Over the course of 2021, I have watched hundreds of interesting Linux apps gain development effort and users. While some of these have been discontinued, others live on, and all the time gaining popularity and new features.
While I wish that I could shed some light on all of these, this is unfortunately not possible. However, I have picked my top 5 favorites and shall share them with you here. They may not make the list of essential Linux applications but I absolutely love them.
Before we get started, it should be noted that all these apps—with the exception of EverSticky—are convergent, meaning they work equally well on desktop and mobile Linux devices. As devices such as the PinePhone and Librem 5 become more popular, I think it is quite important that convergent apps are supported, and it is great to see so many in development.
The PowerTools repository is a container that contains many packages, libraries, and developer tools for either creating from source or installing applications. Most repositories rely on the PowerTools to be enabled, including the most popular Extra packages for the Enterprise Linux repository.
In the following tutorial, you will quickly install the EPEL repository and enable PowerTools on your AlmaLinux 8 system.
Sometimes, some games that are on Steam can only run if I run using the terminal. So basically, the user needs to call the application using the terminal. This requires the user to open a terminal in Linux and write commands to call the application to be run.
One of the benefits of running apps on Linux using the terminal is that the user can find out the logs of the application activity that is running at the same time. It is often used to check, whether the application is running properly or find errors while running.
In my opinion, Calling the application through the terminal many times is a bit of a hassle. However, the user can create a 1-click shortcut that can run the application through the terminal. So users don't have to bother opening a terminal and writing application calling commands repeatedly when calling applications.
Hello, friends. In this post, we will talk about Linux Dash, which is a lightweight System Performance Monitoring Tool. So, you will also learn how to install it on Ubuntu 20.04.
i3lock is a popular X11 screen lock utility. As far as customization goes, it only allows one to set a background from a PNG file. This limitation is part of the design of i3lock: its primary goal is to keep the screen locked, something difficult enough with X11. Each additional feature would increase the attack surface and move away from this goal.1 Many are frustrated with these limitations and extend i3lock through simple wrapper scripts or by forking it.2 The first solution is usually safe, but the second goes against the spirit of i3lock.
XSecureLock is a less-known alternative to i3lock. One of the most attractive features of this locker is to delegate the screen saver feature to another process. This process can be anything as long it can attach to an existing window provided by XSecureLock, which won’t pass any input to it. It will also put a black window below it to ensure the screen stays locked in case of a crash.
Nmap or “Network Mapper” is an open-source tool meant for security experts and developers by the “Nmap Developer Team” since 1997. Here we will learn the commands to install NMAP on Debian 11 Bullseye and how to use it?
Using Nmap, a user can scan the network and or computers on the internet/local (ie with their IP address) can be checked for open ports and the services listening on them. Known and unknown scanning methods make this tool a very powerful program.
The Network Mapper is particularly suitable for finding out all active hosts in the network environment (ping sweeps) as well as their operating system (OS fingerprinting) and version numbers of various services installed there.
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation. Firefox utilizes the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and future anticipated web formats and standards.
For the most part, Firefox is often up to date with the latest stable release on Pop_OS and Ubuntu-based desktops, however non-stable builds such as beta or the more bleeding edge nightly builds can be installed tested the new features or test your websites before its hits the stable repository.
For the most part, the beta build is what curious users should be installing, and the nightly build should never be used by anyone other than sysadmins or developers looking to test a particular feature.
In the tutorial, you will learn how to add and install the beta and nightly build for Firefox using a PPA maintained by the Mozilla team on your Pop!_OS desktop.
Server management is prioritized on the checklist of almost all web server administrators. The Cockpit has made server management easier to execute because of the flexibility it brings to the table.
This Linux-supported software application lets you monitor and manage the status of your Linux-based servers remotely and on a web-based interface. Through Cockpit web server software, a web admin can comfortably start or stop server-based running services, check on the server load, and system performance.
Once you successfully install Cockpit and gain access to its web dashboard interface, you will be able to monitor and assess key information related to your server’s health and other critical system statistics like running processes, network consumption, disk utilization, disk space, CPU & Memory usage, and active users.
