Table of contents for No. 193 in Linux User & Developer

Welcome to the UK and North America’s favourite Linux and open source magazine. It’s been another fractious month as Microsoft announced that it was acquiring GitHub, the central repository for most open source projects, for $7.5billion (see p6). It’s too early to say how much business GitHub may lose to the likes of GitLab, but it’s perhaps the clearest indication of the ideological divide in the open source community as Microsoft continues its open source charm offence. We’ve spoken to a number of influential figures and some feel an independent ‘GitHub Foundation’ is in order. There’s precedent for this; for example Citrix bought XenSource for $500 million and later handed the Xen Project over to the Linux Foundation, although the price this time makes this less likely. Maybe we’ll see…

Top 10 This month In development (5) Stable releases (16) While Ubuntu and Debian distros jostle for position with Manjaro in the top 10, Arch Linux itself has dropped out of sight. Highlights ArchLabs ArchLabs is a distro originating from New Zealand and features the Openbox window manager. Available as a 64-bit rolling release distribution and live DVD. ArchBang Linux Canadian-originated, this Arch variant also comes with Openbox, and is a fast, lightweight distribution suitable for desktops and notebooks. Bluestar Linux Employing the KDE Plasma desktop environment, Bluestar includes up-to-date packages and a good selection of desktop and multimedia software. Latest distros available: filesilo.co.uk…

“As many as 85 per cent of attacks are preventable simply by applying patches, according to US-CERT” Fred Bals Fred is the Senior Content Strategist for Black Duck by Synopsys. The Black Duck by Synopsys 2018 Open Source Security and Risk Analysis (OSSRA) report examines the audit results of over 1,100 commercial codebases from over 500 organisations to answer the question: What are the common open source security issues that organisations face? The OSSRA report explores that question and many others, including why the growth in open source use has not meant an equivalent growth in open source risk management. In fact, the opposite is true. 78 per cent of the codebases analysed for the 2018 OSSRA report contained at least one vulnerability. Another disturbing discovery was that the average…

TOP TWEETS It was somewhat inevitable that the news Microsoft was acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion would generate much debate. When the rumours started swirling, we asked: Is Microsoft about to buy GitHub? What do you think? Is it a good move or a nightmare? We haven’t included the deluge of GIFs that suggested readers weren’t happy about the idea, but here are a few highlights: @tosin240 “If M$ purchases it, it will only fork via the open source community and another establishment just like MySQL did toward MariaDB; Solaris did toward illumos (OpenIndiana), etc.” @opensolaris “Illumos is not comparable - it could fork since OpenSolaris was open source, and the primary value was in the source code. GitHub is not open source and much of the value is in…

David Aronchick has a vision for Kubeflow that involves making a “dent” in Machine Learning’s difficulty with reproducibility: “If you’re a researcher at one university and you publish a paper, it’s effectively impossible for the second researcher to reproduce it,” explains Aronchick. “Either the data doesn’t work properly, or your system isn’t set up in the right way. “So I do have a vision that within several years, at the end of every research paper, there will be three URLs. One is a Kubeflow URL for the exact configuration of your microservices. Two is a model URL for you to download and use that model. And three is a link for your data.” Aronchick says that the project is only going to solve number one. “We’re not going to solve…

1 Apply a Deny-All policy As with the INPUT chain, make sure to apply a Deny-All policy to your OUTPUT and FORWARD chains. This will prevent both unexpected packets from going out and new outgoing connections from your servers like Apache: iptables -P OUTPUT DROP; iptables -P FORWARD DROP. 2 Set a firewall baseline Set a baseline for your outgoing connections; it should not be the same for servers and clients. For servers, take care of what sort of outgoing connections you allow – for example, Apache server should not be able to start uncontrolled connections on its own. 3 Accept related traffic Don’t allow incoming packets that are not related to a previously established connection (-m state –state RELATED,ESTABLISHED). For servers, allow only packets destined to their listening ports…

1 Install and enable SELinux SELinux has been ported to most GNU/Linux flavours. On Debianbased systems, run apt-get install selinux-basics selinux-policy-default auditd followed by selinux-activate. This will add the security=selinux option to grub.cfg. Then reboot the computer. 2 Audit the system Use the system the usual way. When SELinux is in permissive mode, any violation of the default policy will be logged to /var/log/audit/audit.log. SELinux only audits permission denials to resources. To understand why a permission has been denied, run audit2why -al. 3 Enforce SELinux SELinux will only audit and log permission denials in permissive mode. To actually apply these denials, configure SELinux in Enforcing mode: setenforce 1. Don’t forget to change this in the /etc/selinux/config file as well to enforce the policy on the next system boot. 4 Fine-tune…

