• Linux Says Farewell To Intel's Smartphone Attempts With Clearing Out Moorestown / Medfield

  Not only are some old ARM platforms and some obsolete, obscure CPU architectures on the chopping block for some spring cleaning in the Linux kernel, but the Intel Moorestown and Medfield "Mobile Internet Device" platforms are being phased out from the Linux kernel this spring as well.

  Moorestown was Intel's early Atom platform geared for handheld mobile Internet devices and smartphones.

• With Linux 5.12 Set To Boot On The Nintendo 64, The N64 Controller Driver Is Now Queued - Phoronix

  A few days ago we wrote about Linux 5.12 to see support for the Nintendo 64 more than two decades after that MIPS-based video game console first shipped. While the practicality of Linux on the Nintendo 64 is particularly limited given only 4~8MB of RAM and the MIPS64 NEC VR4300 clocked under 100MHz, it's going upstream and now the N64 controller driver is also queued for this next kernel cycle.

  The code talked about a few days ago was getting Linux to boot on the Nintendo 64. With those 200+ lines of code in the MIPS architecture space is enough to get Linux booting on the Nintendo 64 when using a Flashcart device to be able to load the arbitrary code onto the game console.

• Corellium to offer cloud-based iOS virtualisation to individual accounts

  The company, which only recently ported Ubuntu Linux to work on Apple Silicon Macs, has announced on their blog that they will now offer their virtualisation tools for iOS to individual accounts on their CORSEC platform. Previously, only enterprise accounts could access the service, while individuals could only access virtual Android devices.

• Getting started with SystemTap on Oracle Linux

  There are a wealth of tools available for tracing and debugging the Linux kernel on a live system. These include Kprobes, Ftrace, trace-cmd, Dtrace, eBPF, SystemTap, crash, gdb, etc. Among these tools, few allow the user to develop and re-use scripts that can filter events and collect data more than just function arguments and returned values. Dtrace, eBPF and SystemTap are the ones among these tools that do.

• Anticipating Your Memory Needs

  The Linux kernel organizes physical memory in units of pages of a certain size called base pages. For example, the default base page size when running on Intel processors is 4KB. These pages are allocated to user and kernel tasks as they need memory. When processing large amounts of data from slower disk devices, the Linux kernel uses a page cache to cache contents, like disk blocks, to speed up access to frequently accessed data. See this article for more details on how various caches are used by the Linux kernel. This has the positive effect of improving overall system performance but the memory for page cache must come from the same memory pool that is used by rest of the system. The kernel allocates all the memory not currently in use to the page cache. As the kernel needs to allocate more memory for other tasks, it can reclaim pages from the page cache since the contents in the page cache can be restored from disk blocks when the need arises. Reclamation happens as the kernel starts to run low on free memory pages. Individual memory pages are the base pages. As pages are reclaimed, any contiguous base pages are grouped together (compaction) to form higher order pages. Higher order pages are groups of 2^n physically contiguous pages where n is the page order. Higher order pages can then be used to satisfy higher order page allocation requests, for example if an allocation request is for 8 pages, that allocation will be made from order 3 page group.

  The kernel recovers physical memory in the event of a shortage by page reclamation and/or compaction. Both methods are implemented in a similar fashion. As the amount of free memory falls below the low threshold (watermark), memory pages are reclaimed asynchronously via kswapd or compacted via kcompactd. If the free memory continues to fall below a minimum watermark, any allocation request is forced to perform reclamation/compaction synchronously before it can be fulfilled. The latter synchronous method is referred to as the "direct" path and is considerably slower owing to being stalled waiting for memory to be reclaimed. The corresponding stall in the caller results in a non-deterministic increased latency for the operation it is performing and is typically perceived as an impact on performance.

• Thomas Lange: Making Debian available

  This is the subject of an interesting thread on the debian-devel mailing list.

  It started with ".. The current policy of hiding other versions of Debian is limiting the adoption of your OS by people like me.."

