Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has added support for streaming Linux apps to its AppStream service, which could previously only stream Windows apps.
The AppStream service enables users to stream individual graphical apps, and even entire desktops to a remote PC using either a web browser or through the Windows client.
“With this launch, you can now stream Linux applications and desktops to your users, and greatly lower the total streaming cost by migrating Matlab, Eclipse, Firefox, PuTTY, and other similar applications from Windows to Linux on Amazon AppStream 2.0,” shared AWS.
Wyrcan is a bootloader that boots into a container. That’s all it does.
Even though it was delayed we're still finding more out about the SteamDeck and recently we discovered that SteamOS 3 was going to be shipping with an immutable root filesystem.
The OpenSSH client config file is a very powerful feature, that too many people ignore. You can use the client config file to simplify your SSH connections, by including preset options per host. In this video, I'll go over the basics of this config file.
Massimo Stella of Kdenlive talks about KDE's 25th Anniversary, how KDE’s video editor came to be, where it is now and what we can look forward to in the future of open source film-making.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.14.20 kernel.
All users of the 5.14 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.14.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
The Linux 5.16 merge window now past, an initial batch of changes from drm-misc-next has been sent in to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 5.17 cycle kicks off around the start of the new year.
Two sets of driver releases are now available. First we have the open source Mesa 21.3 release and we also secondly have the NVIDIA Vulkan Beta 470.62.12 also out now.
For the Mesa 21.3 release it pulls in a number of new features and performance improvements.
The latest Zink development code paired with the forthcoming "Copper" work is yielding an OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation that when running on NVIDIA's proprietary Vulkan driver is even able to outperform NVIDIA's own proprietary OpenGL driver for at least one notable Linux game.
Following the recent achievements around Zink / Copper and getting Wayland's Weston running atop the experimental code, he shared that with NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack this is a big improvement.
The open-source Nouveau driver's support for the GeForce RTX 30 "Ampere" series remains very limited -- most notably, without any 3D acceleration support -- but now the GA106 GPU can light up for the GeForce RTX 3060.
Since earlier this year has been the very basic Nouveau driver support for Ampere but without 3D acceleration so basically amounts to a kernel mode-setting driver to at least (hopefully) getting the display working nicely. NVIDIA has not yet published the Ampere signed microcode/firmware files necessary for bringing up the engines and get accelerated 3D working.
Then again, even with the GeForce GTX 900 Maxw
Prominent FFmpeg developer Cyanreg has begun working on an experimental Vulkan hardware acceleration video decoder for FFmpeg.
Cyanreg is working on this FFmpeg vulkan_decode GitHub branch where so far H.264 Vulkan-based video decode is wired up. The work-in-progress code is making use of the provisional Vulkan Video extensions and so aside from this FFmpeg code still being a work-in-progress, it's unlikely to be merged until the finalized Vulkan Video extensions come out in the months ahead.
I've had an nvidia graphics card for the past 8 years (and nvidia gtx770), I usually alternate between the nvidia proprietary driver and the nouveau open-source driver, i.e. there is a problem in one, I try the other. But I used the proprietary driver more than the nouveau driver, the latter usually performed worse than it's binary-blob-corporate-jailed driver.
Recently I found that the latest nvidia proprietary driver will finally get GBM support instead of the EGLStream that it currently has (AFAIK, all the other gfx drivers in Linux use GBM, except for nvidia), but... in typical nvidia fashion, they also decided to drop support for older cards, and my card falls into that group, so again, thank you nvidia! again!
That irked me, so I decided to try using the nouveau driver again; it looks like one of the reasons it always did badly in my current distro is that I didn't have the libdrm_nouveau2 package installed (it's likely that it was installed by default and then I removed it). Once I installed that it seemed to work much better (glxinfo is actually a very useful tool).
In an earlier post I talked about Copper and what it could do on the way to a zink future.
What I didn’t talk about was WSI, or the fact that I’ve already fully implemented it in the course of bashing Copper into a functional state.
Earlier this month I provided benchmarks showing the Intel UHD Graphics 770 with Alder Lake compared to other CPUs/APUs under Linux. Those tests were done with the latest open-source Intel Linux graphics driver code at the time, but for those running Alder Lake and wondering if it's worthwhile moving from the stable versions to more bleeding-edge components, this article is for you.
Recently developer Mike Blumenkrantz wrote an interesting post in regards to a future upgrade to Zink, the driver that provides an OpenGL implementation on top of Vulkan and the performance with it is looking impressive.
The new upgrade coming is called Copper. To keep it simple enough for most readers, it will allow Zink to avoid existing problems with the way the driver works and get rendering done more directly. The result of it has been shown off today, where Blumenkrantz tested the newer work with the NVIDIA 495.44 driver on an RTX 2070 and benchmarking Feral Interactive's port of Tomb Raider.
A drum machine is an electronic musical instrument that creates percussion sounds, drum beats, and patterns.
Drum machines may imitate drum kits or other percussion instruments, or produce unique sounds, such as synthesized electronic tones. A drum machine often has pre-programmed beats and patterns for popular genres and styles, such as pop music, rock music, and dance music. Most modern drum machines made in the 2010s and 2020s also allow users to program their own rhythms and beats.
Drum machines may create sounds using analog synthesis or play prerecorded samples.
Here’s our recommended drum machine software captured in one of our legendary rating charts. We only feature free and open source goodness.
For spaceflight enthusiasts, there’s now a GTK4 app for Linux Desktop and Phone (e.g., PinePhone, Librem 5) to keep track of upcoming rocket launches.
It’s “Space Launch”, an open-source app gets data of the launches from spacelaunchnow.me. The app displays the next upcoming launches with information about the company and/or manufacturer, such as Rocket Lab and SpaceX. The location, date and time, and count down for the rocket launches.
