Linux Blimp

My brief, incomplete LM19 Odyssey
Installation phase
==================
Linux Mint 19 64bit Mate v2 LIVE-CD crashed – several attempts needed
(1) frozen windows
(2) bluetooth not working
BIG PROBLEM — PASSWORD stays w ENGLISH … nuisance when using ie yzäöü etc

After Installation
==================
decrypt password reverts back to default= English, hence dont use pw keys that change under different idioms
like zy.- etc

Several freezes after update
Solution: Keep on working, behaviour disappeared

BIG problem
NO shutdown, no reboot — only hard reset
Solution: Add to grub “acpi=force” ==> GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash acpi=force”

BIG problem
several USB SSD which were formated under Win10 1803+ not mountable – NO popup notification …
Under older Mint “Inconsistany complaints of NTFS”
Solution: ???

BIG problem
Font size of many apps dont get adjusted to customized settings- – instead stay small ie
Solution: ???

Contrast
Default font contrast not very eye friendly (lacks contrast)
Solution: ???

Keyboard
Keyboardlayout default cant be permantently changed (always reverts to English)
Solution: ???

Calibre
no icon on taskbar (Problem since 17.x) – lol
Workaround: AllTray

Application interface
When selecting several apps for install at same time/in row, not all get installed then
Solution: ???

Virtualbox
Minimzed window doesnt restore fully – 2 attempts needed
Solution: ???

NO automount of 2nd Disk
Solution: Add line to fstab “/dev/sdbx /media/username/disklabel ntfs defaults 0 0”
ie /dev/sdb3 /media/linuxmint/VM ntfs defaults 0 0
or better use the UUID instead of /dev/sdaX (the UUID can be easily found under “Disks” App)

FOlder colors
Missing several color options, ie yellow, teal, light green
Video folder doesnt change color when applied

Redshift
Doesnt work properly (cant togle between on/off
Solution: Start gtk-redshift ONLY
no redshift adjustment?
Solution: LinuxMint forum? or command line ie mint@mint:~$redshift -O 6000K

AND PLEASE finally stop using YAHOO as your default search engine —- grrrr

Source

Many thanks to all the people who donate to us. Numbers were lower than normal last month but we’re still getting a tremendous amount of support. We’re at an average of $10,000 per month. Although that average decreased slightly over the last three years it is very high, it covers all our expenses, when we need something money is never an issue (whether it’s to scale slowly, invest in security, hosting, CI services or to tackle an emergency) and it allows us to send money upstream when needed and to donate funds internally within our moderation and development teams. We’re able to facilitate development and boost our productivity by making tools available and delegate aspects which would otherwise get in the way. It’s a real help for us, I know I say it every month but I don’t think we’ll ever be thankful enough. If you’re helping us, thank you.

Now, without further ado, let’s talk about development. With Mint 19 and LMDE 3 officially released our hands are now free to develop and improve our software on top of the new bases (respectively Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian Stretch).

Nemo

Nemo 4.0 is lightning fast.

Michael Webster reviewed the Cinnamon file manager and optimized it in many ways. Here are some of his notes when working on it. Throughout the commits below, he asks a new instance of nemo to list the content of /usr/bin after dropping all caches:

Nemo startup time: 3.488751 seconds
Folder load time: 2.644505 seconds
Idle…Folder load time: 2.874406 seconds

Generate tooltips for icon items on-demand, instead of when the view loads:
Nemo startup time: 2.510636 seconds
Folder load time: 1.596948 seconds
Idle…Folder load time: 1.654450 seconds

Optimize icon lookups by GIcon:
Nemo startup time: 2.011817 seconds
Folder load time: 1.158854 seconds
Idle…Folder load time: 1.226699 seconds

Decrease minimum update interval:
Nemo startup time: 1.797009 seconds
Folder load time: 0.937992 seconds
Idle…Folder load time: 0.973764 seconds

The result is very impressive. Nemo feels extremely light and browsing directories is a breeze. It’s never been that fast before and it’s immediately noticeable.

Michael also improved icon sizes and spacing to make Nemo look better.

Nemo is now able to show file creation times (note that this requires ext4, a kernel 4.15 or above and it doesn’t work within an encrypted home directory).

Nemo-python and all Nemo python extensions were ported to Python 3.

