I started using Linux in '97, and in the past couple of weeks, I've actually watched Linux trend on Twitter at least three times. That's something I never thought I'd see, but am thrilled it's happened. To me, that's a sign the open-source operating system is starting to gain more and more market share on the desktop.
As the Linux desktop market share continues to climb, it means more and more new users will be hopping on board. That's why I started this new "Sick of Windows?" series that walks new users through each step of using the open-source operating system. First I demonstrated how to test-drive Linux and followed it up with how to install Linux. During this series, I've used elementary OS as an example. The reason is that elementary OS offers one of the cleanest and simplest experiences (with one exception—more on that in a bit) in all of Linux land. Does that mean it's the best distribution to use? Not necessarily. And given there's a vast array of distributions to choose from, there is something for everyone. The good news is that the installation of elementary OS is a great representation of how easy Linux is to install. If you can install this operating system, you can install Ubuntu, Linux Mint, ZorinOS, Deepin and just about any of the modern versions of Linux.
The recommended OS is Ubuntu Kylin, the official Chinese version of Ubuntu, but with the ability to boot from USB other Linux distros should be viable. OpenSUSE and Debian can be installed without issue, according to Dragonbox. A USB to Ethernet adapter is included as the built-in Qualcomm AR 8035 network card doesn’t work well with all Linux distributions. Interestingly, two percent of the price of each unit sold goes to the developer of Box86/Box64.
British Linux PC vendor Star Labs now has support for their StarBook Mk V laptop upstreamed into Coreboot, which marks their second product having this achievement.
Earlier this year the Star Labs LabTop Mk III/IV support was upstreamed into Coreboot. Now as of today the StarBook Mk V support has been upstreamed in Coreboot. While running on Coreboot, with the StarBook Mk V being Intel Tiger Lake based, it still is reliant on the closed-source Intel firmware support package (FSP) and Management Engine (ME). There are also blobs required for the ITE EC firmware and Intel Flash Descriptor.
Amazon has announced a preview release of its upcoming AL2022 distribution. The company plans to support AL2022 for five years after its release.
Amazon’s cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has put out a preview of its custom Amazon Linux distro (AL2022), while committing to refreshing the distro every two years.
Amazon Linux is popular with AWS users for its tight integration with AWS tools, and no license costs. The service also ensures that its new features work as advertised with the distro.
In the November 2021 survey we received responses from 1,175,392,792 sites across 267,027,794 unique domains and 11,525,855 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 4.06 million sites, but a gain of 1.60 million domains and 137,000 computers.
nginx gained the largest number of domains (+741,000) and web-facing computers (+81,300) this month and continues to lead in both metrics with market shares of 30.1% and 37.3%.
Further down in the market, there was also a noticeable increase in the total number of web-facing computers running LiteSpeed, which went up by 11,200 to 101,000 (+12.5%), although this resulted in only a 1.44% increase in domains. These counts include sites that run on LiteSpeed Web Server and its open source variant, OpenLiteSpeed, both of which exhibit the same “LiteSpeed” server banner.
Both nginx and Apache lost nearly 4 million hostnames each, reducing their sites market shares to 34.7% and 24.4%. Meanwhile, Cloudflare gained 1.15 million sites, which has taken its total up to 58.6 million (+2.00%) and increased its sites share to 4.99%.
nginx and Apache also suffered losses amongst the top million websites, paving the way for Microsoft to increase its presence by 2,369 sites (+3.75%). Microsoft web server software is now used by 65,600 of the top million sites, but Apache is still the most commonly used web server in this sector, with 240,000 of the top million sites using it, and nginx is not far behind with 224,000.
As previously announced, State of the Word will be livestreamed from New York City. That means that you can join the fun either online or in person, on December 14, 2021, between 5 and 7 pm EST!
To join State of the Word 2021 online, check your Meetup chapter for a local watch party, or simply visit wordpress.org/news, where the livestream will be embedded.
If you would like to participate in person in New York City, please request a seat by filling out the registration form by Sunday, November 28. Not all requests will receive a seat due to venue capacity, but everyone who requests one will receive further notification on Tuesday, November 30.
Mixed news for the Steam Deck, deja vu in Germany, Canonical looks to solve an industry-wide issue, Stadia’s death rattle, Apple’s nod towards right to repair, and KDE Korner.
Google has been working on reducing fragmentation on Android for years, though part of the cause of that is the inherent nature of Android and the dual-edged sword of choice and freedom. There are countless OEMs active in the space, and all of them want to make their own modifications for their own devices. The problem then is that it looks like Android OS updates are slow to roll out across the board, but there’s not a lot that Google can actually do to force OEMs to update their devices. As such, the next best thing that Google can do is make the update process as easy and frictionless as possible.
Last week I wrote about a big TCP performance optimization having been queued up into net-next for Linux 5.17. That optimization can yield significant TCP throughput improvements especially with today's high-end 100Gb+ network hardware. There is now another separate juicy optimization to benefit the Linux network performance in the next kernel cycle.
This completely separate optimization but that will also benefit the Linux 5.17 network code path is optimizing the x86_64 csum_partial() function. This latest optimization also comes from Google's Eric Dumazet.
CFS Zen Tweaks is a bash script and systemd service that tweak the Linux CPU scheduler for better desktop responsiveness when under heavy CPU utilization.
The default kernel settings are not tweaked for desktop usage, with high throughput being prioritized over latency, notes the CFS Zen Tweaks author. This results in a less responsive desktop under heavy CPU load. Using CFS Zen Tweaks, you should notice an improved desktop responsiveness - for example, its author mentions that before using this, YouTube would lag while compiling code, and that's no longer the case using the CFS Zen tweaks.
The CFS Zen Tweaks project adjusts the default kernel CPU scheduler (CFS or Completely Fair Scheduler) for better desktop responsiveness. The CFS CPU scheduler settings come from Linux ZEN kernel, which was created to provide a better Linux kernel for everyday systems. Note that only the CFS CPU scheduler tweaks are used from the ZEN kernel, while this custom kernel also has other tweaks.
