Linux

We are excited to announce that Arch Linux is entering into a direct collaboration with Valve. Valve is generously providing backing for two critical projects that will have a huge impact on our distribution: a build service infrastructure and a secure signing enclave. By supporting work on a freelance basis for these topics, Valve enables us to work on them without being limited solely by the free time of our volunteers.

This opportunity allows us to address some of the biggest outstanding challenges we have been facing for a while. The collaboration will speed-up the progress that would otherwise take much longer for us to achieve, and will ultimately unblock us from finally pursuing some of our planned endeavors. We are incredibly grateful for Valve to make this possible and for their explicit commitment to help and support Arch Linux.

These projects will follow our usual development and consensus-building workflows. [RFCs] will be created for any wide-ranging changes. Discussions on this mailing list as well as issue, milestone and epic planning in our GitLab will provide transparency and insight into the work. We believe this collaboration will greatly benefit Arch Linux, and are looking forward to share further development on this mailing list as work progresses.

I know there are lots of people that do not like Ubuntu due to the controversies of Snaps, Canonicals head scratching decisions and their ditching of Unity.

However my experience using Ubuntu when I first used it wasn't that bad, sure the snaps could take a bit or two to boot up but that's a first time thing.

I've even put it on my younger brothers laptop for his school and college use as he just didn't like the updates from Windows taking away his work and so far he's been having a good time with using this distro.

I guess what I'm tryna say is that Ubuntu is kind of the "Windows" of the Linux world, yes it's decisions aren't always the best, but at least it has MUCH lenient requirements and no dumb features from Windows 11 especially forced auto updates.

What are your thoughts and experiences using Ubuntu? I get there is Mint and Fedora, but how common Ubuntu is used, it seemed like a good idea for my bros study work as a "non interfering" idea.

Your thoughts?

Half of these exist because I was bored once.

The Windows 10 and MacOS ones are GPU passthrough enabled and what I occasionally use if I have to use a Windows or Mac application. Windows 7 is also GPU enabled, but is more a nostalgia thing than anything.

I think my PopOS VM was originally installed for fun, but I used it along with my Arch Linux, Debian 12 and Testing (I run Testing on host, but I wanted a fresh environment and was too lazy to spin up a Docker or chroot), Ubuntu 23.10 and Fedora to test various software builds and bugs, as I don't like touching normal Ubuntu unless I must.

The Windows Server 2022 one is one I recently spun up to mess with Windows Docker Containers (I have to port an app to Windows, and was looking at that for CI). That all become moot when I found out Github's CI doesn't support Windows Docker containers despite supporting Windows runners (The organization I'm doing it for uses Github, so I have to use it).

The core Plasma team remains deep in bug-fixing mode until Plasma 6.2.1, with lots of bugs fixed this week! This is the second-to-last week of development before the repos are frozen, and we’re cranking away like mad to get 6.2 in great shape. And it is indeed in very good shape so far. The worst issues we’re still seeing are related to notifications freezing and being mis-rendered, caused by recent changes made to fix another significantly less severe issue. So in the worst-case scenario, we can simply revert the changes before the final 6.2 release if we don’t manage to fix the regressions in time.

Earlier this week my company bought a LIDAR from Ouster. The LIDAR is a network device: it has an ethernet interface, it gets its IP from a DHCP server and then it talks to whichever machine runs the Ouster application.

The engineers and the marketing guy in charge of evaluating it installed the software on a Windows 11 laptop and tried to make it work for 2 days, to no avail. The software simply wouldn’t connect.

So they came to me, the unofficial company “hacker”, to figure it out. And I did: the culprit, as always, was the Windows firewall. Because of course…

But here’s the twist: because it’s Windows, you need some sort of additional antivirus on top of it. Our company uses WithSecure, which is phenomenally annoying and intrusive, and constantly gets in your way when you try to do any work in Windows that isn't Word or Excel. And of course, WithSecure wouldn’t let me punch a hole in the Windows firewall, because of course…

Anyhow, after trying to work around Windows and the hateful compulsory antivirus, I called IT and told them I needed WithSecure disabled, at least temporarily. They told me to fuck off because they’re not letting an unsecured Windows machine on the intranet.

