today's howtos

• Lossless Image Optimization/Compression with Trimage on Ubuntu

• How To Install Java 12 On RHEL/CentOS and Fedora

• How to Install Apache on Debian 10

• How to Install Grav CMS with Nginx and Let's Encrypt on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• How To Configure AWS CLI

• Useful Tools To Find And Delete Duplicate Files In Linux

• How to Configure a Router as an IoT Firewall to Protect All Your IoT Devices

• Write a Ping Sweeper in Bash

• How to fix the Realtek 8812AU WiFi card on Linux

• How to switch between speakers and USB gaming headset on Linux

• Convert & rename all filenames to lower case

Elementary OS is the latest group to ditch Medium for their own blog

Elementary OS – a Linux distribution (distro) built on top of the large, company-backed giant Ubuntu – is a mom-and-pop store by comparison. But it's also one that's managed to capture the attention of even some seasoned Linux users thanks to its focus on user interface (UI) and even user experience (UX) – something often lacking from the more spartan distros. With their focus on icon and UI themes sometimes suspiciously reminiscent of Apple's interfaces – the Elementary OS team have also earned themselves something of a label of “hipsters” in the community. Hence, their decision some years ago to communicate news about the project by hosting their blog on another largely “hipster” online venue – Medium – was little surprise. What's somewhat surprising is the about-face that the project is now making in leaving Medium for the sake of building their own blog hosted on GitHub Pages – using the static generator Jekyll.

Linux Foundation and Intel: Confidential Computing Consortium, OpenGL 4.6 Support For Mesa 19.2 and More

• New Cross-Industry Effort to Advance Computational Trust and Security for Next-Generation Cloud and Edge Computing

  The Linux Foundation today announced the intent to form the Confidential Computing Consortium, a community dedicated to defining and accelerating the adoption of confidential computing. Companies committed to this work include Alibaba, Arm, Baidu, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Swisscom and Tencent. Across industries computing is moving to span multiple environments, from on premises to public cloud to edge. As companies move these workloads to different environments, they need protection controls for sensitive IP and workload data and are increasingly seeking greater assurances and more transparency of these controls. Current approaches in cloud computing address data at rest and in transit but encrypting data in use is considered the third and possibly most challenging step to providing a fully encrypted lifecycle for sensitive data. Confidential computing will enable encrypted data to be processed in memory without exposing it to the rest of the system and reduce exposure for sensitive data and provide greater control and transparency for users.

• The Linux Foundation, Intel & Co Form The Confidential Computing Consortium

  In kicking off the Open Source Summit that has returned to San Diego, the Linux Foundation has announced the formation of the Confidential Computing Consortium in collaboration with Intel and other companies. The initial batch of companies forming the Confidential Computing Consortium include Alibaba, Arm, Baidu, Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Red Hat, Swisscom, and Tencent. This consortium will focus on providing greater transparency and control over user data, reduce exposure to sensitive data, and other protections by means of open-source tooling and hardware advancements around trusted execution environments.

• Intel's OpenGL Linux Driver Now Has OpenGL 4.6 Support For Mesa 19.2

  Two years after the OpenGL 4.6 specification was announced, Intel's open-source OpenGL Linux driver is now officially advertising the support after today landing the remaining SPIR-V enablement work. For the better part of the past two years the Intel OpenGL Linux drivers were held up from having GL 4.6 due to the ARB_gl_spirv / ARB_spirv_extensions extensions for better interoperability with Vulkan. But today those extensions are now crossed off the list and OpenGL 4.6 is finally in Mesa core with Intel's i965/Iris drivers being the first.

• Intel Launches 10th Gen "Comet Lake" Laptop CPUs For Laptops & 2-in-1s

  Earlier this month Intel announced 11 Icelake CPUs for laptops and 2-in1s under their 10th Gen CPU line-up. Today the company announced the 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs also for 2-in-1s and laptops.

Debian and Ubuntu Leftovers

• Joey Hess: releasing two haskell libraries in one day: libmodbus and git-lfs

  The first library is a libmodbus binding in haskell. There are a couple of other haskell modbus libraries, but none that support serial communication out of the box. I've been using a python library to talk to my solar charge controller, but it is not great at dealing with the slightly flakey interface. The libmodbus C library has features that make it more robust, and it also supports fast batched reads. So a haskell interface to it seemed worth starting while I was doing laundry, and then for some reason it seemed worth writing a whole bunch more FFIs that I may never use, so it covers libmodbus fairly extensively. 660 lines of code all told. Writing a good binding to a C library has art to it. I've seen ones that are so close you feel you're writing C and not haskell. On the other hand, some are so far removed from the underlying library that its documentation does not carry over at all. I tried to strike a balance. Same function names so the extensive libmodbus documentation is easy to refer to while using it, but plenty of haskell data types so you won't mix up the parity with the stop bits.

