Frankly it was that or buy a new computer. I used MacOS from 2015 to 2020, but my hardware couldn’t keep up with the OS updates. When I held back on updates to preserve my customizations and maintain performance I found myself increasingly unsupported and abandoned, unable to install or update apps. My machine, a 2015 Macbook Air, had been made purposefully impossible to upgrade and I either had to abandon a perfectly functional machine or resign myself to a total lack of support.
Even worse, I looked over the new features for the latest OS updates and found nothing that would enhance my experience as a user; just more features designed to monetize me as a customer making recurring payments, and lock me into the Apple ecosystem. It was clear that the support for my older Air was not there in the long term and Apple was taking its personal computing environment in a direction I disagreed with.
I wasn’t new to Linux or free software. I had a little experience using Ubuntu from about a decade back, and had been interested for some years in free and open source software developments. So I thought, why not Linux? And if I was going to move anyway, I figured it was better do it sooner rather than later so I could learn and settle down on my new system. The Mac environment wasn’t getting any friendlier to me with time anyway, and I decided not to stick around until things became completely intolerable.
Cue a trial period with Linux on a virtual machine, a flurry of research and preparation, then taking the jump to wipe Mac OS off the machine to do a bare-metal installation of Linux. The Macbook Air is now a Linux machine that I am much happier with.
In this video, I talk about my recent realization of how AWESOME Debian is. It's literally the only distribution you should ever consider. Check out this video and I'll let you know why that is (with a little help from some friends).
Lutris developer Mathieu Comandon joins us to share his perspective on the uncomfortable issues facing Linux desktop developers.
Plus the tech behind Shells.com, community news, feedback, and more.
Special Guests: Mathieu Comandon and Zlatan Todorić.
1:38 Linux Innards 1:02:02 Vibrations from the Ether 1:21:06 Check This Out 1:23:10 Announcements & Outro
In our Innards section, we answer the question “What’s missing” and dive into the world of Arch
OBS Studio is an incredibly popular free and open-source cross-platform streaming and recording program.
You can find the latest OBS Studio version for Linux by using the Flatpak package or Snap.
Now, it looks like you will be able to finally run it as a native Wayland application in the next release (OBS Studio 27.0).
The OBS Studio software for streaming and recording that is quite popular with game streamers is now set to see good Wayland support for its next release. Stavracas for a while has been working on allowing good and native Wayland support for OBS Studio with the last of that work being merged upstream today. Among the work involved was native Wayland integration, creating textures from DMA-BUF for more efficient screen capturing, and Wayland-compatible capturing by making use of PipeWire and Flatpak Portals.
Along with our Intel Core i5 11600K + Core i9 11900K Linux review from yesterday with 22 pages of benchmarks, even more performance data is now published and continues to flow in via OpenBenchmarking.org for looking at the Intel Rocket Lake performance across hundreds of benchmarks and compared to many other processors we have tested and that of the community.
Via Intel Core i9 11900K on OpenBenchmarking.org you can see immediately the benchmarks where the i9-11900K is performing very well compared to all other public results on OpenBenchmarking.org and the areas where it's less competitive. Many of those areas outlined in yesterday's review. Similarly, there is the entry for the Intel Core i5 11600K as well.
Or if interested in just specific workloads of relevance to your computing needs navigate to say the timed kernel compilation, Blender, srsLTE, or other individual test profiles (benchmark) pages. Where there is multiple data points from multiple separate occasions run and statistically significant data collected, there should be the i5-11600K and i9-11900K in the composite rankings to show how these Rocket Lake CPUs stack up against other CPUs with sufficient test data.
It’s not often that NVIDIA releases both a Linux and Windows driver on the same day that bring their own notable changes, but the newly-released 465 versions do just that.
On the Windows side, the new 465.89 driver adds NVIDIA Reflex low-latency technology to Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, with promises of input lag improvements of up to 30%. Considering just how popular this game is, and how crucial it is to have smooth gameplay, this could addition could be adopted pretty quickly. NVIDIA says that seven of the top 10 shooters on the market today now use Reflex.
After releasing PeerTube v3 in early January, a new main version on popular free YouTube alternative is now available. PeerTube 3.1 comes with plenty of improvements and new features.
PeerTube is a piece of software that enables anyone to run their own tube site (like YouTube) very easily. All of the sites everyone runs can talk to each other, and people with accounts on one can interact with people on others. To put it short, it is a network of tube sites.
Haruna Video Player version 0.6.0 has been released today. The new version adds support for YouTube playlists, integration with MPRISv2 applets, and more.
Haruna is a free and open source Qt / QML video player for Linux that makes use of mpv (libmpv) for video playback.
mpv is a lightweight video player which with features such as hardware acceleration, youtube-dl support, Lua scripting, and more, which uses a minimal user interface. This is where Haruna Video Player come in - it adds a GUI on top of mpv (using libmpv) that can show the playlist on mouse-over, easily configure the keyboard shortcuts and mouse buttons, jump to the next chapter by middle click on the progress bar, load primary and secondary subtitles, perform color adjustments, and more.