  It seems that this user managed to contact us developers and give us some important information how we can improve the user experience. The following discussion shows that all our users need non-free firmware to get their wireless network cards run.

  Do we provide such installation images for our users?

  Sure. We build them regularly, host them on our servers, we also sign the hash sum with our official signing key. But we hide them very well and still call them unofficial. Why? I would like to have a more positive name for those images. Ubuntu has the HWE (Hardware Enablement) kernel. Maybe Debian firmware enablement images?

• UBports: Packaging of Lomiri Operating Environment for Debian (part 04)

  Before and during FOSDEM 2020, I agreed with the people (developers, supporters, managers) of the UBports Foundation to package the Unity8 Operating Environment for Debian. Since 27th Feb 2020, Unity8 has now become Lomiri.

  Things got delayed a little recently as my main developer contact on the upstream side was on sick leave for a while. Fortunately, he has now fully recovered and work is getting back on track.

• Debian's Gunnar Wolf: Back to school... As a student

  Although it was a much larger step when I made a similar announcement seven years ago, when I started my Specialization, it is still a big challenge ahead, and I am very happy to pursue this: I have been admitted to a PhD program at UNAM, the university I have worked at for almost 20 years, and one of the top universities in Latin America. What program will I be part of? Doctorado en Ciencia e Ingeniería de la Computación (Computer Science and Engineering Doctorate… Quite a broad program name, yes, sounds like anything goes).

• [Debian-based] SteamTinkerLaunch – SparkyLinux

  There is a new application available for Sparkers: SteamTinkerLaunch

We are pleased to present the first release candidate of NomadBSD 1.4.

• Netflix delivers 'studio-quality' sound upgrade for Android viewers

• Netflix on Android adds support for ‘studio-quality audio’ codec

• Netflix Gets 'Optimal Listening Experience' Upgrade on Android Devices

• Netflix update makes your Android phone’s crappy speakers sound better

• Netflix just got a killer audio upgrade for Android users

• Netflix adopts xHE-AAC variable bitrate audio codec on Android

• Latest Netflix update aims to make your phone’s speakers sound better

• Netflix new Android app features boosts audio wherever you listen

• Netflix introduces 'optimised audio quality' for Android mobile devices in latest update

• Netflix brings 'studio-quality' sound to Android devices with latest update

• Netflix Update Looks to Improve Audio on Android Devices

• Netflix boosts sound quality on Android devices with adaptive audio update

• Netflix's ingenious Android update isn't about 'studio quality' audio

• Clubhouse plans to start working on its Android app ‘soon’

• Clubhouse: Is The Invite-Only App Available On Android Yet?

• Invite-only app Clubhouse come up with Android version

• Android 12 could revive this dumped Android 11 feature

• Android 12: News, Leaks, Release, Features, and Rumors!

• Android 12 might decouple fonts and emoji from system updates

• Pixels could get iPhone-style back tap gesture with Android 12

• Best smartwatch for Android users in 2021

• The 10 Best Live Wallpaper Apps for Android

• Best Android app deals of the day: Earth 3D, DISTRAINT, FolderSync Pro, more

• Desi PUBG rival FAU-G is here for Android smartphone users

• Cheap Google Pixel 5 deals get you the pure Android flagship for less

• Google Photos finally looks okay on Android tablets

• Grimes and Endel bring their AI-powered sleep sounds to Android

• Apple's iMessage May Now be Available to Android Users, Here's How it Could be Possible

• How to quickly block spam SMS in Android

• Sony Xperia Pro is a $2.5k Android phone with a killer 5G use-case

• Why an Android Smartphone Devalues Twice Than an iPhone in One Year: Report

• Hisense’s 55-inch Android-powered 4K TV falls to $480 (Save up to $120)

JWIPC unveiled three “R19x” SBCs that run Linux on Rockchip’s dual -A7, 1.2-TOPS NPU equipped RV1109 camera SoC. Meanwhile, Firefly released two “CAM-C11x” cameras based on the RV1109 and similar quad-core, 2.0-TOPS RV1126.

