● 01.12.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 12/01/2023: LibreOffice 7.4.4 and 15 New Videos

Posted in News Roundup at 7:50 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Due to popular requests, System76 has been hard at work on a refreshed Pangolin laptop that will feature the new AMD Ryzen 7 6800U processor with AMD Radeon 680M graphics, a 144Hz 15.6-inch FHD display, up to 32 GB DDR5 6400 MHz RAM, and up to 16TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD storage.

• System76 promises a “buttery smooth experience” even when playing games (including those that demand higher framerate), watching movies, listening to music, or working on your favorite projects.

• The System76 Pangolin line of laptops are lightweight notebooks with 15.6 inch displays, AMD Ryzen processors. And like all System76 computers, they come with a GNU/Linux distribution pre-installed.

• When the Pangolin first launched a few years ago it initially shipped with an AMD Ryzen 4000U processor. Later that year System76 released an updated model with Ryzen 5000U chips. Now a Ryzen 6000U model is on the way.

• Earlier today, System76 announced its AMD-powered Pangolin Linux laptop is getting a significant redesign. The computer comes with either Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS or the Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS. The laptop has a 144Hz 15.6-inch matte display with a max resolution of 1080p.

• The refreshed notebook now comes equipped with an AMD Ryzen 7 6800 processor and 32GB of RAM (LPDDR5 @ 6400 MHz). You can configure the computer with up to 4TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid state storage. You get three USB 3.2 Gen 1 (Type-A) ports and a single USB 3.2 Gen 2 (Type-C) port.

• For network connectivity. you get both Gigabit Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6E. The included Bluetooth is version 5.2. Both an SD card reader and an HDMI output are included as well. A 720P webcam adorns the top of the screen.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Quick video covering the newest release of Nobara OS. A great project aimed at making a distribution with a Fedora base easy to use for point-and-clickers, content creators and gamers.

• In this video I explain how signed and unsigned binary work, the differences between them, aswell as the concept of buffer overflows and underflow.

• In this video we’ll check out the latest version of NomadBSD! The number one portable FreeBSD OS with a ready made desktop has been updated and refreshed. A Yay or Nay? Let’s find out!

• I’ve been mentioning Nala as an alternative to Apt for a while but I haven’t explained why until now. Nala is a front-end cli tool that works to manage your software and deb packages on Debian based distros.

• So three months with the Steam Deck, Well, lets take a look and give a reaction to see how he felt about those 3 months with it!!

• We occasionally talk about the possibility of RISC V on the desktop but what if I said that RISC V on mobile isn’t something too far away if Google has anything too say about it.

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Toontown Rewritten on KDE Neon.

• Today we will talk about when we first saw Linux, what we used, and what made us switch (or add it to our list).

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Nitrux d5c7cdff and some of the applications pre-installed.

• System76, a company that focuses on Linux-first computers, designs keyboards now. The Launch Keyboard “launched” some time ago, and for some of you the lack of a numpad was a concern. Now, the “Heavy” variation of the Launch mechanical keyboard is available – and yes, it’s a full keyboard complete with a numpad.

• Today, I’m taking a quick first look at the latest release of ArchCraft, an Arch-based Linux distro that features a highly customized openbox session, as well as a highly customized bspwm session. Archcraft is focused on being minimal, lightweight and stunningly beautiful.

• So three months with the Steam Deck, Well, lets take a look and give a reaction to see how he felt about those 3 months with it!!

Kernel Space

• The new Linux kernels are version 6.1.5 of the “stable” kernel and version 5.15.87 of the “longterm” kernel. As the names suggest, stable is intended as a kernel for everyday use, while the “longterm” variant is designed for applications that require a lot of uptime, such as in servers.

Applications

• Discourse is an open-source forum platform known for its vast features and third-party integrations.

• It is also one of the best open-source forum software you can deploy on your Linux servers to build a community.

• The It’s FOSS Community forum is also powered by Discourse. If you have any questions or want to join in discussing Linux/Open-Source stuff with like-minded people, feel free to sign up on our community forum.

• Now, moving on to Discourse’s latest release.

• Most Linux distributions come with a file manager to give you easy access to the files stored on your system.

• That’s because most distros come preinstalled with a desktop environment, and file explorer is an integral part.

• But if you are one of those rare Linux users who take the matter into their hands and configure things as per your preferences, you can install and use another file manager.

• But what choices do you have regarding the file manager on Linux?

