Linux Blimp

There are many rudimentary Microsoft-style themes for Linux, but Chicago95 fastidiously recreates the ineffable beauty of Windows ’95 right down to the finest details. It’s a perfect melding of the historical Windows and modern Linux experiences. Creator Grassmunk (who also made a less-precise but still-beautiful MacOS Classic theme) writes:

I was unhappy with the various XFCE/GTK2/GTK3 Windows 95 based themes and decided to make one that was more consistent across the board for theming.

Included in this theme:

New icons to complete the icon theme started with Classic95
Edited Redmond XFWM theme to more accurately reflect Windows 95
Edited Xfce-Redmond by dbbolton to be more accurate and include XFCE panels
Created GTK-3.0 theme from scratch (based on Win 10 and Mate themes)
Plymouth theme created from scratch
An MS-DOS inspired theme for oh-my-zsh

You’ve got some work to do! Here’s a video tutorial.

Linux programmer developing tools for new open source Code of Conduct

Coraline Ehmke is a leading figure in the push to make Linux programming more welcoming and inclusiv, supplementing the project’s famed Code of Conflict with an enforceable Code of Conduct project called CoC Beacon.

READ THE REST

Linux for Makers, by Aaron Newcomb

I’ve had very little experience with Linux but now that I’m using Raspberry Pis (a cheap single board computer that runs Linux) I need to know how to use Linux. Online how-tos are good, but Linux for Makers, by Aaron Newcomb, is better. In fact, this book is pure gold. It assumes zero prior knowledge […]

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Forthcoming Ataribox renamed “Atari VCS”

The Ataribox, announced after Nintendo scored surprise hits with its popular NES and SNES classic consoles, is going to be called “Atari VCS” instead — the same name as Atari’s original, way back in 1977. The company is showing off the Atari VCS, Classic Joystick, and Modern Controller prototypes to the press this week at […]

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Kickstart a creative career with this Adobe Mastery Bundle

Whether you’re interested in pursuing design or professional photography, you’ll likely build your career with Adobe’s creative tools. From Photoshop and Lightroom to Premiere Pro and After Effects, Adobe provides designers, photographers, and video editors with the tools to do their jobs, and you can master them as well with help from the Complete Adobe Mastery […]

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These bone conduction earphones protect your hearing

Whether you already have hearing loss or want to save what you have, it’s time to look into bone conduction earphones. Well, guess what! These True Wireless Bone Conduction Earphones are on sale and a great introduction to the tech. If you’re not familiar with bone conduction, you’ll notice something different about these otherwise minimalist […]

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5 new ways to escape inward and find your zen

Next time you treat yourself, try holding the guilt hangover. There are plenty of ways to add to your inventory without adding to your clutter. In fact, some of these gift ideas might clear it away. Nobody’s path to zen is the same. Check out this roundup of ways to escape and find your own. […]

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Source

Last month, TrueOS announced that they would be spinning off their desktop offering. The team behind the new project, named Project Trident, have been working furiously towards their first release. They did take a few minutes to answer some of our question about Project Trident and TrueOS. I would like to thank JT and Ken for taking the time to compile these answers.

It’s FOSS: What is Project Trident?

Project Trident: Project Trident is the continuation of the TrueOS Desktop. Essentially, it is the continuation of the primary “TrueOS software” that people have been using for the past 2 years. The continuing evolution of the entire TrueOS project has reached a stage where it became necessary to reorganize the project. To understand this change, it is important to know the history of the TrueOS project.

Originally, Kris Moore created PC-BSD. This was a Desktop release of FreeBSD focused on providing a simple and user-friendly graphical experience for FreeBSD. PC-BSD grew and matured over many years. During the evolution of PC-BSD, many users began asking for a server focused version of the software. Kris agreed, and TrueOS was born as a scaled down server version of PC-BSD. In late 2016, more contributors and growth resulted in significant changes to the PC-BSD codebase. Because the new development was so markedly different from the original PC-BSD design, it was decided to rebrand the project.

