As a Linux newbie, the preference for a Graphical User Interface (GUI) comes naturally. Also, shifting from Windows can be a bit difficult without a GUI. The unfamiliar syntax and the need to memorize the commands might scare you at first, but getting comfortable with the terminal will definitely be helpful in the long run.
More so, you can use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to navigate commands that you have entered before. This greatly simplifies your work and makes it more beginner-friendly. As you become a better developer, the need to use the Command Line Interface (CLI), commonly known as the terminal, will become more apparent.
In this article, we will discuss some key reasons why you should begin using the terminal.
Google today at I/O announced that Linux on Chromebooks would finally be coming out of beta with the release of Chrome OS 91. The company had offered Linux apps on Chrome OS alongside Android apps, hoping to reach an audience of developers with IDEs and so on. However, the Linux Development Environment, as Google had dubbed it, had been in beta ever since while first launched. The company had added new features at a steady cadence, enabling things like GPU acceleration, better support for USB drives, and so on so people could be more productive while using Linux apps.
Alongside Linux, Google also announced that it would be bringing Android 11 to Chromebooks. Technically, the update has already started with Chrome OS 90 for select Chromebooks, and it'll come with a host of new features including increased optimization of Android apps and a new dark theme. Google's increased support of Android is no coincidence. The company says that the operating system sees 3x increased usage of Android apps, and the new Android 11 update will see Android move to a virtual machine rather than the current container based method, making it easier to update in the future.
Microsoft is confirming today that it no longer plans to release Windows 10X. The operating was originally supposed to arrive alongside new dual-screen devices like the Surface Neo, with a more lightweight and simplified interface and features. This was all before the pandemic hit, and Microsoft then decided to prioritize Windows 10X for single-screen laptops instead. Windows 10X is now officially over, and Microsoft is now planning to bring its best bits into Windows 10.
After Chris gets a reality check from Mike, the guys answer some emails and admit a cold hard truth.
Without Dale Dougherty, our guest for this show, we might never have had the maker movement with Maker Faire, Make Magazine, Maker Camp, and the influence it has had on education, hardware, and software creation. In a deeply engaging hour, Dale brings Doc Searls and Aaron Newcomb up to date on the maker movement with its massive influence on education while visiting other fun topics, such as his role as well in the founding of the Web as we know it today.
In some previous videos about Stallman I said something that I would like to take back and that is that Stallman is out of touch with technology, while he does have some funky solutions for some modern problems he certainly understands what the problems actually are.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of UbuntuDDE Remix 21.04 and some of the applications pre-installed.
First up, in our Wanderings, I start building, Joe writes with a pinecil, Tony upgrades, Josh fights a game, and Bo tries to leaf.
Then, our news Audacity gets bought up, System76 Launches the Launch, and LibreOffice Lets you Search!
I'm announcing the release of the 5.12.5 kernel.
All users of the 5.12 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.12.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.12.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
The patch allows for sharing pixmaps of X11 clients under XWayland via shared memory with the MIT-SHM extension.
This work was driven by the Sway/WL-ROOTS developers and they have tentative patches for making use of the functionality. Notably they are pursuing the shared memory buffers support for use in conjunction with their new Pixman software-based renderer. Simor Ser has been working on a new Pixman software renderer for WL-ROOTS with this SHM support being needed for the X11 clients.
A few bits of NVIDIA news to cover today with some small and some big news including drivers, hardware and open source.
Firstly, on the driver front, NVIDIA recently released the Linux 465.31 driver as part of their "New Feature Branch". It's a small release adding in support for the GeForce RTX 3050 Ti Laptop GPU and the GeForce RTX 3050 Laptop GPU, plus a bug fix that "could cause AddressSanitizer to report a heap-buffer-overflow during initialization of the OpenGL and Vulkan libraries".
Onto something bigger: NVIDIA are trying to get "GeForce Cards into the Hands of Gamers". How? Well, they announced a reduced hash rate for newly manufactured GeForce RTX 3080, 3070 and 3060 Ti graphics cards to make them "less desirable to miners". This is somewhat similar to what they did when they announced the RTX 3060. These new cards will start shipping in May, with the reduced ETH hash rate and they will be clearly labelled as either "Lite Hash Rate" or "LHR" and listed on the boxes and will not apply to cards already purchased.
While there is more to consider when choosing a Linux distribution than just the out-of-the-box performance, for those curious about the performance of recent Ubuntu releases for running with Intel's new 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable "Ice Lake" processors, here are some benchmarks showing how the performance has improved from Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS to Ubuntu 20.10 and now the recent Ubuntu 21.04 Linux release.
With now having the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 server for Linux testing, I've been working on a variety of interesting Linux/BSD benchmarks from this Ice Lake Xeon platform. As part of a larger Linux distribution comparison being conducted now, I ran tests of clean installs across Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS / 20.10 / 21.04 on this Intel reference server with the two Xeon Platinum 8380 processors, 512GB of RAM (16 x 32GB DDR4-3200), and Intel 3D XPoint DCP 5800X 800GB (SSDPF21Q800GB) NVMe SSD.
Hello everyone,
The first bugfix release for the 21.1 branch is now available, containing mostly AMD and Intel changes as usual, but also a decent amount of ARM fixes and more.
The next bugfix release is schedules for two weeks from now, on June 2nd.
Cheers, Eric
For those that wait until the first point release of a new quarterly Mesa 3D driver stack feature release before upgrading, now is the time to move to the Mesa 21.1.1 series.
