With the Linux 5.15 kernel merge window likely opening next week, Matthew Wilcox of Oracle has already sent in a prominent pull request to Linus Torvalds: the initial work around landing of the memory folios patches.
Memory folios is part of the effort for improving Linux memory management by introducing a new "folio" struct to help manage memory by allowing file-systems and the page cache to manage memory in chunks larger than the kernel page size.
August 25 marks the 30th anniversary of the release of a free computer operating system that revolutionized nearly every industry and helped spread the open-source movement globally.
First came the software kernel that made it possible for the creation of the initial Linux distributions. Then came more new computing platforms by other software developers encouraged to expand that concept.
Today, there are literally hundreds upon hundreds of Linux distros (the industry-wide nickname) of popular and well-known Linux OSes from which to choose. They are joined by many more obscure Linux choices loved by passionate users.
Brief: Ulauncher is a fast application launcher with extension and shortcut support to help you quickly access application and files in Linux.
An application launcher lets you quickly access or open an app without hovering over the application menu icons.
By default, I found the application launcher with Pop!_OS super handy. But, not every Linux distribution offers an application launcher out-of-the-box.
Fortunately, there is a solution with which you can add the application launcher to most of the popular distros out there.
The GNOME image viewer and organizer app, gThumb 3.11.4 was released! PPA updated with Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, and upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 support.
Thanks to libheif library, the new release introduced HEIF file format support, so it can now handle photos imported from your iOS devices. Also AVIF, an image file format specification for storing images or image sequences compressed with AV1 in the HEIF file format is supported, and you can save file as AVIF.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Zorin OS 16.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GParted on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Gparted (also known as GNOME partition editor) is a free partitioning tool. The package is used to manage disk partitions and can also be used for creating partition tables as well. We advise you to exercise due caution before executing any tasks through GParted. Any inadvertent error may lead to data loss.
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 the step-by-step installation of the GParted (GNOME partition editor) 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.
Manjaro Linux is a derivative of Arch Linux that attempts to make using Arch easier and more stable. Due to this design philosophy, Manjaro is one of the most popular Linux distros on PC. However, it is also available on the Raspberry Pi 4. Here’s how to set it up on your Pi 4.
Recently, I showed you how to create compressed archives from the Linux command-line using the tar command. This time I want to demonstrate the same task, but using a tool you're probably already familiar with. The tool in question is zip, and it creates compressed zip files from whatever you throw at it.
So, let's say you have the folder TEST and you want to create the compressed file TEST.zip so you can send it to a colleague. Fortunately, Linux can use the zip tool, but first, you might have to install it with a command like sudo apt-get install zip -y or sudo dnf install zip -y.
Once installed, zip is ready to go. Let's compress that TEST folder. How you create the zipped file isn't quite as simple as you might think. The basic command is zip NAME.zip NAME (where NAME is the name of the folder to be compressed). However, if you simply issued the command zip TEST.zip TEST, you'd wind up with a file named TEST.zip, but after uncompressing it, you'd find it's missing the contents.
JIRA is a project management tool developed by Atlassian. It is also used for issue tracking and bug tracking related to your software development and other Projects. This guide will walk you through the installation Jira on CentOS 8 / RHEL 8 Linux.
Hackgregator is a desktop reading application for the news website Hacker News. With Hackgregator, it is possible to read the news from this site on the Linux desktop. Here’s how to set it up on your system.
Planning on running your Raspberry PI system as a server? In this article I’ll show you how you can setup your Raspberry PI as a headless system. So one without a monitor, keyboard and mouse. Thanks to the relatively new Raspberry PI Imager software it is quick and easy to perform such a Raspberry PI headless setup. Especially if you know how to access the hidden advanced options screen of the Raspberry PI Imager software.
Last month I wrote about the proposed reflink support for Wine that would provide significant space savings for those having multiple Windows games/applications on Linux installed where Wine and derivatives like Crossover and Steam Play (Proton) generally maintain a separate "prefix" per software installation. Fortunately, that reflink support continues to be worked on for Wine where it can lead to savings up to several hundred megabytes per Wine prefix.
A new and improved paid version of an older first-person psychological horror, \SPEK.TAKL\ - Banned Edition, is out now on itch.io and was apparently too much for Valve.
I have to admit, my own curiosity gets piqued whenever Valve decided to outright refuse a game to be on their store, considering how just …outrageous some games are that are accepted onto Steam.
Another week and another short video from Iron Gate to give a quick look into some changes. This week it's all about shields and how different they will be.
