With Issue 240, Linux Magazine is celebrating its 20th year of print publication. Given the transformations that have taken place in Linux, open source, and in publishing during the past 20 years, this is a remarkable achievement.
Reflecting on these changes, Linux Magazine editor-in-chief Joe Casad said, “I’m struck by how much Linux has changed since I started this job—and how much the publishing industry has itself remained in a perpetual state of reinvention. It is one thing when the subject of the magazine is continually transforming—and quite another when the very context in which you operate is a moving target.”
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Linux Magazine has weathered the various industry shifts with consistency of vision and a small, dedicated workforce. Casad credits the internationally distributed team of professionals, “who stay calm under pressure and show up every day with ideas and good energy,” with much of the magazine’s long-running success.
Lenovo has expanded its range of Ubuntu certified devices to announce 30 Linux-Ready ThinkPad and ThinkStation PCs preinstalled with Ubuntu.
Previously only accessible to enterprises via a customized bid, a comprehensive range of nearly 30 Ubuntu-loaded devices will now be available for purchase via Lenovo.com.
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By providing these devices preloaded with the OEM version of Ubuntu, Lenovo is removing complexity for Linux users and introducing end-to-end web and phone support for platform-related Linux issues.
Lenovo is making good on its promise to support Linux as a pre-install option.
Although 2020 has been a challenging year on so many levels, for the Linux desktop it’s actually been quite good. With manufacturers left and right offering their take on laptops and desktops preinstalled with one flavor or Linux or another, the market is truly burgeoning for the open source platform.
Nowhere is that more evident than with Lenovo. Back in June, Lenovo began certifying a large number of its desktop and laptops for Linux. Not one to rest on reputation, Lenovo has decided to one-up itself by launching Linux-ready ThinPad and ThinkStation hardware preinstalled with Ubuntu. This new launch includes nearly 30 Ubuntu systems for the manufacturer. Included with that lineup are 13 ThinkStation and ThinkPad P series and 14 ThinkPad T, X, X1, and L series laptops.
Linux on Lenovo devices is nothing new, but offering them for general sale is. In the past Lenovo has only offered Linux machines to enterprise customers. Lenovo is now extending its device certification program to include machines aimed directly at the general public. A further 27 models of desktop and laptop computers will come with Ubuntu pre-installed (via arstechnica).
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A phased roll out starting in September 2020 and going through to 2021 will see all of the machines released. But the selection and availability of machines will depend on your location.
Offering OEM machines to the general public could see more mainstream adoption of Linux. Ubuntu has been a popular choice for data science and software development thanks to its relative ease of use and large support base.
Granulate today announced that a platform that leverages machine learning algorithms to optimize Linux server environments running on-premises or in the cloud is now generally available.
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According to the company, more than 40,000 instances of gAgent have already been deployed by IT teams at PicsArt, Perion, AppsFlyer and Coralogix.
Sometimes you might need to check out what conenctions are being made to and from your computer and while you could always try and work out how an application like Wireshark works sometimes that's a bit over kill and you just want a rough idea of what's happening and that's where a tool like Bandwhich, a very simple bandwidth tracking tool becomes useful.
High Availability Router/Firewall Using OpenBSD, CARP, pfsync, and ifstated, Building the Development Version of Emacs on NetBSD, rc.d belongs in libexec, not etc, FreeBSD 11.3 EOL, OPNsense 20.7.1 Released, MidnightBSD 1.2.7 out, and more.
This week we’ve been spying on our children and playing games on Twitch. We discuss the Ubuntu Community Council revival, GNOMEs new versioning scheme, Geary adding encryption support, Plasma 5.20, Xfce 4.16, Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 and Microsoft Edge coming Linux. We also round up our picks from the wider tech news.
One of the most frequent questions received at Phoronix in recent times is whether the "schedutil" governor is ready for widespread use and if it can compare in performance to, well, the "performance" governor on AMD Linux systems. Here are some benchmarks of an AMD Ryzen 9 3900XT using the latest Linux 5.9 development kernel in looking at the performance differences between the CPUFreq governor options of Ondemand, Powersave, Performance, and Schedutil.
Last month Intel published a whitepaper on TDX as Trust Domain Extensions as a means of better securing virtual machines. TDX allows for isolating VMs from the hypervisor and other non-VMM system software. Intel TDX builds off other recent work around MKTME memory encryption and other features. We are now beginning to see that software side support roll-out along with the also-new Key Locker instructions.
Recent hardware enablement work on the Linux kernel is HPE bringing up UV5 support.
Succeeding the SGI UV4 support is now UV5 under the ownership of HPE. UV5 is the latest iteration of their x86_64 based supercomputer architecture.