Two weeks after the big Mesa 21.1 release, Mesa 21.1.1 is now available as the first point release and arriving right on schedule. Current Mesa release manager summed up v21.1.1 in today's announcement as "mostly AMD and Intel changes as usual, but also a decent amount of ARM fixes and more.."
LibreOffice is the most favored office suite app in the Linux community and this is not just due to the fact that it works as an excellent alternative to Microsoft Office Suite but also that it is completely free and open source.
It has successfully branded itself as more than just an app to be a community of culture, collaboration, and sharing. If you ever have any use issues or encounter platform-specific bugs be rest assured that your situation can be taken care of.
This article explains how to display Linux laptop battery information from the command line. Using the tools below, you'll be able to check the current battery discharging rate, the battery capacity (current, full and design), current battery voltage, temperature, and more.
TarGZ archives are a staple of Linux. Many programs are distributed in this file format, as well as other files. Despite this, many Linux users do not know how to unzip TarGZ files in Linux.
In this guide, we’ll show you that it’s effortless to unzip TarGZ files on Linux. To get started, download your favorite TarGZ file and follow along!
The 1Password password manager now adds officially Linux support.
KDE Plasma 5 is a beautiful, fully-featured desktop environment for the Linux desktop. It’s highly modern and has tons of configuration options that any Linux user would love. In this guide, we’ll show you how to set up KDE Plasma 5 on Linux.
SpiderFoot is a free and open-source information gathering tool used to automate the process to gather information from a given target, including domain name, hostname, IP address, subnetwork, threat intelligence lists, spam blacklists, and much more.
It automatically crawls 100+ open-source data sources to get information from the target machine. In this post, we will show you how to install SpiderFoot on Debian 10 VPS.
Last month, my company allowed me to claim some benefits through a dedicated platform. This platform is specifically built for this purpose and allows you to recover these benefits not only in the form of coupons or discount codes, but also as reimbursements for medical visits or interest on mortgage payments.
I wanted to try the latter.
I logged on to the platform and then I filled in all the (many) details about the loan that the plaform asks you to fill in, until I had to upload my amortisation schedule which contains a lot of sensitive data. In fact, a strange thing happened at this step: my file was named document.pdf, but after uploading it was renamed to document_2.pdf.
Having to participate in many online events since the COVID crisis started, I've come to notice that few of the online clients work properly on the current Firefox ESR found in Debian. A quick visit at WebRTC Test confirmed that none of the tests in the Network and Connectivity section pass. Meanwhile, a Windows 10 laptop running Edge via the same network works just fine, so I have to assume that either a Firefox or Debian packaging issue is to blame, but I wouldn't know where to start.
I’ve owned a TaoTronic TT-BH22 headphones with noise cancellation for a while ago, and I can tell you that despite being quite cheap have worked perfectly for me. Battery life is fantastic (around 40 hours) and noise cancelling, even if it’s not 100% perfect as the professional ones, is more than acceptable.
iSCSI is a way of connecting storage devices over a network using TCP/IP. It can be used over a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), or the Internet.
iSCSI devices are disks, tapes, CDs, and other storage devices on another networked computer that you can connect to. Sometimes these storage devices are part of a network called a Storage Area Network (SAN).
If you want to work as a “SAN Device” on software level then you will use “iSCSI“
In the relationship between our computer and the storage device, our computer is called an initiator because it initiates the connection to the device, which is called a target.
Pacemaker is a cluster resource manager. The High Availability Add-On cluster infrastructure provides the basic functions for a group of computers (called nodes or members) to work together as a cluster. High Availability(HA) cluster also known as failover cluster or active-passive cluster.
In this scenario if one node get fails then another node get active and start working.
Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) is an electronic technique of reducing the (average) power provided to a circuit by providing regular discrete pulses. As Raspberry PI hasn’t analogic PINs, this can provide an effective way to simulate an analog output
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to use PWM with Raspberry PI, include an example with a “breathing” LED.
KVM allows you to use multiple OS on your system without having issues. There are options to use virtual machines, VMware, and other integrated systems for using different operating systems on your PC. Still, KVM is one of the most reliable arrangements for virtualization. KVM stands for Kernel-based Virtual Machine, which allows you to switch between mouse, keyboard, monitor, and systems. Some people also consider KVM as an integrated arrangement of Keyboard-Video-Mouse, where the entire system works over an internet (local/broad) connection. KVM has both hardware devices and software systems that you can install/use with your Ubuntu system. If you’re a system administrator, using KVM on your system must give you relief from switching one system to another.
Even though the default database SQLite3 works great with Ruby on Rails, we shouldn't be using it in some cases. For instance, if your Rails application is being concurrently accessed by large number of users, SQLite is not recommended. We should try more robust databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL, which provides scalability, concurrency, centralization, and control. We already knew how to use MySQL with Rails application. Today, we will see how to use PostgreSQL with Ruby on Rails application in Ubuntu Linux.
Images be images. Photos be photos. A collection of pixels. But not just. Various image formats also support the inclusion of additional information in the image file, things like resolution, focal length, shutter speed, GPS data, and more. This extra stuff, commonly referred to as Exif data, can be useful for tagging and search, but it may not necessarily be the best thing when it comes to privacy.
In this article, I'd like to show you a few useful methods for how to examine and then optionally remove Exif data from your photos or images, so that if you must share them with other people, they don't contain too much unnecessary information other than pretty pixels. I'll mostly focus on Linux, with some small extras for Windows folks. All right, follow me.
