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● Links 24/12/2021: Darktable 3.8 and Jami “Taranis”

Posted in News Roundup at 11:51 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Server

=> ↺ 9 Hot Free and Open Source Java Application Servers – LinuxLinks

• An application server is computer software which provides the business logic for an application program. It offers services such as management of large distributed systems, data services, load balancing, transaction support, and network security. The application server is one part of a three-tier application, consisting of a graphical interface server, an application (business logic) server, and a database / transaction server. Many application servers support the Java platform, but they can be found in other environments.

• There are good reasons to deploy an application server in a corporate environment. At a high level, an application server enables updates and upgrades to applications to be distributed to all users. System administrators also benefit from the fact that changes to application configuration can take place centrally, which greatly simplifies technical support and ultimately the end user experience. Application servers also simplify user management, avoiding the need to set up and maintain user-management systems for applications. This type of software also enhances scalability and resource usage, and exposes business components via different deployment wrappers.

• Java is a general-purpose, concurrent, class-based, object-oriented, high-level programming language and computing platform first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. It’s related in some ways to C and C++, in particular with regard to its syntax, and borrows a few ideas from other languages.

• Here’s our recommended Java application servers, captured in a legendary LinuxLinks chart.

Applications

=> ↺ darktable 3.8: Winter Release 2021 | darktable

• The darktable team is proud to announce the second feature release of 2021.

=> ↺ Darktable 3.8.0 released

• Version 3.8.0 of the Darktable photo-processing application has been released. Significant changes include a new keyboard shortcut system, a new diffuse-or-sharpen module, a new “scene-referred” blurs module “to synthesize motion and lens blurs in a parametric and physically accurate way”, support for the Canon CR3 raw format, and more.

=> ↺ Darktable 3.8 Released with Huge Set of Changes, New Modules + More

• Major improvements are on offer in the latest release of Darktable, an open source alternative to Adobe Lightroom.

• This pro photography tool traditionally issues a new stable release on December 24 and 2021 is no exception. Those unfamiliar with this highly-regarded tool will find more details on its capabilities in the comprehensive online manual.

• [...]

• There’s also a new ‘Diffuse or Sharpen’ module, and a new scene-referred blurs module to create motion and lens blurring in a ‘physically-accurate’ way.

• The ‘Perspective Correction’ module is now called ‘Rotate and Perspective’ and lets users “manually define correction settings by drawing lines or rectangles on the image”, and ‘Scopes’ is the new name for the ‘Histogram’ module.

=> ↺ Darktable 3.8 Open-Source RAW Image Editor Released as a Massive Update

• Darktable 3.8 comes with major changes like a completely revamped keyboard shortcut system with support for controlling the app with other devices, such as game controllers or MIDI devices, a new diffuse or sharpen module that lets users simulate or revert diffusion processes to reconstruct images, as well as a new scene-referred blurs module that lets you accurately synthesize motion and lens blurs.

• Other major changes include support for multiple images in the print view, Aa new LMMSE demosaic algorithm, support for the Canon CR3 RAW image format, and the global availability of the composition guides from the crop module across the entire app.

=> ↺ Darktable 3.8 Released For This Great Open-Source Alternative To Adobe Lightroom

• Just in time for dealing with any holiday photos, Darktable 3.8 is out today as the latest shiny feature update to this open-source RAW photography post-production software.

• Darktable 3.8 has seen nearly four thousand commits since the prior v3.6 feature release with more some 265 issues closed, and more than 500 pull requests.

=> ↺ ticker – terminal stock ticker – LinuxLinks

• While it can be a struggle to make ends meet, it’s possible to make life easier through better money management. Financial management is about planning income and expenditure and making informed decisions that enable you to survive financially. With today’s financial pressures, it’s even more important to look after your finances, if only to make sure there are no nasty surprises when you receive your next bank statement.

• One way of staying alert regarding your financial position is to use a stock ticker. This is software that provides live updates of stock prices and enables you to easily monitor your investments.

• As its name suggests, ticker is software that performs this function. And it offers this tracking without straying from the command-line. It’s free and open source software written in Go.

• Command-line software is light on system resources (very useful on low specified machines), can be faster and more efficient than their graphical counterparts, they do not stop working when X is restarted, and are great for scripting purposes.

