● 08.13.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 13/08/2023: KDE Development Report, Debian’s Abuse Culture

Posted in News Roundup at 12:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• Docker containers and VMs are needed to build and maintain software. Docker is used to deploy and scale apps, while VMs are more resource-intensive and can support separate environments.

Applications

• This blog entry provides updated releases information related to modules/components included in each Oracle Cloud Native Environment (OCNE) release.

• Typing tutor software teaches fast and accurate typing through a system of informative lessons and progress tracking. We think it is important that learning should be fun, so we have included some typing games in this feature.

• To provide an insight into the quality of software available, we have compiled a list of 10 useful typing tutors. Hopefully there will be something of interest for anyone looking to improve their typing skills. Here’s our verdict on the software.

Instructionals/Technical

• Want to take your Linux command-line skills to the next level? Here’s everything you need to know to start working with variables.

• If you’re starting your Linux journey, creating and editing files is one of the critical things you’ll be doing, especially if you’re planning to get your hands dirty with shell scripting. One of the most common command-line text editors on Linux is GNU nano, which comes pre-installed on most modern Linux distros.

• WordPress is a comprehensive content management system (CMS) powering a lot of the websites that you visit daily.

• If you’d like to get started developing WordPress websites but are not ready to pay for a server on the cloud, you can run and host your WordPress site locally on your PC. Here’s everything you need to know about installing WordPress on Linux.

• In computing, there are two types of IP addresses, IPv4 and IPv6. IPv6 offers a much larger addressing scheme than IPv4.

• Guest Post: Improving WiFiMon’s configuration and control of WHPs.

• [...]

• Communication between the WAS and the underlying WHPs is possible via the Salt infrastructure management tool. Salt establishes application layer communication among devices, therefore enabling WiFiMon administrators to control and reconfigure WHPs, such as modifying measurement intervals, without physically connecting to them. Moreover, WiFiMon takes advantage of important features provided by Salt. Specifically, by relying on the ZeroMQ message broker, Salt is scalable and allows for reconfiguring the available WHPs in parallel regardless of their total number.

• Suppose, not entirely hypothetically, that your normal DSL Internet connection is down (for example, because the local phone company did something to your line and hasn’t fixed it yet), and you need to get Internet by tethering your Linux desktop machine to your smartphone. The easiest way to do this is to be using a modern Linux desktop along with NetworkManager and so on; at that point you can basically click through the various GUIs to connect to your phone’s hotspot through wifi, a direct USB connection, or BlueTooth, depending on what you have available. This will handle joining the phone’s ad-hoc wifi network, pairing over USB and/or BlueTooth, and all of the other setup you need. However, I don’t use a modern Linux desktop.

• Tailwind started out as a particularly good set of Utility CSS classes. It was notable for being heavily configurable from day one. Its class names were reasonable, and it established certain useful conventions regarding sizing, color systems (very similar to that of Material Design), and lots of other common base settings. Some of these were “borrowed” from old libraries like Bootstrap, others were just created out of the need to buy-into utility CSS wholesale. Early versions of tailwind were horrifically heavy and slow. You’d have to ship megabytes of CSS, for a page that might have a half dozen styled “things” on it. And it was rightly lambasted for this. Utility classes were supposed to make things easier, faster, more convenient, and shipping a JPG worth of unused CSS was not in line with that. Tailwind eventually fixed this, with a generator approach, which would scan your codebase, pull out tailwind classes, and only put them in the generated CSS output. This also let tailwind grow the ability to have arbitrary values, without having to update a configuration file. Now you could do bg-[#ffccff] for a pinkish background, without having to add it to your color scheme. Useful, but dangerous too. Tailwind even sprouted component libraries, built atop tailwind. The tailwind devs have one, called TailwindUI, and there’s an open-source one called Daisy.

• So many people obsess over the size of their JS or CSS, but fail to realize that the bulk of their page is unnecessarily large and not well compressed images.

• Of course, I was one of those people.

• Dark mode is now everywhere (this blog has it). It’s both accessibility-driven and aesthetically pleasing. But it often isn’t the highest benefit feature (and rarely, if ever, a feature that leads to product-market-fit).

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Visual Studio Code on Debian 12. Visual Studio Code (VS Code) has emerged as the code editor of choice for developers around the world. Its versatility, rich feature set, and active community make it an invaluable tool for streamlining coding workflows.