Shenzhen-based JWIPC, which we last covered back in 2014 with its Intel Bay Trail based S015 Dual System signage player, has posted product pages for three development boards built around Rockchip’s new RV1109 camera SoC (translated). The R19x boards are aimed at security access point face recognition applications. The R19S and mini-PCIe and SIM-equipped R19F are 100 x 72mm Pico-ITX SBCs while the R19N has a smaller 100 x 60mm footprint.

Sudo 1.9.5p2 was released today and it addresses two security issues. The first, CVE-2021-3156 (a.k.a. Baron Samedit), was discovered by Qualys Research Labs and could allow local users (sudoers and non-sudoers) to obtain unintended access to the root (system administrator) account.

In addition, the new release patches CVE-2021-23239, a vulnerability discovered in Sudo’s sudoedit utility, which could allow a local attacker to bypass file permissions and determine if a directory exists or not. This security flaw affected Sudo versions before 1.9.5.

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Plasma Browser Integration version 1.8 on the Chrome Web Store as well as Firefox Add-Ons page. This release was originally intended to be just a bugfix update, but instead comes with new features, the usual slew of bug fixes and translation updates, but more importantly: it’s now available on the Microsoft Edge store (needs Plasma 5.21)!

Ever since Red Hat announced that they are changing the development model of CentOS and making it an upstream project rather than downstream, it left many CentOS users frowning. No matter what argument brought forward, CentOS users, especially running production machines, relied on the stability of an enterprise-grade Linux distribution. Compiled from RHEL sources, CentOS offered such stability that it powered many web servers and enjoyed a massive 20% share of the top 500 supercomputers of the world.

Debuggers are essential for locating bugs in programs. There is a plethora of robust Linux debuggers that make it easy to find weak points in your applications. We will outline some of these applications in this guide. Try some of these tools to get a feel of how debugging works in Linux.

Snaps are confined software packages for Linux. They were originally designed / intended for IoT use cases so are optimised for size, bundling dependencies, are compressed on disk and auto update. They can also be used to package server software, like NextCloud, and desktop software like Signal Desktop. There’s millions of desktops, routers, servers and other interesting devices with snaps installed.

There’s a bunch of common components that snap publishers started bundling in their snaps which bloated them out a bit. Snaps have had (for some time) a concept of “shared content” such that one snap may consume assets from another snap. The reason we use the hand-wavy term “assets” and “content” is because while it could be binary programs and libraries which are shared between snaps, it’s not just limited to that. A theme or bundle of themes can be shared too.

One day I was looking at the MR (Merge Request) and saw Tomaz Canabrava’s sketch showing the terminal re-flow lines while it shrinks, and I just thought it would be great to have it fully working.

The first thing to have a line re-flow is define how to mark a line with “continues in the next line”. This is the most important thing, otherwise you can’t go back to original state. My first thought was to set a next line char with something not printable, and then the first screen re-flow on both ways prototype was done.

To improve speed, and hold lines before send to memory, the next thing I did was change the _screenLines holder from an array to a QVector type. It was an improvement in speed, specially to re-flow. No need to a new memory allocation, no copy and no delete, it was just update the QVector content and send from the QVector to history, if needed, and resize it.

By now you're probably suffering from CentOS exposure--it's been all over the place. Every day, someone is writing about what Red Hat did to the beloved Linux distribution that powers so many data centers and services. The reaction has been so sharp, that many forks of CentOS have begun to pop up. Some of these forks look seriously promising, even drop-in 1:1 binary compatibility with RHEL 8. When those forks appear, the landscape will most likely shift. However, until then, where's a business to turn?

Do you go with CentOS 8 Stream? Some might. Others, on the other hand, see Stream as an impossible option, due to cPanel pulling support, which is a very big deal.

What do you do? You could turn to Oracle Linux. Before you protest, I didn't say you should turn to Oracle Linux; I said you could.

Why did I feel the need to make that clarification?

Let me explain, and then I'll get into why Oracle Linux is a viable choice.