=> ↺ 4 Tools / Extensions to Add Falling Snow Effect on Ubuntu 20.04 /21.10 Desktop | UbuntuHandbook

• XSnow is till in active development. It enables falling snow effects in GNOME, XFCE, KDE, LXDE, OPENBOX, etc. Which means, user may run it in Ubuntu, XUbuntu, KUbuntu, Debian, and other based Linux distributions. It also works on RPM based Linux (e.g., Fedora) though the package from system’s own repositories.

• Snow by default is falling on top of opened app windows and screen bottom. So, you won’t see snowflakes if there’s a window maximized.

• XSnow provides an user interface to configure how many snowflakes, size, color, etc. And, it also may display Santa, Scenery, birds and more.

• The app provides modern 64-bit (amd64), old 32-bit (i386), and arm64/armhf (e.g., for Raspberry Pi) deb packages for Debian and Ubuntu based systems. Just select download the latest package from the link below:

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to install and configure Minikube on Ubuntu 21.10 – NextGenTips

• Minikube is a tool that makes it easy to run Kubernetes locally. Minikube runs a single-node Kubernetes cluster inside a VM on your local machine. Kubernetes quickly set up a local Kubernetes cluster on Linux, Windows, and macOS.

• It is always advisable before diving into Kubernetes, you will need a minimal Kubernetes setup. Such a setup should spin up fast and integrate well with other tools.

=> ↺ 2 Ways to Install Homebrew on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux – Linux Shout

• Learn the commands to install Homebrew on Debian 11 Bullseye to install and manage various packages via “formulas” and “casks” on your Linux.

• Homebrew is an open-source project for providing a package manager to macOS because there is no default package manager, unlike Linux systems. However, the Homebrew is also present for Linux, popularly known as Linux brew.

• The homebrew was started by Max Howell. In 2009 the first version of Homebrew was released. To use it the user either has to be on Linux or Mac. However, using homebrew on Linux doesn’t make sense because all of them almost come with their package manager.

• Nevertheless, Homebrew does several things, it can be used to install, uninstall and update software.

=> ↺ FreeAptitude – Playing with DBus and KDE applications (Part 2)

• In a previous article I introduced the DBus technology and provided some examples built around the Klipper service to integrate the clipboard area within our scripts. In this article, we will see other useful DBus services and how to take advantage of them within our scripts.

=> ↺ Debian 11 is broken

• Debian 11 is switching around device names like /dev/sda and /dev/sdb on each boot, as you can see for yourself, if you so wish, or by having a look at my video:

• https://youtu.be/MhZLLoR4Y80

• This means that your Debian 11 system will regularly fail to boot.

• [...]

• P.S.: can you imagine a Microsoft Windows person who would find it conceivable that the system drive, aka (C:), would change its drive letter on each boot? Debian can!

=> ↺ ThingsBoard and Raspberry PI (part 2): Add Device telemetry by MTTQ and Python

• Creating a tenant and adding a first device is the next step once you installed ThingsBoard on Raspberry PI. A simple monitoring task is by checking internal CPU temperature

• In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to create a tenant, add a device and configure it to message by MTTQ and Python with Thingsboard on Raspberry PI. We’ll start from a fresh ThingsBoard installation, according to my ThingsBoard and Raspberry PI: getting a Professional IoT dashboard tutorial.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Krita 5.0 Is Out as a New Major Release With a Lot of Changes

• Without doubt Krita 5.0 is a big release, with a lot of new features and improvements. With their latest version, it should get more exciting for all the users across multiple platforms.

• Krita is a well known digital painting program, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but is primarily known for its Linux side. It’s a professional free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and 2D animation.

• Today all digital artists and art lovers have reason to rejoice, because almost four years since the Krita 4.x branch first saw the light of day, Krita 5.0 has been released.

• So without further ado, let’s dive into what’s new in version 5.

=> ↺ 2021 KDE Eco Sprint | KDE.news

• On 11 December 2021, KDE Eco held the first of many planned Sprints. The Sprint was originally intended to be an in-person event to set up a community measurement lab, but Corona had other ideas. Nevertheless, the community deployed its usual resourcefulness, and we met online instead.

