● 07.03.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 03/07/2023: Kirigami Addons 0.9.0 and Proxmox Backup Server 3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 10:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• The end of June and the beginning of July were really hot and full of great news. We got new Libreboot and GNU Linux-libre kernel releases, a major Blender release that’s also an LTS one, a new Firefox release that’s also an ESR one, as well as new distro releases including Nitrux, Peppermint OS, and KaOS.

• On top of that, I show you how to install the latest and greatest Linux 6.4 kernel on Ubuntu and give you a first look at the new Zorin OS Upgrader utility. You can read this week’s hottest news and access all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for July 2nd, 2023, below.

Desktop/Laptop

• System76, a leading name in the world of open-source hardware, has unveiled the highly anticipated successor to Thelio: the Nebula PC case.

• With a relentless pursuit of innovation, System76’s engineers have again raised the bar, delivering superior quality and unparalleled craftsmanship.

• It is designed with meticulous attention to detail and embodies a perfect blend of form and function, offering a sleek and modern aesthetic that will impress even the most discerning PC builders.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Applications

• Vim is the go-to editor for most Linux system admins and engineers. It is versatile, lightweight, and robust. But for non-seasoned Linux users, Vim might seem a bit overwhelming.

• If you are looking for a Vim-like editor that is modern and lightweight yet powerful, here’s a list of the best Vim-inspired text editors that are more user-friendly.

Instructionals/Technical

• It has been an article of faith for some time that “cool URLs don’t change”, as seen in (for example) this 1998 W3C article written by Tim Berners-Lee (you may have heard of him). Sadly, time has shown that cool URLs do often change, and sometimes they become inaccessible even when they don’t change. But there is another part of this that I feel the need to say out loud: cool URLs keep their contents.

• To simplify the story, as Unix grew both programs and the C library became more complex, with more complex internal operations going on, and people became less tolerant of flaky programs than they might have been in a simple research operating system. Eventually people began to think about threads, and also about standardizing what signal handlers could legally do as part of POSIX. This resulted in the current situation where POSIX signal handlers are very constrained in what they can legally do, especially in threaded programs. To simplify things, you can call some C library functions (primarily to interact with the operating system), or set a flag, and that’s about it. A particular Unix may go beyond the POSIX requirements to make other things safe in signal handlers, and programs may break these requirements and still get away with it most of the time, but today there isn’t much you can safely do in a signal handler within the C API.

• To delete a webmention, first remove a piece of content from your website. Then, ensure the page returns a 410 Gone HTTP status code. This status code indicates that a piece of content has been permanently removed a site. Then, resend a Webmention to the URL to which you originally sent the mention. If implemented, the Webmention receiver used by the site to which you sent the Webmention will acknowledge the 410 then delete the mention from their database. For example, webmention.io, a popular webmention receiver, has implemented deletion support.

• A simple guide on how to install themes in Xubuntu or any Linux distribution featuring Xfce desktop. Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment known for its simplicity, speed, and customization options. It has necessary tools that allow users to personalize their Xfce experience, is the ability to install and apply different themes.

• The Linux operating system, renowned for its robustness and flexibility, offers a myriad of command-line tools that empower users to perform complex tasks with ease. One such tool is the sed command, a powerful stream editor used for parsing and transforming text.

• In the Linux operating system, the grep command is a powerful utility that exemplifies the system’s flexibility and robustness. This command-line tool enables users to search for specific patterns of text within files.

• The Linux ifconfig command is a versatile tool that plays a crucial role in network management. It’s a command-line utility that allows you to configure and manage network interfaces on Linux-based systems.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Node.js on Debian 12. For those of you who didn’t know, Node.js, a powerful and versatile JavaScript runtime environment, has revolutionized modern web development, enabling developers to create scalable and efficient applications.

• The world of software development is changing quickly, and it is no different for the Java developer who needs to learn new skills to manage Java containers.

• Either you are using Windows or Linux, you should have always have backup plan for your devices and the important data you might have. One of the best way to backup your data is by cloning your drives.

