Linux initially started as the OS of choice for servers, but not so much for PCs. However, that has drastically changed over the years, and currently, in 2021, Linux is more than capable of replacing the Mac or Windows installation on your desktop.
And to prove this point, we have put together a list of the most compelling reasons you should use Linux. So without wasting any more time by prolonging this introduction, let’s dive into what’s really important.
The valiantly-titled Slimbook Titan boasts an impressive specs sheet for a laptop, not least because it has Nvidia RTX 3070 graphics — yes, the 3000 series is now available for laptops — as its crowning glory.
Colossal performance doesn’t come cheap: Slimbook Titan will cost €1750 and up, though a special discount price is available to pre-orders.
This article explains the reasons and process to switch from Windows 10 to the latest Linux Mint version, which is Linux Mint 20 Ulyana.
I was using Microsoft Windows for almost 10 years. As of January 2020, Microsoft has terminated the support for windows. I had the option to use windows 7 by paying for Windows 7 Extended Security Updates or upgrade to Windows 10 for free. But I was not interested to upgrade from Windows 7 to 10. Now, I have decided to move to the Linux based operating systems rather than Microsoft Windows. The first question that arose in my mind is which Linux Distro will fulfill my needs in terms of professional and personal use. Some of the Linux distros are fine for professional use, but not meant for personal use like Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Therefore, I was keen on finding the best distro that can be used for professional, as well as personal use, and great community support.
Community support is an important aspect to consider when you are selecting any distro. The reason is that if you face any problem while installing any software applications or doing some configuration, then you can post your problem on the community website, and anyone can give the solution.
RISC V gets thrown around a lot but what is it and how does it differ from what we're already using on our desktop and mobile systems.
Description: History of FreeBSD: Early Days of FreeBSD, mesh VPN using OpenBSD and WireGuard, FreeBSD Foundation Sponsors LLDB Improvements, Host your Cryptpad web office suite with OpenBSD, and more.
So far for the virtual CES this week there hasn't been any big CXL 2.0 announcements since the Compute Express Link 2.0 specification was finalized back in November, but the Linux kernel support for this CPU-to-device interconnect continues coming together and will be hopefully mainlined in a coming release.
Back in November the CXL 2.0 spec was published and immediately following that Intel began posting Linux support patches for implementing the specification with an initial focus on type-3 memory devices as memory expanders for RAM or persistent memory.
For those with TPM2 security chips in your system or various hardware security tokens like YubiKeys, the upcoming systemd 248 will make it much easier to use then for unlocking your encrypted LUKS2 volumes.
While systemd-cryptsetup has already supported unlocking LUKs2 volumes at boot via user-supplied passphrases and key files on a local or removable disk, with systemd 248 will be the ability to make use of TPM2 / FIDO2 / PKCS#11 security hardware for unlocking volumes if desired.
Blogging is a lot of work, and a lot less fun than hacking. I mostly focus on the latter because of that, but from time to time I guess stuff is just too interesting to not be blogged about. Hence here, finally, another blog story about exciting new features in systemd.
Clang LTO for the Linux kernel to provide link-time optimizations for yielding more performant kernel binaries (plus Clang CFI support) looks like it will land for Linux 5.12. With that compiler optimization feature appearing squared away, Google engineers are also working on Clang PGO support for the Linux kernel to exploit profile guided optimizations for further enhancing the kernel performance.
Google engineers on Tuesday posted their latest patches providing the necessary kernel infrastructure around Clang Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO). This is more complicated than LTO support since with compiler PGO functionality it relies on first collecting profiles during run-time to then provide that feedback back to the compiler in order to generate a more optimized binary based on that actual run-time profile/feedback.
Following the very active discussions the past several days over the Linux kernel potentially dropping a number of old CPU targets/architectures, an updated list of planned ARM platforms for removal has been published now that some have been saved thanks to expressed interest.
Several platforms like Axxia, Broadcom Kona, Digicolor, Dove, Nspire, and Spear are no longer expected for removal at this time. Work on them will supposedly resume otherwise they might be dropped in the future.
Arnd Bergmann stirred up a bit of a discussion with his January 8 "bring out your dead" posting, wherein he raised the idea of removing support for a long list of seemingly unloved Arm platforms — and a few non-Arm ones as well. Many of these have seen no significant work in at least six years. In a January 13 followup, he notes that several of those platforms will be spared for now due to ongoing interest.
The big news Collabora wants to share with us is the fact that they’ve added desktop OpenGL 3.1 support in the open source Panfrost graphics driver for Midgard (Mali T760 and newer) and Bifrost GPUs, which will be available for most GNU/Linux distribution as part of the upcoming Mesa 21.0 open source graphics stack.
This work follows on the footsteps of the initial OpenGL ES 3.0 support on Midgard GPUs added last year to the Panfrost driver as part of the Mesa 20.0 graphics stack series. This implemented new features like 3D textures, uniform buffer objects, instanced rendering, as well as multiple render targets on Mali T760 GPUs and higher.
Mesa’s shared code also extends to OpenCL support via Clover. Once a driver supports compute shaders and sufficient compiler features, baseline OpenCL is just a few patches and a bug-fixing spree away. While OpenCL implementations could be layered (for example with clvk), an open source Mesa driver avoids the indirection.
I would like to thank Collaboran Boris Brezillon, who has worked tirelessly to bring OpenGL ES 3.0 support to Bifrost, as well as the prolific Icecream95, who has spearheaded OpenCL and desktop OpenGL support.
With the first Mesa release of 2021 for open source Linux GPU drivers upcoming with Mesa 21.0 hitting the Release Candidate stage, Collabora have been busy bringing up OpenGL on ARM Mali GPUs.
This is coming with the Panfrost driver, which Collabora has been working on for some time now. While not officially conformant yet as it seems they haven't gone through the conformance testing from The Khorons Group, they announced in a fresh blog post that both the Midgard and Bifrost GPU generation will see "non-conformant OpenGL ES 3.0 on Bifrost and desktop OpenGL 3.1 on Midgard (Mali T760 and newer) and Bifrost".
At the start of the month Intel sent out their initial graphics driver changes targeting Linux 5.12 while now a secondary set of changes have been sent to DRM-Next.
That initial pull included restoring Tiger Lake Gen12 frame-buffer compression, HDR display support for select Intel Gen9 graphics hardware support, atomic mode-setting improvements for Big Joiner, and other changes.
The AMD Radeon "AMDGPU" open-source Linux kernel driver is tacking on another new feature: Secure Display TA.
Over the past two years we have seen AMD Linux driver developers work on more "security" features that at least initially appeared to be driven by AMD picking up Chromebook design wins and needing to support this functionality for those use-cases. There has been HDCP display support for APUs to land as well as Trusted Memory Zones - TMZ for securing video memory buffers. The latest feature being tackled is "Secure Display TA".
As in all software, overhead is the performance penalty that is incurred as compared to a baseline measurement. In Mesa, a lot of people know of driver overhead as “Gallium sucks” and/or “A Gallium-based driver is slow” due to the fact that Gallium does incur some amount of overhead as compared to the old-style immediate mode DRI drivers.
While it’s true that there is an amount of performance lost by using Gallium in this sense, it’s also true that the performance gained is much greater. The reason for this is that Gallium is able to batch commands and state changes for every driver using it, allowing redundant calls to avoid triggering any work in the GPU.
It also makes for an easier time profiling and improving upon the CPU usage that’s required to handle the state changes emitted by Gallium. Instead of having a ton of core Mesa callbacks which need to be handled, each one potentially leading to a no-op that can be analyzed and deferred by the driver, Gallium provides a more cohesive API where each driver hook is a necessary change that must be handled. Because of this, the job of optimizing for those changes is simplified.
