● 09.15.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 15/09/2023: RIP, Abraham Raji (Debian)

Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• As of this writing, 4,588 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 6.6 kernel release. The 6.6 merge window, in other words, is just getting started. Nonetheless, a fair amount of significant work has already been pulled, so the time has come to summarize what has happened so far in this development cycle.

• The kernel-development community has recently been discussing a number of independent patches, each of which is intended to help improve the security of deployed systems in some way. They touch on a number of areas within the kernel, including the question of how widely io_uring should be available, how to allow virtual machines to attest to their integrity, and the best way to inform applications when their random-number generators need to be reseeded.

• The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) provides a repository where vendors can upload firmware updates that can be accessed by the fwupd firmware update daemon on Linux systems. That mechanism allows users to keep the hardware components of their systems up to date with the latest firmware releases, but it has gotten so popular that the daily metadata queries are starting to swamp the LVFS content delivery network (CDN) server. So Richard Hughes, who developed fwupd and LVFS, suggested that it would make sense to start looking at ways to reduce that burden; the idea was discussed in a recent thread on the Fedora devel mailing list.

• Linux has become one of the largest operating systems on the servers that run large websites, and hopefully, one day, it will be big in the desktop market too. Some of you may know how Linux as an operating system is structured, but have you ever wondered how the kernel itself is structured? Maybe you’ll find this colorful interactive map of the Linux kernel by [Costa Shulyupin] useful.

• The interactive map depicts the major levels of abstraction and functionalities, dotted with over 400 prominent functions from the Linux kernel, which are also links to a cross-reference site so you can see all the definitions and usages. It divides the kernel into 7 rows and 7 columns containing domains with well-known terms like security and debugging, but also more obscure things like block devices and address families. These are also links, this time to the definition of the term in question. Finally, there are arrows flying everywhere, to show the relationships between all the many functions in the kernel.

Applications

• Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced content creator, you need content creation tools as your companions on the exciting journey of creating stunning videos on Linux.

• So dive into content creation with these eight open-source Linux tools that let you transform your visions into captivating visual stories.

• Kdenlive is a powerful open-source video editing tool that is perfect for Linux content creators. Its user-friendly interface and impressive feature set make it a top choice.

• One of its distinctive features is the multi-track editing. You can easily arrange video and audio clips on different tracks to create the final product. This makes it easy to overlay audio tracks, insert transitions, and synchronize various video elements.

• In Kdenlive, you can preview the changes in real time, which is great for getting things right. This saves a lot of time since you don’t have to keep guessing how your video will turn out. Kdenlive also supports several media formats, so you can use various media sources without any problems.

Instructionals/Technical

• As mentioned on previous posts, I have spent the past few weeks dealing with a ZFS crash on my FreeNAS install. Because of that, not only was I forced to learn how to troubleshoot ZFS, but I also had to learn how to setup new volumes and come up with new backup strategies (between a few other things).

• This was a great opportunity for me to learn more about ZFS (because I new ‘nada’ to start with). And I’m happy to share some of the knowledge that I gathered with you on this post.

• Please keep in mind that I don’t consider myself an expert on ZFS (not even close), but I will try to make things simple and easy to understand for someone, who like me, is just getting started with ZFS.

• If you don’t know what torrents are, it’s a peer-to-peer protocol for transferring files. It is especially useful when dealing with large amounts of data. Each torrent client that connects can both download and upload parts of the file at the same time.

• By the end of the following section, you will have the Transmission client running on your Ubuntu device. You can even install newer versions of Transmission, such as 4.0, to Ubuntu by following these steps.

• Most users rely on external peripherals like USB drives, wireless keyboards, mice, disk drive, and more to use their computers.

• Linux is known for its powerful command-line interface, but it’s not all business and productivity. There are several whimsical commands that add a touch of fun and humor to your terminal experience. In this blog post, we’ll introduce you to two such commands and show you how to use them.

