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Links 31/5/2021: Firefox 89 and Public Holidays



  • GNU/Linux

    • Linux Weekly Roundup #132

      We had a peaceful week in the world of Linux releases with Nitrux OS 2021.05.28, ALT Linux 9.1 "Simply", and Makulu Linux Core 2021-05-28.

      May you have a great week and stay safe!

    • Linux Release Roundup #21.22: AlmaLinux 8.4, Inkscape 1.1, and More New Releases

      In the Linux Release Roundup series, we summarize the new application and distribution versions release in the last few days. This keeps you informed with the latest developments in the Linux world.

    • Test-driving the reMarkable 2 on Linux: paper-like or paper-weight?

      It took about five minutes to unbox and set up the reMarkable from receiving the box from DHL to actually scribbling on the screen to verify that it worked. A bit longer if you count the inevitable account creation and so forth.

      The tactile experience is great. The supply of pen tips included with the tablet concerns me a bit. Just how often are these used up?

      Weight-wise, it’s comfortable. About the same weight as a Moleskine or similar-sized iPad.

      I’m curious to see how much of a pain it is (or isn’t) using the reMarkable 2 with Linux. My first impressions aren’t stellar. But we’ll see if a few days of use help smooth out the rough edges. Making a template and uploading it, etc. were not hard but took a little fiddling and googling to figure out. Copying files over took trial and error, and the initial experience left something to be desired.

    • Virtual Desktops - The Future of Computing | Shells.com AMA [[Ed: This headline is a gross exaggeration]

      Collaborating and partnering with over 10 Linux distributors to make a seamless virtual desktop experience, Alex is CEO of shells.com, a new virtual desktop cloud computing solution that is simplifying the virtual desktop experience.

      The platform lets anyone access their cloud computer from any device with a browser so you can have a Linux desktop on your Apple iPad or your Windows computer on your XBox! The team are also the previous founders and operators of Private Internet Access, one of the world’s best and most trusted VPNs. This Slogging thread by Alex Lee, Justin Roberti, Golda Velez, Zlatan Todoric and Akasha Rose occurred in slogging's official #amas channel, and has been edited for readability.

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Upgrading Lenovo Thinkpad's Memory and Acer Aspire One's Wifi

        Yesterday I upgraded both of my laptop of their respective memory and wifi card. For Lenovo Thinkpad, I upgraded the memory from 4 to 6GB. For Acer Aspire One, I upgraded the wifi device from the nonfree to the free one that I had proven works with Trisquel. Here's how I did it with pictures and some story. Now I can run Ubuntu and other operating systems smoother than ever.

    • Server

      • May 2021 Web Server Survey [Ed: The Microsoft collapse in Web servers continues; down from 5.54% to 4.95% in one single mouth (lost 7 million!)]

        In the May 2021 survey we received responses from 1,218,423,991 sites across 259,596,021 unique domains and 11,051,830 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 6.28 million sites and 112,000 computers, but a loss of 4.87 million domains.

        nginx gained the largest number of hostnames, active sites, and computers this month; but also suffered the largest loss of 4.73 million domains. Its most notable gain was of 78,900 computers (+2.03%), which increased its leading share to 36.0%. It also continues to lead in the hostnames and domains metrics, while Apache is top in active sites.

        Apache also maintains its lead amongst the top million websites, with a 25.4% share compared to nginx's 22.9%. Cloudflare's share of the top million sites is now up to 17.0% after increasing its presence by a further 3,090 sites, and Microsoft added 1,840 sites to bring its share up to 6.85%.

        OpenResty saw the largest decrease of 8.10 million hostnames (-9.88%), which has taken its market share down to 6.06% (-0.7 pp). Microsoft also suffered a large loss of 6.92 million sites (-10.3%), which took its share down to 4.95% (-0.6 pp).

        One of OpenResty's most prominent users is Automattic, which uses it to serve millions of Tumblr microblogging websites that can be found under the tumblr.com domain – for example, icontherecord.tumblr.com.

        Automattic is also responsible for the popular WordPress.com blogging service, where it instead uses nginx to serve millions of blogs. These WordPress-powered sites can either use custom domain names, or free blogs can be created directly under the wordpress.com domain – for example, catsbeingcats.wordpress.com.

