● 08.27.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 27/08/2023: Linux 6.1.48 and Haruna 0.12.0

Posted in News Roundup at 2:56 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Here are the hottest news stories and top articles of the week!

Server

• When Amazon Linux 2023 was released on March 15, it was supposed to be offered as a virtual machine image that organizations could run on their own servers.

• “When Amazon Linux 2023 becomes generally available, it will be provided as a virtual machine image for on-premises use, enabling you to easily develop, test, and certify applications from a local development environment,” the web titan’s FAQs stated at the time. “This option is not available during the preview.”

Kernel Space

• Earlier this month, Valve updated its Steam survey stats for the month of July. It shows what kinds of PC hardware and software gamers are using on its PC service. One small but interesting milestone for that month was shown in those numbers.

• For the first time, the number of Linux gamers accessing Steam (1.96 percent) surpassed those using Apple’s MacOS (1.84). That’s likely due to the sales success of Valve’s Steam Deck portable gaming PC, which uses a Linux-based “SteamOS Holo”.

• While Linux is still a distance second compared to the 96.21 percent of Windows users, it still shows that Valve’s use of the free OS has caused an overall uptick in its use. Indeed Valve has been a champion of promoting Linux PC gaming well before it launched its Steam Deck.

Graphics Stack

• Wayland is a display server protocol. It specifies the communication between a display server and a client. It was made to replace the X window system because of its security, efficiency, and flexibility. It’s written in the C programming language. Wayland isn’t an application that you can download or install.

Applications

• The 1.28 update adds management capabilities to streamline the increasing number of clusters running in production environments.

• The purpose of this article is to identify some tiny but useful tools that complement the cd command. They help users to navigate faster around the filesystem, and increase productivity when using the shell. We feature 9 tools each with their own portal page, a full description with an in-depth analysis of its features, together with links to relevant resources.

• We make the following recommendations. Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion.

• Linux has a good range of open source archive managers. This article focuses on archive managers that sport a graphical user interface.

• Our recommendations are captured in the ratings chart below, in a legendary LinuxLinks-style format. Hopefully there will be something of interest for anyone who wants to backup their data, create new archives, and decompress files downloaded from the internet.

• walk is billed as a terminal file manager and a terminal navigator.

• grump is a billed as a very minimal CLI audio player. It’s free and open source software written in the Go language.

• A mass or batch file rename tool is a software program that allows you to rename multiple files at once, instead of having to rename them individually.

• The LXD team is very excited to announce the release of LXD 5.17!

• This month’s release includes three new features and a focus on documentation improvements, as well as the usual collection of bug fixes and improvements.

• Enjoy!

Instructionals/Technical

• But suppose, not hypothetically, that you want to take your NFS v3 only fileservers and make them support basic non-Kerberos NFS v4 as well, because you’re in the process of moving to NFS v4 for reasons. What do you need to do, and how disruptive is it? Based on our experimentation, here are the answers for Ubuntu 22.04 fileservers and NFS clients.

• As mentioned in the nfsidmap(5) manual page, NFS v4 represents UIDs and GIDs as ‘id@domain’ strings in contexts like stat(2) results and thus, for example, ‘ls -l’ output (this was explained to me in a comment on this entry). If you want your NFS v4 mounts to look like your NFS v3 mounts and work transparently, the server and the client need to agree on the domain, although the exact domain probably doesn’t matter. As I mentioned in my entry on enabling NFS v4, I feel that you might want to set this explicitly rather than count on Linux getting it right (on both the server and all of the clients).

• This simple tutorial shows how to compile and install the Sigil EPUB ebook editor (2.0.1 so far) from the source code in Ubuntu step by step. Sigil is a popular free and open-source ePub ebook editor that works in Windows, Linux, and macOS. However, it does not provide official packages for Linux.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install K9s on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. In the intricate landscape of Kubernetes management, a reliable tool can be your guiding light. Enter k9s—a versatile, command-line tool that simplifies navigating, managing, and troubleshooting Kubernetes clusters.

• With its formidable architecture and unparalleled flexibility, Linux presents tools and commands explicitly crafted for in-depth system diagnostics. A quintessential responsibility for system administrators is to check system reboot history in Linux adeptly. Both scheduled and unforeseen reboots are windows into the system’s overall health and functionality.

• Do you miss playing games on your Nintendo? What if I told you that you can play your favorite Nintendo 3DS games on Linux Mint.

• Citra is a free and open source Nintendo Emulator that allows you to play Nintendo 3DS games on your computer.

• Securing your WordPress blog is an essential thing you must do after setting it up on your server. There shouldn’t be any reason to leave your WordPress wide open for hackers to creep in and steal your information or destroy your data. Spend a few hours securing WordPress, and you’ll save countless hours dealing with constant attacks. This guide shows multiple ways to secure WordPress to keep your data and information safe.