• In the domain of system administration, establishing regular backups is critical. Timeshift, a distinguished tool in the Linux landscape, facilitates file system snapshots, serving as a crucial resource in the event of system failures or data loss.

• After installing two operating system in laptop or desktop, we might come across the issue like GRUB not showing after rebooting. This issue pops up when you install Linux and Windows in single system.

• Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment known for its simplicity, speed, and customization options. It has necessary tools that allow users to personalize their Xfce experience, is the ability to install and apply different themes.

• This article will explore the step-by-step process of installing themes on Xfce desktop and Xubuntu.

• The GRUB bootloader is a crucial part of a dual-boot setup. Here’s what to do in case GRUB doesn’t load after dual-booting multiple operating systems.

• bluetuith is an easy-to-use alternative to the powerful bluetoothctl command on Linux.

Games

• Valve’s traditional Steam Summer Sale is on, and the company has taken the liberty to discount its own Steam Deck hardware quite heavily. While the handheld has gone on sale in the past as well, this time around, prices are slashed by up to 20%.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Xfce desktop environment is known for its lightweight and customizable nature. With a wide range of themes available, you can personalize your Xfce desktop to match your unique style and preferences. Let’s explore some of the best Xfce themes that will truly enhance your desktop experience.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• FormGridContainer makes it possible to make the information exposed with MobileForm more compact by putting multiple small cards in the same row. The number of columns by default is 3 on desktop unless the total number of cards makes it more sensible only to use 2 columns (e.g when there are only 2 or 4 elements).

• On mobile the number of columns is reduced to only 2.

• This new component was initially made by Rishi Kumar for the info grid that Tokodon, with some further improvement from myself. Here is how this looks with Tokodon.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Nautilus in GNOME 45 is getting a search performance boost and the ability to refocus the search bar using Ctrl+F, support for dropping images directly from web pages, redesigned Visible Columns options to allow you to change default columns, as well as the ability to display bytes size as a tooltip for folder properties.

• The Grid View has been improved as well for the GNOME 45 desktop environment to indicate starred files too. Moreover, it looks like Nautilus will boost a more adaptive design where the sidebar width will now adapt to the window width and use a breakpoint for adaptiveness.

Distributions and Operating Systems

Reviews

• It has been over a decade since I have used Windows with any degree of regularity and two decades since I used the operating system at home. For this reason, I tend not to gravitate toward Linux distributions which try to look or act like Microsoft’s operating system. I don’t have anything against them, but resembling Windows isn’t a selling point for me the way it would be for someone in the process of migrating from Windows to Linux. Projects like Zorin OS, for example, I admire as good options for Linux newcomers, but they don’t hold a special appeal for me based on their appearance.

• With that said, I really liked Kumander’s user interface. I liked the soft blue shades, I liked the high contrast text fonts, I liked the lack of distracting visual effects. I especially liked how unusually fast and responsive the desktop was. Xfce usually performs well, and it was running at top speed during my trial, even in a virtual machine. This allows Kumander to run circles around other distributions I’ve used recently, such as Debian or Ubuntu running GNOME and openSUSE running KDE Plasma. In short, Kumander offers some of the visual design benefits of Windows 7 while doing away with the distracting visual effects, annoying pop-ups, and mass of background services which often make using that operating system unpleasant.

• There are a few bugs. Kumander just hit its first stable release so things like the task manager shortcut not working or the timezone being set improperly are small issues which are to be expected. They’re small issues and not critical. The one big issue I ran into was GNOME Software not being to install updates and there not being an easy way to fetch security patches from a GUI application. This is a significant problem and will hopefully be addressed with a dedicated update manager or a fix for the software centre in the next release.

• There are some design choices I have mixed feelings about. Having some configuration modules in the application menu and others in the settings panel feels a touch disorganized. Allowing users to run admin tasks without a password feels on-brand for a distribution trying to imitate Windows, but it’s not a feature I feel good about. Then again, I’m not the target audience and many users will probably appreciate this characteristic.

