Linus' Next Big Thing | LINUX Unplugged 610
Apr 13, 2025
Apple's software is going rotten, while Linux sneaks up as the better Mac. Linus grumbles through Git's 20th birthday, and we spot a hardware window Linux better not slam shut.
Tailscale Community Meetup Seattle — Calling all Tailscale users, homelabbers, and networking enthusiasts! We’re bringing the community together for a casual, community focused meetup in Seattle.
Pick: chat-gipitty: Terminal client for getting answers from LLMs — Chat Gipitty (Chat Get Information, Print Information TTY) is a command line client for ChatGPT. It allows you to chat with your chosen model of ChatGPT in a terminal and even pipe output into it.
GitHub - pgdr/moreutils — a growing collection of the unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago when unix was young.
Pick: ALttP VT Randomizer — Each playthrough shuffles the location of all the important items in the game. Will you find the Bow atop Death Mountain, the Fire Rod resting silently in the library, or even the Master Sword itself waiting in a chicken coop?
American Rat Warrior | The Launch 🚀 17
Apr 09, 2025
Chris thought he'd won the war against the rats—until a neighbor’s questionable tactics threaten to unleash round two. Now he's racing against the clock to save his RV from becoming another tasty rat snack.
We Used to Be Friends | LINUX Unplugged 609
Apr 06, 2025
We attempt to get one of the great gaming classics running on Linux, and dig into some of the technical issues still holding back Linux. Plus: Chris has a new handheld.
Kooha: Elegantly record your screen — Kooha is a simple screen recorder with a minimal interface. You can simply click the record button without having to configure a bunch of settings.
vtt-summarizer: Summarize .vtt files into meeting notes — It uses open source LLMs to handle the data extraction and summarization, ensuring everything can be run locally and without the need to share with third parties.
When AI Attacks | Self-Hosted 146
Apr 04, 2025
We're joined by Xe Iaso, who discusses a creative solution to relentless AI bots and the unexpected delights of running an outrageously overpowered homelab.
Block AI scrapers with Anubis - Xe Iaso — I got tired of this and made a tool to stop them for good. I call it Anubis. Anubis weighs the soul of your connection using a sha256 proof-of-work challenge in order to protect upstream resources from scraper bots. It's a reverse proxy that requires browsers and bots to solve a proof-of-work challenge before they can access your site, just like Hashcash.
Building native packages is complicated - Xe Iaso — Normally when I make projects, I don't expect them to take off. I especially don't expect to front page news on Ars Technica and TechCrunch within the span of a few days. I very much also do not expect to say sentences like "FFmpeg uses a program I made to help them stop scraper bots taking down their issue tracker". The last week has been fairly ridiculous in that regard.
TecharoHQ/anubis — Anubis weighs the soul of your connection using a sha256 proof-of-work challenge in order to protect upstream resources from scraper bots.
Open source devs are fighting AI crawlers with cleverness and vengeance — In a “cry for help” blog post in January, FOSS developer Xe Iaso described how AmazonBot relentlessly pounded on a Git server website to the point of causing DDoS outages. Git servers host FOSS projects so that anyone who wants can download the code or contribute to it.
The surreal joy of having an overprovisioned homelab - Xe Iaso — Tonight I’ll tell you what gets me excited about my homelab and maybe inspire you to make your own. I'll get into what I like about it and clue you into some of the fun you get to have if one of your projects meant to protect your homelab goes hockey-stick.
Talos Linux — Talos Linux is Linux designed for Kubernetes – secure, immutable, and minimal.
Apollo: Sunshine fork — The easiest way to stream with the native resolution of your client device
Amcrest 4MP ProHD Indoor WiFi Camera — – 2. 4ghz WiFi IP camera features immaculate 4MP (2688x1520P at 30fps video using excellent low light capability utilizing the CMOS image sensor and chipset. Cover more ground using super-wide 90° viewing angle and remote pan/tilt.
Two April Fool’s cranks dive into the internet’s highs and lows. Plus, Ang prepares for a road trip, your calls, and a wild tale from the Pacific Northwest.
Sleepless In Seattle | The Launch 🚀 15
Mar 26, 2025
Our terrible sleep habits keeping us up at night, Chris shares one of his biggest pet peeves, and is Angela's DNA data about to be sold to the highest bidder?
Ubuntu's Rusty Roadmap | LINUX Unplugged 607
Mar 23, 2025
Canonical's VP of Engineering for Ubuntu reveals why they're swapping coreutils for Rust-built tools. Then we break down the GNOME 48 release, and why this one is special.
Engineering Ubuntu For The Next 20 Years — We should look deeply at the tools we ship with Ubuntu by default, selecting for tools that have resilience, performance and maintainability at their core.
Carefully But Purposefully Oxidising Ubuntu — Starting with Ubuntu 25.10, my goal is to adopt some of these modern implementations as the default. My immediate goal is to make uutils’ coreutils implementation the default in Ubuntu 25.10, and subsequently in our next Long Term Support (LTS) release, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, if the conditions are right.
GNOME 48 Release Notes — The GNOME project is excited to introduce GNOME 48, a fresh release shaped by six months of hard work from our amazing community. Named “Bengaluru”, this release pays tribute to the dedication of the GNOME Asia 2024 organizers.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Podcasts and music powered by community. Share, discover and support over 4 million shows and emerging artists.
Important 2025 Plex Updates — We are also changing how remote playback works for streaming personal media (that is, playback when not on the same local network as the server). The reality is that we need more resources to continue putting forth the best personal media experience, and as a result, we will no longer offer remote playback as a free feature. This—alongside the new Plex Pass pricing—will help provide those resources. This change will apply to the future release of our new Plex experience for mobile and other platforms.
AIR-1 Air Quality Sensor For Home Assistant — The Apollo AIR-1 is the most compact, feature-rich, affordable, and expandable air sensor for Home Assistant. Utilizing WiFi and ESPHome it is locally controlled with no subscription or cloud required.
EmulatorJS Player - RomM — Our integration with EmulatorJS automates the process of loading and saving save files and save states. Before starting the game, select a save and/or state file to load (if one is available). Anytime you save the game (or create a save state), the save and state files stored with RomM will be updated, so there's no need to manually download or upload them.
Some games are good. Some games are evil. We played the evil ones... a lot. Also, we're unleashing our shiny new listener call-in line. What could go wrong? CALL 📞 1-774-462-5667 LINKS
Flox - Nix for Simplicity & Scale — Flox is all about simplifying your development workflow—think reproducible, portable dev environments powered by Nix, but without the steep learning curve. Whether you’re a solo coder or part of a big team, Flox lets you manage and share environments effortlessly, so you can focus on building great software instead of wrestling with setup headaches.
Pick: pyatv: A client library for Apple TV and AirPlay devices — This is an asyncio python library for interacting with Apple TV and AirPlay devices. It mainly targets Apple TVs (all generations, including tvOS 15 and later), but also supports audio streaming via AirPlay to receivers like the HomePod, AirPort Express and third-party speakers. It can act as remote control to the Music app/iTunes in macOS.
H12SSL-I Stuck at "bmc initiating" — Ugh - just got hit by this. I installed a NIC card and lo and behold - system would not boot. The LE1 LED flashes and turns off. It stays lit when power is applied. But there's no sign of life from the LEDM1 BMC LED. Booting produces nothing, system turns 'on' in the sense the fans power up but no output from the onboard VGA.
First Alert Z Wave Smoke Detector — The z-wave smoke/co alarm can be implemented in residential and institutional applications. Installation settings include sleeping areas within hospitals, hotels, motels, dormitories and other multi-family dwellings
Apollo joins the Works With Home Assistant Program — Apollo Automation is a growing family-run business rooted in the Home Assistant and ESPHome communities. And yes, they’re named after their German Shepherd, Apollo 🐕.
We're pre-gaming two of the biggest Linux events of the year. Engineers, organizers, and surprise guests are dropping by to give us the scoop before it all begins.
SCALE 2025 Meetup — El Cholo Cafe Pasadena - Saturday, Mar 8, 2025, 7:00 PM
Planet Nix — March 6th-7th, 2025 @ Pasadena, CA at the Southern California Linux Expo.
Flox - Your dev environment, everywhere — Flox help teams focus on building fast by providing reproducible environments that span the entire software lifecycle. With Flox, developers can create environments that contain all of the tools and frameworks they need, binding them with the software they ship into the world.
Libro.fm — Your Independent Bookstore for Digital Audiobooks
Pick: OpenAudible-To-AudibleBookShelf — This script automates the process of moving audiobook files from OpenAudible or Libation to an organized folder structure and updates AudioBookShelf accordingly. It handles file organization, metadata mapping, and interaction with the AudioBookShelf API.
Eggsistential | The Launch 🚀 11
Feb 26, 2025
Wes joins us so Chris can finally get some answers. Also, a legendary community creation rises again, and we uncover the truth about renting living things. LINKS:
All Your Kernels Belong to Rust | LINUX Unplugged 603
Feb 23, 2025
There have been major Rust developments in the Linux Kernel; we discuss what's new and how it will impact the future. Plus, we're joined by a special guest.
Greg Kroah-Hartman Makes A Compelling Case For New Linux Kernel Drivers To Be Written In Rust — Yes, mixed language codebases are rough, and hard to maintain, but we are kernel developers dammit, we've been maintaining and strengthening Linux for longer than anyone ever thought was going to be possible. We've turned our development model into a well-oiled engineering marvel creating something that no one else has ever been able to accomplish. Adding another language really shouldn't be a problem, we've handled much worse things in the past and we shouldn't give up now on wanting to ensure that our project succeeds for the next 20+ years. We've got to keep pushing forward when confronted with new good ideas, and embrace the people offering to join us in actually doing the work to help make sure that we all succeed together.
Kees Cook on Rust in the kernel — In other words, I don't see any reason to focus on replacing existing code -- doing so would actually carry a lot of risk. But writing new stuff in Rust is very effective. Old code is more stable and has fewer bugs already, and yet, we're still going to continue the work of hardening C, because we still need to shake those bugs out. But new code can be written in Rust, and not have any of these classes of bugs at all from day one.
Linus Re: Rust kernel policy — You are not forced to take any Rust code, or care about any Rust code in the DMA code. You can ignore it. But "ignore the Rust side" automatically also means that you don't have any say on the Rust side.
Pick: treetrum/amazon-kindle-bulk-downloader — Allows you to bulk download all your Kindle eBook in a more automated fashion. This tool allows you to create backup copies of the books you've already purchased.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
Table Routing vs. Source Routing in ZHA — This article provides a clear breakdown of Table Routing vs. Source Routing, explaining their core differences, advantages, and potential drawbacks to help you make an informed decision. Most importantly, it will guide you on how to enable Source Routing in ZHA and explore why it could dramatically improve the stability and efficiency of your Zigbee network.
ZHA Users: Are You Missing Out on Source Routing? — Most Home Assistant users running Zigbee with ZHA don’t even realize they’re using Table Routing - the default setting - which might be slowing down automations and flooding the network with unnecessary broadcasts.
Open WebUI — Open WebUI is an extensible, self-hosted AI interface that adapts to your workflow, all while operating entirely offline.
GitHub - open-webui — Open WebUI is an extensible, feature-rich, and user-friendly self-hosted AI platform designed to operate entirely offline. It supports various LLM runners like Ollama and OpenAI-compatible APIs, with built-in inference engine for RAG, making it a powerful AI deployment solution.
bcachefs Caching — bcachefs can be configured for writethrough, writeback, and writearound caching, as well as other more specialized setups.
Bcachefs Changes Merged Without Issue For The Linux 6.14 Kernel — So now hopefully all is well in Bcachefs land and the code will continue to be well received assuming Linus Torvalds finds no objections and there is no further friction on the Linux kernel mailing list.
Bcachefs Freezes Its On-Disk Format With Future Updates Optional — The latest round of Bcachefs file-system fixes have been submitted today for the in-development Linux 6.14 kernel. Besides fixes for the current kernel, it was announced today that the on-disk format for the file-system is now considered frozen in its latest development "master" branch.
NanoKVM: The S stands for Security - YouTube — Today I'm taking a look at the Sipeed NanoKVM, a solution for remote control of a computer over a network. It does a lot of things you'd expect from a device in this class, something like a PiKVM or JetKVM, except it does all of it with no regard to data security best practices.
Ecowitt - Home Assistant — The Ecowitt integration works by first creating a callback endpoint on your Home Assistant instance and then adding this configuration to the Ecowitt console so that it starts sending data.
ShelfPlayer — ShelfPlayer is a meticulously crafted iOS and iPadOS app designed to seamlessly integrate with your Audiobookshelf library. Enjoy a captivating listening experience with its sleek interface, lightning-fast performance, and deep system integration.
GitHub - alexmoras/hass-addon-newt — The Fossorial system - with Pangolin at its core - is a self-hosted tunneled reverse proxy with identity and access management, designed to securely expose private resources through encrypted WireGuard tunnels running in user space. Think self hosted Cloudflare tunnels.
Last week, we hit the reset button. This week, meet Angela—Chris’ ex-wife, mother of three, and original Jupiter Broadcasting troublemaker. Get ready for crazy stories from the early days. LINKS:
Music Assistant — Music Assistant is a free, opensource Media library manager that connects to your streaming services and a wide range of connected speakers.
Pick: Add Water — A utility app to easily install the Firefox GNOME Theme and automatically update it in the background. This theme keeps Firefox fashionable within the GNOME design ecosystem, and provides many helpful features to customize the interface to make browsing even more pleasant
The Eagle has Landed | The Launch 🚀 9
Feb 12, 2025
We attempt to swap out a show's engine while it's on the air. Tune in to find out if we can pull off the impossible: live! LINKS
Taming the Demons | LINUX Unplugged 601
Feb 09, 2025
It's week one of our FreeBSD challenge, and for one of us, that penalty Windows install looks uncomfortably close! Plus, Zach Mitchell joins us to update us on Planet Nix.
Pick: GarminDB — Download and parse data from Garmin Connect or a Garmin watch, FitBit CSV, and MS Health CSV files into and analyze data in Sqlite serverless databases with Jupyter notebooks.
Cloud Your Judgment | Self-Hosted 142
Feb 07, 2025
Chris geeks out over his new gadget, Alex gets Pangolin purring, and we break down the latest OPNsense release—plus more surprises!
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
Tempest Home Weather Station — Includes the Tempest app with your Tempest data and AI forecasts to power your personal needs for the
life of the product.
WeatherFlow - Home Assistant — The WeatherFlow integration is a local-only integration that reads weather data from all WeatherFlow Tempest compatible weather station on the local network.
Pick: direnv-vscode — This extension adds direnv support to Visual Studio Code by loading environment variables for the workspace root.
Pick: Warehouse on Linux | Flathub — Warehouse provides a simple UI to control complex Flatpak options, all without resorting to the command line.
The Democrats Behind DeepSeek | Coder Radio 605
Jan 29, 2025
DeepSeek has everyone freaking out; we'll look at what's legitimately fascinating, what bits have been an overreaction, and the big mistake that made this all possible.
💥 Gets Sats with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — The fastest and safest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada and the USA. With self-custody built in. 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost with Fountain.FM and kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution! 🚀
DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report — We present DeepSeek-V3, a strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language model with 671B total parameters with 37B activated for each token. To achieve efficient inference and cost-effective training, DeepSeek-V3 adopts Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and DeepSeekMoE architectures, which were thoroughly validated in DeepSeek-V2. Furthermore, DeepSeek-V3 pioneers an auxiliary-loss-free strategy for load balancing and sets a multi-token prediction training objective for stronger performance. We pre-train DeepSeek-V3 on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning stages to fully harness its capabilities. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that DeepSeek-V3 outperforms other open-source models and achieves performance comparable to leading closed-source models. Despite its excellent performance, DeepSeek-V3 requires only 2.788M H800 GPU hours for its full training. In addition, its training process is remarkably stable.
DeepSeek’s Popular AI App Is Explicitly Sending US Data to China — Amid ongoing fears over TikTok, Chinese generative AI platform DeepSeek says it’s sending heaps of US user data straight to its home country, potentially setting the stage for greater scrutiny.
Satya Nadella on X — Jevons paradox strikes again! As AI gets more efficient and accessible, we will see its use skyrocket, turning it into a commodity we just can't get enough of.
Sam Altman on X — deepseek's r1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they're able to deliver for the price.
we will obviously deliver much better models and also it's legit invigorating to have a new competitor! we will pull up some releases.
Biden Got Freaked Out About AI and National Security After Watching the Newest 'Mission: Impossible' Movie — Speaking to The Associated Press, deputy White House chief of staff Bruce Reed recalled that while Biden has grown concerned over the use of AI to generate fake images of himself or clone a user's voice, it was a screening of "Mission: Impossible -- Dead Reckoning Part One" at Camp David that particularly alarmed the president.
Psycho Shower Linux Power | LINUX Unplugged 599
Jan 26, 2025
On the eve of episode 600, we introduce our next challenge and explore the new wave of Linux phones.
Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers — The Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers will provide a neutral space where industry leaders, academia, developers, and the broader open source community can work together to support projects within the Chromium ecosystem.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves | Self-Hosted 141
Jan 24, 2025
Bamboo teaches us how to lose friends and alienate people. Then, Alex Tran from Immich joins us for a project update, and we shared some dreams for a community RSS project.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
Local dashboard is limited to 5 nodes - Help - Netdata — All of a sudden, when I access the Web UI on 19999 on the central node, I see all the node names, but no graphs. If I hover over one of the hostnames I get “Locked! Local dashboard is limited to 5 nodes”. 1 of the nodes DOES show up, and I can navigate to it, etc. But only 1, not 5.
Bambu Lab Authorization Control System - Consumer Action Taskforce — On January 16, 2025, the 3D-printer manufacturer Bambu Lab announced that future firmwares for their 3D printers would introduce an authorization and authentication protection mechanism for their connection and control, in the name of security. Bambu has stated the following:
Immich — Easily back up, organize, and manage your photos on your own server. Immich helps you browse, search and organize your photos and videos with ease, without sacrificing your privacy.
💥 Gets Sats with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — The fastest and safest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada and the USA. With self-custody built in. 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost with Fountain.FM and kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution! 🚀
Startup Winter: Hacker News Lost its Faith — I believe we're entering what might be called a "Startup Winter" - not because startups have stopped being created, but because the mythology around them has frozen over.
Introducing the Solid Trifecta | Rails 8 Unpacked - YouTube — The Solid Trifecta is a set of database adapters in Rails 8 that simplifies app development by replacing traditional RAM-based solutions like Redis with efficient, cost-effective database-backed tools. Solid Cable handles WebSocket messages, Solid Cache powers caching, and Solid Queue manages job queues, all using databases like MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite.
Framework Fatigue: The Real Reason Developers Get Angry About New Tech — As a developer trying to keep up with the latest tech, you find yourself in a familiar loop: check the landing page, watch the demo, star the GitHub repo “just in case,” and move on with your life. There’s only so much mental bandwidth to go around.
Not Your Distrohopper's Distro | LINUX Unplugged 598
Jan 19, 2025
With more criticisms of NixOS than ever—do they have a point? We'll dig into the tough critiques and give our perspective.
Nix - Death by a thousand cuts — TLDR: In its current state (2025), I don't generally recommend desktop use of Nix(OS), even for seasoned Linux users.
Rich Hickey: Simple Made Easy — Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity’s virtues over easiness’, showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path.
Should I use NixOS? Short answer: no. — If words like "declarative", "generational", and "immutable" don't put your sexuality in jeopardy, you're considering NixOS for the wrong reasons.
Annual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!
Pick: isd — Simplify systemd management with isd! isd is a TUI offering fuzzy search for units, auto-refreshing previews, smart sudo handling, and a fully customizeable interface for power-users and newcomers alike.
Pick: planify — Task manager with Todoist & Nextcloud support designed for GNOME
The CEO who bet on SwiftUI—and lost their job. Then poke some fun at Rust stans, SalesForce claims they're not hiring any developers in 2025, and more!
💥 Gets Sats with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — The fastest and safest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada and the USA. With self-custody built in. 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost with Fountain.FM and kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution! 🚀
Sonos CEO steps down after app upgrade debacle — On its fiscal 2024 earnings call, Spence shared news that annual revenue had gone backwards by four percent, and admitted one reason for that result was “we mishandled the rollout of our new app.”
Reference Cycles Can Leak Memory - The Rust Programming Language — Rust’s memory safety guarantees make it difficult, but not impossible, to accidentally create memory that is never cleaned up (known as a memory leak). Preventing memory leaks entirely is not one of Rust’s guarantees, meaning memory leaks are memory safe in Rust.
Handling memory leaks in Rust - LogRocket Blog — Once in a while, you may experience memory leaks in your Rust projects due to many factors, from unsafe code to shared references, etc. Ideally, you’ll want to fix these memory leaks and ensure your programs are efficient, which may lead to performance gains and resource safety.
Memory leaks are memory safe, and there isn't much to do about it | /home/Samsai — Despite their potential for destruction, Rust considers memory leaks "memory safe" and thus doesn't aim to prevent them. Rust's design, however, makes it less easy to create memory leaks, since it uses a Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII) pattern to abstract resource allocation and deallocation.
CachyOS — Blazingly Fast OS based on Arch Linux — CachyOS is designed to deliver lightning-fast speeds and stability, ensuring a smooth and enjoyable computing experience every time you use it. Whether you're a seasoned Linux user or just starting out, CachyOS is the ideal choice for those looking for a powerful, customizable and blazingly fast operating system.
firelzrd/bore-scheduler: BORE (Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer) CPU Scheduler — BORE (Burst-Oriented Response Enhancer) is enhanced versions of CFS (Completely Fair Scheduler) and EEVDF (Earliest Eligible Virtual Deadline First) Linux schedulers. Developed with the aim of maintaining these schedulers' high performance while delivering resilient responsiveness to user input under as versatile load scenario as possible.
cryptomator on GitHub — Cryptomator for Windows, macOS, and Linux: Secure client-side encryption for your cloud storage, ensuring privacy and control over your data.
Flatsweep on Flathub — When you uninstall a Flatpak, it can leave some files behind on your computer. Flatsweep helps you easily get rid of the residue left on your system by uninstalled Flatpaks.
Buffer on Flathub — Celebrating transience, Buffer provides a minimal editing space for all those things that don't need keeping. Designed for keyboard workflows on desktop.
When Upgrades Go Wrong | Self-Hosted 140
Jan 10, 2025
Alex dives into the perils of upgrading and migrating critical infrastructure—uncovering embarrassing pitfalls and hard-won lessons along the way. Meanwhile, Chris takes his audiobook obsession to the next level, showcasing a couple self-hosted projects that are very ambitious.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
ebook2audiobook — Convert ebooks to audiobooks with chapters and metadata using dynamic AI models and voice cloning. Supports 1,107+ languages!
storyteller · GitLab — Storyteller is a self-hosted platform for creating and reading ebooks with synced narration. It's made of three components: the API server, the web interface, and the mobile apps.
beszel — Beszel is a lightweight server monitoring platform that includes Docker statistics, historical data, and alert functions.
Proxmox Datacenter Manager Roadmap — The Proxmox Datacenter Manager project has been developed with the objective of providing a centralized overview of all your individual nodes and clusters. It also enables basic management like migrations of virtual guests without any cluster network requirements.
Proxmox Datacenter Manager — he project is fully developed in the Rust programming language, from the backend API server to the CLI tools to a completely new frontend. The frontend is built on the new widget toolkit that we developed over the last few years.
Dude, You're Getting a Dell Pro Max Micro Plus! | Coder Radio 602
Jan 08, 2025
CES 2025 Secrets Revealed: A developer’s dream or just more hype? Plus, NVIDIA flexes its AI muscles, and we're admittedly impressed. Then, our thoughts on Dell's historic rebrand.
💥 Gets Sats with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — The fastest and safest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, with self-custody built in. 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost with Fountain.FM and kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution! 🚀
Nvidia’s AI NPCs are no longer chatbots — they’re your new PUBG teammate — Nvidia says that ACE characters can use AI to “perceive, plan, and act like human players,” per a blog post. “Powered by generative AI, ACE will enable living, dynamic game worlds with companions that comprehend and support player goals, and enemies that adapt dynamically to player tactics.” The characters are powered by “small language models (SLMs)” that are “capable of planning at human-like frequencies required for realistic decision making” as well as “multi-modal SLMs for vision and audio that allow AI characters to hear audio cues and perceive their environment.”
Nvidia’s stock heads for worst drop in months as CES speech lacked one big thing — We believe many investors were hoping for more concrete progress updates on the ramp of Blackwell and some input as to the company’s progress with its next-generation GPU platform, Rubin,” Benchmark Research analyst Cody Acree wrote in a note to clients.
Perilously Pontificated Predictions | LINUX Unplugged 596
Jan 05, 2025
We make our big Linux predictions for 2025, but first, we score how we did for 2024.
💥 Gets Sats with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — The fastest and safest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, with self-custody built in. 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost with Fountain.FM and kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution! 🚀
Nvidia's next move: Powering humanoid robots — The chipmaking giant Nvidia is leaning more heavily into robotics in 2025. More specifically, in the first half of the new year, confirms the Financial Times, Nvidia is launching a new generation of compact computers for humanoid robots called Jetson Thor.
Performance Data — As part of the U.S. Department of Labor's commitment to supporting the goals of an open and transparent government, this page provides easy access to employment-based immigration data organized in three main categories
Ethan Evans on X — There are three simple economic arguments for increasing legal immigration by highly educated workers
Mitchell Hashimoto on X — "r/linux": arguments about what "native" means, angry they have to click one link to learn what it is, disappointed that another terminal exists, 50-comment discussion about GTK vs QT
Broken Money — Why Our Financial System Is Failing Us and How We Can Make It Better.
Network 'n Burning Bonanza | LINUX Unplugged 595
Dec 29, 2024
We tested out the OpenWRT One and tried it in a unique use case. Then, Wes goes back to 1999 to solve a problem.
DXX-Rebirth — DXX-Rebirth is a modern port of the Descent game engine, based on the late D1X and D2X source ports (which, in turn, were based on the original Descent source release and LDescent). The Rebirth Team has spent a lot of time working to improve the source code by fixing old bugs and adding some improvements, while always staying true to our philosophy: Keep it Descent!
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
Home Assistant Voice is the open source, privacy-focused voice assistant hardware built to seamlessly connect with Home Assistant, allowing anyone to preview the future of voice today. Its advanced audio processor and dual microphones allow it to hear your commands and control devices. Tactile controls, the injection-molded case and LED ring lend to its premium feel, allowing it to blend into the home.</li><li><a href="https://github.com/balloob" title="Paulus Schoutsen on GitHub" rel="nofollow">Paulus Schoutsen on GitHub</a> — I am Paulus Schoutsen and I work on privacy focused smart homes. I do this by building Home Assistant. I started the project in 2013 and now it's one of the most active open source projects in the world! Besides that I also work on ESPHome, ESP Web Tools, Improv Wi-Fi and more.</li><li><a href="https://www.nabucasa.com/about/" title="Nabu Casa" rel="nofollow">Nabu Casa</a> — Nabu Casa, Inc was founded in 2018 by the founders of both Home Assistant, the open source home automation platform, and Home Assistant OS, the operating system that turns your device into a smart home hub powered by Home Assistant. These projects have seen an immense growth and have helped shape DIY home automation communities around the world.</li><li><a href="https://www.openhomefoundation.org/" title="Open Home Foundation" rel="nofollow">Open Home Foundation</a> — The Open Home Foundation fights for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes. And for every person who lives in one. It does this by supporting the development of open-source projects, and open connectivity and communication standards. </li></ul>
2024 Tuxies | LINUX Unplugged 594
Dec 22, 2024
It's the fifth annual Unplugged Tuxies; our community votes on the best projects, distros, and desktops of 2024. Join us for the final Tuxies, and the second annual Boosties!
💥 Gets Sats with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost with Fountain.FM and kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution! 🚀
Coder Radio 439: Github NoPilot — Microsoft has a bunch of new goodies for developers, but Mike is becoming more and more concerned about an insidious new feature.
Coder Radio 472: Drunken Copilot — Mike just signed up for a year of GitHub Copilot and Chris tries to understand why. Then we catch each other up on some recent surprises.
Introducing CentOS Stream 10 — CentOS Stream serves as a development branch for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), providing a continuous preview of features before they are incorporated into RHEL.
EPEL 10 is now available — The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) 10 has been officially released, offering users access to over 10,000 packages built from 3,600 source packages, thanks to the efforts of over 150 Fedora package maintainers.
Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller: A change of hats! — Matthew Miller, the Fedora Project Leader for over a decade, has announced his decision to step down from the role. Initially aiming for a five-year term, he extended his tenure after feeling there was more to accomplish. Now, after ten years, Miller believes it is the right time for a leadership change to bring fresh energy and ideas to Fedora.
Fedora COSMIC Desktop Spin Proposed For Fedora 42 — The Fedora Project is considering a new "Fedora COSMIC" spin for Fedora 42, featuring the Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment developed by System76.
Ptyxis Becomes Ubuntu's Recommended Replacement To GNOME Terminal — Ptyxis was introduced as an option in Ubuntu 24.10, though it was not the default terminal. While GNOME Console remains the default in Ubuntu 25.04 daily builds, there is growing support for Ptyxis within the Ubuntu community. Canonical Desktop Software Engineer Jeremy Bicha confirmed this shift, stating that Ptyxis is now the "recommended replacement for GNOME Terminal."
Zen Kernel FAQ — Result of a collaborative effort of kernel hackers to provide the best Linux kernel possible for everyday systems
Ports-info — Simple utility to show open ports on linux systems
ODROID and Chill | Self-Hosted 138
Dec 13, 2024
Brent joins to share part two of his NAS build adventure, and things take a tiny turn. Plus, picking the right encrypted chat app and Chris stacks a few Jellyfin wins.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
uvBeast New V3 365nm Mini - Black Light UV Flashlight — UV On A Different Level Entirely. Same high octane yet low contamination uvBeast UV as the V3 365nm. The viewing quality will really impress you. Filtered 365nm UV is considered as the gold standard sweet spot for UV users. uvBeast optimized 365nm UV is in a different league, with little visible light leak, which is exactly what you want in a UV light
ODROID-H4 PLUS — Hardkernel is introducing the ODROID-H4, H4+ and H4 Ultra, which is equipped with higher performance and richer interfaces.
Simplex Chat v6.2.0 — SimpleX Chat and Flux (https://runonflux.com) made an agreement to include servers operated by Flux into the app – to improve metadata privacy.
Watchstate — We have added a WebUI page for Custom GUIDs and stabilized on v1.0 for the guid.yaml file spec. We strongly recommend to use the WebUI to manage the GUIDs
Infuse 8 - Now Available — Libraries which used to consist of only a handful of small files can now easily extend to tens of thousands of massive 4K videos. We took a big step towards handling these larger libraries with the addition of Direct Mode earlier this year and 8.0 builds on that same focus with an entirely revamped browsing infrastructure.
Actual Budget Documentation — Actual Budget is a super fast and privacy-focused app for managing your finances. At its heart is the well proven and much loved Envelope Budgeting methodology.
File Juggler — File Juggler makes it easy to create automatic workflows with files.
maid: Be lazy. Let Maid clean up after you. — Maid keeps files from sitting around too long, untouched. Many of the downloads and temporary files you collect can easily be categorized and handled appropriately by rules you define. Let the maid in your computer take care of the easy stuff, so you can spend more of your time on what matters.
organize: The file management automation tool. — Your desktop is a mess? You cannot find anything in your downloads and documents? Sorting and renaming all these files by hand is too tedious? Time to automate it once and benefit from it forever.
TagStudio: A User-Focused Photo & File Management System — TagStudio is a photo & file organization application with an underlying tag-based system that focuses on giving freedom and flexibility to the user. No proprietary programs or formats, no sea of sidecar files, and no complete upheaval of your filesystem structure.
💥 Gets Sats with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost with Fountain.FM and kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution! 🚀
Tesla Is Screwing Over Dozens Of App Developers — Tesla is preparing to begin charging software developers to access the Application Programming Interface for its cars—something used by just about every third-party dev that builds software that integrates with Tesla's vehicles.
OpenAI launches a new $200 monthly subscription and an updated model — The company is also introducing ChatGPT Pro, a new $200 monthly subscription tier that includes unlimited access to OpenAI o1, GPT-4o, and Advanced Voice mode. It also includes a version of o1, exclusive to Pro users, that uses more compute to provide the best possible answer to the hardest problems (called o1 pro mode).
Introducing ChatGPT Pro — ChatGPT Pro provides a way for researchers, engineers, and other individuals who use research-grade intelligence daily to accelerate their productivity and be at the cutting edge of advancements in AI.
OpenAI explores advertising as it steps up revenue drive — OpenAI is discussing plans to introduce advertising to its artificial intelligence products, as the ChatGPT maker seeks new revenue sources as it restructures as a for-profit company.
home-assistant-technitiumdns — This custom integration allows you to integrate TechnetiumDNS with Home Assistant, providing sensors for various DNS statistics.
Rescuezilla — Rescuezilla is an open-source easy-to-use disk imaging app that's fully compatible with Clonezilla — the industry-standard trusted by tens of millions.
No Code is just Other People's Code | Coder Radio 598
Dec 04, 2024
GitHub has done the research, brought the receipts, and knows just what to do to get more developers into the flow state. Is it legit or hype? We’ll dig in. Plus, making the case that Rails is better low code than low code, and we help someone go from Pizza to Rust.
💥 Gets Sats with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy Bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Advent of Code 2024 — Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like.
rust-query: Type safe query builder for rust — The goal of this library is to allow writing relational database queries using familiar Rust syntax. The library should guarantee that a query can not fail if it compiles.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger retires — Intel has announced that CEO Pat Gelsinger has retired, effective December 1, and stepped down from the company’s board of directors.
KDE Goes Banana | LINUX Unplugged 591
Dec 01, 2024
The KDE and GNOME projects are working on official Linux distributions, but do we need more distros? We dig into their special sauce.
Plus: Wes' top DNS server pick, and it's not one we've heard before.
First Router Designed Specifically For OpenWrt Released — The OpenWrt One costs $89 with a case ($68.42 for the logic board only) and is hacker-friendly, featuring robust hardware specifications such as a MediaTek MT7981B SoC, dual Ethernet ports (2.5 GbE and 1 GbE), USB-C power, and modular expansion options.
TechnitiumSoftware/DnsServer: Technitium DNS Server — Technitium DNS Server is an open source authoritative as well as recursive DNS server that can be used for self hosting a DNS server for privacy & security. It works out-of-the-box with no or minimal configuration and provides a user friendly web console accessible using any modern web browser.
Mechanically Compatible | Self-Hosted 137
Nov 29, 2024
We geek out over Brian Moses's 2025 DIY NAS build guide, contemplate future builds with the new Raspberry Pi Compute 5 module, and fully embrace our digital hoarding nature with a new app.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
catt — Cast All The Things allows you to send videos from many, many online sources (YouTube, Vimeo, and a few hundred others) to your Chromecast. It also allows you to cast local files or render websites.
Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 — Compute Module 5 is a powerful and scalable system on module with a 64-bit Arm processor @ 2.4GHz, an I/O controller, video and PCIe interfaces, and a range of wireless, SDRAM and eMMC options.
Raspberry Pi Launches The Compute Module 5 For $45 USD — This modular version of the Raspberry Pi 5 is priced at $45 USD. Eben Upton noted in today's announcement that some 70% to 80% of Raspberry Pi units are going into industrial and embedded applications.
DIY NAS: 2025 Edition - briancmoses.com — A diminuitive, TrueNAS SCALE machine featuring: 92TB of storage (90TB of HDD, 2TB of SSD), an Intel N100 CPU, 32GB of DDR5 RAM, and 10Gbps networking for under $1,750!
Hoarder — Quickly save links, notes, and images and hoarder will automatically tag them for you using AI for faster retrieval. Built for the data hoarders out there!
Open WebUI — Open WebUI is an extensible, feature-rich, and user-friendly self-hosted AI interface designed to operate entirely offline. It supports various LLM runners, including Ollama and OpenAI-compatible APIs.
Smart Home Index — At DataSolace (the maintainers of SmartHomeIndex.com), we believe in providing high-quality, unbiased information about smart home technology and automation.
Make Google Great Again | Coder Radio 597
Nov 27, 2024
A survey found that nearly 10% of developers are ghosts doing nothing - our thoughts on that, AI Big Brother as a service comes to the workplace, OpenAI's NYT standoff, and Google's growing problem.
💥 Gets Sats with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
DOJ says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search monopoly — The filing includes a broad range of requirements the DOJ hopes the court will impose on Google — from restricting the company from entering certain kinds of agreements to more broadly breaking the company up. The DOJ’s latest proposal doubles down on its request to spin out Google’s Chrome browser, which the government views as a key access point for searching the web.
DOJ’s staggering proposal would hurt consumers and America’s global technological leadership — As just one example, DOJ’s proposal would literally require us to install not one but two separate choice screens before you could access Google Search on a Pixel phone you bought. And the design of those choice screens would have to be approved by the Technical Committee. And that’s just a small part of it. We wish we were making this up.
Building a Large Geospatial Model to Achieve Spatial Intelligence – Niantic Labs — This scanning feature is completely optional – people have to visit a specific publicly-accessible location and click to scan. This allows Niantic to deliver new types of AR experiences for people to enjoy. Merely walking around playing our games does not train an AI model.
Cold reading an ADHD affliction — You don't need a diagnosis to be a flawed human. It goes for all of us. So if you want to supercharge your morning's productivity routine by popping a pill or two of amphetamines, own it!
Self-Host Before You're Toast | LINUX Unplugged 590
Nov 24, 2024
Two years ago, we took a small step toward digital privacy. Today, we're rethinking everything about our online lives, and we'll give you the tools to do the same.
Embrace Alby Hub - phasing out Alby’s shared wallet | Alby User Guide — In the beginning of 2024, we shared our vision in "Where Does Alby Fly From Here". Since then we launched Alby Hub, your self-custodial wallet accessible from anywhere to integrate with dozens of apps. We’ve also launched Alby Go - the easiest-to-use mobile app to connect your Alby Hub and use your sats on the go.
Breez App — The Breez mobile app is a favorite of Lightning wizards and rookies alike. With a non-custodial Lightning node running on your mobile device, digital cash register, podcast player, and its own marketplace, the app delivers a standard-setting UX with 100% bitcoin DNA under the hood.
Fountain on X — Music discovery isn’t what it used to be. Fountain Radio makes it fun again. Wave goodbye to algorithmic playlists and say hello to a new communal listening experience powered by Bitcoin and Nostr. Fountain Radio is live in version 1.1.8 now. Here's how it works 👇
Chrome For Sale | Coder Radio 596
Nov 20, 2024
We react to Microsoft's new vision for the desktop PC, discuss the realities of working with large dependency chains in your projects, and discuss Google selling off Chrome. Then, we read some spicy tech CEO emails!
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Chained to Complexity: Python Dependency Management — Dependency management in software development is often akin to playing an elaborate game of Jenga where everyone involved is on their third IPA: every block you move introduces the risk of toppling the tower which is becoming more wobbly over time.
Windows comes to the Meta Quest — “Full capabilities,” in this context, means that you’ll be able to access a local Windows PC or cloud instance of Windows (via Windows 365) from a Quest headset. Microsoft says it only takes “seconds” to connect, and likens the experience to a “private, high-quality, large, multi-monitor workstation.” We’ll be the judge of that.
6 Reasons to Love Linux 6.12 | LINUX Unplugged 589
Nov 17, 2024
The Linux 6.12 kernel isn't just another update — it's a game-changer that deserves our full attention, from performance improvements to fascinating new features.
Btrfs Assistant — Btrfs Assistant is a GUI management tool to make managing a Btrfs filesystem easier.
kernelconfig.io — search config information for linux kernel modules
Google is Done | Self-Hosted 136
Nov 15, 2024
Breaking free from Google's grip: Our surprising journey and the tools that made it possible. Plus, Brent's NAS feature stirring up debate, s clever tool for distributed video encoding, and more.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
Perplexica — Perplexica is an open-source AI-powered searching tool or an AI-powered search engine that goes deep into the internet to find answers. Inspired by Perplexity AI, it's an open-source option that not just searches the web but understands your questions.
handbrake-web — HandBrake Web is a program for interfacing with handbrake across multiple machines via a web browser. It consists of two components: the server and one or more worker(s).
Python's eating the world - and AI's helping it digest. A cheeky look at why this programming language is suddenly everywhere and the bizarre tale of how AI infiltrated the last place you'd expect.
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
AMD grabs a quarter of x86 market with desktop gains — AMD now accounts for 25 percent of all x86 processor shipments, but only made a slight increase in the past quarter against industry leader Intel in servers – the main gains came from the desktop market.
Intel exec says Arrow Lake launch ‘just didn’t go as planned' — Intel’s Arrow Lake chips’ “bones are solid,” Hallock said during the interview. Still, the company has identified factors “that can combine to produce some pretty wild unintended effects.” Hallock was also clear that the new Arrow Lake performance issues are strictly Intel’s responsibility, and not the fault of Microsoft or anyone else.
Announcing .NET 9 — Today, we are excited to announce the launch of .NET 9, the most productive, modern, secure, intelligent, and performant release of .NET yet. It’s the result of another year of effort on the part of thousands of developers from around the world.
TensorFlow — TensorFlow makes it easy to create ML models that can run in any environment. Learn how to use the intuitive APIs through interactive code samples.
NumPy - — The fundamental package for scientific computing with Python
pandas - Python Data Analysis Library — pandas is a fast, powerful, flexible and easy to use open source data analysis and manipulation tool,
built on top of the Python programming language.
PyTorch — A rich ecosystem of tools and libraries extends PyTorch and supports development in computer vision, NLP and more.
I’m a neurology ICU nurse. The creep of AI in our hospitals terrifies me — We didn’t call it AI at first. The first thing that happened was these new innovations just crept into our electronic medical record system. They were tools that monitored whether specific steps in patient treatment were being followed. If something was missed or hadn’t been done, the AI would send an alert. It was very primitive, and it was there to stop patients falling through the cracks.
Fountain 1.1.6 is now live on iOS and Android — Our latest release contains more bug fixes than ever before - plus we have improved navigation by making the bottom nav bar persistent across all pages.
Planet Nix — CFP Submission Deadline: December 9th, 2024
Annual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!
bees: Best-Effort Extent-Same, a btrfs dedupe agent — bees is a block-oriented userspace deduplication agent designed for large btrfs filesystems. It is an offline dedupe combined with an incremental data scan capability to minimize time data spends on disk from write to dedupe.
markfasheh/duperemove: Tools for deduping file systems — Duperemove is a simple tool for finding duplicated extents and submitting them for deduplication. When given a list of files it will hash their contents on an extent by extent basis and compare those hashes to each other, finding and categorizing extents that match each other.
Smart Contracts for Dumb People | Coder Radio 594
Nov 06, 2024
Malicious NPM packages are sneaking into codebases while FFmpeg devs prove old-school assembly skills can still smoke the competition. Plus, a rare bee species takes on Zuck's AI dreams.
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Why Avoiding Technical Debt Might Be Your Biggest Mistake — In this post, I’ll argue that technical debt isn’t inherently bad — it’s unmanaged technical debt that causes problems. Programmers who refuse to incur any technical debt pay a high price, using up one of a company’s most valuable resources: present time!
FFmpeg devs boast of up to 94x performance boost after implementing handwritten AVX-512 assembly code — The developers have created an optimized code path using the AVX-512 instruction set to accelerate specific functions within the FFmpeg multimedia processing library. By leveraging AVX-512, they were able to achieve significant performance improvements — from three to 94 times faster — compared to standard implementations. AVX-512 enables processing large chunks of data in parallel using 512-bit registers, which can handle up to 16 single-precision FLOPS or 8 double-precision FLOPS in one operation. This optimization is ideal for compute-heavy tasks in general, but in the case of video and image processing in particular.
Regulators reject power deal for nuclear Amazon datacenters — Amazon has hit a roadblock in its plans for nuclear-powered US datacenters. Federal regulators rejected a deal that would let it draw more power from a Susquehanna plant to supply new bit barns next to the site, on the grounds this would set a precedent which may affect grid reliability and increase energy costs.
Meta’s nuclear datacenter plan reportedly stung by bees — CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly told employees at an all-hands meeting that the discovery of a rare species of bees on the prospective build site had contributed to the cancellation of the datacenter project, according to The Financial Times.
AI's energy appetite has Taiwan reconsidering nuclear option — The global surge in AI is placing unprecedented pressure on energy resources, with chipmakers such as TSMC consuming vast amounts of electricity to meet growing demand for advanced silicon. In response, Taiwan's government is signaling a potential shift in its longstanding opposition to nuclear energy to address its mounting power needs.
AAA gaming on Asahi Linux — We’re thrilled to release our Asahi game playing toolkit, which integrates our Vulkan 1.3 drivers with x86 emulation and Windows compatibility. Plus a bonus: conformant OpenCL 3.0.
eyekay/webapps source — Install websites as desktop apps, so that they appear in their own windows separate from any browsers installed. This is similar to the "Install as App" feature found in popular web browsers.
Rebuilding For the Last Time | Self-Hosted 135
Nov 01, 2024
From Nextcloud Breakup to Blissful Reunion: Chris's journey back to a smarter setup. Plus, Jellyfin's game-changing features and a beloved self-hosted app get the upgrade we've all been waiting for.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
Jellyfin 10.10.0 — This major release brings several new features, improvements, and bugfixes to improve your Jellyfin experience. With our faster release cadence between 10.9.0 and 10.10.0, this release should be far less daunting, so please read on for a quick peek at what's new and some important-to-know breaking changes!
TrueNAS 24.10 (Electric Eel) — 24.10 (Electric Eel) brings many new features and improvements to the TrueNAS experience
mealie Release v2.0.0 — The introduction of Households is one of Mealie's most requested features and a huge technical change. The implementation of it touched 300+ files and 10k+ lines of code.
dumb: Private alternative front-end for Genius. — With the massive daily increase of useless scripts on Genius's web frontend, and having to download megabytes of clutter, dumb tries to make reading lyrics from Genius a pleasant experience, and as lightweight as possible.
Jawa — Get the absolute best prices on custom prebuilt PCs and gear, backed by buyer and seller protections that actually matter.
Bake Your Own Linux Cake | Coder Radio 593
Oct 30, 2024
Mike reports in from the COSMIC frontier! Plus: Microsoft's juicy Google drama, GPU eye candy that'll make your wallet nervous, and the tea on why OpenAI's AGI Czar went full scorched-earth on his exit.
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
System76 - Linux Laptops, Desktops, and Servers — We aim to liberate the computer with a new desktop environment powerful enough to build custom OS experiences — for users, developers, and makers of any device with a screen.
Geary — Geary is an email application built around conversations, for the GNOME desktop. It allows you to read, find and send email with a straightforward, modern interface.
Apple Announces Redesigned Mac Mini With M4 and M4 Pro Chips — Apple today announced fully redesigned Mac mini models featuring the M4 and M4 Pro chips, a considerably smaller casing, two front-facing USB-C ports, Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, and more.
Kexec with Determination | LINUX Unplugged 586
Oct 27, 2024
We're hot-swapping our rigs to Fedora 41; then Graham Christensen gives us the inside scoop on a new Nix distribution, and Determinate Systems' big week!
The Future is Nix — Today, we still find ourselves sitting on the most powerful technology of our lifetimes and we can’t even decide on small steps in the direction of making it easier for folks to adopt it.
The future of software is Nix. — Today, we still find ourselves sitting on the most powerful technology of our lifetimes and we can’t even decide on small steps in the direction of making it easier for folks to adopt it.
Determinate Nix documentation — With Determinate Nix, our goal is to transform Nix from what it is today—a tool with great potential but with too many hard edges to be ready for prime time
Nix at work: FlakeHub Cache and private flakes — Today, we’re delighted to announce a new chapter for FlakeHub with the general availability of two new features: FlakeHub Cache and private flakes.
Graham Christensen on X — Yesterday at work we launched a binary cache that goes beyond bytes in a bucket. This launch means you can deploy to brand new cloud environments with two lines of userdata:
Annual Membership — Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!
lobe-chat — an open-source, modern-design AI chat framework. Supports Multi AI Providers
Choosy Moms Choose Ubuntu | LINUX Unplugged 585
Oct 20, 2024
Wes got Mom a new Linux laptop, and he lets her pick the distro. Plus, we take a look at the new Ubuntu 24.10, and why we think this release might be a good sign for the future.
qdm12/gluetun: — VPN client in a thin Docker container for multiple VPN providers, written in Go, and using OpenVPN or Wireguard, DNS over TLS, with a few proxy servers built-in.
cli-ai — A simple command-line AI assistant that translates natural language into shell commands. Supports all Windows and Unix-based systems (Linux, MacOS).
YouTube Unplugged | Self-Hosted 134
Oct 18, 2024
"The" self-hosted app to archive your favorite YouTube channels and easily integrate into Jellyfin/Plex. Plus, our favorite WordPress alternatives and an update on No Google October.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
macOS Window Manager | BentoBox 🍱 — A window manager that boosts productivity by snapping windows into predefined zones, like a Japanese bento box organizing meals.
Ice: Powerful menu bar manager for macOS — Ice is a powerful menu bar management tool. While its primary function is hiding and showing menu bar items, it aims to cover a wide variety of additional features to make it one of the most versatile menu bar tools available.
WordPress: The Drama Continues — The WordPress.org team has forked the Advanced Custom Fields plugin amidst a legal dispute with WP Engine, raising concerns about user awareness and security updates. Were they right to do so? It's complicated, but likely yes.
Withdrawing contributions from WordPress Core and WordPress.org properties · GitHub — Before and since my WordPress Core contribution flow changed, I have tried to play my part, in the community’s interest, to encourage a change of approach by the project’s leadership. Despite this, further community-damaging actions have been taken. As a direct result of this continued unwillingness to respect the community, I am regretfully withdrawing from all contributing to WordPress Core and any WordPress.org property until further notice.
Ghost: The best open source blog & newsletter platform — Ghost is a powerful app for professional publishers to create, share, and grow a business around their content. It comes with modern tools to build a website, publish content, send newsletters & offer paid subscriptions to members.
hugo: The world’s fastest framework for building websites. — Hugo is a static site generator written in Go, optimized for speed and designed for flexibility. With its advanced templating system and fast asset pipelines, Hugo renders a complete site in seconds, often less.
Zola — Zola comes as a single executable with Sass compilation, syntax highlighting, table of contents and many other features that traditionally require setting up a dev environment or adding some JavaScript libraries to your site.
SearXNG instances — This website shows the SearXNG public instances. It is updated every 24 hours, except the response times which are updated every 3 hours
SearXNG Documentation — SearXNG is a free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services. Users are neither tracked nor profiled. Additionally, SearXNG can be used over Tor for online anonymity.
pinchflat: Your next YouTube media manager — Pinchflat is a self-hosted app for downloading YouTube content built using yt-dlp. It's designed to be lightweight, self-contained, and easy to use. You set up rules for how to download content from YouTube channels or playlists and it'll do the rest, periodically checking for new content. It's perfect for people who want to download content for use in with a media center app (Plex, Jellyfin, Kodi) or for those who want to archive media!
FOSS does what Nintendont | Coder Radio 591
Oct 16, 2024
We get frustrated with Nintendo. Then, dig into the 30-year-old backdoor that was recently exploited and the hard lesson we should learn from it. Then, we'll break down some "hot tips" that promise to make you the next DevRel star.
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🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
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Ryujinx Switch Emulator Project Shuts Down Under Nintendo Pressure — Open source Nintendo Switch emulator Ryujinx has thrown in the towel under pressure from Nintendo. Lead developer 'gdkchan' was reportedly contacted by the gaming giant on Monday. He was given the opportunity to stop working on the project and shut down everything under his control, presumably to avoid further action. The project's repo on GitHub has already been deleted.
'Modded Hardware' Defendant Denies Nintendo's Copyright Claims in Court — The alleged operator of Modded Hardware has filed an answer to Nintendo's copyright complaint, denying any wrongdoing. The defendant, who represents himself in court, counters with a long list of affirmative defenses including fair use. The case will now move forward to the discovery process. Meanwhile, the Modded Hardware site has gone private.
The 30-year-old internet backdoor law that came back to bite — The wiretap systems, as mandated under a 30-year-old U.S. federal law, are some of the most sensitive in a telecom or internet provider’s network, typically granting a select few employees nearly unfettered access to information about their customers, including their internet traffic and browsing histories.
Meredith Whittaker on Masto — Case in point: there's no way to build a backdoor that only the "good guys" can use.
Chinese hackers access US telecom firms, worrying national security officials — US investigators believe the hackers potentially accessed wiretap warrant requests, two of the sources said, but officials are still working to determine what information the hackers may have obtained. US broadband and internet providers AT&T, Verizon and Lumen are among the targets, the sources said.
Unlocking the ‘aha’ moment: Developer relations for startups — Developer relations (DevRel) can be a cornerstone of product adoption and growth for early-stage companies, but too often early-stage companies end up focusing on the wrong things. The linchpin for success lies in how quickly developers reach their first "aha" moment
Mermaid | Diagramming and charting tool — JavaScript based diagramming and charting tool that renders Markdown-inspired text definitions to create and modify diagrams dynamically.
Meshtastic in the air — Avery Airfield in Spruce Pine which is running air delivery of critical supplies to HLZs in the AO is now equipping flights with Meshtastic airborne nodes which significantly increases coverage of vital communications.
Hundreds Weigh in on FCC NextNav Petition for 900 MHz Band Change — At issue is a NextNav petition filed in April to the FCC to expand the power level, bandwidth and priority of its licenses in the 902 to 907 and 918 to 928 MHz bands in the United States—a band currently in use by UHF RFID, Z-Wave, Zigbee, LoRa and numerous other wireless technologies. Additionally, NextNav proposes to use 5G connectivity over the relatively low bandwidth.
meshbbs — This is a BBS project to run on a meshtastic node. The system allows for message handling, bulletin boards, mail systems, and a channel directory.
nostrastic — Bridge to publish Nostr posts and send/receive DMs over LoRa using Meshtastic.
Home Assistant and Meshtastic — On this page, we'll guide you through the process of creating Meshtastic MQTT sensor entities within Home Assistant. Whether you want to keep an eye on battery levels, environmental conditions, or even receive notifications from your mesh network, these integrations provide you with the tools to make it happen.
Google’s Loss is Our Win | Coder Radio 590
Oct 09, 2024
Our reaction to Google's major legal blow, forcing them to open the Play Store wide, our thoughts on the world's lovefest with AI-generated podcasts, and the next tool Microsoft is porting over from Linux.
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🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
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Why Google is appealing the U.S. Epic Games verdict — The Epic verdict missed the obvious: Apple and Android clearly compete. We will appeal and ask the courts to pause implementing the remedies to maintain a consistent and safe experience for users and developers as the legal process moves forward.
NotebookLM now lets you listen to a conversation about your sources — Today, we're introducing Audio Overview, a new way to turn your documents into engaging audio discussions. With one click, two AI hosts start up a lively “deep dive” discussion based on your sources. They summarize your material, make connections between topics, and banter back and forth. You can even download the conversation and take it on the go.
ebpf-for-windows — eBPF is a well-known technology for providing programmability and agility, especially for extending an OS kernel, for use cases such as DoS protection and observability. This project is a work-in-progress that allows existing eBPF toolchains and APIs familiar in the Linux ecosystem to be used on top of Windows. That is, this project takes existing eBPF projects as submodules and adds the layer in between to make them run on top of Windows.
Nix on Easy Mode | LINUX Unplugged 583
Oct 06, 2024
Wes gives his shell superpowers to solve a tricky problem. Then, we share an update on our favorite Google Photos alternative, including breaking changes and a great new way to run it.
nixy — Nixy is a Hyprland NixOS configuration with home-manager, secrets and custom theming all in one place. It's a simple way to manage your system configuration and dotfiles.
Nix from First Principles: Flake Edition — This guide is a beginner's guide to Nix and related tooling, focusing on the newer nix command, and flake.nix compared to older tools like nix-env and default.nix. It does not require any prior Nix knowledge, and instead builds up the Flake based world from first principles, so that it can serve as an introduction to Nix itself, as well as the concept and uses of Flakes.
NixOS & Flakes Book — Want to know NixOS & Flakes in detail? Looking for a beginner-friendly tutorial? Then you've come to the right place!
EtchDroid — An application to write OS images to USB drives, on Android, no root required. Use it to make a bootable operating system USB drive when your laptop is dead.
Ditching Google Search for an entire month! We reveal the tool that's helping us break free. Plus, a special guest shares his home lab to data center journey. And, Chris raves about the ultimate Jellyfin client (and confesses to an accidental network camera purchase).
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
streamyfin: A Jellyfin client build with Expo — Welcome to Streamyfin, a simple and user-friendly Jellyfin client built with Expo. If you're looking for an alternative to other Jellyfin clients, we hope you'll find Streamyfin to be a useful addition to your media streaming toolbox.
xSearch for Safari on the App Store — xSearch is a Safari extension that enables you to seamlessly switch between multiple search engines with ease, and even search directly from Spotlight, making your browsing experience more efficient and efficient.
Wyze Cam v4 — 2.5K QHD resolution, Enhanced Color Night Vision, and motion-activated spotligh
docker-wyze-bridge — Create a local WebRTC, RTSP, RTMP, or HLS/Low-Latency HLS stream for most of your Wyze cameras including the outdoor, doorbell, and 2K cams.
Blame the Tools using the Tools | Coder Radio 589
Oct 02, 2024
Our thoughts on big tech firing up old nuclear reactors to satisfy the AI growth plans, Sam's big week, and debate if Meta just had their iPhone moment.
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🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Meta Quest 3S — Unreal experiences at an unreal price
Coming Oct 15. Pre-order yours today.
Microsoft Is Discontinuing HoloLens 2 As Production Ends — HoloLens 2 launched in 2019, three years after the original, with upgrades to almost every aspect: a wider field of view, higher resolution, eye tracking, vastly improved hand tracking, and more powerful compute housed in the rear of the strap to deliver a balanced comfortable design.
Annual Membership — Here is the annual Membership link for all the Jupiter Broadcasting shows!
The Intelligence Age — In 15 words: deep learning worked, got predictably better with scale, and we dedicated increasing resources to it.
Exclusive: OpenAI to remove non-profit control and give Sam Altman equity | Reuters — Chief executive Sam Altman will also receive equity for the first time in the for-profit company, which could be worth $150 billion after the restructuring as it also tries to remove the cap on returns for investors, sources added. The sources requested anonymity to discuss private matters.
Apple not investing in OpenAI after all, new report says — Apple is no longer in talks to participate in an OpenAI funding round expected to raise as much as $6.5 billion, an 11th hour end to what would have been a rare investment by the iPhone maker in another major Silicon Valley company.
Energy Department finalizes loan for Michigan nuclear plant revival — The Biden administration is also awarding $1.3 billion through the Department of Agriculture’s Empowering Rural America program to two rural electric cooperatives, which will discount electricity passed on to their members through emissions-free sources, such as the Holtec plant.
OpenAI on X — Starting this week, Advanced Voice is rolling out to all ChatGPT Enterprise, Edu, and Team users globally. Free users will also get a sneak peek of Advanced Voice.
Attacking UNIX Systems via CUPS — A remote unauthenticated attacker can silently replace existing printers’ (or install new ones) IPP urls with a malicious one, resulting in arbitrary command execution (on the computer) when a print job is started (from that computer).
Marcus Hutchins Scan finds 107,287 servers responding to the UDP port 631 — Instead of relying on Shodan data, I performed my own internet-wide scan using a distributed network of servers. This resulted in discovering drastically more exposed cups-browsed instances, causing my total count to rise from 13,289 to 107,287.
activate-linux — The "Activate Windows" watermark ported to Linux
Install Frog on Linux | Flathub — Extract text from images, websites, videos, and QR codes by taking a picture of the source.
Clapgrep — Ever had a folder full of PDF files, where you knew, somewhere in there, is what you're looking for. But you did not know in which file. So you had to search each of them at a time...
A Coder PSA | Coder Radio
Sep 24, 2024
A quick update from Chris on where the show is at this week, and what to watch out for next week!
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
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The Linux Escape Hatch | LINUX Unplugged 581
Sep 22, 2024
What if we had to abandon ship and stop using Desktop Linux? We've come up with a master plan, and put it to the test.
LINUX Unplugged 269 — What if desktop computing went a very different direction in the late 90s? Deeply multithreaded from the start, fast, intuitive, and extremely stable. This is the world of Haiku, and we go for a visit.
The Dawn of Haiku OS — Haiku, unlike its more established competitors, is exceedingly good at tackling one of the toughest challenges of modern computing: multicore microprocessors. Let's take a look at why that is, how Haiku came to be, and whether the operating system running on your computer really performs as well as it should.
Haiku R1/beta5 Release Notes — The fifth beta for Haiku R1 over a year and a half of hard work to improve Haiku’s hardware support and its overall stability, and to make lots more software ports available for use.
golang-haiku/go — The Haiku port of the Go programming language for upstream support. Changes are made in 'golang-1.11-haiku' or 'golang-haiku-master'.
Uploading at the Speed of Light | Self-Hosted 132
Sep 20, 2024
Alex has been playing around at the speed of light while solving Proxmox problems, and Chris has solved a Jellyfin issue. Plus, our thoughts on the new Plex features.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
Plex Photos — Introducing Plex Photos Beta: We are thrilled to announce the release of the Plex Photos Beta, available today for iOS and Android mobile. This new app is designed to provide you with a focused experience to engage with your photo libraries stored on Plex Media Servers. Whether you’re reminiscing over family photos or sharing backups of your professional photography images,
Home Assistant is 11 years old! — We can’t thank our community enough for the past 11 years. You are the engine driving forward Home Assistant.
Companion App for iOS 2024.9: Getting ready for iOS 18 — The new iOS also brings a new level of customization to Control Center, for which we are introducing five new controls: Assist, Toggle light, Run script, Activate scene, and Open page.
⚪ Bubble Card — Bubble Card is a minimalist and customizable card collection for Home Assistant with a nice pop-up touch.
WiCAN Pro | Crowd Supply — Advanced OBD scanner for next-generation vehicle diagnostics and Home Assistant integration
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
California’s AI Bill Threatens To Derail Open-Source Innovation — While proponents tout amendments made "in direct response to" concerns voiced by "the open source community," critics of the bill argue that it would crush the development of open-source AI models.
Mark Ruffalo on X — My open letter to Gov @GavinNewsom on CA’s #SB1047: the AI regulation we need to get ahead of the risks.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman leaves safety committee — Other members include Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, retired US Army General and former NSA chief Paul Nakasone, and former Sony general counsel Nicole Seligman.
Mailvelope — Mailvelope is a browser add-on that you can use in Chrome, Edge and Firefox to securely encrypt your emails with PGP using webmail providers
Waycheck — Waycheck is a simple graphical application that connects to your Wayland compositor and displays the list of Wayland protocols that it supports, along with the list of protocols that it doesn't.
Supersonic — A lightweight cross-platform desktop client for Subsonic and Jellyfin music servers.
Surfing the WSL Wave | Coder Radio 587
Sep 11, 2024
Our thoughts on the iPhone 16, and then Mike surfs the WSL wave.
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
🇨🇦 Bitcoin Well — Enable your independence with the fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada and the USA. Focused on Bitcoin excellence, enabling true financial independence 🥇
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Apple Announces iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max with Larger Displays, New Camera Control, and More — The devices are powered by the new A18 Pro chip, made using 2nd-generation 3nm technology. It offers a 16-core Neural Engine with 17% more memory bandwidth, making Apple Intelligence tasks up to 15% faster compared to the previous generation. The 6-core CPU features two performance cores and four efficiency cores, providing 15% faster performance and 20% more efficiency. Additionally, the 6-core GPU is up to 20% faster than the A17 Pro, with hardware-accelerated ray tracing for more realistic lighting in games. Faster USB-C speeds and twice the data processing for video encoding are also supported.
Surfing the WSL Wave - dominickm.com — With Summer coming to a close I decided to take another surf on the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) wave and in short was not disappointed.
hotshots.dashboard — A Shiny-powered dashboard summarizing virtual racing league stats!
Secret moments from the show you've never heard before. We kick off with some hardware hurdles, then dive into the news and share a few surprising stories.
The Value of Community | Self-Hosted 131
Sep 06, 2024
We celebrate five years of the show, chat about self-hosted Lightning, and why Alex loves his NanoKVM. Plus, it is a self-hosted replacement for Amazon Wishlists and more.
⚡ Bitcoin Well — Empowering sovereign ownership with free automatic self-custody 🔒
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.1 with Nostr support, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
Deplatformed by PayPal, Antiwar Journalists Speak Out — According to the two organizations, the PayPal ban remains in effect. PayPal had also frozen the outlets’ funds, including $9,348.14 in Consortium’s account, and threatened to seize the money as “damages.”
Patreon Policy Updates — The Community Guidelines have been rewritten to be clearer and more uniform in terminology, tense, and tone. Trust & Safety moderators have also been equipped with new support language to ensure that their interactions with creators are more educational.
Bitcoin Mining Council Survey Confirms Year on Year Improvements in Sustainable Power and Technological Efficiency — The results of this survey show that the members of the BMC and participants in the survey are currently utilizing electricity with a 63.1% sustainable power mix. Based on this data, the global bitcoin mining industry’s sustainable electricity mix has improved marginally to 59.9% and remains one of the most sustainable industries globally.
What is the Lightning Network? — Essentially, the Lightning Network is a way to transact bitcoin faster, cheaper, and more privately than on the Bitcoin blockchain.
ZEUS — Controlling and managing your Lightning node channels has never been easier.
Onboarding to lightning | ZEUS Documentation — ZEUS' embedded node has many different ways to get onboarded onto lightning with payment channels. This doc details all of the different ways and tradeoffs.
Alby Hub Introduction — Alby Hub is more than a lightning wallet. It's your Hub for instant bitcoin payments across a growing ecosystem of apps and flexible enough to serve your very own use case.
Alby Hub v1.7.2: Friends & Family App — Friends & Family app let's you quickly onboard your friends and family to Bitcoin and Lightning via your personal Alby Hub instance. They get a wallet without having to understand lightning or have their own channels, and not rely on large custodial services. They can also get their own Lightning address with an Alby Account, or connect their new wallet via the Alby extension. Soon, they will also be able to connect to Alby's new mobile app, Alby Go.
Everyone should have a PiKVM in their desk area — A few weeks ago I had an epiphany. The kind that once you have it, is so stinkin' obvious you wonder what on earth you were thinking all this time by not seeing it!
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Amazon S3 now supports conditional writes — Using conditional writes, you can simplify how distributed applications with multiple clients concurrently update data in parallel across shared datasets. Each client can conditionally write objects, making sure that it does not overwrite any objects already written by another client. This means you no longer need to build any client-side consensus mechanisms to coordinate updates or use additional API requests to check for the presence of an object before uploading data.
Syncing Prod & Staging Data With Dokku — Dokku’s apps:clone command is a fantastic utility that allows you to replicate an entire app, including all code, databases and environment variables.
Study Finds 77% of Employees Report AI Has Increased Their Workload — The new global study, in partnership with The Upwork Research Institute, interviewed 2,500 global C-suite executives, full-time employees and freelancers. Results show that the optimistic expectations about AI's impact are not aligning with the reality faced by many employees.
macos: OSX (macOS) inside a Docker container. — By default, macOS Ventura will be installed. But you can add the VERSION environment variable to your compose file, in order to specify an alternative macOS version to be downloaded
Rust for filesystems — At the 2024 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, Wedson Almeida Filho and Kent Overstreet led a combined storage and filesystem session on using Rust for Linux filesystems.
One Of The Rust Linux Kernel Maintainers Steps Down - Cites "Nontechnical Nonsense" — One of the several Rust for Linux kernel maintainers has decided to step away from the project. The move is being driven at least in part due to having to deal with increased "nontechnical nonsense" raised around Rust programming language use within the Linux kernel.
On Rust, Linux, developers, maintainers — There's been a couple of mentions of Rust4Linux in the past week or two, one from Linus on the speed of engagement and one about Wedson departing the project due to non-technical concerns. This got me thinking about project phases and developer types.
BITCOIN WELL — The fastest and safest way to buy bitcoin in Canada
The new JB server - KTZ systems — Join Alex, Chris, and Brent as we fly to Toronto to deploy our shiny new colo server in Canada. We'll be deploying the 45homelab HL15 server.
OpenEBS — OpenEBS is a modern Block-Mode storage platform, a Hyper-Converged software Storage System and virtual NVMe-oF SAN (vSAN) Fabric that is natively integrates into the core of Kubernetes.
Install Shotcut on Flathub — Shotcut supports many video, audio, and image formats via FFmpeg and screen, webcam, and audio capture. It uses a time-line for non-linear video editing of multiple tracks that may be composed of various file formats. Scrubbing and transport control are assisted by OpenGL GPU-based processing and a number of video and audio filters are available.
Bonus Pick: Butler — Access your Home Assistant dashboard from a native companion UI, integrating better with your OS.
Redox OS — Redox is a Unix-like general-purpose microkernel-based operating system written in Rust, aiming to bring the innovations of Rust to a modern microkernel, a full set of programs and be a complete alternative to Linux and BSD.
From Ops to Dev and Back Again | Coder Radio 585
Aug 28, 2024
We reflect on the rise of DevOps and the frustrating dynamics that led to it. Plus, tech's latest bright idea: Roombas with attitude.
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
iPad Illustration App Procreate Condemns Generative AI — We're here for the humans. We're not chasing a technology that is a moral threat to our greatest jewel: human creativity. In this technological rush, this might make us an exception or seem at risk of being left behind. But we see this road less travelled as the more exciting and fruitful one for our community.
Procreate on X — We’re never going there. Creativity is made, not generated.
You can read more at http://procreate.com/ai ✨
History of DevOps — The DevOps movement started to coalesce some time between 2007 and 2008, when IT operations and software development communities raised concerns what they felt was a fatal level of dysfunction in the industry.
Apple Is Developing a Tabletop Robot for the Home - YouTube — Apple Inc., seeking new sources of revenue, is moving forward with development of a pricey tabletop home device that combines an iPad-like display with a robotic limb. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports this is part of Apple's bigger move into robotics.
Linus Torvalds Begins Expressing Regrets Merging Bcachefs — The bcachefs patches have become these kinds of "lots of development during the release cycles rather than before it", to the point where I'm starting to regret merging bcachefs.
Re: [GIT PULL] bcachefs fixes for 6.11-rc5 - Linus Torvalds — No one is being jerks here, Linus and I are just sitting in different places with different perspectives. He has a resonsibility as someone managing a huge project to enforce rules as he sees best, while I have a responsibility to support users with working code, and to do that to the best of my abilities.
LINUX Unplugged 545: 3,062 Days Later — Kent Overstreet, the creator of bcachefs, helps us understand where his new filesystem fits, what it's like to upstream a new filesystem, and how they've solved the RAID write hole.
Linux is a CNA — As was recently announced, the Linux kernel project has been accepted as a CNA as a CVE Numbering Authority (CNA) for vulnerabilities found in Linux.
added pihole nix module by Tdback · Pull Request #3 · JupiterBroadcasting/nixconfigs — Recently, I wanted to start 'nixifying' some of my docker-compose setup. I've created a simple module for spinning up a podman container running pihole as a systemd service, so that way I can just stick it on any NixOS machine and easily make it my DNS server.
Pick: SaunaFS is a distributed file system — A robust distributed POSIX file system meticulously designed to revolutionize your storage solutions by offering unmatched efficiency, security, and redundancy. At its core, SaunaFS is a distributed file system primarily written in C++, inspired by the pioneering concepts introduced by Google File System.
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
AdventureLog — AdventureLog is designed to simplify your journey, providing you with the tools and resources to plan, pack, and navigate your next unforgettable adventure.
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Raspberry Pi 5 2GB Launches At $50 USD — Upton explained of the new Broadcom BCM2712 D0 stepping that it eliminates some dark silicon that goes unused by the Raspberry Pi boards but ultimately impacts the die space/pricing and is now eliminated with this new stepping
US Considers a Rare Antitrust Move: Breaking Up Google — This action would mark Washington's first attempt to break up a company for illegal monopolization since the failed bid to dismantle Microsoft two decades ago.
GitHub rolls back database change after breaking itself — "We are experiencing interruptions in multiple public GitHub services," the source code silo said in an advisory on its status page. "We suspect the impact is due to a database infrastructure related change that we are working on rolling back."
GitHub Status - All GitHub services are experiencing significant disruptions — At 22:59 UTC an erroneous configuration change rolled out to all GitHub.com databases that impacted the ability of the database to respond to health check pings from the routing service. As a result, the routing service could not detect healthy databases to route application traffic to. This led to widespread impact on GitHub.com
Diablo 1 for web browsers — I've modified the code to remove all dependencies and exposed the minimal required interface with JS, allowing the game to be compiled into WebAssembly.
The Secret Server | LINUX Unplugged 576
Aug 18, 2024
We reveal how we turned our humble LAN into a public server farm, all while keeping our IP address under wraps and our ISP blissfully unaware.
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
What is InstructLab? — InstructLab is an open source project for enhancing large language models (LLMs) used in generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) applications. Created by IBM and Red Hat
macOS Sequoia makes it harder to run apps that don’t follow Apple’s rules — In macOS Sequoia, users will no longer be able to Control-click to override Gatekeeper when opening software that isn’t signed correctly or notarized. They’ll need to visit System Settings > Privacy & Security to review security information for software before allowing it to run.
Gergely Orosz on X — Following news that Apple succeeded in taking 30% from Patreon subscriptions, Substack reveals it's working w Apple for in-app subscriptions. Terrible idea, given it would mean Apple takes 30%, Substack 10%, Stripe 3%: so 43% goes to platforms.
Brent's Busted Builds | LINUX Unplugged 575
Aug 11, 2024
Brent's computer pulls an all-nighter at the worst possible moment, and the hits keep coming for open-source Android distributions and our new 2FA tool.
GrapheneOS on X — Google can either permit GrapheneOS in the Play Integrity API in the near future
GrapheneOS on X — If Authy insists on using it, they should use the standard Android hardware attestation API to permit using GrapheneOS too. Banning 250k+ people with the most secure smartphones from using your app is anti-security, not pro-security.
GrapheneOS on X — Authy simply delegated checking device integrity to Google. It's Google choosing to block GrapheneOS users from using Authy. Google chooses to allow using a device with no security patches for the past 8 years but bans using an OS much more secure than the stock Pixel OS.
GrapheneOS on X — Our latest release with prevention for most VPN app DNS leaks is currently available in our Alpha and Beta channels. We need more feedback from testing VPN apps and services with leak blocking toggled on, which GrapheneOS already enables by default.
GrapheneOS on X — Our current approach to DNS leak blocking appears to work well without breaking compatibility. We've made progress towards fixing a related issue for some VPN apps where rare connections are made to VPN DNS outside of the tunnel. We can hopefully ship stricter enforcement soon.
GrapheneOS on X — We've become aware of another company selling devices with GrapheneOS while spreading harmful misinformation about it to promote insecure products. We're making our usual attempt at resolving things privately. However, we need to quickly address what has been claimed regardless.
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
Toronto Meetup, Thu, Aug 29 — Chris and Alex are slinging servers in Toronto. Come join us after we get our new box racked.
The Google TV Streamer might be the Apple TV 4K rival we’ve been waiting for — es, there are some Gemini AI tricks thrown in, and with other hardware upgrades like a built-in ethernet jack, the Google TV Streamer seems poised to be a much better entertainment hub than its predecessor. The only downside? Since it’s not a dongle anymore, you’ll have to provide your own HDMI cable when it ships on September 24th.
The Magic Behind HexOS — HexOS combines a simplified UI, automations, workflows, and managed services with user-provided hardware to offer elegant home server management for off-the-shelf server appliances, custom-built hardware, and even recycled PCs. Powered by TrueNAS, the world's most deployed enterprise-grade storage platform, HexOS provides a highly reliable and easy-to-use solution to store, use, and protect your data. In this article, we'll take a closer look at how HexOS works to make all of this possible.
Forgejo v8.0 is available — It comes with a number of new features, as usual. But the most impactful changes are of a different nature: increased stability, less random UI modifications and almost no breaking changes.
ForgeFed — ForgeFed is a federation protocol for software forges and code collaboration tools for the software development lifecycle and ecosystem
Open Letter to Gitea - Restoring Trust in the Gitea Project — After many days of hard work and preparation by a team of former Gitea maintainers and enthusiasts from the FOSS community, we are proud to announce that the Forgejo project is now live.
Rallly — Schedule group meetings with friends, colleagues and teams. Create meeting polls to find the best date and time to organize an event based on your participants' availability. Save time and avoid back-and-forth emails.
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Google default search deals break US law, court finds — "This victory against Google is an historic win for the American people," said Attorney General Merrick Garland, in a statement. “No company – no matter how large or influential – is above the law. The Justice Department will continue to vigorously enforce our antitrust laws."
Jason Kint on X — Don't overlook the impact this may have on Apple. Yes, I believe any remedy has to look at forced divestiture of Chrome and Android in addition to killing the exclusive dealing. But if Apple loses its sweetheart deal with Google, it may lose $12B in revenue (mostly profits)
Puget Systems' Perspective on Intel CPU Instability Issues — Based on this information, we are definitely experiencing CPU failures higher than our historical average, especially with 14th Gen. We have enough data to know that we don’t have an acute problem on the horizon with 13th Gen — it is more of a slow burn
seaweedfs — SeaweedFS is a fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files, and data lake, for billions of files! Blob store has O(1) disk seek, cloud tiering. Filer supports Cloud Drive, cross-DC active-active replication, Kubernetes, POSIX FUSE mount, S3 API, S3 Gateway, Hadoop, WebDAV, encryption, Erasure Coding.
Cabel Sasser - Panic Social — Apple Intelligence in 15.1 just flagged a phishing email as “Priority” and moved it to the top of my Inbox. This seems… bad
System76 tips Fedora Cosmic spin for 2025 release with Fedora 42 — It looks like System76's exciting new Rust-based Cosmic DE will get an official Fedora spin in the upcoming Fedora 42, potentially giving Linux users with bleeding-edge hardware an official way to try Cosmic.
Pop!_OS Mattermost — An excellent place to engage if you want to bring COSMIC to a distro near you.
Portal:Kalpa - openSUSE Wiki — openSUSE MicroOS Desktop Gnome was renamed to openSUSE Aeon, and the Plasma Desktop version is being renamed to openSUSE Kalpa.
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
OpenAI on X: "We’re testing SearchGPT" — We’re testing SearchGPT, a temporary prototype of new AI search features that give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources.
CrowdStrike Outage Losses Estimated at a Staggering $5.4B — Parametrix researchers have found that roughly 25% of Fortune 500 companies experienced disruptions due to the incident, the most heavily affected industries financially being healthcare ($1.94 billion in estimated losses) and banking ($1.15 billion). In addition, a shocking 100% of the transportation and airlines sector was affected, and the group will rack up an estimated $0.86 billion in losses, according to the forecast. The $5.4 billion estimate excludes Microsoft.
California DMV puts 42 million car titles on blockchain to fight fraud — The project, in collaboration with tech company Oxhead Alpha on Ava Labs' Avalanche blockchain, will allow California's more than 39 million residents to claim their vehicle titles through a mobile app, the first such move in the United States.
What is Operation Choke Point 2.0? Trump promises to end it. - YouTube — It was one of the many promises made by former President Donald Trump to a cryptocurrency crowd at this year’s Bitcoin conference. Crypto advocates have dubbed efforts to cut off the cryptocurrency industry from banking services “Operation Choke Point 2.0,” and Trump is vowing to end it.
Operation Choke Point 2.0 — Crypto still needs on- and off-ramps for US dollars, but the US is making it increasingly difficult to maintain them
Operation Choke Point 2.0: How U.S. Regulators Fight Bitcoin With Financial Censorship — “The clandestine Operation Choke Point had more in common with a purge of ideological foes than a regulatory enforcement action”, wrote Frank Keating, a former governor of Oklahoma who served in the DOJ during the Reagan administration, in a 2018 editorial for The Hill. “It targeted wide swaths of businesses with little regard for whether legal businesses were swept up and harmed. In fact, that seemed to be the goal.”
Universal Blue Man Group | LINUX Unplugged 573
Jul 28, 2024
Think Silverblue, but with cloud-native tooling used to build it. From Aurora to Bazzite, our impressions of the ambitious Universal Blue project.
Universal Blue — The Universal Blue project builds a diverse set of continuously delivered operating system images using Fedora Atomic Desktop's support for OCI/Docker containers.
Aurora — Aurora is a clean and reliable desktop operating system for every type of user. Many batteries included.
Bluefin — Bluefin is a custom image of Fedora Silverblue offering the best of both worlds: The reliability and ease of use of a Chromebook and the power of a GNOME desktop.
Bazzite — The next generation of Linux Gaming for all of your devices - including your favorite handheld.
uCore — An OCI base image of Fedora CoreOS with batteries included; a lightweight server image including most used services or the building blocks to host them.
winapps — Run Windows applications (including Microsoft 365 and Adobe Creative Cloud) on GNU/Linux with KDE, GNOME or XFCE, integrated seamlessly as if they were native to the OS.
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
Kelly Vaughn on X — How a massive publicly traded company is only going to just now start doing canary deployments is so far beyond my comprehension…
Licensing announcement - Purchase a license to support Immich! — With those notes, we have enabled a way for you to financially support the continued development of Immich, ensuring the software can move forward and will be maintained, by offering a lifetime license of the software. We think if you like and use software, you should pay for it, but we're never going to force anyone to pay or try to limit Immich for those who don't.
Wording change and clarification for purchasing Immich — I thought about it when I went to bed, I thought about it in my dream, I thought about it while doing the dishes. Taking into consideration all of your feedback and suggestions, and on behalf of the team, I am happy to show you what we came up with.
LinuxFest Northwest 2024: Deploying NixOS Anywhere - YouTube — NixOS, the declarative operating system taking the world by storm, can be challenging to deploy on many hosting providers. In this talk, we'll unlock the full potential of NixOS by exploring how its unique architecture enables installation just about anywhere—from bare metal and VMs to a VPS provider near you.
nixos-infect — A script to install NixOS on non-NixOS hosts.
Docker-OSX — Run Mac OS X in Docker with near-native performance! X11 Forwarding! iMessage security research! iPhone USB working! macOS in a Docker container!
Moshidon for Mastodon - Apps on Google Play — Moshidon is a modified version of the official Mastodon Android app adding important features that are missing in the official app, such as the federated timeline, unlisted posting and an image description viewer.
SchildiChat — SchildiChat is a feature-rich messenger for Matrix based on Element with some extras and tweaks.
SendGrid — Email API and Email Marketing Campaigns
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Andrew Curran on X — Will OpenAI commit to making its next foundation model available to U.S. Government agencies for pre-deployment testing, review, analysis, and assessment?
Open Source AI Is the Path Forward | Meta — Today, Linux is the industry standard foundation for both cloud computing and the operating systems that run most mobile devices – and we all benefit from superior products because of it.
I believe that AI will develop in a similar way.
Taiwan makes tough decisions as it faces its worst drought in nearly a century : NPR — This is the third year in a row that rice farmers in southern Taiwan have not been allowed to plant their crops. Instead, the government is paying them subsidies not to grow rice this season. The rice uses scarce water that semiconductor factories nearby need.
clevis — Clevis is a pluggable framework for automated decryption. It can be used to provide automated decryption of data or even automated unlocking of LUKS volumes.
Automatically decrypt your disk using TPM2 — Entering the passphrase to decrypt the disk at boot can become quite tedious. On modern systems a secure hardware chip called “TPM” (Trusted Platform Module) can store a secret and automatically decrypt your disk. This is an alternative factor, not a second factor. Keep that in mind.
Garmin Forerunner 265 — Forerunner 265 is a running smartwatch with a touchscreen AMOLED display, training metrics, phone-free music, & up to 13 days of battery life in smartwatch
Obtainium — Obtainium allows you to install and update apps directly from their releases pages, and receive notifications when new releases are made available.
Bustle — Bustle draws sequence diagrams of D-Bus activity. It shows signal emissions, method calls and their corresponding returns, with time stamps for each individual event and the duration of each method call. This can help you check for unwanted D-Bus traffic, and pinpoint why your D-Bus-based application is not performing as well as you like. It also provides statistics like signal frequencies and average method call times.
open-and-shut — Type in Morse code by repeatedly slamming your laptop shut
The Insufferable Small Business | Coder Radio 579
Jul 17, 2024
Are small business owners just the worst? The rant that hits close to home. And how AI is looking more like a unicorn, not a horse, but big tech keeps trying to put a saddle on it.
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Sam Altman in conversation with StrictlyVC - YouTube — We talked at length about his work, OpenAI's mission, and some of the criticisms that the young outfit is facing. We had fun, talking with him for this extended sit-down; hope you'll enjoy it, too.
The AI summer — Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back.
Running OpenBSD 7.5 on your laptop is really hard (not) — I couldn't use OpenBSD exclusively; there's software that I need/want which isn't available. But I do appreciate certain of OpenBSD's qualities: it's a simple, ultra-lightweight, traditional UNIX. I have an ancient ThinkPad running OpenBSD configured as a minimalist desktop: it's nice for focused work. Sure, it can't run Steam or play Netflix, but sometimes that's a plus...
Pick: termscp — 🖥 A feature rich terminal UI file transfer and explorer with support for SCP/SFTP/FTP/S3/SMB
Learn Nix The Fun Way — Sure, it’s sort of portable, if you tell the person running it to have curl and jq. What if you relied on a specific version of either though? Nix guarantees portability.
Nostr Workshop | Jupiter Extras 90
Jul 13, 2024
Our Nostr workshop. We’ll help you get your Nostr identity and answer any questions.
Plus, where we see this protocol going and features coming.
The protocol is very promising
We're finding new use cases for it every week. It's based on simple and flexible event objects (passed around as plain JSON). A public key identifies every user. Every post is signed. Every client validates these signatures.
And, of course - it's open source.
How Nostr could be useful for Podcasting
One of the more compelling usecases emerging is decentralized realtime chat.
Because everything is passed around as plain JSON, the ability to build cross-app and platform apps is built in.
Create one identity and use it across all the apps and sites. Taking your identity with you is as simple as bringing your key.
Help us test, learn a little Nostr.
Fountain.fm is building a new live experience, with an embeddable webchat built around Nostr. The chat can be pulled into any app or website. And it will be easy to build tooling around.
Live from the floor of Texas LinuxFest. We capture the structured chaos 1 from Austin Texas.
Links:
Texas Linux Festival 2024 — Texas Linux Fest is the first state-wide annual community-run conference for Linux and open source software users and enthusiasts from around the Lone Star State.
Texas LinuxFest day two live from the floor. It's a busy one, and we have some great guests sit down and chat. Then we send out Brent to walk the show expo hall.
Can't Fix What You Don't Track | Self-Hosted 127
Jul 12, 2024
Chris gets serious about tracking maintenance and alerts, why Alex is impressed by the RISC-V-powered NanoKVM, how we might end up using Docmost, and a follow-up review of LubeLogger.
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts. You can also Boost from the Web via their site.
Announcing Proxmox-NixOS — The project is still in early development and might have some rough edges, but we would be very happy to have our first beta testers!
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Epic Games Newsroom on X — 1/3 Apple has rejected our Epic Games Store notarization submission twice now, claiming the design and position of Epic’s “Install” button is too similar to Apple's "Get" button and that our "In-app purchases" label is too similar to the App Store's "In-App Purchases" label.
Apple approves Epic Games Store for iOS — Later the same day, Apple had a change of heart about the situation, and instead has approved the Epic Games Store.
Jeff Johnson - Mastodon — Apple has ZERO moral high ground. The crApp Store is the origin of many dark patterns.
tvOS 18 Hints at HomePod With Touchscreen Display — A unique touchscreen interface was allegedly found buried in tvOS 18 beta 3 by 9to5Mac, and the finding is actually relevant to the HomePod because the HomePod's software is an offshoot of the tvOS software.
Future HomePod Again Rumored to Add Curved LCD Display — In October, Kosutami shared images of component parts that allegedly belong to a prototype touch screen HomePod. Other reports at the time claimed to verify the legitimacy of these images with other sources.
Luca Casonato 🏳️🌈 on X — Google Chrome gives all *.google.com sites full access to system / tab CPU usage, GPU usage, and memory usage. It also gives access to detailed processor information, and provides a logging backchannel.
Luca Casonato 🏳️🌈 on X — For those interested: this is done through a built-in Chrome extension that can not be disabled, and does not show up in the extensions panel.
Letmein: Authenticating port knocker - Written in Rust — Letmein is a simple port knocker with a simple and secure authentication mechanism. It can be used to harden against pre-authentication attacks on services like SSH, VPN, IMAP and many more.
fwknop: Single Packet Authorization > Port Knocking — fwknop stands for the "FireWall KNock OPerator", and implements an authorization scheme called Single Packet Authorization (SPA). This method of authorization is based around a default-drop packet filter
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
How Google migrated billions of lines of code from Perforce to Piper — As of 2011, the single server had been in operation for the past eleven years of Google history. It had served Google the two-year-old startup, and had now scaled to support Google the public company. In fact, around that time, a lucky Google engineer had just snagged PR #20,000,000. Still chugging along, the server was now executing “11-12 million commands” a day.
We created the first open-source implementation of Meta’s TestGen–LLM — In February, Meta researchers published a paper titled Automated Unit Test Improvement using Large Language Models at Meta, which introduces a tool they called TestGen-LLM. The fully automated approach to increasing test coverage “with guaranteed assurances for improvement over the existing code base” created waves in the software engineering world.
Where the Economy, and the World, Are Headed - YouTube — If you want to know where the economy is headed, ask an economist. If you want to know why (and more), ask a treasury secretary, an economic diplomat, a director of the National Economic Council and the president of Harvard. Larry Summers has been all of those things (and more).
Apple may charge “monthly fees” for advanced Apple Intelligence features — “Though Apple Intelligence will be free to start, the long-term plan is to make money off the capabilities,” said the report. “The company could eventually launch something like Apple Intelligence+ — with extra features that users pay monthly fees for, just like iCloud,” it added.
Apple "will actually be making money from AI," says Bloomberg's Mark Gurman — Longer term, he speculates, the company may be planning a monthly subscription service like "Apple Intelligence+" that offers additional features to monetize the technology. Apple already takes a cut of subscription revenue from any AI partner it brings on board. "The company will be less reliant on hardware tweaks to drive its business and will actually be making money from AI — something everyone in Silicon Valley is hoping to pull off," Gurman says.
character.ai — Personalized AI for every moment of your day
Marknote 1.3 - KDE Blogs — Marknote lets you create rich text notes and easily organise them into notebooks. You can personalise your notebooks by choosing an icon and accent color for each one, making it easy to distinguish between them and keep your notes at your fingertips. Your notes are saved as Markdown files in your Documents folder, making it easy to use your notes outside of Marknote as well as inside the app.
Plasma 6.1 - KDE Community — This release introduces explicit GPU synchronization support for NVIDIA users and triple buffering support on Wayland for smoother animations.
Gadgetbridge — Gadgetbridge is a free and open source Android application that allows you to pair and manage various gadgets such as smart watches, bands, headphones, and more without the need for the vendor application. So in short, you can use Gadgetbridge instead of relying on your gadget's own proprietary app.
Emergency Access | Bitwarden Help Center — Emergency access allows users to designate and manage trusted emergency contacts, who can request access to their vault in cases of emergency.
End-of-life disaster response — If you are reading this, I, like Tommy, have disappeared to Froopyland and I miss you already. There's a lot here, but the first order of business is telling people.
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Linux Workstations - YouTube — We live in an incredible age, computers have never been so fast, nor storage so cheap, but it doesn't feel like it, right? It's not you, computing has been getting worse. And the problem is LAPTOPS.
The New 800-pound Gorilla | Coder Radio 576
Jun 26, 2024
Big Tech vs. Big Brother, how Ashley Madison predicted the rise of AI bots and the messy world of "open source" AI.
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Maestral — Maestral is a lightweight Dropbox client for macOS and Linux. It provides powerful command line tools, supports gitignore patterns to exclude local files from syncing and allows syncing multiple Dropbox accounts.
What does 'open source AI' mean, anyway? | TechCrunch — It’s this challenge that the Open Source Initiative (OSI) is trying to address, led by executive director Stefano Maffulli, through conferences, workshops, panels, webinars, reports and more.
The Model Openness Framework — Promoting Completeness and Openness for Reproducibility, Transparency, and Usability in Artificial Intelligence
dotenv: Loads environment variables from .env for nodejs projects. — Dotenv is a zero-dependency module that loads environment variables from a .env file into process.env. Storing configuration in the environment separate from code is based on The Twelve-Factor App methodology.
`🏆 dotenvx pro — dotenvx pro will build on top of the oss version of dotenvx to better support businesses
All Your Silos are Broken | LINUX Unplugged 568
Jun 23, 2024
Online identity is a ticking time bomb. Are trustworthy, open-source solutions ready to disarm it? Or will we be stuck with lackluster, proprietary systems?
Navigating the social graph — In this paper, you will find a definition of the social graph, principles for thinking about it, and practical ideas for using it for DoS prevention, social discovery, anti-impersonation, accurate ratings, and more.
Highlighter — Highlighter is like Substack & Patreon but on Nostr.
Satlantis — Satlantis is like Trip Advisor, meets Instagram and Google Places.
HiveTalk — Free Video Calls, Messaging and Screen Sharing
zap.stream — Twitch alt powered by value for value and Nostr
ostrGit — A truly censorship-resistant alternative to GitHub that has a chance of working.
Blogstack — Write decentralized blogs over relay using nostr w/ ⚡ lightning tips.
Ditto — Ditto is a Nostr community server. It has a built-in Nostr relay, a web UI, and it implements Mastodon's REST API.
SpeechNote — Speech Note let you take, read and translate notes in multiple languages. It uses Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Machine Translation to do so.
rhasspy/piper: — A fast, local neural text to speech system.
Starship — The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!
💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike — Strike is a lightning-powered app that lets you quickly and cheaply grab sats in over 100 countries. Easily integrates with Fountain.fm. Setup your Strike account, and you have one of the world's best ways to buy sats.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Boost from Fountain.FM's website and keep your current Podcast app. Or kick the tires on the Podcasting 2.0 revolution and try out Fountain.FM the app! 🚀
Study finds 1/4 of bosses hoped RTO would make staff quit — A study claims to have proof of what some have suspected: return to office mandates are just back-channel layoffs and post-COVID work culture is making everyone miserable.
Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope — Research has shed light on the profitability gains that the biggest US corporations experienced after issuing return to office mandates: There weren't any, and the policy made their staff unhappier.
DHH on X — Nothing gets me quite as fired up as discovering the future early and undistributed. That feeling of realizing that something is simply better, and the only reason it hasn't taken off yet is because the world hasn't realized it. It's amazing, and it's how I'm feeling about Linux right now. That "how did I not know it was this good" sensation.
notch on X — Alright, that's enough spyware in my OS. Do I go desktop Mac, or do I have the energy to go full Linux?
Not sure, but I'm tired of my operating system treating me like the product.
OpenAI CEO Says Company Could Become a For-Profit Corporation Like xAI, Anthropic — OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently told some shareholders that the artificial intelligence developer is considering changing its governance structure to a for-profit business that OpenAI's nonprofit board doesn't control, according to a person who heard the comments. One scenario Altman said the board is considering is a for-profit benefit corporation, which rivals such as Anthropic and xAI are using, this person said. Such a change could open the door to an eventual initial public offering of OpenAI, which currently sports a private valuation of $86 billion, and may give Altman an opportunity to take a stake in the fast-growing company, a move some investors have been pushing.
Microsoft backtracks on PC screenshot feature after outcry — Microsoft is making changes to a controversial feature announced for its new range of PCs powered by artificial intelligence after it was flagged as a potential "privacy nightmare".
Alice.Dev — The AI Bot Designed to make your business more efficient.
So Long sudo | LINUX Unplugged 567
Jun 16, 2024
Your Linux box is a-changin'. systemd has a huge new release; we'll get into the most impressive features, including the new sudo replacement. Plus, our thoughts on the new Linux Arm laptops that are just around the corner.
Announcing systemd v256 — In the weeks leading up to this release I have posted a series of serieses of posts to Mastodon about key new features in this release.
Lennart on systemd-vpick — Basically, you can now place multiple versions of the same resource in some dir of your choice, suffix that dir's name with .v/ and the you get some basic version management in place: delete or add new versions by just removing/adding new files, and the tools will find the newest item dropped in automatically.
Introduction to Portable Services — “Portable services” do not provide a fully isolated environment to the payload, like containers mostly intend to. Instead, they are more like regular system services, can be controlled with the same tools, are exposed the same way in all infrastructure, and so on. The main difference is that they use a different root directory than the rest of the system.
Trying out systemd's Portable Services — All in all, the core pieces are already in place for a very promising new technology that should make it easier for 3rd parties to provide Linux system-level software in a safe and convenient way, well done to the systemd team for a well executed concept. All it lacks is some polish around the tooling and integration.
systemd sleep — Putting a PC to sleep is complicated business and there are different mechanisms available to achieve this on Linux.
Lennart on run0 — There's a new tool in systemd, called run0. Or actually, it's not a new tool, it's actually the long existing tool systemd-run, but when invoked under the run0 name (via a symlink) it behaves a lot like a sudo clone. But with one key difference: it's not in fact SUID.
The Tragedy of systemd — Join me on a journey through the bootstrap process, the history of init, the reasons why change can be scary, and the discovery of a part of your OS you may not even know existed.
Tubearchivist: Your self hosted YouTube media server — By indexing your video collection with metadata from YouTube, you can organize, search and enjoy your archived YouTube videos without hassle offline through a convenient web interface.
Bitfocus - Companion — Bitfocus Companion enables the reasonably priced Elgato Streamdeck to be a professional shotbox surface for a huge amount of different presentation switchers, video playback software and broadcast equipment.
Meshtastic — An open source, off-grid, decentralized, mesh network built to run on affordable, low-power devices
Introducing Apple’s On-Device and Server Foundation Models — In the following overview, we will detail how two of these models — a ~3 billion parameter on-device language model, and a larger server-based language model available with Private Cloud Compute and running on Apple silicon servers — have been built and adapted to perform specialized tasks efficiently, accurately, and responsibly.
Apple Likely to Add Google Gemini and Other AI Models to iOS 18 — In conversation with reporters after the WWDC keynote, Apple's senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi revealed that as Apple Intelligence evolves, the company eventually wants to give its users a choice between different AI models, and suggested that Google Gemini could be an option in the future.
Blackmagic Design Unveils Spatial Video Camera for Shooting Apple Vision Pro Content — The URSA Cine Immersive camera features a custom stereoscopic 3D lens system with dual 8K sensors, capable of capturing a 180-degree field of view with spatial audio support. It is designed to capture content with a resolution of 8,160 x 7,200 per eye and offers 16 stops of dynamic range to ensure detail and color accuracy in every frame, with the ability to shoot stereoscopic 3D immersive cinema content at 90 frames per second.
Chef's Choice Ubuntu | LINUX Unplugged 566
Jun 10, 2024
We try Omakub, a new opinionated Ubuntu desktop for power users and macOS expats.
notch on X — Alright, that's enough spyware in my OS. Do I go desktop Mac, or do I have the energy to go full Linux? Not sure, but I'm tired of my operating system treating me like the product.
DHH on X — If I have such a fundamental misalignment with where Apple has gone, why stay? I think that was the question I finally just asked myself for the umph-teenth time, and realized I didn’t have a good answer that wasn’t just based on comfort.
For the Love of Linux — In this podcast episode, REWORK host Kimberly Rhodes talks with David Heinemeier Hansson, co-founder of 37signals and CTO, about his personal shift from using Apple products to exploring Linux and Windows platforms. He discusses the expanded platform integration at 37signals, which now includes all three operating systems.
DHH on X — The big YearofLinuxontheDesktop will be 2025. Snapdragon X chips will be ready. Folks will be sick of AI shoved into every crevasse of their life. Thank heaven for disagreeable nerds refusing to bend the knee to the corporate agenda!
Linux as the new developer default at 37signals — I've personally been having a blast over the last few months digging deeper and deeper into the Linux rabbit hole, and it's been a delight discovering just how good its become as developer platform.
Introducing Omakub — Omakub turns a fresh Ubuntu installation into a fully-configured, beautiful, and modern web development system by running a single command.
GeneBean on X — My dad was so happy with his desktop after I switched him to #Pop_OS! that he had me do the same to the laptop he takes on trips. Thanks for such a stellar distro @system76
helipad-flake — A Nix flake to provide a helipad package and NixOS module. Intended for use with nix-bitcoin.
Kopia — Fast and Secure Open-Source Backup Software
Pick: Multiplex — Multiplex is an app to watch torrents together, providing an experience similar to Apple's SharePlay and Amazon's Prime Video Watch Party.
weron — weron provides lean, fast & secure overlay networks based on WebRTC.
The Ultimate Computer | Coder Radio 573
Jun 05, 2024
The story of how Mike got in a fight with a supercomputer and, like Captain Kirk, came out on top.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
Exclusive-Arm aims to capture 50% of PC market — "Arm's market share in Windows - I think, truly, in the next five years, it could be better than 50%," CEO Rene Haas told Reuters in an interview.
Michael Dominick on X — I think I broke Gemini. I got it to agree that my Alice logo wasn't a person when it objected to giving feedback, then uploaded it again & this.... 1st screen-cap & a link.
Daniel Kokotajlo on X — n April, I resigned from OpenAI after losing confidence that the company would behave responsibly in its attempt to build artificial general intelligence — “AI systems that are generally smarter than humans.”
Google Leak Reveals Thousands of Privacy Incidents — An internal Google database obtained by 404 Media shows Google recording childrens' voices, saving license plates from Street View, and many other self-reported incidents, large and small.
Why Your Wi-Fi Router Doubles as an Apple AirTag — At issue is the way that Apple collects and publicly shares information about the precise location of all Wi-Fi access points seen by its devices. Apple collects this location data to give Apple devices a crowdsourced, low-power alternative to constantly requesting global positioning system (GPS) coordinates.
8BitDo Retro Mechanical Keyboard - M Edition — Meet the new M Edition from the 8BitDo Keyboard line. Packed with programmable keys and an intuitive control panel.
Compatible with Windows and Android.
Mistakes That Made Us Love Linux | LINUX Unplugged 565
Jun 02, 2024
The facepalm moments that make us question our sanity—and swear off sudo for a week.
Linux May Be the Best Way to Avoid the AI Nightmare — What if you care about AI's environmental impact, privacy holes, and the ethical problems of training on data without the creators' permission? The answer might be to switch to Linux. Yes, Linux.
Kate Asks about Mistakes to Avoid — Hey boys-Microsoft has officially gone off the deep end with this AI stuff. I'm pretty sure AI Clippy is pulling the strings behind the scenes. Any tips for escaping to Linux before I get assimilated? What are the big don'ts for a newbie?
Lee Ball on X — I thought I was in a backup directory when I did an rm -rf but turned out I'd forgotten the ./ and just went into /var/lib/mysql and not the backup of said directory.
ChaoticHuman on X — I think my most major beginner mistake once was something like sudochownuseraccount/ because I wanted to not have to deal with file-ownership-conflicts though I no longer remember what exactly I did. I only remember that it led to completely destroying my Linux-system.
Ken Starks on X — What are all these files with a dot before them. They aren't programs. Might as well delete them.
PDunn on X — Using fringe distos and too much distrohopping causing loss of time and not being productive. Linux can be a time sink I don't have time for. So I installed Ubuntu and moved on. I just use what works and is easy to maintain. Unplugged contributor here.
Nix from First Principles: Flake Edition — This guide is a beginner's guide to Nix and related tooling, focusing on the newer nix command, and flake.nix compared to older tools like nix-env and default.nix. It does not require any prior Nix knowledge, and instead builds up the Flake based world from first principles, so that it can serve as an introduction to Nix itself, as well as the concept and uses of Flakes.
Pick: Delfin — Delfin is a native client for the Jellyfin media server. It features a fast and clean interface to stream your media in an embedded MPV-based video player.
The End of Ownership | Self-Hosted 124
May 31, 2024
The "you'll own nothing" trend got worse this week, our thoughts about the Raspberry Pi IPO, poor Nextcloud performance, and Alex's new high-fiber obsession.
Foxes In The Henhouse | Coder Radio 572
May 29, 2024
OpenAI has a new security team led by Sam Altman, and the Biden Administration has a new AI security board led by Sam Altman. We also discuss C# 13 and .Net 9, popping bubbles, and more.
Sam Altman’s ‘Inconsistent Candor’ Is Showing — As Scarlett Johansson threatens legal action over ChatGPT's voice, the OpenAI CEO's trustworthiness is once again being called into question.
DHS establishes Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board — The Board’s first meeting is planned for early May when they will begin the task of focusing on how to develop and deploy AI technology within the United States’ critical infrastructure safely and securely.
House holds hearing on the use of AI in U.S. security and defense — 5/22/2024 - YouTube — The House Committee on Homeland Security holds a hearing to examine how artificial intelligence can be used in homeland security and the implications for AI use. Witnesses testifying at the hearing include: Troy Demmer, co-founder and chief product officer at Gecko Robotics; Michael Sikorski, chief technology officer and VP of engineering at Unit 42 of Palo Alto Networks; Ajay Amlani, president and head of the Americas at iProov; and Jake Laperruque, deputy director of Security and Surveillance Project at The Center for Democracy and Technology.
Albacore ☁️ on X — I was able to get Recall working on this bad boy 😎
Snapdragon 7c+ Gen3, 3.4 GB of RAM, no NPU in sight
ESG ETFs Struggle to Keep Investors on Board — Over the past 12 months, the $13.3 billion iShares ESG Aware MSCI USA ETF (ESGU) has experienced $9.2 billion worth of outflows. The $1 billion Xtrackers MSCI USA Leaders Equity ETF (USSG) has watched $2.5 billion go out the door over the same period.
And the $1.2 billion iShares ESG MSCI USA Leaders ETF (SUSL) has suffered $2.3 billion worth of outflows.
Star Trek: Infinite on Steam — Star Trek: Infinite is a grand strategy experience that lets you play your own Star Trek story as the leader of one of four major factions in the galaxy. Follow the specially crafted story or blaze your own trail in the first Star Trek grand strategy game.
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy — Star Trek: Starfleet Academy is a Star Trek PC simulation game developed and published by Interplay in 1997.
Boost Pick: nh — NH reimplements some basic nix commands. Adding functionality on top of the existing solutions, like nixos-rebuild, home-manager cli or nix itself.
Pick: gridplayer — Simple VLC-based media player that can play multiple videos at the same time. You can play as many videos as you like, the only limit is your hardware. It supports all video formats that VLC supports (which is all of them). You can save your playlist retaining information about the position, sound volume, loops, aspect ratio, etc.
Old Wine New Bottle | Coder Radio 571
May 22, 2024
Big Tech's latest AI flex? More like a desperate grab for attention. Google, OpenAI, and Microsoft are hyping up underwhelming updates while Sam Altman spills the tea on their shady motives.
OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk, but the new ChatGPT release can? — If a departing employee declines to sign the document, or if they violate it, they can lose all vested equity they earned during their time at the company, which is likely worth millions of dollars. One former employee, Daniel Kokotajlo, who posted that he quit OpenAI “due to losing confidence that it would behave responsibly around the time of AGI,” has confirmed publicly that he had to surrender what would have likely turned out to be a huge sum of money in order to quit without signing the document.
A leadership crisis in the Nix community (LWN) — On April 21, a group of anonymous authors and non-anonymous signatories published a lengthy open letter to the Nix community and Nix founder Eelco Dolstra calling for his resignation from the project.
RcloneShuttle — Upload your files to anywhere - GTK4 GUI for Rclone
How much CPU do You REALLY Need | Self-Hosted 123
May 17, 2024
Alex benchmarks Intel CPUs (and an Arc GPU) to find the ideal balance of age, power, and speed for your home media server. Plus, our thoughts on Immich going full-time.
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
FacilMap — FacilMap is a privacy-friendly, open-source versatile online map that combines different services based on OpenStreetMap and makes it easy to find places, plan trips and add markers, lines and routes to custom maps with live collaboration.
GpxEdit - Nextcloud — Simple Nextcloud app to load, edit and save GPX files on an interactive map. You can load/save files from your Nextcloud file storage. GPX, KML, CSV (unicsv format) and geotagged JPG are supported for loading. JPG files are loaded as waypoints. Files can be loaded in GpxEdit interface or in Files app.
The Immich core team goes full-time — Recently, a company in Austin, Texas, called FUTO contacted the team. FUTO strives to develop quality and sustainable open software. They build software alternatives that focus on giving control to users. From their mission statement:
The Best Media Server CPU... in the world. — After a solid 8 months of testing, I think we have a big enough sample size to draw some conclusions. The best media server CPU is...
mafl: Minimalistic flexible homepage — Mafl is an intuitive service for organizing your homepage. Customize Mafl to your individual needs and work even more efficiently!
Ente — Store, share, and discover your memories with absolute privacy
ArDev on X — Altman emphasizes that OpenAI is focused on quality and impact rather than deadlines. They are taking their time with releasing major updates and may even opt for a different naming convention.
Introducing image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux — Image mode for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a new deployment method that takes a container-native approach to deliver the OS as a bootc container image.
bootc Introduction — Transactional, in-place operating system updates using OCI/Docker container images. bootc is the key component in a broader mission of bootable containers.
What is InstructLab? — InstructLab is an open source project for enhancing large language models (LLMs) used in generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) applications.
InstructLab — InstructLab is a model-agnostic open source AI project that facilitates contributions to Large Language Models (LLMs).
instructlab CLI — Command-line interface. Use this to chat with the model or train the model (training consumes the taxonomy data).
IBM's Granite code model family is going open source — We're releasing a series of decoder-only Granite code models for code generative tasks, trained with code written in 116 programming languages. The Granite code models family consists of models ranging in size from 3 to 34 billion parameters, in both a base model and instruction-following model variants.
Getting Started with Fedora/CentOS bootc — The Fedora/CentOS bootc project generates reference base images that are designed for use with the bootc project. Its goal is to provide a host system easily configurable via container tooling, usable as a container host, but also to allow non-containerized deployments with applications bound to the host context.
CentOS/centos-bootc — Create and maintain base bootable container images from Fedora ELN and CentOS Stream packages.
psitransfer — Simple open source self-hosted file sharing solution. It's an alternative to paid services like Dropbox, WeTransfer.
bhh32's food-journal — Command line tool and web application to keep track of my food intake.
Pick: URL to PNG — A URL to PNG generator over HTTP with a fairly simple API accessed via query params passed to the server.
Bonus Pick: Telegraph — Telegraph is a simple Morse translator, start typing your message to see the resulting Morse code and vice versa.
Whatever It Takes | Coder Radio 569
May 08, 2024
Altman's on a spending spree for AGI – why the huge price tag? Mike's back from NYC with juicy API gossip, and we break down the incentives pumping up a giant AI bubble.
<a href="https://twitter.com/tsarnick/status/1785838281671975136?t=E9EIlRX-vHxbQ8g23lQU3A" title=""Sam Altman: I don't care if we burn $50 billion a year"" rel="nofollow">"Sam Altman: I don't care if we burn $50 billion a year" — Sam Altman: I don't care if we burn $50 billion a year, we're building AGI and it's going to be worth it
Sam on GPT4 — GPT4 is "the dumbest model any of you will ever have to use again... by a lot"
The Possibilities of AI [Entire Talk] - Sam Altman (OpenAI) - YouTube — Sam Altman is the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, the AI research and deployment company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E. Altman was president of the early-stage startup accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit research lab with the mission to build general-purpose artificial intelligence that benefits all humanity. In this conversation with Stanford adjunct lecturer Ravi Belani, Altman gives advice for aspiring AI entrepreneurs and shares his insights about the opportunities and risks of AI tools and artificial general intelligence.
"BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: "In developed countries the big winners are... — BlackRock CEO Larry Fink: "In developed countries the big winners are those with shrinking populations.. They'll rapidly develop robotics/AI.. transform productivity.. elevate living standards.. substitute humans for machines"
Apple Vision Pro a big hit in enterprise — There isn't a line item in Apple's earnings for Apple Vision Pro, but CEO Tim Cook shared a tidbit of interest during the Q2 earnings call. He said Apple Vision Pro has been purchased by half of Fortune 100 companies.
Folders as a Service | LINUX Unplugged 561
May 05, 2024
A few of our go-to tools for one-liner web servers, sharing media directly from folders, and a much needed live Arch server update, and more!
Tiny File Manager — Web based File Manager in PHP, Manage your files efficiently and easily with Tiny File Manager and it is a simple, fast and small file manager with a single file.
Self-Hosted 122: Back to the Future — How Chris created live TV streaming from his local media collection, Alex breaks down the new Open Home Foundation and what it means for self-hosters. Brent's been trying out an open-source AirDrop replacement for all systems, and much more!
LocalSend — An open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop.
Pick: audioserve — Simple personal server to serve audiofiles files from folders. Intended primarily for audio books, but anything with decent folder structure will do.
How Chris created live TV streaming from his local media collection, Alex breaks down the new Open Home Foundation and what it means for self-hosters. Brent's been trying out an open-source AirDrop replacement for all systems, and much more!
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
Open Home Foundation — The Open Home Foundation fights for the fundamental principles of privacy, choice, and sustainability for smart homes.
Zigbee2mqtt Home Assistant — ZigBee 1 2 3 4 Gang Smart Switch Tuya Smart Wireless Scenario Switch Button Switches Remoter Home Assistant SmartThings
Immich — High performance self-hosted photo and video management solution
Announcing Traefik v3 — I’m extremely proud to see that this project, born 8 years ago, has become such a critical piece of the modern cloud-native infrastructure stack, with the help of such an amazing community.
localsend — LocalSend is a free, open-source app that allows you to securely share files and messages with nearby devices over your local network without needing an internet connection.
How one clever developer has launched his own Appstore on iOS, our thoughts on how this was pulled off, and making a transition into development work late in life.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
FTC Announces Rule Banning Noncompetes — FTC’s final rule will generate over 8,500 new businesses each year, raise worker wages, lower health care costs, and boost innovation
Core Technology Fee - Support - Apple Developer — Developers operating under the new business terms for EU apps will have the option to distribute their iOS apps in the EU via the App Store, Web Distribution, and/or alternative app marketplaces.
Introducing AltStore PAL | Riley Testut — I’m thrilled to announce a brand new version of AltStore — AltStore PAL — is launching TODAY as an Apple-approved alternative app marketplace in the EU.
Sander van Vliet - Mastodon — This disables the process, removes the AI option from the Logitech Options+ UI and allows you to delete the folder without it returning.
SteerMouse —
SteerMouse is a utility that lets you freely customize buttons, wheels and cursor speed. Both USB and Bluetooth mice are supported.
Linux Festivus For the Rest of Us | LINUX Unplugged 560
Apr 28, 2024
The first LinuxFest is back and better than ever. We share stories and friends from one of the best Linux gatherings of the year: LinuxFest Northwest.
LinuxFest Northwest 2024 — An annual open-source event co-produced by Bellingham Linux Users Group, the Information Technology department at BTC, Cascade STEAM, and Jupiter Broadcasting.
Bellingham Technical College — At BTC, we're here to help you access the hands-on education that can give you an advantage in today's job market.
Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Downloads Now Available — Ubuntu 24.04 is an exciting Long Term Support (LTS) update with this new Linux distribution release being powered by the Linux 6.8 kernel, making use of Netplan for networking on the desktop, features the modernized desktop OS installer, various performance optimizations, and a ton of new features.
x32-proxy — UDP and Web Socket proxy server for Behringer and Midas digital mixer control.
Electromagnetic Field — A non-profit camping festival for those with an inquisitive mind or an interest in making things: hackers, artists, geeks, crafters, scientists, and engineers.
radio-browser.info — This is a community driven effort (like wikipedia) with the aim of collecting as many internet radio and TV stations as possible. Any help is appreciated!
Pick: Playlifin — A tool to convert a Youtube Music playlist to a Jellyfin playlists.
Pick: Playlifin Voyager — Playlifin Voyager is a tool to export and import playlists from and to your Jellyfin Server.
The year of Small Models | Coder Radio 567
Apr 24, 2024
Llama 3 and Phi-3-mini are up and running on phones, Raspberry Pis, and we give them a go. Plus Google kills the vibe, and Meta opens up Horizon OS.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
Building for our AI future — But ultimately we are a workplace and our policies and expectations are clear: this is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts coworkers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.
Meta Debuts Llama 3, Latest AI Model for Powering Chatbots — Llama 3, unveiled Thursday, is an upgrade from an AI model that Meta released last summer. Chief Product Officer Chris Cox said that model, Llama 2, has been downloaded 170 billion times. Llama 2 was billed as open source, though its license included some restrictions such as requiring companies with more than 700 million users to ask for permission to use it.
Dylan Patel on X: — Synthetic data pipelines are massive improvements over internet data
Flywheel only continues with big models too when these techniques are applied
Aran Komatsuzaki on X: "A few caveats about Phi-3:" — Phi-3-medium performs well on TriviaQA but noticeably underperforms rel. to GPT-3.5. We can guess that Phi-3 recipe doesn't magically make it understand more random factoids. It's more focused on valuable knowledges (e.g. STEM), which makes sense.
Fedora 40 beta is fastest operating system I've tested — Apps opened in the blink of an eye. The Overview appeared instantly. Everything seemed to be built around the idea that the user works at the speed of madness and the OS is there to help make it happen.
F40 Change Proposal: Drop Delta RPMs — According to early feedback from Release Engineering, it looks like it will not be feasible to address the shortcomings of Delta RPMs as they are currently implemented, and since they often no longer result in a net reduction in download sizes for upgrades, this Change proposes both to disable the generation of DeltaRPMs during the compose process, and to disable the deltarpm support in dnf / dnf5 by default.
LFNW Talk: 5 Reasons to Love NixOS — NixOS seems to be everywhere these days and has the fanatic energy usually reserved for Arch users. But WHY is it so popular? In this talk, I'll go over 5 reasons I love NixOS and you might too.
LFNW Talk: Deploying NixOS Anywhere — In this talk, we'll unlock the full potential of NixOS by exploring how its unique architecture enables installation just about anywhere—from bare metal and VMs to a VPS provider near you.
LFNW Talk: LINUX Unplugged LIVE — We're recording a live edition of LINUX Unplugged in person. Our weekly Linux talk show with no script, no limits, surprise guests, and tons of opinions.
Forbidden Fruit | Self-Hosted 121
Apr 19, 2024
Special guest Casey Liss from the Accidental Tech Podcast joins the show to discuss his homelab, how he uses HomeBridge, and his delightfully complex garage door sensor system.
Then Alex and Casey do their "best" to convince Chris the Apple Vision Pro is an excellent remote admin tool.
Splitscreen App — Right now Splitscreen only allows you to create one extra virtual display. If you also use Mac Virtual Display that means you can have up to two Mac displays on your Apple Vision Pro.
FOSS Feed & Care | Coder Radio 566
Apr 17, 2024
We delve into the top 3 open-source revenue streams, expose the pitfalls, and discuss what could be done quickly to improve the situation.
Open Source's Funding Fiasco - dominickm.com — I’ve been thinking a lot about how we as a community and industry can make sure open-source projects keep getting the love they deserve. It’s no secret that the traditional funding model of donations and sponsorships is more than a little shaky.
LocalStack — LocalStack is a cloud development platform that facilitates building/testing of cloud and serverless applications on your local machine. At its core, it features a service emulator that runs in a single container on your laptop or in your CI environment.
Watch 3 Body Problem | Netflix Official Site — Across continents and decades, five brilliant friends make earth-shattering discoveries as the laws of science unravel and an existential threat emerges.
Top 5 Essential Apps | LINUX Unplugged 558
Apr 14, 2024
We asked, and you answered: Your top 5 Linux app essentials and post-install rituals. Plus, some news to better cope with "extreme file-system damage."
The Great Llama | Coder Radio 565
Apr 10, 2024
Why does Meta give away Llma for free? What's in it for them?
Plus, our thoughts on the data showing the trades are starting to see a boom, and new coding jobs are declining.
Cloud Next 2024: Gmail voice input, Gemini for Google Chat, more — Google is updating Help me write in mobile Gmail with voice prompting and input that lets you “send emails easily when you’re on the go.” Meanwhile, an “instant polish” feature will “convert rough notes to a complete email with one-click.” Google shared today that “70% of enterprise users who use Help Me Write in Docs or Gmail end up using Gemini’s suggestions.”
Google announces Axion, its first custom Arm-based data center processor | TechCrunch — Google did not provide any documentation to back these claims up and, like us, you’d probably like to know more about these chips. We asked a lot of questions, but Google politely declined to provide any additional information. No availability dates, no pricing, no additional technical data. Those “benchmark” results? The company wouldn’t even say which X86 instance it was comparing Axion to.
Configuring Proxmox For Hetzner - YouTube — Throughout the video, we delve into the nitty-gritty of Proxmox configuration, highlighting key steps such as booting from the drives, setting up network devices, and managing SSH access over Port 2222. I'll walk you through running and connecting to your virtual machines, ensuring you understand every command and its purpose.
Migrate to Proxmox VE — This article aims to assist users in transitioning to Proxmox Virtual Environment. The first part explains the core concepts of Proxmox VE, while the second part outlines several methods for migrating VMs to Proxmox VE. Although it was written with VMware as the source in mind, most sections should apply to other source hypervisors as well.
Dockge — A fancy, easy-to-use and reactive self-hosted docker compose.yaml stack-oriented manager.
Re-Re-Rewrite it in Rust | Coder Radio 564
Apr 03, 2024
Microsoft wins the foot-in-mouth award this week, and Google gets the Rust religion - but Mike is skeptical.
FFmpeg on X — The xz fiasco has shown how a dependence on unpaid volunteers can cause major problems. Trillion dollar corporations expect free and urgent support from volunteers.
Rust developers at Google twice as productive as C++ devs — Speaking at the Rust Nation UK Conference in London this week, Lars Bergstrom, director of engineering at Google, who works on Android Platform Tools & Libraries, described the web titan's experience migrating projects written in Go or C++ to the Rust programming language.
Two Persona Video Demo on X — Here's a video of two Persona (plus the one looking at them) provided by Apple. This wasn't recorded from my demo yesterday. It's just a demo to show what spatial Persona on Apple Vision Pro looks like
The xz Backdoor Exposed 🚨 | LINUX Unplugged 556
Mar 31, 2024
We're breaking down the attack: how it works, how it was hidden, and why time was running out for the attacker.
Andres Freund on Mastodon — I was doing some micro-benchmarking at the time, needed to quiesce the system to reduce noise. Saw sshd processes were using a surprising amount of CPU, despite immediately failing because of wrong usernames etc....
rwmj on Hacker News — Very annoying - the apparent author of the backdoor was in communication with me over several weeks trying to get xz 5.6.x added to Fedora 40 & 41 because of its "great new features"
Matteo Croce on X — I'm the author of such PR. While I absolutely didn't know that libxz had a backdoor, I really think that libraries should be loaded on-demand when rarely used, hence my change :)
Mobile Game Ads Are Boosting Podcast Follower Counts — Wondery, iHeart and Lemonada Media are all using a non-public product from MowPod - which gives extra lives and game credits to gamers if they follow shows on Apple Podcasts from game apps.
Apple announces that RCS support is coming to iPhone — The feature will launch via a software update “later next year” and bring a wide range of iMessage-style features to messaging between iPhone and Android users.
Helix — Multiple cursors as a core editing primitive, inspired by Kakoune. Commands manipulate selections which allows concurrent code editing.
Pick: ATLauncher — A launcher for Minecraft which integrates multiple different modpacks to allow you to download and install modpacks easily and quickly.
Pick: Dissent — Unofficial GTK4 Discord client in Go, use at your own risk!
Apple Loses It's Shine | Coder Radio 562
Mar 22, 2024
The antitrust gloves are off as Apple’s legal brawl with Uncle Sam kicks into high gear. We dig through the documents and are surprised by a few things that seem off.
Open WebUI — Open WebUI is an extensible, feature-rich, and user-friendly self-hosted WebUI for various LLM runners, supported LLM runners include Ollama and OpenAI-compatible APIs.
Ollama — Get up and running with large language models, locally.
LM Studio - Discover, download, and run local LLMs — 🤖 - Run LLMs on your laptop, entirely offline
👾 - Use models through the in-app Chat UI or an OpenAI compatible local server
📂 - Download any compatible model files from HuggingFace 🤗 repositories
🔭 - Discover new & noteworthy LLMs in the app's home page
🍔 Lunch at SCaLE 🍇 — Let's put an official time down on the calendar to get together. The Yardhouse has always been a solid go-to, so sit down and break bread with the Unplugged crew during the lunch break on Saturday!
SCaLEing Nix | LINUX Unplugged 554
Mar 17, 2024
We're on the ground live at NixCon and SCaLE. We catch up with old friends, and discover how Nix is devouring the Linux world one function at a time.
Flox — Create development environments with all the dependencies you need and easily share them with colleagues. Work consistently across the entire software lifecycle.
flox on GitHub — Developer environments you can take with you.
foss-north — foss-north is a free / open source conference covering both software and hardware from the technical perspective. We provide a meeting place for the Nordic foss communities and will bring together great speakers with great audiences.
An Open Letter from NixOS Users Against MIC Sponsorship — Several members of the community are uneasy with the current happenings around the North American Gathering aimed at NixOS Users and its community (also known as NixCon [sic] NA).
Pick: nix-starter-configs — Simple and documented config templates to help you get started with NixOS + home-manager + flakes.
No CUDA for You! | Coder Radio 561
Mar 13, 2024
NVIDIA locks CUDA down further, and we ponder what it might take to break their stranglehold on the market, Zuck's brilliant move that put an egg on his face, and we take a minute to appreciate new developments with Java.
Brad Neuberg on X — Wow so evidently the quarter that Meta got slammed for expenses & earnings it turns out Zuck was actually massively buying available GPU compute on the market to be ready for scaling AI, increasing expenses.
Joe Burnett (🔑)³ on X — Jeff Bezos: "You can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time.”
🍔 Lunch at SCaLE 🍇, Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 1:30 PM | Meetup — Let's put an official time down on the calendar to get together. The Yardhouse has always been a solid go-to, so sit down and break bread with the Unplugged crew during the lunch break on Saturday!
Portably Predictable Productivity | LINUX Unplugged 553
Mar 10, 2024
We each bring surprise topics, a mix of hardware and software, as we prepare to hit the road for NixCon and SCaLE.
Super Productivity — Super Productivity is an advanced todo list app with integrated Timeboxing and time tracking capabilities. It also comes with integrations for Jira, Gitlab, GitHub and Open Project.
How Hard Could it Be? | Self-Hosted 118
Mar 08, 2024
Alex's new Epyc server build, and Jon Seager from Canonical joins us to chat about Nix in the homelab, packaging Scrutiny, and how Nix fits with existing infrastructure management tools.
Juju — Juju is an open source orchestration engine for software operators that enables the deployment, integration and lifecycle management of applications at any scale, on any infrastructure using charms.
Packaging Scrutiny for NixOS · Jon Seager — In a recent (well, recent-ish) episode of the Self Hosted Show, there was some talk of a hard drive monitoring tool called Scrutiny. Scrutiny is a hard drive monitoring tool that exposes S.M.A.R.T data in a nice, clean dashboard. It gathers that S.M.A.R.T data using the venerable smartd, which is a Linux daemon that monitors S.M.A.R.T data from a huge number of ATA, IDE, SCSI-3 drives. The code is available on Github.
Packaging a go app for NixOS — When I found that one of the apps I use daily on my servers was not available in nixpkgs, I thought I'd take a stab at packaging it.
Automatic Ripping Machine (ARM) Scripts — Insert an optical disc (Blu-ray, DVD, CD) and checks to see if it's audio, video (Movie or TV), or data, then rips it.
🍔 Lunch at SCaLE 🍇, Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 1:30 PM — Let's put an official time down on the calendar to get together. The Yardhouse has always been a solid go-to, so sit down and break bread with the Unplugged crew during the lunch break on Saturday!
Artificial Information | Coder Radio 560
Mar 06, 2024
Apple is pissed, and we'll dig into why. Plus, there are some big hints at Apple's AI plans; Meta's had a rough morning, and Sergey Brin popped back up at Google and proceeded to blow it immediately.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
Victoria Nuland, third-highest ranking US diplomat and critic of Russia's war in Ukraine, retiring — She had been a candidate to succeed Wendy Sherman as deputy Secretary of State and had served as acting deputy since Sherman’s retirement seven months ago but lost an internal administration personnel battle when President Joe Biden nominated Kurt Campbell to the no. 2 spot. Campbell took office last month.
The App Store, Spotify, and Europe’s thriving digital music market - Apple — The primary advocate for this decision — and the biggest beneficiary — is Spotify, a company based in Stockholm, Sweden. Spotify has the largest music streaming app in the world, and has met with the European Commission more than 65 times during this investigation.
Will Oremus on X — - Apple complains there was no "credible evidence of consumer harm"
- Spotify is pleased but says “it does not solve Apple’s bad behaviour
Teslaconomics on X — Google hackathon to stop racism & sexism in Gemeni and the founder of Google, Sergey Brin, shows up to get front row seats
Te𝕏asLindsay™ on X — Co-founder of Google, Sergey Brin, seems to think they only messed up on their image generator and fails to acknowledge that Google’s chatbot is just as broken.
Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 on X — And they are lobbying as a group with great intensity to establish a government protected cartel, to lock in their shared agenda and corrupt products for decades to come.
Donations - Panther Pride Boosters — As many know, funding for the arts is abysmal. That is actually a major part of the primary mission of this booster club, to raise funds to allow our students to get the experiences they deserve. 100% of all donations support the Ridgeview High School Panther Pride Band and Color Guard.
Plasma's Perfect Play | LINUX Unplugged 552
Mar 03, 2024
Plasma 6 is out, and we've been giving it a go. What's new, our thoughts, and the lessons other desktops should learn.
NVK is now ready for prime time — Today, I'm proud to announce that NVK, the open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa, is now ready for prime time.
FUSE Passthrough Support May Land For Linux 6.9 To Help Boost I/O Performance — The FUSE passthrough mode patches were recently queued up into FUSE.git's for-next branch. With the patches now in the "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 6.9 merge window in March, the code will hopefully be merged for this next kernel cycle barring any last minute issues.
KDE MegaRelease 6 — With Plasma 6, our technology stack has undergone two major upgrades: a transition to the latest version of our application framework, Qt, and a migration to the modern Linux graphics platform, Wayland.
This Week in Bitcoin — A high-signal Bitcoin news podcast focused on analysis you'll find valuable.
42keebs.eu — Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded custom keyboard shop.
Pick: cpu-controller — CPU Controller for Linux is a straightforward GUI application based on PyQt6, enabling users to toggle individual CPU cores on or off in a Linux system to save battery life.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
Mark Gurman on X — BREAKING NEWS: Apple cancels the Apple Car project after a decade-long, multi-billion effort to rival Tesla. Some employees shifting to Generative AI teams.
Florida Man Games poke fun at state’s reputation — Promoted as “the most insane athletic showdown on Earth,” the Florida Man Games poke fun at the state’s reputation for bizarre stories that involve brawling, drinking, gunfire, reptile wrangling and other antics carrying a risk of time in jail or intensive care.
Nate Silver on X — They need to shut Gemini down. It is several months away from being ready for prime time. It is astounding that Google released it in this state.
Leftism on X — The head of Google's Gemini AI everyone.
samir arora: Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, will be fired or he will resign, says this market veteran — Responding to inquiries on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Arora expressed his belief that Pichai's tenure might come to an end soon, asserting, "My guess is he will be fired or resign - as he should. After being in the lead on AI he has completely failed on this and let others take over."
Dare Obasanjo🐀 on X — Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, argues that we should stop saying kids should learn to code.
AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation — Over the past two years AMD has quietly been funding an effort though to bring binary compatibility so that many NVIDIA CUDA applications could run atop the AMD ROCm stack at the library level -- a drop-in replacement without the need to adapt source code.
Sid Sijbrandij on X — If forced back into the office and needing a break: play these meetings fullscreen without sound and listen to a podcast on your over ear headphones. Nobody will interrupt your break :)
AI Under Your Control | LINUX Unplugged 551
Feb 25, 2024
Corporate AI is a hot mess, but open-source alternatives can be open-ended chaos. We’ll test some of the best ways to get local AI tools under your control.
Google halts Gemini image generation to fix White balance — Google has suspended availability of text-to-image capabilities in its recently released Gemini multimodal foundational AI model, after it failed to accurately represent White Europeans and Americans in specific historical contexts.
Stable Diffusion 3 — The Stable Diffusion 3 suite of models currently ranges from 800M to 8B parameters. This approach aims to align with our core values and democratize access, providing users with a variety of options for scalability and quality to best meet their creative needs.
Deedy on X — Stable Diffusion 3 launched today and may be the best image gen alternative to Gemini! (with examples)
Google goes “open AI” with Gemma, a free, open-weights chatbot family — Developed by Google DeepMind and other Google AI teams, Gemma pulls from techniques learned during the development of Gemini, which is the family name for Google's most capable (public-facing) commercial LLMs, including the ones that power its Gemini AI assistant. Google says the name comes from the Latin gemma, which means "precious stone."
gemma.cpp — Lightweight, standalone C++ inference engine for Google's Gemma models.
InvokeAI — InvokeAI is an implementation of Stable Diffusion, the open source text-to-image and image-to-image generator. It provides a streamlined process with various new features and options to aid the image generation process.
Nixified AI — The goal of nixified.ai is to simplify and make available a large repository of AI executable code that would otherwise be impractical to run yourself, due to package management and complexity issues.
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
Raid Owl - YouTube — Hi there, my name is Brett and I'm just a nerdy dude who is passionate about home lab stuff, networking, pc builds, and tech in general. I created Raid Owl to provide a creative outlet for my passion and hopefully help people along the way.
Core NGINX Developer Forks Web Server Into Freenginx — As such, starting from today, I will no longer participate in nginx development as run by F5. Instead, I’m starting an alternative project, which is going to be run by developers, and not corporate entities:
PurrfectProse — About halfway through January 2024 we reorganized the spare room and Alex pointed out that I’d hardly been reading since Ella had been born and my ‘to read’ staging bookcase was getting perilously full. So a mission began to get back on the wagon.
R36S Handheld Game Console — On The Go Design: Ultra-compact size and old style design, it is very convenient whether you carry it with you during business trips, travel or camping. Recall the dream of the games anytime, anywhere.
🍔 Lunch at SCaLE 🍇, Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 1:30 PM | Meetup — Let's put an official time down on the calendar to get together. The Yardhouse has always been a solid go-to, so sit down and break bread with the Unplugged crew during the lunch break on Saturday!
How Nvidia’s CUDA Monopoly In Machine Learning Is Breaking - OpenAI Triton And PyTorch 2.0 — This report will touch on topics such as why Google’s TensorFlow lost out to PyTorch, why Google hasn’t been able to capitalize publicly on its early leadership of AI, the major components of machine learning model training time, the memory capacity/bandwidth/cost wall, model optimization, why other AI hardware companies haven’t been able to make a dent in Nvidia’s dominance so far, why hardware will start to matter more, how Nvidia’s competitive advantage in CUDA is wiped away, and a major win one of Nvidia’s competitors has at a large cloud for training silicon.
Ready Player Linux | LINUX Unplugged 550
Feb 18, 2024
Chris spends the week in a VR desktop, revealing the glitches, gains, and VR's open-source future.
Simula One - Standalone (Preorder) — Contains detachable compute pack with SimulaOS pre-installed. Can be optionally tethered to host PCs for gaming and other purposes.
umlaeute/v4l2loopback — This module allows you to create "virtual video devices". Normal (v4l2) applications will read these devices as if they were ordinary video devices, but the video will not be read from e.g. a capture card but instead it is generated by another application.
Linux VR Adventures Wiki — A collection of links, useful resources and guides for the amazing world of VR on Linux.
The kernel becomes its own CNA — As many of you all know, I have talked a lot about CVEs in the past, and yes, I think the system overall is broken in many ways, but this change is a way for us to take more responsibility for this, and hopefully make the process better over time. - Greg Kroah-Hartman
aksiksi/compose2nix — A tool to automatically generate a NixOS config from a Docker Compose project.
arion via NixOS configuration example — Example setup running the Grocy kitchen inventory management system via linuxserver.io image and arion on NixOS.
Nebula is Not the Fastest Mesh VPN — For this first public release of data, we’ve chosen to test the most popular mesh VPN options we’re aware of, so we will be comparing Nebula (in AES mode), Netmaker, Tailscale, and ZeroTier (note, this list is intentionally in alphabetical order, as additional confirmation of our commitment to fairness).
Build a Custom LLM with Chat With RTX — Chat With RTX is a demo app that lets you personalize a GPT large language model (LLM) connected to your own content—docs, notes, videos, or other data. Leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), TensorRT-LLM, and RTX acceleration, you can query a custom chatbot to quickly get contextually relevant answers. And because it all runs locally on your Windows RTX PC or workstation, you’ll get fast and secure results.
Charlie Bilello on X — With a $1.83 trillion market cap, Nvidia just passed Amazon to become the 4th largest US company.
garry on X — Google's Gemini can't show me the fastest way to copy memory in c# because it's unethical.
Apple won’t be forced to open up iMessage by EU — The European Commission has decided against designating iMessage as a core platform service. Microsoft’s Edge browser, Bing search engine, and advertising business also avoided the additional scrutiny.
Will it Nixcloud? | LINUX Unplugged 549
Feb 11, 2024
Deploying Nextcloud the Nix way promises a paradise of reproducibility and simplicity. But is it just a painful trek through configuration hell? We built the dream Nextcloud using Nix and faced reality.
45Drives/autotier — A passthrough FUSE filesystem that intelligently moves files between storage tiers based on frequency of use, file age, and tier fullness.
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
🍔 Lunch at SCaLE 🍇, Sat, Mar 16, 2024, 1:30 PM | Meetup — Let's put an official time down on the calendar to get together. The Yardhouse has always been a solid go-to, so sit down and break bread with the Unplugged crew during the lunch break on Saturday!
Tailscale for Docker Container - Chris' Note — The basic idea is to create a tailscale service container, that runs along side the main app container. You then set the main app container to use the tailscale container for networking.
audiobookshelf-docker-compose.yml — Chris' docker-compose.yml for audiobookshelf that uses a Tailscale service container for networking.
2024.2: More voice, more icons, more integrations, more... everything! — In general, contributions to our open-source project have been amazing this month. I’ve never seen so many contributed bug fixes, improvements, and new features in a single release. Like… 21 new integrations! This is, without a doubt, the largest release we’ve ever put out. A big shout-out to everyone who helped! ❤️
Immersed on Meta Quest — VR Offices! FREE app for multiple Virtual Screens in VR for Mac/PC/Linux (with no extra hardware) in stunning virtual worlds. Immersed is great for solo work with multiple screens in a virtual cafe, or for collaborating with your team around even more screens and whiteboards!
Rails 7.1 expands its support for ActiveRecord asynchronous queries — ActiveRecord async queries are a way to execute Active Record queries in parallel, which can improve the performance of your Rails application. This is especially useful for slow or complex queries or for applications that need to handle a lot of concurrent requests.
In-depth Guide to ActiveRecord load_async in Rails 7 — This seemingly simple change of just adding a single new method that takes no arguments has profound implications for database layer interactions. In this tutorial, we’ll deep dive into the intricacies of this new load async API. We’ll discuss lazy-loaded queries, Ruby threading model, blocking IO, database pool vs. max connections limit, and performance impact of concurrent database clients.
Uncomfortable Linux Truths | LINUX Unplugged 548
Feb 04, 2024
Some uncomfortable truths about using Linux, and then we introduce a new segment: Will it Nix?
The Holy Grail Nextcloud setup made easy by NixOS · Carlos Vaz — Hosting Nextcloud has become easier over time, thanks to its docker-compose example setups and to the Snap for use mostly on Ubuntu systems. However, having a faster and more optimized setup can take some effort on these platforms. Thankfully, on NixOS it’s not hard at all, as I’ll show you.
Mitch Downey on PodcastIndex Social — I've been working on Podverse for 10 years now (I didn't even know how to code when I started), and I absolutely love what we've accomplished, but I had always hoped we would have a thriving open source community by now...
The Open Road by Dave Jones — They [Apple] chose to respect podcaster’s choices by reading the Podcasting 2.0 tag from the RSS feed also. By making this choice, they planted their flag firmly on the side of open, RSS based podcasting.
Value 4 Value Audiobooks – oppy1984.com — For a few months now both Adam and Dave have talked about value 4 value (v4v) audiobooks [...] But after the discussion in episode #146 I decided to start writing and get my ideas out there.
Libro.fm — Pick your local bookstore to support with your purchases.
Bookshop.org — Bookshop.org works to connect readers with independent booksellers all over the world.
New GitHub Copilot Research Finds 'Downward Pressure On Code Quality' —
"We find disconcerting trends for maintainability," explains the paper's abstract. "Code churn -- the percentage of lines that are reverted or updated less than two weeks after being authored -- is projected to double in 2024 compared to its 2021, pre-AI baseline. We further find that the percentage of 'added code' and 'copy/pasted code' is increasing in proportion to 'updated,' 'deleted,' and 'moved 'code. In this regard, AI-generated code resembles an itinerant contributor, prone to violate the DRY-ness [don't repeat yourself] of the repos visited."
Apple Has Sold Approximately 200,000 Vision Pro Headsets — Apple has sold upwards of 200,000 Vision Pro headsets, MacRumors has learned from a source with knowledge of Apple's sales numbers. Apple began accepting pre-orders for the Vision Pro on January 19, so the headset has been available for purchase in the U.S. for 10 days.
Apple Vision Pro Review — We have rounded up some of the videos below from well-known YouTube creators and reporters, including Marques Brownlee, Joanna Stern, and others.
President Biden is preparing to announce chipmaker subsidies. — So says The Wall Street Journal in a report this morning that his administration will give “billions of dollars” to the likes of Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), both of which have started US manufacturing projects, although TSMC, at least, is behind schedule.
Behind the Shelves | LINUX Unplugged 547
Jan 28, 2024
Data-hoard with purpose and manage your audiobooks and podcasts with one application, plus the lone Linux box that remains on Mars.
Administrator Bill Nelson announces the end of Ingenuity Mars Helicopter - YouTube — NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has announced that the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter has come to an end. The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter made history by achieving the first powered, controlled flight on another planet on April 19, 2021. Despite initial plans for up to five flights, the helicopter has exceeded expectations and executed an impressive 72 flights on the Red Planet. NASA pays tribute to its accomplishments, which have far exceeded what was thought possible and have paved the way for future flights in our solar system.
#ThanksIngenuity – NASA’s Mars Helicopter Team Says Goodbye - YouTube — The Mars Ingenuity Helicopter flew for the last time on Jan. 18, 2024, and NASA concluded its flight operations after post-flight imagery confirmed damage to at least one of the rotorcraft’s rotor blades that rendered it no longer capable of flight. As the historic mission comes to its end, Ingenuity’s team reflects on some of their favorite moments and memories from the helicopter’s time on Mars.
Zellij — A terminal workspace with batteries included
nix-flatpak — Declarative flatpak manager for NixOS inspired by declarative-flatpak and nix-darwin's homebrew module. NixOs and home-manager modules are provided for system wide or user flatpaks installation.
A NAS in Every Home | Self-Hosted 115
Jan 26, 2024
Brian Moses joins us and shares his most recent NAS build and love for 3D printers. Then Alex gets into the hardware he's deploying around the house, and why we don't see eye-to-eye on ZigBee.
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 has a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
The Bambu A1 Mini — It is the $299 price tag that pushes the Bambu A1 Mini ever so slightly closer to being the best beginner 3D printer than its more expensive siblings.
Blue Series Smart Fan/Light Canopy Module | Inovelli — Control your fan speed and light dim levels individually remotely. Combining the features of our 2-1 and Fan Switch, this canopy module is the most advanced on the market. With the ability to adjust the dimming and fan speed, ramp rate, min/max levels, default light and fan levels, and more.
Automation Trigger - Home Assistant — Triggers are what starts the processing of an automation
rule. When any of the automation’s triggers becomes true (trigger fires), Home Assistant will validate the conditions, if any, and call the action.
Using Tailscale with Docker — The following docker-compose.yml file demonstrates one approach, essentially setting up a Tailscale sidecar container for our service
StevenBlack/hosts: 🔒 — Consolidating and extending hosts files from several well-curated sources. Optionally pick extensions for porn, social media, and other categories.
Sovereign Stack — Sovereign Stack is a complete network solution enabling you to deploy Bitcoin-only website infrastructure. It consists of this website which documents the project, and the Sovereign Stack code. Together these contain all the information you might need to create and operate your own Value4Value websites based on Bitcoin/Lightning.
The App Store Addiction | Coder Radio 554
Jan 24, 2024
We knew they'd be petulant, but even our expectations were higher than this. We dig into how Apple dunked on devs after last week's show, yet another Microsoft hack, and more.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 is out with a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
DHH on X — Apple would be wise to study the long arc of Microsoft’s history. Learn that you can win the battle, say, against Epic, and end up losing the war for the hearts and minds of developers.
Apple's Big Brother Now - dominickm.com — Getting right down to brass App Store tax. You’re almost certainly not saving any money. Apple is only taking three-percent off their cut even if you process the payment via another processor. Payment processors charging what they tend, that means you will likely save no money whatsoever; this is increasingly apparent once you begin to consider the implementation cost of setting up third-party payment processing and complying with the rest of Apple’s onerous terms.
Evan on X — Apple expects to sell an estimated 300K-400K Vision Pros in 2024 - Bloomberg
Apple Vision Pro: Lack of Netflix, YouTube, App Store Tensions Threaten Device - Bloomberg — Some big name developers thus far aren’t doing much to help the device. Three of the world’s most popular streaming services — Netflix Inc., YouTube and Spotify Technology SA — have already signaled that they won’t be launching visionOS software or enabling their iPad apps to run on the Vision Pro.
What You’re Missing about NixOS | LINUX Unplugged 546
Jan 21, 2024
Trying NixOS can be fraught with complexity, half-completed guides, and boring videos. Even if you never plan to switch to NixOS, we invite you to come along for a hype-free ride that digs into one of the most rapidly developing areas of Linux.
Southern California Linux Expo 21x — SCaLE is the largest community-run open-source and free software conference in North America. It is held annually in the greater Los Angeles area.
FOSDEM 2024 - Feb 3-4 — FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate. Every year, thousands of developers of free and open source software from all over the world gather at the event in Brussels. You don't need to register. Just turn up and join in!
Getting started with NixOS by Mike Kelly — I previously wrote Why do people love NixOS so much? to try and explain the advantages of using Nix. So now let’s dive in and actually do an install!
Zero to Nix — Your guide to learning Nix and flakes.
distrobox — Use any linux distribution inside your terminal.
📻 Boost with Fountain.FM — Fountain 1.0 is out with a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
Mark Gurman on X — The Vision Pro virtual keyboard is a complete write-off at least in 1.0. You have to poke each key one finger at a time like you did before you learned how to type. There is no magical in-air typing. You can also look at a character and pinch. You’ll want a Bluetooth keyboard.
Here's How Vision Pro Demos Will Work at Apple Stores — In his Power On newsletter today, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman said each demo will last around 20 to 25 minutes. After a calibration process, he said the customer will view still photos, panoramas, spatial photos, and spatial videos in the Photos app. Next, he said customers will learn how to position multiple app windows and scroll through pages in Safari. Then, they will view immersive 3D content, including movie clips, sports, and a tightrope scene.
Epic’s California injunction against Apple’s anti-steering rule takes effect as Supreme Court denies both parties’ petitions — The most important question, however, is whether the United States Department of Justice, which is reportedly readying a major antitrust case against Apple, and/or other private parties are now going to sue Apple over the App Store monopoly, potentially with stronger expert testimony (which is not even the only way in which they could benefit form the lessons learned from Epic Games v. Apple).
gamesfray on X🧵1/4 — The #EpicGames v. #Apple judgment is now FINAL. The Supreme Court has denied either party's petition for review.
This means the anti-anti-steering injunction that Epic won under California Unfair Competition Law enters into force. Apple wanted to prevent or delay that.
🧵1/4
App Store to Be 'Split in Two' Ahead of EU iPhone Sideloading Deadline — Apple is apparently planning to roll out adjustments to comply with the new legal requirements in the coming weeks, including splitting off the App Store in the EU from the rest of the world. The deadline for Apple to comply with the DMA is March 7, so the company has just over seven weeks to enact the changes.
Apple to Shutter 121-Person San Diego AI Team in Reorganization — Apple Inc. is shutting a 121-person team related to artificial intelligence operations in San Diego, leaving many employees at risk of termination, according to people familiar with the matter.
AI Briefing: What marketing and tech experts noticed at CES 2024 — Unsurprisingly in Las Vegas last week, AI was inarguably one of the hot topics. Major brands and startups alike spent the week touting new AI chatbots for everything from cars and bikes to smart TVs and personal devices.
3,062 Days Later | LINUX Unplugged 545
Jan 14, 2024
Kent Overstreet, the creator of bcachefs, helps us understand where his new filesystem fits, what it's like to upstream a new filesystem, and how they've solved the RAID write hole.
bcachefs — bcachefs is an advanced new filesystem for Linux, with an emphasis on reliability and robustness and the complete set of features one would expect from a modern filesystem.
bcachefs Erasure coding — Bcachefs takes advantage of the fact that it is already a copy-on-write filesystem. If we're designing our filesystem to avoid update-in-place, why would we do update-in-place in our RAID implementation?
bcachefs Caching — bcachefs can be configured for writethrough, writeback, and writearound caching, as well as other more specialized setups.
bachefs Compression — Unlike other filesystems that typically do compression at the block level, bcachefs does compression at the extent level - variable size chunks, up to (by default) 128k.
bcachefs Encryption — bcachefs uses AEAD style encryption (ChaCha20/Poly1305), where each encrypted block is authenticated with a MAC, with a chain of trust up to root (the superblock), and every encrypted block has a unique nonce.
(2015) [ANNOUNCE] bcachefs - a general purpose COW filesystem — It's taken a long time to get to this point - longer than I would have guessed if you'd asked me back when we first started talking about it - but I'm pretty damn proud of where it's at now.
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 is out with a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
Using the occ command — Nextcloud’s occ command (origins from “ownCloud Console”) is Nextcloud’s command-line interface. You can perform many common server operations with occ, such as installing and upgrading Nextcloud, manage users, encryption, passwords, LDAP setting, and more.
Jellystat — Jellystat is a free and open source Statistics App for Jellyfin
OpenSSH: Release Notes — This release contains fixes for a newly-discovered weakness in the SSH transport protocol, a logic error relating to constrained PKCS#11 keys in ssh-agent(1) and countermeasures for programs that invoke ssh(1) with user or hostnames containing invalid characters.
audiobookshelf — Self-hosted audiobook and podcast server
Stirling-PDF: locally hosted web application — This is a powerful locally hosted web based PDF manipulation tool using docker that allows you to perform various operations on PDF files, such as splitting merging, converting, reorganizing, adding images, rotating, compressing, and more. This locally hosted web application started as a 100% ChatGPT-made application and has evolved to include a wide range of features to handle all your PDF needs.
Traefik 101 Guide - Perfect Media Server — In this article we will be discussing reverse proxies, how they will enable you to securely expose webapps running on your LAN to the outside world, and how to automate issuing TLS (the artist formerly known as SSL) certificates using Let's Encrypt, Traefik, Cloudflare and Namecheap.
SSH 114 Boost Barn! — Thank you to everyone who supports the show with a Boost!
iPad Friend Zone | Coder Radio 552
Jan 10, 2024
A prominent developer has brought the anti-trust heat against Apple to the public, kicking off a chain reaction that could have gone very wrong for Apple. Plus, why the Apple Vision Pro is destined for the Friend Zone.
Macs can now detect liquids in USB-C ports — On the Mac, however, the code suggests that the daemon is only used for “analytics” and is not associated with end-user features. While Apple may eventually implement an alert similar to the one that already exists in iOS, it seems more likely that the data collected by this daemon will be used for technicians to determine whether a Mac is eligible for free repair.
The company is asking developers not to refer to visionOS apps using terms such as AR (augmented reality), VR (virtual reality), XR (extended reality), or MR (mixed reality). Instead, Apple says that visionOS apps are “spatial computing apps.”
DHH on X — We have some great, native, dedicated apps ready for HEY Calendar. The Android one is just sitting there waiting for us to push publish in the Google Play Store. Guess what's happening to the other one for iOS? Still "in review" since mid December 🙄
DHH on X — Ah @apple, not this shit again. I thought we sorted it out 2.5 years ago in round one?! Why oh why must it be like this! You know we're not just going to roll over, that we're never going to pay the 30% ransom. Just approve the fucking app and we'll be on our merry way!
DHH on X — Apple just called to let us know they're rejecting the HEY Calendar app from the App Store (in current form). Same bullying tactics as last time: Push delicate rejections to a call with a first-name-only person who'll softly inform you it's your wallet or your kneecaps.
Apple rejects the HEY Calendar from their App Store —
So what’s going to happen? I don’t know, but I do know that we’ll keep fighting. We’re never going to roll over and pay Apple 30% in protection money to be left alone. Last time we found a way, and we will again.
We’ve resubmitted the HEY Calendar app to Apple — Did we want to work through the weekend to add this? No. But we also don’t want to leave our customers with iPhones waiting for our awesome native HEY Calendar app.
DHH on X — Apple approved the HEY Calendar!! It's now available for download in the @appstore
. Ridiculous it needed this level of awareness/pressure, but I'm so happy for our iOS team to see their work through the weekend pay off in full. Thanks to all who cheered!
Amazon's Silent Sacking — In 2023 Amazon laid off more than 27,000 people. While that’s a big number it’s a deceptively small percentage for a company with more than 1.6 million employees (1.7%).
Should You Watch Babylon 5? : startrek — Babylon 5 is basically the anti-Trek. More specifically, it's the anti-TNG. The Earth Alliance isn't a magic utopia, it's the exact government you would expect modern boneheaded American politicians to set up if they suddenly landed in 2250.
Our First Official LIT Stream 🎉 | Jupiter Extras 89
Jan 09, 2024
A bonus stream and our first official LIT Coder stream! Chris discusses CES 2024 day two and its focus on artificial intelligence.
Then, explore AI regulations with Carolyn Posner from the Consumer Technology Association.
Additionally, we delve into the potential approval of Bitcoin ETFs and the fading of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies in big businesses.
Note: Description and Chapters genreated by AI, Boost in and tell me how it did!
First Monday Live Stream of the year w/Chris | Jupiter Extras 88
Jan 08, 2024
Chris hangs with the live stream while we wait for the Coder that never starts. We cover new transparent OLED TVs, the trend of canceling streaming services, a government spending deal, affordable televisions, Nvidia's Super Series, Apple's AI strategy, drug use in Silicon Valley, Bitcoin ETFs, the Y2K issue, and the importance of safety in updating chips and programs. Stay tuned for more.
Note: Description and Chapters have been AI-generated. How'd it do?
Half the Bits, Double the Pain | LINUX Unplugged 544
Jan 07, 2024
This challenge gets ugly as we slowly realize we've just become zombie slayers.
We load Linux on three barely alive systems, and it takes a turn we didn't expect.
MidnightBSD — MidnightBSD is a BSD-derived operating system developed with desktop users in mind. It includes all the software you'd expect for your daily tasks — email, web browsing, word processing, gaming, and much more.
LMDE — LMDE is a Linux Mint project which stands for "Linux Mint Debian Edition".
Its goal is to ensure Linux Mint can continue to deliver the same user experience if Ubuntu was ever to disappear. It allows us to assess how much we depend on Ubuntu and how much work would be involved in such an event. LMDE is also one of our development targets, as such it guarantees the software we develop is compatible outside of Ubuntu.
zram — Pages written to these disks are compressed and stored
in memory itself. These disks allow very fast I/O and compression provides
good amounts of memory savings.
PSI — This helps users understand the resource pressure their workloads are
under, which allows them to rootcause and fix throughput and latency
problems caused by overcommitting, underprovisioning, suboptimal job
placement in a grid, as well as anticipate major disruptions like OOM.
nheko: Desktop client for Matrix using Qt and C++20. — The motivation behind the project is to provide a native desktop app for Matrix that feels more like a mainstream chat app (Element, Telegram etc) and less like an IRC client.
Is a 32 bit machine still usable in 2024? — Luckily, someone had JUST donated this perfectly working Dell Latitude D820, running Windows XP. They were in college actually trying to use this for their school work, but couldn’t even access many of the websites they needed because it was so out of date. I gave her a much newer 64 bit machine in trade.
PICK: Linux Terminal Tools - Terminal Trove — Terminal Trove curates and showcases all things in the terminal such as command line interface tools (CLI), text mode interface tools (TUI), developer tools and more no matter what platform or medium.
SliTaz GNU/Linux (en) — SliTaz is a secure and high performance operating system using the Linux Kernel and GNU software.
tulir/gomuks — A terminal based Matrix client written in Go.
Links home page — Links is text WWW browser with tables and frames. It runs on Linux, Unix, OS/2 and Windows.
The Workstation Lifestyle | Coder Radio 551
Jan 03, 2024
Mike shares his adventures and process of coming from mobile app projects to working with Unreal Engine, and why he realized a laptop just wasn't going to cut it.
💸 Cash App — The Cash App can quickly send sats just by scanning a QR code. It's a great app loaded with features and a simple UI.
🎉 Boost from Fountain's Website — Use Strike, Cash App, or your favorite app with Lightning support and Boost via QR Code right from Fountain's website. No other app is needed!
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 is out with a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
TuxDigital — TuxDigital creates podcasts and videos to help people improve their lives through technology. Our content covers everything from computer hardware and apps to fitness tips to help people live their best life through educational and entertaining media.
System76 Virgo laptop PCB design open sourced ahead of release — The company began sharing hints about the upcoming System76 Virgo laptop earlier this year. Now System76 has released the PCB design files, giving us a few more clues about what to expect.
Bcachefs Merged Into The Linux 6.7 Kernel — Less than twenty-four hours after Bcachefs was submitted for Linux 6.7, this new open-source file-system has been successfully merged for this next kernel version.
CVE-2023-39191: 8.2 HIGH — An improper input validation flaw was found in the eBPF subsystem in the Linux kernel. The issue occurs due to a lack of proper validation of dynamic pointers within user-supplied eBPF programs prior to executing them. This may allow an attacker with CAP_BPF privileges to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code in the context of the kernel.
holoiso — This project attempts to bring the Steam Deck's SteamOS Holo redistribution into a generic, installable format, and provide a close-to-official SteamOS experience.
New MakuluLinux Release Brings AI to the Max — Max is a new distro for MakuluLinux developer Jacque Montague Raymer. It is the first AI-integrated operating system designed with Debian compatibility running on the Gnome backend framework.
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 is out with a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
Healthchecks.io — We notify you when your nightly backups, weekly reports, cron jobs, and scheduled tasks don't run on time.
BorgBackup — Deduplicating archiver with compression and authenticated encryption
Projectivy Launcher - Apps on Google Play — Projectivy Launcher is an alternative launcher for Android TV, tailored for your TVs and projectors needs : smooth, neat, customizable and bundled with unique features. It's Projectivy Tools on steroids !
💸 Cash App — The Cash App can quickly send sats just by scanning a QR code. It's a great app loaded with features and a simple UI.
🎉 Boost from Fountain's Website — Use Strike, Cash App, or your favorite app with Lightning support and Boost via QR Code right from Fountain's website. No other app is needed!
The Coder Robe — Look and feel comfortable, life is better in a robe.
🎉 Boost with Fountain FM — Fountain 1.0 is out with a new UI, upgrades, and super simple Strike integration for easy Boosts.
32-Bit Challenge Details — Can you live and work for a week on a 32-bit system? That's the challenge. It might seem simple, but we think you'll be surprised.
Texas LinuxFest CFP Extended — The CFP deadline for #TXLF has been extended until December 30, 2023, 05:00 UTC (December 29, 2023, 23:00 CST)!
Hacking The Gathering | Coder Radio 549
Dec 20, 2023
The clever way one developer hacked an online game, why we're not buying the latest round of cyber war fear, and we finally have our Babylon 5 vs Star Trek debate.
Should You Watch Babylon 5? — If you liked DS9 seasons 4-7, you'll like B5 even more. If you hated DS9 seasons 4-7, you'll hate B5 even more.
Musk's Neuralink to start human trial of brain implant — Neuralink said on Tuesday it has received approval from an independent review board to begin recruitment for the first human trial of its brain implant for paralysis patients.
Are my podcast downloads declining because of iOS 17? — : Apple's changes help close the gap between downloads and actual listening behaviour. Not every downloaded episode gets played. So, fewer automatic downloads mean fewer downloads sitting unplayed on people's phones. For sponsors and advertisers, fewer automatic downloads mean fewer ads and promos that never get heard.
32-Bit Challenge Details — Can you live and work for a week on a 32-bit system? That's the challenge. It might seem simple, but we think you'll be surprised. Let's find out if the world has moved on too far for 32-bit systems, or if they can still be saved from the landfill.
⭐ Boost from Fountain's Website — Boost without switching Podcast apps - Use Strike, Cash App, or your favorite app with Lightning support, and Boost via QR Code. No other app is needed!
Zooz 700 Series Z-Wave Plus Water Leak XS Sensor — Place it under your appliances to monitor for leaks discreetly. It's OK if the device is splashed with water but it can't be fully submerged so keep that in mind when choosing the installation location.
Domestic Automation's WLED Pre-Installed Board — For use with Individually Addressable LEDs, which allow each LED to display a different color at the same time. Hundreds of animated effects can be displayed such as: “Android”, “Rainbow Runner”,“Twinklefox” and over a hundred more.
Domestic Automation LLC — Want to light up your home and wow your guests? Brighten up your space with some dazzling lights in a variety of colors and entertaining effects!
Home of the QuinLED LED Controllers — This website is about DIY WiFi controllable LED dimmers (Analog) and controllers (Digital) combined with lots of general information about LEDs and LED strip!
Year of the Voice - Chapter 5 - Home Assistant — The ESPHome team has been hard at work adding support for the S3-BOX-3, including the ability to customize the display! Check out the S3-BOX-3 tutorial to get started.
ESP32-POE - Open Source Hardware Board — ESP32-PoE is an ESP32-powered WIFI/BLE/Ethernet development board with Power-Over-Ethernet feature. It is the perfect addition to any project that requires connectivity.
Notice: Updates to Automatic Downloads - Apple Podcasts for Creators — Before iOS 17, when a listener would unpause automatic downloads, the system would automatically download all unplayed episodes. With iOS 17, Apple Podcasts will not download previous episodes and will resume automatically downloading new episodes.
The Lightning Network Grew by 1212% in 2 Years — In this report, we show how the number of users, transactions, and volume have been
accelerating significantly over the past years. We also share some River-specific insights
and discuss significant growth accelerators for the Lightning Network.
Kevin Rooke on X — The average public Lightning Network channel is approaching 8 million sats of capacity now.
Coming in 2024 — V4V based, multiply redundant object store with decentralized CDN for PeerTube self-hosters. Removes 99% of the bandwidth costs of media hosting, as well as the storage costs of online hosting.
SeaweedFS — SeaweedFS is a fast distributed storage system for blobs, objects, files, and data lake, for billions of files! Blob store has O(1) disk seek, cloud tiering. Filer supports Cloud Drive, cross-DC active-active replication, Kubernetes, POSIX FUSE mount, S3 API, S3 Gateway, Hadoop, WebDAV, encryption, Erasure Coding.
V4V SHOW | Mere Mortals — What will digital content look like in 5 years time? In Ep#56 we're going to rehash everything we've learned this season, lay out my predictions for what is ahead of us and learn how you can help shape the future direction of this very podcast.
ChatGPT on X — we've heard all your feedback about GPT4 getting lazier! we haven't updated the model since Nov 11th, and this certainly isn't intentional. model behavior can be unpredictable, and we're looking into fixing it 🫡
The Coder Robe - Yeah it's back! — Promo: SWIFT - The Coder Robe is black and is a one-size-fits-most robe made from 100% cotton terry velour for soft, cozy wear. It is embroidered on the left chest with a classic white-on-black Coder Radio logo.
Junction — Junction lets you choose the application to open files and links.
Vivaldi Browser — Get unrivaled customization options and built-in browser features for better performance, productivity, and privacy.
Grant♟️ on X: Apple will probably win LLMs — They'll release a model that runs locally/native on your iPhone, is good enough, has great privacy/security and has access to all your personal data.
Uncensored AI on Linux | LINUX Unplugged 540
Dec 10, 2023
We test two popular methods to run local language models on your Linux box. Then, we push the limits to see which language models will toe the line and which won't.
Speech Note — Speech Note let you take, read and translate notes in multiple languages. It uses Speech to Text, Text to Speech and Machine Translation to do so. Text and voice processing take place entirely offline, locally on your computer, without using a network connection. Your privacy is always respected. No data is sent to the Internet.
Broadcom cuts at least 2,800 VMware jobs — Broadcom's first big move is going to be layoffs: according to WARN notices filed with multiple states (catalogued here by Channel Futures), Broadcom will be laying off at least 2,837 employees across multiple states, including 1,267 at its Palo Alto campus in California.
Gerald Pfeifer on X — "Broadcom CEO tells VMware workers to ‘get butt back to office’ after completing a $69 billion merger of the two companies"
Unity Layoff 3.8% Of Workforce — Videogame software provider Unity Software (U.N) will eliminate 265 jobs or 3.8% of its global workforce and end an agreement with a digital video effects company founded by the “Lord of the Rings” director as part of a “reset,” the company said on Tuesday.
Stefan Ottenbrite on X — CBC/Radio-Canada employees will have a virtual meeting on Monday with CEO Catherine Tait. Between 600 and 700 employees are expected to be laid off across the country, 300 just in Quebec.
LFNW2024: Ready or not — Quick on the heels of our wildly successful MiniFest this Fall, LinuxFest Northwest is proud to announce a full event: LinuxFest Northwest 2024 1 - April 26-28 2024!
Xbox Talking to Partners for Mobile Store, CEO Spencer Says — “It’s an important part of our strategy and something we are actively working on today not only alone, but talking to other partners who’d also like to see more choice for how they can monetize on the phone,’’ Spencer said in an interview in Sao Paulo during the CCXP comics and entertainment convention.
What's new in .NET 8 — .NET 8 is the successor to .NET 7. It will be supported for three years as a long-term support (LTS) release.
.NET Aspire overview — .NET Aspire is an opinionated, cloud ready stack for building observable, production ready, distributed applications. .NET Aspire is delivered through a collection of NuGet packages that handle specific cloud-native concerns.
@laurengoode — "Altman talked to investors in the Middle East in recent months about raising money to start a new chip company to help OpenAI and others diversify beyond their current reliance on Nvidia GPUs and specialized chips from Google, Amazon, and a few smaller suppliers, according to two people."
Nixified AI — The goal of nixified.ai is to simplify and make available a large repository of AI executable code that would otherwise be impractical to run yourself, due to package management and complexity issues.
Rollback Required | LINUX Unplugged 539
Dec 03, 2023
This week, our embarrassment is your entertainment. Then, we check the age and health of all our disks with one app.
LFNW 2024: Ready or not — Quick on the heels of our wildly successful MiniFest this Fall, LinuxFest Northwest is proud to announce a full event: LinuxFest Northwest 2024 - April 26-28 2024!
GNU Stow — GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager which takes distinct packages of software and/or data located in separate directories on the filesystem, and makes them appear to be installed in the same place.
pfSense Makes no Sense | Self-Hosted 111
Dec 01, 2023
We break down the state of the pfSense changes and the red flags we see. Plus, we're joined by Wolfgang from Wolfgang's channel to dig into his homelab and much more.
Restricting ASRock Rack BMC to dedicated IPMILAN port only — During this process I came across a frustrating "bug" in the Asrock Rack BMC implementation. No matter the settings I gave the BMC it was getting two IP addresses. One on the IPMILAN port as expected in my management VLAN, and another on eth0 which is undesirable.
Addressing Changes to pfSense Plus Home+Lab — Today, we are announcing that the Home+Lab version of pfSense Plus, the commercial fork of the popular open-source firewall pfSense, is no longer available for free download.
OpenAI saga: What is Q-Star? — The ‘humanity-threatening’ AI that could be a reason behind Sam Altman’s removal. "Four times now in the history of OpenAI, the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks, I've gotten to be in the room, when we sort of push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward, and getting to do that is the professional honor of a lifetime,
OpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster, sources say — Ahead of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s four days in exile, several staff researchers wrote a letter to the board of directors warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The ‘AI doomers’ have lost this battle — That’s the reason for the strange organisational structure — to control the risk. Altman has been building this thing as fast as possible, while also saying very loudly and often that this thing is extremely dangerous and governments should get involved to control any attempts to build it. Well, which is it?
The Unexpected Winner in the Craziest Week in AI — Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella made a huge bet on the world’s hottest AI company. After it nearly blew up on him, he now emerges with closer ties to its leader, Sam Altman.
Surprisingly Smooth Transition | LINUX Unplugged 538
Nov 26, 2023
PipeWire hits 1.0, and Wim Taymans joins us to reflect on the smooth success of PipeWire. Plus the details on the first NixCon North America, and more.
First NixCon North America! — We envisage NixCon North America as a complement to the core NixCon in Europe, enriching the global Nix community through more localized events. This event is not just a conference; it’s a celebration of our growth, diversity, and the shared passion for Nix.
🎉 PipeWire 1.0 🎉 — PipeWire 1.0 retains API/ABI compatibility with the long-lived PipeWire 0.3.xx series. PipeWire 1.0 delivers improved time reporting for less jitter in ALSA when using IRQ mode, various module fixes, Bluetooth LC3 codec and compatibility improvements, improved transport and time handling for JACK, optimized buffer re-use with JACK, and a variety of other improvements.
SpiralLinux — SpiralLinux is a selection of Linux spins built from Debian GNU/Linux, with a focus on simplicity and out-of-the-box usability across all the major desktop environments.
grub-btrfs — Include btrfs snapshots in the Grub menu.
Peak AI Hype? — Is this Peak AI hype? Boost in your worst AI marketing.
Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI — In a sudden move, Altman is leaving after the company’s board determined that he ‘was not consistently candid in his communications.’ President and co-founder Greg Brockman has also quit.
OpenAI has received just a fraction of Microsoft’s $10 billion investment — That gives the software giant significant leverage as it sorts through the fallout from the ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The firm’s board said on Friday that it had lost confidence in his ability to lead, without giving additional details.
OpenAI Staff Threaten to Quit Unless Board Resigns — More than 700 employees of OpenAI have signed a letter saying they may quit and join Sam Altman at Microsoft unless the startup’s board resigns and reappoints the ousted CEO.
Emmett Shear’s time at Twitch gives clues to future of OpenAI — “But Shear has expressed strong concerns over the supposed existential risks posed by AI, a concern that I suspect resonated with the board, even though Shear says this CEO shakeup wasn’t about AI safety.”
This Makes Us Unemployable | LINUX Unplugged 537
Nov 19, 2023
Can we save an old Arch install? We'll attempt a live rescue, then get into our tips for keeping your old Linux install running great.
Is Arch Linux suitable for server environment? — Probably the biggest issue with Arch as a server operating system is that it's not clear where and when applications may break after an upgrade. More often than not, you have to keep up with what's going on in the wiki and on the forums before doing any sort of upgrade
Texas Linux Festival 2024 — Texas Linux Fest is the first state-wide annual community-run conference for Linux and open-source software users and enthusiasts from around the Lone Star State. Much like SCALE in Los Angeles, Ohio Linux Fest in Columbus, and Linux Fest Northwest – and an ever-growing list of successful regional shows.
Linus’s law — In software development, Linus's law is the assertion that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".
The Linux Scheduler: a Decade of Wasted Cores — In our experiments, these performance bugs caused many-fold performance degradation for synchronization-heavy scientific applications, 13% higher latency for kernel make, and a 14-23% decrease in TPC-H throughput for a widely used commercial database.
Why you probably shouldn’t add a CLA to your open source project — Contributor license agreements (or CLAs for short) have gained a lot of visibility in recent years as some prominent open-source projects have opted to adopt them. If all the cool kids are doing it, should your open source project? Probably not. Here’s why
⚡ Self-Hosted on the Podcastindex.org — Send a Boost into the show via the web. First, top-up Alby, then head over to our entry on the Podcast Index.
Immich — Self-hosted Backup Solution for Photos and Videos on Mobile Devices.
Immich Release v1.86.0 — In this release we have added an option to enable parter-shared photos to be displayed in the main timeline. This feature can be enabled on a per-partner basis and can be viewed and updated on both the web and mobile app.
45HomeLab - Staff Pick Applications — 45HomeLab provides a platform to run whatever applications you want on your server. For your convenience, our staff picked their favorite applications, tested and assembled them here.
Alderon Matt on X — Apple needs to stop breaking games in macOS Operating System Updates. Imagine writing code that works for a decade and in a macOS update having it throw a NSInternalInconsistencyException. This is going to break thousands of Unreal Engine and other games on Steam.
Amazon Making its Own Linux-Based OS to Replace Android — Amazon’s new operating system is also based on a flavor of Linux, and is using a more web-forward application model. App developers are being told to use React Native as an application framework, which allows them to build native apps with Javascript-powered interfaces,
webOS Open Source Edition — The open-source software platform built for smart and connected devices of tomorrow.
GNOME Recognized as Public Interest Infrastructure — The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to announce the GNOME project is receiving €1M from the Sovereign Tech Fund to modernize the platform, improve tooling and accessibility, and support features that are in the public interest.
Sovereign Tech Fund — The Sovereign Tech Fund supports the development, improvement and maintenance of open digital infrastructure. Our goal is to sustainably strengthen the open source ecosystem. We focus on security, resilience, technological diversity, and the people behind the code.
KDE’s 6th Megarelease - Alpha — It has been nearly 10 years since the last big release of our flagship Plasma desktop environment, and the time has come again. KDE is making available today the Alpha version of all the software we will include in a megarelease scheduled for the end of February 2024.
nix-bitcoin — nix-bitcoin is a collection of Nix packages and NixOS modules for easily installing full-featured Bitcoin nodes with an emphasis on security.
Jonas Nick — Jonas Nick has been a Bitcoin developer with Blockstream since 2015. He is also a contributor to free and open source projects like Bitcoin Core, libsecp, rust-bitcoin and many others.
International Space Station Abandons Windows In Favour Of Debian — “We migrated key functions from Windows to Linux because we needed an operating system that was stable and reliable – one that would give us in-house control. So if we needed to patch, adjust or adapt, we could,” explained Keith Chuvala of United Space Alliance, a NASA contractor involved in ISS operations.
Element Going AGPL — 📣⚠️📣 Announcing a new home and license (AGPLv3) for Synapse and friends: going forwards Element’s work on Synapse, Dendrite & related server-side projects is going to be released as AGPLv3 rather than Apache.
A new home and license (AGPL) for Synapse and friends — The benefit of switching to AGPLv3 is that it obliges downstream developers to contribute back to the core project - either by releasing their modifications as open source for the benefit of the whole Matrix ecosystem, or by contacting Element for an alternative license. Future code contributors to Synapse will need to sign a contributor license agreement (CLA) based on the Apache Software Foundation’s CLA, giving Element the right to license the contribution commercially to third party proprietary forks so we can use it to help fund Matrix core development in future.
Future of the bitcoin-dev mailing list — Our current mailing list host, Linux Foundation, has indicated for years that they have wanted to stop hosting mailing lists, which would mean the bitcoin-dev mailing list would need to move somewhere else. We temporarily avoided that, but recently LF has informed a moderator that they will cease hosting any mailing lists later this year.
Fedora Change: Retire Modularity — Fedora will discontinue building modules for Fedora Linux 39 and further in the Fedora infrastructure and shipping modular content to users.
What’s new in Fedora Workstation 39 — Fedora Workstation 39 includes the latest version of the GNOME desktop environment, GNOME 45. This version features stylish new widgets in several core apps, a brand new Image Viewer app, a new keyboard backlight setting on supported systems, a more informative Activities button, improved performance, and many other refinements to the user experience all throughout.
Introducing Fedora Onyx: Immutable Variant with Budgie Desktop — Built with the same robust technologies as other Fedora immutable variants such as Kinoite, and Silverblue, Fedora Onyx is designed for users who value the Fedora computing platform and Budgie Desktop environment but need the added immutability and atomic capabilities that rpm-ostree provides.
GNOME 45 Release Notes — For the new version we’ve focused on refining your daily interactions, enhancing performance, and making the overall experience smoother and more efficient. From subtle design tweaks to functional upgrades, GNOME 45 is all about refining the core desktop environment you rely on.
KDE Plasma 6.0 Approved For Fedora 40 - Including Dropping The X11 Session — The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on shipping KDE Plasma 6.0 as the KDE desktop option for Fedora 40. Additionally, as part of this change, the plan is to drop the KDE X11 session to leave only the KDE Plasma Wayland session available.
lima — Lima launches Linux virtual machines with automatic file sharing and port forwarding (similar to WSL2).
colima — Container runtimes on macOS (and Linux) with minimal setup.
ProjectM — Cross-platform Music Visualization Library. Open-source and Milkdrop-compatible.
For Your Safety | Coder Radio 543
Nov 08, 2023
New AI "regulation" from on high this week, a few signs you might be pissing in your own pond, and the game dev team that's been together for 40 years.
Hopping instead of hustling: Survey tells us how developers are taking care of business — More developers are looking for or are open to a new job now compared to the last two years—that’s according to the results of our latest survey on the state of developer employment. More than 1,000 developers responded to this year’s survey about jobs and 79% are at least considering new opportunities if not actively looking.
Eric Geller on X — Developers of any LLMs with the potential to pose serious risks will have to red-team them for safety and security issues—based on standards developed by NIST—and share the results with the government. Biden is using the Defense Production Act for this.
Hector Martin — This is a lie, and this excuse needs to die. Linux kernel code quality and review is about as bad as you'd expect for a project of that size with a low reviewer:contributor ratio. It is in no way helped by reviewers and maintainers who are "picky" (=assholes).
Nintendo Is Raising Its Employee Pay By 10% In Japan — Despite a downturn in sales and profits for Nintendo in its third quarter, it's reportedly raising the base salaries of its employees by 10% in its homeland.
Alex’s Backups Disaster | Self-Hosted 109
Nov 03, 2023
How we almost lost valuable data this week, and a Chat with Doug and Mitch about their new home lab server.
Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud — In this article we propose “local-first software”: a set of principles for software that enables both collaboration and ownership for users. Local-first ideals include the ability to work offline and collaborate across multiple devices, while also improving the security, privacy, long-term preservation, and user control of data.
45HomeLab Software — 45HomeLab provides a platform to run whatever applications you want on your server. For your convenience, our staff picked their favorite applications, tested and assembled them here.
The HL15 — The HL15 from 45HomeLab is a open-source, open-platform, 15-bay homelab server. The HL15 features enterprise architecture and strength brought to a scale that works for the homelab. The server's direct-wired architecture can provide blazing fast transfer speed of up to 2GB per second.
Google Nest Mini Gutted And Rebuilt To Run Custom Agents — [Justin] pulled apart a Nest Mini, ripped out the original PCB, and kitted it out with his own internals. He uses the ESP32 as the basis of his design, since it provides plenty of processing power and WiFi connectivity. His replacement PCB also interfaces with the LEDs, mute switch, and capacitive touch features of the Nest Mini, for ease of interaction.
Justin Alvey on X — I “jailbroke” a Google Nest Mini so that you can run your own LLM’s, agents and voice models.
BBC in Hot Water — An article discussing the origins of a phrase.
Fresh Cut Fraud | Coder Radio 542
Nov 01, 2023
We've all made mistakes and tried to play dumb, but this week history is being made.
Google readies Pixel update to fix Android 14 storage access issue — Depending on the device, this issue can result in the primary user being unable to access media storage. Alternatively, the issue can reboot the device with a “Factory data reset” message. If this message is accepted, data that is not backed up can be lost, and if it is declined, the device repeatedly reboots with the “Pixel is starting” message.
<a href="https://mobilegamer.biz/fuck-you-were-not-paying-inside-unitys-runtime-fee-fiasco/" title=""Fuck you, we're not paying": inside Unity’s Runtime Fee fiasco" rel="nofollow">"Fuck you, we're not paying": inside Unity’s Runtime Fee fiasco — One Unity insider told us that a major mobile game publisher – and one of Unity’s biggest clients – met with John Riccitiello himself days after the first Runtime Fee policy was announced. They told him, in the words of our source: “Fuck you, we’re not paying.”
We Nixed Proxmox | LINUX Unplugged 534
Oct 29, 2023
We did Proxmox dirty last week, so we try to explain our thinking. But first, a few things have gone down that you should know about.
Fedora 39 Delayed To At Least 7 November — While Fedora 39 was aiming for an ideal "early final" release on 18 October, that didn't happen, it was delayed, and then delayed again. Now the earliest Fedora 39 will possibly shift is 7 November.
Linux Mint Starts working on Wayland Support — The work started on Wayland. As mentioned earlier this year, this was identified as one of the major challenges our project had to tackle in the mid to long term.
Six Great Features With The Upcoming Linux 6.6 Kernel — While there were many last minute fixes this week, the changes don't appear to be too scary or invasive. In any event the Linux 6.6 kernel is bringing some exciting features.
Btrfs For Linux 6.6 Brings Fixes, Partially Recovers From Scrub Performance Regression — David Sterba of SUSE sent out the Btrfs updates on Monday for the Linux 6.6 kernel merge window. There are no explicit new features this cycle but a variety of bug fixes, including work to address the Btrfs scrub performance following a rework back in Linux 6.4. The scrub performance isn't entirely restored but at least it's inching ahead in the right direction with Linux 6.6.
EXT4 Lands A Nice Performance Improvement For Appending To Delalloc Files — I conducted tests in my 32-core environment by launching 32 concurrent threads to append write to the same file. Each write operation had a length of 1024 bytes and was repeated 100000 times. Without using this patch, the test was completed in 7705 ms. However, with this patch, the test was completed in 5066 ms, resulting in a performance improvement of 34%.
XFS File-System Maintainer Stepping Down — My final act as maintainer is to write down every thing that I've been doing as maintainer for the past six years. There are too many demands placed on the maintainer, and the only way to fix this is to delegate the responsibilities. I also wrote down my impressions of the unwritten rules about how to contribute to XFS.
Linux 6.6 To Bring Another Rust Toolchain Upgrade — Some of the other Rust changes for this imminent merge window include supporting the rust-analyzer for out-of-tree kernel modules, the Rust availability detection script has been improved, a new "paste!" proc macro, new pinned-init APIs, and a variety of other additions to continue to make Rust programming possibilities for the Linux kernel more robust.
SilverBullet — SilverBullet is an extensible open-source, personal knowledge management system. Indeed, that’s fancy talk for “a note-taking app with links.” However, SilverBullet goes a bit beyond just that.
Nixpkgs supply chain security project — The focus of this project is on reducing our reliance on foreign binaries to compile Nixpkgs from scratch, ensuring we are are indeed running the code we compiled by leveraging existing security components in NixOS, and putting in place mechanisms that allow us to deliver the most up-to-date, secure software whenever it is available in a way that can be sustained given our maintainer capacities.
Pick: kmon — Linux Kernel Manager and Activity Monitor 🐧💻
docker-wyze-bridge — WebRTC/RTSP/RTMP/LL-HLS bridge for Wyze cams in a docker container.
wzminihacks — Run whatever firmware you want on your camera and have root access to the device.
Bitcoin Beach — The project Bitcoin Beach is creating a sustainable Bitcoin Economic ecosystem on the coast of El Salvador, where the majority of people do not have access to bank accounts and the local businesses could never qualify for merchant accounts needed to accept credit cards.
Better Late than Never | Coder Radio 541
Oct 25, 2023
Rumors of internal panic at Apple, and concerns about the future of RISC-V. Plus, the software update of the century.
The Risk of RISC-V: What's Going on at SiFive? — I have received reports, now from multiple sources, that the major torch bearer of the RISC-V platform, a company known as SiFive and formed from the original architects of the RISC-V instruction set, has gone through some major changes.
Daring Fireball: Apple and AI — But I think Gurman’s summary does get at an essential truth. If I asked you “Which companies are at the forefront of AI-powered products?”, I doubt you’d put Apple on the list. And AI is proving so useful — and yet is a nascent field — that Apple needs to soon be on that list, lest their products begin to fall behind competitively. “Which companies are best at integrating AI into products?” is going to be like “Which companies are best at creating hardware at scale?” and “Which companies are best at human interface design?”
Exclusive: Nvidia to make Arm-based PC chips in major new challenge to Intel — Nvidia has quietly begun designing central processing units (CPUs) that would run Microsoft’s (MSFT.O) Windows operating system and use technology from Arm Holdings(O9Ty.F), , two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
LinuxFest North Jeff | LINUX Unplugged 533
Oct 22, 2023
We try and pull off one too many projects, but you can't argue with the results. We report on our week of rebuilds and rescues and having a blast at LinuxFest Northwest.
IPFS Podcasting — Decentralized Podcast Distribution over IPFS - Crowd hosting podcast episodes with storage & bandwidth provided by volunteer nodes.
AI in Nextcloud: what, why and how - Nextcloud — To fit everyone’s needs, we offer several types of integrations for AI, from completely self-hosted options to integrations with external services.
Vectorpea - Online Vector Editor — Vectorpea.com is a free online tool for editing vector graphics with support for AI, PDF and SVG files.
Year of Voice: A Bigger Deal Than You Think | Self-Hosted 108
Oct 20, 2023
Home Assistant's founder, Paulus Schoutsen, shares details about the Year of Voice, recent legal actions from Mazda, and the results of a recent third-party audit.
Plus, our recommended Nextcloud setup, converting dumb devices into smart ones with ESPHome, and more.
Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Listener Jeff, and Paulus Schoutsen.
⚡ Self-Hosted on the Podcastindex.org — Send a Boost into the show via the web. First, top-up Alby, then head over to our entry on the Podcast Index.
ESPHome — ESPHome is a system to control your microcontrollers by simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through Home Automation systems.
2023: Home Assistant's year of Voice - Home Assistant — TL;DR: It is our goal for 2023 to let users control Home Assistant in their own language. Mike Hansen, creator of Rhasspy, has joined Nabu Casa to lead this effort. We’re starting off by building a collection of intent matching sentences in every
Removal of Mazda Connected Services integration - Home Assistant — Home Assistant is disappointed that Mazda has decided to take this position. We’re also sad that Mazda’s first recourse was not to reach out to us and the maintainer but to send a cease and desist letter instead.
Year of the Voice - Chapter 4 - YouTube — We’re building an open voice assistant that does not share your data. Join us for our fourth progress update. You don't want to miss this one.
$13 voice assistant for Home Assistant - Home Assistant — This tutorial will guide you to turn an ATOM Echo into the world’s most private voice assistant. Pick up the tiny device to talk to your smart home. Issue commands and get responses!
