First introduced in mid-March 2021, the “Pangolin” Linux laptop is System76’s first ever AMD-powered portable computer that ships with an AMD processor, as well as an integrated AMD graphics card.
The laptop was soon out of stock, but now it’s back and more powerful than ever as customers can now buy the Linux notebook with 4th Gen AMD Ryzen mobile CPUs.
Aura is a package manager for Arch Linux. Its original purpose is as an AUR helper, in that it automates the process of installing packages from the AUR (Arch User Repository). It is, however, capable of much more, including taking snapshots, restoring from those snapshots, and removing orphaned packages.
Days after the Linux kernel celebrated its 30th anniversary, Linus Torvalds, its creator and maintainer, put out its latest release with improvements to hardware support and security.
“The celebrations will go on for a few more weeks yet, but you all may just need a breather from them. And when that happens, I have just the thing for you - a new kernel release to test and enjoy,” wrote Torvalds as he put out the new release.
The development cycle of the 5.14 release didn’t face any major hurdles and completed on schedule in just under two months.
The 5.14 kernel update, which was released by Linus Torvalds on August 29th, includes notable security and performance improvements, reports Sean Michael Kerner in TechCrunch.
Specifically, Kerner says, this release “includes a feature known as core scheduling, which is intended to help mitigate processor-level vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown, which first surfaced in 2018. One of the ways that Linux users have had to mitigate those vulnerabilities is by disabling hyper-threading on CPUs and therefore taking a performance hit.”
Most outside the tech industry will be unaware that Linux has reached such a milestone, even though the project has had a huge impact on everything from smartphones to cloud computing. Torvalds poked fun at that lack of recognition in his usual Sunday release note for a new stable version of the Linux kernel.
"So I realize you must all still be busy with all the galas and fancy balls and all the other 30th anniversary events, but at some point you must be getting tired of the constant glitz, the fireworks, and the champagne," he said. "That ball gown or tailcoat isn't the most comfortable thing, either. The celebrations will go on for a few more weeks yet, but you all may just need a breather from them."
GNU Linux-libre 5.14-gnu was released today as the project's re-base on the recently released Linux 5.14 upstream kernel. But prior supported GNU Linux-libre releases also had to be re-spun as it turned out this "100% free software" kernel was mistakenly leaving in some non-free kernel bits.
As for the new changes with GNU Linux-libre 5.14, the Intel "i915" kernel graphics driver needed various alterations for its de-blobbing, the new Emulex Fibre Channel Target (eftc) driver needed to remove support for loading binary blobs, and various blob name changes were needed across various drivers from AMDGPU to others.
So now the GNU Linux-libre 5.14 kernel is all dandy and out there for use on systems that can run without depending upon any of these stripped out binary firmware/microcode blobs and other non-free software components.
Apologies for the delay in getting this announcement out. It's been a very busy couple of days, and this announcement had a lot of ground to cover. Thanks for your patience.
GNU Linux-libre 5.14-gnu cleaning-up scripts, cleaned-up sources, and cleaning-up logs (including tarball signatures) are now available from our git-based release archive git://linux-libre.fsfla.org/releases.git/ tags {scripts,sources,logs}/v5.14-gnu.
Tarballs and incremental patches will shortly be available at <https://www.fsfla.org/selibre/linux-libre/download/releases/5.14-gnu/>. Freesh .debs are probably ready by now, and Freed-ora rpms are yet to be built. BTW, Freed-ora still needs new maintainers. Please let me know in case you're interested, and whether you'd like to share that task with others.
The cleaning up scripts have been changed in very significant ways since the last -rc. But first, the regular stuff.
Cleaning up of i915 was adjusted on account of a renamed file; drivers for sp8870 and for other av7110 cards got moved in the upstream tree and cleaning up had to be adjusted. An r8188eu file we used to clean up was removed, and documentation for the btqca driver got renamed upstream and cleaning up needed adjusting. Upstream added a dts file specifying blobs to load for a new Qualcomm arm64 variant, and we've cleaned them up.
Emulex Fibre Channel Target, eftc, is a new driver that seems to have inherited a blob-loading feature from its sibling lpfc. Both build blob names from data read from the device, and then attempt to load them. That attempt is disabled in our distribution.
New blob names were also found in btrtl, amdgpu, and adreno, and they have been cleaned up.
Between rc7 and final, the Renesas xHCI driver got a change in the API used to load blobs, and our cleaning up scripts had to be adjusted to match.
On to the unusual stuff. A little over a week ago, Legimet raised flags on some potential nonfree code in GNU Linux-libre.
Though some of the issues were about different standards (we don't generally regard poorly documented code or pure data as object code over speculation about the existence of an alternate, preferrable source form), but a couple of the issues turned out to be sourceless object code, and so we started the process of cleaning them up, and of respinning earlier releases that contained them.
So now we clean up a firmware patch for vs6624 sensors, and several microcode relocation patches for powerpc 8xx. Both are encoded as arrays of numbers in upstream Linux releases. The latter had long seemed suspicious to me, but I had assumed those who started cleaning up Linux before I inherited Linux-libre had good reasons to leave it in. The former was entirely my own mistake. I was likely fooled by apparently discontiguous address ranges, a pattern that suggests register initialization, but the multiple small fragments are actually larger contiguous ranges (thanks, Juca!), shuffled for reasons unknown.
Thanks, Legimet, for reporting the issues.
Back in the old days, when our releases were identified by -libre rather than by -gnu, it was not uncommon to respin older releases. Sometimes we changed the cleaning up machinery and wanted to use it in earier active branches, for uniformity; sometimes Free firmware became available and drivers no longer needed to be cleaned up; other times we found or were told of errors as above.
