After being in Early Access since February 2020, SouthPAW Games have now released their head-swapping rogue-lite action platformer Skul: The Hero Slayer.

Taking place in a world where it seems that things are a bit backwards. The heroes appear to be going on a rampage, enslaving other creatures to help with their dirty work and destroy the demons once and for all. Everyone has been taken prisoner, except for you, a little little Skul. With action comparable to the likes of Dead Cells which I adore, and Hollow Knight, this is a rogue-lite you're going to want to keep on playing.

You're no ordinary fighter though, as you can swap your regular boring old skul with another. When you do this, you gain some pretty impressive abilities and there's quite a lot of different skul's to find. This makes it quite unique because it can end up being very different on each run.

[...]

I should note that the current build on Linux has an issue of a black screen instead of the main menu, although all it does it get you to click a button to load back into the game which does work so it's not a big problem. I've let the developer know.

There's a new release candidate available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.5.4-rc from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release likely around this coming Tuesday.

Tor 0.4.5.4-rc is the second release candidate in its series. It fixes several bugs present in previous releases.

A post on the Debian developer list about issues installing the operating system on a laptop sparked a debate about whether Debian's free software principles have become a blocker to adoption.

Wanting to convert his laptop from Windows 10 to Debian, Dan Pal clicked "Download" on the Linux distro's homepage. It did not install because his wireless chipset was not supported. He succeeded eventually by downloading a DVD image, but had to hunt for it. "The current policy of hiding other versions of Debian is limiting the adoption of your OS by people like me who are interested in moving from Windows 10," he said.

There is a distributable driver for this wireless card but it is non-free, which means it is not officially part of Debian. It is a good principle, but works against users if it completely blocks installation.

The issue has been debated before. "I idly wonder if we could call it firmware and call it a day. I tried to propose that a bunch of times and was not successful," said a reply to the post.

Unlike discord, Matrix doesn't make you pay to use your own custom emotes or stickers, you just need to go and host them yourself. Luckily doing so is surprisignly [sic] easy and can be done for free.

Etebase is a set of client libraries and a server for building end-to-end encrypted applications. Tom Hacohen, who previously appeared on FLOSS Weekly episode 524 to talk about securely syncing contacts, calendars, tasks and notes with his product EteSync, is back to talk about his new baby: Etebase. This is a great discussion as more and more consumers and users are interested in encryption and securing their private information across all platforms they use today.

I like round-number milestones. Especially if they allow one to showcase nice things. For example, sometime ago, I managed to revitalize my fairly ancient LG laptop by installing MX Linux on it. This restored a great deal of speed and nimbleness to the system, allowing it to remain modern and relevant for a bit longer.

Now that my HP machine has reached its double-digit age, I thought of upgrading its Linux system. At the moment, the machine dual-boots Windows 7 (indeed, relax) and Kubuntu 20.04. Things work reasonably well. Spec-wise, the 2010 laptop comes with a first-gen i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM, 7,200rpm hard disk, and Nvidia graphics. Technically, not bad at all, even today. Well, I decided to try some modern distro flavors, to see what gives.

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Trawling through the online forums, I've found a few other mentions of similar problems. Of course, almost every legacy system issue is rather unique, so I can't draw any concrete conclusions here. But it does feel like Linux is leaving old stuff behind. 'Tis a paradox really. On one hand, Linux is well-known for being able to run (and pride itself for being able to do so) on ancient, low-end hardware. On the other hand, providing and maintaining support for an infinite amount of ancient systems is difficult.

And if you do recall my older content, I had a somewhat similar problem on my T42 laptop. Back when it had its tenth birthday, I booted it up after a long pause, and tried using Linux on it yet again. And I had problems finding Linux drivers for its ATI card - Windows drivers were easily and readily available. The problems aren't identical, but they are definitely indicative. Oh well. I may continue testing and playing with the old HP Pavilion, but I might not be able to really show you how well it carries into modern age. Hopefully, you found something useful in this wee sad article.

Today I actually also attended the super low key design team video chat, which involved a brain storm session for Fedora 35 that was exciting!

