● 04.23.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 23/04/2023: SolusOS/SerpentOS Shakeup

Posted in News Roundup at 12:26 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• **step** , **svgpart** , **sweeper** , **syndication** , **syntax-

• highlighting** , **systemsettings** , **threadweaver** , **umbrello** ,

• **wacomtablet** , **xdg-desktop-portal-kde** , **yakuake** , and **zeroconf-

• ioslave** from the **kde** software series of Slackware.

• shasum -a256=fffef0dff4116ee725c0412a213e81db805ae4ac303613617a1e176dc9219f8e

Applications

• Hiding messages is not new. Before the digital age, messages were hidden with invisible ink, subtle indentations in paper, messages written in Morse code that are knitted into an item of clothing, and even tattooing messages under the hair of messengers.

• Ideally, the original message is not noticeably degraded by presence of a hidden message. As a result, the most effective techniques tend to make use of data that contains a lot of redundancy, such as raw audio and image files. Steganography works much less effectively, if at all, with efficient compressed formats such as JPEG.

• We recommend the following steganography tools captured in a LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. All the software is free and open source goodness.

• OpenShot Video Editor is a free, open-source video editor licensed under the GPL version 3.0. OpenShot can take your videos, photos, and music files and help you create the film you have always dreamed of. Easily add sub-titles, transitions, and effects, and then export your film to DVD, YouTube, Vimeo, Xbox 360, and many other common formats. What really sets OpenShot apart from other video editors is the easy-to-use user interface.

• OpenShot has many great features, such as trimming and arranging videos, adjusting audio levels, transitions between videos, compositing multiple layers of video, chroma-key / green screen effect, and support of most formats and codecs.

• Over the last couple of days, posted about new EasyApps and EasySetup:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202304/new-easysetup.html

• These have replaced Roger’s PupApps and PupControl.

• Now it is the turn of JWMDesk, Roger’s superb JWM window manager. Which I have kept, instead just cut it down to be only a JWM manager. JWMDesk does a whole lot more than just configure JWM, whereas I want each tool to have one purpose only.

Instructionals/Technical

• Since I returned to the office in 2022 after the remote work mandate was lifted, I have been using portable Linux desktops that I made.

• These are convenient USB drives with persistence that I boot and so I can circumvent the restrictions (not to mention the spying) in the Windows desktop.

• Apache is one of the most reliable web server software powering millions of hosting servers to run various types of websites. Apache2 is the second version of the Apache HTTP server and is available for all the major operating systems such – as Windows, macOS, and Linux. One of the reasons, why the Apache web server is still active and used by millions of people around the globe for a very long time is its support for various programming languages such as PHP, Perl, and Python; and its capability to serve static and dynamic web pages.

• Apache2 is also highly configurable, therefore developers can use it to customize the server’s behavior and performance to meet their specific needs.

• Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is a popular computing service that allows users to create a virtual machine using various available Linux and applications Images. It is provided by Amazon Cloud with a complete infrastructure to host commercial applications on Linux virtual machines. In short, it is a Cloud service to create virtual servers.

• The interface of AWS is easy to manage that’s why even a new user with some technical knowledge can easily create an EC2 instance and configure it with prefer an operating system, hardware configuration, and required software packages. Depending upon the needs users can launch, terminate, and manage instances and even can scale up or down as demand changes.

• Users will charge on an hourly basis for an Ec2 Instance which further depends upon the instance type, usage duration, and data transfer. To cater to different kinds of users’ requirements Amazon Cloud offers a variety of instance types each optimized for different types of workloads and hardware configurations, such as compute-intensive or memory-intensive applications.

• An old joke is that Emacs is a text editor with an operating system included, given that its extensibility and customization often goes far beyond traditional text editors. Part of its well-earned reputation comes from being built in Lisp which allows it to be expanded to do almost anything. Despite this in-joke in the community, though, you will still need an actual operating system to run it, but not much more than that.

• This project uses User-Mode Linux (UML) as a foundation to load almost nothing other than an Emacs editor. UML is a virtualization technology that allows running multiple Linux kernel instances as separate virtual machines, so once the Linux environment is started and Emacs is compiled, the virtual machine can essentially boot straight into an Emacs environment. Some tools are needed outside of the Linux kernel like mount which allows the virtual file system to access the files needed to build Emacs, but as far as lightweight or minimalist Linux distributions go this one definitely gets at least an honorable mention.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• When I first looked at blendOS, the distro promised a blend of Arch Linux, Fedora Linux, and Ubuntu, but now blendOS 2 is already here and it promises more than that, such as out-of-the-box support for Android apps.

• The Android app support implementation inside blendOS 2 is possible thanks to the WayDroid project, an open-source container-based solution for running the full Android operating system inside your Linux box.

• Weight-loss drug Mounjaro is all the rage these days, helping people to shed pounds. Please don’t confuse this medication with the similarly named “Manjaro” Linux-based operating system. While Mounjaro helps you lose weight, Manjaro can help you lose Windows!

