• How To Install PostgreSQL on Debian 11 - idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PostgreSQL on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, PostgreSQL is a powerful, open-source object-relational database system that uses and extends the SQL language combined with many features that safely store and scale the most complicated data workloads. With over 30 years of active development, PostgreSQL is widely used as a database for numerous mobile and web applications.

  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 PostgreSQL 13 on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• How to Convert xlsx to CSV Format in Linux

  The windows-based Microsoft Excel application is known for its indisputable open XML spreadsheet files support. This same support also extends to XLSX file formats.

  As you adapt or migrate to the Linux operating system environment, you will find the use of CSV or Comma-Separated file format a lot more convenient due to some of the following prime reasons...

• How to Install Nextcloud on Debian 11

  Nextcloud is open-source software for creating public and private file storage. It allows you to create your self-hosted services like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Mega.nz. Originally, it's created by the original owncloud developer Frank Karlitschek. In 2016, he forks the Owncloud project and creates a new project with the new name "Nextcloud"

  By this time, the Nextcloud project growing rapidly and becoming more than file hosting software, it's more like a file sync and content collaboration platform. Backed with a lot of plugins, Nextcloud becomes such a powerful collaboration software. You can install plugins for project management, video conferencing, collaborative editing, note-taking, email client, etc.

  In this guide, you will learn how to install Nextcloud on the latest Debian 11 Bullseye. You will be installing Nextcloud under the LAMP Stack (Linux, Apache2/httpd, MySQL/MariaDB, and PHP).

• How to Install and Use Docker on Rocky Linux 8 – VITUX

  Imagine a box in which you can put all of your files, and it will maintain integrity. This is what Docker does, providing an easy way to manage containers for any application on-premise or cloud-hosted with ease.

  What’s even better about this tool: It comes free (yes, really) as well as being open source so that everyone benefits from its use–not just those who have paid subscriptions like most big companies do these days.

  Docker allows you to put your application in a container, ship it and preserve the environment, as well as make sure that all of those pesky updates don’t break it. You can access much smaller servers and reduce bandwidth since everything is self-contained.

  The Docker team has been working very hard on this tool for a while now–and they have succeeded in making a very excellent and useful product. Those who have been working on or with Linux for a time can appreciate how amazing this is–finally an IT tool that works.

• How to Remove Directories in Linux

  Spring cleaning is not only necessary for homes, Your Linux Mint 20 file system also needs to be decluttered regularly. An organized file system will save you or the system administrator a lot of headaches in the long run.

  In this article, you will learn how to remove your directories to organize your file system.

• How to create documents with Bash scripts | Enable Sysadmin

  Bash "here documents" are a useful way to create uncomplicated YAML and HTML documents, inventory files, and emails.

• Guide to Linux Ubuntu/Debian log files for beginners

  Updated – Ubuntu logs system events into the log files in order to help administrators maintain, analyze and diagnose system related issues and applications problems.

  Log files contain messages related to kernel, services and applications events that are kept on a centralized repository of log files under /var/log directory.

  There are various log files in Linux Ubuntu for different informations. For instance, there is a default log file dedicated to the system, another for security messages another for cron tasks. These log files are actually plain text (ASCII) written in a standardized log file format. Many of these log files are generated by the so called system log daemon, syslogd while some other applications generate their proper logs by writing to files under the directory /var/log.

  The log files generated can therefore be classified into four categories: event Logs, application Logs , system Logs and service Logs.

  In this article, we will provide an overview of Ubuntu log files, and show how to configure and use syslogd. You will also learn how log rotation works and how to view and read the log files. A brief introduction to systemd will be provided at the end .

• Valve answer questions about the Steam Deck in a new FAQ, anti-cheat for all Linux systems | GamingOnLinux

  After gathering questions from pretty much everyone, Valve has put up a new official FAQ page for the Steam Deck that answers some pretty important questions and it's good news.

  One really important questions was answered on anti-cheat support too. There were concerns that with Valve working to get the likes of Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye to support Proton that it might somehow be locked to the Steam Deck. Thankfully, that is simply not the case. Valve has said very clearly that the improvements will "will make it to all systems using Proton".

  [...]

  Sounds like it's pretty much all good news. Being able to boot multiple systems clearly shows how it really is just a small-form factor PC, that will come with SteamOS (based on Arch Linux) by default. Users will be able to do whatever they want with it.

• 10 Best Disney Mobile Games to Play in 2021

  Disney is one of the most popular and one of the largest global media companies. From movies to video games, Disney makes a variety of stuff with a long and detailed history. The history of Disney’s video games goes back overdecades when they were made for multiple game console platforms. However, Disney did not make a mark on the mobile platform until recently.

  In recent times, Disney has launched some decent games, both new and old, which are worth playing. That being said, Disney games are known for their simplicity and easy gameplay. The media house has some famous games under its name, which includes Star Wars and Marvel components. The best part about these games is the fact that they are generally free to play.

• Creative farming and village life game Staxel is now available for Linux | GamingOnLinux

  Staxel, created by developer Plukit (the founder is a former Starbound developer) and publisher Humble Games is a popular and highly rated creative farming and village life game. As of today along with a Nintendo Switch release it's also now available official on Linux.

