● 05.01.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 01/05/2023: Peropesis 2.1 and EasyOS 5.2.3

Posted in News Roundup at 2:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• The purchase not only gives IBM a managed SaaS and AWS marketplace version of the popular open-source Presto database, but membership in the Presto Foundation as well.

• It was one of the big surprises of the recent KubeCON show in Amsterdam – dedicated to all things Kubernetes – when customers that asked about NetBackup’s container backup capabilities were told they should deploy Veritas’s InfoScale software-defined storage for Kubernetes instead.

• Directly competing with Pure Storage’s Portworx, InfoScale offers block storage for applications that run in containers.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Two listeners race to set up a web server on Suicide Linux. One slip-up and it’s all gone. Who will survive?

• Musing about the state of podcasting in 2023.

• shasum -a256=d0c172ecf981c672b13f7dc3dede0b8fc5a9146e722dddafc4fb394706d8f9e2

• This is episode 032 of the TIC TEK TOE podcast, featuring Marcel Gagné and Evan Leibovitch. Today, the boys are talking about why the whole FOSS world has become so boring, and why there may be a solution to that boredom and a renewal of that old open-source excitement courtesy of AI.

Instructionals/Technical

• While many Linux administrators work primarily with the command line interface, not every Linux admin is so confident with commands. Sysadmins with a Windows background or technicians that manage IoT devices may be more comfortable with a GUI such as Cockpit.

• Cockpit provides a graphical view of virtually all the monitoring tools admins might need and supports services such as virtualization and containerization. To install Cockpit, there are many installation options and multi-server use cases, including key-based authentication. Red Hat sponsors Cockpit, but it readily supports non-Red Hat-based distributions.

• Want to mirror your Android screen to a PC, Mac, or Linux? Here’s a free and easy way to share your Android’s screen on your computer.

• So back in the day I was trying to bridge two layer-2 networks over a wireless relay and I was using a TP-Link Archer C7V5 for the two routers. I initially tried out relayd however I found that it wasn’t doing a good job at managing the ARP/route table entries as they were getting out of sync and not being updated and refreshed properly. I tried modding the framework but eventually gave up and wrote my own solution in C because these router units had very limited RAM and CPU available. The original framework was called ARP-Relay-Bridge (arprb) and it did a lot of work to manage the ARP table, PING the clients, listen for ARP Requests, send Proxied Replies, manage the routing table

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Here’s my KDE contributions for this month! It’s a little bit shorter than I’d like, but I’m still trying to find a nice balance between $work and KDE.

• I put up MRs for a bunch of small fixes related to the QML module: [...]

• Let’s take a look at the current state of the KDE e.V. published applications in the Microsoft Store.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Typically, I don’t because the sort of comments those posts get puts me off.

• Some folks assume that if I blog about something I’m somehow trying to suggest it’s “the best” for a given task. That is rarely the case; I simply like to showcase choice, make people aware of alternatives, surface different ways of doing things, and so on.

• But today I thought: ahh, whatever — I’m gonna go for it.

• App Hider is a GNOME Shell extension that lets you hide any app shortcut that appears in the Applications grid by right-clicking on it, and selecting “Hide”

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Easy 5.2.2 was released on April 15, see announcement:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202304/easyos-kirkstone-series-version-522-released.html

• The biggest news item for 5.2.3 is the rationalization of the “apps” and “setup” desktop icons. They launch simple and more specific-purpose GUIs. This is what they look like on the desktop:

• [...]

• Also, EasyJWM is a simplification of JWMDesk, see blog post:

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

• To read about other changes in 5.2.3, see the release notes:

• http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/kirkstone/2023/5.2.3/release-notes.htm

• Download link:

• http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/kirkstone/2023/5.2.3/

• EasyOS 5.2.3 was announced yesterday:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202304/easyos-kirkstone-series-version-523-released.html

• Last night I tested updating from 5.2.2, and all went well, or seemed to. However, booted up this morning and found the “apps” and “setup” icons weren’t launching EasyApps and EasySetup respectively.

• Hmm, ok, right-click on “apps” icon, choose “Edit item” and change “/usr/bin/pupapps” to “/usr/sbin/easyapps”. Do the same for the “setup” icon, change the run action to “/usr/sbin/easysetup”.

