Open Hardware: Arduino IDE, Raspberry Pi Pico/CM4, and More

• Announcing the Arduino IDE 2.0 (beta)

  The Arduino IDE is the well-known software we all use to program our boards. Its development started in 2005 based on the graphical interface of the Processing project and has never stopped since. During these years, countless hours of development by the Arduino team with the help of a vibrant community made the Arduino IDE the de facto standard for electronics prototyping. Thanks to an extensible framework based on modular board support packages, the IDE supports more than 1,000 official and non-official boards; it’s translated in 66 languages, mentioned by more than 3,000 books, and is still growing: during the last year, it was downloaded more than 39 millions of times. More than ever.

• A neat way to add a reset button to Raspberry Pi Pico

  The Raspberry Pi Pico is a nice little board, but if you program in C language, you’d need to disconnect the micro USB cable each time you’d like to flash the UF2 firmware. That’s not convenient and could damage your board over time. The Raspberry Pi Foundation even decided to write a blog post explaining how to add a reset button to your Raspberry Pi Pico using a breadboard circuit.

• Raspberry Pi CM4 Carrier Board comes with RS485/Modbus, CAN, 1-wire interfaces (Crowdfunding)

  Another day, another Raspberry Pi CM4 carrier board. Just like the TOFU carrier board, CM Hunter carrier board for Raspberry Pi CM4 targets industrial applications, but in a different way, as it focuses on industrial communication protocols with Galvanically-Isolated RS485/Modbus, 1-Wire, CAN 2.0B, and together with more common interfaces like Ethernet, HDMI, USB, etc… [...] The project will be open-source hardware with Eagle Schematic and PCB design files, custom libraries, BOM, part numbers, and custom Raspbian Image with all Python libraries and instructions released once the crowdfunding campaign is over. The Raspbian (Raspberry Pi OS) image comes with the FBCP driver for the display, and a demo user interface based on Python 3.7, PySide2 5.12, and QML 5.12 to showcase and control the Modbus, CAN, 1-Wire interfaces respectively using python-can, modbus_tk, and Pyownet open-source libraries, as well as the RTC and the relay.

• 3.5-inch Atom x6000E embedded SBC features 3x GbE, 2x SATA, 6x USB, and more

  Several Elkhart Lake SBC’s integrate two Ethernet ports including Avalue ECM-EHL 3.5-inch SBC or Congatec Conga-PA7 Pico-ITX board with the former equipped with 2.5GbE and GbE ports, and the latter two GbE ports. But if your industrial project requires more Ethernet ports, iBase IB836 3.5-inch Atom x6000E embedded SBC offers three Gigabit Ethernet RJ45 ports, as well as two SATA ports, six USB interfaces, plus various display options, as well as M.2 and mPCIe expansion sockets.

Games: ET Legacy 2.77, Some Free/Libre Games, and DXVK

• ET: Legacy 2.77 Released For Letting Wolfenstein Enemy Territory Live On In 2021 - Phoronix

  ET Legacy 2.77 is out today as the newest version of this open-source game project continuing to advance the open-sourced Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory game from the early 2000's. See this earlier article should you be unfamiliar with the ET: Legacy open-source game that is continuing to build off the open-source foundation of the original Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. ET Legacy has been one of the exciting community, open-source game efforts to follow in recent years given the greatness of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory back in the day.

• Play Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory with the new release of ET: Legacy | GamingOnLinux

  Miss the classic shooter from Splash Damage and id Software? Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory has a modern open source version you can play with ET: Legacy and there's a new release available. Thanks to the original source being released back in 2010, it lives on with the dedicated team behind ET: Legacy and it's easily the best way to play the game with many improvements over the original while remaining compatible with the latest version of the original release.

• Transport Tycoon Deluxe reimplementation OpenTTD has a fresh Beta with OpenGL

  OpenTTD, the free and open source game that's a reimplementation and much enhanced version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe has a big new Beta up with some huge changes. Ahead of their plans to release on Steam on April 1, they're making some sweeping changes to the underlying code to make it run as great as possible across all systems. With OpenTTD 1.11.0-beta2 they've massively improved their rendering work with OpenGL support now merged in. They said it's such a big improvement they had to add a setting to limit the maximum fast-forward speed due to it. The display will now run at 60FPS and there's also now generic Linux builds in addition to per-distro packages making it easier than ever to try out OpenTTD.

• DXVK 1.8.1 Released With More Performance, Game Fixes - Phoronix

  Building off the recent DXVK 1.8 release is a new point release with more performance optimizations, game fixes, and related work to this Direct3D-on-Vulkan translation layer that is extremely popular with Linux gamers. DXVK 1.8.1 is out as the newest stable release for driving Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan for helping Wine / Proton (Steam Play) Windows games often run incredibly well on Linux.