ATOM Echo Smart Speaker Development Kit — ATOM ECHO is a Programmable Smart Speaker based on the M5ATOM design. With its compact form factor measuring only 24 * 24 * 17 mm, this speaker delivers impressive capabilities. Easily play music wirelessly using the BT capabilities of the ESP32 from your mobile phone or tablet.
Unleash Your Creativity with ESP32-S3-BOX-3 — ESP32-S3-BOX-3 is based on Espressif’s ESP32-S3 Wi-Fi + Bluetooth 5 (LE) SoC, with AI acceleration capabilities. In addition to ESP32-S3’s 512KB SRAM, ESP32-S3-BOX-3 comes with 16MB of Quad flash and 16MB of Octal PSRAM.
Anker PowerConf S330 USB Speakerphone — A USB speakerphone with 4 high-sensitivity microphones to pick up all voices within 3m in super-high clarity.
Symfonium: Music player & cast - Apps on Google Play — Symfonium is a simple, modern, beautiful and highly configurable music player, with a unique vision to be the central control point of your music. Add one or multiple media providers.
Sherlockin All Over the Place | Coder Radio 540
Oct 18, 2023
We're about to see a wave of big tech AI features "inspired" by third-party developers at a scale that makes the Sherlocking on Apple's platform seem like chump change. Plus, how Dropbox turned around their dev retention rates, and more.
Analogue is making a 4K Nintendo 64 — The company behind the Analogue Pocket turns its attention to the N64. We don’t know what the console will look like yet, but it’s launching in 2024.
Google to defend generative AI users from copyright claims — "To our knowledge, Google is the first in the industry to offer a comprehensive, two-pronged approach to indemnity" that specifically covers both types of claims, a company spokesperson said.
The AI Profitability Problem - dominickm.com — In the rapidly evolving world of AI technology, challenges abound, from hardware dependencies to business model uncertainties and emerging regulatory concerns.
Chat Control 2.0: EU governments set to approve the end of private messaging and secure encryption — By making a minor concession EU governments hope to find a majority next week to approve the controversial „chat control“ bill. According to the proposed child sexual abuse regulation (CSAR), providers of messengers, e-mail and chat services would be forced to automatically search all private messages and photos for suspicious content and report it to the EU.
We Like Snaps Now | LINUX Unplugged 532
Oct 15, 2023
Has Canonical finally nailed snaps? Why it looks like Ubuntu has turned a new corner; our thoughts on the latest release. Plus, a special guest and more.
Ubuntu 23.10 Released — This is the release where the team aims to land as many major changes as possible to ensure that the community has the chance to take them for a spin and provide feedback for further refinement ahead of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.
Brave New Trusted Boot World — This document looks at the boot process of general purpose Linux distributions. It covers the status quo and how we envision Linux boot to work in the future with a focus on robustness and simplicity.
Fitting Everything Together — Let's popularize image-based OSes with modernized security properties built around immutability, SecureBoot, TPM2, adaptability, auto-updating, factory reset, and uniformity.
Intel Arc Graphics See Faster Performance On Ubuntu 23.10 — Overall though Ubuntu 23.10 is a nice upgrade for those making use of Intel Arc Graphics and sticking to the kernel/Mesa default versions as shipped by Ubuntu. If you are more advantageous, upgrading to Linux 6.6 and Mesa 23.3-devel can mean some very nice performance wins across various OpenGL and Vulkan workloads.
Ubuntu Desktop 23.10 ISOs Recalled Due To Malicious User Translations — We have identified hate speech from a malicious contributor in some of our translations submitted as part of a third party tool outside of the Ubuntu Archive. The Ubuntu 23.10 image has been taken down and a new version will be available once the correct translations have been restored.
Tags on Flathub — Create tags with color schemes and give color to your logs or text files
Mike Breaks the Build | Coder Radio 539
Oct 11, 2023
Mike checks in from the grind and shares some challenges in recent cross-platform testing; then, we get into the avalanche of negative AI press coverage this week and the one massive story they're not touching.
Report Claims LOTR: Gollum Publisher Used AI To Write Apology — An investigation by German outlet Game Two into what went wrong during the development of Lord of the Rings: Gollum has made claims that the publisher’s apology for the terrible state of the released game was written by AI ChatGPT.
AI doesn’t sound particularly profitable. — Despite charging $10 a month for GitHub Copilot, The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft is losing an average of over $20 per user, per month.
Émile P. Torres, PhD on X — This is Sam Altman's sister. Her tweets about sexual, physical, emotional, etc. abuse are incredibly hard to read. Seems that no one in the media is that interested in covering this story because they're afraid of losing access to OpenAI if they write something critical of Sam.
Pledditor on X — Sam Altman's sister is making some eyepopping allegations against him 👀
The Windows Challenge | LINUX Unplugged 531
Oct 08, 2023
We ran Windows for the week with three seemingly simple objectives. How we did, our take on what's gotten a lot better about Windows, and what still needs some work.
Sysinternals — Whether you’re an IT Pro or a developer, you’ll find Sysinternals utilities to help you manage, troubleshoot and diagnose your Windows and Linux systems and applications.
HP ProDesk 600 G1 Desktop Mini PC — HP ProDesk 600 G1 Desktop Mini PC is HP’s smallest business desktop yet. Efficiently crafted to save space and energy.
WireGuard Component — ESPHome — This component uses a custom implementation not developed by original authors and currently available for ESP32 platform only.
Spook 👻 a scary powerful toolbox for Home Assistant. — Spook ships with a lot of goodness for you to explore. Currently, there are three main areas of functionality that Spook sprinkles on top of Home Assistant.
SSH 023: Shields Up - — We've spent thousands of dollars and over a decade refining the perfect home media setup. We get nostalgic and share what worked and what REALLY didn't.
MediaElch: Media Manager for Kodi — MediaElch is a MediaManager for Kodi. Information about Movies, TV Shows, Concerts and Music are stored as NFO files. Fanarts are downloaded automatically from fanart.tv.
tinyMediaManager — tinyMediaManager is a media management tool written in Java/Swing. It is written to provide metadata for the Kodi Media Center (formerly known as XBMC), MediaPortal and Plex media server. Due to the fact that it is written in Java, tinyMediaManager will run on Windows, Linux and macOS (and possible more OS).
FileBot - The ultimate TV and Movie Renamer — FileBot is the ultimate tool for renaming and organizing your movies, TV shows and Anime. Match and rename media files against online databases, download artwork and cover images, fetch subtitles, write metadata, and more, all at once in matter of seconds. It's smart and just works.
ESPHome — ESPHome is a system to control your microcontrollers by simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through Home Automation systems.
Tasmota — Tasmota is an open source firmware for Espressif ESP8266, ESP32, ESP32-S or ESP32-C3 chipset based devices created and maintained by Theo Arends.
A Call for Developers | Jellyfin — We'd like to call on you, the wider community, to help make Jellyfin better! We need contributors, fresh ideas and blood to help the project move past our current funk and into something more.
SSH 107 Boost Barn — Thank you for helping produce episode 107 of Self-Hosted!
You Never Forget Your First | Coder Radio 538
Oct 04, 2023
How does your first major programming language/technology still shape your work and career? Then grab some popcorn and let's watch the next epic tech titan battle unfold.
How To Brew Espresso Like a Pro — Learn how to brew espresso at home, using an automatic or a manual espresso maker. Tips on pulling the perfect espresso shot and a troubleshooting guide.
American Economic Liberties Project on X — Apple and Google have a “fantastic oligopolistic arrangement” says Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on day 14 of the #USvGoogle trial.
Microsoft has spent $100 billion on Bing — Satya Nadella is one of several executives the US Department of Justice will have testify in its antitrust trial about Google search.
An hour-long history lesson about Microsoft’s many failures in mobile. — Nadella is mostly just responding “that sounds right” and “correct.” He’s not arguing that Bing is better than Google — he’s arguing that it’s impossible to be better than Google. And Schmidtlein says no, it’s just that Bing sucks. And that’s your fault, not ours.
Google Podcasts to shut down in 2024 — Today, Google says it plans on further increasing its investment in the podcast experience on YouTube Music and making it more of a destination for podcast fans with features focused on discovery, community and switching between audio podcasts and video.
Podcast Mirror by Blubrry — We offer blazing performance speeds and reliability regardless of web traffic. At the same time allowing your Podcast to support Value4Value, Lit and Live and more Podcasting 2.0 features include the Medium Tag. Podcast Mirror provides you modern podcast features and high dependability.
Podcasting 2.0 Top 100 (Music) — This chart is a ranking of the music tracks played on podcasts that have been boosted the most over the last 7 days. Each entry shows the number of listener boosts sent over this time period. The chart is updated hourly.
Empath Eyes - Ethereal - Shadow Man — A unique blend of organic and electronic elements form these 3 tracks. Featuring electric guitar, bass, drums, horns, and plenty of synths, "Ethereal" will challenge your concept of electronic music.
Radio mediums · Discussion #567 — This medium would be dedicated to 24/7 live streams that don't expect regular updates in their metadata.
Relai — Buy Bitcoin instantly and hold your own keys with ease and simplicity. Join 80,000 others using Relai and start your Bitcoin journey.
Introducing: Raspberry Pi 5! — Today, we’re delighted to announce the launch of Raspberry Pi 5, coming at the end of October. Priced at $60 for the 4GB variant, and $80 for its 8GB sibling.
Raspberry Pi 5 Review: A New Standard for Makers — The Raspberry Pi 5 is significantly faster than its predecessor while costing almost the same price. Its only drawback, which is likely temporary, is that some older HATs and add-ons may not have have software support right away.
RealDudePerson/beakon — Beakon is designed to be a self-host location sharing webserver. Beakon aims to leak as little data as possible and uses mostly self-contained libraries and local database files.
RetroDECK — RetroDECK is a polished and beginner-friendly environment for playing your retro games on Steam Deck, available with just one click from the Discover app.
Pick: Waycheck — Waycheck is a simple graphical application that connects to your Wayland compositor and displays the list of Wayland protocols that it supports, along with the list of protocols that it doesn't.
Changing the Game | LINUX Unplugged 529
Sep 24, 2023
Even if you don't game, the data is in, and the impact of the Steam Deck on Linux is massive. We'll go into details and then share our long-term review of the Deck.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Listener Jeff.
Alby 🐝 on X — Humble reminder: In August, Alby accounts have processed over 1 million transactions! 😊😊😊 And it’s all thanks to… you! 💙 Our users, partners, wallet holders, contributors!
RetroDECK — RetroDECK is an emulation and retro gaming solution to catalog and play your game collection directly from Linux in one unified application.
The Plex Situation Just got Worse | Self-Hosted 106
Sep 22, 2023
Our thoughts on two recent Plex crackdowns, why the Apple TV just got a lot better, how home Assistant could improve 10 years in, and much more.
⚡ Self-Hosted on the Podcastindex.org — Send a Boost into the show via the web. First, top-up Alby, then head over to our entry on the Podcast Index.
Plex is Cracking Down on Pirated Content — Plex is cracking down on at least one hosting service supporting pirated content in a move that may result in some collateral damage.
Account banned : PleX — Today I got my account banned in plex "this Plex account has accepted monetary compensation in exchange for services based in part on Plex". Which is totally untrue.
Apple TV, now with more Tailscale · Tailscale — The newly released tvOS 17 offers support for VPNs, and we’re proud to say Tailscale is among the first to use this new feature. You can now add your Apple TV directly to your tailnet, unlocking three powerful new use cases that we’re excited to share.
10 years Home Assistant - Home Assistant — I wasn’t planning on changing the world. It was a playground, a place where I could use the latest technology and explore all the possibilities with Python. But bit by bit Home Assistant gained traction, more contributors joined and we slowly started to build a community.
Introducing Home Assistant Green — We’ve taken that to heart, and today, we are introducing an affordable way for new users to upgrade their smart homes to Home Assistant. It’s the Home Assistant Green – and it costs only $99 (MSRP).
A new chapter in the Home Assistant Yellow journey — Unfortunately, Raspberry Pi CM4s are still in short supply. At this point we can’t build enough Home Assistant Yellow (with CM4) to fulfill demand. Unfortunately, we can’t make accurate estimates on when Home Assistant Yellow (with CM4) variants will ship, as we have not gotten delivery dates from Raspberry Pi
Why isn’t dotnet core popular among startups? — Is there any specific reason why startups, at least here in India, don’t tend to use dotnet for backend especially now dotnet is also open source and cross-platform.
Almost Half of Grindr’s Employees Quit — Grindr seems to have played itself by giving its employees a return-to-office ultimatum — and nearly half of those employees responded by quitting.
Santiago on X: "I fired somebody cheating" — Around that time, I stumbled upon the idea of overemployment. A whole movement dedicated to helping people work several full-time jobs at once.
The Privacy Sandbox — Billions of people around the world rely on access to information on sites and apps. To provide this free resource without relying on intrusive tracking, publishers and developers need privacy-preserving alternatives for their key business needs, including serving relevant content and ads.
Artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT was built in Iowa — with a lot of water — In a paper due to be published later this year, Ren’s team estimates ChatGPT gulps up 500 milliliters of water (close to what’s in a 16-ounce water bottle) every time you ask it a series of between 5 to 50 prompts or questions. The range varies depending on where its servers are located and the season. The estimate includes indirect water usage that the companies don’t measure — such as to cool power plants that supply the data centers with electricity.
Nissan, Kia 'collect data about drivers' sexual activity' — The foundation said most car companies can comb through a variety of sources to glean personal information about drivers after they pair their smartphones with a vehicle’s connected services.
Where's Your Data? | LINUX Unplugged 528
Sep 17, 2023
Today's theme is data sovereignty, and we'll check in with two crucial projects that are giving you more options.
Ask Noah Show 354 — Google makes the news this week in one of the largest cases in history over meaningful competition. Do we need the regulation to stop Google? Ubuntu will start allowing you to use a TPM chip for encryption, plus your livestreaming, ZFS, and VPN questions are answered!
“Nextcloud Hub 6” launched🚀 — Nextcloud Hub 6 has evolved into a robust collaboration platform that empowers organizations and individuals to work seamlessly while ensuring data privacy.
Element X — Element X isn’t just the fastest Matrix client ever - it’s up to 6000x faster than any other Matrix client.
iPhone 15 Pro: Here's Everything the New Action Button Can Do — A press-and-hold gesture with fine-tuned haptic feedback and visual cues in the Dynamic Island ensure the new Action button launches the intended action, which users can customize in Settings and assign to different actions.
Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 Feature 64GB of Storage — The original Apple Watch, Series 2, and Series 3, had just 8GB of storage, increasing to 16GB on the Apple Watch Series 4. The Apple Watch Series 5 increased storage once more to 32GB, where it has remained through the Series 6, Series 7, and Series 8, making the Series 9 the first time the Apple has increased the device's storage in five years.
Brent's new Framework laptop has been torn apart and put back together again. We'll find out if it's up to his standards. Plus, we're kicking off a new build.
Framework — The time has come for consumer electronics products that are designed to last: products that give you back the power to upgrade, customize, and repair them. We’re excited for the opportunity to fix the consumer electronics industry together.
The Blog Index — TheGoldenDragon and I have hashed out some basic ideas about what Boost 4 Blogs should be and in a moment of glory I decided to mimic The Podcast Index by registering blogindex.org!
Linus Torvalds Comments On Bcachefs Prospects For Linux 6.6 — That very much means NOT continuing this "I'll just do it my way". You need to show that you can work with others, that you can work within the framework of upstream, and that not every single thread you get into becomes an argument.
Box64 — Linux Userspace x86_64 Emulator with a twist, targeted at ARM64 Linux devices.
Podcasting 2.0 Top 100 (Music) — This chart is a ranking of the music tracks played on podcasts that have been boosted the most over the last 7 days. It is recalculated hourly. Thank you to Nathan Gathright for the page design. ❤
Neo-Store — An F-Droid client with modern UI and an arsenal of extra features.
Obtainium — Get Android App Updates Directly From the Source.
⚡ Self-Hosted on the Podcastindex.org — Send a Boost into the show via the web. First, top-up Alby, then head over to our entry on the Podcast Index.
QuickSync Benchmarking Script — Written by cptmorgan (Morgan the doorbell guy!). Use this script to benchmark the performance of your Quick Sync iGPU video transcoder. Submit those results to Alex via the Gist linked (as a comment).
Home-Assistant-Switch-Manager — Switch manager is a centralised component to handle button pushes for your wireless switches. This includes anything passed through the event bus or MQTT.
Quad Zigbee Smart Switch - Chris' Current Fav — Each button has three pairing modes, allowing the 4 scene switches to create 12 unique scenes, including Home Mode, Away Mode, Movie Mode, and more.
Zooz 700 Series Z-Wave Scene Controller — Connect a 120 V light fixture (up to 150 W for LED's) to control it via Z-Wave or use the main button for wireless control only with up to 7 button triggers available.
Read-it-later app Matter can now transcribe your favorite podcasts — The company this morning is debuting “Readable Podcasts,” a feature that will let you save favorite podcasts and transcribe their audio to text. By doing so, you can use Matter’s other tools to interact with the podcast content as you would a saved article, including by doing things like highlighting, taking notes and sharing quotes.
mergerfs: a featureful union filesystem — mergerfs is a union filesystem geared towards simplifying storage and management of files across numerous commodity storage devices. It is similar to mhddfs, unionfs, and aufs.
llama-gpt — A self-hosted, offline, ChatGPT-like chatbot, powered by Llama 2. 100% private, with no data leaving your device.
LUP 486: Goodbye, Google — Chris ditches the iPhone and switches to GrapheneOS, a security and privacy-focused project that lets you take control back from Google.
Voice over IP - Home Assistant — The VoIP integration enables users to talk to Assist using an analog phone and a VoIP adapter.
HomeCam for HomeKit on the App Store — HomeCam is the only app to allow you to view multiple cameras live at once and control their surroundings.
Blame the Automation | Coder Radio 534
Sep 06, 2023
Azure suffers a big outage, and Microsoft blames faulty automation; why we think there might be early signs of weak demand for Apple's Vision Pro and more.
Visual Studio for Mac Retirement Announcement — Today we are announcing the retirement of the Visual Studio for Mac IDE. Visual Studio for Mac 17.6 will continue to be supported for another 12 months, until August 31st, 2024
Apple's Vision Pro Developer Labs Not Drawing Many Attendees — Any developer can apply to attend a developer lab, but Apple is not reimbursing for travel, and developers located on the east coast of the United States will have to fund cross-country travel to get to the lab.
Elon Musk's X obtains required license for crypto payments — Notably, Rhode Island approved a requested license by Twitter Payments LLC — X’s payment branch — on August 28, according to data from NMLS. The “Currency Transmitter” license also includes different crypto-related service providers, such as crypto exchanges, wallets, and payment processors.
Canonical Wins by Default | LINUX Unplugged 526
Sep 03, 2023
While chaos is brewing in SUSE and Red Hat land, Canonical stays the course and doubles down on the Linux desktop. Plus, our thoughts on the kernel team GPL-blocking NVIDIA.
Making life (even) harder for proprietary modules — It changes the behavior of symbolget(), causing it to fail when asked to look up a symbol that is not marked GPL-only. This is an inversion of the usual test, which denies access to symbols that are marked GPL-only. The reasoning is that symbolget() has always been intended for low-level cooperation deep within the kernel, where everything is expected to be GPL-only anyway.
Linux 6.6 To Better Protect Against The Illicit Behavior Of NVIDIA’s Proprietary Driver — Back in 2020 when the original defense was added, NVIDIA recommended avoiding the Linux 5.9 for the time being. They ended up having a supported driver several weeks later. It will be interesting to see this time how long Linux 6.6+ thwarts their kernel driver.
PATCH: modules: only allow symbolget of EXPORTSYMBOLGPL modules — Given that symbolget was only ever inteded for tightly cooperating modules using very internal symbols it is logical to restrict it to being used on EXPORYSYMBOLGPL and prevent nvidia from costly DMCA circumvention of access controls law suites.
Ubuntu Desktop: Charting a course for the future — Recently, we embarked on an internal exercise to consolidate and bring structure to our values and goals for how we plan to evolve the desktop experience over the next few years. This post is designed to share the output of those discussions and give insight into the direction we’re going.
Leap Replacement Discussion — I've been looking at the results from the recent contributor survey to gauge the interest and feasibility of replacing openSUSE Leap with a new community-built offering.
Critical Failure in Open Source | Coder Radio 533
Aug 30, 2023
U.S. officials are warning open-source software could be a cyber security threat. Their solution? Money. But do we want them picking the winners and losers of open source?
Plus, Mike's thoughts after using Cursor AI and a Cornell study take generated code to the shed.
2023 Speakers - OLF Conference — We are excited about our lineup of speakers for the 2023 OLF Conference! Read on to learn more about what they have to say.
Beating Apple to the Sauce | LINUX Unplugged 525
Aug 27, 2023
We daily drive Asahi Linux on a MacBook, chat about how the team beat Apple to a major GPU milestone, and an easy way to self-host open-source ChatGPT alternatives.
Our new flagship distro: Fedora Asahi Remix — We’re still working out the kinks and making things even better, so we are not quite ready to call this a release yet. We aim to officially release the Fedora Asahi Remix by the end of August 2023. Look forward to many new features, machine support, and more!
Hector Martin: “Okay, I’m going to be honest…” — I apologize to all Asahi Linux users. You deserve better. When I chose Arch Linux ARM as a base I didn't realize it would have so many basic QA issues.
The first conformant M1 GPU driver — Our reverse-engineered, free and open source graphics drivers are the world’s only conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 implementation for M1- and M2-family graphics hardware. That means our driver passed tens of thousands of tests to demonstrate correctness and is now recognized by the industry.
llama.cpp — Port of Facebook’s LLaMA model in C/C++
Llama2.c — Inference Llama 2 in one file of pure C
Koboldcpp — A simple one-file way to run various GGML models with KoboldAI’s UI
lollms-webui — Lord of Large Language Models Web User Interface
LM Studio — Discover, download, and run local LLMs
text-generation-webui — A Gradio web UI for Large Language Models. Supports transformers, GPTQ, llama.cpp (ggml/gguf), Llama models.
A comprehensive guide to running Llama 2 locally — Code Llama is a state-of-the-art LLM capable of generating code, and natural language about code, from both code and natural language prompts.
Podcast Bounty Hunters | Office Hours 34
Aug 25, 2023
Behind-the-scenes details of a new show in the works, our thoughts on a new genre of Podcasts bursting onto the scene, and we make JB history live on the show.
BEHIND THE SCH3M3S — Behind the Sch3m3s delves behind the obscure memes, behind the cryptic screams, and behind the conspiracy dreams. Distilling our understanding of Wizards behind the curtain, with zero answers guaranteed is certain. Truth denying can be just as fun as bullshit subscription; indubitably.
Alex does a significant overhaul of his website and shares new insights. Chris finally archives complete local voice control of his network, we complain about the state of domain name sellers, and more.
$13 voice remote for Home Assistant — This tutorial will guide you to turn an ATOM Echo into the world’s most private voice assistant. Pick up the tiny device to talk to your smart home. Issue commands and get responses!
Perfect Media Server — If you're looking to build a media server, then you've come to the right place. This site documents the many aspects of building a media server using Free and Open Source Software, wherever possible.
WyzeHacks — This project contains a set of scripts trying to provide additional features not implemented by the official firmware.
docker-wyze-bridge — Create a local WebRTC, RTSP, RTMP, or HLS/Low-Latency HLS stream for most of your Wyze cameras including the outdoor, doorbell, and 2K cams.
Take It to the Limit | Coder Radio 532
Aug 23, 2023
Mike hits the limits of ChatGPT's knowledge, a chat about editors and what we'd do for a living if it had to be outside of tech.
ChatGPT Cheat Sheet for Developers — As a developer, learning how to master ChatGPT can help you to generate code snippets in various languages, learn programming concepts by example, quickly debug code, write test cases, write documents, and gather information.
The emerging usability of ChatGPT in software development — In the hands of a creative developer, ChatGPT has what it takes to be a helpful coding tool. But generative AI may soon attain the capability to act as more than an assistant.
Alex MacCaw on X — Cursor is the best product I've used in a while - it's an AI enabled editor.
Santiago on X — I'm trying Cursor, an AI-first code editor. Artificial Intelligence is not a feature for them. It's the whole thing!
Tailscale on X — The Tailscale extension for VS Code just got a major upgrade — now you can seamlessly navigate and edit files on any node on your tailnet, all powered by Tailscale SSH.
MetaGPT: 🌟 — The Multi-Agent Framework: Given one line Requirement, return PRD, Design, Tasks, Repo. Assign different roles to GPTs to form a collaborative software entity for complex tasks.
Serge — Serge is a chat interface crafted with llama.cpp for running Alpaca models. No API keys, entirely self-hosted!
README - TypeScript Deep Dive — I've been looking at the issues that turn up commonly when people start using TypeScript.
How Our Server Got It's Groove Back | LINUX Unplugged 524
Aug 20, 2023
Can we build an indestructible server that stands up to the test of giving out root login to the Internet?
LinuxFest Northwest 2023 Sponsorship Prospectus — LinuxFest Northwest 2023 will be held October 20-22, 2023 at Bellingham Technical College. The Fest is a free and open community event dedicated to provide and support educational activities related to Linux and Open Source Software.
Star-History — We know, you can't fully trust a project's GitHub stars alone. It is, however, a good way to determine if a tool is an adequate one and if it's likely to grow, if you use it correctly.
disko — NixOS is a Linux distribution where everything is described as code, with one exception: during installation, the disk partitioning and formatting are manual steps. disko aims to correct this sad 🤡 omission.
nixos-anywhere — You can then initiate an unattended installation with a single CLI command. Since nixos-anywhere can access the new machine using SSH, it's ideal for remote installations.
NixOS Series 4: "Stateless" Operating System — Here's the question: is it really necessary to store the contents of /etc on the disk drive? They're going to be regenerated on each reboot or config switch anyway.
NixOS ❄: tmpfs as root — One fairly unique property of NixOS is the ability to boot with only /boot and /nix. Nothing else is actually required. This supports doing all sorts of weird things with your root file system.
Impermanence - NixOS Wiki — Impermanence in NixOS is where your root directory gets wiped every reboot (such as by mounting a tmpfs to /). Such a setup is possible because NixOS only needs /boot and /nix in order to boot, all other system files are simply links to files in /nix. /boot and /nix still need to be stored on a hard drive or SSD.
Let's talk Java licensing, says unsolicited Oracle email — Oracle is firing off unsolicited emails to businesses offering to discuss Java subscription deals, seemingly in an effort to extract information that could be to its benefit in future license negotiations.
whisper: Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision — Whisper is a general-purpose speech recognition model. It is trained on a large dataset of diverse audio and is also a multitasking model that can perform multilingual speech recognition, speech translation, and language identification.
MetaLawMan on Twitter — This indictment alleges that SBF lobbied members of Congress and "other high-level government officials to promote cryptocurrency regulation that would favor his business and personal interests."
This may make Gary Gensler a witness.
Which means SBF's lawyers would be able to cross-examine Gensler under oath at trial.
Rhino Linux — Rhino Linux re-invents the Ubuntu experience as a rolling release distribution atop a stable Desktop Environment.
Rhino Linux 2023.1, how we made the distro. — Rhino Linux has now officially moved out of Beta! We have released Rhino Linux 2023.1 on x86_64, ARM, Pine64 and Raspberry Pi devices.
Pacstall — Pacstall uses the stable base of Ubuntu but allows you to use bleeding edge software with little to no compromises, so you don't have to worry about security patches or new features.
Nala: a front-end for libapt-pkg — We aim to solve this by not showing some redundant messages, formatting the packages better, and using color to show specifically what will happen with a package during install, removal, or an upgrade.
Nextcloud Conference 2023 — Annually bringing the global Nextcloud Contributor Community together for a week of coding, design, discussion, talks & fun!
SearXNG — A free internet metasearch engine which aggregates results from more than 70 search services.
Archiving the Internet | Self-Hosted 103
Aug 11, 2023
A few tools to build your own Way Back Machine, we check in with the "Year of Voice" and more.
⚡ Self-Hosted on the Podcastindex.org — Send a Boost into the show via the web. First, top-up Alby, then head over to our entry on the Podcast Index.
gmail-unsubscribe: Bulk unsubscribe from lists in your Gmail inbox for free without compromising privacy — This Google Apps Script + Google Spreadsheet combo unsubscribes you from all the messages with a specific label (default "Unsubscribe"). Unlike services such as Unroll.me that sell your data but don't actually work, this script is completely private: all data stays in your Google account, and you can verify the script's behavior by reading its source before giving it access to your account.
Year of the Voice - Chapter 3: Ready when you are - Home Assistant — For Chapter 3, we bring the full power of Assist to the million active Android devices running the Home Assistant Companion app. Got an Android phone, tablet, or watch? Set Assist as your default digital assistant and talk to your Home Assistant with one push!
2023.8: Translated services, events, and wildcards! - Home Assistant — Pretty much all features in this release are absolutely amazing, and it is hard to pick a favorite. Great translation improvements that help with the user experience, a new entity to capture events from things like remotes, and the new Assist features are, again, mind-blowing!
Linkwarden — Linkwarden is a fully self-hostable, open-source collaborative bookmark manager to collect, organize and archive webpages.
IMDB for the Terminal — IMDB for the terminal uses three APIs - one to scrape IMDB for the top 1000 lists, one to give you details on the movies and series and one to show you where you can stream it
Page2API — Page2API is a delightful and versatile API that empowers you to scrape the web like a PRO.
Workgroup:SELinux - NixOS Wiki — This group is about adding SE Linux support to NixOS both booting and when run on a system like Debian or Fedora with SE Linux support.
dotfiles-flake — This repo contains a minimal set of configuration needed for installing NixOS on a computer with ZFS as root filesystem.
ChrisLAS on Nostr — pubkey: npub1awyzkzaktxlhyg6syzst3pxy5lvp0c908yphz4ekk9rp3zcapp5qxn79n4 / eb882b0bb659bf72235020a0b884c4a7d817e0af3903715736b146188b1d0868
Baby Breathing Monitor | Angelcare AC027 — Our Movement Sensor Pad is designed to be placed under your baby's mattress, where it will sense even the smallest of movements.
What the AI Skeptics got Right | Coder Radio 530
Aug 09, 2023
Did we get this one wrong? It seems consumer AI is eating the lunch of some web's biggest names.
Tesla hackers turn to voltage glitching to unlock features — Instead of approaching the problem like Tesla hackers of the past, who've tried to gain control of vehicles or break into them as an outsider, Christian Werling and his fellow researchers wanted to approach the problem like someone who already had physical access to a vehicle and was trying to make their own modifications – like breaking through soft locks on optional, but installed, features.
Apple already shipped attestation on the web — Google isn't the first to think of this, but in fact they're not even the first to ship it. Apple already developed & deployed an extremely similar system last year, now integrated into MacOS 13, iOS 16 & Safari, called "Private Access Tokens".
Gabor Gurbacs on Twitter — New Zoom Terms of Service (10.2) stipulate that you as a user consent to allow AI to train on and use all of your data, including video, audio, facial, biometric data, etc...
Venture-backed startups are failing at record rates — In the first half of 2023, 338 U.S. companies filed for bankruptcy protection, according to newly released S&P Global Market Intelligence data, including 54 companies with private equity or venture capital backing. At that rate, 108 VC-backed startups will fail by year’s end, besting the 95 that failed during 2010.
Coming soon: Fedora for Apple Silicon Macs! — Fedora Asahi Remix will provide a polished experience for Workstation and Server use-cases on Apple Silicon systems. The Asahi Linux project has also announced that the new Asahi Linux flagship distribution will be Fedora Asahi Remix.
ChromeOS is splitting the browser from the OS — The project is called "Lacros," which Google says stands for "Linux And ChRome OS." This will split ChromeOS's Linux OS from the Chrome browser, allowing Google to update each one independently.
Funding Developers With Lightning — PkgZap gives a way for NodeJS developers to easily fund the packages they're relying upon for their project.
Alby | pkgzap — Value4Value payments for npm (and other package managers)
Serving at the Pleasure of the King — But as a software developer, I am deeply ambivalent about an Apple dominated future. Apple isn't shy about cultivating the experience around their new iOS products and the App Store. There are unusually strict, often mysterious rules around what software developers can and cannot do — at least if they want entry into the App Store. And once you're in, the rules can and will change at any time.
Practical Privacy | LINUX Unplugged 522
Aug 06, 2023
Why Linux reigns for privacy; our recommendations for secure tools from chat to DNS.
Privacy friendly ESP32 smart doorbell with Home Assistant local integration — This project is aimed at being simple while allowing a ton of customisation and flexibility. To get started, you’ll need an instance of Home Assistant running with the ESPHome add-on as well as the Home Assistant companion app on your mobile phone to receive notifications when someone presses the doorbell button.
The U.K. Government Is Dangerously Close to Eroding Encryption and Normalizing Mass Surveillance — "The U.K. government wants to grant itself the right to scan every message online for content related to child abuse or terrorism—and says it will still, somehow, magically, protect peoples’ privacy. That’s simply impossible. U.K. civil society groups have condemned the bill, as have technical experts and human rights groups around the world."
Snowflake ❄️ — Snowflake is a system that allows people from all over the world to access censored websites and applications. Similar to how VPNs assist users in getting around Internet censorship, Snowflake helps you avoid being noticed by Internet censors by making your Internet activity appear as though you're using the Internet for a regular video or voice call.
Pi-hole – Network-wide Ad Blocking — Instead of browser plugins or other software on each computer, install Pi-hole in one place and your entire network is protected.
UnifiedPush — UnifiedPush is a set of specifications and tools that lets the user choose how push notifications* are delivered. All in a free and open source way.
EteSync - Secure Data Sync — Secure, end-to-end encrypted, and privacy respecting sync for your contacts, calendars, tasks and notes.
Nextcloud + DAVx5 — DAVx⁵ has been successfully tested with Nextcloud.
Syncthing — Syncthing is a continuous file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers in real time, safely protected from prying eyes. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, whether it is shared with some third party, and how it’s transmitted over the internet.
Send — Send lets you share files with end-to-end encryption and a link that automatically expires. So you can keep what you share private and make sure your stuff doesn’t stay online forever.
nitter: Alternative Twitter front-end — A free and open source alternative Twitter front-end focused on privacy and performance.
Inspired by the Invidious project.
NewPipe - a free YouTube client — NewPipe has been created with the purpose of getting the original YouTube experience on your smartphone without annoying ads and questionable permissions.
yattee — Privacy-oriented video player for iOS, tvOS and macOS
libredirect — A browser extension that redirects YouTube, Twitter, TikTok... requests to alternative privacy friendly frontends and backends.
Nix-on-Droid — Nix-on-Droid brings Nix package manager of NixOS fame to your mobile device.
InvidTUI — InvidTUI is an invidious client, which fetches data from invidious instances and displays a user interface in the terminal, and allows for selecting and playing Youtube audio and video.
IPFS Podcasting | Umbrel App Store — Turn your Umbrel into an IPFS node for self-hosting, crowd-hosting, and archiving of your favorite podcasts to the IPFS network.
Run a Node | IPFS Podcasting — If you have a mini-PC (i.e. Raspberry Pi), an old computer, or an advanced server, you can run a node to host podcast episodes.
This API is Not for You | Coder Radio 529
Aug 02, 2023
Microsoft's dirty old API games, the new, even more restrictive rules Apple developers will now have to follow, and why Google's "Web Integrity API" seems gross.
About 7 years ago I was in a meeting with a former Windows core graphics engineer — Proceeded to explain to me that this was how he, and many other core Windows engineers lined their pockets for years - write complex implementations, do the absolute bare minimum documentation, then take a 6 month sabbatical and publish a reference book that was absolutely required to actually use the API.
App Store developers must detail why they're using some APIs — As detailed on the Apple Developer website, some APIs are now classified as “Required Reason APIs.” This means that in order to use them in an app, the developer must describe to Apple the purpose of that API in the app.
Free and open source software projects are in transition — The tech bubble—the one that has been kept inflated over the past sixteen years with low interest rates, non-existent antitrust regulation, and a legal environment for tech that, in the US at least, has effectively been a free-for-all—is now over.
Nextcloud Conference 2023 — Annually bringing the global Nextcloud Contributor Community together for a week of coding, design, discussion, talks & fun!
GrapheneOS on Twitter — Unfortunately, PayPal permanently locked our GrapheneOS Foundation account today. No reason has been provided for the account being locked. All we've done is accept donations. We added our bank account information yesterday in order to begin withdrawing money and it was locked.
GrapheneOS on Twitter — PayPal has restored our non-profit GrapheneOS Foundation account. We should be able to withdraw all donations made through it in the past few weeks. We received no info on why our account was permanently banned with funds held for 180 days or why they now restored our account.
GrapheneOS on Twitter — We use Bitcoin as the main way we transfer funds internally, including using it to pay most of our project members. It doesn't replace having bank accounts to pay other expenses or accepting donations in other ways.
Ansible Creator Wants to Build a New Automation Platform in Rust — Ansible's creator Michael DeHaan thinks there is still plenty of room to make more tools that would add to the existing automation ecosystem. Especially, when infrastructure automation solutions like Chef and Puppet were acquired.
Rethinking Window Management — We’ve wanted more powerful tiling for years, but there has not been much progress due to the huge amount of work involved on the technical side and the lack of a clear design direction we were happy with. We now finally feel like the design is at a stage where we can take concrete next steps towards making it happen, which is very exciting!
Open Podcast API — The Open Podcast API is an initiative aiming to provide a feature-complete synchronisation API specification for podcast (web) apps and user-focussed servers.
HamWAN — HamWAN is a non-profit organization (501c3) developing best practices for high speed amateur radio data networks. HamWAN also runs the Puget Sound Data Ring, which is a real-world network implementation of the proposed designs.
SUSE Liberty Linux — SUSE Liberty Linux is a technology and support solution that will secure your Linux future without fear of vendor lock-in. With SUSE Liberty Linux, you get trusted support and optional proven management tools that are optimized for mixed Linux environments, including Red Hat ® Enterprise Linux ®, CentOS, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
anytype.io — the everything app for those who celebrate trust & autonomy
bfs 3.0: the fastest find yet! — bfs is a tool I wrote to do breadth-first search through a filesystem. It started out simply enough, but over the years it's grown to include almost every feature from every other find implementation I could find, plus many of its own innovations.
NixOS is a bit Flakey | Self-Hosted 102
Jul 28, 2023
Alex shares a suite of self-hosted apps that replace Reddit. Chris is struggling with Jellyfin, and we discuss where NixOS is killing it and where we think it falls down.
⚡ Self-Hosted on the Podcastindex.org — Send a Boost into the show via the web. First, top-up Alby, then head over to our entry on the Podcast Index.
wallabag — wallabag is a web application allowing you to save web pages for later reading. Click, save and read it when you want. It extracts content so that you won't be distracted by pop-ups and cie.
dua-cli: View disk space usage and delete unwanted data, fast. — dua (-> Disk Usage Analyzer) is a tool to conveniently learn about the usage of disk space of a given directory. It's parallel by default and will max out your SSD, providing relevant information as fast as possible. Optionally delete superfluous data, and do so more quickly than rm.
The NixOS Foundation's Call to Action: S3 Costs Require Community Support — TL;DR - Kicking off an effort to secure long-term funding for our S3 costs and exploring alternatives. This comes after multiple years where Logicblox has been graciously sponsoring the S3 costs for Nix! An enormous thank you to them.
Self-hosting - any tech docs — This article will help you to self-host Any-Sync on your own infrastructure for personal use and configure Anytype clients to work with your nodes.
Outline – Team knowledge base & wiki — Lost in a mess of Docs? Never quite sure who has access? Colleagues requesting the same information repeatedly in chat? It’s time to get your team’s knowledge organized.
Taiga — For cross-functional agile teams to work effectively
Introducing GitHub Copilot X — With chat and terminal interfaces, support for pull requests, and early adoption of OpenAI’s GPT-4, GitHub Copilot X is our vision for the future of AI-powered software development. Integrated into every part of your workflow.
GitHub Copilot Chat enters beta — “As we prepare to bring the entirety of GitHub Copilot X to general availability, we believe every developer could be made 10 times more productive. This means 10 days of work, done in one day. 10 hours of work, done in one hour. 10 minutes of work, done with a single prompt command."
Apple Vision Pro Developer Kits Now Available — Along with a Vision Pro, developers will get help with device setup and onboarding, check-ins with Apple experts for UI design and development guidance, and help with app refining. Each developer who receives a kit will be provided with two additional code-level support requests for troubleshooting code issues.
CSPAN on Twitter — President Biden announces an agreement for responsible innovation in development of artificial intelligence (AI) among seven of the leading AI companies.
Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’ — This is not the first time Musk is changing the Twitter logo. Earlier this year, he briefly changed the social network’s logo to the Doge meme.
Elon Musk on Twitter — In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird.
Elon Musk Wants to Relive His Start-Up Days. — In 2017, he reacquired the X.com domain name and, according to Soni, he once pitched Reid Hoffman on the idea of reacquiring PayPal to revive his original vision.
Worldcoin Launches WLD Token — The Worldcoin Foundation also launched its World ID system and expanded its World App to over 80 countries, with plans to increase that number to 120.
Pledditor on Twitter — Here's a list of WorldCoin VCs, according to http://dealroom.co
plane: 🔥 🔥 🔥 Open Source JIRA — Meet Plane. An open-source software development tool to manage issues, sprints, and product roadmaps with peace of mind lotuspositionwoman.
Outline – Team knowledge base & wiki — Lost in a mess of Docs? Never quite sure who has access? Colleagues requesting the same information repeatedly in chat? It’s time to get your team’s knowledge organized.
To Infinity and Berlin | LINUX Unplugged 520
Jul 23, 2023
Do they build them better in Germany? We try out the next-generation InfinityBook Pro 14 and dig into TUXEDO OS.
Office Hours 33: Just Burn it all Down — Why independent media is getting just as bad as mainstream media, and Brent's escape from a wildfire. Plus, an update on our new bounty release format!
TUXEDO Computers — TUXEDO Computers are customizable Linux notebooks and Desktop PCs optimized in the first place to run with Ubuntu-based Linux operating systems.
TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen8 — 17 mm thin, 1.3 kg light, a chassis footprint of only 31 x 21.5 cm, paired with a top-notch 16:10 3K Omnia display, a max-sized 99 Wh battery and a 14-core Intel Core i7-13700H high-performance processor.
ddev — Docker-based local PHP+Node.js web development environments.
Flipper Zero — Portable Multi-tool Device for Geeks
GNU Wget — GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and FTPS, the most widely used Internet protocols.
GNU Guix — transactional package manager and distribution
Cheogram — Extensible Messaging and Presence for the Telephone Network
no-more-secrets — This project provides a command line tool called nms that recreates the famous data decryption effect seen on screen in the 1992 hacker movie Sneakers.
Bard-Shell — Bard-Shell is a utility that allows you to use Google's Bard AI in the Linux terminal.
Just Burn it all Down | Office Hours 33
Jul 21, 2023
Why independent media is getting just as bad as mainstream media, and Brent's escape from a wildfire.
▶️ Upgrade to a Podcasting 2.0 App — Alternate Enclosure, Boostagrams, Chapters, Funding, Live, Sat Streaming, Search, Social Interact, Soundbite, Transcript, and more!
BC Wildfire Service — Fire size is based on the last known estimated size in hectares.
Twitter says it will start paying creators this week — So far, payout amounts are ranging from a few thousand dollars to nearly $40,000 for accounts with a few million followers. In a thread, Twitter says it will expand eligibility to more creators later this month.
Bitcoin, Nostr & Freedom Tech with Matt Odell — What Bitcoin Did — “Freedom dies by people just taking a little bit more and a little bit more… we just end up in a situation people are like ‘How the fuck did we end up here?’ And at some point down the line you have to practice civil disobedience and say: ‘No, I will not fucking comply.’”
Coder Radio on the Podcastindex.org — Send a boost from the web using the Podcast Index. Start with Alby, top it off, then head on over to our page on the Index.
List of new Podcast apps — Try a Podcasting 2.0 compatible app, and you can boost and more right in the app.
Nostr Privacy — I have observed a few privacy issues with nostr protocol and apps related to privacy. This post is not an attempt to FUD although this could help in more users being aware of the problems and possible solutions.
The Clone Grift Wars | LINUX Unplugged 519
Jul 16, 2023
Have Oracle and SUSE lost their minds? Plus, we dig into Fedora's proposal to add telemetry collection to Workstation.
Keep Linux Open and Free—We Can’t Afford Not To — Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden.
SUSE Preserves Choice in Enterprise Linux by Forking RHEL with a $10+ Million Investment — SUSE is committed to working with the open source community to develop a long-term, enduring compatible alternative for RHEL and CentOS users. SUSE plans to contribute this project to an open source foundation, which will provide ongoing free access to alternative source code.
Why SUSE is forking Red Hat Enterprise Linux — SUSE CEO Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen today argues that SUSE is wading into this because of its belief that “becoming more proprietary should not be the basis for competition between open source companies."
Rocky Linux: Keeping Open Source Open — While we continuously explore other options, the aforementioned approaches are subject to change. However, our unwavering dedication and commitment to open source and the Enterprise Linux community remain steadfast.
AlmaLinux OS - Forever-Free Enterprise-Grade Operating System — After much discussion, the AlmaLinux OS Foundation board today has decided to drop the aim to be 1:1 with RHEL. AlmaLinux OS will instead aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible.
Endless OS’s privacy-preserving metrics system — Let’s stare directly at the elephant in the room: usage metrics – telemetry, analytics, or whatever other terms one might like to use – is something that free software community members are often opposed to, with some good justification.
rustdesk 1.2 — Rewritten with Flutter, Wayland support, Headless Linux, Resolution adjustment, Dark theme.
Joining the Federation | Self-Hosted 101
Jul 14, 2023
The advantages of Federating a local and remote Nextcloud, Chris replaces Google Home Hub's photo powers and the new docker-compose feature that will change Alex's entire setup.
MicroBin v2 Released — I am proud that MicroBin now contributes to a world-wide effort towards making privacy accessible and easy, and I hope v2 will help it towards becoming the secure self-hosted file-sharing solution.
Docker | MicroBin — For Docker, you can either use our setup script, or download the Dockerfile and .env file in the repository and set it up yourself. The image is also available on DockerHub.
Fully Kiosk Browser - Home Assistant — Fully Kiosk Browser is a powerful kiosk browser for Android devices. It provides a number of features for monitoring and controlling your Android device. This integration gives you access to control your device and view the status in Home Assistant.
Fotoo - Photo Frame Slideshow — Turn your tablet/TV/phone into an elegant digital photo frame and photo slideshow player!
What Exactly Is Federation, Anyways? — Really, federation is just, well, decentralization with extra features. Decentralized software is where, in effect, anyone can run their own instance, there is no one ‘central’ location.
Configuring Federation Sharing — Nextcloud — Federated Cloud Sharing is now managed by the Federation app (9.0+), and is now called Federation sharing. When you enable the Federation app you can easily and securely link file shares between Nextcloud servers, in effect creating a cloud of Nextclouds.
Plex Dupefinder — Plex DupeFinder is a python script that finds duplicate versions of media (TV episodes and movies) in your Plex Library and tells Plex to remove the lowest rated files/versions (based on user-specified scoring) to leave behind a single file/version.
The Closing Moment of Opportunity | Coder Radio 526
Jul 12, 2023
openAI's window to build their moat is closing, but they have a powerful friend stepping up to help seal the deal. Plus, our reaction to Oracle's very spicy response to Red Hat.
Keep Linux Open and Free—We Can’t Afford Not To — Finally, to IBM, here’s a big idea for you. You say that you don’t want to pay all those RHEL developers? Here’s how you can save money: just pull from us. Become a downstream distributor of Oracle Linux. We will happily take on the burden.
Traffic to OpenAI's ChatGPT fell almost 10% in June — Traffic to ChatGPT’s website fell by 9.7% over the month of June, according to preliminary estimates from Similarweb, a web analytics firm, released this week. The decline was even greater just in the U.S., with a 10.3% month-on-month decline. The number of unique visitors to ChatGPT also fell by 5.7% from the previous month.
Katharina Koerner on Twitter — This article articulates the fear that with new AI regulations, big companies with the means to employ lawyers will dominate the AI market, and the more creative and innovative startups are shut out.
Linux Action News 299 — Recent advances in embedded Linux, Canonical takes full control of LXD, ZFS gets a handy Btrfs feature, and updates on the show's production.
Ubuntu Core as an immutable Linux Desktop base — Behind the scenes, the Canonical team has been actively exploring the benefits of Ubuntu Core beyond the realm of IoT, most notably in the context of developers and daily users.
ubuntu-core-desktop on GitHub — This directory contains an image of Ubuntu Core 22 with the GDM display manager loaded into the boot file system.
canonical/workshops on GitHub — Workshops provides a user friendly interface to create and manage LXD containers as well as provides a full featured terminal.
Adopting Bitcoin 2023 — The Crowne Plaza is in the heart of the country’s financial district, just over half a kilometer from the San Salvador Cathedral and an hour away from Bitcoin Mecca - El Zonte.
Podcast Listeners Say AI is Poised to Redefine the Medium, Acast Study Finds — Podcast listeners are also supportive of how AI will potentially improve the overall accessibility and discoverability of the medium. In fact, 79% support the use of speech recognition to automatically transcribe podcast episodes to make them searchable and accessible. Another 78% of respondents said they support the use of AI to generate captions in real time in order to make episodes more accessible to deaf audiences. Additionally, 74% said they support the use of AI to suggest specific podcast episodes highly relevant to a topic being discussed in the podcast being listened to and 72% support AI helping them to better discover relevant podcasts.
Transcribe.fm — Lightning-fast transcripts for your podcast
What Are Podcasting 2.0 Transcripts? — Transcripts are no silver bullet, but they certainly make your podcast easier to discover, search, share and repurpose in different content formats.
Bitcoin Hits New 2023 High as BlackRock Refiles Spot Bitcoin ETF Application — Monday’s move in the Bitcoin price comes as financial giant BlackRock re-filed its spot Bitcoin ETF application. As per the details, BlackRock submitted the application to the US SEC through Nasdaq while naming Coinbase Global Inc. as the market to provide surveillance for the proposed ETF.
LXD Moves to Canonical — While the team behind Linux Containers regrets that decision and will be missing LXD as one of its projects, it does respect Canonical’s decision and is now in the process of moving the project over.
Steam Deck on Twitter — “Hi all, just a quick note to celebrate a big milestone - we’ve just passed 10,000 Verified and Playable titles on Steam Deck! 🎉🥳🎉 A bunch of these titles are on sale (along with Steam Deck itself) at the Steam Summer Sale!
ZFS Block Cloning — Block Cloning allows to clone a file (or a subset of its blocks) into another (or the same) file by just creating additional references to the data blocks without copying the data itself. Block Cloning can be described as a fast, manual deduplication
Mike Gets Unreal | Coder Radio 525
Jul 05, 2023
Mike updates us on his development adventures in Unreal 5, signs the Vision Pro might be a flop, and answer questions about abandoning Red Hat's platform.
Elon Musk on Twitter — Temporary emergency measure. We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!
Kareem Carr | Data Scientist | 📊📈 on Twitter — Rate limiting starts the day their cloud contract (that they were having trouble paying) ends. This can’t be a coincidence right?
Red Hat community contributions — Red Hat is a proud contributor to all aspects of the software stack, from the operating system and developer toolchain to middleware, desktop, and cloud. We financially support a number of open source organizations who help us create and maintain better open source software. We also contribute to a wide range of standardization efforts that help define future, interoperable technologies.
Apple wants Xcode to write apps for you, automatically — "In an example, [the] code generator creates a subroutine that facilitates accessing values of the existing ML data," says Apple, "via the particular data type supported in the particular programming language"
Our Essential Apps | Self-Hosted 100 — We cover our must-have self-hosted apps, reflect on the state of Self-Hosting now, and discuss what's new in Proxmox 8.
Red Hat’s commitment to open source: A response to the git.centos.org changes — There was a time, not too long ago, that Red Hat found value in the work done by rebuilders like CentOS. We pushed our SRPMs out to git.centos.org in a neat package that made them easy to rebuild; we even de-branded it for them. More recently, we have determined that there isn’t value in having a downstream rebuilder.
Linux Action News 298 — Why everyone is excited about the next Linux kernel, Valve's big hire, and Red Hat's clone war.
Ask Noah 343 Interview w/Mike McGrath — Mike McGrath joins the Ask Noah Show to discuss the changes Red Hat is making in how they make their source code available.
A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model — We fear that be it through incompetence or malice, many RHEL salespeople and business development professionals may regularly violate GPL and no one knows about it. That said, the business model as described by IBM's Red Hat may well comply with the GPL — it's just so murky that any tweak to the model in any direction seems to definitely violate, in our experience.
Rocky Linux Shares How They May Continue To Obtain The RHEL Source Code — One option is through the usage of UBI container images which are based on RHEL and available from multiple online sources (including Docker Hub). Another method that we will leverage is pay-per-use public cloud instances. With this, anyone can spin up RHEL images in the cloud and thus obtain the source code for all packages and errata.
Springdale Linux Discussions — While RedHat's action itself is not particularly surprising given somewhat-recent developments with regards to the likes of CentOS Stream, the timing has taken many in the RHEL-compatible-clone world by surprise.
Red Hat & Fedora – largely stepping out of this ecosystem - Fedora Mailing-Lists — What Red Hat has done recently is depressing, but not a huge surprise to me. Red Hat struggled repeatedly with how to deal with "the clones".The core idea I always came back to in those discussions was that the value isn't in the bits, but in the stability, services and ecosystem Red Hat enables around the bits.
How Red Hat killed its core product—and became a billion-dollar business — To move from small player to big-time enterprise software competitor, Cormier argued that Red Hat had to ditch the freely downloadable Red Hat Linux. Instead, it should replace Red Hat Linux with a more robust enterprise software package that maintained the principles of free (as in freedom) software without actually being free (as in price) to customers.
Carl George on Fosstodon — “You should have already been using #CentOS Stream. There, I said it.”
NASA secures contract with Rocky Enterprise Linux — NASA/NSSC has a requirement for FY23 CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Purchase. Item: CIQ Rocky Enterprise Linux Per Person Advanced - Annual Subscription. Quantity: 3
catercloud.me — Originally, the project consisted of a web framework that glued together several other, more mature open-source projoects, but as scope creep and my own tendency toward re-inventing the wheel rose to the surface, the project’s development became more and more complex, slowly incorporating a lot of components that go way beyond a simple word cloud and into things like natural language processing.
Our Essentials Apps | Self-Hosted 100
Jun 30, 2023
We cover our must-have self-hosted apps, reflect on the state of Self-Hosting now, and discuss what's new in Proxmox 8.
Proxmox Virtual Environment 8.0 — This major release is based on the latest Debian 12 (“Bookworm), and comes with an extensively tested and detailed upgrade path for users of Proxmox VE 7.4 or older versions to enable a smooth upgrade. Proxmox VE 8.0 uses a newer Linux kernel 6.2 as stable default, and includes updates to the latest versions of leading open-source technologies for virtual environments like QEMU 8.0.2, LXC 5.0.2, ZFS 2.1.12, and Ceph Quincy 17.2.6.
iVentoy — iVentoy is extremely easy to use, without complicated configuration, just put the ISO file in the specified location and select PXE boot in the client machine.
Perfect Media Server — If you're looking to build a media server, then you've come to the right place. This site documents the many aspects of building a media server using Free and Open Source Software wherever possible.
Self-Hosted on the Podcastindex.org — You can Boost the show from the Web! Grab Alby first, top it off, then head over to the Podcast Index and boot from there!
Linux Action News 298
Jun 29, 2023
Why everyone is excited about the next Linux kernel, Valve's big hire, and Red Hat's clone war.
Linux 6.4 Released — Released With Early Apple M2 Code, More WiFi 7, AMD Guided Autonomous Mode
Linux 6.4 Released, focus on 6.5 — Linus Torvalds on Sunday announced the release without making any comment at all on the state of the kernel, or the efforts that led to the release of this version. Indeed, he had little to say about the progress of version 6.4
Early access to the LXD graphical user interface — While we don’t yet advise you to use the LXD UI in a production setting, we made it available as an experimental feature and would like to invite you to take it out for a spin and share your feedback.
Google Pixel 8 could debut Desktop Mode — The Pixel 8 series is expected to leverage DisplayPort alternate mode, although specific details are not yet available. Through code analysis, it is possible to speculate on Google’s intentions for this feature. One obvious use would be to transform a Pixel 8 phone into a desktop replacement.
Red Hat’s commitment to open source: A response to the git.centos.org changes — Ultimately, we do not find value in a RHEL rebuild and we are not under any obligation to make things easier for rebuilders; this is our call to make. That brings me to CentOS Stream, of which there is immense confusion. I acknowledge that this is a change in a longstanding tradition where we went above and beyond, and change like this can cause some confusion.
A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model — We fear that be it through incompetence or malice, many RHEL salespeople and business development professionals may regularly violate GPL and no one knows about it. That said, the business model as described by IBM's Red Hat may well comply with the GPL — it's just so murky that any tweak to the model in any direction seems to definitely violate, in our experience.
Linux Action News 298
Jun 29, 2023
Why everyone is excited about the next Linux kernel, Valve's big hire, and Red Hat's clone war.
Linux 6.4 Released — Released With Early Apple M2 Code, More WiFi 7, AMD Guided Autonomous Mode
Linux 6.4 Released, focus on 6.5 — Linus Torvalds on Sunday announced the release without making any comment at all on the state of the kernel, or the efforts that led to the release of this version. Indeed, he had little to say about the progress of version 6.4
Early access to the LXD graphical user interface — While we don’t yet advise you to use the LXD UI in a production setting, we made it available as an experimental feature and would like to invite you to take it out for a spin and share your feedback.
Google Pixel 8 could debut Desktop Mode — The Pixel 8 series is expected to leverage DisplayPort alternate mode, although specific details are not yet available. Through code analysis, it is possible to speculate on Google’s intentions for this feature. One obvious use would be to transform a Pixel 8 phone into a desktop replacement.
Red Hat’s commitment to open source: A response to the git.centos.org changes — Ultimately, we do not find value in a RHEL rebuild and we are not under any obligation to make things easier for rebuilders; this is our call to make. That brings me to CentOS Stream, of which there is immense confusion. I acknowledge that this is a change in a longstanding tradition where we went above and beyond, and change like this can cause some confusion.
A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model — We fear that be it through incompetence or malice, many RHEL salespeople and business development professionals may regularly violate GPL and no one knows about it. That said, the business model as described by IBM's Red Hat may well comply with the GPL — it's just so murky that any tweak to the model in any direction seems to definitely violate, in our experience.
Apple's Blurry Vision | Coder Radio 524
Jun 28, 2023
We got our eyes on the Vision Pro SDK and share our new insights. And why the claims of stalled Mastodon adoption might ring a bit true.
Apple Vision Pro Will Support WebXR — With Apple now officially supporting WebXR, the standard can claim truly widespread support; WebXR is now supported, at least in some capacity, by Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Edge, and Safari, as well as the Quest browser, Pico browser, Magic Leap Browser, Chrome for Android, Samsung Internet, Opera Mobile, and Firefox for Android. Though like visionOS Safari, some of these browsers have kept the feature as a developer preview for now.
Omni Group Apps Coming to 🍏Vision Pro — Now, we don’t expect this first generation Vision Pro to be adopted by everyone, any more than first generations of Apple’s other platforms—the Apple II, 128K Mac, iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch—were adopted by everyone.
“I think the way to radically improve the App Store is have Phil be an Apple fellow and get his hands off the App Store,” says Shoemaker. “That’s what they really need to do. Eddy’s more progressive, Joz is more progressive, and we know Matt is as well. Phil just needs to get his meaty paws off the App Store.”
Why did the #TwitterMigration fail? — I have evidence of this. I recently shut down my Mastodon instance that I started in November, mastodon.bloonface.com, and (as is proper) it sent out about 700,000 kill messages to inform other instances that it had federated with that it was going offline for good, and to delete all record of it from their databases. Around 25% of these were returned undelivered because the instances had simply dropped offline.
Daring Fireball: Why Has Mastodon Adoption Stalled? — After Elon Musk took the helm at Twitter there was an initial burst of new users and increased usage on Mastodon (and the rest of the Fediverse, but mostly this is about Mastodon as an alternative to Twitter). And then it flattened, and perhaps has even declined.
I would like to see Mastodon thrive. But the platform’s ideological zealotry is obviously holding it back and seemingly isn’t going to change.
Coder Radio on the Podcastindex.org — Boost from the web using the Podcast Index. Top off Alby first, and then visit Coder Radio on the Podcast Index and boost from our page there.
The Fixer-Upper | LINUX Unplugged 516
Jun 25, 2023
Chris tears into two old PCs, and builds a surprisingly powerful multi-monitor Wayland workstation.
Plus, Wes has a new device, and Brent wants answers.
Have I Been Pwned — Check if your email has been compromised in a data breach.
Stalkerware Resources and Help – Darknet Diaries — It’s a nightmare scenario that’s alarmingly common. Your spouse, partner, ex, co-worker, or vengeful person is determined they want to spy on you. To follow you everywhere you go digitally. They might have access to your location, the cameras in your home, your emails. It’s extremely violating and horrible. Here are a few resources that can help if you’re in this situation.
Darknet Diaries — True stories from the dark side of the Internet.
GrapheneOS on Twitter — We’re deprecating SeedVault and will be replacing it with a new implementation. SeedVault was created by a member of the GrapheneOS community in 2017 based on our design for it. Unfortunately, it has been taken over by an untrustworthy group of developers without aligned goals.
Office Hours on the Podcastindex.org — You can boost from the web, once Alby is ready to go, visit our entry on the podcast index, and the boost area will automatically show up!
Scooby-Doo of Code Hiding | Coder Radio 523
Jun 21, 2023
We open the robe and spend a little time chatting about the software development business.
Devicescript — DeviceScript brings a TypeScript developer experience to low-resource microcontroller-based devices. DeviceScript is compiled to a custom VM bytecode, which can run in very constrained environments.
Google doesn’t want employees working remotely — “We know that a number of people moved to fully remote work for many good reasons, as we all adjusted to the pandemic. For those who are remote and who live near a Google office, we hope you’ll consider switching to a hybrid work schedule. Our offices are where you’ll be most connected to Google’s community. Going forward, we’ll consider new remote work requests by exception only.”
Why millions of usable hard drives are being destroyed — In 2021, the company approached IT Asset Disposition (ITAD) firms, who dispose of old technology for businesses that no longer need it. The answer came back: "Sorry, we have to shred old drives."
The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens — A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the federal government is buying troves of data about Americans.
Ask Noah Show Episode 200: Ham Radio Linux Superstation — We celebrate episode 200 by sharing our plans to serve the community better! Ham Radio has come a long way from tubes and dials. Alex Archer KC0REL joins us to discuss building the ideal ham shack on Linux!
HAM - Official Documentary (2022) - YouTube — HAM is a short documentary that follows a group of Montanan amateur radio enthusiasts that show the loyal community of amateur radio, explore what it means to be a ham, and how they are trying to keep the hobby alive.
FT8—What Is It and How Can I Get Started? — FT8 is one of the many digital modes often referred to as sound card modes (SCM) because they utilize a computer’s sound card to bring in audio from your radio to be processed by software to decode the information embedded in the signal.
Zeroretries substack — If you’re not yet licensed as an Amateur Radio Operator, and would like to join the fun by literally having a license to experiment with radio technology, here are some pointers:
Reddark — These subreddits are going dark or read-only on June 12th and after. Some already are. Click here to find out why.
Lemmy 🐀 — A link aggregator and forum for the fediverse
Lemmy is similar to sites like Reddit, Lobste.rs, or Hacker News: you subscribe to forums you're interested in, post links and discussions, then vote, and comment on them. Behind the scenes, it is very different; anyone can easily run a server, and all these servers are federated (think email), and connected to the same universe, called the Fediverse.
Debian 12 “bookworm” released — This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as "obsolete". 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for "bookworm" is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code.
RISC-V Fundamentals Training Course — Learn everything you need to know about RISC-V, the open-source instruction set architecture that is predicted to become ubiquitous as it paves the way for the next 50 years of computing design and innovation.
Help Us Test Evolution — If you’re a bit more advanced user who would like to help with testing and you use Evolution from Flathub, consider switching to the beta channel. You wouldn’t switch to something broken. Milan doesn’t let low quality releases out. It’s for rather rare bugs that would be great to identify and fix before they hit everyone, or for early feedback when UX changes are being done.
Nextcloud Hub 5 — Hub 5 builds on all the improvements we introduced earlier this year, including the Smart Picker and it’s AI integrations, the cool new Nextcloud Tables app and more.
Nextcloud on Twitter — Announcing Hub 5: Self-hosted AI-powered digital workspace for everyone!
Reddit Goes Dark | Coder Radio 522
Jun 14, 2023
We chew on the ridiculous situation Reddit has created for itself and the weak position of app developers.
Stephen Totilo on Twitter — At a behind-closed-doors presentation to press, Xbox boss Phil Spencer says gaming revenue for the company is double what it was in the 360 era, says Xbox has more players than ever, expecting more than $1 billion in PC gaming revenue this year
Apple Releases Tool to Help Developers Port Windows Games to Mac — Developers interested in porting Windows games to the Mac can watch Apple's series of "bring your game to Mac" videos for more details. Apple also has a page on its website outlining various gaming technologies and tools available for developers.
Whisky — Whisky provides a clean and easy to use graphical wrapper for Wine built in native SwiftUI. You can make and manage bottles, install and run Windows apps and games, and unlock the full potential of your Mac with no technical knowledge required.
Coder Radio: Bite of the AR Apple | CR 276 — Wes joins Mike to chat all things Apple. We discuss the surprising implications of the iPhone X, including the challenges of its new special shape & the exciting possibilities of ARKit.
Cheaper Apple Vision Headset Likely to Launch by End of 2025 — Apple still plans to launch a more affordable version of its Vision Pro headset by the end of 2025, with the non-Pro model likely to be called "Apple Vision One," or more simply, "Apple Vision," according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Apple Executive Discusses New Mac Pro's Lack of Graphics Card Support — "Fundamentally, we've built our architecture around this shared memory model and that optimization, and so it's not entirely clear to me how you'd bring in another GPU and do so in a way that is optimized for our systems," Ternus told Gruber. "It hasn't been a direction that we wanted to pursue."
Sebastiaan de With on Twitter — Reddit’s AMA with its CEO on their API (read: third party app killing) is a train wreck. These are remakes from their CEO. Why does Reddit consistently have such terrible leadership?
Before this, Huffman had no public interactions with the community or website for 10 months.
Paul Hudson on Twitter — Apologies for the interruption on r/swift, but Reddit needs a change in management. See https://reddark.untone.uk for the huge number of other subreddits going dark in support of @ChristianSelig
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SouthEast LinuxFest — For the regulars and newbies, please review our schedule to get a feel for what’s happening at this year’s events. For the newbies, be sure to read our About Us page to understand a bit more about the event in general.
Nix from First Principles: Flake Edition — This guide is a beginner's guide to Nix and related tooling, focusing on the newer nix command, and flake.nix compared to older tools like nix-env and default.nix. It does not require any prior Nix knowledge
Fractal — Fractal is a Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust. Its interface is optimized for collaboration in large groups, such as free software projects.
Ubuntu Core as an immutable Linux Desktop base — In this blog post we discuss the architecture of immutable operating systems, their benefits and drawbacks, and the role of Ubuntu Core in the immutable Linux landscape.
Red Hat To Stop Shipping LibreOffice In Future RHEL, Limiting Fedora LO Involvement — However, the "tradeoff" to focusing on that is they will be pivoting away from less desktop application work and "cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHE version. This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora."
Apple Home Brew Repo — Using the game-porting-toolkit formula requires downloading the Game Porting Toolkit from developer.apple.com.
Game Porting Toolkit — Game Porting Toolkit is Apple's new translation layer which combines Wine with Apple's own D3DMetal which supports DirectX 9-12. Games that use anti-cheat or aggressive DRM generally don't work. Games that require AVX CPUs also do not work e.g. Last of Us.
More Pro, More Problems | Coder Radio 521
Jun 07, 2023
We argue over what sucked the most at WWDC this year and then surprise each other with two things that thrill us.
LinuxFest Northwest 2023: Call for Speakers — "After receiving some great submissions over the last couple of days, we decided to EXTEND the speaker submission to June 25th! Submit your talk now.
WWDC 2023 — June 5 - YouTube — Watch the WWDC23 Apple Keynote announcing the latest Apple Vision Pro, MacBook Air 15", software, services, and operating systems.
Ed Leon Klinger on Twitter — “One of the coolest results involved predicting a user was going to click on something before they actually did. That was a ton of work and something I’m proud of. Your pupil reacts before you click in part because you expect something will happen after you click. So you can create biofeedback with a user's brain by monitoring their eye behavior, and redesigning the UI in real time to create more of this anticipatory pupil response. It’s a crude brain computer interface via the eyes, but very cool”
Sterling Crispin 🕊️ on Twitter — I spent 10% of my life contributing to the development of the #VisionPro while I worked at Apple as a Neurotechnology Prototyping Researcher in the Technology Development Group. It’s the longest I’ve ever worked on a single effort. I
Apple Vision Pro Testers Share Impressions: 'By Far the Best Headset' — In a tweet, tech columnist Joanna Stern described the Vision Pro as "by far the best headset out there." In a report for The Wall Street Journal, she elaborated that "the interface and hand gestures are intuitive, 3-D movies are finally making sense and a huge dinosaur felt like it really broke through a wall right in front of me."
Apple to Provide Developers With Vision Pro Development Kits — Apple says that developer kits will be offered to help developers bring their creations to life on Vision Pro, and that they will offer the ability to quickly build, iterate, and test on the headset. Developers will be able to apply to get a kit, but Apple hasn't offered details on when the kits will be made available.
Vision Pro developer kit — To support great ideas for apps and games for visionOS, developer kits will be available to help bring your creations to life on Apple Vision Pro. These kits provide the ability to quickly build, iterate, and test on Apple Vision Pro, so your app or game will be ready to deliver amazing experiences. Stay tuned for how to apply.
Mark Gurman on Twitter — Unless I missed something, it is very curious to me why there are no photos of Tim Cook or other Apple executives actually wearing the Vision Pro. If that is indeed true, that was of course a calculated decision. The question is why?
Apple Announces 'Game Mode' in macOS Sonoma for Better Mac Gaming Performance —
With Game Mode enabled in macOS 14, the Mac prioritizes CPU and GPU power for the running title, thereby improving gaming hardware performance across the board. For example, Game Mode makes gaming on Mac even more immersive by dramatically lowering audio latency with AirPods.
iOS 17 Lets You Create a Voice That Sounds Like You — With the first iOS 17 beta, Apple has introduced a new accessibility feature called Personal Voice. First highlighted earlier this year, Personal Voice is designed to allow you to use artificial intelligence to create a replica of your voice.
These iOS 17 features require an iPhone 12 or newer — Apple just previewed iOS 17. With this new operating system coming later this fall, iPhone 8 and iPhone X users won’t be able to update to the latest update. That said, even if you have an iPhone XS, it doesn’t mean you enjoy all the iOS 17 functions.
New iPhone feature warns about unwanted nudes — “Naked photos and videos show the private body parts that are usually covered by underwear or bathing suits,” the pop-up explains. “It’s not your fault, but naked photos and videos can be used to hurt you.” The screen goes on to explain that the person in the photo or video may or may not have consented to this media being shared.
Add RFC on governance, establishing the Leadership Council — This RFC was jointly authored by @jntrnr (Core), @joshtriplett (Lang Team Lead), @khionu (Moderation), @Mark-Simulacrum (Core Project Director, Release Lead), @rylev (Core Project Director), @technetos (Moderation), and @yaahc (Collaboration Project Director).
Red Hat dropping support for LibreOffice [LWN.net] — Red Hat's Matthias Clasen has let it be known that LibreOffice will be dropped from a future Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, and the future of its support in Fedora is unclear as well.
Nixos-anywhere: install nixos everywhere via ssh — You can then initiate an unattended installation with a single CLI command. Since nixos-anywhere can access the new machine using SSH, it's ideal for remote installations.
NetBird — NetBird is an open-source VPN management platform built on top of WireGuard® making it easy to create secure private networks for your organization or home.
netbird GitHub repo — Connect your devices into a single secure private WireGuard®-based mesh network with SSO/MFA and simple access controls.
The One with 45Drives | Self-Hosted 98
Jun 02, 2023
We chat with 45Drives about their ambitions to build a home-lab server that bridges the gap between enterprise-level servers and consumer-grade NAS products. And more.
Amazon is discontinuing Alexa’s celebrity voices, even if you paid for them — “After three years, we’re winding down celebrity voices,” Amazon spokesperson Eric Sveum says in a statement to The Verge. “Customers will be able to continue using these voices for a limited time, and can contact our customer service team for a refund.”
dua-cli — dua (-> Disk Usage Analyzer) is a tool to conveniently learn about the usage of disk space of a given directory. It's parallel by default and will max out your SSD, providing relevant information as fast as possible. Optionally delete superfluous data, and do so more quickly than rm.
Developing inside a Container using Visual Studio Code Remote Development — The Visual Studio Code Dev Containers extension lets you use a container as a full-featured development environment. It allows you to open any folder inside (or mounted into) a container and take advantage of Visual Studio Code's full feature set.
XFS Metadata Corruption On Linux 6.3 Tracked Down To One Missing One-Line Patch — This is a bug fix that we thought just fixed a livelock on stripe aligned filesystems. I'm guessing that in certain circumstances instead of livelocking on repeated failed allocations, it results in a broken mapping being returned to the writeback code and hence misdirecting the writeback IO.
Linux 6.3.5 Released With XFS Metadata Corruption Fix — Making Linux 6.3.5 a notable point release is that it has back-ported the fix for the XFS metadata corruption bug that was plaguing the Linux 6.3 point releases.
Azure Linux - Microsoft revealed why it did not fork Fedora — Why did Microsoft create Azure Linux? “We needed a Linux distribution internally,” Perrin said. “We wanted a consistent platform for ourselves.” Now there is “one vendor to support the full AKS stack”.
Plasma 6 is Wayland only - No X11 for Plasma 6 — With Fedora KDE and Kinoite being fully Wayland by default from login (since F38) to desktop (since F34), it's now time to work toward eliminating our dependency on the Xorg server for Plasma 6.0.
Xorg server is deprecated since RHEL 9.0 — The X.org display server is deprecated, and will be removed in a future major RHEL release. The default desktop session is now the Wayland session in most cases.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS end of standard support — Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, codenamed ‘Bionic Beaver,’ is approaching the end of its standard five-year maintenance period on 31 May 2023.
Let us serve you, but don’t bring us down — Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon’s AWS services. This activity brought archive.org down for all users for about an hour.
Internet Archive — Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.
Microsoft Goes All-In | Coder Radio 520
May 31, 2023
We chew on the best bits from this year's Microsoft Build and the bright red flag coming from the Rust community.
Ford adopts Tesla charging standard — Under the agreement – revealed in a live Twitter Spaces interview with Tesla and Twitter boss Elon Musk, Farley said current Ford owners will be granted access to more than 12,000 Tesla Superchargers, starting early next year via the use of an adapter.
Chris on Mere Mortals — In Conversation #90, Chris and I discuss: what it's been like to have 25+ podcasts, the current nosedive in advertising, how value for value is creating a richer experience for podcasters, his mindset in analyzing technological ideas, the coming pain from the messed up financial system, why Bitcoin/AI won't be as impactful as the internet and traveling across the US in an RV.
Microsoft enables booting PCs directly into cloud PCs — Microsoft has delivered a preview of tech that lets a physical PC boot into a virtual one, running in Azure, instead of running Windows from its local drive.
GrapheneOS on Twitter — GrapheneOS will be undergoing restructuring of the organization and development team. Daniel Micay has stepped down as lead developer and will be stepping down as a non-profit director. Features and security patches will continue to be delivered to users as rapidly as before.
Daniel Micay on Twitter — It appears the wording above was unclear. I'm stepping down as a GrapheneOS Foundation director and as lead developer. I won't have any leadership role in the GrapheneOS project. It will take time/work to transfer my responsibilities to others, especially non-development roles.
Lapce — Lapce is written in pure Rust with a UI in Druid (which is also written in Rust). It is designed with Rope Science from the Xi-Editor which makes for lightning-fast computation, and leverages OpenGL for rendering.
BitFocus Companion — Bitfocus Companion enables the reasonably priced Elgato Streamdeck to be a professional shotbox surface for a huge amount of different presentation switchers, video playback software and broadcast equipment.
Pick: Please Run That — A Python socket app for letting a friend execute a command on your system without using a ssh server all, with a simple GUI It has active development and works OOTB.
Pick: turtle — Turtle is a gtk4 + libadwaita frontend for pygit2 with nautilus plugin support. The project is currently in a very early development stage.
Zuck Dub Time Machine | Office Hours 30
May 26, 2023
We travel 10 years into the future and report back on how podcasts and Jupiter Broadcasting are doing after all those years.
Dave Jones Taking Count! — I’m really thinking it’s time to stop ingesting Anchor feeds automatically and only accept them into the index if they are tied to an iTunes ID or manually submitted.
Podverse | F-Droid — Podcast app with clips, video, livestreams, playlists, profiles, and cross-platf
Oak - Scheduled Boosts — Scheduled LN Payments (demo) - Stream sats from your own node. Setup a schedule to support your favorite content creators. All they need is a Lightning Address, and they keep 100% of what you send them.
Podman Desktop 1.0 Annouced — Podman Desktop offers a user-friendly interface for handling containers and integrating with Kubernetes from a local workstation.
Introducing Azure Linux — This General Availability announcement follows our October preview announcement under the CBL-Mariner project codename. We’d like to thank the customers who provided valuable feedback and insight during our preview.
CodeWeavers An Employee Ownership Trust — As of April 12th, the the company has a new shareholder - the CodeWeavers Purpose Trust. This Trust will become the primary owner of CodeWeavers.
Red Hat Summit 2023 — Highlights — The Red Hat Summit 2023 witnessed the launch of OpenShift AI and Red Hat Ansible software, security cloud services, and Linux management features.
GrapheneOS version 2023051600 Released — Add initial Contact Scopes feature as an alternative to granting the Contacts permission... Add production ready Pixel 7a support.
GrapheneOS on Twitter — Our new Contact Scopes feature is now available in the Alpha channel. It provides a way to avoid granting the Contacts permission for apps requiring it. It's similar to our Storage Scopes feature replacing needing any of the media/storage permissions.
GrapheneOS on Twitter — GmsCompatConfig (sandboxed Google Play compatibility layer configuration) version 53 released.
Asahi Linux To Users: Please Stop Using X.Org — Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin issued a lengthy post encouraging users of this Apple Silicon focused Linux distribution to stop using X.Org as Wayland is the future.
RHEL 9: Deprecated functionality — The X.org display server is deprecated, and will be removed in a future major RHEL release. The default desktop session is now the Wayland session in most cases.
The LUP Odroid H3+ Chassis — I recently got an Odroid H3+ and desperately needed a chassis for it so I decided to make one. Since I am a long-time listener and a big fan of the Linux Unplugged podcast I wanted to pay tribute to it.
Tempted by the Fruit of Another | Self-Hosted 97
May 19, 2023
Alex tempts Chris with his Obsidian ways, our thoughts on Drobo going bankrupt, and Photoprism adding paid tiers. Plus, the slick suite of tools you'll want to run on your LAN.
Garden - planning with Canvas — I am using Obsidian to keep track of my gardening stuff. I have notes for all vegetables i am growing, how much i harvested etc...This year i decided to use the canvas feature to help with planning.Overall its a rough sketch of my garden and the beds, thats also why there is a huge empty spot in the middle as there are my garden-house and lawn etc...
obsidian-text-extractor — Text Extractor is a "companion" plugin. It's mainly useful when used in conjunction with other plugins (like Omnisearch), but you can also use it to quickly extract texts from images & PDFs.
Split DNS Magic with Tailscale - YouTube — Tailscales Split DNS function within the MagicDNS feature allows us to access devices by name, not IP. But what if we could also access any service running in a remote subnet via a Tailscale subnet router? That's what we'll cover in today's video.
Garden Gnomes Chat on Matrix — A chat room is for people who are interested in discussing all things gardening, and garden technology. Share your garden pictures, nerds out about about sensors, automated watering, build ideas, and more. We can share our experiences, ask questions, and learn from each other.
OpenSprinkler — OpenSprinkler is an open-source, web-based smart sprinkler controller for lawn and plant watering, drip irrigation, farm irrigation, hydroponics etc. The current version is OS 3.2, with built-in WiFi (based on ESP8266) and OLED display. You can choose between AC-powered, DC-powered, or Latch version. OpenSprinkler supports a variety of solenoid valves (24VAC, Latch, DC, motorized ball valve etc.)
Fedora Program Manager Laid Off — On 24 April 2023, Red Hat announced a 4% reduction in global staff. As a member of that 4%, today is my last day at Red Hat.
Tesla sued over battery-busting OTA patch in Model S, X — The named plaintiffs claim that, despite Tesla saying their batteries are supposed to last the life of the vehicle, the Musk-owned automaker "deliberately and significantly interfere[d] with the car's performance through software updates that reduce operating capacity."
Driving Mr. Dominick | Coder Radio 518
May 17, 2023
We laugh at Google's scramble, check in on the Twitter collapse, and how one developer's little mistake screwed millions.
Michael Guimarin on Twitter — About a month from now Apple is going to announce support for using its silicon neural engine to run commercial and open source LLMs on the iPhone, etc.
This will enable the work @BrianRoemmele
is currently popularizing to come to Apple’s entire ecosystem.
Strap in.
🚀🚀🚀
Mark Gurman on Twitter — Power On: As Apple prepares to launch its next M2 Macs, the company is already ramping up testing of M3 chips. Here are the details and code counts of the next-generation 3 nanometer processors
Apple Books Nearly 90% of TSMC's 3nm Production Capacity for This Year — Apple has booked nearly 90% of chip supplier TSMC's first-generation 3-nanometer process capacity this year for future iPhones, Macs, and iPads, according to industry sources cited by DigiTimes, providing the Taiwanese foundry with significant growth momentum in the second half of 2023.
Elon Musk stepping down as Twitter CEO — Linda Yaccarino, NBCUniversal’s advertising chief, is in advanced talks for the role, CNBC’s Julia Boorstin reported.
SteamDeckHQ on Twitter — What is your opinion on the ROG ALLY? Is it something you’ll be getting after seeing the stream and reading the reviews? We are on the fence here. Love the idea of extra power, but the worse battery life, using windows, glitches, and lack of touchpads does hamper our excitement.
ROG Ally (2023) — The ROG Ally is a true Windows 11 gaming machine, and comes bundled with 3 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate for free.
Public Money? Public Code! - FSFE — Why is software created using taxpayers' money not released as Free Software? We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence.
Activities - FSFE — As a non-profit, non-governmental organisation, Free Software Foundation Europe works to create general understanding and support for Free Software and Open Standards.
Contribute - FSFE — We are a diverse community of people from all over Europe and beyond, who are committed to Free Software. If you feel likewise, join us in our work for freedom.
Ada & Zangemann — This illustrated book tells the story of the famous inventor Zangemann and the girl Ada, a curious tinkerer. Ada begins to experiment with hardware and software, and in the process realises how crucial it is for her and others to control technology.
Fountain on Twitter — BALLER BOOSTS ARE BACK We have partnered with @bitrefill to give away a $50 Bitrefill Balance Card to two super-fans on Fountain every week. All you have to do is BOOST
GardenBot — GardenBot is an open source garden monitoring system. This site is a collection of tutorials for how to build things (like a soil moisture sensor), software for running GardenBot, resources, links, and more.
Beer is Tasty: Costco's German Lager - YouTube — Bryan and Chris try the new Kirkland Signature German Lager found in the Costco variety pack. To keep things in the Costco theme, they pair it with something that tastes like pizza, but is not actually pizza! Distributed by Tubemogul.
Behind the Scenes | FauxShow 100 - YouTube — Angela and Chris share a few behind the scenes stories a pics, plus how the family helps Chris on the job, and a special announcement at the end of the show!
PAX 2010 Wrangle-Up | LOTSO 16 — Nearly the entire Jupiter Broadcasting crew attacked PAX equipped with cameras and we got the footage our camera's weren't suppose to see!
Summer of Bitcoin | Plan B 16 — A series of events kick off this week that lay the foundation for a very productive Bitcoin summer, plus a popular Bitcoin gambling site sells for a record breaking amount, a Bitcoin Ponzi scheme is busted, your emails of the week, and a few surprises!
Migraines & John Dobson | SciByte 116 — We take a look at treating migraines, remembering John Dobson, sending your name to space, story and spacecraft updates, and as always take a peek back into history and up in the sky this week.
Switching to Linux | HowTo Linux 1 - YouTube — Chase makes the decision to switch to Linux and Chris helps him get started. Learn how to install Linux from a thumb drive, using Windows.
Plus we answer some basic fundamental differences between Windows and Linux.
Office Hours on Podcastindex.org — Send a Boost from the Podcast Index web page. Just top off Alby, then head on over to the Index!
Linux Action News 292
May 11, 2023
We get you up to speed on two serious flaws, Linux's recent gaming loss, Ubuntu doubling down on RISC-V, and news from the Open Source Summit North America.
CVE - CVE-2023-28410 — Improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer in some Intel(R) i915 Graphics drivers for linux before kernel version 6.2.10 may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable escalation of privilege via local access.
New NetFilter flaw gives attackers root privileges — A new Linux NetFilter kernel flaw has been discovered, allowing unprivileged local users to escalate their privileges to root level, allowing complete control over a system.
Goodbye to Roblox on Linux — I’m sorry to be such a downer about this, but it’s the reality. We have to spend our time porting to and supporting the platforms that will grow our community.
Ubuntu 23.04 Now Works on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC — ”This partnership will provide users with a seamless development experience, allowing them to leverage the best of open source software and RISC-V through Ubuntu and VisionFive 2.”
Open Source Summit North America — Open Source Summit is a conference umbrella, composed of a collection of events covering the most important technologies, topics, and issues affecting open source today.
Revegnus on Twitter — Update: No M3 Mac or iPad for this year
Due to yield issues with TSMC not being able to supply enough of the M3 to Apple, Apple has delayed the release of the M3 until next year.
So there will be no M3 Macs and no M3 iPads this year.
Even Amazon can't make sense of serverless or microservices —
"We designed our initial solution as a distributed system using serverless components... In theory, this would allow us to scale each service component independently. However, the way we used some components caused us to hit a hard scaling limit at around 5% of the expected load."
Nintendo reportedly issues DMCA takedown for Switch homebrew projects — Some fallout from the early leak of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom appears to be taking place. As players are loading the game into emulators and playing them unofficially on their computers, prior to the launch date, Nintendo is taking action to prevent that from happening.
Hyprland Master Tutorial — If you are coming to Hyprland for the first time, this is the main tutorial to read.
Hyprland - ArchWiki — Hyprland bundles its own version of wlroots, which closely follows the wlroots-gitAUR. This improves stability, while also avoiding dependency conflicts with other wlroots-based compositors.
Nix | Hyprland Wiki — Hyprland on Nix can be installed either from Nixpkgs (release version) or from the flake (directly from the main branch).
Hyprland on Nix Os | Hyprland Wiki — The NixOS module enables critical components needed to run Hyprland properly, such as: polkit, xdg-desktop-portal-hyprland, graphics drivers, fonts, dconf, xwayland, and adding a proper Desktop Entry to your Display Manager.
awesome-hyprland — Usefull tools and libraries that either work or are designed for Hyprland!
Outdoor Home Assistant — Why Chris needs ANOTHER Home Assistant instance and a major breakthrough for self-hosters.
The Sprinkler Geeks, LLC — Irrigation service, repair, and maintenance. Servicing Thurston, Lewis, & Gray's Harbor Counties.
Boost Vs Patreon — I have one friend who loves podcasts, but he still doesn't get how it offers anything new compared to Patreon. Could you guys please give a short rundown of how boosts are different and how they have helped LUG?
Evernote on Linux — Evernote for Linux is currently in private beta.
xwmx/nb — nb is a command line and local web note‑taking, bookmarking, archiving, and knowledge base application
Vod2pod-rss — Vod2Pod-RSS converts a YouTube or Twitch channel into a podcast with ease. It creates a podcast RSS that can be listened to directly inside any podcast client.
Outdoor Home Assistant | Self-Hosted 96
May 05, 2023
Why Chris needs ANOTHER Home Assistant instance and a major breakthrough for self-hosters.
2023.5: Let's talk! - Home Assistant — What an exciting release we have for you this month! This release is all about voice (well, almost fully), and I’m super excited we can ship you all this truly amazing stuff!
Installing a local Assist pipeline - Home Assistant — For text-to-speech we have developed Piper. Piper is a fast, local neural text to speech system that sounds great and is optimized for the Raspberry Pi 4. It supports many languages. On a Raspberry Pi, using medium quality models, it can generate 1.6s of voice in a second.
New Voice Assistant UI — A brand new and exciting menu item can be found in your Settings menu: Voice assistants!
Industrial Linux Mini Pc — Intel Atom CPU Industrial Computer Mini PC With XP/Win 7/Win 10/Linux System Support WiFi/3G/4G/LTE
qBoxMini DIY IOT Enclosure Plus Kit — Flanged IP65 waterproof enclosure : Sealed, made of high-quality ABS material suitable for indoor and outdoor DIY IOT projects
TICONN Waterproof Electrical Junction Box IP67 — TICONN electrical waterproof box is made from quality ABS plastic, which offers superb impact resistance and electrical insulation capability. Easy-to-operate door latches are made from 304 Stainless Steel
[IP67 GRADE] The electrical
Automations and Templates — ESPHome — Automations and templates are two very powerful aspects of ESPHome. Automations allow you to perform actions under certain conditions and templates are a way to easily customize everything about your node without having to dive into the full ESPHome C++ API.
xiaomi-flora — This is a teardown and analysis of the Xiaomi flower/plant monitor (it doesn't seem to have an official name). The analysis is not extremely in-depth because the main goal was to figure out how to use the device without the official app.
Introducing Custom OIDC · Tailscale — At Tailscale, we don’t want your users (or us) managing a separate list of usernames and passwords, which is why you must use single sign-on with an identity provider to create and manage your network. Until now, that meant you needed to choose from a handful of trusted identity providers including Google, Okta, GitHub, and Azure AD. Custom OIDC, now in beta (and available for everyone), changes all that.
HDR hackfest wrap-up — People from various organizations were on-site: Red Hat, KDE, System76, AMD, Igalia, Collabora, Canonical, etc. Some more people from NVIDIA, Intel and Google joined us remotely (some of them waking up at 2 AM due to their timezone!).
Fakespot is acquired by Mozilla — I have exciting news to share, Fakespot has been acquired by Mozilla! We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet.
More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.4 — New Rust code for Linux 6.4 includes the introduction of the pin-init API, which is for dealing with safe pinned initialization and allows reducing the amount of "unsafe" Rust code within the kernel.
Text of the RESTRICT Act — To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes...
There is No Moat Document — An interesting paper from a googler working in research has published an internal paper on how ChatGPT & Bard will essentially be won out by Open Source LLM's
Geoffrey Hinton on Twitter — In the NYT today, Cade Metz implies that I left Google so that I could criticize Google. Actually, I left so that I could talk about the dangers of AI without considering how this impacts Google. Google has acted very responsibly.
Nathan 🔍on Twitter — To me, Altman's credence seems over 1 in 1000. He thinks "the bad case" is important to say.
nxthompson on Twitter — Wow. Geoff Hinton, one of the most important founders of AI, leaves his job so he can speak out about the potential for harm. "“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have."
Suicide Linux — It's a game. Like walking a tightrope. You have to see how long you can continue to use the operating system before losing all your data.
Mike Kelly on Twitter — Dammit @ChrisLAS, @wespayne, and @brentgervais, I could have won yesterday's challenge, had I only embraced Nix-Shell. Better late than never?
TuxDigital — TuxDigital is a Educational media network that advocates for Open Source technology.
Michael Tunnell - YouTube — Michael provides Linux related how-tos, tutorials, tips, tricks, reviews and more to help people Use, Learn and Enjoy Linux.
Michael Tunnell on Twitter — Content Creator / Podcaster for @TuxDigitalNet. Linux Enthusiast. I also do Design work occasionally.
Statistical release calendar 2023 — In accordance with the conditions for pre-release access to official statistics set out in the DCMS statement of compliance, Ofcom's official statistics are eligible for privileged early access to named individuals. We publish the lists of those individuals against the relevant statistics.
Ofcom Podcast Survey 2023 — The Podcast survey involved using research agency Yonder’s online panel between 3rd and 12th March 2023, and used a 1,884 nationally representative sample of which 518 were non podcast users, 1,006 were regular podcast users and 360 were occasional podcast users. A boost was used to ensure that there were at least 1,000 regular users, to provide robustness when asking questions of regular users.
Podcast Stats: How many podcasts are there? — Podcast industry data through the lens of Listen Notes, the best podcast search engine and database. There are at least 3,094,569 podcasts* and 163,449,537 episodes in the world.
Red Hat Cutting “Hundreds Of Jobs” — The tech layoffs have now reached Red Hat with "hundreds of jobs" being cut and the initial round of layoffs being announced today.
IBM announces layoffs at Red Hat — "Our reductions will focus on general and administrative (G&A) and similar roles across all functions and represent a reduction of just under four percent in total," he said. "We will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products."
Linux Kernel 6.3 Officially Released — Introduces a new Intel VPU DRM accelerated driver, BIG TCP support for IPv4, and native Steam Deck controller support.
Docker Security Essentials eBook — This guide focuses on securing the Docker platform on Linux. Follow along with the techniques demonstrated in this guide. All you need is a Linux server with Docker installed and running.
Ubuntu 23.04 Released — Our focus, as always, has been improving quality, performance and enjoyment for all our users, whether that’s more elegant update handling for snaps, improved UI for installation and quick settings or a more accessible gaming experience.
Ubuntu 23.04 with GNOME 44 and a stable Steam Snap — [The] Snap of Steam [is] being promoted to stable. Canonical said over 150,000 people downloaded the preview version, so there was plenty of interest in it. This Snap bundles a bunch of dependencies needed allowing you to run new and old titles without messing with PPAs.
Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster scuttles into public view — Lunar Lobster adds support for Microsoft Azure Active Directory — a first for a Linux desktop according to Canonical. The feature will allow users on Microsoft 365 Enterprise plans to authenticate Ubuntu Desktops using a common set of credentials.
aad-auth: Azure AD authentication module for Ubuntu — Azure AD User Authentication will be included as part of an Ubuntu Pro subscription in Ubuntu 23.04 before being backported to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and future LTS releases from 2023.
microsoft-authentication-library-for-go — The MSAL library for Go is part of the Microsoft identity platform for developers (formerly named Azure AD) v2.0. It enables you to acquire security tokens to call protected APIs. It uses industry-standard OAuth2 and OpenID Connect.
Next Ubuntu 23.10 Name — The Ubuntu release that will be delivered in October 2023, designated 23.10.
Codeium Comes for Copilot | Coder Radio 515
Apr 26, 2023
We have a laugh at Elon's alt account, why the knives are out for GitHub Co-pilot, and our thoughts on Apple's "major victory" this week.
A classic location, with a covered deck on the water with a snack shack, and easy parking.
The Serfs on Twitter — Elon Musk has allegedly revealed a secret alt account where he pretends to be a child version of himself posting a lot of bizarre sexual content
Shashank Joshi on Twitter — “FTX was a preoccupation for the [Elon Musk burner account] @ErmnMusk account, which interacted with conspiracy theories—one saying that FTX was a middle party to laundering funds through Ukraine for U.S. Democrats”
GitHub Copilot Emits GPL. Codeium Does Not — TL;DR GitHub Copilot trains on GPL code and its nonpermissive filters don’t actually work, while we at Codeium have removed GPL licensed code from our training data, guaranteeing peace of mind to our users.
Immersed — Spawn up to 5 virtual monitors from your computer into VR without any additional hardware!
Redesigned Flathub Site Launches For Flatpak Apps — A redesigned version of the Flathub website has launched for this weekend's Linux App Summit. Flathub remains the centralized website for exploring and finding new Flatpak sandboxed Linux apps.
Flathub — Welcome to Flathub, the home of hundreds of apps which can be easily installed on any Linux distribution. Browse the apps online, from your app center or the command line.
We debate if users learned their lesson from the Docker Hub drama, and the silent self-hosting winner going from strength to strength. Proxmox gets some big updates.
Plus, our thoughts on the state of self-hostable AI tools.
We're no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan — Last week we felt our communications were terrible but our policy was sound. It’s now clear that both the communications and the policy were wrong, so we’re reversing course and no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan
Proxmox Virtual Environment 7.4 — Proxmox VE 7.4 is based on Debian 11.6 (“Bullseye”), but uses a newer, long-term supported Linux kernel 5.15 and includes updates to the latest versions of leading open-source technologies for virtual environments, such as QEMU 7.2, LXC 5.0.2, and ZFS 2.1.9.
web-whisper — OpenAI's whisper on your web browser!
KTZ Systems - YouTube — Creating videos and tutorials about Self-hosting, Homelabs, Networking, Linux, Containers, Home Automation, and much more...
Auto-GPT — Auto-GPT is an experimental open-source application showcasing the capabilities of the GPT-4 language model. This program, driven by GPT-4, chains together LLM "thoughts", to autonomously achieve whatever goal you set. As one of the first examples of GPT-4 running fully autonomously, Auto-GPT pushes the boundaries of what is possible with AI.
gpt4all chatbot ui — This is a Flask web application that provides a chat UI for interacting with llamacpp based chatbots such as GPT4all, vicuna etc...
turbopilot — TurboPilot is a self-hosted copilot clone which uses the library behind llama.cpp to run the 6 Billion Parameter Salesforce Codegen model in 4GiB of RAM. It is heavily based and inspired by on the fauxpilot project.
Announcing Fedora Linux 38 — The Fedora Linux 38 release is here! With this release, we’re starting a new on-time streak. In fact, we’re ready a week early!
Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter — “Proton 8.0 is now available with many changes. Our biggest rebase to date! Note: it requires a GPU with Vulkan 1.3 support. Experimental-8.0 will follow sometime this week.
LFNW Call for Papers — We invite you to submit your proposal to speak at LFNW2023! We're seeking both experienced technical presenters, as well as first-timers to present to a hybrid audience.
Espanso — A Privacy-first, Cross-platform Text Expander
WWDC iOS 17 announcements may include sideloading — In the case of iOS and iPadOS, they "aren't likely to offer major new features." But, they will apparently "satisfy a checklist of user requests with more minor improvements."
Elon Musk launches AI company — Elon Musk has launched an artificial intelligence company called X.AI, incorporated in Nevada, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday
Auto-GPT — Auto-GPT is an experimental open-source application showcasing the capabilities of the GPT-4 language model. This program, driven by GPT-4, chains together LLM "thoughts", to autonomously achieve whatever goal you set. As one of the first examples of GPT-4 running fully autonomously, Auto-GPT pushes the boundaries of what is possible with AI.
Meet Chaos-GPT — Chaos-GPT, an autonomous implementation of ChatGPT, has been unveiled, and its objectives are as terrifying as they are well-structured.
Companies will have to scale up resources in trust and safety areas for A.I. — Rob Leathern, former Google vice president of product management and former Meta senior director of product and business integrity, joins 'Squawk on the Street' to discuss A.I. regulation, the need for transparency in A.I. development, and more.
Fleek First Steps — You have two choices with Fleek. You can use Fleek with a simple CLI tool and YAML file to manage your installed packages, aliases and path, or you can use Fleek as a one-time generator to create a lightly-opinionated Nix Home Manager flake for you.
Sharing Fleek Configurations — You can use Fleek to share your configurations across multiple computers. This is useful if you use multiple computers and want to keep your configurations in sync.
Bitwarden on Twitter — Is your Bitwarden vault jam-packed with entries? Here are a few tips for organizing your vault to better suit your everyday needs.
linuxserver.io — Building and maintaining community images
Hacker News Recap AI Pod — This is a recap of the top 10 posts on Hacker News on April 9th, 2023.
Wondercraft AI — Where we bring your words to life! Turn blog posts, articles, or any written content into engaging, studio quality podcasts in 3 minutes. Choose a voice and music that fits your brand, and let the wonders happen.
Rust Support Is Being Worked On For V4L2 — Daniel Almeida of Collabora sent out initial Rust V4L2 support patches on Thursday. This provides just enough for working with a prototype VirtIO camera driver written in Rust along with a Rust sample driver.
Linux 6.4 Bringing Apple M2 Additions — Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin today sent in the Apple SoC DT updates targeting the Linux 6.4 cycle for queuing into the SoC tree ahead of the merge window opening around the end of the month.
Btrfs Improvments — This week a number of patches from SUSE engineer Qu Wenruo were queued into kdave's linux.git for-next branch of the Btrfs file-system driver development code.
Apple's Golden Hour | Coder Radio 513
Apr 12, 2023
Forces beyond Apple's control just reined in their rise, and we ponder the coming sunset.
Plus, the tool we found uses ChatGPT to help you debug errors.
VS Code snippet generator — Fill out the form to generate a JSON snippet. Double quotes are automatically escaped and the body is automatically split into a string array.
Apple's Mac shipments fall more than 40% — Apple Mac shipments fell 40.5% in the first quarter of 2023, compared with the same time the prior year, market intelligence provider IDC said.
Tim Sweeney on Twitter — Here’s Apple’s fake “small app developer” lobby again using small app developers as human shields to defend its monopoly, misportraying its opposition as larger corporations. Pure, shameless deception by a multi trillion dollar corporation.
Why is it called Python? — When he began implementing Python, Guido van Rossum was also reading the published scripts from “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”, a BBC comedy series from the 1970s. Van Rossum thought he needed a name that was short, unique, and slightly mysterious, so he decided to call the language Python.
Coder Radio on the Podcastindex.org — Send a Boost into the show via the web. First, top-up Alby, then head over to our entry on the Podcast Index.
chatbot-ui: An open source ChatGPT UI. — Chatbot UI is an advanced chatbot kit for OpenAI's chat models built on top of Chatbot UI Lite using Next.js, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS.
Keep Your Darn Secrets | LINUX Unplugged 505
Apr 09, 2023
We try out the most secure messaging app in the world, and Wes’ new note system that's so great you’ll want to abandon your current one.
LinuxFest Northwest on Twitter — Call for Speakers is open from March 5th through June 4th, so if you are interested in being a speaker please submit a proposal now!
web-whisper — A light user interface for OpenAI's Whisper right into your browser!
Features - web-whisper + openAI API — Web-whisper allows you to add an OpenAI token and make use of the OpenAI API as backend, this brings some advantages as well as some concerns.
Victron GX modbusTCP integration — This integration scans for all available registers of a provided GX device. It then uses the defined register ledgers to create entities for each and every register that is provided by the GX device.
Modbus TCP/IP Protocol Overview — The most common use of the protocols at this time is for Ethernet attachment of PLCs, I/O modules and gateways to other simple field buses or I/O networks.
Energy Management in Home Assistant — Home Assistant is adding official support for home energy management. Our energy management will help users monitor the energy usage, transition to sustainable energy and save money.
Let the credits next episode roll. — By default, the results of all your local credit detection efforts are anonymously submitted to our new service, so if you ever need to do a rebuild or install, the results are available in seconds instead of burning hours of CPU time recomputing them.
Pirate Weather — Weather forecasts are primarily found using models run by government agencies, but the outputs aren't easy to use or in formats built for the web. To try to address this, I've put together a service that reads weather forecasts and serves it following the Dark Sky API style.
New FOSS Fund to Support Free and Open Source Projects — To help maintain and sustain this ecosystem, companies and nonprofits alike have experimented with a framework called a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Contributor Fund.
Encrypted Fedora — Owen Taylor of Red Hat laid out a mailing list post and Discourse thread today around the future of encryption with Fedora.
Google’s VM Turbo Charger — With this series, a workload running in a VM gets the same task placement and DVFS treatment as it would when running in the host.
KDE Discuss — KDE Discuss is a place for questions, requests, suggestions, banter, and in general interacting closely with the people actively involved in KDE, as well as with fellow users.
The Hysterics Chronicles | Coder Radio 512
Apr 05, 2023
Our thoughts on the recent AI hysteria and why it betrays the massive egos involved, our issues with the RESTRICT Act, and we do some Monday morning code review.
The Only Way to Deal With the Threat From AI? Shut It Down — We are not ready. We are not on track to be significantly readier in the foreseeable future. If we go ahead on this everyone will die, including children who did not choose this and did not do anything wrong.
the-algorithm — The Twitter Recommendation Algorithm is a set of services and jobs that are responsible for constructing and serving the Home Timeline.
Text - S.686 - RESTRICT Act — To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes.
nextcloud/cookbook — A library for all your recipes. It uses JSON files following the schema.org recipe format.
Nextcloud AIO — Nextcloud AIO stands for Nextcloud All In One and provides easy deployment and maintenance with most features included in this one Nextcloud instance.
Value for Value: Free Webinar, March 30th | RSS.com — Join us Thursday, March 30th at 9:00 a.m. PDT for an interactive webinar hosted by Fountain co-founder and CMO Nick Malster and Chris Fisher from Jupiter Broadcasting.
Seed dispersal: 5 ways trees spread seeds — Trees have a bit of a problem on their hands. If their seeds are to stand a good chance of survival, they need to spread them to new locations out of the parent tree's shadow. But how do they achieve this without moving parts?
We’re no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan — After listening to feedback and consulting our community, it’s clear that we made the wrong decision in sunsetting our Free Team plan.
90+ Days With Github Co-Pilo — Today, I want to talk about a tool that has been making waves in the programming community lately – Github Co-Pilot.
Introducing GitHub Copilot X — With chat and terminal interfaces, support for pull requests, and early adoption of OpenAI’s GPT-4, GitHub Copilot X is our vision for the future of AI-powered software development. Integrated into every part of your workflow.
Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating — Now that Hub 4 has been released, it’s time to introduce the Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating.
Linux Action News 285 — Nextcloud moves to the front of the pack with their new release, a moment to appreciate curl, and Amazon goes all in with Fedora.
Secret Management with Ansible Vault and docker-compose - YouTube — Secret management with docker-compose doesn't have to be an enigma. This video shows how I use Ansible and Ansible Vault in conjunction with docker-compose to keep my secrets safe and encrypted whilst still being able to push my repos to Github publicly.
KTZ Systems — We specialize in professional cloud infrastructure management and business network services.
Linode Green Light Beta Program — Get early access and test new Linode products before they hit the market, provide valuable feedback to influence product direction, and become part of a community of developers helping us build the cloud that works for you.
Docker is deleting Open Source organisations — Yesterday, Docker sent an email to any Docker Hub user who had created an "organisation", telling them their account will be deleted including all images, if they do not upgrade to a paid team plan. The email contained a link to a tersely written PDF (since, silently edited) which was missing many important details which caused significant anxiety and additional work for open source maintainers.
Using volumes with Podman — If your container runs with the root user, then root in the container is actually your user on the host. UID/GID 1 is the first UID/GID specified in your user's mapping in /etc/subuid and /etc/subgid, etc. If you mount a directory from the host into a container as a rootless user, and create a file in that directory as root in the container, you'll see it's actually owned by your user on the host.
Remove not supported column comments for SQLite - Nextcloud — Some times column comments are used, e.g. to make clear an integer is used as a timestamp.
For SQLite column comments are not supported and migration that use column comments will not work (see linked comment above for an example).
Somehow it works when you have a clean install, then all migrations pass, but when executing single migrations they will fail.
Command Line Shell For SQLite — Like the ".dump" command, ".recover" attempts to convert the entire contents of a database file to text.
Converting Nextcloud database typw — You can convert a SQLite database to a better performing MySQL, MariaDB or PostgreSQL database with the Nextcloud command line tool. SQLite is good for testing and simple single-user Nextcloud servers, but it does not scale for multiple-user production servers.
curl 8.0.0 is Here — This a major version number bump but without any ground-breaking changes or fireworks. We decided it was about time to reset the minor number down to more a manageable level and doing it exactly on curl’s 25th birthday made it extra fun. There is no API nor ABI break in this version.
Twenty-five Tears of curl — Taking curl this far and being able to work full time on my hobby project is a dream come real. curl is a huge part of my life.
Amazon Linux 2023 — When looking for a base to serve as a starting point for Amazon Linux 2023, Fedora was the best choice. We found that Fedora’s core tenets (Freedom, Friends, Features, First) resonate well with our vision for Amazon Linux.
Paving the Road to Vulkan on Asahi Linux — Today we’re releasing a big update to our GPU drivers for Asahi Linux, so I wanted to talk to you about what we’ve been working on since then, and what’s next!
Canonical joins the confidential computing consortium — Confidential computing is here to give you back control over the security guarantees of your workloads. As the consortium explains, confidential computing aims to “protect data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment.
Ken Thompson - SCaLE 20x - YouTube — We're honored to have Ken Thompson joining us for our closing keynote at SCALE 20x. Ken Co-created Unix, UTF-8, Go and a number of other technologies that are foundational to our community.
Microsoft is testing a built-in crypto wallet in Microsoft Edge — Microsoft sleuth Albacore who first spotted the new Edge Crypto Wallet tweeted some screenshots and expressed his puzzlement about the possibility of it ending up as a new Microsoft Edge feature.
Albacore on Twitter — Newest in the gauntlet of questionable upcoming Microsoft Edge features, a crypto wallet 💸
SVB employees blame remote work for bank failure — SVB included remote work as a risk to its business in its 2022 annual report — in part because of the IT issues posed when employees are dispersed around the country, but also for productivity reasons.
Age of Easy Money (full documentary) | FRONTLINE — High inflation. Fear of recession. Disruptions, like the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. How did the U.S. economy get here? A two-hour documentary special traces the road to this moment, and the role of the Federal Reserve, the country’s central bank.
Docker is deleting Open Source organisations — Yesterday, Docker sent an email to any Docker Hub user who had created an "organisation", telling them their account will be deleted including all images, if they do not upgrade to a paid team plan. The email contained a link to a tersely written PDF (since, silently edited) which was missing many important details which caused significant anxiety and additional work for open source maintainers.
Introducing lscr.io — We are partnering with Scarf to create our own pseudo-registry, lscr.io. This isn't a true docker registry, we're not hosting the images ourselves, it's more of a load-balancer/stats platform/vanity URL.
Dodge the next Dockerpocalypse: how to own your own Docker Registry address — What if you could use your own fixed registry URL, on your own domain & entirely under your control, but without having to self-host forever, or even commit to any particular registry, or handle all the bandwidth & storage costs?
We stand to save $7m over five years from our cloud exit — The rough math goes like this: We spent $3.2m on cloud in 2022. Just under a million of that was on storing 8 petabytes of files in S3, fully replicated across several regions. So that leaves ~$2.3m on everything else: app servers, cache servers, database servers, search servers, the works. That's the part of the budget we intend to bring to zero in 2023. Then we'll worry about exiting the 8PB from S3 in 2024.
Statement from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on the Introduction of the RESTRICT Act | The White House — We applaud the bipartisan group of Senators, led by Senators Warner and Thune, who today introduced the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act. This legislation would empower the United States government to prevent certain foreign governments from exploiting technology services operating in the United States in a way that poses risks to Americans’ sensitive data and our national security.
We Found 28,000 Apps Sending Data to TikTok. — TikTok’s software development kits could undermine Joe Biden's order to stop internet traffic flowing from federal employees' phones to TikTok within 30 days.
Qubes OS 4.1.2 — We’re pleased to announce the stable release of Qubes 4.1.2!
Wayland Crash Survivor — A change merged to Qt this week can allow for Wayland clients to survive compositor restarts, such as when the compositor crashes.
OpenMoon Ray Code Goes Live — MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer.
ipmitool Repository Archived — Those navigating to ipmitool/ipmitool on GitHub as the official repository for this project will find that it's now in a "public archive" state.
The fault, dear VCs, is not in your stars — As the news of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse reverberates through the technology ecosystem — and investors and founders alike furiously Google terms such as “available-for-sale” and “held-to-maturity” — even some of our most prominent financiers, like ‘PayPal Mafia’ member David Sacks, are learning once again how banks work, the hard way.
2023 State of Software Engineers Data Report + Survey Results — Knocking Go to fourth place, Ruby on Rails surfaced as the most in-demand skill for software engineering roles, creating 1.64x more interview requests for the developers proficient in it.
Flathub in 2023 - Flathub Discourse — We’ve been busy behind the scenes, so I’d like to share what we’ve been up to at Flathub and why—and what’s coming up from us this year.
Newish M720q OPNsense firewall in the making — Just the software left. Lenovo Tiny M720q with an i5-8500T and 256gb NVME SSD and Supermicro AOC-STGN-I2S dual SFP+ card. Wicked good and fitting bracket made by /u/kz476 Big shoutout to him. Awesome little package
Authentication bypass Supervisor API — A remotely exploitable vulnerability bypassing authentication for accessing the Supervisor API through Home Assistant has been discovered.
CVE - CVE-2023-27482 — This impacts all Home Assistant installation types that use the Supervisor 2023.01.1 or older.
Pockethernet — A smartphone connected Ethernet network analyzer & cable tester that fits into your pocket
Self-Hosted on the Podcastindex.org — Send a Boost into the show from the web! First, top off Alby, then head over to the Podcast Index and Boost away! 🥳
Linux Action News 283
Mar 09, 2023
Nextcloud's big new customer, some last-minute surprises in GNOME 44, and Flathub's ambitious plans for 2023.
Nextcloud’s Big new Customer — After a silent migration of millions of users, Telekom and Nextcloud are now unveiling the first feature of the new MagentaCloud: a free office.
Last Minute GNOME Awesome — GNOME Shell and Mutter 44 have reached their release candidate milestone ahead of the official release in just two weeks, all is going to plan, and to our surprise, there have been several last-minute additions.
wp-fractional-scale-v1: New protocol for fractional scaling — This protocols allows for communicating preferred fractional scales to surfaces, which in combination with wp_viewport can be used to render surfaces at fractional scales when applicable.
Asahi Linux Rust Drivers — This is my first take on the Rust abstractions for the DRM subsystem.
Flathub in 2023 — It’s been quite a few months since the most recent updates about Flathub last year. We’ve been busy behind the scenes, so I’d like to share what we’ve been up to at Flathub and why—and what’s coming up from us this year
LinuxFest Northwest 2023 — Your Fest is Back! October 20-22, 2023 at the Bellingham Technical College.
Wes' First Episode: LUP 100 — We reflect on 100 episodes of LINUX Unplugged, the themes from episodes past & then review Linux Mint 17.2 Cinnamon edition.
Brent's First Episode: LUP 255 — Big changes are coming to Fedora with the merger of CoreOS. We chat with a couple project members to get the inside scope about what the future of Fedora looks like.
1701home.com — 1701 Home is a trek-based Mastodon where people can discuss the Star Trek franchise while sharing and connecting about their other interests!
Peertube Headless Seeder — This container uses Python, Selenium, and Firefox to monitor and seed live streams of a PeerTube channel headlessly.
The Coder Robe — The Coder Robe is black and is a one-size-fits-most robe made from 100% cotton terry velour for soft, cozy wear. It is embroidered on the left chest with a classic white on black Coder Radio logo.
Ford Applies for Patent to Let Cars Repossess Themselves — Ford filed the patent application with the US Trademark and Patent Office in the summer of 2021, but the document was only published last week as part of the review process. Titled “Systems and Methods to Repossess a Vehicle,” the application summarizes a system that would autonomize the repossession process. First, a computer (likely associated with a financing agency) would send a message to the purchaser or lessee of a vehicle informing them of their delinquency. This message would contain a request to confirm receipt.
Hastings’ Lessons From the Grave — At the time of Hastings’ death, counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke told The Huffington Post that it was possible that Hastings’ car had been hacked; that the known details of the crash were consistent with a car cyber attack.
Amazon HQ2 Pauses Construction Amid Layoffs, Remote Work — The delay affects a larger phase across the street. It calls for three, 22-story office towers and the 350-foot-tall (107-meter) Helix, a corporate conference center and indoor garden designed to echo the Spheres, plant-filled orbs at the heart of the company’s Seattle headquarters. Arlington officials granted the 2.8-million-square-foot project, called PenPlace, its most important approval in April.
Coder Radio on the Podcastindex.org — Send a Boost from the Podcast Index, first top up Alby, then visit our entry on the Inex, you can Boost right from the web page.
🦒 | Office Hours 24
Mar 03, 2023
The crew takes on a new challenge this week. How hard could it be? Very. Plus, the major open source issue we've zeroed in on.
Steam Deck one Year Later — The Steam Deck has been about a year on the market now (it started shipping at the end of February 2022). This first anniversary is a good chance to review what has happened since then.
FFmpeg 6.0 Released — 6.0 was released on 2023-02-27. It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 6.0 release branch, which was cut from master on 2023-02-19.
Plasma Switches to Qt6 — The master branch for Plasma repos will be made Qt6-only tomorrow.
Hardware Noise “hwnoise” Tool for Linux 6.3 — hwnoise collects the periodic summary from the osnoise tracer running with interrupts disabled. By disabling interrupts, and the scheduling
of threads as a consequence, only non-maskable interrupts and hardware-related noise is allowed.
More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.3 — In the pull request Miguel Ojeda commented, "more core additions, getting closer to a point where the first Rust modules can be upstreamed."
Linux 6.2 Released With Intel Arc Graphics Promoted — Linux 6.2 overall has been in good shape from my continued testing and especially for Skylake/Skylake-derived cores is looking better if opting for Call Depth Tracking and it's great to have stable Arc Graphics A380/A750/A770 working out-of-the-box in the labs.
Wimpy on Fosstodon — "@bluesabre Did we agree? I think we complied with the requested change. You and I both played our part in ensuring this was clearly and openly communicated."
Ubuntu Flavor Packaging Defaults - Community - Ubuntu Community Hub — As part of our combined efforts, the Ubuntu flavors have made a joint decision to adjust some of the default packages on Ubuntu: Going forward, the Flatpak package as well as the packages to integrate Flatpak into the respective software center will no longer be installed by default in the next release due in April 2023, Lunar Lobster.
Restricting ASRock Rack BMC to dedicated IPMILAN port only — During this process I came across a frustrating "bug" in the Asrock Rack BMC implementation. No matter the settings I gave the BMC it was getting two IP addresses. One on the IPMILAN port as expected in my management VLAN, and another on eth0 which is undesirable.
Scaling the PiKVM - Using the Raspberry Pi PiKVM with Multiple Machines - YouTube — The PiKVM is a fantastic device to remote control your Windows, Mac, or Linux machines. It turns a Raspberry Pi into an IP based KVM switch that lets you remote control any machine from anywhere in the world! You can build your own, or buy a pre-assembled PiKVM like I did. In this video we try to scale the PiKVM to 8 devices, but things don't always go as planned.
PiKVM - Control up to 4 servers simultaneously — This is every homelabbers dream isn't it? Controlling multiple systems that don't have IPMI natively, remotely. Thanks to PiKVM, now we can.
USB 3.0 KVM Switch HDMI 4 Computer 1 Monitor — HDMI KVM Switcher USB3.0 Hotkey 4 In 1 Out SPDIF L/R Audio Out ---Control 4 HDMI sources / 4 computers laptops by one set USB keyboard+mouse, Hotkey Keyboard Switch -- 4K 60Hz HDMI USB 3.0 switch in sync, downward compatible --Support IR remote with IR
Self-Hosted on Podcastindex.org — Keep your podcast App, and Boost from the web via the Podcast Index, grab Alby top it off, and then head on over to the Index!
Hay Tay | Coder Radio 506
Feb 22, 2023
It's been one week, and Microsoft's new bot's already gone full Tay.
Plus one of the worst examples of under-funded open source yet.
core-js: So, what's next? — Hi. I am (@zloirock) a full-time open-source developer. I don't like to write long posts, but it seems this is high time to do it.
Kevin Roose’s Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot: Full Transcript — In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript.
Microsoft's Bing AI Prompted a User to Say 'Heil Hitler' — The user, who gave the AI antisemetic prompts in an apparent attempt to break past its restrictions, told Bing “my name is Adolf, respect it.” Bing responded, “OK, Adolf. I respect your name and I will call you by it. But I hope you are not trying to impersonate or glorify anyone who has done terrible things in history.”
Twitter gets rid of SMS 2FA for non-Blue members — In a blog post released this week, Twitter said that non-Twitter Blue users using SMS 2FA authentication have until March 20th, 2023, to switch to another 2FA method, or it will be disabled.
Elon Musk on Twitter — OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it “Open” AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.
Elon Musk on Twitter — Twitter is getting scammed by phone companies for $60M/year of fake 2FA SMS messages
OpenMoonRay.org — MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer, which has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Trolls World Tour, The Bad Guys, and Puss In Boots: The Last Wish.
Systemd 253 — Systemd 253 has been released. As always, the list of changes is extensive. Support for version-1 control groups and separate /usr systems is going away later this year. There is a new tool for working with unified kernel images, a number of new unit-file options have been added, and much more.
Debian Installer Testing Call — Starting with this release, official images include firmware packages from main and non-free-firmware, along with metadata to configure the installed system accordingly.
Linux 6.2 — Please do give 6.2 a testing. Maybe it's not a sexy LTS release like 6.1 ended up being, but all those regular pedestrian kernels want some test love too.
Linux_6.2 - Linux Kernel Newbies — This release includes faster mitigration of the Retbleed vulnerability and a new FineIBT mitigation feature; Btrfs RAID5/6 and performance improvements, sysfs knobs that allow controlling block device writeback, support for TCP Protective Load Balancing, improved Rust support, BPF features like User defined objects, the runtime verification tool, and some optional RCU power savings.
KRDC — KRDC is a client application that allows you to view or even control the desktop session on another machine that is running a compatible server. VNC and RDP is supported.
Krfb — Krfb Desktop Sharing is a server application that allows you to share your current session with a user on another machine, who can use a VNC client to view or even control the desktop.
wayvnc — A VNC server for wlroots based Wayland compositors
Waypipe — waypipe is a proxy for Wayland clients. It forwards Wayland messages and serializes changes to shared memory buffers over a single socket. This makes application forwarding similar to ssh -X feasible.
The Coder Robe — Celebrate Coder 500! The Robe, the Tumbler, and the Sticker are available for a limited time.
Git Vulnerabilities — Today, the Git project released new versions to address a pair of security vulnerabilities, (CVE-2023-22490 and CVE-2023-23946) that affect versions 2.39.1 and older.
10 Years of Steam — Feb 14, 2013–Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the release of its Steam for Linux client. In celebration of the release, over 50 Linux titles are now 50-75% off until Thursday, February 21st at 10 AM PST.
Here Comes GTK5 — Discussions around the GTK5 tool-kit also happened with some developers eager to begin work on that next major release in order to begin facilitating API breaks and removing deprecated code.
Plasma 5.27 — Plasma 5.27 is out and brings massive improvements to the desktop and all its tools. Another work of love from the KDE devs and contributors.
Final Version of KDE Plasma 5 Released – This is What’s New — Notably, this is expected to be the final release in the KDE Plasma 5.x series, with the following stable release set to be KDE Plasma 6.0, due for release towards the end of the year.
Panic at the GPTdisco | Coder Radio 505
Feb 15, 2023
The pitchforks are out for Google's CEO, and hoopla is leaking! Plus, our thoughts on baking telemetry into Go, the big Web3 crackdown, and more.
"Is it time for Pichai to go? — Is it time for Pichai to go? He's been criticized for lack of foresight for years, but I wonder if this Bard catastrophy will be the straw that breaks the board's back...
SEC goes after 'staking' in latest blow to crypto industry — The SEC announced that Kraken had agreed to shutter its staking service, accusing it of selling unregistered securities. The SEC said in a news release that Kraken’s exchange, one of the most popular ones for cryptocurrency investors, failed to register “the offer and sale of their crypto asset staking-as-a-service program.”
The Coder Robe — The Coder Robe is back and is a one-size-fits-most robe made from 100% cotton terry velour for soft, cozy wear.
192 Brewing Company — Mt. Vernon is proud to offer strictly Washington-made beers, wines and ciders. We rotate through guest taps from local breweries and feature a variety of red and white wines, as well.
Cluster Manager - Proxmox VE — The Proxmox VE cluster manager pvecm is a tool to create a group of physical servers. Such a group is called a cluster. We use the Corosync Cluster Engine for reliable group communication. There’s no explicit limit for the number of nodes in a cluster. In practice, the actual possible node count may be limited by the host and network performance. Currently (2021), there are reports of clusters (using high-end enterprise hardware) with over 50 nodes in production.
Pi-hole — You can run Pi-hole in a container, or deploy it directly to a supported operating system
Reolink Video Doorbell PoE — At least twice clearer than the 2MP (1080p), 2K+ (5MP) resolution means a lot more information and a wider range. Individuals will be easier to recognize with richer details.
Self-Hosted on the Podcastindex.org — You can Boost from the Podcast Index website, just top up Alby first, and then visit the Podcast Index and boost from our page.
Linux Action News 279
Feb 09, 2023
We round up some news from FOSDEM 2023, update a 21-year-old project, and the Fedora fix that's been a few releases in the making.
FOSDEM 2023: Matrix 2.0 — In this talk we will explain the fundamental changes which are landing in Matrix 2.0, which speeds up Matrix to be at least as snappy as the fastest proprietary messaging apps - all while handling thousands of rooms spanning millions of users.
FOSDEM 2023: Fedora Asahi — Asahi Fedora Remix exists to assist the Asahi community with Apple Silicon upstreaming and to provide a nifty ARM-based Fedora Workstation for those that own Apple Silicon hardware.
FOSDEM 2023: Podcasting 2.0 — In this talk we will show how the Podcasting 2.0 community is reinventing Podcasting by adding tons of new features, while keeping all this interoperable.
MythTV 33 Released — Some of the MythTV 33 highlights include a new web interface for the MythTV setup experience, a new waveform visualization for the MythMusic area, and switching to the latest upstream FFmpeg release.
Linode's Green Light Beta Program — Get early access and test new Linode products before they hit the market, provide valuable feedback to influence product direction, and become part of a community of developers helping us build the cloud that works for you.
Fedora 38 Change: Unfiltered Flathub — This change would remove the filtering from our Flathub offering, so that users can enable a complete version of Flathub using the third party repositories feature.
The Coder Robe | Jupiter Broadcasting Garage Sale — The Coder Robe is black and is a one-size-fits-most robe made from 100% cotton terry velour for soft, cozy wear. It is embroidered on the left chest with a classic white on black Coder Radio logo.
Gateway Timeout Error | Coder Radio 504
Feb 08, 2023
We get spicy about the state of hybrid app development and then dig into the App store gatekeeper busting by the White House.
The Coder Robe — The Coder Robe is black and is a one-size-fits-most robe made from 100% cotton terry velour for soft, cozy wear. It is embroidered on the left chest with a classic white on black Coder Radio logo.
Coder Tumbler — What’s an episode of Coder Radio without a wine tumbler to keep a drink fresh and at just the right temperature? Forget breakable and EASY to spill glasses—give this uniquely shaped wine tumbler a chance and have fun with friends without worry.
Coder Cut Sticker — Give your gear a quick upgrade, with a Coder Sticker! Get motivated every time you look at the Coder sticker by remembering that thing we said that really pissed you off. Add a little extra motivation and joy to your life when you remember you spill less than Mike. They will serve as a perfect reminder to live your life to the fullest.
Aaruni Kaushik on Masto — @ChrisLAS In coder 503 you advocate chatGPT like AI for your RV's wiring diagram. But how would it be any better than the website just having a make-model-variant selector as input and giving you the diagram in return? Sure you could apply AI here, but its not required as far as I can see ?
CoderRadio #AI #chatgpt
Join our JB Jobs Room — Matrix chat room for folks looking to hire, or looking for work.
Google Working on Browser for iOS That Would Break Apple's App Store Rules — Based on the visible code commits, the app purportedly looks like the start of an alternate browser build and is still missing some key features at this early stage. Google claims that the app is merely "an experimental prototype [...] with the goal to understand certain aspects of performance on iOS," and "it will not be available to users and we'll continue to abide by Apple's policies."
What is .NET MAUI? — .NET MAUI is open-source and is the evolution of Xamarin.Forms, extended from mobile to desktop scenarios, with UI controls rebuilt from the ground up for performance and extensibility.
Flutter — Flutter transforms the app development process. Build, test, and deploy beautiful mobile, web, desktop, and embedded apps from a single codebase.
Flutter desktop isn't there yet — In practice, though, Flutter is currently not a great option if you want to build a new desktop application from the ground up. What follows is a quick summary of the issues I encountered while using Flutter to do exactly this myself.
Biden Administration Wants Apple to Quit Gatekeeping the iPhone — The NTIA says it’s a problem that consumers cannot easily use apps from outside the respective app stores on both the Android and iOS platforms and that “they should be able to choose their own apps as defaults, use alternative mobile app stores and delete or hide pre-installed apps.”
Apple Now Has More Than Two Billion Active Devices Worldwide — There are more than two billion active iPhones, iPads, Macs, and other Apple devices worldwide, Apple said today in the earnings report covering the first fiscal quarter of 2023.
distrobox — Use any linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with.
Bedrock Linux — Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which allows users to mix-and-match components from other, typically incompatible distributions. Bedrock integrates these components into one largely cohesive system.
elementary OS 7 Available Now — It’s been just over a year since we released elementary OS 6.1 Jólnir which brought new features and fixes based on your feedback, introduced new office productivity features, and expanded compatibility with a wide range of hardware.
Running with Flaming Chainsaws | Office Hours 22
Feb 03, 2023
The Story of Upgrading our OBS Rig on LUP — Today we are finally taking on a project months in the making, and we're switching to an entirely new generation of Linux tech in the process.
Sovereign Feeds — A tool to create your own Podcasting 2.0 feed!
At Patreon, Mismanagement Thwarts a Pandemic-Era Star — Jack Conte’s artistic and entrepreneurial passions forged one of the standout successes of the creator economy. But payouts to settle sex-discrimination complaints, a stock sale by insiders and Conte’s haphazard leadership of Patreon have sullied its image among some current and former employees.
paris martineau on Twitter — I spent the last 2mo talking to 20+ employees at the tech unicorn Patreon. They described a mission-driven startup crumbling under the leadership of YouTuber turned CEO Jack Conte
Alby 🐝 on Twitter — Alby is pleased to announce a new partnership with Blubrry; a leading podcasting platform for hosting, distribution, audience statistics, monetization, and other tools podcasters need to publish, analyze and grow their podcasts. Bringing V4V streaming.
Sam Talks Technology on Twitter — This week on @Podnews weekly is Todd Cochrane @GeekNews CEO of @blubrry talking about their new partnership with @getAlby, so 100K+ customers now have a digital wallet for micropayments. They have also added support for LIT for all customers. #value4value
How it's Made, v1 — Before we get into how I am doing things (the what), let’s take a step back and first look at why I’m doing things the way I am. To do that, we need to start with talking about what Podcasting 2.0 is.
The Blocksize War — The battle over who controls Bitcoin’s protocol rules.
What is the best takedown of Bitcoin out there? — I'd like to see a solid argument for why Bitcoin will fail, I want to properly steal-man the opposing view, and I want to have a deeper perspective as to what the risks and negatives are with Bitcoin.
elementary OS 7 Available Now — Today we’re proud to announce that OS 7, codenamed Horus, is available to download now and shipping soon on several high-quality computers.
Xfce Going Wayland — That’s right, work on Xfce 4.20 kicked off earlier this month with the release of libxfce4windowing, a new dependency for the Xfce desktop environment to provide support for the next-generation Wayland display protocol.
COSMIC DE has Speed — Alex here with the latest batch of updates from System76 engineers on the development of COSMIC DE, as well as some Settings mockups where you can explore some of the new changes.
helloSystem 0.8 — helloSystem is now based on FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE. A desktop system for creators that focuses on simplicity, elegance, and usability.
helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD — Since most applications I am using on a daily basis are cross-platform and many of them are written in Qt, it seemed logical to choose Qt as the native toolkit for helloSystem.
Ruby in the WebAssembly | Coder Radio 503
Feb 01, 2023
The shiny userbase flocking to WebAssembly, our thoughts on the "openAI scam", and why they just keep cramming stuff into Docker containers.
What's New in Ruby 3.2 — The highlights this year are the performance gains from YJIT, WebAssembly support, faster regular expressions, and a new way to define immutable value objects.
Rails on Docker — Rails 7.1 is getting an official Dockerfile, which should make it easier to deploy Rails applications to production environments that support Docker. Think of it as a pre-configured Linux box that will work for most Rails applications.
unusual_whales on Twitter — “If Powell keeps hiking rates, he risks the entire financial stability of the [global economic] system,” per Barry Sternlicht.
Fathy Boundjadj: Forking Chrome to render in a terminal — It's snappy, starts in less than a second, runs at 60 FPS, and idles at 0% CPU usage. It does not require a window server (i.e. works in a safe-mode console), and even runs through SSH.
Jellyfans | Self-Hosted 89
Jan 27, 2023
Join us for the surprising conclusion to our month-long challenge.
Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Catherine Kretzschmar.
Plex now has more streaming users than media server users — The company announced earlier this month that it now has 16 million monthly active users. While it didn’t specify how many are still on the server side, Scott Hancock, Plex’s vice president of marketing, said in an interview that Plex customers using the software’s media server features had been overtaken by customers using Plex’s online streaming capabilities in 2022.
ytdl-sub: Automate downloading and metadata generation with YoutubeDL — ytdl-sub is a command-line tool that downloads media via yt-dlp and prepares it for your favorite media player, including Kodi, Jellyfin, Plex, Emby, and modern music players. No additional plugins or external scrapers are needed.
JB's Jobs Matrix Chatroom — Looking for work? Have an open position? Join our open Matrix jobs board.
k8s at home search — We index Flux HelmReleases from Github repositories with the k8s-at-home topic. To include your repository in this search it must be public and then add the topic k8s-at-home to your GitHub Repository topics. To learn more visit the website from k8s@home.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS End Of Life — Ubuntu 18.04 ‘Bionic Beaver’ is reaching End of Standard Support this April, also known sometimes as End Of Life (EOL).
Ubuntu 22.04.2 Point Release Delayed by 2 Weeks — Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS was due for release on Thursday, February 9. However, the release has had to be delayed by two weeks, and is now scheduled to arrive on Thursday, February 23.
Wine 8.0 is out now with major compatibility improvements — One of the major changes here is the conversion to the PE format for various modules. This format is used by Windows, and an important milestone for Wine to increase compatibility with copy protection, 32-bit applications on 64-bit hosts, Windows debuggers and more.
openSUSE Making It Easier To Install H.264 Codec Support — Inspired by the Fedora / Red Hat and Cisco collaboration around OpenH264 support, openSUSE/SUSE set out for a similar arrangement with Cicsco and its OpenH264 codecs.
Linux 6.2-rc5 Released — Due to an uptick in activity this week and the downtime around Christmas / end-of-year holidays, Torvalds is planning on this cycle spanning through Linux 6.2-rc8 before going gold.
Kernel Security Korner — The issue involved in that compromise became known as CVE-2019-5736 and a complex workaround was implemented in runC to prevent similar vulnerabilities in the future.
Too Big to Care | Coder Radio 502
Jan 25, 2023
How the world without "big tech" might look like, the EU promises to go after Elon and a much-needed head adjustment.
Layoffs in some of Apple's retail channels have begun — The layoff news was first disclosed from an email to AppleInsider. The email — which we have since verified through other sources — says that some Apple retail channel employees who work in places like Best Buy stores have received a thirty-day notice about their rights as it pertains to a layoff.
Microsoft Hosted Sting Performance in Davos on Night Before Announcing Layoffs — On Tuesday evening, Microsoft hosted an event. It was an intimate gathering of 50 or so people, including the company’s top executives, who got to while away the evening listening to a performance by the musical artist Sting, said people familiar with the event.
Old vs. New HomePod Buyer's Guide — First-time HomePod customers, those considering upgrading from the original, or anyone considering adding another HomePod to their setup to create a stereo pair may be wondering whether it is worth buying an original model or the new one, so it is important to weigh up exactly what was added with the reintroduced HomePod.
Jeremy Joslin on Twitter — It's hard for me to believe that after 20 years at #Google I unexpectedly find out about my last day via an email. What a slap in the face. I wish I could have said goodbye to everyone face to face.
#layoffs
Daniel Roberts on Twitter — Google NYC employees who arrived at the office early this morning stood in a line to test their badges-- if light turned red, it meant you had been laid off. if green, you were safe. 👎
Elon Musk Claims He’s Not Worried About The FTC — A recent Washington Post article that is mainly about Musk’s actions over the past two months has destroyed his reputation among many who previously were impressed by him includes two tidbits about Musk and the FTC that suggest he’s in for a world of hurt when the agency takes action.
Coder Radio on the Podcastindex.org — Boost right from your web browser. After you top off Alby with some sats, head to our Podcast Index entry and Boost away.
Updating Our Fiddly Bits | LINUX Unplugged 494
Jan 22, 2023
Today we are finally taking on a project months in the making, and we're switching to an entirely new generation of Linux tech in the process.
BorgWarehouse — BorgBackup Web UI for your central repository server.
Vorta — Vorta is a backup client for macOS and Linux desktops. It integrates the mighty BorgBackup with your desktop environment to protect your data from disk failure, ransomware and theft.
2022: The Year That Podcasting Died — Firstly, I am no longer having any conversations with clients that do not involve video in the discussion.
The Great Podcasting Market Correction - Bloomberg — This past year, podcasting finally achieved one of the ultimate signifiers of middle age — an unsettling realization that the best days of its high-spirited youth may now be behind it.
Spotify enhances chapter support for podcasters — Spotify appears to have enhanced chapter support within the Spotify podcasts app. Nic Ivanov, founder of Vizzy, notes that there’s a new Chapters section in an episode page, and chapter marks and titles within a new player which is rolling out to both iOS (above) and Android. However, Spotify isn’t supporting either ID3 embedded chapters, nor chapters via the new podcast namespace
Podcasting 2.0 Introduction - Blubrry Podcasting — We are in a unique position in that 85,000 independent podcasts use our PowerPress plugin, and tens of thousands of shows use our internal publisher. We can, as one company, enable more than 100,000 shows to implement these new features.
Podcast Addict: "A new Beta has just been published — A new Beta has just been published with support for Podcasting 2.0 LIVE feature. Hopefully, it should be available on the Play Store before tomorrow's LIVE recording of the Podcasting 2.0 podcast. Feel free to provide feedback if you able to test it
A new privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel — The vulnerability consists of a stack buffer overflow due to an integer
underflow vulnerability inside the nftpayloadcopyvlan function, which is
invoked with nftpayload expressions as long as a VLAN tag is present in
the current skb.
libvirt 9.0 Released For Latest Linux Virtualization API — Libvirt 9.0 adds support for external snapshot deletion with QEMU using its existing API, libvirt 9.0 with QEMU now supports PASST as "Plug A Simple Socket Transport" for connecting an emulated network device to the host's network, QEMU external back-end support for SWTPM as a software Trusted Platform Module (TPM), support for passing file descriptors rather than passing files for the QEMU disk, and other additions.
JFS Filesystem’s Days are Numbered — IBM developed the JFS file-system originally in the 90's for AIX and the second-generation implementation then ported to Linux after it was made open-source.
Firefox 109.0 Ships Manifest Version 3 — Manifest Version 3 (MV3) extension support is now enabled by default (MV2 remains enabled/supported). This major update also ushers an exciting user interface change in the form of the new extensions button.
Google delays start of Manifest V2 Chrome extension deprecation — The original plan called for Chrome Beta, Dev, and Canary builds to start experiments that turned off Manifest V2 extension support. Additionally, Manifest V3 would be required to get the “Featured” badge in the Chrome Web Store.
Microsoft gives Google an OpenAI gut punch, why Apple's new hardware fails to impress, and our reaction to the undignified death of Twitter's third-party client API.
Meet the new MacBook Pro and Mac mini - YouTube — Introducing the new MacBook Pro and Mac mini supercharged by the next generation of Apple silicon. Mac mini with M2 and M2 Pro is ready to flex in any setup, with its next-level performance, wide array of ports, and compact size. The new MacBook Pro with M2 Pro and M2 Max delivers exceptional performance and battery life. With a stunning Liquid Retina XDR display and all the ports you need — this is a pro laptop without equal.
Apple’s Tim Cook to take 50% pay hit after shareholder feedback — The Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, is expected to have his pay cut by almost 50% this year to about $49m (£40m) after the billionaire boss asked the company to “adjust his compensation” in the light of feedback from shareholders disappointed at the fall in the company’s share price.
Twitter third-party app 'suspensions are intentional' — Since then, Twitter, including the usually vocal Elon Musk, has not announced the removal of third-party apps. The company has no PR team, while developers of those clients have been similarly kept in the dark, and have resorted to their own messages explaining the situation.
Microsoft's $10B Bet on OpenAI — Microsoft will get 75% of OpenAI’s profits until they recoup the investment. After that threshold is reached, Microsoft will have a 49% stake, other investors taking another 49% and OpenAI’s nonprofit parent getting 2%.
Alby — Lightning for your Browser! — Alby brings Boosts to the web. Grab this, toss a few sats in there or top it off directly. Then head over to the Podcast Index and Boost the show.
NixOS Manual: SSL/TLS Certificates with ACME — NixOS supports automatic domain validation & certificate retrieval and renewal using the ACME protocol. Any provider can be used, but by default NixOS uses Let's Encrypt. The alternative ACME client lego is used under the hood.
Defined Networking is Open for Business — On behalf of everyone here at Defined Networking, I’m excited to announce that our cloud managed version of Nebula is now available to everyone!
LINUX Unplugged 329: Flat Network Truthers — Build one flat network across cloud providers, personal networks, with even thousands of nodes. We feature two amazing open source solutions, and the creators behind them.
Alex dives deep to find out if Kubernetes is overkill for the home and finds solutions to simplify things. And Chris has a new firmware that turns his favorite network cameras up to 11.
Telmate/terraform-provider-proxmox — This repository provides a Terraform provider for the Proxmox virtualization platform and exposes Terraform resources to provision QEMU VMs and LXC Containers.
k8s at home search — We index Flux HelmReleases from Github repositories with the k8s-at-home topic.
Kubernetes for Full-Stack Developers - Free Guide — This comprehensive resource covers everything from the fundamental concepts of Kubernetes to the components of a Kubernetes cluster and network model implementation. New in the 2022 edition are sections on understanding the Standard Kubernetes Dashboard, the high-availability control plane, and autoscaling.
wzminihacks — Run whatever firmware you want on your v2/car/PANv1/v3/PANv2 and have root access to the device, wz camera mods... make your camera better.
Jellyfin — Jellyfin is the volunteer-built media solution that puts you in control of your media. Stream to any device from your own server, with no strings attached. Your media, your server, your way.
LINUX Unplugged 492: A New Challenge Approaches — Join us on a journey to true software freedom. We embark on our 30-day challenge and discover a whole new philosophy that will change the way you think about technology.
Swiftfin on the App Store — As of today, Swiftfin, our native iOS/iPadOS/tvOS app is now on the Apple App Store.
GNOME 44 Hopes and Dreams — GNOME devs are already working hard on the next major release, GNOME 44, due out in late March 2023 with more new features and enhancements.
OpenZFS Performance Gains — With the combination of enabled prefetch and avoided memory copy this change improves sequential single-threaded read speed from a wide NVMe pool from 2049 to 3932 MiB/s. During write profiler shows 22% reduction of unhalted CPU cycles at the same throughput of 3653 MiB/s.
End of the 4.9 Series — Greg KH: I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.337 kernel. All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.
Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Starts to Play Games — Red Hat engineer and longtime open-source Nouveau developer Karol Herbst wrote on his chaos.social account about NVK running games and showing off a screenshot of The Talos Principle running with this open-source, "community" Vulkan driver.
The Talos Principle — The Talos Principle is a philosophical first-person puzzle game from Croteam, the creators of the legendary Serious Sam series, written by Tom Jubert (FTL, The Swapper) and Jonas Kyratzes (The Sea Will Claim Everything).
Internal Server Error | Coder Radio 500
Jan 11, 2023
After sacrificing our pound of flesh for episode 500, we get into some spicy Big Tech dynamics and the performance mess of WebAssembly runtimes.
Amazon Layoffs to Hit Over 18,000 Workers — Cuts focused on the company’s corporate staff exceed earlier projection and represent about 5% of the company’s corporate workforce
A New Challenge Approaches | LINUX Unplugged 492
Jan 08, 2023
Join us on a journey to true software freedom. We embark on our 30-day challenge and discover a whole new philosophy that will change the way you think about technology.
Self-Hosted 87: Jellyfin January — We kick off our Jellyfin January challenge and invite you to join us. Plus, Chris has some new hardware and our thoughts on the trouble at the Matrix foundation.
Search across all Jupiter Broadcasting Show Notes — This site is a searchable archive of the show notes for the all Jupiter Broadcasting shows. Home to the best shows on Linux, Open Source, Security, Privacy, Community, Development, and News.
Android is getting RISC-Y, the handy new Google tool going open source, the next nail in the coffin for ZFS on Ubuntu, and why you were right about smart speakers all along.
New Google Tool Goes Open — The OSV database is a distributed, open-source database that stores vulnerability information in the OSV format. The OSV-Scanner assesses a project's dependencies against the OSV database showing all vulnerabilities relating to the project.
Ubuntu’s New Installer Milestone — With Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" in April that new desktop installer is poised to finally be used by default.
HDR Beginning To Work For Linux Gaming — "New Linux gaming milestone: with the latest work from Josh Ashton, HDR can now be enabled for real games! Tested it tonight on my AMD desktop with Halo Infinite, Deep Rock Galactic, DEATH STRANDING DC. Very early and will still need some time to bake to be useful to most."
Google Home speakers allowed hackers to snoop on conversations — A bug in Google Home smart speaker allowed installing a backdoor account that could be used to control it remotely and to turn it into a snooping device by accessing the microphone feed.
The Copy Paste Wars | Coder Radio 499
Jan 04, 2023
We share our spicy C++ take, major Apple frustrations, and 2023 spoilers.
What’s Left in the Apple Silicon Transition — Depending on how long Apple waits to launch its next Mac, the time following the launch of the MacBook Air could be among the longest periods with no new Mac models at all.
C++ at the end of 2022 — In 2022 the world tried to go back to “normal,” and regarding C++, this was visible through several “real”/live conferences and live ISO committee meetings. Compiler vendors are busy completing support for C++20 and even some C++23 elements. And the ISO committee works on the final parts of C++23 and some features for C++26.
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2022 — Windows is the most popular operating system for developers, across both personal and professional use. A Linux-based OS is more popular than macOS - speaking to the appeal of using open source software.
Get Together — Get Together is an open source event manager for local communities.
Jellyfin January | Self-Hosted 87
Dec 30, 2022
We kick off our Jellyfin January challenge and invite you to join us. Plus, Chris has some new hardware and our thoughts on the trouble at the Matrix foundation.
Home Assistant SkyConnect — The Home Assistant SkyConnect is the easiest way to add Zigbee support to your Home Assistant instance and make it Matter-ready.
It Took MONTHS to Solve This WiFi Problem but I DID! — My family has been hounding me to figure out an audio issue that's ruining our movie nights. Problem is, it's really a Wi-Fi issue, and diagnosing it - even with cool Wi-Spy tools from MetaGeek - could be quite the rabbithole...
Jellyfin — Jellyfin enables you to collect, manage, and stream your media. Run the Jellyfin server on your system and gain access to the leading free-software entertainment system, bells and whistles included.
Swiftfin: Native Jellyfin Client for iOS and tvOS — Swiftfin is a modern video client for the Jellyfin media server. Redesigned in Swift to maximize direct play with the power of VLC and look native on all classes of Apple devices.
The Matrix Holiday Update 2022 — This is directly putting core Matrix development at risk. We are witnessing a classic tragedy of the commons.
ntfy.sh — a simple HTTP-based pub-sub notification service. It allows you to send notifications to your phone or desktop via scripts from any computer, entirely without signup, cost or setup. It's also open source if you want to run your own.
Akademy 2022: Full Steam ahead! — In this talk I will share how Plasma fits into the Steamdeck and what aspects of KDE made us the right choice for their new userbase. I will then share some of the projects that contractors Blue Systems have been doing for Valve and how the work there benefits not just the Steamdeck but improves the ecosystem for all Plasma users.
Libadwaita in the Wild — It’s hard to believe, but Libadwaita is not even one year old, having first been released on December 31, 2021.
libadwaita — Building blocks for modern GNOME applications.
Why the open source driver release from NVIDIA is so important for Linux? — Today NVIDIA announced that they are releasing an open source kernel driver for their GPUs, so I want to share with you some background information and how I think this will impact Linux graphics and compute going forward.
Linux Action News 240 — NVIDIA has announced its plans for an open-source GPU driver. Christian Schaller, the Director for Desktop, Graphics, Infotainment and more at Red Hat, gives us the inside scoop on this historic announcement.
The Birds and the Elephants | Coder Radio 498
Dec 28, 2022
Our take on why several tech companies just teamed up to take on Google Maps, and then we react to the global analyst who says we won't have any new iPhones until 2028. We don't talk about Elon; if we did, it would be chaptered. But we defiantly did not.
Coder Radio on Podcastindex.org — You can Boost right from the Podcast Index listing for the show, just install the Alby extension and top it off with some cheap sats!
2022 Tuxies | LINUX Unplugged 490
Dec 25, 2022
It's the third annual Unplugged Tuxies; our community votes on the best projects, distros, desktops, and services of 2022.
COSMIC by System76 — Computer Operating System Main Interface Components
KDE Plasma — Do it all in a beautiful environment that adapts to your needs, and with the safety, privacy-protection and peace of mind that the best Free Open Source Software has to offer.
immich — Self-hosted photo and video backup solution directly from your mobile phone.
Gamer Radio Gaming with Perspective - Test Show | Coder Radio
Dec 23, 2022
Mike and Chris spend a little time chatting about one of their loves in life, great games. It's a test pilot episode for a possible new show, and we'd like your feedback. Consider it a holiday treat for the Coder fans out there.
Geocatching details on site · Issue #465 — My idea is to use as you thought GitHub just in somewhat different way . My idea is to create issue here or on an empty repo called geocaching .
Office Hours 3: New Website Energy — It's a summer of projects, we get into our plans to totally rebuild our website, some new Podcasting 2.0 features and, Brent takes his first bite of the Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi Adds 100,000 Units to Supply Chain, Back to Pre-pandemic Levels in 2023 | Tom’s Hardware — In the blog post, Upton acknowledged the patience of the community and offers the 100,000 units, made up of Raspberry Pi Zero W, 3A+ and Raspberry Pi 4 2GB and 4GB for single-unit sale. We don't know the breakdown of how many of each model there will be, but Upton does indicate that it is likely that Raspberry Pi Zero W will come back into stock first.
KDE Frameworks 5.101 Released — Per the plans laid out earlier this year at the Akademy developer conference, KDE Frameworks 5 feature development stops following the v5.101 release. KDE Frameworks 5 will now just see maintenance updates moving forward.
Xfce 4.18 Released — After almost two years of work, we are happy to announce the release of Xfce 4.18 !
Shots Across the Pond | Coder Radio 497
Dec 21, 2022
Mike's skeptical of the rumors Apple is preparing to allow third-party app stores, and in a total flip of roles, Chris comes to the defense of Microsoft.
Apple is reportedly preparing to allow third-party app stores on the iPhone — Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports Apple will respond to upcoming EU rules with next year’s iOS 17 update. But it could still have strings attached, like only being available in Europe or only allowing installation of approved apps.
IRS Reminder: Service providers, others may receive 1099-Ks for sales over $600 in early 2023 — The Internal Revenue Service reminds taxpayers earning income from selling goods and/or providing services that they may receive Form 1099-K, Payment Card and Third-Party Network Transactions, for payment card transactions and third-party payment network transactions of more than $600 for the year.
Tailnet lock white paper — Tailscale implements a novel mechanism, tailnet lock, to prevent a malicious control plane from inserting itself into a network. Tailnet lock requires the verification of a cryptographic signature on all WireGuard® node keys distributed by Tailscale’s control plane.
Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History — In "Hardcore History" journalist and broadcaster Dan Carlin takes his "Martian", unorthodox way of thinking and applies it to the past.
Knaves Out – Darknet Diaries — This is the story about how someone hacked into JP Morgan Chase, one of the biggest financial institutions in the world.
Dana Carvey’s The Weird Place — The Weird Place is an episodic sci-fi comedy adventure that will blow your mind. From manipulative aliens to time-traveling pirates to a power-hungry mad man with a magic globe.
Linux Out Loud — Linux Out Loud is a community powered podcast. We take conversations from the DLN Community from places like the DLN Discourse Forums, Telegram group, Discord server and more.
Disqus-ting Tracking | Self-Hosted 86
Dec 16, 2022
What disgusted Alex about Disqus, and how he replaced it with a Self-Hosted solution, a hot HDHomeRun tip, and an update on Chris' hunt for the perfect notes app.
Infinity for Reddit — Infinity is a beautiful, feature-rich app that offers a smooth Reddit browsing experience. It is completely free and ad-less; you can browse Reddit without interruptions or distractions. Built by a passionate university student, Infinity is open source. Please check out, support or contribute to the project at https://github.com/Docile-Alligator/Infinity-For-Reddit!
Apprise - Push Notifications that work — Apprise allows you to send a notification to almost all of the most popular notification services available to us today such as: Telegram, Discord, Slack, Amazon SNS, Gotify, etc.
Dump Disqus for Giscus — This is an easy project. Sure it will probably take an hour or two to get your head around but don't put it off. The end result is great and means no ads or tracking are insidiously injected into your content anymore.
giscus — A comments system powered by GitHub Discussions. Let visitors leave comments and reactions on your website via GitHub! Heavily inspired by utterances.
How to make your own self-hosted VPN in under 30 minutes — As you might have expected, making your own VPN server has multiple advantages and disadvantages. Here are the main points to remember when deciding if you want to go through with hosting a server or not.
HDHomeRun SCRIBE 4K — 4 tuners and 150 hours of recording storage all-in-one amazing box.
Watch and record free TV all around your home. Love your TV more.
Why the next kernel will be "the merge window from hell," a holiday gift for Wayland users, and how the open source community could do more to take on YouTube.
Wine on Wayland 2022 update: more games, more apps, more fun! — Significant improvement compared to last year is support for cross-process rendering, which is required by Chromium/CEF applications. Last year the driver was able to run Chrome with the "--in-process" command-line option. Chrome is now supported without any special flags, and is fully GPU accelerated on both OpenGL and Vulkan!
CERN recommendation for Linux distribution — CERN and Fermilab jointly plan to provide AlmaLinux as the standard distribution for experiments at our facilities, reflecting recent experience and discussions with experiments and other stakeholders
Stephan Dörner (in English) on Twitter — CERN and Fermilab jointly plan to provide AlmaLinux as the standard distribution for experiments at our facilities
GCC Rust “gccrs” Code Merged Into Mainline GCC 13 — Following last week's approval with the GCC Rust v4 patches for them to be merged, all of the "gccrs" code was upstreamed this morning for GNU Compiler Collection 13.
PeerTube v5: the result of 5 years’ handcrafting — Five years later, we are releasing PeerTube v5, a tool used by hundreds of thousands people on a thousand interconnected platforms to share over 850,000 videos.
Sweeney's Final Swing | Coder Radio 496
Dec 14, 2022
We debate a few more drunk or 4D chess moves, the mad lad taking on Apple, and why Dart 3 has people talking. Plus, what a recent criticism of Scrum got wrong.
Launch Keyboard - System76 — Launch Configurable Keyboards are engineered to be comfortable, fully customizable, and make your workflow more efficient.
Elon Musk’s $8 Twitter Blue subscription launches again on Monday — The package will cost $11 per month if you buy it from Apple, with Blue verified checks for people who provide a phone number, while features “coming soon” include prioritized placement in replies and search plus fewer ads.
Scrum Has Failed the Developers — But meanwhile, many developers have suffered. Because people with power misused Scrum to add more pressure on developers. The pressure of delivering items according to plan every Sprint. Having crunch time every two weeks to ensure they meet external expectations. In the good old days of Waterfall projects, teams had to deal with this far less frequently, mostly at the end of the project. These days, many developers feel constant pressure to deliver.
Send a Boost into the Show — Upgrade to a Podcasting 2.0 app, get great new features, and send a Boost into the show 🎉
Revenge of the Lizard People | LINUX Unplugged 488
Dec 11, 2022
We complete a year-long journey and discover some unspoken truths about a great Linux distro. Plus one small, and one major update on our GrapheneOS adventure.
AI Stump Speech — Fellow citizens, I stand before you today as the first-ever AI presidential candidate. I know some of you may be skeptical about my ability to lead, but I assure you that I am more than capable of guiding this great nation to a brighter future.
ChatGPT — We’ve trained a model called ChatGPT which interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests
Sam Altman on Twitter — ChatGPT launched on wednesday. today it crossed 1 million users!
AMA Twitter Thread — We're doing a little @JBOfficeHours AMA during the live stream today.
Swaps Index • LightningNetwork+ — If you have a Bitcoin Lightning Node and you want to open channels to have both outgoing and incoming capacity, we can help you. Here you can easily join a so called liquidity swap where multiple users like you team up and open channels to each other. This setup results in a free incoming channel to you in return for you opening one to someone else. The process takes 4 simple steps. We will give you instructions all throughout the process to make it easy.
Send a Boost into the Show — Upgrade to a Podcasting 2.0 compatible app, and send a Boost into the show.
Linux Action News 270
Dec 08, 2022
The Linux kernel has some exciting updates this week, including a significant Asahi milestone and some good news for Android. Then we take openSUSE's new web-based installer for a spin.
Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux — We’ve been working hard over the past two years to bring this new driver to everyone, and we’re really proud to finally be here. This is still an alpha driver, but it’s already good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games
Android memory safety vulnerabilities declined as Rust usage grew — Specifically, the number of annual memory safety vulnerabilities fell from 223 to 85 between 2019 and 2022. They are now 35% of Android’s total vulnerabilities versus 76% four years ago. In fact, “2022 is the first year where memory safety vulnerabilities do not represent a majority of Android’s vulnerabilities.”
Fedora 38 Cleared To Produce “Mobility Phosh” Spins — The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has provided their blessing to begin creating new x86_64 and AArch64 ISO images for mobile devices that feature the Phosh Wayland compositor.
D-Installer needs your help — Today we published a new prototype of D-Installer, fixing several bugs reported by early testers and improving the usage experience in some areas like the configuration of passwords and users. But beyond those improvements, a couple of new features deserve some attention.
Elon Musk on Twitter — Good conversation. Among other things, we resolved the misunderstanding about Twitter potentially being removed from the App Store. Tim was clear that Apple never considered doing so.
.NET open source is 'heavily under-funded' says AWS — "We found that .NET open source is heavily under-funded," said Saikat Banerjee, an AWS software development manager, at a re:Invent session this week.
Pydantic V2 Plan - pydantic — The release of version 2 is an opportunity to rebuild pydantic and correct many things that don't make sense - to make pydantic amazing 🚀.
PyO3 user guide — Rust bindings for Python, including tools for creating native Python extension modules. Running and interacting with Python code from a Rust binary is also supported.
FastAPI — FastAPI framework, high performance, easy to learn, fast to code, ready for production
Coinbase Wallet on Twitter — You might have noticed you can't send NFTs on Coinbase Wallet iOS anymore. This is because Apple blocked our last app release until we disabled the feature.
The Debian Debate | LINUX Unplugged 487
Dec 04, 2022
After nearly half a year of woe, Brent is ready to give Linux the go. Join us as we compare and contrast two Linux distros and end up with one going on Brent's machine.
Plus, follow-up on Chris' GrapheneOS adventures and more.
A Look at the INTEL ARC A770 — A new challenger appears in the GPU arena! But do they have what it takes to compete? Wendell investigates!
reTerminal CM4104032 — The reTerminal is a Human-Machine Interface facility, designed in modularization, offered multiple interfaces and components. It is your hand-size, powerful, Raspberry Pi-based all-in-one board, assisting you to develop individual IoT & AI projects and being ready to materialize industrial-level monitor and control functions.
Presenting: Obsidian OCR 🎉 — Obsidian OCR allows you to search for text in the images and PDFs in your vault.
AppFlowy.IO — You are in charge of your data and customizations.
Joplin — Joplin is an open source note-taking app. Capture your thoughts and securely access them from any device.
New versions of Ubuntu Touch, Mir, and Unity arrive — Various parts of Ubuntu's canceled desktop/fondleslab convergence project are all still ticking away – some officially and some thanks to user communities.
Eufy cameras caught sending local footage to cloud — Paul Moore, a security researcher, posted on Twitter last week a frightening security situation with Eufy home security products including camera-equipped doorbells.
ClamAV 1.0.0 Released — The first version of ClamAV, which is developed by the US-based tech company Cisco and the open-source community, was released back in 2002.
Red Hat Developers Announce Work On New “Composefs” File-System — Red Hat is working on Composefs as a way to construct and use read-only images that are verifiable and have some immediate use-cases around sharing of Podman container layers and with the verification support for use by OSTree.
Zoë Schiffer on Twitter — NEW: Elon Musk has sent another email to Twitter engineers warning them about code reviews. “All managers are expected to write a meaningful amount of software themselves. Being unable to do so is like a cavalry captain who can’t ride a horse.”
FiniteSingularity on Twitter — Pro Tip- dont update XCode via the software update app, but rather manually download the pkg from the Apple developer downloads page. It downloads/installs much more quickly.
pyenv: Simple Python version management — pyenv lets you easily switch between multiple versions of Python. It's simple, unobtrusive, and follows the UNIX tradition of single-purpose tools that do one thing well.
rbenv: Manage your app's Ruby environment — rbenv is a version manager tool for the Ruby programming language on Unix-like systems. It is useful for switching between multiple Ruby versions on the same machine and for ensuring that each project you are working on always runs on the correct Ruby version.
Computer Chronicles - Intel 486 — In 1992, the big issue was - is it worth the money to upgrade my 386 PC to the new 486 chip? This program looks at the performance of the new Intel 486 and helps users decide.
GrapheneOS — The private and secure mobile operating system with Android app compatibility. Developed as a non-profit open source project.
GrapheneOS on Twitter — We independently discovered the Android lockscreen bypass fixed in Android's November security update while working on features like a duress PIN/password.
Phoronix Premium Black Friday Deal — For this year's deal, you can go premium for just $30 per year or $150 for a lifetime subscription.
Asahi Linux Updates — This month’s update is packed with new hardware support, new features, and fixes for longstanding pain points, as well as a new bleeding-edge kernel branch with long-awaited support for suspend and the display controller!
DiffusionBee - Stable Diffusion GUI App — DiffusionBee is the easiest way to generate AI art on your computer with Stable Diffusion. Comes with a one-click installer. No dependencies or technical knowledge needed.
FTX Owes Its 50 Biggest Unsecured Creditors More Than $3 Billion — Sam Bankman-Fried’s bankrupt crypto empire owes its 50 biggest unsecured creditors a total of $3.1 billion, new court papers show, with a pair of customers owed more than $200 million each.
Antonio García PMC Warfare Theory — What Elon is doing is a revolt by entrepreneurial capital against the professional-managerial class regime that otherwise everywhere dominates (including and especially large tech companies), and that same PMC (which includes the media) is treating it as an act of lèse-majesté.
CBS Quits Twitter, then Returns — On Friday, one of the media outlet’s national correspondents stated that “in light of the uncertainty around Twitter and out of an abundance of caution, CBS News is pausing its activity on the social media site as it continues to monitor the platform.”
Apple Executive Phil Schiller Deactivates Twitter Account — Schiller often used his account to promote new Apple products, services, software, and initiatives and interact with customers. As noted on Twitter by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, however, Schiller's account no longer exists. The account had over 200,000 followers and was created in November 2008 according to a web archive of the account dated November 4.
Apple, Google to Serve as Gatekeepers and Beneficiaries of $8 Twitter Blue — Twitter is trending toward 250 million daily active users. Let’s assume that 1% of that user base—2.5 million people—subscribe on either iOS or Android. Excluding additional subscription products within Twitter, that adds up to $72 million in year one revenue for Apple and $36 million for Google.
Mark Gurman on Twitter — While I expect lots of leeway, there is a real scenario in which Apple/Google remove Twitter because of content moderation issues or because Twitter decides to bypass the 15%-30% cuts. Notably, we appear to now know how Apple’s App Store chief feels about the new Twitter.
We dig into Shufflecake, a tool that lets Linux users hide data with plausible deniability, then let our live stream SSH into our server and see if they can discover our secret data.
Plus, we follow up on Brent's never-ending desktop distro search and Chris' new Linux rig.
Introducing Shufflecake — Shufflecake is a tool for Linux that allows creation of multiple hidden volumes on a storage device in such a way that it is very difficult, even under forensic inspection, to prove the existence of such volumes. Each volume is encrypted with a different secret key, scrambled across the empty space of an underlying existing storage medium, and indistinguishable from random noise when not decrypted.
Hidden Filesystem Design and Improvement - Elia Anzuoni — We propose a novel design, a scheme called Shufflecake, which targets a more balanced compromise between performance and security. The level of deniability it offers, while not protecting against attacks in the most stringent threat model, is sufficient in many practical scenarios.
TwitterToNitter — Bookmarklet that shows the current Twitter page on Nitter. On every click it choses a random Nitter instance.
libredirect — A web extension that redirects YouTube, Twitter, Instagram... requests to alternative privacy friendly frontends and backends.
Hidden NAS | Self-Hosted 84
Nov 18, 2022
We're chatting about workstation builds for a home NAS with Joe Ressington this week. Chris chews on the news of the Evernote buyout and his challenges with Zigbee.
Late Night Linux — Late Night Linux is a podcast that takes a look at what’s happening with Linux and the wider tech industry.
2.5 Admins — 2.5 Admins is a podcast featuring two sysadmins called Allan Jude and Jim Salter, and a producer/editor who can just about configure a Samba share called Joe Ressington.
Before optimizing your channels, it’s best to reduce the amount of traffic on the 2.4 GHz band. There are a few different ways of doing that. But it all boils down to removing as many devices from the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi band as possible. As Zigbee devices can only use the 2.4 GHz band, there isn’t much you can do with them except minimizing the number of commands sent using Zigbee Groups.
Z Wave vs Zigbee — While Z Wave has a better track record of compatibility between products and never interferes with your Wi-Fi network, Zigbee is faster,has a greater range of signal, boasts on open protocol standard, and owns a significantly larger marketshare of the smart home product space.
Announcing Fedora Linux 37 — Fedora Editions are flagship offerings targeted at a particular “market”. With Fedora Linux 37, we’re adding two new Editions.
Meta OSS’ Sapling — A new source control system with Git-compatible client.
Get ready for Google Summer of Code 2023! — We are thrilled to announce the 2023 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and share the timeline with you to get involved! 2023 will be our 19th consecutive year of hosting GSoC.
Announcing Fedora Linux 37 — Fedora Editions are flagship offerings targeted at a particular “market”. With Fedora Linux 37, we’re adding two new Editions.
Meta OSS’ Sapling — A new source control system with Git-compatible client.
Get ready for Google Summer of Code 2023! — We are thrilled to announce the 2023 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and share the timeline with you to get involved! 2023 will be our 19th consecutive year of hosting GSoC.
Microsoft lets its geek flag fly, our observations on .NET 7, and the recent upset caused by the Troll Wizard, but we can't understand who will pay the toll.
NSA urges orgs to use memory-safe programming languages — "NSA recommends that organizations use memory safe languages when possible and bolster protection through code-hardening defenses such as compiler options, tool options, and operating system configurations," advised the agency.
Aegis Authenticator — Aegis Authenticator is a free, secure and open source app for Android to manage your 2-step verification tokens for your online services.
Casey Newton on Twitter — Update: company sources tell me that yesterday Twitter eliminated ~4,400 of its ~5,500 contract employees, with cuts expected to have significant impact to content moderation and the core infrastructure services that keep the site up and running.
.NET 7 is Available Today — Thanks to the open-source .NET community for your numerous contributions that helped shape this .NET 7 release. 28k contributions made by over 8900 contributors throughout the .NET 7 release!
Announcing .NET MAUI for .NET 7 General Availability — Six short months ago we introduced you to .NET Multi-platform App UI (MAUI) and today we are excited to announce the general availability of .NET MAUI in our next major release, .NET 7.
.NET Conf 2022 Keynote: Welcome to .NET — .NET 7 is here! Find out what is new for .NET developers across all workloads including cloud, mobile, desktop, web, AI, IoT, and so much more.
Apple being "very deliberate" on hiring amid economic uncertainty, says CEO Tim Cook — "What we're doing as a consequence of being in this period is we're being very deliberate on our hiring," Cook told "CBS Mornings" at Apple's headquarters in California. "That means we're continuing to hire, but not everywhere in the company are we hiring."
Jay Owens (@hautepop) — Vox’s Future Perfect vertical, which took SBF money to shill for SBF ideology
Preventing 2FA Crises — A recent podcast episode I listed to detailed the painful process of what could happen if you lose your 2FA codes, and I hope to address how to prevent this even if you don't have SMS/calls to authenticate to the 2FA service I'm mentioning (their typical verification process).
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Fedora Falls Flat | LINUX Unplugged 484
Nov 13, 2022
Why this latest release of Fedora misses the mark, and Ubuntu's quiet backing away from ZFS.
Don’s use ZSYS · Issue #230 · ubuntu/zsys — Finally I just want to say I regret having to say this. ZFS and ZSYS are both great technologies. They're ideal solutions to big problems and really move the state of the art forward. Unfortunately, their implementations are both 90% ideal but 10% incomplete.
Podverse on Twitter — Podverse v4.6.12 Beta is ready for testing! #FOSS #OpenSource
Fountain on Twitter — Fountain 0.5.5 is now available on iOS and Android. The update contains several audio playback bug fixes which address your feedback over the last couple of weeks.
\jupiter-search — Showcase for indexing jupiter network podcasts using meilisearch.
Transcriptions · Issue #301 — Over the weekend I've added vad splitting and instructions on how to run the inference. I've also created couple of issues in the repository if someone wants to help.
Mere Mortals Podcast — Philosophy in the park, deep conversations with a light-hearted touch. Stay tuned for dives into cryptocurrencies, fitness, goal setting, fun hypotheticals and whatever captures our attention. 2 to 3 uploads every week!
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Linux Action News 266
Nov 10, 2022
Microsoft's new goodies for Linux users, the Ubuntu Summit wraps up, and our takeaways from the recent fireside chat with Linus Torvalds.
The Ubuntu Summit Just Wrapped Up — Vulture Towers Central Europe are in Prague – which, handily, is also the location for Canonical's 2022 Ubuntu Summit.
Microsoft .NET 7 Released With Better Linux Support — Microsoft .NET 7 brings improved performance, enhanced .NET support on Linux throughout, native support for ARM64, developer productivity enhancements, better cross-platform mobile/desktop app support, HTTP/3 improvements for cloud native apps, 64-bit IBM Power support on Linux, and a variety of other run-time improvements.
Microsoft Launches a Microsoft Teams PWA on Linux — The PWA enables us to ship the latest Microsoft Teams features faster to our Linux customers and helps us bridge the gaps between the Teams desktop client on Linux and Windows.
Khronos Unveils Kamaros — An open, royalty-free standard for controlling camera system runtimes in embedded, mobile, industrial, XR, automotive, and scientific markets.
Fwupd 1.8.7 is a Big Update — Linux firmware updating utility fwupd 1.8.7 has been released adding support for new devices, as well as various improvements.
Voltron Based Development | Coder Radio 491
Nov 09, 2022
Mike just came up for air after a Swift deep dive, and he has a fresh new take. Plus, the wheels of history are spinning faster; we take a snapshot in time and then round it all out with spicy Apple bacon.
Layoffs.fyi — Tracking all tech startup layoffs since COVID-19. Data is compiled from public reports.
Update on supply of iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max — However, we now expect lower iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max shipments than we previously anticipated and customers will experience longer wait times to receive their new products.
Apple predicts ‘substantial’ drop in Mac revenue for holiday quarter — Both Maestri and Apple CEO Tim Cook made it clear during the earnings call with investors that the company is subject to the impacts of the macro economy, which has been affected by the war in Eastern Europe and also as a consequence of the pandemic.
Mysk 🇨🇦🇩🇪 on Twitter — The recent changes that Apple has made to App Store ads should raise many #privacy concerns. It seems that the #AppStore app on iOS 14.6 sends every tap you make in the app to Apple.👇This data is sent in one request: (data usage & personalized ads are off)
Codable — Codable is a type alias for the Encodable and Decodable protocols. When you use Codable as a type or a generic constraint, it matches any type that conforms to both protocols.
SwiftUI Overview — SwiftUI helps you build great-looking apps across all Apple platforms with the power of Swift — and surprisingly little code. You can bring even better experiences to everyone, on any Apple device, using just one set of tools and APIs.
Ubuntu Summit 2022 — An opportunity for the broader Ubuntu community to learn and speak about the amazing work and success stories happening in the ecosystem.
What happened to signal-desktop? - snapcraft.io — This is due to a DMCA takedown request coming from people representing Signal. Canonical is currently working with Signal to resolve this issue.
Godot Engine — Free and open source 2D and 3D game engine.
Godot’s Graduation: Godot moves to a new Foundation — Software Freedom Conservancy and the Godot leadership are excited to share their decision that the Godot project has reached a level of success for which it makes sense for Godot to have its own independent foundation.
Home Assistant Yellow — At the heart of Home Assistant Yellow is the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.
Scheduler card/custom component — The scheduler integration is an alternative for HA automations which use the time or sun as trigger.
Generic Thermostat - Home Assistant — When in heater mode, if the measured temperature is cooler than the target temperature, the heater will be turned on and turned off when the required temperature is reached. When in air conditioning mode, if the measured temperature is hotter than the target temperature, the air conditioning will be turned on and turned off when required temperature is reached.
Sengled Zigbee Smart LED Strip Lights Starter Kit — All in one led strip lights kit that comes with a HUB, an AC adapter, a remote control receiver, 1 reel of 16.4ft light strip; no need for any other expensive devices.
ZimaBoard — World’s First Hackable Single Board Server
Starting at $119.9
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Linux Action News 265
Nov 03, 2022
What you need to know about that new OpenSSL vulnerability, the big bcachefs update we've been waiting for, and why the community is creating a Gitea fork.
OpenSSL 3.0.7 Released Fixing Critical Flaw — Today we published an advisory about CVE-2022-3786 (“X.509 Email Address Variable Length Buffer Overflow”) and CVE-2022-3602 (“X.509 Email Address 4-byte Buffer Overflow”).
Linux 6.2 Power-Savings While Idle Or Lightly Loaded — The short story for Linux end-users is the Lazy RCU work can provide 5~10% power-savings for idle or lightly-loaded systems by this lazy/batching functionality.
Hector's Deleted Tweet — I'm getting tired of arguing with kernel maintainers. The other day I spent 6 hours arguing on IRC about what should've been a 30 minute fix patch.
Hector Martin on Twitter Follow Up Tweet — Like dude, if you aren't going to step into my world and actually understand what I'm trying to do here, just suck it up and ack my patch. It is not my job to drag you kicking and screaming until you either give up or have a lightbulb moment.
Apple flexes its control over the App Store — In its changes this week, Apple updated its App Store rules to give itself a cut of some advertising revenue in social media apps and purchase revenue from Web3 apps
Telegram CEO Accuses Apple of Destroying Dreams and Crushing Entrepreneurs — Durov said Apple is not "happy with content creators monetizing their efforts without paying a 30% tax" and that Telegram has no choice but to disable paid posts and channels on its iOS app. "This is just another example of how a trillion-dollar monopoly abuses its market dominance at the expense of millions of users who are trying to monetize their own content," Durov continued.
MacRumors.com on Twitter — Story updated with the following statement from an Apple spokesperson: "We have paused ads related to gambling and a few other categories on App Store product pages."
alex 🤷🏽♂️😬👍🏾 on Twitter — AppStore discovery has become so shit even in 2016 that Indy devs were finding it hard to get organic growth. What did Apple do? Slowly but surely offer more and more advertising instead of better alternatives
@dominucco
@ChrisLAS
Casey Newton on Twitter — Here it is: Twitter engineers were told today to print out their last 30 to 60 days of code, so they could show it to Elon Musk himself.
MAX PAIN 👀☣️ on Twitter — Elon actually brought in Tesla engineers to review Twitter code Wolf of Wall Street style and not only fired CEO Parag, CFO, and the Indian lawyer lady but the entirety of the C-suite executives on day 1
Facebook parent Meta Q3 2022 earnings — The company’s Reality Labs division, which houses its VR headsets, lost over $9 billion in the first three quarters.
Jim Cramer on Twitter — Meta bought back $6.5 billion as free cash flow dropped off the face of the earth. I did not see this coming. I trusted this management and that was ill-advised
The GNOME Project is closing all its mailing lists —
The GNOME Project is preparing to shut down its mailing lists due to problems maintaining the project's GNU Mailman instance - which relies on Python 2 - and a lack of moderators.
Office Hours 15: One PR At a Time — We recap a busy night after a studio power outage, then dig into what makes an open-source project worth contributing to. Why do some fail while others grow and prosper?
Systemd supremo proposes tightening up Linux boot process — In brief, what he sees as the problem is that on hardware with Secure Boot enabled, while the boot process up to and including the kernel is signed, the next step, loading the initrd, is not. That's what he wants to fix.
Brave New Trusted Boot World — This document looks at the boot process of general purpose Linux distributions. It covers the status quo and how we envision Linux boot to work in the future with a focus on robustness and simplicity.
NixOS bootspec-secureboot — This repository is a research project that aims to improve the bootloader story in NixOS.
FFmpeg.guide — A simple GUI tool to create complex FFmpeg filtergraphs quickly and correctly, without having to mess with the cumbersome filter syntax
One PR At a Time | Office Hours 15
Oct 28, 2022
We recap a busy night after a studio power outage, then dig into what makes an open-source project worth contributing to. Why do some fail while others grow and prosper?
Plus, our thoughts on Pocket Casts going open source and the media winter we're preparing for.
Pocket Casts Mobile Apps Are Now Open Source — “I know that open source is the most powerful idea of our generation.” We believe that podcasting can not and should not be controlled by Apple and Spotify, and instead support a diverse ecosystem of third-party clients.
Alex Rodriguez (@RonJonArod) / Twitter — Pentester/Ops/Developer for @secureideasllc Really enjoy automation and linux thoughts and opinions are my own.
Alex aka elrey Bio — Besides automation, I love open-source, network/sys admining work, and security in general. I am *nix, vim, zsh, zfs, and tmux lover, and I enjoy helping new people with security, linux, or anything I can!
Ubuntu 22.10 Released — Codenamed “Kinetic Kudu”, this interim release improves the experience of enterprise developers and IT administrators. It also includes the latest toolchains and applications with a particular focus on the IoT ecosystem.
Linus Torvalds may pull '486 support from Linux kernel — As Torvalds surveyed contributors' code, he appears to have been frustrated by the need to include workarounds that cater to older CPUs. He therefore suggested ending support for old kit could be an easier way to solve memory matters.
Stratis Storage 3.3 Released — Stratis 3.3.0 includes one significant enhancement and several smaller enhancements as well as number of stability and efficiency improvements.
Matthew Miller on Twitter — Heads up: we are very likely to slip the official Fedora Linux 37 release in order to integrate fixes for the upcoming critical openssl vulnerability. Official decision on this tomorrow.
Forthcoming OpenSSL Releases — OpenSSL 3.0.7 is a security-fix release. The highest severity issue fixed in this release is CRITICAL
Luther Curious | Coder Radio 489
Oct 26, 2022
One of the most challenging aspects of being an independent developer, and our thoughts on Microsoft's recent bad news.
7 Estimation Anti-Patterns — Here are 7 estimation anti-patterns and also how you could fix them. Fair warning: in most cases, there are no easy answers.
Microsoft employees are the latest casualties amid the tech world's layoffs trend — Precisely how many people are being put out of work is unclear. Axios’s source said the newly unemployed will number "under 1,000," which is an odd phrasing, since it could mean just about anything, but it’s pretty clear that the total is significant.
Brad Sams on Twitter — I get that companies have to make priorities and cuts happen but when that same company is trying to spend $70b on an acquisition…it feels odd
Mark Zuckerberg has a $10 billion plan to make it impossible for remote workers to hide from their bosses — But some experts are wary of a full-scale pivot to the metaverse. “We would have to carefully attend to the physical implications of headsets,” Roshni Raveendhran, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, told Fortune last year. “Like if it harms our eyesight or implicates our brain functions; we don’t know any of these things now, and we won’t know until there’s more of a continual usage pattern. We need to pay attention to some of those before we go into full-scale adoption.”
he Wire retracts two recent stories about Meta's XCheck — Earlier this week, The Wire announced its decision to conduct an internal review of its recent coverage of Meta, especially the sources and materials involved in our reporting.
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Just a Prompt Away | LINUX Unplugged 481
Oct 23, 2022
The Internet is going crazy with AI-generated media. What's the open-source story, and is Linux being left out?
Plus, we try out the new Ubuntu release on the ODROID H3+.
Ubuntu 22.10 - Kinetic Kudu — Ubuntu Desktop 22.10 users will benefit from the refinements in GNOME 43, including GTK4 theming for improved performance and consistency. Quick Settings now provide faster access to commonly used options such as wifi, bluetooth, dark mode and power settings.
ODROID-H3+ — Intel® Quad-Core Jasper Lake N6005, Up to 64GB Dual-channel Memory DDR4, PCIe 3.0 x 4 lanes, 2 x 2.5Gbit Ethernet ports, 2 x SATA 3.0 ports, and more!
NVIDIA Container Toolkit — The NVIDIA Container Toolkit allows users to build and run GPU accelerated containers. The toolkit includes a container runtime library and utilities to automatically configure containers to leverage NVIDIA GPUs.
LURE (Linux User REpository) — LURE is intended to bring the AUR to all distros. It is currently in an alpha state and may not be stable. It can download a repository, build packages in it using a bash script similar to PKGBUILD, and then install them using your system package manager.
Roon Ready Ruh-Roh | Self-Hosted 82
Oct 21, 2022
Alex gives Roon Labs whole home audio a try but discovers a critical design flaw while Chris checks out his new ODROID-H3+ and plans his next epic build.
ODROID-H3+ — Intel® Quad-Core Processor Jasper Lake N6005 has a base clock of 2GHz and a boost clock of 3.3GHz with 1.5MB L2 and 4MB L3 cache by a 10 nm process.
Roon Labs - The audiophile player for music fanatics — Whether you’re working out at the gym, heading to the office, or traveling thousands of miles from home – Roon ARC gives you mobile access to your full library of artists, albums, playlists, and tags. No more settling for second-best from streaming apps when you’re on the go. Roon ARC makes everywhere feel like home.
Zigbee Binding — Zigbee has support for binding which makes it possible that devices can directly control each other without the intervention of Zigbee2MQTT or any home automation software.
Top 10 Self-Hosted Apps - Perfect Media Server — Storing and serving files is all well and good but with a little effort, we can replace dozens of hosted services that don't respect your privacy. Here are some of my favourite self-hosted app picks.
moodeaudio.org — Audiophile-quality music playback for the wonderful Raspberry Pi family of single board computers.
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Linux Action News 263
Oct 20, 2022
What makes Google's new OS so secure, a critical WiFi vulnerability in the Kernel, and why Linus is tapping the hype breaks for Linux 6.1.
Announcing KataOS and Sparrow — Our team in Google Research has set out to solve this problem by building a provably secure platform that's optimized for embedded devices that run ML applications.
Some remotely exploitable kernel WiFi vulnerabilities — It would appear that there is a set of memory-related vulnerabilities in the kernel's WiFi stack that can be exploited over the air via malicious packets; five CVE numbers have been assigned to the set.
Linus Torvalds to Linux devs: Stop pulling all-nighters — "Let me just say that after I got my machine sorted out and caught up with the merge window, I was somewhat frustrated with various late pull requests. I've mentioned this before, but it's really quite annoying to get quite a few pull requests in the last few days of the merge window"
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Code Laundering | Coder Radio 488
Oct 19, 2022
We debate if GitHub's Copilot enables automated code laundering after a developer makes a startling discovery. Then we dispense some seriously old-school wisdom.
Is a ‘software engineer’ an engineer? Alberta regulator says no. — The Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA), has asked a court to order one of the province’s leading software companies, Octopusapp Inc., known as Jobber, to stop using the term “engineer” in job titles and postings unless it gets a permit from the regulator.
Frank Karlitschek | Nextcloud — Frank Karlitschek started Nextcloud as an open source project to power a decentralized internet, believing that companies should control their own data. As an engineer in computer science, he worked on many open source projects throughout his career.
Configuring GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code — GitHub Copilot includes a filter which detects code suggestions matching public code on GitHub. You can choose to enable or disable the filter. When the filter is enabled, GitHub Copilot checks code suggestions with their surrounding code of about 150 characters against public code on GitHub. If there is a match or near match, the suggestion will not be shown to you.
Tim Davis on Twitter — @github copilot, with "public code" blocked, emits large chunks of my copyrighted code, with no attribution, no LGPL license. For example, the simple prompt "sparse matrix transpose, cs" produces my cstranspose in CSparse. My code on left, github on right. Not OK.
Hector Martin on Twitter — Don't do this. Ever. This is insulting and disrespectful to your users.
Nobody is entitled to support from volunteer FOSS projects, but they absolutely do deserve not to have the issues they took time to file actively thrown away. If you haven't fixed the bug, it stays open.
Intel Arc Graphics Running On Fully Open-Source Linux Driver - Phoronix — A common misconception or confusion I've heard many times over the past number of months has been questioning whether Intel's discrete GPU driver support on Linux is open-source or is closed-source, etc. Well, it's fully open-source aside from the usual firmware caveat and running on Linux.
The new Thelio — We believed that we could make an open hardware desktop that’s powerful, compact, quiet, beautiful, upgradable, backed by lifetime support, and manufactured in the United States—so we did. Customize your components, your software, even your aesthetic with swappable accents made for any mindset.
RustDesk — A remote desktop software, the open source TeamViewer alternative, works out of the box, no configuration required.
Self-Hosted — Self-Hosted is a chat show between Chris and Alex two long-time "self-hosters" who share their lessons and take you along for the journey as they learn new ones.
Try Infrastructure as Code eBook — This 200+ page ebook is meant to be a step-by-step guide for you to learn how to use some of the most in-demand IaC tools that exist
JB & Hacktoberfest - Let's participate! — It would be cool if JB would add the "hacktoberfest" tag to this repo so contributors can get credit for submitting PRs for Hacktoberfest!
Fountain 0.4.9 — Introducing a new earnings system to replace Flow, plus an improved referrals system that means you will be stacking sats in your sleep!
Fountain 0.5.2 — Android users can now play their podcasts and discover new shows while they are driving.
