It’s always tempting to look outside at what people say about what you create. Beyond KDE’s community, the Linux community is diverse and, more noticeably, surrounded with loud voices who observe what we create and comment on it. This is a good thing, it means that we are making relevant things and that people care. It also means that there needs to be a shared understanding of what is at stake.
It’s a bit of a meme how any change breaks your workflow and, while there is a certain amount of truth about it, it might pose a challenge. In this blog post I’d like to explain some aspects of what it looks like from the creator point of view.
From COVID-19 to national security challenges and space exploration, high-performance computing (HPC) is being leveraged to solve some of our nation’s most pressing issues. In combination with modern application development, HPC is advancing the science and understanding needed to address these challenges.
In a traditional HPC environment, computational scientists set up clusters and run workloads. Quite often, these workloads must be rebuilt for each machine. This makes sharing and reuse of applications difficult. Running cloud-based applications alongside HPC jobs is a better option, but it makes little sense to expend precious HPC compute cycles on jobs that aren’t computationally intensive.
In March 2021 GoDaddy had the most reliable hosting company site, with no failed requests and the fastest average connection time amongst the top 10 of 6ms. GoDaddy provides services that allow customers to build their own web presence, which include hosting solutions, domain registration, and a website builder focused on ease of use. In February, GoDaddy acquired Poynt to accelerate its strategy to provide a complete suite of commerce and payment services.
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Whilst Linux continues to dominate the top 10, FreeBSD makes an appearance in March with NYI in fifth place.
It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.
Another round of AMDGPU kernel driver updates were sent out on Thursday to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window opening in a few weeks.
Given the timing, this might be the last feature pull of new AMD Radeon graphics driver material for the 5.13 cycle. There have already been earlier DRM-Next pulls for 5.13 on the AMD side that included Aldebaran GPU support, FreeSync HDMI, Display ASSR, and more.
Mesa 21.1 is looking to be another exciting release to be introduced later this quarter while going into feature freeze around mid-April. The latest work to land is threaded context support for Zink, which means faster performance for this OpenGL-over-Vulkan implementation.
Gallium3D threaded context support is now wired up for Zink including async buffer mapping/replacement, async queue submission, and the async Gallium3D flush handing.
Calico 3.18 has been released with support for Kuberneter 1.20, therefore it’s time to upgrade!
The grep command provides access to the grep utility, a powerful file processing tool used to find patterns in text files. It has many practical use cases and is certainly one of the most used Linux commands. This guide illustrates some simple yet useful Linux grep commands that have real-world uses.
Today we are looking at how to install Parsec 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.
The du (disk usage) command summarizes directory trees’ sizes, including all of their contents and individual files’ sizes on Linux and Unix-like systems such as macOS. It helps track down space hogs. In other words, we can list directories and files that consume large amounts of space on a hard disk drive. Let us see the ncdu command, a curses-based version of the well-known du command.
Over the years, ncdu recommend to me by many nixCraft readers. Ncdu is a disk usage analyzer with an ncurses interface. Still, I never tried an alternative for finding the sizes of files and directory trees when using a text-based graphical user interface (TUI). However, in this post, I will explain how to install ncdu on Linux or Unix and see if it is worth installing it on production systems.
Do you want to try the new Pantheon Desktop without waiting for elementary OS 6 (Odin)? Then here is the solution to do that by installing it on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or Linux Mint.
Elementary OS 6 is the up coming version from the developers of this operating system, however, even it will be based on Ubuntu 20.4, still taking quite some time to get released. In such a scenario if you don’t want to wait, we can access its early builds to install on some existing Ubuntu 20.04 LTS or Linux mint.
Well, as we know current Elementary OS is based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and the upcoming will be on Ubuntu 20.04. So, in layman’s terms, we can say that Elementary OS is nothing but Ubuntu with some special repositories that provide Pantheon and other applications. Just like we have Linux Mint. This gives us the ability to perform all tasks we can do on Ubuntu including the integration of the PPA repository and that is the thing which going to help us to install the latest Pantheon Desktop without waiting for elementary OS 6.