After the “no US servers will connect” problem on 3.12.0, I found that if you log into it via nordaccount (OAuth) then it will let you connect to US servers again.
Today, their apt repo offered 3.12.1, and under that version, no US servers are available no matter how you log in. It goes back to logging you into another country and limiting you to that country’s servers for an entire day, and then picking another country, apparently, like 3.12 does if you use username/password.
After the issues that happened with Linus from Linus Tech Tips breaking Pop!_OS during the switch to Linux challenge, the APT package manager has been upgraded to prevent future issues happening.
We covered the problem in our previous article, where System76 were going to apply their own fix to prevent a dialogue appearing that allowed users to end up removing essential packages. At the same time, System76 were also talking with the APT team to get an official fix and one has now been created and released with APT 2.3.12.
The issue shouldn't have come up often, and was the result of the Steam package breaking, with APT in terminal mentioning lots of different things that could easily confuse users. To continue you needed to enter "Yes, do as I say!" to progress, which you should probably never do since the warning was there for a reason - essential packages being removed.
A storage device is an integral part of your computer hardware and computing in general. Used for storing processed data, storage devices come in many different forms. Some of the most common ones include external or internal hard drives, flash disks, CDs, etc.
This guide will show you how to format a storage device right from the Linux terminal.
In this tutorial guide I will take you through the installation of PHPStorm on Ubuntu 21.04.
PHPStorm is a proprietary, cross-platform IDE for PHP. It provides an editor for PHP, Javascript and HTML with on-the-fly code analysis, error prevention and automated refactoring for PHP and Javascript code.
This guide describes how to easily install Nagios NRPE agents on Debian 11/Debian 10. If you want to monitor your Debian hosts using Nagios server, then you need to have the NRPE agents installed on these hosts. Nagios Remote Plugin Executor (NRPE) allows you to remotely execute Nagios plugins on other Linux/Unix machines to query machine metrics such as disk usage, CPU load, etc.
Sometimes you just need to copy some files between two computers, you can do that with scp, sftp or rsync. But some of those times you also need to navigate the remote folders and those three options are too cumbersome. A quick&dirty solution is to mount a remote folder with sshfs.
You could export that folder with NFS, Samba or some other network filesystem, but you’ll need to deal with config files, firewalls,… But you surely have already an ssh access to your remote system. If you don’t, you shouldn’t been here.. I think xD
Today, nearly every platform Flatpak that my GNOME/GTK applications depend on and some that my KDE and Qt applications depend on got updated.
Since Flatpak can download only the files the programs need, and then only the files in the Flatpaks that have changed, you can actually bring in many upgrades so fast that it’s like engaging the hyperdrive.
So, not only do I have fairly new applications to run without disturbing my underlying Debian system, they’re easy to maintain.
Fedora used to use patch updates in RPMs and then they turned it off reckoning that everyone has fast and unmetered Internet access anyway.
Garuda Linux is a rolling operating system based on Arch Linux. It uses Arch packages and Arch technologies like Pacman. However, unlike Arch Linux, users do not need to build it from scratch to install it, as it comes with a graphical installer.
Garuda offers a wide variety of Linux desktops, but it primarily focuses on the KDE Plasma desktop. If you love Arch and want a solid KDE experience, follow this guide to learn how to install Garuda Linux.
Note: to install Garuda Linux, you must have a computer with at least 1 GB of RAM and a USB flash drive with at least 1 GB of storage space.
Endeavour OS is a rolling Linux operating system based upon Arch Linux. The project is a successor to Antergos, and it aims to provide an easy way to set up Arch Linux with a slick graphical UI. Here’s how you can get Endeavour OS working on your computer.
Note: to install Endeavour OS, you must have a computer with at least 1 GB of RAM and a USB flash drive with at least 1 GB of storage space.
TLP is a command line advanced Linux power management tool that helps save laptop battery power. It's designed to install and forget about it, TLP taking care of everything automatically. TLP is highly configurable though, so you can tweak it to suit your specific needs, either to manual editing of its configuration file (/etc/tlp.conf), or by using TLPUI, a third-party GUI for TLP.
With version 1.4, TLP has added support for setting start and/or stop charge battery thresholds for some laptops: ASUS, Huawei MateBooks, LG Gram, Lenovo (now for non-Thinkpads too; Thinkpads have been supported for a while) and Samsung. This article explains how to use this TLP feature to set start and/or stop thresholds in case you own a supported laptop.
Have you forgotten the root password in Fedora? Or do you want to change the root user password in your Fedora system? No problem! This brief guide walks you through the steps to change or reset root password in Fedora operating systems.
Step 1 - Switch on your Fedora system and press ESC key until you see the GRUB boot menu. Once the GRUB menu is appeared, choose the Kernel you want to boot and hit e to edit the selected boot entry.
In this article, you will learn how to upgrade CentOS 7 to CentOS 8.5 release. The steps described herein do not depict the official upgrade and this should not be applied to a production server yet.
In our earlier guide, we walked you through the installation of AlmaLinux. If you have CentOS 8 installed, an automated migration script is available to help you migrate seamlessly to the latest version of AlmaLinux 8.5 without uninstalling and performing a fresh installation.
There is also a similar script from Oracle Linux, that helps you to migrate from CentOS to Oracle Linux.
MariaDB is one of the most popular open-source databases next to its originator MySQL. The original creators of MySQL developed MariaDB in response to fears that MySQL would suddenly become a paid service due to Oracle acquiring it in 2010. With its history of doing similar tactics, the developers behind MariaDB have promised to keep it open source and free from such fears as what has happened to MySQL.
