Open-source News

AMD P-State EPP Won't Be Ready Until Linux 6.3

Phoronix - Mon, 12/12/2022 - 20:00
For those that were holding out hope that the AMD P-State Linux driver's EPP functionality for more power/performance control under Linux would be ready for the Linux 6.2 kernel merge window, it's been rejected for the cycle and will be held off until at least the Linux 6.3 cycle begins in February...

Raspberry Pi Supply Chain Issues Beginning To Ease Up

Phoronix - Mon, 12/12/2022 - 18:44
The Raspberry Pi team has a positive supply chain update with some good news ahead of Christmas and when they expect to reach pre-pandemic supply chain levels...

Linux 6.2 Adding FSCRYPT Support For China's Questionable SM4 Cipher

Phoronix - Mon, 12/12/2022 - 18:30
As part of the many pull requests being sent in early for the Linux 6.2 merge window to avoid crunch time around the holidays is the FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework updates...

OpenMandriva ROME 22.12 Platinum Candidate Released For This Clang-Built Rolling Distro

Phoronix - Mon, 12/12/2022 - 18:02
The OpenMandriva Linux distribution crew that traces its roots back to the days of Mandrake Linux is out with a "platinum" release candidate of their upcoming OpenMandriva ROME 22.12 release, which is their rolling release flavor...

Linux 6.2 Adding Driver For Google's ChromeOS Human Presence Sensor

Phoronix - Mon, 12/12/2022 - 17:56
Set to be merged in the Linux 6.2 is a new driver for the ChromeOS Human Presence Sensor "HPS" used for detecting when one or more humans are in front of the Chromebook...

GNU Linux-libre 6.1-gnu Deblobs More Network & GPU Drivers

Phoronix - Mon, 12/12/2022 - 17:31
Following the release last night of the Linux 6.1 kernel by Linus Torvalds, the GNU crew has released their GNU Linux-libre 6.1 kernel that is derived from those sources while continuing to strip out code dependent upon non-free firmware/microcode and blocking the ability to load proprietary kernel modules...

A sysadmin's guide to Carbonio

opensource.com - Mon, 12/12/2022 - 16:00
A sysadmin's guide to Carbonio Arman Khosravi Mon, 12/12/2022 - 03:00

Carbonio Community Edition (Carbonio CE) is an open source no-cost email and collaboration platform by Zextras. It provides privacy for organizations seeking digital sovereignty by using on-premises self-hosted servers. Using self-hosted servers offers a deeper level of control over infrastructure and data. However, it requires more attention to server configurations and infrastructure management to guarantee data sovereignty. Tasks done by system administrators play an important role in this matter. This makes administrative tasks a crucial part of achieving digital sovereignty, therefore, an administrative console dedicated to such tasks becomes extremely valuable to facilitate sysadmins' everyday jobs.

This is why Zextras launched the first release of its own admin panel for Carbonio CE on October 2022. For Carbonio CE system administrators, it is the first step toward the creation of an all-inclusive admin console.

In this article, I go into detail about the Carbonio CE Admin Panel and take a deeper look into what it can accomplish.

Image by:

(Arman Khosravi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

What is the Carbonio CE Admin Panel?

The Carbonio CE Admin Panel is designed to assist the Carbonio CE system administrators with the most repetitive and frequent tasks such as user management and domain configuration. It is a browser-based application that runs on a particular port and is available for system administrators to use in production environments as soon as Carbonio CE is installed.

More for sysadmins Enable Sysadmin blog The Automated Enterprise: A guide to managing IT with automation eBook: Ansible automation for Sysadmins Tales from the field: A system administrator's guide to IT automation eBook: A guide to Kubernetes for SREs and sysadmins Latest sysadmin articles Why do you need the admin panel?

Everything done in Carbonio CE Admin Panel can be done through the command-line interface as well. This raises the question: why might system administrators prefer using the admin panel rather than the command-line interface?

Using the admin panel has its own obvious advantages such as:

  • Making repetitive activities much easier to perform

  • Saving system administrators' time monitoring servers

  • Providing a much easier learning process for junior system administrators

Even though using the admin panel makes administrative tasks easier to perform, there is more to using this native user interface for Carboino CE. In essence, the Carbonio CE Admin Panel gives you the ability to monitor and manage your organization server from a single centralized location. Even when you're far away, you may still access your admin panel to check the status of servers and carry out various administrative activities.