        The underlying WordPress blogging software reached its 18th birthday this month. Automattic continues to contribute to this open source project, and the software is freely available from wordpress.org, allowing anyone to download and install the software on other compatible web server platforms. Although Apache and nginx are recommended, any server that supports PHP and MySQL ought to be capable of running a WordPress site. Such is the popularity of WordPress, some hosting providers also provide one-click installers and other tools that make it easy to manage WordPress sites.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • Kernel prepatch 5.13-rc4

        The fourth 5.13 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "So after two small rc releases, the other show finally dropped, and rc4 is fairly sizable."

      • Linux Adding New Thermal Code To Deal With Hot Tegra Devices - Phoronix

        Simple CPU throttling isn't sufficient for cooling some NVIDIA Tegra devices running the upstream Linux kernel so thermal cooling integration into the device frequency "devfreq" scaling code is in the work for such high performance NVIDIA SoCs.

        Various developers working on the NVIDIA Tegra / Arm Linux support found that some Tegra SoCs / devices are producing much more heat than others. The old ASUS Transformer TF700T with Tegra 3 SoC for example when running the mainline Linux kernel is found to be running very hot and the initial target of these new patches.

      • Linux 5.14 To Have Additional Bring-Up For Intel Alder Lake M - Phoronix

        In recent months there has been a lot of Linux kernel patches for bringing up Alder Lake S and Alder Lake P while more recently the enablement patches for Alder Lake M low-power mobile has begun.

        The Linux support bring-up for Alder Lake M has been trailing the ADL-S and ADL-P but not by much and in most cases the ADL-M amounts to adding additional PCI IDs.

        So far in the mainline Linux kernel for Linux 5.13 there is Alder Lake M support with the intel_th PCI and USB DWC3 drivers but with the Linux 5.14 cycle this summer is when it looks like more of that initial enablement will happen.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • (Resolved) Unknown collation: utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci – TecAdmin

        A collation is a set of rules that defines how to compare and sort character strings in a database server. In this tutorial, we are discussing about an error faced during database restore on other server.

      • Interactive shell scripts - Linux Concept

        The read command is a built-in shell command for reading data from a file or keyboard.

        The read command receives the input from the keyboard or a file until it receives a newline character.

      • How to Create SFTP Only User in Ubuntu & Debian – TecAdmin

        SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) is a secure file protocol used to access, manage, and transfer files over an encrypted SSH transport session. Here SFTP only user means to create an account to access server via SFTP only. That user doesn’t have SSH shell access. This allows you a secure channel to provide limited access to specific files and directories.

        This guide describes you to create SFTP only user without shell access on an Ubuntu and Debian systems.

      • How To Reset Root Password In MySQL 8 On Ubuntu Linux - OSTechNix

        Did you forget your MySQL database root user password? No worries! This step by step guide explains how to reset root password in MySQL 8 on Ubuntu 20.04 operating system.

      • A practical view of the xargs command | Enable Sysadmin

        The day-to-day tasks of the sysadmin are always different for everyone; however, there are simple tasks that are executed equally on managed systems. In the days when disk space was a risk factor in the administrator's day, it was vitally important to locate the directory or filesystem to debug.

      • Adding external modules to MicroPython with Raspberry PI Pico
      • How to install Synfig Studio on Deepin 20.2

        In this video, we are looking at how to install Synfig Studio on Deepin 20.2.

      • How to install Virtual host on Nginx Centos 8 - Unixcop

        Nginx (Engine X) is a most popular, powerful and high-performance open-source HTTP web server and reverse proxy server with a scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. It can also be used as a load balancer, mail proxy, and HTTP cache due to its speed, stability, feature-rich set, easy configuration, and low resource utilization.

      • How to Create a Vagrant Box from an Existing Box

        We have crossed halfway through this series and by this time you might have a good understanding of what Vagrant does and how to use provisioners in vagrant.

