The Unleash Your Potential Program provides a System76 computer to six winners for accelerating the completion of their next project. This week, we interviewed Marquita Wiggins, who is in the early stages of developing her open source Canva alternative, Designy.
SVGs are a great way to create images that can be infinitely scaled but due to how they work it's very easy to have an SVG file that is considerably larger than it ever needs to be but luckily they're also very easy to compress.
I've promised a Linux From Scratch series for a very long time and I've kept putting it off but we're finally here and I'm finally ready to hate my life.
FreeBSD serves Netflix Video at 400Gb/s, Using the RACK TCP stack, an OpenBSD script to update packages fast, Plasma System Monitor and FreeBSD, TrueNAS vs FreeNAS (and why you should upgrade!), auto lock screen on OpenBSD using xidle and xlock, and more.
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), a free software and mass collaboration project that Richard Stallman released in September of '83 is still around, but a competitor has emerged called LLVM. (LLVM is a collection of modular and reusable compiler and toolchain technologies, which has proliferated into an umbrella project consisting of several subprojects, many of which are being used in production by a wide variety of commercial and open source projects -the C compiler portion is called Plane). The Linux kernel was formerly compiled on GCC but can now be compiled LLVM.
"GCC forked for a decade and it turned into the compiler egcs," VMware Open Source Engineer Steven Rostedt says. "Together again as one compiler-now, that's the power of open source! And as long as there's one person maintaining it, it lives. It doesn't depend on one company or funding. That's why I love open source."
GNU C Library (glibc)
The GNU C Library, commonly known as glibc, is the GNU Project's implementation of the C standard library. It was started in the 1980s by the Free Software Foundation for the GNU operating system. Most applications link to glibc.
"C is still popular for systems programming," Rostedt says, "and it's compiler is written in C. C is flexible and robust because there's nothing hindering you. I like to think of it this way: with great power comes great responsibility-that's C. But no one wants to program in it because it's very dangerous; it doesn't protect you from hurting yourself-security and overflow bugs are commonplace. If you've written more than a hundred lines of code, you can bet there's a bug in it."
The hobby-based tinkering that was born out of a frustration with the shortcomings of the Minix system had generated the first version of the Linux operating system by 17th September. It was only 65 kilobytes and comprised some 10,000 lines of Torvalds’ code. Linux is based on open source code that can be modified by anyone.
In comparison, the current Linux 5.14 contains over 3.3 million lines of code.
Google plans to change the process of preparing the Linux kernel for Android. Currently, before the kernel is ready for use on the target Android device, a number of actions are performed on it.
The circuit looks something like this: LTS Kernel Linux → Android Common Kernel → Vendor Kernel → OEM/Device Kernel
First, Google creates a fork of the regular LTS Linux kernel, then a lot of patches that are specific to Android phones are applied to it. Thus, the core is obtained – Android Common. Then chip makers like Qualcomm, Samsung or MediaTek fork Android Common and form the Vendor Kernel for their chips. Then the OEM / Device Kernel is formed from the Vendor Kernel for hardware support for a specific device.
Thus, before the initial kernel reaches the final state, you have to go a long way in applying patches and other preparatory actions. This process can be delayed for a long time, you have to solve a lot of problems, catch errors, and conduct testing cycles.
Intel has been preparing Xe HP bring-up for many months already including fundamental work around their discrete graphics/accelerator support for their Linux graphics driver stack going back quite a while. On the Xe HP front, Friday afternoon brought an important patch series posted for the first time: initial work around multi-tile support.
Intel Xe HP / Ponte Vecchio introduces the notion of a multi-tile / chiplet design. So far the Intel Linux graphics driver has only been built around a single tile design but the patches sent out on Friday afternoon begin the infrastructure changes in the i915 kernel DRM driver to support multiple tiles.
New Linux graphics kernel patches with USB4 DisplayPort Tunneling are now available from AMD. The tunneling feature allows the USB, DisplayPort and PCIe transfer protocols to operate simultaneously by sharing the available bandwidth. For now, only the DisplayPort 1.4 specs are supported with AMD's tunneling drivers. Hopefully, DisplayPort 2.0 specs could be added by the time AMD introduces its next gen embedded and laptop solutions in early 2022.
