Linux Blimp

PostgreSQL 11 is now available in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, allowing customers to test the early production version of PostgreSQL 11 on Amazon RDS including 40+ extensions like PostGIS and support for hash partitioning. PostgreSQL 11 can now be deployed for development and performance testing in the Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment without the hassle of installing, provisioning, and managing the database.

The PostgreSQL community released PostgreSQL 11 on October 18, 2018. PostgreSQL 11 provides users with improvements to overall performance of the database system, particularly for very large databases and high computational workloads. Further, PostgreSQL 11 makes significant improvements to the table partitioning system, adds support for stored procedures capable of transaction management, improves query parallelism, adds parallelized data definition capabilities, and introduces just-in-time (JIT) compilation for accelerating the execution of expressions in queries.

Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment database instances are priced the same as production RDS instances created in the US East (Ohio) Region. The RDS Database Preview Environment supports both Single-AZ and Multi-AZ deployments on the latest generation of instance classes (currently T2, M4, and R4), and can be encrypted at rest using KMS keys. Database instances are retained for a maximum period of 60 days and are automatically deleted after the retention period. To move data in and out of the preview environment, customers can either use standard PostgreSQL dump and load functionality or use native PostgreSQL logical replication.

The Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment Forum is available for customers and the Amazon RDS team to share information and concerns about both the early production versions of PostgreSQL 11 and the RDS Database Preview Environment. For details on Amazon RDS Database Preview Environment, refer to https://aws.amazon.com/rds/databasepreview.

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Here’s your (almost) weekly look at some interesting games and bundles that are currently on sale that have an interesting choice for Linux gamers.

Firstly, Fanatical are offering a reasonably good deal with their new Origins Bundle which includes Punch Club, River City Ransom: Underground, Overfall, Comedy Night, STARWHAL and Gloom which all have Linux support. A favourite of mine from that is Overfall, which is well worth picking up.

Steam also has some great deals like:

• DiRT Rally – 75% off
• F1 2017 – 75% off
• Grow Home – 75% off
• RUNNING WITH RIFLES – 70% off

Humble also have some nice deals:

• Humble Monthly has HITMAN, 7 Days to Die and Hollow Knight which you would be mad to miss if you don’t own them
• The Humble Discovery Pack has 4 days left with War for the Overworld + DLC: Heart of Gold, Kentucky Route Zero season pass edition and Tricky Towers.
• Shadwen – 75% off
• Tabletop Simulator, which is actually great fun! – 50% off

Picked up anything good lately? Do let us know in the comments. We’re always on the look-out for a good deal and may add more later if the deal is good enough.

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Arm’s Pelion IoT Platform provides an end-to-end computing solution for IoT applications (see figure). When initially announced, Pelion devices could run Arm’s Mbed OS that targets Cortex-M class microcontrollers. It’s possible to run the compact Mbed OS on other platforms like Arm’s Cortex-A application processors, too, but these typically run higher-end operating systems like Linux.

Mbed OS is designed to be an IoT stack in a small footprint. It includes features like over-the-air (OTA) updates and basic operating system services that can easily fit into a microcontroller. A simple memory protection unit (MPU) can be used instead of the memory management unit (MMU) found in a Cortex-A platform. Mbed OS also assumes a single core.

Arm’s Pelion IoT Services encompasses the cloud and a plethora of IoT devices, including those running the Mbed OS and Mbed Linux.

Cortex-A platforms are often multicore. They have more memory and features like an MMU and often virtual-machine support. Mbed OS doesn’t even address this level of functionality, but it can be very useful for IoT gateway applications. This is where Mbed Linux comes into play.

Mbed Linux builds Mbed stacks and APIs on top of embedded Linux. As a result, developers can migrate Linux applications to Mbed Linux with Linux’s full functionality while gaining access to the Mbed APIs, including Pelion Device Management (PDM) support.

Mbed Linux is still a work in progress. The initial release is planned for the spring of 2019. A developer preview version will be available soon. Popular boards will initially be targeted, such as the Raspberry Pi 3 and NXP’s i.MX 7Solo-based WaRP7, but it can be ported easily to any Cortex-A platform. It will support Arm’s Platform Security Architecture (PSA) principles, including secure boot and signed updates.