  "In Staxel you build your world block by block from the ground up, so everything is customizable - whether it’s your own farmhouse or a redesign of the village shop to fit your desired aesthetic. Experience the world from a first-person perspective to really immerse yourself in your ideal country life. Whether you want a cozy overgrown cottage or your own wizard tower, you can build it!"

• Q1K3 is a homage to Quake made with 13 kb of JavaScript | GamingOnLinux

  Games seem to be getting bigger all the time taking up vast amounts of drive space but what can be done with very little resources? Quite a lot actually as the Quake homage Q1K3 has shown.

  Developed for the js13kGames competition, where developers are given one month to create a game with HTML5 / JavaScript and possibly get a prize. The main constraint is that the file size limit for submissions is 13 kilobytes. It doesn't sound like a lot and not much bigger than a blank LibreOffice document.

  One clever developer named Dominic Szablewski announced Q1K3 as their entry, which is a first-person Quake inspired shooter and it's actually quite amazing considering just how tiny it is.

• The EPO is on the Run (Escaping Negative Press Coverage)
• [Meme] Lowering the Standards...
• Gemini HTTP/HTML/Web Proxies and Self-Hosting Your Own Proxy
• IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, September 22, 2021
• Links 23/9/2021: GNU Parallel 20210922, Moroccan Propaganda From EPO
• Links 22/9/2021: Google 'Upstream First' in Linux and New Maui Report
• Links 22/9/2021: Mesa 21.2.2, GNOME 41 Released
• Socially- or Corporate- or Centrally-Controlled Surveillance, Censorship and Throttling is Not Media
• Links 22/9/2021: Panfrost's OpenGL ES 3.1 Conformanc and NovProg 3.2.0
• IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 21, 2021
• Agents of Monopoly: WIPO is Lobbying for or Reinforcing Microsoft Monopoly by Pushing Its Proprietary Software and Formats
• Links 21/9/2021: Windowsfx 11, New Chrome, and LF PR Noise
• [Meme] The EPO-EUIPO “Good Brother” Network
• Links 21/9/2021: Samba 4.15 and Ubuntu 14.04/16.04 Support for 10 Years
• Richard Stallman's First Public Talk (Delivered in Person) in Years, Now With a Free Format

• Engadget is now a part of Verizon Media

• Google Maps UI on Android Auto now optimized for right-hand drives - Android Community

• New Skyworth OLED Android TVs Are Coming To The US

• Google Nest Hub 50% off + $100 off Hisense Android TVs - 9to5Google

• Government warns Android phone users of banking scam app: How not to become a victim | Gadgets Now

• google cci case: Google takes CCI to court over leaked Android probe report - The Economic Times

• Best Android app deals of the day: Monopoly, Clue, more - 9to5Toys

• Anker's Android Nebula Cosmos Projector now $600 at Amazon (Reg. $800) + more from $200 - 9to5Toys

• Nokia G50 is a $300 5G phone with a 5000mAh battery, Android updates - The Verge

• Android 12 "monet" color theming may be adopted by other OEMs - GSMArena.com news

• Blackview upgrades BL6000 Pro with Android 11 - Gizchina.com

• Redmi Smart TV series with Android 11, 20 W speakers launched in India at a starting price of Rs 15,999- Technology News, Firstpost

• Gmail for Android Updated With 'Improved Search' Filters

• Samsung Galaxy A30s, A50, and M51 get September 2021 Android security patch - GSMArena.com news

Mozilla Firefox was one of the applications that opened my eyes to open source. It wasn't by any means the tipping point, but it was part of a larger cumulative effect of several open source applications grabbing my attention, which ultimately resulted in me switching to Linux, and never looking back. Since switching to Firefox, which occurred well before I consciously changed to open source, I've been an avid Firefox user. My mobile phone was a Firefox OS mobile phone, and it was until the project was abandoned. Interestingly, though, I didn't necessarily consider myself a Firefox fan. I used it then and continue to use it today because it continues to be the best browser available in many different ways. Here are five reasons you should switch to Firefox right now.

Gateworks provides Linux kernel drivers for FT232H USB to SPI bridge and the NRC7292 SPI radio chip. as well as required firmware file, and a userspace client app to configure the NTC7292. All those are already integrated into the Ubuntu 20.04 image for Venice and Newport ports, but the company asked customers to contact them for Ventana SBCs’ support.

The NRC7292 SoC is designed for many of the same applications as other LPWAN standards including IoT applications, wearables, industrial automation, Smart Agriculture, healthcare, safety & security, the Smart Grid, etc.. but also “multimedia streaming” thanks to the higher 4 Mbps (mPCie card specs) or 15 Mbps (chip specs) bitrate.

After my unexpected luck in getting a new GPU (the AMD 6700XT), it was finally time to build a new computer. While my previous desktop was still ticking, at 6 and a half years old (an Intel i5-4690K, Nvidia GTX 970; see details in our gaming rigs article) it was certainly not up to 4K gaming and VR. The GPU was by far the hardest thing to get, but by this summer most everything else was available and at more regular prices.