• That fixes it, except now the icons are wrong, due to the ‘globicons’ file not having updated. There are two ways to fix that, either edit the file directly, or right-click on “apps”, choose “File apps” then choose “Set Icon…” then drag the required icon. You will find ‘apps48.png’ at /usr/local/lib/X11/pixmaps

• Do the same for “setup”, drag icon ‘configuration48.png’ also located at /usr/local/lib/X11/pixmaps

• Sorry about that. Choose to save at shutdown, and next bootup should be ok.

Reviews

• Microsoft’s decision to make millions of computers obsolete with Windows 11 left those with Windows 10 boxes in a quandary: what to do with a machine that otherwise worked?

• Install Xubuntu, of course.

• In this case, the latest release, Xubuntu 23.04 – code named Lunar Lobster. And it did all I hoped it would do – revive an ancient computer, a Dell Optiplex desktop (with an Intel Core 2 processor, no less) that I bought used a decade ago to play Windows games on.

• Lunar Lobster runs more quickly and with less lag than the machine did under Windows 10. Booting is still slow (about 70 seconds), but the Snap version of the Firefox browser works more or less efficiently. And, and even at its worst, Firefox is much better on Lunar Lobster than it was under Windows 10. That was so tedious that I sometimes went to the kitchen to get coffee while it was loading.

• Most of the annoyances, in fact, had little to do with Xubuntu. The machine doesn’t have wireless, so I had to scrounge a drawer to find a wi-fi dongle that was old enough to be compatible. Plus, the numlock key doesn’t turn off after booting, which is apparently a common problem with hardware this old.

• Otherwise, it’s perfectly fine, and I would have no problems running it as my daily driver.

New Releases

• We’re excited to announce the new stable release of blendOS v2 codenamed “Avial”, with a range of exciting new features!

• Check out our video for a quick overview of all the new features: https://youtu.be/_OpKeqTtY1s.

• Download: https://github.com/blend-os/blendOS/releases/tag/23.04

• Discord: https://discord.gg/m9JPmZB8Kd

• Release notes Major changes In addition to the apps available in containers, it’s now possible to install apps straight from the system Arch repos and the Chaotic-AUR repository, on the base itself. This is extremely useful if you want to install a third-party VPN app, for example, or some missing drivers.

• Peropesis 2.1 Linux OS is released. In the new edition part of the old software was updated and several new packages was installed. Most newly installed packages consist of tools assigned to the GNU Autotools category and additional equipment needed to keep these tools running smoothly.

• The Nitrux team has announced the release of Nitrux 2.8.0, the latest version of their Debian-based distribution. This new version brings several updates and improvements, making it an exciting release for users. One of the highlights of this release is the promise to become “tablet-friendly.”

• Here’s is what’s new.

Fedora Family / IBM

• IBM, Red Hat’s parent company, reported stellar gross profit margins in the first quarter of 2023. As for Red Hat, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said he’s “expecting 11% to 13% [growth] for the year.” That sounds like good news to me! But, the stock market still seems to think that IBM is a growth stock while it’s really been a value stock even after its Red Hat acquisition. Combine that with the current CEO fad of laying off employees for fear of recession, and it comes as no surprise that Red Hat told its staffers that it would reduce its associate base by just under 4% over the next few months.

• This is the first time Red Hat has ever had significant layoffs. The reductions will primarily affect general and administrative roles across all functions, while roles focused on selling to customers and building products will remain intact. However, some Red Hat employees in customer-adjacent areas, such as the Enable Sysadmin group, which oversaw the well-regarded Open Source website, have also been laid off.

• The restructuring process will begin immediately in some countries and continue through the end of the second quarter. With Red Hat’s total staff of about 20,000, approximately 800 Red Hatters will be looking for new jobs.

Devices/Embedded

• BIGTREETECH Pi v1.2, also known as the BBT Pi v1.2, is a Raspberry Pi-sized Allwinner H616 single board computer (SBC) specially designed for 3D printers with many of the same ports as the Raspberry Pi 3/4, but also features 12V-24V DC power input and connectors for the ADXL345 3-axis accelerometer, CAN Bus, and so on.