• For a first stable release, Kumander is doing a lot of things well. It’s fast, stable, and achieves its goal of being Windows like (in a good way) without most of the negative aspects of using Microsoft’s product. There are some issues to work out, but few serious problems.

New Releases

• At this stage not planning to release EasyOS Bookworm-series as a separate release. Instead, have uploaded ‘bookworm_5.4.6_amd64.sfs’, 620MB, an SFS file that can be installed via SFSget.

• It will run as a complete desktop in a container, with icon on the desktop: [...]

• we’re excited to announce the release of Proxmox Backup Server 3.0. It’s based on Debian 12 “Bookworm”, but uses the newer Linux kernel 6.2, and includes ZFS 2.1.12.

• – Davinci Resolve workaround: will detect if davinci resolve installer has been run from terminal, and after installation will prompt for user to run a wizard to perform additional actions. This wizard will perform the workaround required for Davinci Resolve to run (moving DR-shipped glib2 libraries to a backup folder): (https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=180116)

• – payday 2 workaround: will detect if the native linux version of payday 2 is run, and if so will use the zink driver to run it, as the opengl implementation is currently broken, and the native version is no longer receiving official support. (https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/06/overkill-drops-linux-support-for-payday-2/) ()

BSD

• Ever get that sinking feeling after a huge event you were hyped for is finally over? The worst for me has been returning from AsiaBSDCon each year, but this last weekend sure feels similar.

• Over time you hold onto the fond memories and are left with positive thoughts, but in the immediate aftermath? It’s crushing.

• I suppose it’s a way for your body to recognise just how exuberant you must have felt, because the difference is so stark. Had it been merely middling or average, you’d probably feel little to no difference.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• SUSE has weighed in on the Red Hat controversy, setting itself apart and emphasizing its commitment to open source.

• Red Hat ignited a firestorm in late June with an announcement that it would restrict access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux source code to paying customers. What’s more, the RHEL license prohibits sharing or re-publishing the source code, something that many are saying is a violation of the GPL. Even if it is not a violation of the letter of the law, it certainly is a violation of the spirit.

• Some had wondered what stance SUSE would take since the two companies share significant similarities. Like Red Hat, SUSE sells support for an enterprise Linux distro, SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). SUSE also relies on a community-driven distro as its upstream source, openSUSE Tumbleweed, much like Red Hat relies on Fedora. The two companies often share similar legal perspectives, with SUSE quickly following Red Hat’s lead last year when the latter disabled GPU acceleration on AMD GPUs over patent concerns.

• In a statement issued last Thursday, SUSE chief technology officer Dr Thomas Di Giacomo said the implications for vendors, developers and users from Red Hat’s change in policy were significant, adding that the move had caused concern within the open source community.

• At SUSECON 2023, SUSE announced cloud-native AI-based observability with Opni and alluded to more announcements this year. Leaders emphasized cloud-native tech and modernization.

Fedora Family / IBM



• If you’re starved for space, you may be better off just uninstalling Flatpaks in general and then using native packages, which (hopefully) your distro manages for you so that the dependencies are shared.

• And no, saying “bro, just buy more space, bro” is not an excuse. Not everyone has that luxury, especially if they live in poorer countries and such. It’s time to stop this silly notion of making things bigger because “well we have so much space now.”

• Red Hat is finding itself with a rebellion on its hands after it announced it would limit access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources by putting them behind the Red Hat Customer Portal and limited to the CentOS Stream sources.

• This move causes problems for free-of-cost derivatives like AlmaLinux and has been greeted with the same unbridled joy from open sourcers as Tsar Putin had when he heard his former cook was marching on Moscow.

• Red Hat this week issued another blog post by Mike McGrath, the VP of Core Platforms Engineering at Red Hat. In the post, he talks up “Red Hat’s commitment to open source” in which he said that the outfit did make its hard work readily accessible to non-customers.

