Recently, I took an interest in poking at Gentoo a bit. In the eyes of many desktop Linux users, it’s considered a rite of passage to install this historically significant distribution. I’ve scaled Mt. Arch, so Gentoo Peak is next in my Linux mountaineering.
Before I started sinking time into it, though, I wanted to see just what I would gain from the formidable task of installing Gentoo. In other words, what does Gentoo bring to the table? A lot, it turns out, but we’ll get there in time.
This curiosity sent me on a much more interesting Linux safari to explore what truly differentiates distributions. What follows is the classification field guide I wish I had when I began my Linux journey.
There are many factors to consider when choosing an OS, security being among one of the most critical. The general consensus among experts is that Linux is the most secure OS by design - an impressive feat that can be attributed to a variety of characteristics including its transparent open-source code, strict user privilege model, diversity, built-in kernel security defenses and the security of the applications that run on it.
The high level of security, customization, compatibility and cost-efficiency that Linux offers make it a popular choice among businesses and organizations looking to secure high-value data. Linux has already been adopted by governments and tech giants around the world including IBM, Google and Amazon, and currently powers 97% of the top one million domains in the world. All of today’s most popular programming languages were first developed on Linux and can now run on any OS. In this sense, we’re all using Linux - whether we know it or not!
This article will examine why Linux is arguably the best choice for businesses looking for a flexible, cost-efficient, exceptionally secure OS. To help you weigh your options, we’ll explore how Linux compares to Windows in the level of privacy and protection against vulnerabilities and attacks it is able to offer all businesses and organizations.
Windows 10 has been around for a long time, but not everyone likes it. On the other hand, support for Windows 7 ended in early 2020, and users must either upgrade to a new version or look for an alternative. For such cases, there are a huge number of free Linux distributions that you can try and start using.
In today’s article I will give 10 reasons why you should leave Windows in favor of Linux. Linux-based operating systems are open source and freely distributed, but this is not their only advantage.
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In this article, we’ve covered 10 reasons why you should replace Windows 10 with Linux. Every year there are more and more such reasons. Previously, Linux was positioned only as a system for servers. Now everything is not so bad on home computers. In addition, thanks to Valve for Linux, games have appeared. I hope this article will help those who still have doubts. Have you already switched to Linux? What are the most compelling reasons for you? Write in the comments!
In this video, I am going to show an overview of MX Linux 19.4 and some of the applications pre-installed.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we breakdown all of our systems for Backups & Data Recovery! We have some great news on how Open Source is being used to fight rare genetic diseases on multiple fronts. Later in the show, we’re also going to cover Facebooks latest 500 Million record breach. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
Hello and welcome to Episode 406 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, we interview Dave Slotter, W3DJS, of the HamPi and HamPC projects. We learn a little bit about dave, then we take an in-depth look at his ham shack distribution projects. We explore how to get them, compile them, configure and use them and also get support for them. Thank you for listening to this episode of the show. We hope you have a fantastic week and join us again for our next episode.
In this episode, Josepha explores the five groups within the WordPress ecosystem and provides a high-level example of how they interact and support one another. As always, stay tuned for the small list of big things and a contributor highlight.
In my never-ending quest to find the perfect way to create beautiful (yet minimal) websites, I had to try out Org Export in Emacs. Since I tend to write everything in Org Mode these days, it would be amazing to simply be able to convert my Org docs into HTML, and maybe add a little CSS to spice things up.
Free software is an idea that has existed since before the foundation of Linux but has the idea become stuck in the past and is FOSS something that we should move past, this author seems to think so, I disagree though.
The final release of the next version of the Linux kernel might be pushed back by a week, following a larger than expected release candidate (RC).
One of the largest RC releases, Linux kernel 5.12-rc7, is just the latest in a series of issues that have plagued the current release cycle.
“I'm still waffling about the final 5.12 release. The fact that we have a big rc7 does make me think that I'll probably do an rc8 this time around,” wrote Linus Torvalds, the release manager of the mainline Linux kernel.
Linux users will be able to install their favorite distribution on Apple’s M1-based hardware.
Hector Martin has merged the initial support for Apple M1 hardware into the Linux SOC (System On a Chip) tree. Martin is the founder of Asahi Linux, a project to port Linux to Apple Silicon Macs. The project was started in 2020, using the M1 Mac Mini, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro hardware. The Asahi goal is “not just to make Linux run on these machines but to polish it to the point where it can be used as a daily OS.”
Now that M1 support has been merged into the tree, it should make it into the Linux kernel for the 5.13 release (which should come sometime this summer). That does not mean, however, you’ll be able to run Linux on Apple Silicon this summer. In fact, at the moment there is no timetable for full support. The reason for this is porting Linux to Apple Silicon is a daunting task. Because Apple doesn’t release any documentation for the M1 hardware, everything must be reverse-engineered and drivers must then be written.
The MSM DRM driver changes have been sent to DRM-Next for this Freedreno aligned project providing open-source graphics/display driver support for Qualcomm SoCs.
Most notable to the MSM driver changes slated for Linux 5.13 is the initial support for the SC7280, a forthcoming Snapdragon SoC that has seen rumors and various information in recent weeks. The SC7280 SoC so far has surfaced within reports about future Google Chromebooks. Details on the SC7280 remain light.
While these kernel patches aren't expected to land until the Linux 5.14 kernel cycle later in the summer, a set of 19 patches published on Monday morning begin allowing a test system to boot with the DG1 graphics card.
Intel's open-source driver engineers continue pushing a lot of Linux patches around DG1 specifically and other underlying driver changes for being able to support discrete graphics processors with their i915 kernel driver.
There is a struct page associated with every base page (4K) of system memory, regardless of use. This rather contentious data structure is 64bytes long. While it looks small, it exists for every base page (4K) of system memory regardless of how process page tables (huge pages) may look. Thus, on x86, its overhead is about 1.5% of total physical memory... or for quick math, it is 16 GB per 1 TB. In systems where the Trusted Computing Base (TCB) is small and memory availability is a concern, 1.5% can quickly translate to tens of GB of wasted memory that could be dedicated to guests.
