Uncategorized – Jupiter Broadcasting

The State of Stateless | CR 272

chris — Thu, 31 Aug 2017 18:50:07 +0000

RSS Feeds:

MP3 Feed | Video Feed | Torrent Feed | iTunes Audio | iTunes Video

Become a supporter on Patreon:

— Show Notes: —

Hoopla

Apple announces iPhone event on Sept. 12 in Steve Jobs Theater

Apple on Thursday announced an event which will be held at the Steve Jobs Theater located at the company’s new Apple Park campus. The event will take place on September 12 at 10:00 am.

Well this what happens when you talk bad about #mac on #CoderRadio pic.twitter.com/bISTMX42qk

— Michael Dominick (@dominucco) August 31, 2017

Serverless Architecture

Azure Functions
AWS Lambda
Cloud Functions
Mike’s Use Cases
Only billed when actively processing
Respond to SASS trigger events from third party solutions such as Salesforce
Respond to Chron jobs
On the fly data processing
The hype to usefulness ratio

Minio

Minio is a distributed object storage server built for cloud applications and devops.

To Office or Not to Office

6 Months of Working Remotely Taught Me a Thing or Ten

Make your bed. Fix your hair. Get dressed (completely—yes, that means pants). Just because they might only see your face via video chat doesn’t mean you should get that comfortable.

Went to lease some space today @ChrisLAS and couldn’t bring myself to do it. Total 180 #remotework #CoderRadio

— Michael Dominick (@dominucco) August 31, 2017

Careers at The Mad Botter

The post The State of Stateless | CR 272 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Carry on my Wayland son | BSD Now 173

chris — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 23:46:35 +0000

RSS Feeds:

Become a supporter on Patreon:

– Show Notes: –

Headlines

syspatch in testing state

Antoine Jacoutot ajacoutot@ openbsd has posted a call for testing for OpenBSD’s new syspatch tool

syspatch(8), a “binary” patch system for -release is now ready for early testing. This does not use binary diffing to update the system, but regular signed tarballs containing the updated files (ala installer).

I would appreciate feedback on the tool. But please send it directly to me, there’s no need to pollute the list. This is obviously WIP and the tool may or may not change in drastic ways.

These test binary patches are not endorsed by the OpenBSD project and should not be trusted, I am only providing them to get early feedback on the tool. If all goes as planned, I am hoping that syspatch will make it into the 6.1 release; but for it to happen, I need to know how it breaks your systems

Instructions
If you test it, report back and let us know how it went

Weston working

Over the past few years we’ve had some user-interest in the state of Wayland / Weston on FreeBSD. In the past day or so, Johannes Lundberg has sent in a progress report to the FreeBSD mailing lists.
Without further ADO:

We had some progress with Wayland that we’d like to share.

Wayland (v1.12.0)
Working

Weston (v1.12.0)
Working (Porting WIP)

Weston-clients (installed with wayland/weston port)
Working

XWayland (run X11 apps in Wayland compositor)
Works (maximized window only) if started manually but not when
launching X11 app from Weston. Most likely problem with Weston IPC.

Sway (i3-compatible Wayland compositor)
Working

SDL20 (Wayland backend)
games/stonesoup-sdl briefly tested.
https://twitter.com/johalun/status/811334203358867456

GDM (with Wayland)
Halted – depends on logind.

GTK3
gtk3-demo runs fine on Weston (might have to set GDK_BACKEND=wayland
first.
GTK3 apps working (gedit, gnumeric, xfce4-terminal tested, xfce desktop
(4.12) does not yet support GTK3)

Johannes goes on to give instructions on how / where you can fetch their WiP and do your own testing. At the moment you’ll need Matt Macy’s newer Intel video work, as well as their ports tree which includes all the necessary software bits.
Before anybody asks, yes we are watching this for TrueOS!