The Enlightenment 0.25 released as a major update with new features and improvements. In this post, we wrap up the release.
We looked back in time and found out some “Kool” KDE Facts and Trivia. Here it is.
The KDE has a long history. How it was conceptualized, progressed and became a winner as a “go-to” desktop for all user base. In this post, we give you some interesting facts and trivia of KDE that you may be not aware of. And it’s good to know.
The new Nitrux 1.8 release defaults to the XFS file system and comes with the latest Linux kernel. Here’s what’s new!
Nitrux is exclusively a 64-bit KDE Plasma + Debian-based Linux distribution which features NX Desktop with Plasma desktop with its own flavor.
Nitrux relies on KDE Plasma’s famed malleability along with some heavily redesigned components to simplify the workflow for new users. The distribution develops its own NX Desktop, which is a customization layer for the Plasma 5 desktop environment.
One of the really interesting things that kind of differentiates Nitrux from the hundreds of other Debian-based distributions out there is that Nitrux actually ships with AppImage and Flatpak by default. Many of the programs on the system out of the box are actually AppImages rather than native packages installed through the APT package manager.
Now the last release of this systemd-free (Nitrux use the OpenRC init system) Linux distro for this year is out. So let’s see what’s new.
UGOOS UT8 PRO is the first TV box I’ve seen with a Rockchip RK3568 processor, if we exclude Firefly Station P2 that’s more like an Arm Linux mini PC. The device runs Android 11 and is equipped with 8GB RAM, 64GB eMMC flash, and offers WiFi 6 connectivity. There’s also the “UGOOS UT8” with basically the same features except it ships with 4GB RAM and 32GB flash, and a dual-band WiFi 5 and Bluetooth module.
Setting up a Pi-Hole for your network is a beautifully simple process. This is a guide whose intent is to give you the confidence to try it yourself. If you are not new to the Raspberry Pi and have accomplished many things with it, this guide is likely a bit too basic. The goal of this is to get you up and running the easy way.
The best place to go for Pi-Hole reference is at the source of the project: https://docs.pi-hole.net/ It is chocked full of fantastic information and the key resource for this project.
This article is essentially an opinion piece with some technical sprinklings for how to set up a Pi-Hole, step-by-step, to get you from NOT having network wide, DNS filtration one to having one with great DNS filtration and other cool things.
We have just released PGSpider v2.0.0.
PGSpider is High-Performance SQL Cluster Engine for distributed big data. PGSpider can access a number of data sources using Foreign Data Wrapper(FDW) and retrieves the distributed data source vertically. Usage of PGSpider is the same as PostgreSQL. You can use any client applications such as libpq and psql.
We have just released version 1.1.1 of the Foreign Data Wrapper for InfluxDB.
This release can work with PostgreSQL 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14.
Josh and Kurt start the show with the reading of a security themed Christmas poem. We then discuss some of the new happenings around Log4j. The basic theme is that even if we were over-investing in Log4j, it probably wouldn’t have caught this. There are still a lot of things to unpack with this event. We are sure we’ll be talking about it well into the future.
Some of the 20th century’s most iconic design and typography came to us through public signage in the various national railways of Europe. Were you to think of a Modernist clock face for example, the chances are that the prototype for your image hangs somewhere in one of the continent’s great railway terminals. If you don’t fancy getting on a train to see your favourite public timepiece, then maybe [EBP Controller] has a treat for you, with a 3D-printed double-faced Belgian railway station clock.
I am reissuing this appeal from last April for contributions to the Greens Party of Papua New Guinea because their party is still short of the money it needs to participate in the 2022 parliamentary elections in Papua New Guinea (PNG).
The PNG Greens Party still needs to raise $5,000 to meet their $26,000 budget for participating in the elections. As I discuss in more detail below, the budget covers statutory requirements as well as practical needs. They have been raising money from their own members’s dues and fundraising events. They have received $10,000 from Australian Greens. But they have received very little from U.S. Greens. Please make a contribution.
Because of the funding shortfall, the PNG Greens had to postpone their party congress twice from August and then November until hopefully early in 2022.
