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Audiocasts/Shows: LINUX Unplugged, Homelab, and Tabliss
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 27th of January 2021 12:21:08 AM Filed under

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Eating the License Cake | LINUX Unplugged 390
Successful open-source projects all seem to struggle with one major gorilla. Who it is, and what their options are now.
Special Guests: Drew DeVore and Jonathan Corbet.
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The Raspberry Pi is a great way to get started with Homelab! (How to Homelab Episode 4)
If you're looking for a low-cost way to enter into the world of Homelab, look no further than the Raspberry Pi! These small computers are plenty powerful to run quite a few Homelab apps, and in this video I give you my thoughts on why that is. In a future video, we'll explore running some apps on the Raspberry Pi but I wanted to create this video as an introduction to the concept of using a Pi in this way
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Tabliss Is A "New Tab" Plugin For Firefox and Chrome
Tabliss is a beautiful, customisable "New Tab" page for Firefox and Chrome, and the browsers that base of Firefox and Chrome (such as LibreWolf and Brave). In particular, it solves the "empty tab" problem that I was having on LibreWolf
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Free Software Leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 27th of January 2021 12:08:51 AM Filed under

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Ingo Juergensmann: Migrating from Drupal to WordPress
If you can read this on planet.debian.org then migrating my blog from Drupal to WordPress was successful and the feed has been successfully changed by the Debian Planet Maintainers (thanks!).
I’ve been a long term Drupal user. I think I started to use Drupal since it was included in Debian. At some point Drupal was removed from Debian and I started to use Serendipity instead. Later Drupal was included in Debian again and I moved back to Drupal. I think this must have been around Drupal 4 or Drupal 5. No idea.
I even became active in the Drupal community and went to one of the first Drupal barcamps in Germany, namely in Cologne. This was shortly before Dries Buytaert started a business off of Drupal and went to the USA. I met with many devs of Drupal in Cologne and enjoyed the community and started with others a local Drupal User Group in Rostock.
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So, after all the years my Drupal journey will come to an end. It was a long time with you. Sometimes joyful, sometimes painful. I wish you all the best, Drupal!
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The round-the-world trip to fix a bug
Mrs. Vera Cavalcante (@veracape), from Brazil, a long-time contributor for the Portuguese documentation on LibreOffice, was reviewing the translation of the Calc Guide and double-checking the translated text, with respect to the current user interface and the Help pages. Vera noticed that the Help pages on conditional formatting were not correct any more, and reported in the Brazilian team Telegram group (Bugzilla is still very hard for non-native English speakers).…
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Red Kubes Container Platform Flies Open Source Flag
Red Kubes, a Dutch-based startup, open sourced a free community edition of its Otomi Container Platform in a bid to remedy the ongoing complexity surrounding Kubernetes configurations.
The scalability, agility, and speed-to-market advantages that Kubernetes offers have been handsome enough to capture a growing share of the enterprise market, but this very strength can become an Achilles heel for container deployments. In this sense, it’s far too easy – and common – to create thousands or even tens of thousands of containers across applications. Not only does this create an operational money pit, but management becomes a herculean feat to any container newbie.
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The Apache Software Foundation Announces Apache® ECharts™ as a Top-Level Project
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache® ECharts™ as a Top-Level Project (TLP).
Apache ECharts is an intuitive, interactive, and powerful charting and visualization library ideally suited for commercial-grade presentations. The project originated in 2013 at Baidu and entered the Apache Incubator in January 2018.
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Shots fired in disputes over OSS-as-a-Service
Cloud services are the great disruptor of both IT organizations and vendors, and wrapping open source software around a service is the latest flashpoint.
The open source development model has proven to be an incredible incubator of innovative software by democratizing and distributing the conception, design, implementation and debugging of new titles, advantages that were thoroughly explored more than two decades ago in the book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Although open source has since been adopted, encouraged and sponsored by every major software company, its origins were decidedly non-commercial with utopian overtones of liberating code from the tyranny of proprietary shackles. The earliest open source projects, notably Gnu Emacs and other tools from the Gnu Project, embraced this idealistic ethos with a restrictive, comprehensive license, GPL, that applies to derivative work using the code.
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AWS to Fork Elasticsearch as Elastic Moves Away from Open Source
Elastic’s license change from open source ALv2 to SSPL appears to have moved Amazon Web Services to “launch new forks of both Elasticsearch and Kibana.” Elasticsearch’s move towards the more restrictive Server Side Public License has already begun to ruffle feathers among developers.
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Zentyal Server 7.0 Development Now Available
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 26th of January 2021 11:32:51 PM Filed under

