● 08.22.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 22/08/2023: John Warnock Dies

Posted in News Roundup at 12:11 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• On Pop_OS (an excellent Ubuntu / Debian derivative) but the only way I could find to reliably set environment variables was ~/.bash.rc

Audiocasts/Shows

• SHOW NOTES ►► https://tuxdigital.com/podcasts/destination-linux/dl-336/

• On this episode of Destination Linux (336), we discuss Montana banning TikTok and what this means for our community. Is this a privacy guru’s dream or is the government overstepping? Then we’re going to discuss some new competition for RHEL. Plus, we have our tips, tricks and software picks for you.

Applications

• One of the great strengths of Linux is the whole raft of weird and wonderful open source utilities. That strength does not simply derive from the functionality they offer, but from the synergy generated by using them together, sometimes in conjunction with applications.

• The Unix philosophy spawned a “software tools” movement which focused on developing concise, basic, clear, modular and extensible code that can be used for other projects. This philosophy remains an important element for many Linux projects.

• Good open source developers writing utilities seek to make sure the utility does its job as well as possible, and work well with other utilities. The goal is that users have a handful of tools, each of which seeks to excel at one thing. Some utilities work well on their own.

• This article looks at six tiny utilities that offer menu facilities. They get virtually zero coverage in the Linux press, so you may not have heard of them before, but they are well crafted and might just fit the bill. Here’s our verdict on each tool captured in a legendary LinuxLinks’ ratings chart.

Instructionals/Technical

• One of the first things Linux users need to learn is how to move around the Linux file system and, eventually, how to make it even easier to move around the file system. This post describes both the basic commands you need and some smart moves to make navigating easier.

• I’ve always liked tools help me do DevOps-ish stuff but make it easy and have a UI. For example, I used MAMP back in the day because it ran (on my Mac) MySQL, Apache, and PHP, which was the stack for like every CMS. MAMP is still a thing, but I’ve happily moved on to Local because it’s WordPress-specific, which is what I need, and has worked quickly and near-flawlessly as long as I’ve used it.

• CSS Scroll-driven Animations has recently made its debut on the main stage in the latest versions of Chrome and Edge. Before this module became available, linking an element’s animation to a scroll position was only possible through JavaScript. I’ve been (and still am) a huge fan of GSAP ScrollTrigger as one way to achieve such an effect. I never imagined it would become a reality in CSS, but this new API lets us hook right into CSS animation @keyframes and scrub through the animation progress as we scroll the page.

• I want to copy the latest backups for each Bacula client over to a new host. I already do this, on an automated basis, for recent backups, primarily to have the same backups in two different places. In this case, I want to do this once.

• This post might also be a good introduction to copying / moving jobs based on SQL queries. See also Bacula – copy to tape by job size and Moving Bacula Volumes from one Storage to Another.

• I wrote the initial version of SSH (Secure Shell) in Spring 1995. It was a time when telnet and FTP were widely used.

• Anyway, I designed SSH to replace both telnet (port 23) and ftp (port 21). Port 22 was free. It was conveniently between the ports for telnet and ftp. I figured having that port number might be one of those small things that would give some aura of credibility. But how could I get that port number? I had never allocated one, but I knew somebody who had allocated a port.

• The basic process for port allocation was fairly simple at that time. Internet was smaller and we were in the very early stages of the Internet boom. Port numbers were allocated by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority). At the time, that meant an esteemed Internet pioneer called Jon Postel and Joyce K. Reynolds. Among other things, Jon had been the editor of such minor protocol standards as IP (RFC 791), ICMP (RFC 792), and TCP (RFC 793). Some of you may have heard of them.

• To me Jon felt outright scary, having authored all the main Internet RFCs!

• Anyway, just before announcing ssh-1.0 in July 1995, I sent this e-mail to IANA: [...]

• You’d think this would have a simple obvious answer, but in mulling it over recently, how I do this is actually a decent chunk of my internettin’ time and has an algorithm of sorts. When I’ve got a URL on my hands that I need to get back to, there are three broad buckets: [...]

• This suite of tools allow to you track changes on a file system. Via command line tools, you can get events when a file has been created, deleted, opened. I’m using a simple script on my malware zoo that receives notifcations everytime a file is created (which means I dropped a new sample). Then the script performs simple actions. By default: [...]

• Fortunately, Ryan Florence (who knows a lot about routing on the web) had the answer: use an href with an empty string.

• Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) clients for Linux have revolutionized the way we access and control remote systems. Whether you’re a sysadmin managing servers, a developer working on remote projects, or simply seeking to connect to your home computer while on the go, the Linux ecosystem offers a variety of powerful RDP clients.

• Sometimes you encounter a situation where you have a VM configuration that you need to duplicate exactly. Maybe it’s to deploy servers, or maybe it’s for testing.

• Linux distros are typically open-source operating systems and provide a powerful and flexible environment for both home and professional users. And one fundamental task every Linux user should know to perform is navigating to the root directory.

• In Linux, the root directory is the uppermost directory in the system’s hierarchy. Understanding its role and learning to access it is essential for managing files, installing software, and performing administrative tasks.