XappStackSideBar

Joseph Mccullar, who was involved in the UI revamp of the Welcome Screen in Linux Mint 19, and lead the UI revamp of the Software Sources for the upcoming Linux Mint 19.1, created a new widget in libxapp called XappStackSideBar.

This streamlines icon sidebars and makes it really easy to use them within applications. We’re able to design these sidebars from a click of the mouse in Glade, connect them to a GTK stack and design their pages really easily.

The existing XappPreferencesWindow now also makes use of it.

Here’s how it looks for instance in Nemo 4.0:

Cinnamon

The star of the month within the Cinnamon team is Jason Hicks. Last month we talked about VSYNC, input lag and performance improvements within the muffin window manager. This is now a reality and it’s all been merged in preparation for muffin 4.0.

Input lag was reduced on NVIDIA cards and the window manager feels more responsive when moving windows. You now also have the possibility to turn off VSYNC in the System Settings. This basically delegates VSYNC to your GPU driver (which needs to handle it otherwise you get screen tearing) and if that driver performs well, it can eliminate input lag and boost performance.

Jason also ported a huge amount of upstream changes from the GNOME project:

• Similar to Mutter, Muffin now uses its own embedded version of COGL and Clutter, which received most of the patches applied to the one in GNOME.
• Many Mutter performance improvements were applied to Muffin.
• CJS received many commits from GNOME’s GJS, including improvements to its garbage collection.

With so many fixes and improvements applied and performance which depends greatly on the GPU being used, results may vary and we might experience some regressions during the BETA phase. Our own experience is quite positive. Cinnamon 4.0 rarely ventures past 250MB RAM on NVIDIA, it feels more responsive than 3.8 and it looks like some of the long standing rendering issues might be a thing of the past.

Software Sources

When software crashes tools such as mintreport produce a stack trace our developers can look at to understand the cause of the crash. This is the first step towards fixing such a bug. For the stack trace to be meaningful, users need to have debug symbols installed.

In an effort to reduce bandwidth for their mirrors, Debian decided to move debug symbols outside of the main repositories. This decision affected not only Debian and LMDE but also Ubuntu and Linux Mint and made it much more difficult for users to install these symbols.

To simplify this process we added support for debug symbols into the Software Sources tool. You’ll be able to add debug symbol repositories with a click of the mouse.

A new button was also added within the “Maintenance” tab to remove duplicate entries in your repositories.

こんにちは！

There are a few areas where, although a solution is easy to implement, we, the developers, don’t know what needs to be done, what users need and how to provide it. We rely on feedback when it’s about something we don’t really understand or something we can’t really reproduce. We can buy exotic hardware specifically to fix niche issues (Optimus laptops, ATI cards, Wacom tablets etc..), but when the varying factor isn’t the hardware, but us personally, it can get a little difficult. Some of these areas include RTL support, accessibility and input methods.

Well, we still can’t speak Arabic or Hebrew but two of us in the team now know the basics of Japanese. It didn’t take much to see what was missing but when you know what you need it’s much easier to make it happen.

So, the first improvement is that the Language Settings and the Input Methods are now two separate applications.

The user interface for the Input Methods tool was revamped. It uses an icon sidebar and now shows a dedicated page for each supported language.

With the gained space we’re able to show clearer instructions and to accompany the user through not only installing support packages but also selecting the right input method framework and the right input method within it.

Cinnamon 4.0 also received better Fcitx support. Its keyboard applet will hide when Fcitx is running, similar to what it currently does with DBus.

Text Editor

Small things matter. The text editor now indicates in the status bar whether it’s in spaces or tabs mode.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Donations in August:

A total of $7,067 were raised thanks to the generous contributions of 384 donors:

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$31 from 31 smaller donations

If you want to help Linux Mint with a donation, please visit http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php

Rankings:

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Source

Last updated October 11, 2018 By Ankush Das 11 Comments

We are well aware that Microsoft is interested to help the open-source community now more than ever. It has open sourced several of its projects such as .Net Core, VS Code, PowerShell, MS-DOS and a number of AI frameworks and libraries.

But, its latest decision is a big deal for the users, developers and the companies associated with Linux.

