Esta semana pre-navideña estoy comentando todas loas novedades del lanzamiento masivo de actualizaciones de las aplicaciones KDE, la demostración constante de que los desarrolladores de la Comunidad KDE siguen mostrando al mundo que tienen claro su objetivo, que no es otro que ofrecer los mejor del Software Libre para todos de forma continua, constante y sin cambios revolucionarios. Y como siempre estoy dedicando algunos artículos a repasar las buenas nuevas, así que hoy toca hablar de las novedades de Gwenview para KDE Gear 21.12, siguiendo la estela de las novedades de Dolphin, de Spectacle, Kdenlive, Konsole y Elisa de días anteriores.

Novedades de Gwenview para KDE Gear 21.12

El ecosistema de aplicaciones de la Comunidad KDE está bien surtido. Tenemos de todo tipo: ligeras, potentes, rápidas, profesionales, etc.

No obstante, una de las más utilizadas es Gwnview ya que combina rapidez con funcionalidades de forma muy efectiva.

Y, como no puede ser de otra manera, Gwenview no para de mejorar gracias al trabajo constante de los desarrolladores de la Comunidad KDE. De esta forma en este KDE Gear 21.12, esta aplicación nos ofrece las siguientes novedades (extraídas del changelog):

• Al cambiar el tamaño de una imagen la aplicación nos dirá cuánto espacio ocupará la imagen en el disco duro antes incluso de aplicar los cambios.
• Establecimiento de forma automática del sentido de impresión de una imagen.
• Ahora nos permite escribir un nivel de zoom en el combo de zoom.
• Eliminados los antiguos iconos de aplicaciones y acciones.
• Elimnado el cambio al modo de navegación pulsando Esc mientras la ventana emergente está visible.

Además, se han corregido decenas de bugs. El visor simple por defecto pero potente cuando se necesario sigue mejorando.

Más información: KDE Gear 21.12

Veamos algunos atajos de teclado para corregir texto mientras estamos escribiendo en el modo insertar en el editor Vim

En ocasiones puede ser necesario borrar algunos caracteres mientras escribimos en Vim en el modo insertar sin necesidad de salir del modo e ingresar en el modo normal.

Sí, funcionan las teclas normales de borrado de texto o suprimir, o el borrado con «backspace», pero Vim, tiene sus propios atajos de teclado, veamos algunos.

Este artículo es una nueva entrega del curso “improVIMsado” que desde hace meses vengo publicando en mi blog sobre el editor Vim y que puedes seguir en estos enlaces:

• https://victorhckinthefreeworld.com/tag/vim/
• https://victorhck.gitlab.io/comandos_vim/articulos.html

Y para aprender Vim (de la manera más inteligente) aquí tienes esta útil guía:

• https://victorhck.gitbook.io/aprende-vim/

Vamos a echar un vistazo a algunas opciones. Si estamos en el modo insertar escribiendo, podemos pulsar el atajo de teclado:

• Ctrl+h → para eliminar el caracter justo anterior al cursor (similar al «backspace»)
• Ctrl+w → para eliminar la palabra justo anterior al cursor
• Ctrl+u → para eliminar desde la posición del cursor hasta el comienzo de la línea o hasta el comienzo de donde hayamos empezado a insertar texto.

Por cierto si estando en el modo insertar queremos pegar un texto que hemos copiado dentro de Vim, no hace falta salir del modo y entrar en el modo normal para pegarlo con p.

Estando en el modo insertar podemos pegar ese texto en la posición del cursor mediante Ctrl-r 0

Y ya para acabar, un comando que también nos puede resultar útil. Si estos comandos que he apuntado se nos quedan cortas y queremos ejecutar cualquier comando del modo normal mientras estemos en el modo insertar, podemos hacerlo con Ctrl+o

Estando en el modo insertar, si pulsamos Ctrl-o seguidamente podremos ejecutar un comando del modo normal y seguir usando después el modo insertar introduciendo texto.

¿Conoces algún otro comando interesante similar que utilices? Compártelo en los comentarios.

The election was announced on the project mailing list on the 1st of November 2021. The current Election Committee is composed of Ariez Vachha, Mohammad Edwin Zakaria and myself.