TrueOS was chosen as the name for this new direction for PC-BSD as the project had grown beyond providing only a graphical front to FreeBSD and was beginning to make fundamental changes to the FreeBSD operating system. One of these changes was moving PC-BSD from being based on each FreeBSD Release to TrueOS being based on the active and less outdated FreeBSD Current. Other major changes are using OpenRC for service management and being more aggressive about addressing long-standing issues with the FreeBSD release process. TrueOS moved toward a rolling release cycle, twice a year, which tested and merged FreeBSD changes directly from the developer instead of waiting months or even years for the FreeBSD review process to finish. TrueOS also deprecated and removed obsolete technology much more regularly.

As the TrueOS Project grew, the developers found these changes were needed by other FreeBSD-based projects. These projects began expressing interest in using TrueOS rather than FreeBSD as the base for their project. This demonstrated that TrueOS needed to again evolve into a distribution framework for any BSD project to use. This allows port maintainers and source developers from any BSD project to pool their resources and use the same source repositories while allowing every distribution to still customize, build, and release their own self-contained project. The result is a natural split of the traditional TrueOS team. There were now naturally two teams in the TrueOS project: those working on the build infrastructure and FreeBSD enhancements – the “core” part of the project, and those working on end-user experience and utility – the “desktop” part of the project.

When the decision was made to formally split the projects, the obvious question that arose was what to call the “Desktop” project. As TrueOS was already positioned to be a BSD distribution platform, the developers agreed the desktop side should pick a new name. There were other considerations too, one notable being that we were concerned that if we continued to call the desktop project “TrueOS Desktop”, it would prevent people from considering TrueOS as the basis for their distribution because of misconceptions that TrueOS was a desktop-focused OS. It also helps to “level the playing field” for other desktop distributions like GhostBSD so that TrueOS is not viewed as having a single “blessed” desktop version.

It’s FOSS: What features will TrueOS add to the FreeBSD base?

Project Trident: TrueOS has already added a number of features to FreeBSD:

• OpenRC replaces rc.d for service management
• LibreSSL in base
• Root NSS certificates out-of-box
• Scriptable installations (pc-sysinstall)

The full list of changes can be seen on the TrueOS repository (https://github.com/trueos/trueos/blob/trueos-master/README.md). This list does change quite regularly as FreeBSD development itself changes.

It’s FOSS: I understand that TrueOS will have a new feature that will make creating a desktop spin of TrueOS very easy. Could you explain that new feature?

Project Trident: Historically, one of the biggest hurdles for creating a desktop version of FreeBSD is that the build options for packages are tuned for servers rather than desktops. This means a desktop distribution cannot use the pre-built packages from FreeBSD and must build, use, and maintain a custom package repository. Maintaining a fork of the FreeBSD ports tree is no trivial task. TrueOS has created a full distribution framework so now all it takes to create a custom build of FreeBSD is a single JSON manifest file. There is now a single “source of truth” for the source and ports repositories that is maintained by the TrueOS team and regularly tagged with “stable” build markers. All projects can use this framework, which makes updates trivial.

It’s FOSS: Do you think that the new focus of TrueOS will lead to the creation of more desktop-centered BSDs?

Project Trident: That is the hope. Historically, creating a desktop-centered BSD has required a lot of specialized knowledge. Not only do most people not have this knowledge, but many do not even know what they need to learn until they start troubleshooting. TrueOS is trying to drastically simplify this process to enable the wider Open Source community to experiment, contribute, and enjoy BSD-based projects.

It’s FOSS: What is going to happen to TrueOS Pico? Will Project Trident have ARM support?

Project Trident: Project Trident will be dependent on TrueOS for ARM support. The developers have talked about the possibility of supporting ARM64 and RISC-V architectures, but it is not possible at the current time. If more Open Source contributors want to help develop ARM and RISC-V support, the TrueOS project is definitely willing to help test and integrate that code.

It’s FOSS: What does this change (splitting Trus OS into Project Trident) mean for the Lumina desktop environment?

Project Trident: Long-term, almost nothing. Lumina is still the desktop environment for Project Trident and will continue to be developed and enhanced alongside Project Trident just as it was for TrueOS. Short-term, we will be delaying the release of Lumina 2.0 and will release an updated version of the 1.x branch (1.5.0) instead. This is simply due to all the extra overhead to get Project Trident up and running. When things settle down into a rhythm, the development of Lumina will pick up once again.

It’s FOSS: Are you planning on including any desktop environments besides Lumina?

Project Trident: While Lumina is included by default, all of the other popular desktop environments will be available in the package repo exactly as they had been before.