Fine. I pulled another, older Windows laptop without any antivirus, connected it to an air-gapped router, configured DHCP in the router, connected the LIDAR to the router, launched the Ouster app and… it didn't work.

After 3 hours trying to figure out what was wrong, I finally found the problem: the stupid app is an Electron app built with an older version of Electron that had a bug in node.js that prevented it from working if it couldn’t resolve some internet address.

Sigh… Electron… Because of course…

This was getting too painful and annoying with Windows. So I blew away the Windows partition, installed Linux Mint on the laptop, configured the ethernet interface as a private interface, installed the DHCP server so I could do away with the router, connected the laptop to the guest wifi so the stupid Electron app could resolve whatever it needed to resolve to work, installed the Linux version of the Ouster app, and hey-presto, it worked rightaway.

So I made an account for the guys in Mint and handed them the laptop. They played with the LIDAR for a few hours without any problem, pulled records and files out of the machine on USB sticks without any problem, viewed some Excel files in Libreoffice without any problem.

Eventually the marketing guy asked me:

“So what was the problem then?”
“Windows of course” I said. “What else?”
“Wow. That Linux stuff is really good. We tried so hard to make this work but we never could. But it worked rightaway in Linux. That’s slick!”
“Well yeah, I keep telling you guys Windows is crap. There are reasons and this is one of them.”
“Yeah I can see why you don’t like it. And that Linux desktop is really nice actually. I might give it a spin at home.”

So hey, I managed to impress a marketing guy with Linux 🙂

It shows how polished Linux has become, if ordinary computer users can be convinced this easily now. It wasn’t like that for a long long time and it feels kind of rewarding to know you bet on the right horse all along and you're vindicated at last.

Interestingly, the developer is already bringing up the possibility of using Wayland by default.

Btw, after this I feel like the driver is much more usable, would it be acceptable to enable it by default? Is there any other major feature missing (given that virtual display settings is being worked on)?

My sister had a weird problem with Win 10 and needed me to format her notebook, a perfect opportunity to convert another soul. So I suggested installing Linux so she could try it out, she was hesitant but when I showed her some prints of Zorin OS and told her about KDE Connect she was much more inclined.

After the installation I showed her the Gnome tour so she could learn the basics, connected her things, taught her how to install what she needed and let her do her own thing. One thing that is quite not normal for the average Windows user is that she learned to use the LibreOffice suite and other open source programs at school (cool as fuck), so she was quite comfortable with the new environment.

She's quite pleased and I don't think she'll miss Windows, but that only time will tell.

My laptop has been having problems not charging and the top row of the keyboard stopped working. In my pursuit of a replacement I realized how ridiculously cheap Intel iMacs have become.

And then I realized that you can gut them and convert them into an insanely good computer monitor after the internals die.

I was looking for a dead one but somehow managed to get my hands on a working 5k 2017 iMac for $150. God the display is glorious.

For the time being Im just going to use the existing internals since they're still functioning.

I installed Fedora on an external drive and everything seems to be functional. I managed to get fractional scaling functioning. However the output only goes up to 4k. And while thats still really nice, the extra resolution does make an obvious difference when sitting ~1 foot away.

Has anyone been able to get 5k working?

More specifically,

How can I discover what process had ran under a PID, if the process ran under a graphical session which restarted because of a crash, and then I killed it (the session)? It's not in the session's logs (it was COSMIC, so I ran it with RUST_BACKTRACE=1 and redirected the output to a file; nothing, other than a PID for a process that's no longer there).

The error in the COSMIC logs was "PID 22842 does not belong to any known session". I have reason to believe the process is a foot terminal launched by a systemd user service, which ran a script that launched the terminal(s). But I need to be sure, so I know what I'm dealing with, and I can approach it the right way.

Any help, info, or pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Hey there folks,

I'm trying to figure out how to configure my UFW, and I'm just not sure where to start. What can I do to see the intetnet traffic from individual apps so I can know what I might want to block? This is just my personal computer and I'm a total newbie to configuring firewalls so I'm just not sure how to go about it. Most online guides seem to assume one already knows what they want to block but I don't even know how/where to monitor local traffic to figure out what I can/should consider blocking.