Text editors are a curious product. On one hand, they are simple, no-nonsense digital pads for taking notes, without any embellishments or visual styling. On the other, they are powerful code and data toolboxes, allowing for a great deal of flexibility and innovation. Indeed, software developers, Web developers and entrepreneuring nerds worldwide often use text editors for a range of useful tasks and activities. Never have so many owed so much to so few. To that end, we want to introduce you to several powerful text editors in the Snap Store.
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Sometimes, an abundance of choice can be difficult for the consumer. With text editors, it’s quite the opposite. More is more. The wealth and diversity of available products in this space gives tinkerers and developers the ultimate freedom to select just the right tool for the job – and there could be many different tools for different jobs. Hopefully, this article will help you find the text editor that has the best features you need, and allow you to be even more productive in your endeavors. If you have any comments or suggestions, please join our forum for a discussion.
The recent rise in popularity of eBooks has led to the emergence of several different file formats, of which the most popular and the most widely used is the Portable Document Format, or PDF for short. PDFs are one of the most reliable and efficient formats of documents that can easily be shared across computer systems. These files are also secure enough to prevent people from easily updating file contents. This article looks at seven of the best PDF Editors available on all major platforms.
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Scribus is a free and open-source publishing software that is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS. Scribus provides several different PDF editing tools to users, of which the most notable features include highlighting, moving, and adding text; creating PDFs and lists; and making PDF files more interactive by adding text fields, checkboxes, and more. This is a property unique to Scribus, setting it apart from other PDF editors in this list.
After the latest WhatsApp privacy policy updates, many users who trusted the service seem to be making the switch to alternatives like Signal.
Even though WhatsApp tries to clarify and re-assure the change in the policies, users have made their mind while considering the benefits of using privacy alternatives to WhatsApp.
But, what are some useful and impressive alternatives to WhatsApp? In this article, let us take a look at some of the best options.
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Signal is the best blend of open-source and privacy. They’ve improved a lot over the years and is safe to assume as a perfect alternative to WhatsApp. You get almost every essential feature compared to WhatsApp.
However, just because it does not store your data, you may not be able to access all the messages of your smartphone on Desktop. In addition to that, it relies on local backup (which is protected by a passphrase) instead of cloud backups. So, you will have to head to the settings, start the backup, safely copy the passcode of the backup, check where the local backup gets stored, and make sure you don’t delete it.
Regardless of your feelings about Google, many people around the world use Google services every day. As such, it’s important to talk about all the amazing ways you can get easier access to your Google account, particularly for those trying to use Linux in the enterprise. This tutorial shows you how to integrate your Google account into GNOME Shell.
In this video, we are looking at how to install notepadqq on Linux Mint 20.1.
Today we are looking at how to install SMPlayer 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.
If you're an admin with Linux servers in your data center or cloud hosted account (such as AWS and Google Cloud), chances are pretty good you connect to those machines via SSH. Sometimes you need to remain connected for a good amount of time. You could be debugging code, working on containers or Kubernetes, or just about a thousand other reasons.
Kylin Linux distro is the official flavor of Ubuntu released by Canonical and China’s MIIT to target the Chinese laptop and PC consumer market. Although it is based on the same official Ubuntu, however, its interface is much beautiful than the standard custom Gnome one. Ubuntu Kylin desktop environment which is also known as UKUI is more inclined towards the Windows 10 or Deepin like interface with sleek and colorful icons along with user-friendly elements that make it easy to use.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Maven on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Maven is an open-source project management and comprehension tool used primarily for Java projects. Maven uses a Project Object Model (POM), which is essentially an XML file containing information about the project, configuration details, the project’s dependencies, 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 Apache Maven open-source data visualization and monitoring suite on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
Before we proceed I assume you are aware of the EC2 service on AWS and know its basic components. I would recommend visiting my article to create an EC2 instance using the AWS Console and understand the basics of the EC2 instance, click here to go to the article. In this article, we will create an EC2 instance with the latest Linux AMI using Cloudformation hence knowing the basics of cloud formation is required. Even if you are not aware of Cloudformation and would just like to create an instance using it, do not worry and proceed with the article.
The date command is simple. However, it has several useful options that enhance it. It's also capable of giving you practical information about past or future dates. This article shows you some of the format controls to manipulate the date command's output. At the end of the article, I offer some practical suggestions about how you can use this command in conjunction with common tasks.
From the very beginning, the Linux operating system was designed to be a multi-user OS. As such, one of the most common administrative tasks performed on a Linux machine is managing user accounts. It’s a critical part of keeping a healthy and secure Linux machine.
You might think that it is overwhelming to manage users from the command line. On the contrary, it is not at all. There are only a few basic commands that you need to know, and I will cover them in this article.
KubeLinter is an open source project released by Stackrox to analyze Kubernetes YAML files for security issues and errant code. The tool covers Helm charts and Kubernetes configuration files, including Knative files. Using it can improve cloud-native development, reduce development time, and encourage DevOps best practices.
In the previous installment on store-and-forward backups, I mentioned how easy it is to do with ZFS, and some of the tools that can be used to do it without ZFS. A lot of those tools are a bit less robust, so we need some sort of store-and-forward mechanism to verify backups. To be sure, verifying backups is good with ANY scheme, and this could be used with ZFS backups also.
Now that Chrome OS is offering an official Windows Desktop via Parallels, Enterprise customers have a fully-supported and very viable way to access legacy applications while still embracing the cloud. That’s all fine and well for companies that have the means to purchase high-end Chromebooks along with licenses for Windows and Parallels but not so much for us common folk. Lucky for us – where there’s a will, there’s a way and we have a way.
In the early days of Chrome OS, running a separate operating system meant putting your device in developer mode and jumping through a bunch of hoops to essentially dual boot a version on Linux on your machine. In all honesty, the process isn’t that difficult and when you’re finished, you have a fully-functional version of Linux running side-by-side with Chrome OS. The main drawback – aside from the technical expertise required – was the fact that developer mode technically makes a Chromebook less secure and it throws out any and all support you may get from Google should you brick your machine.
Partitioning is vital for system administration. This is the reason the partitioning software comes in so many variants. fdisk and cfdisk are made to be interactive. With parted, you can create everything with commands. Those are the most commonly used ones; sfdisk is not very common. It does have many features, but you can use it for scripts to a much higher degree. For a long time, sfdisk lagged behind on supporting GPT since version 2.26, it does support GPT.
Signal is a free, cross-platform application for communication purpose, it’s main aim is to protect users PRIVACY and one of the best alternative to Whatsapp messenger.
With Signal messenger you can do HD Voice / Video calls, Chat, etc.
Google Chrome OS is based on the open-source Chromium OS. It is a browser-based operating system. You will only have the Google Chrome web browser installed on it. You can install Chrome web apps or extensions from the Chrome Web Store and add more functionality to the operating system.Sadly, the Google Chrome OS is not publicly available for download, and only the source code of Chromium OS is publicly available. So, you can’t run the Google Chrome OS or Chromium OS directly on your computer.
Luckily, a few Chromium OS-based operating systems are available that you can download and install on your computer. The most popular one is Neverware’s CloudReady OS.
This article will show you how to make a Live bootable USB thumb drive of Neverware’s CloudReady OS and run it from the USB thumb drive. So, let’s get started.
The FFmpeg is a popular media library function that you can install individually or alongside a media player on your Linux system. This tool was initially created under the Linux project, but now available for Mac and Windows OS also. The FFmpeg tool is a formation of two media codec packets, which are the FF and the MPEG. The FF is the short form of Fast Forward, and the MPEG is the acronym of Moving Picture Experts Group.