Ubuntu server has many accolades to its name, and its popularity continues to touch the pinnacles of success, given its composition of containers and compatibility with the cloud. This simple, yet detailed guide, will cover everything a beginner needs to know about installing an Ubuntu server on their machine.
Read on to find out why the server is important, how you can use it, and much more.
IP addresses form the backbone of how the internet works. There are two basic types of IP addresses: Public and Private. Public IP addresses are used to connect to external networks, while private IPs are used to identify devices connected to your local network.
You can get your public IP address in Linux using several methods. In this article, we will be discussing in brief how you can use the host command, the dig command, and some external services to find your system's public IP address.
A monorepo is a single repository that holds all the code and multiple projects in a single Git repository.
Following below is a brief description to enable PyCharm 2020.3.5 to execute python scripts been written with PyQT5 bindings involved.
PyQt5 is a comprehensive set of Python bindings for Qt v5. It is implemented as more than 35 extension modules and enables Python to be used as an alternative application development language to C++ on all supported platforms including iOS and Android.
The GNU/Linux operating system, including all variants of it such as Ubuntu, Manjaro and Arch Linux, is still struggling to gain more than one percent of the total market share on the proprietary Steam game store/launcher. The overall GNU/Linux market share is, according to data from NetMarketShare, slightly below two percent as of March 2021.
NetMarketShare measures market share by the number of people who browser select websites they monitor with given web browser user-agents. Their data had GNU/Linux market share moving up from 1.36% in March 2020 to 3.61% in June 2020. It quickly plummeted down to 1.17% when the joy of summer was fading away that year. Their latest data points to a GNU/Linux market share of 1.92% in March 2021.
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Linux market share on Steam has never managed to crush the illusive 1% barrier. It was as close as it has ever been at 0.94% in September 2020. It has since remained steady at around 0.9% with a dip down to 0.78% in December 2020 and another dip to 0.81% in February 2021.
We are happy to announce that another Godot Conference (GodotCon) is coming!
At the beginning of this year we held a Godot Conference completely online for the first time.
We have been thrilled to see many interesting talks held by a group of competent and talented speakers and we've been very happy with the positive reception of the event. You can watch all those talks in replay on YouTube.
...few people on stream mentioned Veloren to me, I had no idea what it was and then I saw a bit of MentalOutlaw's video and I knew I had to play, I remember being excited for Cube World back when that first got announced but this is a FOSS project that seems to have come so much further.
In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu 21.04 Beta.
Today we are looking at Ubuntu 21.04 Beta. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.11, Gnome 3.38.5, and uses about 1.3GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
Chrome OS is a heavily modified version of the Gentoo Linux distribution.
Another month has passed which means another status update.
The python2 removal has been steady and several packages has been removed this month. Currently a query for python2 on archweb returns 139 matches. At the start of the month it was around 160-170. Progress!
I have suggested we remove checkdepends on python2 packages to ease the cleanup of dependency cycles. The response has been lukewarm at best so we’ll see how that progresses. Hopefully more is being removed in the upcoming months.
Support for debug in Arch Linux is in large parts written and under review. The dbscripts patches, which is how we administer packages to our repositories, has all the needed patches and a passing test suite! But it is currently missing a review from the current maintainer. I have also shaped up the infrastructure part so we can provide debuginfod. The general goal is to start providing debug packages through debuginfod and at a later date decide if we want to distribute the packages to some or all mirrors.
Hopefully it’s just a few weeks left until we can provide this to our users!
Arch recent got a new RFC process which is intended to create more structure around changes to the distribution. This is a neat change and there have already been 3 RFCs up for discussion this month from Allan.
The Kamelet is a concept introduced near the end of 2020 by Camel K to simplify the design of complex system integrations. If you’re familiar with the Camel ecosystem, you know that Camel offers many components for integrating existing systems. An integration’s granularity is related to its low-level components, however. With Kamelets you can reason at a higher level of abstraction than with Camel alone.
