● 08.21.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 21/08/2023: Bodhi Linux 7.0 Released and LibreOffice 7.6

Posted in News Roundup at 1:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• This week we celebrated Debian’s 30th anniversary, enjoyed new OpenMandriva Lx and Devuan GNU+Linux releases, and updated our systems to the latest GNOME, KDE, and Budgie releases.

• On top of that, we took a first look at the new features coming to the OBS Studio 30 app. Below, you can read this week’s hottest news and access all the distro and package downloads in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for August 20th, 2023.

Server

• This blog discusses two new features in Kubernetes 1.28 to improve Jobs for batch users: Pod replacement policy and Backoff limit per index.

• These features continue the effort started by the Pod failure policy to improve the handling of Pod failures in a Job.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Josh and Kurt talk about the HashiCorp license change and copyright problems in open source. This isn’t the first and won’t be the last time we see this, but it’s very likely open source developers and communities will view any project that has a contributor license agreement as a problem moving forward.

• On this episode of This Week in Linux (230), want to win a Framework laptop? Well if you have some wallpaper making skills then KDE would like to have a word with you. We’ve got a lot of distro news this week from Debian, OpenMandriva, Devuan and more.

• Can we build an indestructible server that stands up to the test of giving out root login to the Internet?

• **gobject-introspection** , **grantlee** , **graphene** , **graphite2** , and

• **gsettings-desktop-schemas** from the **l** software series of Slackware..

• shasum -a256=4c673667d17a597d3b68d3674ad10f1d5d9fb0d3632002ab4ad3c8dc010e8d03

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds has released the 6.5-rc7 kernel prepatch, which looks to be the final release candidate before the likely release of Linux 6.5 next Sunday.

Graphics Stack

• Forward-looking: The AI boom has companies scrambling for Nvidia’s H100 and A100 GPUs, which are in short supply and cost tens of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, a modder has discovered and shared a method of performing AI tasks on hardware available for less than one percent of that price.

• A modder recently published instructions for coaxing AMD APUs that cost around $100 into running AI tasks usually associated with far more expensive graphics cards. If it catches on, the method could significantly expand the number of people who can at least experiment with AI.

• The most prominent players in AI today operate tools like large language models using H100 and A100 graphics cards that Nvidia sells for $25,000 to $30,000 (reportedly a 1,000% profit margin for the GPU manufacturer), and they can’t get enough of them. Meanwhile, smaller-scale AI operations on consumer hardware typically involve high-end cards costing at least several hundred dollars.

Applications

• English dictionary apps are useful for anyone who needs to look up the definition of a word quickly and conveniently. Some advantages of using dictionary apps include: [...]

Instructionals/Technical

• Warp is a Gnome app that allows you to share files on Ubuntu.

• Perl, a high-level programming language renowned for its flexibility and robust text manipulation capabilities, was developed by Larry Wall and introduced in 1987. Upon its release, this tool gained widespread popularity across various domains, notably in scripting, text processing, system administration, web development, and beyond.

• In this article, you will learn how to use the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform from the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Marketplace to automatically provision GCP resources.

• To use SQL in Elasticsearch, use the “XPOST” API, and pass the Elasticsearch URL and “_sql” document. Now, use SQL query in JSON format as a value of “query”.

• cat command would be on your fingers without any restriction or hesitation if you are going to be a Linux user…

• The chage command stands for ‘Change Age’.

• The ls command is one of the basic and most used commands that any Linux user/you should know…

• $ chage -E -1 -m 0 -M -1 -W -1 user01

• A transparent proxy server, often simply referred to as a “transparent proxy”, is a proxy server that intercepts the network traffic without requiring any configuration or action on the client’s end. It’s “transparent” in the sense that the client is often unaware of its presence.

• I first attempted to do this over SSH using scp and rsync, but for some reason (even though both computers could get 940 Mbps up and down to speedtest or Cloudflare), that maxed out around 312 Mbps (about 39 MB/s). I even tunneled iperf3 through SSH and could only get a maximum around 400 Mbps. I’m not sure if it was something on the ISP level (either Bell Canada or AT&T throttling non-HTTP traffic?), but the CPU on both machines was only hitting 10-13% max, so I don’t think it was an inherent limitation of SSH encryption.