You can directly use the FFmpeg tool on your Linux system through the command-line interface to convert, cut, join, and compress media files. You can also use it for live streaming or feeding live media into a server.
Want to try out the Cinnamon Desktop Environment? Without installing Linux Mint, you can get the desktop packages in Ubuntu via a few commands.
Cinnamon is available in Ubuntu main repositories, though the package version is however a little old. You can simply run the command in step 2 to install it if you don’t stick to the latest features.
The Wasta Linux team maintains an Ubuntu PPA that contains Cinnamon 4.8 packages for Ubuntu 20.04.
Atom editor is built on the Electron framework, which lets developers create modern desktop apps using state-of-the-art Web technologies like HTML5, CSS, Node.js, and JavaScript.
Device temperature control is, therefore, very important. Most of the time, your laptop computer gets too hot because different parts and components of the laptop device are closely coupled to one another. So, in slim laptops, there seems to be little space for airflow. It would do any harm to the physical hardware components and to your body as well if your machine gets too hot. We will learn about how to install temperature sensor packages on any Linux system and how to check the temperature of the CPU.
By default, you can store the snapshots you take of your Btrfs subvolumes in the same Btrfs filesystem, but it is not possible to store the snapshots of one Btrfs filesystem directly to another Btrfs filesystem. However, the Btrfs filesystem provides you with the necessary tools to back up snapshots of one Btrfs filesystem to another Btrfs filesystem. This article shows you how to back up Btrfs snapshots to an external Btrfs filesystem on an external drive.
Xfce 4.16 was released back in December, and it includes some important changes like a dark mode for the Xfce panel, fractional scaling support, and more. This article explains how to install Xfce 4.16 on Xubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) or Xubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla). Undoing the changes is also covered in the article.
Samba is a way to share files across the different operating systems over a network. It let you access all your files from one PC to another without any 3rd party application.
Today, we will install and set up Samba in our Linux system and share files over the network.
It used to be, people would scoff at the idea of switching to a Linux-based operating system due to a lack of software. While that is still true for some folks -- especially business users -- it is less of a concern these days. Why? Well, so many things are done through the web browser nowadays, lessening dependence on Windows software. For many consumers, just having the Google Chrome browser on, say, Ubuntu, is more than enough to accomplish their wants and needs. Not to mention, there are many quality Linux apps like GIMP and DaVinci Resolve.
But OK, lets say you really want to use a Linux-based operating system, but there's some Windows-only software that you absolutely cannot live without. Thankfully, you may still be able to ditch Windows and upgrade to something like Fedora or Linux Mint. How? Thanks to the excellent Wine. This compatibility layer (don't you dare call it an emulator), can sometimes enable you to run Windows software on Linux. Today, version 6.0 is released.
Version 6.0 of the Wine Windows not-an-emulator has been released.
Wine 6.0 bottles up an entire year’s worth of development (fermented from more than 8,300 changes) to bring users a rich and varied palette of improvements, new features, and advanced capabilities with it.
For those unfamiliar with it, Wine is a Windows compatibility layer that allows apps, tools, and games built for Microsoft Windows to run (with caveats) on Linux, BSD, Android, and even macOS systems.
At the time of writing than 27,500 Windows apps and games are compatible with Wine, including well-known software like Photoshop and Microsoft Office, and popular games like StarCraft, Final Fantasy XI Online , and Team Fortress II.
A year in the making, Wine 6.0 is here to provide GNU/Linux users with much-improved support for running Windows applications and gams on their beloved distributions. Major changes including support for core modules in the PE format, Vulkan backend for WineD3D, DirectShow and Media Foundation support, as well as revamped text console.
Wine, the compatibility layer designed to run Windows games and applications on other systems has a big 6.0 release now officially available with thousands of improvements.
This is the main tech behind the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer. Plenty of improvements came as a result of CodeWeavers (who back the Wine project) working with Valve on that since they get Proton changes upstreamed whenever possible into Wine directly.
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How good is Wine? It varies from game to game but it often results in a really great experience. We use it to play titles like Overwatch, Starcraft II, World of Warcraft and more that don't support Linux officially. It's great that Linux has something like this available so you don't have to give up your favourite Windows games.
Wine 6.0 stable is now officially available as the annual stable release for this open-source project allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like platforms.
Among the many highlights for Wine 6.0 are core modules now being implemented in Portable Executable (PE) format, the initial (experimental) Vulkan back-end for WineD3D as an alternative to OpenGL, DirectShow and Media Foundation support, and a redesign of their text console implementation.
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 6.0 is now available.
This release represents a year of development effort and over 8,300 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed in the release notes below. The areas of major changes are:
- Core modules in PE format. - Vulkan backend for WineD3D. - DirectShow and Media Foundation support. - Text console redesign.
This release is dedicated to the memory of Ken Thomases, who passed away just before Christmas at the age of 51. Ken was an incredibly brilliant developer, and the mastermind behind the macOS support in Wine. We all miss his skills, his patience, and his dark sense of humor.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/6.0/wine-6.0.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/6.0/wine-6.0.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
What Never Was is a free short, story-driven first-person puzzle-solving adventure that released back in 2019. It was so popular that the developer is bringing out What Never Was: Chapter II.
The first part released in January 2019, with a Linux build arriving later in April 2019. It went on to gather over 4,000 user reviews and still has an "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating today. Epic Games later noticed it and gave the developer an Epic MegaGrant (no exclusivity) to help Acke Hallgren work on more of it.
"Starting immediately after the events of What Never Was - Sarah finds herself magically whisked away to a strange place. Where did the magical clock take her? What other secrets are to be discovered? What more did her eccentric grandfather hide from her?"
Ready for more Dead Cells? I know I am! Motion Twin and Evil Empire have announced the Dead Cells: Fatal Falls expansion will release on January 26.
This is the third expansion, although only the second that's paid as Dead Cells: Rise of the Giant was released free and comes after over 20 major updates to the game that have been released free. At release, they're also putting up a 'complete the set' bundle to save you 15% on The Bad Seed and Fatal Falls DLC together.
So what to expect from Dead Cells: Fatal Falls? There's two new mid-game biomes, which are alternative paths to Stilt Village / Clock Tower and Slumbering Sanctuary / Forgotten Sepulcher. "One is the Fractured Shrines, which is a load of floating islands connected by ledges that are covered with traps and ready to drop you into the abyss below. When you're not falling you'll be dealing with pagan snake people and giant statues with even bigger axes. After that you'll enter The Undying Shores where you need to descend a cliff in the middle of a storm. Some caves offer a way out of the rain but they're full of weird experiments and undead healers, so good luck getting out!"
It appears that more developers are teaming up to create game bundles on Steam, where you get a couple games from different teams plus a discount to get them all together.
Much like the Devolver Digital Hidden Gems Bundle, this is a good chance to pick up even more indie greats if you don't already own them.
Following the article published at the end of 2020, here’s the follow up in video. It should have been published much earlier, but you know how plans go… Anyway, if you haven’t checked the review yet, this is a good and quick summary alongside some footage...
In my last post I’ve promised that the next one would have screenshots of new developments in the Files app, and it’s finally here!
It took me longer than I expected back then. After the 3.38 release, I had to had to focus my time elsewhere: assisting and training local primary health care teams in managing and following up of the raising number of COVID-19 cases assigned to them. With this mission accomplished, in December I’ve picked up again on my GNOME contributions and have something to show you now.
With GTK4 out and stabilizing well, more GNOME components are working to migrate to this updated toolkit as part of the GNOME 40 development cycle.