Now for something completely different. In the spiritual vein of One Night in Rio: Vacation photos from Plan9 and AWK for multimedia, here is a tool that is the link that ties almost all the projects within the Arcan umbrella together into one – and one we have been building towards for a depressing number of years and tens of thousands of hours.
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Pipeworld will join Safespaces in acting as the main requirement ‘driver’ in improving Arcan and evolving its set of features, while Durden takes the backseat and moves more towards stabilisation.
These projects are not entirely disjunct. Pipewold has been written in such a way that the dataflow and window management can be integrated as tools in these two other environments so that you can mix and match – have Pipeworld be a pulldown HUD in Durden or 360 degrees programmable layers in Safespaces with 3D data actually looking that way.
The analysis and statistics tools that are part of Senseye will join in here, along with other security/reverse engineering projects I have around here.
Accessibility will be one major target for this project. The zoomable nature helps a bit, but much more interesting is the data-oriented workflow; with it comes the ability to logically address / route and treat clients as multi-representation interactive ‘data sources’ with typed inputs and outputs rather than mere opaque box-trees with prematurely composed (mixed contents) pixels and rigid ‘drag and drop’ as main data exchange. With programmable text-to-speech and OCR already available to any Arcan application, when combined with the logically
Another major target is collaboration. Since we can dynamically redirect, splice, compose and transform clients in a network friendly way, new collaboration tools emerge organically from the pieces that are already present.
Where we need much more work is at the edges of client and device compatibility, i.e. modify the bridge tools to provide translations to non-native clients. A direct and simple example is taking our Xorg fork, Xarcan, and intercept ‘screen reading’ requests and substitute for whatever we route to it at the moment – as well as exposing composed cell output as capture devices over v4l2-loopback and so on.
Landing in Mesa 21.1 on Friday was a variable rate shading (VRS) override for the Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver for providing significant performance boosts by effectively rendering less. This feature is limited to RDNA2 graphics processors while here are some benchmarks on what it means for 4K gaming with the AMD Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards on Linux.
The Mesa RADV driver has Variable Rate Shading (VRS) support for trading less rendering for higher performance. The driver allows setting an environment variable (RADV_FORCE_VRS) to force-enable the functionality even for games/software not making direct use of Vulkan VRS. A value of 2x2 will reduce the fragment shader invocations per pixel to one per 2x2 pixels as a decent performance boost while not degrading quality too much. For the benchmarking today I tested the RDNA2 graphics cards available with the 2x2 setting compared to no overrides.
Nuvola Player 4.21 looks to be a major update to this overlooked media player that gives you instant access to a wide range of popular media streaming services like Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Amazon Music, Jamendo, Tidal, BBC iPlayer, DI.FM, SoundCloud, ownCloud Music, SiriusXM, and many others.
Two major changes are implemented in this update, the first being official support for the Linux Mint distribution in the way that the player will no longer give you errors during installation and it better integrates with both the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments, and the second is support for the Anghami Arabic music streaming service.
You are probably using chat applications like Slack, WhatsApp, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and another chat app. These are all great to have but in using them you are making a trade-off; you are trading security and privacy for a service that easy to use.
Matrix is an open standard for communication messages. It is not a server so much as a standard way for clients and servers to talk with each other. The clients and server are open sources. With Matrix, you are not giving your data away to a company that is going to profile you and target advertising at you. This provides a degree of transparency you can look at the code, and you can be confident that it is behaving itself.
Many developer love Matrix because it let them build on it like Lego bricks and write their clients and servers bots or anything else you can self-host your Matrix server and that means you can create a private community where it knows that your communications are not being intercepted by anybody else. Matrix also has the option for end-to-end encryption, so you know that your messages are private.
Let’s take a look at a Matrix client known as Element (Riot and Vector) and it is pretty much the reference messaging client.
RSS Guard is a simple (yet powerful) feed reader. It is able to fetch the most known feed formats, including RSS/RDF and ATOM. It's free, it's open-source. RSS Guard currently supports Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian. RSS Guard will never depend on other services - this includes online news aggregators like Feedly, The Old Reader and others.
Are you trying to capture data packets in order to analyze traffic on your network? Maybe you are a server administrator who has bumped into an issue and wants to monitor transmitted data on the network. Whatever the situation be, the tcpdump Linux utility is what you need.
In this article, we will discuss the tcpdump command in detail, along with some guides on how to install and use tcpdump on your Linux system.
The Forest works on Linux, but only with Proton’s help, which is a built-in feature of the Linux release of Steam. So, before we can go over how to configure the game, we must demonstrate how to install Steam on Linux.
The CopyQ clipboard manager released version 4.0.0 a day ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 18.04 via PPA.
CopyQ is a free and open-source clipboard manager with editing and scripting features. The new 4.0.0 release features new script engine with some new functions, better ECMAScript support, improved performance.
Editing text files and terminal output is an everyday job for those who administer Linux machines. Command-line utilities like sed allow a user to modify and change the content of a text file right from the terminal window.
In this article, we will discuss the sed command in detail, along with some essential examples that demonstrate the power of the sed utility in Linux.
Just like Ubuntu Linux distros, resetting passwords on Linux Mint is the same, you have to use the advance boot option to perform the job. Using this we can even change or reset the root password or some other users as well. Just what you have to do is, restart your Linux PC or laptop in recovery mode and follow the steps given in this article to change the password.
Linux Mint is quite easy to use distro, however, if don’t remember your current password then just like any other operating system, it won’t let you log in. However, as there is no option to recover the current password of your Linux root and other users. Thus, the only option left with us is resetting it manually using the command line. Well, don’t worry, even if you are a Linux beginner, the steps to do that are really a piece of cake.