Where the rubber meets the road (part two)

Continuing with our story from Brian Everly from a week ago, we have an update today on the process to dual-boot OpenBSD with Arch Linux.
As we last left off, Arch was up and running on the laptop, but some quirks in the hardware meant OpenBSD would take a bit longer.
With those issues resolved and the HD seen again, the next issue that reared its head was OpenBSD not seeing the partition tables on the disk. After much frustration, it was time to nuke and pave, starting with OpenBSD first this time.
After a successful GPT partitioning and install of OpenBSD, he went back to installing Arch, and then the story got more interesting.

I installed Arch as I detailed in my last post; however, when I fired up gdisk I got a weird error message:

“Warning! Disk size is smaller than the main header indicates! Loading secondary header from the last sector of the disk! You should use ‘v’ to verify disk integrity, and perhaps options on the expert’s menu to repair the disk.”

Immediately after this, I saw a second warning:

“Caution: Invalid backup GPT header, but valid main header; regenerating backup header from main header.”

And, not to be outdone, there was a third:

“Warning! Main and backup partition tables differ! Use the ‘c’ and ‘e’ options on the recovery & transformation menu to examine the two tables.”

Finally (not kidding), there was a fourth:

“Warning! One or more CRCs don’t match. You should repair the disk!”

Given all of that, I thought to myself, “This is probably why I couldn’t see the disk properly when I partitioned it under Linux on the OpenBSD side. I’ll let it repair things and I should be good to go.” I then followed the recommendation and repaired things, using the primary GPT table to recreate the backup one. I then installed Arch and figured I was good to go.

After confirming through several additional re-installs that the behavior was reproducible, he then decided to go full on crazy,and partition with MBR. That in and of itself was a challenge, since as he mentions, not many people dual-boot OpenBSD with Linux on MBR, especially using luks and lvm!
If you want to see the details on how that was done, check it out.
The story ends in success though! And better yet:

Now that I have everything working, I’ll restore my config and data to Arch, configure OpenBSD the way I like it and get moving. I’ll take some time and drop a note on the tech@ mailing list for OpenBSD to see if they can figure out what the GPT problem was I was running into. Hopefully it will make that part of the code stronger to get an edge-case bug report like this.

Take note here, if you run into issues like this with any OS, be sure to document in detail what happened so developers can explore solutions to the issue.

FreeBSD and ZFS as a time capsule for OS X

Do you have any Apple users in your life? Perhaps you run FreeBSD for ZFS somewhere else in the house or office. Well today we have a blog post from Mark Felder which shows how you can use FreeBSD as a time-capsule for your OSX systems.
The setup is quite simple, to get started you’ll need packages for netatalk3 and avahi-app for service discovery.
Next up will be your AFP configuration. He helpfully provides a nice example that you should be able to just cut-n-paste. Be sure to check the hosts allow lines and adjust to fit your network. Also of note will be the backup location and valid users to adjust.
A little easier should be the avahi setup, which can be a straight copy-n-paste from the site, which will perform the service advertisements.
The final piece is just enabling specific services in /etc/rc.conf and either starting them by hand, or rebooting. At this point your OSX systems should be able to discover the new time-capsule provider on the network and DTRT.

News Roundup

netbenches – FreeBSD network forwarding performance benchmark results

Olivier Cochard-Labbé, original creator of FreeNAS, and leader of the BSD Router Project, has a github repo of network benchmarks
There are many interesting results, and all of the scripts, documentation, and configuration files to run the tests yourself
IPSec Performance on an Atom C2558, 12-head vs IPSec Performance Branch
Compared to: Xeon L5630 2.13GHz
and IPSec with Authentication
I look forward to seeing tests on even more hardware, as people with access to different configurations try out these benchmarks