Given current memory pricing and extremely limited availability of DDR5 memory modules, many Phoronix readers have been requesting DDR4 vs. DDR5 memory benchmarks for Alder Lake on Linux. After picking up a DDR4 Z690 motherboard, here are some reference benchmarks between DDR4 and DDR5 when testing with the Core i5 12600K on Ubuntu Linux in a variety of real-world workloads.
The Alder Lake benchmarking at Phoronix to this point has been with the ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-E GAMING WiFi and Corsair Vengeance 2 x 32GB DDR5-4400 C36 memory, both kindly provided by Intel as part of our review kit. DDR5 commands a significant premium at the moment with that 64GB DDR5-4400 kit currently retailing for $555 USD or even the 32GB version for $295, but good luck finding it in stock or even close to that MSRP if finding it resold online.
Free and open-source clone of Paint.Net 3.0, Pinta, released version 1.7.1 a few days ago with improvements and bug-fixes.
The release is the final version based on GTK2, as the GTK3 / .NET 6 version is nearly ready!
Pinta 1.7.1 is a small release with minor new features to improve user experience. For image with large resolution (or zoomed in), you may use mouse wheel to scroll up / down. Now by holding Shift + mouse wheel, the canvas can be scrolled horizontally.
Same to GIMP, user may now press X to exchange background and foreground palette colors quickly in Pinta since v1.7.1. And, zooming in and out can now be done without pressing the Ctrl key
The release also improved the pop-up dialog when you trying to open an unsupported file format. The file open dialog by default shows only supported images, including ani, png, bmp, jpg, gif, icns, ico, jpeg, ora, pnm, qtif, svg, tga, tif, tiff, xbm, xpm. If you chose show “All files” and selected an unsupported file, it will prompt that file not support and show you all supported file formats.
While OpenPrinting is now leading development of the CUPS print server, PAPPL continues to be developed by CUPS founder Michael Sweet as a modern open-source printer application framework. PAPPL 1.1 as a big feature release is on the way.
PAPPL 1.0 released last December for this open-source framework/library for developing CUPS Printer Applications as the replacement to conventional printer drivers. PAPPL was designed as part of Michael Sweet's work on LPrint and Gutenprint software but can be used for other purposes too.
The Linux script command has been around for ages and provides a simple but useful service. It lets you record command line activity – both input and output. This can be very helpful in troubleshooting problems or verifying what was done later by reviewing the commands that were run along with their output.
Even if you've used the script command time to time, it offers more options than many of us realize. In this post, we will look at the simplest use of script and some of the options that can make it even more useful.
The easiest way to use the script command is simply to type "script" in the terminal window and press ^d when you want to stop the recording. The output, by default, will be saved in a file called "typescript". You will see the file name that is used in the first line of output.
Self-compressed scrips are a quick, reliable way to distribute software or data to users without a package manager, elevated privileges, or other limitations.
With every type of Operating System (OS), there needs to be security in place. With CentOS or Ubuntu, there is the Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM).
One of my development server contains millions of files under a single directory. To free the disk space, we decided to move to them a new folder created on another disk attached to same system. When tried to move file with mv command, received the following error.
The latest user guides from the LibreOffice documentation team are LibreOffice 7.2 Impress and LibreOffice 7.2 Calc, available in free PDF, ODT, or to read in a browser. Low-cost printed copies are available from Lulu.com.
The Hunting ELK or simply the HELK is an Open Source Threat Hunting Platform with advanced analytics capabilities such as SQL declarative language, graphing, structured streaming, and even machine learning via Jupyter notebooks and Apache Spark over an ELK stack.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FreeOffice on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, FreeOffice is a free, full-featured office suite developed by a German-based software company named SoftMaker. It is cross-platform and used in Windows, Mac, and Linux. It has a word processor, spreadsheet application, and presentation program that are seamlessly compatible with Microsoft Office.
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 FreeOffice 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.
UVdesk is a free, open-source, and SaaS-based helpdesk solution for any business process to deliver the best customer service. It is a simple, flexible, user-friendly, and alternative to other popular support platforms. It is written in PHP and based on the Symfony framework. You can integrate UVdesk with multiple marketplaces including, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and Flipkart to support your valuable customer.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to install UVdesk helpdesk solution with Apache on Debian 11.
As we all know, this is the age of social media; and we all tend to text each other via Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, Imo, and other social media platforms. However, imagine the scenario that you are in a remote area and can’t get a strong internet signal or your Android device has run out of data. Furthermore, you’re also not able to communicate verbally because of having a poor network signal. Now, you only have one communication option: texting via phone to your recipient’s numbers as you’ve at least a signal for sending the text. Speaking of texting, Android introduces the text schedule send feature, and users can take advantage of this feature to many different degrees.
For instance, there is something important you would like to SMS, and you need to type the message right now quickly; otherwise, you might forget what exactly you want to say. What should you do now? An alternative method could be taking a note, creating an event on your calendar, or setting up an alarm with the message to remind yourself later.
However, does this sound convenient and easy if you already have a text schedule send feature on your Android device? I would say NO!
Sometimes you may want to encrypt your hard disk so that when someone connects your hard drive to their computer they need to provide user credentials to mount the drive. In Linux, it is possible to encrypt individual block devices. In this article, we will learn how to encrypt block devices in Linux using LUKS. LUKS is the Linux encryption layer that can be used to encrypt the entire root partition, a logical volume, or a specific partition.
If I’m watching movies in a language I don’t understand, I want subtitles. On my computers this is possible as long as there is a subtitles file with the name suffix .srt and the same prefix name as the .mp4 video file in the same directory. I usually prefer to view movies on my TV with a bigger screen, so I copy the movie to a HDD that is normally connected to my TV (a FINLUX model 43-FUD-8020). However, the built-in media player in the TV does not show the subtitles in the .srt file, even when it is in the same directory as the .mp4 file. Therefore I use the MKVToolNix utility mkvmerge to put the movie and subtitles into a Matroska multimedia container (.mkv file), and the TV’s media player can play these .mkv files and does display the subtitles. In fact, so can my laptops and desktop running Linux (I have not tried on a machine running Windows 10, but I assume Windows 10 would have no trouble either).