• We discussed the next steps in KDE’s Eco project, and the day’s conversation was varied, covering topics such as setting up a team space for the project (achieved), completing the Blauer Engel application for Okular (submitted), along with several technical issues related to energy-consumption measurements in the lab, including Standard Usage Scenarios, replicable reference systems, standardizing data output, budget vs. professional power meters, and more. See the minutes for details.

• A more detailed summary of the discussion will be published at the KDE Eco blog (coming soon), so keep an eye out for updates there!

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ [Video] GNOME 42 Demo in Nightly GNOME OS

• We give you the first look at GNOME 42 desktop in GNOMS OS Nightly.

Distributions

=> ↺ 7 Linux Distro Versions Released This Christmas Season – It’s FOSS News

• In this holiday season, are you looking forward to trying out new distributions on your Linux system?

• Fret not, we have you covered. Here, I shall be listing some of the latest Linux distribution releases.

New Releases

=> ↺ Debian-Based siduction 2021.3 Distro Released with Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS, PipeWire

• Dubbed “Wintersky,” siduction 2021.3 comes about five months after the 2021.2 update and brings some interesting changes, such as the use of PipeWire as default sound system, replacing PulseAudio and JACK, as well as the iNet Wireless Daemon (iwd) for handling Wi-Fi networks on the KDE Plasma, LXQt, and Xfce editions, replacing wpa_supplicant.

• As a matter of fact, siduction 2021.3 only comes with KDE Plasma, LXQt, and Xfce editions as live media, alongside the standard Xorg (uses the Fluxbox window manager) and noX (text-mode only) editions, as the development team decided to drop support for the Cinnamon, LXDE, and MATE editions due to lack of time.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

=> ↺ openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/50 & 51

• Unfortunately, I missed writing up the weekly review last week, so I am spanning once again two weeks here. And Tumbleweed has been so stable for the last weeks, even the snapshot count shows this. For example, in the period from snapshot 1116 to 1222, only a total of three snapshots were not released (1204, opneQA issues, and 1216 & 1217 due to a new pango version having an impact on the rendering, which required a lot of needles to be created, which we could not do in time before the next snapshots reached QA). looking only at the time since my last weekly review, we have published 12 snapshots (1209..1215 & 1218..1222). Despite the holiday season, there seem still to be ample changes incoming (but it is getting less, as the look at the Staging dashboard reveals at the moment).

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

=> ↺ Irving Wladawsky-Berger: New Ways of Understanding Human Behavior

• “It is often said that no person is an island and it takes a village to raise a child, but psychology has largely lacked the scientific evidence to quantify and characterize these aphorisms,” wrote MIT professor Alex (Sandy) Pentland in Contextualizing Human Psychology, – an article published in the August, 2020 issue of Technology, Mind and Behavior, a journal of the American Psychological Association. “As a result, experimental focus is usually on more easily quantifiable individual traits and behaviors.”

• “In the last decade, however, digital data from online interactions, cell phones, and credit cards have allowed us to precisely quantify large-scale social behavior at a very fine level of detail. The little data breadcrumbs that we leave behind as we move around in the world are enabling new ways of understanding human behavior, giving rise to the emerging discipline of computational social science. “[T]hese new tools can help relate individual traits to the surrounding social context and thus better explain life outcomes and societal characteristics.”

• The article illustrated the advances and challenges of data-driven predictions by discussing a 2017 mass collaboration experiment. The experiment asked each of 160 academic teams to predict six life outcomes, – such as a child’s grade point average and whether a family would be evicted from their home, – by analyzing development data of over 4.200 at-risk children from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. These data had been collected by interviewing primary caregivers over more than 15 years, as well as other assessments including early childhood education and the children’s scores on a variety of standard tests. Additional information was provided on the parents, including medical, employment, and incarceration histories, religion, and child care practices. Almost 13,000 measurements were made for each child and their family.

=> ↺ 10 of our favorite sysadmin stories from 2021 | Enable Sysadmin

• In the Special Theory of Relativity, Albert Einstein popularized the concept that “time is relative” or that “time is a (persistent) illusion.”

• In a more prosaic way, we all have the feeling that time appears to move slowly when we are bored and quickly when we are having fun.