A tcpdump Tutorial and Primer with Examples

Most users will be familiar with the basics of using tcpdump, but this tutorial/primer is likely to fill in a lot of blanks, and advance many users understanding of tcpdump
“tcpdump is the premier network analysis tool for information security professionals. Having a solid grasp of this über-powerful application is mandatory for anyone desiring a thorough understanding of TCP/IP. Many prefer to use higher level analysis tools such as Wireshark, but I believe this to usually be a mistake.”
tcpdump is an important tool for any system or network administrator, it is not just for security. It is often the best way to figure out why the network is not behaving as expected.
“In a discipline so dependent on a true understanding of concepts vs. rote learning, it’s important to stay fluent in the underlying mechanics of the TCP/IP suite. A thorough grasp of these protocols allows one to troubleshoot at a level far beyond the average analyst, but mastery of the protocols is only possible through continued exposure to them.”
Not just that, but TCP/IP is a very interesting protocol, considering how little it has changed in its 40+ year history
“First off, I like to add a few options to the tcpdump command itself, depending on what I’m looking at. The first of these is -n, which requests that names are not resolved, resulting in the IPs themselves always being displayed. The second is -X, which displays both hex and ascii content within the packet.”
“It’s also important to note that tcpdump only takes the first 96 bytes of data from a packet by default. If you would like to look at more, add the -s number option to the mix, where number is the number of bytes you want to capture. I recommend using 0 (zero) for a snaplength, which gets everything.”
The page has a nice table of the most useful options
It also has a great primer on doing basic filtering
If you are relatively new to using tcpdump, I highly recommend you spend a few minutes reading through this article

How Unix made it to the top

Doug McIlroy gives us a nice background post on how “Unix made it to the top”
It’s fairly short / concise, so I felt it would be good to read in its entirety.

It has often been told how the Bell Labs law department became the
first non-research department to use Unix, displacing a newly acquired
stand-alone word-processing system that fell short of the department’s
hopes because it couldn’t number the lines on patent applications,
as USPTO required. When Joe Ossanna heard of this, he told them about
roff and promised to give it line-numbering capability the next day.
They tried it and were hooked. Patent secretaries became remote
members of the fellowship of the Unix lab. In due time the law
department got its own machine.

Less well known is how Unix made it into the head office of AT&T. It
seems that the CEO, Charlie Brown, did not like to be seen wearing
glasses when he read speeches. Somehow his PR assistant learned of
the CAT phototypesetter in the Unix lab and asked whether it might be
possible to use it to produce scripts in large type. Of course it was.
As connections to the top never hurt, the CEO’s office was welcomed
as another ouside user. The cost–occasionally having to develop film
for the final copy of a speech–was not onerous.

Having teethed on speeches, the head office realized that Unix could
also be useful for things that didn’t need phototypesetting. Other
documents began to accumulate in their directory. By the time we became
aware of it, the hoard came to include minutes of AT&T board meetings.
It didn’t seem like a very good idea for us to be keeping records from
the inner sanctum of the corporation on a computer where most everybody
had super-user privileges. A call to the PR guy convinced him of the
wisdom of keeping such things on their own premises. And so the CEO’s
office bought a Unix system.

Just as one hears of cars chosen for their cupholders, so were these
users converted to Unix for trivial reasons: line numbers and vanity.

Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix

Everybody loves easter-eggs, and today we have some fun odd ones from the history throughout UNIX told by Dennis Ritchie.
First up, was a fun one where the “mv” command could sometimes print the following “values of b may give rise to dom!”

Like most of the messages recorded in these compilations, this one was produced in some situation that we considered unlikely or as result of abuse; the details don’t matter. I’m recording why the phrase was selected.

The very first use of Unix in the “real business” of Bell Labs was to type and produce patent applications, and for a while in the early 1970s we had three typists busily typing away in the grotty lab on the sixth floor. One day someone came in and observed on the paper sticking out of one of the Teletypes, displayed in magnificent isolation, this ominous phrase:
values of b may give rise to dom!

It was of course obvious that the typist had interrupted a printout (generating the “!” from the ed editor) and moved up the paper, and that the context must have been something like “varying values of beta may give rise to domain wall movement” or some other fragment of a physically plausible patent application.
But the phrase itself was just so striking! Utterly meaningless, but it looks like what… a warning? What is “dom?”