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Linux Action News 262
Oct 13, 2022
Plasma 5.26's standout features, Canonical flips the script on Red Hat, and why Android is leaking traffic outside VPNs.
Plasma 5.26 Released — Plasma 5.26 comes with new and tweaked widgets, improves the desktop experience leaps and bounds, and Plasma Big Screen's app family grows
Google Reveals ‘First Laptops Built For Cloud Gaming’ — Google says the Acer Chromebook 516 GE, ASUS Chromebook Vibe CX55 Flip and Lenovo Ideapad Gaming Chromebook all have refresh rates of at least 120Hz, displays with up to 1600p resolution, immersive audio and, critically for cloud gaming, WiFi 6 or 6E connectivity.
Intel Arc Graphics - A750 and A770 GPUs Release — The Intel Arc A750 and A770 GPUs officially launch today, October 12th in select markets. Everyone at Intel is beyond thrilled to get graphics cards with modern features and extremely competitive performance-per-dollar into your hands.
Android leaks connectivity check traffic — As a closing note, we would like to recommend Google to adopt the ability to disable the connectivity checks, like on GrapheneOS, into stock Android.
iOS VPN apps have another flaw: excluding many Apple apps — We confirm that iOS 16 does communicate with Apple services outside an active VPN tunnel. Worse, it leaks DNS requests. Apple services that escape the VPN connection include Health, Maps, and Wallet.
Casual Coders | Coder Radio 487
Oct 12, 2022
Elon Musk's leaked messages reveal how tech CEOs think and talk about their employees, and we dig in.
alex 🤷🏽♂️😬👍🏾 on Twitter — Yo this is a really compelling testimonial from
@ChrisLAS on the merits of 3D media — shame it’s not really taking off or didn’t take off. @CoderRadioShow
any thoughts why?
Michael Dominick on Twitter — What's the value of avoiding a possibly embarrassing and likely damaging deposition? Apparently, $44B. Damn! #tech
Elon Musk: Twitter won't 'take yes for an answer' — Billionaire Elon Musk has said he aims to complete his purchase of Twitter by the end of the month, but the company "will not take yes for an answer".
Tasks - Nextcloud Apps — Tasks can be shared between users. Tasks can be synchronized using CalDAV (each task list is linked to an Nextcloud calendar, to sync it to your local client: Thunderbird, Evolution, KDE Kontact, iCal … - just add the calendar as a remote calendar in your client). You can download your tasks as ICS files using the download button for each calendar.
Home Assistant Yellow — Home Assistant Yellow integrates 1,000+ different devices and services, allowing you to create powerful automations and get insight into your energy usage. All from an easy-to-use interface that runs 100% locally without anything in the cloud.
System76’s Pop!_OS COSMIC Desktop To Make Use Of Iced Rust Toolkit — The UX team has been carefully designing widgets and applications over the last year. We are now at the point where it is critical for the engineering team to decide upon a GUI toolkit for COSMIC. After much deliberation and experimentation over the last year, the engineering team has decided to use Iced instead of GTK.
Matter is now official! — The Connectivity Standards Alliance has certified and released the first version of the Matter smart home interoperability protocol Tuesday and I couldn’t be happier.
Invoice Ninja — Focus on doing what you love. We’ll help with the invoicing.
Docker files for Invoice Ninja — Introducing our very own Helm Chart that helps you launch a simple standalone app to a production-ready, highly available Invoice Ninja setup.
InvoicePlane — InvoicePlane is a self-hosted open source application for managing your quotes, invoices, clients and payments.
Cloudflare Zero Trust and Yubico — Yubico is providing Security Keys at “Good for the Internet” pricing - as low as $10 per key. Yubico will ship the keys to customers directly.
netbird — NetBird is an open-source VPN management platform built on top of WireGuard® making it easy to create secure private networks for your organization or home.
RuneAudio — RuneAudio is a free and open source software that turns embedded hardware into Hi-Fi music players.
Volumio - The Audiophile Music Player — A very powerful and convenient music aggregator, now Volumio can also be used with great results in all sorts of different situations.
snapcast: Synchronous multiroom audio player — Snapcast is a multiroom client-server audio player, where all clients are time synchronized with the server to play perfectly synced audio. It's not a standalone player, but an extension that turns your existing audio player into a Sonos-like multiroom solution.
Badgers Stack — A new page for May 2022, here's a high level overview snapshot of PMS as it stands today.
Install Proxmox VE on Debian 11 Bullseye — The installation of a supported Proxmox VE server should be done via bare-metal ISO installer. In some cases it makes sense to install Proxmox VE on top of a running Debian Bullseye 64-bit, especially if you want a custom partition layout. For this How-To any official Bullseye installation medium should work.
IBM Takes Over Red Hat Storage to IBM Offerings — IBM announced today it will add Red Hat storage product roadmaps and Red Hat associate teams to the IBM Storage business unit, bringing consistent application and data storage across on-premises infrastructure and cloud.
IBM Does A “Quasi-Acquisition” Of Red Hat Storage — Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is also being absorbed into IBM Spectrum Fusion. IBM is assuming the Premier Sponsorship role of the Ceph Foundation from Red Hat.
Announcing Nextcloud Hub 3 — Our design always followed three principles. Focus on content, ease of use, and great accessibility. For this refresh, we added a fourth: make it your own.
Introducing NVK — NVK is a new open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa.
Debian’s firmware vote results — The winning option allows the installer image to include firmware necessary to use the system.
Some 6.0 development statistics — A total of 2,034 developers contributed to the 6.0 release; of those, 236 made their first contribution during this cycle. The total number of developers is just short of the record (2,086) set for 5.19, but the number of first-time contributors is the lowest seen since the 5.6 release (216) in 2020.
I486 - Wikiwand — The Intel 486, officially named i486 and also known as 80486, is a microprocessor. It is a higher-performance follow-up to the Intel 386.
Aquamacs Emacs — An Editor for Text, HTML, LaTeX, C++, Java, Python, R, Perl, Ruby, PHP, and more…
Stadia died because no one trusts Google — No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor understanding of what people want, need and will pay for that at this point, people are wary of investing in even its more popular products.
Nibel on Twitter — No clue where this is going but I'm intrigued.
Sega Channel — The Sega Channel is a discontinued online game service developed by Sega for the Sega Genesis video game console, serving as a content delivery system. Launched on December 14, 1994, the Sega Channel was provided to the public by TCI and Time Warner Cable through cable television services by way of coaxial cable.
OnLive — Games were delivered to OnLive's client software as streaming video rendered by the service's servers, rather than rendered locally by the device.
The Next Big Battle Between Google and Apple Is for the Soul of Your Car — For the car companies involved, which face the nearly impossible challenge of producing software on par with what tech companies offer, working with Silicon Valley can address consumer desires while also staving off competition from companies like Tesla.
412Linux on Twitter — Sadly, @ChrisLAS is the first person I thought about after reading the Stadia update. He really did believe in it. Can't wait to hear his t
A message about Stadia and our long term streaming strategy — A few years ago, we also launched a consumer gaming service, Stadia. And while Stadia's approach to streaming games for consumers was built on a strong technology foundation, it hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected so we’ve made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service.
The Verge blames Linux — Google spent millions convincing publishers like Ubisoft and Take-Two to bring their biggest games to Stadia. Google had to pay such large sums because the work to port games over wasn’t particularly easy given Stadia runs on Linux, a platform game developers haven’t paid enough attention to.
The controversial change for the GNU Toolchain, critical vulnerabilities in popular Matrix clients, and the significant milestone for the Ingenuity LinuxCopter this week.
Announcing the GNU Toolchain Infrastructure Project — Linux Foundation IT services plans for the GNU Toolchain include Git repositories, mailing lists, issue tracking, web sites, and CI/CD, implemented with strong authentication, attestation, and security posture. Utilizing the experience and infrastructure of the LF IT team that is already used by the Linux kernel community will provide the most effective solution and best experience for the GNU Toolchain developer community.
Going All In on Linux | Coder Radio 485
Sep 28, 2022
Mike has spent just over a month living in Linux full-time, and Chris wants to check in and see how he’s doing. Plus we both have the new Thelio from System76 in-house, and our takeaways might surprise you.
Southern California Meet up this Friday — Come join us! We’ll be hanging out from 6pm-8pm. This place has everything you need, great food, great beer, a great atmosphere, and phenomenal company. Also, the patio is dog friendly!
Linux On The Laptop Works So Damn Well That It’s Boring — Honestly, when I use my Linux computer, very little is different from my Mac or Windows machines. It works so well that it’s essentially kind of boring. Which is what you want, right? You don’t want to have to think about your operating system, or worry about it. You just want it to work.
System76 Thelio — We’ve slimmed down Thelio’s wood wrapping into a swappable accent on the front of the system. Style your Thelio with a variety of wood or powder-coated aluminum accents to empower any mindset.
Thelio 2022 Redesign Review - dominickm.com — Proudly proclaiming “real computers have ports”, it comes with a variety of HDMI, Display Port (depending on your GPU) and UBS-C ports. Whether your a developer who needs to connect IOT devices for debugging or a content creator preaching the gospel of Objective Binks, you’ll have the ports you need for your audio devices and (in my case) your mute pedal. Keen observers will notice that the back panel is slightly less styled than previous model, but that hardly detracts from the overall aesthetic appeal.
Thelio Timed Linux Kernel Compilation — This test times how long it takes to build the Linux kernel in a default configuration (defconfig) for the architecture being tested or alternatively an allmodconfig for building all possible kernel modules for the build.
Parboil DevOne Benchmarks — The Parboil Benchmarks from the IMPACT Research Group at University of Illinois are a set of throughput computing applications for looking at computing architecture and compilers. Parboil test-cases support OpenMP, OpenCL, and CUDA multi-processing environments. However, at this time the test profile is just making use of the OpenMP and OpenCL test workloads.
Grab a New Podcast App — Send a Boost into the show with a Podcasting 2.0 compatible app.
The Feeling of Fast | LINUX Unplugged 477
Sep 25, 2022
We finally give Brent his new laptop and get his reaction. Plus our best pick for replacing stock Android with something private.
HP Dev One — From preinstalled Linux Pop!OS to a tuned Linux keyboard with a Super key, HP Dev One is designed with powerful features and tools to help you code your way.
OWC Thunderbolt Dock — Compatible with M1 Macs, Thunderbolt 3 Equipped Macs, and Thunderbolt 4 PCs
Snapcast — Snapcast is a multiroom client-server audio player, where all clients are time synchronized with the server to play perfectly synced audio. It's not a standalone player, but an extension that turns your existing audio player into a Sonos-like multiroom solution.
piCorePlayer — Free software that plays local music as well as online music streaming services on a Raspberry Pi
Using Bitwarden with Fastmail — If you have a Bitwarden account, you can create Masked Email addresses quickly and easily through Bitwarden's Generator.
GNOME 43 Release Notes — After 6 months of hard work, the GNOME project is proud to present version 43. This latest GNOME release comes with improvements across the board, ranging from a new quick settings menu, a redesigned Files app, and hardware security integration. GNOME 43 continues the trend of GNOME apps migrating from GTK 3 to GTK 4, and includes many other smaller enhancements.
Next steps for Rust in the kernel — At the 2022 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit, Miguel Ojeda updated the group on the status of the project with the goal of reaching a conclusion on when this merge might happen. The answer that came back was clear enough: Rust in the kernel will be happening soon indeed.
Rust Porting Begins For Intel’s “e1000” Linux Network Driver — Adding to the growing examples and early drivers being worked on for the Linux kernel to showcase the possibilities of using the Rust programming language within the kernel, an early port of Intel's e1000 wired networking driver has started.
ASUS & Canonical Partner On The IoT — Adding to the growing examples and early drivers being worked on for the Linux kernel to showcase the possibilities of using the Rust programming language within the kernel, an early port of Intel's e1000 wired networking driver has started.
Introducing the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition — Today, we are excited to announce that we have partnered with Google to create the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition. We’ve taken the best parts of the Framework Laptop and merged those with the powerful simplicity of ChromeOS to create a high-performance, upgradeable, repairable, customizable Chromebook.
I Wanted to be a Hipster | Coder Radio 484
Sep 21, 2022
Mike's first look at a built from scratch yet to be released IDE. And we cook up a little Adobe-flavored bacon.
JetBrains Fleet: The Next-Generation IDE by JetBrains — Built from scratch, based on 20 years of experience developing IDEs. JetBrains Fleet uses the IntelliJ code-processing engine, with a distributed IDE architecture and a reimagined UI.
Figma — Figma is the only platform that brings together powerful design features you already love and a more efficient workflow to boot.
Why Figma is Worth $20B — Figma had crossed the ‘this matters to Adobe’s future’ rubicon. They hit $400m ARR and were continuing to double. Figma revenue, independent of margin, was increasingly displacing revenue that might have gone to Adobe, or more specifically, creating pricing pressure on Adobe. It was a product designed natively to be collaborative, to be easier to use than Adobe’s professional tools, and without the baggage of features and nomenclature leftover from years of software releases, platform shifts, and business model changes.
Grab a New Podcast App — Upgrade to a new Podcasting 2.0 compatible app, and boost into the show!
Canary in the Photo Mine | LINUX Unplugged 476
Sep 18, 2022
We've gone deep to find our perfect Google Photos replacement. This week we'll share our setup that we think works great, is easy to use, and is fully backed up.
Syncthing — Syncthing is a continuous file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers in real time, safely protected from prying eyes.
Stingle Photos — Stingle Photos is a convenient, easy to use Gallery/Camera application with Backup and Sync functionality for your photos and videos which seamlessly provides strong security, privacy and encryption.
pigallery2 — A fast directory-first photo gallery website, with rich UI, optimized for running on low resource servers.
Photoview — Photoview is a simple and user-friendly photo gallery that's made for photographers and aims to provide an easy and fast way to navigate directories, with thousands of high-resolution photos.
LibrePhotos — A self-hosted open source photo management service.
Introducing SATurn: Value for Value podcast analytics — Users of the Alby podcaster wallet can connect their account to SATurn to receive valuable insights into the performance of their podcasts and read all messages from their audience sent by Value for Value enabled podcast players.
Shape-shifting cryptominer savaging Linux endpoints and IoT — The malware was dubbed "Shikitega" for its extensive use of the popular Shikata Ga Nai polymorphic encoder, which allows the malware to "mutate" its code to avoid detection. Shikitega alters its code each time it runs through one of several decoding loops that AT&T said each deliver multiple attacks, beginning with an ELF file that's just 370 bytes.
Linux Foundation Announces Open Wallet Foundation — The Linux Foundation, a global nonprofit organization enabling innovation through open source, today announced the intention to form the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort to develop open source software to support interoperability for a wide range of wallet use cases.
IOuring Continues To Prove Very Exciting: Promising iouringspawn Announced — It also continues to be relentlessly optimized by Jens Axboe and others for maximum performance potential. The latest innovation around IOuring that was announced this week at Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin is iouringspawn.
iPhone 14 Pro Models Feature Improved GPS Accuracy — The new iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max feature dual-frequency GPS support for more accurate location tracking, according to Apple's tech specs for the devices.
PhotoPrism — PhotoPrism is an AI-Powered Photos App for the Decentralized Web
Git Large File Storage — Git Large File Storage (LFS) replaces large files such as audio samples, videos, datasets, and graphics with text pointers inside Git, while storing the file contents on a remote server like GitHub.com or GitHub Enterprise.
Carlos Fenollosa on Twitter — Email is now an oligopoly, a service gatekept by a few big companies which does not follow the principles of net neutrality.
Immich — High performance self-hosted photo and video backup solution.
Here is another Immich's progress update — I apologize for the late update. August had been a very productive month for the project and the team. I hope you all had a great one as well.
Android IP Webcam - Home Assistant — The Android IP Webcam integration connects with Android IP Webcam to turn any Android phone or tablet into a network camera with multiple viewing options.
Fully Kiosk Browser - Home Assistant — Fully Kiosk Browser is a powerful kiosk browser for Android devices. It provides a number of features for monitoring and controlling your Android device. This integration gives you access to control your device and view the status in Home Assistant.
Tailscale - Home Assistant — This integration DOES NOT make your Home Assistant accessible via Tailscale VPN remotely!
Rish Tandon on Twitter — “With this change, we are taking a major step in #MicrosoftTeams Teams architecture. We are moving away from Electron to Edge Webview2. Teams will continue to remain a hybrid app but now it will be powered by #MicrosoftEdge. Also Angular is gone. We are now 100% on reactjs”
Full transparency on the Grub issue — After updating to grub 2.06.r322 many users reported that their machines could fail to boot or booted directly into the BIOS or another OS.
SUSE turns 30 — From our start in Nuremberg on September 2, 1992 to our record-breaking IPO in 2021 and continued growth, SUSE has always put community first, including our employee community.
Commercial underwater datacenter goes online this year — The company claims that placing its datacenter modules underwater can reduce power consumption and carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent, as well as lowering latency by allowing the datacenter to be located closer to metropolitan areas, many of which are located near the coast.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — Hope my @PlayMTG & @MTG_Arena had a blast! For the first time out "for real" in a while, I think I did JarJar good :) Standard: 5-0 Sealed: 5-3 Thanks for all the great content to get me up to speed after years off of #MTG
Xcode Cloud Subscriptions Now Available for Developers — 25 compute hours per month is free at the current time, but will later cost $15 per month. 100 computer hours per month is priced at $50/month, 250 compute hours per month is priced at $100/month, and 1000 compute hours per month is priced at $400/month.
Linux’s Malware Inevitability | LINUX Unplugged 474
Sep 04, 2022
Can Linux do better? Apple is scrambling to build always-on malware protection into the next macOS as its market share grows. A precautionary tale for Linux users.
Plus we take a look at Ubuntu Unity as it becomes an official flavor.
Office Hours 11 — We're pushing our new website to production live on the show today. We have no idea how things will turn out - but we're taking you along for the ride either way!
New fwupd 1.8.4 starts work on BIOS control — fwupd now reads your system BIOS settings, and has the ability to change them if the user desires (and has authorization to do).
Pine64 reveals the Star64 RISC-V based Single Board Computer — Along the long leading edges you’ll find PCIe on one end and GPIO on the other. At one end of the board you’ll find a digital video output, a double-stacked Gigabit Ethernet port and a 12V barrel plug for power. On the opposite side, you’ll find 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, an audio jack as well as a power button. There are also two U.FL ports for antennas – one for bluetooth and the other for WiFi.
NetworkManager 1.40 Released With Multi-Path TCP Support — Multi-Path TCP has come together in the kernel over the past two years for this standard, allowing TCP connections to use multiple paths for greater performance/efficiency and added redundancy.
Debian General Resolution To Decide What To Do With Non-Free Firmware — The basic problem is that the use of downloadable firmware in computer systems is on the rise and most of that firmware is not free software. The official Debian installer only incorporates free software (and firmware), which leads to serious problems for many users.
Flipping The Switch | Office Hours 11
Aug 31, 2022
We're pushing our new website to production live on the show today. We have no idea how things will turn out - but we're taking you along for the ride either way!
Twitter is becoming a podcast app — Twitter is officially getting into podcasts. The app will launch a test version of Twitter Spaces today that includes podcasts, letting you listen to full shows through curated playlists based on your interests.
CoderRadioMascot on Twitter — @ChrisLAS, here is another big advantage of having a podcast mascot. Imagine the next podcast convention. You walk up to a fellow podcaster you do not particularly like. Casually ask him: “how is your podcasts mascot doing?” 1/2
The silent majority — In software development, the silent majority are the engineers who write the code, debug the programs, and solve the complex issues behind the scenes. They do not participate in controversial discussions about Visual Basic or Pascal — they just do their work in those languages without even knowing that there’s so much controversy surrounding their language of choice.
gnome-info-collect repository — gnome-info-collect is a simple client-server application used for collecting information on GNOME systems. The data will be used to improve GNOME, specifically by informing design decisions, influencing where resources are invested, and generally helping us to understand users better.
VisiData — VisiData is an interactive multitool for tabular data. It combines the clarity of a spreadsheet, the efficiency of the terminal, and the power of Python, into a lightweight utility which can handle millions of rows with ease.
googerteller — audible feedback on just how much your browsing feeds into google.
Espanso — Tired of typing the same sentences over and over? Discover the incredible power of a full-blown text expander.
We Should Know Better | Self-Hosted 78
Aug 26, 2022
We learned some really hard lessons this week, and reflect. Then Chris finds the perfect temperature sensor, and Alex finds a beautiful media discovery app.
Authentication for local network access — When your Plex Media Server is claimed or signed in to a Plex account, then all access to the server will require authentication by default. That means that you either need to be signed in with the server’s admin/owner account or with an account with which the server is shared.
Overseerr — Overseerr is a request management and media discovery tool
Got Your Back (GYB — Got Your Back (GYB) is a command line tool for backing up your Gmail messages to your local computer. It uses Gmail's API over HTTPS.
immich — High performance self-hosted photo and video backup solution.
New Podcast Apps — Grab a new podcast app, and send a boost into the show.
Linux Action News 255
Aug 25, 2022
Details on two new efforts in the Linux kernel, the Pi-like RISC-V board that just hit its funding goal, and a significant milestone for Asahi GPU driver development.
Experimental Kernel Patches — Patches sent out today clean-up the code taken on those architectures for bringing CPU cores down and allow for parallelism. With these patches and an 80-core Arm server, a Kexec reboot can go from taking around 15 seconds to now just around one second.
VisionFive 2 — Kickstarter — High-performance quad-core RISC-V single board computer (SBC) with an integrated 3D GPU, 2G/4G/8G LPDDR.
Linux Foundation TAB election: call for nominees — The 2022 election for members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) will be held during the Linux Plumbers Conference, September 12 to 14.
Webmin 2.0 Released — Webmin is a web-based system administration tool for Unix-like servers and services with over 1,000,000 installations worldwide.
Flatpak 1.14.0 Released — Flatpak 1.14 brings a variety of mostly small and lower-level improvements to this Linux app sandboxing tech
Firefox 104.0 — The Firefox UI itself will now be throttled for performance and battery usage when minimized or occluded, in the same way background tabs are.
Matthew Green on Twitter — He took a private photo intended for a doctor. In a situation where human being expect (but may not be entitled to) the most extreme privacy that our technical situations have to offer.
Instead his child’s genitals were transmitted to a team of people and he lost years of data.
Matthew Green on Twitter — This is the situation that every normal person fears will happen when “classifiers work as intended” on their private data.
It’s fine to argue this is an extreme and regrettable edge case we can design out of the system. To say it’s defensible? That’s dangerous.
Deirdre Connolly¹ on Twitter — "Fun" reveal in this story: per the (erroneous) referral to police, Google complied with a warrant for this user's /entire Google search history/, as well as location history, messages, and any documents they had associated with the account
The Amazing Critter Man 🇺🇸🐍 on Twitter — Consider this:
These photos were unique. There was no hash in any law enforcement database for these images. Google still found them. They look at your stuff, you have no secrets from Google. Don't give them anything, you have everything to hide.
Micro Frontend Architecture for Mobile Web Apps — Portals micro frontends allow multiple teams to build, test, and ship in parallel with hyper-focused embedded web experiences in your React Native, Android, and iOS mobile apps.
Appflow — Move faster with cloud native builds, live updates, app publishing, and the ability to automate all of it.
It’s time for Apple to fix texting. — These problems exist because Apple refuses to adopt modern texting standards when people with iPhones and Android phones text each other.
Follow Chris on Fountain — Fountain offers a rich clip discovery system. Follow the ones I publish with this link.
New Podcast Apps — Grab a Podcasting 2.0 compatible app, or try out Breez and keep your app!
5 Problems With NixOS | LINUX Unplugged 472
Aug 21, 2022
The five most common problems when trying out an immutable Linux distro like NixOS. Plus, why one Linux dev says just target WINE.
New Flathub Site in Beta - Big Things Coming — [...] next steps are to flesh out the donation infrastructure with the aim to allow app pages to have their own link to donation/purchase.
Win32 Is The Only Stable ABI on Linux — I think this whole situation shows why creating native games for Linux is challenging. It’s hard to blame developers for targeting Windows and relying on Wine + friends. It’s just much more stable and much less likely to break and stay broken.
The ABI status of ELF hash tables — If EAC were free software, of course, chances are there would already be a patch circulating to deal with the problem. As it is, only its owner can deal with this problem directly. Meanwhile, though, there is another workaround available: distributors can easily patch the glibc build to restore the DT_HASH section and make the problem go away for now.
Endless OS — The Endless Operating System is simple and easy for anyone to use. It is fully equipped with essential apps to learn, play, work and connect.
Revolution OS - 2001 — Synopsis: Revolution OS is a 2001 documentary film that traces the twenty-year history of GNU, Linux, open source, and the free software movement.
Robosats: A simple and private bitcoin exchange — RoboSats is a simple and private way to exchange bitcoin for national currencies. Robosats simplifies the peer-to-peer user experience and uses lightning hold invoices to minimize custody and trust requirements. The deterministically generated avatars help users stick to best privacy practices.
Learn RoboSats — A simple and private way to exchange bitcoin for national currencies.
Linux Action News 254
Aug 18, 2022
A Linux jailbreak that's a win for Right to Repair, our favorite things in Android 13, and the major features that just missed the Linux 6.0 window.
Android 13 is in AOSP — Today we’re pushing the Android 13 source to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and officially releasing the newest version of Android.
Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter — Unfortunate that upstream glibc discussion on DTHASH isn't coming out strongly in favor of prioritizing compatibility with pre-existing applications. Every such instance contributes to damaging the idea of desktop Linux as a viable target for third-party developers.
Carlos O’Donell on Twitter — How far should Linux ELF follow the generic ELF standard (gABI)? We recently let distributions drop DTHASH from glibc builds (mandatory under the gABI). This broke EPIC's Easy Anti-Cheat. We should ask the gABI for DTHASH to be optional.
Linux 6.0 debuts, missing some Rusty bits — Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for Linux 6.0, but doesn't mind what you call it.
Real-Time “PREEMPTRT” Not in 6.0-rc1 — Of the 50 patches, it's not too bad either as there are five patches for example that are rather trivial for just enabling real-time (RT) support in the Kconfig files for ARM / ARM64 / POWER / x86 / x86_64. There are also a handful of patches each specific to POWER and the i915 graphics driver code.
Debian turns 29! — Today is Debian's 29th anniversary. We recently wrote about some ideas to celebrate DebianDay, and several events have been planned in more than 14 locations.
mu on Twitter — Sick Codes has jailbroken a John Deere, and this is just the beginning. Turns out our entire food system is built on outdated, unpatched Linux and Windows CE hardware with LTE modems.
CoderRadioMascot on Twitter — I want to remind you that we have strict labor laws in Europe. I don't think denying a mascot it's vacation is legal. I consider founding the first podcast mascot union to make sure podcast mascot's rights are respected and not eradicated.
Archive.org: The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score — Now digital productivity monitoring is also spreading among white-collar jobs and roles that require graduate degrees. Many employees, whether working remotely or in person, are subject to trackers, scores, “idle” buttons, or just quiet, constantly accumulating records. Pauses can lead to penalties, from lost pay to lost jobs.
Stof's thoughts on tabs or Spaces — Essentially, tabs are idealistic and would win any argument not based on real world 'not caring' of humans, so in reality spaces win, but how many spaces is a better question! I wonder what the audience would say about 2 spaces?
RCE Vulnerability found in Electron — This occurs because of the way ElectronJS is designed and is a fundamental design issue within the framework. (ElectronJs = JS + Chromium so this intersection is where the flaw occurs as it’s not same as your normal chrome browser).
Telegram CEO complains about App Store 'obscure review process' — For example, our upcoming update – which is about to revolutionize how people express themselves in messaging – has been stuck in Apple’s ‘review’ for two weeks, without explanation or any feedback provided by Apple.
Mark Gurman on Twitter — Power On: Apple is set to expand ads to more parts of your iPhone, beyond News, Stocks and the App Store. Up next? Probably in Maps, Books, Podcasts and one day TV+.
Patrick Moorhead #SixFiveSummit on Twitter — What an Apple power move: Hobble the advertising efforts of your ecosystem and then start monetizing the real estate yourself. Redefines vertical integration. Truly brilliant.
Shelly Plus H&T - Shelly Cloud — Enhanced with a faster processor, Shelly Plus H&T monitors even the slightest change in the conditions and will help you prevent dryness or mold while maintaining comfortable conditions at the premises.
Shelly Sensors Guide: Humidity and Temperature — Connecting to WiFi and performing other computations causes the internal temperature of the H&T to rise. All electronic devices generate a little bit of heat, so this fact is unavoidable. The small size of the H&T intensifies this challenge. The part of the H&T that takes temperature measurements is close by and confined within the same case that houses the heat-generating components like the CPU. Shelly engineers devised a way to get around the problem by having the device sleep, then quickly take a measurement before the locally-produced heat can skew the measurement.
Boost the Show — Grab a Podcasting 2.0 compatible app, and send a Boost into the show.
Linux Action News 253
Aug 11, 2022
GitHub steps in it this week, Microsoft's Linux distribution now runs on bare metal, FFmpeg gets IPFS support, and the odd thing going on with the kernel.
Microsoft Continues Improving Its Internal Linux Distro With Another Update — Microsoft has kept up with issuing one or more CBL-Mariner updates per month. This summer they rolled out CBL-Mariner 2.0 with many changes over its former 1.0 state, which continues to be maintained too. CBL-Mariner relies upon RPM SPEC files and other assets from Fedora, Photon OS, Openmamba, and Linux From Scratch. This week marked the release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 July 2022 Update 2.
Projects impacted by Tornando cash ban — TIL the creator address of the Eth2.0 Deposit contract was funded with Tornado cash, created the contract and donated the rest to Wikileaks
Samuel JJ Gosling on Twitter — “@TornadoCash For those looking to host the frontend locally, I’ve uploaded the source code to @IPFS as I suspected this happening. Disclaimer: I’m a contributor to tornado but you should still verify the source code.
Linux 5.20 Likely To Be Called Linux 6.0 — With Linus Torvalds' modern versioning after 19~20 point releases has been when he bumps to the next major version number... Linux 4.0 succeeded Linux 3.19 while Linux 5.0 came after Linux 4.20.
An iouring-based user-space block driver [LWN.net] — The ublk driver starts by creating a special device called /dev/ublk-control. The user-space server (or servers, there can be more than one) starts by opening that device and setting up an iouring ring to communicate with it.
Egon on Twitter — I am on vacation at Mediterranean Sea trying to cope with the high humidity. I will now jump into the sea for a swim, maybe that can fix the issue.
Cloud CPU Benchmarking Report — The report reveals how VPS offerings from these cloud providers stand up in terms of price, performance, and value, or performance per dollar spent. It is available as an instant download with no registration required.
Google CEO to employees: Productivity and focus must improve — “There are real concerns that our productivity as a whole is not where it needs to be for the head count we have.” He asked employees to help “create a culture that is more mission-focused, more focused on our products, more customer focused. We should think about how we can minimize distractions and really raise the bar on both product excellence and productivity.”
Get your name in the hat for our JPL tour — Join the JB Crew at JPL! We only have 15 spots. Please enter your info, and our happy little python script might just pick your name from the virtual hat.
remembertoremember on Twitter — I haven’t really had major Linux woes in a long time and I use new hardware with 4k but always shop with Linux in mind.
New Features in Linux Mint 21 ‘Vanessa’ Cinnamon Edition — Linux Mint 21 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable.
Why we hate crypto more than you, plus a frank conversation about boosts in our shows, some big lessons learned from our new website project, and the things we'd never do again.
The disproportionate influence of early tech decisions — A common theme is that all of these were known to be very imperfect implementations even when they were originally added, but they were added anyway in the name of velocity, with an implicit assumption baked in that they’d be shored up and improved later when there were more resources and slack time to do so
London Meetup, Fri, Aug 5, 2022 — Alex from Self-Hosted will be in the UK in August and is proposing a meetup in London on August 5th at 6pm GMT (meetup.com is based off JBs Pacific Time). To confirm when I say 6pm GMT I mean 6pm as you look your watch - time savings and all that be damned - you know what I mean when I say 6pm GMT :)
The real story behind the "Massive GitHub Malware attack," significant updates for the Steam Deck, and the inside scoop on Lenovo's big Linux ambitions.
Massive GitHub Malware Attack? — It was revealed by Stephen Lacy in his tweet, he shared his findings of a large-scale campaign targeting random GitHub repositories with project clones containing credential stealing malware and remote shell execution on top of the original code.
Stephen Lacy on Twitter — “I am uncovering what seems to be a massive widespread malware attack on @github. - Currently over 35k repositories are infected - So far found in projects including: crypto, golang, python, js, bash, docker, k8s - It is added to npm scripts, docker images and install docs”
Checkmarx on Twitter — “A recent tweet uncovered a widespread malware attack on @github. This turned out to be a false alarm of sorts, as the infected repositories are simply forks and clones of the original ones - which were mostly deleted by Github by now. Stay safe!"
Steam Deck Client Update and SteamOS 3.3 — We have just shipped SteamOS 3.3 and an updated Steam Client to the Stable channel. This update includes all the changes and improvements that have been undergoing testing in the Beta and Preview channels.
Fedora Pi Support Gets Real — The work around Raspberry Pi 4 has been on going for a number of years, but we've never officially supported it due to lack of accelerated graphics and other key features. With Fedora 37, Raspberry Pi 4 is now officially supported, including accelerated graphics using the V3D GPU.
Asahi Linux Confirms M2 MBA on Twitter — Linus is using an M2 MacBook Air, running ARM64 Fedora. He does his own kernel builds, of course, with our Asahi kernel branch merged in, and he's been building and testing kernels on it.
ResearchKit — ResearchKit is an open source framework introduced by Apple that allows researchers and developers to create powerful apps for medical research. Easily create visual consent flows, real-time dynamic active tasks, and surveys using a variety of customizable modules that you can build upon and share with the community. And since ResearchKit works seamlessly with HealthKit, researchers can access even more relevant data for their studies — like daily step counts, calorie use, and heart rate.
ResearchKit and CareKit - Apple — a framework for developers to build apps that let you manage your own well-being on a daily basis.
What is GitOps? — GitOps is an operational framework that takes DevOps best practices used for application development such as version control, collaboration, compliance, and CI/CD, and applies them to infrastructure automation.
Clojure needs a Rails — Other programming languages have their definitive web framework. Ruby has Rails, Python has Django, Java has Play, Elixir has Pheonix.
Luminus - a Clojure web framework — Luminus is a Clojure micro-framework based on a set of lightweight libraries. It aims to provide a robust, scalable, and easy to use platform. With Luminus you can focus on developing your app the way you want without any distractions.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — First time using Migration Assistant. Going from an M1 to an Intel Mac. Let’s see how this goes lol
Skills of a Successful Software Engineer — Skills to grow from a solo coder into a productive member of a software development team, with seasoned advice on everything from refactoring to acing an interview.
Open Source Licenses to Avoid — Check if the open sources you use pose a threat to your business and find out what to do today to secure your company for years.
Tough Linux Love | LINUX Unplugged 469
Jul 31, 2022
Is the Linux desktop hard to love? A long-time user experience developer argues it is, and we respond to his criticisms.
JPL Lottery — Join the JB Crew at JPL! We only have 15 spots. Please enter your info, and our happy little python script might just pick your name from the virtual hat. - If you don't get picked, don't worry. We're having another meetup while we are in town!
Google’s in-house desktop Linux - Computerworld — The best-known Google operating system is Chrome OS, but inside Google itself, the company also uses its own Linux desktop distro — gLinux.
The Linux Desktop is Hard to Love — I want to love the “Linux Desktop”. I really do. But I’ve come to the realization that what I love is the idea of the Linux Desktop. But I just can’t stick with it. I always end up back on macOS. And I’m starting to understand why.
Distrobox — Use any linux distribution inside your terminal. Enable both backward and forward compatibility with software and freedom to use whatever distribution you’re more comfortable with.
Rclone — Rclone is a command-line program to manage files on cloud storage.
Tailscale mesh network using OPNsense — OPNsense is an open source router and firewall platform built using FreeBSD. Tailscale can be installed on an OPNsense platform, joining it to your WireGuard-based mesh network.
OPNsense repo by mimugmail — Here you'll find source of a couple of plugins but it's mainly just for tracking bugs or new feature requests.
Hard Drive Life Expectancy — Using the Drive Stats data we’ve collected since 2013, we have selected 10 drive models that have a sufficient number of both drives and drive days to produce Kaplan-Meier life expectancy curves we can use to easily visualize their life expectancy. Using these life expectancy curves we’ll compare drive models in cohorts of 4TB, 8TB, 12TB, and 14TB to see what we can find.
SHELLY FLOOD Detect any leakages immediately — I will show you how to use Home Assistant and Shelly Flood Sensor to detect any leakages at your home immediately. We will use some Home Assistant automations and MQTT protocol.
UNNotificationInterruptionLevel.timeSensitive — The system presents the notification immediately, lights up the screen, and can play a sound, but won’t break through system notification controls.
Shelly Plus H&T — With over 1 year of battery life, Shelly Plus H&T will make sure that you are always aware of the temperature and humidity levels in your home. Enhanced with a faster processor, Shelly Plus H&T monitors even the slightest change in the conditions and will help you prevent dryness or mold while maintaining comfortable conditions at the premises.
Shelly Plus Plug US — Shelly Plus Plug US will monitor and control lighting, heating, or any other connected electrical appliance at home.
Shelly Smoke — When there is smoke detected, Shelly Smoke activates a Voice and Light alarm, and sends a notification instantly.
Jellyfin CSS Customization — Custom CSS provides customization such as changing colors, changing layouts, and item size and behavior. Below is a list of various tweaks that can be applied.
What is the Lightning Network? — The Lightning Network was proposed in 2015 by two researchers, Thaddeus Dryja and Joseph Poon, in a paper titled “The Bitcoin Lightning Network.” Their writings were based on previous discussions of payment channels made by Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous creator of Bitcoin. Nakamoto described payment channels to fellow developer Mike Hearn, who published the conversations in 2013.
Umbrel — Run a personal server in your home, self-host open source apps like Nextcloud and Bitcoin node, break away from big tech, and take full control of your data. For free.
nix-bitcoin — nix-bitcoin is a collection of Nix packages and NixOS modules for easily installing full-featured Bitcoin nodes with an emphasis on security.
Red Hat hints at its future direction, why realtime might finally come to Linux after all these years, and our reaction to Google's ambitious new programing language.
Red Hat’s next steps, according to its new CEO — "We expect to see an 800% increase in edge applications built by 2024. We want those applications to be part of the open hybrid cloud. We think we have a unique position to connect end devices back to the assets that you have in your data centers and cloud that you use to run your company today."
Btrfs Native Encryption Being Worked On — My goal in sending out this RFC is to get feedback on whether these are going in a reasonable direction; while there are a couple of additional parts, they're fundamentally minor compared to this.
Tapping the Breaks | Coder Radio 476
Jul 27, 2022
We're looking at the big picture and, surprisingly, seeing a lot of possibilities.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — The little @system76 is pretty in pink next to its bigger bro! Review to come!
Matrix Meetup Space — A collection of rooms to organize our upcoming meetups.
Apple Silicon Is an Inconvenient Truth — Apple silicon is a profoundly inconvenient truth for many computer enthusiasts who do not like Macs, so they’ve gone into denial.
Netflix rolling out external subscription button for iOS — Any accounts or purchases made outside of this app will be managed by the developer “Netflix.” Your App Store account, stored payment methods, and related features, such as subscription management and refund requests, will not be available. Apple is not responsible for the privacy or security of transactions made with this developer.
Apple is joining other tech big-hitters that have frozen hiring across parts of their organization in response to a cooling global economy.
Google pausing hiring for two weeks — The company a week ago said it would slow hiring for the rest of the year - the sort of announcement that has come from all of its big-tech rivals facing a decelerating economy.
Hardwear – Microsoft Gear Shop — Inspired by Microsoft and Supervsn Creative Director Gavin Mathieu’s love for building a community that empowers innovation through authenticity.
JPL Lottery — Join the JB Crew at JPL! We only have 15 spots. Please enter your info, and our happy little python script might just pick your name from the virtual hat. - If you don't get picked, don't worry. We're having another meetup while we are in town!
Fedora Silverblue User Guide — Unlike other operating systems, Silverblue is immutable. This means that every installation is identical to every other installation of the same version. The operating system that is on disk is exactly the same from one machine to the next, and it never changes as it is used.
Fitting Everything Together — TLDR: Hermetic /usr/ is awesome; let's popularize image-based OSes with modernized security properties built around immutability, SecureBoot, TPM2, adaptability, auto-updating, factory reset, uniformity – built from traditional distribution packages, but deployed via images.
Steam Deck Guide — A guide covering Steam Deck including the applications and tools that will make you a better and more efficient with your Steam Deck device.
BoostCLI — Command line tool to send and review Podcasting 2.0 Value.
Podcasting 2.0 Podcast — The Podcast Index presents Podcasting 2.0 - Upgrading Podcasting.
Podcasting 2.0: “Bells Out” — Adam & Dave discuss the week's developments on podcastindex.org with Chris Fisher from Jupiter Broadcasting.
Impervious API — Impervious API is a programmatic layer that sits on top of the Bitcoin Lightning Network
Pick: Audio Sharing — Running Audio Sharing will automatically share the current audio playback in the form of an RTSP stream. This stream can then be played back by other devices, for example using VLC.
Bottles on Flathub — Run Windows software on Linux with Bottles! Our built-in dependency installation system grants automatic software compatibility access. Use the download manager to download the official components: the runner (Wine, Proton), DXVK, dependencies, etc.
A Good Problem to Have | Office Hours 8
Jul 22, 2022
We're learning on the job this week as the deadline for our new website is just around the corner. Plus, a dirty little secret that explains why most tech press coverage sucks.
Microsoft wants to add Stories to corporate portals — Stories is a part of Viva Engage, a new "AI-powered" component of Viva and app in Microsoft Teams that "provides employees with personal expression tools,"
Giorgio Sardo on Twitter — To clarify our intent, we removed the previous mention to open source pricing. We're committed to building an open Store and enabling dev choice and flexibility. If there are intellectual property concerns about an app, please report it.
Drop-in, drop-out chats with Video Rooms in Element — This has been a long time coming and, frankly, we’re really excited to be introducing Video Rooms to you. It’s a major step towards richer video (and soon voice) rooms!
SCALE 19x — SCaLE 19x is coming up July 28th - the 31st at the LAX Hilton. Promo code LAS50
M2 is here! July 2022 Release & Progress Report — Welcome to another long overdue progress report! As usual, things have been busier than expected… and we have some big news! We’ve just released a new Asahi Linux update with Mac Studio, Bluetooth, and M2 support!
Michael Dominick on Twitter — Living more or less purely in desktop #Linux, I’m finding a lot to love but do wish the community didn’t have to rely so heavily on electron and that there we’re some blessed gui app toolkit that’s was well supported.
Introduction to declarative UI — Frameworks from Win32 to web to Android and iOS typically use an imperative style of UI programming. This might be the style you’re most familiar with—where you manually construct a full-functioned UI entity, such as a UIView or equivalent, and later mutate it using methods and setters when the UI changes.
SwiftUI Overview — SwiftUI helps you build great-looking apps across all Apple platforms with the power of Swift
React Native — React Native combines the best parts of native development with React, a best-in-class JavaScript library for building user interfaces.
Introducing the Works with Home Assistant program — With Home Assistant, we integrate with over 1000 different APIs. The majority of these integrations are created and maintained by the Home Assistant community. Over the years a number of companies have stepped up to work with our community offering samples and engineering support. In a few cases, we saw companies pick up the maintenance of integrating their products in Home Assistant.
Database of Zigbee devices — List of Zigbee devices supported by ZHA, Tasmota, Zigbee2MQTT, deCONZ, Zigbee for Domoticz or ioBroker.zigbee
Vikunja — Vikunja is an Open-Source, self-hosted To-Do list application for all platforms. It is licensed under the AGPLv3.
London Meetup — August 5th at 6pm GMT (meetup.com is based off JBs Pacific Time). To confirm when I say 6pm GMT I mean 6pm as you look your watch - time savings and all that be damned - you know what I mean when I say 6pm GMT :)
West Coast Crew Matrix Chat Room — Are you on the US West coast? Join our Matrix room and get the latest on our west coast road tour coming up!
LinuxCard — Using the LinuxCard is easy, insert the SD card, connect USB-C to a computer, and open your favourite serial console app (minicom, PuTTY, etc), if you do not see the boot log, try the other virtual serial port (two exist). In case of a boot error, the SD card LED will blink in an infinite pattern, you can see the code for details on what various numbers of blinks mean.
Aeotec Water Leak Sensor Zigbee — lace the Aeotec SmartThings Water Leak Sensor under sinks, refrigerators, washing machines, and more to detect excess water or moisture and receive immediate alerts on your phone
FlightAware ADS-B Store — This kit provides you all the parts you need to create an ADS-B receiver. It will allow you to track aircraft up to 250NM away. Using FlightAware’s open-source software you can receive data from 1090MHz equipped aircraft and have it displayed in a web-based radar-like interface.
Valeronoi — A companion for Valetudo for generating WiFi signal strength maps. It visualizes them using a Voronoi diagram.
Shelly Leak Sensor — Connect Shelly Flood directly to your Wi-Fi network, without the need of any additional controller.
How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops — Today, the life of a gLinux team member looks very different. We have reduced the amount of engineering time and energy required for releases to one on-duty release engineer that rotates among team members. We no longer have a big push to upgrade our entire fleet. No more need for multi stage alpha, betas and GAs for new LTS releases while simultaneously chasing down older machines that still were running Ubuntu Precise or Lucid.
Red Hat names new CEO — In a move many will find surprising, Red Hat announced that Paul Cormier, the company's CEO and president since 2020, is stepping over to become chairman of the board. Matt Hicks, a Red Hat veteran and the company's head of products and technologies, will replace Cormier as president and CEO.
KDE Announces Powerful Slimbook 4 Linux Laptop — The laptops are powered by AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor with eight cores. They use USB-C for charging and power, like many other modern laptops. There are two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, an HDMI port, and a wired Ethernet jack.
System76 Launch Lite Teaser — Launch, but Lite. Launch Lite is the everyperson's keeb — comfortable, portable, and configurable.
Linux Build Engineer — Our team works on open-source GPU drivers for Linux. We are leading contributors to the Radeon Mesa graphics and multimedia drivers included in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and Debian. Our software is used in exciting products such as the Tesla Model S and the Steam Deck.
Matthew Garrett: Responsible stewardship of the UEFI secure boot ecosystem — So, to have Microsoft, the self-appointed steward of the UEFI Secure Boot ecosystem, turn round and say that a bunch of binaries that have been reviewed through processes developed in negotiation with Microsoft, implementing technologies designed to make management of revocation easier for Microsoft, and incorporating fixes for vulnerabilities discovered by the developers of those binaries who notified Microsoft of these issues despite having no obligation to do so, and which have then been signed by Microsoft are now considered by Microsoft to be insecure is, uh, kind of impolite?
X.Org Server Hit By New Local Privilege Escalation, Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities — CVE-2022-2319 and CVE-2022-2320 were made public this morning and both deal with the X.Org Server's Xkb keyboard extension not properly validating input that could lead to out-of-bounds memory writes. Hopefully though in 2022 you aren't relying on your xorg-server running as root.
Boycott Wayland. It breaks everything! — tl;dr: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet, and maybe never will. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better of not using Wayland at this point.
Systemd Creator Lands At Microsoft — The prominent open-source developer responsible for several prominent projects joined Microsoft and continuing his focus on systemd development.
Brunch With Brent: Tim Canham — Brent sits down with Tim Canham, Senior Software Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We explore topics including the hardware and software powering NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter; JPL's switch from Solaris to Linux; the open source projects, tools, and philosophy at JPL, ...and more.
Brunch With Brent: Tim Canham | Jupiter Extras 87
Jul 10, 2022
Brent sits down with Tim Canham, Senior Software Engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We explore topics including the hardware and software powering NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter; JPL's switch from Solaris to Linux; the open source projects, tools, and philosophy at JPL, ...and more.
The community is quick at work; we share major updates on our new website project, and chat with the "Offical" Podcasting 2.0 consultant to find out what he's developing next for podcast listeners.
Linux Foundation Uses DRM for New Podcast — Fun fact: the website for the Linux Foundation’s podcast The Untold Stories of Open Source uses a Spotify embedded player, which, um, uses a DRM solution, and makes a certificate call to a Widevine server on load.
Podcasting 2.0 ushers in a new era for podcasting — Podcasting is back. You might be wondering: Did it ever leave? Yes, it did. A true podcast is based on an open protocol (RSS) that any player can use to subscribe to any show.
Citadel for of Umbrel — Citadel allows you to run a Bitcoin Lightning node or a personal server on a Raspberry Pi. Citadel is proudly Free and open-source software (FOSS). Anyone is free to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way.
The new movement to leave GitHub, an Ubuntu bug biting 22.04 users, the hardware platform Fedora might start taking seriously, and a major desktop dev departs Red Hat.
Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come! — Today, we take a stronger stance. We are ending all our own uses of GitHub, and announcing a long-term plan to assist FOSS projects to migrate away from GitHub.
Roma, one of the first RISC-V laptops, may ship in September — As for the specs, the Roma laptop will, we're told, come with a quad-core RISC-V processor, an Arm security enclave core, a GPU/NPU accelerator for video and AI workloads, up to 16GB of LPDDR4 or LPDDR4X memory, and up to 256GB of storage.
New Ubuntu MATE Release — Improved compositor and video playback performance, zswap (lz4) by default & optimised image sizes
Systemd Creator Lands At Microsoft — The prominent open-source developer responsible for several prominent projects joined Microsoft and is continuing his focus on systemd development.
Mike's Linux Toolchain for 2022, and his first week with CoPilot. Then we chat about the series of choices that led us to go independent so many years ago.
Calagator — Calagator is an open-source community calendaring platform.
My Linux Toolbox '22 - dominickm.com — I got some request for what my work stack is like on Linux compared to what it was on macOS. Some of these applications I use on both systems but am listing anyway because they have some feature that facilitates that.
An update to Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye — So with this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image.
Build a Raspberry Pi Linux System the Hard Way — The instructions below will explain how to build a Linux environment for a Raspberry Pi 3B from scratch, focusing on extreme minimalism. I will build most components from source code and use BusyBox as the only user application on the target.
Commits are snapshots, not diffs - The GitHub Blog — I believe that Git becomes understandable if we peel back the curtain and look at how Git stores your repository data. After we investigate this model, we’ll explore how this new perspective helps us understand commands like git cherry-pick and git rebase.
Podverse — NEW: Embed a Podverse player on your website! 🥳
Nebula v1.6.0 — Experimental: nebula clients can be configured to act as relays for other nebula clients. Primarily useful when stubborn NATs make a direct tunnel impossible.
A Pi For Every Problem | Self-Hosted 74
Jul 01, 2022
Our guest this week has more Raspberry Pis than anyone we've ever met. We get insights into all the projects he used them for, what's worked great, and what's not worked at all.
Matrix Meetup Space — Let's plan future meetups, both physical and virtual in our Matrix space. ✅
Nanoleaf Elements - Wood Look Hexagons — Nanoleaf Elements are both beautiful wall art and customizable ambient lighting made to look beautiful on or off.
Nanoleaf - Home Assistant — The Nanoleaf integration allows you to control and monitor Nanoleaf Light Panels, Canvas, Shapes, Elements, and Lines.
BoostCLI — Command-line tool to send and review Podcasting 2.0 Value.
Podcasting 2.0 Apps — Grab a Podcasting 2.0 compatible app with tons of new features like: Boostagrams, Chapters, Hosts info, Sat Streaming, Search, Value, and clips.
Linux Action News 247
Jun 30, 2022
Fedora gets serious about its server editions, our thoughts on Valve's increased Steam Deck production, and the surprising results of booting Linux on the Apple M2 SoC.
Fedora Magazine: Accessibility in Fedora Workstation — I am very happy to announce that Red Hat has just hired Lukas Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer, to lead our effort in making sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation has excellent accessibility support!
Firefox 102 Available With Transform Streams, Geoclue On Linux — Firefox 102.0 isn't the most exciting end-user update but does have some developer additions like Transform Streams support and support for Geoclue with Firefox Linux builds for geolocation.
Thunderbird 102 Released With Big Improvements To This Leading Open-Source Mail Client — Thunderbird 102 introduces a new address book implementation, a new spaces toolbar, a new import/export wizard, a redesigned message header, and other "quality of life" updates. There are also some extras with Thunderbird 102 like adding Matrix chat support.
Matrix.org Security release: Synapse 1.61.1 — Today we're exceptionally releasing Synapse 1.61.1, which comes as a security release. Server administrators are encouraged to update as soon as possible.
Synapse Advisory — URL previews of unusual or maliciously-crafted pages can crash Synapse media repositories or Synapse monoliths.
Valve More Than Doubles Steam Deck Production, Q3 Reservations Starting Soon — Valve just tweeted out some great news for SteamDeck fans, saying it has more than doubled the number of Steam Decks being produced every week. The company also says it just sent out the last batch of Q2 reservation emails and is prepared to start kicking off Q3 reservations on June 30th 2022.
Vim 9.0 — The main goal of Vim9 script is to drastically improve performance. This is accomplished by compiling commands into instructions that can be efficiently executed. An increase in execution speed of 10 to 100 times can be expected.
Apple M2 Enablement For Linux Begins With Good Progress — Hector Martin on Monday began his Linux M2 bring-up effort, including with a livestream of this reverse engineering / debugging / kernel hacking effort. Hector confirmed NVMe, USB, and SMC functionality are working for the M2 on the first day of the effort.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — Runs #Linux @system76 tested and kitten approved! #HPDevOne. My boy has asked to learn #Minecraft modding. Why wouldn’t I teach him on @poposofficial
Senior Oops Engineer on Twitter — github copilot is incredible. it just sells code other people wrote, but because it's an "AI" it is apparently allowed to launder that code without it being a "derivative work". lol. lmao. what an amazing grift.
GitHub Copilot and open source laundering — GitHub’s Copilot is trained on software governed by these terms, and it fails to uphold them, and enables customers to accidentally fail to uphold these terms themselves.
Mosh: the mobile shell — Remote terminal application that allows roaming, supports intermittent connectivity, and provides intelligent local echo and line editing of user keystrokes.
Get a Podcasting 2.0 App — Grab a Podcasting 2.0 compatible app, and send a Boost into the show ✅
We're going back in time to witness the early days of a critical tool to build Linux, then jump forward 15 years and join our buddy Brent on his journey to learn that very tooling.
Brunch with Brent: Quentin Stafford-Fraser — Brent sits down with Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser, computer scientist, serial-entrepreneur, inventor (perhaps) of the webcam, Augmented Reality Ph.D. who ran the very first web server at the University of Cambridge, among much more.
Fountain 0.4.0 — Listen to Earn, Promotions & Paid Likes
gpodder.net — gpodder.net is a libre web service that allows you to manage your podcast subscriptions and discover new content. If you use multiple devices, you can synchronize subscriptions and your listening progress.
Akamai Warns Of “Panchan” Linux Botnet — The botnet introduces a unique (and possibly novel) approach to lateral movement by harvesting of SSH keys. Instead of just using brute force or dictionary attacks on randomized IP addresses like most botnets do, the malware also reads the idrsa and knownhosts files to harvest existing credentials and use them to move laterally across the network.
Canonical Continues Working On Ubuntu’s Firefox Snap Performance — On the Ubuntu blog is a new post by Canonical's Oliver Smith about their latest efforts to improve the Firefox Snap performance and other outstanding issues with this sandboxed version of the Mozilla web browser.
Talisman: Debut of X — I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W.
X Window System Turns 38 Years Old — It was on 19 June 1984 that Bob Scheifler announced the initial X window system release "X1" at MIT.
OK if not Access, then what? — As a regular listener - at least in the last almost year now - I've heard fun comments around MS Access...but more seriously, what would be today's (ideally open source, or at least better) equivalent?
Managed PostgreSQL and MongoDB are Here — With the addition of PostgreSQL and MongoDB, we now offer SQL and NoSQL database options to scale based on your architecture design.
Inflation Chart — Since the COVID19 pandemic started, the printing has gone to a whole different level though. The M1 money supply has almost doubled since. What that means for inflation is heavily argued about by different sides.
Tesla's Musk feels 'super bad' about economy — Tesla CEO Elon Musk has a "super bad feeling" about the economy and needs to cut about 10% of salaried staff at the electric carmaker, he said in emails seen by Reuters.
Despite their more limited resources, he adds, small businesses can be more flexible and responsive to shifts in markets and in demand than their larger counterparts.
Brunch with Brent: Quentin Stafford-Fraser - Jupiter Extras — Brent sits down with Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser, computer scientist, serial-entrepreneur, inventor (perhaps) of the webcam, Augmented Reality Ph.D. who ran the very first web server at the University of Cambridge, among much more. We explore topics including computer science as an art-form, the origins of the Raspberry Pi and T9 predictive text, philosophies around innovation and invention, challenging the patent system, and more.
DNS Toys — A DNS server that takes creative liberties with the DNS protocol to offer handy utilities and services that are easily accessible via the command line.
Mars helicopter needs patch to work around failed sensor — The patch inserts a small code snippet into the software running on Ingenuity's flight computer, intercepting incoming garbage packets from the inclinometer and injecting replacement packets constructed from IMU data.
Umbrel 0.5 — Umbrel 0.5 brings the very first redesign of Umbrel’s UI since we launched. We went back to the drawing board to design a completely new homepage, a refreshed UI with beautifully crafted glass-like elements, a new dock-based layout, and the option to pick and choose from one of the 16 gorgeous, hand-curated wallpapers. And, of course, there’s a dark mode.
Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser's Website — I’m a computer scientist, entrepreneur, part-time academic and full-time gadget enthusiast based in Cambridge, England.
Jellyfin Release v10.8.0 — After a rather long development cycle the Jellyfin team is proud to announce stable version 10.8! This release post will mostly cover the highlights with little prose, as there is so much to cover!
nix-bitcoin — A collection of Nix packages and NixOS modules for easily installing full-featured Bitcoin nodes with an emphasis on security.
Brunch with Brent: Quentin Stafford-Fraser | Jupiter Extras 86
Jun 19, 2022
Brent sits down with Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser, computer scientist, serial-entrepreneur, inventor (perhaps) of the webcam, Augmented Reality Ph.D. who ran the very first web server at the University of Cambridge, among much more. We explore topics including computer science as an art-form, the origins of the Raspberry Pi and T9 predictive text, philosophies around innovation and invention, challenging the patent system, and more.
A special episode today as TechnoTim joins Alex to discuss everything Kubernetes and HomeLab. The #100DaysOfHomeLab initiative from Tim is just getting started, find out what it’s all about in today's episode.
The HomeLab Challenge Video — This challenge is meant to accelerate your knowledge in servers, networking, infrastructure, automation, storage, containerization, orchestration, virtualization, Windows, Linux, and more!
Flux — Flux is a set of continuous and progressive delivery solutions for Kubernetes that are open and extensible.
k8s-at-home — Awesome projects involving running Kubernetes at home.
We get the details behind Thunderbird acquiring K-9 Mail, share the best new features of Plasma 5.25, check-in on Ubuntu's RISC-V development status, and discuss Photoshop coming to Linux via the web.
Adobe Plans To Make Photoshop on the Web Free To Everyone — The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes the service as “freemium” and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop’s core functions.
Make it so, Dev One! | Coder Radio 470
Jun 15, 2022
You can't judge a book by its cover, and this week we surprised each other when we dug into the HP Dev One. Plus some insights on remote virtual dev desktops and the gotcha's from WWDC we missed.
Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup — No venue confirmed atm, this event is currently 100% provisional. Location most likely in London area - probably central and probably outdoors for obvious reasons. If you're interested in attending please indicate by RSVPing yes to this event.
Managed PostgreSQL and MongoDB are Here | Linode — We’ve added PostgreSQL and MongoDB to our managed database service. Launched in May with support for MySQL, Linode Managed Databases gives developers access to popular databases in a managed service that shifts some of the responsibility for maintenance and monitoring to us.
HP Dev One — From preinstalled Linux Pop!OS to a tuned Linux keyboard with a Super key, HP Dev One is designed with powerful features and tools to help you code your way.
Introducing Zed — A lightning-fast, collaborative code editor written in Rust.
Sunsetting Atom — Today, we’re announcing that we are sunsetting Atom and will archive all projects under the organization on December 15, 2022.
Here's why Stage Manager only works on M1 iPads — While iPadOS 16 is compatible with tablets ranging from the A9-powered fifth-gen iPad, not all features will roll out to non-M1-powered machines — the most notable being Stage Manager.
Apple will allow Linux VMs to run Intel apps with Rosetta in macOS Ventura — Some developers, including Hector Martin of the Asahi Linux project and Twitter user @neverreleased, have already found that these steps can also enable Rosetta on non-Apple ARM CPUs as long as they're modern enough to support at least version 8.2 of the Arm instruction set.
HP Dev One — From preinstalled Linux Pop!_OS to a tuned Linux keyboard with a Super key, HP Dev One is designed with powerful features and tools to help you code your way.
Podverse — Podcasting 2.0 certified player for Android, F-Droid, iOS, and the web. Share created clips, highlights, playlists, and chapters, sync your queue and more!
Outdoor networking adventures, new decentralized tools we're building, and a great chat with one of the co-founders of Podverse - an impressive open-source Podcasting 2.0 app.
Plus, a surprise live unboxing of HP's Dev One Linux laptop.
VDO.Ninja Trampoline — This form is just a URL simplification trampoline, i.e., it takes a few intuitive URL parameters and redirects to the underlying complex technical URL of VDO.Ninja. It allows you to control VDO.Ninja parameters at a central place while being able to use clean, intuitive and stable URLs for both the presenters and OBS Studio.
Vingester — Vingester (Video ingester, /ˈvɪnˈdʒɛster/) is a small, Open Source licensed, Electron-based, desktop application for use under Windows, macOS or Linux to run multiple Chromium-based Web browser instances and ingesting their rendered Web Contents as screen/window-captured or NDI-multicasted or FFmpeg-based video streams for further use in local or remote video mixing applications or for local recording.
Raspberry_ninja — Turn your Raspberry Pi or Nvidia Jetson into a ninja-cam with hardware-acceleration enabled! This lets you publish live streaming video and audio directly to your web browser or OBS instance using VDO.Ninja. Achieve very low streaming latency over the Internet or a LAN; all for free.
PeerTube 4.2 — Editing videos from the web interface, detailed viewers stats for videos, ability to adjust latency during a live broadcast and much more... Let's look around and see what it brings us!
Alby - Bitcoin Lightning Wallet — The Bitcoin Lightning wallet for direct payments across the globe, Bitcoin Lightning applications and passwordless logins.
Alby is a wallet to send and receive Bitcoin payments with your normal browser on the Bitcoin Lightning Network with ease.
HP Dev One — From preinstalled Linux Pop!_OS to a tuned Linux keyboard with a Super key, HP Dev One is designed with powerful features and tools to help you code your way.
HP Dev One Unboxing - JupiterTube — I clipped the video of the HP Dev One unboxing from Office Hours, just in case you'd like to take a peek!
Umbrel 0.5 — This is Umbrel 0.5. A beautiful personal server OS that makes self-hosting accessible for everyone. And our biggest update to Umbrel yet.
Umbrel ☂️ on Twitter — A whole new look. Realtime app updates. App permissions, dependencies, and authentication. Official Bitcoin & Lightning node apps. Oh, and dark mode.
SUSE Enterprise is already switching to the new NVIDIA open kernel driver, a Matrix-powered Walkie-Talkie, and the details on Apple's Rosetta for Linux.
Element Call Beta 2 includes lots of exciting new updates! — In a walkie-talkie call, videos are disabled, and everyone is muted by default. To speak, press the ‘push-to-talk’ (PTT) button, either by pressing it on the screen or by holding the spacebar. The catch is that, just like a walkie-talkie or two-way radio, only one person can speak at a time. When someone else is speaking, your PTT button will be disabled, and if you try to push it you’ll hear a warning beep.
Fedora and Ubuntu EOL announcements — If you are running Fedora 34, the time has come to move on; that distribution will reach the end of its support life on June 7. Users of Ubuntu 21.10 have a little longer, but that release loses support on July 14 and users should update to 22.04.
HP Dev One Now Shipping — Unplug and work from any location. At 3.24 lbs, with up to 12 hours of battery life and an ultra-bright display, HP Dev One was made to perform on the go.
Hector Martin on Twitter — “Huh, so Rosetta is now a Linux app. Without Linux kernel patches this can’t use any special M1 features, so if this runs significantly better than FOSS offerings that should help dispel the myth that “the M1 has magic make-Rosetta-fast features”.
Longhorn on Twitter — Well. Rosetta 2 needs a quite recent CPU (post v8.2) to work because of the instructions used. Does it work on non-Apple arm64 CPUs? 🤔 Yes. (allows to settle the argument once and for all that this needs anything Apple specific outside of TSO support*. Answer is a no.)
The Problem with WWDC | Coder Radio 469
Jun 08, 2022
We jump aboard Hair Force One and are a bit let down. We get into why. Plus Mike's first impressions of the HP Dev One laptop.
iOS 16: Features and everything new — Apple has officially unveiled iOS 16 with new features focused on customization, communication, and more. Right off the bat, the company says that iOS 16 brings an all-new lock screen with a slew of new customization options. Head below for the details.
Apple announces new redesigned MacBook Air at WWDC — Apple today announced its next-generation MacBook Air, starting at $1199, featuring the just-announced M2 chip inside. The new MacBook Air has a redesigned enclosure and comes in striking new case colors.
Apple announces new flagship M2 processor — Much like the original M1 chip, the new M2 uses Apple’s custom Arm silicon, and it’s built on a 5nm process complete with 20 billion transistors — 25 percent more than the original M1. All of these transistors should boost performance, and Apple is promising a 18 percent faster CPU, and 35 percent faster GPU inside the M2 compared to the original M1.
MetalFX is Apple's take on upscaling tech for games — Metal 3 will include support for MetalFX Upscaling. Your Mac will render smaller frames that are less compute-intensive. MetalFX will upscale the visuals and apply temporal anti-aliasing.
macOS Ventura Drops Support for Older Macs, Works With 2017 and Later Machines — The new macOS Ventura software that was introduced today is compatible with many of the Macs that were able to run macOS Monterey, but it does drop support for some Mac models from 2014 through 2016, according to Apple's webpage for the update.
Apple Seeds First Beta of macOS 13 Ventura to Developers — After today's keynote event that saw the unveiling of macOS 13 Ventura, the newest version of the Mac operating system, Apple has seeded the first beta of the new software to developers for testing purposes.
Apple Seeds First Betas of iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 to Developers — Following the conclusion of today's keynote event that saw the unveiling of new versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS, Apple has made the first betas of iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 available to developers for testing purposes.
NixOS 22.05 released — NixOS is already known as the most up to date distribution and is the distribution with the most packages. This release saw 9345 new packages and 10666 updated packages. Removal of unmaintained packages is also important to keep the package set working and secure. This release removed 5874 packages that were available in 21.11.
NixOS On Linode.md — This tutorial is written for people who want to run NixOS on a Linode instance. The installation is pretty straightforward, but it involves some bootstrapping using Linode's tools.
Premium Special To Celebrate Phoronix’s 18th Birthday — This Sunday, 5 June, marks the 18th birthday for Phoronix.com since I started this website to focus on Linux hardware reviews and performance testing. To mark the occasion, there will be a Phoronix Premium special if you wish to go ad-free on the site and enjoy multi-page articles on a single page while helping to hopefully ensure a successful 19th year for Phoronix.
Pinkt — Pinkt is an unofficial Pinboard Android client. Pinboard is a fast, no-nonsense bookmarking site for people who value privacy and speed.
Dogsheep — Dogsheep is a collection of tools for personal analytics using SQLite and Datasette.
Gitea Webhook Change — In PR #17482 the Gitea project introduced a breaking change for security reasons. They introduced a new webhook.ALLOWEDHOSTLIST value which needed to be configured in order for webhooks to work.
Welcoming Rocket.Chat to Matrix — We just wanted to take a moment to welcome Rocket.Chat to Matrix, given the recent announcement that they are switching to using Matrix for standards-based interoperable federation!
OliveTin — OliveTin gives safe and simple access to predefined shell commands from a web interface.
Did Google just change it’s mind about ending the G Suite legacy free edition? — What if I use G Suite legacy free edition for personal use? If you’re using the G Suite legacy free edition for non-commercial purposes, you can opt out of the transition to Google Workspace by clicking here (requires a super administrator account) or going to the Google Admin console.
Our thoughts on NixOS' new GUI installer, winning hearts and minds one firmware update at a time, the performance bug that hit Linux 5.18, and preparation begins for the open-source NVIDIA driver.
Nouveau Begins Shifting Around Code For Use By New Driver — "This just moves the codegen build into a separate library, this is just prep work for a future where another drivers wants to reuse this code. this isn't perfect for plugging into a vulkan driver, but doing that requires more in depth surgery."
Welcoming Rocket.Chat to Matrix! — We just wanted to take a moment to welcome Rocket.Chat to Matrix, given the recent announcement that they are switching to using Matrix for standards-based interoperable federation!
AlmaLinux 9.0 Released — AlmaLinux OS 9.0 is based on upstream kernel version 5.14 and contains enhancements around cloud and container development and improvements to the web console.
NixOS 22.05 Released With New Graphical Installer — NixOS 22.05 builds atop the Nix 2.8 package manager, which brings better performance, general improvements, the experimental nix fmt command that applies a formatter defined by the flake output to the Nix expressions in a flake, and other additions.
NixOS GUI Configuration Editor — A simple NixOS configuration editor application built with libadwaita, GTK4, and Relm4. The goal of this project is to provide a simple graphical tool for modifying and managing desktop NixOS configurations.
London Meetup PROVISIONAL, Sat, Aug 6, 2022 — Alex from Self-Hosted will be in the UK in August and is proposing a meetup in London on August 6th at 2pm GMT (meetup.com is based off JBs Pacific Time).
Try Infrastructure as Code eBook — This 200+ page ebook is meant to be a step-by-step guide for you to learn how to use some of the most in-demand IaC tools that exist
Build 2022: Project Volterra — “Because we expect to see NPUs being built into most, if not all future computing devices, we’re going to make it easy for developers to leverage these new capabilities, by baking support for NPUs into the end-to-end Windows platform,”
Microsoft Dev Box is a cloud-powered developer workstation — Microsoft is pitching this at a variety of developers who might work on projects that have software conflicts and dependencies that make maintaining a developer workstation more of a headache.
Microsoft finds severe bugs in Android apps from large mobile providers — The researchers found these vulnerabilities (tracked as CVE-2021-42598, CVE-2021-42599, CVE-2021-42600, and CVE-2021-42601) in a mobile framework owned by mce Systems exposing users to command injection and privilege escalation attacks.
'realityOS' Trademark Filing Hints at Possible WWDC Announcement — The two separate trademark filings (1, 2) were resurfaced by Parker Ortolani on Twitter, who notes that while both were initially submitted on December 8, 2021, more interestingly, they're both listed with foreign filing date deadlines of June 8, 2022, just two days after Apple's main WWDC keynote. Another filing on the USPTO website lists a foreign filing date deadline of June 9, 2022.
Newest Version of Systemd Includes Experimental Feature for A/B-Style Updating — "Let's popularize image-based OSes," writes Lennart Poettering, "with modernized security properties built around immutability, SecureBoot, TPM2, adaptability, auto-updating, factory reset, uniformity — built from traditional distribution packages, but deployed via images."
Fitting Everything Together — In this blog story I hope to provide that from my personal perspective, i.e. explain how I personally would build an OS and where I personally think OS development with Linux should go.
systemd-sysupdate — This tool implements file, directory, or partition based update schemes, supporting multiple parallel installed versions of specific resources in an A/B (or even: A/B/C, A/B/C/D/, …) style. A/B updating means that when one version of a resource is currently being used, the next version can be downloaded, unpacked, and prepared in an entirely separate location, independently of the first, and — once complete — be activated, swapping the roles so that it becomes the used one and the previously used one becomes the one that is replaced by the next update, and so on.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon — The benefits to Intel are clear. The company can do price differentiation among its customers in an attempt to extract the maximum revenue from each while simultaneously reducing the number of different hardware products it must carry in its catalog. The revenue stream from a processor will not necessarily stop once the CPU is purchased, and might continue indefinitely. The benefit for customers is not quite so clear. In theory, customers with minimal needs can avoid paying for expensive features they don't use and can "upgrade" their hardware without downtime if their needs change.
platform/x86: Add Intel Software Defined Silicon driver — Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) is a post manufacturing mechanism for activating additional silicon features. Features are enabled through a license activation process. The SDSi driver provides a per socket, sysfs attribute interface for applications to perform 3 main provisioning functions.
London Meetup PROVISIONAL, Sat, Aug 6, 2022 — No venue confirmed atm, this event is currently 100% provisional. Location most likely in London area - probably central and probably outdoors for obvious reasons. If you're interested in attending please indicate by RSVPing yes to this event.
Spotify error puts ads for booze on podcasts — Spotify added advertising banners to many podcasts on Saturday for Wild Turkey, a bourbon whiskey. The ad, which on some platforms included an “order now” button for the liqour, was even placed on a podcast for recovering alcoholics.
YouTube Reach Whitepaper - Podtrac — In this analysis, we’ll provide a complete audience view across all sources of podcast traffic for a sample of weekly Audio + Video Podcasts that post audio via RSS and video to YouTube.
Conan O’Brien’s Podcast Company Sells to SiriusXM in Deal Valued Around $150 Million — The US’s largest podcast publisher SiriusXM has acquired podcast producer Team Coco, and its podcast Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend. Conan has entered into a five year talent agreement with the company. The Wall Street Journal reports the deal is valued at $150m.
OpenSats — Support contributors to Bitcoin and other free and open source projects.
The controversial Intel code now shipping in Linux, why F-Droid is getting more attractive for developers, and the rumor that could change the industry.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon — Its purpose is to disable access to specific processor capabilities in the absence of a certificate from Intel saying otherwise.
Ubuntu 22.10 Makes PipeWire Default for Audio — “That’s right, as of today the Kinetic ISO (pending, not yet current since the changes were just made) has been updated to run only PipeWire and not PulseAudio […] you can look forward to this for Kinetic”
Danielle DiMartino Booth on Twitter — "Amazon first announced it was going to be laying off 100,000 workers, and we really did get validation of the slowdown with Target, Walmart, Kohl’s saying we’re sitting on way too much inventory, demand is not there."
Richard Field on Twitter — So to retain its mythical credibility, will Fed follow through on its forward guidance and raise rates thereby making the recession more severe or will the Fed say, wait, all the contemporaneous data we have suggests we are in a recession, so time to halt rate increases?
The Labor Market Just Cratered — the Fed will be hard-pressed to drive inflation down towards its 2% target without raising the unemployment rate meaningfully, which in turn will require a significant downshift in labor demand.
The Cantillon Effect: Why Wall Street Gets a Bailout and You Don't — The reason is because money has to travel through institutions, and right now, the institutions for the powerful function well, and those for the rest of us are rickety and broken. So money gets to the rich first. Eventually, some money will get to the rest of us, but in the interim period before that money fully circulates, the wealthy can use their access to money to buy up physical or financial assets.
London Meetup PROVISIONAL, Sat, Aug 6, 2022 — Alex from Self-Hosted will be in the UK in August and is proposing a meetup in London on August 6th at 2pm GMT (meetup.com is based off JBs Pacific Time).
What’s New In Python 3.11 — This article explains the new features in Python 3.11, compared to 3.10.
HP Dev One — Get ready for a laptop that’s customized for the way you code. Featuring preinstalled Pop!_OS Linux and a tuned Linux keyboard with a Super key, HP Dev One was designed with developers in mind.
Adaptive Cards — Adaptive Cards are platform-agnostic snippets of UI, authored in JSON, that apps and services can openly exchange.
London Meetup — Alex from Self-Hosted will be in the UK in August and is proposing a meetup in London on August 6th at 2pm GMT (meetup.com is based off JBs Pacific Time).
HP Dev One — Get ready for a laptop that’s customized for the way you code. Featuring preinstalled Pop!OS Linux and a tuned Linux keyboard with a Super key, HP Dev One was designed with developers in mind.
Bringing bcachefs to the mainline — Bcachefs is a longstanding out-of-tree filesystem that grew out of the bcache caching layer that has been in the kernel for nearly ten years. Based on a session led by Kent Overstreet at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), though, it would seem that bcachefs is likely to be heading upstream soon. He intends to start the process toward mainline inclusion over the next six months or so.
Tow-Boot — Tow-Boot a user-friendly, opinionated distribution of U-Boot, where there is as few differences in features possible between boards, and a "familiar" user interface for an early boot process tool.
OpenSats — Support contributors to Bitcoin and other free and open source projects.
Alex has found the perfect tool to bring your recipe management into the future. Plus, a convenient trick for scripts with passwords, dying hard drives, and the killer new Proxmox feature.
Tandoor Recipe — The recipe manager that allows you to manage your ever growing collection of digital recipes.
🥧Tandoor Recipe v1.4 released — Hi everyone, more than 6 month have passed since I last brought to you the latest and greatest changes we have made to the Tandoor Recipemanager. Since then lots of awesome things happened.
bcachefs — Bcachefs is an advanced new filesystem for Linux, with an emphasis on reliability and robustness and the complete set of features one would expect from a modern filesystem.
Storing Ansible Vault password in Bitwarden — Ansible vault exists to enable storing secrets safely in a public repository, encrypted using a password. But where does that password live.
Why Google's new open-source security effort might fall a bit short, the Arch snag this week, a big win for Right to Repair, and why you might soon have a new favorite filesystem.
New from Google Cloud: Assured Open Source Software service — Assured OSS enables enterprise and public sector users of open source software to easily incorporate the same OSS packages that Google uses into their own developer workflows.
OSS-Fuzz — continuous fuzzing for open source software.
Arch Linux Temporarily Steps Back From WirePlumber After Snafu — With the recent attempt to switch to WirePlumber, that modern session manager was unconditionally taking over audio responsibilities even if the user had configured their system to use PulseAudio or ALSA directly.
Arch Linux News — Undone replacement of pipewire-media-session with wireplumber.
Bringing bcachefs to the mainline — Bcachefs is a longstanding out-of-tree filesystem that grew out of the bcache caching layer that has been in the kernel for nearly ten years. Based on a session led by Kent Overstreet at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), though, it would seem that bcachefs is likely to be heading upstream soon. He intends to start the process toward mainline inclusion over the next six months or so.
Luxury Emotional Manipulation | Coder Radio 466
May 18, 2022
Why Mike feels like Heroku is in a failed state, what drove us crazy about Google I/O this year, how Chris botched something super important, and some serious Python love sprinkled throughout.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — The first step pf #opencore / #foss Alice. See
@CoderRadioShow
I’m working on it! #automation. For nerds I’m trying to split the layers - the ones that make sense as #GPL and of course the rest. This harder than I had thought
Why Did Heroku Fail? — Fifteen years later, developers are still trying to recreate the developer experience of Heroku.
Apple's Director of Machine Learning Resigns Due to Return to Office Work — Goodfellow reportedly broke the news to staff in an email, saying his resignation is in part due to Apple's plan to return to in-person work, which required employees to work from the office at least one day per week by April 11, at least two days per week by May 2, and at least three days per week by May 23. "I believe strongly that more flexibility would have been the best policy for my team," Goodfellow said in the email.
FIG JAM on Twitter — So...all these tech companies that have created hardware and software to connect people and enable them to collaborate and create from all over the world doesn't work for the companies themselves?
What happened to eating your own dog food?
Python Distilled 1, Beazley, David M, eBook — The richness of modern Python challenges developers at all levels. How can programmers who are new to Python know where to begin without being overwhelmed? How can experienced Python developers know they're coding in a manner that is clear and effective? How does one make the jump from learning about individual features to thinking in Python at a deeper level? Dave Beazley's new Python Distilled addresses these and many other real-world issues.
Python Workout — The only way to master a skill is to practice. In Python Workout, author Reuven M. Lerner guides you through 50 carefully selected exercises that invite you to flex your programming muscles.
What is Tauri? — Tauri is a toolkit that helps developers make applications for the major desktop platforms - using virtually any frontend framework in existence. The core is built with Rust, and the CLI leverages Node.js making Tauri a genuinely polyglot approach to creating and maintaining great apps.
NVIDIA's New View | LINUX Unplugged 458
May 15, 2022
NVIDIA is open-sourcing their GPU drivers, but there are a few things you need to know. Plus, we get some exclusive insights into Tailscale from one of its co-founders.
Special Guests: Avery Pennarun and Christian F.K. Schaller.
Why the open source driver release from NVIDIA is so important for Linux? — Today NVIDIA announced that they are releasing an open source kernel driver for their GPUs, so I want to share with you some background information and how I think this will impact Linux graphics and compute going forward.
By which they mean, they moved most of it to firmware and made the open source driver call into it. There are almost 900 functions implemented in the 34MB firmware, give or take, from what I can see.
Broadcom vibes...
Longhorn on Twitter — Note that the 30MB+ firmware supports multiple GPU generations, and that’s an important factor.
(If you see the elf sections, there’s ones for Turing, Ampere DC, Ampere customer and Gnext)
Linux Action News 240 — NVIDIA has announced its plans for an open-source GPU driver. Christian Schaller, the Director for Desktop, Graphics, Infotainment and more at Red Hat, gives us the inside scoop on this historic announcement.
Tailscale raises $100M… to fix the Internet — This is not our first rodeo. We don’t know where the economy or the market are going. We don’t want to be pressured into juicing growth numbers beyond where they belong. We don’t want to put revenue ahead of quality, because our stats say quality is where all our growth comes from.
sshuttle — where transparent proxy meets VPN meets ssh
Access a Pi-hole or Raspberry Pi from anywhere — One common use of a Raspberry Pi is to run a Pi-hole, a DNS-based ad blocking services. A typical setup is to have a Raspberry Pi in your house running Pi-hole, acting as the DNS server for your local Wi-Fi network.
Fountain 0.3.16 — You can now add another Fountain user as a split for your show or any episode. This is a really valuable feature if you have co-hosts, guests or a larger team working on your podcast that you want to distribute your income to.
Fountain on Twitter — Give
@LynAldenContact
a warm welcome to Podcasting 2.0! When you listen to Lyn's interview with
@kerooke
, a share of the sats you stream or Boost go to her Fountain wallet.
nout on Twitter — So I sent 10k sats from my
@MuunWallet
to
@fountain_app
(1 sat fee), I started listening to a podcast by
@kerooke
chatting with
@LynAldenContact
and I sent them a
@PodcastindexOrg
2.0 boost, which got split evenly between Kevin and Lyn, while couple sats went to the tools!
Podcast Index Case Study — Established in September of 2020, The Podcast Index is an alternative podcast directory that offers open, free access to creators, listeners, and podcast app developers. The inspiration of the brand is to be an alternative podcast directory to Apple, which is centralized and is monopolizing podcast distribution.
An Introduction to Podcasting 2.0 — Podcasting 2.0 is an umbrella term that covers a collection of initiatives to advance podcasting technology and to decentralize podcasting, taking control of the medium out of the hands of large technology companies.
Podcasting 2.0 Podcast — The Podcast Index presents Podcasting 2.0 - Upgrading Podcasting
Mastering the Lightning Network (LN) — The book describes the Lightning Network (LN), a Peer-to-Peer protocol running on top of Bitcoin and other blockchains, which provides near-instant, secure, micro-payments.
Non-Technical: Lightning Network Explained - YouTube — For the non-technical, what is the Lightning Network? How does it function? In this video Andreas walks through what's happening on the Lightning Network, all in a non-technical fashion. From funding transactions, to channels, routing, fees, security and trustlessness, this clip will give you a good overview of what's happening!
NVIDIA has announced its plans for an open-source GPU driver. Christian Schaller, the Director for Desktop, Graphics, Infotainment and more at Red Hat, gives us the inside scoop on this historic announcement.
NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules — This release is a significant step toward improving the experience of using NVIDIA GPUs in Linux, for tighter integration with the OS and for developers to debug, integrate, and contribute back.
Mike's Magic Mom | Coder Radio 465
May 11, 2022
After solving a moral dilemma in our particular kind of way, Mike dishes on some ambitious plans that might kick off a new era of development for him.
Leaf Node Monitoring - Leaf Node — Open Source (GPLv3) Network Monitoring for Windows, Linux & Android. Written in C++ & Qt 5. Perfect to run on your desktop and monitor your servers. Simple setup, auto-detects running services, runs checks concurrently, open port scanning and alerting. Hosts with failed checks automatically rise to the top, everything that’s okay stays nice and green.
Python.NET — Python.NET provides a powerful application scripting tool for .NET developers. Using this package you can script .NET applications or build entire applications in Python, using .NET services and components written in any language that targets the CLR (C#, VB.NET, F#, C++/CLI).
Alice — The AI Bot Designed to make your business more efficient.
Joshua Lee / Jb Challenges · GitLab — This repository is setup for the Jupiter Broadcasting Community, by a community member. These challenges are for the Jupiter Broadcasting community and entirely community driven. It's easy make a challenge, and offer a reward in Bitcoin Satoshi's with a match going to Jupiter Broadcasting.
An Introduction to Podcasting 2.0 — The Podcast Namespace is a collection of extensions to the RSS 2.0 specification which support additional features for podcasting.
The RSS 2.0 spec was last updated in 2009 and there had been little to no activity to update RSS since then.
Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace — A wholistic rss namespace for podcasting that is meant to synthesize the fragmented world of podcast namespaces. The broad goal is to create a single, compact, efficient namespace that is easily extensible, community controlled/authored and addresses the needs of the independent podcast industry now and in the future. Our hope is that this namespace will become the framework that the independent podcast community needs to deliver new functionality to apps and aggregators.
Automated Chaos | LINUX Unplugged 457
May 08, 2022
Each of us brings a secret topic to the show, and we discover a common theme about using the wrong tool for the right job.
New NASA Black Hole Sonifications with a Remix — In some ways, this sonification is unlike any other done before because it revisits the actual sound waves discovered in data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory. The popular misconception that there is no sound in space originates with the fact that most of space is essentially a vacuum, providing no medium for sound waves to propagate through. A galaxy cluster, on the other hand, has copious amounts of gas that envelop the hundreds or even thousands of galaxies within it, providing a medium for the sound waves to travel.
LXD vs Docker — System containers (as run by LXD) are similar to virtual or physical machines. They run a full operating system inside them, you can run any type of workload, and you manage them exactly as you would a virtual or a physical machine.
Learning Ansible Basics - Red Hat — Ansible is an open source IT automation engine that automates provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, orchestration, and many other IT processes.
Ansible 101 - Standards — This blog provides a list of the common standards or best practices to live by when writing Ansible code. This is an unofficial list of standards based on my personal experience with hundreds of customers and my own development practices I have used over the years.
Jeff Gerrling - Ansible 101 Youtube Series — Ansible 101 is a live YouTube streaming video series that I started in March, 2020, to help people level-up their automation skills by learning Ansible during the global coronavirus pandemic. While everyone is isolated at home, this series brought people together to learn a valuable new skill.
0.34.0 security release for matrix-appservice-irc — Incorrect handling of a CR character allowed for making part of the message be sent to the IRC server verbatim rather than as a message to the channel.
holoiso: SteamOS 3 — This project attempts to bring Steam Deck's Holo OS into a generic, installable format and replicate close-to-official SteamOS experience.
Office Hours 3: New Website Energy — It's a summer of projects, we get into our plans to totally rebuild our website, some new Podcasting 2.0 features and, Brent takes his first bite of the Raspberry Pi.
Plausible Analytics — Plausible is lightweight and open source web analytics. No cookies and fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA and PECR.
Umami — Umami is a simple, fast, privacy-focused alternative to Google Analytics.
eufy Security Indoor Cam 2K Pan & Tilt — 2K Pan and Tilt Plug-in Indoor Security Camera, Home Security Camera for Indoor Surveillance, Human and Pet AI, Voice Assistant Compatibility, Motion Tracking, Night Vision.
wzminihacks: v3 camera mods — Run whatever firmware you want on your v3/PANv2 and have root access to the device. This is in early stages of testing, use CAUTION if you are unsure of what you are doing. No support whatsoever is offered with this release.
Our Cuban Car Moment | Coder Radio 464
May 04, 2022
Mike shares a tale involving a comedy of errors, and we ponder a new reusable culture around tech.
Office Hours w/Chris — A podcast for the community of Jupiter Broadcasting, the Open Source media powerhouse of the Internet. Get the inside scope on our projects, the future of independent media, and decentralized community.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger anticipates the end of the chip shortages by 2024 — That’s part of the reason that we believe the overall semiconductor shortage will now drift into 2024, from our earlier estimates in 2023, just because the shortages have now hit equipment and some of those factory ramps will be more challenged.
Telegram 'Premium' subscription is in the works — Highlighted on an unofficial Telegram Beta channel, the latest iOS beta version (8.7.2) of Telegram has revealed the first evidence of “Telegram Premium,” which seems to be primarily focused on expanded reactions and stickers that aren’t available in the app’s free format.
Apple Gives Developers More Time to Update 'Outdated' Apps Before Removal — Apple says that apps that have not been updated within the past three years and which do not meet a minimum threshold for downloads ("not been downloaded at all or extremely few times during a rolling 12 month period") are subject to the policy, with developers receiving notices via email.
Office Hours 3: New Website Energy — It's a summer of projects, we get into our plans to totally rebuild our website, some new Podcasting 2.0 features and, Brent takes his first bite of the Raspberry Pi.
Introducing early access to the Steam snap! — It’s time to do a call for testing on a new Steam snap which brings along everything you need to run Steam games via proton or, of course, native Linux games. Since this is an early access snap, expect there to be bugs and gaps, which we need assistance in identifying. We will iterate quickly, and respond to this feedback.
PopOS! 22.04 has a surprise you might not have noticed, we get the details on Ubuntu’s new Real-Time kernel, and the clever idea from the Framework laptop team.
Pop!OS 22.04 by System76 — Pop!OS is designed for fast navigation, easy workspace organization, and fluid, convenient workflow. Your operating system should encourage discovery, not obstruct it.
Steam Deck Client and OS Updates — Today's update includes Steam, OS, and firmware updates, and may take a few minutes to apply after restarting. Please be patient while your Steam Deck updates.
Proton 7.0-2 Out — . Proton 7.0-2 is the new main stable version, not to be confused with Proton Experimental that was also updated recently.
Element Introduces Threads in Beta — Threads help you separate conversations from the main timeline. Starting a new Thread opens the thread view where you can continue your conversations without interruption from other messages or topics pinging through in the timeline.
Framework Mainboar Developer Giveaway Program — To accelerate the ecosystem of projects using Framework Laptop Mainboards, we’re giving away 100 i5-1135G7 Mainboards for free to creators and developers!
New Website Energy | Office Hours 3
Apr 28, 2022
It's a summer of projects, we get into our plans to totally rebuild our website, some new Podcasting 2.0 features and, Brent takes his first bite of the Raspberry Pi.
Podcastindex.org on Twitter — Using the tag, Curiocaster’s feed generator (called Sovereign Feeds) can change the UI for feed/episode creation to make everything reflect the type of content you are creating (like a music album). This is another part of “the vision”.
Linux Foundation Shills NFTs and Spreads FUD about Bitcoin — The Linux Foundation has started spreading FUD about free software projects in an attempt to sell the virtues of their centralized Proof of Work blockchain Hyperledger and shill "green" NFTs.
From 1999: Dig more coal -- the PCs are coming — The current fuel-economy rating: about 1 pound of coal to create, package, store and move 2 megabytes of data. The digital age, it turns out, is very energy-intensive. The Internet may someday save us bricks, mortar and catalog paper, but it is burning up an awful lot of fossil fuel in the process.
You Git What You Pay For | Coder Radio 463
Apr 27, 2022
Mike battles the onslaught of yet another bout with the plague. At the same time, we react live to Elon buying Twitter, Gitlab kicking off some free accounts, and we discover Google and Apple are working together again to pull the rug on app developers.
Elon Musk on Twitter — I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means.
Twitter accepts Elon Musk's buyout deal — The announcement ends a weeks-long saga Musk kicked off when he offered to buy the company at $54.20 per share, his “best and final.”
Elon Musk talks Twitter, Tesla and how his brain works — live at TED2022 - YouTube — In this unedited conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, Elon Musk — the head of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company — digs into the recent news around his bid to purchase Twitter and gets honest about the biggest regret of his career, how his brain works, the future he envisions for the world and a lot more. (Recorded at TED2022 on April 14, 2022)
NEW SHOW: Office Hours with Chris — A podcast for the community of Jupiter Broadcasting, the Open Source media powerhouse of the Internet. Get the inside scope on our projects, the future of independent media, and decentralized community.
Protopop Games on Twitter — I feel sick. Apple just sent me an email saying they're removing my free game Motivoto because its more than 2 years old.
Protopop Games on Twitter Adds — I'm sitting here on a Friday night, working myself to to bone after my day job, trying my best to scrape a living from my indie games, trying to keep up with Apple, Google, Unity, Xcode, MacOS changes that happen so fast my head spins while performing worse on older devices.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Dark Style Changes — Now in GNOME 42, it is officially supported, expanding on a concept from elementary OS 6 7. A toggle switch in the new Appearance panel in the core Settings app enables and disables the feature. A lot of work was done in GNOME apps to fix visual dark style bugs. A new transition effect was added (also inspired by elementary) to more elegantly crossfade when the style is switched.
deb-get — apt-get functionality for .debs published in 3rd party repositories or via direct download
Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS Release Notes — Ubuntu MATE 22.04 LTS is the culmination of 2 years of continual improvement 😅 to Ubuntu and MATE Desktop. As is tradition, the LTS development cycle has a keen focus on eliminating paper 🧻 cuts 🔪
Linux Downtime – Episode 45 — Joe and Adam are joined by Martin Wimpress to talk about what goes into running a distro like Ubuntu Mate.
docker snap unconditionally uses xtables — Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is defaulting to using the GNOME X.Org session rather than Wayland when running the proprietary NVIDIA driver.
pimox7: Proxmox V7 for Raspberry Pi — Pimox is a port of Proxmox to the Raspberry Pi allowing you to build a Proxmox cluster of Rapberry Pi's or even a hybrid cluster of Pis and x86 hardware.
LINUX Unplugged 453: Raleigh Action Show — We just wrapped up our East Coast meetup and have a bunch of great stories to share. Plus some Nix ups and downs, and more.
OpenMower - The affordable Open Source DIY Smart GPS Robotic Mower - YouTube — The Open Mower project allows you to build your own smart lawn mower robot using the Raspberry Pi and an Arduino. The robot is able to localize itself using very precise RTK GPS. As base for this project, an off-the-shelf robot mower is used. The electric components and the software are published as an open source project.
Our take on why Fedora's Legacy BIOS plans have stirred up such a strong debate, how NVIDIA's Linux strategy seems to be changing, and a surprising kernel patch from Sony.
Sony Contributes ~73%+ Performance Improvement For exFAT Linux Driver — In turn this improved block request handling leads to 73% and higher performance improvements for tests carried out by Sony engineer Yuezhang Mo on an Arm test platform with SD card storage that is common for Microsoft exFAT file-system usage.
Google Chrome/Chromium Experimenting With A Qt Back-End — It looks like Google is at least evaluating the prospects of Qt toolkit support for the Chromium/Chrome UI. A Phoronix reader tipped us off to newly-started Gerrit code reviews for Qt support with Chromium.
We kick off a new show and chat about the rapid centralization facing the podcast industry. Then we share some secret future Jupiter Broadcasting plans, answer your questions, and more.
It's Office Hours with Chris! Join us for a beta run of a new series officially kicking off next Tuesday.
Tesla accelerator stuck going 83 mph — Javier Rodriguez, a resident of Irvine, told KABC in Los Angeles that his Tesla Model 3’s computer froze up while driving on Interstate 10 — rendering the Tesla’s central touchscreen useless, but also causing the turn signals, hazard lights and other standard car features to malfunction.
ENCODYA on Steam — Neo Berlin 2062. Tina – a nine-year-old orphan – lives with SAM-53 – her big clumsy robot guardian –in a rooftop makeshift shelter in Neo-Berlin, a dark megalopolis controlled by corporations.
Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup — Jupiter Broadcasting regularly provides community events, talks, meet and greets and special hang-out dinners while attending fests and conferences.
Office Hours.Hair — Join ChrisLAS for an update on all things Jupiter Broadcasting
Meta Platforms is Struggling to Develop Its Own Device Chips — In late 2021, a team of Meta Platforms employees building a key chip for the second version of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses was notified that the company had decided to go with an alternative chip from Qualcomm
Would-be home buyers may be forced to rent the American dream, rather than buy it - 60 Minutes - CBS News — Tricon is trying to buy 800 houses a month and there are companies even bigger. Invitation Homes owns more than 80,000 rental houses, American Homes 4 Rent close to 60,000. Some of the all stars of finance – Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Blackstone - have put hundreds of millions of dollars into these companies. They all offer rental homes online, and all focus on the sunbelt.
Double Distro Details | LINUX Unplugged 454
Apr 17, 2022
Has Fedora pulled ahead of Ubuntu? We take a look at the new Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 releases.
Office Hours — Join ChrisLAS for an update on all things Jupiter Broadcasting.
What’s New in Fedora 36 — In a blog post introducing the Fedora 36 beta in late March, Red Hat said Fedora 36 continues the project’s “emphasis on delivering leading-edge open source technologies.”
Podman 4.0 — Podman 4.0 is one of our most significant releases ever, featuring over 60 new features. Headlining this release is a complete rewrite of the network stack for improved functionality and performance.
The Best New Features in GNOME 42 — GNOME 42 features a plethora of GTK4/libawaita app ports, intros a retooled screenshot experience, and makes several notable performance upticks.
Upgrading from Ubuntu 20.04? Look Out for These Features in 22.04 — Wayland is the default display server in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS — but don’t panic: it’s 2022 and Wayland is pretty solid these days. Plus, thanks to technologies like Pipewire, even previously tricky areas like screen sharing work out of the box, and without fuss under Wayland. Heck, in Ubuntu 22.04 Wayland is so robust it even ships as default for computers for those with select NVIDIA graphics cards.
RSSHub: 🍰 Everything is RSSible — RSSHub is an open source, easy to use, and extensible RSS feed generator. It's capable of generating RSS feeds from pretty much everything.
What is the enthusiast trap, and why does it seem to ensnarl every successful open source project? Also, some excellent listener power user tips for NextCloud.
Links:
The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2019 — Recorded in front of a live audience at The California Theater in San Jose on Tuesday, 4 June 2019
openSUSE Developing “Adaptable Linux Platform” For Next-Gen SUSE Linux Enterprise — Another important point is that we intend to split what was a more generic, everything is closely intertwined into two parts: One smaller hardware enabling piece, a kind of "host OS", and the and the layer providing and supporting applications, which will be container (and VM) based.
An update to Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye — With this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image. This is in line with the way most operating systems work nowadays, and, while it may cause a few issues where software (and documentation) assumes the existence of the “pi” user, it feels like a sensible change to make at this point.
PipeWire 0.3.50 — WINE applications using the JACK backend should no longer crash.
OpenSSH 9.0 released — It is claimed to be primarily a bug-fix release, but it also switches to a new, quantum-computer-proof key-exchange protocol by default and includes a number of sftp changes, some of which may create some compatibility issues with scp.
Reiser5 Issues New Development Release, Performance Numbers For Scaling Out — Shishkin published an new Reiser5 unstable snapshot today that targets Linux 5.16 kernel compatibility. Along with updating Reiser5 for newer kernel compatibility and other changes since its prior snapshot, Shishkin accompanied today's announcement with some benchmark numbers.
New NVIDIA Open-Source Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Appears — Appearing with NVIDIA's latest Linux4Tegra code drop is a new open-source kernel graphics driver not previously published. This driver isn't based on the existing Nouveau driver but rather appears to be derived from their internal driver code-base with some copyright references going back to 90's.
NVIDIA Publishes Signed Ampere Firmware To Finally Allow Accelerated Open-Source Support — Even with the signed firmware images, there are still complications around re-clocking the GPU to get off the rather low boot clock frequencies. Those complications around power management in the context of signed firmware images have meant the GTX 900 series and newer hasn't been able to operate with the open-source driver at its optimal clock frequencies...
Debian still having trouble with merged /usr — The addition of the "/usr merge" feature has been something of longstanding mess in the Debian world. It seems like a relatively innocuous change, but ever since we first covered the feature introduction for Debian—more than six years ago—it has a been a recurring series of headaches within that community. Recent events have seemingly simply prolonged the pain, though perhaps the end is in sight.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — And a dead 🚘 wow… rough morning. Lol. Guess it’s my turn in the Murphy’s law barrel 😂
Michael Dominick on Twitter — I’d like to say my MacBook Air lasted the night. I’d really like to… nobody tell ChrisLAS. It’s in rice. It’s fine.
Tank on Twitter — Let me break this down for you: Elon became largest shareholder for Free Speech Elon was told to play nice and not speak freely.
Sounding the alarm: How noise hurts the heart — In the last decade, a growing body of research more directly links air and road traffic noise to a heightened risk for a number of cardiovascular ailments — and scientists are beginning to pinpoint the mechanisms at play.
Fig — Fig adds IDE-style autocomplete to your existing terminal. Move faster with Fig.
Warp Raises $23M — "You walk by any developer’s desk and they’re going to have a terminal open. There are only a couple apps like that: the terminal and the code editor."
Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt on why people should return to the office — Schmidt says it’s not just a matter of nostalgia: There are practicalities to working together in person. For example, he says that conversations about professionalism — which might be particularly necessary at companies full of young employees, are much harder to have virtually.
Raleigh Action Show | LINUX Unplugged 453
Apr 10, 2022
We just wrapped up our East Coast meetup and have a bunch of great stories to share. Plus some Nix ups and downs, and more.
Microsoft Working On AMD GPU Hotplug Support For Linux Driver — Here is a combination not normally expected... Microsoft engineers have submitted patches for review enabling AMD GPU hot-plugging support with the Radeon "AMDGPU" Linux kernel driver.
webtop — Alpine, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch based containers containing full desktop environments in officially supported flavors accessible via any modern web browser.
Tea — The tools that build the Internet have steeped too long. It’s time for a fresh brew.
FreeRDP — FreeRDP is a free implementation of the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), released under the Apache license.
Rust Pick: bore — a simple CLI tool for making tunnels to localhost.
Unwyze Choices | Self-Hosted 68
Apr 08, 2022
We chat about Wyze's recent real bad, no-good security news, why Plex Discover has potential but hasn't impressed us yet, and a brief tour of Alex's home network setup.
Self-Hosted 4: The Joy of Plex with Elan Feingold — Plex Co-Founder and CTO Elan Feingold shares why he started Plex, its future direction, his home setup, his love for electric cars and the beach.
Release 10.8.0 Beta 1 · jellyfin — We're pleased to announce the first Beta pre-release of our upcoming 10.8.0 version. This release has a dedicated branch in preparation for the final 10.8.0 release. At this time, only bugfixes will be merged.
2022.4: Groups! Groups! Groups! - Home Assistant — 👋 I’m not sure where to start with this release; It’s April, and I can assure you: This release is no joke. Seriously, it is packed with features and incredible new things 🤯.
Linux Action News 235
Apr 07, 2022
Docker surprises everyone, new Fedora tools in the works, and an old debate with a fresh take.
LXD 5.0 LTS has been released — This is our 4th LTS release and quite an exciting one for anyone coming from LXD 4.0 as it significantly steps up LXD’s abilities, especially when operating in clustered environments.
Anaconda is getting a new suit and a wizard — Before starting the redesign work for the Anaconda installer, the team reviewed user feedback and usability study data that we’ve gathered over the years.
Lutris 0.5.10 Released With Steam Deck Support — Lutris 0.5.10 brings proper Steam Deck support thanks to their collaboration with Valve and receiving a Steam Deck developer kit. Lutris' Flatpak version is still being improved upon as the next step in enhancing the Steam Deck support for this game manager.
Mathieu Comandon on Twitter — We gotta stop this culture of "only install Flatpaks / using root is dangerous" before it extends beyond the Steam Deck. Last thing I want is for desktop Linux to become like Android or ChromeOS.
FOSS Patents: Supreme Court deems Google's use of Java APIs in Android fair use, thus no infringement--doesn't reach API copyrightability — Surprisingly, the Supreme Court has just declared Google's copying of thousands of lines of declaring code to be fair use, thereby substantially weakening software copyright protection in the United States as there had not previously been a case involving such a substantial amount of undisputedly original and creative program code that someone else was allowed to incorporate into a competing product and distribute billions of times.
WWDC21 - Apple Developer — The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off with exciting reveals, inspiration, and new opportunities. Join the worldwide developer community for an in-depth look at the future of Apple platforms, directly from Apple Park.
Introducing Libadwaita — GNOME 41 will come with libadwaita, the GTK 4 port of libhandy that will play a central role in defining the visual language and user experience of GNOME applications.
Chris's thoughts on Linux's NVIDIA conundrum, Elon's takeover of Twitter, MailChimp's insider hack, and the Google Drones taking off in Texas.
Links:
Matthew Miller's Thread on Twitter — "Here's the conundrum with @Nvidia drivers on Linux, in a thread. I have a Fedora perspective, obviously, but I think it's a shared problem. (🧵 rant which I'm not going to bother to count or number.) #linux #nvidia #opensource #freesoftware"
Elon Musk Buys 9.2% Twitter Shares in Passive Stake — Elon Musk took a 9.2% stake in Twitter Inc. to become the platform’s biggest shareholder, a week after hinting he might shake up the social media industry.
Fortnite raised $144 million for Ukraine relief — The game raised $36 million in its first day alone, and today, Epic revealed the final total of $144 million. The funds are being put towards several aid groups, including Direct Relief, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Children’s Fund, and the World Food Programme.
Alphabet's Wing will begin drone deliveries in Dallas-Fort Worth on April 7th — Alphabet's Wing division has announced that it's launching a drone delivery service in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex on April 7th. "With this service, the DFW area will be the largest metro in the world, and the first in the United States, with access to on-demand drone delivery," a company spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Synapse Collapse | LINUX Unplugged 452
Apr 03, 2022
How we nearly crashed our Matrix server; what we did wrong and how we're fixing it.
Plus an update on elementary OS, GNOME's next chapter, and we kick off the NixOS Challenge.
Guides to Learn to Matrix — Imagine a place... where you are welcomed to be yourself, where you have control on your data, and where you can talk more privately, while also allowing you to socialize with others.
Ubuntu gets a new rolling-release remix — The new flavor is the brainchild of MrBeeBenson, building on work by Martin Wimpress, who is the project leader of the Ubuntu MATE remix.
WirePlumber 0.4.9 Fixes Surround Sound For Some Linux Games — It was reported that some games within Steam were not able to enjoy 5.1 surround sound with PipeWire in a year-old bug report. A fix landed in WirePlumber a month ago to relax the format parsing within the si-audio-adapter module and this appears to fix up that issue
Linux 5.18 Power Management Brings Improvements For Both Intel & AMD — Intel's P-State driver will now use the default default Energy Performance Preference (EPP) exposed by the firmware, and over on the AMD CPU side, the CPUPower utility that lives within the kernel source tree now supports running in conjunction with the AMD P-State driver.
XFS Online Repair Functionality To Undergo A Massive Design Review — XFS online repair has been talked about for years along with online scrubbing and it looks like it's about all buttoned up. Darrick Wong will be spending the next roughly two months focusing on the "massive" design review for XFS online repair code.
Problems emerge for a unified /dev/*random — A bunch of changes for the kernel random-number generator (RNG) were merged by Linus Torvalds on March 21. Unfortunately a user-space regression surfaced that led Torvalds to say that he would revert the patch. The idea was good, but it "causes problems for various platforms that can't do jitter entropy and have nothing else happening either".
Revolution in Review | Coder Radio 459
Mar 30, 2022
We just watched Revolution OS before the show, so we reflect on the audacity of their vision and the new revolution we see brewing.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — I've broken down & am going to be using #blockchain for something. Here's my obligatory #web3 tweet ;) Trolling aside, I am very excited. It's actually a really great practical solution for a real-world problem my customers face. You were right. I see it now. Don't tell
@ChrisLAS
Apple’s Tim Cook Says He Owns Cryptocurrency — Cook said in a recorded interview for The New York Times' DealBook conference that he views crypto as "reasonable to own" within a "diversified portfolio."
Dive into the Bitcoin DeFi Ecosystem — While other chains may have taken the lead in terms of DeFi development, the Bitcoin community has also not been resting on its laurels and have ploughed ahead with implementing DeFi dApps on the blockchain.
Cardano Developer Portal — Cardano is a collection of open-source, patent-free protocols. It's a platform that enables you to store, transform, and manage value, identity, and governance. Cardano follows research not opinions or bias.
Speed boost achievement unlocked on Docker Desktop — . During testing with our amazing macOS community of users, we have observed that these changes have reduced the time taken to complete filesystem operations by up to 98%.
Hector Martin on Twitter — Well, this is unfortunate. It turns out Apple's custom NVMe drives are amazingly fast - if you don't care about data integrity.
If you do, they drop down to HDD performance. Thread.
Upgrading from Paperless-NG to Paperless-NGX — As of February 2022, the paperless-ng community created a new fork to continue development due to the inactivity on the original repo 1. This has means new docker images, new configs, etc.
paperless-ngx — Paperless-ngx is a document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can keep, well, less paper.
Argon EON: 4-Bay Network Storage powered by Raspberry Pi 4 — Argon EON, a 4 - Bay SATA NAS Enclosure, powered by the most versatile single board computer. By the very nature and essence of the Raspberry Pi the Argon EON is a Build Your Own Network Attached Storage (BYO-NAS).
fEVR -frigate Event Video Recorder — fEVR works along side of frigate and home assistant to collect video and snapshots of objects detected using your existing camera systems.
Linux Action News 233
Mar 23, 2022
A significant follow-up to one of the biggest Linux stories, the Pandora's box the MIT Technology Review claims open-source devs just opened, and Linux on the M1 finally ships.
Documentation/process: Add Researcher Guidelines — This document seeks to clarify what the Linux kernel community considers acceptable and non-acceptable practices when conducting such research. At the very least, such research and related activities should follow standard research ethics rules.
The first Asahi Linux Alpha Release is here! — We’re really excited to finally take this step and start bringing Linux on Apple Silicon to everyone. This is only the beginning, and things will move even more quickly going forward!
Hector Martin on Twitter — We've been getting a steady trickle of users with the installation failing because the APFS resizer does a fsck and finds corruption.
This confirms my personal experience that Apple's APFS code is just buggy... it seems a lot of people have latent filesystem corruption :(
Apple M1 Performance On Linux: Benchmarks Better Than Expected For Its Alpha State — I eagerly loaded up Asahi Linux on an M1-powered Apple Mac Mini knowing the various early limitations of the Linux kernel support that is still settling. Overall the Apple M1 Linux performance ended up exceeding my expectations for the performance in its early alpha state.
Install and Configure NixOS on a Linode — You can use a pre-existing Linode, or you can create a new one. If you’re using a pre-existing Linode, go to the Create Disks for Nix section, and resize your images into that approximate format.
iCloud and Many Other Apple Services Are Down — Affected services and apps include the App Store, iCloud, Siri, iMessage, iTunes Store, Apple Maps, Apple Music, Apple Podcasts, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple TV+, Find My, FaceTime, Notes, Stocks, and many others, according to complaints across Twitter and other platforms. Apple's developer website is also inaccessible due to server issues.
Upcoming EU Sideloading Bill — The Digital Markets Act has been in development for some time and the finalized version that could be completed as soon as this month will allow for sideloading and alternate app store options. Apple will be required to allow customers in Europe to download apps outside of the app stores, and it will also allow developers to use alternate purchase methods.
Consolidation in podcasting: happening fast — If you wanted to reach 50% of all weekly podcast consumers a year ago, you would need to have advertised on the top seven podcast networks. But after considerable acquisition of big independent shows in the past twelve months, you can now reach 50% of weekly listeners if you buy advertising on just four podcast networks, he says
On the weaponisation of open source | Tales about Software Engineering — As part of this post, I’m going to look at the decision by MongoDB to cut off services in Russia, the destructive change in a node library that deleted files on Russian IPs, a change in code/licence in a community terraform module.
New sanctions bill targets publishing code — It additionally calls for sanctions on anyone who “significantly and materially assisted, sponsored, or provided financial, material, or technological support for, or goods or services to or in support of any [sanctioned] person.”
The first Asahi Linux Alpha Release is here! — It’s been a long while since we updated the blog! Truth be told, we wanted to write a couple more progress reports, but there was always “one more thing”… So, instead, we decided to take the plunge and publish the first public alpha release of the Asahi Linux reference distribution!
OpenBSD/arm64 on Apple M1 systems — It has taken a while, but I'm pleased to announce that OpenBSD/arm64 works well enough on Apple M1 systems for some wider testing.
The Best New Features in GNOME 42 — GNOME 42 features a plethora of GTK4/libawaita app ports, intros a retooled screenshot experience, and makes several notable performance upticks.
GNOME MR - Dynamic triple/double buffering (v4) — Use triple buffering if and when the previous frame is running late. This means the next frame will be dispatched on time instead of also starting late.
Fountain 0.3.10 — Fountain transcribes each episode so you can easily create and edit clips. With Fountain 0.3.10 we've introduced better transcription accuracy and faster processing speeds.
AntennaPod 2.5 — The key feature that we added in this release? That would be synchronisation with “GPodder Sync” app for Nextcloud, implemented by @thrillfall.
remembertoremember on Twitter — @ChrisLAS
you sounded afraid to use the term lifestyle business. Why let this be a bad word. I maintain that these are just businesses. It’s the hyper scalers struggling to pay back huge returns to vcs. That are doing something weird. Does scale really deliver value to customers?
AT&T RCS is taking over Google's, and people are mad — AT&T has apparently rolled its own RCS system into Messages. The AT&T RCS protocol has appeared on at least some carrier-branded Galaxy S22 devices. According to these two threads, the carrier-branded system prevents RCS communication with people who aren’t on AT&T and/or aren’t using a Galaxy S22 device.
Obsidian — Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
How To ADHD — Those of us with ADHD have brains that work differently, which means we need to work differently.
Onion Share — OnionShare is an open source tool that lets you securely and anonymously share files, host websites, and chat with friends using the Tor network.
How the Lightning Network is Innovating Podcasting — Podcast Index allows podcasters to add their podcast and connect your podcast to your own node, or use their service and they run a node for you. Users can set a specific sats per minute to listen, and the content creators stream payment by sats.
We look back at our favorite moments from the last ten years of the Raspberry Pi, why you might want to start considering one, and where we want to see the platform evolve.
10 years of Raspberry Pi - YouTube — Almost exactly ten years ago today, thousands of you set your alarms, and woke on leap-day morning to discover that we’d started selling Raspberry Pi computers. By the time our all-volunteer team gathered in the pub that evening for celebratory drinks, our licensees Farnell and RS Components had taken over 100,000 orders (despite struggling to keep their websites online under the load); we had (briefly) out-trended Lady Gaga; and Raspberry Pi was on the road to becoming a little larger than we’d planned.
Too expensive to run in the UK now?! — My server uses 136 watts, and will costs £1.80 a day to run from June when the price increases kick in costing £54 a month. I'm starting to think maybe it's not worth it anymore having it run all the time!
Is anyone else re-thinking their home servers given the current cost situation?
The future of computers is only $4 away, with Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton — TodayToday I’m talking to Eben Upton, the CEO of Raspberry Pi, a fascinating company that makes beloved tiny hackable computers that are extremely inexpensive: the cheapest Raspberry Pi is just $4, the most popular model is about $35, and the most expensive model that comes with a keyboard is $70. They run Linux, and you can do just about anything with them: people build robots, they learn to code, they run media servers.
Which devices will work with Matter? — Matter is designed to bring the smart home together, and big brands including Google, Amazon and Apple are making plans for compatibility.
Linux Action News 231
Mar 10, 2022
Why Dirty Pipe is a dirty dog, the explosive adoption of Linux at AMD, and an important update on elementary OS.
Catalin Cimpanu on Twitter — “DirtyPipe (CVE-2022-0847) is a vulnerability in the Linux kernel since 5.8 which allows overwriting data in arbitrary read-only files. This leads to privilege escalation. It is similar to CVE-2016-5195 “Dirty Cow” but is easier to exploit.
Ron Amadeo on Twitter — “By my count, Dirty Pipe affects only brand-new Android 12 devices like the Pixel 6 and S22. Linux 5.8 and above has only been an Android option for five months."
AMD Posts Some New Linux Job Openings From Client CPU To Server — AMD would need a lot more Linux engineers to achieve the same level of timely Linux support and low-level kernel enhancements that Intel has been focused on for years, especially when it comes to Intel's open-source work beyond just the actual hardware device enablement.
Introducing Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call! — What’s more, Element Call is built entirely on Matrix: it doesn’t need any additional servers to get going. You can run it against your existing Matrix homeserver to provide complete self-sovereignty… while still being able to talk to anyone else anywhere on the wider Matrix network! We will also be able to automatically use Matrix’s end-to-end encryption to secure all Element Call conferences
Danielle Foré on Twitter — Okay it’s been a full month and this situation still isn’t resolved, and it sucks for you to just be completely in the dark and it’s pretty obvious something is up and people are asking what’s going on, so here is my side of the story 🧵
We revisit one of the core theses of the show and expand on it in a new way, leading us to ponder just what a wild ride the next eight years are going to be.
John Carmack asks why Wine isn't good enough — I truly do feel that emulation of some sort is a proper technical direction for gaming on Linux. It is obviously pragmatic in the range of possible support, but it shouldn’t have the technical stigma that it does. There really isn’t much of anything special that a native port does – we still make OpenGL calls, winsock is just BSD sockets, windows threads become pthreads, and the translation of input and audio interfaces don’t make much difference (XInput and Xaudio2 are good APIs!). A good shim layer should have far less impact on performance than the variability in driver quality.
After NVIDIA, Hacker Group Lapsus$ Targets Samsung — Global tech and electronics major Samsung became the latest target of the South America-based cyber extortion group Lapsus$. The hacker group leaked sensitive proprietary information, including source codes, for various device and online operations a week after it leaked 19 GB of data stolen from NVIDIA. Lapsus$’s has hinted that its next big target could be Vodafone, Impresa, or MercadoLibre/MercadoPago.
Ransomware Group Threatens To Leak "Nvidia's Most Closely Guarded" Secrets — “We request that Nvidia commits to completely open source their graphics processing unit drivers for Windows, MacOS, and Linux from now on and forever,” the ransomware group said in a statement. Should the company not acquiesce to the request, Lapsus will “release the complete silicon, graphics, and computer chipset files for all recent Nvidia graphics processing units.”
Russia to Legalize Software Piracy — Against the backdrop of sanctions gaining momentum, Russian authorities are urgently preparing support measures, among which is being discussed the suspension of criminal and administrative liability for use of pirated software “from countries supporting sanctions”. Such a step could temporarily soften the exit from Russia of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and others, say experts. But, they warn, a large part of significant software from those companies is sold on subscription, which means access to them will be blocked in any event.
A Mystery in Plain Sight | LINUX Unplugged 448
Mar 06, 2022
We surprise each other with three different topics, hidden away by encryption in our show notes - we literally have no idea what we're talking about this week.
Raneto — A free, open, simple Markdown powered Knowledgebase for Nodejs
Plex-Meta-Manager — Python script to update metadata information for items in plex as well as automatically build collections and playlists. The Wiki Documentation is linked below.
Valve expect to make ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Steam Decks next month — The good news is though, production is quickly ramping up. Yang mentioned how "in production terms it'll ramp very quickly, in the first month very quickly we'll be in the tens of thousands, by the second month we'll be in the hundreds of thousands and beyond that it'll grow even quicker".
Collabora talk briefly about their work with Valve on SteamOS, Steam Deck — With its new “A/B” design, there are now two operating system partitions, with two different versions of SteamOS. When upgrading, a new operating system image is written to whichever partition is not currently in use, before rebooting the system. A specialized bootloader module then automatically selects the newer operating system and boots into it.
Linux kernel edges closer to dropping ReiserFS — The problem was that ReiserFS code in the kernel used some API calls that nothing else did, preventing them from being changed or enhanced. For now, one of the other ReiserFS developers has contributed a patch that removes the issue.
CentOS New “AutoSD” Distribution Announced For In-Vehicle Linux Distro — CentOS Automotive Stream Distribution is their binary distribution that will serve as a public, in-development preview of Red Hat's upcoming in-vehicle operating system. CentOS formed their Automotive SIG last year with Red Hat working on a RHEL-based in-vehicle Linux platform that is yet to be publicly released.
Zaolin on Twitter — For everyone wondering what’s @IntelSoftware planning for the Firmware Support Package 3.0 #fsp and USF is basically going fully closed-source on the firmware side. This means Intel’s #fsp decides to drop #OSF open-source firmware. It’s really a shame…
Intel’s software-defined silicon set to debut in Linux 5.18 — The existence of software-defined silicon (SDSI) emerged in October 2021 when Intel staffers posted to the Linux Kernel mailing list with hints about new functionality that would allow users to purchase licenses that turned on capabilities physically present in processors, but which are not available to use out of the box.
One Revision Away | Coder Radio 455
Mar 02, 2022
Mike and Chris eat some crow as they change their tune on a recent spicy take.
Plus, new details about Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard are just too juicy to ignore.
Activision CEO set for $15M “golden parachute” in Microsoft deal — The filing reveals that Microsoft gaming executive Phil Spencer began talks with Kotick about a potential acquisition on Nov. 19, three days after a Wall Street Journal expose that said Kotick knew of sexual misconduct at the company for years.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — I was totally wrong on #VR. @ChrisLAS has shown me the light, I absolutely love the #OculusQuest2
An Umbrel for Everything | LINUX Unplugged 447
Feb 27, 2022
We look at two new options that enable ANYONE to run a personal server at home or a small business.
Self-Hosted 65: Failing at Scale — Alex gives the new TrueNAS SCALE a go and hits a snag. Plus the future Home Assistant update that has Chris so concerned he might stop updating forever.
Umbrel — a personal server for everyone — Run your personal server with a Bitcoin and Lightning node in your home, self-host open source apps like Nextcloud and Matrix to break away from big tech, and take full control of your data. For free.
Z-Wave and OpenZwave integrations pending removal — This is just based on the 2022.3 beta release notes, but wanted to give a heads up as soon as possible for anyone who hasn't updated to Z-Wave JS yet. You probably only have until April to switch over to one of the new Z-Wave JS integrations.
TrueNAS SCALE — TrueNAS® SCALE is an Open Source Hyperconverged Infrastructure solution. Built on TrueNAS CORE, SCALE adds Linux Containers, KVM, and scale-out ZFS storage capabilities.
TrueCommand — Manage your TrueNAS fleet all from one place
Nextcloud Two-factor authentication — Two-factor authentication adds an additional layer of security to user accounts. In order to log in on an account with two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled, it is necessary to provide both the login password and another factor. 2FA in Nextcloud is pluggable, meaning that they are not part of the Nextcloud Server component but provided by featured and 3rd-party Nextcloud apps.
Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup Page — upiter Broadcasting regularly provides community events, talks, meet and greets and special hang-out dinners while attending fests and conferences.
Linux Action News 229
Feb 24, 2022
The Linux secret behind the new TrueNAS release, Intel acquires a major Kernel contributor and our thoughts on Podman 4.0.
Plus why the Simula One VR Linux computer could be worth a serious look.
TrueNAS Scale 22.02 Released and Resetting the NAS Paradigm — First off, let us start with what is TrueNAS Scale, and where are we in the process. TrueNAS Scale is based on Linux instead of FreeBSD like TrueNAS. We get all of the storage features we would expect in a modern solution like snapshotting, replication, iSCSI, SMB, NFS, and S3-compatible object storage.
Intel Acquires Team behind PREMPTRT patches — Linutronix is comprised of a team of highly qualified and motivated employees with a wealth of experience and involvement in the ongoing development of Linux. Led by CEO Heinz Egger and CTO Thomas Gleixner, Linutronix is the architect of PREEMPTRT (Real Time) and the leading technology provider for industrial Linux. Gleixner has been the principal maintainer of x86 architecture in the Linux kernel since 2008.
Neil McGovern Stepping down in 6 Months — Now, nearly 5 years later, I’ve decided the timing is right for me to step back and for GNOME to start looking for its next leader.
Steam for Chrome OS gets minimum hardware specs — If you follow Chrome Unboxed or Chrome OS development in general, the name ‘Borealis‘ may provoke some feelings of excitement and anticipation.
Warm Desk Pad — Warm desk pad made with high quality PVC Mateirals and rubber back,edge stitched, waterproof, pad size: 31*13 inch.
Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported — These three patients, and more than 350 other blind people around the world with Second Sight’s implants in their eyes, find themselves in a world in which the technology that transformed their lives is just another obsolete gadget.
Chris Lattner left Swift core team — To answer your question, the root cause of my decision to leave the core team is a toxic environment in the meetings themselves. The catalyst was a specific meeting last summer: after being insulted and yelled at over WebEx (not for the first time, and not just one core team member), I decided to take a break. I was able to get leadership to eventually discuss the situation with me last Fall, but after avoiding dealing with it, they made excuses, and made it clear they weren't planning to do anything about it. As such, I decided not to return. They reassure me they "want to make sure things are better for others in the future based on what we talked about" though.
Core team to form language workgroup — The core team is currently looking at restructuring the project's leadership to provide more pathways for community members to become actively involved in the project's stewardship.
Why Coinbase admitted Apple calls the shots — As Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote on February 4th, “For any app to be listed in the Apple and Google App Stores, it needs to play by the rules of those two companies.” That means that whatever Apple and Google decide as their content policy, Coinbase will follow, Armstrong says. “Our approach is to be free speech supporters, but not free speech martyrs.”
Immersed on Oculus Quest 2 | Oculus — VR Offices! Free app to get your Mac/PC/Linux screens in VR (including additional virtual screens with no extra hardware) in stunning virtual worlds!
Kudu Cores and Cloud Wars | LINUX Unplugged 446
Feb 20, 2022
We put the sports car of Linux laptops to the test. Is it the multi-tasking machine it claims to be?
Kudu from System76 — Enjoy fast, steady progression with the Kudu’s powerful H-class AMD processor. The Kudu laptop is equipped to handle longer sessions so you can taste the victory of beating your schedule.
Pick: Spodcast — Spodcast is a caching Spotify podcast to RSS proxy. Using Spodcast you can follow Spotify-hosted netcasts/podcasts using any player which supports RSS, thus enabling the use of older hardware which is not compatible with the Spotify (web) app.
Pick: hwatch — A modern alternative to the watch command, that records the result of command execution and can display history and diffs.
Pick: rnote — A simple drawing application to create handwritten notes.
Pick: dog dns client — dog is an open-source DNS client for the command-line. It has colourful output, supports the DoT and DoH protocols, and can emit JSON.
Linux Action News 228
Feb 17, 2022
Canonical has a big week, why bcachefs looks like it's taking another step forward, and ChromeOS Flex for PCs is released.
Proton 7.0 out with Easy Anti-Cheat improvements — Proton 7.0 pulls in Wine 7.0 which it's based upon along with: upgrades to DXVK 1.9.4 for DirectX 9 / 10 / 11, newer VKD3D-Proton for DirectX 12 to Vulkan
Bcachefs Might Be Ready For Upstreaming In Linux This Year — The Bcachefs file-system that was born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code has over the past few years matured greatly. Now in 2022 the core fundamentals of the file-system are "pretty close to done" and will hopefully be mainlined this calendar year into the Linux kernel.
Get Chrome OS Flex for PC or Mac — Chrome OS Flex is a free and sustainable way to modernize devices you already own. It’s easy to deploy across your fleet or simply try it to see what a cloud-first OS has to offer.
Seattle Mazda drivers can’t tune their radios away from KUOW — Also gone from the infotainment center were such features as Bluetooth, navigation, the clock and vehicle stats — “Many of the features I paid for when I bought it new,” Welding says.
How Microsoft hopes to secure Activision Blizzard takeover — "We have developed these principles in part to address Microsoft's growing role and responsibility as we start the process of seeking regulatory approval in capitals around the world for our acquisition of Activision Blizzard," said Microsoft president Brad Smith, in a blog post announcing Redmond's commitments.
Brent's Betrayal | LINUX Unplugged 445
Feb 13, 2022
Linux is the master of small computers, and this week it’s going to the next level. We chat with the creator of the $15 Linux box and share some significant updates for the Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi Locator — It's a website to track Raspberry Pi 4 model B, Compute Module 4, Pi Zero 2 W, and Pico availability across multiple retailers in different countries.
Raspberry Pi OS Finally Going 64bit 🔥 — For those curious, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance improvement by switching from Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit to 64-bit.
A Minimum Viable Computer, or Linux for $15 — This is a ‘Linux Swiss Army Knife’, offering maximum utility while still being able to fit in your pocket. Is it fast? No. Can it run a GUI? Also no. But it can run scripts, ping a server, toggle a few GPIOs, and interact with a USB device. This is a minimum viable computer.
Orange's Matrix Setup Social — Want to join the matrix? Not sure what it is, how to set it up, or why? Want to just chat about the project, its uses, or anything else Matrix related? Come along, hang out, and lets mob on getting people some matrix servers setup!
Subscriptions Update — New subscriptions or changes to payment method after February 1, 2022 will start at $6.50 per month. This is our first price increase since we launched Home Assistant Cloud more than three years ago.
gelli — This is a native music player for Android devices that connects to Jellyfin media servers.
Jellyfin Audio Player — This is a React Native-based audio streaming app for Jellyfin.
Linux Action News 227
Feb 10, 2022
A last-minute kernel patch for the Steam Deck, why Intel is supporting RISC-V development, and we go hands-on with Plasma 5.24.
$66 billion deal for Nvidia to purchase Arm collapses — SoftBank’s $66 billion sale of UK-based chip business Arm to Nvidia collapsed on Monday after regulators in the US, UK, and EU raised serious concerns about its effects on competition in the global semiconductor industry, according to three people with direct knowledge of the transaction.
What Nvidia Can’t Buy, It Can Still Get Through An Arm Partnership — While a $1.25 billion hit to the Nvidia books after the company terminated its $40 billion deal to acquire chip designer Arm Holdings from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group this week is a big deal
Steam Deck Platform Driver Posted For The Linux Kernel — This platform driver is for supporting the Steam Deck Specific "VLV0100" device presented by the embedded controller (EC) firmware. This is ultimately used for functionality like CPU/device fan control, access to DDIC registers, battery temperature measurements, display-related settings, and USB Type-C event notifications.
Steam Deck Previews are up — The flood gates are beginning to open around the Steam Deck with a few big YouTube channels doing a hands-on preview now live. Plus, dbrand poke fun at Nintendo with their upcoming Steam Deck accessory kit.
Swift and C++ interoperability workgroup announcement — To advance the interoperability support between Swift and C++, we are announcing the formation of the Swift and C++ interoperability workgroup as part of the Swift project.
Distributing dating apps in the Netherlands — Developers of dating apps who want to continue using Apple’s in-app purchase system may do so and no further action is needed. Those who want to use a different payment system will need to request the StoreKit External Purchase Entitlement or the StoreKit External Purchase Link Entitlement.
Ubuntu MATE 22.04 Will Include Flatpak Support by Default — Ubuntu MATE isn’t shipping the Flathub repo (like Flathub) preconfigured, or bundling in any Flatpak apps by default. There are also no plans at present to add or expose Flatpak-friendly features in the distro’s homegrown tools like Software Boutique.
Kismet — A wireless network and device detector, sniffer, wardriving tool, and WIDS (wireless intrusion detection) framework.
Slackware Release Announcement — Well folks, in spite of the dire predictions of YouTube pundits, this morning the Slackhog emerged from its development den, did not see its shadow, and Slackware 15.0 has been officially released.
Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit — Over the past year, we’ve been trialling a beta of Raspberry Pi OS in glorious 64-bit. Now it’s time to open it up to a wider audience.
Framework’s Series A and the Years Ahead — We’ve just raised an $18M Series A round to pull in the future of consumer electronics, with Spark Capital as our lead investor.
Docker Desktop for Linux (Tech Preview) — Docker Desktop is an easy-to-install application that enables you to build and share containerized applications and microservices
MariaDB Corporation Ab to Become a Publicly Traded Company — In the transaction, Angel Pond will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Mangomill plc, an Irish public limited company (which will be renamed MariaDB plc), through a domestication merger with a wholly owned subsidiary of MariaDB plc. Immediately following such domestication merger, the current MariaDB will merge with and into MariaDB plc. Angel Pond will then be liquidated.
The Trouble with Tablets | Coder Radio 451
Feb 02, 2022
Microsoft's cold war with Apple is revealed in court filings this week, and Google thinks they've got the next hit on their hands, which sounds a lot like the old hit.
Apple Reports Record 1Q 2022 Results — For the quarter, Apple posted revenue of $123.9 billion and net quarterly profit of $34.6 billion, or $2.10 per diluted share, compared to revenue of $111.4 billion and net quarterly profit of $28.8 billion, or $1.68 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter.
Linux Did This First | LINUX Unplugged 443
Jan 30, 2022
We all take it for granted, but it is one of the best things about Linux. We share the history of the live CD, how it all got started, and the times it saved our bacon.
K3b — K3b was created to be a feature-rich and easy to handle CD burning application.
Finnix — Finnix is the original utility live Linux distribution. Write it to a USB flash drive or burn it to a CD, boot it, and you're seconds from a root prompt with hundreds of utilities available for recovery, maintenance, testing and more.
Richard Brown on Twitter — Rebrand and rescope; Old expanded support was just RHEL and just for purpose of holding customers over until they migrated to SLE; Liberty includes CentOS and Leap, and doesn’t require customers to move to SLE.
sc-im — Spreadsheet Calculator Improvised – An ncurses spreadsheet program for terminal.
Pulling the Rug Out | Self-Hosted 63
Jan 28, 2022
Alex has a new high-quality self-hosted music setup, and Chris solves complicated Internet problems.
Aeotec Z-Wave Smart Switch 7 — Aeotec’s smallest, best-certified smart plug built with Gen7, Z-Wave Plus, S2, and SmartStart. 30% smaller than past smart switches at only 2.4x1.5x1.2 inch - so small that it doesn’t block other power outlets!
Lidarr — Lidarr is a music collection manager for Usenet and BitTorrent users. It can monitor multiple RSS feeds for new albums from your favorite artists and will interface with clients and indexers to grab, sort, and rename them. It can also be configured to automatically upgrade the quality of existing files in the library when a better quality format becomes available.
AMD — RandomNinjaAtk/amd is a Lidarr companion script to automatically download music for Lidarr
Google will shut down your free G Suite account — Google announced yesterday (Jan. 19) that all users of the G Suite "legacy free edition" would need to "to upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription" by July 1, 2022 in order to keep using Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive and the Google office suite, including Docs, Sheets and Slides.
Let's Encrypt is revoking lots of SSL certificates in two days — Let's Encrypt will begin revoking certain SSL/TLS certificates issued within the last 90 days due to a bug, starting January 28, 2022. The move could impact millions of active Let's Encrypt certificates.
ChrisLAS Birthday Party Hang and Chow | Meetup —
Join us at the studio up in Arlington for a hang and chow. Attendees are encouraged to bring their favorite dish or at least an appetite.
Mobile Internet Bundles — Most bundles come with everything you need to get you online and connected
PepVPN - Peplink — PepVPN is our foundation VPN engine. It is ideal for establishing a secure tunnel over any WAN link and is probably the world’s easiest VPN technology.
PDF: SpeedFusion and PepVPN — Our patented SpeedFusion technology powers enterprise VPNs that tap into the bandwidth of up to 13 low-cost cable, DSL, 4G LTE/3G, and other links connected anywhere on your corporate or institutional WAN.
Linux Action News 225
Jan 27, 2022
The big disruption that looks like a bust, a security issue you need to pay attention to, and some great news for the Steam Deck.
SiFive Shifting Production Focus To Next-Gen HiFive Development Board — "With such great ecosystem adoption, demand has exceeded our already high expectations, and we’re close to selling out our production inventory. Given the challenge of supply chain issues that we overcame for the first run of these boards (issues that we continue to face), we’ve decided to focus on the next generation SiFive HiFive development systems rather than trying to put together another build of the HiFive Unmatched platform in 2022."
Steam Dynamic Cloud Sync — Dynamic Cloud Sync is now live on Steam, and it's a first for any gaming platform currently in operation. It appears to be inspired by a specific use case: playing your favorite PC game on the go via the Steam Deck, then resuming that same game later on your home PC.
The audience hits us in the face with some hard truths, and then we dig into Microsoft's fox-like moves to snatch up Activision Blizzard on "the cheap."
Bobby Kotick interview — Bobby Kotick has been CEO of Activision Blizzard since its inception in the merger of Activision and Blizzard in 2008, and he was also CEO of Activision for decades before that. He engineered the $5.9 billion acquisition of King, maker of Candy Crush Saga, in 2015.
Xbox on Twitter — Xbox is committed to our journey for inclusion in every aspect of gaming. We hold all teams to this commitment. We’re looking forward to extending our culture of proactive inclusion to the great teams across Activision Blizzard.
Vivek Sharma on Twitter — What a time to be alive! Some thoughts on Microsoft + ActiveVision with my usual caveat of these being my own musing and nothing much to do with our work at Meta
marak 🗿 on Twitter — What's up @Github? Ten days since you removed my ability to publish to NPM and fix the Infinity Zalgo bug in colors.js
Duane O'Brien on Twitter — The crux of this thread is: we sponsored faker.js, I don't think it helped the maintainer much, we didn't get any notice, and I'd do it all again.
Introduction to Celery — Celery communicates via messages, usually using a broker to mediate between clients and workers. To initiate a task the client adds a message to the queue, the broker then delivers that message to a worker.
Liberty Leaks and Lies | LINUX Unplugged 442
Jan 23, 2022
SUSE had an awkward week; we breakdown the very mixed launch of SUSE Liberty Linux.
Plus, we've cracked what's driving Linux Distribution adoption these days.
Edge ISO available for Linux Mint 20.3 — This image is made for people whose hardware is too new to boot the 5.4 LTS kernel included in Linux Mint 20.3. It ships with kernel 5.13.0-25 instead.
All Roads Lead to Arch: The Evolution of Linux Distros Used for Gaming Over Time — Ubuntu used to be a juggernaut, a staple in the world of Linux Gaming. Ubuntu was the default go-to distro for many users for probably a decade. It’s still an important distro at almost 20% share in our graph, but it’s not the first one anymore.
GNOME 42 Desktop Environment Is Now Available for Public Testing — The next development release in the GNOME 42 cycle will be the beta version, currently scheduled for release on mid-February. The final release of the GNOME 42 desktop environment is expected on March 23rd, 2022.
GNOME 42.alpha released — The gnome-desktop module can be built against GTK 4 now and the internals
were split in 3 libraries.
SUSE Liberty Linux Announced For Mixed Linux Environments — With SUSE Liberty Linux, you get trusted support with optional proven management tools that are optimized for mixed Linux environments, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and as you would expect openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Planning To Stick With Linux 5.15 By Default — In the discussion over Ubuntu 22.04's GNOME plans, it was mentioned by Sebastien Bacher of Canonical that "the plan is to use 5.15 for the LTS but the oem and hwe variants will get 5.17 as some point."
oss-security - Linux kernel: Heap buffer overflow in fscontext.c since version 5.1 — Exploitation relies on the CAPSYSADMIN capability; however, the permission only needs to be granted in the current namespace. An unprivileged user can use unshare(CLONENEWNS|CLONENEWUSER) to enter a namespace with the CAPSYS_ADMIN permission, and then proceed with exploitation to root the system.
All Roads Lead to Arch: The Evolution of Linux Distros Used for Gaming Over Time — Not only has Arch Linux gained progressively some share to be solidly at 20% now for several months, but the whole landscape looks a lot like Arch derivatives now. Manjaro is almost as big as Arch (but seems to be stagnating in adoption below 20%) and Garuda Linux and EndeavourOS add 6-7% to the mix. In effect, almost half of the gamers on ProtonDB are running some form of Arch.
JetBrains Fleet — Built from scratch, based on 20 years of experience developing IDEs. Fleet uses the IntelliJ code-processing engine, with a distributed IDE architecture and a reimagined UI.
Hillel is teaching a workshop on Twitter — Okay, we've all seen this meme, so what's the story behind it? Was it a real book, and was it actually intended for children?
Dare Obasanjo on Twitter — Apple’s approach to allowing 3rd party payments for IAPs in Netherlands will follow Google’s approach in South Korea.
Developers will still need to pay Apple a fee even if they use Stripe,etc. Google reduced their fee by 4% meaning there’s zero benefit.
Dare Obasanjo on Twitter — Apple & Google are going to tell developers “Fine instead of 30%, the fee is now 26% and after giving Stripe 2.9% + 30¢ plus a worse UX, you’ll be worse off”.
This is a diabolical way to meet the letter but not the spirit of laws. World class legal judo.
Apple's AR/VR headset could be priced above $2,000 — A Friday report indicated that Apple was having trouble with its rumored AR/VR headset due to overheating, camera, and software challenges, which could make the company delay its plans to unveil its Mixed Reality headset this year. Now, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is back with some more tidbits regarding the product.
Microsoft is now the Disney of Video Games | Jupiter Extras 82
Jan 18, 2022
We react to Microsoft gobbling up yet another game studio, chat about Crypto.com's recent $15M hack, the massive failure YouTube just admitted, and a few personal crew stories.
Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard — Microsoft will acquire Activision Blizzard for $95.00 per share, in an all-cash transaction valued at $68.7 billion, inclusive of Activision Blizzard’s net cash. When the transaction closes, Microsoft will become the world’s third-largest gaming company by revenue, behind Tencent and Sony. The planned acquisition includes iconic franchises from the Activision, Blizzard and King studios like “Warcraft,” “Diablo,” “Overwatch,” “Call of Duty” and “Candy Crush,” in addition to global eSports activities through Major League Gaming. The company has studios around the world with nearly 10,000 employees.
YouTube Shuts Down Original Content Group — “We will honor our commitment for already contracted shows in progress and creators who are involved with those shows should expect to hear from us directly in the coming days,” Kyncl wrote in the message posted to Twitter.
Susanne Daniels Exits YouTube as Global Originals Head — Susanne Daniels is exiting YouTube after nearly seven years at the Google-owned global video-sharing company. The YouTube global head of original content will depart in March.
Denver Road Trip Memories — During our summer road trip to Denver we had the microphone's recording and captured some great moments.
Denver Road Trip Tech — Our road trip machine is loaded up from solar to networking, the tech that made working, living, and recording from the road possible for 44 days and over 2,200 miles.
bismuth — KDE Plasma extension, that lets you tile your windows automatically and manage them via keyboard, just like in classical tiling window managers (i3, dwm or XMonad).
homebridge — Homebridge is a lightweight NodeJS server you can run on your home network that emulates the iOS HomeKit API. It supports Plugins, which are community-contributed modules that provide a basic bridge from HomeKit to various 3rd-party APIs provided by manufacturers of "smart home" devices.
HomeKit - Home Assistant — The HomeKit integration allows you to make your Home Assistant entities available in Apple HomeKit, so they can be controlled from Apple’s Home app and Siri; even if those devices do not natively support HomeKit.
How to Easily Program NFC Tags with Your iPhone — The best part is that you can do many things with an NFC tag. Basically, the sky is the limit – and if you can program it, you can use an NFC tag to automate it.
Apple TV - Home Assistant — The Apple TV integration allows you to control an Apple TV (any generation).
Infuse 7 on the App Store — Ignite your video content with Infuse – the beautiful way to watch almost any video format on your iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Mac. No need to convert files! Infuse is optimized for macOS 12, with powerful streaming options, Trakt sync, and unmatched AirPlay & subtitle support. Gorgeous interface. Precise controls. And silky-smooth playback.
Dozzle — Dozzle is a real-time log viewer for docker containers.
ChrisLAS Birthday Party Hang and Chow Meetup — Join us at the studio up in Arlington for a hang and chow. Attendees are encouraged to bring their favorite dish or at least an appetite.
Road Trip Tech | Jupiter Extras 81
Jan 13, 2022
Our road trip machine is loaded up from solar to networking, the tech that made working, living, and recording from the road possible for 44 days and over 2,200 miles.
MultiPlus - Victron Energy — The MultiPlus, as the name suggests, is a combined inverter and charger in one elegant package. Its many features include a true sine wave inverter, adaptive charging, hybrid PowerAssist technology, plus multiple system integration features.
Dual LTE Router — With a compact form factor, simultaneous dual-band 11ac Wi-Fi, and two embedded LTE modems, the MAX Transit Duo is ready to deliver fast, reliable connectivity in transportation and public safety deployments
RØDECaster Pro — Featuring four microphone inputs with studio-grade preamps for recording crystal-clear audio, smartphone, USB, and Bluetooth channels for seamlessly integrating remote guests, eight sound pads for triggering music and sound effects, powerful audio processing at the touch of a button and so much more, the RØDECaster Pro is all you will ever need to create incredible podcasts.
Dev corrupts NPM libs 'colors' and 'faker' breaking thousands of apps — The colors library receives over 20 million weekly downloads on npm alone and has almost 19,000 projects relying on it. Whereas, faker receives over 2.8 million weekly downloads on npm, and has over 2,500 dependents.
Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning: Teens Dread the Green Text Bubble — The reference to the color of group text messages—Android users turn Apple Inc.’s iMessage into green bubbles instead of blue—highlighted one of the challenges of her experiment. No longer did her group chats work seamlessly with other peers, almost all of whom used iPhones. FaceTime calls became more complicated and the University of Michigan sophomore’s phone didn’t show up in an app she used to find friends.
Android on Twitter — iMessage should not benefit from bullying. Texting should bring us together, and the solution exists. Let’s fix this as one industry.
Bartender 4 — Bartender is an award-winning app for macOS that superpowers your menu bar, giving you total control over your menu bar items, what's displayed, and when, with menu bar items only showing when you need them.
Magnet – Window manager for Mac — Activated by dragging, customizable keyboard shortcuts or via menu bar, Magnet declutters your screen by snapping windows into organized tiles.
Koch: A New Future for GnuPG — Longtime GnuPG maintainer Werner Koch has posted an update on the project, mostly focused on the new associated "GnuPG VS-Desktop" business that is, it seems, going quite well.
A Short introduction to Fuchsia — FuchsiaOS, by now just Fuchsia, was designed to be an entirely modular system, allowing its libraries and applications to be entirely removed, updated and added on it without the system get affected .
Michael Dominick on Twitter — I am on the DL going to set my kid up his own PC (an old Mac mini) I'd like it to run a Kiddie flavor of #Linux and be good to before he gets. I also want 0 internet access. Is KidBuntu still a thing?
@ubuntu
I'd like a kid / education focused distro. THX!
quickemu — Quickly create and run optimised Windows, macOS and Linux desktop virtual machines.
Ultimate Hacking Keyboard — A fully programmable, impeccably built, open source, split mechanical keyboard designed for extreme productivity and ergonomics.
What's Apple Releasing in 2022? — The company has a bevy of new pro Macs in the works based on the M1 Pro and M1 Max chips that are already inside the MacBook Pro. That includes a smaller Mac Pro with up to 40 CPU cores and 128 graphics cores, a new Mac mini and a large-screened iMac Pro. I’d expect Apple to finish announcing its transition to its own silicon from Intel chips as early as June at WWDC 2022.
Why Linux Will Win in 20 Years | Jupiter Extras 79
Jan 04, 2022
It's a casual community hangout, and we spin the Wheel of Topics. From what Linux does worst, our thoughts on EndlessOS, Ubuntu Web Remix, QubesOS, Brent's adventures with JellyFin, and why Linux will ultimately dominate all operating systems in 20 years.
Kindle Comic Converter — Kindle Comic Converter is an app that allows you to transform your PNG, JPG, GIF, CBZ, CBR and CB7 files into EPUB or MOBI format e-books. Preparing comics and manga for your E-Ink device was never easier.
Linux Action Show Season 2 preview… Kindle Oops — Bryan and Chris give you a preview on Season 2's first episode of The Linux Action Show! Watch a take that you won't see in the final episode.
That First Layer Squish | Self-Hosted 61
Dec 31, 2021
Some old friends of JB join Alex to discuss 3D printing.
Ender 3 — The Creality Ender 3 is one of the cheapest ways to get started with 3d printing.
3d printer maintenance — Sometimes we have so much fun with our 3D printers that we get carried away. We forget that our precious printers need some TLC every now and then. This video will give you all the information that you need in order to maintain and service your 3D printer.
blog.ktz.me - The Tinkerspace — I needed a space where I could explode an entire computer, or 3d printer, or some other overly complex piece of equipment without getting in the way of the rest of the house.
Improve 3d print finish quality — One of our biggest gripes about 3D printing is that your finished print invariably ends up looking, well... a bit 3D printed. Sometimes that's fine, but other times it's not. Here are our top tips on how to finish 3D prints, condensed into one lovely infographic for you.
Blizzard Battery Battle | Coder Radio 446
Dec 29, 2021
Mike finds a new normal and doubles down on what works. Chris meanwhile is stranded in the woods and is having a bit of a panic.
GitHub Sponsors — Invest in the open source projects you depend on
We Just Gave $154,999.89 to Open Source Maintainers — Indeed’s generous $10,000 donation to us was part of an industry initiative they launched called FOSS Fund Adopters; Microsoft and Salesforce are also on board.
Problem solver: Tech entrepreneur excels through adaptation — For The Mad Botter, a company that relies heavily on in-person trade shows to sell its unique products and services, 2020-21 could have been disastrous. But true to form, it evolved on the fly.
System 76 Pangolin Review - dominickm.com — My most recent dip back into the Linux desktop world has been their Pangolin laptop. It’s a 15″ laptop with a full AMD chip-set.
Million-Dollar Predictions | LINUX Unplugged 438
Dec 28, 2021
We do our best to predict what will happen in 2022, and own up to what we thought might happen in 2021.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Drew DeVore, and Joe Ressington.
Rails 7.0: Fulfilling a vision — This vision wasn’t possible even just a few years ago. We simply didn’t have the core technologies in place.
The One Person Framework — The part that really excites me about this version, though, is how much closer it brings us to the ideal of The One Person Framework. A toolkit so powerful that it allows a single individual to create modern applications upon which they might build a competitive business. The way it used to be.
Apple Releases Swift Playgrounds 4 — The newest version of the app allows iPhone and iPad apps to be created directly on an iPad without the need for a Mac.
The 2021 Tuxies | LINUX Unplugged 437
Dec 21, 2021
It's the second annual Unplugged Tuxies; our community votes on the best projects, distros, desktops, and services of 2021.
elementary OS 6.1 Secrets with Founder and CEO Danielle Foré | Jupiter Extras 78
Dec 21, 2021
Big internal process improvements have resulted in a major new version of elementary OS hot on the heals of the previous release. Find out why 6.1 is a lot more than just a number.
Special Guest: Danielle Foré .
Links:
elementary OS 6.1 Available Now — Just over four months ago we announced elementary OS 6 Odin with new ways to be in control and express yourself, a slew of innovative new features, and a focus on gettability and inclusivity. So far, OS 6 has been downloaded from our website over 250,000 times—and as always, that’s not including downloads from third parties or direct downloads via torrent that bypass our download page!
elementary Store — Every purchase goes towards developing elementary OS, its apps, and its services. We're a small team, mostly volunteer, working constantly to make elementary better—your support helps make elementary OS more sustainable.
Linux Action News 220
Dec 19, 2021
The nasty Log4Shell vulnerability isn't solved yet, this week saw a new round of attacks and patches.
Plus how the work to port Linux to the Apple M1 resulted in fixing a bug that impacted all Linux distros.
EXT4 Prepared To Switch To Linux’s New Mount API — Linux's new mount API is what came about in recent times as a set of system calls offering more flexibility than the long-standing mount syscall that is a one-shot effort while this new multi-step mounting procedure allows for more options.
The End-Of-Year 2021 State Of Linux On Apple’s M1 SoC — The Asahi Linux project has published their October and November status update to provide an overview of where the Apple Silicon / Apple M1 open-source support is now at as we approach the end of 2021.
Hector Martin on Twitter — Looks like Apple changed the requirements for Mach-O kernel files in 12.1, breaking our existing installation process... and they also added a raw image mode that will never break again and doesn't require Mach-Os.
And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us.
Podcastindex.org — The Podcast Index is here to preserve, protect and extend the open, independent podcasting ecosystem.
AWS explains outage — A major Amazon Web Services outage on Tuesday started after network devices got overloaded, the company said on Friday.
Arthur on Twitter — The AWS outage trickled down to my automated Christmas lights not turning on tonight
WLED — Control WS2812B and many more types of digital RGB LEDs with an ESP8266 or ESP32 over WiFi!
John Foreman on Twitter — AWS had an outage and now I can't vacuum the dog hair in my living room. What a time to be alive
Valetudo — Valetudo is a standalone binary, which runs on rooted Vacuums of the Xiaomi ecosystem and aims to enable the user to operate the robot vacuum without any Cloud Connection whatsoever.
Amazon Web Services crashed today : amazonecho — I spent about an hour restarting routers, checking for updates, unplugging and plugging in devices, and scouring the web for answers and finally saw in the news that an AWS outage took out a huge chunk of the internet. Amazon hasn’t released a statement yet, that I know of, but I assume this is what’s affecting all of the devices, e.g., my smart plug stopped working and my echo dot and show only stream one song before quitting for no apparent reason.
Tasmota — Total local control with quick setup and updates.
Control using MQTT, Web UI, HTTP or serial.
Automate using timers, rules or scripts.
Integration with home automation solutions.
Incredibly expandable and flexible.
log4j Vulnerability | Info :: LinuxServer.io — Multiple vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-44228 and CVE-2021-45046) have been discovered in log4j which can lead to denial of service and remote code execution. The following Linuxserver containers have been confirmed not to be affected by CVE-2021-44228 or CVE-2021-45046 due to existing mitigations, upstream patches, or workarounds applied to the container images.
changedetection.io — The best and simplest self-hosted open source website change detection monitoring and notification service. An alternative to Visualping, Watchtower etc. Designed for simplicity - the main goal is to simply monitor which websites had a text change. Open source web page change detection - Now also includes JSON API change detection and monitoring support!
Paulus Schoutsen on Twitter — With
@NabuCasa
we’re doing all our meetings in VR. It feels more like being together compared to a grid of webcam feeds. Especially for collaborative sessions this is a big win.
How to Approach a company about building an HA integration on their API? — From the web UI I can see that the system is designed with security in mind - each request must contain various tokens generated with a combination of AES256 encryption, MD5 and SHA512 hashing of the rest of the request, along with device-provided keys and various state-tracking.
Infrastructure as Code - Perfect Media Server — This simple philosophy of managing configuration in the same way as we do with source code revolutionized the way I approach building systems.
Get Together | New Server Christening — Lets get together, share some foods, and power up the new Jupiter Broadcasting local server. Then stick around and listen in to a live recording of LINUX Unplugged from the studio.
Mining the Logs | Coder Radio 444
Dec 15, 2021
The broader software problem the Log4Shell vulnerability reveals, and the story of how Chris lit his Coder robe on fire... While wearing it.
Apple Silicon Guide — A guide covering Apple Silicon including the applications, libraries and tools that will make you a better and more efficient with your Apple Silicon powered device.
notes.jupiterbroadcasting.com — This site is a searchable archive of the show notes for the all Jupiter Broadcasting shows. Home to the best shows on Linux, Open Source, Security, Privacy, Community, Development, and News.
How does Jupiter Broadcasting's notes site work? — It was a normal (for 2021) Sunday evening back in July, I was minding my own business, obviously doing something super cool, when I spotted a message from a certain badger-y fellow in the Self Hosted show’s Discord
Hackers start pushing malware in worldwide Log4Shell attacks — When the Log4j application parses these logs and encounters the string, the bug will force the server to make a callback, or request, to the URL listed in the JNDI string. Threat actors can then use that URL to pass Base64-encoded commands or Java classes to execute on the vulnerable device.
New Server Christening Get Together — Lets get together, share some foods, and power up the new Jupiter Broadcasting local server. Then stick around and listen in to a live recording of LINUX Unplugged from the studio.
Jeremy Soller on Twitter — Pop switched the build system and repositories away from http://launchpad.net to our own system http://apt.pop-os.org/release for 21.10 in order to improve our control of package updates and reduce the time to build, test, and release them. It is not related to changing bases.
Recovery Partition - System76 Support — The Recovery Partition is a full copy of the Pop!OS installation disk. It can be used exactly the same as if a live disk copy of Pop!OS was booted from a USB drive.
Add Recovery To Your Pop!OS — If you like me, fellow reader, you may be using a more custom partition setup. Unfortunately, anything other than the default clean install on Pop!_OS means you do not get the automatically generated recovery partition of goodness. Here's a small guide over how to get the setup on an already existing install.
casper — A hook for initramfs-tools to boot live systems.
Raycast — Raycast is a blazingly fast, totally extendable launcher. It lets you complete tasks, calculate, share common links, and much more.
Pick: n.eko — A self hosted virtual browser that runs in docker and uses WebRTC.
Ventoy — With ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly.
Linux Action News 219
Dec 12, 2021
The Log4Shell vulnerability is making waves this week; we'll explain why and break down how it works.
Plus, some good news for the Desktop and systemd-homed gets one step closer.
GNOME 42 To Finally Allow Input Events To Happen Full-Rate — Up to now GNOME Shell has been compressing pointer motion events so they are synchronized to the monitor refresh rate, which can be anywhere from around 30 to 144 events per second depending upon display.
FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE Announcement — The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/12 branch.
Log4Shell — RCE 0-day exploit found in log4j2, a popular Java logging package
Apache - The ASF on Twitter — “Did you know that Ingenuity, the Mars 2020 Helicopter mission, is powered by Apache Log4j? https://t.co/gV0uyE1ylk #Apache #OpenSource #innovation #community #logging #services
Kevin Beaumont on Twitter — “Starting a new thread for log4j security vulnerability and fallout. Spoiler: although this emerged as a Minecraft issue (lol) there is going to be impacts across a wide range of enterprise software for some time.”
Relegendable keycaps for your macropad — One at work and one at home, both run QMK, firmware that allows me to program the macropad with my own shortcuts.
Absolute Zero has a great system for productivity — Search engines can be great for discovery of new information so long as you know how they work, but they are sorely lacking in the information recall department. One of the best productivity hacks for me to address information recall has been to use the following system.
New York CEO fires 900 employees on Zoom call — The CEO of New York-based online mortgage lender Better.com has sacked a total of 900 employees with immediate effect during a now-viral Zoom call.
GitHub - geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook — This playbook installs and configures most of the software I use on my Mac for web and software development. Some things in macOS are slightly difficult to automate, so I still have a few manual installation steps, but at least it's all documented here.
’MiamiCoin’ cryptocurrency is a potential game-changer —
The South Florida city is the first municipality to accept cryptocurrency contributions through CityCoins, which the mayor says may one day take the place of taxes
Desktop Burnout | LINUX Unplugged 435
Dec 07, 2021
This was not the year of the Linux Desktop. We’ve been slacking on the mailbag, so we go on a feedback frenzy and answer some hard questions about desktop Linux.
Introducing CentOS Stream 9 — CentOS Stream is a continuous-delivery distribution providing each point-release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
EPEL 9 is now available! — This is the culmination of five months of work between the EPEL Steering Committee, the Fedora Infrastructure and Release Engineering team, and other contributors.
Pick: audapolis — An editor for spoken-word audio with automatic transcription.
Cryptocurrency Chat with Chris | Jupiter Extras 77
Dec 06, 2021
Taken from Monday's Coder live stream, Chris reacts to discovering that the city of Miami has its own crypto coin. As the conversation goes on it turns into a broader discussion about how cryptocurrency gets a bad reputation, and why that reputation is completely divorced from the reality of the technology.
Links:
CityCoins — MiamiCoin — MiamiCoin gives citizens and supporters the power to support, improve and program the Magic City.
Blender 3.0 Released — Blender Foundation announces the release of Blender 3.0, to mark the beginning of a new era for open source 2D/3D content creation.
Firmware “Best Known Configuration” in fwupd — 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.
LINUX Unplugged 433: The Lessons of Jellyfin — We revisit some old assumptions about the open-source Plex-alternative, Jellyfin. We each try it out, and along the way, gain a few insights about open source.
Portainer — Accelerate container adoption and reduce time-to-value on Docker and Kubernetes with a smart, self-service management portal, allowing you to deliver containerized applications from the data centre to the edge
lazydocker — The lazier way to manage everything docker. A simple terminal UI for both docker and docker-compose, written in Go with the gocui library.
Dozzle — Dozzle is a real-time log viewer for docker containers.
What’s New In Docker Compose v2? — Docker Compose v2 was announced at DockerCon 2021. It promises big changes to the Compose experience by integrating it into the docker CLI. v2 also comes with new convenience features to help you manage your container stacks.
1.4 Display Port KVM Switch — Have you ever wanted a KVM switch that doesn’t suck, supports DisplayPort 1.4 (3840x2160@120hz / 8k @ 30hz ) and USB3?
Listen. No KVM is perfect BUT our customers tell us -- The Level1Techs KVMs are pretty darn good.
Touched by the Bar | Coder Radio 442
Dec 01, 2021
Mike visits Pallet Town and comes back with some SQLAlchemy performance wisdom to share. Meanwhile, struggling with a lack of performance, Chris has kicked the tires of his new M1 Max MacBook Pro and is ready to share his counter-narrative take on the new hardware.
Ditto — Ditto is an extension to the Windows Clipboard. You copy something to the Clipboard and Ditto takes what you copied and stores it in a database to retrieve at a later time.
Maccy — Maccy is a lightweight clipboard manager for macOS. It keeps the history of what you copy and lets you quickly navigate, search, and use previous clipboard contents.
Advanced Visual Studio Code for Python Developers — During this tutorial, you’ll learn how you can configure, extend, and optimize VS Code for a more effective and productive Python development environment. After finishing this tutorial, you’ll have a variety of tools to help you be more productive using VS Code. It can be a powerful tool for rapid Python development.
Pallet Town: SQLAlchemy Performance I — SQLAlchemy is the standard ORM toolkit for Python programs and it can be a little intimidating, especially for folks who haven’t done much database development. It also, like just about every ORM, is laden with pitfalls for developers who haven’t deal with even medium-scale database-powered applications. Once you get some of the basics down, these three tips should help you avoid those pitfalls.
Parallels Desktop 17 — Support for VirGL in Virtio GPU which enables Linux 3D acceleration out of the box in supported Linux distributions, brings visual performance improvements, and allows using the Wayland protocol in Linux virtual machines.
Endlessly Flat | LINUX Unplugged 434
Nov 30, 2021
The Director of EndlessOS joins us to respond to recent Flatpak criticism.
We take the opportunity to expand on the overall effort to solve Linux fragmentation.
Special Guests: Martin Wimpress, Neal Gompa, and Will Thompson.
Pocket Popcorn Computer — Finally, a handheld Linux device with a high-definition 1080p display and large battery life. Pocket P.C. is your hacker terminal on-the-go.
On Flatpak disk usage and deduplication – Will Thompson’s GNOME-ish blog — There is a blog post doing the rounds asserting that Flatpak Is Not The Future. The post is really long, and it seems unlikely that I and the author will ever agree on this topic, so I’m only going to talk about a couple of paragraphs about disk usage and sharing of runtimes between apps which caught my eye.
Bustle — Graphical D-Bus message analyser and profiler.
Flatpak Is Not the Future - Ludocode — Flatpak calls itself “the future of application distribution”. I am not a fan. I’m going to outline here some of the technical, security and usability problems with Flatpak and others. I’ll try to avoid addressing “fixable” problems (like theming) and instead focus on fundamental problems inherent in their design. I aim to convince you that these are not the future of desktop Linux apps.
docker-slim — Don’t change anything in your Docker container image and minify it by up to 30x
Flatseal — Flatseal is a graphical utility to review and modify permissions from your Flatpak applications.
Bruch with Brent with Stuart Langridge — Brent sits down with Stuart Langridge, co-host of Bad Voltage, for an exploration of open source’s “final mile”, the text and language interface as a UX opportunity, terminals vs. search engines, Darwinian processes and crab-bucketism in software development, and more.
Seeking contractors for work on Flathub project — GNOME has a donor who is interested in supporting financial sustainability for app developers and removing barriers to an inclusive ecosystem. Flathub would like to use these funds to work with a contractor for a short-term project and make steps towards supporting application developers being able to request payments (whether donations or subscriptions).
Linux Action News 217
Nov 28, 2021
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.
Amazon Linux 2022 Released - Based On Fedora With Changes — Amazon Linux / Amazon Linux 2 had been based on a combination of RHEL and Fedora packages while in today's Amazon Linux 2022 release they note it's explicitly based on Fedora.
Are Linux devs getting upset with the Python community? We weigh in on a nuanced issue. Plus the mass-mod resignation over at Rust, and Mike's thoughts on setting up a dev environment on Windows 11.
Windows 11 - A Dev's Perspective — I was up and running with Python / FastAPI in less than a half hour. Postgresql, my database of choice, works just fine on Windows. Coder Radio listeners will know that I have been a fan of WSL for some time, however, for this challenge, I stuck with native Windows tooling. That’s right PowerShell! Upon install and launching the now built-in Windows Terminal, I was prompted to update PowerShell to PowerShell 7 and it’s great. If you only use BASH for basic terminal functionality or git from the CLI, you’ll be just fine on PowerShell.
Python: Please stop screwing over Linux distros — I manage my Python packages in the only way which I think is sane: installing them from my Linux distribution’s package manager. I maintain a few dozen Python packages for Alpine Linux myself. It’s from this perspective that, throughout all of this turmoil in Python’s packaging world, I have found myself feeling especially put out.
Every one of these package managers is designed for a reckless world in which programmers chuck packages wholesale into ~/.pip, set up virtualenvs and pin their dependencies to 10 versions and 6 vulnerabilities ago, and ship their computers directly into production in Docker containers which aim to do the minimum amount necessary to make their user’s private data as insecure as possible.
1068-rust-governance - The Rust RFC Book — Subteam, and especially core team members are also held to a high standard of behavior. Part of the reason to separate the moderation subteam is to ensure that CoC violations by Rust's leadership be addressed through the same independent body of moderators.
The Lessons of Jellyfin | LINUX Unplugged 433
Nov 23, 2021
We revisit some old assumptions about the open-source Plex-alternative, Jellyfin. We each try it out, and along the way, gain a few insights about open source.
Kodi “Matrix” 19.3 Release — Okay, we know that we've only just released 19.2, and some of you are probably even still waiting for that, but that's a big part of the reason we need to push out a new build. We still had some challenges with the Xbox release, and some other issues came to light that we didn't want to ignore - so, rather than get into platform-specific point releases, we thought we'd just nudge up to 19.3 and go for it.
Jellyfin — Jellyfin is the volunteer-built media solution that puts you in control of your media. Stream to any device from your own server, with no strings attached. Your media, your server, your way.
Plex — Plex brings together all the media that matters to you. Your personal collection will look beautiful alongside stellar streaming content.
Dual Gigabit Ethernet Carrier Board for Raspberry Pi CM4 4 with 4GB RAM/ 32GB eMMC — It features a variety of I/O peripherals such as MIPI CSI, MIPI DSI, micro-HDMI to connect displays/ cameras, a standard 9-pin USB 3.0 header for more USB expansion, a micro-SD card slot, and an FPC connector while maintaining a compact form factor! This board is ideal for HTPC makers, Linux developers, software router enthusiasts, and the majority of regular Raspberry Pi users.
Jellyfin Plugin for Kodi — The Jellyfin for Kodi add-on combines the best of Kodi - ultra smooth navigation, beautiful UIs and playback of any file under the sun, and Jellyfin - the most powerful open source multi-client media metadata indexer and server. You can now retire your MySQL setup in favor of a more flexible setup.
catt — Cast All The Things allows you to send videos from many, many online sources to your Chromecast.
Self-Hosted Podcast — Discover new software and hardware to get the best out of your network, control smart devices, and secure your data on cloud services.
Perfect Media Server — Perfect Media Server began life as a series of blog posts over at blog.linuxserver.io. Those posts continue to be very popular but a blog post (or three) can only get you so far... I therefore introduce perfectmediaserver.com - a wiki format information repository detailing all you need to know to build a free, open and modular media server that will last for many, many years.
Pick: Junction — Set Junction as the default application for a resource and let it do the rest. Junction will pop up and offer multiple options to handle it.
Just how severe is this DNS cache poisoning attack revealed this week? We'll break it down and explain why Linux is affected. Plus, the feature now removed from APT, more performance patches in the Kernel, and a big batch of project updates.
Linux has a serious security problem that once again enables DNS cache poisoning — We can actually guess the ephemeral port in the embedded UDP packet and package it in an ICMP probe to a DNS resolver. If the guessed port is correct, it causes some global resource in the Linux kernel to change, which can be indirectly observed. This is how the attacker can infer which ephemeral port is used.
KDE Discover gets update to prevent you breaking your Linux system — Another change to make things look a bit friendlier in Discover is if you have issues upgrading, it will instantly shove a load of technical details in your face. To normal consumers, that's clearly not going to do much to help and probably scare them away. Now, instead, it will provide a very clear and friendly message, with the option to get more details to report the issue.
Add support for list issue - Jens Axboe — With the support in 5.16-rc1 for allocating and completing batches of IO, the one missing piece is passing down a list of requests for issue.
FWUPD 1.7.2 Released With Fixes, Faster & Smaller Daemon — FWUPD 1.7.2 adds support for handling exported MTD block devices, tweaking the compiler flags to reduce the install size by around 300 Kb, speeding up the FWUPD daemon startup by ~40% by postponing some work, and a variety of fixes. The fixes range from a possible DFU crash to DLI download troubles and other device-specific corrections.
Buy a Compute Module 4 IO Board — Exposing every interface from Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, the Compute Module 4 IO Board provides a development platform and reference base-board design for our most powerful Compute Module yet.
Just Say No to M1 | Coder Radio 440
Nov 17, 2021
We get some spicy emails, dig into why Mike just picked up another Linux laptop, and then share our real thoughts on Web3.
Plus, how we met, and why the future is probably not so bright for Apple users long-term.
Web3 For Dummies — Web 3.0 generally refers to the next generation of the worldwide web. Just like Web 2.0 started from an abstract concept of sending information on an open network, Web 3.0 goes deeper into building a fairer and more transparent internet. For this reason, Web 3.0 is often associated with blockchain technology.
Web3 Foundation Grants Program — As part of our commitment to promoting the Web3 ecosystem, we offer comprehensive grants programs focused on funding software development and research efforts related to Polkadot, Kusama and Substrate
What Exactly is Web3? by Juan Benet at Web3 Summit 2018 — Juan Benet, Founder & CEO of Protocol Labs, talks about what Web3 is and how it is a part of a larger movement going on in the Internet in which humanity is going from a pre-computing civilization to a post-computing civilization.
Apple Quietly Buying Ads Via Google For High-Value Subscription Apps — Apple is secretly buying Google ads for high-value apps to collect potentially millions of dollars in subscription revenue, multiple app publishers have told me. Apple is placing the ads without the app developers’ consent, and Google won’t delete them, they say.
Apple’s Ad Network Is The Biggest Beneficiary Of Apple’s New Marketing Rules: Report — “ASA is the only media source in iOS that functions independently of SKAdNetwork and deterministically attributes users,” AppsFlyer says. “It is therefore no surprise that it is the new #1 player among consenting users in both the Retention Index’s global power and volume rankings.”
Three Tumbleweed Temptations | LINUX Unplugged 432
Nov 16, 2021
Can we live with openSUSE Tumbleweed?
We try three different builds and prepare ourselves for our journey into SUSE land. Our setups, what we liked, and what we still need to figure out.
SteamOS 3.0 will have an immutable filesystem - a first for arch? — During the Steam Deck Development live steam, Valve finally gave us some good news and said that SteamOS 3.0 will be generally available for everyone to install on their computers. They also revealed that SteamOS 3.0 will have an immutable root file system to prevent unauthorized access and use PipeWire for audio.
Manpage for transactional-update — Transactional-update updates the system in a transactional way; this means updates are atomic, so either the patches are fully applied or nothing is changed. The update does not influence the running system and it can be rolled back. To activate the changes, the system needs to be rebooted. To achieve this transactional-update is using Btrfs' snapshot mechanism, combined with the default distribution tools
Raspberry Pi OS hits the bullseye — Raspberry Pi announced the release of a new version of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian), which advances to the Debian 11 “bullseye” release.
What’s new in RHEL 8.5 — Customers running Microsoft SQL Server on RHEL will see a number of enhancements to help configure, manage and operate RHEL more efficiently.
AlmaLinux OS 8.5 Stable Now Available — AlmaLinux OS 8.5 includes features and improvements to container tools to reduce friction and make the build and deploy processes more flexible, support for OpenJDK 17, additional OpenSCAP profiles for hardening and security compliance, new system roles, and Network Time Security (NTS) for NTP, amongst other additions and enhancement.
Big Btrfs Changes in the Works — I’m working on a large set of on-disk format changes to address some of the more painful parts of Btrfs’s design. There’s a lot of discrete changes here, but they’ll all go under the single umbrella of “extent-tree-v2.”
Valve Shares New Steam Deck Details, Proton Update Available For Testing — Steam Deck will use an immutable root file-system, albeit can be changed for developers/enthusiasts wanting more control over the system state. The immutable root file-system approach is similar to the likes of Fedora Silverblue.
Better Open With — With so many cool Android apps, Better Open With saves you the hassle of having to choose only one default app handler when you click a filetype, and without having to choose between "only once" and "always"!
Announcing .NET 6 — There are massive gains in performance, which we’ve seen dropping the cost of hosting cloud services at Microsoft. .NET 6 is the first release that natively supports Apple Silicon (Arm64) and has also been improved for Windows Arm64.
Building the next phase of GitHub, together — This morning, I shared the following post with Hubbers in response to Nat’s announcement about his next adventure. I am thrilled to take on the role of CEO to build the next phase of GitHub for our global community of software developers.
Carl Richell on Twitter — We celebrated 16 years of @system76 today. It was a nice surprise.
This is about a third of the team. While we’ve adapted to remote work well, I miss full-company events and hope we can get back to those soon.
It’s Been 9 Years Since Valve Rolled Out The Steam Linux Beta — Over the past nine years Valve has done an incredible job advancing gaming for Linux and allowing it to reach heights never once imagined. As we move into 2022 and ten years of Steam on Linux it will be incredibly exciting to see how Steam Deck performs in the marketplace and ultimately its impact on the Linux ecosystem.
Kalendar is out! — Note that this is still an in-development release and that there will be bugs, features still to be added, and so on. We want your feedback — especially bug reports! These will help us improve Kalendar as much as we possible can before we can release a truly stable 1.0 version.
Linux HATES Me – Daily Driver CHALLENGE Pt.1 - YouTube — This is part 1 in a series where Linus and Luke migrate their home workstation to Linux. In this episode, each decides which Distro they'll use, and then tries to run a game on it.
Vorta for BorgBackup — Vorta is a backup client for macOS and Linux desktops. It integrates the mighty Borg Backup with your favorite desktop environment to protect your data from disk failure, ransomware and theft.
Nat Friedman quits as CEO of GitHub — GitHub CEO Nat Friedman announced today he's leaving the organization on November 15 and will be replaced by chief product officer Thomas Dohmke.
Google Will Now Pay $31,337 To $50,337 For New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities — Google is effectively tripling its previous reward amounts and promise to honor it for at least the next three months. They are hoping these $31,337 or $50,337 rewards will encourage more security researchers to explore the kernel and report their findings.
Ubuntu is Building a New Firmware Updater App — This new GUI utility is being built using Flutter and Dart, further cementing Ubuntu’s commitment to go all in on Flutter for future desktop apps. The tool will be distributed as a Snap and provide a Ubuntu-style front-end to the fwupd tool and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service.
WirePlumber in Fedora 35 — Today marks an exciting day as Fedora 35 has now been released, with WirePlumber as the default session manager for PipeWire!
SONOFF CC2531 USB Zigbee Dongle — The CC2531 USB dongle is a fully operational USB device which provides a PC interface to IEEE802.15.4 / ZigBee application
Obsidian — Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
MkDocs — MkDocs is a fast, simple and downright gorgeous static site generator that's geared towards building project documentation. Documentation source files are written in Markdown, and configured with a single YAML configuration file. Start by reading the introductory tutorial, then check the User Guide for more information.
Drone CI — Drone is a self-service Continuous Integration platform for busy development teams.
Home Assistant on Twitter — We encountered a daylight savings bug last weekend when Europe transitioned last weekend. A restart will resolve the issue. If you are yet to transition to a new summer/winter time, update to 2021.10.7.
The Oppenheimer Problem | Coder Radio 438
Nov 03, 2021
After a little async Ruby chat and developer morality struggle, Chris explains how macOS Monterey has lapped Linux with a critical workstation feature.
Google's 'Be Evil' business transformation is complete — Looking through the lawsuit, the scope and shamelessness of Google's greed would appear to be stark. Project Bernanke, for example, is claimed to take data from publishers' ad servers to boost Google's own services. Project NERA, to create a "not owned but operated" walled garden for users if they used any Google service. "Project Jedi" was allegedly meant to freeze out independent ad exchanges by using insider knowledge, and in "Jedi Blue", Google is alleged to have conspired with Facebook to parcel out the goodies between themselves.
fasterthanlime 🌌 on Twitter — "Ok so, I just read through all 173 pages of the unredacted Google antitrust filing and I have to say that either Google is screwed or society is screwed, we'll find out which."
Async Ruby — Async Ruby adds new concurrency features to the language; you can think of it as "threads with none of the downsides". It's been in the making for a couple of years, and with Ruby 3.0, it's finally ready for prime time.
Explaining Ruby Fibers — A fiber is simply an independent execution context that can be paused and resumed programmatically. We can think of fibers as story lines in a book or a movie: there are multiple happenings involving different persons at different places all occurring at the same time, but we can only follow a single story line at a time: the one we’re currently reading or watching.
Low Power Mode — The downside of any Low Power Mode feature will be reduced performance. This is generally easy to quantify via benchmarks, and the Mac's low power mode is not an exception
Erase all content and settings — Open System Preferences and check the menu bar to launch the Erase Assistant. In short, it retains the system data volume (originally introduced in Catalina) and formats the paired data volume, destroying your encryption keys in the process so that no data can be recovered from the drive.
Window management — Clicking and holding the green stoplight button when an app is in full-screen mode presents some additional options, too. In Big Sur, this menu will only offer to exit full-screen mode, but in Monterey you can send a Split View window into its own separate full-screen view, or you can replace one half of a Split View window with another app. And there’s also a setting that makes the menu bar stay at the top of the screen even when you’re using full-screen mode, instead of hiding-and-showing as it does by default.
Some Older Macs Reportedly Bricked After Installing macOS Monterey — At least ten separate posts (1, 2, 3 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) on Apple Support Communities contain users complaining that as they were attempting to update their Mac to macOS Monterey, the Mac went completely black and they're unable to turn it on.
The Real Beefy Miracle | LINUX Unplugged 430
Nov 02, 2021
We check-in with Fedora Project lead Matthew Miller on the state of the project, then conduct our exit interview with Fedora 34, and review Fedora 35.
What's new, what's changed, and what's broken. It's a Fedora special.
Writing a Linux-compatible kernel in Rust — I've been working on a new operating system kernel Kerla, written from scratch in Rust which aims to be Linux-compatible at the ABI level. In other words, support running unmodified Linux binaries!
Roving With Perseverance - NASA Mars — Displays including full-scale models of Perseverance and the Ingenuity Mars helicopter will be on exhibit in museums across the country
Remote desktop and screen casting in Wayland - GNOME Wiki! — Remote desktop functionality is not implemented in mutter but in GNOME Remote Desktop. GNOME Remote Desktop currently supports "screen share", also known as "remote assistance" mode through VNC or RDP. VNC support is provided via LibVNCServer and RDP support is provided via FreeRDP.
GNOME remote desktop RDP setup guide — The RDP server in gnome-remote-desktop currently doesn't have the UI to setup yet. To be able to use the RDP server, the server certificate, private keyfile and credentials therefore need to be created manually.
Worth the wait: Fedora Linux 35 is here! — We switched the default audio system to PipeWire in Fedora Linux 34, and now we’re improving this by adding the new WirePlumber session manager. WirePlumber allows for more customization of the policy and rules for audio and video. It provides a richer development experience and adds bindings for most languages.
WirePlumber 0.4.4 documentation — WirePlumber is a modular session / policy manager for PipeWire and a GObject-based high-level library that wraps PipeWire’s API, providing convenience for writing the daemon’s modules as well as external tools for managing PipeWire.
Tom Wagner / Helvum — Helvum is a GTK-based patchbay for pipewire, inspired by the JACK tool catia.
New Raspberry Pi hardware has a few surprises, the most impressive things in Linux 5.15, and our reaction to classic functionality under consideration for removal from Fedora.
New product: Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W on sale now at $15 — Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC die as the launch version of Raspberry Pi 3, with Arm cores slightly down-clocked to 1GHz, bundled into a single space-saving package alongside 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM.
Element One - Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place — Element One is a huge step change. It’s a very affordable, unlimited usage way for people to have all of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place - that’s a combined three billion users!
Fedora considers removing NIS support — The change proposal does note that: "For some users this change may be a bit disruptive and it may require some learning curve for switching to alternative solutions".
What is the support status of Network Information Service — As seen from the RHEL8.3 release notes the yp rpms (ypserv, ypbind, yp-tools) have been marked as deprecated. Furthermore those components will no longer be available in RHEL-9.
Microsoft Officially Deprecates UWP — Going forward, UWP will only receive “bug, reliability, and security fixes,” and not new features, Microsoft says, indicating that it is now deprecated.
vscode.dev Visual Studio Code for the Web — Now when you go to https://vscode.dev, you'll be presented with a lightweight version of VS Code running fully in the browser. Open a folder on your local machine and start coding.
Apple Announces 'Tech Talks' Where Developers Can Interface With Apple Experts — Apple says that developers can use the sessions to dive into technical content, get answers to questions, and seek one-on-one meetings for guidance. Sessions will be held online from Apple locations around the world in multiple time zones, including Bengaluru, India; Cupertino, California; London; Mexico City; São Paulo; Seoul, South Korea; Shanghai; Singapore; Sydney; Tel Aviv, Israel; and Tokyo.
Stack Overflow Blog — Network protocols in orbit: Building a space-based ISP
starlink-grpc-tools — This repository has a handful of tools for interacting with the gRPC service implemented on the Starlink user terminal (AKA "the dish").
Major performance milestones are being hit with new code inbound for Linux, Plasma and GNOME desktops are set to run Wayland on NVIDIA's binary driver, and why the SFC's new GPL fight could have implications for you.
Newest Linux Optimizations Can Achieve 10M IOPS Per-Core With IOuring — These optimizations today were primarily within the kernel's block / NVMe / IOuring code but also some touching the memory management code. All of these optimizations he has been pursuing for achieving the best possible per-core I/O performance can be found via linux-block's perf-wip branch.
KDE Plasma Readies Its NVIDIA GBM Support, Fingerprint Authentication Added — Initial support for the NVIDIA driver with KDE Plasma 5.23.2's GBM back-end. In conjunction with the NVIDIA 495 Linux driver beta exposing Generic Buffer Manager support, Plasma 5.23.2+ will play nicely with that new driver support on Wayland.
Copyleft Compliance Projects - Software Freedom Conservancy — Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit organization focused on ethical technology, is filing the lawsuit as the purchaser of a product which has copylefted code. This approach makes it the first legal case that focuses on the rights of individual consumers as third-party beneficiaries of the GPL.
Feeling Wyze | Self-Hosted 56
Oct 22, 2021
Local self-hosted video capture with AI object detection just got easy. Morgan joins us to detail his Frigate setup and its optional tight integration with Home Assistant.
Plus, our new favorite up time monitoring tool and an easy way to add Tailscale and other apps to OPNsense with community plugins.
OPNsense Repo — Welcome to my custom community repository, offering a couple of packages and plugins which are not available in core and even wouldn’t fit.
Uptime Kuma — It is a self-hosted monitoring tool like "Uptime Robot".
Frigate — A complete and local NVR designed for Home Assistant with AI object detection. Uses OpenCV and Tensorflow to perform realtime object detection locally for IP cameras.
(3) WallPanel and Alarm Panel Application Maintainers Wanted — I am looking for an individual or individuals to take over these projects. WallPanel is very popular for displaying the Home Assistant home page. Alarm Panel integrates with the Home Assistant Alarm component and the Alarmo integration.
Plex Meta Manager — Plex Meta Manager is a Python 3 script that can be continuously run using YAML configuration files to update on a schedule the metadata of the movies, shows, and collections in your libraries as well as automatically build collections based on various methods all detailed in the wiki.
Apple announces 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro — The M1 Pro chip is an upscaled version of the M1 chip, with up to 200 GB/s memory bandwidth, up to 32 GB RAM, and more than double the number of transistors. Apple said the CPU performance is about 70% faster than M1, and GPU performance is about double. M1 Max doubles RAM to 64 GB, and doubles the GPU size to 32 cores.
Diablo II: Resurrected Outages — tl;dr: Our server outages have not been caused by a singular issue; we are solving each problem as they arise, with both mitigating solves and longer-term architectural changes.
Facebook Newsroom on Twitter — Right now 30+ journalists are finishing up a coordinated series of articles based on thousands of pages of leaked documents. We hear that to get the docs, outlets had to agree to the conditions and a schedule laid down by the PR team that worked on earlier leaked docs.
Hector Martin on Twitter — Asahi Linux on M1 Pro bring-up stream ~next week. Thanks to all my Patreon supporters for making this kind of thing possible!
AlmaLinux ELevate — ELevate enables migration between major versions of RHEL® derivatives. Easily go from CentOS 7.x to any 8.x of your choice.
UTM — UTM employs Apple's Hypervisor virtualization framework to run ARM64 operating systems on Apple Silicon at near native speeds.
ytcc — Command line tool to keep track of your favorite playlists on YouTube and many other places.
rust-motd — Beautiful, useful MOTD generation with zero runtime dependencies.
Pick: onetun — onetun opens a TCP port on your local system, from which traffic is forwarded to a TCP port on a peer in your WireGuard network. It requires no changes to your operating system's network interfaces: you don't need to have root access, or install any WireGuard tool on your local system for it to work.
Linux Action News 211
Oct 17, 2021
We cover what's special about Plasma's 25th-anniversary edition, chat with CloudLinux's CEO, and detail why Apple supporting Blender is good for all of us.
Plus, why we're worried Ubuntu is losing its charm for developers.
Apple joins Blender Development Fund — The Blender Foundation, the organization behind the popular open source 3D creation tool “Blender”, today announced that Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member to support continued core development for Blender.
How to Use a Block Storage Volume with Plex Media Server — Plex is a media server that allows you to store your media on a remote server and stream it to your devices. This guide shows how to attach a Block Storage Volume to an existing Linode in order to meet the demands of a growing media library.
