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No more boot loader: Please use the kernel instead
by Peter Reutemann 09 Jul '24

09 Jul '24

'We are working on a new scheme to replace the GRUB bootloader with a fast, secure, Linux-based, user-space solution: nmbl (for no more boot loader). Most people are familiar with GRUB, a powerful, flexible, fully-featured bootloader that is used on multiple architectures (x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le OpenFirmware). Although GRUB is quite versatile and capable, its features create complexity that is difficult to maintain, and that both duplicate and lag behind the Linux kernel while also creating numerous security holes. On the other hand, the Linux kernel, which has a large developer base, benefits from fast feature development, quick responses to vulnerabilities and greater overall scrutiny. We (Red Hat boot loader engineering) will present our solution to this problem, which is to use the Linux kernel as its own bootloader. Loaded by the EFI stub on UEFI, and packed into a unified kernel image (UKI), the kernel, initramfs, and kernel command line, contain everything they need to reach the final boot target. All necessary drivers, filesystem support, and networking are already built in and code duplication is avoided. We will showcase the work done so far, and ask you for your feedback and use cases.' -- source: https://pretalx.com/devconf-cz-2024/talk/W3AVCT/ -- video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywrSDLp926M Cheers, Peter

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FreeBSD Contributor Mocks Gloomy Predictions for the Open Source Movement
by Peter Reutemann 08 Jul '24

08 Jul '24

'In Communications of the ACM,/em>, long-time FreeBSD contributor Poul-Henning Kamp mocks the idea that the free and open-source software has "come apart" and "will end in tears and regret." Economists and others focused on money — like my bank — have had a lot of trouble figuring out the free and open source software (FOSS) phenomenon, and eventually they seem to have reached the conclusion that it just makes no sense. So, they go with the flow. Recently, very serious people in the FOSS movement have started to write long and thoughtful opinion pieces about how it has all come apart and will end in tears and regret. Allow me to disagree... What follows is a humorous history of how the Open Source movement bested a series of ill-conceived marketing failures starting after the "utterly bad" 1980s when IBM had an "unimaginably huge monopoly" — and an era of vendor lock-in from companies trying to be the next IBM: Out of that utter market failure came Minix, (Net/Free/Open)BSD, and Linux, at a median year of approximately 1991. I can absolutely guarantee that if we had been able to buy a reasonably priced and solid Unix for our 32-bit PCs — no strings attached — nobody would be running FreeBSD or Linux today, except possibly as an obscure hobby. Bill Gates would also have had a lot less of our money... The essay moves on to when "that dot-com thing happened, fueled by the availability of FOSS operating systems, which did a much better job than any operating system you could buy — not just for the price, but in absolute terms of performance on any given piece of hardware. Thus, out of utter market failure, the FOSS movement was born." And ultimately, the essay ends with our present day, and the phenomenon of companies that "make a business out of FOSS or derivatives thereof..." The "F" in FOSS was never silent. In retrospect, it seems clear that open source was not so much the goal itself as a means to an end, which is freedom: freedom to fix broken things, freedom from people who thought they could clutch the source code tightly and wield our ignorance of it as a weapon to force us all to pay for and run Windows Vista. But the FOSS movement has won what it wanted, and no matter how much oldsters dream about their glorious days as young revolutionaries, it is not coming back; the frustrations and anger of IT in 2024 are entirely different from those of 1991. One very big difference is that more people have realized that source code is a liability rather than an asset. For some, that realization came creeping along the path from young teenage FOSS activists in the late 1990s to CIOs of BigCorp today. For most of us, I expect, it was the increasingly crushing workload of maintaining legacy code bases...' -- source: https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/07/07/0243241 Cheers, Peter

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“RegreSSHion” vulnerability in OpenSSH gives attackers root on Linux
by Peter Reutemann 03 Jul '24

03 Jul '24

'Researchers have warned of a critical vulnerability affecting the OpenSSH networking utility that can be exploited to give attackers complete control of Linux and Unix servers with no authentication required. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-6387, allows unauthenticated remote code execution with root system rights on Linux systems that are based on glibc, an open source implementation of the C standard library. The vulnerability is the result of a code regression introduced in 2020 that reintroduced CVE-2006-5051, a vulnerability that was fixed in 2006. With thousands, if not millions, of vulnerable servers populating the Internet, this latest vulnerability could pose a significant risk. [...] The vulnerability affects the following: - OpenSSH versions earlier than 4.4p1 are vulnerable to this signal handler race condition unless they are patched for CVE-2006-5051 and CVE-2008-4109. - Versions from 4.4p1 up to, but not including, 8.5p1 are not vulnerable due to a transformative patch for CVE-2006-5051, which made a previously unsafe function secure. - The vulnerability resurfaces in versions from 8.5p1 up to, but not including, 9.8p1 due to the accidental removal of a critical component in a function.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/07/regresshion-vulnerability-in-opens… OpenSSH 9.8 was released July 1st: https://www.openssh.com/ Cheers, Peter

