Linux Blimp

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 Installation on VMware Workstation

This video tutorial shows

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 Installation

on VMware Workstation/Player step by step. This tutorial is also helpful to install SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 (SLES 12) on physical computer or laptop hardware. We also test

VMware Tools

(Open VM Tools) features such as Fit Guest Now, Drag-Drop File and Clipboard Sharing on SLES 12 SP2.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 Installation Steps:

1. Download SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 ISO
2. Create Virtual Machine on VMware Workstation/Player
3. Start SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Installation
4. Test VMware Tools Features: Fit Guest Now, Drag-Drop File and Clipboard Sharing

Installing SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 on VMware Workstation

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 New Features and Improvements

SUSE

has announced the release of a new service pack for

SUSE Linux Enterprise

. SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 2 offers a number of performance improvements and bug fixes. However, the biggest news is SUSE’s support for a wide range of hardware, such as ARM-powered devices. The distribution is also introducing enterprise level support for Raspberry Pi computers. SUSE is one of the first to bring enterprise support for Raspberry Pi and 64-bit ARM v8-A platforms. In mixed IT environments you can easily stay ahead of the curve with full support for IBM Power Systems, OpenPOWER servers and the newest virtualization capabilities of IBM KVM and z/VM.

SUSE Linux Website:

http://www.suse.com/

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 Minimum System Requirements

1. Local Installation: 512 MiB RAM, 512 MiB Swap recommended
2. 2 GiB available disk space (more recommended, 8.5 GiB for all patterns)
3. 16 GiB for snapshot/rollback of the OS

Hope you found this SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP2 Installation tutorial helpful and informative. Please consider sharing it. Your feedback and questions are welcome!

Source

ethtool

is a networking utility on Linux. It is used to configure Ethernet devices on Linux.

ethtool

can also be used to find a lot of information about connected Ethernet devices on your Linux computer.

In this article, I will show you how to use ethtool command on Linux. I will be using Debian 9 Stretch for the demonstration. But any modern Linux distribution should work. Let’s get started.

In most cases, ethtool should already be installed on your favorite Linux distribution. You can check whether ethtool is installed already with the following command:

As you can see, ethtool 4.8 is installed on my Debian 9 Stretch machine.

If you see an error, then ethtool may not be installed on your computer. You can install ethtool very easily in your favorite Linux distribution. I will show you how to install ethtool on Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL 7 and CentOS 7 in the next sections of this article below.

Installing ethtool on Ubuntu and Debian:

ethtool is available in the official package repository of Ubuntu and Debian. So it is really easy to install.

First, update the APT package repository cache with the following command:

Now, install ethtool with the following command:

$ sudo apt install ethtool -y

Installing ethtool on CentOS 7 and RHEL 7:

ethtool is available in the official package repository of CentOS 7 and RHEL 7. You can install it very easily.

First, update the YUM cache with the following command:

Finally, install ethtool with the following command:

$ sudo yum install ethtool -y

Displaying Network Interface Card Information with ethtool:

You can display information about the network interface cards (NICs) connected to your computer with ethtool utility. To do that, you need the network interface name of your network interface card (NIC).

On Linux, every network interface card (NIC) is assigned unique names such as eth0, ens32 etc.

First, find the assigned names of all the available network interfaces of your computer, with the following command:

As you can see, I have only two network interface cards (NICs) connected to my computer. If you have more, it should show up here. The assigned names of my network interfaces are ens33 and enx00e04c42a3fe respectively. Yours should be different. But take a note of these as you will need it from now on.

Now, to display more information about a network interface card (let’s say enx00e04c42a3fe) with ethtool, run the following command:

$ sudo ethtool enx00e04c42a3fe

As you can see, a lot of information about the network interface card enx00e04c42a3fe is listed here.

For example, the supported link modes of your NIC is displayed here.

The currently used duplex mode and speed is displayed here as well. As you can see, it is connected in full duplex mode at 100 Mbps speed.

You can also find out whether your NIC supports auto negotiation from here. If auto negotiation is enabled, your NIC picks a random link mode from one of its supported link modes depending on the Router or switch port it’s connected to.

Checking Which Driver your NIC is Using:

You can also check which driver your NIC is using with ethtool command.