The election clock is ticking, with the formal call for elections scheduled for April 28, nominations due by May 5, voting scheduled for June 25 to July 8, and the results to be reported on July 28.
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We in the U.S. are linked to and ultimately harmed by this destruction of biodiversity in PNG. Rainforest destruction increases atmospheric carbon and global warming. Biodiversity maintains the stability and productivity of ecosystems upon which we all depend for food. Biodiversity provides the raw materials for new medicines. As habitat and biodiversity are destroyed and replaced with monocultural plantations and factory farms, pathogens like Covid-19 more frequently jump from animal hosts to humans with deadly consequences.
U.S. consumers are linked to this destruction by the globalization of trade that drives this destruction of biodiversity and impoverishment of people. The ecological unequal exchange in this trade exploits the rainforests of countries like Papua New Guinea in order to provide wood, palm oil, and other products to the U.S. and other rich countries. The U.S. is the world’s biggest importer of tropical products, which under today’s economy means the U.S. is the top destroyer of biodiversity. Papua New Guinea is the world’s third largest exporter of tropical products that destroy biodiversity.
When Intellectual Ventures predicted an "IP reckoning" for the automotive industry, it presumably had its enforcement action against General Motors, Toyota, and Honda (Eastern District of Texas) already prepared. Meanwhile, Sivel v. Ford and especially Acer v. Volkswagen have drawn even more interest in the automotive patent litigation arena. Automotive patent lawsuits get filed pretty much every week, and it now turns out that a patent previously assigned to Intellectual Ventures is being enforced in the Eastern District of Texas by a non-practicing entity with the patriotic name of Liberty Patents against Toyota, Subaru, and BlackBerry
Nearly all of the ROs that deem one ISA to be competent specify the European Patent Office (EPO) as that ISA. Most of those are EPC member states or allow the extension or validation of a European Patent. Interestingly, despite Austria being an ISA only the EPO can be an ISA when Austria is the RO. The other ROs that deem one ISA to be competent are Canada with the Canadian IPO being the ISA and Papua New Guinea with IP Australia being the ISA.
EPO Dismisses DABUS Patent Applications, Rules Inventor Must Be Natural Person – On Tuesday, December 21, the European Patent Office’s (EPO) Legal Board of Appeal announced its decision to dismiss a pair of patent applications listing the artificial intelligence system DABUS as the sole inventor after conducting oral proceedings in which the Board found that relevant provisions of the European Patent Convention (EPC) required an inventor to be a person having legal capacity.
The departure of young people from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) is not a new thing. Sadly, but with amazement, we look at those who choose to stay in their country and push their limitsfrom it. Remember the name Katarina Ponjavic – an innovator from Zepce who invented the patent, the only one of its kind in the world, and received a prestigious award for it.
A patent for the disposal of medical and infectious waste made in BiH received the highest international recognition from the European Patent Office in Munich. BiH has an internationally recognized patent. It was invented by Katarina Ponjavic, a student at the Faculty of Dentistry in Sarajevo.
“This device is of global importance, as there are problems in the medical and infectious waste disposal system everywhere in the world since it is a very complicated process,” explainedKatarina.
The UK and US governments have recently launched calls for views regarding their SEP and FRAND policies, in order to understand the opinions of all the stakeholders, such as patent owners, implementers, consumers, etc.
In the US, the Department of Justice (DoJ), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) have released a modified version of their 2019 Policy Statement regarding Licensing Negotiations and Remedies for Standards-Essential Patents Subject to FRAND, and have requested public feedback on 11 issues related to it. This comes after the White House issued an executive order in July designating possible modifications to the statement as a policy priority.
Simultaneously, the UK IPO has issued a call for views in relation to SEPs and innovation. The consultation includes a wider range of questions than the US, focusing on the relationship between SEPs, innovation, and competition. It raises the question, ‘What actions or interventions would make the greatest improvements for consumers in the UK?’; and whether an imbalance exists between the licensor and the licensee. The document also asks whether there are alternative ways to address disputes on pricing mechanisms, for example, ‘what point in the value chain provides an economic basis to calculate rates payable?’ The review document contains 27 explicit questions, but it also allows contributors to add any other remarks or insights that they consider to be relevant.