• I’ll answer to that question in this article. I have also added a few file browsers that work in the terminal.

• Converseen image converter announced 0.9.10.0 release few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu via PPA.

• Converseen is a free and open-source tool for converting or resizing a large quantity of photo images to another format with a few mouse clicks.

• The new 0.9.10.0 release redesigned the Images Settings dialog. Previously, it automatically removes the metadata (information including date & time, device, and even location you capture the photo image) in output images, and replaces with only modified date and other non-sensitive data.

• Now, it provides a “Remove image’s metadata” check-box. So, user can manually choose to either to remove the metadata information about the photo images in output files.

• To make this even more appealing, the Standard Notes UI is very simple to use. One might even call Standard Notes pretty basic in its design. For many users, that simplistic design means the application has a very shallow learning curve. I cannot imagine anyone opening Standard Apps and not immediately feeling right at home with the tool. And because Standard Notes is available to install on Linux, MacOS, Windows, web, Android, and iOS, you can sync your notes to any device you use.

• The one caveat to installing on Linux is that you’re limited to either an AppImage or a Snap package. I’ve tried both and found they perform equally as well. However, I do prefer the Snap package as it can be updated without having to download a new AppImage.

• Emacs, Vim, and nano are the most prominent text editors in the Linux community. But there are several other lesser-known alternatives for you to use.

• Terminal-based text editors are used for almost everything on Linux; from writing quick Bash scripts and configuration files to producing fully-fledged programs or even writing a novel.

• While nano comes pre-installed on most distros, and Emacs and Vim have their own followings, there are other great terminal-based text editors out there.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snap on Linux Mint 21. For those of you who didn’t know, Snap is a powerful package management system for Linux that makes it easy to install and manage software. Similar to AppImage or Flatpak the Snap Store provides up-to-date software no matter what version of Linux you are running and how old your libraries are

• 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 Snap package management on Linux Mint 21 (Vanessa).

• ChatGPT Wrapper is an unofficial open source command-line interface and Python API for interacting with ChatGPT.

• When you try to install a package or a tool, you get the following error: “dpkg was interrupted, you must manually run ‘dpkg –configure -a’ to correct the problem” as shown below when I tried to install the neofetch utility.

• Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 4 with the EagleFX Broker on a Chromebook.

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

• Today we are looking at how to install Game Jolt on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to deploy NRPE agent as a Docker container. Docker containers have revolutionized how applications are deployed!

• I mentioned in the post about upgrading my home internet that part of the work I did was creating a read-only Debian root with a squashfs image. This post covers the details of how I boot with that image; a later post will cover how I build the squashfs image.

• First, David Reader kindly pointed me at his rodebian setup, which was helpful in making me think about the whole problem but ultimately not the direction I went. Primarily because on the old router (an RB3011) I am space constrained, with only 120M of usable flash, and so ideally I wanted as much as possible of the system in a well compressed filesystem. squashfs seemed like the best option for that, and ultimately I ended up with a 39M image.

• I’ve then used overlayfs to mount a tmpfs, so I get what looks like a writeable system without having to do too many tweaks to the actual install. On the plus side I can then see exactly what is getting written where and decide whether I need to update something in the squashfs. I don’t boot with an initrd – for initial testing I booted directly off a USB stick. I’ve actually ended up continuing to do this in production, because I’ve had no pressing reason to move it all to booting off internal flash (I’ve ended up with a Sandisk SDCZ430-032G-G46 which is tiny). However nothing I’m going to describe is dependent on that – this would work perfectly well for a initial UBIFS rootfs on internal NAND.

• In this tutorial you will learn how to install openssh server on Linux mint 21.

• Created by CryoByte, CryoUtilities is a Linux application that will help assist with performance on the Steam Deck. Here’s how it works.

• Setting a Sudo or administrator password on your Steam Deck will make so many of the different things you can do on Linux infinitely easier. Here’s how to quickly do that!

• Linux is a little different from Windows, or even macOS. There’s not a lot of room for error once you start fiddling around with the administrative powers that Linux can offer. Not that things are easy to mess up, but it’s why the terminal will frequently request a Sudo password.

• The file systems table (fstab) is a system configuration file, stored in the /etc directory on Linux, that contains information about various file systems and how the system should mount them during boot.

• The Linux kernel uses information from the fstab file to determine which file systems to mount and where to mount them. Here’s everything you need to know about fstab and file systems on Linux.

• Understanding the concept of sources.list in Ubuntu will help you understand and fix common update errors in Ubuntu.