The primary way to reference, allocate and pin runtime OS resources on Linux today are file descriptors ("fds"). Originally they were used to reference open files and directories and maybe a bit more, but today they may be used to reference almost any kind of runtime resource in Linux userspace, including open devices, memory (memfd_create(2)), timers (timefd_create(2)) and even processes (with the new pidfd_open(2) system call). In a way, the philosophically skewed UNIX concept of "everything is a file" through the proliferation of fds actually acquires a bit of sensible meaning: "everything has a file descriptor" is certainly a much better motto to adopt.
Because of this proliferation of fds, non-trivial modern programs tend to have to deal with substantially more fds at the same time than they traditionally did. Today, you'll often encounter real-life programs that have a few thousand fds open at the same time.
Like on most runtime resources on Linux limits are enforced on file descriptors: once you hit the resource limit configured via RLIMIT_NOFILE any attempt to allocate more is refused with the EMFILE error — until you close a couple of those you already have open.
Bleachbit is an open-source utility that helps you in cleaning, optimizing, and protecting your privacy. It takes care of cleaning your disk space, browser history, delete cookies, shreds temporary files and directories, delete logs, and discard junk from your system. This tool has evolved over time and has added more features.
BleachBit is created to clean thousands of applications including Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and more. Beyond easily removing files, it contains advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, erasing free disk space to mask traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster.
The Linux command line – the terminal – stores history of commands executed in the past by a user. This history is persistent and remains in memory even if we reboot our system. We can retrieve and reuse these stored commands to make the most of the history storage feature of the bash shell.
The Linux bash has a very powerful command called “history”. This command is a built-in bash command that is used to extract history information about commands that have been executed by Linux users in all previous sessions. In this tutorial, we will enable you to get the most out of your shell history by learning the proper use of the history command. Linux stores the command history for a particular user in a ~/.bash_history file by default.
We will use the Linux terminal application to execute the commands mentioned in this tutorial.
Typing texts and memorizing commands is one of the downsides of being a command-line enthusiast. And if you need to type and remember the same long command, it might reduce your productivity in a terminal.
What if you can replace a long command with your own fancy short name, or group multiple commands? Yes, alias is a method that can help you use the command line efficiently.
In this article, I will show you aws-cli commands to manage Cloudwatch from the terminal. This guide will help you get started with using aws-cli for creating, managing Cloudwatch alarms.
ModSecurity is a free, open-source, and most popular web application firewall (WAF) that protects your web application against a wide range of Layer 7 attacks. It was designed for Apache web server monitoring, logging, and filtering requests. It comes with a Core Rule Set that detects and stops several attacks including, SQL injection, cross-site scripting, Trojans, bad user agents, session hijacking, and more.
gdm-tools is, like its name suggests, a set of command line tools to change the look of the GNOME Display / Login Manager (GDM 3).
Using gdm-tools, you'll be able to easily change the GDM login screen (greeter) theme and background image, backup / restore the default GDM theme and optionally reset everything to default, and extract the default GDM theme for use in "weird" GNOME sessions, such as the Ubuntu session.
Figma is a popular tool amongst graphic designers and UI, UX designers. It can be used to create wireframes, high-fidelity interface designs, prototyping, etc. One of the unique features of Figma is that it runs entirely inside a browser. Since it’s an online tool, it also has features for real-time collaboration. Being a web app also means Figma can be used on any platform with a web browser. However, a native client certainly is more convenient to use. So, today we’ll show you how to install Figma on Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Notepad++ on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Notepad++ is one of the most popular text editors on Windows. Sadly, the developers have no plans to write a native, Linux version of the Notepad++ app. Fortunately, thanks to tools like Snap packages, getting the Windows release of Notepad++ working on Linux is easier than ever.
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 Notepad++ open-source code editor on a Debian 10 (Buster).
In this article we will discus the most common commands with examples which are used in process monitoring in Linux systems such as...
Today we are looking at how to install Karlson by Dani on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
This is a simple guide to check your Ubuntu disk usage using built-in program named Disk Usage Analyzer. With this, you can view ranking of folders measured by each size. This may help you finding and removing unused folders to free you some disk space. Let's try it!
If you've not played Sunless Skies, you absolutely should and the free enhanced Sunless Skies: Sovereign Edition is officially out now for all players. An absolutely magnificent experience overall, and now better than ever with a number of big upgrades. Awesome writing, backed up by an incredible style that really absorbs your attention.
[...]
Look, you get to soar through the skies in a Space Train, with some incredible gothic scenes and masterful story-telling. What more can you possibly want in a game? Don't pass up on this one. Brilliant.
It's Camille (PouleyKetchoupp) again. I've been working on improving Godot Physics since December and time flies! A lot has happened and it's finally time for some progress update. You might know some things already if you're following news I post on Twitter from time to time, but you can read further for more details.
Get ready to look after your hive once more and create some of that sweet honey in Hive Time, which just had a sweet upgrade for World Bee Day (May 20). A game created by Cheeseness, a developer who has contributed articles to GamingOnLinux in the past.
While the Nintendo Wii U game console is approaching a decade since launch and has already been discontinued for several years, work towards a mainline Linux kernel driver for properly supporting the Wii U gamepad continues.
There has been the libdrc.org open-source project for supporting the Wii U gamepad under Linux but a proper kernel driver with mainline ambitions has been in the works more recently with the latest code having been volleyed today.
With a classic retro arcade feeling, the shoot 'em up fuelled by new technology and a roguelite features Jetboard Joust has officially arrived for Linux on Steam. The Linux release comes along side the release for the Atari VCS, which is also based on Linux and so the builds are pretty close. Hopefully if more developers decide to release for the VCS we might see even more, just like with Danger Scavenger.