This tutorial is going to show you how to install MediaWiki on Ubuntu 20.04. MediaWiki is the backend software that powers Wikipedia. It’s free open-source and the most widely used wiki software today. Well-known users of MediaWiki include Wikipedia.org and wikia.com.
You can use MediaWiki to create your own private or public wiki site. MediaWiki has a lot of useful extensions that have been created both for Wikipedia and for other wiki sites.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Kotlin Programming Language on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Kotlin is a free and open-source statically-typed programming language. It runs on the JVM, and one can compile to JavaScript source code. Kotlin is similar to Apple’s Swift. Kotlin was recently open-sourced and the compiler made accessible through Github.
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 the Kotlin Programming Language on a Debian 10 (Buster).
LibreOffice office suite 7.1.2, the second bug-fix release for the 7.1 series, now is available to install in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Linux Mint 20, Ubuntu 20.10 via its official PPA.
Varnish Cache is a powerful reverse HTTP proxy used to speed up web applications that is available as Open-Source software. Varnish caches both static and dynamic content. It handles all inbound requests before they land on your web server backend. It sits between a web browser and Apache or Nginx web server. Varnish cache stores all incoming page requests in memory so web servers don't have to create the same web page over and over again.
In this post, we will show you how to install Varnish cache with Apache and Nginx on CentOS 8.
PHP is one of the most popular server scripting languages used for creating dynamic pages. Many popular CMS is written in PHP including, WordPress, Laravel, Magento, and many more.
The PHP 7.4 version was officially released on November 28th, 2019 with a number of new features. It has also few incompatibilities so you should take care before upgrading from the previous version.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP7.4 with Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04 server.
If your keyboard has a broken or missing key, working on it can be challenging. In general, regardless of whether you use a laptop or an external keyboard, it's plausible that it could run into such keyboard problems over time.
While there are several ways to fix a broken keyboard, the simplest (and beginner-friendly) method is to blow away the dust or debris entrenched in the keyboard activity.
However, there are instances when this doesn't work. An alternative solution at such times is to remap the broken key to another key on your keyboard.
DMIDECODE command in Linux is used fetch the complete system hardware information. It can information like Serial Numbers, Part number etc for all the hardware components like CPU, RAM, HDD etc. We can also get information related to system BIOS.
DMIDECODE command in Linux is actually fetched data from DMI table or Desktop Management Interface Table & produced it in human-readable format, hence it’s also called DMI Table Decoder.
Total War: ROME REMASTERED, the recent announcement from Creative Assembly and Feral Interactive is coming to Linux on April 29 and here's a look at what's improved. It's going to be replacing the original too, which only supported Windows, while this will be properly cross-platform across Linux, macOS and Windows together.
Some of the new improvements include updated battlefield environments, new unit models, an enhanced campaign map, improved visual effects during battles and much more.
The development team behind the widely used and lightweight Xfce desktop environment have done a great job this month keeping several important apps and plugins updated with new features, improvements, bug fixes, and updated translations.
The star of this month is Thunar, Xfce’s default file manager, which received not one but three maintenance updates to version 4.16 that re-introduce alternative shortcuts for the zoom functionality, add the ability to select the copied files after copy operation, prevent it from merging folders when creating a copy with same name, add the ability to reload the current directory before selecting new files, add the ability to hide the “properties” menu-item for unmounted devices, and revamp the documentation to modernize and uniform it across components.
Now I can type €² (exponent two), €© (copyright mark), €® (registered trademark), â⢠(trademark) with some shortcut keys I chose myself. I do not need to open Insert Special Characters anymore with this ability. This [Compose key] here is an arbitrary key (such as Alt) which when pressed once will show a mark on screen, and I should press Shift+C and then O to make €©. For the superscripts, for example I press Compose key once, then I should press Shift+6, and I press a number. Magic! This can be configured on Settings and Tweaks.
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Since few versions ago, I saw Settings look responsive, that was, resizable to a smartphone screen size. The reason is, that GNOME is indeed made suitable for touchscreen devices (tablet and phones) and today it is made a reality thanks to PinePhone & Librem you can check them out. The new changes at Settings I found are under Keyboard section with Input Sources moved there and added with a new Compose Key facility, however I found Dock is missing (and missing also in Tweaks) and I don't know why -- perhaps just like in the past, GNOME developers want to make Dock position permanent unless we change it someway.
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GNOME Forty is fast I encourage you to try it! Everything feels seamless, looks better designed. Maps, Weather, Settings, and Files after the user navigation are now faster and better. However, there's still some issues and in my opinion the most unpleasant is Software as mentioned above. Overall, it is worth trying and waiting for the inclusion on Ubuntu in particular and on GNU/Linux distros worldwide in general. Finally, enjoy your computer with GNOME! Congratulations and thank you to all GNOME developers!