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Made Move To Wayland
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 01 Jul '24

01 Jul '24

I’d been running Wayland OK on my laptop for some months now, but I held off putting it on my main machine for one reason: when I logged into a Wayland session, Emacs would not recognize my Compose key (which I have set to Caps Lock). Today I finally figured out I have to install the “emacs-pgtk” package instead of “emacs-gtk”; the former is built with a version of GTK that works with Wayland. And yes, my Compose key works again. Still have to get used to slightly different input behaviour: previously, once I hit Compose, nothing would appear until I finished the whole key sequence. Now it echoes each keystroke immediately as I type it, in place, overwriting the previous echo (starting with an underline for the Compose key itself), then when I have typed the last key, it overwrites the echo area with the final character.

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From Jupyter To JupyterLab
by Lawrence D'Oliveiro 28 Jun '24

28 Jun '24

I’ve been using Jupyter <https://jupyter.org/> as a convenient basis for “scratchpad” programming (not just in Python, but also some other languages) for a while now. I had heard about this next-generation “JupyterLab” thing they were working on, but always held off trying it out. Then I did my usual monthly upgrade of Debian Unstable on my main machine a few days ago, and this time my Jupyter installation broke. So I updated my wrapper scripts for building Jupyter from source, to check out more recent versions of all the necessary components. Got the build done, started it up, and ... it seems my Jupyter has turned into JupyterLab. Yup, it has a new interface now. The file-manager display no longer seems to open things with a single click; that now only selects items, and you then have to perform an action (like open a notebook) from a right-click menu. And there is no “open in new tab/window” menu item; creating a new tab always happens when opening a notebook, while opening a subfolder always replaces the current tab contents. I used to be able to middle-click on a folder to open it in a new tab, but that option is now gone. There is an option in the right-click menu to “Copy Shareable Link”. When you do this on a notebook or folder and paste the result into the address bar, it opens the item in what I can only call “lab” mode. The window now has three panes, with the middle one an editor-type display, for viewing/editing notebook contents and other document content. The left-hand pane can show various things, selected by clicking one of the icons in its leftmost margin: it can show folder contents, or the table of contents of the current notebook, or a summary of open notebooks, running processes etc. And in the right-hand pane, there are various kinds of “tools” (for debugging, inspection etc) that only seem to appear when viewing notebook content. Ah, discovered how to control the visibility of this “tool” pane: it has two icons for selecting the two different categories of this it can display. But if you click the icon for the section that is already showing, the whole pane shrinks down to a narrow strip just showing the icons. Click again to expand the pane, of course. Further ah, same thing happens with the left-hand pane: click the icon for the section that’s already showing, and that pane too shrinks down. Hiding both the left- and right-hand panes brings you almost back to the old-style minimal-frills notebook/document display, except it only takes a click to bring one of those extras back. The middle pane has its own tab system, to let you have multiple documents open at once. You can drag its internal tabs around to tile them vertically or horizontally. And you can just drag a document to here from the folder display on the left to open it. Click on the document tab header, and that item opens in a separate browser window/tab. If nothing is open here it defaults to showing a “Launcher” tab, with icons for creating notebooks, opening terminal sessions, and creating other document types. The “lab” mode is activated by having an extra “/lab” part in the URL; if you remove this, it reverts to the old-style view of a single folder or notebook. Another thing that has changed is the way notebooks are saved. Previously, there was a menu option to “save and checkpoint” (with no option to do a manual save without checkpointing). And I found that if you tried to close the view of a modified notebook, it would ask to confirm you wanted to close the tab/window, but regardless of which you selected, the notebook would still be saved back to the file. Now that confirm-close trick no longer does saving; you have to explicitly select Save from the File menu, or hit CTRL/S. Checkpointing might still happen automatically as part of autosaving; I can’t find a menu option for explicitly creating a checkpoint, only for restoring from one. So anyway, a lot of intriguing new stuff in there to discover. If you like experimenting with code (as I do), Jupyter can be a great way to do it.