Games

• Some rather great timing here from Humble Bundle as they’ve put up a re-hash of a previous bundle with The Complete Godot Software Bundle Encore. Clearly someone over at Humble Bundle has been watching the Unity situation unfold.

• The saga with the Unity game engine continues, after their completely botched announcement of a new fee system game developers will need to pay.

• I think my love for Vampire Survivor like games has ended, and a new relationship has been made with Heretic’s Fork because it’s simply brilliant. Note: personal purchase.

• Joining the Steam 20 year celebration, the Steam Deck and Docking Station are now discounted across all three models when buying brand new from Valve.

• Releasing in February 14th, 2024 – Tomb Raider I-III Remastered is heading to Steam thanks to Aspyr Media. The remasters were announced today for various consoles, with it also appearing for pre-order now on Steam. Time to replay a bit of history!

• Fanatical is currently giving away free Steam keys for the physics-based 3D platformer, Crumble.

• A change to any one of those layers can make a game run badly, or not at all. I’ve personally used MS-DOS emulator DOSBox to play PC games from the early 90s, but admit that I also assumed that any PC game I played in the last 15 years will just magically keep working forever. But just last week, a viral video detailed how many PC games from Rockstar Games run poorly or break down entirely because they haven’t been ported properly to newer operating systems. Sometimes, official versions of those games on Steam are actually cracked versions, because the piracy community does a better job of maintaining them than one of the biggest video game publishers in the world.

• Lee became the guy to do this work by working with Humble Bundle, a company started in 2010 that sold bundles of mostly indie games and allowed people to donate part of the proceeds to charity. Humble Bundle asked participating PC game developers to also be able to run on macOS and Linux. Lee had some experience with the latter from porting a small game called Waveform to Linux.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Since the release of Xfce 4.18, the Xfce devs have been steadily working towards making Xfce compatible with Wayland, the modern successor to the aging X11 display server protocol. In this update, we’ll take a look at the latest developments in the Xfce Wayland roadmap for 2023.

Distributions and Operating Systems

• Rhino Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution launched back on August 8th, 2023. It follows the rolling release model which many Ubuntu users have been wanting for years. The current version as of writing this is 2023.2 released on August 28th, 2023. If you’re interested in trying it out, the ISO is available for download.

• But is a rolling release of Ubuntu enough for someone to migrate to a totally new Linux distribution? As a Linux user who hops around new distros all the time, it got me interested. So I powered up VirtualBox and tried out this cute purple distribution. Let me share my findings with you.

• I choose Alpine because it’s really small and very close to OpenBSD in many ways, and the struggle to install it is quite low, what you need for it, are the following (I will “install” 3 VMs, one master and 2 workers): [...]

• Can you really do 3D printing from OpenBSD? Cue suspenseful music whilst I formulate my answer, which is: Yes.

• If you aren’t familiar with the 3D printing process, it’s divided into several steps, vaguely analogous to writing, compiling and running a program in a compiled language.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• This week saw openSUSE Tumbleweed level up with a new Linux Kernel.

• The rolling release had many snapshots, but only recently did the zypper dup change the distribution to Linux Kernel 6.5.

• The most recent snapshot to be released is 20230913. Mozilla Firefox 117.0.1 fixes a bug that causes extensions with long-running tasks to be terminated prematurely. The web browser resolves problems with audio for WebAssembly-based sites. An update of curl 8.3.0 removes Global Secure Kit and Network Security Services support. The package also fixes address issues like handling IPv6 addresses in response headers, reduces some timeouts and improves SSL and HTTP protocol handling. An update of virtualization tool qemu 8.1.0 improved live migration support for Virtual Function Input/Output (VFIO) and has some Advanced Encryption Standard acceleration for arm, PowerPC, and RISC-V architectures. An update of sudo 1.9.14p3 fixes a crash issue related to Python 3.12 and resolves output formatting problems when piping or redirecting output. Several other packages updated in the snapshot.

