LINUX Unplugged - Episodes Tagged with “Firmware”

482: Legacy Gets the Boot

Jupiter Broadcasting — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 20:00:00 -0700

Are the long-timers holding Linux back? Lennart Poettering argues we are and proposes a new Microsoft-blessed way to secure Linux.

Plus, our thoughts on the slow decline of mailing lists in open-source development.

Special Guest: Neal Gompa.

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Tailscale: Tailscale is a programmable networking software that is private and secure by default - get it free on up to 100 devices!
Linode Cloud Hosting: A special offer for all Linux Unplugged Podcast listeners and new Linode customers, visit linode.com/unplugged, and receive $100 towards your new account.
Bitwarden: Bitwarden is the easiest way for businesses and individuals to store, share, and sync sensitive data.

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“Old/weird laptops” sought to help test Linux kernel backlight drivers — You could help smooth out a long-needed overhaul of Linux's backlight systems.
The GNOME Project is closing all its mailing lists — The GNOME Project is preparing to shut down its mailing lists due to problems maintaining the project's GNU Mailman instance - which relies on Python 2 - and a lack of moderators.
[Evolution] Announcement: this mailing list will be retired
Re: Moving final mailman lists over to discourse
Issues · jupiterbroadcasting.com
Office Hours 15: One PR At a Time — We recap a busy night after a studio power outage, then dig into what makes an open-source project worth contributing to. Why do some fail while others grow and prosper?
How I make a living working on SerenityOS — This post describes in detail how I support myself while working on the SerenityOS project.
Systemd supremo proposes tightening up Linux boot process — In brief, what he sees as the problem is that on hardware with Secure Boot enabled, while the boot process up to and including the kernel is signed, the next step, loading the initrd, is not. That's what he wants to fix.
Brave New Trusted Boot World — This document looks at the boot process of general purpose Linux distributions. It covers the status quo and how we envision Linux boot to work in the future with a focus on robustness and simplicity.
NixOS bootspec-secureboot — This repository is a research project that aims to improve the bootloader story in NixOS.
Matthew's NixOS Screen shot
Grab a new podcast app — Upgrade to a Podcasting 2.0 compatible app.
vhs: Your CLI home video recorder 📼 — Write terminal GIFs as code for integration testing and demoing your CLI tools.
FFmpeg.guide — A simple GUI tool to create complex FFmpeg filtergraphs quickly and correctly, without having to mess with the cumbersome filter syntax

462: One Cosmic Collaboration

Jupiter Broadcasting — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 17:00:00 -0700

From skeptic to buyer, why the HP Dev One is the best Linux laptop yet. This is the one review you don't want to miss.

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Starlink RV Mounting & Storage Options
HP Dev One — From preinstalled Linux Pop!_OS to a tuned Linux keyboard with a Super key, HP Dev One is designed with powerful features and tools to help you code your way.
AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 5850U Processor
HP Dev One CPU Bench Benchmarks
Blender Test On HP DEV One Benchmarks
Podverse — Podcasting 2.0 certified player for Android, F-Droid, iOS, and the web. Share created clips, highlights, playlists, and chapters, sync your queue and more!
Office Hours 6 — Peer to Peer Future
Office Hours on Podverse
LINUX Unplugged on Podverse
Podverse on Twitter
Podverse on GitHub

460: CPU as a Service

Jupiter Broadcasting — Sun, 29 May 2022 17:30:00 -0700

A new Linux update allows Intel to control features in your CPU using hardware-level DRM.