It’s FOSS: Any plans to include Steam to increase the userbase?

Project Trident: Steam is still unavailable natively on FreeBSD, so we do not have any plans to ship it out of the box currently. In the meantime, we highly recommend installing the Windows version of Steam through the PlayOnBSD utility.

It’s FOSS: What will happen to the AppCafe?

Project Trident: The AppCafe is the name of the graphical interface for the “pkg” utility integrated into the SysAdm client created by TrueOS. This hasn’t changed. SysAdm, the graphical client, and by extension AppCafe are still available for all TrueOS-based distributions to use.

It’s FOSS: Does Project Trident have any corporate sponsors lined up? If not, would you be open to it or would you prefer that it be community supported?

Project Trident: iXsystems is the first corporate sponsor of Project Trident and we are always open to other sponsorships as well. We would prefer smaller individual contributions from the community, but we understand that larger project needs or special-purpose goals are much more difficult to achieve without allowing larger corporate sponsorships as well. In either case, Project Trident is always looking out for the best interests of the community and will not allow intrusive or harmful code to enter the project even if a company or individual tries to make that code part of a sponsorship deal.

It’s FOSS: BSD always seems to be lagging in terms of support for newer devices. Will TrueOS be able to remedy that with a quicker release cycle?

Project Trident: Yes! That was a primary reason for TrueOS to start tracking the CURRENT branch of FreeBSD in 2016. This allows for the changes that FreeBSD developers are making, including new hardware support, to be available much sooner than if we followed the FreeBSD release cycle.

It’s FOSS: Do you have any idea when Project Trident will have its first release?

Project Trident: Right now we are targeting a late August release date. This is because Project Trident is “kicking the wheels” on the new TrueOS distribution system. We want to ensure everything is working smoothly before we release. Going forward, we plan on having regular package updates every week or two for the end-user packages and a new release of Trident with an updated OS version every 6 months. This will follow the TrueOS release schedule with a small time offset.

Will you give Project Trident a try when it’s released? Who would you like us to interview next? Let us know in the comments below.

Source

Most people simply are unaware of how much personal data they leak on a
daily basis as they use their computers. Enter this weekend’s reading topic:
Privacy.

FOSS Project Spotlight: Tutanota, the First Encrypted Email Service with an App on F-Droid
by Matthias Pfau

Seven years ago Tutanota was built, an encrypted email service with a strong focus on security, privacy and open source. Long before the Snowden revelations, Tutanota’s team felt there was a need for easy-to-use encryption that would allow everyone to communicate online without being snooped upon.

The Wire
by Shawn Powers

In the US, there has been recent concern over ISPs turning over logs to the
government. During the past few years, the idea of people snooping on our
private data (by governments and others) really has made encryption more
popular than ever before. One of the problems with encryption, however, is
that it’s generally not user-friendly to add its protection to your
conversations. Thankfully, messaging services are starting to take notice of
the demand. For me, I need a messaging service that works across multiple
platforms, encrypts automatically, supports group messaging and ideally can
handle audio/video as well. Thankfully, I found an incredible open-source
package that ticks all my boxes: Wire.

Facebook
Compartmentalization
by Kyle Rankin

Whenever people talk about protecting privacy on the internet, social-media
sites like Facebook inevitably come up—especially right now. It makes
sense—social networks (like Facebook) provide a platform where you can
share your personal data with your friends, and it doesn’t come as much of a
surprise to people to find out they also share that data with advertisers
(it’s how they pay the bills after all). It makes sense that Facebook uses
data you provide when you visit that site. What some people might be
surprised to know, however, is just how much. Facebook tracks them when they
aren’t using Facebook itself but just browsing around the web.

Some readers may solve the problem of Facebook tracking by saying “just
don’t use Facebook”; however, for many people, that site may be the only way
they can keep in touch with some of their friends and family members.
Although I don’t post on Facebook much myself, I do have an account and use
it to keep in touch with certain friends. So in this article, I explain how
I employ compartmentalization principles to use Facebook without leaking too
much other information about myself.

