Open-source News

'Kora' Icon Set Gives Your Linux Desktop a Classy New Look  OMG! Ubuntu!

Newly discovered Linux vulnerability rated 10 in severity  IT World Canada

9 resources about open source for educators and students Don Watkins Sat, 12/24/2022 - 03:00

Open source provides fertile ground for innovation, not only in the cloud but in the classroom. Whether you are homeschooled, in a traditional K-12, university, someone looking to learn new skills, open source provides rich opportunities for personal and professional development. This year, Opensource.com writers provided readers with a considerable list of opportunities for continuing education regardless of where you are on the continuum.

Lack of computer science classes

Did you know that only 51% of the high schools in the United States offer courses in computer science? Only 4.7% of students are enrolled in the courses available. This statistic is telling at a time when the US News and World Report recently ranked software development as one of the best jobs in America in 2022. Candace Sheremeta provided us with a list of three open source efforts to reverse that trend in her article about open source tools to introduce students to computer science.

As computer science grows, it's important to have an understanding of what it means to be "cloud native." It's also necessary to understand the nuance of cloud native architecture. Anita Ihuman provides a beginner's guide to cloud native open source communities. This comprehensive article provides you with everything you need to know about cloud native and cloud native architecture.

Ada Lovelace day crowdsourcing

Managing editor Lauren Pritchett, invited us to celebrate Ada Lovelace day with a crowdsourced list of hands-on programming tutorials to fictional adventure novels. Opensource.com contributors shared their favorite books for programmers who are just starting out. You can start from Scratch and add to that a complete list of programming books available from NoStarch Press.  This includes my favorite book, Teach Your Kids to Code by Bryson Payne. There's also a list of three books for very young children to read about coding pioneer Ada Lovelace.

Security and interoperability

Concerns for security and interoperability have provided universities the impetus to move toward Rocket.chat for collaboration. Sara Cemazar has six compelling reasons why academia has adopted Rocket.chat. At the top of the list is how it improves hybrid and remote learning which have become mainstays of higher education. In addition it ensures complete data privacy and compliance with both FERPA in the United States, and GDPR in the EU.

More great content Free online course: RHEL technical overview Learn advanced Linux commands Download cheat sheets Find an open source alternative Explore open source resources Publishing in academia

Publishing is the life blood of academics and yet it's largely siloed and inordinately expensive to do. That's changing and Joshua Pearce has written about how the paradigm is changing and why open source is leading the way. Joshua writes, “Academics routinely give away their work to companies for free — and then they buy it back." Academics like Joshua have been trapped for decades in a scheme where they give away their work freely in exchange for job security. Then they pay millions of dollars a year to read our own writing. Now academics can read free, publish free, and stay on track for professional success.

Google

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) can benefit anyone at various stages of their career, including people changing careers, those who are self-taught, those returning to the workforce, and more. You might be one of those people! Stefan Miklosovic provides the details of how you can get involved in GSOC by contributing to Apache Cassandra. Start the new year by getting involved.

Open source hardware

The open source hardware field is growing exponentially with the growth of the internet of things that includes wearables, single board computers, cameras, and robotics. This year Joshua Pearce introduced readers to an amazing opportunity created by the confluence of open hardware in academia and the Sloan Foundation. Supported by fellowships worth up to $100,000 individuals will be able to tackle some of the latest issues for integrating open hardware deep into academia. If you are in the U.S. and interested in one of the eight Fellowships, check out the Request for Proposals here!

Education and open source

It is stunning how many opportunities open source projects give people to learn and improve themselves. Education can be costly but it does not have to be if one takes advantage of the myriad open source resources available on the web. You don't have to look too hard to find something free to learn! Try finding an open source learning resource now. You will not regret it.

Open source helps educators, scholars, students, and lifelong learners explore new horizons.

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(Seth Kenlon, CC0)

Best of Opensource.com Education What to read next Free and open source education materials for children and teens 6 Python interpreters to try in 2022 Learn Python: 7 of my favorite resources This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

How to use your Linux terminal as a file manager sethkenlon Sat, 12/24/2022 - 03:00

A terminal is an application that provides access to the user shell of an operating system (OS). Traditionally, the shell is the place where the user and the OS could interface directly with one another. And historically, a terminal was a physical access point, consisting of a keyboard and a readout (a printer, long ago, and later a cathode ray tube), that provided convenient access to a mainframe. Don't be fooled by this "ancient" history. The terminal is as relevant today as it was half a century ago, and in this article, I provide five common file management tasks you can do with nothing but the shell.

1. Open a terminal and look around

Today, everyone's got a computer on their desk or in their bag. The mainframe-and-terminal model is now essentially emulated through an application. Your operating system might have a unique name for it, but generically it's usually known as a "terminal" or "console".

• Linux: Look for Console, Konsole, or Terminal. Regardless of the name, you can usually launch it from your application menu using the key word "terminal."

• macOS: The default terminal application isn't open source and is widely considered lacking in features. Download iTerm2 to get a feature-rich, GPLv2 replacement.

• Windows: PowerShell is the open source terminal application, but it uses a language and syntax all its own. For this article to be useful on Windows, you can install Cygwin which provides a POSIX environment.

Once you have your terminal application open, you can get a view of your file system using the command ls.

ls

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 2. Open a folder

In a graphical file manager, you open a folder by double-clicking on it. Once it's open, that folder usually dominates the window. It becomes your current location.

In a terminal, the thought process is slightly different. Instead of opening a folder, you change to a location. The end result is the same: once you change to a folder, you are "in" that folder. It becomes your current location.

