● 08.08.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 08/08/2023: Incus and PineTab-V

Posted in News Roundup at 4:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• I’ve been using Linux since 1997 and it’s only failed me on one rare occasion. Considering the length of time, that’s an impressive run. Imagine you’ve managed to work with an operating system for nearly 30 years and have had minor problems a handful of times and only one serious issue.

• That’s a win, no matter how you look at it.

• But, during those early years, it wasn’t exactly easy. That’s probably why I became so familiar with the OS very early on… I had to work at it.

• Today’s Linux is not yesterday’s Linux. Now, the platform is incredibly easy to use. There’s no more need to use the command line. There’s no more need to compile your own kernel. There’s no more need to write bash scripts, work with regular expressions, and install your own firmware.

• It’s just so simple now.

• Given that, why aren’t more people using Linux on the desktop?

Server

• The Linux Containers project is excited to announce its latest addition, Incus!

• Incus isn’t a completely new project however, it’s a fork of LXD created by Aleksa Sarai. Aleksa Sarai is most known for his work on runc, umoci and other OpenContainers projects as well as contributions to the Linux kernel.

• But in addition to all that, he’s also been the long time packager of LXD in OpenSUSE. Aleksa created the fork shortly after Canonical’s decision to take LXD away from Linux Containers with the name Incus being introduced immediately following the LXD 5.16 release. This fork was first intended as a personal project, but has since gathered quite a bit of interest both from the community as well as from former LXD contributors.

• After some discussion with Aleksa and a fair bit of encouragement from our community, we have made the decision to take Incus under the umbrella of Linux Containers and will commit to it the infrastructure which was previously made available to LXD.

• The Linux Containers project has announced the addition of Incus, which is a fork of LXD 5.16 started by Aleksa Sarai. Incus was created in response to Canonical’s removal of LXD from Linux Containers.

Applications

• The CLI provides a way of interacting with a computer program where the user (or client) issues commands to the program in the form of successive lines of text (command lines). This way, the user gains full control over the operating system. There are many advantages in using a CLI application. They are generally frugal in using system resources, they are fast in operation, offer great scripting opportunities, and can be extremely powerful and flexible. Typing commands into a terminal or the console may appear mundane, but with the right tools, the command line can be incredibly powerful.

• The whole is greater than the sum of its parts is a very famous quote from Aristotle, a Greek philosopher and scientist. This quote is particularly pertinent to Linux. In my view, one of Linux’s biggest strengths is its synergy. The usefulness of Linux doesn’t derive only from the huge raft of open source (command line) utilities. Instead, it’s the synergy generated by using them together, sometimes in conjunction with larger applications.

• If you want to know more about init systems, it’s important to first understand the systemctl and service commands and their underlying differences.

• service and systemctl are both vital and extremely similar commands in Linux. They’re so similar that it’s easy to wonder what differences there are between them at all—and whether you can use the two commands interchangeably.

• Knowing the finer details about service and systemctl will allow you to work with them seamlessly.

• In Linux, the service command is a wrapper script that allows users to easily configure and interact with system services. It precedes systemd and primarily works with the scripts found in /etc/init.d.

Instructionals/Technical

• Editing the Crontab in a Linux environment is a powerful way to automate repetitive tasks and schedule important commands and scripts to run at specific times or intervals. Crontab is a time-based job scheduler in Linux that allows you to specify when and how frequently tasks should be executed.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• The developers of the systemd-free Linux distribution, Nitrux, have released a new version of the operating system (version 2.9.1) which includes kernel 6.4. This Debian-based distribution is immutable and uses the KDE Plasma desktop environment as a base to form its own unique desktop, called NX Desktop.

• Although this is just a point release, it shifts to the Liquorix Linux kernel, version 6.4.8, the latest KDE software (including KDE Frameworks 5.108 and KDE Gear 23.04.3), and is built against Qt 5.15.5.

• You’ll also find a few new bits, such as the Kernel Boot tool that simplifies the process of booting different kernels. Another addition is the Hardware Probe Tool, which makes hardware detection easier and more reliable. As well, fuse-overlayfs has been added for rootless containers. Finally, you’ll enjoy built-in support for AppImages and a suite of convergent applications (called Maui Apps), such as Index, Nota, Station, VVave, Pix, Clip, Buho, and Shelf.

• If you’re looking for what might well be the most polished and user-friendly Linux distribution on the market, Zorin OS has a new release for you that covers all the bases.