This election is required to fill two seats on the openSUSE Board, as the term for Simon Lees and Vinzenz Vietzke are coming to an end.

To learn more about openSUSE membership, check out this wiki.

As the initial nominations/applications phase ended, we had only two members who expressed to run for this election. They are:

• Attila Pinter
• Maurizio Galli

Since, we had only two candidates for two available seats, we extended the nominations/applications phase for another two weeks, giving other members the chance to toss the names of people who'd they wish to nominate. However, even after the two weeks, we were still left with only two candidates and therefore, as per the election rule about insufficient nominations, we started the election and each candidate is required to obtain 50% of votes to be considered a winner.

The ballots were opened on the 13th of December and openSUSE members received their voting URL/credentials by email. They can vote until the 30th of December at 23h59 UTC. Ballots will close on 31st December at midnight and a few hours later the result will be announced.

I dedicate this text to Vincent and Sara. :wave: If we cannot share the experience, so let me share at least the story.

Prologue

Also in 2021, holiday plans fell victim to yet another Covid-19 wave. Eventually, I waited until mid December and booked in face of the next emerging Covid-19 variant Omicron the least adventures holidays of my adulthood: a week-long all-inclusive cruise in the Orient with every aspect handled in due care by a world-class global-scale tour operator.

For the sake of completeness, let me quickly recap the outbound connection to the destination. I got a Rail&Fly ticket to a nearby airport in Germany. The Airbus A380 to Dubai, a huge airplane with two floors, was approximately occupied 30%, maybe less. I use Atmosfair.de for CO2 compensation. Not sure who would need to pay for all those empty seats around me. The time difference between Germany and Dubai is 3 hours. I arrive after about 6 hours of flight and a short sleep of about 3 hours at 6 o’clock in the morning. On top of mandatory PCR tests to get on the flight, it seems that Dubai tests just again all tourists upon arrival. No need to wait for the result – it is delivered about 3 hours later to you via SMS. I wonder what happens in the case of a positive test. I didn’t find out as my test was fortunately negative. 😁

The tour operator takes care of the transfer to the cruise ship. They also handle all subsequent paper work to enter the destination countries, that means here the United Arabic Emirates (UAE) and Oman. For this purpose, they require all passengers to hand over their passports before getting on board of the ship. After some hesitation and some questioning, I resign and hand out my passport, too.

Once on board of the ship, I drop off my luggage, eat something and head out to explore Dubai on my own.

Dubai: Everything is also a Shopping Mall

I have made no efforts to prepare my first day in Dubai. I only downloaded a city map. The cruise ship harbour of Dubai is a 30 min car ride from the lively city centre. So I join two other passengers, who happen to know Dubai very well, for a shared taxi ride to their destination, the Dubai Mall. I am amazed by all those skyscrappers on the way. Every street is a high way with 3 lanes minimum it seems.

Taxi ride from the harbour to the Dubai Mall. On the left side, you can see the aerial railway with its futuristic railway station (open in large).

Before the other passengers leave, they point me to the famous aquarium in the mall. The aquarium spans several floors and is indeed impressive. Otherwise, the mall has everything you expect: fashion store H&M, bakery PAUL, L’Occitane en Provence, Birkenstock, Decathlon, the best of the best!

I consider to buy a camera lens for landscape photography. I find an electronics store, who got one for 1500€. Now, the deal I found earlier in the Internet to rent this lens for 100€ per week appears under a totally different, much better light. So I head towards the rental office in the South of Dubai. Long tubes hanging 6 meters over the highways bring you from the mall to the metro. The metro is in fact an aerial railway. And it is packed. The people seem to be from all over the world – later I learn that Dubai has about 80% immigrants.

The photography rental shop is in the 8th floor of a skyscraper. Fortunately, they still have the lens in stock. Unfortunately, I cannot get it, because they ask as a deposit for a) my passport, b) amount blocked with a local credit card, or c) 1200€ cash in local currency. The tour operator has my passport, I don’t have a local credit card and feel uneasy to withdraw and hand in 1500€ in cash. I am frustrated. 😩 I envy all those people who have spare passports due to their second nationality. People ask me sometimes why I wanted to become also a French citizen. I just got one argument more. I decide to find another store that possibly rents lenses. I end up in the Dubai Marina Mall and buy eventually for about 280€ an entry-level lens.¹

On my way out, I discover a city e-bike self-rental station. I quickly sign up for a day plan (4€) and cycle to the Dubai Marina. I make a lot of photos.

