In this video, I am going to show an overview of Lubuntu 20.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
A little while ago I looked at bspwm receptacles which provided one way to do manual tiling and today we're looking at another option in the form of bspwm preselections which let you turn bspwm into a manual tiler if you you really want to.
Thank you to everyone who joined us LIVE to celebrate 200 Episodes of Destination Linux! We had an absolute blast during Game Fest and can’t wait to do another event in the near future! Thank you to everyone for helping us get to 200 episodes of the best darn Linux show on the planet. This week we have an interview with a representative from Tutanota, an open-source end-to-end encrypted email software and service. Then of course we have our popular tips/tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux.
Unfettered Freedom is a video podcast that focuses on news and topics about GNU/Linux, free software and open source software.
Mike buys a laptop live on air while Chris worries about the turkey.
thanksgiving, ardor, odin, ready player two
In our conversation about The Future of Stuff with its author Vinay Gupta, we discuss the founding role of Free Software in the digital world. We'll also talk about the need to list and protect human rights that were barely imaginable in the old physical world—and the radical ways we might make that happen. Vinay is the founder of Mattereum, a London-based fintech company using legally-enforceable smart contracts to enable the sale, lease, and transfer of physical property and other legal rights. He is a technologist and policy analyst interested in how specific technologies can close or create new avenues for decision-makers. This interest has taken him through cryptography, energy policy, defense, security, resilience, and disaster management arenas. He is perhaps best known for his work on the Hexayurt Project, a public domain disaster relief shelter designed to be built from commonly-available materials, and Ethereum, a distributed network designed to handle smart contracts.
Tuxera, a world-leader in quality-assured storage management and networking software, announced that the company's SMB server implementation, Fusion File Share by Tuxera, now offers transparent compression to platforms outside of Microsoft Windows. Compression is being rapidly and widely adopted in the storage industry as a feature in memory hardware, file system implementations, and also networking protocols such as Microsoft's server messaging block technology (SMB). The ability to compress files inline during transfer can significantly reduce bandwidth and transfer time. Microsoft released the transparent compression feature to their SMB protocol specification in early 2019. However, Tuxera is the first to implement SMB compression outside of Microsoft Windows, bringing this highly in-demand feature to Linux environments in enterprises around the world.
With Wake-on-LAN (WoL) it can be slightly easier to manage machines in-house. You can fire up the workstation and start the day’s compile jobs (to catch up with overnight work by the KDE community, say) while drinking an espresso downstairs and doomscrolling.
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If all the administrative bits are in place, then the simple way to wake up a machine is wake <hostname>. This requires root, since it sends specially-crafted (broadcast) Ethernet packets, which isn’t something that regular users can do.
Thanks to work by AMD and SUSE engineers, the Linux kernel could soon be seeing frequency invariance support for EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors for yielding greater performance and power efficiency.
Over the past year we have seen a lot of Linux kernel work for dealing with frequency invariance but to now that on the x86 side has been focused on Intel Xeon processors. Now through the cooperation of AMD with patches led by SUSE, frequency invariance is being worked on for the EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors.
This week marked the release of Vulkan 1.2.162 with the ray-tracing extensions now finalized. As such Intel's stellar open-source team has begun landing their work around Vulkan ray-tracing ahead of the Xe HPG hardware availability that will support this functionality.
Back in October I wrote about Intel preparing their open-source driver support for Vulkan ray-tracing ahead of Xe HPG and now with the updated Vulkan spec out there they are able to push more of their work.
Last week a new vulnerability was made public for IBM POWER9 processors resulting in a mitigation of the processor's L1 data cache needing to be flushed between privilege boundaries. Due to the possibility of local users being able to obtain data from the L1 cache improperly when this CVE is paired with other side channels, the Linux kernel for POWER9 hardware is flushing the L1d on entering the kernel and on user accesses. Here are some preliminary benchmarks looking at how this security change impacts the overall system performance.
All the latest Linux kernel stable series are now patched with the new POWER9 behavior for the L1 data cache flushing when crossing privilege boundaries. As outlined already, that L1d flushing behavior is the default but can be disabled with new "no_entry_flush" and "no_uaccess_flush" kernel options to maintain the prior behavior of not flushing.
The first update for qBittorrent 4.3 series was released today with some new features, bug-fixes, and web UI changes.
The fourth major release in 2020 is here to further improve the user experience, adding powerful new booleans, better cloth sculpting with support for collisions, volume objects modifiers, outline, improved animation tools and so much more.
Blender 2.91 is the project's fourth and last major release of 2021 with a focus on enhancing the user experience and usability of this cross-platform, open-source 3D modeling software. There are also improvements to new tooling around cloth sculpting, animation enhancements, continued fine-tuning to the grease pencil, and much more.
