover from a failure, regardless of how disastrous that failure might be.

• Some of the methods still being used today are considered ancient by today’s standards. Why replace something that continues to work? One such technology is called RAID. Initially, the acronym stood for redundant array of inexpensive disks, but it was later reinvented to describe a redundant array of independent disks.

• The idea of RAID was first conceived in 1987. The primary goal was to scale multiple drives into a single volume and present it to the host as a single pool of storage. Depending on how the drives were structured, you also saw an added performance or redundancy benefit. (See the box titled “RAID Recap.”)

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Xfce 4.18 will be coming soon to MX-21 users. We intend to add Xfce 4.18 to the main MX repositories sometime in January, and the update should come to existing Xfce users via the usual update channels. There are a lot of benefits to Xfce 4.18, including dual pane capability in thunar, updates to the Xfce settings applets, panel, and terminal, and options to have Xfce apps use the older Xfwm window theming instead of gtk3-client-side-decorations.

• The team behind MX Linux – the number one distro in DistroWatch’s rankings – has said that Xfce 4.18, which was released in mid-December, will be available to MX Linux users in January. The plan is to add Xfce 4.18 to the main MX repositories in January, then MX-21 users running Xfce will get the upgrade through the MX Updater program.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today, we bring you a new quick report on the Maui Project’s progress before new years eve.

• Maui 2.2.1 was released almost one month ago, and since then, new features, bug fixes, and improvements have been made to the Maui set of apps and frameworks; the following blog post will cover some of the changes and highlights building up to the upcoming stable release.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• As I was quite busy during the days before Christmas this year I didn’t get time to write the traditional holidays Maps blog post.

• So I thought I should at least write a quick wrap-up of the happenings during 2022 before the end-of-year.

• As always, we started out in spring with a new major release along the spring GNOME release (42.0).

• In 42.0 (or rather during the development cycle leading up to it) Maps gained support for using the development profile, so that you can install nightly snapshot releases from the GNOME nightly Flatpak repo (or using locally-built bundles) in parallell with a stable release (using the Flathub release or from a „traditional“ distro package).

Distributions and Operating Systems

Debian Family

• During holiday season we present to you our new release siduction 2022.1. This edition for obvious reasons has been given the code name »Masters of War«. This goes back to a Bob Dylan song of the same name from 1962. Users that have been with us for a while will remember that we used to use rock songs as code names for our releases. Well, today we are returning to that tradition. The wallpaper of this release combines the artwork for Debian GNU/Linux 12 »Bookworm« with this Bob Dylan song, that is as fresh today as it was in 1962.

• Dubbed “Masters of War,” siduction 2022.1 is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.1 kernel series to provide users with the best possible hardware support. The ISO images come with Linux kernel 6.1.1 by default, which is the latest release at the moment of writing.

• Three flagship editions are provided with this release featuring the latest KDE Plasma 5.26.4 desktop environment, which is accompanied by the latest KDE Frameworks 5.101 and KDE Gear 22.12 software suites for the best Plasma experience, as well as the recently released Xfce 4.18 and LXQt 1.2 desktop environments.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Compared to other embedded boards that I have, this one is surprisingly well documented; given you find the right webpages (list at the end). The vendor page itself is in a rather typical state, where an online translator occasionally comes handy to translate Chinese into something I understand 😉 But then, there is the really nice sunxi community wiki with has all extra information that you need.

• For the device itself, some months ago I decided to get this one mostly because of the reasons price and delivery date. However, it has a big disadvantage for me when I use it for testing the KDE Yocto layers: There is only a 2D GPU on the board (namely a “G2D” unit) for which also no Kernel drivers are present at the moment (except those from the Kernel source blob by the device vendor). However, for all other parts there is impressive community work. Most notably, coming with Kernel 6.2, there is finally the HDMI driver support that made the above picture possible.

• [...]

• Unfortunately, I do not expect any Plasma or KDE application running on the Nezha board in the sooonish future (at least not accelerated via the G2D chip)… Yet, if you recall, at FOSDEM 2019 Alistair already demonstrated Plasma running on a HiFive Unleashed board, using an expansion board for graphics. Finally, there is right now another very interesting and not too expensive RISC-V board becoming available with on-board 3D GPU and it is already on my shopping list… I am looking forward to 2023 🙂

• Last week we attended the RISC-V Summit in San Jose. Traction in the RISC-V ecosystem is accelerating faster and faster. The embedded world has shipped 10’s billions of RISC-V cores collectively over the last few years. Qualcomm has silently shifted control and security cores that are not exposed to the user since the 2020 S865 chip. This has enabled them to ship a total of 650 million RISC-V cores! Andes and Codasip are each at over 2 billion RISC-V cores shipped, Western Digital ships over a billion RISC-V cores a year, and even Apple is converting some non-user-facing functions to RISC-V!