For example, to check for the driver used by one of your NIC (let’s say enx00e04c42a3fe), run ethtool command as follows:

$ sudo ethtool -i enx00e04c42a3fe

As you can see, my enx00e04c42a3fe NIC is using Realtek r8152 driver version 1.08.7. Yours may be different.

Display Network Usage Statistics with ethtool:

You can find out how many packets the NIC sent (Tx or transmitted) and received (Rx or received) using ethtool. You can also find out how many of these packets collided, transmission (Tx) errors and receiver errors (Rx) and many more.

To display your NIC (let’s say enx00e04c42a3fe) statistics, run ethtool as follows:

$ sudo ethtool -S enx00e04c42a3fe

As you can see, a lot of statistics data on your NIC is displayed.

Making your NIC Blink Using ethtool:

Making your NIC blink may sound useless. But imagine a case where your computer has lots of network interfaces. How would you know which port is assigned what network interface name? Well, just blink each network interface and find out for yourself using ethtool. Simple!

To blink a network interface (let’s say enx00e04c42a3fe) with ethtool, run ethtool as follows:

$ sudo ethtool -p enx00e04c42a3fe

This feature may not be available on your NIC card. Check the manual of your NIC card for more information on this.

My NIC card do not have this feature, so all I get is an error.

Setting Speed and Modes on NICs Manually:

At times, auto negotiation may fail and your NIC may use the wrong speed and mode. You can easily fix that with ethtool.

First, check what speeds and modes are supported on your NIC (Let’s say enx00e04c42a3fe) with the following command:

$ sudo ethtool enx00e04c42a3fe

You can find the supported link modes of your NIC in the Supported link modes section and your Routers or Switches advertised link modes on Link partner advertised link modes section as you can see in the marked section of the screenshot below. My NIC and Router supports, 10baseT and 100baseT in Half and Full duplex mode.

Currently, my NIC enx00e04c42a3fe is working in Full duplex mode at 100 Mbps speed.

To change it, let’s say in Full duplex mode at 10 Mbps speed, run ethtool as follows:

$ sudo ethtool -s enx00e04c42a3fe speed 10 duplex full autoneg off

As you can see, the speed is changed to 10Mbps and the duplex mode is full. Also, auto negotiation is turned off.

Getting Help on ethtool:

The ethtool command has lots of options. It’s not possible to show how every option work in this article due to the scope and hardware limitation of my computer.

But you should be able to find what you need on the manpage of ethtool, which you can access with the following command:

So, that’s how you use ethtool on Linux. Thanks for reading this article.

Source

I’m sure a lot of you have been waiting for the launch of Kali 2.0. I’ve started looking into competitive programming, and hence now have a bit less time for this blog. That being said, I took a few screenshots for you guys to see what Kali 2.0 has to offer.

Kali installed in VMWare 11

 

Some tools

Information gathering tools

Password attack tools

More tools

Web app analysis

And the ones we use all the time, the wireless hacking suites.

For those who want to know the specifics, take a look at the original post on Kali website.

I’m quoting the official website here, just one paragraph –

 

The tl;dr of this release is best explained by comparison: If Kali 1.0 was

focused on building a solid infrastructure

then Kali 2.0 is

focused on overhauling the user experience and maintaining updated packages and tool repositories

. Along with the arrival of 2.0 comes a whole lot of interesting updates… You can head down to our

Kali Linux 2.0 Download

page to get the goodness for yourself.

I think I’ll make my exit here.

Source

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP (similar to npm for Node.js or pip for Python). Composer will pull in all the required PHP packages your project depends on and manage them for you.

This tutorial provides the steps necessary to install Composer on Debian 9 systems. We will also cover how to use Composer to create and manage PHP projects.

Prerequisites

Before continuing with this tutorial, make sure you are logged in as a user with sudo privileges and you have PHP installed on your Debian 9 system.

Installing Composer

Follow the steps below to install Composer on Debian systems:

1. First update the packages index and install the necessary packages with the following commands:

   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install php-cli php-zip wget unzip

2. Once the dependencies are installed, use the php cli toll to download the Composer installation script:

   php -r “copy(‘https://getcomposer.org/installer’, ‘composer-setup.php’);”

   The command above will download the composer-setup.php file in the current working directory.

3. We’ll verify the script data integrity by comparing the script SHA-384 hash with the latest installer hash found on the Composer Public Keys / Signatures page.