Gestures are a great starting point. They are buggy, yes, but they also are 1:1 (which is not taken from KDE Plasma, although some of the gesture code is) and they are quite useful. Tocuhscreen gestures are also very effective and the animations are good. This receives a big thumb up from me.
A new version of JingOS, the tablet-friendly Linux distro, is available to download — and it’s jam packed with improvements.
For those new to it, JingOS is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution targeted at tablet devices. It sports a custom Qt-based desktop environment designed for touch (but compatible with mouse and keyboard), comes with a suite of bespoke apps, and …has more than a passing nod to Apple’s iPadOS!
JingOS 0.8 is the first major update to the OS since January, when the JingOS alpha emerged to much excitement. Two months and a tonne of tweaks later, JingOS gains support for over-the-air (OTA) updates, ships a redesigned settings app, and a custom app store...
Statistics recently showed us that many users did not update their computer. The way other operating systems handle updates is either by forcing their users to do so, or by frustrating them and annoying them until they do.
We spent time looking into this and talking to casual users to understand why they weren’t applying updates. We found many of them were sensitive to the importance of applying updates but didn’t do so simply because they were never really told to. When asked why and when they updated their phone they recognized that the phone update notifications were annoying but that they were successful in making them apply the updates.
Some users expressed a feeling of relief after applying phone updates, both because they felt like they were doing “the right thing” and because they knew the notification wouldn’t come back “for a while”. To us this looks like a partial delegation of responsibility. The user is aware of the importance of the issue and happy to be reminded of it to some extent as long as it doesn’t happen too often. Although the user does not review updates and is likely to apply all of them, he/she is not fully onboard with automation, appreciates being asked consent and decides on the timing of the updates.
Statistics showed us we needed to do something. Feedback showed us people hated to be annoyed, taken hostage or forced to do something they didn’t want (this is a major source of frustration for Mac and Windows users apparently). We also had key principles to respect. This is your computer not ours. You’re also all very different and you use the software we make in very different ways, so we needed to keep that in mind and let you configure and tune the software so it remains flexible and useful no matter how you like to use it.
So with all that said here’s what we did. We designed a notification system which acts as a gentle and welcome reminder and took great care not to turn it into an annoyance.
Enterprise software developer Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH has released Proxmox Mail Gateway 6.4, the latest version of its open-source email security solution.
Proxmox Mail Gateway is a complete operating system based on Debian Buster 10.9, but using Linux kernel 5.4.106, which is under long term support (LTS) status.
The anti-spam and anti-virus filtering solution from Proxmox functions as a full featured mail proxy, that is deployed between the firewall and the internal mail server. It protects organizations against threats, such as spam, viruses, Trojans, and phishing emails.
We know about the 'initrd' file, which is an initramfs that runs first at bootup. EasyOS has this, as do the puppies. A traditional full installation, occupying an entire partition, may not need an initrd, and can be run directly from the kernel boot parameters. For example, if the full installation is in /dev/sda9, then boot parameters would include root=/dev/sda9, or the PARTUID could be specified. If an initrd is used, the boot parameters would not have root=, instead would have something like initrd=initrd.gz, where initrd.gz is the name of the file, with perhaps a path. One of the reasons we have a initrd is to setup the layered filesystem, using overlayfs or aufs, then a switch_root is performed onto the layered filesystem. However, Dima, forum name 'dimkr' on github and the Puppy Forum, and 'iguleder' on the old Puppy Murga Forum, has come up with a way to load the layered filesystem without requiring an initrd.
The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.13.4 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
This release includes a fix for busybox CVE-2021-28831 and kernel fixes for Ampere Mt Jade machines.
Xinuos, formed around SCO Group assets a decade ago under the name UnXis and at the time disavowing any interest in continuing SCO's long-running Linux litigation, today sued IBM and Red Hat for alleged copyright and antitrust law violations.
"First, IBM stole Xinuos' intellectual property and used that stolen property to build and sell a product to compete with Xinuos itself," the US Virgin Islands-based software biz claims in its complaint [PDF]. "Second, stolen property in IBM's hand, IBM and Red Hat illegally agreed to divide the relevant market and use their growing market powers to victimize consumers, innovative competitors, and innovation itself."
The complaint further contends that after the two companies conspired to divide the market, IBM then acquired Red Hat to solidify its position.
SCO Group in 2003 made a similar intellectual property claim. It argued that SCO Group owned the rights to AT&T's Unix and UnixWare operating system source code, that Linux 2.4.x and 2.5.x were unauthorized derivatives of Unix, and that IBM violated its contractual obligations by distributing Linux code.
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"While this case is about Xinuos and the theft of our intellectual property," said Sean Snyder, president and CEO of Xinuos, in a statement. "It is also about market manipulation that has harmed consumers, competitors, the open-source community, and innovation itself."
