I read a lot of negativity about YaST on the webs, Reddit, YouTubes… other places… and I wanted to write a counter to all those negative statements. Why? YaST was the biggest selling point for me to go openSUSE when I departed the Mandrake / Mandriva world about 10 years ago (at the time of […]

Securing the sudo to sudo_logsrvd connection

Using sudo_logsrvd to centrally collect sudo session recordings from your network is a huge step forward in security: users cannot delete or modify session recordings locally. However, by default, transmission of recordings is not encrypted, making it open to modifications and eavesdropping. Encrypting the connection between sudo and sudo_logsrvd can eliminate these problems. Larger environments usually either have in-house PKI tooling in place, or colleagues who know all openssl options off the top of their heads. However, small and medium enterprises often lack the infrastructure or knowledge to work with TLS certificates.

This blog can help you to secure connections between sudo and sudo_logsrvd when there is no PKI tooling available to you, or you want to create all the certificates yourself using openssl. It is based on the sudo_logsrvd manual, but changed in such a way that all information is entered on the command line. While interactive certificate generation works fine for a single cert, generating multiple client certificates is easier when everything is on the command line.

Read my blog at https://blog.sudo.ws/posts/2021/08/securing-the-sudo-to-sudo_logsrvd-connection/

While focused on the openSUSE Innovator initiative as an openSUSE member and official Intel oneAPI innovator, I tested the Beast Canyon NUC 11 machine on openSUSE Leap 15.3 and Tumbleweed; With all the work, we made available in the SDB an article on how to use the GNA Technologie on the openSUSE platform. More information can be found at https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Install_GNA_in_NUC_Beast_Canyon.

Beast Canyon (still on pre-order) is the highest-performing Intel® NUC available today. Beast Canyon is the evolution of Intel’s modular gaming mini PC, a more compact gaming PC than most gamers could dream of building on their own. The equipment in some models has the Core i9-11900KB processor with the GNA feature: Gaussian & Neural Accelerator Library.

Intel® Gaussian & Neural Accelerator is a low-power neural coprocessor for continuous inference at the edge. For more information, visit : https://github.com/intel/gna

Here is the 32nd grab-and-go sized podcast episode This is the first recording in the new studio on new hardware. There are some slight audio issues but if I went for perfection… I would have just deleted this recording I would have stopped these long ago Wayland Display Server on openSUSE Tumbleweed in 2021 elementary […]

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

Thanks to Richard for taking care of Tumbleweed for us the last few weeks, while I did an electro-detox. Took some effort, but I did actually manage to stay away from all and any computers. But now I’m back, full in swing and helping Tumbleweed to roll at full speed again. Richards last review covered up to Snapshot 0817. Since then, and thus during the one-week time frame, 4 snapshots have been published (0820, 0823, 0824, and 0825).

The most noteworthy changes in those snapshots were:

• Mesa 21.2.0
• Mozilla Firefox 91.0.1 & Thunderbird 91.0.1
• Linux kernel 5.13.12
• Node.JS 16.6.2
• Python 3.8.11
• Poppler 21.08.0
• gcc 11.2.1
• Most of GNOME 40.4 (some late packages coming in the next days)

The staging projects are quite crowded, the main topics being worked on at the moment being:

• glibc 2.34
• openssl 1.1.1l
• rpmlint 2.1
• meson 0.59.1
• openssl 3 – test project
• Linux kernel 5.13.13
• systemd 249.2

A biased review of elementary OS 6.0 Odin by an openSUSE user.

Snapshot releases of openSUSE Tumbleweed began to flow this week for the rolling release.

Moving past last week’s build failures and the obstacles with the ISO media size being excessively large, three snapshots were released this week.

