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So you're thinking about migrating to Linux? Here's what you need to know  ZDNet

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

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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.

Linux Containers What are Linux containers? What is Kubernetes? Free online course: Containers, Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift technical over… eBook: A guide to Kubernetes for SREs and sysadmins Free online course: Running containers with Red Hat technical overview eBook: Storage patterns for Kubernetes For Fedora users

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)

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Huawei added UEFI mirror memory function support to Linux AArch 64  HC Newsroom

Weekly Roundup: April 17th, 2022 - 9to5Linux  9to5Linux

Global Linux Operating System Market Size, Analytical Overview, Growth Factors, Demand, Trends and Forecast To 2030 – Political Beef  Political Beef

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.18-rc3 as the Easter Sunday kernel for testing as Linux 5.18 works its way toward a stable release toward the end of May...

Linux 5.18-rc3 Released - "Yes, Yes, It's Also Easter Sunday, But Priorities, People!"  Phoronix

Solaris Might Be Free If You Want It  Hackaday

How I repurposed an old Raspberry Pi into a travel router  Digital Trends

There have been bug reports recently for those using GNOME Shell 42 whether it be the likes of Ubuntu 22.04 or Fedora (Silverblue) 36 Beta over crashes or blank screens appearing when making use of the Radeon DRM/KMS kernel driver. That older Radeon DRM driver is for pre-GCN 1.2 graphics processors (aside from those on GCN 1.0/1.1 that switch to using the AMDGPU kernel driver with optional module parameters) while now Mutter has landed a fix for this issue...

Chrome OS Flex installation and hands-on: Not for the faint of heart  Android Police

How Can I Recover Text from Corrupt Text Files? - Linux & Unix  BleepingComputer

Two Intel TSX (Transactional Synchronization Extensions) fixes were submitted today ahead of Linux 5.18-rc3 and are also marked for back-porting to existing Linux stable kernels. One of the fixes is for addressing a case where systems could still be left vulnerable to the TSX Asynchronous Abort (TAA) vulnerability and the other is where TSX may not get turned off...

New Intel TSX Fixes For The Linux Kernel Queue Up, Forces Off TSX "Development Mode"  Phoronix

Haiku as the open-source operating system continuing the great work inspired by BeOS remains very active in working to accomplish their goals...

Haiku Had A Very Busy March Improving Hardware Support & More  Phoronix

How I scan family photos on Linux Alan Formy-Duval Sun, 04/17/2022 - 03:00

Linux isn't just something that runs on servers and powers the internet. It's a safe place for your data, your family history and memories, working or having fun, and real life.

Case in point: Right now I'm in the middle of a project scanning old family photos. I have been using Fedora Linux with the GNOME desktop for a few years, so I didn't have to install any additional software packages. I just plug my scanner into the USB port, start up the scanning software (Document Scanner), and I'm good to go. Keep reading to see how I did it.

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Many people are interested in learning more about their family history, ancestry, and legacy. With the technology now available, digitizing old artifacts has become a common practice. Whether it's your 1980s cassette collection, high school artwork, or old family photos, putting them into a digital format is a modern method of preservation and future proofing.

My mom recently gave me some photos of some of my ancestors, so I have several images that I want to preserve. Scanning them not only provides a certain sense of permanence but also allows me to manipulate them in ways that were unheard of in the era when they were captured. For instance, I have a photo of my grandfather, who unfortunately passed a few years before my birth. By digitizing his photo, I can zoom in, get to know him, and maybe relate to him in a way that otherwise would be impossible.

Workflow

The first thing to do is plug my Canon scanner into the USB port. When I open Document Scanner, it detects my Canon LiDE 210 scanner. Next, I place the photo onto the flatbed scanner. I adjust the settings for 2400 DPI image resolution to ensure I capture every detail.

Then I click scan. At this resolution the scan may take a while, but once it is complete, I can crop the image as needed and save it.

By the way, as I scan my photos and write this article, I'm also enjoying some of my favorite music with Clementine, an open source audio player—on the same computer. Performance hit? Not a bit!

Once scanning is complete, I've also got the option of cropping the image and saving it as a PDF, JPG, or whatever format I choose.

Real life

Allow me to introduce my grandfather and my Uncle George, circa 1944. George was a World War II vet having seen action in Europe battling the Nazis. My grandfather, on the right, was the foreman of a southeastern North Carolina lumber mill. While he didn't see the battlefield, he was in charge of captured Nazi POWs assigned to work at his mill. He described them as young boys that just wanted to go home to their families.

Image by:

(Alan Formy-Duval, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Final thoughts

As a dedicated Linux desktop user, I sometimes hear people say they don't use Linux because there are certain tasks it can't perform. Linux is all I use, and I haven't had that problem for roughly 14 years and counting. Whether you're looking for a pleasant pastime or a way to be more productive, there's likely a solution for you that runs on Linux.

With Linux, I can connect with my ancestors in unexpected ways.

Image by:

PublicDomainPictures. CC0.

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Essentially free  mid-day.com

Linux for Smartphones. In a world run by Apple and Google… | by mr.smashy | CodeX | Apr, 2022  Medium