The latest GTK4 porting work to be merged is GNOME Shell's extensions application and portal components being moved from GTK3 to GTK4.
Finally in 2021 with the GNOME 40 release is the ability of GNOME's Nautilus file manager to show and sort by file creation times...
Going back more than a decade have been requests for being able to show timestamps for when files are created within the GNOME file manager or to be able to sort by file creation times in a folder rather than the last modified date. Initially that was blocked by the Linux kernel / file-systems exposing the information while in recent years that's been addressed and more time until it was implemented for GNOME.
Thanks to Krzesimir Nowak, a 17-year-old feature request in GLib has been implemented: it’s now possible to define GError domains which have extended information attached to their GErrors.
You could now, for example, define a GError domain for text parser errors which includes context information about a parsing failure, such as the current line and character position. Or attach the filename of a file which was being read, to the GError informing of a read failure. Define an extended error domain using G_DEFINE_EXTENDED_ERROR(). The extended information is stored in a ‘private’ struct provided by you, similarly to how it’s implemented for GObjects with G_DEFINE_TYPE_WITH_PRIVATE().
Alpine Linux, the distribution popular for container environments due to its lightweight nature with employing Musl libc and Busybox while being designed for simplicity, security, and efficiency, is out with version 3.13. With Alpine Linux 3.13 the distribution is ramping up its cloud ambitions.
Alpine Linux 3.13 brings the project's first official cloud images. There are now official Alpine Linux cloud images for Amazon AWS EC2 on x86_64 and AArch64. Support for more public cloud providers are expected with time. Alpine Linux images for EC2 were previously available but with version 3.13.0 is now considered "official" and supported.
Coming about eight months after the Alpine Linux 3.12 series, Alpine Linux 3.13 is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series and introduces ifupdown-ng network device manager as a replacement for BusyBox’s ifupdown and provide users with a flexible ifup/ifdown implementation.
This release also improves Wi-Fi support in the setup scripts, introduces support for the latest and greatest PHP 8.0 general-purpose scripting language, as well as initial support for the cloud-init industry standard multi-distribution method for cross-platform cloud instance initialization.
We are pleased to announce the release of Alpine Linux 3.13.0, the first in the v3.13 stable series.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Garuda KDE Dr460nized 210107 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Zoom, the cloud meeting company, unifies cloud video conferencing, simple online meetings, and group messaging into one easy-to-use platform. Our solution offers the best video, audio, and screen-sharing experience across Zoom Rooms, Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and H.323/SIP room systems.
We are happy to announce our newest public service: A manual pages indexing site at man.archlinux.org that publishes the man pages of all our packages and allows you to search and browse them. Check out, for example, the man page of tar.
Following the surprise announcement last month that CentOS 8 will be discontinued at EOY2021 with CentOS Stream to be the new upstream for RHEL, several different organizations and developers have announced their intentions to create new community-oriented, open-source rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that will be free. One of the promising announcements so far has been from CloudLinux and today they have announced it as AlmaLinux.
CloudLinux, which provides a CentOS-based Linux distribution catering to shared hosting providers, announced in December they would be working on their own replacement to CentOS. They said this drop-in CentOS alternative would be supported by them with $1 million USD annually for development.
Launching a CentOS alternative was an obvious move for the company, said Igor Seletskiy, CEO and founder of CloudLinux Inc., in the announcement. “The Linux community was in need, and the CloudLinux OS is a CentOS clone with significant pedigree—including over 200,000 active server instances. AlmaLinux is built with CloudLinux expertise but will be owned and governed by the community. We intend to deliver this forever-free Linux distribution this quarter,” he said.
Most notable to the Flatpak 1.10 stable release is a new and more efficient repository format. This new format - which is already supported by Flathub - allows isolating metadata based on the CPU architecture used by the client, supports delta-based incremental updates, and other optimizations. In many cases the new repo format means no longer having to download megabytes each time but can be as little as ~20k updates. Thus it's a win for lowered bandwidth usage while also helping expand Flathub in supporting more CPU architectures thanks to the new design.
Drools is a popular open source project known for its powerful rules engine. Few users realize that it can also be a gateway to the amazing possibilities of artificial intelligence. This two-part article introduces you to using Red Hat Decision Manager and its Drools-based rules engine to combine machine learning predictions with deterministic reasoning. In Part 1, we’ll prepare our machine learning logic. In Part 2, you’ll learn how to use the machine learning model from a knowledge service.
Tracking and controlling activities across a large environment is challenging in any IT environment. Adding requirements like HIPAA compliance makes life even more challenging for IT teams, and takes time away from addressing higher-level business problems. In this post, we'll look at how teams can use OpenSCAP in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to help with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance and focus on work that delivers real value for the business.
IBM’s vaunted mainframe business in the 1960s and 1970s was knocked down a few pegs by the advent of proprietary and then RISC/Unix and then Wintel/Lintel systems, and it was blindsided by the rise of the PC to a certain extent. Even though it recovered for more than a decade, IBM could just not keep up. And while Microsoft was able to take its hegemony on the Windows desktop into the datacenter with Windows Server and a large stack of systems software, it has not been able to keep Apple from rising from the dead – for the second time, mind you – and creating a huge and profitable client machine. Intel similarly made the leap from the desktop to the datacenter, and has become the dominant compute engine maker to an extent that we have not seen since the late 1960s with the IBM mainframe. In 2020, if the final quarter works out as we expect, X86-based machines will account for over 90 percent of the $82 billion in server revenues and approaching 99 percent of the more than 12 million server shipments worldwide. And Intel Xeon SP processors will be in the overwhelming majority of those machines. Still. After years of Arm and AMD.
This article shows you how to install Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP) XP 2.0.0 GA with support for Eclipse MicroProfile. Once you’ve enabled Eclipse MicroProfile, you will be able to use its quickstart examples to start developing your own MicroProfile applications with Red Hat CodeReady Studio. In this demonstration, you’ll learn two ways to build and run the MicroProfile Config quickstart application.
Today, the Eclipse Foundation announced that they are moving their headquarters from the U.S. to Brussels, Belgium. As a founding member of the new Eclipse Foundation AISBL nonprofit association, IBM believes this move to Europe will accelerate global collaboration around open source projects and pave the way for richer technology as a result of Europe’s rigorous privacy and security standards.
The Eclipse Foundation has a proven historical record for being a fair, secure place to collaborate in the open. With more than 170 members and over 900 committers based in Europe, it’s fair to say that European open source developers are already invested in the Eclipse Foundation projects, so moving its headquarters makes sense to continue to support this growth.
Red Hat OpenShift will pair with Intel Xeon Scalable processors, Intel Ethernet Network Adapters, FlexRAN reference software and Open Network Edge Services Software, an edge computing software toolkit.
Bullseye is freezing! Yay! (And Trondheim is now below -10.)
It's too late for that kind of change now, but it would have been nice if plocate could have been default for bullseye...
It seems that since buster, there's an override in place to change its priority away from standard, and I haven't been able to find anyone who could tell me why. (It was known that it was request moved away from standard for cloud images, which makes a lot of sense, but not for desktop/server images.)
The Debian 11 "Bullseye" build-essential freeze is now in effect with the release team no longer entertaining transition requests. Meanwhile, architecture support for Debian 12 is in early stages of discussion with a possible reduction in i386 support for that follow-on release.
Debian 11.0 "Bullseye" will see its soft freeze for new packages begin on 12 February, the hard freeze beginning a month later on 12 March, and then the full freeze of Debian 12 to happen at some later point to be determined.
