Audiocasts/Show: Steam Deck, Open Source Security, WP Briefing, and Linux Action News

• Chill out. The Steam Deck's immutable filesystem solves our biggest problem. - Invidious

  I've seen a lot of comments complaining about the Steam Deck's immutable filesystem on the Dev Stream Deep Dive video. We need to clear up the misconceptions.

• Open Source Security Episode 299 – Experts From A World That No Longer Exists – Open Source Security

  Josh and Kurt talk about an article about how expertise has a limited lifetime. We are all experts in something, but some of us will find our expert knowledge to be outdated eventually. We discuss what that means in the context of security and tech and disagree about how to best keep your skills up to date.

• WP Briefing: Episode 21: All Things Block Themes!

  In episode 21 of the WordPress Briefing, Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, talks all things block themes with developers and theme specialists Maggie Cabrera and Jeff Ong.

• Linux Action News 217

  Fedora's massive endorsement this week that went unnoticed, why RISC-V mobile devices might be getting near, and the significant change coming to a critical open-source tool.

LVFS and OpenZFS

• Richard Hughes: Firmware “Best Known Configuration” in fwupd

  I’ve just deployed some new functionality to the LVFS adding support for component <tag>s. These are used by server vendors to identify a known-working (or commercially supported) set of firmware on the machine. This is currently opt-in for each vendor to avoid the UI clutter on the components view, and so if you’re a vendor reading this post and realize you want this feature, let me know and it’s two clicks on the admin panel.

• FWUPD Linux Firmware Updater Prepares "Best Known Configuration" Feature - Phoronix

  The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) and FWUPD on their great upward trajectory has in recent times been expanding beyond their initial focus of desktop/laptop hardware to supporting more server platforms for firmware updating. The latest feature driven by their growing server interests is "best known configuration" handling for where there are multiple independently-versioned firmware packages for a given system and may be support recommendations or potential version conflicts between the the different firmware packages.

• OpenZFS 3.0 Introduced at Developer Summit

  The ninth annual OpenZFS Developer Summit took place November 8th and 9th online with iXsystems proudly returning as a Gold sponsor. The OpenZFS community remains vibrant and is continuing to develop features at a rapid pace. This blog summarizes some of the more interesting talks.

Review: LockBox 1.0

LockBox is one of the most recent additions to the DistroWatch database. LockBox (sometimes referred to as LBX) is a Linux distribution derived from Ubuntu and elementary OS. It is especially intended for storing and managing cryptocurrencies. It includes several hardened configuration changes for security purposes, a highly restrictive firewall setup, several applications designed for data backups, a password manager, and the Brave Internet browser. LockBox is available for x86_64 machines exclusively and its install media is 3.4GB in size. In a curious case of life imitating art, the LockBox website currently describes the project using a quote from the DistroWatch information page about the distribution. One of the first things I discovered about the distribution is LockBox will not boot in Legacy BIOS mode. A boot menu will appear and begin a countdown from five seconds. When the countdown reaches zero, or when we select any of the boot options, the counter simply resets to five seconds again. The boot menu offers to let us "Try or install elementary OS" or "Check disks for defects" and both options simply reset the boot menu counter. When trying to launch the distribution in UEFI mode, only the Try/Install option is presented and choosing it boots the distribution's live environment. When the live system boots we are shown a graphical window where we can choose our preferred language from a list. We are given the choice to try the live desktop, which loads the Pantheon desktop. Alternatively we can launch the system installer. I'll talk about the Pantheon desktop later in this review.

today's howtos

1. How To Install Apache Server on Fedora 35 - idroot

   In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Server on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache HTTP is a popular web server for Linux servers. It is a free cross-platform web server that is supported on various operating systems. Developers prefer Apache for its speed, security, reliability, robustness, and ease of customization. In addition, Apache is able to meet the needs of many environments as it allows the installation of various extensions and modules. 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 Apache webserver on a Fedora 35.