MariaDB has become just as popular as MySQL with developers, with features such as advanced clustering with Galera Cluster 4, faster cache/indexes, storage engines, and features/extensions that you won’t find in MySQL.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MariaDB 10.7 on Debian 11 Bullseye.
Sometime your shell scripts get out of control. Sometimes you are proud of them. Sometimes….both.
I need to be able to re-add a bunch of nodes to an OpenStack cluster on a regular basis. Yes, I could do this with Ansible, but, well, Ansible is great for doing something via SSH, and this just needs to be done here and now. So shell is fine.
This started as a one liner, and got a bit bigger.
This is a utility script that I keep modifying as I need new things from it. I have not cleaned it up or anything, but I find it works OK as is and is not too big that I lose sight of what it is doing.
This is not my finest code. It is the worst case of “just make it work” I’ve produced all week.
But it runs.
What does it do? It takes the first binary number in an array, and converts it to decimal. It assumes that the number is no more than 3 digits long.
It divides that number by 100 to get the 100s digit. Then it multiples that number by 100, assuming that it has gotten truncated. It subtracts that value from the original number to chop off the 100s digit, and divides the result by 10 to get the 10s digit.
Similar process to get the 1s digit.
Most system administrators have experienced some kind of abrupt, unknown failure with technology and wished they had a way to predict (and possibly prevent) these kinds of issues from happening—especially when it could otherwise mean late-night calls, paperwork explaining outages, and complicated remediation plans.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to enable BBR on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time, or BBR, is a congestion control algorithm that powers traffic from google.com and YouTube, Google Cloud Platform, and Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Google developed the algorithm, and it can produce higher throughput and lower latency for traffic from your server.
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 configure BBR 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.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Telnet on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Telnet is a terminal emulation program for TCP/IP networks that allows you to access another computer on the Internet or local area network by logging in to the remote system. Telnet listens to all the requests by the user usually on TCP port 23, but you can change it accordingly.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Telnet on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
This tutorial shows how to install multiple PHP versions on an ISPConfig Debian server. The PHP version can later be selected in the ISPConfig 3 website settings for each site individually. This feature works with PHP-FPM and FastCGI. We will install PHP 5.6 and 7.x as a PHP-FPM and a FastCGI version on a Debian server by using the PHP packages from sury.org.
ONLYOFFICE Docs is an open-source office suite distributed under GNU AGPL v3.0. It comprises web-based viewers and collaborative editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations highly compatible with OOXML formats.
ONLYOFFICE Docs can be integrated with various cloud services such as Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, Alfresco, Plone, etc., as well as embedded into your own solution. The editors can also be used as a part of the complete productivity solution ONLYOFFICE Workspace.
Redmine is a free and open-source project management and issue tracking tool that comprises per project wikis and forums, time tracking, and flexible role-based access control. With integrated ONLYOFFICE Docs, you are able to edit and co-author office documents directly from Redmine.
Laravel is an open-source and cross-platform PHP framework that is hailed by web developers everywhere. Laravel is built by Symfony framework and works on model-view-controller pattern. It is highly regarded because it cuts down the grunt work and lets the developers do the real work.
In this article, You will learn how you can install and set up the Laravel framework on your Ubuntu System.
Brave is an increasingly popular web browser for Linux and other operating system. The focus on blocking ads and tracking by default along with Chrome extension support has made Brave a popular choice among Linux users.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn to install Brave on Fedora Linux. You’ll also learn about updating it and removing it.
The tutorial has been tested on Fedora but it should also be valid for other distributions in the Red Hat domain such as CentOS, Alma Linux and Rocky Linux.
The name KDE comes from “K Desktop Environment.” For those not familiar with KDE Desktop, it is a free, open-source desktop environment. It provides Linux users on various distributions an alternative graphical interface to customize their desktop environment and applications for everyday use enhancement.
In Rocky Linux’s case, this is Gnome. Besides the graphical enhancements and changes, it is also a lightweight, fast, smooth environment with superior performance compared to native shipped desktops with some Linux Distributions.
In the following tutorial, you will have learned how to install KDE Desktop Environment on your Rocky Linux 8 operating system.
In this guide we will explore how to install the latest release of RabbitMQ in Ubuntu 20.04 Server or Workstation
RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software that implements the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP). RabbitMQ works by receiving messages from publishers (applications that publish them) and routes them to consumers (applications that process them).
In this tutorial guide we are going to install and configure Grafana with Podman on a Rocky LInux server.
Grafana is a complete observability stack that allows you to monitor and analyze logs, metrics and traces.
Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your data insight. Grafana can create, explore and create beautiful dashboards that can be shared with your teams.
Podman is a daemonless, open source, Linux native tool designed to make it easy to find, run, build, share and deploy applications using Open Container Initiative (OCI) containers and container images. Containers can be run as root or as a regular user.
I can't tell you how many times I've had to work to upload data to a new system (be it a CMS, CRM, HRM ... you name it), only to find out the platform wouldn't accept the file format I had available. I might have a spreadsheet or JSON file with tons of data, but the system would only accept a CSV file.
Connecting over email service using the internet connection is not a new thing, it has been there for decades. And to use this service an email account is often a prerequisite for logging and receiving messages. Whereas various E-mail clients help us to smoothly manage our emails, especially if we have multiple e-mail accounts. Out of such clients, one is Mailspring. It is a free and open-source mail client with all the basic functions you want, however, if that is not enough the pro version of the Mailspring is available for Linux such as Ubuntu 20.04/Debian/CentOS, etc, macOS, and Windows… These include pro functions such as later sending, extensive contact profiles, and link tracking.