Hi all,
=== bullseye Transition and (build-)essential freeze ===
We're pleased to announce that the freeze for Debian 11 'bullseye' has begun. On January 12th we stopped accepting transition requests and we are working to complete the transitions in progress. We ask the maintainers of packages that are (transitively) part of (build-)essential to stop uploading those packages [1]. We remind everybody to stop uploading large or disruptive changes to unstable, from here on experimental is the place to do that.
Further details of the freeze are available in the freeze policy [2]. The freeze contains 3 more milestones: * 2021-02-12 - Milestone 2 - Soft Freeze no new packages, delayed migration * 2021-03-12 - Milestone 3 - Hard Freeze - key packages and packages without autopkgtests need a manual unblock for migration * TBA - Milestone 4 - Full Freeze all packages need a manual unblock for migration
=== RC bugs ===
We are missing the Bug Squashing parties. We have the impression that in the current list of Release Critical bugs for bullseye [3] there are quite a few bugs that are relatively easy to fix by NMU and we normally don't see them this late in the cycle. Please everybody, we know the times are different, but with your help, we can keep this freeze short.
=== bullseye architectures ===
We have decided that the architectures that will be part of the bullseye release are: amd64, arm64, armel, armhf, i386, mips64el, mipsel, ppc64el and s390x (i.e. the same we had for buster minus mips).
There are some issues with a couple of the architectures, the number of porters being the main one. However, we realized that the call for porters was late and makes more sense at the start of the release cycle, instead of near the end. We intend to do the bookworm call soon after we release bullseye and architectures with too few porters will be dropped early (after sufficient warnings).
One of the architectures at stake is i386, which we stopped waiving. We're interested in the discussion about i386 support in Debian that was going on recently and that will probably continue in one form or another. If the outcome requires changes to how we build some ports, the start of the bookworm release cycle is a good moment to try to get those in place.
We're also interested in the proposal [4] to make it less troublesome for architectures to move between Release Architecture and Debian Ports, albeit we see that this mainly doesn't depend on us.
=== your packages ===
Please take this opportunity to check packages are in their final shape and stay vigilant for release-critical bugs.
On behalf of the Release Team, Paul
[1] https://release.debian.org/bullseye/essential-and-build-essential.txt [2] https://release.debian.org/buster/freeze_policy.html [3] https://udd.debian.org/dev/bugs.cgi [4] https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2020/11/msg00381.html
It has been a few years since ECS announced its LIVA Q range of mini-PCs, which it last refreshed with Intel Apollo Lake processors. Now, the company has introduced ARM models that it has called the LIVA Q1A and LIVA Q1A Plus, respectively. The machines share broadly the same hardware, but ECS has distinguished them by their processors.
I hope you are aware of file permissions. If not, I have written a detailed and easy to understand guide to Linux file permission and I suggest you read that.
Most people probably never noticed it but the home directory in Ubuntu has the permission 755 i.e. rwxr-xr-x.
What it means is that if there are multiple users on the same Ubuntu system, they can enter home directory of other users and read the files stored in it. They cannot modify these files or execute them, however.
I think this is the common practice in many Linux distributions as this allows to easily share files between users on the same Linux system, specially in a server environment.
A Reddit user newhacker1746 posted a thread on Reddit where he claimed to run Ubuntu on iPhone 7. Initially, he managed to just run Ubuntu CLI but he later managed to run Ubuntu GUI properly.
[...]
This wasn’t surprising for people who are already nerd. There’s already a project postmarketOS that brought Linux to the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus.
Sometimes it is time to critically question things and look for new ways. This is what we as the Ubuntu Community Council have initiated with the existing Local Communities (LoCo) project. The LoCos have been an integral part of the Ubuntu family since almost the beginning of Ubuntu. The aim of the LoCos is that people who are involved with Ubuntu find contact persons and like-minded people in their area, so that they are included in the Ubuntu community and also get help with possible questions or problems with Ubuntu.It is also the aim that these local units fill Ubuntu with life and organise events. In the past years they have been an important institution in building the community around Ubuntu. Last year, we at the newly elected Community Council wanted to re-staff the international council that oversees this LoCo and called for nominations. Unfortunately, there were not enough candidates so that we could re-staff this council.
The Astro Slide is a 5G smartphone with a 6.5 inch display and a physical keyboard that slides out from behind the screen, allowing you to use the phone like a tiny laptop computer. It will ship with Android, but the plan is to also make GNU/Linux distributions including Debian and Ubuntu Touch available for download.
First announced by Planet Computers in March, 2020, the phone went up for pre-order through an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that raised more than $1.6 million in hopes of shipping the Astro Slide to customers by March, 2021.
Now the makers of the phone are providing an update – because of pandemic-related delays it will likely ship in June instead. And the specs have changed (the phone has more RAM than initially planned, but a less powerful processor and smaller battery).
Once we’re done we can use the phone. I did not install a SIM card, so I just used my PinePhone with Firefox and the terminal for now. Browsing the web is not super smooth, but not quite as slow as I would have expected on an Allwinner A64 processor, and works without major bugs. I did notice the Thai language is not supported, and can’t be configured from the user interface, but it should not be too hard to install from the terminal once I learn more about Alpine Linux/postmarketOS. I plan to do so by checking out the Wiki.
As you can see from the photo above there are very few apps right now, and the software app store is almost empty. At this stage, the battery will deplete quite fast. I charge it in the evening, before switching to charge to my Android phone, and the battery was depleted in the morning.
As a development tool and for people caring about privacy it looks promising. PinePhone shown here with 2GB RAM, 16GB storage is sold for $149.99 with KDE Plasma Mobile. The exact version with postmarketOS is not available anymore, as currently, the Pine64 community works in batch with a different OS for each production run. This will change in the future however.
The Mozilla VPN has now landed on Mac and Linux, reports Engadget. The VPN, which is also available for Android, iOS, and Windows 10, is offered under a $5/month subscription in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Singapore, and Malaysia, with more regions coming soon.
Mozilla has announced that its VPN solution is now available for users of Mac and Linux devices, following its Windows, iOS, and Android launch last year. Mozilla VPN is currently available in six countries (the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and Malaysia), with more regions coming soon.
Like many VPNs, Mozilla’s offering uses the WireGuard protocol to encrypt network activity and hide the user’s IP address. WireGuard’s use of high-speed cryptographic primitives also means that users of Mozilla VPN should still be able to experience fast network speeds.
Mozilla VPN provides device-level encryption, utilizing more than 280 servers spread across over 30 countries, promising no bandwidth restrictions and no recording of your online activity. Signing up for the VPN costs $4.99 a month and allows up to five devices to be connected.
The promised subscription-based VPN service from Mozilla is now available for the Linux platform.
Back in July 2020, Mozilla launched a subscription-based VPN service and made it immediately available for Android, iOS, and Windows. Linux and macOS users, however, were left in the lurch. That has officially changed, with Mozilla making their VPN available for the two operating systems missing in the original mix.
The new VPN service isn’t free. In fact, it’s a bit pricier than a number of other options on the market. What do you get for your $4.99/month? Users can enjoy the service on up to five different devices (be they desktops, laptops, phones, or tablets), and with over 280 servers available in 6 countries (with zero bandwidth restrictions), Mozilla claims their VPN is one of the fastest available. This is achieved with the use of high-speed, low-level cryptographic algorithms.
As with in-person voting, the basic idea behind securing mail-in ballots is to tie each ballot to a specific registered voter and ensure that every voter votes once.