Linux applications can be deployed using OCI-compliant containers, which helps improve security and provides developers with a modular platform.

Like Mbed OS, Mbed Linux is an open-source project. It can be used for free, including the latest updates. Arm will provide commercial support for customers who need firm SLA and platform longevity support. The cost for these services is available from Arm.

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Last updated August 24, 2018

If you are encountering “sub process usr bin dpkg returned an error code 1” while installing software on Ubuntu Linux, here is how you can fix it. One of the common issue in Ubuntu and other Debian based distribution is the broken packages. You try to update the system or install a new package and you encounter an error like ‘Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code’.

That’s what happened to me the other day. I was trying to install a radio application in Ubuntu when it threw me this error:

Unpacking python-gst-1.0 (1.6.2-1build1) …
Selecting previously unselected package radiotray.
Preparing to unpack …/radiotray_0.7.3-5ubuntu1_all.deb …
Unpacking radiotray (0.7.3-5ubuntu1) …
Processing triggers for man-db (2.7.5-1) …
Processing triggers for desktop-file-utils (0.22-1ubuntu5.2) …
Processing triggers for bamfdaemon (0.5.3~bzr0+16.04.20180209-0ubuntu1) …
Rebuilding /usr/share/applications/bamf-2.index…
Processing triggers for gnome-menus (3.13.3-6ubuntu3.1) …
Processing triggers for mime-support (3.59ubuntu1) …
Setting up polar-bookshelf (1.0.0-beta56) …
ln: failed to create symbolic link ‘/usr/local/bin/polar-bookshelf’: No such file or directory
dpkg: error processing package polar-bookshelf (–configure):
subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1
Setting up python-appindicator (12.10.1+16.04.20170215-0ubuntu1) …
Setting up python-gst-1.0 (1.6.2-1build1) …
Setting up radiotray (0.7.3-5ubuntu1) …
Errors were encountered while processing:
polar-bookshelf
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

The last three lines are of the utmost importance here.

Errors were encountered while processing:
polar-bookshelf
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

It tells me that the package polar-bookshelf is causing and issue. This might be crucial to how you fix this error here.

Fixing Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

Let’s try to fix this broken error package. I’ll show several methods that you can try one by one. The initial ones are easy to use and simply no-brainers.

You should try to run sudo apt update and then try to install a new package or upgrade after trying each of the methods discussed here.

Method 1: Reconfigure Package Database

The first method you can try is to reconfigure the package database. Probably the database got corrupted while installing a package. Reconfiguring often fixes the problem.

sudo dpkg –configure -a

Method 2: Use force install

If a package installation was interrupted previously, you may try to do a force install.

sudo apt-get install -f

Method 3: Try removing the troublesome package

If it’s not an issue for you, you may try to remove the package manually. Please don’t do it for Linux Kernels (packages starting with linux-).

sudo apt remove

Method 4: Remove post info files of the troublesome package

This should be your last resort. You can try removing the files associated to the package in question from /var/lib/dpkg/info.

You need to know a little about basic Linux commands to figure out what’s happening and how can you use the same with your problem.

In my case, I had an issue with polar-bookshelf. So I looked for the files associated with it:

ls -l /var/lib/dpkg/info | grep -i polar-bookshelf
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 2324811 Aug 14 19:29 polar-bookshelf.list
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 2822824 Aug 10 04:28 polar-bookshelf.md5sums
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 113 Aug 10 04:28 polar-bookshelf.postinst
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 84 Aug 10 04:28 polar-bookshelf.postrm

Now all I needed to do was to remove these files:

sudo mv /var/lib/dpkg/info/polar-bookshelf.* /tmp

Use the sudo apt update and then you should be able to install software as usual.

Which method worked for you (if it worked)?

I hope this quick article helps you in fixing the ‘E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)’ error. If it did work for you, which method was it? Did you manage to fix this error with some other method? If yes, please share that to help others with this issue.