Highlights of Blender 2.91 include better cloth sculpting with collision support for the Sculpt Cloth brush and filter, a new Sculpt Trim tool for cutting and adding geometry using box or lasso gestures, new Simulation Target property for simulating cloth effects, and new Boundary brush for controlling the shape of mesh boundaries.
To improve modeling, a new Exact solver is included in this release to handle complex geometry, along with better Intersect Knife and Intersect Boolean, the ability to use a collection as boolean, new options for the Subdivision Surface modifier, better loop select tools in UV Editor, as well as Split Viewport and Render Resolution in Ocean Modifier.
Debian 10 sits at Linux kernel 4.19. While this kernel version isn’t exactly the oldest release ever, it’s undoubtedly out of date. However, it is possible to install more modern versions of the kernel.
Today we are looking at how to install Reaper on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Reaper is a very powerful tool for audio editing, but it is difficult to learn, so please use their startup guide. You can also use it as a voice-changer, for discord, etc.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Lyrebird on Linux Mint 20, which is a voice changer for Discord.
Thonny is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Python beginners. It is created with Python and released under MIT License. It is cross-platform and can run in Linux, macOS, Windows.
This article is a quick guide on how to install git on different Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc.
Git is an open-source, cross-platform version control system. It is used to track and maintain changes for a set of files. The tool is mainly popular with programmers for their projects. However, the tool can also be used for any sort of scenario that requires changes to files from time to time.
Git was developed by Linus Torvalds in 2005 to manage the Linux kernel development.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Redis on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Redis is an open-source in-memory key-value data store. It can be used as a database, cache and, message broker, and supports various data structures such as Strings, Hashes, Lists, Sets, and more. Redis provides high availability via Redis Sentinel and automatic partitioning across multiple Redis nodes with Redis Cluster.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of Redis on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
YouTube is one of the websites with the most videos on the internet (as of writing this post, it is number one on the list). For some reason, you might need to download some videos to watch later while offline. Situations like following a tutorial playlist about a project or listening to your favorite songs while offline requires you to download some of these videos.
Whatever your reason might be, we will show you how you can download YouTube Videos on a Linux system. We will guide you through both the graphical (GUI) and the command-line way. Let’s dive in!
Minecraft Bedrock Edition works on Linux with the help of the Minecraft Bedrock Launcher for Linux. It is an unofficial app that makes the game work on Linux with the Minecraft Android APK.
Redis is open source software used as a database and cache that sits in memory, allowing for exceptional performance. When you're ready to give this lightning fast program a try, the developers recommend installing Redis on a Linux system, and what better candidate than Ubuntu Linux?
In this tutorial, we'll guide you through the step by step instructions of installing Redis (both server and client) on Ubuntu. Then, we'll verify that it's connectable and configure the UFW firewall to allow incoming connections.
This is guide, how to install NVIDIA proprietary drivers on Fedora 33 with Hybrid Switchable Graphics [Intel + Nvidia GeForce]
Get your wallets ready and your votes as two big events are happening and live now on Steam with both the Steam Autumn Sale and the 2020 Steam Award Nominations.
Firstly, let's talk about the Steam Awards. This is the fifth annual event, where users all across Steam can vote for their favourite games across different categories. The final voting will take place in December, with nominations running until December 1 at 5PM UTC.
4A Games have confirmed in an official 10th anniversary update post today that Metro Exodus is still going to release for Linux and macOS as well.
They gave a small overview in the post about what's been going on like celebrating the first release of Metro 2033 which arrived back in March 2010. Not only that, they recently got acquired by Embracer Group who also control Koch Media, Saber Interactive, THQ Nordic and others. Specifically, 4A Games are now an independently run subsidiary of Saber Interactive.
While Metro Exodus can run on Linux right now via Steam Play, 4A Games is still working on a port of this popular game to Linux and Mac systems.
Following the reliable ports of Metro 2033 and Metro Redux to Linux, we've been looking forward to the native Linux port of Metro Exodus since at least the earlier versions have been benchmark-friendly for our needs following the Linux port (complete with CLI switches, unlike the Windows version at least at the time).
The Godot Game Engine has been funding work on a GPU-based texture compressor to deal with the issue that importing textures to this leading open-source game engine can often be painfully slow.
Betsy is the open-source project being worked on for the Godot Engine. Betsy implements BC6, ETC1, ETC2, and EAC algorithms among others using GLSL compute shaders. This compressor is implemented as GLSL compute shaders so the work can be offloaded to the graphics processor either via OpenGL or Vulkan usage as well.