Zentyal Development Team today announced the availability of Zentyal Server Development Edition 7.0. This is a new major community release of the Zentyal Linux Server, based on Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS. This version comes with the most recent versions of all the integrated software, including Samba 4.11 and the latest stable SOGo version.
Zentyal Server provides an easy-to-use Linux alternative to Windows Server®. Thanks to the integration of Samba, Zentyal provides native compatibility with the Microsoft Active Directory® and allows transparent management of Windows® clients. It is used by companies and public administrations mainly as a domain and directory server and a file server. The graphical user inferface that Zentyal offers helps to make Linux server management easier for all and specially for new Linux users.
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Write GIMP scripts to make image processing faster
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 26th of January 2021 11:14:22 AM Filed under

Some time ago, I wanted to give a blackboard-style look to a typeset equation. I started playing around with the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) and was satisfied with the result. The problem was that I had to perform several actions on the image, I wanted to use this style again, and I did not want to repeat the steps for all the images. Besides, I was sure that I would forget them in no time.
GIMP is a great open source image editor. Although I have been using it for years, I had never investigated its batch-processing abilities nor its Script-Fu menu. This was the perfect chance to explore them.
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Screencasts/Audiocasts/Shows: KaOS 2021.01, Destination Linux, Late Night Linux and More
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 26th of January 2021 07:56:25 AM Filed under

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KaOS 2021.01 overview | A Lean KDE Distribution.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of KaOS 2021.01 and some of the applications pre-installed.
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Destination Linux 210: The Fediverse – Become An Adult Again
You’ve heard us talk about Matrix and Mastodon along with many other decentralized services but what does that actually mean and why does it matter? Well this week, we’re going to deep dive into the various Fediverses to answer those questions. We’re also going to cover some recent exciting news from Red Hat which is guaranteed to make many in the community very happy. We will also discuss why Chromium may soon be missing from your distro repository. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux.
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Late Night Linux – Episode 109
Will’s hybrid cloud approach to Pi-hole, and huge batch of feedback about all sorts including Firefox, convergence, home monitoring, email servers, and more.
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Activitypub: The Open Future Of Social Media
Twitter has been doing the usual Twitter things but there already exists an amazing open alternative in the form of the Fediverse powered by Activitypub, and not just a replacement for Twitter but a wide array of other platforms and the best thing is they can all communicate with eachother.
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GNOME, Arch and FreeBSD
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 26th of January 2021 07:53:25 AM Filed under