Just yesterday, we learned that specifications for upcoming Radeon Navi GPUs had leaked. Now, a new Linux OpenGL driver stack might have given us more information, including the codename for another unannounced AMD GPU.
AMD’s Linux OpenGL driver stack (Mesa 20.03-devel) added support for a new GPU codenamed Dimgrey Cavefish. In the driver stack’s code, it isn’t clear which Navi 2x GPU is Dimgrey Cavefish, but if we cross information with the hexadecimal ranges (0x3C, 0x46) that AMD has previously provided, just like @KOMACHI_ENSAKA did, we conclude that it is the Navi 23 GPU. Doing the same with Navy Flounder hexadecimal ranges (0x32, 0x3C) suggests that Flounder is the Navi 22 GPU.
It turns out AMD is at least exploring the possibilities around using the Rust programming language in their graphics driver tooling.
AMD is hiring another 3D Driver Development Engineer but what makes this job posting of interest is they are specifically looking for a Rust developer. Yes, the increasingly popular programming language focused on memory safety and concurrency.
For a long time now, I’ve been writing about various work I’ve done in the course of getting to GL 4.6. This has generally been feature implementation work with an occasional side of bug hunting and fixing and so I haven’t been too concerned about performance.
I’m not done with feature work. There’s still tons of things missing that I’m planning to work on.
I’m not done with bug hunting or fixing. There’s still tons of bugs (like how currently spec@!opengl 1.1@streaming-texture-leak ooms my system and crashes all the other tests trying to run in parallel) that I’m going to fix.
But I wanted a break, and I wanted to learn some new parts of the graphics pipeline instead of just slapping more extensions in.
Last week, X.Org Developers Conference 2020 was held online for the first time. This year, with all the COVID-19 situation that is affecting almost every country worldwide, the X.Org Foundation Board of Directors decided to make it virtual.
I love open-source conferences :-) They are great for networking, have fun with the rest of community members, have really good technical discussions in the hallway track… and visit a new place every year! Unfortunately, we couldn’t do any of that this time and we needed to look for an alternative… being going virtual the obvious one.
The organization team at Intel, lead by Radoslaw Szwichtenberg and Martin Peres, analyzed the different open-source alternatives to organize XDC 2020 in a virtual manner. Finally, due to the setup requirements and the possibility of having more than 200 attendees connected to the video stream at the same time (Big Blue Button doesn’t recommend more than 100 simultaneous users), they selected Jitsi for speakers + Youtube for streaming/recording + IRC for questions. Arkadiusz Hiler summarized very well what they did from the A/V technical point of view and how was the experience hosting a virtual XDC.
While writing, it's essential to have a distraction-free environment. That will help the writer formulate his ideas into words.
Most of the text processor software and document editor programs are full of tools, customization options which make them distracting the writer, and they already take large portion of the screen.
Distraction-free editors are required by writers, screenwriters, novelists, researchers and journalists.
Distraction-free modes have several criteria that starts from minimal user-interface, full-screen mode, few tools in the user-interface and focus mode.
Want to check your IP address, listening ports, or local network devices but hate Linux commands? Well, What IP is a simple graphical tool to do the job.
What IP is a free open-source tool written in Python 3 with GTK+ 3 framework.
Email continues to be one of the most popular and useful functions of a Linux system. Being able to keep in touch with your friends, family, and colleagues is essential for any platform. As the scope of email threats keeps increasing, systems for email security and encryption have become more complex and more of a necessity. Protecting email from unauthorized access and inspection is important particularly because the protocols that govern email do not include encryption. Email was not designed with any privacy or security in mind. The consequence of the lack of security is that email can be compromised on the sender’s device, on a network, on a server, and on the recipient’s device.
Sending encrypted messages is one method of ensuring electronic privacy. By encrypting messages, this will help to keep your precious information safe by making messages look like garbled text to uninvited onlookers. Encrypting email may sound a little daunting, but it’s actually simple with the right software.
OpenPGP is the most widely used email encryption standard. Whether you are using an email client or a web-based email solution, you can encrypt your email with OpenPGP.
There are very few email applications that have PGP encryption enabled by default. Fortunately, there are some good open source encryption applications available for Linux that are simple to use.
Amazon Luna will give you access to certain Channels of games which you subscribe to. The first two announced are Amazon's own Luna+ to get access to a "growing" library and Ubisoft are also confirmed to have their own subscription channel coming to it too. The Luna+ subscription will have 100s of games from big names too like Resident Evil 7, Control, The Surge 2, A Plague Tale: Innocence and a great many more. By the time it launches, it's going to have quite a full library already.
