● 07.31.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 31/07/2023: EasyOS 5.4.9 and More New Releases

Posted in News Roundup at 7:04 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• We cover user groups that are running in Georgia. This article forms part of our Linux Around The World series.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Two important news stories, plus our thoughts on GNOME’s new windowing proposal and the Framework 16.

Kernel Space

Applications

• Everyone’s familiar with Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Vivaldi, and it’s tempting to use one of these well-known apps as your go-to window on the web.

• But browser development in the Linux space isn’t limited to the big four, and you have the freedom to use whatever browser you choose.

Instructionals/Technical

• Sometimes it’s just faster and easier to use the command line on Linux. Who needs a GUI, anyway?

• Want to try Linux without installing it on a PC? Here’s how to install Ubuntu 22.04 in VirtualBox.

• FlatPress is a free and open-source blogging engine written in PHP language. FlatPress stores all its content on text files, so it does not require a database. In this tutorial. I am going to explain how to install FlatPress on Ubuntu.

• Roadiz is a free and open-source content management system based on a node system. In this tutorial, we will learn how to install Roadiz on Debian server.

• Chromium is an open source web browser, that you can use on OpenSUSE.

• Chromium is available on the OpenSUSE’s repository, and therefore we can install it on OpenSUSE directly from the terminal, or by using YaST software, which is the default package manager on OpenSUSE.

• In this article, discover the intriguing history of the YUM package manager, from its rise to its decline, leading to its eventual replacement by DNF, a modern solution for package management.

• Tiki Wiki is a free open-source content management system (CMS) groupware platform written entirely in PHP programming language and deployed on Linux on Apache/Nginx web servers, PHP, and MySQL database as backend.

• There are a few ways to check your Laptop’s battery health in Linux. Here are a few methods that use the upower and acpi commands to check your Laptop’s battery health in Linux, such as battery percentage, battery vendor name, current battery state, charge cycles, and more.

• One thing that drives IT admins bonkers with Docker is its complex onion-layered infrastructure.

• Are you using Ubuntu, but you don’t know which version of Ubuntu you are using?

• Finding the version of Ubuntu is easy, and you can use GUI or Terminal to check information about your system.

• MyBB, formerly known as MyBulletinBoard, is a flexible, free, open-source CMS that can be used to set up online forum portals or discussion boards.

• Apache Kafka is a free and open-source streaming platform used for streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications. Compared to ActiveMQ and RabbitMQ, Kafka has better throughput, built-in partitioning, replication, and fault-tolerance.

Games

• It’s often said that Linux isn’t a platform for gamers. It’s not true of course, and Linux gamers have access to the best AAA games available.

• And if you have some spare time, but don’t want to fire up the latest open-world, immersive gore-fest, you can open a terminal and have fun with these command-line games for Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME developers are “rethinking” the Activities button that appears by default in GNOME Shell’s Top Bar.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Another one! Small changes since 5.4.8, but good ones. Release

• https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/kirkstone/2023/5.4.9/release-notes.htm

• If you are new to EasyOS, please read the 5.4 announcement:

• https://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/kirkstone/2023/5.4.9/

• https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?p=95153#p95153

• Last month, we made Kodi v20.1 available for all supported OSMC devices. As mentioned before, all devices supported by OSMC on Kodi v19 remain supported for Kodi v20.

• Since then, we’ve been working hard on a number of bug fixes as well as improving support for our soon to be released new version of our flagship device: Vero V.

• The status of the 4MLinux 43.0 series has been changed to STABLE. Edit your documents with LibreOffice 7.5.5 and GNOME Office (AbiWord 3.0.5, GIMP 2.10.34, Gnumeric 1.12.55), surf the Internet with Firefox 115.0.2 and Chrome 115.0.5790.110, send emails via Thunderbird 115.0.1, enjoy your music collection with Audacious 4.3.1, watch your favorite videos with VLC 3.0.18 and SMPlayer 23.6.0, play games powered by Mesa 23.1.1 and Wine 8.12. You can also setup the 4MLinux LAMP Server (Linux 6.1.33, Apache 2.4.57, MariaDB 10.6.14, PHP 5.6.40, PHP 7.4.33, and PHP 8.1.19.). Perl 5.36.0, Python 2.7.18, Python 3.11.3, and Ruby 3.1.4 are also available.