[...]

Overall, the main components follow a pretty typical mid-range to enthusiast gaming build for 2021. These are all solid, well recommended choices, at a good price to performance ratio. I’ll discuss my choice to move to all AMD below, but overall there wasn’t anything I had to worry about being Linux compatible. These days I’d mostly be concerned about Wi-Fi, along with any specialty hardware. I opted out of Wi-Fi since my desktop is right next to my router for a wired connection, though the Bluetooth would be handy for things like controlling the Valve Index’s base stations. That and Wi-Fi can be handled with a cheap USB adapter if I want it. (Honestly, the motherboard I wanted in white also didn’t have Wi-Fi, so that made the choice easier, too.) The only thing for me was wondering about controlling all that RGB, but open source comes through again, as I’ll detail later.

In terms of specifics the 5600X is a great performer with the latest Zen 3 architecture and good single core performance to go with the 6 cores and 12 threads. This has become easily available, at least in the US, at or below MSRP. There are some great Zen 2 CPUs to pick from, but in my case I wanted the latest (I tend not to upgrade frequently, obviously) as well as plenty of power for photo editing and compiling as I’ve been contributing patches and packages to Guix.

Also: Valve Publishes New Steam Deck FAQ With A Few New Details Shared - Phoronix

• The rest of the 5.15 merge window

  Linus Torvalds released 5.15-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release on September 12; at that point, 10,471 non-merge changesets had found their way into the mainline repository. Those changesets contain a lot of significant changes and improvements. Read on for a summary of what came into the mainline in the roughly 7,000 changesets pulled since our first-half summary was written.

• The folio pull-request pushback

  When we last caught up with the page folio patch set, it appeared to be on track to be pulled into the mainline during the 5.15 merge window. Matthew Wilcox duly sent a pull request in August to make that happen. While it is possible that folios could still end up in 5.15, that has not happened as of this writing and appears increasingly unlikely. What we got instead was a lengthy discussion on the merits of the folio approach.

  The kernel's memory-management subsystem deals with memory in pages, a fundamental unit that is generally set by the hardware (and is usually 4KB in size). These "base" pages are small, though, so the kernel often needs to deal with memory in larger units. To do so, it groups sets of physically contiguous pages together into compound pages, which are made up of a head page (the first base page of many in the compound page) and some number of tail pages. That leads to a situation where kernel code that is passed a struct page pointer often does not know if it is dealing with a head or a tail page without explicitly checking.

  It turns out that the "make sure this is a head page" checks add up to a certain amount of expense in a running kernel. The use of struct page everywhere also makes kernel APIs unclear — it can be difficult to know if a given function can cope with tail pages or not. To address this problem, Wilcox created the concept of a "folio", which is like a struct page but which is known not to be a tail page. By changing internal functions to use folios, Wilcox is able to speed up the kernel and clean up the API at the same time. The patch set is huge and intrusive, but it appeared to have overcome most resistance and be ready to head into the mainline kernel.

• Extended attributes for special files

  The Linux extended-attribute mechanism allows the attachment of metadata to files within a filesystem. It tends to be little used — at least, in the absence of a security module like SELinux. There is interest in how these attributes work, though, as evidenced by the discussions that have followed the posting of revisions of this patch by Vivek Goyal, which seeks to make a seemingly small change to the rules regarding extended attributes and special files.

  Specifically, extended attributes (often referred to as "xattrs") are name-value pairs that can be attached to a file. The name of an extended attribute is divided into a namespace and an identifier within the namespace. The namespace is currently one of security, system, user, or trusted; each namespace has its own special rules. As a general rule, system and trusted see little use. The security namespace, instead, is used by a number of Linux security modules. An example of a security attribute can be seen by running getfattr on a system that is set up for SELinux

• systemd OOMD Maturing Nicely, Adds Support For User Services - Phoronix

  Systemd-oomd as the out-of-memory daemon originally developed by Facebook has been maturing nicely since being merged last year and then its most notable deployment to date has been with Fedora 34's debut earlier this year. Anita Zhang of Facebook provided an update today on the systemd-oomd effort.

• Brave is a browser of many contradictions

  It’s not just popup ads that annoy people. You also have creepy companies like Facebook and Google following your every move on the internet. They know what you have been up to and use this information to offer tailored ads. Worse still, sometimes they sell this information to third parties. So we have seen a rise in privacy extensions for browsers too.

  That is the vision upon which Brave browser was born. It’s easily one of the fastest-growing browsers on the [Internet]. They claim to be a privacy-focused browser. It’s easy to see what Brave is all about. Instead of you having to install Chrome, install Adblock, tweak privacy settings and so on you can just install Brave. It is based on Chromium, the engine that powers Chrome, Chromium and Edge.

• Google Docs in a clean-room browser

  With the news that Google would be phasing in a new version of Google Docs I thought we ought to get the current version working in Flow. Because of many bug fixes in Flow for other websites, Google Docs now seemed to load mostly fine, though it rendered without word wrap and you couldn’t actually type into it.