Breakpoint released today and it's an absolute joy. I don't need to bury the lead on this one, as I just want to tell you how freaking-awesome it is.
What do you get when you take a bright neon twin-stick shooter, where the shooting has been taken away from you and replaced with exploding melee weapons? A whole lot of action and insane amount of fun that's what. I get a big smile on my face each time I load it up, as it's just genuine easy-going entertainment. Even the intro was brilliantly done, as it's both a tiny tutorial and a logo screen as you smash things and get shown the logos. Excellent touch.
The day no doubt many of our readers have been waiting for is here, as Valve worked with the community to create a brand new update to Left 4 Dead 2 named The Last Stand.
Made in partnership with over 30 members of the modding community, it's been a long time since Valve came back to Left 4 Dead 2 in any sizeable way which is why it's so exciting. What exactly does it include? A lot. Seriously, there's loads. Some highlights include: The Last Stand Campaign and over 20 survival maps, new melee weapons, new animations, new voice lines and so much more.
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The player count is already spiking up dramatically compared to the usual amounts. Looking on SteamDB, it took all of 15 minutes to jump another 15,000+ players on top of around that amount already online. Considering it's one of Valve's most popular games, it's not exactly surprising. This new update might even keep those counts up for some time.
Unrailed! from Indoor Astronaut and Daedalic Entertainment has now left Early Access as a finished and highly entertaining co-op experience all about keeping a train going as long as you can.
Chop trees, mine for iron and get building. Simple mechanics but it quickly becomes absolute chaos. As you progress and stop at each station for a quick breather and upgrade, the train will then set off slightly quicker than your last run. The train will catch fire, llamas will come along and drink all your water, a thief will steal your resources and so much more. Unrailed! is a game of constant movement and it really is hilarious.
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The big 1.0 release pulls in a new biome to build through, a "Kids" difficulty mode if Easy was still to difficult, an Extreme difficulty mode if you like to be punished, a new wagon to attach to your train, new characters and something that looks like another wagon but they kept it secret so you just have to find out.
GNOME, short for GNU Network Object Model Environment, was released back in 1999 as a part of the GNU Project. However, throughout its development, the acronym was dropped as it no longer resonated with the evolving GNOME vision. At the time of writing, GNOME 3 is its latest iteration and is currently one of the most popular desktop environment used by almost every major Linux distro.
It offers a modern desktop focused on delivering an intuitive user experience for all users – programmers and non-programmers alike.
In terms of functionality, new features and options are regularly getting added to GNOME with every point release. Right now, GNOME 3.38 just came out. You can check out its unique features over here.
In this Linux Desktop Environment review, we have a slightly controversial choice. Deepin, both as a distribution and as a Desktop Environment, is one that not everybody feels comfortable using and trusting. However, we’ll be setting that aside, dispelling some myths, and looking at the beautiful Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE), its user experience, some notable features, and giving some recommendations on where to experience it and who should use it.
I tagged and built 5.8.2 today, and it should be appearing on a mirror near you, momentarily.
DragonFlyBSD 5.8.2 is out today as the latest stable version of this popular BSD operating system.
Among the changes to find with DragonFlyBSD 5.8.2 are:
- DSynth now supports ccache and various other improvements.
- A few fixes for HAMMER2 and enhancing the pfs-list and pfs-delete support.
- The serial port default changed from 9600 to 115200.
In this video, we are looking at KaOS 2020.09. Enjoy!
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 10.1 was released in May 2020. Like every other GCC release, this version brought many additions, improvements, bug fixes, and new features. Fedora 32 already ships GCC 10 as the system compiler, but it’s also possible to try GCC 10 on other platforms (see godbolt.org, for example). Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) users will get GCC 10 in the Red Hat Developer Toolset (RHEL 7), or the Red Hat GCC Toolset (RHEL 8).
This article focuses on the part of the GCC compiler on which I spend most of my time: The C++ front end. My goal is to present new features that might be of interest to C++ application programmers. Note that I do not discuss developments in the C++ language itself, although some language updates overlap with compiler updates. I also do not discuss changes in the standard C++ library that comes with GCC 10.
We implemented many C++20 proposals in GCC 10. For the sake of brevity, I won’t describe them in great detail. The default dialect in GCC 10 is -std=gnu++14; to enable C++20 features, use the -std=c++20 or -std=gnu++20 command-line option. (Note that the latter option allows GNU extensions.)
