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Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #547

Efficient Linux at the CLI

This week we’re talking to Daniel J. Barrett, author of Efficient Linux at the Command Line as well as many other books. Daniel has a PhD and has been teaching and writing about Linux for more than 30 years (almost 40!). So we invited Dan to join us on the show to talk about efficient ways to use Linux. He teaches us about combining commands, re-running commands, $CDPATH hacks, and more.

Martin Heinz martinheinz.dev

Why I will never use Alpine Linux ever again

Nowadays, Alpine Linux is one of the most popular options for container base images. Many people (maybe including you) use it for anything and everything. Some people use it because of its small size, some because of habit and some, just because they copy-pasted a Dockerfile from some tutorial. Yet, there are plenty of reasons why you should not use Alpine for your container images, some of which can cause you great amount of grief…

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #512

Linux mythbusting & retro gaming

This week we’re doing some Linux mythbusting and talking retro gaming with Jay LaCroix from Learn Linux TV. This is a preview of what’s to come from our trip to All Things Open next week. By the way, make sure you come and check us out at booth 60. We’ll be recording podcasts, shaking hands, giving out t-shirts and stickers…and speaking of gaming, you can go head-to-head with us on Mario Kart or Rocket League on the Nintendo Switch. We’re giving that Switch away to a lucky winner at the conference, but you have to play to win. If you’re there, make sure you come see us because we want to see you.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #501

The power of eBPF

eBPF is a revolutionary kernel technology that has lit the cloud native world on fire. If you’re going to have one person explain the excitement, that person would be Liz Rice. Liz is the COSO at Isovalent, creators of the open source Cilium project and pioneers of eBPF tech.

On this episode Liz tells Jerod all about the power of eBPF, where it came from, what kind of new applications its enabling, and who is building the next generation of networking, security, and observability tools with it.

Linux diziet.dreamwidth.org

Upgrading from Debian Jessie i386 to Bullseye amd64 after ~30 years

chiark is my ā€œcoloā€ - a server I run, which lives in a data centre in London. It hosts ~200 users with shell accounts, various websites and mailing lists, moderators for a number of USENET newsgroups, and countless other services…

chiark’s last major OS upgrade was to jessie (Debian 8, released in April 2015). That was in 2016.

A harrowing tale of planning and peril. Surprisingly, it went quite well!

Command line interface lifehacker.com

I raised my kids on the command line... and they love it

John Goerzen built a computer for his 3yo, installed Debian on it, and set up a GUI for it.

The looks of shock I get from people when I explain, as if it’s perfectly natural, that my child has been able to log in by himself to a Linux shell since age 3, are amusing and astounding. Especially considering that it is really not that hard.

It’s not that hard, but it is so foreign to people that they’re quickly impressed by such things. Still, John decided to introduce his kids to a GUI eventually:

Jacob mastered the basics of xmonad really quickly. Alt-Shift-C to close a window. Alt-Shift-Q to quit back to the ā€œbig black screenā€. Alt-Shift-Enter to get a terminal window.

We launched thunar (the XFCE file manager) and plugged in his camera. He had a good deal of fun looking at photos and videos from it. But then I dropped the true highlight of the day for him: I offered to install Tuxpaint for him. That’s probably his favorite program of all time.

Tux Paint!

Linux phoronix.com

Linus Torvalds: Rust for the kernel could possibly be merged for Linux 5.20

Speaking this morning at The Linux Foundation’s Open-Source Summit, Linus Torvalds talked up the possibilities of Rust within the Linux kernel and that it could be landing quite soon – possibly even for the next kernel cycle…

The Linux 5.20 merge window will open following the release of Linux 5.19 stable around the end of July, so at that point we’ll see if the Rust PR is submitted and lands for this next kernel version. It wouldn’t be too surprising with how things have been pacing and already having the blessing of Linus.

Lots of positivity about this in the attached comment thread.

Opensource.com Icon Opensource.com

The only Linux command you need to know

Cheeky title, but they’re talking about cheat, which is different than man and info in that it’s entirely example based and community maintained.

The cheat system cuts to the chase. You don’t have to piece together clues about how to use a command. You just follow the examples. Of course, for complex commands, it’s not a shortcut for a thorough study of the actual documentation, but for quick reference, it’s as fast as it gets.

Changelog Interviews Changelog Interviews #489

Run your home on a Raspberry Pi

This week we’re joined by Mike Riley and we’re talking about his book Portable Python Projects (Running your home on a Raspberry Pi). We breakdown the details of the latest Raspberry Pi hardware, various automation ideas from the book, why Mike prefers Python for scripting on a Raspberry Pi, and of course why the Raspberry Pi makes sense for home labs concerned about data security.

Use the code PYPROJECTS to get a 35% discount on the book. That code is valid for approximately 60 days after the episode’s publish date.

Terence Eden shkspr.mobi

Things I can’t do on macOS which I can do on Ubuntu

A solid rant by Terence Eden, who has to use macOS for work but would rather not:

I know you’re going to be tempted to reply with ā€œyou’re using it wrongā€ - but I’m not. This is how I like to use my computer. And it is clear that the MacBook isn’t my computer - it is Apple’s. (OK, OK! It belongs to my employer!)

Some of his grievances like window snapping and moving/removing UI elements can be alleviated with 3rd-party solutions, but he’s not wrong that the operating system doesn’t provide these features.

Linux asahilinux.org

Linux on Apple Silicon

Asahi Linux is a project and community with the goal of porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs, starting with the 2020 M1 Mac Mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro.

Our goal is not just to make Linux run on these machines but to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS. Doing this requires a tremendous amount of work, as Apple Silicon is an entirely undocumented platform. In particular, we will be reverse engineering the Apple GPU architecture and developing an open-source driver for it.

Asahi Linux is developed by a thriving community of free and open source software developers.

Yes, please!

Ars Technica Icon Ars Technica

A bug lurking for 12 years gives attackers root on every major Linux distro

Linux users on Tuesday got a major dose of bad news—a 12-year-old vulnerability in a system tool called Polkit gives attackers unfettered root privileges on machines running any major distribution of the open source operating system.

Previously called PolicyKit, Polkit manages system-wide privileges in Unix-like OSes. It provides a mechanism for nonprivileged processes to safely interact with privileged processes. It also allows users to execute commands with high privileges by using a component called pkexec, followed by the command.

Oh my. It requires local access first, which is the only good news here.

Luis Artola luisartola.com

Reviewing the Framework laptop with Ubuntu

Luis Artola:

I built my own laptop over the holiday break and it’s a developer’s dream come true. I took a chance and ordered a Framework Laptop DIY Edition. I’m so glad I did. The Framework is an excellent platform to customize and build a very capable and stable Linux machine for development. Here’s what I love about it and things that could be better.

Reviewing the Framework laptop with Ubuntu
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