Fedora Family / IBM

• f things really do happen in threes as some people say, then that means we’re soon going to get news that some open-leaning tech organization has decided to expand its board of directors by two.

• I say this because on Monday we learned that the board at the nonprofit digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation had been expanded by two seats, and then today we learned that the board of directors at AlmaLinux OS Foundation, the group that watches over the eponymous Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based distribution, is also expanding by two seats.

• There are some differences between the two announcements, however. For example, when EFF expanded its board, it didn’t really tell anybody in advance or give a reason for the expansion. With the AlmaLinux OS Foundation, though, today’s announcement is not only our advance notice that the board is going to expand, but that the expansion is set to happen sometime after the middle of December, which is when the polls will close on a planned election to determine who’ll be filling the two seats.

• Fedora has consistently been at the forefront of innovation and progress. Fedora 40 is set to make a critical change that will impact the way users interact with the KDE Plasma desktop environment.

Debian Family

• LMDE is a cross between the normal Ubuntu-based Mint and Debian. LMDE looks like Mint, it installs very much like Mint, and once up and running it’s almost indistinguishable from Mint. We looked at the previous release, the Debian-11-based LMDE 5 Elsie, about 18 months ago, and the same remarks that we made then still hold true.

• The Debian Project has lost a member of its community. On 13th September 2023 Abraham Raji was involved in a fatal accident during a kayaking trip.

• Abraham was a popular and respected Debian Developer as well a prominent free software champion in his home state of Kerala, India. He was a talented graphic designer and led design and branding work for DebConf23 and several other local events in recent years. Abraham gave his time selflessly when mentoring new contributors to the Debian project, and he was instrumental in creating and maintaining the Debian India website.

• The Debian Project honors his good work and strong dedication to Debian and Free Software. Abraham’s contributions will not be forgotten, and the high standards of his work will continue to serve as an inspiration to others.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• This version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution offers a kernel that promises immediate responses to incoming requests, which can be vital for real-time operations.

• We are going on the Roadshow with things that we already built for different customers and also with our partners who are big players in that space. In the Amsterdam session, we’ll be together with Nvidia, making a workshop and showing how MLOps should be done on the enterprise level and production grade. So there will be a lot of exciting showcases during that workshop where people can get a first-hand experience and actual technical stuff as well.

• There are a lot of new companies being funded, a lot of people getting excited about generative AI and we want to enable more and more innovators. People who are not coming from like 10 years of tech background, but actually have a cool idea and earlier were coming from medical or legal or any other field to show them how easy it is to innovate and how accessible open-source tooling is in this space.

• We were in Berlin on one of AI summits organized by NVIDIA. There were a lot of people from Berlin and from the surrounding areas who were showing off the projects that they have built utilizing generative AI. At least half of the founders were not from the technical background and they didn’t have a brilliant CTO with 10 years of Google experience or something.

• Telco edge clouds are among the most popular and promising technologies with great potential to deliver performance improvements. An edge cloud is an infrastructure to run software located close to devices and end-users.

• This type of local deployment brings several performance benefits, one of which is reduced latency. Edge computing services can offer timely response to events and actions at the network edge. This is possible thanks to the advancements in mobile telecommunication technologies. Various sectors, such as manufacturing, healthcare, transport and automotive can achieve faster interaction between edge computing services and devices, and with higher reliability. The fast and reliable set of communication services necessary to facilitate efficiency for these sectors are collectively known as ultra reliable low latency communications (URLLC) services.

Open Hardware/Modding

• The rapid rise of edge AI capabilities on embedded targets has proven that relatively low-resource microcontrollers are capable of some incredible things. And following the recent release of the Arduino UNO R4 with its Renesas RA4M1 processor, the ceiling has gotten even higher as YouTuber Nikodem Bartnik has demonstrated with his lidar-equipped mobile robot.

• When we think about machine learning, our minds often jump to datacenters full of sweating, overheating GPUs. However, lighter-weight hardware can also be used to these ends, as demonstrated by [Nikodem Bartnik] and his latest robot.