Selfie at the Dubai Marina (open in large).

Then, I head towards the artificial lagoon The Palm Jumeirah. Unfortunately, I am on the wrong way of the highway and after half an hour to find a path I realise that there seems to be just no way to cross it with a bike. It happened again two more times later that day.

Eventually, I give up the search and get on the Monorail panorama train to access The Palm. The third stop is integrated in, guess what, the Nakheel Mall. The Mall features a hotel with a restaurant on the top called The View. The ticket for the lift after 4:00 PM (sunset time) is 40% more. It is now 4:03 PM. I decide to keep it for next time (:wave: Vincent, Sara), hop on the Monorail, and get to the next stop: Atlantis Aquaventure. It turns out, the part freely accessible is mostly a mall. Again! They have also an aquapark and a hotel and Dolphins.

View from the Monorail on The Palm Jumeirah (open in large).

I leave The Palm, find a city e-bike and get back to the harbour. After 90 minutes cycling without a break, I check the map. This city is huge and I am nowhere close to the harbour. On the way to bring the bike back to a rental station, I discover the Dubai Canal and the newly constructed canalfront promenade and bridges. Though I am quite exhausted, I spend another hour to make photos. Eventually, I get a taxi that brings me back to the harbour. At midnight, the ship leaves Dubai for the next stop in Abu Dhabi.

View from the Dubai Canal (open in large).

Como estoy comentando estos días estamos ante un nuevo lanzamiento masivo de actualizaciones de las aplicaciones KDE, en esta ocasión previas a las fiestas de final de año, con el que los desarrolladores de la Comunidad KDE siguen mostrando al mundo que tienen claro que su objetivo es ofrecer los mejor del Software Libre para todos de forma continua, constante y sin cambios revolucionarios. Y como siempre voy a dedicar algunos artículos a repasar las buenas nuevas, así que hoy toca hablar de las novedades de Elisa para KDE Gear 21.12, siguiendo la estela de las novedades de Dolphin, de Spectacle, Kdenlive y Konsole de días anteriores.

Novedades de Elisa para KDE Gear 21.12

Para quienes no lo conozcan, Elisa es un reproductor de música desarrollado por la Comunidad KDE que se basa en la simplicidad y facilidad de uso. Su nacimiento fue la respuesta a la necesidad de crear un producto flexible para afrontar los diferentes entornos de trabajo y casos de uso por parte de los usuarios. Su desarrollo es lento pero seguro, afianzándose versión a versión en el ecosistema de aplicaciones KDE y mostrando una imagen moderna, clara y funcional.

Y, como no puede ser de otra manera, Elisa no para de mejorar gracias al trabajo constante de los desarrolladores de la Comunidad KDE. De esta forma en este KDE Gear 21.12 esta aplicación nos ofrece casi 100 mejoras, algunas de las cuales son las siguientes (extraídas del changelog):

• Retoques de la interfaz y opciones más optimizadas que no interfieren en su forma de rocanrolear. Elisa sigue ganando en elegancia.
• Mejoras en el texto de MediaPlayListView.
• Unificado el aspecto de las cabeceras, concretamente entre la página «Now Playing» y otras páginas.
• Se ha hecho que las calificaciones de las pistas sean editables en línea.

Además, se han corregido decenas de bugs. Esto marcha, ¿llegará a reemplazar Amarok en mi corazón? Está en ello.

Más información: KDE Gear 21.12

I wish I had BastilleBSD twenty years ago. I had a part-time sysadmin job - running web servers. PHP started to become popular by the turn of the century. Using jails on FreeBSD seemed to be a safe environment to run PHP-enabled web servers. However, there were no tools yet to work with jails. I had to write many scripts to build and update jails.

A bit of history

At first, I had a single server. Adding a new client every other month by hand was not a big overhead. However, after a year or so, the service became popular. First, I automated adding new users, then creating jails, migrating jails between servers. Later, the service gained central management, an LDAP and Windows-based management application, and almost everything was automated. At its peak, my system served tens of thousands of domains.