• Most applications communicate over a TCP or UDP port. Ports 0-1023 are usually privileged and require administrator or superuser access to bind a network socket to an IP with the corresponding port. But anything over 1024 is up for grabs. IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) can “reserve” ports for specific applications — but this is only a formality; users and applications are free to use whatever port they wish.

• The ideas of Unix are not just about how things work; they’re also about how people should interact with the system. For example, consider Rob Pike’s thread about the Unix file model over on the Fediverse, which is at its core all about how people interact with ‘files’, rather than how the technology works. The ideas of Unix admit a wide variety of ways to interact with Unix, not necessarily through a command line, but the ideas tend to shine through all of them; see, for example, Russ Cox’s “A Tour of Acme” (YT). I suspect you can readily see various Unix ideas in GUI form in Acme, although it’s a GUI program.

• Kubectl is a command-line utility in Kubernetes used to run commands against Kubernetes clusters. You can use it to perform a wide range of tasks, including deploying applications/microservices, viewing and managing resources, inspecting log files, and so much more.

• In this tutorial, we feature commonly used kubectl commands for managing a Kubernetes (K8S) cluster.

Games

• The most important addition to the Box64 version 0.2.4 is that Dynarec now works on RISC-V. This facilitates faster operations of x86_64 Linux software on RISC-V 64-bit system and makes simplistic games, such as Stardew Valley, playable on Vision Five 2-based devices. Additionally, the new version introduces several fixes for Steam, enhanced multi-threading capabilities, and broader improvements for emulation across various CPU architectures.

• After a while, I found that it works better on KDE on X11. In fact, KWin in general feels faster and more responsive under X11.

• So, possibly XWayland issues? Older versions of stuff than Fedora had? Who cares, I just want my game to work.

• The open source compatibility layer Wine has a brand new development release available. Here’s what’s new and changed in Wine 8.14. We’re over half-way through the year now, so in around another ~5 months we’re likely to see the stable Wine 9.0 release.

• Valve has rolled out two updates for the Beta Branch of the Steam Deck within two days, August 17th and August 19th. The August 17th update addresses General, Library, and Desktop mode issues. While the August 19th update addresses Desktop Mode and Steam Input issues. Full list of changes will be added below, separated by day with links to each list.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE), developed by the Deepin project, aims to provide an elegant, user-friendly, and visually appealing computing experience. Its modern design, smooth animations, and attention to detail in aesthetics and functionality characterize it.

• At the same time, the desktop environment is one of the few not presented as an official Ubuntu flavor. Although an unofficial release, UbuntuDDE Remix fills this gap, pleasing lovers of aesthetics.

• More than a year after its previous 22.04 release, the wait is over as the latest iteration of this Linux distribution hits the scene, blending the power of Ubuntu with the elegance of the Deepin Desktop Environment.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Plasma 6 will require users to double-click on files and folders to open them (by default; the setting is configurable). Controversial change?

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME is one of the most popular desktop environments for Linux, and it’s used in Ubuntu, Fedora, and other desktop distributions. The next major release, GNOME 45, is now officially in beta testing ahead of its inclusion in Ubuntu 23.10 and other operating systems.

• GNOME 44 was released in March of this year, with a reorganized Settings app, updates to the Files app, a GTK4 overhaul for the default web browser, and other helpful changes. GNOME 45 is following up on that with a few changes to the core applications. The Loupe app developed by Christopher Davis and Sophie Herold is the new default image viewer in GNOME, replacing the Eye of GNOME viewer that has been included for years. The new app will still be called “Image Viewer” in the desktop environment to avoid confusion. There’s also a new camera app replacing the long-running Cheese tool: Snapshot, developed by Maximiliano Sandoval and Jamie Murphy, which will be branded as “Camera.”