• Seriously deep monster-catching dungeon-crawler Siralim Ultimate releases in March | GamingOnLinux

  Ready for a run through the dungeons? How about to catch 1000s of monsters? Siralim Ultimate will see return of the deep RPG when it enters Early Access on March 12. As confirmed in a Kickstarter update, the Linux port is also now available and ready for the release with Beta backers already having access.

• Colony building sim Maia surprises with a big feature release, gets ray-marched shadows

  I always have a soft spot for Maia, a colony building sim from Simon Roth of Machine Studios with its very different take on building up a space colony on a distant world.

  Unlike RimWorld and other colony building games, Maia is more about looking pretty and providing some hard-science. It's a little difficult, in some ways a bit buggy but it always has such huge potential to be awesome. After a break, Roth is back to updating the game and this latest release is huge. One of the big additions is a new "ray-marched voxelised shadow system" which is pretty fancy and allows "every light in your base to cast accurate dynamic shadows into the world".

• Try out Luxtorpeda, a Steam Play tool to run games in native game engines | GamingOnLinux

  There's quite a few games available on Steam that either don't support Linux, or do support Linux but like the Windows release there's a better way to run it perhaps with an open source game engine. Luxtorpeda will help with that.

  It's a project we briefly mentioned in a previous article talking about Boxtron, another Steam Play compatibility layer to run games on Steam that use DOSBox in your native install of DOSBox. Remember - Steam Play is just a feature, that runs different compatibility layers on Linux so anyone can make one. What Luxtorpeda does, is allow you to run various games (an expanding list) on Steam inside a native Linux game engine be it open source or otherwise.

  The original Luxtorpeda project only supports a few titles, but there's also the much newer Luxtorpeda-dev that is continuing the development which will hopefully merge together one day. Luxtorpeda-dev works with games like Cortex Command, Caesar 3, DOOM 3, Doki Doki Literature Club!, Freespace 2, Good Robot, Gothic 2: Gold Edition, RealRTCW, Return to Castle Wolfenstein, RollerCoaster Tycoon 2: Triple Thrill Pack, WRATH: Aeon of Ruin, Warzone 2100 and plenty more.

• Super sweet chilled-out game Kind Words has a nice free content update | GamingOnLinux

  Kind Words is one of the most chilled-out games around, although calling it a game feels a little weird. You write anonymous caring letters to real people around the world and it really is sweet. The developer mentioned how over 3 million messages have now been exchanged in game and thousands go through it each day.

  Writing about the update, the developer said "We are humbled to have Kind Words become a regular part of so many people's lives and, in keeping with long-standing international custom for developer-player relations, we offer you this traditional gift: a giant, looming beast and some mittens."

• GraviFire is a block-pushing puzzler with a gravity twist now on Linux | GamingOnLinux

  Love your block-pushing puzzle games? GraviFire released back in November 2020, and it recently gained Linux support.

  Taking the basic idea and pushing around blocks, it mixes things up with a few nice twists. The biggest one being that you're also dealing with gravity, so all blocks will be sliding around towards the same direction at the same time. It looks like it adds a nice bit of complication to the genre.

  "The green fire has been abducted by evil aliens, who force him to solve puzzles for tests. Need to pass all the tests to be able to return the green fire back to his home. You have to brainstorm over 50 levels. Gravity, movement, killing lasers... What else the aliens have prepared?"

• How To Change The Default Shell In Linux - Linux Uprising Blog

  This article explains how to change the default shell in Linux. Using this you can set Bash, sh, Zsh, Csh, Fish, etc. as your shell.

  The article includes instructions for changing the login shell from the command line using chsh, or changing the shell only for a particular terminal application. While the article is targeted at Linux users, this should also work on other Unix-like systems.

• How To Enable Minimize And Maximize Buttons In Fedora - OSTechNix

  Today, we will see one of the post installation steps in Fedora desktop. This brief guide explains how to enable minimize and maximize buttons in application windows in Fedora Workstation and Silverblue editions.