  Like Google Mail, Google Docs almost entirely consists of obfuscated JavaScript, some of it common between the two. Its HTML structure is quite simple, though it uses hidden iframes for various purposes (one for key input and another for calculating word widths, amongst others). Over the course of the couple of months I identified over 30 distinct issues that needed fixing, and I’ll discuss the more interesting ones in the second section of this blog.

• New free resources for young people to become independent digital makers

• Godot Engine - Dev snapshot: Godot 3.4 beta 5

  The upcoming Godot 3.4 release will provide a number of new features which have been backported from the 4.0 development branch (see our release policy for details on the various Godot versions). This beta 5 build provides additional features and fixes to bugs reported against previous builds.

  If you already reviewed the changelog for the previous beta, you can skip right to the differences between beta 4 and beta 5 (part 1, part 2).

  Some big changes since the previous beta are the promotion of object validity checks to release builds (no more "dangling pointers" release surprises), initial support for Android Play Asset Delivery, and a new ACES Fitted high quality tonemapper.

• Linux: Central real-time patches integrated after 17 years [Ed: Translation from German]

  The heart of real-time support for Linux has finally made it into the official kernel. As before, real-time support cannot be activated there, because there are still some medium-sized and all kinds of small construction sites. Developers of the project, which has been dragged out due to lack of money, discussed these things at the Linux Plumbers Conference 2021, which is currently taking place. There it was also discussed how they want to maintain the whole thing in the future.

  [...]

  The recorded changes to locking techniques such as spinlocks, mutexes and Rwlocks are ultimately the core of it all, with the PREEMPT_RT in autumn 2004 still started under a different name Has. The now integrated adjustments added up to a whopping seventy patches. They allow a kernel compiled with real-time support to interrupt almost all of the tasks it has performed at any time without any major delay in order to temporarily devote itself to more important things.

  This is crucial for real-time support: Linux can quickly turn to programs that always have to complete a certain task in a pre-defined time – even if something unimportant demands a lot from the system and creates adverse conditions. A marking on the process determines which programs the kernel should prefer. For many PCs and servers in particular, this is of no interest, because the greater responsiveness means that other tasks are interrupted more frequently and run more slowly.

• The ephemeral miniconf

  The ephemeral miniconf is a Perl and Raku virtual miniconf that will take place in Zoom the 18 november 2021.

  It's free, small and relax.

• Zoom's $15bn merger with Five9 probed by Uncle Sam for national security risks

  Zoom’s ties to China are at the center of a US government investigation into the video-conferencing giant's $15bn plan to take over Five9, a California call-center-in-the-cloud.

  The snappily titled Committee for the Assessment of Foreign Participation in the United States Telecommunications Service Sector – known as Team Telecom under a previous president – is right now probing the planned acquisition. This interagency panel is chaired by Attorney General Merrick Garland, and has reps from the Pentagon and Homeland Security.

• U.S. Farm Cooperative Takes Systems Offline After Ransomware Attack Linked To Russian [Crackers] [iophk: Windows TCO]

  The attack on New Cooperative, which is believed to have been launched last week just as Iowa's corn and soy harvesting got under way, has been attributed to a group called BlackMatter.

• Federal agencies warn companies to be on guard against prolific ransomware strain [iophk: Windows TCO]

  The FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Wednesday issued a warning to U.S. organizations to be aware of a specific type of ransomware that has already wreaked havoc on hundreds of groups.

  The agencies issued a joint alert specifically warning groups to be on guard against the Conti ransomware variant, with the agencies noting that 400 U.S. and international groups had already fallen victim to Conti.

• Tim Cook says employees who leak memos do not belong at Apple, according to leaked memo

  On September 17th, Tim Cook announced during an internal company-wide meeting that Apple would be requiring frequent testing for unvaccinated employees — but was stopping short of a vaccine mandate. He also said that he was “looking forward to moving forward” after the Epic v. Apple antitrust case. Shortly after the meeting, both pieces of news leaked to The Verge.

  Now, Cook is tying the news to product leaks — which the company has historically gone to great lengths to track down.

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 923

  tech support woes abound, printers, amico, retro consoles

• Firefox Snap Becoming The Default On Ubuntu - Invidious

  Snap's continue to be a controversial software distribution method from Canonical and recently another step towards a full snap system has begun to occur and that is the replacement of Firefox's deb package with a snap as the default.

• FLOSS Weekly 648: Pop!_OS and System76 - Carl Richell, Pop_OS!

  Carl Richell, founder and CEO of System76 joins Jonathan Bennett and Shawn Powers on FLOSS Weekly. He's been selling Linux laptops and desktops for years, and now leads the team behind the easy-to-use Pop_OS! One of his biggest fans, Leo Laporte, also joins the show. Open Firmware, what's new in the OS, and the perfect hardware for keyboard nerds and upcoming news for System 76 are part of the show discussions. Bennett finally gets the scoop behind the "Pop_OS!" name. A fun show with great discussions.

• Do We Still Need a Bastion?