We've already seen the food changes and the blocking / staggering changes, which paired up with the newly tweaked shield mechanics definitely will make combat feel totally different. Tower shields will see a big buff with a lot more knock-back, making it a tanks best friend. The Buckler will let you parry oncoming strikes, while the regular round shields will be a "balanced" choice for a regular fighter.
This month’s update brings some long awaited bug fixes to our favorite cell collecting feature, binding agents, to provide a much more enjoyable and stable cell colony experience. In addition this release will allow you to carry over your old cells from the previous version, allowing you to continue where you left off without starting anew. Keep yourself alert, because our upgraded autoevo algorithm will ensure that rival species will be much more adaptable and capable to better compete with you, while our reworked spawn system will ensure that you find a healthy balance of the compounds you need to thrive. Finally, to put the cherry on top, we have new wonderful graphical improvements to make our cells truly shine, as well as giving our familiar iron chunks a new textured look. This, and much more await you in our latest release!
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However in order for this to happen, all past contributors to Thrive must sign our CLA form in order for Thrive to conform to steam’s policies. If any past contributors have questions or are interested in signing the CLA, please contact us for further information on how to do so.
Thrive is a free and open source evolution sim, a bit like the early stages of Spore and there's a new release out. With Thrive 0.5.5 their focus has been on improving everything that's already there with big bug fixes. So this means no big new features but it does make a better and more interesting game to play through.
MiniChimera Game Studio has released Blackout: The Darkest Night, a very stylish interactive fiction (visual novel) adventure. Inspired by White Wolf’s World of Darkness, H.P. Lovecraft and unique TV shows like Twin Peaks. From what the developer explains Blackout is a game about hidden monsters and hidden fears, and ultimately about overcoming the worst adversary: one’s true self.
"You play as a man who finds himself lost in a dark street somewhere in the city of New Wenders. It doesn’t take long before you start having flashbacks and regaining your memory. Something terrible happened, and you were part of it. This event somehow opened your eyes to a whole new world that has been hiding beneath the shadows."
If you've been using Linux for a while, you might have wondered about the sheer number of Linux distributions and desktop environments out there. The Linux kernel that powers all these distributions is modular and does not have a one-size-fits-all philosophy around it.
Traditionally, most Linux distributions come with a user-friendly desktop environment such as GNOME or XFCE at the cost of higher memory and CPU usage. But if you're a power user looking to be more productive with Linux, consider having a look at window managers like i3 instead.
A member of the Asahi Linux team has shown the GNOME desktop running on the Apple M1 chip, reporting that it is "not great, but usable."
Alyssa Rosenweig, who has been working on reverse engineering the Apple M1 GPU since January, has now posted a screenshot of "GNOME Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal."
A terminal in the shot shows that it is running a pre-release of the 5.14 Linux kernel, Debian Linux, and GNOME 3.38.4. "No, it's not GPU accelerated," she said, adding: "Honestly, it's usable. Not great, but usable, on a near mainline kernel. If 'missing most drivers' is this snappy, when everything is done @AsahiLinux will run like a dream on these machines."
GTK 4.4.0 is now available for download in the usual places. Here are some highlights of the work that has gone into it.
The NGL renderer has continued to see improvements. This includes speedups, fixes for transformed rendering, avoiding huge intermediate textures, and correct handling of partial color fonts. After some help from driver developers, NGL now works correctly with the Mali driver. We are planning to drop the original GL renderer in the next cycle.
Outside of GSK, our OpenGL setup code has been cleaned up and simplified. We increasingly rely on EGL, and require EGL 1.4 now. On X11 we use EGL, falling back to GLX if needed. On Windows, we default to using WGL.
GTK 4.4 is out as the latest stable update to the GTK4 open-source toolkit.
GTK 4.4 saw a lot of work still going into its new NGL renderer. There are more performance improvements for the NGL renderer, various rendering fixes, support for the Arm Mali driver, and more. The prior OpenGL renderer for GTK is expected to be dropped this next release cycle with only NGL support in place.
After another month of work and getting a bit of a deeper hang of some GTK4 mechanisms like GtkExpression, the 2021 edition of Google Summer of Code comes to an end.
In previous posts I explained my journey towards being able to implement an account switcher, using the new ListModel machinery in the end. While I already worked on Fractal in 2020, this time I did my task over a clean slate, given that a complete rewrite of Fractal was started.