If we didn’t care about the secrecy of the ballot, the easy solution would be to give every voter a unique identifier (Operationally, it’s somewhat easier to instead give each ballot a unique serial number and then keep a record of which serial numbers correspond to each voter, but these are largely equivalent). Then when the ballots come in, we check that (1) the voter exists and (2) the voter hasn’t voted already. When put together, these checks make it very difficult for an attacker to make their own ballots: if they use non-existent serial numbers, then the ballots will be rejected, and if they use serial numbers that correspond to some other voter’s ballot then they risk being caught if that voter voted. So, from a security perspective, this works reasonably well, but it’s a privacy disaster because it permanently associates a voter’s identity with the contents of their ballots: anyone who has access to the serial number database and the ballots can determine how individual voters voted.
The solution turns out to be to authenticate the envelopes not the ballots. The way that this works is that each voter is sent a non-unique ballot (i.e., one without a serial number) and then an envelope with a unique serial number. The voter marks their ballot, puts it in the envelope and mails it back. Back at election headquarters, election officials perform the two checks described above. If they fail, then the envelope is sent aside for further processing. If they succeed, then the envelope is emptied — checking that it only contains one ballot — and put into the pile for counting.
This procedure provides some level of privacy protection: there’s no single piece of paper that has both the voter’s identity and their vote, which is good, but at the time when election officials open the ballot they can see both the voter’s identity and the ballot, which is bad. With some procedural safeguards it’s hard to mount a large scale privacy violation: you’re going to be opening a lot of ballots very quickly and so keeping track of a lot of people is impractical, but an official could, for instance, notice a particular person’s name and see how they voted.1 Some jurisdictions address this with a two envelope system: the voter marks their ballot and puts it in an unmarked “secrecy envelope” which then goes into the marked envelope that has their identity on it. At election headquarters officials check the outer envelope, then open it and put the sealed secrecy envelope in the pile for counting. Later, all of the secrecy envelopes are opened and counted; this procedure breaks the connection between the user’s identity and their ballot.
In any production app, the user is directed to a route based on some authentication logic whenever the app is opened. In our Flutter App, we have at least two routes, Login and Dashboard. The problem is how can we decide which route should a user be redirected to?
In this app, we will check the value of a locally stored boolean variable to dynamically decide the home route. We can use any method for writing our authentication logic, like checking the validity of the API token, but for the sake of simplicity, we will explore a simple logic.
Configuring things in any framework is always tricky especially when we are just starting. We will learn today that how can we add and customize Bootstrap in our Nuxt project. Once we go through this guide, we will get an overall idea of how to make things work in Nuxt. By learning how to setup Bootstrap, we can install Popper.js and JQuery as well which are peer dependencies for Bootstrap.
GCC 11 is slated to enter "Stage 4" development at the end of this weekend after which only regression and documentation fixes will be permitted. The first GCC 11 stable release should be out in 2~3 months, but at the moment there is an increasing number of P1 regressions that are of the highest priority.
SUSE's Richard Biener announced today that GCC 11 will transition from stage three to stage four at the end of the week, at which point only regression fixes and documentation updates can be merged to trunk.
There has been though another 30 P1 regressions, which are bugs of the highest priority, bringing the total count to 67. There is also 331 P2 regressions, 34 P3 regressions, 190 P4 regressions, and 24 P5 regressions. While some 60 P3 regressions were closed, there is a net gain of around 50 new bugs since the prior GCC 11 status report.
I work with multiple servers with various architectures (e.g., Intel, AMD, Arm, etc.) when I'm testing software on Linux.
[...]
Until then, I had never accounted for this scenario (although I knew about it). I primarily work on scripting languages (usually Python) coupled with shell scripting. The Bash shell and the Python interpreter are available on most Linux servers of any architecture. Hence, everything had worked well before.
However, now I was dealing with a compiled language, Go, which produces an executable binary. The compiled binary consists of opcodes or assembly instructions that are tied to a specific architecture. That's why I got the format error. Since the Arm64 CPU (where I ran the binary) could not interpret the binary's x86-64 instructions, it errored out. Previously, the shell and Python interpreter took care of the underlying opcodes or architecture-specific instructions for me.
A C++ entity is a value, object, reference, function, enumerator, type, class member, bit-field, structured binding, namespace, template, template specialization, or parameter pack. An entity can be of one or more types. There are two categories of C++ types: fundamental and compound types. A scalar is arithmetic or a pointer object type. Fundamental types are scalars, while the rest of the entity types are compound types.
The memory of a computer is a series of cells. Each cell has the size of one byte, it is normally the space occupied by a Western European character. The size of an object is given in bytes. This article gives a summary of C++ types. You should already have basic knowledge of C++, in order to understand this article.
For those who might not be aware, Firebird on MacOS is now relocatable, in that you don't necessarily have to install it as a Framework, this also means that you can create an embedded version out of the current installer.
If you're a web admin and you're looking to make your job a bit easier, you probably have your eyes on a control panel. Such tools are generally web-based GUIs that make your job considerably easier. You might have a fine grasp on the command line tools necessary to get the job done, but having a GUI makes your work more efficient.
On top of that, when you assign tasks to lesser admins, you can be sure you find them staring at the screen, wondering what to do next.
Two functions are mainly used in PHP to delay the execution of the script for some time. These are usleep() and sleep(). The usleep() function is used to delay the execution of the script for specific microseconds. This function can throw an exception if the negative microseconds value is provided. This function consumes the CPU cycle also when called. How this function can be used in PHP has shown in this tutorial.
Many built-in functions exist in PHP to write in a new file or into the existing file. fwrite() function one of them to write content into the file. fopen() and fclose() functions are required to write content into the file using fwrite() function. fopen() function is used to open a file for reading, writing, and appending that returns a file handler. fwrite() function uses the file handler to write the content in the file. fclose() function is used to close the file that has opened for reading or writing and release the buffer that is used by the file. How the content can be written into a new or an existing file using the fwrite() function has been explained in this tutorial.
PHP has many built-in functions to change the case of the string. The string value can be converted into all uppercase or lowercase; convert the first letter of the string into the uppercase or lowercase, and convert the first character of each word of a string into uppercase. strtoupper(), ucfirst(), and ucwords() functions are used to change the case of a full string or a part of a string into the uppercase letter in different ways. The uses of these functions have been explained in this tutorial by using different examples.
Generating a different number every time by executing the script is called the random number. The random number can be used for various purposes in the programming, such as generating a random filename, random password, and a random number that is not predictable to others. PHP has many built-in functions to generate random numbers in different ways. rand(), random_int(), and mt_rand() functions are used in PHP to generate random numbers. How these functions is used to generate the random numbers are explained in this tutorial.
When any programming code generates unexpected output, it requires to find out the reason behind the error of the output to solve the problem. Debugging is the best way to find out the reason for the unexpected output of the code by tracing the code step by step.
Normally, print_r() and var_dump() functions are used to check the output of the variables. Xdebug extension is used in PHP for an advanced level of debugging. This extension is not installed in PHP by default. You have to install it and set up the necessary configurations to use its features. How the Xdebug extension can be installed and configured in PHP and integrated with the Visual Studio Code editor on Ubuntu is shown in this tutorial.
Different types of operators exist in PHP to perform logical operations. These are AND, OR, NOT, and XOR. These operators are used as a Boolean operator and bitwise operator. This tutorial mainly focuses on the Use of the XOR operator. The full form of XOR is exclusive, OR that works on two conditions. The XOR operator returns true when any condition returns true and returns false when both conditions return true or false. Xor keyword is used between the states to perform Boolean Xor operation, and ‘^’ symbol is used between the operands to perform bitwise xor operation. How the xor operator can be used for Boolean and bitwise operation, have shown in this tutorial.
