● 09.03.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 03/09/2023: GNOME 45 Work and Debian Fatigue

Posted in News Roundup at 9:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

• Welcome back for another late edition of FOSS Week in Review! Late again because, we’re in the process of moving FOSS Force from the home office that has been our home since we started publishing something like 15 years ago.

• It seems that the woman who owned the house we’ve been renting for the last 30 years or so died in May and her two children decided to sell the 168 acres that our house sits on. A few months ago, some local good ‘ol boy rural yuppies bought the place and verbally gave us to the end of the year to vacate the house…which we thought was pretty nice of them since the rental housing market in these parts has gone from pretty cheap and easy-to-find to expensive and nearly impossible to find, evidently as a result of the whole Covid thing.

Desktop/Laptop

• My Slimbook died. I closed the lid and chucked the laptop into a backpack, and two hours later at the other end of that trip it didn’t start at all. Something I really like about Slimbook is their customer service. My experience is that sending them mail is actually useful, and this time I got back a bunch of troubleshooting advice and a disassembly video. So the machine may be out of warranty, there’s still support and help to repair the machine – good from a sustainability perspective, too.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Hello and welcome to Episode #514 of Linux in the Ham Shack.

Kernel Space

• New Kernels are available for PCLinuxOS. kernel-5.4.256-pclos1-1-1pclos2023.x86_64.rpmkernel-5.10.194-pclos1-1-1pclos2023.x86_64.rpmkernel-5.15.130-pclos1-1-1pclos2023.x86_64.rpmkernel-6.1.51-pclos1-1-1pclos2023.x86_64.rpmkernel-6.4.14-pclos1-1-1pclos2023.x86_64.rpm

• The Containers and Checkpoint/Restore micro-conference focuses on both userspace and kernel related work. The micro-conference targets the wider container ecosystem ideally with participants from all major container runtimes as well as init system developers.

• The microconference will be discussing recent advancements in container technologies with some of the usual candidates being: [...]

• Linux Plumbers is now sold out and in-person registration is closed.

• This year it happened not as fast as in 2022, but the registration is still sold out long before the event.

Applications

• Cloud and FTP backup are two different types of backup solutions used to store data in a secure and easily accessible location. Cloud backup involves storing data on remote servers operated by a third-party service provider, while FTP backup involves transferring data to a remote server using the File Transfer

Instructionals/Technical

• The shell is the command interpretor in an operating system such as Unix or GNU/Linux, it is a program that executes other programs. It provides a computer user an interface to the Unix/GNU Linux system so that the user can run different commands or utilities/tools with some input data.

• When the shell has finished executing a program, it sends an output to the user on the screen, which is the standard output device. For this reason, it is referred to as the “command interpretor”.

• Structuring or organizing directories is not much different from structuring or organizing other stuff and it really comes down to what makes the most sense to you – at least as long as you’re only dealing with your own directories. As soon as you’re dealing with an organization, things can very quickly get out of hand.

• The main purpose behind any kind of organizing is efficiency. That really is the keyword. You need to be able to easily and quickly find what you’re looking for and just as easily and quickly be able to store what needs to be stored.

• Extension Manager is an app that allows you to install different shell extensions, to make your Linux experience better.

• Extension Manager is a flatpak app on flathub repository, so installing Gnome Extension on your system could be done by using flatpak.

• Zoom has become the world’s most popular video conferencing software. With its easy-to-use interface and reliable video quality, Zoom is great for meetings, webinars, and connecting with colleagues and friends remotely. While Zoom is proprietary software, it can be installed on Linux-based operating systems like Ubuntu.

• For those who are sticking to Firefox ESR, the latest 115 release is now easy to install in all current Ubuntu releases via PPA. Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) is a slow moving release series target for organizations, including schools, universities, businesses. It has different release circle compare to the general Firefox series.

• I like how Juha-Matti Santala didn’t just think in terms of those categories for themselves but re-bucketed like: [...]

• Originally the discussion sparked somewhat simultaneously in two communities where we discussed the use of tabs in browsers. A lot of people have a lot of tabs open all the time and they never close tabs. That’s their strategy to store things and if the browser would crash and forget the tabs, they’d lose them all which seems to cause a bit of anxiety.