• Direct3D 9-10-11 to Vulkan translation layer DXVK 1.8.1 is out now | GamingOnLinux

  After the 1.8 release of DXVK on February 19, a small 1.8.1 release just went out for this Direct3D 9-10-11 to Vulkan translation layer. DXVK is usually used for the Wine and Proton compatibility layers for running Windows games on Linux. Quite a short and sweet release this one with no major new features, instead there's some nice bug fixes and improvements.

• Free and open source RTS Warzone 2100 gains Vulkan support in the 4.0 Beta | GamingOnLinux

  Ready for even more open source goodness? The classic real-time strategy game Warzone 2100 is gearing up for a new release with some absolutely huge changes. Warzone 2100 was originally developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive, released as open source in 2004 and the legacy of it continues on as a completely free game. To this day it's still one of the most innovative RTS games around. The brand new 4.0.0 Beta version is out and it brings in a rendering overhaul. There's now support for Vulkan, OpenGL ES 3.0 / 2.0, DirectX (using libANGLE) and Metal (using MoltenVK) in addition to the OpenGL 3.0 Core and OpenGL 2.1 Compat modes it already supports. Switching can be done in-game via the Video menu.

• Fun hack and slash dungeon crawler Son of a Witch gets a massive free expansion

  With a price increase to come mid-March, the amusing action-roguelite Son of a Witch from Bigosaur has a huge content expansion out now with the Demon Hunter update. If you've never played it before it's often compared to the likes of Castle Crashers, The Binding of Isaac and other similar titles that have you battle through smaller arenas with plenty of random generation. An action roguelite with colourful and inviting graphics that sees you fight through tons of different enemies and bosses. This fresh update is the biggest to the game so far adding in the likes of a new hero, level, enemies, bosses, weapons, items, pets, quests and challenges, potions, magic scrolls, achievements and so on. [...] The Linux version seems to continue running perfectly fine too and now is a great time to get back into it.

today's howtos

• How to Install Magento 2 on Ubuntu 20.04

  In this guide, we will show you how to install Magento 2 with LEMP stack on an Ubuntu 20.04 VPS. Magento is one of the most popular open-source e-commerce platforms available, thanks to its customizability and flexibility. It is created using the Zend Framework and uses MySQL as its database management system. Magento provides online merchants with a very flexible shopping cart and it comes with a rich set of features. Installing Magento 2 on Ubuntu 20.04 should take less than 10 minutes to complete. Let’s get started with the tutorial.

• How to create an RPM package from a tarball

  Creating RPM package files can be both as easy or complicated as you desire. If you're needing to create an RPM package from a tarball (.tar.gz) that a vendor sent you, this tutorial will be beneficial for you. In this tutorial, I will describe a step-by-step procedure for building an RPM package from a tar file. The procedure includes creating the required directory structure, configuring a .spec file required for the rpmbuild process, and building and installing the RPM package. An additional step is added for those who may need to create more RPM packages in the future via a skeleton file.

• CrowdSec - Open Source Security Automation Tool - Putorius

  CrowdSec is a massively multiplayer firewall designed to protect Linux servers, services, containers, or virtual machines exposed on the internet with a server-side agent. It was inspired by Fail2Ban and aims to be a modernized, collaborative version of that intrusion-prevention tool. CrowdSec is free and open source (under an MIT License), with the source code available on GitHub. It is using a behavior analysis system to qualify whether someone is trying to hack you, based on your logs. If your agent detects such aggression, the offending IP is then dealt with and sent for curation. If this signal passes the curation process, the IP is then redistributed to all users sharing a similar technological profile to “immunize” them against this IP.

• Ubuntu Blog: Creating Graphical Shells – Try Mir in a Virtual Machine

  Mir works with the modern Wayland protocol which, in principle, provides many advantages over the traditional X protocol used by legacy systems. With Wayland becoming more widely supported the practice is now catching up with the theory. There are a range of graphical shells created with Mir ranging from the simple “kiosk” used for IoT by the mir-kiosk snap to the Lomiri shell used by the Ubuntu Touch phone. We have made it simple to try out a range of Mir-based shells in a virtual machine. This should give you some idea of the possibilities of using Mir.

• Creating and merging PDFs on Linux | Network World

  There are a number of ways that you can create PDFs on a Linux system. You can use an application like LibreOffice or OpenOffice, or you can take advantage of any of a number of commands that can generate PDFs from text files or from a group of other file formats. There are also a number of ways that you can merge a group of PDFs into a single PDF file.

