12

A new app was added to GNOME Circle: Binary by @fizzyizzy05@tech.lgbt! https://apps.gnome.org/Binary/

Binary makes working with numbers of different bases (like binary or hexadecimal) a breeze. No more counting binary digits on your fingers!

Congratulations! 🎉

16

Overview of some of the new features in the upcoming GNOME 47 release.

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 6 points 4 days ago

Still using mutt after two decades (with isync for fetching).

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 4 points 4 days ago

Yes, based on the diagrams on their blog, it looks like this only impacts Snaps.

71

Over the past few years, the evolution of AI-driven tools like GitHub’s Copilot and other large language models (LLMs) has promised to revolutionise programming. By leveraging deep learning, these tools can generate code, suggest solutions, and even troubleshoot issues in real-time, saving developers hours of work. While these tools have obvious benefits in terms of productivity, there’s a growing concern that they may also have unintended consequences on the quality and skillset of programmers.

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 12 points 5 days ago

From the Discourse Blog:

The Linux desktop provides XDG Desktop Portals as a standardised way for applications to access resources that are outside of the sandbox. Applications that have been updated to use XDG Desktop Portals will continue to use them. Prompting is not intended to replace XDG Desktop Portals but to complement them by providing the desktop an alternative way to ask the user for permission. Either when an application has not been updated to use XDG Desktop Portals, or when it makes access requests not covered by XDG Desktop Portals.

Since prompting works at the syscall level, it does not require an application’s awareness or cooperation to work and extends the set of applications that can be run inside of a sandbox, allowing for a safer desktop. It is designed to enable desktop applications to take full advantage of snap packaging that might otherwise require classic confinement.

So this looks like it complements and not replaces the XDG Desktop Portals, especially for applications that have not implemented the Portals. It allows you to still run those applications in confinement while providing some more granular access controls.

62

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ndlug.org/post/1104312

The upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 operating system promises a new feature called “permissions prompting” for an extra layer of privacy and security.

The new permissions prompting feature in Ubuntu will let users control, manage, and understand the behavior of apps running on their machines. It leverages Ubuntu’s AppArmor implementation and enables fine-grained access control over unmodified binaries without having to change the app’s source code.

From Ubuntu Discourse: Ubuntu Desktop’s 24.10 Dev Cycle - Part 5: Introducing Permissions Prompting

This solution consists of two new seeded components in Ubuntu 24.10, prompting-client and desktop-security-center alongside deeper changes to snapd and AppArmor available in the upcoming snapd 2.65. The first is a new prompting client (built in Flutter) that surfaces the prompt requests from the application via snapd. The second is our new Security Center:

In this release the Security Center is the home for managing your prompt rules, over time we will expand its functionality to cover additional security-related settings for your desktop such as encryption management and firewall control.

...

With prompting enabled, an application that has access to the home interface in its AppArmor profile will trigger a request to snapd to ask the user for more granular permissions at the moment of access:

As a result, users now have direct control over the specific directories and file paths an application has access to, as well its duration. The results of prompts are then stored in snapd so they can be queried and managed by the user via the Security Center.

1
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org to c/ubuntu@lemmy.ml

The upcoming Ubuntu 24.10 operating system promises a new feature called “permissions prompting” for an extra layer of privacy and security.

The new permissions prompting feature in Ubuntu will let users control, manage, and understand the behavior of apps running on their machines. It leverages Ubuntu’s AppArmor implementation and enables fine-grained access control over unmodified binaries without having to change the app’s source code.

From Ubuntu Discourse: Ubuntu Desktop’s 24.10 Dev Cycle - Part 5: Introducing Permissions Prompting

This solution consists of two new seeded components in Ubuntu 24.10, prompting-client and desktop-security-center alongside deeper changes to snapd and AppArmor available in the upcoming snapd 2.65. The first is a new prompting client (built in Flutter) that surfaces the prompt requests from the application via snapd. The second is our new Security Center:

In this release the Security Center is the home for managing your prompt rules, over time we will expand its functionality to cover additional security-related settings for your desktop such as encryption management and firewall control.

...

With prompting enabled, an application that has access to the home interface in its AppArmor profile will trigger a request to snapd to ask the user for more granular permissions at the moment of access:

As a result, users now have direct control over the specific directories and file paths an application has access to, as well its duration. The results of prompts are then stored in snapd so they can be queried and managed by the user via the Security Center.

1

Sysprof as the system-wide performance profiler for Linux systems is now set to be installed by default on Ubuntu 24.10 and moving forward with future Ubuntu Linux releases. Currently users need to sudo apt install sysprof to enjoy this GUI and command-line driven program but now is to be installed by default on the Ubuntu desktop.

1

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 856 for the week of September 1 - 7, 2024.

  • Upgrades to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Suspended / Re-enabled
  • Ubuntu Stats
  • Hot in Support
  • Ubuntu Meeting Activity Reports
  • LXD: Weekly news - 361
  • Starcraft Clinic - 2024-Aug-30
  • UbuCon Asia
  • LoCo Events
  • Jammy Jellyfish (22.04.5 LTS) Point-Release Status Tracking
  • Ubuntu Representation at EthAccra 2024
  • A desktop touched by Midas: Oracular Oriole
  • Looking for more internship project ideas for Outreachy (December-March cohort)
  • ...
  • And much more!
1

Last Wednesday, we temporarily suspended upgrades to Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS due to unforeseen issues with dependencies of installed kernel headers after release upgrades. These issues were tracked in bug 2078720 and have now been resolved, and upgrades to 24.04.1 LTS have been enabled again.

...

This issue has been fixed in the APT 2.4.13 update in 22.04 LTS, and upgrades from interim releases have been addressed by a fallback to the previous algorithm in the ubuntu-release-upgrader 1:24.04.23 stable release update. We are adding additional checks to our automated upgrade testing to prevent similar issues in the future.