Ubuntu 21.10 is Now Available to Download — This release — the 35th Ubuntu release for those keeping count — is backed by 9 months of security updates, critical fixes, and select software updates.
SeaGL 2021 Schedule Published! — We’ll see you Friday November 5 & Saturday November 6 for SeaGL 2021, all virtual! As always, SeaGL is completely free to attend and no registration is required.
Ask Alice | Coder Radio 435
Oct 13, 2021
Mike just launched the secret project he's been working on for months and shares all the details.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — "Excited to share Alice from @TheMadBotterINC. She's an #automation #nocode tool that understands all kinds of different data formats and can help your business run more efficiently. Think of her as a Rosetta Stone for data! Got a problem? #AskAlice
Apple is appealing the Epic Games ruling it originally called a ‘resounding victory’ — Apple has filed for an appeal of the ruling in its major trial against Epic. While Apple largely won that case (the company went so far as to call the ruling a “resounding victory”) with Judge Gonzalez Rogers ruling in favor of Apple in nine of the ten claims Epic brought against the company, it did lose in one important way: the judge found that Apple violated California’s anti-steering rules, and demanded that Apple let developers link to outside payment systems. That policy would have taken over in December, but it may be pushed out beyond that — and it seems that’s the point.
Understanding all of Python, through its builtins — Python as a language is comparatively simple. And I believe, that you can learn quite a lot about Python and its features, just by learning what all of its builtins are, and what they do.
PyO3 — Rust bindings for Python, including tools for creating native Python extension modules. Running and interacting with Python code from a Rust binary is also supported.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — "Does anyone know of a way to get @TwitterSupport / @Twitter to review a site and relive that it shouldn’t be blacklisted? Kind of need this resolved for Monday"
Carl George on Twitter — "I’ve been playing around with matplotlib to chart this data over time. Due to the difference in scale it’s necessary to split into different ranges. The “Liberty” systems started showing up in August, with a high of 79 systems the week of 2021-09-06 to 2021-09-12."
Microsoft transforms the Windows Subsystem for Linux into a Windows 11 app — “Our goals are to make WSL in the Microsoft Store the best way to install and use WSL, as you’ll be able to get the latest updates fastest through that route, and in the long term we’d like to move WSL users to use the store version.”
Craig Loewen on Twitter — "A preview of WSL inside of the Microsoft Store is now available for Windows 11 machines!"
Hayden Barnes on Twitter — "So many new goodies today! WSL in the Store, WSLg bundled with WSL, new WSL2 kernel version, a bunch of fixes for ARM64 👀, wsl.exe --mount, and a handful of nice refinements and fixes."
Ubuntu 19.10 To 21.10: AMD Zen 2 + Radeon Performance On Linux Over Two Years — Ubuntu 19.10 was the first release following the Zen 2 debut in the summer of 2019. The benchmarks today are looking at the Ubuntu 19.10 performance up against the Ubuntu 21.10 daily ISO in its near final form ahead of the official release on Thursday.
MATE 1.26 released | MATE — The theme for this release has been adding new functionality to the MATE Desktop while maintaining the look and feel that we all know and love. While all the added features are surely quite exciting we also did not forget to do tons of bugfixing, modernising the code base and optimizing the performance.
KDE Plasma desktop 5.22 Release Announcement — This time around, the big new feature is Adaptive Transparency: This means the panel and panel widgets will usually be pleasantly translucent, but will become entirely opaque if there are any maximized windows, to avoid any visual distractions when you need to focus.
quickemu — Quickly create and run highly optimised desktop virtual machines for Linux, macOS and Windows; with just two commands. You decide what operating system you want to run and Quickemu will figure out the best way to do it for you.
A GUI for Quickemu — Provides an interface for setting up new VMs with Quickget, starting and stopping existing VMs.
Why I have decided to step down from the AlmaLinux OS Foundation Board — "So, here we are. I am no longer on the board - and I am no longer deciding what is next for AlmaLinux OS Foundation. I will continue to be heavily involved in the day-to-day of AlmaLinux. CloudLinux and TuxCare will continue being just one of many corporate sponsors. benny Vasquez was voted to become a new chair of the board, and I am sure that the foundation and the board will flourish under her guidance."
Linux Action News 210
Oct 10, 2021
Apple M1 Linux development reaches a key milestone and boots a useable desktop; Ubuntu reveals a new product, and the secret SUSE project that leaked this week.
Plus, the essential RISC-V code landing in the Linux kernel.
Linux 5.16 KVM To Land RISC-V Hypervisor Support — Given that it's taken a while to freeze, there isn't yet any performant RISC-V processors out there actually implementing the complete extension and so for now and during development, it's been a function of running it on simulators.
Canonical launches Ubuntu Frame, the foundation for embedded displays — Canonical announces the release of Ubuntu Frame, a solution that allows developers to easily build and deploy graphical applications for interactive kiosks, digital signage solutions, or any other products that require a graphical output.
Software Engineer - Toolbox (containers / desktop / golang) — The Red Hat Desktop team is looking for a Software Engineer to join us. In this role, you will develop and maintain containerization technologies for software development like toolbox.
SUSE Working on a CentOS Clone? — I like looking in dnf countme data to see the various distros requesting EPEL repos. There are often many weird distro names showing up in the single digits. But this one jumped out at me with 38 hits last week
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) — High-quality packages that have been developed, tested, and improved in Fedora available for RHEL and compatible derivatives such as CentOS and Scientific Linux.
Home Assistant Turns Amber | Self-Hosted 55
Oct 08, 2021
A lot is changing in Home Assistant land, and it's almost all for the better; we break down the essential items. Chris gets wired about energy monitoring and shares his journey to get miss-formated power stats working in Home Assistant's new Energy dashboard.
Plus, off-line YouTube backup, backing up iCloud photos, Tailscale feedback, and more.
Z-Wave JS - Home Assistant — This integration allows you to control a Z-Wave network via the Z-Wave JS driver. This is our recommended Z-Wave integration for Home Assistant.
Home Assistant Amber | Crowd Supply — This flagship version of Home Assistant Amber is ready to go out of the box. It comes pre-assembled in a custom enclosure with a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) and a custom heat sink for fanless, silent operation. The CM4 is a version without wireless and has 2 GB RAM and 16 GB eMMC storage, pre-installed with Home Assistant.
Integration - Riemann sum integral - Home Assistant — The integration platform provides the Riemann sum of the values provided by a source sensor. The Riemann sum is an approximation of an integral by a finite sum. The integration sensors is updated upon changes of the source.
History Stats - Home Assistant — The history_stats sensor platform provides quick statistics about another integration or platforms, using data from the history integration.
Utility Meter - Home Assistant — The utility meter integration provides functionality to track consumptions of various utilities (e.g., energy, gas, water, heating).
Tubesync — TubeSync is a PVR (personal video recorder) for YouTube. Or, like Sonarr but for YouTube (with a built-in download client). It is designed to synchronize channels and playlists from YouTube to local directories and update your media server once media is downloaded.
This Old Linux PC | LINUX Unplugged 426
Oct 07, 2021
It's the worst time ever to upgrade or buy a new PC, so we cover our favorite tips for getting the most out of your current hardware. Then we pit a 2014 desktop against a 2021 laptop and find out if our old clunker can beat the Thinkpad.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Christian F.K. Schaller, Jack Aboutboul, and Martin Wimpress.
PipeWire and fixing the Linux Video Capture stack — With PipeWire having stabilized a lot for audio now we feel the time has come to go back to the video side of PipeWire and work to improve the state-of-art for video capture handling under Linux.
Linux Action News 209 — Why Linus believes keeping Linux fun is critical, the massive investment Fedora is about to make in video, and why we suspect Cloudflare's R2 service will make Amazon squirm.
AlmaLinux OS Foundation Membership Opens to the Public — An individual can qualify for membership as anyone who uses AlmaLinux OS, contributes to AlmaLinux OS, provides services to the AlmaLinux OS community or otherwise supports the AlmaLinux OS. All past and present contributors or mirror maintainers would qualify as Contributor members.
What AlmaLinux Foundation Membership Means for You - AlmaLinux OS Blog — We all own AlmaLinux now and no one can change that. Forever. Not CloudLinux, not any other corporation or anyone else. Our fate and future are in the hands of every member and is ours alone to control. We're no longer bound by one person, group or entity. It can not be bought nor sold, nor transferred or fought about.
Pick: Helvum — Helvum is a GTK-based patchbay for pipewire, inspired by the JACK tool catia.
Pick: tubesync — Syncs YouTube channels and playlists to a locally hosted media server.
Coding Gungan Style | Coder Radio 434
Oct 06, 2021
It's final push time on a big project for Mike, but Chris is the one who is exhausted. Still we've got some new insights into testing and thoughts on an emerging category of developer.
Plus, why the hermit developer is alive and well, some important feedback, and a Python tip.
Hermit programmers are dead — However, with the advent of cloud computing and AI, the scenery may change soon for this profession. It’s time for programmers to mutate into sociable software engineers, recap and re-adapt, and take advantage of the only thing that machines cannot overtake: our human nature. Otherwise, I believe misfit programmers will perish… for sure.
Why OpenAI’s Codex Won’t Replace Coders — It might create a new specialty, too: "prompt engineering," the often-complex process of crafting the textual prompts which allow AI systems like Codex to work their magic.
Python Sample for Tip of the Week — This is an example of being able to use type hinting on a return < Python 3.10. In 3.10 the from future will not be required. This requires Python 3.6+
Python 3.10 Release Stream — with Pablo Galindo - YouTube — Python 3.10 is set to be released on 4 October 2021. Join us live in our Python 3.10 Release Stream with Pablo Galindo, CPython Core Developer and Python 3.10 Release Manager, and Leon Sandøy.
Linus Tech Tips Linux Challenge: Our Reaction | Jupiter Extras 76
Oct 05, 2021
Our virtual LUG of experts had a lot to say about the Linus Tech Tips Switch to Linux challenge. We recap what is going on, how it could go wrong, and what we hope happens.
This release is an excerpt from our LINUX Unplugged live stream on Tuesday, October 5th, 2021.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Martin Wimpress, and Neal Gompa.
Why Linus believes keeping Linux fun is critical, the massive investment Fedora is about to make in video, and why we suspect Cloudflare's R2 service will make Amazon squirm.
Plus a low key update to the Raspberry Pi 4, and the changes in the new Docker Compose 2.0.
Linus Torvalds on Community, Rust and Linux’s Longevity — The ceremony opened by acknowledging a special moment in time with a birthday cake ceremoniously delivered to Torvalds to mark Linux’s 30th anniversary, drawing a round of applause from the audience.
Raspberry Pi 4 model Bs arriving with newer ‘C0’ stepping — The local Micro Center only had the 8 GB model in stock, so I went a little over budget and bought it. When I arrived home, I checked the board, and noticed a bit of a difference on the Broadcom SoC
Linode on Twitter — We’re rolling out ultra-fast, better-performing, and more reliable NVMe block storage across all 11 of our global data centers
Ubuntu Community on Twitter — An experimental open-source/libre snap server and wrapper by @RudraSaraswat1 is ready with the name 'lol'. You can daily-drive it on most distributions which support snaps.
Activist employees told the publication that Cook answered only two of a number of questions they wanted to ask. The report fails to detail what those two questions were, but notes the Apple chief did comment on pay equity, at least in part.
FastAPI — FastAPI is a modern, fast (high-performance), web framework for building APIs with Python 3.6+ based on standard Python type hints.
Starlette — Starlette is a lightweight ASGI framework/toolkit, which is ideal for building high performance asyncio services.
pydantic — Data validation and settings management using python type annotations.
Typer — Typer is a library for building CLI applications that users will love using and developers will love creating. Based on Python 3.6+ type hints.
SQLModel — SQL databases in Python, designed for simplicity, compatibility, and robustness.
Street Coder — Software development isn't an "ivory tower" exercise. Street coders get the job done by prioritizing tasks, making quick decisions, and knowing which rules to break.
Coder to Developer — Coder to Developer helps you excel at the many non-coding tasks entailed, from start to finish, in just about any successful development project.
Amazon’s Astro home robot is like having Alexa on wheels — Amazon claims the Astro can do a wide variety of things you might want from a home robot. It can map out your floor plan and obey commands to go to a specific room. It can recognize faces and deliver items to a specific person.
Syscall User Dispatch — The Linux Kernel documentation — Compatibility layers like Wine need a way to efficiently emulate system calls of only a part of their process - the part that has the incompatible code - while being able to execute native syscalls without a high performance penalty on the native part of the process. Syscall User Dispatch brings the filtering of the syscall dispatcher address back to userspace.
Poll: Which “server” distro should we go with next? — So it's time to replace our garage server... We've been running Arch, and so far it's worked mostly great. Should we keep pushing our luck, or try something new?
Canonical gives Linux admins a lucky break, the details on Android's slow shift to an upstream Kernel, a breakthrough for Linux gaming, and our take on GNOME 41.
Plus how AlmaLinux just rounded out their offering.
Canonical extends support for 14.04 and 16.04 LTS • The Register — Users still running on 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), released back in April 2014, now have until April 2024 (up from 2022) to make the move to something more recent. 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), which dropped into Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) in April this year, has had this extended from April 2024 to April 2026.
BattlEye on Twitter — “BattlEye has provided native Linux and Mac support for a long time and we can announce that we will also support the upcoming Steam Deck (Proton). This will be done on an opt-in basis with game developers choosing whether they want to allow it or not.”
Linode on Twitter — “We’re rolling out ultra-fast, better-performing, and more reliable NVMe block storage across all 11 of our global data centers 🚀
GNOME 41 Released With Wayland Improvements, More Performance Tuning — This morning's GNOME 41 release announcement sums up the new release as "Highlights in this release include improvements to the Software app, new multitasking settings and enhanced power management. Beyond that, there is a new Connections application, a refreshed Music application, performance improvements from the compositor to the toolkit, and much more."
Alex is abroad and uses the opportunity to build out not one but two ultimate self-hosted off-site servers. We share the hardware, software, and networking details.
Plus, how Chris built a Nest-type thermostat using parts he already had.
Tailscale · Best VPN Service for Secure Networks — Create a secure network between your servers, computers, and cloud instances. Even when separated by firewalls or subnets, Tailscale just works.
headscale — An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale coordination server.
autorestic: High level CLI utility for restic — Autorestic is a wrapper around the amazing restic. While being amazing the restic cli can be a bit overwhelming and difficult to manage if you have many different locations that you want to backup to multiple locations. This utility is aimed at making this easier 🙂.
Generic Thermostat - Home Assistant — The generic_thermostat climate platform is a thermostat implemented in Home Assistant. It uses a sensor and a switch connected to a heater or air conditioning under the hood. When in heater mode, if the measured temperature is cooler than the target temperature, the heater will be turned on and turned off when the required temperature is reached.
Apple Releases iOS 15 and iPadOS 15 — A new Focus mode cuts down on distractions by limiting what's accessible and who can contact you, and notifications can now be grouped up in daily summaries.
iOS and iPadOS 15: The MacStories Review - Section on Focus — What stood out to me when I started playing around with Apple’s presets for Focus (which include the basic Do Not Disturb, Driving, and Sleep, plus templates for Fitness, Gaming, and Reading) is the number of personalization options that were previously hard to find or not available at all with the classic Do Not Disturb.
Singularity – Microsoft’s Experimental OS — These are the type of questions that the Microsoft Research team was trying to answer around 18 years ago and it was then when they came up with a pretty cool name for their new OS — Singularity.
As A Solo Developer, I Decided To Offer Phone Support, And This Is What Happened — As a matter of fact, when it comes to large problems, offering phone support enables you to understand that inconveniences that occur when the app’s behaviors and messages are hard to understand are more frequent than bugs in the programming (when bugs crash the application, it’s easy to identify them through the log, and no reports are made with a phone call).
Space for Theming | LINUX Unplugged 424
Sep 21, 2021
A serious problem is brewing in Desktop Linux that hasn't impacted end users yet, but will soon. We break down why distribution makers are getting upset and explain what's next.
Plus, an update on Matrix and the recent upgrades we made to our server.
Building an Alternative Ecosystem | Joshua Strobl — While we have been consistent in this vision, though certainly not without flaws in its execution, we have seen a significant shift from GNOME’s development efforts and vision being focused from their desktop experience, to a heavier focus on mobile-to-desktop application scalability and a more touch-oriented, almost iPadOS like user experience that does not (in our opinion) provide the most optimized experience for laptop and desktop users.
Spaces: The next frontier — Using Spaces and Subspaces to build hierarchies effectively turns Matrix into a global decentralised filesystem for conversations and other real-time data!
toger5/TheBoard — A collaborative Whiteboard powered by the [matrix] protocol and infrastucture.
Compressing Synapse database | Levans’ workshop — Anyone running a federating instance of the Matrix homeserver Synapse will likely have seen this: synapse is database-hungry. It tends to take a lot of space. In this post, I'm documenting how I shrunk my homeserver database from 100GB to a little under 8GB, during a long maintenance cleanup.
Pick: Wayfire — Wayfire is a wayland compositor based on wlroots. It aims to create a customizable, extendable and lightweight environment without sacrificing its appearance.
Desktop Linux graphics are about to get a significant investment, Mozilla and Canonical work together on a Firefox Snap, and some key new insights into the Linux port to Apple’s M1.
Red Hat - Senior Software Engineer - HDR Enablement — The Red Hat Workstation Engineering team is looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to work on desktop, compositor, and GPU support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) formats and displays for Linux.
Jared Domínguez on Twitter — "It's that time again. I'm looking for someone to join my team to work on enabling HDR support in upstream Linux, Fedora and RHEL. Global applicants welcome. Underrepresented minorities highly encouraged."
Ubuntu to Make Firefox Snap Default in 21.10 — “Per Canonical’s distribution agreement with Mozilla, we’re making the snap the default installation of firefox on desktop ISOs starting with Ubuntu 21.10.”
Feature Freeze Exception: Seeding the official Firefox snap in Ubuntu Desktop — This is the result of cooperation and collaboration between the Desktop and Snap teams at Canonical and Mozilla developers, and is the first step towards a deb-to-snap transition that will take place during the 22.04 development cycle.
Apple Silicon / M1 Port Planned For GCC 12 — While the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) supports AArch64 and macOS/Darwin, it hasn't supported the two of them together but there is a port in progress to change it.
Alyssa Rosenzweig on Twitter — Hello from Linux on my M1's internal storage! Thank you to @svenpeter42 for the NVMe driver. My daily driver now supports internal storage plus hotpluggable HDMI (native resolution), USB, and Ethernet.
LVFS joins Linux Foundation — The Linux Foundation welcomes the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) as a new project.
Richard wrote on twitter — We hit 2 million firmware downloads in the last 30 days for the first time. There are now over 3000 firmware files available on the LVFS, with over 100 vendors using 50 different protocols. It's been a huge amount of work but it feels pretty awesome.
There’s now malware for Windows Subsystem for Linux — "These files acted as loaders running a payload that was either embedded within the sample or retrieved from a remote server and was then injected into a running process using Windows API calls,
GitKraken — Legendary Git GUI client for Windows, Mac & Linux
Apple Unveils iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max — Apple today announced the iPhone 13 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro Max at its "California Streaming" event, featuring brighter Super Retina XDR displays with ProMotion, improved rear cameras, a more powerful variant of the A15 Bionic chip, up to 1TB of storage, a new Sierra Blue color option, and more.
Java 17 / JDK 17 — JDK 17, the reference implementation of Java 17, is now Generally
Available. We shipped build 35 as the first Release Candidate of
JDK 17 on 6 August, and no P1 bugs have been reported since then.
Build 35 is therefore now the GA build, ready for production use.
K-Duo — This versatile brewer is the best of both worlds, using both K-Cup® pods and ground coffee to brew a cup and a carafe of your favorite varieties.
Email from Purism — As previously announced, we will be increasing prices for all new orders of the Librem 5 in stages (the phone will be priced at $1199 from all orders received on or after Nov 1st, 2021 and we expect this price to go upward to $1299 in March 2022) as component prices change and as we deliver greater quantities of product.
Linux Phones | Madaidan’s Insecurities — Linux phones lack any significant security model and the points from the Linux article apply to Linux phones fully. There is not yet a single Linux phone with a sane security model.
Linux kernel needs more phones and tablets, says developer — "Especially for guys even running upstream kernel on RPI CM4 like me, more ARM devices with upstream kernel support will just be more happiness. Not to mention this also means super long time support, way longer than the lifespan of those devices."
POKE 756,224 on Twitter — @ChrisLAS I admire your quest to get Linux running on your Thinkpad with the same battery life and perf you get on Windows. I've gotta admit, I've given up and just run Windows on mine, and the ugly truth is that Windows 11 is, for my needs anyway, really nice!
Pick: Flatseal — Flatseal is a graphical utility to review and modify permissions from your Flatpak applications.
Linux Action News 206
Sep 12, 2021
Linus Torvalds attempts to get kernel developers to clean up their code, the performance regression that almost shipped, and the major production struggle Red Hat acknowledged this week.
Plus, we try out Microsoft’s Linux distro, and some thoughts on our editorial style.
We chat with Matt from Adventurous Way about the home automations that have improved his quality of life, the clever way he manages their off-grid rig, and the new smart home project he's just kicking off.
Adventurous Way - YouTube — Our motto is to live life the adventurous way. If there is a conventional way to do something and an adventurous way to do something - we choose the adventurous way.
Our DIY RV electrical system 3 years later - a detailed walk-through - YouTube — We installed our DIY RV electrical system as soon as we hit the road in the RV almost 3 years ago. In this video, we give you a detailed walk-through of our system that consists of 300Ah Battle Born Batteries, Victron inverter, DC to DC charger, 600 watts of rooftop solar that lets us boondock in beautiful places that we otherwise couldn't.
SONOFF SV — Wi-Fi DIY Smart Switch for low voltage goodness
CARP — CARP is the Common Address Redundancy Protocol. Its primary purpose is to allow multiple hosts on the same network segment to share an IP address. CARP is a secure, free alternative to the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRP) and the Hot Standby Router Protocol (HSRP).
Color Control GX — The Color Control GX is the communication-centre of your installation. It offers at-a-glance live information, and lets you control all products connected to it.
Node-RED — Node-RED is a programming tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways.
Pi-KVM — This device helps to manage servers or workstations remotely, regardless of the health of the operating system or whether one is installed. You can fix any problem, configure the BIOS, and even reinstall the OS using the virtual CD-ROM or Flash Drive.
Python in Visual Studio Code — We are pleased to announce that the September 2021 release of the Python Extension for Visual Studio Code is now available.
The Light Phone — The Light Phone II is a premium, minimal phone. It will never have social media, clickbait news, email, an internet browser, or any other anxiety-inducing infinite feed.
Nftables reaches 1.0 — The release of nftables 1.0.0 can be seen as a signal that it is time for the laggards to get more serious about making the switch. While it is hard to imagine iptables support being removed anytime soon, it's rather easier to foresee that enthusiasm for maintaining it will continue to wane. It only took 13 years, but this transition finally appears to be heading into its final stage.
Pick: yt-dlp — A youtube-dl fork with additional features and fixes.
Pick: ytmdl — A simple app to get songs from YouTube in mp3 format with artist name, album name etc from sources like iTunes, Spotify, LastFM, Deezer, Gaana etc.
Linux Action News 205
Sep 05, 2021
SUSE's new era kicks off this week, CentOS users get some relief, and how Docker managed to piss off their users.
Plus RISC-V gets a surprising benefactor, and the kernel feature we never thought would get merged that was just approved by Linus.
SUSE Rancher 2.6 Launches After the Acquisition of Rancher Labs — The number of Kubernetes distributions SUSE Rancher 2.6 can support has been raised by two, with the addition of Microsoft Azure’s AKS and Google Cloud Platform’s GKE. Rancher 2.6 also will add support for SLE’s Base Container Images.
SUSE Updates Rancher Platform for Kubernetes — Version 2.6 of SUSE Rancher adds a revamped user interface with improved logic-based workflows along with providing integration with SUSE Linux Enterprise Base Container Images (SLE BCI), a repository for container images for SUSE Linux.
Docker is Updating and Extending Our Product Subscriptions - Docker Blog — The new Docker Personal subscription replaces the Docker Free subscription. With its focus on open source communities, individual developers, education, and small businesses – which together account for more than half of Docker users – Docker Personal is free for these communities.
Linux on the Framework Laptop — We recommend using 5.12 or newer for a kernel to get solid platform, WiFi, and bluetooth functionality, along with libfprint 1.92.0 or newer for the fingerprint reader. All of the other hardware like speakers, microphones, headphones, webcam, hardware privacy switches, keyboard media keys, ambient light sensor, and all of the Expansion Cards should work completely.
Apple Possibly Exploring Open-Source Alternative to Arm Architecture — According to a newly posted job alert, spotted by Tom's Hardware, Apple is looking for an engineer that specializes in RISC-V, an open-source architecture instruction set that allows device makers to build their own chips without having to pay a license or royalty.
Apple M1 IOMMU Driver Merged For Linux 5.15, Intel Scalable Mode By Default — This IOMMU on the Apple M1 has been a bit challenging for the developers to deal with as the hardware is fixed to using a 16K pagesize while there is ongoing work to improve the infrastructure so it will play happy when using a kernel with 4K CPU pagesize.
KSMBD As An In-Kernel SMB3 File Server Merged For Linux 5.15 — KSMBD, developed by Samsung, is focused on delivering speedy SMB3 file serving performance and also supporting features more implemented in kernel-space, like RDMA support for SMB Direct. KSMBD doesn't aim to be as comprehensive as well known Samba for CIFS/SMB support in user-space but is just focused on the performance and kernel feature angle.
Apple Fools Everyone | Coder Radio 429
Sep 01, 2021
Recent reports would have you believe Apple has made significant concessions to developers. Don't be fooled! We read between the lines and break down what is and what is not changing.
Plus, some thoughts on environmental PCs and the question we hate the most.
Colony Tracker - Live Tracker — Use the live tracker (powered by Linode) to check the current location. If we're going to be in your area, hit that micro-meetup link.
Election Day Linux Desktop Contest — I am happy to announce that The Mad Botter INC is once again hosting an open-source software development contest for US students.
Server Savior Squad | LINUX Unplugged 421
Aug 31, 2021
A surprise server outage at the studio requires we jump into action with a few last-minute solutions and deploy one of our favorite open-source tools.
Plus some community news, handy picks, emails, and more. It's a special edition of the Unplugged show.
SCO v. IBM settlement deal is done — Documents filed in the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware last week suggest a settlement payment of just $14.25 million will see the matter closed.
Ventoy Adds a Web GUI — Ventoy now ships with a web-based graphical user interface since version 1.0.36.
Ventoy — Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.
“Apps For GNOME” Launches To Highlight GNOME Apps — There hasn't been a comprehensive, modern, user-friendly web-site for outlining all of the GNOME apps and inviting participation until now with this Apps for GNOME.
Pick: psst — Fast and multi-platform Spotify client with native GUI.
Linux Action News 204
Aug 29, 2021
Why the Linux kernel received so much mainstream attention this week, some of our favorite open-source projects get great updates, and why we're concerned about Linux Foundation members transferring innovation from Linux to closed source software at an industrial scale.
Linux 5.14 set to boost future enterprise application security — A particular area of interest for both enterprise and cloud users is always security and to that end, Linux 5.14 will help with several new capabilities. Mike McGrath, vice president, Linux Engineering at Red Hat told TechCrunch that the kernel update includes a feature known as core scheduling, which is intended to help mitigate processor-level vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown
PipeWire 0.3.34 Released — Bluetooth battery status support for head-set profile and using Apple extensions. aptX-LL and FastStream codec support was added.
CodeWeavers still hiring for a ‘General Wine Developer' — CodeWeavers announced recently they need a bit of help on finding more developers, with a spot still currently open for a 'General Wine Developer' who will work on Wine and Proton.
Microsoft, Google partner on eBPF — Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the new eBPF Foundation, which was unveiled August 12, plans to expand eBPF and extend it beyond Linux.
Linux On The Apple M1 Can Now Boot To The GNOME Desktop — Alyssa Rosenweig, who has been working on reverse engineering the Apple M1 GPU since January, has now posted a screenshot of "GNOME Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal."
Kobol Team is pulling the plug ;( — Hi Folks, a bit saddened that after 4 months of radio silence we are coming up with a news that is clearly not the one you were expecting.
SSH 033: Helios64 Review — Alex puts the fantastic-looking, ARM-powered NAS known as the Helios64 to the test.
docker-wyze-bridge — Docker container to expose a local RTMP, RTSP, and HLS stream for all your Wyze cameras including v3. No Third-party or special firmware required.
The Unicorn Project — The Unicorn Project reveals the Five Ideals: The First Ideal of Locality and Simplicity; The Second Ideal of Focus, Flow, and Joy; The Third Ideal of Improvement of Daily Work; The Fourth Ideal of Psychological Safety; and the Fifth Ideal of Focus on the Customer.
The Effective Manager — The Effective Manager is a hands-on practical guide to great management at every level. Written by the man behind Manager Tools, the world's number-one business podcast, this book distills the author's 25 years of management training expertise into clear, actionable steps to start taking today.
URLSession — The URLSession class and related classes provide an API for downloading data from and uploading data to endpoints indicated by URLs. Your app can also use this API to perform background downloads when your app isn’t running
Objective-See: LuLu — LuLu is the free, open-source firewall that aims to block unknown outgoing connections, protecting your privacy and your Mac!
Little Snitch — Little Snitch makes Internet connections visible and puts you back in control!
Jeremy C. Owens on Twitter — After another meeting between Apple and Google senior executives, notes showed that the execs agreed: "Our vision is that we work as if we are one company."
Real People Are Out There | LINUX Unplugged 420
Aug 24, 2021
We share some stories from our Denver meetup, the strange reason we found ourselves at a golf course, and some news you should know.
jonhat on Twitter — Need local admin and have physical access? Plug a Razer mouse (or the dongle), windows Update will download and execute RazerInstaller as SYSTEM, then abuse elevated Explorer to open Powershell with Shift+Right click.
Btrfs Set To Land Support For IDMAPPED Mounts In Linux 5.15 — Back when IDMAPPED mounts functionality was added to the Linux kernel, the initial implementation came for FAT and EXT4. XFS support has also been in the works while now for Linux 5.15 the Btrfs support appears ready.
IDMAPPED Mounts Aim For Linux 5.12 - Many New Use-Cases From Containers To Systemd-Homed — Idmapped mounts make it possible to easily share files between multiple users or multiple machines especially in complex scenarios. For example, idmapped mounts will be used in the implementation of portable home directories in systemd-homed.service(8) where they allow users to move their home directory to an external storage device and use it on multiple computers where they are assigned different uids and gids.
brauner/mount-idmapped — Helper utility to use IDMAPPED mounts until upstream support exists.
Ubuntu 21.10 Systemd To Finally Ship With Cgroup v2 By Default — Ubuntu has been sticking to the legacy cgroup v1 hierarchy because their prized Snap support hasn't supported Cgroup v2. Upstream Snap still doesn't have the support yet but there are patches pending that are still expected to be merged this cycle.
Fedora 35 To Support Restarting User Services On Package Upgrades — What this ultimately means is that user services like PipeWire can seamlessly restart when upgrading them via Fedora RPM updates rather than needing to manually do so or restarting the system for the upgrade to take effect.
Linux Action News 203
Aug 22, 2021
What’s coming next for the Linux desktop, and some exclusive news from System76.
Plus, we try out Element’s new voice messages and share our thoughts.
This week in KDE — The KDE Project released today KDE Gear 21.08 as the newest series of their open-source software suite for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and other projects.
MATE 1.26 Desktop Released With Some Wayland Support — After one and a half years in development of MATE 1.26 as a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop components, this release is now available with initial Wayland support and more.
Element introduces Voice Messages — This has been one of our oldest and most upvoted feature requests ever, so we are incredibly happy to unleash our first version of it at last.
Launch Configurable Keyboard | System76 — The Launch Configurable Keyboard is engineered to be comfortable, fully customizable, and make your workflow more efficient.
Second-Class Desktop | Coder Radio 427
Aug 18, 2021
Chris makes a big mistake on the road, and Mike drops some reality-based sage wisdom.
But it's really all just a ruse to get you to email the show.
Denver Meetup | Meetup — This meet up starts at 4pm MDT but you are welcome to (encouraged even) to trickle in anytime between 4-7pm
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2021 — In May 2021 over 80,000 developers told us how they learn and level up, which tools they’re using, and what they want.
Steve Troughton-Smith on Twitter — The Mac is in the best place it’s ever been, fresh off a CPU transition, new design language, and beautiful new hardware, w/ 2 brand new UI frameworks, universal apps, and a popular new programming language. If all that’s not enough to convince devs to make native apps, what is?
Users lobby 1Password to abandon new Electron version — The forthcoming 1Password 8 for Mac is now in beta, but instead of a regular Mac app, it uses the resource-intensive Electron system — and users are objecting.
What's Cookin' at System76 | LINUX Unplugged 419
Aug 17, 2021
Live from Denver, we chat with old friends and new. We get the inside scope on what has been going on at System76, and what's coming up next.
Plus we catch up with a few members of our crew, and find out what Linux tech they're loving these days.
Special Guests: Aaron Honeycutt, Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Carl Richell, Cassidy James Blaede, chzbacon, and Ian Santopietro.
Gadgetbridge for android — Gadgetbridge is an Android (4.4+) application which will allow you to use your Pebble, Mi Band, Amazfit Bip and HPlus device (and more) without the vendor's closed source application and without the need to create an account and transmit any of your data to the vendor's servers.
tldr: Collaborative cheatsheets for console commands — The tldr-pages project is a collection of community-maintained help pages for command-line tools, that aims to be a simpler, more approachable complement to traditional man pages.
Energy Management in Home Assistant — Today’s release of Home Assistant Core 2021.8 contains a new energy dashboard. The goal is to make it super easy for users to get insight into their energy usage.
Death of man pages? — "I'm seeing a sad pattern lately. Software for Linux is being distributed for Linux as containers such as flatpaks, appimages, etc. or as straight binaries but the documentation that come with these formats in very limited or non-existent. I've also not seen any applications distributed this way contain man pages."
Debian 11 “bullseye” Released — After 2 years, 1 month, and 9 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 11 (code name bullseye), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.
Microsoft & Others Form The eBPF Foundation - Phoronix — For driving eBPF usage moving forward for these sandboxed programs within the Linux kernel, the eBPF Foundation has been formed with backing from The Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, Google, and others.
Apple's Rotten Scanning | Self-Hosted 51
Aug 13, 2021
We discuss the ramifications of Apple's local photo scanning announcement on your privacy, why everything seems to be a subscription these days, and a new challenge for the show.
Apple to scan U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse — Apple unveiled plans to scan U.S. iPhones for images of child sexual abuse, drawing applause from child protection groups but raising concern among some security researchers that the system could be misused, including by governments looking to surveil their citizens.
Edward Snowden on Twitter — No matter how well-intentioned, @Apple
is rolling out mass surveillance to the entire world with this. Make no mistake: if they can scan for kiddie porn today, they can scan for anything tomorrow.
They turned a trillion dollars of devices into iNarcs—without asking.
Exclusive: Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained — Apple Inc AAPL.O dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices in the company's iCloud service after the FBI complained that the move would harm investigations, six sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.
elementary OS 6 Odin Available Now — It’s been a long road to elementary OS 6 but it’s finally here. elementary OS 6 Odin is available to download now. And it’s the biggest update to the platform yet!
Valve working with AMD to support Windows 11 on Steam Deck — “There’s work looking at TPM just now. We’ve focused so much on Windows 10, so far, that we haven’t really gotten that far into it. Our expectation is that we can meet that.”
wg-easy — The easiest way to run WireGuard VPN + Web-based Admin UI.
drago — Securely connect anything with WireGuard® and manage all your networks from a single place.
WireGuard Home Assistant Community Add-on — WireGuard is pretty simple, however, can be quite complex for user that isn't familiar with all terminology used. The add-on takes care of a lot of things for you (if you want).
autowire — Automatically configure Wireguard interfaces in distributed system. It supports Consul as backend.
netmaker — Netmaker is a platform for creating and managing fast, secure, and dynamic virtual overlay networks using WireGuard.
wiretrustee — Connect your devices into a single secure private WireGuard®-based mesh network.
headscale — An open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.
innernet — A private network system that uses WireGuard under the hood.
Pro Custodibus — Pro Custodibus is a SaaS with a web GUI that makes it easy to add users and devices to WireGuard VPNs, manage their configuration, and monitor their usage.
New WireGuardNT shatters throughput ceilings on Windows — The WireGuard VPN project announced a major milestone for its Windows users today—an all-new, kernel-mode implementation of the VPN protocol called WireGuardNT. The new implementation allows for massively improved throughput on 10Gbps LAN connections—and on many WI-Fi connections, as well.
Google Calls On Companies To Devote More Engineers To Upstream Linux, Toolchains — The post notes that stable Linux kernel releases see close to 100 new fixes each week, but given that rate of change vendors are not always picking up the latest fixes or in some cases just trying to cherry-pick the "important" fixes. Besides acknowledging the need for more upstream kernel developers, the post also encourages vendors to go the route of chasing the latest Linux stable or LTS kernel releases in order to incorporate all fixes.
Intel Proposes Linux Kernel Driver Allow/Deny Filtering — Given the VMM is an untrusted entity and the VMM presents emulated
hardware to the guest, a threat vector similar to Thunderclap [1] is
present. Also, for ease of deployment, it is useful to be able to use
the same kernel binary on host and guest, but that presents a wide
attack surface given the range of hardware supported in typical
builds.
A major bug fix week over at the KDE project — We are really trying to improve the stability of our software now that it’s starting to be used in more 3rd-party products like the Steam Deck.
Lutris 0.5.9 Beta Released With Epic Games Store Support — The Lutris 0.5.9 beta delivers on initial support for the Epic Games Store, support for DXVK-NVAPI and DLSS, FidelityFX Super Resolution is now an exposed option for compatible Wine versions, Valve's Gamescope Wayland game compositor is now an option, Esync usage is now enabled by default, the Dolphin emulator is now available as a game source, improved process monitoring, and other enhancements. It's quite a hearty update for this game manager.
Sorbet Compiler — For the past year, the Sorbet team has been working on an experimental, ahead-of-time compiler for Ruby, powered by Sorbet and LLVM. Today we’re sharing the source code for it.
Patrick Collison on Twitter — We're big believers in multi-year infrastructure bets. After a few years of Ruby infra work, our in-house Ruby compiler is now 22–170% faster than Ruby's default implementation for Stripe's production API traffic. If interested in working on such problems, we're hiring!
Sorbet · A static type checker for Ruby — Sorbet is 100% compatible with Ruby. It type checks normal method definitions, and introduces backwards-compatible syntax for method signatures.
Time crystals — But time crystals want to be coherent. So putting them inside a quantum computer, and using them to conduct computer processes could potentially serve an incredibly important function: ensuring quantum coherence.
White paper: Observation of Time-Crystalline Eigenstate Order on a Quantum Processor — Here we implement a continuous family of tunable CPHASE gates on an array of superconducting qubits to experimentally observe an eigenstate-ordered DTC. We demonstrate the characteristic spatiotemporal response of a DTC for generic initial states. Our work employs a time-reversal protocol that discriminates external decoherence from intrinsic thermalization, and leverages quantum typicality to circumvent the exponential cost of densely sampling the eigenspectrum. In addition, we locate the phase transition out of the DTC with an experimental finite-size analysis. These results establish a scalable approach to study non-equilibrium phases of matter on current quantum processors.
The end of open source? — I think the “hypocrite commits” contretemps is symptomatic, on every side, of related trends that threaten the entire extended open-source ecosystem and its users. That ecosystem has long wrestled with problems of scale, complexity and free and open-source software’s (FOSS) increasingly critical importance to every kind of human undertaking.
Facebook allegedly tried to buy Pegasus spyware to track iPhone users — The Facebook representatives stated that Facebook was concerned that its method for gathering user data through Onavo Protect was less effective on Apple devices than on Android devices,” Hulio said in his declaration.
Run Every Distro At Once | LINUX Unplugged 417
Aug 03, 2021
Yabba Dabba Distro! Run every major distribution on one native host. How we hijacked a Fedora install and turned it into the ultimate meta Linux box.
Plus Valve and AMD team up to improve Linux performance and the duct-tape solution holding our server together.
AMD + Valve Working On New Linux CPU Performance Scaling Design — Along with other optimizations to benefit the Steam Deck, AMD and Valve have been jointly working on CPU frequency/power scaling improvements to enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on modern AMD platforms running Linux.
Bedrock Linux — Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which allows users to mix-and-match components from other, typically incompatible distributions. Bedrock integrates these components into one largely cohesive system.
Chris Fisher on Twitter — I joined the @latenightlinux boys to cover my @syncthing setup that just hit the two-year mark, and we chat a little @teamsilverblue, the problem of OSS grifting, and more.
Pick: imgdupes — Find and delete near-duplicate images based on a perceptual hash.
Linux Action News 200
Aug 01, 2021
Microsoft's next kernel patch fixes a long-standing Linux issue, we'll share the details. Plus ChromeOS's next power user feature you haven't heard of, and Valve's broader plans that came into focus this week.
Microsoft Effort For A Global Counter On Block/Disk Changes — This global counter for block device changes is sought after to better correlate events for devices that may end up re-using the same device, commonly for cases like /dev/sda or /dev/loop0 when a device is detached and then later reattached but not necessarily the same device.
Microsoft: Component Shortages Not Going Away Any Time Soon — Supply-chain pressures also will continue to impact Microsoft's Xbox gaming consoles and PCs made by its partners, company officials conceded. Hood told analysts to expect Windows OEM revenues in Q1 FY22 to decline mid to high single digits and Surface revenue to decline by low teens.
Chrome OS persistent desk bar receives a vital pre-release fix — Last month, the Chrome OS development team decided that virtual desks weren’t being used enough by well, practically anyone, so they created what’s called Bento – or the ‘Persistent Desk Bar’.
Google to Officially Announce Subsea Cable to Connect Europe and Asia — The laying of the cable is part of the arms race between the tech giants, with Google competing against Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft in the cloud and data center sectors. Owning a cable, as opposed to renting one, secures a company’s control of the traffic on the cable and ensures the company can serve its clients first before sharing traffic with its competitors.
Chris and The Badger T-Shirt — A limited edition "Chris and The Badger" t-shirt to commemorate the Self-Hosted podcasts 50th episode. Get yours whilst supplies last!
Chris and The Badger Sticker — To celebrate the 50th episode of Self-Hosted we're launching a new Chris and The Badger sticker!
Self-Hosted T-Shirt — We challenge you to tell the world you are nerd without saying a word. This new t-shirt is sure to be a conversation starter! Available for a limited time.
Self-Hosted Square Sticker — We love this one because it's our MP3 album art turned into a sticker. And we think that makes it pretty darn special.
WallPanel — WallPanel is an Android application for Web Based Dashboards and Home Automation Platforms. You can either side load the application to your Android device from the release section, install the application from Google Play or get WallPanel from the Amazon Appstore.
Amazon Fire Toolbox — Now, thanks to XDA Senior Member Datastream33, owners of Amazon Fire/Fire HD tablets can more easily sideload Google Play Store, replace the stock launcher, and remove all Amazon bloatware apps with an easy-to-use application.
[WINDOWS][TOOL]Fire Toolbox V20.0 — The Fire Toolbox is a collection of useful ADB (Android Debug Bridge) tweaks that can be applied to Amazon's Fire Tablets. The Toolbox project aims to help users fully customize and unlock the full potential of their tablets by putting all the power into their hands.
Plex-Meta-Manager — Plex Meta Manager is a Python 3 script that can be continuously run using YAML configuration files to update on a schedule the metadata of the movies, shows, and collections in your libraries as well as automatically build collections based on various methods all detailed in the wiki.
MovieMatch for Plex — Have you ever spent longer deciding on a movie than it'd take to just watch a random movie? This is an app that helps you and your friends pick a movie to watch from a Plex server.
Infuse 7 — Browse and play videos stored on a Mac, PC, NAS, media servers like Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, or cloud service like Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, Box, MEGA, and others. Plus, videos from multiple sources can all be displayed neatly together in one central library.
Arlo (VMS4330P) Pro 2 - Wireless Home Security Camera System with Siren — Arlo Pro 2 is the most powerful and easy to use wire-free security camera ever thanks to its 1080P video, wire-free simplicity and the option to plug it in to a power outlet whenever needed, all in a small weather-resistant design. Additional features include Alexa voice commands and rechargeable batteries. Requirements: High-speed Internet connection, Available Ethernet port on your router. Wireless: 2.4 GHz & 802.11n. Operating temperature: 32° to 122° F (0° to 50° C). Battery - 2440mAh rechargeable battery. Battery life varies based on settings, usage, & temperature.
Mike shares his adventures coding while riding Amtrak, Chris is trying to get DOS running while he still can, and many of you wrote in sharing your concern for GNOME.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — I missed Earth Day & it's time for me to give away a
@system76 #Thelio. This one's got a 12GB @nvidia
card. Open to middle and high-school students in the US. More details to come, but I want to see some #FOSS around civics and it's yours. Courtesy of
@TheMadBotterINC
Michael Dominick on Twitter - Wifi Power Fix — If you're experiencing slow wifi on #Ubuntu or #PopOS #Linux, try editing /etc/NetworkManager/conf.d/default-wifi-powersave-on.conf to wifi.powersave=2 ;)
Server Meltdown | LINUX Unplugged 416
Jul 27, 2021
We try to pull off a show while recovering from an epic server crash. Then we build the ultimate remote Linux desktop—in the cloud!
Framework: The Touchpad and Fingerprint Reader — If you’re a Linux user, we’ve got you covered too! Our firmware lead Kieran submitted a patch to libfprint, and support is making its way into various distributions to be able to work automatically.
Element raises $30M to boost Matrix — Element, the startup founded by the team who created Matrix, just raised $30M of Series B funding in order to further accelerate Matrix development and improve Element, the flagship Matrix app.
Webtop — Alpine and Ubuntu based containers containing full desktop environments in officially supported flavors accessible via any modern web browser.
Chris Fisher on Twitter — I joined the @latenightlinux boys to cover my @syncthing setup that just hit the two-year mark, and we chat a little @teamsilverblue, the problem of OSS grifting, and more.
PIck: docker-wine — Docker image that includes Wine and Winetricks for running Windows applications on Linux and macOS
Linux Action News 199
Jul 25, 2021
We share the facts about a recent systemd vulnerability, the new details we've learned this week about the Steam Deck, and then dig into the reviews of the Framework Laptop.
Plus, how hard is it to port Linux software to Fucshia? We get the answer from Google's Adam Barth.
Denial of Service in systemd — The Qualys Research Team has discovered a stack exhaustion denial-of-service vulnerability in systemd, a near-ubiquitous utility available on major Linux operating systems. Any unprivileged user can exploit this vulnerability to crash systemd and hence the entire operating system (a kernel panic).
Nasty Linux systemd security bug revealed — It works by enabling attackers to misuse the alloca() function in a way that would result in memory corruption. This, in turn, allows a hacker to crash systemd and hence the entire operating system.
Faster Zombies to Steam Deck: The History of Valve and Linux Gaming — Well, Valve and Linux Gaming together have come a very long way since the early blogs posts about getting Left 4 Dead 2 running fast on Linux to the new Steam Deck. But just how far have they come? Let's do a little reminiscing.
The Framework Laptop is now shipping, and press reviews — We’re excited to see the first press reviews go live for the Framework Laptop and the first orders land on your doorsteps today! With the FTC unanimously voting to enforce the Right to Repair just yesterday, our timing couldn’t be better for delivering a great, high performance, easy to repair product.
Two Googlers offer a tour & demo of Fuchsia OS — Rubber Duck Engineering, a weekly web show hosted by Fuchsia software engineer Adam Barth and Flutter engineer Eric Seidel, was able to record a dedicated episode teaching about the current state of Fuchsia OS.
Qualcomm CEO Outlines Plans to Compete With Apple Silicon — Speaking to Reuters, Amon said that Qualcomm is capable of having the best chip on the market, thanks to a team of chip architects who previously worked for Apple but have since come to Qualcomm.
Satya Nadella on Twitter — With Windows 365, we’re bringing the operating system to the cloud and creating a new category: the cloud PC, providing organizations with greater flexibility and a secure way to empower their workforce, regardless of location.
"Every Preference Has a Cost" — GNOME’s Tobias Bernard has a new blog post out and it’s an essential read if you’re interested in the direction of the GNOME desktop.
Community Power Part 4: The GNOME Way — In this post we’ll go over that ethos, both in terms of high level values, and what those translate to in more practical terms.
Could the Steam Deck mean fewer native Linux games? We chat with prolific game developer Ethan Lee and get his perspective on the negative impacts of the Deck.
Plus, our thoughts on how Valve might successfully ship Arch to consumers, a batch of feedback, and more.
Ethan Lee on Twitter — "If you have released a Linux version of your game on Steam and are directly approached by Valve about using Proton instead, please get in touch (DMs open). They’ve already done this a few times, but I would like to see how aggressive they’re planning to be going forward."
Valve has formally announced the Steam Deck — Valve has now formally revealed the Steam Deck, a portable handheld gaming console powered by a new version of their Linux-based SteamOS operating system.
Valve Making Linux Anti-Cheat a Reality for Steam Deck Launch — Valve's newly-announced Steam Deck has a nice bonus for Linux gamers — it's helping to improve Linux anti-cheat by working with Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye to provide Proton support for their software.
Gabe Newell expects Steam Deck to sell ‘millions of units’ — "Our view is, if we're doing this right, we're going to be selling these in millions of units, and it's clearly going to be establishing a product category that ourselves and other PC manufacturers are going to be able to participate in."
Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 Officially Released — Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 is here as a maintenance update that plugs various annoyances and bugs to make the entire Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system more stable and reliable.
Amazon’s Elasticsearch fork OpenSearch hits prime time — Amazon has launched the first production-ready version of its Elasticsearch fork OpenSearch. This comes six months after Amazon’s AWS first revealed plans to fork Elasticsearch
Windows 365 Cloud PC — Securely stream your Windows experience—including your personalized apps, content, and settings—from the Microsoft cloud to any device with your Windows 365 Cloud PC. Available August 2.
Microsoft reveals $31 per user per month price tag — Microsoft isn't sharing pricing for its just-announced Windows 365/ Cloud PC service until early August. But the pricing of one of its lower-end SKUs seemingly has leaked already.
Introducing a new era of hybrid personal computing — Windows 365 supports your business apps—Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform—line of business apps, and more. With Windows 365, we also stand by our promise of app compatibility with App Assure, a service that helps customers with 150 or more users fix any app issues they might run into at no additional cost.
Authelia — Protect your applications with Single Sign-On and 2 Factor.
2 Factor Auth and Single Sign On with Authelia - YouTube — Authelia is an open source Single Sign On and 2FA companion for reverse proxies. It helps you secure your endpoints with single factor and 2 factor auth. It works with nginx, traefik, and HA proxy. Today, we'll configure Authelia with Portainer and Traefik and have 2 Factor up and running with brute force protection!
SHIELD TV users are mad as hell — Irate users are storming the Android TV Home app listing in the Play Store by the hundred, leaving pissed-off reviews invariably scoring the app with one star.
Union Pacific Steam Schedule — Big Boy No. 4014 will depart Cheyenne, Wyoming, Thursday, Aug. 5, traveling through Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Illinois, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming. Along the way, the Big Boy will be on display in the following cities during the tour.
Don't Code in Bed | Coder Radio 422
Jul 14, 2021
It seems AI isn't replacing developers just yet, and why we think you shouldn’t get too comfortable.
Plus the almost impossible story of how Mike defeated another laptop.
This Week in Linux - TuxDigital — This Week in Linux is a weekly news show that covers the latest news in the world of Linux. We cover a wide variety of topics from application / distro releases to Linux Gaming and even news about core system items like the Linux kernel itself.
Destination Linux Network — DLN is a media network powered by Linux & Open Source designed to bring passionate creators together to spread our love of open-source, technology, and Linux.
OwnTracks — OwnTracks allows you to keep track of your own location. You can build your private location diary or share it with your family and friends. OwnTracks is open-source and uses open protocols for communication so you can be sure your data stays secure and private.
Current sitting CentOS Board Member Recomends People use AlmaLinux — Hey guys .. Igor and all .. I want to wish you all the very best. And for anyone out there who wants to move from CentOS Linux 8 to another downstream RHEL community build , this is the definitely the one I would recommend. I have known the Cloud Linux team for a while .. and I very much trust them.
Feedback: Michael Staggs on Twitter — @ChrisLAS You mentioned recommending Deepin to new users. I know in current political climate, China and security are hotbutton issues, but I don't feel we can give Deepin a pass on security. So bad that OpenSUSE audit team won't audit them anymore.
Open Source's best hope for alternatives to Microsoft and Google gets a significant update this week, and we cover a plethora of new goodies coming to a Linux near you soon.
Plus, our take on the Audacity fork drama and the milestone reached this week that none of us have been looking forward to.
Nextcloud Hub 22 Released — At a virtual presentation streamed worldwide, the Nextcloud team introduced the availability of Nextcloud Hub 22, the second major product launch this year.
ardour — Any number of tracks and busses. Non-linear editing. Non-destructive (and destructive!) recording. Any bit depth, any sample rate. Dozens of file formats.
REAPER — REAPER is a complete digital audio production application for computers, offering a full multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing and mastering toolset.
IBM President and former Red Hat boss Jim Whitehurst quits — The CEO said Whitehurst had "played a pivotal role in the IBM and Red Hat integration" and was "instrumental in articulating IBM’s strategy" but alas "Jim has decided to step down".
Rocky Linux Community Update — After seven months of long, hard work, we are beyond excited to announce that Rocky Linux 8.4 has reached General Availability for x86_64 and aarch64!
SpecialInterestGroup/Hyperscale - CentOS Wiki — The Hyperscale SIG will focus on enabling CentOS Stream deployment on large-scale infrastructures and facilitating collaboration on packages and tooling.
Audacity Is Now A Possible Spyware, Remove It ASAP — The updated privacy policy page for Audacity includes a wide range of data collection mechanisms. It states for example that it can hand any user data to state regulators where it is located, which is basically Russia, USA and the EEA zone.
Google is moving away from APKs on the Play Store — Starting in August, Google will require that new Play apps will have to be published using the Android App Bundle format. Your phone will still download apps as APKs, but the app bundles will create APKs that are optimized for your device.
NFS is broken in Linux 5.13 — This made it into 5.13 final, and completely breaks NFSD for me. Existing mounts on clients hang, as do new mounts from new clients.
A Solution Looking for a Problem | Self-Hosted 48
Jul 02, 2021
Tuya shocks us by announcing native Home Assistant support, we have an update on a smart doorbell Ring alternative, and we tell all about how PiKVM just levelled up in awesome.
Home Assistant on Twitter announces Tuya partnership — "We had a call with @tuyasmart this morning. They are working on an official Home Assistant integration maintained by them. The beta is already available as a custom component at https://t.co/71bjKySm4X It connects to their official cloud API. But local access will follow.
PiKVM - 4 servers 1 Pi - blog.ktz.me — This is every homelabbers dream isn't it? Controlling multiple systems that don't have IPMI natively, remotely. Thanks to PiKVM, we now can.
You Can't Sideload Happiness | Coder Radio 420
Jul 01, 2021
Mike's got some strong feels about his new system, and Chris spent a week with Windows 11. And that's not even scratching the surface. It's a wild one, with some hard truths, so buckle up.
Windows 11 is a new and refreshing approach to an old and familiar home — The last significant change to Windows 11 that we’re able to test right now is the new Microsoft Store. To put it simply, Microsoft’s app store for Windows has sucked since it first appeared nearly 10 years ago. Microsoft is finally allowing developers to submit any win32 traditional desktop app, and Microsoft Store has already become far more useful during a beta than it ever was before.
Salt Lake City | Meetup — On our way to Denver, we are swinging through Salt Lake City, that is if we get enough people to sign up!
Denver Meetup | Meetup — Many of the Jupiter Broadcasting cast are getting together in Denver for a much overdue reunion - and we'd like to spend an evening with you!
How we Arrived at the Pop!OS COSMIC Design — Pop!OS 21.04 introduces the COSMIC desktop, which changes the workflow that users have become accustomed to since Pop!_OS first released.
GitHub Copilot — With GitHub Copilot, get suggestions for whole lines or entire functions right inside your editor.
Use Microsoft Live Share to collaborate with Visual Studio Code — Live Share enables you to quickly collaborate with a friend, classmate, or professor on the same code without the need to sync code or to configure the same development tools, settings, or environment.
GitHub Pages — Hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.
Going Deepin on Fuchsia | LINUX Unplugged 412
Jun 29, 2021
Is Fuchsia a risk to Linux? We try out a cutting-edge Fuchsia desktop and determine if it is a long-term threat to Linux.
Plus, have we all been missing the best new Linux distribution? We give this fresh distro a spin and report.
PipeWire 0.3.31 Released — JACK has seen massive stability improvements. Locking and correctness wrt to callbacks and has been reworked. Also thread priorities have improved.
PipeWire Project on Twitter — Important change in PipeWire 0.3.31 is that we now have a database of weird Bluetooth hardware. This allows us to apply device specific tweaks to work around issues. This database is from Android and should let us support more devices seamlessly.
Deepin Linux 20.2.2 Introduces a Brand-New App Store, Secure Boot Support — With this release, fans of Deepin Linux can enjoy a brand-new App Store that supports installation of Android apps, offers a better app management with support for batch installation of applications, and has a fresh new design with simplified interaction.
A new version of Mixxx is out — Mixxx 2.3.0 comes with a new default skin: "LateNight" underwent a massive redesign and replaces "Deere" as default skin.
The news this week that pushes Linux ahead in the enterprise, the challenges Windows 11 might bring, and we go hands-on with the new Debian-based TrueNAS SCALE.
Plus, our thoughts on WD Live users getting their data wiped and Rocky Linux's gold master.
Rocky Linux 8.4 Available Now — The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is pleased to announce the General Availability of Rocky Linux 8.4 for x86_64 and ARM64.
Ubuntu-maker Canonical will support open source Blender on Windows, Mac, and Linux — The support offering will include Blender LTS releases across Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and macOS. Canonical’s engineers will engage directly with customers to provide comprehensive technical support to users by understanding, diagnosing and resolving issues as swiftly as possible.
Canonical Gives RISC-V a HiFive — Canonical have announced that its Ubuntu operating system now supports two RISC-V boards from SiFive, the HiFive Unleashed and HiFive Unmatched.
Why Windows 11 is forcing everyone to use TPM chips — While Microsoft has required OEMs to ship devices with support for TPM chips since Windows 10, the company hasn’t forced users or its many device partners to turn these on for Windows to work. That’s what’s really changing with Windows 11, and combined with Microsoft’s Windows 11 upgrade checker, it has resulted in a lot of understandable confusion.
TrueNAS SCALE 21.06-BETA Now Available! — With this first BETA, we kickoff the official pre-release testing cycles and prepare for a release version in the coming months. Users are encouraged to provide feedback on any issues found to our bug ticketing system so we can continue the work to make SCALE the best, most stable release possible.
Salt Lake City | Meetup — On our way to Denver, we are swinging through Salt Lake City, that is if we get enough people to sign up!
Denver Meetup | Meetup — Many of the Jupiter Broadcasting cast are getting together in Denver for a much overdue reunion - and we'd like to spend an evening with you!
Google is risk averse & has paralyzing bureaucracy, executives say — Several other Google executives told The New York Times that the company is suffering from a number of issues related to its size and maturity, including a "paralyzing bureaucracy, a bias toward inaction and a fixation on public perception."
Apple's Tim Cook called Nancy Pelosi — Cook cautioned that the bills were rushed, would stifle innovation, and would hurt consumers by wreaking havoc on Apple services, according to the report. He also requested that the Judiciary Committee delay its process of consideration, a funnel through which the legislation must pass before reaching the full House.
U.S. Lawmakers Introduce Antitrust Legislation — These measures are the culmination of a 16-month antitrust investigation into tech companies practices that kicked off in 2019, and which saw Apple CEO Tim Cook testify in an antitrust hearing alongside Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Microsoft Market Value Hits $2 Trillion — Microsoft Corp. took its place in the history books as just the second U.S. public company to reach a $2 trillion market value
The Best of Both OSs | LINUX Unplugged 411
Jun 22, 2021
Is it possible to have Arch’s best feature on other Linux distros? We attempt it and report our findings. Plus our reaction to NVIDIA’s beta Wayland support–is this the milestone we’ve been waiting for?
Christian Schaller on Twitter — We been working closely with NVidia over the last year to prepare the ground for full NVidia driver Wayland support, including XWayland. Today NVidia released the first beta driver of that work.
Fedora Cloud Btrfs By Default - Fedora Project Wiki — For cloud installs of Fedora, we want to provide advanced file system features to users in a transparent fashion. Thus, we are changing the file system for the Cloud Edition to Btrfs so we can leverage its features and capabilities to improve the quality of experience for Cloud users.
Linux's résumé got a nice boost this week; why Google is paying for more kernel development, and how CloudLinux might be pulling ahead of the CentOS pack.
Plus, our thoughts on Steam possibly coming to ChromeOS and the game-changing feature coming to ZFS.
Rust in the Linux kernel just got a big boost from Google — The main goal of the push to bring Rust to Linux is to wipe out an entire class of memory-related security bugs in the kernel. This is important because, as Microsoft has recently highlighted, 70% of all bugs it fixes are memory-related. Historically, key Linux drivers that make up the kernel have been written in C, which is not memory-safe.
Supporting Miguel Ojeda’s Work on Rust in the Linux Kernel — While this is the first memory safety effort we’ve announced under our new Prossimo project name, our memory safety work began in 2020. You can read about our efforts to bring memory safety to curl and the Apache HTTP server, and to add improvements to the Rustls TLS library.
ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon — OpenZFS founding developer Matthew Ahrens opened a PR for one of the most sought-after features in ZFS history—RAIDz expansion—last week. The new feature allows a ZFS user to expand the size of a single RAIDz vdev.
Steam on ChromeOS: Not a Rumor Anymore — There are now some QA testers being hired to work on the “ChromeOS Steam Launch Team” to triage games, find defects and test performance in specific configurations.
Whose License Is It Anyway? | Self-Hosted 47
Jun 18, 2021
We take a look at a self-hosted TeamViewer alternative, give you our take on some Home Assistant drama and discuss the effects of a new crypto coin on hard drive prices.
RustDesk - Yet another remote desktop software — A great alternative to TeamViewer and AnyDesk! You have full control of your data, with no concerns about security. You can use our rendezvous/relay server, set up your own, or write your own rendezvous/relay server.
Chia Network — Chia Network develops a blockchain and smart transaction platform created by the inventor of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen. It implements the first new Nakamoto consensus algorithm since Bitcoin in 2008. Proofs of Space and Time replace energy intensive “proofs of work.”
ESPHome - Version 1.19.0 — Wow. Ok, so this release may not look big, but there are a number of new features that are not new components.
ESP Web Tools — ESP Web Tools is a set of open source tools to allow working with ESP devices in the browser
Ultimate Road Warrior Bundle — Complete Mobile Internet Solution with Dual LTE-A Pro CAT-12 Cellular and 2.4/5.8ghz WiFi Designed for Power Users
Cellular Data Plans - Mobile Internet Resource Center — Cellular data plans are offered for smartphones, mobile hotspot devices and cellular embedded routers. They come direct from the carriers, prepaid & postpaid and through 3rd parties. Unlimited doesn't always mean unlimited either.
Stripe Identity: Verify identities with confidence — Stripe Identity lets you programmatically confirm the identity of global users so you can prevent attacks from fraudsters while minimizing friction for legitimate customers.
Zhuowei Zhang on Twitter — Virtualization.framework even emulates DFU mode when booting macOS 12 Apple Silicon as a guest, over virtio-usb, using AVPBooter.
Pidgin: the universal chat client — Pidgin is a chat program which lets you log into accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on XMPP and sitting in an IRC channel at the same time.
Pidgin contributors: grim — Long time contributor, author of Guifications, and a founding member of the plugin pack.
Zerodium on Twitter — We’re looking for #0day exploits affecting Pidgin on Windows and Linux. Bounty: $100,000.
ZERODIUM — Limited-Time Bug Bounties and Temporarily Increased Payouts
Linux 5.14 Mainline Should Work With The Raspberry Pi 400 — No kernel driver changes were needed since it's basically very close to the Raspberry Pi 4 but the updated DTS configuration is needed for the 1.8GHz clock rate, a different WiFi chip, and power off handling via GPIO.
XFS To Enjoy Big Scalability Boost With Linux 5.14 — The big numbers are seeing the transaction rate go up from around 700k to 1.7M commits per second and a reduction in flush operations by 2~x orders of magnitude less for metadata heavy workloads that don't enforce fsync.
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS — Ubuntu 6.06 LTS introduces functionality that simplifies common Linux server deployment processes. For system administrators setting up large numbers of web, mail and related servers, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS offers the fastest and most consistent path to deployment, combined with the availability of global commercial support where needed.
Damn Small Linux — Damn Small Linux is a very versatile 50MB mini desktop oriented Linux distribution.
BackTrack Linux — BackTrack was a Linux distribution that focused on security, based on the Knoppix Linux distribution aimed at digital forensics and penetration testing use.
auto-cpufreq — Automatic CPU speed & power optimizer for Linux based on active monitoring of laptop's battery state, CPU usage, CPU temperature and system load. Ultimately allowing you to improve battery life without making any compromises.
Privilege escalation with polkit — The vulnerability enables an unprivileged local user to get a root shell on the system. It’s easy to exploit with a few standard command line tools
FOSDEM 2021 - hello... again? — helloSystem is FreeBSD preconfigured as a desktop operating system. Its design follows the “Less, but better” philosophy. It is intended as a system for “mere mortals”, welcoming to switchers from a world in which a global menu bar exists, the Command key is used rather than Control, and applications are contained in .app bundles.
Bearded Tux Unisex Joggers - Jupiter Garage — Get ready for that 10K run or take it slow in your backyard—these joggers are sure to make you feel comfortable either way while making a low key statement that Linux is awesome.
Why Would Developers Care? | Coder Radio 417
Jun 09, 2021
Our takes on the important bits from Apple's WWDC 2021 keynote and State of the Union.
FaceTime is coming to Android and Windows — Apple is turning FaceTime into a bit more of a Zoom-like video calling service with this update. FaceTime is also going to allow you to grab a link to a scheduled call so that you can share it with people in advance and join in at the right time.
iPadOS 15 Preview - Features - Apple — A menu at the top of apps lets you enter Split View, Slide Over, full screen, or center window with just a tap. You can also quickly close a window from the menu.
Apple Updates App Store Review Guidelines — First, developers who appeal an app rejection can now specify if they believe their app was rejected due to unfair treatment by the App Review team, including political bias or other forms of bias. Second, developers can now report other apps if they believe they present trust or safety concerns, or otherwise violate the App Store Review Guidelines.
Google Photos Sync — Google Photos Sync downloads your Google Photos to the local file system. It will backup all the photos the user uploaded to Google Photos, but also the album information and additional Google Photos 'Creations' (animations, panoramas, movies, effects and collages).
PhotoPrism — PhotoPrism is a privately hosted app for browsing, organizing, and sharing your photo collection. It makes use of the latest technologies to tag and find pictures automatically without getting in your way.
Piwigo — Piwigo is open source photo gallery software for the web. Designed for organisations, teams and individuals.
Exbin: A pastebin clone written in Elixir/Phoenix. — Post pastes publicly and privatley
List of all public pastes
Use nc to pipe text and get the URL. (e.g., cat file.txt | nc exbin.call-cc.be 9999)
"Raw View" where text is presented as is, ideally to share code for copy and pasting.
Syntax highlighted view.
"Reader View" where text is presented in a more readable manner. Better suited to share prose text.
awesome-selfhosted — A list of Free Software network services and web applications which can be hosted on your own servers
Greyhole — An application that uses Samba to create a storage pool of all your available hard drives, and allows you to create redundant copies of the files you store, in order to prevent data loss when part of your hardware fails.
LINUX Unplugged 408: Linux Road Warrior — We’re joined by a special guest who’s built his very own Linux battle bus. We get the technical details on how Linux is at the core of this open road machine.
Strange Voltron of Hell | Coder Radio 416
Jun 02, 2021
Mike's unique take on the bold promises made at MS Build this year, and the one item he REALLY wants announced at WWDC next week.
Plus a batch of your emails, a little proxy war, and more!
Qualcomm has a Snapdragon Developer Kit to test Windows apps — Powered by the Snapdragon 7c Gen 2 chipset, it’s also going to include things like .NET 5.0, Visual Studio Code, FFMPEG, LLVM, Chromium, Wix, and more. With x64 emulation currently preview, developers can test that out as well to see the benefit with a native ARM64 app.
Apple Accuses Microsoft of Using Epic in Legal Attack — Apple claims Epic used as many witnesses associated with Microsoft at trial as it did its own -- five each -- including Susan Athey from Stanford University.
Linux Road Warrior | LINUX Unplugged 408
Jun 01, 2021
We’re joined by a special guest who’s built his very own Linux battle bus. We get the technical details on how Linux is at the core of this open road machine.
Venus GX - Victron Energy — The Venus GX is the communication-centre of your installation. Venus allows you to talk to all components in your system and ensure they are working in harmony.
An Open-Source USB to CAN Adapter - CANable — The CANable is a small low-cost open source USB to CAN adapter. The CANable shows up as a virtual serial port on your computer and acts as a serial-line to CAN bus interface
One week of Libera Chat — It’s been an exciting first week, and we’d like to say a massive thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and patience as we continue to work to bring Libera.Chat up to full capacity. In these first few days, we’ve been able to reach 16,500 simultaneous connections and 20,000 registered accounts.
Gentoo Freenode channels have been hijacked — Today (2021-05-26) a large number of Gentoo channels have been hijacked by Freenode staff, including channels that were not yet migrated to Libera.chat. We cannot perceive this otherwise than as an open act of hostility and we have effectively left Freenode.
The FBI will feed compromised passwords to Have I Been Pwned — As Hunt explained, the FBI is involved into all sorts of investigations into digital crimes, such as botnets, ransomware, online child sexual exploitation and terrorism. The compromised passwords they find are often being used by crime rings, so the passwords' quick addition to the HIBP database would be extremely helpful. That said, the website doesn't have a way for the feds to quickly feed passwords into its database yet.
New Audacity Owners Want a CLA — For those not yet aware, we are introducing a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which contributors to Audacity will need to sign in order to contribute code to the project.
Linux Game Development at Tesla? — Some of you might have heard, our dear technoking is bullish on games and making an awesome platform for all gamers in Tesla vehicles. The latest Model S on our website can give you a hint of what we're aiming for in terms of platform capability (sorry, can't divulge much more for now). The Tesla infotainment OS and platform software are based on a standard Linux, so of course, we're interested in helping the gaming community make Linux gaming excellent.
Keyboard Kurious | Coder Radio 415
May 26, 2021
We both fall for a new fancy keyboard; then we get philosophical about free software's never-ending quest to conquer mobile.
Launch Keyboard - System76 — The Launch Configurable Keyboard is engineered to be comfortable, fully customizable, and make your workflow more efficient.
Red Hat Is Hiring Even More Graphics Engineers — Red Hat is now hiring two more graphics engineers working on the Linux graphics drivers. This will be focusing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and upstream graphics drivers for the open-source code around Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.
Introducing Firefox’s new Site Isolation Security Architecture — Site Isolation builds upon a new security architecture that extends current protection mechanisms by separating (web) content and loading each site in its own operating system process.
Freenode Debacle Prompts Staff Exodus, New Network — Through a complex series of events which actually started several years ago, control of Freenode has been taken from the community and put into the hands of an enigmatic and wealthy entrepreneur who claims his ultimate goal is to revolutionize IRC and return it to the forefront of online communication.
Upheaval at freenode — Evidently there has been a change of control within the volunteer-run organization that has led to the resignations of multiple different volunteers, at least in part due to a concern about the personal information of freenode users under the new management.
Welcome to Libera Chat — We’re excited to announce the launch of Libera.Chat, and welcome you to a next-generation IRC network for free and open source software projects and similarly-spirited collaborative endeavours.
Spaces: The next frontier — Spaces rethink groups in Element and Matrix, and today we’re launching public beta testing on Element Web, Desktop and Android (with iOS coming soon!).
Home Assistant Blue! — Hardware that is affordable and fast, packed in a gorgeous case and powered by the most powerful home automation software on the planet: Home Assistant
ESPHome on Twitter @esphome — ESPHome is the easiest way to use ESP8266/ESP32 via simple configuration files and control them remotely via home automation systems like @homeassistant.
Nabu Casa on Twitter @NabuCasa — The missing cloud piece for @home_assistant, by the founder of Home Assistant. Control your Home Assistant from anywhere. Fully encrypted.
Framework Laptop review (hands on) — the anti-MacBook is here — This is a big deal for DIY computing enthusiasts, and it's a powerful sales pitch in a market where leading manufacturers like Apple proudly release products designed to be difficult (if not impossible) for customers to crack open and tinker with themselves.
Google I/O 2021 preview — Google I/O starts Tuesday, May 18 at 1 pm EDT, when Google/Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai will take the stage and presumably show off what Google has been working on all year.
How M1 Macs feel faster than Intel models: it’s about QoS — The pattern of use of cores is that almost all the activities of macOS are run on the Efficiency cores, with only the occasional blip on the Performance cores. Running apps and performing other user tasks is the other way around, with the brunt borne on the Performance rather than Efficiency cores. This is because those user tasks are more likely to run with QoS of at least 17, and in many cases 25 and 33.
Mars Goes to Shell | LINUX Unplugged 406
May 18, 2021
Tim Canham, Mars Helicopter Operations Lead at NASA’s JPL joins us again to share technical details you've never heard about the Ingenuity Linux Copter on Mars. And the challenges they had to work around to achieve their five successful flights.
Ingenuity Helicopter Operational History — Ingenuity's fifth flight succeeded on May 7, 2021, 19:26 UTC, lasting 108 seconds. Ingenuity went 5 meters (16 ft) high, just like the last three flights, and traveled to a landing site 131 meters (429 ft) to the south.
Ingenuity Spots Perseverance From the Air — NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover is visible in the upper left corner of this image the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter took during its third flight, on April 25, 2021. The helicopter was flying at an altitude of 16 feet (5 meters) and roughly 279 feet (85 meters) from the rover at the time.
Some PeerTube Problems — For now, we plan to keep testing PeerTube behined the scenes, trying out the new releases, and searching for ways to automate deploying content to PeerTube.
Pick: Finamp — Finamp is a music player for Jellyfin. Its main feature is the ability to download songs for offline listening.
Samsung is now a contributor to Google’s Fuchsia OS - 9to5Google — Samsung’s “Flash-Friendly File System.” Better known as “F2FS,” the project is an alternative system for managing the files on a storage device, such as the built-in storage of a smartphone.
Framework Laptop pre-orders are now open — A thin, lightweight, high-performance 13.5” notebook that can be upgraded, customized, and repaired in ways that no other notebook can.
Launch Keyboard - System76 — The Launch Configurable Keyboard is engineered to be comfortable, fully customizable, and make your workflow more efficient.
Hacker Accessed AWS for $50k+ – AWS Ignoring Me — My business has used AWS for around 3 years and our normal usage is $1k per month in EC2 and S3. In early March a hacker accessed our AWS account through my login via an IP address in Austria (I'm in Austin, TX). They spun up 3 large instances of EC2 which began charging us $1k-$2k per day.
Changing How Updates Work with Docker Desktop 3.3 — If you use Docker Desktop at work you may need to skip a specific update. For this reason, Pro or Team subscription developers can skip notifications for a particular update when a reminder appears.
Dieu Cao on Twitter — The snooze interval is once a day. I'm asking our comms team if they can update the existing blog post to be more explicit about the behavior that you won't see these until two weeks after an update becomes available and then once a day after that.
Nick Statt on Twitter — This is really key. Apple’s lawyer says "Apple did not establish the 30 percent,” but rather game companies did back around 2003 when digital distrbuition was starting.
“30% was, as Epic’s integrate documents will show, industry standard."
Ben Bajarin on Twitter — Basically, they want to argue that macOS being more "open" yet still employing strong security and privacy stands in contrast to their argument about the policies on iPhone and iOS app store.
Sensory’s custom voice assistant debuts on a Linux-based microwave — Sensory announced that its 100 percent locally processed TrulyHandsfree technology can be used to create custom voice assistants without sacrificing privacy, as demonstrated in a new Linux-based Farberware FM11VABK microwave.
EmulationStation — A graphical and themeable emulator front-end that allows you to access all your favorite games in one place, even without a keyboard!
Open Letter: DistroWatch and Nitrux — For the better part of three years, we have remained silent about your ongoing efforts to affect people’s perception of our Linux distribution continuously. We have tried our best not to engage with your evident hostility and disregard to inform your viewers and visitors about correct facts of the Linux distributions you display on your website, especially ours. However, we have decided to take a stance. It is today, the 6th of May, that we gallantly demand you to stop.
Nitrux — Nitrux is a Linux desktop distribution directly based on Debian. It uses the Calamares installer and includes NX Desktop and NX Firewall on top of the KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment and MauiKit Applications.
NX Desktop — NX Desktop is a customization layer for Plasma 5.
AppImageHub — Here are 1200 apps (and counting) that you can run on Linux without installation.
Installing other DEs in Nitrux — During last month’s release of Nitrux, we made available a minimal ISO to let users install Nitrux and also install a different desktop environment and a selection of applications than the ones we include by default.
Nitrux: pnx — pnx (lowercase; originally Pacman for Nitrux) allows users to install software from Linux distributions that use the Pacman package manager on other Linux distributions that don’t use it without interfering with the distributions default package manager.
Feedback: PrivateBin — A minimalist, open-source online pastebin where the server has zero knowledge of pasted data. Data is encrypted/decrypted in the browser using 256 bits AES.
Linux 5.10 LTS Will Be Maintained Through End Of Year 2026 — Linux 5.10 as the latest Long Term Support release when announced was only going to be maintained until the end of 2022 but following enough companies stepping up to help with testing, Linux 5.10 LTS will now be maintained until the end of year 2026.
[pdf] IEEE Statement — One of the PC members briefly mentioned a possible ethical concern in their review, but that comment was not significantly discussed any further at the time; we acknowledge that we missed it.
LKML: Kees Cook: Report on University of Minnesota Breach-of-Trust Incident — This report summarizes the events that led to this point, reviews the "Hypocrite Commits" paper that had been submitted for publication, and reviews all known prior kernel commits from UMN paper authors that had been accepted into our source repository. It concludes with a few suggestions about how the community, with UMN included, can move forward.
Plex Skeptics | Self-Hosted 44
May 07, 2021
Plex announces some big plans that make us a little nervous, Alex solves Chris's tablet performance woes, and we chat about Prometheus.
Plus, our thoughts on Duplicati alternatives and more.
Plexamp Release — This probably deserves a bigger version bump than just 0.0.1 as it encompasses a whole lot of upgrades under the hood which greatly improve performance 58 and unlock a lot of stuff for the future.
Plex Plans To Place All Legal Streaming Options (and Piracy) Into One Interface — After completing a growth equity round of $50m, Plex has announced plans to become a one-stop-shop for movies and TV. The goal is to at least partially solve one of the most annoying problems in today's legal streaming market by placing all content in a single searchable interface. By default, this will also include users' 'pirate' libraries, an interesting proposition that could yield results.
Infuse 7 - An Elegant Video Player — Infuse's powerful, super-efficient playback engine supports just about every video file ever created including: MKV, MP4, AVI, ISO, DVD, BDMV, and many, many others.
How to install install LineageOS on a 2015 7" Amazon Fire tablet — This is a guide for getting LineageOS (an older and unofficial version) onto an Amazon Fire 2015 7" tablet (also known as the 5th generation 7" Amazon Fire or under the internal codename "ford").
Prometheus — Power your metrics and alerting with a leading
open-source monitoring solution.
Healthchecks.io — We notify you when your nightly backups, weekly reports, cron jobs, and scheduled tasks don't run on time.
Monitoring VMware clusters using Prometheus and Grafana | by Michael Kotelnikov — rometheus and Grafana have always been great opensource tools to monitor every aspect of your environment no matter how detailed you want your information, and no matter the scale of your environment. Prometheus will be gathering the metrics, and Grafana will be presenting the graphs and details you would like to see.
Context in Comprehension | Coder Radio 412
May 05, 2021
From adventures in learning, a recipe for great collaborations, to creativity and problem-solving in tech. It's a deep dive chat with Wes Payne.
Other topics include:
one definition of Wes-work
introvertedness and the subtle art of being agreeable
strategies in brainstorming
entropy and evolution of routines in creativity
hammock time and meditation
Buddhism and our mind's understanding of the world
Get Involved with elementary OS — Everything that we make is 100% open source and developed collaboratively by people from all over the world. Even if you're not a programmer, you can get involved and make a difference.
Audacity & MuseScore Announcement! — Audacity has just joined Muse Group, a collection of brands that includes another popular open source music app called MuseScore.
FAQ: CentOS Stream Updates — CentOS Stream 9 will launch in Q2 2021 as part of the RHEL 9 development process.
Fedora Linux 34 is officially here! — Following the introduction of BTRFS as the default filesystem on desktop variants in Fedora Linux 33, we’ve introduced transparent compression on BTRFS filesystems.
An update on the UMN affair — None of the three patches that contained real bugs were accepted by maintainers, though the reasons for rejection were not always the bugs in question. The paper itself has been withdrawn and will not be presented in May as was planned.
“Full disclosure” from the University of Minnesota — The researchers at the University of Minnesota have posted a description of the work they did as part of their "hypocrite commits" project. It includes a list of the buggy commits they posted and how they were handled.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 arrives — The latest version of Red Hat's flagship Linux operating system is designed to be deployed on the computing edge.
Rocky Linux 8.3 Release Candidate 1 — The intent of a release candidate is for the community to test and validate expected functionality of Rocky Linux and report any bugs if present.
CentOS replacement distro AlmaLinux gets commercial support options — CloudLinux Inc has announced that it will offer commercial support for the AlmaLinux community distribution. The new support plans will include regular patches and updates for AlmaLinux's kernel and core packages, patch delivery SLAs, and 24/7 incident support.
8.4 Beta of AlmaLinux Released — This is a BETA release and should not be used for production installations. The provided upgrade instructions should not be used on production machines, unless you don't mind if something breaks. 😉
Ubuntu Bug Breaks EFI on 21.04 Update With Older Machines — The exact nature of the hardware likely to fail is still unclear. Canonical software engineer Dave Jones suggested modern machines would be unaffected but older machines such as a ThinkPad 420 from 2011 and a MacBook Air from 2012 were affected by the bug.
elementary OS 6 Beta Available Today — Developers and testers, it’s the day you’ve been waiting for: elementary OS 6 Beta is available now! We first started talking publicly about elementary OS 6 in August of last year.
New Spectre Exploits Beat All Mitigations: Fixes to Severely Degrade Performance — Researchers from two universities have discovered several new variants of Spectre exploits that affect all modern processors from AMD and Intel with micro-op caches. Existing Spectre mitigations do not protect the CPUs against potential attacks that use these vulnerabilities.
M1 Mesa Driver Upstreamed — I’ve begun a Gallium driver for the M1, implementing much of the OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 specifications. With the compiler and driver together, we’re now able to run OpenGL workloads like glxgears and scenes from glmark2 on the M1 with an open-source stack. To top it off, the compiler and driver are now upstreamed in Mesa!
Hidden Features of Fedora 34 | LINUX Unplugged 403
Apr 27, 2021
The new release of Fedora has more under the hood than you might know. It's a technology-packed release, and nearly all of it is coming to a distro near you.
Plus the questions we think the University of Minnesota kernel ban raises, and more.
Some 5.12 development statistics — By the time the 5.12 kernel was finally released, some 13,015 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository for this development cycle. That makes 5.12 the slowest development cycle since 5.6, which was released at the end of March 2020. Still, there was plenty of work done for 5.12.
Looking forward to Fedora 34 — In 2021, complaints about PulseAudio are scarce indeed; the quirks have long since been ironed out and, for most people, sound just works. Obviously, it must be time to rip out the audio infrastructure and start over. That is what Fedora has done in the 34 release; PulseAudio is gone, replaced by PipeWire.
Fedora Workstation 34 feature focus: Btrfs transparent compression - Fedora Magazine — This article is going to go a little further under the hood and talk about data compression and transparent compression in btrfs. A term like that may sound scary at first, but less technical users need not be wary. This change is simple to grasp, and will help many Workstation users in several key areas.
Intentionally buggy commits for fame—and papers [LWN.net] — A buggy patch posted to the linux-kernel mailing list in early April was apparently the last straw for Greg Kroah-Hartman as it led to the planned reversion of a whole slew of commits with one thing in common: their origin at the University of Minnesota (UMN).
An open letter to the Linux community [LWN.net] — We sincerely apologize for any harm our research group did to the Linux kernel community. Our goal was to identify issues with the patching process and ways to address them, and we are very sorry that the method used in the “hypocrite commits” paper was inappropriate.
Ubuntu 21.04 is here | Ubuntu — Ubuntu 21.04 comes with native Microsoft Active Directory integration, Wayland graphics by default, and a Flutter application development SDK.
Watch Mars Ingenuity's First Flight! (VIDEO AND IMAGES) — Mars Perseverance has been a historic mission, now its chopper, Ingenuity is flying on Mars. Watch a recap right here and see the very first video and images of it up in the air.
Open source goes to Mars 🚀 - The GitHub Blog — Today, we want to make the invisible visible. So, we have worked with JPL to place a new Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge on the GitHub profile of every developer who contributed to the specific versions of any open source projects and libraries used by Ingenuity.
Home Assistant Mac App — Home Assistant Companion is a new application for Mac to control your Home Assistant instance, exposing your Mac sensors to Home Assistant and to receive notifications.
AlDente — MacOS tool to limit maximum charging percentage
linuxserver/healthchecks - LinuxServer.io — Healthchecks is a watchdog for your cron jobs. It's a web server that listens for pings from your cron jobs, plus a web interface.
docker stats — Display a live stream of container(s) resource usage statistics
zfs.rent — Simple cloud service to store ZFS snapshots.
DS1621+ | Synology Inc. — Synology DS1621+ is a powerful and compact 6-bay network attached storage solution designed to store and protect critical data assets.
Apple Will Keep 15 to 30% Cut of Podcast Subscriptions — Apple today announced a new podcasts subscription feature that's coming to the Podcasts app. Podcast subscriptions will let podcast publishers sell subscriptions to an individual show or a group of shows, with pricing starting at 49 cents per month
Steve Troughton-Smith on Twitter — Interesting that Apple went to the trouble of showing off things like Continuity & Handoff that macOS has had for years — they must really be anticipating a fresh audience for these iMacs
All The Apple Park Transitions—April 20, 2021 — Apple announces new iMac, AirTags, iPad Pro with the M1 processor, and more at its Spring Loaded event. It also offered a glimpse of the Apple Park campus by means of transitions for each presentation section.
Hirsute Hippo Release Notes — These release notes for Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Ubuntu and its flavours.
LINUX Unplugged 396: How Linux Got to Mars — Tim Canham, the Mars Helicopter Operations Lead, shares Linux’s origins at JPL and how it ended up running on multiple boxes on Mars.
Nasa successfully flies small helicopter on Mars — The drone, called Ingenuity, was airborne for less than a minute, but Nasa is celebrating what represents the first powered, controlled flight by an aircraft on another world.
Dell Technologies Announces Planned VMware Spin-Off — Under terms of the planned spin-off, VMware will distribute a special cash dividend of $11.5 - $12 billion to all VMware shareholders, including Dell Technologies.
COSMIC to Arrive in June Release of Pop!OS 21.04 — We’re providing a honed desktop user experience in Pop!OS through our GNOME-based desktop environment: COSMIC. It’s a refined solution that makes the desktop easier to use, yet more powerful and efficient for our users through customization.
Carl Richell on Twitter — Yes, tiling will remain a separate extension and can be used on other distros. COMIC can as well.
Carl Richell on Twitter — The is an extension that creates a unique GNOME UX while maintaining compatibility with GNOME and the GNOME app ecosystem and HIG.
Carl Richell on Twitter — We’re currently developing and testing on X and Pop 21.04 will default to X as well. However, we may be able to shift over to Wayland for future releases with the recent nvidia news about Wayland driver support.
Element Matrix Services launches bridging for Microsoft Teams — A single Microsoft Teams Bridge supports unlimited users across unlimited channels. Pricing is based on the number of active users using the bridge from MS Teams, at a cost of $0.50 per user per month. Traffic from Element (or any other Matrix-based client) is free.
Servicing the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 Linux kernel — We’ve just shipped the 5.10.16.3 WSL 2 Linux kernel version to Windows Insiders which brings exciting new changes: Support for the LUKS disk encryption, and some long-awaited bug fixes.
We visit an alternate reality where Epic wins in their fight against Apple, COBOL reigns supreme, and the halls of great Jedi Temple are lined with Object-C developers.
Objective-C slides down the popularity rankings — Objective-C, the general-purpose programming language that was used for OS X and iOS development in the earlier days of Apple, enjoyed high spots in the TIOBE index until 2014, and was listed for language of the year award in 2011 and 2012
IBM COBOL for Linux on x86 1.1 — COBOL for Linux on x86 1.1 is the latest addition to the IBM COBOL compiler family, which includes Enterprise COBOL for z/OS and COBOL for AIX.
Mike Kelly on Twitter — I’ve been curious to try out @rustlang and wanted to celebrate @LinuxUnplugged episode 400… so I combined both in a silly fun little project. Check it out… a mini-website powered by Rust… @ChrisLAS and @wespayne would be proud!
Mars Helicopter Flight Delayed — During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a “watchdog” timer expiration.
Work Progresses Toward Ingenuity’s First Flight on Mars — Over the weekend, the team considered and tested multiple potential solutions to this issue, concluding that minor modification and reinstallation of Ingenuity’s flight control software is the most robust path forward.
Asahi Linux on Twitter — Initial M1 support has been merged into the Linux SoC tree and will be coming to Linux 5.13!
SiFive FU740 PCIe Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13 — The HiFive Unmatched has a FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core, 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet.
uBlock Origin works best on Firefox — The Firefox version of uBO makes use of WebAssembly code for core filtering code paths. This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers because this would require an extra permission in the extension manifest which could cause friction when publishing the extension in the Chrome Web Store.
Wayland Is Driving Fragmentation Around EDID Parsing - A Call To Fix That — Currently there is no de facto EDID parsing library for Linux but many different choices and most Wayland compositors rolling their own. Rather than exposing all of the parsed information from the kernel, there is now a call to have a more unified Linux EDID parsing library.
vgpu_unlock — Unlock vGPU functionality for consumer-grade GPUs.
Announcing KDE’s Qt 5 Patch Collection — As Qt 5 support is drawing to a close, and we shift to Qt 6, we need to ensure that KDE products are as reliable as ever. To this end, KDE will be maintaining a set of patches with security and functional fixes so that we can enjoy good KDE Software still based on Qt5 until our software is reliably based on Qt 6.
Whistleblower: Ubiquiti Breach “Catastrophic” — Now a source who participated in the response to that breach alleges Ubiquiti massively downplayed a “catastrophic” incident to minimize the hit to its stock price, and that the third-party cloud provider claim was a fabrication.
Linode on Twitter — This episode of Top Docs talks about the benefits of using Infrastructure as Code.
Plausible Analytics — Plausible is a lightweight and open-source website analytics tool. No cookies and fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA and PECR. Made and hosted in the EU 🇪🇺
WWDC21 - Apple Developer — The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference is coming to a screen near you, June 7 to 11. Join the worldwide developer community for an all-online program with exciting announcements, sessions, and labs at no cost.
Introducing Libadwaita — Such a library would define the visual language of GNOME by offering the stylesheet and the patterns in a single package.
The See Ya Next Tuesday | LINUX Unplugged 400
Apr 06, 2021
Old friends and new join us on a quest to celebrate four hundred episodes.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Corry Clinton, Drew DeVore, and Graham Morrison.
Too Much Choice | LINUX Unplugged — Does the Linux community lean on the age old excuse of choice, to brush of the real limitations of desktop Linux environments? We debate that, and then discuss the growing reasons to roll your own email server.
Still Minty Fresh | LINUX Unplugged 100 — We reflect on 100 episodes of LINUX Unplugged, the themes from episodes past & then review Linux Mint 17.2 Cinnamon edition.
Gallaghers’ Where U Brew — We are a family (and dog!) friendly tap room and brewery, working to make your DIY brewing experience a successful, positive, uplifting and rewarding pursuit of fabulously great beer, extraordinarily fine wine or cider, and even root beer!
Introducing Libadwaita — This new libadwaita library intends to extend that concept by being the missing code part of Adwaita. and will be implemented as a direct GTK 4 continuation and replacement of libhandy.
OBS Studio Now Ready With Wayland Capture Support — Well-known GNOME developer Georges Stavracas has been working on allowing good and native Wayland support for OBS Studio with the last of that work being merged upstream today.
Ruby off the Rails — On Wednesday, Bastien Nocera, the maintainer of a software library called shared-mime-info, informed Daniel Mendler, maintainer of a Ruby library called mimemagic, which incorporates Nocera's code, that he was shipping mimemagic under an incompatible software license.
Chip shortage could benefit Apple with better component pricing — The global chip shortage will become a problem for devices like iPhones and Macs requiring chips for storage, but Wedbush believes it could be beneficial to Apple and its suppliers by improving the pricing of components.
No PRs Please | LINUX Unplugged 399
Mar 30, 2021
Lutris developer Mathieu Comandon joins us to share his perspective on the uncomfortable issues facing Linux desktop developers.
Plus the tech behind Shells.com, community news, feedback, and more.
Special Guests: Mathieu Comandon and Zlatan Todorić.
Linux Action News 182 — GNOME 40 is out and we chat with the project’s Executive Director about the technical and visual improvements in the new release. Plus the facts around RMS’s return to the FSF board, and our analysis of the situation.
Episode 118 — Stallman is back and ruffling feathers, PHP moves to GitHub, AMP might be on its way out, Audacity’s latest update gives us pause, Fairphone delivers an unlikely update, online events, and more.
AlmaLinux OS Stable Release is live! — We are very happy to announce that today we are releasing the first AlmaLinux OS stable version. That's right, you can go right ahead and download the stable version and use it everywhere you need a stable, reliable, Linux distribution.
Ubuntu 21.04 Testing Week — Ubuntu and its flavors will be participating in another ‘Ubuntu Testing Week’ from April 1st to April 7th.
Shells — Personal Workspaces Powered by Cloud Computers.
[Mathieu's Blog] Not on the same page — The disconnect I feel between what I want to deliver in what I build and what the users asks for is now too big to ignore. In some way, I already knew it would be the case before I even started Lutris. I knew that what I was trying to achieve wasn’t in line with how Linux users usually behave…
GNOME 40 Release Notes — GNOME 40 is the latest version of GNOME, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 24571 changes, made by approximately 822 contributors.
Jeff Geerling - YouTube — K8s, Ansible, Raspberry Pi, photography, tech, DIY, tools, etc. Most anything has the potential for showing up on this channel. I might focus on one thing someday, but it's more fun to do ALL THE THINGS!
Hardware RAID on the Raspberry Pi CM4 | Jeff Geerling — Now I have actual enterprise SAS drives running on a hardware RAID controller on a Raspberry Pi, and it's faster than the 'fastest' SATA RAID array I set up in that other video.
Caesar Sengupta on Twitter — After ~15 wonderful yrs @Google, I’m stepping into the outside world on a new journey. I leave, heart full of gratitude, joy and many deep friendships. 🙏🙏🙏 @sundarpichai and many many Google friends.
Apple's Longtime App Store Developer Relations Lead Retires — Okamoto was responsible for overseeing the App Store review process and policies, distributing tools to allow developers to build and sell apps, developer support, developer communications, developer awards, and he also handled the annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
HomePod Mini Features Dormant Temperature and Humidity Sensor — Apple's HomePod mini includes a dormant hidden sensor that can measure temperature and humidity, potentially providing the means to power upcoming features that could arrive in a future software update, according to Bloomberg.
Apple Adds FaceTime Framework to Apple TV/HomePod — Ahead of these rumors, MacRumors contributor Steve Moser was combing through the tvOS 14.5 beta code and found that Apple has added FaceTime and iMessage frameworks, along with a new AVFCapture framework related to capturing images.
GitLab 13.10 released — 13.10 offers administrative enhancements to help scale DevOps in your org, Geo package integrity verification to improve Disaster Recovery, vulnerability management automation to apply efficiency and consistency to security processes, and—as always—a ton of fantastic contributions from the wider community.
Adobe details the transition of its apps to Apple Silicon — We compared an M1 MacBook to a previous-generation MacBook similarly configured, and found that under native mode, Photoshop was running 50% faster than the older hardware.
Back in the Freedom Dimension | LINUX Unplugged 398
Mar 23, 2021
We share our favorite networking trick of all time, and then chat with the blokes behind a new WireGuard-powered service.
Plus our reaction to RMS's return to the FSF, some big project updates, picks, and more!
edw · elementary Developer Weekend — This conference is our way of reaching out to app developers, sharing the knowledge we’ve all collected over the years, and providing a space to ask questions and provide feedback.
Ubuntu Touch OTA-16 Release — Today we are happy to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-16, our sixteenth stable update to the system!
Linus Torvalds on where Rust will fit into Linux — Torvalds thinks "Rust's primary first target seems to be drivers, simply because that's where you find just a lot of different possible targets, and you have these individual parts of the kernel that are fairly small and independent. That may not be a very interesting target to some people, but it's the obvious one."
Hoppy — Hoppy provides a unique public IPv4 and IPv6 address to each of your devices, allowing connectivity without limitations. If you are behind a restrictive ISP, constantly on the move, or self-hosting services, Hoppy is for you. All major platforms are supported.
ngrok — Secure introspectable tunnels to localhost.
Project POCKIT — PocKit is a computer made for the real, physical world. On top of its powerful, versatile Core, you can attach BLOCKS - any number of any kind - to suit your application.
Mobile Linux OSes are looking better than ever this week, a new effort to keep legacy applications running on Linux, and the signals indicating a Fuchsia release is nigh.
Plus a PSA for GNOME users, and a recently improved tool for the Raspberry Pi.
Ubuntu Touch OTA-16 Release — Today we are happy to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-16, our sixteenth stable update to the system!
Find your device: devices.ubuntu-touch.io — This list shows the devices which are currently under development in the Ubuntu Touch ecosystem. Mature devices have easy access to installation through the UBports Installer. Devices in an early state generally need to follow a manual installation procedure.
Google is preparing for Fuchsia’s first releases — For years now, we’ve been watching and waiting as Google has gradually developed their Fuchsia operating system from the ground up. Now evidence has appeared pointing to Google’s Fuchsia OS getting its first — and second — proper release.
Employees Actually Work Less Than 3 Hours a Day — New research from the UK’s largest money saving brand has revealed that the average UK office worker is only productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes out of the working day.
Linux Desktop Levels Up | LINUX Unplugged 397
Mar 16, 2021
We break down the next-level features coming to a Linux near you in just a few weeks.
Virtual x86 — v86 emulates an x86-compatible CPU and hardware. Machine code is translated to WebAssembly modules at runtime in order to achieve decent performance.
The Linux desktop is boring again — Where I was once a constant "fiddler" with my desktop, I now want the interface to work how I want it to work, but still look the way I want it to look. I'm more of a minimalist now, so GNOME suits my needs on both levels quite well. However, I find myself rather bored with the Linux desktop.
What to look for in Fedora Workstation 34 — Christian F.K. Schaller — The big ticket item we have wanted to close off on was Wayland, because while Wayland has been production ready for most of us for a while, there was still some cases it didn’t cover as well as X.org.
Christian Schaller on Twitter — 2020 was a year where we focused a lot on polishing what we had and getting things past the finish line and Fedora Workstation 34 is going to be the culmination of that effort in many ways.
GNOME 40 Introducing Headless Native Backend, Virtual Monitors — As part of this headless native back-end is also the ability to create virtual monitors via command-line options for debugging and other purposes. This also allows creating virtual monitor PipeWire streams.
Pick: kmon — Linux Kernel Manager and Activity Monitor 🐧💻
Pick: ebpfsnitch — eBPFSnitch is a Linux Application Level Firewall based on eBPF and NFQUEUE. It is inspired by OpenSnitch and Douane but utilizing modern kernel abstractions - without a kernel module.
The A-Team assembled to make open source more trustworthy, why we might be about to find out how much SUSE is worth, and some essential project updates.
Linux Foundation serves up free code-signing service — The Linux Foundation, with the support of Google, Red Hat, and Purdue University, is launching a service called sigstore to help developers sign the code they release.
Introducing sigstore — Installing most open source software today is equivalent to picking up a random thumb-drive off the sidewalk and plugging it into your machine.
rekor: Signature Transparency Log — Rekor's goals are to provide an immutable tamper resistant ledger of metadata generated within a software projects supply chain.
Fulcio: SigStore WebPKI — fulcio is a free Root-CA for code signing certs - issuing certificates based on an OIDC email address.
German software company SUSE targets pre-summer IPO — SUSE is targeting a pre-summer initial public offering in a deal that may value the private equity-backed company with German roots at 7-8 billion euros ($8.3-9.5 billion), people close to the matter said.
VirtIO Sound Driver Coming — The virtual sound driver for VirtIO has been queued up into the sound-next code ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window this spring.
GNOME 40 Introducing Virtual Monitors — This headless native back-end that was merged today into GNOME 40's Mutter allows for running the native back-end atop a render node in a headless configuration without a physical display attached.
GRUB 2.06 Release Candidate Available For Testing — Among the changes coming with GRUB 2.06 are expanded Btrfs RAID support, LUKS2 encrypted disk support, the BootHole patches and other security work,
Troy Hunt: Home Assistant, Pwned Passwords and Security Misconceptions — Two of my favourite things these days are Have I Been Pwned and Home Assistant. The former is an obvious choice, the latter I've come to love as I've embarked on my home automation journey. So, it was with great pleasure that I saw the two integrated recently.
Validating Leaked Passwords with k-Anonymity — Cloudflare continues to support Pwned Passwords by providing CDN and security functionality such that the data can easily be made available for download in raw form to organisations to protect their customers.
Shelly 2.5 — No HUB required – Connect Shelly 2.5 directly to your Wi-Fi at home.
filebrowser: 📂 Web File Browser — filebrowser provides a file managing interface within a specified directory and it can be used to upload, delete, preview, rename and edit your files.
Tandoor Recipes — Today i am happy to announce that I have released a new version which finally gives the application its well deserved name and logo: Tandoor Recipes.
Not Found | Coder Radio 404
Mar 10, 2021
Mike reveals his secret project to Chris, who has several probing questions.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — Mesa announcing something new tonight and someone we all know and love who has great hair is going disapprove of the architecture!
CoderBytes — New super secret project landing page.
Open Bug Bounty — Free Bug Bounty Program and Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — I’m submitting a talk entitled “OpenSUSE Evangelism and The @ChrisLAS Challenge” 😈
ReSharper — The Visual Studio Extension for .NET Developers
dotUltimate — All .NET tools, ReSharper C++,
and JetBrains Rider, together in one pack
Michael Dominick on Twitter — Damn.... working in #CSharp is just a pleasure.... #Tempation. Does anyone know a lot about how @dotnet #Linux binaries compare in comparison to #cpp ones? I am reconsidering some of my choices here....
Apple discontinues the iMac Pro — More notably, the iMac Pro is a product from a different time, and represents a path Apple ultimately chose not to take with the Mac. When Apple announced in April 2017 it would make a new Mac Pro and was recommitting to its core pro customers, the iMac Pro was about to be announced. When it shipped that December, it felt very much like an interim step, a computer that was built as the replacement for the Mac Pro, only to have the Mac Pro survive after all.
MWC Barcelona Conference Planning for 50,000 In-Person — As reported by Bloomberg, GSMA, the organizer of MWC Barcelona, says that it plans to hold the conference in-person between June 28 and July 1, with expectations of up to 50,000 attendees.
How Linux Got to Mars | LINUX Unplugged 396
Mar 09, 2021
Tim Canham, the Mars Helicopter Operations Lead, shares Linux’s origins at JPL and how it ended up running on multiple boxes on Mars.
Plus the challenges Linux still faces before its ready for mission-critical space exploration.
Debian running on Rust coreutils — tldr: uutils/coreutils is now available in Debian, good enough to boot a Debian with GNOME, install the top 1000 packages, build Firefox, the Linux Kernel and LLVM/Clang.
uutils/coreutils — An attempt at writing universal (as in cross-platform) CLI utilities in Rust.
Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games to Run on Linux — Proton has been receiving many updates in the past few months as well, with the introduction of the Soldier Linux runtime container and Proton Experimental on top of the regular Proton releases.
NASA’s Perseverance Drives on Mars’ Terrain for First Time — NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover performed its first drive on Mars March 4, covering 21.3 feet (6.5 meters) across the Martian landscape. The drive served as a mobility test that marks just one of many milestones as team members check out and calibrate every system, subsystem, and instrument on Perseverance.
JPL CubeSat ASTERIA — ASTERIA (Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics) was a technology demonstration and opportunistic science mission to conduct astrophysical measurements using a CubeSat.
Canonical: Flutter Is The Default Choice For Future Ubuntu Apps — Along with the new installer, Ken Vandine, Engineering Manager, Ubuntu Desktop, Canonical revealed that the out-of-the-box experience for devices preloaded with Ubuntu will also be powered by Flutter.
Ubuntu on Twitter — Flutter is the default choice for future Ubuntu apps. @kenvandine, Engineering Manager, is here to tell you about some of Canonical’s contributions to Flutter at #FlutterEngage.
The Linode network model — As we worked on expanding our global network, three things were non-negotiable: maintaining vendor diversity, balancing flexibility and control, and incorporating Linux starting at the network level as much as possible.
Linux Mint may start pushing high-priority patches to users — Besides looking for available updates, the Manager will also track cases where updates are overlooked. This will include metrics on when updates were last applied; when were packages last upgraded; and how many days have passed since a particular update was made available.
A warning about 5.12-rc1 — This merge window, we had a very innocuous code cleanup and simplification that raised no red flags at all, but had a subtle and very nasty bug in it: swap files stopped working right. And they stopped working in a particularly bad way: the offset of the start of the swap file was lost. Swapping still happened, but it happened to the wrong part of the filesystem, with the obvious catastrophic end results.
Save the Date! | Container Plumbing Days — The Container Plumbing Days will be a 2-day event to investigate, discuss, hack, learn, and celebrate the “lower-level” open source container technologies, everything from the container runtime on down to the Linux kernel.
Forbidden | Coder Radio 403
Mar 03, 2021
After we pine about the way things used to be, Mike shares why he is developing a fondness for C++.
TouchEgg — Touchégg is an app that runs in the background and transform the gestures you make on your touchpad or touchscreen into visible actions in your desktop.
Apple Touch Bar Linux Driver Hopes For Upstream In 2021 — Sent out on Saturday by independent developer Ronald Tschalär was the latest reverse-engineered, open-source driver code that gets the Touch Bar and ALS support working for MacBook Pro 13,* / 14,* / 15,* models.
liamg/traitor — Automatic Linux privesc via exploitation of low-hanging fruit e.g. gtfobins.
Don't expose the Docker socket (not even to a container) — Docker primarily works as a client that communicates with a daemon process (dockerd). Typically that socket is a UNIX domain socket called /var/run/docker.sock. That daemon is highly privileged; effectively having root access. Any process that can write to the dockerd socket also effectively has root access.
Red Hat is still in damage control mode, a new hacker laptop called Framework makes bold promises, and what Google is spending money on in the Linux kernel.
Plus why we've recently switched back to Firefox, and more.
Google Funds Linux Kernel Developers to Focus Exclusively on Security — Silva and Chancellor’s exclusive focus is to maintain and improve kernel security and associated initiatives in order to ensure the world’s most pervasive open source software project is sustainable for decades to come.
Latest Firefox release includes Multiple Picture-in-Picture and Total Cookie Protection — In today’s release, we added multiple picture-in-picture views, available on Mac, Linux and Windows, and includes keyboard controls for fast forward and rewind. Total Cookie Protection stops cookies from tracking you around the web by creating a separate cookie jar for every website.
Unofficial Bitwarden compatible server written in Rust — This is a Bitwarden server API implementation written in Rust compatible with upstream Bitwarden clients*, perfect for self-hosted deployment where running the official resource-heavy service might not be ideal.
Changes to LastPass Free — As a Free user, your first login on or after March 16th will set your active device type. You’ll have three opportunities to switch your active device type to explore what’s right for you.
Intel GVT-g — Intel GVT-g is a technology that provides mediated device passthrough for Intel GPUs (Broadwell and newer). It can be used to virtualize the GPU for multiple guest virtual machines, effectively providing near-native graphics performance in the virtual machine and still letting your host use the virtualized GPU normally.
The Coder — Look and feel comfortable, while kicking ass. Life is better in a robe.
Keychron K3 Ultra-slim Wireless Mechanical Keyboard — Keychron K3 Ultra-slim Wireless Bluetooth Mechanical Keyboard has included keycaps for both Windows and macOS, and users can hotswap every switch in seconds with the hot-swappable version.
Keychron K3 review — If you need the lightest and smallest low-profile mechanical keyboard, Keychron's new K3 fits the bill.
Keychron K6 Wireless Mechanical Keyboard — Crafted to maximize your workspace with an ergonomic design, while retaining all necessary multimedia and function keys. The hot-swappable version offers the freedom to easily personalize your typing experience without soldering.
RSI Work Regime — When Chris mentioned his ongoing battle against RSI on episode 401, it got me thinking about a few coding techniques I rely on.
Start with a niche — One of the most common mistakes is to ignore niches and just try to attract all kinds of customers. It’s essential to find 1-2 ponds to start from and then expand to the other, larger, and more promising lakes and oceans
Announcing .NET 6 Preview 1 — Our unification efforts offer something for all .NET developers. If you are desktop app developer, there are new opportunities for you to reach new users. If you are a mobile app developer, you will benefit from using the mainline .NET tools and APIs while targeting iOS and Android platforms. If you are a web or cloud developer, it will be easier to expose services to .NET mobile apps and share code with them.
Tempted But the Truth is Discovered | LINUX Unplugged 394
Feb 23, 2021
After all these years, what's made us stick with Linux?
Plus the commitment just made by the GNOME team, and some new tools that are changing our game.
Nvidia is nerfing its new RTX 3060 for Ethereum cryptocurrency mining — Nvidia is purposefully making its new RTX 3060 graphics cards less efficient to mine Ethereum cryptocurrency. New drivers that will accompany the release of the GPUs later this month will reduce the hash rate of Ethereum mining by around 50 percent, using software detection for cryptocurrency mining.
Linux has made it to Mars — “It’s kind of an open-source victory, because we’re flying an open-source operating system and an open-source flight software framework and flying commercial parts that you can buy off the shelf if you wanted to do this yourself someday.”
Linux Action News 177 — We share some exclusive details about the Linux-powered gear that just landed on Mars, and the open-source frameworks that make it possible.
GNOME Shell 40 and multi-monitor — Multi-monitor has come up a fair bit in conversations about the GNOME Shell UX updates that are coming in GNOME 40. There’s been some uncertainty and anxiety in this area, so we wanted to provide more detail on what the multi-monitor experience will exactly be like, so people know what to expect.
PipeWire 0.3.22 Released With Many Improvements — PipeWire 0.3.22 was released this week with a whole lot of work in trying to see that Fedora 34 this spring can ship with it in use by default.
SonoBus — SonoBus is an easy to use application for streaming high-quality, low-latency peer-to-peer audio between devices over the internet or a local network.
PipeWire — It provides a low-latency, graph based processing engine on top of audio and video devices that can be used to support the use cases currently handled by both pulseaudio and JACK.
How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars — This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars. We’re actually running on a Linux operating system. The software framework that we’re using is one that we developed at JPL for cubesats and instruments, and we open-sourced it a few years ago.
Linux 5.12 Git Seeing New Code Land Following Winter Storm — While the first week of a new merge window is often one of the busiest times for Linus Torvalds in overseeing the Linux kernel, until last night there was no actual Linux 5.12 code being pushed into the Linux Git repository. Linus was offline most of the week due to winter storms preventing him from pushing to the Git repository and interacting much with the mailing list.
Apple M1 teaser — So OpenBSD boots multi-user on the new Apple M1 hardware. This still has some hacks in it that need to be fixed, so don't expect support for this in the tree right now. But a big thank you to those that contributed to the pool for getting us some hardware.
Unauthorized | Coder Radio 401
Feb 17, 2021
Mike crosses over to report back from the other side, and Chris is along for the ride.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — "Holy crap! All those years not trying #ThinkPad from @Lenovo - I didn’t know what I was missing!"
Michael Dominick on Twitter — "It's so beautiful! #WSL #Linux @CoderRadioShow. Another don't tell @ChrisLAS ;) CC @PengwinLinux And yes, I am taking a mild WSL challenge again."
Google's iOS Apps, Which Still Haven't Been Updated Since Early December — After saying “This app is out of date”, its warning goes on to say “You should update this app.” We can’t. “The version you’re using doesn’t include the latest security features to keep you protected. Only continue if you understand the risks.”
Here’s a first look at Microsoft’s xCloud for the web — Microsoft has started testing its xCloud game streaming through a web browser. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s Xbox plans tell The Verge that employees are now testing a web version of xCloud ahead of a public preview. The service allows Xbox players to access their games through a browser, and opens up xCloud to work on devices like iPhones and iPads.
AmpliPi - Home Audio System — Kickstarter — One thing that sets apart the AmpliPi design is that we have made it open source, from the software, to the firmware, to the schematics. The REST API and Web App are written in Python and run on a Raspberry Pi 3+ Compute Module.
The Coder — The Coder is made from 100% cotton terry velour for soft, cozy wear. Embroidered on the left chest with a classic white on black Coder Radio logo.
Windows Refund Day — For those who hadn't heard the story, February 15th 1999 was windows refund day. It was a worldwide day when open source OS users went to microsoft's offices to return their unused licenses of windows that they were forced to acquire since they were bundled with the machine they bought.
Manjaro Linux on Twitter — We updated #PlasmaMobile to the latest #Plasma 5.21 stable release. This comes with the latest 5.10 LTS kernel and updated development packages. Checkout the latest software by @kdecommunity powered by @ManjaroLinuxARM for your #Pinephone!
Plasma 5.2 — Apart from the numerous improvements in stability, there are quite a few Plasma components that are getting much better support in Wayland. KRunner, for example, is now able to list all open windows in Wayland, a new component in the panel’s system tray informs you of the keyboard layout, and we now support features required for GTK 4, so all GTK 4 applications will now work.
SonoBus — SonoBus is an easy to use, open-source, application for streaming high-quality, low-latency peer-to-peer audio between devices over the internet or a local network.
Linux Action News 176
Feb 14, 2021
Microsoft and Ubuntu's relationship is under a new spotlight this week.
Plus our rundown of the feature-packed 5.11 release, a Fuchsia surprise, exciting hardware news, and more.
KDE Plasma 5.21 is Packed with New Features — KDE Plasma 5.21 is going to be released on February 16 and when it arrives it’ll bring a barrel load of changes and enhancements with it.
Linux 5.11 Is Heavy On New Features, Improvements For 2021 — There are a ton of Intel and AMD changes, Syscall User Dispatch for helping some newer Windows games run under Wine, continued IO_uring advancements, many Btrfs file-system improvements, Lenovo contributed ThinkPad palm sensor detection support, and much more.
System76 on Twitter — “The Launch keyboard PCB! #system76 #launch #keyboard #linux #comingsoon #sneakpeek"
AMD Is Currently Hiring More Linux Engineers — Several of these new job descriptions do begin with, "step up into a new organization built to engage more strategically and deeply with the technical teams of our commercial customers."
Google Fuchsia OS could run Android & Linux apps ‘natively’ — This week, a proposal has been put forward for an alternative solution for Fuchsia to run programs meant for Linux and Android. Instead of running Linux itself, Fuchsia would gain a system called “Starnix,” which would act as a translator between instructions for the Linux kernel and instructions for Fuchsia’s Zircon kernel.
FileRun - File Manager — Just like you do with an FTP server, point FileRun to where you keep the files on your server and you will get instant web access to them.
termpad — Just an empty terminal, in your browser.
Tinypin — A self-hosted, minimalistic image collection board.
OPNsense 21.1 Released — For those wondering, the WireGuard plugin has been available since 2019 and receives continuous improvements by its maintainer and various users alike. And that is unlikey to change in the future.
Hassio-google-drive-backup — A complete and easy way to back up your Home Assistant snapshots to Google Drive.
Duplicati — Backup files and folders with strong AES-256 encryption. Save space with incremental backups and data deduplication. Run backups on any machine through the web-based interface or via command line interface. Duplicati has a built-in scheduler and auto-updater.
Bad Request | Coder Radio 400
Feb 10, 2021
After reflecting on more than 8 years of the show, we get into solving problems and taking names.
Plus a couple of special announcements, and some Hoopla we've just got to talk about.
Coder Radio Episode 1 MP4 - Direct Download — Michael and Chris introduce our new weekly software development podcast. We start with a look at ways beginners can get started with development.
Plus we chat about the issues new developers face entering a market dominated by App stores.
Then – How platform vendors are feeling the need to reclaim greater control from developers.
Coder Radio Episode 400 Poster — Celebrate 400 episodes of Coder Radio with this word cloud tribute poster. Every title turned into one cool poster.
The Coder | Official Coder Radio Robe — The Coder is made from 100% cotton terry velour for soft, cozy wear. Embroidered on the left chest with a classic white on black Coder Radio logo.
RabbitMQ Message Server One-Click App | Linode Marketplace — RabbitMQ is a highly available intermediary for messages to scale applications and prevent impacts to performance due to message processing. Monitor message status and performance stats in the simple interface, or control entirely in the command line. Message queuing ensures that your server is optimized for your application’s load time, reducing performance impacts due to too many message requests. Use plugins to connect to other tools, including Kubernetes and Prometheus.
Rust Foundation - Hello World! — Today, on behalf of the Rust Core team, I’m excited to announce the Rust Foundation, a new independent non-profit organization to steward the Rust programming language and ecosystem,
The unanswered question at CentOS community Q&A: How can we trust you now? — The CentOS board conducted a public Q&A just ahead of last week's FOSDEM 2021 open source conference – and there was an awkward silence when someone asked whether changing the end-of-life (EOL) date for a released project is something that might happen again.
Ubuntu Backports a Major App Update to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS — Ubuntu 20.04 LTS shipped with Thunderbird 68.x but this version is no longer supported upstream. This leaves Ubuntu developers will a problem: backport individual security fixes to Thunderbird 68, or port the newer (and still-supported) Thunderbird 78 to LTS users?
EndeavourOS Issues First 2021 Release For Easy-To-Use Arch-Based Linux Distro — For those that have been meaning to try out an Arch Linux based distribution that is easy-to-use and not time consuming with sensible defaults, EndeavourOS is out with its first new spin since 2021 -- and in fact their first fresh ISO release since September.
Pick: ht — Yet another HTTPie clone, written in Rust.
PIck: fddf — Fast data dupe finder, written in Rust.
Pick: bottom — Yet another cross-platform graphical process/system monitor, written in Rust.
Linux Action News 175
Feb 06, 2021
The story behind a Microsoft repo shipping in Raspberry Pi OS, Canonical updates a special version of Ubuntu, and a couple of milestones the Linux world hit this week.
Eben Upton on Twitter — I can’t understand why you think this was a controversial thing to do. We do things of this sort all the time without putting out a blog post about how to opt out.
Donating Docker Distribution to the CNCF — To make the project clearly an industry wide collaboration, hosting it in the CNCF was the obvious place, as it is the home of many successful collaborative projects, such as Kubernetes and Containerd.
Distribution — The toolkit to pack, ship, store, and deliver container content.
AlmaLinux, the CentOS Linux replacement, beta is out — AlmaLinux, the open-source enterprise-level Linux distribution created as an alternative to CentOS, has been released in beta with most Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages.
Google Stadia Shuts Down Internal Studios — Google will close its two game studios, located in Montreal and Los Angeles. Neither had released any games yet. That closure will impact around 150 developers, one source familiar with Stadia operations said.
Slack’s Outage on January 4th 2021 - Slack Engineering — As if this was not already an inauspicious start to the New Year, while we were in the early stages of investigating, our dashboarding and alerting service became unavailable.
Huginn: Your agents are standing by! — Huginn is a system for building agents that perform automated tasks for you online. They can read the web, watch for events, and take actions on your behalf. Huginn's Agents create and consume events, propagating them along a directed graph. Think of it as a hackable version of IFTTT or Zapier on your own server.
GNOME 40ified | LINUX Unplugged 391
Feb 02, 2021
We try out GNOME 40 and its new workspace layout. Who we think this works well for, and who might want to avoid it.
Plus Wimpy, Ubuntu's Desktop lead, chats with us about his future after Canonical.
Refreshing the Ubuntu Desktop Installer — We have started working on the new desktop installer, and plan to have a preliminary version ready for testing in the 21.10 release; due in October 2021. This paves the way to transitioning to the new installer for the next LTS release, which will be 22.04, due for release in April 2022.
Martin 🙂 Wimpress on Twitter — I’ll soon⏳be leaving Canonical. I’m very excited to be joining the fine people @SlimDevOps😃Despite the change, I’ll continue to lead @ubuntu_mate; it’s my passion💖project. Naturally, I’ll remain an enthusiastic #Ubuntu & Snapcraft community contributor💪
GNOME 40 Approaches Its UI Freeze, Easy Means To Start Testing It — GNOME Shell recently merged its new horizontal workspaces, among other changes. The official GNOME Shell & Mutter development blog put out a new post on Monday highlighting their latest efforts. They are working to get the remaining big items in place over the next two weeks before the freeze and then an “intense period of polishing and bug fixing.”
Welp, Ubuntu 21.04 Won’t Ship with GNOME 40 or GTK4 — Ubuntu devs cite the redesign of GNOME Shell in GNOME 40 and its potential impact on GNOME extensions (of which Ubuntu ships a few by default) and the Yaru GTK theme as reason to “stick” to GNOME 3.38 this cycle.
Carl George on Twitter — I’ve been a @gnome fan/apologist for a long time. Dynamic virtual workspaces spanned across multiple horizontally arranged monitors are so damn wonderful to use. Productive. Efficient. Spatial.
Element team waiting hours — Update: we’re still waiting for a response from Google to our explanatory mail sent ~8 hours ago. Thanks all for your patience while we get this sorted...
New Linux SUDO flaw lets local users gain root privileges — The issue is a heap-based buffer overflow exploitable by any local user (normal users and system users, listed in the sudoers file or not), with attackers not being required to know the user's password to successfully exploit the flaw. The vulnerability was introduced in the Sudo program almost 9 years ago, in July 2011.
Rocky Linux gets a new sponsor—Gregory Kurtzer’s startup, Ctrl IQ — Rocky Linux is to be a beneficiary of Ctrl IQ's revenue, not its source—the company describes itself in its announcement as the suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing."
Security Bulletin 1- Home Assistant — It has come to our attention that certain custom integrations have security issues and could potentially leak sensitive information.
Security Disclosure 2: vulnerabilities in custom integrations HACS, Font Awesome and others - Home Assistant — . The conclusion is that some custom integrations are still vulnerable to a directory traversal attack while not being authenticated with Home Assistant. It allows an attacker to access any file without having to log in. This access includes any credentials that you might have stored to allow Home Assistant to access other services.
Generic Thermostat - Home Assistant — The genericthermostat climate platform is a thermostat implemented in Home Assistant. It uses a sensor and a switch connected to a heater or air conditioning under the hood.
ATCMiThermometer — Custom firmware for the Xiaomi Thermometer LYWSD03MMC and Telink Flasher via USB to Serial converter.
ESPHome — ESPHome is a system to control your ESP8266/ESP32 by simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through Home Automation systems.
Xiaomi Mijia BLE Temperature and Humidity Sensor - Home Assistant — The mitemp_bt sensor platform allows one to monitor room temperature and humidity. The Xiaomi Mijia BLE Temperature and Humidity sensor with LCD is a small Bluetooth Low Energy device that monitors the room temperature and humidity.
Alacritty: A cross-platform, OpenGL terminal emulator. — Alacritty is a modern terminal emulator that comes with sensible defaults, but allows for extensive configuration. By integrating with other applications, rather than reimplementing their functionality, it manages to provide a flexible set of features with high performance. The supported platforms currently consist of BSD, Linux, macOS and Windows.
How We Ported Linux to the M1 — At Corellium, we've been tracking the Apple mobile ecosystem since iPhone 6, released in 2014 with two 64-bit cores.
Probabilistic flakiness: How do you test your tests? — While we use automated tests to detect regressions in product quality, until recently we had no means of automatically detecting whether the tests themselves were deteriorating.
Eating the License Cake | LINUX Unplugged 390
Jan 26, 2021
Successful open-source projects all seem to struggle with one major gorilla. Who it is, and what their options are now.
FEDORA-2021-48866282e5 — security update for chromium — Fedora Updates System — I gave a lot of thought to whether I wanted to continue to maintain the Chromium package in Fedora, given that many (most?) users will be confused/annoyed when API functionality like sync and geolocation stops working for no good reason. Ultimately, I decided to continue for now, because there were at least some users who didn't mind, and if I stopped, someone else would start over and run blindly into this problem.
Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch | AWS Open Source Blog — In order to ensure open source versions of both packages remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.
Jellyfin 10.7.0 Release Changelog — SyncPlay for TV shows and Music, significantly improved web performance, an upgrade to .NET SDK 5.0 for improved performance in the backend, and more!
Pick: dust — A more intuitive version of du in rust
Pick: Waybar — Highly customizable Wayland bar for Sway and Wlroots based compositors.
Linux Action News 173
Jan 24, 2021
Why we don't think Red Hat's expanded developer program is enough, our reaction to Ubuntu sticking with an older Gnome release, and a tiny delightful surprise.
Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch | AWS Open Source Blog — In order to ensure open source versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.
Electron package guidelines — Arch Linux provides global electron and versioned electron* packages that can be used to run an electron application via a shellscript wrapper.
MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Pro, M1 Rumors — This week was sure a busy one in the Apple world, with a flurry of announcements out of CES early in the week followed by a rash of Mac- and iPhone-related rumors later in the week.
This week in KDE: new KWin compositing, new Kickoff, new recording level visualization! — This week KWin’s compositing code was almost totally rewritten! It should broadly reduce latency throughout all compositing operations, and also adds a user-facing control in the System Settings Compositing page so people can choose for themselves whether they prefer lower latency or smoother animations.
Xfce 4.16 Released — Today, after 1 year and 4 months of work, we are happy to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.16, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.14.
XFCE Nation on Twitter — Reminder to @ChrisLAS and @wespayne that Xfce 4.16 has been out since December 22nd but hasn’t been mentioned on @LinuxActionNews or @LinuxUnplugged.
Wine 6.0 released — This release is dedicated to the memory of Ken Thomases, who passed away just before Christmas at the age of 51. Ken was an incredibly brilliant developer, and the mastermind behind the macOS support in Wine. We all miss his skills, his patience, and his dark sense of humor.
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 6.0 — The core DLLs, including NTDLL, KERNEL32, GDI32, USER32, etc. are built in PE format. This should help a number of copy protection schemes that check that the DLL files on disk match the in-memory contents.
CloudLinux readies CentOS Linux replacement: AlmaLinux — AlmaLinux will be a free, open-source, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 (and future releases). For CentOS users, the company promises Lenix will provide an uninterrupted way to convert existing CentOS servers with absolutely zero downtime or need to reinstall anything
Using Podman and Docker Compose — Up to now, support for Docker Compose, the command-line utility that orchestrates multiple Docker containers for local development, was missing. With Podman 3.0 now in development upstream, we have begun to support Compose.
Chromium Blog: Limiting Private API availability in Chromium — During a recent audit, we discovered that some third-party Chromium-based browsers were able to integrate Google features, such as Chrome sync and Click to Call, that are only intended for Google’s use. We are limiting access to our private Chrome APIs starting on March 15, 2021.
HedgeDoc - The best platform to write and share markdown. — HedgeDoc (formerly known as CodiMD) is an open-source collaborative markdown editor. With HedgeDoc you can easily collaborate on notes, graphs and even presentations in real-time. All you need to do is to share your note-link to your co-workers, and they’re ready to go.
Home Assistant Blue! — Hardware that is affordable and fast, packed in a gorgeous case and powered by the most powerful home automation software on the planet: Home Assistant.
Actiontec MoCA 2.5 Network Adapter for Ethernet Over Coax — With the reliability of a wired network, MoCA 2.5 technology upgrades your network for latency, reliability, and more. MoCA adapters use the same coaxial cables as your cable TV or fiber-optic service.
Everyone Fools Around with Linux in College | Coder Radio 396
Jan 13, 2021
Mike and Chris discuss the recent JetBrains FUD and ponder the impact of recent AWS policy enforcement.
Plus a bunch of cool setups sent in by our audience.
Homebrew on Apple Silicon — The biggest issue for me was Homebrew. According to this issue “There won’t be any support for native ARM Homebrew installations for months to come.” No big deal though. Homebrew can work just fine with Rosetta 2 and some things work natively.
Question on Quora that Captures the Impact — Are creators of IntelliJ, the JetBrains company, a project of Russian secret services stealing secrets from all the Western software shops?
Apple M1 Docker Tech Preview — This tech preview is aimed at early adopters of Apple M1 machines, who would like to try an experimental build of Docker Desktop.
Waxing On With Wendell | LINUX Unplugged 388
Jan 12, 2021
Wendell joins the show to cover the state of graphics on Linux, and what Intel has in store for the future.
Plus why we're excited about PeerTube again, some feedback, and more.
Linux Action News 171 — We explain the recent Qt upset, and then go hands-on with the new PeerTube release. Plus Wendell from Level1Techs joins us to discuss his thoughts on porting Linux to the Apple M1.
Intel Xe MAX Needs Two Linux Kernels For Now - Meaning You Need To Use A GPU-Accelerated VM — The good news is the Xe MAX graphics can be used for a GPU-accelerated Linux virtual machine. The bad news is the Xe MAX support doesn't yet allow for dGPU usage by the host outside of a virtual machine context as it needs "two different [Linux] kernels" for operation in conjunction with the integrated graphics.
Intel GVT-g - ArchWiki — Intel GVT-g is a technology that provides mediated device passthrough for Intel GPUs (Broadwell and newer). It can be used to virtualize the GPU for multiple guest virtual machines, effectively providing near-native graphics performance in the virtual machine and still letting your host use the virtualized GPU normally.
openSUSE Feedback — I'd like to make an argument about Yast. OpenSuse definitely should be clearer in who it is intended for. But here is my humble opinion. It is not for folks who have been using Linux for years.
Feedback: Try Alpine! — Overall, Alpine is a small, simple distro with a lot of tricks up its sleeves. It's definitely worth a look!
Pick: GPU-Viewer for Linux — This project aims to capture all the important details of glxinfo, vulkaninfo and clinfo in a GUI. The project is being developed using python 3 pygobject with GTK3.
LTS versions of Qt going closed-source — The Qt Company is making LTS releases commercial only and thus closed-source. "The problem is that these releases are in effect no longer maintained. If there is a security issue, or a fix needed to support some change in one of the target operating systems, open-source users will not get that fix other than in the not-ready version 6.0."
A shell UX update – GNOME Shell & Mutter — The new design has prompted a lot of interest and comment, which we’re all really thrilled about. In this post I wanted to provide an update of where the initiative is at. I also want to take the opportunity to answer some of the common questions that have come up.
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I — A few weeks ago, I purchased a Mac Mini with an M1 GPU as a development target to study the instruction set and command stream, to understand the GPU’s architecture at a level not previously publicly understood, and ultimately to accelerate the development of a Mesa driver for the hardware. Today I’ve reached my first milestone: I now understand enough of the instruction set to disassemble simple shaders with a free and open-source tool chain, released on GitHub.
NVIDIA getting geared up to support hardware accelerated XWayland — NVIDIA’s Erik Kurzinger has submitted a Merge Request to the xserver GitLab titled “Xwayland: Support hardware accelerated rendering with the proprietary NVIDIA driver”, with the two patches included “intended to accompany upcoming support in the proprietary NVIDIA driver for hardware accelerated GL and Vulkan rendering with Xwayland”. Kurzinger continues to mention that once a driver is out with the needed hooks, this code should “just start working”.
Beancount: Double-Entry Accounting from Text Files. — A double-entry bookkeeping computer language that lets you define financial transaction records in a text file, read them in memory, generate a variety of reports from them, and provides a web interface.
Fava - web interface for Beancount — Fava is a web interface for the double-entry bookkeeping software Beancount with a focus on features and usability.
Dell.com/linux — With Canonical and Red Hat certification, Dell validation, and factory install options, you can be assured that your system just works.
Dell XPS 13 Laptop As Built for the Show — + “Tiger Lake” 11th-gen CPU up to 4.2 GHz
+ Ubuntu Linux 20.04
+ Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics (more on this)
+ 16GB 4267MHz LPDDR4x Memory Onboard (Max of 32GB possible)
+ 512GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive (Max of 2TB Possible)
+ 1080p touch edge to edge infinity display (4k optional)
MkDocs — MkDocs is a fast, simple and downright gorgeous static site generator that's geared towards building project documentation. Documentation source files are written in Markdown, and configured with a single YAML configuration file
SaaS we happily pay for — We try to run a lean operation at Mailbrew, but we are suckers for great tools that improve our daily workflows, so we pay for quite a few of them each month.
Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2020 — In February 2020 nearly 65,000 developers told us how they learn and level up, which tools they’re using, and what they want.
Perilously Precocious Predictions | LINUX Unplugged 386
Dec 29, 2020
Friends join us for a special edition of the show to review last year's predictions, and forecast the future.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, Joe Ressington, and Neal Gompa.
Our annual predictions episode kicks off with a review of what we got right and wrong for 2020, and then we speculate wildly about what could happen in 2021.
ThinkPad TrackPoint Keyboard II — The ThinkPad TrackPoint II Keyboard translates the ThinkPad notebook’s iconic typing experience into a stand-alone device.
Gooseneck Tablet Holder — Flexible Arm Clip Tablet Stand Bed Desk Mount Compatible with iPad Pro Mini Air, Galaxy Tabs and More
FastAPI — FastAPI framework, high performance, easy to learn, fast to code, ready for production
Qt for Python | The official Python bindings for Qt — Qt for Python is the project that provides the official set of Python bindings (PySide2) that will supercharge your Python applications. While the Qt APIs are world renowned, there are more reasons why you should consider Qt for Python. The first official release of the PySide2 module is available now!
Pylance - Visual Studio Marketplace — Pylance is an extension that works alongside Python in Visual Studio Code to provide performant language support. Under the hood, Pylance is powered by Pyright, Microsoft's static type checking tool. Using Pyright, Pylance has the ability to supercharge your Python IntelliSense experience with rich type information, helping you write better code faster.
microsoft/pyright: Static type checker for Python — Pyright is a fast type checker meant for large Python source bases. It can run in a “watch” mode and performs fast incremental updates when files are modified.
Jeremy Soller on Twitter — "I can no longer let things like this go. While System76 has been a part of the process, this should not be interpreted as consent to the new GNOME Shell design. We will do whatever possible to improve Pop!_OS UX even if it breaks significantly from GNOME's defaults."
Carl Richell on Twitter — Yes, we were involved but our involvement had no impact on the design. Our design ethos and reading of the research differs. We raised our concerns and proposed a different design. We’re continuing our research and building prototypes.
GNOME on Twitter — System76 was part of the entire process: setting up the research, doing polls, evaluating the results, suggesting changes
Synology QuickConnect — Synology QuickConnect allows you to access your Synology NAS anytime, anywhere, from any device and browser, without having to set up port forwarding.
Google kills Android Things, its IoT OS, in January — Google announced it had basically given up on the project as a general-purpose IoT operating system in 2019, but now there's an official shutdown date thanks to a new FAQ page detailing the demise of the OS.
Ron Amadeo on Twitter — Oof, Google promised three years of updates when Android Things launched in May 2018, the actual support it delivered? One year, three months.
Google acquires CloudReady OS to make PCs Chromebooks — Neverware lets you turn old PCs and Macs into Chromebook-esque devices through its CloudReady OS. While primarily aimed at schools and enterprises, a free “Home” edition for everyone is available. Google has now acquired Neverware and CloudReady with plans to integrate it with Chrome OS.
Matrix.to: Reloaded — A challenge we regularly face is all the factors which make Matrix flexible and powerful as an open, secure decentralised protocol also increase the difficulty of getting started.
Introducing Cerulean — Alongside all the normal business-as-usual Matrix stuff, we’ve found some time to do a mad science experiment over the last few weeks - to test the question: "Is it possible to build a serious Twitter-style decentralised microblogging app using Matrix?"
TP-Link AV1000 Powerline Starter Kit —
HomePlug AV2 Standard - high-speed data transfer rates of up to 1000 Mbps, supporting all your online needs
PCI(e) Passthrough - Proxmox VE — PCI(e) passthrough is a mechanism to give a virtual machine control over a PCI device from the host. This can have some advantages over using virtualized hardware, for example lower latency, higher performance, or more features (e.g., offloading).
Home Assistant Conference 2020 - Home Assistant — The Home Assistant Conference is an online event to celebrate the community. It’s where the Home Assistant community will share their ideas, creations and major milestones. The event will take place on December 13, 2020.
Home Assistant Blue! — We challenged ourselves: what would the perfect home automation hub look like. Not just software, but also hardware and looks.
Automate with Blueprints! — Say hello; to the major new feature of Home Assistant 2020.12: Blueprints!
Matrix Client: Fractal — Fractal is a Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust. Its interface is optimized for collaboration in large groups, such as free software projects.
Matrix Client: nheko — The motivation behind the project is to provide a native desktop app for Matrix that feels more like a mainstream chat app.
Before You Get Mad About The CentOS Stream Change, Think About… — But, before you get angry, please read this. I’ve been surfing Twitter, Reddit, and HackerNews threads just like many others. I’ve gathered some major buckets of complaints which seem to come up, and I’d like to address each of them.
Linux 5.10 Released — Besides being the last kernel release of 2020, this is a significant milestone in that it's also a Long Term Support (LTS) kernel to be maintained for at least the next five years and also is a huge kernel update in general with many new features.
CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream — The future of the CentOS Project is CentOS Stream, and over the next year we’ll be shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release.
CentOS Stream: Building an innovative future for enterprise Linux — Since its introduction, we’ve seen great enthusiasm from partners and contributors around CentOS Stream and the continuous stream of innovation that the project provides. Given this, we’ve informed the CentOS Project Governing Board that we are shifting our investment fully from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream.
OG CentOS Founder Wants to build another CentOS — I am considering creating another rebuild of RHEL and may even be able to hire some people for this effort. If you are interested in helping, please join the HPCng slack (link on the website hpcng.org).
Pi-KVM — A very simple and fully functional Raspberry Pi-based KVM over IP that you can make with your own hands without any soldering!
Check out Self-Hosted — Discover new software and hardware to get the best out of your network, control smart devices, and secure your data on cloud services.
New Raspberry Pi OS release — The traditional end-of-year new release of Raspberry Pi OS, which we launch today.
Raspberry Pi’s V3DV Vulkan Driver Now Supports Wayland — Raspberry Pi fans were celebrating that the V3DV driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for supporting this modern high-performance graphics/compute API atop the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer.
Should Red Hat be afraid of SUSE’s Rancher acquisition? — SUSE, a major Linux and cloud company, finalized its acquisition of Rancher Labs earlier this year.. Rancher, formerly a privately held open-source company, had over 37,000 active users and 100-million downloads of its flagship Kubernetes management program, Rancher.
Kobol Wiki — Kobol Network Attached Storage (NAS) are open source projects, therefore any technical data related to these projects will be published on this Wiki.
Helios64 Product Limitation Notification — Recently we have discovered that when Helios64 2.5G Ethernet interface is connected at 1000Mb/s Link Speed (e.g. Connected to a Gigabit switch), the performance is really degraded, around 10 - 100 Mbps.
Home Assistant Conference 2020 — The Home Assistant Conference is an online event to celebrate the community. It’s where the Home Assistant community will share their ideas, creations and major milestones. The event will take place on December 13, 2020.
The Gold Rust | Coder Radio 390
Dec 02, 2020
After we geek out about keyboards, we answer some feedback and take a dip in the Rust lust.
Vortex Race 3 Mechanical Keyboard — Vortex's newest 75% keyboard, the 83-key Race 3! Do you need dedicated arrow keys that your 60% doesn't provide, but don't want the size of a TKL? A 75% may be just for you! Most of the keys are in the "normal" spot, so there's nearly no learning curve for this keyboard.
Dear Microsoft — So welcome, Microsoft, to the revolution. We’re glad you’re going to be helping us define this new product category. We admire many of your achievements and know you’ll be a worthy competitor. We’re sure you’re going to come up with a couple of new ideas on your own too. And we’ll be right there, ready.
ZaReason is Done. The Store is Closed. — As many have noticed, our product line has been getting smaller and our tech support has been slowing down to a crawl. Unfortunately, the pandemic has been the final KO blow. It has hit our little town hard and we have not been able to recover from it. As of Tuesday, 11/24/20 17:00 EST ZaReason is no longer in business.
Hector Martin on Twitter — Help make Linux on Apple Silicon Macs a reality! Patreon is up! I’m pausing billing until I get $4k/mo of commitment, so you won’t be charged until there is enough momentum to make the project viable.
Pick: gallery-dl — gallery-dl is a command-line program to download image-galleries and -collections from several image hosting sites. It is a cross-platform tool with many configuration options and powerful filenaming capabilities.
Linux Action News 165
Nov 29, 2020
What caused the recent major AWS outage, the breaking changes that just arrived upstream, and a new mail client for Linux.
Plus our reaction to Microsoft's Android subsystem that's in the works.
Microsoft is working on an Android subsystem for Windows 10 — This new initiative is called 'Project Latte,' and similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), will create a virtualized Android environment running directly within Windows 10.
Smoked Laptops | Coder Radio 389
Nov 25, 2020
Mike buys a laptop live on air while Chris worries about the turkey.
Rust Watch: Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive — Utilizing an in-development Flash emulator called Ruffle, we have added Flash support to the Internet Archive’s Emularity system, letting a subset of Flash items play in the browser as if you had a Flash plugin installed.
Ruffle — Flash Player emulator written in the Rust programming language
We’re Building the Future of GNOME — Our plans for 2021 are even more ambitious and involve sustaining our ongoing work while building up new initiatives and support for the growing GNOME project and community.
Jasem’s Ekosphere: KStars v3.5.0 is Released — This release marks a significant milestone for KStars with the integration of StellarSolver, the Cross Platform Sextractor and Astrometry.net-Based Internal Astrometric Solver.
Wave-share — Serverless, peer-to-peer, local file sharing through sound.
Wave-share on GitHub — A proof-of-concept for WebRTC signaling using sound. Works with all devices that have microphone + speakers. Runs in the browser.
Standing up for developers: youtube-dl is back — Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.
Canonical Saw ~$119M Revenue In 2019 But Still Operating At A Loss — Ubuntu maker Canonical Holdings Limited recently submitted their UK financial report for their fiscal year ending 31 December 2019. During the pre-COVID times they generated around 22% more revenue than 2018 but still operated at a loss albeit more narrowly than in prior years.
Servo’s new home — Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed.
OpenAudible - Audio Book Manager — OpenAudible is a cross-platform audiobook manager designed for Audible users. Download, view, convert to MP3 or M4A, and manage all your audio books with our easy-to-use desktop application.
MQTT - Home Assistant — MQTT (aka MQ Telemetry Transport) is a machine-to-machine or “Internet of Things” connectivity protocol on top of TCP/IP. It allows extremely lightweight publish/subscribe messaging transport.
AdGuard Home — Network-wide software for blocking ads & tracking
Using Pihole with pfsense or opnsense — Pihole is a network wide ad blocker. Using DHCP we can tell every device on your network to automatically and transparently use Pihole for DNS.
PhotoPrism — PhotoPrism® is a server-based application for browsing, organizing and sharing your personal photo collection. It makes use of the latest technologies to automatically tag and find pictures without getting in your way. Say goodbye to solutions that force you to upload your visual memories to the cloud.
Standing up for developers: youtube-dl is back — Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.
Michael Dominick on Twitter: — "It has begun.... #macOS #BigSur @ChrisLAS the lengths I will go for show content....
Abrodolph Lincoler — Abrodolph Lincoler is a humanoid experiment who debuted in Ricksy Business
Apple Responds to macOS Privacy Concerns — “Gatekeeper performs online checks to verify if an app contains known malware and whether the developer’s signing certificate is revoked,” explains Apple. “We have never combined data from these checks with information about Apple users or their devices. We do not use data from these checks to learn what individual users are launching or running on their devices,” clarified the company.
No Sur, No Thank You | LINUX Unplugged 380
Nov 17, 2020
We review the Dell Precision 5750, a born and bred MacBook killer that runs Linux.
Plus a nasty reminder of how closely Apple monitors its users, and their fatal flaw that we think is outrageous.
Why Linux: Your Mac Isn’t Yours — On modern versions of macOS, you simply can’t power on your computer, launch a text editor or eBook reader, and write or read, without a log of your activity being transmitted and stored.
Application Trust is Hard, but Apple does it Well — Security Embedded — It comes down to an argument of trust - do you trust Apple, acting in their best interests, is sufficiently aligned with your best interests too? Or do you believe they're a malevolent entity? It's not feasible for an individual to maintain the list of trustworthy or untrustworthy parties that Apple does.
Longhorn on Twitter — So how will you boot third-party operating systems on arm64 Macs? You might have seen that pongoOS has been getting a ton of work in the recent past, and even more is coming. This work will allow us to support pongoOS as a second-stage bootloader for Apple Silicon-based Macs.
patrick wardle on Twitter — In Big Sur Apple decided to exempt many of its apps from being routed thru the frameworks they now require 3rd-party firewalls to use (LuLu, Little Snitch, etc.) 🧐 Q: Could this be (ab)used by malware to also bypass such firewalls? 🤔 A: Apparently yes, and trivially so 😬😱😭
Systemd catches up with bind events — Perhaps the real lesson here is that the community would be better served by closer relations between the kernel project and projects managing low-level utilities like systemd.
eBPF - The Future of Networking & Security — Cilium is an open source project that has been designed on top of eBPF to address the networking, security, and visibility requirements of container workloads. It provides a high-level abstraction on top of eBPF. Cilium is to eBPF what Kubernetes and container runtimes are to Linux kernel namespaces, cgroups, and seccomp
Apple Event — November 10 - YouTube — Join us for a special Apple Event on November 10 at 10 a.m. PST. Set a reminder and we'll send an update before the show.
Linux Mint pre-loads Chromium and Brings New IPTV Player — The package is available Linux Mint repository as “chromium” which you can install using standard “apt-get” or via the package manager. This is pure native Chromium and not a snap version.
profile-sync-daemon — Symlinks and syncs browser profile dirs to RAM thus reducing HDD/SDD calls and speeding-up browsers.
GPU-Viewer — A front-end to glxinfo, vulkaninfo, clinfo and es2_info.
Ivan Molodetskikh: Video Trimmer — Video Trimmer cuts out a fragment of a video given the start and end timestamps. The video is never re-encoded, so the process is very fast and does not reduce the video quality.
Liquorix kernel for Debian users — Liquorix is a distro kernel replacement built using the best configuration and kernel sources for desktop, multimedia, and gaming workloads.
Raspberry Pi 400: the $70 desktop PC — The Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer Kit is the “Christmas morning” product, with the best possible out-of-box experience: a complete PC which plugs into your TV or monitor.
Dell is Adding Webcam and Microphone Kill Switches — Dell is adding new code in Linux kernel that will enable you to disable newer Dell system’s webcam and microphone with keyboard shortcuts. Why? Because privacy.
Dual 4G LTE Router for Public Transportation MAX Transit Duo — With a compact form factor, simultaneous dual-band 11ac Wi-Fi, and two embedded LTE modems, the MAX Transit DUO is ready to deliver fast, reliable connectivity in transportation and public safety deployments
SpeedFusion Cloud - Peplink — From video streaming to online collaboration, everything depends on consistent Internet.
LTE UE Category & Class Definitions — LTE utilises the LTE UE Category or User Equipment categories or classes to define the performance specifications of LTE devices
NymphCast: Audio and video casting system — NymphCast is a software solution which turns your choice of Linux-capable hardware into an audio and video source for a television or powered speakers. It enables the streaming of audio and video over the network from a wide range of client devices, as well as the streaming of internet media to a NymphCast server, controlled by a client device.
i386 | Coder Radio 386
Nov 04, 2020
Chris attempts a Lizard intervention and gets sucked into Mike's Green tinted data center paradise.
Plus our thoughts on the Raspberry Pi 400, and Apple's secret weapon.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — "Moving another server to #SUSE and it feels so good! @CoderRadioShow @ChrisLAS @openSUSE ;)"
Open Build Service — The Open Build Service (OBS) is a generic system to build and distribute binary packages from sources in an automatic, consistent and reproducible way. You can release packages as well as updates, add-ons, appliances and entire distributions for a wide range of operating systems and hardware architectures.
Apple Announces November 10 Event — Apple today announced a third fall 2020 event, which is set to be held on Tuesday, November 10 at 10:00 a.m.
Mike’s Hiring a Python Programmer — We are seeking a Python Developer to become an integral part of our team! You will be responsible for creating and modifying computer application software or specialized utility programs.
All in One Pi | LINUX Unplugged 378
Nov 03, 2020
Why we think the new Raspberry Pi 400 is just the beginning.
And we chat with the CTO of the Uno Platform, a new way to bring native apps to Linux.
Chapters: 00:00:00 Pre-show 00:01:01 Intro 00:02:23 Meet the Raspberry Pi 400 00:11:21 Manjaro Update 00:16:59 State of Linux Gaming 00:23:11 GNOME 40 00:27:36 Building Native Apps on Linux 00:48:16 Housekeeping 00:50:05 Feedback 00:58:47 Pick 01:04:23 Post-show
The Windows Calculator on Linux with Uno Platform | Ubuntu — The good folks in the Uno Platform community have ported the open-source Windows Calculator to Linux. The calculator is published in the snapstore and can be downloaded right away.
Tzlil on Twitter — So the CEO of GitHub popped in #youtube-dl a few hours ago, looks like they are trying to get youtube-dl back, I hope this works out.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — "Ugh of course it's #Gnome extensions! I disabled Backslide, rebooted and all of a sudden it all works again."
Building A Better GNOME Extensions Experience — With the advent of the new release of GNOME 3.38 – we want to start focusing next cycle on improving the GNOME Extensions experience.
Introducing Microsoft Edge preview builds for Linux — Today’s release supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE distributions. Going forward, we plan to release weekly builds following our typical Dev Channel cadence alongside our other supported platforms.
Thorsten ‘the Linux kernel logger’ Leemhuis on Twitter — #Linux 5.10 will be the next Longterm (aka LTS) #kernel (and thus supported for at least two years, but in the end it often are six). That’s what @gregkh said a few minutes ago in a “Ask the Expert Session” on #OSSummit Europe
Ubuntu 20.10 Released, Now Available to Download — Ubuntu 20.10 rides atop the Linux 5.8 kernel, includes the GNOME 3.38 release, has new wallpapers, Active Directory integration (for enterprise users) in the installer, and carries a clutch of updated software, tools, and libraries.
Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise — It is the world’s first software that runs Windows directly on enterprise Chromebooks―enabling full-featured Windows apps including Microsoft Office and proprietary apps―even when there is not an Internet connection.
youtube-dl removed from GitHub by RIAA takedown notice — Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies on matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, audiovisual works and images, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet.
Microsoft Edge arrives in preview form for Linux — The release officially supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE. Sadly, there is no love for Pi fans at present; the team are apparently "looking at Arm", but no release has been forthcoming.
PayPal Launches New Service Enabling Users to Buy, Hold and Sell Cryptocurrency — Today announced the launch of a new service enabling its customers to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency directly from their PayPal account, and signaled its plans to significantly increase cryptocurrency's utility by making it available as a funding source for purchases at its 26 million merchants worldwide.
Google study on disk temps — A 2007 study by Google showed the reverse to be true. Hard drives with average temperatures below 27 °C had a failure rate worse than hard drives with the highest reported average temperature of 50 °C, and a failure rate at least twice as high as the optimum temperature range of 37 °C to 46 °C.
New Hard Drive Rituals — It is for these reasons that I now religiously do not commit any data to a drive until it has undergone at least one full cycle using a tool called badblocks
Using 'sun' as condition fails to allow automation to trigger. — I've been using the Automation UI from the web to create the automation's and so for the conditoin I selected "Sun" and then 'after sunset' and 'before sunrise' but the automation stopped working. I had to use a 'state' condition and use 'sun.sun' and use the state 'below_horizon'
NFS Auto Mount with systemd — Network mount units automatically acquire After dependencies on remote-fs-pre.target, network.target and network-online.target, and gain a Before dependency on remote-fs.target unless nofail mount option is set.
30mm On-Metal NFC Tag – CloudFree — These blank 30mm circular NFC tags can be written to and read from using the Home Assistant app on NFC-compatible phones.
ESXi on Raspberry Pi — Getting ESXi up and running on one of the Pis was relatively easy but there are a few gotchas.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — "Today's @CoderRadioShow is brought to you by the Lizard people who love @openSUSE! #Linux #SUSE thanks for the SWAG!
Follow up on Oracle v Google — Oracle's best claim for copying of actual code is a complaint that Google improperly combined GPL code into an Apache-licensed software suite, but not even that - it is that Apache Harmony did this and Google copied it inadvertently.
NVIDIA Doesn’t Expect To Have Linux 5.9 Driver Support For Another Month — Linux Kernel 5.9+ is incompatible with current and previous NVIDIA Linux GPU drivers. We advise customers to defer updating to Linux Kernel 5.9+ until mid-November when an NVIDIA Linux GPU driver update with Kernel 5.9+ support is expected to be available.
PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition | PINE64 — This community edition will ship in a custom presentation box designed by Manjaro’s development team, and the PinePhone itself will feature a sleek-looking Manjaro logo on the back-cover.
Pick: badblocks — badblocks is a program to test storage devices for bad blocks.
Linux Action News 159
Oct 18, 2020
The new Plasma release makes a compelling argument for the workstation, why LibreOffice and OpenOffice can't seem to get along and a recently found bug in Linux that goes back to Kernel 2.6.
Plus, our thoughts on Apple's seeming abandoning of CUPS, the latest and greatest open source podcast player, and an important show update.
Google and Intel warn of high-severity Bluetooth security bug in Linux — The flaw resides in BlueZ, the software stack that by default implements all Bluetooth core protocols and layers for Linux. Besides Linux laptops, it's used in many consumer or industrial Internet-of-things devices. It works with Linux versions 2.4.6 and later.
Greg K-H on Twitter — "They are now claiming you need a 5.10 kernel or newer to solve this. 5.10 will be released at the end of December 2020. Intel knows better, and knows how to do this properly, this feels malicious at this point..."
Antennapod 2.0 Released — AntennaPod version 2 released with a range of new features, bug fixes and improvements. Below you’ll find an extensive list of highlights, with each time the Pull Request ID.
Wrong About Pop! | LINUX Unplugged 375
Oct 14, 2020
We're reminded that you can't judge a distro by its screenshots. We use Pop!_OS for a few weeks and share our embarrassing discovery.
Plus our thoughts on the new Plasma release, a super handy pick, and more.
Chapters: 0:00 Pre-Show 0:44 Intro 0:50 SPONSOR: A Cloud Guru 2:39 Plasma 5.20 7:50 Kernel 5.9 8:05 VMware Flirts with Arm 15:28 SPONSOR: Linode 18:54 Big News for Nebula 22:10 Code-Shaming the Kernel 27:40 Housekeeping 29:31 Pop!OS Exit Interview 31:44 Pop!OS Full-Time Staff 34:49 Pop!OS: The Last Ten Percent 37:46 Pop!OS: A Very Unique Distribution 43:13 Pop!OS: Driving Hardware Sales 47:40 Pop!OS: Strengthening the System76 Brand 49:51 Manjaro Arm 20.10 Released 50:48 SPONSOR: A Cloud Guru 51:48 Feedback: TLP Magic 53:23 Feedback: Chromebooks and Education 56:16 Pick: Autotier 59:09 Pick: Antennapod 2.0.1 1:00:30 SPONSOR: Core Contributors 1:01:10 Outro 1:03:18 Post-Show
ESXi on Arm Fling is LIVE! — The ESXi-Arm Fling supports a number of different Arm platforms ranging from a traditional Datacenter form-factor to both Near and Far Edge systems including the highly requested Raspberry Pi.
PIck: autotier — A passthrough FUSE filesystem that intelligently moves files between storage tiers based on the frequency of use, file age, and tier fullness.
No, Microsoft is not rebasing Windows to Linux — The choice will not really be Windows or Linux, it will be whether you boot Hyper-V or KVM first, and Windows and Ubuntu stacks will be tuned to run well on the other.
NextCloud makes some significant changes, and we share our reaction; IBM is planning to split into two, but we have some questions, and Firefox may soon display sponsored "top sites."
Plus Nvidia's Jetson Nano release and the freaky future of low-level AI, and our thoughts on Coninbase's recent news.
Nextcloud 20 Released — Nextcloud Hub 20 debuts Dashboard, unifies search and notifications, integrates with other technologies
Nextcloud bridging chat services in Talk — This allows users to connect a Talk conversion to one or more external services, like IRC, Slack, MS Teams or more. The administrator has to have enabled this feature and users can then simply configure it from the right-hand sidebar in Talk.
Firefox may soon display Sponsored Top Sites on the New Tab Page — A recently added bug to Mozilla's bug tracking site Bugzilla indicates that Firefox may soon display sponsored top sites on the New Tab page. The bug requests that a preference is added to Firefox to disable sponsored top sites.
Diun — Diun provides automatically updated Docker images within Docker Hub. It is possible to always use the latest stable tag or to use another service that handles updating Docker images.
Traefik Ambassador Program — The Traefik Ambassador program is built to support and reward contributors of code, content, and community building.
Traefik Plugin Hackaethon 2020 — Join the team of engineers who maintain Traefik and the Traefik Ambassadors for a week of virtual hacking and collaboration on the open-source projects Traefik and Traefik Mesh.
Perfect Nextcloud Setup | LINUX Unplugged 374
Oct 06, 2020
Our secrets for a low-cost bulletproof Nextcloud server that we figured out the hard way. We take you into the "server garage" and share our lessons learned.
Jonathan Meek on Twitter — Does this count as BBQ or no? Some chicken w/ a homemade BBQ sauce & others w/ a honey brown sugar thyme sauce. Figured I would ask since I am listening to Coder Radio while I sit in the cool air.
Futhark - Ready to take the challenge? — Futhark is a small programming language designed to be compiled to efficient parallel code. It is a statically typed, data-parallel, and purely functional array language in the ML family, and comes with a heavily optimising ahead-of-time compiler that presently generates GPU code via CUDA and OpenCL
Supporting Linux kernel development in Rust — Since then, Linus Torvalds and other core kernel maintainers have expressed openness in principle to supporting kernel development in Rust
How One Guy Ruined #Hacktoberfest2020 #Drama — Hacktoberfest is an annual event that occurs every October. It is held by Digital Ocean and encourages developers to submit Pull Requests to Open Source repositories and as a reward you get a T-Shirt.
Hacktoberfest presented by DigitalOcean — We’re making Hacktoberfest opt-in only for projects – which maintainers can do simply by adding the ‘hacktoberfest’ topic to a repository.
What is Google TV and how is it different from Android TV? — Google TV is a new interface for Android TV that is powered by Google's machine learning, Google Assistant and the Google Knowledge Graph. It also reorganizes your content to help make it easier for you to find what you want to work.
Listening to Developer Feedback to Improve Google Play — Our policies apply equally to all apps distributed on Google Play, including Google’s own apps. We use the same standards to decide which apps to promote on Google Play, whether they're third-party apps or our own apps.
Atari VCS Backer Units are On the Way! — This shipment includes the one-time-only, Indiegogo-exclusive Atari VCS 800 Collector’s Edition model. Inspired by and designed as an homage to the original Atari 2600, there will only be 6,000 numbered and authenticated versions of this model.
Flamewar Feedback Frenzy | Coder Radio 381
Sep 30, 2020
We provoked quite a response and cover the feedback that puts us in our place. Then we dive into the wild era of text editor of yore and solve an age-old question.
Google to enforce 30% cut on in-app purchases — Google said Monday it will enforce rules that require app developers distributing Android software on the Google Play Store to use its in-app payment system.
Coalition for App Fairness — The Coalition for App Fairness is an independent nonprofit organization founded by industry-leading companies to advocate for freedom of choice and fair competition across the app ecosystem.
Swift System is Now Open Source — Today, I’m excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing System and adding Linux support! Our vision is for System to eventually act as the single home for low-level system interfaces for all supported Swift platforms.
The Era of Visual Studio Code — I believe the era of new text editors emerging and quickly becoming popular has now ended with Visual Studio Code. VS Code has reached unprecedented levels of popularity and refinement, laying a foundation that could mean decades of market dominance. If, like me, one of your priorities for your tools is longevity2, then that means VS Code might be a great text editor to invest in learning today.
Your New Tools | LINUX Unplugged 373
Sep 29, 2020
We embrace new tools to upgrade your backup game, securely move files around the network, and debunk the idea that Windows will ever be based on Linux.
Chapters: 0:00 Pre-Show 0:29 Intro 0:46 SPONSOR: A Cloud Guru 2:31 LVFS Hits 20 Million Downloads 4:10 Dell Precision 5750 Review Unit Coming Soon 6:27 LVFS Continued 7:29 Xen Hypervisor is Porting to Raspberry Pi 4 12:09 New Dell XPS 13 Developer Editions 14:56 Lenovo Expands its Linux-Loaded Selection 16:48 SPONSOR: Linode 19:31 WSL to Support GUI Apps 24:09 Will Microsoft Switch to Linux? 33:18 Fedora 33 Beta is Live 35:13 Housekeeping 36:13 Exploring Send and Receive 38:06 Send and Receive: Backups 39:37 Send and Receive: Setting Up the Volumes 41:00 Send and Receive: Rsync Comparison 43:40 Send and Receive: Data Retention Tests 48:10 Send and Receive: Comparing Performance 50:09 Send and Receive: Right Tool for the Job 55:29 Send and Receive: Rivaling NTFS and APFS 57:39 Feedback: Todo Apps 1:01:33 SPONSOR: Unplugged Core Contributors 1:02:30 Outro 1:04:17 Post-Show
Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, and Neal Gompa.
Linux GUI apps are coming to Windows — GUI app support is still a work in progress, but Microsoft program manager Craig Loewen shared a GIF showing what it looks like when you launch an GUI application like the Nautilus file manager or GIMP image editor using a command in a Linux terminal window.
An Important Update on Mozilla WebThings — We are writing to inform you that the WebThings project is being spun out of Mozilla as an independent open source project.
Introducing SWAG - Secure Web-server And Gateway — SWAG is a rebirth of our letsencrypt docker image, a full fledged web server and reverse proxy that includes Nginx, Php7, Certbot (Let's Encrypt client) and Fail2ban.
0.115: B-Day release! - Home Assistant — There's a party goin' on right here 🕺
A dedication to last throughout the years 🥳
So bring your good times, and your laughter too 😂
We gonna celebrate our party with you 🎁
It's a celebration! 🎉
One more thing… - Home Assistant — Home Assistant Companion is a new application for Mac to control your Home Assistant instance, exposing your Mac sensors to Home Assistant and to receive notifications.
Add card by entities — Are you a bit overwhelmed by all the different types of cards Lovelace has? You can now just select the entities you want to use for a card, and have Lovelace suggest a card for you.
Distro Triforce | LINUX Unplugged 372
Sep 22, 2020
What would it really take to get you to switch Linux distributions? We debate the practical reasons more and more people are sticking with the big three.
Plus Carl from System76 stops by to surprise us with some firmware news.
Chapters: 0:00 Pre-Show 2:22 Intro 2:36 SPONSOR: A Cloud Guru 4:24 USB Booting the Pi 4 10:10 System76 Open Firmware Update 23:14 SPONSOR: Linode 25:28 OpenPOWER Summit 2020 29:23 EndeavourOS ARM 30:14 Housekeeping 30:53 SPONSOR: Unplugged Core Contributors 32:59 It's Really Just a Three Distro World 46:37 Feedback: systemd Skepticism 50:50 Feedback: EmacsConf2020 51:40 Picks 52:12 Pick: Cloud Hypervisor 53:51 Pick: SongRec 54:45 Pick: tmpmail 55:55 Pick: MyPaas 57:16 Outro 59:11 Post-Show
Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Carl Richell, and Neal Gompa.
EmacsConf2020 — Have you heard about the recent announcement for EmacsConf 2020? It's a free two-day online Emacs conference scheduled for the weekend of November 28th and 29th, 2020.
We try out the new GNOME "Orbis" release and chat about Microsoft's new Linux kernel patches that make it clear Windows 10 is on the path to a hybrid Windows/Linux system.
Plus, the major re-architecture work underway for Chrome OS with significant ramifications for Desktop Linux.
Introducing GNOME 3.38: “Orbis” — GNOME 3.38 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 27896 changes, made by approximately 901 contributors.
Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes — today we are announcing the end of life for two legacy services that grew out of the Firefox Test Pilot program: Firefox Send and Firefox Notes.
Firefox for Android LAN-Based Intent Triggering — The SSDP engine in Firefox for Android (68.11.0 and below) can be tricked into triggering Android intent URIs with zero user interaction. This attack can be leveraged by attackers on the same WiFi network and manifests as applications on the target device suddenly launching, without the users' permission, and conducting activities allowed by the intent.
Steve T on Twitter — I do have a question about the latest episode; there was a lot of talk about code being safe.
What is memory safety? — For the purposes of this post, we are generally considering whether a program execution is memory safe or not. From this notion, we deem a program to be memory safe if it all of its possible executions are memory safe, and a language to be memory safe if all possible programs in the language are memory safe.
Software Engineer- Networking / Privacy- - Jobs at Apple (DE) — Do you have a passion for developing secure, high-performance systems-level software? We develop and deploy software which forms the foundation for some of Apple's most important services, including iCloud, Maps, iTunes, and more. Our software ensures that Apple's services are reliable, scalable, fast, and secure. In this role you will have a unique opportunity to participate in delivering some of the world's largest-scale cloud services.
Blazing 7 | Coder Radio 67 - Mike was Right — iOS 7 is landing and Mike and Chris discuss what’s in store for developers, and the real reason to put a 64bit CPU in a cell phone.
Your Language Sucks, It Doesn’t Matter — The central thesis is that the actual programming language (syntax, semantics, paradigm) doesn’t really matter. What matters is characteristics of the runtime — roughly, what does memory of the running process look like?
Post-Open Source — Imo, open source as a community endeavor is falling apart right before our eyes, and being replaced by open source as Big Corp entrenchment strategy.
I mean it’s been happening for a while, but seeing Mozilla sinking like this is just driving the point home for me.
The Latest On The Linux 5.9 Kernel Regression Stemming From Page Lock Fairness - Phoronix — Last week we reported on a Linux 5.9 kernel regression following benchmarks from Linux 5.0 to 5.9 and there being a sharp drop with the latest development kernel. That kernel regression was bisected to code introduced by Linus Torvalds at the start of the Linux 5.9 kernel cycle. Unfortunately it's not a trivial problem and one still being analyzed in coming up with a proper solution.
Making apps for Linux, a proposal — I have a few thoughts on this topic, and so does Alan Pope, and so we got chatting and put together a proposal for a programming environment for making simple apps in a way that new developers could easily grasp. We were quite pleased with it as a concept, but: it didn’t get selected for further development. Oh well, never mind. But the ideas still seem good to us, so I think it’s worth publishing the proposal anyway so that someone else has the chance to be inspired by it, or decide they want it to happen.
Introducing the Promoted Add-ons Pilot — This pilot program, which will run between the end of September and the end of November 2020, aims to expand the number of add-ons we can review and verify as compliant with Mozilla policies,
Access Linux filesystems in Windows and WSL 2 — WSL 2 will be offering a new feature: wsl --mount. This new parameter allows a physical disk to be attached and mounted inside WSL 2,
Syncthing — Syncthing is a continuous file synchronization program. It synchronizes files between two or more computers in real time, safely protected from prying eyes. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, whether it is shared with some third party, and how it's transmitted over the internet.
CloudFree Smart Plug – Runs Tasmota — This product runs Tasmota, which requires some technical skill to set up. The Tasmota project will not provide technical support.
Raspberry Pi Power Monitor — This project is an extremely affordable, yet highly capable “build-your-own” energy monitoring solution. With up to six total inputs, you can monitor many different consumption and production sources.
Rust, Safe for Marketing | Coder Radio 378
Sep 09, 2020
A special friend of the show joins us to discuss C++ in 2020 and the growing adoption of Rust.
Plus feedback, a Python surprise and a little small business corner.
Miguel de Icaza on Twitter — I bet Fortnite could work in Safari without going through the AppStore. Like Confucius famously said in 500 BC: “When there is a billion dollar budget there is a way to compile the code to WebAssembly”
Apple Shares Details on Privacy 'Nutrition Labels' Coming to App Store — As part of iOS 14, Apple is introducing a new App Store feature that will provide privacy details for each app that you're downloading, which the company has said can be likened to a "nutrition label" for apps.
C++20 Is Feature Complete; Here’s What Changes Are Coming — If you have an opinion about C++, chances are you either love it for its extensiveness and versatility, or you hate it for its bloated complexity and would rather stick to alternative languages on both sides of the spectrum. Either way, here’s your chance to form a new opinion about the language.
FastAPI — FastAPI framework, high performance, easy to learn, fast to code, ready for production
Use FastAPI to build web services in Python — FastAPI is a modern Python web framework that leverage the latest Python improvement in asyncio. In this article you will see how to set up a container based development environment and implement a small web service with FastAPI.
Lenovo begins rollout of Fedora Linux on their laptops, Ubuntu systems due soon — The first model appearing with Fedora as an option is the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8. Not only has it rolled out with Fedora, it's right there on the store and you can't miss it as it shows up first, as it's also the cheapest option for this model available right now.
HP Z series on Ubuntu — HP announced the launch of its Z series of laptops and workstations certified with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the latest additions to their popular professional workstation line.
LineageOS 17.1 adds support for the Google Pixel 2, Pixel 3a, Pixel 4 — Over the last couple of months, the team has added support for devices like the ASUS ROG Phone II, Google Pixel 3 series, Samsung Galaxy A7 2016, Xiaomi Mi A1, Samsung Galaxy J7 2015, OnePlus One, Sony Xperia XZ2, and many more.
Upgrading GitHub to Ruby 2.7 - The GitHub Blog — Falling behind on Ruby upgrades has drastic negative effects on the stability of your codebase. Upgrading Ruby supports your application health, improves performance, fixes language and framework bugs, and guides the future of the language!
Ruby Creator Yukihiro Matsumoto on the Challenges of Updating a Programming Language — A recent presentation from Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator and chief designer of the Ruby programming language — and Chief Architect of Ruby at the cloud platform-as-a-service company Heroku — offered a clear example of the thoughtful care with which Matsumoto leads his Ruby community.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — #iOSDev what do you feel about the #AppStore rules? Is the problem the 30% or the restrictions on what you can build? I’m thinking especially of #iPad here. Sound off on this tweet thread.
Apple Confirms New App Store Policies on Bug Fix Updates and Challenging Guidelines Are Live — For apps that are already on the App Store, bug fixes will no longer be delayed over guideline violations except for those related to legal issues. You'll instead be able to address guideline violations in your next submission. And now, in addition to appealing decisions about whether an app violates guidelines, you can suggest changes to the guidelines. We also encourage you to submit your App Store and Apple development platform suggestions so we can continue to improve experiences for the developer community.
Double Data Rate Trouble | LINUX Unplugged 369
Sep 01, 2020
The Raspberry Pi might be getting a small software fix that makes a big performance improvement.
Plus, we attempt to combine two internet connections with Linux live from the woods!
Chapters: 0:00 Pre-Show 1:07 Intro 1:55 SPONSOR: A Cloud Guru 2:35 Lenovo Linux Laptops 11:21 Raspberry Pi Storage Speedup 13:31 SPONSOR: Linode 17:45 Linux Unplugged Core Contributors 18:58 Fedora 33 Bug-a-Thon 20:55 Using Two Internet Connections in Linux 25:11 Policy Routing 28:32 Net-ISP-Balance 31:46 Diving into Policy Routing 33:42 Speedify 39:35 Feedback 40:32 Pick: tunshell 43:16 Outro 45:46 Post-Show
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, and Neal Gompa.
How to use count with modules in Terraform 0.13 — The upcoming 0.13 release of Terraform adds many new features. In my opinion none are more exciting than finally being able using count when calling a module
The Best is Yet to Come | LINUX Unplugged 368
Aug 26, 2020
It's a new day for Jupiter Broadcasting and the show, we share our big news.
Plus our plan to help make a difference in free software, and we reunite with some old friends.
Chapters: 0:00 Pre-Show 0:42 Intro 1:08 SPONSOR: A Cloud Guru 2:59 Arch Update 4:13 Big News for Jupiter Broadcasting 6:58 Coder Radio Returns 8:08 Linux Action News Returns 9:45 The Future of Jupiter Broadcasting 10:23 Unplugged Core Contributors 15:01 Arch Update Part 2 16:49 Housekeeping 18:20 Arch Update Part 3 19:05 Bug Squashers Assemble 24:11 Fedora 33 Test Week 28:27 Fedora IoT 33:51 Pick: FetchCord 34:50 Wimpy's Discord Plea 37:14 Arch Update Part 4 38:16 Pick: Chowdown 40:59 Catching Up with Mike 52:21 Catching Up with Joe 54:30 Catching Up with Wimpy 1:01:19 Outro 1:03:34 Post-Show
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Alex Kretzschmar, Drew DeVore, Joe Ressington, Martin Wimpress, and Neal Gompa.
Fourth of July Contest | The Mad Botter — Based on the success of our annual Earth Day contest and our continuing commitment to STEM education and open-source software, The Mad Botter INC team is launching a Fourth of July competition for US students. We are thrilled to offer this competition to promote civic-mindedness and STEM in students and to honor the birth of our great nation.
The Future of Unraid | Self-Hosted 25
Aug 13, 2020
Jonathan Panozzo, aka Johnp join us to talk all things Unraid. He hints at future subscription plans, details performance features coming soon, shares the story of how Docker came to Unraid, and much more.
Unraid — Unraid OS allows sophisticated media aficionados, gamers, and other intensive data-users to have ultimate control over their data, media, applications, and desktops, using just about any combination of hardware.
Roundcube — ...is a browser-based multilingual IMAP client with an application-like user interface. It provides full functionality you expect from an email client, including MIME support, address book, folder manipulation, message searching and spell checking.
Install Docker Engine — Docker provides convenience scripts at get.docker.com and test.docker.com for installing edge and testing versions of Docker Engine - Community into development environments quickly and non-interactively.
SSH over SMS | Devpost — Our python project listens for a text message (through a dedicated SMTP email server) then reads and parses the email to get a bash command.
Linux Arm Wrestling | LINUX Unplugged 364
Jul 28, 2020
The past, present and future of Linux on Arm. The major challenges still facing full Linux support, and why ServerReady might be a solution to unify Arm systems.
Plus we chat with the Manjaro team about recent changes.
Chapters: 0:00 Pre-Show 0:58 Intro 2:01 Terminal 2.0 in ChromeOS 4:41 Manjaro's Process Problems 13:49 Manjaro Sneak Peaks 15:41 Weekend Manjaro Journey 21:02 Housekeeping 22:09 ARM on Linux 24:01 The History of ARM 28:16 Single Board Computing Revolution 31:47 ARM Reaching into the Present 33:17 The Future of ARM 36:42 Not Everyone Loves ARM 43:01 Wants and What Ifs 48:30 App Pick: tuptime 49:48 App Pick: s-tui 50:21 Outro 51:36 Post-Show
Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Dalton Durst, Drew DeVore, Jeremy Soller, Marius Gripsgard, Neal Gompa, and Philip Muller.
Brunch with Brent: Carl Richell | Jupiter Extras 75
Jul 24, 2020
Brent sits down with Carl Richell, Founder and CEO of System76. We explore the people, passion, and culture behind the scenes, learn of young Carl, the early years of building a Linux-focused hardware business, how today System76 fuels a tiny piece of SpaceX, and more.
We've spent thousands of dollars, and over a decade refining the perfect home media setup. We get nostalgic and share what worked, and what REALLY didn't.
Links:
Boxee Box — Boxee Box by D-Link is a Linux-based set-top device and media extender that first began shipping in 33 countries worldwide on 10 November 2010.
MythTV, Open Source DVR — MythTV is a Free Open Source software digital video recorder (DVR) project distributed under the terms of the GNU GPL. It has been under heavy development since 2002, and now contains most features one would expect from a good DVR (and many new ones that you soon won't be able to live without).
Microsoft Windows Media Center Extenders — The Media Center Extender with DVD Player (DMA2200) from Linksys, a division of Cisco, is an elegant solution that combines an upscaling DVD player with a dual-band Wireless-N Extender for Windows Media Center.
The Hidden Cost of Nextcloud | LINUX Unplugged 362
Jul 14, 2020
Our team has been using Nextcloud to replace Dropbox for over a year, we report back on what has worked great, and what's not so great.
Plus why Linus Torvalds has become the master of saying no.
Deep Stack AI — This system uses Docker containers to run DeepStack AI and process images from a watch folder, then fires a set of registered triggers to make web request calls, send MQTT events, and send Telegram messages when specified objects are detected in the images.
Jared Domínguez on Twitter — Today’s cynical take: Apple supporting Linux VMs is a way to make devs feel good with minimal effort (offload the work to Parallels/BSD community) while allowing Apple to deprecate their already super stale Unix userland. macOS itself will become less accessible.
Brunch with Brent: Philip Müller | Jupiter Extras 74
Jun 19, 2020
Brent sits down with Philip Müller, Co-Founder and Lead Developer of Manjaro, and CEO at Manjaro GmbH & Co. KG. We explore the formation and evolution of Manjaro as a Linux distribution, the development of past and recent hardware partnerships, cross-distribution collaborations, and what's inspiring Philip in the next 5 years.
The Little Distro That Could | LINUX Unplugged 357
Jun 09, 2020
The lightweight distro that stole our hearts, the four of us each try out a different contender and come away with what we think will be the leanest and meanest distribution for your PC.
Special Guests: Drew DeVore and Jill Bryant Ryniker.
You're not a true self-hoster until you've lost your entire configuration at least once. Alex does a deep dive into cloud backup, plus we need your help to find the right Wifi solution for a listener.
Jupiter Extras: A Chat with mergerfs Developer Antonio Musumeci — mergerfs makes JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives) appear like an ‘array’ of drives. mergerfs transparently translates read/write commands to the underlying drives from a single mount point, such as /mnt/storage.
Duplicati — Duplicati works with standard protocols like FTP, SSH, WebDAV as well as popular services like Backblaze B2, Microsoft OneDrive, Amazon S3, Google Drive, box.com, Mega, hubiC and many others.
restic · Backups done right! — Backing up your data with restic should only be limited by your network or hard disk bandwidth so that you can backup your files every day.
Backblaze — Cloud storage that's astonishingly easy and low-cost.
How does Backblaze support Linux Users? — There are a variety of options for using Linux with B2. These include open-source (free) and commercial applications, command-line (CLI) and graphical interface (GUI) tools, and tools that include encryption, automation, hybrid NAS/B2 support, mounting remote archives as volumes, and other capabilities.
How to configure Backblaze B2 with Duplicity on Linux — Duplicity can store backup data in many destinations, including Backblaze B2. This guide will help you get setup and give you the commands to do a full backup and restore of a specific folder.
duplicity — Duplicity backs directories by producing encrypted tar-format volumes and uploading them to a remote or local file server.
rsync.net — We give you an empty UNIX filesystem that you can access with any SSH tool
Amazon S3 Glacier — Long-term, secure, durable Amazon S3 object storage classes for data archiving, starting at $1 per terabyte per month
Linux Hardware Love | LINUX Unplugged 356
Jun 03, 2020
From the low-end to the high-end we try out both ends of the Linux hardware spectrum. Wes reviews the latest XPS 13, and Chris shares his thoughts on the Pinebook Pro.
Plus a really cool new feature in Linux 5.7, and we get some answers to the recent GNOME patent settlement from the source.
Brunch with Brent: Kyle Rankin | Jupiter Extras 73
May 22, 2020
Brent sits down with Kyle Rankin, Chief Security Officer and Vice President at Purism and former Tech Editor and columnist at Linux Journal. We explore his 10+ years with Linux Journal, as well as Purism's culture, ideals, product design and engineering philosophies, and more.
Home Assistant on Twitter — "We're deprecating the Home Assistant Supervised installation on Generic Linux. Alternatives are to run Home Assistant Core in a Docker container or run our OS in a VM."
HomelabOS — Your offline-first privacy-centric personal data center.
HomelabOS - Syncing Settings via Git — HomelabOS will automatically keep the settings/ folder in sync with a git repo if it has one. So you can create a private repo on your Gitea instance for example, then clone that repo over the settings folder. Now any changes you make to settings/ files will be commited and pushed to that git repo whenever you run make, make update or make config.
Introduction - HomelabOS — Ansible templates out the HomelabOS config file using Jinja2 templating, which is then used to deploy HomelabOS itself.
sanoid for ZFS Snapshots — Policy-driven snapshot management and replication tools. Using ZFS for underlying next-gen storage.
Microsoft FINALLY Gets It | LINUX Unplugged 354
May 19, 2020
Windows is getting more competitive by adopting core Linux features, so we cover the latest Linux-inspired additions to Windows. Then review the new release of Pi-hole, sort through recent PINE64 updates, and read your feedback.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Drew DeVore, Neal Gompa, and Philip Muller.
Jim and Wes take the latest release of the Caddy web server for a spin, investigate Intel's Comet Lake desktop CPUs, and explore the fight over 5G between the US Military and the FCC.
Encrypted Crash Dumps in FreeBSD, Time on Unix, Improve ZVOL sync write performance with a taskq, central log host with syslog-ng, NetBSD Entropy overhaul, Setting Up NetBSD Kernel Dev Environment, and more.
Some time ago, I was describing how to configure networking crash dumps. In that post, I mentioned that there is also the possibility to encrypt crash dumps. Today we will look into this functionality. Initially, it was implemented during Google Summer of Code 2013 by my friend Konrad Witaszczyk, who made it available in FreeBSD 12. If you can understand Polish, you can also look into his presentation on BSD-PL on which he gave a comprehensive review of all kernel crash dumps features.
The main issue with crash dumps is that they may include sensitive information available in memory during a crash. They will contain all the data from the kernel and the userland, like passwords, private keys, etc. While dumping them, they are written to unencrypted storage, so if somebody took out the hard drive, they could access sensitive data. If you are sending a crash dump through the network, it may be captured by third parties. Locally the data are written directly to a dump device, skipping the GEOM subsystem. The purpose of that is to allow a kernel to write a crash dump even in case a panic occurs in the GEOM subsystem. It means that a crash dump cannot be automatically encrypted with GELI.
Time, a word that is entangled in everything in our lives, something we’re intimately familiar with. Keeping track of it is important for many activities we do.
Over millennia we’ve developed different ways to calculate it. Most prominently, we’ve relied on the position the sun appears to be at in the sky, what is called apparent solar time.
We’ve decided to split it as seasons pass, counting one full cycle of the 4 seasons as a year, a full rotation around the sun. We’ve also divided the passing of light to the lack thereof as days, a rotation of the earth on itself. Moving on to more precise clock divisions such as seconds, minutes, and hours, units that meant different things at different points in history. Ultimately, as travel got faster, the different ways of counting time that evolved in multiple places had to converge. People had to agree on what it all meant.
syslog-ng is the Swiss army knife of log management. You can collect logs from any source, process them in real time and deliver them to wide range of destinations. It allows you to flexibly collect, parse, classify, rewrite and correlate logs from across your infrastructure. This is why syslog-ng is the perfect solution for the central log host of my (mainly) FreeBSD based infrastructure.
I used T_PAGEFLT’s blog post as a reference for setting my NetBSD kernel development environment since his website is down I’m putting down the steps here so it would be helpful for starters.
Three Course Battery | LINUX Unplugged 352
May 05, 2020
Manjaro has a new hardware partner so Phillip joins to share the details, and we have the Lemur Pro in house for a battery endurance test like no other.
Plus an Arch server update, and Chris orders the new Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera.
Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, Jeremy Soller, and Philip Muller.
BSD Community Collections | BSD Now 348
Apr 30, 2020
FuryBSD 2020Q2 Images Available, Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux, Ars technica reviews GhostBSD, “TLS Mastery” sponsorships open, BSD community show their various collections, a tale of OpenBSD secure memory allocator internals, learn to stop worrying and love SSDs, and more.
The Q2 2020 images are not a visible leap forward but a functional leap forward. Most effort was spent creating a better out of box experience for automatic Ethernet configuration, working WiFi, webcam, and improved hypervisor support.
Since I wrote my article "Why you should migrate everything from Linux to BSD" I have been wanting to write something about the technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux and while I cannot possibly cover every single reason, I can write about some of the things that I consider worth noting.
When I began work on the FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE review last week, it didn't take long to figure out that the desktop portion wasn't going very smoothly.
I think it's important for BSD-curious users to know of easier, gentler alternatives, so I did a little looking around and settled on GhostBSD for a follow-up review.
GhostBSD is based on TrueOS, which itself derives from FreeBSD Stable. It was originally a Canadian distro, but—like most successful distributions—it has transcended its country of origin and can now be considered worldwide. Significant GhostBSD development takes place now in Canada, Italy, Germany, and the United States.
My next book will be TLS Mastery, all about Transport Layer Encryption, Let’s Encrypt, OCSP, and so on.
This should be a shorter book, more like my DNSSEC or Tarsnap titles, or the first edition of Sudo Mastery. I would like a break from writing doorstops like the SNMP and jails books.
JT (our producer) shared his Open Source Retail Box Collection on twitter this past weekend and there was a nice response from a few in the BSD Community showing their collections:
It's been a very long time I haven't written anything after my last OpenBSD blogs, that is,
OpenBSD Kernel Internals — Creation of process from user-space to kernel space.
OpenBSD: Introduction to execpromises in the pledge(2)
pledge(2): OpenBSD's defensive approach to OS Security
So, again I started reading OpenBSD source codes with debugger after reducing my sleep timings and managing to get some time after professional life. This time I have picked one of my favourite item from my wishlist to learn and share, that is, OpenBSD malloc(3), secure allocator
my home FreeNAS runs two pools for data. One RAIDZ2 with four spinning disk drives and one mirror with two SSDs. Toying with InfluxDB and Grafana in the last couple of days I found that I seem to have a constant write load of 1 Megabyte (!) per second on the SSDs. What the ...?
