Open-source News

Intel Alder Lake Performance Fix To Be Backported To Linux 5.15 LTS

Phoronix - Mon, 04/18/2022 - 19:29
A Canonical kernel engineer is now proposing an Intel P-State performance fix for latest-generation Intel Alder Lake processors be back-ported to the Linux 5.15 LTS series. In turn this should then be picked up by Ubuntu 22.04's kernel build moving forward and others on this latest long-term support series for Linux...

ZoneFS File-System To See Some Improvements With Linux 5.19

Phoronix - Mon, 04/18/2022 - 19:26
Back in 2019 Western Digital announced their work on ZoneFS as a new Linux file-system just designed for specialty use-cases and running on zoned block devices. There hasn't been much code churn around ZoneFS in a number of kernel releases since it was merged back in 2020 while for Linux 5.19 this summer a number of fixes/improvements have been queuing up...

Legacy BIOS Support Remains Important For Some On Fedora, May Shift Responsibility To SIG

Phoronix - Mon, 04/18/2022 - 18:30
Earlier this month the change proposal was laid out for Fedora 37 looking to deprecate legacy BIOS support. That kicked the hornets nest with many Fedora users expressing their desire to see Fedora legacy BIOS support continue whether it be for running the Linux distribution on dated hardware or even just for VMs without UEFI boot. It's looking more like that responsibility of legacy BIOS support may instead be shifted to a new special interest group (SIG) to take up the work of maintaining and testing that pre-UEFI boot support...

Clang 15 Lands Support To Randomize Structure Layout, Linux Prepares To Use It

Phoronix - Mon, 04/18/2022 - 17:49
In matching behavior already provided by the GCC compiler, LLVM/Clang has landed "RandStruct" functionality to allow optionally randomizing the structure layout for C code...

VirtIO-Crypto Seeing A Big Performance Speedup

Phoronix - Mon, 04/18/2022 - 17:11
The "virtio-crypto" kernel driver for supporting the VirtIO-spec'ed virtual crypto hardware accelerator for virtual machines is about to offer significantly better performance...

How to Install LibreNMS Monitoring Tool on Debian 11/10

Tecmint - Mon, 04/18/2022 - 15:10
The post How to Install LibreNMS Monitoring Tool on Debian 11/10 first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides .

LibreNMS is an open-source and fully-featured networking monitoring tool that provides a wide range of monitoring features and capabilities for your network devices. Key features include: Automatic discovery of your entire network using ARP,

The post How to Install LibreNMS Monitoring Tool on Debian 11/10 first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides.

3 open source tools for people with learning difficulties

opensource.com - Mon, 04/18/2022 - 15:00
3 open source tools for people with learning difficulties Amar Gandhi Mon, 04/18/2022 - 03:00

Disabilities significantly impact people's lives. As someone with dyspraxia and dyslexia, I can tell you that is true. One thing that mitigates my difficulties is the technology I use, such as a screen-reader and task manager. I've set up an ecosystem of sorts that helps me manage a variety of difficulties that I believe could be useful to you whether or not you have dyspraxia or dyslexia. If you love good software and want to improve how you work, then maybe my workflow will be helpful to you, too.

Nextcloud Image by:

(Amar Gandhi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Nextcloud was the first solution I found out about from a YouTube channel called the Linux Experiment. Nextcloud is a productivity suite you run on your own server. I set mine up on a Raspberry Pi, but you can find preconfigured versions on Linode, Vultr, or Digital Ocean. Nextcloud can replace Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps (Docs, Drive, and so on) while also being encrypted, private, and entirely under your control.

Nextcloud, on its own, is basically a file manager and text editor on the Internet. However, because it's structured around plug-ins, it has what is essentially an app store (except that all the apps are free). You can install an office suite (powered by Collabora Office), task manager, contacts, calendar, notes (similar to Notion), podcast application, music player, video conferencing, chat, and much more.

One of the standout things about Nextcloud is its dashboard, where you can see all of your information at once. The dashboard reminds me a little of the Windows 8 start menu, which many people liked. I think Nextcloud's version is more aesthetically pleasing than the old Windows 8 start menu. This is important because it allows me to see my information at a glance. The dashboard lets me take in a lot of data at once and then decide my next course of action.