Creating and managing user accounts

Managing users has always been one of the most, if not the most, performed action by sysadmins. Therefore it should be an essential part of every administrative GUI available for system administrators. Suppose you, as the system administrator of the company have received some request by users to edit some information on their account. For instance, giving them access to some features, or your company has hired new employees, or some employees have left the company. All these scenarios require a sysadmin to manage user accounts frequently.

Using the Carbonio CE Admin Panel you can simply go to Domains > select a domain > Accounts and select any account to modify, or press the + button to add a new account.

Image by:

(Arman Khosravi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Creating and managing mailing lists

Besides creating user accounts, a system administrator is often required to create different mailing lists that reflect the organizational structure of the company. Using mailing lists, users can simply send emails to a group of users by inserting the list address instead of every user address one by one.

Creating mailing lists in Carbonio CE is extremely easy using the admin panel. You need to go to Domains > select a domain > Mailing List > press the + button. You can now use the wizard that opens up to create a mailing list.
 

Image by:

(Arman Khosravi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

The essential steps to follow are:

  • Insert the name

  • Insert the mailing list address

  • Press NEXT

  • Insert the members

  • Press CREATE.

You can follow the same path to edit mail lists created before.

Creating and managing domains

Managing domains is another task frequently done by system administrators. Similar to accounts, creating a domain is very easy in the Carbonio Admin Panel. You only need to go to Domains > select a domain > under the details and find different entries to monitor the status of the domain. To create a new domain simply click on the CREATE button on the top bar and select Create New Domain and insert the necessary information such as:

  • Domain name

  • Maximum number of accounts and maximum email quota

  • Mail server where the domain is hosted

Image by:

(Arman Khosravi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Creating and managing mailstore servers

The Carbonio CE Admin Panel allows system administrators to manage different servers present in the infrastructure and provide them with different tools to configure them. To monitor a new mailstore server you can go to Mailstores > Servers List and find all the available mailstore servers in your infrastructure in a list (when just one server is installed, only one server is shown in this area).

Under Server Details, you can select any of the available servers in the list and select Data Volumes to show more details of the storage volumes attached to it. While multiple volumes can be mounted simultaneously, only one primary volume, one secondary volume, and one index volume can be designated as active. You can add new volumes using the NEW VOLUME + button in the same section. You can also change the volume properties simply by clicking on them to open their detail window.

Image by:

(Arman Khosravi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Creating and managing classes of service

Another scenario that can be facilitated with the help of the admin panel is creating classes of service (COS). After the installation, a system administrator might need to create different classes (groups) and assign different properties to them. This way, later in the process each user or a group of users can be easily nominated to a class of service in order to have access to the features and properties assigned to that specific COS.

Image by:

(Arman Khosravi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

To create a COS simply click on the CREATE button and select Create New COS or alternatively go to COS on the left panel and click on CREATE NEW COS +. You can then insert the name of the COS and define the different services available to this specific class.

To edit a COS, go to COS on the left panel and select a COS from the dropdown menu at top of the list.

You can define settings like quotas, the mail servers that can host accounts from this COS, or enable features for this COS. You can also define features for general features like Mail, Calendar, and Contacts. Additional customizable options include Tagging, Out of Office Reply, Distribution List Folders, and so on.
 

Image by:

(Arman Khosravi, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Conclusion

In this article, you saw a few scenarios in which the Carbonio CE Admin Panel saves you time and effort. The admin panel is an evolution of classical administrative tools in a new and centralized interface that gives the possibility of accessing different functionalities and monitoring tools from the same location.

Carbonio Community Edition is an open source collaboration tool. Here's how to use its admin panel.

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A Linux file manager for Vim fans

opensource.com - Mon, 12/12/2022 - 16:00
A Linux file manager for Vim fans Seth Kenlon Mon, 12/12/2022 - 03:00

Ranger is a terminal-based file manager that uses Vim-like keyboard commands. If you're working in a terminal all day, running Sed and Awk commands and using Vim, then you might want a way to manage files without leaving the comforting glow of your amber-on-black screen. There are, of course, the ls and cd commands, but sometimes you want to "walk through" your system, or maybe you want to mimic a graphical experience without the graphics.