   Run the following wget command to download the expected signature of the latest Composer installer from the Composer’s Github page and store it in a variable named HASH:

   HASH=”$(wget -q -O – https://composer.github.io/installer.sig)”

   To verify that the installation script is not corrupted copy and paste the following code into your console:

   php -r “if (hash_file(‘SHA384’, ‘composer-setup.php’) === ‘$HASH’) { echo ‘Installer verified’; } else { echo ‘Installer corrupt’; unlink(‘composer-setup.php’); } echo PHP_EOL;”

   If the hashes match, you’ll see the following output:

   If the hashes doesn’t match you will see Installer corrupt. In this case you will need to redownload the Composer installation script and double check the value of the $HASH variable with echo $HASH. Once the installer is verified, you can continue with the next step.

4. The following command will install Composer in the /usr/local/bin directory:

   sudo php composer-setup.php –install-dir=/usr/local/bin –filename=composerAll settings correct for using Composer
   Downloading…

   Composer (version 1.7.2) successfully installed to: /usr/local/bin/composer
   Use it: php /usr/local/bin/composer

   At this point you have Composer installed on your Debian system. It is installed as a system-wide command and it will be available for all users.

5. To verify the installation simply type:

   The command above will print the Composer’s version, commands and arguments.

   ______
   / ____/___ ____ ___ ____ ____ ________ _____
   / / / __ / __ `__ / __ / __ / ___/ _ / ___/
   / /___/ /_/ / / / / / / /_/ / /_/ (__ ) __/ /
   ____/____/_/ /_/ /_/ .___/____/____/___/_/
   /_/
   Composer version 1.7.2 2018-08-16 16:57:12

   Usage:
   command [options] [arguments]

If you want to use a per-project Composer installation run the following command php composer-setup.php which will create a file named composer.phar in your current working directory. You can use the composer by running ./composer.phar <command>.

Getting Started with Composer

Now that you have Composer is installed on your Debian system we will show you how to create a PHP project with Composer.

Start by creating a a directory which will be the project root and hold the composer.json file. This file describes your PHP project including the PHP dependencies and other metadata.

Create the project directory and switch to it with:

mkdir ~/my-first-composer-project
cd ~/my-first-composer-project

Next, we’ll initialize a new composer.json file using the composer require <package name> command and specify the package we want to download. In this example we will create a sample application that will print the current time using a package called carbon.

Run the following command to initialize a new composer.json file and install the carbon package:

composer require nesbot/carbonUsing version ^1.34 for nesbot/carbon
./composer.json has been created
Loading composer repositories with package information
Updating dependencies (including require-dev)
– Installing symfony/polyfill-mbstring (v1.9.0): Downloading (100%)
– Installing symfony/translation (v3.4.17): Downloading (100%)
– Installing nesbot/carbon (1.34.0): Downloading (100%)
symfony/polyfill-mbstring suggests installing ext-mbstring (For best performance)
symfony/translation suggests installing symfony/config
symfony/translation suggests installing symfony/yaml
symfony/translation suggests installing psr/log-implementation (To use logging capability in translator)
Writing lock file
Generating autoload files

Composer will create a composer.json file and download and install carbon and all its dependencies.

If you list your project’s directory, you will see that it contains two files composer.json and composer.lock, and a vendor directory.

-rw-r–r– 1 linuxize users 60 Oct 16 21:02 composer.json
-rw-r–r– 1 linuxize users 6851 Oct 16 21:02 composer.lock
drwxr-xr-x 5 linuxize users 4096 Oct 16 21:02 vendor

• vendor – the directory where the project dependencies are stored.
• composer.lock – file containing a list of all installed packages including the exact packages versions.
• composer.json – file describing the PHP project and all PHP dependencies.

You can search the Composer repository Packagist for PHP packages.

Composer provides autoload capabilities which allows us to use PHP classes without the need to require or include the files.

Create a file named testing.php and paste the following code:

<?php

require __DIR__ . ‘/vendor/autoload.php’;

use CarbonCarbon;

printf(“Now: %s”, Carbon::now());

Let’s analyze the code line by line.

In the first line after the opening php tag we are including the vendor/autoload.php file that was automatically generated by Composer. This file will autoload all the required libraries.