• Early in June 2023, Red Hat announced that they would limit access to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code to paying customers. This change caused a stir within the Linux community, as dozens of downstream distributions rely on the public RHEL source code to provide 1:1 compatibility.

• With so many enormous changes looming, it’s easy to wonder how they will affect downstream distros.

• Josh and Kurt talk about Red Hat closing up the RHEL source code. Kurt and Josh both worked at Red Hat in the past. This isn’t a show that bashes Red Hat, and it’s not a show praising them. We take an honest look at the past, present, and future of Linux. There’s a lot to talk about in this one. TL;DR, Red Hat was the chosen on, and we all feel betrayed.

• When CentOS announced in 2020 that it was shutting down its traditional “rebuild” of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to focus on its development build, Stream, CentOS suggested the strategy “removes confusion.” Red Hat, which largely controlled CentOS by then, considered it “a natural, inevitable next step.”

• Last week, the IBM-owned Red Hat continued “furthering the evolution of CentOS Stream” by announcing that CentOS Stream would be “the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases,” with RHEL’s core code otherwise restricted to a customer portal. (RHEL access is free for individual developers and up to 16 servers, but that’s largely not the issue here).

• Red Hat’s post was a rich example of burying the lede and a decisive moment for many who follow the tricky balance of Red Hat’s open source commitments and service contract business. Here’s what followed.

Debian Family

• In the ever-evolving landscape of Linux distributions, Peppermint OS, well-loved for its unique combination of speed, elegance, and simplicity, has unveiled a freshly minted update, introducing a refined look and a bunch of enhanced features. With a build date of July 1, 2023, this Debian-based operating system will surely cool down your summer with its delightful refinements.

• The first striking change is the updated branding. Peppermint OS has received a facelift in terms of aesthetics with a new Plymouth design, demonstrating the development team’s commitment to continual improvement and modernization. This uplift is a welcomed change, presenting users with a fresh and visually appealing boot-up experience.

• PeppermintOS can be regarded as one of the most lightweight and flexible Linux distros.

• Over the years, it has received a steady stream of updates, and this time, a new major release promises a host of improvements.

• Let’s take a look at what it offers.

• Two versions of Peppermint OS are available to download: one based on Debian, and one based Devuan. Both use the Xfce desktop environment. This post concerns the Debian edition updated on July 1, 2023.

• The Peppermint team would like to announce that we have released our Debian(bookworm) base. You can download the new files from here.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Don’t get too excited; the new store is one you’ve heard about before (if you read this site, at least). It’s the community-created Flutter software hub I wrote about last year, which Ubuntu devs later expressed interest in making official — and thus did.

• A couple of interesting — and potentially controversial — things planned for the first official incarnation of the tool were revealed recently so I figured I’d ferry along word.

Devices/Embedded

• The Geniatech SOM3588 is another Rockchip-based System-on-Module designed for commercial and industrial applications. Additionally, the company launched a compatible carrier board with Wi-Fi 6/BT5.0 support, GbE LAN and many other peripherals.

• As its name implies the SOM3588 is built on the RockChip RK3588 processor with an 8nm process similar to the Forlinx FET3588-C SoM.

• When Purism first announced plans to build a smartphone that would run mainline Linux, the company set a launch price of $599 for the Librem 5 phone. But it took another two years for the phone to begin shipping in small batches. By then, it had received a $100 price hike.

• In the years since then, Purism has raised the price several more times… by a lot. An entry-level Librem 5 now sells for $1,299 and customers who want a made-in-the-USA model can pay $1,999 for a phone that’s basically the same, but promises a “secure supply chain” for folks worried about buying phones made in China. And now… there’s an even more expensive model called the Liberty Phone. It has a little more memory and storage and a $2,199 price tag.

• The more tech-savvy among you probably know that Android is based on the Linux kernel. But it is nothing like a typical Linux that you may have seen on PCs – or on smartphones.