Protection,
Privacy and Playoffs
by Shawn Powers

I’m not generally a privacy nut when it comes to my digital life. That’s not
really a good thing, as I think privacy is important, but it often can be
very inconvenient. For example, if you strolled into my home office, you’d
find I don’t password-protect my screensaver. Again, it’s not because I want
to invite snoops, but rather it’s just a pain to type in my password every
time I come back from going to get a cup of tea. (Note: when I worked in a
traditional office environment, I did lock my screen. I’m sure working from
a home office is why I’m comfortable with lax security.)

A
Machine for Keeping Secrets?
by Vinay Gupta

The most important thing that the British War Office learned about
cryptography was how to keep a secret: Enigma was broken at Bletchley Park
early enough in World War II to change the course of the war—and of
history. Now here’s the thing: only if the breakthrough (called Ultra, which
gives you a sense of its importance) was secret could Enigma’s compromise be
used to defeat the Nazis. Breaking Enigma was literally the “zero-day” that
brought down an empire. Zero-day is a bug known only to an attacker.
Defenders (those creating/protecting the software) have never seen the
exploit and are, therefore, largely powerless to respond until they have
done analysis. The longer the zero-day is kept secret, and its use
undiscovered, the longer it represents absolute power.

Own Your
DNS Data
by Kyle Rankin

I honestly think most people simply are unaware of how much personal data
they leak on a daily basis as they use their computers. Even if they have
some inkling along those lines, I still imagine many think of the data they
leak only in terms of individual facts, such as their name or where they ate
lunch. What many people don’t realize is how revealing all of those
individual, innocent facts are when they are combined, filtered and
analyzed.

Cell-phone metadata (who you called, who called you, the length of the call
and what time the call happened) falls under this category, as do all of the
search queries you enter on the Internet.

For this article, I discuss a common but often overlooked source of data
that is far too revealing: your DNS data.

Tor
Security for Android and Desktop Linux
by Charles Fisher

The Tor Project presents an effective countermeasure against hostile and
disingenuous carriers and ISPs that, on a properly rooted and capable
Android device or Linux system, can force all network traffic through Tor
encrypted entry points (guard nodes) with custom rules for iptables. This
action renders all device network activity opaque to the upstream
carrier—barring exceptional intervention, all efforts to track a user
are afterward futile.

Source

By default Kernel-Based Virtual Machines(KVM) are not set up to access a serial console on the host using virsh. To enable a serial virsh console, so you can view text-based output on the host machine from the virtual machine you will need to make modifications to both the virtual machine and the physical machine. Enabling serial console access can be beneficial when troubleshooting boot issues or accessing the virtual machine if networking is not working correctly at that time. You can read more about virsh commands on redhat’s website.

Enable VIRSH Console on the Virtual Machine

First, log in to the virtual machine and edit /etc/default/grub and change this line from:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”crashkernel=auto rd.lvm.lv=centos/root rd.lvm.lv=centos/swap rhgb quiet”

To

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”crashkernel=auto rd.lvm.lv=centos/root rd.lvm.lv=centos/swap rhgb quiet console=ttyS0″

If you want to see the output of boot messages you can also remove “rhgb quiet” from the console line as well. Save the file then remake the grub config

grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

Enable Serial Console Access on the KVM host

Now you will need to login to the host machine to edit the xml file relating to that virtual machine
virsh edit
Replacing vm-name with the correct virtual machine name.

Once you are in the configuration you will need to change

<console type=’pty’>
<target type=’serial’ port=’0’/>
</console>

To

<console type=’pty’ tty=’/dev/pts/6′>
<source path=’/dev/pts/6’/>
<target type=’serial’ port=’0’/>
<alias name=’serial0’/>
</console>

Then you can go ahead and save that file, by default it uses vi, so to save type

:wq

Then go ahead shut down the VM

virsh shutdown <vm-name>

Then recreate it

virsh start <vm-name>

Access The KVM Through the Console

You should now be able to attach a console to the virtual machine by typing

virsh console <vm-name>

To exit out of a virsh console you will need to press ctrl + ] at the same time and that will break out of the console session.

Source

What is LVM

Logical Volume Managment (LVM) is an abstraction layer between physical devices and the file systems which they create. This can make disk management easier by adding abilities to shrink or expand filesystems by just adding additional physical devices no longer being limited to a single physical device as the volume can span over multiple physical devices.

