Show Notes: linuxactionnews.com/248

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Show Notes: linuxunplugged.com/403

The post Hidden Features of Fedora 34 | LINUX Unplugged 403 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Show Notes: linuxactionnews.com/179

The post Linux Action News 179 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Show Notes/Links: https://www.bsdnow.tv/314

The post Swap that Space | BSD Now 314 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

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Follow Up / Catch Up

Raspberry Pi Zero W is a $10 computer with WiFi and Bluetooth

In the case of the Raspberry Pi Zero W, the W signifies exactly what is new: wireless connectivity. It boasts exactly the same specifications (1GHz single-core Broadcom BCM2835 CPU, 512MB of RAM, 40-pin header) as its predecessor but the Zero W adds both 802.11n WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0 to the existing Zero design.

• New product! Raspberry Pi Zero W joins the family – Raspberry Pi

To recap, here’s the full feature list for Zero W:

• 1GHz, single-core CPU
• 512MB RAM
• Mini-HDMI port
• Micro-USB On-The-Go port
• Micro-USB power
• HAT-compatible 40-pin header
• Composite video and reset headers
• CSI camera connector
• 802.11n wireless LAN
• Bluetooth 4.0

Mozilla acquires Pocket to gain a foothold on mobile devices

The nine-year-old company, which makes tools for saving articles and videos to view them later, is Mozilla’s first acquisition. It represents a homecoming of sorts for Pocket, which began life as a Firefox extension before eventually expanding its team and building a suite of apps for every major platform. Pocket has been Firefox’s default read-it-later service since 2015.

AMD’s Ryzen Will Really Like A Newer Linux Kernel

So with Linux 4.10 looks to be — and reaffirmed by this trusted confidant — a good point for AMD Ryzen testing and usage. So far in the Linux 4.11 cycle we haven’t seen anything Ryzen-specific appear to come through.

#Ryzen will work best with #Linux 4.10 and later. In other words… #ARCH pic.twitter.com/KARy0RjhIg

— Chris Fisher (@ChrisLAS) February 27, 2017

Linux Academy

• Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

Do we really need swap on modern systems?

• Do we really need swap on modern systems?

Can I run without swap? Is further tuning possible?

Systems without swap can make sense and are supported by Red Hat – just be sure the behaviour of such a system under memory pressure is what you want. In most environments, a bit of swap makes sense.

• /proc/meminfo Committed_AS field shows how much memory processes have requested.
• Using sysctl, we can enable/disable overcommit, and configure how much overcommit should be allowed. The defaults need to be changed only in rare cases, and after properly testing the new settings. The RHEL Performance Tuning Guide has details.
• A solution document with details regarding the likeliness of swapping – for example in changing vm.swappiness. This also requires good testing with your applications.
• Without swap, the system will call the OOM when the memory is exhausted. You can prioritize which processes get killed first in configuring oom_adj_score.
• If you write an application, want to lock pages into RAM and prevent them from getting swapped, mlock() can be used.
• If you design your applications to regularly use swap, make sure to use faster devices, like SSD – starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1, ‘swapon –discard’ can be used to send TRIM to SSD devices, to discard the device contents on swapon. *

The Storage Administration Guide has also a section on swap configuration.

Linux Update Fixes 11-Year-Old Flaw

Andrey Konovalov, a security researcher at Google, found a use-after-free hole within Linux, CSO Online reported. This particular flaw is of interest because it appears to be situational. It only showed up in kernels built with a certain configuration option — CONFIG_IP_DCCP — enabled.

Unfortunately, many popular Linux distributions have enabled this option by default. A new Linux update has since patched the vulnerability, although the exploit has been present in Linux kernels since 2005.

Telegram is no longer open source :: lucb1e.com

Telegram for Android is now a closed source application. According to the repository and the Telegram website, it is covered by the GPL license which states one must publish changes. However, since early October 2016, there have been many releases but no updates of the source code. Everyone involved is pretending there is no issue because they have their fingers in their ears:

• the original author did not respond to the criticism for months;
• Telegram’s chat support does not respond in over a week;
• Telegram’s Twitter account is active (30 minutes ago) but ignores my tweet of a week ago;
• Markus Ra (the face of Telegram) does not respond in over a week; and

• Telegram has no other, official contact method nor a physical mail address.

