• How one hacker's push to secure the internet became a crucial part of Mac, Linux, and Windows operating systems [Was: "How Jason A. Donenfeld created secure VPN WireGuard, included in Linux"

• Fedora program update: 2021-02

  Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora this week. Self-Contained Change proposals for Fedora 34 are due by Tuesday 19 January. The mass rebuild begins on 20 January.

  Not next week, but normally I have weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else.

• App Spotlight: Dictionary

  Among the easily installable and ad-free apps within the PureOS store is Dictionary. This is a simple tool that lets you search through numerous online or local dictionaries and translation sources.

• Comet Lake-S appears on COM Express

  Portwell’s Linux-ready “PCOM-B655VGL” Basic Type 6 module features Intel’s up to 10-core, 10th Gen Comet Lake-S plus up to 32GB DDR4, 3x DDI, 4x SATA III, 4x USB 3.2 Gen2, and PCIe x16 and 8x PCIe x8 Gen3.

• RetroPie booze barrel

• 20 years of Drupal: Founder Dries Buytaert on API first, the end of breaking compatibility, and JavaScript bloat

  Content management system Drupal is 20 years old, prompting its founder to talk to about its evolving role, why it shifted from a policy of breaking compatibility with each release, and concerns about JavaScript bloat causing issues for those with poor connectivity.

  "When I started Drupal 20 years ago I built it for myself, for me with my friends," Buytaert told us. That was at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, in 2000. He wrote a small message board. When he graduated he put it on the web, intending to call it dorp, which is Dutch for village. He mistyped it as drop, creating drop.org. Drupal is derived from the English pronunciation of druppel, Dutch for drop.

  Buytaert is now project lead for Drupal and CTO of Acquia, a cloud platform for marketing sites.

• What Can We Learn From SQL’s 50 Year Reign? A Story of 2 Turing Awards

  Many of the programming languages we use today were not introduced until the 90s (Java was introduced in 1996). However, there is one programming language that is still as popular today as it was when it was introduced nearly 50 years ago: SQL.

  This article will discuss the events that led to the introduction of relational databases, why SQL grew in popularity, and what we can learn from its success.

• ScyllaDB NoSQL database to improve with Project Circe

  The open source SycllaDB NoSQL database continues to gain new features and users as it ramps up its plans for 2021.

  At the Scylla Summit 2021 virtual event which ran from Jan. 12-14, ScyllaDB CEO Dor Laor shared new features and the roadmap for the NoSQL database's future.

  A key part of ScyllaDB's roadmap is Project Circe, a yearlong initiative that aims to bring new performance and consistency to the database. The Summit was also highlighted by multiple users that outlined their ScyllaDB deployments, including Ticketmaster, Expedia Group, Zillow and GE Healthcare.

• "Studio" Tour Of An Australian Linux Zoomer

  Ever wondered what my "studio" actually looks like outside of the normal shot, well today you can find out and I use the term studio very loosly, this is my bedroom with some lights set up but none the less it's a make shift studio and it's what I use to make 15+ videos a week.

• DistroToot Is Now Accepting New Members

  DistroToot is my own personal Mastodon instance. Mastodon is a decentralized, federated micro-blogging platform. Essentially, it is a free and open source Twitter. People have asked me if I would open up DistroToot to accept other members (not just myself).

• duf - Disk Usage/Free Utility for Linux, BSD, macOS & Windows - nixCraft

  We use the df command to show how much disk space is free on mounted file systems in Linux, macOS, and Unix-like systems. We also have the du command to estimate file space usage. We now have another fancy and fantastic looking tool called duf to display statistics on free disk space in Unix, Linux, macOS, *BSD, Android, and Windows written in Golang.

• Systemd Applet Release - Michael Jansen, Drive By Coding

  Given no one seems to be interested in working on the applet (boo) I decided to tackle the bug myself. Apparently the fact it worked previously was the result of happenstance.

  The systemd manager processes only send out signals after at least one process told them to do so. It seems that some process did that on my computer before but no more.

• 5 Best free PDF editors for Ubuntu Linux in 2021 [Ed: Some of these are proprietary software, which GNU/Linux users do not need for any practical reason]

  PDF readers and editors are a popular part of our day-to-day work related to documents, ebooks, presentations, whitePaper, and more because of PDF’s portability and security. However, when it comes to reader application for PDF files, you will generally find a one on Linux desktop systems, easily. However, PDF editors may still need to be installed, which are available only a handful.