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ 10 best mood tracker apps for Android – Android Authority

=> ↺ Huawei gets patent for technology related to Android applications migration

=> ↺ L-Launcher is a free launcher app for non-Wear OS Android smartwatches

=> ↺ Top 3 reasons why Android is at 18GB RAM and iOS is at 6GB RAM

=> ↺ Galaxy S20 owners, brace yourselves for an upcoming Android 12 update – PhoneArena

=> ↺ How to customize your Android 12 phone’s Material You theme

=> ↺ Google explains how Android’s Private Compute Core works

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Becky Stern’s machine brings the NYC hot dog experience to you | Arduino Blog

• For her gift to Colin Furze as a participant in this year’s YouTube Makers Secret Santa event, Becky Stern opted to bring the street food of New York City in the form of a mostly automatic hot dog dressing machine. It was designed with the intention of letting a user set down a hot dog at the top of a small roller ramp and then have it slide along as it gets covered in various authentic toppings.

• An Arduino Uno is responsible for controlling all three servo motors via a single PCA9685 driver module and the attached Adafruit Sound Board, which is loaded with sounds that Stern recorded around Manhattan. A separate Adafruit Pro Trinket sits at the base and sends commands to an RGB LED matrix in order to scroll text across the display.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ 13 Website copiers that help you keep offline mirrored versions of websites

• Ever wanted to save a copy of a certain website to review it later when offline?

• In the early 2000s, we used to copy a whole website into a static HTML format with images and scripts assets, in order to have access to them when disconnected.

• Believe it or not, for many reasons, some are still doing this.

• To have a copy of a website, you need to use a special web crawler, called a website copier that copies all the website into static HTML files alongside its images, styles, and JavaScript files.

=> ↺ Top 20 free, Open-source Icon packs for your project

• Finding the right icons for your project, is not an easy task, especially when you are looking for something specific to give your project a distinguished appearance and match its specifications, and standards.

• You can find many free icons sets out there, however, some of them are not truly open-source or come with a limitation for commercial use.

• In this article, we present you with a list of open-source icon fonts, which you can use freely in your personal, and commercial projects.

=> ↺ Jrnl: Create your personal journals with style

• Jrnl is a command-line journal and note-taking application for all old-school nerds who value the terminal.

• Jrnl is created and maintained by several contributors who like the project and packed by many supporters.

• Unlike other personal journaling systems, Jrnl comes with no constraints to a user interface, all it is required is: typing your journals, tagging them, encrypting them, and searching them with simple commands.

• [...]

• Jrnl is released as free and open-source software under GPL-3.0 License.

=> ↺ MedicLog: The personal health logger that everyone needs

• The application and source code is licensed under GPL-3.0 License.

=> ↺ Another ASRock Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge Motherboard Ported To Open-Source Coreboot – Phoronix

• Another aging Intel motherboard is now supported by Coreboot for those wanting to free your system down to the BIOS.

• The ASRock H77 Pro4-M is the latest board picked up by mainline Coreboot. Like with many of the consumer desktop motherboards supported by Coreboot, it’s an old Sandy Bridge / Ivy Bridge era motherboard. The ASRock H77 Pro4-M is a micro-ATX motherboard that supports LGA-1155 Sandy/Ivy Bridge processors, four DDR3 slots, one PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot, Gigabit Ethernet, and other usual features for its age.

FSF

GNU Projects

=> ↺ Taranis, a major release of Jami

• Taranis is the new major stable release of Jami, and so we invite all Jami users to upgrade their version of Jami to this newest release now. Taranis, the Gallic and Celtic god of the sky, lightning and thunder, will be the baptismal name of this new version of Jami.

=> ↺ Jami “Taranis” released

• The Jami communication tool has released a major new stable version called “Taranis”; the blog post announcement explains: “Taranis, the Gallic and Celtic god of the sky, lightning and thunder, will be the baptismal name of this new version of Jami.

=> ↺ GNU Jami Taranis Released For Free Software Conferencing, Peer-To-Peer Communication – Phoronix

• GNU Jami “Taranis” has been released as a major update to this free software project for peer-to-peer communication and SIP-based messaging. GNU Jami is what previously started out as SFLphone and then GNU Ring for initially being focused on softphones.

