Leftovers: BSD Now, TLLTS, Canonical, Snapcraft, LibreOffice and More

• ZFS Rename Repo | BSD Now 327

  We read FreeBSD’s third quarterly status report, OpenBSD on Sparc64, ZoL repo move to OpenZFS, GEOM NOP, keeping NetBSD up-to-date, and more.

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 836

• [Canonical on] The mundane revolution: Unexpected innovations in robotics

  Today’s headlines tend to focus on the weird and wonderful robots of this world: the Hollywood Terminators or mechanical dogs developed by Boston Dynamics and other Silicon Valley start-ups. The greatest innovations, however, can often be found in the more mundane corners of our society, within the industries and environments people least expect. It’s happened with medicine and the discovery of penicillin, for example, while Archimedes had his eureka moment in the bath. Robotics is no different. Its true value as a proposition will only reveal itself when we take the obvious with the sublime, and do not overlook the sublime simpler uses of robots, already active in the market today.

• Snapcraft now auto-detects missing dependencies

  When you build snaps, the process of composing a complete snapcraft.yaml file will usually revolve around three main activities: parts, build requirements and runtime components. Sometimes, you may discover that you’re missing certain libraries in the compilation stage, or that they are required for your application to run. In most cases, you will iterate on your build a few times, and perhaps use our faster development guide to quickly nail down the missing elements. From snapcraft release 3.7 onward, things have become ever so easier. Now, it is possible to have snapcraft automatically detect and list missing runtime libraries, and allow you to complete your build with fewer errors and in less time.

• Fixed a terrible [LibreOffice] regression

  There was a bug tdf#128133 about "muddy fonts in LibreOffice GUI with 125% scale in Windows". I have 125% scaled GUI on all my machines with Windows because I have a bad vision. And that bug was very terrible for me. The bug was a regression but we have couldn't to find a bad commit using bibisect process. We just have had wrong result.

• [LibreOffice] Celebrating International Volunteer Day

  Today is International Volunteer Day. All around the world, volunteers give their time and energy to help many different causes – including free and open source software projects like LibreOffice. Indeed, LibreOffice wouldn’t be where it is today, without the incredibly valuable help of hundreds of volunteers in the last decade. So to everyone who has contributed to our project and community over the years, we at The Document Foundation want to say a big thank you! Your work has helped many millions of LibreOffice users around the world benefit from powerful, open and multilingual productivity tools.

• The rise, disappearance, and retirement of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin

  In that context, it’s important to look back at the big moments in both men’s careers and how the actions they took have had an outsized impact not just on the tech industry, but on the internet and society itself. What Page and Brin have built will likely last for decades to come, and knowing how Google got to where it is today will be an important piece in the puzzle of figuring out where it goes in the future.

• CERN selects Juniper Networks to increase data centres capacity

  The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has deployed Juniper Networks networking solutions to increase the capacity of its data centres and technical network to adapt to increasing research requirements.

• The Foundational Era of Open Source

  Between 2012 and 2015, though, we passed into a new, modern era of open source software that I call the Foundational era of open source. Open source projects were given to community-owned, non-profit foundations to manage and nourish—organizations such as the Linux Foundation, the folks behind Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the Continuous Delivery Foundation; Cloud Foundry Foundation; The Apache Foundation; and the Eclipse Foundation (one of the early entrants, even if IBM did come to dominate it) took over the stewardship of many open source projects. This has ushered in a truly golden age of open source software that has seen open source become the dominant form of software in the world. The Foundational era of open source has flourished for several reasons. For one, now multiple commercial entities can contribute code without worrying that it is for the exclusive benefit of just one company. What’s more, these foundations have a mix of vendors, practitioners and large enterprise users that really do allow for the democratization of open source at levels not seen before. Also, there is a process of incubation to graduation that these projects are put through that help them evolve and grow.

• Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'

  “There are two reasons for this. One is that at 96 I am cutting back on my commitments and the second is that fewer organisations and individuals are now caring about the correct use of the apostrophe in the English Language."

today's howtos

• How to Install Wine on Linux

• How To Install Kali Undercover Mode On Any Xfce Linux Distribution

• Module hotfixes in Copr

• Injecting a Host Entry in podman-run

• Configuration files in /etc and /usr/etc

• How to solve ” fsck error on boot: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; “

Events: KVM Forum 2019 and "Bar Charts for Diversity"

• A recap of KVM Forum 2019

  The 13th KVM Forum virtualization conference took place in Lyon, France in October 2019. One might think that development may have finished on the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) module that was merged in Linux 2.6.20 in 2007, but this year's conference underscored the amount of work still being done, particularly on side-channel attack mitigation, I/O device assignment with VFIO and mdev, footprint reduction with micro virtual machines (VMs), and with the ability to run VMs nested within VMs. Many talks also involved the virtual machine monitor (VMM) user-space programs that use the KVM kernel module—of which QEMU is the most widely used.

• Enhancing KVM for guest protection and security

  A key tenet in KVM is to reuse as much Linux infrastructure as possible and focus specifically on processor virtualization. Back in 2007, this meant a smaller code base and less friction with the other kernel subsystems, especially when compared with other virtualization technologies such as Xen. This led to KVM being merged into the mainline with relative ease. But now, in the era of microarchitectural vulnerabilities, the priorities have shifted, and the KVM's reliance on other kernel subsystems can be a liability. For one thing, the host kernel widens the TCB (Trusted Computing Base) and makes for a larger attack surface. In addition, kernel data structures such as the direct memory map give Linux access to guest memory even when it is not strictly necessary and make it impossible to fully enforce the principle of least privilege. In his talk "Enhancing KVM for Guest Protection and Security" (slides [PDF]) presented at KVM Forum 2019, long-time KVM contributor Jun Nakajima explained this risk and suggested some strategies to mitigate it.

• Bar charts for diversity

  At the Linux App Summit I gave an unconference talk titles Hey guys, this conference is for everyone. The “hey guys” part refers to excluding people from a talk or making them feel uncomfortable – you can do this unintentionally, and the take-away of the talk was that you, (yes, you) can be better. I illustrated this mostly with conversational distance, a favorite topic of mine that I can demonstrate easily on stage. There’s a lot of diversity in how far people stand away from strangers, while explaining something they care about. The talk wasn’t recorded, but I’ve put the slides up. Another side of diversity can be dealt with by statistics. Since I’m a mathematician, I have a big jar of peanuts and raisins in the kitchen. Late at night I head down to the kitchen and grab ten items from the jar. Darn, all of them are raisins. What are the odds!? Well, a lot depends on whether there are any peanuts in the jar at all; what percentage is peanuts; whether I’m actually picking things randomly or not. There’s a convenient tool that Katarina Behrens pointed me to, which can help figure this out. Even if there’s only a tiny fraction of peanuts in the jar, there’s an appreciable chance of getting one (e.g. change the percentage on that page to 5% and you’ll see).