        Till now you are using prebuilt vagrant boxes downloaded from the vagrant cloud site. Some boxes are preconfigured to serve different purposes like the scotch box which comes with a LAMP stack, trusty64cdh which comes with a single node CDH Hadoop distribution. You can also create your box like the one mentioned and share it with the community or fellow geeks working with you on the same project.

      • How to play Among Us on a Chromebook with GeForce Now - Epic Games

        Today we are looking at how to play Among Us on a Chromebook with GeForce Now - Epic Games. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

      • How to install LibreOffice on AlmaLinux or Rocky 8 - Linux Shout

        LibreOffice is a free and open-source office suite and often considered a good alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. It offers impressive features, a user-friendly interface, comprehensive, and compatible with MS Office files. Here we let you know how to install LibreOffice on RHEL based AlmaLinux 8.x or Rocky Linux 8.

        Being a fork of Apache OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice also contains all the essential components need to deal with daily document and calculation needs. It comes with a Word file created called Writer, the spreadsheet program is known as Calc, which competes with Excel; for MS PowerPoint alternative it has Impress; the Base, a database administrator software tool and Draw program for drawing and diagram. Although both OpenOffice and LibreOffice are the same, LibreOffice is much popular because it receives frequent updates, which means new features and early bug fixing.

      • How to Install PHP 7.4 on Ubuntu 20.04

        PHP, an acronym for Hypertext Preprocessor, is an open-source scripting language used in web development. PHP runs on the server-side and is the powerhouse behind many popular web-based solutions such as WordPress and Moodle.

        On Ubuntu 20.04, PHP 7.4 is the version available in the default package repository at the time of this post. However, PHP 8.0 is the latest version of the PHP language.

        In this tutorial, our focus will be on the installation of PHP 7.4 for Apache and NGINX web servers running on Ubuntu 20.04.

      • How To Install ExpressJS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ExpressJS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ExpressJS is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.

        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 ExpressJS web application framework on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

      • GoAccess - Analyze Real-Time Apache and Nginx Logs

        One of the primary roles of any systems administrator is viewing and analyzing log files. Web server log files from other Apache and Nginx can build up over time and examining them can prove to be a tedious and time-consuming activity. Thankfully, GoAccess can alleviate all that stress and enable you to seamlessly monitor and analyze web server log files.

        Written in C programming language, GoAccess is an opensource, terminal-based real-time web log analyzer. It’s fast, interactive, and displays the logs in an elegant and intuitive fashion. It provides support for a wide variety of web log files including Apache, Nginx, Caddy, Amazon S3, and CloudFront to mention just a few. It can render the results in HTML format, JSON, and also generate a CSV report.

      • How to reset AlmaLinux / Rocky Linux 8 root password - Linux Shout

        Have you forgotten your AlmaLinux or Rocky root user password, then here is the step-by-step tutorial to rest the root password using the command terminal.

        AlmaLinux / Rocky are the two latest RedHat-based Linux distros meant to use for Servers as well as on Desktops. However, in case after some time you want to log in root user and you couldn’t remember its password then the only way is to recover the root password is by resetting it. Yes, we cannot get our old password at all, instead, we manually have to change it.

    • Games

      • Fanatical has some good bundles going right now if you need some new games

        Fanatical aren't a store we cover often but they're actually great, and they currently have a few bundles going that you should check out if you need some new games this week.

        With all the sales going often on the likes of GOG, Humble, Steam and more we're never short of new experiences. Fanatical though, have also been around a long time now, previously known as Bundle Stars. Based in the UK, Fanatical offer up a store with tons of games and they do regular bundles too. We shall highlight in bold text the games that have Linux native builds available.

      • Submissions open for Godot 2021 showreel

        Does your Godot-made game or tool (published or work in progress) make you proud? Would you like to showcase it in the upcoming 2021 showreel? Please send us a short video of it!

      • Valve's GameNetworkingSockets 1.3 Released With Better Performance - Phoronix

        One of Valve's many open-source projects is GameNetworkingSockets as a basic transport layer for games to handle UDP-based messaging, P2P networking, encryption, IPv6, and other network handling functionality of particular use to games / game engines.