  There is a growing discussion among network engineers, DevOps teams, and security professionals about the security benefits of bastions. Many assume that they are the “old way” of network access and have little relevance in the modern cloud native stack. These speculations are not irrelevant as in recent years, the corporate IT network perimeter as we knew it is diminishing, and the concept has been shifted to data, identity, and compute perimeter. Software-defined networking solutions have overtaken hardware firewall boxes, and the requirement of managing bare metal servers has shifted to container deployed or even serverless applications. Where do bastions fit in these scenarios? Do we even need one?

• What’s in a package

  There is no shortage of package managers. Each tool makes its own set of tradeoffs regarding speed, ease of use, customizability, and reproducibility. Guix occupies a sweet spot, providing reproducibility by design as pioneered by Nix, package customization à la Spack from the command line, the ability to create container images without hassle, and more.

  Beyond the “feature matrix” of the tools themselves, a topic that is often overlooked is packages—or rather, what’s inside of them. Chances are that a given package may be installed using any of the many tools at your disposal. But are you really getting the same thing regardless of the tool you are using? The answer is “no”, contrary to what one might think. The author realized this very acutely while fearlessly attempting to package the PyTorch machine learning framework for Guix.

  This post is about the journey packaging PyTorch the Guix way, the rationale, a glimpse at what other PyTorch packages out there look like, and conclusions we can draw for high-performance computing and scientific workflows.

• Courtès: What's in a package

  Over at the Guix-HPC blog, Ludovic Courtès writes about trying to package the PyTorch machine-learning library for the Guix distribution. Building from source in a user-verifiable manner is part of the philosophy behind Guix, but there were a number of problems that were encountered...

• How to install Friday Night Funkin' VS Mario REMASTERED V1.1 on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Friday Night Funkin' VS Mario REMASTERED V1.1 mod 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.

• How To Install Visual Studio Code on Debian 11 [Ed: This is proprietary software and it lets Microsoft spy on GNU/Linux users]

• How to install Microsoft Teams on Linux Lite 5.4 - Invidious [Ed: Why are Linux channels encouraging added proprietary software/malware to one's repos?]

• How To Run Cron Jobs Every 5, 10, 15, or 30 Minutes - ByteXD

  Cron is used for scheduling tasks in Linux. It helps you automate the repeating tasks at ease. The tasks that are performed at pre-scheduled times are called Cron Jobs.

  For example, you could create a script for automatically backing up some of your files and run the script as a cron job at a certain interval. We use the crontab command to edit the cron table and schedule tasks according to our preferences.

  In this tutorial, we’ll go through how to run cron jobs every 5, 10, 15, or 30 minutes, as well as the fundamentals of scheduling cron jobs.

  If you want an in-depth article that covers all the topics about cron from basics to advanced, check out our tutorial on How to Schedule Cron Jobs in Linux With Crontab.

• How to enable ssh on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux - Linux Shout

  SSH (Secure Shell) is a standard network tool used to access PC and other systems remotely but in a secure way. Here we let you know how to enable SSH on Ubuntu and use it using Authentication keys.

• How to Install Graphite and Graphite Web on Ubuntu 20.04

  Graphite is a free and open-source monitoring tool to store numeric time-series data and its graph in real-time.

  Graphite doesn't collect data by itself, instead it receives data from other tools. As soon as Graphite receives data it can create graphs in the webapp.

  In this tutorial, we learn how to install Graphite and Graphite Web on Ubuntu 20.04 using docker. The easiest way to have a running Graphite instance is by using docker.

GNU Parallel 20210922 ('Vindelev') [stable] has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a
stable release.

A lot of years Postgres will have some big pillar or theme to the release. Often this is thought of after the fact. Everything that is committed is looked at and someone thinks, "This is the key thing to talk about." In Postgres 9.2 it was JSON, in 9.4 it was JSONB, in 10 it was logical replication, 12 was a broader performance theme. While I look forward to each of these big highlights, in each release I'm equally excited to browse through and pull out the small things that simply make my life better.

Postgres is, and for some time will continue to be, the first database I turn to. As Postgres focuses on the little things, it just deepens my commitment to it. Why look elsewhere when the bond just grows over time? So today I wanted to call some extra attention to those little things, the ones that don't get the spotlight, but simply make a developer's life better.

[....]

I've talked a lot over the years about how I'm a fan of psql - the CLI client that comes with Postgres. It's quite feature rich, more so than most CLI tools I know. It has the ability to customize it via a psqlrc, a lot of handy shortcuts, ability to format the output of a query with \x and \x auto to auto format it, and features like \watch to auto re-run a query every few seconds.

When I started going through the psql improvements in Postgres 14 it was great to see not just 1 new feature but a slew of them.

First, there's a nice improvement contributed by two of my colleagues to the shortcut \df to allow you to see function and operator arguments. This helps reduce the number of matches for overloaded entries.

[Via]

• Fantasy city-builder Songs of Syx added in reproduction and riots

  The very promising Early Access fantasy city-builder Songs of Syx has expanded in multiple ways in the latest update and you're going to need to prepare for a lot more people.

  With major new systems appearing including reproduction, so your people will now pair up with a procreation room and do the deed. After which you're left with a bunch of children running around, eating food and taking up your time. Thankfully there's also now an education system to give them something to do until they grow up and get to work. A new happiness system was also introduced so you need to keep people happy or they will riot and ruin everything. That plus a whole lot more.