Systemd is a software application that provides an array of system components for Linux operating systems. It is the first service to initialize the boot sequence. This always runs with pid 1. This also helps use to manage system and application service on our Linux operating system.
We can also run any custom script as systemd service. It helps the script to start on system boot. This can be helpful for you to run any script which required to run at boot time only or to run always.
In our previous tutorial we have provides you instructions to run a Python script using Systemd. This tutorial coverts to run a shell script as Systemd service.
Unlike when working with a server, when using the Linux desktop, I spend more time with a GUI than I do the command line. That doesn't mean I never touch the command line from within a desktop environment. In fact, I do so on a daily basis. I also try to use it as efficiently as possible.
What if, there was a benefit in building from source, a system that is commonly used by pre-fabricated binary packages, like Arch or any of its forks and desktop flavors? What Arch considers a “clean-chroot” is primarily of need to developers ensuring their package can be both satisfied for all dependencies AND are reproducible, as long as this can be achieved within a constantly rolling distribution. That is open and nearly free condition for you.
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Scratch most of this for several reasons. We are not developers, we are building our own system like Gentoo-ers, k1ss-ers, Crux-ers, and others do. We want to make sure that each of our packages fits well within the parameters of our specific machine, and it wasn’t built on another machine that may not be 100% compatible to ours. One of the aspects of Arch’s clean chroot that shouldn’t be neglected is the tmpfs space a chroot is given. That 20G is borderline enough to build some packages … that may be compiling for half a day and end with an error message “no space left on device“. That is a very sad waste of electricity and processing mileage.
Wine team released its new development version 6.6
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install wine 6.6 in Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 20.04, Fedora 33, and Linux Mint 20.1.
Everyone knows about the cat command alternative to the tail command , which is used to view the contents of files. But in some cases you don’t need to look at the whole file, sometimes it’s enough to look only at the end of the file. For example, when you want to see the contents of a log file, you do not need what it starts with, you will have enough of the latest error messages.
To do this, you can use the tail command, it allows you to output a specified number of lines from the end of the file, as well as display new lines online. This article will look at the tail Linux command.
This tutorial shows you how to enable large indexes in MariaDB 10 on Debian 10. This refers to the innodb_large_prefix option which exists in MariaDB and MySQL. I will show you how to enable the large index option permanently by editing the MariaDB configuration file and I will also show you how to enable it temporarily in the current database session by using SQL commands. InnoDB large prefix allows it to have index key prefixes up to 3072 bytes (for 16k pages, smaller otherwise).
This morning posted how LibreOffice was compiled in EasyOS: https://bkhome.org/news/202104/how-to-compile-libreoffice-in-easyos.html ...and mentioned that menu font size is a bit small. Well, that is the case for all gtk+3 applications, compared with gtk+2 apps. The reason is, Easy is released with a theme set for gtk+2 apps, but no theme set for gtk+3 apps. So gtk+3 apps use the default theme built-in to gtk+3.
This is quick guide howto enable root account password/login on Fedora 34/33.
I have been avoiding this for like ten years now, but today is the day when I will setup a FreeIPA with Foreman Proxy for development and testing purposes and here are my notes.
The goal is to deploy a libvirt VM with IPA server and Foreman Proxy intergated with it. The domain will be ipa.lan and the host named ipa.ipa.lan. This is NOT how you should deploy production Foreman FreeIPA integration! For that, reading our official documentation and using foreman-installer is suggested instead.
If you're looking out for a new real-time strategy (RTS) to play you're in luck. Recently, OpenHV has a first stable release powered by the OpenRA game engine.
OpenHV has a fun history, basing the game around an unreleased game named Hard Vacuum that developer Daniel Cook wrote up a Post Mortem for back in 2005. Tons of assets were released under open licenses, along with details on what the gameplay would be like and so OpenHV was created from the ashes. OpenHV also uses the remastered Tyrian Graphics and the Iron Plague artwork by Daniel Cook as well.
Want to get some free Pro time on Google Stadia? Here's a chance for you if you act quick enough as Lenovo are giving away 3 months of Stadia Pro for FREE.
All you have to do is register for an account with their Lenovo Legion Gaming community, confirm your email and then it will send you to a special page to claim which will look like this:
Metro Exodus will be officially releasing for Linux on April 14, ahead of the release 4A Games and Deep Silver have put out some new system requirements.
Even more glorious retro FPS goodness is coming! Wolfenstein - Blade of Agony, the incredible GZDoom story-driven free game will be getting a brand new release on April 30.
"Blade of Agony is a story-driven FPS. The project is inspired by WWII shooters from the 90's and early 2000's, like Wolfenstein 3D, Medal of Honor, and Call of Duty, but with faster-paced gameplay in the spirit of Doom! The game can be played standalone using the GZDoom engine as a base."
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So running it on Linux is as easy as another other Doom-like mod you want to play so we expect no Linux-specific issues at release. You can also use the Snap / Flathub packages.
More KDE KWin Wayland improvements are coming down the pipe.
KDE developer Vlad Zahorodnii has been working on furthering along the KWin compositor's Wayland support with one of his latest undertakings to adapt the compositor's existing window-level-focused scene structure into an item-based scene. The items in turn can represent individual surfaces like tooltips, server-side decoration items, etc. This opens up per-item damage tracking and other possible improvements moving forward and potentially a scene/render graph.
The concept of using Linux on a touchscreen monitor or two-in-one computer has come a long way. Touchscreen support is now built in to the Linux kernel, so theoretically, any Linux distribution should run with a touchscreen. That said, not every distribution will be easy to use on a touchscreen, and this comes down to the desktop. This means choosing the best Linux distros for a touchscreen that use the optimal desktop out of the box.
For example, using a tiling window manager like Awesome or i3 isn’t going to do you much good on a touchscreen. Choose the right desktop (more precisely, desktop environment), and you’ll have a much better time using Linux with a touchscreen.
