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Using EndeavourOS as a daily driver

By Muhammad Najmi bin Ahmad Zabidi
June 16, 2023

Choosing a new distro

I have been using Manjaro Linux (based on Arch Linux) for my work desktop and Pop!_OS (based on Ubuntu) for my laptop for quite some time now, and wanted to find another Arch Linux-based distro for my daily driver. Rather than aimlessly searching through the hundreds of Linux distros out there, I made several requirements the chosen distro should meet:

• Easy to maintain.
• Has strong community support and stable development.
• Has a Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) full-disk encryption option in the installation.
• If possible, the distro of choice should be able to trim down the number of default packages. For example, I am a Gnome desktop user, so I don’t want to install the game packages I won’t use.

I decided to use EndeavourOS. It supports the features that I need: It has a strong community and most of Arch Linux’s documentation/​references are still applicable to it, like they are to most Arch Linux-based distros using systemd.

The most notable differences between EndeavourOS and Arch Linux are EndeavourOS’s GUI-based installer—we can select between installing XFCE, Plasma KDE, Gnome, and several others desktop environments—as well as …

Compressed CZML

By Dmitry Kiselev
June 13, 2023

Let’s talk about CZML, Cesium’s main language for specifying 3D scenes, and how to incorporate external resources such as billboard graphics, material textures, and 3D models into CZML files.

For example, let’s look at how we can include glTF models.

glTF models are composed of multiple files: a single JSON index file along with a variable number of binary buffer files and textures. So, in order to package CZML assets that include glTF models for distribution, you have to read the CZML document itself, then read the referenced glTF files. If they are not binary GLB files, you must also read the glTF files and package all of the files referenced by the glTF models. And if you find this paragraph cumbersome, that’s no accident. Indeed, the whole process is quite cumbersome!

So we are dealing with something like:

• CZML Document

  • glTF Model

    • buffer1.bin
    • buffer2.bin
    • texture1.png
    • texture2.png
    • …

If you want to keep the glTF model as a single asset, you can convert the glTF files into binary (GLB) files, and then embed them as base64 data links into CZML.

Another example would be a set of points with billboards, let’s say a couple hundred points with plenty of …

VisionPort: The Future of Tourism Marketing

By Jonathan Perlin
June 13, 2023

In a world of rapidly evolving technology, businesses and organizations in the tourism industry must adapt to stay relevant and competitive. VisionPort offers innovative and powerful technological solutions that can help organizations and destinations in tourism enhance the customer experience and reach a wider audience.

By showcasing destinations and providing immersive and engaging content, VisionPort can help agencies stay ahead of the competition through the use of geographic information systems and customized presentations.

Showcase destinations

VisionPort’s ability to showcase destinations through interactive panoramic views and virtual tours is a game-changer for the tourism industry. By providing immersive and engaging content, potential visitors can get a real sense of what it would be like to experience a particular destination. This can help to spark their interest and inspire them to plan a trip to that location.

With its support for a variety of media types, including panoramic views, photos, and videos, VisionPort enables businesses to create high-quality content that highlights their unique features and attractions. For instance, a resort or hotel can create …

Rocky Linux 9 via Hetzner Robot for the impatient

By Jeffry Johar
June 12, 2023

Image: https://www.pexels.com/photo/go-kart-17122631/

Update: A Better Way to Install Rocky Linux 9 at Hetzner Cloud

Hey everyone, I wanted to share an update regarding the installation process of Rocky Linux 9 at Hetzner Cloud.

After input from Brian Clemens of the Rocky Linux project and some further exploration and testing, I have a more efficient and straightforward method to get Rocky Linux up and running on the Hetzner platform. You can check out the new method in my second blog post here.

About Rocky Linux

Rocky Linux is a free and open-source community-driven operating system designed to be a drop-in replacement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Rocky fills the gap left by the end of CentOS, which was a popular Linux distribution based on the same source code as RHEL but offered as a free alternative with community support. CentOS Stream is their new offering, but it is just different enough to not be entirely compatible with RHEL.

Another alternative is AlmaLinux, and everything mentioned here applies to Alma with some adaptation.