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Google Chrome, or Chrome, is a web browser software that tries to compete with major players, such as Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and even the Opera web browser. It is available for the Linux, Android, iOS, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems. But Google Chrome is more than a web browser, as it combines sophisticated open source technology, borrowed from the Chromium application, into a minimal design, all in order to help users surf the web much faster, a lot easier, and safer than ever before.

Features at a glance

A unique functionality of the Google Chrome application is its ability to search the web directly from the address bar. Just type one or more words in the address bar and immediately get suggestions for popular web pages. The application displays thumbnails of your top websites on the new tab page, a function that is popularly called Speed Dial. This functionality is also available on other similar products, and it allows you to easily access your favorite web pages instantly, with lightning speed, from any new tab.

Comes with Private browsing mode

Private browsing is also a strong point of the Google Chrome web browser, enabling users to surf the Internet in an incognito window, when they don’t want to save their browsing history, or if they’re hiding from NSA (National Security Agency). Just like Mozilla Firefox, the Chrome web browser includes a handy cloud service, which allows you to safely and securely sync all of your passwords, browsing history, bookmarks, apps, extensions, autofill, themes, and opened tabs across multiple devices.

Will never replace Mozilla Firefox

Because we heard such good things about it, we’ve tried a little experiment with the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox products. We wanted to replace the powerful Mozilla Firefox web browser that we use on many computers here at Softpedia, with Google Chrome. Surprisingly, the Chrome browser proved to be a poor product for our needs, especially because it misses some important extensions that are currently available only on the Mozilla Firefox application, such as Clippings, Copy Plain Text, or InFormEnter.

You should try Mozilla Firefox

These days, you can’t avoid Google’s web services. Whether you sign up for Gmail and Google+, or you just want to use its quite powerful office tools (yes, this short review is written in Google Documents), you may find you end up asking yourself, “Why not use Chrome?”. The answer is simple, use Chrome if you just want to use Google’s powerful services and nothing more. But if you want a serious web browser, you should try Mozilla Firefox.

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Neil MacDougall and Richard Cox of SUSE gave a talk (and demo) at the recent Cloud Foundry Summit EU, detailing the past, present, and future of Stratos–an open source UI for Cloud Foundry. Like everything SUSE works on, Stratos is open source. Although SUSE remains the project lead on it, Stratos is now part of the Cloud Foundry Foundation.

The main purpose of the talk is to help grow awareness of Stratos and to get more people contributing to it via code, UX, ideas, or other improvements. Lots of people and organizations use Stratos currently, including IBM, Orange, and Cloud.gov, but it could improve more quickly if even more people actively contributed to it. Stratos is, of course, the UI in our SUSE Cloud Application Platform.

The most exciting part of the talk is news that Stratos is moving to regular monthly releases with an intriguing set of upcoming features, including extensions, GitLab support and support for private source repositories.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation has posted all recorded talks from the Summit on YouTube. Check them out if you want to learn more about the latest news from the Cloud Foundry community. We’ll be posting more SUSE talks here over the coming days. Watch Neil and Richard’s talk below:

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At a time when many companies are rushing to internationalize their products and
services to appeal to the broadest possible market, the Linux kernel is
actively resisting that trend, although it already has taken over the
broadest possible market—the infrastructure of the entire world.

David Howells recently created some sample code for a new kernel library,
with some complex English-language error messages that were generated from
several sources within the code. Pavel Machek objected that it would be
difficult to automate any sort of translations for those messages, and that
it would be preferable simply to output an error code and let something in
userspace interpret the error at its leisure and translate it if needed.

In this case, however, the possible number of errors was truly vast, based
on a variety of possible variables. David argued that representing each and
every one with a single error code would use a prohibitively large number of
error codes.

Ordinarily, I might expect Pavel to be on the winning side of this debate,
with Linus Torvalds or some other top developer insisting that support for
internationalization was necessary in order to give the best and most useful
possible experience to all users.

However, Linus had a very different take on the situation:

We don’t internationalize kernel strings. We never have. Yes, some people tried to do some database of kernel messages for translation purposes, but I absolutely refused to make that part of the development process. It’s a pain.

For some GUI project, internationalization might be a big deal, and it might be “TheRule(tm)”. For the kernel, not so much. We care about the technology, not the language.

