September 2020 - wlug - University of Waikato Mail Lists

by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

For quite a while now, I’ve been annoyed by the system notification volume going to 100% on my Debian systems, regardless of my attempts to set it to a lower level. For example, when I open the KDE System Settings app, change something, then try to close the window, the sound that accompanies the save/discard/cancel alert is always startlingly loud. I think I have finally found a fix: in your /etc/pulse/daemon.conf, put in a line saying flat-volumes = no (You should find an existing comment “; flat-volumes = yes” that indicates the default.) You can make this new setting take effect in the current session immediately without having to logout or reboot, by executing the following as the currently-logged-in user: pulseaudio -k (This kills and restarts the PulseAudio daemon for your user session.) There are several discussions of the pros and cons of this issue online, going back some years. For example, here <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1265267>. Also a mention about the “flat-volumes” setting in the ever-reliable Arch Linux Wiki here <https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PulseAudio>.

3 months

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Random Firefox Tweaks

by Lawrence D'Oliveiro

Been looking at various settings changes you can make in the “about:config” page in Firefox. Here are a couple I have found useful: * keyword.enabled -- set to false to stop Firefox trying to do a search on the contents of the address box if it doesn’t match a URL. This is why I have a search box separate from the address box. * browser.fixup.alternate.enabled -- set to false to stop it helpfully tacking on “www.” and “.com” if the original URL you type doesn’t work. I have occasionally been confused by it complaining about not finding a URL, but showing a different one from the one I typed. By the way, when you first try to view this page, Firefox shows you a warning to ensure you understand the consequences of messing about with settings at this level. It remembers it has shown you this warning by adding the following line to the prefs.js file in your profile: user_pref("browser.aboutConfig.showWarning", false); Firefox seems to overwrite this file when it quits, and reloads it when it is launched again.

4 months, 1 week

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controlling network manager from the console

by Peter Reutemann

Hi everyone For a project at work, I'm working with a Nvidia Jetson Nano (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/autonomous-machines/embedded-systems/jetson-na…). In order to get it hooked up to the wireless network, I came across the following tutorial: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/adding-wifi-to-the-nvidia-jetson/all The interesting tidbit in this article was the "nmcli" tool (https://linux.die.net/man/1/nmcli) to control the network manager from the console. Really neat! Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

6 months, 2 weeks

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Developers Try Again To Upstream Motorola 68000 Series Support In LLVM

by Peter Reutemann

'Hobbyist developers are trying once again to get a Motorola 68000 back-end merged into the upstream LLVM compiler. Phoronix reports: The Motorola 68000 series processors have been around since the 80's thanks to the likes of the early Apple Macintosh computers. Fast forward to 2020, the Motorola 68000 is still a popular target for vintage computer enthusiasts and hobbyists. Community developers have worked on improving the Linux kernel support for M68k hardware like early Apple Powerbooks as recently as a few years ago and the compiler support is a continued target. GCC 11 due out next year was looking to drop the M68k target over its unmaintained status. Hobbyists though stepped up there so the M68k support will remain in GCC. Now developers are also looking at adding M68k support to the LLVM compiler. This isn't the first time that M68k support for LLVM has been brought up albeit never successfully landed to date. Building off the past failures to get the Motorola 68000 series support upstreamed, developers last week sent out new patches proposing this back-end -- this time they are showing more clarity about the developers involved and being committed to supporting the code, the sustainability of the code, and responding quickly to code review comments. This patch series is the latest attempt at upstreaming Motorola 68000 series support in LLVM. Besides all the back-end specific code there is also some common LLVM code changes that fall under greater scrutiny. ' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/09/30/225226 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

6 months, 3 weeks

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Xen Project Officially Ports Its Hypervisor To Raspberry Pi 4

by Peter Reutemann

'The Xen Project has ported its hypervisor to the 64-bit Raspberry Pi 4. The Register reports: The idea to do an official port bubbled up from the Xen community and then reached the desk of George Dunlap, chairman of the Xen Project's Advisory Board. Dunlap mentioned the idea to an acquaintance who works at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and was told that around 40 percent of Pis are sold to business users rather than hobbyists. With more than 30 million Arm-based Pis sold as of December 2019, and sales running at a brisk 600,000-plus a month in April 2020, according to Pi guy Eben Upton, Dunlap saw an opportunity to continue Xen's drive towards embedded and industrial applications. Stefano Stabellini, who by day works at FPGA outfit Xilinx, and past Apache Foundation director Roman Shaposhnik took on the task of the port. The pair clocked that the RPi 4's system-on-chip used a regular GIC-400 interrupt controller, which Xen supports out of the box, and thought this was a sign this would, overall, be an easy enough job. That, the duo admitted, was dangerous optimism. Forget the IRQs, there was a whole world of physical and virtual memory addresses to navigate. The pair were "utterly oblivious that we were about to embark on an adventure deep in the belly of the Xen memory allocator and Linux address translation layers," we're told. [The article goes on to explain the hurdles that were ahead of them.] "Once Linux 5.9 is out, we will have Xen working on RPi4 out of the box," the pair said. [...] Stefano Stabellini told The Register that an official Xen-on-RPi port will make a difference in the Internet-of-Things community, because other Arm development boards are more costly than the Pi, and programmers will gravitate towards a cheaper alternative for prototyping. He also outlined scenarios, such as a single edge device running both a real-time operating system alongside another OS, each dedicated to different tasks but inhabiting the same hardware and enjoying the splendid isolation of a virtual machine rather than sharing an OS as containers. George Dunlap also thinks that an official Xen-on-RPi port could also be of use to home lab builders, or perhaps just give developers a more suitable environment for their side projects than a virtual machine or container on their main machines. Stay tuned to Project EVE's Github page for more details about how to build your own Xen-for-RPi. Hacks to get it up and running should also appear on the Xen project blog.' -- source: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/20/09/29/2025213 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