For such respins, we'd increment the -libre release counter, first to -libre1, then -libre2, and so on. We hadn't had reason to do so since we became a GNU subproject, but the day was bound to come. We now have -gnu1 releases for all of the active stable and longterm upstream branches: 5.13, 5.10, 5.4, 4.19, 4.14, 4.9, and 4.4.
I've used the same deblob-check (our "database" of patterns to accept, flag or clean up) that went in 5.14-gnu, and backported various cleaning-up improvements that had been introduced over the years since 4.4 first came up. This took some back-and-forth testing and verifying and adjusting until I thought all of them had got cleaned up properly.
While making the adjustments and hitting some differences in earlier versions, I've improved the cleaning up of x86 microcode documentation, and split various cleanup directions that used to be grouped under MICROCODE or similar. These cleaned-up files are now listed under the actual configuration keys that enable them, even though the cleanups are conceptually related with microcode updates.
After nearly 22 hours non-stop of cleaning up and backporting and adjusting and respinning and fixing and repeating, I had all of the base releases ready, so I pushed them to the git repo, and went for some sleep. As I woke up, 5.14-gnu, 5.13-gnu1, 5.10-gnu1, 5.4-gnu1, 4.19-gnu1, 4.14-gnu1, 4.9-gnu1, and 4.4-gnu1 tarballs had finished compressing, and I started respinning the latest patch release of each branch.
Alas, I did not catch a cleaning up error in 4.4-gnu1's b43 and b43legacy drivers, caused by my failure to backport some long forgotten custom cleaning up directions from the deblob-4.9 script to deblob-4.4, that still carried a more limited form of cleaning up. Without those directions, deblob-check dropped quotes along with b43's blob names, and syntax errors ensued when attempting to build those modules. Jason Self hit and reported the build error, and so we got b43 fixed in 4.4.282-gnu1.
This was very important: b43 is one of the few WiFi drivers that works with Free firmware on some cards, and it was the need for retaining the code to load the Free firmware available for some variants, while disabling the code that loads the non-Free firmware that other variants require, that made its cleaning-up code so unusual, and deserving of a major rewrite with custom code between 4.4-gnu and 4.9-gnu.
As soon as the respins were done, I pushed 5.13.13-gnu1, 5.10.61-gnu1, 5.4.143-gnu1, 4.19.205-gnu1, 4.14.245-gnu1, 4.9.281-gnu1, 4.4.282-gnu1 to the git repository.
I also prepared erratum patches for 4.4-gnu1 scripts and sources; I've dubbed that 4.4-gnu1a. It's not a release proper, just some patch files that will appear in releases/4.4-gnu1/errata-a/ in the download repository. I figured I should get them in git too, even though they didn't go through the release process, so I applied the patches onto scripts/4.4-gnu1 and sources/4.4-gnu1, and tagged them as 4.4-gnu1a. There's a logs/4.4-gnu1a as well, with an ERRATUM.txt instead of README.txt, and no logs nor tarball signatures, but rather the patches and their signatures.
Alas, I didn't notice the same problem affected b43legacy, and shortly after I pushed 4.4.282-gnu1 out, Jason reported the b43legacy problem was still there. Ugh. Unlike b43, that works on some cards with Free firmware, b43legacy doesn't work on any freedom-compatible cards, so if you hit the issue and wish to work around it before a fix is out, you might as well disable that module. I expect to put out 4.4-gnu1b and 4.4.282-gnu1b errata along with 4.4.283-gnu1, shortly after 4.4.283 comes out upstream. Hopefully this will be the end of it.
Or maybe not. If you'd have use for a respin of any of the other major releases (and latest stable/longterm patch release), please let me know. If you ask politely :-) I can try and give it a respin too.
It will be eventually take over by the Linux git history librewrite (short for libre rewrite :-) project I've finally got going, that will greatly simplify and speed up the release process (just progressively integrate commits from upstream, fixing any freedom issues at point of the commit that introduces it), but it's still going to be a while till it catches up with active branches.
(Incidentally, respins will become even more laborious under this arrangement, so let's hope they remain rare events, or that they're justified by newly-available Free firmware)
The -gnu tarballs of past releases, that contain the newly-removed non-Free Software bits, are going away in a not-too-distant future (say from a couple of weeks to a month, when our infinite hunger for disk space gets close to filling up again the storage kindly provided by the FSF (thanks! :-). At that point, only scripts and patches are going to remain within releases/old/gen6.
The git tags are also going away, probably at about the same time: they aren't anywhere as space-hungry as tarballs, but those that contain non-Free Software don't belong in our git repository.
In yet another news, we've been hanging out in the #gnu-linux-libre channel on libera.chat for a while now. Unlike #linux-libre on freenode, that we'd used long before becoming a GNU subproject, the new channel is in the GNU namespace.
I don't know whether there are still people on #linux-libre on freenode, but I haven't been hanging there any more, after being locked out by one-too-many server configuration changes.
What I do know is that there are still people on #linux-libre on libera.chat. We used that channel for a few days, but couldn't get it registered under that namespace, so it has a topic that follows the right pattern (I put it there myself, a while ago), but we lost ops and can't update it any longer. I'm told this has got some people confused, so if you are one of the few people who are still keeping it alive, would you please vacate it, and join us on #gnu-linux-libre on libera.chat instead? Thanks, talk to you there, ;-)
For up-to-the-minute news, join us on IRC, or follow me on P2P or federated social media. Check the link in the signature for directions.