        GameNetworkingSockets 1.3 was released on Sunday as the newest feature release. Notable with GameNetworkingSockets 1.3 is better performance thanks to a new fine-grained locking strategy to reduce locking contention. GameNetworkingSockets previously suffered from major locking contention issues that hampered its scalability especially across multiple threads. This long-standing issue with GameNetworkingSockets should now be addressed.

      • 1998 classic strategy game Signus: The Artefact Wars sees a full open source release

        Signus: The Artefact Wars, originally a commercial release in 1998 was later open sourced in 2002 and it just got an updated re-release with all the data too. It's similar to the Battle Isle series, which some of you will probably be a bit more familiar with.

        "Earth sent a fleet of colony ships to a distant planet called Arkonis. When the fleet arrived, they found the planet inhabited by an alien race advanced beyond human comprehension. All attempts to communicate with the aliens failed and the colonists had no choice but to settle down on the planet. Their ships could not make another interplanetary journey. So they attacked the peaceful aliens."

      • MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries runs great on Linux with Proton now it's on Steam | GamingOnLinux

        MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, the first single player MechWarrior game for a long time has jumped from the Epic Store over to Steam and it runs well on Linux.

      • Retro game streaming service Piepacker is quite impressive and works well on Linux | GamingOnLinux

        The Piepacker team gave us early access to take a look, so we took it for an initial spin and it worked perfectly on Linux. As long as you have a Chromium/Chrome based browser (Firefox support is to come).

    • Distributions

      • Linux distribution Solus joins Open Collective for funding hardware and developers

        Solus, a popular standalone Linux distribution has announced they've joined Open Collective as they attempt to pull in funding to push ahead with it.

        Talking about their aims for the distribution, developer Joshua Strobl mentions how Solus has been on a "multi-year endeavor to build and curate a unique and modern desktop experience for home computing platforms".

      • New Releases

        • MakuluLinux Flash 2021- First Look !

          Now that Core is released, We are Hard at work on the new MakuluLinux flash Edition, We hope to have it ready for release soon, but enough Talk, lets take a look at the new Flash in the video below...

      • SUSE/OpenSUSE

        • Release Manager Provides Update on Early Features Requisitions for Leap 15.4

          The release manager of openSUSE Leap is finishing up the release of Leap 15.3, but wants to keep contributors and developers informed about an early feature request deadline for the Leap 15.4 release.

          Early feature requests are important since Leap is compatible with SUSE Linux Enterprise and the early feature request deadline for Service Pack 4 is June 26.

          “This is very important to openSUSE Leap 15.4 contributors as 1/3 of Leap 15.4 binaries will be re-used with SUSE Linux Enterprise and therefore submit requests are accepted there,” wrote release manager Lubos Kocman on a project email list. “Just to clarify, this deadline is the same for everyone, be it a largest partner, community contributor or an employee.”

          openSUSE Leap and Package Hub exclusive packages will have similar deadlines as described in the roadmap.

        • openSUSE.Asia Summit 2021 Logo Competition Announcement

          It’s a rationally acknowledged fact that openSUSE has a reputation for community-driven projects. Buckle up, here’s your chance to contribute to this community event! Since the inception of openSUSE.Asia summits, logos have perfectly illustrated the organizing country. Following the suit, a logo-designing competition has been organized for openSUSE.Asia Summit 2021, India.

          The organizing team will send “Geeko Mystery Box” as a token of appreciation for the best logo design, voted on by the openSUSE Asia committee.

      • IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

        • X.Org Server Git Lands Latest Patches To Help NVIDIA XWayland

          Red Hat's Olivier Fourdan has landed the latest XWayland improvements into X.Org Server Git for primarily benefiting the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack.

          The code pushed to X.Org Server Git today is adding the GLVND (OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library) vendor to the XWayland screen. This change is ultimately about ensuring the proper GLX library gets loaded when using the XWayland EGLStreams back-end.

        • Get started with Kubernetes using chaos engineering

          Kubernetes is turning 11, so I'll be celebrating its birthday by giving you some open source tools that will help you cause chaos. Chaos engineering is part science, part planning, and part experiments. It's the discipline of experimenting on a system to build confidence in the system's capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.