My name is Matias N. Goldberg, I normally maintain the 2.x branch of Ogre aka ogre-next and I wrote Betsy, a GPU texture compressor that runs on GPUs.
This work was commissioned by Godot Engine through the Software Freedom Conservancy to solve a major complaint: importing textures is excruciantly slow and takes many minutes.
Certain compression algorithms such as BC1-5 are quite simple and there are already fast high quality compression algorithms.
However algorithms such as BC6, ETC1, ETC2 and EAC are currently taking the majority of time and thus considerably attention were given to these.
Nonetheless Betsy implemented compute-shader versions for BC1,3,4,5,6, ETC1,2 and EAC algorithms.
Betsy works as a standard Command Line tool which means it can be used like any other exe tool outside of Godot.
Coming two months after the first point release, GNOME 3.38.2 is here with better support for the GNOME OS project that lets developers and user test drive upcoming features of the popular desktop environment.
This support was implemented in the GNOME Boxes software, which now comes with up-to-date download URLs for GNOME OS, the ability to install GNOME OS under the osinfo custom database, as well as updated recommended downloads for the latest Linux distro releases and improved handling of file extensions.
The Seattle GNU/Linux Conference took place online this year and we were there. Executive Director Neil McGovern gave a presentation titled “Patently Obvious” about our legal case with a patent assertion entity and how the settlement impacts all of FOSS.
Strategic Initiatives Manager M. de Blanc gave a surprise talk that had nothing to do with GNOME, but discussed the Foundation nonetheless.
We also had talks at Linux Application Summit and GNOME.Asia, which you can read more about below.
Last month, we released Debian Buster with Kodi v18.8. While this version had the majority of fixes backported from Kodi v18.9 which was still in progress, we've decided to issue a final release of the Kodi Leia series in the form of an 18.9 point release.
Our focus will now be on enabling OSMC support for Kodi v19 (codename Matrix) which is now in beta release. This new version of Kodi will bring a significant number of improvements. However -- it should be noted that this new Kodi release will also introduce some caveats, and this is why we've chosen to polish the Kodi v18.x series of OSMC as much as possible, particularly as some users may need to stay on this version if there device is no longer supported or their add-ons do not work with the new version.
Kodi Matrix upgrades its Python implementation from Python 2.x to Python 3.x. While the majority of add-ons have already been updated to support this new version, you may find that some add-ons do not work. Furthermore, Raspberry Pi 0, 1 and Vero 2 will no longer be supported, meaning that this release will be the final supported version for these devices.
Based on the latest MX Linux 19.3 “Patito Feo” release, AV Linux MX Edition is here about six months after the last update to the project with many new and updated tools for audio production and musicians. The distro is still based on Debian GNU/Linux, but not derived from it anymore, but instead from MX Linux.
This means that AV Linux now inherits many of MX Linux’s goodies, including the fact that it doesn’t ship with the systemd init system by default. Of course, it also includes the many great tools and utilities of MX Linux.
After more than six months of development, the creator and maintainer of AV Linux Glen MacArthur released a new version 2020.11.23.
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Being a first build based on MX Linux, AVL-MXE comes in two separate editions for the x86_64 platform with Xfce desktop, Linux Kernel 5.9.1-rt20, and i386 platform with (Xfce plus) Openbox window manager, Kernel 5.9.1-rt19.
Unlike the MX approach to provide trusted third-party repositories for software packages, AVL-MXE provides carefully selected repositories that are specifically created for users of Debian GNU/Linux.
If you are into systems management, you most likely have heard about Cockpit at some point. In a nutshell, it offers a good looking web-based interface to perform system tasks like inspecting the logs, applying system updates, configuring the network, managing services, and so on. If you want to give it a try, you can install Cockpit in openSUSE Tumbleweed just by typing zypper in cockpit.
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Cockpit already features a nice module to configure the network so you might be wondering why not extending the original instead of creating a new one. The module shipped with Cockpit is specific to NetworkManager and adapting it to a different backend can be hard.
In our case, we are trying to build something that could be adapted in the future to support more backends, but we are not sure how realistic this idea is.
Well, I suppose after all this talk of how to find your story and then write your story, I should make a post about how to do just that. I've broken it down into three sections: how to find your story, how to write your story, and how to share it and get it published.
During the All Things Open virtual event this year, I was invited to share my tips, and now you can watch that. It's about 20 minutes with some questions and commentary at the end.
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First, decide whether you want to self-publish, on your own blog or a place like Medium, or if you want to get your article published on a publication like Opensource.com or Linux Today.
If you're reaching out to a publication, try to find information about how they would like you to submit your article. Some have webforms, some want you to simply send them an email. Some, like us, have both. Let them know who you are, what you wrote about, and perhaps why you wrote about it.