Be Free! with GNU Linux-libre.
One of the earliest pull requests sent in for the now-open Linux 5.15 cycle was proposing KSMBD land as the in-kernel SMB3 file server as an alternative on Linux systems to running Samba in user-space. At the time it wasn't clear if Linus Torvalds would pull in this file server code to the Linux kernel but now he has indeed landed it.
Tachyumâ⢠Inc. today announced that it has successfully executed the Linux boot process on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) prototype of its Prodigy Universal Processor, in 2 months after taking delivery of the IO motherboard from manufacturing. This achievement proves the stability of the Prodigy emulation system and allows the company to move forward with additional testing before advancing to tape out.
Tachyum engineers were able to perform the Linux boot, execute a short user-mode program and shutdown the system on the fully functional FPGA emulation system. Not only does this successful test prove that the basic processor is stable, but interrupts, exceptions, timing, and system-mode transitions are, as well. This is a key milestone, which dramatically reduces risk, as booting and running large and complex pieces of software like Linux reliably on the Tachyum FPGA processor prototype shows that verification and hardware stability are past the most difficult turning point, and it is now obvious that verification and testing should successfully complete in the coming months. Designers are now shifting their attention to debug and verification processes, running hundreds of trillions of test cycles over the next few months, and running large scale user mode applications with compatibility testing to get the processor to production quality.
With the Linux 5.15 kernel is a new build-time option to further harden the kernel around side channel attacks and information leakage. Enabling this option can have some (small) performance cost and a slightly larger kernel.
The new option added for Linux 5.15 to further harden the kernel is CONFIG_ZERO_CALL_USED_REGS. Enabling this option and using the GCC 11 compiler or newer to build the kernel will enable the -fzero-call-used-regs=used-gpr compiler option.
Making use of this "zero-call-used-regs" compiler option ensures any called-used register contents are zeroed prior to returning from a function. That focus is on ensuring temporary values are not potentially leaked outside of the function to reduce the chances of the register contents being used for side channel attacks or information exposures. As for the effectiveness of this new compiler option for building the Linux kernel, it reduced the number of ROP gadgets in the kernel image by around 20% and eliminating simple "write-what-where" gadgets.
Giara, the Reddit app for Gnome, released version 1.0. It’s now based on GTK4.
Giara is a free and open-source client for Reddit that runs on Linux. The software is written in Python 3 programming language. With GTK framework and libadwaita (formerly libhandy), it has a modern and adaptive user interface works on both desktop and Linux mobile devices.
Process accounting logs are collected into binary log files on Linux. You can turn them into human readable format locally, using various tools. You can also use syslog-ng to read those files. Syslog-ng can parse those binary logs, create name-value pairs from them and store the results.
am a new Amazon Linux 2 EC2 instance user. My EC2 name was set to ‘ip-172-26-7-134’ during instance creation. But now, I would like to change the EC2 hostname to ‘stats1’. Can you tell me how do I remove ip-172-26-7-134 and set it to stats1 on Amazon Linux 2? How do I change the Amazon Linux Lightsail or EC2 cloud server instance?
HEIF photos (those with the .HEIC file extension) can store image data more efficiently than JPG or PNG, which yields a smaller file size. But the glaring drawback is that HEIF doesn’t enjoy widespread support. If you have some HEIF photos that you need to convert to a different format, this can be done from the Linux command line.
In this tutorial, you’ll see how to convert HEIF images to JPG or PNG with Linux commands.
In PC gaming, Steam is the largest and most popular platform for video game distribution by Valve. Steam offers a native client for all major platforms to manage and play your favorite games from the Steam store.
Steam is also at the forefront when it comes to Linux gaming. Since its debut on Linux, Steam has made constant improvements to enable playing Windows games on Linux. Most of the PC games are designed for Windows. Thanks to Steam Play and Proton (Steam’s version of Wine), you can play almost any of your favorite games on Linux with the Steam client.
This guide demonstrates installing and configuring the Steam client on Debian.
Debian is a Linux distro composed of free and open-source software (FOSS). It’s developed by the Debian Project, a community-driven project. It’s one of the oldest operating systems based on the Linux kernel. Debian is at the core of many popular operating systems like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, MX Linux, Deepin, and much more.
This guide will demonstrate how to keep Debian’s packages up-to-date from the terminal.
Network or system administrators have to properly look after the network, as they are supposed to provide an uninterrupted service within a network or system. For this, they must undergo several network checks to continuously monitor the network performance; several diagnostic tools allow network administrators to check the connectivity over the network, such as ping. However, another command is used for network diagnostics that is “traceroute” in Linux and macOS, while the same command is named “tracert” on windows OS. Traceroute command maps the route data from the source to the destination; the traceroute command is used to trace the paths that data packets take from their source point to destination point. In this detailed guide, we will explore the use of the traceroute command in Ubuntu with several examples.
If you are a newbie in the world of computers and programming languages then it is important to know that your computer cannot “understand” any of the programming languages. The computers interpret only machine languages (ones and zeros). In this situation, a compiler can help you. A computer utilizes compilers for “translating” programming languages into machine language, or we can also say that it converts your source code into an executable file format for your system.
Odoo is a business suite platform that runs on Ubuntu. With Odoo, users can boost their sales, run POS, timesheets, help desks, inventory, and purchases. In this guide, we’ll show you how to install Odoo on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Note: Although this guide focuses on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, it is also possible to get the app working with newer releases of Ubuntu.
Ubuntu beginners frequently ask: Is there any task manager in Ubuntu? If yes, then how we can use the task manager for monitoring the system.