• The board is equipped with 1GB RAM, a microSD card slot to run the operating system (Debian 11 with Klipper), a 4K capable micro HDMI port, Fast Ethernet and WiFi 4 networking, four USB ports, and the usual 40-pin Raspberry Pi header.

Open Hardware/Modding

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• To split a comma delimited string using PHP we can use the explode() function

• The explode() function breaks the string in to an array, which is then assigned to a variable. We then use a foreach loop to output the results / elements.

Java

• A simple application that prints nothing more than the words ‘Hello World’ is the seminal start to learning any programming language.

• Furthermore, the relative verbosity and expressiveness with which a given language prints these eleven Unicode characters has become a popular ‘flex’ between platform advocates.

• Python and Java developers often go toe-to-toe on the ‘Hello World’ debate, which is why a thorough comparison of how to write ‘Hello World’ in the two languages is necessary.

Rust

• You can control the flow of your program by using conditional statements. Learn to use if-else in Rust.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

Proprietary

• Several dozen employees fired in Israel as part of the company’s latest goal of 9,000 cuts

• Large layoffs are continuing in the world’s leading firms, and Israelis are on the chopping block like everybody else. Amazon’s cutbacks reached their Haifa and Tel Aviv R&D hub, with several dozen employees fired in Israel as part of the company’s latest goal of 9,000 cuts.

• Amazon started cutting back on less successful products and developments, that either never gained success or were beaten by competitors, in favor of the preferred industry of artificial intelligence (AI). Some of their first divisions axed were advertising, Twitch live streaming, and video games, but they started laying off employees in cloud computing and warehouses.

Security

• This is the second part of remastering Episode 42 which is all about the security in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie. It’s a fun show and it’s shocking how many of these security themes are still relevant today.

• DataBreaches has received a tip that TIC Hosting Solutions in Romania had a recent data breach affecting customer data. The tipster provided an .SQL database called “Galactic” as an example of data being leaked. The users table included usernames and email addresses, including one for “tichhosting.”

• [...]

• The person who contacted DataBreaches states that the intervention (as they called it) occurred on the morning of April 23. Four servers were reportedly affected and all customers’ data — approximately 4TB — and other databases and systems were reportedly taken.

• When asked, the individual would not disclose the vulnerability they claim to have exploited, writing, “I can’t disclose it until they fix it and notify customers about it and also provide them with a full statement about the situation.”

• According to this individual, TIC has not responded to the accusations about this incident. “They just said that it was a hardware issue and that they would restore the services in the following days but without the data,” the source wrote. They included a screencap from the firm’s Discord as well as screencaps of GalacTIC admin panels.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Bring your A game to improve your privacy online, whether you are a Linux user or not. Follow these tips for a secure experience!

Defence/Aggression

Environment

Energy/Transportation

Finance

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• My friends, I have a request. That request is, for all that’s Holy, stop calling things “clickbait.” It’s an old and busted term that has no place in the media landscape of 2023.

TikTok/Fentanylware/Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

Twitter

FB

Civil Rights/Policing

Monopolies

Patents

• Calculating damages for patent infringement can be a complex task, particularly when the invention is an improvement to an existing machine or product.  The Supreme Court’s 1884 decision in Garretson v. Clark, 111 U.S. 120, helped establish a rule requiring apportionment in cases involving improvement patents.

Trademarks

Copyrights

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

• When we moved house this past autumn I was adamant with every member of the family, including the two who are college age and on their own (sort of) that the garage was not going to be fair game to store their excess stuff, that we now had a basement, and if they couldn’t fit something into their own living space or the basement we didn’t need it. This was in contrast to our previous garage, which over time had become so filled with everyone’s random junk that I was using my truck’s tailgate as a makeshift workbench those times that I needed to do repairs on something or even build something from scratch. They all fought me, not openly of course, but by the time we were moved in the garage was nevertheless full from front to back. In the weeks since the weather became tolerable here I’ve managed to reclaim almost all of the space, cramming all of the Christmas and Halloween decorations back into the basement, putting up shelves and just moving things around and organizing. So now it’s time to start getting some back burner projects done.