So we’ll continue to give error numbers for “an error happened”. And if/when people need more information about just what _triggered_ that error, they are as English-language strings. You can quote them and google them without having to understand them. That’s just how things work.

[…]

There are places where localization is a good idea. The kernel is *not* one of those places.

He added later:

I really think the best option is “Ignore the problem”. The system calls
will still continue to report the basic error numbers (EINVAL etc), and the extended error strings will be just that: extended error strings. Ignore them if you can’t understand them.

That said, people have wanted these kinds of extended error descriptors forever, and the reason we haven’t added them is that it generally is more pain than it is necessarily worth.

Pavel still felt that, since David’s code was all new, there was no ancient
cruft standing in the way of implementing internationalization in this one
new area. He agreed there was no point in a lot of other cases, but for this
one, it felt like being given a fresh chance.

But Linus said, “Really. No translation. No design for translation. It’s a
nasty nasty rat-hole, and it’s a pain for everybody.”

He added, “the fact is, I want simple English interfaces. And people who
have issues with that should just not use them. End of story. Use the
existing error numbers if you want internationalization, and live with the
fact that you only get the very limited error number. It’s really that
simple.”

The discussion ended shortly thereafter. It’s a fascinating rejection of a
very politically popular attitude, based on the technical consideration that
keeping the programming interface simple is worth more than keeping the user interface friendly.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has great resources for issuing and using SSL certificates, but the process of migrating existing resources to HTTPS can be complex — and it can also require many intermediate steps.

But as this tutorial shows, you can get your S3 bucket set up in just an hour or two.

Why is this necessary, anyway?

Reason 1: Google is Forcing the Issue

The big driver for this need is Google, which is phasing support for HTTP connections out of Google Chrome.

Currently, Chrome warns users when they’re accessing a site HTTP, but doesn’t prevent it altogether….

To get started, you’ll need an SSL certificate. On anything but AWS, the best option is Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates, which issues free certificates to all.

Read more at The New Stack

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What is mod_fastcgi?

mod_fastcgi is an Apache module for interfacing with CGI programs allowing a server to handle more requests at one time. It does this by keeping an instance of php running in the background. When apache receives the request it forwards it to FasctCGI. It can increase performance and reduce memory useage over mod_php. If you have not already done so, you will need to setup php-fpm for this to work. Please the following guide on how to do so Install PHP-FPM

Install mod_fastcgi

First get the required the required packages

wget -O /usr/src/mod_fastcgi-2.4.6.tar.gz https://github.com/txduncan/mod_fastcgi/blob/master/mod_fastcgi-2.4.6.tar.gz

Change to the download directory:

cd /usr/src

Uncompress the package:

tar xfvz mod_fastcgi-2.4.6.tar.gz

Copy the make file:

cp /usr/src/mod_fastcgi-2.4.6/Makefile.AP2 /usr/src/mod_fastcgi-2.4.6/Makefile

Make and install the package

make top_dir=/usr/lib64/httpd make top_dir=/usr/lib64/httpd install

If the build directory differs from the standard apache build you will need to update top_dir to the parent directory of the build directory

Configure Apache to use mod_fastcgi

Edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and add

LoadModule fastcgi_module lib/apache/mod_fastcgi.so

To make the entire Apache server to use php-fpm with mod_fastcgi:

Comment out any additional references to php in httpd.conf

# LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so
# AddType application/x-httpd-php .php

Edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and add the following

LoadModule fastcgi_module modules/mod_fastcgi.so

Edit /etc/httpd/conf.d/fastcgi.conf and add the following

<IfModule mod_fastcgi.c>
FastCGIExternalServer /usr/sbin/php-fpm -host 127.0.0.1:9000
AddHandler php-fastcgi .php
Action php-fastcgi /usr/sbin/php-fpm.fcgi
ScriptAlias /usr/sbin/php-fpm.fcgi /usr/sbin/php-fpm
<Directory /usr/sbin>
Options ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
SetHandler fastcgi-script
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
</IfModule>

Be sure to update the path to the php-fpm binary in the above configuration, to find it do:

which php-fpm

Add a include in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Include /etc/httpd/conf.d/fastcgi.conf

Restart Apache to load the new configuration:

service httpd restart

Once you have done that go ahead and create a test file in a Apache document root:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

Visiting that page should show the PHP variables from the newly configured mod_fastcgi.