Microsoft’s Corporate VP – Erich Andersen – announced in a blog post that they would be bringing their portfolio of over 60,000 issued patents to Open Invention Network (OIN).

Open Invention Network (OIN) is a community backed by a lot of big companies like IBM, Google, Sony, etc. to protect Linux and associated open-source projects from patent lawsuits.

In the blog post, Erich mentioned how OIN is helping protect Linux:

“Since its founding in 2005, OIN has been at the forefront of helping companies manage patent risks. In the years before the founding of OIN, many open source licenses explicitly covered only copyright interests and were silent about patents. OIN was designed to address this concern by creating a voluntary system of patent cross-licenses between member companies covering Linux System technologies. OIN has also been active in acquiring patents at times to help defend the community and to provide education and advice about the intersection of open source and intellectual property. Today, through the stewardship of its CEO Keith Bergelt and its Board of Directors, the organization provides a license platform for roughly 2,650 companies globally. The licensees range from individual developers and startups to some of the biggest technology companies and patent holders on the planet.“

Now, with Microsoft taking such a big step, Erich also mentioned how it would impact the open-source community:

“Now, as we join OIN, we believe Microsoft will be able to do more than ever to help protect Linux and other important open source workloads from patent assertions. We bring a valuable and deep portfolio of over 60,000 issued patents to OIN. We also hope that our decision to join will attract many other companies to OIN, making the license network even stronger for the benefit of the open source community.”

Satya Nadella quoted this after buying GitHub for $7.5 billion

It would be interesting to see how it unfolds because when it comes to money, Microsoft is no one’s friend. Microsoft earns a huge chunk of revenue from patents. It has patents with Android as well that enables it to earn $5-$15 from every Android device sold. I don’t think those 60,000 patents were bringing any revenue to Microsoft. But that just my presumption.

Input from Abhishek: Microsoft has its own selfish interest in this case. This time around it is more about protecting Microsoft and its cloud business on Azure that depends heavily on Linux. Remember Oracle vs Google legal battle over the use of Java in the Android operating system? If Linux ever gets into patent battle and loses it, all the companies using Linux might have to pay billions. Microsoft surely doesn’t want to be in such a situation and hence it (along with many other big corporations) wants to protect Linux in order to save its own back.

What do you think about the entire episode? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

About Ankush Das

A passionate technophile who also happens to be a Computer Science graduate. He has had bylines at a variety of publications that include Ubergizmo & Tech Cocktail. You will usually see cats dancing to the beautiful tunes sung by him.

Source

X.Org Server (xorg-server) is an open source and freely distributed implementation of the X Window System (X.Org), provided by the X.Org Foundation, specially designed for the GNU/Linux operating system.

Features at a glance

Key features include input hotplug, KDrive, DTrace and EXA. It’s designed to run on many UNIX-like operating systems, including most Linux distributions and BSD variants it. It is also the default X server for the Solaris operating system.

Forked from XFree86

X.Org Server is part of the X.Org software, the popular and powerful X Window System used in many POSIX operating systems, including almost all GNU/Linux distributions, as well as some BSD and Solaris flavors. The software was originally forked from the XFree86 project.

An important component of every Linux distro

This is a very important and essential component of all Linux kernel-based operating systems that run a graphical desktop environment or a window manager. Without X.Org and X.Org Server, you will only be able to use a distro from the command-line.

It’s installed by default

Of course, this means that it is installed by default in all these GNU/Linux distributions, without exception. If you remove this package from your installation, you won’t be able to access the graphical environment anymore.

X.Org, X.Org Server and X.Org Foundation

Many people get confused about these two essential components of a Linux distribution that uses a graphical session, but one should know that X.Org (X Window System) is the display server and X.Org Server is the X Window System implementation that contains several other projects, such as XCB and Xlib.

Furthermore, X.Org Foundation is the organization that governs these two projects. The X.Org (X Window System) packages are freely available for download on Softpedia.

X11 server Window system X window system Xorg X.Org Server Xorg-server

Source

Nitrux 1.0.16 – See What’s New

Nitrux 1.0 .16 is the latest release of Nitrux OS based on based on the development branch of Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish and powered by Linux Kernel 4.18 series. This release also brings together the latest software updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and ready-to-use hardware support.