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Phaedrus Leeds: Cleaning Up Unused Flatpak Runtimes
Despite having been a contributor to the GNOME project for almost 5 years now (first at Red Hat and now at Endless), I’ve never found the time to blog about my work. Fortunately in many cases collaborators have made posts or the work was otherwise announced. Now that Endless is a non-profit foundation and we are working hard at advocating for our solutions to technology access barriers in upstream projects, I think it’s an especially good time to make my first blog post announcing a recent feature in Flatpak, which I worked on with a lot of help from Alex Larsson.
On many low-end computers, persistent storage space is quite limited. Some Endless hardware for example has only 32 GB. And we want to fill much of it with useful content in the form of Flatpak apps so that the computers are useful even offline. So often in the past we have shipped computers that are already quite full before the user stores any files. Ideally we want that limited space to be used as efficiently as possible, and Flatpak and OSTree already have some neat mechanisms to that end, such as de-duplicating any identical files across all apps and their runtimes (and, in the case of Endless OS, including the OS files as well).
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Outreachy Progress Report
I’m halfway gone into my Outreachy internship at the GNOME Foundation. Time flies so fast right? I’m a little emotional cuz I don’t want this fun adventure to end soo soon. Just roughly five weeks to go!!
Oh well, let’s find out what I’ve been able to achieve over the past eight weeks and what my next steps are…My internship project is to complete the integration between the GNOME Translation Editor (previously known as Gtranslator) and Damned Lies(DL). This integration involves enabling users to reserve a file for translation directly from the Translation Editor and permitting them to upload po files to DL.
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Kubernetes on Hetzner in 2021
Hello and welcome to my little Kubernetes on Hetzner tutorial for the first half of 2021. This tutorial will help you bootstrapping a Kubernetes Cluster on Hetzner with KubeOne. I am writing this small tutorial, because I had some trouble to bootstrap a cluster on Hetzner with KubeOne. But first of all let us dive into the question why we even need KubeOne and how does KubeOne helps. KubeOne is a small wrapper around kubeadm. Kubeadm is the official tool for installing Kubernetes on VMs or bare-metal nodes, but it has one major disadvantage: It is very toilsome. KubeOne tries to solve this with providing you a wrapper around Kubeadm and various other provisioning tools like Terraform. Terraform lets you manage your infrastructure as code. The advantage is that you can easily destroy, deploy or enhance your infrastructure via a few config file changes. You may ask yourself why you even need this tutorial. There is already at least one tutorial that guides you through the process of setting up a Kubernetes cluster on Hetzner. This is correct, but I felt it is unnecessary complicated, takes too much manual steps and is not really automatable (although there are solutions like kubespray that intend to solve this).
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FreeBSD Desktop – Part 22 – Configuration – Aero Snap Extended
I like to post new articles and solutions when I think they are ready. Production tested and stable. Well thought and tested … or at least trying to make things as good as possible in the available time window. Perfectionism definitely does not help making often articles on the blog.
Today’s solution is not perfect but I will ‘ship it’ anyway because good and done is better then perfect. I wanted to rework it so many times that I stopped counting … and I really would like to continue the series – thus I have made a conscious decision to finally release it and hope that maybe someone else will have better ideas to make it better. I really wanted to provide pixel perfect solution with as much screen space used as possible but to deliver it as it is I tested it only on the resolution I use the most – the FullHD one with 1920×1080 pixels.
You may want to check other articles in the FreeBSD Desktop series on the FreeBSD Desktop – Global Page where you will find links to all episodes of the series along with table of contents for each episode’s contents.
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Sharing and Free Software Leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 26th of January 2021 07:46:23 AM Filed under
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10 fabulous free apps for working with audio, video, and images
You want Photoshop-like features without the Photoshop-like price tag, and, for that, there’s Gimp. Free, open-source, and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, this powerful tool can be used by graphic designers, photographers, and illustrators alike.
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Gnuastro 0.14 released
Dear all, I am happy to announce the availability of Gnuastro 0.14. For the full list of added and changed/improved features, see the excerpt of the NEWS file for this release in [1] below. Gnuastro is an official GNU package, consisting of various command-line programs and library functions for the manipulation and analysis of (astronomical) data. All the programs share the same basic command-line user interface (modeled on GNU Coreutils). For the full list of Gnuastro's library, programs, and a comprehensive general tutorial (recommended place to start using Gnuastro), please see the links below respectively: https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-library.html https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-programs-list.html https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/General-program-usage-tutorial.html The most prominent new feature may be the new Query program (called with 'astquery'). It allows you to directly query many large astronomical data centers (currently VizieR, NED, ESA and ASTRON) and only download your selected columns/rows. For example with the command below you can download the RA, Dec and Parallax of all stars in the Gaia eDR3 dataset (from VizieR) that overlap with your 'image.fits'. You just have to change '--dataset' to access any of the +20,000 datasets within VizieR for example! You can also search in the dataset metadata from the command-line, and much more. astquery vizier --dataset=gaiaedr3 --overlapwith=image.fits \ --column=RAJ2000,DEJ2000,Plx See the new "Query" section in the Gnuastro book for more: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Query.html Here is the compressed source and the GPG detached signature for this release. To uncompress Lzip tarballs, see [2]. To check the validity of the tarballs using the GPG detached signature (*.sig) see [3]: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.14.tar.lz (3.6MB) https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.14.tar.gz (5.6MB) https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.14.tar.gz.sig (833B) https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.14.tar.lz.sig (833B) Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums: 30d77e2ad1c03d4946d06e4062252969 gnuastro-0.14.tar.gz f3ddbc4b5763ec2742f9080d42b69ed3 gnuastro-0.14.tar.lz cfbcd4b9ae1c5c648c5dc266d638659f0117c816 gnuastro-0.14.tar.gz 4e4c6b678095d2838f77b2faae584ea51df2d33c gnuastro-0.14.tar.lz I am very grateful to (in alphabetic order) Pedram Ashofteh Ardakani, Thérèse Godefroy, Raúl Infante-Sainz, Sachin Kumar Singh, Samane Raji and Zahra Sharbaf for directly contributing to the source of Gnuastro since the last alpha-release. It is great that in this release we have an equal gender balance in the contributors. I sincerely hope this can continue in the next release :-). I am also very grateful to (in alphabetic order) Antonio Diaz Diaz, Paul Eggert, Andrés García-Serra Romero, Thérèse Godefroy, Bruno Haible, Martin Kuemmel, Javier Licandro, Alireza Molaeinezhad, Javier Moldon, Sebastian Luna Valero, Samane Raji, Alberto Madrigal, Carlos Morales Socorro, Francois Ochsenbein, Joanna Sakowska, Zahra Sharbaf, Sachin Kumar Singh, Ignacio Trujillo and Xiuqin Wu for their very useful comments, suggestions and bug fixes that have now been implemented in Gnuastro since the last alpha-release. If any of Gnuastro's programs or libraries are useful in your work, please cite _and_ acknowledge them. For citation and acknowledgment guidelines, run the relevant programs with a `--cite' option (it can be different for different programs, so run it for all the programs you use). Citations _and_ acknowledgments are vital for the continued work on Gnuastro, so please don't forget to support us by doing so. This tarball was bootstrapped (created) with the tools below. Note that you don't need these to build Gnuastro from the tarball, these are the tools that were used to make the tarball itself. They are only mentioned here to be able to reproduce/recreate this tarball later. Texinfo 6.7 Autoconf 2.70 Automake 1.16.2 Help2man 1.47.17 ImageMagick 7.0.10-59 Gnulib v0.1-4396-g3b732e789 Autoconf archives v2019.01.06-98-gefa6f20 The dependencies to build Gnuastro from this tarball on your system are described here: https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dependencies.html Best wishes, Mohammad
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LibreOffice Community Member Monday: Felipe Viggiano and Zhenghua Fong
In the future, I would like to start contributing more with others teams, and with TDF in order to help increase LibreOffice’s success. In my opinion, LibreOffice needs to be better known – we have a great free office solution that attends the majority of the requirements of the general public, but, at least in Brazil, many people are not aware of this!
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ISA2 Launches New Open Source Bug Bounties
Awards of up to EUR 5000 are available for finding security vulnerabilities in Element, Moodle and Zimbra, open source solutions used by public services across the European Union. There is a 20% bonus for providing a code fix for the bugs they discover.
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Amazon Creates ALv2-Licensed Fork of Elasticsearch
Amazon states that their forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana will be based on the latest ALv2-licensed codebases, version 7.10. “We will publish new GitHub repositories in the next few weeks. In time, both will be included in the existing Open Distro distributions, replacing the ALv2 builds provided by Elastic. We’re in this for the long haul, and will work in a way that fosters healthy and sustainable open source practices—including implementing shared project governance with a community of contributors,” the announcement says.
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Elasticsearch and Kibana are now business risks
In a play to convert users of their open source projects into paying customers, today Elastic announced that they are changing the license of both Elasticsearch and Kibana from the open source Apache v2 license to Server Side Public License (SSPL). If your organisation uses the open source versions of either Elasticsearch or Kibana in its products or projects, it is now at risk of being forced to release its intellectual property under terms dictated by another.
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Wikipedia Turns Twenty
If there is a modern equivalent to Encyclopédie for cultural impact, scale of content, and controversy, it’s surely Wikipedia, the free open-source online encyclopedia run by the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Started by entrepreneurs Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15th, 2001, it has since grown to become one of the world’s top 15 websites with a vast database of 55 million articles in 317 languages, as well as a family of related projects covering everything from travel guides to recipes. Beloved of geeks, friend to lazy students and journalists alike, and bane to procrastinators, it celebrates its 20th birthday this month.
It’s hard to overstate just how much information is on Wikipedia. You can instantly find the average July temperature in Lisbon, the difference between an ale and a lager, the historical background to the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, or the full list of 10 ways a batsman can be out in cricket. The illustrated article on aguaxima includes far more information than Diderot’s effort, and readers can find a far more accurate article on religion in Sweden. These articles all link to their sources, so a reader can do their own fact-checking.
There is one more crucial difference between Encyclopédie and Wikipedia, though. Encyclopédie’s subscribers needed to pay 280 livres for it, far beyond the wages of an ordinary person. But anyone who can afford a device with an Internet connection can access Wikipedia wherever they go. This accessibility was game-changing.
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GParted 1.2.0 Released
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 26th of January 2021 07:37:53 AM Filed under