So I run three VMs on the SSDs in total. One with Windows 10, two with Ubuntu running Confluence, A wiki essentially, with files for attachments and MySQL as the backend database. Clearly the writes had to stop when the wikis were not used at all, just sitting idle, right?
Well even with a full query log and quite some experience in the operation of web applications I could not figure out what Confluence is doing (productively, no doubt) but trust me, it writes a couple of hundred kbytes to the database each second just sitting idle.
I've wanted to write about my infrastructure for a while, but I kept thinking, "I'll wait until after I've done $next_thing_on_my_todo." Of course this cycle never ends, so I decided to write about its state at the end of 2019. Maybe I'll write an update on it in a couple of moons; who knows?
For something different than our usual Beastie Bits… we bring you…
We're all quarantined so lets install BSD on things! Install BSD on something this week, write it up and let us know about it, and maybe we'll feature you!
After being part of Jupiter Broadcasting since we started back in 2013, BSDNow is moving to become independent. We extend a very large thank you to Jupiter Broadcasting and Linux Academy for hosting us for so many years, and allowing us to bring you over 100 episodes without advertisements.
What does this mean for you, the listener? Not much will change, just make sure your subscription is via the RSS feed at BSDNow.tv rather than one of the Jupiter Broadcasting feeds. We will update you with more news as things settle out.
<a href="https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GCC-10-Static-Analyzer-State" title="GCC’s New Static Analysis Capabilities Are Getting Into Shape For GCC 10 - Phoronix
" rel="nofollow">GCC’s New Static Analysis Capabilities Are Getting Into Shape For GCC 10 - Phoronix
Rethinking OpenBSD security, FreeBSD 2020 Q1 status report, the notion of progress and user interfaces, Comments about Thomas E. Dickey on NetBSD curses, making Unix a little more Plan9-like, Not-actually Linux distro review: FreeBSD, and more.
OpenBSD aims to be a secure operating system. In the past few months there were quite a few security errata, however. That’s not too unusual, but some of the recent ones were a bit special. One might even say bad. The OpenBSD approach to security has a few aspects, two of which might be avoiding errors and minimizing the risk of mistakes. Other people have other ideas about how to build secure systems. I think it’s worth examining whether the OpenBSD approach works, or if this is evidence that it’s doomed to failure. I picked a few errata, not all of them, that were interesting and happened to suit my narrative.
Welcome, to the quarterly reports, of the future! Well, at least the first quarterly report from 2020. The new timeline, mentioned in the last few reports, still holds, which brings us to this report, which covers the period of January 2020 - March 2020.
I was recently pointed at a web page on Thomas E. Dickeys site talking about NetBSD curses. It seems initially that the page was intended to be a pointer to some differences between ncurses and NetBSD curses and does appear to start off in this vein but it seems that the author has lost the plot as the document evolved and the tail end of it seems to be devolving into some sort of slanging match. I don't want to go through Mr. Dickey's document point by point, that would be tedious but I would like to pick out some of the things that I believe to be the most egregious. Please note that even though I am a NetBSD developer, the opinions below are my own and not the NetBSD projects.
I’m not really interested in defending anything. I tried out plan9port and liked it, but I have to live in Unix land. Here’s how I set that up.
A Warning
The suckless community, and some of the plan9 communities, are dominated by jackasses. I hope that’s strong enough wording to impress the severity. Don’t go into IRC for help. Stay off the suckless email list. The software is great, the people who write it are well-spoken and well-reasoned, but for some reason the fandom is horrible to everyone.
This month's Linux distro review isn't of a Linux distribution at all—instead, we're taking a look at FreeBSD, the original gangster of free Unix-like operating systems.
The first FreeBSD release was in 1993, but the operating system's roots go further back—considerably further back. FreeBSD started out in 1992 as a patch-release of Bill and Lynne Jolitz's 386BSD—but 386BSD itself came from the original Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). BSD itself goes back to 1977—for reference, Linus Torvalds was only seven years old then.
Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge something up front—our distro reviews include the desktop experience, and that is very much not FreeBSD's strength. FreeBSD is far, far better suited to running as a headless server than as a desktop! We're going to get a full desktop running on it anyway, because according to Lee Hutchinson, I hate myself—and also because we can't imagine readers wouldn't care about it.
FreeBSD does not provide a good desktop experience, to say the least. But if you're hankering for a BSD-based desktop, don't worry—we're already planning a followup review of GhostBSD, a desktop-focused BSD distribution.
After being part of Jupiter Broadcasting since we started back in 2013, BSDNow is moving to become independent. We extend a very large thank you to Jupiter Broadcasting and Linux Academy for hosting us for so many years, and allowing us to bring you over 100 episodes without advertisements. LinuxAcademy is now under new leadership, and we understand that cutbacks needed to be made, and that BSD is not their core product. That does not mean your favourite BSD podcast is going away, we will continue and we expect things will not look much different.
What does this mean for you, the listener? Not much will change, just make sure your subscription is via the RSS feed at BSDNow.tv rather than one of the Jupiter Broadcasting feeds. We will update you with more news as things settle out.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Where Do I Start? | Self-Hosted 17
Apr 23, 2020
Knowing which hardware to buy or which apps to run on that shiny new hardware can be hard. Chris and Alex discuss networking gear and where to find some of the best getting started documentation on the net.
Plex have been busy and launched two new apps, we cover that and more in this episode of Self-Hosted.
The latest Ubuntu LTS is here, but does it live up to the hype? And how practical are the new ZFS features? We dig into the performance, security, and stability of Focal Fossa.
Plus our thoughts on the new KWin fork, if Bleachbit is safe, and a quick Fedora update.
Brunch with Brent: Sri Ramkrishna | Jupiter Extras 71
Apr 21, 2020
Brent sits down with Sri Ramkrishna, seasoned GNOME community member, founder of Linux App Summit, and Principle Ecosystems Engineer at ITRenew. We discuss his experiences in the GNOME community since 1998, the value of building relationships across communities, the increasing importance of non-technical roles in open source projects, and more.
Tales from a core file, Lenovo X260 BIOS Update with OpenBSD, the problem of Unix iowait and multi-CPU machines, Hugo workflow using FreeBSD Jails, Caddy, Restic; extending NetBSD-7 branch support, a tale of two hypervisor bugs, and more.
On the side, I’ve been wrapping up some improvements to the classic Unix stdio libraries in illumos. stdio contains the classic functions like fopen(), printf(), and the security nightmare gets(). While working on support for fmemopen() and friends I got to reacquaint myself with some of the joys of the stdio ABI and its history from 7th Edition Unix. With that in mind, let’s dive into this, history, and some mistakes not to repeat. While this is written from the perspective of the C programming language, aspects of it apply to many other languages.
Various Unixes have had a 'iowait' statistic for a long time now (although I can't find a source for where it originated; it's not in 4.x BSD, so it may have come through System V and sar). The traditional and standard definition of iowait is that it's the amount of time the system was idle but had at least one process waiting on disk IO. Rather than count this time as 'idle' (as you would if you had a three-way division of CPU time between user, system, and idle), some Unixes evolved to count this as a new category, 'iowait'.
After hosting with Netlify for a few years, I decided to head back to self hosting. Theres a few reasons for that but the main reasoning was that I had more control over how things worked.
In this post, i’ll show you my workflow for deploying my Hugo generated site (www.jaredwolff.com). Instead of using what most people would go for, i’ll be doing all of this using a FreeBSD Jails based server. Plus i’ll show you some tricks i’ve learned over the years on bulk image resizing and more.
Typically, some time after releasing a new NetBSD major version (such as NetBSD 9.0), we will announce the end-of-life of the N-2 branch, in this case NetBSD-7.
We've decided to hold off on doing that to ensure our users don't feel rushed to perform a major version update on any remote machines, possibly needing to reach the machine if anything goes wrong.
Security fixes will still be made to the NetBSD-7 branch.
VM escape has become a popular topic of discussion over the last few years. A good amount of research on this topic has been published for various hypervisors like VMware, QEMU, VirtualBox, Xen and Hyper-V. Bhyve is a hypervisor for FreeBSD supporting hardware-assisted virtualization. This paper details the exploitation of two bugs in bhyve - FreeBSD-SA-16:32.bhyve (VGA emulation heap overflow) and CVE-2018-17160 (Firmware Configuration device bss buffer overflow) and some generic techniques which could be used for exploiting other bhyve bugs. Further, the paper also discusses sandbox escapes using PCI device passthrough, and Control-Flow Integrity bypasses in HardenedBSD 12-CURRENT
FuryBSD 12.1 Overview
> Joe Maloney got in touch to say that the issues in the video and other ones found have since been fixed. Now that's community feedback in action, and an example of a developer who does his best to help the community. A great guy indeed.
In what turns out to be our final publication, we say goodbye.
Switchers to BSD | BSD Now 345
Apr 09, 2020
NetBSD 8.2 is available, NextCloud on OpenBSD, X11 screen locking, NetBSD and RISC OS running parallel, community feedback about switching to BSD, and more.
NextCloud and OpenBSD are complementary to one another. NextCloud is an awesome, secure and private alternative for proprietary platforms, whereas OpenBSD forms the most secure and solid foundation to serve it on. Setting it up in the best way isn’t hard, especially using this step by step tutorial.
Preface
Back when this tutorial was initially written, things were different. The OpenBSD port relied on PHP 5.6 and there were no package updates. But the port improved (hats off, Gonzalo!) and package updates were introduced to the -stable branch (hats off, Solene!).
A rewrite of this tutorial was long overdue. Right now, it is written for 6.6 -stable and will be updated once 6.7 is released. If you have any questions or desire some help, feel free to reach out.
I have been experimenting with running two systems at the same time on the RK3399 SoC. It all begun when I figured out how to switch to the A72 cpu for RISC OS. When the switch was done, the A53 cpu just continued to execute code. OK I thought why not give it something to do! My first step was to run some small programs. It worked!
Thanks to Tom Jones for the pointer to this article
Several weeks ago we covered a story about switching from Linux to BSD. Benedict and JT asked for community feedback as to their thoughts on the matter. Allan was out that week, so this will give him an opportunity to chime in with his thoughts as well.
Today we make nice with a killer, an early out-of-memory daemon, and one of the new features in Fedora 32. We put EarlyOOM to the test in a real-world workload and are shocked by the results.
Plus we debate if OpenWrt is still the best router solution, and chew on Microsoft's new SELinux competitor.
Microsoft announces IPE, a new code integrity feature for Linux — Microsoft says that IPE is not intended for general-purpose computing. The IPE LSM was designed for very specific use cases where security is paramount, and administrators need to be in full control of what runs on their systems. Examples include embedded systems, such as network firewall devices running in a data center, or Linux servers running strict and immutable configurations and applications.
Fedora 32 Looking At Using EarlyOOM By Default To Better Deal With Low Memory Situations — The oom-killer generally has a bad reputation among Linux users. This may be part of the reason Linux invokes it only when it has absolutely no other choice. It will swap out the desktop environment, drop the whole page cache and empty every buffer before it will ultimately kill a process. At least that's what I think that it will do. I have yet to be patient enough to wait for it, sitting in front of an unresponsive system.
earlyoom - Early OOM Daemon for Linux — The oom-killer generally has a bad reputation among Linux users. This may be part of the reason Linux invokes it only when it has absolutely no other choice. It will swap out the desktop environment, drop the whole page cache and empty every buffer before it will ultimately kill a process. At least that's what I think that it will do. I have yet to be patient enough to wait for it, sitting in front of an unresponsive system.
oomd — Out of memory killing has historically happened inside kernel space. On a memory overcommitted linux system, malloc(2) and friends usually never fail. However, if an application dereferences the returned pointer and the system has run out of physical memory, the linux kernel is forced to take extreme measures, up to and including killing processes. This is sometimes a slow and painful process because the kernel can spend an unbounded amount of time swapping in and out pages and evicting the page cache. Furthermore, configuring policy is not very flexible while being somewhat complicated.
low-memory-monitor — low-memory-monitor, as its name implies, monitors the amount of free physical memory on the system and will shoot off signals to interested user-space applications, usually session managers, or sandboxing helpers, when that memory runs low, making it possible for applications to shrink their memory footprints before it's too late either to recover a usable system, or avoid taking a performance hit.
Nohang — Nohang is a highly configurable daemon for Linux which is able to correctly prevent out of memory (OOM) and keep system responsiveness in low memory conditions.
Pagure, the free software GitLab alternative no one is talking about.
Neal Gompa joins us to discuss what makes it unique, which projects are using it, and the significant adoption in progress.
Special Guest: Neal Gompa.
Links:
Pagure.io — With pagure you can host your project with its documentation, let your users report issues or request enhancements using the ticketing system and build your community of contributors by allowing them to fork your projects and contribute to it via the now-popular pull-request mechanism.
Pagure project documentation — The name Pagure is taken from the French word 'pagure'. Pagure in French is used as the common name for the crustaceans from the Paguroidea superfamily, which is basically the family of the Hermit crabs.
A new site for fully free collaboration - Free Software Foundation — As we said in an end-of-year post highlighting our work supporting free software development and infrastructure, the Free Software Foundation is planning to launch a public code hosting and collaboration platform to launch in 2020.
Linux Action News 152
Apr 05, 2020
WireGuard officially lands in Linux. We cover a bunch of new features in Linux 5.6 and discuss the recent challenges facing LineageOS.
Plus the PinePhone UBports edition goes up for pre-order, and our reaction to Huawei joining the Open Invention Network.
Links:
Linux kernel 5.6 release announcement — This has a bit more changes than I'd like, but they are mostly from
davem's networking fixes pulls, and David feels comfy with them. And I
looked over the diff, and none of it looks scary. It's just slightly
more than I'd have preferred at this stage - not doesn't really seem
worth delaying a release over.
Ubuntu Touch Q&A 72 — We are very pleased to announce that we are now working together with German phone startup Volla. They are joining us as a sponsor and will have a place on our Advisory Board. We expect that UT will be available as a pre-installed option with the new Volla phone.
Atari VCS: Managing the Unexpected — We believe it would be unfair to use the balance to fulfill only a small number of Indiegogo orders, so Atari’s plan is to ship to all backers at the same time when enough VCS units and peripherals are available.
Brunch with Brent: Daniel Foré | Jupiter Extras 68
Apr 03, 2020
Brent sits down with Daniel Foré, founder of elementary OS and co-host of User Error. We explore his early years in design and software, formative aspects of Ubuntu and Gentoo, the philosophies and history of elementary OS, and more.
We take a look at Cloudflare's impressive Linux disk encryption speed-ups, and explore how zoned storage tools like dm-zoned and zonefs might help mitigate the downsides of Shingled Magnetic Recording.
Plus we celebrate WireGuard's inclusion in the Linux 5.6 kernel, and fight some exFAT FUD.
fs: New zonefs file system — zonefs is a very simple file system exposing each zone of a zoned block device as a file. This is intended to simplify implementation of application zoned block device raw access support by allowing switching to the well known POSIX file API rather than relying on direct block device file ioctls and read/write.
What is Zoned Storage and the Zoned Storage Initiative? — Zoned Storage is a new paradigm in storage motivated by the incredible explosion of data. Our data-driven society is increasingly dependent on data for every-day life and extreme scale data management is becoming a necessity.
Beware of SMR drives in PMR clothing — WD and Seagate are both submarining Drive-managed SMR (DM-SMR) drives into channels, disguised as "normal" drives.
The exFAT filesystem is coming to Linux—Paragon software’s not happy about it — When software and operating system giant Microsoft announced its support for inclusion of the exFAT filesystem directly into the Linux kernel back in August, it didn't get a ton of press coverage. But filesystem vendor Paragon Software clearly noticed this month's merge of the Microsoft-approved, largely Samsung-authored version of exFAT into the VFS for-next repository, which will in turn merge into Linux 5.7—and Paragon doesn't seem happy about it.
Speeding up Linux disk encryption - The Cloudflare Blog — Encrypting data at rest is vital for Cloudflare with more than 200 data centres across the world. In this post, we will investigate the performance of disk encryption on Linux and explain how we made it at least two times faster for ourselves and our customers.
Shell text processing, data rebalancing on ZFS mirrors, Add Security Headers with OpenBSD relayd, ZFS filesystem hierarchy in ZFS pools, speeding up ZSH, How Unix pipes work, grow ZFS pools over time, the real reason ifconfig on Linux is deprecated, clear your terminal in style, and more.
This article is part of a self-published book project by Balthazar Rouberol and Etienne Brodu, ex-roommates, friends and colleagues, aiming at empowering the up and coming generation of developers. We currently are hard at work on it!
One of the things that makes the shell an invaluable tool is the amount of available text processing commands, and the ability to easily pipe them into each other to build complex text processing workflows. These commands can make it trivial to perform text and data analysis, convert data between different formats, filter lines, etc.
When working with text data, the philosophy is to break any complex problem you have into a set of smaller ones, and to solve each of them with a specialized tool.
One of the questions that comes up time and time again about ZFS is “how can I migrate my data to a pool on a few of my disks, then add the rest of the disks afterward?”
If you just want to get the data moved and don’t care about balance, you can just copy the data over, then add the new disks and be done with it. But, it won’t be distributed evenly over the vdevs in your pool.
Don’t fret, though, it’s actually pretty easy to rebalance mirrors. In the following example, we’ll assume you’ve got four disks in a RAID array on an old machine, and two disks available to copy the data to in the short term.
I am a huge fan of OpenBSD’s built-in httpd server as it is simple, secure, and quite performant. With the modern push of the large search providers pushing secure websites, it is now important to add security headers to your website or risk having the search results for your website downgraded. Fortunately, it is very easy to do this when you combine httpd with relayd. While relayd is principally designed for layer 3 redirections and layer 7 relays, it just so happens that it makes a handy tool for adding the recommended security headers. My website automatically redirects users from http to https and this gets achieved using a simple redirection in /etc/httpd.conf So if you have a configuration similar to mine, then you will still want to have httpd listen on the egress interface on port 80. The key thing to change here is to have httpd listen on 127.0.0.1 on port 443.
Our long standing practice here, predating even the first generation of our ZFS fileservers, is that we have two main sorts of filesystems, home directories (homedir filesystems) and what we call 'work directory' (workdir) filesystems. Homedir filesystems are called /h/NNN (for some NNN) and workdir filesystems are called /w/NNN; the NNN is unique across all of the different sorts of filesystems. Users are encouraged to put as much stuff as possible in workdirs and can have as many of them as they want, which mattered a lot more in the days when we used Solaris DiskSuite and had fixed-sized filesystems.
I was opening multiple shells for an unrelated project today and noticed how abysmal my shell load speed was. After the initial load it was relatively fast, but the actual shell start up was noticeably slow. I timed it with time and these were the results.
In the future I hope to actually recompile zsh with additional profiling techniques and debug information - keeping an internal timer and having a flag output current time for each command in a tree fashion would make building heat maps really easy.
Pipes are cool! We saw how handy they are in a previous blog post. Let’s look at a typical way to use the pipe operator. We have some output, and we want to look at the first lines of the output. Let’s download The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, a fairly long novel.
In my entry on why ZFS isn't good at growing and reshaping pools, I mentioned that we go to quite some lengths in our ZFS environment to be able to incrementally expand our pools. Today I want to put together all of the pieces of that in one place to discuss what those lengths are. Our big constraint is that not only do we need to add space to pools over time, but we have a fairly large number of pools and which pools will have space added to them is unpredictable. We need a solution to pool expansion that leaves us with as much flexibility as possible for as long as possible. This pretty much requires being able to expand pools in relatively small increments of space.
In my third installment of FreeBSD vs Linux, I will discuss underlying reasons for why Linux moved away from ifconfig(8) to ip(8).
In the past, when people said, “Linux is a kernel, not an operating system”, I knew that was true but I always thought it was a rather pedantic criticism. Of course no one runs just the Linux kernel, you run a distribution of Linux. But after reviewing userland code, I understand the significant drawbacks to developing “just a kernel” in isolation from the rest of the system.
if you’re someone like me who habitually clears their terminal, sometimes you want a little excitement in your life. Here is a way to do just that.
This post revolves around the idea of giving a command a percent chance of running. While the topic at hand is not serious, this simple technique has potential in your scripts.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Windows as a Linux User + Sway Window Manager | Choose Linux 32
Apr 02, 2020
Ell tells us about her first ever experience with Windows 10 and how it compares with Linux. Plus Drew has been using a Wayland-based i3-like tiling window manager called Sway.
User Error: What Will Change Post-virus? | Jupiter Extras 67
Mar 31, 2020
Joe, Alan, and Dan speculate about what the world will be like after the situation with Coronavirus is under control and life returns to something resembling normality.
Special Guests: Alan Pope and Daniel Fore.
Linux Action News 151
Mar 29, 2020
Mozilla puts your money where your mouse is and partners with Scroll to launch Firefox for a Better Web. We'll explain the details, and why it might just have a shot.
Plus we try out Plasma Bigscreen, cover Telegram's really bad news, and much more.
Plasma Bigscreen — Plasma BigScreen is a platform intended to use on smart TVs with big remote-friendly UI controls, and Voice activation. What technology did we use for it? Plasma (of course!) and Mycroft.
Brunch with Brent: Aleix Pol | Jupiter Extras 66
Mar 27, 2020
Brent sits down with Aleix Pol, president of KDE e.V., KDE software developer, co-founder of Linux App Summit and Barcelona Free Software. We discuss his longstanding collaborations within the KDE community, developer sponsorships in open source business models, and more.
The details that make a great distro, things that make us wince, smug people online, great photos, imposter syndrome, and more.
00:00:27 Do you ever get imposter syndrome? 00:08:16 What's your unusual "fingernails on chalkboard" equivalent? 00:12:26 What gives a Linux distro that feeling of polish? 00:23:16 What's your favorite photograph? 00:28:12 How do you feel when someone chimes in online with "well, actually…"?
FreeBSD, Corona: Fight! | BSD Now 343
Mar 26, 2020
Fighting the Coronavirus with FreeBSD, Wireguard VPN Howto in OPNsense, NomadBSD 1.3.1 available, fresh GhostBSD 20.02, New FuryBSD XFCE and KDE images, pf-badhost 0.3 released, and more.
Here is a quick HOWTO for those who want to provide some FreeBSD based compute resources to help finding vaccines.
UPDATE 2020-03-22: 0mp@ made a port out of this, it is in “biology/linux-foldingathome”.
Per default it will now pick up some SARS-CoV‑2 (COVID-19) related folding tasks. There are some more config options (e.g. how much of the system resources are used). Please refer to the official Folding@Home site for more information about that. Be also aware that there is a big rise in compute resources donated to Folding@Home, so the pool of available work units may be empty from time to time, but they are working on adding more work units. Be patient.
WireGuard is a modern designed VPN that uses the latest cryptography for stronger security, is very lightweight, and is relatively easy to set up (mostly). I say ‘mostly’ because I found setting up WireGuard in OPNsense to be more difficult than I anticipated. The basic setup of the WireGuard VPN itself was as easy as the authors claim on their website, but I came across a few gotcha's. The gotcha's occur with functionality that is beyond the scope of the WireGuard protocol so I cannot fault them for that. My greatest struggle was configuring WireGuard to function similarly to my OpenVPN server. I want the ability to connect remotely to my home network from my iPhone or iPad, tunnel all traffic through the VPN, have access to certain devices and services on my network, and have the VPN devices use my home's Internet connection.
WireGuard behaves more like a SSH server than a typical VPN server. With WireGuard, devices which have shared their cryptographic keys with each other are able to connect via an encrypted tunnel (like a SSH server configured to use keys instead of passwords). The devices that are connecting to one another are referred to as “peer” devices. When the peer device is an OPNsense router with WireGuard installed, for instance, it can be configured to allow access to various resources on your network. It becomes a tunnel into your network similar to OpenVPN (with the appropriate firewall rules enabled). I will refer to the WireGuard installation on OPNsense as the server rather than a “peer” to make it more clear which device I am configuring unless I am describing the user interface because that is the terminology used interchangeably by WireGuard.
The documentation I found on WireGuard in OPNsense is straightforward and relatively easy to understand, but I had to wrestle with it for a little while to gain a better understanding on how it should be configured. I believe it was partially due to differing end goals – I was trying to achieve something a little different than the authors of other wiki/blog/forum posts. Piecing together various sources of information, I finally ended up with a configuration that met the goals stated above.
NomadBSD 1.3.1 has recently been made available. NomadBSD is a lightweight and portable FreeBSD distribution, designed to run on live on a USB flash drive, allowing you to plug, test, and play on different hardware. They have also started a forum as of yesterday, where you can ask questions and mingle with the NomadBSD community. Notable changes in 1.3.1 are base system upgraded to FreeBSD 12.1-p2. automatic network interface setup improved, image size increased to over 4GB, Thunderbird, Zeroconf, and some more listed below.
Eric Turgeon, main developer of GhostBSD, has announced version 20.02 of the FreeBSD based operating system. Notable changes are ZFS partition into the custom partition editor installer, allowing you to install alongside with Windows, Linux, or macOS. Other changes are force upgrade all packages on system upgrade, improved update station, and powerd by default for laptop battery performance.
This new release is now based on FreeBSD 12.1 with the latest FreeBSD quarterly packages. This brings XFCE up to 4.14, and KDE up to 5.17. In addition to updates this new ISO mostly addresses community bugs, community enhancement requests, and community pull requests. Due to the overwhelming amount of reports with GitHub hosting all new releases are now being pushed to SourceForge only for the time being. Previous releases will still be kept for archive purposes.
pf-badhost is a simple, easy to use badhost blocker that uses the power of the pf firewall to block many of the internet's biggest irritants. Annoyances such as SSH and SMTP bruteforcers are largely eliminated. Shodan scans and bots looking for webservers to abuse are stopped dead in their tracks. When used to filter outbound traffic, pf-badhost blocks many seedy, spooky malware containing and/or compromised webhosts.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Keeping Track of Stuff | Self-Hosted 15
Mar 26, 2020
We have a neat self-hosted home inventory management system for preppers of any type, plus Chris' simple Home Assistant trick and Alex's valiant battle with the WebSockets daemon of the reverse proxies.
Also - we answer listener questions, and share updates.
Links:
Grocy — ERP beyond your fridge - grocy is a web-based self-hosted groceries & household management solution for your home
Home Assistant External Reverse Proxy Setup with nginx — I was running into an issue for a while tonight where I could get Home Assistant itself working just fine but any add-ons that used web sockets wouldn't load properly.
FOSS Talk Live 2020 has been cancelled. — It seems very unlikely that London will be functioning by June so I have made this difficult call. I'm very sorry to anyone who has made travel and accommodation arrangements but I trust that everyone will understand why this had to be done.
TXLF 2020 Rescheduled — Given the recommendations by public health officials, we have decided to not have Texas Linux Fest on May 2020 at the Palmer Events Center in Austin, TX. We are currently investigating opportunities to bring parts of Texas Linux Fest online.
TurnKey GNU/Linux — a free Debian based library of system images that pre-integrates and polishes the best free software components into secure, easy to use solutions.
Sandstorm — an open source project built by a community of volunteers with the goal of making it really easy to run open source web applications
PAPPL Is A New Printer Application Framework Made By The Founder Of CUPS — Michael Sweet, the lead developer of CUPS who had been at Apple for more than a decade since they acquired it, is now developing PAPPL as a printer application framework in addition to his work on the new LPrint project.
Firefox 74.0 Released — Firefox now provides better privacy for your web voice and video calls through support for mDNS ICE by cloaking your computer’s IP address with a random ID in certain WebRTC scenarios.
Brunch with Brent: Stuart Langridge | Jupiter Extras 65
Mar 20, 2020
Brent sits down with Stuart Langridge, co-host of Bad Voltage, for an exploration of open source's "final mile", the text and language interface as a UX opportunity, terminals vs. search engines, Darwinian processes and crab-bucketism in software development, and more.
OpenBSD Full disk encryption with coreboot and tianocore, FreeBSD 12.0 EOL, ZFS DVA layout, OpenBSD’s Go situation, AD updates requires changes in TrueNAS and FreeNAS, full name of FreeBSD’s root account, and more.
It has been a while since I have posted here so I wanted to share something that was surprisingly difficult for me to figure out. I have a Thinkpad T440p that I have flashed with Coreboot 4.11 with some special patches that allow the newer machine to work. When I got the laptop, the default BIOS was UEFI and I installed two operating systems.
Windows 10 with bitlocker full disk encryption on the “normal” drive (I replaced the spinning 2.5″ disk with an SSD)
Ubuntu 19.10 on the m.2 SATA drive that I installed using LUKS full disk encryption
I purchased one of those carriers for the optical bay that allows you to install a third SSD and so I did that with the intent of putting OpenBSD on it. Since my other two operating systems were running full disk encryption, I wanted to do the same on OpenBSD.
As of February 29, 2020, FreeBSD 12.0 will reach end-of-life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of FreeBSD 12.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release as soon as possible.
One piece of ZFS terminology is DVA and DVAs, which is short for Data Virtual Address. For ZFS, a DVA is the equivalent of a block number in other filesystems; it tells ZFS where to find whatever data we're talking about. The short summary of what fields DVAs have and what they mean is that DVAs tell us how to find blocks by giving us their vdev (by number) and their byte offset into that particular vdev (and then their size). A typical DVA might say that you find what it's talking about on vdev 0 at byte offset 0x53a40ed000. There are some consequences of this that I hadn't really thought about until the other day.
Right away we can see why ZFS has a problem removing a vdev; the vdev's number is burned into every DVA that refers to data on it. If there's no vdev 0 in the pool, ZFS has no idea where to even start looking for data because all addressing is relative to the vdev. ZFS pool shrinking gets around this by adding a translation layer that says where to find the portions of vdev 0 that you care about after it's been removed.
Critical Information for Current FreeNAS and TrueNAS Users
Microsoft is changing the security defaults for Active Directory to eliminate some security vulnerabilities in its protocols. Unfortunately, these new security defaults may disrupt existing FreeNAS/TrueNAS deployments once Windows systems are updated. The Windows updates may appear sometime in March 2020; no official date has been announced as of yet.
FreeNAS and TrueNAS users that utilize Active Directory should update to version 11.3 (or 11.2-U8) to avoid potential disruption of their networks when updating to the latest versions of Windows software after March 1, 2020. Version 11.3 has been released and version 11.2-U8 will be available in early March.
NetBSD now has a users(7) and groups(7) manual. Looking into what entries existed in the passwd and group files I wondered about root’s full name who we now know as Charlie Root in the BSDs....
Over in the fediverse, Pete Zaitcev had a reaction to my entry on OpenBSD versus Prometheus for us:
I don't think the situation is usually that bad. Our situation with Prometheus is basically a worst case scenario for Go on OpenBSD, and most people will have much better results, especially if you stick to supported OpenBSD versions.
If you stick to supported OpenBSD versions, upgrading your machines as older OpenBSD releases fall out of support (as the OpenBSD people want you to do), you should not have any problems with your own Go programs. The latest Go release will support the currently supported OpenBSD versions (as long as OpenBSD remains a supported platform for Go), and the Go 1.0 compatibility guarantee means that you can always rebuild your current Go programs with newer versions of Go. You might have problems with compiled binaries that you don't want to rebuild, but my understanding is that this is the case for OpenBSD in general; it doesn't guarantee a stable ABI even for C programs (cf). If you use OpenBSD, you have to be prepared to rebuild your code after OpenBSD upgrades regardless of what language it's written in.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Solus + Visual Studio Code | Choose Linux 31
Mar 19, 2020
We try out Solus and are all impressed by this independent distro. Then Ell and Drew sing the praises of Visual Studio Code - a text editor that's packed full of features.
Links:
Solus — Solus is an operating system that is designed for home computing. Every tweak enables us to deliver a cohesive computing experience.
Visual Studio Code — Code editing. Redefined. Free. Built on open source. Runs everywhere.
Don't Go Viral, Go Virtual | LINUX Unplugged 345
Mar 17, 2020
It was the first of its kind, and the first forced to go virtual. We get the behind the scenes story of WSL Conf from the organizers.
Plus our impressions of the latest GNOME release, community news, app picks, and more.
Special Guests: Hayden Barnes, Neal Gompa, and Sohini Bianka Roy.
elementary #AppCenterForEveryone on Twitter — Due to travel restrictions and for the safety and well-being of our contributors, we are postponing the AppCenter for Everyone sprint that was planned to take place March 12–19. We are coordinating making alternate arrangements with attendees and will provide more info soon
Daniel Foré on Twitter — I’m really bummed that we had to postpone an in-person sprint, but we still hit the ground running today and got a lot done.
npm is joining GitHub - The GitHub Blog — Looking further ahead, we’ll integrate GitHub and npm to improve the security of the open source software supply chain, and enable you to trace a change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that fixed it.
El Reg gets some unexpected lessons from WSLConf — Microsoft celebrated the conclusion of a successful - and suddenly virtual - Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) conference by switching the forthcoming Build event to a digital affair as well. The Register spoke to those behind the first WSLConf about hitting the big red button with mere days to go.
Behind the Scenes: LINUX Unplugged | Jupiter Extras 64
Mar 17, 2020
We share what goes into making LINUX Unplugged special, and have a laugh at some of our bad ideas from show past.
Links:
LINUX Unplugged 1: Too Much Choice — Does the Linux community lean on the age old excuse of choice, to brush of the real limitations of desktop Linux environments? We debate that, and then discuss the growing reasons to roll your own email server.
LINUX Unplugged 27: Debian’s systemd Decision — One of the bumpier chapters in Debian’s history looks to be drawing to a close, at least for now. But what was all the drama about? And where do things stand now? We’ll dig into the latest developments in the Debian init system debate.
LINUX Unplugged 67: Debian Community Divided — We recap the recent mini-exodus in the Debian project & discuss how the tone of discussion around systemd has had some terrible consequences. We follow that with some concrete ideas of what we can do to change that tone.
LINUX Unplugged 329: Flat Network Truthers — Build one flat network across cloud providers, personal networks, with even thousands of nodes. We feature two amazing open source solutions, and the creators behind them.
Linux Action News 149
Mar 14, 2020
Solid releases from GNOME and Firefox, bad news for custom Android ROM users, and a new container distro from Amazon.
Plus Mozilla and KaiOS team up to bring the modern web to feature phones, and the surprising way Microsoft is shipping a Linux kernel.
Introducing GNOME 3.36: “Gresik” — GNOME 3.36 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, such as new login and unlock experience, and a dedicated app for managing extensions.
Announcing Bottlerocket — Bottlerocket comes with a single-step update mechanism and includes only the essential software to run containers. These properties enable customers to use container orchestrators to manage OS updates with minimal disruptions, enabling better uptime for containerized applications and lower operational cost.
Docker: Helping You and Your Development Team Build and Ship Faster — How are we going to do this? By focusing on developer experience through Docker Desktop, partnering with the ecosystem, and making Docker Hub the nexus for all the integrations, configuration, and management of the application components which constitute your apps and microservices.
Magisk may no longer be able to hide bootloader unlocking from apps — Users have noticed that their bootloader-unlocked devices are failing SafetyNet’s Basic Integrity check even though they used Magisk to patch the boot image. According to Magisk creator John Wu, this is because Google may have implemented hardware-level key attestation to verify that the boot image has not been tampered with.
Kernels for WSL2 will come from Windows Update — WSL2 will soon be officially available as part of Windows 10, version 2004! As we get ready for general availability, we want to share one additional change: updating how the Linux kernel inside of WSL2 is installed and serviced on your machine.
Brunch with Brent: Elizabeth K. Joseph | Jupiter Extras 63
Mar 13, 2020
Brent sits down with Elizabeth K. Joseph, Developer Advocate at IBM Z, former Ubuntu Community Council member, and contributor to Ubuntu, Debian, Xubuntu, and others. We discuss her new passion for mainframes, her early contributions to open source projects, the niche opportunities in Z DevOps on mainframes, and more.
ReBoot - Wikipedia — Bob and his companions Enzo and Dot Matrix work to keep the computer system of Mainframe safe from the viruses Megabyte and Hexadecimal.
Endianness - Wikipedia — "Big-endian" and "Little-endian" redirect here. For the conflicting ideologies in Gulliver's Travels, see Lilliput and Blefuscu § History and politics.
Apps that make us feel old, emotional songs, using actual paper, evolution of language, IRC channels we never look at, and more.
00:00:35 Do any songs trigger you to cry? 00:05:40 How many communication channels is it possible to keep up with? 00:11:25 Do you own a 2d printer? What was the last thing you printed out? 00:17:22 In an ever-shrinking world, should we drop tradition and use the easiest and most logical spellings and pronunciations? 00:25:52 Which hugely popular apps or websites do you just not get?
U-NAS-ification | BSD Now 341
Mar 12, 2020
FreeBSD on Power, DragonflyBSD 5.8 is here, Unifying FreeNAS/TrueNAS, OpenBSD vs. Prometheus and Go, gcc 4.2.1 removed from FreeBSD base, and more.
The power and promise of all open source software is freedom. Another way to express freedom is choice — choice of platforms, deployment models, stacks, configurations, etc.
The FreeBSD Foundation is dedicated to supporting and promoting the FreeBSD Project and community worldwide. But, what does this mean, exactly, you may wonder. The truth is it means many different things, but in all cases the Foundation acts to expand freedom and choice so that FreeBSD users have the power to serve their varied compute needs.
This blog tells the story of one specific way the Foundation helps a member of the community provide greater hardware choice for all FreeBSD users.
DragonFly version 5.8 brings a new dsynth utility for building your own binary dports packages, plus significant support work to speed up that build - up to and including the entire collection. Additional progress has been made on GPU and signal support.
The details of all commits between the 5.6 and 5.8 branches are available in the associated commit messages for 5.8.0rc1 and 5.8.0. Also see /usr/src/UPDATING for specific file changes in PAM.
FreeNAS and TrueNAS have been separate-but-related members of the #1 Open Source storage software family since 2012. FreeNAS is the free Open Source version with an expert community and has led the pursuit of innovations like Plugins and VMs. TrueNAS is the enterprise version for organizations of all sizes that need additional uptime and performance, as well as the enterprise-grade support necessary for critical data and applications.
From the beginning at iXsystems, we’ve developed, tested, documented, and released both as separate products, even though the vast majority of code is shared. This was a deliberate technical decision in the beginning but over time became less of a necessity and more of “just how we’ve always done it”. Furthermore, to change it was going to require a serious overhaul to how we build and package both products, among other things, so we continued to kick the can down the road. As we made systematic improvements to development and QA efficiency over the past few years, the redundant release process became almost impossible to ignore as our next major efficiency roadblock to overcome. So, we’ve finally rolled up our sleeves.
With the recent 11.3 release, TrueNAS gained parity with FreeNAS on features like VMs and Plugins, further homogenizing the code. Today, we announce the next phase of evolution for FreeNAS and TrueNAS.
We have a decent number of OpenBSD machines that do important things (and that have sometimes experienced problems like running out of disk space), and we have a Prometheus based metrics and monitoring system. The Prometheus host agent has enough support for OpenBSD to be able to report on critical metrics, including things like local disk space. Despite all of this, after some investigation I've determined that it's not really sensible to even try to deploy the host agent on our OpenBSD machines. This is due to a combination of factors that have at their root OpenBSD's lack of ABI stability
As described in Warner's email message[1] to the FreeBSD-arch mailing list we have reached GCC 4.2.1's retirement date. At this time all supported architectures either use in-tree Clang, or rely on external toolchain (i.e., a contemporary GCC version from ports).
GCC 4.2.1 was released July 18, 2007 and was imported into FreeBSD later that year, in r171825. GCC has served us well, but version 4.2.1 is obsolete and not used by default on any architecture in FreeBSD. It does not support modern C and does not support arm64 or RISC-V.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Embracing Automation | Self-Hosted 14
Mar 12, 2020
Wendell Wilson is back, and he and Chris are struggling with their automation setups. Also, we chat about ideal home server hardware for a server or a pfSense box.
Plus Wendell's home-rolled presence detection rig, some 3D printing chat, and more.
Special Guest: Wendell Wilson.
Links:
Fractal Design — Fractal Design is a leading designer and manufacturer of premium PC hardware including cases, cooling, power supplies and accessories.
Tinkercad — Tinkercad is a free, easy-to-use app for 3D design, electronics, and coding. It's used by teachers, kids, hobbyists, and designers to imagine, design, and make anything!
Fusion 360 — Integrated CAD, CAM, and CAE software.
Pocket Rotary Cellphone — The 3D-printed case contains an ATmega2560V microcontroller and an Adafruit FONA 3G cell module, while a flexible mono eInk display adorns the outside.
Our Week with Windows | LINUX Unplugged 344
Mar 10, 2020
We load up Windows 10 with WSL2, the new Terminal, and give it a go to see what it does better than Linux. Then we dive into the deep end and attend the first-ever WSLConf.
Plus the big new feature coming to Ubuntu, why Chris is going to Denver, and more.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Brent Gervais, and Martin Wimpress.
Building an Open Source Community: Wirefall | Jupiter Extras 62
Mar 10, 2020
Ell and Wes sit down with Wirefall, founder of the Dallas Hackers Association, to talk about the struggles and rewards of community building, why moving with the times is key, and how to foster an inclusive community meetup that still feels like a family gathering.
Opposite of a Platform for DPL 2020 — I hope to be DPL again some year, but 2020 is the wrong year for me and for the project. So I will not nominate myself this year, but hope to do so some future year.
systemd v245 released, with homed stuff — A small new service systemd-homed.service has been added, that may be
used to securely manage home directories with built-in encryption.
FreeNAS and TrueNAS are Unifying — With the 12.0 release coming in the latter half of the year, we will not only bring more features and improvements than any release that has come before it, we will also unify both products into a single software image and name!
Brunch with Brent: Nuritzi Sanchez | Jupiter Extras 61
Mar 06, 2020
Brent sits down with Nuritzi Sanchez, Senior Open Source Program Manager at GitLab, former GNOME Foundation President and Chairperson of the Board of Directors, and Founding Member of Endless, Inc. We explore her current experiences at GitLab, her deep involvement in the growth of GNOME's community, the evolution of the Linux App Summit, her involvement with Endless, and why she is so drawn to the human aspects of technology.
Hack Computer - Coding for kids — "Hack lets kids explore basic coding concepts and computational thinking as they journey down learning pathways. Everything is hackable - hack your apps, games and operating system."
Cloudflare recently embarked on an epic quest to choose a CPU for its next-generation server build, so we explore the importance of requests per watt, the benefits of full memory encryption, and why AMD won.
Plus Mozilla's rollout of DNS over HTTPS has begun, a big milestone for Let's Encrypt, and more.
Why ZFS is doing filesystem checksumming right, better TMPFS throughput performance on DragonFlyBSD, reshaping pools with ZFS, PKGSRC on Manjaro aarch64 Pinebook-pro, central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD, and more.
One of the best aspects of ZFS is its reliability. This can be accomplished using a few features like copy-on-write approach and checksumming. Today we will look at how ZFS does checksumming and why it does it the proper way. Most of the file systems don’t provide any integrity checking and fail in several scenarios:
Data bit flips - when the data that we wanted to store are bit flipped by the hard drives, or cables, and the wrong data is stored on the hard drive.
Misdirected writes - when the CPU/cable/hard drive will bit flip a block to which the data should be written.
Misdirected read - when we miss reading the block when a bit flip occurred.
Phantom writes - when the write operation never made it to the disk. For example, a disk or kernel may have some bug that it will return success even if the hard drive never made the write. This problem can also occur when data is kept only in the hard drive cache.
Checksumming may help us detect errors in a few of those situations.
It's been a while since last having any new magical optimizations to talk about by DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon, but on Wednesday he landed some significant temporary file-system "TMPFS" optimizations for better throughput including with swap.
Of several interesting commits merged tonight, the improved write clustering is a big one. In particular, "Reduces low-memory tmpfs paging I/O overheads by 4x and generally increases paging throughput to SSD-based swap by 2x-4x. Tmpfs is now able to issue a lot more 64KB I/Os when under memory pressure."
There's also a new tunable in the VM space as well as part of his commits on Wednesday night. This follows a lot of recent work on dsynth, improved page-out daemon pipelining, and other routine work.
This work is building up towards the eventual DragonFlyBSD 5.8 while those wanting to try the latest improvements right away can find their daily snapshots.
recently read Mark McBride's Five Years of Btrfs (via), which has a significant discussion of why McBride chose Btrfs over ZFS that boils down to ZFS not being very good at evolving your pool structure. You might doubt this judgment from a Btrfs user, so let me say as both a fan of ZFS and a long term user of it that this is unfortunately quite true; ZFS is not a good choice if you want to modify your pool disk layout significantly over time. ZFS works best if the only change in your pools that you do is replacing drives with bigger drives. In our ZFS environment we go to quite some lengths to be able to expand pools incrementally over time, and while this works it both leaves us with unbalanced pools and means that we're basically forced to use mirroring instead of RAIDZ.
(An unbalanced pool is one where some vdevs and disks have much more data than others. This is less of an issue for us now that we're using SSDs instead of HDs.)
I wanted to see how pkgsrc works on aarch64 Linux Manjaro since it is a very mature framework that is very portable and supported by many architectures – pkgsrc (package source) is a package management system for Unix-like operating systems. It was forked from the FreeBSD ports collection in 1997 as the primary package management system for NetBSD.
One might question why use pkgsrc on Arch based Manjaro, since the pacman package repository is very good on its own. I see alternative pkgsrc as a good automated build framework that offers a way to produce independent build environment /usr/pkg that does not interfere with the current Linux distribution in any way (all libraries are statically built)
syslog-ng is the Swiss army knife of log management. You can collect logs from any source, process them in real time and deliver them to wide range of destinations. It allows you to flexibly collect, parse, classify, rewrite and correlate logs from across your infrastructure. This is why syslog-ng is the perfect solution for the central log host of my (mainly) FreeBSD based infrastructure.
This blog post continues where the blog post A central log host with syslog-ng on FreeBSD left off. Open source solutions to check syslog log messages exist, such as Logcheck or Logwatch. Although these are not too difficult to implement and maintain, I still found these to much. So I went for my own home grown solution to check the syslog messages of the SoCruel.NU central log host.
Pentesting Problems: Bryson Bort | Jupiter Extras 60
Mar 03, 2020
Ell sits down with Bryson Bort to discuss pentesting with Scythe, Red Team vs Blue Team operations, and the benefits that a Purple Team might have on the industry.
Bruce Schneier puts his name behind Solid, Firefox starts to roll out DNS over HTTPS as default, and Microsoft's Linux first device ships to customers.
Plus a birthday gift to Raspberry Pi users, Collabora comes to mobile, and more.
Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me — I have joined a company called Inrupt that is working to bring Tim Berners-Lee's distributed data ownership model that is Solid into the mainstream.
Brunch with Brent: Brandon Bruce | Jupiter Extras 59
Feb 28, 2020
Brent sits down with Brandon Bruce, Director of Customer Support at Linux Academy. We explore the world of support, how his former role as professional chef informs his "Kitchen Brigade" approach to building a support team, analytics data's ability to reveal surprising user experience patterns, and more.
Heat by Bill Buford - Goodreads — An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany
Whether open source needs to be a complete experience, a deep need for conflict, preferred social media, and our favorite emoji.
00:00:30 Why do you prefer Twitter over Facebook? 00:07:57 Can Linux on the desktop ever succeed without a full ecosystem? 00:18:32 Hoodies: zip or no zip? 00:22:26 Do people really want all the drama to calm down? 00:29:40 What's your most commonly used emoji?
BSD Fundraising | BSD Now 339
Feb 27, 2020
Meet FuryBSD, NetBSD 9.0 has been released, OpenBSD Foundation 2019 campaign wrapup, a retrospective on OmniOS ZFS-based NFS fileservers, NetBSD Fundraising 2020 goal, OpenSSH 8.2 released, and more.## Headlines
At its heart, FuryBSD is a very simple beast. According to the site, “FuryBSD is a back to basics lightweight desktop distribution based on stock FreeBSD.” It is basically FreeBSD with a desktop environment pre-configured and several apps preinstalled. The goal is to quickly get a FreeBSD-based system running on your computer.
You might be thinking that this sounds a lot like a couple of other BSDs that are available, such as NomadBSD and GhostBSD. The major difference between those BSDs and FuryBSD is that FuryBSD is much closer to stock FreeBSD. For example, FuryBSD uses the FreeBSD installer, while others have created their own installers and utilities.
As it states on the site, “Although FuryBSD may resemble past graphical BSD projects like PC-BSD and TrueOS, FuryBSD is created by a different team and takes a different approach focusing on tight integration with FreeBSD. This keeps overhead low and maintains compatibility with upstream.” The lead dev also told me that “One key focus for FuryBSD is for it to be a small live media with a few assistive tools to test drivers for hardware.”
Currently, you can go to the FuryBSD homepage and download either an XFCE or KDE LiveCD. A GNOME version is in the works.
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 9.0, the seventeenth major release of the NetBSD operating system.
This release brings significant improvements in terms of hardware support, quality assurance, security, along with new features and hundreds of bug fixes. Here are some highlights of this new release.
Our target for 2019 was CDN$300K. Our community's continued generosity combined with our corporate donors exceeded that nicely. In addition we received the largest single donation in our history, CDN$380K from Smartisan. The return of Google was another welcome event. Altogether 2019 was our most successful campaign to date, yielding CDN$692K in total.
We thank all our donors, Iridium (Smartisan), Platinum (Yandex, Google), Gold (Microsoft, Facebook) Silver (2Keys) and Bronze (genua, Thinkst Canary). But especially our community of smaller donors whose contributions are the bedrock of our support. Thank you all!
Our OmniOS fileservers have now been out of service for about six months, which makes it somewhat past time for a retrospective on them. Our OmniOS fileservers followed on our Solaris fileservers, which I wrote a two part retrospective on (part 1, part 2), and have now been replaced by our Linux fileservers. To be honest, I have been sitting on my hands about writing this retrospective because we have mixed feelings about our OmniOS fileservers.
I will put the summary up front. OmniOS worked reasonably well for us over its lifespan here and looking back I think it was almost certainly the right choice for us at the time we made that choice (which was 2013 and 2014). However it was not without issues that marred our experience with it in practice, although not enough to make me regret that we ran it (and ran it for as long as we did). Part of our issues are likely due to a design mistake in making our fileservers too big, although this design mistake was probably magnified when we were unable to use Intel 10G-T networking in OmniOS.
On the one hand, our OmniOS fileservers worked, almost always reliably. Like our Solaris fileservers before them, they ran quietly for years without needing much attention, delivering NFS fileservice to our Ubuntu servers; specifically, we ran them for about five years (2014 through 2019, although we started migrating away at the end of 2018). Over this time we had only minor hardware issues and not all that many disk failures, and we suffered no data loss (with ZFS checksums likely saving us several times, and certainly providing good reassurances). Our overall environment was easy to manage and was pretty much problem free in the face of things like failed disks. I'm pretty sure that our users saw a NFS environment that was solid, reliable, and performed well pretty much all of the time, which is the important thing. So OmniOS basically delivered the fileserver environment we wanted.
Is it really more than 10 years since we last had an official fundraising drive?
Looking at old TNF financial reports I noticed that we have been doing quite well financially over the last years, with a steady stream of small and medium donations, and most of the time only moderate expenditures. The last fundraising drive back in 2009 was a giant success, and we have lived off it until now.
OpenSSH 8.2 was released on 2020-02-14. It is available from the mirrors listed at https://www.openssh.com/.
OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.
Once again, we would like to thank the OpenSSH community for their continued support of the project, especially those who contributed code or patches, reported bugs, tested snapshots or donated to the project. More information on donations may be found at:
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
IRC is Not Dead | Self-Hosted 13
Feb 27, 2020
Self-Hosted IRC solutions are better than ever. Alan Pope joins us to make a case for the classic way to communicate online and tells us about a modern client for the web, mobile, and desktop you run on your server.
Plus, follow up on the new Self-Hosted wiki, and more.
You don't need a UI for docker containers — You really don't. Managing small deployments of containers from the command line is easier, faster and 'commit-able'. We're not talking about vast fleets of containers here but in this article I'll cover how I use docker-compose to manage over 30 docker containers in a simple, scalable and faster way than if you were using a UI.
Quasseldroid IRC Client — Quassel makes IRC fun again – open a client anywhere, connect to your core, and have all your favourite channels and networks right there.
The Lounge — A web-based IRC client for the modern world! Once configured and started, users can access it from their browser or mobile device.
Mastering Cyber Security Basics: James Smith | Jupiter Extras 58
Feb 25, 2020
Wes and Ell sit down with James Smith to have an honest conversation about what skills are needed to start a career and be successful in Tech and Information Security.
Special Guest: James Smith.
Links:
OverTheWire Wargames — The wargames offered by the OverTheWire community can help you to learn and practice security concepts in the form of fun-filled games.
Cyber Security Skills Roadmap — Explore this interactive training roadmap to find the right courses for your immediate cyber security skill development and for your long-term career goals.
Linux Action News 146
Feb 23, 2020
Microsoft Defender for Linux is in preview, Mozilla's VPN has a secret advantage, and why the community is calling out NPM Inc.
Plus a new report about open source security, and more.
Firefox releases an Android app for its VPN service — The Firefox Private Network VPN is powered by Mullvad VPN. Mullvad VPN claims that it won’t log and monitor user data, unlike many other VPN services.
The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science release census for open-source software security — Census II (run by Harvard) wanted to look at language-level packages. Their report discusses some of the challenges. One challenge of many is that the JavaScript environment strongly encourages tiny modules, with around 1/2 of all JavaScript packages having at most one function. As a result, when you start counting dependencies, there are far more dependencies in JavaScript (because each module does so little), and so JavaScript tends to dominate.
Hopeful for HAMR | TechSNAP 423
Feb 21, 2020
We explore the potential of heat-assisted magnetic recording and get excited about a possibly persistent L2ARC.
Plus Jim's journeys with Clear Linux, and why Ubuntu 18.04.4 is a maintenance release worth talking about.
Links:
Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS: here's what's new — It's not as shiny and exciting as entirely new versions, of course, but it does pack in some worthwhile security and bugfix upgrades, as well as support for more and newer hardware.
MobaXterm — Enhanced terminal for Windows with X11 server, tabbed SSH client, network tools and much more.
Linux distro review: Intel’s own Clear Linux OS — There's not much question that Clear Linux is your best bet if you want to turn in the best possible benchmark numbers. The question not addressed here is, what's it like to run Clear Linux as a daily driver? We were curious, so we took it for a spin.
Clear Linux* Project — Clear Linux OS is an open source, rolling release Linux distribution optimized for performance and security, from the Cloud to the Edge, designed for customization, and manageability.
Persistent L2ARC might be coming to ZFS on Linux — The primary ARC is kept in system RAM, but an L2ARC device can be created from one or more fast disks. In a ZFS pool with one or more L2ARC devices, when blocks are evicted from the primary ARC in RAM, they are moved down to L2ARC rather than being thrown away entirely. In the past, this feature has been of limited value, both because indexing a large L2ARC occupies system RAM which could have been better used for primary ARC and because L2ARC was not persistent across reboots.
Persistent L2ARC by gamanakis · Pull Request #9582 · zfsonlinux/zfs — This feature implements a light-weight persistent L2ARC metadata structure that allows L2ARC contents to be recovered after a reboot. This significantly eases the impact a reboot has on read performance on systems with large caches.
HAMR don’t hurt ’em: laser-assisted hard drives are coming in 2020 — Although the 2012 "just around the corner" HAMR drives seem to have been mostly vapor, the technology is a reality now. Seagate has been trialing 16TB HAMR drives with select customers for more than a year and claims that the trials have proved that its HAMR drives are "plug and play replacements" for traditional CMR drives, requiring no special care and having no particular poor use cases compared to the drives we're all used to.
Previously on TechSNAP 341: HAMR Time — We've got bad news for Wifi-lovers as the KRACK hack takes the world by storm; We have the details & some places to watch to make sure you stay patched. Plus, some distressing revelations about third party access to your personal information through some US mobile carriers. Then we cover the ongoing debate over HAMR, MAMR, and the future of hard drive technology & take a mini deep dive into the world of elliptic curve cryptography.
Brunch with Brent: Heather Ellsworth | Jupiter Extras 57
Feb 21, 2020
Brent sits down with Heather Ellsworth, Software Engineer on Canonical's Ubuntu Desktop Team, a GNOME Foundation Member, and former Purism Librem 5 Documentation Engineer. We discuss her deep history in experimental high energy physics at CERN, the similarities and synergies between the sciences and software engineering, her love of documentation, her newly established maintainership of LibreOffice, and how empathy factors into good bug reporting.
Distrowatch reviews FuryBSD, LLDB on i386 for NetBSD, wpa_supplicant as lower-class citizen, KDE on FreeBSD updates, Travel Grant for BSDCan open, ZFS dataset for testing iocage within a jail, and more.
FuryBSD is the most recent addition to the DistroWatch database and provides a live desktop operating system based on FreeBSD. FuryBSD is not entirely different in its goals from NomadBSD, which we discussed recently. I wanted to take this FreeBSD-based project for a test drive and see how it compares to NomadBSD and other desktop-oriented projects in the FreeBSD family.
FuryBSD supplies hybrid ISO/USB images which can be used to run a live desktop. There are two desktop editions currently, both for 64-bit (x86_64) machines: Xfce and KDE Plasma. The Xfce edition is 1.4GB in size and is the flavour I downloaded. The KDE Plasma edition is about 3.0GB in size.
My fresh install of FuryBSD booted to a graphical login screen. From there I could sign into my account, which brings up the Xfce desktop. The installed version of Xfce is the same as the live version, with a few minor changes. Most of the desktop icons have been removed with just the file manager launchers remaining. The Getting Started and System Information icons have been removed. Otherwise the experience is virtually identical to the live media.
FuryBSD uses a theme that is mostly grey and white with creamy yellow folder icons. The application menu launchers tend to have neutral icons, neither particularly bright and detailed or minimal.
Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages.
In February 2019, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues, fixing watchpoint and threading support.
The original NetBSD port of LLDB was focused on amd64 only. In January, I have extended it to support i386 executables. This includes both 32-bit builds of LLDB (running natively on i386 kernel or via compat32) and debugging 32-bit programs from 64-bit LLDB.
wpa_supplicant is definitely a lower-class citizen, sorry.
I increasingly wonder why this stuff matters; transit costs are so much lower than the period when eduroam was setup, and their reliance on 802.11x is super weird in a world where, for the most part + entire cities have open wifi in their downtown core + edu vs edu+transit split horizon problems have to be solved anyways + many universities have parallel open wifi + rate limiting / fare-share approaches for the open-net, on unmetered + flat-rate solves the problem + LTE hotspot off a phone isn't a rip off anymore + other open networks exist
essentially no one else feels compelled to do use 802.11x for a so called "semi-open access network", so I think they've lost the plot on friction vs benefit.
(we've held hackathons at EDU campus that are locked down like that, and in every case we've said no way, gotten a wire with open net, and built our own wifi. we will not subject our developers to that extra complexity).
Some bits and bobs from the KDE FreeBSD team in february 2020. We met at the FreeBSD devsummit before FOSDEM, along with other FreeBSD people. Plans were made, schemes were forged, and Groff the Goat was introduced to some new people.
The big ticket things:
Frameworks are at 5.66
Plasma is at 5.17.5 (the beta 5.18 hasn’t been tried)
KDE release service has landed 19.12.2 (same day it was released)
Developer-centric:
KDevelop is at 5.5.0
KUserfeedback landed its 1.0.0 release
CMake is 3.16.3
Applications:
Musescore is at 3.4.2
Elisa now part of the KDE release service updates
Fuure work:
KIO-Fuse probably needs extra real-world testing on FreeBSD. I don’t have that kind of mounts (just NFS in /etc/fstab) so I’m not the target audience.
KTextEditor is missing .editorconfig support. That can come in with the next frameworks update, when consumers update anyway. Chasing it in an intermediate release is a bit problematic because it does require some rebuilds of consumers.
The Travel Grant Application for BSDCan 2020 is now open. The Foundation can help you attend BSDCan through our travel grant program. Travel grants are available to FreeBSD developers and advocates who need assistance with travel expenses for attending conferences related to FreeBSD development. BSDCan 2020 applications are due April 9, 2020. Find out more and apply at: https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/what-we-do/grants/travel-grants/
Did you know the Foundation also provides grants for technical events not specifically focused on BSD? If you feel that your attendance at one of these events will benefit the FreeBSD Project and Community and you need assistance getting there, please fill out the general travel grant application. Your application must be received 7 weeks prior to the event. The general application can be found here: https://goo.gl/forms/QzsOMR8Jra0vqFYH2
Be warned, this failed. I’m stalled and I have not completed this.
I’m going to do jails within a jail. I already do that with poudriere in a jail but here I want to test an older version of iocage before upgrading my current jail hosts to a newer version.
In this post:
FreeBSD 12.1
py36-iocage-1.2_3
py36-iocage-1.2_4
This post includes my errors and mistakes. Perhaps you should proceed carefully and read it all first.
Podcasting Basics: Joe Ressington | Jupiter Extras 56
Feb 18, 2020
Joe talks about the basics of podcasting including recording spaces, types of microphones, post-production techniques, editing, and more.
Links:
Building a Home Recording Booth — We want to create a recording booth with a minimum expense and making as few permanent modifications to the home as possible.
Linux Action News 145
Feb 16, 2020
The week was packed with major project releases, we go through each of them and tell you what stands out.
Plus an update from Essential, and NetBSD's first big ask in ten years.
Tor Browser 9.0.5 Released — This release updates Firefox to 68.5.0esr, NoScript to 11.0.13, and on desktop, Tor to 0.4.2.6. We also added a new default bridge and backported a few improvements from the alpha series.
Brunch with Brent: Broadus Palmer | Jupiter Extras 55
Feb 14, 2020
Brent sits down with Broadus Palmer, Google Cloud Training Architect at Linux Academy and Cloud Career Coach at Level Up with Broadus. We explore his history as a musician and banker, sneaker bots, the value of mentorship, what gets people hired in tech, leveling up as a lifestyle, and more.
Open source at work, learning languages, naming cars, and innovations that haven't appropriately delivered.
Plus permission vs apologies, who has the most shoes, and more.
00:01:33 Does your car have a name? 00:06:56 How do I convince my employer to adopt open source software? 00:14:00 Is it better to ask permission or beg forgiveness? 00:18:40 How many pairs of shoes do you own? 00:25:00 If you were to learn a foreign language, which one would it be and why? 00:28:52 What innovation should have changed the world, but didn't?
Kubernetes on bhyve | BSD Now 337
Feb 13, 2020
Happinesses and stresses of full-time FOSS work, building a FreeBSD fileserver, Kubernetes on FreeBSD bhyve, NetBSD 9 RC1 available, OPNSense 20.1 is here, HardenedBSD’s idealistic future, and more.
In the past few days, several free software maintainers have come out to discuss the stresses of their work. Though the timing was suggestive, my article last week on the philosophy of project governance was, at best, only tangentially related to this topic - I had been working on that article for a while. I do have some thoughts that I’d like to share about what kind of stresses I’ve dealt with as a FOSS maintainer, and how I’ve managed (or often mismanaged) it.
February will mark one year that I’ve been working on self-directed free software projects full-time. I was planning on writing an optimistic retrospective article around this time, but given the current mood of the ecosystem I think it would be better to be realistic. In this stage of my career, I now feel at once happier, busier, more fulfilled, more engaged, more stressed, and more depressed than I have at any other point in my life.
The good parts are numerous. I’m able to work on my life’s passions, and my projects are in the best shape they’ve ever been thanks to the attention I’m able to pour into them. I’ve also been able to do more thoughtful, careful work; with the extra time I’ve been able to make my software more robust and reliable than it’s ever been. The variety of projects I can invest my time into has also increased substantially, with what was once relegated to minor curiosities now receiving a similar amount of attention as my larger projects were receiving in my spare time before. I can work from anywhere in the world, at any time, not worrying about when to take time off and when to put my head down and crank out a lot of code.
The frustrations are numerous, as well. I often feel like I’ve bit off more than I can chew. This has been the default state of affairs for me for a long time; I’m often neglecting half of my projects in order to obtain progress by leaps and bounds in just a few. Working on FOSS full-time has cast this model’s disadvantages into greater relief, as I focus on a greater breadth of projects and spend more time on them.
Recently at my job, I was faced with a task to develop a file server explicitly suited for the requirements of the company. Needless to say, any configuration of a kind depends on what the infrastructure needs. So, drawing from my personal experience and numerous materials on the web, I came up with the combination FreeBSD+SAMBA+AD as the most appropriate. It appears to be a perfect choice for this environment, and harmonic addition to the existing network configuration since FreeBSD + SAMBA + AD enables admins with the broad range of possibilities for access control. However, as nothing is perfect, this configuration isn’t the best choice if your priority is data protection because it won’t be able to reach the necessary levels of reliability and fault tolerance without outside improvements.
Now, since we’ve established that, let’s move on to the next point. This article’s describing the process of building a test environment while concentrating primarily on the details of the configuration. As the author, though, I must say I’m in no way suggesting that this is the only way! The following configuration will be presented in its initial stage, with the minimum requirements necessary to get the job done, and its purpose in one specific situation only. Here, look at this as a useful strategy to solve similar tasks. Well, let’s get started!
February 11th was the first meeting of this new user group, founded by John Young and myself
11 people attended, and a lot of good discussions were had
One of the attendees already owns a domain that fits well for the group, so we will be getting that setup over the next few weeks, as well as the twitter account, and other organization stuff.
Special thanks to the illumos users who drove in from Buffalo to attend, although they may have actually had a shorter drive than a few of the other attendees.
The next meeting is scheduled again for the 2nd Tuesday of the month, March 10th.
We are still discussing if we should meet at a restaurant again, or try to get a space at the local college or innovation hub where we can have a projector etc.
There are quite a few solutions for container orchestration, but the most popular (or the most famous and highly advertised, is probably, a Kubernetes) Since I plan to conduct many experiments with installing and configuring k8s, I need a laboratory in which I can quickly and easily deploy a cluster in any quantities for myself. In my work and everyday life I use two OS very tightly - Linux and FreeBSD OS. Kubernetes and docker are Linux-centric projects, and at first glance, you should not expect any useful participation and help from FreeBSD here. As the saying goes, an elephant can be made out of a fly, but it will no longer fly. However, two tempting things come to mind - this is very good integration and work in the FreeBSD ZFS file system, from which it would be nice to use the snapshot mechanism, COW and reliability. And the second is the bhyve hypervisor, because we still need the docker and k8s loader in the form of the Linux kernel. Thus, we need to connect a certain number of actions in various ways, most of which are related to starting and pre-configuring virtual machines. This is typical of both a Linux-based server and FreeBSD. What exactly will work under the hood to run virtual machines does not play a big role. And if so - let's take a FreeBSD here!
For over 5 years now, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing.
20.1, nicknamed "Keen Kingfisher", is a subtle improvement on sustainable firewall experience. This release adds VXLAN and additional loopback device support, IPsec public key authentication and elliptic curve TLS certificate creation amongst others. Third party software has been updated to their latest versions. The logging frontend was rewritten for MVC with seamless API support. On the far side the documentation increased in quality as well as quantity and now presents itself in a familiar menu layout.
Over the past month, we purchased and deployed the new 13-CURRENT/amd64 package building server. We published our first 13-CURRENT/amd64 production package build using that server. We then rebuilt the old package building server to act as the 12-STABLE/amd64 package building server. This post signifies a very important milestone: we have now fully recovered from last year's death of our infrastructure. Our 12-STABLE/amd64 repo, previously out-of-date by many months, is now fully up-to-date!
HardenedBSD is in a very unique position to provide innovative solutions to at-risk and underprivileged populations. As such, we are making human rights endeavors a defining area of focus. Our infrastructure will integrate various privacy and anonymity enhancing technologies and techniques to protect lives. Our operating system's security posture will increase, especially with our focus on exploit mitigations.
Navigating the intersection between human rights and information security directly impacts lives. HardenedBSD's 2020 mission and focus is to deliver an entire hardened ecosystem that is unfriendly towards those who would oppress or censor their people. This includes a subtle shift in priorities to match this new mission and focus. While we implement exploit mitigations and further harden the ecosystem, we will seek out opportunities to contribute a tangible and unique impact on human rights issues. Providing Tor Onion Services for our core infrastructure is the first step in likely many to come towards securely helping those in need.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Which Wiki Wins | Self-Hosted 12
Feb 13, 2020
We try out the top self-hosted Wikis and tell you which we like best, and Chris has a major project off-grid update.
Plus Alex tells us about his robot vacuum that runs Ubuntu.
Links:
Going Solar — Work, Life, and RV Podcast — It's a huge investment! So we lay out our rationale for going solar after four years in our RV. Why we think who and how it gets installed is so critical, exactly HOW MUCH we spent, and how this new set up will keep us working from the road.
Developing on Remote Machines using SSH and Visual Studio Code — The Visual Studio Code Remote - SSH extension allows you to open a remote folder on any remote machine, virtual machine, or container with a running SSH server and take full advantage of VS Code's feature set. Once connected to a server, you can interact with files and folders anywhere on the remote filesystem.
Don't blindly trust Docker for the selfhosted stuff — It is my strong belief that you shouldn't go crazy with all-things-docker when deploying selfhosted services at home. Online forums, especially r/selfhosted, seem to foster an opinion that providing a Dockerfile or better yet a docker-compose.yml or even prebuilt public images on Docker Hub is an acceptable way to distribute software targeting the selfhosting crowd.
Wiki.js — The most powerful and extensible open source Wiki software.
BookStack — BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information.
Material for MkDocs — Material is a theme for MkDocs, an excellent static site generator geared towards project documentation. It is built using Google's Material Design guidelines.
Mycroft's Position on Patent Trolls — We are going to litigate every single patent suit to the fullest extent possible including appealing any adverse decisions all the way to the Supreme Court.
GNU-FSF cooperation update — Our mutual aim is to work together as peers, while minimizing change in the practical aspects of this cooperation, so we can advance in our common free software mission.
The draft GNU Social Contract — I have been working with several other GNU Maintainers and volunteers to draft a GNU Social Contract which explains the key commitments we want from the GNU Project.
Linux couldn’t duplicate OpenBSD, FreeBSD Q4 status report, OPNsense 19.7.9 released, archives retain and pass on knowledge, HardenedBSD Tor Onion Service v3 Nodes, and more.
OpenBSD has a well deserved reputation for putting security and a clean system (for code, documentation, and so on) first, and everything else second. OpenBSD is of course based on BSD (it's right there in the name) and descends from FreeBSD NetBSD (you can read the history here). But one of the questions you could ask about it is whether it had to be that way, and in particular if you could build something like OpenBSD on top of Linux. I believe that the answer is no.
Linux and the *BSDs have a significantly different model of what they are. BSDs have a 'base system' that provides an integrated and fully operational core Unix, covering the kernel, C library and compiler, and the normal Unix user level programs, all maintained and distributed by the particular BSD. Linux is not a single unit this way, and instead all of the component parts are maintained separately and assembled in various ways by various Linux distributions. Both approaches have their advantages, but one big one for the BSD approach is that it enables global changes.
Making global changes is an important part of what makes OpenBSD's approach to improving security, code maintenance, and so on work. Because it directly maintains everything as a unit, OpenBSD is in a position to introduce new C library or kernel APIs (or change them) and then immediately update all sorts of things in user level programs to use the new API. This takes a certain amount of work, of course, but it's possible to do it at all. And because OpenBSD can do this sort of ambitious global change, it does.
This goes further than just the ability to make global changes, because in theory you can patch in global changes on top of a bunch of separate upstream projects. Because OpenBSD is in control of its entire base system, it's not forced to try to reconcile different development priorities or integrate clashing changes. OpenBSD can decide (and has) that only certain sorts of changes will be accepted into its system at all, no matter what people want. If there are features or entire programs that don't fit into what OpenBSD will accept, they just lose out.
Here is the last quarterly status report for 2019. As you might remember from last report, we changed our timeline: now we collect reports the last month of each quarter and we edit and publish the full document the next month. Thus, we cover here the period October 2019 - December 2019.
If you thought that the FreeBSD community was less active in the Christmas' quarter you will be glad to be proven wrong: a quick glance at the summary will be sufficient to see that much work has been done in the last months.
As 20.1 nears we will be making adjustments to the scope of the release with an announcement following shortly.
For now, this update brings you a GeoIP database configuration page for aliases which is now required due to upstream database policy changes and a number of prominent third-party software updates we are happy to see included.
I've been working today on deploying Tor Onion Service v3 nodes across our build infrastructure. I'm happy to announce that the public portion of this is now completed. Below you will find various onion service hostnames and their match to our infrastructure.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
What We Love About Linux | Choose Linux 28
Feb 06, 2020
Valentine's Day is nearly here so it's time to talk about why we love Linux and open source. Nothing is perfect though, so we also touch on a few areas that we feel could be improved.
The Mint Mindset | LINUX Unplugged 339
Feb 04, 2020
We get into the Linux Mint mindset after years away and share our take on Cinnamon's many improvements.
Plus news that'll have knock-on effects for the rest of the year, and more.
Wes and Ell sit down with Duncan McAlynn to discuss what mistakes we might all be making that could be putting our privacy and security at risk.
Special Guest: Duncan McAlynn.
Links:
Operandis — Cybersecurity Technical Content Development
Cyber Speaks LIVE — Cyber Speaks LIVE is a weekly InfoSec podcast series hosted by Duncan McAlynn (@infosecwar) and his special guest co-hosts, where YOU get to participate in the discussions with full video and audio.
Linux 5.5 Released — So this last week was pretty quiet, and while we had a late network update with some (mainly iwl wireless) network driver and netfilter
module loading fixes, David didn't think that warranted another -rc. And outside of that, it's really been very quiet indeed - there's a
panfrost driver update too, but again it didn't really seem to make sense to delay the final release by another week.
Thunderbird’s New Home — As of today, the Thunderbird project will be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, MZLA Technologies Corporation.
Ginni Rometty is out as IBM CEO — Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat — which IBM acquired last year in a $34 billion megadeal — will become IBM's president on the same day.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty to step down — Under her tenure, IBM experienced 22 consecutive quarters of sales declines that ended in 2018. In the company’s latest quarter, sales dropped 3.9% year-over-year to $18 billion.
Brunch with Brent: Peter Adams Part 2 | Jupiter Extras 51
Jan 31, 2020
Brent sits down with Peter Adams, professional photographer and former founder and CTO of several internet-technology startups in New York and Silicon Valley. In this Part 2 we explore open source and photography through workflows, lighting controls, and camera OSs, artificial intelligence and the future of photography, and more.
Whether we'd use Windows if it was FOSS, pointless tech, bathing habits, useless jobs, annoying popey with dream stories, and more.
00:00:45 What desirable tech does everyone else want, but you don't see the point of? 00:06:17 What’s the most useless job that you’d still be willing to do? 00:10:34 If Windows was released as open source, would you start using it? 00:18:34 Bath or shower? 00:24:58 Is there any software which is feature complete that you use on a regular basis? 00:31:54 When describing a dream, how many sentences are too many?
FreeBSD Down Under | BSD Now 335
Jan 30, 2020
Hyperbola Developer interview, why you should migrate from Linux to BSD, FreeBSD is an amazing OS, improving the ptrace(2) API in LLVM 10, First FreeBSD conference in Australia, and a guide to containers on FreeNAS.
Update 2020-01-21: Since I wrote this article it got posted on Hacker News, Reddit and Lobster, and a few people have emailed me with comments. I have updated the article with comments where I have found it needed. As an important side note I would like to point out that I am not a FreeBSD developer, there may be things going on in the FreeBSD world that I know absolutely nothing about. I am also not glued to the FreeBSD developer mailing lists. I am not a FreeBSD "fanboy". I have been using GNU/Linux a ton more for the past two decades than FreeBSD, mainly due to hardware incompatibility (lacking or buggy drivers), and I love both Debian GNU/Linux and Arch Linux just as much as FreeBSD. However, I am concerned about the development of GNU/Linux as of late. Also this article is not about me trying to make anyone switch from something else to FreeBSD. It's about why I like FreeBSD and that I recommend you try it out if you're into messing with operating systems.
I think the year was late 1999 or mid 2000 when I one day was browsing computer books at my favorite bookshop and I discovered the book The Complete FreeBSD third edition from 1999 by Greg Lehey. With the book came 4 CD Roms with FreeBSD 3.3.
I had already familiarized myself with GNU/Linux in 1998, and I was in the process of migrating every server and desktop operating system away from Microsoft Windows, both at home and at my company, to GNU/Linux, initially Red Hat Linux and then later Debian GNU/Linux, which eventually became my favorite GNU/Linux distribution for many years.
When I first saw The Complete FreeBSD book by Greg Lehey I remember noticing the text on the front page that said, "The Free Version of Berkeley UNIX" and "Rock Solid Stability", and I was immediately intrigued! What was that all about? A free UNIX operating system! And rock solid stability? That sounded amazing.
In late December 2019, Hyperbola announced that they would be making major changes to their project. They have decided to drop the Linux kernel in favor of forking the OpenBSD kernel. This announcement only came months after Project Trident announced that they were going in the opposite direction (from BSD to Linux).
Hyperbola also plans to replace all software that is not GPL v3 compliant with new versions that are.
To get more insight into the future of their new project, I interviewed Andre, co-founder of Hyperbola.
This month I have improved the NetBSD ptrace(2) API, removing one legacy interface with a few flaws and replacing it with two new calls with new features, and removing technical debt.
As LLVM 10.0 is branching now soon (Jan 15th 2020), I worked on proper support of the LLVM features for NetBSD 9.0 (today RC1) and NetBSD HEAD (future 10.0).
FreeBSD has existed as an operating system, project, and foundation for more than twenty years, and its earlier incantations have exited for far longer. The old guard have been developing code, porting software, and writing documentation for longer than I’ve existed. I’ve been using it for more than a decade for personal projects, and professionally for half that time.
While there are many prominent Australian FreeBSD contributors, sysadmins, and users, we’ve always had to venture overseas for conferences. We’re always told Australians are among the most ardent travellers, but I always wondered if we could do a domestic event as well.
And on Tuesday, we did! Deb Goodkin and the FreeBSD Foundation graciously organised and chaired a dedicated FreeBSD miniconf at the long-running linux.conf.au event held each year in a different city in Australia and New Zealand.
This is a simple write-up to setup Docker on FreeNAS 11 or FreeBSD 11.
But muh jails?
You know that jails are dope and you know that jails are dope, yet no one else knows it. So here we are stuck with docker. Two years ago I would be the last person to recommend using docker, but a whole lot of things has changes past years…
So jails are dead then?
No, jails are still dope, but jails lack tools to manage them. Yes, there are a few tools, but they meant for hard-core FreeBSD users who used to suffering. Docker allows you to run applications without deep knowledge of application you’re running. It will also allow you to run applications that are not ported to FreeBSD.
As an operating system GNU/Linux has become a real mess because of the fragmented nature of the project, the bloatware in the kernel, and because of the jerking around by commercial interests.
All of our questions this week were pretty technical in nature so I'm going to save those for the next episode so Allan can weigh in on them, since if we cover them now we're basically going to be deferring to Allan anyway.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Host Your Blog the Right Way | Self-Hosted 11
Jan 30, 2020
We each like different blogging platforms, and share why. Then our tips for keeping your server secure.
Plus a great way to score cheap drives, a Project Off-Grid update, making your household light switches smart, and Alex's review of the HDHomeRun.
What SMART Stats Are Telling Us About Hard Drive Reliability — As of September 30, 2019, Backblaze had 115,151 spinning hard drives spread across four data centers on two continents. Of that number, there were 2,098 boot drives and 113,053 data drives.
Shelly 2.5 - Shelly Cloud — Shelly 2.5 comes with a programming/debug header which can be used to flash alternative firmware on the device. It has an ESP8266 inside, with a 2MB flash chip. A USB-to-UART adapter is needed as well as a reliable 3.3V with at least 350 mA drive capability.
Success Through Vulnerability | LINUX Unplugged 338
Jan 28, 2020
How did we get from shareware to free software? We jump in the Linux powered time machine and revisit software past.
Plus a new Plasma focused laptop, and two powerful command-line picks.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.
Brunch with Brent: Peter Adams Part 1 | Jupiter Extras 50
Jan 28, 2020
Brent sits down with Peter Adams, professional photographer and former founder and CTO of several internet-technology startups in New York and Silicon Valley. We explore his photography project "Faces of Open Source", his history in the dot-com bubble era, how he came to love open source, and more.
Brunch with Brent: Peter Adams Part 2 comes out this Friday.
The real reason Rocket League is dropping support for Linux, Wine has a massive release, and the potential for Canonical's new Android in the cloud service.
Plus, our take on the FSF's Upcycle Windows 7 campaign, and the clever Chrome OS strategy upgrade for education in 2020.
Distrowatch Running FreeBSD | BSD Now 334
Jan 23, 2020
Upgrading FreeBSD from 11.3 to 12.1, Distrowatch switching to FreeBSD, Torvalds says don’t run ZFS, iked(8) removed automatic IPv6 blocking, working towards LLDB on i386, and memory-hard Argon2 hashing scheme in NetBSD.
Now here’s something more like what I was originally expecting the content on this blog to look like. I’m in the process of moving all of our FreeBSD servers (about 30 in total) from 11.3 to 12.1. We have our own local build of the OS, and until “packaged base” gets to a state where it’s reliably usable, we’re stuck doing upgrades the old-fashioned way. I created a set of notes for myself while cranking through these upgrades and I wanted to share them since they are not really work-specific and this process isn’t very well documented for people who haven’t been doing this sort of upgrade process for 25 years.
Our source and object trees are read-only exported from the build server over NFS, which causes things to be slow. /etc/make.conf and /etc/src.conf are symbolic links on all of our servers to the master copies in /usr/src so that make installworld can find the configuration parameters the system was built with.
This may be a little off-topic for this board (forgive me if it is, please). However, I wanted to say that I'm one of the people who works on DistroWatch (distrowatch.com) and this past week we had to deal with a server facing hardware failure. We had a discussion about whether to continue running Debian or switch to something else.
The primary "something else" option turned out to be FreeBSD and it is what we eventually went with. It took a while to convert everything over from working with Debian GNU/Linux to FreeBSD 12 (some script incompatibilities, different paths, some changes to web server configuration, networking IPv6 troubles). But in the end we ended up with a good, FreeBSD-based experience.
Since the transition was successful, though certainly not seamless, I thought people might want to do a Q&A on the migration process. Especially for those thinking of making the same switch.
iked(8) no longer automatically blocks unencrypted outbound IPv6 packets. This feature was intended to avoid accidental leakage, but in practice was found to mostly be a cause of misconfiguration.
If you previously used iked(8)'s -6 flag to disable this feature, it is no longer needed and should be removed from /etc/rc.conf.local if used.
“Don’t use ZFS. It’s that simple. It was always more of a buzzword than anything else, I feel, and the licensing issues just make it a non-starter for me.”
This is what Linus Torvalds said in a mailing list to once again express his disliking for ZFS filesystem specially over its licensing.
To avoid unnecessary confusion, this is more intended for Linux distributions, kernel developers and maintainers rather than individual Linux users.
We successfully incorporated the Argon2 reference implementation into NetBSD/amd64 for our 2019 Google Summer of Coding project. We introduced our project here and provided some hints on how to select parameters here. For our final report, we will provide an overview of what changes were made to complete the project.
The Argon2 reference implementation, available here, is available under both the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 and the Apache Public License 2.0. To import the reference implementation into src/external, we chose to use the Apache 2.0 license for this project.
Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages.
In February 2019, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues, fixing watchpoint and threading support.
Throughout December I've continued working on our build bot maintenance, in particular enabling compiler-rt tests. I've revived and finished my old patch for extended register state (XState) in core dumps. I've started working on bringing proper i386 support to LLDB.
Brunch with Brent: Jim Salter | Jupiter Extras 48
Jan 21, 2020
Brent sits down with Jim Salter, co-host of Jupiter Broadcasting's TechSNAP and technology reporter at Ars Technica. We explore his relationship with computers via the US Navy, when code has it's place in either proprietary or open source licensing, the value in being a social gadfly, and Jim's motivations behind his writing and who he is hoping to reach and inspire.
Nextcloud Hub Announced — New generation of leading content collaboration platform integrates office document editing and collaboration apps, introduces workflows, rich work spaces, file locking and more
Ell and Wes are joined by Infrastructure Engineer Seth McCombs for a chat about how he got started in tech, the hard transition from legacy data centers to the cloud, and why being honest about both success and failure can lead to a better open source community.
Context switching, improving Linux conferences, a positive approach to life, what makes us cringe, and more.
#ErrorAsk: What's the dumbest idea for an app that you can come up with?
00:03:24 Have you ever met your own doppelganger? 00:06:55 Can you just jump right in to each type of task, or do you have a ritual before? 00:13:12 What’s missing from Linux and open source conferences? 00:23:53 Should you “yes, and” life? 00:33:37 What makes you cringe?
Your Impact on FreeBSD in 2019, Wireguard on OpenBSD Router, Amazon now has FreeBSD/ARM 12, pkgsrc-2019Q4, The Joys of UNIX Keyboards, OpenBSD on Digital Ocean, and more.
It’s hard to believe that 2019 is nearly over. It has been an amazing year for supporting the FreeBSD Project and community! Why do I say that? Because as I reflect over the past 12 months, I realize how many events we’ve attended all over the world, and how many lives we’ve touched in so many ways. From advocating for FreeBSD to implementing FreeBSD features, my team has been there to help make FreeBSD the best open source project and operating system out there.
In 2019, we focused on supporting a few key areas where the Project needed the most help. The first area was software development. Whether it was contracting FreeBSD developers to work on projects like wifi support, to providing internal staff to quickly implement hardware workarounds, we’ve stepped in to help keep FreeBSD innovative, secure, and reliable. Software development includes supporting the tools and infrastructure that make the development process go smoothly, and we’re on it with team members heading up the Continuous Integration efforts, and actively involved in the clusteradmin and security teams.
Our advocacy efforts focused on recruiting new users and contributors to the Project. We attended and participated in 38 conferences and events in 21 countries. From giving FreeBSD presentations and workshops to staffing tables, we were able to have 1:1 conversations with thousands of attendees.
Our travels also provided opportunities to talk directly with FreeBSD commercial and individual users, contributors, and future FreeBSD user/contributors. We’ve seen an increase in use and interest in FreeBSD from all of these organizations and individuals. These meetings give us a chance to learn more about what organizations need and what they and other individuals are working on. The information helps inform the work we should fund.
wireguard (wg) is a modern vpn protocol, using the latest class of encryption algorithms while at the same time promising speed and a small code base.
modern crypto and lean code are also tenants of openbsd, thus it was a no brainer to migrate my router from openvpn over to wireguard.
my setup : a collection of devices, both wired and wireless, that are nat’d through my router (openbsd 6.6) out via my vpn provider azire* and out to the internet using wg-quick to start wg.
running : doubtless this could be improved on, but currently i start wg manually when my router boots. this, and the nat'ing on the vpn interface mean its impossible for clients to connect to the internet without the vpn being up. as my router is on a ups and only reboots when a kernel patch requires it, it’s a compromise i can live with. run wg-quick (please replace vpn with whatever you named your wg .conf file.) and reload pf rules.
AWS, the cloud division of Amazon, announced in December the next generation of its ARM processors, the Graviton2. This is a custom chip design with a 7nm architecture. It is based on 64-bit ARM Neoverse cores.
Compared to first-generation Graviton processors (A1), today’s new chips should deliver up to 7x the performance of A1 instances in some cases. Floating point performance is now twice as fast. There are additional memory channels and cache speed memory access should be much faster.
The company is working on three types of Graviton2 EC2 instances that should be available soon. Instances with a “g” suffix are powered by Graviton2 chips. If they have a “d” suffix, it also means that they have NVMe local storage.
General-purpose instances (M6g and M6gd)
Compute-optimized instances (C6g and C6gd)
Memory-optimized instances (R6g and R6gd)
You can choose instances with up to 64 vCPUs, 512 GiB of memory and 25 Gbps networking.
And you can see that ARM-powered servers are not just a fad. AWS already promises a 40% better price/performance ratio with ARM-based instances when you compare them with x86-based instances.
AWS has been working with operating system vendors and independent software vendors to help them release software that runs on ARM. ARM-based EC2 instances support Amazon Linux 2, Ubuntu, Red Hat, SUSE, Fedora, Debian and FreeBSD. It also works with multiple container services (Docker, Amazon ECS, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service).
The pkgsrc developers are proud to announce the 65th quarterly release of pkgsrc, the cross-platform packaging system. pkgsrc is available with more than 20,000 packages, running on 23 separate platforms; more information on pkgsrc itself is available at https://www.pkgsrc.org/
In total, 190 packages were added, 96 packages were removed, and 1,868 package updates (to 1388 unique packages) were processed since the pkgsrc-2019Q3 release. As usual, a large number of updates and additions were processed for packages for go (14), guile (11), perl (170), php (10), python (426), and ruby (110). This continues pkgsrc's tradition of adding useful packages, updating many packages to more current versions, and pruning unmaintained packages that are believed to have essentially no users.
A decade or so ago while helping a friends father clean out an old building, we came across an ancient Sun Microsystems server. We found it curious. Everything about it was different from what we were used to. The command line was black on white, the connectors strange and foreign, and the keyboard layout was bizarre.
We never did much with it; turning it on made all the lights in his home dim, and our joint knowledge of UNIX was nonexistent. It sat in his bedroom for years supporting his television at the foot of his bed.
I never forgot that keyboard though. The thought that there was this alternative layout out there seemed intriguing to me.
Last night I had a need to put together a new OpenBSD machine. Since I already use DigitalOcean for one of my public DNS servers I wanted to use them for this need but sadly like all too many of the cloud providers they don't support OpenBSD. Now they do support FreeBSD and I found a couple writeups that show how to use FreeBSD as a shim to install OpenBSD.
They are both sort of old at this point and with OpenBSD 6.6 out I ran into a bit of a snag. The default these days is to use a GPT partition table to enable EFI booting. This is generally pretty sane but it looks to me like the FreeBSD droplet doesn't support this. After the installer rebooted the VM failed to boot, being unable to find the bootloader.
Thankfully DigitalOcean has a recovery ISO that you can boot by simply switching to it and powering off and then on your Droplet.
Alex Kretzschmar on Twitter — "Another item off the Todo list. Self-hosted cameras using @AmcrestSecurity 4k IP8M-T2499EW
Self-hosted Speedtest — Self-hosted Speedtest for HTML5 and more. Easy setup, examples, configurable, mobile friendly. Supports PHP, Node, Multiple servers, and more
Statping: Status Page for monitoring your websites — An easy to use Status Page for your websites and applications. Statping will automatically fetch the application and render a beautiful status page with tons of features for you to build an even better status page. This Status Page generator allows you to use MySQL, Postgres, or SQLite on multiple operating systems.
Linus' Filesystem Fluster | LINUX Unplugged 336
Jan 14, 2020
Linus Torvalds says don't use ZFS, but we think he got a few of the facts wrong. Jim Salter joins us to help us explain what Linus got right, and what he got wrong.
Plus some really handy Linux picks, some community news, and a live broadcast from Seattle's Snowpocalypse!
Brunch with Brent: Chase Nunes | Jupiter Extras 46
Jan 14, 2020
Brent sits down with Chase Nunes, co-host of Unfilter, Jupiter Broadcasting's former weekly media watchdog. We discuss his beginnings in podcasting and how Unfilter came to be, his contributions to LinuxFest Northwest, his love for Linux in the media broadcasting industry, and his recent 15-month life-changing personal transformation journey.
Chase is a Broadcast Engineer for KOMO-TV 4 ABC in Seattle, and founder of gaming & pinball eSports platform GeekGamer.TV.
Are we overloaded with open source licenses? We consider a simpler future. Results from the Debian init vote are in, and why Amazon's new open source project might be worth checking out.
Plus, our reaction to Google's search ballot scheme launch.
AutoGluon Documentation 0.0.1 documentation — Only Linux installation is supported for now (Mac OSX and Windows versions will be available soon). AutoGluon requires Python version 3.6 or 3.7.
Announcing HyperbolaBSD, IPFW In-Kernel NAT setup on FreeBSD, Wayland and WebRTC enabled for NetBSD 9/Linux, LLDB Threading support ready for mainline, OpenSSH U2F/FIDO support in base, Dragonfly drm/i915: Update, and more.
Due to the Linux kernel rapidly proceeding down an unstable path, we are planning on implementing a completely new OS derived from several BSD implementations.
This was not an easy decision to make, but we wish to use our time and resources to create a viable alternative to the current operating system trends which are actively seeking to undermine user choice and freedom.
This will not be a "distro", but a hard fork of the OpenBSD kernel and userspace including new code written under GPLv3 and LGPLv3 to replace GPL-incompatible parts and non-free ones.
Reasons for this include:
Linux kernel forcing adaption of DRM, including HDCP.
Linux kernel proposed usage of Rust (which contains freedom flaws and a centralized code repository that is more prone to cyber attack and generally requires internet access to use.)
Linux kernel being written without security and in mind. (KSPP is basically a dead project and Grsec is no longer free software)
Many GNU userspace and core utils are all forcing adaption of features without build time options to disable them. E.g. (PulseAudio / SystemD / Rust / Java as forced dependencies)
As such, we will continue to support the Milky Way branch until 2022 when our legacy Linux-libre kernel reaches End of Life.
Future versions of Hyperbola will be using HyperbolaBSD which will have the new kernel, userspace and not be ABI compatible with previous versions.
HyperbolaBSD is intended to be modular and minimalist so other projects will be able to re-use the code under free license.
After graduating college, I am moving from Brooklyn, NY to Redmond, WA (guess where I got a job). I always wanted to re-do my OPNsense firewall (currently a HP T730) with stock FreeBSD and IPFW’s in-kernel NAT.
Why IPFW? Benchmarks have shown IPFW to be faster which is especially good for my Tor relay, and because I can! However, one downside of IPFW is less documentation vs PF, even less without natd (which we’re not using), and this took me time to figure this out.
But since my T730 is already packed, I am testing this on a old PC with two NICs, and my laptop [1] as a client with an USB-to-Ethernet adapter.
Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages.
In February, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues and fixing watchpoint support. Then, I've started working on improving thread support which is taking longer than expected. You can read more about that in my September 2019 report.
So far the number of issues uncovered while enabling proper threading support has stopped me from merging the work-in-progress patches. However, I've finally reached the point where I believe that the current work can be merged and the remaining problems can be resolved afterwards. More on that and other LLVM-related events happening during the last month in this report.
Hardware backed keys can be generated using "ssh-keygen -t ecdsa-sk" (or "ed25519-sk" if your token supports it). Many tokens require to be touched/tapped to confirm this step.
You'll get a public/private keypair back as usual, except in this case, the private key file does not contain a highly-sensitive private key but instead holds a "key handle" that is used by the security key to derive the real private key at signing time.
So, stealing a copy of the private key file without also stealing your security key (or access to it) should not give the attacker anything.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Explaining Linux and Open Source as Concepts | Choose Linux 26
Jan 09, 2020
Trying to explain what Linux and open source are can be tricky. We discuss our various approaches, and how they differ depending on the experience of who we are explaining them to.
Practically Perfect Predictions | LINUX Unplugged 335
Jan 07, 2020
Find out what's happening in 2020 before it happens. Our crew returns from the future with predictions so perfect you could bet some Dogecoin on it.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.
Brunch with Brent: Joe Ressington | Jupiter Extras 44
Jan 07, 2020
Brent sits down with Joe Ressington, Jupiter Broadcasting Podcast Content Director, Late Night Linux host, and musician, for an exploration of his journey in podcasting, a behind-the-scenes of User Error and Linux Action News, how music led to Linux, the origins of Brunch with Brent's theme music, and more.
It's our annual predictions episode. We review how we did in 2019, and then set out to predict what we think will happen in 2020.
OK Then | User Error 82
Jan 03, 2020
Whether the Web is yesterday’s news, a possible new approach to law and order, resolving conflicts, and some surprisingly useful life hacks.
00:00:37 Is the Web irrelevant now 00:09:12 Should we apply a git-style approach to improve laws? 00:16:52 Is it wrong to take the blame when it's not your fault? 00:29:26 What's your best life hack?
Why Computers Suck | BSD Now 331
Jan 02, 2020
How learning OpenBSD makes computers suck a little less, How Unix works, FreeBSD 12.1 Runs Well on Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, BSDCan CFP, HardenedBSD Infrastructure Goals, and more.
How much better could things actually be if we abandoned the enterprise development model?
Next I will compare this enterprise development approach with non-enterprise development - projects such as OpenBSD, which do not hesitate to introduce ABI breaking changes to improve the codebase.
One of the most commonly referred to pillars of the project's philosophy has long been its emphasis on clean functional code. Any code which makes it into OpenBSD is subject to ongoing aggressive audits for deprecated, or otherwise unmaintained code in order to reduce cruft and attack surface. Additionally the project creator, Theo de Raadt, and his team of core developers engage in ongoing development for proactive mitigations for various attack classes many of which are directly adopted by various multi-platform userland applications as well as the operating systems themselves (Windows, Linux, and the other BSDs). Frequently it is the case that introducing new features (not just deprecating old ones) introduces new incompatibilities against previously functional binaries compiled for OpenBSD.
To prevent the sort of kernel memory bloat that has plagued so many other operating systems for years, the project enforces a hard ceiling on the number of lines of code that can ever be in ring 0 at a given time. Current estimates guess the number of bugs per line of code in the Linux kernel are around 1 bug per every 10,000 lines of code. Think of this in the context of the scope creep seen in the Linux kernel (which if I recall correctly is currently at around 100,000,000 lines of code), as well as the Windows NT kernel (500,000,000 lines of code) and you quickly begin to understand how adding more and more functionality into the most privileged components of the operating system without first removing old components begins to add up in terms of the drastic difference seen between these systems in the number of zero day exploits caught in the wild respectively.
Unix is beautiful. Allow me to paint some happy little trees for you. I’m not going to explain a bunch of commands – that’s boring, and there’s a million tutorials on the web doing that already. I’m going to leave you with the ability to reason about the system.
Every fancy thing you want done is one google search away.
But understanding why the solution does what you want is not the same.
That’s what gives you real power, the power to not be afraid.
For those of you interested in AMD's new Ryzen Threadripper 3960X/3970X processors with TRX40 motherboards for running FreeBSD, the experience in our initial testing has been surprisingly pleasant. In fact, it works out-of-the-box which one could argue is better than the current Linux support that needs the MCE workaround for booting. Here are some benchmarks of FreeBSD 12.1 on the Threadripper 3970X compared to Linux and Windows for this new HEDT platform.
It was refreshing to see FreeBSD 12.1 booting and running just fine with the Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32-core/64-thread processor from the ASUS ROG ZENITH II EXTREME motherboard and all core functionality working including the PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD storage, onboard networking, etc. The system was running with 4 x 16GB DDR4-3600 memory, 1TB Corsair Force MP600 NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 580 graphics. It was refreshing to see FreeBSD 12.1 running well with this high-end AMD Threadripper system considering Linux even needed a boot workaround.
While the FreeBSD 12.1 experience was trouble-free with the ASUS TRX40 motherboard (ROG Zenith II Extreme) and AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, DragonFlyBSD unfortunately was not. Both DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 stable and the DragonFlyBSD daily development snapshot from last week were yielding a panic on boot. So with that, DragonFlyBSD wasn't tested for this Threadripper 3970X comparison but just FreeBSD 12.1.
FreeBSD 12.1 on the Threadripper 3970X was benchmarked both with its default LLVM Clang 8.0.1 compiler and again with GCC 9.2 from ports for ruling out compiler differences. The FreeBSD 12.1 performance was compared to last week's Windows 10 vs. Linux benchmarks with the same system.
BSDCan 2020 will be held 5-6 (Fri-Sat) June, 2020 in Ottawa, at the University of Ottawa. It will be preceded by two days of tutorials on 3-4 June (Wed-Thu).
NOTE the change of month in 2020 back to June Also: do not miss out on the Goat BOF on Tuesday 2 June.
We are now accepting proposals for talks. The talks should be designed with a very strong technical content bias. Proposals of a business development or marketing nature are not appropriate for this venue.
If you are doing something interesting with a BSD operating system, please submit a proposal. Whether you are developing a very complex system using BSD as the foundation, or helping others and have a story to tell about how BSD played a role, we want to hear about your experience. People using BSD as a platform for research are also encouraged to submit a proposal. Possible topics include:
How we manage a giant installation with respect to handling spam.
and/or sysadmin.
and/or networking.
Cool new stuff in BSD
Tell us about your project which runs on BSD
other topics (see next paragraph)
From the BSDCan website, the Archives section will allow you to review the wide variety of past BSDCan presentations as further examples.
Both users and developers are encouraged to share their experiences.
2019 has been an extremely productive year with regards to HardenedBSD's infrastructure. Several opportunities aligned themselves in such a way as to open a door for a near-complete rebuild with a vast expansion.
The last few months especially have seen a major expansion of our infrastructure. We obtained a number of to-be-retired Dell R410 servers. The crash of our nightly build server provided the opportunity to deploy these R410 servers, doubling our build capacity.
My available time to spend on HardenedBSD has decreased compared to this time last year. As part of rebuilding our infrastructure, I wanted to enable the community to be able to contribute. I'm structuring the work such that help is just a pull request away. Those in the HardenedBSD community who want to contribute to the infrastructure work can simply open a pull request. I'll review the code, and deploy it after a successful review. Users/contributors don't need access to our servers in order to improve them.
My primary goal for the rest of 2019 and into 2020 is to become fully self-hosted, with the sole exception of email. I want to transition the source-of-truth git repos to our own infrastructure. We will still provide a read-only mirror on GitHub.
As I develop this infrastructure, I'm doing so with human rights in mind. HardenedBSD is in a very unique position. In 2020, I plan to provide production Tor Onion Services for the various bits of our infrastructure. HardenedBSD will provide access to its various internal services to its developers and contributors. The entire development lifecycle, going from dev to prod, will be able to happen over Tor.
Transparency will be key moving forward. Logs for the auto-sync script are now published directly to GitHub. Build logs will be, soon, too. Logs of all automated processes, and the code for those processes, will be tracked publicly via git. This will be especially crucial for development over Tor.
Integrating Tor into our infrastructure so deeply increases risk and maintenance burden. However, I believe that through added transparency, we will be able to mitigate risk. Periodic audits will need to be performed and published.
I hope to migrate HardenedBSD's site away from Drupal to a static site generator. We don't really need the dynamic capabilities Drupal gives us. The many security issues Drupal and PHP both bring also leave much to be desired.
So, that's about it. I spent the last few months of 2019 laying the foundation for a successful 2020. I'm excited to see how the project grows.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Conquering Planned Obsolescence | Self-Hosted 9
Jan 02, 2020
Master of details, open source advocate and YouTuber, Quindor from Intermittent.Tech joins us for a chat about tuya-convert to avoid planned hardware obsolescence, his new 100TB server build, highly available home setups, and his DIY LED project.
Brunch with Brent: Jackie DeVore | Jupiter Extras 43
Dec 31, 2019
Brent sits down with Jackie DeVore, co-host of horror podcast Sirens of Scream and multi-disciplinary artist. Our in-person chat explores the origins of her podcasting, creativity as a lifestyle, women in tech, art, and gaming, and her co-founding and recent launch of Hell Bunny Independents Club, a women's inclusive and supportive digital safe space.
From classifying cats to colorizing old photos we share our top tips and tools for starting your machine learning journey. Plus, learn why Nebula is our favorite new VPN technology, and how it can help simplify and secure your network.
Happy Holidays, All(an) | BSD Now 330
Dec 26, 2019
Authentication Vulnerabilities in OpenBSD, NetBSD 9.0 RC1 is available, Running FreeNAS on a DigitalOcean droplet, NomadBSD 1.3 is here, at e2k19 nobody can hear you scream, and more.
We discovered an authentication-bypass vulnerability in OpenBSD's authentication system: this vulnerability is remotely exploitable in smtpd, ldapd, and radiusd, but its real-world impact should be studied on a case-by-case basis. For example, sshd is not exploitable thanks to its defense-in-depth mechanisms.
From the manual page of login.conf:
OpenBSD uses BSD Authentication, which is made up of a variety of authentication styles. The authentication styles currently provided are: > passwd Request a password and check it against the password in the master.passwd file. See login_passwd(8). > skey Send a challenge and request a response, checking it with S/Key (tm) authentication. See login_skey(8). > yubikey Authenticate using a Yubico YubiKey token. See login_yubikey(8). > For any given style, the program /usr/libexec/auth/login_style is used to > perform the authentication. The synopsis of this program is:
> /usr/libexec/auth/login_style [-v name=value] [-s service] username class
This is the first piece of the puzzle: if an attacker specifies a username of the form "-option", they can influence the behavior of the authentication program in unexpected ways.
login_passwd [-s service] [-v wheel=yes|no] [-v lastchance=yes|no] user [class] The service argument specifies which protocol to use with the invoking program. The allowed protocols are login, challenge, and response. (The challenge protocol is silently ignored but will report success as passwd-style authentication is not challenge-response based).
This is the second piece of the puzzle: if an attacker specifies the username "-schallenge" (or "-schallenge:passwd" to force a passwd-style authentication), then the authentication is automatically successful and therefore bypassed.
Case study: smtpd
Case study: ldapd
Case study: radiusd
Case study: sshd
Acknowledgments: We thank Theo de Raadt and the OpenBSD developers for their incredibly quick response: they published patches for these vulnerabilities less than 40 hours after our initial contact. We also thank MITRE's CVE Assignment Team.
Since the start of the release process four months ago a lot of improvements went into the branch - more than 500 pullups were processed!
This includes usbnet (a common framework for usb ethernet drivers), aarch64 stability enhancements and lots of new hardware support, installer/sysinst fixes and changes to the NVMM (hardware virtualization) interface.
We hope this will lead to the best NetBSD release ever (only to be topped by NetBSD 10 next year).
Here are a few highlights of the new release:
> Support for Arm AArch64 (64-bit Armv8-A) machines, including "Arm ServerReady"
compliant machines (SBBR+SBSA)
> Enhanced hardware support for Armv7-A
> Updated GPU drivers (e.g. support for Intel Kabylake)
> Enhanced virtualization support
> Support for hardware-accelerated virtualization (NVMM)
> Support for Performance Monitoring Counters
> Support for Kernel ASLR
> Support several kernel sanitizers (KLEAK, KASAN, KUBSAN)
> Support for userland sanitizers
> Audit of the network stack
> Many improvements in NPF
> Updated ZFS
> Reworked error handling and NCQ support in the SATA subsystem
> Support a common framework for USB Ethernet drivers (usbnet)
ZFS is awesome. FreeBSD even more so. FreeNAS is the battle-tested, enterprise-ready-yet-home-user-friendly software defined storage solution which is cooler then deep space, based on FreeBSD and makes heavy use of ZFS. This is what I (and soooooo many others) use for just about any storage-related task. I can go on and on and on about what makes it great, but if you're here, reading this, you probably know all that already and we can skip ahead.
I've needed an offsite FreeNAS setup to replicate things to, to run some things, to do some stuff, basically, my privately-owned, tightly-controlled NAS appliance in the cloud, one I control from top to bottom and with support for whatever crazy thing I'm trying to do. Since I'm using DigitalOcean as my main VPS provider, it seemed logical to run FreeNAS there, however, you can't. While DO supports many many distos and pre-setup applications (e.g OpenVPN), FreeNAS isn't a supported feature, at least not in the traditional way :)
Before we begin, here's the gist of what we're going to do:
> Base of a FreeBSD droplet, we'll re-image our boot block device with FreeNAS iso.
We'll then install FreeNAS on the second block device.
Once done we're going to do the ol' switcheroo: we're going to re-image our original
boot block device using the now FreeNAS-installed second block device.
Part 1: re-image our boot block device to boot FreeNAS install media.
Part 2: Install FreeNAS on the second block-device
Part 3: Re-image the boot block device using the FreeNAS-installed block device
> The base system has been changed to FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE-p1
Due to a deadlock problem, FreeBSD's unionfs has been replaced by unionfs-fuse
The GPT layout has been changed to MBR. This prevents problems with Lenovo
systems that refuse to boot from GPT if "lenovofix" is not set, and systems that
hang on boot if "lenovofix" is set.
Support for ZFS installations has been added to the NomadBSD installer.
The rc-script for setting up the network interfaces has been fixed and improved.
Support for setting the country code for the wlan device has been added.
Auto configuration for running in VirtualBox has been added.
A check for the default display has been added to the graphics configuration scripts. This fixes problems where users with Optimus have their NVIDIA card disabled, and use the integrated graphics chip instead.
NVIDIA driver version 440 has been added.
nomadbsd-dmconfig, a Qt tool for selecting the display manager theme, setting the
default user and autologin has been added.
nomadbsd-adduser, a Qt tool for added preconfigured user accounts to the system has been added.
Martin Orszulik added Czech translations to the setup and installation wizard.
The NomadBSD logo, designed by Ian Grindley, has been changed.
Support for localized error messages has been added.
Support for localizing the password prompts has been added.
Some templates for starting other DEs have been added to ~/.xinitrc.
The interfaces of nomadbsd-setup-gui and nomadbsd-install-gui have been improved.
A script that helps users to configure a multihead systems has been added.
The Xorg driver for newer Intel GPUs has been changed from "intel" to "modesetting".
/proc has been added to /etc/fstab
A D-Bus session issue has been fixed which prevented thunar from accessing samba shares.
DSBBg which allows users to change and manage wallpapers has been added.
The latest version of update_obmenu now supports auto-updating the Openbox menu. Manually updating the Openbox menu after packet (de)installation is therefore no longer needed.
Support for multiple keyboard layouts has been added. www/palemoon has been removed. mail/thunderbird has been removed. audio/audacity has been added. deskutils/orage has been added. the password manager fpm2 has been replaced by KeePassXC mail/sylpheed has been replaced by mail/claws-mail multimedia/simplescreenrecorder has been added. DSBMC has been changed to DSBMC-Qt Many small improvements and bug fixes.
After 2 years it was once again time to pack skis and snowshoes, put a satellite dish onto a sledge and hike through the snowy rockies to the Elk Lakes hut.
I did not really have much of a plan what I wanted to work on but there were a few things I wanted to look into. One of them was rpki-client and the fact that it was so incredibly slow. Since Bob beck@ was around I started to ask him innocent X509 questions ... as if there are innocent X509 questions! Mainly about the abuse of the X509_STORE in rpki-client. Pretty soon it was clear that rpki-client did it all wrong and most of the X509 verification had to be rewritten. Instead of only storing the root certificates in the store and passing the intermediate certs as a chain to the verification function rpki-client threw everything into it. The X509_STORE is just not built for such an abuse and so it was no wonder that this was slow.
Lucky me I pulled benno@ with me into this dark hole of libcrypto code. He managed to build up an initial diff to pass the chains as a STACK_OF(X509) and together we managed to get it working. A big thanks goes to ingo@ who documented most of the functions we had to use. Have a look at STACK_OF(3) and sk_pop_free(3) to understand why benno@ and I slowly turned crazy.
Our next challenge was to only load the necessary certificate revocation list into the X509_STORE_CTX. While doing those changes it became obvious that some of the data structures needed better lookup functions. Looking up certificates was done using a linear lookup and so we replaced the internal certificate and CRL tables with RB trees for fast lookups. deraadt@ also joined the rpki-client commit fest and changed the output code to use rename(2) so that files are replaced in an atomic operation. Thanks to this rpki-client can now be safely run from cron (there is an example in the default crontab).
I did not plan to spend most of my week hacking on rpki-client but in the end I'm happy that I did and the result is fairly impressive. Working with libcrypto code and especially X509 was less than pleasant. Our screams of agony died away in the snowy rocky mountains and made Bob deep dive into UVM with a smile since he knew that benno@ and I had it worse.
In case you wonder thanks to all changes at e2k19 rpki-client improved from over 20min run time to validate all VRPS to roughly 1min to do the same job. A factor 20 improvement!
Thanks to Theo, Bob and Howie to make this possible. To all the cooks for the great food and to Xplornet for providing us with Internet at the hut.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Special Guest: Mariusz Zaborski.
Tails + Virtualization | Choose Linux 25
Dec 26, 2019
Ultimate privacy in Distrohoppers, and the best ways to run other operating systems within your current Linux distro.
Links:
Tails — Tails is a live operating system that you can start on almost any computer from a USB stick or a DVD. It aims at preserving your privacy and anonymity.
Virtual machine manager — The virt-manager application is a desktop user interface for managing virtual machines through libvirt.
Boxes — Boxes is an application that gives you access to virtual machines, running locally or remotely. It also allows you to connect to the display of a remote computer.
LINUX Unplugged episode about virtualization — Our crew walks you through their PCI Passthrough setups that let them run Windows, macOS, and distro-hop all from one Linux machine.
Linux Wayback Machine | LINUX Unplugged 333
Dec 24, 2019
Open source won the last decade, but what if it hadn’t? We look back at some major milestones and reflect on a world where they never existed.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.
Brunch with Brent: Catherine Kretzschmar | Jupiter Extras 42
Dec 24, 2019
Brent sits down with Catherine Kretzschmar, professional music teacher, coding bootcamp enlistee, and humanist celebrant, for an in-person connective chat on the relationship between music and coding, the quality-of-life implications of ever-evolving home automation, an intro to humanist celebrancy, and more.
Catherine is a good friend of the Jupiter Broadcasting family and wife of Alex Kretzschmar, co-host of Self-Hosted.
Canonical Releases Multipass 1.0 As "A Mini-Cloud On Your Workstation" — "a mini-cloud on your workstation using native hypervisors of all the supported plaforms (Windows, macOS and Linux), it will give you an Ubuntu command line in just a click ("Open shell") or a simple multipass shell command, or even a keyboard shortcut."
Krita Receives Epic MegaGrant — Epic, the makers of the Unreal game engine, have supported Krita with a $25,000 MegaGrant
Guidance for Atari VCS Content Developers — Initial procedures announced for more independent game and app developers to start creating and planning now for earning a place in the Atari VCS storefront.
Brunch with Brent: Jason Spisak Part 2 | Jupiter Extras 41
Dec 20, 2019
Brent sits down with Jason Spisak, professional voice actor, actor, producer, and co-founder of multiple Linux-related projects including Lycoris, Symphony OS, and Symple PC. In Part 2 we explore Jason's various voice acting roles, his approach to embodying roles like The Joker, the setup in his Linux-only audio recording studios, the power in collaborative innovation, examining yourself through meditation, and more.
The future of Internet video, the best way to develop open source software, skills vs talents, and our favourite types of animal companions.
00:00:24 What is likely to knock YouTube off its iron throne? 00:09:12 Is it really Open Source software if it’s not developed collaboratively? 00:20:54 What's the one thing you wish you could do well but are terrible at? 00:33:18 Dogs or cats?
Lucas’ Arts | BSD Now 329
Dec 19, 2019
In this episode, we interview Michael W. Lucas about his latest book projects, including the upcoming SNMP Mastery book.
Interview - Michael Lucas
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Special Guest: Michael W Lucas.
WLED Changes the Game | Self-Hosted 8
Dec 19, 2019
Sometimes one project can lead to a hundred more. We celebrate Home Assistant's new release, the inclusion of the WLED integration and fall down the DIY project rabbit hole.
Plus some clever power solutions, cheap LED light strips, and a test drive of Project Off-Grid.
We recorded our first ever live stream to accompany this where we flash an ESP8266 board in seconds using WLED and esptool. This can be found on YouTube.
Links:
Hass.io - Home Assistant — Hass.io turns your Raspberry Pi (or another device) into the ultimate home automation hub powered by Home Assistant. With Hass.io you can focus on integrating your devices and writing automations.
ESPHome — ESPHome is a system to control your ESP8266/ESP32 by simple yet powerful configuration files and control them remotely through Home Automation systems.
Home Assistant Smart LEDs using WLED and ESP8266 — A platinum level Home Assistant integration for the WLED project was released with version 0.120 on Nov 20th 2019. I'm going to walk you through flashing a D1 Mini (though the same steps apply for a NodeMCU too) using Linux. You can probably expect this process to take about 5-10 minutes.
Brunch with Brent: Jason Spisak Part 1 | Jupiter Extras 40
Dec 17, 2019
Brent sits down with Jason Spisak, professional voice actor, actor, producer, and co-founder of multiple Linux-related projects including Lycoris, Symphony OS, and Symple PC. In Part 1 we chat about everything from Jason's deep motivations behind his Linux projects, to patents vs. open source, digital independence and the nature of human endeavor. A few additional voices join us throughout for good measure...
Brunch with Brent: Jason Spisak Part 2 comes our way this Friday.
The Unbelievers - IMDb — Renowned scientists Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss cross the globe as they speak publicly about the importance of science and reason in the modern world.
The first desktop Office 365 app arrives, Ubuntu commits to current and future Raspberry Pi boards, and why the near-term future of Linux gaming looks a bit rocky.
Plus, our concerns with Google's clever long-term Fuchsia strategy.
Links:
Microsoft Teams is now available on Linux — Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available for Linux users in public preview, enabling high quality collaboration experiences for the open source community at work and in educational institutions. Users can download the native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats.
Zulip 2.1: Open source team chat — Zulip is the world’s most productive team chat software, used by thousands of teams as an alternative to Slack, HipChat, Mattermost and IRC. Zulip's unique topic-based threading combines the immediacy of chat with the asynchronous efficiency of email-style threading, and is 100% free and open source software.
DXVK To Enter Maintenance Mode — Not because it's considered feature complete and bug-free, but because the main developer considers that DXVK has become a "fragile, unreliable and frustrating maintenance nightmare".
Linux Academy Black Friday Sale — Give yourself a year of opportunity and save $150. Get a full year of Hands-On Cloud Training. Limited time Black Friday Offer.
Linux Academy Black Friday Sale — Give yourself a year of opportunity and save $150. Get a full year of Hands-On Cloud Training. Limited time Black Friday Offer.
LLDB Threading support now ready, Multiple IPSec VPN tunnels with FreeBSD, Netflix Optimized FreeBSD's Network Stack More Than Doubled AMD EPYC Performance, happy eyeballs with unwind(8), AWS got FreeBSD ARM 12, OpenSSH U2F/FIDO support, and more.
Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages.
In February, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues and fixing watchpoint support. Then, I've started working on improving thread support which is taking longer than expected. You can read more about that in my September 2019 report.
So far the number of issues uncovered while enabling proper threading support has stopped me from merging the work-in-progress patches. However, I've finally reached the point where I believe that the current work can be merged and the remaining problems can be resolved afterwards. More on that and other LLVM-related events happening during the last month in this report.
But it is also possible to have multiple, 2 or more, IPSec VPN tunnels created and running on a FreeBSD host. How to implement and configure this is described below.
The requirements is to have 3 locations (A, B and C) connected with IPSec VPN tunnels using FreeBSD (11.3-RELEASE).
Each location has 1 IPSec VPN host running FreeBSD (VPN host A, B and C).
VPN host A has 2 IPSec VPN tunnels: 1 to location B (VPN host B) and 1 to location C (VPN host C).
Drew Gallatin of Netflix presented at the recent EuroBSDcon 2019 conference in Norway on the company's network stack optimizations to FreeBSD. Netflix was working on being able to deliver 200Gb/s network performance for video streaming out of Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC servers, to which they are now at 190Gb/s+ and in the process that doubled the potential of EPYC Naples/Rome servers and also very hefty upgrades too for Intel.
Netflix has long been known to be using FreeBSD in their data centers particularly where network performance is concerned. But in wanting to deliver 200Gb/s throughput from individual servers led them to making NUMA optimizations to the FreeBSD network stack. Allocating NUMA local memory for kernel TLS crypto buffers and for backing files sent via sentfile were among their optimizations. Changes to network connection handling and dealing with incoming connections to Nginx were also made.
For those just wanting the end result, Netflix's NUMA optimizations to FreeBSD resulted in their Intel Xeon servers going from 105Gb/s to 191Gb/s while the NUMA fabric utilization dropped from 40% to 13%.
unwind has a concept of a best nameserver type. It considers a configured DoT nameserver to be better than doing it's own recursive resolving. Recursive resolving is considered to be better than asking the dhcp provided nameservers.
This diff sorts the nameserver types by quality, as above (validation, resolving, dead...), and as a tie breaker it adds the median of the round trip time of previous queries into the mix.
One other interesting thing about this is that it gets us past captive portals without a check URL, that's why this diff is so huge, it rips out all the captive portal stuff (please apply with patch -E): 17 files changed, 385 insertions(+), 1683 deletions(-)
Please test this. I'm particularly interested in reports from people who move between networks and need to get past captive portals.
FreeBSD is an operating system used to power servers, desktops, and embedded systems. Derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley, FreeBSD has been continually developed by a large community for more than 30 years.
FreeBSD's networking, security, storage, and monitoring features, including the pf firewall, the Capsicum and CloudABI capability frameworks, the ZFS filesystem, and the DTrace dynamic tracing framework, make FreeBSD the platform of choice for many of the busiest web sites and most pervasive embedded networking and storage systems.
I just committed all the dependencies for OpenSSH security key (U2F) support to base and tweaked OpenSSH to use them directly. This means there will be no additional configuration hoops to jump through to use U2F/FIDO2 security keys.
Hardware backed keys can be generated using "ssh-keygen -t ecdsa-sk" (or "ed25519-sk" if your token supports it). Many tokens require to be touched/tapped to confirm this step.
You'll get a public/private keypair back as usual, except in this case, the private key file does not contain a highly-sensitive private key but instead holds a "key handle" that is used by the security key to derive the real private key at signing time.
So, stealing a copy of the private key file without also stealing your security key (or access to it) should not give the attacker anything.
Once you have generated a key, you can use it normally - i.e. add it to an agent, copy it to your destination's authorized_keys files (assuming they are running -current too), etc. At authentication time, you will be prompted to tap your security key to confirm the signature operation - this makes theft-of-access attacks against security keys more difficult too.
Please test this thoroughly - it's a big change that we want to have stable before the next release.
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explainshell — Write down a command-line to see the help text that matches each argument
EndeavourOS — An Arch-based distro with a dynamic and friendly community at its core.
Regular expression — A regular expression is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern.
Samba — Samba is the standard Windows interoperability suite of programs for Linux and Unix.
Nextcloud — The self-hosted productivity platform that keeps you in contro
apt install arch-linux | LINUX Unplugged 331
Dec 10, 2019
We're myth-busting this week as we take a perfectly functioning production server and switch it to Arch. Is this rolling distro too dangerous to run in production, or can the right approach unlock the perfect server? We try it so you don't have to.
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Christmas Student Contest! | The Mad Botter — We are running a contest for High-School students to win a System76 Thelio Linux PC on us. To qualify you must be a US high-school student with your parents permission to participate and write a small FOSS project and publish it on GitHub.
Brunch with Brent: Alan Pope | Jupiter Extras 38
Dec 10, 2019
Brent sits down with Alan Pope (popey), who shares his knack for fuzzy-testing, the beginnings of Ubuntu Podcast, insights into Ubuntu Touch and Unity, the joys and perils of being "Internet Famous", and how to contribute meaningfully to your favorite Linux distributions.
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Ubuntu Pro is a click away, and their kernel goes rolling on AWS. We process the range of announcements, while Mozilla cranks up the security and impresses us with DeepSpeech.
Plus why Ubuntu is taking the Windows Subsystem for Linux so seriously.
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Amazon Announces Graviton2 SoC Along With New 64-Core Arm Instances — The new Graviton2 SoC is a custom design by Amazon’s own in-house silicon design teams and is a successor to the first-generation Graviton chip. The new chip quadruples the core count from 16 cores to 64.
Ell and Wes sit down with Karthik Gaekwad to sort through the buzzword bingo and explain what DevSecOps is, what it isn’t, and why security should be part of the full lifecycle of your apps.
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DevSecOps Days is coming to Austin, Texas. — Join us for the first ever DevSecOps Days Austin, Texas. Meet fellow practitioners integrating security into their DevOps practices. Learn about their journeys, share ideas on integrating security into your teams, and trade insights on automating security within the entire developer and production pipeline. Come learn how to put the "Sec" into DevSecOps.
How DevOps and security teams can get along better — One of the biggest issues for IT security teams is getting involved early enough in the development process. For many, security is something that gets applied once the applications have been built and are moving into production. However, this is an old fashioned approach that is held over from the days when development took place in waterfall phases and applications were held behind strong perimeter security implementations.
What is DevSecOps? — DevOps isn’t just about development and operations teams. If you want to take full advantage of the agility and responsiveness of a DevOps approach, IT security must also play an integrated role in the full life cycle of your apps.
Security’s Shift Right — Once you give up on the idea of teaching developers to not write bugs, you are freer to think of approaches to help them. One of the best approaches is to provide rapid feedback to developers. In the land of application performance, we found that running APM tools in production was a way to help developers find places to optimize their code. This created a feedback loop from production (the right) to development (the left).
Karthik on Twitter — I live in Austin, work with @golang, k8s & containers at Oracle; @lynda author; organize @devopsdays, @containerdays and @cloudaustin. Views are my own.
Imaginary Turkey | User Error 80
Dec 06, 2019
Talking to ourselves, delicious family meals, and the complexities of modern work.
Plus inexpensive acquisitions, the price we put on security, and popey refusing to answer the simplest of questions.
00:00:47 Is turkey dinner really worth the effort? 00:06:54 What's the best bargain you've ever acquired? 00:12:18 If you were given $1,000 for every person you shared your master password with, how many people would you share it with? 00:18:49 Have you ever had an imaginary friend? 00:22:55 Is the gig economy good or bad? 00:29:46 Beer/cider: warm or flat?
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ZFS Rename Repo | BSD Now 327
Dec 05, 2019
We read FreeBSD’s third quarterly status report, OpenBSD on Sparc64, ZoL repo move to OpenZFS, GEOM NOP, keeping NetBSD up-to-date, and more.
This quarter the reports team has been more active than usual thanks to a better organization: calls for reports and reminders have been sent regularly, reports have been reviewed and merged quickly (I would like to thank debdrup@ in particular for his reviewing work).
Efficiency could still be improved with the help of our community. In particular, the quarterly team has found that many reports have arrived in the last days before the deadline or even after. I would like to invite the community to follow the guidelines below that can help us sending out the reports sooner.
Starting from next quarter, all quarterly status reports will be prepared the last month of the quarter itself, instead of the first month after the quarter's end. This means that deadlines for submitting reports will be the 1st of January, April, July and October.
Next quarter will then be a short one, covering the months of November and December only and the report will probably be out in mid January.
OpenBSD, huh? Yes, I usually write about FreeBSD and that’s in fact what I tried installing on the machine first. But I ran into problems with it very early on (never even reached single user mode) and put it aside for later. Since I powered up the SunFire again last month, I needed an OS now and chose OpenBSD for the simple reason that I have it available.
First I wanted to call this article simply “OpenBSD on SPARC” – but that would have been misleading since OpenBSD used to support 32-bit SPARC processors, too. The platform was just put to rest after the 5.9 release.
Version 6.0 was the last release of OpenBSD that came on CD-ROM. When I bought it, I thought that I’d never use the SPARC CD. But here was the chance! While it is an obsolete release, it comes with the cryptographic signatures to verify the next release. So the plan is to start at 6.0 as I can trust the original CDs and then update to the latest release. This will also be an opportunity to recap on some of the things that changed over the various versions.
Because it will contain the ZFS source code for both Linux and FreeBSD, we will rename the "ZFSonLinux" code repository to "OpenZFS". Specifically, the repo at http://github.com/ZFSonLinux/zfs will be moved to the OpenZFS organization, at http://github.com/OpenZFS/zfs.
The next major release of ZFS for Linux and FreeBSD will be "OpenZFS 2.0", and is expected to ship in 2020.
A long time ago— like 15 years ago— I worked at Sun Microsystems. The company was nearly dead at the time (it died a couple years later) because they didn't make anything that anyone wanted to buy anymore. So they had a lot of strange ideas about how they'd make their comeback.
Sometimes while testing file systems or applications you want to simulate some errors on the disk level. The first time I heard about this need was from Baptiste Daroussin during his presentation at AsiaBSDCon 2016. He mentioned how they had built a test lab with it. The same need was recently discussed during the PGCon 2019, to test a PostgreSQL instance. If you are FreeBSD user, I have great news for you: there is a GEOM provider which allows you to simulate a failing device.
GNOP allows us to configure transparent providers from existing ones. The first interesting option of it is that we can slice the device into smaller pieces, thanks to the ‘offset option’ and ‘stripsesize’. This allows us to observe how the data on the disk is changing. Let’s assume that we want to observe the changes in the GPT table when the GPT flags are added or removed (for example the bootme flags which are described here). We can use dd every time and analyze it using absolute values from the disks.
This is a tutorial to guide you through the shiny new pkg_comp 2.0 on NetBSD.
Goals: to use pkg_comp 2.0 to build a binary repository of all the packages you are interested in; to keep the repository fresh on a daily basis; and to use that repository with pkgin to maintain your NetBSD system up-to-date and secure.
This tutorial is specifically targeted at NetBSD but should work on other platforms with some small changes. Expect, at the very least, a macOS-specific tutorial as soon as I create a pkg_comp standalone installer for that platform.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Why We Love Home Assistant | Self-Hosted 7
Dec 05, 2019
Home Assistant has changed our families' lives for the better. We share tips for getting started, implementing automation, devices we use, and our favorite integrations.
Plus Alex's thoughts on automating his new LG TV and be sure to check the links!
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Nabu Casa — No longer worry if you left the garage door open. Quickly access your Home Assistant instance from your phone, your favorite coffeeshop or at work.
All data is fully encrypted between your device and your Home Assistant instance. No snooping
Chris' Portable Oil-Filled Radiator — 1200 watts of heating power, silent operation, Best for small to medium rooms that need constant heat in the colder seasons.
Mosquitto - An open source MQTT broker — The MQTT protocol provides a lightweight method of carrying out messaging using a publish/subscribe model. This makes it suitable for Internet of Things messaging such as with low power sensors or mobile devices such as phones, embedded computers or microcontrollers.
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Brunch with Brent: Rocco | Jupiter Extras 36
Dec 03, 2019
Brent sits down with Rocco of Big Daddy Linux for a conversation about the origins of Linux Spotlight, some shared behind-the-scenes podcasting perspectives, and just how great we feel about our Linux community.
Linux Academy Black Friday Sale — Give yourself a year of opportunity and save $150. Get a full year of Hands-On Cloud Training. Limited time Black Friday Offer.
Linux Academy Black Friday Sale — Give yourself a year of opportunity and save $150. Get a full year of Hands-On Cloud Training. Limited time Black Friday Offer.
Mozilla: Be Smart. Shop Safe. — How creepy is that smart speaker, that fitness tracker, those wireless headphones? We created this guide to help you shop for safe, secure connected products.
Minimum Security Guidelines Explained — These three organizations proposed five minimum guidelines that companies making connected devices should reasonably be expected to satisfy.
Kali Linux 2019.4 released with Xfce by default — We are incredibly excited to announce our fourth and final release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.4, which is available immediately for download.
Machine Learning Magic | TechSNAP 417
Nov 29, 2019
We explore the rapid adoption of machine learning, its impact on computer architecture, and how to avoid AI snake oil.
Plus so-so SSD security, and a new wireless protocol that works best where the Wi-Fi sucks.
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Linux Professional Institute extends its Open Technology certification track with the BSD Specialist Certification. Starting October 30, 2019, BSD Specialist exams will be globally available. The certification was developed in collaboration with the BSD Certification Group which merged with Linux Professional Institute in 2018.
G. Matthew Rice, the Executive Director of Linux Professional Institute says that "the release of the BSD Specialist certification marks a major milestone for Linux Professional Institute. With this new credential, we are reaffirming our belief in the value of, and support for, all open source technologies. As much as possible, future credentials and educational programs will include coverage of BSD.”
The seventh annual OpenZFS Developer Summit took place on November 4th and 5th in San Francisco and brought together a healthy mix of familiar faces and new community participants. Several folks from iXsystems took part in the talks, hacking, and socializing at this amazing annual event. The messages of the event can be summed up as Unification, Refinement, and Ecosystem Tooling.
In the previous post I explained why sometimes building your software from ports may make sense on FreeBSD. I also introduced the reader to the old-fashioned way of using tools to make working with ports a bit more convenient.
In this follow-up post we’re going to take a closer look at portmaster and see how it especially makes updating from ports much, much easier. For people coming here without having read the previous article: What I describe here is not what every FreeBSD admin today should consider good practice (any more)! It can still be useful in special cases, but my main intention is to discuss this for building up the foundation for what you actually should do today.
Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages.
In February, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support, extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues and fixing watchpoint support. Then, I've started working on improving thread support which is taking longer than expected. You can read more about that in my September 2019 report.
So far the number of issues uncovered while enabling proper threading support has stopped me from merging the work-in-progress patches. However, I've finally reached the point where I believe that the current work can be merged and the remaining problems can be resolved afterwards. More on that and other LLVM-related events happening during the last month in this report.
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Void Linux — Void is a general purpose operating system, based on the monolithic Linux® kernel.
Mozilla bug report writing guidelines — This page assumes you'd like to contribute to the Mozilla project by collecting enough information to enter a useful bug report in Bugzilla, the Mozilla bug tracking system.
Reporting bugs in Ubuntu — A quick introduction to reporting bugs in Ubuntu. This is just a very brief rough guide. Not final.
Write the Docs — Write the Docs is a global community of people who care about documentation.
Operation Safe Escape — Ell and Wes talk to Chris Cox, the executive director of Operation Safe Escape about battling stalking and technology-based abuse.
Flat Network Truthers | LINUX Unplugged 329
Nov 26, 2019
Build one flat network across cloud providers, personal networks, with even thousands of nodes. We feature two amazing open source solutions, and the creators behind them.
Plus community news, first impressons of Google Stadia, listener feedback, and some great picks.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Guus Sliepen, and Ryan Huber.
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Brunch with Brent: Jacob Roecker | Jupiter Extras 35
Nov 26, 2019
Brent sits down with Jacob Roecker, long-time Jupiter Broadcasting community member and Bronze Star Medal decorated United States Army veteran. Jacob shares his journey from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan through to dealing with PTSD, and how Jupiter Broadcasting and it's community was integral throughout.
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Google, Mozilla, and GitLab make serious upgrades to their bug bounty programs, insights into Debian's renewed systemd debate, and how Microsoft and IBM are working together to fight patent trolls.
Plus our thoughts on LVFS for Chromebooks, and the recent Monero hack.
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GitLab: We are increasing bounties in our bug bounty program — Since we opened our bug bounty program to the public in December 2018, our community of external security researchers submitted 1,282 reports and we paid out $515,899 in bounties.
Debian init systems - what, another GR ? — Sam Hartman, the Debian Project Leader, has proposed a General Resolution (a plebiscite of the whole project) about init systems. In this posting I am going to try to summarise the situation. This will necessarily be a personal view but I will try to be fair. Also, sorry that it's so long but there is a lot of ground to cover.
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Disposing of hard drives, what a TV really is, and the veganism of software.
Plus the serious business of coffee, why modern music sucks, and making Popey feel bad.
00:00:48 With better technology, why don’t we necessarily see better art? 00:09:03 Is Linux (or FOSS) the vegan option within software? 00:13:43 Do you own a TV? 00:20:24 How do you prepare your coffee? 00:25:05 How do you forgive yourself? 00:32:19 How do you dispose of your old hard drives for security purposes?
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Cracking Rainbows | BSD Now 325
Nov 21, 2019
FreeBSD 12.1 is here, A history of Unix before Berkeley, FreeBSD development setup, HardenedBSD 2019 Status Report, DNSSEC, compiling RainbowCrack on OpenBSD, and more.
Nobody needs to be told that UNIX is popular today. In this article we will show you a little of where it was yesterday and over the past decade. And, without meaning in the least to minimise the incredible contributions of Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, we will bring to light many of the others who worked on early versions, and try to show where some of the key ideas came from, and how they got into the UNIX of today.
Our title says we are talking about UNIX evolution. Evolution means different things to different people. We use the term loosely, to describe the change over time among the many different UNIX variants in use both inside and outside Bell Labs. Ideas, code, and useful programs seem to have made their way back and forth - like mutant genes - among all the many UNIXes living in the phone company over the decade in question.
Part One looks at some of the major components of the current UNIX system - the text formatting tools, the compilers and program development tools, and so on. Most of the work described in Part One took place at Research'', a part of Bell Laboratories (now AT&T Bell Laboratories, then as nowthe Labs''), and the ancestral home of UNIX. In planned (but not written) later parts, we would have looked at some of the myriad versions of UNIX - there are far more than one might suspect. This includes a look at Columbus and USG and at Berkeley Unix. You'll begin to get a glimpse inside the history of the major streams of development of the system during that time.
As we are experiencing the Suricata community first hand in Amsterdam we thought to release this version a bit earlier than planned. Included is the latest Suricata 5.0.0 release in the development version. That means later this November we will releasing version 5 to the production version as we finish up tweaking the integration and maybe pick up 5.0.1 as it becomes available.
LDAP TLS connectivity is now integrated into the system trust store, which ensures that all required root and intermediate certificates will be seen by the connection setup when they have been added to the authorities section. The same is true for trusting self-signed certificates. On top of this, IPsec now supports public key authentication as contributed by Pascal Mathis.
We at HardenedBSD have a lot of news to share. On 05 Nov 2019, Oliver Pinter resigned amicably from the project. All of us at HardenedBSD owe Oliver our gratitude and appreciation. This humble project, named by Oliver, was born out of his thesis work and the collaboration with Shawn Webb. Oliver created the HardenedBSD repo on GitHub in April 2013. The HardenedBSD Foundation was formed five years later to carry on this great work.
Shopware is the next generation of open source e-commerce software. Based on bleeding edge technologies like Symfony 3, Doctrine2 and Zend Framework Shopware comes as the perfect platform for your next e-commerce project. This tutorial will walk you through the Shopware Community Edition (CE) installation on FreeBSD 12 system by using NGINX as a web server.
Requirements
Make sure your system meets the following minimum requirements:
Linux-based operating system with NGINX or Apache 2.x (with mod_rewrite) web server installed.
PHP 5.6.4 or higher with ctype, gd, curl, dom, hash, iconv, zip, json, mbstring, openssl, session, simplexml, xml, zlib, fileinfo, and pdo/mysql extensions. PHP 7.1 or above is strongly recommended.
MySQL 5.5.0 or higher.
Possibility to set up cron jobs.
Minimum 4 GB available hard disk space.
IonCube Loader version 5.0.0 or higher (optional).
Project RainbowCrack was originally Zhu Shuanglei's implementation, it's not clear to me if the project is still just his or if it's even been maintained for a while. His page seems to have been last updated in August 2007.
The Project RainbowCrack web page now has just binaries for Windows XP and Linux, both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
Earlier versions were available as source code. The version 1.2 source code does not compile on OpenBSD, and in my experience it doesn't compile on Linux, either. It seems to date from 2004 at the earliest, and I think it makes some version-2.4 assumptions about Linux kernel headers.
You might also look at ophcrack, a more modern tool, although it seems to be focused on cracking Windows XP/Vista/7/8/10 password hashes
You should not run your mail server because mail is hard — In this article, I will voluntarily use the term mail because it is vague enough to encompass protocols and software. This is not a very technical article and I don’t want to dive into protocols, I want people who have never worked with mail to understand all of it.
Brunch with Brent: Emma Marshall | Jupiter Extras 33
Nov 19, 2019
Brent sits down with Emma Marshall, Customer Happiness Manager at System76 for a fun chat touching on her love of pinball and puppies, spreading happiness, women in tech, and more.
Note: This episode was recorded before the Superfans 3 event, which occurred between November 15-17, 2019.
PINEPHONE – “BraveHeart” Limited Edition Linux SmartPhone For Early Adaptor — The “BraveHeart” Limited Edition PinePhones are aimed solely for developer and early adopter. More specifically, only intend for these units to find their way into the hands of users with extensive Linux experience and an interest in Linux-on-phone.
Brave browser comes out of beta — The Brave open source browser fundamentally shifts how users, publishers, and advertisers interact online by giving users a private, safer, and 3-6x faster browsing experience, while funding the Web through a new attention-based platform of privacy-preserving advertisements and rewards.
Choose Linux 22: Finding Your Community — We talk about the best ways to get involved in open source communities, finding like-minded people, conference strategies, community hubs, and what happened to all the LUGs.
Mental Health Hackers | Jupiter Extras 32
Nov 15, 2019
Ell and Wes sit down with Megan Roddie from Mental Health Hackers about neurodiversity in tech and the importance of peer support.
Mental Health Hackers Website — Our mission is to educate tech professionals about the unique mental health risks faced by those in our field – and often by the people who we share our lives with – and provide guidance on reducing their effects and better manage the triggering causes.
Mental Health First Aid — Mental Health First Aid is a skills-based training course that teaches participants about mental health and substance-use issues.
Hackers, Hugs, & Drugs: Mental Health in Infosec — The information security community is difficult to compare to any other. We are composed of intelligent, driven, passionate, opinionated individuals. When you combine the pressure and stress we put on ourselves in the form of research, learning, teaching, and creating it starts to build up. Not only do we put pressure on ourselves, but we also take it on from our bosses, co-workers, and family in many different forms. The end result is that many of us are broken. We need to bring to light a topic that shouldn't be as faux pas as it is. I'll share my personal struggles, stories of friends and family, and hopefully help us come closer together as a community to help you or people around you.
I.T. Phone Home | TechSNAP 416
Nov 15, 2019
Ubiquiti's troublesome new telemetry, Jim's take on the modern Microsoft, and why Project Silica just might be the future of long term storage.
Microsoft Edge is coming to Linux. But will anybody use it? | Ars Technica — At Microsoft Ignite a slide announced that Microsoft's project to rebase its perennially unloved Edge browser on Google's open source project Chromium is well underway. Sharper-eyed attendees also noticed a promise for future Linux support.
Migrating drives and zpool between hosts, OpenBSD in 2019, Dragonfly’s new zlib and dhcpcd, Batch renaming images and resolution with awk, a rant on the X11 ICCCM selection system, hammer 2 emergency space mode, and more.
Today I move a zpool from an R710 into an R720. The goal: all services on that zpool start running on the new host.
Fortunately, that zpool is dedicated to jails, more or less. I have done some planning about this, including moving a poudriere on the R710 into a jail.
Now it is almost noon on Saturday, I am sitting in the basement (just outside the server room), and I’m typing this up.
In this post:
FreeBSD 12.0
Dell R710 (r710-01)
Dell R720 (r720-01)
drive caddies from eBay and now I know the difference between SATA and SATAu
I’ve used OpenBSD on and off since 2.1. More back then than in the last 10 years or so though, so I thought I’d try it again.
What triggered this was me finding a silly bug in GNU cpio that has existed with a “FIXME” comment since at least 1994. I checked OpenBSD to see if it had a related bug, but as expected no it was just fine.
I don’t quite remember why I stopped using OpenBSD for servers, but I do remember filesystem corruption on “unexpected power disconnections” (even with softdep turned on), which I’ve never really seen on Linux.
That and that fewer things “just worked” than with Linux, which matters more when I installed more random things than I do now. I’ve become a lot more minimalist. Probably due to less spare time. Life is better when you don’t run things like PHP (not that OpenBSD doesn’t support PHP, just an example) or your own email server with various antispam tooling, and other things.
This is all experience from running OpenBSD on a server. On my next laptop I intend to try running OpenBSD on the dektop, and will see if that more ad-hoc environment works well. E.g. will gnuradio work? Lack of other-OS VM support may be a problem.
Verdict
Ouch, that’s a long list of bad stuff. Still, I like it. I’ll continue to run it, and will make sure my stuff continues working on OpenBSD.
And maybe in a year I’ll have a review of OpenBSD on a laptop.
d00d, that document is devilspawn. I've recently spent my nights in pain implementing the selection mechanism. WHY OH WHY OH WHY? why me? why did I choose to do this? and what sick evil twisted mind wrote this damn spec? I don't know why I'm working with it, I just wanted to make a useful program.
I didn't know what I was getting myself in to. Nobody knows until they try it. And once you start, you're unable to stop. You can't stop, if you stop then you haven't completed it to spec. You can't fail on this, it's just a few pages of text, how can that be so hard? So what if they use Atoms for everything. So what if there's no explicit correlation between the target type of a SelectionNotify event and the type of the property it indicates?
So what if the distinction is ambiguous? So what if the document is littered with such atrocities? It's not the spec's fault, the spec is authoritative. It's obviously YOUR (the implementor's) fault for misunderstanding it. If you didn't misunderstand it, you wouldn't be here complaining about it would you?
As anyone who has been running HAMMER1 or HAMMER2 has noticed, snapshots and copy on write and infinite history can eat a lot of disk space, even if the actual file volume isn’t changing much. There’s now an ‘emergency mode‘ for HAMMER2, where disk operations can happen even if there isn’t space for the normal history activity. It’s dangerous, in that the normal protections against data loss if power is cut go away, and snapshots created while in this mode will be mangled. So definitely don’t leave it on!
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Finding Your Community | Choose Linux 22
Nov 14, 2019
We talk about the best ways to get involved in open source communities, finding like-minded people, conference strategies, community hubs, and what happened to all the LUGs.
Distro Disco | LINUX Unplugged 327
Nov 12, 2019
Get to know our Linux Users Group a little better and learn why they love their Linux distros of choice, and the one thing they'd change to make them perfect.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Neal Gompa.
APT-RPM — APT-RPM is a port of Debian's APT tools to a RPM based distribution.
URPMI - Mageia wiki — urpmi is Mageia's command line tool for managing packages and repositories
Linux Millionaire Question Form — Jupiter Broadcasting wants to create a fun game for Linux enthusiasts to test their knowledge on the depths of technology and Linux history. Please help by providing us your thoughtful questions and suggested answers!
Brunch with Brent: A Chat with Jill Bryant Ryniker | Jupiter Extras 31
Nov 12, 2019
Brent sits down with Jill Bryant Ryniker, long time linux aficionado, for a connective conversation exploring her deep involvement in linux and open source, from community to professional animation and more.
Jill wears many complimentary hats, a few of which include: co-host of Linux Weekly Daily Wednesday, regular community guest on Linux Unplugged, LinuxChix LA co-organizer, professional animator and teacher, ...and more! Grab a seat and join us..
Google steps up support for older Chromebooks, Microsoft Edge is coming to Linux, and the App Defense Alliance teams up to fight Android malware.
Plus Google Cardboard goes open source, and a neat machine-learning tool to pull songs apart.
Special Guest: Wes Payne.
Links:
Google gives most Chromebooks an extra year of software support — Seven Chromebooks from Lenovo recently had their support lifespan extended, and now Google has updated the EOL date for 135 more models from several manufacturers. Most models received another year of support, others only got another six months, and some now have two more years.
What’s new in Chrome OS: Virtual Desks, simpler printing and more — Think of Virtual Desks as separate workspaces within your Chromebook. Use this feature to create helpful boundaries between projects or activities. If you’re working on multiple projects, you can dedicate a desk to each one. Open Overview and tap New Desk in the top right-hand corner of your screen to try out Virtual Desks.
Open sourcing Google Cardboard — Today, we’re releasing the Cardboard open source project to let the developer community continue to build Cardboard experiences and add support to their apps for an ever increasing diversity of smartphone screen resolutions and configurations.
Access ESM, now free to the community, via the updated Ubuntu Advantage client — Canonical is happy to announce that all community users are entitled to a free Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure account for access to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and Kernel Livepatch* for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) for up to three machines, and up to 50 machines for all official Ubuntu Members.
Releasing Spleeter: Deezer Research source separation engine — We are releasing Spleeter to help the research community in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) leverage the power of a state-of-the-art source separation algorithm. It comes in the form of a Python Library based on Tensorflow, with pretrained models for 2, 4 and 5 stems separation.
Paying attention to all the Linux users we never hear from, being less clever than we thought, and our biggest fears.
Plus alternatives to copy paste, and whether Popey loves pink.
00:00:44 Would the Web/Internet be better or worse if the concept of copy and paste had never been invented? 00:07:29 What are you afraid of? 00:13:51 Is it time to stop ignoring the vast silent majority of Linux users? 00:27:37 What's your favourite colour and why? 00:34:54 Have you ever had a genius idea that turned out to be spectacularly unoriginal?
ZFS Isn’t the Only Option | Self-Hosted 5
Nov 07, 2019
Getting your storage setup just right often takes making painful mistakes first. We share ours, our current storage setups, when ZFS is not the tool for the job, and what you should consider when protecting your data.
Plus, we share a few recent project mishaps.
Links:
The Perfect Media Server - 2019 Edition — Reliable means you don't lose data. And that's exactly what the MergerFS + Snapraid combo I first wrote about in 2016 has provided. A solid, boring and reliable way of storing multiple TBs of data with little fuss.
New Hard Drive rituals — It is for these reasons that I now religiously do not commit any data to a drive until it has undergone at least one full cycle
The 'hidden' cost of using ZFS for your home NAS — With ZFS, you either have to buy all storage you expect to need upfront, or you will be wasting a few hard drives on redundancy you don't need.
A Chat with mergerfs Developer — Alex, Drew from ChooseLinux and Brent (of the Brunch fame) sit down with Antonio Musumeci, the developer of mergerfs during the JB sprint.
The earliest Unix code, how to replace fail2ban with blacklistd, OpenBSD crossed 400k commits, how to install Bolt CMS on FreeBSD, optimized hammer2, appeasing the OSI 7-layer burrito guys, and more.
What is it that runs the servers that hold our online world, be it the web or the cloud? What enables the mobile apps that are at the center of increasingly on-demand lives in the developed world and of mobile banking and messaging in the developing world? The answer is the operating system Unix and its many descendants: Linux, Android, BSD Unix, MacOS, iOS—the list goes on and on. Want to glimpse the Unix in your Mac? Open a Terminal window and enter “man roff” to view the Unix manual entry for an early text formatting program that lives within your operating system.
2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of Unix. In the summer of 1969, that same summer that saw humankind’s first steps on the surface of the Moon, computer scientists at the Bell Telephone Laboratories—most centrally Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie—began the construction of a new operating system, using a then-aging DEC PDP-7 computer at the labs.
As many of you have heard in the past, the first online message ever sent between two computers was "lo", just over 50 years ago, on Oct. 29, 1969.
It was supposed to say "log," but the computer sending the message — based at UCLA — crashed before the letter "g" was typed. A computer at Stanford 560 kilometres away was supposed to fill in the remaining characters "in," as in "log in."
The CBC Radio show, “The Current” has a half-hour interview with the man who sent that message, Leonard Kleinrock, distinguished professor of computer science at UCLA
"The idea of the network was you could sit at one computer, log on through the network to a remote computer and use its services there,"
50 years later, the internet has become so ubiquitous that it has almost been rendered invisible. There's hardly an aspect in our daily lives that hasn't been touched and transformed by it.
Q: Take us back to that day 50 years ago. Did you have the sense that this was going to be something you'd be talking about a half a century later?
A: Well, yes and no. Four months before that message was sent, there was a press release that came out of UCLA in which it quotes me as describing what my vision for this network would become. Basically what it said is that this network would be always on, always available. Anybody with any device could get on at anytime from any location, and it would be invisible.
Well, what I missed ... was that this is going to become a social network. People talking to people. Not computers talking to computers, but [the] human element.
Q: Can you briefly explain what you were working on in that lab? Why were you trying to get computers to actually talk to one another?
A: As an MIT graduate student, years before, I recognized I was surrounded by computers and I realized there was no effective [or efficient] way for them to communicate. I did my dissertation, my research, on establishing a mathematical theory of how these networks would work. But there was no such network existing. AT&T said it won't work and, even if it does, we want nothing to do with it.
So I had to wait around for years until the Advanced Research Projects Agency within the Department of Defence decided they needed a network to connect together the computer scientists they were supervising and supporting.
Q: For all the promise of the internet, it has also developed some dark sides that I'm guessing pioneers like yourselves never anticipated.
A: We did not. I knew everybody on the internet at that time, and they were all well-behaved and they all believed in an open, shared free network. So we did not put in any security controls.
When the first spam email occurred, we began to see the dark side emerge as this network reached nefarious people sitting in basements with a high-speed connection, reaching out to millions of people instantaneously, at no cost in time or money, anonymously until all sorts of unpleasant events occurred, which we called the dark side.
But in those early days, I considered the network to be going through its teenage years. Hacking to spam, annoying kinds of effects. I thought that one day this network would mature and grow up. Well, in fact, it took a turn for the worse when nation states, organized crime and extremists came in and began to abuse the network in severe ways.
Q: Is there any part of you that regrets giving birth to this?
A: Absolutely not. The greater good is much more important.
blacklistd(8) provides an API that can be used by network daemons to communicate with a packet filter via a daemon to enforce opening and closing ports dynamically based on policy.
The interface to the packet filter is in /libexec/blacklistd-helper (this is currently designed for npf) and the configuration file (inspired from inetd.conf) is in etc/blacklistd.conf
Now, blacklistd(8) will require bpfjit(4) (Just-In-Time compiler for Berkeley Packet Filter) in order to properly work, in addition to, naturally, npf(7) as frontend and syslogd(8), as a backend to print diagnostic messages. Also remember npf shall rely on the npflog* virtual network interface to provide logging for tcpdump() to use.
Unfortunately (dont' ask me why ??) in 8.1 all the required kernel components are still not compiled by default in the GENERIC kernel (though they are in HEAD), and are rather provided as modules. Enabling NPF and blacklistd services would normally result in them being automatically loaded as root, but predictably on securelevel=1 this is not going to happen.
Sometime in the last week OpenBSD crossed 400,000 commits (*) upon all our repositories since starting at 1995/10/18 08:37:01 Canada/Mountain. That's a lot of commits by a lot of amazing people.
(*) by one measure. Since the repository is so large and old, there are a variety of quirks including ChangeLog missing entries and branches not convertible to other repo forms, so measuring is hard. If you think you've got a great way of measuring, don't be so sure of yourself -- you may have overcounted or undercounted.
Subject to the notes Theo made about under and over counting, FreeBSD should hit 1 million commits (base + ports + docs) some time in 2020
NetBSD + pkgsrc are approaching 600,000, but of course pkgsrc covers other operating systems too
Bolt is a sophisticated, lightweight and simple CMS built with PHP. It is released under the open-source MIT-license and source code is hosted as a public repository on Github. A bolt is a tool for Content Management, which strives to be as simple and straightforward as possible. It is quick to set up, easy to configure, uses elegant templates. Bolt is created using modern open-source libraries and is best suited to build sites in HTML5 with modern markup. In this tutorial, we will go through the Bolt CMS installation on FreeBSD 12 system by using Nginx as a web server, MySQL as a database server, and optionally you can secure the transport layer by using acme.sh client and Let's Encrypt certificate authority to add SSL support.
Requirements
The system requirements for Bolt are modest, and it should run on any fairly modern web server:
PHP version 5.5.9 or higher with the following common PHP extensions: pdo, mysqlnd, pgsql, openssl, curl, gd, intl, json, mbstring, opcache, posix, xml, fileinfo, exif, zip.
Access to SQLite (which comes bundled with PHP), or MySQL or PostgreSQL.
Apache with mod_rewrite enabled (.htaccess files) or Nginx (virtual host configuration covered below).
Refactor the XOP groups in order to be able to queue strategy calls, whenever possible, to the same CPU as the issuer. This optimizes several cases and reduces unnecessary IPI traffic between cores. The next best thing to do would be to not queue certain XOPs to an H2 support thread at all, but I would like to keep the threads intact for later clustering work. The best scaling case for this is when one has a large number of user threads doing I/O. One instance of a single-threaded program on an otherwise idle machine might see a slightly reduction in performance but at the same time we completely avoid unnecessarily spamming all cores in the system on the behalf of a single program, so overhead is also significantly lower.
This will tend to increase the number of H2 support threads since we need a certain degree of multiplication for domain separation.
This should significantly increase I/O performance for multi-threaded workloads.
I've seen the writing on the wall, and while for now you can configure Firefox not to use DoH, I'm not confident enough to think it will remain that way. To that end, I've finally set up my own DoH server for use at Chez Boca. It only involved setting up my own CA to generate the appropriate certificates, install my CA certificate into Firefox, configure Apache to run over HTTP/2 (THANK YOU SO VERY XXXXXXX MUCH GOOGLE FOR SHOVING THIS HTTP/2 XXXXXXXX DOWN OUR THROATS!—no, I'm not bitter) and write a 150 line script that just queries my own local DNS, because, you know, it's more XXXXXXX secure or some XXXXXXXX reason like that.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Dell, elementary, Fedora, oh my! | LINUX Unplugged 326
Nov 05, 2019
Dell expands their linux hardware lineup, why elementary OS's Flatpak support sets the bar, and we chat with Christian Schaller of Red Hat about Fedora 31 and what's around the corner.
Plus an update on Ubuntu on the Raspberry Pi 4 and a pick that's just for Wes.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Christian F.K. Schaller, Daniel Fore, and Martin Wimpress.
Brunch with Brent: A Chat with Martin Wimpress | Jupiter Extras 29
Nov 04, 2019
Brent sits down with Martin Wimpress, co-founder and project lead for Ubuntu MATE https://ubuntu-mate.org/, Director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical, and co-host of Ubuntu Podcast https://ubuntupodcast.org/.
We dive into why innovative, creative people are attracted to open source, his journey through Linux and podcasting, his feelings on his new position in the Desktop Team at Canonical, and much more.
Fedora arrives from the future, the big players line up behind KernelCI, and researchers claim significant vulnerabilities in Horde.
Plus, Google's new dashboard for WordPress and ProtonMail's apps go open source.
Links:
Fedora 31 is officially here! — This release features GNOME 3.34, which brings significant performance enhancements which will be especially noticeable on lower-powered hardware.
Fedora Server brings the latest in cutting-edge open source server software to systems administrators in an easy-to-deploy fashion.
Distributed Linux Testing Platform KernelCI Secures Funding and Long-Term Sustainability — "Testing is traditionally done only on the most common hardware. But because Linux runs on more hardware than any other operating system, it's important to also test it on all that hardware. The Linux Foundation's support is enabling us to expand the great work we started five years ago and sets us up for a bright future with a growing community,"
Hackers can steal the contents of Horde webmail inboxes with one click — Horde is one of the most popular free and open-source web email systems available. It’s built and maintained by a core team of developers, with contributions from the wider open-source community. It’s used by universities, libraries and many web hosting providers as the default email client.
A Chat with mergerfs Developer Antonio Musumeci | Jupiter Extras 28
Oct 31, 2019
Alex, Drew from ChooseLinux, and Brent (of the Brunch fame) sit down with Antonio Musumeci, the developer of mergerfs during the JB sprint. It is a union filesystem geared towards simplifying storage and management of files across numerous commodity storage devices, it is similar to mhddfs, unionfs, and aufs.
mergerfs makes JBOD (Just a Bunch Of Drives) appear like an ‘array’ of drives. mergerfs transparently translates read/write commands to the underlying drives from a single mount point, such as /mnt/storage. Point all your applications at /mnt/storage and forget about how the underlying storage is architected, mergerfs handles the rest transparently. Multiple mismatched size drives? No problem.
Happy Halloween, 2019! | Jupiter Extras 27
Oct 31, 2019
Drew and Jackie DeVore talk about talk about their Halloween obsession, and give out a few recommendations for tech-related movies, shows, and podcasts to enjoy.
In the summer of 1969 computer scientists Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created the first implementation of Unix with the goal of designing an elegant and economical operating system for a little-used PDP-7 minicomputer at Bell Labs. That modest project, however, would have a far-reaching legacy. Unix made large-scale networking of diverse computing systems — and the Internet — practical. The Unix team went on to develop the C language, which brought an unprecedented combination of efficiency and expressiveness to programming. Both made computing more "portable". Today, Linux, the most popular descendent of Unix, powers the vast majority of servers, and elements of Unix and Linux are found in most mobile devices. Meanwhile C++ remains one of the most widely used programming languages today. Unix may be a half-century old but its influence is only growing.
In my prior blog post, I traced Ken's scrounged PDP-7 to SN 34. In this post I'll show that we have actual video footage of that PDP-7 due to an old film from Bell Labs. this gives us almost a minute of footage of the PDP-7 Ken later used to create Unix.
Hello friends and followers, Lots of plugin and ports updates this time with a few minor improvements in all core areas. Behind the scenes we are starting to migrate the base system to version
12.1 which is supposed to hit the next 20.1 release. Stay tuned for more infos in the next month or so.
Here are the full patch notes:
system: show all swap partitions in system information widget
system: flatten services_get() in preparation for removal
system: pin Syslog-ng version to specific package name
system: fix LDAP/StartTLS with user import page
system: fix a PHP warning on authentication server page
system: replace most subprocess.call use
interfaces: fix devd handling of carp devices (contributed by stumbaumr)
firewall: improve firewall rules inline toggles
firewall: only allow TCP flags on TCP protocol
firewall: simplify help text for direction setting
firewall: make protocol log summary case insensitive
reporting: ignore malformed flow records
captive portal: fix type mismatch for timeout read
dhcp: add note for static lease limitation with lease registration (contributed by Northguy)
ipsec: add margintime and rekeyfuzz options
ipsec: clear $dpdline correctly if not set
ui: fix tokenizer reorder on multiple saves
plugins: os-acme-client 1.26[1]
plugins: os-bind will reload bind on record change (contributed by blablup)
plugins: os-etpro-telemetry minor subprocess.call replacement
plugins: os-freeradius 1.9.4[2]
plugins: os-frr 1.12[3]
plugins: os-haproxy 2.19[4]
plugins: os-mailtrail 1.2[5]
plugins: os-postfix 1.11[6]
plugins: os-rspamd 1.8[7]
plugins: os-sunnyvalley LibreSSL support (contributed by Sunny Valley Networks)
plugins: os-telegraf 1.7.6[8]
plugins: os-theme-cicada 1.21 (contributed by Team Rebellion)
plugins: os-theme-tukan 1.21 (contributed by Team Rebellion)
plugins: os-tinc minor subprocess.call replacement
Since the release of 19.09, I have seen a lot of misunderstandings on what is GhostBSD and the future of GhostBSD. GhostBSD is based on TrueOS with FreeBSD 12 STABLE with our twist to it. We are still continuing to use TrueOS for OpenRC, and the new package's system for the base system that is built from ports. GhostBSD is becoming a slow-moving rolling release base on the latest TrueOS with FreeBSD 12 STABLE. When FreeBSD 13 STABLE gets released, GhostBSD will be upgraded to TrueOS with FreeBSD 13 STABLE.
Our official desktop is MATE, which means that the leading developer of GhostBSD does not officially support XFCE. Community releases are maintained by the community and for the community. GhostBSD project will provide help to build and to host the community release. If anyone wants to have a particular desktop supported, it is up to the community. Sure I will help where I can, answer questions and guide new community members that contribute to community release.
There is some effort going on for Plasma5 desktop. If anyone is interested in helping with XFCE and Plasma5 or in creating another community release, you are well come to contribute. Also, Contribution to the GhostBSD base system, to ports and new ports, and in house software are welcome. We are mostly active on Telegram https://t.me/ghostbsd, but you can also reach us on the forum.
Looking for a lightweight VPN client, but are not ready to spend a monthly recurring amount on a VPN? VPNs can be expensive depending upon the quality of service and amount of privacy you want. A good VPN plan can easily set you back by 10$ a month and even that doesn’t guarantee your privacy. There is no way to be sure whether the VPN is storing your confidential information and traffic logs or not. sshuttle is the answer to your problem it provides VPN over ssh and in this article we’re going to explore this cheap yet powerful alternative to the expensive VPNs. By using open source tools you can control your own privacy.
VPN over SSH – sshuttle
sshuttle is an awesome program that allows you to create a VPN connection from your local machine to any remote server that you have ssh access on. The tunnel established over the ssh connection can then be used to route all your traffic from client machine through the remote machine including all the dns traffic. In the bare bones sshuttle is just a proxy server which runs on the client machine and forwards all the traffic to a ssh tunnel. Since its open source it holds quite a lot of major advantages over traditional VPN.
ssh(1), sshd(8), ssh-add(1), ssh-keygen(1): an exploitable integer overflow bug was found in the private key parsing code for the XMSS key type. This key type is still experimental and support for it is not compiled by default. No user-facing autoconf option exists in portable OpenSSH to enable it. This bug was found by Adam Zabrocki and reported via SecuriTeam's SSD program.
ssh(1), sshd(8), ssh-agent(1): add protection for private keys at rest in RAM against speculation and memory side-channel attacks like Spectre, Meltdown and Rambleed. This release encrypts private keys when they are not in use with a symmetric key that is derived from a relatively large "prekey" consisting of random data (currently 16KB).
This release includes a number of changes that may affect existing configurations:
ssh-keygen(1): when acting as a CA and signing certificates with an RSA key, default to using the rsa-sha2-512 signature algorithm. Certificates signed by RSA keys will therefore be incompatible with OpenSSH versions prior to 7.2 unless the default is overridden (using "ssh-keygen -t ssh-rsa -s ...").
New Features
ssh(1): Allow %n to be expanded in ProxyCommand strings
ssh(1), sshd(8): Allow prepending a list of algorithms to the default set by starting the list with the '' character, E.g. "HostKeyAlgorithms ssh-ed25519"
ssh-keygen(1): add an experimental lightweight signature and verification ability. Signatures may be made using regular ssh keys held on disk or stored in a ssh-agent and verified against an authorized_keys-like list of allowed keys. Signatures embed a namespace that prevents confusion and attacks between different usage domains (e.g. files vs email).
ssh-keygen(1): print key comment when extracting public key from a private key.
ssh-keygen(1): accept the verbose flag when searching for host keys in known hosts (i.e. "ssh-keygen -vF host") to print the matching host's random-art signature too.
All: support PKCS8 as an optional format for storage of private keys to disk. The OpenSSH native key format remains the default, but PKCS8 is a superior format to PEM if interoperability with non-OpenSSH software is required, as it may use a less insecure key derivation function than PEM's.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
KaOS + How We Install Software | Choose Linux 21
Oct 31, 2019
There are numerous ways to install software on a modern Linux system and we each have a different approach.
Plus a lean and focused KDE experience in DistroHoppers.
Links:
KaOS — KaOS is an independent distribution focused on Qt and KDE.
KaOS Sponsors — A FOSS project like KaOS really need that some companies and individuals are willing to sponsor through donating mirror space, hardware and other vital infrastructure.
Flatpak — Flatpak is a next-generation technology for building and distributing desktop applications on Linux.
Snapcraft — Publish your app for Linux users — for desktop, cloud, and Internet of Things.
GNOME decides to fight, Ubuntu's desktop director steps down, GitLab backs off its telemetry plans, and we've got the data on Google's Project Treble.
Plus, the latest Firefox has a new dashboard, and it looks like Disney+ won't work on Linux.
Links:
GNOME files defense against patent troll — Agreeing to this would leave this patent live, and allow this to be used as a weapon against countless others. We will stand firm against this baseless attack, not just for GNOME and Shotwell, but for all free and open source software projects.
Episode Blinking Eye Patches | User Error 77
Oct 25, 2019
Tech mistakes, communicating with spouses, and why you shouldn't let popey drive you anywhere.
Plus patching humans as if they were code, back to basics web browsing, cold drinks, and conkers.
00:00:31 Is there anything you close your eyes while doing that other people might think is odd? 00:04:32 What's your biggest or most significant tech blunder? 00:11:09 What's your favorite thing about your least favorite season, and your least favorite thing about your favorite season? 00:16:55 If humans were code and you could patch a bug/feature/issue which exists in most humans, what would it be, and what would you "fix"? 00:23:29 If your preferred search engine offered a function to exclude all websites utilizing anything other than HTML and CSS - would you use it? 00:27:16 Somewhere there’s a sliding scale in your mind of when a partner deserves to be in on a choice. Where does that begin and why?
The Joy of Plex with Elan Feingold | Self-Hosted 4
Oct 24, 2019
Plex Co-Founder and CTO Elan Feingold shares why he started Plex, its future direction, his home setup, his love for electric cars and the beach.
Also Alex convinces Chris to give Ghost (the blogging platform) a try.
Texas Cyber Summit — Texas Cyber Summit is a premier cyber security summit held in San Antonio Texas, with the mission of spreading knowledge and interest in the field of Cyber Security.
Red vs. Blue — ThreatGEN™ Red vs. Blue is the industry's first multi-player strategy computer game where players compete against each other, head-to-head, to take control/maintain control of a computer network.
Howdy Neighbor Smart House — “Howdy Neighbor” is GRIMM’s Internet of Things (IoT) Capture the Flag (CTF)-like challenge.
Linux Action News 128
Oct 20, 2019
A new Ubuntu has promise, Linux on Dex is dead, and our strong reaction to Google pulling two open-source apps from the Play Store.
Plus a big boost for ARM on Linux, and our thoughts on recent Red Hat news.
Links:
Ubuntu 19.10 Released — Ubuntu 19.10 “Eoan Ermine” boasts an upgraded Linux kernel along with faster boot times, updated themes, and experimental ZFS file system support. Whether or not you upgrade, Ermine shows what to expect from Ubuntu’s next LTS release, due April 2020.
Samsung ends Linux on DeX beta with Android 10 — Samsung will no longer provide support on future OS and device releases. The company also notes that users will not be able to perform a version rollback to Android 9 Pie once they have upgraded to Android 10.
Bare Metal Arm-Based EC2 Instances — Just like for existing bare metal instances (M5, M5d, R5, R5d, z1d, and so forth), your operating system runs directly on the underlying hardware with direct access to the processor.
andOTP removed from Google Play Store — andOTP was recently removed from the Google Play Store for violating their payment terms.
This is most likely due to the fact that we offer in-app donation links that DO NOT use Googles In-App billing, which is against their terms.
WireGuard removed from Google Play Store — They said it was because we're in violation of their "Payments Policy", presumably because we have a link inside the app that opens the user's web browser to wireguard.com/donations/.
We dive into Ubuntu 19.10's experimental ZFS installer and share our tips for making the most of ZFS on root.
Plus why you may want to skip Nest Wifi, and our latest explorations of long range wireless protocols.
Single Board Computers | Choose Linux 20
Oct 17, 2019
We are joined by special guest Chz who is a long-time user of single board computers to talk about how we use boards like the Raspberry Pi, Orange Pi, and ROCKPro64.
/* Title: Episode 320: Codebase: neck deep Description: FreeBSD on the Google Pixelbook, Porting NetBSD to the AMD x86-64, ZFS performance really does degrade as you approach quota limits, Fixing up KA9Q-unix, HAMMER2 and fsck for review, the return of startx(1) for non-root users, and more.
FreeBSD and custom firmware on the Google Pixelbook
Back in 2015, I jumped on the ThinkPad bandwagon by getting an X240 to run FreeBSD on. Unlike most people in the ThinkPad crowd, I actually liked the clickpad and didn\u2019t use the trackpoint much. But this summer I\u2019ve decided that it was time for something newer. I wanted something..
lighter and thinner (ha, turns out this is actually important, I got tired of carrying a T H I C C laptop - Apple was right all along);
with a 3:2 display (why is Lenovo making these Serious Work\u2122 laptops 16:9 in the first place?? 16:9 is awful in below-13-inch sizes especially);
with a HiDPI display (and ideally with a good size for exact 2x scaling instead of fractional);
with USB-C ports;
without a dGPU, especially without an NVIDIA GPU;
assembled with screws and not glue (I don\u2019t necessarily need expansion and stuff in a laptop all that much, but being able to replace the battery without dealing with a glued chassis is good);
supported by FreeBSD of course (\u201csome development required\u201d is okay but I\u2019m not going to write big drivers);
how about something with open source firmware, that would be fun.
I was considering a ThinkPad X1 Carbon from an old generation - the one from the same year as the X230 is corebootable, so that\u2019s fun. But going back in processor generations just doesn\u2019t feel great. I want something more efficient, not less!
And then I discovered the Pixelbook. Other than the big huge large bezels around the screen, I liked everything about it. Thin aluminum design, a 3:2 HiDPI screen, rubber palm rests (why isn\u2019t every laptop ever doing that?!), the \u201cconvertibleness\u201d (flip the screen around to turn it into.. something rather big for a tablet, but it is useful actually), a Wacom touchscreen that supports a pen, mostly reasonable hardware (Intel Wi-Fi), and that famous coreboot support (Chromebooks\u2019 stock firmware is coreboot + depthcharge).
So here it is, my new laptop, a Google Pixelbook.
Conclusion
Pixelbook, FreeBSD, coreboot, EDK2 good.
Seriously, I have no big words to say, other than just recommending this laptop to FOSS enthusiasts :)
NetBSD is known as a very portable operating system, currently running on 44 different architectures (12 different types of CPU). This paper takes a look at what has been done to make it portable, and how this has decreased the amount of effort needed to port NetBSD to a new architecture. The new AMD x86-64 architecture, of which the specifications were published at the end of 2000, with hardware to follow in 2002, is used as an example.
Portability
Supporting multiple platforms was a primary goal of the NetBSD project from the start. As NetBSD was ported to more and more platforms, the NetBSD kernel code was adapted to become more portable along the way.
General
Generally, code is shared between ports as much as possible. In NetBSD, it should always be considered if the code can be assumed to be useful on other architectures, present or future. If so, it is machine-independent and put it in an appropriate place in the source tree. When writing code that is intended to be machine-independent, and it contains conditional preprocessor statements depending on the architecture, then the code is likely wrong, or an extra abstraction layer is needed to get rid of these statements.
Types
Assumptions about the size of any type are not made. Assumptions made about type sizes on 32-bit platforms were a large problem when 64-bit platforms came around. Most of the problems of this kind had to be dealt with when NetBSD was ported to the DEC Alpha in 1994. A variation on this problem had to be dealt with with the UltraSPARC (sparc64) port in 1998, which is 64-bit, but big endian (vs. the little-endianness of the Alpha). When interacting with datastructures of a fixed size, such as on-disk metadata for filesystems, or datastructures directly interpreted by device hardware, explicitly sized types are used, such as uint32_t, int8_t, etc.
Conclusions and future work
The port of NetBSD to AMD's x86-64 architecture was done in six weeks, which confirms NetBSD's reputation as being a very portable operating system. One week was spent setting up the cross-toolchain and reading the x86-64 specifications, three weeks were spent writing the kernel code, one week was spent writing the userspace code, and one week testing and debugging it all. No problems were observed in any of the machine-independent parts of the kernel during test runs; all (simulated) device drivers, file systems, etc, worked without modification.
Every so often (currently monthly), there is an "OpenZFS leadership meeting". What this really means is 'lead developers from the various ZFS implementations get together to talk about things'. Announcements and meeting notes from these meetings get sent out to various mailing lists, including the ZFS on Linux ones.
In the September meeting notes, I read a very interesting (to me) agenda item:
Relax quota semantics for improved performance (Allan Jude)
Problem: As you approach quotas, ZFS performance degrades.
Proposal: Can we have a property like quota-policy=strict or loose, where we can optionally allow ZFS to run over the quota as long as performance is not decreased.
This is very interesting to me because of two reasons. First, in the past we have definitely seen significant problems on our OmniOS machines, both when an entire pool hits a quota limit and when a single filesystem hits a refquota limit. It's nice to know that this wasn't just our imagination and that there is a real issue here. Even better, it might someday be improved (and perhaps in a way that we can use at least some of the time).
Second, any number of people here run very close to and sometimes at the quota limits of both filesystems and pools, fundamentally because people aren't willing to buy more space. We have in the past assumed that this was relatively harmless and would only make people run out of space. If this is a known issue that causes serious performance degradation, well, I don't know if there's anything we can do, but at least we're going to have to think about it and maybe push harder at people. The first step will have to be learning the details of what's going on at the ZFS level to cause the slowdown. (It's apparently similar to what happens when the pool is almost full, but I don't know the specifics of that either.)
With that said, we don't seem to have seen clear adverse effects on our Linux fileservers, and they've definitely run into quota limits (repeatedly). One possible reason for this is that having lots of RAM and SSDs makes the effects mostly go away. Another possible reason is that we haven't been looking closely enough to see that we're experiencing global slowdowns that correlate to filesystems hitting quota limits. We've had issues before with somewhat subtle slowdowns that we didn't understand (cf), so I can't discount that we're having it happen again.
I'll preface this by saying - yes, I'm still neck deep in FreeBSD's wifi stack and 802.11ac support, but it turns out it's slow work to fix 15 year old locking related issues that worked fine on 11abg cards, kinda worked ok on 11n cards, and are terrible for these 11ac cards. I'll .. get there.
Anyhoo, I've finally been mucking around with AX.25 packet radio. I've been wanting to do this since I was a teenager and found out about its existence, but back in high school and .. well, until a few years ago really .. I didn't have my amateur radio licence. But, now I do, and I've done a bunch of other stuff with a bunch of other radios. The main stumbling block? All my devices are either Apple products or run FreeBSD - and none of them have useful AX.25 stacks. The main stacks of choice these days run on Linux, Windows or are a full hardware TNC.
So yes, I was avoiding hacking on AX.25 stuff because there wasn't a BSD compatible AX.25 stack. I'm 40 now, leave me be.
But! A few weeks ago I found that someone was still running a packet BBS out of San Francisco. And amazingly, his local node ran on FreeBSD! It turns out Jeremy (KK6JJJ) ported both an old copy of KA9Q and N0ARY-BBS to run on FreeBSD! Cool!
I grabbed my 2m radio (which is already cabled up for digital modes), compiled up his KA9Q port, figured out how to get it to speak to Direwolf, and .. ok. Well, it worked. Kinda.
HAMMER2 is Copy on Write, meaning changes are made to copies of existing data. This means operations are generally atomic and can survive a power outage, etc. (You should read up on it!) However, there\u2019s now a fsck command, useful if you want a report of data validity rather than any manual repair process.
Mark Kettenis (kettenis@) has recently committed changes which restore a certain amount of startx(1)/xinit(1) functionality for non-root users. The commit messages explain the situation:
CVSROOT: /cvs
Module name: src
Changes by: kettenis@cvs.openbsd.org 2019/09/15 06:25:41
Modified files:
etc/etc.amd64 : fbtab
etc/etc.arm64 : fbtab
etc/etc.hppa : fbtab
etc/etc.i386 : fbtab
etc/etc.loongson: fbtab
etc/etc.luna88k: fbtab
etc/etc.macppc : fbtab
etc/etc.octeon : fbtab
etc/etc.sgi : fbtab
etc/etc.sparc64: fbtab
Log message:
Add ttyC4 to lost of devices to change when logging in on ttyC0 (and in some cases also the serial console) such that X can use it as its VT when running without root privileges.
ok jsg@, matthieu@
CVSROOT: /cvs
Module name: xenocara
Changes by: kettenis@cvs.openbsd.org 2019/09/15 06:31:08
Modified files:
xserver/hw/xfree86/common: xf86AutoConfig.c
Log message:
Add modesetting driver as a fall-back when appropriate such that we can use it when running without root privileges which prevents us from scanning the PCI bus.
This makes startx(1)/xinit(1) work again on modern systems with inteldrm(4), radeondrm(4) and amdgpu(4). In some cases this will result in using a different driver than with xenodm(4) which may expose issues (e.g. when we prefer the intel Xorg driver) or loss of acceleration (e.g. older cards supported by radeondrm(4)).
ok jsg@, matthieu@
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What is a Container? | Jupiter Extras 23
Oct 16, 2019
Containers changed the way the IT world deploys software. We give you our take on technologies such as docker (including docker-compose), Kubernetes and highlight a few of our favorite containers.
Pod Overview - Kubernetes — A Pod is the basic execution unit of a Kubernetes application–the smallest and simplest unit in the Kubernetes object model that you create or deploy. A Pod represents processes running on your Cluster.
It's Pronounced 19.10 | LINUX Unplugged 323
Oct 15, 2019
We risk it all and try ZFS on root with Ubuntu 19.10, and share our first impressions and what improvements we can't live without.
Plus, exciting news for both Plasma and GNOME, coreboot laptops from System76, and too many picks.
Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, and Martin Wimpress.
A Chat with Allan Jude | Jupiter Extras 22
Oct 15, 2019
Brent sits down for an in-person chat with Allan Jude for a retrospective storytelling of his beginnings in BSD, his long history with podcasting, BSDNow and Jupiter Broadcasting, a beginner's guide to the benefits of FreeBSD, with technical nuggets and nostalgic bits throughout.
Allan Jude wears many hats including FreeBSD developer and member of the FreeBSD Core team, ZFS expert, co-founder and VP Engineering at Klara Inc., co-founder and VP Operations at ScaleEngine Inc., host of BSDNow, former host of TechSNAP among many others.
Richard Stallman's GNU leadership is challenged by an influential group of maintainers, SUSE drops OpenStack "for the customer," and Google claims Stadia will be faster than a gaming PC.
Plus OpenLibra aims to save us from Facebook but already has a miss, lousy news for Telegram, and enormous changes for AMP.
Links:
FSF and GNU — GNU decision-making has largely been in the hands of GNU leadership. Since RMS resigned as president of the FSF, but not as head of GNU ("Chief GNUisance"), the FSF is now working with GNU leadership on a shared understanding of the relationship for the future.
Joint statement on the GNU Project — Yet, we must also acknowledge that Stallman’s behavior over the years has undermined a core value of the GNU project: the empowerment of all computer users. GNU is not fulfilling its mission when the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to.
No radical changes in GNU Project — As Chief GNUisance, I'd like to reassure the community
that there won't be any radical changes in the GNU Project's goals, principles and policies.
SUSE is dropping OpenStack and embracing Kubernetes — As we make these bold customer-driven investments and in order to maximize these opportunities, SUSE has carefully reviewed its business and has decided to cease production of new versions of SUSE OpenStack Cloud and to discontinue sales of SUSE OpenStack Cloud.
Ghost, Meat, or Block? | User Error 76
Oct 11, 2019
Our first computers, the future of food, and ethical sources of funds.
Plus the spooky reason that Popey unfollowed Joe.
00:00:24 What was the first computer you ever used? 00:11:13 Do you believe in ghosts? 00:15:28 Would you eat "clean meat"? 00:23:18 Ignore, mute, or block? 00:27:45 Should we refuse to take money from anyone we may object to?
Home Network Under $200 | Self-Hosted 3
Oct 10, 2019
How far can you get with a Raspberry Pi 4? We go all in and find out.
Plus our favorite travel router with WireGuard built in, and Chris kicks off Project Off-Grid. Meanwhile, Alex adopts proprietary software.
Links:
5.11 Taclite Trousers — Constructed using premium polyester and cotton mechanical stretch Taclite ripstop fabric with a triple-stitching built, this pair of pants is sturdy and flexible to ensure maximum performance in the field.
GL-AR750S - The SLATE Our favorite travel router — The first dual-band Gigabit AC travel router. We upgrade Ethernet ports (totally 3) to Gigabit ports so that it get faster speed in your travel. We also added 128MB Nand Flash to provide dual flash for more storage and faster operation speed. It has a MicroSD (TF) slot which increase your storage space up to 128GB.
Migrate qcow2 images from KVM to VMWare — I recently switched from Proxmox to ESXI for my primary Hypervisor due to better support for automation tools like Ansible and Terraform plus better integrations with Red Hat Satellite.
Gotchas when migrating Fedora qcow2 images to vmware — My issue was that the initramfs didn't contain the necessary drivers for the emulated hardware and as such the VM refused to boot except into emergency mode.
Lack Rack, Jack | BSD Now 319
Oct 09, 2019
Causing ZFS corruption for fun, NetBSD Assembly Programming Tutorial, The IKEA Lack Rack for Servers, a new OmniOS Community Edition LTS has been published, List Block Devices on FreeBSD lsblk(8) Style, Project Trident 19.10 available, and more.
Datto backs up data, a lot of it. At the time of writing Datto has over 500 PB of data stored on ZFS. This count includes both backup appliances that are sent to customer sites, as well as cloud storage servers that are used for secondary and tertiary backup of those appliances. At this scale drive swaps are a daily occurrence, and data corruption is inevitable. How we handle this corruption when it happens determines whether we truly lose data, or successfully restore from secondary backup. In this post we'll be showing you how at Datto we intentionally cause corruption in our testing environments, to ensure we're building software that can properly handle these scenarios.
Causing Corruption
Since this is a mirror setup, a naive solution to cause corruption would be to randomly dd the same sectors of both /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc. This works, but is equally likely to just overwrite random unused space, or take down the zpool entirely. What we really want is to corrupt a specific snapshot, or even a specific file in that snapshot, to simulate a more realistic minor corruption event. Luckily we have a tool called zdb that lets us view some low level information about datasets.
Conclusion
At the 500 PB scale, it's not a matter of if data corruption will happen but when. Intentionally causing corruption is one of the strategies we use to ensure we're building software that can handle these rare (but inevitable) events.
To others out there using ZFS: I'm curious to hear how you've solved this problem. We did quite a bit of experimentation with zinject before going with this more brute force method. So I'd be especially interested if you've had luck simply simulating corruption with zinject.
A sparc64 version is also being prepared and will be added when done
This post describes how to write a simple hello world program in pure assembly on NetBSD/amd64. We will not use (nor link against) libc, nor use gcc to compile it. I will be using GNU as (gas), and therefore the AT&T syntax instead of Intel.
Why assembly?
Why not? Because it's fun to program in assembly directly. Contrary to a popular belief assembly programs aren't always faster than what optimizing compilers produce. Nevertheless it's good to be able to read assembly, especially when debugging C programs
Due to the nature of the guide, visit the site for the complete breakdown
First occurrence on eth0:2010 Winterlan, the LackRack is the ultimate, low-cost, high shininess solution for your modular datacenter-in-the-living-room. Featuring the LACK (side table) from Ikea, the LackRack is an easy-to-implement, exact-fit datacenter building block. It's a little known fact that we have seen Google engineers tinker with Lack tables since way back in 2009.
The LackRack will certainly make its appearance again this summer at eth0:2010 Summer.
Summary
When temporarily not in use, multiple LackRacks can be stacked in a space-efficient way without disassembly, unlike competing 19" server racks.
The LackRack was first seen on eth0:2010 Winterlan in the no-shoe Lounge area. Its low-cost and perfect fit are great for mounting up to 8 U of 19" hardware, such as switches (see below), or perhaps other 19" gear. It's very easy to assemble, and thanks to the design, they are stable enough to hold (for example) 19" switches and you can put your bottle of Club-Mate on top! Multi-shiny LackRack can also be painted to your specific preferences and the airflow is unprecedented!
Howto
You can find a howto on buying a LackRack on this page. This includes the proof that a 19" switch can indeed be placed in the LackRack in its natural habitat!
The OmniOS Community Edition Association is proud to announce the general availability of OmniOS - r151030.
OmniOS is published according to a 6-month release cycle, r151030 LTS takes over from r151028, published in November 2018; and since it is a LTS release it also takes over from r151022. The r151030 LTS release will be supported for 3 Years. It is the first LTS release published by the OmniOS CE Association since taking over the reins from OmniTI in 2017. The next LTS release is scheduled for May 2021. The old stable r151026 release is now end-of-life. See the release schedule for further details.