          Before I start passing out the gifts, in this introductory article, I will explain the basics of how chaos engineering works.

        • Join upstream maintainers in this new free online event [Ed: IBM and OSI boosting Microsoft moles and lobbyists (of proprietary software!) and this is so awful on so many levels. Speaks of "our pals at" Microsoft... and notice how many Microsoft employees lead this. They've killed the term "Open Source".]

          Upstream will kick off Maintainer Week, a series of events we're hosting alongside our pals at GitHub to celebrate the vital work of open source maintainers and highlight some of the heroes behind the movement.

        • Fedora Community Blog: Outreachy Interns introduction – 2021 Summer

          Recently, Outreachy announced selected Interns for May 2021 to August 2021 round and we have 4 interns with us. This blog introduces them to the community. If you see them around, please welcome them and share some virtual cookies.

          Outreachy is a paid, remote internship program that helps traditionally underrepresented people in tech make their first contributions to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities. Fedora is participating in this round of Outreachy as a mentoring organization. We asked our Outreachy interns to tell us some things about themselves!

        • Learn Quarkus faster with quick starts in the Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift

          Java developers are usually required to take many actions before we can begin developing and deploying cloud-native microservices on Kubernetes. First, we have to configure everything from the integrated development environment (IDE) to build tools such as Maven or Gradle. We also need to configure the command-line tools used for containerization and generating the Kubernetes manifest. If we don’t want to spin up a Kubernetes cluster locally, we also must connect to a remote Kubernetes cluster for continuous testing and deployment.

          Developers should spend less time on configuration and more time accelerating the inner-loop development cycle of building, testing, and deploying our applications. Ideally, we should be able to continuously develop applications in a pre-configured Kubernetes environment.

          This article is a guide to configuring Java applications using Quarkus quick starts in the Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift. As you'll see, using quick starts in the developer sandbox lets you focus on the inner loop of development, without needing to configure the Kubernetes cluster or development tools.

        • 4 books to boost your data storytelling skills [Ed: "Consider these books as essential resources to help you maximize the value of your data" sounds like some sort of surveillance PR slant in Red Hat's site]

          Whether you are an analyst, a business operations pro, an upwardly mobile team lead, or a senior executive, working with data is now a critical success factor to advancing your career. While hardcore data skills like being good at math and computer science are key, softer skills are equally important and sometimes harder to master.

          Soft data skills involve being able to communicate your vision and persuade stakeholders with a compelling story. Unfortunately, most data science courses don’t teach these skills, which makes obtaining these types of skills a challenge.

      • Debian Family

        • pie-executable and sharedlib fixed again

          However, I see in latest build of EasyOS that binary executables are still showing as mime type "application/x-sharedlib" in package 'shared-mime-info', though 'file' executable shows them as "ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable".

          Chased the cause down to the build using an older /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml, instead of the one that comes with the 'shared-mime-info' package.

          Also fixed a couple of other things...

          A change rather than a fix... the keyboard layout and password entry in the initrd are now gtk GUI apps. That is, nice GUI apps before the switch_root to the main filesystem. Previously, was only doing that for non-English builds, then not at all as Xorg was not working with the /dev/fb0 framebuffer -- solved by rolling back to xserver 1.19.7, from 1.20.8.

          Note, in the EasyOS Buster-series had this problem, and compiled a very cutdown xserver 1.19.6 and made it into a PET. Used that to run GUI apps in the initrd.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

        • Linux Mint 20.2 “Uma” Announced with New Bulk Renaming App, Beta Is Coming Mid-June

          Dubbed “Uma,” Linux Mint 20.2 will be the second major point release in the Linux Mint 20 series, which is derived from the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series and supported until 2025. Most probably, Linux Mint 20.2 will be based on Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS.

          The even better news is that a beta version will be ready for testing as soon as mid-June, in about two weeks from the moment of writing this article, so we can have an early taste of the new features and improvements.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Genode OS 21.05 Released With Webcam Support, Encrypted File Vault

        Genode OS as the from-scratch open-source operating system framework built atop a micro-kernel abstraction layer and various original user-space components is out with its version 21.05 update.