• Linux makes it easy to give users varied access levels and assign them specific responsibilities. All you have to do is create groups specifying the permissions you want to give the users and then put the users in the group.

• But what exactly is a group in Linux? Are groups of different types? And how do you create them?

• Containers and Virtual Machines are both Virtualization technologies that can be used to deploy and manage applications. However, they have different strengths and weaknesses, and the best choice for a particular application will depend on a number of factors.

Games

• Ready to dig deep? Dwarf Fortress now has a Linux Beta available on Steam, so you can get testing and see what all the fuss is about with this new version. While it was already playable with Proton, we knew for a while that Bay 12 Games planned Native Linux support as well.

• The community maintained GE-Proton has two new releases available, so here’s what’s changed and improved with the latest versions. This is the version of Proton not supported by Valve, so it may have issues at times the official Proton does not. However, it also at times pulls in fixes a bit quicker and can do things sometimes that Valve cannot do. To sum up: use it if you need it for specific games, otherwise sticking with the official Proton is the best idea. More about Proton can be found in my Proton beginner’s guide.

• Has it really been that long? Apparently so. Valve originally announced their rebranding of Steam Play with Proton back on August 21st, 2018. Seems like a good time for a quick reflection being halfway to a decade old now.

• Necesse is a very interesting genre-blending game that mixes in colony-building, adventuring, sandbox survival and a whole lot more. With the latest free update, it’s also become a lot bigger. Currently in Early Access it has gained quite a following too with a Very Positive user review score so clearly they’re onto something good here.

• Fanatical has a new charity Into Games Bundle live, with a fun selection of games and with all proceeds going towards the UK’s leading national non-profit for skills and careers in games. Seems like quite an interesting choice to help fund, while also getting something back.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• I’ve already written a basic data model and set of triggers in SQLite, so now comes the tricky thing of evaluating what graphical toolkit and language to use. The three canidates are Perl with Prima, PyQt, and Lazarus. I need to learn Python for work, so I figure that would be a two birds with one stone thing. Lazarus on the other hand offers a rapid prototyping environment for Object Pascal, which would be pretty great.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Part of the work of packaging software is in identifying and collecting all of its dependencies, in the right version, and making sure that the versions are all coherent with the rest of the system. Some of it is in testing the resulting whole system. A certain amount of it is in making a particular piece of software conform to the standards you’ve set up for a particular environment or distribution; for example, Debian has a specific scheme for how Apache is configured, and the general idea is used by Debian for a bunch of other software. Sometimes you fix bugs or pull in as yet unreleased changes.

Reviews

• The much anticipated Bodhi Linux 7.0 is released after a long development cycle. This release promises a wonderful desktop experience and is made possible by a small team of developers, including support from the community.

• Let’s have a deep dive into this release while highlighting the features.

BSD

• Until a few weeks later when I decided to upload a new blog post. Unfortunately, I had made the process too complex for my aging brain to easily recover from long term storage. I found I had installed multiple jails on the FreeBSD host system to perform various tasks. One for the hugo installation, another for the webserver, and another for a purpose that I completely forget offhand. At the time of building the system all of the jails seemed important (this is

• StockholmKubernetes syndrome at work).

• Thus, in a fit of pique with past John I decided to simplify my life and migrate away from a containerized system and to a simple webhost. So I installed OpenBSD on a Vultr VPS, setup httpd with SSL and migrated jrgsystems to it.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• Let’s pretend we have a time machine and set the 5th-dimensional time coordinates back ten years.

• Once we arrived in that simpler period, ask me my top five Linux distributions for new users and you can bet I would have included PCLinuxOS in the mix. That’s because, at the time, this particular open-source operating system was ahead of its time and offered a platform that any user could adopt without too much trouble.

• Hop back in that time machine and return to the here and now and you’ll see that OS is no longer on the list of best Linux distributions for new users.

• Why? What happened?

Fedora Family / IBM

• Matt Hicks talks up Red Hat’s efforts to support generative AI adoption through OpenShift AI and weighs in on the issues surrounding the company’s decision to limit access to RHEL source code.

• The era of mainframe computers and directly programming machines with switches is long past, but plenty of us look back on that era with a certain nostalgia. Getting that close to the hardware and knowing precisely what’s going on is becoming a little bit of a lost art. That’s why [Phil] took it upon himself to build this homage to the mainframe computer of the 70s, which all but disappeared when PCs and microcontrollers took over the scene decades ago.

Debian Family

• The early history of Linux is a rather murky period to most, long before the era of glitzy marketing and proclamations of ‘the Linux desktop’ being the next hot thing. This was also the era when the first Linux distributions were born, as the Linux kernel never came as a whole OS package – unlike the BSDs – which necessitated others to package it with the elements that make up kernel and user space, such as the GNU tools.