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Phoronix reports that the latest AMD GPU kernel graphics driver for Linux includes mentions of USB4 DisplayPort tunneling. This is a new feature specific to the USB4 standard that ties directly to the Thunderbolt 3 standard. It allows multiple protocols like USB, DisplayPort and PCIe to operate at the same time, although with restricted bandwidth. USB4 also supports alt modes that target the full bandwidth at a specific protocol. For instance, the DisplayPort 2.0 protocol supported now by USB4 can use up to 80 Gbps bandwidth to enable 8K resolutions at 60 Hz with HDR10 color gamut. However, the AMD Linux driver currently only supports DisplayPort 1.4 tunneling through Thunderbolt 3, which limits the available bandwidth to well under 40 Gbps, yet this solution may still be helpful when using a USB dock.
Barring any last minute reservations it appears the initial "FUTEX2" work that is of much interest to Linux gamers enjoying Steam Play / Proton will find that kernel functionality in Linux 5.16.
The FUTEX2 work was slimmed down this year to focus just on the WaitForMultipleObjects-type behavior as offered by Windows. Those patches in turn were picked up for tip/tip.git's "locking/core" branch. With it now hitting this Git branch, it makes it almost definite that it will be found in the next merge window (Linux 5.16) barring any problems creeping up that would cause a revert.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MicroK8s on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, MicroK8s is a lightweight upstream Kubernetes distribution package to run as an immutable container. MicroK8s follows upstream Kubernetes releases and focuses on providing an effortless installation and management experience. Here’s how to get started running your own cluster.
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 MicroK8s 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.
The kernel plays a significant role, and although the kernel is pretty fresh in Debian 11, chances are it won’t suit you for some reason. Moreover, the 5.14 kernel contains many changes that are likely to affect Debian for the better. Of the main changes in the 5.14 kernel, we can note improved support for AMD Ryzen processors, the btrfs file system has been optimized, for Lenovo laptops a added WMI interface for changing BIOS settings has been , support for Dell Hardware Privacy, and support for Intel Alder Lake P graphics has been added in the 5.14 kernel and much more,
At the end of the article, consider the moment when you want to install Debian 11 with a default kernel that does not support modern hardware.
In this tutorial, we provide a step by step guide on how to install and use NMCLI tool on Debian Linux.
Let’s see the commands that we can use to install Gfortran 5/6/7/8/9/10/11 versions on Ubuntu 18.04/20.04/21.04, Linux Mint, Debian, and other similar systems.
FORTRAN is the abbreviation of Formula Translation. This high-level language was designed for science, engineering problems, or those problems in enterprise management that can be expressed by mathematical formulas, and its numerical calculation function is strong.
It was proposed in 1954 and officially used in 1956. It has a history of sixty years until 2021, but it is still enduring. It has always been the main language used in the field of numerical computing. However, it has also been an object-oriented programming language since 2003, which is used in particular for numerical calculations in science, technology, and research.
The GNU version of Fortran is known as GFortran, a GNU Fortran compiler, which is part of the free GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) for Fortran 95/2003/2008/2018. Learn more about it on Wikipedia.
Here we will learn the steps to install GFortran’s latest version on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal fossa to start learning this programming language
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Duf Disk Utility on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Duf (disk usage/free) is a command-line utility to find disk usage in Linux and Unix systems. One of the excellent features of Duf is its ability to display the disk usage details in a beautiful, user-friendly layout in tab form. You can even get the disk usage output in JSON format as well.
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 Duf Disk Utility on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
This guide is about guiding you how to enable dark mode in popular web browsers such as Firefox, Google Chrome, Chromium and Microsoft Edge.
The Wine 6.19 development release is out now following more weeks of hacking away trying to create the best possible Windows compatibility layer. Part of what makes up Steam Play Proton. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made.
KDE developers remain very busy squashing bugs ahead of the release of Plasma 5.23 that is also known as the Plasma 25th Anniversary Edition.
One of the most fundamental changes this week is KDE now making use of GitLab continuous integration. But aside from that plenty of Plasma 5.23 bug fixing continues, especially on the KDE Plasma Wayland front where there continues to be many issues resolved each and every week. Some of the highlights for this week include...
KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.87.0.
KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
KDE Gear 21.08.2 is the second bug fix update for the latest stable version of this package of various software components and libraries for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and its applications. In addition to bug fixes, users can expect improvements to the functionality of several applications that are part of KDE.
The Okular Document Viewer has received an update, after which it uses automatic settings for forced rasterization if required to change the scale of the document when printing. Kate’s text editor also received a fix that addresses the poor stability of the Replicode plugin, and the Dolphin file manager should no longer have problems with split views even when closing and restarting them. Several minor fixes have also been added for the Konqueror web browser or the Konsole application.
Recently, I decided that I wanted to give OpenSUSE a try, as it’s been nearly ten years since I ran it on my home system for any longer than an hour or two for testing purposes, and I have fond memories of it’s stability, great implementation of the KDE Plasma desktop environment, and the super supportive community behind it. So, I stuck the Leap 15.3 ISO on a flash drive, booted into the live environment, and installed it; it went without a hitch and was easy as can be.