You can use your Nextcloud environment on any device because its APIs and applications are available on every platform. You can access it from anywhere and store all of your files in one place.

One way that it can work with any operating system is over WebDAV, a technology that uses HTTP and HTTPS to connect to a remote server over standard Internet ports (80 and 443). This means you can add data from Nextcloud to any appropriate application on any operating system, such as a calendaring app to manage your day or a file manager to view files saved on your Nextcloud server.

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You can also use Nextcloud as a Progressive Web Application, meaning you can install your Nextcloud website as an application on most operating systems (except for Safari on iOS, which does not support web applications). Many operating systems, particularly Windows, Chrome OS, and Linux, treat web applications as native applications. The result is that you can have notifications of new activity on your Nextcloud just as if it was a local desktop application. It also means that Nextcloud's task manager and notes app can follow you everywhere, regardless of what device you're using.

Some operating systems offer integration between your phone and your desktop, allowing you to view Android apps and notifications on your Windows device and even being able to respond to messages and calls on your desktop. For me, the difficulty with this is that my brain gets accustomed to one device, and I forget how notifications and applications work on another device. Nextcloud, however, allows you to have location and SMS notifications between Nextcloud and your Android device. The impact is that you can do all your personal work on one single web application that doesn't change.

This also prevents me from being overwhelmed with multiple tabs. Modern web browsers can have upwards of a hundred tabs, but it's difficult sometimes to remember what each tab is for. With Nextcloud, you can access many apps within one tab.

Photoprism Image by:

(Amar Gandhi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Photoprism is an open source photo gallery and storage repository that relies on Google's TensorFlow technology, which is also used in the Google Photos application. I use Photoprism to store my photos because it tells me the date, place, time, and device the photos were taken on at a glance.

Photoprism is accessible as a Progressive Web Application, which means it's possible to access any device on every device. As with Nextcloud, it's also possible to access using a WebDAV client, even if your device doesn't allow web applications. This enables most devices to treat your Photoprism instance as a native application, so you can upload and download photos directly to and from your device. The interface is the same regardless of which device it is used on, allowing those with learning difficulties to develop muscle memory for each of the applications mentioned here, making them far easier to use. You can use Photoprism on most devices.

Photoprism is available on preconfigured Digital Ocean, or you can self-host (primarily as a container application, so be sure to read up on containers before attempting).

OpenDyslexic Font Image by:

(Amar Gandhi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

OpenDyslexic font is an open source font that uses evenly spaced letters and an italic typeface. It aims to make it easier for people with dyslexia to read the direction of the letters such as "a" and "d" by using a weighted bottom.

Of course, whether OpenDyslexic improves readability for you depends entirely on your own perception. It doesn't work for everyone, but there are many open source fonts out there, and it can pay dividends to find a font that works well for you.

Open source accessibility

Making applications that work well for users with learning disabilities, physical disabilities, or just users who have preferences a little different from another user makes open source better for everyone. The ability to customize applications is one of the great strengths of open source. If you're a developer making more options possible, keep up the great work. If you're a user benefitting from all the choices you have in open source applications, let us know about what you use.

Image by:

Opensource.com

Tools Diversity and inclusion Nextcloud Accessibility What to read next Accessibility in open source for people with ADHD, dyslexia, and Autism Spectrum Disorder How I use Linux accessibility settings This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

What Linux users and packagers need to know about Podman 4.0 on Fedora

opensource.com - Mon, 04/18/2022 - 15:00
What Linux users and packagers need to know about Podman 4.0 on Fedora Lokesh Mandvekar Mon, 04/18/2022 - 03:00

 

 

The newly released Podman 4.0 features a complete rewrite of the network stack based on Netavark and Aardvark, which will function alongside the existing Container Networking Interface (CNI) stack.

Netavark is a Rust-based tool for configuring networking for Linux containers that serves as a replacement for CNI plugins (containernetworking-plugins on Fedora). Aardvark-dns is now the authoritative DNS server for container records. Along with the new stack comes distro packaging changes along with repository availability changes for Fedora 35.