• There was a time when you needed to install third-party apps to view and type Emojis on Ubuntu.

• Those days are long gone. Ubuntu now displays emoticons correctly out of the box. No special software is needed.

• And there is also a built-in Emoji picker for typing emojis. You can use it to easily and quickly insert emojis into supported GTK 3 applications.

• Let me show you how to use this Emoji picker.

• The “jq” is a command that’s based on the JSON processor.

• It allows you to transform, slice, map, filter, or perform other operations on JSON data.

• By default, jq reads JSON entities (e.g., numbers, literals) from stdin.

• You can use whitespace to separate entities like 1 and 2 or true and false.

• In this guide, you’ll learn how to install jq on Ubuntu, test it, or uninstall it.

• vcpkg is a C and C++ package manager to acquire and manage libraries.

• You can download over 1,500 open-source libraries or add your own private libraries.

• It’s maintained by the Microsoft C++ team and open-source contributors.

• In this guide, you’ll learn how to install vcpkg on Ubuntu, test it, and uninstall it.

• This is the first newsletter of the year 2023.

• The new year brings new resolutions and if learning Linux is one of your resolutions, save this newsletter.

• To help you improve your Linux knowledge, I am sharing a collection of free books, courses and other resources.

• Google Chrome is a popular web browser that is widely used for browsing the internet, streaming videos, and running web-based applications. If you want to install Google Chrome on Pop!_OS, you can follow a few simple steps to download and install the browser. In this article, we will walk through the process of installing Google Chrome on Pop!_OS, including downloading the installation package, installing dependencies, making the package executable, and using the “dpkg” command to install the package.

• If you are running XAMPP on Ubuntu Linux and want to install WordPress on it, then here are the steps to follow, given in this guide.

• XAMPP is not a new software that needs a detailed introduction. It has been around for quite some time, now. The main purpose of XAMPP is to provide a single package that offers an AMPP stack (Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl). In the XAMPP, ‘X’ stands for Cross-Platform (X).

• This free software is available for Windows, macOS as well as Linux. Here in this tutorial, we learn the steps for installing WordPress on Xampp which is already running on Ubuntu.

• VirtualBox is a popular virtualization software by Oracle which is available for Linux, mac and Windows systems. It is flexible and brings many features to take advantage of your virtualization. It’s the best and easy way to experience Ubuntu in Windows without installing it. However, I strongly recommend installing Ubuntu physically as a dual-boot to enjoy its advantage.

• The steps outlined below assume that you are installing Ubuntu for the first time in Windows. Hence the steps are a little descriptive and a bit lengthy. Furthermore, the following steps should work for Windows 10 and Windows 11 as host machines.

• When working with a system, it is often important to know the technical specifications of your hardware. One important piece of hardware in any computer is the graphics card, also known as a video card or GPU. This tutorial will outline how to display graphics card information on Ubuntu, using a variety of different tools. It will cover both the command line and graphical user interface methods of viewing this information, as well as provide examples for each tool.

• Groups are an essential part of the Linux permission structure and a powerful way to manage file access on your system.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Helpy Customer Helpdesk on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Helpy Helpdesk is a customer service software that provides businesses with an effective way to manage customer inquiries and support tickets, streamline customer communication and enhance customer satisfaction.

• 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 Helpy Customer Helpdesk 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.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install osTicket on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, osTicket is an open-source and one of the most widely used ticketing systems by small and medium-sized businesses. One of the main features of osTicket is its web-based interface, which allows users to create, track, and respond to customer support tickets. The interface is intuitive and easy to use, and it includes tools for managing and organizing tickets, such as the ability to assign tickets to specific users or teams, set priorities, and track the status of tickets.

• 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 osTicket customer support and ticketing system 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.

• Kora is a fancy new SVG-based icon set for the Linux desktop. It comes with 3 themes: Kora, Kora Light, Kora, Light Panel, and Kora Pgrey. Here’s how to set up each of these themes on your Linux desktop.

• How to Install the VMware Workstation 17 Player on Debian 11

• In this tutorial post, we will show you the method to install the VMware Workstation 17 player on Debian 11 and its derivatives.

• In this tutorial, I will show you how to create your own docker image with a dockerfile.

• In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to install the Flask application on Ubuntu 22.04 with Apache Web server and mod WSGI.