• Once a week, millions of people set out their trash cans next to the curb for collection the following day, which many consider to be extremely annoying or laborious. So rather than manually dragging out the garbage and recycling bins, the YouTuber known as Max Maker decided to build a system that could automate the task at the touch of a key fob button.

• Max’s idea involved creating a single track that would span from the back garden area all the way down the driveway to the curb. From here, a train consisting of several flat carts with wheels underneath would be connected together in addition to a single locomotive cart at the rear. The first version of the locomotive used a windshield wiper motor, controlled by an Arduino Uno and motor driver board, to rotate a pair of rubber wheels along the lower track. However, the lack of power from the windshield wiper motor combined with the lack of grip from the wheels meant the heavy weight of the loaded trash cans could not be moved uphill.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

• The Beta channel has been updated to 109.0.5414.61 for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Mozilla

• If you happen to be using Firefox Beta 109 on an overpriced MacBook Pro that has a sticky letter s today (the 29th of December, 2022), this is what the User-Agent string looks like:

• Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/109.0

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• When I created the original MySQL optimizer in 1995, it was quite simple. A big part of the plans were based on costs, but there where also a lot of rule based choices. The original ‘base of cost’ was “one disk seek”. The cost of key read was also a disk seek.

• Over time a lot of developers have worked on the optimizer and added many new features, but the original cost model has stayed the same (until now). Most new features was done with based on a cost model, but still some new things (like deciding which index to use for sorting) were still partly rule based.

• If there was only one or a few choices for a plan, the old optimizer was reasonably good in finding a good plan. But the more complex the queries got (complex = a lot of different choices could be made for each table) the more chance that it would not find the optimal plan. This goes all back to the original cost model not being ‘good enough’.

• The main developers of the 11.0 optimizer changes in MariaDB 11.0 are Sergei Petrunia and me. Vicențiu Ciorbaru has also provided some code and help.

• The optimizer changes consist of more than 100 commits, starting from October 2021!

• It has been a long project!

FSF

• FSF program manager Miriam Bastian shares why she thinks the freedom to share is important.

• Sharing is what makes a strong community. It has always impressed me to see how people in the free software community share their time, ideas, achievements, knowledge, and software with others. This sharing community is what attracted me in the first place to the free software movement: I wanted to know what it is that people spend so much time and joint effort on and why. What I found convinced me and won me over to free software.

• I started to climb the freedom ladder in 2014. Having profited from software like KeePassXC, Calibre, LibreOffice, F-Droid, Zotero, VLC media player, Privacy Badger, and TeXstudio for more than seven years, I wanted to give back to the free software community. When the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was looking for a program manager, I considered this to be the perfect opportunity to utilize my organizational, managerial, and interpersonal skills, and I am immensely grateful that I now have the privilege to contribute to the free software movement as the FSF’s program manager.

Programming/Development

• A generous member of the wider curl community stepped up and donated an unused Mac mini m1 model to me to be used for curl development. Today it arrived at my home. An 8C CPU/16GB/1TB/8C GPU/1GbE model as per the sticker on the box.

Perl / Raku

• These posts presented my work in progress, in advent calendar style of course, on a new raku module: CLI::AWS::EC2-Simple. The module is now available at the raku zef repository via raku.land with github repo here. This post completes the CL::AWS trilogy with a demo of it in action and how the OO model from last time is now wrapped as a command.

• It is my firm belief that every thought or idea that you or I have, has been had before. On the balance of statistics, the chances are that those that had these ideas handled it better, and have developed more powerful utilities to exploit these innovations. One therefore has a few possible options, when thinking of creating a solution to a problem. The first probably is to look for other published solutions and use them; these may be more mature, tried, tested and optimised. The second is to go ahead and implement another idea, foolishly perceived as an innovation, leading to a proliferation of methods duplicating, triplicating existing work, in the end producing a half-baked distraction.