Terminology:

Physical Volume (PV) – This is the physical device to be used with LVM
Volume Group (VG) – A storage pool made up of PGs
Logical Volume(LV) – A logical volume is a portion of a volume group, this is the usable space to the file system

Find And Create The Physical Volume

First make sure you have the right disk. In this example we are going to use /dev/vdd (a virtual disk on a KVM virtual machine)

# fdisk -l /dev/vdd

Disk /dev/vdd: 8589 MB, 8589934592 bytes, 16777216 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk label type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x000b9af0

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/vdd1 2048 16777215 8387584 83 Linux

Next use parted to create partition.

# parted /dev/vdd

(parted) mklabel
New disk label type? msdos
Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/vdd will be destroyed and all data on this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue?
Yes/No? Yes
(parted) mkpart
Partition type? primary/extended? primary
File system type? [ext2]? xfs
Start? 0%
End? 100%

To use the entire disk, you will want to enter 0% to start and 100% to end. Then enter ‘print’ to verify the partition details

(parted) print
Model: Virtio Block Device (virtblk)
Disk /dev/vdd: 8.00GiB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size Type File system Flags
1 0.00GiB 8.00GiB 8.00GiB primary xfs

Go ahead and quit out of parted. You will now want to use pvcreate to create the physical volume

pvcreate /dev/vdd1
WARNING: xfs signature detected on /dev/vdd1 at offset 0. Wipe it? [y/n]: y
Wiping xfs signature on /dev/vdd1.
Physical volume “/dev/vdd1” successfully created.

Create The LVM Volume Group

You will use vgcreate to create the volume group. The syntax is vgcreate <volume-group-name> <partition>. The volume group name can be whatever you want.

# vgcreate vg02 /dev/vdd1
Volume group “vg02” successfully created

Then do a vgdisplay to find the amount of Physical extents in the disk:

# vgdisplay vg02
— Volume group —
VG Name vg02
System ID
Format lvm2
Metadata Areas 1
Metadata Sequence No 2
VG Access read/write
VG Status resizable
MAX LV 0
Cur LV 1
Open LV 1
Max PV 0
Cur PV 1
Act PV 1
VG Size 8.00 GiB
PE Size 4.00 MiB
Total PE 2047
Alloc PE / Size 2047 / 8.00 GiB
Free PE / Size 0 / 0
VG UUID NHX1cN-9Ujw-dnXf-hSfo-srIc-6do6-mFnCba

Create The LVM Logical Volume

You will then use lvcreate to create the logical volume based on the number of physical extents found in vgdisplay. The -n flag allows you to name the volume, this is again whatever you would like to describe the logical volume.

# lvcreate -l 2047 vg02 -n logvol1
Logical volume “logvol1” created.

After it has been created, perform a lvdisplay to verify.

# lvdisplay

— Logical volume —
LV Path /dev/vg02/logvol1
LV Name logvol1
VG Name vg02
LV UUID eZCOf2-9adr-KIMx-LxZi-hDDi-ss1L-8LMfnK
LV Write Access read/write
LV Creation host, time centos7-vm1, 2017-05-15 21:28:15 -0400
LV Status available
# open 0
LV Size 8.00 GiB
Current LE 2047
Segments 1
Allocation inherit
Read ahead sectors auto
– currently set to 8192
Block device 253:2

Format the LVM logical volume

In this example, we are going to format the logical volume as xfs using mkfs.xfs so it can be mounted

mkfs.xfs /dev/vg02/logvol1
meta-data=/dev/vg02/logvol1 isize=512 agcount=4, agsize=524032 blks
= sectsz=512 attr=2, projid32bit=1
= crc=1 finobt=0, sparse=0
data = bsize=4096 blocks=2096128, imaxpct=25
= sunit=0 swidth=0 blks
naming =version 2 bsize=4096 ascii-ci=0 ftype=1
log =internal log bsize=4096 blocks=2560, version=2
= sectsz=512 sunit=0 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none extsz=4096 blocks=0, rtextents=0

Once that has been completed it can now be mounted and added to /etc/fstab to persist during reboots.

May 15, 2017LinuxAdmin.io

Source

 

Once again Guybrush Threepwood is caught in a mess with Voodoo Zombie Pirate LeChuck! But there is a twist, he also accidentally cursed his wife Elaine by turning her into a gold statue. Explore the mysteries of Plunder Island, solve clever & silly pirate puzzles and interact with the residents.

