Open-source News

3 ways to Install Discord on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux  Linux Shout

Linux Fu: The Chrome OS Flex Virtualization  Hackaday

Linux Fu: The Chrome OS Flex Virtualization  Hackaday

MX Linux makes sharing folders with Samba as simple as it gets  TechRepublic

MX Linux makes sharing folders with Samba as simple as it gets  TechRepublic

Weston 11.0 Alpha is out as the newest feature milestone for this reference Wayland compositor that has seen quite an uptick in development activity this year...

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5965WX Benchmarks Show Some Speedups With Linux 6.0 Git  Phoronix

With AMD EPYC showing some nice gains on Linux 6.0, I've been eager to begin testing Linux 6.0 on more systems especially now that the v6.0 merge window is winding down... With now having the shiny new AMD Ryzen Threadripper 5965WX, I decided to take this high-end 24-core chip for a run with Linux 6.0 Git to see how it performs over Linux 5.19 stable...

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop  The Register

CISA warns of UnRAR security flaw affecting Linux systems  BetaNews

The EFI changes were merged last week for the Linux 6.0 cycle and contain two notable improvements on the ARM64 side...

IPFS as the "InterPlanetary File-System" protocol for peer-to-peer network support in decentralized file sharing as a distributed file-system is now supported with FFmpeg 5.1. IPFS developers at Protocol Labs are also looking at expanding support for this protocol to other open-source projects...

The Linux kernel continues making preparations around the very exciting Compute Express Link (CXL) thanks to the work of Intel engineers...

The NFS server improvements have been merged for the ongoing Linux 6.0 merge window...

"CC_OPTIMIZE_FOR_PERFORMANCE_O3" Performance Tunable Dropped In Linux 6.0  Phoronix

Our favorite Linux replacements for antiquated open source tools Opensource.com Wed, 08/10/2022 - 03:00 1 reader likes this 1 reader likes this

Here at Opensource.com, we thought it would be interesting to survey some of our authors to get a feel for what tools they feel are antiquated (but perhaps still useful!) and what they think of the replacement utilities. What follows is a series of responses and a bit of fun, too.

We sent out the following prompt:

• Have you discovered some of your favorite tools have become outdated or deprecated? Or maybe you just switched it up for something new?
• What do you use now? Tell us a little about how you feel it is helpful to have made the switch.

Firewalls

A biggie for me is iptables. I sweated blood learning how to use iptables, and ebtables, and arptables, and how to manipulate MAC addresses, and more. I built dozens of firewalls around scripts to set up rulesets, and I eventually got pretty good at it. Now nftables makes all that obsolete. The fun never stops. I still think somebody with marketing clout could make software-defined boundaries work. —Greg Scott

+1 on iptables

I have been using iptables since I first learned Linux 25+ years ago. The newest tool is firewalld, but that and all other firewall tools I have seen for Red Hat-based distros are still based on and wrap around the kernel-level netfilter modules. I find the firewalld tool creates huge sets of rules that don't do anything more for me than the older iptables. I am sure some large environments need those complex rulesets, but they could also be implemented using iptables or scripts like Greg's.

I do like nmcli, but it is taking me some time to learn it. In fact, I prefer it to the old ifcfg and ip commands. It feels more integrated into the system than the older ones. But I do like the older ifcfg- interface configuration files. Those are easy to create and understand. They don't require the INI-style format that requires section headers. In fact, the old-style files are not even sequence sensitive. —David Both

ipchains?

To further underscore this example, are you sure you weren't using ipchains back then? (The ipfirewall and ipfwadm successor, ipchains wasn't supplanted by iptables until around 2001.) —Jeremy Stanley

In response to Jeremy. ^^

My very first firewall was ipchains, circa late 1999. Everything after that was iptables. Back then, I had to build my own kernel to get all the netfilter modules I needed. Modern conveniences like flat-panel monitors and DSL were science fiction in those days. And don't even think about fiber. I had to ride a horse uphill through blizzards every day to visit customers. And then it was uphill back home, too. —Greg Scott

More Linux resources Linux commands cheat sheet Advanced Linux commands cheat sheet Free online course: RHEL technical overview Linux networking cheat sheet SELinux cheat sheet Linux common commands cheat sheet What are Linux containers? Our latest Linux articles Text editing

I just have to ask—who's still using troff (groff) and who has moved on to... hmm, shall we say, LibreOffice or AsciiDoctor or...?

