● 08.30.23

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● Links 30/08/2023: New Firefox, Chrome Woes (Sync is Spyware)

Posted in News Roundup at 9:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Audiocasts/Shows

• A media server is simply a specialized file server or computer system for storing media (digital videos/movies, audio/music, and images) that can be accessed over a network.

• In order to set up a media server, you need computer hardware (or perhaps a cloud server) as well as software that enables you to organize your media files and makes it easier to stream and/or share them with friends and family.

Kernel Space

• Many of the changes in 6.5 are enabling performance and throughput improvements. While there’s not much that’s huge and flashy this time around, the perf gains might make 6.5 worth looking into.

• Linus Torvalds announced today the release of the Linux 6.5 kernel series as a major update with several new features, better hardware support, and other changes.

• The Linux kernel 6.5 has features like MIDI 2.0 support in ALSA, ACPI support for the RISC-V architecture, Landlock support for UML (User-Mode Linux), better support for AMD “Zen” systems, as well as user-space support for the ARMv8.8 memcpy/memset instructions.

• Linux 6.5 supports Intel TPMI (Topology Aware Register and PM Capsule Interface) for the power capping subsystem and a TPMI interface driver for Intel RAPL, and the “runnable boosting” feature in the EAS balancer to improve CPU utilization for specific workloads.

• Back in July, Linus Torvalds was worried the next update of the Linux kernel might be “one of those releases that may drag out” because most of Europe goes on vacation during August.

• It turns out that his worries were for nothing — and the new release has arrived: “Nothing particularly odd or scary happened this last week, so there is no excuse to delay the 6.5 release,” announced Torvalds on 27 August.

• [...]

• To that end, he encourages developers to give “this final release one last round of testing.” So, before you get too wrapped up in building new releases on top of Linux 6.5, developers would be wise to check out the new kernel carefully before deploying it.

• Some of the developers who are likely to be eager to build on the new release include those working on Linux distros, such as Arch, who often leap at the latest releases, and those working on the upcoming Ubuntu 23.10, whose developers plan on using Linux 6.5.

• Here it is, on August 27th the latest work by a great many developers was released with Linus Torvalds announcing the Linux kernel 6.5. From the release announcement:

Applications

• The qBittorrent project aims to provide a Free Software alternative to µtorrent. qBittorrent is an advanced and multi-platform BitTorrent client with a nice user interface as well as a Web UI for remote control and an integrated search engine. qBittorrent aims to meet the needs of most users while using as little CPU and memory as possible. qBittorrent is a truly Open Source project, and as such, anyone can and should contribute to it.

Instructionals/Technical

• Many developers and security experts love using Linux for various reasons. It’s free and open source, and the customizability is extensive. However, modern Macs have transitioned to Apple silicon chips, and you may want to install and run Linux on them.

• We’ll show you the two ways of installing Linux on your Apple silicon Mac using Parallels Desktop and UTM.

• Firefly 3 is an open-source and free personal finance manager that can be installed on your Raspberry Pi.

• This software lets you track your expenses and income without relying on a cloud service.

• Sometimes a process or application can cause problems on a Linux machine. When that happens, you’ll need to know how to kill the wayward process.

• This guide explores various ways of installing PHP 8 on Debian 12, codenamed Bookworm, which is the latest Debian release.

• Curious about your Linux desktop’s screen resolution? Wondering how to find it using simple commands? Look no further! In this guide, we’ll walk you through the easy steps to find your Linux desktop screen resolution right from the command line.

• Universal Media Server (UMS) is a cross-platform and free DLNA-compliant, HTTP(s) PnP Media server, which provides a number of capabilities such as sharing multimedia files such as images, videos, and audio between modern devices such as game consoles, smart TVs, Blu-ray players, Roku devices, and smartphones.

• UMS was originally based on a PS3 Media Server in order to ensure greater stability and file compatibility.

Games

• Larian only just released a MASSIVE patch for Baldur’s Gate 3, and another is being planned out to come with some “major performance improvements” which sounds exciting – especially for Steam Deck players.

• Chaosmonger Studio sure are busy. After releasing ENCODYA and Clunky Hero, then announcing Soul Tolerance and Three Minutes To Eight they’ve now announced a fifth game. It’s called Schizollama and it looks ridiculous.

• Drova – Forsaken Kin is an upcoming action RPG from Just2D and Deck13, inspired by the allure of Celtic mythology. There’s also a fresh demo out to try.