In this article we will look at several Linux distributions, which are an excellent choice if we want to use them as servers. We chose them precisely because they have an excellent level of security, regular patch maintenance and updates, and huge communities. In addition, there are thousands of tutorials on the Internet for every single thing on how to do it and last but not least they are easy to use.
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Although we have not put them in the top three, not because they are not unique server operating systems, but because they require more patience, knowledge and time, we must mention FreeBSD, Red Hat, Cent OS and Fedora.
With the release of FreeBSD 13.0 on the horizon, I wanted to see how it shapes up on my Lenovo T450 laptop. Previous major releases on this laptop, using it as a workstation, felt very rough around the edges but with 13, it feels like the developers got it right.
I like to keep things simple when it comes to a desktop operating system so the description below is how I went from a fresh install of FreeBSD 13.0RC1 to a working environment that is based on using the XFCE4 desktop experience.
The FreeBSD install process is simple and well documented in other official locations, so I am not going to repeat that here. However, some of the configuration items that I did select was to use ZFS on Root, encrypted swap and disabled all services (this is a workstation, not a server).
Once the machine had been rebooted, we need to set it up so that suspend/resume works correctly (and tests as such) and enable power management. The main issue that people have getting the resume part of the suspend/resume to work is not having the drm or xf86 drivers loaded that are applicable to the onboard graphics.
In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu Budgie 21.04 Beta.
Today we are looking at Ubuntu Budgie 21.04 Beta. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.11, Budgie Desktop 10.5.2, and uses about 1.4GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
It’s been almost a year since we unveiled SUSECON Digital 2020 – our first virtual SUSECON event. No lies, that event was pulled off in a frenzied whirlwind of pandemic onslaughts, virtual session recordings, and bandwidth battles. Frankly, I was amazed that we met our production schedule in the wake of the Covid-cancellation of our live event in Dublin. And I was even more amazed at our SUSECON audience reaction to the virtual event. You loved it! As one of the first virtual conferences of the Covid era, your feedback told us that we had delivered exactly what was needed at the time. What an exceptional opportunity for us to include thousands of friends from all over the world who normally can’t join us at the big event!
Debian and Arch Linux are what many distributions are based on. But what are they and what are their main differences? Can they be used as an operating system for a server or home computer?
In their development, they hold radically different views. Debian is the main GNU / Linux distribution with all the ensuing ones. Arch Linux – DIY distribution (do it yourself). But let’s talk about everything in order.
Let’s start comparing Debian and Arch Linux as usual with the installation. Debian has a graphical installer. Most of the questions are not difficult. Although some points could be automated, such as adding a Grub bootloader. In general, if you read the tips carefully, then even a beginner will cope with the installation. After that, only the basic set of programs will be available to you.
There are several installation images, by default a small image is offered with the installation of most packages from the Internet. There is also a kit for full installation. However, this is not the best solution, as multiple disks are used. But if you do not need several desktop shells, then download the live image with the desired environment. With it you will not only get acquainted with the distribution, but also get a quick installation.
Arch Linux does not have a graphical installer, it does not even have a text version. All commands must be registered manually, starting with the disk layout and ending with the installation of the environment and the bootloader. This method of installation scares away not only beginners but also experienced users.
Luke Metoki virtualized MacOS and Windows simultaneously on an 2000s-era PC, with Arch Linux as the host organism. The mad science worked, but Windows was "very sluggish" if not given the lion's share of RAM.
Oh my. Today is officially the day many of us have been waiting for. Yes, Fedora Linux 34 has officially achieved Beta status, and you can download it immediately. For many Linux users, Fedora is considered the best overall operating system to be based on that open source kernel, and I happen to agree. The distro focuses on truly free and open source software -- a pure Linux experience. It is also fairly bleeding edge, but at the same time, it remains stable for everyday use. Hell, even the inventor of Linux, Linus Torvalds, uses Fedora.
But what is so exciting about Fedora 34 Beta? Well, this pre-release version of the upcoming operating system uses GNOME 40 as its default desktop environment, and version 40 is the most electrifying version of GNOME in years. GNOME 40 is notable for having a horizontal workspace switcher and having the Dash (favorites launcher) moved to the bottom of the screen.
"Fedora 34 Workstation Beta includes GNOME 40, the newest release of the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME 40 represents a significant rewrite and brings user experience enhancements to the GNOME shell overview. It changes features like search, windows, workspaces and applications to be more spatially coherent. GNOME shell will also start in the overview after login, and the GNOME welcome tour that was introduced in Fedora Linux 33 will be adapted to the new design for an integrated, cohesive look for the desktop," explains Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader.
Flatpak packaging comes baked-in in Fedora and Solus distributions. Gradually, it has gained a dedicated following and userbase.
If you are coming in late, Flatpak is an application bundle used to distribute and install an app on a Linux-based platform. Flathub is where you usually get Flatpak packaged applications. Have a look at our Flatpak guide for more information.
If you are thinking about giving Flatpak a try, or if you want to try some cool open-source applications, Flathub offers several tools for your Linux distribution. So, I have made a list of some of the most popular software that you can get now from Flathub.
The Fedora Council has been working with the Fedora Community Action and Impact Coordinator to update and improve Fedora’s Code of Conduct. This work began with Brian Exelbierd during his tenure as FCAIC and was then picked up by Marie Nordin at the start of 2020. The new draft of the Code of Conduct is more comprehensive than our current Code of Conduct and will be accompanied by a set of Clarifying Statements. The Clarifying Statements are a work in progress.
By using hardware offloading and dedicated hardware businesses can free up their CPU resources and handle network traffic more efficiently. In this post we'll look at using NVIDIA BlueField-2 data processing units (DPU) with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat OpenShift to boost performance and reduce CPU load on commodity x64 servers.