• The Orange Pi Zero 3 is a compact Allwinner H618 quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 SBC with 1GB to 4GB RAM, 16MB SPI flash, micro HDMI output, Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5.0, a USB 2.0 port, and two headers for expansion.

• It provides an update to the Allwinner H616-powered Orange Pi Zero 2 SBC quadrupling the maximum memory to 4GB and embedding a larger SPI flash. The new board basically offers the same ports but in a different layout and a slightly smaller form factor.

• The main difference between Allwinner H616 and Allwinner H618 is that the latter comes with 1MB L2 cache for better performance. Another significant difference relates to software support with the new Orange Pi Zero 3 board supporting more recent operating systems such as Android 12 for TV, Ubuntu 22.04, and Debian 12, as can be seen from the simplified Orange Pi Zero 2 / Orange Pi Zero 3 comparison table below.

• The Geniatech SOM3588 is another Rockchip-based System-on-Module designed for commercial and industrial applications. Additionally, the company launched a compatible carrier board with Wi-Fi 6/BT5.0 support, GbE LAN and many other peripherals.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Finally, I wanna share a bit about my experience with the community since Voron is its community. Overall, my experience was really positive- I really love how freely folks share their builds, experiences, and modifications for others. I love the collaboration between the designers, community, and vendors. For the most part, folks and organizations seem genuinely investing in making everything better for everyone.

• However, nothing is perfect. Voron’s community is spread across a bunch of platforms. There’s the official forums, the TeamFDM forums, the official Discord, and a subreddit. Since the Voron subreddit remains private in the face of Reddit’s recent policy changes, a large amount of discoverable knowledge has been lost. The Discord seems to be the most used and contains both an active user base and a ton of accumulated knowledge. Unfortunately, this knowledge mostly stays confined to Discord where it becomes harder and harder to discover and share over time. The Discord users are generally helpful, but some have fallen into the pattern of scolding new users for not reading pinned threads or knowing some other assumed knowledge. This culture combined with the high amount of activity and the extraordinarily large amount of channels leads to an environment that can be difficult for some to participate in.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Message from former GNOME Foundation member: “I had to de-list from planet GNOME because of the threats, harassment, and utter garbage I was getting both in my blog comments and sent to me via other channels and I just let my foundation membership lapse and stopped being an active GNOME contributor. ☹️ I get that occasionally in other open source projects like even in Fedora, but it was really next level in terms of nastiness and volume… GNOME is just super high-visible and/or somehow is a magnet for these people”.

• An electronic book (commonly abbreviated e-book) is a text and image-based publication which can be read on a computer or other digital devices such as an e-book reader.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• Honk is a very lightweight ActivityPub server created by Ted Unangst.

• An ActivityPub server with minimal setup and support costs.

• With an ActivityPub server you become part of the Fediverse.

• Honk is written in Go and uses SQLite as database.

FSFE

Programming/Development

• Versions of the following question can be traced back at least to the work of Henri Poincaré (Poincaré (1912)):

• In how many ways a simple loop in the plane can cross a line a specified number of times?

• Last weekend was the bi-annual time to roll the main machine and server to the current Ubuntu release, now at 23.04. It must now have been fifteen or so years that I have used Ubuntu for my desktop / server (for “reasons” I may write about another time). And of course it all passed swimmingly as usual.

• This post is for people familiar with Helmet.js. It was last updated for Helmet 7.0 and Express 4.18.

• I maintain Helmet, a sorta-popular npm package which sets various HTTP security response headers.

• It’s designed to be easy to use and integrate, but if you want to avoid a dependency and get a slight performance boost, here’s how.

• By default, Helmet adds 12 HTTP response headers and removes one.

Standards/Consortia

• For the most part, I think the RSS reader apps that we have now are actually much nicer than Google Reader ever was. So my nostalgia is very tempered. But the social features of Google Reader, I don’t think, have quite been replicated yet. I wish there were videos or something of how that all worked so I could remember it better, but I seem to remember having friends on Google Reader, well before Google had Google+ or anything like that.

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