Next we are aliasing CarbonCarbon as Carbon and with the last line we are printing the current time using the Carbon now method.

Run the script by typing:

The output should look something like below:

3. Updating Packages with Composer

To update the PHP packages, simply run:

The command above will check for newer versions of the installed packages and if a newer version is found and the version constraint match with the one specified in the composer.json, Composer will update the package.

Conclusion

You have learned how to install Composer on your Debian 9 machine. We have also shown you how to use Composer to create a basic PHP project. To find more information about Composer visit the official Composer documentation page.

If you have any question, please leave a comment below.

Source

HOW TO KILL DEFUNCT OR ZOMBIE PROCESS

A “defunct” processes
is also known as a “zombie” processes. A Zombie
process is referred as dead process which is receding on your
system though it’s completed executing. In one shot we can say it’s a dead
processes which is still in RAM. This process will be in your process table and
consuming your memory. Having more defunct process will consume your memory
which intern slows your system. We have to kill the defunct process in order to
free RAM and make system stable.

What is a zombie process?

When a process finishes execution, it will
have an exit status to report to its parent process. Because of this last
little bit of information, the process will remain in the operating system’s
process table as a zombie process, indicating that it is not to be scheduled
for further execution, but that it cannot be completely removed (and its
process ID cannot be reused) until it has been determined that the exit status
is no longer needed.

When a child exits, the parent process will
receive a SIGCHLD signal to indicate that one of its children has finished
executing; the parent process will typically call the wait() system call at
this point. That call will provide the parent with the child’s exit status, and
will cause the child to be reaped, or removed from the process table.

Why
defunct process are created?

Ans
: When ever a process ends
all the memory used by that process are cleared and assigned to
new process but due to programming errors/bugs some
processes are still left in process table. These are created when there is no
proper communication between parent process and child proces

How do I remove zombie
processes from a system?

Well, first you can wait.
It’s possible that the parent process is intentionally leaving the process in a
zombie state to ensure that future children that it may create will not receive
the same pid. Or perhaps the parent is occupied, and will reap the child
process momentarily.

Secondly, you can send a
SIGCHLD signal to the parent (“kill -s SIGCHLD <ppid>“). This will cause
well-behaving parents to reap their zombie children.

Finally, you can kill the
parent process of the zombie. At that point, all of the parent’s children will
be adopted by the init process (pid 1), which periodically runs wait() to reap
any zombie children. Then system need reboot to kill zombie process.

Interview
questions & answers

1. How to find a defunct
process?

Run “ps aux” and look for a
Z in the STAT column.

ps aux | awk
‘”[Zz]” ~ $8 { printf(“%s, PID = %dn”, $8, $2); }’

2. How can I kill a
defunct process?

Ans : Just use kill command

3. Still not able to
kill?

Ans : Then use kill -9 to force
kill that process

4. Still have an issue in
killing it?

Ans : Then try to kill it’s
parent id and then defunct.

#kill
parent-id-of-defunct-pid

#kill -9
parent-id-of-defunct-pid

Ans : If you still find defunct
process eating up RAM then last and final solution is to reboot your
machine(This is not preferred on production boxes).

6.What is orphan process?

Ans : An orphan process is said
to be a process which runs through parent process is terminated, these process
do not know what to do and when to terminate.

7. What is difference
between orphan and defunct processes?

Ans : A defunct process is a dead
process where there is no execution happening whereas orphan process is a live
process which is still in execution state but don’t have parent process

Source

Memcached is a high-performance caching system that is primarily used to speed up sites that rely on databases. It is an in-memory system for storing any data that could be from database calls or page requests. To read more about Memcached you can view the project wiki on github

Clean out the repository:

yum clean all

Make sure everything is to date:

yum -y update

Install memcached and libevent-devel:

yum -y install memcached libevent-devel

Verify the configuration

nano /etc/sysconfig/memcached

You should see the following configuration information:

PORT=”11211″
USER=”memcached”
MAXCONN=”1024″
CACHESIZE=”64″
OPTIONS=””

Start memcached:

systemctl start memcached

Make sure it persists on reboot:

systemctl enable memcached

To make sure it is running you can telnet to the port you ran it on and type stats