But, before we get into the issue I faced, and the resolution, let’s look at some details.
While not overly challenging for the linux-experienced, something like this might be enough to throw a new user completely for a loop and scare them off using an amazing system like OpenSUSE. Thankfully, YaST is powerful, easy to use, and there is plenty of OpenSUSE related documentation available online too!
IBM engineer Pratik Sampat published an early prototype of a CPU namespace interface for the Linux kernel. This CPU namespace was devised to address coherency issues with current means of viewing available CPU resources as well as addressing possible security issues stemming from understanding resource access/positioning on the system.
A few weeks ago I attended a very interesting online seminar, Economics in the Age of Covid-19, by University of Toronto professor Joshua Gans. Over the past 18 months, professor Gans has been conducting research and writing extensively on the impact of Covid-19, including a number of articles, a newsletter, and two books. His key thesis is that a pandemic is fundamentally an information problem. If you know that someone you interact with is potentially infectious, you can take actions to limit the interactions. However, if you have to guess whether a person is infectious, you’re taking a risk. Not only can you become infected, but you might also pass that infection on to others.
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In his seminar, Gans cited the 2002 SARS outbreak in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and the 2015 MERS outbreak in South Korea as examples of pandemics that were quickly contained. With SARS and MERS, people only became infectious when they developed a fever, cough, and other easily identifiable flu-like symptoms. Anyone suspected of being infected could thus be quickly isolated before infecting many others. This made it possible to contain the SARS and MERS viruses within a few short months, and to suppress them completely a few months later.
The Debian project is pleased to announce the eleventh update of its oldstable distribution Debian 10 (codename buster). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.
Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 10 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old buster media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.
The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian 11 (codename bullseye). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.
Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 11 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old bullseye media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.
Debian 11 "Bullseye" debuted back in August as the latest major release for this popular community Linux distribution. Today it's been succeeded by Debian 11.1.
As usual with Debian point releases, Debian 11.1 is just a collection of updated packages primarily providing various bug and security fixes to the platform. There are some new upstream stable release packages like a newer Linux 5.10 point release but for the most part the changes are relatively mundane aside from the security work and unless you were impacted by any of the bugs.
There is a new application available for Sparkers: Kotatogram Desktop
Right from the early days of gmail, I have used it in "basic html view". However, recently it has been coming up in "standard view", and despite trying to set it back to basic html view, persists in coming up in standard view.
[....]
...it seems, gmail looks at the user-agent string, and does not recognise Brave browser. Feedback at the above link says changing the user-agent string in Brave to Chrome* fixes it. There is a fix, if you want to force basic html view, it can be specified in the URL. A couple of sites give this URL, and I even found it recommended at a Google help site:
https://mail.google.com/?ui=html
...works for me, but some people are reporting that it only works "sometimes".
The developers of the Linux Mint distribution published another of their summary reports on the development of the last month, in which they presented some interesting news, the completion of the project website or progress in their efforts to improve the design of the user environment. One of the good news is the announcement of the planned release date of Linux Mint 20.3 or preparations for the completion of LMDE 5.
The new version of Linux Mint 20.3, codenamed Una, should be released later this year, more specifically around the Christmas holidays. As always, this version will offer its users a choice of three desktop environments Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce, including the necessary software package updates and other development news since the release of the last stable version. An edition of LMDE 5 is also being prepared, which will be based on the Debian 11 distribution with the Cinnamon desktop environment. Once again, users can expect new LMDE installation images for both amd64 and i386 processor architectures.
The scent of a Raspberry Pi port can be traced to Twitter, where System76’s Principal Engineer and Pop!_OS maintainer Jeremy Soller recently posted a photo showing the 64 bit OS apparently running on a stock Raspberry Pi 400. More tellingly, he also shared a link to a repository full of Pop!_OS packages for ARM devices.
For those not already familiar, Pop!_OS is an Ubuntu-based OS that’s free and open-source, with a custom Gnome desktop known as COSMIC. It’s maintained by System76, a computer builder operating out of Denver, Colorado, that sells laptops, desktops and servers, all with either Pop!_OS or Ubuntu installed. They’re quite keen on Linux there, it could be said.
Pop!_OS is notable for its support of AMD and Nvidia GPUs with no additional tinkering, and its auto-tiling desktop, which fills your display with app windows. A tabbed, web-browser-like, look is also available, along with a complete set of keyboard shortcuts to move windows around. It has a 7.5% share of all Steam installations on Linux, according to the Steam Hardware Survey.