Cloud-native apps stand on four pillars: containers, DevOps, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD), and microservices. Migrating a legacy, monolithic application to become cloud-native usually demands a significant refactoring effort. Sometimes a VM is better than a container, for example, with LDAP/Active Directory applications, tokenization applications, and applications requiring intensive GPU workloads. But it can get complicated when you have some cloud-native applications running on a Kubernetes platform and other applications running on non-Kubernetes platforms. What if you could run both containers and VMs on a Kubernetes platform? Wouldn't the world be beautiful?
Enter KubeVirt, an open source project distributed under an Apache 2.0 License. It was created by Red Hat engineers to enable Kubernetes to provision, manage, and control VMs alongside container resources. KubeVirt can make it easier for an enterprise to move from a VM-based infrastructure to a Kubernetes and container-based stack, one application at a time.
As a computer geek, I tend to unintentionally collect computers. Sometimes they're computers I rescue from the rubbish bin, other times they're computers people give me as payment for helping them transfer their data to their newer computer, and still other times, it's a small fleet of machines I manage for charity organizations lacking finances for a "real IT guy." I can attest that anything from two to 200 computers is too many to set up and configure manually.
This week Red Hat announced the release of OpenShift Container Storage 4.5. We invited Pete Brey, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Red Hat to deep dive into this release. One of the major highlights of this release is ‘External Mode’ that allow customer to tap into their standalone Ceph Storage platform that’s not connected to any Kubernetes cluster. It allows users to set-up a shared storage platform between different Kubernetes Clusters.
US-based enterprise open source software solution provider Red Hat Inc’s Red Hat OpenShift has been named as the most widely deployed multicloud container platform, boosting powerful development and unified operations experiences across many public and on-premises platforms.
In a statement today, Red Hat said OpenShift was evaluated by Forrester Research in The Forrester Wave: Multicloud Container Development Platforms, Q3 2020.
Ceph, the open source integrated file, block and object storage software, can support one billion objects. But can it scale to 10 billion objects and deliver good and predictable performance?
Yes, according to Russ Fellows and Mohammad Rabin of the Evaluator Group who set up a Ceph cluster lab and, by using a huge metadata cache, scaled from zero to 10 billion 64KB objects.
In their soon-to-be published white paper commissioned by Red Hat, “Massively Scalable Cloud Storage for Cloud Native Applications”, they report that setting up Ceph was complex – without actually using that word. “We found that, because of the many Ceph configuration and deployment options, it is important to consult with an experienced Ceph architect prior to deployment.”
Interning at Red Hat has been one of the most challenging summers of my life, but it's been well worth it. Being an engineering intern working on Red Hat OpenShift's GitOps workflow has forced me to grow and learn more than ever before.
My internship position on March 4th. A very short time later, COVID-19 caused companies to cancel their internships all over the United States. Thankfully, Red Hat announced that internships would go on in a virtual format.The Early Talent team made the necessary arrangements to make sure that our experience was impacted as little as possible by this change.
Jumping into the open source world can be intimidating for the uninitiated. Don’t let fear of the unknown stop you from getting involved in open source. In this blog post, we cover some of the basics you need to know before contributing your first line of code.
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Now that you understand that basic gist of open source, let’s go a little deeper.
While some open source projects are small developer tools that help you accomplish a single task, other open source projects are large, complicated pieces of software that have interconnected parts. In these larger projects, different teams or working groups focus on developing specific parts of the technology, collaborating on the technology, peer reviewing and testing the code, and contributing their changes to the core tech.
Without a doubt, Kubernetes is one of hottest open tech projects today and has been so for many years now. The reason for its durable, not-so-secret success? It’s the ability to containerize code, which frees developers from the constraint of writing code for one platform only and instead gives you the freedom of write-once, deploy-anywhere development. And why is this important? Enterprises know that the fastest route to app modernization depends on the ability to develop solutions that protect current tech investments, which likely run across multiple cloud platforms on and off premises. In other words, success depends on your ability to build solutions once and deploy them across multiple hybrid cloud platforms. Yep, containers tech delivers all of that and more.
With that baseline, I’m writing to let you know that when it comes to learning Kubernetes, the IBM Developer advocates team has you completely covered with the Build Smart on Kubernetes World Tour. Since we launched the World Tour back in the fall of 2019, the team has delivered literally hundreds of free hands-on workshops globally to teach developers about the power of Kubernetes. It’s all part of the IBM Developer Way, delivering on our sole mission to teach the world’s developers about open tech through hands-on workshops and supporting content such as blog posts, tutorials, and videos. With the recent launch of new content on the Build Smart on Kubernetes World Tour site, it feels like a good time to provide a quick virtual tour of all that the site offers. Visit the updated site to find more than just upcoming tour events, but also self-paced learning options. You can now choose whether you learn at your own pace by viewing recorded content, register for upcoming live events, or, even better, both. I’m going to review each section to show you the details.
