today's leftovers
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Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 678 for the week of April 4 – 10, 2021.
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The web team at Canonical run two-week iterations building and maintaining all of Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
This iteration has seen many of the team out of the office as schools are out in the UK. This has not limited the exciting new features and developments from the team.
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It’s been almost a year since we unveiled SUSECON Digital 2020 – our first virtual SUSECON event. No lies, that event was pulled off in a frenzied whirlwind of pandemic onslaughts, virtual session recordings, and bandwidth battles. Frankly, I was amazed that we met our production schedule in the wake of the Covid-cancellation of our live event in Dublin. And I was even more amazed at our SUSECON audience reaction to the virtual event. You loved it! As one of the first virtual conferences of the Covid era, your feedback told us that we had delivered exactly what was needed at the time. What an exceptional opportunity for us to include thousands of friends from all over the world who normally can’t join us at the big event!
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In this article we will look at several Linux distributions, which are an excellent choice if we want to use them as servers. We chose them precisely because they have an excellent level of security, regular patch maintenance and updates, and huge communities. In addition, there are thousands of tutorials on the Internet for every single thing on how to do it and last but not least they are easy to use.
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Although we have not put them in the top three, not because they are not unique server operating systems, but because they require more patience, knowledge and time, we must mention FreeBSD, Red Hat, Cent OS and Fedora.
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You are probably using chat applications like Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and another chat app. These are all great to have but in using them you are making a trade-off; you are trading security and privacy for a service that easy to use.
Matrix is an open standard for communication messages. It is not a server so much as a standard way for clients and servers to talk with each other. The clients and server are open sources. With Matrix, you are not giving your data away to a company that is going to profile you and target advertising at you. This provides a degree of transparency you can look at the code, and you can be confident that it is behaving itself.
Many developer love Matrix because it let them build on it like Lego bricks and write their clients and servers bots or anything else you can self-host your Matrix server and that means you can create a private community where it knows that your communications are not being intercepted by anybody else. Matrix also has the option for end-to-end encryption, so you know that your messages are private.
Let’s take a look at a Matrix client known as Element (Riot and Vector) and it is pretty much the reference messaging client.
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RSS Guard is a simple (yet powerful) feed reader. It is able to fetch the most known feed formats, including RSS/RDF and ATOM. It's free, it's open-source. RSS Guard currently supports Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian. RSS Guard will never depend on other services - this includes online news aggregators like Feedly, The Old Reader and others.
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Free software is an idea that has existed since before the foundation of Linux but has the idea become stuck in the past and is FOSS something that we should move past, this author seems to think so, I disagree though.
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The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and the American Association of Insurance Services (AAIS), today are announcing the launch of OpenIDL, the Open Insurance Data Link platform and project. The platform will reduce the cost of regulatory reporting for insurance carriers, provide a standardized data repository for analytics and a connection point for third parties to deliver new applications to members.
openIDL brings together some of the world’s largest insurance companies, including The Hanover and Selective Insurance Group, along with technology and service providers Chainyard, KatRisk and MOBI to advance a common distributed ledger platform for sharing information and business processes across the insurance ecosystem.
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“AAIS, and the insurance industry in general, are trailblazers in their contribution and collaboration to these technologies,” said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and general manager of Projects at the Linux Foundation. “Open governance networks like openIDL can now accelerate innovation and development of new product and service offerings for insurance providers and their customers. We’re excited to host this work.”
As an open source project, all software source code developed will be licensed under an OSI-approved open source license, and all interface specifications developed will be published under an open specification license. And all technical discussions between participants will take place publicly, further enhancing the ability to expand the network to include other participants. As with an openly accessible network, organizations can develop their own proprietary applications and infrastructure integrations.
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The 2021 spring edition of Pwn2Own hacking contest concluded last week on April 8 with a three-way tie between Team Devcore, OV, and Computest researchers Daan Keuper and Thijs Alkemade.
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The Zoom vulnerabilities exploited by Daan Keuper and Thijs Alkemade of Computest Security are particularly noteworthy because the flaws require no interaction of the victim other than being a participant on a Zoom call. What's more, it affects both Windows and Mac versions of the app, although it's not clear if Android and iOS versions are vulnerable as well.
Technical details of the flaws are yet to be disclosed, but in a statement sharing the findings, the Dutch security firm said the researchers "were then able to almost completely take over the system and perform actions such as turning on the camera, turning on the microphone, reading emails, checking the screen and downloading the browser history."
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Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel and libldb), Debian (mediawiki, qemu, ruby-kramdown, and xen), Fedora (grub2, libldb, libopenmpt, python-pikepdf, python39, samba, squid, and webkit2gtk3), openSUSE (bcc, ceph, gssproxy, hostapd, isync, kernel, openexr, openSUSE KMPs, and tpm2-tss-engine), SUSE (fwupdate and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (spamassassin).
| Programming Leftovers
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In my never-ending quest to find the perfect way to create beautiful (yet minimal) websites, I had to try out Org Export in Emacs. Since I tend to write everything in Org Mode these days, it would be amazing to simply be able to convert my Org docs into HTML, and maybe add a little CSS to spice things up.
