Índex per January 2020 a Linux Magazine

Dear Reader, We in Linux publishing have spent a lot of time holding Microsoft accountable for all the FUD and monkey business they have subjected us to through the years, so it is only fair to acknowledge them when they take a positive step. Microsoft has actually been doing better recently – I have written about Redmond’s newfound support for Linux and their open sourcing of core development tools. This month the big news is the announcement that Microsoft will “honor California’s new privacy rights throughout the United States.” A little over a year ago, the State of California passed the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), which will take effect on January 1, 2020. The CCPA is a landmark bill that takes on the pertinent and perplexing issue of data…

The Gnome Project was recently sued by a company called Rothschild Patent Imaging for a patent related to the Shotwell photo manager. The Gnome community has just announced that it is counter-suing Rothschild, which they refer to as a patent troll (https://www.gnome.org/news/2019/10/gnome-files-defense-against-patent-troll/). Keith Bergelt, OIN’s CEO, said (https://www.zdnet.com/article/open-invention-network- comes-to-gnomes-aid-in-patent-troll-fight/) in his keynote at Open Source Summit, Europe, “Rothschild is a bad company. This is an entity that’s antithetical to the goals of innovation. It will sue foundations. It will sue not for profits. It will sue individuals. It will sue corporations. Their playbook is to establish a pattern of wins through relatively modest settlements,” which can get other businesses to pay up without a fight. Gnome turned down the offer to settle for a fivefigure sum in order to sue…

‘sudo’ is one of the most useful Linux/UNIX commands, allowing users without root privileges to manage administrative tasks. However, a new vulnerability was discovered in sudo that gives users root privileges. “When sudo is configured to allow a user to run commands as an arbitrary user via the ALL keyword in a Runas specification, it is possible to run commands as root by specifying the user ID -1 or 4294967295,” according to the sudo advisory (https://www.sudo.ws/alerts/minus_1_uid.html). The vulnerability allows users with sudo privileges to run commands as root even if the Runas specification explicitly disallows root access as long as the ALL keyword is listed first in the Runas specification. Sudo developers have already released a patch to fix the vulnerability. Update your systems now.…

Author The Linux kernel mailing list comprises the core of Linux development activities. Traffic volumes are immense, often reaching 10,000 messages in a week, and keeping up to date with the entire scope of development is a virtually impossible task for one person. One of the few brave souls to take on this task is Zack Brown. Trusted Computing and Linux Sumit Garg posted a new version of the Trusted Keys subsystem for the Linux kernel, essentially targeting support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM) devices. The general idea behind TPM technology is that the TPM chip manages access to a given device by encrypting its firmware and creating a corresponding hash value that is stored on a central server. When the system tries to use the device, the TPM hashes…

FHEM [1] is an open source server for home automation. Your FHEM system can control Internet of Things (IoT) devices, such as lamps, thermostats, shutters, audio equipment, and all the other gadgets that populate a smart home. You can interact with FHEM through a smartphone front end or even over the web. FHEM supports several different home automation protocols and has a number of different interfaces for the user to interact with directly or through a script. The modular architecture currently includes more than 430 modules. The quality of an open platform depends on the commitment and skills of the community backing it. That commitment is evident in the case of FHEM. The FHEM Forum, the official contact point for enthusiasts, now has more than 20,000 members. Although the number…

Alternative systems for distributing software are on the rise. In 2018, everyone was talking about Flatpak and Snap. In addition, AppImage, which does not require any basic installation, offers completely self-sufficient packages. Flatpak [1], developed by Fedora under the leadership of Alexander Larsson, is compatible with desktop applications. It lets you package software so that the same package works on all distributions. The only requirement is a matching Flatpak runtime environment. Origins Flatpak, which reached version 1.0 in mid-2018, is now considered mature enough for production use. The current version is 1.50. The origin of the format dates back to 2007, when Red Hat employee Larsson was experimenting with klik [2], AppImage’s predecessor. However, he did not like some of the technical details. In the same year, he released Glick,…

From the start, open hardware has repurposed used technology. Companies like Minifree and Technoethical have based their entire business plans around such recycling. By the time you read this article, these companies will have been joined by a crowdfunding campaign for Inkplate 6 [1], an e-paper display that combines open source firmware with parts from used Kindle e-readers. Inkplate 6 is developed by e-radionica.com [2], a company started by David Zovko when he was 16. The company’s first product was the Croduino Basic microcontroller, an Arduino-compatible board named for the fact that it was manufactured in Croatia. Today, e-radionica.com offers 70 Arduino-compatible boards, all of which are open hardware. “Since openness enabled my creation of the first board,” Zovko says, “I have committed that all my maker projects will be…

