Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 678

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 678 for the week of April 4 – 10, 2021.

Ubuntu Blog: Design and Web team summary – 12 April 2021

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.

Enabling Rapid Decision Making with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and NVIDIA Virtual GPU (vGPU)

SUSECON Digital 2021: a Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Space Oddity | SUSE Communities

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!

JK Tyre & Industries improves operating efficiency and drives future innovation with SUSE

Top 3 Linux Server Operating Systems in 2021

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. [...] 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.

Element Keeps conversations in your control

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.

RSS Guard 3.9.2

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.

Free Software: Is It Just A Thing Of The Past?

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.

New Linux Foundation project takes blockchain and the open source approach to the insurance industry

Linux Foundation Hosts Collaboration Among World’s Largest Insurance Companies

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. [...] “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.

Windows, Ubuntu, Zoom, Safari, MS Exchange Hacked at Pwn2Own 2021

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. [...] 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."

Security updates for Monday

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).

Create Beautiful Websites Using Emacs Org Mode

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.

Qt Creator 4.15: New CMake Features

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.

7 Popular Open Source CI/CD Tools

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.

Community Member Monday: Gökçe Kuler

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.

App Showcase: Drawing

Drawing is a simple app in the PureOS store to doodle on a digital canvas.

How to Use tcpdump and 6 Examples

Are you trying to capture data packets in order to analyze traffic on your network? Maybe you are a server administrator who has bumped into an issue and wants to monitor transmitted data on the network. Whatever the situation be, the tcpdump Linux utility is what you need. In this article, we will discuss the tcpdump command in detail, along with some guides on how to install and use tcpdump on your Linux system.

How to play The Forest on Linux

The Forest works on Linux, but only with Proton’s help, which is a built-in feature of the Linux release of Steam. So, before we can go over how to configure the game, we must demonstrate how to install Steam on Linux.

How to Install CopyQ Clipboard Manager 4.0.0 in Ubuntu 20.04 | UbuntuHandbook

The CopyQ clipboard manager released version 4.0.0 a day ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 18.04 via PPA. CopyQ is a free and open-source clipboard manager with editing and scripting features. The new 4.0.0 release features new script engine with some new functions, better ECMAScript support, improved performance.

These 10 Sed Examples Will Make You a Linux Power User

Editing text files and terminal output is an everyday job for those who administer Linux machines. Command-line utilities like sed allow a user to modify and change the content of a text file right from the terminal window. In this article, we will discuss the sed command in detail, along with some essential examples that demonstrate the power of the sed utility in Linux.