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Fedora and Red Hat: Good and Bad

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Red Hat
  • Fedora Magazine: 4 cool new projects to try in COPR for January 2020

    COPR is a collection of personal repositories for software that isn’t carried in Fedora. Some software doesn’t conform to standards that allow easy packaging. Or it may not meet other Fedora standards, despite being free and open source. COPR can offer these projects outside the Fedora set of packages. Software in COPR isn’t supported by Fedora infrastructure or signed by the project. However, it can be a neat way to try new or experimental software.

    This article presents a few new and interesting projects in COPR. If you’re new to using COPR, see the COPR User Documentation for how to get started.

  • Robbie Harwood: Fedora Has Too Many Security Bugs

    I don't work on Fedora security directly, but I do maintain some crypto components. As such, I have my own opinions about how things ought to work, which I will refrain from here. My intent is to demonstrate the problem so that the project can discuss solutions.

    To keep this easy to follow, my data and process is in a section at the end; curious readers should be able to double-check me.

  • Vague proposal: ship prebuilt initramfs images

    Measured boot involves generating cryptographic measurements of boot components and configuration and using that to either control access to a local secret (in the case of sealing secrets to a TPM) or proving to another device (eg, a remote server or a local phone) what was booted. We're shipping most of the infrastructure to do this, but we're still left with a pretty fundamental problem - we need to know what the expected values are in order to know whether something's been tampered with or not. For many components this isn't a huge problem (we build and distribute the files - users can extract them and calculate the appropriate measurements, and maybe long term we'll be able to ship the measurements in a digestable way), but our initramfs images are generated on the user system and include system-specific data. This makes it impractical to know the expected measurements in advance. I've been thinking about ways to solve this for a while, and I'm coming to the conclusion that the best plan is probably to just ship pre-built initramfs images. I can think of three main reasons to want to use system-specific images: 1) They're smaller. By default we're already generating a generic image for rescue purposes, so disk space isn't the concern here - we're largely looking at losing boot speed. As machines have got faster this is probably not a huge deal. 2) They contain machine-specific configuration. Some of this can be passed on the kernel command line instead (eg, the machine ID), but we'd need answers for the rest. I can think of a couple of solutions: a) Stick the config in UEFI variables. It's small enough that we wouldn't run out. Cool Extend grub to read some config files and synthesise an initramfs image for them. If we measure the paths that those images use then we don't need to worry about the contents as long as the tools that read the config can't be subverted via that configuration. 3) User customisation, such as including extra tooling. grub supports loading multiple initramfs images. Packages that right now install stuff in the initramfs could instead ship a prebuilt image that grub could append to the main initramfs. This would allow for things like overriding Plymouth themes, and we could ship the measurements for these pre-built images in order to allow them to be validated. Any thoughts on this?

  • Fedora Stakeholders Discuss Possibility Of Using Pre-Built Initramfs Images

    Another alternative to slow initramfs generation could be distributing pre-built initramfs images to users. An additional benefit of that is possibly better security with measured boot capabilities, a matter currently being discussed by Fedora stakeholders.

    Fedora from time-to-time has brought up the topic of using pre-built initramfs images and that happened again last week by former Red Hat employee turned Googler Matthew Garrett. He brought up a possible proposal to ship prebuilt initramfs images in the name of better security with measured boot.

  • RHEL 8 Still Vulnerable to “Magellan 2” SQLite Bugs, as Patches Drop

    Severe bugs in the ubiquitous SQLite engine – used in thousands of software applications – continue to pose a major security threat, security researchers say, with Red Hat admitting today that its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 remains vulnerable, despite patching other products this week.

    Red Hat said in a security update it had now inoculated RHEL 7 and its “RHEL 8.0 Update Services for SAP Solutions”, but RHEL 8 itself remains affected by one of the vulnerabilities, first disclosed to the Chromium team by China’s Tencent Blade – which dubbed them “Magellan 2.0” – in October 2019.

  • Communication superstars: A model for understanding your organization's approach to new technologies

    The Open Organization Ambassadors have learned a great deal about the ways open principles are impacting organizational practices. In particular, we've developed an Open Organization Definition that specifies the five principles that distinguish open organizations from other types of organization—namely, more transparency, more inclusivity, greater adaptability, deeper collaboration and a sense of purpose teams/community. I've also delivered a presentation on this topic several times since 2016 and learned new insights along the way. So I'd like to update this article with a few comments that reflect those findings. And then, in a follow-up article, I'd like to offer readers some guidelines on how they can determine their organization's level of comfort with communication technology and use it to increase their success relative to industry competitors.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. 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 the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.