For example: My name is Jen Wike Huger. I'm a community manager and editor for Opensource.com, so my expertise is writing and working with authors. My article is about how to find your story, writing, and getting published.
Deploying critical PostgreSQL applications in the cloud requires both consistent performance and resilience to protect essential data for business continuity. Together, technologies from Crunchy Data and Red Hat can help enable organizations to deliver data resilience for critical PostgreSQL applications.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage plays an increasingly important role, letting organizations deploy reliable, scalable, and highly available persistent storage for their most important PostgreSQL applications. This single software-defined storage solution can be launched on premise, in the public cloud, or in hybrid cloud deployments—increasing agility and resilience even as it simplifies operations.
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.8.1 is generally available as of November 23, 2020.
Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
Docker Inc. CEO Scott Johnston says this alliance with Canonical extends a verified publisher initiative that already spans 200 organizations. There are now 160 Docker Official Images available via Docker Hub, which is accessed by more than 11 million active developers, according to the company. On average, Johnston notes there are more than 13+ billion pulls per month from 7.9 million application repositories that reside within the Docker Hub container registry.
Docker Hub container registry is at the core of the ongoing effort to recast Docker Inc. as a provider of tools that optimize workflows for developers building container applications. Currently it is the largest public container registry employed; however, there are now several alternatives to Docker Hub that cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) are positioning as platforms that have no rate limitations. Those alternatives, however, will only make it more complicated for developers to employ container images across multiple platforms, notes Johnston.
Just yesterday Raspberry Pi fans were celebrating that the V3DV driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for supporting this modern high performance graphics/compute API atop the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer. Today another milestone was reached with V3DV.
The V3DV Vulkan driver for supporting the Broadcom VideoCore graphics hardware on the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer now works natively on Wayland too.
Clockwork is pre-selling an $219 to $249, open-spec “DevTerm” retro AiO PC kit with a Raspberry Pi CM3+, a keyboard with gamepad, a 6.8-inch IPS screen, a thermal printer, and a battery holder. Future options will include RK3399 and Allwinner H6 models.
Clockwork’s open source DevTerm Kit runs Linux on a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ Lite (CM3+ Lite) housed inside a keyboard chassis. Unlike the Raspberry Pi 4-like, keyboard form-factor Raspberry Pi 400, the fully hackable, retro-game oriented DevTerm boasts an integrated display and even a thermal printer.
After the launch of ClockworkPi GameShell in Q4 2018, now ClockworkPi has come with yet another exciting product. DevTerm is a portable computer that comes with a 6.8-inch IPS screen, a keyboard with 67 keys, and a battery module, all connected to ClockworkPi v3.14 carrier board and a choice of core modules. It will also come with an optional built-in thermal printer.
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It has integrated 5GHz WIFI (802.11ac) and Bluetooth 5.0 which makes it suitable for wireless communication applications as well. A high-gain antenna (HGA) increases the signal strength and provides a more precise way of targeting radio signals. This is very essential for long-range wireless networks. Other specifications include a Micro-HDMI interface, 3.5 headphone jack with a microphone input.
As mentioned above, you have the option to choose a suitable core. Some of them include the A-04 series Arm 64-bit quad-core Cortex-A53 (likely Allwinner H6) coupled with 1/2 GB LPDDR3, A-06 series Arm 64-bit dual-core Cortex-A72 + quad-core Cortex-A53 (Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor) plus 2/4GB LPDDR3. To break it down, the A-04 series and RPI-CM3 are suitable for general purpose applications including writing, coding, e-mails, making indie-games, running most video game emulators, etc. While the A-06 series will provide you with a better solution for high performance, such as for AI/algorithm development and rapid prototyping of embedded devices.
Dubbed Tamandua, the November 2020 release of Armbian Linux is here and it comes about three months after the previous version, Armbian 20.08. The biggest news is the fact that most supported kernels (except for sunxi and mvebu) have been updated to the latest and greatest Linux 5.9 kernel series.
On top of that, this new major release updates the U-Boot open-source boot loader for embedded devices to version 2020.10, which requires users to manually update it on their installations using the armbian-config tool.
While the processor was introduced in 2017, there are only a few Allwinner H6 SBC’s on the market with, for instance, Orange Pi 3 or Pine H64 boards, and it never became as popular as solutions based Allwinner H3 processor.
But Boardcon has now launched its own Allwinner H6 SBC targeting professionals with Boardcon EMH6 board combining a carrier board and a computer-on-module that can be integrated into products.
Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), an open source project developing a shared software platform for in-vehicle technology, today announced the latest code release of the AGL platform, UCB 10, also known under the codename "Jumping Jellyfish."
