I am happy to announce the availability of the new ISO 21.01.15. This new ISO comes with a clean-up of packages that include removing LibreOffice and Telegram from the default selection. We did this to bring the zfs RW live file systems to run without problem on 4GB of ram machine. We also removed the UFS full disk option from the installer. Users can still use custom partitions to setup UFS partition, but we discourage it. We also fixed the Next button's restriction in the custom partition related to some bug that people reported. We also fix the missing default locale setup and added the default setup for Linux Steam, not to forget this ISO includes kernel, userland and numerous application updates.

This report covers FreeBSD related projects for the period between October and December, and is the fourth of four planned reports for 2020.

This quarter had quite a lot of work done, including but certainly not limited to, in areas relating to everything from multiple architectures such as x86, aarch64, riscv, and ppc64 for both base and ports, over kernel changes such as vectored aio, routing lookups and multipathing, an alternative random(4) implementation, zstd integration for kernel dumps, log compression, zfs and preparations for pkg(8), along with wifi changes, changes to the toolchain like the new elfctl utility, and all the way to big changes like the git migration and moving the documentation from DocBook to Hugo/AsciiDoctor, as well as many other things too numerous to mention in an introduction.

This report with 42 entries, which don't hold the answer to life, the universe and everything, couldn't have happened without all the people doing the work also writing an entry for the report, so the quarterly team would like to thank them, as otherwise, we wouldn't have anything to do.

Please note that the deadline for submissions covering the period between January and March is March 31st.

We hope you'll enjoy reading as much as we enjoyed compiling it.
Daniel Ebdrup Jensen, on behalf of the quarterly team.

• Wildcards in Linux explained with 10 examples | FOSS Linux

  Wildcards, a.k.a. meta characters, are a godsend when it comes to searching for particular filenames from a heap of similarly named files. For example, by using Wildcards in Linux, you can use the ls command, rm command, or any other Linux command for that matter, on multiple files as long as they match the defined criteria.

• Set Raspberry PI Swap Memory - peppe8o

  Beside CPU, RAM is the most valuable resource in every computer. It is where data are stored for running programs and it is one the most important resource for applications managing a big amount of data. Raspberry PI Swap Memory, like other linux systems, can reduce small RAM impact avoiding Out of Memory errors

• Install and Configure a Multi-Master HA Kubernetes Cluster with kubeadm, HAProxy and Keepalived on CentOS 7

  The kubeadm tool is great if you need a simple way to deploy Kubernetes, and integrate it into provisioning systems such as Ansible. I use Ansible a lot nowadays, but before I got to the point of automating my Kubernetes homelab, I had to do it by hand. You can’t automate what you don’t understand.

  As we will be deploying three Kubernetes control plane nodes, we need to deploy a kube-apiserver load balancer in front of them. The load balancer distributes traffic to all healthy control plane nodes in its target list. HAProxy is my homelab load balancer of choice, and we will configure it with Keepalived to provide node redundancy. If one of the HAProxy servers becomes unavailable, the other one will serve traffic.

  We will use three KVM hosts to deploy resources. The goal is to sustain data and maintain service in the event of a loss of a (single) hypervisor host.

• How to Find a Directory in Linux

  Looking for a specific directory in your Linux file system? Fortunately, you have many search tools at your disposal. We'll look at several easy-to-use options, and how to use them to search for folders efficiently.

• How to Install and Use Terraform on Ubuntu 20.04 - LinuxBuz

  Terraform is an open-source software tool created by Hashicorp. It is used to automate and manage your infrastructure, your platform and services that run on that platform. It uses a declarative language that means you don't have to define every step of how this automation and management is done. With Terraform, you can create a VPS, AWS users and permissions, spin up servers and install the application on servers.

• Transition from Thunderbird to Mutt

  I was going OK with Thunderbird and enigmail(though it have many problems). Normally I go through changelogs before updating packages and rarely do a complete upgrage of my machine. Couple of days ago I did a complete upgrade of system which updated my Thunderbird to latest version and throwing of enigmail plugin for using their native openPGP support. There is a blog from Mozilla which I should’ve read earlier. Thunderbird’s builtin openPGP functionality is still in experimental, atleast not ready for my workflow. I could’ve downgrade to version 68. But I chose to move to my secondary MUA, mutt. I was using mutt for emails and newsletters that I check twice in a year a so.