$ telnet localhost 11211
Trying ::1…
Connected to localhost.
Escape character is ‘^]’.
stats
STAT pid 6331
STAT uptime 43199874
STAT time 1500745928
STAT version 1.4.10
STAT libevent 1.4.13-stable
STAT pointer_size 64
STAT rusage_user 645.228910
STAT rusage_system 1121.041575
STAT curr_connections 10
STAT total_connections 11
STAT connection_structures 11
STAT reserved_fds 20
STAT cmd_get 0
STAT cmd_set 0
STAT cmd_flush 0
STAT cmd_touch 0
STAT get_hits 0
STAT get_misses 0
STAT delete_misses 0
STAT delete_hits 0
STAT incr_misses 0
STAT incr_hits 0
STAT decr_misses 0
STAT decr_hits 0
STAT cas_misses 0
STAT cas_hits 0
STAT cas_badval 0
STAT touch_hits 0
STAT touch_misses 0
STAT auth_cmds 0
STAT auth_errors 0
STAT bytes_read 7
STAT bytes_written 0
STAT limit_maxbytes 1073741824
STAT accepting_conns 1
STAT listen_disabled_num 0
STAT threads 4
STAT conn_yields 0
STAT hash_power_level 16
STAT hash_bytes 524288
STAT hash_is_expanding 0
STAT expired_unfetched 0
STAT evicted_unfetched 0
STAT bytes 0
STAT curr_items 0
STAT total_items 0
STAT evictions 0
STAT reclaimed 0
END

That is it for installing memcached on CentOS.

Jul 24, 2017LinuxAdmin.io

Source

Kali Linux 2017.1 Installation on Oracle VirtualBox

This video tutorial shows

Kali Linux 2017.1 installation

on Oracle VirtualBox step by step. This tutorial is also helpful to install Kali Linux 2017 on physical computer or laptop hardware. We also install

Guest Additions

on Kali Linux 2017 for better performance and usability features such as Automatic Resizing Guest Display, Shared Folder, Seamless Mode and Shared Clipboard, Improved Performance and Drag and Drop.

Kali Linux 2017.1 Installation Steps:

1. Create Virtual Machine on Oracle VirtualBox
2. Start Kali Linux Installation
3. Install Guest Additions
4. Test Guest Additions Features: Automatic Resizing Guest Display and Shared Clipboard

Installing Kali Linux 2017.1 on Oracle VirtualBox

Kali Linux 2017.1 New Features and Improvements

Kali Linux

is a Debian-based distribution which features several security and forensics tools. Kali Linux 2017.1 features drivers for RTL8812AU wireless chipsets, improved GPU support and there are now Azure and AWS images of Kali Linux for cloud instances.

Kali Linux 2017.1

brings with it a bunch of exciting updates and features. As with all new releases, you have the common denominator of updated packages, an updated kernel that provides more and better hardware support, as well as a slew of updated tools.

Kali Linux Website:

https://www.kali.org/

VirtualBox Guest Additions Features

The Guest Additions offer the following features below:

 

1. Improved Video Support: While the virtual graphics card which VirtualBox emulates for any guest operating system provides all the basic features, the custom video drivers that are installed with the Guest Additions provide you with extra high and non-standard video modes as well as accelerated video performance.
2. Mouse Pointer Integration: This provides with seamless mouse support. A special mouse driver would have to be installed in the guest OS, which would exchange information with the actual mouse driver on the host. The special mouse driver then allows users to control the guest mouse pointer.
3. Time Synchronization: With the Guest Additions installed, VirtualBox can ensure that the guest’s system time is better synchronized with that of the host.
4. Shared Folders: These provide an easy way to exchange files between the host and the guest.
5. Seamless Windows: With this feature, the individual windows that are displayed on the desktop of the virtual machine can be mapped on the host’s desktop, as if the underlying application was actually running on the host.
6. Shared Clipboard: With the Guest Additions installed, the clipboard of the guest operating system can optionally be shared with your host operating system.

Hope you found this Kali Linux 2017.1 installation on Oracle VirtualBox tutorial helpful and informative. Please consider sharing it. Your feedback and questions are welcome!