• In the dynamic realm of network troubleshooting, the dig command emerges as a stalwart ally, wielding the power to unravel the intricacies of the domain name system (DNS). For Linux aficionados and seasoned system administrators alike, wielding the dig command with finesse can unlock a world of insights and resolutions.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install KDE Plasma Desktop on Fedora 38. For those of you who didn’t know, KDE Plasma is a powerful, customizable, and user-friendly desktop environment that offers a seamless computing experience.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Webmin on Debian 12. For those of you who didn’t know, Webmin, a versatile web-based system administration tool, redefines the way Linux servers are managed. With its graphical interface, even those without a profound command-line understanding can comfortably navigate complex administrative tasks.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Matomo on Debian 12. Matomo, a powerful web analytics platform, stands out for its privacy-focused approach. By self-hosting Matomo on your Debian 12 server, you retain complete control over your data, ensuring compliance with data protection regulations.

• Managing user permissions is a cornerstone of system administration. In Arch Linux, this is no different. Ensuring the right users have the appropriate permissions is crucial for the security and functionality of your system.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Today I want to discuss in detail our plans for icon theming in Plasma 6. It will be rather technical, but may be of interest if you’re a user, developer, or theme author who wants to know what (if anything) you’ll have to do differently for Plasma 6.

• Let’s start by briefly reviewing the way FreeDesktop-compatible icon themes work. Icons in icon themes are named with standardized names, like edit-copy. A list of standard names can be found here. When an app wants the icon for a “Copy” action, it uses the API of its toolkit to ask for a themed icon named edit-copy. In Qt, this you use QIcon::fromTheme(). If an icon isn’t found by its name, the implementation is required to chop off the last word and try again. So if an app asks for edit-copy-path and an icon with that name isn’t found in the icon theme, it will look for edit-copy and return that instead. Icons can also come in multiple sizes, so that each icon can be optimized for being displayed at different sizes. There’s more to it than that, but it’s enough for now.

• Over time, icon themes started doing something interesting: they changed the visual styling between sizes! For example in many icon themes, the symbolic monochrome style is used for icons’ 16px and 22/24px versions, and a full-color style is used for the 32px and larger versions. Breeze is one such icon theme.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• This book is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0)

• Produced using LibreOffice

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Three of Red Hat’s chief enterprise Linux competitors are banding together to create an alternative to Red Hat-based software, after the company made changes to its terms of use earlier this summer, making it more difficult to access its source code.

• Oracle, SUSE, and CIQ, in a joint statement issued Thursday, said that the new Open Enterprise Linux Association will “encourage the development” of Linux distributions compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux by providing free access to source code.

Debian Family

• Discovered by Daniel Moghimi, “Downfall” (a.k.a. CVE-2022-40982) is a GDS (Gather Data Sampling) hardware vulnerability that allows unprivileged speculative access to data that was previously stored in vector registers.

• Affecting both Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” and Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” systems, this vulnerability allows a user to access and steal data from other users on the same computer.

• There are over 70,000 messages on debian-private. They have gradually been emerging over IPFS. As more evidence appears, it will be added in the appropriate place below. Please bookmark this page and check back from time to time to see what has been added. Follow the independent Debian.News site to keep abreast of Debian disclosures that may impact you.

• Thought exercise: at what point did Debian turn into a cult?

• For setting up subdomain on debian.net, we usually use LDAP Gateway. [1]

• db.debian.org

• I have started to make private posts, accessible only to my Dreamwidth access list.

• If you use dput-ng, you may be familiar with the Twitter hook that tweets a message when uploading a package.

• A similar hook is now available for Mastodon too; if interested, give it a try and comment on the MR

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• India’s Defence Ministry is ditching Microsoft Windows for Ubuntu-based Maya which has been developed by Indian government agencies within six months, and is aimed at preventing malware attacks by cybercriminals

Devices/Embedded

• Let’s face it — Android wasn’t what most of us had in mind when we imagined having Linux running on our phones. While there’s a (relatively) familiar kernel hiding at the core of Google’s mobile operating system, the rest of the environment is alien enough that you can’t run Linux software on it without jumping through some hoops. While that’s fine for most folks, there remains a sizable group of users who still dream of a mobile device that can run a full Linux operating system without any compromises.

• Judging by the work put into the Blackberry Pi, we’re willing to bet that [IMBalENce] falls into that camp. The custom handheld combines the Raspberry Pi Zero, a 320×240 LCD, and the BBQ20KBD keyboard from Solder Party with a 2500 mAh LiPo pouch cell and associated charging circuitry. Optionally, it also supports modules such as the Raspberry Pi Camera, a Real-Time-Clock, a ADS1015 ADC to read the battery voltage, and even a USB hub — although you can’t have all the goodies installed at once as it draws too much current.

