● 08.26.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 26/08/2023: OpenTF’s Fork of Terraform

Posted in News Roundup at 8:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Graphics Stack

• Without any additional commit messages except the repository description, Nvidia posted the source code for its Developer Kit tool on Github under the NVIDIA Corporation organization umbrella.

• AMD just announced the Radeon RX 7800 XT and Radeon RX 7700 XT Graphics Cards, and they’re giving out more details on FidelityFX Super Resolution 3 (FSR 3).

• It’s always nice when you get several stories in a row that contrast with one another in order to make a point. We were just discussing Rockstar’s decision to scoop up a roleplaying and modding community in order to build in new and interesting ways to play GTA and Red Dead Redemption games. What I had hoped out loud would be a sign that Rockstar was turning over a new leaf on modding communities was dashed almost immediately as the company then went after another group of mod-makers for the crime of being fans of its games and trying to make them more interesting and playable. Game companies don’t have to do this sort of thing.

Applications

• macOS is Apple’s proprietary operating system for its line of Macintosh computers. Its interface, known as Aqua, is highly polished and built on top of a BSD derivative (Darwin). There’s a whole raft of proprietary applications that are developed by Apple for their operating software. This software is not available for Linux and there’s no prospect of that position changing.

• In 2020, Apple began the Apple silicon transition, using self-designed, 64-bit ARM-based Apple M1 processors on new Mac computers. Maybe it’s the perfect time to move away from the proprietary world of Apple, and embrace the open source Linux scene.

• Apple Launchpad is a central location where you can view all your apps and easily open them.

• Launchpad is proprietary software and not available for Linux. We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

Instructionals/Technical

• Emails have been an essential part of communication. Today in this blog we are going to know how to send emails without ever going to your browser or Gmail app by just using some cool command lines on Linux. you may ask But why to do all this for now I will say maybe just to look like a hacker.

• The more command on Linux may have a lot more options than you know and use.

• Does your organization need the fully loaded capabilities of Postman or the lightweight implementation style offered by Insomnia? Read this quick breakdown to get the picture.

• Plausible Analytics on the Raspberry Pi is a relatively straightforward process thanks to being installed through a Docker container. We will, however, need to make adjustments to get it running on our ARM based system.

• While the curl command was created to make things work without any human interaction, you can still use it to save output to a file.

Games

• I have to say though… its already very very fun. There is something very adrenaline-rushy about playing it on the harder levels, where everything gets a bit hectic. In these days of F2P, monetization, competitive e-sports, multi gigabyte patches, and achievements and so on… there is something very pleasurable about a simple game where you move left and right and hit the fire button!

• We knew an expansion was coming as it was confirmed some time ago, but now Wube Software have revealed much more about what’s now called Factorio: Space Age.

• ARMORED CORE VI FIRES OF RUBICON is the big new release developed by FromSoftware Inc, the same team from ELDEN RING and it does seem to run quite well on Steam Deck and desktop Linux.

• There’s currently somewhere around 92,000 games on Steam and so it’s going to take a long time for Valve to check them all on Steam Deck but here’s some recent picks.

• Gaming on PC has historically been the domain of the Windows operating system. That’s true even to this day. While there are some awesome Linux games on the market, most modern games are primarily developed with Windows in mind.

• However, Linux gaming has come a long way since then. Long gone are the days when you had to tinker with numerous packages, scripts, and whatnot to make even the simplest game run consistently. Thanks to the relentless community effort, Linux gaming is something one can seriously consider.

• However, not everything is sunshine and rainbows. There are a couple of hiccups that you should know when deciding a game on Linux…

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• This week we weren’t done improving input device defaults; for Plasma 6, touchpad tap-to-click is now enabled by default! If you’re curious about the reasons, click that link.

• In addition, convergence is starting to happen. You might notice that the number of open Plasma 6 issues is lower this week than it was last week! A good sign for sure.

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Besides updates to current tools, new versions of Kali typically introduce fresh tools.

