Septor 2020.3 (June 3)

Tor Browser is fully installed (9.5) System upgrade from Debian Buster repos as of June 2, 2020 Update Linux Kernel to 5.4.19 Update Thunderbird to 68.8.0-1 Update VLC to 3.0.10 Update Youtube-dl to 2020.05.29 New add-ons: Ublock (Tor Browser), Enigmail (Thunderbird)

today's howtos

• DeGoogle a Google Phone

• How To Reset MySQL Root User Password In Linux

• How to Audit Your Linux System’s Security with Lynis

• How to Execute a Command or a Script on system Startup or Reboot

• How to find installed npm package version

• How to make your Linux look sexy – Briefly explained

Games: Skeletal Avenger, Humble Cities: Skylines Bundle and More

• Skeletal Avenger is a rogue-lite hack'n'slash where you throw your head

  10tons, developer of hits like Crimsonland and JYDGE have announced another new title currently in development. It's called Skeletal Avenger and you quite literally need to use your head. While they're also still working on DYSMANTLE, it seems they've been very busy. One of the features that they're using to set Skeletal Avenger apart from other hack and slashes are the special moves, which involve taking off your head at throwing it around. It looks and sounds pretty hilarious. It's also what they're calling a reverse rogue-lite dungeon crawler, since you're coming from the depths to get revenge.

• Grimy steampunk metroidvania SteamDolls - Order Of Chaos launches Kickstarter

  Developer The Shady Gentlemen and Top Hat Studios have launched a Kickstarter for the seriously intense looking SteamDolls - Order Of Chaos, and it's almost funded already. The Kickstarter campaign only launched on June 2 and of their €30K goal, they already have over €20K. As we wrote about before, they full plan to support Linux with it and there's a great big "tux" icon on their Kickstarter page to show it off. Gameplay will mix together action and exploration, with a touch of stealth depending on how you choose to play through and a fair amount of blood. You play as The Whisper, voice by David Hayter (Solid Snake - Metal Gear).

• Infuse a sword with magic to slay goblins in the puzzler Sword Slinger

  You've played puzzle games that get you to do basic programming like move left, move right, stop at a wall and such but what about adding magic to a sword and watching it spin around a level? Enter Sword Slinger. It's not much to look at being mostly black and white but it's a weirdly attention grabbing game. The idea is not only dumb but also totally hilarious. The levels have goblins spread out across them and you need to slay them all. To do so, you're given a sword and you have to program it with magical behaviours. What results from this can be very comical.

• Make a crazy vehicle with wacky contraptions to get across America in Making it Home

  Making it Home, a game about building a great big vehicle full of crazy contraptions to get home sounds like a lot of fun. Oh, you're also a tiny ladybug. Admittedly, I've been following this for quite some time but haven't posted about it until now. I really wasn't sure what to make of it. Early footage looked odd but I loved the idea. Nearly a year later after discovering it I took a look back with the latest trailer and wow does it look hilarious. Bounce around your vehicle, hoisting sails, squeezing bellows, spinning propellers and deal with a Rabbit and some flying carrots. I think you will like this.

• 2D action-RPG with a tiny hero The Cork gets an early demo

  The Cork, currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter is a pixel-art 2D action-RPG where you play as a seriously tiny hero and you can now try out an early demo. With a sprinkle of features from metroidvanias, platformers and seriously challenging combat, The Cork follows your return to a village after several months away to find it devastated by a mysterious plague. The Kickstarter campaign is currently looking like it will fail but the developer is determined to create the full experience anyway. In the latest update they mentioned it will just take longer.

• Humble Cities: Skylines Bundle adds two more DLC

  If you already picked up the Humble Cities: Skylines Bundle or were on the fence about it, Humble recently announced more additions for you. You can still grab the base game Cities: Skylines and Cities: Skylines - Deep Focus Radio for £1, making it one of the best deal bundles we've seen for a while for such a great game. The second tier of the bundle, where you need to pay more than the average is where it's expanded.

• shapez.io, an open source factory building sim about making shapes

  Inspired by Factorio, we have another base-building factory sim with shapez.io and the beauty of it is that it's open source under the GPL.

Nextcloud Hub 19

• Michael Meeks: Making Collabora Online trivial to setup

  Today we release a big step in improving Collabora Online installability for home users. Collabora has typically focused on supporting our enterprise users who pay the bills: most of whom are familiar with getting certificates, configuring web server proxies, port numbers, and so on (with our help). The problem is that this has left home-users, eager to take advantage of our privacy and ease of use, with a large barrier to entry. We set about adding easy-to-setup Demo Servers for users - but of course, people want to use their own hardware and not let their documents out of their site. So - today we've released a new way to do that - using a new PHP proxying protocol and app-image bundled into a single-click installable Nextcloud app (we will be bringing this to other PHP solutions soon too). This is a quick write-up of how this works.

• Michael Meeks: 2020-06-02 Tuesday

  Mail; admin, wrote up the Nextcloud proxy pieces.

• Collabora Online as default in Nextcloud Hub

  Collabora Online has been available as integrated solution for many productivity use cases for more than three years. However, feedback from home users and the community showed an increasing need for a much easier way to setup LibreOffice online. Users found configuring separate certificates, ports, docker images, and so on too complex, so Collabora created a totally new way to deploy Collabora Online using an innovative PHP proxy and a new custom protocol. With the release of NC 19, this work is ready to use: the new app “Collabora Online: built-in CODE server” can be installed and activated with a single click. The new app is the same fully functional productivity solution that people already know, with the same feature richness, easy collaboration and excellent interoperability as a normal CODE – Collabora Online Development Edition – installation. Naturally it has its limitations in performance and scalability that are provided by a normal server installation. This makes it much easier for people to make the right choice, with an open standards based, solution built on fully open source code that respects their privacy. It has never been easier for users to work and collaborate on office documents online, on their own hardware.

• Nextcloud Hub 19 Brings Passwordless Authentication, Collabora Online as Default Office App

  Nextcloud GmbH announced today the general availability of Nextcloud Hub 19, a major release of their popular and open-source self-hosted on-premises collaboration platform. With Nextcloud Hub 19, the file sharing and collaboration platform introduces much-needed features for people who are forced to work from home during the COVID-19 crisis, including passwordless authentication with support for security keys. This implementation not only makes Nextcloud logins painless, but also strengthens them through the use of hardware keys, and the first to be supported is Nitrokey. New security measures are also in place to make it easier for administrators to secure the accounts of remote workers. These include password expiration features, password reuse limitations, automatic locking of account after multiple failed login attempts, as well as optional automatic logout.