The release will be sometime late this year, although we don't know exactly when, Creative Assembly said the Linux version will "be available as close to launch day as possible".
If you're after a new strategy game to sink you mouse fingers into - check out AI War 2 as the huge second expansion AI War 2: Zenith Onslaught has just released.
The Zenith Onslaught expansion is absolutely jam-packed with features. From "small" details like powerful new elite Cruisers that you can put in a new slot in your fleets, to galaxy-spanning empires like the Dark Zenith and the Zenith Architrave, this expansion is filled with new tools to use and new foes to best. Wormhole Borers let certain AIs alter the map topology, while Nomad Planets alter the map topology on their own as they roam around. The Zenith Miners consume entire planets, and Golem variants abound. There are also options to make some of the new fations your allies, and take on the AI together.
This is a weekly blog looking at the HP EliteDesk 800 G2 Mini Desktop PC running Linux.
We’ve previously examined the onboard graphics capabilities of the HP EliteDesk 800 G2. This ultra small PC uses the Intel HD Graphics 530 (GT2), a mobile integrated graphics processor launched in 2015 for the Skylake-based processors. The GPU integrates 24 execution units clocked at up to 1150 MHz (depending on the CPU model). Due to its lack of dedicated graphics memory or eDRAM cache, the HD 530 has to access the main system memory.
We acknowledge that integrated graphics struggle with demanding games. But there are tons of free games available for Linux which aren’t that graphically intensive. How do they fare?
Valve have again updated the incredible first-person puzzler Portal 2, this time the update is quite small (comparatively to the Vulkan update) but still mighty.
While modders have been able to use the Steam Workshop for some time now, there were some limits on file sizes that constrained what they could do - but no more! The latest update removes to 100mb level size limit for the Steam Workshop. Will be thoroughly interesting to see if it brings back more level creators to create some bigger and wilder puzzles to solve.
The word ‘Open Source‘ can be attributed to the Linux community which brought it into existence along with the introduction of Linux (successor of then-existing Unix Operating System). Although ‘Linux‘ in itself came into existence as only a base Kernel, its open-source nature attracted a huge society of developers worldwide to contribute to its development.
This created a revolution worldwide and many people and communities started contributing towards making it a complete Operating System which could replace Unix. Then onwards, there has been no turning back with active development going on at a steady pace.
The GSoC 2021 cohort has just been announced. There’s a fantastic list of organisations involved, including GNOME, and I’m happy that this year two of those projects will be based around Tracker.
[...]
I hope the increased involvement shows our developer experience improvements are starting to pay dividends. More eyes on the code that powers search in GNOME is always a good thing.
For so long, we didn't have a fancy calculator on Linux desktops, but now we have Pebbles.
Pebbles is a lightweight multi-mode calculator intended for students, scientists and statisticians. Even more, it is completely free (Libre) open-source project with active development team of 5.
Although, Pebbles is built primarily for elementaryOS, other distro users can install it easily, especially on Arch Linux, Manjaro, Ubuntu and Debian. The only requirement to install it from source there is "vala" as an additional dependency.
We've just released SRU33 for Oracle Solaris 11.4. It is available via 'pkg update' from the support repository or by downloading the SRU from My Oracle Support Doc ID 2433412.1.
Oracle on Tuesday released Solaris 11.4 SRU33 as the latest monthly stable release update for this largely idling operating system. With the thirty-third stable release update to Solaris 11.4 are delivering some arguably long overdue features.
Perhaps most notable is the VirtIO guest support now being included with Solaris 11.4 SRU33. This KVM/VirtIO guest support was merged for 11.4 SRU33 and includes the PCI framework and driver support and various other components for guest support in complying with this virtualization standard.
The latest GeckoLinux ROLLING brings Kernrel 5.12.3 and the new fully redesigned desktop environment Gnome 40.
GeckoLinux is a Linux spin based on the openSUSE distribution. It comes in two flavors. The Static editions for GeckoLinux are based on openSUSE Leap while the rolling edition is based on the stable openSUSE Tumbleweed release. But unlike OpenSUSE, Gekolinux provides installation media with seven separate graphical desktops for both release models.
The latest GeckoLinux ROLLING 999.210517 update are built with unmodified openSUSE Tumbleweed and Packman packages from those projects’ own repositories. This release offers several improvements for GeckoLinux rolling users.
While focused on the openSUSE Innovator initiative as an openSUSE member and official Intel oneAPI innovator, I tested the RealSenseID device on openSUSE Leap 15.1, 15.2, 15.3 RC and Tumbleweed. With all the work, we made available in the SDB an article on how to install this device on the openSUSE platform. More information can be found at https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Install_RealSenseID.
So, I was searching around for a ready-to-use Arch Linux with only Window Manager options and found this Archcraft OS. Here's a quick review of Archcraft OS, in case if you are planning to try it out.
Apache Cassandra is an open source NoSQL database trusted by thousands of companies around the globe for its scalability and high availability that does not compromise performance. Contributing to such a widely used distributed system may seem daunting, so this article aims to provide you an easy entry point.
Templates offer very interesting features for deploying Red Hat's single sign-on technology on Red Hat OpenShift. As an end user, you can use one of the re-encrypt TLS termination templates, where TLS is configured automatically, or a pass-through termination TLS template, in which case you will do some of the TLS configuration manually. As you've seen in this article, it's much easier to add new certificates to the SSO truststore when using a pass-through TLS termination template. You can do it dynamically by updating the secret for the trustsrore.jks file. If you are using a re-encrypt TLS termination template, you will need to rebuild and redeploy your original SSO image.