        Given the amount of work being carried out by Genode OS and not just relying on the Linux kernel or a platform with existing device driver support, Genode for some areas is late to the party... Such as with today's Genode OS 21.05 release now introducing web camera support. Genode OS 21.05 features initial web cam support that they began working on last year given the pandemic. This ended up being quite involved even with leveraging libuvc and libusb. They do have webcam support working now though including having developed integration for VirtualBox and QEMU.

      • Daniel Stenberg: curl localhost as a local host

        When you use the name localhost in a URL, what does it mean? Where does the network traffic go when you ask curl to download http://localhost ?

        Is “localhost” just a name like any other or do you think it infers speaking to your local host on a loopback address?

      • Huawei P50 teased with latest invite for the HarmonyOS event on June 2

        Huawei has been using the invites for its HarmonyOS event to tease upcoming products – first the Huawei Watch 3, then a new M-Pencil for the upcoming MatePad Pro 2 tablet and now the Huawei P50 series. The latest invite shows two circular camera bumps seen at an angle.

        We have seen these bumps several times before in leaked renders and hands-on photos. They are supposed to house an impressive Sony IMX800 1” sensor, however, the trade sanctions and the delays they brought have caused Huawei to lose some of its thunder.

      • Web Browsers

        • Nyxt Browser is a Keyboard-oriented Web Browser Inspired by Emacs and Vim

          You get plenty of open-source web browsers available for Linux. Not just limited to chrome-based options, but chrome alternatives as well.

          [...]

          Nyxt is a keyboard-oriented open-source web browser available for Linux and macOS.

          Of course, not every power user utilizes keyboard shortcuts, but this aims to cater the needs of users who prefer to navigate via the keyboard.

          It is inspired by how the keyboard shortcuts in Vim and Emacs work — so if you are comfortable with those editors, the shortcuts will feel familiar to you.

          Unlike mainstream web browsers, you do not have to navigate your way inside multiple settings and menu, you will get all the functionality that you need to access with a quick shortcut or a command.

          In case you were wondering, it is web engine agnostic, but it currently supports WebEngine and WebKit.

          So, it saves time and improves your browsing experience if you are a fan of navigating around using the keyboard.

          It offers a fair share of useful features which I shall highlight below.

        • Mozilla

          • Firefox 89 Is Now Available for Download with Fresh New Look, Improved Privacy

            Firefox 89 has been in public beta testing since April 20th, when I took it for a test drive to get an early taste of the fresh new look called “Proton,” which Mozilla prepared for us in summer 2021. It took a little longer to release this version as Mozilla extended the beta testing cycle to 6 weeks instead of 4.

            But it’s finally here, and you can enjoy the fresh new look that introduces simplified browser chrome and toolbar, a new tab design with floating tabs, streamlined menus, updated infobars and modals prompts, a refined color palette, a brand-new first-run welcome page, as well as a more consistent styling and lighter iconography.

          • Firefox Plans for Long-Awaited Native Translation Feature

            No more installing additional extensions. You can get the Firefox Translation feature - right at the browser window natively. You can easily translate to English and other available languages. Here's how.

      • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

        • LibreOffice IRC channels moving to Libera.Chat

          Many projects in the LibreOffice community use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to communicate. This is a real-time text-based communication protocol that’s popular amongst many free and open source software projects.

        • Get LibreOffice Handbooks Printed Version

          We are happy and pleased to welcome LibreOffice Handbooks printed version being published just yesterday. Now everyone can purchase them online at LuLu Store (the book store that established by Red Hat co-founder) and they are shipping to more than 200 countries worldwide. Schools, universities, governments, enterprises, Free Libre Open Source Software activists, individuals, teachers and students now can have these guide books for their computing activities with LibreOffice Writer, Calc, Impress and Base. Finally, for people switching from proprietary to free software, these are the books you are looking for. Finally, a ton of thanks and respects to LibreOffice Team for writing these great books. Happy reading!

      • Programming/Development

        • ConvertiGo: RAD web and mobile development with low- and no-code support

          ConvertiGo is a No-Code, Low-code platform for full-stack mobile and web application development. It helps developers to keep a huge amounts of time and money instead of waste them by writing and maintaining complex code.