A Kamelet is a document specifying an integration flow. A Kamelet uses Camel components and enterprise integration patterns (EIPs) to describe a system’s behavior. You can reuse a Kamelet abstraction in any integration on top of a Kubernetes cluster. You can use any of Camel’s domain-specific languages (DSLs) to write a Kamelet, but the most natural choice is the YAML DSL. The YAML DSL is designed to specify input and output formats, so any integration developer knows beforehand what kind of data to expect.
A Kamelet also serves as a source or sink of events, making Kamelets the building blocks of an event-driven architecture. Later in the article, I will introduce the concept of source and sink events and how to use them in an event-driven architecture with Kamelets.
On the tail of the release of Fedora Linux 34 Beta, I am excited to announce that we will be celebrating the final release of Fedora Linux 34 with a virtual Release Party! Join us April 30th & May 1st for a series of sessions on the new features in F34 as well as some of the latest news and developments in Fedora. Make sure to save the dates and register on Hopin to party with Fedora!
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)! The Final freeze begins Tuesday.
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
Many thanks to all of you for supporting our open-source projects, specially in this difficult days. Your donations help keeping them and us alive.
I’m very excited by the perspective that I outlined in this document. It really resonates with my own mission statement as a Debian developer (written a long time ago)...
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The easiest changes to implement are technical (such as improvements to distro-tracker) and require little interaction. This work is used to recharge me by offering me an immediate reward for my efforts.
Finally, and this is a substantive effort, I want to create in the project working conditions that allow all contributors to give their best. It starts with developing a common vision …
Techbase’s “iModGATE-AI” gateway for predictive maintenance is built around the RPi CM4 and a Coral Edge TPU AI module and offers up to 24-bit analog inputs and an advanced 9-axis IMU.
Techbase has announced an iModGATE-AI edge AI gateway that combines the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 or earlier RPi CM3+ with Google’s M.2 Accelerator equipped with its Coral Edge TPU. This is the same up to 4-TOPS at 0.5W, 2-TOPS per Watt AI chip found on the Coral Dev Board, Coral Dev Board Mini, LGA-based Coral Accelerator Module, and other Coral products.
IEI’s fanless, rugged “DRPC-330-A7K” embedded computer runs Ubuntu on a Marvell Armada 7040 and offers 10GbE SFP+, 2x GbE, 4x isolated serial, 2x USB, and 3x M.2 connections.
IEI announced a networking-oriented embedded computer called the DRPC-330-A7K that runs Ubuntu 18.10 on Marvell’s Armada 7040 (88F7040). The DIN-rail form-factor system has a -20 to 60€°C range with air flow with 10%~95% non-condensing humidity tolerance. It offers 5G shock resistance per IEC68-2-27 and vibration resistance compliant with MIL-STD-810G 514.6C-1.
AMD Ryzen 4000-U series 15W processors were announced in January 2020, and by the end of the year, we covered some mini PCs with Ryzen 3/5/7 processors from the new family with products such as ASRock Mars 4000U and ASROCK 4X4 BOX-4800U.
MINISFORUM has now announced its own Ryzen 4000-U series mini PC with MINIXFORUM HM50 mini PC powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U hexa-core processor that offers three 4K display output ports (HDMI, DP, and USB-C), as well a 2.5GbE and Gigabit Ethernet ports, six USB 3.0/3.1 ports and more.
Neuralaxy’s NeuroStimDuino is an open-source Arduino shield that allows students, researchers, and hobbyists to study the effects of neurostimulation on muscle contraction easily and cheaply.
What is Neurostimulation exactly? It works by applying short electrical pulses to the surface of the skin for the purpose of stimulating the underlying nerves and muscles. Neurostimulation has several uses including a treatment called Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) therapy to help restore mobility in the paralyzed limb muscles of stroke victims and those who have suffered spinal cord injuries, and studies are being carried out to better understand how it can be leveraged for pain reduction and sensory feedback.
Arduino IDE is a popular software framework for embedded developers. Its compatibility with various devices using the Boards Manager makes it a useful and dynamic software for users. The recent launch of the Arduino IDE 2.0 has made it even better, featuring a range of new functionality, like live debugging.