Of course, my scripts were not so universally useful as BastilleBSD. They were single purpose: creating FreeBSD jails with various PHP versions. Later some extra utilities were added, like ImageMagick, used by many popular PHP applications. As disk space was a premium, these scripts made sure that only the absolutely necessary files stayed in the jails. Removing all shells and apps with extra privileges also helped in reducing the attack surface. The way how my jails were created also meant that package management was not an option. The jails could not be updated. Any security update meant compiling a new base system and new ports.

Why BastilleBSD?

BastilleBSD has a very different approach to jails. Of course, not all functionalities of my scripts are covered, for example migrating jails between hosts is missing. However, they are more generic and make it easy to maintain jails.

Compiling an updated jail and updating jails was a painful process even with my scripts. With BastilleBSD, updating the base system without touching any of the ports is easy:

bastille update 13.0-RELEASE

And it is updated with the latest security updates in all jails utilizing this base system.

I spent a lot of time removing files from jails. This way I could spare hundreds of megabytes for each jail. BastilleBSD solves this problem in a different way: the base system is installed only once and mounted under each jail in read-only mode. This saves even more space and makes the system even more tamper-proof.

To add an application to a jail, I had to compile everything from scratch. Once everything was installed, the scripts removed much of the files. BastilleBSD has full package management within jails. If a user needs an extra app, it can easily be installed. And all ports in a jail can be updated easily, almost the same way as on the host:

bastille pkg alcatraz update
bastille pkg alcatraz upgrade

What’s more, BastilleBSD has a template system. Instead of installing all applications by hand from ports, templates can automate the process. It’s a bit like Dockerfile on Linux, but there is no central registry to store images. You can download the templates using git and apply the template to a jail locally.

bastille template alcatraz BastilleBSD-Templates/syslog-ng

I do not want to list here all BastilleBSD advantages, so here are just some highlights: it can configure PF firewall rules, use ZFS, and there is even some experimental support for Linux-based jails.

What is next?

If you want to learn more about BastilleBSD, check their website: https://bastillebsd.org/. For a very simplified introduction, you can also read my blog, where I use the syslog-ng template of BastilleBSD to setup a couple of syslog-ng servers: https://www.syslog-ng.com/community/b/blog/posts/running-syslog-ng-in-bastille-revisited

De nos jours, nous avons souhaitons que l’on respecte notre vie privée surtout en naviguant sur le www. Le navigateur Web Brave fait justement cela tout en bloquant pratiquement toute publicité sur Internet. Brave paie pour chaque site Web que vous visitez pour l’affichage de publicités. Si le blocage des annonces ne vous dérange pas, …

Le navigateur Brave pour protéger notre vie privéeRead More »

The post Le navigateur Brave pour protéger notre vie privée appeared first on Cybersécurité, Linux et Open Source à leur plus haut niveau | Network Users Institute | Rouen - Normandie.

Amidst the holidays that perhaps aren't turning out exactly as hoped, one can take comfort in small tokens of continuity – like the fact that xsnow is still being actively maintained.

Thanks, everyone, for all the good software. Let's extract the best from the year to come.

March 5th, 2022 update: Sigh.

Como estoy comentando estos días, estamos ante un nuevo lanzamiento masivo de actualizaciones de las aplicaciones KDE, en esta ocasión previas a las fiestas de final de año, con el que los desarrolladores de la Comunidad KDE siguen mostrando al mundo que tienen claro que su objetivo es ofrecer los mejor del Software Libre para todos de forma continua, constante y sin cambios revolucionarios. Y como siempre voy a dedicar algunos artículos a repasar las buenas nuevas, así que hoy toca hablar de las novedades de Konsole para KDE Gear 21.12, siguiendo la estela de las novedades de Dolphin, de Spectacle y Kdenlive de días anteriores.

Novedades de Konsole para KDE Gear 21.12

Debo reconocer, y siempre lo comento en mis charlas, que solía tener miedo atroz a la consola. Y digo tenía porque cada vez la uso más y más, y le veo una utilidad brutal. Se ha convertido en una herramienta para hacer acciones rápidas y efectivas, a la vez que me permite donde hay errores en las aplicaciones.