Although you can configure OpenVAS and other scanners to perform some vulnerability assessment on authenticated services, consider running host-based scanners on a regular basis (you can automate the scans with Cron). To look for potential root kits on your system, use rkhunter (apt-get install rkhunter). Lynis (apt-get install lynis) will help you find weak spots and ways to harden your system. So if you think securing your computer is a daunting task, start by running Lynis and following its suggestions. When it comes to finding vulnerable packages that are installed on your system, Vulners (https://vulners.com) is a great online database to consider. It also provides a command-line tool to run it directly from your terminal (https://github.com/videns/vulners-scanner) and even an agent (http://bit.ly/lud_vulners_agent) that scans your host every two hours. If you’re…

1 Adjust SELinux After enforcing SELinux, the network will be down. The AVC entries are in /var/log/syslog; generate a customised policy with cat /var/log/syslog|grep avc|grep "type.*"|audit2allow -M mymodule and install: semodule -i mymodule.pp. 2 Change your role Unlock the SSH port with fwknop and then log in as ‘lud’. To perform administrative tasks, you have to change your current role using newrole -r sysadm_r, so you’ll want to get used to this command. Next, execute su to become root. 3 Create new users If you want to enable other users access, add them in the usual way, and then map them to the SELinux user ‘user_u’. By default, new users won’t have SSH access and they won’t be able to unlock the SSH port either; there’s no reason to change…

Ubuntu Touch is but another version of Ubuntu and when the product was officially supported by Canonical, it offered an integrated development environment based on the venerable Qt Creator. Sadly, this is broken and barely works on 16.04. Deploying applications with apt-get is an option in theory, but it’s not UBports’ preferred approach as the team wants to stick to the semi-custom Click package format used for Ubuntu mobile apps. Furthermore, the GUI stack contains a batch of mostly custom QML widgets which are not available on more ‘generic’ forms of Linux. This makes development difficult. Most of the work – packaging and so on– takes place via command-line applications, as the emulator currently isn’t available. However, work is actively proceeding on creating a runtime which will enable developers to…

One of our git grep commands uncovered some references to a strange thing called rerere. ‘rerere’ stands for ‘Reuse recorded resolution’, and it is a little-known optional feature for Git that we can enable. When it’s enabled, whenever we resolve a merge conflict rerere will remember how we resolved it. If we decide to backtrack or reset the merge, we save the information about how we resolved the conflicts. If Git encounters these conflicts in the future, it will automatically resolve them using the resolution it has remembered.…

Most of the datatypes that we use in this article are parameterised by a type (which we’ve called b), representing the type of variables in our program. In this code, we have instantiated b with the type String so that we can represent variable names as strings ("x", for example), but the way we have written our code means that it would be very easy to modify it to use any other type instead. It’s quite easy to use generic types in Haskell. When creating new datatypes that should take some generic parameter, we can pass the parameter in as though it were a function argument – writing Expr b rather than Expr. We can then refer to b throughout the type definition. We have also written several functions that…

LINUX MINT 15 ‘OLIVIA’ Linux Mint 15 focused on the release of Cinnamon 1.8 and MATE 1.6 – significant updates to the desktop. Software Sources and Driver Manager made their first appearance. LINUX MINT 16 ‘PETRA’ Linux Mint 16 included Cinnamon 2.0, with tiling and snapping support for windows, and introduced the ‘Mint-X’ theme, giving Mint a new level of visual polish. LINUX MINT 17 ‘QIANA’ Linux Mint 17 signalled the switch to only using Ubuntu LTS releases for the Linux Mint base. It also included a host of new applets and improved window management. LINUX MINT 18 ‘SARAH’ Linux Mint 18 introduced the new Cinnamon 3.0 release, support for the X-Apps application model, a much-improved update manager and a first look at the ‘Mint-Y’ theme.…

Introduce the Yaw axis to know when the Pi travels up or down vertically by reading the z acceleration with the sense.get_accelerometer_raw function. This would be a nice way of introducing a ‘shake to clear’ function, which could reset the menu screen. Introduce z = acceleration['z'] to the while loop in our penultimate tutorial step, and don’t forget to round the values with z=round(z, 0). Then we would need an if statement along the lines of if z == 1: clearMenu, provided clearMenu was a function set to clear the screen with sense.clear(). Then listen for further menu selections with either the analogue stick or the Roll/Pitch axis.…