Distributions and Operating Systems

• So last time I posted I was able to say that I got the client side for OpenVPN on Haiku working but not the server but I am proud to say that now both the server and client work extremely well now on Haiku I was able to get the server from not working to working and was able to get the latency for the entire VPN operation down from 1000ms average to anywhere between 2ms to 9ms (that’s a caveat as that is without blocking which will be discussed later). I had a check in my tun_read() function wrong where I wanted any side that is non-blocking to send a signal to the other side’s condition variable that something is now in their queue but had it backwards with a not statement in there. The simplest mistakes slip the mind huh :p Anyway, the server also follows suit with the faster latency so now that the read and write functions are basically complete, lets get on with what I was dealing with for the past 2ish weeks.

Reviews

• MiniOS seems to do what it sets out to accomplish, being a live desktop distribution with a variety of editions in different sizes. It provides a portable, desktop flavour of Debian which can be quite minimal or fairly robust. While I found MiniOS wasn’t able to boot on my laptop, it did a fine job in a virtual machine and offered a smooth experience with no surprises. With this in mind, it’s tempting to declare “mission accomplished” and give MiniOS a gold star.

• On the other hand, MiniOS’s website says the project has been around for over a decade (in one form or another) and, to date, there is very little in the way of useful documentation or infrastructure. There is almost no documentation on the distribution’s concept of modules or setting up a configuration file. There is very little in terms of explaining what these optional modules are or why we would want to use them compared to other package/service formats. The discussion forum is almost empty, which feels weird for a project claiming over a decade of experience.

• The current release (at the time of writing) is still based on Debian 11 which means the most up to date software in MiniOS is about three years old. This might not be a problem, exactly, but it does make the distribution look dated compared to some other live desktop distributions.

• None of these concerns I mentioned is a critical problem, the distribution still accomplishes its core goal. However, it feels like there are some pieces missing – user support, documentation, newer hardware support – which could make running the distribution go from merely usable to a powerful, customized experience.

• I’d also like to acknowledge that it seems the project quietly publishes new ISO files semi-regularly. There have been a few updates in the week I’ve been writing this overview of the project. So it looks like development is quite active. It’s not always clear if the new snapshots are offering complete new versions of the distribution or minor fixes as there do not appear to be any release notes. However, I am hoping this activity indicates there were be more improvements and refreshed documentation in the future.

New Releases

• Just after releasing Core Update 178 which was added into our release cycle to address Intel’s and AMD’s latest CPU vulnerabilities, we are back on track with our regular schedule. This release features Indirect Branch Tracking for user space, a completely rewritten ExtraHD amongst a large number of package updates and the usual bunch of bug fixes.

• This technology uses a CPU extension which (if available) will check if a program returns from a function or jump correctly. If not, for example in case of injected code, an exception is being raised and the program is being terminated.

• We’re thrilled to announce the arrival of Bodhi Linux 7.0, a culmination of months of dedicated development by a small team of developers. From performance enhancements to cutting-edge updates, let’s dive into what makes this release a must-have for users who want a lightweight Linux desktop experience.

• Learn what’s new.

• Bodhi Linux 7.0 comes more than 2 years after Bodhi Linux 6.0 and introduces a new flavor called “s76” that features a more recent kernel, namely Linux 6.4, packaged by System76 for those who want cutting-edge performance.

• The standard ISO image is powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series for those looking for stability. Both ISOs are based on the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series with support for Ubuntu backports in the sources list. This major release also enables kernel updates by default.

• The long-awaited Bodhi Linux 7.0 release has finally arrived, and it should make big waves in the open-source community. Built on the solid foundation of Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish), Bodhi 7.0 represents a significant evolution in the realm of Linux distributions. With a strong emphasis on improving user experience, performance, and maintaining its core values of minimalism and customization, this release aims to redefine what Linux can offer to its users. In a world dominated by proprietary operating systems like Microsoft Windows, Bodhi Linux 7.0 emerges as a breath of fresh air, presenting itself as a compelling alternative. The release boasts an impressive array of enhancements and changes that cater to both newcomers and seasoned Linux enthusiasts.