Fedora Family / IBM

• A dramatic disagreement in the enterprise Linux community has some distributions scrambling to keep their code compatible with Red Hat, as the acknowledged biggest player in the space cracks down on source code distribution.

• The core issue is the existence of several “downstream” Linux distributions based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Those distributions were historically based on CentOS, a free RHEL clone developed originally for the purposes of testing and development. The downstream distributions in question, however, are supported by companies like CIQ and Oracle – which sell support services for their “clones” of RHEL. This has led to a long-running tension between those companies and Red Hat, whose supporters argue that the downstream companies are simply repackaging Red Hat’s work for profit, while detractors say that Red Hat is violating the sprit – if not, technically, the law – of open source.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Ubuntu is one of the top most used Linux distributions on the desktop and Canonical, the company behind it, has a new blog post up giving some thoughts on the future of Ubuntu Desktop.

• It has been a little while since we shared our vision for Ubuntu Desktop, and explained how our current roadmap fits into our long term strategic thinking. Recently, we embarked on an internal exercise to consolidate and bring structure to our values and goals for how we plan to evolve the desktop experience over the next few years. This post is designed to share the output of those discussions and give insight into the direction we’re going.

• These values form the framework by which we determine our priorities and measure our progress, and hopefully inspire those that want to contribute to this experience to focus their energies in ways that are aligned with our longer term ambitions.

Devices/Embedded

• Wind River®, a global leader in delivering software for mission-critical intelligent systems, today announced that Wind River Linux has been selected by global electric mobility technology brand ZEEKR to power its future electronic and electrical architecture for software-defined vehicles.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Maker Glen Akins wanted to relive his best mountain bike ascents and descents, so he hacked a vintage aircraft altitude indicator (also called an ‘altimeter’) using Raspberry Pi Pico and a little digital data conversion wizardry.

• The digital world offers many advantages over its analog relatives, the use of boolean logic among them. Some of the functions, like NOT, OR, and AND are fairly straightforward and line up nicely with their linguistic counterparts. Others are more elusive, like XOR and NAND. For those just getting their start in digital logic, this teaching tool allows different logic gates to be wired together with patch cables.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Two weeks ago, HashiCorp announced they are changing the license to all their core products, including Terraform, to the Business Source License (BSL). In an attempt to keep Terraform open source, we published the OpenTF manifesto, and the community response was huge! Over 100 companies, 10 projects, and 400 individuals pledged their time and resources to keep Terraform open-source. The GitHub repository for the manifesto already has over 2.5k stars, and the number is growing quickly!

• The manifesto outlined the intent of the OpenTF initiative in two steps — the first was to appeal to HashiCorp to return Terraform to the community and revert the license change they were making for this project. The second, in case the license was not reverted, was to fork the Terraform project as OpenTF.

• The OpenTF Foundation has announced that it is moving forward with its eponymous fork of HashiCorp Terraform, which was recently changed to a non-FOSS license by the company. The organization has applied to become part of the Linux Foundation, “”with the end goal of having OpenTF as part of Cloud Native Computing Foundation””. There is a GitHub repository for its manifesto, but the code repository for OpenTF is private for now, with plans to open it up in the next week or two. Work has been going on for the last week and more developers are coming on board…

• The vendor-led group says it wants to donate a fork based on the latest open source version of the infrastructure as code tool to a foundation, ideally the Linux Foundation or CNCF.

• Well, ya might have noticed that I somehow missed last week’s FWIR. Busy, busy, busy, which unfortunately means that forces other than FOSS Force are vying for my time. I’ll be writing about that next week…maybe. Look for it, it’ll be an interesting read if I do, a tale filled with cancer surgery (not me but in my home), followed by emergency brain surgery (also, not me but in my home), all in the midst of losing the home we’ve been renting for 30 years (just when rentals are either not available or priced so high that my retirement savings be gone in a few years).

• Oy vey.

• This article will require between 1 and 2 minutes of your attention if you read only the first half; obviously double that if you also feel like reading the second (more philosophical & strategic) half.