Since the release of .NET Core, .NET developers are able to develop applications for and in GNU/Linux using languages like C#
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4, which was pre-announced on April 27 at Red Hat Summit, is now generally available. We encourage Linux developers to download this latest release and try out the new software. We also recommend updating both development, and production systems to the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.4 release.
Red Hat is pleased to introduce an expanded Red Hat OpenShift Certification to further support applications on Kubernetes and container orchestration across hybrid cloud footprints. With this certification, Red Hat partners can enable and certify their software solutions on OpenShift through either Operators or Helm charts.
Red Hat OpenShift is the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform; and with this enhanced certification, partners can more easily tap into Kubernetes-native technologies to manage and scale software deployments. Red Hat OpenShift Certification allows partners using Helm to access Red Hat certification tools and services to verify the functionality of their software on OpenShift.
In November of 2020, we announced a deployment option for Red Hat Enterprise Linux aimed at solving challenges common to edge computing environments. With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.4, we are excited to continue the momentum in bringing our customers an operating system experience aimed at simplifying and securing workloads outside the core data center. The focus of this release is around improving the user experience around the core capabilities released last year.
Ubuntu 21.04 is the latest release of Ubuntu and comes at the mid-point between the most recent Long Term Supported (LTS) release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and the forthcoming 22.04 LTS release due in April 2022. This provides a good opportunity to take stock of some of the latest security features delivered in this release, on the road to 22.04 LTS. Ubuntu 21.04 brings with it a vast amount of improvements and features across a wide variety of packages. In this blog post, we will take a look at those features and improvements that add to the overall security of a Ubuntu system.
Starting from the bottom-up, one of the most fundamental components in Ubuntu is the GRUB2 boot-loader. In light of the recent additional GRUB2 secure-boot bypass vulnerabilities, the Ubuntu Foundations team considered options to make Ubuntu more secure by enabling easier grub updates. The outcome was to change the way GRUB2 is shipped in Ubuntu. In general Ubuntu releases would ship with a fixed version of GRUB2 (and many other packages) at release time and so when it came time to fix security issues, patches would have to be backported to an aging codebase. This brings numerous technical challenges, so to alleviate these, a single GRUB2 package will now be shipped across all supported Ubuntu releases, with 21.04 being the initial release to support this feature.
In March, Jingling revealed the JingPad A1, the first 2-in-1 convertible running a tablet OS based on Linux (JingOS). At the time, it was unclear how much the JingPad A1 would cost, but Jingling has now confirmed that the tablet will start at US$549.
There is a caveat though, as this is Indiegogo pricing. The campaign will commence on June 15, but we expect US$549 to be the tablet's early-bird price. The JingPad A1 runs on a Unisoc Tiger T7510, a relatively unknown SoC that has a PowerVR GM9446 GPU and two ARM CPU core clusters: four Cortex-A75 cores and four Cortex-A55 cores.
Firefly has launched a Rockchip RK3566-powered single-board computer. Appropriately called the ROC-RK3566-PC, the single-board computer (SBC) is the same size as many SBCs, including the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. Specifically, the ROC-RK3566-PC measures 90 mm x 60 mm, making it 5 mm wider than the Pi 4 and 4 mm longer.
Currently, the ROC-RK3566 starts at US$65 with 2 GB of RAM and 32 GB of storage. Firefly also sells a 4 GB/32 GB model for US$95. Please note that both of these are promotional prices that will eventually increase to US$89 and US$119, respectively. Firefly hopes to eventually sell a model with 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage, though.
Wind River€®, a global leader in delivering software for intelligent systems, today announced security enhancements to Wind River Studio, a cloud-native platform for the development, deployment, operations, and servicing of mission-critical intelligent systems. Studio enables companies to meet rigorous cybersecurity and anti-tamper requirements, further helping secure devices and systems through development, deployment, and operations.
The steep rise in security threats shows a concerning trend. As new devices become connected, each represents a point of entry that can be exploited by a cyberattack. In 2020, IoT devices were responsible for 32.72% of infections observed in wireless networks, more than twice that in 2019.(1) Industries with higher dependency on software and intelligence-based systems will need to start demanding that security be addressed at every step in an intelligent system’s lifecycle.
When reviewing mini PCs I typically look at their performance under both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu) and compare them against some of the more recently released mini PCs. Since the start of 2021, I review using Windows 10 version 20H2 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and test with a selection of commonly used Windows benchmarks and/or equivalents for Linux together with Thomas Kaiser’s ‘sbc-bench’ which is a small set of different CPU performance tests focusing on server performance when run on Ubuntu. I also use ‘Phoronix Test Suite’ and benchmark with the same set of tests on both Windows and Ubuntu for comparison purposes. On Ubuntu, I also compile the v5.4 Linux kernel using the default config as a test of performance using a real-world scenario.
Prior to benchmarking, I perform all necessary installations and updates to run the latest versions of both OSes. I also capture some basic details of the device for each OS.
Virtual reality technology has come a long way in the last decade, but there are still some major things that could be done to make it even more interactive and immersive. For one, what if VR users could actually feel the ground they walk on rather than simply see it? A team of students from KAIST in South Korea and the University of Chicago set out to tackle this by creating a fairly large 1.8 by 0.6 meter platform that can accurately create the feeling of varied terrain. Called the Elevate, this device uses a total of 1,200 pins that can individually raise and lower with 15mm of resolution.
Google has just announced the release of Android 12 Beta. We already covered the first Android 12 developer preview with changes including support for AVIF image format, trust and safety improvement, and enhanced media transcoding. But with the release of Android 12 Beta, Google also introduced significant changes to the user interface created with a design language called Material You, plus some new features that we’ll explore in this post.
