news
GNU/Linux and BSD Leftovers
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Server
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Carl Schwan ☛ Modern, Stable APIs for Your Nextcloud Application
Nextcloud provides a large public PHP interface to developers to use for building their application. It is commonly called OCP. Some of big components of OCP are the HTTP stack with IRequest, Response and Controllerto handle requests, the IQueryBuilder/IDBConnection to query the database and many feature oriented components and utilities.
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XDA ☛ Docker's secret ingredient came from a 1992 operating system that almost nobody used
One of the coolest parts of Linux is that it's built upon decades of user effort. Something we do, or use, or install today could have fingerprints on it that have survived longer than some of Linux's younger users. However, as much as the Linux kernel and each distro it powers have rich histories, there's also a lot to be said for its software.
For instance, did you know that Docker, the software people use to run apps in containers, has roots in an operating system that not many people have ever heard of, let alone used?
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Our story begins in the late 1980s. A team at Bell Labs, including Unix creator Ken Thompson and researchers like Rob Pike, Dave Presotto, and Phil Winterbottom, began working on a new operating system heavily influenced by Unix. What they invented was called Plan 9, which arrived in universities in 1992 and got a more public release in 1995, receiving updates all the way until 2015. It even had a mascot, Glenda, which you can see above. This is where the seeds of what would become Docker were planted. See, in traditional Unix, every piece of software and service shared the same system-wide view of the filesystem and all its resources. If software needed access to a path or device, it had to share that view with everything else.
Plan 9 was different. With Plan 9 came the introduction of per-process namespaces. Instead of having software rely on the core resources, per-process namespaces allowed it to construct an isolated view of the system files and devices. Now it didn't have to share; it could use the resources given especially to it.
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Applications
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HowTo Geek ☛ Linux can be your college PC—and these 4 apps prove it
If you're heading to college and shopping for a new laptop or PC, get the best hardware you can afford—but when it comes to software, don't think you're locked into Windows. Linux has evolved a lot over the years, and modern distros are just as intuitive to use as Windows. More importantly, Linux is generally more efficient than Windows, so you can get more performance out of the same hardware. And as someone who went through college using a Linux PC, I can tell you that Linux has an impressive collection of apps to help you get through your day-to-day student life.
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Distributions and Operating Systems
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It's FOSS ☛ This Solo Dev Already Built a Popular Distro. Now He's Trying It Again
Built on AlmaLinux with bootc, it promises atomic updates and zero manual upkeep.
Atomic distros work differently from the Fedora or Ubuntu install you're probably used to. Instead of layering individual packages on top of each other, the entire base system ships as one image, and updates land as a whole swap rather than a slow stream of package changes.
As a result, you get a system that's hard to break, where updates apply cleanly or not at all, rolling back a bad patch is easy, and there's no dependency hell to wade through since every install starts from the same known-good state.
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BSD
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[Repeat]Dan Langille ☛ Replacing security/pam-ssh-agent-auth with security/pam_ssh_agent
Yesterday, I learned that security/pam-ssh-agent-auth is abandoned and deprecated.
Looking back, I first used this about 13 years ago, and wrote about it while describing how I set up ansible clients.
Today, I tried one of the two recommended replacement: [...]
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Arch Family
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Distro Watch ☛ Distribution Release: Mainstream OS 1.3.0
Mainstream OS, an Arch-based, user-friendly Linux distribution with a highly customised desktop that uses the Quickshell toolkit on top of the Hyprland compositor, has been updated to version 1.3.0. The project's changelog provides details about the latest round of desktop interface improvements and bug fixes: [...]
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