• Well this is certainly unexpected. Mimimi Games developer of games including Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun, Desperados III and the recently launched Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew will be closing up.

• Here’s something interesting for you. Valve released a fresh upgrade for the Steam Deck OS now in Beta, including a fix for an upcoming game.

• The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall continues living on with Daggerfall Unity, an open source recreation of Daggerfall in the Unity engine and a new release just rolled out with Daggerfall Unity 0.15.4 Beta.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE Plasma is exactly what you would expect from a desktop. It contains all the pieces and parts any Windows user has come to know and depend on.

• It includes a taskbar, system tray, clickable desktop icons, a desktop menu, and all of the usual items that help make interacting with your computer a breeze.

• Of course, KDE Plasma has a few more tricks up its sleeve than Windows. One such trick is called KRunner.

• Kdenlive is an acronym for KDE Non-Linear Video Editor. It works on GNU/Linux, Windows and BSD. Through the MLT framework, Kdenlive integrates many plugin effects for video and sound processing or creation. Furthermore Kdenlive brings a powerful titling tool, a DVD authoring (menus) solution, and can then be used as a complete studio for video creation.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• If you’re disillusioned with Windows, Linux is probably the top alternative. While it has been around since the 90s, you might not have used any of its implementations or distributions (distros). Kali Linux is one such popular distro used primarily for cybersecurity. It might not be geared toward the average Linux user, but if you’re a professional penetration tester or studying cybersecurity with an aim to get certified, Kali Linux is one of the best tools available.

• People are attracted to Linux thanks to its stability, security, and open-source nature. Unlike mainstream operating systems like Windows, Linux is much faster, too, simply because it’s more lightweight. However, you don’t access Linux with just “Linux.” Distros are specific implementations of the Linux kernel, and these are what people use when they talk about installing Linux.

• Kali Linux itself is derived from Debian, one of the oldest and most popular Linux distros. It was initially designed in 2013 for penetration testing and security analysis. Like most distros, it’s an open-source project. It’s developed and maintained by Offensive Security, and for the purposes of keeping it secure, only the packages signed off by the development team are officially approved. This is partly the reason the average Linux user might prefer Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or other distros instead.

• Rhino Linux is a new distribution based on the Ubuntu development branch but, unlike it, relies on the rolling release model. The developers have worked hard on its first releases to fix issues with the distribution to make it as attractive and seamless as possible for new Linux users.

• In this light, just three weeks after its first stable release, Rhino Linux 2023.1, we already have the second one released, so let’s see what improvements it brings us.

• Powered by the latest and greatest Linux kernel, 6.5, this release focuses mainly on improving the desktop environment’s performance and providing reliable disk encryption.

• One main issue in the distribution’s initial stable release was that LUKS did not work as expected. Fortunately, this is now in the past, as Rhino Linux 2023.2 comes with fixes for this, and you can now install your system with disk encryption.

• This update to the keyboard-driven, tiling desktop environment also introduces an alpha-quality Wayland-based session based on the Sway compositor (though this is only available if using the DE on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and above, or Debian Bookworm).

• An assortment of other bug fixes, code cleanups, and performance optimizations are included in Regolith Desktop 3.0 too, so read through the full release notes if you need more information.

• Upgrading from an earlier version of Regolith? There are a few changes to be aware if. The directory for config files has changed, as have Xresrouce key names. Refer to the Regolith 3.0 migration guide for more information.

• I find that many Linux users have a misconception about immutable distributions without knowing what it actually is. There is a lot of misinformation and generalization in the Internet about immutable distributions being “locked down”, “inflexible”, etc., when we could argue the same with many traditional distributions.

• In this article, we’ll look at what makes an immutable distribution, the concept of an immutable distribution versus implementations, misconceptions about immutable distributions (both pro and con), and why they exist in the first place.

BSD

• Replacing a sort algorithm in the FreeBSD kernel has improved its boot speed by a factor of 100 or more… and although it’s aimed at a micro-VM, the gains should benefit everyone.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

• What started as a fork of Mandriva Linux, now has grown into a fully-fledged independent Linux distro.

• Started back in 2010, Mageia has come a long way since. It is now a stable and secure operating system for desktop/server use that gets regular updates.

• With a recent announcement, Mageia 9 was introduced with plenty of key improvements.

• Allow me to take you through those.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Although Linux is often considered Windows’ greatest rival, there’s not a single definitive Linux operating system. Rather, there is a complex environment of several Linux-based OSes to choose from. For Linux users who prioritize professional software with the latest features, Fedora is the premiere Linux OS, and it’s primarily used for workstations, servers, and more. Here’s everything you need to know about Fedora.

