Vivaldi 5.0 Brings Early Christmas Gift - Introduces Shareable Browser Themes, Automatic Translation

Vivaldi 5.0 released with impressive updates and arguably making it the best Linux web browser today. Read on for the release coverage.

Vivaldi Web Browser Turns 5, Celebrates with New Features

Thankfully I didn’t need to think too hard. The brains behind the browser made a unique play from the off, positioning Vivaldi as the choice du jour for power-users left frustrated by the tightly-controlled experiences offered elsewhere. To celebrate its fifth birthday the browser makes a new update available, Vivaldi 5.0. Vivaldi 5.0 includes a couple of interesting additions (which I’ll get to in a moment) but the real party is taking place over on Android. Vivaldi for Android 5.0 introduces something of a first: a two-tier tab bar (!).

today's howtos

1. My Homelab NAS on NixOS

   Installing NixOS was utterly painless. Using a combination of settings from the Arch Linux wiki (seriously wish I could get a printed copy of that thing, it's worth its weight in gold for how much weird arcane things you can learn from it), the NixOS wiki and copying things off of a Synology box's samba configuration file, I managed to trick everything into working and now all the machines on our tailnet can access the data on the NAS without too much trouble. Even iPhones and iPads thanks to the recent addition of SMB mounting on iP{hone|ad}OS. It also works over Tailscale too, so I can get into the NAS' files anywhere I have an internet connection.

2. Logitech MX Keys and MX Master on OpenBSD using Logi Bolt

   Long story short, I need a way to manage a Windows (pro) laptop, an OpenBSD thinkpad and an iPad Pro with a single keyboard & mouse. After a bit of digging, I ended up getting a Logitech MX Keys and Logitech MX Master 3.

3. SSH alternatives for mobile, high-latency or unreliable connections

   SSH is the best option in most cases. It is widely used, usually installed by default, and clients exist for every platform. However, there are a few cases where you may want to consider an SSH alternative. I was recently looking for ways to solve these edge cases. These are my notes on alternative SSH servers.

4. Unfortunately, damaged ZFS filesystems can be more or less unrepairable

   The second unfortunate aspect is that generally you can't repair this damage the way you can in more conventional filesystems. Because of ZFS's immutability and checksums, once something makes it to disk with a valid checksum, it's forever. If what made it to disk was broken or corrupted, it stays broken or corrupted; there's no way to fix it in place and no mechanism in ZFS to quietly fix it in a new version. Instead, the only way to get rid of the problem is to delete the corrupted data in some way, generally after copying out as much of the rest of your data as you can (and need to). If you're lucky, you can delete the affected file; if you're somewhat unfortunate, you're going to have to destroy the filesystem; if you're really unlucky, the entire pool needs to be recreated.

5. How to work more efficiently with log files using Linux csvkit - TechRepublic

   All IT pros and incident handlers have to deal almost daily with log files from various sources. Learn to work more quickly and efficiently to get the best out of CSV files with csvkit on Linux.

6. How to install Notepadqq on Elementary OS 6.0

7. How to install Netbeans 8.1 on a Chromebook

   Today we are looking at how to install Netbeans 8.1 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

8. How to install Windows 11 on Ubuntu 20.04 using VirtualBox - Linux Shout

   Windows 11 is the latest Microsoft operating system that we can install on Ubuntu 20.04 focal fossa Linux to test it using VirtualBox. Here we let you know how? If you have just moved to Linux for some reason but there are some apps that only work on Windows such as Microsoft Office, Adobe, and others. Then running Windows using a Virtual machine is a good idea. For those who don’t know about VirtualBox, it is an open-source application to create and manage virtual machines on all popular operating systems.

Kernel Space: Rollercoaster, Memory Management, Linux 5.16, and More

• Rollercoaster: group messaging for mix networks [LWN.net]

  Even encrypted data sent on the internet leaves some footprints—metadata about where packets originate, where they are bound, and when they are sent. Mix networks are meant to hide that metadata by routing packets through various intermediate nodes to try to thwart the traffic analysis used by nation-state-level adversaries to identify "opponents" of various kinds. Tor is perhaps the best-known mix network, but there are others that make different tradeoffs to increase the security of their users. Rollercoaster is a recently announced mechanism that extends the functionality of mix networks in order to more efficiently communicate among groups. Tor uses multiple relay nodes, each of which only knows its predecessor and the node to pass the message on to. It relies on the difficulty of tracking messages through that path, but a sophisticated and well-placed adversary can do various kinds of traffic analysis to potentially match up traffic between two endpoints, thus drawing conclusions about the participants in the communication. To minimize latency, Tor nodes forward packets as quickly as they can, which may help eavesdroppers correlate the traffic. The Rollercoaster developers, Daniel Hugenroth, Martin Kleppmann, and Alastair R. Beresford from the University of Cambridge, used the Loopix mix network to validate their work. Loopix is different from Tor in that sacrifices latency in order to make traffic analysis even more difficult. The client endpoints in such a mix network send fixed-sized packets at a fixed rate; if there is no outbound traffic, a cover packet is sent that is indistinguishable from normal traffic. The packets are sent to the relay nodes, which independently delay each packet before passing it on to the next relay. All of that makes it much more difficult to correlate the traffic and identify communicating endpoints.

• Some upcoming memory-management patches [LWN.net]

  The memory-management subsystem remains one of the most complex parts of the kernel, with an ongoing reliance on various heuristics for performance. It is thus not surprising that developers continue to try to improve its functionality. A number of memory-management patches are currently in circulation; read on for a look at the freeing of page-table pages, kvmalloc() flags, memory clearing, and NUMA "home nodes".

• 5.16 Merge window, part 2 [LWN.net]

  Linus Torvalds released 5.16-rc1 and ended the 5.16 merge window on November 14, as expected. At that point, 12,321 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline; about 5,500 since our summary of the first half of the merge window was written. As is usually the case, the patch mix in the latter part of the merge window tended more toward fixes, but there were a number other changes as well.

• Intel SGX2 / Enclave Dynamic Memory Management Patches Posted For Linux - Phoronix

  While Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX) functionality has been present in CPUs going back to Skylake, it took until last year with Linux 5.11 for SGX support to finally be mainlined and required more than 40 rounds of review/revisions. Finally today Intel posted patches for bringing up SGX2 as the next iteration of Software Guard Extensions and already found in shipping processors. Intel SGX is about defining private memory regions "enclaves" that are encrypted and cannot be read/used by any other processes or the host. SGX can be used for some interesting secure computing scenarios but the belated kernel support as well as various possible security vulnerabilities / attacks have rather limited its scope so far. Earlier this year building off the prior SGX support in Linux 5.11, SGX was brought for KVM guest support in v5.13.