  So I started configuring mutt to handle my big mailboxes. It took three evenings to configure mutt to my workflow. Though the basic setup can be done in less than an hour it is the small nitpicks consumed much of my time. Currently I have isync to pull and keep mails offline. Mutt to read, msmtp to send, abook as the email address book and urlview to see the links in mail. I am still learning notmuch and virtual mailbox ways to filter.

• Setting up Tomcat 9.0.41 && mariadb-server 10.5 on Debian Bullseye/sid

  Setup Tomcat via original tar.gz ball and JDK 11 allow to deploy "war" archive been built for Web Servlet Application from http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/295844/index.html . Thus CRUD Server side Java Apps might be moved on Debian Bullseye/sid in 3-5 minutes .

MuseScore, free open-source sheet music player and editor, released the new major version 3.6 with many new features, improvements and bug-fixes.

• Thomson Path Android TVs Launched in India in 42-Inch and 43-Inch Variants, Sale Starts January 20

• Thomson launches Path Android TVs in 42 and 43 inches, prices start at ₹19,999

• Android Powers Some of the Best TVs We’ve Seen — These 4 Are Worth Your Time

• ALDI selling 2 smart Android TV powered TV’s next Saturday 23rd Jan

• Google reportedly requires new Android TV devices support AV1 video decoding

• This massive 100-inch 4K Android Laser TV is discounted by $2,600 right now!

• Doogee S96Pro: Android 10 + night vision

• itel Vision 1 Pro with HD+ display, Android 10 Go, and 4000mAh battery launched in India

• [Update: Jan. 16] Realme 7 Pro & Narzo 20 Realme UI 2.0 (Android 11) update: Here's what we know so far

• OnePlus 7/7T series Android 11 update is here as custom ROMs

• [Update: January 16] OxygenOS 11 (Android 11) update for OnePlus 7 series: Here's what we know

• Xperia 1 and Xperia 5 getting Android 11 update

• Sony Xperia 1 and Xperia 5 start receiving stable Android 11 update

• Best Android app deals of the day: Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, iPoe Collections, more

• Google is testing a bottom bar for its in-app browser on Android

• A warning for Android users to instantly remove these malicious apps from their smartphones which carry the dangerous type of malware

• Here’s how an encrypted, locked Android and Apple phone gets bypassed

• Nokia 3.4 receiving new Android Build V1.260

Git is an open source distributed version control system which was originally designed by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, in 2005 for Linux kernel development. This control system is widely used by the open source community, handling small to extremely large projects with an emphasis on speed and efficiency, but maintaining flexibility, scalability, and guaranteeing data integrity.

Git is one of a number of open source revision control systems available for Linux. Git is frequently regarded by many developers to be the finest version control tool available.

Most Linux distributions offer lots of secondary tools that add additional functionality. Like many things in Linux, the choice can be bamboozling. This article seeks to help identify tools which we’ve found to be very useful. They should be a good addition to maximise the benefits of using Git.

Garuda Linux is based on Arch Linux. It is provided with all major Desktop environments like KDE, GNOME, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt-kwin, Wayfire, Qtile, BSPWM, and i3wm.

On a short period, Garuda Linux is the most preferable distribution on Linux community.

So, we will walk through the Garuda KDE Installation process and feel the Garuda KDE’s Beast.

Python is a trendy programming language that comes with tons of libraries and modules. To install these libraries, you can install them using their wheel file or use any library manager.

PIP is a python library that stands for PHP Install Packages or Preferred Installer Program that helps you install, remove, and upgrade all other libraries without reinventing wheel files every time when you install new packages.

Today, we guide you on using PIP to install, reinstall, remove, and manage all other libraries with this single library.

• My ISP Is Killing My Idle SSH Sessions. Yours Might Be Too.

