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Posted in News Roundup at 4:52 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
Before diving headfirst into the wonky world of GNU/Linux systems, it’s important to understand how they came about and some of the terms you may encounter while researching and using them. I’ll start with a brief history of the big three: UNIX, Linux, and GNU.
UNIX is a proprietary, command-line-based operating system originally developed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson (among others) at AT&T’s Bell Labs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. UNIX is coded almost entirely in the C programming language (also invented by Ritchie) and was originally intended to be used as a portable and convenient OS for programmers and researchers. As a result of a long and complicated legal history involving AT&T, Bell Labs, and the federal government, UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems grew in popularity, as did Thompson’s influential philosophy of a modular, minimalist approach to software design.
During this period, Richard Stallman launched the GNU Project with the goal of creating “an operating system that is free software.” GNU, confusingly, stands for “GNU’s Not UNIX.” This project is responsible for the UNIX-like GNU OS. Stallman also launched the related Free Software Foundation (FSF) on the principle that “any user can study the source code, modify it, and share the program” for any participating software.
PC Magazine has dusted off an old and much mocked headline and claimed that 2021 Is the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
In case you had not noticed it, PC Mag explains that there are millions of machines out there which are using Linux including Chromebooks. So, yeah, that counts right?
Chrome OS and Android are both based on the Linux kernel. They don’t have the extra GNU software that distributions like Ubuntu have, but they’re descended from Linus Torvalds’ original work and are the fastest growing segment of the traditional PC market, according to Canalys.
For several years now Facebook engineers have been working on BOLT as a way to speed-up Linux/ELF binaries. This “Binary Optimization and Layout Tool” is able to re-arrange executables once profiled to generate even faster performance than what can be achieved by a compiler’s LTO and PGO optimizations. One of the latest BOLT efforts has been on optimizing the Linux kernel image.
While the OpenZFS 2.1 feature release has been available since July, for those still using the OpenZFS 2.0.x series and not yet prepared to make the jump to that big new release with dRAID and other changes, OpenZFS 2.0.6 was released this week.
OpenZFS 2.0.6 is another maintenance release for those not migrating yet to the v2.1 series. OpenZFS 2.0.6 most notably brings support for newer versions of the Linux kernel: OpenZFS 2.0.5 supported up through Linux 5.12 while OpenZFS 2.0.6 now supports Linux 5.13/5.14 plus some early 5.15 compatibility patches.
Earlier this month Intel engineers posted their initial Linux kernel enablement around x86 User Interrupts with this feature premiering with Xeon “Sapphire Rapids” CPUs. As implied by the name, the User Interrupt functionality allows for interrupts to bypass the kernel for more efficient, low-latency, low-utilization interrupts being received by other user-space tasks. Intel talked more about User Interrupts this week at LPC2021.
While it’s been argued that Linux has four different “birthdays,” last Friday saw the 30th anniversary of Linux’s very, very first release — version 0.01.
That special first release “was never publicly announced, and I only emailed a handful of people in private about the upload,” Torvalds remembered on the Linux kernel mailing list. He no longer has copies of those announcement emails, “so there’s no real record of that. The only record of the date is in the Linux-0.01 tar-file itself, I suspect.”
Another item is now crossed off the XWayland TODO list with OpenGL sRGB support wired up.
Merged this week into the XWayland GLX code is enabling of sRGB frame-buffer configurations when the underlying OpenGL driver support allows GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB.
Bat is a cat command clone with advance syntax highlighting for a large number of programming and markup languages.
Despite the title of this article, we’ll not talk about cats and bats here, but about the cat and bat commands in Linux.
As you know, the cat (short for concatenate) command is a utility in Linux. One of its most commonly known usages is to print the content of a file onto the standard output stream. But given more time spent in the command line, features like syntax highlighting come in very handy.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install pgAdmin on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, pgAdmin is a free and open-source web-based tool that provides a friendly web interface to fully manage PostgreSQL databases, and it includes several features that can help you administer and maintain databases with ease. It’s written in Python and supports many operating systems such as Linux, Windows, and macOS.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of pgAdmin on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
Whether it is to set up a personal server, to play retro games, or simply out of curiosity and to learn programming, today we can all get a Raspberry Pi . This microcomputer has earned a great reputation within the IT sector thanks to its construction based on free hardware, the considerable power it offers and, above all, its price. We can install a wide variety of operating systems (especially Linux) on it. But, whatever system we install, we may have to make some configuration to adapt it to our needs. And here the problems can begin.