• telegram-history-dump: Backup Telegram chat logs using telegram-cli

This utility is the successor of telegram-json-backup, written from the
ground up in Ruby. It can create backups of your Telegram user and (super)group
dialogs using telegram-cli’s remote control feature.

Compared to the old project, telegram-history-dump:

• Has better support for media downloads
• Supports output formats other than JSON and is extensible with custom formats
• Supports incremental backup (only new messages are downloaded)
• Does not depend on unstable Python/Lua bindings within telegram-cli
• Has a separate YAML formatted configuration file

The default configuration will backup all dialogs to a directory named output in JSON format, without downloading any media.

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

Internet-Connected Teddy Bear Leaks Millions Of Voice Messages and Password

Now, in the latest security failing of the internet-connected smart toys, more than 2 Million voice recordings of children and their parents have been exposed, along with email addresses and passwords for over 820,000 user accounts.

• Troy Hunt: Data from connected CloudPets teddy bears leaked and ransomed, exposing kids’ voice messages

CloudPets has absolutely no password strength rules. When I say “no rules”, I mean you can literally have a password of “a”. That’s right, just a single character. Not only that, check out how the tutorial demonstrates account creation and particular, how to choose a password:

DigitalOcean

• DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

gstreamer 0.10 moved to AUR

yaourt -R gstreamer0.10 gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg gstreamer0.10-bad gstreamer0.10-bad-plugins gstreamer0.10-base gstreamer0.10-base-plugins gstreamer0.10-good gstreamer0.10-good-plugins gstreamer0.10-ugly gstreamer0.10-ugly-plugins

• gstreamer0.10 packages moved to AUR | Antergos Community Forum

gstreamer0.10 was maintained because of legacy software. Now that most of all audio/video software can be compiled against current gstreamer, gstreamer0.10 has no use.

• AUR gstreamer packages broke : archlinux

The packages not updating are the gstreamer0.10, not the gstreamer1.10 ones.

• Gstreamer Cheat Sheet
• Gstreamer Application Development

The post AWS Loses Its ShIOT | LINUX Unplugged 186 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Performance tips for keeping your Linux install running like new, some basic tricks & some advanced tips.

Why Microsoft’s new Surface Book might be able to run Linux & we reflect on the larger issues behind the recent public exits from the Linux Kernel development team & more!

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Show Notes:

Pre-Show:

• Rover Electrical Upgrade | Rover Log 10

Feedback:

• A World Without Linux | The Linux Foundation

World Without Linux Episode #1: What’s the Name of That Song?

Remembering who sings your favorite song is a lot harder without Linux.

• N1 Is A Beautiful Open Source Email App for Linux – OMG! Ubuntu!

N1 is a new open source e-mail app from Created by Nylas Inc., built using React, Flux, and Electron.

Like a web-browser or modern text editor, N1 is designed to be built on and improved through extensions.

Rover Log

TING

• Ting – mobile that makes sense

Surface Book – The ultimate laptop

Ultra-thin, meticulously crafted, with incredible screen resolution. This is the ultimate laptop.

• Hands On: Microsoft Surface Book | PCMag.com

The latching mechanism has a wide electrical connector, no doubt PCIe-based to facilitate communication between the GPU and the rest of the system.

DigitalOcean

• DigitalOcean: SSD Cloud Server, VPS Server, Simple Cloud Hosting

Keeping Linux Performing Well.

Tips and tricks for keeping your Linux box in top performance.

• If you gotta swap, swap on a sep disk

Creating your swap files on a separate disk can also help quite a bit, especially if your machine swaps frequently. It happens if you do not have enough RAM for your environment. Using KDE with all the features and applications that come along may require several GiB of memory, whereas a tiny window manager with console applications will perfectly fit in less than 512 MiB of memory.

• XFS – ArchWiki

Although the extent-based nature of XFS and the delayed allocation strategy it uses significantly improves the file system’s resistance to fragmentation problems, XFS provides a filesystem defragmentation utility (xfs_fsr, short for XFS filesystem reorganizer) that can defragment the files on a mounted and active XFS filesystem. It can be useful to view XFS fragmentation periodically.