• Humble releases a Tropico 20th Anniversary Bundle | GamingOnLinux

  Become El Presidente for cheaps as the latest Humble Bundle has arrived with the Tropico 20th Anniversary Bundle letting you build up your collection.

  As usual the amount of games you get depends on how much you pay, with this one split across three different tiers. Here's our usual breakdown of how they work on Linux.

• Enforcement of the GNU GPL with Till Jaeger

  With our 12th episode of the Software Freedom Podcast we dig into the history and the beginning of enforcing Free Software licences, especially the GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL). Together with Till Jaeger, who has been working alongside Harald Welte for enforcing the GNU GPL in the first court cases in Germany, we talk about the long way we have come since those early days.

  Our guest, Till Jaeger, discusses with our host, Matthias Kirschner, how the decision to go to court and stand up for the rights of copyleft licences came about. Till and Matthias tell an exciting story about those first steps on this new legal ground. They also highlight the short term and long term impacts of the first court decision in favour of Free Software. For example, how more and more information about licensing and especially using a Free Software licence became available and publicly known. But also how workshops, like the FSFE's yearly Legal and Licensing Workshop were created for those interested in using and being compliant to Free Software licences.

  Discover together with us the changes that have come from those first steps to the acceptance of Free Software in companies. Till has been involved with Free Software licensing for a long time and provides a deep and well rounded insight into the history of enforcing the GNU GPL. To give this episode a perfect ending, Matthias and Till also talk about some of the most common misunderstandings of Free Software licensing. This is the perfect episode for everyone to get an insight into one of the most important events in the history of enforcing Free Software licences.

• Home Automation Terminal With Cyberpunk Style

  The OLKB-Terminal designed by [Jeff Eberl] doesn’t have a battery, can’t fold up (even if it seems like it could), and is only portable in the sense that you can literally pick it up and move it somewhere else. So arguably it’s not really a cyberdeck per se, but it certainly does look the part. If you need to be furiously typing out lines of code in a dimly lit near-future hacker’s den, this should do you nicely.

  [Jeff] has provided everything you’d need to recreate this slick little machine on your own, though he does warn that some of the hardware decisions were based simply on what he had on-hand at the time, and that better or cheaper options may exist. So for example if you don’t want to use the Raspberry Pi 4, you can easily swap it out for some other single-board computer. Though if you want to change something better integrated, like the LCD panel, it will probably require modifications to the 3D printed components.

• 4 most popular IoT Linux distros: Which is best for you?

  Linux is the operating system of choice for Internet of Things device manufacturers looking to fit their resource-constrained embedded devices with lightweight software systems. As an open-source project, Linux offers a stable, low-cost, secure, and up-to-date platform that can be run on a variety of microprocessor architectures, powering a range of devices from IoT sensors at the low end to powerful supercomputers.

• Nvidia cosies up to Open Robotics for hardware-accelerated ROS

  Nvidia has linked up with Open Robotics to drive new artificial intelligence capabilities in the Robot Operating System (ROS).

  The non-exclusive agreement will see Open Robotics extending ROS 2, the latest version of the open-source robotics framework, to better support Nvidia hardware – and in particular its Jetson range, low-power parts which combine Arm cores with the company's own GPU and deep-learning accelerator cores to drive edge and embedded artificial intelligence applications.

  "Our users have been building and simulating robots with Nvidia hardware for years, and we want to make sure that ROS 2 and Ignition work well on those platforms," Brian Gerkey, Open Robotics' chief exec, told The Register.

• UP Xtreme i11 Edge Compute Enabling Kit supports 5G, WiFi 6, Myriad X AI accelerator cards - CNX Software

  The computer is compatible with Microsoft Windows 10 full version, Yocto project 3.0/3.1 using Linux 5.4, and Ubuntu 20.04 with Linux 5.8, as well as Intel OpenVINO toolkit 2021 R1 with support for TensorFlow and Caffe AI frameworks. Ubuntu and OpenVINO are also part of the Intel Software Foundation Kit that may be installed on the device upon request, and also includes MRAA and UPM I/O and sensor libraries, Docker, k3s Kubernetes, AWS Greengrass, and more.

• This robotic bartender serves up drinks using a Nano RP2040 Connect and the Arduino Cloud | Arduino Blog

  Mixing up perfect, custom cocktails often requires months or even years of training, in addition to having to know a plethora of recipes. But Jithin Sanal wanted to pour his favorite drinks without spending the extra time and effort, so he concocted a robotic cocktail mixer to perform this task for him. It operates by using a series of ingredient reservoirs, pumps, an Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, and a few relays to dispense a precise quantity of the desired ingredient into a container. Sanal also designed and fabricated his own circuit board to connect each component together in a circuit.

  Rather than having a bunch of physical buttons on the front of the robotic cocktail mixer, Sanal instead opted to use the Arduino Cloud with five virtual ones that each correspond to a single drink. When a button is pressed, a function is executed on the Nano RP2040 Connect that activates the correct pumps in the specified order for a certain duration. By utilizing this method, users can be confident their drink is perfectly made every single time. More drinks can be added to the system simply by adding another button within the IoT Cloud and creating the associated function in the RP2040’s code.