An IBM spokesperson told The Register that the company has not yet been served with a copy of the complaint. Red Hat did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Xinuos, Inc., a software company headquartered in the U.S. Virgin Islands that provides commercial customers with server operating systems, today filed a copyright infringement and antitrust lawsuit against International Business Machines Corp. ("IBM") and Red Hat, Inc. ("Red Hat") in the United States District Court of the Virgin Islands, St. Thomas and St. John Division. Xinuos alleges that IBM and Red Hat, using wrongfully copied software code, have engaged in additional, illegal anti-competitive misconduct to corner the billion-dollar market for Unix and Linux server operating systems.
The first stable release of AlmaLinux, the drop-in CentOS replacement, has arrived on schedule. AlmaLinux is an open source rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that aims to fill the void left by Red Hat’s move to divert its resources to the CentOS Stream distro.
Proposed by server OS vendor CloudLinux, AlmaLinux backs the new Linux distro with a financial commitment of a million dollars a year, and promises to develop and foster an open source community around the project.
“So, after about 4 months since the decision to steer CentOS in a different path, you now have a 1:1 binary compatible drop-in replacement, with a very long support timeframe,” write the AlmaLinux developers in the release announcement.
As a sysadmin and a consultant, I'm constantly looking for ways to learn new things and keep updated with the latest technologies. In addition to training and self-learning, completing a technical certification program is a good way to learn, sharpen, and demonstrate your skills.
Change is the one constant in computing and networking environments. It has now driven their evolution to encompass the telecommunications edge.
The centralized cloud in datacenters–today’s dominant paradigm for communications service providers (CSPs)–remains vital to efficiently store and process information. However, as the demand for real-time processing and low-latency connectivity applications and services increases, edge computing is poised to become progressively more important—and, in time, indispensable as part of a hybrid cloud computing model. Service providers can offer an edge cloud platform to deliver services for vertical industry participants, providing more innovation and ultimately serve customers better.
The successful shaping of an organization’s DevOps culture depends on a few key factors: leadership, technology, and investment in quality training resources. With Red Hat’s immersive DevOps curriculum—featuring courses on open practices to culture enablement—these critical concepts can help catalyze widespread transformation within your organization.
Late last year, I’ve read that a new Ansible-related exam was available: the Red Hat Certified Specialist in Services Management and Automation exam (EX358). I’ve taken and passed this exam at the end of January. It was the first time I did a Red Hat exam that was brand new and without having the possibility of finding online some opinions around it.
You know about using Fedora Linux to write code, books, play games, and listen to music. You can also do system simulation, work on electronic circuits, work with embedded systems too via Fedora Labs. But you can also make music with the VCV Rack software. For that, you can use to Fedora Jam or work from a standard Fedora Workstation installation with the LinuxMAO Copr repository enabled. This article describes how to use modular synthesizers controlled by Fedora Linux.
QEMU/KVM libvirt virtual machine can be acessed via serial console. When a new VM is created, serial console device is created. However to fully utilize this, several steps are needed on the guest machine.
Earlier this month, Matthew Miller suggested the Fedora Council update the default content license from the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0) license to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. This license applies to content (not code) submitted to Fedora that does not have an explicit license attached. It does not override the explicit license choices of contributors or upstream projects.
My graphics card died and thanks to COVID and Bitcoin, it will be a long wait until it’s back. I am on Mac M1 at the moment and it looks like there are not many good IRC clients on MacOS.
I was looking for a simple letsencrypt tutorial for my home server running Fedora but it looks like the official (and quite capable) certbot is not availble in Fedora repos. So I have decided to go a more simple route of using acme-tiny shell script which is present and does the same, at least if you are running Apache httpd.
The siduction distribution is a desktop-oriented operating system and live medium based on the "unstable" branch of Debian GNU/Linux. Forked from aptosid in late 2011, siduction offers many separate live media with a range of desktop environments. The project also promises regular releases, an open development model, and friendly relationship with its developer and user community.
Debian-based Parrot OS has come up with a new release Parrot 4.11 with Linux 5.10 Kernel as default and updated hacking tools.
In March I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 12.25 hours from earlier months. I worked 25.75 hours and will carry over the remainder.
I eventually settled on an apparently working patch series to fix the futex security issue in Linux 4.9. This went through upstream stable review and was included in 4.9.260. I applied the same fixes to the Debian package, along with some other security and regression fixes. I uploaded it and issued DLA-2586-1.
One of the original promises of open source software is that distributed peer review and transparency of process results in enhanced end-user security. However, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free and open source software for malicious flaws, almost all software today is distributed as pre-compiled binaries. This allows nefarious third-parties to compromise systems by injecting malicious code into ostensibly secure software during the various compilation and distribution processes.
The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.
Freexian’s “Debian LTS” service has so far been entirely successful, with a steady growth over the years. Thanks to this, and even if there are always new challenges, it is fair to say that the Debian LTS team has met its goal in the last few years.
While this started from the desire to make LTS a reality, many sponsors are only looking for a way to give back to Debian through their company, and to make sure that Debian fits their needs.