Source

In this guide, we try to cover most part of processes and understand how to manage them on your Linux system. So when we execute a program it represents one or more processes, in order to make our system operations smooth, the management and control of processes is essential. Usually, processes on the Linux system will execute, live, and get killed without intervention from the user because kernel manage them automatically. However, there can be some cases when a process is executed and after sometime the process can die for some unknown reason and it needs a restart to get the work done. Or a process may run fiercely and consume lots of system resources, in such case requiring a termination. We may need a instruct running process to perform certain operation, such as rereading a configuration file.

How a process works: When Linux system boots up, the kernel executes some of its own processes, basically, runs series of shell scripts to make system ready to use. Many of these processes are implemented as daemon processes, processes that just sit in the background and perform their task without having any interaction with user. So even you are just boot up the system and don’t log-in, the system is little busy performing routine jobs.

The kernel of the system maintains information of each process executed to keep system well organized. For instance, when a process is executed a number called PID (process ID) assigned to it. PID (process ID) are always assigned in ascending order. The kernel also helps keep track of system memory assigned to each process, as well as those processes’ ready to resume their execution.

Lets follow the guide, how to manage processes on your system:

Viewing Processes with “PS”

PS – this command can be used to get the information about running processes. There are almost 80 options available for ps command, we will cover some combinations of them.

Run this command in your system to display the processes information:

ps

To view processes by the your logged-in user:

ps -ux

View processes by user ‘noobslab’:

ps -U noobslab

View processes by program name:

ps -C gnome

View particular process by PID:

ps -p1,2,18076

View more refined output of ps using grep:

ps -ux | grep gnome
ps aux | grep gnome
ps auxw | grep gnome

It shows every running process with details:

ps aux

Displays all processes in a threaded view, with parent/child process hierarchy and session IDs:

ps -ejH

View processes hierarchy in BSD-style:

ps axjf

If you want to dive more into PS command then check manual using this command:

man ps

 

Viewing Processes with “PSTREE”

PSTREE – It is used to display the hierarchical list of processes in tree format. It is very useful for understanding the parent/child processes relationship.

Run this command in your system to display the processes in tree format:

pstree

Display processes tree including PID:

pstree -p

for more options check manual:

man pstree

Viewing Processes with “TOP”

TOP – This command is similar to ps but it displays continuous updated results. It is very useful when you need to keep an eye on one or more processes to check how they are performing and consuming resources. In addition, it displays CPU-intensive process at the top (displaying processes using CPU from higher to lower). Further more, we can use this command with other options to get expected results.

You can run this command in your system to get processes information:

top

Display processes with delay of 1 second (default 3 seconds):

top -d 1

Display processes of a user:

top -u noobslab

Display processes using PID:

top -p 1,2,18076,18092

It runs ‘top’ command for sometime and log output in the file:

top -b -n 1000 > processes_log.txt

To know more options for TOP run this command:

man top

Viewing Processes with “PGREP”

PGREP – It lets you look up the process and get the information about the process

Run this command to display the process information:

pgrep -l gnome

Run this command to list all processes by user:

pgrep -lu noobslab

You can get more information using this command:

man pgrep

Beside these popular command utilities, do you use anything else? Let everybody know in the comment below!

Source

Tails is a live media Linux distro designed to boot into a highly secure desktop environment. Tor is a browser that prevents somebody watching your internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.

Learn why anonymity matters and how you can protect yourself with this Linux Journal Weekend Reading.

Tor Hidden Services

Why should clients get all the privacy? Give your servers some privacy too!

Tails above the Rest: the Installation

How to get and validate the Tails distribution and install it. We will follow up with what Tails can and can’t do to protect your privacy, and how to use Tails in a way that minimizes your risk. Then we will finish with some more advanced features of Tails, including the use of a persistent volume (with this feature, depending on your needs, you could conceivably use Tails as your main Linux distribution).

Tails above the Rest, Part II

Now that you have Tails installed, let’s start using it. Read on to find out how to get started.

Tails above the Rest, Part III

In the first two parts on this series, we gave an overview of Tails, including how to get the distribution securely, and once you have it, how to use some of the basic tools. Here, we cover some of the more advanced features of Tails, such as some of its log-in options, its suite of encryption tools and the persistent disk.

Tor Security for Android and Desktop Linux

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 afterwards futile.

A Bundle of Tor

The best way to set up Tor on your personal machine.