The latest 20210824 snapshot updated Mozilla Thunderbird from version 78.13.0 to version 91.0.1, which is the next Extended Support Release codebase. The new email client offers many new features like keyboard shortcuts to access To/CC/BCC fields and a PDF JavaScript viewer is now included in Thunderbird. Two major version updates were in the snapshot; an update to nftables 1.0.0 now recognizes the command-line option --define. GTK based volume control tool pavucontrol 5.0 has support for switching Bluetooth codecs that comes new in PulseAudio 15.0, which was released in the 20210823 snapshot 24-hours earlier. GNU Compiler Collection was updated to version 11.2 and fixed the One-time Passwords In Everything package with glibc 2.34. A few GNOME and RubyGems packages were updated in the snapshot. Command-line utility grep updated to version 3.7, which skipped the stack overflow tests in the qemu build. The runtime nodejs16 16.6.2 update fixed the improper handling of untypical characters in domain names and fixed three Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures.

The network-detector, packet-sniffer, and intrusion-detection package Kismet updated to its latest 2021.08 version in snapshot 20210823; the packages made some small improvements and has a new Wireless Intrusion Detection System alert. PulseAudio 15.0 dropped several BlueTooth patches and improved hardware support. PDF rendering package poppler 21.08.0 added an Application Programming Interfaces to allow the addition and modification of outlines into a PDF. An updated 1.9.7 version of sudo enabled OpenSSL support for a secure central session recording collection. And yast2-bootloader 4.4.6 replaced mkinitrd with dracut.

The 20210820 snapshot updated the Linux Kernel to version 5.13.12, which had several network device support fixes. The update of Mozilla Firefox 91.0.1 fixed an issue that caused tabs from private windows to be visible in non-private windows and it had several CVE fixes in the updated browser version. The update of python38 3.8.11 addressed some security issues and fixed a regression introduced in the previous version. Updated graphics package Mesa 21.2.0 enabled the Gallium3D OpenGL driver in case there is an issue with some video hardware acceleration. Other packages to update in the snapshot were document reader okular 21.08.0, libstorage-ng 4.4.35, diffutils 3.8 and several YaST packages.

 So, current LibreOffice git version now has support for drawing based on Skia also for the Mac. Both Raster and Metal (the Mac GPU framework). Below is the obligatory screenshot, and here is the hey-it-can-be-faster video.

I became aware of the Wayland Display Server project in 2012 when I was playing with using DisplayLink on openSUSE. I was told that when Wayland is released, it would fix my woes. Nine years later, it was time to give Wayland an honest go with openSUSE again. The impetus behind it was curiosity since […]

I love listening to music. And while I am lazy (which is the popular term for considering if something is worth the effort before doing it), I still prefer listening to it in a realistic sound quality. Which sounds like a contradiction, isn’t it? Well, yes, but only if you are not ready for compromises. In this blog, I focus on technologies and software problems, and the compromises I made to keep listening to music simple but still enjoy it. On the audio device side, I won’t mention any brands.

Digital audio

My number one compromise is that I listen to digital audio. I am often told that a true audiophile listens only to analog sound sources. For them, listening to music actually starts days earlier: doing all kinds of cleaning rituals on vinyls.

I have multiple problems with the vinyl approach. First of all: I have no idea what I will want to listen to in a few days. I do not even know what I want to listen to in a few hours. I only know what I want to listen to right now. This need is easy to meet with digital sources, but not so convenient with analog ones, especially not with vinyl. The other problem is that there is no vinyl without some extra noise. When I bring this up, I’m reminded of concerts, namely that there are extra noises in the concert room as well. That is right. And I do not like that either :-).

Bluetooth headphones

Whenever I mention that next to my regular headphones, I also use a pair of Bluetooth headphones, people swear at me, claiming that it substantially degrades sound quality. Yes, that is right. And to add insult to injury, I even use active noise canceling, which changes the original sound even more. But who cares when it is just background music, so I can concentrate on my work when people are talking around me? It does its job: keeps the noise out. Of course I switch to my studio headphones as soon as I want to focus on the music itself. But when it comes to background music, Bluetooth is a lot more comfortable.

Music sources

I have tons of CDs, but no CD player anymore. I have a USB CD drive instead, which I use to grab CDs into FLAC files. I play those lossless files whenever I want to play my collection. Of course you might ask why do I still buy CDs. There are many reasons for that. First of all: I want to own the music I like in physical format. I also like the booklets. Many CDs are never published to TIDAL or to online services. Finally, music could be removed from online services or could become region limited. So, it could happen that the music I like suddenly disappears. What I have in a physical format and grabbed into FLAC files is already my own. It just cannot disappear suddenly.