Most software or application in Ubuntu, does not come as one package and it depends on other packages to work as intended. These supporting packages are called dependency packages as they are required for the proper working of the software. Usually, the package manager in your system automatically resolves these dependencies, but sometimes an issue or error occurs and you have to resolve the issue manually.
In that case, it is better to have a detailed picture of the dependencies of the package so that you can locate the issue easily. Therefore, You will learn how to check the dependencies of any package in this article.
Virtualbox is an open-source application for running operating systems virtually in our base system and this application is available for multiple operating systems (ie) Windows, Linux, and macOS.
It has a large number of features, high performing software used in enterprise-level and licensed under General Public License (GPL). It is developed by a community based on a dedicated company.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Oracle VirtualBox 6.1.30 in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 19.10, CentOS 8 / Redhat 8, and Fedora.
This guide will show how to upgrade to Debian 11 Bullseye, which is the latest version of the operating system, released on August 14, 2021.
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, which relies on client/server technology. It is a software application that transfers files between systems. The FTP protocol was developed in the 1970s and is one of the most commonly used protocols to transfer data between computers over the Internet.
However, despite being an old methodology, users still find it to be one of the best and most commonly used protocols, and users enjoy using it for uploading and downloading files in their day-to-day work. Setting up an FTP server on Linux is generally quite simple.
Essentially, this FTP software package performs two (2) basic tasks: 'Put' and 'Get. When "Put" is used, files will be copied from a local computer to a remote computer, while "Get" handles the opposite. FTP daemon 'vsftpd' is a server component that constantly listens for FTP requests from remote clients. It manages the log-in process and establishes the connection when a request is received. By default, it works with port 21 and executes any commands sent by the FTP client during the session.
This step-by-step guide will teach you how to install and configure FTP servers (vsftpd) for users with local accounts to upload/download files in Rocky Linux 8.4. Similarly, this guide can be used with RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, and Ubuntu with a few minor modifications.
Backend services and microservices typically use state machines to maintain the state of their resources, whether the state machine is defined explicitly or not. To create a well-written service, you must expressly and clearly define its state machine, so that users know what to expect and can ensure that tests cover all possible (and impossible) transitions.
In this article, you'll learn important guidelines for building state machines. You'll also get an introduction to stateswitch, a Go library that you can use to organize a state machine's transition logic.
This tutorial explains how to install Microsoft Windows applications on Trisquel operating sistem. This workaround uses a popular program called Wine, that is, a technology that allows GNU/Linux system to run a lot of W32 executable programs. With Wine, we technically can run both categories, libre software and proprietary software, however in this tutorial we only give examples using libre software. We will install and run W32 version of Gimp, Inkscape, and Super Tux Kart. Enjoy!
In this article we will see how to create our first Pod on Kubernetes Cluster. We shall see the steps to create a pod for Nginx.
In this guide you are going to learn how to configure Google Cloud CDN for external websites which is not hosted on Google cloud and have a custom origin server.
Here we will configure a HTTPS load balancer and setup an external backend service with Network Endpoint Group (NEG) which connects to your server.
The xz command on Linux, macOS, *BSD, and Unix-like systems offer excellent compression. It will outperform zip and other formats when we use xz with tar for maximum reduction in size. For instance, I compressed a directory having 37M size using both xz and zip. The zip file size was 31M, while the xz file was 16M after compression. Pretty impressive, isn’t it? Let us see how to compress the whole directory using xz and tar.
Despite the strong competition over the years, Google Chrome has effortlessly surpassed the list of internet browsers to become one of the most popular and widely used search engines online. Its ease of use, availability and compatibility with several operating systems alongside various notable features has made it adept in the field of browsing. Whether you are using it on Windows, Linux, or Mac OS, Google Chrome is free, easily available, and comes along with many development tools for software developers.
It is not just a web browser but also a complete package for both your desktop and phone. The simple yet fascinating interface is fast, secure and includes Google’s smart built-in extensions and themes, making your working experience a cut above the other browsers.
It happens. Yes, sometimes you can lose track of your passwords, including the root password which is critical in performing root privileged tasks. This can happen for a myriad of reasons including staying for a protracted period without logging in as a root user or having a complex root password – in which case you should consider using a password manager to safely store your password.
In case you have forgotten your root password and have nowhere to retrieve it, worry not. If you have physical access to your server, you can reset your forgotten root password with a few simple steps.
Have you ever asked yourself: How do I migrate from CentOS 7 to AlmaLinux? Well, you don’t need to worry about this anymore, because it’s now possible in just a few easy steps that I will show you in this guide.
This will be especially helpful for users of CentOS 7 who will be left without a clear upgrade path after the end of the year when Red Hat withdraws support for CentOS 8. This is especially important because CentOS 7, which will will lose support in 2024, is assumed to have a much larger user base than CentOS 8, which had only been available for a little over a year when Red Hat announced it was being sunsetted.
As Linux users, we can never undervalue the importance of the FSCK (File System Consistency Check) command, as it scans and troubleshoots your Linux filesystem for performance issues or errors and then tries to fix them if it can.
FSCK is a default pre-installation on all Linux operating system distributions. Therefore, if you had yourself worried about mastering the steps for installing, configuring, and using this Linux filesystem tool.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ISPConfig on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, ISPConfig 3 is an open-source panel for Linux which is capable of managing multiple servers from one control panel. With ISPConfig we can easily add Apache virtual host or Nginx server blocks, create/edit/delete databases, configure cron jobs, create email accounts, and many more.
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 ISPConfig 3 on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
When you get a VPS or a dedicated (bare metal) server, the hosting provider lets you choose the operating system you want to install.
Typically, you can choose from a list of about ten systems. What if your favorite Linux system is not included in that list?
Installing Alpine (or other Linux) on VPS or Bare Metal Server There are perhaps several methods to install a particular Linux distribution of your choice on a remote server.
I wanted to use the ultra lightweight Alpine Linux. It is available as an option on Linode but not on OVH. I primarily use OVH so I used this method to get Alpine on my server.
Welcome to the introduction to Kubernetes course. Kubernetes, also known as k8s or kube, is the most popular container Orchestration tool in the industry which is a Google made product. This Kubernetes tutorial consists of series articles on Kubernetes. In the first part, we will be discussing what is Kubernetes and the basic concepts of Kubernetes.