Raspberry Pi OS is the official operating system for this microcomputer. This system is based on Debian, and it comes specially prepared and optimized to work in an optimized way on this device. However, depending on the use that we are going to give it, we may have to configure some aspect of it as soon as we start it up.
In this way, we find two ways to configure this Raspberry Pi OS to adapt it to our needs.
I downloaded a Fedora rpm file, and was unable to open it. Hmmm, we had this problem ages ago, see this blog post in 2011:
https://bkhome.org/archive/blog2/201106/busybox-39rpm2cpio39-fails.html
And a fix for Xarchive in 2018:
https://bkhome.org/news/201812/fix-rpm-extraction-in-xarchive.html
EasyOS has the busybox ‘rpm2cpio’ applet, and that is still broken. The ‘exploderpm’ script doesn’t seem to work either.
f you’ve installed the Firefox browser using flatpak on openSUSE, you probably have noticed these two issues:
- poor video quality with lags (e.g videos on Twitter) - funky font display on some pages (e.g Facebook)
Firefox comes with the ffmpeg extension enabled but the libs need to be installed. At the time of writing this post, the extension for ffmpeg version 20.08 was enabled in the following file if you installed Firefox using the –user flag with Flatpak.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install osTicket on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, osTicket is a free and open-source customer support ticketing system and is widely used globally. It is a simple lightweight web-based application that allows one to organize, manage and archive support requests.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the osTicket support ticketing system on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
For laptop and desktop PC with more than one audio input and output devices, it’s possible to switch between audio devices quickly with upper right corner system tray menu.
It’s a common situation that users have more than one audio devices connected to the computer. GNOME, the default Ubuntu Desktop Environment, provides Sound settings to choose which input and/or output device to use.
To make life easier, a Gnome extension is available to integrate the settings into system tray status menu under volume control slider. So users can quickly choose a speaker, HMDI, microphone or other input device via few clicks.
This guide explains the steps you need to install Enlightenment Desktop in Arch Linux. This guide has two parts. The first part deals with installing the base Arch system. The second part is installing the complete Enlightenment desktop environment on top of Arch Linux.
Building off yesterday’s Wine 6.18 development release is now the next Wine-Staging installment that has more than six hundred extra patches on top.
Wine-Staging 6.18 has 616 patches on top of the upstream Wine code-base. This comes after a number of patches were recently upstreamed around NTOSKRNL, Shell32, PSAPI, and other components.
An experimental branch of the open implementation of WinAPI – Wine 6.18 has been released . Since the release of version 6.17 , 19 bug reports have been closed and 485 changes have been made.
[...]
The new release provides synchronization with the Wine 6.18 codebase. 7 patches related to ntoskrnl.exe, IRP, unixfs support in shell32 and implementation of the K32GetModuleBaseNameW, K32GetModuleInformation and K32GetModuleBaseNameA functions have been transferred to the main Wine composition. Added 4 patches with the ability to integrate Token objects into sapi and support for the FltBuildDefaultSecurityDescriptor and ISpObjectToken-CreateInstance functions. The updated patch has been plat-streaming-support .
Howdy Godotters! Time for another update on Godot 4.0′s multiplayer networking.
We have been really busy working on the foundation of the networking and multiplayer classes lately, and there are quite a few new features to talk about. In this post, we’ll start by showing some of the new RPC syntax and features.
When I was young, I was told that games like Wolfenstein 3D use “fake 3D” and ever since I’ve been wondering what they meant by that. I recently satisfied my curiosity by reading through Fabien Sanglard’s very enjoyable book, Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D, which explains how Wolfenstein 3D was built. While reading, I realized, “Hey – I can do that!” and set about reimplenting the renderer: specifically, the algorithm that generates and textures the walls in a 3D perspective. Here’s the result with a texture and a map I generated myself:
We already knew that the Steam Deck was going to be more than just a typical handheld game console. In a new section of frequently asked questions, Valve has answered some of the doubts that its potential buyers may have, and, at the same time, has confirmed some of its added capabilities.
Perhaps the most interesting thing is that it can be used as a controller for games on PCs. All that needs to be done is to connect the Steam Deck to a personal computer via Remote Play and configure it as a controller. Sounds really good.
We already know that the Steam Deck will have more features than your typical handheld gaming console, and Valve has just revealed another of its functions: the ability to be used as a PC controller. But one thing it won’t have is support for external GPUs, which was pretty much expected, admittedly.