  Adobe developed the PDF (portable document format) in such a way that it can present the layout in the final document as it is, anywhere, regardless of the OS system or software in which you are going to use it later. Therefore, editing PDF files afterward is not an easy task- apart from the standard note and comment functions. However, Adobe offers a professional PDF editor for Mac and Windows but that also has limited capabilities. This means we can edit all PDF files not thoroughly like we do Word documents.

• Better Fujitsu A64FX Support Arrives For GCC, LLVM Clang Compilers - Phoronix

  The high performance Fujitsu A64FX ARM processor now has the possibility of performing even better if relying upon the upstream open-source compilers from GCC and LLVM.

  The Fujitsu A64FX, which powers the "Fugaku" supercomputer among other accomplishments, has seen open-source compiler work going back a year while now the latest upstream GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and LLVM Clang are seeing more complete support.

• 4 DevOps books to read this year | Opensource.com

  We have just entered 2021, and DevOps will become much more relevant. It is smack dab in the spotlight given that the world is experiencing a pandemic and businesses are fighting to stay digitally relevant and competitive.

• Vger security analysis

  I would like to share about Vger internals in regards to how the security was thought to protect vger users and host systems.

• After years of dithering companies are embracing automation

  Bosses have boasted of automating their operations for years without an awful lot to show for it. Covid-19 has spurred them to put their money where their mouths are. Hernan Saenz of Bain, a consultancy, reckons that between now and 2030 American firms will invest $10trn in automation. Nigel Vaz, chief executive of Publicis Sapient, a big digital consultancy, says that the downturn offers bosses the perfect cover. “The unrelenting pressure for short-term financial results from investors has temporarily been suspended,” he says. “Firms are not just going back pre-pandemic, but completely reimagining how they work,” says Susan Lund, co-author of a forthcoming report from the McKinsey Global Institute, a think-tank. A recent survey by the institute’s sister consultancy found that two-thirds of global firms are doubling down on automation.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.0.6: Some Updates

  The Rcpp team is proud to announce release 1.0.6 of Rcpp which arrived at CRAN earlier today, and has been uploaded to Debian too. Windows and macOS builds should appear at CRAN in the next few days. This marks the first release on the new six-months cycle announced with release 1.0.5 in July. As reminder, interim ‘dev’ or ‘rc’ releases will often be available in the Rcpp drat repo; this cycle there were four.

  Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing R with C or C++ code. As of today, 2174 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further (which is an 8.5% increase just since the last release), along with 207 in BioConductor.

• Use Bash Strict Mode (Unless You Love Debugging)

  Let's start with the punchline. Your bash scripts will be more robust, reliable and maintainable if you start them like this:

  	#!/bin/bash
  	set -euo pipefail
  	IFS=$'\n\t'
   

  I call this the unofficial bash strict mode. This causes bash to behave in a way that makes many classes of subtle bugs impossible. You'll spend much less time debugging, and also avoid having unexpected complications in production.

  There is a short-term downside: these settings make certain common bash idioms harder to work with. Most have simple workarounds, detailed below: jump to Issues & Solutions. But first, let's look at what these obscure lines actually do.

• Java Built-In Functional Interfaces Cheatsheet and Examples

  In order to use lambda expressions in Java 8, you need a functional interface. For most of your needs, you can use the already built ones in Java which are as follows...

• GitHub still won’t explain if it fired someone for saying ‘Nazi,’ and employees are pissed

  The current conflict began the day of the riots in Washington, DC when a Jewish employee told co-workers: “stay safe homies, nazis are about.” Some colleagues took offense to the language, although neo-Nazi organizations were, in fact, present at the riots. One engineer responded: “This is untasteful conduct for workplace [in my opinion], people have the right to protest period.”

• Amazon Web Services opens first office in Greece

  It said services covered areas from big data analytics and mobile, web and social media applications to enterprise business applications and the internet of things.

• Critical Microsoft Defender Bug Actively Exploited; Patch Tuesday Offers 83 Fixes

  Researchers believe the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2021-1647, has been exploited for the past three months and was leveraged by hackers as part of the massive SolarWinds attack. Last month, Microsoft said state-sponsored hackers had compromised its internal network and leveraged additional Microsoft products to conduct further attacks.