For example, say you want open your Downloads folder. The command to use is cd plus the location you want to change to:

cd Downloads

To "close" a folder, you change out of that location. Taking a step out of a folder you've entered is represented by the cd command and two dots (..):

cd ..

You can practice entering a folder and then leaving again with the frequent use of ls to look around and confirm that you've changed locations:

$ cd Downloads
$ ls
cat-photo.jpg
$ cd ..
$ ls
Documents    Downloads    Music    Pictures    Videos
$ cd Documents
$ ls
zombie-apocalypse-plan-C.txt
zombie-apocalypse-plan-D.txt
$ cd ..
$ ls
Desktop  Documents   Downloads
Music    Pictures    Videos

Repeat it often until you get used to it!

The advanced level of this exercise is to navigate around your files using a mixture of dots and folder names.

Suppose you want to look in your Documents folder, and then at your Desktop. Here's the beginner-level method:

$ cd Documents
$ ls
zombie-apocalypse-plan-C.txt
zombie-apocalypse-plan-D.txt
$ cd ..
$ ls
Desktop  Documents   Downloads
Music    Pictures    Videos
$ cd Desktop
$ ls
zombie-apocalypse-plan-A.txt

There's nothing wrong with that method. It works, and if it's clear to you then use it! However, here's the intermediate method:

$ cd Documents
$ ls
zombie-apocalypse-plan-C.txt
zombie-apocalypse-plan-D.txt
$ cd ../Desktop
$ ls
zombie-apocalypse-plan-A.txt

You effectively teleported straight from your Documents folder to your Desktop folder.

There's an advanced method, of this, too, but because you know everything you need to know to deduce it, I leave it as an exercise for you. (Hint: It doesn't use cd at all.)

3. Find a file

Admit it, you sometimes misplace a file. There's a great Linux command to help you find it again, and that command is appropriately named find:

$ find $HOME -iname "*holiday*"
/home/tux/Pictures/holiday-photos
/home/tux/Pictures/holiday-photos/winter-holiday.jpeg

A few points:

• The find command requires you to tell it where to look.

• Casting a wide net is usually best (if you knew where to look, you probably wouldn't have to use find), so I use $HOME to tell find to look through my personal data as opposed to system files.

• The -iname option tells find to search for a file by name, ignoring capitalization.

• Finally, the "*holiday*" argument tells find that the word "holiday" appears somewhere in the filename. The * characters are wildcards, so find locates any filename containing "holiday", whether "holiday" appears at the beginning, middle, or end of the filename.

The output of the find command is the location of the file or folder you're looking for. You can change to a folder using the cd command:

$ cd /home/tux/Pictures/holiday-photos
$ ls
winter-holiday.jpeg

You can't cd to a file, though:

$ cd /home/tux/Pictures/holiday-photos/winter-holiday.jpeg
cd: Not a directory4. Open a file

If you've got a file you want to open from a terminal, use the xdg-open command:

$ xdg-open /home/tux/Pictures/holiday-photos/winter-holiday.jpeg

Alternatively, you can open a file in a specific application:

$ kate /home/tux/Desktop/zombie-apocalypse-plan-A.txt5. Copy or move a file or folder

The cp command copies and the mv file moves. You can copy or move a file by providing the current location of the file, followed by its intended destination.

For instance, here's how to move a file from your Documents folder to its parent directory:

$ cd Documents
$ ls
zombie-apocalypse-plan-C.txt
zombie-apocalypse-plan-D.txt
$ mv zombie-apocalypse-plan-C.txt ..
$ cd ..
$ ls
Documents  Downloads    Music    Pictures
Videos     zombie-apocalypse-plan-C.txt

While moving or copying, you can also rename it. Here's how to move a file called example.txt out of the directory with the new name old-example.txt:

$ mv example.txt ../old-example.txt

You don't actually have to move a file from one directory to another just to rename it:

$ mv example.txt old-example.txtLinux terminal for files

The Linux desktop has a lot of file managers available to it. There are simple ones, network-transparent ones, and dual-panel ones. There are ones written for GTK, Qt, ncurses, and Swing. Big ones, small ones, and so on. But you can't talk about Linux file managers without talking about the one that's been there from the beginning: the terminal.

The terminal is a powerful tool, and it takes practice to get good at it. When I was learning the terminal, I used it for what I could, and then I opened a graphical file manager for advanced operations that I hadn't learned for the terminal yet. If you're interested in learning the how to use a terminal, there's no time like the present, so get started today!

Here are five common file management tasks you can do with nothing but the shell.

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iradaturrahmat via Pixabay, CC0

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8 Ways You Can Fine-Tune NGINX Performance on Linux  MUO - MakeUseOf

‘Kora’ Icon Set Gives Your Linux Desktop a Classy New Look  OMG! Ubuntu!

It was back in July 2021 that Haiku R1 Beta 3 was released for this spiritual successor to the BeOS operating system. Now before Christmas and closing out 2022, Haiku R1 Beta 4 has been released as the latest major milestone for this open-source operating system effort...

Patch now: Serious Linux kernel security hole uncovered  ZDNet

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Fancy climbing into ALP over New Year's? Fresh preview versions of SUSE's distro and NetBSD 10 are here  The Register

Linux Mint 21.1: The better-than-ever Linux desktop  ZDNet

Linux Mint 21.1: The better-than-ever Linux desktop  ZDNet

Happy Holidays & Merry Christmas from GamingOnLinux  GamingOnLinux

Intel working on new Xe graphics driver for Linux  GamingOnLinux