May 21, 2017LinuxAdmin.io

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Ibase’s Taiwan Excellence Award winners include two new railway computers

Oct 24, 2018 — by Eric Brown

Ibase announced that its new Atom E3845 based “MPT-3000RP” — a EN50155-TX certified, IP67-protected railway PC — won a Taiwan Excellence Award along with a “DRD-037PC” railway signage PC and two recent Ibase embedded systems.

Ibase has won four 2019 Taiwan Excellence Awards, including one for a new MPT-3000RP railway computer, which is pictured at top and detailed farther below. The other winners include a yet to be announced, dual-screen DRD-037PC transportation computer and two systems that have recently been profiled on LinuxGizmos: the MAI602-M4D80 motion control computer and SI-324 signage player:

• DRD-037PC — This ultra-wide, 21:6 ratio dual-screen transportation PC has yet to receive a spec list, but there’s a landing page linked to above. It likely runs on an Intel CPU and may well support Linux as well as Windows. The IP65 protected system meets EN50155 rolling stock equipment and EN45545-2 fire protection standards for railway applications. It features a screen on both sides to enables applications such as information and entertainment displays for railway platforms or for internally or externally mounted railway car displays. Features include an M.2 connector, multiple GbE ports, and “a wide viewing angle, high brightness and high resolution display,” says Ibase.

  DRD-037PC

• MAI602-M4D80 — This rugged, Linux-supported motion control computer is designed for factory production applications, including machine vision systems. The system runs on Intel 6th or 7th Gen Core processors and integrates a PCIe card with 4-axis motion control and a camera. You also get 80-channel DIO and mini-PCIe expansion.

  MAI602-M4D80 (left) and SI-324
  (click images to enlarge)

   

• SI-324 — This Ubuntu-ready signage PC runs on an AMD Ryzen Embedded V1000 SoC backed up by up to 32GB DDR4. The SI-324 provides four HDMI 2.0 ports for up to four simultaneous [email protected] displays or dual [email protected] displays. Other features include 2x GbE, 2x USB 3.0, mini-PC and M.2 expansion, and remote EDID management.

MPT-3000RP

Like the DRD-037PC, the MPT-3000RP is an EN50155 and EN45545 compliant transportation computer optimized for railway applications. However, instead of acting as a signage player, this is a more general-purpose computer designed to control a variety of onboard systems.

Protected from water and other ingress per IP67, the 270 x 210 x 63mm MPT-3000RP is equipped with a quad-core Intel Atom E3845 clocked at 1.91GHz. No OS support was listed.

MPT-3000RP front and side views
(click images to enlarge)

 

You can load up to 4GB DDR3L-1333 via dual slots, and store data with a CFast slot and a 2.5-inch SATA bay. In addition, one of the three M.2 sockets is designed for 2280-form factor SATA cards.

A second M.2 is designed for wireless 3042 cards, and a third M.2 slot is for a variety of 2230 cards (USB 2.0/PCIe). You also get half- and full-size mini-PCIe slots with USB 2.0 and USB 2.0/PCIe support, respectively. Dual SIM card slots and 4x antenna connectors are also available.

All the external interfaces use rugged M12 connectors. You get 2x GbE, 2x USB 2.0, and 3x serial ports, as well as single VGA, CAN, and wide-range voltage GPIO ports. There’s also an M12 connector for the “DC 9V~36V / 72V / 110V” input. Or as the announcement says, the system provides “interchangeable modular power supplies supporting a variety of inputs” and “full vehicle battery power control.”

The MPT-3000RP OS is wall-mountable and supports -40 to 70°C operation with an SSD. It also offers EN61373 compliant shock and vibration resistance. Other certifications include EN50153:2014, EN50121-3-2:2015, CE class A, and FCC class A.

Further information

No pricing or availability information was provided for the MPT-3000RP. More information may be found on Ibase’s MPT-3000RP product page (PDF).

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