But if you look at the bigger picture outside of this small LTS area, you will easily find many issues that need to be addressed if we want Debian to meet the needs of corporate users. Those issues can have widely different types and complexity be. They can be as simple as missing the latest upstream version for an important package because the maintainer disappeared and nobody noticed before it was too late (i.e. the release was frozen); or a somewhat basic piece of software not yet packaged at all; or a release critical bug that was left unattended. On the other end of the spectrum, some corporate requirements will prove tougher to solve, for instance for large software suites that are complex to package, or could potentially have an impact elsewhere in Debian.
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This major shift in our offering would also be an ideal opportunity to build a professional, free-software based infrastructure aimed at sustaining this business, making it easier to administer the various aspects of this work, and easily allowing many more sponsors to join (individuals included!).
On a more pragmatic/operational note, this shift will bring a lot of challenges to the table, and those can hardly be handled with the current resources of Freexian: if we hope to properly implement this new strategy, we’ll need some additional help.
While containers are known for their multiple benefits for the enterprise, one should be aware of the complexity they carry, especially in large scale production environments. Having to deploy, reboot, upgrade or apply patches to patches to hundreds and hundreds of containers is no easy feat, even for experienced IT teams. Different types of Kubernetes solutions have emerged to address this issue.
However, navigating these solutions to pick the right one is often challenging, as there is no true ‘one size fits all’ . Each route you take to adopting Kubernetes comes with its pros and cons; this gets even trickier when you consider that what might be a deal breaker for one organisation, might not be an issue for another, depending on each business’s specific profile.
So before we dive into the challenges and solutions of each type of Kubernetes, let’s explore some of the key considerations for businesses, that will impact which Kubernetes approach is most suitable to their needs.
If you just want a tutorial to set up your data science environment on Ubuntu using NVIDIA RAPIDS and NGC Containers just scroll down. I would however recommend reading the reasoning behind certain choices to understand why this is the recommended setup.
Cloud or local setup
Public clouds offer a great set of solutions for data professionals. You can set up a VM, container, or use a ready-made environment that presents you with a Jupyter notebook. They are also great in terms of productizing your solution and exposing an inference endpoint. Nevertheless, every data scientist needs a local environment.
If you are starting your career it’s better to understand exactly how all the pieces are working together, experiment with many tools and frameworks, and do it in a cost-effective way.
If you are an experienced professional you will always meet a customer which cannot put their data on a public cloud, ie. for compliance or regulatory reasons.
Additionally, I like to be able to take my work with me on a trip, and sometimes I’m not within range of a fast internet connection. Having your own machine makes a lot of sense.
We are thrilled to release the Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview, a special build of Ubuntu for the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) that serves as a sandbox for experimenting with new features and functionality. Over the past year, we have proudly hosted two WSL conferences known as WSLConf. WSLConf was initially intended to be an event where the early adopters of WSL could share best practices. As interest and engagement spread, the now global conference has turned into a hub for innovation, collaboration, and ideas. The new Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview is our way of thanking the community and providing a space for us to collectively shape the future of Ubuntu on WSL.
Canonical today announced the release of the "Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview" as a specialized build of Ubuntu catering to Microsoft's WSL2.
The Raspberry Pi 4 is a pretty cool board, but if you wished it was just a bit smaller, and you could use the PCIe interface exposed by the Broadcom BCM2711 processor more easily, Timon has designed Piunora carrier board for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4.
The solution provides a board with the guts of Raspberry Pi 4 SBC but using the Arduino form factor including access to the six ADC pins, and an M.2 socket with the PCIe signal from the Broadcom SoC.
The key concept introduced in Arm v9's new Confidential Compute Architecture is the realm. Realms are containerized, isolated execution environments, completely opaque to both operating system and hypervisor. The hypervisor itself will only be responsible for scheduling and resource allocation. Realms themselves are to be managed by the realm manager—a new concept that can apparently be implemented in 1/10th the code required for a hypervisor.
Arm has set out its stall for the first major new version of its instruction set architecture – Armv9 – in about a decade, and promised compatible chips will have improved machine-learning and security capabilities.
Previous versions of the architecture introduced support for things like virtualization and SIMD; the last major update, Armv8, debuted in 2011. Arm says its latest instruction set architecture, v9, will be geared toward today's top buzzword in tech – AI. The chip design house, which Nvidia is still trying to acquire from Softbank, laid on the marketing a little thick for the unveiling of the ISA, though there is some detail here.
Armv8 was announced in October 2011 as the first 64-bit architecture from Arm. while keeping compatibility with 32-bit Armv7 code. Since then we’ve seen plenty of Armv8 cores from the energy-efficient Cortex-A35 to the powerful Cortex-X1 core, as long as some custom cores from Arm partners.
But Arm has now announced the first new architecture in nearly ten years with Armv9 which builds upon Armv8 but adds blocks for artificial intelligence, security, and “specialized compute” which are basically hardware accelerators or instructions optimized for specific tasks.
As SiFive has a portfolio of RISC-V cores ranging from low-power E2-series to high-performance U8-series cores with performance similar to Cortex-A7x cores, the company has not released new cores for a while, and instead focuses on improving their current RISC-V cores.