This course is for absolute beginners, you don’t need to have any pre-requisite knowledge to learn this technology. We will walk you through all the Kubernetes basics to make you understand the concepts.
Before getting started with Kubernetes, let's have a basic understanding of Docker and Containers.
Something smells a bit fishy here! Paradox Interactive has released the Stellaris: Aquatics Species Pack DLC along with another big free update for all players.
This actually sounds like one of the most interesting race packs released yet, especially with the new ship designs and the origins.
While Proxy Studios are currently working on their next strategy game with ZEPHON, they still had time to bring out a fresh DLC for their previous game with Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Adeptus Mechanicus.
In the only 4x strategy game set in Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 universe, Gladius has been out for a while now since July 2018 and it remains quite popular. They've already expanded the game a number of times before with the likes of the Tyranids, Chaos Space Marines, T’au and Craftworld Aeldari but now it's time for the Adeptus Mechanicus to rise and try to take Gladius Prime.
Sail Forth showed off its interesting colourful open-world sailing in previous demos but it seems the whole game has grown and needs just a bit more time. Originally due this year, the developer and publisher has announced a move to Summer 2022 to give it more time.
From the press release they said it's now "a full-blown oceanic adventure with tons of new content, quests, characters, and narrative". So we have to wait a bit longer but it sounds like it's going to be far more impressive.
Motion Twin / Evil Empire have released a big free upgrade for Dead Cells, bringing with it a number of items taken from other popular indie gems. This crossover takes the form of new weapons and outfits for your character, although you do need to hunt for clues and go find them to actually use them.
"As we wanted to make this year's Christmas special, our gift itself needed to be special. Something great, something more, something you've never seen before... something literally out of this world.
While there’s plenty to chew on in terms of new free features and enhancements in the large patch that has come out alongside No Step Back, the most noticeable and important of these is the overhaul of the logistics system. Trains and rail lines make an appearance and, in order for armies to fight effectively, supply lines have to be protected and supply hubs captured. This new system is fairly elegant and adds an element of complexity that is easily understood and interacted with.
I’ve played several games and observed the new supply system and how it fits in with the overhauled combat and weather systems. There’s plenty to love and I instinctively found myself planning offensives with supply hubs as primary objectives; disrupting enemy supply likewise was something that I found myself doing more and more. It’s safe to say that it’s a marked improvement to the old system and that in areas with low infrastructure it can be a right pain to keep momentum.
Arcan as an open-source display server stack originally built atop a game engine and embracing VR/XR, and pushing forward on other new technologies is out with a new version.
Arcan has become quite a large project for those not familiar with it from past articles over the years. Arcan describes itself on GitHub as "a powerful development framework for creating virtually anything from user interfaces for specialized embedded applications all the way to full-blown standalone desktop environments. At its heart lies a robust and portable multimedia engine, with a well-tested and well-documented Lua scripting interface. The development emphasizes security, debuggability and performance -- guided by a principle of least surprise in terms of API design."
Ever since Gnome 3 in 2011, the activities overview has played a key role in interacting with it. Despite its heavy criticism at launch, many users have now come to love it, leading to some other desktop environments looking at implementing similar features.
And, it looks like KDE Plasma is adding something like it, more like a brand new Gnome-like overview feature. Let us take a closer look.
It’s been over a month since I last wrote anything; I acted as a caregiver for my mom for a while, then she moved house which led to frantic painting, unboxing, furniture assembling and all the other time-and-energy sinks associated with moving. Since the end of october I’ve been mostly back at work doing Calamares and KDE and FreeBSD- related things. Let’s catch up on Calamares, first.
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The ZFS bits are something I’m quite excited about, but they do ask that the distro do some work – the ZFS kernel modules and tools need to be on the ISO, for instance. That doesn’t happen magically, and distro-makers still need to do their thing – and make their own choices; there’s nothing forcing ZFS onto distributions, but Calamares (through Evan) now makes it possible.
Gnome Next Meeting Applet is an AppIndicator that shows your next Google Calendar meetings / events in a menu on the panel. It also shows your next Google Calendar event title and remaining time directly on the panel, so you can quickly find out when your next event / meeting is due.
The applet makes use of Gnome Online Accounts to grab your Google Calendar info, and has useful features like the ability to automatically detect video conference URLs (it supports Google Meet, Zoom and Bluejeans), allowing you to click on a meeting to join it. The application also shows the document links attached to the current meeting.
Deepin Linux 20.3 is now official as you can now download the latest version of Deepin Linux. One of the exciting features that you will see in Deepin Linux 20.3 is its kernel as it is powered by Linux Kernel 5.15 LTS. Meanwhile, Linux kernel 5.10 LTS is kept as the default kernel in this release.
Deepin is the top Linux distribution from China, devoted to providing a beautiful, easy-to-use, safe, and reliable operating system for global users. (Global Ranking)
In deepin 20.3, the Stable kernel is upgraded to version 5.15 with better compatibility, system security vulnerabilities are fixed, some deepin applications come with new features and optimizations to meet the needs under different scenarios, and DDE issues are fixed and optimized to improve the overall user experience.
As a user experience (UX) professional, do you ever get a little too comfortable in your product group bubble? Do you yearn to pursue an idea for a project or process improvement, but lack the time to do so? Are you missing an opportunity to engage with folks on projects outside your day-to-day tasks?
From time to time, we’ve felt this way here on Red Hat’s User Experience Design (UXD) team for Red Hat Cloud Services. As a team of 22 people spread across various UX disciplines—research, design, content design, and front-end development—we often find ourselves engaging with many of the same people in the same product area every day as we focus on tasks and milestones.
Recently, our team lead suggested we step away from our usual work and try out some new projects with different people by engaging in a three-week innovation or "breakaway" sprint.
This wasn’t easy, but it was well worth it—so much so that we want to spread the word to other UX folks like you who might be looking for a way to expose your team members to new experiences, help them build skills, and infuse a bit of variety (and fun!) into their workday.