Firstly, you should know what a task manager does. The task manager displays all currently active processes and their memory usage. It also manages processes and provides you the option of terminating or killing a process. Although an experienced Ubuntu user prefers the command-line method of locating processes and memory use, you do not have to use it when you are just getting started with Ubuntu. Instead, you can utilize the “System Monitor” that serves as a task manager in your Ubuntu system.
In this article, we will talk about how to use a task manager in Ubuntu to monitor the system. So let’s start!
The task manager displays all currently active processes and their memory usage. It also manages processes and provides you the option of terminating or killing a process. Although an experienced Ubuntu user prefers the command-line method of locating processes and memory use, you do not have to use it when you are just getting started with Ubuntu. Instead, you can utilize the "System Monitor” that serves as a task manager in your Ubuntu system. This article explains how to use task manager to monitor system activities in Ubuntu.
Checking a binary or executable file for extracting human-readable text is not something that we do in our day-to-day life, but what if you are asked for it? In Ubuntu, the “strings” command allows you to see all the human-readable characters present in a binary/executable file. The “strings” command is primarily used to determine the type of file, but it can also be utilized to extract text. For example, you have a file saved in an unusual binary format; you can extract the text you entered in this file using the “strings” command without encountering non-printable characters.
A question can come to your mind: why do we add text in the executable files? Many developers packaged the binary files when software or application is released. However, it is an excellent idea to include ASCII text in that binary file. It is beneficial for the developers and users to gain a better understanding of the executable file. As a result, the “strings” command will help them determine the content of these non-text files.
In this article, we will talk about how to install and use strings on your Ubuntu system. So, let’s move ahead!
The command-line interface of Linux-based distros works as a catalyst to the actions performed by the users. Like other distros, Ubuntu also supports a variety of commands, and among those, directory handling commands are used to handle the operations related to directories, such as the “cd” command is used to change the current working directory; “mkdir” command is used to make a new directory. Similarly, tree command prints directories, sub-directories, and their content in a tree-like structure. It is almost like an “ls” command, but the main difference is the print pattern of both commands: the “ls” command lists down the content, whereas the “tree” command shows the output in a tree-like hierarchical structure. In this demonstration, we will provide a deep insight into the usage of tree commands with examples. So, let’s start with the installation of the tree:
Every computing device has time and date as the very basic service provided by them. Date/time and time zone are interlinked phenomena in computing devices as date/time depends on the time zone selected by the user. The date and time are automatically fetched according to the time zone; however, the users can also change them manually.
Laravel is a free and open-source PHP web framework based on the Symfony framework. It is used for the faster development of web applications. Laravel makes it easier to perform some common tasks such as authentication, routing, sessions and caching. It has several useful features including, Artisan, Object-relational mapping, Template Engine, MVC Architecture, Unit-Testing, and Database Migration System.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to install Laravel on Debian 11.
In Ubuntu 17.10, a new command-line network configuration tool was introduced known as “Netplan”. Netplan makes it simple to configure and manage network settings in your Ubuntu system. It also permits you the YAML abstraction for configuring a network interface. It interacts with the kernel through the systemd-networkd and NetworkManager daemons which are also known as renderers. You have to choose any one from both of them. Netplan reads the network configurations from “/etc/netplan/*.yaml” files, which can save the configuration settings for all network interfaces.
If you use the netplan command on Ubuntu, then It becomes easy to restart and change network settings. Netplan is also good for automation (humans and programs can read YAML). This write-up is focusing on how to use the netplan command on Ubuntu.
Linux supports two types of clocks in any system; one is a hardware clock, and the other is a software clock. The hardware clock functioning is independent of the operating system, and it keeps on running even if the system is turned off. The moment you turn on your machine, the software clock gets the information from the hardware clock and thus shows the date and time as saved in the hardware clock. In this article, we will briefly discuss the use of hwclock in Ubuntu, along with its various functions and options too.
PostgreSQL is a free and open-source database management system focusing on extensibility and SQL compliance. PostgreSQL is an advanced and enterprise-class RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) supports both SQL (relational) and JSON (non-relational) querying.
It's a highly stable database management system backed by more than 20 years of development by the open-source community and has a strong reputation among developers and system admins for its reliability, flexibility, feature robustness, and performance.
PostgreSQL is used as a primary database for web applications, mobile applications, and analytic applications. Some notable PostgreSQL users around the globe are Reddit, Skype, Instagram, Disqus, The Guardian, Yandex, Bloomberg, Nokia, BMW, etc.
In this guide, you will learn how to install the PostgreSQL database on Rocky Linux, securing the PostgreSQL database deployment, and basic usage of PostgreSQL queries for managing users and databases.
Java is a general-purpose, class-based, object-oriented multipurpose programming language that is popular due to the design of having lesser implementation dependencies, meaning that the compiled Java code can be run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java is also fast, secure, and reliable, therefore. It is widely used for developing Java applications in laptops, data centers, game consoles, scientific supercomputers, cell phones, etc.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ImageMagick on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, ImageMagick is a free and open-source image manipulation tool. It is mainly used to create, edit, compose or convert bitmap images. Its uses include resizing, rotating, shearing images, applying various special effects, or drawing text, lines, and curves. Its flexibility can be realized from the fact that it can be used across multiple different platforms such as run on Windows and Mac OS, as well as on Android OS and iOS.
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 ImageMagick on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gdu Disk Analyzer on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Gdu (Go Disk Usage) is very similar to Ncdu, a popular console disk usage analyzer, with one major difference: speed. Gdu makes use of parallel processing, being specially created for solid-state drives (SSD). It also works with hard disk drives (HDD), but its performance gain compared to other tools is not so great in this case.