After months of hard work from our amazing community, we are proud to announce the second beta release of postmarketOS, based on Alpine Linux 3.13. The amount of supported devices has been increased from one (just the PinePhone in v20.05) to no less than eleven - and all of them run a (close to) mainline kernel! Each device is able to run modern phone shells Phosh, Plasma Mobile and Sxmo. The Nokia N900 is an exception of course, for that one we recommend running i3.
As mentioned in the header of the blog post, in its current state, postmarketOS is for Linux enthusiasts. Expect bugs and help out with fixing them. It's a long hard road to an alternative smartphone OS that doesn't track its users, gives back control and makes a long lifetime feasible. But we are making steady progress, and when compared to when we started out, a huge community has been established - not only within postmarketOS, but also a whole ecosystem of other projects that share the same goal and work together.
Release versions of postmarketOS are best for stability. For the over 250 (!) booting devices in the testing category and rolling release thrills, use postmarketOS edge.
Google Pixel phones support what they call ”Motion Photo” which is essentially a photo with a short video clip attached to it. They are quite nice since they bring the moment alive, especially as the capturing of the video starts a small moment before the shutter button is pressed. For most viewing programs they simply show as static JPEG photos, but there is more to the files.
Rapid progress is being made towards a new Libreboot release. It should be done by late April or early June 2021. Many new boards will be supported, with lots of bugs fixed, new features added and the latest coreboot/GRUB/SeaBIOS versions used on all boards. The Libreboot website will be massively overhauled.
I, Leah Rowe, have re-taken full control of the Libreboot project after 4 years delay in bringing out a new release. Long story in short, Libreboot began a new and ambitious re-write of its build system in 2017; as of 2021, that build system is still not ready; the design is fundamentally flawed and the code is unmaintainable so I have scrapped the rewrite entirely. The work will be preserved, for reference, but it has otherwise been abandoned.
I, Leah Rowe, was not responsible for that re-write. The design of that re-written build system is fundamentally flawed, and it has too many bugs. The people working on it kept adding too many new features without fixing fundamental issues. I have revoked all of their access to project infrastructure; Libreboot is now lead by me. I have a completely different idea for how to run the project and what a coreboot distro should be.
I, Leah Rowe, stepped down from Libreboot development in 2017. Since late 2020, I’ve been actively developing Libreboot again. I have been working on another project, forked via Libreboot 20160907 build system lbmk but on documentation from December 2020. That project is: http://osboot.org/ - if Libreboot seems dead to you right now, it’s because I’ve been doing the work exclusively in osboot, with the intention of adapting that work back into Libreboot.
osboot has very different goals than Libreboot, but the build system there is vastly improved. I have focused on adding all libre-friendly boards to osboot which means anything that Libreboot does support, or can support. I am presently using a version of coreboot from December 2020, with patches applied on top to improve certain functionality on specific boards.
Google Chrome developers have announced plans to roll out DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) support to Chrome web browser for Linux.
DoH has been supported on Google Chrome for other platforms, including Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, and Android, since at least 2020.
While the exact version of Chrome for Linux that would come out with DoH support is yet to be announced, the Chromium project expects either M91 or M92 to contain the feature.
The failure mode of decoding according to the wrong encoding is very different for the Latin script and for non-Latin scripts. Also, there are historical differences in UTF-8 adoption and encoding labeling in different language contexts. For example, UTF-8 adoption happened sooner for the Arabic script and for Vietnamese while Web developers in Poland and Japan had different attitudes towards encoding labeling early on. For this reason, it’s not enough to look at the global aggregation of data alone.
Since Firefox’s encoding behavior no longer depends on the UI locale and a substantial number of users use the en-US localization in non-U.S. contexts, I use geographic location rather than the UI locale as a proxy for the legacy encoding family of the Web content primary being read.
The geographical breakdown of telemetry is presented in the tables by ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code. The code is deduced from the source IP addresses of the telemetry submissions at the time of ingestion after which the IP address itself is discarded. As another point relevant to make about privacy, the measurements below referring to the .jp, .in, and .lk TLDs is not an indication of URL collection. The split into four coarse categories, .jp, .in+.lk, other ccTLD, and non-ccTLD, was done on the client side as a side effect of these four TLD categories getting technically different detection treatment: .jp has a dedicated detector, .in and .lk don’t run detection at all, for other ccTLDs the TLD is one signal taken into account, and for other TLDs the detection is based on the content only. (It’s imaginable that there could be regional differences in how willing users are to participate in telemetry collection, but I don’t know if there actually are regional differences.)
Heikki Nousiainen: The funding is definitely going to strengthen our position. We believe that there's a big trend moving to open source and moving to cloud with managed services and we are in a very good position to grow aggressively. This round also allows us to significantly increase our investment in the open source technology that we love as we contribute back to projects, making sure that they are healthy.
I’m happy to announce that we yet again completed a full eight week release cycle and as customary, we end it with a fresh release. Enjoy!