Además, si se utiliza terminal como Konsole, la cosa no hace más que mejorar gracias a las multitud de opciones que nos proporciona: pestañas, ventanas múltiples, vistas previa de diversos ficheros como las imágenes, búsqueda de frases directamente en el navegador web, opciones de personalización en cuanto a su aspecto, etc.

Y, como no puede ser de otra manera, Konsole no para de mejorar gracias al trabajo constante de los desarrolladores de la Comunidad KDE. De esta forma en este KDE Gear 21.12 esta aplicación nos ofrece casi 100 mejoras, algunas de las cuales son las siguientes (extraídas del changelog):

• Nuevo icono «edit-copy-path» para el elemento de menú.
• Ahora la barra de desplazamiento se adapta al esquema de colores del terminal para el estilo del widget Breeze.
• Actualizado el manual para los nuevos menús.
• Optimizado el guardado de los accesos directos del perfil.
• Añadida una opción «establecer como predeterminado» al diálogo de edición de perfiles.
• Cambio en el comportamiento con los plugins: en lugar de ocultar el menú de Plugins, mostrar una acción de «no hay plugins disponibles

Más información: KDE Gear 21.12

Year 2021 comes to an end, but not before the YaST Team publishes another development report covering areas as diverse as:

• Improvements in the installer self-update mechanism
• Better error reporting in storage analysis
• More consistent management of UEFI
• Better handling of the installer boot arguments
• More intuitive representation of thin logical volumes

Let’s check every one in detail.

Fast Self-Update for All

As you may know, YaST has the ability to update itself at the very beginning of the installation of the operating system. That makes possible to correct the installation process in case errors are detected after publishing a given release of SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Recently we found there was room for improving the speed and also to simplify how the mechanism works in some scenarios. It’s hard to explain exactly what we did in only a few words… so we will not try. ;-) But if you don’t mind reading quite some words and watching a couple of animations, go and check the description of this pull request.

Apart from the already mentioned improvements, we also extended the YaST self-update to support relative URLs. Check the details in this separate pull request.

Better Error Reporting Regarding Storage Devices

One of the most important phases of the execution of YaST, both during installation and when running some of the available configuration modules, is the analysis of the storage setup of the system. That includes checking the available disks and how they are organized into partitions, RAIDs, LVM volume groups and many other storage technologies recognized by YaST. If something goes wrong during that process, YaST stops and asks the user whether it should abort the current process.

That’s fine for most cases. But what happens if a system presents a problematic setup… replicated in more than 60 disks? Those kinds of setups are not unusual in enterprise environments and having to click “continue” 60 times is not exactly fun. So we decided to improve how YaST reports those errors, adding also the possibility of easily reviewing them all at any later point in time from the Partitioner. Check this description of the feature, containing dozens of screenshots!

This new mechanism will be used in future releases of Leap and SLE and is already available in openSUSE Tumbleweed.

More Consistent Management of UEFI

A lot of modern systems use UEFI firmware for booting. But correctly checking if a given system uses that technology or which UEFI features are available may not always be that straightforward. During this sprint we did some internal reorganization of the YaST code which deals with UEFI to make it more robust. Why an internal reorganization may be relevant for our blog readers? Because we took the opportunity to document how the detection works and how it can be overridden for YaST to setup UEFI from a system booting in legacy x86 mode and vice versa.

Better Handling of the Installer Boot Arguments

What do self-update, error reporting and UEFI detection have in common in YaST? Of course, that all of them have been mentioned on this blog post. But also that their behavior can be influenced passing some boot parameter to the installer. That’s a powerful tool for advanced users that provides great flexibility but that had a tiny drawback… until it was fixed during this sprint.

Intuitive Visualization of LVM Thin Volumes

The last change we want to highlight in this report is something that may be considered cosmetic and that affects only those using such an expert tool as LVM thin logical volumes. But it represents the kind of details we really enjoy improving when we have some spare development cycles. The small UI adjustment you can see in this pull request is already available at openSUSE Tumbleweed and will be also there in future releases of SLE and openSUSE Leap.

That’s all for this year

As we always point, this is only a small sample of everything we have done during the sprint. But we don’t want to keep you busy reading about bug-fixes and small code reorganizations. After all, year 2022 is around the corner and it’s already vacation season in many areas around the globe. So go and enjoy the celebrations. The YaST Team will be here next year with more news to share. Take care!