  As you may already know, there is no minimize and maximize buttons in Application windows in Fedora Silverblue as well as Fedora Workstation editions. If you want to minimize an application window, you need to right click on its title bar and choose the minimize option from the context menu. Unfortunately, you don't even get that option in Firefox with your mouse. To minimize Firefox window, you should hit the Left ALT+SPACEBAR keys and choose Minimize option.

  I don't know what is the benefit of hiding most frequently used buttons. Ubuntu GNOME desktop has the min/max buttons, but Fedora hasn't. If you want to bring back the minimize and maximize buttons in Fedora GNOME and Silverblue editions, you can enable them with the help of Gnome Tweaks utility and Dash to Panel extension in Fedora.

• How to Find Top 10 Running Processes by Memory and CPU Usage

  Linux is quite popular for its command-line utilities, which not only make any task at hand easier but also saves a lot of time, which is otherwise wasted in graphical UI based utilities.

  This is one of the reasons why Linux is a preferred operating system for servers and administrative machines. Combine the knowledge of Linux commands and shell scripting and you have a proper toolkit of system administration at your disposal.

  Today we will see how to see the top 10 heaviest memory and CPU resource-consuming processes in Linux using a command-line tool called ps command, which is used to display information about running processes in Linux.

• How to Install Ansible on Ubuntu 20.04

  Ansible is an Infrastructure as Code tool that allows its users to control many servers from a centralized location. The benefit of using Ansible is that it uses SSH along with YAML files for configuration without any need to require other configurations. In this tutorial, I will describe how to install and configure Ansible on an Ubuntu 20.04 system.

• How to Upgrade a Single Package in Ubuntu

  On Ubuntu to install newer versions of the packages we run apt-get update followed by apt-get upgrade commands. This will update all installed packages which have new versions available in the repositories.

  In some situation we have to upgrade only a single package such as PHP, Apache or Nginx.

• How to Self-host Plausible Analytics [Complete Guide]

  As an ethical website, we try to keep Linux Handbook as much Google and tracking free as possible. In that regard, we refrain from using Google Analytics for website traffic measurement.

  Instead, we use Plausible Analytics. It is a simple, lightweight (<1 KB), open-source and privacy-friendly alternative to Google Analytics (GA).

  It may not give you as many details as GA, but it gives you an idea about the traffic you are getting on your website along with the bounce rate and visit duration.

  You can also see which pages are getting most visits, from where your website is getting the traffic, bounce rate and duration on page. You can also measure traffic based on geographical region and devices.

• How to View and Change Boot Sequence in Linux Terminal

  Have you ever had a need to change your boot sequence via terminal? Maybe you're doing so remotely via SSH, or maybe you can't manage to get into the BIOS during that two second sweet spot when your computer is first turned on. In this article, we'll explain how to easily change the boot sequence via terminal.

• How to create Cloudwatch alarms for RDS (MySQL) on AWS

  Monitoring your RDS instances is very important, and the same applies to other resources. In this article, we will create a simple alarm for an RDS MySQL instance which will check for free storage space on the instance. There are different metrics too which can be used to create alarms, click here to see the list of available metrics for RDS instances. The "FreeStorageSpace" metric checks for the storage space available on the instance and depending upon the condition specified the alarm gets triggered and sends notifications to SNS Endpoint. The "FreeStorageSpace" metric accepts the value in bytes and not percent.
  Before we proceed with this article, I assume you are aware of the basics of RDS instances and already have one in your account to create alarms for.

• How to Send An Email With File Attachment from Command Line

  The key to becoming an advanced Linux user is to use more of the command line and less of the GUI; more of the keyboard and less of the mouse! As the diaspora of Linux command-line tools grows, not only administrative but several non-administrative, in fact, crucial day-to-day tasks, are performed using the command line.