In a new FAQ, Valve answers what it says are the 20 most popular questions about Steam Deck. Probably the most interesting revelation is confirmation that the handheld can be used as a controller for your PC games. All you have to do is connect the Steam Deck to your computer via Remote Play.
Valve’s upcoming Steam Deck gaming console is set to start shipping in December of this year, and interest is high for the handheld gaming console. Steam Deck buyers have a lot of upfront questions, though, so Valve has posted a frequently asked questions (FAQs) page to share some more details about the new system.
As a reminder, the Steam Deck gaming console is Valve’s attempt to enter the handheld gaming market, and it wields a custom AMD APU. Featuring four cores and eight threads of Zen 2 core IP, the chip runs at 2.4–3.5 GHz clock speeds. It also features an RDNA 2 graphics engine with eight compute units running at 1.0–1.6 GHz. The APU is rated for a thermal power budget of anywhere from 4W to 15W, and it connects to 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM running at 5500 MT/s. For external storage, there’s a high-speed microSD card slot. This is all tied together by a custom Arch Linux-based operating system with Valve’s Steam UI on top of it.
No one really knows when you’ll be able to get your hands on a Steam Deck, with shipping dates slipping into the second quarter of 2022. In the meantime, Valve and AMD are working to squeeze more performance out of the Zen 2 SoC inside the new handheld console, as well as improve its energy efficiency.
Valve’s upcoming Steam Deck will be able to run Windows 11 for those who want it, but the majority of users will likely stick with the company’s own Arch Linux-based SteamOS 3.0, which uses the Proton compatibility layer to run games that don’t run natively on Linux.
Plasma 5.23’s beta period is half over, and we’re busy fixing issues found by our wonderful users. One thing to note is that I don’t mention fixes for regressions that never shipped to users in final releases, and this includes beta versions. If I included those, the list below would be much longer! Because rest assured, we have been fixing tons and tons of the bugs and regressions that all your faithful QA has caught during the beta period. All those bug reports are really valuable. So please do keep filing them! Bug reporting isn’t a black hole!
In the Plasma Wayland session, KWin now supports “DRM leasing”, which allows us to re-add support for VR headsets and let them achieve optimal performance (Xaver Hugl, Plasma 5.24)
KWin now lets you optionally set a global keyboard shortcut to move a window to the center of its screen (Kristen McWilliam, Plasma 5.24)
With the KDE Plasma 5.23 release quickly approaching, feature development is already heating up for Plasma 5.24 while concurrently driving many fixes into the v5.23 codebase.
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with his weekly development recap for the open-source desktop project. It’s been a busy week of new KDE Plasma 5.24 feature code landing plus further stabilizing Plasma 5.23 and related components — including the ongoing push of Wayland fixes. Highlights for the week are…
Zorin OS is reborn with Stunning New Features, Impressive Improvements in Design, and a Whole New World of Apps that will TRANSFORM how You Experience your computer.
There was a conversation in IRC (libera.chat, #fedora-admin) on the amount of disk space that Fedora is using over time. It used to grow astronomically over time, but there was an idea that it might be slowing down.. and then the realization that no one had graphed it. Taking this challenge in hand I decided to look at it. Doing a complete mirror of the data would require me to have a very long time frame and 100+ TB of disk space, but luckily for me, the Fedora mirror system does a du every night and outputs this data to a file, https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/DIRECTORY_SIZES.txt
The file covers all the directories that the main download servers have including the archive trees which are where old releases go to live. It also puts it in a ‘human-readable’ format like…
A new desktop has been implemented to APTus AppCenter: Sway
ITEAD has introduced many smart switches over the year under the SONOFF brand, and their latest SONOFF Smart Stackable Power Meter is DIN mountable and made for larger industrial applications with up to 128 devices.
The solution is comprised of the “SPM-Main” WiFi connected main unit controlling up to 32 “SPM-4Relay” units with 4 relays each using RS485 daisy-chaining.
These toys usually have one or two 12V high-speed motors driving plastic gear trains for the rear wheels. This one is a two-motor model and unexpectedly comes with a steering motor for parental remote control. All its electronics were dead, so rather than do a complete motor upgrade he instead doubled the voltage and installed decent motor controllers with an Arduino sending them instructions. Otherwise it received an upgrade and stiffening of its chassis and steering components, and the kids plastic steering wheel was replaced with a wooden one.
We were trading stories of our first self-made PCBs in the secret underground Hackaday bunker, and a couple of the boards looked really good for first efforts. Of course there were mistakes and sub-optimal routing, but who among us never connects up the wrong signals or uses a bad footprint? What lead me to have a hacker “kids these days have it so easy” moment was that all of the boards were, of course, professionally fabbed with nice silkscreens. They all looked great.
