LWDW 157: Dirty Snap

OBS Studio 23.0 RC1 is looking for testers, Snap checks its privilege, RISC-V powered Fedoras, and using YouTube for cloud storage.

Special thanks to:
Linda
Andre
David

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Colour key – Venn Jill Pedro

Slight delay for 18.04.2 LTS

Glad they waited a week before this bug was released in the wild with disastrous results.
I was happy to hear that Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS will ship with Ubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish graphics stack and kernel, so we will get a new kernel and updated Mesa drivers.
On the topic of 18.10.
If you use XFCE, don’t.
Key-ring (while annoying) does not work.
File-roller does not work with Thunar.
ffmpeg built without nvenc.
So if you stream the video games, don’t.
Totem don’t work.
Saving nvidia-settings, using the gnome software center, synaptic, well, anything that requires the admin password dies in a fire.
A week’s delay is perfectly acceptable, especially if it means fixing a boot issue.
- Yeah, aboot that.
  - And here I was, ready to cut them some slack.

It’s since been fixed but yeah, ouch.
At least the vulnerability is already fixed upstream and if you’ve run apt upgrade in the past couple of days, it’s probably fixed there too.
The thing here is, all those cloud servers Canonical has so proudly been talking about lately, I hope they update things.
It was a vulnerability called “Dirty_Sock” in the REST API causing a privilege escalation.
It is fixed in 2.37. But I would suggest nuking snap from orbit.
sudo apt autoremove –purge snapd gnome-software-plugin-snap
rm -fr ~/snap
No wonder gnome-system-monitor took so long to start, it was a snap…was.
Has nothing on the Brave browser Snap, that takes a solid 5 seconds to launch.

The screen reader now supports desktop icons and the Alt+Tab window switcher! This is something many of my blind friends have complained about not having.
KRunner no longer shows duplicate bookmarks from Firefox. That was always annoying and created a lot of visual clutter.
Flatpak packages now have app extension support in Discover, and now you can choose which ones to install.
Discover as a GUI for the flatpak-y bits is good to have.
Even if Discover is PackageKit-level atrocity written in Qt.
Wayland support for the pager.

Added Limiter and Expander audio filters.
- Probably won’t replace my hardware Giggletron 9000 though ;-D
Advanced output settings now has FFmpeg multi-track audio support.
Now in Audio settings you can add a fourth Mic/Auxiliary audio option.
It works but I would suggest building off master.
If you use multiple cameras prepare to do a happy dance.
Rate distortion optimization is neat.

The “Tabbed” interface, which is like Microsoft Office “Ribbon interface” is now available for all the programs in the suite.
A new alternative interface called “Groupedbar Compact” is available, which combines traditional and tabbed interfaces, and is great when desktop space is at a premium.
You can copy pasta spreadsheet data natively in Writer now.
I wonder if it can now handle a pair of CSV files I have, which previously made it poop the bed.

Long live Fredorf!
- Fedorf is best dorf!
That looks bland.
They did choose to use the Candidate #1 Fedora logo over the Candidate #2 logo that Pedro and I liked better from the article we talked about last month.
The Linux community also liked the Candidate #1 Fedora logo better, and the design team realised that Candidate #2 was too similar to other logos.
From the new logo Candidates I like the logo Candidate #2 because visually the “f” is closer to the size and weight of the font, has a curved inner tail on the “f”, and a nice distance in space between the end of the inner tail curve and the stem of the “f.”
The design team still would like community feedback, and ask that it is both constructive and detailed.

Using a FPGA for I/O is a little metal.
28nm process, like… Excavator cores? Athlon 860K?
What I’m curious is how much this all cost.
Like Andrew Back talks about in the article, this is a testament to how far along that open source and its development has come that you can just put the parts together to build a RISC-V desktop and it just boots!

Steganography in motion.
In theory this would let you do massive backups using any site that hosts video.
I’m surprised more projects haven’t done this.
Though, if this starts to take off, I can see Alphabet doing something about it on their end.
Here is a program I could have used many years ago when I started doing freelance animation, and when I was an animation student.
Corrupted video is commonplace, especially in today’s world of gigabyte and terabyte file sizes.
One of my tricks to recover corrupt video files was to run them thru Testdisk/PhotoRec.
I would make a copy of the corrupted file for backup, and then delete one of the copies and run PhotoRec to recover a deleted file, and this would sometimes fix the corrupted video as well.
VLC is excellent at fixing corrupted video files also.
If VLC will allow you to convert it to another video file format, sometimes it can fix it as well.
I have used HandBrake, FFmpeg and Kdenlive as well to convert a corrupted video file to another file format, that’s again, if it will even let you open it.

Clevo N131WU… That’s the same laptop as the Tuxedo Infinity Book which I had a look at.
This is good!
As we have talked about on LWDW in the past, this helps complete and solidify the dream of open hardware and software that Carl Richell has been wanting for System76.
Carl Richell tweeted that System76 is still in the research phase using Coreboot, but it is coming along nicely.

Slice of Pi

Pi on the high street

Smack in the middle of downtown Cambridge, in the Grand Arcade.
I shall be going there at some point, I have a week off at the end of February.
Finally a computer store with Linux being the dominant operating system! At least, not only in Brazil.
The local Micro Center has an excellent RasPi section that does extremely well in sales, and educating the general public that DIY boards exist.
They sell bear plushies.