Being an email client it can handle multiple e-mail accounts and collects incoming e-mails in a common inbox. Mailspring supports IMAP / SMTP accounts and can handle mails from various services such as Gmail, G Suite, Yahoo, iCloud, Fast Mail Microsoft Office 365. Exchange accounts, however, are currently not supported. Touch gestures and keyboard shortcuts (can be customized) can be used for control. Furthermore, the e-mail client can handle receipts and offers a quick search.
Soul Tolerance is the newest title planned by Chaosmonger Studio developer of previous titles like ENCODYA, Clunky Hero and the Robot Will Protect You animation.
A sci-fi mystery set in the city of Sapporo 2214, it's an investigative RPG with turn-based combat that the developer says is unique to the genre. In the game you will explore a beautiful world in voxel art, populated solely by robots. On your travels you will speak to various characters, hunt for clues, craft your own minions, and discover a secret that could upset the entire Earth. They say it's "Disco Elysium meets Cloudpunk meets Divinity: Original Sin".
If you remember anything from 1983, it’s likely to be some of the year’s popular culture highlights, maybe Return of the Jedi, or Michael Jackson’s Thriller. For anyone connected with the video gaming industry though, it’s likely that year will stick in the mind for a completely different reason, as the year of the infamous Great Video Games Crash. Overcapacity in the console market coupled with a slew of low quality titles caused sales to crash and a number of companies to go out of business, and the console gaming world would only recover later in the decade with the arrival of the Japanese 8-bit consoles from Nintendo and Sega. You might expect Atari to shy away from such a painful period of their history, but instead they are embracing it as part of their 50th anniversary and launching three never-released titles on cartridges for their 8-bit 2600 console.
This sort of thing isn’t even uncommon. It doesn’t take a massive change to Windows to trigger it. Things like this and worse already happened in cumulative updates to Windows 10 which did not have big change logs.
On GNU/Linux systems, kernel panics are almost unheard of, even with Intel’s shitty uEFI firmware and processor bugs.
Today the Terraria x Don't Starve Together crossover event is live, with both games seeing an update with elements of the other appear. Sounds like a lot of fun and a surprisingly good fit between them.
Why though? During the 10th anniversary of Terraria, the developer was asked "If you could implement another crossover into Terraria, what franchise would you choose?" and they replied "If I had to pick just one I would love to do something with Don't Starve Together". Shortly after, chats began and this is the result from both development teams.
I wrote recently about building my new gaming desktop where, if you weren’t blinded by all the lights, I also noted that I’ve moved from Arch to GNU Guix as my distro of choice. Why? And what is Guix? (And no, it is just coincidental that Valve is going all-in with Arch on the Deck.)
While I’ll get to details on both below, perhaps the simplest answer to “why” is because I just like tinkering. As I’ve written before, that’s very much at the heart of why I love to use Linux and can’t seem to just let a computer be without messing with it in some way. There’s plenty of good reasons why I think this is valuable (from learning to openness), but perhaps foremost it is fun.
So let me lead with this: Guix, for me, is the most fun I’ve had in Linux in a long time. There are some clear epochs in my Linux life, like being on the bleeding edge as 64-bit went mainstream, compiling kernels (and everything else) on Gentoo, to more recently VFIO and then Proton. Distros in my life have mostly gone from Debian to Gentoo to Arch, to what I think is now my “forever $HOME”: GNU Guix. I’ve always wanted to see what the latest and greatest is: Guix is new and different in a way that truly moves the Linux scene forward.
The ongoing saga of modders versus Take-Two continues on, after some people behind the Grand Theft Auto fan projects "re3" and "reVC" got their work taken down from GitHub and then sued.
With the two projects, the developers recreated the game engines used for Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City, which were done through reverse engineering. There was a bit of back and forth as Take-Two sent a DMCA claim to have the projects taken down, a counter-claim was filed that put both back up and then Take-Two formally sent in the lawyers with the lawsuit to get payments in damages.
Based on the SpringRTS game engine, which itself started off by getting Total Annihilation into 3D, Beyond All Reason is going to be a standalone free RTS and it's coming along nicely.
The developers announced recently how they've been hacking away at the old Spring engine, to bring the performance up to modern standards. Some of what they've added in includes a whole new multithreaded pathing system, along with moving to modern OpenGL4 rendering. The result is impressive with better performance, and support for thousands more units and buildings in a single game.
Ready to try out the free and open source Godot Engine? Here's a fun chance. As part of the month-long Go Godot Jam 2 Festival, their Game Jam will start soon!
The main target for the whole thing is of course the Godot audience, however the Festival as a whole is hoping to bring in new people into gave development and showcase Godot as a solid alternative for people looking to switch engines. Officially, the actual Game Jam starts on November 19 but at 10PM UTC the timer ticking down on the itch.io page is up where the actual theme will be revealed.
CMake is increasingly becoming the de-facto build system for C++ projects. While it has been possible to build Qt applications using CMake for a long time, with Qt6, Qt switched its own internal build system to CMake.
The KDE Community was among the first large, open-source projects that adopted CMake about 15 years ago. Over this time, a lot of experience with CMake has accumulated in the community and solutions for recurring problems have been implemented.
Howdy folks! I want to announce a game for GNOME that I’ve been working on for a few months.
I’ve always enjoyed solving Crossword puzzles. It’s something I grew up doing as a kid, and we continue to do them as a family at the dinner table at night. I’ve wanted to try my hand at writing crosswords for a while, but there isn’t really a good tool available for doing so, and certainly no free software ones that work well with a recent GNOME release. I recently bought myself a lovely new Fedora-loaded Lenovo, and after it arrived, I thought I’d take a shot at writing such a tool.
If you own a laptop (Dell, HP, Lenovo) with a WWAN module, it is very likely that the modules are FCC-locked on every boot, and the special FCC unlock procedure needs to be run before they can be used.