Sorry if this is a yapathon, this is a detailed issue, and I will put an AI summary in the comments

I have already made a post about that but that was outdated and I learned some new information. If anyone thinks it's cluttering their feeds, I will delete the post, just ask.

I have been absolutely stumped by this issue that I'm facing, even as a 5-year Linux user. I have just got my hands on a Getac F110-G2 tablet. It came with Windows 10 pre-installed, and everything functioned perfectly fine. Of course, I don't like Windows and I shortly went to installing Debian, and got a GNOME live image straight from their website. I downloaded, flashed to a USB drive, and installed. The installer booted and functioned perfectly fine, with the only weird thing being a random signoff which didn't seem to break anything. One thing to note is that I installed and started gpsd, but that shouldn't mean anything because that was a live image. I clicked reboot, and the tablet seemed to reboot normally, until the boot process started.

When nothing happened but a black screen for a minute, I rebooted my tablet, but that didn't do anything either. Than, I rebooted to the installation media to try another install. It was black too. This caused me to try re-flashing the USB drive with the same Debian, but no luck. I tried to disable TPM which I know can cause some issues, and still no luck. I also switched between UEFI and Legacy boot modes, and observed that the installed version of debian had only installed on legacy. I contacted Getac support because no secure boot toggle was in the BIOS, and they directed me to it. I disabled secure boot and still no luck. I've tried again a few times, and that's where I'm at. Also note that I've tried with my TV as a display and that didn't work either, so it's definitely not a display issue. I tried a different USB stick with no luck, and it seems like my tablet is just soft-bricked from now on.

So where to now?

• I've thought about installing the SSD to my PC's motherboard, wiping it clean, and then re-installing to try and boot.

https://gitlab.com/christosangel/sapo3

• Sapo3 is a suite of scripts-tools that can help the user convert a text file to an audio file.

• It uses the tts-edge API for text-to-speech conversion.

• Big txt files can be easily converted to audio books, using a wide range of customization capabilities.

When the user runs Sapo3, they will be presented with a menu of options:

• o option: Fix name pronunciation with Fix Names

• c option: Split text to chapters with Chapterize

• v option: Convert File to audio

• f option: Check every sentence outcome with Fix Audio option.

• m option: Merging Audio Files

• p option: Configuring Preferences

Red Hat's report on vulnerability

Phoronix

There's been talk of this unauthenticated RCE vulnerability coming with a CVSS 9.9 rating but none of the technical details were publicly known until it was made public just now at the top of the hour. Simone Margaritelli discovered this vulnerability and has shared a write-up around this potentially very impactful Linux vulnerability.

This vulnerability, fortunately, doesn't affect the Linux kernel but rather CUPS... The print server commonly used on Linux systems and other platforms.

...

From Attacking UNIX Systems via CUPS, Part I:

"A remote unauthenticated attacker can silently replace existing printers’ (or install new ones) IPP urls with a malicious one, resulting in arbitrary command execution (on the computer) when a print job is started (from that computer)."

...

This remote code execution issue can be exploited across the public Internet via a UDP packet to port 631 without needing any authentication, assuming the CUPS port is open through your router/firewall. LAN attacks are also possible via spoofing zeroconf / mDNS / DNS-SD advertisements.

Besides CUPS being used on Linux distributions, it also affects some BSDs, Oracle Solaris, Google Chrome OS, and others.

As of writing there is no Linux fix available for this high profile security issue. In the meantime it's recommended to disable and remove the "cups-browsed" service, updating CUPS, or at least blocking all traffic to UDP port 631.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1167059

COSMIC’s Alpha 2 release builds upon that work with functionality built out for Files, additional Settings pages, considerable infrastructure work for screen reader support+, and some highly requested window management features. System76 is ecstatic at the level of excitement and collaboration so far with alpha testers and early app & applet developers, and we look forward to seeing what comes from these new additions.

...

The second COSMIC alpha will be released on September 26th. Those participating in Alpha 1 on Pop!_OS can simply update through the COSMIC App Store to transition. This alpha will be followed by monthly alpha releases until all core features have been built out.

More coverage:

• COSMIC DE Alpha 2 Released, This is What’s New

• COSMIC Alpha 2 Released with Bluetooth Settings, Much-Improved File Manager

• Cosmic Desktop Alpha 2: BIG PROGRESS for a month of work!