• Today, Manjaro Linux 22.1 is released. Code-named “Talos,” it is chock-full of new features. Once again, this version of the distribution can be had with your choice of three desktop environments — GNOME, KDE Plasma, and Xfce.

• One of the highlights of Talos is the GNOME edition, which boasts several updates to the GNOME 43 series. This includes fixes and polish that were missing when GNOME 43 was initially released in September 2022. Users can find detailed changes made to each point-release on the Manjaro website.

• The redesigned system status menu is one of the most noticeable changes in GNOME 43. This feature allows users to quickly change commonly used settings without having to dig through menus. Users can now see the status of their settings at a glance, thanks to the new design.

New Releases

• Solus is a fully-fledged, independent rolling release Linux distribution targeted at desktop users. It is unique because it is written from scratch and has its repositories and package manager, EOPKG. In addition, the distro is traditionally associated with Budgie as its flagship desktop environment.

• While receiving less attention than other leading desktop-oriented Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, and others, Solus has a devoted fan base concerned about what has been happening to their favorite distro in the last month. Here’s what it is all about.

• Every Linux distro goes through at lest one big change at some point in its life span. However, there is one distro that seems to keep encountering major turmoil and changes on a regular basis. Let’s look at the latest news coming from Solus.

• There are approximately six billion Linux distros (or so it seems). Most of them are reskins of Ubuntu or Arch, with at least one new feature added or highlighted. I can count on one hand the number of distros that are actually built from scratch. Solus is one of them.

• According to Solus’ website, “Solus is built from scratch to ensure every tweak, configuration, and optimization enables the delivery of a singular, cohesive desktop experience.” All the important system tools, from the build tools to the package manager, have been built from scratch. They even created their own desktop environment named Budgie. (Budgie had since been spun off to be an independent project.)

Devices/Embedded

• The Turing RK1 is a computer module powered by the Octa-core Rockchip RK3588 System-on-Chip. The RK1 will be available with up to 32GB RAM, 16GB eMMC storage and various other interfaces.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

GNU Projects

• GNU Parallel 20230422 (‘Grand Jury’) has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

• Quote of the month:

• parallel might be one of the best utilities out there

• – @ThePrimeagen@twitter ThePrimeagen

• New in this release:

• –jobs evaluates expression: +3*log(55)% = ncpu*1.12

• Bug fixes and man page updates.

• News about GNU Parallel:

• Running shell script in parallel https://w3toppers.com/running-shell-script-in-parallel/

• Simulating climate risk scenarios for the Amazon Rainforest https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/hpc/simulating-climate-risk-scenarios-for-the-amazon-rainforest/

• How To Use Your Entire CPU In Bash With Parallel https://bash-prompt.net/guides/parallell-bash/

• Bash – parallel command execution https://medium.com/linuxstories/bash-parallel-command-execution-d4bd7c7cc1d6

• 3 tips for faster batch post-pro https://www.cfdengine.com/newsletter/142/

• GNU Parallel – For people who live life in the parallel lane.

• If you like GNU Parallel record a video testimonial: Say who you are, what you use GNU Parallel for, how it helps you, and what you like most about it. Include a command that uses GNU Parallel if you feel like it.

• About GNU Parallel

• GNU Parallel is a shell tool for executing jobs in parallel using one or more computers. A job can be a single command or a small script that has to be run for each of the lines in the input. The typical input is a list of files, a list of hosts, a list of users, a list of URLs, or a list of tables. A job can also be a command that reads from a pipe. GNU Parallel can then split the input and pipe it into commands in parallel.

• If you use xargs and tee today you will find GNU Parallel very easy to use as GNU Parallel is written to have the same options as xargs. If you write loops in shell, you will find GNU Parallel may be able to replace most of the loops and make them run faster by running several jobs in parallel. GNU Parallel can even replace nested loops.

• GNU Parallel makes sure output from the commands is the same output as you would get had you run the commands sequentially. This makes it possible to use output from GNU Parallel as input for other programs.

• For example you can run this to convert all jpeg files into png and gif files and have a progress bar:

• parallel –bar convert {1} {1.}.{2} ::: *.jpg ::: png gif

• Or you can generate big, medium, and small thumbnails of all jpeg files in sub dirs:

• find . -name ‘*.jpg’ |

• parallel convert -geometry {2} {1} {1//}/thumb{2}_{1/} :::: – ::: 50 100 200

• You can find more about GNU Parallel at: http://www.gnu.org/s/parallel/

• You can install GNU Parallel in just 10 seconds with:

• $ (wget -O – pi.dk/3 || lynx -source pi.dk/3 || curl pi.dk/3/ || \

• fetch -o – http://pi.dk/3 ) > install.sh

• $ sha1sum install.sh | grep 883c667e01eed62f975ad28b6d50e22a

• 12345678 883c667e 01eed62f 975ad28b 6d50e22a

• $ md5sum install.sh | grep cc21b4c943fd03e93ae1ae49e28573c0

• cc21b4c9 43fd03e9 3ae1ae49 e28573c0

• $ sha512sum install.sh | grep ec113b49a54e705f86d51e784ebced224fdff3f52

• 79945d9d 250b42a4 2067bb00 99da012e c113b49a 54e705f8 6d51e784 ebced224

• fdff3f52 ca588d64 e75f6033 61bd543f d631f592 2f87ceb2 ab034149 6df84a35

• $ bash install.sh

• Watch the intro video on http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL284C9FF2488BC6D1

• Walk through the tutorial (man parallel_tutorial). Your command line will love you for it.