• Flask is a very popular web framework written in Python and used by many developers worldwide. The Apache is the Web server where requests are coming to the application, and the Mod WSGI is the Apache module that implements a WSGI-compliant interface for hosting Python-based web applications.

• Installing Flask with Apache and WSGI on Ubuntu 22.04 is a process that may take up to 30 minutes. Let’s get started!

• The ribbon interface in Microsoft Office is a sweet spot for many users. The tabbed ribbon interface groups specific options inside a single tab.

• This guide explains what is Go Programming language and how to install Go language in Linux and finally how to create a test program in Golang with a simple example.

Games

• Recently, with the Steam Next Fest, I revived my taste for demos: small doses with lots of flavor. And I have been playing them when I have the opportunity. Hence, I am happy I discovered Star Fetchers, developed by Svavelstickan, released in 2020 on Steam. It is a 1-hit kill hack & slash 2D platformer inspired by grindhouse movies, that works great on Linux with any Proton.

• The art looks like it was made in MS Paint Pinta, but there are so much attention to detail, to properly set the world, and the game physics. All done so well, that gives the game its authenticity and uniqueness.

• While all contributors are on the deck working to finalize the Godot 4.0 release (currently at beta 11), some of us are still backporting important bugfixes to the current stable branch, Godot 3.5.

• It had its first stable release in early August, and a first maintenance release in late September, and so far so good, most users seem to be pretty happy with 3.5.1.

• But since then, quite a few bugfixes have been queued in the 3.5 branch, so it’s time to wrap up a new 3.5.2 maintenance release. We had a first Release Candidate on December 15, and after fixing one regression and backporting a few other fixes, it’s time for a second RC build to validate the update.

• Please give it a try if you can. It should be as safe to use as 3.5.1-stable is, but we still need a significant number of users to try it out and report how it goes to make sure that the few changes in this update are working as intended and not introducing new regressions.

• The SteamDeck might be my favorite electronic gadget, off-the-shelf device I have purchased, possibly ever. The newness has long worn off but the amount of use has maintained or perhaps expanded as it has moved into the home theater arena as well.

• One drawback of being a fairly early adopter of the Steam Deck was the lack of accessories, things like docks and cases were not available so my SteamDeck largely stayed in its travel case if I was not immediately using it. I wanted to avoid any sort of tragic end to the delightful handheld machine.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Akademy 2023 will be a hybrid event, combining on-site and remote sessions, and will include talks, workshops, Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetups, training and coding sessions. The conference is expected to draw hundreds of attendees from the global KDE community to discuss and plan the future of the community and its technologies. Many participants from the broad Free and Open Source software community, local organizations and software companies will also attend. The call for papers will open soon, and the registrations shortly after. We will soon update Akademy’s website, in the meanwhile follow us on Twitter and Mastodon to keep up to date with Akademy’s news.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Endless Computers is preparing a new version of its Endless OS distro, an easy-to-use OS for computing novices of all ages. It’s a unique distro which shows how desktop OSes may evolve.

• Endless is an American company – since 2020, a nonprofit foundation – which strives to bring computers, and computer literacy, to people who don’t yet have access to it. Its flagship product is Endless OS, a rather different sort of Linux distribution. It also offers the Endless Key, a bootable USB flash drive with Endless OS on it, and the inexpensive Endless Laptop.

• It’s the distro that we are mainly looking at today, though. Endless OS combines several mainstream components, such as Debian and GNOME, to create something quite different. It’s probably the most widespread and least experimental immutable desktop Linux. Although the hard disk layout is fairly standard (a single root partition, formatted with the standard Linux ext4 format), the root directory is read-only. Yes, even for the superuser. Although the OS is based on Debian, you won’t find the apt or dpkg commands or any other command-line package management tools whatsoever.

• In my last post, I was trying out Debian. I had some idea that I wanted to try out something dead simple. I think that idea lasted for about a month, before I went back to Gentoo again.

Arch Family

• Arch Linux mourns the sudden loss of Jonathon Fernyhough, known in our community as jonathon, who passed away on Saturday night.

• Jonathon was an active participant and contributor to Arch Linux, several derived distributions, the AUR and through personal repositories. He was enthusiastic, helpful and eager to contribute towards improving the free and open source software community as a whole.

• On behalf of the wider Arch Linux community, our condolences go out to his family and friends.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly.