Tomorrow, Friday September 25, 2020, Phoenix Software International, Inc., will release (E)JES V6R0, an update to its z/OS system management product. This release includes enhancements to further modernization initiatives introduced in previous releases as well as brand new features that bring the accessibility of z/OS resources and tasks to other platforms. Concurrent with this release, Phoenix Software is also launching a new online documentation library within its secure customer support portal.
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Poste Italiane Group ("Poste Italiane" or the "Group") is building an innovation platform based on Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio, including Red Hat OpenShift. The platform is intended to support more and deeper connections with ecosystem partners, provide a more seamless customer experience to the Group’s 35 million customers along with access to an extensive, timely product and services portfolio, and support Italy’s growing digital economy.
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the release of Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.5, delivering Kubernetes-based data services for modern, cloud-native applications across the open hybrid cloud. Tightly integrated with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4.5 is designed to help organizations enable a more seamless data services architecture for applications.
Raspberry Pi is a mini-computer as well as a marker board that comes with all the hardware built-in and is designed to make coding easier. You will find everything necessary, including RAM, CPU, and GPU on the boards. However, no matter how perfect Raspberry Pi looks, it isn’t capable of doing a lot of things, including running x86 apps. As a result, we need the Raspberry pi emulators to help us with the problems. One of the most amazing uses of these emulators is to play any of your favorite classic retro games using them on your Pi board.
Toradex has licensed Altium’s online Geppetto embedded board prototyping and design tool for customers using its Arm-based, Linux supported Verdin and Colibri modules.
Gumstix, which was acquired by Altium, has long been known for its Geppetto Design-to-Order (D2O) custom board design service for customizing carrier boards based its own Linux-driven modules and those of partners such as Toradex. Now Altium has announced that Toradex has licensed Geppetto for in-house use.
Congatec announced a Linux-ready “Conga-PA7” Pico-ITX SBC with Intel’s new Atom x6000E SoCs with up to 16GB LPDDR4-4267 and 512GB UFS 2.0 flash, triple 4K display support, 2x GbE with TSN and OOB, and 2x USB 3.1.
Congatec has announced an SBC and four SMARC, Qseven, COM Express compute modules based on Intel’s new Elkhart Lake Atom x6000E, Pentium, and Celeron system-on-chips. The German embedded vendor also unveiled a dozen Tiger Lake boards, joining its previously announced Conga-TC570 and Conga-HPC/cTLU Tiger Lake modules. We will cover these in separate reports and will focus here on the Pico-ITX form-factor Conga-PA7 SBC.
Earlier today, Intel announces the Elkhart Lake IoT edge processor family, and quite discreetly more 15W Tiger Lake Core i3/i5/i7 UP3 processors designed for IoT & embedded applications, and with a configurable TDP from 12W to 28W.
While taking photos today is normally a digital affair, there is a wealth of visual information stored on film negatives. Digitization is possible, but it tends to be rather time-intensive, so photographer/hacker Seckin Sinan Isik decided to automate the process.
His setup uses a film carrier augmented with a stepper motor and belt drive to advance the 35mm film under a tripod-mounted digital camera. This is controlled by an Arduino Nano, with the camera’s view shown via a video capture device on a nearby computer.
Learning a new language is always a challenge, but can also be extremely rewarding. To help with this task — specifically learning Greek — Angeliki Beyko created an arcade-style review machine. Her device cleverly uses a sheet of pegboard to hold the electronics, including seven LCD screens to indicate category, level, and the actual Greek word being reviewed.
Possible answers are shown as pictures on four TFT displays, driven by four separate Arduino Uno boards that pull up pictures stored on SD cards. An Arduino Mega provides overall control for the interactive panel.
At the time of that blog post, the book was already at 13,000 words and 115 written subsections. I still had that naive hope that I would have it nearly “complete” by the summer of 2016. Always the optimist.
Today, the book is at over 72,000 words with content in 600 subsections – with just 21 subtitles noted “TBD” to signal that there’s still content to add there. The PDF version of it now clocks in at over 400 pages.
I’ve come to realize and accept that it will never be “complete” and that we will just keep on working on it indefinitely since curl itself keeps changing and we keep improving and expanding texts in the book.
The latest version of Firefox Reality for standalone VR headsets brings a host of long-awaited features we're excited to reveal, as well as improved stability and performance.
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Look for Firefox Reality 12 available now in the HTC, Pico and Oculus stores. This feature-packed release of Firefox Reality will be the last major feature release for a while as we gear up for a deeper investment in Hubs. But not to worry! Firefox Reality will still be well supported and maintained on your favorite standalone VR platform.