For a variety of reasons, including potential virus transmission, it’s a bad idea to touch your face too often. If you need a little “help” to break this habit, then you might consider the STOP Face Touching Device by DesignMaker.
The system takes the form of a very sci-fi-looking helmet, which monitors the area around the user’s face with four IR sensors. An Arduino Nano is used for control of the device, and when you do touch your face, it responds by smacking your forehead with a motor/spring device. It also increases the number of touches on an OLED display.
Android Auto is certainly different and something I will need to get used to. Fortunately we live in a time of change. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea of having VLC available to me on the car dashboard.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is hemorrhaging board members and management following the reinstatement of Richard Stallman. The GPL author and founder of the FSF announced last week that he had rejoined the board and is not planning to resign a second time. An open letter signed by more than 3,000 people called for the removal of Stallman from all leadership positions, including the GNU project, and removal of the entire Board of the FSF. So far it has gained support from Red hat, Mozilla, Outreachy, the Software Conservancy project, and many other high profile organizations.
“We are long past the point where we can pretend that the most important thing about software freedom is the software,” Mozilla Engineering Community Manager Michael Hoye said in signing support for the open letter. “We cannot demand better from the internet if we do not demand better from our leaders, our colleagues and ourselves.”
LibreOffice is free and open source software, which means that it’s much more than zero-cost. Anyone can study how it works, modify it, and share those modifications with other users. (So the “free” is more about freedom than price.)
There are many other well-known free software projects, such as the GNU/Linux operating system, Firefox web browser, and Thunderbird email client. Free software helps companies, organisations and governments to reduce costs, improve reliability and free themselves from dependence on a single vendor.
Now, the Council of the German city of Dortmund has announced that it’s moving to free and open source software, where possible.
In this article, I will share how to build robust REST APIs in Express. First, I will present some of the challenges of building REST APIs and then propose a solution using open standards.
This article won't be an introduction to Node.js, Express.js, or REST APIs. Make sure to check out the links before diving deeper if you need a refresher.
These are some answers to the Week 106 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.
Coming off the excellent raku weekly news, my curiosity was piqued by a tweet about big-endian smells that referenced a blog about “extreme math”. After getting my fill of COBOL mainframe nostalgia, the example of Muller’s Recurrence got me thinking.
The simple claim made in the tweet thread was:
Near the end it [the blog] states that no modern language has fixed point, but Raku (formerly Perl6) has a built in rational type which is quite an interesting comparison. It keeps two integers for the numerator and the denominator and no loss of precision occurs.
I have also covered some of the benefits of the raku approach to math in a previous blog Machine Math and Raku, often the example given is 0.1 + 0.2 =>0.3 which trips up a lot of languages. I like this example, but I am not entirely convinced by it – sure it can be odd when a programming newbie sees a slightly different result caused by floating point conversions – but it is too mickey mouse to be a serious concern.
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PS. And to reflect the harsh reality of life, Victor Ejikhout’s comment can have the final word: so know your own limits!
Python is one of the most powerful programming languages. It gives us various unique features and functionalities that make it easy for us to write code.
In this article we'll solve Leetcode array problems in one line using one of Python's most interesting features – List Comprehension.
Scaling the governance of the project to keep up with its growing popularity has been a constant theme. The first step was when we created a core team (initially pcwalton, brson, and I) to make decisions. We needed some kind of clear decision makers, but we didn’t want to set up a single person as “BDFL”. We also wanted a mechanism that would allow us to include non-Mozilla employees as equals.2
Having a core team helped us move faster for a time, but we soon found that the range of RFCs being considered was too much for one team. We needed a way to expand the set of decision makers to include focused expertise from each area. To address these problems, aturon and I created RFC 1068, which expanded from a single “core team” into many Rust teams, each focused on accepting RFCs and managing a particular area.
As written, RFC 1068 described a central technical role for the core team3, but it quickly became clear that this wasn’t necessary. In fact, it was a kind of hindrance, since it introduced unnecessary bottlenecks. In practice, the Rust teams operated quite independently from one another. This independence enabled us to move rapidly on improving Rust; the RFC process – which we had introduced in 20144 – provided the “checks and balances” that kept teams on track.5 As the project grew further, new teams like the release team were created to address dedicated needs.