• 10 Useful Websites for Learning PostgreSQL Database System

  PostgreSQL (also known as Postgres ) is the world’s most popular and advanced open-source enterprise-grade object-relational database management system (ORDMS). PostgreSQL has a broad variety of community and commercial support choices accessible for users. The PostgreSQL community and other online learning resource providers, provide many helpful resources to become familiar with PostgreSQL, discover how it works, and learn/master how to use it.

• Access Clipboard Contents Using Xclip and Xsel In Linux

  In this guide, we are going to learn what Xclip and Xsel programs are, and how to manipulate and access Clipboard contents using Xclip and Xsel programs in Linux. What are Xclip and Xsel programs? Xclip is a command line interface to X selections i.e. Clipboard. Xclip reads the data from one or more files and makes the data available as an X selection for pasting the data into X applications. If no files are specified, it reads data from the standard input. It can also print the X selection to the standard output.

• How to Install Blender 2.92 in Ubuntu 20.04, 20.10 via PPA

  For those prefer installing apps via the classic apt method, you can now install Blender 2.92 via PPA in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, and also Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04. The open-source 3D modeller software Blender 2.92 was released a few days ago. Features “a completely new workflow for editing meshes, new physics simulation methods, faster Cycles rendering, better compositing with Eevee, and so much more.” Blender offers official Snap package, which runs in sandbox, and is available to install directly from Ubuntu Software. As well, a Linux portable package is available to download in its website. For those prefer the classic deb packages, Thomas Schiex’s PPA has made it for Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 20.10 users.

• How to Install and Use GVM Vulnerability Scanner on Ubuntu 20.04

  GVM also called "Greenbone Vulnerability Management" is an open-source vulnerability scanning and management software that provides a set of network vulnerability tests to find security loopholes in systems and applications. This is an all-in-one suite of tools used by many security experts and normal users around the world. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure GVM on Ubuntu 20.04 server.

• How to Get Started Using Linux

  New to Linux and not sure how to get started? It's easier than you might think. Whether you're coming over from the macOS or Windows side, or just Linux-curious, you're sure to gain useful knowledge from this beginner's guide to using Linux.

• How To Install Python 3.9 on Ubuntu, Debian & LinuxMint

  Python is an object-oriented, high-level programming language. The Python 3.9 stable version has been released with several improvements and security updates. Which included multiple new modules and improved existing modules and new features. As of today, Python 3.9 is the latest stable version available for production used. Most of the Debian based Linux distribution’s includes older version of Python in software repositories. Also the Debian packages are not available for all distributions. In this tutorial you will learn to compile Python 3.9 from source code and install on Debian based systems. This tutorial will help you to how to install Python 3.9 on Ubuntu, Debian, and LinuxMint systems using source code.

• How To Install DirectAdmin on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install DirectAdmin on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, DirectAdmin is a web hosting control panel providing a graphical interface and automation tools to simplify server and account management. Features include E-mail, FTP, DNS and web management, Statistics, Apache configuration, User and reseller management, and more. 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 DirectAdmin control panel on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• How to Use AUR in Arch Linux - Make Tech Easier

  If you’re using Arch Linux or an Arch-based distribution like Manjaro, Archbang, or EndeavourOS, you’ve probably seen the term AUR. What is it? How can you use it? Find out what AUR is and how to use AUR in Arch Linux. What Is AUR? The Arch User Repository (AUR) is a place where you can find software that’s not tested by Arch’s creators and maintainers but by its users. Thanks to this, you can access more software that’s not in the official repositories.

• How to migrate CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux - YouTube

  AlmaLinux is an exciting new distribution, that aims to carry on CentOS (as we used to know it). In this video, I show of a migration script that can be used to migrate from CentOS8 to AlmaLinux, in place.

• How to use NMAP command to test Server/Network Security - The Linux GURUS

  NMAP command (short for Network Mapper) is an open-source network security tool & is the best port scanner for your server/network. Nmap command is widely used for auditing the network security & also for the penetration testing of your networks. It displays the open or exposed ports or services on your or another target machine/network & along with that, it will also provide other information of the system like Operating system, etc. Another way that we can use Nmap is for “Network Discovery”.

• How to fix apt's "the following packages have been kept back" issue

  Have you ever run sudo apt-get upgrade, only to be told there are packages that will be kept back? What this warning means is that the dependencies have changed on one of the software packages you have installed, and if upgrading that dependency would cause problems with the standard upgrade, the dependency in question is kept back. In other words, it's a precaution to prevent upgrades from breaking. Of course, you can always get around that by issuing the following command: sudo apt-get dist-upgrade However, that can be dangerous, as it may remove packages to resolve rather complex dependency problems. It's an issue that can be tricky to resolve, but not really. There are a couple of ways to resolve this issue.