• Statistics indicate that someone will take that path of the fool. I am not going to argue with Quantum Programmodynamics; if it has to be someone, let it be me. Interaction in console applications may involve the ping-pong between a script and STDIN. It may be more sophisticated using Curses::UI. This is established, used for heavyweight applications and has a superb feature set. It could be more modern using Tickit by Perl’s resident genius and author of over 235 Perl modules, Paul Evans; powerful, versatile, event-aware and handled in a Perlish way, Tickit is the API for the future of Perl console applications. Or one could try and invent something different. Not better, not more powerful, not more elegant. Just different. Why? Quantum, that’s why.

• There may be reasons other than pure bloody mindedness or foolishness for doing something differently. Indeed, perhaps the only way to learn to appreciate the right way, is to do the wrong thing. Honestly.

Leftovers

Proprietary

Security

• Linux is widely known as a highly secure operating system. However, like any other system software, it too can fall prey to loopholes and exploits, the worst of which are privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow an adversary to elevate their permissions and potentially take over an entire organization.

• Polkit CVE-2021-4034 is a critical privilege escalation vulnerability that has gone unnoticed for over 12 years and affects all major Linux distributions. It is so devastating that a criticality rating of 8 was issued to the vulnerability. So, what exactly is Polkit CVE-2021-4034, and how can you fix it?

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (multipath-tools), Fedora (containerd and trafficserver), Gentoo (libksba and openssh), and SUSE (webkit2gtk3).

• The return of malware strains like Emotet, Conti and Trickbot indicates an expansion of cybercrime for hire.

• CISA has added two new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, based on evidence of active exploitation. These types of vulnerabilities are frequent attack vectors for malicious cyber actors and pose significant risks to the federal enterprise. Note: To view the newly added vulnerabilities in the catalog, click on the arrow in the “Date Added to Catalog” column, which will sort by descending dates.

• According to their data, the company had received almost 70 million new malware samples on Windows.

Privacy/Surveillance

• EPIC’s Alan Butler was featured on CBS Mornings about toys that collect data on kids.

Civil Rights/Policing

• “They harassed us because we are Black,” Nakedi told News Central TV. “They said we were not allowed to swim in the pool because it is for Whites only.”

Right to Repair/Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• People ought to be able to fix their stuff. That’s why we’ve been planning and building for the passage of Digital Right to Repair laws, regulations, rules, and standards for the past ten years. It’s been a long game – longer than we ever expected. Every small victory, such as the work done for the Nixing the Fix FTC study, has been preparing for the big fight.

• The real fight was always getting real protections in the force of law, and much like we saw last night, not everything went perfectly. We got a bill passed in New York State but took some lumps getting over the finish line.

Monopolies

Patents

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• All the times, I smile, the thoughts. Every time, I wish those, feelings. Many times, I wonder, emotions. Make my life, heaven, hey Hell!

• i have a ultra lightweight osprey backpack: might be very useful except the zips open by themselves and then stuff falls out!

• today i sewed the zips so that these can’t open past the top of the backpack. one side i did with a button foot, the other with a wide zig-zag. the zig zag was the better of the two.

• Just kidding, I don’t have a guitar. I borrowed my sisters acoustic guitar, so that’s the one I am picking up.

• I am not new to the guitar, it’s just that when I discovered triathlon in the earliest 90′ies I immediately got real serious about that, it completely took over my life, in a good way, for some years. And now, about 30 years and a lot of triathlon training and racing later, I feel quite done with that.

• It seems like the history of me writing about gardening on the small internet is basically the story of my efforts getting ever, well, smaller. But not in the warm and fuzzy “smol” sense, although maybe I ought to try to mentally reframe it that way.

Technical

Programming

• A couple of weeks ago I was playing with Haunt to see if it was an good candidate to replace Jekyll for a couple of websites I host.

• I forgot to publish here that a few weeks ago I had published an alpha version of my ninja platform game Pagoda of Death on itch.io. I had this project rolling since 2015 or 2016 but I was trying to make it perfect, so didn’t shipped anything since. Now I said “screw it” and published it anyways:

• I’ve mentioned that an artifact (a compiled function or data) ingested into harn is stored with all the metadata needed to recreate it. This metadata includes the source code of the artifact.

• Note that unlike current systems, I am not satisfied with leaving the source in the middle of some text file in some directory. I want the source for that particular artifact in _my system_, and to that end, I keep a running log of all compiled C code in the ‘sources’ file.

• 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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