I have a dear friend who continues with a troff-based product on his Sun SPARCStation V. —Chris Hermansen

[ Related read Old-school technical writing with groff ]

Editing man pages

^^ In response to Chris

Anyone maintaining man pages! Though lots of people are probably generating those from other markup these days. Some folks (like me) do still compose or edit the troff files directly instead. —Jeremy Stanley

Markup stacks

There are always people who use older things, but there are superior tools nowadays. I wouldn't use LibreOffice for the kind of stuff you'd use troff/groff for—if you are writing at that level, you probably depend on a text editor you know well, source-control for managing your inputs, and you are comfortable with markup languages.

That means you want to use a markup stack. There are many, including:

• Sphinx + ReST + GitHub Actions + GitHub Pages
• MkDocs + Markdown + GitLab CI + GitLab Pages
• Nikola + Jupyter Notebooks + Jenkins + (AWS S3 + CloudFront)

What is common to all the stacks is:

• A thing that pulls different input files into one coherent whole (Sphinx/MkDocs/Nikola)
• A reasonably high-level text markup language (ReST/Markdown/MD embedded in Jupyter Notebooks)
• A CI pipeline to transform those into the output format (usually a tree of HTML files, but sometimes a PDF or something)
• A place where people can download the published version (GitHub Pages, GitLab Pages, AWS S3 + CloudFront)

I'll note that these are pretty much orthogonal choices. Any reasonable generator can take any input (even MkDocs, for which it is least true, has the mkdocs-gen-files plugin so you can use Pandoc to convert stuff to Markdown). Any reasonable CI can run any generator and push to any target.

So even with the list above, there are 81 stacks available.

(Sphinx/MkDocs/Nikola) x (ReST/Markdown/Jupyter Notebooks) x (GHA/GitLab CI/Jenkins) x (GHP/GLP/S3+CF)

Because Pandoc understands troff (ms/man), you can plug troff+ms or troff+man into the "markup" slot if you really want to. You can probably install Jenkins on the Sun SPARCStation V and keep using the same machine and format. But why? :)

There's probably an article for OSDC there: "How I converted troff docs to a modern stack using mkdocs+mkdocs-gen-files and GitLab CI." —Moshe Zadka

Other groff examples

Actually, I'm writing an article right now about "Old school technical writing with groff" (part of a larger series I'm writing about tech writing tools). I don't use groff for serious tech writing, but it's in my toolkit of things I learned and will probably never forget. And I review groff when I teach "Writing with Digital Technologies."

While writing the article, I recalled that when I installed Linux in 1993, there weren't any writing apps on Linux. No word processors, just groff and LaTeX. I used LaTeX to write my physics lab reports (because it could do math easily) and groff to write papers for other classes (because I could opt to print to a line printer instead, which I thought was a clever way to make my paper look longer). If I wanted to write with a word processor, I had to dual-boot back to DOS to run WordPerfect or Galaxy Write. StarOffice came out for Linux in 1996. I bought StarOffice.

Interestingly, Brian Kernighan still writes all his books in groff. "Unix: A History and a Memoir" (2020) and "Understanding the Digital World" (2021) were both completely processed in groff. —Jim Hall

Revisiting the fmt command

I use the fmt command a lot these days. It's really handy for a ton of stuff. If you write Readme documentation (or other docs) in plain text, you know the pain when you insert some new text in the middle of a line, and then the lines don't end at the same column. You can run fmt to clean that up.

More commonly, I'm on an email list where list members prefer to receive emails in plain text, so my email client is set for plain text most of the time. If I need to reply to someone's list email (and they didn't send it in plain text), a paragraph is usually just one long line, and my email client doesn't correctly line-wrap when I reply. It's just > at the start of a long sentence.

So I do this:

$ fmt -p '>' > /tmp/f
{copy & paste ">" quoted text}
^D

And then:

$ cat /tmp/f

And then copy and paste the result into my email. —Jim Hall

Changes to bootloaders

Just when your foo is sufficiently sharp, there are reasonable odds the tools will be replaced.

LILO to GRUB was painful until my GRUB-foo reached a sufficient level. GRUB2 is awesome, but a new learning curve.

Muscle memory is also an issue — ipconfig, nslookup, and netstat are on auto-pilot. Plus, if you're using other Linux environments, like Tiny Core Linux, you might not always have the latest and greatest tools.

Switching from if-cfg-style scripts to nmcli is the new learning curve, so this never really ends. —Steven Ellis

[ Related read 6 deprecated Linux commands and the tools you should be using instead ]

Quick FIPS set up

Often things change for the better; my two cents. The question was asked, Have you discovered some of your favorite tools have become outdated or deprecated? Or maybe you just switched it up for something new?

A colleague recently asked me how to enable FIPS on Linux, and it's something I had not done in a while. I remember how arcane this process was, which involved enabling a repo, installing a package (dracut-fips), running commands (dracut) to regenerate initramfs, modifying the GRUB bootloader config file (fips=1), etc.