• I personally have never been much of a tabber. If I have more than a small handful of tabs open at any given time, I get anxious. I usually keep a few tabs open as pinned (like mail, calendar) and then very limited amount of tabs I work actively. I close tabs as soon as I no longer need them actively. I’d rather open a site over and over again during the day when I need it rather than keep it open.

• At first, I was going to write an entry about the practical challenges of doing very much of these end to end tests and alerts in our rather different environment. But the more I thought about it, the more I think that this ‘user journeys’ style of alerting is not entirely generally applicable, or at the least is very hard to apply in some environments. As an outsider, it seems that ‘user journey’ alerts work best in an environment where you have relatively few user services and these services don’t have single points of failure in their implementation, and perhaps you have significant churn over time in how these services are implemented and operated. This often describes web applications, which also tend to come with convenient broad problem indicators in the form of monitoring for certain HTTP error results that signal internal issues.

• One of the things I’ve become more and more aware of over time as I talk about our metrics, monitoring, and alerting system is that what ‘alerts’ are can vary quite a bit between environments, despite everyone using the same term and often the same technology to implement their particular form of ‘alerts’. Some of the difference in what alerts mean is technological and some of it is organizational (or ‘operational’).

• This is my take on an introduction. Everyone has their own style, informed by their experience and the types of content they write; there are few hard rules about introductions. Ultimately, it is up to you, the writer, to figure out what you want to say and how you want to say it!

• For individuals concerned about online privacy, Ungoogled Chromium serves as an excellent browser choice. This guide will detail installing Ungoogled Chromium on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish LTS or the older stable release of Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa LTS; this method will also work with the latest short-term release.

• I recently ran into an interesting warning on newer versions of ARM GCC, including the latest (as of this writing) Arm GNU Toolchain 12.3.Rel1.

idroot

• In today’s digital landscape, web servers play a pivotal role in delivering content and services to users worldwide. Nginx, a popular open-source web server, is known for its speed and versatility. However, as your web applications gain popularity, they can become targets for malicious activities, making security a top priority.

• In the dynamic realm of networking, achieving seamless connectivity and swiftly resolving issues are paramount for optimal performance. Enter the “traceroute” command – a network detective tool that reveals the journey packets undertaken across networks.

linuxconcept

• Nagios, a powerful open-source monitoring system, is a lifeline for IT professionals tasked with ensuring the reliability of critical infrastructure. However, like any robust tool, Nagios can sometimes become a double-edged sword when it comes to notifications. The constant stream of alerts can quickly overwhelm your team, leading to alert fatigue and missed critical issues.

• In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, where software systems and applications are at the core of most businesses, the ability to respond swiftly to critical alerts is paramount. These critical alerts often signify potential issues that, if left unattended, can lead to system failures, downtime, and ultimately, financial losses.

• In the realm of system monitoring and infrastructure management, Nagios has long been a stalwart companion. This powerful open-source tool empowers administrators to keep a vigilant eye on the health and performance of their IT environments.

• In today’s fast-paced world, staying informed about the status of your critical IT infrastructure is paramount. Nagios, a popular open-source monitoring system, provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities to ensure the health and performance of your systems. One crucial aspect of monitoring is receiving timely alerts when issues arise.

• In the realm of IT operations and infrastructure monitoring, Nagios has long been a trusted ally. Its robust capabilities for system and network monitoring provide valuable insights into the health and performance of your environment. However, effectively managing incidents and responding promptly to alerts generated by Nagios can be a complex task.

• Monitoring your IT infrastructure is essential for ensuring its reliability and availability. Nagios is a powerful open-source monitoring system that can help you keep a close eye on your network, servers, and services. One of the key features of Nagios is its ability to send email notifications when issues are detected.

• In the fast-paced world of Information Technology (IT), where systems are constantly evolving and user demands are ever-increasing, effective IT monitoring is crucial. However, monitoring alone is not sufficient; what truly empowers IT teams is timely notifications.

WINE or Emulation

• Two bits of Wine news for this weekend with the development release Wine 8.15 now available, and more work for Wine Wayland is incoming too.