Until ModemManager 1.18.2, the procedure was automatically run for the FCC unlock procedures we knew about, but this will no longer happen. Once 1.18.4 is out, the procedure will need to be explicitly enabled by each user, under their own responsibility, or otherwise implicitly enabled after installing an official FCC unlock tool provided by the manufacturer itself.
As I have reported recently the Multiple Sound Card Wizard is ALSA-centric, with bluez-alsa support bolted on last year, and a first attempt to bolt on pulseaudio support. Now, attempting to improve the pulseaudio support.
The code is still based on setting the default sound card in /etc/asound.conf, though that might turn out to be limiting.
The guys testing Easy 3.1.10 reported after plugging in a USB sound adapter, after a reboot, there was no network connection.
If this article began with a cartoon representing how much time had passed since the start of the pandemic, you’d see a caricature of me with a waist-length ZZ Top-style beard, scratching lines on the wall of my cell to indicate each day that had passed. Each day would be represented by a single line, and the wall would be covered with hundreds of lines.
During those 500+ days, I haven’t been on a plane or in an office, yet I may have accomplished more than in any other period of my career. I’m sure some road warriors will read that and be saddened. But for me, it served as a semi-sabbatical from the traditional office and gave me a chance to evolve how I work as a CIO.
In today’s digital workplace, listening can be harder than ever. We are continuously inundated with waves of information battling for our attention. Just as you’re collecting your thoughts from one meeting, you’re heading straight into the next.
Listening is one of the most powerful tools you possess as a leader. It helps you build trust and foster loyalty. It lets others know that they are important to you and that you value what they have to say.
Unfortunately, many leaders don’t carry this awareness and never learned how to effectively listen. In fact, less than two percent of all professionals have had formal training to improve their listening skills.
In a previous article, I explained that OpenJDK's Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler relies heavily on speculation to achieve higher performance. This optimization technique generates code under an assumption that is expected to be correct but can't be proven certain. If the assumption turns out to be wrong, the JIT compiler prevents incorrect execution by returning control to the bytecode interpreter. This process is called deoptimization.
This article explains how profiling at runtime can improve speculation and contribute to optimization in other ways. I'll show examples of profile data collected at runtime, explain how the JIT compiler uses the data, and illustrate the benefits of runtime profiling.
After designing a universal application image that will run well on Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift—and that will pass Red Hat Container Certification—your next consideration is how to successfully build and store each image. This article discusses how to use a build pipeline to implement two best practices: Automating compliance with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and tagging each image with a unique identifier. Using a build pipeline to build and store images automates the process and makes it repeatable and reliable. I'll also discuss the Red Hat Container Certification requirements for each of these best practices.
This article introduces a high-level design to implement an authorization cache associated with the Envoy proxy using WebAssembly. The goal of this project is to reduce the latencies of HTTP requests passing through the Envoy proxy by reducing the traffic to the service responsible for authentication and authorization of requests. The cache stores data about authorization so that the external service needs to be contacted only on cache misses, instead of for every HTTP request.
We also provide the source code of an authorization cache that interacts with Red Hat 3scale API Management. The cache was implemented as a part of the Google Summer of Code 2021 project.
This article is the first in a two-part series. This first article introduces a high-level, generic design that will give you a basic idea of the cache's overall functionality. The second part explains the major design decisions and implementation details.
The latest iteration of CentOS alternative, Rocky Linux has arrived and includes numerous updates as well as support for Secure Boot.
Soon after Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 was released, AlmaLinux 8.5 Stable was made available. Not to be outshined, the original developer of CentOS has unleashed the 8.5 version of Rocky Linux, which introduces a crucial feature for mass adoptions, Secure Boot support.
Main developer (and original creator of CentOS), Gregory Kurtzer, says of this release, “There was an amazing amount of work and collaboration that went into this release. The Rocky Release Engineering team went far and above the call of duty to make 8.5 a reality so quickly.”
Maintaining security for Linux systems can be a complex task, especially as your number of servers and applications increases. The SCAP Security Guide, which is used in various Red Hat technologies like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite, can help you maintain system compliance with select security baselines.
In this post, we’ll share some details about the SCAP profiles for ANSSI-BP-028, a guideline published by Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information (ANSSI), the French National Information Security Agency, and how you use them to assist in hardening your RHEL 7 and 8 environments.
Over the past several years, Discover has seen significant growth in our product offerings and in our market share. Behind the scenes, this requires tremendous operational rigor to maintain. With a company of our size and the vast number of processes that span across the business, it becomes clear just how important automation is to our success. Especially within the financial services industry, which is highly regulated, the ability to create predictable and consistent processes is key to unlocking the ability to innovate and continuing our growth trend.
When our CIO joined the company two years ago, he initiated a transition to a product-based organization, which required focus on fundamental pillars like reliability, tech-optimization and automation as key enablers for its success. Pockets of automation activity had popped up organically, but connectivity across the company was missing. So, we launched Extreme Automation - a dedicated program to holistically push toward a true culture of automation. Our ambitious vision was for each manual process across Discover to be understood, optimized, automated or eliminated.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rules-based software that performs tasks typically accomplished with human intervention. Machine learning (ML) is a subset of AI in which the AI is able to learn and develop over time. These two terms are often combined as AI/ML. AI/ML helps organizations extract insights and value from the massive amounts of data they collect.
While the term may conjure images of robots and science fiction, real-world AI/ML applications are shaping societies in numerous (and sometimes unexpected) ways. According to Grand View Research, "the global [AI] market size was valued at US$62.35 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand" to US$997.8 billion by 2028. It’s no wonder with all sorts of industries using AI/MLââ¬â¢including to advance breast cancer detection, help reduce road deaths, improve education, and even help people invest via "AI-powered robo-advisors."