• Why GNU/Linux Users (and the Public at Large) Should Support Leaking/Whistleblowing Sites (Including Wikileaks)
• EPO President António Campinos is Still Not Listening, According to Internal EPO Documents
• Why You Should Give Falkon (the Web Browser) a Chance on GNU/Linux, BSD, or Windows
• Kluwer Patent Spin and Distortion of Facts (Regarding UPC and More)
• Links 26/1/2021: 4MLinux 35.1, GParted 1.2, Gnuastro 0.14
• IRC Proceedings: Monday, January 25, 2021
• It's Wrong to Assume Red Hat Competes With Microsoft
• EPO Staff Representation Complains That EPO Management Exploits Pandemic and 'House Arrests' to Overwork Staff, Lower Quality
• Fake News is Not a 'Wing' Thing
• Links 25/1/2021: Huawei on GNU/Linux, NuTyX 20.12.1, Whisker Menu 2.5.3, Lutris 0.5.8.3, Linux 5.11 RC5
• Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) in ZDNet is the Norm

While Firefox 85 introduced a couple of new privacy features, Firefox 86 promises some other cool changes, such as basic support for the AV1 Image File Format (AVIF), a powerful, lossless, royalty-free and open-source image file format designed to encode AV1 bitstreams in the HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) container, enabled by default.

Basic support means that advanced features like animated images and colorspace support aren’t supported at this time. AVIF support landed in Firefox a few months ago, but only now it’s enabled by default as Mozilla considers it ready for the masses. Therefor, you could enable AVIF support in previous Firefox release by setting the image.avif.enable option in about:config to true.

If you read the last article on How to create bootable Ubuntu 20.04 on windows 10 in that We have promised we’ll make a complete get started guide on Linux.

This is the second article on Get started guide on Linux. I’ll not cover the Ubuntu Operating System features rather than I’ll show you a simple way to install Ubuntu on your Windows PC.

Without taking any further moment, let’s start the Installation process first check the basics system requirement to Install.

Nvidia 460.39 is here three weeks after Nvidia 460.32.03 and introduces support for new graphics cards, including NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 laptop GPUs, as well as NVIDIA GeForce GT 1010. This support is available only for GNU/Linux and FreeBSD systems.

Linux users would be happy to learn that the new Nvidia graphics adds support for newer kernels, such as the latest and greatest Linux 5.10 LTS series, restoring essential functionality like runtime power management, hot-plugging of audio-capable display devices, as well as S0ix-based system suspend.

• Samsung Galaxy S21 has an annoying Android update problem

• Android 12 may let you hibernate unused apps to free up space

• Samsung Galaxy XCover 5 visits Geekbench with Exynos 850 and Android 11

• OnePlus Nord Android 11-based OxygenOS open beta 2 update released: Here are all the new features

• Always-on Display can be enabled on OnePlus 7/7T series devices with Android 11 – Here’s how

• Motorola's "Ibiza" may launch soon as a phone with Android 11 and Wi-Fi 5

• How to use Android messenger on your Chromebook

• How To Stop Spam Calls On Android Using Caller ID & Spam Protection

• Smart TV Deal: This Hisense Android TV Is the Best $200 You Can Spend on Amazon Today

• 4K AV1 Android TV dongles surface with Amlogic S905Y4 Cortex-A35 processor

• Google is working on MicroDroid, a stripped-down version of Android for virtual machines

• Google Photos finally gets a tablet-optimized UI on Android

• “Seamless updates” is a great Android feature that the Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra still doesn’t have

• Google Lens for Android rolling out offline translate capability

• Google makes big changes this week with a new look on Android and iPhone

• Netflix gets a serious boost on Android, and you should be able to hear the difference now

• Apple's iMessage coming to Android? Sounds exciting until you hear the catch

• The best affordable Android tablets for gaming

• FAU-G gaming app available for download on Android in India

• FAU-G launched on Android: Gameplay in pics

• Grimes and Endel bring their AI-powered sleep sounds to Android

GNOME 40 is now available as the first step towards releasing this updated Linux desktop environment in March.

GNOME 40 Alpha comes with a ton of changes -- many of which we have been outlining in various Phoronix articles over the past few months. Among the main highlights of GNOME 40