  Affected versions of Microsoft Malware Protection Engine range from 1.1.17600.5 to 1.1.17700.4 running on Windows 10, Windows 7 and 2004 Windows Server, according to the security bulletin.

• Making Clouds Rain :: Remote Code Execution in Microsoft Office 365

  TL;DR; This post is a story on how I found and exploited CVE-2020-168751, a remote code execution vulnerability in Exchange Online and bypassed two different patches for the vulnerability. Exchange Online is part of the Office 365 suite that impacted multiple cloud servers operated by Microsoft that could have resulted in the access to millions of corporate email accounts.

• Dropbox lays off 11% of its workforce as COO departs

  Dropbox in November provided revenue guidance of $497 million to $499 million for the fourth quarter. The company said at the time that it’s aiming to achieve margins of 28% to 30% in the long term.

• Technical Error 'Saw 150,000 U.K. Police Records Wiped' From Databases

  Police have been asked to assess if there is a threat to public safety after it was revealed that thousands of police records were deleted in error, including data on fingerprints, DNA, and arrest histories.

  The error, first reported in the Times, saw 150,000 files lost, with fears it could mean offenders go free. A coding error is thought to have caused the earmarking of the files for deletion.

  The U.K. Home Office said the lost entries related to people who were arrested and then released without further action and no records of criminal or dangerous people had been deleted. Home secretary Priti Patel is now under pressure to explain the mistake, which the opposition Labour party said "presents huge dangers" for public safety.

• January 2021 Linux Foundation Newsletter: Bootcamp Sale, SolarWinds Orion, New Kubernetes & WebAssembly Classes, LFX Webinar Series

• How I hijacked the top-level domain of a sovereign state

  Note: This issue has been resolved and the .cd ccTLD no longer sends NS delegations to the compromised domain.

  TL;DR: Imagine what could happen if the country-code top-level domain (ccTLD) of a sovereign state fell into the wrong hands. Here’s how I (@Almroot) bought the domain name used in the NS delegations for the ccTLD of the Democratic Republic of Congo (.cd) and temporarily took over 50% of all DNS traffic for the TLD that could have been exploited for MITM or other abuse.

• Apple begins blocking M1 Mac users from side loading iPhone and iPad applications

  As a refresher, Apple Silicon Macs allow users to run iOS and iPad applications on their Mac, but developers can opt out of allowing their apps to be installed on the Mac. This is the path that many developers have taken, making the necessary change in App Store Connect to remove their app from the Mac App Store.

  But with that being said, until today, you could manually install iOS apps like Netflix, Instagram, and Facebook on an M1 Mac by using their respective IPA files downloaded under a valid Apple ID. Many people were using tools such as iMazing to complete this process.

  9to5Mac has now confirmed that, starting today, this is no longer possible unless the application is available on the Mac App Store. Apple has flipped the necessary sever-side switch to block iPhone and iPad applications from being installed on Apple Silicon Macs.

• Apple is blocking Apple Silicon Mac users from sideloading iPhone apps

  Apple has turned off users’ ability to unofficially install iOS apps onto their M1 Macs (via 9to5Mac). While iOS apps are still available in the Mac App Store, many apps, such as Dark Sky and Netflix, don’t have their developer’s approval to be run on macOS. Up until now, there was a workaround that allowed the use of third-party software to install the apps without having to use the Mac App Store, but it seems like Apple has remotely disabled it.

  When we tried to install an unsupported app on an M1 Mac running macOS 11.1, we got an error message saying that we couldn’t install it and should “try again later”. You can see a screenshot at the top of this article.

• Apple TV Plus Free Subscriptions Extended Again, This Time Through July 2021

  The tech giant is extending the free-access period for Apple TV Plus customers who have signed up through its 12-month free subscription offer through July 2021. That’s after it had previously pushed that gratis period to February. So if you were among the first to take the one-year-free deal back in November 2019, that’s turned into 21 months free of Apple TV Plus.

• Spotify Enters Settlement Talks With PRO Music Rights Founder Jake P. Noch

  But a new legal filing, shared with DMN this afternoon, reveals that Spotify and Noch have officially entered settlement talks. The involved parties “jointly” moved for a 60-day stay, “including discovery and all deadlines,” so that they can “attempt to negotiate a resolution of this matter,” the three-page-long document (dated January 13th, 2021) indicates.

