● 07.02.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 02/07/2023: Switching From Windows to Ubuntu, IBM’s Red Bait Promotes Outsourcing

Posted in News Roundup at 6:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Transitioning from Windows to Ubuntu can be daunting at first especially if you’ve never used a Linux-based system before. However, you shouldn’t face any challenges or surprises if you’re properly prepared for the switch.

• Preparation for the transition is easy and involves knowing just a few things that might work a little bit differently on the new platform. Here are eight things you need to take note of before making the switch from Windows to Ubuntu.

Kernel Space

• The recently released Linux 6.4 kernel is making some big networking strides that end users, enterprises and service providers will benefit from in the months to come.

• The Linux kernel offers essential capabilities for running operations that are widely used in networking equipment, enterprise, telco and the cloud. The kernel is part of a larger Linux operating system, with various vendors offering supported distributions including Red Hat, SUSE, and Canonical. Linux kernel development follows a rapid pace with new releases every six to ten weeks.

• Among the key networking features in Linux 6.4 are multiple improvements to improve traffic flow, extended support for Wi-Fi 7 wireless networking, new eBPF (extended Berkeley Packet Filter) features and IPv6 optimizations.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Docker on Debian 12. For those of you who didn’t know, Docker is a powerful containerization platform, that revolutionizes the way software is developed, deployed, and managed. With its ability to isolate applications and their dependencies, Docker offers enhanced portability, scalability, and efficiency.

• In the digital era, where our personal and professional lives often intertwine with the online world, privacy and security have become paramount. One effective method of ensuring this is by using a Virtual Private Network (VPN). openVPN, an open-source VPN software, is particularly popular due to its robustness and versatility. When used with an OS like Kali Linux, known for its advanced penetration testing and security auditing features, you get a robust solution for your online privacy needs.

• This is a static site, meaning that no server-side processing occurs. All HTML is generated out of a few folders full of markdown source and then uploaded to the cluster. Searching on this site was always provided by a text-box form that sent you to google with ‘site:raymii.org’ appended to it. Works fine, but it sends all data to Google. With my recent removal of all Google Ads on this site, as well as tracking via Google Analytics, sending searches via Google seems wrong.

• I recently found the pagefind program which I now use on here, it is a self hosted static site search engine of sorts.

• With the release of Ubuntu 23.04, Canonical has made a shocking announcement that it will no longer ship new versions of Ubuntu with Flatpak. Instead, all new Ubuntu flavors will come with the Snap Store. However, not everyone is a fan of the Snap package manager and their slow app, instead many prefer to use Flatpak for their software needs. For the uninitiated, Flatpak is a cross-distro package manager used to download and manage applications. If you are one of those users, learn how to download and use Flatpak on Ubuntu 23.04.

• While most people have used screen editors like nano or Vim on Linux for a long time, there is still a holdover from the days of teletypes available: ex, a line editor. While it may be very old, it still has some uses.

• [...]

• Line editors were mainly used when most people used printing terminals, also known as teleprinters or teletypes, to interact with a computer. Since these devices printed on paper, it was impractical to print a whole file just to change a few lines. These devices also had a major influence on the length of Linux commands.

• When video terminals became popular, many people switched to screen editors because they could see the whole file at once. Most users found this far more convenient than the old line editors, and they stuck with them with the transition from terminals connected to a minicomputer or mainframe to desktop computers running terminal emulators and GUIs.

• If you’ve ever wanted to dip your toes into the vast ocean of Linux software, but you enjoy the comfort of your Mac, then you’re in the right place. Today, we’re going to break down six methods of running Linux software on your Mac – making it easy to experience the power of open-source software and turbo-charge your Mac at the same time.

• Symbolic links or symlinks are one of the most important Linux features, especially for aspiring Linux sysadmins. As the name suggests, symbolic links allow users to point a file toward another file without mirroring its data, essentially providing you with multiple places to access the same file. So, in this guide, let’s look at how you can create symbolic links in Linux.

• Learning file management in Linux is the key to efficient workflow. One of the most basic tasks that you would need to learn as a Linux beginner is copying files. Terminal is your friend in Linux and it can be used to most even the simplest of tasks quickly. As a beginner, if you’re struggling with copying files, here’s a tutorial with two different methods detailing how to copy files in Linux.

Games

• Move over Redstone computers in Minecraft, hello 32-bit computers in Terraria.