• The Linux command line is a powerful tool that can be used to do anything from managing files to configuring your system. However, as technology evolves, so do the tools at our disposal. In this tutorial, we will explore 17 modern alternatives to some of the most popular Linux commands, highlighting their advantages and example use cases. These alternatives often offer improved performance, enhanced features, and simplified syntax.

Games

• There is a thriving Arduino gaming community, with many homebrew video games developed to run on Arduino development boards. Arduboy, for example, produces custom handheld consoles with games that can also run on Arduino hardware. However, many boards have microcontrollers with limited processing power and memory, which means the graphics have to be simple. But Volos Projects took advantage of the new Nano ESP32 to build a portable gaming device with full-color graphics.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Haruna version 0.12.0 is out. You can get it now on flathub:

• Availability of other package formats depends on your distro and the people who package Haruna.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• It has been quite a while since the last update, and we’ve accomplished a lot since then. I’ve also completed finish my GSoC project, which adds Acrostic puzzles support to GNOME Crosswords.

• After implementing cell selection for ClueGrid, I added other signals ie. guess and other command actions.

• The next step was to finalize the layout and Implement the Navigation as outlined in the design document.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• In a remarkable stride towards technological advancement in West Africa, the ingenious collaboration between Professor Dr. Edward Danso Ansong and research assistant, Dominic Damoah has birthed an epoch-making breakthrough – Trend OS, a pioneering Linux distribution.

• With the potential to usher in an era of fortified cybersecurity, this state-of-the-art operating system stands poised to revolutionize digital defense measures and reshape the region’s technology landscape.

• Driven by an unyielding passion for Linux and a relentless desire to secure West Africa’s digital future, Dr. Edward Danso Ansong embarked on an audacious mission after recognizing the region’s pressing need for an ultra-secure Linux distribution.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• Powered by the Linux 6.4 kernel series, Mageia 9 is here with a smaller disk footprint for minimal installations when disabling the recommended packages, adoption of SQLite for the RPM database for faster package management, and Zstd compression for the stage1 images.

• This release also drops the 15-years-old forked NFS code for NFS support, which is now done using system tools, lets you specify a port different than “80” when using an HTTP server, switches cURL instead of GNU Wget for downloading packages during the installation, and enables the NetworkManager system service by default in the KDE Plasma live ISO.

Debian Family

• There’s been a very successful barbeque running in the garden: burgers, sausages, beer, vegetarian dishes and then ice cream.

• The chance to catch up with people you only meet in IRC. Talking and laughter – and probably a couple of games of Mao.

• Thanks also to our sponsors – Collabora, Codethink and RattusRattus for contributions to food and drink.

*

• The meat has been fetched: those of us in the house are about to get bacon sandwiches. Pepper the dog is in the garden. Time for the mayhem to start, I think.

• Various folk are travelling here so it will soon be crowded: the weather is sunny but cool and it looks good for a three day weekend.

• This is a huge effort that falls to Steve and Jo and a huge disruption for them each year – for which many thanks, as ever. [And, as is traditional on this blog, the posts only ever seem to appear from Cambridge].

• A book I’m planning to write after Run Your Own Mail Server really needs to use Debian as the reference platform, for reasons I’m not gonna get into here. But my heart is obviously and publicly in BSD-land. How could I write this and be truthful?

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Which is kind of surprising given the popularity of Steam, but also kind of not — and I’ll get to why in a second.

• So what’s the rub?

• This (unintentional) issue stems from Ubuntu’s switch to a new Flutter-based installer.

• The new installer leverages Subiquity on the backend. This was originally created for Ubuntu server where 32-bit library support isn’t enabled by default. Due to an “oversight”, Subiquity desktop installs also don’t enable 32-bit library support.

• Steam for Linux does requires 32-bit support (so that all the old games people purchased continue to work), and Ubuntu’s repo build of the Steam gaming client assumes 32-bit support is already setup (since it’s supposed to be, by default).

Devices/Embedded

• This week, Sipeed announced that the Lichee Cluster 4A will go on sale starting next week. This cluster platform comes in a Mini-ITX form-factor and it’s compatible with the RISC-V-based Lichee Module 4A with support for up to 16GB RAM and up to 128GB eMMC storage.

• The Lichee Cluster 4A can accommodate up to seven Lichee Module 4A modules for a total memory capacity of 128GB LPDDR4X and a storage capacity of 896GB.

• For reference, the LM4A is based on the Alibaba TH1520 System-on-Chip with RISC-V architecture…

• The DRPC-124-EHL by ICP Germany is described as an ultra compact DIN-rail PC powered by the Intel Celeron J6412 quad-core CPU. Key features of this fanless PC includes one GbE LAN port, three 2.5 GbE LAN ports and multiple M.2 slots for expansion.