Also, What do you use now? Tell us a little about how you feel it is helpful to have made the switch.

Luckily on RHEL9, the above has been replaced by the fips-mode-setup command with two handy flags, --check and --setup. That's it! Run those commands, reboot the system, and your machine boots up with FIPS enabled. Super easy! —Gaurav Kamathe

Old and comfortable

Clearly, both the fun of open source and the strong opinions are still present, as is the variety of tools and the freedom to choose what works best for you. Perhaps these tools and others like them are old—even antiquated—but they may still serve a purpose. Some of these older utilities inspired more modern solutions without losing their own inherent value. Finally, there's something to be said for user comfort and familiarity. With open source, all those hours spent developing your foo need not be lost just because some vendor decided it was time for a new release.

We asked our community of contributors what open source tools they are using in place of those that feel outdated or antiquated.

Image by:

Opensource.com

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Create beautiful PDFs in LaTeX Jim Hall Wed, 08/10/2022 - 03:00 1 reader likes this 1 reader likes this

The LaTeX document preparation system has an interesting history. When programmer Don Knuth wrote his first book, The Art of Computer Programming, in 1968, it was produced using an old-style printing press method. When he published the second edition in 1976, the publisher had moved to modern phototypesetting.

Knuth was unhappy with how the new edition looked. Addressing the problem from a programmer's perspective, Knuth decided to create his own text processing system so his future books could be formatted to look the same way, for every book in the series. And so it was that Don Knuth wrote the first version of TeX in 1978.

A few years later, Leslie Lamport created a set of macros that help authors write complex documents more easily. Lamport's macro extensions, LaTeX, essentially extends TeX to easily produce all kinds of documents. For example, many academic organizations use LaTeX to publish journals and proceedings.

Writing documents in LaTeX

It's easy to learn the basics of LaTeX by writing a short article. Let's start by borrowing from the About Opensource.com page to create this sample input file:

$ cat about.tex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

Opensource.com is a premier, daily publication focused on
open source and Linux tutorials, stories, and resources.

We're a diverse and inviting group, made up of staff
editors, Correspondents, contributors, and readers. We
value differences in skills, talents, backgrounds, and
experiences. There are a few different ways to get involved
as a reader or a writer.

\end{document}

Like other document formatting programs, LaTeX collects words and fills paragraphs. That means you can add new text in the middle of a paragraph and not worry about how the final document will look. As long as you don't add a blank line in the middle of a paragraph, LaTeX creates fully justified paragraphs. When it finds a blank line, LaTeX starts a new paragraph.

LaTeX needs a few control statements to define the document. Every LaTeX document should start with a declaration of the document's class. LaTeX supports several kinds of documents, including letters, books, and articles. For this example, I used \documentclass{article} to set the article class.

Tell LaTeX where the text begins and ends with the \begin{document} and \end{document} statements. If you add text before the \begin{document}, LaTeX generates an error. Any text after \end{document} is ignored.

Process this document using LaTeX with the latex command:

$ latex about.tex
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.141592653-2.6-1.40.22 (TeX Live 2021) (preloaded format=latex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(./about.tex
LaTeX2e <2020-10-01> patch level 4
(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/article.cls
Document Class: article 2020/04/10 v1.4m Standard LaTeX document class
(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/size10.clo))
(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3backend/l3backend-dvips.def)
No file about.aux.
[1] (./about.aux) )
Output written on about.dvi (1 page, 736 bytes).
Transcript written on about.log.

LaTeX produces a lot of text so you can see what it is doing. If your document contains errors, LaTeX prints a message, and possibly prompt for what it should do. In most cases, you can type exit at the prompt to force LaTeX to quit.

If LaTeX was successful in generating a document, it produces a file with a .dvi extension. The DVI stands for Device Independent because you can use a variety of tools to create other kinds of output. For example, the dvipdf program converts the DVI file to a PDF file.

$ dvipdf about.dvi Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Adding lists

LaTeX supports two kinds of lists: an enumerated list where each item starts with a number, and an itemized or "bullet" list. Add a short enumerated list after the second paragraph to list the ways that folks can get involved with Opensource.com:

\begin{enumerate}
\item Be a writer
\item Be a reader
\end{enumerate}

Similar to how you need to provide \begin and \end statements around a document definition, you also need to provide \begin and \end statements around a list. Within the list, start each new item with an \item command. When you process this new file with LaTeX and convert it to PDF format, you see your list formatted as a numbered list:

Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

More Linux resources Linux commands cheat sheet Advanced Linux commands cheat sheet Free online course: RHEL technical overview Linux networking cheat sheet SELinux cheat sheet Linux common commands cheat sheet What are Linux containers? Our latest Linux articles