  Furthermore, the filing specifies that Sosa Entertainment, Jake P. Noch, and Spotify “have recently made progress towards a potential resolution of the litigation.” The joint motion doesn’t elaborate upon the terms of this possible agreement – though Noch said in a statement that he’s eager to begin working towards an “excellent resolution” in earnest.

• The FSF fights for your right to repair

  It is this example of automated vehicles that served as inspiration for the FSF's animated video Fight to Repair.

  However, any technology we use could potentially be co-opted by the proprietary, DRM-controlled subscription model Tesla and the tractor manufacturers are proposing. Imagine your "smart home" having a broken lock, or worse, being broken into, and not having the control, or the simple right to repair the bug. Countless other examples can be found showing us that the key to a free future is the right to repair. We need to fight for a future in which the software used is free in order to maintain ownership and control not only over our technology, but over our lives.

• Christian Kastner: Keeping your Workstation Silent

  I've tried numerous coolers in the past, some of monstrous proportions (always thinking that more mass must be better, and reputable brands are equally good), but I was never really satisfied; hence, I was doubtful that trying yet another cooler would make a difference. I'm glad I tried the Noctua NH-D15 anyway. With some tweaking to the fan profile in the BIOS, it's totally inaudible at normal to medium workloads, and just a very gentle hum at full load—subtle enough to disappear in the background.

  For the past decade, I've also regularly purchased sound-proofed cases, but this habit appears anachronistic now. Years ago, sound-proofed cases helped contain the noise of a few HDDs. However, all of my boxes now contain NVMe drives (which, to me, are the biggest improvement to computing since CPUs going multi-core).

  On the other hand, some of my boxes now contain powerful GPUs used for GPGPU computing, and with the recent higher-end Nvidia and AMD cards all pulling in over 300W, there is a lot of heat to manage. The best way to quickly dump heat is with good airflow. Sound-proofing works against that. Its insulation restricts airflow, which ultimately causes even more noise, as the GPU's fans need to spin at very high RPMs. This is, of course, totally obvious in hindsight.

• Junichi Uekawa: It's been 20 years since I became a Debian Developer.

  It's been 20 years since I became a Debian Developer. Lots of fun things happened, and I think fondly of the team. I am no longer active for the past 10 years due to family reasons, and it's surprising that I have been inactive for that long. I still use Debian, and I still participate in the local Debian meetings.

• Michael Prokop: Revisiting 2020

  Mainly to recall what happened last year and to give thoughts and plan for the upcoming year(s) I’m once again revisiting my previous year (previous editions: 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013 + 2012).

  Due to the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, 2020 was special™ for several reasons, but overall I consider myself and my family privileged and am very grateful for that.

  In terms of IT events, I planned to attend Grazer Linuxdays and DebConf in Haifa/Israel. Sadly Grazer Linuxdays didn’t take place at all, and DebConf took place online instead (which I didn’t really participate in for several reasons). I took part in the well organized DENOG12 + ATNOG 2020/1 online meetings. I still organize our monthly Security Treff Graz (STG) meetups, and for half of the year, those meetings took place online (which worked OK-ish overall IMO).

  Only at the beginning of 2020, I managed to play Badminton (still playing in the highest available training class (in german: “Kader”) at the University of Graz / Universitäts-Sportinstitut, USI). For the rest of the year – except for ~2 weeks in October or so – the sessions couldn’t occur.

  Plenty of concerts I planned to attend were cancelled for obvious reasons, including the ones I would have played myself. But I managed to attend Jazz Redoute 2020 – Dom im Berg, Martin Grubinger in Musikverein Graz and Emiliano Sampaio’s Mega Mereneu Project at WIST Moserhofgasse (all before the corona situation kicked in). The concert from Tonč Feinig & RTV Slovenia Big Band occurred under strict regulations in Summer. At the beginning of 2020, I also visited Literaturshow “Roboter mit Senf” at Literaturhaus Graz.

• Familiars.io is a MMO monster catching game where the creatures have permadeath

  Well this is quite unusual. You've played monster catching games before but not like this. Familiars.io put a fresh spin on it all and it's quite ingenious.

  Developed as a pixel-art retro-looking browser game, it's super accessible since you can play it on pretty much anything that can run some simple graphics in a browser window. It's an MMO too, so you can join up with others and chill out. When you want to, go off and catch some monsters, engage is some PvP and perhaps find a new favourite game waiting for you.