• Here are the release notes from Cockpit 283 and cockpit-machines 281:

• Services: Create timer to run every minute

• In the Timers part of Services page, the create timer dialog can create systemd timers to run in “minutely” mode, which runs a command every minute on the specified second.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• UnityX (formerly UnityX 10) was initially designed as the next major release of the Unity desktop environment used by the Ubuntu Unity official flavor. However, it would appear that UnityX is now being developed as a flavor of the upcoming Unity 7.7 release that will offer more customization options.

• While it will look pretty much the same as Unity7, this new flavor comes with some interesting benefits over Unity7, such as Compiz-free use, the ability to use a window manager of your choice (yes, you’ll be able to use Wayland), replace or remove the top panel, as well as the ability to adjust the opacity of the Unity Dash and Launcher.

• A small update rolling out to the Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS distro could make a big impact on system performance.

• Pop!_OS now enables zram support by default — and to quote Sytem76 themselves the feature “actively compresses memory in the background, increasing the amount of free memory your system has available. This results in increased FPS in games, or faster simulations and compiler runs.”

• Pretty nice, eh?

• Instead of moving infrequently used data to a separate swap partition on disk (which is slow), zram compresses data, and keeps it in RAM (which is faster). On systems with lower amounts of RAM available zram allows more available memory to be used for runnings apps and games.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Raspberry Pi is one of the most pocket-friendly single-board computers out there.

• You can get the tiniest Raspberry Pi Zero for $5 or purchase the Raspberry Pi 4 (with 1 GB RAM or more) starting at $35.

• However, that is not the end of it. You will need certain accessories to make it functional for a project you want to use it with.

• Arduino has launched the MKR IoT Carrier Rev2 board for Arduino MKR boards with a Bosch SensorTech BME688 4-in-1 pressure, humidity, temperature, and gas sensor replacing the HTS221 humidity sensor and LP22HB barometric pressure sensor, and the LSM6DSOX taking the place of the LSM6DS3, among other some other small changes.

• First sold as part of the Arduino Oplà IoT Kit, the Arduino MKR IoT Carrier eventually became available on its own in February 2021 offering a display, sensors, and I/Os for Arduino MKR boards with wireless connectivity. The company has now introduced a second revision for the Arduino MKR IoT Carrier with new sensors and repositioning of some of the components following customer feedback.

• Espressif Systems has finally launched the ESP32-C6 WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.0 LE, and 802.15.4 IoT microcontroller by making the ESP32-C6-WROOM-1 module available on Aliexpress for $14.25 as well as the ESP32-C6-DevKitC-1 development board that’s out of stock on the official store at the time of writing. but somehow listed in another store for $16.22 plus shipping.

• Besides the availability announcement, another surprise is the 802.15.4 radio for Zigbee and Thread that was not part of the original ESP32-C6 announcement in April 2021. The ESP32-C6-DevKitC-1 development board comes with a module with 8MB flash, exposes most of the I/O’s from the ESP32-C3, and comes with two USB-C ports, two buttons, and an RGB LED.

• After finishing his recent Binbot 9000, James Bruton noticed a serious problem: the robot can’t climb stairs. That is an issue when his home does, in fact, contain stairs. Bruton has plans to build a beverage delivery robot and didn’t want to make the same mistake again. So to test the concept, he developed this prototype stair-climbing robot.

• This robot climbs stairs using an interesting series of mechanisms. It has three wheeled sections, and the first and third sections can lift up relative to the middle section. The front two sections have differential drive motors, while the rear section only has freewheeling omniwheels. A sliding lead weight on top helps the robot shift its center of gravity, so it can balance on whichever wheels it needs to at any given time. Finally, the rear section slides forward and backward on rails, so the robot can move forward as it moves up each step.

• This Adafruit OV5640 Camera Breakout with 120 Degree Lens has a nice quality OV5640 camera with a 5 Megapixel sensor element, 120-degree wide angle lens, and all the support circuitry you need.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• LibrePhotos is a free web-based self-hosted photo manager app that enables you to organize your photos, upload raw images, backup them, and share them with your friends, publicly or with LibrePhotos users.

• It also uses a face detection and face classification libraries that auto-discover portrait images and faces. If the photo contains a geolocation, LibrePhoto can easily extract the location and perform a reverse geocoding using the Mapbox library that allows your first 50.000 geocode for free every month.

Events/FSF

• Thursday, January 12, 2023 — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced Erin Rose Glass as its first keynote speaker for LibrePlanet 2023, the fifteenth edition of the Free Software Foundation’s conference on ethical technology and user freedom. The annual technology and social justice conference will be held March 18 and 19, 2023, online and in the Boston area, with the theme “Charting the Course.”