Proxmox has released version 7.1 of Proxmox Virtual Environment based on Debian Bullseye 11.1, but using a newer Linux kernel 5.13.
Proxmox VE (Virtual Environment) is a complete, open source server management platform for enterprise virtualization. It integrates the KVM (Kernal-based Virtual Machine) hypervisor and Linux Containers (LXC), software-defined storage, and networking functionality on a single platform.
One of the greatest features of Proxmox is its managed web-based interface, accessible after installation. This means that you can manage Proxmox through the web interface based on the javascript framework, and it allows the administrator to control all features.
Yesterday the Enterprise software developer Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH has released version 7.1 of its server virtualization management platform, Proxmox Virtual Environment, so let’s check what’s new.
[Xasin] began with Tap version 1 back in 2019, and learned all about coding for BLE, making 3D printed cases, and eventually working out all the kinks in the system. Tap v1 used capacitive touch sensing, but the current version detects physical taps using an accelerometer and also can detect gestures. Feature creep along the way brings a sensor array, an array of emotive LEDs, an OLED screen, and a speaker. The whole thing is powered by a dual-core ESP32 Pico MCU. [Xasin] has published his project on GitHub in case you want to explore some of these other features on your own.
Hopefully you’ve been with us during the roller-coaster ride of Arduino EDUvision season 4, which just came to a close. We’ve had a wonderful time, and the response from the community has been outstanding.
Arduino EDUvision began life as a way to compensate for the lack of in-person events during 2020. And now we’ve already live streamed 40 episodes, with thousands of viewers tuning in each week as we interview guests from across education, tech, science and STEM.
The Chrome team is excited to announce the promotion of Chrome 97 to the Beta channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. Chrome 97.0.4692.20 contains our usual under-the-hood performance and stability tweaks, but there are also some cool new features to explore - please head to the Chromium blog to learn more!
Most notable with today's Chrome 97 beta release is initial support for WebTransport. WebTransport is a protocol framework similar to WebRTC data channels but principally for clients constrained by the web security model to communicate with a remote server using a secure, multi-plexed transport. WebTransport uses the HTTP/3 protocol for bidirectional transport. Unlike WebSockets that is TCP-based, WebTransport relies on UDP-like datagrams and cancellable streams. Learn more about WebTransport via the W3C working draft at W3.org.
Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links. Chrome 97 is beta as of November 18, 2021.
Starting today, we will be rolling out this change to M97 Beta, we will be re-configuring our Privacy and Security settings related to data a site can store (e.g. cookies). Users can now delete all data stored by an individual site by navigating to Settings > Privacy and Security > Site Settings > View permissions and data stored across files, where they’ll land on chrome://settings/content/all. We will be removing the more granular controls found when navigating to Settings > Privacy and Security > Cookies and other site data > See all cookies and site data at chrome://settings/siteData from Settings. This capability remains accessible for developers, the intended audience for this level of granularity, in DevTools.
Mouse gestures are mouse movement and key combinations that give you the power to customize the way you maneuver around web pages. If your online work requires a fair amount of distinct, repetitive activity—things like rapid page scrolling, opening links in background tabs, closing batches of open tabs, etc.—the right mouse gesture can make a major impact on your task efficiency. Here are a few browser extensions that provide excellent mouse gesture features…
A big thank you to all the Outreachy applicants who applied for this cycle.
The pgAdmin Development Team is pleased to announce pgAdmin 4 version 6.2. This release of pgAdmin 4 includes 22 bug fixes and new features. For more details please see the release notes.
pgAdmin is the leading Open Source graphical management tool for PostgreSQL. For more information, please see the website.
Pgpool-II is a tool to add useful features to PostgreSQL, including..
StackGres 1.0.0 is an Open Source Postgres-as-a-Service that runs on any Kubernetes environment. StackGres is the Postgres platform with more Postgres extensions available: 120 as of today. Many more to come in the future.
Having been canceled the past two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Nordic PGDay is once again scheduled to be an in-person event for the Nordic PostgreSQL community. The format is like before: a one-day single-track event - packed with great content but in a room big enough to ensure desired social distancing.
Our call for papers is now open, accepting proposals until the end of the year. We welcome speakers from all parts of the world, all talks will be given in English. Technical details, case studies, good ideas or bad ideas -- all are good ideas for topics. All speakers get free entrance, so it's also a good excuse to come visit Finland!
The north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch to open source software, including LibreOffice, in its administration and schools.
In doing so, the state wants to reduce its dependence on proprietary software, and eventually end it altogether. By the end of 2026, Microsoft Office is to be replaced by LibreOffice on all 25,000 computers used by civil servants and employees (including teachers), and the Windows operating system is to be replaced by GNU/Linux.
The necessary steps for this are specified in the planning of the Schleswig-Holstein state parliament (German), as digital minister Jan Philipp Albrecht explains in an interview with c’t (also German – Google Translate version here).
The Dutch government is about to form itself and setting up goals for the next term. With an open letter, the FSFE urges the coalition parties to implement the "open, unless" policy of 2020 and thus the principle of Public Money? Public Code!
Free Software gives everybody the right to use, study, share, and improve software. This right helps support other fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, press and privacy. With the principle of "Public Money? Public Code!" implemented, the government will improve the transparency and digital sovereignty.
The French government showed last week just how all-in they are when it comes to open technologies — especially open source software.
Speaking at the close of the inaugural Open Source Experience conference in Paris, France’s Public Transformation and Civil Service Minister Amélie de Montchalin spelled out the French government’s plans for open source, which included an announcement of the launch of the code.gouv.fr platform, a two-year-in-the-making project that has ambitions to inventory all source code published by public organizations.