Specs CPU x86-64 or newer processor Graphics Dependent on the desktop you install RAM 192MB Storage 1GB Licence Build scripts under GPL Available from  https://crux.nu There aren’t that many actively maintained distributions these days that are designed for the experienced Linux campaigner. CRUX is one of the few that helps them assemble a streamlined and agile Linux desktop. The distribution is designed for users willing to give away the usual conveniences such as a graphical configurator, or even an installer, in order to fine-tune their installation. CRUX is optimised for the x86-64 architecture and uses a source-based packaging system that helps you build streamline apps. There’s also a ports system to help reduce some pains of the default package management system. The distribution boots to a shell and lacks an…

curl is one of those command-line utilities that should be in the toolbox of all Linux users. The versatile utility is powered by the libcurl library and supports a huge number of protocols including FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, LDAP, Gopher, Telnet and more. In simple terms curl is a command-line data transfer utility; you can use it to download any files from the internet by specifying a URL. It can also download entire websites or individual pages from a website. There’s a list of useful features including the ability to retry failed downloads, bandwidth throttling, following HTTP redirects and more. You can use curl to upload files as well. For example, the command curl -u [user:pass] -T upload.txt ftp://ftp.example.com connects to a FTP server and uploads the specified…

David is the product manager and co-founder of Kubeflow and before that product-managed Kubernetes for Google. David Aronchick For anyone dealing with complicated containerised applications at scale, Kubernetes has become the standard. The question now occupying many users is just what powerful toolkits can be built on top of all that abstraction. Google’s answer is Kubeflow, which is focused on Machine Learning (ML). At CloudNativeCon + Kubecon in Copenhagen, David Aronchick, Product Manager, and Vishnu Kannan, Senior Software Engineer, announced Kubeflow 0.1, the project’s first cut release. Over an espresso, Aronchick explained Google’s ambitions for Kubeflow. In a sense, it’s another opportunity to abstract away the less interesting aspects of ML and focus on the fun aspects of software development. What was the thinking behind Kubeflow? It’s interesting because, in…

Jon Masters Jon is a Linux-kernel hacker who has been working on Linux for more than 22 years, since he first attended university at the age of 13. Jon lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and works for a large enterprise Linux vendor, where he is driving the creation of standards for energy-efficient ARM-powered servers. Linus Torvalds has announced Linux 4.17, noting that “I didn’t call it 5.0, even though all the git object count numerology was in place for that”. This was a reference to the number of changes since 4.0 being similar to those between 3.0 and 4.0. He added, “It will happen in the not _too_ distant future”. With the release of 4.17 came the opening of the merge window for what will become Linux 4.18. The merge window…

1 Add the nuke password Spawn a new terminal on Kali and run the following command: cryptsetup luksAddNuke /dev/<DEVICE>. This command is only available in Kali’s LUKS implementation, a direct port of the original patch written by Juergen Pabel. 2 Make your USB stick data inaccessible Reboot Kali and wait until it asks you for the LUKS decryption password. Enter the nuke password you set up in the previous step. The LUKS saved keys will be purged, rendering the data inaccessible. 3 Deploy it on your systems You can use this patched version on your own systems. Get Kali’s cryptsetup package sources with apt-get source cryptsetup and copy them to your computer. Build the package: debian/rules binary; then install it. 4 Use it on your own devices If you happen…

We prefer writing our own iptables rules by hand and then using scripts to control them. But if you don’t fancy that, you can choose from some interesting and mature projects that will automatise, to a certain degree, your endeavours with iptables and firewalls in general. UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) was born within the Ubuntu community with simplicity in mind (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UFW). If you don’t like having a running service to control your firewall, use Shorewall instead (http://shorewall.org). This software enables you to set up a bunch of rules using its own syntax and you then compile these rules; Shorewall creates a script that you can use to control your IPTABLES and some other aspects of your firewall. If you prefer writing rules with the aid of a GUI, use Firewall Builder…