• As you may know, in addition to this blog here, I have also been microblogging very actively for years (whether on Twitter or on LinkedIn), particularly the day-to-day / work-in-progress of my Free & Open Source software contributions across GNOME and the FreeDesktop, and that habit shall outlive Twitter’s 2022-2023 chaotic hostile takeover and sabotage by its new majority shareholder/owner. I have (reluctantly) found refuge in the shire that is the fediverse, a quirky platform filled with countless technical & usability challenges, but eh, what else have we got left? Tis the last bastion we have (we’ll see what happens when Meta/Facebook “enters the chat”, will it be like what happened with XMPP? 🤷)…

• Just for a (welcome) change, the Computer Weekly Open Source Insider team is not off to San Francisco, Las Vegas, Barcelona, Boston or London’s glittering ExCeL centre, this time it’s Bilbao.

• Organizations must meet a variety of regulatory compliance requirements today. Here’s a look at six open source GRC tools and related resources that might help.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• The new CVE has an ID containing 2020 and that is weird. When you register a CVE you typically get it with the year you request it. Unless you get an ID for an old problem of the past. Is that what they did?

• Sources seem to indicate that this was published just days ago.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• The project I’m currently working on only has a single external dependency: SQLite, with full text search enabled. As a result, the application is extremely easy to package and run. However, I found out that ensuring that you have the exact same SQLite version and feature set in all your environments (development machines running macOS and linux, CI and production) is trickier than I expected.

• MariaDB reported $13.0 million total revenue for the third quarter of fiscal 2023 and annual recurring revenue of $55.0 million, an increase of 14 percent year-on-year. Operational losses narrowed to $12.2 million for the quarter, down from $13.1 million in the same period last year.

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• LibreOffice, formerly known as OpenOffice, before that called StarOffice, and which evolved from a German CP/M word processor called StarWriter, is the leading open source desktop office suite. StarWriter was released in 1985, so the product family is now nearly 40 years old – considerably older than Linux itself. Its history is so long that when The Reg reported that Sun was acquiring Star Division and making the product free last century, this was still a young publication, newly moved from email newsletter to website. (You can tell by how short those stories are.)

Education

• Mark your calendars! The November 2023 FreeBSD Vendor Summit will take place November 2-3, 2023 at the NetApp Campus in San Jose, CA. The Vendor Summit will feature a single track of talks on both days.

Programming/Development

• This post is a response to this very common refrain. It provides strategies for contributing to an open source project whose development has stalled by triaging pull requests and issues.

• I’m writing this post as someone who has been on both sides of this over the last ~20 years of contributing to, and maintaining, open source software projects. I’ve encountered stalled projects and helped revitalize them, and — as the long-time maintainer of a popular project — I’ve benefited from others injecting energy into a project.

• Many people who work in software development today have heard of the practice of pair programming, yet it still only has patchy adoption in the industry. One reason for its varying acceptance is that its benefits are not immediately obvious, it pays off more in the medium- and long-term. And it’s also not as simple as “two people working at a single computer”, so many dismiss it quickly when it feels uncomfortable. However, in our experience, pair programming is vital for collaborative teamwork and high quality software.

• You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci!

Python

• The advisory for CVE-2023-40217 was published this week which affects Python versions before 3.11.5, 3.10.13, 3.9.18, and 3.8.18. This was my first end-to-end vulnerability disclosure for Python which included handling of embargoed info (ie non-public), a coordinated release of fixed Python versions, and publishing of the advisory to the security-announce@python.org mailing list and to the PSF Advisory Database.

• Now that I’ve experienced the flow from end-to-end and I can start to think about where there is potential for improvement and what items need to be on our “checklist” to reduce stress and guesswork from remediation developers, release managers, and coordinators. This process is pretty opaque (for obvious reasons) so I also wanted to share the experience with everyone to know what’s happening in the background to keep Python users safe.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• In the context of this month’s SAP Developer Challenge on APIs, some participants working through today’s task have tripped up on a Bash feature, a feature which is one of a family of features relating to “expansion” of information. In this short post I dig into what that feature is, and how to ensure you don’t trip yourseves up with it.

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