Follow my step-by-step guide on installing and configuring The Curse of Monkey Island in Linux with PlayOnLinux.

Note: This guide applies to the GOG version of The Curse of Monkey Island. Other versions may require additional steps.

Tips & Specs:
To learn more about PlayOnLinux and Wine configuration, see the online manual: PlayOnLinux Explained

Mint 18.3 64-bit

PlayOnLinux: 4.2.12
Wine: 3.0

Wine Installation
Click Tools

Select “Manage Wine Versions”

Look for the Wine Version: 3.0

Select it
Click the arrow pointing to the right

Click Next

Downloading Wine

Extracting

Downloading Gecko

Installed

Wine 3.0 is installed and you can close this window

PlayOnLinux Setup
Launch PlayOnLinux

Click Install

Click “Install a non-listed program”

Select “Install a program in a new virtual drive”

Click Next

Name the virtual drive: cursemonkeyisland

Click Next

Check all three options:

 

• Use another version of Wine
• Configure Wine
• Install some libraries

Click Next

Select Wine 3.0

Click Next

Select “32 bits windows installation”

Click Next

Wine Configuration
Applications Tab

Windows version: Windows 7

Graphics Tab
Check “Automatically capture the mouse in full-screen windows”

Click OK

PlayOnLinux Packages (DLLs, Libraries, Components)

Check the Following:

 

• POL_Install_corefonts
• POL_Install_d3dx9
• POL_Install_tahoma

Click Next

Click Browse

Select “setup_the_curse_of_monkey_islandtm.exe”

Click Open

Click Next again…

Click OK

Click Options

Uncheck “Create desktop icon”
Check “Yes, I have read and accept EULA”
Click Install

Click Exit

PlayOnLinux Shortcut
Select “scummvm.exe”

Click Next

Name the shortcut: Curse of Monkey Island

Click Next

Select “I don’t want to make another shortcut”

Click Next

PlayOnLinux Configure
Back to PlayOnLinux

Select “Curse of Monkey Island”
Click Configure

General Tab
Wine version: 3.0

Note: Click the + to download other versions of Wine. Click the down-arrow to select other versions of WineDisplay Tab
Video memory size: Enter the amount of memory your video card/chip uses

Run Curse of Monkey Island with Windows SCUMMVM

Select “Curse of Monkey Island”

Click Run

Note: Click debug to see bugs and errorsSCUMMVM (Windows)
Updates check: Never

Click Proceed

Click “Add Game…”

Navigate to C:GOG Games

Select “The Curse of Monkey Island” folder
Click Choose

Click OK

Click Start

Run Curse of Monkey Island with Linux SCUMMVM
Use your package manager to install SCUMMVM

or download from the website:

https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/

Launch Linux SCUMMVM

Click “Add Game…”

Navigate to the same GOG Games folder: The Curse of Monkey Island

Full Path:

Code:

/home/username/.PlayOnLinux/wineprefix/cursemonkeyisland/drive_c/GOG Games/
Click Choose

Click OK

Click Start

Conclusion:
To play Curse of Monkey Island you only need to install it with PlayOnLinux or Wine, then just launch the Linux SCUMMVM and add the path. Pretty simple! Everything else runs perfectly fine.

Gameplay Video:

Screenshots:

Source

[Posted October 25, 2018 by ris]

Truta: Farewell, Glenn Randers-Pehrson

[Briefs] Posted Oct 25, 2018 16:05 UTC (Thu) by ris

Cosmin Truta reports
the death of Glenn Randers-Pehrson. “Glenn is one of the original designers of the PNG format, and a
co-founder of the PNG Development Group, back in the mid-90’s. He took
good care of the PNG Specification, as a contributing author for PNG
version 1.0, and as the main editor for all of the subsequent editions
through PNG 1.1 and 1.2, until the current W3C/ISO/IEC standard PNG
Specification, Second Edition. In addition, all of the related
Specifications, i.e., the registered PNG extensions, and the companion
MNG Specification version 1.0 and JNG Specification version 1.0, had
Glenn at the front as the main editor and moderator-in-chief.”
(Thanks to Paul Wise)

Source

Sparky 4.9 RC is out and ready for testing.

The time for next stable point release is coming, which is released 2 times per year, so a release candidate has to be published to make sure all the new features work fine.