• Is it REALLY worth Tuning your IO scheduler?

The kernel supports different schedulers for storage disk in-/output (IO). These are the CFQ scheduler (Completely Fair Queuing), the NOOP and Deadline. Another, the BFQ (Budget Fair Scheduler) is available in the linux-zen kernel.

A HDD has spinning disks and head that move physically to the required location. Such structure leads to following characteristics:

• random latency it quite high, for modern HDD it is ~10ms (ignoring a disk controller write buffer).
• sequential access provides much higher throughput. In this case head needs to move less distance.

In case if we have a lot of running processes that make IO requests to different parts of storage (i.e. random access) then we can expect that a disk handles ~100 IO requests per second. Because modern systems can easily generate load much higher than 100 requests per second we have a queue of requests that have to wait for access to the storage. One way to improve throughput is to linearize access, i.e. order waiting requests by its logical address and always choose the closest request. Historically this was the first Linux IO scheduler called elevator scheduler.

One of the problems with the elevator algorithm is that it makes suffer processes with sequential access. Such processes read a block of data then process it for several microseconds then read next block and so on. The elevator scheduler does not know that the process is going to read another block nearby and, thus, moves to another request at some other location. To overcome the problem anticipatory IO scheduler was added. For synchronous requests this algorithm waits for a short amount of time before moving to another request.

While these schedulers try to improve total throughput they also might leave some unlucky requests waiting for a very long time.

• Anything-sync-daemon – ArchWiki

• Linux Performance Tuning – Linux Foundation Training

Linux Academy

• Linux Academy | Linux and AWS Online Training

Going my own way

In the end it’s a mixture of just being tired of dealing with the crap associated with Linux development and realising that by continuing to put up with it I’m tacitly encouraging its continuation, but I can’t be bothered any more. And, thanks to the magic of free software, it turns out that I can avoid putting up with the bullshit in the kernel community and get to work on the things I’m interested in doing. So here’s a kernel tree with patches that implement a BSD-style securelevel interface. Over time it’ll pick up some of the power management code I’m still working on, and we’ll see where it goes from there. But, until there’s a significant shift in community norms on LKML, I’ll only be there when I’m being paid to be there. And that’s improved my mood immeasurably.

Closing a door | The Geekess

I am no longer a part of the Linux kernel community.

Runs Linux from the people:

• Send in a pic/video of your runs Linux.
• Please upload videos to YouTube and submit a link via email or the subreddit.

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Post Show:

• Using GNU Stow to manage your dotfiles

The post Kernel of Truth | LINUX Unplugged 113 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Join us as we peer into the past and revisit some big topics!

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• Get Paid to Write for DigitalOcean

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Show Notes:

• Episode 17 – Is swap needed?
• Episode 28 – The 80/20 rule for open source
• Episode 25 – Aaron Seigo talks the culture of shiny
• Episode 28 – Linux in schools
• Episode 31 – Is Ubuntu Animosity Misplaced?

The post Unplugging the Past | LINUX Unplugged 81 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Chromecast has been called the gadget of the year, but are the better options? Or is a simple, low cost, Linux powered gadget the ultimate living room solution? We’ll debate where it stacks up compared to XMBC, Plex, and others.

Plus: Some insights into why Canonical might be looking to License their Binary repos to the Mint projects, your feedback, and more!

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• Help the DigitalOcean community by submitting articles and get paid $50 per published piece!

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FU

• Ubuntu Wants a Binary License from Mint?

• Canonical to force Linux Mint to license Ubuntu binary packages?

• Tiling WM Challenge

Reaching into /dev/random

• Top 10 Gadgets of 2013 | Top 10 Everything of 2013 – Technology | TIME.com

Instead of trying to do everything — like Google\’s famously ambitious and unsuccessful Google TV — this thumb-sized gizmo does one thing, does it as simply as possible and does it for the impulse-purchase price of $35. Plug it into one of your TV\’s HDMI ports, and you can fling videos and other content from your laptop, tablet or phone to the big screen, no wires involved. Lots of companies have built devices to do this; Chromecast is the first one that gets it right.