• What we expect to come from Valve to help Linux gaming in 2021 | GamingOnLinux

  By now you've probably heard either through us in our previous article or elsewhere that Valve are cooking something up to help Linux gaming even further. We have an idea on what one part of it is.

  Valve already do quite a lot. There's the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer, the new container runtime feature to have Linux games both natively supported and Windows games in Proton run through a contained system to ensure compatibility, their work on Mesa drivers and much more.

  In Valve's review of Steam in 2020 that we covered in the link above, one thing caught our eye and has been gaining attention. Valve mentioned for 2021 they will be "putting together new ways for prospective users to get into Linux gaming and experience these improvements" so what exactly does that mean? Well, a big part of that might have already been suggested directly.

• Godot Engine - Dev snapshot: Godot 3.2.4 beta 6

  While our main focus stays on the 4.0 branch, the current stable 3.2 branch is receiving a lot of great improvements, and the upcoming 3.2.4 release is going to be packed with many new features.

Zeroshell 3.9.5 is ready. In this release TLS 1.0 has been disabled and TLS 1.2 enabled for HTTPS. This improves security and compatibility with new browser releases.

The Unix Way™ provides extreme hackability. The idea is that software should be written as tools to accomplish discrete tasks, and that it should be modular, extensible, and play well with others. It’s like software as a LEGO set — you can put the blocks together however you want, within limits, and make stuff that’s significantly cooler than any of the individual blocks alone.

Clearly this doesn’t work for all applications — things like graphics editors and web browsers don’t really lend themselves to being elegant tools that integrate well with others, right? It’s only natural that they’re bloaty walled gardens. What happens in the browser must stay in the browser, right?

But how sad is it that the one piece of software you use all day, your window into cyberspace, doesn’t play well with the rest of your system? I’d honestly never really been bothered by that fact until stumbling on TabFS. It’s an extension to Chrome that represents the tabs on your browser as if they were files on your local system — The Unix Way™. And what this means is that any other program that can read from or write to a file can open tabs, collect them, change webpages on the fly, and so on. It opens up the browser to you.

[...]

So please, if you’re working on a big software package, or even just writing a plug-in for one, do think about how you can make more of its abilities available to the casual scripter. Otherwise, it’s just plastic blocks that don’t fit with the rest of the set.

• KDE e.V. board meeting January 2021 | [bobulate]

  A few times per year, the board of KDE e.V. gets together for a board meeting. While we also meet once a week for an hour to keep track of what is happening within the organization, the longer meetings are when big tasks are undertaken and the dusty corners are tidied up.

• KDE OSM Indoor Map Demo App

  Last year KDE Itinerary got an indoor map view for airports and train stations, using a specialized map renderer and using raw OSM data as source. Improving that by contributing to upstream OSM data as well as our MapCSS styles now got a bit easier.

• Season Of KDE - The Beginning

  Hello KDE Community I am Manav Sethi an engineering student from India and I got selected for Sok this year .

  I will be working on creating an app for the Promo Team which will be used to post to multiple social media platforms at once. Since the Promo team Members spend time posting the same thing on multiple platforms this will definitely help in increasing their efficiency.

• The new beginnings- Season Of KDE

  Hello KDE community! I am Sai Moukthik Konduru, an undergrad from India. This pandemic gave me a chance to explore my interest in programming, and it has been a roller-coaster ride, to say the least. Recently I got to know about the concept of Open-source projects. The idea of collaborating and learning from the best and brightest minds across the globe has pumped me up so much that I started looking for organizations to work with. I found the KDE community thanks to a youtube video and got to know about the Season of KDE. I was not sure if I was good enough to be a part of Sok. But thanks to Devin Lin (who helped me make my first open-source contribution and is also my mentor for SoK), I am confident that I can complete this project as long as there is this huge community behind me.

I am happy to announce the availability of the new ISO 21.01.15. This new ISO comes with a clean-up of packages that include removing LibreOffice and Telegram from the default selection. We did this to bring the zfs RW live file systems to run without problem on 4GB of ram machine. We also removed the UFS full disk option from the installer. Users can still use custom partitions to setup UFS partition, but we discourage it. We also fixed the Next button's restriction in the custom partition related to some bug that people reported. We also fix the missing default locale setup and added the default setup for Linux Steam, not to forget this ISO includes kernel, userland and numerous application updates.