• I’ve been a big fan of Zorin OS for a long time. And although it’s yet to become my everyday operating system, I’ve planned on making the switch for some time. The only thing stopping me is me and someday I’ll get out of my own way and make it happen.

• Why do I like Zorin OS so much? First off, it’s very easy to use. Second, it’s incredibly stable, flexible, beautiful, secure, and has a nice choice of desktop layouts. And if you pay for the Zorin OS Pro license ($39.00 USD), you get even more desktop environments to choose from.

Fedora Family / IBM

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The LXD story has turned into a bit of a soap opera, but one with a happy ending for those who support openness.

• On Friday the LXD project that Ubuntu had removed from community development a month ago was forked as Incus, and then almost immediately the fork was accepted as a project by Linux Containers, LXD’s former home. While this was happening, the head honcho at Canonical/Ubuntu, Mark Shuttleworth, was commenting to a Hacker News post, in what seems to be something of a doomed attempt at damage control.

• This was a neat cut and paste for the folks at Linux Containers. Almost all of the same community people who were in charge of the project when it was Ubuntu’s LXD are in charge at the project as Incus.

• There are a few different reasons why the average person — as opposed to an enthusiast tinkerer — might want to try out one of the many available flavors of free Linux-based operating systems. If someone doesn’t use their computer for much beyond basic tasks like web browsing and word processing, then there’s a decent argument that they might be fine with one of the more user-friendly Linux software distributions (“distros”).

• Some Linux distros, particularly those built to be lightweight, can sometimes be used to get extra life out of an older computer — to the point that there are companies running TV commercials aimed at older customers selling bootable “live” Linux USB sticks for that purpose. Another use case is having bootable live Linux USB drives handy in case of emergency — you can have at least some semblance of a computer in the event of an issue that prevents you from booting into Windows.

• These days, when it comes to introducing Linux to someone who’s never tried it before, the distro that’s usually pointed to is Linux Mint. Linux Mint’s “about” page describes it as “a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.”

• Great news, fellow Linux enthusiasts! Rhino Linux has officially shed its Beta label, unleashing the new Rhino Linux 2023.1. This release is available for x86_64, ARM, Pine64, and Raspberry Pi devices.

• AJ, the primary developer behind Rhino Linux, evolved the project from a simple hobby into an entirely new desktop operating system. Inspired by the initial success of Rolling Rhino Remix, the idea of Rhino Linux was born in October 2022, aiming for a maintainable and practical solution.

Devices/Embedded

• In the long ago times, when phones still flipped and modems sang proudly the songs of their people, I sent away for a set of Slackware CDs and embarked on a most remarkable journey. Back then, running Linux (especially on the desktop) was not a task to be taken lightly. The kernel itself was still in considerable flux — instead of changing some obscure subsystem or adding support for a niche gadget you don’t even own, new releases were unlocking critical capabilities and whole categories of peripherals. I still remember deciding if I wanted to play it safe and stick with my current kernel, or take a chance on compiling the latest version to check out this new “USB Mass Storage” thing everyone on the forums was talking about…

• But modern desktop Linux has reached an incredible level of majority, and is now a viable choice for a great number of computer users. In fact, if you add Android and Chrome OS into the mix, there are millions and millions of people who are using Linux on daily basis and don’t even realize it. These days, the only way to experience that sense of adventure and wonderment that once came pre-loaded with a Linux box is to go out and seek it.

• Which is precisely how it feels using using the Beepy from SQFMI. The handheld device, which was formerly known as the Beepberry before its creators received an all-to-predicable formal complaint, is unabashedly designed for Linux nerds. Over the last couple of weeks playing with this first-run hardware, I’ve been compiling kernel drivers, writing custom scripts, and trying (though not always successfully) to get new software installed on it. If you’re into hacking around on Linux, it’s an absolute blast.

• The PineTab-V is a tablet with a 10.1 inch HD display, at least 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, a detachable keyboard, and a $160 starting price. And it’s also one of the first tablets you can buy that’s powered by a RISC-V processor.

• That makes a tablet with otherwise budget specs pretty exciting… for developers. For the rest of us it’s not actually all that useful yet, because when Pine64 first introduced the tablet in April the company noted that it couldn’t even boot a command-line Linux environment yet. But things have come a long way since then: it’s now possible to boot a Yocto Linux image with a hardware-accelerated KDE Plasma desktop environment.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Obit Dutch free software developer Bram Moolenaar has died. He was 62. His Vim text editor is probably one of the single most widely used Linux programs of all time.