• Taranis is the name of the new GNU Jami release, which they describe as a major update. Jami sums itself up as “a GNU package for universal communication that respects the freedom and privacy of its users. Jami is an end-to-end encrypted secure and distributed voice, video, and chat communication platform that requires no central server, and leaves the power of privacy and freedom in the hands of users.”

=> ↺ Jami Taranis released

Programming/Development

=> ↺ The Most Excellent Non-Programming Books for Coders

• Learning always goes on in absolute swing for learners and developers. Coding has picked up as a great career opportunity, and that is happening coders also have to be on their best learning to provide high-quality performance at work.

• Programming is also a fast-moving technique and thus requires one to be on their learning curve to stay relevant and crucial for developers to stay updated. Books are an excellent source for knowledge bearing and the same stands for programmers and coders.

=> ↺ Top Programming Languages for Data Science

• Data science is an important instrument in the modern world. A lot of computers gather a lot of bytes of information about users behavior, weather, results of sports games and all other kinds of content that appears every second. However, there are a lot of questions about the quality of conclusions that are built according to the analysis of such data. For instance, some respectable magazine created a list of top universities in the country according to their special scoring.

=> ↺ Jussi Pakkanen: This year receive the gift of a free Meson manual

• About two years ago, the Meson manual was published and made available for purchase. The sales were not particularly stellar and the bureaucracy needed to keep the sales channel going took a noticeable amount of time and effort. The same goes for keeping the book continually up to date.

• Thus it came to pass that sales were shut down a year ago. At the time there were some questions on whether the book could be made freely available. This was not done, as it would not really have been fair to all the people who paid actual money to get it. So the book has been unavailable since.

Perl/Raku

=> ↺ [Perl] Monthly Report – November

• I started the 1000 days FREE T-shirt campaign. I am so grateful for all the support that I received so far. It feels great. I decided to gift FREE specially designed T-shirt to all the champions of The Weekly Challenge. I am done with the most difficult phase of the campaign i.e. collecting funds. Thanks to all the sponsors, we have collected £1029.64 in total. The fund is enough to cover the cost of T-shirt printing and international delivery as per my own estimation.

• As of today, I have received 32 confirmations out of 53 eligible members. I am not in a rush to be honest. I would want to gift each and every eligible members unless anyone says the opposite. I am hoping after the holiday break they will find time to respond to my email request. You can find the regular update to the campaign in the blog here.

Leftovers

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

=> ↺ Security updates for Friday

• Security updates have been issued by Debian (webkit2gtk and wpewebkit), Fedora (httpd and singularity), Mageia (ldns, netcdf, php, ruby, thrift/golang-github-apache-thrift, thunderbird, and webkit2), openSUSE (go1.16, go1.17, libaom, and p11-kit), and SUSE (go1.16, go1.17, htmldoc, libaom, libvpx, logstash, openssh-openssl1, python3, and runc).

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ We take action against Hack-for-Hire firm Belltrox #SaveOurPrivacy

• The surveillance-for-hire industry has been in the eye of the storm in 2021 and it is essential that these entities are held accountable for their illegal actions. Following a new report from Meta (Facebook) on the surveillance activities of an Delhi-based company Belltrox, we have filed a criminal complaint with the Cyber Crime Cell of the Delhi Police asking them to take appropriate action.

• [...]

• In July, the activities of Israel’s NSO Group, especially its spyware Pegasus, became the focus of media and public ire over allegations of hacking and misuse. However, the NSO Group isn’t the only entity engaged in surveillance activities. While Pegasus is a spyware which is sold for use by its clients, there are also entities engaged in the (self-explanatory) surveillance-for-hire activities. These entities targeted people across the world, including journalists and human rights activists.

• On December 16, 2021, Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook, issued a press release titled, “Taking Action Against the Surveillance-For-Hire Industry”. This press release was on the basis of and accompanied by a threat report titled, “Threat Report on the Surveillance-for-Hire Industry”. The report was authored by Mike Dvilyanski, Facebook’s Head of Cyber Espionage Investigations, David Agranovich, Facebook’s Director of Threat Disruption, and Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s Head of Security Policy. At the end of a months-long investigation, seven entities were identified as engaging in surveillance-for-hire activities and subsequently removed from Meta’s platforms.

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