          ConvertiGo currently used by more than 150K developers worldwide, building enterprise class mobile apps.

        • Nishit Patel: Beginning my GSoC Journey

          I am starting a new blog series, for covering my GSoC’21 journey with GNOME Foundation. This is going to be an introductory blog where I will talk about the project on which I’ll be working this summer. Before we get started let me introduce myself to the folks reading from the GNOME planet. I am Nishit Patel, an undergraduate Computer Engineering student from India.

          I began my pre GSoC journey back in November 2020 when I opened my first MR in tracker project. It was a small bug fix in the README.md file which I came across while setting up my local environment. Later, I began keeping a watch on the #tracker IRC and used to ask maintainers for help whenever I was stuck at something. Maintainers were very helpful and polite with their prompt replies even if I was asking some stupid question that was already addressed somewhere in the documentation. One thing that I noticed is it is better to first google, and check the docs before asking the question as it saves the maintainers precious time, and you also get to learn something new in the process.

        • inline 0.3.19: Another Update

          A new release of the inline package got to CRAN today, following and further updating the recent update from earlier in the month. inline facilitates writing code in-line in simple string expressions or short files. The package was used quite extensively by Rcpp in the days before Rcpp Attributes arrived on the scene providing an even better alternative for its use cases. inline is still used by rstan and a number of other packages.

          This release builds on and extends the work of the recent 0.3.18 release and tweaks some of the test. We cannot fully test all platforms used by CRAN so some times iterations such as this one are needed. The package was uploaded a few days ago, but it sometimes takes a few days to clarify changes over email to the CRAN maintainers whose work is still greatly appreciated.

        • Qt Online Installer 4.1.1 released

          We are happy to announce that Qt Online Installer 4.1.1 has been released today.

  • Leftovers

    • Finding the Mother Tree

      I don't know where it's likely to go better.

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Environment

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • Inside the Attacks on Critical Race Theory

        Texas’ bill, and similar GOP legislation elsewhere, began as a knee-jerk reaction to the popularity among educators of the New York Times’ 1619 Project and right-wing media click-bait stories of the horrors of multicultural workshops and diversity training. Conservatives have lumped all these approaches to analyzing the dynamics of racism under the umbrella of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) which Idaho has legally condemned for “inflame[ing] divisions on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or other criteria in ways contrary to the unity of the nation”. When the legislative template for these bills was crafted it came to reflect certain novel aspects of the conservative mind as it has been shaped by evangelicalism, Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, Fox News, Trump, and Q-anon.

        Texas’ HB 87 declares that the purpose of social studies education is to “develop each student ’s civic knowledge” of “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment”. The key word here is “the”, as in “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations”, strongly implying that there was some unity, some sort of consensus about moral and political principles at the founding. To view American society in 1776 as having anything approaching agreement about what constituted morality or the proper basis of government requires ignoring the deep factional fights within patriot ranks that eventually festered into America’s first party system, the many dissenting religious groups, and the views of the one in five Americans who were legally property. Lurking in this idea of “civic knowledge” is a mandate to consider only land-owning whites as constituting “the American experiment”.

      • Texas Advances Voter Suppression Law That Makes It Easier to Overturn Elections
      • Opinion | Arizona Bill Would Refer Mismatched Mail Ballot Signatures to Prosecutors

        Turning simple signature issues into a potential criminal matter would discourage people from voting.

      • Outspoken Republican Who Opposes Legalization Owns Quite a Lot of Stock in Pot
      • Texas GOP Finalizes 'Ruthless' Voter Suppression Bill, Sparking Calls for Congressional Action

        The state legislation has been slammed by voting rights advocates nationwide—including President Joe Biden, who said that "it's part of an assault on democracy that we've seen far too often this year."

      • Biden Must Take Executive Action to Affirm That Clean Water Is a Human Right
      • Teslas made in Texas will likely have to leave the state before Texans can buy them

        Tesla is building a factory in Texas to make some of its cars, but when it’s up and running, the cars made there may have to go on a roundabout journey to get to Texan buyers (via The Drive). Because of state laws banning car companies from selling directly to consumers, Tesla could end up shipping the cars from its Austin factory to other states, before they’re sent back to their Texan buyers. The state’s lawmakers were debating legislation that would have prevented the situation, but they’ve now missed their chance to pass it before they have to go on break until 2023 — the factory is expected to be completed by the end of 2021.