• One of these original distributions was Debian, which this month celebrates its 30th birthday. Its entire history, starting with the initial 0.01 release is covered in great detail on the Debian website. After the first release of the Linux kernel in 1991, it would take until August of 1993 when [Ian Murdock] embarked on the Debian project, sponsored by the GNU Project of the Free Software Foundation. This was a pretty rough period, with much of 1994 spent figuring out the basics of the system, the package manager and establishing a release system.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Bodhi Linux 7.0 is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and uses the Enlightenment-based desktop and Moksha window manager by default. The distro is notable for running deftly on devices with limited resources (though there’s no reason you can’t or shouldn’t run it on high-end devices too).

• I took a look at the Bodhi Linux 7.0 beta back in May and liked what I saw. Since then the distro’s devs have updated the s76 ISO to use Linux kernel 6.4 and the HWE ISO to use Linux kernel 6.2, brought in a yet-newer version of slick-greeter, and continued fixing up bugs and adding polish.

Devices/Embedded

• Ka-Ro Electronics’ QS93 is a tiny solder-down NXP i.MX 93 System-on-Module (SoM) running Linux and designed for edge processing. The company also offers a credit card-sized evaluation board that may remind some of the Raspberry Pi with its GPIO header and general layout, but it comes with two Fast Ethernet ports and one USB 2.0 port.

• We’ve already covered several system-on-modules based on the NXP i.MX 93 Cortex-A55/M33 AI processor including some with high-density board-to-board connectors such as the Compulab UCM-IMX93 and Forlinx FET-MX9352-C, others with a SO-DIMM connector like the VAR-SOM-MX93, and finally some designed to be soldered on the carrier board such as the OSM-L compatible iW-RainboW-G50M, and the QS93 adds to the latter category in a tiny 27×27 mm form factor.

• Last month I went through an unboxing of the VOIPAC iMX8M Industrial Development Kit with some specs and a quick try with the pre-loaded Yocto 3.1 Linux image. The kit is quite versatile with plenty of interfaces and headers, and eventually, it will support Android 12 and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. but in the meantime, I played a bit with the Yocto Linux SDK for the NXP i.MX 8M board and will report by experience getting started with VOIPAC IMX8M Industrial development kit.

• But before checking out Yocto Linux, I will install the two WiFi antennas since I did not do it last time around. We can attach the SMA connectors to the two metal plates on the side of the board securing them with the provided nuts and spacers.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Old tech will always be cool. A mix of nostalgia and forgotten design concepts will forever make something appealing to the right person. Sometimes though, the technology behind them can be hard to keep using – this is where our favourite tiny computer comes in to modernise.

• When working on a PCB design in KiCad, it’s helpful that the files are all text and can easily be checked into Git or other source control. However, stepping back through the revisions to determine where precisely a trace got routed wrong can be tricky. [Leandro] started with a simple script that exported the KiCad project to an image for inspection — over time it grew into a full-blown visual diff tool named KiCad Revision Inspector (KiRI).

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Yes, over 77 million users lost in 4 years and 7 months. If you average out the loss over this period, then they’ve lost about 1.4 million Firefox users per month, give or take a couple thousand. Per day, that means that over 46,300 people slam Firefox shut and never open it again.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• As some may know, I’m an XMPP user, an instant messaging protocol which used to be known as Jabber. My server is running Prosody XMPP server on OpenBSD. Recently, I got more users on my server, and I wanted to improve performance a bit by switching from the internal storage to SQLite.

• Actually, prosody comes with a tool to switch from a storage to another, but I found the documentation lacking and on OpenBSD the migration tool isn’t packaged (yet?).

• The switch to SQLite drastically reduced prosody CPU usage on my small server, and went pain free.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• LibreOffice 7.6 is the next major upgrade for the open-source office suite.

• With its previous LibreOffice 7.5 release, the developers unveiled new app icons and feature upgrades. And, this time, it includes a good set of new abilities.

• Let us take a look at what’s new with the release.

• A statement from The Document Foundation, the body that oversees the project, said there were versions for Windows (Intel/AMD and ARM processors), macOS (Apple and Intel processors), and Linux.

• This release is the last to use traditional version numbering: first digit for release cycle, second digit for major release.

• From next year, TDF will adopt calendar-based release numbering: the next major release will be LibreOffice 2024.02 in February 2024.

Programming/Development

• Instead of things that are good enough, I’d rather we make things that are fit for purpose. The phrase “fit for purpose” doesn’t carry the connotation of cutting corners, but of actively considering what is needed and ensuring that that’s present. Whatever you’re describing has what it needs to do the job.

• What did they do in the 1600s? They wrote down everything about the circumstances in which the observations were made, like atmospheric conditions, status of the telescope and other equipment, times, climate, weather – I wouldn’t be surprised if they recorded what the astronomer had eaten and how much they had slept – and then they asked an expert to judge, based on the circumstances, which observation was best. And they used that single observation.

• It makes complete sense – they knew what the problem of measurement error was, and they tried to reduce it by picking the least erroneous observation. Absolutely the right intention, but they just didn’t have the technology we do now: an understanding of statistics and how numbers behave in aggregate.

Standards/Consortia

• Warnock worked for Xerox before he and colleague Charles Geschke created a company around a rejected idea in 1982. Nearly a decade later, Warnock outlined an early version of the Portable Document Format, or PDF, transforming the way documents are exchanged.

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