Games

• I code my games in C++ using visual studio 2015, and some help from visual assist from whole tomato (basically improved intellisense). I coded my own engine, but as GSSG is a simple 2D space shooter, thats easily good enough. I thought just in case anyone who reads my blog is learning C++, it might be interesting to describe some of the code.

• After the rather exciting development in the last Steam Hardware & Software Survey where Linux users overtook macOS for the first time, the latest survey shows Linux continues to be above macOS but with the numbers dipping down.

• Optimus-manager is a nice piece of software that lets you configure dual GPU setups usually available on laptops that share the same built-in screen and have a lot of nuances to be dealt with: [...]

• The latest release for GE-Proton, the community version of Proton, has dropped. Version 8-14 brings with it several fixes and workaround removals that had deprecated. We must note that this isn’t the official version of Proton from Valve, so you’ll have to download it separately.

• The question on everyone’s lips when a new piece of hardware comes out is this: Will it run DOOM? Many pieces of modern hardware have been coaxed into playing id Software’s 1993 classic, but there have always been some older machines that just didn’t have the power to do it. One of them has now been conquered though, and it’s a doozy. [Frenkel]’s Doom8088, as its name suggests, is a port of the game for the original PC and AT.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• In this blog, I’m pumped to share my experience attending GUADEC 2023 held in Riga, Latvia.

• During the conference, I presented a joint talk with Pooja Patel on “How to add 16.67% more users and contributors: A guide to creating accessible applications”.

• The talk was on Day 2 of the conference and we got quite nervous haha. We didn’t join the walking tour and had to skip some of the most amazing talks on Day 2.

• Fortunately, The journey was made more streamlined due to the extensive support of the staff team. I also want to thank Melissa for doing all the bookings and keeping up with our issues xD

• In the recent update of Ubuntu 23.10 daily build, the GNOME desktop has been updated to v45 beta. And, here are some visual changes. The default wallpaper now has a dark variant. Meaning changing Ubuntu Desktop to dark style will also change to dark style wallpaper.

• By now it is probably no longer news to many: GNOME Shell moved from GJS’ own custom imports system to standard JavaScript modules (ESM).

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

• Powered by Liquorix kernel 6.4, Nitrux 3.0 ships with the most up-to-date Plasma 5.27.7, bug fixes, and the latest Maui apps.

• Today is an exciting day in the world of Linux; Nitrux 3.0.0 has just been launched, and you can download an ISO here. This groundbreaking release screams innovation and forward-thinking, something that seems to have escaped Microsoft’s latest Windows 11. Nitrux 3.0.0 comes with a robust set of improvements, from its use of Linux Kernel 6.4.12-2 (Liquorix) to an updated Firefox version 117.0. But let’s talk about the ‘Nitrux Update Tool System’ that even offers a rescue operation for backup redundancy.

Debian Family

• Coming about a month from the previous update for the Armbian 23.05 series, Armbian 23.08 is here with support for the most recent memory chips on the Banana Pi BPI-M5 single-board computer, Linux kernel 6.1 LTS support for the Banana Pi BPI-CM4 single-board computer, and initial support for the Lenovo ThinkPad X13s ARM laptop.

• Armbian 23.08 also brings official distro upgrade support integrated into armbian-config, armbian-gaming as an extension, a new grub-with-dtb extension to enable the GRUB extension and implement various GRUB hooks, enables power management functions in Allwinner boards, improves Khadas VIM3/VIM3L and Odroid M1 boot support.

• Wayland simply isn’t ready and it isn’t clear it ever will be.

• People have noticed that Thiemo Seufer’s death in a car accident occurred after working on Christmas Day. That was in 2008. It turns out there was a precedent for this.

• [...]

• The deaths were discussed on the debian-private gossip network. Robert Millan commented that Sr Estrada had worked all night at a previous DebConf.

• I found an archived copy of Sr Estrada’s web site. It has a large banner on the front page, Wellcome to HELL. Coincidentally, the distance from Valencia to Seville is approximately 666km.

• This is a minor update of Sparky of the oldstable line 6.7.1 “Po Tolo” targeted to the single board mini computers Raspberry Pi.

• September. Looking at performance traces and analysing scheduling and other issues. CPU Cache doesn’t really play into effect until I figure out the scheduling issues. They don’t collide.