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 Gdu Disk Analyzer 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.
Jack Wallen is ready to help you with the built-in Execute tool in nano when you want to make it a bit more flexible.
Subversion is an open source version control system. Founded in 2000 by CollabNet, Inc., the Subversion project and software have seen incredible success over the past decade. Subversion has enjoyed and continues to enjoy widespread adoption in both the open source arena and the corporate world.
User-Friendly USVN is a web interface written in PHP used to configure Subversion repositories.It’s goal is to ease the creation of new projects without having to use the command line interface, therefor, maybe without privileged access to the server. USVN will then generate the list of users allowed to access your source code. This enable the delegation of rights to administrate Subversion repositories.
The Yii is the acronym of Yes It Is, which is a great free and open-source (FOSS) Model–view–controller, a PHP framework tool for PHP development. It’s a tool for developing PHP modules and applications. The Yii PHP framework is available for both Ubuntu and Windows. It can rapidly build up large PHP modules, and its component-oriented work functionalities have made it unique and user-friendly. The Yii PHP Framework works with an entry script, application, controller, filter, and model layer.
Containers are a critical part of today's IT operations. A container image contains a packaged application, along with its dependencies, and information on what processes it runs when launched.
You create container images by providing a set of specially formatted instructions, either as commits to a registry or as a Dockerfile. For example, this Dockerfile creates a container for a PHP web application...
Firefox users who are experiencing performance issues while using the Firefox web browser on desktop systems and on Android, may improve performance by disabling the browser's accessibility services.
[...]
To make matters worse, Mozilla did remove options to control the desktop browser's accessibility settings from the preferences some time ago. While it is still possible to turn them off using about:config, it is probably not something that most users know about or feel comfortable using.
Reports suggest that some users managed to reduce the Firefox web browser's memory usage after disabling the service; others on the other hand reported that changing the setting did not impact memory usage. It may be a good idea to test this on the local system to find out if the local Firefox installation is affected by the issue.
TCP IP header refers to Transmission Control Protocol is responsible to make communication between devices and send data over the network.
It provides reliable, ordered, and error check communications. Major internet applications rely on this protocol such as World wide web, email, remote administration, file transfer, etc. Applications that don’t require reliability use UDP (User Datagram Protocol).
After being released for more than 10 years, VVVVVV is back with a big new version which follows on from the source code being released back in early 2020. This marks the first update to the game in around seven years too. Not something that you will see too often for a classic indie platformer.
The Fertile Crescent has been an absolutely brilliant retro-styled Bronze Age real-time strategy game that's currently free and the future of it has been secured.
While it's currently free and a hobby project for the team, it's still a very high quality game that feels like a low-res Age of Empires but with some mechanics that set them apart. Writing in a new update post on itch.io, the team shared that "TFC will be leveling up from a hobby project to a full time job for us thanks to a publishing deal we signed earlier this year". The recent updates to the game have remained free and they've been pretty big, which is thanks to this publisher.
Now they're working on a last free update to the current version of the game, to then move onto building it up into a commercial version. The good news is that this one will stick around and get bug fixes but the majority of the time will be on the upcoming paid-for bigger version that will eventually release on Steam.
Releasing on September 7, Surviving Mars: Below & Beyond is the brand new expansion for the Martian city-builder from Paradox Interactive and newer developer Abstraction (who took over from Haemimont Games).
Giving the relaxed building sim some much needed expansion into other areas, Below & Beyond enhances colony management by going below the surface and beyond the horizon to build underground bases, mine asteroids, and gather rare resources.
"When we started planning out what was next for Surviving Mars, we really wanted to dive deep into the parts of the Red Planet we had not already explored. We know we had to come out swinging and Surviving Mars: Below & Beyond expands gameplay in a meaningful way," says Magnus Lysell, Product Manager for Surviving Mars at Paradox Interactive. "The possibilities are endless and we’re eager to continue exploring the Red Planet with our players."
I don't know how we missed this but Battle Gem Ponies from Yotes Games only has a few days left on Kickstarter, it's fully funded and it's pretty much My Little Pony styled creatures in a Pokemon style RPG. Honestly didn't ever think I would need something like this but now I do.
According to the developer "Battle Gem Ponies is a tale of friendship with themes of unbreakable bonds, mankind's role within nature, and healthy competition" along with magical ponies you catch and collect, which you then get to beat the crap out of other ponies.
The popular kart racing game SuperTuxKart 1.3 now release candidate is out!
After a year of development, the game now is ported to Switch though you need to have Homebrew installed. So the 3D open-source arcade racer now works on Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, iOS (beta), and Nintendo Switch.
A new version of famed FOSS racing game SuperTuxKart is zipping towards release, with a release candidate build now available to download.
SuperTuxKart 1.3 features a number of exciting improvements like updated karts for several of the game’s famous FOSS faces (including Gnu); a new playable character in Pepper, from libre web comic Pepper&Carrot; plus a pair of new arenas, both of which support multiplayer online ‘capture the flag’ mode.
The Ancient Colosseum Labyrinth battle arena is inspired by the famous Roman colosseum, while the Alien Signal arena is based on the real-world location of the extra-terrestrial SETI program.
Plasma 5.22 was released in June 2021 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include...
KDE Plasma 5.23 is set for release on October 7, 2021, and it promises several (although subtle) improvements across the board. This new release is powered by Qt 5.15 and KDE Frameworks version 5.86. Along with the improvements found in those software stacks, there’s plenty of goodness to go around within KDE itself.
