Now you can make video calls on a PinePhone (but it’s very much a work in progress)

When the PinePhone began shipping to early adopters, it had all the hardware you’d expect from a smartphone, but it lacked the software needed to make some of that hardware work. If you were one of the first people to get your hands on a PinePhone, you had a Linux-friendly phone with a camera that couldn’t be used to take pictures or record video. But over time kernel and app developers got the phone’s front and rear cameras working, and now most Linux distributions for the PinePhone allow you to take pictures (of mediocre quality). One thing you couldn’t do until recently though? Video calls. But now it looks like that’s possible too… soft of. The process looks rather painful at the moment, but it should get better over time. Also: Plasma Mobile tarball release: bugfixes and new releases

A warning about 5.12-rc1

• A warning about 5.12-rc1

  Hey peeps - some of you may have already noticed that in my public git
  tree, the "v5.12-rc1" tag has magically been renamed to
  "v5.12-rc1-dontuse". It's still the same object, it still says
  "v5.12-rc1" internally, and it is still is signed by me, but the
  user-visible name of the tag has changed.
  
  
  
  
  The reason is fairly straightforward: 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.
  
  
  
  
  Now, the good news is even if you do use swap (and hey, that's nowhere
  near as common as it used to be), most people don't use a swap *file*,
  but a separate swap *partition*. And the bug in question really only
  happens for when you have a regular filesystem, and put a file on it
  as a swap.
  
  
  
  
  And, as far as I know, all the normal distributions set things up with
  swap partitions, not files, because honestly, swapfiles tend to be
  slower and have various other complexity issues.
  
  
  
  
  The bad news is that the reason we support swapfiles in the first
  place is that they do end up having some flexibility advantages, and
  so some people do use them for that reason. If so, do not use rc1.
  Thus the renaming of the tag.
  
  
  
  
  Yes, this is very unfortunate, but it really wasn't a very obvious
  bug, and it didn't even show up in normal testing, exactly because
  swapfiles just aren't normal. So I'm not blaming the developers in
  question, and it also wasn't due to the odd timing of the merge
  window, it was just simply an unusually nasty bug that did get caught
  and is fixed in the current tree.
  
  
  
  
  But I want everybody to be aware of because _if_ it bites you, it
  bites you hard, and you can end up with a filesystem that is
  essentially overwritten by random swap data. This is what we in the
  industry call "double ungood".
  
  
  
  
  Now, there's a couple of additional reasons for me writing this note
  other than just "don't run 5.12-rc1 if you use a swapfile". Because
  it's more than just "ok, we all know the merge window is when all the
  new scary code gets merged, and rc1 can be a bit scary and not work
  for everybody". Yes, rc1 tends to be buggier than later rc's, we are
  all used to that, but honestly, most of the time the bugs are much
  smaller annoyances than this time.
  
  
  
  
  And in fact, most of our rc1 releases have been so solid over the
  years that people may have forgotten that "yeah, this is all the new
  code that can have nasty bugs in it".
  
  
  
  
  One additional reason for this note is that I want to not just warn
  people to not run this if you have a swapfile - even if you are
  personally not impacted (like I am, and probably most people are -
  swap partitions all around) - I want to make sure that nobody starts
  new topic branches using that 5.12-rc1 tag. I know a few developers
  tend to go "Ok, rc1 is out, I got all my development work into this
  merge window, I will now fast-forward to rc1 and use that as a base
  for the next release". Don't do it this time. It may work perfectly
  well for you because you have the common partition setup, but it can
  end up being a horrible base for anybody else that might end up
  bisecting into that area.
  
  
  
  
  And the *final* reason I want to just note this is a purely git
  process one: if you already pulled my git tree, you will have that
  "v5.12-rc1" tag, and the fact that it no longer exists in my public
  tree under that name changes nothing at all for you. Git is
  distributed, and me removing that tag and replacing it with another
  name doesn't magically remove it from other copies unless you have
  special mirroring code.
  