  We found the culprit! The connection tested after waiting slightly more than 60 minutes didn’t work, meaning they dropped the connection from their NAT table. 1 hour is too short time for them to wait – they should wait at least 2 hours and 4 minutes. I documented my findings, and sent an email to my ISP. I quickly got a response back acknowledging that this is a bug on their side, and thanking me for my research. They still haven’t fixed the problem though.

  The tcp-keepalive-test gave the same result, but strangely enough the tcp-recv-test reported all connections as working. I assume this is because I pay my ISP to have a static public IPv4 mapped to my CGN address. But then why did the server’s keepalive packages get dropped in the SSH example? I speculate that my ISP drops those because they don’t refer to a valid TCP session anymore.

  Actually they shouldn’t track my connections at all – they should just forward all packages, and only translate the source or destination IP. But that’s a problem for another day.

• Converting from CentOS Linux 8 to CentOS Stream - YouTube

• How to Install V Lang on Ubuntu 20.04 - Cloudbooklet

  How to Install V Lang on Ubuntu 20.04. V is a simple language to build maintainable programs. You can learn V language within 1 hour using the documentation. It is similar to Go language and improved upon some things like no null, no global state, no undefined values and many more.

  In this guide you are going to learn how to install V language on Ubuntu 20.04. This installation is tested on Google Cloud platform. So these steps will work well on other cloud hosting or VPS or dedicated servers running Ubuntu or Debian.

• How to upgrade Alpine Linux 3.12 to 3.13

  Alpine Linux version 3.13 has been released. Here is how to upgrade Alpine Linux from 3.11/3.12 to the latest stable version, 3.13 using CLI.

• How to find if a website using gzip / deflate compression using curl on Linux and Unix

• OpenSUSE install Brotli module for Nginx

  How do I install or add Brotli compression support to Nginx on OpenSUSE Linux to speed up my webpages and apps?

  Brotli is a free and open-source generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm that compresses data using various methods. It is similar in speed to deflate or gzip but offers more dense compression for Apache or Nginx web server.

  Nginx does not support Brotli, but we can install a module developed by Google called ngx_brotli to add support to Nginx. This page explains how to add or install Brotli support to Nginx on an OpenSUSE Linux server 15.2 to speed up webpages.

• How To List Disk Partitions In Linux - OSTechNix

  In this brief guide, we will see all the possible ways to find and list disk partitions in Linux and Unix-like operating systems. Before getting into the topic, let us take a quick look at what is disk partitioning and how disk partitions are named in Linux.

• How to browse the internet using Debian Terminal

  Today, we are going to talk about text-based web browsers. But you might be wondering that what’s the need for a text-based browser in today’s graphical age. There might be several reasons for it. one reason might be because some people are more Terminal savvy and they want to perform everything from their command line. Another reason might be the slow internet connection and annoying advertisements of GUI browser. So text-based browsers are the best tool that can help them enjoy a faster browser experience without any distractions.

• How to Setup and use Google Drive on Ubuntu 20.04 - Linux Shout

  Unlike Windows on Ubuntu’s latest versions such as 20.04 LTS, we don’t need to install any extra software to connect and use Google Drive account. Everything there and we just need to login to Ubuntu using a Google account.

  One of the popular public cloud services to store data is Google Drives because of free 15 GB storage. Most of the time to use that we visit Google Drive’s website to upload and download files, however, you can save your time by access G – Drive storage directly on your machine like any other network drive. However, there is no official client from Google for Linux systems, well, still we can use it using the default GNOME Online Accounts feature available on Ubuntu and other Linux systems.

2020 has featured a major increase in commits to the ::gentoo repository, and especially commits from non-developers. The overall number of commits has grown from 73400 to 104500 (by 42%), while the number of commits made by non-developers has grown from 5700 (8% of total) to 11000 (10.5% of total). The latter group has featured 333 unique authors in 2019, and 391 in 2020.

The ::guru repository has thrived in 2020. While 2019 left it with merely 7 contributors and a total of 86 commits, 2020 has featured 55 different contributors and 2725 commits. GURU is a user-curated repository with a trusted user model. Come join us!