• His family on Saturday announced his passing, appropriately enough on the Vim-announce mailing list. It has resulted in an outpouring of grief across many techie forums and some moving tributes. Moolenaar was a private man, known to the world mainly through his work.

• Vim was not the only program he wrote, but it was certainly the most widely known. A core part of the Unix credo is that everything is a file – and specifically, in most cases, it’s a text file. And text editors are among the most important core parts of any Unix-like operating system.

Programming/Development

• [1]Sourceware has been running for almost 25 years, providing a worry-free, developer friendly home for Free Software core toolchain and developer tool communities. And we would like to keep providing that for the next 25 years.

• That is why in the last couple of years we have started to diversify our hardware partners, setup new services using containers and isolated VMs, investigated secure supply chain issues, added redundant mirrors, created a non-profit home, collected funds, invested in open communication, open office hours and introduced community oversight by a [2]Sourceware Project Leadership Committee with the help from the [3]Software Freedom Conservancy.

• Please [4]participate and let us know what more we (and you!) can do to make Sourceware and all hosted projects a success for the next 25 years.

• Sourceware, the development home for the GNU toolchain and more, is about to celebrate its 25th anniversary and is looking forward to the next 25 years:

Perl / Raku

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Security

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (burp, chromium, ghostscript, openimageio, pdfcrack, python-werkzeug, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (amanda, libopenmpt, llhttp, samba, seamonkey, and xen), Red Hat (thunderbird), Slackware (mozilla and samba), and SUSE (perl-Net-Netmask, python-Django1, trytond, and virtualbox).

• Rhysida is a new ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group that has emerged since May 2023. The group drops an eponymous ransomware via phishing attacks and Cobalt Strike to breach targets’ networks and deploy their payloads. The group threatens to publicly distribute the exfiltrated data if the ransom is not paid. Rhysida is still in early stages of development, as indicated by the lack of advanced features and the program name Rhysida-0.1. The ransomware also leaves PDF notes on the affected folders, instructing the victims to contact the group via their portal and pay in Bitcoin. Its victims are distributed throughout several countries across Western Europe, North and South America, and Australia. They primarily attack education, government, manufacturing, and technology and managed service provider sectors; however, there has been recent attacks against the Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) sector.

• On or about July 7, Karakurt threat actors added Jefferson County Health Center in Iowa to their leak site to pressure them to pay ransom demands.

• Or was it Jefferson County Hospital in Oklahoma that they had hit? Right below their heading claiming it was the Iowa facility, their text indicated it was the similarly named hospital in Oklahoma.

• In an update published just minutes ago following a press conference, the news site also reports that Nuno Perry, Director of Cybersecurity Services for the Regional Government, said the cyberattack was the largest, in terms of scope and impact, recorded in the health sector in the Region, and predicts that recovery of the system will be slow. “It’s not something that can be resolved in a day,” he asserted.

• School leaders, federal officials and technology executives will convene at the White House to discuss the importance of improving schools’ digital security to prevent hackers from shutting down classes and stealing students’ and teachers’ sensitive personal information. The summit will cover topics such as prioritizing the most effective cyber defenses, practicing cyber incident responses, adopting lessons from physical security preparations and pushing education technology vendors to build safer products.

• A team of researchers from British universities has trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keyboard keystrokes recorded using a microphone with an accuracy of 95%.

• When Zoom was used for training the sound classification algorithm, the prediction accuracy dropped to 93%, which is still dangerously high, and a record for that medium.

• Such an attack severely affects the target’s data security, as it could leak people’s passwords, discussions, messages, or other sensitive information to malicious third parties.

• Threat actors such as the operators of the Cl0p ransomware family increasingly exploit unknown and day-one vulnerabilities in their attacks.

Defence/Aggression

Environment

Energy/Transportation

Finance

• In 2021, the average CEO pay grew 1,460% higher than it was in 1978. That’s a lot, even for CEOs.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

Civil Rights/Policing

Monopolies

Patents

Software Patents

Trademarks

• With decision of 6 July 2023 (original German text and English machine translation) the Board of Appeal of the EUIPO (BoA) stated that a 3D trade mark described as a “heart-based bread roll” is devoid of the necessary minimum degree of distinctive character.

Copyrights

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• The absence of pronouns is an exciting space, full of possibilities not dragged down by there being any one (is the word ‘one’ a pronoun in that context?) mucking the landscape with desire, want, and all the rest of the blah blah.

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