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London Meetup — Sat, Aug 6, 2022, 2:00 PM GMT
Newest Version of Systemd Includes Experimental Feature for A/B-Style Updating — "Let's popularize image-based OSes," writes Lennart Poettering, "with modernized security properties built around immutability, SecureBoot, TPM2, adaptability, auto-updating, factory reset, uniformity — built from traditional distribution packages, but deployed via images."
Fitting Everything Together — In this blog story I hope to provide that from my personal perspective, i.e. explain how I personally would build an OS and where I personally think OS development with Linux should go.
systemd-sysupdate — This tool implements file, directory, or partition based update schemes, supporting multiple parallel installed versions of specific resources in an A/B (or even: A/B/C, A/B/C/D/, …) style. A/B updating means that when one version of a resource is currently being used, the next version can be downloaded, unpacked, and prepared in an entirely separate location, independently of the first, and — once complete — be activated, swapping the roles so that it becomes the used one and the previously used one becomes the one that is replaced by the next update, and so on.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon — The benefits to Intel are clear. The company can do price differentiation among its customers in an attempt to extract the maximum revenue from each while simultaneously reducing the number of different hardware products it must carry in its catalog. The revenue stream from a processor will not necessarily stop once the CPU is purchased, and might continue indefinitely. The benefit for customers is not quite so clear. In theory, customers with minimal needs can avoid paying for expensive features they don't use and can "upgrade" their hardware without downtime if their needs change.
platform/x86: Add Intel Software Defined Silicon driver — Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) is a post manufacturing mechanism for activating additional silicon features. Features are enabled through a license activation process. The SDSi driver provides a per socket, sysfs attribute interface for applications to perform 3 main provisioning functions.
Boost without Switching Podcast Apps with Breez
New Podcast Apps
Pick: Mainline — A tool for installing the latest Linux kernels on Ubuntu-based distributions.

423: What Makes a Linux User?

Jupiter Broadcasting — Tue, 14 Sep 2021 17:30:00 -0700

Why it might be time to re-think who is and who is not a Linux user, plus we do a reality check on the state of Linux phones.

Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

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Email from Purism — As previously announced, we will be increasing prices for all new orders of the Librem 5 in stages (the phone will be priced at $1199 from all orders received on or after Nov 1st, 2021 and we expect this price to go upward to $1299 in March 2022) as component prices change and as we deliver greater quantities of product.
Linux Phones | Madaidan’s Insecurities — Linux phones lack any significant security model and the points from the Linux article apply to Linux phones fully. There is not yet a single Linux phone with a sane security model.
Linux kernel needs more phones and tablets, says developer — "Especially for guys even running upstream kernel on RPI CM4 like me, more ARM devices with upstream kernel support will just be more happiness. Not to mention this also means super long time support, way longer than the lifespan of those devices."
Steam Deck dev-kits are on the move Valve say, as some already have it — "All packaged up and ready for devs! This is one of the limited batches of Steam Deck dev-kits heading out today for partners to test their games."
POKE 756,224 on Twitter — @ChrisLAS I admire your quest to get Linux running on your Thinkpad with the same battery life and perf you get on Windows. I've gotta admit, I've given up and just run Windows on mine, and the ugly truth is that Windows 11 is, for my needs anyway, really nice!
Pick: Flatseal — Flatseal is a graphical utility to review and modify permissions from your Flatpak applications.

362: The Hidden Cost of Nextcloud

Jupiter Broadcasting — Tue, 14 Jul 2020 12:00:00 -0700

Our team has been using Nextcloud to replace Dropbox for over a year, we report back on what has worked great, and what's not so great.

Plus why Linus Torvalds has become the master of saying no.

Special Guest: Drew DeVore.

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355: Chris' Data Crisis

Jupiter Broadcasting — Tue, 26 May 2020 21:30:00 -0700

Chris' tale of woe after a recent data loss, and Wes' adventure after he finds a rogue device on his network.

Special Guest: Drew DeVore.

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315: Wayland Buddies

Jupiter Broadcasting — Tue, 20 Aug 2019 20:00:00 -0700

We spend our weekend with Wayland, discover new apps to try, tricks to share, and dig into the state of the project.

Plus System76's new software release, and Fedora's big decision.

Special Guests: Brent Gervais and Drew DeVore.