2. How To Easily Set Up Secure OTA Firmware Updates On ESP32 | Hackaday

   Fortunately, over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates are a thing, allowing embedded devices to be reprogrammed over their wireless data connection instead of with a physical hardware device. Security is of course a concern, and thankfully [Refik] explains how to set up a basic framework so that ESP32 OTA updates can happen securely, allowing one to deploy devices and still push OTA updates in confidence. [Refik] begins by setting up a web server using Ubuntu Linux, and sets up HTTPS using a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt, but a self-signed SSL certificate is also an option. Once that is done, the necessary fundamentals are in place to support deploying OTA updates in a secure manner. A bit more configuration, and the rest is up to the IoT devices themselves. [Refik] explains how to set things up using the esp32FOTA library, but we’ve also seen other ways to make OTA simple to use.

3. How To Install UVdesk on Debian 11 - idroot

   In this tutorial, we will show you how to install UVdesk on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, UVdesk is a free, open-source, and SaaS-based helpdesk solution for any business process to deliver the best customer service. It is a simple, flexible, user-friendly, and alternative to other popular support platforms. Uvdesk supports Enterprise service desk features like workflow, Email piping, knowledgebase, Mailbox, Ecommerce and Multichannel Integration. 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 UVdesk helpdesk system on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

4. How to Copy Files Between Kubernetes Pods and Your Machine – CloudSavvy IT

   Containers running in Kubernetes Pods are meant to be self-contained compute units that you don’t need to manually interact with. Sometimes you might have to copy files to or from a Pod’s filesystem though, perhaps because you’re debugging a problem and want to archive logs, config files, or caches stored in a container. Here’s how to move files between your machine and containers in a Pod, using Kubectl’s built-in transfer feature or a manual alternative.

5. How to Install Firefox Next (Beta) or Firefox Quantum (Nightly) on Linux Mint - LinuxCapable

   Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox utilizes the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and future anticipated web formats and standards. For the most part, Firefox is often up to date with the latest stable release on Linux Mint and Ubuntu-based desktops, however non-stable builds such as beta or the more bleeding edge nightly builds can be installed tested the new features or test your websites before its hits the stable repository. For the most part, the beta build is what curious users should be installing, and the nightly build should never be used by anyone other than sysadmins or developers looking to test a particular feature. In the tutorial, you will learn how to add and install the beta and nightly build for Firefox using a PPA maintained by the Mozilla team.

6. How to Install Grafana 8 on Ubuntu 20.04

   Grafana is a tool for monitoring, analysis, and visualization of real-time system data. From a series of data collected, we will obtain a graphical panorama of the situation of a company or organization. It generates graphs and dashboards from a time-series database (Graphite, InfluxDB, or OpenTSDB). It also allows you to share them as snapshots with other users.

7. How to Repair File System Errors in Debian Based Systems

   In Linux, using heavy hardware components can be checked and recovered. Specifically, on Ubuntu and Debian systems, finding out the hard-disk bad sectors is easy. Once your hard disk or drive gets some bad sectors or gets corrupted, it gets spread day by day. On Ubuntu and other Debian Linux machines, you can use a few tools or commands to find out the file system errors and repair the errors. Not fixing errors or bad sectors might make your system boot slower and can also affect initialization.

8. How to Securely Transfer Files between Ubuntu Systems Using Croc – VITUX

   Croc is an open-source CLI-based tool that allows to securely transfer files between systems. During file transfer, a code is generated for the sender and the receiver systems to use for end-to-end encryption. Whether the sender and receiver are on the same network or the different networks, Croc can easily and quickly transfer files between them without the need for port forwarding. Croc can be installed and used on Linux, Windows, and MacOS, allowing you to share files between different operating systems. In today’s tutorial, we will install Croc to securely transfer files between Ubuntu systems. To install Croc on Ubuntu, you should have root or sudo privileges. Note: The procedure has been demonstrated on Ubuntu OS. You can use the same installation procedure for Debian OS.

