● 05.29.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 29/05/2023: Snap and PipeWire Plans as Vendor Lock-in

Posted in News Roundup at 8:43 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

Applications

• Linux Matters I recently started presenting Linux Matters podcast with my friends Martin Wimpress and Mark Johnson.

• In episode 4 (that link will only work once the episode is released) I briefly talked about some simple bots I setup on the Ubuntu Social Mastodon instance (which, incidentally I talked about in episode 1).

• Ubuntu 23.10 is aiming to ship the CUPS printing stack as a snap package. Canonical’s Till Kamppeter, who is also the project lead for the OpenPrinting Project, says he wants to “…switch Ubuntu 23.10, the Mantic Minotaur, as planned, to use the CUPS Snap as its printing system and the Printer Application Snaps as drivers for non-IPP-driverless printers.”

• We finally reached a major milestone with Chromium 110, which was a release where we finally got screen sharing enabled by default on Wayland, and since then you no longer have to go into the preferences and enable the flag you need. That doesn’t mean my work there is over, but I’ve shifted my focus to something related but slightly different and that is PipeWire camera support.

• Improve PGP/GPG encryption support: the project aims to enhance the experimental PGP/GPG encryption support in LibreOffice by addressing several shortcomings, such as the need to select recipients anew for every save and the difficulty in finding the right keys.

Instructionals/Technical

• Snap packages are automatically updated. But you can still control the updates manually. Learn all about Snap updates here.

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS introduced fractional scaling in 2020 by introducing 100%, 125%, 150%, 175% and 200%. It is available in Settings under the Display page.

• But in the Fedora workstation with the default GNOME desktop, only 100% and 200% scaling are available.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• One of the things I’ve been recently working on at Igalia is the desktop portals implementation, the middleware layer of API for application and toolkit developers that allows both sandboxed applications to interact with the host system. Sandboxing technologies like Flatpak and Snap expose the portal D-Bus interfaces inside the sandbox they manage, to handle user-mediated interactions like opening a file that exists outside of the locations available to the sandboxed process, or talking to privileged components like the compositor to obtain a screenshot.

• Outside of allowing dynamic permissions for sandboxed applications, portals act as a vendor-neutral API for applications to target when dealing with Linux as an OS; this is mostly helpful for commercial applications that are not tied to a specific desktop environment, but don’t want to re-implement the layer of system integration from the first principles of POSIX primitives.

• Project Title: Create a New “System” panel in GNOME SettingsMentor : Felipe BorgesContributor : Gotam Gorabh

• This summer I’m working on a project titled Create a New “System” panel in GNOME Settings, which aims to create a New System panel. This blog summarizes my progress during the bonding period and the first week of the Google Summer Of Code 2023.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Easy keeps evolving and the documentation falls behind. As the “How and why EasyOS is different” page may be the first stop for those checking out Easy, I have updated it:

• https://easyos.org/about/how-and-why-easyos-is-different.html

• Tomorrow afternoon, after returning from a family engagement, plan to do a complete recompile in OpenEmbedded, updating many packages.

• After that, some sanity testing, then likely to release Easy 5.3.2. We can test that, with a view to releasing 5.3.3 that will be announced on Distrowatch. That’s the plan anyway.

Debian Family

• This year I attended Debian Reunion Hamburg (aka MiniDebConf Germany) for the second time. My goal for this MiniDebConf was just to talk to people and make the most of the time I have there. No other specific plans or goals. Despite this simple goal, it was a very productive and successful event for me.

Devices/Embedded

• The DPS310/368 Kit2Go from Infineon is a low-cost development board powered by the XMC100 industrial microcontroller. The compact embedded board can be quickly integrated into IoT and embedded applications since it supports the Arduino IDE platform.

• The Milk-V Mars is a new single board computer built on the StarFive JH7110 RISC-V processor.

• Recently, I was looking for a couple of Single Board Computers (SBCs) for a project I’m working on. Given the characteristics I was looking for, there were not many options; in the end, I opted for the ROCKPro64 by Pine64.

• Once I received the SBC, I immediately tried to put Fedora on it. The process proved slightly more complex than I was expecting since I assumed that U-Boot (or some other boot loader) was already present on the board.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• WordPress turned 20 over the weekend. Older than that, if you count the b2 codebase WordPress forked from. 20 years for a project is quite an accomplishment, but WordPress hasn’t merely survived for 20 years. The open source CMS powers a huge chunk of the Internet and has shown how commerce and community can coexist successfully for the long haul.

• It’s hard to convey how impressive WordPress was when it was launched, if you haven’t dabbled with the CMSes of the time. By the time WordPress 1.0 was released, I’d fussed with static site generators (Blosxom), phpWebLog, and even Slashcode. Standing up a CMS on shared hosting was non-trivial.

• Here was WordPress. Easy to install, easy to use, ran well on minimal hardware if you didn’t have heavy traffic, and entirely free. It was just a few steps and you could have a blog running in five minutes on a shared hosting account. You could have a site set up in an hour if you were happy with a stock theme.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

Proprietary

Privatisation/Privateering

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

Defence/Aggression

Environment

Energy/Transportation

Wildlife/Nature

Overpopulation

Finance

• Aircraft engine maker Rolls-Royce is planning to lay off thousands of employees. The company hired consultants led by McKinsey & Co. to advise the company on the issue.

• According to the information, the company plans to lay off 3,000 non-manufacturing staff out of the total number of its employees present all over the world. Apart from laying off employees, the company plans to merge its non-manufacturing departments. The company has civil aerospace, defense, and power systems divisions in non-manufacturing. Through this, the company wants to make its operations economical.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

Censorship/Free Speech

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

Civil Rights/Policing

Monopolies

Patents

Software Patents

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