SUSE provides public cloud customers with PAYG (Pay-As-You-Go) images on AWS, Azure, and GCP. Instances created from these images connect to a managed update infrastructure. So if you need to update your instances with the latest software updates or install that needed package using zypper, usually you can be assured that the underlying repositories are there with no further hassles. There are exceptions, though. Instances configured to utilize a proxy server or traverse firewalls, NAT gateways, proxies, security rules, Zscalar, or other security and network devices may run into problems. The purpose of this post is to address some of the more commonly occurring configuration issues seen with public cloud environments.

This is the fifth blog of a series that provides insight into SUSE Linux Enterprise product development. You will get a first-hand overview of SUSE, the SLE products, what the engineering team does to tackle the challenges coming from the increasing pace of open source projects, and the new requirements from our customers, partners and business-related constraints.

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Based on our joint schedule, openSUSE Leap and SLE have a predictable release time frame: a release every 12 months and a 6 months support overlap for the former and new release, thus when the time is ready a snapshot of openSUSE Tumbleweed is made and both openSUSE and SLE will use this snapshot to create our next distributions versions.
With this picture, we are not talking about our distribution per se yet, it’s only a pool of packages sources that we will use to build our respective distribution. But before going into how it’s built, note that it’s a simplified view because of course, there is always some back and forth between for instance openSUSE Leap/SLE and openSUSE Tumbleweed; it’s not just a one-way sync because during the development phase of our distributions, bugs are found and of course fixes are submitted back to Factory so openSUSE Tumbleweed also receives fixes from the process. For the sake of simplifying the picture we did not add these contributions as arrows.
Also at SUSE, Open source is in our genes so we have always contributed to openSUSE but, since 2017, our SUSE Release Team had enforce a rule called “Factory First Policy“, which force code submissions for SLE to be pushed to Factory first before it lands in SLE. This is a continuation of the “Upstream First” principle on the distribution level. It reduces maintenance effort and leverages the community.

Gabe Newell of Valve Software (Steam) recently spoke to 1 NEWS in New Zealand about everything that has been going on and teased a few fun details. For those who didn't know, Newell has been staying in New Zealand since early 2020 and decided to stay after a holiday when COVID-19 got much worse.

Newell continues to talk very highly of New Zealand, even somewhat jokingly mentioning that some Valve staffers appear to strongly want to move their work over there now too. Newell mentioned why there's no reason other game companies couldn't move to New Zealand, and joked how they're a producer of "not-stupidium" seemingly referring to how well New Zealand has dealt with COVID-19.

[...]

Nice to see they continue to keep Linux in their sights for games too with all their recent games (Artifact, Underlords and Half-Life: Alyx) all having Linux builds, although Alyx is not directly mentioned on the store page for Linux it is available.

Firaxis has confirmed the next DLC that forms part of the New Frontier Pass for Civilization VI will be releasing on January 28. Here's some highlights of what's to come.

While the full details are yet to be released, Firaxis did a developer update video to tease some of it. There's going to be a new civilization with Vietnam joining the world, two new leaders for existing civilizations (China and Mongolia), a new "Monopolies and Corporations" game mode with expanded economic options which sounds really quite interesting.

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 666 for the week of January 10 – 16, 2021.

SimpleMail is a small Qt library for sending mails, this release makes sure it compiles fine with Qt6, and has some small issues fixed.

I thought this would give me a bit of work but was mostly changing CMakeLists.txt and including one header.

But how does it do all this? By periodically pulling IP addresses from well-known and well-respected spammer-IPs databases, where bad IP addresses are frequently logged (dangerous IPs reported by internet users) and stored.

Then adding all collected IP addresses to the PF firewall (as an IP-table) that is already active on your server (hopefully?), and through that way, prevents their access to your server. So sort of works with the PF firewall.

The blocklists are pulled from quality, trusted sources. The 'Spamhaus', 'Firehol', 'Emerging Threats' and 'Binary Defense' block lists are used as they are popular, regularly updated lists of the internet's most egregious offenders.