• Chromecast Apps

• Chromecast gadget beams media from Chrome to TVs · LinuxGizmos.com

Mail Sack:

• Comic Collection software
• Comix – GTK Comic Book Viewer
• calibre – E-book management

Book Pick:

• Star Trek X: The Lost Years (Adapted) Audiobook | J. M. Dillard | Audible.com

The post Fidel Chromecastro | LINUX Unplugged 20 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Have IRC chat rooms, forums, reddit, and Google Hangouts killed the local Linux Users Group? We’ll share our ideas to reboot the LUG and make them relevant for the modern Linux user.

PLUS: Your follow up thoughts on the perfect swap setup, feedback, and much more!

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• Help the DigitalOcean community by submitting articles and get paid $50 per published piece!

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Show Notes:

FU

• Installed Bridge Linux on the UltraPro

• Infomercial Speical

• Getting Girls on Linux: Response to Comments

• On swap partitions

• Ting Golden Ticket

• ZRAM, Swap Files, and Hibernating for the Winter

Double Recording on Tuesday 17th Starting at 12pm PDT no LIVE show the 24th

Are LUGs Dying? Or just need a reboot?

• Linux user group – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Linux User Group or Linux Users\’ Group (LUG) or GNU/Linux User Group (GLUG) is a private, generally non-profit or not-for-profit organization that provides support and/or education for Linux users, particularly for inexperienced users. The term commonly refers to local groups that meet in person, but is also used to refer to online support groups that may have members spread over a very wide area and which do not organize, or which are not based around, physical meetings. Many LUGs encompass FreeBSD and other free Unix-based operating systems.

• Bellevue Linux Users Group home page: serving the Seattle area

Welcome to the Bellevue Linux Users Group (BELUG) website. BELUG is dedicated to promoting an interest in and an understanding of Linux and other free software.

• Bellingham Linux Users Group

Blug was started in 1998 by a small group of computer geeks who wanted to get off Windows and learn from local Unix gurus. We hold a presentation meeting the first Thursday of the month at Bellingham Technical College in room CC201. On the second Thursday we hold an informal organization meeting with the time and location announced on the mailing list. We also put on special events including LinuxFest Northwest held the last weekend of April.

• Everett Linux Users Group

• Oracle becomes sponsor of OpenStack Foundation – business issues, Internet-based applications and services, open source, middleware, development platforms, software, internet, cloud computing, system management, Infrastructure services, Oracle – CIO

Oracle is now a corporate sponsor of the OpenStack Foundation and plans to weave parts of the open-source infrastructure platform into its own products, saying it will give customers more flexibility and options for managing clouds.

• Congsu’s LUG Success story, runs his University LUG.

Double Recording on Tuesday 17th Starting at 12pm PDT no LIVE show the 24th

The post Hugs for LUGs | LINUX Unplugged 18 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Do you run without swap? This week we reach into the topic grab bag and debate to swap or not to swap, the reasons long timer Linux users are switching to BSD, and what’s wrong with our Sailfish OS coverage.

Plus we’ll some perspective from a new Linux user on what she ran into, your emails, and more!

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• Help the DigitalOcean community by submitting articles and get paid $50 per published piece!

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Show Notes:

FU

• Sailfish OS Coverage

• Hibernate and swap partitions

• Jupiter Broadcasting 2014 Limited Shirt | Teespring

Jupiter Broadcasting will have an epic 2014 despite recent setbacks. This rebranding was planned for Q2 but are launching early to get things rolling! Support the network and grab this new logo before it\’s anywhere else!

Reaching into /dev/random

• Time to move on?

• Show Idea (Tiling Window Managers)

• Humble Jumbo Bundle (pay what you want and help charity)

Mail Sack:

• Negative in the practical dimension

Double Recording on Tuesday 17th Starting at 12pm PDT no LIVE show the 24th

The post Swap It Outta Here | LINUX Unplugged 17 first appeared on Jupiter Broadcasting.

Our tips and tweaks to get the most performance and battery life out of your Linux box, and we’ll blast though a few audience submitted favorites!

Plus: Our thoughts on Ubuntu 12.10 shipping with Amazon shopping links in the dash, the good news for Optimus users, Humble Bundles not so humble sales, the Steam is nigh, and so much more!

All this week on, The Linux Action Show!

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