This article introduces a special rule definition in Cryostat 2.0 that lets you access JDK Flight Recorder (JFR) data on the fly, without waiting for your application's normally scheduled archive process. We'll introduce Cryostat's new POST rule definition and show you how to use it to quickly diagnose performance problems in containerized applications running on Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift.
Thank goodness we live in the golden age of podcasts.
With fewer of us traveling to in-person events and conferences and less time available to connect with our IT peers, these audio gems can give us a bit of what we’re missing. Whether it’s hearing from fellow CIOs about their victories and losses, keeping tabs on the last trends in technology-enabled innovation, or learning from some of the leadership greats, these eight podcasts offer aural opportunities for IT leaders seeking education, entertainment, and connection.
One of the hardest aspects of digital transformation is that it’s never truly “done.” Being in a state of constant change and disruption can take a serious toll on employee motivation, causing fatigue, distrust, and burnout.
We asked CIOs who recently took home a 2021 CIO of the Year ORBIE Award how they are avoiding transformation fatigue on their teams. The awards were presented by the Charlotte CIO Leadership Association and the Michigan CIO Leadership Association, professional communities that annually recognize CIOs for their excellence in technology leadership.
Read on for advice that can help you keep up the pace of transformation, while keeping people motivated and connected to meaningful work.
Ubuntu is the platform of choice for deploying and running workloads on public clouds. No other operating system gives you better performance and consistency of experience across public clouds, including Amazon, Azure, Google, IBM and Oracle. There is a reason behind this exceptional experience. By design, Ubuntu images in public clouds include an optimized Linux kernel for each cloud, giving you the best performance and functionality across all instance types and services. At the same time, Ubuntu integrates with cloud-native tooling, enabling you to manage your fleet from the cloud’s dashboards.
How do these cloud-specific kernel optimizations actually look in practice? Let’s do a deep dive on the optimizations Ubuntu enables on public clouds.
The leading fair in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Singapore will open the doors to C-level experts and executives in Frankfurt. Canonical will be attending as a Gold Sponsor, presenting strategies and trends for industry leading companies.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 710 for the week of November 14 – 20, 2021.
RISC-V Summit is an annual conference that showcases the power that open collaboration can have on the processor industry. This year, the event is taking place in San Francisco and virtually on December 6-8th and is co-located with the Design Automation Conference and SEMICON West.
Canonical is a proud bronze sponsor of the RISC-V Summit. Make sure to visit our physical or virtual booth for engaging conversations on the power of open source technology!
In the past few years, the word “observability” has steadily gained traction in the discussions around monitoring, DevOps, and, especially, cloud-native computing. However, there is significant confusion about the overlap or difference between observability and monitoring. Instead of providing yet another definition of “What is observability” and “Is observability different from monitoring and why” (you can read what I think about it on the What is observability page), I thought I would have a look at what the rest of the Internet seems to think about it. In this post, I’ll provide a few data points around observability and monitoring based on search term trends, social media, and various blog posts, and argue that the debate around observability vs. monitoring is, at best, poorly understood.
DragonBox has launched a $529 “Phytium D2000 ARMv8 Mini PC” that runs Linux on an octa-core Phytium D2000 and offers a Radeon RX550 GPU, 16GB DDR4, a 512GB NVMe SSD, 6x USB, and HDMI 2.0b and GbE ports.
Germany based DragonBox, which last December launched an open-spec DragonBox Pyra portable game console that runs Linux on a TI OMAP3530, has returned with a compact desktop system with a more powerful and exotic Arm processor. The Phytium D2000 ARMv8 Mini PC runs Linux on an octa-core Phytium D2000, a Linux-driven, desktop-oriented SoC based on 64-bit ARMv8.
Inspired by a special two-axis mechanism that uses a pair of beveled gears to create panning and tilting motions, maker and YouTuber JBV Creative wanted to integrate it into a larger kinetic sculpture that could move electromechanically while also looking great at the same time. This led to the creation of RobBob, which is essentially a robot-shaped head that has been placed onto a pan/tilt system.
Initially, RobBob could only move with the help of a person turning a pair of opposing knobs — one for each axis. But after some minor additions, including mounts on each side for a single servo motor and adapters that allow servo horns to attach to the knobs, RobBob could now move on its own power. At first, JBV considered using a serial monitor to send rotation commands, although he eventually settled on an N64 joystick since it was a more natural choice for fluid motion.
[TechKiwiGadgets] built a Pac-Man clock a few years ago that was well-received, but not cheap or easy to mimic. Since then, they have ported the code to the ESP32 and made a new version that has fewer and friendlier components. Not only that, they have great instructions for building the ESP32 shield on protoboard and also offer the shield as an open-source fab-able PCB. Still too much work? The complete kit version is available over on Tindie. Be sure to check it out in crazy speed mode action after the break.
You can even try the beta now, after registration, with the software running on Windows 7/8.1/10 32-/64-bit, macOS v10.13 or higher, Ubuntu 18.04/20.04 64-bit, and Debian 10/11/Testing 32-/64-bit. You don’t need a powerhouse to develop software for such low-end FPGA either as the minimum hardware requirements include a 2,500 MHz processor, at least 512MB RAM, 128MB graphics RAM, and 750MB of free hard disk space. Note the download link will be provided immediately, so you don’t need to share a working email.
However, [Rodrigo Alfonso] has recently upgraded his GBA Remote Play system that lets him play PlayStation games and others on his classic Game Boy Advance. We first featured this project back in July, which uses a Raspberry Pi 3 to emulate games and pipe video data to the handheld for display, receiving button presses in return.
We love this video featuring BBC Micro co-designer Dr Sophie Wilson CBE and our own Eben Upton, both alumni of the University of Cambridge.
Eben owned a BBC Micro as a kid, and as an adult he set about designing Raspberry Pi to do what the BBC Micro had done for him: inspire widespread interest in computer programming.
VersaLogic has launched a rugged, Linux-ready “Eagle” SBC with a 9th Gen Xeon E-2276ML, up to 32GB DDR4 with ECC, 128GB of soldered NVMe, 2x GbE, 2x mini-DP++, 4x USB, 2x COM, and a SATA port.