This is only a small selection of the new features, and bug fixes in the new release; review the release notes for full details.
If you upgrade from r22 and want to see all new features added since then, make sure to also read the release notes for r24, r26 and r28.
For full relase notes including upgrade instructions;
When I have to work on Linux systems I usually miss many nice FreeBSD tools such as these for example to name the few: sockstat, gstat, top -b -o res, top -m io -o total, usbconfig, rcorder, beadm/bectl, idprio/rtprio,… but sometimes – which rarely happens – Linux has some very useful tool that is not available on FreeBSD. An example of such tool is lsblk(8) that does one thing and does it quite well – lists block devices and their contents. It has some problems like listing a disk that is entirely used under ZFS pool on which lsblk(8) displays two partitions instead of information about ZFS just being there – but we all know how much in some circles the CDDL licensed ZFS is unloved in that GPL world.
Example lsblk(8) output from Linux system:
$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sr0 11:0 1 1024M 0 rom
sda 8:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
|-sda1 8:1 0 500M 0 part /boot
`-sda2 8:2 0 931G 0 part
|-vg_local-lv_root (dm-0) 253:0 0 50G 0 lvm /
|-vg_local-lv_swap (dm-1) 253:1 0 17.7G 0 lvm [SWAP]
`-vg_local-lv_home (dm-2) 253:2 0 1.8T 0 lvm /home
sdc 8:32 0 232.9G 0 disk
`-sdc1 8:33 0 232.9G 0 part
`-md1 9:1 0 232.9G 0 raid10 /data
sdd 8:48 0 232.9G 0 disk
`-sdd1 8:49 0 232.9G 0 part
`-md1 9:1 0 232.9G 0 raid10 /data
What FreeBSD offers in this department? The camcontrol(8) and geom(8) commands are available. You can also use gpart(8) command to list partitions. Below you will find output of these commands from my single disk laptop. Please note that because of WordPress limitations I need to change all > < characters to ] [ ones in the commands outputs.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
A Chat with Angela Fisher | Jupiter Extras 21
Oct 09, 2019
Brent sits down with Angela Fisher, Executive Producer at Linux Academy, Jupiter Broadcasting co-founder, co-host of many JB productions including The FauxShow, and Tech Talk Today, among others. We touch on a variety of topics including the early beginnings of Jupiter Broadcasting, the origins of Brunch with Brent, aswell as many that are closer to her heart - from painting to parenting.
"You can pick your friends. You can pick your nose. But you can't pick your friends' nose." - A Wise Painted Rock
Microsoft's CEO says Windows doesn't matter anymore, but do we buy it? Nextcloud 17 goes enterprise-grade and the Internet’s horrifying new method for installing Google apps on Huawei phones.
Plus, Google finds an Android zero-day in the wild, and the Document Collective's new approach to earn revenue for LibreOffice.
Starting The Document Collective — In particular, selling branded versions of LibreOffice in the macOS and Windows app stores has not been something that TDF could tackle. The TDF board of directors is looking to change that with the creation of a new entity, The Document Collective (TDC)
Linode — High performance SSD Linux servers for all of your infrastructure needs.
Amazon Lightsail Deep Dive — This course aims to teach the skills essential to get the most from Lightsail.
The TrueNAS Library | BSD Now 318
Oct 02, 2019
DragonFlyBSD vs. FreeBSD vs. Linux benchmark on Ryzen 7, JFK Presidential Library chooses TrueNAS for digital archives, FreeBSD 12.1-beta is available, cool but obscure X11 tools, vBSDcon trip report, Project Trident 12-U7 is available, a couple new Unix artifacts, and more.
For those wondering how well FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD are handling AMD's new Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors, here are some benchmarks on a Ryzen 7 3700X with MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE where both of these popular BSD operating systems were working out-of-the-box. For some fun mid-week benchmarking, here are those results of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 up against openSUSE Tumbleweed and Ubuntu 19.04.
Back in July I looked at FreeBSD 12 on the Ryzen 9 3900X but at that time at least DragonFlyBSD had troubles booting on that system. When trying out the Ryzen 7 3700X + MSI GODLIKE X570 motherboard on the latest BIOS, everything "just worked" without any compatibility issues for either of these BSDs.
We've been eager to see how well DragonFlyBSD is performing on these new AMD Zen 2 CPUs with DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon having publicly expressed being impressed by the new AMD Ryzen 3000 series CPUs.
For comparison to those BSDs, Ubuntu 19.04 and openSUSE Tumbleweed were tested on the same hardware in their out-of-the-box configurations. While Clear Linux is normally the fastest, on this system Clear's power management defaults had caused issues in being unable to detect the Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe SSD used for testing and so we left it out this round.
All of the hardware was the same throughout testing as were the BIOS settings and running the Ryzen 7 3700X at stock speeds. (Any differences in the reported hardware for the system table just come down to differences in what is exposed by each OS for reporting.) All of the BSD/Linux benchmarks on this eight core / sixteen thread processor were run via the Phoronix Test Suite. In the case of FreeBSD 12.0, we benchmarked both with its default LLVM Clang 6.0 compiler as well as with GCC 9.1 so that it would match the GCC compiler being the default on the other operating systems under test.
iXsystems is honored to have the TrueNAS® M-Series unified storage selected to store, serve, and protect the entire digital archive for the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. This is in support of the collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum (JFK Library). Over the next several years, the Foundation hopes to grow the digital collection from hundreds of terabytes today to cover much more of the Archives at the Kennedy Library. Overall there is a total of 25 million documents, audio recordings, photos, and videos once the project is complete.
Having first deployed the TrueNAS M50-HA earlier in 2019, the JFK Library has now completed the migration of its existing digital collection and is now in the process of digitizing much of the rest of its vast collection.
Not only is the catalog of material vast, it is also diverse, with files being copied to the storage system from a variety of sources in numerous file types. To achieve this ambitious goal, the library required a high-end NAS system capable of sharing with a variety of systems throughout the digitization process. The digital archive will be served from the TrueNAS M50 and made available to both in-person and online visitors.
With precious material and information comes robust demands. The highly-available TrueNAS M-Series has multiple layers of protection to help keep data safe, including data scrubs, checksums, unlimited snapshots, replication, and more. TrueNAS is also inherently scalable with data shares only limited by the number of drives connected to the pool. Perfect for archival storage, the deployed TrueNAS M50 will grow with the library’s content, easily expanding its storage capacity over time as needed. Supporting a variety of protocols, multi-petabyte scalability in a single share, and anytime, uninterrupted capacity expansion, the TrueNAS M-Series ticked all the right boxes.
FreeBSD 12.0 is already approaching one year old while FreeBSD 12.1 is now on the way as the next installment with various bug/security fixes and other alterations to this BSD operating system.
FreeBSD 12.1 has many security/bug fixes throughout, no longer enables "-Werror" by default as a compiler flag (Update: This change is just for the GCC 4.2 compiler), has imported BearSSL into the FreeBSD base system as a lightweight TLS/SSL implementation, bzip2recover has been added, and a variety of mostly lower-level changes. More details can be found via the in-progress release notes.
For those with time to test this weekend, FreeBSD 12.1 Beta 1 is available for all prominent architectures.
The FreeBSD release team is planning for at least another beta or two and around three release candidates. If all goes well, FreeBSD 12.1 will be out in early November.
The fourth biennial vBSDCon was held in Reston, VA on September 5th through 7th and attracted attendees and presenters from not only the Washington, DC area, but also Canada, Germany, Kenya, and beyond. While MeetBSD caters to Silicon Valley BSD enthusiasts on even years, vBSDcon caters to East Coast and DC area enthusiasts on odd years. Verisign was again the key sponsor of vBSDcon 2019 but this year made a conscious effort to entrust the organization of the event to a team of community members led by Dan Langille, who you probably know as the lead BSDCan organizer. The result of this shift was a low key but professional event that fostered great conversation and brainstorming at every turn.
I fear we're drifting a bit here and the S/N ratio is dropping a bit w.r.t the actual history of Unix. Please no more on the relative merits of version control systems or alternative text processing systems.
So I'll try to distract you by saying this. I'm sitting on two artifacts that have recently been given to me:
by two large organisations
of great significance to Unix history
who want me to keep "mum" about them
as they are going to make announcements about them soon*
and I am going slowly crazy as I wait for them to be offically released. Now you have a new topic to talk about :-)
CentOS Stream and 8 have quite a bit for us to talk about, Docker's struggles go public, and the GNOME Foundation is facing a patent fight.
Plus the best bit of Android 10 Go, Microsoft gives serious thought to bringing Edge to Linux, and Stallman's role at GNU comes into question.
Links:
CentOS 8 Released — Hello and welcome to the first CentOS-8 release. The CentOS Linux distribution is a stable, predictable, manageable and reproducible platform derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Presenting CentOS Stream — CentOS Stream will be a rolling-release Linux distro that exists as a midstream between the upstream development in Fedora Linux and the downstream development for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is a cleared-path to contributing into future minor releases of RHEL while interacting with Red Hat and other open source developers. This pairs nicely with the existing contribution path in Fedora for future major releases of RHEL.`
Fedora and CentOS Stream — There’s not really been a consistent flow between the projects and product at all.
Docker is struggling financially — Docker CEO Rob Bearden sent an email to employees this week acknowledging challenges as the company tries to raise money.
GNOME Foundation facing lawsuit — The GNOME Foundation has been made aware of a lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC over patent 9,936,086. Rothschild allege that Shotwell, a free and open source personal photo manager infringes this patent.
Google announces Android 10 (Go edition) — Android 10 (Go edition) includes a new form of encryption, built by Google for entry-level smartphones, called Adiantum.
Android: Try OTA updates without committing — That’s why they unveiled Dynamic System Updates (DSU) in Android 10 to let developers try a barebones version of a new OS update without unlocking the bootloader or wiping data.
Sean Larkin on Twitter — "🚨🔥We on the @MSEdgeDev team are fleshing out requirements to bring Edge to Linux, and we need your help w/ some assumptions!🚨🔥 If you're a dev who depends on Linux for dev, testing, personal browsing, pleasetake a second to fill out this survey! 📝 https://t.co/PCerGONmCG" / Twitter
A Chat with Christophe Limpalair | Jupiter Extras 18
Sep 27, 2019
Brent joins Christophe Limpalair, VP of Growth at Linux Academy and founder of Scale Your Code, for a get-to-know-you conversation that spans from taming your lizard brain through to mastering the miscellaneous, with a generous ask of the community.
Being a good FOSS citizen, forcing popey to answer stupid questions, and personal freedom vs societal harm.
Plus paying for podcasts, and how many domains we all own.
00:00:34 What do you owe to upstream? 00:11:14 Should all drugs be legal? 00:20:57 Would you ever subscribe to a paywalled podcast? 00:25:24 How many domain names do you own? 00:30:42 What are your favourite and least favourite memes?
Why Self-Host? | Self-Hosted 2
Sep 26, 2019
We visit Wendell Wilson of Level1Techs and get a tour of his self-hosted setup, what he does and does not trust in the cloud, and we reminisce about the early days of computing and the internet.
Plus we discuss craftsmanship in the Linux Kernel, and address the fundamental question of "why self-host."
Setting up buildbot in FreeBSD jails, Set up a mail server with OpenSMTPD, Dovecot and Rspamd, OpenBSD amateur packet radio with HamBSD, DragonFlyBSD's HAMMER2 gets fsck, return of startx for users.
We’re back from EuroBSDcon in Lillehammer, Norway. It was a great conference with 212 people attending. 2 days of tutorials, parallel to the FreeBSD Devsummit, followed by two days of talks. Some speakers uploaded their slides to papers.freebsd.org already with more to come.
The social event was also interesting. We visited an open air museum with building preserved from different time periods. In the older section they had a collection of farm buildings, a church originally built in the 1200s and relocated to the museum, and a school house. In the more modern area, they had houses from 1915, and each decade from 1930 to 1990, plus a “house of the future” as imagined in 2001. Many had open doors to allow you to tour the inside, and some were even “inhabited”. The latter fact gave a much more interactive experience and we could learn additional things about the history of that particular house. The town at the end included a general store, a post office, and more. Then, we all had a nice dinner together in the museum’s restaurant.
The opening keynote by Patricia Aas was very good. Her talk on embedded ethics, from her perspective as someone trying to defend the sanctity of Norwegian elections, and a former developer for the Opera web browser, provided a great deal of insight into the issues. Her points about how the tech community has unleashed a very complex digital work upon people with barely any technical literacy were well taken. Her stories of trying to explain the problems with involving computers in the election process to journalists and politicians struck a chord with many of us, who have had to deal with legislation written by those who do not truly understand the issues with technology.
In this article, I would like to present a tutorial to set up buildbot, a continuous integration (CI) software (like Jenkins, drone, etc.), making use of FreeBSD’s containerization mechanism "jails". We will cover terminology, rationale for using both buildbot and jails together, and installation steps. At the end, you will have a working buildbot instance using its sample build configuration, ready to play around with your own CI plans (or even CD, it’s very flexible!). Some hints for production-grade installations are given, but the tutorial steps are meant for a test environment (namely a virtual machine). Buildbot’s configuration and detailed concepts are not in scope here.
Self-hosting and encouraging smaller providers is for the greater good
First of all, I was not clear enough about the political consequences of centralizing mail services at Big Mailer Corps.
It doesn’t make sense for Random Joe, sharing kitten pictures with his family and friends, to build a personal mail infrastructure when multiple Big Mailer Corps offer “for free” an amazing quality of service. They provide him with an e-mail address that is immediately available and which will generally work reliably. It really doesn’t make sense for Random Joe not to go there, and particularly if even techies go there without hesitation, proving it is a sound choice.
There is nothing wrong with Random Joes using a service that works.
What is terribly wrong though is the centralization of a communication protocol in the hands of a few commercial companies, EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM coming from the same country (currently led by a lunatic who abuses power and probably suffers from NPD), EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM having been in the news and/or in a court for random/assorted “unpleasant” behaviors (privacy abuses, eavesdropping, monopoly abuse, sexual or professional harassment, you just name it…), and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM growing user bases that far exceeds the total population of multiple countries combined.
The HamBSD project aims to bring amateur packet radio to OpenBSD, including support for TCP/IP over AX.25 and APRS tracking/digipeating in the base system.
HamBSD will not provide a full AX.25 stack but instead only implement support for UI frames. There will be a focus on simplicity, security and readable code.
The amateur radio community needs a reliable platform for packet radio for use in both leisure and emergency scenarios. It should be expected that the system is stable and resilient (but as yet it is neither).
HAMMER2 is Copy on Write, meaning changes are made to copies of existing data. This means operations are generally atomic and can survive a power outage, etc. (You should read up on it!) However, there’s now a fsck command, useful if you want a report of data validity rather than any manual repair process.
Add modesetting driver as a fall-back when appropriate such that we can use it when running without root privileges which prevents us from scanning the PCI bus.
This makes startx(1)/xinit(1) work again on modern systems with inteldrm(4), radeondrm(4) and amdgpu(4). In some cases this will result in using a different driver than with xenodm(4) which may expose issues (e.g. when we prefer the intel Xorg driver) or loss of acceleration (e.g. older cards supported by radeondrm(4)).
CentOS 8.1905 — Hello and welcome to the first CentOS-8 release. The CentOS Linux distribution is a stable, predictable, manageable and reproducible platform derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
CentOS Stream — CentOS Stream will be a rolling-release Linux distro that exists as a midstream between the upstream development in Fedora Linux and the downstream development for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is a cleared-path to contributing into future minor releases of RHEL while interacting with Red Hat and other open source developers. This pairs nicely with the existing contribution path in Fedora for future major releases of RHEL.
Transforming the development experience within CentOS — The CentOS Stream project sits between the Fedora Project and RHEL in the RHEL Development process, providing a "rolling preview" of future RHEL kernels and features. This enables developers to stay one or two steps ahead of what’s coming in RHEL, which was not previously possible with traditional CentOS releases
Reinventing Home Directories — The concept of home directories on Linux/UNIX has little changed in the last 39 years. It's time to have a closer look, and bring them up to today's standards, regarding encryption, storage, authentication, user records, and more.
Twitch Becomes Premiere Sponsor of the OBS Project | OBS — We are excited to announce that Twitch is now officially sponsoring my work on the OBS Project! Since 2012 we've maintained a great relationship with Twitch and their engineers. They've always been good to us, and we've always helped each other whenever needed. Twitch has always been one of the biggest supporters of our project, and now it's official.
Free Courses at Linux Academy — On September 17th Linux Torvald first released the Linux Operating System Kernel on September 17th, 1991 so we are celebrating by offering free training for you to increase your Linux Skills.
Unofficial Hacker Family Dinner & Unbirthday Party | Meetup — Join Chris, Wes, Chz and Ell for a meet and greet with fellow Texas Cyber Summit attendees and a belated celebration of Ell and Allie's Birthdays! There will be good food, good friends, and we hope some good conversation.
Richard Stallman resigns from MIT — I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT. I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.
Debian reconsiders init diversity — In some ways dropping Elogind is a bigger decision. If we ever want to try something different than Systemd, we'll need something like Elogind.
systemd-homed: systemd Now Working To Improve Home Directory Handling — Among the goals are allowing more easily migratable home directories, ensuring all data for users is self-contained to the home directories, UID assignments being handled to the local system, unified user password and encryption key handling, better data encryption handling in general, and other modernization efforts.
Huawei confirms the new Mate 30 Pro won’t come with Google’s Android apps — Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer products division, revealed onstage at a press event in Germany this morning that the company has been forced to drop Google’s Mobile Services (GMS) license on the Mate 30 series of devices.
A Chat with Ell Marquez | Jupiter Extras 15
Sep 20, 2019
Brent is joined by Ell Marquez, Community Architect for Jupiter Broadcasting and co-host of Choose Linux for a chat about her experiences in community, the importance of inclusivity, how to cultivate great mentorships, redefining failure and more. Join us!
It's TechSNAP story time as we head out into the field with Jim and put Sure-Fi technology to the test.
Plus an update on Wifi 6, an enlightening Chromebook bug, and some not-quite-quantum key distribution.
Links:
RF Chirp tech: Long distance, incredible penetration, low bandwidth | Ars Technica — Recently, I took the company's technology for a spin with a pair of hand-held demo communicators about the size of a kid's walkie-talkie. They don't do much—just light up with a signal strength reading on both devices, whenever a transmit button on either is pressed—but that's enough to get a good indication of whether the tech will work to solve a given problem.
Say hello to 802.11ax: Wi-Fi 6 device certification begins today | Ars Technica — Today, the Wi-Fi Alliance launched its Wi-Fi Certified 6 program, which means that the standard has been completely finalized, and device manufacturers and OEMs can begin the process of having the organization certify their products to carry the Wi-Fi 6 branding.
Quantum Key Distribution - QKD — This paper provides an overview of quantum key distribution targeted towards the computer science community. A brief description of the relevant principles from quantum mechanics is provided before surveying the most prominent quantum key distribution protocols present in the literature.
Linux Headlines — Linux and open source headlines every weekday, in under 3 minutes.
Introducing New People to Linux | Choose Linux 18
Sep 19, 2019
There's lots to consider when setting someone up with Linux for the first time. User needs and expectations, distro choice, hardware, and so much more.
We discuss our experiences, and ask some fundamental questions.
git commit FreeBSD | BSD Now 316
Sep 18, 2019
NetBSD LLVM sanitizers and GDB regression test suite, Ada—The Language of Cost Savings, Homura - a Windows Games Launcher for FreeBSD, FreeBSD core team appoints a WG to explore transition to Git, OpenBSD 6.6 Beta tagged, Project Trident 12-U5 update now available, and more.
As NetBSD-9 is branched, I have been asked to finish the LLVM sanitizer integration. This work is now accomplished and with MKLLVM=yes build option (by default off), the distribution will be populated with LLVM files for ASan, TSan, MSan, UBSan, libFuzzer, SafeStack and XRay.
I have also transplanted basesystem GDB patched to my GDB repository and managed to run the GDB regression test-suite.
NetBSD distribution changes
I have enhanced and imported my local MKSANITIZER code that makes whole distribution sanitization possible. Few real bugs were fixed and a number of patches were newly written to reflect the current NetBSD sources state. I have also merged another chunk of the fruits of the GSoC-2018 project with fuzzing the userland (by plusun@).
The following changes were committed to the sources:
ab7de18d0283 Cherry-pick upstream compiler-rt patches for LLVM sanitizers
966c62a34e30 Add LLVM sanitizers in the MKLLVM=yes build
8367b667adb9 telnetd: Stop defining the same variables concurrently in bss and data
fe72740f64bf fsck: Stop defining the same variable concurrently in bss and data
40e89e890d66 Fix build of t_ubsan/t_ubsanxx under MKSANITIZER
b71326fd7b67 Avoid symbol clashes in tests/usr.bin/id under MKSANITIZER
c581f2e39fa5 Avoid symbol clashes in fs/nfs/nfsservice under MKSANITIZER
030a4686a3c6 Avoid symbol clashes in bin/df under MKSANITIZER
fd9679f6e8b1 Avoid symbol clashes in usr.sbin/ypserv/ypserv under MKSANITIZER
5df2d7939ce3 Stop defining _rpcsvcdirty in bss and data
5fafbe8b8f64 Add missing extern declaration of ib_mach_emips in installboot
d134584be69a Add SANITIZER_RENAME_CLASSES in bsd.prog.mk
2d00d9b08eae Adapt tests/kernel/t_subr_prf for MKSANITIZER
ce54363fe452 Ship with sanitizer/lsan_interface.h for GCC 7
7bd5ee95e9a0 Ship with sanitizer/lsan_interface.h for LLVM 7
d8671fba7a78 Set NODEBUG for LLVM sanitizers
242cd44890a2 Add PAXCTL_FLAG rules for MKSANITIZER
5e80ab99d9ce Avoid symbol clashes in test/rump/modautoload/t_modautoload with sanitizers
e7ce7ecd9c2a sysctl: Add indirection of symbols to remove clash with sanitizers
231aea846aba traceroute: Add indirection of symbol to remove clash with sanitizers
8d85053f487c sockstat: Add indirection of symbols to remove clash with sanitizers
81b333ab151a netstat: Add indirection of symbols to remove clash with sanitizers
a472baefefe8 Correct the memset(3)'s third argument in i386 biosdisk.c
7e4e92115bc3 Add ATF c and c++ tests for TSan, MSan, libFuzzer
921ddc9bc97c Set NOSANITIZER in i386 ramdisk image
64361771c78d Enhance MKSANITIZER support
3b5608f80a2b Define target_not_supported_body() in TSan, MSan and libFuzzer tests
c27f4619d513 Avoids signedness bit shift in db_get_value()
680c5b3cc24f Fix LLVM sanitizer build by GCC (HAVE_LLVM=no)
4ecfbbba2f2a Rework the LLVM compiler_rt build rules
748813da5547 Correct the build rules of LLVM sanitizers
20e223156dee Enhance the support of LLVM sanitizers
0bb38eb2f20d Register syms.extra in LLVM sanitizer .syms files
Almost all of the mentioned commits were backported to NetBSD-9 and will land 9.0.
Many myths surround the Ada programming language, but it continues to be used and evolve at the same time. And while the increased adoption of Ada and SPARK, its provable subset, is slow, it’s noticeable. Ada already addresses more of the features found in found in heavily used embedded languages like C+ and C#. It also tackles problems addressed by upcoming languages like Rust.
Chris concludes, “Development technologies have a profound impact on one of the largest and most variable costs associated with embedded-system engineering—labor. At a time when on-time system deployment can not only impact customer satisfaction, but access to services revenue streams, engineering team efficiency is at a premium. Our research showed that programming language choices can have significant influence in this area, leading to shorter projects, better schedules and, ultimately, lower development costs. While a variety of factors can influence and dictate language choice, our research showed that Ada’s evolution has made it an increasingly compelling option for engineering organizations, providing both technically and financially sound solution.”
In general, Ada already makes embedded “programming in the large” much easier by handling issues that aren’t even addressed in other languages. Though these features are often provided by third-party software, it results in inconsistent practices among developers. Ada also supports the gamut of embedded platforms from systems like Arm’s Cortex-M through supercomputers. Learning Ada isn’t as hard as one might think and the benefits can be significant.
The FreeBSD Core Team is the governing body of FreeBSD.
Core approved source commit bits for Doug Moore (dougm), Chuck Silvers (chs), Brandon Bergren (bdragon), and a vendor commit bit for Scott Phillips (scottph).
The annual developer survey closed on 2019-04-02. Of the 397 developers, 243 took the survey with an average completion time of 12 minutes. The public survey closed on 2019-05-13. It was taken by 3637 users and had a 79% completion rate. A presentation of the survey results took place at BSDCan 2019.
The core team voted to appoint a working group to explore transitioning our source code 'source of truth' from Subversion to Git. Core asked Ed Maste to chair the group as Ed has been researching this topic for some time. For example, Ed gave a MeetBSD 2018 talk on the topic.
There is a variety of viewpoints within core regarding where and how to host a Git repository, however core feels that Git is the prudent path forward.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Positive in the Freedom Dimension | LINUX Unplugged 319
Sep 17, 2019
Richard Stallman has resigned as president and director of the Free Software Foundation, and that's just one of the major shifts this week.
Also what makes Manjaro unique? We chat with one of the founders and find out why it's much more than a desktop environment.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Bernhard Landauer, Brent Gervais, and Neal Gompa.
Links:
Richard Stallman Resigns — On September 16, 2019, Richard M. Stallman, founder and president of the Free Software Foundation, resigned as president and from its board of directors.
GNOME relationship with GNU and the FSF – Liberal Murmurs — In my capacity as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, I have also written to the FSF. One of the most important parts of my role is to think of the well being of our community and the GNOME mission. One of the GNOME Foundation’s strategic goals is to be an exemplary community in terms of diversity and inclusion. I feel we can’t continue to have a formal association with the FSF or the GNU project when its main voice in the world is saying things that hurt this aim.
balena releases first fully functional 64-bit OS for the Raspberry Pi 4 — Today, we are excited to announce the release of 64-bit balenaOS for the Raspberry Pi 4, providing support for the full 4GB of memory and allowing the simultaneous, side-by-side running of 32-bit and 64-bit Docker containers - a first for the Raspberry Pi 4!
PowerShellOnLinux - Home — Our Site is focused on everything PowerShell regardless of which OS you are running but we are specifically focused on Linux and Mac.
Free Courses at Linux Academy — September 2019 — On September 17th Linux Torvald first released the Linux Operating System Kernel on September 17th, 1991 so we are celebrating by offering free training for you to increase your Linux Skills.
Linux Headlines — Linux and open source headlines every weekday, in under 3 minutes.
Self-Hosted 1: The First One — You've been wanting to host a Nextcloud instance (or anything else) for your family for a while now. Where on Earth do you start? We share some hard learned lessons about self-hosting, discuss the most important things to consider when building a home server, and Chris gives Alex a hard time about Arch as a Server OS.
Unofficial Hacker Family Dinner & Unbirthday Party | Meetup — Join Chris, Wes, Chz and Ell for a meet and greet with fellow Texas Cyber Summit attendees and a belated celebration of Ell and Allie's Birthdays! There will be good food, good friends, and we hope some good conversation.
Manjaro - enjoy the simplicity — Manjaro is a professionally made Linux based operating system that is a suitable replacement for Windows or MacOS. Multiple Desktop Environments are available through our Official and Community editions. We also work with manufacturers to design dedicated hardware. Visit the shop for more information.
ClipGrab — A friendly downloader for YouTube and other sites
Linux 5.4 Cycle To Begin With exFAT Driver, EPYC Improvements & New GPU Support — Finally there will be mainline exFAT support for that Microsoft file-system with it finally being blessed to be supported under Linux/open-source. The exFAT driver still has a lot of improvements to go (the current code quality has been called horrible) but is already making progress within staging.
PowerShell on Linux | Jupiter Extras 14
Sep 17, 2019
Chris and Wes talk with DM from the PowerShell On Linux community about PowerShell's strengths and its place in the Linux ecosystem.
Coder Radio - A New Developer Podcast! — A weekly talk show taking a pragmatic look at the art and business of software development and related technologies.
WWDC Fallout | Coder Radio 2 — Michael and Chris cover the items from WWDC that they think developers will be impacted by, discuss the Facebook pressure, and reflect on hardware updates announced.
Docker All The Things | Coder Radio 66 — We’re joined by two gentlemen from dotCloud, the folks behind Docker. We chat about what Docker is best at, how far out the 1.0 release is, the projects use of Go, the future of Docker, and much more.
Open Season on Swift | Coder Radio 182 — The majority of our discussion this week is around the open sourcing of Swift, what Apple got really right & what areas still really need improvement.
Clojure Calisthenics | Coder Radio 325 — Wes joins Mike to discuss why .NET still makes sense, the latest antics from Fortnite, a brave new hope for JVM concurrency, and the mind-expanding benefits of trying a Lisp.
Mike on Twitter — Software Developer & entrepreneur at a #startup in the #Aerospace and #IOT spaces. @TheMadBotterINC.
Mike's Blog — Meditations on the Art of Technology
Speed is the big story around GNOME 3.34, two new major Firefox security features start to roll out, and we explain the CentOS 8 delay.
Plus our thoughts on the PineTime, and more.
Links:
GNOME 3.34 Released — Version 3.34 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance improvements and new features.
GNOME Firmware 3.34.0 Release — With the new fwupd 1.3.1 you can now build just the libfwupd library, which makes it easy to build GNOME Firmware (old name: gnome-firmware-updater) in Flathub
Firefox’s Test Pilot Program Returns with Firefox Private Network Beta — It originally started as an Add-on before we relaunched it three years ago. Then in January, we announced that we were evolving our culture of experimentation, and as a result we closed the Test Pilot program to give us time to further explore what was next.
Welcome to the Future of Cloud Native Java | Eclipse Foundation — To say this a big deal is an understatement. With 18 different member organizations, over 160 new committers, 43 projects, and a codebase of over 61 million lines of code in 129 Git repositories, this was truly a massive undertaking.
PineTime on Twitter — "This is the #PineTime (actual photo) - a #Linux smartphone companion and a side-project of ours. Are you a @real_FreeRTOS or @ArmMbed developer with an interest in smartwatches? - let us know. https://t.co/j7ygDWNqbD" / Twitter
The Story Behind our Daily Linux Podcast | Jupiter Extras 13
Sep 13, 2019
Chris and Chz catch up on what's been going on and then share the story behind our new daily Linux podcast and the breakthrough it took to make it possible.
00:01:22 How do you deal with splitting up money with friends after a group trip/bbq/dinner? 00:06:20 What’s the best way to organise the finances for a FOSS project? 00:14:49 Do you swear in front of your family and, if not, why not? 00:22:22 Would you ride in an automated car that has no human input or override? 00:26:03 What do you do to feel better when you feel upset? 00:29:16 Would you rather always be 10 minutes late or always be 20 minutes early?
The First One | Self-Hosted 1
Sep 12, 2019
You've been wanting to host a Nextcloud instance (or anything else) for your family for a while now. Where on Earth do you start? We share some hard learned lessons about self-hosting, discuss the most important things to consider when building a home server, and Chris gives Alex a hard time about Arch as a Server OS.
Your preferred Linux "server" OS? — I currently host a bunch of services inside of Docker containers. Had been using Ubuntu Server, but I felt like the OS is kind of bloated and I wanted to try some new things so I switched to Alpine.
Alpine is a bit too minimalistic for my tastes and I've run into some compatibility issues with it (even when using it just as a Docker host).
At this point I'm planning on staying with a Linux OS and with Docker as the way I run my actual services, just not sure of what I want to actually use next.
Wireless Security Camera System - EufyCam E Review — What's the best wireless security camera system? Here's my EufyCam E review, which covers my main criteria for a good camera system: battery-operated, easy to setup, good image quality, no subscription fees, local storage, and integrations with my smart home.
vBSDcon 2019 recap, Unix at 50, OpenBSD on fan-less Tuxedo InfinityBook, humungus - an hg server, how to configure a network dump in FreeBSD, and more.
Headlines
vBSDcon Recap
Allan and Benedict attended vBSDcon 2019, which ended last week.
It was held again at the Hyatt Regency Reston and the main conference was organized by Dan Langille of BSDCan fame.The two day conference was preceded by a one day FreeBSD hackathon, where FreeBSD developers had the chance to work on patches and PRs. In the evening, a reception was held to welcome attendees and give them a chance to chat and get to know each other over food and drinks.
The first day of the conference was opened with a Keynote by Paul Vixie about DNS over HTTPS (DoH). He explained how we got to the current state and what challenges (technical and social) this entails.
If you missed this talk and are dying to see it, it will also be presented at EuroBSDCon next week
John Baldwin followed up by giving an overview of the work on “In-Kernel TLS Framing and Encryption for FreeBSD” abstract and the recent commit we covered in episode 313.
Meanwhile, Brian Callahan was giving a separate session in another room about “Learning to (Open)BSD through its porting system: an attendee-driven educational session” where people had the chance to learn about how to create ports for the BSDs.
David Fullard’s talk about “Transitioning from FreeNAS to FreeBSD” was his first talk at a BSD conference and described how he built his own home NAS setup trying to replicate FreeNAS’ functionality on FreeBSD, and why he transitioned from using an appliance to using vanilla FreeBSD.
Shawn Webb followed with his overview talk about the “State of the Hardened Union”.
Benedict’s talk about “Replacing an Oracle Server with FreeBSD, OpenZFS, and PostgreSQL” was well received as people are interested in how we liberated ourselves from the clutches of Oracle without compromising functionality.
Entertaining and educational at the same time, Michael W. Lucas talk about “Twenty Years in Jail: FreeBSD Jails, Then and Now” closed the first day. Lucas also had a table in the hallway with his various tech and non-tech books for sale.
People formed small groups and went into town for dinner. Some returned later that night to some work in the hacker lounge or talk amongst fellow BSD enthusiasts.
Colin Percival was the keynote speaker for the second day and had an in-depth look at “23 years of software side channel attacks”.
Allan reprised his “ELI5: ZFS Caching” talk explaining how the ZFS adaptive replacement cache (ARC) work and how it can be tuned for various workloads.
“By the numbers: ZFS Performance Results from Six Operating Systems and Their Derivatives” by Michael Dexter followed with his approach to benchmarking OpenZFS on various platforms.
Conor Beh was also a new speaker to vBSDcon. His talk was about “FreeBSD at Work: Building Network and Storage Infrastructure with pfSense and FreeNAS”.
Two OpenBSD talks closed the talk session: Kurt Mosiejczuk with “Care and Feeding of OpenBSD Porters” and Aaron Poffenberger with “Road Warrior Disaster Recovery: Secure, Synchronized, and Backed-up”.
A dinner and reception was enjoyed by the attendees and gave more time to discuss the talks given and other things until late at night.
We want to thank the vBSDcon organizers and especially Dan Langille for running such a great conference. We are grateful to Verisign as the main sponsor and The FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring the tote bags. Thanks to all the speakers and attendees!
The InfinityBook 14” v2 is a fanless 14” notebook. It is an excellent choice for running OpenBSD - but order it with the supported wireless card (see below.).
I’ve set it up in a dual-boot configuration so that I can switch between Linux and OpenBSD - mainly to spot differences in the drivers. TUXEDO allows a variety of configurations through their webshop.
The dual boot setup with grub2 and EFI boot will be covered in a separate blogpost. My tests were done with OpenBSD-current - which is as of writing flagged as 6.6-beta.
See Article for breakdown of CPU, Wireless, Video, Webcam, Audio, ACPI, Battery, Touchpad, and MicroSD Card Reader
Maybe its pervasiveness has long obscured its origins. But Unix, the operating system that in one derivative or another powers nearly all smartphones sold worldwide, was born 50 years ago from the failure of an ambitious project that involved titans like Bell Labs, GE, and MIT. Largely the brainchild of a few programmers at Bell Labs, the unlikely story of Unix begins with a meeting on the top floor of an otherwise unremarkable annex at the sprawling Bell Labs complex in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
It was a bright, cold Monday, the last day of March 1969, and the computer sciences department was hosting distinguished guests: Bill Baker, a Bell Labs vice president, and Ed David, the director of research. Baker was about to pull the plug on Multics (a condensed form of MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service), a software project that the computer sciences department had been working on for four years. Multics was two years overdue, way over budget, and functional only in the loosest possible understanding of the term.
Trying to put the best spin possible on what was clearly an abject failure, Baker gave a speech in which he claimed that Bell Labs had accomplished everything it was trying to accomplish in Multics and that they no longer needed to work on the project. As Berk Tague, a staffer present at the meeting, later told Princeton University, “Like Vietnam, he declared victory and got out of Multics.”
Within the department, this announcement was hardly unexpected. The programmers were acutely aware of the various issues with both the scope of the project and the computer they had been asked to build it for.
Still, it was something to work on, and as long as Bell Labs was working on Multics, they would also have a $7 million mainframe computer to play around with in their spare time. Dennis Ritchie, one of the programmers working on Multics, later said they all felt some stake in the success of the project, even though they knew the odds of that success were exceedingly remote.
Cancellation of Multics meant the end of the only project that the programmers in the Computer science department had to work on—and it also meant the loss of the only computer in the Computer science department. After the GE 645 mainframe was taken apart and hauled off, the computer science department’s resources were reduced to little more than office supplies and a few terminals.
Some of Allan’s favourite excerpts:
In the early '60s, Bill Ninke, a researcher in acoustics, had demonstrated a rudimentary graphical user interface with a DEC PDP-7 minicomputer. Acoustics still had that computer, but they weren’t using it and had stuck it somewhere out of the way up on the sixth floor.
And so Thompson, an indefatigable explorer of the labs’ nooks and crannies, finally found that PDP-7 shortly after Davis and Baker cancelled Multics.
With the rest of the team’s help, Thompson bundled up the various pieces of the PDP-7—a machine about the size of a refrigerator, not counting the terminal—moved it into a closet assigned to the acoustics department, and got it up and running. One way or another, they convinced acoustics to provide space for the computer and also to pay for the not infrequent repairs to it out of that department’s budget.
McIlroy’s programmers suddenly had a computer, kind of. So during the summer of 1969, Thompson, Ritchie, and Canaday hashed out the basics of a file manager that would run on the PDP-7. This was no simple task. Batch computing—running programs one after the other—rarely required that a computer be able to permanently store information, and many mainframes did not have any permanent storage device (whether a tape or a hard disk) attached to them. But the time-sharing environment that these programmers had fallen in love with required attached storage. And with multiple users connected to the same computer at the same time, the file manager had to be written well enough to keep one user’s files from being written over another user’s. When a file was read, the output from that file had to be sent to the user that was opening it.
It was a challenge that McIlroy’s team was willing to accept. They had seen the future of computing and wanted to explore it. They knew that Multics was a dead-end, but they had discovered the possibilities opened up by shared development, shared access, and real-time computing. Twenty years later, Ritchie characterized it for Princeton as such: “What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form.”
Eventually when they had the file management system more or less fleshed out conceptually, it came time to actually write the code. The trio—all of whom had terrible handwriting—decided to use the Labs’ dictating service. One of them called up a lab extension and dictated the entire code base into a tape recorder. And thus, some unidentified clerical worker or workers soon had the unenviable task of trying to convert that into a typewritten document.
Of course, it was done imperfectly. Among various errors, “inode” came back as “eye node,” but the output was still viewed as a decided improvement over their assorted scribbles.
In August 1969, Thompson’s wife and son went on a three-week vacation to see her family out in Berkeley, and Thompson decided to spend that time writing an assembler, a file editor, and a kernel to manage the PDP-7 processor. This would turn the group’s file manager into a full-fledged operating system. He generously allocated himself one week for each task.
Thompson finished his tasks more or less on schedule. And by September, the computer science department at Bell Labs had an operating system running on a PDP-7—and it wasn’t Multics.
By the summer of 1970, the team had attached a tape drive to the PDP-7, and their blossoming OS also had a growing selection of tools for programmers (several of which persist down to this day). But despite the successes, Thompson, Canaday, and Ritchie were still being rebuffed by labs management in their efforts to get a brand-new computer.
It wasn’t until late 1971 that the computer science department got a truly modern computer. The Unix team had developed several tools designed to automatically format text files for printing over the past year or so. They had done so to simplify the production of documentation for their pet project, but their tools had escaped and were being used by several researchers elsewhere on the top floor. At the same time, the legal department was prepared to spend a fortune on a mainframe program called “AstroText.” Catching wind of this, the Unix crew realized that they could, with only a little effort, upgrade the tools they had written for their own use into something that the legal department could use to prepare patent applications.
The computer science department pitched lab management on the purchase of a DEC PDP-11 for document production purposes, and Max Mathews offered to pay for the machine out of the acoustics department budget. Finally, management gave in and purchased a computer for the Unix team to play with. Eventually, word leaked out about this operating system, and businesses and institutions with PDP-11s began contacting Bell Labs about their new operating system. The Labs made it available for free—requesting only the cost of postage and media from anyone who wanted a copy.
A network dump might be very useful for collecting kernel crash dumps from embedded machines and machines with a larger amount of RAM then available swap partition size. Besides net dumps we can also try to compress the core dump. However, often this may still not be enough swap to keep whole core dump. In such situation using network dump is a convenient and reliable way for collecting kernel dump.
So, first, let’s talk a little bit about history. The first implementation of the network dumps was implemented around 2000 for the FreeBSD 4.x as a kernel module. The code was implemented in 2010 with the intention of being part of FreeBSD 9.0. However, the code never landed in FreeBSD. Finally, in 2018 with the commit r333283 by Mark Johnston the netdump client code landed in the FreeBSD. Subsequently, many other commitments were then implemented to add support for the different drivers (for example r333289). The first official release of FreeBSD, which support netdump is FreeBSD 12.0.
Now, let’s get back to the main topic. How to configure the network dump? Two machines are needed. One machine is to collect core dump, let’s call it server. We will use the second one to send us the core dump - the client.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
A Chat with Wes Payne | Jupiter Extras 12
Sep 11, 2019
Brent joins Wes Payne, well-known Jupiter Broadcasting co-host of Linux Unplugged, Coder Radio, and TechSNAP, for a deep-dive conversation that touches a wide swath of life as a Wes, with topics including:
adventures in learning
a recipe for great collaborations
one definition of Wes-work
creativity and problem-solving in tech
introvertedness and the subtle art of being agreeable
strategies in brainstorming
entropy and evolution of routines in creativity
hammock time and meditation
Buddhism and our mind's understanding of the world
Manjaro Levels Up | LINUX Unplugged 318
Sep 10, 2019
It’s official, Manjaro is a legitimate business; so what happens next? We chat with Phil from the project about the huge news.
Plus we share some big news of our own, and the strange feels we get from Chrome OS.
Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Ell Marquez, and Philip Muller.
Links:
Kate Planning — Whereas Kate already works well as a general purpose editor, the competition in the text editor space got more intense in the last years. For example Sublime, Atom and Visual Studio Code are things to keep an eye on feature & polishing wise.
Free software advocate Richard Stallman spoke at Microsoft Research this week | ZDNet — Stallman gave a "mostly standard talk," covering the importance of free software, GPL v3, GNU vs. Linux. He added that "he had a list of 'small requests': make Github push users to better software license hygiene, make hardware manufacturers to publish their hardware specs, make it easier to workaround Secure Boot."
Manjaro is taking the next step - Announcements - Manjaro Linux Forum — On July 8th, Philip and Bernhard met together with the CEO of Blue Systems to officially found this business entity. As a result, Bernhard and Philip will now be able to commit full-time to Manjaro, while Blue Systems will take a role as an advisor.
Self-Hosted — Discover new software and hardware to get the best out of your network, control smart devices, and secure your data on cloud services. Self-Hosted is a chat show between Chris and Alex two long-time "self-hosters" who share their lessons and take you on the journey of their new ones.
Linux Headlines — Linux and open source headlines every weekday, in under 3 minutes.
Free Courses at Linux Academy — September 2019 — On September 17th Linux Torvald first released the Linux Operating System Kernel on September 17th, 1991 so we are celebrating by offering free training for you to increase your Linux Skills.
Unofficial Hacker Family Dinner & Unbirthday Party — Join Chris, Wes, Chz and Ell for a meet and greet with fellow Texas Cyber Summit attendees and a belated celebration of Ell and Allie's Birthdays! There will be good food, good friends, and we hope some good conversation.
LINUX Unplugged 296: Defining Desktop Linux — "[...] a desktop linux operating system where you are able to download the source code for the current version of the kernel, compile it, install it, reboot and boot off the kernel you just compiled and built. If you can't do that, it is not desktop linux." - Wimpy
Google Launches Chrome OS, Says Windows is 'Torturing Users' | CIO — Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Windows and other traditional PC operating systems are "torturing users" at Google's Chrome OS launch event Wednesday, where the company claimed 75% of business users can be converted from Windows to Chrome OS right away.
Chromebooks can now run Linux in a Chrome OS window – Gigaom — This is cool: Chromebook users can now run their favorite Linux distribution within a window right on their Chrome OS desktop. Google’s own happiness evangelist François Beaufort revealed with a Google+ post Tuesday that Chromebook oners who have set their device in developer mode can download special Crouton Chrome extension to run Linux without being forced to switch back and forth between the two operating systems.
You can now run Linux apps on Chrome OS | TechCrunch — For the longest time, developers have taken Chrome OS machines and run tools like Crouton to turn them into Linux-based developer machines. That was a bit of a hassle, but it worked. But things are getting easier. Soon, if you want to run Linux apps on your Chrome OS machine, all you’ll have to do is switch a toggle in the Settings menu. That’s because Google is going to start shipping Chrome OS with a custom virtual machine that runs Debian Stretch, the current stable version of the operating system.
Neverware — Whether you’re a business, a school, or a home user, CloudReady OS is the fast, easy way to convert your hardware to the security and manageability of Google's Chrome ecosystem.
Brunch with Brent: A Chat with Drew DeVore — Brent sits down with Drew DeVore, Jupiter Broadcasting's latest addition to the Audio Editing Engineer team and cohost of Choose Linux. We chat shoes, his love for linux, adventures in audio, and why JB feels like home.
Python's Long Tail | Coder Radio 374
Sep 09, 2019
As Python 2's demise draws near we reflect on Python's popularity, the growing adoption of static typing, and why the Python 3 transition took so long.
Plus Apple's audacious app store tactics, Google's troubles with Typescript, and more!
Feedback: What about Perl 6? — Last episode (373) that's on about shell scripting, interpreted languages, repl & cli, made me think about Perl 6.
Feedback: Pry and a Pick — In the previous episode I was amazed to hear that Mike had never used pry before! It's one of the first things I show off to people when introducing them to Ruby.
Feedback: Learning Web Dev — I feel woefully unready and I was wondering if either of you had suggestions for structured content around web dev/design that I could use to augment my learning? I've been using Pluralsight, which is great, and I'd be curious to know what else you might suggest.
Google feedback on TypeScript 3.5 — We know and expect every TypeScript upgrade to involve some work. For example, improvements to the standard library are expected and welcomed by us, even though they may mean removing similar but incompatible definitions from our own code base. However, TypeScript 3.5 was a lot more work for us than other recent TypeScript upgrades.
Apple has copied some of the most popular apps in the App Store for its iPhone, iPad and other software updates - The Washington Post — Apple plans this month to incorporate some of Clue’s core functionality such as fertility and period prediction into its own Health app that comes pre-installed in every iPhone and is free — unlike Clue, which is free to download but earns money by selling subscriptions and services within its app. Apple’s past incorporation of functionality included in other third-party apps has often led to their demise.
How Apple’s Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls - The New York Times — But as Apple has become one of the largest competitors on a platform that it controls, suspicions that the company has been tipping the scales in its own favor are at the heart of antitrust complaints in the United States, Europe and Russia.
Sunsetting Python 2 | Python.org — We have decided that January 1, 2020, will be the day that we sunset Python 2. That means that we will not improve it anymore after that day, even if someone finds a security problem in it. You should upgrade to Python 3 as soon as you can.
Our journey to type checking 4 million lines of Python | Dropbox Tech Blog — Dropbox is a big user of Python. It’s our most widely used language both for backend services and the desktop client app (we are also heavy users of Go, TypeScript, and Rust). At our scale—millions of lines of Python—the dynamic typing in Python made code needlessly hard to understand and started to seriously impact productivity. T
junegunn/fzf — fzf is a general-purpose command-line fuzzy finder.
Linux Action News 122
Sep 08, 2019
Android 10 has a lot we like while the PinePhone is real and closer than we thought.
Plus Red Hat's new desktop strategy, and what we think Mozilla is getting right.
Links:
Welcoming Android 10! — Today we're releasing the Android 10 source code to Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and making it available to the broader ecosystem. We’re also starting the official Android 10 rollout to all three generations of Pixel devices worldwide.
The PinePhone is real & shipping soon — I am hereby happy to announce that the first PinePhones have now entered production and will start shipping to developers this month.
Firefox 69 released — As of today, Enhanced Tracking Protection will be turned on by default
Introducing Red Hat CodeReady Containers — CodeReady Containers brings a minimal, preconfigured OpenShift 4.1 or newer cluster to your local laptop or desktop computer for development and testing purposes.
Mobile Security Mistakes | TechSNAP 411
Sep 06, 2019
We take a look at a few recent zero-day vulnerabilities for iOS and Android and find targeted attacks, bad assumptions, and changing markets.
Plus what to expect from USB4 and an upcoming Linux scheduler speed-up for AMD's Epyc CPUs.
Project Zero: In-the-wild iOS Exploit Chain 1 — This exploit provides evidence that these exploit chains were likely written contemporaneously with their supported iOS versions; that is, the exploit techniques which were used suggest that this exploit was written around the time of iOS 10. This suggests that this group had a capability against a fully patched iPhone for at least two years.
Project Zero: In-the-wild iOS Exploit Chain 3 — It’s difficult to understand how this error could be introduced into a core IPC library that shipped to end users. While errors are common in software development, a serious one like this should have quickly been found by a unit test, code review or even fuzzing.
Project Zero: JSC Exploits — In this post, we will take a look at the WebKit exploits used to gain an initial foothold onto the iOS device and stage the privilege escalation exploits. All exploits here achieve shellcode execution inside the sandboxed renderer process (WebContent) on iOS.
Project Zero: Implant Teardown — There is no visual indicator on the device that the implant is running. There's no way for a user on iOS to view a process listing, so the implant binary makes no attempt to hide its execution from the system. The implant is primarily focused on stealing files and uploading live location data. The implant requests commands from a command and control server every 60 seconds.The implant has access to all the database files (on the victim’s phone) used by popular end-to-end encryption apps like Whatsapp, Telegram and iMessage.
Android Zero-Day Bug Opens Door to Privilege Escalation Attack, Researchers Warn | Threatpost — “In the unlikely event an attacker succeeds in exploiting this bug, they would effectively have complete control over the target device,” he told Threatpost. Once an attacker obtains escalated privileges, “it means they could completely take over a device if they can convince a user to install and run their application,”
Why 'Zero Day' Android Hacking Now Costs More Than iOS Attacks | WIRED — "During the last few months, we have observed an increase in the number of iOS exploits, mostly Safari and iMessage chains, being developed and sold by researchers from all around the world. The zero-day market is so flooded by iOS exploits that we've recently started refusing some them"
Linux 5.4 Kernel To Bring Improved Load Balancing On AMD EPYC Servers — The scheduler topology improvement by SUSE's Matt Fleming changes the behavior as currently it turns out for EPYC hardware the kernel has failed to properly load balance across NUMA nodes on different sockets.
USB4 is coming soon and will (mostly) unify USB and Thunderbolt | Ars Technica — The USB Implementers Forum published the official USB4 protocol specification. If your initial reaction was "oh no, not again," don't worry—the new spec is backward-compatible with USB 2 and USB 3, and it uses the same USB Type-C connectors that modern USB 3 devices do.
We react to the "ship date" of the Librem 5, and look back at when it was first announced.
Then our take on what steps Purism could take to turn this situation into a net positive.
Links:
Librem 5 Will Begin Shipping In The Weeks Ahead, But Varying Quality Over Months Ahead — With the initial batch of phones at the end of September and early October, the hardware quality is said to be "Individually milled case, loose fit, varying alignment, unfinished switch caps. (Hand crafted)" On the software side there is their initial release of mobile software on PureOS while software updates will have to be done from the terminal. Their shipping window for this first batch is 24 September to 22 October.
Librem 5 Shipping Announcement – Purism — Due to the high volume, growing demand for the Librem 5, and in the interest of openness and transparency, Purism is publishing its full, detailed, iterative shipping schedule.
Unix virtual memory when you have no swap space, Dsynth details on Dragonfly, Instant Workstation on FreeBSD, new servers new tech, Experimenting with streaming setups on NetBSD, NetBSD’s progress towards Steam support thanks to GSoC, and more.
Recently, Artem S. Tashkinov wrote on the Linux kernel mailing list about a Linux problem under memory pressure (via, and threaded here). The specific reproduction instructions involved having low RAM, turning off swap space, and then putting the system under load, and when that happened (emphasis mine):
Once you hit a situation when opening a new tab requires more RAM than is currently available, the system will stall hard. You will barely be able to move the mouse pointer. Your disk LED will be flashing incessantly (I'm not entirely sure why). [...]
I'm afraid I have bad news for the people snickering at Linux here; if you're running without swap space, you can probably get any Unix to behave this way under memory pressure. If you can't on your particular Unix, I'd actually say that your Unix is probably not letting you get full use out of your RAM.
To simplify a bit, we can divide pages of user memory up into anonymous pages and file-backed pages. File-backed pages are what they sound like; they come from some specific file on the filesystem that they can be written out to (if they're dirty) or read back in from. Anonymous pages are not backed by a file, so the only place they can be written out to and read back in from is swap space. Anonymous pages mostly come from dynamic memory allocations and from modifying the program's global variables and data; file backed pages come mostly from mapping files into memory with mmap() and also, crucially, from the code and read-only data of the program.
First, history: DragonFly has had binaries of dports available for download for quite some time. These were originally built using poudriere, and then using the synth tool put together by John Marino. Synth worked both to build all software in dports, and as a way to test DragonFly’s SMP capability under extreme load.
Matthew Dillon is working on a new version, called dsynth. It is available now but not yet part of the build. He’s been working quickly on it and there’s plenty more commits than what I have linked here. It’s already led to finding more high-load fixes.
dsynth
DSynth is basically synth written in C, from scratch. It is designed to give us a bulk builder in base and be friendly to porting and jails down the line (for now its uses chroot's).
The original synth was written by John R. Marino and its basic flow was used in writing this program, but as it was written in ada no code was directly copied.
The intent is to make dsynth compatible with synth's configuration files and directory structure.
This is a work in progress and not yet ready for prime-time. Pushing so we can get some more eyeballs. Most of the directives do not yet work (everything, and build works, and 'cleanup' can be used to clean up any dangling mounts).
Some considerable time ago I wrote up instructions on how to set up a FreeBSD machine with the latest KDE Plasma Desktop. Those instructions, while fairly short (set up X, install the KDE meta-port, .. and that’s it) are a bit fiddly.
So – prompted slightly by a Twitter exchange recently – I’ve started a mini-sub-project to script the installation of a desktop environment and the bits needed to support it. To give it at least a modicum of UI, dialog(1) is used to ask for an environment to install and a display manager.
The tricky bits – pointed out to me after I started – are hardware support, although a best-effort is better than having nothing, I think.
In any case, in a VBox host it’s now down to running a single script and picking Plasma and SDDM to get a usable system for me. Other combinations have not been tested, nor has system-hardware-setup. I’ll probably maintain it for a while and if I have time and energy it’ll be tried with nVidia (those work quite well on FreeBSD) and AMD (not so much, in my experience) graphics cards when I shuffle some machines around.
Following up on an earlier post, the new servers for DragonFly are in place. The old 40-core machine used for bulk build, monster, is being retired. The power efficiency of the new machines is startling. Incidentally, this is where donations go – infrastructure.
We have three new servers in the colo now that will be taking most/all bulk package building duties from monster and the two blades (muscles and pkgbox64) that previously did the work. Monster will be retired. The new servers are a dual-socket Xeon (sting) and two 3900X based systems (thor and loki) which all together burn only around half the wattage that monster burned (500W vs 1000W) and 3 times the performance. That's at least a 6:1 improvement in performance efficiency.
With SSD prices down significantly the new machines have all-SSDs. These new machines allow us to build dports binary packages for release, master, and staged at the same time and reduces the full-on bulk build times for getting all three done down from 2 weeks to 2 days. It will allow us to more promptly synchronize updates to ports with dports and get binary packages up sooner.
Monster, our venerable 48-core quad-socket opteron is being retired. This was a wonderful dev machine for working on DragonFly's SMP algorithms over the last 6+ years precisely because its inter-core and inter-socket latencies were quite high. If a SMP algorithm wasn't spot-on, you could feel it. Over the years DragonFly's performance on monster in doing things like bulk builds increased radically as the SMP algorithms got better and the cores became more and more localized. This kept monster relevant far longer than I thought it would be.
But we are at a point now where improvements in efficiency are just too good to ignore. Monster's quad-socket opteron (4 x 12 core 6168's) pulls 1000W under full load while a single Ryzen 3900X (12 core / 24 thread) in a server configuration pulls only 150W, and is slightly faster on the same workload to boot.
I would like to thank everyone's generous donations over the last few years! We burned a few thousand on the new machines (as well as the major SSD upgrades we did to the blades) and made very good use of the money, particularly this year as prices for all major components (RAM, SSDs, CPUs, Mobos, etc) have dropped significantly.
Ever since OBS was successfully ported to NetBSD, I’ve been trying it out, seeing what works and what doesn’t. I’ve only just gotten started, and there’ll definitely be a lot of tweaking going forward.
Capturing a specific application’s windows seems to work okay. Capturing an entire display works, too. I actually haven’t tried streaming to Twitch or YouTube yet, but in a previous experiment a few weeks ago, I was able to run a FFmpeg command line and that could stream to Twitch mostly OK.
My laptop combined with my external monitor allows me to have a dual-monitor setup wherein the smaller laptop screen can be my “broadcasting station” while the bigger screen is where all the action takes place. I can make OBS visible on all Xfce workspaces, but keep it tucked away on that display only. Altogether, the setup should let me use the big screen for the fun stuff but I can still monitor everything in the small screen.
Ultimately the goal is to get Valve's Steam client running on NetBSD using their Linux compatibility layer while the focus the past few months with Google Summer of Code 2019 were supporting the necessary DRM ioctls for allowing Linux software running on NetBSD to be able to tap accelerated graphics support.
Student developer Surya P spent the summer working on compat_netbsd32 DRM interfaces to allow Direct Rendering Manager using applications running under their Linux compatibility layer.
These interfaces have been tested and working as well as updating the "suse131" packages in NetBSD to make use of those interfaces. So the necessary interfaces are now in place for Linux software running on NetBSD to be able to use accelerated graphics though Steam itself isn't yet running on NetBSD with this layer.
Those curious about this DRM ioctl GSoC project can learn more from the NetBSD blog. NetBSD has also been seeing work this summer on Wayland support and better Wine support to ultimately make this BSD a better desktop operating system and potentially a comparable gaming platform to Linux.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
A Chat with Drew DeVore | Jupiter Extras 10
Sep 04, 2019
Brent sits down with Drew DeVore, Jupiter Broadcasting's latest addition to the Audio Editing Engineer team and cohost of Choose Linux. We chat shoes, his love for linux, adventures in audio, and why JB feels like home.
Performance Picks for Kicks | LINUX Unplugged 317
Sep 03, 2019
We take a trip to visit Level1Tech's Wendell Wilson and come back with some of his performance tips for a smoother Linux desktop.
Plus the story behind exFAT coming to Linux, and the big desktop performance improvements landing next week.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Drew DeVore, and Ell Marquez.
Links:
XKCD Forum Hacked — The security breach occurred two months ago, according to security researcher Troy Hunt who alerted the company of the incident, with unknown hackers stealing around 562,000 usernames, email and IP addresses, as well as hashed passwords.
Examining exFAT — Linux kernel developers like to get support for new features — such as filesystem types — merged quickly. In the case of the exFAT filesystem, that didn't happen; exFAT was created by Microsoft in 2006 for use in larger flash-storage cards, but there has never been support in the kernel for this filesystem. Microsoft's recent announcement that it wanted to get exFAT support into the mainline kernel would appear to have removed the largest obstacle to Linux exFAT support. But, as is so often the case, it seems that some challenges remain.
Waypipe Is Successfully Working For This Network-Transparent Wayland Apps/Games Proxy — Waypipe development was successful this summer by student developer Manuel Stoeckl who was working on the effort as part of this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Waypipe is successfully working now for running Wayland games/applications over the network using this proxy mechanism and supports features like compression, multi-threading optimizations, and hardware-accelerated VA-API for video encode/decode across the network.
GSOC 2019 - M. Stoeckl's website — Waypipe supports many quality of life features, including a user-friendly command line wrapper for ssh, hardware accelerated video encoding, transfer compression with either LZ4 or Zstd, and a method to reconnect applications when the ssh connection breaks. With more recent kernels and versions of Mesa that support DMABUFs (GPU-side buffers), it can proxy programs that render images using OpenGL.
What to Expect in GNOME 3.34, Out Next Week - OMG! Ubuntu! — GNOME 3.34 makes it MUCH easier to create app folders in the GNOME Shell ‘Application Overview’, i.e. the grid of app shortcuts you see when pressing the All Apps icon on the Ubuntu Dock.
GNOME 3.34's Mutter Lands A Last-Minute Performance Fix For NVIDIA — Canonical's Daniel van Vugt who is known for his many GNOME performance optimizations over the past two years has been toying with this NVIDIA fix/optimization the past few months and merged the code this morning to Mutter. This change that landed is the removal of GLX threaded swap wait handling for the NVIDIA binary driver.
Geometric Picking Finally Lands In GNOME/Mutter 3.34 For Lowering CPU Usage — This is about cursor movement and now avoiding OpenGL/GPU usage for the color picking operations. That logic is now being done on the CPU without OpenGL but turns out is more efficiently done this way and is able to cause a measurable drop in CPU usage when moving the mouse cursor and especially when moving around windows.
GTK, Adwaita, and Vendor Styles - Platform - GNOME Discourse — After the BoF, we decided to continue the discussion and find actionable items to move things forward to improve Adwaita itself, the situation for app developers, and the experience for downstream vendors that wish to ship a distinct visual style. We decided that continuing here on Discourse is a good plan to keep the discussion persistent and centralized.
The Need for a FreeDesktop Dark Style Preference - GUADEC 2019 - Videos — Cassidy has been observing and researching dark styles in consumer software for several months, and conducted a user study with over 1,500 participants. In this talk he shares his research, observations, prior art, and requirements for a dark style preference on FreeDesktop platforms.
gamemode — GameMode is a daemon/lib combo for Linux that allows games to request a set of optimisations be temporarily applied to the host OS and/or a game process.
Free Courses at Linux Academy — September 2019 – Linux Academy — On September 17th Linux Torvald first released the Linux Operating System Kernel on September 17th, 1991 so we are celebrating by offering free training for you to increase your Linux Skills.
Unofficial Hacker Family Dinner & Unbirthday Party | Meetup — Join us for a meet and greet with fellow Texas Cyber Summit attendees and a belated celebration of Ell and Allie's Birthdays! There will be good food, good friends, and we hope some good conversation.
cpufreq - GNOME Shell Extensions — This is a lightweight CPU frequency scaling monitor and powerful CPU management tool. The extension is using standard cpufreq kernel modules to collect information and manage governors. It needs root permission to able changing governors.
i7z — A better i7 (and now i3, i5) reporting tool for Linux.
Jupiter.Gallery — Our self-hosted photo gallery powered by Lychee. Send your photos to chz at jupiterbroadcasting.com.
Lychee — A great looking and easy-to-use photo-management-system you can run on your server, to manage and share photos.
Audio in Linux question — Is there something lacking in our ALSA/JACK/PuleAudio stack that I'm not aware of? We obviously can do pro audio production, given Ardour, REAPER and even Audacity. What's missing?
zFRAG by LostTrainDude — Defrag your mind by manually defragging a virtual Hard Disk, sector by sector, or enable the AUTODEFRAG to sit back and watch it do it on its own.
meshroom: 3D Reconstruction Software — Meshroom is a free, open-source 3D Reconstruction Software based on the AliceVision Photogrammetric Computer Vision framework.
Interactive Investigations | Coder Radio 373
Sep 02, 2019
We debate the best way to package scripting language apps then explore interactive development and the importance of a good shell.
Plus npm bans terminal ads, what comes after Rust, and why Mike hates macros.
Links:
Feedback: Getting started on .NET? — My question is what is the easiest route to get started in .net development? When I looked online there are several different languages that can be used from C# ,F#, ASP.NEt among others. In your personal experience what is the easiest way to get started on this path?
Feedback: Questioning Rust — [...] The primary issue here is that most of the work to prove that safety (beyond "trust me" blocks) is pushed onto the developer instead of having the compiler insert protections surmised from uses of the data structures outlined in the source code. After all, it can only prove what it is shown, not what it assumes.
Feedback on Mike and Macros — I'd also love to hear more about what you dislike about macros. Personally, I view Rust's macro system as one of its biggest selling points. I've written more than a few macros myself and, every time, they've simplified my code in ways I couldn't have managed without them. Perhaps more importantly, I've also noticed that many of my favorite crates make heavy use of macros—and doing so lets them expose a much more ergonomic API.
The Imposter's Handbook by Rob Conery — You've had to learn on the job. New languages, new frameworks, new ways of doing things - a constant struggle just to stay current in the industry. This left no time to learn the foundational concepts and skills that come with a degree in Computer Science.
npm Bans Terminal Ads — After last week a popular JavaScript library started showing full-blown ads in the npm command-line interface, npm, Inc., the company that runs the npm tool and website, has taken a stance and plans to ban such behavior in the future.
Apple wants to remove scripting languages from macOS — Scripting language runtimes such as Python, Ruby, and Perl are included in macOS for compatibility with legacy software. In future versions of macOS, scripting language runtimes won’t be available by default, and may require you to install an additional package. If your software depends on scripting languages, it’s recommended that you bundle the runtime within the app
Building Standalone Python Applications with PyOxidizer — Python hasn't ever had a consistent story for how I give my code to someone else, especially if that someone else isn't a developer and just wants to use my application.
Tim Ewald - Clojure: Programming with Hand Tools — For most of human history, furniture was built by hand using a small set of simple tools. This approach connects you in a profoundly direct way to the work, your effort to the result. This changed with the rise of machine tools, which made production more efficient but also altered what's made and how we think about making it in in a profound way. This talk explores the effects of automation on our work, which is as relevant to software as it is to furniture, especially now that once again, with Clojure, we are building things using a small set of simple tools.
Things You Didn't Know About GNU Readline — GNU Readline is an unassuming little software library that I relied on for years without realizing that it was there. Tens of thousands of people probably use it every day without thinking about it. If you use the Bash shell, every time you auto-complete a filename, or move the cursor around within a single line of input text, or search through the history of your previous commands, you are using GNU Readline.
bpython — A fancy curses interface to the Python interactive interpreter
pry — Pry is a runtime developer console and IRB alternative with powerful introspection capabilities. Pry aims to be more than an IRB replacement. It is an attempt to bring REPL driven programming to the Ruby language.
Ammonite — Ammonite lets you use the Scala language for scripting purposes: in the REPL, as scripts, as a library to use in existing projects, or as a standalone systems shell.
rebel-readline — A terminal readline library for Clojure Dialects
litecli — A command-line client for SQLite databases that has auto-completion and syntax highlighting.
Linux Action News 121
Sep 01, 2019
Microsoft continues to prove how much it loves Linux while Google tries to eat their lunch, mixed news from Mozilla, and good stuff from GNOME.
Plus Telegram's cryptocurrency is definitely happening. Honest.
Special Guest: Wes Payne.
Links:
exFAT in the Linux kernel? Yes! — It’s important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence. To this end, we will be making Microsoft’s technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate development of conformant, interoperable implementations. We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network’s Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN’s 3040+ members and licensees.
The Initial exFAT Driver Queued For Introduction With The Linux 5.4 Kernel — Greg lived up to his talk and today committed the exFAT driver to staging-next. This nearly eleven thousand lines of new code did get the sign-off of Microsoft and with it being in the "-next" branch will be set for inclusion into the Linux 5.4 mainline code-base once Linux 5.3 is released.
Chris Beard to step down as Mozilla CEO — This is a good place to recruit our next CEO and for me to take a meaningful break and recharge before considering what’s next for me. It may be a cliché — but I’ll embrace it — as I’m also looking forward to spending more time with my family after a particularly intense but gratifying tour of duty.
Thunderbird 68 released — Thunderbird version 68.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as upgrade from Thunderbird version 60 or earlier. A future version 68.1 will provide updates from earlier versions. Note that add-ons are only supported if add-on authors have adapted them.
What’s New in Thunderbird 68 — Thunderbird 68 focuses on polish and setting the stage for future releases. There was a lot of work that we had to do below the surface that has made Thunderbird more future-proof and has made it a solid base to continue to build upon. But we also managed to create some great features you can touch today.
GNOME Firmware Updater — A few months ago, Dell asked if I’d like to co-mentor an intern over the summer. The task was to create a GTK “power user” application for managing firmware. The idea being that someone like Dell support could ask the user to run a little application and then read back firmware versions or downgrade to an older firmware version rather than getting them to use the command line.
GNOME Foundation launches Coding Education Challenge — The GNOME Foundation, with support from Endless, has announced the Coding Education Challenge, a competition aimed to attract projects that offer educators and students new and innovative ideas to teach coding with free and open source software. The $500,000 in funding will support the prizes, which will be awarded to the teams who advance through the three stages of the competition.
Telegram will launch its Gram cryptocurrency by October 31 or bust — Telegram’s cryptocurrency— the Gram — may be going public after all. The encrypted messaging app company plans to deliver “the first batches” of the coin in the next two months, according to a report at The New York Times.
Bunk Beds | Jupiter Extras 9
Aug 30, 2019
What should have been an innocent question about bunk beds turned into the longest ever User Error out take.
Here is the unedited version of a segment on User Error 73. There is some bad language.
Stealing the Top Bunk | User Error 73
Aug 30, 2019
AskError special. Sleeping arrangements, hypothetical distro infrastructure, and IT milestones.
00:00:52 Top bunk or bottom bunk? 00:02:59 How would the distro landscape change if Ubuntu didn't allow other distros to use their infrastructure/repos? 00:14:31 Are there any things that you are irrationality frugal/tight/stingy with? 00:18:01 What's the best thing to happen in IT since you started using computers? 00:24:28 What's your worst habit? 00:27:35 If you knew could definitely get away with one crime, what would it be?
The Story Behind Self Hosted | Jupiter Extras 8
Aug 29, 2019
Brent joins Alex and Chris to discuss the origins of Jupiter Broadcasting new selfhosted.show. It's a casual chat about a project in the making for two years, hit play and the drinks are on us.
LinuxServer.io — We are a group of like minded enthusiasts from across the world who build and maintain the largest collection of Docker images on the web, and at our core are the principles behind Free and Open Source Software. Our primary goal is to provide easy-to-use and streamlined Docker images with clear and concise documentation.
The Perfect Media Server - 2019 Edition — Storage should be boring. Boring is reliable. Reliable means you don't lose data. And that's exactly what the MergerFS + Snapraid combo I first wrote about in 2016 has provided. A solid, boring and reliable way of storing multiple TBs of data with little fuss.
Smart RGB LED strips with Home Assistant — 2019 is the year I am taking back control of my smart devices by bringing as much 'smarts' back inside my LAN as possible. To do this I've recently been experimenting with Home Assistant which I have running in a docker container on my media server.
OpenBSD on 7th gen Thinkpad X1 Carbon, how to install FreeBSD on a MacBook, Kernel portion of in-kernel TLS (KTLS), Boot Environments on DragonflyBSD, Project Trident Updates, vBSDcon schedule, and more.
Another year, another ThinkPad X1 Carbon, this time with a Dolby Atmos sound system and a smaller battery. The seventh generation X1 Carbon isn't much different than the fifth and sixth generations. I opted for the non-vPro Core i5-8265U, 16Gb of RAM, a 512Gb NVMe SSD, and a matte non-touch WQHD display at ~300 nits. A brighter 500-nit 4k display is available, though early reports indicated it severely impacts battery life. Gone are the microSD card slot on the back and 1mm of overall thickness (from 15.95mm to 14.95mm), but also 6Whr of battery (down to 51Whr) and a little bit of travel in the keyboard and TrackPoint buttons. I still very much like the feel of both of them, so kudos to Lenovo for not going too far down the Apple route of sacrificing performance and usability just for a thinner profile. On my fifth generation X1 Carbon, I used a vinyl plotter to cut out stickers to cover the webcam, "X1 Carbon" branding from the bottom of the display, the power button LED, and the "ThinkPad" branding from the lower part of the keyboard deck.
FreeBSD with some additional setup can be installed on a MacBook 1,1 or 2,1. This article covers how to do so with FreeBSD 10-12.
Installing
FreeBSD can be installed as the only OS on your MacBook if desired. What you should have is:
A Mac OS X 10.4.6-10.7.5 installer. Unofficial versions modified for these MacBooks such as 10.8 also work.
A blank CD or DVD to burn the FreeBSD image to. Discs simply work best with these older MacBooks.
An ISO file of FreeBSD for x86. The AMD64 ISO does not boot due to the 32 bit EFI of these MacBooks.
Burn the ISO file to the blank CD or DVD. Once done, make sure it's in your MacBook and then power off the MacBook. Turn it on, and hold down the c key until the FreeBSD disc boots.
One of the projects I have been working on for the past several months in conjunction with several other folks is upstreaming work from Netflix to handle some aspects of Transport Layer Security (TLS) in the kernel. In particular, this lets a web server use sendfile() to send static content on HTTPS connections. There is a lot more detail in the review itself, so I will spare pasting a big wall of text here. However, I have posted the patch to add the kernel-side of KTLS for review at the URL below. KTLS also requires other patches to OpenSSL and nginx, but this review is only for the kernel bits. Patches and reviews for the other bits will follow later.
This is a tool inspired by the beadm utility for FreeBSD/Illumos systems that creates and manages ZFS boot environments. This utility in contrast is written from the ground up in C, this should provide better performance, integration, and extensibility than the POSIX sh and awk script it was inspired by. During the time this project has been worked on, beadm has been superseded by bectl on FreeBSD. After hammering out some of the outstanding internal logic issues, I might look at providing a similar interface to the command as bectl.
This is a general package update to the CURRENT release repository based upon TrueOS 19.08. Legacy boot ISO functional again This update includes the FreeBSD fixes for the “vesa” graphics driver for legacy-boot systems. The system can once again be installed on legacy-boot systems.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Self Hosted Secrets | LINUX Unplugged 316
Aug 27, 2019
Safely host your own password database using totally open source software. We cover BitWarden, our top choice to solve this problem.
Plus we announce a new show we're super proud of, and chat with Dan Lynch from OggCamp.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Dan Lynch, and Ell Marquez.
Links:
low-memory-monitor: new project announcement — low-memory-monitor, as its name implies, monitors the amount of free physical memory on the system and will shoot off signals to interested user-space applications, usually session managers, or sandboxing helpers, when that memory runs low, making it possible for applications to shrink their memory footprints before it's too late either to recover a usable system, or avoid taking a performance hit.
Pinebook Preorders — Public #Pinebook Pro pre-orders start in the morning PDT (California, USA Time) August 25. The NEXT pre-order window will be mid-September; so don't worry if you won't get a pre-order now, it won't be a long wait for the next pre-order window.
LINUX Unplugged - Blog - Summer Sprint 2019 — Working remotely certainly has its advantages and I love the ability to sit in the comfort of my own home doing work I’m passionate about. That being said, I think it’s equally important to spend time together in meat space. There really is nothing like looking across the table at your co-workers while you try to flush out new ideas, make important decisions, or just share a meal. Not to mention, Washington is beautiful this time of the year...
Subscribe to Self Hosted — Discover new software and hardware to get the best out of your network, control smart devices, and secure your data on cloud services. Self Hosted is a chat show between Chris and Alex two long-time "self hosters" who share their lessons and take you on the journey of their new ones.
OGGCAMP 19 - OggCamp 19 — We’re at The Manchester Conference Centre in the Pendulum Hotel near Picadilly Station the weekend of October 19th and 20th 2019.
Jupiter Extras — New ideas, great interviews, events, and other content you will love. We bring you the Extras.
Texas Cyber Summit — October 10th-12th, 2019 at the Grand Hyatt in San Antonion
Behind the scenes with the Bitwarden password manager | Opensource.com — I've used password management tools for years. I became frustrated by the complexity and barrier to entry many of the existing solutions offered. There was also a lack of quality, open source solutions available. I thought things could be done better and that there was great value in doing so.
bitwarden/cli: The command line vault (Windows, macOS, & Linux). — The Bitwarden CLI is a powerful, full-featured command-line interface (CLI) tool to access and manage a Bitwarden vault. The CLI is written with TypeScript and Node.js and can be run on Windows, macOS, and Linux distributions.
Manage your passwords with Bitwarden and Podman - Fedora Magazine — You can also sync your passwords across devices if you have a cloud-based password manager like LastPass, 1Password, or Dashlane. Unfortunately, none of these products are open source. Luckily there are open source alternatives available.
Wayland Buddies | LINUX Unplugged 315 : linuxunplugged — A lot of the "Wayland is really smooth" talk really means "Mutter is really smooth", since it's gnome-shell's compositor Mutter that has to implement everything which Xorg used to do.
Meet Alex from Self Hosted | Jupiter Extras 7
Aug 27, 2019
Brent welcomes Alex into the podcast family and discusses his long journey from Apple to Red Hat, and London to Raleigh. Plus some tidbits about the new show he's co-hosting on Jupiter Broadcasting and spending time with the crew.
We're back and going crazy about Crystal, a statically typed language that's as fast as C and as slick as ruby.
Plus an update on Rails 6, Intel's growing adoption of Rust, and the challenge of making breaking changes.
Links:
Feedback: Academia and Industry — Do either of you have any insights as to how the software development community would view someone with a math PhD, but no industry coding experience as a job applicant? Any advice would be appreciated.
Feedback: Absurd Abstractions — FYI about wanting interface in Python: they are called abstract base classes. Check out the standard library module, abc for that and collections.abc some useful predefined container interfaces.
Feedback: Breaking Changes — I developed a niche Python package that has some user following in the network security realm. I’m at a crossroads though as a change I want to make will subtly break scripts that worked in previous/current versions. The end result of my pending change is good for the project but I fear I’ll ruin the workflow of my users. Other than my github page I don’t know how to query/inform my users of this pending change. What should I do?
Altruism Still Fuels the Web. Businesses Love to Exploit It | WIRED — The original well-meaning, geeky architects of the web believed that there was an abundance of altruism in human nature—and they were more correct on this count, it turns out, than many esteemed social philosophers were. But they were too optimistic in overlooking the possibility that corporations would exploit and colonize this new realm. If only we had all seen it coming.
The Crystal Programming Language — Crystal is statically type checked, so any type errors will be caught early by the compiler rather than fail on runtime. Moreover, and to keep the language clean, Crystal has built-in type inference, so most type annotations are unneeded.
Linux Action News 120
Aug 25, 2019
More tools to keep your Linux box and cloud servers secure this week, OpenPOWER responds to Risc-V competition, and we ponder the year-long open-source supply chain attacks.
Plus our reaction to Android dropping dessert names, the Confidential Computing consortium, and more.
System76 announce new firmware updater — We’ve been working on the Firmware Manager project, which we will be shipping to all Pop!_OS users, and System76 hardware customers on other Debian-based distributions. It supports checking and updating firmware from LVFS and system76-firmware services, is Wayland-compatible, and provides both a GTK application and library.
The Next Step in the OpenPOWER Foundation Journey — The OpenPOWER Foundation will now join projects and organizations like OpenBMC, CHIPS Alliance, OpenHPC and so many others within the Linux Foundation.
Confidential Computing Consortium — Confidential computing focuses on securing data in use. Current approaches to securing data often address data at rest (storage) and in transit (network)but encrypting data in use is possibly the most challenging step to providing a fully encrypted lifecycle for sensitive data.
Android to drop dessert names — So, this next release of Android will simply use the version number and be called Android 10. We think this change helps make release names simpler and more intuitive for our global community. And while there were many tempting “Q” desserts out there, we think that at version 10 and 2.5 billion active devices, it was time to make this change.
A Chat with Chz Bacon | Jupiter Extras 6
Aug 23, 2019
A revealing conversation with Jupiter Broadcasting's designer Mr. Chz Bacon. We discuss his Linux roots, design philosophies, community involvement, and a lot more.
Epyc Encryption | TechSNAP 410
Aug 23, 2019
It's CPU release season and we get excited about AMD's new line of server chips. Plus our take on AMD's approach to memory encryption, and our struggle to make sense of Intel's Comet Lake line.
Also, a few Windows worms you should know about, the end of the road for EV certs, and an embarrassing new Bluetooth attack.
Links:
A detailed look at AMD’s new Epyc “Rome” 7nm server CPUs | Ars Technica — The short version of the story is, Epyc "Rome" is to the server what Ryzen 3000 was to the desktop—bringing significantly improved IPC, more cores, and better thermal efficiency than either its current-generation Intel equivalents or its first-generation Epyc predecessors.
AMD Rome Second Generation EPYC Review: 2x 64-core Benchmarked — Ever since the Opteron days, AMD's market share has been rounded to zero percent, and with its first generation of EPYC processors using its new Zen microarchitecture, that number skipped up a small handful of points, but everyone has been waiting with bated breath for the second swing at the ball. AMD's Rome platform solves the concerns that first gen Naples had, plus this CPU family is designed to do many things: a new CPU microarchitecture on 7nm, offer up to 64 cores, offer 128 lanes of PCIe 4.0, offer 8 memory channels, and offer a unified memory architecture based on chiplets.
AMD EPYC Rome Still Conquering Cascadelake Even Without Mitigations - Phoronix — Out of curiosity, I've run some unmitigated benchmarks for the various relevant CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities on both the Intel Xeon Platinum 8280 Cascadelake and AMD EPYC 7742 Rome processors for seeing how the performance differs.
Intel’s line of notebook CPUs gets more confusing with 14nm Comet Lake | Ars Technica — Going by Intel's numbers, Comet Lake looks like a competent upgrade to its predecessor Whiskey Lake. The interesting question—and one largely left unanswered by Intel—is why the company has decided to launch a new line of 14nm notebook CPUs less than a month after launching Ice Lake, its first 10nm notebook CPUs.
A look at the Windows 10 exploit Google Zero disclosed this week | Ars Technica — On Tuesday, Tavis Ormandy of Google's Project Zero released an exploit kit called ctftool, which uses and abuses Microsoft's Text Services Framework in ways that can effectively get anyone root—er, system that is—on any unpatched Windows 10 system they're able to log in to
Patch new wormable vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Services (CVE-2019-1181/1182) – Microsoft Security Response Center — Today Microsoft released a set of fixes for Remote Desktop Services that include two critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-1181 and CVE-2019-1182. Like the previously-fixed ‘BlueKeep’ vulnerability (CVE-2019-0708), these two vulnerabilities are also ‘wormable’, meaning that any future malware that exploits these could propagate from vulnerable computer to vulnerable computer without user interaction.
KNOB Attack — TL;DR: The specification of Bluetooth includes an encryption key negotiation protocol that allows to negotiate encryption keys with 1 Byte of entropy without protecting the integrity of the negotiation process. A remote attacker can manipulate the entropy negotiation to let any standard compliant Bluetooth device negotiate encryption keys with 1 byte of entropy and then brute force the low entropy keys in real time.
Troy Hunt: Extended Validation Certificates are (Really, Really) Dead — With both browsers auto-updating for most people, we're about 10 weeks out from no more EV and the vast majority of web users no longer seeing something they didn't even know was there to begin with! Oh sure, you can still drill down into the certificate and see the entity name, but who's really going to do that? You and I, perhaps, but we're not exactly in the meat of the browser demographics.
Google wants to reduce lifespan for HTTPS certificates to one year | ZDNet — Scott Helme argues that the security benefits of shorter SSL certificate lifespans have nothing to do with phishing or malware sites, but instead with the SSL certificate revocation process. Helme claims that this process is broken and that bad SSL certificates continue to live on for years after being mississued and revoked.
The Enthusiast Trap - Office Hours with Chris | Jupiter Extras 5
Aug 22, 2019
What is the enthusiast trap, and why does it seem to ensnare every successful open source project? Also, some excellent listener power user tips for NextCloud.
Links:
Email: The Enthusiast Trap — I recently heard of a name for the phenomenon that's happening with Manjaro (and many other projects): it's called the enthusiast trap.
Email: Nextcloud features to explore — Hey Chris I had some tips for Nextcloud features that I didn't hear mentioned that you would definitely find useful.
We check out a great tool for learning web development basics, and Distrohoppers brings us mixed experiences.
Plus which of the 10 commandments for Linux users we agree with.
Links:
Ell's Trip to Hacker Summer Camp — The whole Choose Linux crew talk about Ell's recent trip to Black Hat, B-sides, DEF CON, and more at Hacker Summer Camp.
PCLinuxOS — PCLinuxOS is a free easy to use Linux-based Operating System for x86_64 desktops or laptops.
Today, Linux and open source rules the world, and the UNIX philosophy is widely considered compulsory. Organizations are striving to build small, focused applications that work collaboratively in a cloud and microservices environment. We rely on the network, as well as HTTP (text) APIs for storing and referencing data. Moreover, nearly all configuration is stored and communicated using text (e.g. YAML, JSON or XML). And while the UNIX philosophy has changed dramatically over the past 5 decades, it hasn’t strayed too far from Ken Thompson’s original definition in 1973:
We write programs that do one thing and do it well
We write programs to work together
And we write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface
Valuable research is often hindered or outright prevented by the inability to install software. This need not be the case.
Since I began supporting research computing in 1999, I’ve frequently seen researchers struggle for days or weeks trying to install a single open source application. In most cases, they ultimately failed.
In many cases, they could have easily installed the software in seconds with one simple command, using a package manager such as Debian packages, FreeBSD ports, MacPorts, or Pkgsrc, just to name a few.
Developer websites often contain poorly written instructions for doing “caveman installs”; manually downloading, unpacking, patching, and building the software. The same laborious process must often be followed for other software packages on which it depends, which can sometimes number in the dozens. Many researchers are simply unaware that there are easier ways to install the software they need. Caveman installs are a colossal waste of man-hours. If 1000 people around the globe spend an average of 20 hours each trying to install the same program that could have been installed with a package manager (this is not uncommon), then 20,000 man-hours have been lost that could have gone toward science. How many important discoveries are delayed by this?
The elite research institutions have ample funding and dozens of IT staff dedicated to research computing. They can churn out publications even if their operation is inefficient. Most institutions, however, have few or no IT staff dedicated to research, and cannot afford to squander precious man-hours on temporary, one-off software installs. The wise approach for those of us in that situation is to collaborate on making software deployment easier for everyone. If we do so, then even the smallest research groups can leverage that work to be more productive and make more frequent contributions to science.
Fortunately, the vast majority of open source software installs can be made trivial for anyone to do for themselves. Modern package managers perform all the same steps as a caveman install, but automatically. Package managers also install dependencies for us automatically.
For two years I've been driving myself crazy trying to figure out the source of a driver problem on OpenBSD: interrupts never arrived for certain touchpad devices. A couple weeks ago, I put out a public plea asking for help in case any non-OpenBSD developers recognized the problem, but while debugging an unrelated issue over the weekend, I finally solved it.
It's been a long journey and it's a technical tale, but here it is.
Presently, Wine on amd64 is in test phase. It seems to work fine with caveats like LD_LIBRARY_PATH which has to be set as 32-bit Xorg libs don't have ${PREFIX}/emul/netbsd32/lib in its rpath section. The latter is due to us extracting 32-bit libs from tarballs in lieu of building 32-bit Xorg on amd64. As previously stated, pkgsrc doesn't search for pkgconfig files in ${PREFIX}/emul/netbsd32/lib which might have inadvertent effects that I am unaware of as of now. I shall be working on these issues during the final coding period. I would like to thank @leot, @maya and @christos for saving me from shooting myself in the foot many a time. I, admittedly, have had times when multiple approaches, which all seemed right at that time, perplexed me. I believe those are times when having a mentor counts, and I have been lucky enough to have really good ones. Once again, thanks to Google for this wonderful opportunity.
As a part of Google Summer of Code’19, I am working on improving the support for Syzkaller kernel fuzzer. Syzkaller is an unsupervised coverage-guided kernel fuzzer, that supports a variety of operating systems including NetBSD. This report details the work done during the second coding period.
"So I said I won’t be talking about the BSDs, but I feel like I should at the very least give you a general overview of the RK3399 *BSD functionality. I’ll make it quick. I’ve spoken to *BSD devs whom worked on the RockPro64 and from what I’ve gathered (despite the different *BSDs having varying degree of support for the RK3399 SOC) many of the core features are already supported, which bodes well for *BSD on the Pro. That said, some of the things you’d require on a functional laptop – such as the LCD (using eDP) for instance – will not work on the Pinebook Pro using *BSD as of today. So clearly a degree of work is yet needed for a BSD to run on the device. However, keep in mind that *BSD developers will be receiving their units soon and by the time you receive yours some basic functionality may be available."
Killing processes in a Unix-like system can be trickier than expected. Last week I was debugging an odd issue related to job stopping on Semaphore. More specifically, an issue related to the killing of a running process in a job. Here are the highlights of what I learned:
Unix-like operating systems have sophisticated process relationships. Parent-child, process groups, sessions, and session leaders. However, the details are not uniform across operating systems like Linux and macOS. POSIX compliant operating systems support sending signals to process groups with a negative PID number.
Sending signals to all processes in a session is not trivial with syscalls.
Child processes started with exec inherit their parent signal configuration. If the parent process is ignoring the SIGHUP signal, for example, this configuration is propagated to the children.
The answer to the “What happens with orphaned process groups” question is not trivial.
I love fast software. That is, software speedy both in function and interface. Software with minimal to no lag between wanting to activate or manipulate something and the thing happening. Lightness.
Software that’s speedy usually means it’s focused. Like a good tool, it often means that it’s simple, but that’s not necessarily true. Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance. Fastness in software is like great margins in a book — makes you smile without necessarily knowing why.
But why is slow bad? Fast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness. Fast software gives the user a chance to “meld” with its toolset. That is, not break flow. When the nerds upon Nerd Hill fight to the death over Vi and Emacs, it’s partly because they have such a strong affinity for the flow of the application and its meldiness. They have invested. The Tool Is Good, so they feel. Not breaking flow is an axiom of great tools.
A typewriter is an excellent tool because, even though it’s slow in a relative sense, every aspect of the machine itself operates as quickly as the user can move. It is focused. There are no delays when making a new line or slamming a key into the paper. Yes, you have to put a new sheet of paper into the machine at the end of a page, but that action becomes part of the flow of using the machine, and the accumulation of paper a visual indication of work completed. It is not wasted work. There are no fundamental mechanical delays in using the machine. The best software inches ever closer to the physical directness of something like a typewriter. (The machine may break down, of course, ribbons need to be changed — but this is maintenance and separate from the use of the tool. I’d be delighted to “maintain” Photoshop if it would lighten it up.)
Wayland Buddies | LINUX Unplugged 315
Aug 20, 2019
We spend our weekend with Wayland, discover new apps to try, tricks to share, and dig into the state of the project.
Plus System76's new software release, and Fedora's big decision.
Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Drew DeVore.
Links:
System76 Blog — The New Firmware Manager — we’re excited to announce that you can now check and update firmware through Settings on Pop!_OS, and through the firmware manager GTK application on System76 hardware running other Debian-based distributions.
pop-os/firmware-manager — Generic framework and GTK UI for firmware updates from system76-firmware and fwupd, written in Rust.
Richard Brown on Twitter — Today I’m stepping down as openSUSE Chairman, leaving the Project in the fine hands of the openSUSE board and it’s new Chair, @GeraldPfeifer.
Scan for network vulnerabilities w/ Nmap - Linux Academy YouTube — With data breaches becoming so common, it's vital to be proactive in finding and patching severe vulnerabilities on our system. One of the free/open-source ways you can scan for these vulnerabilities is by using Nmap.
How to copy directories with SCP recursively tutorial - Linux AcademyYouTube — When working with servers you will often find yourself in a situation where you need to copy files from one machine to another. You can package them into a tarball and then copy a tarball over to a remote machine and then unpack it there. This is not a bad option but you can also use SCP to copy the files as they are and preserve the directory structure, without the need for packaging.
What’s Taking Wayland So Long? » Linux Magazine — Over the years, the project’s goals have evolved, but more or less remained: the development of a simpler, more efficient, and more secure display server.
pp3345/gnome-with-patches Copr — This repo contains gnome-shell and mutter builds based on the official Fedora ones with some additional patches (mainly to improve performance).
Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator — Tilix is an advanced GTK3 tiling terminal emulator that follows the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines.
GNOME 3.34 Works Out Refined XWayland Support For X11 Apps Run Under Sudo - Phoronix — This allows the X11 clients to now work from a different VT without any extra environment variables set besides the DISPLAY. In other words, the same user on the same system can now more easily run clients with XWayland thanks to this commit coming late in the 3.34 cycle.
The MATE Desktop Is Becoming Quite Usable On Wayland Via Mir - Phoronix — The MATE desktop is seeing Wayland support thanks to Mir doing the heavy lifting. This is also becoming one of the leading examples of Mir's use-case following Canonical engineers re-tooling their display server with Wayland support after pulling back from their original design goals around Ubuntu Touch and mobile/convergence.
Wayland misconceptions debunked | Drew DeVault’s Blog — This article has been on my backburner for a while, but it seems Wayland FUD is making the news again recently, so I’ve bumped up the priority a bit. For those new to my blog, I am the maintainer of wlroots, a library which implements much of the functionality required of a Wayland compositor and is arguably the single most influential project in Wayland right now; and sway, a popular Wayland compositor which is nearing version 1.0.
Flameshot — Powerful yet simple to use screenshot software.
Ed Therriault on Twitter — @ChrisLAS I’ve been out of the loop for a bit as I’ve been focusing on work and family but I need to know what’s a good incremental backup solution that will use very little storage. I’ll be uploading them to google drive. Ubuntu server 19. Thank you for your time.
seemoo-lab/opendrop — An open Apple AirDrop implementation written in Python
anirudhajith/process-wallpaper — Shell and python scripts that set the desktop wallpaper to a word cloud of the most resource-hungry processes.
Chris and Wes React to LINUX Unplugged | Jupiter Extras 3
Aug 20, 2019
Nothing is worse than your past self. So we play old clips of LINUX Unplugged and react.
Absurd Abstractions | Coder Radio 371
Aug 19, 2019
It’s a Coder Radio special all about abstraction. What it is, why we need it, and what to do when it leaks.
Plus your feedback, Mike’s next language challenge, and a functional ruby pick.
Links:
Feedback: Clojure, Racket, and Extempore — Thinking about the problem could take the form of leveraging the REPL to work out code to solve a problem or you could spend some time away from your computer screen (or in “Hammock Time”) working out problems. If I have learned anything from Clojure’s creator, “Rich Hickey” its “Programming is not about not about typing, it’s about thinking”.
The Law of Leaky Abstractions – Joel on Software — This is what I call a leaky abstraction. TCP attempts to provide a complete abstraction of an underlying unreliable network, but sometimes, the network leaks through the abstraction and you feel the things that the abstraction can’t quite protect you from.
Forget about Leaky Abstractions — Even if an abstraction is leaky it can still be useful. Sometimes you cannot escape it (uniform memory) and sometimes the workaround is costly to implement (TCP, SQL). So you accept the technical debt for now. Hope the debt does not kill the project. Maybe there will come a time where it is worthwhile to pay off the debt.
All Abstractions Are Failed Abstractions — It's our job as modern programmers not to abandon abstractions due to these deficiencies, but to embrace the useful elements of them, to adapt the working parts and construct ever so slightly less leaky and broken abstractions over time.
Appropriate Levels of Abstraction — Instead of aspiring to higher levels of abstraction, we should instead seek to work at the appropriate level of abstraction for the problem at hand. The appropriate level is sometimes very high and sometimes very low. It varies for different situations even in the same software project. Just as other engineering disciplines require different tools for different situations, software development also requires tools and languages that support our work at multiple levels of abstraction.
Choosing The Proper Level of Abstraction — In software development, choosing the right abstraction can be tricky. If you make it too simple, it won’t let you create a model to satisfy even the immediate requirements. If you make it restricted to the urgent needs, you might have to change it almost immediately to implement the next iteration of the model. However, if you make your abstraction too generic and all-encompassing, modeling solutions might get so complicated that you’ll go out of business before you are finished.
The Crystal Programming Language — Crystal is statically type checked, so any type errors will be caught early by the compiler rather than fail on runtime. Moreover, and to keep the language clean, Crystal has built-in type inference, so most type annotations are unneeded.
affect: Algebraic effects for Ruby — Affect is a tiny Ruby gem providing a way to isolate and handle side-effects in functional programs. Affect implements algebraic effects in Ruby, but can also be used to implement patterns that are orthogonal to object-oriented programming, such as inversion of control and dependency injection.
Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us — Imagine that you’re writing code with goto, and somebody shows you if and for statements. Or maybe you’re deep in the callback hell, and somebody shows you async / await. Pretty cool, huh? If you’re the kind of person who likes to learn about programming ideas several years before they hit the mainstream, it might be a good time to get curious about algebraic effects. Don’t feel like you have to though. It is a bit like thinking about async / await in 1999.
MinIO — The 100% Open Source, Enterprise-Grade, Amazon S3 Compatible Object Storage
Forever Friday | The Friday Stream 13
Aug 19, 2019
It's the final Friday, and the crew shares some great stories from a recent team summer camp.
Plus some super-secret projects in the works, and another famous flash mob.
We go hands-on with the big Xfce release that took four years and five months to develop. Kubernetes gets an audit that might just set a precedent, and Google has a new feature for AMP that has us all worked up.
Links:
Xfce 4.14 released — After 4 years and 5 months of work, we are pleased to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.14, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.12.
Open Sourcing the Kubernetes Security Audit — The group created an open request for proposals, taking responsibility for evaluating the submitted proposals and recommending the vendor best suited to complete a security assessment against Kubernetes, bearing in mind the high complexity and wide scope of the project.
Server-side rendering for AMP — AMP now officially supports a technique called server-side rendering (SSR) which you can apply to your AMP pages to make them load even faster. Our tests show increases of up to a whopping 50% on the popular FCP metric.
OSdisc.com Has Closed — In just the past couple days, a very popular Linux OS supply site has closed.
Ell's Trip to Hacker Summer Camp | Jupiter Extras 2
Aug 16, 2019
The whole Choose Linux crew talk about Ell's recent trip to Black Hat, B-sides, DEF CON, and more at Hacker Summer Camp.
Dealing with users who hate change, dumb phones, and different approaches to social media consumption.
Plus infidelity, the state of the world, and consequences of small decisions.
00:00:16 #AskError: Do you read everything or follow all the people? 00:04:53 Changing software and user backlash 00:10:12 #AskError: Hypothetically speaking, do you think it was easier to be unfaithful in a relationship 20 years ago or now? 00:18:07 Dumb phone trope 00:24:54 #AskError: Do you have a 'Sliding Doors' moment in your past? 00:30:31 Will polarised politics last forever?
Conference Gear Breakdown | BSD Now 311
Aug 15, 2019
NetBSD 9.0 release process has started, xargs, a tale of two spellcheckers, Adapting TriforceAFL for NetBSD, Exploiting a no-name freebsd kernel vulnerability, and more.
If you have been following source-changes, you may have noticed the creation of the netbsd-9 branch! It has some really exciting items that we worked on:
New AArch64 architecture support:
Symmetric and asymmetrical multiprocessing support (aka big.LITTLE)
Support for running 32-bit binaries
UEFI and ACPI support
Support for SBSA/SBBR (server-class) hardware.
The FDT-ization of many ARM boards:
the 32-bit GENERIC kernel lists 129 different DTS configurations
the 64-bit GENERIC64 kernel lists 74 different DTS configurations
All supported by a single kernel, without requiring per-board configuration.
Graphics driver update, matching Linux 4.4, adding support for up to Kaby Lake based Intel graphics devices.
ZFS has been updated to a modern version and seen many bugfixes.
New hardware-accelerated virtualization via NVMM.
NPF performance improvements and bug fixes. A new lookup algorithm, thmap, is now the default.
NVMe performance improvements
Optional kernel ASLR support, and partial kernel ASLR for the default configuration.
Kernel sanitizers:
KLEAK, detecting memory leaks
KASAN, detecting memory overruns
KUBSAN, detecting undefined behaviour
These have been used together with continuous fuzzing via the syzkaller project to find many bugs that were fixed.
The removal of outdated networking components such as ISDN and all of its drivers
The installer is now capable of performing GPT UEFI installations.
Dramatically improved support for userland sanitizers, as well as the option to build all of NetBSD's userland using them for bug-finding.
Update to graphics userland: Mesa was updated to 18.3.4, and llvmpipe is now available for several architectures, providing 3D graphics even in the absence of a supported GPU.
We try to test NetBSD as best as we can, but your testing can help NetBSD 9.0 a great release. Please test it and let us know of any bugs you find.
xargs is probably one of the more difficult to understand of the unix command arsenal and of course that just means it’s one of the most useful too. I discovered a handy trick that I thought was worth a share. Please note there are probably other (better) ways to do this but I did my stackoverflow research and found nothing better. xargs — at least how I’ve most utilized it — is handy for taking some number of lines as input and doing some work per line. It’s hard to be more specific than that as it does so much else. It literally took me an hour of piecing together random man pages + tips from 11 year olds on stack overflow, but eventually I produced this gem: This is an example of how to find files matching a certain pattern and rename each of them. It sounds so trivial (and it is) but it demonstrates some cool tricks in an easy concept.
This is a transcript of the talk I gave at pkgsrcCon 2019 in Cambridge, UK. It is about spellcheckers, but there are much more general software engineering lessons that we can learn from this case study. The reason I got into this subject at all was my paternal leave last year, when I finally had some more time to spend working on pkgsrc. It was a tiny item in the enormous TODO file at the top of the source tree (“update enchant to version 2.2”) that made me go into this rabbit hole.
I have been working on adapting TriforceAFL for NetBSD kernel syscall fuzzing. This blog post summarizes the work done until the second evaluation. For work done during the first coding period, check out this post.
Summary
> So far, the TriforceNetBSDSyscallFuzzer has been made available in the form of a pkgsrc package with the ability to fuzz most of NetBSD syscalls. In the final coding period of GSoC. I plan to analyse the crashes that were found until now. Integrate sanitizers, try and find more bugs and finally wrap up neatly with detailed documentation.
> Last but not least, I would like to thank my mentor, Kamil Rytarowski for helping me through the process and guiding me. It has been a wonderful learning experience so far!
A new patch has been recently shipped in FreeBSD kernels to fix a vulnerability (cve-2019-5602) present in the cdrom device. In this post, we will introduce the bug and discuss its exploitation on pre/post-SMEP FreeBSD revisions.
> A closer look at the commit 6bcf6e3 shows that when invoking the CDIOCREADSUBCHANNEL_SYSSPACE ioctl, data are copied with bcopy instead of the copyout primitive. This endows a local attacker belonging to the operator group with an arbitrary write primitive in the kernel memory.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Bigger. Faster. Harder to Maintain. | LINUX Unplugged 314
Aug 13, 2019
It's huge, and it's getting bigger every month. How do you test the Linux Kernel? Major Hayden from Red Hat joins us to discuss their efforts to automate Kernel bug hunting.
Plus our honest conversation about which Linux works best for us.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Drew DeVore, Ell Marquez, Major Hayden, and Neal Gompa.
Links:
Unpatched KDE vulnerability disclosed on Twitter — When a user opens the KDE file viewer to access the directory where these files are stored, the malicious code contained within the .desktop or .directory files executes without user interaction.
KDE rips out ability for KConfig to run shell code — KDE responded on Wednesday by removing the feature to have shell commands as values in the KConfig files, which was described as an intentional feature that allowed for flexibility.
First modern coreboot server platform — This platform is the first modern upstream coreboot server platform on the market with an Intel Xeon E3-1200 v6 processor also known as Kabylake-DT.
Open-source firmware is the future - Blog | Mullvad VPN — This is the first time a modern off-the-shelf server platform gains coreboot support, and it is an integral part of realizing our vision of transparent and independently auditable VPN servers.
major.io — words of wisdom from a systems engineer
Continuous integration testing for the Linux kernel | Opensource.com — The call for continuous integration (CI) grows for more and more projects, the Continuous Kernel Integration (CKI) team forges ahead with a single mission: prevent bugs from being merged into the kernel.
0-Day Continuous Integration (CI) Test Service from Intel — With so much code contributed to each release, it’s impossible to avoid potential regressions. To eliminate them, you must first find the bugs that cause them, which can be like finding a needle in the proverbial haystack. This is what makes the 0-Day Continuous Integration (CI) Test Service so important. 0-Day delivers comprehensive, automated and continuous integration testing that monitors the Linux mainline and 800+ developer trees for regressions, helping find bugs before they reach the Linux kernel so problems can be fixed before they impact users. Simply put, 0-Day helps ensure Linux kernel quality in a highly complex development environment.
Snowpatch: continuous-integration testing for the kernel — The Linux kernel project lags many others in its use of CI testing for a number of reasons, including a fundamental mismatch with how kernel developers tend to manage their workflows. At linux.conf.au 2019, Russell Currey described a CI system called Snowpatch that, he hopes, will bridge the gap and bring better testing to the kernel development process.
Linux Test Project — Linux Test Project is a joint project started by SGI, OSDL and Bull developed and maintained by IBM, Cisco, Fujitsu, SUSE, Red Hat, Oracle and others. The project goal is to deliver tests to the open source community that validate the reliability, robustness, and stability of Linux.
patchwork — Patchwork is a web-based patch tracking system designed to facilitate the contribution and management of contributions to an open-source project.
Kernel Patch-Evaluated Testing — KPET is a framework which will execute targeted testing based on changes introduced in the patch, e.g. a network driver or similar would trigger network related testing to be invoked, or a filesystem change would invoke filesystem testing.
google/syzkaller — syzkaller is an unsupervised, coverage-guided kernel fuzzer
openQA | Introduction to the heart of openSUSE's automated testing — OpenSUSE is way too versatile for humans to test even the most common configurations. Therefore openQA was introduced and became an indispensable part of the openSUSE development and release processes. openQA is an automated test tool for operating systems. It allows to test the whole installation process of an operating system in a wide range of software and hardware configurations by leveraging qemu. This talk gives an introduction to openQA and explains how openQA works to help understand what it's output means.
OpenQA - Fedora Project Wiki — Fedora uses the openQA automated testing system as a significant part of the release validation testing process, and for testing updates. On this page you can find more information about openQA, how Fedora uses it, and how to install your own instance of openQA so you can try it out and contribute to test development.
TeleCast with popey — An experiment in lean audio delivery via Telegram. TeleCast with popey is an informal short-form audio podcast-like show
LINUX Unplugged 202: Halls of Endless Linux — Michael Hall from Endless joins us to discuss his new role, Endless’ involvement with Gnome & the unique approach they are taking with EndlessOS.
End of life - Fedora Project Wiki — Fedora Project maintains each release of Fedora according to the Fedora Release Life Cycle. The following releases have reached End of Life, and are no longer maintained and do not receive any updates.
quicktile — Adds window-tiling keybindings to any X11-based desktop.
F'ing # | Coder Radio 370
Aug 12, 2019
Things get heated when it’s time for Wes to check-in on Mike’s functional favorite, F#, and share his journey exploring modern .NET on Linux.
Plus your feedback, combining ruby and rust, and the latest scandal with JEDI.
Links:
Emacs Feedback from DJ — Another point for the show is a soft intro to functional programming. Wes mentioned Emacs because of the packages supporting Clojure development when he started with that. Elisp seems to be fairly intuitive and well documented, as a little functional language its own right (correct me if I'm wrong)--this makes for a soft intro to FP. Most of my coding has been in the space of embedded systems and low-level languages--not much functional programming to be had. This show has gotten me curious about FP, which is quite old in concept, and getting implemented nicely in modern languages. For me, I still rely heavily on special Vim keys that are not mapped in evil-mode, which causes some paper cuts. However, elisp makes it easy to customize the desired UI functionality with very short programs/elisp statements in a config file. It's quite a refreshing exercise for someone like me.
artichoke/artichoke: Artichoke is a Ruby made with Rust — Artichoke is a platform for building MRI-compatible Ruby implementations. Artichoke provides a Ruby runtime implemented in Rust that can be loaded into many VM backends.
AP Sources: Boeing changing Max software to use 2 computers — Boeing is working on new software for the 737 Max that will use a second flight control computer to make the system more reliable, solving a problem that surfaced in June with the grounded jet, two people briefed on the matter said Friday.
In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places - The New York Times — Experts thought the contract for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, known by the cinematic acronym JEDI, would go to Amazon Web Services, the dominant player in the field of cloud computing. They did not count on two developments: an extraordinarily aggressive public relations and lobbying campaign by Oracle, one of Amazon’s competitors, and the hostility of Mr. Trump to Amazon and its founder, Jeff Bezos.
The Problem With F# Evangelism — There seems to be a constant struggle to convince seasoned C# developers to give F# a try. Which is a pity because language and concepts deserve better.
Enhancing our ZFS support on Ubuntu 19.10 — We are going to enhance ZFS on root support in the coming cycles. Ubuntu 19.10 is a first-round towards that goal. We want to support ZFS on root as an experimental installer option, initially for desktop, but keeping the layout extensible for server later on.
Big performance improvements for LibreOffice — The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3, a feature-rich major release of the LibreOffice 6 family with better performance, a large number of new and improved features, and enhanced interoperability with proprietary document formats:
Linux Journal Ceases Publication — On August 7, 2019, Linux Journal shut its doors for good. All staff were laid off and the company is left with no operating funds to continue in any capacity.
We examine why it's so difficult to protect your privacy online and discuss browser fingerprinting, when to use a VPN, and the limits of private browsing.
Plus Apple's blaring bluetooth beacons and Facebook's worrying plans for WhatsApp.
OBS Studio + Endless OS | Choose Linux 15
Aug 08, 2019
Distrohoppers delivers a distro that divides us, and we check out the video streaming and recording software OBS Studio.
Plus a handy audio recorder that's as simple as it gets.
Links:
OBS Studio — Free and open source software for video recording and live streaming.
Endless OS — The operating system that comes with everything your family needs.
Thomas Cameron Texas LinuxFest Keynote | Jupiter Extras 1
Aug 08, 2019
The complete keynote from Texas LinuxFest that inspired us to try harder. Thomas Cameron presents a keynote that everyone needs to hear. It's time to end the distro wars, invite everyone to the dance, and build the future.
Cloud dude, Linux advocate, Open Source evangelist and current Amazonian, Thomas Cameron's keynote is a must listen.
My New Free NAS | BSD Now 310
Aug 07, 2019
OPNsense 19.7.1 is out, ZFS on Linux still has annoying issues with ARC size, Hammer2 is now default, NetBSD audio – an application perspective, new FreeNAS Mini, and more.
We do not wish to keep you from enjoying your summer time, but this is a recommended security update enriched with reliability fixes for the new 19.7 series. Of special note are performance improvements as well as a fix for a longstanding NAT before IPsec limitation.
Full patch notes:
system: do not create automatic copies of existing gateways
system: do not translate empty tunables descriptions
system: remove unwanted form action tags
system: do not include Syslog-ng in rc.freebsd handler
system: fix manual system log stop/start/restart
system: scoped IPv6 "%" could confuse mwexecf(), use plain mwexec() instead
system: allow curl-based downloads to use both trusted and local authorities
system: fix group privilege print and correctly redirect after edit
system: use cached address list in referrer check
system: fix Syslog-ng search stats
firewall: HTML-escape dynamic entries to display aliases
firewall: display correct IP version in automatic rules
firewall: fix a warning while reading empty outbound rules configuration
firewall: skip illegal log lines in live log
interfaces: performance improvements for configurations with hundreds of interfaces
reporting: performance improvements for Python 3 NetFlow aggregator rewrite
dhcp: move advanced router advertisement options to correct config section
ipsec: replace global array access with function to ensure side-effect free boot
ipsec: change DPD action on start to "dpdaction = restart"
ipsec: remove already default "dpdaction = none" if not set
ipsec: use interface IP address in local ID when doing NAT before IPsec
web proxy: fix database reset for Squid 4 by replacing use of ssl_crtd with security_file_certgen
plugins: os-acme-client 1.24[1]
plugins: os-bind 1.6[2]
plugins: os-dnscrypt-proxy 1.5[3]
plugins: os-frr now restricts characters BGP prefix-list and route-maps[4]
One of the frustrating things about operating ZFS on Linux is that the ARC size is critical but ZFS's auto-tuning of it is opaque and apparently prone to malfunctions, where your ARC will mysteriously shrink drastically and then stick there.
Linux's regular filesystem disk cache is very predictable; if you do disk IO, the cache will relentlessly grow to use all of your free memory. This sometimes disconcerts people when free reports that there's very little memory actually free, but at least you're getting value from your RAM. This is so reliable and regular that we generally don't think about 'is my system going to use all of my RAM as a disk cache', because the answer is always 'yes'. (The general filesystem cache is also called the page cache.)
This is unfortunately not the case with the ZFS ARC in ZFS on Linux (and it wasn't necessarily the case even on Solaris). ZFS has both a current size and a 'target size' for the ARC (called 'c' in ZFS statistics). When your system boots this target size starts out as the maximum allowed size for the ARC, but various events afterward can cause it to be reduced (which obviously limits the size of your ARC, since that's its purpose). In practice, this reduction in the target size is both pretty sticky and rather mysterious (as ZFS on Linux doesn't currently expose enough statistics to tell why your ARC target size shrunk in any particular case).
The net effect is that the ZFS ARC is not infrequently quite shy and hesitant about using memory, in stark contrast to Linux's normal filesystem cache. The default maximum ARC size starts out as only half of your RAM (unlike the regular filesystem cache, which will use all of it), and then it shrinks from there, sometimes very significantly, and once shrunk it only recovers slowly (if at all).
commit a49112761c919d42d405ec10252eb0553662c824
Author: Matthew Dillon <dillon at apollo.backplane.com>
Date: Mon Jun 10 17:53:46 2019 -0700
installer - Default to HAMMER2
* Change the installer default from HAMMER1 to HAMMER2.
* Adjust the nrelease build to print the location of the image files
when it finishes.
Summary of changes:
nrelease/Makefile | 2 +-
usr.sbin/installer/dfuibe_installer/flow.c | 20 ++++++++++----------
2 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)
http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git/commitdiff/a49112761c919d42d405ec10252eb0553662c824
NetBSD audio – an application perspective ... or, "doing it natively, because we can"
audio options for NetBSD in pkgsrc
Use NetBSD native audio (sun audio/audioio.h)
Or OSS emulation layer: Basically a wrapper around sun audio in the kernel. Incomplete and old version, but works for simple stuff
Many many abstraction layers available:
OpenAL-Soft
alsa-lib (config file required)
libao, GStreamer (plugins!)
PortAudio, SDL
PulseAudio, JACK
... lots more!? some obsolete stuff (esd, nas?)
Advantages of using NetBSD audio directly
Low latency, low CPU usage: Abstraction layers differ in latency (SDL2 vs ALSA/OpenAL)
Query device information: Is /dev/audio1 a USB microphone or another sound card?
Avoid bugs from excessive layering
Nice API, well documented: [nia note: I had no idea how to write audio code. I read a man page and now I do.]
Your code might work on illumos too
[nia note: SDL2 seems very sensitive to the blk_ms sysctl being high or low, with other implementations there seems to be a less noticable difference. I don't know why.]
Two new FreeNAS Mini systems join the very popular FreeNAS Mini and Mini XL:
FreeNAS Mini XL+: This powerful 10 Bay platform (8x 3.5” and 1x 2.5” hot-swap, 1x 2.5” internal) includes the latest, compact server technology and provides dual 10GbE ports, 8 CPU cores and 32 GB RAM for high performance workgroups. The Mini XL+ scales beyond 100TB and is ideal for very demanding applications, including hosting virtual machines and multimedia editing. Starting at $1499, the Mini XL+ configured with cache SSD and 80 TB capacity is $4299, and consumes about 100 Watts.
FreeNAS Mini E: This cost-effective 4 Bay platform provides the resources required for SOHO use with quad GbE ports and 8 GB of RAM. The Mini E is ideal for file sharing, streaming and transcoding video at 1080p. Starting at $749, the Mini E configured with 8 TB capacity is $999, and consumes about 36 Watts.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
I Spy With My Little Pi | LINUX Unplugged 313
Aug 06, 2019
We put the Raspberry Pi 4 to the desktop test, and try it as our daily driver.
Plus some neat and powerful uses for recent Pis, and our thoughts on Manjaro's change of heart.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Alex Kretzschmar, and Brent Gervais.
Links:
Millions of Books Are Secretly in the Public Domain. You Can Download Them Free — Prior to 1964, books had a 28-year copyright term. Extending it required authors or publishers to send in a separate form, and lots of people didn't end up doing that. Thanks to the efforts of the New York Public Library, many of those public domain books are now free online.
Google Engineers Get Windows Booting When Kexec'ed Under Linux - Phoronix — An interesting summer internship at Google has led to an experimental effort to get Microsoft Windows running via Kexec from Linux. The engineers involved have been implementing enough of the EFI Boot Services to be able to kexec Windows from Linux.
Roy Hopkins on Twitter — That's a coincidence. Today I managed to boot Windows 10 directly from Linux on a real platform using a kernel module to emulate UEFI. I hate to say it but achieving ExitBootServices is only the beginning...
LinuxBoot — LinuxBoot is a firmware for modern servers that replaces specific firmware functionality like the UEFI DXE phase with a Linux kernel and runtime.
Benchmarking the Raspberry Pi 4 - Gareth Halfacree — Although appearing similar at first glance, the new board is slightly larger thanks to ports extending further from the PCB for improved case compatibility, the Ethernet and USB ports have been switched around, the power input is now a USB Type-C connector, and the full-size HDMI output has been swapped out for not one but two micro-HDMI connectors.
r-darwish/topgrade: Upgrade everything — Keeping your system up to date mostly involves invoking more than a single package manager. This usually results in big shell one-liners saved in your shell history. Topgrade tries to solve this problem by detecting which tools you use and run their appropriate package managers.
Old Man Embraces Cloud | Coder Radio 369
Aug 05, 2019
Chris finally gets excited about Docker just as Wes tells him it’s time to learn something new.
Plus the state of browser extension development, the value of non-technical advice, and your feedback.
Links:
Feedback: good mic for voice recording? — I'm looking for a good mic for voice recording since I will be a guest on a podcast soon. Since you sound good in your shows, can you share what mics you are using?
Half of all Google Chrome extensions have fewer than 16 installs — All in all, about 50% of all Chrome extensions have fewer than 16 installs, meaning that half of the Chrome extension ecosystem is actually more of a ghost town, according to a recent scan of the entire Chrome Web Store conducted by Extension Monitor.
All the best engineering advice I stole from non-technical people — As I focus on becoming a better manager of engineers, I have been reflecting more and more on the advice that produced a 10X boost in my abilities at that same stage. More often than not the best advice, the things that stuck with me, came from people who had no background at all in software.
Overview of Docker Compose | Docker Documentation — Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container Docker applications. With Compose, you use a YAML file to configure your application’s services. Then, with a single command, you create and start all the services from your configuration.
Podman — What is Podman? Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Simply put: alias docker=podman.
Storage Heartbreak | The Friday Stream 12
Aug 05, 2019
We share stories from a time when computer storage was very precious, and the types of storage were still battling it out for the standard.
Plus our proposals to do away with time zones, and a special guest helps give away some games.
Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Jackie DeVore.
Links:
The radical plan to destroy time zones - The Washington Post — The plan was strikingly simple. Rather than try to regulate a variety of time zones all around the world, we should instead opt for something far easier: Let's destroy all these time zones and instead stick with one big "Universal Time."
How India's single time zone is hurting its people - BBC News — The sun rises nearly two hours earlier in the east of India than in the far west. Critics of the single time zone have argued that India should move to two different standard times to make the best use of daylight in eastern India, where the sun rises and sets much earlier than the west. People in the east need to start using their lights earlier in the day and hence use more electricity.
Sirens of Scream Podcast — Three lady geeks explore the dark side of comics, games, film and tv. The spooky and sinister, the gory and gross; nothing is off limits.
Time Capsule For The Year 2957 Discovered at MIT — As we’ve seen time and again, most time capsules are incredibly boring. But MIT recently discovered a time capsule filled with some amazing materials from 1957 inside. It’s not supposed to be opened until the year 2957, and thankfully MIT is honoring that wish.
A Moment in Time: Time capsule found during construction at MIT — Back in the early stages of construction for MIT.nano, members of the crew stumbled upon something that clearly didn't belong: A time capsule buried in 1957 as part of the dedication to the Compton Laboratories.
Relic from last century | MIT News — During excavation for MIT.nano, the Department of Facilities unearthed an unexpected relic between buildings 12 and 26: a time capsule buried on June 5, 1957, to commemorate the opening of the Karl Taylor Compton Laboratories.
Iomega Jaz (1996 – 2002) | Museum of Obsolete Media — Introduced by Iomega in 1996, the Jaz disk was a removable hard-disk storage system, that initially had a capacity of 1 GB (a 2 GB version was released in 1998).
Jaz drive - Wikipedia — Following the success of the Iomega Zip drive, which stored data on removable magnetic cartridges with 100MB nominal capacity, the company developed and released the Jaz drive. Initially the drive featured 1GB capacity per removable disk; this was increased to 2GB in 1998.
MiniDisc - Wikipedia — MiniDisc (MD) is a magneto-optical disc-based data storage format offering a capacity of 60, 74 minutes and, later, 80 minutes, of digitized audio or 1 gigabyte of Hi-MD data. Sony brand audio players were on the market in September 1992.
PocketZip - Wikipedia — It was known as the "Clik!" drive until the click of death class action lawsuit regarding mass failures of Iomega's Zip drives. Thenceforth, it was renamed to PocketZip.
Manjaro's news starts us off and leads us into a bigger philosophical question about open source development.
Plus Gnome and KDE come together at the Linux App Summit, Mozilla's update on DNS-over-HTTPS, and the case for the VR desktop.
Links:
Manjaro to ship FreeOffice by default — We will ship FreeOffice by default. This is possible since we partnered up with Softmaker. Enjoy the best compatibility to MS Office.
Manjaro backtracks — Manjaro will not be installing FreeOffice by default.
An update on Android for search providers in Europe — Next year, we'll introduce a new way for Android users to select a search provider to power a search box on their home screen and as the default in Chrome (if installed).
DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) Update — We want to understand how often users of Firefox are subject to these network configurations.
Contract for the Web is becoming a reality — Berners-Lee has called it many things since he announced it at the 2018 Web Summit: a contract, a “magna carta” and a Bill of Rights.
Moving the Linux desktop to another reality — Today, we are very excited to announce a new open source project which enables interaction with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR.
Duvets Are Not Tech | User Error 71
Aug 02, 2019
It's another #AskError special! Sleep tech, missing apps on Linux, a deep question, and much more.
00:00:36 What sleep tech do you use? 00:07:59 What’s the first thing you’d do if you won the lottery? 00:13:30 What one application is completely missing on Linux? 00:17:15 Do you ever use default folders like documents, pictures, music etc? 00:25:47 What’s in your conference bag? 00:29:38 What is love?
Get Your Telnet Fix | BSD Now 309
Jul 31, 2019
DragonFlyBSD Project Update - colo upgrade, future trends, resuming ZFS send, realtime bandwidth terminal graph visualization, fixing telnet fixes, a chapter from the FBI’s history with OpenBSD and an OpenSSH vuln, and more.
For the last week I've been testing out a replacement for Monster, our 48-core opteron server. The project will be removing Monster from the colo in a week or two and replacing it with three machines which together will use half the power that Monster did alone.
The goal is to clear out a little power budget in the colo and to really beef-up our package-building capabilities to reduce the turn-around time needed to test ports syncs and updates to the binary package system.
Currently we use two blades to do most of the building, plus monster sometimes. The blades take almost a week (120 hours+) to do a full synth run and monster takes around 27.5 hours. But we need to do three bulk builds more or less at the same time... one for the release branch, one for the development branch, and one for staging updates. It just takes too long and its been gnawing at me for a little while.
Well, Zen 2 to the rescue! These new CPUs can take ECC, there's actually an IPMI mobo available, and they are fast as hell and cheap for what we get.
The new machines will be two 3900X based servers, plus a dual-xeon system that I already had at home. The 3900X's can each do a full synth run in 24.5 hours and the Xeon can do it in around 31 hours. Monster will be retired. And the crazy thing about this? Monster burns 1000W going full bore. Each of the 3900X servers burns 160W and the Xeon burns 200W. In otherwords, we are replacing 1000W with only 520W and getting roughly 6x the performance efficiency in the upgrade. This tell you just how much more power-efficient machines have become in the last 9 years or so. > This upgrade will allow us to do full builds for both release and dev in roughly one day instead of seven days, and do it without interfering with staging work that might be happening at the same time.
Future trends - DragonFlyBSD has reached a bit of a cross-roads. With most of the SMP work now essentially complete across the entire system the main project focus is now on supplying reliable binary ports for release and developer branches, DRM (GPU) support and other UI elements to keep DragonFlyBSD relevant on workstations, and continuing Filesystem work on HAMMER2 to get multi-device and clustering going.
One of the amazing functionalities of ZFS is the possibility of sending a whole dataset from one place to another. This mechanism is amazing to create backups of your ZFS based machines. Although, there were some issues with this functionality for a long time when a user sent a big chunk of data. What if you would do that over the network and your connection has disappeared? What if your machine was rebooted as you are sending a snapshot?
For a very long time, you didn't have any options - you had to send a snapshot from the beginning. Now, this limitation was already bad enough. However, another downside of this approach was that all the data which you already send was thrown away. Therefore, ZFS had to go over all this data and remove them from the dataset. Imagine the terabytes of data which you sent via the network was thrown away because as you were sending the last few bytes, the network went off.
In this short post, I don't want to go over the whole ZFS snapshot infrastructure (if you think that such a post would be useful, please leave a comment). Now, to get back to the point, this infrastructure is used to clone the datasets. Some time ago a new feature called “Resuming ZFS send” was introduced. That means that if there was some problem with transmitting the dataset from one point to another you could resume it or throw them away. But the point is, that yes, you finally have a choice.
If for some reasons you want to visualize your bandwidth traffic on an interface (in or out) in a terminal with a nice graph, here is a small script to do so, involving ttyplot, a nice software making graphics in a terminal.
The following will works on OpenBSD. You can install ttyplot by pkg_add ttyplot as root, ttyplot package appeared since OpenBSD 6.5.
There’s a FreeBSD commit to telnet. fix a couple of snprintf() buffer overflows. It’s received a bit of attention for various reasons, telnet in 2019?, etc. I thought I’d take a look. Here’s a few random observations.
The first line is indented with spaces while the others use tabs.
The correct type for string length is size_t not unsigned int.
sizeof(char) is always one. There’s no need to multiply by it.
If you do need to multiply by a size, this is an unsafe pattern. Use calloc or something similar. (OpenBSD provides reallocarray to avoid zeroing cost of calloc.)
Return value of malloc doesn’t need to be cast. In fact, should not be, lest you disguise a warning.
Return value of malloc is not checked for NULL.
No reason to cast cp to char * when passing to snprintf. It already is that type. And if it weren’t, what are you doing?
The whole operation could be simplified by using asprintf.
Although unlikely (probably impossible here, but more generally), adding the two source lengths together can overflow, resulting in truncation with an unchecked snprintf call. asprintf avoids this failure case.
Earlier this year I FOIAed the FBI for details on allegations of backdoor installed in the IPSEC stack in 2010, originally discussed by OpenBSD devs (https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=129236621626462 …) Today, I got an interesting but unexpected responsive record:
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
What Modern Linux Looks Like | LINUX Unplugged 312
Jul 30, 2019
Manjaro takes significant steps to stand out, and the shared problem major distributions are trying to solve, and why it will shape the future of Linux.
Plus macOS apps on Linux, and our first impressions of the Raspberry Pi 4.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Drew DeVore, Martin Wimpress, Neal Gompa, and Philip Muller.
Links:
ThinkTiny — The ThinkTiny is a miniature laptop computer with a 0.96 inch display and a design that’s heavily inspired by Lenovo/IBM ThinkPad style. There’s even a TrackPoint-like pointing nub.
Darling Picks Up New Contributors For Its macOS Compatibility Layer On Linux — Darling is the long-standing (albeit for some years idling) effort to allow macOS binaries to run on Linux that is akin to Wine but focused on an Apple macOS layer rather than Windows. This summer it's been moving along and seeing some new developer contributions.
Darling Progress Report Q2 2019 — We are very excited to say that in Q2 2019 (April 1 to June 30) we saw more community involvement than ever before. Many pull requests were submitted that spanned from bug fixes for our low level assembly to higher level modules such as the AppKit framework. Thanks to everyone for your contributions and we hope for this level of engagement to continue.
Raspberry Pi 4 Ubuntu Server 18.04.2 Install / Config Guide — Right now there is a memory limitation of 1 GB in 64 bit mode on the Raspberry Pi 4. This is apparently due to the SD card driver breaking when more than 1 GB of RAM is present. This will all be solved eventually but until then I recommend using the 32 bit version of Ubuntu or waiting until the Raspberry Pi 4 support catches up. If you want to run the 64 bit one now anyway it works fine other than the memory limitation.
Ubucon Europe 2019 – Sintra, 10th-13th October — Ubucon is an event organized by the Ubuntu Communities from all around the world. The focus of the event is Ubuntu, an open source, community-driven and free linux distribution, and other free and open source technologies. This year, this event will be organized in Sintra, Portugal, in October 2019. We are preparing four full days of sprints, workshops, conferences, talks and social events for all participants.
AWS Cloud Practitioner Study Group — RSVP to this study group created to help you pass the AWS Cloud Practitioner Certification starting on Wednesday July 31st at 11am Pacific.
Introducing Fedora CoreOS — Fedora CoreOS is built to be the secure and reliable host for your compute clusters. It’s designed specifically for running containerized workloads without regular maintenance, automatically updating itself with the latest OS improvements, bug fixes, and security updates
Fedora CoreOS - Getting Started — Fedora CoreOS has no install-time configuration. Every Fedora CoreOS system begins with a generic, unconfigured disk image. On first boot Ignition will read the supplied config and configure the system. Ignition configs are usually supplied via the cloud’s userdata mechanism, or, in the case of bare metal, injected at install time. This guide will show you how to launch Fedora CoreOS on AWS, QEMU, and bare metal as well as how to create Ignition configs.
Podman — What is Podman? Podman is a daemonless container engine for developing, managing, and running OCI Containers on your Linux System. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Simply put: alias docker=podman.
Buildah, Podman, and Skopeo – the BIT that matters — Still doing all your Linux container management using an insecure, bloated daemon? Well, don’t feel bad. I was too until very recently. Now I’m finding myself slowly saying goodbye to my beloved Docker daemon and saying hello to Buildah, Podman, and Skopeo. In this article, I explore the exciting new world of rootless and daemon-less Linux container tools.
Replacing Docker with Podman — Yeah, you read it right… while Docker is a buzzword in the tech industry now. we will see the consequences of using it and how we can solve the problem with Podman. Replacing Docker with Podman
Ubuntu Core — We redesigned the entire system from first boot to create the most secure embedded Linux for devices and connected things.
Clojure Clash | Coder Radio 368
Jul 29, 2019
Mike and Wes debate the merits, and aesthetics, of Clojure in this week's rowdy language check-in.
Plus why everyone's talking about the sensitivty conjecture, speedy TLS with rust, and more!
Links:
Feedback: Which Language To Use And Why? — There are so many languages out there, and I just don’t understand when or why you would want to use a language over another.
ELI5: The Sensitivity Conjecture has been solved. What is it about? — Think of it like a Buzzfeed quiz. You answer a bunch of multiple-choice input questions about seemingly random topics ('What's your favourite breakfast cereal?', 'What's your favourite classic movie?', 'What did you want to be when you grew up?', and so on), and you get a response back at the end: usually which Hogwarts house you belong in.
Sensitivity Conjecture resolved — Paul Erdös famously spoke of a book, maintained by God, in which was written the simplest, most beautiful proof of each theorem. The highest compliment Erdös could give a proof was that it “came straight from the book.” In this case, I find it hard to imagine that even God knows how to prove the Sensitivity Conjecture in any simpler way than this.
GitHub starts blocking developers in countries facing US trade sanctions — There's a debate over free speech taking place after Microsoft-owned GitHub "restricted" the account of a developer based in the Crimea region of Ukraine, who used the service to host his website and gaming software.
TLS performance: rustls versus OpenSSL — A TLS library will represent separate sessions in memory while they are in use. How much memory these sessions use will dictate how many sessions can be concurrently terminated on a given server.
IT's a Support Trap! | The Friday Stream 11
Jul 29, 2019
We share family tech support stories and reminisce about the good old days of being the "go-to" tech support member.
Plus how we TV these days, streaming subscription fatigue, and Ell's search for missing persons.
Updated Nvidia Shield TV spotted in FCC listing — In the Android TV world, the Nvidia Shield TV is still by far the best option available. However, the aging hardware is due for an upgrade. Today, an FCC listing for an updated Nvidia Shield TV has been revealed, hinting that a release could be around the corner.
Forget 'Russian' FaceApp — Why is a simple face changing app yielding such a backlash over the nationality of its developers when there has been little concern over Facebook opening its archives of its two billion users for data mining by researchers including those working directly with those very Russian intelligence services Senator Schumer fears?
This “Dating” Website Will Help You Find the Perfect Dog — How I Met My Dog is a website that, like eHarmony and Match.com, asks you to fill out an extensive personality questionnaire in an effort to find you an adoptable pet that meets your specific needs. Once you sign up, you answer 56 questions about your preferences, your expectations, and your lifestyle habits, before being matched with compatible dogs in shelters across 17 states.
Linux Action News 116
Jul 28, 2019
Fedora CoreOS introduced its future looks bright, VLC's president debunks security claims, Mozilla debuts an open-source router firmware and the Android flaw that might be our favorite in years.
Plus how Sailfish OS 3.1 is stepping things up, the first 16-core RISC-V chip is revealed, and more.
Links:
Introducing Fedora CoreOS — A new Fedora edition built specifically for running containerized workloads securely and at scale.
Android Phones Open to ‘Spearphone’ Eavesdropping — A Spearphone attacker can use the accelerometer in LG and Samsung phones to remotely eavesdrop on any audio that’s played on speakerphone, including calls, music and voice assistant responses.
Sailfish OS 3.1 released — Redesigns to core apps such as People, Phone, Messages and Clock. Other areas that have been improved include; Document viewers, Email, Calendar, Dual SIM Card viewer information and Gallery gestures which have been improved.
Alibaba Reveals 16-core RISC-V Chip — Alibaba Group’s chip subsidiary, Pingtouge Semiconductor, this week announced what it claims is the most powerful RISC-V based processor
Apollo's ARC | TechSNAP 408
Jul 26, 2019
We take a look at the amazing abilities of the Apollo Guidance Computer and Jim breaks down everything you need to know about the ZFS ARC.
Plus an update on ZoL SIMD acceleration, your feedback, and an interesting new neuromorphic system from Intel.
Links:
ZFS On Linux Has Figured Out A Way To Restore SIMD Support On Linux 5.0+ — Those running ZFS On Linux (ZoL) on post-5.0 (and pre-5.0 supported LTS releases) have seen big performance hits to the ZFS encryption performance in particular. That came due to upstream breaking an interface used by ZFS On Linux and admittedly not caring about ZoL due to it being an out-of-tree user. But now several kernel releases later, a workaround has been devised.
Linux 5.0 compat: SIMD compatibility · zfsonlinux/zfs@e5db313 — Restore the SIMD optimization for 4.19.38 LTS, 4.14.120 LTS,
and 5.0 and newer kernels. This is accomplished by leveraging
the fact that by definition dedicated kernel threads never need
to concern themselves with saving and restoring the user FPU state.
Therefore, they may use the FPU as long as we can guarantee user
tasks always restore their FPU state before context switching back
to user space.
Chris's Wiki :: ZFS on Linux still has annoying issues with ARC size — One of the frustrating things about operating ZFS on Linux is that the ARC size is critical but ZFS's auto-tuning of it is opaque and apparently prone to malfunctions, where your ARC will mysteriously shrink drastically and then stick there.
Software woven into wire, Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer — One of the first computers to use integrated circuits, the Apollo Guidance Computer was lightweight enough and small enough to fly in space. An unusual feature that contributed to its small size was core rope memory, a technique of physically weaving software into high-density storage.
Virtual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) software — Since you are looking at this README file, you are in the "master" branch of the repository, which contains source-code transcriptions of the original Project Apollo software for the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) and Abort Guidance System (AGS), as well as our software for emulating the AGC, AGS, and some of their peripheral devices (such as the display-keyboard unit, or DSKY).
The Underappreciated Power of the Apollo Computer - The Atlantic — Without the computers on board the Apollo spacecraft, there would have been no moon landing, no triumphant first step, no high-water mark for human space travel. A pilot could never have navigated the way to the moon, as if a spaceship were simply a more powerful airplane. The calculations required to make in-flight adjustments and the complexity of the thrust controls outstripped human capacities.
Brains scale better than CPUs. So Intel is building brains | Ars Technica — Neuromorphic engineering—building machines that mimic the function of organic brains in hardware as well as software—is becoming more and more prominent. The field has progressed rapidly, from conceptual beginnings in the late 1980s to experimental field programmable neural arrays in 2006, early memristor-powered device proposals in 2012, IBM's TrueNorth NPU in 2014, and Intel's Loihi neuromorphic processor in 2017. Yesterday, Intel broke a little more new ground with the debut of a larger-scale neuromorphic system, Pohoiki Beach, which integrates 64 of its Loihi chips.
Dancing Demon - YouTube — Written in 1979 by Leo Christopherson for the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I computer. This is the best game ever for at that time.
Endeavour OS + Pisi Linux | Choose Linux 14
Jul 25, 2019
We take a look at the continuation of Antergos called Endeavour OS and are pretty impressed, and Distrohoppers delivers an interesting distro that's obsessed with cats.
Plus the only way to watch YouTube videos on Android.
Links:
Endeavour OS — An Arch-based distro with a friendly community
Pisi Linux — Pisi Linux is a GNU/Linux distribution based on the old Pardus Linux with its famous PiSi package management system.
Mumbling with OpenBSD | BSD Now 308
Jul 24, 2019
Replacing a (silently) failing disk in a ZFS pool, OPNsense 19.7 RC1 released, implementing DRM ioctl support for NetBSD, High quality/low latency VOIP server with umurmur/Mumble on OpenBSD, the PDP-7 where Unix began, LLDB watchpoints, and more.
Maybe I can’t read, but I have the feeling that official documentations explain every single corner case for a given tool, except the one you will actually need. My today’s struggle: replacing a disk within a FreeBSD ZFS pool. What? there’s a shitton of docs on this topic! Are you stupid? I don’t know, maybe. Yet none covered the process in a simple, straight and complete manner.
Hi there, For four and a half years now, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing. We thank all of you for helping test, shape and contribute to the project! We know it would not be the same without you. Download links, an installation guide[1] and the checksums for the images can be found below as well.
Ioctls are input/output control system calls and DRM stands for direct rendering manager The DRM layer provides several services to graphics drivers, many of them driven by the application interfaces it provides through libdrm, the library that wraps most of the DRM ioctls. These include vblank event handling, memory management, output management, framebuffer management, command submission & fencing, suspend/resume support, and DMA services.
Native DRM ioctl calls
NetBSD was able to make native DRM ioctl calls with hardware rendering once xorg and proper mesa packages where installed. We used the glxinfo and glxgears applications to test this out.
Discord users keep telling about their so called discord server, which is not dedicated to them at all. And Discord has a very bad quality and a lot of voice distorsion. Why not run your very own mumble server with high voice quality and low latency and privacy respect? This is very easy to setup on OpenBSD! Mumble is an open source voip client, it has a client named Mumble (available on various operating system) and at least Android, the server part is murmur but there is a lightweight server named umurmur. People authentication is done through certificate generated locally and automatically accepted on a server, and the certificate get associated with a nickname. Nobody can pick the same nickname as another person if it’s not the same certificate.
From time to time, I like to review my knowledge in a certain area, even when I feel like I know a lot about it already. I go back to the basics and read tutorials, manuals, books or watch interesting videos. I’ve been using macOS for a couple of years now, previously being a linux user for some (relatively short) time. Both these operating systems have a common ancestor — Unix. While I’m definitely not an expert, I feel quite comfortable using linux & macOS — I understand the concepts behind the system architecture, know a lot of command line tools & navigate through the shell without a hassle. So-called unix philosophy is also close to my heart. I always feel like there’s more I could squeeze out of it. Recently, I found that book titled “Unix for dummies, 5th edition” which was published back in… 2004. Feels literally like AGES in the computer-related world. However, it was a great shot — the book starts with the basics, providing some brief history of Unix and how it came to life. It talks a lot about the structure of the system and where certain pieces fit (eg. “standard” set of tools), and how to understand permissions and work with files & directories. There’s even a whole chapter about shell-based text editors like Vi and Emacs! Despite the fact that I am familiar with most of these, I could still find some interesting pieces & tools that I either knew existed (but never had a chance to use), or even haven’t ever heard of. And almost all of these are still valid in the modern “incarnations” of Unix’s descendants: Linux and macOS. The book also talks about networking, surfing the web & working with email. It’s cute to see pictures of those old browsers rendering “ancient” Internet websites, but hey — this is how it looked like no more than fifteen years ago! I can really recommend this book to anyone working on modern macOS or Linux — you will certainly find some interesting pieces. Especially if you like to go back to the roots from time to time as I do!
In preparation for a talk on Seventh Edition Unix this fall, I stumbled upon a service list from DEC for all known PDP-7 machines. From that list, and other sources, I believe that PDP-7 serial number 34 was the original Unix machine. V0 Unix could run on only one of the PDP-7s. Of the 99 PDP-7s produced, only two had disks. Serial number 14 had an RA01 listed, presumably a disk, though of a different type. In addition to the PDP-7 being obsolete in 1970, no other PDP-7 could run Unix, limiting its appeal outside of Bell Labs. By porting Unix to the PDP-11 in 1970, the group ensured Unix would live on into the future. The PDP-9 and PDP-15 were both upgrades of the PDP-7, so to be fair, PDP-7 Unix did have a natural upgrade path (the PDP-11 out sold the 18 bit systems though ~600,000 to ~1000). Ken Thompson reports in a private email that there were 2 PDP-9s and 1 PDP-15 at Bell Labs that could run a version of the PDP-7 Unix, though those machines were viewed as born obsolete.
Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages. In February, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support and lately extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types and fix compat32 issues. You can read more about that in my May 2019 report. In June, I have finally finished the remaining ptrace() work for xstate and got it merged both on NetBSD and LLDB end (meaning it's going to make it into NetBSD 9). I have also worked on debug register support in LLDB, effectively fixing watchpoint support. Once again I had to fight some upstream regressions.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
32 Hours of Outrage | LINUX Unplugged 311
Jul 23, 2019
Keynote presenter from Texas LinuxFest and established industry expert Thomas Cameron joins us to discuss the end of the distro wars, the future of Linux jobs, his personal take on IBM's acquisition of Red Hat, some really great Linux job tips, and much more.
Plus we catch up on some community news from old friends, complain about a few Linux bugs, and share a "magical" app pick.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Martin Wimpress, and Thomas Cameron.
Passing the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam — Whether you need the Cloud Practitioner certification for work or as a personal goal, studying and staying on track is hard because life gets in the way. Join this study group and we’ll help you pass the exam by meeting on a bi-weekly basis and going over the main topics covered in the certification exam.
Thomas Cameron at Texas Linux Fest 2019 — Thomas Cameron has been an IT Professional since 1993. He's worked with Linux at multinational financial services companies, transportation companies, manufacturing, and more. He's a Red Hat Certified Architect, and was a regional chief architect at Red Hat. He's currently on the Amazon Linux team at Amazon.
The Perfect Media Server - 2019 Edition — There's a ton of resources on serverbuilds but you should definitely take a few minutes to browse the excellent CPU spreadsheet before buying a new CPU. You'll probably think twice about that Sandy Bridge chip now (in a good way).
Mike rekindles his youthful love affair with Emacs and we debate what makes a "10x engineer".
Plus the latest Play store revolt and some of your feedback.
Links:
Feedback on Coder Radio 366 — As a C++ developer working on a large, primarily OO codebase, I’ve been writing ever more C++ as “just a pipeline of data transformations.” As you guys mentioned, you can get a lot of benefit even in an OO situation from wrapping a functional “core” up in an object “package.”
Functional Core, Imperative Shell — In this screencast we look at one method for crossing this divide. We review a Twitter client whose core is functional: managing tweets, syncing timelines to incoming Twitter API data, remembering cursor positions within the tweet list, and rendering tweets to text for display. This functional core is surrounded by a shell of imperative code: it manipulates stdin, stdout, the database, and the network, all based on values produced by the functional core.
Mike on Twitter — So when I just was getting started I was an #emacs user but had that beaten out of me. I’m thinking of looking back at it on #macOS and #Linux under GNOME any recommendations?
Tinder Bypasses Google Play, Revolt Against App Store Fee — Tinder joined a growing backlash against app store taxes by bypassing Google Play in a move that could shake up the billion-dollar industry dominated by Google and Apple Inc.
EmacsWiki: Evil — Evil is an extensible vi layer for Emacs. It provides Vim features like Visual selection and text objects.
A personal story about 10× development — The "×ness" of any developer does not exist in a vacuum but depends on many organizational things. The most obvious one is tooling.
Shekhar Kirani on Twitter — 10x engineers. Founders if you ever come across this rare breed of engineers, grab them. If you have a 10x engineer as part of your first few engineers, you increase the odds of your startup success significantly.
The mythical 10x programmer - — The following is a list of qualities that I believe make the most difference in programmers productivity.
rubocop — RuboCop is a Ruby static code analyzer and code formatter. Out of the box it will enforce many of the guidelines outlined in the community Ruby Style Guide.
RetroArch coming to Steam — But will this "completely free" release run afoul of Steam Community Guidelines?
Introducing ubuntu-wsl — “A collection of utilities for WSL” to let you create shortcuts on the Windows desktop with wslusc, start the default Windows browser with wslview, and do a few other things.
EvilGnome: Rare Malware Spying on Desktop Users — We have named the implant EvilGnome, for its disguise as a Gnome extension. The malware is currently fully undetected across all major security solutions. EvilGnome is a rare type of malware due to its appetite for Linux desktop users.
Macbook keyboard and trackpad support coming to Linux 5.3 — Linux up to now hasn't had mainline support for the keyboard and trackpad on recent years of MacBooks: from MacBook8,1 or later or MacBookPro13 and MacBookPro14 models. These IDs roughly correlate to the MacBook systems since the end of 2015.
Maintainer for gpodder.net needed — Some effort is required to keep a website or web service running and up-to-date. I (the current maintainer) have enough time to keep the system up and running for now, but no time to do any improvements and other development.
Old and Insecure | User Error 70
Jul 19, 2019
Whether Linux is inherently secure, the next phase of online interaction, and wasting our free time.
Plus where to focus your contributions, and a tricky hypothetical question.
00:00:53 Without security through obscurity, would Linux make for a more secure desktop than Windows etc? 00:08:19 #AskError: Would you rather be old and rich or young and poor? 00:18:37 What will the next form of social interaction online look like? 00:27:18 #AskError: If you had to choose between contributing to an Ubuntu flavour or the desktop environment it uses, which do you contribute to? 00:31:17 Do you need to structure your free time in order not to waste it?
Twitching with OpenBSD | BSD Now 307
Jul 18, 2019
FreeBSD 11.3 has been released, OpenBSD workstation, write your own fuzzer for the NetBSD kernel, Exploiting FreeBSD-SA-19:02.fd, streaming to twitch using OpenBSD, 3 different ways of dumping hex contents of a file, and more.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/11 branch.
Some of the highlights:
The clang, llvm, lld, lldb, and compiler-rt utilities as well as libc++ have been updated to upstream version 8.0.0.
The ELF Tool Chain has been updated to version r3614.
OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.2s.
The ZFS filesystem has been updated to implement parallel mounting.
The loader(8) has been updated to extend geli(8) support to all architectures.
The pkg(8) utility has been updated to version 1.10.5.
The KDE desktop environment has been updated to version 5.15.3.
The GNOME desktop environment has been updated to version 3.28.
The kernel will now log the jail(8) ID when logging a process exit.
Several feature additions and updates to userland applications.
Several network driver firmware updates.
Warnings for features deprecated in future releases will now be printed on all FreeBSD versions.
Warnings have been added for IPSec algorithms deprecated in RFC 8221.
Deprecation warnings have been added for weaker algorithms when creating geli(8) providers.
Why OpenBSD? Simply because it is the best tool for the job for me for my new-to-me Lenovo Thinkpad T420. Additionally, I do care about security and non-bloat in my personal operating systems (business needs can have different priorities, to be clear).
I will try to detail what my reasons are for going with OpenBSD (instead of GNU/Linux, NetBSD, or FreeBSD of which I’m comfortable using without issue), challenges and frustrations I’ve encountered, and what my opinions are along the way.
Disclaimer: in this post, I’m speaking about what is my opinion, and I’m not trying to convince you to use OpenBSD or anything else. I don’t truly care, but wanted to share in case it could be useful to you. I do hope you give OpenBSD a shot as your workstation, especially if it has been a while.
A Bit About Me and OpenBSD
I’m not new to OpenBSD, to be clear. I’ve been using it off and on for over 20 years. The biggest time in my life was the early 2000s (I was even the Python port maintainer for a bit), where I not only used it for my workstation, but also for production servers and network devices.
I just haven’t used it as a workstation (outside of a virtual machine) in over 10 years, but have used it for servers. Workstation needs, especially for a primary workstation, are greatly different and the small things end up mattering most.
The easy way to describe fuzzing is to compare it to the process of unit testing a program, but with different input. This input can be random, or it can be generated in some way that makes it unexpected form standard execution perspective.
The simplest 'fuzzer' can be written in few lines of bash, by getting N bytes from /dev/rand, and putting them to the program as a parameter.
Coverage and Fuzzing
What can be done to make fuzzing more effective? If we think about fuzzing as a process, where we place data into the input of the program (which is a black box), and we can only interact via input, not much more can be done.
However, programs usually process different inputs at different speeds, which can give us some insight into the program's behavior. During fuzzing, we are trying to crash the program, thus we need additional probes to observe the program's behaviour.
Additional knowledge about program state can be exploited as a feedback loop for generating new input vectors. Knowledge about the program itself and the structure of input data can also be considered. As an example, if the input data is in the form of HTML, changing characters inside the body will probably cause less problems for the parser than experimenting with headers and HTML tags.
For open source programs, we can read the source code to know what input takes which execution path. Nonetheless, this might be very time consuming, and it would be much more helpful if this can be automated. As it turns out, this process can be improved by tracing coverage of the execution
The talks will have a very strong technical content bias. Proposals of a business development or marketing nature are not appropriate for this venue.
If you are doing something interesting with a BSD operating system, please submit a proposal. Whether you are developing a very complex system using BSD as the foundation, or helping others and have a story to tell about how BSD played a role, we want to hear about your experience. People using BSD as a platform for research are also encouraged to submit a proposal.
Possible topics include: How we manage a giant installation with respect to handling spam, snd/or sysadmin, and/or networking, Cool new stuff in BSD, Tell us about your project which runs on BSD.
Both users and developers are encouraged to share their experiences.
In February 2019 the FreeBSD project issued an advisory about a possible vulnerability in the handling of file descriptors. UNIX-like systems such as FreeBSD allow to send file descriptors to other processes via UNIX-domain sockets. This can for example be used to pass file access privileges to the receiving process.
Inside the kernel, file descriptors are used to indirectly reference a C struct which stores the relevant information about the file object. This could for instance include a reference to a vnode which describes the file for the file system, the file type, or the access privileges.
What really happens if a UNIX-domain socket is used to send a file descriptor to another process is that for the receiving process, inside the kernel a reference to this struct is created. As the new file descriptor is a reference to the same file object, all information is inherited. For instance, this can allow to give another process write access to a file on the drive even if the process owner is normally not able to open the file writable.
The advisory describes that FreeBSD 12.0 introduced a bug in this mechanism. As the file descriptor information is sent via a socket, the sender and the receiver have to allocate buffers for the procedure. If the receiving buffer is not large enough, the FreeBSD kernel attempts to close the received file descriptors to prevent a leak of these to the sender. However, while the responsible function closes the file descriptor, it fails to release the reference from the file descriptor to the file object. This could cause the reference counter to wrap.
The advisory further states that the impact of this bug is possibly a local privilege escalation to gain root privileges or a jail escape. However, no proof-of-concept was provided by the advisory authors.
In the next section, the bug itself is analyzed to make a statement about the bug class and a guess about a possible exploitation primitive.
After that, the bug trigger is addressed.
It follows a discussion of three imaginable exploitation strategies - including a discussion of why two of these approaches failed.
In the section before last, the working exploit primitive is discussed. It introduces a (at least to the author’s knowledge) new exploitation technique for these kind of vulnerabilities in FreeBSD. The stabilization of the exploit is addressed, too.
The last section wraps everything up in a conclusion and points out further steps and challenges.
The privilege escalation is now a piece of cake thanks to a technique used by kingcope, who published a FreeBSD root exploit in 2005, which writes to the file /etc/libmap.conf. This configuration file can be used to hook the loading of dynamic libraries if a program is started. The exploit therefore creates a dynamic library, which copies /bin/sh to another file and sets the suid-bit for the copy. The hooked library is libutil, which is for instance called by su. Therefore, a call to su by the user will afterwards result in a suid copy of /bin/sh.
If you ever wanted to make a twitch stream from your OpenBSD system, this is now possible, thanks to OpenBSD developer thfr@ who made a wrapper named fauxstream using ffmpeg with relevant parameters.
The setup is quite easy, it only requires a few steps and searching on Twitch website two informations, hopefully, to ease the process, I found the links for you.
You will need to make an account on twitch, get your api key (a long string of characters) which should stay secret because it allow anyone having it to stream on your account.
These same techniques should work for Twitch, YouTube Live, Periscope, Facebook, etc, including the live streaming service ScaleEngine provides free to BSD user groups.
There is also an open source application called ‘OBS’ or Open Broadcaster Studio. It is in FreeBSD ports and should work on all of the other BSDs as well. It has a GUI and supports compositing and green screening. We use it heavily at ScaleEngine and it is also used at JupiterBroadcasting in place of WireCast, a $1000-per-copy commercial application.
Monitoring Agent · NCPA — New to NCPA? See some of the awesome features present in the Web GUI and API, available on any operating system.
Functional First | Coder Radio 366
Jul 16, 2019
It’s a Coder Radio special as Mike and Wes dive into functional programming in the real world and share their tips for applying FP techniques in any language.
Links:
Porting Redis to WebAssembly with Clang/WASI — In this post, we share our experience of porting an existing open-source software package — the data structure server Redis — to WebAssembly. While this is not the first time that Redis has been ported to Wasm (see this port by Sergey Rublev), it is the first time to our knowledge that the obtained port can be run deterministically.
Solving Problems the Clojure Way - Rafal Dittwald — It is said that Clojure is a "functional" programming language; there's also talk of "data-driven" programming. What are these things? Are they any good? Why are they good? In this talk, Rafal attempts to distill the particular blend of functional and data-driven programming that makes up "idiomatic Clojure", clarify what it looks like in practise (with real-world examples), and reflect on how Clojure's conventions came to be and how they continue to evolve.
The Value of Values with Rich Hickey — In this keynote speech from JaxConf 2012, Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure and founder of Datomic gives an awesome analysis of the changing way we think about values.
Clojure Made Simple by Rich Hickey — In the seven years following its initial release, Clojure has become a popular alternative language on the JVM, seeing production use at financial firms, major retailers, analytics companies, and startups large and small. It has done so while remaining decidedly alternative—eschewing object orientation for functional programming, C-derived syntax for code-as-data, static typing for dynamic typing, REPL-driven development, and so on. Underpinning these differences is a commitment to the principle that we should be building our systems out of fundamentally simpler materials. This session looks at what makes Clojure different and why.
sparklemotion/mechanize — Mechanize is a ruby library that makes automated web interaction easy.
How to write idempotent Bash scripts — It happens a lot, you write a bash script and half way it exits due an error. You fix the error in your system and run the script again. But half of the steps in your scripts fail immediately because they were already applied to your system. To build resilient systems you need to write software that is idempotent.
Young and the Wreckless | The Friday Stream 10
Jul 15, 2019
Joined by a new friend we share the stories of our first vehicles and the crazy things we did to them, and watch out Florida man, Oregon man is coming for you!
Cat burgler brings his own cat — Ryan Douglas Bishop allegedly brought his cat to a burglary where he donned the homeowners Christmas pajama onesie.
Linux Millionaire Question Form — Jupiter Broadcasting wants to create a fun game for Linux enthusiasts to test their knowledge on the depths of technology and Linux history. Please help by providing us your thoughtful questions and suggested answers!
Trace Labs — Trace Labs offers information security conferences with a unique high value experience for contestants by way of an open source intelligence (OSINT) Capture The Flag (CTF) contest known as the “Missing CTF”.
The Joe Jacksons — The Joe Jacksons are a rock 'n' roll band from Austin, TX.
Linux Action News 114
Jul 12, 2019
Another project breach raises significant questions, Fedora considers dropping Snaps in Gnome Software, and has the ISPA let Mozilla off the hook?
Plus Microsoft makes it into linux-distros, the Raspberry Pi 4 charger issue, and more.
Firefox addons outage post mortem — Sorry this took so long to get out; we’d hoped to have this out within a week, but obviously that didn’t happen. There was just a lot more digging to do than we expected. In any case, we’re now ready to share the results.
Microsoft admitted to linux-distros list — I see no valid reasons not to subscribe Microsoft (or part(s) of it, see below) to linux-distros. The only voiced reasons not to, such as in Georgi Guninski's posting and in comments on some technology news sites that covered Microsoft's request, are irrelevant per our currently specified membership criteria.
IBM Red Hat deal closes — IBM and Red Hat announced today that they have closed the transaction under which IBM acquired all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total equity value of approximately $34 billion.
Remove GsAuth support. (!255) · Merge Requests — This used to be used in the Snap and Ubuntu Reviews plugins, but is now no longer required. The remaining usage in the Snap plugin is not a common case on desktop and not necessary to support anymore.
Comparing Hammers | BSD Now 306
Jul 11, 2019
Am5x86 based retro UNIX build log, setting up services in a FreeNAS Jail, first taste of DragonflyBSD, streaming Netflix on NetBSD, NetBSD on the last G4 Mac mini, Hammer vs Hammer2, and more.
I have recently acquired an Am5x86 computer, in a surprisingly good condition. This is an ongoing project, check this page often for updates!
I began by connecting a front panel. The panel came from a different chassis and is slightly too wide, so I had to attach it with a couple of zip-ties. However, that makes it stick out from the PC front at an angle, allowing easy access when the computer sits at the floor - and thats where it is most of the time. It's not that bad, to be honest, and its way easier to access than it would be, if mounted vertically
There is a mains switch on the front panel because the computer uses an older style power supply. Those power supplies instead of relying on a PSON signal, like modern ATX supplies, run a 4 wire cable to a mains switch. The cable carries live and neutral both ways, and the switch keys in or out the power. The system powers on as soon as the switch is enabled.
Originally there was no graphics card in it. Since a PC will not boot with out a GPU, I had to find one. The mainboard only has PCI and ISA slots, and all the GPUs I had were AGP. Fortunately, I bought a PCI GPU hoping it would solve my issue...
However the GPU turned out to be faulty. It took me some time to repair it. I had to repair a broken trace leading to one of the EEPROM pins, and replace a contact in the EEPROM's socket. Then I replaced all the electrolytic capacitors on it, and that fixed it for good.
Having used up only one of the three PCI slots, I populated the remaining pair with two ethernet cards. I still have a bunch of ISA slots available, but I have nothing to install there. Yet.
This piece demonstrates the setup of a server service in a FreeNAS jail and how to share files with a jail using Apache 2.4 as an example. Jails are powerful, self-contained FreeBSD environments with separate network settings, package management, and access to thousands of FreeBSD application packages. Popular packages such as Apache, NGINX, LigHTTPD, MySQL, and PHP can be found and installed with the pkg search and pkg install commands.
This example shows creating a jail, installing an Apache web server, and setting up a simple web page.
NOTE: Do not directly attach FreeNAS to an external network (WAN). Use port forwarding, proper firewalls and DDoS protections when using FreeNAS for external web sites. This example demonstrates expanding the functionality of FreeNAS in an isolated LAN environment.
Last week, I needed to pick a BSD Operating System which supports NUMA to do some testing, so I decided to give Dragonfly BSD a shot. Dragonfly BSDonly can run on X86_64 architecture, which reminds me of Arch Linux, and after some tweaking, I feel Dragonfly BSD may be a “developer-friendly” Operating System, at least for me.
I mainly use Dragonfly BSD as a server, so I don’t care whether GUI is fancy or not. But I have high requirements of developer tools, i.e., compiler and debugger. The default compiler of Dragonfly BSD is gcc 8.3, and I can also install clang 8.0.0 from package. This means I can test state-of-the-art features of compilers, and it is really important for me. gdb‘s version is 7.6.1, a little lag behind, but still OK.
Furthermore, the upgradation of Dragonfly BSD is pretty simple and straightforward. I followed document to upgrade my Operating System to 5.6.0 this morning, just copied and pasted, no single error, booted successfully.
I’m about halfway through the new edition of Sudo Mastery. Assuming nothing terrible happens, should have a complete first draft in four to six weeks. Enough stuff has changed in sudo that I need to carefully double-check every single feature. (I’m also horrified by the painfully obsolete versions of sudo shipped in the latest versions of CentOS and Debian, but people running those operating systems are already accustomed to their creaky obsolescence.)
But the reason for this blog post? I have Eddie Sharam’s glorious cover art. My Patronizers saw it last month, so now the rest of you get a turn.
I'm a big fan of NetBSD. I've run it since 2000 on a Mac IIci (of course it's still running it) and I ran it for several years on a Power Mac 7300 with a G3 card which was the second incarnation of the Floodgap gopher server. Today I also still run it on a MIPS-based Cobalt RaQ 2 and an HP Jornada 690. I think NetBSD is a better match for smaller or underpowered systems than current-day Linux, and is fairly easy to harden and keep secure even though none of these systems are exposed to the outside world.
Recently I had a need to set up a bridge system that would be fast enough to connect two networks and I happened to have two of the "secret" last-of-the-line 1.5GHz G4 Mac minis sitting on the shelf doing nothing. Yes, they're probably outclassed by later Raspberry Pi models, but I don't have to buy anything and I like putting old hardware to good use.
With the newly released DragonFlyBSD 5.6 there are improvements to its original HAMMER2 file-system to the extent that it's now selected by its installer as the default file-system choice for new installations. Curious how the performance now compares between HAMMER and HAMMER2, here are some initial benchmarks on an NVMe solid-state drive using DragonFlyBSD 5.6.0.
With a 120GB Toshiba NVMe SSD on an Intel Core i7 8700K system, I ran some benchmarks of DragonFlyBSD 5.6.0 freshly installed with HAMMER2 and then again when returning to the original HAMMER file-system that remains available via its installer. No other changes were made to the setup during testing.
And then for the more synthetic workloads it was just a mix. But overall HAMMER2 was performing well during the initial testing and great to see it continuing to offer noticeable leads in real-world workloads compared to the aging HAMMER file-system. HAMMER2 also offers better clustering, online deduplication, snapshots, compression, encryption, and many other modern file-system features.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Qubes OS + Plex vs Kodi | Choose Linux 13
Jul 11, 2019
Distrohoppers throws up a fascinating distro where every application runs in its own VM. Plus Drew and Joe disagree on the best media solution.
Old School Outages | TechSNAP 407
Jul 10, 2019
Jim shares his Nagios tips and Wes chimes in with some modern tools as we chat monitoring in the wake of some high-profile outages.
Plus we turn our eye to hardware and get excited about the latest Ryzen line from AMD.
The Future is Open | LINUX Unplugged 309
Jul 09, 2019
Open Source has taken over the world, as IBM's purchase of Red Hat closes. We reflect on this historic moment.
Plus Mozilla's been labeled an Internet Villian, we deep dive into the tech behind all the controversy and how you can self-host secure DNS.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Drew DeVore.
Links:
Red Hat, Inc. on Twitter — As #RedHat's acquisition by @IBM closes, Red Hat will maintain independence and neutrality to give customers freedom, choice and flexibility.
Ubuntu-Maker Canonical’s GitHub Account Gets Hacked — An unknown hacker yesterday successfully managed to hack into the official GitHub account of Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux project and created 11 new empty repositories.
Ubuntu Security on Twitter — We can confirm that on 2019-07-06 there was a Canonical owned account on GitHub whose credentials were compromised and used to create repositories and issues among other activities.
Raspberry Pi admits to faulty USB-C design on the Pi 4 — After reports started popping up on the Internet, Raspberry Pi cofounder Eben Upton admitted to TechRepublic that "A smart charger with an e-marked cable will incorrectly identify the Raspberry Pi 4 as an audio adapter accessory and refuse to provide power." Upton went on to say, "I expect this will be fixed in a future board revision, but for now users will need to apply one of the suggested workarounds. It's surprising this didn't show up in our (quite extensive) field testing program."
Linux Millionaire Question Form — Jupiter Broadcasting wants to create a fun game for Linux enthusiasts to test their knowledge on the depths of technology and Linux history. Please help by providing us your thoughtful questions and suggested answers!
Linux Academy on Twitter — The AWS #DevOps Professional certification exam has just been updated with new emphasis on the AWS #Developer Tools suite.
Passing the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam — Whether you need the Cloud Practitioner certification for work or as a personal goal, studying and staying on track is hard because life gets in the way. Join this study group and we’ll help you pass the exam by meeting on a bi-weekly basis and going over the main topics covered in the certification exam.
Emma on Twitter — Hey @system76 fans! I'm looking for a few people to join the HAPPINESS TEAM at System76!
dnscrypt-proxy 2 — A flexible DNS proxy, with support for modern encrypted DNS protocols such as DNSCrypt v2 and DNS-over-HTTPS.
Running a DNS over HTTPS Client — There are several DNS over HTTPS (DoH) clients you can use to connect to 1.1.1.1 in order to protect your DNS queries from privacy intrusions and tampering.
curl/doh — A libcurl-using application that resolves a host name using DNS-over-HTTPS (DOH).
RFC 7858 — Specification for DNS over Transport Layer Security
DNS Security with DNSCrypt — While OpenDNS has provided world-class security using DNS for years, and OpenDNS is the most secure DNS service available, the underlying DNS protocol has not been secure enough for our comfort.
DNSSEC – What Is It and Why Is It Important? - ICANN — Engineers in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the organization responsible for the DNS protocol standards, long realized the lack of stronger authentication in DNS was a problem. Work on a solution began in the 1990s and the result was the DNSSEC Security Extensions (DNSSEC).
DNS Security and Privacy — Choosing the right provider — However, with all great options out there (eg: 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9), come great responsibilities. Which provider to choose? Which protocol to choose? DNSCrypt? DNS over HTTPS or TLS? What about DNSSEC? …
DevilsPie — A totally crack-ridden program for freaks and weirdos who want precise control over what windows do when they appear. If you want all XChat windows to be on desktop 3, in the lower-left, at 40% transparency, you can do it.
Devilspie2 — Devilspie2 is a window matching utility, allowing the user to perform scripted actions on windows as they are created.
Objectively Old | Coder Radio 365
Jul 08, 2019
Wes turns back the clock and explores the message passing mania of writing Objective-C without a Mac, and we wax-poetic about programming language history.
Plus Mike gets real about the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and our take on the new MacBook keyboard leak.
Links:
Apple is reportedly giving up on its controversial MacBook keyboard - The Verge — Apple is planning to ditch the controversial butterfly keyboard used in its MacBooks since 2015, according to a new report from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. 9to5Mac notes that Apple will reportedly move to a new scissor-switch design, which will use glass fiber to reinforce its keys. According to Kuo’s report, the first laptop to get the new keyboard will be a new MacBook Air model due out this year, followed by a new MacBook Pro in 2020.
Objective-C - History - Wikipedia — After acquiring NeXT in 1996, Apple Computer used OpenStep in its then-new operating system, Mac OS X. This included Objective-C, NeXT's Objective-C-based developer tool, Project Builder, and its interface design tool, Interface Builder, both now merged into one application, Xcode. Most of Apple's current Cocoa API is based on OpenStep interface objects and is the most significant Objective-C environment being used for active development.
A Short History of Objective-C — While most programmers discovered Objective-C only during the iPhone app revolution, Objective-C has been around for over 30 years. Objective-C has been the foundation of Apple’s desktop operating system, Mac OS X, since its debut in 2001, and was also the basis for NEXTSTEP — OS X’s immediate ancestor — created by Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer Inc. However, Objective-C was created neither by Apple nor NeXT. Its origin was a small Connecticut startup in the early 1980s called Stepstone.
GNUstep — GNUstep is a mature Framework, suited both for advanced GUI desktop applications as well as server applications. The framework closely follows Apple's Cocoa (formerly NeXT's OpenStep) APIs but is portable to a variety of platforms and architectures.
GNUstep: Fun with Objective-C — Objective-C is a language based upon C, with a few additions that make it a complete, object-oriented language. Why do I think Objective-C is fun? Precisely because of this emphasis on simplicity
Installing and Using GNUstep and Objective-C on Linux - Techotopia — The basics of Objective-C are supported by the GNU compiler collection. In order to utilize the full power of Objective-C together with the Cocoa /openStep environments on Linux, and to work with many of the examples covered in this book, it is necessary to install gcc, the gcc Objective-C support package and the GNUstep environment.
Objective-C Compiler and Runtime FAQ - GNUstepWiki — The history of Objective-C in GCC is somewhat complicated. Originally, NeXT was forced to release the original Objective-C front end in order to comply with the GPL. This code was not quite compatible with the GNU runtime and so it was modified. NeXT did not adopt these modifications and so each release of GCC by NeXT, and then Apple, contained changes that needed back-porting to the main branch of GCC.
For a long time, GCC was the only compiler that worked with GNUstep. Unfortunately, the GCC team has not invested much effort in Objective-C in the last few years and it currently lags behind Apple's version by a significant amount.
From Zero to Murder | The Friday Stream 9
Jul 08, 2019
Everyone is back from Texas with a great story to share, and Chris comes within 3 seconds of a life-ending moment.
Plus Chz goes up against Brent in our most surprising giveaway game yet.
Links:
Red Faction Guerrilla — Red Faction: Guerrilla re-defines the limits of destruction-based game-play with a huge open-world, fast-paced guerrilla-style combat, and true physics-based destruction.
OSCAR - Open Source CPAP Analysis Reporter — OSCAR is PC (Windows, Mac, Linux) software developed for reviewing and exploring data produced by CPAP and related machines used in the treatment of sleep apnea.
Thompson's Bookstore — Located in the historic Vybek building in downtown Fort Worth, Thompson’s elevates the art of the cocktail while transporting you to a simpler time.
Boulder Adventure Lodge — Our goal is to give you access to the best outdoor adventures that Boulder has to offer. Whether your climbing, fishing, skiing, cycling, hiking, or taking in the town, the A-Lodge offers instant access to all your favorite adventures.
Wyoming Whiskey — e are independent, family-owned whiskey makers with a world-class distillery in the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming.
Hot Springs State Park - Thermopolis, Wyoming — Come for the hot springs, but prepare to be enchanted by all that Hot Springs State Park has to offer. Relax in the park’s Free Bath House where the 104-degree water soothes away aches and pains. You don’t have to go to Yellowstone to see Bison. Wyoming’s state Bison Herd is located in the Hot Springs State Park.
Ash Gray News — Ash Gray is a troubadour in the truest sense.Born in US East Coast steeltown of Pittsburgh, the middle son of expat Yorkshire parents, he’s had an eye on the highway practically ever since he was old enough to play a gig.
Ash Gray on Twitter — I am singer/songwriter with various projects that revolve around Rock,Pop,Alt. Country and Americana.
We try out Debian 10 Buster and cover what's new. There is a fresh Linux distro for Chromebooks that is very appealing, and the ISPA calls Mozilla a villain.
Plus why Fucshia OS might be the most significant future threat to Linux.
GalliumOS 3.0 released — GalliumOS can be installed in place of ChromeOS, or in a dual-boot configuration alongside ChromeOS.
You Can Finally Read/Write To The SSDs On Newer Macs — This out-of-tree patch is against the current Linux 5.1 kernel and the write support should be considered particularly experimental, so be aware before trying to use this on a drive with any sensitive data.
Mozilla teases $5-per-month ad-free news subscription — Mozilla has started teasing an ad-free news subscription service, which, for $5 per month, would offer ad-free browsing, audio readouts, and cross-platform syncing of news articles from a number of websites.
ISPA calls Mozilla a villain — The Internet Services Providers’ Association is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2019 Internet Hero and Villain.
Fuchsia gets a website — A couple of days ago and without fanfare Google went live with Fuchsia.dev, a developer site for its new operating system, currently called the Fuchsia Project.
In order to make up for the shortcomings of Linux, Android has a thick middle layer and is constantly making compromises.
Partner Password Policy | User Error 69
Jul 05, 2019
How many users distros actually have, automating our homes, and the importance of common views and interests with our partners.
Plus Popey discovers a new way to annoy Joe, and sharing passwords with loved ones.
00:00:29 Distro User Numbers 00:13:17 #AskError: do you get annoyed by people who use "last seen recently"? 00:19:20 Home Automation 00:29:16 #AskError: do you share any accounts or passwords with your partner? 00:34:45 The importance of having things in common with your life partner
Changing face of Unix | BSD Now 305
Jul 03, 2019
Website protection with OPNsense, FreeBSD Support Pull Request for ZFS-on-Linux, How much has Unix changed, Porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD, FreeBSD Enterprise 1 PB Storage, the death watch for X11 has started, and more.
with nginx plugin OPNsense become a strong full featured Web Application Firewall (WAF)
The OPNsense security platform can help you to protect your network and your webservers with the nginx plugin addition. In old days, install an open source firewall was a very trick task, but today it can be done with few clicks (or key strokes). In this article I'll not describe the detailed OPNsense installation process, but you can watch this video that was extracted from my OPNsense course available in Udemy. The video is in portuguese language, but with the translation CC Youtube feature you may be able to follow it without problems (if you don't are a portuguese speaker ofcourse) :-)
This pull request integrates the sysutils/openzfs port’s sources into the upstream ZoL repo
> Adding FreeBSD support to ZoL will make it easier to move changes back and forth between FreeBSD and Linux
> Refactor tree to separate out Linux and FreeBSD specific code
> import FreeBSD's SPL
> add ifdefs in common code where it made more sense to do so than duplicate the code in separate files
> Adapted ZFS Test Suite to run on FreeBSD and all tests that pass on ZoL passing on ZoF
The plan to officially rename the common repo from ZFSonLinux to OpenZFS was announced at the ZFS Leadership Meeting on June 25th
This will allow improvements made on one OS to be made available more easily (and more quickly) to the other platforms
For example, mav@’s recent work:
Add wakeup_any(), cheaper version of wakeup_one() for taskqueue(9)
> As result, on 72-core Xeon v4 machine sequential ZFS write to 12 ZVOLs with 16KB block size spend 34% less time in wakeup_any() and descendants then it was spending in wakeup_one(), and total write throughput increased by ~10% with the same as before CPU usage.
UNIX-like systems have dominated computing for decades, and with the rise of the internet and mobile devices their reach has become even larger. True, most systems now use more modern OSs like Linux, but how much has the UNIX-like landscape changed since the early days? So, my question was this: how close is a modern *NIX userland to some of the earliest UNIX releases? To do this I'm going to compare a few key points of a modern Linux system with the earliest UNIX documentation I can get my hands on. The doc I am going to be covering(https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/Research/Dennis_v1/UNIX_ProgrammersManual_Nov71.pdf) is from November 1971, predating v1 of the system. I think the best place to start this comparison is to look at one of the highest-profile parts of the OS, that being the file system. Under the hood modern EXT file systems are completely different from the early UNIX file systems. However, they are still presented in basically the same way, as a heirerarchicat structure of directories with device files. So paths still look identical, and navigating the file system still functions the same. Often used commands like ls, cp, mv, du, and df function the same. So are mount and umount. But, there are some key differences. For instance, cd didn't exist, yet instead chdir filled its place. Also, chmod is somewhat different. Instead of the usual 3-digit octal codes for permissions, this older version only uses 2 digits. Really, that difference is due to the underlying file system using a different permission set than modern systems. For the most part, all the file handling is actually pretty close to a Linux system from 2019.
I have been working on porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD as a GSoC 2019 project. Wine is a compatibility layer which allows running Microsoft Windows applications on POSIX-complaint operating systems. This report provides an overview of the progress of the project during the first coding period. Initially, when I started working on getting Wine-4.4 to build and run on NetBSD i386 the primary issue that I faced was Wine displaying black windows instead of UI, and this applied to any graphical program I tried running with Wine. I suspected it , as it is related to graphics, to be an issue with the graphics driver or Xorg. Subsequently, I tried building modular Xorg, and I tried running Wine on it only to realize that Xorg being modular didn't affect it in the least. After having tried a couple of configurations, I realized that trying to hazard out every other probability is going to take an awful lot of time that I didn't have. This motivated me to bisect the repo using git, and find the first version of Wine which failed on NetBSD.
Today FreeBSD operating system turns 26 years old. 19 June is an International FreeBSD Day. This is why I got something special today :). How about using FreeBSD as an Enterprise Storage solution on real hardware? This where FreeBSD shines with all its storage features ZFS included. Today I will show you how I have built so called Enterprise Storage based on FreeBSD system along with more then 1 PB (Petabyte) of raw capacity. This project is different. How much storage space can you squeeze from a single 4U system? It turns out a lot! Definitely more then 1 PB (1024 TB) of raw storage space.
Once we are done with this we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is. I have no idea how true this is about X.org X server maintenance, either now or in the future, but I definitely think it's a sign that developers have started saying this. If Gnome developers feel that X.org is going to be in hard maintenance mode almost immediately, they're probably pretty likely to also put the Gnome code that deals with X into hard maintenance mode. And public Gnome statements about this (and public action or lack of it) provide implicit support for KDE and any other desktop to move in this direction if they want to (and probably create some pressure to do so). I've known that Wayland was the future for some time, but I would still like it to not arrive any time soon.
Looking Glass - Quickstart Guide — These guides are designed to help you get Looking Glass up and running on an already configured QEMU KVM Virtual Machine that has a VGA PCI Passthrough device.
duncanthrax/scream — Scream is a virtual device driver for Windows that provides a discrete sound device. Audio played through this device is published on your local network as a PCM multicast stream.
ACS patch COPR — Fedora kernels with add-acs-overrides patch from Arch AUR
ACS Override Kernel Builds — This page contains links to the latest kernel builds with the ACS override patch applied for PCI devices.
VFIO tips and tricks: IOMMU Groups, inside and out — Sometimes VFIO users are befuddled that they aren't able to separate devices between host and guest or multiple guests due to IOMMU grouping and revert to using legacy KVM device assignment, or as is the case with may VFIO-VGA users, apply the PCIe ACS override patch to avoid the problem. Let's take a moment to look at what this is really doing.
"Error 43: Driver failed to load" on Nvidia GPUs passed to Windows VMs — Since version 337.88, Nvidia drivers on Windows check if an hypervisor is running and fail if it detects one, which results in an Error 43 in the Windows device manager. Starting with QEMU 2.5.0 and libvirt 1.3.3, the vendor_id for the hypervisor can be spoofed, which is enough to fool the Nvidia drivers into loading anyway.
New and Improved Mac OS Tutorial, Part 1 (The Basics) - The Passthrough POST — Due to certain recent developments, It’s become clear to us that it’s necessary to update and improve our OSX VM guide. A lot’s changed since we wrote it, and rolling in those changes will make the process much more user friendly and accessible to newer VFIO users.
How to setup VFIO GPU passthrough using OVMF and KVM on Arch Linux — This article will detail the steps required to passthrough your GPU to a guest VM which will in our case be a Windows 10 VM used for gaming. Yes, this is the exact same technology made popular by Linus on his LinusTechTips YouTube channel in the seven gamers, one CPU video.
Synergy — Synergy is a software download that shares one mouse and one keyboard between multiple computers. Simply move your mouse between your computers effortlessly
barrier: Open-source KVM software — Barrier is KVM software forked from Symless's synergy 1.9 codebase. Synergy was a commercialized reimplementation of the original CosmoSynergy written by Chris Schoeneman.
foxlet/macOS-Simple-KVM — Documentation to set up a simple macOS VM in QEMU, accelerated by KVM.
Gabbing About Go | Coder Radio 364
Jul 01, 2019
Mike and Wes burrow into the concurrent world of Go and debate where it makes sense and where it may not.
Plus gradual typing for Ruby, a new solution for Python packaging, and the real story behind Jony Ive's exit.
Links:
Goroutines - Concurrency in Golang — Goroutines are functions or methods that run concurrently with other functions or methods. Goroutines can be thought of as light weight threads. The cost of creating a Goroutine is tiny when compared to a thread.
Why build concurrency on the ideas of CSP? — One of the most successful models for providing high-level linguistic support for concurrency comes from Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes, or CSP. Occam and Erlang are two well known languages that stem from CSP. Go's concurrency primitives derive from a different part of the family tree whose main contribution is the powerful notion of channels as first class objects.
Jony Ive ‘dispirited’ by Tim Cook’s lack of interest in product design — To many, Jony Ive’s announced departure from Apple last week felt very sudden. But a narrative is forming to suggest that he’s been slowly exiting for years as the company shifted priorities from product design to operations.
A Tour of Go — These example programs demonstrate different aspects of Go. The programs in the tour are meant to be starting points for your own experimentation.
Google I/O 2013 - Advanced Go Concurrency Patterns — Concurrency is the key to designing high performance network services. This talk expands on last year's popular Go Concurrency Patterns talk to dive deeper into Go's concurrency primitives, and see how tricky concurrency problems can be solved gracefully with simple Go code.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — Ok, so this is cool I have a fully working #rails dev environment up under #Windows usign #WSL and @PengwinLinux. Using @code for the editor. So far so good!
Pengwin by Whitewater Foundry — Pengwin is a Linux environment for Windows 10 built on work by Microsoft Research and the Debian project.
Open-sourcing Sorbet — Sorbet is a fast, powerful type checker designed for Ruby. It scales to codebases with millions of lines of code and can be adopted incrementally.
Gradual typing of Ruby at Scale — This talk shares experience of Stripe successfully been building a typechecker for internal use, including core design decisions made in early days of the project and how they withstood reality of production use
Building Standalone Python Applications with PyOxidizer — PyOxidizer's marquee feature is that it can produce a single file executable containing a fully-featured Python interpreter, its extensions, standard library, and your application's modules and resources. In other words, you can have a single .exe providing your application.
pex — pex is a library for generating .pex (Python EXecutable) files which are executable Python environments in the spirit of virtualenvs.
shiv — shiv is a command line utility for building fully self-contained Python zipapps as outlined in PEP 441, but with all their dependencies included!
Linux Action News 112
Jun 30, 2019
We've got the new Raspberry Pi 4 and share our thoughts, why Microsoft applied to join the linux-distros mailing list, and Ubuntu's 32-bit future is clarified.
Plus Mozilla's big plans Firefox on Android, and the future of Steam on Linux.
Links:
Raspberry Pi 4 Released — Raspberry Pi 4 is now on sale, starting at $35. This is a comprehensive upgrade, touching almost every element of the platform. For the first time we provide a PC-like level of performance for most users, while retaining the interfacing capabilities and hackability of the classic Raspberry Pi line.
New version of Raspbian — We are actually releasing it slightly in advance of the official Debian release date. The reason for this is that one of the important new features of Raspberry Pi 4
Reinventing Firefox for Android — Today we’re very happy to announce a pilot of our new browser for Android devices that is available to early adopters for testing as of now.
Introducing people.kernel.org — Ever since the demise of Google+, many developers have expressed a desire to have a service that would provide a way to create and manage content in a format that would be more rich and easier to access than email messages sent to LKML.
Statement on 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS — We will put in place a community process to determine which 32-bit packages are needed to support legacy software, and can add to that list post-release if we miss something that is needed.
Prospering with Vulkan | BSD Now 304
Jun 27, 2019
DragonflyBSD 5.6 is out, OpenBSD Vulkan Support, bad utmp implementations in glibc and FreeBSD, OpenSSH protects itself against Side Channel attacks, ZFS vs OpenZFS, and more.
Informal test results showing the changes from 5.4 to 5.6 are available.
Reduce stalls in the kernel vm_page_alloc() code (vm_page_list_find()).
Improve page allocation algorithm to avoid re-iterating the same queues as the search is widened.
Add a vm_page_hash*() API that allows the kernel to do heuristical lockless lookups of VM pages.
Change vm_hold() and vm_unhold() semantics to not require any spin-locks.
Change vm_page_wakeup() to not require any spin-locks.
Change wiring vm_page's no longer manipulates the queue the page is on, saving a lot of overhead. Instead, the page will be removed from its queue only if the pageout demon encounters it. This allows pages to enter and leave the buffer cache quickly.
Refactor the handling of fictitious pages.
Remove m->md.pv_list entirely. VM pages in mappings no longer allocate pv_entry's, saving an enormous amount of memory when multiple processes utilize large shared memory maps (e.g. postgres database cache).
Refactor vm_object shadowing, disconnecting the backing linkages from the vm_object itself and instead organizing the linkages in a new structure called vm_map_backing which hangs off the vm_map_entry.
pmap operations now iterate vm_map_backing structures (rather than spin-locked page lists based on the vm_page and pv_entry's), and will test/match operations against the PTE found in the pmap at the requisite location. This doubles VM fault performance on shared pages and reduces the locking overhead for fault and pmap operations.
Simplify the collapse code, removing most of the original code and replacing it with simpler per-vm_map_entry optimizations to limit the shadow depth.
DRM
Major updates to the radeon and ttm (amd support code) drivers. We have not quite gotten the AMD support up to the more modern cards or Ryzen APUs yet, however.
Improve UEFI framebuffer support.
A major deadlock has been fixed in the radeon/ttm code.
Refactor the startup delay designed to avoid conflicts between the i915 driver initialization and X startup.
Add DRM_IOCTL_GET_PCIINFO to improve mesa/libdrm support.
Fix excessive wired memory build-ups.
Fix Linux/DragonFly PAGE_MASK confusion in the DRM code.
Fix idr_*() API bugs.
HAMMER2
The filesystem sync code has been rewritten to significantly improve performance.
Sequential write performance also improved.