6 months, 3 weeks

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Cloudflare's Privacy Crusade Continues With a Challenge To Google Analytics

by Peter Reutemann

'Fortune: Cloudflare is launching a privacy-friendly rival to Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a free toolkit that's used by website administrators across the globe to help them track the behavior of the people visiting those sites -- how they find them, what they do there, the devices they're using, and so on. However, the service -- the most popular of its kind -- also helps Google track websites' visitors, so it can better profile them for advertising purposes. This privacy-invasive aspect makes many people squeamish. And that's where Cloudflare would now like to step in. Around its birthday every year, the decade-old company -- which went public last year -- announces a move intended to "give back" to the wider Internet community. These moves are often related to privacy. On Tuesday, it unveiled Cloudflare Web Analytics, a free-to-use toolkit that largely replicates what Google Analytics offers -- minus the invasive tracking, and thus the ability to assess the performance of targeted ads carried on websites. Cloudflare Web Analytics is immediately available to the company's paid customers, but any website owner will be able to use it from some point in the coming months. Cloudflare's scale is crucial here [...] because it takes substantial resources to run a free analytics platform, and Cloudflare already has a giant network that can support the load. Cloudflare Web Analytics isn't the company's only big announcement this week. "On Monday, Cloudflare launched a beta testing program for a cloud technology called Durable Objects," the report adds. "You can read the technical explanation here, but in essence this is a tool that allows developers of online services to make those services comply with the increasing number of data-localization and data-protection laws that limit where users' data is supposed to go." "With Durable Objects, Cloudflare says, it is possible to specify where particular data will reside on Cloudflare's network, so -- for example -- a German user's data does not have to leave Germany. Or, with an eye to other current news, a service such as TikTok could ensure that U.S. users' data never leaves the U.S., without having to create a separate version of its service for that country." ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/09/29/2011226 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

6 months, 3 weeks

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Google Removes 17 Android Apps Caught Engaging In WAP Billing Fraud

by Peter Reutemann

'Google has recently removed 17 Android applications from the official Play Store because they were infected with the Joker (aka Bread) malware. ZDNet reports: "This spyware is designed to steal SMS messages, contact lists, and device information, along with silently signing up the victim for premium wireless application protocol (WAP) services," Zscaler security researcher Viral Gandhi said this week. The 17 malicious apps were uploaded on the Play Store this month and didn't get a chance to gain a following, having been downloaded more than 120,000 times before being detected. Following its internal procedures, Google removed the apps from the Play Store, used the Play Protect service to disable the apps on infected devices, but users still need to manually intervene and remove the apps from their devices. But this recent takedown also marks the third such action from Google's security team against a batch of Joker-infected apps over the past few months. [...] The way these infected apps usually manage to sneak their way past Google's defenses and reach the Play Store is through a technique called "droppers," where the victim's device is infected in a multi-stage process. Malware authors begin by cloning the functionality of a legitimate app and uploading it on the Play Store. This app is fully functional, requests access to dangerous permissions, but also doesn't perform any malicious actions when it's first run. Because the malicious actions are usually delayed by hours or days, Google's security scans don't pick up the malicious code, and Google usually allows the app to be listed on the Play Store. But once on a user's device, the app eventually downloads and "drops" (hence the name droppers, or loaders) other components or apps on the device that contain the Joker malware or other malware strains. ' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/09/28/236245 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