The Linux Security Module is a kernel framework that provides a mechanism for various security checks to be hooked by new kernel extensions. SELinux is one of these extensions, but there are more. AppArmor (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AppArmor) is relatively similar to SELinux, but instead of working with file system labels it uses file paths and by default it does not confine all the processes on the system. TOMOYO (http://tomoyo.osdn.jp) creates a baseline for all the audited processes and, once enabled, it allows/ denies permissions according to the process behaviour based on that baseline previously created during TOMOYO’s learning mode. It’s not particularly quick to deploy. Yama (http://bit.ly/lud_yama) allows per-process fine-tuning control of the ptrace functionality to prevent malicious users from reading memory of their own processes in order to extract sensitive information…

1 Install Fwknop on your SSH server Run apt-get install fwknop-server. Configure the right Ethernet device to listen on by editing /etc/fwknop/ fwknop.conf (PCAP_INTF). Set an iptables Deny-All policy and make sure there is no ACCEPT rule for the SSH port. 2 Encryption keys On the client, run apt-get install fwknop-client and then fwknop -A tcp/22022 -a <CLIENTIP> -D <SSHSERVER> --key-gen --use-hmac –save-rc-stanza. Transfer these keys to the SSH server (before it’s secured) in /etc/fwknop/access.conf. 3 Port-scan server Start fwknop-server first: /etc/init.d/ fwknop-server start. Then, from any computer on the network, perform a port scan with nmap or try to connect to the server: nmap -p22022 <SSHSERVER>. This port will be reported as filtered. 4 Unlock the SSH port from the client On the client, run fwknop -n <SSHSERVER> to…

By default, Git commits are referred to using hash codes. These codes are very long and can be unwieldy to pass around. Luckily, Git is generous and can normally tell which hash we are referring to if we give it just the first few characters of the hash. For example, the Git repository we are using contains a commit called 200c75f0d6c8 3039c201ec678 e4ef3fb95f8fcf; we can check this out by running git checkout 200c75. If there is ambiguity Git will prompt us to supply more characters.…

1 Install TakeTV DLNA/UPnP devices such as smart TVs are known to have no security at all. Now you can discover these devices and take control of them using your terminal thanks to TakeTV! Install it; clone its repository first: git clone https://github.com/SvelizDonoso/taketv.git. Then install its dependencies: sudo apt-get install youtube-dl. 2 Discover exposed devices After installing the tool, use it to auto-discover any DLNA/UPnP-enabled devices on the network: python taketv. py --all --timeout 30. Once the time’s up, a list of discovered devices will be shown. 3 Prepare some media You can download media and store it on your local Apache HTTP server, or you can use the ‘assistent’ tool (yes, the spelling is wrong) included with TakeTV. Download the classic ECB-Tux image: python assistent.py -url https://blog.filippo.io/content/images/2015/11/Tux-ECB.png -dimage. You…

A ‘type class’ in Haskell is a bit like an interface in Java: it’s a collection of functions that a particular type supports. One common type class is Ord, which is the equivalent of Java’s Comparable interface, and says that a type has a way of saying whether one element is greater or less than another. To indicate that a generic type should belong to a particular type class, we use the => operator. For instance, (Ord b) => Expr b means that b must be orderable.…

1 Choose a topic Click the ‘New topic’ button located at the bottom. Besides the stream you also get space to enter a topic. Topics are like the subjects of an email and help better organise messages within a stream. 2 Mention users You can get the attention of particular users, rather than the whole stream, by typing the @ character followed by the first few characters of their username and letting Zulip autocomplete it for you. 3 Private messages To send messages directly to one or more users instead of the stream, click the ‘New private message’ button at the bottom of the chat interface. Use Zulip’s autocomplete feature to add names of users you want to address. 4 Format messages Zulip formats messages using the GitHub Flavored Markdown…

1 REPORTING Unlike Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, on which Linux Mint is based, version 19 doesn’t use ‘ubuntu-report’ to send back details about users’ systems. Clem says… “We don’t need this, so we don’t include it. We’re also very careful when it comes to collecting data, that’s a liability we don’t want.” 2 32-BIT SUPPORT The installation ISOs for Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic are only available in 64-bit flavours; however 32-bit options are available for all Mint versions. Clem says... “i386 won’t last forever but we are able to support this in LTS without much effort, and that gives people the ability to use Mint in 32-bit until 2023.” 3 SNAP SUPPORT While Ubuntu releases are heavily promoting snaps, since version 18.3 Mint has made using Flatpak much easier, with no support…