• We are used to seeing Linux running on almost everything, but we were a bit taken aback to see [semu-c64] running Linux on a Commodore 64. But between the checked-out user name and the caveat that: “it runs extremely slowly and it needs a RAM Expansion Unit”, one can already start piecing together what’s happening here.

Open Hardware/Modding

• This Raspberry Pi radio lets you tune into radio stations from around the world using a cool LCD screen for an interface.

• Cool Pi has put its CM5 Rockchip RK3588 system-on-module to good use by integrating it into a 14.1-inch laptop with 1920×1080 resolution running Android 12, Ubuntu 22.04, or other Linux distributions.

• Mohammad Reza Sharifi is using a Raspberry Pi to detect emotions and change the color of an RGB light based on the detected emotion.

• When regular people think of 3D printing, they likely imagine semi-newfangled objects like twisty vases and useless trinkets. But there is so much more to 3D printing, as [andrei.erdei]’s printed, woven coasters demonstrate.

• Raspberry Pis makes great media players, and we love seeing the creative ways the Pi community at large houses them. Whether you put one inside a tiny Simpson’s TV or build one just for Twitch streams, it’s hard to beat the fun versatility of this classic SBC. Today, we’re sharing another Pi-based TV project. This one was created by maker and developer Joe_vs_the_Jalapeno, who’s brought a broken Sony TV back to life using a Pi 4.

• The e-ink devices I favor are low powered ARM devices running linux without a display server or gigabytes of RAM. Let’s break down why that’s so awesome: [...]

• She was part of a two-person team tasked with fixing broken books after performances; she enjoyed the bookbinding process enough to pursue it as a hobby.

• The hardware is surprisingly straightforward, with a resistive touch screen and a PCB featuring power management, an ESP32 main processor, and a GSM module. The 2G connectivity may not be the fastest, or even available in your country, but otherwise the feature set looks more than reasonable for a basic mobile phone.

• Rainbow love I’ve previously written about how the Sinclair line of computers kickstarted a life-long love of computing.

• I still sometimes go back and play classic Spectrum games on my Nintendo DS.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Events

• As the first week of work and school comes to an end, I realized that this 100 days to offload is harder than predicted. I partly blame that I got the traditional going-back-to-work cold, but I guess I also have less time to spend on fun stuff like writing.

• This week has been about cleaning up.

• I’ve started to clean-up my backlog of foss-north video recordings. I’ve got some 12GB of videos rendered, and I’m not even halfway. For next year we really need to do something about the audio recording situation, but it is what it is and it will have to do.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• What’s the news? As of August 2023, the number of active Firefox users around the world has dropped to 176 million users. A far cry from the end of 2018 when it had 244 million active users. This means that the Firefox browser has roughly lost 70 million active users in the last five years.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• The pgAdmin Development Team is pleased to announce pgAdmin 4 version 7.6. This release of pgAdmin 4 includes 26 bug fixes and new features. For more details please see the release notes.

• pgAdmin is the leading Open Source graphical management tool for PostgreSQL. For more information, please see the website.

• Notable changes in this release include: [...]

• Back in 2015, when PostgreSQL 9.5 alpha 1 was released, I had posted thePostgreSQL data from Debian’s popularity contest.

• 8 years and 8 PostgreSQL releases later, the graph now looks like this:

• [...]

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• Nearly 2,000 attendees gathered for two days of keynotes, sessions, and community-building conversations at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in the largest attended WordCamp US ever. Saturday’s sessions concluded with back-to-back keynotes by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg and Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy.

• If you publish content online or are considering it, you may be curious about the growing buzz surrounding headless WordPress. While WordPress is primarily known as an all-in-one content management system (CMS), the rise of headless WordPress challenges this notion. This article explains everything you need to know to decide whether WordPress headless CMS is a good choice for you.

• WordPress sites can require different post types. Some will run smoothly using the default post types, while others need custom post types to better serve their content needs. If your website is the latter, this guide shows how to add a WordPress custom post type.

• All WordPress websites have the same default login URL, so anyone who’s aware of this can make login attempts to any WordPress site using the default URL. Fortunately, you can easily change the default WordPress login URL.

• Do you want to track your WordPress website’s conversions, analytics, marketing, and other metrics? Learn how to set up Google Tag Manager (GTM) for WordPress with GTM4WP.

Education

• While Macworld and MacUser capture the history of the Macintosh, Byte nicely captures the history of the entire personal computer industry from the early days (Sept 1975) through July 1998 (just two issues shy of 23 years).