• Erin Rose Glass is a researcher and educator who encourages the use of ethical technology that puts user freedom and community values front and center. Glass believes that students should have the opportunity to learn with free software. Otherwise, they “leave the classroom having missed the opportunity to know and experience ethical forms of software practice, leaving them ill prepared to face our current technological political challenges,” she states.

• Join the FSF and friends on Friday, January 13, from 12:00 to 15:00 EST (17:00 to 20:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

• Our goal in bringing Rust into Chromium is to provide a simpler (no IPC) and safer (less complex C++ overall, no memory safety bugs in a sandbox either) way to satisfy the rule of two, in order to speed up development (less code to write, less design docs, less security review) and improve the security (increasing the number of lines of code without memory safety bugs, decreasing the bug density of code) of Chrome. And we believe that we can use third-party Rust libraries to work toward this goal.

• Rust was developed by Mozilla specifically for use in writing a browser, so it’s very fitting that Chromium would finally begin to rely on this technology too. Thank you Mozilla for your huge contribution to the systems software industry. Rust has been an incredible proof that we should be able to expect a language to provide safety while also being performant.

• The Chrome team is excited to announce the promotion of Chrome 110 to the Beta channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. Chrome 110.0.5481.30 contains our usual under-the-hood performance and stability tweaks, but there are also some cool new features to explore – please head to the Chromium blog to learn more!

• Hi everyone! We’ve just released Chrome Beta 110 (110.0.5481.29) for Android. It’s now available on Google Play.

• You can see a partial list of the changes in the Git log. For details on new features, check out the Chromium blog, and for details on web platform updates, check here.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Coming one month and three weeks after LibreOffice 7.4.3, the LibreOffice 7.4.4 point release brings even more bug fixes to make the LibreOffice 7.4 office suite series more stable and reliable for everyday use in offices or at home.

• LibreOffice 7.4.4 includes a total of 114 fixes for bugs or other issues, which should improve document interoperability, as well as the core components of the LibreOffice office suite.

• LibreOffice 7.4.4 Community, the fourth maintenance release of LibreOffice 7.4, the volunteer-supported office suite for personal productivity on the desktop, is immediately available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows (Intel and Arm processors), macOS (Apple M1 and Intel processors), and Linux.

Programming/Development

• I have been updating the text layout roadmap for librsvg, and part of this involves describing how some of the current code works — for example, how a <text> element gets broken up into a tree of Chunk and Span structures.

• Notice how those links go to the generated documentation for the library’s internals. In the HTML, rustdoc adds “source” links that in turn take you to the actual source code for that item.

• Aside: Chunk has documentation, but Span doesn’t; I haven’t gotten around to writing it yet. Linking to the documentation for the library’s internals helps me see what things are undocumented yet. Maybe a struct Point { x: f64, y: f64 } doesn’t need much documetation, but something more complicated like Span definitely does!

Perl / Raku

Python

• A Python list is an ordered and changeable collection of data objects. Unlike an array, which can contain objects of a single type, a list can contain a mixture of different types. A list in Python is used to store the sequence of various types of data. A list can be defined as a collection of values or items of different types. Python has a great built-in list type named “list”.

Rust

• Let’s investigate how to generate random numbers without external dependencies in Rust.

Standards/Consortia

• There are many approaches to creating realistic-looking materials for 3D objects. However, not all of them are suitable for transmission over the Web, and many have a prohibitively steep learning curve. Physically Based Rendering (PBR) has emerged as an artist-friendly, intuitive, expressive, and robust technique for adding materials to 3D objects.

• The Khronos 3D Formats Working Group has embraced this approach, and over the past few years, they have created formal glTF extensions for a variety of PBR materials. glTF’s growing set of PBR material extensions allow artists to create strikingly realistic 3D objects – suitable for cross-platform applications including browsers, mobile devices, native applications and more – that will perform consistently across a wide range of viewers and devices

• The latest HTTP version is called HTTP/3 and is being transferred over QUIC instead of the old classic TCP+TLS duo.

Leftovers

• Plus what makes things worse, that Youtube through it’s policy of placing LiveStreams “OnTop” of all other videos, actively promotes this “Not So Happy New Year” Bitcoin scam.

Hardware

• Kontron D3724-R mSTX is an upcoming industrial Mini-STX motherboard powered by an AMD Ryzen Embedded R2000 Series SoC and designed for applications with high graphical requirements such as casino gaming, medical displays, thin clients, and compact industrial PCs.