Modern networks are expected to be able to quickly and securely move a large number of data packets. Processing that data on both the sending and the receiving ends is an expensive operation for servers that are responsible for handling the network traffic. As the server is performing network operations, its CPUs are spending valuable cycles handling the networking tasks and, as a result, have fewer cycles available to run the actual applications or process the data. A practical solution to this problem is to use hardware offloading to transfer resource intensive computational tasks from the server’s CPU to a separate piece of hardware.
Network security in modern datacenters is primarily focused on the inbound/outbound packet flow, often referred to as north-south traffic. However, the growth of cloud-native applications has driven an explosion of east-west network traffic within a datacenter where applications can create hundreds of thousands of network connections among virtual machines and containers. As a consequence the ability to track, monitor and secure a datacenter in a timely manner has risen above that of any individual or team. To combat this challenge, Red Hat and NVIDIA are working together to protect networks from breaches via real-time AI security analysis.
NVIDIA’s Morpheus AI application framework is designed to handle a variety of complex security tasks and policies allowing users to develop and deploy AI-enabled security applications efficiently. Morpheus AI provides several pre-trained models, including one with the ability to immediately recognize many types of sensitive personal information, like public cloud or GitHub user credentials, private keys, passwords, and credit card numbers. This pre-trained model enables AI to search through network packets for patterns associated with these credentials and flag exposed data to the enterprise security team.
Convert2RHEL is now an officially supported component of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Convert2RHEL enables the conversion of select RHEL derivative distributions into a supportable RHEL system, retaining existing applications and configurations. This is the culmination of multiple teams within Red Hat who have worked to provide solutions and guidance to our customers and the community at large.
The concept for the Convert2RHEL utility began nearly five years ago when Red Hat engineering was asked to explore how conversions to RHEL might work. Since then, it has evolved as a collaborative effort between Red Hat Engineering and Consulting services, who have used it successfully with many Oracle Linux and CentOS Linux conversions in many large and complex enterprise environments. Due to numerous requests, Red Hat has now productized it as a supported component of RHEL.
It was important to ensure that access to the Convert2RHEL utility was frictionless and served the broad CentOS Linux user community who wanted to make use of new options such as our no-cost developer subscriptions. In January, Red Hat announced the enhanced no-cost Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals and the Developer for Teams subscription (available via sales), which both provide no-cost access to RHEL subscriptions. This includes Red Hat Insights and many management capabilities from cloud.redhat.com.
In February 2020 Red Hat proudly announced that we had earned a place on Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For. At the time, achieving such a distinction seemed guaranteed to be one of the most memorable moments of the year. 2020 had other ideas, though.
Welcome, Ubuntu 21.04! This preview is for you who are curious about this new version of Ubuntu that planned to be released at Thursday, 22 April 2021 with the codename Hirsute Hippo. It features a hippopotamus as a wallpaper now continuing the gorilla wallpaper from the previous release of 20.10. This includes updates to GNOME (the desktop), improvements to Settings (the control panel), LibreOffice (the document suite) alongside the Linux kernel and Wayland technologies inside. Let's dive in!
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 678 for the week of April 4 – 10, 2021.
The web team at Canonical run two-week iterations building and maintaining all of Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
This iteration has seen many of the team out of the office as schools are out in the UK. This has not limited the exciting new features and developments from the team.
Drawing is a simple app in the PureOS store to doodle on a digital canvas.
The small, but growing trend toward deploying containers on embedded devices should improve security, although these are not likely to spread quickly to the smart home. With container solutions, multiple applications with various security levels and even operating systems can coexist in secure, sandboxed containers, which are automatically updated from the cloud with security patches. One related solution is Canonical’s Ubuntu Core, a stripped down, container-like version of Ubuntu that provides automated updates and transaction rollbacks for restoring the software in case of an attack.
As spotted on Reddit, the Light Based Optical Productivity Enhancement System (LOPES) is an Arduino Nano Every-powered device that lights up depending on the tasks that you have left to complete. The Nano takes input from five copper touch sensor plates on the top, which enable you to add or remove jobs of different priorities.
Display is via addressable LEDs diffused by a tube, and importance is ranked as either green, yellow or red. As of now, it simply shows how much you have to do without specifics, however, its creator plans to eventually make an app to allow for further interface with a phone.
At Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference, CEO Jensen Huang announced that the company was working with industry partners to make its graphics technology more widely accessible. Specifically, Huang mentioned that it is looking to bring its GeForce GPU graphics technology to ARM-based processors that are popular on Chromebooks today.
“We’re announcing a partnership with MediaTek to create a reference system and SDK for Chrome OS and Linux PCs,” Huang said during his keynote presentation at GTC while highlighting the power efficiency and popularity of ARM processors due to their open licensing model. “Combining Nvidia GPUs and MediaTek SoCs [systems on a chip] will make excellent PCs and notebooks.”
Over the next decade, speech is expected to become the primary way people interact with devices — from laptops and phones to digital assistants and retail kiosks. Today’s voice-enabled devices, however, are inaccessible to much of humanity because they cannot understand vast swaths of the world’s languages, accents, and speech patterns.
To help ensure that people everywhere benefit from this massive technological shift, Mozilla is partnering with NVIDIA, which is investing $1.5 million in Mozilla Common Voice, an ambitious, open-source initiative aimed at democratizing and diversifying voice technology development.
Most of the voice data currently used to train machine learning algorithms is held by a handful of major companies. This poses challenges for others seeking to develop high-quality speech recognition technologies, while also exacerbating the voice recognition divide between English speakers and the rest of the world.
I’m from Aydñn, Turkey. Currently I’m studying in my final years at the Computer Engineering department of Ãâ¡anakkale Onsekiz Mart University. I’m interested in free software – and enjoy working with free software projects and learning new things aboutthemit. I met free software when I started university via my advisor Necdet Yücel.