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GParted 1.2.0 Released
GParted is the GNOME Partition Editor for creating, reorganizing, and deleting disk partitions. The GParted 1.2.0 release includes some new features in addition to bug fixes, and language translation updates. Key changes include: - Add exFAT support using exfatprogs - Wait for udev change on /dev/DISK when erasing signatures - Don't try to mask non-existent Systemd \xe2\x97\x8f.service Visit https://gparted.org for more details.
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GParted 1.2 Released With Support For exFAT File-Systems
GParted as the widely used, GUI solution for managing Linux partitions/file-systems on the Linux desktop now finally supports dealing with exFAT file-systems.
Since Linux 5.7 has been the modern exFAT file-system driver from Samsung to replace the earlier exFAT driver code following Microsoft's blessing in late 2019. That exFAT file-system driver is in increasingly good shape and continues seeing fixes/improvements with succeeding kernel releases and continues to be widely used on Android devices and elsewhere.
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GParted 1.2 Open-Source Partition Editor Released with exFAT Support
GParted 1.2 open-source partition editor software has been released today with initial support for the exFAT file system, as well as various other improvements.
Coming a year after the previous release, GParted 1.2 is here as the first release of the popular and very handy partition editor utility to implement support for partitioning disks formatted with the exFAT file system developed by Microsoft. exFAT support is handled by using the exfatprogs command-line utility, which needs to be installed in your GNU/Linux system.
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The 10 Best Linux Server Distributions [2021 Edition]
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 26th of January 2021 04:42:13 AM Filed under