• The motherboard supports up to 32GB RAM, SATA & NVMe storage, and is equipped with up to three DisplayPort outputs, one HDMI port, as well as eDP and dual-channel LVDS interfaces to support up to four independent 4K displays.

• Canalys’ PC market analysis for Q4 2022 and the full 2022 is out and there are two ways to look at the numbers. While 2021 was a great year for the PC market, fuelled by the pandemic, 2022 saw the enthusiasm cool down. Overall, PC shipments are down 16% year-on-year, but when compared to 2019 (pre-pandemic), they are actually 7% up.

• Notebooks took the biggest hit with 30% fewer sales in Q4 2022 while for the full 2022, the decline is 19%. Desktops fared slightly better with a 24% decline in Q4 2022 and a 7% decline year-over-year.

• When Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing speaks, the datacenter sector of the IT industry listens because, with few exceptions, this foundry etches the compute, networking, and storage engines that power the datacenter. And the rest of the entire IT industry also listens, particularly the smartphone industry and a good portion of the PC industry (the part not controlled by Intel), because TSMC is also for the most part their foundry.

• So TSMC is perhaps the best indicator of how the semiconductor industry is doing, and what it will be doing based on the capital expense and revenue guidance that TSMC gives.

• In the fourth quarter ended in December, TSMC’s revenues rose by 26.7 percent to $19.93 billion, and the company brought an incredible 47.3 percent of revenue – that is $9.43 billion – down to the bottom line. If this were any other business, we would be telling you that within a few years, TSMC would have competition crawling all over it with such high profits.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• Essentially, everyone in the country is at risk for infection now,

• even if they’re super careful,

• up to date on vaccines,

• or have caught it before

• The number of severe infections and deaths remains relatively low,

• despite the high level of infections,

Proprietary

• Juniper Networks has released security updates to address vulnerabilities affecting multiple products. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.

• Last year, I spent a lot of time researching the security of applications built on top of XMPP, an instant messaging protocol based on XML. More specifically, my research focused on how subtle quirks in XML parsing can be used to undermine the security of such applications. (If you are interested in learning more about that research, I did a talk on it at Black Hat USA 2022. The slides and the recording can be found here and here).

• At some point, when a part of my research was published, people pointed out other examples (unrelated to XMPP) where quirks in XML parsing led to security vulnerabilities. One of those examples was a vulnerability dubbed Psychic Paper, a really neat vulnerability in the way Apple operating system checks what entitlements an application has.

Linux Foundation

• It’s that time of year again! Time to look back on the success and challenges of the past year, both of which we saw much of in 2022. Another year of a global pandemic, an uncertain economy, and more colorful geopolitical issues. But also stronger open source communities, more innovation, and integration across verticals as the industry marches toward digital innovation. That said, read below for my predictions as we head into 2023 and a look back at where we netted out on 2022 predictions.

• [..]

• With further technology export and import bans and increased geo-specific regulation (e.g. EU), Open Source will remain the neutral platform where innovation happens. OSS development will continue to comply with the changing legislation, allowing country-specific requirements (security, data, federation, compliance, etc.) and be upstreamed into Open Source Networking and connectivity projects.

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (emacs, libxstream-java, and netty), Fedora (mingw-binutils, pgadmin4, phoronix-test-suite, vim, and yarnpkg), Red Hat (.NET 6.0, dbus, expat, java-1.8.0-ibm, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, libreoffice, libtasn1, libtiff, postgresql:10, sqlite, systemd, usbguard, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel), and SUSE (net-snmp, openstack-barbican, openstack-barbican, openstack-heat-gbp, openstack-horizon-plugin-gbp-ui, openstack-neutron, openstack-neutron-gbp, php7, php74, php8, python-future, python3, samba, SDL2, and w3m).

• Malicious actors are actively attempting to exploit a recently patched critical vulnerability in Control Web Panel (CWP) that enables elevated privileges and unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) on susceptible servers.

• Tracked as CVE-2022-44877 (CVSS score: 9.8), the bug impacts all versions of the software before 0.9.8.1147 and was patched by its maintainers on October 25, 2022.

• Drupal has released a security update to address a vulnerability affecting private vocabulary modules for Drupal 8.x. An unauthorized user could exploit this vulnerability to bypass access permissions to create, modify, and delete private vocabulary terms.