You can also add lists within a list. This is a neat feature if you need to provide a list with several options for each item. For example, you can add a few different resources for folks who want to become writers at Opensource.com. The embedded list uses its own \begin and \end statements. I'll add some extra space around this example so it's easier to see, but LaTeX doesn't really care about the blank lines and extra spaces:

\begin{enumerate}
\item Be a writer

  \begin{itemize}
  \item Resources for writers
  \item Contributor Club
  \item Correspondent Program
  \end{itemize}

\item Be a reader
\end{enumerate}

The new list is inserted as an embedded list inside item number 1 because you added the list between the two original \item statements. You could have instead inserted this list after item number 2 by adding the new list before the \end{enumerate} statement.

Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sections and subsections

You can make a long document easier to read by breaking it up into sections. To add a section title to a LaTeX document, use the \section{...} statement, and write the section's title inside the braces. For example, you can add a new section titled "About Opensource.com" to the top of the document with this:

$ head about.tex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

\section{About Opensource.com}

Opensource.com is a premier, daily publication focused on
open source and Linux tutorials, stories, and resources.

We're a diverse and inviting group, made up of staff
editors, Correspondents, contributors, and readers. We

The article document class adds a number before each major section, and increases the font size so it stands out in the document.

Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

For documents that require more organization, you can add subsections using the \subsection{...} command. Like the \section{...} command, enter the subsection's title between the curly braces.

$ head about.tex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

\section{About Opensource.com}

Opensource.com is a premier, daily publication focused on
open source and Linux tutorials, stories, and resources.

\subsection{Welcome to the Opensource.com community} Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Title and author

Scientific articles meant for publication require a title, author, and publication date. LaTeX provides a method to add this information by inserting commands that define each, then generates the article's title with a separate \maketitle command.

Add "About Us" as the article's title, "Opensource.com Editors" for the author, and "July 10, 2022" as the publication date. You must enter this block after the \begin{document} and before the rest of the content, such as the first section:

\title{About Us}
\author{Opensource.com Editors}
\date{July 10, 2022}
\maketitle

When you process the document, LaTeX adds the title, author, and date to the top of the artcle:

Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Adding emphasis

Scientific and other technical documents often include terms and phrases that need to carry special emphasis. LaTeX provides several font effects you can use in technical documents, including emphasis text (usually displayed in italics), bold text, and small caps.

Update your LaTeX document to put the phrase "staff editors, Correspondents, contributors, and readers" in italics text, and the specific words "reader" and "writer" later in the paragraph in emphasis text. You can also put the phrase "skills, talents, backgrounds, and experiences" in bold. And while it's not the correct way to style it, you can use small caps to type "Linux."

$ head -20 about.tex
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}

\title{About Us}
\author{Opensource.com Editors}
\date{July 10, 2022}
\maketitle

\section{About Opensource.com}

Opensource.com is a premier, daily publication focused on
open source and \textsc{Linux} tutorials, stories, and resources.

\subsection{Welcome to the Opensource.com community}

We're a diverse and inviting group, made up of \textit{staff
editors, Correspondents, contributors, and readers}. We
value differences in \textbf{skills, talents, backgrounds, and
experiences}. There are a few different ways to get involved
as a \emph{reader} or a \emph{writer}.

This sample shows different ways to apply different styles to text. When you need to add emphasis, use the \emph{...} command, with the word or phrase between the curly braces. To display text in italics, boldface, or small caps, use a variation of the \text command: \textit{...} for italics, \textbf{...} for boldface, and \textsc{...} for small caps. LaTeX supports lots of other ways to style text, but these styles get you pretty far in writing scientific documents.

Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Using LaTeX

I've only touched on a few ways to write scientific and technical documents in LaTeX. Depending on your needs, you can also use LaTeX to insert footnotes and typeset mathematical equations and expressions. To explore other ways to use LaTeX for scientific writing, also read A introduction to creating documents in LaTeX here on Opensource.com.

Use the LaTeX markup language to compose documents.

Image by:

Jonas Leupe on Unsplash

Linux Documentation What to read next How I use the Linux fmt command to format text How I use the Linux sed command to automate file edits Old-school technical writing with groff This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

CISA Issues Warning on Active Exploitation of UnRAR Software for Linux Systems  The Hacker News

The post How to Integrate ONLYOFFICE in WordPress for Document Editing first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides .

It’s no secret that WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems for websites and blogs all over the Internet. In fact, 43% of the web is built on the WordPress platform.

The post How to Integrate ONLYOFFICE in WordPress for Document Editing first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides.

Resurrecting a "dead" "live" USB - Linux & Unix  BleepingComputer