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group today announced the release of PostgreSQL 13, the latest version of the world’s most advanced open source database.
PostgreSQL 13 includes significant improvements to its indexing and lookup system that benefit large databases, including space savings and performance gains for indexes, faster response times for queries that use aggregates or partitions, better query planning when using enhanced statistics, and more.
Along with highly requested features like parallelized vacuuming and incremental sorting, PostgreSQL 13 provides a better data management experience for workloads big and small, with optimizations for daily administration, more conveniences for application developers, and security enhancements.
Version 13 of the PostgreSQL database management system is out. "PostgreSQL 13 includes significant improvements to its indexing and lookup system that benefit large databases, including space savings and performance gains for indexes, faster response times for queries that use aggregates or partitions, better query planning when using enhanced statistics, and more. Along with highly requested features like parallelized vacuuming and incremental sorting, PostgreSQL 13 provides a better data management experience for workloads big and small, with optimizations for daily administration, more conveniences for application developers, and security enhancements."
PostgreSQL 13.0 is out this morning as the latest major update to this widely-used relational database server.
There are many improvements to find with PostgreSQL 13.0 from better performance to helpful additions for database administrators. Among the PostgreSQL 13 highlights are:
- Larger databases will find improvements to its indexing and lookup performance for indexes, faster response times for some queries, space savings, better query planning, and more.
While this progress in shortened documentation development time is fairly good, it can be substantially improved by having more contributors on the team.
It would be terrific if all contributors were a skilled technical writers, but in reality anyone with a reasonable command of the English language and an eye for detail can make a valuable contribution. No contributor is expected to rewrite entire guide books, although some of our most experienced, long term contributors do exactly that. In fact nothing is expected or demanded of any contributor, other than to let other members of the team know what they what they have chosen to work on. In some cases that might be to update a chapter of an existing guide, or reviewing the work of another team member. Reviewing can take the form of proof reading, or researching the accuracy of the guide information in relation to the software’s actual operation. By identifying yourself as a Docs Team contributor does not mean you are making any permanent or long term commitment, many contributors come and go over long periods according to the demands of their “real” life.
We are pleased to announce beta release 2.69c of GNU Autoconf.
This release includes two months of bug fixes since the previous beta, 2.68b, and eight years of development work since the previous full release, 2.69. See below for the list of significant changes since the previous beta. See the NEWS file for a complete list of significant changes since 2.69.
We tentatively plan to make the final release of Autoconf 2.70 at the end of October 2020. Please test this beta with your autoconf scripts, and report any problems you find to the Savannah bug tracker:
https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?func=additem&group=autoconf
Please also send general comments and feedback to <autoconf@gnu.org>.
Please also spread this announcement widely, so that as many Autoconf users as possible hear about it.
Here are the compressed sources: https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.69c.tar.gz (2.0MB) https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.69c.tar.xz (1.3MB)
Here are the GPG detached signatures[*]: https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.69c.tar.gz.sig https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.69c.tar.xz.sig
Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth: https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
[*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:
gpg --verify autoconf-2.69c.tar.gz.sig
If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then run this command to import it:
gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 384F8E68AC65B0D5
and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.
This release was bootstrapped with the following tools: Automake 1.16.2
Noteworthy changes and bug fixes since the previous beta (2.69b):
* A performance regression in AC_PROG_CXX has been corrected. See https://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?110285 for details.
* AC_PROG_YACC has been reverted to using ‘bison -y’. After 2.70, we will instead add an AC_PROG_BISON macro for programs that require Bison extensions. See https://savannah.gnu.org/support/index.php?110266 for details.
* AC_PROG_LEX no longer looks for a library providing the function ‘yywrap’. LEXLIB will only be set to ‘-lfl’ or ‘-ll’ if a scanner that defines both ‘main’ and ‘yywrap’ itself still needs something else from that library.
Packages should define yywrap themselves, or use %noyywrap.
* When ‘$CC -E’ doesn’t run the C preprocessor, AC_PROG_CPP now looks in $PATH for ‘cpp’ before falling back to ‘/lib/cpp’.
* AC_TYPE_PID_T now gives pid_t the correct definition on 64-bit native Microsoft Windows.
* AC_INIT now trims extra white space from its arguments. For instance,
AC_INIT([ GNU Hello ], [1.0])
will set PACKAGE_NAME to “GNU Hello”.
* autoreconf will now run gtkdocize and intltoolize when appropriate.
* autoreconf now avoids complaints from subsidiary tools about unknown warning categories. For example, ‘autoreconf -Wcross’ will no longer cause complaints from (current released versions of) aclocal and automake.