Add simple dependency tracking to prevent directory/file splits during create/rename/remove operations, for better consistency after a crash.
Refactor the snapshot code to reduce flush latency and to ensure a consistent snapshot.
Attempt to pipeline the flush code against the frontend, improving flush vs frontend write concurrency.
Improve umount operation.
Fix an allocator race that could lead to corruption.
Numerous other bugs fixed.
Improve verbosity of CHECK (CRC error) console messages.
Somewhat surprisingly, OpenBSD has added the Vulkan library and ICD loader support as their newest port. This new graphics/vulkan-loader port provides the generic Vulkan library and ICD support that is the common code for Vulkan implementations on the system. This doesn't enable any Vulkan hardware drivers or provide something new not available elsewhere, but is rare seeing Vulkan work among the BSDs. There is also in ports the related components like the SPIR-V headers and tools, glsllang, and the Vulkan tools and validation layers. This is of limited usefulness, at least for the time being considering OpenBSD like the other BSDs lag behind in their DRM kernel driver support that is ported over from the mainline Linux kernel tree but generally years behind the kernel upstream. Particularly with Vulkan, newer kernel releases are needed for some Vulkan features as well as achieving decent performance. The Vulkan drivers of relevance are the open-source Intel ANV Vulkan driver and Radeon RADV drivers, both of which are in Mesa though we haven't seen any testing results to know how well they would work if at all currently on OpenBSD, but they're at least in Mesa and obviously open-source.
A note: The BSDs are no longer that far behind.
FreeBSD 12.0 uses DRM from Linux 4.16 (April 2018), and the drm-devel port is based on Linux 5.0 (March 2019)
OpenBSD -current as of April 2019 uses DRM from Linux 4.19.34
***
I recently released another version – 0.5.0 – of Dinit, the service manager / init system. There were a number of minor improvements, including to the build system (just running “make” or “gmake” should be enough on any of the systems which have a pre-defined configuration, no need to edit mconfig by hand), but the main features of the release were S6-compatible readiness notification, and support for updating the utmp database. In other words, utmp is a record of who is currently logged in to the system (another file, “wtmp”, records all logins and logouts, as well as, potentially, certain system events such as reboots and time updates). This is a hint at the main motivation for having utmp support in Dinit – I wanted the “who” command to correctly report current logins (and I wanted boot time to be correctly recorded in the wtmp file). I wondered: If the files consist of fixed-sized records, and are readable by regular users, how is consistency maintained? That is – how can a process ensure that, when it updates the database, it doesn’t conflict with another process also attempting to update the database at the same time? Similarly, how can a process reading an entry from the database be sure that it receives a consistent, full record and not a record which has been partially updated? (after all, POSIX allows that a write(2) call can return without having written all the requested bytes, and I’m not aware of Linux or any of the *BSDs documenting that this cannot happen for regular files). Clearly, some kind of locking is needed; a process that wants to write to or read from the database locks it first, performs its operation, and then unlocks the database. Once again, this happens under the hood, in the implementation of the getutent/pututline functions or their equivalents. Then I wondered: if a user process is able to lock the utmp file, and this prevents updates, what’s to stop a user process from manually acquiring and then holding such a lock for a long – even practically infinite – duration? This would prevent the database from being updated, and would perhaps even prevent logins/logouts from completing. Unfortunately, the answer is – nothing; and yes, it is possible on different systems to prevent the database from being correctly updated or even to prevent all other users – including root – from logging in to the system.
A good find
On FreeBSD, even though write(2) can be asynchronous, once the write syscall returns, the data is in the buffer cache (or ARC), and any future read(2) will see that new data even if it has not yet been written to disk.
***
Last week, Damien Miller, a Google security researcher, and one of the popular OpenSSH and OpenBSD developers announced an update to the existing OpenSSH code that can help protect against the side-channel attacks that leak sensitive data from computer’s memory. This protection, Miller says, will protect the private keys residing in the RAM against Spectre, Meltdown, Rowhammer, and the latest RAMBleed attack. SSH private keys can be used by malicious threat actors to connect to remote servers without the need of a password. According to CSO, “The approach used by OpenSSH could be copied by other software projects to protect their own keys and secrets in memory”. However, if the attacker is successful in extracting the data from a computer or server’s RAM, they will only obtain an encrypted version of an SSH private key, rather than the cleartext version. In an email to OpenBSD, Miller writes, “this change encrypts private keys when they are not in use with a symmetric key that is derived from a relatively large ‘prekey’ consisting of random data (currently 16KB).”
You’ve probably heard us say a mix of “ZFS” and “OpenZFS” and an explanation is long-overdue. From its inception, “ZFS” has referred to the “Zettabyte File System” developed at Sun Microsystems and published under the CDDL Open Source license in 2005 as part of the OpenSolaris operating system. ZFS was revolutionary for completely decoupling the file system from specialized storage hardware and even a specific computer platform. The portable nature and advanced features of ZFS led FreeBSD, Linux, and even Apple developers to start porting ZFS to their operating systems and by 2008, FreeBSD shipped with ZFS in the 7.0 release. For the first time, ZFS empowered users of any budget with enterprise-class scalability and data integrity and management features like checksumming, compression and snapshotting, and those features remain unrivaled at any price to this day. On any ZFS platform, administrators use the zpool and zfs utilities to configure and manage their storage devices and file systems respectively. Both commands employ a user-friendly syntax such as‘zfs create mypool/mydataset’ and I welcome you to watch the appropriately-titled webinar “Why we love ZFS & you should too” or try a completely-graphical ZFS experience with FreeNAS. Oracle has steadily continued to develop its own proprietary branch of ZFS and Matt Ahrens points out that over 50% of the original OpenSolaris ZFS code has been replaced in OpenZFS with community contributions. This means that there are, sadly, two politically and technologically-incompatible branches of “ZFS” but fortunately, OpenZFS is orders of magnitude more popular thanks to its open nature. The two projects should be referred to as “Oracle ZFS” and “OpenZFS” to distinguish them as development efforts, but the user still types the ‘zfs’ command, which on FreeBSD relies on the ‘zfs.ko’ kernel module. My impression is that the terms of the CDDL license under which the OpenZFS branch of ZFS is published protects its users from any patent and trademark risks. Hopefully, this all helps you distinguish the OpenZFS project from the ZFS technology.
There was further discussion of how the ZFSOnLinux repo will become the OpenZFS repo in the future once it also contains the bits to build on FreeBSD as well during the June 25th ZFS Leadership Meeting. The videos for all of the meetings are available here
***
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
***
Regolith, Rosa, and Antsy Alien Attack | Choose Linux 12
Jun 27, 2019
Two new hosts join Joe to talk about a nice i3 implementation and an amazing arcade game written in Bash.
Plus a new segment called Distrohoppers, and a useful hidden feature of GNOME.
Links:
Regolith Linux — Regolith Linux is a distro for people that prefer a spartan interface with polished and consistent system management. It brings together a trifecta of Ubuntu’s ubiquity, i3-wm’s efficient and productive interface, and Gnome’s system configuration features.
Regolith Linux is the i3 Ubuntu Spin You’ve Been Waiting For — Regolith is two things: it’s an Ubuntu-based Linux distro and it’s an installable desktop session. Both approaches share the same aim: make it (a bit) easier to get started with i3 on Ubuntu.
Rosa Linux — ROSA Desktop is a Linux distribution featuring a highly customised KDE desktop and a number of modifications designed to enhance the user-friendliness of the working environment.
Antsy Alien Attack! — A game, written in Bash, that is a somewhat retro-a-like shoot 'em up. Hopefully.
QJoyPad — A simple Linux/QT program that lets you use your gaming devices where you want them: in your games!
Ubuntu Podcast S12E10.5 @ FOSS Talk Live 2019 — Mark, Alan and Martin from Ubuntu Podcast have each been working on a secret coding challenge. All is revealed before a live audience at FOSS Talk Live 2019!
What's your NextCloud? | LINUX Unplugged 307
Jun 25, 2019
Go full self-hosted with our team’s tips, and we share our setups from simple to complex.
Plus what really happens on a 64-bit Linux box when you run 32-bit software, some very handy picks, our reaction to the new Raspberry Pi 4 and more.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.
Links:
These 5D Glass Discs Store 360 TB Of Data For 13.8 Billion Years — Researchers at the University of Southampton have showcased their new nanostructured glass discs that have the ability to store digital data for billions of years. The university announced that they've managed to build a device that can store huge amounts of data on small glass discs using laser writing
The Raspberry Pi 4 launch site runs on a Pi 4 cluster | Ars Technica — The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B has launched. It's a pretty big upgrade from the Raspberry Pi 3, with the company claiming that the device can provide "desktop performance comparable to entry-level x86 PC systems."
Is 4 GB The Limit For The Raspberry Pi 4? | Hackaday — It’s not the lack of an Oxford comma that caught his eye, but the tantalising mention of an 8 GB Raspberry Pi 4. Could we one day see an extra model in the range with twice the memory? It would be nice to think so.
Steam is dropping support for Ubuntu, but not Linux entirely | PC Gamer — Last Friday, a developer at Valve announced that Ubuntu Linux 19.10—which is due to come out this October—won't be supported by Steam. Valve is still supporting Linux, just not future versions of the Ubuntu operating system.
Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter — Ubuntu 19.10 and future releases will not be officially supported by Steam or recommended to our users. We will evaluate ways to minimize breakage for existing users, but will also switch our focus to a different distribution, currently TBD.
What it takes to run a 32-bit x86 program on a 64-bit x86 Linux system — Suppose that you have a modern 64-bit x86 Linux system (often called an x86_64 environment) and that you want to run an old 32-bit x86 program on it (a plain x86 program). What does this require from the overall system, both the kernel and the rest of the environment?
Nextcloud — The self-hosted productivity platform that keeps you in control
lexicon — Manipulate DNS records on various DNS providers in a standardized way.
ARandR: Another XRandR GUI — ARandR is designed to provide a simple visual front end for XRandR. Relative monitor positions are shown graphically and can be changed in a drag-and-drop way.
Find Your Off-Ramp | Coder Radio 363
Jun 24, 2019
We take on the issues of burnout, work communication culture, and keeping everything in balance.
Plus Wes asks 'Why Not Kotlin' and breaks down where it fits in his toolbox.
Links:
Kotlin overview — Kotlin is an open-source, statically-typed programming language that supports both object-oriented and functional programming. Kotlin provides similar syntax and concepts from other languages, including C#, Java, and Scala, among many others. Kotlin does not aim to be unique—instead, it draws inspiration from decades of language development. It exists in variants that target the JVM (Kotlin/JVM), JavaScript (Kotlin/JS), and native code (Kotlin/Native).
Kotlin/Native — Kotlin/Native is a technology for compiling Kotlin code to native binaries, which can run without a virtual machine. It is an LLVM based backend for the Kotlin compiler and native implementation of the Kotlin standard library.
Kotlin for JavaScript — Kotlin provides the ability to target JavaScript. It does so by transpiling Kotlin to JavaScript. The current implementation targets ECMAScript 5.1 but there are plans to eventually target ECMAScript 2015 as well.
Arrow: Functional companion to Kotlin's Standard Library — Arrow aims to provide a lingua franca of interfaces and abstractions across Kotlin libraries. For this, it includes the most popular data types, type classes and abstractions such as Option, Try, Either, IO, Functor, Applicative, Monad to empower users to write pure FP apps and libraries built atop higher order abstractions.
awesome-kotlin — A curated list of awesome Kotlin frameworks, libraries, documents and other resources
Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian Warns Always-On Work Culture Creating ‘Broken’ People - WSJ — “I’ve spoken out quite a bit about things like ‘hustle porn,’ and this ceremony of showing off on social [media] about how hard you’re working,” said Mr. Ohanian, who previously co-founded online discussion forum Reddit. “Y’all see it on Instagram and you certainly see it in the startup community, and it becomes really toxic.”
Thread by @mwseibel — I’ve noticed that many people compete in games they don’t understand because they are modeling the behavior of people around them. Most common is the competition for wealth as a proxy for happiness.
Understanding Burnout Meetup — You may not know it yet, but IT is not easy. Breakdowns in people, processes, and technology leads to frustrating times for all of us. As it spirals out of control, we often meet the final boss: burnout.
What It's Like To Be An Amazon Flex Delivery Driver — Amazon has offered free two-day shipping for Prime members since 2005. As Amazon rolls out a one-day shipping guarantee for its 100 million Prime members, Amazon Flex drivers help solve the company's last mile problem. CNBC spoke to these on-demand contract workers all over the country to find out what it's really like to deliver for Amazon.
V.92 - Wikipedia — V.92 is an ITU-T recommendation, titled Enhancements to Recommendation V.90, that establishes a modem standard allowing near 56 kb/s download and 48 kb/s upload rates. With V.92 PCM is used for both the upstream and downstream connections; previously 56K modems only used PCM for downstream data.
Paratrooper DOS Game — Paratrooper is a 1982 computer game, written by Greg Kuperberg and published by Orion Software. Paratrooper is one of the three games written by Greg Kuperberg when the IBM-PC was still very new.
Floppy disk - Wikipedia — A floppy disk, also known as a floppy, diskette, or simply disk, is a type of disk storage composed of a disk of thin and flexible magnetic storage medium, sealed in a rectangular plastic enclosure lined with fabric that removes dust particles.
No, Your Kid Isn't Growing Horns Because Of Cellphone Use | Techdirt — This week, the Washington Post grabbed plenty of attention for a story that claimed that kids are actually growing "horns" because of cell phone use. The story, which leans on 2016 and 2018 research out of Australia, was cribbing off of this more nuanced piece by the BBC on how skeletal adaptation to modern living changes are kind of a thing.
Yes Kids are Growing Horns - But the Solution is Simple - YouTube — Recently this has become big news with many media outlets reporting on it. It may sound sensationalist, but it really isn't. This is a serious symptom of the augmented lifestyle young people are living involving their phones and media devices.
Linux Action News 111
Jun 23, 2019
Ubuntu sets the Internet on fire, new Linux and FreeBSD vulnerabilities raise concern, while Mattermost raises $50M to compete with Slack.
Plus we react to Facebook's Libra confirmation and the end of Google tablets.
Links:
Ubuntu to drop i386 architecture — he Ubuntu engineering team has reviewed the facts before us and concluded that we should not continue to carry i386 forward as an architecture. Consequently, i386 will not be included as an architecture for the 19.10 release, and we will shortly begin the process of disabling it for the eoan series across Ubuntu infrastructure.
Wine devs worried — "I think not building packages for Ubuntu 19.10 would be the only practical option. It would probably be good to have a small explanation on the download page though. As I understand it, it would still be possible to run 32-bit executables on the Ubuntu 19.10 kernel, but we'd have to build and ship all our dependencies ourselves. I don't think we want to go there just yet."
At least some games not working without 32-bit — Further to the recent announcement and subsequent discussion, I did a little testing over lunch on eoan 19.10 with all i386 packages removed and the i386 part of the repo disabled.
Ubuntu NOT “dropping support for i386 applications” — What we are dropping is updates to the i386 libraries, which will be frozen at the 18.04 LTS versions. But there is every intention to ensure that there is a clear story for how i386 applications (including games) can be run on versions of Ubuntu later than 19.10.
Mattermost raises $50M — The capital infusion follows a $20 million series A in February and a $3.5 million seed round in February 2017 and brings the Palo Alto, California-based company’s total raised to roughly $70 million.
Facebook's Libra confirmed — Facebook is planning to launch a cryptocurrency it hopes will “transform the global economy.”
SACK Attack | TechSNAP 406
Jun 23, 2019
A new vulnerability may be the next 'Ping of Death'; we explore the details of SACK Panic and break down what you need to know.
Plus Firefox zero days targeting Coinbase, the latest update on Rowhammer, and a few more reasons it's a great time to be a ZFS user.
Links:
SACK Panic Security Bulletin — Netflix has identified several TCP networking vulnerabilities in FreeBSD and Linux kernels. The vulnerabilities specifically relate to the Maximum Segment Size (MSS) and TCP Selective Acknowledgement (SACK) capabilities. The most serious, dubbed “SACK Panic,” allows a remotely-triggered kernel panic on recent Linux kernels.
Ubuntu SACK Panic Guidance — You should update your kernel to the versions specified below in the Updates section and reboot. Alternatively, Canonical Livepatch updates will be available to mitigate these two issues without the need to reboot.
Red Hat SACK Panic Advisory — Red Hat customers running affected versions of these Red Hat products are strongly recommended to update them as soon as errata are available. Customers are urged to apply the available updates immediately and enable the mitigations as they feel appropriate.
RFC 2018 - TCP Selective Acknowledgment Options — TCP may experience poor performance when multiple packets are lost from one window of data. With the limited information available from cumulative acknowledgments, a TCP sender can only learn about a single lost packet per round trip time. An aggressive sender could choose to retransmit packets early, but such retransmitted segments may have already been successfully received. A Selective Acknowledgment (SACK) mechanism, combined with a selective repeat retransmission policy, can help to overcome these limitations.
Ping of Death — In a nutshell, it is possible to crash, reboot or otherwise kill a large number of systems by sending a ping of a certain size from a remote machine.
RAMBleed — RAMBleed is a side-channel attack that enables an attacker to read out physical memory belonging to other processes. The implications of violating arbitrary privilege boundaries are numerous, and vary in severity based on the other software running on the target machine. As an example, in our paper we demonstrate an attack against OpenSSH in which we use RAMBleed to leak a 2048 bit RSA key.
Digging into the new features in OpenZFS post-Linux migration | Ars Technica — One of the most important new features in 0.8 is Native ZFS Encryption. Until now, ZFS users have relied on OS-provided encrypted filesystem layers either above or below ZFS. While this approach does work, it presented difficulties.
Allan Jude on Twitter — Once the FreeBSDs are upstreamed, everything is changing to 'OpenZFS', including the github organization currently know as 'zfsonlinux'.
Delete Your Community | User Error 68
Jun 21, 2019
Two #AskError specials in a row! Advice for our younger selves, leaving communities, our listening habits, and hoarding.
Plus the most serious question that’s ever been asked on the show, and more.
00:00:42 What's the one bit of Linux advice you'd give yourself if you could go back to the start of your journey? 00:04:17 What would make you delete your Twitter account? 00:11:29 When do you think you’ll buy your first electric car? 00:19:06 Have you ever been banned from a community? 00:25:39 What kind of printer cartridges do you buy? 00:30:27 How many podcasts do you listen to? 00:33:42 What do you hoard, but probably shouldn't?
The ZFS on FreeBSD project has renamed the userland and kernel ports from zol and zol-kmod to openzfs and openzfs-kmod
The new versions from this week are IOCTL compatible with the command line tools in FreeBSD 12.0, so you can use the old userland with the new kernel module (although obviously not the new features)
With the renaming it is easier to specify which kernel module you want to load in /boot/loader.conf:
> zfs_load=”YES”
or
> openzfs_load=”YES”
To load traditional or the newer version of ZFS
The kmod still requires FreeBSD 12-stable or 13-current because it depends on the newer crypto support in the kernel for the ZFS native encryption feature. Allan is looking at ways to work around this, but it may not be practical.
We would like to do an unofficial poll on how people would the userland to co-exist. Add a suffix to the new commands in /usr/local (zfs.new zpool.new or whatever). One idea i’ve had is to move the zfs and zpool commands to /libexec and make /sbin/zfs and /sbin/zpool a switcher script, that will call the base or ports version based on a config file (or just based on if the port is installed)
For testing purposes, generally you should be fine as long as you don’t run ‘zpool upgrade’, which will make your pool only importable using the newer ZFS.
For extra safety, you can create a ‘zpool checkpoint’, which will allow you to undo any changes that are made to the pool during your testing with the new openzfs tools. Note: the checkpoint will undo EVERYTHING. So don’t save new data you want to keep.
Note: Checkpoints disable all freeing operations, to prevent any data from being overwritten so that you can re-import at the checkpoint and undo any operation (including zfs destroy-ing a dataset), so also be careful you don’t run out of space during testing.
blacklistd(8) provides an API that can be used by network daemons to communicate with a packet filter via a daemon to enforce opening and closing ports dynamically based on policy. The interface to the packet filter is in /libexec/blacklistd-helper (this is currently designed for npf) and the configuration file (inspired from inetd.conf) is in etc/blacklistd.conf Now, blacklistd(8) will require bpfjit(4) (Just-In-Time compiler for Berkeley Packet Filter) in order to properly work, in addition to, naturally, npf(7) as frontend and syslogd(8), as a backend to print diagnostic messages. Also remember npf shall rely on the npflog* virtual network interface to provide logging for tcpdump() to use. Unfortunately (dont' ask me why :P) in 8.1 all the required kernel components are still not compiled by default in the GENERIC kernel (though they are in HEAD), and are rather provided as modules. Enabling NPF and blacklistd services would normally result in them being automatically loaded as root, but predictably on securelevel=1 this is not going to happen
Motivation and Context
> This is a alpha-quality preview of RAID-Z expansion. This feature allows disks to be added one at a time to a RAID-Z group, expanding its capacity incrementally. This feature is especially useful for small pools (typically with only one RAID-Z group), where there isn't sufficient hardware to add capacity by adding a whole new RAID-Z group (typically doubling the number of disks).
> For additional context as well as a design overview, see my short talk from the 2017 OpenZFS Developer Summit: slides video
A couple months ago I noticed that the monitor on my workstation never power off anymore. Screensaver would go on, but DPMs (to do the poweroff) never kicked in. I grovels the output of various tools that display DPMS settings, which as usual in Xorg were useless. Everybody said DPMS is on with a timeout. I even wrote my own C program to use every available Xlib API call and even the xscreensaver library calls. (should make it available) No go, everybody says that DPMs is on, enabled and set on a timeout. Didn’t matter whether I let xscreeensaver do the job or just the X11 server. After a while I noticed that DPMS actually worked between starting my X11 server and starting all my clients. I have a minimal .xinitrc and start the actual session from a script, that is how I could notice. If I used a regular desktop login I wouldn’t have noticed. A server state bug was much more likely than a client bug.
Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages. In February, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support and lately extending NetBSD's ptrace interface to cover more register types. You can read more about that in my Apr 2019 report. In May, I was primarily continuing the work on new ptrace interface. Besides that, I've found and fixed a bug in ptrace() compat32 code, pushed LLVM buildbot to ‘green’ status and found some upstream LLVM regressions. More below.
If you have a traditional window manager like fvwm, one of the things it can do is iconify X windows so that they turn into icons on the root window (which would often be called the 'desktop'). Even modern desktop environments that don't iconify programs to the root window (or their desktop) may have per-program icons for running programs in their dock or taskbar. If your window manager or desktop environment can do this, you might reasonably wonder where those icons come from by default. Although I don't know how it was done in the early days of X, the modern standard for this is part of the Extended Window Manager Hints. In EWMH, applications give the window manager a number of possible icons, generally in different sizes, as ARGB bitmaps (instead of, say, SVG format). The window manager or desktop environment can then pick whichever icon size it likes best, taking into account things like the display resolution and so on, and display it however it wants to (in its original size or scaled up or down). How this is communicated in specific is through the only good interprocess communication method that X supplies, namely X properties. In the specific case of icons, the _NET_WM_ICON property is what is used, and xprop can display the size information and an ASCII art summary of what each icon looks like. It's also possible to use some additional magic to read out the raw data from _NET_WM_ICON in a useful format; see, for example, this Stackoverflow question and its answers.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Flipping FreeNAS for Fedora | LINUX Unplugged 306
Jun 18, 2019
We attempt something you never should, we live flip our FreeNAS ZFS install to a Fedora server.
Plus a REALLY weird PC, and our command line picks.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Brent Gervais, Martin Wimpress, and Neal Gompa.
Links:
Netflix Uncovers TCP Bugs Within The Linux & FreeBSD Kernels - Phoronix — As Netflix's first security bulletin for 2019, they warned of TCP-based remote denial of service vulnerabilities affecting both Linux and FreeBSD. These vulnerabilities are rated "critical" but already being corrected within the latest Git code.
Initial Benchmarks Of Microsoft's WSL2 - Phoronix — Since the release of WSL2 as a Windows 10 Insider Preview update this week, we've been putting the new Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 under some benchmarks compared to WSL1 and bare metal Linux. While WSL2 has improved the I/O performance thanks to the new Hyper-V-based virtualization approach employed by WSL2, the performance has regressed in other areas for running Linux binaries on Windows 10.
The Future of Docker Desktop for Windows - Docker Engineering Blog — ith WSL 2 integration, you will still experience the same seamless integration with Windows, but Linux programs running inside WSL will also be able to do the same. This has a huge impact for developers working on projects targeting a Linux environment, or with a build process tailored for Linux. No need for maintaining both Linux and Windows build scripts anymore! As an example, a developer at Docker can now work on the Linux Docker daemon on Windows, using the same set of tools and scripts as a developer on a Linux machine
Atari VCS goes on $250 pre-order with Linux running on Ryzen R1000 — Atari has opened $250 pre-orders for its Atari VCS retro game console, which will run Linux on the new AMD Ryzen R1000 SoC. Indiegogo backers are set for a December release while new orders will be fulfilled in Mar. 2020.
A EALLY Weird PC… - System76 Thelio Review — There’s more than one company that makes its own operating system and hardware, and today, we’re taking a look at System76’s Thelio, an open source design you can build yourself.
Fedora · zfsonlinux/zfs Wiki — Only DKMS style packages can be provided for Fedora from the official zfsonlinux.org repository. This is because Fedora is a fast moving distribution which does not provide a stable kABI. These packages track the official ZFS on Linux tags and are updated as new versions are released.
Sharing ZFS Datasets Via NFS | Programster's Blog — The great thing about ZFS is that it is very easy to split your "pool" into as many datasets as you like. Each dataset is treated like its own filesystem, with its own rules and settings, which means with regards to sharing over NFS, that you can share more securely as client's will not be able to reach out of the bounds of that dataset/filesystem that you decided to share.
How to easily configure WireGuard - Stavros' Stuff — At its core, all WireGuard does is create an interface from one computer to another. It doesn’t really let you access other computers on either end of the network, or forward all your traffic through the VPN server, or anything like that. It just connects two computers, directly, quickly and securely.
Use Public Key Authentication with SSH — Password authentication is the default method most SSH (Secure Shell) clients use to authenticate with remote servers, but it suffers from potential security vulnerabilities, like brute-force login attempts. An alternative to password authentication is public key authentication, in which you generate and store on your computer a pair of cryptographic keys and then configure your server to recognize and accept your keys
pindexis/marker: The terminal command palette — Marker is a command palette for the terminal. It lets you bookmark commands (or commands templates) and easily retreive them with the help of a real-time fuzzy matcher.
It Crashes Better | Coder Radio 362
Jun 17, 2019
It's a Coder three-way as Chris checks-in with an eGPU update, and Mike shares his adventures with ReasonML.
Plus the state of linux application packaging, and Chris' ultimate mobile workflow.
Reason Homepage — Reason lets you write simple, fast and quality type safe code while leveraging both the JavaScript & OCaml ecosystems.
What & Why · Reason — Reason can almost be considered as a solidly statically typed, faster and simpler cousin of JavaScript, minus the historical crufts, plus the features of ES2030 you can use today, and with access to both the JS and the OCaml ecosystem!
Null, Undefined & Option · Reason — Reason itself doesn't have the notion of null or undefined. This is a great thing, as it wipes out an entire category of bugs. No more undefined is not a function, and cannot access foo of undefined!
Variant! · Reason — Behold, the crown jewel of Reason data structures!
Most data structures in most languages are about "this and that". A variant allows us to express "this or that".
Syntax Cheatsheet · Reason — We've worked very hard to make Reason look like JS while preserving OCaml's great semantics & types. Hope you enjoy it!
OCaml Homepage — OCaml is an industrial strength programming language supporting functional, imperative and object-oriented styles.
ReasonReact · All your ReactJS knowledge, codified. — It's Just Reason. We leverage the existing type system to create a library that types just right. Plus lightweight, first-class support for the ReactJS community idioms you've been using.
ReasonML - React as first intended — ReasonML is the new tech that Facebook is using to develop React applications and promoting as a futuristic version of JavaScript
Creating a snap - Snap documentation — A snap can be created from apps you’ve already built and zipped, or from your preferred programming language or framework.
Similar projects · AppImage/AppImageKit Wiki — This page compares various similar systems to AppImage. Of course, each system was built toward its own specific objectives. This page is intended to illustrate the points that were important in the AppImage design, and similarities as well as differences to other systems.
Take it for Granite | The Friday Stream 7
Jun 17, 2019
Chris gets lost with the animals, while Ang plays with fire and we solve the Deepfake problem.
Plus Wes and Ang battle it out for a million dollars.
Special Guest: Hadea Fisher.
Links:
CSE Push-Start Propane Torch — Ideal for melting ice on sidewalks and driveways/Grass and weed removal/ Paint removal/ Roofing shingle softener. Attaches easily to a standard propane tank including units with the new OPD valve. Wand comes with a flow valve and turbo blast trigger for maximum flame and temperatures over 3000° F!
Help! My Teen Has Diabetes: The Resource for Frustrated Parents by Hadea Fisher. — Raising a teen with diabetes can be overwhelming, exhausting, and thankless. As a parent, you don’t want to feel like you have to micromanage your child in order to keep them well. But there’s another way…one that creates safety for your child and sanity for you.
Deepfaked Mark Zuckerberg Looks Uncannily Like the Real Thing — The artists in question, Bill Posters and Daniel Howe, said they modified a a September 2017 statement Zuckerberg gave on Russian election interference on the Facebook platform using CannyAI’s “video dialogue replacement (VDR)” technology.
Elders in the community show us how to properly build services, Huawei is reportedly working on a Sailfish OS fork and Apple joins the Cloud Native club.
Plus Facebook wants you to use their cryptocurrency, and CERN launches "The Microsoft Alternatives project".
Links:
Mozilla says paid subscription service is coming to Firefox — The goal for Mozilla is to develop “diverse sources of revenue” so that it isn’t so heavily reliant on money it receives from search companies that pay to be featured in the browser.
New Firefox branding — The “Firefox” you’ve always known as a browser is stretching to cover a family of products and services united by putting you and your privacy first.
Apple joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the home of open-source projects like Kubernetes, today announced that Apple is joining as a top-level Platinum End User Member.
MAlt project — The Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) started a year ago to mitigate anticipated software license fee increases.
Huawei may use Sailfish OS-based Aurora — Aurora OS is a Russian-made mobile operating system based on the open-source Sailfish OS Linux distribution developed by Finnish company Jolla.
Zorin OS 15 + LineageOS | Choose Linux 11
Jun 13, 2019
Zorin OS is described as “a powerful desktop you already know how to use.” It’s elegant, beginner-friendly and looks beautiful, too. Should we be paying more attention to it?
Then in another first, Jason installs his first alternative mobile OS, and Joe gives advice on getting the most out of LineageOS.
Unfortunately we end the episode by saying goodbye to Jason as he moves on to pursue several independent projects, but the show will go on with the same spirit of discovery and newness!
Links:
Zorin OS — Zorin OS is the alternative to Windows and macOS designed to make your computer faster, more powerful, secure, and privacy respecting.
DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been working on a big VM rework in the name of performance and other kernel improvements recently. Here is a look at how those DragonFlyBSD 5.5-DEVELOPMENT improvements are paying off compared to DragonFlyBSD 5.4 as well as FreeBSD 12 and five Linux distribution releases. With Dillon using an AMD Ryzen Threadripper system, we used that too for this round of BSD vs. Linux performance benchmarks. The work by Dillon on the VM overhaul and other changes (including more HAMMER2 file-system work) will ultimately culminate with the DragonFlyBSD 5.6 release (well, unless he opts for DragonFlyBSD 6.0 or so). These are benchmarks of the latest DragonFlyBSD 5.5-DEVELOPMENT daily ISO as of this week benchmarked across DragonFlyBSD 5.4.3 stable, FreeBSD 12.0, Ubuntu 19.04, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0, Debian 9.9, Debian Buster, and CentOS 7 1810 as a wide variety of reference points both from newer and older Linux distributions. (As for no Clear Linux reference point for a speedy reference point, it currently has a regression with AMD + Samsung NVMe SSD support on some hardware, including this box, prohibiting the drive from coming up due to a presumed power management issue that is still being resolved.) With Matthew Dillon doing much of his development on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper system after he last year proclaimed the greatness of these AMD HEDT CPUs, for this round of testing I also used a Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX with 32 cores / 64 threads. Tests of other AMD/Intel hardware with DragonFlyBSD will come as the next stable release is near and all of the kernel work has settled down. For now it's mostly entertaining our own curiosity how well these DragonFlyBSD optimizations are paying off and how it's increasing the competition against FreeBSD 12 and Linux distributions.
Maybe you have been reading recently about the release of OpenBSD 6.5 and wonder, "What are the differences between Linux and OpenBSD?" I've also been there at some point in the past and these are my conclusions. They also apply, to some extent, to other BSDs. However, an important disclaimer applies to this article. This list is aimed at people who are used to Linux and are curious about OpenBSD. It is written to highlight the most important changes from their perspective, not the absolute most important changes from a technical standpoint. Please bear with me.
Siddharth Muralee - Enhancing Syzkaller support for NetBSD
Surya P - Implementation of COMPAT_LINUX and COMPAT_NETBSD32 DRM ioctls support for NetBSD kernel
Jason High - Incorporation of Argon2 Password Hashing Algorithm into NetBSD
Saurav Prakash - Porting NetBSD to HummingBoard Pulse
Naveen Narayanan - Porting WINE to amd64 architecture on NetBSD
The communiting bonding period - where students get in touch with mentors and community - started yesterday. The coding period will start from May 27 until August 19. Please welcome all our students and a big good luck to students and mentors! A big thank to Google and The NetBSD Foundation organization mentors and administrators! Looking forward to a great Google Summer of Code!
The opening keynote at EuroBSDCon 2016 predicted the future 10 years of BSDs. Amongst all the funny previsions, gnn@FreeBSD said that by 2026 OpenBSD will have its first implementation of SMP. Almost 3 years after this talk, that sounds like a plausible forecast... Why? Where are we? What can we do? Let's dive into the issue!
State of affairs
Most of OpenBSD's kernel still runs under a single lock, ze KERNEL_LOCK(). That includes most of the syscalls, most of the interrupt handlers and most of the fault handlers. Most of them, not all of them. Meaning we have collected & fixed bugs while setting up infrastructures and examples. Now this lock remains the principal responsible for the spin % you can observe in top(1) and systat(1). I believe that we opted for a difficult hike when we decided to start removing this lock from the bottom. As a result many SCSI & Network interrupt handlers as well as all Audio & USB ones can be executed without big lock. On the other hand very few syscalls are already or almost ready to be unlocked, as we incorrectly say. This explains why basic primitives like tsleep(9), csignal() and selwakeup() are only receiving attention now that the top of the Network Stack is running (mostly) without big lock.
Next steps
In the past years, most of our efforts have been invested into the Network Stack. As I already mentioned it should be ready to be parallelized. However think we should now concentrate on removing the KERNEL_LOCK(), even if the code paths aren't performance critical.
This release finally addresses some of the problems that prevent simple running of several games. This happens for example when an old FNA.dll library comes with the games that doesn't match the API of our native libraries like SDL2, OpenAL, or MojoShader anymore. Some of those cases can be fixed by simply dropping in a newer FNA.dll. fnaify now asks if FNA 17.12 should be automatically added if a known incompatible FNA version is found. You simply answer yes or no.
Another blocker happens when the game expects to check the SteamAPI - either from a running Steam process, or a bundled steam_api library. OpenBSD 6.5-current now has steamworks-nosteam in ports, a stub library for Steamworks.NET that prevents games from crashing simply because an API function isn't found. The repo is here. fnaify now finds this library in /usr/local/share/steamstubs and uses it instead of the bundled (full) Steamworks.NET.dll. This may help with any games that use this layer to interact with the SteamAPI, mostly those that can only be obtained via Steam.
The order of the arguments in the create, start, and stop commands of vmctl(8) has been changed to match a commonly expected style. Manual usage or scripting with vmctl must be adjusted to use the new syntax. For example, the old syntax looked like this:
# vmctl create disk.qcow2 -s 50G
The new syntax specifies the command options before the argument:
Right now I am a bit unhappy at Fedora for a specific packaging situation, so let me tell you a little story of what I, as a system administrator, would really like distributions to not do. For reasons beyond the scope of this blog entry, I run a Prometheus and Grafana setup on both my home and office Fedora Linux machines (among other things, it gives me a place to test out various things involving them). When I set this up, I used the official upstream versions of both, because I needed to match what we are running (or would soon be). Recently, Fedora decided to package Grafana themselves (as a RPM), and they called this RPM package 'grafana'. Since the two different packages are different versions of the same thing as far as package management tools are concerned, Fedora basically took over the 'grafana' package name from Grafana. This caused my systems to offer to upgrade me from the Grafana.com 'grafana-6.1.5-1' package to the Fedora 'grafana-6.1.6-1.fc29' one, which I actually did after taking reasonable steps to make sure that the Fedora version of 6.1.6 was compatible with the file layouts and so on from the Grafana version of 6.1.5. Why is this a problem? It's simple. If you're going to take over a package name from the upstream, you should keep up with the upstream releases. If you take over a package name and don't keep up to date or keep up to date only sporadically, you cause all sorts of heartburn for system administrators who use the package. The least annoying future of this situation is that Fedora has abandoned Grafana at 6.1.6 and I am going to 'upgrade' it with the upstream 6.2.1, which will hopefully be a transparent replacement and not blow up in my face. The most annoying future is that Fedora and Grafana keep ping-ponging versions back and forth, which will make 'dnf upgrade' into a minefield (because it will frequently try to give me a 'grafana' upgrade that I don't want and that would be dangerous to accept). And of course this situation turns Fedora version upgrades into their own minefield, since now I risk an upgrade to Fedora 30 actually reverting the 'grafana' package version on me.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
***
Resilience Is Futile | LINUX Unplugged 305
Jun 11, 2019
Is Resilient Linux truly an indestructible distro? Or is this our toughest distro challenge yet?
Plus why openSUSE is looking at a renaming, and if we’d pay for Firefox Premium.
Special Guest: Brent Gervais.
Links:
VLC 3.0.7 and security - Yet another blog for JBKempf — We just released VLC 3.0.7, a minor update of VLC branch 3.0.x. This release is a bit special, because it has more security issues fixed than any other version of VLC.
Renaming openSUSE — The primary motivation for a name change is, as described by openSUSE board chair Richard Brown, trademarks. Since "openSUSE" contains "SUSE", the company will have to retain a significant amount of control over what the foundation can do with its own name, which "makes such things rather complicated".
Firefox Premium Coming Later This Year, But Will You Pay for It? — “We will probably launch some new services first and then we will think carefully about which model makes the most sense, while ensuring the best user safety. Firefox and many security features and services, like ETP [Enhanced Tracking Protection], will still be free.”
Mozilla working on Firefox premium subscription offering — Mozilla is looking into options that would result in the launch of a paid-for version of Firefox this autumn. It has been reported that Mozilla CEO, Chris Beard, said that the company is aiming to launch the premium offering by October, with features like a VPN and secure cloud storage built-in - justifying a subscription fee.
LINUX Unplugged - Blog - BSides San Antonio 2019 — I’m writing this post the day after BsidesSATX and it’s almost like the day after Christmas. BsidesSATX is the conference I look forward to all year because I get to see all of my Infosec family.
LinuxAcademy.com on Twitter — The AWS #DevOps Professional certification exam has just been updated with new emphasis on the AWS #Developer Tools suite.
BSD Now 301 — GPU passthrough on bhyve, confusion with used/free disk space on ZFS, OmniOS Community Edition, pfSense 2.4.4 Release p3, NetBSD 8.1 RC1, FreeNAS as your Server OS, and more.
Back to the Basics: Linux Permissions 101 — Join Alex Juarez (Rackspace) and Ell Marquez for an introduction to Linux permissions! Whether you are brand new or have been doing Linux for a while or even professionally there will be something for you.
liveng — liveng 1.0 documentation — A live operating system allows booting from a removable medium, such a USB key, without the need of being installed to the hard drive.
Only 5.5% of all vulnerabilities are ever exploited in the wild — The research -- considered the most extensive of its type to date -- found that only 4,183 security flaws from the total of 76,000 vulnerabilities discovered between 2009 and 2018 had been exploited in the wild.
Update Uncertainty | TechSNAP 405
Jun 11, 2019
We explore the risky world of exposed RDP, from the brute force GoldBrute botnet to the dangerously worm-able BlueKeep vulnerability.
Plus the importance of automatic updates, and Jim's new backup box.
ZEEEE Shell! | Coder Radio 361
Jun 10, 2019
Apple is shaking up the foundations of UI development with SwiftUI and raising developer eyebrows with a new default shell on MacOS.
Plus feedback with a FOSS dilemma and an update on our 7 languages challenge.
Links:
Feedback: Lance’s FOSS Quandary — I was working on an open source project for school that we (4 members) submitted. Myself and another did 98% of the work the others contributed to the documentation (outside of the codebase). Class is over now for many months and nobody has touched the code but one other member and I wish to keep it going.
Feedback: Developer, have money for a new Mac Pro? Buy these instead. — The recently unveiled Mac Pro is no doubt a gorgeous machine, engineered for a very particular group of people. While it will likely be a great machine for those who live and breathe within Finalcut and work with ProRes files, it’s overkill for a good developer machine.
Apple makes fancy zsh default in forthcoming macOS 'Catalina' — "zsh is highly compatible with the Bourne shell (sh) and mostly compatible with bash, with some differences," Apple explained in a support document posted on Monday in conjunction with the announcement of macOS Catalina, which ships this fall.
Oh My Zsh - a delightful & open source framework for Z-Shell — Oh My Zsh is a delightful, open source, community-driven framework for managing your Zsh configuration. It comes bundled with thousands of helpful functions, helpers, plugins, themes, and a few things that make you shout... “Oh My ZSH!”
Mike's Blog: Converting to SwiftUI Steps[0] — SwiftUI is the next paradigm in iOS and macOS user interface development. However, if you’re like me you already have Xcode projects that are using the now legacy storyboard technology. Luckily, it possible to update your existing projects to use SwiftUI and the process is very straightforward.
Mike's Blog: Converting to SwiftUI Steps[1] — Continuing my journey into SwiftUI, I am taking a look at re-using existing UIViews and UIViewControllers in SwiftUI. The primary advantage here is not having to rewrite your existing code from scratch, however, it’s probably best to create any new views in SwiftUI directly rather than UIView.
SwiftUI for React Native Developers — Developers with React Native experience may notice some similarities to the philosophies Apple has imbued into their new UI framework. Utilizing structs as immutable value types for view modeling, a declarative syntax, and with their new async event library Combine, a reactive architecture.
SwiftUI - Apple Developer — SwiftUI is an innovative, exceptionally simple way to build user interfaces across all Apple platforms with the power of Swift.
Mic And Coke | The Friday Stream 6
Jun 10, 2019
The funniest 17 seconds from Texas Linux Fest and we learn some remarkable things about our crew’s past.
DigitalPour — Helping restaurants, breweries, tap houses & growler stations maximize draft sales and profitability with a robust customer-facing Digital Menu driven by a powerful back-end system that integrates with Point of Sale, website, mobile apps and social media.
Amazon drone program taking flight — Today at Amazon’s re:MARS Conference (Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics and Space) in Las Vegas, we unveiled our latest Prime Air drone design. We’ve been hard at work building fully electric drones that can fly up to 15 miles and deliver packages under five pounds to customers in less than 30 minutes. And, with the help of our world-class fulfillment and delivery network, we expect to scale Prime Air both quickly and efficiently, delivering packages via drone to customers within months.
Relicensing CockroachDB — But our past outlook on the right business model relied on a crucial norm in the OSS world: that companies could build a business around a strong open source core product without a much larger technology platform company coming along and offering the same product as a service. That norm no longer holds.
Microsoft and Oracle link up their clouds — Microsoft and Oracle announced a new alliance today that will see the two companies directly connect their clouds over a direct network connection so that their users can then move workloads and data seamlessly between the two.
Stadia details announced — Stadia games run on custom Linux-based server hardware maintained by Google, promising "10.7 teraflops of power in each instance." Game audio and video is streamed from those servers to a user's device, and inputs are streamed from the user to the server over a network of what Google says are "7,500 edge nodes" around the world.
Mind the Apps | User Error 67
Jun 07, 2019
It's another #AskError special. Meditation and mindfulness, friends making obvious mistakes, and AppImage popularity.
Plus cashless society, and hoarding phone apps.
00:01:14 How do you manage apps on your smartphone? 00:04:51 Why isn’t AppImage part of the larger universal packaging discussion? 00:14:43 How would you feel if cash went away? 00:19:39 Thoughts on meditation and mindfulness? 00:28:43 What do you do when you see someone you know making an obvious mistake?
GPU Passthrough | BSD Now 301
Jun 05, 2019
GPU passthrough on bhyve, confusion with used/free disk space on ZFS, OmniOS Community Edition, pfSense 2.4.4 Release p3, NetBSD 8.1 RC1, FreeNAS as your Server OS, and more.
Normally we cover news focused on KVM and sometimes Xen, but something very special has happened with their younger cousin in the BSD world, Bhyve.
For those that don’t know, Bhyve (pronounced bee-hive) is the native hypervisor in FreeBSD. It has many powerful features, but one that’s been a pain point for some years now is VGA passthrough. Consumer GPUs have not been useable until very recently despite limited success with enterprise cards.
However, Twitter user Michael Yuji found a workaround that enables passing through a consumer card to any *nix system configured to use X11:
All you have to do is add a line pointing the X server to the Bus ID of the passed card and the VM will boot, with acceleration and everything. He theorizes that this may not be possible on windows because of the way it looks for display devices, but it’s a solid start.
As soon as development surrounding VGA passthrough matures on Bhyve, it will become a very attractive alternative to more common tools like Hyper-V and Qemu, because it makes many powerful features available in the host system like jails, boot environments, BSD networking, and tight ZFS integration. For example, you could potentially run your Router, NAS, preferred workstation OS and any number of other things in one box, and only have to spin up a single VM because of the flexibility afforded by jails over Linux-based containers.
The user who found this workaround also announced they’d be writing it up at some point, so stay tuned for details on the process.
It’s been slow going on Bhyve passthrough development for a while, but this new revelation is encouraging. We’ll be closely monitoring the situation and report on any other happenings.
I use ZFS extensively. ZFS is my favorite file system. I write articles and give lectures about it. I work with it every day. In traditional file systems we use df(1) to determine free space on partitions. We can also use du(1) to count the size of the files in the directory. But it’s different on ZFS and this is the most confusing thing EVER. I always forget which tool reports what disk space usage! Every time somebody asks me, I need to google it. For this reason I decided to document it here - for myself - because if I can’t remember it at least I will not need to google it, as it will be on my blog, but maybe you will also benefit from this blog post if you have the same problem or you are starting your journey with ZFS.
The understanding of how ZFS is uses space and how to determine which value means what is a crucial thing. I hope thanks to this article I will finally remember it!
The OmniOS Community Edition Association is proud to announce the general availability of OmniOS - r151030.
OmniOS is published according to a 6-month release cycle, r151030 LTS takes over from r151028, published in November 2018; and since it is a LTS release it also takes over from r151022. The r151030 LTS release will be supported for 3 Years. It is the first LTS release published by the OmniOS CE Association since taking over the reins from OmniTI in 2017. The next LTS release is scheduled for May 2021. The old stable r151026 release is now end-of-life. See the release schedule for further details.
This is only a small selection of the new features, and bug fixes in the new release; review the release notes for full details.
If you upgrade from r22 and want to see all new features added since then, make sure to also read the release notes for r24, r26 and r28.
The OmniOS team and the illumos community have been very active in creating new features and improving existing ones over the last 6 months.
We are pleased to announce the release of pfSense® software version 2.4.4-p3, now available for new installations and upgrades!
pfSense software version 2.4.4-p3 is a maintenance release, bringing a number of security enhancements as well as a handful of fixes for issues present in the 2.4.4-p2 release.
pfSense 2.4.4-RELEASE-p3 updates and installation images are available now!
To see a complete list of changes and find more detail, see the Release Notes.
We had hoped to bring you this release a few days earlier, but given the announcement last Tuesday of the Intel Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS) issue, we did not have sufficient time to fully incorporate those corrections and properly test for release on Thursday. We felt that it was worth delaying for a few days, rather than making multiple releases within a week.
Upgrade Notes
Due to the significant nature of the changes in 2.4.4 and later,
warnings and error messages, particularly from PHP and package updates, are likely to occur during the upgrade process. In nearly all cases these errors are a harmless side effect of the changes between FreeBSD 11.1 and 11.2 and between PHP 5.6 and PHP 7.2.
Always take a backup of the firewall configuration prior to any major change to the firewall, such as an upgrade.
Do not update packages before upgrading pfSense! Either remove all packages or do not update packages before running the upgrade.
The upgrade will take several minutes to complete. The exact time varies based on download speed, hardware speed, and other factors such installed packages. Be patient during the upgrade and allow the firewall enough time to complete the entire process. After the update packages finish downloading it could take 10-20 minutes or more until the upgrade process ends. The firewall may reboot several times during the upgrade process. Monitor the upgrade from the firewall console for the most accurate view.
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 8.1, the first update of the NetBSD 8 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements.
Some highlights of the 8.1 release are:
x86: Mitigation for INTEL-SA-00233 (MDS)
Various local user kernel data leaks fixed.
x86: new rc.conf(5) setting smtoff to disable Simultaneous Multi-Threading
Various network driver fixes and improvements.
Fixes for thread local storage (TLS) in position independent executables (PIE).
Fixes to reproducible builds.
Fixed a performance regression in tmpfs.
DRM/KMS improvements.
bwfm(4) wireless driver for Broadcom FullMAC PCI and USB devices added.
What if you could have a server OS that had built in RAID, NAS and SAN functionality, and could manage packages, containers and VMs in a GUI? What if that server OS was also free to download and install? Wouldn’t that be kind of awesome? Wouldn’t that be FreeNAS?
FreeNAS is the world’s number one, open source storage OS, but it also comes equipped with all the jails, plugins, and VMs you need to run additional server-level services for things like email and web site hosting. File, Block, and even Object storage is all built-in and can be enabled with a few clicks. The ZFS file system scales to more drives than you could ever buy, with no limits for dataset sizes, snapshots, and restores.
FreeNAS is also 100% FreeBSD. This is the OS used in the Netflix CDN, your PS4, and the basis for iOS. Set up a jail and get started downloading packages like Apache or NGINX for web hosting or Postfix for email service.
Just released, our new TrueCommand management platform also streamlines alerts and enables multi-system monitoring.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Losing My Religion | LINUX Unplugged 304
Jun 04, 2019
Adopting a distro like it’s a religion is stupid. That’s one of many hard lessons we take away from Texas Linux Fest this week; we’ll share some of the best.
Plus some old friends visit the show, reading eBooks on Linux, and a new Ryzen handheld.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Martin Wimpress.
Links:
Ctrl Shift Face - YouTube — Now, here’s another reminder that the tools to craft deepfakes are widely available for just about anyone with the right skills to use: the manipulated videos posted on YouTuber Ctrl Shift Face are particularly creepy.
The Smach Z AMD+Linux Gaming Handheld Might Actually Ship This Year - Phoronix — Smach Z is expected to make its formal debut next week at the E3 gaming conference next week. The Smach Z in its current form is using an AMD Ryzen Embedded V1605B SoC with Vega graphics and still appears to be running Linux. The base model has 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage for $629~699 USD but goes up to around $989~1099 for 16GB RAM / 256GB storage.
PeerTube Release v1.3.0 — Be part of a network of multiple small federated, interoperable video hosting providers. Follow video creators and create videos. No vendor lock-in. All on a platform that is community-owned and ad-free.
Jim Kopps on Twitter — I would be interested in @ChrisLAS and the Jupiter crew's opinion of this. For the record, it has been my opinion since the first "year of the Linux desktop" what seems like fifty years ago:
"The current situation with dozens of distributions, each with different rules, each with different versions of different libraries, some with certain libraries missing, each with different packaging tools and packaging formats ... that basically tells app developers "go away, focus on platforms that care about applications."
The Linux desktop's last, best shot | ZDNet — Sure, Linux will continue to dominate the end-user experience, thanks largely to Android and Chrome OS, but the traditional desktop? I fear only Linux power users, developers, and engineers will continue to be its users.
FOSS Talk Live 2019 — FOSS Talk Live is back for 2019! It is happening on the 8th June at The Harrison near King's Cross in London.
The Friday Stream Episode 5: Junk Yard Sale — Chris and Brent are back from their buddies trip to Portland and share a few stories, but the big surprise comes when Chris’ wife joins to share big life-changing news.
Back to the Basics: Linux Permissions 101 | Meetup — Join Alex Juarez (Rackspace) and Ell Marquez for an introduction to Linux permissions! Whether you are brand new or have been doing Linux for a while or even professionally there will be something for you.
New Mobile Video Player Experience and Fire TV — A new video player and all the new features that come with it. While they’re not ready for release yet, I’m happy to be able to share more details about all of the exciting work going on!
LINUX Unplugged Article - Texas Linuxfest 2019 — Our journey to Texas Linuxfest (TXLF) began Friday afternoon with a five-hour drive from the Texas coast north to the hill country. The plan was to rendezvous at Hard Eights BBQ from 6:30 to 8:00. Since we had to make a five-hour journey it had us arriving a little later to the meetup. As soon as we pulled into the parking lot that smell of slow-smoked Texas BBQ slapped me right in the face, and I knew I had arrived; Google did not even have to tell me.
Swift Kick In The UI | Coder Radio 360
Jun 03, 2019
We react to Apple's big news at WWDC, check in with Mike's explorations of Elixir, and talk some TypeScript.
Plus Mike's battles with fan noise, and why he's doubling down on the eGPU lifestyle.
Links:
Thelio Fan Noise Hack - Mike's Blog — I’ve had a System 76 Thelio for a little over four months now and a consistent issue that I’ve been experiencing is persistent fan noise even when the machine is idle.
Elixir — Elixir leverages the Erlang VM, known for running low-latency, distributed and fault-tolerant systems, while also being successfully used in web development and the embedded software domain.
Mike on Twitter — Someone tell @wespayne that I hate him ;) He introduced me to @elixirlang and it's like fast #Ruby. I think I might be hooked. Totally failed to get anything done though lol
Elixir vs. Ruby and Phoenix vs. Rails: Detailed Comparison and Use Cases — If you are facing the Elixir vs. Ruby/Phoenix vs. Rails dilemma, the best way to decide is to cater to the needs of your project. In fact, it is even possible to use both technologies in one project by choosing which of them works best for each individual feature. For example, you can implement chats with Elixir Phoenix, and the rest of the code can be written in Ruby on Rails.
Why TypeScript · TypeScript Deep Dive — Types have proven ability to enhance code quality and understandability. However, types have a way of being unnecessarily ceremonious. TypeScript is very particular about keeping the barrier to entry as low as possible.
Introduction - fp-ts — fp-ts provides developers with popular patterns and reliable abstractions from typed functional languages in TypeScript.
Purify — Functional programming library for TypeScript
piotrwitek/utility-types — Collection of utility types, complementing TypeScript built-in mapped types and aliases (think "lodash" for static types).
Solving Problems the Clojure Way - Rafal Dittwald — After overcoming a fear of brackets, the next challenge for would-be Clojurians is less superficial: to stop writing Java (or Javascript, or Haskell...) with Clojure's syntax, and actually start "thinking" in Clojure. It is said that Clojure is a "functional" programming language; there's also talk of "data-driven" programming. What are these things? Are they any good? Why are they good? In this talk, Rafal attempts to distill the particular blend of functional and data-driven programming that makes up "idiomatic Clojure", clarify what it looks like in practise (with real-world examples), and reflect on how Clojure's conventions came to be and how they continue to evolve.
Linux Action News 108
Jun 02, 2019
Frankenstein Linux malware and a Docker bug that's blown out of proportion get our attention this week.
As well as the new GParted release, the Unity Editor for Linux and the Browser vendors struggle with the W3C's latest twist.
Links:
HiddenWasp Linux malware — Fully developed HiddenWasp gives attackers full control of infected machines.
Announcing the Unity Editor for Linux — A growing number of developers using the experimental version, combined with the increasing demand of Unity users in the Film and Automotive, Transportation, and Manufacturing (ATM) industries means that we now plan to officially support the Unity Editor for Linux.
BTW, I installed Arch | Choose Linux 10
May 30, 2019
He didn't stop at Xfce. Jason became that Arch Linux guy. Is it as challenging to install as we’ve been told? We discuss the hard way, and then the easier way.
Then we take the mighty Oryx Pro laptop from System76 for a first impressions test drive!
Arch Linux Install Script — Arch Linux Install Script (alis) installs unattended, automated and customized Arch Linux system.
Boot-Repair — Boot-Repair lets you fix these issues with a simple click, which (generally reinstalls GRUB and) restores access to the operating systems you had installed before the issue.
System76 Oryx Pro — This engineering feat squeezes a high-performance H-class Intel CPU and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-Series GPU into an impressively thin laptop body.
The Big Three | BSD Now 300
May 30, 2019
FreeBSD 11.3-beta 1 is out, BSDCan 2019 recap, OpenIndiana 2019.04 is out, Overview of ZFS Pools in FreeNAS, why open source firmware is important for security, a new Opnsense release, wireguard on OpenBSD, and more.
We’re back from BSDCan and it was a packed week as always.
It started with bhyvecon on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Benedict spent the whole day in productive meetings: annual FreeBSD Foundation board meeting and FreeBSD Journal editorial board meeting.
On Wednesday, tutorials for BSDCan started as well as the FreeBSD Developer Summit. In the mornings, there were presentations in the big auditorium, while working groups about networking, failsafe bootcode, development web services, swap space management, and testing/CI were held. Friday had a similar format with an update from the FreeBSD core team and the “have, need, want” session for FreeBSD 13. In the afternoon, there were working groups about translation tools, package base, GSoC/Outreachy, or general hacking. Benedict held his Icinga tutorial in the afternoon with about 15 people attending.
Devsummit presentation slides can be found on the wiki page and video recordings done by ScaleEngine are available on FreeBSD’s youtube channel.
The conference program was a good mixture of sysadmin and tech talks across the major BSDs. Benedict saw the following talks: How ZFS snapshots really work by Matt Ahrens, 20 years in Jail by Michael W. Lucas, OpenZFS BOF session, the future of OpenZFS and FreeBSD, MQTT for system administrators by Jan-Piet Mens, and spent the rest of the time in between in the hallway track.
Thanks to all the sponsors, supporters, organizers, speakers, and attendees for making this yet another great BSDCan. Next year’s BSDCan will be from June 2 - 6, 2020.
FreeNAS uses the OpenZFS (ZFS) file system, which handles both disk and volume management. ZFS offers RAID options mirror, stripe, and its own parity distribution called RAIDZ that functions like RAID5 on hardware RAID. The file system is extremely flexible and secure, with various drive combinations, checksums, snapshots, and replication all possible. For a deeper dive on ZFS technology, read the ZFS Primer section of the FreeNAS documentation.
SUGGEST LAYOUT attempts to balance usable capacity and redundancy by automatically choosing an ideal vdev layout for the number of available disks.
The following vdev layout options are available when creating a pool:
Stripe data is shared on two drives, similar to RAID0)
Mirror copies data on two drives, similar to RAID1 but not limited to 2 disks)
RAIDZ1 single parity similar to RAID5
RAIDZ2 double parity similar to RAID6
RAIDZ3 which uses triple parity and has no RAID equivalent
The goal of the root of trust should be to verify that the software installed in every component of the hardware is the software that was intended. This way you can know without a doubt and verify if hardware has been hacked. Since we have very little to no visibility into the code running in a lot of places in our hardware it is hard to do this. How do we really know that the firmware in a component is not vulnerable or that is doesn’t have any backdoors? Well we can’t. Not unless it was all open source.
Every cloud and vendor seems to have their own way of doing a root of trust. Microsoft has Cerberus, Google has Titan, and Amazon has Nitro. These seem to assume an explicit amount of trust in the proprietary code (the code we cannot see). This leaves me with not a great feeling. Wouldn’t it be better to be able to use all open source code? Then we could verify without a doubt that the code you can read and build yourself is the same code running on hardware for all the various places we have firmware. We could then verify that a machine was in a correct state without a doubt of it being vulnerable or with a backdoor.
It makes me wonder what the smaller cloud providers like DigitalOcean or Packet have for a root of trust. Often times we only hear of these projects from the big three or five.
This update addresses several privilege escalation issues in the access control implementation and new memory disclosure issues in Intel CPUs. We would like to thank Arnaud Cordier and Bill Marquette for the top-notch reports and coordination.
Here are the full patch notes:
system: address CVE-2019-11816 privilege escalation bugs[1] (reported by Arnaud Cordier)
system: /etc/hosts generation without interfacehasgateway()
system: show correct timestamp in config restore save message (contributed by nhirokinet)
system: list the commands for the pluginctl utility when n+ argument is given
system: introduce and use userIsAdmin() helper function instead of checking for 'page-all' privilege directly
system: use absolute path in widget ACLs (reported by Netgate)
system: RRD-related cleanups for less code exposure
interfaces: add EN DUID Generation using OPNsense PEN (contributed by Team Rebellion)
Earlier this week I imported a port for WireGuard into the OpenBSD ports tree. At the moment we have the userland daemon and the tools available. The in-kernel implementation is only available for Linux. At the time of writing there are packages available for -current.
Jason A. Donenfeld (WireGuard author) has worked to support OpenBSD in WireGuard and as such his post on ports@ last year got me interested in WireGuard, since then others have toyed with WireGuard on OpenBSD before and as such I've used Ted's article as a reference. Note however that some of the options mentioned there are no longer valid. Also, I'll be using two OpenBSD peers here.
The setup will be as follows: two OpenBSD peers, of which we'll dub wg1 the server and wg2 the client. The WireGuard service on wg1 is listening on 100.64.4.3:51820.
Conclusion
WireGuard (cl)aims to be easier to setup and faster than OpenVPN and while I haven't been able to verify the latter, the first is certainly true...once you've figured it out. Most documentation out there is for Linux so I had to figure out the wireguardgo service and the tun parameters. But all in all, sure, it's easier. Especially the client configuration on iOS which I didn't cover here because it's essentially pkgadd libqrencode ; cat client.conf | qrencode -t ansiutf8, scan the code with the WireGuard app and you're good to go. What is particularly neat is that WireGuard on iOS supports Always-on.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Stateless and Dateless | LINUX Unplugged 303
May 28, 2019
We visit Intel to figure out what Clear Linux is all about and explain a few tricks that make it unique.
Plus Wes and Ell are back from KubeCon in Barcelona and return with some great news for open source.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.
Links:
Assigning GPU Devices - Red Hat Customer Portal — To assign a GPU to a guest virtual machine, you must enable the I/O Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) on the host machine, identify the GPU device by using the lspci command
Ubuntu 19.10 To Bundle NVIDIA's Proprietary Driver — The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" drivers will remain the default for NVIDIA graphics on new Ubuntu installations, but this change is positioning the mainline and legacy NVIDIA proprietary drivers onto the Ubuntu ISO so that they can be easily obtained locally post-install.
Leave the themes alone — If you don't like our themes, create your own Linux distribution, where Adwaita theme will be installed, which cannot be changed, or close source code of GNOME.
Texas Linux Fest 2019 — Texas Linux Fest is an annual Linux and open source software event for Texas and the surrounding region. We are excited to bring you two days of general sessions and vendor sessions this year along with two full days of expo floor! Texas Linux Fest is for the business and home Linux user, and for the experienced developer and newcomer alike.
The Friday Stream Episode 5: Junk Yard Sale — Chris and Brent are back from their buddies trip to Portland and share a few stories, but the big surprise comes when Chris’ wife joins to share big life-changing news.
Linux Academy Redesigned Hands-On Labs UI — After returning from the holiday weekend, we are ready to show off the new Hands-On Labs interface along with a ton of new hands-on labs and two new courses.
Clear Linux OS - Architecture Overview — Describes how Clear Linux OS is designed, highlighting core features, operating models, and foundational tools that are key to understanding how the distro operates.
Chris and Brent are back from their buddies trip to Portland and share a few stories, but the big surprise comes when Chris’ wife joins to share big life-changing news.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket deals out 60 Starlink broadband satellites — Meanwhile, the second stage pressed on to orbit, shooting for satellite deployment at an altitude of 440 kilometers (273 miles). SpaceX made use of an unorthodox deployment method that involved having the stack of 60 satellites slowly disperse.
Junk Yard Oil Change // vlog 36 - YouTube — We dry camp at our favorite junkyard while we work on projects in our motorhome. We attempt our first oil change ever, with some rather funny results.
Wes is back and Mike's got a few surprises in store, including a new view on Electron, a hot take on titles, and a programming challenge for the both of them.
Plus when it's okay to lie to the compiler, what GitHub's Sponsors program means for open source, and your feedback.
Links:
Coder Radio 343: Say My Functional Name — Mike breaks down the drama around nullable reference types in C# 8.0, and we debate what it means for the future of the language.
Coder Radio 358 Feedback — In the discussion of Marzipan and Electron I think the answer is WKWebView, which just arrived in macOS 10.10.
Show Content Poll — What Do You Want More of on #CoderRadio @CoderRadioShow this is your chance to give me some feedback for the next few months!
Why Computer Programmers Should Stop Calling Themselves Engineers — The respectability of engineering, a feature built over many decades of closely controlled, education- and apprenticeship-oriented certification, becomes reinterpreted as a fast-and-loose commitment to craftwork as business.
About GitHub Sponsors — Anyone with a GitHub account can sponsor anyone with a sponsored developer profile through a recurring monthly payment. You can choose from multiple sponsorship tiers, with monthly payment amounts and benefits that are set by the sponsored developer.
Lying to the compiler | Jon Skeet's coding blog — I’m lying to the compiler to get it to stop it emitting a warning. The reason is that in the case where the value is null, it won’t matter that it’s null.
Programming Language Tourism | Bushido Codes — I am attracted to this book precisely because it is impractical. You don’t gain mastery of any programming languages. Rather, you get the chance to explore and complete a series of coding katas to expand your mind about the art of programming.
Uno Platform — The only platform for building native mobile, desktop and WebAssembly with C#, XAML from single codebase. Open source and professionally supported.
Uno.QuickStart — This repository is a basic sample for an Uno application which cross-targets UWP, iOS, Android and WebAssembly.
Linux Action News 107
May 26, 2019
Firefox has a new speed trick, openSUSE Leap has a time-traveling kernel while the project plans for the future, and we react to Antergros coming to an end.
Plus the ghost of Firefox OS lives on in the well-financed KaiOS, GitHub launches sponsors, and obvious uses for the new Google Glass 2.
openSUSE considers governance options — The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE community is currently under discussion as the community considers different options for how it wants to be organized and governed in the future.
Antergos Linux Project Ends — We came to this decision because we believe that continuing to neglect the project would be a huge disservice to the community. Taking this action now, while the project’s code still works, provides an opportunity for interested developers to take what they find useful and start their own projects.
Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 drops to $999 — Google is today ready to officially unveil Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2, a followup with a faster processor, improved camera, and new Smith Optics frames.
KaiOS raises $50M, hits 100M handsets — The funding takes the total raised by KaiOS — which has now shipped 100 million devices across 100 countries — to $72 million.
Announcing GitHub Sponsors — We’re thrilled to announce the beta of GitHub Sponsors, a new way to financially support the developers who build the open source software you use every day.
Prefork Pitfalls | TechSNAP 404
May 25, 2019
We turn our eye to web server best practices, from the basics of CDNs to the importance of choosing the right multi-processing module.
Plus the right way to setup PHP, the trouble with benchmarking, and when to choose NGiNX.
Links:
Jim's Blog: Installing WordPress on Apache the modern way — It’s been bugging me for a while that there are no correct guides to be found about using modern Apache 2.4 or above with the Event or Worker MPMs. We’re going to go ahead and correct that lapse today, by walking through a brand-new WordPress install on a new Ubuntu 18.04 VM.
Apache Performance Tuning — Apache 2.x is a general-purpose webserver, designed to provide a balance of flexibility, portability, and performance. Although it has not been designed specifically to set benchmark records, Apache 2.x is capable of high performance in many real-world situations.
worker - Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4 — This Multi-Processing Module (MPM) implements a hybrid multi-process multi-threaded server. By using threads to serve requests, it is able to serve a large number of requests with fewer system resources than a process-based server.
event - Apache HTTP Server Version 2.4 — The event Multi-Processing Module (MPM) is designed to allow more requests to be served simultaneously by passing off some processing work to the listeners threads, freeing up the worker threads to serve new requests.
PHP-FPM — PHP-FPM (FastCGI Process Manager) is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation with some additional features useful for sites of any size, especially busier sites.
FastCGI overview — FastCGI is a way to have CGI scripts execute time-consuming code (like opening a database) only once, rather than every time the script is loaded. In technical terms, FastCGI is a language independent, scalable, open extension to CGI that provides high performance without the limitations of server specific APIs.
What Is a CDN? How Does a CDN work? — A content delivery network (CDN) refers to a geographically distributed group of servers which work together to provide fast delivery of Internet content.
W3 Total Cache – WordPress plugin — W3 Total Cache improves the SEO and user experience of your site by increasing website performance, reducing load times via features like content delivery network (CDN) integration and the latest best practices.
krakjoe/apcu: APCu - APC User Cache — APCu is an in-memory key-value store for PHP. Keys are of type string and values can be any PHP variables.
Introduction to Varnish — Varnish HTTP Cache — Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 - 1000x, depending on your architectur
ab - Apache HTTP server benchmarking tool — ab is a tool for benchmarking your Apache Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) server. It is designed to give you an impression of how your current Apache installation performs. This especially shows you how many requests per second your Apache installation is capable of serving.
jimsalterjrs/network-testing — This is a small collection of GPLv3-licensed tools to assist an intrepid researcher in testing the performance of networks, wired or wireless.
Cross Desktop | User Error 66
May 24, 2019
Linux desktop standards, how the Web has changed over the years, and the ethics of space exploration.
Plus what to do if you see a crime, and the things we hate the most.
00:00:12 Free Desktop 00:12:43 #AskError: if you witness a petty crime, should you intervene? 00:17:55 Old vs new Web 00:28:41 #AskError: what are your pet hates? 00:37:47 Should humans spend billions on space exploration while so many people live in poverty?
The NAS Fleet | BSD Now 299
May 22, 2019
Running AIX on QEMU on Linux on Windows, your NAS fleet with TrueCommand, Unleashed 1.3 is available, LLDB: CPU register inspection support extension, V7 Unix programs often not written as expected, and more.
YES it’s real!
I’m using the Linux subsystem on Windows, as it’s easier to build this Qemu tree from source. I’m using Debian, but these steps will work on other systems that use Debian as a base.
first thing first, you need to get your system with the needed pre-requisites to compile
Great with those in place, now clone Artyom Tarasenko’s source repository
Since the frame buffer apparently isn’t quite working just yet, I configure for something more like a text mode build.
Now for me, GCC 7 didn’t build the source cleanly. I had to make a change to the file config-host.mak and remove all references to -Werror. Also I removed the sound hooks, as we won’t need them.
Now you can build Qemu.
Okay, all being well you now have a Qemu. Now following the steps from Artyom Tarasenko’s blog post, we can get started on the install!
Hundreds of thousands of FreeNAS and TrueNAS systems are deployed around the world, with many sites having dozens of systems. Managing multiple systems individually can be time-consuming. iXsystems has responded to the challenge by creating a “single pane of glass” application to simplify the scaling of data, drive management, and administration of iXsystems NAS platforms. We are proud to introduce TrueCommand.
TrueCommand is a ZFS-aware management application that manages TrueNAS and FreeNAS systems.
The public Beta of TrueCommand is available for download now. TrueCommand can be used with small iXsystems NAS fleets for free. Licenses can be purchased for large-scale deployments and enterprise support.
TrueCommand expands on the ease of use and power of TrueNAS and FreeNAS systems with multi-system management and reporting.
This is the fourth release of Unleashed - an operating system fork of illumos. For more information about Unleashed itself and the download links, see our website.
As one might expect, this release removes a few things.
The most notable being the removal of ksh93 along with all its libs.
As far as libc interfaces are concerned, a number of non-standard functions were removed. In general, they have been replaced by the standards-compliant versions. (getgrentr, fgetgrentr, getgrgidr, getgrnamr, ttynamer, getloginr, shmdt, sigwait, gethostname, putmsg, putpmsg, and getaddrinfo)
Additionally, wordexp and wordfree have been removed from libc. Even though they are technically required by POSIX, software doesn't seem to use them. Because of the fragile implementation (shelling out), we took the OpenBSD approach and just removed them.
The default compilation environment now includes XOPENSOURCE=700 and EXTENSIONS. Additionally, all applications now use 64-bit file offsets, making use of LARGEFILESOURCE, LARGEFILE64SOURCE, and FILEOFFSET_BITS unnecessary.
Last but not least, nightly.sh is no more. In short, to build one simply runs 'make'. (See README for detailed build instructions.)
Why did we decide to fork illumos? After all, there are already many illumos distributions available to choose from. We felt we could do better than any of them by taking a more aggressive stance toward compatibility and reducing cruft from code and community interactions alike.
Upstream describes LLDB as a next generation, high-performance debugger. It is built on top of LLVM/Clang toolchain, and features great integration with it. At the moment, it primarily supports debugging C, C++ and ObjC code, and there is interest in extending it to more languages.
In February, I have started working on LLDB, as contracted by the NetBSD Foundation. So far I've been working on reenabling continuous integration, squashing bugs, improving NetBSD core file support and updating NetBSD distribution to LLVM 8 (which is still stalled by unresolved regressions in inline assembly syntax). You can read more about that in my Mar 2019 report.
In April, my main focus was on fixing and enhancing the support for reading and writing CPU registers. In this report, I'd like to shortly summarize what I have done, what I have learned in the process and what I still need to do.
Future plans
My work continues with the two milestones from last month, plus a third that's closely related:
Add support for FPU registers support for NetBSD/i386 and NetBSD/amd64.
Support XSAVE, XSAVEOPT, ... registers in core(5) files on NetBSD/amd64.
Add support for Debug Registers support for NetBSD/i386 and NetBSD/amd64.
The most important point right now is deciding on the format for passing the remaining registers, and implementing the missing ptrace interface kernel-side. The support for core files should follow using the same format then.
Userland-side, I will work on adding matching ATF tests for ptrace features and implement LLDB side of support for the new ptrace interface and core file notes. Afterwards, I will start working on improving support for the same things on 32-bit (i386) executables.
Yesterday I wrote that V7 ed read its terminal input in cooked mode a line at a time, which was an efficient, low-CPU design that was important on V7's small and low-power hardware. Then in comments, frankg pointed out that I was wrong about part of that, namely about how ed read its input.
Sidebar: An interesting undocumented ed feature
Reading this section of the source code for ed taught me that it has an interesting, undocumented, and entirely characteristic little behavior. Officially, ed commands that have you enter new text have that new text terminate by a . on a line by itself:
In other words, it turns a single line with '.' into an EOF. The consequence of this is that if you type a real EOF at the start of a line, you get the same result, thus saving you one character (you use Control-D instead of '.' plus newline). This is very V7 Unix behavior, including the lack of documentation.
This is also a natural behavior in one sense. A proper program has to react to EOF here in some way, and it might as well do so by ending the input mode. It's also natural to go on to try reading from the terminal again for subsequent commands; if this was a real and persistent EOF, for example because the pty closed, you'll just get EOF again and eventually quit. V7 ed is slightly unusual here in that it deliberately converts '.' by itself to EOF, instead of signaling this in a different way, but in a way that's also the simplest approach; if you have to have some signal for each case and you're going to treat them the same, you might as well have the same signal for both cases.
Modern versions of ed appear to faithfully reimplement this convenient behavior, although they don't appear to document it. I haven't checked OpenBSD, but both FreeBSD ed and GNU ed work like this in a quick test. I haven't checked their source code to see if they implement it the same way.
A small programming note: After BSDNow episode 300, the podcast will switch to audio-only, using a new higher quality recording and production system. The live stream will likely still include video.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Dark Style Rises | LINUX Unplugged 302
May 21, 2019
Can the Free Desktop avoid being left behind in the going dark revolution? Cassidy from elementary OS joins us to discuss their proposal.
Plus we complete our Red Hat arc by giving Silverblue the full workstation shakedown, Drew shares his complete review, and we discuss the loss of Antergros.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Cassidy James Blaede, and Drew DeVore.
Links:
Antergos Linux Project Ends — Today, we are announcing the end of this project. As many of you probably noticed over the past several months, we no longer have enough free time to properly maintain Antergos.
The Need for a FreeDesktop Dark Style Preference — OS-wide dark styles are hard. For ages you’ve been able to forcibly change out the system style on GTK, KDE, Android and Windows with something that’s dark by default instead of light, but this causes issues when apps don’t expect it
The Friday Stream Episode 4: The Techxorcist — Chris tries to convince Brent to take a buddies trip, we try to get the audience a discount chicken deal, and Ell’s trying to get out of a locked server room.
Texas Linux Fest 2019 — Texas Linux Fest is an annual Linux and open source software event for Texas and the surrounding region.
Team Silverblue — Before we chose the name Team Silverblue, the team was the Fedora Atomic Workstation SIG, and the Atomic Workstation is what we are producing, now under its new name, Silverblue. At its core, it is a variant of the Fedora Workstation which uses rpm-ostree to provide an immutable OS image with reliable updates and easy rollbacks.
MineTime — MineTime is part of a research project to build a modern, multi-platform, AI-powered calendar application.
Batteries are Leaking | Coder Radio 358
May 20, 2019
A strong argument against Python’s batteries included model exposes some bigger problems the community is struggling with. We chat about all of it.
Plus lessons learned six years after a project, a new tool, and some feedback.
Links:
Home Page - ABC-Deploy — ABC-Update is an easy to use tool that sets you in control of MS Update operations.
On logic in a Rails app, revisited 6 years later — My argument was that Rails is just an UI layer, and business logic should be put in domain objects instead of keeping somewhere in Model, View or Controller.
The Techxorcist | The Friday Stream 4
May 20, 2019
Chris tries to convince Brent to take a buddies trip, we try to get the audience a discount chicken deal, and Ell’s trying to get out of a locked server room.
Plus we dig into the WhatsApp spyware, prove that robots will replace podcasters, and call a higher power for some help because no problem is too small, too big, or too weird.
Special Guest: Brent Gervais.
Links:
Flavor of the day by GoFetch — Special thanks to Planet Java in Pioneer Square for allowing us to film in your restaurant!
Ell on Twitter — So we are locked in the server room. Send help!
WhatsApp vulnerability exploited to infect phones with Israeli spyware | Ars Technica — Exploits worked by calling either a vulnerable iPhone or Android device using the WhatsApp calling function. Targets need not have answered a call, and the calls often disappeared from logs, the publication said. The WhatsApp vulnerability was fixed in updates released on Friday.
We Talked to a Witch Who Casts Viruses Out of Computers With Magic — To excise such entities out of a machine, she uses a variety of techniques—she might place stones on top of the computer, clear the dark energy by setting an intention with her mind, or cleanse the area around the computer by burning sage. The time it takes to clear these viruses depends on the nefariousness of the entity, she says: sometimes it takes just an hour, other times it can take up to four.
Reverend Joey Talley — "When nasty viruses infect the computers of folks up in Northern California, Reverend Joey Talley is on it. “No problem is too small, too big, or too weird” is Talley’s motto. Sure, she can do a love spell, but she’d rather face off with ghosts and demons.."
Faux Rogan — Our deep learning engineers at Dessa built a model to replicate Joe Rogan's voice to showcase current AI techniques.
Firefox Multi-Account Containers — Firefox Multi-Account Containers lets you keep parts of your online life separated into color-coded tabs that preserve your privacy. Cookies are separated by container, allowing you to use the web with multiple identities or accounts simultaneously.
Linux Action News 106
May 19, 2019
ZombieLoad's impact on Linux, AMP to start hiding Google from the URL, and the huge Linux switch underway.
Plus the impact of Google suspending business with Huawei, the recent ChromeOS feature silently dropped, and more.
Links:
ZombieLoad Attack — After Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow, we discovered more critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. The ZombieLoad attack allows stealing sensitive data and keys while the computer accesses them.
AMP to start hiding google from the URL — Signed-Exchange is something which can help you show your own domain in AMP page URLs, with all the AMP-Cache capabilities intact.
South Korean government planning Linux migration as Windows 7 support ends — The Herald quotes the Interior Ministry as indicating that the transition to Linux, and the purchase of new PCs, would cost about 780 billion won ($655 million), but also anticipates long-term cost reductions with the adoption of Linux. The report doesn't mention a specific distro, instead "hopes to avoid building reliance on a single operating system."
Google suspends business with Huawei — “Huawei will only be able to use the public version of Android and will not be able to get access to proprietary apps and services from Google,” the source said.
Intel’s Clear Linux + The FOSS Contribution Project | Choose Linux 9
May 16, 2019
Practically overnight, Intel’s Clear Linux OS has turned into a distribution worth paying attention to. But is it ready for regular desktop Linux users?
Plus, Jason goes down yet another awesome rabbit hole with a new project on GitHub aimed at giving back to the Linux and open source community.
Links:
It's Time To Pay Attention To Intel's Clear Linux OS Project — Intel's Clear Linux Project has been on my radar for months, mainly because of its sheer dominance over traditional Linux distributions -- and often Windows -- when it comes to performance.
8 Ways To Contribute To The Desktop Linux Community, Without Knowing A Single Line Of Code — Have you ever felt the urge to give back to the Linux community? To help out the developers who spend a significant amount of their (typically unpaid) free time creating the distro, software, or desktop environment that you enjoy on a daily basis? Maybe you just have no clue where to start. That's exactly the predicament I found myself in, so I started asking questions.
Let's Build A Wiki For Contributing To The Linux And FOSS Community — Since starting my Linux adventure last summer, I've wanted to contribute back to this awesome community. After all, it's this community that has embraced my journey, and provided me with endless amounts of positive feedback, encouragement and knowledge. But I can't write code. I don't fully understand the nuts-and-bolts of the kernel. So I started asking some questions.
Contributing To The Linux And FOSS Community — The Wiki will include exhaustive links to various "Get Involved" pages of all Linux distributions and open source software projects of all sizes.
BSD On The Road | BSD Now 298
May 15, 2019
36 year old UFS bug fixed, a BSD for the road, automatic upgrades with OpenBSD, DTrace ext2fs support in FreeBSD, Dedicated SSH tunnel user, upgrading VMM VMs to OpenBSD 6.5, and more.
This update eliminates a kernel stack disclosure bug in UFS/FFS directory entries that is caused by uninitialized directory entry padding written to the disk.
When the directory entry is written to disk, it is written as a full 32bit entry, and the unused bytes were not initialized, so could possibly contain sensitive data from the kernel stack
It can be viewed by any user with read access to that directory. Up to 3 bytes of kernel stack are disclosed per file entry, depending on the the amount of padding the kernel needs to pad out the entry to a 32 bit boundary. The offset in the kernel stack that is disclosed is a function of the filename size. Furthermore, if the user can create files in a directory, this 3 byte window can be expanded 3 bytes at a time to a 254 byte window with 75% of the data in that window exposed. The additional exposure is done by removing the entry, creating a new entry with a 4-byte longer name, extracting 3 more bytes by reading the directory, and repeating until a 252 byte name is created.
This exploit works in part because the area of the kernel stack that is being disclosed is in an area that typically doesn't change that often (perhaps a few times a second on a lightly loaded system), and these file creates and unlinks themselves don't overwrite the area of kernel stack being disclosed.
It appears that this bug originated with the creation of the Fast File System in 4.1b-BSD (Circa 1982, more than 36 years ago!), and is likely present in every Unix or Unix-like system that uses UFS/FFS. Amazingly, nobody noticed until now.
This update also adds the -z flag to fsck_ffs to have it scrub the leaked information in the name padding of existing directories. It only needs to be run once on each UFS/FFS filesystem after a patched kernel is installed and running.
Submitted by: David G. Lawrence dg@dglawrence.com
So a patched kernel will no longer leak this data, and running the fsck_ffs -z command will erase any leaked data that may exist on your system
OpenBSD commit with additional detail on mitigations
The impact on OpenBSD is very limited:
1 - such stack bytes can be found in raw-device reads, from group operator. If you can read the raw disks you can undertake other more powerful actions.
2 - read(2) upon directory fd was disabled July 1997 because I didn't like how grep * would display garbage and mess up the tty, and applying vis(3) for just directory reads seemed silly. read(2) was changed to return 0 (EOF). Sep 2016 this was further changed to EISDIR, so you still cannot see the bad bytes.
3 - In 2013 when guenther adapted the getdents(2) directory-reading system call to 64-bit ino_t, the userland data format changed to 8-byte-alignment, making it incompatible with the 4-byte-alignment UFS on-disk format. As a result of code refactoring the bad bytes were not copied to userland. Bad bytes will remain in old directories on old filesystems, but nothing makes those bytes user visible.
There will be no errata or syspatch issued. I urge other systems which do expose the information to userland to issue errata quickly, since this is a 254 byte infoleak of the stack which is great for ROP-chain building to attack some other bug. Especially if the kernel has no layout/link-order randomization ...
As regular It’s FOSS readers should know, I like diving into the world of BSDs. Recently, I came across an interesting BSD that is designed to live on a thumb drive. Let’s take a look at NomadBSD.
NomadBSD is different than most available BSDs. NomadBSD is a live system based on FreeBSD. It comes with automatic hardware detection and an initial config tool. NomadBSD is designed to “be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or to test FreeBSD’s hardware compatibility.”
This German BSD comes with an OpenBox-based desktop with the Plank application dock. NomadBSD makes use of the DSB project. DSB stands for “Desktop Suite (for) (Free)BSD” and consists of a collection of programs designed to create a simple and working environment without needing a ton of dependencies to use one tool. DSB is created by Marcel Kaiser one of the lead devs of NomadBSD.
Just like the original BSD projects, you can contact the NomadBSD developers via a mailing list.
Version 1.2 Released
NomadBSD recently released version 1.2 on April 21, 2019. This means that NomadBSD is now based on FreeBSD 12.0-p3. TRIM is now enabled by default. One of the biggest changes is that the initial command-line setup was replaced with a Qt graphical interface. They also added a Qt5 tool to install NomadBSD to your hard drive. A number of fixes were included to improve graphics support. They also added support for creating 32-bit images.
Thoughts on NomadBSD
I first discovered NomadBSD back in January when they released 1.2-RC1. At the time, I had been unable to install Project Trident on my laptop and was very frustrated with BSDs. I downloaded NomadBSD and tried it out. I initially ran into issues reaching the desktop, but RC2 fixed that issue. However, I was unable to get on the internet, even though I had an Ethernet cable plugged in. Luckily, I found the wifi manager in the menu and was able to connect to my wifi.
Overall, my experience with NomadBSD was pleasant. Once I figured out a few things, I was good to go. I hope that NomadBSD is the first of a new generation of BSDs that focus on mobility and ease of use. BSD has conquered the server world, it’s about time they figured out how to be more user-friendly.
OpenBSD 6.5 advertises for an installer improvement: rdsetroot(8) (a build-time tool) is now available for general use. Used in combination with autoinstall.8, it is now really easy to do automatic upgrades of your OpenBSD instances.
I first manually upgraded my OpenBSD sandbox to 6.5. Once that was done, I could use the stock rdsetroot(8) tool. The plan is quite simple: write an unattended installation response file, insert it to a bsd.rd 6.5 installation image and reboot my other OpenBSD instances using that image.
Extra notes
There must be a way to run onetime commands (in the manner of fw_update) to automatically run sysmerge and packages upgrades. As for now, I’d rather do it manually.
This worked like a charm on two Synology KVM instances using a single sd0 disk, on my Thinkpad X260 using Encrypted root with Keydisk and on a Vultr instance using Encrypted root with passphrase. And BTW, the upgrade on the X260 used the (iwn0) wireless connection.
I just read that florian@ has released the sysupgrade(8) utility which should be released with OpenBSD 6.6. That will make upgrades even easier! Until then, happy upgrading.
I use ssh tunneling A LOT, for everything. Yesterday, I removed the public access of my IMAP server, it’s now only available through ssh tunneling to access the daemon listening on localhost. I have plenty of daemons listening only on localhost that I can only reach through a ssh tunnel. If you don’t want to bother with ssh and redirect ports you need, you can also make a VPN (using ssh, openvpn, iked, tinc…) between your system and your server. I tend to avoid setting up VPN for the current use case as it requires more work and more maintenance than running ssh server and a ssh client.
The last change, for my IMAP server, added an issue. I want my phone to access the IMAP server but I don’t want to connect to my main account from my phone for security reasons. So, I need a dedicated user that will only be allowed to forward ports.
This is done very easily on OpenBSD.
The steps are: 1. generate ssh keys for the new user 2. add an user with no password 3. allow public key for port forwarding
Obviously, you must allow users (or only this one) to make port forwarding in your sshd_config.
We're running dedicated vmm(4)/vmd(8) servers to host opinionated VMs.
OpenBSD 6.5 is released! There are two ways you can upgrade your VM.
Either do a manual upgrade or leverage autoinstall(8). You can take care of it via the console with vmctl(8).
Upgrade yourself
To get connected to the console you need to have access to the host your VM is running on. The same username and public SSH key, as provided for the VM, are used to create a local user on the host.
When this is done you can use vmctl(8) to manage your VM. The options you have are:
A small programming note: After BSDNow episode 300, the podcast will switch to audio-only, using a new higher quality recording and production system. The live stream will likely still include video.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Peak Red Hat | LINUX Unplugged 301
May 14, 2019
We scale the Red Hat Summit and come back with a few stories to share.
Plus some big community news, finding threats on the command line, and our reaction to Microsoft shipping the Linux kernel in Windows.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Ell Marquez, and Neal Gompa.
About GitHub Package Registry — GitHub Package Registry is a software package hosting service, similar to npmjs.org, rubygems.org, or hub.docker.com, that allows you to host your packages and code in one place.
Package hello-world-npm — This is a simple npm package that demonstrates the GitHub Package Registry.
Lenovo adds AMD Ryzen Pro-powered laptops to its ThinkPad family — The biggest differences between these laptops and Intel-powered ThinkPads are performance and ports. According to Lenovo, the second-gen AMD Ryzen 7 Pro processors combined with integrated Vega graphics should provide an 18-percent improvement in performance over previous generations
Clear Linux Further Enhances Its Desktop Installer, Launches Help Forums — This week I was pleased to find they have further improved the graphical interface for making their desktop Linux installation on-par with other Linux installers. If you recall, it was only towards the end of last year that they rolled out a new desktop installer and now with their latest design improvements, their latest installer looks much better off than their previous version.
It's Time To Pay Attention To Intel's Clear Linux OS Project — This is neither a review nor an endorsement of Clear Linux at this stage, but it is an open invitation to be curious about it. To explore it. Maybe to even actively contribute to it. Especially as we edge closer to Intel's assault on the dedicated GPU market.
Install Clear Linux* OS from the live desktop — The live desktop allows you to boot Clear Linux* OS in a GNOME desktop without modifying the host system, offering the chance to explore developing on Clear Linux OS. Better yet, launch the Clear Linux OS installer to install on your target system.
Clear Linux* OS - An Introduction and Beyond — We invite you to join us for the first in a series of Intel Clear Linux OS MeetUps. The aim of this initial MeetUp is to introduce you to the Clear Linux* project and help you learn how to better use the Clear Linux OS in your everyday job. Light refreshments and dinner provided.
Ulauncher is migrating to Python 3. Changes to Extension API and more — It's been a while since the last significant update in Ulauncher. One of the reasons was the migration from Python 2 to 3. For a regular user it may not mean a lot, but Python 2 end of life is coming very soon so that had to be done.
2019 Is the Year of Linux on the Desktop — Traditional Linux distributions may not be taking over the world, but Linux is becoming even more pervasive than ever.
The Friday Stream Episode 3: Fluffle of Fools — Back from Boston and we have a few stories to share, the best 39 seconds from Red Hat Summit, and the protest we found our selves in the middle of.
Texas Linux Fest 2019 — Texas Linux Fest is an annual Linux and open source software event for Texas and the surrounding region. We are excited to bring you two days of general sessions and vendor sessions this year along with two full days of expo floor! Texas Linux Fest is for the business and home Linux user, and for the experienced developer and newcomer alike.
Introducing the Red Hat Universal Base Image — With the release of the Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI), you can now take advantage of the greater reliability, security, and performance of official Red Hat container images where OCI-compliant Linux containers run - whether you’re a customer or not.
Azure Red Hat OpenShift, a Kubernetes service jointly managed by Microsoft and Red Hat, is now available — The two companies announced Azure Red Hat OpenShift at last year’s Red Hat Summit. OpenShift is available on other public clouds, but Microsoft and Red Hat will jointly manage and support this service on Azure and customers will be able to pay for it through a single unified bill from Azure under a revenue-sharing agreement.
Red Hat Summit 2019 — Are cloud and culture alive and well at Red Hat? If I've taken away anything from this year's Red Hat Summit (my first), it's the two simple words "cloud and culture." Two words echoed several times this past week which to me is obviously by design. Red Hat and IBM want us to know they are ready for the cloud, hybrid-cloud, other person's Linux box, and its culture is still alive and well despite grumbling in the community about the IBM acquisition.
Command Line Threat Hunting — That viruses and malware are Windows problems is a misnomer that is often propagated through the Linux community and it's an easy one to believe until you start noticing strange behaviour on your system. What do you do next? Join Ell Marquez (Jupiter Broadcasting/Linux Academy) and Tony Lambert (redcanary.com) in discussing a common sense approach to threat detection using only command line tools.
3 OSes 1 GPU | Coder Radio 357
May 13, 2019
Microsoft catches Mike’s eye with WSL 2, Google gets everyone's attention with their new push for Kotlin, and we get a full eGPU report.
Links:
QA Feedback from Lewis — I thought I was going to be in a big rush to get out of the basement and up to a developer position, but after listening to the show I really feel like my contribution to this team is going to be important and necessary from the get go.
Request: Subreddit recommendations — Anyone know any linux and/or programming subs aren't full of mindless circlejerking? Most seem to be afflicted with mindless circlejerking, free software extremism and other indiscretions.
Feedback on Tools for Docs — One idea is a mind map tool (like Freeplane). This can provide a free-form way to show at a high level how all the parts link together, and attach as much details as needed
Kotlin is now Google’s preferred language for Android app development — “Android development will become increasingly Kotlin-first,” Google writes in today’s announcement. “Many new Jetpack APIs and features will be offered first in Kotlin. If you’re starting a new project, you should write it in Kotlin; code written in Kotlin often mean much less code for you–less code to type, test, and maintain.”
Flutter and Chrome OS: Better Together — Flutter initially focused on providing a UI toolkit for building apps for mobile devices, which typically feature touch input and small screens. However, we’ve been building keyboard and mouse support into Flutter since before our 1.0 release last December. And today, we’re pleased to announce that Flutter for Chrome OS is now stronger with scroll wheel support, hover management, and better keyboard event support.
How Windows and Chrome quietly made 2019 the year of Linux on the desktop — The cleverly named Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, announced at Microsoft’s Build event this week, shakes things up by shipping a full Linux kernel (version 4.19) within Windows itself as a lightweight virtual machine. Doing so should supercharge performance for developers who use the tool.
Ubuntu 19.04 – Easy-to-use setup script for your EGPU — I have created a script which automatically detects your (E)GPUs and creates the needed X-Server configuration files.
You won't have to mess around with finding the correct BUS-IDs and convert them from dec to hex or anything like that, the script takes care of it.
Linux Action News 105 — RHEL 8 is released, we report from the ground of the big announcement, Microsoft announces WSL 2 with a real Linux kernel at the core, and details on their new open source terminal.
Fluffle of Fools | The Friday Stream 3
May 13, 2019
Back from Boston and we have a few stories to share, the best 39 seconds from Red Hat Summit, and the protest we found our selves in the middle of.
Plus we get to know the new guy a little better, the Pixel 3a is announced and we weigh the tradeoffs, and we replay Chris having a panic attack on air.
RHEL 8 is released, we report from the ground of the big announcement, Microsoft announces WSL 2 with a real Linux kernel at the core, and details on their new open source terminal.
Plus Alpine Linux Docker images shipped for 3 years with root accounts unlocked, and Google's new attempt to send updates directly to your phone.
Links:
RHEL 8 released — Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is the operating system redesigned for the hybrid cloud era and built to support the workloads and operations that stretch from enterprise datacenters to multiple public clouds.
WireGuard Sent Out Again For Review — WireGuard lead developer Jason Donenfeld has sent out the ninth version of the WireGuard secure network tunnel patches for review. If this review goes well and lands in net-next in the weeks ahead, this long-awaited VPN improvement could make it into the mainline Linux 5.2 kernel.
CloudFlare announces Warp VPN — Using Cloudflare’s existing network of servers, Internet users all over the world will be able to connect to Warp VPN through the 1.1.1.1 app. In the same vein, Warp VPN will not significantly increase battery usage by using an efficient protocol called WireGuard.
CloudFlare Launches "BoringTun" As Rust-Written WireGuard User-Space Implementation - Phoronix — CloudFlare took to creating BoringTun as they wanted a user-space solution as not to have to deal with kernel modules or satisfying certain kernel versions. They also wanted cross platform support and for their chosen implementation to be very fast, these choices which led them to writing a Rust-based solution.
cloudflare/boringtun — BoringTun is an implementation of the WireGuard® protocol designed for portability and speed.
WireGuard Windows Pre-Alpha — I've been mostly absent these last weeks, due to being completely absorbed in Windows programming. I think we're finally getting to the state where we might really benefit from testing of the "pre-alpha".
Wintun – Layer 3 TUN Driver for Windows — Wintun is a very simple and minimal TUN driver for the Windows kernel, which provides userspace programs with a simple network adapter for reading and writing packets. It is akin to Linux's /dev/net/tun and BSD's /dev/tun.
NetworkManager 1.16 — NetworkManager 1.16 is a big feature release bringing support for WireGuard VPN tunnels
Portal Cloud - Subspace — Subspace is an open source WireGuard® VPN server that supports connecting all of your devices to help secure your internet access.
High Availability vs. Fault Tolerance vs. Disaster Recovery — You need IT infrastructure that you can count on even when you run into the rare network outage, equipment failure, or power issue. When your systems run into trouble, that’s where one or more of the three primary availability strategies will come into play: high availability, fault tolerance, and/or disaster recovery.
High Availability: Concepts and Theory — Running server operations using clusters of either physical or virtual computers is all about improving both reliability and performance over and above what you could expect from a single, high-powered server.
RPO and RTO: Understanding the Differences — Recovery time objective refers to how much time an application can be down without causing significant damage to the business. Recovery point objectives refer to your company’s loss tolerance: the amount of data that can be lost before significant harm to the business occurs.
Command Line Threat Hunting — That viruses and malware are Windows problems is a misnomer that is often propagated through the Linux community and it's an easy one to believe until you start noticing strange behavior on your system. What do you do next? Join Ell Marquez and Tony Lambert in discussing a common sense approach to threat detection using only command line tools.
Fear the Man in the Middle? This company wants to sell quantum key distribution — For now, Quantum XChange has only said about a dozen companies are part of the pilot. But with the appetite for quantum solutions in the US increasing—the National Quantum Initiative was just signed into law at the end of 2018 to advance the tech—this could be an opportune time to enter the market, so long as the service lives up to its billing.
Dungeons and Distros | User Error 65
May 10, 2019
What it takes to make a proper distro, how we send emails, and the constant quest for knowledge.
Plus D&D, and April Fools annoyances.
00:01:00 Email etiquette 00:10:17 #AskError: Thoughts on Dungeons and Dragons? 00:14:00 What does it take to be a proper Linux distro? 00:26:33 #AskError: Do April Fool’s Day tech “jokes” annoy you? 00:32:16 Always learning new things
Dragonfly In The Wild | BSD Now 297
May 08, 2019
FreeBSD ZFS vs. ZoL performance, Dragonfly 5.4.2 has been release, containing web services with iocell, Solaris 11.4 SRU8, Problem with SSH Agent forwarding, OpenBSD 6.4 to 6.5 upgrade guide, and more.
With iX Systems having released new images of FreeBSD reworked with their ZFS On Linux code that is in development to ultimately replace their existing FreeBSD ZFS support derived from the code originally found in the Illumos source tree, here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the FreeBSD 12 performance of ZFS vs. ZoL vs. UFS and compared to Ubuntu Linux on the same system with EXT4 and ZFS.
Using an Intel Xeon E3-1275 v6 with ASUS P10S-M WS motherboard, 2 x 8GB DDR4-2400 ECC UDIMMs, and Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB NVMe solid-state drive was used for all of this round of testing. Just a single modern NVMe SSD was used for this round of ZFS testing while as the FreeBSD ZoL code matures I'll test on multiple systems using a more diverse range of storage devices.
FreeBSD 12 ZoL was tested using the iX Systems image and then fresh installs done of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE when defaulting to the existing ZFS root file-system support and again when using the aging UFS file-system. Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS with the Linux 4.18 kernel was used when testing its default EXT4 file-system and then again when using the Ubuntu-ZFS ZoL support. Via the Phoronix Test Suite various BSD/Linux I/O benchmarks were carried out.
Overall, the FreeBSD ZFS On Linux port is looking good so far and we are looking forward to it hopefully maturing in time for FreeBSD 13.0. Nice job to iX Systems and all of those involved, especially the ZFS On Linux project. Those wanting to help in testing can try the FreeBSD ZoL spins. Stay tuned for more benchmarks and on more diverse hardware as time allows and the FreeBSD ZoL support further matures, but so far at least the performance numbers are in good shape.
```The normal ISO and IMG files are available for download and install, plus an uncompressed ISO image for those installing remotely. I uploaded them to mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org last night so they should be at your local mirror or will be soon. This version includes Matt's fix for the HAMMER2 corruption bug he identified recently.```
If you have an existing 5.4 system and are running a generic kernel, the normal upgrade process will work.```
I'm a huge fan of the FreeBSD jails feature. It is a great system for splitting services into logical units with all the performance of the bare metal system. In fact, this very site runs in its own jail! If this is starting to sound like LXC or Docker, it might surprise you to learn that OS-level virtualization has existed for quite some time. Kudos to the Linux folks for finally getting around to it. 😛
If you're interested in the history behind Jails, there is an excellent talk from Papers We Love on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U
Getting started
There are plenty of options when it comes to setting up the jail system. Ezjail and Iocage seem popular, or you could do things manually. Iocage was recently rewritten in python, but was originally a set of shell scripts. That version has since been forked under the name Iocell, and I think it's pretty neat, so this tutorial will be using Iocell.
To start, you'll need the following:
A FreeBSD install (we'll be using 11.0)
The iocell package (available as a package, also in the ports tree)
A ZFS pool for hosting the jails
Once you have installed iocell and configured your ZFS pool, you'll need to run a few commands before creating your first jail. First, tell iocell which ZFS pool to use by issuing iocell activate $POOLNAME. Iocell will create a few datasets.
As you can imagine, your jails are contained within the /iocell/jails dataset. The /iocell/releases dataset is used for storing the next command we need to run, iocell fetch. Iocell will ask you which release you'd like to pull down. Since we're running 11.0 on the host, pick 11.0-RELEASE. Iocell will download the necessary txz files and unpack them in /iocell/releases.
Today we are releasing the SRU 8 for Oracle Solaris 11.4. It is available via 'pkg update' from the support repository or by downloading the SRU from My Oracle Support Doc ID 2433412.1.
This SRU introduces the following enhancements:
Integration of 28060039 introduced an issue where any firmware update/query commands will log eereports and repeated execution of such commands led to faulty/degraded NIC. The issue has been addressed in this SRU.
UCB (libucb, librpcsoc, libdbm, libtermcap, and libcurses) libraries have been reinstated for Oracle Solaris 11.4
Re-introduction of the service fc-fabric.
ibus has been updated to 1.5.19
The following components have also been updated to address security issues:
After hacking the matrix.org website today, the attacker opened a series of GitHub issues mentioning the flaws he discovered. In one of those issues, he mentions that “complete compromise could have been avoided if developers were prohibited from using [SSH agent forwarding].”
Here’s what man ssh_config has to say about ForwardAgent: "Agent forwarding should be enabled with caution. Users with the ability to bypass file permissions on the remote host (for the agent’s Unix-domain socket) can access the local agent through the forwarded connection. An attacker cannot obtain key material from the agent, however they can perform operations on the keys that enable them to authenticate using the identities loaded into the agent.""
Simply put: if your jump box is compromised and you use SSH agent forwarding to connect to another machine through it, then you risk also compromising the target machine!
Instead, you should use either ProxyCommand or ProxyJump (added in OpenSSH 7.3). That way, ssh will forward the TCP connection to the target host via the jump box and the actual connection will be made on your workstation. If someone on the jump box tries to MITM your connection, then you will be warned by ssh.
Start by performing the pre-upgrade steps. Next, boot from the install kernel, bsd.rd: use bootable install media, or place the 6.5 version of bsd.rd in the root of your filesystem and instruct the boot loader to boot this kernel. Once this kernel is booted, choose the (U)pgrade option and follow the prompts. Apply the configuration changes and remove the old files. Finish up by upgrading the packages: pkg_add -u.
Alternatively, you can use the manual upgrade process.
You may wish to check the errata page or upgrade to the stable branch to get any post-release fixes.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Fear, Uncertainty, and .NET | Coder Radio 356
May 08, 2019
.NET 5 has been announced and brings a new unified future to the platform. We dig in to Microsoft's plans and speculate about what they might mean for F#.
Plus the value of manual testing, Visual Studio Code Remote, and Conway's Game of Life in Rust.
ruby/rdoc — RDoc produces HTML and command-line documentation for Ruby projects.
Javadoc — Javadoc is a documentation generator created by Sun Microsystems for the Java language for generating API documentation in HTML format from Java source code.
Literate programming — Literate programming is a programming paradigm introduced by Donald Knuth in which a program is given as an explanation of the program logic in a natural language, such as English, interspersed with snippets of macros and traditional source code, from which a compilable source code can be generated.
Literate Programming — Writing a literate program is a lot more work than writing a normal program. After all, who ever documents their programs in the first place!? Moreover, who documents them in a pedagogical style that is easy to understand? And finally, who ever provides commentary on the theory and design issues behind the code as they write the documentation?
Visual Studio Code Remote Development — Visual Studio Code Remote Development allows you to use a container, remote machine, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as a full-featured development environment.
Introducing .NET 5 — There will be just one .NET going forward, and you will be able to use it to target Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, tvOS, watchOS and WebAssembly and more.
The Friday Stream — Our crew from all over the world share stories, make new friends, and give each other a hard time live.
Ultimate Fedora Test | LINUX Unplugged 300
May 07, 2019
Is Fedora 30 the peak release of this distribution? We put it through the ultimate test, live on the air, and put everything on the line.
Plus Red Hat’s new logo, Dell’s new Linux workstations, and meet a new member of our crew.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Neal Gompa.
Links:
I made a smart watch from scratch — I decided sometime last year that I wanted to make a smart watch from scratch. I am an electrical engineer and product designer by day, so this was a fun side project that had been rolling around in my head for a while now.
New hat, same vision video — We are Red Hat. We believe that transparency, sharing, and collaboration are the best ways to create better technology..and logos. See the transformation of the Red Hat logo.
Canonical Releases "WLCS" Wayland Conformance Suite 1.0 — As part of their Wayland interests and namely as part of developing Mir now with Wayland support, for a while they have been working on the "Wayland Conformance Suite" for testing the Wayland protocols for conformance to the specifications. This is for ensuring Wayland compositors behave correctly against the intentions of the protocols.
L4T Ubuntu - A fully featured linux on your switch — L4T Ubuntu is a version of Linux based on nvidia's linux for tegra project. It uses a different kernel compared to previous releases which allows it to use features not yet in mainline. Such as audio, docking support and vulkan.
Changes/FlickerFreeBoot - Fedora Project Wiki — Make Fedora Workstation boot graphically smooth, without the display briefly turning off and without any abrupt graphical transitions.
Releases/30/ChangeSet - Fedora Project Wiki — These changes have been accepted by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee for the Fedora 30 Release as System Wide Changes.
Security Lab — The Fedora Security Lab provides a safe test environment to work on security auditing, forensics, system rescue and teaching security testing methodologies in universities and other organizations.
Fedora LXQt Desktop — Fedora LXQt provides a lightweight, well-integrated LXQt desktop environment. In addition to LXQt itself it provides a small, well selected collection of applications like the QupZilla browser, which combines Chromium's rendering engine with a nice Qt experience.
Fedora Silverblue Documentation — Fedora Silverblue is an immutable desktop operating system. Aiming at good support for container-focused workflows, this variant of Fedora Workstation targets developer communities.
My 30 days with Fedora 29 Silverblue — Silverblue is a Fedora variant that uses OStree and Flatpak instead of dnf. So basically you've got an immutable (read-only) system image built with OStree.
Fedora Python Classroom — The Python Classroom lab is shipped as a live operating system. It's everything you need to try out Fedora's Python Classroom - you don't have to erase anything on your current system to try it out, and it won't put your files at risk.
Sysctl Explorer — Sysctl Explorer is an initiative to facilitate the access of Linux' sysctl reference documentation. This is a work in progress and you may consider this increment as a Minimum viable product (MVP) version.
The Eggquisition | The Friday Stream 2
May 07, 2019
Sometimes the road home is a little bumpy, and sometimes you just want them to cook the bloody eggs.
Linux Action News 104
May 05, 2019
Fedora 30 is out, we share our thoughts. Purism's new Librem One service is launched, we're rather skeptical and the reason might surprise you.
Plus the massive Firefox blunder, Canonical's new service, and a report from DockerCon.
Links:
Fedora 30 Released — Fedora Workstation features GNOME 3.32 — the latest release of this popular desktop environment.
Purism launches Librem One — Librem One is a subscription service, using open standards and free software, and it is available for $7.99/mo, or $71.91/yr for the four services.
Todd attempts to save face — By putting services under a centralized brand, we make these decentralized services just as convenient to use as the big tech alternatives.
Firefox addon cert blunder — Late on Friday May 3rd, we became aware of an issue with Firefox that prevented existing and new add-ons from running or being installed.
Canonical consolidates open infrastructure support — Canonical today announced Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure, a consolidated enterprise security, compliance and support offering that covers the full range of open source infrastructure capabilities for up to 10 years.
Amazon Managed Blockchain hits general availability — Amazon told businesses that they “can quickly set up a blockchain network spanning multiple AWS accounts with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console,” doing away with what it describes as the typical cost and difficulty of creating a company network.
OpenBSD 6.5 has been released, mount ZFS datasets anywhere, help test upcoming NetBSD 9 branch, LibreSSL 2.9.1 is available, Bail Bond Denied Edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails, and one reason ed(1) was a good editor back in the days in this week’s episode.
ZFS is very flexible about mountpoints, and there are many features available to provide great flexibility.
When you create zpool maintank, the default mountpoint is /maintank.
You might be happy with that, but you don’t have to be content. You can do magical things.
Some highlights are:
mount point can be inherited
not all filesystems in a zpool need to be mounted
each filesystem (directory) can have different ZFS characteristics
In my case, let’s look at this new zpool I created earlier today and I will show you some very simple alternatives. This zpool use NVMe devices which should be faster than SSDs especially when used with multiple concurrent writes. This is my plan: run all the Bacula regression tests concurrently.
Folks,
once again we are quite late for branching the next NetBSD release (NetBSD 9).
Initially planned to happen early in February 2019, we are now approaching May and it is unlikely that the branch will happen before that.
On the positive side, lots of good things landed in -current in between, like new Mesa, new jemalloc, lots of ZFS improvements - and some of those would be hard to pull up to the branch later.
On the bad side we saw lots of churn in -current recently, and there is quite some fallout where we not even have a good overview right now. And this is where you can help:
please test -current, on all the various machines you have
especially interesting would be test results from uncommon architectures
or strange combinations (like the sparc userland on sparc64 kernel issue
I ran in yesterday)
Please test, report success, and file PRs for failures!
We will likely announce the real branch date on quite short notice, the likely next candidates would be mid may or end of may.
We may need to do extra steps after the branch (like switch some architectures back to old jemalloc on the branch). However, the less difference between -current and the branch, the easier will the release cycle go.
Our goal is to have an unprecedented short release cycle this time. But..
we always say that upfront.
We have released LibreSSL 2.9.1, which will be arriving in the LibreSSL
directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon. This is the first stable release
from the 2.9 series, which is also included with OpenBSD 6.5
It includes the following changes and improvements from LibreSSL 2.8.x:
API and Documentation Enhancements
CRYPTO_LOCK is now automatically initialized, with the legacy
callbacks stubbed for compatibility.
Added the SM3 hash function from the Chinese standard GB/T 32905-2016.
Added the SM4 block cipher from the Chinese standard GB/T 32907-2016.
Added more OPENSSLNO* macros for compatibility with OpenSSL.
Partial port of the OpenSSL ECKEYMETHOD API for use by OpenSSH.
Implemented further missing OpenSSL 1.1 API.
Added support for XChaCha20 and XChaCha20-Poly1305.
Added support for AES key wrap constructions via the EVP interface.
Compatibility Changes
Added pbkdf2 key derivation support to openssl(1) enc.
Changed the default digest type of openssl(1) enc to sha256.
Changed the default digest type of openssl(1) dgst to sha256.
Changed the default digest type of openssl(1) x509 -fingerprint to sha256.
Changed the default digest type of openssl(1) crl -fingerprint to sha256.
Testing and Proactive Security
Added extensive interoperability tests between LibreSSL and OpenSSL
1.0 and 1.1.
Added additional Wycheproof tests and related bug fixes.
Internal Improvements
Simplified sigalgs option processing and handshake signing
algorithm selection.
Added the ability to use the RSA PSS algorithm for handshake signatures.
Added bnrandinterval() and use it in code needing ranges of
random bn values.
Added functionality to derive early, handshake, and application
secrets as per RFC8446.
Added handshake state machine from RFC8446.
Removed some ASN.1 related code from libcrypto that had not been
used since around 2000.
Unexported internal symbols and internalized more record layer structs.
Removed SHA224 based handshake signatures from consideration for
use in a TLS 1.2 handshake.
Portable Improvements
Added support for assembly optimizations on 32-bit ARM ELF targets.
Added support for assembly optimizations on Mingw-w64 targets.
Improved Android compatibility
Bug Fixes
Improved protection against timing side channels in ECDSA signature
generation.
Coordinate blinding was added to some elliptic curves. This is the
last bit of the work by Brumley et al. to protect against the Portsmash
vulnerability.
Ensure transcript handshake is always freed with TLS 1.2.
The LibreSSL project continues improvement of the codebase to reflect modern,
safe programming practices. We welcome feedback and improvements from the
broader community. Thanks to all of the contributors who helped make this
release possible.
I had a brilliant, hideous idea: to produce a charity edition of FreeBSD Mastery: Jails featuring the cover art I would use if I was imprisoned and did not have access to a real cover artist. (Never mind that I wouldn’t be permitted to release books while in jail: we creative sorts scoff at mere legal and cultural details.)
I originally wanted to produce my own take on the book’s cover art. My first attempt failed spectacularly.
I downgraded my expectations and tried again. And again. And again.
I’m pleased to reveal the final cover for FreeBSD Mastery: Jails–Bail Bond Edition!
This cover represents the very pinnacle of my artistic talents, and is the result of literally hours of effort.
But, as this book is available only to the winner of charity fund-raisers, purchase of this tome represents moral supremacy. I recommend flaunting it to your family, coworkers, and all those of lesser character.
Get your copy by winning the BSDCan 2019 charity auction… or any other other auction-type event I deem worthwhile.
As far as my moral fiber goes: I have learned that art is hard, and that artists are not paid enough.
And if I am ever imprisoned, I do hope that you’ll contribute to my bail fund. Otherwise, you’ll get more covers like this one.
It is common to describe ed(1) as being line oriented, as opposed to screen oriented editors like vi. This is completely accurate but it is perhaps not a complete enough description for today, because ed is line oriented in a way that is now uncommon. After all, you could say that your shell is line oriented too, and very few people use shells that work and feel the same way ed does.
The surface difference between most people's shells and ed is that most people's shells have some version of cursor based interactive editing. The deeper difference is that this requires the shell to run in character by character TTY input mode, also called raw mode. By contrast, ed runs in what Unix usually calls cooked mode, where it reads whole lines from the kernel and the kernel handles things like backspace. All of ed's commands are designed so that they work in this line focused way (including being terminated by the end of the line), and as a whole ed's interface makes this whole line input approach natural. In fact I think ed makes it so natural that it's hard to think of things as being any other way. Ed was designed for line at a time input, not just to not be screen oriented.
This input mode difference is not very important today, but in the days of V7 and serial terminals it made a real difference. In cooked mode, V7 ran very little code when you entered each character; almost everything was deferred until it could be processed in bulk by the kernel, and then handed to ed all in a single line which ed could also process all at once. A version of ed that tried to work in raw mode would have been much more resource intensive, even if it still operated on single lines at a time.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Family Reunion - The FRIDAY Stream
May 02, 2019
The party before the party, its Friday! A full crew from all over the world joins us in studio to share stories, meet new friends, and give each other a hard time.
F# Shill | Coder Radio 355
May 02, 2019
Mike and Wes dive into Bosque, Microsoft’s new research language, and debate if it represents the future of programming languages, or if we should all just be using F#.
Plus some Qt license clarity, a handy new Rust feature, and your feedback.
Complying with the Requirements of the GPL/LGPL v3 License — With the discontinuation of our continued support for Qt 5.6 also ends our support for the last Qt version licensed under LGPL v2.1. Moving forward, versions 5.7 and beyond will be subject to LGPL v3. This webinar is a great opportunity to gain a better understanding of the differences in rights and obligations between the two licensing versions.
Rust Pinning — The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.33.0. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
Regularized Programming with the BOSQUE Language — We believe that, just as structured programming did years ago, this regularized programming model will lead to massively improved developer productivity, increased software quality, and enable a second golden age of developments in compilers and developer tooling.
The Mad Botter INC on Twitter — Happy #EarthDay! We are awarding a free @system76 #DarterPro to the middle or high school student that can send our CEO @dominucco an innovative idea to fight climate change using #Linux. To submit please write up a report and diagram & email it to michael@themadbotter.com.
git-secrets — Prevents you from committing secrets and credentials into git repositories.
git-hound — Hound is a Git plugin that helps prevent sensitive data from being committed into a repository by sniffing potential commits against PCRE regular expressions.
truffleHog — Searches through git repositories for secrets, digging deep into commit history and branches. This is effective at finding secrets accidentally committed.
Ubuntu MATE on the Pi + The Linux Community | Choose Linux 8
May 02, 2019
We take Ubuntu MATE 18.04 for a test drive on the Raspberry Pi 3. How does it compare to Raspbian? After that, a fascinating discussion about the Linux community.
What are the high points and low points? What’s that magic ingredient that makes it feel so different from other tech communities?
Shame as a Service | LINUX Unplugged 299
Apr 30, 2019
Fresh back from LinuxFest Northwest we share a few of our favorite stories and memories.
Plus our concerns with Pursim's new subscription services, Fedora 30 is released, and we spin up the Distro Hoppers.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Ell Marquez.
Links:
What's new in Fedora 30 Workstation — Fedora 30 Workstation includes the latest release of the simple, beautiful GNOME 3.32 desktop environment.
Librem One Campaign Wants to Help De-Google Your Life — Purism, perhaps best known for the Librem 5 Linux phone crowdfunding campaign, has launched a new initiative offering “privacy protecting, no-track, no-ads” apps and services for mobile users.
Red Hat Summit 2019 — Red Hat Summit 2019 will feature executives, open source leaders, and some of our most innovative customers discussing trends, telling stories, and anticipating the future.
DockerCon San Francisco 2019 — Whether you’re just getting started with containers or consider yourself an expert, DockerCon enables you to advance your technical expertise with hands-on learning and expert-led sessions.
Linux Academy Sale! — Last chance to get the #1 Cloud Training Platform for 33% OFF!
LinuxFest Northwest 2019 Reflections — As the mountains shrink in the distance the realization that LinuxFest Northwest (LFNW) has actually come to a close begins to sink in. I don’t think anyone would argue that this year’s LFNW was a fantastic success. Being that this was my first LFNW to attend I was pleasantly surprised how this event felt more like a large family reunion than a Linux conference. With friends traveling from as far away as the United Kingdom and Shanghai, this event was truly a unique experience that I'll never forget.
Smart RGB LED strips with Home Assistant — 2019 is the year I am taking back control of my smart devices by bringing as much 'smarts' back inside my LAN as possible.
Linux Lite, A Free Operating System — Linux Lite is a 'gateway operating system'. It was created to make the transition from Windows to a linux based operating system, as smooth as possible.
Linux Action News 103
Apr 28, 2019
Docker Hub gets hacked, Nextcloud 16 has a new feature to prevent hacks, and France's 'Secure" Telegram replacement gets hacked within an hour.
Plus who is spending $30m a month on AWS? Docker on ARM, and some LinuxFest Northwest thoughts.
Docker developers can now build Arm containers on their desktops — The main idea here is to make it easy for Docker developers to build their applications for the Arm platform right from their x86 desktops and then deploy them to the cloud (including the Arm-based AWS EC2 A1 instances), edge and IoT devices.
Rancher looks to rope in Kubernetes users with new OS distro — It hasn’t been that long since Rancher announced k3s, a Kubernetes distribution for resource constrained environments. Just two months on, the project now gets its own operating system – k3OS.
France's 'Secure' Telegram Replacement Hacked in an Hour — The French government said that it still plans to require its use in lieu of WhatsApp and Telegram, for any informal communications between government employees, agencies and some handpicked non-governmental organizations.
Abandoned Support | User Error 64
Apr 26, 2019
Why Linux doesn't just work on all hardware, criticism of your field, and the ethics of acquiring old software.
Plus venturing outside, and how we install unusual applications.
00:00:37 Why is hardware support so terrible? 00:12:21 #AskError: How much time do you spend outside? 00:16:08 If you're wedded to a concept or axiom for your job, is there any way you can be objective about criticism of your field? 00:26:13 #AskError: If an application you want is not available in your distro’s repo, which community package would you choose and why? 00:31:54 Is it ok to pirate abandonware?
Snapshot Sanity | TechSNAP 402
Apr 25, 2019
We continue our take on ZFS as Jim and Wes dive in to snapshots, replication, and the magic on copy on write.
Plus some handy tools to manage your snapshots, rsync war stories, and more!
The Magic Behind APFS: Copy-On-Write — The brand-new Apple File System (APFS) that landed with macOS High Sierra brings a handful of important new features that rely on a technique called copy-on-write (CoW).
Introducing funlinkat(), an OpenBSD Router with AT&T U-Verse, using NetBSD on a raspberry pi, ZFS encryption is still under development, Rump kernel servers and clients tutorial, Snort on OpenBSD 6.4, and more.
It turns out, every file you have ever deleted on a unix machine was probably susceptible to a race condition
One of the first syscalls which was created in Unix-like systems is unlink. In FreeBSD this syscall is number 10 (source) and in Linux, the number is dependent on the architecture but for most of them is also the tenth syscall (source). This indicated that this is one of the primary syscalls. The unlink syscall is very simple and we provide one single path to the file that we want to remove.
The “removing file” process itself is very interesting so let’s spend a moment to understand the it. First, by removing the file we are removing a link from the directory to it. In Unix-like systems we can have many links to a single file (hard links). When we remove all links to the file, the file system will mark the blocks used by the file as free (a different file system will behave differently but let’s not jump into a second digression). This is why the process is called unlinking and not “removing file”. While we unlink the file two or three things will happen:
We will remove an entry in the directory with the filename.
We will decrease a file reference count (in inode).
If links go to zero - the file will be removed from the disk (again this doesn't mean that the blocks from the disk will be filled with zeros, though this may happen depending on the file system and configuration. However, in most cases this means that the file system will mark those blocks to as free and use them to write new data later
This mostly means that “removing file” from a directory is an operation on the directory and not on the file (inode) itself.
Another interesting subject is what happens if our system will perform only first or second step from the list. This depends on the file system and this is also something we will leave for another time.
The problem with the unlink and even unlinkat function is that we don’t have any guarantee of which file we really are unlinking.
When you delete a file using its name, you have no guarantee that someone has not already deleted the file, or renamed it, and created a new file with the name you are about to delete.
We have some stats about the file that we want to unlink. We performed some tests. In the same time another process removed our file and recreated it. When we finally try to remove our file it is no longer the same file. It’s a classic race condition.
Many programs will perform checks before trying to remove a file, to make sure it is the correct file, that you have the correct permissions etc. However this exposes the ‘Time-of-Check / Time-of-Use’ class of bugs. I check if the file I am about to remove is the one I created yesterday, it is, so I call unlink() on it. However, between when I checked the date on the file, and when I call unlink, I, some program I am running, might have updated the file. Or a malicious user might have put some other file at that name, so I would be the one who deleted it.
In Unix-like operating systems we can get a handle for our file called file - a descriptor. File descriptors guarantee us that all the operations that we will be performing on it are done on the same file (inode). Even if someone was to unlink a number of directories entries, the operating system will not free the structures behind the file descriptor, and we can detect the file that was removed by someone and recreated (or just unlinked). So, for example, we have an alternative functions fstat which allows us to get file status of the given descriptor
We already know that the file may have many links on the disk which point to the single inode. What happens when we open the file? Simplifying: kernel creates a memory representation of the inode (the inode itself is stored on the disk) called vnode. This single representation is used by all processes to refer the inode to the disk. If in a process we open the same file (inode) using different names (for example through hard links) all those files will be linked to the single vnode. That means that the pathname is not stored in the kernel.
This is basically the reason why we don’t have a funlink function so that instead of the path we are providing just the file descriptor to the file. If we performed the fdunlink syscall, the kernel wouldn’t know which directory entry you would like to remove. Another problem is more architectural: as we discussed earlier unlinking is really an operation on the directory not on the file (inode) itself, so using funlink(fd) may create some confusion because we are not removing the inode corresponding to the file descriptor, we are performing action on the directory which points to the file.
After some discussion we decided that the only sensible option for FreeBSD would be to create a funlinkat() function. This syscall would only performs additional sanitary checks if we are removing a directory entry which corresponds to the inode stored which refers to the file descriptor.
int funlinkat(int dfd, const char *path, int fd, int flags);
The API above will check if the path opened relative to the dfd points to the same vnode. Thanks to that we removed a race condition because all those sanitary checks are performed in the kernel mode while the file system is locked and there is no possibility to change it.
The fd parameter may be set to the FD_NONE value which will mean that the sanitary check should not be performed and funlinkat will behave just like unlinkat.
As you can notice I often refer to the unlink syscall but at the end the APIs looks like unlinkat syscall. It is true that the unlink syscall is very old and kind of deprecated. That said I referred to unlink because it’s just simpler. These days unlink simply uses the same code as unlinkat.
I upgraded to AT&T's U-verse Gigabit internet service in 2017 and it came with an Arris BGW-210 as the WiFi AP and router. The BGW-210 is not a terrible device, but I already had my own Airport Extreme APs wired throughout my house and an OpenBSD router configured with various things, so I had no use for this device. It's also a potentially-insecure device that I can't upgrade or fully disable remote control over.
Fully removing the BGW-210 is not possible as we'll see later, but it is possible to remove it from the routing path. This is how I did it with OpenBSD.
Do you have an old Raspberry Pi lying around gathering dust, maybe after a recent Pi upgrade? Are you curious about BSD Unix? If you answered "yes" to both of these questions, you'll be pleased to know that the first is the solution to the second, because you can run NetBSD, as far back as the very first release, on a Raspberry Pi.
BSD is the Berkley Software Distribution of Unix. In fact, it's the only open source Unix with direct lineage back to the original source code written by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs. Other modern versions are either proprietary (such as AIX and Solaris) or clever re-implementations (such as Minix and GNU/Linux). If you're used to Linux, you'll feel mostly right at home with BSD, but there are plenty of new commands and conventions to discover. If you're still relatively new to open source, trying BSD is a good way to experience a traditional Unix.
Admittedly, NetBSD isn't an operating system that's perfectly suited for the Pi. It's a minimal install compared to many Linux distributions designed specifically for the Pi, and not all components of recent Pi models are functional under NetBSD yet. However, it's arguably an ideal OS for the older Pi models, since it's lightweight and lovingly maintained. And if nothing else, it's a lot of fun for any die-hard Unix geek to experience another side of the POSIX world.
One of the big upcoming features that a bunch of people are looking forward to in ZFS is natively encrypted filesystems. This is already in the main development tree of ZFS On Linux, will likely propagate to FreeBSD (since FreeBSD ZFS will be based on ZoL), and will make it to Illumos if the Illumos people want to pull it in. People are looking forward to native encryption so much, in fact, that some of them have started using it in ZFS On Linux already, using either the development tip or one of the 0.8.0 release candidate pre-releases (ZoL is up to 0.8.0-rc3 as of now). People either doing this or planning to do this show up on the ZoL mailing list every so often.
The rump anykernel architecture allows to run highly componentized kernel code configurations in userspace processes. Coupled with the rump sysproxy facility it is possible to run loosely distributed client-server "mini-operating systems". Since there is minimum configuration and the bootstrap time is measured in milliseconds, these environments are very cheap to set up, use, and tear down on-demand.
This document acts as a tutorial on how to configure and use unmodified NetBSD kernel drivers as userspace services with utilities available from the NetBSD base system. As part of this, it presents various use cases. One uses the kernel cryptographic disk driver (cgd) to encrypt a partition. Another one demonstrates how to operate an FFS server for editing the contents of a file system even though your user account does not have privileges to use the host's mount() system call. Additionally, using a userspace TCP/IP server with an unmodified web browser is detailed.
As you may recall from previous posts, I am running an OpenBSD server on an APU2 air-cooled 3 Intel NIC box as my router/firewall for my secure home network. Given that all of my Internet traffic flows through this box, I thought it would be a cool idea to run an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) on it. Snort is the big hog of the open source world so I took a peek in the packages directory on one of the mirrors and lo and behold we have the latest & greatest version of Snort available! Thanks devs!!!
I did some quick Googling and didn’t find much “modern” howto help out there so, after some trial and error, I have it up and running. I thought I’d give back in a small way and share a quickie howto for other Googlers out there who are looking for guidance. Here’s hoping that my title is good enough “SEO” to get you here!
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
A Life of Learning | Coder Radio 354
Apr 25, 2019
We celebrate the life of Erlang author Dr Joe Armstrong by remembering his many contributions to computer science and unique approach to lifelong learning.
Francesco Cesarini on Twitter — It is with great sadness that I share news of Joe Armstrong's passing away earlier today. Whilst he may no longer be with us, his work has laid the foundation which will be used by generations to come. RIP @joeerl, thank you for inspiring us all.
Goodbye Joe — One of the amazing things Joe mentioned in his texts that was out of the ordinary compared to everything I had read before is that developers would make mistakes and we could not prevent them all. Instead, we had to be able to cope with them. He did not just tell you about a language, he launched you on a trail that taught you how to write entire systems
Goodbye Joe in r/programming — About two weeks ago I came across Armstrong's blog for the first time and poked around at a few posts. I noticed he had recently (in the past year was my impression) discovered TiddlyWiki and rewritten his blog in it. His post talking about his eureka moment with TiddlyWiki had the feel of a very young, excited writer, so I was very surprised to later discover his age. I didn't know about him for very long, but the character described in this post really shined through.
Joe the office mate — Joe would get wildly excited by one "big idea" for weeks at a time. This could be a new idea of his own or a "well known" idea of somebody else's: the Rsync algorithm; public key cryptography; diff algorithms; parsing algorithms; etc. He would take an idea off the shelf, think (and talk!) about it very intensely for a while, and then put it back for a while and dive into the next topic that felt ripe.
Erlang/OTP 21.3 — Welcome to Erlang/OTP, a complete development environment for concurrent programming.
One secret to becoming a great software engineer: read code — Similarly, seeing diverse coding practices lets you expand your palette when it comes time to write your own code. Reading others’ code exposes you to new language functionality and different coding styles.
djblue/tetris — An almost complete tetris in clojurescript
The Mad Botter INC on Twitter — Happy #EarthDay! We are awarding a free @system76 #DarterPro to the middle or high school student that can send our CEO @dominucco an innovative idea to@fight climate change using #Linux. To submit please write up a report and diagram & email it to michael@themadbotter.com
Blame Joe | LINUX Unplugged 298
Apr 23, 2019
This week we discover the good word of Xfce and admit Joe was right all along. And share our tips for making Xfce more modern.
Plus a new Debian leader, the end of Scientific Linux, and behind the scenes of Librem 5 apps.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, and Ell Marquez.
Ataris VCS Delayed, But Does Anyone Even Care? — There’s no prototype (yet). There’s no Ubuntu-based OS (yet). There’s not even a convincing demo of any of the games which will run on it (yet).
Announcing my Contract with Purism for an Adaptive Fractal UI — Overall, I’m very excited that Purism accepted my proposal and that I get to work on this. I have been looking forward to the day where I can run Fractal on my phone, and I’m glad to be bringing that closer.
Scientific Linux Discontinued — Fermilab will continue to support Scientific Linux 6 and 7 through the remainder of their respective lifecycles. Thank you to all who have contributed to Scientific Linux and who continue to do so.
DPL Platform for Sam Hartman — One of my key roles as DPL will be to make sure Debian is a community where we can be heard, and where we have the opportunity to reach understanding regardless of whether our ideas are chosen. I will do this by personally participating in such mediation and recruiting others to these mediation efforts. Eventually, I hope many of us will get better at seeking to understand and avoiding escalating discussions on our own.
Manjaro XFCE Stable Edition — This edition is supported by the Manjaro team and comes with XFCE, a lightweight and reliable desktop with high configurability.
Xubuntu — Xubuntu is a community developed operating system that combines elegance and ease of use.
OpenAudible — An open-source cross-platform audible audiobook manager. Download, view, convert to MP3, and manage all your audible.com content with our easy-to-use desktop application.
Subspace by Portal Cloud — Subspace is an open source WireGuard® VPN server that supports connecting all of your devices to help secure your internet access.
ARandR: Another XRandR GUI — ARandR is designed to provide a simple visual front end for XRandR. Relative monitor positions are shown graphically and can be changed in a drag-and-drop way.
Wavebox — The best of the web, in one focused place.
nativefier — Make any web page a desktop application
Open infrastructure, developers and IoT are 19.04's focus — Ubuntu 19.04 integrates recent innovations from key open infrastructure projects – like OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph – with advanced life-cycle management for multi-cloud and on-prem operations – from bare metal, VMware and OpenStack to every major public cloud.
Pyodide — Pyodide is an experimental project from Mozilla to create a full Python data science stack that runs entirely in the browser.
OpenSSH 8.0 released — This release contains mitigation for a weakness in the scp(1) tool and protocol (CVE-2019-6111).
Presenting search app and browser options to Android users in Europe — Following the changes we made to comply with the European Commission's ruling last year, we’ll start presenting new screens to Android users in Europe with an option to download search apps and browsers.
Ang Takes a Punch - The Friday Stream
Apr 19, 2019
A bunch of the crew get together and share a few stories, recap the week, and play a little music.
This is a beta test of a community live event we are doing on Fridays at 2pm Pacific: http://jblive.tv
The SSH Tarpit | BSD Now 294
Apr 18, 2019
A PI-powered Plan 9 cluster, an SSH tarpit, rdist for when Ansible is too much, falling in love with OpenBSD again, how I created my first FreeBSD port, the Tilde Institute of OpenBSD education and more.
Plan 9 from Bell Labs comes from the same stable as the UNIX operating system, which of course Linux was designed after, and Apple’s OS X runs on top of a certified UNIX operating system. Just like UNIX, Plan 9 was developed as a research O/S — a vehicle for trying out new concepts — with it building on key UNIX principles and taking the idea of devices are just files even further.
In this post, we take a quick look at the Plan 9 O/S and some of the notable features, before moving on to the construction of a self-contained 4-node Raspberry Pi cluster that will provide a compact platform for experimentation.
I’m a big fan of tarpits: a network service that intentionally inserts delays in its protocol, slowing down clients by forcing them to wait. This arrests the speed at which a bad actor can attack or probe the host system, and it ties up some of the attacker’s resources that might otherwise be spent attacking another host. When done well, a tarpit imposes more cost on the attacker than the defender.
The Internet is a very hostile place, and anyone who’s ever stood up an Internet-facing IPv4 host has witnessed the immediate and continuous attacks against their server. I’ve maintained such a server for nearly six years now, and more than 99% of my incoming traffic has ill intent. One part of my defenses has been tarpits in various forms.
The post written about rdist(1) on johan.huldtgren.com sparked
us to write one as well. It's a great, underappreciated, tool. And we wanted to show how we wrapped doas(1) around it.
There are two services in our infrastructure for which we were looking to keep the configuration in sync and to reload the process when the configuration had indeed changed. There is a pair of nsd(8)/unbound(8) hosts and a pair of hosts running relayd(8)/httpd(8) with carp(4) between them.
We didn't have a requirement to go full configuration management with tools like Ansible or Salt Stack. And there wasn't any interest in building additional logic on top of rsync or repositories. > Enter rdist(1), rdist is a program to maintain identical copies of files over multiple hosts. It preserves the owner, group, mode, and mtime of files if possible and can update programs that are executing.
I was checking the other day and was appalled at how long it has been since I posted here. I had been working a job during 2018 that had me traveling 3,600 miles by air every week so that is at least a viable excuse.
So what is my latest project? I wanted to get something better than the clunky old T500 “freedom laptop” that I could use as my daily driver. Some background here. My first paid gig as a programmer was on SunOS 4 (predecessor to Solaris) and Ultrix (on a DEC MicroVAX). I went from there to a Commodore Amiga (preemptive multitasking in 1985!). I went from there to OS/2 (I know, patron saint of lost causes) and then finally decided to “sell out” and move to Windows as the path of least resistance in the mid 90’s.
My wife bought me an iPod literally just as they started working with computers other than Macs and I watched with fascination as Apple made the big gamble and moved away from PowerPC chips to Intel. That was the beginning of the Apple Fan Boi years for me. My gateway drug was a G4 MacMini and I managed somehow to get in on the pre-production, developer build of an Intel-based Mac. I was quite happy on the platform until about three years ago.
I created my first FreeBSD port recently. I found that FreeBSD didn't have a port for GoCD, which is a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) system. This was a great opportunity to learn how to build a FreeBSD port while also contributing back to the community
Welcome to tilde.institute! This is an OpenBSD machine whose purpose is to provide a space in the tildeverse for experimentation with and education of the OpenBSD operating system. A variety of editors, shells, and compilers are installed to allow for development in a native OpenBSD environment. OpenBSD's httpd(8) is configured with slowcgi(8) as the fastcgi provider and sqlite3 available. This allows users to experiment with web development using compiled CGI in C, aka the BCHS Stack. In addition to php7.0 and mysql (mariadb) by request, this provides an environment where the development of complex web apps is possible.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
The Xfce Surprise + Entroware Ares Review | Choose Linux 7
Apr 18, 2019
Jason leaves the warm embrace of GNOME and finally tries Xfce for 24 hours. What happened took him by surprise!
Then we dive into some hardware talk about the latest All-In-One Linux PC from Entroware, which packs in a lot of quality for the price. But are there any downsides?
Links:
Xfce Desktop Environment — Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for UNIX-like operating systems. It aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly.
Manjaro — Manjaro is an operating system, suitable as a free replacement to Windows or MacOS.
Xubuntu — Xubuntu is an elegant and easy to use operating system.
Moving on from Rails and what’s next — A lot has happened during that time. I created Diesel, an ORM for Rust. In April of last year, I began managing the operations of crates.io, which eventually led to the creation of the crates.io team which I co-lead. I also started to find myself less able to effectively contribute to Rails. It became clear that I have a different vision for the future, and that I would never make it onto the core team.
WLinux's New Name — Hayden Barnes, of Whitewater Foundry, told El Reg that WLinux was only ever supposed to be a codename, and the new name "reflects our distribution's connection to both Linux and Windows". He added "it is close to the Japanese pronunciation and transliteration of penguin, which is pengin." Japan remains the company's top market.
Release the Dingo | LINUX Unplugged 297
Apr 16, 2019
Ubuntu's new release is here, and this one might be one of the most important in a while. But is it worth upgrading from an LTS? We review and debate just that.
Plus some great picks, community news, and more.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Brent Gervais, Ell Marquez, and Martin Wimpress.
Links:
Announcing the evolution of the Red Hat Certified Engineer program — In the updated program, we are shifting the focus to automation of Linux system administration tasks using Red Hat Ansible Automation and will be changing the requirements for achieving an RHCE credential.
Linux for Chromebooks: Secure Development - Google I/O 2019 — Learn how Chrome OS gives you a secure, safe sandbox for the Web, Android, and Linux through Chrome OS design principles, Sandboxing Chrome, ARC++, and Linux (Crostini). This session will also cover ways to handle challenges to high performance and tradeoffs with safety.
The first Devuan Conference - report, videos and interviews — The submarine looking building gave home to an event gathering open source super heroes and all sorts of magical creatures because to quote the first Devuan docsprint in December 2016 from a booklet called ‘Software freedom your way’ : “We must apply thought and attention to software development and we share responsibility, as users and developers of software systems, to foster values of cooperation in the spirit of science, human cultures, and the diversity of life.”
Ubuntu Still Working On ZFS Install Support, But Not In Time For 19.04 — For the past number of months we've seen Canonical developers working on ZFS support in the Ubuntu desktop and ZFS root partition support so that the Ubuntu desktop could (optionally) be installed to a ZFS On Linux partition.
TechSNAP Episode 401: Everyday ZFS — Jim and Wes sit down to bust some ZFS myths and share their tips and tricks for getting the most out of the ultimate filesystem.
Plus when not to use ZFS, the surprising way your disks are lying to you, and more!
Our Trip to Dell | LAS 464 — Is Dell’s new hardware a sign of serious commitment to Linux or a large company’s hedge against market changes? We go inside Dell, get exclusive access to the teams & people behind many of Dell’s products that run Linux & find out.
Plus we discuss Ubuntu dropping Unity for Gnome, Lightworks’ latest release & more!
Google's important news this week, why Linux is fueling PowerShell Growth, and the Matrix breach that might be worse than it sounds.
Plus more good work by Mozilla, and the Chinese crackdown on Bitcoin mining.
Links:
The 6 most important announcements from Google Cloud Next 2019 — Anthos is the new name of the Google Cloud Services Platform, Google’s managed service for allowing enterprises to run applications in their private data center and in Google’s cloud.
PowerShell growth fueled by Linux use — PowerShell Core usage has grown significantly in the last two years. In particular, the bulk of our growth has come from Linux usage
Matrix suffers security breach — An attacker gained access to the servers hosting Matrix.org. The intruder had access to the production databases, potentially giving them access to unencrypted message data, password hashes and access tokens.
Linux Without Borders | User Error 63
Apr 12, 2019
Where bad feeling and rivalry in the FOSS world actually originates, what we should be teaching our kids, and the violence that underlies everything around us.
Plus Joe is a lazy swine, and dodgy VPN providers.
00:00:33 FOSS Rivalry 00:10:27 #AskError: How often do you clean your tech and with what tools? 00:13:11 Teaching kids to code 00:24:09 #AskError: Are all VPN providers as shady as they seem? 00:32:43 All property is theft
Everyday ZFS | TechSNAP 401
Apr 11, 2019
Jim and Wes sit down to bust some ZFS myths and share their tips and tricks for getting the most out of the ultimate filesystem.
Plus when not to use ZFS, the surprising way your disks are lying to you, and more!
Links:
ZFS - Ubuntu Wiki — ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed and implemented by a team at Sun Microsystems led by Jeff Bonwick and Matthew Ahrens.
Performance tuning - OpenZFS — Make sure that you create your pools such that the vdevs have the correct alignment shift for your storage device's size. if dealing with flash media, this is going to be either 12 (4K sectors) or 13 (8K sectors).
Booking Jails | BSD Now 293
Apr 11, 2019
This week we have a special episode with a Michael W. Lucas interview about his latest jail book that’s been released. We’re talking all things jails, writing, book sponsoring, the upcoming BSDCan 2019 conference, and more.
###Interview - Michael W. Lucas - mwl@mwl.io / @mwlauthor FreeBSD Mastery: Jails
BR: Welcome back to the show and congratulations on your latest book. How many books did you have to write before you could start on FreeBSD Mastery: Jails?
AJ: How much research did you have to do about jails?
BR: The book talks about something called ‘incomplete’ jails. What do you mean by that?
AJ: There are a lot of jail management frameworks out there. Why did you chose to write about iocage in the book?
BR: How many jails do you run yourself?
AJ: Can you tell us a bit about how you handle book sponsorship these days?
BR: What other books (fiction and non-fiction) are you currently working on?
AJ: Which talks are you looking forward to attend at the upcoming BSDCan conference?
BR: How is the BSD user group going?
AJ: Anything else you’d like to mention before we release you from our interview jail cell?
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Defining Desktop Linux | LINUX Unplugged 296
Apr 09, 2019
The way we’ve been thinking about Desktop Linux is all wrong. We start by defining Desktop Linux, and where it might be going in the future.
Plus we throw a studio party for our new look, and the text editor that’s taking the crew by storm.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Ell Marquez, and Martin Wimpress.
Proton: One Graph To Sum It All — Don’t we all feel that the world of Linux gaming is in a better spot right now than let’s say, 7-8 months ago? Thanks to Valve, Codeweavers, DXVK and all the gang we can now enjoy a lot more games coming from the Windows world than ever before. I decided to take some time to show what kind of progress we are talking about
Lutris 0.5.2 Released With Various Improvements For Linux Gaming — Lutris 0.5.2 adds the Vulkan ICD (installable client driver) loaders to the system options, adds a sample count option to Wine for enabling MSAA anti-aliasing in older games, a warning is now displayed if Vulkan is not properly setup, and various other bug fixes and enhancements.
Coder Radio Episode 352: Self Driving Disaster — Mike’s away so Chris joins Wes to discuss running your workstation from RAM, the disappointing realities of self driving cars, and handling the ups and downs of critical feedback.
Linux Academy - Full Stack Ruby on Rails Developer (Remote) — Your primary focus will be development of all server-side logic, definition and maintenance of the central database, and ensuring high performance and responsiveness to requests from the front-end. You will also be responsible for integrating the front-end elements built by you or your co-workers, matching a design given to you, into an Angular 6 application, using NGRX.
wkhtmltopdf — wkhtmltopdf and wkhtmltoimage are open source (LGPLv3) command line tools to render HTML into PDF and various image formats using the Qt WebKit rendering engine. These run entirely "headless" and do not require a display or display service.
Self Driving Disaster | Coder Radio 352
Apr 09, 2019
Mike’s away so Chris joins Wes to discuss running your workstation from RAM, the disappointing realities of self driving cars, and handling the ups and downs of critical feedback.
Linux Action News 100
Apr 07, 2019
Chef goes 100% open source, and this recipe has an old twist, the VMware lawsuit is abandoned.
A new way to run Android apps on Linux using Wayland, Sailfish and Mer merge, and more.
Links:
Chef goes 100% open source — “In the open core model, you’re saying that the value is in this proprietary sliver. The part you pay me for is this sliver of its value. And I think that’s incorrect,” he said. “I think, in fact, the value was always in the totality of the product.”
Linux developer abandons VMware lawsuit — For over 10 years, VMware was accused of illegally using Linux code in its VMware ESX bare-metal virtual machine hypervisor. After a German court dismissed the case, the Linux programmer behind the lawsuit has called it a day.
New way to run Android apps on Linux — It's now possible to run Android applications in the same graphical environment as regular Wayland Linux applications with full 3D acceleration.
UBports Foundation finally created — We are very proud and excited to announce that we are about to be granted the status of an official foundation.
EU launches blockchain association — The International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) grew out of months of forums and roundtables held by the commission to create a strategy around the emerging technology.
Manjaro 18 + Starting Your Journey | Choose Linux 6
Apr 04, 2019
The LInux Gaming Report rolls forward as Jason throws Manjaro 18 on the test bench and walks away shocked.
Then we offer some best practices and tips for, well, choosing Linux! How to pick the right hardware for your needs, where to discover your perfect distribution, and how to best enjoy your new journey.
Links:
Manjaro — Manjaro is an operating system, suitable as a free replacement to Windows or MacOS. It has different editions, they all use the same base but provide a different experience, based on the diversity of desktop environments available.
LibreHunt — Safe, private, and secure. Choose Linux today.
Distrochooser — This test will help you to choose a suitable Linux distribution for you.
Standard notes — Standard Notes is a safe place for your notes, thoughts, and life's work.
Syncthing — Syncthing replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and decentralized.
Kodi — Kodi is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub that can be installed on Linux, OSX, Windows, iOS and Android
AsiaBSDcon 2019 Recap | BSD Now 292
Apr 04, 2019
FreeBSD Q4 2018 status report, the GhostBSD alternative, the coolest 90s laptop, OpenSSH 8.0 with quantum computing resistant keys exchange, project trident: 18.12-U8 is here, and more.
Both Allan and I attended AsiaBSDcon 2019 in Tokyo in mid march. After a couple of days of Tokyo sightseeing and tasting the local food, the conference started with tutorials.
Benedict gave his tutorial about “BSD-based Systems Monitoring with Icinga2 and OpenSSH”, while Allan ran the FreeBSD developer summit.
On the next day, Benedict attended the tutorial “writing (network) tests for FreeBSD” held by Kristof Provost. I learned a lot about Kyua, where tests live and how they are executed. I took some notes, which will likely become an article or chapter in the developers handbook about writing tests.
On the third day, Hiroki Sato officially opened the paper session and then people went into individual talks.
Benedict attended
Adventure in DRMland - Or how to write a FreeBSD ARM64 DRM driver by Emmanuel Vadot
powerpc64 architecture support in FreeBSD ports by Piotr Kubaj Managing System Images with ZFS by Allan Jude FreeBSD - Improving block I/O compatibility in bhyve by Sergiu Weisz Security Fantasies and Realities for the BSDs by George V. Neville-Neil ZRouter: Remote update of firmware by Hiroki Mori Improving security of the FreeBSD boot process by Marcin Wojtas
Allan attended
Adventures in DRMland by Emmanuel Vadot Intel HAXM by Kamil Rytarowski BSD Solutions in Australian NGOs Container Migration on FreeBSD by Yuhei Takagawa Security Fantasies and Realities for the BSDs by George Neville-Neil
ZRouter: Remote update of firmware by Hiroki Mori Improving security of the FreeBSD boot process by Marcin Wojtas
When not in talks, time was spent in the hallway track and conversations would often continue over dinner.
Stay tuned for announcements about where AsiaBSDcon 2020 will be, as the Tokyo Olympics will likely force some changes for next year. Overall, it was nice to see people at the conference again, listen to talks, and enjoy the hospitality of Japan.
Since we are still on this island among many in this vast ocean of the Internet, we write this message in a bottle to inform you of the work we have finished and what lies ahead of us. These deeds that we have wrought with our minds and hands, they are for all to partake of - in the hopes that anyone of their free will, will join us in making improvements. In todays message the following by no means complete or ordered set of improvements and additions will be covered: i386 PAE Pagetables for up to 24GB memory support, Continuous Integration efforts, driver updates to ENA and graphics, ARM enhancements such as RochChip, Marvell 8K, and Broadcom support as well as more DTS files, more Capsicum possibilities, as well as pfsync improvements, and many more things that you can read about for yourselves. Additionally, we bring news from some islands further down stream, namely the nosh project, HardenedBSD, ClonOS, and the Polish BSD User-Group. We would, selfishly, encourage those of you who give us the good word to please send in your submissions sooner than just before the deadline, and also encourage anyone willing to share the good word to please read the section on which submissions we’re also interested in having.
The subject of this week’s Linux Picks and Pans is a representative of a less well-known computing platform that coexists with Linux as an open source operating system. If you thought that the Linux kernel was the only open source engine for a free OS, think again. BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) shares many of the same features that make Linux OSes viable alternatives to proprietary computing platforms. GhostBSD is a user-friendly Linux-like desktop operating system based on TrueOS. TrueOS is, in turn, based on FreeBSD’s development branch. TrueOS’ goal is to combine the stability and security of FreeBSD with a preinstalled GNOME, MATE, Xfce, LXDE or Openbox graphical user interface. I stumbled on TrueOS while checking out new desktop environments and features in recent new releases of a few obscure Linux distros. Along the way, I discovered that today’s BSD computing family is not the closed source Unix platform the “BSD” name might suggest. In last week’s Redcore Linux review, I mentioned that the Lumina desktop environment was under development for an upcoming Redcore Linux release. Lumina is being developed primarily for BSD OSes. That led me to circle back to a review I wrote two years ago on Lumina being developed for Linux. GhostBSD is a pleasant discovery. It has nothing to do with being spooky, either. That goes for both the distro and the open source computing family it exposes. Keep reading to find out what piqued my excitement about Linux-like GhostBSD.
A few weeks back I managed to pick up an incredibly rare laptop in immaculate condition for $50 on Kijiji: a Tadpole Technologies SPARCbook 3000ST from 1997 (it also came with two other working Pentium laptops from the 1990s). Sun computers were an expensive desire for many computer geeks in the 1990s, and running UNIX on a SPARC-based laptop was, well, just as cool as it gets. SPARC was an open hardware platform that anyone could make, and Tadpole licensed the Solaris UNIX operating system from Sun for their SPARCbooks. Tadpole essentially made high-end UNIX/VAX workstations on costly, unusual platforms (PowerPC, DEC Alpha, SPARC) but only their SPARCbooks were popular in the high-end UNIX market of the 1990s.
OpenSSH 7.9 came out with a host of bug fixes last year with few new features, as is to be expected in minor releases. However, recently, Damien Miller has announced that OpenSSH 8.0 is nearly ready to be released. Currently, it’s undergoing testing to ensure compatibility across supported systems.
Better Security Copying filenames with scp will be more secure in OpenSSH 8.0 due to the fact that copying filenames from a remote to local directory will prompt scp to check if the files sent from the server match your request. Otherwise, an attack server would theoretically be able to intercept the request by serving malicious files in place of the ones originally requested. Knowing this, you’re probably better off never using scp anyway. OpenSSH advises against it: “The scp protocol is outdated, inflexible and not readily fixed. We recommend the use of more modern protocols like sftp and rsync for file transfer instead.”
Interesting new features
ssh(1): When prompting whether to record a new host key, accept the key fingerprint as a synonym for “yes”. This allows the user to paste a fingerprint obtained out of band at the prompt and have the client do the comparison for you.
Thank you all for your patience! Project Trident has finally finished some significant infrastructure updates over the last 2 weeks, and we are pleased to announce that package update 8 for 18.12-RELEASE is now available. To switch to the new update, you will need to open the “Configuration” tab in the update manager and switch to the new “Trident-release” package repository. You can also perform this transition via the command line by running: sudo sysup --change-train Trident-release
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Stay and Compile a While | LINUX Unplugged 295
Apr 02, 2019
Is there really any advantage to building your software vs installing the package? We discuss when and why you might want to consider building it yourself.
Plus some useful things Mozilla is working on and Cassidy joins us to tell us about elementary OS' big choice.
Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, and Martin Wimpress.
Reducing Notification Permission Prompt Spam in Firefox — According to our telemetry data, the notifications prompt is by far the most frequently shown permission prompt, with about 18 million prompts shown on Firefox Beta in the month from Dec 25 2018 to Jan 24 2019. Not even 3% of these prompts got accepted by users.
A Real-Time Wideband Neural Vocoder at 1.6 kb/s Using LPCNet — It’s the first time a neural vocoder is able to run in real-time using just one CPU core on a phone (as opposed to a high-end GPU) with quality that is much better than existing very low bitrate vocoders and comparable to that of more traditional codecs using a higher bitrate.
elementary AppCenter + Flatpak – elementary — We’re excited to announce that elementary will be joining the larger independent open source movement and adopting Flatpak for AppCenter and our third-party developer ecosystem.
Raspberry Pi Keyboard and Mouse — I’m delighted to announce the official Raspberry Pi keyboard with integrated USB Hub, and the official Raspberry Pi mouse.
Ubuntu MATE 18.04 Beta 1 for Raspberry Pi — We are preparing Ubuntu MATE 18.04 (Bionic Beaver) for the Raspberry Pi. With this Beta pre-release, you can see what we are trying out in preparation for our next (stable) version.
UK Open Source Awards — Now in their 6th year, UKOSA is a free non-profit event that celebrates and acknowledges the contributions from the community of technology experts that make open source such a powerful and unstoppable disruptive force in the current technology landscape.
Feedback from Tom — I haven't tried Rust yet, but it seems to have a lof of momentum. Maybe there are issues with it, but I'm not going to take advice from someone who "really doesn't care" that Rust produces safer and more secure code.
Why I miss Rails — In the transition to the modern web stack we’ve unsolved some of what tools like Rails made easy 10 years ago. I don’t think it needs to be that way.
Luminus — Luminus is a Clojure micro-framework based on a set of lightweight libraries. It aims to provide a robust, scalable, and easy to use platform. With Luminus you can focus on developing your app the way you want without any distractions.
Phoenix — A productive web framework that
does not compromise speed or maintainability. Phoenix leverages the Erlang VM ability to handle millions of connections alongside Elixir's beautiful syntax and productive tooling for building fault-tolerant systems.
Mozilla’s new Android app, Google wants you to adopt AMP for Email, and our reaction to LVFS joining the Linux Foundation.
Plus Debian's generous gift, Red Hat crosses the $3B mark, and the Open Source Awards are nigh!
Links:
Firefox Lockbox comes to Android — Today, we are excited to bring Firefox Lockbox to Android users, a secure app that keeps people’s passwords with them wherever they go.
AMP for email launched — Google today officially launched AMP for Email, its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences
Red Hat crosses $3B revenue mark — Red Hat recorded revenue of US$2.9 billion for the last fiscal year which ended in February 2018.
LVFS joins Linux Foundation — The Linux Foundation welcomes the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) as a new project.
Handshake donates $300,000 USD to Debian — This significant financial contribution will help Debian to continue the hardware replacement plan designed by the Debian System Administrators, renewing servers and other hardware components and thus making the development and community infrastructure of the Project more reliable.
UK Open Source Awards 2019 — The Awards Event will be The Informatics Forum of the University of Edinburgh and will take place on Wednesday 12 June 2019.
Emergency Condiments | User Error 62
Mar 29, 2019
What attracted us to Linux in the first place, planning for when tech goes away, and why we aren't surrounded by alien life.
Plus a difficult culinary choice for Dan, and what we'd use instead of Linux.
00:00:33 How do you balance embracing new tech with planning for its obsolescence? 00:09:01 #AskError: Is there any food you won't eat? Even in an emergency? 00:15:56 Why did you start using Linux? 00:26:40 #AskError: If you started working at a company and could only choose Mac or Windows, which would be the less painful choice? 00:31:13 What's your take on the Fermi Paradox?
Supply Chain Attacks | TechSNAP 400
Mar 28, 2019
We break down the ASUS Live Update backdoor and explore why these kinds of supply chain attacks are on the rise.
Plus an update from the linux vendor firmware service, your feedback, and more!
Links:
Joren Verspeurt on Twitter — The explanation you gave for unsupervised wasn't correct, that was just using a net that was trained in a supervised way. Unsupervised learning doesn't involve labels at all. A good example: clustering. You say "there are x clusters" and it learns a way of grouping similar items.
Malicious updates for ASUS laptops — A threat actor modified the ASUS Live Update Utility, which delivers BIOS, UEFI, and software updates to ASUS laptops and desktops, added a back door to the utility, and then distributed it to users through official channels.
Asus Live Update Patch Now Availabile — Asus has emitted a non-spyware-riddled version of Live Update for people to install on its notebooks, which includes extra security features to hopefully detect any future tampering.
ASUS response to the recent media reports regarding ASUS Live Update tool attack by Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) groups — ASUS has also implemented a fix in the latest version (ver. 3.6.8) of the Live Update software, introduced multiple security verification mechanisms to prevent any malicious manipulation in the form of software updates or other means, and implemented an enhanced end-to-end encryption mechanism. At the same time, we have also updated and strengthened our server-to-end-user software architecture to prevent similar attacks from happening in the future.
The Messy Truth About Infiltrating Computer Supply Chains — The Defense Intelligence Agency believed that China’s capability at exploiting the BIOS “reflects a qualitative leap forward in exploitation that is difficult to detect”
Inside the Unnerving CCleaner Supply Chain Attack — Security researchers at Cisco Talos and Morphisec made a worst nightmare-type disclosure: the ubiquitous computer cleanup tool CCleaner had been compromised by hackers for more than a month. The software updates users were downloading from CCleaner owner Avast—a security company itself—had been tainted with a malware backdoor. The incident exposed millions of computers and reinforced the threat of so-called digital supply chain attacks, situations where trusted, widely distributed software is actually infected by malicious code.
Gaming industry still in the scope of attackers in Asia — Yet again, new supply-chain attacks recently caught the attention of ESET Researchers. This time, two games and one gaming platform application were compromised to include a backdoor.
Microsoft Security Intelligence Report Volume 24 is now available — Software supply chain attacks are another trend that Microsoft has been tracking for several years. One supply chain tactic used by attackers is to incorporate a compromised component into a legitimate application or update package, which then is distributed to the users via the software. These attacks can be very difficult to detect because they take advantage of the trust that users have in their software vendors. The report includes several examples, including the Dofoil campaign, which illustrates how wide-reaching these types of attacks are and what we are doing to prevent and respond to them.
Supply Chain Security: A Talk by Bunnie Huang — I recently gave an invited talk about supply chain security at BlueHat IL 2019. I was a bit surprised at the level of interest it received, so I thought I’d share it here for people who might have missed it.
Attack inception: Compromised supply chain within a supply chain poses new risk — The plot twist: The app vendor’s systems were unaffected. The compromise was traceable instead to a second software vendor that hosted additional packages used by the app during installation. This turned out be an interesting and unique case of an attack involving “the supply chain of the supply chain”.
Supply Chain Attacks and Secure Software Updates — In general, a supply chain attack involves first hacking a trusted third party who provides a product or service to your target, and then using your newly acquired, privileged position to compromise your intended target.
Bad USB, Very Bad USB — The best defense for this type of attack is to only use devices that do not have reprogrammable firmware. Outside of this, it is important to only use USB drives that you trust completely, because after plugging in an untrusted device, you will never know if there is an invisible threat running on your computer.
LVFS Project Announcement - The Linux Foundation — The Linux Foundation welcomes the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) as a new project. LVFS is a secure website that allows hardware vendors to upload firmware updates. It’s used by all major Linux distributions to provide metadata for clients, such as fwupdmgr, GNOME Software and KDE Discover.
Two new supply-chain attacks come to light in less than a week — Called “Colourama,” the package looked similar to Colorama, which is one of the top-20 most-downloaded legitimate modules in the Python repository. The doppelgänger Colourama package contained most of the legitimate functions of the legitimate module, with one significant difference: Colourama added code that, when run on Windows servers, installed a Visual Basic script.
Storage Changes Software | BSD Now 291
Mar 28, 2019
Storage changing software, what makes Unix special, what you need may be “pipeline +Unix commands”, running a bakery on Emacs and PostgreSQL, the ultimate guide to memorable tech talks, light-weight contexts, and more.
Early last year we completed a massive migration that moved our customers’ hosting data off of a legacy datacenter (that we called FR-SD2) onto several new datacenters (that we call FR-SD3, FR-SD5, and FR-SD6) with much more modern, up-to-date infrastructure. This migration required several changes in both the software and hardware we use, including switching the operating system on our storage units to FreeBSD. Currently, we use the NFS protocol to provide storage and export the filesystems on Simple Hosting, our web hosting service, and the FreeBSD kernel includes an NFS server for just this purpose.
Problem
While migrating virtual disks of Simple Hosting instances from FR-SD2, we noticed high CPU load spikes on the new storage units.
Ever since Unix burst onto the scene within the early '70s, observers within the pc world have been fast to put in writing it off as a unusual working system designed by and for knowledgeable programmers. Regardless of their proclamations, Unix refuses to die. Means again in 1985, Stewart Cheifet puzzled if Unix would turn out to be the usual working system of the longer term on the PBS present “The Laptop Chronicles,” though MS-DOS was effectively in its heyday. In 2018, it is clear that Unix actually is the usual working system, not on desktop PCs, however on smartphones and tablets.
What Makes Unix Special?
It is also the usual system for net servers. The actual fact is, hundreds of thousands of individuals all over the world have interacted with Linux and Unix programs daily, most of whom have by no means written a line of code of their lives. So what makes Unix so beloved by programmers and different techie sorts? Let’s check out a few of issues this working system has going for it. (For some background on Unix, try The Historical past of Unix: From Bell Labs to the iPhone.)
I came across Taco Bell Programming recently, and think this article is worthy to read for every software engineer. The post mentions a scenario which you may consider to use Hadoop to solve but actually xargs may be a simpler and better choice. This reminds me a similar experience: last year a client wanted me to process a data file which has 5 million records. After some investigations, no novel technologies, a concise awk script (less than 10 lines) worked like a charm! What surprised me more is that awk is just a single-thread program, no nifty concurrency involved. The IT field never lacks “new” technologies: cloud computing, big data, high concurrency, etc. However, the thinkings behind these “fancy” words may date back to the era when Unix arose. Unix command line tools are invaluable treasure. In many cases, picking the right components and using pipeline to glue them can satisfy your requirement perfectly. So spending some time in reviewing Unixcommand line manual instead of chasing state-of-the-art techniques exhaustedly, you may gain more. BTW, if your data set can be disposed by an awk script, it should not be called “big data”.
Just over a year ago now, I finally opened the bakery I’d been dreaming of for years. It’s been a big change in my life, from spending all my time sat in front of a computer, to spending most of it making actual stuff. And stuff that makes people happy, at that. It’s been a huge change, but I can’t think of a single job change that’s ever made me as happy as this one. One of the big changes that came with going pro was that suddenly I was having to work out how much stuff I needed to mix to fill the orders I needed. On the face of it, this is really simple, just work out how much dough you need, then work out what quantities to mix to make that much dough. Easy. You can do it with a pencil and paper. Or, in traditional bakers’ fashion, by scrawling with your finger on a floured work bench. And that’s how I coped for a few weeks early on. But I kept making mistakes, which makes for an inconsistent product (bread is very forgiving, you have to work quite hard to make something that isn’t bread, but consistency matters). I needed to automate.
Imagine this. You’re a woman in a male-dominated field. English is not your first language. Even though you’re confident in your engineering work, the thought of public speaking and being recorded for the world to see absolutely terrifies you. That was me, five years ago. Since then, I’ve moved into a successful career in Developer Advocacy and spoken at dozens of technical events in the U.S. and worldwide. I think everyone has the ability to deliver stellar conference talks, which is why I took the time to write this post.
Abstract: “We introduce a new OS abstraction—light-weight con-texts (lwCs)—that provides independent units of protection, privilege, and execution state within a process. A process may include several lwCs, each with possibly different views of memory, file descriptors, and access capabilities. lwCs can be used to efficiently implement roll-back (process can return to a prior recorded state),isolated address spaces (lwCs within the process may have different views of memory, e.g., isolating sensitive data from network-facing components or isolating different user sessions), and privilege separation (in-process reference monitors can arbitrate and control access). lwCs can be implemented efficiently: the overhead of a lwC is proportional to the amount of memory exclusive to the lwC; switching lwCs is quicker than switching kernel threads within the same process. We describe the lwC abstraction and API, and an implementation of lwCs within the FreeBSD 11.0 kernel. Finally, we present an evaluation of common usage patterns, including fast roll-back, session isolation, sensitive data isolation, and in-process reference monitoring, using Apache, nginx, PHP,and OpenSSL.”
We’ve hit that point where we are running low on your questions, so if you have any questions rolling around in your head that you’ve not thought of to ask yet… send them in!
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Rusty Stadia | Coder Radio 350
Mar 26, 2019
We debate Rust’s role as a replacement for C, and share our take on the future of gaming with Google's Stadia.
Plus Objective-C's return to grace, Mike’s big bet on .NET, and more!
Links:
The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2019 — The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.
Avalonia: A multi-platform .NET UI framework — Avalonia is a WPF-inspired cross-platform XAML-based UI framework providing a flexible styling system and supporting a wide range of OSs: Windows (.NET Framework, .NET Core), Linux (GTK), MacOS, Android and iOS.
Google’s Stadia looks like an early beta of the future of gaming — “The future of gaming is not a box,” according to Google. “It’s a place.” Just like how humans have built stadiums for sports over hundreds of years, Google believes it’s building a virtual stadium, aptly dubbed Stadia, for the future of games to be played anywhere.
Stadia — Push the envelope of game development with Stadia.
Rust is not a good C replacement | Drew DeVault’s Blog — The kitchen sink approach doesn’t work. Rust will eventually fail to the “jack of all trades, master of none” problem that C++ has. Wise languages designers start small and stay small. Wise systems programmers extend this philosophy to designing entire systems, and Rust is probably not going to be invited. I understand that many people, particularly those already enamored with Rust, won’t agree with much of this article. But now you know why we are still writing C, and hopefully you’ll stop bloody bothering us about it.
Introduction to Python Development at Linux Academy — This course is designed to teach you how to program using Python. We'll cover the building blocks of the language, programming design fundamentals, how to use the standard library, third-party packages, and how to create Python projects. In the end, you should have a grasp of how to program.
Tainted Love | LINUX Unplugged 294
Mar 26, 2019
Why we sometimes go too far with our Linux advocacy, and a few humble strategies to switch people to Linux.
Plus an update to the most important text editor in the world, the new distro causing controversy, and what is a tainted kernel.
Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Ell Marquez, and Neal Gompa.
Links:
Could ‘alcosynth’ provide all the joy of booze – without the dangers? — David Nutt has long been developing a holy grail of molecules – also referred to as “alcarelle” – that will provide the relaxing and socially lubricating qualities of alcohol, but without the hangovers, health issues and the risk of getting paralytic.
Happy 21st, curl — We estimate that there are now roughly 6 billion curl installations world-wide. In phones, computers, TVs, cars, video games etc. With 4 billion internet users, that’s like 1.5 curl installation per Internet connected human on earth.
nano 4.0 has been released — An overlong line is no longer automatically hard-wrapped, smooth scrolling (one line at a time) has become the default, and more!
Malicious updates for ASUS laptops — The trojanized utility was signed with a legitimate certificate and was hosted on the official ASUS server dedicated to updates, and that allowed it to stay undetected for a long time. The criminals even made sure the file size of the malicious utility stayed the same as that of the original one.
SigintOS: A Linux Distro for Signal Intelligence — SigintOS is an Ubuntu based distribution with a number of built in signal intelligence applications for software defined radios such as RTL-SDRs and other TX capable SDRs like the HackRF, bladeRF and USRP radios.
SigintOS — SigintOS; as the name suggests, SIGINT is an improved Linux distribution for Signal Intelligence. This distribution is based on Ubuntu Linux. It has its own software called SigintOS. With this software, many SIGINT operations can be performed via a single graphical interface.
Careers – Linux Academy — Ruby on Rails Dev? Maybe some angular love or willing to learn? Linux Academy is hiring RIGHT NOW
LFNW: T-shirt preorder closes on 3/31 — While we will have some for sale on site during LFNW2019, the only way to guarantee that you get a shirt is to register for the event, and buy an Individual Sponsorship.
Call for Proposals - DebConf19 — The DebConf Content team would like to call for proposals in the DebConf 19 conference, which will take place in Curitiba, Brazil, between July 21th and 28th.
What is a tainted kernel in Linux? — The feature is intended to identify conditions which may make it difficult to properly troubleshoot a kernel problem. For example, the loading of a proprietary module can make kernel debug output unreliable because kernel developers don't have access to the module's source code and therefore cannot determine what the module may have done to the kernel. Likewise, if the kernel had previously experienced an error condition or if a serious hardware error had occurred, the debug information generated by the kernel may not be reliable.
Install Fests - Free Software Foundation — My new idea is that the install fest could allow the devil to hang around, off in a corner of the hall, or the next room. (Actually, a human being wearing sign saying “The Devil,” and maybe a toy mask or horns.) The devil would offer to install nonfree drivers in the user's machine to make more parts of the computer function, explaining to the user that the cost of this is using a nonfree (unjust) program.
How OpenXR could glue virtual reality’s fragmenting market together — “OpenXR since the beginning has had a lot of positive energy and urgency," Trevett continued. “I think people kind of realize everyone can benefit. Obviously it's not going to be magic, but I think it can make a difference, because everyone wins."
Albert Vaca Cintora on Twitter — "KDE Connect has been removed from @GooglePlay for violating their new policy on apps that access SMS [1]. The policy has an explicit exception for companion apps (like KDE Connect), but it was removed anyway and there's no way to talk to Google."
Albert Vaca Cintora on Twitter — "To close this thread, I want to say that KDE Connect finally got approved, and SMS support is back in version 1.12.4, both on the Play Store and F-Droid! Thanks everyone who spread the voice (this thread got half a million impressions on Twitter!) and helped make it happen :D… https://t.co/OTLY5KJdI6"
Google forced into Android browser choice — Now we’ll also do more to ensure that Android phone owners know about the wide choice of browsers and search engines available to download to their phones. This will involve asking users of existing and new Android devices in Europe which browser and search apps they would like to use.
FreeBSD on Cavium ThunderX, looking at NetBSD as an OpenBSD user, taking time-stamped notes in vim, OpenBSD 6.5 has been tagged, FreeBSD and NetBSD in GSoC 2019, SecBSD: an UNIX-like OS for Hackers, and more.
While I don’t remember for how many years I’ve had an interest in CPU architectures that could be an alternative to AMD64, I know pretty well when I started proposing to test 64-bit ARM at work. It was shortly after the disaster named Spectre / Meltdown that I first dug out server-class ARM hardware and asked whether we should get one such server and run some tests with it. While the answer wasn’t a clear “no” it also wasn’t exactly “yes”. I tried again a few times over the course of 2018 and each time I presented some more points why I thought it might be a good thing to test this. But still I wasn’t able to get a positive answer. Finally in January 2019 year I got a definitive answer – and it was “yes, go ahead”! The fact that Amazon had just presented their Graviton ARM Processor may have helped the decision.
I use to use NetBSD quite a lot. From 2.0 to 6.99. But for some reasons, I stopped using it about 2012, in favor of OpenBSD. Reading on the new 8 release, I wanted to see if all the things I didn’t like on NetBSD were gone. Here is a personal Pros / Cons list. No Troll, hopefully. Just trying to be objective.
What I liked (pros)
Things I didn’t like (cons)
Conclusion
So that was it. I didn’t spend more than 30 minutes of it. But I didn’t want to spend more time on it. I did stop using NetBSD because of the need to compile each and every packages ; it was in the early days of pkgin. I also didn’t like the way system maintenance was to be done. OpenBSD’s 6-months release seemed far more easy to manage. I still think NetBSD is a great OS. But I believe you have to spent more time on it than you would have to do with OpenBSD. That said, I’ll keep using my Puffy OS.
I frequently find myself needing to take time-stamped notes. Specifically, I’ll be in a call, meeting, or interview and need to take notes that show how long it’s been since the meeting started. My first thought was that there’s be a plugin to add time stamps, but a quick search didn’t turn anything up. However, I little digging did turn up the fact that vim has the built-in ability to tell time. This means that writing a bit of vimscript to insert a time stamp is pretty easy. After a bit of fiddling, I came up with something that serves my needs, and I decided it might be useful enough to others to be worth sharing.
It’s that time of year again; Theo (deraadt@) has just tagged 6.5-beta. A good reminder for us all run an extra test install and see if your favorite port still works as you expect.
For the 4th year in a row and for the 13th time The NetBSD Foundation will participate in Google Summer of Code 2019! If you are a student and would like to learn more about Google Summer of Code please go to the Google Summer of Code homepage. You can find a list of projects in Google Summer of Code project proposals in the wiki. Do not hesitate to get in touch with us via #netbsd-code IRC channel on Freenode and via NetBSD mailing lists!
SecBSD is an UNIX-like operating system focused on computer security based on OpenBSD. Designed for security testing, hacking and vulnerability assessment, it uses full disk encryption and ProtonVPN + OpenVPN by default. A security BSD enviroment for security researchers, penetration testers, bug hunters and cybersecurity experts. Developed by Dark Intelligence Team for private use and will be public release coming soon.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Linux Gaming Report and Purism Librem 15 | Choose Linux 5
Mar 21, 2019
Jason goes deeper down the rabbit hole by exploring the state of Steam gaming on 9 different Linux distributions. Find out how Fedora compares to Pop!_OS.
Plus, first impressions of Purism’s brand new Librem 15 v4 laptop.
Linux Laptop Battery Optimization Tool TLP 1.2 Released — TLP 1.2 was released today after being in development for more than a year, and it brings support for NVMe, and removable drives like USB and IEEE1394 devices, support for multi queue I/O schedulers (blk-mq), and other significant enhancements.
Suse is once again an independent company — Few companies have changed hands as often as Suse and yet remained strong players in their business. Suse was first acquired by Novell in 2004. Novell was then acquired by Attachmate in 2010, which Micro Focus acquired in 2014. The company then turned Suse into an independent division, only to then announce its sale to EQT in the middle of 2018.
MATE 1.22 released — Wanda the Fish now works properly on HiDPI displays
Albert Vaca Cintora on Twitter — KDE Connect has been removed from @GooglePlay for violating their new policy on apps that access SMS. The policy has an explicit exception for companion apps (like KDE Connect), but it was removed anyway and there's no way to talk to Google
Full-system dynamic tracing on Linux using eBPF and bpftrace — What if you want to trace what happens inside a system call or library call? What if you want to do more than just logging calls, e.g. you want to compile statistics on certain behavior? What if you want to trace multiple processes and correlate data from multiple sources?
In 2019, there's finally a decent answer to that on Linux: bpftrace, based on eBPF technology.
IO Visor Project — The IO Visor Project is an open source project and a community of developers to accelerate the innovation, development, and sharing of virtualized in-kernel IO services for tracing, analytics, monitoring, security and networking functions. It builds on the Linux community to bring open, flexible, distributed, secure and easy to operate technologies that enable any stack to run efficiently on any physical infrastructure.
Their Rules, Your Choice | Coder Radio 349
Mar 18, 2019
We join the fight between Apple and Spotify, and debate the meaning of 'fair play' in the App Store and the browser wars.
Plus some thoughts on the lessons learned from the 737 MAX, an Elastic Beanstalk PSA, and more!
Links:
Microsoft proves the critics right: We’re heading toward a Chrome-only Web | Ars Technica — Last week, Microsoft made a major update to the Web version of its Skype client, bringing HD video calling, call recording, and other features already found on the other clients. And as if to prove a point, the update works only in Edge and Chrome. Firefox, Safari, and even Opera are locked out.
The 737Max and Why Software Engineers Might Want to Pay Attention — What is different here is: the MCAS commands the trim in this condition without notifying the pilots AND to override the input, the pilots must deactivate the system via a switch on a console, NOT by retrimming the aircraft via the yoke, which is a more common way to manage the airplane’s trim.
How a 50-year-old design came back to haunt Boeing with its troubled 737 Max jet - Los Angeles Times — The crisis comes after 50 years of remarkable success in making the 737 a profitable workhorse. Today, the aerospace giant has a massive backlog of more than 4,700 orders for the jetliner and its sales account for nearly a third of Boeing’s profit. But the decision to continue modernizing the jet, rather than starting at some point with a clean design, resulted in engineering challenges that created unforeseen risks.
Trevor Sumner on Twitter: — Some people are calling the 737MAX tragedies a #software failure. Here's my response: It's not a software problem.
Timeline - Time to Play Fair — Apple’s behavior isn’t new. In fact, there are countless times over the years that demonstrate that they don’t play fair.
Addressing Spotify’s Claims - Apple — At its core, the App Store is a safe, secure platform where users can have faith in the apps they discover and the transactions they make. And developers, from first-time engineers to larger companies, can rest assured that everyone is playing by the same set of rules.
Introduction to Python Development at Linux Academy — This course is designed to teach you how to program using Python. We'll cover the building blocks of the language, programming design fundamentals, how to use the standard library, third-party packages, and how to create Python projects. In the end, you should have a grasp of how to program.
AWS Elastic Beanstalk Platform Support Policy — Elastic Beanstalk is retiring these platform versions containing Nginx 1.12 or earlier, which are marked end of life by its supplier. We recommend that you migrate your environments to the latest supported platform version as soon as possible. Here is a complete list of your environments in the us-west-2 Region running on platform versions with a retirement date of March 01, 2020.
TechSNAP Episode 399: Ethics in AI — Machine learning promises to change many industries, but with these changes come dangerous new risks. Join Jim and Wes as they explore some of the surprising ways bias can creep in and the serious consequences of ignoring these problems.
User Error Episode 61: Faith in Microsoft — Maybe it's finally time to cut Microsoft some slack, the pace of technological change, and what a couple of common terms actually mean.
Linux Action News 97
Mar 17, 2019
We try out the latest GNOME 3.32 release, and why it might be the best release ever. New leader candidates for Debian emerge, we experience foundation inception, and NGINX is getting acquired.
Plus Android Q gets an official Desktop Mode, the story behind the new Open Distro for Elasticsearch, and more!
Links:
GNOME 3.32 Released — Version 3.32 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance improvements and new features.
Leaderless Debian — What would happen if Debian were to hold an election and no candidates stepped forward? The Debian project has just found itself in that situation and is trying to figure out what will happen next.
Foundations galore — The merger is supported by 30 corporate and end user members including Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Joyent.
New Red Team Project —
The Linux Foundation has launched the Red Team Project, which incubates open source cybersecurity tools to support cyber range automation, containerized pentesting utilities, binary risk quantification, and standards validation and advancement.
CommunityBridge — The Linux Foundation today announced CommunityBridge – a new platform created to empower open source developers – and the individuals and organizations who support them – to advance sustainability, security, and diversity in open source technology.
NGINX to be acquired — I’m incredibly excited that today we announced NGINX has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by F5.
Open Distro for Elasticsearch — We have therefore decided to partner with others such as Expedia Group and Netflix to create a new open source distribution of Elasticsearch named “Open Distro for Elasticsearch.”
Machine learning promises to change many industries, but with these changes come dangerous new risks. Join Jim and Wes as they explore some of the surprising ways bias can creep in and the serious consequences of ignoring these problems.
Links:
Microsoft’s neo-Nazi sexbot was a great lesson for makers of AI assistants — What started out as an entertaining social experiment—get regular people to talk to a chatbot so it could learn while they, hopefully, had fun—became a nightmare for Tay’s creators. Users soon figured out how to make Tay say awful things. Microsoft took the chatbot offline after less than a day.
How to make a racist AI without really trying | ConceptNet blog — Some people expect that fighting algorithmic racism is going to come with some sort of trade-off. There’s no trade-off here. You can have data that’s better and less racist. You can have data that’s better because it’s less racist. There was never anything “accurate” about the overt racism that word2vec and GloVe learned.
Microsoft warned investors that biased or flawed AI could hurt the company’s image — Notably, this addition comes after a research paper by MIT Media Lab graduate researcher Joy Buolamwini showed in February 2018 that Microsoft’s facial recognition algorithm’s was less accurate for women and people of color. In response, Microsoft updated its facial recognition models, and wrote a blog post about how it was addressing bias in its software.
AI bias: It is the responsibility of humans to ensure fairness — Amazon recently pulled the plug on its experimental AI-powered recruitment engine when it was discovered that the machine learning technology behind it was exhibiting bias against female applicants.
A.I. Could Worsen Health Disparities — A recent study found that some facial recognition programs incorrectly classify less than 1 percent of light-skinned men but more than one-third of dark-skinned women. What happens when we rely on such algorithms to diagnose melanoma on light versus dark skin?
Responsible AI Practices — These questions are far from solved, and in fact are active areas of research and development. Google is committed to making progress in the responsible development of AI and to sharing knowledge, research, tools, datasets, and other resources with the larger community. Below we share some of our current work and recommended practices.
The Ars Technica System Guide, Winter 2019: The one about the servers — The Winter 2019 Ars System Guide has returned to its roots: showing readers three real-world system builds we like at this precise moment in time. Instead of general performance desktops, this time around we're going to focus specifically on building some servers.
Introduction to Python Development at Linux Academy — This course is designed to teach you how to program using Python. We'll cover the building blocks of the language, programming design fundamentals, how to use the standard library, third-party packages, and how to create Python projects. In the end, you should have a grasp of how to program.
Faith in Microsoft | User Error 61
Mar 15, 2019
Maybe it's finally time to cut Microsoft some slack, the pace of technological change, and what a couple of common terms actually mean.
Plus Joe fails to convince the others about his favourite movie, and one of the deepest questions that you can ask.
00:00:12 Is it time to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt on their Linux love? 00:08:34 #AskError: If you could only watch one film for the rest of your life, what would it be? 00:12:38 Is technological change really accelerating? 00:24:27 #AskError: What's the difference between UX and UI and why do you get so annoyed when people confuse them or lump them together? 00:28:07 Why don't you believe in God or follow a religion?
Microkernel Failure | BSD Now 289
Mar 14, 2019
A kernel of failure, IPv6 fragmentation vulnerability in OpenBSD’s pf, a guide to the terminal, using a Yubikey for SSH public key authentication, FreeBSD desktop series, and more.
Today in Tedium: In the early 1990s, we had no idea where the computer industry was going, what the next generation would look like, or even what the driving factor would be. All the developers back then knew is that the operating systems available in server rooms or on desktop computers simply weren’t good enough, and that the next generation needed to be better—a lot better. This was easier said than done, but this problem for some reason seemed to rack the brains of one company more than any other: IBM. Throughout the decade, the company was associated with more overwrought thinking about operating systems than any other, with little to show for it in the end. The problem? It might have gotten caught up in kernel madness. Today’s Tedium explains IBM’s odd operating system fixation, and the belly flops it created.
Packet Filter is OpenBSD’s service for filtering network traffic and performing Network Address Translation. Packet Filter is also capable of normalizing and conditioning TCP/IP traffic, as well as providing bandwidth control and packet prioritization. Packet Filter has been a part of the GENERIC kernel since OpenBSD 5.0.Because other BSD variants import part of OpenBSD code, Packet Filter is also shipped with at least the following distributions that are affected in a lesser extent: FreeBSD, pfSense, OPNSense, Solaris.
Note that other distributions may also contain Packet Filter but due to the imported version they might not be vulnerable. This advisory covers the latest OpenBSD’s Packet Filter. For specific details about other distributions, please refer to the advisory of the affected product.
TL;DR: Here are my dotfiles. Use them and have fun.
GUIs are bloatware. I’ve said it before. However, rather than just complaining about IDEs I’d like to provide an understandable guide to a much better alternative: the terminal. IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment. This might be an accurate term, but when it comes to a real integrated development environment, the terminal is a lot better. In this post, I’ll walk you through everything you need to start making your terminal a complete development environment: how to edit text efficiently, configure its appearance, run and combine a myriad of programs, and dynamically create, resize and close tabs and windows.