At the same time, we were experimenting with text-to-voice software by Doug McIlroy and others, and of course the phrase was tried out with it. For whatever reason, its rendition of “give rise to dom!” accented the last word in a way that emphasized the phonetic similarity between “doom” and the first syllable of “dominance.” It pronounced “beta” in the British style, “beeta.” The entire occurrence became a small, shared treasure.
The phrase had to be recorded somewhere, and it was, in the v6 source. Most likely it was Bob Morris who did the deed, but it could just as easily have been Ken.
I hope that your browser reproduces the b as a Greek beta.

Next up is one you might have heard before:

/* You are not expected to understand this */
Every now and then on Usenet or elsewhere I run across a reference to a certain comment in the source code of the Sixth Edition Unix operating system.

I’ve even been given two sweatshirts that quote it.

Most probably just heard about it, but those who saw it in the flesh either had Sixth Edition Unix (ca. 1975) or read the annotated version of this system by John Lions (which was republished in 1996: ISBN 1-57298-013-7, Peer-to-Peer Communications).
It’s often quoted as a slur on the quantity or quality of the comments in the Bell Labs research releases of Unix. Not an unfair observation in general, I fear, but in this case unjustified.

So we tried to explain what was going on. “You are not expected to understand this” was intended as a remark in the spirit of “This won’t be on the exam,” rather than as an impudent challenge.

There’s a few other interesting stories as well, if the odd/fun side of UNIX history at all interests you, I would recommend checking it out.

Beastie Bits

Feedback/Questions

Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

The post Carry on my Wayland son | BSD Now 173 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Shell-Shocked 2016 | LINUX Unplugged 176

chris — Tue, 20 Dec 2016 23:39:20 +0000

RSS Feeds:

Become a supporter on Patreon:

Show Notes:

Links

The post Shell-Shocked 2016 | LINUX Unplugged 176 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Sandboxing Cohabitation | BSD Now 170

chris — Thu, 01 Dec 2016 03:52:34 +0000

RSS Feeds:

Become a supporter on Patreon:

– Show Notes: –

Headlines

EuroBSDcon 2016 Presentation Slides

Due to circumstances beyond the control of the organizers of EuroBSDCon, there were not recordings of the talks given at the event.
However, they have collected the slide decks from each of the speakers and assembled them on this page for you
Also, we have some stuff from MeetBSD already:
Youtube Playlist
Not all of the sessions are posted yet, but the rest should appear shortly
MeetBSD 2016 Trip Report: Domagoj Stolfa

Cohabiting FreeBSD and Gentoo Linux on a Common ZFS Volume

Eric McCorkle, who has contributed ZFS support to the FreeBSD EFI boot-loader code has posted an in-depth look at how he’s setup dual-boot with FreeBSD and Gentoo on the same ZFS volume.
He starts by giving us some background on how the layout is done. First up, GRUB is used as the boot-loader, allowing boot of both Linux and BSD
The next non-typical thing was using /etc/fstab to manage mount-points, instead of the typical ‘zfs mount’ usage, (apart from /home datasets)
data/home is mounted to /home, with all of its child datasets using the ZFS mountpoint system
data/freebsd and its child datasets house the FreeBSD system, and all have their mountpoints set to legacy
data/gentoo and its child datasets house the Gentoo system, and have their mountpoints set to legacy as well
So, how did he set this up? He helpfully provides an overview of the steps:
- Use the FreeBSD installer to create the GPT and ZFS pool
- Install and configure FreeBSD, with the native FreeBSD boot loader
- Boot into FreeBSD, create the Gentoo Linux datasets, install GRUB
- Boot into the Gentoo Linux installer, install Gentoo
- Boot into Gentoo, finish any configuration tasks
The rest of the article walks us through the individual commands that make up each of those steps, as well as how to craft a GRUB config file capable of booting both systems.
Personally, since we are using EFI, I would have installed rEFInd, and chain-loaded each systems EFI boot code from there, allowing the use of the BSD loader, but to each their own!