Dolphins in the NSA Dragnet

As we mentioned in “NSA: Linux Journal is an ‘extremist forum’ and its readers get flagged for extra surveillance”, the NSA has been flagging certain Internet traffic as extremist based on specific patterns.

Source

Intel Core i9 9900K vs. AMD Ryzen 7 2700X Linux Gaming Benchmarks

Complementing the just-published Intel Core i9 9900K Linux benchmarks with the launch-day embargo lift are the Linux gaming benchmarks… This article is looking at the Linux performance between the Core i9 9900K and AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X in a variety of native Linux games as well as comparing the performance-per-Watt. So if you are a Linux gamer and deciding between these sub-$500 processors, this article is for you.

 

 

If you didn’t yet read the main article that features a 15-way CPU comparison on Ubuntu 18.10 with the Linux 4.19 kernel, here is a recap of this new Coffeelake refresh CPU. The Core i9 9900K is an eight-core / sixteen-thread processor with 3.6GHz base frequency and 5.0GHz turbo frequency. This 14nm CPU has a 16MB L3 cache, dual channel DDR4-2666 support, and a 95 Watt TDP. There is also the onboard UHD Graphics 630, but if you’re a gamer, that isn’t going to cut it. The Core i9 9900K is launching at $499 USD.

 

At least until AMD introduces a Ryzen 7 2800X, the closest competition they have is with the Ryzen 7 2700X. The AMD Ryzen 7 2700X is eight cores / sixteen threads and also a 16MB L3 cache but where it differs is having a 3.7GHz base clock (+100MHz), 4.3GHz boost clock (-700MHz compared to the i9-9900K), 12nm FinFET (compared to Intel’s 14nm), and a 105 Watt TDP (+10 Watts). But the Ryzen 7 2700X retails for just over $300 USD and also includes the Wraith Prism heatsink fan while the i9-9900K at $499 does not include a stock heatsink, further upping its cost. But for my Core i9 9900K I have been using an Arctic Cooling Freezer 12 that retails for about $20 USD since we don’t focus on overclocking and this Arctic i11/12 heatsinks work out well and also comply with 4U height requirements for the racked up systems.

 

 

For these benchmarks both systems were tested with a Radeon RX Vega 64 8GB given the popularity of Radeon graphics by Linux gamers given the open-source driver stack being a boon these days thanks to AMD, Valve, and other contributors, The RX Vega 64 was using the Linux 4.18 kernel and Mesa 18.2.2 built against LLVM 7.0 as shipped by Ubuntu 18.10.

 

Both systems were running with 2 x 8GB DDR4-3200 memory, ASUS motherboards, Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD while the Steam game collection is on a Crucial MX300 525GB SATA 3.0 SSD, and running with the other default Ubuntu 18.10 software components. Both systems were running with the latest BIOS/microcode releases and all relevant CPU speculative execution mitigations.

 

A variety of Linux-native games were carried out for this comparison using the Phoronix Test Suite. Rather than just running the games at low resolutions and low quality settings in order to be CPU bound, this testing was focused on being more real-world to Linux gamers and thus tested at a variety of modern resolutions and quality settings.

As usual, each CPU was tested at its default frequencies… With the case of the auto-generated system table it just comes down to a difference in the CPU frequency scaling driver reporting a base vs. turbo clock speed difference for the number reported. Both systems were also using their “performance” CPU frequency scaling governor.

The impact of Linux games on the CPU tend to have different impact on processors than Windows games due to many of the premiere games being ported over from Windows and often wrapped around various Direct3D to Vulkan (or OpenGL, for the older games) and other porting layers. There is also the matter that most Linux native games that are considered “current” tend to be out months if not years later than the Windows release — such as the Rise of the Tomb Raider Linux port having just come out earlier this year by Feral.

 

Not focused in this round of testing are any Steam Play / Proton / Wine games but those tests will be coming soon now that Steam Play / DXVK has matured enough and should begin handling some of the more graphically interesting and benchmark-friendly Windows games.

 

 

During these benchmarks the Phoronix Test Suite was monitoring the system’s AC power consumption in real-time (interfacing with a WattsUp Pro power meter) and automatically generating performance-per-Watt metrics. Thanks again to Intel for sending over the Core i9 9900K review sample and ASUS for supplying the PRIME Z390-A motherboard that has been working out great with i9-9900K testing the past two weeks.

 

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