Developed through a joint effort by dozens of member companies, the AGL Unified Code Base (UCB) is an open source software platform that can serve as the de facto industry standard for infotainment, telematics and instrument cluster applications.
In an effort to help provide paralyzed patients with an easier way to operate their wheelchairs, these makers have developed a system that uses an OpenBCI brainwave cap to collect electroencephalogram (EEG) and electromyography (EMG) signals, literally from a user’s head. Data is then sent to a PC running OpenBCI software and passed along to an Arduino Uno via Bluetooth for control.
Looking inside the rugged case reveals a Raspberry Pi 3 that provides computing power along with an Arduino Leonardo for a custom joystick input device.
The lawn game of cornhole has seen a surge in popularity over the last couple of decades. But if you’ve ever thought about raising its cool factor, then YouTuber Hardware Unknown has just what you’ve been waiting for: light and audio effects that react to your throws.
Hardware Unknown’s foldable boards each feature an Arduino Nano for control. A vibration sensor is used to tell when a bean bag hits the board, and an IR break-beam setup senses when one goes into the hole.
The PinePhone is designed to make distro hopping easy. Whether you order a model that comes with Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, Manjaro, or KDE Neon pre-installed, the phone is designed to boot first from any properly prepared microSD card.
That means you can install an alternate OS on a card, insert it, and turn on the phone to try a different operating system. If you like it, you can use JumpDrive to install it to the phone’s built-in eMMC storage, which should bring at least a modest boost in speed.
Just want to try out a bunch of different operating systems without committing to one or constantly flashing microSD cards? That’s where Megi’s multi-distro demo image comes in. The developer offers a single image with a bunch of different operating systems pre-installed.
Megi released a new version of November 23, 2020 and it has 17 different operating systems crammed into a 6GB disk image.
In Imagine a world without apps Shira Ovide asks “a wild question: What if we played games, shopped, watched Netflix and read news on our smartphones — without using apps? Our smartphones, like our computers, would instead mostly be gateways to go online through a web browser.”
This question can be extrapolated into a larger question: “What do we want from our technology?”
The power of control by Big-Tech in the app store is but a small example of exploitation of our digital lives. If you don’t control the software, the companies who wrote that software control you. You become a digital prisoner.
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The ability to encrypt your personal data with your own keys on your own device ensures that you fully control your digital life. With this as the starting point, you can then choose (aka opt-in) to share what you want with the people you want. This right is rooted in personal property rights, and is one of the most egregious abuses by Big Tech and those that have influence over them. If manufacturers, operating system developers, and software developers took a Hippocratic-like oath, one area society would agree on is the right that your personal data is your personal property and something you must retain control over and consent to share before it leaves your possession.
Without regulatory assistance to protect personal data, society is left to fend for itself against the pressure from a multi-trillion dollar industry to exploit that personal data. There is no way to resist that pressure without the market creating convenient alternatives that honor that right while completely avoiding Big Tech. Purism creates products that are increasing in convenience daily, that fully protect you, and these products are the market answer to the worst abuses of Big Tech companies.
LTO-PGO is still working great in Firefox 83, which expands in-browser PDF support, adds additional features to Picture-in-Picture (which is still one of my favourite tools in Firefox) and some miscellany developer changes. The exact same process, configs and patches to build a fully link-time and profile-guided optimized build work that was used in Firefox 82.
A headless CMS (content management system) is a backend system which works the content available through API (RESTful API or GraphQL). It's built to give the developers the possibilities to create what they want.
The API-driven headless approach is trending right now especially for enterprise users and developers.
Headless CMS programs can be used as a backend for mobile apps, static generated websites with frameworks like Next, Nuxt, Gridsome and Hugo which also supports server-side rendering. They can be also used to manage IoT (Internet of Things) applications.
Unlike the majority of content management systems (CMSs) which have built-in embedded comments functionalities (like WordPress), many systems don't have comments by default, especially the newly trending static generators.
As example this blog is powered by Ghost which is an open-source blogging system that comes with many functions and options except comments, also it does not have a plugin system to extend it with comments plugin. So, we are forced like many other users to find external options which was Disqus.
2020 is a year to remember. While many may remember the pandemic, there have nevertheless been many positive changes in terms of Free Software in recent months. In fact, a lot has changed. You can now read in one document how busy our movement was in our annual report Software Freedom in Europe 2020.
The EU and the WHO followed our arguments that publicly funded Corona-related contact tracing apps should be published only under a Free Software license. Several cities, including Munich, promised to rely more on Free Software in the future. We convinced publicly funded hackathons to publish their results as Free Software, and the largest conservative party in Europe, the German CDU, resolved to join the FSFE in demanding that software developed with public money should be publicly available as Free Software.