I also buy digital music files. Once I was a Society of Sound member, but as you can see, this service is no longer available. They published one, later two albums each month. Even if I did not like the music on each and every album, the quality of their recordings is fantastic, and a joy to listen to.

Currently, I am a TIDAL subscriber. When you use their player, they have all albums available at least in CD quality, some even at a higher quality. Originally, they had a very limited repertoire, but now it is quite good.

Linux

For many years, I listened to music on Linux. First of all, because it is my primary operating system. But also because it sounded the best. There were no additional layers between the sound card and music player applications, making the sound very clean. Unfortunately, pulseaudio became popular later, and now you cannot use a GUI without using pulseaudio. And while it adds some extra flexibility, it really degrades sound quality. With some tuning, the situation can be improved, but it is far from perfect.

There are still some Linux-based music appliances without pulseaudio, providing excellent sound quality. But unless it is just background music, the Linux desktop is not really good to listen to music anymore.

Another pain point on Linux is TIDAL. You can only use it from a browser, where only the lowest sound quality is available.

Windows

I am a Linux guy, so I avoid Windows as much as possible. But of course sometimes I still use it, for example for photo editing, when playing with my MIDI keyboard, and for some minimal gaming. On Windows, I have Foobar2000 as music player. And of course I also have TIDAL. Recently I learned some extra settings: using the sound card directly (without sharing it with other applications), and turning off normalization. These two settings eliminate all degradation I could hear. Of course some people say that even this is not enough, but for me, additional complex tweaks just do not worth the time, money or effort.

MacOS

Not my favorite OS either. Neither of my DACs work perfectly with music player applications trying to use the sound directly. The only exception here is TIDAL, which works just perfectly and can use the sound card directly, just like on Windows. So, I often use my MacBook Pro when I want to listen to TIDAL. It is an Intel-based one though, but hopefully it will be supported for another few years.

A surprising choice: Android

Android is not famous for its multimedia capabilities. The TIDAL Android app cannot use the sound output directly, so sound quality is degraded, only good for some background music. Previously I used a music player application, which could play my FLAC and DSD files from my NAS accessing the USB port of my Android device directly. First they broke DSD support, which was not a problem though, as I only had a few sample files. My own collection is purely FLAC. But then they also broke network support, which proved to be a bigger problem, as my music collection sits on a NAS, because it is a lot larger than it could fit the storage of my Android devices.

Luckily, I heard about USB Audio Player Pro in one of the Facebook discussion groups I am a member of. It can directly access the USB port, making “bit perfect” audio possible. And best of all, it can play back not just my FLAC collection, but also TIDAL - in better sound quality than the official TIDAL application on Android itself! Of course, there are some limitations: discovering new music is not so easy as it is in the official app. As a workaround, I use TIDAL on my MacBook Pro to discover new music, but I use my Google Pixel C tablet with USB Audio Player Pro whenever I listen to music or composers I already know. There, I can easily combine music from my NAS with music from TIDAL. A few weeks ago, I complained that the keyboard of my Google Pixel C tablet died. Luckily the tablet itself still works just fine, so I can use it to listen to music.

A bit of fun

And just to prove that analog vs. digital is more of a religious question than audio quality. One of my favorite recordings is John Metcalfe – Kites And Echoes (The Vinyl Experience). It was one of the albums from Society of Sound. And, as its note states:

A special exclusive edition called The Vinyl Experience. This is to provide listeners with a high resolution 96kHz recording of the actual vinyl LP.

Someone was listening to music at my place, and loudly complained that digital music does not have a soul, as it’s missing important details, and all the usual arguments. So, I proposed that we listen to an LP instead of digital. Of course I do not have a record player, but I started the above recording on my Pixel C. The mood quickly changed, and my guest was all smiles once the familiar sound of an LP started coming out from the speakers. However, the smile turned into laughter, once I explained how I cheated :-)