I like playing the guitar and the kalimba. Also, I recently started painting with acrylic paints. I’m vegetarian, and actively participate in animal protection and gender equality projects.
Recently a big controversy surrounding the Free Software Community appeared and cut deep into the community when it was announced without warning that Richard Stallman (RMS) had returned.
This controversy reached a boiling point, as we covered before with a petition to have Stallman removed. Since then, the FSF repeatedly put out statements about their policies, things that will change, people resigning, a Twitter post and more - but not once did the FSF mention Stallman or what the heck was going on. Finally, multiple weeks later, both the FSF and Stallman have released new statements.
In the FSF statement, it's mentioned that FSF staff had no idea what was going on and neither did organisers of LibrePlanet where RMS returning was announced. RMS was voted back in by voting members and the board of directors after "several months of thorough discussion and thoughtful deliberation". The FSF acknowledge how "badly we handled the news of his election to a board seat" and take "full responsibility". With RMS back on the board as an "unpaid volunteer" the rules still apply including "prohibitions against conflicts of interest and sexual harassment and those outlining whistleblower processes and fiduciary duties". The FSF linked to the changes the organisation is committed to implementing and will "continue to pursue additional ideas and actions designed to improve transparency and accountability".
Yet what is there to do? The only thing Stallman ever directly gave to me in life was an email explaining elegantly how there was nothing he could do for the Minecraft GPL community fiasco. At a time when I was so personally lost as I saw a community I love tear itself apart, he stood by idly as the so-called steward of these licenses that I was just too naïve to believe in. That experience to me now is amplified in the light of the much more egregious things he is accused of.
So, the Free Software Foundation welcomes Richard Matthew Stallman back to its board. Wonderful. Congratulations Mr. Stallman. I am going to pause for a moment of sadness and hurt as I contemplate the impact of this moment on our fragile movement, which has much bigger enemies today than it has in its 40 year legacy. But then…
I will move on. Because we have to. The only way is forward.
Ever since my teenage years, I felt as if there were a filmy curtain separating me from other people my age. I understood the words of their conversations, but I could not grasp why they said what they did. Much later I realized that I didn't understand the subtle cues that other people were responding to.
Later in life, I discovered that some people had negative reactions to my behavior, which I did not even know about. Tending to be direct and honest with my thoughts, I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them -- especially women. This was not a choice: I didn't understand the problem enough to know which choices there were.
Sometimes I lost my temper because I didn't have the social skills to avoid it. Some people could cope with this; others were hurt. I apologize to each of them. Please direct your criticism at me, not at the Free Software Foundation.
[...]
False accusations -- real or imaginary, against me or against others -- especially anger me. I knew Minsky only distantly, but seeing him unjustly accused made me spring to his defense. I would have done it for anyone. Police brutality makes me angry, but when the cops lie about their victims afterwards, that false accusation is the ultimate outrage for me. I condemn racism and sexism, including their systemic forms, so when people say I don't, that hurts too.
The voting members of the Free Software Foundation, which include the board of directors, voted to appoint Richard Stallman to a board seat after several months of thorough discussion and thoughtful deliberation.
We decided to bring RMS back because we missed his wisdom. His historical, legal and technical acumen on free software is unrivaled. He has a deep sensitivity to the ways that technologies can contribute to both the enhancement and the diminution of basic human rights. His global network of connections is invaluable. He remains the most articulate philosopher and an unquestionably dedicated advocate of freedom in computing.
RMS acknowledges that he has made mistakes. He has sincere regrets, especially at how anger toward him personally has negatively impacted the reputation and mission of FSF. While his personal style remains troubling for some, a majority of the board feel his behavior has moderated and believe that his thinking strengthens the work of the FSF in pursuit of its mission.
We take full responsibility for how badly we handled the news of his election to a board seat. We had planned a flow of information that was not executed in a timely manner or delivered in the proper sequence.
FSF staff should have been informed and consulted first. The announcement by RMS at LibrePlanet was a complete surprise to staff, all those who worked so hard to organize a great event, to LibrePlanet speakers and to the exhibitors. We had hoped for a more inclusive and thoughtful process and we apologize that this did not occur.
The Free Software Foundation has finally issued a statement on why the decision to return Richard Stallman to the organization's board of directors was taken.
Inclusion is a fundamental pillar of our community and the broader free software and open source communities that we are part of, are connected with, and value.
We firmly stand against sexism, racism,… and strive to keep our communities open, welcoming, and safe for everyone to join.
Qt Creator 4.15 comes with a bunch of features and bug fixes for the CMake Project Manager.
Below, you have a list of what’s new and a few tips and tricks which would hopefully improve your CMake experience in Qt Creator.
DevOps is a software development strategy that incorporates agile practices for fast, efficient product creation and release. It focuses on integration of development and operations teams, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) and automation of tasks and processes.
Typically, DevOps teams use pipelines to streamline and standardize processes. DevOps pipelines are toolchains that teams can use to automate tasks and provide visibility into the software development life cycle. In this article, we’ll cover seven popular open source CI/CD tools.
If the European Patent Office (EPO) notes a very slight decrease in the total number of European patent applications filed in 2020 (-0.7%), it nevertheless notes for this pandemic year a strong increase in these filings in the biomedical field.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and the American Association of Insurance Services (AAIS), today are announcing the launch of OpenIDL, the Open Insurance Data Link platform and project. The platform will reduce the cost of regulatory reporting for insurance carriers, provide a standardized data repository for analytics and a connection point for third parties to deliver new applications to members.
openIDL brings together some of the world’s largest insurance companies, including The Hanover and Selective Insurance Group, along with technology and service providers Chainyard, KatRisk and MOBI to advance a common distributed ledger platform for sharing information and business processes across the insurance ecosystem.
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“AAIS, and the insurance industry in general, are trailblazers in their contribution and collaboration to these technologies,” said Mike Dolan, senior vice president and general manager of Projects at the Linux Foundation. “Open governance networks like openIDL can now accelerate innovation and development of new product and service offerings for insurance providers and their customers. We’re excited to host this work.”