With the competitive landscape of mobile computing, Google seems to have decided that it has the edge with personalization. The company released changes to many of its products at Google IO 2021 – perhaps one of the most significant changes could be what Android 12 will bring.
Mozilla Firefox is adding new security features to improve the browsing experience. It will be coming soon to stable releases.
The upcoming Firefox release coming out on June 1, understands that after this last year we all need some simplicity. The Firefox browser is being redesigned to bring you a more modern and calmer web experience. Wherever visual noise — like notifications, menus and buttons — could be eliminated, were eliminated. Subtle design changes add up to make a big visual difference with new tabs that are easier to navigate, extra spacing, and lighter typography. You know those auto-playing videos that normally disrupt your browsing? Instead of having to click on every tab to see where the sound is coming from, easily scroll your tab bar and look for the sound-on icon and with one tap, turn it off. Plus, you know that you have more privacy and security built into your web experience with Firefox’s SmartBlock feature and Total Cookie Protection. You can sit back and enjoy the fresh new experience with one less thing to worry about.
Mozilla detailed today how their year-long effort so far aiming to improve the stability of the Firefox web browser on Linux is paying off.
Helping Mozilla developers improve Firefox's Linux stability can be attributed in large part to better crash report handling. One of the big specific items improving their Linux crash report handling is that they are now scraping debug information for Firefox builds and its dependencies from package repositories on Arch, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu.
Roughly a year ago at Mozilla we started an effort to improve Firefox stability on Linux. This effort quickly became an example of good synergies between FOSS projects.
Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) was released over 7 years ago and is currently used by less than 1% of all users on the Internet with usage rapidly declining. A large majority of popular websites have already stopped supporting IE11 (including Microsoft Teams in 2020), and even the Microsoft 365 apps and services will be dropping support later this year.
WebGPU as a next-gen web standard for accelerated graphics and compute is stepping closer to reality with the first public working drafts having been published.
POCL 1.7 is out as the newest version of this "Portable Computing Language" that aims to effectively allow OpenCL to run well on various CPU architectures as well as other targets like OpenCL over NVIDIA CUDA and AMD HSA.
POCL continues to support OpenCL 1.2 with various OpenCL 2.x features thanks to LLVM's Clang doing much of the heavy lifting for supporting OpenCL across targets. POCL 1.7 as the open-source project's first new feature release since December brings a few key improvements.
Deep Learning is basically a subset of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Typical AI and ML algorithms can work with datasets having a few hundred features. However, an image or a signal may have millions of attributes. That’s where the Deep Learning Algorithms come in. Most of the DL algorithms have been inspired by the human brain called the artificial neural network. The modern world has extensive use of Deep Learning. From biomedical engineering to simple image processing – it has its uses. If you want to become an expert in this field, you have to go through the different DL algorithms. And that’s what we will be discussing today.
This is the eighth in a series of articles about features that first appeared in a version of Python 3.x. Python 3.7 was first released in 2018, and even though it has been out for a few years, many of the features it introduced are underused and pretty cool. Here are three of them.
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Python 3.7 was released about four years ago, but some of the features that first showed up in this release are cool—and underused. Add them to your toolkit if you haven't already.
Trends in the software engineering industry show that the Python programming language is growing in popularity. Properly managing Python dependencies is crucial to guaranteeing a healthy software development life cycle. In this article, we will look at installing Python dependencies for Python applications into containerized environments, which also have become very popular. In particular, we introduce micropipenv, a tool we created as a compatibility layer on top of pip (the Python package installer) and related installation tools. The approach discussed in this article ensures that your applications are shipped with the desired software for the purposes of traceability or integrity. The approach provides reproducible Python applications across different application builds done over time.
One of the most important tools for most sysadmins is automation. We write and maintain scripts to automate the common and frequent tasks that we must perform.
I have dozens of scripts—short and long—that I've written and modified over the years. Some of my most useful scripts have been to perform regular backups early each morning, install updated software packages with fixes and enhancements, and upgrade from one version of Fedora to the next. I just upgraded all of my personal hosts and servers to Fedora 34 a few days ago using a fairly simple script.
This is the fifth blog post in a series about character encoding mishaps. (See posts 1, 2, 3 and 4.) My aim in each case is to understand how perfectly good characters get mangled into mojibake, otherwise known as gibberish. Today's victims come from two recent data audits and deserve a lot of sympathy. In both cases the datasets I checked were UTF-8 encoded.
Languages don't enjoy long lives. Very few people still code with the legacies of the 1970s: ML, Pascal, Scheme, Smalltalk. (The C language is still widely used but in significantly updated versions.) Bucking that trend, the 1977 Unix utility Awk can boast of a loyal band of users and seems poised to continue far into the future. In this article, I’ll explain what makes Awk special and keeps it relevant.
For decades, enterprises have developed business-critical applications on various platforms, including physical servers, virtual machines, and cloud environments. The one thing these applications have in common across industries is they need to be continuously available (24x7x365) to guarantee stability, reliability, and performance, regardless of demand. Therefore, every enterprise must be responsible for the high costs of maintaining an infrastructure (e.g., CPU, memory, disk, networking, etc.) even if actual resource utilization is less than 50%.