What a glorious time to be starting down the hardware path! When I made my first PCB, the options were basically laying down tape, pulling out the etch resist pen, or paying a bazillion inflation-adjusted dollars for a rapid prototype board. This meant that the aspiring hacker also had to have a steady hand and be at least casually acquainted with a little chemistry. The ability to just send your files out to a PCB house means that the barrier to stepping up your hardware game from plug-them-together modules is lower than it’s ever been.
As a maker, you probably have a third hand for your soldering station. They come in handy when you need to hold a component, PCB, solder, and soldering iron all at the same time. But an extra hand would be useful for a wide range of other everyday activities. That’s why this team of researchers created a compact robotic third arm called AugLimb.
While robotic augmentations aren’t a new idea, they aren’t often as usable as AugLimb. This robotic arm is lightweight and compact, making it comfortable to wear. It can’t lift much weight, but it is very dexterous thanks to seven degrees of freedom and an extendable gripper. It attaches to the wearer’s bicep and folds up when not in use. When it is time for action, AugLimb unfolds and reaches further than the user’s own arm.
There’s a certain elite set of chips that fall into the “cold, dead hands” category, and they tend to be parts that have proven their worth over decades, not years. Chief among these is the ubiquitous 555 timer chip, which nearly 50 years after its release still finds its way into the strangest places. Add in other silicon stalwarts like the 741 op-amp and the LM386 audio amp, and you’ve got a Hall of Fame lineup for almost any project.
On last part, we managed to generate package by hand. While it works, having a script to do everything for us is even better. So I’ve wrote a small python script to automate the process.
Apart from the SDK issue mentioned above, we still need to write proper tutorials on https://develop.kde.org/ about cross compile. I’m happy with the overall result, to be able to cross compile to target platform is essention to mobile development. The major difference between Plasma Mobile and Android/iOS is apps on Plasma Mobile are neither self-contained or static linked. Together with the updating of system libraries it’s impossible to ship a static SDK, you’ll need to have all the dynamic linked libraries on rootfs. For iOS and Android, the only dynamic linked libraries is system ones, and they don’t change throughout one major version. You can have Android 10 SDK for Android 10, 11 SDK for 11… But for Plasma Mobile Manjaro, it’s a rolling distribution, you’ll also need a rolling SDK.
I hope the ablity to cross compiling to PinePhone can improve everyone’s productivity on Plasma Mobile development, however it’s just a small step towards what Android and iOS have. We still lack phone emulator, remote debugging and UI debugging tools.
In some Firefox version after 88.0 it looks like they’re enabling WebRenderer by default, and it also looks like my hardware (an Nvidia graphics card with the proprietary driver)[1] isn’t whitelisted, so what Firefox does is enable “software WebRenderer” instead.
First things first, I had been trying WebRenderer for some time (more than a couple of month) by force-enabling it, and while it seemed to make things better at first, on the whole the experience was awful, and because WebRenderer, if I understand correctly, uses GPU acceleration, that affected the rest of the desktop, so after a while I disabled WebRenderer (and “Hardware Acceleration” in the preferences tab, and set the processes limit to 2, while I was there), and then things seemed to be better.
Due to the iffy state Firefox can be in sometimes, I had decided to skip updates for as long as I can, i.e. I update Firefox, then stick with the version I have until an extension I use no longer works, or there is a really compelling new feature in a new version of Firefox (which, sadly, doesn’t seem to be as often as it was before the “rapid release” schedule Mozilla had adapted…). So here I was using Firefox 88.0, shut the machine down at night, turned it on in the morning, then when I was opening a link, Firefox started and all the tabs had the “your tab crashed” “reload this tab?” message, clicking that button had no effect.
So nothing worked, not restoring the previous tabs, disabling all extensions, moving ~/.mozilla and starting anew; a couple of online searches later, still nothing, then I looked at rpm -qa –last | less, now I think the reason is a glibc update, which broke Firefox, probably it would be fixed by rebuilding Firefox against the new glibc. Not really OpenSuse Tumbleweed’s problem because the current version of Firefox in the repos is 92.0…
Mozilla introduced new privacy features to its VPN service, Mozilla VPN, earlier this week. The organization launched Mozilla VPN back in June 2020 in select regions and has expanded the availability since then.
Mozilla partnered with Mullvad, a Swedish company, and uses the company’s infrastructure for its own Mozilla VPN product.