Rocky 9 on Hetzner

Hetzner is a popular hosting company offering bare metal and virtual servers at very affordable prices. It is based in …

Google Chrome Yum/​RPM package update fails on RHEL/​CentOS 7

By Jon Jensen
June 8, 2023

Painting by Willgard Krause, Pixabay license

One of our clients uses the Chrome web browser running on their continuous integration server with Jenkins for automated e2e (end-to-end) testing of their website. That server runs Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7—actually the rebuild CentOS 7.

Last month, in May 2023, Google started signing Chrome RPMs with a GnuPG subkey, where they before had signed with the main key. Now yum upgrade fails when trying to update Chrome, giving this error:

warning: /var/cache/yum/x86_64/7/google-chrome/packages/google-chrome-stable-114.0.5735.106-1.x86_64.rpm: Header V4 RSA/SHA512 Signature, key ID a3b88b8b: NOKEY
Retrieving key from https://dl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub


The GPG keys listed for the "google-chrome" repository are already installed but they are not correct for this package.
Check that the correct key URLs are configured for this repository.


 Failing package is: google-chrome-stable-114.0.5735.106-1.x86_64
 GPG Keys are configured as: https://dl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub

To double-check, we tried to manually verify the signature on the downloaded RPM package with:

# rpm -K …

Migrating from Universal Analytics to GA4

By Juan Pablo Ventoso
June 1, 2023

Image: Migration by Aivar Ruukel, 2014. Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0), obtained from Flickr

Most public-facing websites rely on Google Analytics to track their traffic, analyze the user’s characteristics and behavior, and run reports based on that information to improve marketing strategies, engage their public, and ultimately, increase the user’s loyalty.

Universal Analytics vs. Google Analytics 4

Until 2020, Google relied on Universal Analytics, a system that offered a set of reports that were mainly based on page visits and content visualization. But in October 2020, Google announced that the new Google Analytics 4 (GA4) was launched, using an event-centered approach for metrics. That allows several improvements in the way the data is collected and analyzed, like taking into account several platforms and devices as a source for the data (for example, combining website traffic with mobile app usage and activity on social networks).

Another improvement is privacy: Among the new features, anonymous IP addresses are now the default setting for GA4. The user’s IP address will be still registered and used to group data when doing the initial collection, but it won’t …

I wrote the same app twice, with Hotwire and Blazor Server — here’s what I learned

By Kevin Campusano
May 27, 2023

There’s been a very interesting movement that has emerged recently in the world of frontend web development: a rise of little-to-no-JavaScript frontend frameworks.

The promise here is that we would be able to develop web applications with rich interactive capabilities without the need to write a whole lot of JavaScript. As such, these new approaches present themselves as alternatives to the likes of Vue, React, Angular, etc.

Two recent technologies that try to fulfill this promise come from two of the most prolific web application development frameworks of today: Blazor, built on .NET, and Hotwire, built on Ruby on Rails.

Now, I love my JS frameworks as much as the next guy, but these new technologies are intriguing. So I decided to build the same application twice, with Hotwire and with Blazor. I learned a few things along the way that I would like to share in this blog post.

Note that there is a table of contents at the end of this post.

What this article is

I want to present some of my findings when working with these two technologies. I also want to discuss how they work and how they feel. How they are similar and how they are different. How they take different routes …

Mount a remote filesystem over SSH using SSHFS

By Trevor Slocum
May 25, 2023

While creating and debugging software, it is important to reduce the amount of friction between each iteration of making a change to the software and then testing that change. Over time, even small amounts of friction can lead to fatigue and decreased performance of a developer. Because of this, we should take every opportunity to make our workflow as smooth and comfortable as possible.

A common source of friction when developing software running on remote systems is the separation between your personal computer and the server. Your personal computer likely has an IDE configured just the way you like. The server, on the other hand, is likely configured to be easily available to everyone on your team.

You could copy files back and forth between systems using SFTP or some other file transfer protocol. This works for quick one-off changes, but for development requiring multiple iterations you likely want a more streamlined workflow.

If only there was a way to use the software installed on your personal system to edit files on a remote system, without copying the files back and forth…

There is! SSHFS is a tool for mounting and interacting with remote directories over SSH. …