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System76 Blog — The New Firmware Manager — we’re excited to announce that you can now check and update firmware through Settings on Pop!_OS, and through the firmware manager GTK application on System76 hardware running other Debian-based distributions.
pop-os/firmware-manager — Generic framework and GTK UI for firmware updates from system76-firmware and fwupd, written in Rust.
Richard Brown on Twitter — Today I’m stepping down as openSUSE Chairman, leaving the Project in the fine hands of the openSUSE board and it’s new Chair, @GeraldPfeifer.
Approved: Fedora 31 To Drop i686 Everything/Modular Repositories - Phoronix — The FESCo group gave their formal approval today for permitting these i686 repositories to be removed beginning with Fedora 31
Jupiter Extras: Chris and Wes React to LINUX Unplugged — Nothing is worse than your past self. So we play old clips of LINUX Unplugged and react.
Scan for network vulnerabilities w/ Nmap - Linux Academy YouTube — With data breaches becoming so common, it's vital to be proactive in finding and patching severe vulnerabilities on our system. One of the free/open-source ways you can scan for these vulnerabilities is by using Nmap.
How to copy directories with SCP recursively tutorial - Linux AcademyYouTube — When working with servers you will often find yourself in a situation where you need to copy files from one machine to another. You can package them into a tarball and then copy a tarball over to a remote machine and then unpack it there. This is not a bad option but you can also use SCP to copy the files as they are and preserve the directory structure, without the need for packaging.
Linux Archives – Linux Academy
What’s Taking Wayland So Long? » Linux Magazine — Over the years, the project’s goals have evolved, but more or less remained: the development of a simpler, more efficient, and more secure display server.
pp3345/gnome-with-patches Copr — This repo contains gnome-shell and mutter builds based on the official Fedora ones with some additional patches (mainly to improve performance).
rafaelmardojai/firefox-gnome-theme — A GNOME👣 theme for Firefox🔥
Tilix: A tiling terminal emulator — Tilix is an advanced GTK3 tiling terminal emulator that follows the Gnome Human Interface Guidelines.
GNOME 3.34 Works Out Refined XWayland Support For X11 Apps Run Under Sudo - Phoronix — This allows the X11 clients to now work from a different VT without any extra environment variables set besides the DISPLAY. In other words, the same user on the same system can now more easily run clients with XWayland thanks to this commit coming late in the 3.34 cycle.
The MATE Desktop Is Becoming Quite Usable On Wayland Via Mir - Phoronix — The MATE desktop is seeing Wayland support thanks to Mir doing the heavy lifting. This is also becoming one of the leading examples of Mir's use-case following Canonical engineers re-tooling their display server with Wayland support after pulling back from their original design goals around Ubuntu Touch and mobile/convergence.
Plasma/Wayland Showstoppers - KDE Community Wiki — This page tracks the Wayland showstoppers through out the stack .
Wayland misconceptions debunked | Drew DeVault’s Blog — This article has been on my backburner for a while, but it seems Wayland FUD is making the news again recently, so I’ve bumped up the priority a bit. For those new to my blog, I am the maintainer of wlroots, a library which implements much of the functionality required of a Wayland compositor and is arguably the single most influential project in Wayland right now; and sway, a popular Wayland compositor which is nearing version 1.0.
Flameshot — Powerful yet simple to use screenshot software.
Auto Move Windows - GNOME Shell Extensions — Move applications to specific workspaces when they create windows.
Ed Therriault on Twitter — @ChrisLAS I’ve been out of the loop for a bit as I’ve been focusing on work and family but I need to know what’s a good incremental backup solution that will use very little storage. I’ll be uploading them to google drive. Ubuntu server 19. Thank you for your time.
seemoo-lab/opendrop — An open Apple AirDrop implementation written in Python
anirudhajith/process-wallpaper — Shell and python scripts that set the desktop wallpaper to a word cloud of the most resource-hungry processes.
Huge Survey of Firmware Finds No Security Gains in 15 Years – The Security Ledger — A survey of more than 6,000 firmware images spanning more than a decade finds no improvement in firmware security and lax security standards for the software running connected devices by Linksys, Netgear and other major vendors.

Episode 275: Year of the Relevant Desktop

Jupiter Broadcasting — Tue, 13 Nov 2018 19:15:00 -0800

Christian F.K. Schaller from Red Hat joins us to discuss seamless Linux upgrades, replacing PulseAudio, some of the recent desktop Projects Red Hat’s been working on... And the value they get from them.

Plus a big batch of important community news, Wimpy’s Thunderbolt Dock experiments, and way to run pacman on any Linux distribution.

Special Guests: Alan Pope, Christian F.K. Schaller, and Martin Wimpress.