Versalogic has released a compact industrial SBC that runs Ubuntu, CentOS, or Windows on a hexa-core, up to 2.4GHz Xeon E-2276ML from Intel’s 9th Gen Coffee Lake Refresh generation. The “Eagle” follows other avian-themed SBCs from VersaLogic including its Apollo Lake based Owl. Other compact Coffee Lake Refresh SBCs include Advantech’s 3.5-inch MIO-5393 and Premio’s CT-MCL01, among others.
PINE64 has announced the upcoming release of the PinePhone Pro. Let's take a look at its capabilities and see if it's a good daily driver candidate.
In late November of 2019, PINE64 released its first smartphone running on mainline Linux – the PinePhone. Since the phone's hardware was simply too weak to handle the unrefined software, most of its users already knew that the phone was meant to be used for development and experimentations rather than a regular daily driver.
About two years later, PINE64 has finally announced the upcoming release of the new PinePhone Pro. This updated version features more capable hardware and better software.
With these improvements, is the PinePhone Pro Linux phone a reasonable candidate to be your next daily driver? Let's take a look.
The Ohio LinuxFest is re-emerging as we reboot Open Libre Free Conference as a hybrid event. Re-emergence can mean simply reopening our non-profit for in-person operation. But to us, it is an invitation to reconsider how you use, experience, modify, and distribute technology in the new economy.
I was at the Open Source Experience event in Paris, France last week.
While it was nice to see friends from the FLOSS community, it did feel that the general public decided to stay away, probably because Covid cases are on the rise in France again. I was manning a Perl booth but used the fact that we were 4 people to wander again and ask vendors if they would be willing to support their applications in Fedora. As you can probably guess, results were mixed...
The first community PostgreSQL conference in North America in many months is coming to New York City in just two weeks! PGConf NYC is a non-profit, community-run and PostgreSQL community recognized conference being run by the United States PostgreSQL Association (PgUS).
Our schedule is up, the deadline for booking your hotel room is this FRIDAY, November 19th, and it's time to get registered and confirm you have your ticket for this great event!
PGConf NYC delivers two days packed with presentations about PostgreSQL and related technologies, as well as the usual hallway and social track. PGConf NYC is being held December 2nd and 3rd, 2021 in New York City.
PGroonga 2.3.4 a full text search platform for all languages, released.
Pgpool-II 4.2.6, 4.1.9, 4.0.16, 3.7.21 and 3.6.28, a connection pooler and statement replication system for PostgreSQL, re l ea s ed.
Ora2Pg 23.0, a tool for migrating Oracle databases to PostgreSQL, released. https://github.com/darold/ora2pg/blob/master/changelog
BigAnimal, a managed PostgreSQL database on Azure, released.
pgAdmin4 6.2, a web- and native GUI control center for PostgreSQL, released.
Learning is all about how much you can get to learn from any source, how better the medium/platform is for you, and how much you’re compatible with the medium. In this era, eLearning is not a myth or a dream anymore. Thousands of courses are available on the web that you can grab from different eLearning platforms. In the entire post, we have gone through a few most used and intuitive online eLearning platforms that you can run on your Linux machine.
I do remember most of my 'firsts' I had with the FSFE. Strictly my first contact was reading the FSFE website and becoming a Fellow (the construct at that time). But after this quite formal arrangement I was looking for more informal contact and a feeling of community. So I still have good memories how Felix Stegerman, then Deputy Coordinator Netherlands, invited me to the Linux Nijmegen User Group to get to know each other and learn more about the FSFE. Up until that evening my efforts in Free Software were a solo effort and that changed in that evening. I became part of a larger community of like-minded people, thanks to Felix.
GNU Parallel 20211122 ('Peng Shuai') [stable] has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4 No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release.
A pure end user of code cannot incur liability for violating an open source license. Open source licenses can be violated only by re-distributing software — or in the case of network licenses like AGPL, by modifying it and making it available to others as a service. In fact, GPL2 specifically says “Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope. The act of running the Program is not restricted.”
In contrast, if the vendor is distributing software to a customer for the customer to provide its own SaaS to others, customary open source diligence is appropriate. But this isn’t a SaaS deal, of course. It’s a distribution deal.
So, end user customers of SaaS need not conduct diligence into open source licensing issues. If, for example, the SaaS vendor is using modified AGPL code to provide its service to the customer, then the customer may have a right to receive source code from the vendor. But that is a benefit, not a problem. In other words, the purpose of due diligence is to reduce the user’s risk, so even AGPL is not the user’s issue.
Intel just released IGC 1.0.9289 as a huge update to their open-source Graphics Compiler used on Linux currently by their OpenCL/oneAPI Level Zero compute stack and also by Windows with their official driver.
The LLVM-based Intel Graphics Compiler has been maturing well over the past few years since its original introduction as part of their OpenCL "NEO" driver on Linux. Intel has even begun using IGC on Windows within their widely-used driver stack there while Intel's Mesa OpenGL/Vulkan drivers may eventually transition to using IGC too for having a unified graphics compiler across targets.
This week brought the sad news that David H. Adler has passed away. David had many hobbies, in which he all excelled (like knowledge about Monty Python, Doctor Who, really, really bad movies, to name but a few of them). The Perl / Raku community was only one of the communities he was part of.
David was involved in the very early Raku development process. More recently, he was involved in documenting various features of the Raku Programming Language. Attending many Perl and related Open Source Conferences, he was a familiar sight and a good person to spend time with (many pictures). He is sorely missed (FaceBook, /r/perl, blogs.perl.org, presentation from 2016).
Python 3.11 has just been released, we can explore the new features which had been added and removed from the previous release.
Python programming language is an interpreted high-level general-purpose programming language. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability with its use of significant code indentation.
If you are someone in the field of Computer Science, chances are you’re a little familiar with Python. As this high-level, general-purpose programming language is rising in popularity, its strengths and impact are becoming more and more prominent. New developers want to delve into data analytics possible with Python’s elite data visualization and analysis tools.
Python is Significant in the World of Programming
According to a survey done by JetBrains, “Python is the primary language used by 84% of programmers. Furthermore, almost 58% of developers use Python for data analysis, while 52% use it for web development. The use of Python for DevOps, machine learning, and web crawling or web scraping follow close behind along with a multitude of other uses.”
wayland-protocols 1.24 is now available.