The JDBC project is proud to announce the latest version 42.2.24
check_pgbackrest is designed to monitor pgBackRest backups from Nagios, relying on the status information given by the info command.
It allows to monitor the backups retention and the consistency of the archived WAL segments.
We have just released version 2.1.0 of the Foreign Data Wrapper for SQLite.
This release can work with PostgreSQL 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14.
Important keys for a business to be successful online is to have a professional and attractive, easy to navigate, and affordable website. The themes and plugins a business chooses are important as they directly impact its presence online.
With thousands of satisfied customers, GPLKey is an online source for premium themes and plugins for WordPress websites that fit the needs of businesses looking to create a presence on the Internet. Each of the hundreds of products featured on the GPLKey.com website have a full list of features, customization tools and the included plug-ins.
Companies around the world are increasingly realizing that they need not break the bank for a successful website. This realization has led many organizations into utilizing open-source solutions, with one of those being WordPress as a development model. All features demanded by customers are found on this software which uses an open-source license called GNU General Public License (GPL).
The software industry continues to succeed in solving real world problems to individual users and customer-oriented cooperations. All the demanded features have been found to be open-source, which involves the utilization of WordPress as a development model. GPLPlus understands the fact that every web developer deserves the right website, even without breaking the bank. The company has offers WordPress users the ability to excel in their next project through perfect plugin and themes.
Windows is the most widely used operating system, both in home and business environments. Most of the programs are created to run on this operating system. However, the people who create these programs (developers, programmers and system administrators mainly) prefer to leave Windows aside and work on another operating system: Linux. Why? What brings you to this?
Linux offers a large number of advantages when it comes to working and developing, advantages that range from flexibility to security and system performance. Today, Linux is a perfectly affordable system for any user, since it is not much more complicated to use than any Windows system. However, this OS does not end up gaining popularity within home environments, its main strength being the servers and the computers of the programmers.
Perl version 5.36. isa operator. try catch syntax. enable warnings. use v5.36. use v7. The introduction of the members of Perl core team.
Java Development Kit 17 and Java 17 are now generally available. JDK 17 was announced by the Open JDK group and Oracle released the new version under a commercial license for those using the Oracle JDK release as part of an Oracle product or service, or for those who want to be able to get commercial support.
Java 17 is an LTS (Long Term Support) version and Oracle says Oracle JDK 17 and future JDK releases are provided under a free-to-use license until a full year after the next LTS release. Oracle will also continue providing Oracle OpenJDK releases under the open-source General Public License (GPL), as it has since 2017.
The consortium formed by Dyne.org, RIDDLE&CODE and InfoCert, has been selected by the European Commission as one of seven contractors to develop the next version of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI).
The award is one more milestone in the consortium’s track record of excellence with cryptography and blockchain, after Dyne.org led the flagship H2020 project DECODE, RIDDLE&CODE’s blockchain solutions are deployed in banking and utility markets Europe wide and InfoCert being the largest Certification Authority at European level and eIDAS certified QTSP.
You can always install Ubuntu or Linux Mint
Being a Linux evangelist it would be very remiss of me not to at least mention it is an option that you have. Linux Distros like Ubuntu and Linux Mint are quite user friendly and easy to set up. It’s a lot easier to install Ubuntu on your laptop or PC than it is to install Windows. You can even install Ubuntu or Linux Mint alongside Windows and choose which OS you want to boot into during startup.
I am always telling people that these days it doesn’t really matter which OS you are using as long as you can install Google Chrome. Most of the stuff we do and need is in the cloud. If you are an accountant for example you can use Sage or QuickBooks in the cloud so there is no need for Windows support. You can use Office 365 or Google Workspace and so much more.
Your OS just sits behind the scenes unobtrusively facilitating your desires. There was a time when desktop apps ruled the roost and this was a big reason for you not to install Linux but those days are long gone. Ubuntu 20.04 will be supported for the next 10 years so, 2030 inenge ichipo!
Ubuntu will also run much faster than Windows 11 will ever will on your old Hardware. You can do that or just keep Windows 10 which Microsoft has said they will keep supporting and updating.
The body responsible for protecting the interests of champagne producers, Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne (CIVC), initially brought two opposition claims in the Oficina Española de Patentes y Marcas (the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office) against the GB Group (GB), a Spanish entity that operates tapas bars in Spain. GB marketed CHAMPANILLO (a frothy drink) using a sign on its leaflets and social media accounts that portrayed two cups filled with the drink “clinking” together. The opposition claims were upheld, and GB ceased its marketing in 2015.
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