There was also a major increase in Bugzilla activity. 2020 featured almost 25500 bugs reported, compared to 15000 in 2019. This is probably largely thanks to Agostino Sarubbo’s new tinderboxing effort. The total number of bugs closed in 2020 was 23500, compared to 15000 in 2019.

Also; Distribution Kernels: module rebuilds, better ZFS support and UEFI executables

• This week in KDE: text reflow in Konsole!

  This week a huge new feature landed in Konsole: it now reflows the text when you resize the window! This feature can be turned off if you don’t like it, but comes on by default. It works really well. Thanks very much to Carlos Alves and Tomaz Canabrava for this work! It will be released in Konsole 21.04.

• KDE Will Reflow Text In Konsole On Window Resizing, Kirigami Icons Now Use Less RAM - Phoronix

  KDE developers have remained very busy in the new year working to improve their open-source desktop stack. 

  Following last week's near total rewrite of the KWin compositing code there has been an interesting batch of new improvements this week. Some of this week's highlights include: 

  - KDE's Konsole now re-flows text when resizing the window. The functionality is enabled by default (but there is an option to disable it). 

LibreOffice 7.1 is the next major release of the beloved and free office suite used by millions of computer users worldwide, and it’s been in development for more than five months. Now, two months after the beta release, the RC (Release Candidate) milestone is ready for public testing.

So if you want to help shape the future of the open source LibreOffice office suite and give The Document Foundation’s QA (Quality Assurance) community a helping hand to make sure LibreOffice 7.1 is a rock-solid release, go ahead and download the Release Candidate (RC1) installers for DEB- or RPM-based distros, as well as the source tarball, from the official website.

• InteLeaks – Part XVI: Intel Cannot Do Command Line, Even When It's Vastly Simpler and More Suitable for Development
• IRC Proceedings: Friday, January 15, 2021
• Links 15/1/2021: KaOS 2021.01, Whisker Menu 2.5.2, Istio 1.8.2
• InteLeaks – Part XV: Intel is Blind to Blind and Colour-Blind People
• Links 15/1/2021: GStreamer 1.18.3 and Proton 5.13-5
• IRC Proceedings: Thursday, January 14, 2021
• Links 14/1/2021: Wine 6.0, Debian 11 Freeze, and Alpine Linux 3.13

Etcher is a utility created by Balena, that makes your life easy with its unique take on creating bootable USB and SD cards with a .iso file. In this guide, I will show you the steps to download and install Etcher. Although it is a bit trivial for some, may be difficult for others. Hence this guide.

In prior years, this annual series covered individual apps. This year, we are looking at all-in-one solutions in addition to strategies to help in 2021. Welcome to day 6 of 21 Days of Productivity in 2021.

In the long, long ago, when compiling a kernel was the only way to get wifi drivers, a graphical environment was mainly for running a web browser and opening lots of terminal windows. The look and feel was a mishmash of whatever toolkit the author of the program chose to use. And then, in 1996 Matthias Ettrich proposed and later released the first version of KDE. It was based on the then proprietary Qt toolkit (since made Free and Open Source). This release sparked what can only be called a desktop revolution on Linux, with the creation of the GNOME Desktop using the at-that-time FOSS GTK Toolkit. Between KDE and GNOME, Linux went from a only computer people use Linux operating system to a robust desktop environment for everyone.

Since 2001, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Licensing and Compliance Lab has provided the legal muscle to defend free software, and has supported software users, programmers, legal professionals, and activists who want their software to remain free. FSF representatives had done copyleft enforcement before this, but the founding of the Lab was a big step toward formalizing and organizing this work. You may have already read licensing and compliance manager Donald Robertson’s comprehensive accounting of the current functions of the team, but today, following our thirty-fifth anniversary celebration, we’re taking a look back at the role this team has played over the course of the FSF’s thirty-five year-long history, and some milestones along the way.

Like the other accounts written for this series, which focused on the campaigns team and the tech team's histories, this is far from a complete story of the FSF’s licensing work: there are important milestones that we were barely able to touch upon, and important people involved whose stories and voices aren’t represented here. It’s also possible that some details may have been missed or lost to time.