Using the latest version of Nomad Desktop as default desktop environment, which is built on top of KDE Plasma 5.13.90 and Qt 5.11.1. The Software Center was updated to using new web scraper backend allowing for automated sorting and listing of AppImages.

Download Nitrux 1.0 .16

Source

By

Shashwat Chaudhary

April 04, 2017

• Disclaimer – TLDR; some stuff here can be used to carry out illegal activity, our intention is, however, to educate

In the previous tutorial, we set up our web application pentesting lab. However, it’s far from ready, and we need to make some changes to get it working as per our needs. Here’s the link to the previous post if you didn’t follow that-

Set up your web app pentesting lab

Contents

1. Fixing the problems
2. Changing credentials
3. Adding recaptcha key
4. Enabling disabled stuff
5. Installing missing stuff
6. Giving write privileges

Fixing problems

If you remember from previous post, we reached this point-

There’s some stuff in red color

All the stuff in red needs fixing. If you are lucky, we have the same set of issues which need fixing. Otherwise, you’ll have to do some googling to find out how to fix problems which you are facing and I am not.

Changing mysql username and password

The default credentials are ‘root’ and ‘p@ssw0rd’ in the config.inc.php file. We change it to the correct mysql login credentials, ‘root’ and ”, in my case. You can change depending on your mysql credentials. This gets rid of our biggest worry – Unable to connect to database!

This is the biggest problem. Solving this means we can create our database, some modules may not work perfectly, but DVWA will run. Without fixing this, we won’t even be able to start. To fix this, open /opt/lamp/htdocs/DVWA-master/config/config.inc.php file in your favorite text editor.

This password isn’t the password of our mysql database. In my case, password is nothing, i.e. two single quotes (i.e. ”). Update the value here. In case your mysql password is something else, use that. Change the username too is need be.

Now we’ll fix the other remaining issues.

Fixing missing recaptcha key

Firstly, we need to solve the recaptcha key missing problem. Go to this

URL

–

Go to the URL, you’ll see a form like this

Fill form, values don’t matter much

You obtain site key and secret key. Site key = Private key, secret key = private key

Open the config.ini.php file in your favourite text editor

Edit the recaptcha public key and private key fields. Here is what I did.

Now we have a a recaptcha key. One red down, 3 to go.

Fixing disabled allow_url_include

We simply have to locate the configuration file and edit the value of the parameter from Off to On.

The php configuration file is located at /opt/lampp/etc/php.ini Edit it with your favourite text editor, you’ll need root privileges (sudo)

Locate the allow_url_include line by using search feature of your text editor

Change Off to On

Restart the lampp service

Reload page, you’ll see that the issue is fixed

Note: Any other function which is disabled can be enabled in a similar manner. All settings are in the php.ini file. You just need to search for the corresponding line and edit it.

Fixing missing modules

If a module is shown as missing , then we need to install it. In my case, everything is installed. Most likely, since you are also using XAMPP, everything would be installed. However, if that is not the case, then you have to figure out how to install the modules. If you aren’t using XAMPP and did everything manually, then apt-get would be the way to go. Otherwise look at XAMPP’s (or whichever bundle you are using) documentation.

Fixing File Ownership

We need to give www-data user write access to two directories. We’ll can use chgrp and chmod commands in unison to give only the privileges that are needed, or we could go the lazy way and use chmod 777 (full read, write and execute privileges to everyone). I’m feeling lazy and I’m just gonna go the chmod way. Run the command below-

chmod 777 <directory>

Replace directory with the correct directory.

This is the last thing that needs to be done

Everything is green finally! Also, notice the credentials, we’ll need it later. “admin // password”

Database created. Populated with tables.

Finally the damn vulnerable application is running.

The username = “admin” and password is “password” (“admin // password” that we saw three pics ago).

Everything is running perfectly. This is the page you should see after successful login.

I’ll leave you at the welcome page of DVWA. In the next tutorial, we’ll begin proper exploitation of the intentional vulnerabilities, moving from trivial stuff to the really hard stuff. The first two tutorials complete the installation and configuration parts.

Source

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Despite cloud computing being a generally well-accepted and used technology that has slipped into the common vernacular very easily, there is still some confusion around the different types of cloud options out there. Specifically around the concepts of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. While some of this is due to slightly hazy marketing, largely it is down to misunderstanding. We know, just from looking at many of the cars on the street today, that a hybrid is a combination of two things (in the case of the image on this page, a bobcat and a bird), but how does that differ from multi-cloud?