• If you’re not super familiar with Linux, you might think it’s just like Windows except open source, but that’s not exactly correct. Instead, there are lots of Linux-based operating systems out there, and they can be completely different from each other. Linux-based operating systems are distributions, or distros, of Linux. And they distribute the Linux kernel, which is what defines a Linux OS as a Linux OS. The kernel is essentially the core of the operating system, but it’s mostly under the hood and not something you interact with directly. It’s the job of the distribution to add a front-end on top of the kernel so that users have something to actually use besides a basic command line terminal.

• Ever since its initial release two decades ago, Fedora has been maintained by the Fedora Project, which has received open-source contributions from both the community as a whole as well as Red Hat, one of IBM’s subsidiaries. There are five editions of Fedora: Workstation, Silverblue, Server, IoT (Internet of Things), and CoreOS. Plus, there are some purpose-specific versions via the Fedora Labs bundles. Fedora is also an upstream distro, or a distro that other Linux OSes take and use as a foundation. Notably, Fedora is the upstream distro of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

• At the end of June, the announcement regarding limiting access to RHEL’s source code shocked the enterprise Linux niche to its core, putting the industry’s leading names in a delicate situation.

• While CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE joined forces in the recently formed Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA) to guarantee Enterprise Linux’s safe and predictable future, AlmaLinux chose a different course.

• The distro has decided to shift its focus from this to being 1:1 compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in favor of achieving Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatibility.

• In this regard, AlmaLinux has announced the addition of two new repositories, Testing and Synergy, which mark a significant milestone in AlmaLinux’s goal to stay only ABI compatible with RHEL.

• Our previous blog discussed the persistent volume challenges with peer-pods and how to resolve them. It also introduced using the CSI wrapper as a potential solution to the persistent volume usage challenges with peer-pods.

• This post dives deeper into the various components that make up the persistent volume solution in peer-pods.

• We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.12.5 is generally available as of August 28th, 2023.

• Red Hat Satellite is an infrastructure management solution designed to provision and maintain any Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure – physical, virtual, cloud, and edge environments. Satellite streamlines provisioning, patching, and other repetitive system management tasks to increase efficiency while keeping systems more secure, available, and compliant.

Debian Family

• Coming almost two years after Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 4, the Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 5 release is based on the Debian GNU/Linux 12.1 “Bookworm” operating system and it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series, which is a major bump from Linux 5.10 LTS used in the previous release.

• Emmabuntüs DE 5 sticks to using a dual desktop setup with Xfce being the primary graphical environment for the live session and LXQt remaining the alternative for those who want even a lighter desktop environment. This release ships with Xfce 4.18.1 and LXQt 1.2.0 by default.

Devices/Embedded

• Developer Onno Kortmann has brought Linux to a device few would have imagined capable of running it: the eight-bit Commodore 64, released nearly a decade before Linus Torvalds’ groundbreaking kernel.

• “‘But does it run Linux?’ can now be finally and affirmatively answered for the Commodore C64,” Kortmann writes of his work. “There is a catch (rather: a couple) of course: it runs extremely slowly and it needs a RAM Expansion Unit (REU), as there is no chance to fit it all into just 64KiB.”

• IoT operating systems are software platforms that run on internet-connected devices, enabling them to communicate, process, and store data. IoT operating systems are different from traditional operating systems in that they are designed to be lightweight, scalable, secure, and compatible with various hardware and protocols. This article will introduce you to 10 IoT operating systems you should know about in 2023.

• [...]

• Tizen is an open-source, Linux-based operating system that supports various devices, such as smartphones, smart TVs, wearables, smart home appliances, and automotive systems. Tizen offers rich features and services, such as web and native application development frameworks, security modules, device management tools, and cloud integration. The Tizen Association, a consortium of industry leaders such as Samsung, Intel, Huawei, and LG, backs Tizen.

Open Hardware/Modding

• If you want a McFlurry, there’s about a one-in-four chance that the machine making it is broken. The problem is so common that there’s a website that tracks it and an FTC investigation asking hard questions about ice cream. To find out what the hell is going on, repair website and right-to-repair advocates iFixit got hold of one of the McFlurry machines and tore it down to figure out what makes the ice cream machine so difficult to repair.