  
  
  
  So if you have a kernel git tree (and I'm here assuming "origin"
  points to my trees), and you do
  
  
  
  
       git fetch --tags origin
  
  
  
  
  you _will_ now see the new "v5.12-rc1-dontuse" tag. But git won't
  remove the old v5.12-rc1 tag, because while git will see that it is
  not upstream, git will just assume that that simply means that it's
  your own local tag. Tags, unlike branch names, are a global namespace
  in git.
  
  
  
  
  So you should additionally do a "git tag -d v5.12-rc1" to actually get
  rid of the original tag name.
  
  
  
  
  Of course, having the old tag doesn't really do anything bad, so this
  git process thing is entirely up to you. As long as you don't _use_
  v5.12-rc1 for anything, having the tag around won't really matter, and
  having both 'v5.12-rc1' _and_ 'v5.12-rc1-dontuse' doesn't hurt
  anything either, and seeing both is hopefully already sufficient
  warning of "let's not use that then".
  
  
  
  
  Sorry for this mess,
               Linus
  
  
  
  
  

• A warning about 5.12-rc1

  Linus Torvalds has sent out a note telling people not to install the recent 5.12-rc1 development kernel; this is especially true for anybody running with swap files. "But I want everybody to be aware of because _if_ it bites you, it bites you hard, and you can end up with a filesystem that is essentially overwritten by random swap data. This is what we in the industry call 'double ungood'." Additionally, he is asking maintainers to not start branches from 5.12-rc1 to avoid future situations where people land in the buggy code while bisecting problems.

 

• Linux 5.12-rc2 Likely Coming Early Due To That Nasty File-System Corruption Bug

  Linus Torvalds has now warned developers over using Linux 5.12-rc1 as a basis for their future branches and is looking to release 5.12-rc2 ahead of schedule as a result of that problematic file-system corruption bug stemming from a swap file bug. 

Games: Godot, Artifact, Loop Hero, and Urtuk: The Desolation

• Godot Showcase - Primal Light developer interview

  Welcome to the fourth developer interview following the introduction of the Godot Showcase page! This week, we are interviewing the studio Fat Gem about their first game Primal Light.

• Valve gives up on Artifact setting it free with Artifact Classic and Artifact Foundry | GamingOnLinux

  Valve's Dota themed card game Artifact has now well and truly failed, as they've now stopped the 2.0 redevelopment which is now named Artifact Foundry with the original as Artifact Classic and both now free to play. In a post titled "The Future of Artifact", Valve mentioned how the player count fell off dramatically and it was pretty much dead shortly after being released. Even though the big 2.0 revamp was far along in development, they've now formally and totally shelved it as they "haven't managed to get the active player numbers to a level that justifies further development at this time".

• Loop Hero is out now and I'm going to need help to tear myself away from it | GamingOnLinux

  Loop Hero, probably the only titles I've pre-ordered in the last few years is officially out now and I really will need some help to pull myself away from running just one more loop. It's such a strange and beautifully intoxicating mix of genres. For each loop through you're placed into a world full of nothing but a path and it's up to you to build up the world each time. You do this through your deck of cards, while the hero automatically loops around the path and fights enemies along the way without your input. Even though you don't have direct control, there's quite a lot of strategy involved in it.

• Dark low-fantasy tactical survival RPG 'Urtuk: The Desolation' is out now | GamingOnLinux

  Urtuk: The Desolation from David Kaleta presents you with a dark world in a low-fantasy settings where you guide a team of survivors through a ruined world. Note: key provided by the developer. Hitting nearly one thousand user reviews and a Very Positive rating on Steam overall, Urtuk: The Desolation seems to have managed to hit a sweet spot. Giving you tough turn-based combat, with a character progression system that sees you extracting skills and traits from fallen enemies. It's a bit of a gross world and the main character, Urtuk, is an escaped subject of experimentation with a severe mutation and worsening health. The idea is to eventually find a cure but getting there will be tough.

today's howtos

• How to find duplicate files in Linux? Help is here with the fdupes command! - Webleit.info

  Fdupes is a command line tool that allows you to find all duplicate files through the console. The advantage over using graphical tools like fslint is of course the speed. At the end of the day, there is nothing faster and more convenient than the Linux console. Why should we look for duplicate files in Linux? No matter what operating system you use sooner or later, your computer will contain many files of different sizes, and if you’re not careful enough, repeating them can cost you disk space that you need. For example, you inadvertently downloaded the same ultra HD movie with 40 giga bytes twice.

