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Today's leftovers

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  • Layout the DVA | BSD Now 342

    OpenBSD Full disk encryption with coreboot and tianocore, FreeBSD 12.0 EOL, ZFS DVA layout, OpenBSD’s Go situation, AD updates requires changes in TrueNAS and FreeNAS, full name of FreeBSD’s root account, and more.

  • Solus + Visual Studio Code | Choose Linux 31

    We try out Solus and are all impressed by this independent distro. Then Ell and Drew sing the praises of Visual Studio Code - a text editor that's packed full of features.

  • Whonix VirtualBox 15.0.0.9.4 - Point Release!

    Whonix is being used by Edward Snowden, journalists such as Micah Lee, used by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Qubes OS. It has a 7 years history of keeping its users safe from real world attacks. [1]

    The split architecture of Whonix relies on leveraging virtualization technology as a sandbox for vulnerable user applications on endpoints. This is a widely known weakness exploited by entities that want to circumvent cryptography and system integrity. Our Linux distribution come with a wide selection of data protection tools and hardened applications for document/image publishing and communications. We are the first to deploy tirdad, which addresses the long known problem of CPU activity affecting TCP traffic properties in visible ways on the network and vanguards, an enhancement for Tor produced by the developers of Tor, which protects against guard discovery and related traffic analysis attacks. Live Mode was recently added. We deliver the first ever solutions for user behavior masking privacy protections such as Kloak. Kloak prevents websites from recognizing who the typist is by altering keystroke timing signatures that are unique to everyone.

  • openSUSE's board turmoil

    Like many larger free-software projects, openSUSE has an elected board that is charged with handling various non-technical tasks: organizing events, dealing with conduct issues, managing the project's money, etc. Sitting on such a board is usually a relatively low-profile activity; development communities tend to pay more attention to technical contributions than other types of service. Every now and then, though, board-related issues burst into prominence; that is the case now in the openSUSE project, which will be holding a special election after the abrupt resignation of one-third of its board.

    The openSUSE project has, in fact, just held a board election that closed on January 31. There were four candidates for the two available seats; in the end, Simon Lees was returned to the board for another term and Sarah Julia Kriesch won the other seat. The discussion over the course of the election was perhaps a bit more contentious than usual, with Kriesch in particular stirring things up by claiming to be the driving force behind the in-progress openSUSE foundation effort and seemingly overlooking the existence of openSUSE contributors in China (something she later apologized for). That all settled down, though, and it appeared that the new board was set to get to work after the announcement of the results on February 1.

  • Whiskey Lake thin Mini-ITX board has PCIe golden finger

    Avalue’s Linux-ready “EMX-WHL-GP” is a thin Mini-ITX board with 8th Gen Whiskey Lake CPUs, triple displays, 3x GbE, SATA with power, 2x M.2, PCIe, and optional -20 to 60°C support.

    Avalue announced an industrial thin Mini-ITX board that runs Linux or Win 10 on Intel’s 8th Gen Whiskey Lake U-series processors. The EMX-WHL-GP has much in common with its 6th or 7th Gen EMX-KBLU2P thin Mini-ITX model, but adds a third GbE port and a PCIe golden finger interface among other enhancements.

  • Building a split mechanical keyboard with a Raspberry Pi Zero controller

    Looking to build their own ergonomic mechanical split keyboard, Gosse Adema turned to the Raspberry Pi Zero W for help.

  • The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers

    Since the first browser war between Netscape and Internet Explorer, web browsers have been using features as their primary means of competing with each other. This strategy of unlimited scope and perpetual feature creep is reckless, and has been allowed to go on for far too long.

    I used wget to download all 1,217 of the W3C specifications which have been published at the time of writing1, of which web browsers need to implement a substantial subset in order to provide a modern web experience. I ran a word count on all of these specifications. How complex would you guess the web is?

    The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing. If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications.2

    I conclude that it is impossible to build a new web browser. The complexity of the web is obscene. The creation of a new web browser would be comparable in effort to the Apollo program or the Manhattan project.

    [...]

    The major projects are open source, and usually when an open-source project misbehaves, we’re able to to fork them to offer an alternative. But even this is an impossible task where web browsers are concerned. The number of W3C specifications grows at an average rate of 200 new specs per year, or about 4 million words, or about one POSIX every 4 to 6 months. How can a new team possibly keep up with this on top of implementing the outrageous scope web browsers already have now?

    The browser wars have been allowed to continue for far too long. They should have long ago focused on competing in terms of performance and stability, not in adding new web “features”. This is absolutely ridiculous, and it has to stop.

  • Firefox 76 Enabling VA-API Wayland Acceleration For All Video Codecs

    With the upcoming Firefox 75 there is VA-API GPU-based video acceleration working on Wayland. While this built off FFmpeg, the initial code was limited to supporting H.264 while for Firefox 76 that is being extended.

    There has been the bug report to track VP9 decode support using VA-API. That was done by Red Hat's Martin Stránský who has been leading this Wayland and VA-API work.

    As of Wednesday, support was merged so VA-API on Wayland uses all video formats available. Up until now (and for Firefox 75) there was code limiting the support to the H.264 codec while for Firefox 76 those limitations are set to be cleared.

  • The Unicode Standard Now Includes CC License Symbols

    The latest Unicode Standard adds 5,930 characters, including 4 new scripts, 55 new emoji characters, and the following CC license symbols:

  • African WhatsApp Modders are the Masters of Worldwide Adversarial Interoperability

    Since the earliest days of consumer computing, computer users have asserted their right to have a say in how their tools worked: whether it was Gopher delivering easy new ways to access services that had originally been designed for power users who could memorize obscure addresses and arcane commands; or toolkits like Hypercard and Visual Basic, which let everyday people automate their work; or Scratch, which lets kids design games and apps that come from their imaginations, rather than an app store.

    This ability to adapt your tools is especially urgent when those tools are designed by people who live very different lives from your own. The disability rights movement's rallying cry of "Nothing about us without us," crystallizes generations of discontent with the high-handed attitude of distant “experts” who built systems and tools without truly working together with those who use and are affected by them. Technologists are especially notorious for this high-handedness: —like the Honeywell 316, a $10,600 "kitchen computer" for storing recipes that was offered for sale in the 1969 Nieman Marcus catalog. It was designed for women by men, but no women wanted or needed a kitchen computer, and they didn't sell a single one. Despite this ghastly failure, early computer vendors continued to market their wares to women by advertising the ability to store and retrieve recipes.

  • Uber open-sources Piranha, a tool that automatically deletes stale code

    Uber today made available in open source Piranha, a tool that automatically deletes stale and unused code from app codebases. The company says it eliminates the need for engineers to engage in the task of code removal themselves, which often prevents them from working on newer features.

  • Amazon is looking to bring Target and Walmart into an open source technology group

    The e-tailer, which formed an open source organization called Dent last year, is now looking to bring Target and Walmart into the fold, per The Wall Street Journal.

    But Target and Walmart reportedly don’t plan to participate at this point. Dent has access to some of the technologies that enable Amazon to operate its Go stores, which feature autonomous checkout, and already works with technology solutions firm Marvell Technology Group and networking software provider Cumulus Networks. The open source nature of Dent means that firms that download Amazon’s software can use it as they like without collaborating directly with Amazon.

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.