• We’re thrilled to report that Zorin OS 16 has been downloaded over 5.3 million times, all in under two years after its initial release. Thank you all for helping to make this the biggest release of Zorin OS ever!

• Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Zorin OS 16.3. It’s packed with improvements that elevate your computing experience even further.

• We are pleased to announce the latest NST release: “NST 38 SVN:13644″. This release is based on Fedora 38 using Linux Kernel: “kernel-6.3.12-200.fc38.x86_64″. This release brings the NST distribution on par with Fedora 38.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• For a while Dirk Mueller was working in the background to get a sponsored CDN subscription. Thanks to his effort Fastly.com has agreed to sponsor the openSUSE project with bandwidth. We primarily intend to use it to improve the reachability (latency) of download.opensuse.org in various areas of the world, but of course can expand it to other usecases as well.

• openSUSE-repos simplifies openSUSE repository management by utilizing Repository Index Service (RIS) for core distribution repositories and its latest update switches users to the new cdn.opensuse.org.

• Change just landed in Tumbleweed, openSUSE Leap 15.5 users will receive it in the next few days via a maintenance update. The change will be available also as part of Leap Micro 5.5. Users who don’t want to wait can get it from Base:System/openSUSE-repos.

Fedora Family / IBM

• IBM-owned open source vendor Red Hat initially rejected a patch for a vulnerability in iperf3 which was submitted by a developer of RHEL clone AlmaLinux, only agreeing to merge it after a lot of jaw.

Debian Family

• There is ongoing debate about whether the average German citizen knew anything about the Holocaust while it was in progress. If they did know, there remains a question about the exact point in time, for example, was it known in 1942 or only in 1943? Wikipedia has an article dedicated to the very question of how much the German population knew and when.

• Brunhilde Pomsel was the secretary of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Despite her proximity to the Nazi leadership, she is one of many government employees who denied any knowledge of what her boss was doing. Is this plausible?

• In fact, we can see that the Nazis went to great lengths to cultivate a culture of silence. They began doing this in the early days of their rule. The Schriftleitergesetz was introduced in October 1933. This was a Code of Conduct for the newspapers and journalists. (article in English and original legislation in German)

• The reports about Schriftleitergesetz give many details about the everyday practical impact of the law. For example, every journalist had to do a new training course and exam. The most significant thing to note about Schriftleitergesetz is that journalists could be arrested in the same manner as rapists and murderers.

• Many were not willing to tolerate that risk: The Guardian was banned from Germany. Other newspapers chose to shut down or work from abroad.

• [...]

• The recent demise of the Red Hat source code makes the debian-private archives particularly relevant. The archives contain many of the early discussions about the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the relationships between Debian, OSI, SPI and Red Hat.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• UBPorts has just released Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-2 based on Ubuntu 20.04 with three new phones supported namely the Fairphone 3, the Volla Phone X23, and F(x)tec Pro1 X with the latter being introduced in 2020 in a crowdfunding campaign claiming Ubuntu Touch support.

• Ubuntu Touch was initially an initiative by Canonical for desktop/mobile convergence, but when the company decided to refocus its efforts on cloud and IoT, the UBPorts community took over and eventually outed the first stable Ubuntu Touch release in June 2017. Work has continued since then and with the Ubuntu Touch 20.04 OTA-2 release, the community-supported distribution now supports 15 smartphones with the Fairphone 4, Google Pixel 3a and 3a XL, Oneplus 5 and 5T, OnePlus 6 and 6T, Vollaphone and Vollaphone X, Vollaphone 22, Xiaomi Mi A2, Xiaomi Poco M3, Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 and 7 Pro, besides the three new mobile devices added to OTA-2.

Devices/Embedded

• The Boardcon is a Single Board Computer based on the Rockchip RK3566 and optimized for AI and Industrial applications. The SBC includes multiple peripherals including a Gigabit Ethernet port, multiple display ports and dual camera interfaces.

