news
GNU/Linux, BSD, and KDE
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Server
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Yordi Verkroost ☛ Building My Own Personal Cloud (One Pod at a Time)
Over the past couple of weeks, I took my first steps into owning more of the media I consume. Like my music, for which I've gone back to buy it in physical form. The grander goal of this is to become less dependent on the "big tech bros", especially those from outside of Europe. While streaming media might be convenient (although it has become less so with all the fragmentation over multiple services), I also realized I have nothing left when a streaming company decides to pull back (some of) the music I often listen to. In addition to owning the music in the form of physical media (CD and vinyl), I've digitized part of it and now run it on a personal Navidrome music server I can access everywhere I have an [Internet] connection.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The BSD Now Podcast ☛ BSD Now 652: Ghostly Graphics
OpenZFS monitoring, hellosystems 0.8, GhostBSD and XLibre, Bhyve Exporters and 30 year old LibC issues.
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Kernel Space / File Systems / Virtualization
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OS/2 Museum ☛ The History of a Security Hole
After much head scratching, I noticed that the (virtual) CPU’s A20 gate was off. That’s a big no-no because when the CPU is in protected mode, turning the A20 gate off has very nasty, unpredictable, and system-specific consequences. It’s one of those Just Don’t Even Try That things. But could a user process really turn off the A20 gate? That makes no sense.
As it turns out, a user process really could do that on i386 OpenBSD 6.3 (again, i386 only, not amd64). A security hole allowed regular user processes to read and write many I/O ports, which is obviously very unhealthy. The chain of events that led to this is long, and probably the biggest player in it is Intel, with important contributions from NetBSD and OpenBSD developers. Thanks to the nature of open source, we can trace back exactly how it came to be, and perhaps even learn a thing or two from the mistakes.
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Desktop Environments (DE)/Window Managers (WM)
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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KDE Connect of the Future
An exploration of things that could be.
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Creating a wooden board with Perlin Noise in Mankala
During this Season of KDE, we made a lot of design changes to the Mankala Engine. We successfully redesigned most of the components including the entire home page, boards and game variants. Now I was in the middle of creating a new cover image to select game variants. I tried to create a natural wooden board for Bohnenspiel, and well, we got most of the things nicely done.
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