• Firmware Find Hints At Subscription Plan for reMarkable Tablet

  To their credit, at least reMarkable is being upfront by admitting a subscription model is being considered. It also sounds like existing users will be grandfathered in when it goes live, which should come as some comfort to current owners. But for prospective buyers, this could literally change everything. It’s bad enough that cloud synchronization of documents would potentially be time-limited, though we’ll admit there’s some justification in that the company is obviously incurring costs by hosting these files. Limiting features based on subscription tier on the other hand is simply a step too far, especially on a device that the user purchased outright.

  We’ve already seen the first tentative steps towards developing a free and open source operating system for the reMarkable tablet, and this news is only going to redouble the efforts of those who wish to liberate this very promising piece of hardware from the overbearing software it ships with. What worries us is how the company is likely to respond to such projects if they’ve found themselves in a situation where recurring charges have become necessary to balance the books. We’ve already seen a motorcycle airbag that will only deploy if the wearer has paid up for the year, so is a tablet that won’t let you install additional applications unless you’ve sprung for the premium membership really that far fetched? Sadly, we all know the answer.

• Jakub Kadlčík: Building RHEL packages with Tito

  Are you a Fedora packager and consider Tito to be a valuable asset in your toolbox? Do you know it can be used for maintaining RHEL packages as well? Or any downstream packaging? I didn’t. This article explains how it can be done.

• linuxium.com.au: New release of 'isorespin.sh'

  Following news of the GRUB2 Secure Boot Bypass 2021 and as a result of Google's security changes on Google Drive together with the first daily build's from Canonical of Ubuntu 21.10 (impish) and point releases for 20.04.3 and 18.04.6 I've updated my ‘isorespin.sh‘ script and respun some ISOs suitable for Intel Atom and Intel Apollo Lake devices.

• PHP maintains an enormous lead in server-side programming languages

  The venerable web programming language PHP is a source of frequent complaints and frustration, but according to a report W3Techs released today, it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon.

  W3Techs' web server survey looks for technologies in use by sites in Alexa's top 10 million list; today's report includes a year-on-year chart beginning with January 2010, running all the way through 2021. The survey only includes top sites not out of elitism, but as one part of its effort to avoid data-skewing returns from domain-parking services and spammers, which would otherwise dominate legitimate websites through sheer volume.

  Within that dataset, the story told is clear. Apart from PHP—which held a 72.5 percent share in 2010 and holds a 78.9 percent share as of today—only one other server-side language ever broke a 10 percent share. That one competitor is ASP.NET, which held an impressive 24.4 percent share in 2010 but was down to 9.3 percent in January and 8.3 percent this month.

  Amongst the small fry, the only truly impressive growth to be seen is in Ruby—which at 5.2 percent this month is still seeing continued uninterrupted growth in W3Techs' survey. This might come as a shock if you're mostly familiar with Ruby on Rails, which itself remains viable but seems to be on the decline in popularity.

• PHP Holds Impressive Lead Among Server-Side Languages

  This share constitutes an enormous lead over PHP’s rivals, with only one other server-side language ever reaching a 10 percent share. As Jim Salter reports, ASP.NET held a 24 percent share in 2010 but usage has now declined to 8.3 percent.

• 10 Best Open Source Linux Code Editors [Ed: Very bad list. The first two in the list are Microsoft and even proprietary software with surveillance or 'telemetry' that spies on coders]

  Coding is part of every developer’s life and IDE (Integrated Development Environment) makes this job easier for them. IDEs come with tons of handy features and support programming of various languages within the same environment.

  Furthermore, IDEs provide users with plug-ins for adding the extra capability to the program and auto-complete tags and classes to make programming faster. Users can also utilize the pre-provided piece of code in their programs. IDEs make coding faster and easier and hence today we’re here to discuss the 10 best Code Editors (IDEs) available for Linux.

A flaw in Microsoft's Autodiscover protocol, used to configure Exchange clients like Outlook, can cause user credentials to leak to miscreants in certain circumstances.

The upshot is that your Exchange-connected email client may give away your username and password to a stranger, if the flaw is successfully exploited. In a report scheduled to be published on Wednesday, security firm Guardicore said it has identified a design blunder that leaks web requests to Autodiscover domains that are outside the user's domain but within the same top-level domain (TLD).

Exchange's Autodiscover protocol, specifically the version based on POX XML, provides a way for client applications to obtain the configuration data necessary to communicate with the Exchange server. It gets invoked, for example, when adding a new Exchange account to Outlook. After a user supplies a name, email address, and password, Outlook tries to use Autodiscover to set up the client.

• Firefox Add-on Reviews: YouTube your way—browser extensions put you in charge of your video experience

  YouTube wants you to experience YouTube in very prescribed ways. But with the right browser extension, you’re free to alter YouTube to taste. Change the way the site looks, behaves, and delivers your favorite videos.

  [...]

  Though its primary function is to automatically play all YouTube videos in their highest possible resolution, YouTube High Definition has a few other fine features to offer.