HardenedBSD introduces Safestack into base

HardenedBSD has integrated SafeStack into its base system and ports tree
SafeStack is part of the Code Pointer Integrity (CPI) project within clang.
“SafeStack is an instrumentation pass that protects programs against attacks based on stack buffer overflows, without introducing any measurable performance overhead. It works by separating the program stack into two distinct regions: the safe stack and the unsafe stack. The safe stack stores return addresses, register spills, and local variables that are always accessed in a safe way, while the unsafe stack stores everything else. This separation ensures that buffer overflows on the unsafe stack cannot be used to overwrite anything on the safe stack.”
“As of 28 November 2016, with clang 3.9.0, SafeStack only supports being applied to applications and not shared libraries. Multiple patches have been submitted to clang by third parties to add support for shared libraries.”
SafeStack is only enabled on AMD64

pledge(2)… or, how I learned to love web application sandboxing

We’ve talked about OpenBSD’s sandboxing mechanism pledge() in the past, but today we have a great article by Kristaps Dzonsons, about how he grew to love it for Web Sandboxing.
First up, he gives us his opening argument that should make most of you sit up and listen:

I use application-level sandboxing a lot because I make mistakes a lot; and when writing web applications, the price of making mistakes is very dear.

In the early 2000s, that meant using systrace(4) on OpenBSD and NetBSD. Then it was seccomp(2) (followed by libseccomp(3)) on Linux. Then there was capsicum(4) on FreeBSD and sandbox_init(3) on Mac OS X.

All of these systems are invoked differently; and for the most part, whenever it came time to interface with one of them, I longed for sweet release from the nightmare. Please, try reading seccomp(2). To the end. Aligning web application logic and security policy would require an arduous (and usually trial-and-error or worse, copy-and-paste) process. If there was any process at all — if the burden of writing a policy didn’t cause me to abandon sandboxing at the start.

And then there was pledge(2).

This document is about pledge(2) and why you should use it and love it. “

Not convinced yet? Maybe you should take his challenge:

Let’s play a drinking game. The challenge is to stay out of the hospital.

1.Navigate to seccomp(2).
2. Read it to the end.
3. Drink every time you don’t understand.

For capsicum(4), the challenge is no less difficult. To see these in action, navigate no further than OpenSSH, which interfaces with these sandboxes: sandbox-seccomp-filter.c or sandbox-capsicum.c. (For a history lesson, you can even see sandbox-systrace.c.) Keep in mind that these do little more than restrict resources to open descriptors and the usual necessities of memory, signals, timing, etc. Keep that in mind and be horrified. “

Now Kristaps has his theory on why these are so difficult (NS..), but perhaps there is a better way. He makes the case that pledge() sits right in that sweet-spot, being powerful enough to be useful, but easy enough to implement that developers might actually use it.
All in all, a nice read, check it out! Would love to hear other developer success stories using pledge() as well.

News Roundup

Unix history repository, now on GitHub

OS News has an interesting tidbit on their site today, about the entire commit history of Unix now being available online, starting all the way back in 1970 and bringing us forward to today.
From the README

The history and evolution of the Unix operating system is made available as a revision management repository, covering the period from its inception in 1970 as a 2.5 thousand line kernel and 26 commands, to 2016 as a widely-used 27 million line system. The 1.1GB repository contains about half a million commits and more than two thousand merges. The repository employs Git system for its storage and is hosted on GitHub. It has been created by synthesizing with custom software 24 snapshots of systems developed at Bell Labs, the University of California at Berkeley, and the 386BSD team, two legacy repositories, and the modern repository of the open source FreeBSD system. In total, about one thousand individual contributors are identified, the early ones through primary research. The data set can be used for empirical research in software engineering, information systems, and software archaeology.

This is a fascinating find, especially will be of value to students and historians who wish to look back in time to see how UNIX evolved, and in this repo ultimately turned into modern FreeBSD.