This report covers FreeBSD related projects for the period between October and December, and is the fourth of four planned reports for 2020.

This quarter had quite a lot of work done, including but certainly not limited to, in areas relating to everything from multiple architectures such as x86, aarch64, riscv, and ppc64 for both base and ports, over kernel changes such as vectored aio, routing lookups and multipathing, an alternative random(4) implementation, zstd integration for kernel dumps, log compression, zfs and preparations for pkg(8), along with wifi changes, changes to the toolchain like the new elfctl utility, and all the way to big changes like the git migration and moving the documentation from DocBook to Hugo/AsciiDoctor, as well as many other things too numerous to mention in an introduction.

This report with 42 entries, which don't hold the answer to life, the universe and everything, couldn't have happened without all the people doing the work also writing an entry for the report, so the quarterly team would like to thank them, as otherwise, we wouldn't have anything to do.

Please note that the deadline for submissions covering the period between January and March is March 31st.

We hope you'll enjoy reading as much as we enjoyed compiling it.
Daniel Ebdrup Jensen, on behalf of the quarterly team.

• Wildcards in Linux explained with 10 examples | FOSS Linux

  Wildcards, a.k.a. meta characters, are a godsend when it comes to searching for particular filenames from a heap of similarly named files. For example, by using Wildcards in Linux, you can use the ls command, rm command, or any other Linux command for that matter, on multiple files as long as they match the defined criteria.

• Set Raspberry PI Swap Memory - peppe8o

  Beside CPU, RAM is the most valuable resource in every computer. It is where data are stored for running programs and it is one the most important resource for applications managing a big amount of data. Raspberry PI Swap Memory, like other linux systems, can reduce small RAM impact avoiding Out of Memory errors

• Install and Configure a Multi-Master HA Kubernetes Cluster with kubeadm, HAProxy and Keepalived on CentOS 7

  The kubeadm tool is great if you need a simple way to deploy Kubernetes, and integrate it into provisioning systems such as Ansible. I use Ansible a lot nowadays, but before I got to the point of automating my Kubernetes homelab, I had to do it by hand. You can’t automate what you don’t understand.

  As we will be deploying three Kubernetes control plane nodes, we need to deploy a kube-apiserver load balancer in front of them. The load balancer distributes traffic to all healthy control plane nodes in its target list. HAProxy is my homelab load balancer of choice, and we will configure it with Keepalived to provide node redundancy. If one of the HAProxy servers becomes unavailable, the other one will serve traffic.

  We will use three KVM hosts to deploy resources. The goal is to sustain data and maintain service in the event of a loss of a (single) hypervisor host.

• How to Find a Directory in Linux

  Looking for a specific directory in your Linux file system? Fortunately, you have many search tools at your disposal. We'll look at several easy-to-use options, and how to use them to search for folders efficiently.

• How to Install and Use Terraform on Ubuntu 20.04 - LinuxBuz

  Terraform is an open-source software tool created by Hashicorp. It is used to automate and manage your infrastructure, your platform and services that run on that platform. It uses a declarative language that means you don't have to define every step of how this automation and management is done. With Terraform, you can create a VPS, AWS users and permissions, spin up servers and install the application on servers.

• Transition from Thunderbird to Mutt

  I was going OK with Thunderbird and enigmail(though it have many problems). Normally I go through changelogs before updating packages and rarely do a complete upgrage of my machine. Couple of days ago I did a complete upgrade of system which updated my Thunderbird to latest version and throwing of enigmail plugin for using their native openPGP support. There is a blog from Mozilla which I should’ve read earlier. Thunderbird’s builtin openPGP functionality is still in experimental, atleast not ready for my workflow. I could’ve downgrade to version 68. But I chose to move to my secondary MUA, mutt. I was using mutt for emails and newsletters that I check twice in a year a so.

  So I started configuring mutt to handle my big mailboxes. It took three evenings to configure mutt to my workflow. Though the basic setup can be done in less than an hour it is the small nitpicks consumed much of my time. Currently I have isync to pull and keep mails offline. Mutt to read, msmtp to send, abook as the email address book and urlview to see the links in mail. I am still learning notmuch and virtual mailbox ways to filter.