• This Raspberry Pi companion robot locomotes with bipedal legs and has integrated AI for advanced image processing.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The Intel 8086 processor started the x86 architecture that is still extensively used today. The 8086 has some quirky characteristics: it is little-endian, has a parity flag, and uses explicit I/O instructions instead of just memory-mapped I/O. It has four 16-bit registers that can be split into 8-bit registers, but only one that can be used for memory indexing. Surprisingly, the reason for these characteristics and more is compatibility with a computer dating back before the creation of the microprocessor: the Datapoint 2200, a minicomputer with a processor built out of TTL chips. In this blog post, I’ll look in detail at how the Datapoint 2200 led to the architecture of Intel’s modern processors, step by step through the 8008, 8080, and 8086 processors.

• So in this post we’ll explore the loader routine, decrypt and extract it, figure out how the copy protection is implemented and work around it, and then pull out the payload it reads for a faster start. While we’re at it, let’s look briefly at the program itself, an interesting example of Forth programming “in the large” on 1980′s home computers.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• I started using Mastodon back in November, and it’s the Twitter alternative where I’ve been spending most of my time recently, mostly because the Fediverse is where a lot of the Linux nerds seem to be right now.

• I’ve found Mastodon quite a bit more confusing than Twitter because it’s a distributed system, so here are a few technical things I’ve learned about it over the last 10 months. I’ll mostly talk about what using a single-person server has been like for me, as well as a couple of notes about the API, DMs and ActivityPub.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Tor Browser 13.0a2 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• This release updates Firefox to 115.1.0esr, including bug fixes, stability improvements and important security updates. We also backported the Android-specific security updates from Firefox 116.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Either way, everyone had to agree: we’d outgrown our old, naïve implementation. Onward and upward! We can do hard things!

• In situations like this, presented with a dazzling array of next-generation architecture options that can be built to last us through the decade, it’s easy to forget what our goal was: to get database performance under control.

Education

• With more than 20,000 conference attendees spending the best part of a week attending classes to hone security skills, and talks about the latest exploits, you’d expect the network to be under constant assault. Attacks do happen, but as one of the NOC crew explained to The Register, not as often as you might think.

• “It’s very different than most environments, because when you look at the environments that you have, there’s something to protect,” said Dave Glover, who works by day on the RSA Netwitness Platform. “You need to protect your cloud assets, maybe text databases, files, blah, blah, blah.

• “Here, there’s nothing. There’s nothing to really protect outside of the registration network.”

• Hundreds of companies and organizations showcased their cybersecurity products and services this week at the 2023 edition of the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

• To help cut through the clutter, the SecurityWeek team is publishing a digest summarizing some of the announcements made by vendors at Black Hat USA 2023, including new products and services, updates to existing offerings, reports, and other initiatives.

• Experienced whitewater rafting practitioners know that when they reach a bend in the river and hear the sound of crashing water but can’t see what’s ahead, it’s a good time to pull to the nearest bank and scout the course. Amid the current explosion of generative artificial intelligence use cases, the cybersecurity industry is having its whitewater moment.

• That moment was on full display during the Black Hat 2023 gathering of cybersecurity researchers in Las Vegas this week. Multiple presenters spoke about the rapidly changing AI landscape in terms characterized more by questions than answers.

Programming/Development

• If a system is easy to test, it’s usually easy to work with — easy to extend, easy to debug, easy to refactor. Maybe because adding tests is a form of extending, debugging, and refactoring a system.

• Here are some options.

• People keep lamenting how lackluster Qt’s SVG renderer is. It leads to poorly rendered icons and wallpapers and it mostly only implements the SVG Tiny specification. As a weekend project I put together a resvg based image handler replacement. It was super easy because resvg is amazing!

• …widely used by (currently) 1092 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 30.1 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 545 times according

• This release brings bugfix upstream release 12.6.1. Conrad release 12.6.0 when CRAN went on summer break. I rolled it up ran the full reverse-depenency check against the now more than 1000 packages. And usage from one those revealed a corner-case bug (of not always ‘flattening’ memory for sparse matrices to zero values) so 12.6.1 followed. This is what was uploaded today. And as I prepared it earlier in the week as CRAN reopened, Conrad released a new 12.6.2. However, its changes are only concerned with settings for Armadillo-internal use of its random number generators (RNGs). And as RcppArmadillo connects Armadillo to the RNGs provided by R, the upgrade does not affect R users at all. However it is available in the github repo, in the Rcpp drap repo and at r-universe.

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