The United States Copyright Office is now accepting comments in support of exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's (DMCA) anti-circumvention provisions, and we need your help by December 7th to ensure that every new exemption is granted.
The DMCA has been making headlines recently for all the wrong reasons. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently was able to temporarily have youtube-dl removed from GitHub, via a poorly thought out take down notice. GitHub has now restored youtube-dl, but not before forcing some changes to the project. While the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA can have some use, it's clearly an abuse for the RIAA to interfere with such a project -- particularly given that part of their notice was a claim about some sort of violation of YouTube's rights, not the RIAA's, and was related to a different section of the DMCA, the section 1201 anti-circumvention provisions. Those provisions create legal penalties for avoiding Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and even harsher penalties for sharing the tools to do so.
This last point -- the separate penalties for sharing tools used to remove restrictions -- is especially important. Recently, Google demanded GitHub take down tools used to work around its Widevine DRM. This just underscores that users will be unable to take advantage of even approved exemptions, unless they are able to write their own tools from scratch to get the DRM out of their way. It's like saying everyone is free to cook what they want in their own kitchen, but buying and selling stoves is illegal.
To celebrate this year's thirty-fifth anniversary of the FSF, we designed and issued an extremely cool undersea-themed 35th Anniversary T-shirt. The initial run sold out faster than a weekend scuba diving trip, but we've reprinted them in a new color scheme worthy of Neptune himself -- lots of these are in stock and ready to send to you.
But that's not all! So excited are we on the occasion of FSF's coral anniversary that we also made new socks. Warm your toes with the brand new FSF thirty-fifth anniversary socks -- crew-length socks whose coral, black, and blue color scheme will match your FSF 35th Anniversary Poster. Orders for these limited edition socks will be accepted on a "pre-order" basis until December 9th -- we'll collect customer orders, then print the socks, which I'll then ship to you. Be sure to order socks within the above time frame if you want them, because we won't have a lot of surplus after the orders are filled.
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Finally, a note about shipping. The current pandemic places a lot of obstacles to buying and selling merchandise at FSF, so your order may be shipped less punctually than before -- but it absolutely will be shipped. This time of year, many customers place orders hoping to have them in hand by December 25. If this is you, and you are in the United States, please place your order before December 4, in order to provide us with the necessary lead time to make sure that your gifts are shipped on time. In any circumstance, it's advisable to place any order as soon as you can; I will endeavor to ship it as promptly as circumstances permit. As always, don't hesitate to email sales@fsf.org with any questions or concerns about shipping, inventory, payment, suggestions for future items for sale, or anything else -- this email address is the first thing I check every work day, especially at this time of year.
The Qt Company has just announced Qt 6.0 Release Candidate 1 as what should be the second to the last test build ahead of the big Qt 6.0 toolkit release next month.
Qt 6.0 Release Candidate 1 has the latest batch of bug/regression fixes to the Qt6 code-base. The very basic Qt 6.0 RC1 release announcement can be read on the Qt development list.
Porting from Qt 5 to Qt 6 has been intentionally kept easy. There has been a conscious effort throughout the development of Qt 6 to maintain as much source compatibility with Qt 5 as possible. Still, some effort is involved in porting. This short post summarizes some of the steps required when porting to Qt 6.
In Qt 5 some of the classes already had existing replacements, and some classes got successors during the Qt 6 development phase. Therefore it might make sense to be able to compile your code with both the old and new Qt version. This can ensure that the amount of work where your code does not compile with either version is minimized, allowing your application or library to continue to work with Qt 5 and Qt 6. Another advantage could be that existing unit tests continue to work for most of the duration of porting, and regressions resulting from porting your code are easily distinguished from bugs introduced in Qt 6.
PHP 8.0 is scheduled for release tomorrow on the US Thanksgiving day. PHP 8.0 brings with it many new language features on top of the opt-in JIT compiler support. Here is a look at some of the PHP 8.0 changes along with a quick look at the near final performance of PHP 8.0 on an AMD EPYC Linux server.
PHP 8.0 is a very worthy successor to last year's PHP 7.4. Besides the JIT compiler there is a ton of work incorporated into this big version bump. Among the PHP 8.0 highlights are:
- PHP8 introduces the much anticipated Just In Time (JIT) compiler for further enhancing the speed of PHP scripts. More details on PHP's JIT compiler via this Wiki page.
Are you an Android developer looking to learn web development? I find it easier to learn a new technology stack by comparing it to a stack I’m already familiar with. Android developers can layout views using the simple yet flexible LinearLayout class. The web platform has similar tools to layout elements using CSS, and some concepts are shared. Here’s some tips to learn web development using your Android knowledge.
