PinePhone Malware Surprises Users, Raises Questions

December 16, 2021 by Arya Voronova 85 Comments

On December 5th, someone by the IRC nickname of [ubuntu] joined the Pine64 Discord’s #pinephone channel through an IRC bridge. In the spirit of December gift-giving traditions, they have presented their fellow PinePhone users with an offering – a “Snake” game. What [ubuntu] supposedly designed had the potential to become a stock, out-of-the-box-installed application with a small but dedicated community of fans, modders and speedrunners.

Unfortunately, that would not be the alternate universe we live in, and all was not well with the package being shared along with a cheerful “hei gaiz I make snake gaem here is link www2-pinephnoe-games-com-tz replace dash with dot kthxbai” announcement. Shockingly, it was a trojan! Beneath layers of Base64 and Bashfuscator we’d encounter shell code that could be in the “example usage” section of a modern-day thesaurus entry for the word “yeet“.

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Linux Fu: The Ultimate Dual Boot Laptop?

November 30, 2021 by Al Williams 37 Comments

I must confess, that I try not to run Windows any more than absolutely necessary. But for many reasons, it is occasionally necessary. In particular, I have had several laptops that are finicky with Linux. I still usually dual boot them, but I often leave Windows on them for one reason or another. I recently bought a new Dell Inspiron and the process of dual booting it turned out to be unusually effective but did bring up a few challenges.

If you ever wanted a proper dual-booting laptop, you’ll be interested in how this setup works. Sure, you can always repartition the drive, but the laptop has a relatively small drive and is set up very specifically to work with the BIOS diagnostics and recovery so it is always a pain to redo the drive without upsetting the factory tools.

Since the laptop came with a 512 GB NVMe drive, I wanted to upgrade the drive anyway. So one option would have been to put a bigger drive in and then go the normal route. That was actually my intention, but I wound up going a different way.

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HPi95LX Puts Linux In Your Palm

November 29, 2021 by Chris Lott 30 Comments

A few decades ago, palmtop computers were mostly based on MS-DOS, and while many users tried to mimic the UNIX experience, the results were mixed. Fast forward to the present and business-card-sized Linux computers modules abound. Canadian tinkerer [Rune Kyndal] decided to make his own Linux palmtop by sacrificing an old HP-95LX and replacing the guts with a Raspberry Pi Zero and a color LCD screen. We’re impressed with the rich set of features he has crammed into the limited volume of the case:

Raspberry Pi Zero W
Color LCD, 4.3 inch, 800×480 w/Backlight
Capacitive touch screen (not connected yet)
Stereo speakers + microphone
Ethernet 10/100
USB 2.0, 2 each
RS-232, DE-9 connector
microSD card
HDMI
IR dataport
Webcam (TBD)
LiPo Battery w/Charger

One problem that any palmtop faces is how to make a usable keyboard, and HP had one of the better designs. The keys are the same famous style as used in HP calculators. And while no human with normal hands could touch-type on it, the keyboard’s layout and tactile feel was well-suited to “thumb typing”. [Rune] made a good decision by keeping the original keyboard.

While fully functional, this is more of a proof of concept than a polished project. [Rune] primarily used bits and pieces that he had laying around. [Rune] says if he did it again, he would replace all the hot-glued accessory parts with a custom PCB, which is probably good advice. If you want to make your own, check out the project comments for some suggestions.

accelerometer, oled, and PocketBeagle create a gesture-controlled calculator

The Calculator Charm: Calculatorium Leviosa!

November 28, 2021 by Orlando Hoilett 5 Comments

Have you ever tried waving your hand around like a magic wand and summoning a calculator? We would guess not since you’d probably look a little silly doing so. That is unless you had [Andrei’s] cool gesture-controlled calculator. [Andrei] thought it would be helpful to use a calculator in his research lab without having to take his gloves off and the results are pretty cool.

His hardware consists of a PocketBeagle, an OLED, and an MPU6050 inertial measurement unit for capturing his hand motions using an accelerometer and gyroscope. The hardware is pretty straightforward, so the beauty of this project lies in its machine learning implementation.

[Andrei] first captured a few example datasets to train his algorithm by recreating the hand gestures for each number, 0-9, and recording the resulting accelerometer and gyroscope outputs. He processed the data first with a wavelet transform. The intent of the transform was two-fold. First, the transform allowed him to reduce the number of samples in his datasets while preserving the shape of the accelerometer and gyroscope signals, the key features in the machine learning classification. Secondly, he was able to increase the number of features for the classification since the wavelet transform resulted in both approximation and detailed coefficients which can both be fed into the algorithm.

Because he had a small dataset, he used the Stratified Shuffle Split technique instead of the test train split method which is generally more suited for larger datasets. The Stratified Shuffle Split ensured approximately the same number of train and test samples for each gesture. He was also very conscious of optimizing his model for running on a portable processing unit like the PocketBeagle. He spent some time optimizing the parameters of his algorithm and ultimately converted his model to a TensorFlowLite model using the built-in “TFLiteConverter” function within TensorFlow.