Changes:
– all packages updated from Debian stable Stretch repository as of October 26, 2018
– many small changes and improvements; many of them have been done as a result of cooperation with lami07; thank’s a lot Szymon and… keep it doing!

Please test it and report whatever you find.

The stable 4.9 point release should be out on November 11.

The new iso images can be downloaded from the download/development page.

Source

Nextcloud

is one of the most popular open source, self-hosted cloud storage alternative. It offers a visually appealing and intuitive frontend for you to access your data remotely. You can install Nextcloud on a local server to share files among your colleagues. Or if you want to install it on a VPS as an alternative to iCloud, Google Drive or Dropbox, Nextcloud can do that too!

Today we will be installing Nextcloud on FreeNAS. For those who don’t know, FreeNAS is a FreeBSD based operating system, specifically designed to be used as a NAS (Network-attached storage). It too comes with a frontend GUI and is often used to share files via SMB, NFS, etc or act as an LDAP server and offer directory services. The best thing about FreeNAS is that it relies on ZFS and so your data is in safe hands.

With FreeNAS as a robust and powerful backbone for managing your data and Nextcloud as a wonderful user-friendly cross platform product, you can have the ultimate cloud storage experience!

To follow along, you need to have:

1. A FreeNAS installation ready at hand
2. Root access to the said FreeNAS installation

Installing Nextcloud Plugin

A nextcloud plugin can be installed from the FreeNAS web interface itself, in a couple of clicks. Just login to your server as root, go to plugins (from the top menu, if you are using the older UI) and from there to the list of available plugins:

There you can find Nextcloud available for to download and install. Go ahead and install Nextcloud, it may take a few minutes to half an hour depending on your Internet connection and available computing resources.

Then enable Nextcloud service. To do this switch to the Installed tab on the same plugins menu. And set the service status of Nextcloud Plugin to ON as shown below.

FreeNAS will assign the jail a random private IP address, select the Nextcloud plugin, under the plugin submenu from the left hand column, to get a link to this service:

If that works for you, it’s great. But I prefer to configure networking a little differently.

Configuring Networking

If your local network has a DHCP server (often your home router acts as one) you need to ensure that the Nextcloud gets an IP address of its own from this DHCP server. Or you can manually assign it an IP address, if you want.

We are going for the DHCP approach, since this is the most common setup in most households and small offices. Nextcloud is installed, on our FreeNAS box inside a Jail. Jails are the precursors to containerization technology that Linux later adopted as docker and LXC. Like any container, our Nextcloud plugin can also have an IP of its own, distinct from the FreeNAS IP.

To do this, go to the JAIL tab from the top menu.

Select the nextcloud jail, as it is named on your machine. Click on the red button below to stop the service temporarily and then edit the jail, by clicking the settings icon from the bottom left. Ignore the IP address assigned currently, and click on advanced mode.

Within Advanced mode, select DHCP as your IPv4 option. You can verify the default gateway and a few other parameters too, if you want:

After this, restart your nextcloud jail and you can see your new IP. By selecting the Jails from the top menu and viewing the jails.

In my case the IP address was 192.168.0.105 which is where Nextcloud is running. But for some reason, which I haven’t been able to identify, this doesn’t work when you go to the browser and type in the IP address.

Circumventing the bug

One way to circumvent this bug is to take note of the IP address that the DHCP server assigned your jail, for example, 192.168.0.105 in my case. Stop that jail again, open the edit jail menu and go to the advanced mode, like we did before.

Here, you can again manually assign the DHCP assigned IP address to your jail. Scroll down the advanced menu and uncheck the box that says VIMAGE. This step is important.

After this is done go to the plugin menu from the top bar and restart the plugin. If it was running already, you may have to stop and start it back again for the changes to take effect. And now, finally, if you open a browser from your desktop and open http://192.168.0.105 (or whatever the IP address was assigned in your case) you will be greeted by the Nextcloud menu.

Everything else from here on out is simple. You can create accounts for your employees, family members, access it from whatever device you choose and you can be assured that the data is safe with OpenZFS.

Make sure to go to your DHCP server settings (commonly listed as LAN setup in your home router settings) and assign nextcloud a static IP in there. Otherwise, once the DHCP lease expires, your router may end up assigning nextcloud a different IP which will be inaccessible to you. You should probably do the same for your main FreeNAS box as well.