The open source world and Chinese manufacturing have a long relationship. Some fifteen years ago, the big topic was how companies could open-source their hardware designs and not get driven bankrupt by competition from overseas. Companies like Sparkfun, Adafruit, Arduino, Maple Labs, Pololu, and many more demonstrated that this wasn’t impossible after all.
We found the six Albanian/Kosovan women who received GSoC & Outreachy money, tickets to DebConf and many other events following the former leader around Europe.
These are snapshots of their Github activity for the last 12 months. We decided not to write their names.
We don't want to vilify these women. We want to ask who decided to spend over $30,000 on them without any plan?
Hacktoberfest 2021 is underway, and this year DigitalOcean has made updates to the event, starting with “maintainer-friendly rules” that include “allowing repos to opt-in to Hacktoberfest, ensuring only accepted pull requests count towards participants’ Hacktoberfest goals,” reports Mike Melanson.
With October suddenly upon us, it’s every open source maintainer’s favorite time of year – Hacktoberfest!
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The New Stack is a wholly owned subsidiary of Insight Partners, an investor in the following companies mentioned in this article: MADE.
Amazon Web Services and Gitlab are sponsors of The New Stack.
Recently, our LibreOffice Conference 2021 took place – and online, due to the ongoing pandemic situation. But some members of the German community organized a small “hybrid” event in Hamburg!
The release of the Firefox 93 browser has taken place. Let’s consider the main changes in the new version.
Thunderbird 91 was launched two months ago, but it wasn’t offered as an OTA (Over-the-Air) upgrade from Thunderbird 78 and earlier releases. After three minor point releases, Thunderbird 91.2 is here and enables support for OTA upgrades from earlier Thunderbird versions.
Thunderbird 91.2 is also a minor update, bringing only the ability to use a unique filename when saving a single message in the .eml file format, as well as a bunch of bug fixes. But the major change in this release is the ability to upgrade from Thunderbird 78 and earlier versions without from within the app.
Mozilla is trialling personalised advertising in its Firefox Suggest feature, along with sponsored search results, with users told that it "helps fund Firefox development."
Firefox Suggest was first introduced last month in Firefox 92, billed as "a new discovery feature that is built directly into the browser."
The feature provides links as the user types in the search bar, which can be based on local browsing history, bookmarks and open tabs, or on "sponsored suggestions from vetted partners." Currently, users outside the US only see these uncontentious local prompts.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) this week updated an open source Apache Drill tool that enables end users to query multiple data sources using SQL — without waiting for enterprise IT teams to create schemas and set up pipelines.
The PostgreSQL Community Code of Conduct Committee welcomes three new members...
Use Collabora Online to edit documents from within the web browser, à la Google Docs and Microsoft 365
During the dot-com boom, the technology contender for e-money was eCash from DigiCash, and this CBDC design is based on the ideas of its founder David Chaum and the successor to eCash, the open source GNU Taler. During the 1990s, DigiCash was piloted by Deutsche Bank and there were rumors of interest from Goldman Sachs, Visa, Microsoft and Netscape.
Quite a few of the posts prior to this one where inspired by a post of fellow blogger. I would like to double down on that today. Vadim wrangled with symbols and Fabio enjoyed renaming them. Having struggled with packages in the past, Vadim’s post was very helpful in making me realise, .HOW is how I can get hold of the object that is the package. And if Perl can do it, there is surely no way to stop Raku to have the same capability.
We want to re-export functions while changing their name. Just adding a prefix will do for now. That presents the first problem. Currently, there is no way to get named arguments to use handed to sub EXPORT. Any Hash will also be gobbled up. All we have are positional parameters. Since Raku is omni-paradigmatic, that wont pose a challenge.
But not those at Google, Uber, Dropbox, Soundcloud, Slack, and Medium. The programmers at top corporations have long fallen for the language with the cute mascot.
According to a TIOBE statement in October 2021, Python is now the most popular programming language in the world.
According to the latest ratings from the software company TIOBE, Python is now the most popular programming language in the world. The so-called TIOBE Index is based on the number of language searches performed online, which may also be a measure of a language’s popularity.
The AlmaLinux Foundation, stewards of the 100% community-owned and governed enterprise-grade Linux distribution, announces membership options for all project contributors and community members.
The AlmaLinux Foundation is set up as a 501(c)(6) non-profit, the same model used by the Linux Foundation. Individuals and organizations will now be eligible to vote for, and be voted into, the AlmaLinux Foundation’s board of directors, as well as participate in committees. Members will directly help to steer AlmaLinux OS and ensure the Foundation is acting in the best interests of the community. The provisional board of directors has approved a set of Bylaws and a membership committee has been formed to welcome new members.