Finally, in true open-source fashion, all his code is available on GitHub, so feel free to give it a go yourself. Calculatorium Leviosa!

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Firefox Brings The Fire: Shifting From GLX To EGL

November 23, 2021 by Matthew Carlson 55 Comments

You may (or may not) have heard that Firefox is moving from GLX to EGL for the Linux graphics stack. It’s an indicator of which way the tides are moving in the software world. Let’s look at what it means, why it matters, and why it’s cool.

A graphics stack is a complex system with many layers. But on Linux, there needs to be an interface between something like OpenGL and a windowing system like X11. X11 provides a fundamental framework for drawing and moving windows around a display, capturing user input, and determining focus, but little else. An X11 server is just a program that manages all the windows (clients). Each window in X11 is considered a client. A client connects to the server over a Unix process socket or the internet.

OpenGL focuses on what to draw within the confines of the screen space given by the window system. GLX (which stands for OpenGL Extension to the X window system) was originally developed by Silicon Graphics. It has changed over the years, gaining hardware acceleration support and DRI (Direct Rendering Interface). DRI is a way for OpenGL to talk directly to the graphical hardware if the server and the client are on the same computer. At its core, GLX provides OpenGL functions to X11, adds to the X protocol by allowing 3d rendering commands to be sent, and an extension that reads rendering commands and passes them to OpenGL.

EGL (Embedded-System Graphics Library) is a successor of GLX, but it started with a different environment in mind. Initially, the focus was embedded systems, and devices such as Android, Raspberry Pi, and Blackberry heavily lean on EGL for their graphical needs. Finally, however, Wayland decided to use EGL as GLX brought in X11 dependencies, and EGL offers closer access to hardware.

When Martin Stránský initially added Wayland support to Firefox, he used EGL instead of GLX. Additionally, the Wayland implementation had zero-copy GPU buffer sharing via DMABUF (a Linux kernel subsystem for sharing buffers). Unfortunately, Firefox couldn’t turn on this improved WebGL’s performance for X11 (it existed but was never stable enough). Nevertheless, features kept coming making Wayland (and consequently EGL) a more first-class citizen. Now EGL will be enabled by default in Firefox 94+ with Mesa 21+ drivers (Mesa is an implementation of OpenGL, Vulkan, and other specifications that translate commands into instructions the GPU can understand).

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Change Desktop Environments On… IOS?

November 19, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 32 Comments

While Apple’s modern operating systems may seem like they exist independently of the rest of the computing world, they are actually close cousins of modern versions of Linux. The primary link between the two is that Apple’s offerings are Unix-based and even though Linux isn’t Unix in the strict sense, it’s built to be extremely Unix-like. Plenty of Linux software is POSIX-compliant, meaning it is effectively compatible with true Unix. But what can we do with that information? Well, to start, we can run Linux desktop environments on top of an iOS install on your favorite iPhone or iPad.

To be sure, we will be filing this hack in the “because you can” category. [Torrekie], the creator of this project, has plenty of builds (Google translate from Chinese) where the boundaries between things like Linux and Unix are either blurred or nonexistant. In this particular project, a jailbroken iOS device is essentially gifted a ported version of XFCE which is able to run fairly well on iOS thanks to its compatibility with Unix environments. Details on how this was accomplished are sparse without a full investigation of the source code right now, but you can head over to the repository if you are curious enough to try this for yourself. [Torrekie] does note that this will only work with iOS devices that have been jailbroken using the “unc0ver” jailbreak only though.

To be sure, the relationship between modern Apple operating systems and Linux is about as close as modern Porsches and the Volkswagen Beetle, but either way the two are close enough to get interesting and impressive mashups like this project. For now only time will tell if using XFCE on iOS will be useful for anyone, but other projects bridging the gap between Linux and Apple are sure to be more immediately fruitful.

Linux: Coming Soon To M1 Macbooks

November 17, 2021 by Bryan Cockfield 62 Comments

Regardless of the chipset or original intended use of any computer system, someone somewhere is going to want to try and run Linux on it. And why not? Linux is versatile and free to use as well as open-source, so it’s quite capable of running on almost anything. Of course, it takes a little while for the Linux folk to port the software to brand new hardware, but it’s virtually guaranteed that it’s only a matter of time before Linux is running on even the most locked-down of hardware, like the M1 MacBooks.

[Hector Martin] aka [marcan] has been hard at work getting Linux up and running on the latest Apple offerings with their ARM-based M1 processors. Since these are completely divorced from their x86 product line the process had to be worked from the ground up which included both booting Linux and modifying the kernel to include support for the hardware. [marcan] has a lot of hardware working such as the USB ports and the SD card slot, and notes that his setup is even compatible with the webcam notch included in the latest batch of MacBooks.

There are a few things still missing. He’s running Arch and doesn’t have the GPU configured yet, so all of the graphics are rendered in software. But he has put the computer through the wringer including running some computationally-intense software for nearly a full day before realizing that the machine wasn’t charging, which did not make much difference in performance. These machines are indeed quite capable with their new ARM chipsets and hopefully his work going forward will bring Linux to the rest of us who still use Macs even if they don’t want to run macOS.