The parties in Interference No. 106,132, namely Senior Party Sigma-Aldrich and Junior Party the University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC"), filed their respective lists of proposed preliminary motions four days prior to their August 3rd teleconference with the Board to present their arguments for the Board to grant leave to file any of them.
Junior Party CVC proposed ten preliminary motions. CVC Substantive Preliminary Motion No. 1, which CVC characterized as a "threshold" motion, sought to have a finding of no interference-in-fact because CVC alleged Sigma-Aldrich's application-in-interference was properly governed under the "first inventor to file" provisions of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act because that patent "contains or contains at any time" (emphasis in brief) subject matter not entitled to priority to an application filed prior to enactment of the AIA. As Sigma-Aldrich did in its analogous request for preliminary motion against Broad (see "Sigma-Aldrich and Broad Propose Preliminary Motions in Recent CRISPR Interference No. 106,133"), CVC provides an Appendix outlining the bases in Sigma-Aldrich's application-in-interference No. 15/456,204:
The opt-out is a means by which a patent owner can remove European patents and European patent applications from the jurisdiction of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) when it comes into effect. The default position is that all European patent applications and European patents with a filing date of 01 March 2007 or later will be subject to the jurisdiction of the UPC when it comes into effect, unless an opt-out is filed. The opt-out ensures that the litigation options remain the same.
A quirk of European patent prosecution is the requirement for the description to be amended in line with allowed claims. This requirement is provided for by the EPO Guidelines for Examination (F-IV-4.4). Despite having unclear legal basis, the description amendment requirement was controversially made even more stringent in the 2021 Guidelines (IPKat). Now, in a remarkable decision from the Boards of Appeal (T 1989/18), published on the 22nd December, a Board of Appeal searched for and unambiguously failed to find any legal basis in the EPC for the requirement that the description must be brought in line with the claims.
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The Board of Appeal decision in T 1989/18 considered whether there was legal basis for refusing an application on the grounds that the description had not been amended in line with the allowed claims. After accepting the claims as allowable, the Examiner refused the application (EP2794651) for the sole reason that the description did not comply with the requirements of Article 84 EPC, i.e. that the claims should be clear and concise and supported by the description.
The Examiner argued that the description identified embodiments as being part of the invention which were not part of the invention as defined by the claims. Particularly, the Examiner's main objection was that the description specified subject matter as being part of the invention, where this subject-matter was broader than the independent claims. The Examiner suggested some more substantial amendments to the description, but these were not accepted by the applicant. Notably, the Examining Division decision dates back to 2018, i.e. before the even more stringent guidelines on description amendments were introduced.
On appeal, the applicant maintained as their Main Request a description having only minimal amendments. The applicant argued that there was no legal basis in the EPC for the requirement that parts of the description no longer covered by the claims should be marked as non-related to the invention or deleted. As such, the applicant argued, "the adaption of the description is superimposed by the Examining Division on the Applicant as an additional, non-EPC-based hurdle before a decision to grant will be issued". The applicant also pointed out the non-uniform way in which the Guidelines were applied by different Examiners.
A few weeks ago, IP experts in Munich had already speculated that Lars Meinhardt (52), rather than one of the experienced Munich patent judges, would chair the 6th Civil Senate at the Higher Regional Court in Munich. The senate is mainly responsible for patent disputes, but also handles copyright and unfair competition cases. Now the president of the court has appointed Meinhardt to succeed Konrad Retzer as of 1. January. Retzer had retired this autumn.
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Already during his time as presiding judge at the Munich Regional Court, Lars Meinhardt was considered by lawyers and in-house counsel to be one of the most experienced German judges for soft IP cases. However, Meinhardt did not gain much experience with patent infringement suits during his career.
However, many Munich patent attorneys and patent litigators had hoped that Retzer would be succeeded by one of the judges of the 7th and 21st Civil Chambers at the Munich Rigional Court with experience in patent litigation. Matthias Zigann in particular was considered a favourite. He had contributed significantly to Munich patent courts’ rising significance.