• When using programs that use GNU Parallel to process data for publication please cite:

• O. Tange (2018): GNU Parallel 2018, March 2018, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1146014.

• If you like GNU Parallel:

• Give a demo at your local user group/team/colleagues

• Post the intro videos on Reddit/Diaspora*/forums/blogs/ Identi.ca/Google+/Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin/mailing lists

• Get the merchandise https://gnuparallel.threadless.com/designs/gnu-parallelRequest or write a review for your favourite blog or magazine

• Request or build a package for your favourite distribution (if it is not already there)

• Invite me for your next conference

• If you use programs that use GNU Parallel for research:

• Please cite GNU Parallel in you publications (use –citation)

• If GNU Parallel saves you money:

• (Have your company) donate to FSF https://my.fsf.org/donate/About GNU SQL

• GNU sql aims to give a simple, unified interface for accessing databases through all the different databases’ command line clients. So far the focus has been on giving a common way to specify login information (protocol, username, password, hostname, and port number), size (database and table size), and running queries.

• The database is addressed using a DBURL. If commands are left out you will get that database’s interactive shell.

• When using GNU SQL for a publication please cite:

• O. Tange (2011): GNU SQL – A Command Line Tool for Accessing Different Databases Using DBURLs, ;login: The USENIX Magazine, April 2011:29-32.

• About GNU Niceload

• GNU niceload slows down a program when the computer load average (or other system activity) is above a certain limit. When the limit is reached the program will be suspended for some time. If the limit is a soft limit the program will be allowed to run for short amounts of time before being suspended again. If the limit is a hard limit the program will only be allowed to run when the system is below the limit.

Programming/Development

Perl / Raku

Leftovers

Science

Education

Proprietary

Linux Foundation

Security

• MedMinder has not issued any press release or public notification concerning the incident and did not reply to this site’s inquiry of March 11. In a statement to TechCrunch last month, the prescription delivery and management service indicated it was “aware of the allegations” but declined to comment further while the company was investigating. DataBreaches sent Medminder a second inquiry on April 18, but still received no reply.

• Clop claims to have Medminder files that they describe as “Technical documentation. PDF, png files, xlsx databases. Data files in “godrive” goanywhere`s folder.”

Privacy/Surveillance

Defence/Aggression

Environment

Energy/Transportation

Wildlife/Nature

Overpopulation

Finance

• So, mom finally did set up online access to her retirement account and let me see the disaster her employer made for her.

• The news is hyping Apple Savings accounts, which are just Goldman Sachs, which runs Marcus. So the accounts are similar to Marcus and Goldman had to explain to investors that they don’t think there will be serious “cannibalization” of existing clients.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

Censorship/Free Speech

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

Twitter

Monopolies

Patents

YouTube

Copyrights

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• Strange. I have been miserable for months. Badly at the start of 2023. Still 1/3 of that.

• Oddly, I get a perception that my neighbors are equally as miserable.

• No reason for them to NOT be. They’re loners/no one’s, like me, and I am scurrying down to Farmington Missouri in June, bless, so I won’t have this disposition. Rehab (alcohol) ma happen in that time, too. Overdue.

• Good tea (jin jun mei, milk silk oolong). A beautiful cow paces your bike down a country lane. Give a child structure & space to be a child; catch the child using it well. Unexpect- ed glimpse of stunning sky, bright moon, mist tower above Kentucky River. Nap during demand- ing day. Mailed letter arrives. Surprised laugh at quick wit, apt retort. Stop to reflect after doing something hard, especially with people.

• I spent a couple of hours today with a small woodsaw and my powerdrill to finally make a Soroban that I had planned to build for a while now. It consists of simple soft wood for the frame, wooden beads and brass rods for the beads to slide on.

• For those curious: The brass rods are 2mm thick and 12mm apart. The beads are 10mm diameter with a 3mm hole. The wood for the top and bottom beams are 10x15mm, the middle beam is 10x2mm.

Technical

Internet/Gemini

• I updated my Gopherhole a bit. I added a new article to my /Gopher Novice/ series. It’s about zines because I had thought that there were absent on the 90′s Gophersphere. And it was wrong. As I’ve seen on [Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists, Tom 4] there was a significant increase in publications of that type. And many of them were published on Gophersphere then.

• 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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