If you are affected by this issue, you can run apt install --fix-broken to remove the old kernel headers and make apt operational again.

68

NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?

...

Which brings me to this article—a collection of thoughts comparing the design of NT (July 1993) against contemporary Unix systems such as 4.4BSD (June 1994) or Linux 1.0 (March 1994). Beware that, due to my background, the text is written from the point of view of a Unix “expert” and an NT “clueless”, so it focuses on describing the things that NT does differently.

Long but interesting article that compares the Windows NT kernel to traditional Unix kernels such as that found in BSDs or Linux.

14

As part of our outreachy internship program on the GNOME Community Udo Ijibike and Tamnjong Larry (myself) under the guide of our mentors Allan Day and Aryan Kaushik conducted usability tests to evaluate the user experience across three media applications: Decibels (Audio Player), Loupe (Image Viewer), and Showtime (Video Player). Our goal was to identify areas for improvement and enhance the overall usability of these applications to better align with users' natural workflows.

...

For this study, we recruited five participants from across the world who were GNOME users but had not used any of the media apps before the study. The participants were from diverse works of life from software developers, students, and a medical doctor, just people who use GNOME regularly. The participants were recruited through social media posts on GNOME's official channels on Twitter and Mastodon.

61

How does Linux move from an awake machine to a hibernating one? How does it then manage to restore all state? These questions led me to read way too much C in trying to figure out how this particular hardware/software boundary is navigated.

105

elementary OS may not be as much as popular as it used to be.

That being said, elementary OS 8 release is still on the horizon with some useful changes based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

...

However, amidst disagreement between co-founders during the pandemic in 2022, co-founder Cassidy quit the elementary OS team.

Right after that, the development pace took a big hit, and we saw elementary OS 7 being released almost a year after Ubuntu 22.04 LTS came up.

...

A good indicator about its development activity is its upcoming major release, elementary OS 8, based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

I took a sneak peek at it using the daily build, and elementary OS 8 is almost ready to have an RC release.

...

You can expect things like:

  • The settings app handles system updates (instead of AppCenter)
  • AppCenter is now Flatpak only
  • New toggle menu icon giving you easy access to the screen reader, onscreen keyboard, font size, and other system settings
  • WireGuard VPN support
[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 40 points 3 weeks ago

The reasons for this shift in budget away from funding Free Software and the NGI initiative seems to be an allocation of more funds for AI, leaving internet infrastructure by the wayside. Meanwhile, the EC has thus far declined to comment to share its official reasoning for striking this funding from its budget.

Sigh. It appears that they are chasing after the latest "shiny" thing instead of investing in existing infrastructure. Not surprising, but disappointing.

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 77 points 1 month ago

Not a bad list. Off the top of my head, I would say it is missing two things:

  1. Discrete Math (formal logic, sets, probability, etc)
  2. Theory of Computing (not just algorithms, but things like Turing machines, NFAs, DFAs, etc.). These may not be strictly the most practical courses, but I think a Computer Science degree would be incomplete without these.

The "Introduction to Operating Systems" link no longer works (redirects to "Autonomous Systems" courses). Instead, I would recommend using Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces, which is the textbook I use in my OS course.

Finally, something like The Missing Semester of Your CS Education would also be a nice extra.

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 47 points 10 months ago

And that's exactly what happened in your case David. Which is why I'm so happy (also because I fixed the tools from an author I like and already had the books at home :-P):

Really detailed and cool response from the kernel developer. I also found the use of the recent BPF feature to provide a workaround until a proper kernel fix lands really interesting.

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 52 points 10 months ago

Would to see them publish stable releases via this apt repository as well.

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 45 points 11 months ago

No word on how long it will get software support though. With everyone else going to 5 or 7 years of updates, Motorola's typical 2 year support cycle is a huge negative.

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 90 points 11 months ago

I wish they had a mastodon account... they have https://mozilla.social, but they don't have an account there... which is bizarre.

They do have an account for Firefox Nightly and Firefox Dev Tools account though.

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 38 points 1 year ago

Headline is a bit misleading... This is just Tails updating to the latest LTS kernel, which has the security fix (which many other distributions have done).

This update is a good thing, but the headline made it sound like the Tails project was contributing a fix to the kernel.

Anyway, thanks for sharing.

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 33 points 1 year ago

Currently self-hosting my own mastodon server and honestly the setup wasn't too bad (using docker)... much more straight-forward than I feared.

My main concerns, which Julia mentions, is that if you have a small instance, you are very much an island as the way federation work is not what you expect. For instance, as Julia notes, if you view a new person's profile on your own instance, it will look empty (as if they haven't posted anything). Lemmy also has this issue if you view a community you have not subscribed to yet for the first time.

Likewise, my "#explore" tab is basically always empty and discovering new tags or people is difficult if you are just looking on your own instance (I basically have to go to Fossotodon or another instance to find new things and then import them into my own instance). I've recently learned that you have to have a third party application basically seed your instance with posts... again, similar to the bot tricks use for seeding Lemmy with communities.

Overall, I think discovery is a big pain point for the fediverse and ActivityPub. It's great that we can have our own instances and control our own small communities, but it seems that we are lacking the ability to really connect across instances and form experiences that really bridge across multiple communities.

[-] pnutzh4x0r@lemmy.ndlug.org 47 points 1 year ago

I wonder if it is because of the various outages on both instance and the new "dead instance" detection, lemmy.ml has temporarily stopped receiving updates?

The federation code now includes a check for dead instances which is used when sending activities. This helps to reduce the amount of outgoing POST requests, and also reduce server load.

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pnutzh4x0r

joined 1 year ago