We showcase a tool that will change your Linux game.

Plus our thoughts on the recent Btrfs FUD, a bunch of feedback, and a handy pick.

Much has been written and broadcast about the recent actions from Google and Apple to remove the Parler app from their app stores. Apps get removed from these app stores all the time, but more than almost any past move by these companies, this one has brought the power Big Tech companies wield over everyone’s lives to the minds of every day people. Journalists have done a good job overall in presenting the challenges and concerns with this move, as well as addressing the censorship and anti-trust issues at play. If you want a good summary of the issues, I found Cory Doctorow’s post on the subject a great primer.

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This is part of the article where Android users feel smug. After all, while much more of their data gets captured and sold than on iOS, in exchange they still (sometimes) have the option of rooting their phones and (sometimes) “sideloading” applications (installing applications outside of Google’s App Store). If Google bans an app, all a user has to do is follow a list of complicated (and often sketchy) procedures, sometimes involving disabling protections or installing sketchy software on another computer, and they can wrench back a bit of control over their phones. Of course in doing so they are disabling security features that are the foundation for the rest of Android security, at which point many Android security experts will throw up their hands and say “you’re on your own.”

[...]

The Librem 5 phone runs the same PureOS operating system as Librem laptops, and it features the PureOS Store which provides a curated list of applications known to work well on the phone’s screen. Even so, you can use the search function to find the full list of all available software in PureOS. After all, you might want that software to be available when you dock your Librem 5 to a larger screen.

We aim to provide software in the PureOS store that respects people’s freedom, security, and privacy and will audit software that’s included in the store with that in mind. That way people have a convenient way to discover software that not only works well on the phone but also respects them. Yet you are still free to install any third-party software outside of the PureOS Store that works on the phone, even if it’s proprietary software we don’t approve of.

The talks, first reported by The Information, have been ongoing since at least last fall, sources tell to The Hollywood Reporter, and ultimately could end up taking several different forms. Regardless, it’s clear that Tim Cook-led Apple — after spending the last two years watching rival-in-music-streaming Spotify invest hundreds of millions of dollars to align itself with some of the most prolific producers and most popular personalities in podcasting — is no longer content sitting on the sideline. “There’s a huge opportunity sitting under their nose with 1.4 million iOS devices globally,” says Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives, “and they don’t want to lose out.” Apple declined to comment about its podcasting plans.

Much of the growth of the podcasting industry over the last decade can be traced back to Apple and its former CEO Steve Jobs, who in 2005 declared that he was “bringing podcasting mainstream” by adding support for the medium to iTunes. A few years later, the company introduced a separate Podcasts app that quickly became the leading distribution platform for the medium. But Apple, which netted $275 billion in sales in fiscal 2020, has refrained from turning podcasting — still a relatively small industry that the Interactive Advertising Bureau estimated would bring in nearly $1 billion in U.S. advertising revenue last year — into a moneymaking venture.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and The Blacks In Technology Foundation, the largest community of Black technologists globally, today announced the launch of a new scholarship program to help more Black individuals get started with an IT career.

Blacks in Technology will award 50 scholarships per quarter to promising individuals. The Linux Foundation will provide each of these recipients with a voucher to register for any Linux Foundation administered certification exam at no charge, such as the Linux Foundation Certified IT Associate, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator and more. Associated online training courses will also be provided at no cost when available for the exam selected. Each recipient will additionally receive one-on-one coaching with a Blacks In Technology mentor each month to help them stay on track in preparing for their exam.

While everything I have seen served via Gemini is friendly and sociable, the technical barriers of what-is-a-command-line and how-do-I-use-one are a fence put up that keep out the riffraff. Certainly, you can walk around the corner and go through the gate, but ultimately the geminiverse is lovely because it is underpopulated, slower-paced, and literate. It is difficult enough to access that those who can use it can be welcoming without worrying its smallness will be compromised.

The tragedy is that I don’t think many of its denizens would claim that they only want to hear from technical, educated people, but in order to use a small [Internet], an August [Internet], they have let the fence keep out anyone else.