Concretely, software is just bits in electronic storage that control and/or are manipulated by processors. Abstractions are the building blocks that enable humans to design and build complex software systems out of bits. Abstractions are products of out minds—they allow us to assign meaning to clusters (some large, some small) of bits. They allow us to build software systems without thinking about billions of bits or how processors work.
We manifest some useful and generally simple abstractions (instructions, statements, functions, classes, modules, etc.) as “code” using other abstractions we call “languages.” Languages give us a common vocabulary for us to communicate about those abstract building blocks and to produce the corresponding bits. There are many useful tools that can and should be created to help us understand the code-level operation of a system.
But most systems we build today are too complex to be fully understood at the level of code. In designing them we must use higher-level abstractions to conceptualize, compose, and organize code. Abstract machines, frameworks, patterns, roles, stereotypes, heuristics, constraints, etc. are examples of such higher-level abstractions.
The languages we commonly use provide few, if any, mechanisms for directly identifying such higher-level abstractions. These abstractions may manifest as naming or other coding conventions but recognizing them as such depends upon a pre-existing shared understanding between the writer and readers of the code.
These are some answers to the Week 88 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.
The process of adopting a new governance model for the Perl project appears to be reaching an end; the new model is designed to look a lot like the one adopted by the Python project
Python has several built-in data types. Sometimes, when writing Python code, you might need to convert one data type to another. For example, concatenate a string and integer, first, you’ll need to convert the integer into a string.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PyCharm on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, PyCharm is an intelligent and fully-featured IDE for Python developed by JetBrains. It also provides support for Javascript, Typescript, and CSS, etc. You can also extend PyCharm features by using plugins. By using PyCharm plugins you can also get support for frameworks like Django, Flask. We can also use PyCharm for other programming languages like HTML, SQL, Javascript, CSS, and more.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of PyCharm on a Debian 10 (Buster).
The startup's networking platform Cilium runs inside Linux, instead of running on top of the OS.
The site's security writer, Catalin Cimpanu, has form [1, 2, 3] in screwing up when he writes about Linux. And ZDNet has a person on staff, Stephen J. Vaughan-Nicholls, who knows the Linux very well. So why exactly the kind of dross that was published on 24 November was ever allowed to pass the editor's knife is puzzling.
To details. In this case, Cimpanu was writing about a botnet known as Stantinko, a new version of which has apparently been detected by the Israeli security firm Intezer and detailed in a blog post which was shared with Cimpanu before being made available to world+dog.
Before I go any further, let me say that i have reported on Intezer at least thrice, and they are sound when it comes to their research. There is no hyperbole and when they say something, they have enough evidence to do so.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (spip and webkit2gtk), Fedora (kernel and libexif), openSUSE (chromium and rclone), Slackware (mutt), SUSE (kernel, mariadb, and slurm), and Ubuntu (igraph).
Linux-based operating systems have a reputation for their high-security level. That's one of the reasons why the market share for Linux has been growing. The most commonly used operating systems such as Windows are often affected by targeted attacks in the form of ransomware infections, spyware, as well as worms, and malware.
As a result, many personal, as well as enterprise users, are turning to Linux-based operating systems such as the Ubuntu-based Linux OS for security purposes. While Linux based systems are not targeted as frequently as other popular operating systems, they are not completely foolproof. There are plenty of risks and vulnerabilities for all types of Linux devices which put your privacy as well as your identity at risk.
Learn how to bridge the gap between operations/development and security.
India has banned another 43 apps from operating in its territory.
As was the case with previous bans, India's Ministry of Electronics & IT (MEITY) said the prohibited apps are “engaging in activities which are prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order.” Just how the apps do that was not explained in the announcement of the new ban.
The new list includes Alibaba's apps for both buyers and sellers, plus an app named Alipay Cashier that facilitates AliPay payments.
Whether India worries that Alibaba is misusing locals’ data, represents a threat to local payment schemes, or has been censured for otherwise behaving badly is not known. What is certain is that India and China have recently skirmished on a disputed border and previous app bans were interpreted as a de facto reprisals. India is also running a self-sufficiency drive that it hopes will increase local production to the point at which buyers beyond its shores consider it a viable rival to China as an offshore manufacturing destination.
Boris Epshteyn's diagnosis came after he attended a news conference led by Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
But all hope is not lost. There have been a couple of good judgements, one from the CIC (Chief Information Commissioner) wherein in specific cases a wife can know salary details of her husband, especially if there is some kind of maintenance due from the husband. There was so much of hue and cry against this order that it was taken down from the livelaw RTI corner. Luckily, I had downloaded it, hence could upload and share it.
