● 07.04.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 04/07/2023: Kodi 20.2 and Glance at Steam Deck KDE

Posted in News Roundup at 3:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• Just about every take on the Red Hat news seems to have missed the mark. Special Guest: Carl George.

• More about EPUB, and then **farstream** and **ffmpeg**

• shasum -a256=6981776b59b473cbae4201bee8616a9303fe4d3a10087b899a87adcc51cf2dcc

Instructionals/Technical

• There is a great set of articles in the Ubuntu Server guide about how to achieve an unattended installation of Ubuntu Server:

• [...]

• Velero is an open source tool to safely backup and restore, perform disaster recovery, and migrate Kubernetes cluster resources and persistent volumes.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MySQL on Debian 12. For those of you who didn’t know, MySQL is a popular open-source relational database management system and is a fundamental component of many web applications and services.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to configure UFW Firewall on Debian 12. For those of you who didn’t know, UFW, the Uncomplicated Firewall, is a front-end for iptables, offering a simplified approach to firewall management on Debian systems.

• Data is a major resource today and securing all our devices has become crucial. We would like to protect ourselves from anyone logging into our laptop or computer. If we are using hardware shared by multiple people who have multiple user IDs, there is a chance that another user may want to log into our system for our files, etc. So let us understand how we can detect such intrusions in our Linux machines, by setting up a program that takes a photo when a wrong password is entered in our system.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Not actually the first attempt, but the first attempt using the version of the operating system that users actually use. There were pre-release versions of the Steam Deck’s operating system that had different partition setups.

• Do not assume that it will be easy to use system libraries for development. By default, system libraries do not come with headers on the Steam Deck, unlike Arch Linux. You can get the headers and other things related to setting up a traditional KDE development environment by running sudo steamos-devmode enable. However, you may not even have enough space in your rootfs partition to install all the libraries and headers you need. The rootfs only has 5GiB of space, even on the 512GB Steam Deck model (my model).

• Last but not least, I won’t stay at Akademy for long in order to run back to my family, but… I’ll be holding an online workshop about the KDE Stack during the training day.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• As is always inevitable in software, we are back with a new release of Kodi “Nexus”.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• When it comes to choosing a reliable and powerful Linux distribution for your workloads, CentOS and openSUSE are both popular options. However, recent changes in the CentOS project have left many users seeking alternatives. In this blog post, we will explore ten compelling reasons why migrating from CentOS to openSUSE might be a smart move.

• Migrating from CentOS to openSUSE brings numerous benefits, including stability, SUSE’s support to the community, powerful system management tools, advanced distro features, and access to a rich package repository. The active openSUSE community and easy migration tools further enhance the transition process. If you are seeking a robust and reliable Linux distribution for your workloads, you should consider openSUSE.

Oracle/ IBM

• Until the announcement that CentOS Linux 8 would be EOL at the end of 2021, CentOS users enjoyed a relatively drama-free period of stability that might suggest RHEL has always had a viable, dependable clone with predictable releases. That is, as you’re probably already guessing, very far from the truth.

• In this post we’ll look at the CentOS history from inception until the CentOS Project came under Red Hat’s direct sponsorship. That’s early 2004 through January 7, 2014 when the announcement went out to the world on the CentOS-announce list. We’ll also mention a few other attempts at cloning RHEL didn’t quite thrive over the long haul.

• Note, I’m mostly leaving Oracle Linux out of this even though it was introduced in 2006. As you might have guessed, it’ll be the topic of another post on its own.

• 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.

• On 21 June, Red Hat announced that it would make source code for its RHEL distribution only available to those who were customers of the company.

• However, support for Oracle Developer Studio rested on others who are running Oracle Solaris. I want to change that and get Oracle Developer Studio running on one of my own machines. That is going to mean using one of the Illumos distros, since I am not about to pay Oracle to use Solaris.

• I chose OpenIndiana because it is the first Illumos distro I think of, and because it is actively well-maintained. If I am going to invest in learning some Solaris, I would like it to be for the long haul; I want to learn one Illumos distro and stick with it. While I am sure other Illumos distros are also well-maintained, I did not spend much time on deciding. I knew OpenIndiana existed, and I chose it.

• With that said, I believe these steps will work on all 64-bit x86 Illumos distros.

• Join me on my quest to install Oracle Developer Studio 12.6 on Illumos despite Oracle’s best attempts to stop me.

