IBM/Red Hat/Fedora: Chromium, Cloudwashing, Chris Wright and CentOS 'Damage Control'

• Fedora preemptively turns off Chromium usage of private Google Sync APIs

  Fedora has jumped seven weeks before Google ends the Linux distribution's use of the Google Chrome Sync service within the Chromium browser. The Sync service allows users to keep data such as browser history, login details, and bookmarks synced between different devices. Earlier this month, Google said it completed an audit, and was restricting the open source version of Chrome from accessing those APIs "that are only intended for Google's use". Notifying Fedora users over the weekend, Chromium maintainer for the distribution Tom Callaway said the change will make the program "significantly less functional". [...] To that end though, by closing off the service, Fedora is able to fix 26 security vulnerabilities. Version 88.0.4324.96-1 of Fedora Chromium will be the first to have Sync disabled, and landed as an update in repositories over the weekend. Google said it would be locking down access to the Sync service on March 15. Some Chromium-based browsers do offer a non-Google sync solution.

• IBM Cloud Now: GitLab Ultimate for IBM Cloud Paks, Security Insights, and WebSphere Hybrid Edition

• Technically Speaking: Season 1 Trailer

  Join Red Hat CTO Chris Wright and a rotating cast of experts and industry leaders for the first season of the all-new Technically Speaking. In each episode, Chris will explore what's on the horizon for open source and topics like cloud, AI/ML, edge, 5G, blockchain, and more. The first episode drops on January 27, 2021. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to tune in.

• To plug gap left by CentOS, Red Hat amends RHEL dev subscription to allow up to 16 systems in production

  Red Hat, which is killing CentOS Linux in favour of CentOS Stream, will extend its developer subscription to allow free production use of RHEL for up to 16 systems. CentOS Linux is a community build of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and therefore suitable for production use. CentOS Stream, which will remain available, is a preview build of what is likely to be in RHEL – great for testing but not ideal for production use. The popularity of CentOS, which drives 17.7 per cent of Linux-based web sites, according to W3Techs, has meant a strong response to Red Hat's decision, including alternative free builds such as Rocky Linux and Project Lenix, which is now known as Alma Linux. Red Hat said in December that it would work to plug the gap left by CentOS with new ways to license RHEL and today's statement is said to be "the first of many new programs."

Raspberry Pi: Boot to BASIC

40 years ago this Christmas, I got my first “personal computer”. It was a Sinclair ZX81 with 1KiB of RAM and a tape deck for storage. Every time I powered it on, like all ‘81 owners, I was greeted with this. A couple of taps later, and I had written some code! Ok, not a super auspicious creation, but it’s a start. It’s likely the same first program you wrote if you had one. Perhaps with rude words, who knows, they were fun times back in the ’80s. Through the following years I had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 16K (later upgraded to 48K), a Spectrum +2 128K and an Amstrad CPC 464. All of which also booted directly to a programming language - BASIC.

today's howtos

• An Introduction to Bash Brace Expansion - Putorius

  The Borne Again Shell (BASH) has a lot of great features that it borrows from other shells and even from some programming languages. It was created in the late 1980s in a response to a lacking in the current available shells on Berkley Distributions (BSD), and the predecessor to Linux, GNU. BASH features numerous in-built features such as in-line scripting capabilities like brace expansion, which we are going to examine today.

• How to Convert PDF to Image in Linux

  For many reasons, you often need to convert PDF documents to different image formats. You can find many online sites that easily convert PDF to images, but there is no guarantee your file will be secure always. You can easily do it in your own Linux system. This article is going to show you to convert pdf to other image formats (jpg, png, gif, tif) using the following two popular methods.

• How to Install Gitea on Ubuntu 20.04 | RoseHosting

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gitea with Nginx as a reverse proxy on an Ubuntu 20.04 VPS.

• How to Search, Install, Remove Snap Apps in Command Line | UbuntuHandbook

  This simple tutorial shows how to search for, install, remove, and list installed Snap applications in Ubuntu from command line. Snap is an universal Linux package format developed by Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu. Though many users hate the Snap apps, it’s hard to keep away from it since many popular applications (e.g., VLC, Spotify, VS Code, Android Studio) offer official Ubuntu binaries through Snap rather than classic deb package. As Ubuntu Software still sucks and does not load application pages quite often, you can run followings command instead to search for & install snap applications.

• How to install Jellyfin Media Server on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - Linux Shout

  When it comes to creating your own Medis server, the first name would be Kodi or Plex, however, these are not only out there. Jellyfin is another popular open-source project that lets us create quickly a modern media server with an interactive web user interface to manage videos, images, and music from any device. We can browser media content using Jellyfin on various devices such as computers, apps on your Roku, Android, iOS (including AirPlay), Android TV, or Fire TV device, or via your Chromecast or existing Kodi. Whereas when it comes to installing the Jellyfin server platform it doesn’t limit to Linux only, we can set it up on machines running Microsoft Windows, macOS, or in a Docker container.

• Why you need to drop ifconfig for ip | Opensource.com

  For a long time, the ifconfig command was the default method for configuring a network interface. It served Linux users well, but networking is complex, and the commands to configure it must be robust. The ip command is the new default networking command for modern systems, and in this article, I'll show you how to use it. The ip command is functionally organized on two layers of the OSI networking stack: Layer 2 (data link layer) and Layer 3 (network or IP layer). It does all the work in the old net-tools package.