• CISA released twelve Industrial Control Systems (ICS) advisories on January 12, 2023. These advisories provide timely information about current security issues, vulnerabilities, and exploits surrounding ICS.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A few months ago, the Linux Foundation (LF) announced its intent to launch the Open Wallet Foundation (OWF) in early 2023. The OWF aims to develop open source software, key building blocks, and best practices that anyone can use to build multi-platform, interoperable, secure, and privacy-protecting digital wallets that will support a wide variety of applications from identity credential to payments.

• I’ve been really intrigued by digital wallets, a fairly complex and poorly understood subject. To learn more, I read “The Current and Future State of Digital Wallets,” a comprehensive report on digital wallets published in April of 2019 by technologist and entrepreneur Darrell O’Donnell. The report was sponsored by a consortium of Canadian companies that recognized that digital wallets were a major requirement to be able to properly manage our digital identities, — arguably the toughest challenge in the continuing evolution of the internet and the digital economy.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• I couldn’t agree more – what we see is a deep embarrassment. No one needs to starve or be homeless. But I have a small bone to pick.

• [...]

• Capitalism – as distinguished by its suffix -ISM, is a system in which CAPITAL is given preference to everything else. Right there it’s a hint that it is not ‘free market’ anything. Money talks.

• Consider socialism – a system in which the well-being of individuals is given preference. I am not talking about fake socialism – like USSR. Even the so-called socialism in some of the more enlightened European countries – that is just a band-aid on top of highly capitalistic economic system.

• But even in a socialist-leaning country you are likely to get some kind basic social needs covered – be it medical, housing or financial if you are in trouble. In a capitalist country you are likely to get squat, while a large corporation that basically warehouses people will get billions from the government.

• I had someone recommend me the band Spiritbox recently and I’ve been listening to them almost nonstop all week.

• I’ve only been exploring metal and some of its subgenres since early last year and I’m still a little picky about which bands I’ll get into. Some bands end up sounding like mush to me for a couple reasons. Sometimes it’s untiring double kick drums, sometimes it’s not enough variation, sometimes it’s just muddy mixing.

• Of all the substances which can exist in the universe, which ones are found on Earth, and which ones aren’t?

• Of those which are, which ones are abundant and which are rare? Which ones participate in biogeochemical cycles and which ones don’t?

• Of those which are abundant and are of practical use to human civilisation, which ones are just lying around on the ground free for the taking and which ones are deeply embedded in ecosystems which we cannot help but seriously damage by extracting and using them, no matter how gently we do it?

• [...]

• The answers to these questions, and others like them, are of existential importance to human civilisation. From the answers to these questions follow, inescapably, the answers to questions of the form “for how many years can a population of X humans with an average lifespan of Y and a per-person material/energy/land footprint of Z sustain itself before hitting some kind of limit?”.

• Note that these questions of existential importance are not political questions! The answers to all of them are exactly the same under capitalism as they are under socialism or anarchism or your favourite trendy -ism that I haven’t heard of yet. The answers to these questions were fixed – in some cases literally set in stone – before any humans were around to believe in -isms.

• Recently, work has felt fairly meh and sloggy. I had a few months of

• fairly mundane, day dragging, irritating busy work while waiting for

• big decisions to be made. The past few days has been spent doing

• quarterly planning and it looked like another 3 months of meh and

• sloggy waiting around work. Then I got a call.. I am moving on to

• another programme and it is a great one which seems reasonably well

• resourced. The change in mood and what not is crazy. I have been

• looking forward to being in the office again.

Politics

• “OK, people, it’s getting to be a lot of responsibility to distribute resources and tasks fairly and efficiently. Not sure any one person can do it. We all remember when Grunk was in charge of that mysteriously decreasing cookie jar.”

• “Maybe what we need isn’t a person, but an automatic system, like a protocol or a set of game rules.”

• “How about I do it? Market capitalism is my name. I use an invisible hand of supply and demand to set prices.”

• “OK, impressive! You’re hired.”

Technical

• Cryptoboosters like to refer to this sort of data as proof that Bitcoin (and its underlying proof-of-work algorithm) isn’t actually an outrageous energy-guzzling carbon-emitting monster. (Although such people are a bit quieter nowadays, perhaps due to the ongoing crypto collapse[b].)

Programming

• In theory the above test implies that the #!/bin/sh line is optional in a shell script. In practice this is an inadequate test; the shell that is running the script adds complexity.

• 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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