Devices/Embedded

• Gowin Semiconductor and Andes Technologies have recently unveiled the specifications for their AndesCore A25 RISC-V CPU IP along with the AE350 peripheral subsystem integrated into the GW5AST-138 GOWIN FPGA from the Arora V family. The announcement marks one of the initial successful implementations of a complete RISC-V MCU implemented into an FPGA.

• SparkFun’s Arduino IoT Weather Station is a complete weather station kit leveraging the company’s MicroMod ecosystem with an ESP32 Processor Board and various sensors and developed in collaboration with Arduino for integration into their IoT Cloud service. Most people will check the weather on the Internet or watch the weather forecast on TV, but if you live in a remote area with a micro-climate or just want to have fun building your own weather station, the latest SparkFun kit will allow you to monitor temperature, air and soil humidity, wind speed and direction, lightning, and rainfall data at home and monitor the data from anywhere using a web browser.

• The old adage that you’ll make a fortune by developing a better mouse trap is not super realistic, as the engineers behind Sony’s Betamax video tape standard could tell you. However, you can still learn a lot building your own, as this project from [ROBO HUB] demonstrates.

• [Jeff Geerling]’s latest project is for the birds — literally. Even though he has a brand new high-speed fiber optic internet connection, online backups of YouTube video projects still take hours. He decided to see if the conclusions from a 2009 in South Africa study still hold true today — that using carrier pigeons to send files can be faster than the internet. [Jeff] sets up an experiment to send 3 TB of data by homing pigeon a distance of one mile to establish a baseline. Next, [Jeff] sends the same 3 TB of data over the internet, and donning the cap of honorary pigeon, simultaneously embarks on a journey by air to his off-site backup service in Nova Scotia, Canada.

Open Hardware/Modding

• According to Jazmati, the project consists of a plastic disc with holes that spin through a small trough of soapy water. A fan is connected to blow air through the bubble solution on the disc. You can experiment with different hole sizes and fan speeds to tune it right.

• Someone recently sent me their Amiga 1200, which used to be their pride and joy, for free, to look after. They no longer had a use for it. It needed a bit of work, so I decided to document it.

• Call it a “refurb weekend sequel” to our previous work on my beloved Commodore 128DCR. It’s been a hot, horrid summer in Floodgap Very Sub-Orbital Headquarters and I was somewhat concerned about the heat in the house computer lab even with the A/C cranked up to “Vegas weekend for Southern California Edison’s Board of Directors” levels. But it’s even worse for cooling when your one and only rear vent looks like this: [...]

• I wanted my computer to be a traditional word processor but with a few modern updates: it was important for me to be able to write directly to the cloud so that I could pick up writing from anywhere, and know my progress would be saved automatically. I also wanted a screen to display my documents in a very simplified manner – ideally monochrome or e-ink so that my focus was on the words directly and not on social media, video games, or any other distractions. With this in mind, I started my preliminary design process.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• The UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), New Zealand’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC-NZ), the Canadian Centre for Cyber Security – part of the Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE), and Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) are aware that the actor known as Sandworm has used a new mobile malware in a campaign targeting Android devices used by the Ukrainian military. The malware is referred to here as Infamous Chisel.

• So Android is working on a feature to transfer your eSIM from one phone to another and it is a HUGE deal. But to understand how big of a deal it is, we first need to understand the problem. Quick 411 on what an eSIM is So an eSIM is basically a downloaded SIM card.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Email has a lot of the same problems fedi has. It’s used by some very bad people, there’s not a lot of moderators, there’s spam and bad faith servers that you need to block on the instance level, if you get kicked off a server or a server operator folds you need to migrate your address and that’s a 🐝, the protocol is also really complicated these days with many layers and spec addons, it’s difficult to find a place and crowd that’s good for you etc.

• Fedi also has some of the same advantages as email: no-one owns it, it can be used for all kinds of things, it’s free etc.

• Email and fedi work very similarly except fedi has more bugs.

• Hackaday ran a story about Vim with some interesting history. I knew the late Bram Moolenaar had started the project on the Amiga, though I didn’t know the history of the original code going back to Tim Thompson’s Stevie on the Atari ST, and the ports made by Tony Andrews. I swear the world is conspiring to get me into buying a 520 or 1040ST.