Yandex commits improvements to FreeBSD network stack

“Rework ip_tryforward() to use FIB4 KPI.”
This commit brings some code from the experimental routing branch into head
As you can see from the graphs, it offers some sizable improvements in forwarding and firewalled packets per second
commit

The brief history of Unix socket multiplexing – select(2) system call

Ever wondered about the details of socket multiplexing, aka the history of select(2)?
Well Marek today gives a treat, with a quick look back at the history that made today’s modern multiplexing possible.
First, his article starts the way all good ones do, presenting the problem in silent-movie form:

In mid-1960’s time sharing was still a recent invention. Compared to a previous paradigm – batch-processing – time sharing was truly revolutionary. It greatly reduced the time wasted between writing a program and getting its result. Batch-processing meant hours and hours of waiting often to only see a program error. See this film to better understand the problems of 1960’s programmers: “The trials and tribulations of batch processing”.

Enter the wild world of the 1970’s, and we’ve now reached the birth of UNIX which tried to solve the batch processing problem with time-sharing.

These days when a program was executed, it could “stall” (block) only on a couple of things1:

wait for CPU

wait for disk I/O

wait for user input (waiting for a shell command) or console (printing data too fast)“

Jump forward another dozen years or so, and the world changes yet again:

This all changed in 1983 with the release of 4.2BSD. This revision introduced an early implementation of a TCP/IP stack and most importantly – the BSD Sockets API.
Although today we take the BSD sockets API for granted, it wasn’t obvious it was the right API. STREAMS were a competing API design on System V Revision 3.

Coming in along with the sockets API was the select(2) call, which our very own Kirk McKusick gives us some background on:

Select was introduced to allow applications to multiplex their I/O.

Consider a simple application like a remote login. It has descriptors for reading from and writing to the terminal and a descriptor for the (bidirectional) socket. It needs to read from the terminal keyboard and write those characters to the socket. It also needs to read from the socket and write to the terminal. Reading from a descriptor that has nothing queued causes the application to block until data arrives. The application does not know whether to read from the terminal or the socket and if it guesses wrong will incorrectly block. So select was added to let it find out which descriptor had data ready to read. If neither, select blocks until data arrives on one descriptor and then awakens telling which descriptor has data to read.

[…] Non-blocking was added at the same time as select. But using non-blocking when reading descriptors does not work well. Do you go into an infinite loop trying to read each of your input descriptors? If not, do you pause after each pass and if so for how long to remain responsive to input? Select is just far more efficient.

Select also lets you create a single inetd daemon rather than having to have a separate daemon for every service.

The article then wraps up with an interesting conclusion:
> CSP = Communicating sequential processes

In this discussion I was afraid to phrase the core question. Were Unix processes intended to be CSP-style processes? Are file descriptors a CSP-derived “channels”? Is select equivalent to ALT statement?

I think: no. Even if there are design similarities, they are accidental. The file-descriptor abstractions were developed well before the original CSP paper.

It seems that an operating socket API’s evolved totally disconnected from the userspace CSP-alike programming paradigms. It’s a pity though. It would be interesting to see an operating system coherent with the programming paradigms of the user land programs.

A long (but good) read, and worth your time if you are interested in the history how modern multiplexing came to be.

How to start CLion on FreeBSD?

CLion (pronounced “sea lion”) is a cross-platform C and C++ IDE
By default, the Linux version comes bundled with some binaries, which obviously won’t work with the native FreeBSD build
Rather than using Linux emulation, you can replace these components with native versions
- pkg install openjdk8 cmake gdb
- Edit clion-2016.3/bin/idea.properties and change run.processes.with.pty=false
- Start CLion and open Settings | Build, Execution, Deployment | Toolchains
- Specify CMake path: /usr/local/bin/cmake and GDB path: /usr/local/bin/gdb
Without a replacement for fsnotifier, you will get a warning that the IDE may be slow to detect changes to files on disk
But, someone has already written a version of fsnotifier that works on FreeBSD and OpenBSD
fsnotifier for OpenBSD and FreeBSD — The fsnotifier is used by IntelliJ for detecting file changes. This version supports FreeBSD and OpenBSD via libinotify and is a replacement for the bundled Linux-only version coming with the IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition.