• Paulsb went on to explain some of the design choices in the build. Most notably, the controller uses a Pico W as the main board but he also had to an an ADS1115 ADC board as the Pico W only has three analog channels. The ADS1115 adds an additional four ADC channels to the Pico W controller.

• Due primarily to the overwhelming demand for the Librem 5 we were able to lower our component costs in recent purchasing, this was certainly welcome news after the higher pricing seen during 2021, 2022, and into 2023. With our latest fabrication run we are now able to pass that savings onto new customers.

• After reaching shipping parity for the Librem 5 and shipping all new orders within our standard 10 day fulfillment window, we are proud to be able to lower the initial purchasing price for new Librem 5 to $999 (a $300 savings from peak pricing).

• Equivalent to getting the first month free of Librem AweSIM cellular service. Librem AweSIM—like VPN for cellular—ensures you are protecting your personal identifying information and financial details from all the carriers. You can now bundle and save, where you can buy the Librem 5 at $899 (a $400 savings) coupled with Librem AweSIM (a $99/mo unlimited voice and data service).

• Anyway, he developed all of that. Somehow, Marconi got the idea of reading his patents. And he realised, if he put like seven patents together, you could build a radio. He kind of pulled the rug out from under Tesla. He got the radio first, and once Tesla’s sponsor knew that the radio was out there, he was like, “Oh, I don’t need you any more, I’m not giving you any more money.”

• As well as our worldwide annual Coolest Projects online showcase, in-person Coolest Projects events are taking place across the globe in 2023.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Chris Brandrick asked me, for Frontend Focus, “to share a few of his favorite tools and services” which of course I’m happy to. Here are my (somewhat random) picks: [...]

• Tor Browser 13.0a4 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.

• This release updates Firefox to 115.2.1esr, including bug fixes, stability improvements and important security updates. We also backported the Android-specific security updates from Firefox 117.

Events

• The recordings from FOSSY are now up! You can check them out on the Internet Archive. We have over 100 talks from 19 tracks, from speakers coming from over 12 countries. It was such an incredible first year conference and we’re so happy to share the presentations with you. We’ll be highlighting specific talks over the comings days, so be on the lookout on our social media.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

• Did you know that the red panda is also known as a firefox? Sept. 16 is International Red Panda Day, so we thought it would be a good time to visit a Firefox, ahem red panda, in real life and talk to their caretakers at zoos across the U.S.

• Did you know that the red panda is also known as a firefox? Sept. 16 is International Red Panda Day, so we thought it would be a good time to visit a Firefox, ahem red panda, in real life and talk to their caretakers at zoos across the U.S. See our full series of interviews here.

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Postgres is a very popular and feature-rich database. However, unlike other database management systems like MySQL, you cannot use the LIMIT keyword in Delete or Update statements. You can only use it in a select statement. In this blog post, you will learn about a couple of workarounds that can help delete rows on a Posgrest table with an arbitrary limit, let’s get going!

Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

• LibreOffice 7.6.1 is here only three weeks after the release of LibreOffice 7.6 but it looks like it’s a hefty update that brings more than 120 changes. According to the changelogs, this update includes a total of 122 fixes and it’s highly recommended to all LibreOffice 7.6 users.

• You can download LibreOffice 7.6.1 binaries for DEB or RPM-based GNU/Linux distributions right from the official website. These binary installers are packaged by The Document Foundation, and you will also find the source tarball available for download if you’re a system integrator.

Education

• The first ever Perl and Koha conference was held in Helsinki, Finland this year. It featured three main days of Perl and Koha presentations and two days of workshops. Workshops included a Perl training session, a masterclass for new Koha developers, Koha improvement initiatives, discussions on the future of Perl as a language, and more.

Licensing / Legal

• The FAA dropped the news on Sept. 13, stating that drone pilots now have until March 16, 2024 to make their drones Remote ID compliant —— a six month extension from the initially-stated enforcement date.