As an open source project, all software source code developed will be licensed under an OSI-approved open source license, and all interface specifications developed will be published under an open specification license. And all technical discussions between participants will take place publicly, further enhancing the ability to expand the network to include other participants. As with an openly accessible network, organizations can develop their own proprietary applications and infrastructure integrations.
The 2021 spring edition of Pwn2Own hacking contest concluded last week on April 8 with a three-way tie between Team Devcore, OV, and Computest researchers Daan Keuper and Thijs Alkemade.
[...]
The Zoom vulnerabilities exploited by Daan Keuper and Thijs Alkemade of Computest Security are particularly noteworthy because the flaws require no interaction of the victim other than being a participant on a Zoom call. What's more, it affects both Windows and Mac versions of the app, although it's not clear if Android and iOS versions are vulnerable as well.
Technical details of the flaws are yet to be disclosed, but in a statement sharing the findings, the Dutch security firm said the researchers "were then able to almost completely take over the system and perform actions such as turning on the camera, turning on the microphone, reading emails, checking the screen and downloading the browser history."
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel and libldb), Debian (mediawiki, qemu, ruby-kramdown, and xen), Fedora (grub2, libldb, libopenmpt, python-pikepdf, python39, samba, squid, and webkit2gtk3), openSUSE (bcc, ceph, gssproxy, hostapd, isync, kernel, openexr, openSUSE KMPs, and tpm2-tss-engine), SUSE (fwupdate and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (spamassassin).
For a long time I gave Apple and Google the benefit of the doubt with respect to app store policies. When my own app development company got affected by the utterly unreasonable COVID app rules those monopolists had promulgated more than a year ago, I couldn't help but conclude that the situation was unsustainable. And brought my own antitrust complaints against those companies in multiple jurisdictions (including the UK) though I continue to agree with those companies in some other areas, particularly patent policy.
It's bad enough that private companies like the Coronavirus Reporter team and mine were prevented from making our little contributions to the fight against COVID-19. But what's really unfathomable is that Apple and Google's hubris even impedes governmental pandemic control efforts.
This must be a wake-up call for lawmakers, regulators, and courts. Alternative third-party app stores for iOS and Android are absolutely needed. Even governments need such alternatives in a situation like this.
The BBC's technology desk editor Leo Kelion reported today that "[a]n update to England and Wales's contact tracing app has been blocked for breaking the terms of an agreement made with Apple and Google." Yes, this is about the official contact-tracing app provided by the National Health Service (NHS).
As I reported on Saturday, Waco-based Judge Alan Albright of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas denied an Intel motion to transfer or postpone the second VLSI v. Intel patent trial. Intel understandably expressed concern over the possibility of jurors having learned in the local media about the very recent $2.175 billion verdict in another case involving the same parties but unrelated patents. That verdict would be the first of that magnitude to be upheld by the appeals court. Normally, those damages awards don't stand. The final damages award is zero if the patent turns out on appeal never to have been infringed, or to be invalid; and even if the decision on the merits stands, the amount very often turns out to be excessive. But jurors may take that earlier verdict at face value--and may not fully understand that the outcome of one case over different patents doesn't mean anything for the case before them, just like the outcome of a hockey game between a team from New York and one from L.A. doesn't predetermine the result of a football game between teams from the same two cities.
Today I was one of more than 60 people to dial in and listen to opening arguments. In an order, Judge Albright had stated an incorrect meeting code, but friendly court staff provided the correct one when I contacted them about it. I missed VLSI's opening statement for that reason, but was just about in time for Intel's response.
The patents-in-suit are U.S. Patent No. 6,633,318 on a "method and apparatus for enabling a stand[-]alone inegrated circuit" and U.S. Patent No. 6,366,522 on a "method and apparatus for controlling power consumption of an integrated circuit." Those patents were originally filed in 2000 by a company named SigmaTel and ultimately acquired by VLSI, a non-practicing entity (NPE) set up specifically for the purpose of buying those patents as Intel noted. One of them has already expired, and the other will expire next month.
In November, the Dusseldorf Regional Court decided to refer to the European Court of Justice certain questions of component-level licensing of standard-essential patents (SEPs) as well as questions regarding the application of the Huawei v. ZTE SEP injunction framework. In February, Nokia withdrew its interlocutory appeal of that order.
In January, the Munich I Regional Court's 21st Civil Chamber (Presiding Judge: Tobias Pichlmaier) identified a different patent-related question that it would like the top EU court to answer. The Munich court, which is clearly the most popular patent injunction venue in the world by now, would like to enjoy broader discretion in preliminary injunction decisions than its appeals court (which decides patent PI cases consistently with the appeals courts in Dusseldorf and Karlsruhe) allows. I translated that order.
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From what I heard, the translations in the automotive case will be sent to the governments of the EU member states and the parties later this month, with a likely deadline for the European Commission's, the EU Member States' and the parties' observation in early to mid August. I have not been able to find out about the timeline in the preliminary injunction case.
MOUNT VERNON, NY / ACCESSWIRE / April 12, 2021 / Applied UV, Inc. (NASDAQ: AUVI) ("Applied UV" or the "CompanyApplied UV Receives Patent for Pathogen Destroying Devices in China
"), an infection control technology company that applies the power of narrow-range ultraviolet light ("UVC") for surface areas and catalytic bioconversion technology for air purification to destroy pathogens safely, thoroughly, and automatically, today announced that the Chinese Patent office has issued a notice granting Applied UV's patent application for its core pathogen destroying device.
"We have always maintained that a strong and growing intellectual property portfolio is one of our key assets and will enable us to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage while establishing barriers of entry to future competitors," said Max Munn, President of Applied UV. "Including China, we have received ten crucial patents for our foundational pathogen destroying technology, which defines an exciting new path to address the global challenge of infection prevention and reinforces the uniqueness of our technology."