Suppose you need to create a function for adding two numbers together in plain C. How would you write it? What sort of an API would it have?
Finding your way around a version control system can be tricky. It can be massively overwhelming for a newbie, but being well-versed with the terminology and the basics of a version control system like Git is one of the baby steps to start contributing to open source.
Being familiar with Git can also help you out of sticky situations in your open source journey. Git is powerful and makes you feel in control—there is not a single way in which you cannot revert to a working version.
We have released Qt 6.0.3 today. As a patch release the Qt 6.0.3 does not add any new functionality but provides bug fixes and other improvements.
While Qt 6.1 is aiming to release around the end of April, for now the Qt 6.0 series continues marching forward and is out today with the Qt 6.0.3 point release providing another few dozen bug fixes.
The overview notes that "JavaScript is now used by an incredible number of high-profile applications, showing that deeper knowledge of this technology is an important skill for any web or mobile developer.” This tutorial explores the various building blocks of the language to help you get started.
Since you are here, you are already using Emacs for text editing, possibly for email, and certainly for coding tasks. When you start doing serious web development, you want as many advantages as are possible. Here are some tools that will make your experience coding for the web using Emacs.
As the saying goes, Emacs is an operating system lacking a decent editor. You can set things up so that Emacs runs the entire workflow for you, including git, compiling, and many more things.
I'm a big fan of Makefiles. Almost all my side projects are using them, and I've been advocating their usage at work too.
Makefiles give your contributors an entry point on how to do certain things like, building, testing, deploying. And if done correctly, they can massively simplify your CI/CD pipeline scripts as they can often just stupidly call the respective make targets. Most importantly, they are a very convenient shortcut for you as a developer as well.
When debugging code, you're often faced with figuring out when a variable changes. Without any advanced tools, you have the option of using print statements to announce the variables when you expect them to change. However, this is a very ineffective way because the variables could change in many places, and constantly printing them to a terminal is noisy, while printing them to a log file becomes unwieldy.
This is a common issue, but now there is a simple but powerful tool to help you with monitoring variables: watchpoints.
The watchpoint concept is common in C and C++ debuggers to monitor memories, but there's a lack of equivalent tools in Python. watchpoints fills in the gap.
In Python, functions are treated no different than regular objects like numbers and strings. You can assign a function to a variable and store it inside a data structure. You can pass a function to another function as one of its parameters. You can even define a function inside another function. Such functional programming approach in Python can be best illustrated by built-in functions called map(), filter(), and reduce().
In this tutorial, we will see how to use map(), filter(), and reduce() in Python. While their functionalities can be equally achieved with list comprehension or explicit for-loops, these functions allow us to write short, simple, and concise code. For example, a problem that can be solved with 4-5 lines of code using an explicit for-loop can be done in 1-2 code lines using these functions. So, without further ado, let's get started and see each one of them with examples.
This article will cover a tutorial on handling “csv” files using Python. The term “csv” stands for “comma separated values” where each row or line contains text based values delimited by commas. In some cases, “semicolon” is also used instead of “comma” to separate values. However, this doesn’t make much difference to file format rules and the logic to handle both types of separators remains the same.
CSV file format is most commonly used for maintaining databases and spreadsheets. The first line in a CSV file is most commonly used to define column fields while any other remaining lines are considered rows. This structure allows users to present tabular data using CSV files. CSV files can be edited in any text editor. However, applications like LibreOffice Calc provide advanced editing tools, sort, and filter functions.
This article will cover a guide on “zip” function available in Python’s standard module library. This method allows you to combine and pair elements of multiple iterable objects. You can then run further logic on these pairs. In many cases, using a “zip” function is much more efficient and cleaner than using multiple, nested “for” loops.
The dice is a simple cube that generates any number from 1 to 6, and the dice simulator is a computer model that rolls the dice for the user. A dice rolling simulator can be implemented in different ways by Python. Six images will be required to create that will be used in the simulator. The Pillow module of Python is used to display any image in Python that is not installed by default. The dice rolling simulator can be implemented without GUI and GUI, as shown in this tutorial.
The main task of the webserver is to handle the HTTP requests from the client. It waits for the HTTP requests coming from the particular IP address and port number, handles the request, and sends the client’s response back. Python uses the SimpleHTTPServer module to create a web server instantly and easily serve the content of the file from the server. It can be used for file sharing also. For this, you have to enable this module with the location of the shareable files. This module comes with the Python interpreter. You don’t need to install it. Since this module is merged with the http.server module in python3, so you have to run http.server to run the webserver in python3. How web server can be used to handle HTTP request and share files, have been shown in this tutorial.