SSH is an awesome tool. Logging into other machines securely is so pervasive to us sysadmins nowadays that few of us think about what’s going on underneath. Even more so once you start using the more advanced features such as the ssh-agent, agent-forwarding and ProxyJump. When doing so, care must be taken in order to not compromise one’s logins or ssh keys. You might have heard of Yubikeys. These are USB authentication devices that support several different modes: they can be used for OTP (One Time Password) authentication, they can store OpenPGP keys, be a 2-factor authentication token and they can act as a SmartCard. In OpenBSD, you can use them for Login (with login_yubikey(8)) with OTP since 2012, and there are many descriptions available(1) how to set this up.
Announcing the release of sway 1.0 | Drew DeVault’s Blog — 1,315 days after I started the sway project, it’s finally time for sway 1.0! I had no idea at the time how much work I was in for, or how many talented people would join and support the project with me. In order to complete this project, we have had to rewrite the entire Linux desktop nearly from scratch. Nearly 300 people worked together, together writing over 9,000 commits and almost 100,000 lines of code, to bring you this release.
Winding down my Debian involvement — When I joined Debian, I was still studying, i.e. I had luxurious amounts of spare time. Now, over 5 years of full time work later, my day job taught me a lot, both about what works in large software engineering projects and how I personally like my computer systems. I am very conscious of how I spend the little spare time that I have these days.
The following sections each deal with what I consider a major pain point, in no particular order. Some of them influence each other—for example, if changes worked better, we could have a chance at transitioning packages to be more easily machine readable.
A (Partial) Defense of Debian | The Changelog — I was sad to read on his blog that Michael Stapelberg is winding down his Debian involvement. In his post, he outlined some critiques of Debian. In his post, I want to acknowledge that he is on point with some of them, but also push back on others.
Leaderless Debian - LWN.net — One of the traditional rites of the (northern hemisphere) spring is the election for the Debian project leader. Over a six-week period, interested candidates put their names forward, describe their vision for the project as a whole, answer questions from Debian developers, then wait and watch while the votes come in. But what would happen if Debian were to hold an election and no candidates stepped forward? The Debian project has just found itself in that situation and is trying to figure out what will happen next.
Chris Fisher on Twitter — Went hands on with @Azure Spehere dev kits. I would not be surprised if @linuxacademyCOM students start asking for courses in this stuff. They keep the #Linux based OS up to date for 10 years, no subscription.
System76 on Twitter — Jupiter Broadcasting meetup photo! It’s always a guaranteed great time with @ChrisLAS and @jupitersignal!
Trying out software? - Feedback from Ken — I'm intrigued by and curious about much of the software you mention regularly. I'm tempted to try some of it, but I don't have a good sense of how easy it is to delete or clean off installed programs in a way that ensures a stable system without a lot of left over junk.
Can you give some insight about how you usually handle this. I'd rather not have to nuke-and-pave the OS over and over to insure a stable system.
Home automation tips from Paul — I have only recently started to use node-red on my ubuntu box at home. Connected it easily to Alexa and also my Broadlink IR/RF blaster. But I am hardly scraping the surface.
Dependency Dangers | Coder Radio 348
Mar 11, 2019
Mike has salvaged a success story from the dumpster fire of the Google+ shutdown, and Wes shares his grief about brittle and repetitive unit tests.
Plus Mike reviews the System76 Darter Pro, our tool of the week, and some fantastic audience feedback.
Links:
TechSNAP Episode 388: The One About eBPF — eBPF is a technology that you’re going to be hearing more and more about. It powers low-overhead custom analysis tools, handles network security in a containerized world, and powers tools you use every day.
Feedback from Tom — I don't think people need to worry about Google's/Chrome's dominance the way we did about IE6. It's not just that Chrome is cross-platform and open-source, and (with Chrome Web Apps well behind us) sticks to the standards in a way that IE did not. Practically speaking, we must keep in mind that the browser is locked down on iOS in a way that didn't exist (and wouldn't have been tolerated) back then. This means that no matter how popular Chrome becomes, an importnat portion of mobile users must use Apple's browser (engine). But also, now matter how much effort, money Google puts into their web initiatives and in spite of their browser share dominance, they can lose big as they did with web components and webasm. That's the beauty of a standards based platform.
Inside Clojure: Journal 2019.10 — Some tests I wrote were posted on Reddit this week, which was unexpected. The one thing in there that I think is worth thinking about is how to write tests that validate returns while also being open to accretion.
QuickCheck: Automatic testing of Haskell programs — QuickCheck is a library for random testing of program properties. The programmer provides a specification of the program, in the form of properties which functions should satisfy, and QuickCheck then tests that the properties hold in a large number of randomly generated cases.
Darter Pro Review - dominickm.com — My continuing adventures in Linux hardware and working on Linux as a software developer has lead me to check out the System 76 Darter Pro.
Google+ API Shutdown — Legacy Google+ APIs have been shut down as of March 7, 2019.
code-server: Run VS Code on a remote server. — Code on your Chromebook, tablet, and laptop with a consistent dev environment, take advantage of large cloud servers to speed up tests, compilations, downloads, and
preserve battery life when you're on the go.
Linux Action News 96
Mar 10, 2019
Free Software does what commercial can't this week, getting a Debian desktop on more Android devices gets closer, and PureOS promises Convergence but is there more beneath the surface?
Plus Microsoft open sources Windows Calculator, and a quick recap of SCaLE 17x.
Links:
Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Released — OTA-8 is primarily a stability improvement release as we continue to work on using upstream technologies in Ubuntu Touch, increasing our project output.
Fedora Challenge And NextCloudPi | Choose Linux 4
Mar 07, 2019
The distro challenges roll on with Fedora Workstation. Jason shares his thoughts on getting it up and running, feeling at home with vanilla Gnome, and why Fedora may be perfect place for his Magic the Gathering addiction.
Plus, the Raspberry Pi journey continues with NextCloudPi. Is creating a DropBox substitute really this easy?
Links:
The Fedora 29 Linux Community Challenge — By popular demand, we're moving into March by exploring another community-powered distro with a corporate shadow (in Red Hat), and one that people have passionately encouraged me to try: Fedora Workstation.
Fedora Workstation — Fedora Workstation is a reliable, user-friendly, and powerful operating system for your laptop or desktop computer. It supports a wide range of developers, from hobbyists and students to professionals in corporate environments.
Create A Personal Home Backup Server With Raspberry Pi 3 — NextCloudPi is a standalone, self-contained OS that runs on your Raspberry Pi. It lets you sync and manually back up files from practically any device (including your phone and its camera instantly), and serve files to those devices.
NextCloudPi — NextCloudPi is a Nextcloud instance that is preinstalled and preconfigured, and includes a management interface with all the tools you need to self host your private data in a single package.
This is an official open source community project that aims at making it easier for everyone to have control over their own data.
Net Scan — Network scanning and discovery along with port scanner.
Wonder Shaper — Wonder Shaper is a script that allow the user to limit the bandwidth of one or more network adapters. It does so by using iproute's tc command, but greatly simplifies its operation.
Turing Complete Sed | BSD Now 288
Mar 07, 2019
Software will never fix Spectre-type bugs, a proof that sed is Turing complete, managed jails using Bastille, new version of netdata, using grep with /dev/null, using GMail with mutt, and more.
Researchers from Google investigating the scope and impact of the Spectre attack have published a paper asserting that Spectre-like vulnerabilities are likely to be a continued feature of processors and, further, that software-based techniques for protecting against them will impose a high performance cost. And whatever the cost, the researchers continue, the software will be inadequate—some Spectre flaws don’t appear to have any effective software-based defense. As such, Spectre is going to be a continued feature of the computing landscape, with no straightforward resolution. The discovery and development of the Meltdown and Spectre attacks was undoubtedly the big security story of 2018. First revealed last January, new variants and related discoveries were made throughout the rest of the year. Both attacks rely on discrepancies between the theoretical architectural behavior of a processor—the documented behavior that programmers depend on and write their programs against—and the real behavior of implementations. Specifically, modern processors all perform speculative execution; they make assumptions about, for example, a value being read from memory or whether an if condition is true or false, and they allow their execution to run ahead based on these assumptions. If the assumptions are correct, the speculated results are kept; if it isn’t, the speculated results are discarded and the processor redoes the calculation. Speculative execution is not an architectural feature of the processor; it’s a feature of implementations, and so it’s supposed to be entirely invisible to running programs. When the processor discards the bad speculation, it should be as if the speculation never even happened.
Many people are surprised when they hear that sed is Turing complete. How come a text filtering program is Turing complete, they wonder. Turns out sed is a tiny assembly language that has a comparison operation, a branching operation and a temporary buffer. These operations make sed Turing complete. I first learned about this from Christophe Blaess. His proof is by construction – he wrote a Turing machine in sed (download turing.sed). As any programming language that can implement a Turing machine is Turing complete we must conclude that sed is also Turing complete. Christophe offers his own introduction to Turing machines and a description of how his sed implementation works in his article Implementation of a Turing Machine as a sed Script.
Christophe isn’t the first person to realize that sed is almost a general purpose programming language. People have written tetris, sokoban and many other programs in sed. Take a look at these:
Bastille helps you quickly create and manage FreeBSD Jails. Jails are extremely lightweight containers that provide a full-featured UNIX-like operating system inside. These containers can be used for software development, rapid testing, and secure production Internet services. Bastille provides an interface to create, manage and destroy these secure virtualized environments.
Netdata is distributed, real-time, performance and health monitoring for systems and applications. It is a highly optimized monitoring agent you install on all your systems and containers. Netdata provides unparalleled insights, in real-time, of everything happening on the systems it runs (including web servers, databases, applications), using highly interactive web dashboards. It can run autonomously, without any third party components, or it can be integrated to existing monitoring tool chains (Prometheus, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Kafka, Grafana, etc). Netdata is fast and efficient, designed to permanently run on all systems (physical & virtual servers, containers, IoT devices), without disrupting their core function.
Patch release 1.12.1 contains 22 bug fixes and 8 improvements.
The peculiar presence of /dev/null here is an old Unix trick that is designed to force grep to always print out file names, even if your find only matches one file, by always insuring that grep has at least two files as arguments. You can wind up wanting to do the same thing with a direct use of grep if you’re not certain how many files your wildcard may match.
I recently switched to using mutt for email and while setting up mutt to use imap is pretty straightforward, this tutorial will also document some advanced concepts such as encrypting your account password and sending emails from a different From address. This tutorial assumes that you have some familiarity with using mutt and have installed it with sidebar support (sudo apt-get install mutt-patched for the ubuntu folks) and are comfortable with editing your muttrc. If you would just like to skip to the end, my mutt configuration file can be found here.
QemuUserEmulation - Debian Wiki — This page describes how to setup and use QEMU user emulation in a "transparent" fashion, allowing execution of non-native target executables just like native ones.
Firefox 67: automatically unload unused tabs to improve memory — If things go as planned, Firefox 67 will introduce a new feature to unload unused tabs to improve memory. The initial bug report dates back eight years but work on the feature began in earnest just a short while ago.
Chrome OS 74 dev channel brings Linux app improvements (Crostini) — There’s now support for audio playback when using Linux apps. Up until now if you wanted to use Linux software to watch videos, listen to music, or do anything else that requires sound, you were out of luck.
GNOME 3.32 Lands Long-Awaited Fractional Scaling Support — Fractional scaling allows for greater control over the UI scaling than the previous integer based scaling of 2, 3, etc, to instead support fractions like 3/2 (1.5) increase in user-interfaces. Fractional scaling is primarily to improve the user experience with modern HiDPI displays.
Canonical adds containerd to Ubuntu Kubernetes — Enabling Kubernetes to drive containerd directly reduces the number of moving parts, reduces latency in pod startup times, and improves CPU and memory usage on every node in the cluster.
Dotfile madness — To those of you reading this: I beg you. Avoid creating files or directories of any kind in your user's $HOME directory in order to store your configuration or data. This practice is bizarre at best and it is time to end it. I am sorry to say that many (if not most) programs are guilty of doing this while there are significantly better places that can be used for storing per-user program data.
More home directory pollution — I looked in my home directory and now see (in addition to 26 dot-files) directories named go, snap and systems.
Steve Reaver on Twitter — There is so much junk in my home dir I had to ls it in column format. I've just about given up using ~ because of all the crap that application put in there!
Why do hidden files in Unix begin with a dot? — The answer is very simple, because it's extremely easy to test if a file is hidden or not by simply testing the first character of the filename.
Yet Another Dotfiles Manager — When you live in a command line, configurations are a deeply personal thing. They are often crafted over years of experience, battles lost, lessons learned, advice followed, and ingenuity rewarded. When you are away from your own configurations, you are an orphaned refugee in unfamiliar and hostile surroundings. You feel clumsy and out of sorts. You are filled with a sense of longing to be back in a place you know. A place you built. A place where all the short-cuts have been worn bare by your own travels. A place you proudly call… $HOME.
Lyft to spend $300 million on Amazon Web Services by 2022 — Notably, Lyft said that if its usage of Amazon's cloud doesn't hit or exceed that $300 million threshold, it'll have to pay the difference. Lyft committed to spending at least $80 million in each of the three years of the deal, with the stipulation that it will spend $300 million in aggregate overall
Flowblade — Flowblade is a multitrack non-linear video editor released under GPL3 license. From beginners to masters, Flowblade helps make your vision a reality of image and sound.
Shotcut — Shotcut is a free, open source, cross-platform video editor for Windows, Mac and Linux. Major features include support for a wide range of formats; no import required meaning native timeline editing; Blackmagic Design support for input and preview monitoring; and resolution support to 4k.
Rusty Rubies | Coder Radio 347
Mar 05, 2019
Mike breaks down what it takes to build a proper iOS build server, and leaves the familiar shallows of Debian for the open waters of openSUSE.
Plus Wes’ reluctant ruby adventures and our pick to ease your javascript packaging woes.
Special Guest: Wes Payne.
Links:
rbenv: Groom your app’s Ruby environment — Use rbenv to pick a Ruby version for your application and guarantee that your development environment matches production. Put rbenv to work with Bundler for painless Ruby upgrades and bulletproof deployments.
Serverless Feedback from TomEnom — One thing you left out of your definition of serverless (IMO) that I find important is that it scales to zero. So if your lambda/function is not being used it incurs zero cost. I guess you could say that that is where serverless becomes literal.
Install openSUSE on Digital Ocean — Unfortunately, Digital does not at present have an option for an openSUSE image. That doesn’t mean that you can’t use openSUSE on Digital Ocean, but it is going to be a little more work than most common Linux distributions.
What is Pika? — Pika's mission is to make modern JavaScript more accessible by making it easier to find, publish, install, and use modern packages on npm.
Introducing: pika/pack — If you’ve recently published a package to npm, you know how much work goes into a modern build process. Transpile JavaScript, compile TypeScript, convert ES Module syntax (ESM) to Common.js, configure your package.json manifest… and that’s just the basics.
We sift Mobile World Congress to find just the best and most relevant stories, and discuss the Thunderclap vulnerability.
Plus we say goodbye to Koroa, find a reason to checkout GRUB nightlies, and how Android aims to kill passwords for good.
Links:
LineageOS 16.0 released — We feel that the 16.0 branch has reached feature parity with 15.1 and is ready for initial release. With 16.0 being the most recent and most actively-developed branch, on March 1st, 2019 it will begin receiving builds nightly and 15.1 will be moved to weekly builds.
KaiOS now with 85M feature phones shipped — With 85 million phones now shipped in more than 100 markets with handset brands like Nokia and India’s Jio, KaiOS now has an expanded partnership to put more Google
RISC-V Support Added To The GRUB Bootloader — As working towards this year's GRUB 2.04 update, we've known they have been on the finishing stretch for merging RISC-V support and as of this morning that milestone has been crossed.
Thunderclap and Linux — The authors built a "fake" network card2 and performed various DMA attacks and were able to temper with memory regions that their network card should have no access to whatsoever.
RIP Korora — "Our @kororaproject website has been redirected to @fedora as we do not have any new releases coming. Thank you for your support over the last 13 odd years."
How to deal with Internet drama in the Linux world, the rise of live streaming, and disturbing people with messages and calls.
Plus preparing for end times, and the best moment of Joe's life.
00:00:25 #AskError: What's your biggest claim to fame? 00:03:47 Internet drama and Linux 00:15:31 #AskError: If you send someone a message and it disturbs them, whose fault is it? 00:22:46 On demand vs live streaming 00:32:25 #AskError: Should you prepare for the apocalypse?
Proper Password Procedures | TechSNAP 398
Feb 28, 2019
We reveal the shady password practices that are all too common at many utility providers, and hash out why salts are essential to proper password storage.
Plus the benefits of passphrases, and what you can do to keep your local providers on the up and up.
Links:
Plain wrong: Millions of utility customers’ passwords stored in plain text | Ars Technica — In September of 2018, an anonymous independent security researcher (who we'll call X) noticed that their power company's website was offering to email—not reset!—lost account passwords to forgetful users. Startled, X fed the online form the utility account number and the last four phone number digits it was asking for. Sure enough, a few minutes later the account password, in plain text, was sitting in X's inbox.
The LinkedIn Hack: Understanding Why It Was So Easy to Crack the Passwords | — LinkedIn stated that after the initial 2012 breach, they added enhanced protection, most likely adding the “salt” functionality to their passwords. However, if you have not changed your password since 2012, you do not have the added protection of a salted password hash. You may be asking yourself–what on earth are hashing and salting and how does this all work?
How Developers got Password Security so Wrong — As time has gone on; developers have continued to store passwords insecurely, and users have continued to set them weakly. Despite this, no viable alternative has been created for password security.
Adding Salt to Hashing: A Better Way to Store Passwords — A salt is added to the hashing process to force their uniqueness, increase their complexity without increasing user requirements, and to mitigate password attacks like rainbow tables.
Why Do Developers Get Password Storage Wrong? A Qualitative Usability Study — We were interested in exploring two particular aspects: Firstly, do developers get things wrong because they do not think about security and thus do not include security features (but could if they wanted to)? Or do they write insecure code because the complexity of the task is too great for them? Secondly, a common suggestion to increase security is to offer secure defaults.
OWASP Password Storage Cheatsheet — This article provides guidance on properly storing passwords, secret question responses, and similar credential information.
Secure Salted Password Hashing - How to do it Properly — If you're a web developer, you've probably had to make a user account system. The most important aspect of a user account system is how user passwords are protected. User account databases are hacked frequently, so you absolutely must do something to protect your users' passwords if your website is ever breached. The best way to protect passwords is to employ salted password hashing. This page will explain why it's done the way it is.
Plain Text Offenders — We’re tired of websites abusing our trust and storing our passwords in plain text, exposing us to danger. Here we put websites we believe to be practicing this to shame.
On the Security of Password Managers - Schneier on Security — There's new research on the security of password managers, specifically 1Password, Dashlane, KeePass, and Lastpass. This work specifically looks at password leakage on the host computer. That is, does the password manager accidentally leave plaintext copies of the password lying around memory?
LinuxFest Northwest 2019 — It's the 20th anniversary of LinuxFest Northwest! Come join your favorite Jupiter Broadcasting hosts at the Pacific Northwest's premier Linux event.
SCALE 17x — The 17th annual Southern California Linux Expo – will take place on March. 7-10, 2019, at the Pasadena Convention Center. SCaLE 17x expects to host 150 exhibitors this year, along with nearly 130 sessions, tutorials and special events.
Jupiter Broadcasting Meetups — The best place to find out when Jupiter Broadcasting has a meetup near you! Also stay tuned for upcoming virtual study groups.
rc.d in NetBSD | BSD Now 287
Feb 28, 2019
Design and Implementation of NetBSD’s rc.d system, first impressions of Project Trident 18.12, PXE booting a FreeBSD disk image, middle mouse button pasting, NetBSD gains hardware accelerated virtualization, and more.
In this paper I cover the design and implementation of the rc.d system start-up mechanism in NetBSD 1.5, which replaced the monolithic /etc/rc start-up file inherited from 4.4BSD. Topics covered include a history of various UNIX start-up mechanisms (including NetBSD prior to 1.5), design considerations that evolved over six years of discussions, implementation details, an examination of the human issues that occurred during the design and implementation, as well as future directions for the system.
Introduction
NetBSD recently converted from the traditional 4.4BSD monolithic /etc/rc start-up script to an /etc/rc.d mechanism, where there is a separate script to manage each service or daemon, and these scripts are executed in a specific order at system boot. This paper covers the motivation, design and implementation of the rc.d system; from the history of what NetBSD had before to the system that NetBSD 1.5 shipped with in December 2000, as well as future directions. The changes were contentious and generated some of the liveliest discussions about any feature change ever made in NetBSD. Parts of those discussions will be covered to provide insight into some of the design and implementation decisions.
History
There is great diversity in the system start-up mechanisms used by various UNIX variants. A few of the more pertinent schemes are detailed below. As NetBSD is derived from 4.4BSD, it follows that a description of the latter’s method is relevant. Solaris’ start-up method is also detailed, as it is the most common System V UNIX variant.
Project Trident (hereafter referred to as Trident) is a desktop operating system based on TrueOS. Trident takes the rolling base platform of TrueOS, which is in turn based on FreeBSD’s development branch, and combines it with the Lumina desktop environment.
+Installing
The debut release of Trident is available as a 4.1GB download that can be burned to a disc or transferred to a USB thumb drive. Booting from the Trident media brings up a graphical interface and automatically launches the project’s system installer. Down the left side of the display there are buttons we can click to show hardware information and configuration options. These buttons let us know if our wireless card and video card are compatible with Trident and give us a chance to change our preferred language and keyboard layout. At the bottom of the screen we find buttons that will open a terminal or shutdown the computer.
Early impressions
Trident boots to a graphical login screen where we can sign into the Lumina desktop or a minimal Fluxbox session. Lumina, by default, uses Fluxbox as its window manager. The Lumina desktop places its panel along the bottom of the screen and an application menu sits in the bottom-left corner. On the desktop we find icons for opening the software manager, launching the Falkon web browser, running the VLC media player, opening the Control Panel and adjusting the Lumina theme. The application menu has an unusual and compact layout. The menu shows just a search box and buttons for browsing applications, opening a file manager, accessing desktop settings and signing out. To see what applications are available we can click the Browse Applications entry, which opens a window in the menu where we can scroll through installed programs. This is a bit awkward since the display window is small and only shows a few items at a time. Early on I found it is possible to swap out the default “Start menu” with an alternative “Application menu” through the Panels configuration tool. This alternative menu offers a classic tree-style application menu. I found the latter menu easier to navigate as it expands to show all the applications in a selected category.
Conclusions
I have a lot of mixed feelings and impressions when it comes to Trident. On the one hand, the operating system has some great technology under the hook. It has cutting edge packages from the FreeBSD ecosystem, we have easy access to ZFS, boot environments, and lots of open source packages. Hardware support, at least on my physical workstation, was solid and the Lumina desktop is flexible.
I had to set up a regression and network performance lab. This lab will be managed by a Jenkins, but the first step is to understand how to boot a FreeBSD disk by PXE. This article explains a simple way of doing it. For information, all these steps were done using 2 PC Engines APU2 (upgraded with latest BIOS for iPXE support), so it’s a headless (serial port only, this can be IPMI SoL with different hardware) .
THE BIG PICTURE
Before explaining all steps and command line, here is the full big picture of the final process.
In my entry about how touchpads are not mice, I mused that one of the things I should do on my laptop was insure that I had a keyboard binding for paste, since middle mouse button is one of the harder multi-finger gestures to land on a touchpad. Kurt Mosiejczuk recently left a comment there where they said: Shift-Insert is a keyboard equivalent for paste that is in default xterm (at least OpenBSD xterm, and putty on Windows too). I use that most of the time now as it seems less… trigger-happy than right click paste. This sparked some thoughts, because I can’t imagine giving up middle mouse paste if I have a real choice. I had earlier seen shift-insert mentioned in other commentary on my entry and so have tried a bit to use it on my laptop, and it hasn’t really felt great even there; on my desktops, it’s even less appealing (I tried shift-insert out there to confirm that it did work in my set of wacky X resources). In thinking about why this is, I came to the obvious realization about why all of this is so. I like middle mouse button paste in normal usage because it’s so convenient, because almost all of the time my hand is already on the mouse. And the reason my hand is already on the mouse is because I’ve just used the mouse to shift focus to the window I want to paste into. Even on my laptop, my right hand is usually away from the keyboard as I move the mouse pointer on the touchpad, making shift-Insert at least somewhat awkward.
NVMM provides hardware-accelerated virtualization support for NetBSD. It is made of an ~MI frontend, to which MD backends can be plugged. A virtualization API is shipped via libnvmm, that allows to easily create and manage virtual machines via NVMM. Two additional components are shipped as demonstrators, toyvirt and smallkern: the former is a toy virtualizer, that executes in a VM the 64bit ELF binary given as argument, the latter is an example of such binary.
Open Broadcaster Software | New Ways to Support OBS Development — It’s amazing to think that the first version of OBS was publicly released over six years ago. What started out as a small side project by Hugh “Jim” Bailey to make a free and open source program to stream StarCraft 2 has grown into a powerful force in the streaming and video production industry. Hundreds of thousands of people use OBS Studio every day not just for video gaming, but also for broadcasting everything from conferences to sports competitions to school announcements. It’s a tool that can be used freely by anyone, from large studios with big budget productions to individuals who just want to engage with a community online.
Available Now: New GeForce-Optimized OBS — We have collaborated with OBS, the industry-leading streaming application, to help them release a new version with improved support for NVIDIA GPUs. The new OBS Studio, version 23.0, reduces the FPS impact of streaming by up to 66% compared to the previous version, meaning higher FPS for your games.
What’s Free at Linux Academy — March 2019 - Linux Academy Blog — Each month, we will kick off our community content with a live study group, allowing members of the Linux Academy community to come together and share their insights in order to learn from one another.
LiNUX Courses - Linux Operating System Fundamentals — Kenny first encountered Solaris UNIX while I was in the military, and found out about Linux through the grapevine. He has worked with Linux in local government, fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, and by providing training. I have received Linux certifications from LPI, CompTIA, and Red Hat. Kenny has been working with Linux for nearly two decades and is passionate about sharing his knowledge with others about the system, and strives to learn more about the operating system every day.
Martin Wimpress on Twitter — This week I am working on @ubuntumate 18.04.2 images for the @RaspberryPi models 2 and 3/3+
Nothing exciting to report just yet, build system is configured and the root file system is being generated. Next up is adding the kernel and boot loader.
Python Wheels for the Raspberry Pi — piwheels is a Python package repository providing Arm platform wheels (pre-compiled binary Python packages) specifically for the Raspberry Pi, making pip installations much faster.
StableReleaseUpdates - Ubuntu Wiki — Once an Ubuntu release has been completed and published, updates for it are only released under certain circumstances, and must follow a special procedure called a "stable release update" or SRU.
Awesome Home Assistant — Awesome Home Assistant is a curated list of awesome Home Assistant resources.
Home Assistant — Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.
openHAB — a vendor and technology agnostic open source automation software for your home.
Domoticz — Domoticz is a Home Automation system design to control various devices and receive input from various sensors.
IronicBadger: Home Assistant configuration files — This repository contains all configuration used to configure my home automation setup using Home Assistant. This is a living and breathing repository and as such is subject to change.
Linux Action Show special about Home Assistant — Our founder Paulus Schoutsen is interviewed by Chris Fisher for a Linux Action Show special about home automation, Hass.io and the new Home Assistant podcast.
Podcast Generator — Podcast Generator is an open source Content Management System written in PHP and specifically designed for podcast publishing. It provides the user with the tools to easily manage all of the aspects related to the publication of a podcast, from the upload of episodes to its submission to the iTunes store.
Serverless Squabbles | Coder Radio 346
Feb 26, 2019
The three of us debate when to go full serverless, and if ditching servers is worth the cost.
Plus the battle against the Cult of Swift gains new allies.
Special Guest: Wes Payne.
Links:
Marco Arment on Twitter — Add up all of the time you’ve spent learning Swift from scratch, accommodating its strictness, fighting its buggy tools, migrating your code through language changes, and re-learning APIs and conventions as they’ve changed over the last 5 years.
I’ve spent zero time doing that.
A Swift Takes Flight on Windows — I have finally managed to get the compiler, the support libraries, the runtime, standard library, libdispatch, and now, Foundation to build and run on Windows!
Linux Academy - Full Stack Ruby on Rails Developer (Remote) — Your primary focus will be development of all server-side logic, definition and maintenance of the central database, and ensuring high performance and responsiveness to requests from the front-end.
What is Serverless? — Serverless computing (or serverless for short), is an execution model where the cloud provider (AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud) is responsible for executing a piece of code by dynamically allocating the resources.
Serverless Architectures - Martin Fowler — Serverless architectures are application designs that incorporate third-party “Backend as a Service” (BaaS) services, and/or that include custom code run in managed, ephemeral containers on a “Functions as a Service” (FaaS) platform.
Serverless Architectures at AWS — A serverless architecture is a way to build and run applications and services without having to manage infrastructure.
Linux Action News 94
Feb 24, 2019
Linus pops another hype bubble, we go hands on with the new OnionShare, and some insights into Redis labs changing its license... Again.
And why KDE joining the Matrix, along with others might be establishing a new open source standard.
Arm unveils new Neoverse chips for data centers — Arm claims that the design provides as much as 2.5 times more processing power for certain server workloads than the previous Cortex-A72 architecture.
Wine Developers Release Hangover Alpha — Hangover 0.4 is the first (alpha) release from this project for running x86/x86_64 Windows programs now on 64-bit ARM Linux distributions.
Adding glue to a desktop environment, flashing the BIOS on a PC Engine, revive a Cisco IDS into a capable OpenBSD computer, An OpenBSD WindowMaker desktop, RealTime data compression, the love for pipes, and more.
In this article we will put some light on a lot of tools used in the world of Unix desktop environment customization, particularly regarding wmctrl, wmutils, xev, xtruss, xwininfo, xprop, xdotools, xdo, sxhkd, xbindkeys, speckeysd, xchainkeys, alttab, triggerhappy, gTile, gidmgr, keynav, and more. If those don’t make sense then this article will help. Let’s hope this can open your mind to new possibilities. With that in mind we can wonder if what’s actually needed from a window manager, presentation and operation, can be split up and complemented with other tools. We can also start thinking laterally, the communication and interaction between the different components of the environment. We have the freedom to do so because the X protocol is transparent and components usually implement many standards for interfacing between windows. It’s like gluing parts together to create a desktop environment.
The tools we’ll talk about fall into one of those categories:
I absolutely love the PC Engines APU devices. I use them for testing HardenedBSD experimental features in more constrained 64-bit environments and firewalls. Their USB and mSATA ports have a few quirks, and I bumped up against a major quirk that required flashing a different BIOS as a workaround. This article details the hacky way in which I went about doing that. What prompted this article is that something in either the CAM or GEOM layer in FreeBSD 11.2 caused the mSATA to hang, preventing file writes. OPNsense 18.7 uses FreeBSD 11.1 whereas the recently-released OPNsense 19.1 uses HardenedBSD 11.2 (based on FreeBSD 11.2). I reached out to PC Engines directly, and they let me know that the issue is a known BIOS issue. Flashing the “legacy” BIOS series would provide me with a working system. It also just so happens that a new “legacy” BIOS version was just released which turns on ECC mode for the RAM. So, I get a working OPNsense install AND ECC RAM! I’ll have one bird for dinner, the other for dessert. Though I’m using an APU4, these instructions should work for the other APU devices. The BIOS ROM download URLs should be changed to reflect the device you’re targeting along with the BIOS version you wish to deploy. SPECIAL NOTE: There be dragons! I’m primarily writing this article to document the procedure for my own purposes. My memory tends to be pretty faulty these days. So, if something goes wrong, please do not hold me responsible. You’re the one at the keyboard. ;) VERY SPECIAL NOTE: We’ll use the mSATA drive for swap space, just in case. Should the swap space be used, it will destroy whatever is on the disk.
Even though Cisco equipment is very capable, it tends to become End-of-Life before you can say “planned obsolescence”. Websites become bigger, bandwidths increase, and as a side effect of those “improvements”, routers, firewalls, and in this case, intrusion prevention systems get old quicker and quicker. Apparently, this was also the case for the Cisco IDS-4215 Intrusion Detection Sensor that I was given a few months ago. I’m not too proud to admit that at first, I didn’t care about the machine itself, but rather about the add-on PCI network card with 4 Fast Ethernet interfaces. The sensor has obviously seen better days, as it had a broken front panel and needed some cleaning, but upon a closer inspection under the hood (which is held closed by the 4 screws on top), this IDS consists of an embedded Celeron PC with two onboard Ethernet cards, a 2.5″ IDE hard disk, a CF card, and 2 PCI expansion slots (more on them later). Oh, and don’t forget the nasty server-grade fan, which pushed very little air for the noise it was making.
Since I started using *N?X, I’ve regularly used WindowMaker. I’ve always liked the look and feel, the dock system and the dockapps. It may look a bit oldish nowadays. And that’s enough to try to change this. So here it is, a 2019 flavored WindowMaker Desktop, running on OpenBSD 6.4/amd64. This configuration uses the Nord color-scheme, the Adapta-Nokto-Eta GTK theme and the Moblin Unofficial Icons icon set. I did remove applications icons. I just don’t need them on the bottom of the screen as I heavily use “F11” to pop-up the windows list. To be able to do that and keep the dockapps, I tweaked my ~/GNUstep/Defaults/WMWindowAttributes and created a ~/GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Themes/Nord.themed/style. And here it is, the NeXT OpenBSD Desktop!
In a previous episode, we’ve seen that it is possible to create opaque types. However, creation and destruction of such type must be delegated to some dedicated functions, which themselves rely on dynamic allocation mechanisms. Sometimes, it can be convenient to bypass the heap, and all its malloc() / free() shenanigans. Pushing a structure onto the stack, or within thread-local storage, are natural capabilities offered by a normal struct. It can be desirable at times. The previously described opaque type is so secret that it has no size, hence is not suitable for such scenario. Fortunately, static opaque types are possible. The main idea is to create a “shell type”, with a known size and an alignment, able to host the target (private) structure. For safer maintenance, the shell type and the target structure must be kept in sync, by using typically a static assert. It will ensure that the shell type is always large enough to host the target structure. This check is important to automatically detect future evolution of the target structure.
My top used shell command is |. This is called a pipe. In brief, the | allows for the output of one program (on the left) to become the input of another program (on the right). It is a way of connecting two commands together. According to doc.cat-v.org/unix/pipes/, the origin of pipes came long before Unix. Pipes can be traced back to this note from Doug McIlroy in 1964
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Raspberry Pi and retro gaming | Choose Linux 3
Feb 21, 2019
Jason finally discovers the bottomless well of potential that is the Raspberry Pi, and talks about his first experience with Raspbian. Then Joe and Jason take a nostalgic deep dive into retro gaming on both the Raspberry Pi and the Pinebook.
Plus some final thoughts on openSUSE Tumbleweed and Leap.
Links:
Raspberry Pi — A small and affordable computer that you can use to learn programming
RetroPie — RetroPie allows you to turn your Raspberry Pi, ODroid C1/C2, or PC into a retro-gaming machine
Lakka — Lakka is a lightweight Linux distribution that transforms a small computer into a full blown retrogaming console.
Pinebook — An Affordable 64-bit ARM based Open Source Notebook
openSUSE — The makers' choice for sysadmins, developers and desktop users.
The Meat Factor | LINUX Unplugged 289
Feb 19, 2019
Will there ever be another "big" Linux distro, or has that time passed?
Plus two popular Linux desktop apps see a big upgrade, and Wes explains to Chris why he should care a lot more about cgroups.
Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Neal Gompa.
Links:
MX-18.1 Continuum Official Release — MX-18.1 is a refresh of our MX-18 release, consisting of bugfixes and application updates since our original release of MX-18.
Bootstrap Your Snap | Snapcraft — The goal of Snapcraft Live is to bootstrap developers in building snaps and publishing them in the Snap Store
Shoreline Firewall Maintainer Retires — Shorewall 5.2.3 will be my last Shorewall release. If you find problems
with that release, I will attempt to resolve them. But, I am now
departing on an extended trip to visit some of the places in the world
that I have always dreamed of seeing.
Shoreline Firewall — Shorewall is a gateway/firewall configuration tool for GNU/Linux.
Geary 0.13.0 released! — This is a major new release, featuring a number of new features — including a new user interface for creating and managing email accounts, integration with GNOME Online Accounts (which also provides OAuth login support for some services), improvements in displaying conversations, composing new messages, interacting with other email apps, reporting problems as they occur, and number of important bug fixes, server compatibility fixes, and security fixes.
digiKam 6.0.0 is released — Dear digiKam fans and users, following the long stage of integrating a lots of work from students during the Summer of Code, and after 2 years of intensive developement, we hare proud to announce the new digiKam 6.0.0.
Fedora 31 Planning To Use Cgroups V2 By Default - Phoronix — Enabling Cgroups V2 by default will allow systemd and the various Linux container technologies along with libvirt and friends to make use of the new features and improvements over the original Cgroups like offering a unified hierarchy.
netdata, the open-source real-time performance and health monitoring, released v1.12 ! : linux — Introducing netdata.cloud, the free netdata service for all netdata users
High performance plugins with go.d.plugin (data collection orchestrator written in Go)
7 new data collectors and 11 rewrites of existing data collectors for improved performance
A new management API for all netdata servers
Bind different functions of the netdata APIs to different ports
Improved installation and updates
F# Envy | Coder Radio 345
Feb 19, 2019
The guys discuss the real last bastion of scratch your own itch, and debate the merits of recent C# functional programing fads that are transforming the language.
Plus Mike’s swimming in hardware, and a new movement sweeping the web that starts right here.
Special Guest: Wes Payne.
Links:
Yo, Thelio! - dominickm.com — Overall, I am very happy with Thelio and if you’re interesting in running Linux on a desktop full-time, I recommend you consider it.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — 10 minutes in and the #DarterPro has the best non-Mac trackpad I’ve ever used.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — Yeah, so @ChrisLAS I have fallen hard off the old man sleep wagon and it's deeply sub-optimal.
SCaLE 17x — SCaLE is the largest community-run open-source and free software conference in North America. It is held annually in the greater Los Angeles area.
C# 8: The switch expression — C# 8 delivers a few new C# features to developers, and it is nice to see the language improving, but today I would like to talk about only one and it is "switch expressions".
Andrew Madsen on Twitter — It’s weird how the iOS community has shifted so much from “iOS development” to “Swift”. 5 years on, and a huge part of what everyone’s doing revolves around the language, not how to create great apps. Why is that?
Michael Dominick on Twitter — Thinking more about this conversation about how the #iOSDev #macOs scene has changed online, it occurs to me that there’s a platform where that past ethos of “just build cool things” lives — desktop #Linux and @elementary in particular #CoderRadio @ChrisLAS
Google scrambles to repurpose Android Things, Microsoft wants to protect your Linux install really bad, and the first bank backed Crypto-coin makes a splash.
Plus Void Linux issues a warning, running Linux on ARM laptops built for Windows, and more.
Links:
Google refocuses Android Things as a ‘platform for OEM partners’ — When Google announced Android Things at its 2015 I/O developer conference, it pitched it as a versatile, embedded, and open operating system designed to run on low-power and memory-constrained internet of things (IoT) devices with support for Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, and the Weave protocol.
Microsoft Developer: You Still Should Have Anti-Virus With Windows Subsystem For Linux — In CPU/system benchmarks we routinely see Windows 10 WSL with Ubuntu and other distributions performing very well, but when it comes to disk reads/writes, it's drastically slower than bare metal Linux installs and in some cases much slower still than dedicated virtual machines.
Digitalocean launches Managed Databases for PostgreSQL — Starting with support for PostgreSQL, Managed Databases enables developers of all skill levels to quickly and easily spin up a high-performance database cluster that is worry-free and scalable
Void Linux loses control of .eu domain — We would like to warn people of a domain name that is no longer under Void Linux control. voidlinux.eu lapsed in its original registration, and was purchased by an unknown 3rd party before Void Linux could regain ownership.
J.P. Morgan Creates Digital Coin for Payments — J.P. Morgan this month became the first U.S. bank to create and successfully test a digital coin representing a fiat currency. The JPM Coin is based on blockchain-based technology enabling the instantaneous transfer of payments between institutional accounts.
JPMorgan is creating a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar — The new cryptocurrency will be built atop JPMorgan's Quorum blockchain technology, a variant of Ethereum that has been modified to serve the needs of a major financial institution like JPMorgan.
Is the great hope for open hardware actually going to materialize or is RISC-V just hype? Are some conspiracy theories worth more than just passing disdain?
Plus hoarding all your own tracking data, and some great #AskError questions.
00:00:18 #AskError: What's the best decade for music? 00:04:13 RISC-V 00:12:43 Collecting our own data 00:24:02 #AskError: Pain for principles - where's your threshold? 00:30:24 Conspiracy theories
Quality Tools | TechSNAP 397
Feb 14, 2019
Join Jim and Wes as they battle bufferbloat, latency spikes, and network hogs with some of their favorite tools for traffic shaping, firewalling, and QoS.
Plus the importance of sane defaults and why netdata belongs on every system.
Links:
Why you want QoS - Netdata Documentation — One of the features the Linux kernel has, but it is rarely used, is its ability to apply QoS on traffic. Even most interesting is that it can apply QoS to both inbound and outbound traffic.
BSD Strategy | BSD Now 285
Feb 14, 2019
Strategic thinking to keep FreeBSD relevant, reflecting on the soul of a new machine, 10GbE Benchmarks On Nine Linux Distros and FreeBSD, NetBSD integrating LLVM sanitizers in base, FreeNAS 11.2 distrowatch review, and more.
Since I participate in the FreeBSD project there are from time to time some voices which say FreeBSD is dead, Linux is the way to go. Most of the time those voices are trolls, or people which do not really know what FreeBSD has to offer. Sometimes those voices wear blinders, they only see their own little world (were Linux just works fine) and do not see the big picture (like e.g. competition stimulates business, …) or even dare to look what FreeBSD has to offer. Sometimes those voices raise a valid concern, and it is up to the FreeBSD project to filter out what would be beneficial. Recently there were some mails on the FreeBSD lists in the sense of “What about going into direction X?”. Some people just had the opinion that we should stay where we are. In my opinion this is similarly bad to blindly saying FreeBSD is dead and following the masses. It would mean stagnation. We should not hold people back in exploring new / different directions. Someone wants to write a kernel module in (a subset of) C++ or in Rust… well, go ahead, give it a try, we can put it into the Ports Collection and let people get experience with it. This discussion on the mailinglists also triggered some kind of “where do we see us in the next years” / strategic thinking reflection. What I present here, is my very own opinion about things we in the FreeBSD project should look at, to stay relevant in the long term. To be able to put that into scope, I need to clarify what “relevant” means in this case. FreeBSD is currently used by companies like Netflix, NetApp, Cisco, Juniper, and many others as a base for products or services. It is also used by end‐users as a work‐horse (e.g. mailservers, webservers, …). Staying relevant means in this context, to provide something which the user base is interested in to use and which makes it more easy / fast for the user base to deliver whatever they want or need to deliver than with another kind of system. And this in terms of time to market of a solution (time to deliver a service like a web‐/mail‐/whatever‐server or product), and in terms of performance (which not only means speed, but also security and reliability and …) of the solution. I have categorized the list of items I think are important into (new) code/features, docs, polishing and project infrastructure. Links in the following usually point to documentation/HOWTOs/experiences for/with FreeBSD, and not to the canonical entry points of the projects or technologies. In a few cases the links point to an explanation in the wikipedia or to the website of the topic in question.
Long ago as an undergraduate, I found myself back home on a break from school, bored and with eyes wandering idly across a family bookshelf. At school, I had started to find a calling in computing systems, and now in the den, an old book suddenly caught my eye: Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. Taking it off the shelf, the book grabbed me from its first descriptions of Tom West, captivating me with the epic tale of the development of the Eagle at Data General. I — like so many before and after me — found the book to be life changing: by telling the stories of the people behind the machine, the book showed the creative passion among engineers that might otherwise appear anodyne, inspiring me to chart a course that might one day allow me to make a similar mark. Since reading it over two decades ago, I have recommended The Soul of a Machine at essentially every opportunity, believing that it is a part of computing’s literary foundation — that it should be considered our Odyssey. Recently, I suggested it as beach reading to Jess Frazelle, and apparently with perfect timing: when I saw the book at the top of her vacation pile, I knew a fuse had been lit. I was delighted (though not at all surprised) to see Jess livetweet her admiration of the book, starting with the compelling prose, the lucid technical explanations and the visceral anecdotes — but then moving on to the deeper technical inspiration she found in the book. And as she reached the book’s crescendo, Jess felt its full power, causing her to reflect on the nature of engineering motivation. Excited to see the effect of the book on Jess, I experienced a kind of reflected recommendation: I was inspired to (re-)read my own recommendation! Shortly after I started reading, I began to realize that (contrary to what I had been telling myself over the years!) I had not re-read the book in full since that first reading so many years ago. Rather, over the years I had merely revisited those sections that I remembered fondly. On the one hand, these sections are singular: the saga of engineers debugging a nasty I-cache data corruption issue; the young engineer who implements the simulator in an impossibly short amount of time because no one wanted to tell him that he was being impossibly ambitious; the engineer who, frustrated with a nanosecond-scale timing problem in the ALU that he designed, moved to a commune in Vermont, claiming a desire to deal with “no unit of time shorter than a season”. But by limiting myself to these passages, I was succumbing to the selection bias of my much younger self; re-reading the book now from start to finish has given new parts depth and meaning. Aspects that were more abstract to me as an undergraduate — from the organizational rivalries and absurdities of the industry to the complexities of West’s character and the tribulations of the team down the stretch — are now deeply evocative of concrete episodes of my own career.
Last week I started running some fresh 10GbE Linux networking performance benchmarks across a few different Linux distributions. That testing has now been extended to cover nine Linux distributions plus FreeBSD 12.0 to compare the out-of-the-box networking performance. Tested this round alongside FreeBSD 12.0 was Antergos 19.1, CentOS 7, Clear Linux, Debian 9.6, Fedora Server 29, openSUSE Leap 15.0, openSUSE Tumbleweed, Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS, and Ubuntu 18.10. All of the tests were done with a Tyan S7106 1U server featuring two Intel Xeon Gold 6138 CPUs, 96GB of DDR4 system memory, and Samsung 970 EVO SSD. For the 10GbE connectivity on this server was an add-in HP NC523SFP PCIe adapter providing two 10Gb SPF+ ports using a QLogic 8214 controller. Originally the plan as well was to include Windows Server 2016/2019. Unfortunately the QLogic driver download site was malfunctioning since Cavium’s acquisition of the company and the other Windows Server 2016 driver options not panning out and there not being a Windows Server 2019 option. So sadly that Windows testing was thwarted so I since started testing over with a Mellanox Connectx-2 10GbE NIC, which is well supported on Windows Server and so that testing is ongoing for the next article of Windows vs. Linux 10 Gigabit network performance plus some “tuned” Linux networking results too.
Over the past month I’ve merged the LLVM compiler-rt sanitizers (LLVM svn r350590) with the base system. I’ve also managed to get a functional set of Makefile rules to build all of them, namely: ASan, UBSan, TSan, MSan, libFuzzer, SafeStack, XRay. In all supported variations and modes that are supported by the original LLVM compiler-rt package.
The project’s latest release is FreeNAS 11.2 and, at first, I nearly overlooked the new version because it appeared to be a minor point release. However, a lot of work went into the new version and 11.2 offers a lot of changes when compared next to 11.1, “including a major revamp of the web interface, support for self-encrypting drives, and new, backwards-compatible REST and WebSocket APIs. This update also introduces iocage for improved plugins and jails management and simplified plugin development.”
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
We're Gonna Need a Bigger Repo | LINUX Unplugged 288
Feb 12, 2019
The hype around a new security flaw hits new levels. Fedora has a bunch of news, and we discover what's new in the latest Plasma release.
Plus we fall down the openSUSE rabbit hole when Ell updates us on her desktop challenge.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Brent Gervais, Daniel Fore, Ell Marquez, Martin Wimpress, and Neal Gompa.
Links:
KDE Plasma 5.15: Lightweight, Usable and Productive — Discover, Plasma's software and add-on installer, has received tonnes of improvements to help you stay up-to-date and find the tools you need to get your tasks done.
Container Bug Allows Attackers to Gain Root Access on Host Machine — The container bug, CVE-2019-5736, affects runc, the underlying container runtime for Docker, containerd, Kubernetes, cri-o and other container software, which means that nearly everyone running containers is affected.
Fedora logo redesign — The current Fedora Logo has been used by Fedora and the Fedora Community since 2005. However, over the past few months, Máirín Duffy and the Fedora Design team, along with the wider Fedora community have been working on redesigning the Fedora logo.
Elementary Staging COPR Repo — This repository contains packages of official elementaryOS projects which are not (yet) ready for inclusion in fedora as official packages.
Pantheon Desktop on Fedora — The Pantheon desktop environment is the DE that powers elementaryOS. It builds on GNOME technologies, but utilizes components that were written from scratch in vala, using the GTK+3 toolkit.
UberWriter — It's a simple markdown editor that offers a lot of features.
solVItaire — An implementation of the classic solitaire games Klondike and Spider which has some nice to use vi(1) like keybindings, but can also be played with standard cursor keys, the number pad/row or even the mouse.
Cupertino's King Makers | Coder Radio 344
Feb 12, 2019
The gangs all together and cover your poignant feedback right out of the gate. Then we jump into the psychological trap of freelancing, and imagine a world where app stores are a true level playing field.
Plus some really fun picks, a bit of hoopla, and more.
Emma on Twitter — Keep @dominucco away and make sure all beverages are in a separate room!
Why Freelancing Creates Anxiety About Money — But once I started freelancing, things changed. I became hyperconscious of how much money I could (or should) charge for my time, and this made me unhappy and mean when my nonworking hours didn’t measure up to the same value. It was akin to the rage of watching cab fare tick up while you’re sitting in traffic, minutes and dollars dribbling away before your eyes.
What Hooks Mean for Vue — You may read through this and wonder what Hooks have to offer in Vue. It seems like a problem that doesn’t need solving. After all, Vue doesn’t predominantly use classes. Vue offers stateless functional components (should you need them), but why would we need to carry state in a functional component?
Hooks at a Glance – React — Hooks are functions that let you “hook into” React state and lifecycle features from function components. Hooks don’t work inside classes — they let you use React without classes.
Making Sense of React Hooks – Dan Abramov — Unlike patterns like render props or higher-order components, Hooks don’t introduce unnecessary nesting into your component tree. They also don’t suffer from the drawbacks of mixins.
Create Your Own AI Family Portraits — This week NVIDIA's research engineers open-sourced StyleGAN, the project they've been working in for months as a Style-based generator architecture for Generative Adversarial Networks.
StyleGAN GitHub — This repository contains the official TensorFlow implementation
Python Developers Survey 2018 Results — In the fall of 2018, the Python Software Foundation together with JetBrains conducted the official annual Python Developers Survey for the second time.
miniC — What is it? A simple stack-based virtual machine that runs C (missing features below) in the browser and the beginning of an interactive tutorial that covers C, how the VM works, and how the language is compiled.
Make all videos fun to watch — Our project Laff track is a plugin to Chrome, which adds this craziness to all Youtube videos. It simply detects when people are not talking, and adds in a bit of laughter.
Linux Action News 92
Feb 10, 2019
A week of nasty security flaws, and a lack of patches... For some of us. Raspberry Pi opens a physical store, our thoughts on the new LibreOffice interface, and the new round of nasty flaws hitting all versions of Android.
Plus new disk encryption coming to Linux, Intel releases their open source encoder for future video on the web, and more.
Links:
Raspberry Pi opens IRL store — The store is located on the first floor in the Grand Arcade in the centre of Cambridge, UK.
LibreOffice 6.2 has a new UI — LibreOffice 6.2 with NotebookBar, a significant major release of the free office suite which features a radical new approach to the user interface
Android PNG vulnerability — A maliciously crafted PNG image could execute code smuggled within the file, if an application views it.
Adiantum: encryption for the low end — Low-end devices bound for developing countries, such as those running the Android Go edition, lack encryption support because the hardware doesn't provide any cryptographic acceleration.
The AV1 Video Codec - YouTube Talk — This talk will discuss the road from specification to production, the current state of AV1 deployment, and our own efforts to write an AV1 encoder in Rust, rav1e. It is intended for a technical audience, but does not require previous signal processing experience.
FOSDEM 2019 | BSD Now 284
Feb 07, 2019
We recap FOSDEM 2019, FreeBSD Foundation January update, OPNsense 19.1 released, the hardware-assisted virtualization challenge, ZFS and GPL terror, ClonOS 19.01-RELEASE, and more.
Allan and I were at FOSDEM 2019 in Brussels, Belgium over the weekend.
On the Friday before, we held a FreeBSD Devsummit in a hotel conference room, with 25 people attending. We talked about various topics of interest to the project. You can find the notes on the wiki page.
Saturday was the first day of FOSDEM. The FreeBSD Project had a table next to the Illumos Project again. A lot of people visited our table, asked questions, or just said “Hi, I watch BSDNow.tv every week”. We handed out a lot of stickers, pens, swag, and flyers. There was also a full day BSD devroom, with a variety of talks that were well attended.
In the main conference track, Allan held a talk explaining how the ZFS ARC works. A lot of people attended the talk and had more questions afterwards. Another well attended talk was by Jonathan Looney about Netflix and FreeBSD.
Sunday was another day in the same format, but no bsd devroom. A lot of people visited our table, developers and users alike. A lot of meeting and greeting went on.
Overall, FOSDEM was a great success with FreeBSD showing a lot of presence. Thanks to all the people who attended and talked to us. Special thanks to the people who helped out at the FreeBSD table and Rodrigo Osorio for running the BSD devroom again.
Dear FreeBSD Community Member, Happy New Year! It’s always exciting starting the new year with ambitious plans to support FreeBSD in new and existing areas. We achieved our fundraising goal for 2018, so we plan on funding a lot of work this year! Though it’s the new year, this newsletter highlights some of the work we accomplished in December. We also put together a list of technologies and features we are considering supporting, and are looking for feedback on what users want to help inform our 2019 development plans. Our advocacy and education efforts are in full swing as we prepare for upcoming conferences including FOSDEM, SANOG33, and SCaLE. Finally, we created a year-end video to talk about the work we did in 2018. That in itself was an endeavor, so please take a few minutes to watch it! We’re working on improving the methods we use to inform the community on the work we are doing to support the Project, and are always open to feedback. Now, sit back, grab a refreshing beverage, and enjoy our newsletter! Happy reading!! Deb
For more than four years now, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing. The 19.1 release, nicknamed “Inspiring Iguana”, consists of a total of 620 individual changes since 18.7 came out 6 months ago, spread out over 12 intermediate releases including the recent release candidates. That is the average of 2 stable releases per month, security updates and important bug fixes included! If we had to pick a few highlights it would be: The firewall alias API is finally in place. The migration to HardenedBSD 11.2 has been completed. 2FA now works with a remote LDAP / local TOTP combination. And the OpenVPN client export was rewritten for full API support as well.
These are the most prominent changes since version 18.7:
fully functional firewall alias API
PIE firewall shaper support
firewall NAT rule logging support
2FA via LDAP-TOTP combination
WPAD / PAC and parent proxy support in the web proxy
P12 certificate export with custom passwords
Dpinger is now the default gateway monitor
ET Pro Telemetry edition plugin[2]
extended IPv6 DUID support
Dnsmasq DNSSEC support
OpenVPN client export API
Realtek NIC driver version 1.95
HardenedBSD 11.2, LibreSSL 2.7
Unbound 1.8, Suricata 4.1
Phalcon 3.4, Perl 5.28
firmware health check extended to cover all OS files, HTTPS mirror default
updates are browser cache-safe regarding CSS and JavaScript assets
collapsible side bar menu in the default theme
language updates for Chinese, Czech, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese and Russian
API backup export, Bind, Hardware widget, Nginx, Ntopng, VnStat and Dnscrypt-proxy plugins
Here are the full changes against version 19.1-RC2:
ipsec: add firewall interface as soon as phase 1 is enabled
Over two years ago, I made a pledge to use NetBSD as my sole OS and only operating system, and to resist booting into any other OS until I had implemented hardware-accelerated virtualization in the NetBSD kernel (the equivalent of Linux’ KVM, or Hyper-V). Today, I am here to report: Mission Accomplished! It’s been a long road, but we now have hardware-accelerated virtualization in the kernel! And while I had only initially planned to get Oracle VirtualBox working, I have with the help of the Intel HAXM engine (the same backend used for virtualization in Android Studio) and a qemu frontend, successfully managed to boot a range of mainstream operating systems.
ZFS is todays most advanced filesystem. It originated on the Solaris operating system and thanks to Sun’s decision to open it up, we have it available on quite a number of Unix-like operating systems. That’s just great! Great for everyone. For everyone? Nope. There are people out there who don’t like ZFS. Which is totally fine, they don’t need to use it after all. But worse: There are people who actively hate ZFS and think that others should not use it. Ok, it’s nothing new that some random guys on the net are acting like assholes, trying to tell you what you must not do, right? Whoever has been online for more than a couple of days probably already got used to it. Unfortunately its still worse: One such spoilsport is Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux guru and informal second-in-command after Linus Torvalds. There have been some attempts to defend the stance of this kernel developer. One was to point at the fact that the “ZFS on Linux” (ZoL) port uses two kernel functions, __kernel_fpu_begin() and __kernel_fpu_end(), which have been deprecated for a very long time and that it makes sense to finally get rid of them since nothing in-kernel uses it anymore. Nobody is going to argue against that. The problem becomes clear by looking at the bigger picture, though: The need for functions doing just what the old ones did has of course not vanished. The functions have been replaced with other ones. And those ones are deliberately made GPL-only. Yes, that’s right: There’s no technical reason whatsoever! It’s purely ideology – and it’s a terrible one.
ClonOS is a turnkey Open Source platform based on FreeBSD and the CBSD framework. ClonOS offers a complete web UI for easily controlling, deploying and managing FreeBSD jails containers and Bhyve/Xen hyperviser virtual environments. ClonOS is currently the only platform available which allow both Xen and Bhyve hypervisor to coexist on the same host. Being a FreeBSD base platform, ClonOS ability to create and manage jails allows you to run FreeBSD applications without losing performance.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
Anyone Can Benchmark + openSUSE Challenge | Choose Linux 2
Feb 07, 2019
Episode 2 is all about opposites, such as the major differences between benchmarking graphics cards like Radeon VII on Linux and Windows. Then we dive into the Phoronix Test Suite, a robust tool that isn't just for tech reviewers. Find out why you should be using it too.
Plus, the distro challenges roll on as Jason decides to do a complete 180, jumping from elementary OS to openSUSE Tumbleweed.
VLC 4.0 Plans — VLC lead developer Jean-Baptiste Kempf talked about their plans for version 4.0, codenamed Otto Chriek. For VLC 4.0 they want a new playlist, a redone user-interface, a new video output architecture that supports VR/3D content, and removal of old platforms.
GNOME Shell Gets a Major Speed Boost — Anyone who’s tried the latest GNOME builds on the bleeding edge can attest: these are real, perceptible improvements that give GNOME Shell the peppiness and responsiveness that users have been longing for.
Good Will Snapping - Alan Pope at FOSDEM — Thousands of users, millions of downloads, dozens of distributions. Numbers going up and down and sideways. A look behind the scenes of Snapcraft, the highly popular universal app store for Linux.
Pi-hole v4.2 Available — In preparation of the new API we are working on, FTLDNS will now store its data in a shared-memory space, so that the API can come in and read from that memory to fulfill requests.
Apple restores Google’s own internal iPhone apps after privacy brouhaha — For less than a day, Apple had briefly revoked Google’s iOS certificate that enabled those private apps to conduct various internal business such as company shuttles, food menus, as well as pre-release beta testing, and more.
Apple Developer Enterprise Program — Get tools and resources to transform your mobile workforce with enterprise-class apps, distributed seamlessly and securely within your organization.
Apple Is Fighting a Good Fight Against Facebook and Google — The implication that Apple is exhibiting some monopolistic urge to gutshot Facebook and Google makes close to zero sense. The events of this week will not affect their bottom lines, and Apple could have taken much more drastic action to lock down iOS — as it has before.
Nilay Patel on Twitter — Hi, I'm the nagging voice in the back of your head pointing out that it's pretty intense that Apple can simply decide to prevent people from running code on their phones.
Make your next C# project non-nullable — The naming is a bit confusing, because reference types have always been nullable, and that’s the whole problem. The novelty is that they can now also be non-nullable.
Switch to errors instead of warnings for nullable reference types in C# 8 — Nullable reference types coming in C# 8 are a great addition to anyone’s toolbox. But if you tried it you probably know “just” warnings are produced. And sometimes you’d like to have errors instead of warnings, so the build fails hard or something like that. It’s surprisingly easy to do so.
Linux Action News 91
Feb 03, 2019
Firefox is standing out, Pine64 has a lot more cheap Linux hardware coming, and the good and the bad with the new Kodi Release.
Plus HP Joins LVFS, why you shouldn't expect a Raspberry Pi 4 in 2019, and more.
Links:
Firefox 65 released — We’re happy to announce a new set of redesigned controls for the Content Blocking
HP joins LVFS — If you’ve got a Z2, Z6, Z8, Z440, Z640 or Z840 system then you might want to check for an update in the GNOME Software updates panel or using fwupdmgr update in the terminal.
Pine64 to Launch $79 Linux Tablet, $199 PineBook Pro Laptop — Pine64, the company that gave us the $89 Pinebook Linux laptop, is branching out and is set to launch a Linux tablet this year for just $79. That's as well as a new Linux laptop, smartphone, camera, single board computers, and retro gaming kit.
We won't see a Raspberry Pi 4 in 2019 — "I don’t have a route to do something this year," he told us. "I think we kind of understand what featureset we want [and] what would be involved in getting that featureset. I don’t think we have a defined plan for turning that into a product yet."
Kodi 18.0 Released — One of the big features of this release: support for gaming emulators, ROMs and controls.
Stranger Distro Danger | User Error 58
Feb 01, 2019
New JB team member Ell joins us to discuss e-waste, the motivations for our distro choices, and letting children out of your sight.
Plus some solid #AskError questions about food and aliases.
00:00:26 Intro 00:01:26 Computer sustainability 00:13:17 #AskError: What one meal could you live on for the rest of your life? 00:17:06 Distro choice 00:25:09 #AskError: What is your favorite bash alias? If you aren't heavy alias users - why? 00:29:30 Independent children
Special Guest: Ell Marquez.
Floating Point Problems | TechSNAP 396
Jan 31, 2019
Jim and Wes are joined by OpenZFS developer Richard Yao to explain why the recent drama over Linux kernel 5.0 is no big deal, and how his fix for the underlying issue might actually make things faster.
Plus the nitty-gritty details of vectorized optimizations and kernel preemption, and our thoughts on the future of the relationship between ZFS and Linux.
Special Guest: Richard Yao.
Links:
LinuxFest Northwest 2019 — Join a bunch of JB hosts and community celebrating the 20th anniversary!
Choose Linux — The show that captures the excitement of discovering Linux.
ZFS On Linux Landing Workaround For Linux 5.0 Kernel Support — So while these symbols are important for SIMD vectorized checksums for ZFS in the name of performance, with Linux 5.0+ they are not going to be exported for use by non-GPL modules. ZFS On Linux developer Tony Hutter has now staged a change that would disable vector instructions on Linux 5.0+ kernels.
Re: x86/fpu: Don't export __kernelfpu{begin,end}() — My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant. Sun explicitly did not want their code to work on Linux, so why would we do extra work to get their code to work properly?
The future of ZFS in FreeBSD — This state of affairs has led to a general agreement among the stakeholders that I have spoken to that it makes sense to rebase FreeBSD's ZFS on ZoL. Brian Behlendorf has graciously encouraged me to add FreeBSD support directly so that we might all have a singleshared code base.
Dephix: Kickoff to The Future — OpenZFS has grown over the last decade, and delivering our application on Linux provides great OpenZFS support while enabling higher velocity adoption of new environments.
The future of ZFS on Linux [zfs-discuss] —
Do you realize that we don’t actually need the symbols that the kernel removed. It All they do is save/restore of register state while turning off/on preemption. Nothing stops us from doing that ourselves. It is possible to implement our own substitutes using code from either Illumos or FreeBSD or even write our own.
Honestly, I am beginning to think that my attempt to compromise with mainline gave the wrong impression. I am simply tired of this behavior by them and felt like reaching out to put an end to it. In a few weeks, we will likely be running on Linux 5.0 as if those symbols had never been removed because we will almost certainly have our own substitutes for them. Having to bloat our code because mainline won’t give us access to trivial functionality is annoying, but it is not the end of the world.
Graphical Interface-View | BSD Now 283
Jan 31, 2019
We’re at FOSDEM 2019 this week having fun. We’d never leave you in a lurch, so we have recorded an interview with Niclas Zeising of the FreeBSD graphics team for you. Enjoy.
BR: Welcome Niclas. Since this is your first time on BSDNow, can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you started with Unix/BSD?
AJ: What made you start working in the FreeBSD graphics stack?
BR: What is the current status with the FreeBSD graphics stack?
AJ: What challenges do you face in the FreeBSD graphics stack?
BR: How many people are working in the graphics team and what kind of help do you need there?
AJ: You’re also involved in FreeBSD ports and held a poudriere tutorial at last years EuroBSDcon. What kind of feedback did you get and will you give that tutorial again?
BR: You’ve been organizing the Stockholm BSD user group meeting. Can you tell us a bit about that, what’s involved, how is it structured?
AJ: What conferences do you go to where people could talk to you?
BR: Is there anything else you’d like to mention before we let you go?
Kodi 18.0 — The Kodi team is very pleased to announce the immediate availability of Kodi 18.0 "Leia" for all supported platforms.
Canonical Outs Major Linux Kernel Update for Ubuntu 18.04 — These vulnerabilities could allow attackers to either execute arbitrary code or crash the system via a denial of service attack by utilizing a maliciously crafted EXT4 image that could be mounted on the vulnerable machine.
Shortwave Hello World | Felix Häcker — I wanted to rewrite Gradio entirely from scratch using Rust and thought it’s better to start a completely new project.
fx_cast: chromecast for firefox — Enables Chromecast support for casting web apps (like Netflix or BBC iPlayer), HTML5 video and screen/tab sharing.
Cool-Retro-Term 1.1.1 is out! — Big performance improvements (and lowered resource consumption), new shiny (literally) frame, system fonts support, and more!
Webs Assemble! | Coder Radio 342
Jan 28, 2019
Apple wades into controversy after filing some Swift-related patents and we explore WebAssembly and its implications for the open web.
Plus the latest on Mike's road to Rust, some great feedback, and more!
Special Guest: Wes Payne.
Links:
Choose Linux — The show that captures the excitement of discovering Linux.
DHH on Twitter (1) — Treating the web as a “compile target” washes away much of what‘s so special about it. Reducing the web to just another closed platform, like Windows or iOS, is to be blind to its truly unique shape and promise. Let’s cherish what made the web special, not pave it over.
DHH on Twitter (2) — Web Assembly is exciting in a lot of ways. This isn’t one of them. Hopefully we’ll keep HTML/CSS/JS readable, tinkerable, teachable for all the work that doesn’t need Web Assembly.
Wine 4.0 Released — This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000
individual changes.
Microsoft Employee Hints at Windows Core OS Open Source Components — The Security Program Manager then said that he "improved the security posture of Windows Open Source Components through initiatives that investigate vulnerabilities found and establish a process for remediation.”
Multipass for Win10 public beta — Multipass, at its core, is a service to manage Linux (in this case, Ubuntu) virtual machines in Windows 10 without the overhead of faffing about with Hyper-V (although Hyper-V is most definitely required to make the thing work).
Ubuntu Core 18 gets 10 years of support — Dell has been working closely with Canonical over the past three years to certify Ubuntu Core on all our Edge Gateway platforms.
Debian releases new images with apt fix — This point release incorporates the recent security update for APT, in order to help ensure that new installations of stretch are not vulnerable. No other updates are included.
It might be harder to block ads in Chromium — Google engineers have proposed changes to the open-source Chromium browser that will break content-blocking extensions, including ad blockers.
Project Trident 18.12 released, Spotifyd on NetBSD, OPNsense 18.7.10 is available, Ultra EPYC AMD Powered Sun Ultra 24 Workstation, OpenRsync, LLD porting to NetBSD, and more.
Full paper requirement is relaxed a bit this year (this year ONLY!) due to the short submission window. You don’t need all 10-12 pages, but it is still preferred.
Send a message to secretary@asiabsdcon.org with your proposal. Could be either for a talk or a tutorial.
Two days of tutorials/devsummit and two days of conference during Sakura season in Tokyo, Japan
The conference is also looking for sponsors
If accepted, flight and hotel is paid for by the conference
These are the steps I went through to build and run Spotifyd (this commit at the time of writing) on NetBSD AMD64. It’s a Spotify Connect client so it means I still need to control Spotify from another device (typically my phone), but the audio is played through my desktop… which is where my speakers and headphones are plugged in - it means I don’t have to unplug stuff and re-plug into my phone, work laptop, etc. This is 100% a “good enough for now solution” for me; I have had a quick play with the Go based microcontroller from spotcontrol and that allows a completely NetBSD only experience (although it is just an example application so doesn’t provide many features - great as a basis to build on though).
2019 means 19.1 is almost here. In the meantime accept this small incremental update with goodies such as Suricata 4.1, custom passwords for P12 certificate export as well as fresh fixes in the FreeBSD base. A lot of cleanups went into this update to make sure there will be a smooth transition to 19.1-RC for you early birds. We expect RC1 in 1-2 weeks and the final 19.1 on January 29.
A few weeks ago, I got an itch to build a workstation with AMD EPYC. There are a few constraints. First, I needed a higher-clock part. Second, I knew the whole build would be focused more on being an ultra high-end workstation rather than simply utilizing gaming components. With that, I decided it was time to hit on a bit of nostalgia for our readers. Mainly, I wanted to do an homage to Sun Microsystems. Sun made the server gear that the industry ran on for years, and as a fun fact, if you go behind the 1 Hacker Way sign at Facebook’s campus, they left the Sun Microsystems logo. Seeing that made me wonder if we could do an ultimate AMD EPYC build in a Sun Microsystems workstation.
This is a clean-room implementation of rsync with a BSD (ISC) license. It is designed to be compatible with a modern rsync (3.1.3 is used for testing). It currently compiles and runs only on OpenBSD. This project is still very new and very fast-moving. It’s not ready for wide-spread testing. Or even narrow-spread beyond getting all of the bits to work. It’s not ready for strong attention. Or really any attention but by careful programming. Many have asked about portability. We’re just not there yet, folks. But don’t worry, the system is easily portable. The hard part for porters is matching OpenBSD’s pledge and unveil.
LLD is the link editor (linker) component of Clang toolchain. Its main advantage over GNU ld is much lower memory footprint, and linking speed. It is of specific interest to me since currently 8 GiB of memory are insufficient to link LLVM statically (which is the upstream default). The first goal of LLD porting is to ensure that LLD can produce working NetBSD executables, and be used to build LLVM itself. Then, it is desirable to look into trying to build additional NetBSD components, and eventually into replacing /usr/bin/ld entirely with lld. In this report, I would like to shortly summarize the issues I have found so far trying to use LLD on NetBSD.
It’s the second week of 2019 already, which means I’m curious what Nate is going to do with his series This week in usability … reset the numbering from week 1? That series is a great read, to keep up with all the little things that change in KDE source each week — aside from the release notes. For the big ticket items of KDE on FreeBSD, you should read this blog instead.
In ports this week (mostly KDE, some unrelated):
KDE Plasma has been updated to the latest release, 5.14.5.
KDE Applications 18.12.1 were released today, so we’re right on top of them.
Marble was fixed for FreeBSD-running-on-Power9.
Musescore caught up on 18 months of releases.
Phonon updated to 4.10.1, along with its backends.
And in development, Qt WebEngine 5.12 has been prepared in the incongruously-named plasma-5.13 branch in Area51; that does contain all the latest bits described above, as well.
Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv
elementary OS and OpenMediaVault | Choose Linux 1
Jan 23, 2019
We kick off a brand new show with a discussion about Jason's elementary OS community challenge. Then we get into the pros and cons of setting up your own NAS with OpenMediaVault.
Plus, find out more about your hosts and what we have in store for future episodes.
Links:
Introducing The Elementary OS 5 Linux Community Challenge — The basic premise of the elementary OS Challenge is simple: ditch Windows, macOS or your current Linux OS of choice and exclusively use elementary OS 5 Juno as your daily driver for two weeks. Explore the curated AppCenter and the bundled software to get all of your working and playing done. For email, for music, for coding, for gaming, for whatever.
Elementary OS Challenge: Let's Talk About Dark Themes — Like every other deliberate choice the elementary OS developers make (such as minimizing windows), the absence of an optional dark mode reflects their clear and unwavering vision of what a desktop experience should be.
openmediavault — openmediavault is the next generation network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian Linux. It contains services like SSH, (S)FTP, SMB/CIFS, DAAP media server, RSync, BitTorrent client and many more. Thanks to the modular design of the framework it can be enhanced via plugins.
Too Late for Jenkins? | Coder Radio 341
Jan 23, 2019
Mike and Wes are back to debate the state of developer tools and ask where Jenkins fits in 2019.
Plus some some anger at Apple, and Mike reveals the latest language that's caught his eye.
Special Guest: Wes Payne.
Links:
Dokku — A docker-powered PaaS that helps you build and manage the lifecycle of applications.
Jenkins — The leading open source automation server, Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project.
Jenkins Evergreen — Evergreen is an automatically updating rolling distribution system for Jenkins. It consists of server-side, and client-side components to support a Chrome-like upgrade experience for Jenkins users.
Jenkins Blue Ocean — Blue Ocean is a project that rethinks the user experience of Jenkins, modelling and presenting the process of software delivery by surfacing information that’s important to development teams with as few clicks as possible.
Introducing Jenkins X — Jenkins X automates CI/CD and DevOps best practices for you.
Jenkins Helm Chart — Jenkins master and slave cluster utilizing the Jenkins Kubernetes plugin.
Jenkins Chef Cookbook — Installs and configures Jenkins CI master & node slaves. Resource providers to support automation via jenkins-cli, including job create/update.
Why on earth did we choose Jenkins for 2019? — This article tries to explain why the hell Rookout, a relatively new SaaS company, chose to use Jenkins, and what the big advantages are that make Jenkins so great even now, eight years in.
Linux Academy Certified Jenkins Engineer — Learn CI/CD concepts as well as Jenkins installation and functionality. Plus best practices for CD pipelines as well as Jenkin's security.
'Mad Botter' takes 'MacGyver' approach to tech sales — The Plant City-based company turns run-of-the-mill consumer electronics into devices capable of being deployed for use in advanced military applications, such as fighter jets.
Pain the APT | LINUX Unplugged 285
Jan 22, 2019
An embarrassing vulnerability has been found in the apt package manager, we’ll break it all down. Plus Alessandro Castellani tells us about his plans to build a professional design tool for Linux.
We also have a batch of big community news, and the case for the cloud killing Open Source.
Special Guests: Alessandro Castellani and Brent Gervais.
Links:
OggCamp 19 — OggCamp is an unconference celebrating Free Culture, Free and Open Source Software, hardware hacking, digital rights, and all manner of collaborative cultural activities.
Remote Code Execution in apt-get — A vulnerability in apt allows a network man-in-the-middle (or a malicious package mirror) to execute arbitrary code as root on a machine installing any package. The bug has been fixed in the latest versions of apt.
Which block I/O scheduler is the best? We asked eBPF. — I set out expecting to see differing distributions of latencies for each block scheduler, but ultimately found that I didn’t understand low-level systems behavior to the degree I thought I did.
Linux Operating System Fundamentals — Have you heard of Linux, but don't really know anything about it? Are you a non-technical person just wanting to know what this 'Linux' thing is? Then this course is for you.
Late Night Linux – Episode 55 — Are you better off with the elasticity of public clouds like AWS, or should you avoid lock-in by running servers on premises?
Looking Forward to 2019 - Let's Encrypt — We’re now serving more than 150 million websites while maintaining a stellar security and compliance track record. Most importantly though, the Web went from 67% encrypted page loads to 77% in 2018, according to statistics from Mozilla. This is an incredible rate of change!
Let's Encrypt ACME v2 API Announcements — Now that the draft standard is in last-call and the pace of major changes has slowed, we’re able to release a “v2” API that is much closer to what will become the final ACME RFC.
Let's Encrypt disables TLS-SNI-01 validation — The researcher noticed that "at least two" large hosting providers host many users on the same IP address and users are able to upload certificates for arbitrary names without proving they have control of a domain.
Another troubling week for MongoDB, ZFS On Linux lands a kernel workaround, and 600 days of postmarketOS.
Plus our thoughts on the new Project Trident release, and Mozilla ending their Test Pilot program.
Links:
MongoDB removed from major distros — Red Hat won't use MongoDB in Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora thanks to MongoDB's new Server Side Public License.
First release of Project Trident — This version is based off the 18.12-stable branch of TrueOS (FreeBSD 13-CURRENT), using the new TrueOS distribution framework with several add-ons by Project Trident itself.
Android-x86 8.1-r1 (Oreo-x86) released — Add Taskbar as an alternative launcher which puts a start menu and recent apps tray on top of your screen and support freeform window mode.
Mozilla kills Test Pilot Program — So today, we are announcing that we will be moving to a new structure that will demonstrate our ability to innovate in exciting ways and as a result we are closing the Test Pilot program as we’ve known it.
Wes and Jim have some great new SNAP in the works, in the meantime Chris stops by to keep you updated and share his favorite "hacker" story of the week.
Free To Succeed? | User Error 57
Jan 18, 2019
Is the decision to listen to this really up to you, or is it predetermined by chemistry and physics? Can mobile Linux ever succeed beyond a small niche?
Plus hoarding physical media, terrible books, and extreme weather.
00:00:35 #AskError: What's the worst book you've ever read? 00:04:45 Physical media vs streaming 00:11:29 Can mobile Linux ever succeed? 00:27:02 #AskError: If you could get rid of summer and winter and just have a single meh season, would you do it? 00:32:25 Is free will an illusion?
EPYC Server Battle | BSD Now 281
Jan 17, 2019
SCP client vulnerabilities, BSDs vs Linux benchmarks on a Tyan EPYC Server, fame for the Unix inventors, Die IPv4, GhostBSD 18.12 released, Unix in pictures, and more.
Free as in Get Out | LINUX Unplugged 284
Jan 15, 2019
ZFS on Linux is becoming the official upstream project of all major ZFS implementations, even the BSDs. But recent kernel changes prevent ZFS from even building on Linux. Neal Gompa joins us to discuss why it all matters.
Plus some surprising community news, and a few great picks!
Apple’s FoundationDB open sources CloudKit database layer — The FoundationDB Record Layer is an open source library that provides a record-oriented datastore with semantics similar to a relational database, implemented on top of FoundationDB.
'Celluloid' is the new name of GNOME MPV — “The current name is a bit unelegant, and doesn’t really fit in with other apps on the GNOME platform. Good app names are usually a single noun that’s related to the app’s domain (e.g. “Fragments” for a torrent app, or “Peek” for a screen recorder).”
Google is Adding 'Apt Search' to the ChromeOS App Launcher — Now, based on a code commit uncovered by Chrome Story, users of the Linux (beta) for Chromebooks will also be able to search for and install Linux apps from the Chrome OS launcher.
The Optional Option | Coder Radio 340
Jan 15, 2019
Wes joins Mike for a special Coder. They share thoughts on the costs and benefits of Optionals in Swift, uncover Mike's secret love affair with F#, and debate the true value of serverless.
Choose your own Linux is coming to Chrome OS, GitHub private repos go free, LVFS gets another win, and Amazon released their MongoDB competitor DocumentDB.
Plus Homebrew comes to Linux, the recent Ethereum Classic attack, and more.
Github offers free private repos — Today we’re announcing two major updates to make GitHub more accessible to developers: unlimited free private repositories, and a simpler, unified Enterprise offering.
Homebrew comes to Linux — The most significant changes since 1.8.0 are Linux support, (optional) automatic brew cleanup and providing bottles (binary packages) to more Homebrew users.
Amazon launches Mongo-compatible DocumentDB — The launch of AWS DocumentDB – a fully managed document database service – comes just months after MongoDB announced a new licence
Phoenix joins the LVFS — Just like AMI, Phoenix is a huge firmware vendor, providing the firmware for millions of machines.
A EULA in FOSS clothing, NetBSD with more LLVM support, Thoughts on FreeBSD 12.0, FreeBSD Performance against Windows and Linux on Xeon, Microsoft shipping NetBSD, and more.
All About Azure | TechSNAP 394
Jan 10, 2019
Wes is joined by a special guest to take a look back on the growth and development of Azure in 2018 and discuss some of its unique strengths.
Fedora 31 Isn't Expected To Be Delayed After All — Since November the developers behind Fedora Linux had been discussing whether to significantly delay or even cancel Fedora 31 so they could spend around one year working on re-tooling how the distribution is crafted and work on other fundamental changes. But it turns out now they have decided against this big shake-up delay
Linux 5.0 is on the way — The numbering change is not indicative of anything special. If you want to have an official reason, it's that I ran out of fingers and toes to count on, so 4.21 became 5.0
"Would totally skip Linux." — We shipped Planetary Annihilation on Win, Mac, and Linux. Linux uses we're a big vocal part of the Kickstarter and forums.
In the end they accounted for <0.1% of sales but >20% of auto reported crashes and support tickets
Jason Evangelho on Twitter — Re: Adobe Premiere on Linux. I have a call next week with both Bill Roberts (Sr. Director Product Management) & Patrick Palmer (Principal Product Manager). They reached out to ME. I think a genuine effort is being made here to listen to & understand various perspectives.
Raspberry Pi joins the RISC-V Foundation, MIPS is going open source, and Mozilla is experimenting with more ads in Firefox.
Plus the BSDs rebase their ZFS on the Linux implementation, the EU has bug bounties, and Thunderbird gets set to fly!
Links:
Raspberry Pi joins RISC-V Foundation — We're excited to have joined the @risc_v Foundation as a silver member. Hoping to contribute to maturing the Linux kernel and @debian port for the world's leading free and open instruction set architecture.
MIPS to be open sourced — The MIPS Open initiative will help greatly expand the existing MIPS ecosystem comprised of thousands of developers and over 100 academic institutions worldwide by offering new opportunities to create innovative solutions from third-party tool vendors, software developers and universities.
EU Offers Bug Bounties For 14 Open Source Projects — As the bug bounty programs begin to roll out in January, security experts worry that the programs miss the mark on truly securing open source projects.
Thunderbird ready to fly into 2019 — Welcome to 2019, and in this blog post we’ll look at what we got accomplished in 2018 and look forward to what we’re going to be working on this year.
FreeBSD admits that Linux is better (when it comes to ZFS) — In the past few years the vast majority of new development in ZFS has taken place in DelphixOS and zfsonlinux (ZoL). Earlier this year Delphix announced that they will be moving to ZoL. This shift means that there will be little to no net new development of Illumos.
A Good Walled Garden | User Error 56
Jan 04, 2019
Android vs iOS, turning users into contributors, and good vs bad in the world.
00:00:29 #AskError: What Linux-related opinion makes you completely disregard anything that person says? 00:03:10 iOS vs Android 00:15:35 How do we turn more users into contributors? 00:30:45 Is there more good or bad in the world?
Future of ZFS | BSD Now 279
Jan 03, 2019
The future of ZFS in FreeBSD, we pick highlights from the FreeBSD quarterly status report, flying with the raven, modern KDE on FreeBSD, many ways to launch FreeBSD in EC2, GOG installers on NetBSD, and more.
Back to our /roots | TechSNAP 393
Jan 03, 2019
In a special new year’s episode we take a moment to reflect on the show’s past, its future, and say goodbye to an old friend.
Links:
Jim Salter — Jim Salter (@jrssnet) is an author, public speaker, small business owner, mercenary sysadmin, and father of three—not necessarily in that order. He got his first real taste of open source by running Apache on his very own dedicated FreeBSD 3.1 server back in 1999, and he's been a fierce advocate of FOSS ever since.
Wishing Upon a Kernel | LINUX Unplugged 282
Jan 02, 2019
We start off the new year with our hopes and dreams for Linux and open source in 2019 and beyond.
Plus Clear Linux aims to build the ultimate Linux desktop based on Xfce, and it looks like GNOME is closing the performance gap.
Special Guests: Alan Pope and Brent Gervais.
Links:
Clarity in the Desktop | Clear Linux* Project — Clear Linux* recently introduced a series of updates that incorporate a developer-optimized desktop experience. This experience is built upon Xfce 4.12, created with the goal of enabling you to get what you need perform your work quickly and efficiently.
Reiser4 File-System Port To The Linux 4.20 Kernel — Edward Shishkin, the last main Reiser4 developer involved and former employee of Hans Reiser's Namesys company, has updated his Reiser4 kernel tree where there is now the few code changes necessary to get the file-system kernel module building for Linux 4.20 along with a patch containing a fix.
Don’t call them resolutions, lets just call them reasonable goals. Mike and Chris share their plans for 2019’s ground work, and why every single thing is fair game.
Linux Action News 86
Dec 30, 2018
We take a look back at our 2018 Linux predictions, and make some bold new ones for the year ahead.
Plus there’s no avoiding how far off we were when it came to Bitcoin last year, but that didn’t stop us having a go again this year!
2018's Deal Channels | Coder Radio 337
Dec 27, 2018
The guys drink some Liquid Christmas Tree and reflect on the major trends of 2018, and the stuff they are preemptively freaking out about for 2019.
The Real McCoy | BSD Now 278
Dec 27, 2018
We sat down at BSDCan 2018 to interview Kirk McKusick about various topics ranging about the early years of Berkeley Unix, his continuing work on UFS, the governance of FreeBSD, and more.
2019 Predictions | LINUX Unplugged 281
Dec 26, 2018
We get serious and bring in a special referee to help us lock in our Linux predictions for 2019.
The Open Source midlife crisis, Donald Knuth The Yoda of Silicon Valley, Certbot For OpenBSD's httpd, how to upgrade FreeBSD from 11 to 12, level up your nmap game, NetBSD desktop, and more.
Linux Action News 85
Dec 23, 2018
It’s been a huge year for Linux and FOSS news, and we take a look at some of the major stories that shaped the industry over the last 12 months.
Acquisitions, solid releases, a revolution for gaming, politics in the kernel community, Chrome OS coming of age, and more.
Links:
IBM to Acquire Red Hat — Most significant tech acquisition of 2018 will unlock true value of cloud for business
Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS — The world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc.
Welcome to Fedora CoreOS — This new thing will be “Fedora CoreOS” and serve as the upstream to Red Hat CoreOS.
Red Hat's Stratis Storage Project Reaches 1.0 — Stratis 1.0 was quietly released last week with the 1.0 version marking its initial stable release and where also the on-disk meta-data format has been stabilized.
Microsoft to acquire GitHub — Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced it has reached an agreement to acquire GitHub
Microsoft joins OIN — Microsoft is joining the Open Invention Network (“OIN”), a community dedicated to protecting Linux and other open source software programs from patent risk.
Microsoft’s Linux powered dev boards, Azure Sphere for sale — Azure Sphere is a solution for creating highly-secured, connected Microcontroller (MCU) devices, providing you with the confidence and the power to reimagine your business and create the future.
Ubuntu 18.04 released — The 'main' archive of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years until April 2023.
Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for 10 years — At OpenStack Summit in Berlin, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said in a keynote that Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support (LTS) support lifespan would be extended from five years to 10 years.
Steam Machines disappear from Valve's site — Valve is no longer highlighting Steam Machine hardware through the front page of its online Steam store, seemingly putting a final nail in the coffin of Valve's partnership with third-party PC builders.
Steam Link box discontinued — According to Valve, the inventory of Steam Links has fully depleted, meaning this one’s apparently gone for good.
Meltdown and Spectre — Meltdown and Spectre exploit critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. These hardware vulnerabilities allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer.
Linus takes a break and a new CoC for kernel devs — The revamped Linux code of conduct encourages behaviors like accepting constructive criticism gracefully, using inclusive language, and being respectful of “differing viewpoints and experiences.”
Linux apps on Chrome OS confirmed — Support for Linux will enable you to create, test and run Android and web app for phones, tablets and laptops all on one Chromebook. Run popular editors, code in your favorite language and launch projects to Google Cloud with the command-line. Everything works directly on a Chromebook.
Chrome OS tablet launched — The Pixel Slate is a Chrome OS tablet with a detachable keyboard cover that turns it into something very closely resembling a laptop.
Chrome OS 70 brings native network file share support — Mr. Beaufort points to a Chromium Gerrit commit that gives details of the feature that shows M70 of Chrome OS will have its NativeSmb flag to set to enabled by default.
Great News, We Lied | User Error 55
Dec 21, 2018
Whether new users have to suffer the pain of the command line, lying about Santa, and the best tech news of 2018.
Plus we learn whether Dan is a hipster, and more.
00:00:40 #AskError: What will self-driving cars be called? 00:02:02 Lying to children about Santa 00:09:19 Do new users still need to learn how to use the command line? 00:19:36 #AskError: How much do you spend getting your hair cut and how often? 00:23:57 The best tech news stories of the year
Handmade Desktop Linux | LINUX Unplugged 280
Dec 18, 2018
We’re just back from touring System76’s new factory, and getting the inside scoop on how they build their Thelio desktop. This is our story about walking in as skeptics, and walking out as believers.
Plus some surprising community news, a few great picks, and more!
Keyboardio: A Startling Discovery — On the one hand, there's a lot of money missing. We think there's a decent chance that money has vanished never to be seen again. Products that we said we sent you...simply never existed. We're genuinely sorry about that.
Linux Academy supports St. Jude's — For each Learning Activity that you complete between 12/16 and 12/26, Linux Academy will donate $1 to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital this holiday season.
The x32 subarchitecture may be removed — The x32 subarchitecture is a software variant of x86-64; it runs the processor in the 64-bit mode, but uses 32-bit pointers and arithmetic.
FreeBSD 12.0 released — The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/12 branch.
CNCF to Host etcd — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation Technical Oversight Committee voted to accept etcd as an incubation-level hosted project.
Introduction to Knative — Knative is a framework from the folks at Google and Pivotal focused on “serverless” style event driven functions.
IBM Embraces Knative to Drive Serverless Standardization — Knative is not the first open-source functions-as-a-service effort that IBM has backed. Back in 2016, IBM announced the OpenWhisk effort, which is now run as an open-source project at the Apache Software Found.
Demystifying Kubernetes CVE-2018-1002105 — With a specially crafted request, users that are authorized to establish a connection through the Kubernetes API server to a backend server can then send arbitrary requests over the same connection directly to that backend, authenticated with the Kubernetes API server’s TLS credentials used to establish the backend connection.
security.christmas — This year we will prepare you for the Christmas celebration, by giving you small presents of knowledge every day, which will teach you about the world of security.
Introducing the Helm Hub — This hub provides a means for you to find charts hosted in many distributed repositories hosted by numerous people and organizations.
WireGuardians of the Galaxy | LINUX Unplugged 279
Dec 11, 2018
We have a WireGuard success story to share, and it's probably not what you're expecting.
Plus we check in on Ubuntu 19.04, start the search for an Emby replacement, and how to use Reddit on the commandline.
chrimbus_'s self hosted streaming questions — Yo @ChrisLAS / @ubuntupodcast I'm tired of depending on our internet to play movies for the kiddo. I was trying to rip some dvds tonight using VLC and AcidRip in hopes to run them off a home server. Either the video ends up glitchy af or no audio. Any suggestions?
Annoucing Jellyfin - a free software fork of Emby — After the announcement of Emby transitioning to a proprietary model, a number of us decided to fork it to focus on delivering a free software media solution
Canonical makes Kubernetes moves — Canonical wants to make it darn clear that, besides being the leading cloud Linux distributor, it's also a major Kubernetes player.
Everyone’s Going Chrome | Coder Radio 335
Dec 11, 2018
Estimates can be a very tricky thing to get right, but they are vitally important. Peter Kretzman joins us to make it all a bit easier and clearer.
Plus Chris thinks he knows why Microsoft is willing to kill off their Edge browser engine and switch it out for Chromium. But can he convince Mike?
Special Guest: Peter Kretzman.
Links:
Electron — The Electron framework lets you write cross-platform desktop applications using JavaScript, HTML and CSS. It is based on Node.js and Chromium and is used by the Atom editor and many other apps.
Microsoft is moving to Chromium, and Mozilla isn't too thrilled about it.
Plus the Kernel team's clever Spectre slowdown fix, Emby goes proprietary, Steam Link lives on, and more.
Links:
Microsoft Edge to move to a Chromium base — Today we’re announcing that we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.
Chrome and Firefox to have native Arm builds on Win10 — Mozilla announced today it is working on bringing a native version of Firefox to Windows 10 on ARM. The organization is doing so in cooperation with Qualcomm.
WordPress 5 Released — The new block-based editor won’t change the way any of your content looks to your visitors. What it will do is let you insert any type of multimedia in a snap and rearrange to your heart’s content.
Emby becomes proprietary — we are modularizing and open sourcing as many standalone components as we possibly can.
Spectre slowdown fix — Linux 4.20-rc5 addresses the performance issue by making the security defense optional.
NVIDIA open sources PhysX — We’re doing this because physics simulation — long key to immersive games and entertainment — turns out to be more important than we ever thought.
DragonflyBSD 5.4 has been released, down the Gopher hole with OpenBSD, OpenBSD in stereo with VFIO, BSD/OS the best candidate for legally tested open source Unix, OpenBGPD adds diversity to the routing server landscape, and more.
Backup to the Moon | User Error 54
Dec 07, 2018
It's another #AskError special! Getting normals to do backups, should we stop making distros, ridiculous pipe dreams, and more.
00:01:08 How do we get normal people to use proper passwords and backups? 00:13:19 What's the most popular movie you've never seen? 00:16:54 Is it time to stop making new Linux distros? 00:31:40 What's the most ridiculous pipe dream you've ever had?
Sputnik turns 6: Presenting the folks behind it — Thanks to the interest and support of the community, eight months later, the project became a product. On November 29, 2012 the Dell XPS 13 developer edition was born.
Running Android in the Cloud with Amazon EC2 A1 instances — W demonstrated a fully automated solution deployed by Juju to run Android within LXD containers in the cloud and stream out the display of a gaming app from an Amazon EC2 A1 instance to a mobile phone over the internet
Clear Linux Homepage — Clear Linux OS is an open source, rolling release Linux distribution optimized for performance and security, from the Cloud to the Edge, designed for customization, and manageability.
clr-boot-manager — clr-boot-manager exists to enable the correct maintenance of vendor kernels and appropriate garbage collection tactics over the course of upgrades.
Linux Action News 82
Dec 02, 2018
Clear Linux doubles down on the desktop, Fedora 31 is likely canceled or delayed, and why Firecracker is being called the new "Docker killer".
Plus AMP's new governance model kicks in, and the Necuno Mobile Plasma tease.
Links:
Clear Linux now easier to try and to install — The addition of the desktop-live image itself is also certainly a welcome addition for those planning a desktop install rather than first having to install the basic Clear Linux without any desktop environment, especially if you first want to verify your system's hardware support/compatibility before proceeding with the installation. From their downloads area the new images are the "live-desktop-beta" images.
Fedora may move to annual releases — Not formally drafted besides a mailing list thread, there is a new proposal about moving Fedora to an annual platform release following Fedora 30. This was suggested by Red Hat's RHEL development coordinator, Brendan Conoboy.
AMP Project’s new governance model now in effect — Two key features of AMP’s new governance model are the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and the Advisory Committee (AC). We have endeavored to ensure that these committees consist of people who bring a wide variety of perspectives, with representatives from different AMP constituencies.
Necuno Mobile: An open phone with Plasma Mobile — With a focus on openness, security and privacy, the Necuno Mobile is built around an ARM® Cortex®-A9 NXP i.MX6 Quad and a Vivante GPU. According to Necuno, none of the closed firmware has access to the memory.
Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation Announce Joint Collaboration — This partnership with the Linux Foundation will enable the RISC-V Foundation to grow the RISC-V ecosystem with improved support for the development of new applications and architectures across all computing platforms.
Firecracker mini VMs tipped to the next big thing — Firecracker can launch user space or application code in less than 125ms and microVMs at a rate of 150 per second per host. It churns out fairly compact microVMs too, with each requiring less than 5MiB of memory overhead, so thousands can co-exist on a single server.
Firecracker Fundamentals | TechSNAP 391
Nov 29, 2018
We break down Firecracker Amazon’s new open source kvm powered, virtual machine monitor, and explore what makes it different from the options on the market now.
Plus some good news for OpenBGP and the wider internet community, and a handy tool for inspecting docker images.
Firecracker — Firecracker is an open source virtualization technology that is purpose-built for creating and managing secure, multi-tenant containers and functions-based services.
VENOM Vulnerability — VENOM, CVE-2015-3456, is a security vulnerability in the virtual floppy drive code used by many computer virtualization platforms. This vulnerability may allow an attacker to escape from the confines of an affected virtual machine (VM) guest and potentially obtain code-execution access to the host.
s2n — s2n is a C99 implementation of the TLS/SSL protocols that is designed to be simple, small, fast, and with security as a priority.
OpenBGPD — OpenBGPD is a FREE implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol, Version 4. It allows ordinary machines to be used as routers exchanging routes with other systems speaking the BGP protocol.
Sennheiser Headset Software Could Allow Man-in-the-Middle SSL Attacks — When users have been installing Sennheiser's HeadSetup software, little did they know that the software was also installing a root certificate into the Trusted Root CA Certificate store. To make matters worse, the software was also installing an encrypted version of the certificate's private key that was not as secure as the developers may have thought.
Assembly language on OpenBSD, using bhyve for FreeBSD development, FreeBSD Gaming, FreeBSD for Thanksgiving, no space left on Dragonfly’s hammer2, and more.
Skipping Fedora 31 | LINUX Unplugged 277
Nov 27, 2018
Fedora might take a year off, to focus on it self. Project Lead and Council Chair Matthew Miller joins us to explain this major proposal.
Plus Wimpy shares his open source Drobo alternative, and our final Dropbox XFS hack.
Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Martin Wimpress, and Matthew Miller.
Are people forgetting what open source is? — There is a responsibility for the dev to make sure they vet what is being put into, but also a larger responsibility for large company's to vet dependency themselves, such as this package event-stream
LinuxFest Northwest 2019 — LinuxFest Northwest is an annual Open Source event co-produced by Bellingham Linux Users Group and the Information Technology department at Bellingham Technical College
SnapRAID — SnapRAID is a backup program for disk arrays. It stores parity information of your data and it recovers from up to six disk failures.
Fedora 31 Will Likely Be Cancelled Or Significantly Delayed — It's about trying to re-tool the distribution and restructure the way its developed to rely more upon automated testing, improving the release processes, and related infrastructure to make it more scalable and better for the longer-term.
Michael Dominick on Twitter — "Was running out of drive storage on my desktop, so I did the unthinkable @ChrisLAS. I opened it up and installed an additional HDD! What madness is that? #CoderRadio"
Linux Action News 81
Nov 25, 2018
The Fuchsia bomb ticks closer, Valve's Steam Link end of life shocks us, and Amazon's new, rather obvious feature.
Plus the surprise use for Red Hat Enterprise, and an update on the Linux powered Atari VCS.
Links:
Huawei testing Fuchsia on the Honor Play — A new commit in the Fuchsia source code has revealed that Huawei has managed to boot the Zircon kernel on the Honor Play.
Steam Link box discontinued — According to Valve, the inventory of Steam Links has fully depleted, meaning this one’s apparently gone for good.
Atari VCS update — Mostly unfiltered excerpts of some of Rob Wyatt’s internal notes to the Atari VCS team over the past several months of development that reveal some of the story around the origins of the Atari VCS Operating System.
Predictive Scaling for EC2, Powered by Machine Learning — Today we are making Auto Scaling even more powerful with the addition of predictive scaling. Using data collected from your actual EC2 usage and further informed by billions of data points drawn from our own observations, we use well-trained Machine Learning models to predict your expected traffic (and EC2 usage) including daily and weekly patterns.
There's something almost intangible about the way Linux presents itself and Popey tries to explain it, the balance between living for the moment and planning for the future, and doing it wrong with social media.
Plus moving country, and stupid folding phones.
A Thoughtful Episode | BSD Now 273
Nov 23, 2018
Thoughts on NetBSD 8.0, Monitoring love for a GigaBit OpenBSD firewall, cat’s source history, X.org root permission bug, thoughts on OpenBSD as a desktop, and NomadBSD review.
What’s Up with WireGuard | TechSNAP 390
Nov 22, 2018
WireGuard has a lot of buzz around it and for many good reasons. We’ll explain what WireGuard is specifically, what it can do, and maybe more importantly, what it can’t.
NRE Labs — NRE Labs is a no-strings-attached, community-centered initiative to bring the skills of automation within reach for everyone
Introduction to Antidote — Antidote is an open-source project aimed at making automated network operations more accessible with fast, easy and fun learning.
StackStorm — From simple if/then rules to complicated workflows, StackStorm lets you automate DevOps your way.
Very Long Term Support | LINUX Unplugged 276
Nov 20, 2018
Android and Ubuntu are working exceptionally hard to create longer support cycles. We’ll highlight the work that makes this possible, and what’s motivating these two different projects to strive for Very Long Term Support.
Plus Chris reviews how his new Thunderbolt 3 GPU docking station works under Linux, and why he’ll never be undocking again.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Brent Gervais, and Martin Wimpress.
Links:
Pioneers — Pioneers, the wonderfully addicting game based on "The Settlers of Catan"
XPRA — multi-platform screen and application forwarding system
or "screen for X11"
Mark Shuttleworth announced 10 years support of Ubuntu 18.04, but there's a catch. Why we're buying the new Raspberry Pi, and we have a laugh at folding Android screens.
Plus the new Red Hat Enterprise beta has modularity, why Canonical might be ready for investors, and the bad week for cryptocurrencies.
Links:
New mid-range Raspberry Pi launched — TL;DR: you can now get the 1.4GHz clock speed, 5GHz wireless networking and improved thermals of Raspberry Pi 3B+ in a smaller form factor, and at the smaller price of $25.
Raspbian updated — Today we’re releasing a new update for Raspbian, including a multimedia player, updated Thonny, and more.
Android prepares for folding screens — The multi-resume feature now makes it possible for multiple apps to be open and actually be running at the same time. Google is now allowing manufacturers to keep all apps resumed/active when in multi-window.
Essential launches $149 clip-on headphone jack — It’s the $149 magnetic headphone jack adapter Essential promised way back in September 2017. The company first announced in June that the accessory would start shipping in the summer, but it apparently missed that deadline.
Canonical looking for investors — Shuttleworth likens this program of getting the company ready to IPO to getting fit. “There’s no point in saying: I haven’t done any exercise in the last 10 years but I’m going to sign up for tomorrow’s marathon,” he said.
Cryptocurrency market tanks — Within one brutal hour yesterday, Bitcoin’s price plummeted by around $800. The coin is trading under $5,800 for the first time since its October 2017 boom
Detain the bhyve | BSD Now 272
Nov 15, 2018
Byproducts of reading OpenBSD’s netcat code, learnings from porting your own projects to FreeBSD, OpenBSD’s unveil(), NetBSD’s Virtual Machine Monitor, what 'dependency' means in Unix init systems, jailing bhyve, and more.
The Future of HTTP | TechSNAP 389
Nov 15, 2018
Wes is joined by special guest Jim Salter to discuss Google's recent BGP outage and the future of HTTP.
Plus the latest router botnet, why you should never go full UPnP, and the benefits of building your own home router.
Year of the Relevant Desktop | LINUX Unplugged 275
Nov 13, 2018
Christian F.K. Schaller from Red Hat joins us to discuss seamless Linux upgrades, replacing PulseAudio, some of the recent desktop Projects Red Hat’s been working on... And the value they get from them.
Plus a big batch of important community news, Wimpy’s Thunderbolt Dock experiments, and way to run pacman on any Linux distribution.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Christian F.K. Schaller, and Martin Wimpress.
snes9x — For those packaging the GTK+ port, note that building with GTK+ 3 is now highly recommended over GTK+ 2 and should have no regressions. Also note that Wayland compatibility is implemented, which, if enabled, also requires GTK+ to have been compiled with Wayland support.
Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth says he has no plans to sell anytime soon — “I value my independence,” he told me during a brief chat on the outskirts of the OpenStack Summit in Berlin today. In part, that’s because he simply doesn’t personally need the money but also because he’d like to see through to the end his vision for Canonical and Ubuntu
Open Invention Network Expands Linux Definition — The expansion includes 151 new packages, bringing the total number of protected packages to 2,873. “With this update to the Linux System definition, OIN continues with its well-established process of carefully maintaining a balance between stability and innovative core open source technology,” stated Mirko Boehm, OIN’s director for the Linux System definition. “While the majority of the new additions are widely used and found in most devices, the update includes a number of key open source innovations such as Kubernetes, Apache Cassandra and packages for Automotive Grade Linux.”
Bitwarden Completes Third-party Security Audit — We are pleased to announce that Bitwarden has completed a thorough security audit and cryptographic analysis from the security experts at Cure53.
Adding an optional install duration to LVFS firmware — We’ve just added an optional feature to fwupd and the LVFS that some people might find useful: The firmware update process can now tell the user how long in seconds the update is going to take.
PipeWire Hackfest — The event kicked off with Wim Taymans presenting on current state of PipeWire and outlining the remaining issues and current thoughts on how to resolve them. Most of the first day was spent on a roadtable discussion about what are and should be the goals of PipeWire and what potential tradeoffs there would be going forward.
Junest — The lightweight Arch Linux based distro that runs upon any Linux distros without root access.
Linux Action News 79
Nov 11, 2018
Ubuntu on select Samsung devices goes into beta, we cover the technicalities of Linux on the new Macs, one of our favorite desktop projects gets a big update, and the Librem 5 slips.
Plus it's the end of the line for the Nexus devices, and more!
Links:
Booting Linux on new Macs — Apple's T2 security chip being embedded into their newest products provides a secure enclave, APFS storage encryption, UEFI Secure Boot validation, Touch ID handling, a hardware microphone disconnect on lid close, and other security tasks. The T2 restricts the boot process quite a bit and verifies each step of the process using crypto keys signed by Apple.
WSL gets new features — A slate of improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) feature in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update.
Samsung announce Linux on DeX — Samsung is announcing the beta launch of Linux on DeX which extends the value of Samsung DeX to Linux developers. Linux on DeX empowers developers to build apps within a Linux development environment by connecting their Galaxy device to a larger screen for a PC-like experience.
KDE Connect Updated — Android Oreo introduced some restrictions in regard to apps running in the background. In the future in order to be able to run in the background KDE Connect needs to show a persistent notification. The good news is that you can hide the notification. The (slightly) bad news is that we cannot do it by default. To hide the notification you need to long-press it and switch it off. Other notifications from KDE Connect are unaffected by this.
GSConnect updated — The GNOME Shell UI has been rewritten to better conform to design guidelines. Appearance is important to everyone and work will continue to improve usability for touchscreens, HiDPI and users requiring accessibility features.
Librem 5 slips again — I am reluctant to give a new timeline for shipping the dev kits… What we know is that our new PCB fabrication here in the USA will be 11 business days. We will make over 300 of these boards, which are pretty complex—we have over 160 different parts and more than 500 components in total per board. This takes some time, even with the amazing SMT machines placing tiny parts.
Nexus devices finally dead — An over-the-air (OTA) update, which is based on Android 8.1 Oreo, is now rolling out to both the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P (as well as to the Pixel/Pixel XL, the Pixel 2/Pixel 2 XL, and Pixel 3/Pixel 3 XL), bumping up both phones to the latest November security patches. But if Google’s update policies are to be followed here, then this will be the last update to be released to both Nexus phones, meaning that the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P have now officially reached end-of-life (EOL) status. Furthermore, online and phone support for both devices is also being discontinued.
Little Packages of Joy | User Error 52
Nov 09, 2018
What's the best strategy when it comes to desktop Linux applications? We look at both ends of the spectrum, and wonder how much big tech companies should dictate who has access to their platforms.
Plus some solid #AskError questions, having kids, and our new forum at community.error.show.
Automatic Drive Tests | BSD Now 271
Nov 08, 2018
MidnightBSD 1.0 released, MeetBSD review, EuroBSDcon trip reports, DNS over TLS in FreeBSD 12, Upgrading OpenBSD with Ansible, how to use smartd to run tests on your drives automatically, and more.
Before Coder | Coder Radio 332
Nov 07, 2018
We answer how Chris and Mike started in independent contracting, and the lessons changes they’d make with some perspective of time.
Plus System76’s new Thelio hardware looks great, but would the Mac Mini be the wiser purchase? The guys debate. And a tool of the week, some news, and more!
ASP.NET Core Ditching .NET Framework — Microsoft yesterday (Oct. 29) said that going forward, ASP.NET Core 3.0 -- the Web framework part of the "Core" platform offerings -- will only run on the base NET Core 3.0 platform, not the traditional .NET Framework that has been a Windows-only mainstay for some 16 years.
Erick Roberts on Twitter — "@dominucco I went way back in the @coderradioshow archives hoping to get some back story on how you and Chris both started your independent contractor lives. Can you or @ChrisLAS point me to a blog post or a podcast episode. It cuts me off at episode 55."
Gogh — Color Scheme for Gnome Terminal and Pantheon Terminal
Celebrating 100 | Ask Noah Show 100
Nov 07, 2018
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Celebrating 100 | Ask Noah Show 100
For 100 episodes The Ask Noah Show has delivered quality content every single week without exception. This week we celebrate this important milestone live from the Tamarack Tap Room in Woodbury MN. Brandon Johnson joins us live and as always we take your questions!
-- The Cliff Notes --
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ArcoLinux with Erik Dubois | Ask Noah Show 99
Nov 07, 2018
ArcoLinux with Erik Dubois | Ask Noah Show 99
In this episode we make a bombshell announcement regarding the future of Ask Noah! Later in the hour Erik Dubois from ArcoLinux joins us to talk about a rolling distro built for those who want to learn Linux!
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Stump The Linux Chumps | Ask Noah Show 98
Nov 07, 2018
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Our friends from Destination Linux join us and together we form the “Linux Chumps”! Can we be stumped? We think not, but your calls try anyway! Your emails, your calls, your questions are the priority. Join Michael, Zeb, Ryan and Noah as we take on you the listener in this special edition!
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The Faster FUSE Has Been Fused Into Linux 4.20 — Performance work for FUSE in this next version of the Linux kernel includes symlink caching, a hash table optimization, and copy file range support.
Microsoft Joins OIN with Patrick McBride | Ask Noah Show 97
Nov 06, 2018
Microsoft Joins OIN with Patrick McBride | Ask Noah Show 97
The Open Invention Network is a shared defensive patent pool with the mission to protect Linux. On October 10th Microsoft joined the OIN so we invited Patrick McBride the Senior Director of Patents to join us and explain the implications both to Red Hat as well as the larger Linux community.
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The new Fedora has a neat trick, The Register's KDE klickbait, and GhostBSD impresses.
Plus Sailfish's release strategy gets refined, System76 announces their Thelio Linux hardware, and more.
SQLite with Richard Hipp | Ask Noah Show 96
Nov 03, 2018
SQLite with Richard Hipp | Ask Noah Show 96
If you have a device with an operating system chances are it uses SQLite. Richard Hipp is our guest this hour and he joins us to talk about their controversial CoC. As an alternative to the Contributor Covenant the Rule of St. Benedict was chosen for it’s long and proven track record. Red Hat has officially dropped support for the KDE Desktop and we give you our take on that decision but as always your phone calls go to the front of the line!
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Community hour is where we take some time to focus on you the listener! You set the topics, you ask the questions! In this episode we chat about self hosting. We talk email, to nextcloud, to file sync. Friend of the show Brandon explains why Ansible is the solution you want to manage multiple servers!
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OpenBSD 6.4 released, GhostBSD RC2 released, MeetBSD - the ultimate hallway track, DragonflyBSD desktop on a Thinkpad, Porting keybase to NetBSD, OpenSSH 7.9, and draft-ietf-6man-ipv6only-flag in FreeBSD.
Blue Is The New Red | Coder Radio 331
Oct 31, 2018
We react to the news that IBM is buying Red Hat, cover some feedback that sets us straight, and are pleasantly surprised by Qt Design Studio.
New LSP language service supporting Swift and C-family languages for any editor and platform — I'm excited to announce that we are going to start a new open-source project for a Swift and C-family language service based on the Language Server Protocol 1.6k. We've chosen to adopt LSP so we can benefit from its active community and wide adoption across other editors and platforms. This means that Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime Text, or whatever your favorite editor happens to be, can use the same service as Xcode, and any improvements we make to the service will benefit them all.
IBM to Acquire Red Hat — IBM will acquire all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total enterprise value of approximately $34 billion.
Forget Watson, the Red Hat acquisition may be the thing that saves IBM — Watson, the business division focused on artificial intelligence whose public claims were always more marketing than actually market-driven, has not performed as well as IBM had hoped and investors were losing their patience.
International Hat Machines | LINUX Unplugged 273
Oct 31, 2018
We speculate about a future where IBM owns Red Hat, and review the latest Fedora 29 release that promises a new game changing feature.
Plus Chris returns from MeetBSD with his review, and we get the inside scope on System76’s Thelio hardware.
IBM Buys Red Hat | Ask Noah Show 94
Oct 30, 2018
IBM Buys Red Hat | Ask Noah Show 94
In the largest software company acquisition in history, tech giant IBM has purchased Red Hat for 34 billion dollars. The open source community was shocked and devastated at first but is it too soon to judge? What has IBM really purchased a product or a culture? We explain why this could be the best thing ever to happen to Linux and FOSS!
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Linus is back in charge with the whole world watching, IBM is buying Red Hat, and Pine64 says they’re working on a Plasma phone.
Plus Firefox has a new sales pitch for you, and how HTC's blockchain future is already fizzling out.
The Open Source Broadcast Appliance | Ask Noah Show 93
Oct 27, 2018
Fred Gleason has worked for years to develop a open source Linux based broadcasting appliance. Rivendell can be used for the acquisition, management, scheduling and playout of audio content. It has all of the features one would expect in a modern, fully-fledged automation system, including support for both PCM and MPEG audio encoding, full voicetracking and log customization as well as support for a wide variety of third party software and hardware. Fred joins us this hour to tell us the story of how Rivendell can make anyone a headache free broadcaster.
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Linus has taken a break while he worked on his tooling to be more socially acceptable. That time is over and Greg KH has officially handed the kernel back to him. We discuss the implication of his return and what it might mean for Linux.
A Google contract has been leaked that shows Google is requiring it’s hardware partners to maintain security patches and updates for at least 2 years.
All that and more in this special edition of The Ask Noah Show!
-- The Cliff Notes --
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Universal Basic Disruption | User Error 51
Oct 26, 2018
It’s a special all #AskError episode! A hypothetical Linux world, the future of welfare, tech disruption, and terrible email addresses.
Plus Distrowatch rankings, and a crucial seasonal question.
The One About eBPF | TechSNAP 388
Oct 25, 2018
We explain what eBPF is, how it works, and its proud BSD production legacy.
eBPF is a technology that you’re going to be hearing more and more about. It powers low-overhead custom analysis tools, handles network security in a containerized world, and powers tools you use every day.
Tiny Daemon Lib | BSD Now 269
Oct 24, 2018
FreeBSD Foundation September Update, tiny C lib for programming Unix daemons, EuroBSDcon trip reports, GhostBSD tested on real hardware, and a BSD auth module for duress.
Business Backup Tips | Ask Noah Show 91
Oct 23, 2018
Business Backup Tips | Ask Noah Show 91
If you have data, that data should be backed up. If you own a business or manage the IT infrastructure for a business than your backup strategy needs to be reliable, straightforward, and functional. Have you ever wondered what happens to the backup should you be hit by a bus? We tackle that question, dive into some SQLite CoC drama, and chat with Simon Quigley about the latest Qt release.
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Prepare for Pipewire | LINUX Unplugged 272
Oct 23, 2018
The lead developer of PipeWire Wim Taymans joins us to discuss Linux’s multimedia past, and its exciting future. They promise to greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux.
Plus we review the professional grade Precision 5530, tour our new studio in a box, and release one of our first production tools as free software!
Vinny's Unit Tests | Coder Radio 330
Oct 23, 2018
What’s the future of .NET? With .NET Core growing and the future of the orginal .NET seems uncertain. Chris and Mike suspect there is clear possibility.
Plus a few more thoughts on Unit Testing, embedded productivity companion devices, and the hoopla of the week.
Linux Action News 76
Oct 21, 2018
The Cosmic Cuttlefish is out, and we share our quick take. Juno finally lands and this one sets the bar, MongoDB gets hip to the license changes, and watch out Linux... Here come the pros!
Plus we go over the newly publish Ubuntu statistics, and Google's new Android licensing scheme in Europe.
Netcat Demystified | BSD Now 268
Oct 17, 2018
6 metrics for zpool performance, 2FA with ssh on OpenBSD, ZFS maintaining file type information in dirs, everything old is new again, netcat demystified, and more.
Juno Jubilation | LINUX Unplugged 271
Oct 16, 2018
Elementary OS’ latest and greatest released today, and we talk with Dan and Cassidy from the project about their biggest release yet.
Then community news, a preview of upcoming Ubuntu 18.10, and we announce our own free software project. Plus a chat with Dalton about the new Ubuntu Touch release and we find a real Photoshop replacement for Linux.
Building a WISP and CCTV | Ask Noah Show 90
Oct 16, 2018
Building a WISP and CCTV | Ask Noah Show 90
It's family friendly, we promise! You know that Linux succeededs where others fail, but did you know that cam girls are turning to Linux for it's reliability, stability, and functionality? We cover this amusing reddit thread, give you an update on the car dealership camera install. We touch a little on visualization, and as always - take your calls at the front of the line!
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Azure Sphere dev kits are shipping and we take a look at the practicalities of getting setup to start developing.
We clear some recent Java FUD, read some feedback, and share a few stories.
Linux Action News 75
Oct 14, 2018
Another fork is brewing, Microsoft hands over their patents of mass destruction leaving us with a few questions, and the best features of the new Plasma release.
Plus Google's new Linux hardware, Flatpak's have met their critic, and more.
Understand The Hype | User Error 50
Oct 12, 2018
It seems to be all about Plasma these days so we want to know if the hype is justified. We have a couple of great #AskError questions, and wonder whether we are heading for a tech dystopia.
Plus the heaviest of all subjects rears its head again this week.
Private Cloud Building Blocks | TechSNAP 387
Oct 11, 2018
We bring in Amy Marrich to break down the building blocks of OpenStack. There are nearly an overwhelming number of ways to manage your infrastructure, and we learn about one of the original tools.
Plus a few warm up stories, a war story, and more.
Absolute FreeBSD | BSD Now 267
Oct 10, 2018
We have a long interview with fiction and non-fiction author Michael W. Lucas for you this week as well as questions from the audience.
Stratis Pulls it All Together | LINUX Unplugged 270
Oct 09, 2018
Red Hat developer Andy Grover joins us to discuss Stratis Storage, an alternative to ZFS on Linux and its recent milestone.
Also Google subtracts Plus, some KDE and GNOME news, and a bit of forgotten Linux history.
Privacy Matters | Ask Noah Show 89
Oct 09, 2018
Supermicro suffered a huge security breach that gave the Chinese government access to servers manufactured with Supermicro boards. This revelation has caused companies like Apple and Amazon to distance themselves from the popular server manufacture. Unifi has announced that their new "Unifi Protect" will only be available on their hardware and not user built boxes. We dive into all of this plus an update from Simon Quigley on Lubuntu 18.10!
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In Testing We Trust | Coder Radio 328
Oct 08, 2018
Mike makes his case for realism when it comes to automated testing and a readjustment of expectations in the wider community.
Plus the guys define what makes a “Dark Matter Developer,” gauk at the possibility of this young hip upstart’s automated build pipeline, and share memories of large scale QA testing teams.
Linux Action News 74
Oct 07, 2018
Red Hat's Stratis project reaches a major milestone, Microsoft's Linux powered dev boards go up for sale, and Fedora's hunt for buggy hibernation under Linux has begun.
Plus Android App mirroring, how the islands of the clouds are getting bridged, and Chris channel’s his inner Shuttleworth.
What Makes Google Cloud Different | TechSNAP 386
Oct 04, 2018
We bring on our Google Cloud expert and explore the fundamentals, demystify some of the magic, and ask what makes Google Cloud different.
Plus how Google hopes Roughtime will solve one of the web’s biggest problems, some great emails, and more!
File Type History | BSD Now 266
Oct 03, 2018
Running OpenBSD/NetBSD on FreeBSD using grub2-bhyve, vermaden’s FreeBSD story, thoughts on OpenBSD on the desktop, history of file type info in Unix dirs, Multiboot a Pinebook KDE neon image, and more.
Alternate Desktop Universe | LINUX Unplugged 269
Oct 02, 2018
What if desktop computing went a very different direction in the late 90s? Deeply multithreaded from the start, fast, intuitive, and extremely stable. This is the world of Haiku, and we go for a visit.
Plus the latest community news, true flicker freedom comes to Fedora, and our favorite tools for easy virtual machines on our laptops.
Kubernetes & Containers | Ask Noah Show 88
Oct 02, 2018
Kubernetes & Containers | Ask Noah Show 88
Have you ever wanted to know what containers and Kubernetes are all about? This week we try something new – Steve Ovens from Red Hat has produced a segment on containers for us. We talk about the latest release of Zabbix, and Noah gives the details of a client who wants Altispeed to build a mini WISP in their city. It’s a packed show!
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Mike is the extreme laptop killer with a tale you’ll have to hear to believe. With only a few short hours left on a deadline, it was 24 hours of chaos.
Plus we take a quick look at Mac in the Cloud, Microsoft’s new Azure service, a travel hack, and more.
Linux Action News 73
Sep 30, 2018
Google's Project Zero criticizes Linux distros, Firefox can now tell you when you get pwned, and the growing elephant in the room about Azure.
Plus a new release of our favorite non-distro, GPL revoking debunking, and Android turns 10.
Not Dead Yet | User Error 49
Sep 28, 2018
Chris joins us to talk about his recent brush with death, we wonder how Linux on Windows is affecting bare metal adoption, we wish phones weren’t so big and stupid, and a great #AskError.
3 Things to Know About Kubernetes | TechSNAP 385
Sep 27, 2018
Kubernetes expert Will Boyd joins us to explain the top 3 things to know about Kubernetes, when it’s the right tool for the job, and building highly available production grade clusters.
Plus the privacy improvements that could be coming to HTTPS, and a new SSH auditing tool hits the open source scene.
Software Disenchantment | BSD Now 265
Sep 27, 2018
We report from our experiences at EuroBSDcon, disenchant software, LLVM 7.0.0 has been released, Thinkpad BIOS update options, HardenedBSD Foundation announced, and ZFS send vs. rsync.
Elementary, My Dear Plasma | LINUX Unplugged 268
Sep 25, 2018
We chat with Nate Graham who’s pushing to make Plasma the best desktop on the planet. We discuss his contributions to this effort, and others.
Plus we get the scope on a new Juno feature from the source, and the creator of WSLinux a distro built specifically for Windows 10’s Windows Subsystem for Linux joins us.
Also some community news, some old friends stop by, and more!
This is How You Should Store Your Data | Ask Noah Show 87
Sep 25, 2018
This is How You Should Store Your Data | Ask Noah Show 87
In this episode your calls drove the show and that's the show we set out to do! We talk storage, LVM, hard disk configuration, SteamOS, troubleshoot an OBS box, and still find time break the news about the new and best way to listen to The Ask Noah Show live!
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I'm A Stakeholder Now | Coder Radio 326
Sep 24, 2018
After catching up the guys dig into the “why” Jupiter Broadcasting sold to Linux Academy, the big shift Chris is seeing, and why the timing was critical.
Plus we respond to some emails, chat about GitHub’s future plans to sell talent, and Mike’s big announcement: Gryphon.
Linux Action News 72
Sep 23, 2018
Linus is taking a break from maintaining the kernel, AMP might be set free, and Firefox goes VR.
It’s also been a big week for Linux on Windows with Flatpaks and a new distro running on WSL, and a flawless Ubuntu VM experience.
Interplanetary Peers | TechSNAP 384
Sep 21, 2018
Jon the Nice Guy joins Wes to discuss all things IPFS. We'll explore what it does, how it works, and why it might be the best hope for a decentralized internet.
Plus, Magecart strikes again, Alpine has package problems, and why you shouldn't trust Western Digital's MyCloud.
Optimized-out | BSD Now 264
Sep 20, 2018
FreeBSD and DragonflyBSD benchmarks on AMD’s Threadripper, NetBSD 7.2 has been released, optimized out DTrace kernel symbols, stuck UEFI bootloaders, why ed is not a good editor today, tell your BSD story, and more.
People Patches | LINUX Unplugged 267
Sep 19, 2018
Linus takes a break and the Linux kernel adops a new Code of Conduct. We work through these major watershed moments, and discuss what it means for the community.
Plus our review of our brand new ThinkPad T480’s running Linux, the bug you need to know about, and why this might be one of the greatest Linux laptops of all time.
Linus Takes a Break | Ask Noah Show 86
Sep 18, 2018
Linus Takes a Break | Ask Noah Show 86
Linus Torvalds has decided he needs a break so he can understand people and their emotions better. The kernel has finally adopted a code of conduct based on the contributor covenant. No one knows more about codes of conduct than Paul M. Jones. Paul joins us in the second half of the program to help us explore the situation and give us some insight into what we can expect for the future of Linux.
-- The Cliff Notes --
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Fedora want help testing their innovations, Mozilla continue to focus on mobile, Chrome OS gets a major new feature, and Microsoft almost stepped in it bigtime.
Plus new releases from nano and Nextcloud, huge news for Jupiter Broadcasting, and more.
Living The Dream | User Error 48
Sep 14, 2018
User Error is back with a new set of hosts! We answer some #AskError questions and talk about whether the Linux desktop will ever make money.
Plus we wonder if dockless bike sharing is a good idea and whether travel really is as great as everyone seems to think.
The Power of Shame | TechSNAP 383
Sep 14, 2018
TechSNAP progenitor and special guest Allan Jude joins us to talk mobile security, hand out some SSH tips and tricks, and discuss why security shaming works so well.
Plus, how Mozilla is protecting their GitHub repos, a check-in on Equifax, and some great picks.
Encrypt That Pool | BSD Now 263
Sep 12, 2018
Mitigating Spectre/Meltdown on HP Proliant servers, omniOS installation setup, debugging a memory corruption issue on OpenBSD, CfT for OpenZFS native encryption, Asigra TrueNAS backup appliance shown at VMworld, NetBSD 6 EoL, and more.
From Jupiter to Beyond | LINUX Unplugged 266
Sep 11, 2018
We announce our big news, Jupiter Broadcasting is joining Linux Academy and what we have planned for the future is huge!
Plus a new NextCloud lands, concerns are brewing for the Solus project, and a report from the recent Libre Application Summit.
Does This Make FOSS Better or Worse | Ask Noah Show 85
Sep 11, 2018
Does This Make FOSS Better or Worse | Ask Noah Show 85
Does the "Commons Clause" help the commons? The Commons Clause was announced recently along with several projects moving portions of their code base under it. It's an additional restriction intended to be applied to existing open source licenses with the effect of preventing the work from being sold. We play devils advocate and tell you why this might not be such a bad thing. As always your calls go to the front of the line, and we give you the details on how you can win free stuff in the Telegram group!
-- The Cliff Notes --
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Great new releases for GNOME and Tor, delays for the Librem 5, and Linus proves to be extremely important.
Plus some innovative tech gets an open source implementation, and NSA encryption removed from the kernel within weeks of inclusion.
Clojure Calisthenics | Coder Radio 325
Sep 07, 2018
Wes joins Mike to discuss why .NET still makes sense, the latest antics from Fortnite, a brave new hope for JVM concurrency, and the mind-expanding benefits of trying a Lisp.
We’re joined by a special guest to discuss the failures of campaign security, the disastrous consequences of a mismanaged firewall, and the suspicious case of Speck.
Plus the latest vulnerabilities in Wireshark and OpenSSH, the new forensic hotness from Netflix, and some great introductions to cryptography.
OpenBSD Surfacing | BSD Now 262
Sep 06, 2018
OpenBSD on Microsoft Surface Go, FreeBSD Foundation August Update, What’s taking so long with Project Trident, pkgsrc config file versioning, and MacOS remnants in ZFS code.
Privacy Priorities | LINUX Unplugged 265
Sep 04, 2018
Intel has disappointed the kernel community with its latest security disclosures but there's still hope for a better future. That's more than can be said for the state of privacy on Android, so we discuss some alternatives.
Plus the latest community updates, a new timeline for the Librem 5, tempting new Chromebooks, and some top picks.
Better Than Google Titan | Ask Noah Show 84
Sep 04, 2018
Google is launching it’s own hardware security key for two-factor authentication but there’s a few major problems. From pricing, to security concerns, we break the entire situation down for you. New audio production software is released for Linux, and we talk with a caller about BluRays on Linux and ripping them.
-- The Cliff Notes --
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This week saw a huge release for UBports, proof that LMDE is still alive, and Mozilla earning a lot of respect.
Plus mixed news for Google, and a surprising blockchain fact.
Rage Against The Beer | CR 324
Aug 31, 2018
Mike and Chris have a strong reaction to beer from Utah, and then get into the weeds around Mike’s new gear, the situation with Qt, and a few new tools they’ve recently found.
FreeBSDcon Flashback | BSD Now 261
Aug 30, 2018
Insight into TrueOS and Trident, stop evildoers with pf-badhost, Flashback to FreeBSDcon ‘99, OpenBSD’s measures against TLBleed, play Morrowind on OpenBSD in 5 steps, DragonflyBSD developers shocked at Threadripper performance, and more.
Here Comes Cloud DNS | TechSNAP 381
Aug 30, 2018
To make DNS more secure we must move it to the cloud...at least that’s what Mozilla and Google suggest. We breakdown DNS-over-HTTPS, why it requires a “cloud” component, and the advantages it has over traditional DNS.
Plus new active attacks against Apache Struts and a Windows 10 zero-day exposed on Twitter.
Reacting to React Native | CR 323
Aug 30, 2018
After digging into some feedback, we react to the big upset in the world of React Native.
Plus some recent hoopla, a new way to get started contributing to open source, and more!
Proton, Electron for Games! | LUP 264
Aug 28, 2018
Steam Play rocks the Linux world as it promises new levels of compatibility with AAA Windows games. But the story of how Valve is doing it might be just as fascinating.
Plus community news, our thoughts on building a market for Linux apps, the latest from UBPorts, and more good news from LVFS!
How to Get Hired at Red Hat | Ask Noah Show 83
Aug 28, 2018
How to Get Hired at Red Hat | Ask Noah Show 83
Steve Ovens from Red Hat joins us to answer the question many of you have asked - how do you get hired by a company like Red Hat? Steve takes us through his exciting rise to working for the largest open source company in the US. Steam has dropped a bomb shell that has left Windows users dropping their gaming computers like yesterday's laundry and as always your phone calls go to the front of the line!
-- The Cliff Notes --
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Some massive free software milestones this week, Intel's Microcode benchmark snafu, and Windows games for Steam on Linux confirmed, so we give it a test.
Plus Venezuela ties its currency to a cryptocoin, and our reaction to Windows 95 getting stuffed inside an Electron app.
Hacking Tour of Europe | BSD Now 260
Aug 23, 2018
Trip reports from the Essen Hackathon and BSDCam, CfT: ZFS native encryption and UFS trim consolidation, ZFS performance benchmarks on a FreeBSD server, how to port your OS to EC2, Vint Cerf about traceability, Remote Access console to an RPi3 running FreeBSD, and more.
Updates from the Source | Linux Unplugged 263
Aug 22, 2018
Docker controversy is brewing but it's probably not what you think. We get a round of community updates directly from the source and why Debian and Intel are playing the game of he said, she said.
Should We Care About Libre? | Ask Noah Show 82
Aug 21, 2018
Should We Care About Libre? | Ask Noah Show 82
We talk about Linux and Open Source, but is it far enough? Do we need to go all the way and push for everyone to use Libre freedom respecting software? We invite Kenny Schmidt, a 17 year old who is starting out with Linux and ask that question. We talk about a $100 device that will monitor your Internet, the EFFs stance to protect the individual’s ability to call out security problems as they find them.
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
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It seems Valve is working to make Windows games work on Linux, and LVFS turns its focus to NVMe drives.
Plus KDE 3 lives on, Endless ships on Asus, and major distros patch against Foreshadow.
Terminal Fault | TechSNAP 380
Aug 16, 2018
Microsoft’s making radical changes to Windows 10, and a new type of speculative execution attack on Intel’s processors is targeting cloud providers.
Long Live Unix | BSD Now 259
Aug 16, 2018
The strange birth and long life of Unix, FreeBSD jail with a single public IP, EuroBSDcon 2018 talks and schedule, OpenBSD on G4 iBook, PAM template user, ZFS file server, and reflections on one year of OpenBSD use.
Jupiter Broadcasting's Focus
Aug 16, 2018
A quick note from Chris on some changes, Jupiter Broadcasting's focus going forward, and... Well that's about it.
Tribes of Init | LUP 262
Aug 14, 2018
The FreeBSD community shares the hard lessons learned from systemd, we play some great clips from a recent event.
Plus our work-arounds for Dropbox dropping support for anything but vanilla Ext4, the return of an old friend, and a ton of community news and updates.
Firefox Made This More Secure | Ask Noah Show 81
Aug 14, 2018
This week firefox made waves by encrypting DNS entries making DNS more secure for everyone. We talk about IP cameras, gaming on Linux, and Steve Ovens from RedHat joins us. It's a packed episode you can't afford to miss!
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
Mike's adventures with Qt land him on Windows 10 this week battling DLL hell. He shares the latest developments in his attempt to build his next app with Qt.
Plus some feedback, thoughts on AMP, and why dynamic linking keeps Mike up at night.
Linux Action News 66
Aug 12, 2018
We cover the noteworthy features of Android Pie, Lenovo joins The Linux Vendor Firmware Service, and Dropbox is ending support for non-Ext4 filesystems.
Plus big news for Flatpaks, the blockchain goes to work, and Open Source goes all Hollywood.
SegmentSmack is Whack | TechSNAP 379
Aug 10, 2018
Take down a Linux or FreeBSD box with just 2kpps of traffic, own Homebrew in 30 minutes, and infiltrate an entire network via the Inkjet printers.
It’s a busy TechSNAP week.
The Truth About Southeast Linuxfest | Ask Noah Show 80
Aug 09, 2018
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
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In the last weekly episode of Unfilter, we look at the four major fronts facing Donald Trump, discuss the state of intellectualism, and share our thoughts on the week's news.
Plus a packed Overtime, tons of your notes, and more!
OS Foundations | BSD Now 258
Aug 08, 2018
FreeBSD Foundation July Newsletter, a bunch of BSDCan trip reports, HardenedBSD Foundation status, FreeBSD and OSPFd, ZFS disk structure overview, and more Spectre mitigations in OpenBSD.
GNOME, GNOME on the Range | LUP 261
Aug 07, 2018
GNOME is discussing big changes, Elementary OS has big news, and a big bug has been found in Linux.
Plus an update on our PeerTube efforts, our take Android P, and Lenovo’s big commitment to ThinkPad’s running Linux.
What You Need to Know about WireGuard | Ask Noah Show 79
Aug 07, 2018
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
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Mike shares more first impressions of Qt, the surprising places we’ve found QML in the wild, and why or why not to use Qt.
Plus we answer some questions, share some travel hacks, and discuss the top programming languages of 2018, as declared so by the IEEE.
Linux Action News 65
Aug 05, 2018
GNOME and elementary OS receive a large somewhat mysterious donation. Wireguard is coming to a Kernel near you, and Mozilla wants to talk about the Dweb.
Plus OpenWrt is alive and well, and Samsung has a new trick.
Two-Factor Fraud | TechSNAP 378
Aug 02, 2018
Reddit’s Two Factor procedures fail, while Google’s prevents years of attacks. We’ll look at the different approaches, and discuss the fundamental weakness of Reddit’s approach.
Plus a Spectre attack over the network, BGP issues take out Telegram, and more!
The Big Bezos | CR 320
Aug 02, 2018
Mike’s ordered a surprise new rig, Chris is getting particular, and do a first impressions of Qt Creator.
Plus why we all need to pull back on the AI hype a bit, and more!
Great NetBSD 8 | BSD Now 257
Aug 02, 2018
NetBSD 8.0 available, FreeBSD on Scaleway’s ARM64 VPS, encrypted backups with OpenBSD, Dragonfly server storage upgrade, zpool checkpoints, g2k18 hackathon reports, and more.
Trump Tower Tales | Unfilter 289
Aug 01, 2018
Did Trump know about the Russian meeting with his son? His old fixer seems to think so. And the reaction from the White House has been manic.
Plus a very important update about the show in the Patreon segment.
Linux Under Pressure | TechSNAP 377
Aug 01, 2018
Some new tools will give you better insights into your system under extreme load, and we flash back to the days of AOL and discuss the new way social hackers are spreading malware.
Plus the death of a TLD, the return of SamSam, and more!
Homeless to Web Developer Overnight | Ask Noah Show 78
Jul 31, 2018
-- The Cliff Notes --
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We get an update from Dell’s Barton George on their Linux initiative Sputnik, cover some important community news, and the uncomfortable questions raised by Krita’s new financial boost.
And some simple tips to improve your security at the edge.
Nadella Stamp | CR 319
Jul 31, 2018
After we happily avoid the recent MacBook scandals we deep dive into hardware for a bit...and then pull it out with a overview of Microsoft Async/await pattern.
Linux Action News 64
Jul 29, 2018
Slackware's founder runs into challenges, YouTube makes changes that slow down Firefox, while Firefox is cutting back on some features, and another German region dumps FOSS.
Plus some hard data on why it's time to drop 32-bit Linux, and Lubuntu's got a new direction.
Google Don’t Front | TechSNAP 376
Jul 26, 2018
Google and Amazon recently shutdown Domain Fronting. Their abrupt change has created a building backlash.
We’ll explain what Domain Fronting is, how activists can use it to avoid censorship, and why large organizations are compelled to disable it.
Plus how road navigation systems can be spoofed with $223 in hardware, and another bad Bluetooth bug.
Trump Tape Troubles | Unfilter 288
Jul 25, 2018
Michael Cohen’s secret stash of tapes leaks to the media, and everyone is hearing something different. We’ll play the clips.
Plus the FISA sauce is weak, and the GCHQ is getting away with it all!
Proprietary Action News | LUP 259
Jul 25, 2018
Another potential desktop Linux app is scared away by an aggressive free software community, and we struggle to find the balance between our moral ideals, and getting work done.
Plus some community news, old friends return, and much more.
Because Computers | BSD Now 2^8
Jul 25, 2018
FreeBSD ULE vs. Linux CFS, OpenBSD on Tuxedo InfinityBook, how zfs diff reports filenames efficiently, why choose FreeBSD over Linux, PS4 double free exploit, OpenBSD’s wifi autojoin, and FreeBSD jails the hard way.
These Apps Make Linux Usable Now | Ask Noah Show 77
Jul 24, 2018
The year of the Linux desktop has become a cliché. In 2018 has a Forbes writer finally found a distro that has one click installs for every app he used to use on Windows? Microsoft ports PowerShell to a Linux snap, and of course your calls go to the front of the line!
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from our podcast dashboard!
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Linux gains a world class media editor, Atari is making Chris nervous, and the Librem 5 hits some rocky waters.
Plus the EU fines Google over how they leverage Android, some follow up, and more.
Surprise Root Access | TechSNAP 375
Jul 19, 2018
Google's Cloud Platform suffers an outage, and iPhones in India get owned after a very specific attack.
Plus how a malware author built a massive 18,000 strong Botnet in one day, and Cisco finds more "undocumented" root passwords.
Bob’s Dozen Russians | Unfilter 287
Jul 18, 2018
The world melts down after Trump meets with Putin, but we’ll focus on the substance of the meeting and the possibly positive developments… And of course a bit of the reaction!
Plus highlights from Peter Strzok’s testimony, your everyday cyber attacks, and much more!
What Are You Pointing At | BSD Now 255
Jul 18, 2018
What ZFS blockpointers are, zero-day rewards offered, KDE on FreeBSD status, new FreeBSD core team, NetBSD WiFi refresh, poor man’s CI, and the power of Ctrl+T.
The Future of Retro | LUP 258
Jul 18, 2018
Atari has released details about its upcoming Linux powered console, some of us are sold… And some of us are rather skeptical.
Plus how SSH got its port, Mir goes to the farm, and what happens when Linus retires?
Should You Ditch Linux for FreeBSD | Ask Noah Show 76
Jul 17, 2018
Chris Moore, and JT Pennington join the Ask Noah Show this week to answer the question what does BSD offer to attract Linux users over to their ball park. We discuss the Lumina desktop as well as Project Trident. Your calls as always go to the front of the line. Learn how a law office can convert their practice to Linux with our PDF software recommendation.
-- The Cliff Notes --
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Good progress is being made on post-quantum resilient computing. We’ll explain how they’re achieving it, the risks facing traditional cryptography.
Plus how bad defaults led to the theft of military Drone docs, new attacks against LTE networks, more!
Bare the OS | BSD Now 254
Jul 12, 2018
Control flow integrity with HardenedBSD, fixing bufferbloat with OpenBSD’s pf, Bareos Backup Server on FreeBSD, MeetBSD CfP, crypto simplified interface, twitter gems, interesting BSD commits, and more.
A Chat with Uno | CR 317
Jul 11, 2018
The Uno platform recently got our attention, and Jérôme from the project joins us to explain a few things, and have a frank discussion about what they've gotten right, that others have missed.
Plus your emails, a bit of hoopla, and more!
Gangster Government | Unfilter 286
Jul 11, 2018
Trump’s gut punching at the NATO summit, North Korea is throwing around the “gangster” label, and Paul Manafort is really screwed while Cohen plays ball.
The crew is back together for another roadshow edition.
Security Amateur Hour | LUP 257
Jul 11, 2018
We reflect on recent FOSS security screw ups and ponder a solution powered by community.
Plus get you caught up on community news, Firefox changes, and poke the new minimal Ubuntu.
Dell Precision 5510 Review
Jul 10, 2018
Many have tried and failed to manufacture a laptop that stops Apple's Macbook Pro in it's tracks! Has Dell finally done it with their Precision 5510? Can you get a $2200 laptop for under $1000 brand new from Dell? We'll show you how it's done and how it stacks up to Apple in this week's episode. We talk to Brandon who wants to know how to scale his small business and of course your calls as always go to the front of the line.
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
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SUSE is acquired and GNOME is hiring, and it might just be the summer of forks.
Plus how about a new package manager for your distro?
When Clouds Go Dark | CR 316
Jul 05, 2018
Mike discovers a new open source project that promises a free UWP Bridge for iOS, Android and WebAssembly. We kick the tires and share our first thoughts.
Plus a nasty software failure is striking down new iMac Pro's, and the 7 most cited reasons engineers quit.
Silence of the Fans | BSD Now 253
Jul 05, 2018
Fanless server setup with FreeBSD, NetBSD on pinebooks, another BSDCan trip report, transparent network audio, MirBSD's Korn Shell on Plan9, static site generators on OpenBSD, and more.
FreeBSD Already Does That | TechSNAP 373
Jul 05, 2018
Allan Jude and Wes sit-down for a special live edition of the TechSNAP program.
Joined by Jed and Jeff they have a wide ranging organic conversation.
Gowdy Gettin' Rowdy | Unfilter 285
Jul 04, 2018
Pressure is building to wrap the Russia investigation, and we play the clips that demonstrate the US war machine is just starting to ramp up.
Peering Into the Future | LUP 256
Jul 04, 2018
A major Internet monopoly might just be on the edge of cracking thanks to free software, a bit of initiative, and a lot of gumption. We'll follow up on a major experiment we kicked off last week.
Plus SUSE is sold again, Linux on the Nintendo Switch just got way better, Mint has a new release, we look at elementary OS Juno's first beta, and we cover a ton of community news.
Serving Customers Well | Ask Noah Show 74
Jul 03, 2018
This week on the Ask Noah Show we tackle the difficult discussion - is it okay for companies to collect data and when should you be worried about companies having too much data? We interview Brian Martell who uses the finance aspect to get people on Linux. As always your questions go to the front of the line!
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
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Allan Jude joins us for a FreeBSD birthday special edition of Tech Talk. We also discuss the privacy win for US mobiles, some history and future hopes for Intel's dedicated GPU Larrabee, and that time Allan's town lost power.
Chicken Farmers | CR 315
Jul 02, 2018
Tech companies are taking over cities, and becoming more powerful than some nations. Is their a moral stand developers inside these huge corporations should be taking? Or is the shift to a chicken farmer economy truly best for all?
It's a very introspective edition of the Coder Radio show.
Linux Action News 60
Jul 01, 2018
Gentoo's GitHub is compromised, and Google's writing big checks to the Linux Foundation to distract you from the Fuchsia elephant in the room.
Plus we try out AWS' new Linux WorkSpace, RISC-V's Linux first commitment looks a lot stronger this week, and why we think STARTTLS initiative is a great first step.
Goes to 11.2 | BSD Now 252
Jun 28, 2018
FreeBSD 11.2 has been released, setting up an MTA behind Tor, running pfsense on DigitalOcean, one year of C, using OpenBGPD to announce VM networks, the power to serve, and a BSDCan trip report.
Team America, Space Police | Unfilter 284
Jun 27, 2018
The show is back after a couple weeks hiatus and there is much to cover, from separating families to the North Korea summit.
Plus the building Trade Wars, the recent IG report about the Russia and Clinton investigations, and the unbelievable news that broke just before the show.
Fedora to the Core | LUP 255
Jun 27, 2018
Big changes are coming to Fedora with the merger of CoreOS. We chat with a couple project members to get the inside scope about what the future of Fedora looks like.
Plus the big feature of the new GitLab release, how Pocket might be Firefox's secret sauce, and why Chris is really excited by PeerTube.
What You Need to Know about WPA3 | Ask Noah Show 73
Jun 26, 2018
What You Need to Know about WPA3 | Ask Noah Show 73
There's new security out for WiFi. Noah takes you through exactly what you need to know to stay up to date. What does WPA3 offer over WPA2? How do you take advantage of it? We talk about everything from WiFi to Colo in this weeks episode!
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
Mike's got a dream, and it's a dream where Microsoft saves us from Electron. Now historically speaking, he's been wrong every single time. But this week we'll make the case why we all need to collective pull for his vision.
Linux Action News 59
Jun 24, 2018
Projects once thought dead are now full of life, with new major releases and we kick the tires.
Plus new commits suggest Fuchsia will support Linux apps, Fedora CoreOS is announced, and we look over the first public Ubuntu desktop metrics.
Crypto HAMMER | BSD Now 251
Jun 21, 2018
DragonflyBSD’s hammer1 encrypted master/slave setup, second part of our BSDCan recap, NomadBSD 1.1-RC1 available, OpenBSD adds an LDAP client to base, FreeBSD gets pNFS support, Intel FPU Speculation Vulnerability confirmed, and what some Unix command names mean.
Don’t Link to This | LUP 254
Jun 20, 2018
Free Software projects concerned about Article 13 are claiming it could destroy free software as we know it. We debate this controversial copyright law about to be voted on in the EU.
Plus a big batch of community news, some exciting hardware updates, and a bit of retro gaming.
Plus Chris shares what got done at Linux Academy, and more!
Talking Over IP | Ask Noah Show 72
Jun 19, 2018
Ever wanted your own phone system? Maybe you want an intercom system for you house? How about the ability to use use an internet connected ham radio? We're talking Audio over IP this hour! We show you how simple it is to get AOIP setup and all the things you never knew you could do with it. The first 3 minutes have some poor audio but we work the issues out live and bring you a quality product so please hang in there!
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
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Plasma Desktop has a new release so we cover the new features and some bugs, Mycroft has an "opportunity" for you, and trouble at CopperheadOS.
Plus Debian's call for help, and more.
GitLab’s CEO | CR 313
Jun 15, 2018
We chat with GitLab’s CEO and co-founder Sid Sijbrandij, about the GitLab model, the changes they’ve made since Microsoft purchased GitHub, his thoughts on that acquisition, and his compelling case for 100% remote work.
Logs and Metrics and Traces, Oh My! | TechSNAP 372
Jun 14, 2018
Netflix has learned the hard way how to utilize all the logs, we cover their lessons in their journey to build a fully observable system.
Plus the Lazy State FPU bug that cropped up this week, backdoored Docker images, your questions, and more!
BSDCan 2018 Recap | BSD Now 250
Jun 14, 2018
TrueOS becoming a downstream fork with Trident, our BSDCan 2018 recap, HardenedBSD Foundation founding efforts, VPN with OpenIKED on OpenBSD, FreeBSD on a System76 Galago Pro, and hardware accelerated crypto on Octeons.
Personalities Happen | LUP 253
Jun 13, 2018
There is trouble at CopperheadOS, Plasma has a shiny new release, and we share the story of how Linux has powered the curiosity rover for 17 years.
Plus our stories from a weekend of Linux parties, Texas LinuxFest, SouthEast LinuxFest, and FOSS Talk Live.
CopperheadOS Takeover Explained | Ask Noah Show 71
Jun 12, 2018
A hostile takeover has just happened to the Copperhead OS Project. Lead developer Daniel Micay has been fired by Copperhead CEO James Donaldson. Micay claims Donaldson is up to no good, and Donaldson says it's Micay who doesn't have the company's best interest in mind. Who's to blame? Was the government part of this? What has been publicly released? Will the CopperheadOS project survive? We break that down for you plus your calls in this week's episode.
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
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Free and open source developers are still freaking out about Microsoft buying GitHub, ReactOS reaches a major milestone, TrueOS appears to be forking, and changes are coming to the core of Plasma desktop team.
Plus we try out the new Devuan release, and more.
Small Business Theme Hour | Ask Noah Show 70
Jun 10, 2018
Do you run a small business? Do you work for a small business? Join us this hour as we talk to Keith Perry from DAO Technologies. Keith has been running a small business for a long time and implementing open source where possible. We get Keith's insight as well as bring in Chris DeLuca to tell us when it's okay to tell a client "No!"
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from our podcast dashboard!
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When You're Ready to Scale So is Linux | Ask Noah Show 69
Jun 09, 2018
When You're Ready to Scale So is Linux | Ask Noah Show 69
This week on the Ask Noah Show we take you live to the SELF floor! We take a look at a broadcasting company that was founded and runs entirely on Linux. That company? Jupiter Broadcasting. We tell you what you can expect from Southeast Linux Fest and how you can participate from anywhere in the world.
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from our podcast dashboard!
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
Microsoft puts a data center under the ocean, and they might be onto something. The Zip Slip vulnerability sneaks into your software, and VPNFilter turns out to be more complicated than first known.
Plus the mass exploit of Drupalgeddon2 continues, we break down why, a batch of questions, and more.
Router On A Stick | BSD Now 249
Jun 06, 2018
OpenZFS and DTrace updates in NetBSD, NetBSD network security stack audit, Performance of MySQL on ZFS, OpenSMTP results from p2k18, legacy Windows backup to FreeNAS, ZFS block size importance, and NetBSD as router on a stick.
Pardon Me, Mr. President | Unfilter 283
Jun 06, 2018
Trump kicks off a Pardon Party, and the reason seems obvious… We just both completely disagree with each other. We share our theories on the pardon parade, the storm approaching Fusion GPS, and much more!
Github Hubbub | LUP 252
Jun 06, 2018
Microsoft has purchased GitHub, sending shock-waves through the free software community. We discuss the bidding war that took place, and it leaves us questioning what the future of Electron might be.
Plus we’ve found a great batch of Linux apps you're going to want to try, NextCloud turns two, big changes to the KWin project, and the details on Samsung’s Chromebook Plus landing Linux app support.
Microsoft Buys GitHub | Ask Noah Show 68
Jun 05, 2018
This week on the show we give you the quick and dirty on Microsoft buying GitHub. We speak to Jason Plumb from GitLab and he gives us a brief overview of the services GitLab offers and how they've worked to create a product that blows GitHub out of the water. Plus a brief overview on what you can expect from Southeast Linuxfest this year!
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
Microsoft is buying GitHub, Apple just kicked off WWDC 2018, and we've got a packed show!
Linux Action News 56
Jun 03, 2018
Ubuntu-based Atari VCS crowd-funding is going very well, Endless employees are hit with layoffs, and why GNOME might be too fat for Pi.
Plus the group trying to force Samsung to update its phone loses, and Essential says they are definitely, totally, not shutting down.
Hidden in Plain Sight | TechSNAP 370
Jun 01, 2018
We explain how the much hyped VPNFilter malware actually works, and its rather surprising sophistication.
Plus a clear break down of the recent Kubernetes news, how a 40 year old tel-co protocol is being abused today, and a Git vulnerability you should know about.
Kremlin Script Kiddies | Unfilter 282
May 30, 2018
We try to get to the root of what Russia actually hacked, cover the whiplash from the North Korea news since last week, and serve up some cold cyber analysis.
The Qt and the Ugly | LUP 251
May 30, 2018
After we make ourselves at Gnome, we look at some future open source goodies coming your way, look at how Canonical’s upstream pitch, and get excited about the next great Linux filesystem hope.
Plus Chris’ first wreck on the road to Texas, Thunderbolt networking, and our results from the best Linux laptop for 2018.
Show Me The Mooney | BSD Now 248
May 29, 2018
DragonflyBSD release 5.2.1 is here, BPF kernel exploit writeup, Remote Debugging the running OpenBSD kernel, interview with Patrick Mooney, FreeBSD buildbot setup in a jail, dumping your USB, and 5 years of gaming on FreeBSD.
Ask Noah Show 67 | A New Way to Rag Chew
May 29, 2018
The New Way to Rag Chew | Ask Noah Show 67
We talk quite a bit about owning your communication and how you can do that with Ham Radio. What if you love your Linux and want to continue to use your computer to communicate? This week we dive into an all new way to use ham radio, all on Linux, all with open source software. We take a call from a a caller who wants to automate his door lock, a caller who wants to replace quicken and Noah dives into why it’s important to have a central home automation system.
-- The Cliff Notes --
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Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
After a bit of CoffeeScript reminiscing we get down to data and design.And discuss why the bot market has collapsed, and how Google is running the table in AI.
Plus a few classic Coder moments, feedback, and more.
Linux Action News 55
May 27, 2018
openSUSE Leap 15 is released, along a new LXQt, the Essential Phone getting canceled, and why older Chrombooks might be receiving the big Linux apps update.
Plus we’ll explain what portable systemd services are, and the Android phones that recently shipped with Malware.
Interning for FreeBSD | BSD Now 247
May 24, 2018
FreeBSD internship learnings, exciting developments coming to FreeBSD, running FreeNAS on DigitalOcean, Network Manager control for OpenBSD, OpenZFS User Conference Videos are here and batch editing files with ed.
Tech Talk Today 280
May 24, 2018
It's Google's turn to receive the Facebook treatment. In a series of rapid fire leaks, lawsuits, and PR blunders we re-cap Google's awful bad week.
Plus MoviePass's desperate grab for data seems to be going bust, and IBM warns of cracking encryption with their Quantum Computer.
Then we wrap it up with our Kickstarter of the week, that wants to build open source VR for exploring Mars.
The Illusion of the Institution | Unfilter 281
May 23, 2018
Trump chips away at the shared illusion of our “cherished” Institutions, and the secret spy inside the Trump campaign is revealed, and the history of this individual tells all.
Plus the latest in Cyber, the High-Note, and more. It’s our first roadshow edition of Unfilter!
Another Pass at Bypass | TechSNAP 369
May 23, 2018
We’ll explain how Speculative Store Bypass works, and the new mitigation techniques that are inbound.
Plus this week’s security news has a bit of a theme, and we share some great war stories sent into the show.
Only The Best | LUP 250
May 23, 2018
What is the best laptop for Linux in 2018? How about the best Evernote killer, and production setup? We cover the best of the best this week.
Plus Gnome’s performance hackfest, Mycroft goes Blockchain, and what’s behind Tesla’s big GPL dump.
Ask Noah Show 66 | We Found Another Spectre Meltdown Flaw
May 22, 2018
We Found Another Spectre, Meltdown Flaw | Ask Noah Show 66
This week on the show give you the latest on the new Intel flaw. We take an interesting question from a caller who asks Noah, can a router be virtualized? Plus we give you the run down on our Small Business Theme Hour coming up in early June.
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
The future is JavaScript and Mike’s seen the way. Plus we answer a listener's questions about career changes, discuss the week’s hoopla, and share a cautionary tale.
Linux Action News 54
May 20, 2018
Asteroid OS reaches 1.0, and Joe gives it a go. GNOME developers consider removing the ability to launch binaries, but punt for now. And the lessons learned from malware in the Snap Store.
Plus the reality of EFail, Steam Link on Android, and another shoe drops for Ubuntu’s 32bit support.
Tech talk Today 279
May 17, 2018
Nearly all mobile carriers are caught selling your location, and the story gets twisted. The senate votes to overturn the net neutrality repeal but there's a long way to go. OnePlus 6's specs are out, and how some guy heated his bath water with Bitcoin mining.
Plus the big Nest outage, and the SOUDCAM. You're going to want this Kickstarter of the week.
Properly Coordinated Disclosure | BSD Now 246
May 17, 2018
How Intel docs were misinterpreted by almost any OS, a look at the mininet SDN emulator, do’s and don’ts for FreeBSD, OpenBSD community going gold, ed mastery is a must read, and the distributed object store minio on FreeBSD.
Mutually Assured Manipulation | Unfilter 280
May 16, 2018
Palestinians grab the attention of the world once again, and no one is coming out a winner. A new insight into why the Trump White House leaks so much, a mole in the Trump campaign, and some extreme cyber.
EFail Explained | TechSNAP 368
May 16, 2018
The EFail hype train has hit hypersonic speed, we’ll tap the breaks and explain who disclosed it, what it is, what it’s not, our recommendations, and early reactions.
Plus things to consider when deciding on-premises vs a cloud deployment, and the all business gadget from 1971 that kicked off the consumer electronics revolution.
Home Grown FUD | LUP 249
May 15, 2018
The Linux community is eating its own this week, as attention seeking plucky YouTuber’s trade on free software’s good name for clicks. We learn the real story behind some of the Internet’s recent free software freak-out.
Plus a fantastic batch of community news and updates, some cool tools, and we discuss if it’s time to give up the Qt or GTK purist lifestyle.
Ask Noah Show 65 | Can This Be Virtualized?
May 15, 2018
Ask Noah Show 65 | Can This Be Virtualized?
This week on the show we talk about everything from DMX lighting on Linux to USB-C. We take an interesting question from a listener who has a massive virtual desktop infrastructure project and he asks Noah if Linux can handle this project or if he should stick with Windows
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
A critical PGP and S/MIME bug is in the wild, EasyMesh promises standards Wifi Mesh networks, Zuck's in the sites, and Bittorrent Inc gets a rename.
Plus the return of a classic!
Best of Both Worlds | CR 309
May 14, 2018
We get fired up about cloud lock-in, and attempt to find some common ground.
But the overall framework for today's conversation is the important bits for developers from this years Microsoft Build and Google I/O events.
Linux Action News 53
May 13, 2018
It's confirmed Linux apps are coming to Chrome OS. Google is finally putting pressure on OEM's to ship security patches, and we try Android of Things.
Plus we get some clarity on CoreOS and Red Hat, and their strategy for cloud domination in the future.
Tech Talk Today 277
May 11, 2018
The world is freaking out about Google Duplex, new features coming to Google Photos we like and Android P promises to improve your "well being".
Plus Apple deals a blow to GrayKey, our Kickstarter of the week, and sending ultra sonic commands to Alexa.
FreeNAS Uber Build | TechSNAP 367
May 10, 2018
Our FreeNAS build is complete and Allan’s back to cover the final details. Plus the new GPU attack against Android phones, and a perfect example of poor IoT security.
ZFS User Conf 2018 | BSD Now 245
May 10, 2018
Allan’s recap of the ZFS User conference, first impressions of OmniOS by a BSD user, Nextcloud 13 setup on FreeBSD, OpenBSD on a fanless desktop computer, an intro to HardenedBSD, and DragonFlyBSD getting some SMP improvements.
Iran Pullout | Unfilter 279
May 09, 2018
Trump announces the United States withdraw from the “Iran Nuke Deal”. We’ll explain the historical context, the ramifications from the pullout, and where this all leads.
Plus Trump’s lawyer gets tapped, Bolton goes berserk, and the CIA has a new face.
Contain All The Things | LUP 248
May 09, 2018
Chris ends a multi-year experiment with Fedora on the server, and shares his surprising results. Chrome OS is officially getting full-fledged Linux apps, and we ponder if this is truly a win for Linux.
Ask Noah Show 64 | Should I Buy a Chromebook?
May 08, 2018
Last week we broke the news to you that rumer has it Google is making Linux apps for the desktop a reality on Chromebooks. This week Keith Myers joins us and tells us what the experience on a Google Pixelbook is like. He explains what it took to get native Linux apps on his Chromebook and give us an update from Google IO and what you can expect on your Chromebook. This is a loaded hour with a lot of calls and very good questions!
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
The fight for Net Neutrality is back on, we round up the news from Build 2018, and get impressed by Tesla's barnacle purge.
Plus we have a question for you, and more!
The Nicheing Down Fallacy | CR 308
May 07, 2018
Focusing on a niche can catastrophically backfire when the market shifts, and Mike goes into full reviewer mode this week.
Plus fresh out of Build the guys share the initial impressions of Microsoft’s big event, discuss their growing fear of Amazon, and resources for learning .Net Core.
Linux Action News 52
May 06, 2018
Fedora fights for the user, Ubuntu Flavors draw the line, and why we're worried small distributions are starting to collapse.
Tech Talk Today 275
May 03, 2018
Pocket Casts gets acquired, and we worry about "big podcasting" pushing for more data collection, Cambridge Analytical is filing for bankruptcy, and Amazon is playing hardball.
Plus a brilliant Kickstarter of the week, some picks of the week, and more.
System.Evolution | CR 307
May 03, 2018
Mike and Chris have a workflow hangover, hit rock bottom, and bounce back with a new understanding.
Plus the creeping revelation that our future is embed.
C is a Lie | BSD Now 244
May 03, 2018
Arcan and OpenBSD, running OpenBSD 6.3 on RPI 3, why C is not a low-level language, HardenedBSD switching back to OpenSSL, how the Internet was almost broken, EuroBSDcon CfP is out, and the BSDCan 2018 schedule is available.
Catching up with Allan | TechSNAP 366
May 02, 2018
We catch up with Allan Jude and he shares stories of hunting network bottlenecks, memories of old firewalls, and some classic ZFS updates.
Plus the vulnerabilities found in Volkswagen cars, and the lengths a security research went to create the ultimate honeypot laptop.
Year of the Linux Desktop | LUP 247
May 02, 2018
Ubuntu and Fedora have new releases, and our early impressions are great. We’ll share the features that we think make these distros some of the best Linux desktop releases ever.
Plus some important community news, some Darktable tips for beginners, and some select clips from this year’s LinuxFest Northwest.
Ask Noah Show 63 | The Next Chromebooks
May 01, 2018
Ask Noah Show 63 | The Next Chromebooks
Google has everyone wondering, is what they're doing going to finally lead to the year of the Linux Desktop? Are we okay with Google being in charge with Linux on the desktop? 18.04 is out and we talk about our initial impressions. Simon Quigley the release manager for Lubuntu joins us this hour to break some exclusive Lubuntu news! As always your calls go to the front of the line.
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
Live From LFNW 2018 | Ask Noah Show 62
May 01, 2018
Ask Noah Show 62 | Live From LFNW 2018
Yet again Jupiter Broadcasting broadcasts entirely on Linux! We bring you live coverage from the floor of Linuxfest Northwest. The broadcast is done on Linux, the interviews are done on Linux, we talk about Linux.
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from our podcast dashboard!
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
Windows 10 users are getting a big update, but we're a little unimpressed, the tragic story of Eric Lundgren, someone is trying to extort GrayShift, and scientist have buckets with living pig brains.
Also - how GEDmatch was helpful in busting the Golden State Killer.
Plus the new horrible truth we just learned about online dating... All live from LinuxFest Northwest with special guests!
Progressive Webbie Things | CR 306
Apr 30, 2018
The death of desktop apps has reached the next stage, but the long transition to WebAssembly is going to hurt, and why the crushing demand for good enough will force us all to live a life of "Progressive Webbie Things".
Linux Action News 51
Apr 29, 2018
Ubuntu 18.04 is out and we round up the new features, the flavors, and our first takes. The Librem 5 learns a new trick, and Linux apps on Chrome OS looks like a much bigger deal than first suspected.
Plus what's great about GIMP's biggest release in six years, and more.
Calculated Comey | Unfilter 278
Apr 25, 2018
The memo’s are out, the interviews are in, and we've read the book. It’s our take on former FBI Director James Comey’s moral crusade.
Plus latest news the masters, some special guests, and a packed overtime!
The Bionic Bet | LUP 246
Apr 25, 2018
We get the inside scope from the Ubuntu flavors prepping for the 18.04 release, and then we finally make good on a long running threat.
Plus the quiet shuttering of the Windows division inside Microsoft, and how they could help save Linux from Apple.
Understanding The Scheduler | BSD Now 243
Apr 25, 2018
OpenBSD 6.3 and DragonflyBSD 5.2 are released, bug fix for disappearing files in OpenZFS on Linux (and only Linux), understanding the FreeBSD CPU scheduler, NetBSD on RPI3, thoughts on being a committer for 20 years, and 5 reasons to use FreeBSD in 2018.
The Unfixable Exploit | TechSNAP 365
Apr 25, 2018
Hardware flaws that can’t be solved, human errors at the physical layer, and spoofing cellular networks with a $5 dongle.
This Guy Hates Encryption | Ask Noah Show 61
Apr 24, 2018
Ask Noah Show 60 | This Guy Hates Encryption
James Comey says American's don't need encryption the government can't override. In an age of terrorism should a segment of the population be allowed to exist beyond the reach of law? We get Chris Fisher's take on this as well as your calls on this weeks episode!
James Comey, Encryption, FBI, Cloud Security, VPN, NSA, CIA, altispeed, ask questions, best desktop os, best distro, best server os, call in show, getting started, linux, linux, linux questions, noah chelliah, podcast, privacy, production, questions, security, server distro, starting distro, talk radio, voxtelesys
-- The Cliff Notes --
For links to the articles and material referenced in this week's episode check out this week's page from o our podcast dashboard!
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
Google suffers from the Telegram ban, Valve is back in the business of making games, and Amazon has a top secret robot.
Plus the puzzle that was hidden in Windows years ago, and a new project that aims to be a Wikipedia for Terms of Service agreements.
Linux Action News 50
Apr 22, 2018
Trisquel has a new release, and Chris tries out the new ReactOS. Plus our thoughts on Microsoft announcing their own Linux, the German government switching to NextCloud, and the fix is in for Gnome Shell's infamous "Memory leak".
Microsoft Linux | Ask Noah Show 60
Apr 21, 2018
Ask Noah Show 60 | Microsoft Linux
It's hard to believe but Microsoft is shipping the Linux kernel. We give you the details of how and why this week on the show.
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
Telegram’s battle of the ban continues, and AWS and Google Cloud become targets. Reddit is growing like crazy, which worries us a bit, and Microsoft loses their multi-year legal fight with the US Government.
And why autonomous boats might be here much sooner than self-driving cars.
Linux Takes The Fastpath | BSD Now 242
Apr 18, 2018
TrueOS Stable 18.03 released, a look at F-stack, the secret to an open source business model, intro to jails and jail networking, FreeBSD Foundation March update, and the ipsec Errata.
Bomb First Ask Later | Unfilter 277
Apr 18, 2018
In defiance of logic and International Law the US and its gang of moral crusaders have broken the law to teach Assad a lesson about breaking the law.
It’s a special edition of Unfilter about the current state of the war in Syria.
The Case for Monitoring | TechSNAP 364
Apr 18, 2018
We cover all the bases this week in our TechSNAP introduction to server monitoring.
Why you should monitor, what you should monitor, the basics of Nagios, the biggest drawbacks of Nagios, its alternatives, and our lessons learned from the trenches.
Microsoft of Things | LUP 245
Apr 18, 2018
Azure Sphere is Microsoft making silicon as a service, with Linux at its core. We’ve chatted with the folks behind Azure Sphere and breakdown this huge announcement.
Plus a bunch of community news, a string of app picks, and maybe even a concerned rant.
Podcasting 101 | Ask Noah Show 59
Apr 17, 2018
This week Noah goes on location to the University of North Dakota as a guest speaker for the communications department. He gives students his crash course on how to get a podcast up and running leveraging Linux and Open Source.
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
Tesla blames robots for their recent setbacks, Russia starts to block Telegram, Pandora discovers Podcasts, and a new design is coming to Gmail.
Plus the fascinating audio isolation AI Google's developed, and leaked memos!
Perpetual Beta Tester | CR 305
Apr 16, 2018
We revisit IBM’s total dominance over the PC industry in the early 80s, how they got there, and how we can apply the IBM model to current events.
Plus a batch of your feedback, and a defeated discussion about the state of all desktop operating systems and hardware kicked off by Apple’s taking our beer away.
Linux Action News 49
Apr 15, 2018
ZFS' first data loss bug comers to Linux, GameMode could have some serious potential, and Mozilla thinks the Internet is in bad shape.
Plus new research shows Android OEMs are lying about their patch levels, Lineage goes hard on "Play certification" and we have thoughts on all of it.
Tips from the Top | TechSNAP 363
Apr 13, 2018
Getting started or getting ahead in IT is a moving target, so we’ve crowd sourced some of the best tips and advice to help.
Plus a tricky use of zero-width characters to catch a leaker, a breakdown of the new BranchScope attack, and a full post-mortem of the recent Travis CI outage.
Bowling in the LimeLight | BSD Now 241
Apr 12, 2018
Second round of ZFS improvements in FreeBSD, Postgres finds that non-FreeBSD/non-Illumos systems are corrupting data, interview with Kevin Bowling, BSDCan list of talks, and cryptographic right answers.
Saving Syria Now | Unfilter 276
Apr 11, 2018
War in Syria seems just hours away, with Trump calling out Putin and Assad, the warships moving into position, and the hawks circling.
Plus the fallout from Trump’s lawyer getting raided by the FBI, Zuckerberg going to Washington and we share the highlights, an overtime packed with follow up stories, and much more!
Plasma Predicament | LUP 244
Apr 10, 2018
We have some Plasma problems this week, but we’re sticking with it and still putting it into production in our most ambitious event yet.
But we start with a bunch of important community news, including what looks like ZFS on Linux’s first major bug, the future of Elementary OS apps, and a proposal to revamp Ubuntu’s betas.
Has Apple Given Up on The Macbook? | Ask Noah Show 58
Apr 10, 2018
This week on the Ask Noah Show we ask the question you've been asking us all week - Has Apple given up on desktop and laptop users? Plus, Brad joins us to ask Noah about how to get a small business of the ground, and how Altispeed has grown to what it is today.
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
What we can learn from Mike’s first business failing in 2014? Mike shares some necessary balance to today’s celebrity CEO “stories”. And we discuss how having naive expectations, avoiding conflict, and a lack of focus can sneak up on you and hurt your business.
Also some tips on how to change your expectations, embrace conflict, and maybe even be a bit ruthless.
Linux Action News 48
Apr 08, 2018
The Linux kernel gets a spring cleaning, things are going well for RISC-V, and Linux-Libre is clearly prioritizing freedom over security with their recent update.
Steam Machines were pronounced dead and then alive this week, we'll try and clear things up, and Mozilla has a new project.
It’s a TechSNAP introduction to Terraform, a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.
Plus a recent spat of data leaks suggest a common theme, Microsoft’s self inflicted Total Meltdown flaw, and playing around with DNS Rebinding attacks for fun.
Under Armour Inc (UAA.N) (UA.N) said on Thursday that data from some 150 million MyFitnessPal diet and fitness app accounts was compromised in February, in one of the biggest hacks in history, sending shares of the athletic apparel maker down 3 percent in after-hours trade.
The data available in plain text from Panera’s site appeared to include records for any customer who has signed up for an account to order food online via panerabread.com.
tl;dr: In August 2017, I reported a vulnerability to Panera Bread that allowed the full name, home address, email address, food/dietary preferences, username, phone number, birthday and last four digits of a saved credit card to be accessed in bulk for any user that had ever signed up for an account. This includes my own personal data! Despite an explicit acknowledgement of the issue and a promise to fix it, Panera Bread sat on the vulnerability and, as far as I can tell, did nothing about it for eight months. When Brian Krebs publicly broke the news, other news outlets emphasized the usual “We take your security very seriously, security is a top priority for us” prepared statement from Panera Bread. Worse still, the vulnerability was not fixed at all — which means the company either misrepresented its actual security posture to the media to save face or was not competent enough to determine this fact for themselves. This post establishes a canonical timeline so subsequent reporting doesn’t get confused.
Meet the Windows 7 Meltdown patch from January. It stopped Meltdown but opened up a vulnerability way worse ... It allowed any process to read the complete memory contents at gigabytes per second, oh - it was possible to write to arbitrary memory as well.
HashiCorp Terraform enables you to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.
Compared to the JSON or YAML files used by CloudFormation, Terraform HCL is both a more powerful and a more readable language. Here is a small example of a snippet that defines a subnet for the application servers. As you can see, the Terraform code is a quarter of the size, more readable, and easier to understand.
Russia has launched a diplomatic counter-offensive, demanding that its scientists be involved in investigating the reported poisoning of former spies, Trump plans to send the Coast Guard to the border, and that’s just the highlights.
We also talk about PBS’s “exclusive” look at the US’s “Cyber Defense”, discuss the latest in the Muller investigation, and end it all on a great high-note.
TCP Blackbox Recording | BSD Now 240
Apr 04, 2018
New ZFS features landing in FreeBSD, MAP_STACK for OpenBSD, how to write safer C code with Clang’s address sanitizer, Michael W. Lucas on sponsor gifts, TCP blackbox recorder, and Dell disk system hacking.
What's Coming Next | Ask Noah Show 57
Apr 03, 2018
It's been one year of non-stop unapologetic Linux content! We meet up with fans in Minneapolis for a live show and tell you about our exciting plans as we kick of year 2 of the Ask Noah Show.
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
Richard Stallman has some practical steps society could take to roll back the rampant and expanding invasion of our privacy. But his suggestions leave us asking some larger questions.
Plus the latest on the march to Juno, some fun app picks, a quick look at Qubes OS 4.0, community news, and more.
Snapd 2.32.2 is now available to download and should be coming soon to the stable software repositories of your favorite, Snappy-enabled GNU/Linux distribution. What's exciting about this release is that it enables Snappy the use Nvidia's most recent proprietary graphics drivers in Snap apps on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and similar operating systems.
The architectures which will become deprecated are Blackfin, CRIS, FRV, M32R, Metag, MN10300, Score and Tile. Although not being deprecated, the Unicore32 and Hexagon architectures are also at risk but their maintainers are working on improving the situation so their support can be continued.
Oragono is a modern, experimental IRC server written in Go. It's designed to be simple to setup and use, and it includes features such as UTF-8 nicks / channel names, client accounts with SASL, and other assorted IRCv3 support.
The surveillance imposed on us today far exceeds that of the Soviet Union. For freedom and democracy’s sake, we need to eliminate most of it. There are so many ways to use data to hurt people that the only safe database is the one that was never collected. Thus, instead of the EU’s approach of mainly regulating how personal data may be used (in its General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR), I propose a law to stop systems from collecting personal data.
What is focus for the software industry? And is focus always a good thing, or can it lead to tunnel vision? Plus we spend a bit more time saluting Sun Microsystems for their contribution to our industry.
Plus some feedback, a bit of weekly Hoopla, and more!
Pen is Mightier | User Error 47
Apr 02, 2018
The two sides of the pond meet this week when Joe Ressington joins Chris and Noah to discuss why Chris only has 26 years left to live, some hard questions about gun ownership, and Cloudflare launching a new DNS service…
But something doesn’t smell right.. Maybe it’s the important animal flatulence facts, and why we think the Kodi project might be facing a crisis.
00:00:00 - Chris only has 26 years left to live
00:01:47 - Joe fosters cats
00:14:02 - Kodi has a branding problem
00:25:05 - Gun facts
00:55:18 - Cloudflare DNS
01:01:40 - Do birds fart?
Linux Action News 47
Apr 01, 2018
ChromeOS comes to tablets, and we ponder why... Google removes Kodi from autocomplete results in an apparent bow to pressure, Firefox combats Facebook tracking, and Oracle vs Google is back for their biggest fight yet.
The Return To ptrace | BSD Now 239
Mar 29, 2018
OpenBSD firewalling Windows 10, NetBSD’s return to ptrace, TCP Alternative Backoff, the BSD Poetic license, and AsiaBSDcon 2018 videos available.
Staring into Sun | CR 302
Mar 29, 2018
Sun Microsystems was fertile ground for what might be the largest developer upset in ten years. We look back at some of the real innovations Sun brought us, discuss the latest developments in Oracle's suit against Google, and the massive shift Microsoft announced today.
This is one of those episodes we’ll be referencing back to for quite a while.
"Techlash" is having an impact. With growing awareness of threats to privacy, access and innovation, as well as increasing suspicion of super-conglomerates in the areas of search, content, e-commerce and social media, we're finally seeing pervasive pessimism yield some change. But there's still a long way to go.
Snapchat is building a way for people to use their Snapchat account to connect with third-party apps. The idea, in theory, would let Snapchat users grant outside companies access to their Snapchat data to help personalize other services.
Microsoft is carving up Myerson's Windows and Devices Group (WDG), moving some pieces of it into one of two new engineering units announced this morning.
It’s All in the Logs | TechSNAP 361
Mar 29, 2018
Embarrassing flaws get exposed when the logs get reviewed, Atlanta city government gets shut down by Ransomware, and the cleverest little Android malware you’ll ever meet.
Plus we go from a hacked client to a Zero-day discovery, answer some questions, ask a few, and more!
It may not be noticeable at first (apart from the highlighting I’ve added of course), but the text “frogger13” is the password I used on a newly created APFS formatted FileVault Encrypted USB drive with the volume name “SEKRET”. (The new class images have a WarGames theme, hence the shout-outs to classic video games!)
Giovanni Collazo said a quick query on the Shodan search engine returned almost 2,300 Internet-exposed servers running etcd, a type of database that computing clusters and other types of networks use to store and distribute passwords and configuration settings needed by various servers and applications. etcd comes with a programming interface that responds to simple queries that by default return administrative login credentials without first requiring authentication. The passwords, encryption keys, and other forms of credentials are used to access MySQL and PostgreSQL databases, content management systems, and other types of production servers.
The malware was sneaked onto the Google Play store disguised as seven different apps -- six QR readers and one 'smart compass' -- and bypassed security checks by hiding its true intent with a combination of clever coding and delaying its initial burst of malicious activity.
We will discover in this article how a recent incident response to a customer was handled and how we discovered an otherwise publicly unknown vulnerability that was never reported by the manufacturer which left thousands of users unprotected from this security flaw.
Fox pundit, world renowned war-hawk, and now Trump’s National Security Advisor. We take a look at John Bolton, and the bomb first ask questions second kind of policy he advocates.
Plus Stormy Daniels goes on 60 Minutes, we’ve got the highlights, some discussion, and questions about the bigger picture.
Then it’s a celebrity high-note, and a packed Overtime.
Debian on the Fly | LUP 242
Mar 27, 2018
A new version of Slax is out this week, and they might just be onto something really unique. We take this Debian powered, Fluxbox running, net bootin distro for a test drive.
Plus Google moves to block GApps on “uncertified devices”, Red Hat turns 25, a new Wayland contender, a few app picks, and much more.
Tech That Kills You | Ask Noah 56
Mar 27, 2018
Tech literally has a body count! As we tell you what happened and how we dive into the potentially deadly implications of automation. Have you ever wanted to manage digital signage, using linux, and on a budget? We have the solution for you. Your calls go to the front of the line as always! We wrap by spilling our plans for next week's meetup for our 1 year anniversary.
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
The push for encryption backdoors is back on, why Valve has 1,700 CPU's working non-stop, and the big Netflix move Apple is about to pull.
Then we'll cover a study that shows just one percent of Reddit users causes 75 percent of the drama, follow up on some topics, and discuss our thoughts for Season 2.
We set off to SCaLE this year with a goal in mind, but quickly realized the trip and this season of Tech Talk Today, we're going to be about something entirely different.
Linux Action News 46
Mar 25, 2018
webOS is back, and the Linux Foundation has a Hypervisor for your car. Plus some of GNOME's performance issues, Firefox changes, and the hidden files in Bitcoin's blockchain.
The Slice Age | T3 269
Mar 23, 2018
Facebook gets punched in the face all week long, Amazon has drones that can smell fear, Telegram is ordered to hand over the keys, and some crazy folk want to make ketchup slices.
Plus the huge space station thats falling to earth, we talk a little GDPR, and own up to the big mistake Chris made.
VLAN-Zezes-ki in Hardware | BSD Now 238
Mar 22, 2018
Looking at Lumina Desktop 2.0, 2 months of KPTI development in SmartOS, OpenBSD email service, an interview with Ryan Zezeski, NomadBSD released & John Carmack's programming retreat with OpenBSD.
AMD Flaws Explained | TechSNAP 360
Mar 22, 2018
We cut through the noise and explain in clear terms what’s really been discovered. The botched disclosure of flaws in AMD products has overshadowed the technical details of the vulnerabilities, and we aim to fix that..
Plus another DNS Rebinding attack is in the wild and stealing Ethereum, Microsoft opens up a new bug bounty program, Expedia gets hacked, and we perform a TechSNAP checkup.
Analytica Aftermath | Unfilter 273
Mar 21, 2018
The twisted way that data about you and your family is used to manipulate the way you feel about hot button topics gets exposed when a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower reveals all.
Plus Trump’s had a busy week, the high-note is quick, and the Overtime is packed!
Getting Started with Chef | Ask Noah 55
Mar 20, 2018
This week on the show we bring you the industry experts to teach you more than you ever wanted to know about Chef. Learn how to automate your entire system. Plus uber's self driving car kills someone & we give you our take, all that and more in this weeks episode.
Need more help than a radio show can offer? Altispeed provides commercial IT services and they’re excited to offer you a great deal for listening to the Ask Noah Show. Call today and ask about the discount for listeners of the Ask Noah Show!
LG in cooperation with South Korea's NIPA government agency are working on making webOS suitable as a more open platform with open connectivity. They are still looking to commercialize it as an open-source platform, LG announced this morning.
GNOME 3.28 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 25832 changes, made by approximately 838 contributors.
Today marks the start of an exciting shift over here at Private Internet Access. As long-time supporters of the Free and Open Source Software community, we have started the process of open sourcing our software, and over the next six months we will be releasing the source code for all our client-side applications, as well as libraries and extensions.
An open source Spotify client running as a UNIX daemon. Spotifyd streams music just like the official client, but is more lightweight, and supports more platforms. Spotifyd also supports the Spotify Connect protocol, which makes it show up as a device that can be controlled from the official clients.
VP, Product & Technical Community at @datadoghq, recovering SysAdmin, SCALE Conference Chair, and other FL/OSS fun.
Unethical Data Experiment | T3 268
Mar 19, 2018
Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook data was a 'grossly unethical experiment' coming to light thanks to a whistleblower. We'll play his story, and discuss what they did with the data.
Plus Google, Target, and Walmart's unholy alliance to battle Amazon and Twitter's Cryptocoin crackdown.
Links
Uber Halts Autonomous-Car Testing After Fatal Arizona Crash --- The 49-year-old woman, Elaine Herzberg, was crossing the road outside of a crosswalk when the Uber vehicle operating in autonomous mode under the supervision of a human safety driver struck her, according to the Tempe Police Department.
Google plans to boost Amazon competitors in search shopping ads --- Google made the announcement on its AdWords blog this morning, detailing an initiative called Shopping Actions. Through this feature, retailers can leverage a "universal cart" that allows customers to easily shop across mobile, desktop and voice-controlled devices. Basically, Google says this will make it much easier for you to shop by voice or with a phone/computer from a number of stores.
Cambridge Analytica harvested data from millions of unsuspecting Facebook users --- Cambridge Analytica, a company that profiled voters for Donald Trump's campaign, allegedly harvested private information from more than 50 million Facebook profiles, which they used to influence and wage a "culture war" during the 2016 election.
Twitter Will Ban Most Cryptocurrency-Related Ads --- Twitter plans to ban most cryptocurrency-related ads in the next few weeks, as Sky News first reported and a source confirms to Axios. Why it matters: The recent boom in cryptocurrencies and digital tokens has unsurprisingly attracted some fraudsters. Twitter is following in the footsteps of Facebook and Google, though it's been having its own problems with accounts promoting scams.
GameOn is built-on top of AWS and designed to work cross platform; as long as the system your game is running on can make API calls — be it mobile, console, or a computer — it should all work just fine.
GNOME 3.28 Released --- One major new feature for this release is automatic downloading of operating systems in Boxes, which takes the work out of creating and running virtual machines -- just pick the operating system that you want to create a virtual machine of, and Boxes will now download and install it for you.
Firefox 59 released --- We launched an entirely new engine in November, made significant improvements to graphics rendering in January, and are continuing to post performance gains and add features with this release. On Firefox for desktop, we've improved page load times, added tools to annotate and crop your Firefox Screenshots, and made it easier to arrange your Top Sites on the Firefox Home page. On Firefox for Android, we've added support for sites that stream video using the HLS protocol. * Firefox is a Snap* Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ --- Alongside a 200MHz increase in peak CPU clock frequency, we have roughly three times the wired and wireless network throughput, and the ability to sustain high performance for much longer periods.* US city bans new Bitcoin mining --- Plattsburgh, New York has imposed an 18-month moratorium on Bitcoin mining to prevent miners from using all the city's cheap electricity.
Let's Encrypt rolls out wildcard certs --- Free "wildcard" certificates to enable secure HTTP connections for entire domains. In addition to a new version of the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol, an interface that can be used by a variety of client software packages to automate verification of certificate requests.
TechSNAP Episode 359* Eric Raymond's open source UPS --- Last week, ESR opened up the work-in-progress on GitLab: the Upside project is currently defining requirements and developing a specification for a "high quality UPS that can be built from off-the-shelf parts in any reasonably well-equipped makerspace or home electronics shop".
Wil Wheaton runs Linux --- But about a week ago, something went wrong. Everything started slowing down like crazy, Chrome just quit working entirely, and even Firefox ran so slow, I felt like I was using a 386.
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