• I have been participating in an annual work-internal project contest (we call it Pet Project contest) since I moved to London and switched jobs to my current employer. I am very happy to say that I won a “silver” prize last week here 🎆. Over the last couple of years I have been a finalist in this contest six times and won some kind of prize five times. Some of my projects were also released as open source software. One had a magazine article published, and for another one I wrote an article on my employer’s engineering blog. If you have followed all my posts on this blog (the one you are currently reading), then you have probably figured out what these projects were:

• The past week is finally over and between wrapping up final exams, graduation ceremonies, and so much more, I’m exhausted.

• Finals weren’t so bad. My most intense classes didn’t have finals and instead just had projects and presentations. My databases course and intro to data science course both had very low-key exams that were online and open note. The biggest exam I had to worry about was linear algebra which thankfully wasn’t very stressful.

• The day of graduation ceremonies was really long and took a lot out of me. It’s nice to have that behind me. I’m grateful I got to hang out with family as much as I did this week though.

• I realized this morning I’ve spent most of my life trying to find people not as doltish as the nuclear family I grew up in.

• I changed from their religion to another in late high school.

• I went to a fundamentalist university after graduating from high school. My dad wept before he and my mom went back to their car after dropping me off.

• I got around to finishing Metroid Prime Remastered. I ended up sitting on the Ridley fight (this isn’t a spoiler; if it’s a Metroid game, and Ridley shows up, there’s probably gonna be a Ridley fight) and the final-boss fight for several weekends, as one does when he has all sorts of other things competing for his time and attention on the weekend.

• I’m really not the kind of person who seems to enjoy wandering around anymore. I got super duper mega lost in Metroid II: Return of Samus, even going as so wrong as to try backtracking to previous levels down the central tunnel, but these days I’m satisfied to just follow a walkthrough for most of the game. In-game time ended up being 20 hours or so, giving me a helmet-off ending. I most emphatically did not finish scanning every single enemy, so there’s an extra-good ending that I’m going to have to look up on the Internet that was recorded by someone who’s way better, or at least persistent, at video games than I am. I beat the final boss with single-digit amounts of health left, and if I’d tried to scan it, I would’ve had to try at least once more, and possibly more than that.

• I wonder how I’ll end up playing The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. I enjoyed wandering around Hyrule in Breath of the Wild, but I don’t think the new game will be quite as freeform as the previous one and I don’t have the free time that I used to to just wander around Hyrule and do stuff.

Technical

• In my eternal quest to use OpenBSD as a platform for gaming, which it was never really intended for, I want to share the games that I have completed on OpenBSD. You could say this is meant as proof against the naysayers that look at gaming on OpenBSD with scepticism.

• Yesterday, I wrote about how I broke and repaired my weather-vane. After it got repaired, I was able to get the sensor working in software. Everything worked, but there was one thing odd about the sensor.

• To give some background, the sensor can tell the direction of the wind by triggering one of 8 magnetic reed switches each connected to a resistor. If I measure the resistance of the sensor, I can tell which direction the wind is blowing.

• Meanwhile I discovered git-shell-commands. Why didn’t I use this feature before? I implemented the basic create, list, delete repo functions using a combination of ksh and rust. Now it is simple to maintain git repos on the RPi using the git shell.

• So. I’ve just remembered that I actually set up this capsule!

• I’ve decided it’s time to share whatever workable knowledge I’ve picked up over the last 30 years of practicing (and sometimes teaching or facilitating) self-improvement, self-help, self-exploration methods.

• Please note that this is about how I intend to use the internet in the short term on a *personal* level. Professionally I have to use online products and services that I find reprehensible. Occasionally and accidentally these two worlds may collide.

• Having discovered the joys of more simplicity and less distraction I want more of this in my life and that is essentially the reason why I am doing this. I want less noise and more simplcity in my internet experience.

• In the past I did some research on what should be the _contents_ of software system documentation. It wasn’t really relevant, but I also got interested in tools to format technical documents at that time too. I recently revisited this, just to see what has changed.

• First, I’m only interested in markup languages. In particular, opaque binary formats like Word just create a lot of work for people. With a text file, particularly if you use semantic line breaking, you can branch and merge no problem. I’d recommend putting the documentation in a “doc” directory at the root of your project, then tags & releases always link the source code and relevant documentation.

• Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter. Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

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