* Generated configure scripts no longer fail catastrophically when stdin, stdout, or stderr is closed on startup.
* Many bugs related to building Autoconf itself have been corrected. These mostly affected non-GNU operating systems and situations where optional tools are not available.
* The obsolete macros AC_DIAGNOSE, AC_FATAL, AC_WARNING, and _AC_COMPUTE_INT are now replaced with modern equivalents by autoupdate.
* The macro AC_OBSOLETE is obsolete. Autoupdate will replace it with m4_warn([obsolete], [explanation]). If possible, macros using AC_OBSOLETE should be converted to use AU_DEFUN or AU_ALIAS instead, which enables autoupdate to replace them, but this has to be done by hand and is not always possible.
* AC_FC_LINE_LENGTH now documents the maximum portable length of "unlimited" Fortran source code lines to be 250 columns, not 254.
* Warnings about obsolete constructs are now on by default. They can be turned off with '-Wno-obsolete'.
* autoconf will now issue warnings (in the ‘syntax’ category) if the input file is missing a call to AC_INIT and/or AC_OUTPUT.
* AC_INIT will now issue warnings (in the “syntax” category) for a non-literal URL argument, and for a TARNAME argument which is either non-literal or contains characters that should not be used in file names (e.g. ‘*’).
It was just a few days ago that Arm outlined the Neoverse N2 "Perseus" design as a follow-on to the Neoverse N1 and coming concurrently to the next-generation Cortex-A. Now the company has already jumped on beginning their open-source/Linux enablement work around the Neoverse N2.
There haven't been any Neoverse N2 additions yet to LLVM/Clang or GCC as the most interesting aspects where it would reveal any new instruction set extensions / capabilities not yet formally announced by Arm (there also isn't any patches out under review on that front either), but a patch out this morning adds Neoverse N2 support to the GNU Assembler (Gas).
In this episode, we worked on a new view to display course resources. While building out the template, I used some template tags to dynamically regroup a queryset into a more useful data format for rendering.
I started a new view before the stream to display content, but I had not filled it in before the stream started.
We added new data to the context, and did some adjustments to the URL based on the required inputs for the view.
Once I had the data, I quickly iterated in the template to see the parts that I included. I needed to display the course resources in a different way from how the queryset provided them so I used the built-in regroup template tag to organize the data differently. regroup saved me from doing a bunch of manipulation in the view code.
virtualenv is a tool that builds virtual environments for Python. It was first created in September 2007 and just went through a rewrite from scratch. Did you ever want to know what parts virtual environments can be broken down into? Or how they work? And how does virtualenv differ from the Python builtin venv? This is the webinar you want.
This is the sixth maintenance release of Python 3.8
The Python 3.8 series is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations.
Python 3.8.6 is the sixth maintenance release of Python 3.8.
Facial detection is a powerful and common use-case of Machine Learning. It can be used to automatize manual tasks such as school attendance and law enforcement. In the other hand, it can be used for biometric authorization.
In this article, we'll perform facial detection in Python, using OpenCV.
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With OpenCV installed, we can import it as cv2 in our code.
To read an image in, we will use the imread() function, along with the path to the image we want to process. The imread() function simply loads the image from the specified file in an ndarray. If the image could not be read, for example in case of a missing file or an unsupported format, the function will return None.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to send emails with CSV attachments using Python.
Pre-Requirements
I am assuming you already have an SMTP server setup if not you can use the Gmail SMTP or Maligun or anything similar to that.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to send emails with zip files using Python’s built-in modules.
Pre-Requirements
I am assuming that you already have an SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol ) server setup if not you can use Gmail SMTP or something like mailgun. A simple google search will land you on multiple ways to get free SMTP servers.
If data science is going to remain a main-stream in the next 5 years, it needs to add value not only in terms of proof of concept (as it is doing now) but also in terms of production (as it is failing in over 70% of cases, as Gartner recently surveyed). While R is an absolute winner in terms of classical pattern recognition libraries and statistical methods, python has a better ability to write production-ready codes.
Above point raises another important point, that is best practices of software engineering (e.g., uml architecture designs, unit testing, coding review, scrum) are going to be absolute requirements in near future for data scientists, in addition to the expected knowledge in machine learning and statistics. The reason is that proper software, production ready, codes require proper architecture design, with proper reviews and testing.
This is part of a series of essays about working with SD files at the record and simple text level. In the last two essays I showed examples of using chemfp to process SDF records and to read two record data items. In this essay I'll introduce chemfp's chemistry toolkit I/O API, which I developed to have a consistent way to handle structure input and output when working with the OEChem, RDKit, and Open Babel toolkits.
Ever wondered what you could learn from a code review?