• Misc Developer News (#49)

  The news are collected on https://wiki.debian.org/DeveloperNews
  Please contribute short news about your work/plans/subproject.
  
  In this issue:
   + Self-service buildd givebacks
   + Removal of the mips architecture
   + Superficial package testing
   + Debian Developers Reference now maintained as ReStructuredText
   + Scope of debian-mentors broadened to help with infrastructure questions
   + Hiding package tracker action items
  
  Self-service buildd givebacks
  -----------------------------
  
   Philipp Kern has created[1] an *experimental* service that allows Debian
   members to perform self-service retries of failed package builds (aka
   give-backs). This service aims to reduce the time it takes for give-back
   requests to be processed, which was done manually by the wanna-build
   admins until now. The service is authenticated using the Debian Single
   Signon[2] service. Debian members are still expected to act responsibly
   when looking at build failures; do your due diligence and try reproducing
   the issue on a porterbox first. Access to this service is logged and logs
   will be audited by the admins.
  

• Debian Guts Support For Old MIPS CPUs

  Debian developers have decided to remove the 32-bit MIPS big-endian architecture. Debian will continue to maintain MIPSEL and MIPS64EL but the older 32-bit big-endian variant of MIPS will be no more. Debian developers decided to drop the older 32-bit BE support due to it being limited to 2GB of virtual address space and it being one of the remaining holdouts of big endian architectures for Debian. Not to mention, there hasn't been much interest in the older MIPS 32-bit BE target in a while either.

• Alpha: Self-service buildd givebacks

  Builds on Debian's build farm sometimes fail transiently. Sometimes those failures are legitimate flakes, for instance when an in-progress build happens to exhaust its resources because of other builds on the same machine. Until now, you always needed to mail the buildd, wanna-build admins or the Release Team directly in order to get the builds re-queued. As an alpha trial I implemented self-service givebacks as a web script. As SSO for Debian developers is now a thing, it is trivial to add authentication in a way that a role account can use to act on your behalf. While at work this would all be an RPC service, I figured that a little CGI script would do the job just as well.

• Linux Mint 19.2 Cinnamon Edition – Ships With Cinnamon 4.2 and Uses Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Package Base

  Linux Mint 19.2 has been released and announced by Linux Mint Project, now available to download which ship with the Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce editions both for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures. It’s powered by the Linux 4.15 kernel and uses the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS package base, which will be supported for five years until 2023. Linux Mint 19.2 Cinnamon edition features latest version of Cinnamon desktop 4.2 with new features and updates. Although the amount of RAM consumed by Cinnamon largely depends on the video driver, Cinnamon uses significantly less RAM than before. The application menu is faster and it now identifies and distinguishes duplicates. If two applications have the same name, the menu will show more information about them. Scrollbars are now configurable and Nemo file manager support pin file and folder .

• Jupyter looks to distro-agnostic packaging for the democratisation of installation

  When users of your application range from high school students to expert data scientists, it’s often wise to avoid any assumptions about their system configurations. The Jupyter Notebook is popular with a diverse user base, enabling the creation and sharing of documents containing live code, visualisations, and narrative text. The app uses processes (kernels) to run interactive code in different programming languages and send output back to the user. Filipe Fernandes has a key responsibility for Jupyter packaging and ease of installation. At the 2019 Snapcraft Summit in Montreal, he gave us his impressions of snaps as a tool to improve the experience for all concerned. “I’m a packager and a hacker, and I’m also a Jupyter user. I find Jupyter to be great as a teaching tool. Others use it for data cleaning and analysis, numerical simulation and modelling, or machine learning, for example. One of the strengths of Jupyter is that it is effectively language agnostic. I wanted Jupyter packaging to be similar, distro-agnostic, if you like.” Filipe had heard about snaps a while back, but only really discovered their potential after he received an invitation to the Snapcraft Summit and noticed that Microsoft Visual Studio Code had recently become available as a snap. The ease of use of snaps was a big factor for him. “I like things that just work. I often get hauled in to sort out installation problems for other users – including members of my own family! It’s great to be able to tell them just to use the snap version of an application. It’s like, I snap my fingers and the install problems disappear!”