A while back I looked at a font preview script but it was kind of annoying to use, but it turns out there's a much better version of that script called font preview ueberzug which is what we're checking out today.

For a few years we’ve been performing a live version of an Ubuntu Podcast at FOSS Talk Live. This is a lively, nerdy, in-person Linux Podcast event at the Harrison Pub in London. A few shows are performed in front of a live slightly drunk studio pub audience. We are but one troup of performers though, over the course of the evening. The whole thing is organised by Joe Ressington and attended by our friends and/or/xor listeners. Joe has just announced over on episode 114 of Late Night Linux that we’re all doing it again! Go and listen to that show for a small amount of detail.

Kevin Lin and Dendron. Kevin Lin joins Jonathan Bennett and Katherine Druckman to talk about Dendron, a note-taking application built on top of VSCode. After many years of taking notes, Kevin found himself with a massive, unmanageable personal knowledge store. None of the existing note-taking applications quite solved his problem, so Kevin did the only reasonable thing, and wrote his own. On this episode of FLOSS Weekly, Lin covers some of his design decisions, including building Dendron on VSCode and Javascript, and helps us understand how Dendron can help tame the jungle of personal knowledge.

Intel SGX support finally landed in Linux 5.11 after going through 40+ rounds of review that took years for bringing up Software Guard Extensions in the mainline kernel. But that trek isn't yet over as Intel is now working on KVM SGX virtualization support to be upstreamed.  Intel earlier sent out a "request for comments" on KVM SGX virtualization support while on Monday they sent out the first formal (non-RFC) patch series with this support for handling Software Guard Extensions in the context of KVM virtualization. Basically this allows for a portion of the system memory to be encrypted with an SGX enclave exclusively for a KVM guest virtual machine that can't be accessed outside of the secure enclave. Separate from SGX enclaves, Intel also has coming out with future CPUs the Total Memory Encryption (TME) feature. AMD meanwhile has been working on Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) with Secure Memory Encryption (SME) as their EPYC approach for securing guest VM memory from other VMs or the host. 

For those wanting to help in testing out the Linux 5.12 kernel, at least it should no longer eat your data now if you rely on a swapfile.  The file-system corruption issue on Linux 5.12 Git noted last week and then followed up on yesterday when the corruption hit Intel's graphics CI systems and narrowed down to a set of swap-related changes, has now been resolved with today's latest Git code.  [...] With that fix now in, we can get back to looking at Linux 5.12 performance changes and other more interesting testing than worrying about data loss.

Young and rising Linux security developer Alexander Popov of Russia's Positive Technologies discovered and fixed a set of five security holes in the Linux kernel's virtual socket implementation. An attacker could use these vulnerabilities (CVE-2021-26708) to gain root access and knock out servers in a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

Ready to try another demo of a promising upcoming game? The developer of Drova - Forsaken Kin emailed in about their pixel-art RPG and it sounds pretty promising. They mention that it's a pixel art RPG that "focuses on investigative exploration and combat with high player agency", with you choosing a side in a changing world "devoured by Ether, the essence of creation itself getting out of control when an ancient threat returns". So what they're saying is the world is dynamic, it changes and you have an effect on things - something like that. [...] The developer, Just2D, mentioned how they've put "a lot of effort into Linux compatibility" so hopefully that works out well for them.

Valheim is a bit of a different beast in that list. It has a Linux client in the first place, but there’s apparently enough people who had trouble with it not working properly that they ended up falling back on Proton (and it looks like it works perfectly under Proton). So, do not take this as a recommendation to play the game on Proton, but simply as an alternative in case you have issues.

Core Defense, a positively rated tower defense game by users (and one we enjoyed) from developer ehmprah that sprinkles in a little deck-building is getting an expansion with a Beta you can try. Quite different to most tower defense games, as the placement of almost everything is down to you. You're building up a maze for enemy units to travel through, and then each round you pick from a set of cards that can give you new towers, abilities and more. It was a success too, earning the developer over $20K in the first week on Steam, clearly hit a mark.

Proton Experimental is the extra special testing area where new fixes and features enter the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer before going out to everyone and there's a new update out. If you're not clear on what Proton and Steam Play are, be sure to check out our constantly updated dedicated page. It's a special compatibility layer for running Windows games and apps from Steam on Linux.

In this video, I am going to show how to install Kali Linux 2021.1.

"I run Arch!" You hear everyone else saying it, now you can say it too! In this video, we'll go through the process of setting up Arch Linux from scratch. It'll start at the command-line, and we'll build the installation all the way up to a full desktop environment!

Redis is an open-source and in-memory data structure store that can be used for caching, real-time analytics, searching, and machine learning. Integrate Redis with PHP and MySQL will improve your application performance because Redis stores data in RAM. You can use it with databases like MySQL or MariaDB. Redis provides a mechanism to cache your queries. For example, when a user requests your application page the first time, a MySQL query is performed on the server, and Redis caches this query to RAM. When another user requests the same page, you don’t need to query the database again.

Linux Mint is one the best Linux distributions for beginners. Especially Windows users that want to switch to Linux, will find its flagship Cinnamon desktop environment very familiar. Cinnamon gives a traditional desktop experience and many users like it as it is. It doesn’t mean you have to content with what it provides. Cinnamon provides several ways for customizing the desktop.

Today we are looking at how to install Toontown Rewritten 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.

In this video, we are looking at how to install the Brave Beta Browser on Linux Mint 20.1.