The design outlined by Tobias Bernard has been implemented as he said, with the exception of multi-window support. However, it is not fully functional yet given the appearance of two weird bugs. The most notable one is that when clicking over any user entry it does not change the GtkStack page even though the signal handler calls the appropriate method. Initially it worked right, but this bug got in the code out of nowhere in the middle of the development process. Another issue is that multiple user entries in the switcher can appear as selected at the same time. Both problems have been diagnosed for days both by me and Julian Sparber and we found nothing clear. We are not even sure if we are hitting a bug in GTK4. I will update this section when we discover what’s going on and fix the issues. Once that is tackled, the main MR will be merged and this work will be part of Fractal.
A couple of intense days getting there, finally booted "Easy Slack" to a desktop, built from Slackware 15.0 RC1 binary packages. A snapshot:
After all that effort, have decided to take it no further. Various reasons...
Slackware is supposed to be "lean and mean" and I expected the final easy-*.img.gz file to be small, at least smaller than the Easy-Buster Debian-based build. But, it is 610MB, bigger.
The Slackware repository is quite small. SalixOS have some extras, but important packages are missing, such as LibreOffice and Inkscape. Perhaps they intend to add them?
To fill the gaps of missing packages, I used some from Easy Dunfell-series, those compiled by me in OpenEmbedded. But ran into library version hell. Simply creating symlinks to libraries of a different version is very iffy.
Anyway, got a desktop, wifi works. Sakura terminal works, but the "back arrow" key deposits strange characters on the screen. Perhaps because sakura is from Dunfell and vte is from Slackware repo, with a vte library version mismatch.
While the telecommunications industry is familiar with enterprise open source—95% of our survey respondents are already using it—it also stands at an inflection point with the rise of edge computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) and the rapid deployment of 5G.
According to "The State of Enterprise Open Source" report we published earlier this year, open source will continue to play an important role in the future of telecommunications. With data collected from 13 countries, the report shows a picture of how, where, and why IT leaders across the globe and a range of sectors use enterprise open source. Let’s see how it’s positioning telecommunications providers to keep up with their technology revolution.
According to my original proposal, I should have completed all four tasks during Coding I. Looking back, the main lesson from these past weeks is a known classic: my timeline was too optimistic: I definitely underestimated the difficulty of the packaging process. Out of the four tasks, I only finished the first one.
Whereas the raw data may not sound by itself very positive, my personal conclusion is. This is, whereas I didn’t fully finish the required deliverables envisioned in my original proposal, I do feel I am much closer to, eventually, becoming a Debian Developer. So, by all means, I consider this project has had a positive outcome.
This step-by-step tutorial is going to show you how to safely upgrade Debian 10 Buster to Debian 11 Bullseye from command line.
On on August 14th, 2021 the Debian project has finally released a stable version of Debian 11 Bullseye after over 2 years of development. It is comes with a lot of new features as most of the software in this version has been updated. Debian 11 will receive support for the next 5 years just like any other Debian stable version.
Let’s now focus on how you can upgrade from Debian 10 Buster to Debian 11 Bullseye. The upgrade process is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account.
How can you run a fully managed Kubernetes in a private cloud at half the cost of Amazon EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service)?
From autonomous mobile robots to robot butlers. It is impressive to see how much progress has been made in the last decade. Thanks to our open source robotics community we keep learning, and this newsletter is filled with events, R&D updates, new products and tutorials for you.
Lantronix has an “Open-Q 5165RB” module that runs Linux on Qualcomm’s robotics-focused QRB5165 SoC. A companion “Open-Q 865 SOM development kit” works with the QRB5165 SoC or any other Open-Q 865 family SOM.
Lantronix has announced its Open-Q 5165RB, a tiny (50 x 29mm) production-ready computing system-on-module) SOM based on Qualcomm’s QRB5165 SoC. The QRB5165 is a robotics-oriented variant of the Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865. Along with the module, Lantronix has rolled out the Open-Q 865 SOM development kit as a companion to the Open-Q 5165RB SOM. The dev it consists of an open-frame carrier board compatible with the 5165RB SOM, exposing all of its available I/O. The products support Ubuntu 18.04 Linux.
There are a growing number of user interfaces or shells for mobile Linux distributions. Some of the most popular include Phosh (developed by Purism), Plasma Mobile (from the folks who make KDE), and Lomiri (from the UBPorts/Ubuntu Touch team). But there’s also Sxmo, Hildon, Glacier, and others.
Now you can add one more to the list: Cutie Shell. It’s a new mobile phone shell with a design that’s inspired by user interface for Sailfish OS – an operating system that’s based on open source software, but which has a proprietary UI.