XML document is used to store a small amount of data, and sometimes it is required to read the particular content of XML document based on the path value using PHP script. xpath() function is used to parse the content of an XML document. This function can be used by using simplexml_load_file() function or by creating the object of SimpleXMLElement class. The xpath() function can be used to read the particular XML node values shown in this tutorial.
If-else statements are normally used to define conditional statements in any programming language. ternary operator(?:) can be used as the alternative of any simple if-else statement. It is one of the shorthand comparison operators in PHP and contains three operands: the conditional statement, the statement for true condition, and the statement for the false condition. This operator is better implemented with a simple logical statement with a short code because it is better to maintain and can be defined in a single statement. The uses of this operator are explained in this tutorial.
Many built-in functions exist in PHP to sort the array variables. usort() function is one of them. This function sorts the array by using a user-defined callback function. When the array contains a particular type of data that can’t be sort in a standard way by using other sort functions, then usort() is better to use. For example, if the array contains data values, then the variety can’t be appropriately sorted using other sort functions of PHP. This type of collection can be sort by defining the proper user-defined function called in the second argument of the usort() function how usort() function can sort the specific array values shown in this tutorial.
In 2020, Java marked its 25th anniversary and, despite its age, remains strong and active. Its seven to 10 million developers make it one of the top three languages in use today, according to the TIOBE Index.
To help celebrate Java reaching a quarter-century, Daniel Oh recounted Java's history before he explained How to install Java on a Mac (because its future depends on more people using it). To continue the party, we've compiled the top five things we learned about Java in 2020. Whether you're just starting with the language or experienced and trying to improve your Java development skills, these are things you should know.
The Khronos Group and LunarG have announced an updated Vulkan SDK that includes now formally providing support for Apple platforms, including Apple Silicon systems via Universal Binaries.
With Apple still not officially backing Vulkan but preferring their own closed ecosystem of the Metal API, Vulkan on macOS/iOS platforms continue to rely on the MoltenVK portability layer that ultimately routes Vulkan over the Metal drivers.
In prior years, this annual series covered individual apps. This year, we are looking at all-in-one solutions in addition to strategies to help in 2021. Welcome to day 3 of 21 Days of Productivity in 2021.
Before we had calendars on our computers, we often had to do a dance around scheduling a meeting. A time that was good for Alice and Bob might not be suitable for Carol and Dave, so there was a lot of talking about when the meeting could be held. When electronic calendars became generally available, it was a revolution. Alice could check to see when Bob, Carol, Dave, and a meeting room were open, and send out an invitation asking for all of them to attend.
In prior years, this annual series covered individual apps. This year, we are looking at all-in-one solutions in addition to strategies to help in 2021. Welcome to day 4 of 21 Days of Productivity in 2021. In this article, I'll examine a strategy for prioritizing tasks on a to-do list. To find the open source tool that suits your routine, check out this list.
It is easy to add things to a task or to-do list. Almost too easy, really. And once on the list, the challenge becomes figuring out what to do first. Do we do the thing at the top of the list? Is the top of the list the most important thing? How do we figure out what the most important thing is?
With quantum computers already available for commercial use, albeit not in great quantity, I believe it is time for companies to start considering how to incorporate them into their arsenal of IT services. Time is running out for security teams to get their defenses in order ahead of the first quantum computer attack.
Right now, it’s not really possible to just buy the latest quantum computer model and take it for a spin. It takes some real architectural brain power to actually make such a computational beast fit into an existing structure.
What kind of architect would be needed for such a task, and what would the design look like?
The Linux Foundation has announced a new training program designed to introduce open source best practices to management and technical staff within organizations, Open Source Management & Strategy.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (adplug, audacious-plugins, cpu-x, kernel, kernel-headers, ocp, php, and python-lxml), openSUSE (crmsh, firefox, and hawk2), Oracle (thunderbird), Red Hat (kernel-rt), SUSE (kernel and rubygem-archive-tar-minitar), and Ubuntu (openvswitch and tar).
The number of non-human workers is growing, particularly as global organizations increasingly prioritize cloud computing, DevOps, IoT devices, and other digital transformation initiatives. Yet, organizations frequently only apply access controls to humans (employees, contractors, etc.), despite the risks associated with cyberattacks and data breaches linked to non-human workers and their privileged access to sensitive information.
Thousands of Syrian detainees have returned since a change in the rules in October, but homecoming is often not all it’s cracked up to be.
Salem Radi was overjoyed when news came through that he and his family would soon be allowed to return home after almost two years in al-Hol, a packed camp in northeast Syria that has become notorious for housing both supporters and victims of the so-called Islamic State.
The 44-year-old man, his wife, and eight children fled their rural hometown of al-Susah in eastern Deir Ezzor province in March 2019, part of an exodus of tens of thousands leaving the extremists’ rapidly shrinking territory in that part of Syria, battles raging behind them.
Along with other locals who fled, they were taken north across the desert by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. Backed by a US-led coalition, the SDF led the fight against IS in the area. After an intense security screening process, Radi and his family joined the almost 70,000 Syrians and foreigners in al-Hol, the largest camp in the Kurdish-held northeast.
During the 2020 election, liberal pundits and politicians repeatedly warned that democracy was “on the line,” “at stake,” “in peril,” and facing “an existential threat.” There was occasion for the hyperbolic language: Donald Trump and his Republican allies orchestrated an unprecedented assault on the integrity of U.S. elections by, to list just a few examples, promulgating ludicrous lies about voter fraud, obstructing early mail-in voting, encouraging vigilante voter intimidation, and constricting access to polls. But critics risk succumbing to a liberal version of “Make America Great Again” nostalgia if they assume Trump’s departure from office will solve our democratic crisis. His efforts to maintain power built upon a long history of political exclusion and racial subordination in the United States. It is not surprising that politicians, if allowed, would prefer to pick their own voters. The more vexing question is why voter suppression is not more taboo in a country that extols its democratic system as a beacon for the world.
This election has exposed a broad ambivalence about (and from some quarters, outright disdain for) majoritarian, multiracial democracy. Candidates compete on a playing field designed over generations to protect capital, colonial ambitions, and white supremacy. The anti-majoritarian Senate and Electoral College have rightly come under harsh scrutiny this election cycle. But contests are also distorted by the nation’s gerrymandered districts, a campaign finance system that licenses wide-scale legalized corruption, and immigration and naturalization policies that dictate which residents must live and work under laws that they have no voice in shaping. Millions more are disenfranchised due to incarceration and felony convictions, or because they lived in Washington, D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, or the Northern Mariana Islands.
[...]
After these dead ends, activists turned to agency registration. These “motor voter” laws required that state agents offer people applying for a driver’s license or social services the opportunity to register to vote. In the 1980s, scholar-activists Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward embraced agency registration as a strategy to counter Ronald Reagan’s assault on the welfare state, hoping that registering public assistance beneficiaries would alter the demographics of the electorate and force politicians to more aggressively defend the interests of state workers, low-income people, and communities of color. Their organization, the Human Service Employees Registration and Voter Education Fund, joined with civil rights, community action, and voting rights organizations (and later “Rock the Vote”) to push for registration reforms at the state and federal level throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. Because officials would be registering people already affirmatively identified by the state, organizers hoped the policy would be insulated from concerns about voter fraud. But the specter of fraud continued to haunt the debate. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell campaigned tirelessly against the law, sarcastically dubbing it “auto-fraudo,” while arguing that “relatively low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy.” President George H.W. Bush vetoed motor voter legislation in 1992 on the grounds that it was “an open invitation to fraud and corruption.” When President Bill Clinton finally signed the law in 1993, fraud concerns had rationalized the inclusion of new voter list maintenance requirements and the elimination of election day registration.
