today's howtos

• How to – Inkscape – rounded corners

• Install WPS Office on Debian 11 Bullseye or 10 Buster Linux

  The free office suite “WPS Office Free” which was earlier known as Kingsoft Office Free is one of the best free alternatives available for Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It is not open source like LibreOffice but readily available for Linux systems. Here we learn the commands or steps to install WPS Office on Debian 11 Bullseye. The WPS office package supports and opens all documents saved in Microsoft file types such as DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, and PPTX. Functionally, the three modules offer a professional range of services: from the spell checker, thesaurus and mail merge function via formula editor, WordArt function, and target value search for tables to saving presentations as MPEG videos. The creation of PDFs is also possible with “WPS Office Free”.

• GNU Linux bash – analyze get detailed info on hardware summary with inxi

• Understanding the PHP values in the php.ini configuration file

  In this tutorial, we are going to explain what contains the “php.ini” configuration file and what is used for. The PHP ini configuration file is a special file for PHP applications used to control PHP settings what users can or can not do with the website. When PHP is installed the server is configured to use the default PHP settings, but sometimes we need to change the behavior of the PHP at runtime and this is when this configuration file comes to in use.

• Using whois/jwhois on Linux | Network World

  The whois and jwhois commands allow you to retrieve a lot of information on Internet domains--likely a lot more than you might imagine. Here's how these commands work and how they can be useful.

• How To Install Siege Benchmarking Tool on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Siege Benchmarking Tool on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Siege is one of the popular HTTP load testings and benchmarking utility tools to measure the performance of web servers under stress. You can perform a stress test using a single URL with a specific number of users or you can put all URLs in files and stress them simultaneously. Siege reports the total number of hits recorded, bytes transferred, response time, concurrency, and return status. Siege supports HTTP/1.0 and 1.1 protocols, the GET and POST directives, cookies, transaction logging, and basic authentication. 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 the step-by-step installation of the Siege open-source regression test and benchmark utility 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.

• Find out who Edited Files in Linux - kifarunix.com

  In this tutorial, you will learn how to find out who edited files in Linux. Linux provides user space tools for security auditing called auditd (Audit daemon). auditd keeps track of all the changes happening on the system and generate logs that can be analyzed so as to get an insight into system security posture. This include finding out who edit what files at what specific time.

• Linux Fu: The Ultimate Dual Boot Laptop? | Hackaday

  I must confess, that I try not to run Windows any more than absolutely necessary. But for many reasons, it is occasionally necessary. In particular, I have had several laptops that are finicky with Linux. I still usually dual boot them, but I often leave Windows on them for one reason or another. I recently bought a new Dell Inspiron and the process of dual booting it turned out to be unusually effective but did bring up a few challenges. If you ever wanted a proper dual-booting laptop, you’ll be interested in how this setup works. Sure, you can always repartition the drive, but the laptop has a relatively small drive and is set up very specifically to work with the BIOS diagnostics and recovery so it is always a pain to redo the drive without upsetting the factory tools. Since the laptop came with a 512 GB NVMe drive, I wanted to upgrade the drive anyway. So one option would have been to put a bigger drive in and then go the normal route. That was actually my intention, but I wound up going a different way.

GNOME and GTK Development

• State persistence for apps and sessions: Endless Orange Week | Philip Withnall

  Those two bullet points hide a lot of complexity, and it’s not surprising that I didn’t get particularly far in this project! It requires coordinated changes in a lot of components: GLib, GTK, gnome-session and applications themselves. A lot of these changes have been prototyped or worked on before, by various people, but nothing has yet come together. In fact, gnome-session used to fully support restoring apps to a certain degree — before it was ported away from XSMP, it used to support saving the set of apps when closing a session, and re-starting those apps when starting the session again. It did not support restoring the state of each app, though, just the fact that it was running.

• GstVA in GStreamer 1.20 – Herostratus’ legacy

  It was a year and half ago when I announced a new VA-API H.264 decoder element in gst-plugins-bad. And it was bundled in GStreamer release 1.18 a couple months later. Since then, we have been working adding more decoders and filters, fixing bugs, and enhancing its design. I wanted to publish this blog post as soon as release 1.20 was announced, but, since the developing window is closed, which means no more new features will be included, I’ll publish it now, to create buzz around the next GStreamer release.

• Carlos Garnacho: An Eventful Instant

  Traditionally, GNOME Shell has been compressing pointer motion events so its handling is synchronized to the monitor refresh rate, this means applications would typically see approximately 60 events per second (or 144 if you follow the trends). This trait inherited from the early days of Clutter was not just a shortcut, handling motion events implies looking up the actor that is beneath the pointer (mainly so we know which actor to send the event to) and that was an expensive enough operation that it made sense to do with the lowest frequency possible. If you are a recurrent reader of this blog you might remember how this area got great improvements in the past. But that alone is not enough, motion events can also end up handled in JS land, and it is in the best interest of GNOME Shell (and people complaining about frame loss) that we don’t need to jump into the JavaScript machinery too often in the course of a frame. This again makes sense to keep to a minimum.

Security Leftovers

• Germany’s new government will firmly defend encryption, key Social Democrat says – EURACTIV.com

  According to Jens Zimmermann, the German coalition negotiations had made it “quite clear” that the incoming government of the Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens and the business-friendly liberal FDP would reject “the weakening of encryption, which is being attempted under the guise of the fight against child abuse” by the coalition partners. Such regulations, which are already enshrined in the interim solution of the ePrivacy Regulation, for example, “diametrically contradict the character of the coalition agreement” because secure end-to-end encryption is guaranteed there, Zimmermann said. Introducing backdoors would undermine this goal of the coalition agreement, he added.

• Security updates for Wednesday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (nss), Fedora (rubygem-rmagick), openSUSE (xen), Red Hat (firefox and nss), SUSE (kernel and xen), and Ubuntu (mailman and nss).

• Security: This new Firefox feature could stop zero-day flaws in their tracks | ZDNet

  Mozilla has released Firefox 95 and shipped it with its new security sandboxing technology called RLBox for Firefox on Windows, Linux and macOS.

• Mozilla Releases Security Updates for Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Thunderbird | CISA

  Mozilla has released security updates to address vulnerabilities in Firefox, Firefox ESR, and Thunderbird. An attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system. CISA encourages users and administrators to review the Mozilla security advisories for Firefox 95, Firefox ESR 91.4.0, and Thunderbird 91.4.0 and apply the necessary updates.

The 10 Best Ubuntu-Based Linux Distributions of All Time

Ubuntu, the Debian-based Linux OS, has been around since 2004; ever since, it has spawned some excellent distributions that are, in turn, based on Ubuntu’s source code. These distributions continue to mete out varying degrees of success for serving diverse use cases. The following list of community-maintained Ubuntu distributions is technology’s current creme. Without further ado, let’s find out what makes each of these Ubuntu-based distros tick.