Last year the ARM server startup launched Ampere Altra with impressive performance thanks to being able to offer 80 physical cores per socket. Ampere Altra is making use of Arm's Neoverse N1 while moving ahead they have been quietly designing their own cores. Ampere did reaffirm as part of today's strategy update that Ampere Altra Max with up to 128 cores per socket compared to 80 cores with Ampere Altra is still coming this year. Previously we were expecting Ampere Altra Max earlier in the year while their latest guidance is to expect Altra Max in Q3 -- not surprising given the supply chain issues and other factors plaguing the industry.
Beef and dairy farmers are joining forces to raise money for testicular cancer, while also improving their herd genetics as part of Breedr’s Bulls Out for Cancer campaign.
Linux support is far and away our most requested feature. Bringing the world’s most loved password manager to such a passionate community – and building on the incredible work of the open source community – is both humbling and exciting for all of us at 1Password.
This is a tricky proposition for some—an official 1Password client has been released for Linux.
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The sticking point for some? It's not open source.
For me, that's not a problem. The most important thing to me is that the software I need/want runs on Linux. Once upon a time, I was a purist in that I would only install and use open source software. Over the years I realized there was too much software I required that didn't have an open source option with the features I needed. At that point, I decided if the software would run on Linux, I was okay with it.
Besides, if I support closed source software that runs on Linux, it might help other companies realize there is a market out there for proprietary solutions on Linux. In the end, the more commercial software Linux has, the better its chances are of being accepted by the masses. This was an important lesson for me to learn back in the early 2000s.
1Password is a pretty good password manager (even though not open-source) and has a good rep in the open-source community as well. They even offer free team memberships for users working on open-source projects.
Its desktop client for Linux was in the beta phase but now it is ready for prime time.
After nearly seven months since the first development preview, Linux users now have access to 1Password's most requested feature for years — an official app for Linux computers.€
Since October last year, we’ve been closely following 1Password for Linux after it was first announced and we also wrote an article on how to install the beta releases. Finally, the good news is, the first stable build of the application has finally landed on Linux, and in this article, let’s try it out and look at how to install 1Password on Linux.
But first, what is 1Password? For starters, 1Password is a paid password manager that stores your passwords and makes managing them easier for you. The stored passwords are locked by a master password called PBKDF2.
It includes several features Windows, Mac, iOS and Android users don't have yet.
The Linux Foundation has announced a new online course designed to help developers learn to use WebAssembly modules "from the cloud to the edge," and it's currently free for anyone who wants to sign up.
WebAssembly, despite its name, is far more useful than just as a stack-based virtual machine (VM) for web browsers. It's increasingly being used to address a wide variety of programming needs from cloud-native computing, edge computing, mobile development, and edge-based projects. To help you master it, the Linux Foundation is now offering a free online training course, called WebAssembly Actors: From Cloud to Edge (LFD134x).
Together with Linux Foundation Research, Hyperledger is conducting a survey to measure the market awareness and perceptions of Hyperledger and its projects relative to other blockchain platforms used in the technology industry, specifically identifying myths and misperceptions. Additionally, the survey seeks to help Hyperledger articulate the perceived time to production readiness for products and understand motivations for developers that both use and contribute to Hyperledger technologies.
Contrast Security, a leader in modernizing application security, today announced that it has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Linux Foundation as a silver member, which brings together the world's top developers, end-users, and vendors to enable cloud native architectures and open source technologies. CNCF serves as the vendor-neutral home for many of the fastest-growing open source projects, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy. In becoming a member, Contrast aims to support and educate the industry on the increasing risks and benefits of cloud native architectures and open source software through active participation in the foundation's events, projects, and community.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (cacti, cacti-spine, exif, and hivex), Red Hat (bash, bind, bluez, brotli, container-tools:rhel8, cpio, curl, dotnet3.1, dotnet5.0, dovecot, evolution, exiv2, freerdp, ghostscript, glibc, GNOME, go-toolset:rhel8, grafana, gssdp and gupnp, httpd:2.4, idm:DL1, idm:DL1 and idm:client, ipa, kernel, kernel-rt, krb5, libdb, libvncserver, libxml2, linux-firmware, mailman:2.1, mingw packages, NetworkManager and libnma, opensc, p11-kit, pandoc, perl, pki-core:10.6 and pki-deps:10.6, poppler and evince, python-cryptography, python-lxml, python-urllib3, python27:2.7, python3, python38:3.8, qt5-qtbase, raptor2, redis:6, rh-mariadb103-mariadb and rh-mariadb103-galera, rust-toolset:rhel8, samba, sane-backends, shim, slapi-nis, spice, spice-vdagent, sqlite, squid:4, sudo, systemd, tigervnc, trousers, unbound, userspace graphics, xorg-x11, and mesa, virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel, wpa_supplicant, and xorg-x11-server), SUSE (kernel), and Ubuntu (djvulibre, gst-plugins-base1.0, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, python-pip, and runc).
Each of these scenarios obligates a party to do something it might not want to do voluntarily, and in each case that party will have to comply or a court will impose contempt sanctions. So the net effect as well as the nature of the leverage is materially the same in each of the three cases. The UK Supreme Court's Unwired Planet approach has already failed, as my fifth slide shows that there's been a flurry of antisuit injunction activity since that decision came down last summer.
How could we get out of this? I've asked that question before. Intergovernmental agreements are not going to happen anytime soon. Standard-setting organizations are in no better position to reach a consensus. The solution I propose can be implemented by any country seeking to preserve its jurisdiction over its patents. It can be implemented unilaterally. It's to decline to recognize in a given jurisdiction a license agreement imposed on a party by a foreign court (regardless of which of the three above-mentioned types of coercion it may be). If a SEP holder didn't want to be bound to a UK determination of the value of the German part of the portfolio, German courts could allow the enforcement of those patents, for the purpose of obtaining incremental payments up to a FRAND level. Conversely, if a UK court sets a royalty rate that is too high with respect to a major market like, for instance, China, the Chinese company might go to its local courts and seek a partial refund.