The teams were scaling well, but there was still a bottleneck: most people who contributed to Rust were still doing so as volunteers, which ultimately limits the amount of time people can put in. This was a hard nut to crack6, but we’ve finally seen progress this year, as more and more companies have been employing people to contribute to Rust. Many of them are forming entire teams for that purpose – including AWS, where I am working now. And of course I would be remiss not to mention the launch of the Rust Foundation itself, which gives Rust a legal entity of its own and creates a forum where companies can pool resources to help Rust grow.
You may think I'm an imagination-less oldster who cannot immerse themselves in the new and innovative. Wrong. There are lot of new technologies out there, which definitely have amazing potential and use cases. Just to give you my perspective, say AR/VR. Lots of buzzwords, but this is actually something cool. AR/VR will solve real problems in hazardous environment work, healthcare. AR/VR will provide significant benefits to disabled people or those with learning difficulties. AI/ML may have some actual value, if we actually ever get to understand how the engines self-optimize.
IoT? Don't know. It may have value in the industry space, but in the consumer space? Ah. This is where I don't see any practical application of smart devices. Not because they aren't smart or (potentially) practical - because humans are stupid, impractical and random. And because, after several thousand years of careful tweaking and optimization, we have pretty much nailed down the analog way of doing things. Anything else that requires the human to give control over to machines implies inefficiency. Replacing analog with digital isn't the solution. That's just refactoring. Furthermore, finding new, real needs in the consumer space is going to be hard. If people use it, the need has already been met, or if there's a need, something has or will have been made to satisfy it. Which is why IoT is a hammer looking for a nail to beat. Well, if someone has a good answer, I'd love to hear it. For the time being, I shall do my cynical, skeptical thing.
AMD published a security whitepaper this week looking at their Predictive Store Forwarding (PSF) feature that is new to Zen 3 series processors. AMD is going to allow customers to disable this performance feature as they think it may be vulnerable to a Spectre-like attack.
Zen 3's Predictive Store Forwarding aims to enhance performance by trying to predict dependencies between loads and stores. PSF can speculatively execute instructions based on what it thinks the result of the load will be and while the predictions should be largely accurate, there is the possibility of incorrect CPU speculation.
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AMD's whitepaper says they have proposed Linux patches that would allow disabling of Predictive Store Forwarding using the Zen 3 "PSFD" bit as well as new kernel command line options of psfd/nopsfd. However, as of writing those patches do not appear to be public.
Funimation is a successful anime streaming company. It has a monthly subscription tier, which is ad-free, and a free tier, which includes advertisement. This week, failed company Firtiva filed a lawsuit against Funimation. The lawsuit asserts that Funimation violates Firtiva’s patent, U.S. 10,116,999, titled “Method for advertisers to sponsor broadcasts without commercials.”
“Without commercials” apparently means “with commercials” when you’re trying to force a successful company to pay you money.
The ‘999 Patent
Derived from an application filed back in 2001, the ‘999 patent is about a system where the time viewers spend watching any given broadcast is monitored. That time is associated with a sponsor, and based on that association, the viewer is later offered some kind of ‘enticement’ by the sponsor.
Now, in large part this seems like exactly what the Nielsen “People Meter” system did—the meter would monitor how long viewers spent watching and record that data. They receive a gift for that—an enticement to participate. And all ads are functionally enticements to purchase something, meaning that the idea of enticement as a reward for viewing is as old as broadcast advertising.
It isn’t tied to a particular sponsor, but advertisers sponsoring a given segment of content is as old as radio, much less TV. Even making that sponsorship commercial-free isn’t novel—Schindler’s List was famously broadcast in 1997 without commercial interruption, with the viewers being shown a Ford ad after the movie ended.
So even if no one had yet come up with the idea of having sponsor information tied to a given segment of media, measuring that viewing, and providing an enticement is all well within the realm of what a person of ordinary skill in the art would have been able to do back in 2001.
But the Patent Office still issued a patent for it.
