Today in Techrights

• How To Deal With Your Raspberry Spy -- Part IV: Doing The Task
• Corporations Do Not Represent Communities and Activists, They Just Exploit Them, Discredit Them, and Hijack Their Hard Work
• Why the 'Raspberry Spy' Blunder is a Lot More Serious and Profound Than the Corporate Media is Willing to Acknowledge
• Links 6/3/2021: “SLS” Mitigation and Exiv2/KDE Project

today's howtos

• How To Install GNOME Desktop on Manjaro 20 - idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GNOME Desktop on Manjaro 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Gnome 3 is an intuitive desktop environment that utilizes a tablet or smartphone-style interface to access applications. Although Gnome is very easy to learn and use, its customization options are quite limited, and it can be difficult to configure. A 64-bit installation of Manjaro running Gnome uses about 447MB of memory. By default, Manjaro installed it as an Xfce4 desktop environment. Installing GNOME Desktop on the Manjaro system is fairly straightforward. There is no need to reinstall your Manjaro Linux system with Manjaro GNOME Edition if you only wish to change the desktop environment. 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 GNOME desktop environment on a Manjaro 20 (Nibia).

• How To Restore Or Recover Deleted Commands In Linux - OSTechNix

  In this brief tutorial, we will learn how to restore or recover deleted commands in Linux using coreutils and busybox.

• How to create your own database on Linux | TechRadar

  These days, databases are more routinely associated with powering websites and ecommerce systems. To the casual user they look impenetrable, involving connecting to third-party database servers such as SQL and hiding behind opaque languages like PHP. But at their heart, databases are simple tables of information: each row represents a single record, and its specific characteristics – such as name, colour, or whether it’s currently in your possession or not – are recorded in columns known as fields. If your needs are modest, then you don’t need to learn any programming languages or tackle complex database software to put together a collection of information you can later search in various ways to find what you need from it.

• Sharing A USB Drive From Your Wi-Fi Router, Part 2

  In my previous article, I omitted the LXQt desktop environment because I am not well acquainted with it, and was unsure about the status of its "parent" (LXDE). Although LXDE coexists with LXQt and is technically still being maintained, it is living on borrowed time because it has a GTK2 codebase. LXDE's most recent stable release dates from 2016. LXDE's founder, Hong Jen Yee (aka "PCMan"), found it impractical to base LXDE on GTK3. GTK3 broke backward compatibility and caused components to become more memory-hungry and slower. So Dr. Hong1 began experimenting with Qt as a base; eventually, his LXDE-Qt project merged with the Razor-qt project (in July 2013). LXQt is now the successor to LXDE. Although a bit rough around the edges compared to LXDE, LXQt is very usable and is progressing towards its goal of reaching version 1.0. (Its current release is 0.16.0). LXQt's primary goals are simplicity and being light on resources, with sensible default settings that meet most users' needs. I have been testing the PCLinuxOS LXQt Community Release, created by daniel (Daniel Meiβ-Wilhelm), on a spare partition of my trusty netbook.2 This version resembles a Mini.iso, insofar as it does not include a large collection of applications; however, the applications are well-integrated, responsive and the system is visually appealing. The screenshots were taken from the most recent 2020.11 release.

• GIMP Tutorial: Top GIMP Filters, Part 2

  I've used this filter (Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur) to soften photos just a bit, but Davies points out that you can use it to fix a photo problem. Sometimes we want to use the subject of a photo, but not the background. After cutting away the background we're left with some rough edges on the subject. Gaussian Blur can help minimize them. In this image we have a white flower and many green leaves. Suppose I wanted to add this flower, but not the leaves, to another floral image.