Beastie Bits

Feedback/Questions

Send questions, comments, show ideas/topics, or stories you want mentioned on the show to feedback@bsdnow.tv

The post Sandboxing Cohabitation | BSD Now 170 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Noah Delivers Linux | LAS 412

chris — Sun, 10 Apr 2016 16:54:07 +0000

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

It started with speaking about Open Source. Were you thinking the Emma vs Noah showdown wasn’t worth making it out? Do you have doubts that Noah can switch your friends & family? Take a trip with us & see for yourself what it takes to convert Mac & Windows users to Linux!

We dive in & spend an evening with the Sandbagger crew switching their whole house to Linux, then they talk about how they’re going to switch the class they’re teaching next semester!

Plus Linus’ hopes for the Linux desktop, setting up a network wide ad blocker using Pi-Hole & more!

Thanks to:

Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

Direct Download:

RSS Feeds:

Become a supporter on Patreon:

— Show Notes: —

Brought to you by: Linux Academy

Switching People to Linux

Quick Tips

Start them on software on their preferred platform first
Go at their pace
Address the problems they have not the problems you want to talk about
Be available for questions
Answer questions for people you’ve switched like you would for yourself – don’t be afraid to be creative

Software we installed and showed them how to use

LibreOffice
Crossover
Wine
Inkscape
Gimp
Simplenote
Telegram
VLC
Lightworks
Blender

Special Thanks to the Sandbaggers

— PICKS —

Runs Linux

New Linux User’s Ad Blocker RUNS LINUX

Vulan switched to Linux about 2 weeks ago

Runs Ubuntu 14.04 on an intel i5 with a GTX960.

Recently installed PiHole to block ads network wide

Configured DNS on his DHCP server to point to his Pitop

Desktop App Pick

BlueCherry

Download our bootable ISO for quick installation or simply follow our two line instructions and run apt-get install bluecherry from an existing Debian or Ubuntu LTS installation.
Watch live and recorded videos and manage your system from our cross platform client.
With our growing list of 2800 pre-defined IP cameras from over 30 IP manufacturers it is easy to add your IP cameras. Have a IP camera that isn’t on our pre-defined list? No problem, simply add the RTSP or MJPEG path and start streaming video!

Weekly Spotlight

Lightworks

Lightworks is EditShare’s Academy and Emmy award-winning, professional Non-Linear Editing (NLE) software supporting resolutions up to 4K as well as video in SD and HD formats. In the last 25 years Lightworks has been used to edit some of the finest films in cinema history

One of the most powerful professional NLE’s on Linux

Whether you are running on Linux, Windows or Mac OS X, the power of Lightworks will be right at your fingertips. Now you can use your operating system of choice without impacting on the work you need to get done. No other editing software out there runs on all three platforms.

Lightworks has the widest native format support available in any professional NLE. MXF, Quicktime and AVI containers, with almost every format you can think of importing natively without the need for transcoding, from ProRes, Avid DNxHD, AVC-Intra, DVCPRO HD, RED R3D, DPX, AVCHD (with AC3 audio), H.264, XDCAM EX / HD 422, all on the same timeline in realtime. Check out the detailed Tech Specs for a full list of supported formats.

Hollywood Movies Cut on Lightworks

Background Import, Rendering and Export. We believe that users should be able to import, render or export without delay. Lightworks allows you to continue editing whilst you are importing a batch of material, rendering your complicated third party FX or exporting two files at the same time to your favourite format. With time saving elements like this Lightworks might just be the fastest editing application available. World class Trimming for fast, precision editing!