BSD

• The smartest thing I did all trip was attend the ’new to BSDcan’ intro meeting run by Michael W. Lucas on Thursday evening. Michael described BSDcan traditions and expectations and gave a general sense of how the conference usually plays out. Toward the end of the meeting, Michael facilitated attaching newbies to veteran BSDcan attendees. I was fortunate to be assigned to Peter Hansteen (Book of pf fame) who showed me the ropes and made introductions for me at the pub.

• I am pleased to report that the conference itself was very enjoyable. The conference takes place in multiple locations. All of which were an easy walk from my hotel.

Gentoo Family

• This article is a summary of all the changes made on Automated Gentoo System Updater project during weeks 11 and 12 of GSoC.

• Project is hosted on GitHub ( gentoo_update and mobile app).

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Marcel holds 79% of the SUSE shares, and EQT Private Equity has announced that it will launch a voluntary public purchase offer to the remaining shareholders prior to the delisting. The offering price for those shares is EUR 16.00.

• Both the SUSE Management and Supervisory boards support this move as it will allow the company to shift its focus to its operation priorities and long-term strategies.

• SUSE’s CEO, Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, said of the move, “I believe in the strategic opportunity of taking the company private – it gives us the right setting to grow the business and deliver on our strategy with the new leadership team in place.” He continued, “EQT Private Equity’s and SUSE’s partnership in a private setting has been fruitful before and we are excited about the long-term potential of the company and our continued collaboration”.

Fedora Family / IBM

• In IBM Red Hat’s book, anyone who isn’t currently coughing up a subscription fee to use RHEL is “Freeloading”. Basically, they see you as a parasite.

• This word doesn’t just apply to a person who grabs Fedora and uses it on their laptop and never files bug reports or anything. It applies more broadly to organizations that deploy a free Enterprise Linux clone to their business because they think they can self-support.

Devuan Family

• Devuan 5.0 “Daedalus” is derived from Debian 12 “Bookworm”, but with the controversial systemd init replaced by the user’s choice of sysvinit, openrc or runit.

• The latest release of the distro, codenamed Daedalus, came out at the start of the week, just shortly before Debian’s 30th birthday. Being based off Debian 12 “Bookworm”, released in June, its many components inherit the versions included in that version: for instance, it uses Linux kernel 6.1, which for now is the newest long-term support kernel version.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• In the realm of virtualisation and cloud computing, the hypervisor is a critical component that enables the seamless operation of multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single host. While virtualisation is a technology, the hypervisor is its actual implementation. In this beginner’s guide, we will explore the fundamentals of hypervisors, their types, and how they differ from container runtimes. We will also review some of the leading hypervisors available today.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Here in the West, power going out is an unusual event. But in more remote regions like the Himalayas, reliable electricity isn’t a given. A group of local craftspeople, researchers, and operators in Nepal have worked together to devise a modular waterwheel system.

• Christopher Barnatt with ExplainingComputers gives us an up close look at the new Lichee Pi 4A RISC-V computer.

• And every sound has it’s own characteristics. Like the train tracks that run outside my office: they transmit sound through the earth, meaning if I wanted to soundproof my room from that, I’d need to spend thousands of dollars isolating the floor entirely.

• Google has just released MediaPipe Solutions for no-code/low-code on-device machine learning for the Raspberry Pi (and an iOS SDK) following the official release in May for Android, web, and Python, but it’s been years in the making as we first wrote about the MediaPipe project back in December 2019. The Raspberry Pi port is an update to the Python SDK and supports audio classification, face landmark detection, object detection, and various natural language processing tasks. MediaPipe Solutions consists of three components: MediaPipe Tasks (low-code) to create and deploy custom end-to-end ML solution pipelines using cross-platform APIs and libraries MediaPipe Model Maker (low-code) to create custom ML models MediaPipe Studio (no-code) webpage to create, evaluate, debug, benchmark, prototype, and deploy production-level solutions.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Antananarivo, Madagascar – August 20th, 2023

• pgBadger is a PostgreSQL performance analyzer, built for speed with fully detailed reports based on your PostgreSQL log files.