• The SBC3566 incorporates the PICO3566 System-on-Module which was advertised as a drop-in replacement for the Raspberry Pi CM3+.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• While the Cookie Banner Reduction and Quick Actions in address bar features are once again missing from the final release, Firefox 116 is here with an improved Picture-in-Picture mode that now features the volume slider so you can more easily change the volume while watching videos in the pop-up window.

• Also new in Firefox 116 is the ability to edit existing text annotations, the ability to copy any file from your operating system and paste it into Firefox, and a new “Learn More” link in the update notification prompt that lets English locale users access the release notes.

Programming/Development

• Text generation web UI is software that offers a web user interface for a variety of large language models such as LLaMA, llama.cpp, GPT-J, OPT, and GALACTICA.

• Hello all, hope you’re doing well. This is my week 9 report for my project “Porting Gentoo’s packages to modern C”

• Similar to last week, I picked up bugs at random and started submitting patches. But this time I made sure to check out the upstream and send in patches whenever possible, if it turned out to be difficult or I couldn’t find upstream I made sure to make a note about it in the PR either via commit message or through a separate comment. This way it’ll help my Sam keep track of things and my progress.

• In many applications, completing more than a single update as an atomic unit (transaction) is needed to preserve data integrity. This installment of the ongoing Node.js Reference Architecture series covers the Node.js reference architecture team’s experience with integrating transactions into your application to satisfy this requirement.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• In the penultimate chapter of the Bash Basics series, learn about for, while and until loops.

Standards/Consortia

• In Illinois (known as STATE OF ILL on your tax return), you have to re-certify for any Medicaid program every year.

• Their Web site, ABE, is a giant piece of shit designed by some crooked contractor who was obviously wanting to get “support ticket” revenue from STATE OF ILL forever.

• Anyway, it won’t just be Medicaid cases that deal with this soon.

• [...]

• The STATE OF ILL controls the power company and so as if what goes on in Ukraine disrupting world energy markets and Biden’s shitty “green” energy plan wasn’t driving your bill high enough already, the STATE OF ILL forced them to sign a contract with Microsoft Azure, and move everything over.

• Now it shits out diarrhea “HTML” and bogus self-contradicting “JavaScript” meant for GULAGCRASH (Chrome) and Microsoft’s ALSOGULAGCRASH (Edge).

• So I went back to paying my bill through the mail, with a stamp, and writing down my credit card number on the payment coupon.

• I’ve blogged before about Microsoft deals with STATE OF ILL, to the point where interacting with PUBLIC courts, you get warned that if you don’t use Microsoft’s ALSOGULAGCRASH (Edge) to edit PDFs, your petition could be denied.

• It’s not like people using standards-compliant Free Software to deal with PDF court forms deserve to be taken seriously as members of the public and taxpayers, right?

Leftovers

Science

Hardware

• Got an old router gathering dust in a drawer? Power it up – we’ll show you in six easy steps how to adjust its settings to improve your wi-fi signal

• US smartphone shipments in the second quarter fell by 24% year-on-year, surpassing the fall for global shipments for the period which was 11%, the technology analyst firm Counterpoint Research says.

• e-con Systems See3CAM_24CUG a full HD color global shutter USB 3.1 Gen 1 camera based on an Onsemi AR0234CS CMOS image sensor capable of capturing moving scenes at up to 120 fps. This global shutter camera is especially useful for robotics and other applications that may require a high frame rate such as Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMR), gesture recognition, drones, barcode scanners, factory automation, conveyor monitoring cameras, and traffic monitoring systems. e-con Systems sent a See3CAM_24CUG USB global shutter camera sample to CNX Software for review. I’ll go through an unboxing before testing in Ubuntu with both an AMD Ryzen 7 2700U laptop and a Raspberry Pi 4 single board computer. It happens to be based on the same sensor as the e-CAM20_CURB camera for Raspberry Pi 4 that we reviewed last year.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

Security

• Military and civilian power grids, water supplies and communications may be threatened: New York Times

Privacy/Surveillance

Defence/Aggression

War in Ukraine

Environment

• Phoenix endured its 31st straight day of temperatures of at least 110°F Sunday, as a California wildfire spread into Nevada and another blaze threatened border communities in Washington state and Canada.