One of my favorite tasks that comes up in my day to day adventure at Mozilla is a chance to work with the data collected by this amazing Glean thing my team has developed. This chance often arises when an engineer needs to verify something, or a product manager needs a quick question answered. I am not a data scientist (and I always include that caveat when I provide a peek into the data), but I do understand how the data is collected, ingested, and organized and I can often guide people to the correct tools and techniques to find what they are looking for.
In this regard, I often encounter challenges in trying to read or analyze data that is related to another common task I find myself doing: advising engineering teams on how we intend Glean to be used and what metric types would best suit their needs. A recent example of this was a quick Q&A for a group of mobile engineers who all had similar questions. My teammate chutten and I were asked to explain the differences between Counter Metrics and Event Metrics, and try and help them understand the situations where each of them were the most appropriate to use. It was a great session and I felt like the group came away with some deeper understanding of the Glean principles. But, after thinking about it afterwards, I realized that we do a lot of hand-wavy things when explaining why not to do things. Even in our documentation, we aren’t very specific about the overhead of things like Event Metrics. For example, from the Glean documentation section regarding “Choosing a Metric Type” in a warning about events:
Angle your head between two mirrors and watch yourself watching yourself for a while. I never understood what my 7-year-old self loved about it. Sandwiched between two floor-length mirrors, I would pretend that the little Black girls dancing behind me in an accordion-like formation were my back up, my chorus. Now I feel suffocated by the memory of cascading versions of myself, recessing further than my eyes could trace. In a hyper-online world, this feeling is mirrored in the way I see my image read, projected, and thrust back to me by unflinching algorithms and ever-reflective screens.
As a result of the pandemic, I went into my final year of college waging a fervent war against my own loneliness. Like most, I clung to my devices as a way of digging my feet (or, in this case, the ever active thumb) into a world that was increasingly out of physical reach. I dragged my eyes down timelines, devoted daily scrolls to TikTok, and stared longingly at my explore page until it blurred into an addictive, multicolored collage. A host of unknown companies were learning me everyday via the internet, which had become my lounge, workplace, and school.
PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
Translation courtesy of Timothy Brennan Jr.
Brazilian computer users in general, the community of Brazilian free software users and supporters, and of LibreOffice in particular, have received quite the gift today: the Brazilian LibreOffice documentation team proudly announces the publication of the Guia do Writer 7.1, the most complete Writer word processor guide for the best free software office suite, the LibreOffice Community.
The datetime module provides classes for manipulating dates and times. There can be numerous applications that require processing dates and times. The datetime module is very useful for dealing with different types of dates and times format.
The date and time objects can be either categorized as aware or naive depending on whether or not they include timezone information.
An aware object can identify itself relative to other time objects with the help of other parameters such as timezone and daylight saving information.
A naive object on the other hand doesn't contain enough information to identify itself to other date/time objects.
Datetime objects have an optional timezone information attribute tzinfo which we will cover later. The tzinfo lets us handle offset from UTC time, timezone name and whether daylight saving time is in effect.
Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service) was a timesharing operating system that dated back to the 1960s, and was therefore still very much in vogue at the time of our tale. It dynamically linked pretty much everything, and its influence can still be found lurking in the code of today.
Scientists have published a new, detailed radio image of the Andromeda galaxy – the Milky Way’s sister galaxy – which will allow them to identify and study the regions of Andromeda where new stars are born.
The study – which is the first to create a radio image of Andromeda at the microwave frequency of 6.6 GHz – was led by University of British Columbia physicist Sofia Fatigoni, with colleagues at Sapienza University of Rome and the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics. It was published online in Astronomy and Astrophysics.
“This image will allow us to study the structure of Andromeda and its content in more detail than has ever been possible,” said Fatigoni, a PhD student in the department of physics and astronomy at UBC. “Understanding the nature of physical processes that take place inside Andromeda allows us to understand what happens in our own galaxy more clearly – as if we were looking at ourselves from the outside.”
Even if you haven't heard of "foundation models" in AI, you've probably encountered one or more of them in some way. They could be rather pivotal for the future of not only machine learning and computer science but also society as a whole.
Foundation models are called this because they are the base upon which myriad applications can be built, and issues at the foundation level could therefore have repercussions on the software and services we use.
Speaking to TMZ, the former child star’s father James said Messing was transported to hospital on Monday night (August 16) where he tested positive for COVID-19.
According to James, his son is “struggling to survive” and nobody is allowed to visit him.
AWS has introduced MemoryDB, a Redis-compatible database manager that combines in-memory performance with persistence.
