● 09.14.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 14/09/2023: Sparky 7.1 and Curl 8.3.0

Posted in News Roundup at 5:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

• Recording your desktop session is a common and good practice for a variety of purposes, such as playing a hard level of a game, creating a video tutorial, or writing a how-to article. Screen recording software can help you accomplish all of these tasks.

• In this review guide, we shall cover some of the best screen recording and live video streaming software that you can find for your Linux desktop.

• Email, an enduring method of communication, remains a fundamental way to share information; however, the preference has shifted from web applications to email clients over the years

• An email client is software that allows users to manage their inbox, send, receive, and organize messages directly from a desktop or mobile phone.

Instructionals/Technical

idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Maven on Debian 12. Apache Maven is an essential tool for Java developers, providing a robust and efficient way to manage project dependencies, build, and deploy applications.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PlayOnLinux on Debian 12. PlayOnLinux is a remarkable graphical front-end for Wine, a compatibility layer that allows you to run Windows applications on Linux systems.

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install WezTerm on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. In the world of Linux, having a powerful and versatile terminal emulator can greatly enhance your workflow and productivity. One such standout terminal emulator is WezTerm. It offers a modern and feature-rich environment for your command-line tasks.

• In the dynamic realm of software development, effective project management and streamlined dependency management are crucial for successful outcomes. This comprehensive guide aims to unravel the intricate world of Maven Repositories, a fundamental component in modern software development.

• Recently, our IMAP server had unusually high CPU usage and was increasingly close to saturating its CPU. When I investigated with ‘top’ it was easy to see the culprit processes, but when I checked what they were doing with the strace command, they were all busy madly doing IO, in fact processing recursive IMAP LIST commands by walking around in the filesystem. Processes that intensely do IO like this normally wind up in “iowait”, not in active CPU usage (whether user or system CPU usage). Except here these processes were, using huge amounts of system CPU time.

• It’s pretty simple. The clock face has 256 “ticks” (annotated in hexadecimal), and four dials, each moving exactly 256 times slower than the previous. The longest and fastest moving dial moves at one tick per second, which means it takes very approximately 4 minutes to do a full revolution (4:16, actually). The next hand takes roughly 18 hours, the next roughly 6 months, and the smallest hand takes ~136 years – or exactly 2^32 seconds.

• In spite of configuring debug logging and log forwarding from AWX, I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. My assumption was the body of the post was missing something. I looked at the source code of the api view controller and still didn’t figure it out and basically gave up after an hour. Actual webhooks posted from Gitea worked (when configured in AWX as Github), but my simple curl invocation wouldn’t. (Remind me to rave about how I like Gitea and Forgejo.)

• BookWyrm is an open-source federated social network for book readers. It acts as an ad-free Goodreads alternative. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install BookWyrm on a Debian 12 server.

Games

• It’s time again to upgrade your install of the Heroic Games Launcher which helps you install games from Epic, GOG, Amazon and more on Steam Deck and desktop Linux.

• In the wake of Unity setting everything on fire with their new revenue model for developers, here’s a reminder on what other game engines and tech is out there for developers to look into.

• After Valve recently launched a stable Steam Client update for desktop and Steam Deck, along with the recent SteamOS 3.4.10 release – SD Cards became a bit problematic.

• Another chance for you to fill up your Steam library ensuring there’s never a dull moment – Fanatical launched the Killer Bundle 27 with 20 games included. This is not a build it yourself bundle either, all games are included in it for one purchase.

• Well this is pretty fun to see! The ZDoom / GZDoom family is expanding with VKDoom, a new source-port that has a focus on expanded Vulkan support and modern rendering. Now it’s worth noting that GZDoom already supports Vulkan, but VKDoom has a focus on making the Vulkan support much more modern with advanced rendering features for modern GPUs.

• Fancy city-building but don’t want to pay a big sum for all the extra content? Humble Bundle have a new Cities: Skylines Bundle live now with the base game and major expansions. This game has Native Linux support and is rated Steam Deck Playable.

• Stock up on some fantastic indie games, as GOG have launched their Indie Festival which is live now until September 25th, 10 PM UTC. While there’s been numerous big releases over the last year, don’t forget about all the really great indie games that often do things the bigger lot won’t.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• This report covers hrev57184 through hrev57256.

• It’s worth noting: the main Haiku CI is currently offline as the developer who was hosting the build machine moved to a location with much slower internet. A new build machine and home for the CI has already been selected, but isn’t fully online yet, so the nightly builds are a bit behind at the moment.

• To the user, an appimage is a binary that looks and feels like a statically linked binary. In fact, you’d have a hard time discovering a binary is an appimage at all.

• At its core, an appimage is a squashfs image that contains an application and all of its dependencies. Prepended to the binary is a statically linked runtime that: [...]

Fedora Family / IBM

• Fedora 39, the latest version of the upcoming Fedora Linux is almost ready for the beta release. With tons of new updates and features, this release is sure to make your Linux experience even better. In this article, we’ll cover all the important feature highlights of Fedora 39 so you can get the most out of it. Let’s dive in!

Debian Family

• LMDE is a Linux Mint project which stands for “Linux Mint Debian Edition”. Its goal is to ensure Linux Mint would be able to continue to deliver the same user experience, and how much work would be involved, if Ubuntu was ever to disappear. LMDE is also one of our development targets, to guarantee the software we develop is compatible outside of Ubuntu.

• LMDE aims to be as similar as possible to Linux Mint, but without using Ubuntu. The package base is provided by Debian instead.

• Sparky is a Debian-based Linux distribution designed to be lightweight, fast, and user-friendly. It aims to provide a reliable, easy-to-use desktop environment while offering various software packages.