• Tip Top Tips: How I Converted My H.264 Video To HEVC

  Note that on Stream #0:1(eng) the video was indeed encoded in hevc. I have to highlight the significant reduction in file size without losing video and sound quality from the original copy. What I did on the VLC menu was click on Media > Convert / Save (Ctrl+R). On the File tab, click Add then Open the video you want to convert. Once listed, click Convert/Save. Check that the Source is the actual file you wanted to convert. On the Settings section of the dialog window, you'll see Profile and a down arrow. Click to change the Profile to Video - H.265 + MP3 (MP4) or you can create your own profile using the (Encapsulation) MP4, (Video codec [enable Video] > Codec) H-265 (Note: also check that the resolution scale is set to either Auto or 1 or you can shrink your video dimensions), (Audio codec [enable Audio] and enable Keep original audio track or as I prefer, change the codec to MPEG 4 Audio (AAC)) ... Subtitles? If you're creating a new profile, do not forget to give it a Profile Name so it'll be easier to find next time. The last part is the Destination. You will need to click on Browse, navigate to the folder where you want to save your file, and click Save. When all is ready, click Start and wait for VLC to complete the task. Depending on the duration of your video, it may take a couple of minutes or longer.

• Make A Collage Or Wordcloud With Fotowall

  In January, ms_meme posted in the forum that she had been using a program called Fotowall, and was wanting a bit of help. I downloaded it and started talking to her. Turns out that it's a nifty little program if you want to make a photo collage. It has other features, so I'll cover some of them, too. It's a pretty nice little program, but it has some problems and limitations. There's a beginning screen, which says Create in the center at first. After you've saved a project it looks a bit different, listing your previous projects at top left so you can open one if you want. Click on Create. [...] The other choices are Print, PDF or SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics can be edited and manipulated in Inkscape). Setup ONLY lets you enable OpenGL, which is a graphics accelerator. Mine's working fine right now so I didn't bother with it. Fotowall is a pretty good program for what it does, but it has some problems. It does the collages pretty well, but the Wordclouds confound me as there seem to be several glitches in the program. If I wanted my words arranged a specific way, however, or a different font, I would fall back to Scribus. There are also a few good internet sites you can use to make Wordclouds. The downside to Fotowall is that it apparently hasn't had much, if anything, done to it since 2017. Hopefully, they will update and improve it soon.

FreeBSD 13.0-RC1 Now Available

The first RC build of the 13.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

Installation images are available for:

o 13.0-RC1 amd64 GENERIC
o 13.0-RC1 i386 GENERIC
o 13.0-RC1 powerpc GENERIC
o 13.0-RC1 powerpc64 GENERIC64
o 13.0-RC1 powerpc64le GENERIC64LE
o 13.0-RC1 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE
o 13.0-RC1 armv6 RPI-B
o 13.0-RC1 armv7 GENERICSD
o 13.0-RC1 aarch64 GENERIC
o 13.0-RC1 aarch64 RPI
o 13.0-RC1 aarch64 PINE64
o 13.0-RC1 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
o 13.0-RC1 aarch64 PINEBOOK
o 13.0-RC1 aarch64 ROCK64
o 13.0-RC1 aarch64 ROCKPRO64
o 13.0-RC1 riscv64 GENERIC
o 13.0-RC1 riscv64 GENERICSD

Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without
console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of
freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access.  Additionally,
the root user password is set to root.  It is strongly recommended
to change the password for both users after gaining access to the
system.

Installer images and memory stick images are available here:

    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/13.0/

The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.

If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR
system or on the -stable mailing list.

If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing
system, use the "releng/13.0" branch.

A summary of changes since 13.0-BETA4 includes:

o An update to handle partial data resending on ktls/sendfile has been
  added.

o A bug fix in iflib.

o A fix to pf(4) for incorrect fragment handling.

o A TCP performance improvement when using TCP_NOOPT has been added.

o Several SCTP fixes and improvements.

o Several other miscellaneous fixes and improvements.

A list of changes since 12.2-RELEASE is available in the releng/13.0
release notes:

    https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes.html

Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be
updated on an ongoing basis as the 13.0-RELEASE cycle progresses.

=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===

VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64
architectures.  Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL
(or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):

    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/13.0-RC1/

The partition layout is:

    ~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label)
    ~ 1 GB  - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label)
    ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)

The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image
formats.  The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB
respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.

Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI
loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the
virtual machine images.  See this page for more information:

    https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU

To boot the VM image, run:

    % qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt  \
	-bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \
	-drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \
	-device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \
	-device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \
	-netdev user,id=net0

Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.

BASIC-CI images can be found at:

    https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/CI-IMAGES/13.0-RC1/

=== Amazon EC2 AMI Images ===

FreeBSD/amd64 EC2 AMIs are available in the following regions:

  af-south-1 region: ami-024a37d8ee55504a9
  eu-north-1 region: ami-0f7e6ef964131a5c5
  ap-south-1 region: ami-0da383cf93cddac9d
  eu-west-3 region: ami-0c2e5eecf725c8480
  eu-west-2 region: ami-07e739abd39787f83
  eu-south-1 region: ami-042c036041ab5c683
  eu-west-1 region: ami-02b72374c39f164f4
  ap-northeast-3 region: ami-06b158bab2dc009b8
  ap-northeast-2 region: ami-0fbcb7db014004a7f
  me-south-1 region: ami-0a5040da848631036
  ap-northeast-1 region: ami-0ea2e5573427aa49c
  sa-east-1 region: ami-0e8ca0e56ecd00395
  ca-central-1 region: ami-08503cd732e74743f
  ap-east-1 region: ami-0fa7c7d12cd5c992f
  ap-southeast-1 region: ami-0adc820ff9c36b582
  ap-southeast-2 region: ami-0f031e3027fe5ed45
  eu-central-1 region: ami-0685d9bbc37652517
  us-east-1 region: ami-0dc102bfa2a63a6c0
  us-east-2 region: ami-0d65407784cf103ac
  us-west-1 region: ami-0d676e4b02aeac56e
  us-west-2 region: ami-0f2f2e90ae8956750

FreeBSD/aarch64 EC2 AMIs are available in the following regions:

  af-south-1 region: ami-00bc7809c32164ef7
  eu-north-1 region: ami-079c3b3939e1422f5
  ap-south-1 region: ami-09f83dd115907186c
  eu-west-3 region: ami-0b466ac2ccb1d9a17
  eu-west-2 region: ami-03127626a3b795617
  eu-south-1 region: ami-04b543c7eca712cb2
  eu-west-1 region: ami-04bec8381d23b2d33
  ap-northeast-3 region: ami-08ec822521c26b950
  ap-northeast-2 region: ami-08b8dd381dcc36d65
  me-south-1 region: ami-07253323150004fb7
  ap-northeast-1 region: ami-0979ee58e90456542
  sa-east-1 region: ami-06effcb873d7718ef
  ca-central-1 region: ami-0c5838a8f4369ddb8
  ap-east-1 region: ami-0ee5d390ccfa85ec5
  ap-southeast-1 region: ami-0bda890b388931e8e
  ap-southeast-2 region: ami-069ccae98ade21bc2
  eu-central-1 region: ami-0c06b28ffd66f0a3c
  us-east-1 region: ami-04f0d8aef11064219
  us-east-2 region: ami-022f3e436ebcf74f2
  us-west-1 region: ami-037a2837218ac2a61
  us-west-2 region: ami-0f0a390fdd1ca6fba

=== Vagrant Images ===

FreeBSD/amd64 images are available on the Hashicorp Atlas site, and can
be installed by running:

    % vagrant init freebsd/FreeBSD-13.0-RC1
    % vagrant up

=== Upgrading ===

The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of amd64 and i386
systems running earlier FreeBSD releases.  Systems running earlier
FreeBSD releases can upgrade as follows:

	# freebsd-update upgrade -r 13.0-RC1

During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by
merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically
performed merging was done correctly.

	# freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before
continuing.

	# shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new
userland components:

	# freebsd-update install

It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible,
especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example,
FreeBSD 11.x.  Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat11x and
other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted
into the new userland:

	# shutdown -r now

Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove
stale files:

	# freebsd-update install