● 07.14.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 14/07/2023: Godot Engine Needs Help, AlmaLinux Diverging From RHEL, Rust 1.71.0 is Out

Posted in News Roundup at 7:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Linux has never been as popular as Microsoft Windows or Apple’s macOS; that has been true for decades. But according to StatCounter’s latest data, the open-source operating system hit a 3% market share in the desktop PC space in June 2023 – pointing to a growing audience enjoying Linux’s lightweight, bloatware-free, and customization-friendly approach.

Desktop/Laptop

• Need a new mini-PC? Hardware vendor Star Labs have announced their refreshed Byte Mk II and it looks like quite a tidy little unit.

• Coming with an Intel N200 fanless processor, dual 1Gbps ethernet, coreboot and 8GB 3200MHz RAM (up to 16GB) and a 480GB PCIe SSD (up to 2TB) it has what you need to get going. As usual for Star Labs it has exceptional support for various Linux distributions with you being able to configure it with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, elementary OS, Linux Mint, Manjaro and more options.

Applications

• We recently explored Argos Translate, state of the art neural machine translation software. That software provides a Python library, command-line interface, and a GUI.

• LibreTranslate is a machine translation API which is entirely self-hosted. This software lets you use open source machine translation in your projects. It uses Argos Translate for its translation engine.

• We tested LibreTranslate with the Arch distro. As we recommended in our review of Argos Translate, use a virtual environment to install LibreTranslate. We’ll use conda, but you may prefer to run the software with Docker.

Instructionals/Technical

• Hi, this is a quick guide explaining how to use a network scanner on Qubes OS (or Linux/BSD in general).

• I’ll be using a network printer / scanner Brother MFC-1910W in the example.

• Our ISP began offering IPv6 earlier this year. Rather than a single public IPv4 address, we’ve now been delegated a /48, from which our router can DHCPv6 addresses to every Internet-connected interface in our local domain.

• One of the biggest advantages of IPv6, from a network administration perspective, is the ease of renumbering. While IPv4 networks can be renumbered using DHCP, the process of changing the address of every device on a network is always fraught with unexpected challenges. People (like me) have a habit of manually assigning printers and network-attached storage (NAS) devices a fixed address so they will be easy to find and use.

• In my entry on how web server should refuse requests for random URLs, I mentioned that we have an open source security and vulnerability scanner. Among the reactions I saw to that entry was people who felt that such scanners are basically a bad idea, and in thinking about the issue I’ve decided that I can see two views of such scanners.

Games

• Factory building and automation sim Factorio has a fresh stable release out, continuing years of free upgrades and it now has gamepad controller support. Becoming available first in the 1.1.83 experimental build that I wrote about previously, the developers continuing refining various bits in the game for a few more testing releases before pushing it out to everyone today.

• With Godot Engine moving over to being supported by the Godot Foundation directly, they’ve begun pushing for people to support their efforts via their new funding platform inspired by Blender.

• The incredible team building the Nintendo Switch emulator yuzu have a new progress report out for June 2023 and it’s quite a doozy. Yes June, they’re running over previous work. As usual, it’s a lengthy read full of technical speak and exciting features and fixes so I’m here to summarise the important bits for you.

• Finally it’s here! Valve has updated Team Fortress 2 with a Summer Event for 2023 and it appears to have exploded the player counts. Going from around 100-125 thousand players at time to a record-breaking 253,997 peak as of 2 hours ago. Seems TF2 has plenty of life left in it, if only Valve gave it a bit more regular attention huh?

Distributions and Operating Systems

Fedora Family / IBM

• In case you missed it, Red Hat announced they will no longer be providing the means for downstream clones to continue to be 1:1 binary copies of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Very quickly, both Jack and I shared some initial thoughts, but we intentionally took our time deciding the next right step for AlmaLinux OS. After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible*.

• AlmaLinux has announced that the distribution will no longer be a strict clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but will maintain ABI compatibility.

• Fedora Alt Downloads provides an impressive array of alternative distributions, catering to diverse needs within the Fedora community. Whether it’s through Fedora Spins, Fedora Labs, Fedora Remixes, Fedora Silverblue, or ARM editions, users can find specialized distributions that suit their requirements, preferences, and use cases. This versatility and community-driven approach makes Fedora Alt Downloads a valuable resource for Fedora Linux enthusiasts, fostering innovation, and customization within the Fedora ecosystem. You can find complete information about Fedora Alt Downloads at https://alt.fedoraproject.org/

• Red Hat’s move to restrict access to its source code sparked outrage in the Linux community, turning practically all open-source advocates against it. However, everyone was waiting to see how the industry’s big names would react to Red Hat’s move.

• SUSE was the first to publish a statement criticizing the move, stating unequivocally that they adhere firmly to the open source’s philosophy and moral norms, confirming that they always have and will continue to do so.

• Later, they went even further, claiming their plans to fork RHEL to develop a new distribution based on it, ensuring everyone has free access to enterprise Linux.

• We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.13.2 is generally available as of July 12, 2023.