A blog written in 2017 by our own Terri Schlosser previously addressed this, but having had a number of conversations with confused customers and partners over the last year or so, I decided to record a very brief video to help clarify the situation.

Follow this link to watch the video, and if you have any thoughts, please leave a comment on this blog, contact me at matthew.johns@suse.com or via Twitter. I hope that you find it useful in understanding more about what can be at times a very confusing set of terms. If you’d like to read more about cloud in general, then please visit our Cloud Solutions page on suse.com, or get in contact with us to see how SUSE can support you in your journey to the cloud.

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Source

HTTP download speed difference in windows 7 vs Linux

I have a strange situation regarding a Windows PC which is showing limited internet transfer speeds for no apparent reason. If I am performing the same test on Linux box then I am getting good speed.

Upon intense debugging, I am able to diagnose and find out the root cause of the problem.

It was/is Windows HTTP packet fragmentation that happens locally. Basically its
how windows compile HTTP headers locally so found a fix to it.

We came across some TCP settings which restrict download speed in the windows
box, hence in order to permit download of large files, have modified below
settings:

These were my initial TCP settings

C:Windowssystem32>netsh interface tcp show global

Querying active state…

TCP Global Parameters

———————————————-

Receive-Side Scaling State: disabled

Chimney Offload State : automatic

NetDMA State: enabled

Direct Cache Acess (DCA): disabled

Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level: disabled

Add-On Congestion Control Provider: none

ECN Capability: disabled

RFC 1323 Timestamps : disabled

** The above autotuninglevel setting is the result of Windows Scaling heuristics

overriding any local/policy configuration on at least one profile.

C:Windowssystem32>netsh interface tcp show heuristics

TCP Window Scaling heuristics Parameters

———————————————-

Window Scaling heuristics : enabled

Qualifying Destination Threshold: 3

Profile type unknown: normal

Profile type public : normal

Profile type private: restricted

Profile type domain : normal

Thus I did:

# disable heuristics

C:Windowssystem32>netsh interface tcp set heuristics wsh=disabled

Ok.

# enable receive-side scaling

C:Windowssystem32>netsh int tcp set global rss=enabled

Ok.

# manually set autotuning profile

C:Windowssystem32>netsh interface tcp set global autotuning=experimental

Ok.

# set congestion provider

C:Windowssystem32>netsh interface tcp set global congestionprovider=ctcp

Ok.

C:Windowssystem32>netsh interface tcp show global

Querying active state…

TCP Global Parameters

———————————————-

Receive-Side Scaling State: enabled

Chimney Offload State : automatic

NetDMA State: enabled

Direct Cache Acess (DCA): disabled

Receive Window Auto-Tuning Level: experimental

Add-On Congestion Control Provider: ctcp

ECN Capability: disabled

RFC 1323 Timestamps : disabled

After changing these settings downloading is fast again, hitting the internet connection’s limit.

Source

On Fedora, RHEL and its clones such as CentOS, Scientific Linux, Oracle Linux, you can find it using the following command:

rpm -qi basesystem

Sample output

[[email protected] ~]# rpm -qi basesystem
Name : basesystem
Version : 10.0
Release : 7.el7.centos
Architecture: noarch
Install Date: Thu 29 Mar 2018 05:05:32 PM IST
Group : System Environment/Base
Size : 0
License : Public Domain
Signature : RSA/SHA256, Fri 04 Jul 2014 06:16:57 AM IST, Key ID 24c6a8a7f4a80eb5
Source RPM : basesystem-10.0-7.el7.centos.src.rpm
Build Date : Fri 27 Jun 2014 04:07:10 PM IST
Build Host : worker1.bsys.centos.org
Relocations : (not relocatable)
Packager : CentOS BuildSystem http://bugs.centos.org
Vendor : CentOS
Summary : The skeleton package which defines a simple CentOS Linux system
Description :
Basesystem defines the components of a basic CentOS Linux
system (for example, the package installation order to use during
bootstrapping). Basesystem should be in every installation of a system,
and it should never be removed.

Source