Another one was a case/suit about a legally matured women who had decided to marry without parental consent. In this case, the Delhi High Court had taken women’s side and stated she can marry whom she wants. Interestingly, about a week back Uttar Pradesh (most notorious about crime against women) had made laws called ‘Love Jihad‘ and 2 -3 states have followed them. The idea being to create an atmosphere of hate against Muslims. This is when in a separate suit/case against Sudharshan TV (a far-right leaning channel promoting hate against Muslims) , the Government of India itself put an affidavit stating that Tablighis (a sect of Muslims who came from Malaysia to India for religious discourse and assembly) were not responsible for dissemination of the virus and some media has correctly portrayed the same. Of course, those who are on the side of the Govt. on this topic think a ‘traitor’ has written. They also thought that the Govt. had taken a wrong approach but couldn’t tell of a better approach to the matter.
There are too many matters in the Supreme Court of women asking for justice to tell all here but two instances share how the SC has been buckling under the stress of late, one is a webinar which was chaired by Justice Subramaniam where he shared how the executive is using judicial appointments to do what it wants. The gulf between the executive and the SC has been since Indira Gandhi days, especially the judicial orders which declared that the Emergency is valid by large, it has fallen much more recently and the executive has been muscling in which have resulted in more regressive decisions than progressive.
This observation is also in tune with another study which came to the same result although using data. The raw data from the study could give so much more than what has been shared. For e.g. as an idea for the study, of the ones cited, how many have been in civil law, personal law, criminal or constitutional law. This would give a better understanding of things. Also what is shocking is none of our court orders have been cited in the west in the recent past, when there used to be a time when the west used to take guidance from Indian jurisprudence sometimes and cite the orders to reach similar conclusion or if not conclusion at least be used as a precedent. I guess those days are over.
China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) and European Patent Office (EPO) launched a two–year pilot on December 1, 2020 aiming to give nationals or residents of the P.R. China the option of selecting the EPO as their International Searching Authority (ISA) and as their International Preliminary Examining Authority (IPEA) when filing international patent applications in English under the PCT. The pilot is of particular relevance to Chinese applicants who intend to enter the European phase in the following three aspects:
The EU has announced plans to beef up its intellectual property protections, amid concerns that foreign nations are unreasonably appropriating European IP.
In its new Action Plan on Intellectual Property, the European Commission says it aims to promote a global level playing field, improving IP protection and awareness, particularly amongst SMEs, facilitating the sharing of IP and improving the enforcement of IP rights.
"Europe is home to some of the world's leading innovations, but companies are still not fully able to protect their inventions and capitalise on their intellectual property," says commissioner for the internal market Thierry Breton.
Why is intellectual property important for the EU economy and its recovery?
Intangible assets such as inventions, cultural creations, brands, software, know-how and data are the cornerstone of today's economy. Over the last two decades, the volume of annual investments in such ‘intellectual property products' increased by 87% in the EU, while the volume of tangible investments increased by only 30%.
Intellectual property (IP) rights are titles for patents, trade-marks, designs, copyright, geographical indications, plant variety rights as well as trade secrets which help companies and creators protect and valorise their intangible assets.
Discovering a previously unknown indication for a known drug is a common pattern in pharmaceutical research and development. Perhaps the most widely known example for the repurposing of a known drug is acetylsalicylic acid, also known as aspirin. Originally developed by Bayer in 1897 as a pain and fever medication, long-term low dosing of aspirin was later discovered to be an effective cardiovascular medication that can lower the chances of a heart attack or certain kinds of stroke.
There are many other examples of successfully repurposed drugs. Pregabalin was originally developed to treat epileptic seizures and it was later discovered to be effective in treating neuropathic pain and generalised anxiety disorder. Similarly, sildenafil was originally developed to treat cardiovascular diseases and only later discovered to be effective in treating erectile dysfunction, eventually leading to Pfizer’s blockbuster drug Viagra.
The EC supports a rapid roll out of the unitary patent system, to create a one-stop-shop for patent protection and enforcement across the EU (2021), currently on hold pending German ratification of the UPC agreement.
[...]
Pooling
Following the patent pledges and pooling related to the COVID 19 therapeutics and vaccines, the Commission states to be “looking into ways to incentivise the rapid pooling of critical IP in times of crisis, for instance through a novel licensing system making critical IP available(…)”, including via compulsory licences as last resort.
SEPs
Recognising that SEP disputes currently seen in the automotive sector might extend to many other sectors, the Commission wishes to reduce frictions between SEP owners and implementers via industry-led initiatives, but most importantly, through reforms to improve the rules governing essentiality declarations, licensing and enforcement of SEPs, including a third-party essentiality check independent system.