• An engineering student has developed a functional “fully compliant RISC-v computer” in the 2D sandbox game. Computerraria, as developer Xander Naumenko calls it, took over 600 hours in the space of five months to develop, and stands as an incredibly impressive feat of technical achievement.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Hello world,

• This is my fourth blog post and a continuation to my previous blog posts for Google Summer of Code 2023 under KDE.

• In this blog, I will be sharing my experiences during the 3rd and 4th weeks of GSoC’23.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

Open Hardware/Modding

• Reach the next level with your 3D game designs with the More Unity path from the Raspberry Pi Foundation. A perfect next step after completing our Intro to Unity path

• People ask me why the Commodordion boots from a tape drive emulator, which takes a couple of seconds and involves manual key presses. In contrast, an autostart cartridge on the expansion port would get everything up and running instantly at power-on.

• In the particular case of the Commodordion, there’s a lack of space around the expansion ports. But in addition to that, the answer I usually give is that it’s much easier to implement a tape drive emulator than a cartridge. The communication protocol is slow and needs only a few wires, whereas a cartridge interfaces directly with the buses of the computer (via dozens of signals) and needs to respond in a fraction of a microsecond. And I knew I could build a tape drive emulator using components that I already had at home, whereas making my own cartridge would involve designing and ordering a custom PCB.

• Or would it? The question kept itching at the back of my head. Wouldn’t it be a nice challenge to try to make an autostarting C64 cartridge on a humble stripboard?

• The SID chip (Sound Interface Device) in the Commodore 64 has three channels, which means that it can play up to three sounds at the same time. A channel can be individually configured to play any one of the supported sounds, such as pulse wave, triangle wave, or white noise.

• In contrast, the APU (Audio Processing Unit) of the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) offers five fixed-function channels: Two pulse-wave channels, one triangle-wave channel, one noise channel, and one channel for sample playback.2

• LILYGO T-Deck is a development kit with an ESP32-S3 WiFi and BLE module, a 2.8-inch display with touchscreen support, a Blackberry-like keyboard based on ESP32-S3, and optional LoRaWAN connectivity through an SX1262 LoRa module. It looks ideal for text-based messaging, but the devkit also includes two microphones and a speaker so audio communication must be possible. Other features include a MicroSD card slot, a Grove connector (UART) for expansion, and support for a LiPo battery with USB charging.

• Banana Pi BPI-Wifi 6 is an ultra-low-cost WiFi 6 router board with five Gigabit Ethernet ports based on Triductor Technology TR6560 dual-core Cortex-A9 router SoC and TR5220 WiFi 6 chipset and that sells for just $26.32 plus shipping on Aliexpress, or $39.99 as part of a kit with the board, four antennas, and a 12V power supply. The board is equipped with 512MB RAM and a 128MB SPI flash for OpenWrt, comes with four antenna connectors for WiFi, and can also take an optional 12V PoE module for power instead of relying on a 12V power adapter via a DC jack.

• Mekotronics A58 7-inch smart display is powered by a Rockchip RK3588 SoC with up to 16GB RAM and 128GB eMMC flash, and ships with a DSLR camera mount to enable video broadcasting and live streaming on social platforms. In the past, we’ve covered several Rockchip RK3588-powered Arm mini PCs by Mekotronics such as the R58, R58X, and more recently the R58X-Pro and R58X-HDD models, but the company has now leveraged its experience with the platform by launching a 7-inch smart display that can be used for live-streaming, but as we’ll see from the specifications below can also find many other uses.

• Toshiba “MH3 Group (2)” Arm Cortex-M3 microcontrollers come with a 1MB flash memory partitioned into two 512KB partitions to enable firmware updates without interrupting microcontroller operation using an area swap function to rotate to the new firmware seamlessly. The new M3H Group (2) builds upon the M3H Group(1) by expanding the code flash memory up to 1MB, and the RAM capacity from 66KB to 130KB.

• ANAVI Technology has launched two more open-source hardware mechanical keyboards based on the Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, equipped with an OLED display, and programmable with CircuitPython: the ANAVI Macro Pad 12 with 12 keys and the ANAVI Arrows with four keys and a rotatory encoder. The new mechanical keyboards follow ANAVI Macro Pad 10 & Knobs input devices equipped with the same Seeed Studio XIAO RP2040 MCU module running the KMK firmware written with CircuitPython, but with different form factors and features.