Both Fahrenheit and Celsius are used for temperature measurement. German physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit is the inventor of the Fahrenheit measurement scale, and the unit of this measurement is defined by the degree. The water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit and water boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Swedish astronomer Andres Celsius is the inventor of the Celsius measurement scale, and the unit of this measurement is also defined by the degree. The water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius, and water boils at 100 degrees Celsius. Different ways to convert the Fahrenheit scale to the Celsius scale using python script are shown in this tutorial.
pexpect is a popular Python module for doing different types of automated tasks. Different types of interactive applications such as telnet, ssh, ftp, etc., can be automated using this module. It is a pure Python module, and it does not require a C compiler or TCL or Expect extensions like others expect modules. It can work easily by using a Python interpreter only. This module can be used in two ways. One way is to use the run() function, and another way is to use spawn class. The run() function is easy to use than the spawn class and performs the automated tasks quickly. The particular command or a program can be executed by the run() function that returns the output. This function can be used as the alternative to the os.system() function. The spawn class is more powerful than the run() function that can spawn a child program, interact with it by sending input, and waiting for the response. This module is installed in python3 by default. The two ways of using this module have shown in this tutorial.
If you've been using the Bash shell for a decent amount of time, you probably know how to print strings in the Linux terminal using the echo command. The printf command, however, makes printing text with specific formatting much easier.
Today we'll learn how to make use of the printf function in order to enhance our Bash scripting skills.
Bash is a UNIX shell-compatible command process whose main task is to manipulate strings conducted in a shell environment. Programmers are at times called upon to work on different files. They can add, delete, and replace parts or the whole file to fit their work. This calls upon the knowledge of replacing string in bash. Data storage can be temporary or permanent, depending on the nature of the data. File string is essential when replacing file contents.
With the release of Jakarta EE 8, enterprise Java technology joined the open source community. Despite the massive scale of this undertaking, which involved scores of projects, tests, meetings, presentations, and deliberations, the transition was a huge success, providing Java developers worldwide with an open source platform for cloud-native enterprise applications.
However, the next challenge for Jakarta EE was already on deck. Although Jakarta EE 8 was fully compatible with its Java EE 8 predecessor, for the Jakarta EE 9 release, all the specification package prefixes had to be changed from javax to jakarta. For a cloud-native Java runtime, such as Open Liberty, the challenge is to ensure that this change results in as little disruption as possible for application developers.
The Linux Foundation announced Wednesday it will host the AsyncAPI Initiative. AsyncAPI is a specification and a suite of open source tools that work with asynchronous APIs and event-driven architectures. It is the fastest-growing API specification according to a recent developer survey, tripling in production usage from 2019 to 2020.
LF Networking (LFN), the de-facto collaboration ecosystem for Open Source Networking projects, today announced that Walmart has joined as a Platinum member. Walmart is the first retail member of LFN and joins 21 other global organizations as Platinum members all working to accelerate open source networking.
“We are thrilled to welcome Walmart to the LF Networking community,” said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge and IoT, at the Linux Foundation. “As the world’s largest retailer, Walmart brings expertise across a broad swath of areas, including retail point of sale networking, enterprise IT, and hybrid cloud deployments. We look forward to collaborative efforts that accelerate the open source networking community.”
Hosted within The Linux Foundation, LF Energy leads the way by bringing together stakeholders to solve the complex, interconnected problems associated with the decarbonization of energy and sector coupling through neutral governance, an open, collaborative community, and using resilient, secure, and flexible open source software.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and the OpenTreatments Foundation, which enables treatments for rare genetic diseases regardless of rarity and geography, today announced the RareCamp software project will be hosted at the Linux Foundation. The Project will provide the source code and open governance for the OpenTreatments software platform to enable patients to create gene therapies for rare genetic diseases.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (curl, ldb, leptonlib, and linux-4.19), Fedora (busybox), Gentoo (openssl, redis, salt, and sqlite), Mageia (firefox, fwupd, glib2.0, python-aiohttp, radare2, thunderbird, and zeromq), openSUSE (firefox), SUSE (ovmf, tomcat, and zabbix), and Ubuntu (curl, lxml, and pygments).
Security researchers have disclosed two new vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel that could be exploited to circumvent mitigations for speculative execution attacks such as Spectre and obtain sensitive information from the kernel's memory.
Tracked as CVE-2020-27170 and CVE-2020-27171 the vulnerabilities were discovered by Piotr Krysiuk, a member of the threat hunter team at Symantec, who reported them to the Linux kernel security team, which promptly released patches that have now been mainlined.
“These bugs affect all Linux machines, but would be particularly impactful on shared resources, as it would allow one malicious user to access data belonging to other users,” reveals Symantec in a blog post discussing the vulnerabilities in detail.
Security research from Symantec’s Threat Hunter team, Piotr Krysiuk, caught two new vulnerabilities in Linux systems. Exploiting these vulnerabilities could allow an adversary to conduct Spectre attacks whilst evading the existing mitigations.
Hello! Over the last few days I made a little tool called dnspeep that lets you see what DNS queries your computer is making, and what responses it’s getting. It’s about 250 lines of Rust right now.
I’ll talk about how you can try it, what it’s for, why I made it, and some problems I ran into while writing it.
How Secure are your Linux Endpoints? An Ethical Hacker’s Guide to Securing and Hardening Linux and Unix Endpoints