During her address, she indicated that the French government hopes its actions will will have as “many States seek to embark” on the road to adopting and promoting the use of open technologies, saying, “We must now build the public action of the new century.”
As a former software engineer who’s mostly worked with C programming, and to a lesser extent assembler, I know in my heart that those are the two most efficient programming languages since they are so close to the hardware.
But to remove any doubts, a team of Portuguese university researchers attempted to quantify the energy efficiency of different programming languages (and of their compiler/interpreter) in a paper entitled Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages published in 2017, where they looked at the runtime, memory usage, and energy consumption of twenty-seven well-known programming languages. C is the uncontested winner here being the most efficient, while Python, which I’ll now call the polluters’ programming language :), is right at the bottom of the scale together with Perl.
The study goes through the methodology and various benchmarks, but let’s pick the binary-trees results to illustrate the point starting with compiled code.
Have you ever wondered if there is a correlation between a computer’s energy consumption and the choice of programming languages? Well, a group Portuguese university researchers did and set out to quantify it. Their 2017 research paper entitled Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages / How Do Energy, Time, and Memory Relate? may have escaped your attention, as it did ours.
Today Volker Birk and I were speaking over lunch about object initialisation in C++ and about how weakly defined a program entry point is, because of objects with static storage duration.
Volker wrote a short program whose output changes after reversing the order of two variable definitions, both out of a main function whose entire body was return 0;. He discussed it in German, on his blog.
CMake is increasingly becoming the de-facto build system for C++ projects. While it has been possible to build Qt applications using CMake for a long time, with Qt6, Qt switched its own internal build system to CMake.
The KDE Community was among the first large, open-source projects that adopted CMake about 15 years ago. Over this time, a lot of experience with CMake has accumulated in the community and solutions for recurring problems have been implemented.
These solutions are available for everyone in the Extra CMake Modules framework, or ECM, for short.
Wow! The response to the last Rustc Reading Club was overwhelming – literally! We maxed out the number of potential zoom attendees and I couldn’t even join the call! It’s clear that there’s a lot of demand here, which is great. We’ve decided to take another stab at running the Rustc Reading Club, but we’re going to try it a bit differently this time. We’re going to start by selecting a smaller group to do it a few times and see how it goes, and then decide how to scale up.
Who are you? No, who are you really? You’re an amalgamation of influences from your family, your friends, the media, and the parasocial relationships you have with fictional characters. It’s okay; we all are. It can’t be helped that there’s a lot of it about.
[Kim Pimmel]’s YOU examines this question of identity in the form of projected typography. YOU are solidly laser-cut at birth, but then come the influences — the water of everyday life that surrounds you, the lights that mask your dread or lay you bare, and the prisms of circumstance that twist the light into brilliant patterns that burn memories into your brain.
In theory, vinyl is capable of returning higher frequencies than CD, assuming that you as the listener have a decent enough record player. But we’ve also established that unless you are a child you probably won’t be able to hear the difference much if at all.
The last nail in the vinyl coffin, however, is that while a vinyl record may have the capability to hold more information than a CD, the reality is that these days it’s generated from the same master as its digital rivals, so it has probably been cut from the same 44.1 kHz, 16 bit data stream anyway. Maybe vintage recordings can escape this, but then you need to think about the frequency response of whatever magnetic tape was in the studio back when it was recorded. It might be that the reason that you can’t hear the difference between your vinyl and your CDs is that there isn’t a difference to hear in the first place.
What is certainly true is that a good quality cartridge, turntable, and amp will deliver a superlative listening experience that is the equal of an uncompressed digital stream. And that a lousy turntable will sound atrocious. So enjoy your vinyl if you still use it, after all there’s a pleasure to be had in the feel and look of a 12ââ¬Â³ album and its cover. But perhaps don’t make any claims about it that can’t be substantiated without a calibrated reference 10-year-old child.
These days, a lot of phones don’t have audio jacks anymore. It can make it hard to listen to music if your favorite headphones aren’t already wireless-enabled. Minty Tunes solves that problem, combined with a little Altoids tin flair.
Call it the Teamsification of Microsoft Edge: the software giant revealed that it will add yet another superfluous feature to its web browser. And this one is maybe not such a great idea.
Windows 11 lets you choose your default browser, but it takes a lot of clicks and Microsoft sometimes forces you to use Edge, anyway. Firefox had a workaround, but Microsoft calls it “improper” and will soon block it.
Imagine running a trillion dollar company that bundles various open source components into your products, making billions of dollars of profit annually. When one of your users reach out and ask for help, with the product you ship to your customers, you instead refer the user to the open source project. The project which is run by volunteers which you never sponsored with a cent.
While browsing through your newly updated Windows 11, you may have noticed that some of the system's links launch in Microsoft Edge, even if you set Chrome or Firefox to your default browser. If you’re confused about what’s happening, you’re not the only one.
You'll notice this happen more often when you launch a link in one of Windows 11's apps. For example, clicking an article in the "News and Interests" widget always launches itself in Microsoft’s browser, and not whichever browser you've set as the default for websites.
But why is this happening? Let's dive in and have a closer look.
Last month I reported on activity around Straight Line Speculation "SLS" mitigation for x86_64 CPUs, similar to the work carried out by Arm last year on their SLS vulnerability. That work on the x86 (x86_64 inclusive) side has now been merged to GCC 12 Git and a kernel patch is expected to come shortly that will flip it on as the latest CPU security protection.
Prior to a few weeks ago, much of the Straight Line Speculation talk was in reference to mitigating on Arm with GCC and LLVM/Clang having already merged their mitigation. But now there has been increasing x86_64 activity culminating with the GNU Compiler Collection support being merged on Wednesday.