The King’s Speach
Centurion
Bruce Almighty
Pulp Fiction
Aviator
Mission Impossible I
The Nutty Professor
The Departed

Version 12.6 released on February 4th

Added Export to Vimeo at up to 1080p in the Free version.
Added ability to right click a Group within the Content Manager and Copy/Move it to
another project.
Added new keyboard .prefs file compatible with Contour Shuttle Pro drivers.
Added full compatibility support for Ubuntu 15.10.
Fixed potential crash browsing to a location containing a corrupt JPEG file.
Fixed segmentation Fault with OpenSSL 1.0.2 (caused a crash on sign in to the
application).
Fixed PNG image sequence exports being incorrect from an edit containing an image
key.
Behind the GNOME 3.20 Release Video

It’s a little more than two weeks since GNOME made yet another release. Having a release video to go alongside with it is almost a tradition by now. I’m slightly frightened and super excited about it at the same time. (-:

Jupiter Broadcasting @ LFNW 2016 Meetup

Join the Jupiter Broadcasting crew as they cover one of the largest Linux Community Events in the Great Pacific Northwest. Plus join us as we have one of the biggest Linux Conversion showdowns in all of Linux History. Will Noah Chelliah, Co-Host of the Linux Action Show and businessman man, become self proclaim supreme Linux converter he claims to be? Or will the Closer known as Emma Marshall from System 76 put the money where the mouth is and take the crown. Stashes and beards are on the line on this epic weekend.

— NEWS —

Ubuntu Tablet Pushed Back

Bq has quietly pushed back the shipping estimate of the world’s first true Ubuntu tablet by one week.

Updating shipping information for both HD and FHD models of tablet on its website, Bq say “Deliveries will take place starting from the second half of April“.

It previously read: “Deliveries will take place starting from the second week of April” (emphasis ours).

Not a huge delay but a delay nonetheless.

If you pre-ordered the tablet on the assumption of getting it this week this is us telling why you may be waiting a little longer for a dispatch notice.

The delay was pointed out to us by reader Jack F., who explained in his e-mail

“I pre-ordered the BQ tablet thinking that deliveries would take place second week of April. BQ have changed this to second half on their site without notifying via email it would be delayed. Would be good for other customers to know.”

Researchers help shut down spam botnet that enslaved 4,000 Linux machines

Known as Mumblehard, the botnet was the _product of highly skilled developers. It used a custom “packer” to conceal the P__erl-based source code that made it run, a backdoor that gave attackers persistent access, and a mail daemon that was able to send large volumes of spam._

itch.io Open Market Place trying to get App on Steam

Itch.io is an open marketplace for indie games. According to their About page, if you’ve made a game you can easily upload it, set the price, and sell your game through Itch.io, and “It’s never necessary to get votes, likes, or follows to get your content approved…”

Speaking of which, the creators of Itch.io have a desktop client called Itch, and while it’s already available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, they’re going a step further by putting Itch on Steam Greenlight, where they hope to get enough votes, likes, or follows to make it onto Steam proper. Which sounds a bit strange, trying to launch an app for a games marketplace on another games marketplace. As one commenter puts it: “storefrontception.”

Linus Torvalds Gives TED Talk

Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system and the Git source code management system, opened the “Code Power” session at the recent TED2016 conference, speaking in an interview with TED Curator Chris Anderson.

In the talk, Torvalds, whose blunt approach in dealing with people is well known, stated, “I’m actually not a people person. I don’t really love other people, but I do love other people who get involved in my project.”

In the TED talk, Torvalds admitted that he is sometimes “myopic, when it comes to other people’s feelings…” However, he said, “What I love about open source is that it really allows different people to work together.”

Nonetheless, typically self-deprecating Torvalds doesn’t see himself as a visionary. Instead, he says: “I’m an engineer. I’m happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in.”

Linus Torvalds still wants Linux to take over the desktop

I actually am very happy with the Linux desktop, and I started the project for my own needs, and my needs are very much fulfilled. That’s why, to me, it’s not a failure. I would obviously love for Linux to take over that world too, but it turns out it’s a really hard area to enter. I’m still working on it. It’s been 25 years. I can do this for another 25. I’ll wear them down.”