Jon “maddog” Hall is an author, educator, computer scientist, and free software pioneer who has been a passionate advocate for Linux since 1994 when he first met Linus Torvalds and facilitated the port of Linux to a 64-bit system. He serves as president of Linux International®. In Support of Women Programmers “Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys” – Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson “It’s a girl my lord in a flatbed Ford …” – Eagles “Take It Easy” I’ve been thinking about these two songs, one of which has been playfully rewritten to be “coders” instead of “cowboys,” and the other which, seemed to show astonishment that a female would be driving a “flatbed Ford” truck through the streets of Winslow, Arizona. I have always loved…

Sparkling gems and new releases from the world of Free and Open Source Software 3D designer/editor/renderer Blender 2.8 Blender really needs no introduction. It’s one of the best known open source projects in the world. By showing open source’s capabilities, regardless of platform, it has become a flag bearer for the entire movement. All of this is a long way from the uncertainty of 2002’s Free Blender campaign, which raised over $100,000 to release the formerly proprietary source code. Blender is now a 3D platform to be reckoned with. In recent months, the project has been given grants worth millions of dollars by Epic Games and NVidia and is celebrating this huge milestone release of Blender 2.8. It has features that compete with some of the best commercial offerings. In…

TWO TERRIFIC DISTROS DOUBLE-SIDED DVD! Ubuntu 19.10 “Eoan Ermine” The latest Ubuntu release includes an updated Linux 5.3 kernel, with faster boot times, updated themes, and new ZFS filesystem support. The Gnome 3.34 desktop offers better performance and many application updates. This Ubuntu 19.10 short-term release version is supported until July 2019. Fedora 31 Workstation The community-based (and Red-Hat-sponsored) Fedora project tries to stay current and is often one of the first distros to implement new applications and updates. The latest Fedora Workstation release includes Gnome 3.34, improvements to the audio system, expanded Flatpak features, and more. Defective discs will be replaced. Please send an email to subs@linux-magazine.com. Although this Linux Magazine disc has been tested and is to the best of our knowledge free of malicious software and defects,…

The Red-Hat-sponsored Fedora community has announced the release of Fedora 31, the latest version of Red Hat’s community distribution (https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/fedora-31-now-generally-available). Fedora comes in many different editions – each targeting a different workload. Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server are aimed at developers using Fedora for development and then testing their apps on servers. Other editions include Fedora CoreOS, Fedora IoT and Fedora Silverblue. Fedora Workstation is among the most popular distributions and is reportedly the preferred distro of Linus Torvalds. Fedora 31 Workstation comes with Gnome 3.34 and many tools and features for general users as well as developers. Gnome 3.34 brings significant performance enhancements, which will be especially noticeable on lower-powered hardware. Fedora 31 Workstation also expands the default uses of the Wayland graphics system, including allowing Firefox to run…

Hetzner is an internet hosting company and data center operator out of Germany that provides dedicated hosting, shared web hosting, virtual private servers, managed servers, domain names, SSL certificates, storage, and cloud solutions. Recently the company announced the launch of a new line of Ryzen-based dedicated root servers that offer a significant boost in performance for customers across all of their services. According to Tommy Giesler, Product Manager for Dedicated Root Servers at Hetzner Online, “All four servers are built to handle applications that have high multithreading requirements.” He continued that “they’re also great as general entry level servers for people with heavy workloads.” The new lineup consists of the AX41 and AX41-NVME, which are based on the Ryzen 5 3600 CPU (with 6 cores and 12 threads), and can…

If you want to control your own home automation environment with Amazon Alexa using natural language, you have two options. Either resort to a prebuilt Alexa skill, as offered by the vendors of some automation components, or write a skill of your own. If you can find a prebuilt skill that performs the task you want to automate, you can accomplish the automation with just a few short steps; however, the possibilities are limited to the set of options that have already been provided by thirdparty programmers. If you want to reach other devices – or even if you just want to execute a series of actions that don’t fall easily within Alexa’s existing skill set, you need to write the skill yourself. This article shows how to build the…