Many of the new features and improvements are all about refinement, so you probably won’t see anything that’s mind-blowing or drastic. For example, one of the highlighted new features is that you can specify an alternative accent color than that which is configured by the theme. Other subtle newness includes the ability to choose list or grid view for all Kickoff items (so it no longer only applies to Favorites), a new QML-based Overview effect has been introduced that is similar to GNOME’s Workspace view, the Dolphin file manager can be configured to display hidden files/folders first, and selected items can be deleted from the clipboard popup.
The Plasma Mobile team is happy to present the Plasma Mobile updates for August 2021. Read on to find out about all the new stuff included in this release...
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Kasts, Plasma Mobile’s podcast app, apart from getting some minor bugfixes, now lets you change the location where the downloaded podcast episodes and cached images are saved. These files can take up a lot of disk space, so it is nice to be able to store them elsewhere on systems with limited home folder disk space. The related settings now show the disk space used by episodes and images, and allows to clear the image cache.
For several weeks we have been working on the user interface of KDE's standard image viewer Gwenview and now the date for the release is just around the corner. In this video five remaining problems are pointed out. We were able to implement solutions to most of them in time for the Gwenview 21.08 release.
A new website called Apps For GNOME has been launched with the intention of showcasing the best applications in the GNOME ecosystem.
Until now there has been no single listing of the apps available for GNOME, and the intention of Apps For GNOME is that it will provide potential users with a comprehensive directory.
If you’re into Linux, you might know EndeavourOS. It is an Arch-based Linux distribution that focuses on improving the Linux gaming scene. A new version of the same is out, bringing a bunch of new features and improvements. Here’s everything you need to know about the latest EndeavourOS release.
EndeavourOS 2021.08.30: What’s New?
New App Versions
The Calamares installer has been updated to version 3.2.41.1-9 and Firefox to 91.0.2.1. The distro ships with Linux kernel 5.13.12.arch1-1, mesa 21.2.1-1 driver, and the latest Nvidia-dkms 470.63.-1-3.
Thankfully, there is an arguably better option -- just switch to Linux! Yes, modern Linux-based operating systems are very well-supported and most will run great on aging hardware (unlike Windows 11). Linux Lite, which uses the Xfce desktop environment, is one of the best Linux distributions for Windows-switchers, as it is lightweight, modern, and familiar.
Today, Linux Lite 5.6 FINAL becomes available, and it is based on Ubuntu 20.04.3. The operating system uses Linux kernel 5.4.0-81, but other kernels are available too, ranging from 3.13 to 5.14. This new version of Linux Lite also comes with some excellent software packages, such as Firefox 91.0.1, Thunderbird 78.11.0, LibreOffice 6.4.7.2, VLC 3.0.9.2, and GIMP 2.10.18.
Linux Lite 5.6 Final is now available for download and installation. This release includes updates to the Help Manual - our extensive, easy to follow Linux Lite guide, you can now install Linux Lite directly from Lite Welcome, an updated Papirus icon theme, 2 new features added to Lite Tweaks, the introduction of the 'Pay what You Want' digital download model, 7 new wallpapers, Python default version now set to Python3, and a host of bug fixes and enhancements for our target audience. If you're coming from Windows, you'll find this to be a solid, stable release that will help make your transition to a linux based operating system, user friendly.
Linux Lite 5.6, based on the recently released Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS is now available for the download. Linux Lite is one of the popular lightweight Linux based operating system that runs well on low-end hardware.
For some people, vacation season is just the right time for housekeeping or for learning new skills. And that’s exactly what the YaST team has been doing in the latest two sprints.
It has been an eventful twelve months for the SUSE Rancher team. We have worked through a global pandemic, navigated a company acquisition, and successfully settled into our new home at SUSE. Today we are excited to announce the first SUSE release of Rancher, SUSE Rancher 2.6.
SUSE’s 28-year legacy in open source Linux operating systems has helped enterprises around the world power their mission-critical applications and systems. In December 2020, SUSE expanded its open source solution stack with the acquisition of Rancher Labs and its leading Kubernetes management platform Rancher*.
Users have multiple choices for production-ready Kubernetes clusters when they move to the cloud, including Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). With the launch of SUSE Rancher 2.6, users now have full lifecycle management support for clusters hosted across the three major cloud providers. Teams utilizing these services traditionally had the option to either use cloud provider-specific tools or manually configure a CNCF tool on their own. With SUSE Rancher 2.6, users can now apply a standard set of CNCF tooling and configuration to manage their Day Two operations across all their clusters.
We showed you how to enable Simple Content Access (SCA) and register your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with Insights. In this post, we will look at the use of groups in custom tags with Insights.
Network controls and segmentation methods allow you to control, segregate, and visualize Kubernetes traffic. These methods help you isolate tenants and better secure communications flow between containerized applications and microservices.
August is "Network Controls" month in Red Hat’s monthly Security series! Since March 2021, the Red Hat Security Ecosystem team has published monthly articles and videos on DevOps Security topics to help you learn how Red Hat can help you master the practice called DevSecOps.
By explaining how to assemble Red Hat products and introducing our security ecosystem partners, we aim to aid in your journey to deploying a comprehensive DevSecOps solution.
As interest grows in microservices and containers, Java developers have struggled to make applications smaller and faster to meet today’s demands and requirements. In the modern computing environment, applications must respond to requests quickly and efficiently, be suitable for running in volatile environments such as virtual machines or containers, and support rapid development. Because of this, Java, and popular Java runtimes, are sometimes considered inferior to runtimes in other languages such as Node.js and Go.