One of the best things about Linux is the various types of distributions it has to offer. No matter how you plan to use your Linux PC, there’s a Linux distro optimized with all the necessary tools and functionalities to meet your needs. And this brings us to Linux server distributions – Linux distros optimized to be used on servers. These are lightweight Linux distros, sometimes even stripped of a desktop environment, and packed with tools to improve speed, stability, and security – the traits of a good server OS.
But with that being said, there are literally hundreds of Linux server distros circulating the internet. So which one should you choose for your home server or even for professional use? Well, to answer your question, we have put together a comprehensive list of the 10 best Linux Server Distributions for 2021.
[...]
So this brings us to the end of our list of the 10 best Linux server distributions of 2021. We hope this was useful and helped you find the right Linux server distro for your specific needs and requirements.
All the server distros come with their own unique advantages and disadvantages, as you can see. If you are completely new, we recommend starting with a Ubuntu server. With time, you’ll understand what features you need and then migrate to a distro that delivers those functionalities.
But that being said, this is by no means a comprehensive list of all the best Linux server distros out there. So if your favorite distro didn’t make it up on this list, then feel free to mention it down in the comments along with why you prefer it over the options discussed here. We would surely like to know.
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4MLinux 35.1 released.
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 26th of January 2021 04:25:35 AM Filed under

This is a minor (point) release in the 4MLinux STABLE channel, which comes with the Linux kernel 5.4.85. The 4MLinux Server now includes Apache 2.4.46, MariaDB 10.5.8, and PHP 7.4.13 (see this post for more details).
You can update your 4MLinux by executing the "zk update" command in your terminal (fully automatic process).
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