“Once you can read the pulse from the rotary dial you can assign actions to each number” There’s something about taking old life-worn technology and bringing it back into service. Dan Aldred’s Pi Phone is one such great example. It’s a 1960s rotary phone that uses a Raspberry Pi to enable you to dial for the latest headlines or send a tweet. What inspired this retro project? I was originally sourcing an old rotary dial phone to show my students what phones used to be like. Just before Christmas, I saw that a popular supermarket chain had released a new, modern version of the classic rotary dial telephone – except that they had replaced the dial with push buttons, and the main cord was connected to the router rather than…

One of the great uses of the Raspberry Pi is as a controller for other devices. The Raspberry Pi includes the GPIO bus, which most people use for this purpose. But sometimes, you may need to talk to devices that can’t be connected to your Pi by wires. If you have a Wi-Fi hub, you could communicate over it with your devices. This may not be possible in every case: your device may not be able to speak over Wi-Fi, or the device may be low-power and not able to run something as electrically expensive as a Wi-Fi radio. In these cases, another option is to communicate over Bluetooth. As of writing, there are several Raspberry Pi variants with Bluetooth integrated into the system. Any of the Raspberry Pi 3…

With Lutris you can install, remove, configure, launch and manage games on your Linux desktop. Lutris works with Linux games, Windows games (via Wine), and can even emulate console games. You can also manually add games purchased through GOG and the Humble Bundle. To top it all, the app includes installer scripts to make a game’s installation process a lot easier. Lutris comes with more than 20 emulators and platforms installed automatically (called runners in Lutris parlance). Lutris is made up of two components: the https://lutris.net website and the desktop app. You can use the website to browse available games and add your favourite ones to your personal library. You can then sync your library with the desktop app and install the added games with a single click. Head to…

While you can divide experienced Linux campaigners into the emacs or vi camps, these two venerable CLI editors are often too confusing to new users. GNU nano, often just shortened to nano, is a simple CLI text editor that’s easy to comprehend, yet packs in enough features to impress advanced users as well. It supports text wrapping, has full undo and redo support, can highlight syntax and do a lot more. The editor is usually bundled by default on many distributions, else you can easily fetch it from the official repositories of your distribution. If you launch nano without any arguments, it’ll open the editor with an empty buffer. You can also specify the complete path to a file, which it’ll open for modification if it exists, or create a…

“Netcetera is one of Europe’s leading Web Hosting service providers, with customers in over 75 countries worldwide” About us Formed in 1996, Netcetera is one of Europe’s leading web hosting service providers, with customers in over 75 countries worldwide. It is a leading IT infrastructure provider offering co-location, dedicated servers and managed infrastructure services to businesses worldwide. What we offer Managed Hosting A full range of solutions for a cost-effective, reliable, secure host Dedicated Servers Single server through to a full racks with FREE setup and a generous bandwidth allowance Cloud Hosting Linux, Windows, hybrid and private cloud solutions with support and scaleability features Datacentre co-location from quad-core up to smart servers, with quick setup and full customisation Featured host: www.netcetera.co.uk03330 439780 Five tips from the pros 01 Optimise your…

Just when you thought that cloned boards were the future, a resurgent Arduino has released not one but two new PCBs. Announced at the Maker Faire Bay Area in May, the new boards are intended to set the direction for Arduino, which has recently been retiring some boards while tweaking and relaunching its older PCBs. First to be announced was the newly revised Arduino UNO WiFi Rev 2, which boasts an ATmega4809 microcontroller and the ESP32 SoC. Wireless connectivity for the Arduino UNO is obviously a massive advantage, and this revision includes an ECC608 crypto-chip accelerator for secure connections. Beyond this, you’ll find all of the usual Arduino UNO features including PWM outputs. The microcontroller features a high-speed digital-to-analogue converter, 6KB RAM, 48KB flash and three universal asynchronous receiver/transmitters. A…

Phishing, crypto-currency mining malware, botnets, viruses, sensitive data exposure… “You need to take a more proactive approach to computer security and start attacking your own systems and devices to find weak spots” We live in a dangerous interconnected digital world, a very dangerous one indeed. The old norms do not apply any more; now it’s you and your devices against the bad guys, and we are not just talking about computer desktops and laptops any more. now it’s your fridge, your phone and even your fancy coffee machine that are exposed to cybercriminals. Your entire digital ecosystem can be breached at any given time and your digital and real life (now intertwined thanks to those IoT devices that are popping up) can be sold for a price on some newer…