I’ve seen a tonne of Linux distros come and go in the 12 years I’ve been blogging about Ubuntu, but precious few have been designed exclusively for tablet use.

So when I came across JingOS, a new Ubuntu-based distro touting a touch-centric UI, I was naturally intrigued. Tablet-based Linux distros aren’t exactly common.

JingOS’s developers say it is “the world’s first iPadOS-style Linux distro”. I don’t imagine anyone is going to take issue with that statement, especially once they’ve seen how it looks!

While new feature code is normally not allowed in past the end of the merge window for a given Linux kernel release cycle, Linus Torvalds has decided to merge the newly-published open-source driver code for the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics cards for the Linux 5.11 kernel that will debut as stable in February.

Ahead of this weekend's Linux 5.11-rc4 release, Linus Torvalds has merged the new initial open-source code for the NVIDIA RTX 30 / Ampere GPUs via the Nouveau driver. He was fine with allowing this late addition to Linux 5.11 as the new hardware support is all self-contained and doesn't risk regressing the existing NVIDIA GPU support within the Nouveau driver. Thus it's one of the rare times he permits new code to be added after a merge window since there is minimal risk of it regressing the status quo of hardware support.

• Minimalist vs Modern - Linux Mint 20.1

  It's time to check out the two desktop environments built for the latest release of Linux Mint 20.1 - MATE and Cinnamon!

• Google Docs Replacement | Self-Hosted 36

  Our favorite Google Docs killer with markdown support has a big update. We explain how we host it and why we love it.

• Announcing Istio 1.8.2

  This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.8.1 and Istio 1.8.2

• openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/02 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

  Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

  Somewhere, I read, 2021 will be the year of the Linux desktop. Do you agree? Let’s make it the year of Tumbleweed on the desktop. In any case, Tumbleweed has been steadily rolling with 5 snapshots published during this week (0107, 0108, 0110, 0111, and 0113).

• Ubuntu 21.04 To Expand The Use Of Phased Package Updates - Phoronix

  With this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 there is more widespread use of "phased updates" for gradually rolling out new stable release updates to help avoid any regressions en masse from coming to light. For years the Ubuntu desktop has employed this phased updates strategy while now with it being plumbed into APT, Ubuntu Server and other versions will by default make use of phased updates.

  Going back a number of years in Ubuntu has been Phased Updates that wired into Update Manager has led to the gradual rollout of new stable release updates over a period of about two days. This has been done gradually to ensure that no regressions or potential big problems hit all Ubuntu users at once by over the course of many hours exposing more Ubuntu users to these updates.

• Security updates for Friday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (flatpak, ruby-redcarpet, and wavpack), Fedora (dia, mingw-openjpeg2, and openjpeg2), Mageia (awstats, bison, cairo, kernel, kernel-linus, krb5, nvidia-current, nvidia390, php, and thunderbird), openSUSE (cobbler, firefox, kernel, libzypp, zypper, nodejs10, nodejs12, and nodejs14), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), Slackware (wavpack), SUSE (kernel, nodejs8, open-iscsi, openldap2, php7, php72, php74, slurm_20_02, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (ampache and linux, linux-hwe, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-hwe-5.8, linux-lts-xenial).

• Project Zero: Introducing the In-the-Wild Series

  At Project Zero we often refer to our goal simply as “make 0-day hard”. Members of the team approach this challenge mainly through the lens of offensive security research. And while we experiment a lot with new targets and methodologies in order to remain at the forefront of the field, it is important that the team doesn’t stray too far from the current state of the art. One of our efforts in this regard is the tracking of publicly known cases of zero-day vulnerabilities. We use this information to guide the research. Unfortunately, public 0-day reports rarely include captured exploits, which could provide invaluable insight into exploitation techniques and design decisions made by real-world attackers. In addition, we believe there to be a gap in the security community’s ability to detect 0-day exploits.

• Google series on in-the-wild exploits

  The Google Project Zero blog is carrying a six-part series exploring, in great detail, a set of sophisticated exploits discovered in the wild.