• Setting up Tomcat 9.0.41 && mariadb-server 10.5 on Debian Bullseye/sid

  Setup Tomcat via original tar.gz ball and JDK 11 allow to deploy "war" archive been built for Web Servlet Application from http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/295844/index.html . Thus CRUD Server side Java Apps might be moved on Debian Bullseye/sid in 3-5 minutes .

MuseScore, free open-source sheet music player and editor, released the new major version 3.6 with many new features, improvements and bug-fixes.

• Thomson Path Android TVs Launched in India in 42-Inch and 43-Inch Variants, Sale Starts January 20

• Thomson launches Path Android TVs in 42 and 43 inches, prices start at ₹19,999

• Android Powers Some of the Best TVs We’ve Seen — These 4 Are Worth Your Time

• ALDI selling 2 smart Android TV powered TV’s next Saturday 23rd Jan

• Google reportedly requires new Android TV devices support AV1 video decoding

• This massive 100-inch 4K Android Laser TV is discounted by $2,600 right now!

• Doogee S96Pro: Android 10 + night vision

• itel Vision 1 Pro with HD+ display, Android 10 Go, and 4000mAh battery launched in India

• [Update: Jan. 16] Realme 7 Pro & Narzo 20 Realme UI 2.0 (Android 11) update: Here's what we know so far

• OnePlus 7/7T series Android 11 update is here as custom ROMs

• [Update: January 16] OxygenOS 11 (Android 11) update for OnePlus 7 series: Here's what we know

• Xperia 1 and Xperia 5 getting Android 11 update

• Sony Xperia 1 and Xperia 5 start receiving stable Android 11 update

• Best Android app deals of the day: Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, iPoe Collections, more

• Google is testing a bottom bar for its in-app browser on Android

• A warning for Android users to instantly remove these malicious apps from their smartphones which carry the dangerous type of malware

• Here’s how an encrypted, locked Android and Apple phone gets bypassed

• Nokia 3.4 receiving new Android Build V1.260

Git is an open source distributed version control system which was originally designed by Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, in 2005 for Linux kernel development. This control system is widely used by the open source community, handling small to extremely large projects with an emphasis on speed and efficiency, but maintaining flexibility, scalability, and guaranteeing data integrity.

Git is one of a number of open source revision control systems available for Linux. Git is frequently regarded by many developers to be the finest version control tool available.

Most Linux distributions offer lots of secondary tools that add additional functionality. Like many things in Linux, the choice can be bamboozling. This article seeks to help identify tools which we’ve found to be very useful. They should be a good addition to maximise the benefits of using Git.

Garuda Linux is based on Arch Linux. It is provided with all major Desktop environments like KDE, GNOME, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt-kwin, Wayfire, Qtile, BSPWM, and i3wm.

On a short period, Garuda Linux is the most preferable distribution on Linux community.

So, we will walk through the Garuda KDE Installation process and feel the Garuda KDE’s Beast.

Python is a trendy programming language that comes with tons of libraries and modules. To install these libraries, you can install them using their wheel file or use any library manager.

PIP is a python library that stands for PHP Install Packages or Preferred Installer Program that helps you install, remove, and upgrade all other libraries without reinventing wheel files every time when you install new packages.

Today, we guide you on using PIP to install, reinstall, remove, and manage all other libraries with this single library.

• My ISP Is Killing My Idle SSH Sessions. Yours Might Be Too.

  We found the culprit! The connection tested after waiting slightly more than 60 minutes didn’t work, meaning they dropped the connection from their NAT table. 1 hour is too short time for them to wait – they should wait at least 2 hours and 4 minutes. I documented my findings, and sent an email to my ISP. I quickly got a response back acknowledging that this is a bug on their side, and thanking me for my research. They still haven’t fixed the problem though.

  The tcp-keepalive-test gave the same result, but strangely enough the tcp-recv-test reported all connections as working. I assume this is because I pay my ISP to have a static public IPv4 mapped to my CGN address. But then why did the server’s keepalive packages get dropped in the SSH example? I speculate that my ISP drops those because they don’t refer to a valid TCP session anymore.

  Actually they shouldn’t track my connections at all – they should just forward all packages, and only translate the source or destination IP. But that’s a problem for another day.