Redis (Remote Dictionary Server) is an in-memory key-value database manager sometimes thought of as a cache – but MemoryDB uses a distributed transactional log so that the database is durable as well as fast.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ffmpeg, ircii, and scrollz), Fedora (kernel, krb5, libX11, and rust-actix-http), Mageia (kernel and kernel-linus), openSUSE (aspell, chromium, dbus-1, isync, java-1_8_0-openjdk, krb5, libass, libhts, libvirt, prosody, systemd, and tor), SUSE (cpio, dbus-1, libvirt, php7, qemu, and systemd), and Ubuntu (inetutils).
Close to 14 million Linux-based systems are directly exposed to the Internet, making them a lucrative target for an array of real-world attacks that could result in the deployment of malicious web shells, coin miners, ransomware, and other trojans.
That's according to an in-depth look at the Linux threat landscape published by U.S.-Japanese cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, detailing the top threats and vulnerabilities affecting the operating system in the first half of 2021, based on data amassed from honeypots, sensors, and anonymized telemetry.
Linux now has been around long enough that old versions are causing security problems, according to a new report from Trend Micro. Security analysts found that 44% of security breach detections came from CentOS versions 7.4 to 7.9, followed by CloudLinux Server, which had more than 40% of the detections, and Ubuntu with almost 7%. CentOS 7 was first released in June 2014 and full support ended in August 2019.
Kubernetes has become the de facto choice for container orchestration. Some studies report that up to 88% of organizations are using Kubernetes for their container orchestration needs and 74% of that occurring in production environments. That said, security remains a critical concern with as many as 94% of organizations reporting at least one security incident in their Kubernetes environments in the last 12 months.
As organizations continue to adopt Kubernetes, it is crucial that they follow industry best practices and guidance to ensure they are using Kubernetes securely. One great resource is the Kubernetes Hardening Guidance recently published by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).
Ubuntu received the FIPS 140-2, Level 1 certification for its cryptographic modules in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, including OpenSSL 1.1.1. This certification is built on Canonical’s track record in designing Ubuntu for high security and regulated workloads that powers U.S government agencies, prime contractors, service providers, and organizations in regulated industries, including healthcare and finance.
Like internet personalities the world over, Kenyan TikTok comedian Mark Mwas was intrigued when Facebook announced a $1 billion (R14 billion) plan to pay content creators like him.
But the 25-year-old, whose following surged past 160,000 as entertainment-starved Kenyans flocked to the app during the pandemic, is skeptical that fans would follow him to the older social network.
A few weeks in the past, after we mentioned the historical past of Gopher in Genbeta, the protocol that dominated the Web within the early 1990s — shortly earlier than the arrival (and triumph) of the HTTP protocol and the World Broad Net — we talked about that there have been these as we speak who wished to maintain this know-how alive and that even some builders that they had set to work to create a successor: the Gemini protocol.
Gemini followers suggest this protocol not as one thing that may exchange the present WWW, however in its place that claims what it might have been, in comparison with the present one which they understand as heavy, insecure, loaded with artifacts, promoting and consumer surveillance techniques, depending on the APIs of assorted centralizing platforms.
Double-u, double-u, double-u. "The World Wide Web is the only thing I know of whose shortened form takes three times longer to say than what it's short for," as the great Douglas Adams once said.
But for those who fancy eyeballing exhibits from acoustic couplers and coffee-cams to dot-matrix printers and cartoon badgers in the venerable author's home town, WEB@30 Cambridge is well worth a look.
The exhibition, which runs until the start of September, occupies a vacant store in Cambridge's Grand Arcade, and gives passers-by the opportunity to get hands on with some delightfully retro hardware in a celebration of the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web.
Along with the vueltitas of the arroba, the numeral stomp among the symbols of the digital age. So much so that it has its own day on the calendar: every August 23 the International Day of Hashtag, an initiative promoted by Twitter in 2018 and that pays tribute to this conversation generator and topic grouper.
To join us in the festivities, in this note from TN Tecno We propose to review the secrets and curiosities of the hashtag. We will talk about the names that he has received and still receives, his life before Twitter, and some of the milestones he achieved to establish himself as a must-see on social networks.
Obviousness of a design patent is governed by 35 U.S.C. 103, just like utility patents. However, the methodology is a bit different. Importantly, the Federal Circuit suggests that the obviousness inquiry should begin with a primary reference whose whose “design characteristics … are basically the same as the claimed design” and that creates “basically the same visual impression.” That primary reference can then be combined with other references to fill in gaps that would have been obvious in order to create the “same overall visual appearance as the claimed design.” Apple v. Samsung (Fed. Cir. 2012).