Bitlocker is the Full Disk Encryption (FDE) solution offered by Microsoft for its Windows operating systems starting with Windows Vista to protect users’ data at rest. The solution offers various configurations including several ways to store the decryption key. The most common configuration consists in storing the Volume Master Key (VMK) within the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) that is embedded in recent computers.
This setup is interesting because the decryption is completely transparent to the user. This benefit surpasses others since many companies are reluctant to configure an additional password/PIN for the user to boot its computer. The downside is that it opens the door to several attacks including the TPM sniffing described in this post but also DMA or Cold Boot attacks.
Under the hood, the TPM checks various system properties during the startup to ensure that the boot sequence has not been altered. If the validation succeeds, the VMK is released and transmitted to the CPU which could start to decrypt the disk and to load the operating system.
BusyBox is an open-source utility that combines several standard Unix tools such as cp, ls, grep into a single binary or executable file.
DevOps firm JFrog and industrial cybersecurity company, Claroty’s researchers have published a joint report to share details of fourteen vulnerabilities they identified in the BusyBox Linux utility.
Drupal has released security updates to address vulnerabilities that could affect versions 8.9, 9.1, and 9.2. An attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
CISA encourages users and administrators to review Drupal Security Advisory SA-CORE-2021-011 and apply the necessary updates.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (binutils, firefox, flatpak, freerdp, httpd, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, kernel, openssl, and thunderbird), Fedora (python-sport-activities-features, rpki-client, and vim), and Red Hat (devtoolset-10-annobin and devtoolset-10-binutils).
Team82 and JFrog have announced the discovery, by using static and dynamic techniques, of 14 vulnerabilities affecting the latest version of BusyBox.
Over 200 recording artists, including Tom Morello, Mannequin Pussy, Speedy Ortiz, Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna, and Jeff Rosenstock, have signed off on an open letter demanding that Denver’s famed Red Rocks Amphitheater, ticketing company AXS, and its parent company AEG Worldwide, cancel its contracts to begin implementing palm-scanning technology from Amazon for entry at the venue.
AEG and AXS announced the addition of the Amazon One Palm Recognition service for Red Rocks in September, touting the concept’s potential as a more convenient, secure, and hygienic alternative for concertgoers to be admitted to a venue compared to traditional tickets. The company said it would add the technology to more of its venues in the future. Critics, however, worry implementing palm scanners at shows comes with serious privacy and safety concerns for concertgoers.
The Deep State definitely doesn’t like VPNs. They have the Southern Poverty Law Center defaming VPN (and Brave Browser, and Matrix) users as “extremists and terrorists”, and Apple’s Tim Cook says that if you want privacy from their on-device scanning that can detect any file at all that the government is looking for (Windows already has one called “Defender”), you’re probably a pedophile, and if you want Freedom-respecting software, you can use an Android phone (because it has F-Droid).
We’ve come a long way from the Internet of the 90s and early 00s. Not just in terms of technology, capabilities, and culture, but in the attitude most of us take when accessing the ‘net. In those early days most users had a militant drive to keep any personal or identifying information to themselves beyond the occasional (and often completely fictional) a/s/l, and before eBay and Amazon normalized online shopping it was unheard of to even type in a credit card number. On today’s internet we do all of these things with reckless abandon, and to make matters worse most of us carry around a device which not only holds all of our personal information but also reports everything about us, from our browsing habits to our locations, back to databases to be stored indefinitely.
Roy Schestowitz asks why I pay for VPNs with the Google Play Store.
My answer: It’s basically a payment condom.
People complain they give NordVPN their credit card and can’t stop them from billing them again every month after they cancel.
In July, 2021, a press release by the Government of Meghalaya stated that facial recognition technology (FRT) would be used to verify the identity of pensioners to issue a Digital Life Certificate. On August 5, 2021, we provided support to Mr. Jade Jeremiah Lyngdoh, a law student, in sending a legal notice to the relevant authorities seeking reconsideration of such use of FRT in view of the possible privacy concerns. The Meghalaya Government by its response dated November 1, 2021 has explained its position. We welcome the department’s reply and believe that it encourages discussion and transparency around FRT, however, the reply suffers from various legal infirmities which we have analysed below.
There were no verifiable, centralised records of Internet shutdowns in the country. Neither the Ministry of Home Affairs nor the Department of Telecom maintain such a record, the parliamentary standing committee on information and technology pointed out in its report adopted on Tuesday.
The committee, headed by senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, pressed for a detailed study on the economic impact owing to frequent and prolonged Internet shutdowns.
Would you ever rent a house you have never seen, whose owner you have never met, in a city you have never visited? Would you ever pay upfront to a person you do not know, and you will never meet, who promises to deliver an object you have never seen? A few decades ago, the answers to these questions would have been negative for most customers. Conversely, nowadays, millions of users rely on digital platforms like Airbnb and eBay to do precisely as described above. How is that possible? How did users around the world start to trust each other after millennia of skepticism?
An answer to such questions relies on the innovative way digital marketplaces reduce information asymmetry between parties: review systems. In almost all digital platforms, users can review the services they have experienced, providing new information to prospective users.
My paper “Competition and Reputation in a Congested Marketplace: Theory and Evidence from Airbnb” addresses such questions. Here I study how ratings on Airbnb help hosts to build their reputation, gain the trust of potential guests, and increase their profits.
On Tuesday, the Durham, North Carolina-based Open Invention Network announced that the Chinese firm Bilbili has thrown its patents into pot to protect the Linux system from patent trolls by becoming an OIN member. Shanghai-based Bilbili operates a video sharing website that focuses on animation, comics, and games. The site has 237 million active monthly users and 20.9 million paying users, according to the data company Statista.
The recommended cut-off dates to order from our shop by to ensure delivery in time for Dec 25th.