Conclusion

The only tricky business with the nextcloud plugin is the bug where the IP address is not reachable despite being assigned. I have a strong suspicion that VIMAGE is the culprit here, but I don’t have any evidence to back that up, just yet.

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JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is the bread and butter of every app developer. Despite having

JavaScript

in its name it is actually used across many languages from Python to Go. Each language has its own parser to ‘understand’ valid JSON payloads making it the most useful way for APIs to communicate with other programs.

For those of us who don’t know what JSON is, its a syntax with which data is exchanged between two communicating pieces of software, usually over HTTP. This is the form in which data is sent from, say, your Twitter webpage or Twitter Mobile app to the servers of Twitter.

This allows people to work different front-ends (web UI, official App, third party clients, etc)for the same Twitter service.

A JSON object consists of an unordered list of data or values and each value is can be represented by a name. The data types allowed are:

1. String
2. Number
3. Another JSON object (so you can have JSON objects nested inside one another)
4. Boolean
5. Null
6. Array: An ordered list of any of the data types above

This is all well and good, but JSON is not very human-readable and so we find ourselves in need for a JSON beautifier something that can turn this: {“name”:”John”, “age”:31, “city”:”New York”} into this:

{
“name”: “John”,
“age”: 31,
“city”: “New York”
}

Now, deciphering what are names and what are values is much much easier. For example, “city” is name with the value “New York”.

You can easily read the latter format while the former is just strewn with quotations and commas to the point where you can’t understand where one value ends and the next name begin. With complicated applications and large JSON payloads, this problem can get out of hand pretty quickly. So we need a JSON beautifier for application developers to help them keep track of things. The following are a few curated options that can be used Ubuntu, although as you will see a few of them work as editor extensions and can run on any OS with Visual Studio Code or Atom editor installed there’s also a web based utility that for testing the waters:

1. Code Beautify JSON viewer

This web-based utility offers features including the beautify one, which makes your JSON object friendlier to the human eye. Along with that it also has a minify feature which tightly packages the JSON object, removing excess whitespaces.

There’s feature that lets you choose between hard tabs or spaces of a given length for indentation and much more. The drawbacks of using this are:

1. Can’t use this natively with your text editor, switching between editor and web browser is distracting.
2. Not secure. JSON payloads often contain authentication tokens, API keys and other sensitive information. You don’t want to paste it into an untrusted web page.

2. Pretty JSON (extension for Sublime Text Editor 2 and 3)

Next on the list is Pretty JSON, a package for those who are rocking a sublime text editor 2 or 3. The package is feature rich with support for converting JSON into XML, prettify JSON or minify it.

There are no default shortcut keys that come along with this extension, and you would have to either set those shortcuts yourself or use the command palette Ctrl[Cmd]+Shift+P to make use of this.

3. JSON Tools (extension for VS Code)

Arguably, the most popular text editor, VS Code has an extension for pretty much anything under the sun. One such extension is JSON Tools and the best thing about it is that you don’t even have to reach for your mouse if you don’t want to.

It offers only two simple and useful features: JSON prettify and JSON minify. It can be accessed directly from the Command Palette (Ctrl[Cmd]+Shift+P ) where you can search for JSON minify or prettify. You can go Ctrl[Cmd]+Alt+P to directly prettify the selected text or and Alt+M to minify it.

4. Pretty-JSON (extension for Atom Text Editor)

Pretty-JSON for Atom editor comes with features for prettify, minify, sort and prettify (which sorts your JSON object by the name of each value) and few other useful features. Given how many keyboard shortcuts and commands are already available in Atom, the author has decided that by default you can use this extension directly via the command palette Ctrl[Cmd]+Shift+P. If you do decide that you want a custom shortcut, you can always go to settings and configure one.

Atom editor is already infamous for slow startup time and this extension does add a significant amount to it. My editor (which is installed inside a VM, so results are a little exaggerated) gets an increase of over 4000 ms in the startup time for Atom. That over 4 seconds of you waiting for a text editor to open. Even in a low spec VM that’s too long of a wait time and that’s the only criticism I have about this extension.

Conclusion

If you are developer, chances are you are using one of the editors listed above. Hopefully, the tools mentioned here would meet your expectations and improve your workflow.

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