• Location history: How your location is tracked and how you can limit sharing it

  In real estate, the age old mantra is “location, location, location,” meaning that location drives value. That’s true even when it comes to data collection in the online world, too — your location history is valuable, authentic information. In all likelihood, you’re leaving a breadcrumb trail of location data every day, but there are a few things you can do to clean that up and keep more of your goings-on to yourself.

  [...]

  For some apps, location helps them function better, like navigating with a GPS or following a map. Location history can also be useful for retracing your steps to past places, like finding your way back to that tiny shop in Florence where you picked up beautiful stationery two years ago.

  On the other hand, marketing companies use location data for marketing and advertising purposes. They can also use location to conduct “geomarketing,” which is targeting you with promotions based on where you are. Near a certain restaurant while you’re out doing errands at midday? You might see an ad for it on your phone just as you’re thinking about lunch.

  Location can also be used to grant or deny access to certain content. In some parts of the world, content on the internet is “geo-blocked” or geographically-restricted based on your IP address, which is kind of like a mailing address, associated with your online activity. Geo-blocking can happen due to things like copyright restrictions, limited licensing rights or even government control.

• An update on Memory Safety in Chrome [LWN.net]

  The Google security blog provides an overview of what is being done to address memory-safety problems in the Chrome browser.

• Chrome 94 Released for Android, macOS, Windows, Linux: What's New | Technology News

  Chrome 94 stable update has been released by Google for Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows operating systems. The update will be rolled out over the coming weeks and it brings new security features, new functionality, and bug fixes. Google Chrome 94 stable is the first version of Chrome of the new four-week release cycle. Previously, Chrome update was released every six weeks. Its features include HTTPS-First mode that makes users browsing more secure. Also, Google said that 19 different security issues were fixed in the Chrome 94 version.

  The update for Google Chrome was announced through a blog post on September 21. Chrome 94 introduces HTTPS-First mode. It is available in Chrome for desktop systems and for Android. HTTPS is a more secure version of HTTP and many websites support it. With the latest update, the browser will also show a full-page warning when the user loads a site that doesn't support HTTPS. This ensures privacy when using public Wi-Fi. Google says this was previously planned for Chrome 92.

• Google emits Chrome 94 with 'Idle Detection' API to detect user inactivity amid opposition

  Google has released Chrome 94 for desktop and Android, complete with an "Idle Detection" API to detect user inactivity, despite privacy concerns expressed by Mozilla and Apple.

  New and changed features in Chrome 94 are listed here and include the removal of the AppCache feature, described as a "security and stability liability", and something which has "imposed a tax on all of Chrome's significant architectural efforts."

  There is also a new VirtualKeyboard API with more control over its shape and an event fired when it covers page content; more efficient low-level access to media encoders and decoders; and a new JavaScript Self Profiling API which enables developers to collect JavaScript performance profiles from end users.

• Google Finally Shifting To "Upstream First" Linux Kernel Approach For Android Features

  Google's Android had been notorious for all of its downstream patches carried by the mobile operating system as well as various vendor/device kernel trees while in recent years more of that code has been upstreamed. Google has also been shifting to the Android Generic Kernel Image (GKI) as the basis for all their product kernels to further reduce the fragmentation. Looking ahead, Google is now talking of an "upstream first" approach for pushing new kernel features.

  Google's Todd Kjos talked today during Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC2021) around their Generic Kernel Image initiative. With Android 12 and their Linux 5.10 based GKI image they have further cut down the fragmentation to the extent that it's "nearly eliminated". With the Android 12 GKI, most of the vendor/OEM kernel features have now either been upstreamed into the Linux kernel, isolated to vendor modules/hooks, or merged into the Android Common Kernel.

• Google Finally Shifting To 'Upstream First' Linux Kernel Approach For Android Feature

• Clang-format for Xen Coding Style Checking Scheduled - Xen Project

  At the moment there is no tool that would allow to format patches in Xen. The idea of Xen-checker is to use the clang-format approach as a base for Xen ‘checkpatch’ process. The new tool consists of modified .clang-format configuration file to automate Xen patches format checking and reformatting. The tool can be used as a pre-commit hook to check and format every patch automatically. Some features are missing in the clang configurator, so new clang-format options have been proposed for more flexible code formatting. Also, the purpose of the topic is to start the discussion about the existing rules for Xen code formatting to eliminate possible inaccuracies in the work of the Xen checker. This will make it easier to adhere to the unanimous decision.

• Mesa Merge Pending For Vulkan Ray-Tracing On Older AMD GPUs - Phoronix

  Merged yesterday for Mesa 21.3 was open-source Vulkan ray-tracing for AMD RDNA2 / RX 6000 series GPUs with the RADV driver. Opened today now is a merge request that would provide Vulkan ray-tracing with RADV to pre-RDNA2 GPUs on this driver going back to the likes of Polaris, granted the performance is another story.

  Joshua Ashton known for his work on DXVK and other Direct3D-on-Vulkan efforts for Valve has opened the merge request to enable RADV Vulkan ray-tracing for older generations of AMD GPUs.