A new attack vector was found against the Apache http server, which remained unpatched in the 2.4.50 update and allows access to files from areas outside the root directory of the site. In addition, researchers have found a way that, in the presence of certain non-standard settings, not only read system files, but also remotely execute their code on the server. The problem only manifests itself in releases 2.4.49 and 2.4.50, earlier versions of the vulnerability are not affected. To fix the new variant of the vulnerability , the release of Apache httpd 2.4.51 was promptly formed .
In essence, the new problem ( CVE-2021-42013 ) is completely similar to the original vulnerability (CVE-2021-41773) in 2.4.49, the only difference is in a different character encoding “..”. In particular, in the 2.4.50 release, the possibility of using the sequence “% 2e” to encode a point was blocked, but the possibility of double encoding was missed – when specifying the sequence “%% 32% 65”, the server decoded it into “% 2e”, and then into ” . “, ie characters “../” to go to the previous directory could be coded as “. %% 32% 65 /”.
As for the exploitation of a vulnerability through code execution, this is possible if you enable mod_cgi and use the base path in which the execution of CGI scripts is allowed (for example, if the ScriptAlias ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹directive is enabled or the ExecCGI flag is specified in the Options directive). A prerequisite for a successful attack is also to explicitly provide access to directories with executable files, such as / bin, or access to the FS root “/” in the Apache settings. Since such access is usually not provided, a code execution attack is of little use to real systems.
Security researchers at the antivirus and security company Eset claim to have discovered a new family of malware for Linux. It enables remote access, collects access data and sets up proxies on infected systems for further attacks.
Cybersecurity researchers have detailed a new campaign that likely targets entities in Southeast Asia with a previously unrecognized Linux malware that's engineered to enable remote access to its operators, in addition to amassing credentials and function as a proxy server.
Crushing the tax haven racket is a big political challenge, but the steps needed are straightforward and simple.
Rising political polarization can have serious ramifications for businesses. Companies that speak out on controversial issues can face decreased customer loyalty from those with opposing beliefs, increased internal conflict between employees, or reduced sales from boycotts. Furthermore, taking a public stance can often exacerbate social tensions. For example, after the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, Delta Air Lines was reported to have eliminated an NRA member discount. Despite affecting very few people, the move further heightened tensions around gun control and prompted state lawmakers to threaten the airline’s fuel tax exemptions.
In a new chapter of the ongoing saga of Sisvel’s 4G patents against (mainly Chinese) infringers, the present interlocutory decision shows that the procedural attitude of a defendant (in the present case Wiko) may be very important and can influence the court’s decision.
Acasti Pharma Inc. (“Acasti” or the “Company”) (Nasdaq: ACST and TSX-V: ACST), today announces that the European Patent Office, Chinese Patent Office and the Mexican Patent Office have issued composition of matter patents for GTX-101, a novel bio-adhesive film forming topical spray formulation of bupivacaine for the treatment of Postherpetic Neuralgia (PHN). PHN is a persistent and often debilitating neuropathic pain caused by nerve damage from the varicella zoster virus (shingles), which may persist for months and even years. GTX-101 could provide significant benefits over the current standard of care including greater convenience, faster onset of action and longer duration of pain relief. The granted patents are valid until 2036.
Smart cars were officially available in the USA from 2008 to 2019. Daimler finally pulled the plug due to poor sales, but only after stringing out the supermini's lifespan as an electric. Even then, the fortwo Electric Drive offered poor range, but that was the least of its troubles.
Patents and innovation are closely linked. Patents can boost innovation by granting a legal monopoly over certain technology, and inventors may be willing to invest more time, money and creativity into their inventions if they can do this in anticipation of being rewarded with such monopoly on their invention. Furthermore, patents boost future innovation because the technology protected by a patent will be made publicly available and can be used by everyone once the patent protection term expires. However, patents may even hinder innovation, because technology and its further-development could be blocked by existing patents.
In recent years, AI patent activity has exponentially increased. The figure below shows the volume of public AI patent applications categorized by AI component in the U.S. from 1990-2018. The eight AI components in FIG. 1 are defined in an article published in 2020 by the USPTO. Most of the AI components have experienced explosive growth in the past decade, especially in the areas of planning/control and knowledge processing (e.g., using big data in automated systems).
In Universal Secure Registry LLC v. Apple Inc., No. 2020-2044 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 26, 2021), the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s determination that four patents related to securing credit card transactions without a credit card magnetic strip are patent ineligible under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101.