This release adds feedback to the DMA buffer protocol, allowing smarter and more dynamic DMA buffer allocation semantics. Other changes include documentation improvements and improved testing infrastructure.
This is also the first release of wayland-protocols that do not include a autotools build description.
Wayland Protocols 1.24 is out today as the latest revision to this official collection of the Wayland protocols/specifications. Notable with the 1.24 revision is the introduction of wp_linux_dmabuf_feedback.
Added initially as an "unstable" addition for Wayland-Protocols 1.24 is wp_linux_dmabuf_feedback as the "feedback" addition to the Linux DMA-BUF protocol. This is particularly useful for modern multi-GPU setups where needing to know about the GPU device in use by the compositor and the semantics around it such as if using the secondary GPU that DMA-BUF can still exchange buffers with the main GPU and in a compatible format.
Web pages are built with HTML, which specifies the content of a page. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a separate language which specifies a page’s appearance.
CSS code is made of static rules. Each rule takes one or more selectors and gives specific values to a number of visual properties. Those properties are then applied to the page elements indicated by the selectors.
Here’s our recommended tutorials to learn CSS.
By any metric you care to use, this is a very exciting time for America’s space program. NASA is refocusing their efforts towards the Moon and beyond, SpaceX is launching routine crew and cargo flights to the International Space Station with reusable rockets, and if you’ve got deep enough pockets, there are now multiple companies offering suborbital pleasure trips requiring little more than a few hours worth of training. It’s taken longer than many people had hoped, but it seems we’re finally making the confident strides necessary to truly utilize space’s vast resources.
But things are just getting started. A new generation of massive reusable rockets are currently being developed, which promise to make access to space cheaper and faster than ever before. We’ve seen quite a bit of SpaceX’s Starship, thanks in no small part to the dramatic test flights that the media-savvy company has been regularly live streaming to YouTube. But Blue Origin, founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, has been far more secretive about their New Glenn. That is, until now.
Sometimes it begins to feel like a tradition that a certain substance or group of substances become highly popular due to certain highly desirable chemical or physical properties, only for these chemicals then to go on to turn out to form a hazard to the biosphere, human life, or both. In the case of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) it’s no different. Upon the discovery that a subgroup of these -the fluorosurfactants – have the ability to reduce water surface tension significantly more than other surfactants, they began to be used everywhere.
Today, fluorosurfactants are being used in everything from stain repellents to paint, make-up, and foam used by firefighters. In a recent study of 231 cosmetic products bought in the US and Canada (Whitehead et al., 2021), it was found that all of them contained PFAS, even when not listed on the packaging. The problematic part here is that PFASs are very stable, do not decay after disposal, and bioaccumulate in the body where they may have endocrine-disrupting effects.
We all know we live in a soup of electromagnetic radiation, everything from AM radio broadcasts to cosmic rays. Some of it is useful, some is a nuisance, but all of it is invisible. We know it’s there, but we have no idea what the fields look like. Unless you put something like this 3D WiFi field strength visualizer to work, of course.
[Lee Adamson] is no stranger to classic computers. He recently picked up a Heathkit H11A which, as you might remember, is actually a PDP-11 from DEC. Well, technically, it is an LSI-11 but still. Like a proper LSI-11, the computer uses the DEC QBus. Unlike a lot of computers of its day, the H11 didn’t have a lot of switches and lights, but it did have an amazing software library for its day.
[Lee] takes us through a tour of all the different cards inside the thing. It is amazing when you think of today’s laptop motherboards that pack way more into a much smaller space. He also had to fix the power supply.
When you can buy a 3D printer at Aldi, you pretty much know that 3D printing has been reduced to practice. At least for the plastic version of 3D printing; metal printing is another thing entirely. It’s easy to squeeze out a little molten plastic in a controlled fashion, but things get a little more — energetic — when you try to do the same with metal.
At least that’s what [Lucas] has been experiencing with his attempts to build a metal 3D printer over on his Cranktown City YouTube channel. Granted, he set himself up for a challenge from the get-go by seeking to stick a MIG welder onto an Ender 3, a platform that in no way was ready for the abuse it was about to endure. Part 1 of the video series below shows the first attempt, which ended badly for both the printer and for the prints.
If you can’t imagine writing a letter on a typewriter and putting it in a mailbox, then you take computers for granted. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. More niche applications begat niche machines, and a number of them are on display in this film that the Computer History Archives Project released last month. Aside from the File-o-matic Desk, the Addressograph, or the Sound Scriber, there a number of other devices that give us a peek into a bygone era.
[...]
I recognized, and actually used a few of the items featured in this film. My father’s workplace, where I would sometimes hang out after school, had a few of these machines back in the 1970s. The most spectacular was the Addressograph system, used to prepare mailings for newsletters, post cards, etc. It was basically a mechanical database. Each person was represented by a special card, prepared by a Graphotype machine, a specialized typewriter that embosses text on small metal plates, not unlike a dog-tag. The card was actually a frame, which held the embossed plate, a piece of card stock with the information typed by conventional means, and a series of slots along the top of the card which could hold metal tabs. These tabs denoted different user-defined categories. In an engineering company, for example, you could designate tab positions for each department, for each building, for each project team, etc. The entire company roster is now contained in one or more filing drawers, each about the size of an old-fashioned library card catalog drawer.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (mbedtls), Red Hat (kernel and rpm), and Ubuntu (freerdp2).
WordPress is far more than just blogs. It powers over 42% of all websites. So whenever there's a WordPress security failure, it's a big deal. And now GoDaddy, which is the top global web hosting firm with tens of millions more sites than its competition, reports that data on 1.2 million of its WordPress customers has been exposed.
As the EU is launching a legislative proposal on the transparency of sponsored political content, Access Now, the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, and EDRi are laying out a set of recommendations to help the European Commission effectively minimize the negative impact of disinformation sweeping Europe.
“Europe already has many of the rules needed to quash the spread of dangerous disinformation,” said Eliška Pírková, Europe Policy Analyst at Access Now. “They simply need proper enforcement. We also have the resources and experience to draft new legislation that will fill the gaps — starting with targeted advertising.”