• Red Hat Satellite is an infrastructure management solution designed to provision and maintain any Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure – physical, virtual, cloud and edge environments. Satellite streamlines provisioning, patching and other repetitive system management tasks to increase efficiency while keeping systems secure, available and compliant.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Linux Mint buffs have reason to celebrate as the much-anticipated release of version 21.2, codenamed “Victoria,” brings many exciting updates and improvements. Based on the latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (codenamed “Jammy Jellyfish”) and powered by the formidable Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS, this release is set to elevate the Linux Mint experience to new heights.

Open Hardware/Modding

• While Ubuntu has been the primary default operating system for Venice, Gateworks is now providing OpenWrt for the users that have requested the networking-centric operating system.

• [...]

• OpenWrt is still considered an embedded operating system and has a much smaller footprint than a larger Ubuntu OS. It is ideal for wireless routers and access points.

• In the past, people relied on pocket watches and then wristwatches to keep track of time. Now thanks to smartphones, those days are slowly fading away. However, one maker and developer, known as Yakroo, has started a new cyberpunk-themed trend for makers with his latest project. Using a board with the Raspberry Pi Pico’s RP2040, he’s created a wearable neck watch that looks as cool as it is useful!

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• The open source Istio service mesh project is hitting a major milestone today as it officially graduates to be a full project at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

• Istio describes a service mesh as “a dedicated infrastructure layer that you can add to your applications. It allows you to transparently add capabilities like observability, traffic management, and security, without adding them to your own code.”

• Graduation at the CNCF is an indication of the maturity, usefulness, contribution and production-grade quality of a project, which are all check boxes that Istio arguably achieved years ago. Istio was originally started by Google in 2017, where it remained until April 2022 despite repeated calls from users and other vendors for the project to be contributed to a neutral third-party organization. That organization is the CNCF, which is also home to the open source Kubernetes container orchestration project that is routinely the primary way that Istio is deployed.

• Version 8.1 of OpenBGPD, the OpenBSD Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing daemon, has just been released.

• Helping game developers integrate various AMD FidelityFX technologies into their games, AMD yesterday open sourced the FidelityFX SDK.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• From chat engines and generative apps to self-driving cars, technologies that use artificial intelligence continue to transform our lives in new ways. But how do we create AI that serves society without disempowering some of us? How can we make sure these innovations are fair and trustworthy?

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• TLDR: YottaDB is a fast and clean database and it deserves a Lua API that is as fast as possible. This article discusses how we improved lua-yottadb to go ~4× as fast when looping through database records, and a stunning 47× as fast when creating Lua objects for database nodes, plus other improvements (results here). Low-hanging fruit aside, the biggest (and trickiest) improvement was caching the node’s subscript array in the Lua object that references a specific database node. Finally, porting to other language wrappers is discussed, as well as a tentative thought on how YDB might support an even faster API. Along the way we learned numerous things that might help someone port these efficiencies to other languages.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• LibreOffice is a powerful and versatile open-source office suite that provides a free alternative to commercial software like Microsoft Office. While using LibreOffice, you may encounter issues or experience glitches that can disrupt your workflow. In such cases, a factory reset can often resolve these problems and restore LibreOffice to its default settings. In this comprehensive guide, we will walk you through how to factory reset LibreOffice, step by step.

Education

• DNS Hackathon took place during the weekend before RIPE 86 in Rotterdam. Co-hosted by DNS-OARC, Netnod and the RIPE NCC, it included 46 “hackers” who worked on 6 projects, had a lot of fun and many stroopwafels. Read about the results, and join us next time!

Programming/Development

• And here we come to a central problem with any fuzzy system – repetitiveness. How to make it say something new every time it is called? I guess there are three main approaches: [...]

• It was challenging to fit this all in just 1024 bytes! This post is a retrospective on the project.

• I am a happy Sourcehut user and I wanted to try its build service. Every time changes are pushed to a git repository hosted on Sourcehut, it is possible to trigger a series of actions described in a manifest that will be run in a virtual machine on builds.sr.ht. If you’ve ever used Github Actions or Gitlab Pipelines, you should be pretty familiar with this concept.

Rust

• The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.71.0. Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

• [...]

• The behavior for unforced unwinding (the typical case) is specified in this table from the RFC which proposed this feature. To summarize:

• Each ABI is mostly equivalent to the same ABI without -unwind, except that with -unwind the behavior is defined to be safe when an unwinding operation (panic or C++ style exception) crosses the ABI boundary. For panic=unwind, this is a valid way to let exceptions from one language unwind the stack in another language without terminating the process (as long as the exception is caught in the same language from which it originated); for panic=abort, this will typically abort the process immediately.

• For this initial stabilization, no change is made to the existing ABIs (e.g. “C”), and unwinding across them remains undefined behavior. A future Rust release will amend these ABIs to match the behavior specified in the RFC as the final part in stabilizing this feature (usually aborting at the boundary). Users are encouraged to start using the new unwind ABI variants in their code to remain future proof if they need to unwind across the ABI boundary.

• Version 1.71.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes this time include the C-unwind ABI, an upgrade to musl 1.2, and more.

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.