• Almost two months after the previous 7.0 release, the dev team announced the general availability of the latest stable Sparky 7.1, the first refresh in the 7.x “Orion Belt” series based on Debian’s stable branch.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The implementation of ZFS on Linux has been a highly contentious affair over the years.

• You see, ZFS support is not included in the Linux kernel owing to licensing conflicts, and in the past, even Linus Torvalds himself has mentioned not to use ZFS on Linux.

• However, distributions based on Linux are free to include ZFS support if they wish to, and many of them do.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

• Tablets with “desktop” operating systems aren’t too common these days, outside the occasional Microsoft Surface. There are 2-in-1 laptops which can be used like tablets, which has all but eliminated the need of cramming desktop operating systems into a tablet-only form factor. Most tablets either are iPads or run Android, and come equipped with ARM-based chipsets just like smartphones. If you want something a little different, however, this Linux tablet might fit the bill.

• Brandal started this project as an excuse to experiment with his new CNC router. Cutting gears seemed like a good way to do so, but he didn’t have a need for any mechanism that utilized them. That led him to the concept of a kinetic sculpture and Intermittent Luminal Phase is the result. It spins endlessly, making noise and blinking lights. But it is almost hypnotizing to see in action.

• The Liberty Phone enhances the Librem 5 hardware specs and utilizes the software stack of PureOS. Here is a montage of videos documenting our path in creating the Liberty Phone.

• When it comes to driving a display, you can do all kinds of fancy tricks with microcontrollers to get an image up. Really, though, FPGAs are the weapon of choice for playing with these kinds of signals. [Ted Fried] put one to great work driving an ancient IBM 5151 MDA display, and shared his results on Hackaday.io.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Web Browsers/Web Servers

• I have a long standing setup where I read my email on one of our Linux login servers, instead of on my desktop. Email can include URLs that I want to open, so I need some way of opening these URLs in my desktop browser. For a long time this has been through one of two options; either I forwarded X over SSH and used Firefox’s X-based remote control, or I was operating purely with text and selected the URLs in the terminal to use with my tools to open URLs in various browsers.

• The number of security fixes is adjusted due to the recently rejected CVE-2023-32001

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• Microsoft Office still dominates market share of office suites. Businesses have often rejected free Office alternatives. However, things are changing. With the cost of a price subscription plan for Microsoft Office, the average home user or small business will welcome a free alternative. Fortunately, there are some truly excellent open source alternatives available for Linux (and other operating systems).

• Our recommendations are captured in our legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. Only free and open source software is eligible for inclusion.

Education

• The security industry is not too accessible. It focuses on common details, rather than fundamental problems and solutions. We can do better by building communities with free knowledge and compassion, rather than exclude newcomers with paywalled content and competitive hazing. Fundamentals like separating code and data must be top of mind as new technologies like large language models get deployed. Bad cryptography is everywhere and we hope to make cryptographic knowledge more accessible.

• This talk summary is part of my DEF CON 31 series. The talks this year have sufficient depth to be shared independently and are separated for easier consumption.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Data

• In this meetup, we will replicate open science research. This meetup is the second event of the Reproducing Open Research Series. We chose the paper “Learning, Inside and Out: Prior Linguistic Knowledge and Learning Environment Impact Word Learning in Bilingual Individuals” within the linguistics domain and features experimental data.

Programming/Development

• She worked with Shafat Insha and Midhat Munira to develop a smart colour-based object tracking system, using OpenCV and Raspberry Pi 3. The autonomous Smart Object Tracking Robot can detect and track objects of a specific colour in real time.

• In software, we store strings of text as arrays of bytes in memory using one of the Unicode Transformation Formats (UTF), the most popular being UTF-8 and UTF-16. Windows, Java, C# and other systems common languages and systems default on UTF-16, whereas other systems and most of the web relies on UTF-8. There are benefits to both formats and we are not going to adopt one over the other any time soon. It means that we must constantly convert our strings from UTF-8 to UTF-16 and back.

• Directed graphs are ubiquitous, so it’s incredibly weird to me that not a single mainstream programming language has a built-in directed graph type. And it’s even weirder that not a single mainstream programming language has them in the standard library.

• I have recently been seeing an increasing amount of chatter about and against pull requests. These especially often come from the crowd that advocates for pair or mob/ensemble programming. I saw a great one in Mastodon the other week but failed to save it so I can’t reference it. In essence, that toot asked: What legit benefit is there for pull requests for teams that trust each other?

• And I’ve seen this sentiment quite often: some people consider that pull requests’ main or even only function is to prevent malicious or bad code from entering a codebase from untrusted sources. And in many distributed open source projects that is one of its functions. However, I’d argue that focusing solely on the trust issue and then dismissing pull requests for teams that trust each other, is short-sighted.

• “The next is replace — replace feature after feature after feature of the older Cerner system with a new Cerner system, new Millennium, which we are not coding in Java like we usually do. The new Cerner system is being generated — as you know, generative AI generates code. We have an application generator called APEX. And we are not writing code for the new Cerner; we are generating that code in APEX, and it’s going extremely well.”

• This is a quote from Larry Ellison in Oracle’s latest earnings call. It should be taken with a grain of salt — Ellison is a master of narrative, and he’s addressing an audience of investors. Whether APEX works as well as he claims or if developers are simply using GitHub Copilot, the fact remains: this is the future of a good chunk of software development.

Python

• The past few weeks I’ve been finishing slides, recording my video, and collaborating with my co-presenter 🚀

Rust

• Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!

Standards/Consortia

• Allow me to unpack that. To comply with recent European regulations, the iPhone 15, unveiled Tuesday, will abandon the Lightning connector that has been the method for charging iPhones for 11 years. In its place will be a different oval-shaped connector: USB-C.

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