• pgBadger 12.2 was released today, this release of pgBadger fixes some issues reported by users since last release and adds two new features: [...]

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Highlights of LibreOffice 7.6 include support for zoom gestures on touchpads in the main view, support for document themes, along with the ability to import and export theme definitions for ODF and OOXML documents, as well as many improvements to font handling, especially for right-to-left scripts, CJK, and Asian alphabets.

• For LibreOffice Writer, this release introduces a new Page Number Wizard in the Insert menu to easily insert page numbers in the header or footer, an updated Paragraph Style dropdown in the Formatting toolbar that now displays a list of styles used in the document, and highlighting of used paragraph and character styles, as well as of direct formatting in text.

• LibreOffice 7.6 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, and the last based on the historical release numbering scheme (first digit for release cycle, second digit for major release), is immediately available from www.libreoffice.org/download for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple and Intel processors), and Linux. Starting from 2024, TDF will adopt calendar based-release numbering, so the next major release will be LibreOffice 2024.02 in February 2024.

• LibreOffice is a popular open-source software suite, serving as a replacement for Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other applications. It’s a great option if you want to edit documents and spreadsheets without paying a subscription for Microsoft 365, especially since LibreOffice has more features and supports more file formats than many other free alternatives. The Document Foundation has now released LibreOffice 7.6 across all platforms, making the office suite even better.

• LibreOffice 7.6 isn’t a groundbreaking update, so if you were hoping for more interface options or wild new online features, you won’t find them here. The Document Foundation said in its announcement, “After twelve years and five release cycles – code cleaning, code refactoring, polishing the user interface, extending to new hardware and software platforms, and optimizing interoperability with OOXML to support users – it is increasingly difficult to develop entirely new features, so most of them are refinements or improvements of existing ones.” However, document themes are now supported across all applications, and there are more fixes for opening Microsoft Office documents.

• This update lands exactly on schedule, some 6 months after the LibreOffice 7.5 release (which included visual tweaks, major PDF export enhancements, and other changes). LibreOffice 7.6 sees its devs build out further to deliver fixes, finesse, and a decent drop of new features.

• Keen to learn more? I know you are, so let’s dive in!

• LibreOffice, maintained by The Document Foundation, is a comprehensive open-source office suite of productivity software applications encompassing word processing, spreadsheet creation, presentation design, drawing, and database management.

• With each new release, it continues to enhance its suite of applications, striving to provide users with a comprehensive and efficient platform for all their document-related needs.

Licensing / Legal

• However, as far as I know (and I did look), my university has no blanket policy on employees signing individual CLAs to contribute work they did on university time. Obtaining permission from the university would likely take multiple people each spending some time on this. Many of them are busy people, and beyond that you might as well think of this as a meeting where all of us are sitting around a table for perhaps half an hour, and we all know how much meetings cost once you multiply the cost of each person’s time out. Universities may feel that staff time is often almost free, but that isn’t universal and there are limits.

• I’ve seen a view expressed that Contributor License Agreements are only a small extra piece of formality over contributing bugfixes and other open source changes. I think this is wrong. Often, the decisions that are made over whether or not to contribute changes to open source projects are significantly different than the decisions that must be made over CLAs, such that my university and similar institutions have little to lose from the former and a great deal to lose from the latter.

Programming/Development

• I haven’t written a graphical desktop program for many years. Most of mine were done in Visual Basic 6 back in the day, but Borland Delphi and Java Swing were probably the last ones. But I’ve decided to give a new one a try.

• Another minor release, now at 0.2.4, of our RcppRedis package arrived on CRAN yesterday. RcppRedis is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and much more). RcppRedis does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling with MessagePack binary (de)serialization via RcppMsgPack. The package has carried production loads on a trading floor for several years. It also supports pub/sub dissemination of streaming market data as per this earlier example.

Python

• The biggest news in the open source security space right now is the Request for Information (RFI) titled “Request for Information on Open Source Software Security: Areas of Long-Term Focus and Prioritization”. This announcement means that the US Government is soliciting ideas from the broader community on where to focus and what to do to improve the security of open source software.

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