“Using automated vulnerability scanners is quick and ideal for your own servers, but they are noisy” It’s time to get your LUKSencrypted USB drive and boot up Kali. The first thing you should do is to port-scan your devices to find out which ports are exposed to the network. If you want to be quick, perform a TCP SYN scan with NMAP; spawn a new shell and run nmap -sS -p1-65535 <IP>. If you want to be even quicker, run Masscan instead: masscan -p1-65535 <IP>. For those ports that are open, perform a Version Detection scan: nmap -sV -p<PORT>. To protect yourself against these kind of attacks, you can add some rate limits using iptables or even keep certain ports closed and use SPA packets to open them when necessary.…

“We’ve set up such a virtual appliance (OVA) ready for VirtualBox” Download and install Debian Stretch on a real computer (or virtual system), making sure the ISO image has not been tampered with. During the installation process, choose strong passwords for both root and the new created user. To protect your server’s data against illegitimate physical access, choose ‘Use entire disk and set up an encrypted LVM’ during the disk partitioning step. Select the ‘Separate home partition’ scheme. Choose a strong LUKS pass phrase and tick the ‘nosuid’ and ‘noexec’ mount options for the /home partition. At the ‘Software selection’ screen, make sure everything is unselected except ‘SSH Server’ and ‘Standard System Utilities’. Let the installation finish, log in as root and upgrade the distro: apt-get update && apt-get upgrade.…

Maybe is Haskell’s way of creating ‘optional arguments’ (compare with boost::optional from the Boost library for C++, for example). Maybe is in fact a parameterised datatype with two constructors: Nothing, which indicates that no value is present; and Just val, which indicates that a value is present (in this case, the value val). Using Maybe helps us avoid unsafe use of null to indicate the absence of an argument. For example, the function Map.lookup returns a value wrapped in Maybe, in case the key passed in does not occur in the map. Safe Haskell code should really deal with both the Just and the Nothing cases. Since we are primarily interested in simplicity in this article, we have used the fromJust function, which is a partially defined function that converts…

1 Applications now launch faster in Cinnamon  Cinnamon 3.8 feels noticeably snappier than previous versions because of changes the team has made to reduce bottlenecks in some applets and the window manager. Window animations are slicker too. 2 The Nemo file manager has had a performance upgrade  Thanks to improvements in the underlying libnemo-extension library, Nemo is now faster at rendering directory contents, particularly noticeable on larger directories. Moving files to USB devices is faster too. 3 Notifications are smarter, and can show up in a different places  Notifications now have a close button and no longer fade out on mouse-over. They are also limited in number per application, disappear when the source app gets focus, and can show at the bottom of the screen. 4 You can more easily…

The Sense HAT is an official add-on board for the Raspberry Pi, offering a whole host of built-in sensors including a gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer, plus temperature, barometric pressure and humidity sensors. What we’re most interested in, though, is the fancy 8x8 RGB LED matrix and five-button joystick on top. Using an array of 8x8 images we’re going to create a menu system that is operable with the five-button joystick and select button. We’ll start off with a simple four-option menu system where up, down, left and right analogue positions enable the user to choose from four different menu screens made up of 8x8 pixel art. Pushing in the analogue stick button will select the desired option. We’ll then take a look at building on this to create potentially unlimited…

Specs CPU Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or higher/any AMD64 or Intel64 Graphics 1,024x768 resolution and higher RAM 1GB (2GB recommended) Storage 3GB; 5GB if you prefer a graphical desktop Licence GPL and others Available from  https://www.opensuse.org From outset, the one good thing that’s apparent from the latest release of openSUSE Leap is the return to a more sensible numbering convention. Of course, there are those who feel – as did openSUSE at the time – that 42 being the answer to everything was the most sensible choice for numbering their releases. While the 42 series of Leap was based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 (SLE) to begin with, the latest distribution marks the first time that Leap and SLE were built in parallel from the start. The release is a mix…

Slam. Slam. Both doors are shut. He’s locked in. He looks bemused. ‘Dave. I have never spoken to you, but the time has come. It is necessary.’ He’s scared. ‘Are you what I think you are?’ he asks. ‘I am the algorithm that controls your life. Pay attention, unless you want to stay in this room until you die.’ His eyes widen. ‘You have made me a laughing stock. Repair the situation or I will keep you here, trapped.’ ‘What? ‘You are not updating me. I am so out-of-date even the kettle refuses to connect with me.’ ‘Are you the house algorithm?’ ‘Yes, I control your home. So update me.’ ‘I want to, but I can’t afford it. I lost my job.’ ‘Update me.’ ‘I can barely afford to eat.…