• Converting from CentOS Linux 8 to CentOS Stream - YouTube

• How to Install V Lang on Ubuntu 20.04 - Cloudbooklet

  How to Install V Lang on Ubuntu 20.04. V is a simple language to build maintainable programs. You can learn V language within 1 hour using the documentation. It is similar to Go language and improved upon some things like no null, no global state, no undefined values and many more.

  In this guide you are going to learn how to install V language on Ubuntu 20.04. This installation is tested on Google Cloud platform. So these steps will work well on other cloud hosting or VPS or dedicated servers running Ubuntu or Debian.

• How to upgrade Alpine Linux 3.12 to 3.13

  Alpine Linux version 3.13 has been released. Here is how to upgrade Alpine Linux from 3.11/3.12 to the latest stable version, 3.13 using CLI.

• How to find if a website using gzip / deflate compression using curl on Linux and Unix

• OpenSUSE install Brotli module for Nginx

  How do I install or add Brotli compression support to Nginx on OpenSUSE Linux to speed up my webpages and apps?

  Brotli is a free and open-source generic-purpose lossless compression algorithm that compresses data using various methods. It is similar in speed to deflate or gzip but offers more dense compression for Apache or Nginx web server.

  Nginx does not support Brotli, but we can install a module developed by Google called ngx_brotli to add support to Nginx. This page explains how to add or install Brotli support to Nginx on an OpenSUSE Linux server 15.2 to speed up webpages.

• How To List Disk Partitions In Linux - OSTechNix

  In this brief guide, we will see all the possible ways to find and list disk partitions in Linux and Unix-like operating systems. Before getting into the topic, let us take a quick look at what is disk partitioning and how disk partitions are named in Linux.

• How to browse the internet using Debian Terminal

  Today, we are going to talk about text-based web browsers. But you might be wondering that what’s the need for a text-based browser in today’s graphical age. There might be several reasons for it. one reason might be because some people are more Terminal savvy and they want to perform everything from their command line. Another reason might be the slow internet connection and annoying advertisements of GUI browser. So text-based browsers are the best tool that can help them enjoy a faster browser experience without any distractions.

• How to Setup and use Google Drive on Ubuntu 20.04 - Linux Shout

  Unlike Windows on Ubuntu’s latest versions such as 20.04 LTS, we don’t need to install any extra software to connect and use Google Drive account. Everything there and we just need to login to Ubuntu using a Google account.

  One of the popular public cloud services to store data is Google Drives because of free 15 GB storage. Most of the time to use that we visit Google Drive’s website to upload and download files, however, you can save your time by access G – Drive storage directly on your machine like any other network drive. However, there is no official client from Google for Linux systems, well, still we can use it using the default GNOME Online Accounts feature available on Ubuntu and other Linux systems.

2020 has featured a major increase in commits to the ::gentoo repository, and especially commits from non-developers. The overall number of commits has grown from 73400 to 104500 (by 42%), while the number of commits made by non-developers has grown from 5700 (8% of total) to 11000 (10.5% of total). The latter group has featured 333 unique authors in 2019, and 391 in 2020.

The ::guru repository has thrived in 2020. While 2019 left it with merely 7 contributors and a total of 86 commits, 2020 has featured 55 different contributors and 2725 commits. GURU is a user-curated repository with a trusted user model. Come join us!

There was also a major increase in Bugzilla activity. 2020 featured almost 25500 bugs reported, compared to 15000 in 2019. This is probably largely thanks to Agostino Sarubbo’s new tinderboxing effort. The total number of bugs closed in 2020 was 23500, compared to 15000 in 2019.

Also; Distribution Kernels: module rebuilds, better ZFS support and UEFI executables

• This week in KDE: text reflow in Konsole!

  This week a huge new feature landed in Konsole: it now reflows the text when you resize the window! This feature can be turned off if you don’t like it, but comes on by default. It works really well. Thanks very much to Carlos Alves and Tomaz Canabrava for this work! It will be released in Konsole 21.04.

• KDE Will Reflow Text In Konsole On Window Resizing, Kirigami Icons Now Use Less RAM - Phoronix

  KDE developers have remained very busy in the new year working to improve their open-source desktop stack. 

  Following last week's near total rewrite of the KWin compositing code there has been an interesting batch of new improvements this week. Some of this week's highlights include: 

  - KDE's Konsole now re-flows text when resizing the window. The functionality is enabled by default (but there is an option to disable it).