Germany has long been a magnet for global patent litigation, ensnaring companies like Apple Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. and Alphabet Inc.'s Google.
Now a coalition of German blue-chip firms and foreign multinationals, including big U.S. tech firms, is pushing legislation that would lessen the country's appeal for those seeking to assert their intellectual property.
Germany's main patent courts, in Munich, Mannheim and Düsseldorf, systematically order injunctions, or temporary sales bans, for products subject to patent suits. That makes them attractive legal venues for patent holders.
Key targets of the legislation are so-called nonpracticing entities, or NPEs, which amass portfolios of patents that they license instead of using them in their own products. Critics call them patent trolls.
The proposed rules aim to make it harder for a plaintiff to win an injunction. The initiative has split Germany's typically unified business community, pitting some of the country's biggest patent users against its biggest patent holders.
On his way out the White House door, Donald Trump left a present for the pharmaceutical industry in the form of proposed changes to the Bayh-Dole Act that would weaken protections for access to inventions funded with taxpayer money.
The reforms in question concern the so-called “march-in” orders that were included in the act as a compromise to ensure that all inventions created with federal funds are made available to the public “on reasonable terms”. In specific circumstances the government can march in and either grant, or require the patent owner to grant, licences to third parties.
The European Patent Office (EPO) released the Patent Index 2020, which gives an overview of the filing activities in the EU during the past year. Despite the Covid-19 pandemic’s dramatic impact on all aspects of the economy, the number of patent applications filed only slightly declined with a 0.7% decrease compared to 2019.
In this scenario, Italy emerges as one of the fastest-growing European countries in the healthcare innovation sector, achieving an increase in applications well above the average in pharmaceutical patents. Also worth noting is a considerable growth in medical technology, which is now the fourth most relevant technical field in the country.
Medical technologies, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnology all registered strong performance overall at the EPO level as well. Healthcare innovation was the main driver of European patent applications in 2020, with medical technologies in the lead spot among all tech sectors and major growth in the pharmaceuticals and biotechnology fields.
The chart below shows a measure of patent grant rate for a group of 30,000 recently completed patent prosecution cases. I reported earlier on the grant-rate differential based upon entity size classification: Large>Small>Micro. For this chart, I also added-in a second variable of whether the patent application filings were submitted by a registered US patent attorney or agent. As you might expect, those non-represented cases showed a much lower grant rate.
The most surprising result: Overall in this sample, I found that over 99% of patent applicants were represented by a US patent practitioner. An important note here is that the focus of this study was non-provisional utility application filings. I expect that the rate of true pro-se applications would be much greater if we looked at provisional patent applications.
[...]
Micro entities are a creation of the America Invents Act of 2011 and allow for reduced fees for individuals without much patenting experience (<5 prior applications filed for themselves) and who are not unduly wealthy (<3x median US household income). Again though, universities can count as micro entities. In my sample, a number of the small and micro entities are universities with a higher grant rate than the average for their category.
Generally, the USPTO requires non-human legal entities to be represented by a patent practitioners. Of the 22,000+ large entity filings in my sample, I found only 4 that were not represented by a US patent attorney/agent. Those cases appeared to me to be ones where the filer should have claimed small or micro entity status.
An individual who asserted that he was the co-inventor of a patent directed to a method of “reverse online dating” must pay the attorney fees incurred by one of the named inventors and her company, who successfully defended against the individual’s claims for joint inventorship and various state law torts, including fraud and defamation. According to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the federal district court in New York City correctly determined that the case was “exceptional” for purposes of the Patent Act’s fee-shifting provision, based on the “sheer lack of colorable factual (or legal) support” for the claims, as well as for making, through counsel, “tendentious, bizarre, non-responsive and caustically accusatory arguments.” The Federal Circuit also held that the defendants were entitled to sanctions in the form of appellate attorney fees and double costs, against both the complaining individual and his legal counsel (Pirri v. Cheek, March 22, 2021, per curiam).
Red Cat Holdings, Inc. (OTCQB:RCAT), a leading brand in the drone industry, reports that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued U.S. Patent No. 10,877,162 on December 29, 2020 to Skypersonic Inc. Red Cat previously announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Skypersonic in February 2021 and expects to close the transaction in April.
This consequential judgment, handed down by Mr Justice Marcus Smith on 12 March 2021, addresses the repercussions deriving from two opposing conclusions having been reached, almost concurrently, by the Patents Court and the European Patent Office.
The patent in question claimed prolonged release pharmaceutical formulations concerning the active ingredient melatonin to improve the restorative quality of sleep in a patient suffering from primary insomnia characterised by non-restorative sleep.
On 4 December 2020, following an expedited trial, the Patents Court determined Neurim Pharmaceuticals Ltd’s (“Neurim”) EP (UK) 1,441,702 B1 (the “Patent”) to be valid and infringed by Generics UK Limited and Mylan UK Healthcare Limited (“Mylan”). On 16 December 2020 Orders were made in Neurim’s favour, in line with that judgment, but were never sealed (together, the “First Order”).
Only 48 hours later, the EPO Technical Board of Appeal expressed its oral opinion, that the Patent lacked sufficiency. Neurim withdrew its appeal against the earlier invalidity decision of the Opposition Division (“OD”) and, in consequence, the Patent was revoked. Revocation takes place ab initio, meaning it’s as though the patent never was.
On April 9, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,500 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claims 1, 4, 5, 8, and 9 of U.S. Patent 7,590,636. This patent is owned by Gravel Rating Systems, LLC, an NPE.
The '636 patent relates to a method and system comprising of receiving information input into a database and organizing items of information in the database. This allows the user to quickly share and obtain information about the data stored. It is currently being asserted against Kohl's, Lowe's, McAfee, T-Mobile, Costco, and Target in the Eastern District of Texas.