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Superfile: A Modern Terminal File Manager for Linux and macOS
by Peter Reutemann 20 Jun '24

20 Jun '24

'Superfile is a modern terminal file manager that recently caught my attention; it’s not only easy to use but is very user-friendly compared to its alternatives, such as Ranger, MC, or nnn. It allows you to create files and directories, view (process, metadata, clipboard), provide a navigation pane, create multiple panels to work in two separate directories, support plugins, offer a variety of themes, and much more. The project is new, so there have been active updates every week, allowing you to see new features quickly. I’ve also been using it for a few days, and honestly, one key factor in using DE in Linux for me was its easy-to-use file manager, but with Superfile, there’s no need for that now.' -- source: https://linuxtldr.com/installing-superfile/ I've used mc in the past, being familiar with norton commander, but I might give Superfile a go in the future. Cheers, Peter

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systemd-tmpfiles, deleting /home
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jun '24

19 Jun '24

Saw this on my mastodon feed: 'TIL (thankfully second hand) that running "systemd-tmpfiles --purge" will delete /home in systemd 256 [1]. Apparently if you think linux is mainly for running cloud services, this seems reasonable to you. Or something. [1] tested with systemd-tmpfiles --dry-run --purge on debian. I guess it _could_ be a Debian addition, but I'm guessing not.' -- source: https://mathstodon.xyz/@bremner/112615591101488528 Anyone keen on giving it a go??? :-) Cheers, Peter

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DietPi Released a New Version 9.5
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jun '24

19 Jun '24

Just saw these release notes come across my feed: https://dietpi.com/docs/releases/v9_5/ Since I'd never heard of DiePi before: 'DietPi is a highly optimised & minimal Debian-based Linux distribution. DietPi is extremely lightweight at its core, and also extremely easy to install and use. Setting up a single board computer (SBC) or even a computer, for both regular or server use, takes time and skill. DietPi provides an easy way to install and run favourite software you choose.' -- source: https://dietpi.com/docs/ And it supports a range of boards: https://dietpi.com/docs/hardware/ RPis, Odroid, Pine64, Radxa, Sparky, ASUS Tinker board, NanoPi, Orange Pi Cheers, Peter

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KDE Plasma 6.1 Released
by Peter Reutemann 19 Jun '24

19 Jun '24

'"The KDE community announced the latest release of their popular desktop environment: Plasma 6.1," writes longtime Slashdot reader jrepin. From the announcement: While Plasma 6.0 was all about getting the migration to the underlying Qt 6 frameworks correct, Plasma 6.1 is where developers start implementing the features that will take you desktop to a new level. In this release, you will find features that go far beyond subtle changes to themes and tweaks to animations (although there is plenty of those too). Among some of the new features in this release you will find improved remote desktop support with a new built-in server, overhauled and streamlined desktop edit mode, restoration of open applications from the previous session on Wayland, synchronization of keyboard LED colors with the desktop accent color, making mouse cursor bigger and easier to find by shaking it, edge barriers (a sticky area for mouse cursor near the edges between screens), explicit sync support eliminates flickering and glitches for NVidia graphics card users on Wayland, and triple buffering support for smoother animations and screen rendering.' -- source: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/06/18/2050203 Cheers, Peter

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High-severity vulnerabilities affect a wide range of Asus router models
by Peter Reutemann 18 Jun '24

18 Jun '24

'Hardware manufacturer Asus has released updates patching multiple critical vulnerabilities that allow hackers to remotely take control of a range of router models with no authentication or interaction required of end users. The most critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-3080 is an authentication bypass flaw that can allow remote attackers to log into a device without authentication. The vulnerability, according to the Taiwan Computer Emergency Response Team / Coordination Center (TWCERT/CC), carries a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10. [...] A second vulnerability tracked as CVE-2024-3079 affects the same router models. It stems from a buffer overflow flaw and allows remote hackers who have already obtained administrative access to an affected router to execute commands. TWCERT/CC is warning of a third vulnerability affecting various Asus router models. It’s tracked as CVE-2024-3912 and can allow remote hackers to execute commands with no user authentication required.' -- source: https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/06/high-severity-vulnerabilities-affe… The article lists affected routers and links to their respective bios/firmware pages. Cheers, Peter

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