Recently CodingNomads invited me on their Tech Talk series. CodingNomads does online code camps for Python and Java.
The Tech Talks are a series of videos that teach or talk about tech. In my case, I got to talk about my favorite programming language, Python!
Although not due to arrive until March 2021, Java Development Kit (JDK) 16 has begun to take shape, with proposed features including concurrent thread-stack processing for garbage collection, support for C++ 14 language features, and an “elastic metaspace” capability to more quickly return unused class metadata memory to the OS.
JDK 16 will be the reference implementation of the version of standard Java set to follow JDK 15, which arrived September 15. The six-month release cadence for standard Java would have JDK 16 arriving next March.
Web developers resent having to deal with Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari, which they cite among their top three pain points, alongside layout and styling inconsistencies among browsers.
This finding comes from the Mozilla Developer Network's 2020 Browser Compatibility Report [PDF], a survey of web development concerns culled from 1,429 responses out of 3,236 – the remainder having been tossed for invalid or missing data.
The purpose of the report is to alert the browser vendors to problems so they can be addressed.
The Linux Foundation has announced the development of a new entry-level certification exam to complement their existing Linux Foundation Certified Sysadmin (LFCS) and Linux Foundation Certified Engineer (LFCE) exams. This new certification, the Linux Foundation Certified IT Associate (LFCA), targets people just moving into systems administration.
The Linux Foundation goes into many examples, but I'm going to focus on telecommunications and networking since it's a field I know well.
What do some of the world’s largest, most regulated, complex, centuries-old industries such as banking, telecommunications, and energy have in common with rapid development, bleeding-edge innovative, creative industries such as the motion pictures industry? They’re all dependent on open source software. That would be a great answer and correct, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. A complete answer is these industries not only depend on open source, but they’re building open source into the fabric of their R&D and development models. They are all dependent on the speed of innovation that collaborating in open source enables.
The kernel support for Nitro Enclaves landed this week in char-misc-next ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle kicking off next month.
Nitro Enclaves is a capability of Amazon AWS' EC2 cloud for protecting highly sensitive data. Nitro Enclaves provide additional isolation and security by punting the sensitive work/data off to an isolated virtual machine without persistent storage access and other reductions to possible attack surfaces while also providing cryptographic attestation for ensuring only trusted/authorized code is running.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (firefox, libproxy, mbedtls, samba, and zeromq), openSUSE (chromium and virtualbox), Red Hat (firefox and kernel), SUSE (cifs-utils, conmon, fuse-overlayfs, libcontainers-common, podman, libcdio, python-pip, samba, and wavpack), and Ubuntu (rdflib).
A group of aging environmentalists is out with an Open Letter telling people: Don’t vote for the Green Party. As the aging environmentalist who is the Green Party candidate for president, let me respond.
The role of the environmental movement should be to make its demands on every candidate, not make compromises to provide cover for a candidate like Biden with a feeble environmental record and platform. By settling for Biden without making any demands or getting any commitments, they have given away their power. As President, Biden will ignore them because they settled for nothing.
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It was Black voter suppression and the Electoral College that put the popular vote losers Bush and Trump in the White House, not the Green Party.
Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris, co-chair of George W. Bush’s Florida campaign, suppressed tens of thousands of Black voters and ballots in Florida in 2000 through voter roll purges and disqualified ballots. Black people who were able to vote in Florida went 93% for Gore. The “official” victory for Bush was 537 votes. Republican voter suppression in that election should be a notorious national embarrassment. Instead of fighting the Republicans for stealing that election, the Democrats have spent 20 years blaming Ralph Nader and the Green Party for “spoiling” it. That narrative hides how the election was stolen by the Republicans. It demonizes Nader and the Greens for exercising their First Amendment rights of free speech, assembly, and petition to run against the two-party system of corporate rule.
It was Jill Stein of the Green Party, not the Democratic Party, who went to court in 2016 to get over 75,000 uncounted ballots from mostly Black and likely Clinton voters in Detroit counted. Trump won Michigan’s electoral votes and the presidency by 10,704 votes in Michigan. The judge ruled that Stein had no standing because she could not win the election if those ballots were counted. Clinton did have that standing and her lawyers were present at the hearing, but they refused to agree to a count of those votes (Greg Palast, How Trump Stole 2020, p. 122). Yet Democrats blame the Greens for Trump.
In this case, the E.D. Tex. jury came back with a win for the defendant — finding that HP did not infringe Network-1’s US6218930 and that the patent was invalid. Post-Verdict, the district court flipped on validity — holding that HP was estopped from raising its obviousness challenge because it had joined an (unsuccessful) IPR against the patent.