Install Ranger

On Linux, you may find Ranger in your Linux distribution's software repository. On Fedora, CentOS, Mageia, and similar:

$ sudo dnf install ranger

For instance, on Debian, Elementary, Linux Mint, and similar:

$ sudo apt install ranger

On macOS, use Homebrew or MacPort.

Using Ranger

If you use Vim, then Ranger is the terminal-based file manager for you. Sure, there's the NERDTree plugin for use while in Vim, but Ranger has all the conveniences of a file manager plus the interface conventions of Vim. If you don't know Vim (yet), then Ranger can serve as a nice introduction to the way Vim is operated.

Launch Ranger from a terminal:

$ ranger

Your terminal is now the Ranger interface, and by default, it lists the contents of your current directory.

Image by:

(Seth Kenlon, CC BY-SA 4.0)

By default, Ranger uses a three-column layout. From left to right:

  • List of home directories on your system.

  • List of directories.

  • Contents of the selected directory.

The basic interactions with Ranger can be performed with either your arrow keys or with the classic Vim navigation controls of the hjkl keys.

  • Up or K: Move to the previous item in a list, making it the active selection.

  • Down or J: Move to the next item in a list, making it the active selection.

  • Right or L: Move into a directory or open a file.

  • Left or H: Move to the parent directory.

If all you need to do is search for a file and open it, then you now know as much about Ranger as you need to know.

Of course, managing files is more than just navigating and opening files. The most common file management tasks have single-key shortcuts assigned to them, and you can view a complete list by pressing ? and then K for key bindings.

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 Select a file

You can select (or "mark," in Ranger terminology) a file or directory three different ways.

First, whatever happens to be highlighted in the Ranger window is considered the active selection. By default, any action you take is performed on your active selection. When you first launch Ranger, the active selection is probably the Desktop folder, which is usually at the very top of the list in your home directory. If you press the Left arrow, then you move into the Desktop folder and whatever item is at the top of that list becomes the active selection. This is the keyboard version of clicking on a file or folder in a graphical file manager.

The other way is to mark several files at once. To mark your current selection, press Spacebar. The item you've marked is indented one space and changes color, and your cursor is moved to the next item in the list. You can press Space again to select that item or move to a different item and press Space on it to add to your marked selection. This is the keyboard version of drawing a selection box around several items in a graphical file manager.

The third way is to select all items in a folder. To select everything, press v on your keyboard. To unselect everything, press v again.

Copy a file

To copy (or "yank," in Ranger terminology) your current selection (whether it's a single file or several files), press y y on your keyboard (that's the letter y twice in a row.)

To paste a file that you've copied, navigate to your target directory and press the p key twice in a row.

Move a file

To move a file from one location to another, press d twice in a row. Then move to your target location and press p twice.

Commands

In Ranger as in Vim, you can drop out of the normal mode of interaction to enter a command by pressing the : key.

For instance, say you've descended deep into a series of directories and subdirectories, and now you want to get to your Zombie_Apocalypse folder quickly. Press : and then type cd ~/Zombie_Apocalypse and press Return. You're instantly taken to the ~/Zombie_Apocalypse folder.

There are lots of commands to choose from, and you can see them all by pressing ? and then c for commands.

Tab

Ranger is a tabbed interface, just like your web browser. To open a new tab, press Ctrl+N. A tab number appears in the top right of the Ranger interface. To move between tabs, press Alt along with the number of the tab you want to switch to.

Split window

While the default view of Ranger is hierarchical columns, you can use an alternate view that splits the Ranger interface into two (or more) panels. This is useful for moving files from one directory to another quickly, or for comparing the contents of directories.

To split Ranger's interface, you change the view mode to multipane. This is done with the command set. To run a command in Ranger, you press : and then type your command:

:set viewmode multipane

When you split the Ranger interface, you're actually expanding tabs into one view. Instead of columns, you're now looking at two or more distinct single columns.

Image by:

(Seth Kenlon, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Instead of moving between these columns with Right and Left arrows (or h and l), you switch between tabs with Alt and a number. For instance, if you have three tabs open as split panes, the left column is Alt+1, the middle is Alt+2, and the right column is Alt+3.

A file manager for Vim users

Ranger is an obvious choice for you if you're a longtime Vim user, or if you just want to immerse yourself in the Vim style of working. The transition from Vim to Ranger and back again is nearly seamless, so fire up your favorite multiplexer and launch Ranger and Vim for easy access.

Use the Ranger file manager without leaving the comfort of your Linux terminal.

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