• A week ago, GitHub fused its home page feed with algorithmic recommendations, infuriating more than a few users of the Microsoft-owned code-hosting giant.

• On Tuesday, GitHub responded to the hostile feedback by stating that some of the questioned behavior was actually due to bugs that have now been fixed, even as it doubled down on its decision to combine the previously separate “Following” and “For You” feeds.

• The “Following” feed included “activity by people you follow and from repositories you watch.” It was the result of deliberate user choice: developers selected the code and contributors they were interested in.

• The “For You” feed included “activity and recommendations based on your GitHub network.” It was the result of GitHub’s social algorithm and user behavior data.

• As of last week, GitHub combined the two to lighten the burden on its servers, or so the company claimed.

• “We understand that many of you are upset with the recent changes to your feed,” the company stated. “We should have done a better job communicating recent changes and how those decisions relate to our broader platform goals. Your continued feedback is invaluable as we evolve and continue to strive to provide a first-class developer experience that helps every developer be happier and more productive.”

Programming/Development

• I was planning on working on a redesign of a photo site, and wanted to use JPEG-XL as the preferred image format for storage. The only implementation I know of is the libjxl reference implementation written in C++. Alas, it hasn’t been a good week for JPEG successors, and I would much prefer not to run this code on my server.

• While looking at libjxl a short while ago, I did notice that the build system supports compiling to WASM. Seems like this could be the needed solution to my safety concerns. Hook this into my go server with something like wazero, and I’d feel a lot more comfortable connecting this to the internet. I didn’t investigate too thoroughly at the time, but it seemed quite straightforward.

• Hello! I was talking to a friend about how git works today, and we got onto the topic – where does git store your files? We know that it’s in your .git directory, but where exactly in there are all the versions of your old files?

• For example, this blog is in a git repository, and it contains a file called content/post/2019-06-28-brag-doc.markdown. Where is that in my .git folder? And where are the old versions of that file? Let’s investigate by writing some very short Python programs.

• A key component is, before you dive into waiting mode, you should have a plan for monitoring the situation. In the preview feature example, the monitoring plan could be as simple as a calendar reminder to check back in, or you could wait until you feel the pain more acutely. If your “waiting” strategy is causing a lot of pain, that’s a great indicator that you can’t wait any longer.

• Histograms are a fantastic way to visualize the distribution of data. They provide insights into the underlying patterns and help us understand our data better. But what if you want to add some color to your histograms to make them more visually appealing or to highlight specific data points? In this blog post, we’ll explore how to create histograms with different colors in R, and we’ll provide several examples to guide you through the process.

• Is it worth getting used to another terminal? Which one? Why?

• The pidfd API has been added to the kernel over the last several years to provide a race-free way for processes to refer to each other. While the GNU C Library (glibc) gained basic pidfd support with the 2.36 release in 2022, it still lacks a complete solution for race-free process creation. This patch set from Adhemerval Zanella seems likely to fill that gap in the near future, though, with an extension to the posix_spawn() API.

• Unix systems refer to processes via an integer ID (the “process ID” or PID) that is assigned at creation time. The problem with PIDs is that they are reused over time; once a process with a given PID has exited and been reaped, that PID can be assigned to a new and unrelated process with the result that any given PID might not, in fact, refer to the process that the user thinks it does. To address this problem, the pidfd concept was introduced; a pidfd is a file descriptor that acts as a handle for a process. The process associated with a pidfd can never change, so many of the race conditions associated with PIDs do not exist with pidfds.

Python

• A recent discussion on the Python forum looked at a way to protect module objects (and users) from mistaken attribute assignment and deletion. There are ways to get the same effect today, but the mechanism that would be used causes a performance penalty for an unrelated, and heavily used, action: attribute lookup on modules. Back in 2017, PEP 562 (“Module __getattr__ and __dir__”) set the stage for adding magic methods to module objects; now a new proposal would extend that idea to add __setattr__() and __delattr__() to them.

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