• Here for your reading pleasure are the first and second installment of the Byte archives, now including the entire run of the magazine.

Licensing / Legal

• BYTE: We read your GNU Manifesto in the March 1985 issue of Dr. Dobb’s. What has happened since? Was that really the beginning, and how have you progressed since then?

• Stallman: The publication in Dr. Dobb’s wasn’t the beginning of the project. I wrote the GNU Manifesto when I was getting ready to start the project, as a proposal to ask computer manufacturers for funding. They didn’t want to get involved, and I decided that rather than spend my time trying to pursue funds, I ought to spend it writing code. The manifesto was published about a year and a half after I had written it, when I had barely begun distributing the GNU EMACS. Since that time, in addition to making GNU EMACS more complete and making it run on many more computers, I have nearly finished the optimizing C compiler and all the other software that is needed for running C programs. This includes a source-level debugger that has many features that the other source-level debuggers on UNIX don’t have. For example, it has convenience variables within the debugger so you can save values, and it also has a history of all the values that you have printed out, making it tremendously easier to chase around list structures.

• BYTE: You have finished an editor that is now widely distributed and you are about to finish the compiler.

Programming/Development

• All of the above is achievable with reasonable effort, time, and cost. It is often impractical for people to advocate for or work on pure Rust cryptography, even if they want to do so—especially when they may work for organizations that already have committed to doing something else. The community has to kindly demand pure Rust cryptography, politely but firmly refuse compromises, and generously support the individuals who are actively working towards making safe Rust cryptography a reality.

• Recently the internet resurfaced my 2017 article, “NP-hard does not mean hard”. I wrote the article mainly to express the nuance that NP-hardness only models the worst case of a problem, not the average case under any particular distribution—i.e., the instances you happen to encounter in the real world. More specifically, being NP-hard means that a problem has sufficient expressive power to model arbitrary boolean logic. But you can’t blame NP-hardness for why you’re bad at Super Mario

• Recently serde, one of the most popular Rust libraries made a decision that supposedly sped up compile times by using a precompiled version of a procedural macro instead of compiling it on the fly. Like any technical decision, there are tradeoffs and advantages to everything. I don’t think the inherent ecosystem risks in slinging around precompiled binaries are worth the build speed advantages, and in this article I’m going to cover all of the moving parts for this space.

• Hi, my name is Marshall and throughout the summer of 2023 I worked on developing a new communicator for the GNUnet transport service. I learned a lot about GNUnet through my development experience. Here are some details about the journey!

Python

• One of my favourite patterns in the Python programming language is the “dictionary dispatch” pattern. This pattern is when you have a dictionary with string keys and functions as values. These functions can then be called concisely. This is useful if you have a range of functions to which different values can be applied that all accept (around) the same arguments.

• The RP2040 is a gorgeous little chip with a well-defined datasheet and a fantastic price tag. Two SDKs are even offered: one based on C and the other MicroPython. More experienced MCU wranglers will likely reach for the C variant, but Python does bring a certain speed when banging out a quick project or proof of concept. Perhaps that’s why [Jeremy Bentham] ported his RP2040-based vehicle speedometer to MicroPython.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Default installations of Linux distributions mount more filesystems than they used to. This is because of loop devices, cgroups, and, in Ubuntu, snaps. As a result, the output from GNU df(1) as well as from lsblk(8) and mount(8) is more difficult to understand at a glance.

• It is possible to make the output of these commands more readable by removing some of the “noise” devices. The following is a list of command arguments that remove irrelevant devices. After the list, I show how to replace the default commands in fish. You can adapt the replacement script for other shells.

Standards/Consortia

• PostScript, licensed to hundreds of software and hardware companies, helped make Adobe rich. But the company was largely unknown to the public until 1993, when it released Acrobat, a program designed to render and read files in what it called a Portable Document Format, or PDF.

• The PDF was the result of Dr. Warnock’s abiding obsession since graduate school: finding a way to ensure that the graphics displayed on one computer — whether words or images — looked the exact same on another computer, or on a page from a printer, regardless of the manufacturer.

• Today in Tedium: Every one of our file formats has a story. The GIF, for example, came to being thanks to a need to serve up images on pokey Compuserve connections with limited RAM. The MP3, meanwhile, was built around the contours of Suzanne Vega’s unaccompanied voice on “Tom’s Diner.” And the ZIP file came to life in a brutal legal battle that was egged on by the whims of BBS users. These stories have been discussed at length by others, but there’s a file format I see every day, one that, more than any other, has allowed our society to go (mostly) paperless. It’s the Portable Document Format, or PDF, a file format that was exactly what the business world needed at the time of its release. Today’s Tedium discusses the past, present, and future of the PDF. — Ernie @ Tedium

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