linux

I’m usually in the habit of keeping my Linux desktop up to date. Normally, it’s pretty uneventful to run the Ubuntu updater or do it on the command line. However, today something interesting happened. I ran the update, noted that there was a kernel update from 6.2.0-34 to 6.2.0-36 and let it run. The fun started when I rebooted my computer. On reboot, the WiFi network was gone. I’m using a pretty crappy USB network adapter that required some special drivers and apparently the update borked the driver.

In the same vein as my post yesterday, I was very impressed by this description of how small you can make a simple ELF binary. Starting with the generic output of compiling one of the simplest possible C programs from gcc at 3998 bytes, the article outlines how you can slim it down. The first steps are using the features in gcc to optimize the size. That gets it down to 2616 bytes.

The title is generally true, but in this case, I’m talking about an interesting article about the steps that happen when you run python3 hello.py. It’s a really nice breakdown of all the steps from figuring out the path to the python executable to mapping that file on the disk to creating a new process to finding the ELF file to linking to libraries to printing out “Hello World!”. The detail is nice.

In a continuation of recent changes to open source businesses, SUSE has decided to go back to being a private company. SUSE’s foray as a public company was certainly not profitable for investors who bought in at the IPO (thankfully, not me) but represents a good deal for current shareholders. My experience with SUSE has been very positive. I used it to deploy some SAP HANA databases about ten years ago and it was a very nice distro with some interesting configuration and management tools.

I recently enabled Kernel Livepatch on my Ubuntu 22.04.3 desktop system. Livepatch is intended for systems that you don’t want to reboot. It’s completely overkill for a desktop that I can reboot whenever I need to but I wanted to understand it better. Kernel Livepatch is part of the Ubuntu Pro offering that is free for a limited number of systems - five systems currently. That seems like a pretty smart play by Ubuntu to differentiate their offering a little bit and get a premium service into the hands of more users who might then go on to buy a package later.

I’m intrigued that the Linux kernel is moving beyond C and allowing Rust in the 6.1 kernel. It seems like a 30 year run of using C is long enough. Times change and the kernel has to change as well. I don’t know much about Rust, but this makes me interested in taking a deeper look. Writing really solid C code is notoriously hard even using modern techniques to avoid buffer overflows and the like.

I just finished the Developing Secure Software course from The Linux Foundation. It was a solid introduction to the basics of developing more secure software. It features a good overview of the tools and techniques that can be applied during all phases of the software development lifeycle. I had a solid understanding of some of the material (e.g., cryptography and GDPR) but it was a good refresher on those topics and got me thinking much more about the process of designing and developing secure software in general.

I bought a cheap USB WiFi Adapter for my Ubuntu 22.04 system. I used to connect via a WiFi bridge running on DD-WRT but I’ve got this new Internet router from Cox cable that wasn’t being very cooperative with that, so I decided to replace it. I probably should have done a little bit more research. I just looked at the product descriptions for something that had Linux listed and figured that should be good enough.

I’ve been using btop for monitoring system usage and statistics on Linux and MacOS. It’s much better than the built in resource monitors and seems to incur less overhead as well. Being able to use the command line to get insights into what processes are taking up resources is very handy. It works great on Ubuntu right out of the box (or, more accurately, sudo apt install btop). It also works on MacOS with brew install btop but the colors don’t work quite right on my system unless I set it to the TTY theme.

I upgraded my Linux Mint laptop to 20.3 today after my upgrade from 19.3 last week. It was very easy and took just a few minutes. I’ve only been using it for an hour, but so far, so good. The new theme looks sharp and I like the rounded windows. I haven’t tried the updated apps yet and might not have much cause to. I am intrigued that they named the new document manager Thingy.