If you are tasked with discovering the cause of a performance problem on a Linux system that has slowed down to a crawl, you will typically turn to tools such as iostat, top, or mpstat to see exactly what is throwing a spanner in the works [1]. Not enough RAM? Lame hard disk? CPU overloaded? Or is network throughput the bottleneck? Although a tool like top shows you the running processes, it cannot detect short-lived instances that start and end again immediately. Periodically querying the process list only makes sense to visualize long-running processes. Fortunately, the Linux kernel already contains thousands of test probes known as Kprobes and tracepoints. Users can inject code, log events, or create statistics there. One totally hot tool for doing this is bpftrace. With simple…

Although there are plenty of Mastodon [1] clients out there (as we saw in the prior installment [2]), sometimes you just want that something special to satisfy your needs. Fortunately, Mastodon’s API is open and well-organized and there is a Python wrapper [3] that makes it even easier. Registration First, you need to install the Mastodon.py wrapper. The easiest way to do this is by using pip: or, if pip complains about permissions: Next you want to register your application with the Mastodon network. You can do this from the Mastodon website where you have opened your account. We talked about how to do this in Linux Magazine, issue 227 [4]. Or you could do it all from the comfort of your command line with something like what you see…

For the longest time, any Linux user needing to work with a Microsoft browser had few options. There was always IEs4Linux, but that option tended to install out-ofdate, buggy versions of the software. Users could also run a version of Windows within a virtual machine, but that meant actually running Windows. All of that changes in 2020, when Microsoft Edge comes to Linux. In the "State of the Browser: Microsoft Edge" session at Ignite 2019, it was finally announced that Microsoft was, in fact, bringing their new browser to Linux (https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/79341?source=sessions). The new Microsoft browser is built around the open source Chromium browser (https://www.chromium.org), but this won’t simply be a rebuild and rebrand. Microsoft plans on being actively involved as a contributor to Chromium’s open source development. That means any…

As Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is becoming a critical piece of Microsoft’s cloud and data-center audience, openSUSE is working on technologies that help developers use distributions of their choice for WSL. Users can run the same WSL distribution that they run in the cloud or on their servers. The core piece of openSUSE’s WSL offering is the WSL appx files, which are basically zip files that contain a tarball of a Linux system (like a container) and a Windows exe file, the so called launcher. An openSUSE blog explains (https://lizards.opensuse.org/2019/10/09/opensuse-wsl-images-in-obs/) that “building a container is something SUSE’s Open Build Service (OBS) can already do fully automatic by means of Kiwi. The launcher as well as the final appx however is typically built on a Windows machine using Visual Studio…

IBM has announced that it is joining the Mayflower Autonomous Ship project. The Mayflower project, led by the marine research organization ProMare, has the goal of building and sailing an autonomous ship across the Atlantic from Plymouth, England to Plymouth, Massachusetts, to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Pilgrims who landed in America in 1620. IBM will provide AI for the mission and will use its expertise to help the new Mayflower “navigate autonomously and avoid ocean hazards.” According to the press release, “Putting a research ship to sea can cost tens of thousands of dollars or pounds a day and is limited by how much time people can spend onboard – a prohibitive factor for many of today’s marine scientific missions,” said Brett Phaneuf, a Founding Board Member of…

In July 2009, thousands of Amazon’s Kindle users logged into their devices to find that their purchased copies of George Orwell’s 1984 had been erased. Internet pundits quickly drew comparisons between the corporate giant’s move and that of “Big Brother” in Orwell’s dystopian imagining of England. More recently, in April of this year, Microsoft announced the closure of their own ebook store. Customers lost access to their book collections but were offered a full refund. The abundance of e-reader devices such as the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble NOOK has made a lasting impact: In 2018, electronic books made up 25.8 percent of book sales worldwide. Most reading devices are designed to sell content for specific platforms, which has resulted in a number of differing, incompatible ebook formats.…

Users, developers, and vendors meet at Linux events around the world. We at Linux Magazine are proud to sponsor the Featured Events shown here. For other events near you, check our extensive events calendar online at http://linux-magazine.com/events. If you know of another Linux event you would like us to add to our calendar, please send a message with all the details to events@linux-magazine.com. 36C3-Chaos Communication Congress Date: December 27-30, 2019 Location: Leipzig, Germany Website: https://events.ccc.de/ The Chaos Computer Club e. V. (CCC) is Europe's largest association of hackers. For the 36th time, the CCC will host the Chaos Communication Congress between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Around 17,000 participants are expected from December 27-30, 2019, including more than 2,000 volunteers. FOSDEM '20 Date: February 1-2, 2020 Location: Brussels, Belgium Website:…