• For years, CentOS Linux has been an important Linux distro for us and many, many other operators around the world. It’s one of the three options we offer when you spin up a new Virtual Server, and – for now – it’s a core part of our Web Hosting tech stack.

• So we have been paying close attention ever since the end of CentOS as we know it was announced in 2021. There has been no need to panic, as CentOS Linux 7 will remain in support until mid-2024, but we have kept an eye on developments and blogged occasional updates as other distros have upped their game and gotten closer to becoming viable CentOS replacements.

Debian Family

• The 6th monthly Sparky project and donate report of the 2023: – Linux kernel updated up to 6.4.0 & 5.15.119-LTS – Sparky 7.0 Orion Belt of the stable line released; amd64 iso images boot with Secure Boot on now – removed xscreensaver from all sparky-desktop-xxxxx meta packages [...]

Devices/Embedded

• Orange Pi launched today a single board computer board with a small form-factor based on the Allwinner H618 64-bit processor clocked at 1.5GHz. The Orange Pi Zero 3 is equipped with one Gigabit Ethernet port with PoE support, various GPIOs and Wi-Fi/BT 5.0 connectivity.

• For OS support, the company indicates that they will provide support for Android 12 TV, Debian 11/12, Ubuntu 22.04/20.04. Refer to the Orange Pi GitHub repository and their Wiki pages.

• As expected, Espressif has just released the ESP-IDF 5.1 framework with ESP32-C6 and ESP32-H2 support, so more ESP32-C6 boards should become available, and after Olimex ESP32-C6-EVB launched earlier this week, we’ve noticed WeAct had introduced a low-cost ESP32-C6 development board that sells for just $6.43 plus shipping a few weeks ago. >

Open Hardware/Modding

• A few months ago, I finally decided to build myself a NAS. I was pushed to do this by a few different factors: [...]

• Magneto-Optical is not a fight between mutants from X-Men, but a very reliable drive technology which you may have even used, even if you haven’t heard of it.

• For portable power, the GPS Pothole Tracker uses a USB power bank. Out in the field, when the user is near a pothole, they press the button. If the GPS is locked, the tracker records the button press in the FRAM. “The Pico W takes in the input from the GPS, gaming button, and then stores the GPS locations, and gives output to the user in the form of the light of the button, and the buzzer,” explains ScienceDude1990. When the user gets home, they can then open a text file and send any pertinent pothole information onto whoever needs to have it.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• My knee-jerk reaction was “this looks great, I could definitely replace my iPhone with this. How much is it…” but after giving it some thought, I decided I most definitely could not ditch my iPhone for a dumb phone.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• 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.

• Red Hat rivals and many open-source developers are mad as hell about the company’s new source code policy. Will this dispute end up in the courts?

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• Arti is our ongoing project to create a next-generation Tor client in Rust. Now we’re announcing the latest release, Arti 1.1.6.

• After months of hard work, Arti finally has working client-side onion service support! That is, programs can* now use Arti to connect to onion services on the Tor network.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Object-relational mapping (ORM) libraries are scattered about millions of code repositories. They promise to bridge the gap between a relational database and an object-oriented programming language.

• Instead of writing a SQL query like `SELECT * from users where id = 1`, you would define a User type with some special annotations and then write something like `user = users.select().where(“id = ?”, id)`. Some other features they might provide: type safety, connection management, or a migration framework.

• But using an ORM is controversial. Some developers swear by them, while others avoid them altogether. Some myths about ORMs.

Programming/Development

• Thanks to Nicholas Guriev, dotenv-cli now uses exec instead of popen to create the new process on POSIX systems.

• Another minor maintenance release, now at version 0.0.20, of RcppAnnoy has arrived on CRAN.

• In other applications, you can just change your name. In git, the history is meant to be immutable, so a record of old names is just… there. You could rewrite history, but in a team setting that sort of rebasing isn’t really tenable. You just cannot stop the world long enough to make it happen.

• Fortunately, we can paper over it by using git mailmap1. This lets you replace the name and email addresses on commits with the correct ones. It’s pretty straightforward.

• However, PNGs have no maximum file size. You can embed an infinite amount of metadata in PNGs—even a 1×1 image could be terabytes large if it has enough metadata inside.

Perl / Raku

• This document describes differences between the 5.36.0 release and the 5.38.0 release.

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