• The sudo utility provides a way for privileged users of Unix-like systems (eg: Linux and FreeBSD) to run a command as root. It presents a bit of a risk in that low-privileged rogue users or software could find a way to abuse it, such as by exploiting a bug in the code, to elevate their access to root, or superuser, level. Ideally sudo and su should be as secure and vulnerability-free as possible, as they act as gateways to taking full control of a system.

Events

• Better to give a talk at a hacker event, that is. Or in your hackerspace, or even just to a bunch of fellow nerds whenever you can. When you give the talk, don’t be afraid to make it too “easy” to understand. Making a tough topic comprehensible is often the sign that you really understand it, after all, and it’s also a fantastic service to the audience. And also don’t be afraid that your talk isn’t “hard core” enough, because with a diverse enough crowd, there will absolutely be folks for whom it’s still entirely new, and they’ll be thankful.

Education

• Don’t know how to eat, sleep, study, budget and flourish in college? Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered. This is by no means a comprehensive list, but it’s a good college starter pack to get you through your first year. Who knows? By this May, you may just have your own list of college hacks. But for now, you can take some of ours. (You’re welcome!)

• How many roads must a programmer walk down before you call them a contractor? It’s been about three years since I went down this (bumpy) path, and I finally have the feeling that my contracting business is “bootstrapped”1. Here’s an account of my journey so far, hoping you find it inspiring!

Programming/Development

• This would be the first in a series of lessons that I would want to convey. Having clear expectations on the veracity of AI-generated text is, in my book, a foundation: something that should be taught at the earliest possible opportunity. From there, ideas like prompting can be explored: the idea that, with natural language, you can tune the response to a question. “Explain this to me like I am five”, or “Convey this point in bullet points”, or variants thereof are interesting. I am especially intrigued by how language models can convey the same concept in different ways.

• I recently ran into an interesting warning on newer versions of ARM GCC, including the latest (as of this writing) Arm GNU Toolchain 12.3.Rel1. In particular I’m dealing with arm-none-linux-gnueabihf-g++. Here’s a very simple example program that demonstrates the warning: [...]

• Previous post about supporting Void Linux .xbps packages:

• https://bkhome.org/news/202309/woofq-support-to-build-withvoid-xbps-packages.html

• Have now got the ’0setup’, ’1download’ and ’2createpackages’ scripts to work in woofQ.

• One problem is that support/void/cvt.sh (called from void0setup) performs an incomplete db conversion. ‘cvt.sh’ is written in awk, that I have less than rudimentary capability with. I know that the awk language is wonderful, and have always intended to learn more about it. Anyway, I fixed a couple of db issues by putting in some extra code in ’0setup’:

• I have not been a fan of “usr-merge”; however, many mainstream distributions have changed, or are planning to change, to it. Let’s see, Fedora, Mageia, Ubuntu, Arch, openSUSE and Void have changed, and Debian intends to do so in the next release.

• OpenEmbedded/Yocto has the capability, via adding “usrmerge” to the DISTRO_FEATURES variable. “usrmerge” was introduced to OE in 2017:

• Didn’t really do anything on Niepce in August, so no updates on that front. However I worked on a few other things.

• A lot of work done on it. See my other wlog post. The short version is that I should look towards releasing 0.4.0 sometime soon.

• Since that last post, I have added a long standing to-do item: code to generate test cases so I can run a non regression test suite on existing files. However I get hit with flaws in the various XML serde crates.

Python

• The Python “tarfile” module is used to perform various functions on tarfile, such as creating and reading tar files in various modes, extracting tar files, etc.

• In Python, the inbuilt “min()” function retrieves the smallest item/element in an iterable such as a list, string, or dictionary.

• In Python, the “df.apply()” method is used along with the “df.groupby()” method to apply the specified function to the DataFrame group data.

• The “df.to_csv()” method of the “pandas” module and “Openpyxl” and “CSV” modules are used to convert XLSX to CSV in Python.

• The “pandas.crosstab()” function of the “pandas” module determines the simple cross-tabulation of single or multiple factors.

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