    • Misinformation/Disinformation

      • How America Does Regime-Change Propaganda

        This is how America does regime-change propaganda, every time: lies.

        These lies come from the regime that spends around half of all of the entire world’s military spending, and the regime that imprisons the world’s highest percentage of its subjects (or ‘citizens’). It’s the ‘land of the free’, and exports its ‘freedom and democracy’ everywhere.

        And that’s how America does regime-change operations: by sheer lies.

        Like all imperialism throughout history, it’s based on lies — propaganda. And, like in all imperialistic regimes throughout history, their public believe these lies, every time, time after time. They don’t learn the truth, because they’re never taught the truth. (Dissenters are suppressed, not hired. In any dictatorship, the financial incentives support the liars, not the truth-tellers.)

    • Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

    • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • Safe Orthopaedics announces the Paris Court of Justice judgment in its favor in the infringement case against Neo Medical [Ed: Well, FR patents are a joke as INPI in France does no real patent examination and therefore became a mere rubber-stamping faculty in service of the rich]

          Safe Orthopaedics (FR0013467123 – ALSAF), a company specialised in the design, manufacture and marketing of ready-to-use technologies for back surgery, with a particular focus on the treatment of emergency vertebral fractures, announced the judgment of May 28, 2021 rendered by the 3rd Chamber of the Judicial Court of Paris in the infringement case against Neo Medical.

          Having discovered that the French and Swiss companies Neo Medical were importing and offering for sale on French territory products which, according to Safe Orthopaedics, reproduced the characteristics of the claims of one of its patents, Safe Orthopaedics sued the companies Neo Medical in front of the Paris Court of Justice for infringement and unfair competition.

        • Compulsory Licensing Canada [Ed: In many cases not really the solution; in many of the covered domains it would be better to have no patents at all]

          The legal basis for compulsory licenses under Canadian Patent law is the Canadian Patent Act (hereinafter “Patent Act”) Chapter 9.

          Additionally, Part 12 of Bill C-13 amends the Patent Act to permit the Government of Canada, upon the application to the Commissioner of Patents to make, construct, use and sell a patented invention to the extent it is necessary to respond to a public health emergency.

          [...]

          Section 19.2 of the Patent Act grants the patentee the right to appeal the Commissioner’s decision to the Federal Court, including application and remuneration. However, section 19.2 does not apply to section 19.4.

          The new regulation grants the Federal Court the right to make an order requiring the Government of Canada or any authorized person to cease making, constructing, using or selling the patented invention only in a manner that is inconsistent with the granted authorization.

        • Cooking up a Patent for your unique recipe might not be as easy as you think - Graham McGlashan [Ed: Scotsman doesn't have journalists, so it just let's a bunch of law/lie firms do misleading and shameless self-promotion instead, this time (as usual) for Marks & Clerk, a highly corrupt firm that faces major lawsuits]

          Glasgow can lay claim to many inventions that helped revolutionise the modern world: television, the steam engine, antiseptic and cash machines. One lesser-known invention is the chicken tikka masala.

        • [Older] Patent troll sues Apple and Qualcomm for allegedly infringing on a patent related to 5G transceivers

          Remember when Apple and Qualcomm were suing each other every day over alleged patent infringements? Apple was getting so desperate to find a source of 5G modem chips that it was willing to bet the farm on a 5G modem chip that Intel was developing even though it really wanted the component made by Qualcomm. So right in the middle of opening statements during a trial between the two firms, an announcement was made that changed everything.

          Patent troll goes after both Apple and Qualcomm

          Apple and Qualcomm said that they had reached a settlement that included the dropping of all lawsuits on both sides. Additionally, the parties agreed on a six-year chip licensing agreement with an option for another two years, and a multi-year chip supply contract. Apple paid Qualcomm a sum reported to be $4.5 billion and everyone was happy.



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