The Java language and platform have been very successful over the years, preserving Java as the predominant language in current use. Analysts have estimated the global application server market size at $15.84 billion in 2020, with expectations of growing at a rate of 13.2% from 2021 to 2028. Additionally, tens of millions of Java developers worldwide work for organizations that run their businesses using Java. Faced with today’s challenges, these organizations need to adapt and adopt new ways of building and deploying applications. Forgoing Java for other application stacks isn’t a choice for many organizations. It would involve re-training their development staff and re-implementing processes to release and monitor applications in production.
If you do a web search for computing terms that go with the word reactive, you'll find a wealth of phrases: Reactive streams, reactive systems, reactive messaging, and reactive programming are examples. The word reactive is also associated with other popular concepts like non-blocking I/O, functional programming, and backpressure.
Although those are all interesting topics, studying reactive systems is a good place to start. This concept was defined by the Reactive Manifesto as an architectural style for distributed systems that are responsive, elastic, resilient, and message-driven. Other constructs such as reactive streams (an asynchronous and non-blocking backpressure protocol) and reactive programming (such as reactive extensions) are implementation details.
Although the Reactive Manifesto is language-agnostic and framework-agnostic, Node.js is an excellent framework for carrying out its principles. This article provides general background on Node.js in reactive systems, then takes you step-by-step through a reactive service built with Node.js and Apache Kafka.
So what can you do to improve the situation and make better use of your time? The answer can be complex and, in some cases, require the company to address it systemically. For other problems, you can use your technical expertise to improve the way you work by automating these repetitive, mundane tasks.
When we think of automating an IT process, it's normal to evaluate spending the time and effort to develop automation artifacts to address large or complex issues. There are many benefits to doing this. You can realize the same advantages by applying automation to simple and repetitive tasks, especially when you can reuse the automation to manage hundreds or thousands of systems.
The Armbian 21.08 release appears to be a very important update as it comes with upgraded builds based on the latest Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux releases, such as Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo) and Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye,” as well as new desktop environment flavors like Xfce, Cinnamon, and Budgie.
This move puts Armbian on-par with many well-known distributions that offer support for ARM devices, and, on top of that, it lets users easily create their own Linux distribution. In addition to the desktop flavors, the Armbian 21.08 release also comes with Minimal and Server editions for advanced users.
Earlier this year we wrote about Mutantc V3 DIY Raspberry PI UMPC after noticing a talk about it at FOSDEM 2021 online conference. MutantC V4 is a new version of the Raspberry Pi handheld PC that is both easier to build and cheaper.
The new model replaces the Arduino Pro Micro board with a more compact ESP32-S2 module and offers a Lite version with even fewer parts (notification LED, IR blaster, IMU, etc..) to make it easier to build.
Back in May, LilyGo started selling “Paul’s 3D Things” Open-Smartwatch open-source hardware ESP32 watch as a kit with the board and a round display, but no case, wristband, or battery, although now a smartwatch kit, but still without battery, is available for around $30.
The company has now designed the T-Watch 2021 which builds upon the Open-Smartwatch but adds features like a touchscreen display, a vibration motor, a magnetometer, and ships as a devkit with board and display or a complete smartwatch kit including a 500mAh battery.
Poor posture is an epidemic for nearly anyone who spends an excessive amount of time sitting, and this can lead to a whole host of problems later in life. Some of these might include back pain, limited range of motion, and muscle tightness. Recognizing that his own posture was lacking, element14 user vlasov01 got to work designing and constructing a small wearable device for element14 Design for a Cause 2021 contest, which could help him alter his posture throughout the day to a more correct one. This project was dubbed the Trakcore, and it uses the sensors on the Arduino Nano 33 IoT to sense how a person is sitting or standing and then sends an alert when it needs adjustment.
With the urgency to prevent environmental degradation, reduce waste and increase profitability, farmers around the globe are increasingly opting for more efficient crop management solutions supported by optimization and controlling technologies derived from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
Intelligent information and communication technologies (IICT) (machine Learning (ML), AI, IoT, cloud-based analytics, actuators, and sensors) are being implemented to achieve higher control of spatial and temporal variabilities with the aid of satellite remote sensing. The use and application of this set of related technologies are known as “Smart Agriculture.”
World's largest Open Source foundation's community rallies during pandemic; uptick in project activity, participation, and sponsor support advances Foundation to continue to provide $22B+ worth of software to the public-at-large at 100% no cost.
The Apache Drill Project announced the release of Apache€® DrillTM v1.19, the schema-free Big Data SQL query engine for Apache Hadoop€®, NoSQL, and Cloud storage.
"Drill 1.19 is our biggest release ever," said Charles Givre, Vice President of Apache Drill. "With an already short learning curve, Drill 1.19 makes it even easier for users to quickly query, analyze, and visualize data from disparate sources and complex data sets.”
An "SQL-on-Hadoop" engine, Apache Drill is easy to deploy, highly performant, able to quickly process trillions of records, and scalable from a single laptop to a 1000-node cluster. With its schema-free JSON model (the first distributed SQL query engine of its kind), Drill is able to query complex semi-structured data in situ without requiring users to define schemas or transform data. It provides plug-and-play integration with existing Hive and HBase deployments, and is extensible out-of-the-box to access multiple data sources, such as S3 and Apache HDFS, HBase, and Hive. Additionally, Drill can directly query data from REST APIs to include platforms like SalesForce and ServiceNow.