Political elites with a vested interest in limited participation have bequeathed us with a maze of seemingly apolitical technical regulations—restrictive registration policy, limited poll locations, constrained absentee and early voting—that the Trump administration seized upon in their efforts to undermine the 2020 election. These mechanisms are best understood as growing out of old status tests for political rights, tools used to guard not just against unlawful votes but unwelcome, particularly Black, voters.
This Kat takes journal subscriptions seriously. How seriously? Well, Mrs. Kat says that he would likely win his town’s award for the resident with the most paid subscriptions to journalistic content. For sure, this Kat has followed with ever-increasing concern, tinged by moments of incipient depression, the two-decade downward trajectory of print media in the face of (often free) on-line contents.
This Kat is no Luddite. There is complementary space for both on-line blogs, such as IPKat, and traditional journalistic content. The problem is that the IPKat has a simple cost structure, namely none, except for potential lost opportunity costs facing each member of the team. But newspapers and journals do not have that luxury. Unless they have a Daddy Warbucks in the background ready and able to cover losses, financial viability remains a constant challenge in the face of the availability of free on-line contents.
And so, the on-going struggle--how to attract paid subscribers? One of the most interesting recent attempts to do so has been to try and establish a notable presence in a different medium, and then to leverage that position to facilitate increased paid subscriptions in the original print product. This Kat has been particularly struck by the efforts of print icons to gain a foothold in the podcast space for that purpose.
NeoDynamics AB (Spotlight Stock Market: NEOD), a MedTech company dedicated to advancing diagnosis and care of breast cancer, today announces that the European Patent Office (EPO) has issued a Communication under Rule 71(3) EPC (Notice of Allowance) and intends to grant a European patent for NeoDynamics pulse biopsy tools, including a multi-purpose driver supporting several different needle options. The decision will be published in the European Patent Bulletin, once the requirements concerning the translation of the claims and payment of all fees are fulfilled by NeoDynamics.
On October 16, 2020, the Provincial Court of Barcelona issued a ruling that we consider very interesting and which provides an answer to the question of what should happen in an ongoing dispute over a patent, when it is amended at the European Patent Office.
Indeed, once the grant of a European patent is published in the European Patent Bulletin, it can be validated in Spain. With this validation, the patent holder can oppose it to third parties in Spain. However, the European patent that is validated in Spain can still be objected to by third parties in the European Patent Office. In the context of this opposition, the patent may be limited. This requires that the patent validated in Spain also be modified by submitting the corresponding translation to the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office.
This is what happened in the case resolved by the referenced resolution. Corning Opticals filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Huawei based on a Spanish patent. Huwaei answered the claim rejecting the infringement and filed a counterclaim requesting the invalidity of the Spanish patent. In parallel, Huwaei filed an opposition with the EPO against the European patent which served as the basis for the Spanish patent.
In the first instance, the Court considered that the patent was valid and that it had been infringed. The resolution was appealed in front of the High Court of Barcelona. At the same time, the opposition procedure before the EPO continued and ended up involving the limitation of the European patent in front of the EPO.
Therefore, the Spanish patent that was being considered in the appeal was limited as a consequence of the opposition process at the EPO. Corning Opticals submitted an amendment to the OEPM, with its corresponding Spanish translation. However, Huwaei requested that the nullity claim be terminated due to a supervening lack of purpose and that it be declared that there was no infringement of the patent.
Forward Pharma A/S (NASDAQ:FWP) (“we,” “Forward” or the “Company”), today announced that due to ongoing precautionary measures against the spread of the novel coronavirus (“COVID-19”), the Technical Board of Appeal (the “TBA”) of the European Patent Office (the “EPO”) again has rescheduled the oral hearing of the appeal against the decision of the Opposition Division that revoked the EP2801355 patent (the “’355 Patent”). The new hearing date is set for September 6, 2021.
A judge refused on Thursday to grant telecoms giant Vodafone a stay on a €508 million ($617 million) patent dispute over 3G technology brought by a Spanish technology company while a related dispute plays out in Madrid.
Vodafone had caused the "fragmentation" between the cases, High Court Judge Marcus Smith said. But he added that the British company had "entirely properly" avoided being a party in the Spanish lawsuit brought against it and Huawei by Top Optimized Technologies'; by invoking exclusive jurisdiction contract clauses requiring disputes to be dealt with in England.
"It is Vodafone that has forced the fragmentation of...
35 U.S.C. €§ 144. [My Article] The provision was amended in 1984 to particularly require a “mandate and opinion.” However, prior to that time the Federal Circuit and its predecessor always wrote opinions associated with every judgment. Although there is no legislative history, I believe that the fact of an opinion was assumed and simply codified into law.
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In this case, Waterblasting, LLC appealed an adverse IPR decision cancelling claims 1-4 and 10 of its US7255116 (Stripe removal system). On appeal, Waterblasting argued that the PTAB had erred in its legal analysis and also made factual conclusions that were not supported by substantial evidence.
The Federal Circuit sided with the PTO and affirmed. However, rather than explaining its decision, the Federal Circuit simply issued its judgment without opinion as permitted under Federal Circuit Local Rule 36.
The world's five largest IP offices granted 1.6 million patents in 2019, an increase of 5.9% on the previous year, according to the latest IP5 Statistics Report published earlier this week on the IP5 website.
The report is an annual compilation of patent statistics published by the European Patent Office, the Japan Patent Office, the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the China National Intellectual Property Administration and the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
In total, 2.7 million patent applications were filed at the IP5 offices in 2019, a decrease of 4% on 2018, but at the level of filings in 2017. Last year applications rose at KIPO (+4.3%), the EPO (+4.1%) and the USPTO (+4.1%), while falling at the JPO (-1.8%) and CNIPA (-9.2%).
All of the IP5 offices reported an increase in the number of patents granted in 2019, except for the JPO.
Following the passing in Germany of the Bill for Re-ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA) in December 2020, two constitutional complaints against German ratification were filed at the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC).
The FCC has now confirmed to journalists that the FCC has asked the Federal President not to sign the bill into law. Signing of the bill is the last step necessary before UPCA and Protocol on Provisional Application (PPA) ratifications can be deposited by Germany.
It is unclear at present whether the delay will be short (for example if the FCC declines to admit the complaints for detailed consideration), or will last for several years in the case that the FCC decides that at least one of the complaints is admissible. The first constitutional complaint against German ratification of the UPCA was filed in 2017 and decided only in 2020.
Agricultural sources claim restrictive plant breeding regulations are holding back CRISPR patent filings in Europe
Counsel from IBM, Blaze Bioscience, and four other companies say the USPTO should expand the requirements for joining the patent bar to increase gender diversity
IMPEACH 45. President Trump is the 45th President and so the meaning of this proposed mark (IMPEACH 45) is clear. The USPTO examiner caught the implication and rejected the application “because the applied-for mark consists of or includes something identifying a particular living individual whose written consent to register the mark is not of record.” The applicant then abandoned the registration application. A slightly more cryptic mark made it through the registration process. The image to the right shows the general prohibition sign (“no-sign”) covering the number 45 that is now a registered mark owned by Kamyar Shadan of Tiburon, CA.
Back in August 2016, it looked like Hillary Clinton would be No. 45. Thus when Mark Allan filed for IMPEACH THAT BITCH, the TM examiner similarly found that the proposed mark improperly “identifies Hillary Clinton, a living individual.” That registration application has also been abandoned. Other anti-Hillary registration applications include ANYBODY BUT CLINTON, WOMEN AGAINST CLINTON, and the catchy HILLARY.CON. These registration applications have all been abandoned.