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Podman v4 is available as an official Fedora package on Fedora 36 and Rawhide. Both Netavark and Aardvark-dns are available as official Fedora packages on Fedora 35 and newer versions and form the default network stack for new installations of Podman 4.0.

On Fedora 36 and newer, fresh installations of Podman v4 will automatically install Aardvark-dns along with Netavark.

To install Podman v4:

$ sudo dnf install podman

To update Podman from an older version to v4:

$ sudo dnf update podman

Because Podman v4 features some breaking changes from Podman v3, Fedora 35 users cannot install Podman v4 using the default repositories. However, if you're eager to give it a try, you can use a Copr repository instead:

$ sudo dnf copr enable rhcontainerbot/podman4

# install or update per your needs
$ sudo dnf install podman

After installation, if you would like to migrate all your containers to use Netavark, you must set network_backend = "netavark" under the [network] section in your containers.conf, typically located at /usr/share/containers/containers.conf.

Testing the latest development version

If you would like to test the latest unreleased upstream code, try the podman-next Copr:

$ sudo dnf copr enable rhcontainerbot/podman-next

$ sudo dnf install podman

CAUTION: The podman-next Copr provides the latest unreleased sources of Podman, Netavark, and Aardvark-dns as RPM Package Managers (RPMs). These will override the versions supplied by the official packages.

For Fedora packagers

The Fedora packaging sources for Podman are available in Fedora's repository for package maintenance. The main Podman package no longer explicitly depends on containernetworking-plugins. The network stack dependencies are now handled in the containers-common package, which allows for a single point of dependency maintenance for Podman and Buildah.

- containers-common
Requires: container-network-stack
Recommends: netavark

- netavark
Provides: container-network-stack = 2

- containernetworking-plugins
Provides: container-network-stack = 1

This configuration ensures that:

  • New installations of Podman will always install Netavark by default.
  • The containernetworking-plugins package will not conflict with Netavark, and users can install them together.
Listing bundled dependencies

If you need to list the bundled dependencies in your packaging sources, you can process the go.mod file in the upstream source. For example, Fedora's packaging source uses:

$ awk '{print "Provides: bundled(golang("$1")) = "$2}' go.mod | \
sort | uniq | sed -e 's/-/_/g' -e '/bundled(golang())/d' -e '/bundled(golang(go\
|module\|replace\|require))/d'Netavark and Aardvark-dns

The .tar vendored sources for Netavark and Aardvark-dns will be attached as an upstream release artifact. Then you can create a Cargo config file to point it to the vendor directory:

tar xvf %{SOURCE}
mkdir -p .cargo
cat >.cargo/config << EOF
[source.crates-io]
replace-with = "vendored-sources"

[source.vendored-sources]
directory = "vendor"
EOF

The Fedora packaging sources for Netavark and Aardvark-dns are also available in the Fedora Project's repository.

The Fedora packaged versions of the Rust crates that Netavark and Aardvark-dns depend on are frequently out of date (for example, rtnetlink, sha2, zbus, and zvariant) at the time of initial package creation. As a result, Netavark and Aardvark-dns are built using the dependencies vendored upstream, found in the vendor subdirectory.

The netavark binary is installed to /usr/libexec/podman/netavark, while the aardvark-dns binary is installed to /usr/libexec/podman/aardvark-dns.

The netavark package has a Recommends on the aardvark-dns package. The aardvark-dns package will be installed by default with Netavark, but Netavark will be functional without it.

Listing bundled dependencies

If you need to list the bundled dependencies in your packaging sources, you can run the cargo tree command in the upstream source. For example, Fedora's packaging source uses:

$ cargo tree --prefix none |  \
awk '{print "Provides: bundled(crate("$1")) = "$2}' | \
sort | uniqTo learn more

I hope you found these updates helpful. If you have any questions please feel free to open a discussion on GitHub, or contact me or the other Podman maintainers through Slack, IRC, Matrx, or Discord. Better still, we’d love for you to join our community as a contributor!

New Podman features offer better support for containers and improved performance.

Image by:

(Máirín Duffy, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Linux Containers What to read next This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

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