On December 21, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 6,115,174, owned by Optic153 LLC, an Equitable IP entity. The '174 patent is generally related to devices that vary optical signals and has been previously asserted against Comcast, Verizon, T-Mobile, Windstream Holdings, Dish Network, Charter Communications, Crown Castle International Corp., and AT&T.
On December 20, 2021, the China National Intellectual Property Administration declared all claims of CN102256122, owned by Dolby International AB, invalid. CN102256122 is purportedly essential or related to patents purportedly essential to the HEVC Advance pool and SISVEL’s AV1 and VP9 pools.
Keyser Söze is the main antagonist in Bryan Singer’s movie classic The Usual Suspects from 1995. In the movie, Keyzer Söze is described as a crime lord with a legendary and mythical status with regard to brutality and impact. Feared by criminals and police force alike and always able to elude the courts, the character is never seen in the movie and is only described through flashbacks from the con artist Roger Kint under police interrogation. The movie leaves it open to the viewer to decide whether the crime lord is in fact real or merely an urban legend. As the character Roger Kint puts it in the movie: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist".
26 years after the movie was released, the Danish courts might finally have caught up with Keyser Söze. At least the character plays a central part in a ruling from November 2021 from the Danish Maritime and Commercial High Court.
The case concerned the protection of the trade mark ’Kejser Sausage’ used for a ‘gourmet hot dog’ cart in Copenhagen. The lawsuit was addressed at another Copenhagen restaurant choosing to use the name ‘Keyser Social’. For the attentive reader, both parties were obviously inspired by the character Keyser Söze when choosing the names for their respective businesses.
Monday, December 27, 2021, is opening day for the new USPTO ex parte expungement and reexamination procedures. The Director of the USPTO is expected to throw out the ceremonial first brief and holler "play ball!" Meanwhile the Office has issued "Examination Guide 1-21: Expungement and Reexamination Proceedings Under the Trademark Modernization Act of 2020." [pdf here]. The Office has also made available a new TEAS form called "Petition for Expungement or Reexamination."
For example, in assessing likelihood of confusion the Board applies the "DuPont factors. See if you can match the case names listed below with the issue that each addressses.
In a nonprecedential ruling, the CAFC upheld the Board's decision dismissing an opposition to registration of SKY CINEMAS for "movie theaters" [CINEMAS disclaimed], finding the mark not likely to cause confusion with SKY NEWS for radio and television news services. The Board concluded that the involved services are not related nor offered through the same trade channels, and it found that opposer failed to show that movie theaters are within its natural zone of expansion. [TTABlogged here]. Sky International AG v. Sky Cinemas LLC, Appeal No. 21-1575 (Fed. Cir. December 17, 2021) [not precedential].
As copyright has risen in ubiquity as more and more of daily life takes place online, increasing attention has been paid by scholars to exceptions and limitations. A prominent feature of the debate has been the comparison between the fair use provision contained in section 107 of the US Copyright Act 1976 and the more detailed exceptions and limitations contained in legislation such as the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Some have argued in favour of the perceived flexibility of the former, while others have argued in favour of the perceived certainty offered by the latter. Much ink has been spilled both by those arguing in favour, or resisting, legislative change and by law reform bodies charged with considering such arguments.
In April 2020 and February 2021 two substantial new contributions to this debate were published. First came Emily Hudson’s Drafting Copyright Exceptions: From the Law in Books to Law in Action (Cambridge University Press) [IPKat review here]. This was the product of extensive fieldwork conducted with cultural institutions (archives, galleries, libraries, museums and industry peak bodies) in Australia, Canada, the UK and the USA over 15 years examining how such bodies apply such provisions in practice and the lessons that can be learned by policy makers. Then came this book by Tito Rendas, a revised and updated version of his doctoral thesis at Universidade Católica Portuguesa. Although a purely doctrinal work, this contribution draws not only on a thorough survey of the existing literature on exceptions and limitations (albeit not an exhaustive one given that Hudson’s book is not cited), but also on linguistics, philosophy and the theory of law.