6 months, 3 weeks

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Ubuntu - Online upgrade to 20.04.1 now available

by Ian Stewart

Hi All, I mentioned last night at the WLUG meeting that there had been a delay in releasing the Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04.1 online upgrade. As of today, the Focal Fossa (20.04.1 LTS) Point-Release Status Tracking webpage<https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/focal-fossa-20-04-1-lts-point-release-status…> is still showing Status 20.04.1 Released! Upgrades from 18.04 to 20.04.1 still disabled ...but with... Upgrade blockers None Previously two bugs, 1891680<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1891680> and 1876506<https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/focal/+source/os-prober/+bug/1876506> had been shown as the "upgrade blockers". These bugs were fixed in the last few weeks. Despite the above message, today on my Ubuntu Mate 18.04 laptop, I ran the GUI application "Software Updater". When it completed it stated: The software on this computer is up to date. However, Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS is now available (you have 18.04). I clicked on "Upgrade". There were 384 new packages to install and 1547 packages to upgrade requiring about 1.4GB of downloading. On my rather slow 1.4GHz CPU, but with reasonably fast internet and a SSD it took 50 minutes to do the upgrade. cheers, Ian. PS: The upgrade kept my python Version 2 at V2.7.18 and upgraded Python3 to 3.8.2. If I had done a fresh install from DVD/USB of Ubuntu 20.04.1 it would not have installed Python 2.

6 months, 3 weeks

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Eric S. Raymond: Is Microsoft Switching To a Linux Kernel That Emulates Windows?

by Peter Reutemann

'Most of Microsoft's money now comes from its cloud service Azure, points out open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond. Now he posits a future where Windows development will "inevitably" become a drag on Microsoft's business: So, you're a Microsoft corporate strategist. What's the profit-maximizing path forward given all these factors? It's this: Microsoft Windows becomes a Proton-like emulation layer over a Linux kernel, with the layer getting thinner over time as more of the support lands in the mainline kernel sources. The economic motive is that Microsoft sheds an ever-larger fraction of its development costs as less and less has to be done in-house. If you think this is fantasy, think again. The best evidence that it's already the plan is that Microsoft has already ported Edge to run under Linux. There is only one way that makes any sense, and that is as a trial run for freeing the rest of the Windows utility suite from depending on any emulation layer. So, the end state this all points at is: New Windows is mostly a Linux kernel, there's an old-Windows emulation over it, but Edge and the rest of the Windows user-land utilities don't use the emulation. The emulation layer is there for games and other legacy third-party software. Economic pressure will be on Microsoft to deprecate the emulation layer... Every increment of Windows/Linux convergence helps with that — reduces administration and the expected volume of support traffic. Eventually, Microsoft announces upcoming end-of-life on the Windows emulation. The OS itself , and its userland tools, has for some time already been Linux underneath a carefully preserved old-Windows UI. Third-party software providers stop shipping Windows binaries in favor of ELF binaries with a pure Linux API... ...and Linux finally wins the desktop wars, not by displacing Windows but by co-opting it. Perhaps this is always how it had to be.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/09/27/193250 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

6 months, 3 weeks

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GNU is Not Unix Emacs Developers (Including Richard Stallman) Discuss How to Build a More 'Modern' Emacs

by Peter Reutemann

'LWN.net re-visits the emacs-devel mailing list, where the Emacs 28 development cycle has revived discussions about how to make the text editor more "modern" and attractive to new users: A default dark theme may not be in the future, leading one to think that there may yet be hope for the world in general. But there does seem to be general agreement that Emacs could benefit from a better, more centralized approach to color themes, rather than having color names hard-coded throughout various Elisp packages. From that, a proper theme engine could be supported, making dark themes and such easily available to those who want them... Another area where Emacs is insufficiently "modern", it seems, has to do with keyboard and mouse bindings. On the keyboard side, users have come to expect certain actions from certain keystrokes; ^X to cut a selection, ^V to paste it, etc. These bindings are easily had by turning on the Cua mode, but new users tend not to know about this mode or how to enable it. Many participants in the discussion said that this mode should be on by default. That, of course, would break the finger memory of large numbers of existing Emacs users, who would be unlikely to appreciate the disruption. Or, as Richard Stallman put it: It is not an option to change these basic key bindings to imitate other, newer editors. It would create a different editor that we Emacs users would never switch to. It is unfortunate that the people who implemented the newer editors chose incompatibility with Emacs.... The situation with mouse behavior is similar; as several participants in the discussion pointed out, users of graphical interfaces have come to expect that a right-button click will produce a menu of available actions. In Emacs, instead, that button marks a region ("selection"), with a second click in the same spot yanking ("cutting") the selected text. Many experienced Emacs users have come to like this behavior, but it is surprising to newcomers. The right mouse button with the control key held down does produce a menu defined by the current major mode, but that is evidently not what is being requested here; that menu, some say, should present global actions rather mode-specific ones. Stallman suggested offering a "reshuffled mode" that would bring the context menu to an unadorned right-button click, and which would add some of the expected basic editing commands there as well. This would be relatively easy to do, he said, since mouse bindings are separate from everything else. Besides, as he noted, the current mouse behavior was derived from "what was the standard in X Windows around 1990"; while one wouldn't want to act in haste, it might just be about time for an update. Other proposed changes involved "discoverability," including the default enabling of various modes, although to incorporate them into GNU Emacs "would often require the author to sign copyrights over to the Free Software Foundation, which is not something all authors are willing to do..."' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/09/25/2213230 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

6 months, 3 weeks

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wlug September 2020