• Tens of thousands of people were evacuated from high-risk areas of Beijing and another northern city as much of China was lashed by torrential rain on Sunday. Deadly storm Doksuri has been sweeping northwards over China since Friday, when it careened into southern Fujian province after battering the Philippines as a typhoon.

• Phoenix sizzled through its 31st consecutive day of at least 110 degrees and other parts of the country grappled Sunday with record temperatures after a week that saw significant portions of the U.S. population subject to extreme heat.

Finance

• American trucking company Yellow Corporation shut down its operations Sunday, just short of its 100th anniversary. It comes after the company conducted layoffs and stopped taking in new shipments. Yahoo Finance Reporter Dani Romero discusses Yellow’s potential bankruptcy filing and the impact it would have on its employees.

• When U.S. data-processing company CloudFactory first set up operations in Nepal over a decade ago, it made some lofty promises. The company’s founder and CEO, Mark Sears, said in 2014 that he wanted to alleviate poverty in the country by building skills and creating jobs. Fast forward to 2022, and Sears was laying off Nepali staff by the dozens — via a video he posted on Slack.

• Like most employees at CloudFactory’s Kathmandu office, 40-year-old Kumar first heard about the layoffs through this 10-minute video. An hour later, senior management informed him that he had been let go and had one hour to accept the severance package they were offering. “I never got to hand over work, never got to say goodbye,” Kumar, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym as he feared retribution from the company, told Rest of World. “It came as a shock.”

• Accenture plans up to 890 job cuts at its Irish operation. The layoffs come on top of 400 cuts already announced by the services giant earlier this year.

• Accenture employs over 6,500 people in Ireland, bringing its employment reduction in the downturn to almost 20pc.

• It was heavily impacted by operations cuts at tech multinationals such as Meta, which has let over a third of its workforce go in the last year.

• Staff were informed today, a company spokesperson told Independent.ie.

• The management consultancy services company informed staff of the redundancies today – just months after letting 400 others go.

• The multinational group has claimed that its Irish business, which currently employs around 6,500 people, continues to perform strongly.

• The latest job losses have seen Accenture cut around 20 per cent of its business in Ireland so far this year.

• Global consultancy firm, Accenture will cut hundreds of additional jobs from its Irish workforce, marking its second round of mass layoffs since the start of this year.

• Cutting 400 jobs in March, the company was largely impacted by layoffs at tech giant, Meta, which has cut around 900 Irish jobs in total since November last year.

• Kape Technologies, the cybersecurity firm that owns ExpressVPN, has cut its workforce by around 12%, affecting various departments across the company. The layoffs came as the number of tech companies implementing cuts passed the 900-mark over the weekend.

• “To ensure we are set up in the long term to continue providing our customers with the best protection in the industry, we recently conducted an organizational restructuring. Following a careful evaluation, this included the difficult decision to implement a reduction in force, resulting in approximately 180 employees, around 12% of our workforce, being made redundant across the business,” Kape Technologies said in a statement Saturday.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• I was just thinking about how the bluebird social network was rebranded, and how it now feels legitimate to give it a place in the museum of dead social networks…

• Billionaire Elon Musk says Twitter – the social media company he is in the midst of rebranding as “X” – will keep its headquarters in San Francisco despite the “doom loop” the city is facing as big-name businesses head for the exits.

• Twitter/X quietly reactivates Kanye West’s account, but reports say he will be unable to monetize his account, and no ads will appear alongside his posts. X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has reinstated the account of Ye, the disgraced rapper and business mogul formerly known as Kanye West.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• A federal judge has dismissed former President Trump’s $475 million defamation lawsuit against CNN, in which he accused the network of associating him with Hitler by describing his false 2020 election claims as “the big lie.”

Monopolies

• The long-tail process by which the UK voted to buy Activision-Blizzard a Microsoft buyout has made a step forward. The UKs Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) was able to move the transaction further in the month of April but then reopened the transaction again as it was despite some more enquiries of Microsoft, which had recently been released by the CMA. The government is asking for further opinions on this issue.

• A request for comment specificly asks questions of a squander of what there has been in the resuscence for the [report of the CMA’s latest] report. If people would like to ponder on the pond, they may not be able to do so until the end of the year 4th, even if the CMA has requested that the statutory deadline from August 29th make any final decision.

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