• NEWRACOM has just introduced the NRC7394 Wi-Fi HaLow Arm Cortex-M3 SoC with higher power efficiency and lower cost than the previous generation NRC7292 Cortex-M3/M0 HaLow SoC and available in a 6x6mm package. I first wrote about the 802.11ah standard in 2014. Also known as the WiFi HaLow (consumers name), it operates in the 900 MHz band, offers a longer range and lower power consumption for items like IP cameras, and the first products came to market in 2021. I was expecting a flood of new WiFi HaLow devices in 2022 in my year 2021 round-up and it was not exactly a prescient prediction as it never happened. But maybe the new NRC7394 SoC will help make WiFi HaLow devices more popular by lowering the costs and further improving battery life.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• The whole piece was interesting, because I for one, haven’t thought about digital The whole piece was interesting, because I for one, haven’t thought about digital minimalism in regards to phones. Except for using fewer apps. But this is more about being constrained physically.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Trying to make web applications federated is a popular effort. Examples include things like the “fediverse”, as well as various other efforts, like attempts to make distributed software forges, and so on. However, all of these efforts suffer from a problem which is fundamental in building federated applications built on top of the web platform.

• The problem is fundamentally this: when building an application on top of the web platform, an HTTP URL inherently couples an application and a resource.

• Let’s take the Fediverse as an example. Suppose some user profile is hosted at https://example.com/johnsmith. This URL can be used by Fediverse clients to retrieve machine-readable profile information, but visiting it in a web browser, or clicking a link to it from some other location, results in loading a specific application served from example.com and chosen by the operator of that server.

• OpenSearchServer is an open-source search engine software that allows developers to create their own search engine for their websites or applications. It is developed in Java and comes with a REST API that allows developers to integrate search functionality into their applications easily.

• OpenSearchServer is a powerful, enterprise-class, search engine

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• WordPress 6.3 Beta 2 is ready for download and testing.

• This version of the WordPress software is under development. Please do not install, run, or test this version of WordPress on production or mission-critical websites. Instead, it is recommended that you test Beta 2 on a test server and site.

Education

• Think of automata, and the image that pops into your head will most likely depend on your age. If you’re a child of the 1980s, you’re most likely imagining the seaside amusement from the film Big that turns a child into Tom Hanks. If you’re a child of the 1880s, you might be thinking of the Mechanical Turk, the machine that terrified audiences by seeming to play chess against a human opponent.

• Others still may think of the works of Tim Hunkin. He’s been building machines to inspire and delight for decades, and now has two arcades full of his own creations: Novelty Automation in London, and the Under The Pier Show in Southwold. We caught up with him to chat about precision, engineering, and the joy of the mechanical in a digital world.

Programming/Development

• I have been writing C++ professionally for the last 4 years and 3 months ago I started a new job in Rust. I would like to share my experience and thoughts on the transition between 2 languages.

• Disclaimer: This article is not a C++ vs Rust comparison. I will talk about my personal experience and things which are important to me, not the engineering community in general.

• In Rust, macros are pieces of code that generate other Rust code using a technique commonly known as metaprogramming. A macro is expanded during compilation, and the output of a macro is inserted into the source code of the program.

• The most famous example of a macro is println!. Even though it looks like a function and is used like a function, it’s actually expanded during compilation, and the println! call is replaced with a more complex implementation code.

• In this article, you’ll see some practical examples of macros and learn some tips and tricks on how to best use them.

• parallelly 1.36.0 is on CRAN since May 2023. The parallelly package is part of the Futureverse and enhances the parallel package of base R, e.g. it adds several features you’d otherwise expect to see in parallel. The parallelly package is one of the internal work horses for the future package, but it can also be used outside of the future ecosystem.

• In software, it is common to represent time as a time-stamp string. It is usually specified by a time format string. Some standards use the format %Y%m%d%H%M%S meaning that we print the year, the month, the day, the hours, the minutes and the seconds. The current time as I write this blog post would be 20230701205436 as a time stamp in this format. It is convenient because it is short, easy to read and if you sort the strings lexicographically, you also sort them chronologically.

Python

• After announcing myself and my mission to the CPython Core Developers I was quickly invited to join the Python Security Response Team (PSRT) in order to help with triaging and responding to security reports for CPython. So now when you email security@python.org there’s a chance I’ll be the one helping you out. I’ve also become a moderator of the mailing list to help with sorting through spam and invalid requests.

• In addition to joining the team, I’ve been gathering feedback from members of the PSRT in order to improve the processes that already exist. From listening to folks, I’ve heard three common topics and have put together a set of proposed changes to be discussed by PSRT members and ultimately approved by the Python Steering Council. The three topics I’ve heard are: [...]

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