Courts could still force someone into a global license agreement, but effectively the courts in other jurisdictions would be in a position to correct those findings. A portfolio may not be all that strong in a given jurisdiction. Or the local rates may simply be lower.
The claims filed by InterDigital against Xiaomi regard EP 33 55 537, EP 24 21 318, and EP 2 485 558, all of which protect 3G and 4G technology. The Regional Court Munich will hear the claims in three separate proceedings (case IDs 7 O 4225/21 and 4226/21, 21 O 4227/21).
An oral hearing at the 7th chamber of the court (7O 4226/21) is scheduled for February 2022 and will launch proceedings. This hearing is the main hearing concerning EP 318. Unusually, the case has no early first hearing, which is the norm according to the Munich procedure.
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In the ASI dispute, both Arnold Ruess and Hogan Lovells appeared for the first time in the proceedings for clients InterDigital and Xiaomi.
For the main proceedings, Hogan Lovells is setting up a mixed team of litigators and patent attorneys from the Düsseldorf and Munich offices.
Arnold Ruess relies on the technical support of patent attorney firm df-mp. The firm is one of the most active litigation outfits in Germany for proceedings involving mobile communications patents. Both Dominik Ho and David Molnia worked side by side with EIP for Conversant in the dispute with Daimler.
At the end of 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Commission (“the Commission”) published its new "Pharmaceutical Strategy for Europe." This communication underlines that while major progress has been made in the last twenty years, many patients do not benefit from these innovations since medicines are either unaffordable or unavailable.
The Commission's goals are ambitious: promoting patient access to innovative and affordable medicines, supporting the competitiveness and innovative capacity of the EU’s pharmaceutical industry and developing the strategic autonomy of the EU, while enabling a green and digital transition of the European pharmaceutical policy.
Korean giant Samsung Is undoubtedly a leader in the field of foldable smartphones, and there are currently multiple foldable devices on the market. The company has no plans to slow down its foldable smartphones so far, from what we can make from all the reports on Samsung’s foldable plans for 2021. According to a new report, Samsung’s SID Display Week 2021 includes a foldable 17-inch tablet and a flexible smartphone with a 7.2-inch display that can be folded in two places, with a structure of letter Z or S. similar.
When transporting flowers, several measures need to be taken to maintain their freshness. Floriation’s patent required regulation of the ethylene concentration in the package. Whether Royal Flora Holland had used this feature was the central theme in this decision. The provisions judge found no direct infringement and also concluded that there was no equivalency, since in such a case the deviating feature should have the same function as the claimed feature. That was not the case.
Davies Collison Cave won two Managing IP Asia-Pacific awards in 2020: patent prosecution firm of the year for Australia, and boutique firm of the year for the whole region. With offices in Singapore and New Zealand as well as in Australia, the firm works with clients across Asia-Pacific.
Oxford Nanopore recently announced its plans to list on the London Stock Exchange, with some valuing the company at over €£4 billion. So where does the actual value of the company lie? Partly in its know-how, but substantially in the IP which protects the underlying technology. The company has a broad portfolio of over 200 patent families, some owned by the company itself, and some which are licenced-in. This portfolio, which covers different aspects of the sequencing platform technology, is critical to the company's ability to secure deals and attract investment.
The 'doctrine of equivalents' (ie, the principle that a patent may be infringed by a product or process which is considered equivalent to that…
Five counsel in LATAM and the US say they’ll need to change prosecution tactics and scrutinise their portfolios as a result of the Direct Action 5,529 decision
On May 19, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 8,849,814. The patent is owned by Relevant Holdings, LLC, a NPE. The '814 patent generally relates to a database that is able to search, sort, and display various video and sounds clips. The patent is currently being asserted against Mindgeek USA, Inc.
On May 19, 2021, Unified Patents filed a Chinese invalidation request for CN1663258 owned by Dolby International AB. CN1663258 has been designated essential to the HEVC Advance pool and SISVEL’s AV1 pool. It is also related to patents that have been designated in those pools.
After months of discussion, South Africa’s Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry reached a formal decision on the President’s reservations in respect of the Copyright Amendment Bill (CAB) and the Performers’ Protection Amendment Bill (PPAB). [The Portfolio Committee on Trade and Industry is part of the National Assembly/Parliament]
As readers may know, following the President’s letter indicating reservations about the constitutionality of the two bills [on which see Katpost here], the CAB and PPAB were returned to the National Assembly who is tasked with reconsidering the bills and addressing the President’s concerns.
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On the controversial fair use exception, the Opinion indicated, citing various parliamentary submissions and testimonies, that there was adequate public participation in drafting of the clause and that the President’s reservations were unfounded.
This position is contrary to the position already taken by the Parliament to reopen the fair use provision and other copyright exceptions for public comments. While there are other groups such as South African Democratic Union (Sadtu), ReCreate South Africa, the South African Guild of Actors (Saga) and Blind SA that agree with the above-mentioned Opinion, others prefer the position taken by the Parliament to go back to the drawing board and re-engage the public on the Bills.
Whatever side one takes, the CAB and the PPAB are essentially up for discussion and public engagement…again. [Thankfully?], in its decision, the Parliament stated that it will incorporate its previous work on the bills (including previous consultations and submissions) up to the Second Reading of the Bills. The next step will now be to see how Parliament rolls out the public engagement and consultation process this time around... Stay tuned!