• How to Install Moodle with Nginx and Let's Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 20.04

  Moodle is a free and open-source Learning Management System written in PHP. It provides a way for tutors and instructors to create courses for their students or learners. Moodle provides a robust and secure integrated system and comes with a custom dashboard that helps users to access current, past or future courses, as well as review pending work. It is used by many schools, universities, and organizations across the globe and provides a better learning experience. It provides a rich set of features including, wiki, grading, assignment submission, online quizzes, discussion boards, and more. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Moodle with Nginx web server and Let's Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 20.04.

• Install WordPress Automatically on Ubuntu 20.04 using WordOps

  WordOps is a simple tool that provides the ability to deploy WordPress sites from the command line using an optimized LEMP stack. The LEMP software stack consists of a group of software that describes a Linux Operating System, an Nginx web server (pronounced engine-x), a MySQL database with the dynamic processing being handled by PHP. LEMP is an acronym for Linux, Engine-x (Nginx), MySQL and PHP. WordOps simplifies so much of the process of installing and configuring all the packages from the LEMP stack needed to deploy a site while taking care of creating virtual hosts in Nginx, installing WordPress, and even gets you a SSL certificate. It also installs some components that allow you to see statistics about the server’s workload. In this tutorial we’ll use WordOps to quickly and easily install WordPress on an Ubuntu 20.04 machine, and we’ll check out and explain some of the extra features that WordOps offers.

• How to Find Out When a Webpage Was Published - Make Tech Easier

  When you’re doing research on a topic, it’s vital to ensure your sources are up to date. If you’re writing an academic paper, dates of publication are often required in the citations. The majority of the time, getting the date is easy: simply look on the site and find the published date to find how recent it was. Things get a little more complicated when there is no date listed on the webpage. When this happens, how do you know when a webpage was published?

• How to install Wireshark 3.4.3 on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Wireshark 3.4.3 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• Another Piece For The Home Network Puzzle – A Return To Cisco IOS! – Jon's FOSS Blog

  I’ve missed the good old days of configuring and setting up good quality switching hardware (like the big, huge Cisco switches and routers I used to experiment on with their IOS command line interface). I recently ordered this newer, smaller Cisco switch which can also provide power to a new “prosumer” WiFi AP (no power cables needed).

• Making environment variables accessible in front-end containers - Red Hat Developer

  When building a container for a single-page application using any modern JavaScript framework (such as Angular, React, or Vue.js), you might find that the configuration settings are different depending on where the container will run. A typical case would be the base URL for your API, which will differ depending on whether you are testing the application or deploying it into production. Developers usually solve this problem using environment variables. Environment variables typically work on the backend because that is where code runs. But what if your application lives in the user’s browser? There are many ways around this limitation. In some cases, you might build a server whose endpoint holds the necessary parameters. Another workaround is to use PHP to inject the environment variables as globals in the JavaScript code. Both of these options work, but it would be ideal to inject the environment variables as part of the container build process. That way, you don’t have to change the codebase, and you can still deliver the application content using a static web server like NGINX. This article shows you how to inject environment variables directly into your codebase as you build your container.

• The Strange Case of How We Escaped the Docker Default Container

  TL;DR During an internal container-based Red Team engagement, the Docker default container spontaneously and silently changed cgroups overnight, which allowed us to escalate privileges and gain...

• How to copy and paste between host and VM