To provide transparency into our ongoing efforts to protect your privacy and security on the Internet, we are releasing a security audit of Mozilla VPN that Cure53 conducted earlier this year.
In this meeting, the Realms proposal finally moved forward to stage 3. The form it will take is as what is now called “isolated realms”. This form does not allow direct object access across the realm boundary (which you can do with iframes). To address this, a new proposal is being put forward titled getOriginals.
Beyond that, the ergonomic brand checks proposal moved to stage 4 and will be published in the next specification. Intl.Enumeration also finally moved to stage 3 and implementers have started working on it.
A feature that developers can look forward to experimenting with soon is Array find-from-last. This will enable programmers to easily search for an element from the end of a collection, rather than needing to first reverse the collection to do this search.
ONLYOFFICE Docs 6.4 is now available for the download. It is one of the popular open source office suite. You can see the number of improvements and features in the latest version of ONLYOFFICE Docs. The suite supports the WOPI protocol for easier integration with other software tools.
Steve Roe opened an issue in the raku.land repository: My modules are Duplicates. It describes the tricky issue the Raku ecosystem is facing in light of the migration of modules between different “repository backends”. There are currently three of them: the original git-based ecosystem, the modules uploaded to CPAN (with PAUSE), and modules uploaded to the zef repository backend (with fez) (/r/rakulang comments). This will most likely need some more careful thought in a problem solving issue.
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All of the core developments of this week are either directly or indirectly a result of the extensive work that is being done on the new-disp branch, which is focussing more and more on making things faster, than making things work again!
Cryptography, the science of ciphers, is made real with the help of coding. We cannot decide a programming language to be better or worse than another. However, the selection of an appropriate cryptography library makes all the difference.
Python provides some very sophisticated libraries and modules for encryption and decryption of the data. Some of them are Cryptography, hashlib, Simple-Crypt, etc. The article demonstrates the use of modern cryptographic practices in Python with the help of the cryptography library by illustrating how to encrypt and decrypt text strings and files.
A working directory is a current directory in which we are working and from which the script is run; within this directory, we have access to many files (the ones located within it). However, we sometimes need to change directories and go back and forth between files and folders. In this tutorial, we will learn how to change the working directory in Python.
One might have to delete letters from either a string sometimes. Just what the case may be, Linux includes several built-in, useful tools for removing letters form such a text in Bash. This article demonstrates how to delete letters from either a string using those methods. In this post, the instructions were run on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa. The very same instructions may be run on any Linux system that has the utilities mentioned above installed. To execute the instructions, we’ll utilize the usual Terminal. The Ctrl+Alt+T shortcut will open the Terminal tool.
Set –e is used within the Bash to stop execution instantly as a query exits while having a non-zero status. This function is also used when you need to know the error location in the running code. Let’s continue the article to elaborate on the concept of “set –e” in different aspects of codes.
Install Bash extensions in Linux. If it is already installed, then you need to upgrade the version because the version must be above 4.
When you create your Bash scripts, their functionality is such that you have to wait for some function within it to complete its processing before proceeding further. The wait within a Bash script is introduced with the “sleep” command. The sleep command in Bash allows you to wait for as long as you want before doing any further processing. This functionality finds a special use case while dealing with clients and servers in Linux.
Multiple clients can connect to a single server depending upon its request handling capacity in a client-server model. A client always initiates a connection request, whereas a server listens to this request. However, at times, a server might be busy processing other requests. Therefore, there should be a time duration defined for the client for which that client should wait before canceling the connection initiation request. This time duration can be defined while making use of the sleep command.
This was just a simple use case of the sleep command with the client-server model; however, this command can also serve other different purposes within this model. Our motive is to learn how we can sleep in a Bash script in Ubuntu 20.04. For doing that, we have designed this tutorial so that you will get the maximum benefit out of it once you follow the examples shared in it.
Sometimes, the scripts are written in such a dynamic manner that even the programmer does not know exactly how many arguments will be provided by the user at runtime, but he might want to use that total number somewhere later in that script. How to check the Number of Arguments in Bash is explained in this article.
You can provide any desired number of command-line arguments to your Bash scripts in Ubuntu 20.04 while executing them. However, sometimes the scripts are written in such a dynamic manner that even the programmer does not know exactly how many arguments will be provided by the user at runtime, but he might want to use that total number somewhere later in that script.
In this situation, there must be a way through which you can check the total number of arguments passed to any particular Bash script. For that, Bash has a special variable, i.e., $#. To figure out how this special variable works, you will have to go through all the examples shared in this article.
In any code or a program, sometimes such a situation exists where we need to know how big the data of the filefile’s data is. We can get this through the number of lines of a file, instead of consulting the whole data. Counting the lines manually can consume a lot of time. So these tools are used, that ease us with our desired output. In this guide, wThis guide will cover some common and uncommon ways to count the line number in a file.
Ransomware attacks are exponentially increasing. And, the way it gets distributed evolves every day.
One of the most effective ways is by using reputable brand names to lure users into downloading malicious files that may end up encrypting your files and demand a ransom.
And, in this case, some scammers have started using Krita’s name to deceive users through email.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (libsndfile and libX11), Debian (ledgersmb, libssh, and postgresql-9.6), Fedora (squashfs-tools), openSUSE (389-ds, nodejs12, php7, spectre-meltdown-checker, and thunderbird), Oracle (kernel, libsndfile, and libX11), Red Hat (bind, cloud-init, edk2, glibc, hivex, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, microcode_ctl, python3, and sssd), SUSE (bind, mysql-connector-java, nodejs12, sssd, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (apr, squashfs-tools, thunderbird, and uwsgi).