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Qt Creator 4.15 comes with a bunch of features and bug fixes for the CMake Project Manager.
Below, you have a list of what’s new and a few tips and tricks which would hopefully improve your CMake experience in Qt Creator.
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DevOps is a software development strategy that incorporates agile practices for fast, efficient product creation and release. It focuses on integration of development and operations teams, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and automation of tasks and processes.
Typically, DevOps teams use pipelines to streamline and standardize processes. DevOps pipelines are toolchains that teams can use to automate tasks and provide visibility into the software development life cycle. In this article, we’ll cover seven popular open source CI/CD tools.
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I’m from Aydın, Turkey. Currently I’m studying in my final years at the Computer Engineering department of Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University. I’m interested in free software – and enjoy working with free software projects and learning new things aboutthemit. I met free software when I started university via my advisor Necdet Yücel.
I like playing the guitar and the kalimba. Also, I recently started painting with acrylic paints. I’m vegetarian, and actively participate in animal protection and gender equality projects.
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Drawing is a simple app in the PureOS store to doodle on a digital canvas.
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Suse 10.2 - Dreamlinux - LinuxMint
Pretty much I am in the same boat, while not and IT professional per say, since I make my living in Product Development / Engineering. I recently started following linux news sites again after leaving it alone for more than 3 years... With the imminent release of Vista and the increasing annoyance that I feel towards all things MS and Digital Content Control related I started looking for a distribution to eventually replace or live beside Windows XP which I will no doubt keep simply because my wife is used to it.
I have two Desktop PC's that I use at home, one mainly for managing downloads and files etc. and for my father to use occasionally when he needs to, and a second that I use as my main desktop, for Graphic/Web Design, and some hobby related Digital Media Creation (videos, dvd's etc, music all the good stuff)
After trying out the Ubuntu's, Mepis, Mandrake, PC LinuxOS, DSL, Puppy, Xandros, Freespire, and so many others - Found a few which really worked well for me Suse 10.2, Dreamlinux and LinuxMint. Each of them work well for different things and I currently have both LinuxMint and Dreamlinux running on my old P3 450 and Suse on my main desktop(Athlon 64 3800).
I keep Suse on the main desktop because frankly it was the only distro of all the ones I tested that I could easily get my analog TV Tuner card to work with. Besides it did so flawlessly and without any help from me, so who can argue with that. Installing binary drivers, codecs, and additional software were really easy once the system was installed. VMware, and absolute deal breaker for me, installed perfectly and hasn't crashed on me yet. K9copy from the packman repositories works so well I will no longer be backing up or burning anything in Windows ever again. I could go on and on but if you need a solid desktop that will grow with you as you learn I would most likely go with Suse as recommended.
Besides that the new features in 10.2 (kickoff) are worth sticking it to MS just to see
Linux Mint is another distro that is totally slick. Based on Ubuntu the single CD(Live), boots fairly quickly and installs just as easy as Ubuntu. Comes with all the proprietary codec and DVD playback by default(may not be legal) but who really cares I paid for the DVD why can't I watch it.
If you really want to get a different Gui I would give DreamLinux a try.. LiveCD will let you know whether it's going to work and it gives you a really intuitive interface. One of the things i like best is the built in Make your own distro utility MKDistro. Very cool and one of those feature you will only find in the Linux OSS community. who else would encourage you to create something new based on what you really love yourself.
One final note... I totally agree about letting things settle. Find a distro that supports the hardware you have, and learn to make it work the way you want (if it doesn't already).
Once you have one working well download the VMware trial and set that up so you can test to your hearts delight without pooching your system.
I feel that SuSe is your
I feel that SuSe is your best option. One of the best features about suse that makes it an easy linux distro to switch to is YaST. YaST provides you with a centralized control panel so you can configure all the items you mentioned above (excpet the games).
In regards to simple and boring...its linux...i dont know how you got simple and boring. Im not really into the whole GUI thing but i know KDE gives you endless possibilities with how you want it to look...you just have to "tweak" it to your satisfaction. As you know, linux is open source so its only as boring as its user...you can always dig through the code of any linux distro and find more fun for yourself. As far as the 3d acceleration goes...research your video card and make sure it can support it. The Distro wont have much effect on how your graphics perform...its all about drivers.
It does seem like you went through to many distro's in a short period of time. I suggest sitting down with 1 distro and just learning it...if you dont like it in 3 months then switch. Untill you get a good understanding of the whole linux OS (command especialy) it wont matter which distro you run....especialy if you plan to use it at work. I hope this helps you in your path to zen!
-Sean-
http://www.projecttpan.net