In this paper, Access Now, the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, and EDRi lay out out a set of recommendations to help the European Commission effectively minimize the negative impact of disinformation sweeping Europe.
Microsoft's annual shareholder meeting is coming up, and the proxy statements include five excellent shareholder resolutions. One of them is on a topic I've written a lot about here: prohibiting sales of facial recognition technology to governments. Unsurprisingly, I support it! As Councilmember Jeanne Kohl-Welles and Jennifer Lee of ACLU of Washington said earlier this year in King County government must turn its back on facial recognition technology
Following days of protests opposing French military involvement in counter-terrorism efforts and a spike in militant attacks, internet shutdown continues for third day
The fight for net neutrality is not over, yet. In September 2020, TRAI forwarded a set of recommendations to the Department of Telecommunications(DoT) regarding the enforcement of net neutrality principles by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and telecom networks, which included the establishment of an independent Multi Stakeholder Body (MSB) to play an advisory and a regulatory role over the ISPs, by overseeing the Traffic Management Practices (TMP) by the ISPs. More than a year and several representations later, these recommendations have still not been implemented. We wrote to the Minister for Telecommunications, Ashwini Vaishnaw to highlight the lack of implementation of TRAI’s recommendations by the DoT despite our repeated efforts.
[...]
As per TRAI’s recommendations, the creation of a MSB is essential to safeguard citizens’ rights to access to the internet and it requires further support from DoT for its meaningful implementation. Managing the TMPs and updating them continually requires a framework, regulated by a functionally independent MSB, which would have agility and would be able to react fast and evolve with the changes in time, technology, services and other factors, without falling prey to industry capture. The MSB will also be responsible for enforcing standards for technical and operational procedures for monitoring and enforcement of Net Neutrality. Further, an inclusive MSB will effectively raise institutional capacity within the state to catch and punish net neutrality violations.
The need for a strong and independent MSB is further illustrated by the repeated instances of licensees discriminating against certain types of internet content and blocking it with impunity. These instances conform with observations from a larger study published by the Centre for Internet and Society on January 17th, 2020, wherein they found that the website blocklists of licensed internet service providers (ISPs) across India are widely inconsistent with one another, suggesting that a larger pattern wherein internet providers are either a) not complying with blocking orders or b) arbitrarily blocking websites without legal orders. Any blocks which occur without legal orders are a clear violation of Net Neutrality principles now codified within the User Agreement License terms. In order to strictly enforce net neutrality, a strong and independent MSB is of crucial importance.
[...]
Earlier this year, DoT had exhibited hesitancy towards instituting a MSB . We had learnt, in response to an Right to Information request filed with them, that DoT has requested TRAI to reconsider their recommendations, and had cited COVID-19 related budgetary concerns and other feasibility concerns related to the implementation of MSB, among reasons for lack of establishment of an MSB.
However, these constraints no longer apply as the Ministry of Finance on September 24th, 2021 has removed the expenditure curbs that were imposed on various Ministries/Departments, including the DoT, for the July-September quarter.
Thus, we have requested Minister of Communications Ashwini Vaishnaw to operationalize the TRAI’s recommendations at the earliest, especially by establishing the multistakeholder body as recommended by TRAI. The recommendations from TRAI come at an opportune time to avert the massive damages caused by internet shutdowns upon the fundamental rights as well as the economic opportunities of the citizens. It now remains up to DoT to take this fight to its logical conclusion and act on the recommendations decisively in order to assist in public advocacy for vital information.
The shutdown began for journalist Shams Irfan on 16 October 2019. Irfan lives in Pampore, a town known for growing saffron and being near to Srinagar, the traditional summer capital of the Indian-administered territory of Jammu and Kashmir, which is part of the wider Kashmir region. A few days before, there had been a gun battle between Kashmiri rebels and Indian security forces in which two rebels died, he says. “As it is a norm now, if there is a gunfight in any area, the first thing that is shut is the internet.” Usually, service is fully restored in around three days, but this time that did not happen.
“I started noticing a pattern; it was not shut randomly,” Irfan continues. The internet was down from 7.30am to 11am and then from 2.30pm to 10.30pm. He believes it is a “proper curtailment plan”. During earlier internet shutdowns there was usually a reason given by the authorities, he says, but this current pattern has left even journalists like him “clueless”. “What I came to know is that the same pattern is followed in many other areas across Kashmir,” he says.
As of October this year, there have been 317 internet shutdowns in Kashmir since 2012, part of 548 across India in the same period, contributing to a collapse in media freedoms. Governments are increasingly turning to internet shutdowns to control the spread of information often connected to political instability. The estimated cost to the global economy was $8bn in 2019.
Shutdowns are also becoming more sophisticated and targeted. “No longer does a regime have to plunge a whole nation into darkness – it can lock onto a certain group of people it determines as a threat and disconnect them from each other and the rest of the world,” says Felicia Anthonio, a campaigner at Access Now, a digital rights NGO.
On an unrecorded day in 1827, a woman in the first trimester of pregnancy suffered her sixth, perhaps seventh miscarriage. In the remarks written on her case, it is said that she endured three premature losses for every two successful pregnancies, and “her general health was greatly impaired” in the process. Most likely, she labored between her sweat-soaked and blood-soiled bed sheets, with a midwife watching nearby. Maybe it was a warm morning, in a small home where the walls grew slick with condensation. Heavy breathing and humidity. Maybe the breath was hers, hurried, alongside that of several children huddled outside in the hallway. Maybe her husband kept as close as he could, grave with concern. Or maybe, after so many consecutive losses, he was left feeling almost unfazed. One thing is certain, the woman and the midwife went about their painful work. And when, with a final push, the gestational sac, embryo, and placenta were passed, the midwife promptly collected them and took leave. She hurried through the streets of London until she reached the workplace of the Italian doctor and author, Augustus Bozzi Granville (1783–1872). In the midst of perfecting his book, Graphic Illustrations of Abortion and Diseases of Menstruation, Granville summoned his engraver, Joseph Perry, to perpetuate these particular tissues of miscarriage in detailed, undiminished lithographic color. It now bears the title: Plate 2, Figure 12.