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Radio Garden
PlayStation Classic relies on open source emulator for its 20 games - SlashGear — Kotaku got some early hands-on time with the PlayStation Classic and discovered that it uses the PCSX ReARMed emulator.
snes9x — For those packaging the GTK+ port, note that building with GTK+ 3 is now highly recommended over GTK+ 2 and should have no regressions. Also note that Wayland compatibility is implemented, which, if enabled, also requires GTK+ to have been compiled with Wayland support.
Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth says he has no plans to sell anytime soon — “I value my independence,” he told me during a brief chat on the outskirts of the OpenStack Summit in Berlin today. In part, that’s because he simply doesn’t personally need the money but also because he’d like to see through to the end his vision for Canonical and Ubuntu
Open Invention Network Expands Linux Definition — The expansion includes 151 new packages, bringing the total number of protected packages to 2,873. “With this update to the Linux System definition, OIN continues with its well-established process of carefully maintaining a balance between stability and innovative core open source technology,” stated Mirko Boehm, OIN’s director for the Linux System definition. “While the majority of the new additions are widely used and found in most devices, the update includes a number of key open source innovations such as Kubernetes, Apache Cassandra and packages for Automotive Grade Linux.”
Bitwarden Completes Third-party Security Audit — We are pleased to announce that Bitwarden has completed a thorough security audit and cryptographic analysis from the security experts at Cure53.
Adding an optional install duration to LVFS firmware — We’ve just added an optional feature to fwupd and the LVFS that some people might find useful: The firmware update process can now tell the user how long in seconds the update is going to take.
Help wanted - SuperTuxKart networking testers
Supertuxkart
PipeWire Hackfest — The event kicked off with Wim Taymans presenting on current state of PipeWire and outlining the remaining issues and current thoughts on how to resolve them. Most of the first day was spent on a roadtable discussion about what are and should be the goals of PipeWire and what potential tradeoffs there would be going forward.
Thunderbolt 3 GPU Dock — Integrated NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 graphics card.
Automation System Name Poll — Vote on the Automation System name.
Junest — The lightweight Arch Linux based distro that runs upon any Linux distros without root access.
Wimpy’s xrandr Script

Episode 269: Alternate Desktop Universe

Jupiter Broadcasting — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 18:30:00 -0700

What if desktop computing went a very different direction in the late 90s? Deeply multithreaded from the start, fast, intuitive, and extremely stable. This is the world of Haiku, and we go for a visit.

Plus the latest community news, true flicker freedom comes to Fedora, and our favorite tools for easy virtual machines on our laptops.

Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar and Brent Gervais.

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System76 To Release A "New Open-Source Computer"
Fedora 29 Succeeds At Flicker-Free Boot Experience On Intel Hardware
Google gets into game streaming with Project Stream and Assassin’s Creed Odyssey in Chrome
Halloween Documents
BeOS R5
R1/beta1 – Release Notes | Haiku Project — It’s been just about a month less than six years since Haiku’s last release in November 2012
Ars spends too much time trying to work in Haiku, the BeOS successor — What starts as a joke Turned into a fool's errand "I'll work in Haiku."
The Be Book - The Application Kit
s-tui: Terminal based CPU stress and monitoring utility — Terminal based CPU stress and monitoring utility
Lenovo-throttling-fix — Workaround for Intel throttling issues in Linux.
fwupd - ArchWiki — fwupd is a simple daemon allowing to update some devices firmware, including UEFI BIOS for several machines.
Virtual Machine Manager Home — The virt-manager application is a desktop user interface for managing virtual machines through libvirt. It primarily targets KVM VMs, but also manages Xen and LXC (linux containers).
Kimchi — Kimchi is an HTML5 based management tool for KVM. It is designed to make it as easy as possible to get started with KVM and create your first guest.
python-imaging Ubuntu Package

Episode 263: Updates from the Source

Jupiter Broadcasting — Tue, 21 Aug 2018 18:45:00 -0700

Docker controversy is brewing, but it's probably not what you think. We get around of community updates directly from the source, and why Debian an Intel are playing the game of he said, she said.

Special Guests: Brent Gervais, Cassidy James Blaede, Danielle Foré, and Martin Wimpress.

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Episode 261: GNOME, GNOME on the Range

Jupiter Broadcasting — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 19:30:00 -0700

GNOME is discussing big changes, Elementary OS has big news, and a big bug has been found in Linux.

Plus an update on our PeerTube efforts, our take Android P, and Lenovo’s big commitment to ThinkPad’s running Linux.

Special Guests: Alan Pope, Cassidy James Blaede, Danielle Foré, and Eric Hendricks.

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