• “This smells like a right-to-repair issue, and it turns out it is,” iFixit Teardown Tech Shahram Mokhtari said in the video. So what’s wrong with the machines? The short answer is Software. “This ice cream machine is not a complicated piece of equipment, but the downtime that it suffers is well in excess of what’s acceptable for industrial equipment.”

• Anyway, my point is, that with less software bloat, you can get away with running a small computer.

• Retro gaming is a massively popular Raspberry Pi application, and while loading your favourite old video games onto an SD card is pretty straightforward, building the physical shell of a gaming system can be daunting for those of us without 3D printers or design skills of any kind. PiBoy Mini bridges that gap by providing partially-assembled devices to their customers. The rest is BYORP: bring your own Raspberry Pi.

• Registration for Moonhack 2023 is open. In this free, global coding event, young people can create projects focused on space and innovation.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• This utilises a pair of new extensions to the SSH protocol: [...]

• I wanted a slideshow software with programmable animations. I got suffering instead.

• Speech Note use OpenAI’s Whisper and a stack of other open-source libraries, voice engines, and other doohickeys to perform its transliterative magic.

• It supports Speech to Text (i.e you speak, it types), Text to Speech (i.e. you type, it speaks), and machine translation to translate text/speech from one language to another.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Chromium

• Five years ago I wrote an article about the shortcomings of Chrome Sync (as well as a minor issue with Firefox Sync). Now Chrome Sync has seen many improvements since then. So time seems right for me to revisit it and to see whether it respects your privacy now.

• Spoiler: No, it doesn’t. It improved, but that’s an improvement from outright horrible to merely very bad. The good news: today you can use Chrome Sync in a way that preserves your privacy. Google however isn’t interested in helping you figure out how to do it.

Mozilla

• But don’t get excited about its arrival, okay?

• Given the rapid release cadence this browser uses the days of blockbuster, feature-packed Firefox updates are long gone. We still get ace new features, but we get them in dribs and drabs, spread out over the course of a year, rather than in a single blockbuster update.

• Which is why updates like Firefox 117 seem unexciting (though to be clear: I’m not saying unexciting is a bad thing, lest anyone jumps me down in the comments).

• Case in point?

• Earlier this year, we announced that we were testing a new way for Firefox Relay users to access their email masks directly from Firefox. Today, we’re taking it to the next level and rolling this feature over the next couple of weeks out to millions of Firefox Account users in Firefox. Signing up for a Firefox Account is free and has its advantages, and it now includes access to email protection with Firefox Relay.

Licensing / Legal

• After the recent news that HashiCorp has changed the licenses of its hitherto-open-source products, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the licenses that have sprung up around PostgreSQL and adjacent and related communities, since quite a bit has changed there recently, and it’s hard to keep track.

• But what sparked this particular bit of thinking was Sid Sijbrandij’s response: “HashiCorp switching to BSL shows a need for open charter companies”. Now, Sijbrandij is the cofounder of GitLab, which is at the time of this writing a 7 billion dollar market cap public company which is built on MIT-licensed open source software. He knows what he’s talking about.

• I, on the other hand, am not a lawyer like Kyle or a billionaire like Sij. But I’ve been interested in the business of open source since high school (fun fact, I wrote my International Baccalaureate thesis on the subject), and have seen the lifecycle of one of the open core companies, and I would like to roll the idea around for a little bit.

Programming/Development

• Version 0.92 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated): [...]

• I’m always interested to see what the Go developers are doing with generic types in the standard library. One such development I’ve noticed recently is a new generic function in the ‘reflect’ package, reflect.TypeFor(); this will likely appear as part of Go 1.22. What TypeFor() does is relatively straightforward; it returns the reflect.Type of its type, which you can then use either for further reflection or to compare it to some other type (which you will likely have obtained through reflection).

• This weekend I experimented with using word surprisals — given a corpus of text, how “surprising” is it that a given word appears — for text prediction. I ended up with a neat context-aware autocomplete tool that, given a blog post, will recommend how to complete a word. I made a user interface that lets you press the tab key to accept a suggestion.

Standards/Consortia

• A recently disclosed Intel document has provided insights regarding the compatibility of the IEEE 802.11be standard, commonly referred to as Wi-Fi 7. According to this document, Windows 11, Linux, and ChromeOS are the only operating systems that will support Wi-Fi 7.

• Windows 10 is notably absent from this compatibility list, and this absence is corroborated by information from the source, chi11eddog, who confirmed the lack of a certified driver for Wi-Fi 7 on Windows 10. This suggests that users of older systems may encounter challenges if they plan to adopt the new WLAN standard.

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