9. How to Set or Change Hostname in Linux System

   Hostname is the label of a system or in other words it is a human readable name of a system, after setting up the hostname of the device then it becomes easy to manage and access based on their label or hostname.

10. How to Setup SSH Login Without Password

    In this article I will show you how to setup SSH login without passwords in a Linux operating system by using key-based authentication. SSH is used to remotely log into servers for running the commands and programs. However, sometimes you might want or even need to automatically log in to an SSH server without entering your username and password. The two most popular mechanisms to log into remote systems via SSH are password-based authentication and key-based authentication. Username and password combination is the most common authentication method for SSH and is a suitable method for most people. But if you regularly use SSH to connect to remote servers, the key-based authentication method is best for you. So, can you SSH without a password? In short, yes! Here’s how to do it.

11. How to create a VPC Peering between 2 VPCs on AWS

    A VPC peering connection is a connection between two VPCs that enables you to route traffic between them. We can create a VPC peering connection between our VPCs, or with a VPC in another AWS account. The VPCs can also be in different regions. We can peer the VPCs across accounts to create a network filesystem and we can also use a VPC peering connection to allow other VPCs to access resources we have in one of our VPCs.

12. How to install Travis CI on Ubuntu 20.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, I am going to take you through the installation of Travis CI on UIbuntu 20.04. Travis CI is a hosted continuous integration service used to build and test software projects hosted on Github and Bitbucket. Travis CI provided services to Open-source projects for free. Travis CI enables teams to test and ship apps with confidence. You can easily sync your projects with Travis CI. Travis CI automatically detects when a commit is made and pushed to the GitHub repository that is using Travis CI, and each time this happens, it will try to build the project and run tests.

13. How to list all running & stopped Docker containers - Linux Shout

    Docker is the popular platform to run container virtual machines using the pre-built app images. The installation and its usage are pretty simple, yet, if you are new to it and want to know how to list all the created or stopped Docker containers to delete or manage them easily. Then here are the commands to follow.

14. How to monitor domain expiry date using shell script in Linux

    The shell is an interface that helps users to operate the system through different commands, scripts, and utilities provided by Linux and Unix-based operating systems. For most of the Linux distros, Bash shell is the popular and default shell. You can identify your current shell using the following command.

15. Getting access to somebody else's Ansible Galaxy namespace | die-welt.net

    TL;DR: adding features after the fact is hard, normalizing names is hard, it's patched, carry on. I promise, the longer version is more interesting and fun to read! Recently, I was poking around Ansible Galaxy and almost accidentally got access to someone else's namespace. I was actually looking for something completely different, but accidental finds are the best ones!

16. Fedora Magazine: Use Diffoscope in packager workflows

    In the role of a packager, updating packages is a recurring task. For some projects, a packager is involved in upstream maintenance, or well written release notes make it easy to figure out what changed between the releases. This isn’t always the case, for instance with some small project maintained by one or two people somewhere on github, and it can be useful to verify what exactly changed. Diffoscope can help determine the changes between package releases. Diffoscope is a “smart binary diff” tool that was born in the Reproducible Builds project in Debian, which is also available in Fedora. It “knows” about various types of text and binary formats, and will try to recursively unpack and compare two blobs. In particular it knows that some objects need to be decompressed before comparing, that archives need to be unpacked, and how to deconstruct binary objects like ELF programs and libraries, Java .jar files, Windows .cab files, etc.

17. A Step-By-Step Guide to Installing Xubuntu 20.04 Linux

    Xubuntu is a popular lightweight Linux distribution that is based on Ubuntu. It ships with an Xfce desktop environment which is light, stable, and highly configurable. Being a lightweight distribution, Xubuntu is a perfect choice for users who are running modern PCs with low RAM and CPU resources. It also works quite well on older hardware.