The most popular operating system for computers is Windows. According to StatCounter, Windows has more than 30 percent of the global market share. macOS and Linux are behind, but it does not mean that the two are inferior to MS Windows.
If anything, these two operating systems offer a plethora of neat features and fit profiles of certain individuals and businesses. Ultimately, a lot comes down to one’s needs.
At the same time, someone might be looking to try a different OS, and switching from Windows to Linux or macOS could be just the thing.
Knowing the key differences between the two will make you decide easier, and you can find these differences below.
There are some absolutely crazy people working on the Linux kernel and Ingo Molnar is one of them and he is working on a project that he dubs fast kernel headers which improves kernel build times by over 50%
Every time I make a video where I'm doing stuff at the command line, inevitably I get the troll comment about the "useless use of cat" (UUOC). What's weird (and mildy annoying) about the folks crying "UUOC" is that my useless use of cat is not useless. I have my reasons!
Sandra Henry-Stocker, @bugfarm on Twitter, whose column for Network World is Unix as a Second Language, joins Doc Searls and Dan Lynch from her home in the mountains of Western Virginia to share wisdom gathered from more than 30 years administering and writing about Unix and Linux systems. The topics range widely to adjacent subjects, including astronomy, containers and lesser operating systems.
Was he justified? Our thoughts on the dev who corrupted libraries in NPM for millions of users with his political statement about free software.
Plus how Google blew a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to control mobile messaging.
Cutefish is an upcoming desktop environment that's going to be radically different from anything you've experienced till now. Stunning looks, modern design, and intuitiveness that's basically instinct, drive the development of this new and premium interface. I've installed the beta version of Cutefish and the way it feels to use this interface has left me very impressed. The idea behind this project is to provide a high-quality interface for Linux newcomers, that is easy to navigate, equipped with all the tools needed for everyday usage but leaves out the complex things which might overwhelm the users.
In addition to the prompt support for Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Gen 1, another exciting milestone for the in-development Linux 5.17 kernel is introducing mainline support for the StarFive JH7100, which has been trying to make its debut as the first usable and low-cost RISC-V platform.
The StarFive JH7100 SoC is powered by SiFive's U74 dual-core 64-bit RISC-V processor running at 1.5GHz while having 4K display support but no integrated 3D GPU at this point. The StarFive JH7100 was announced last year as a low-cost RISC-V SoC. The performance out of the SiFive U74 cores is reported to be in similar ball park to Arm Cortex-A55 cores.
The watch command in Linux is used to run other commands on a regular interval, and then it displays the output in the terminal. Here’s how to use it!
Sometimes, while working on the Linux command line, you might want to execute a command repeatedly so as to track any change in output. Luckily, there is a command-line utility that lets you do this.
With the Linux watch command, you can track the changes in the output from time to time. It is beneficial for reflecting the real-time view of events that are happening on an operating system.
The watch command comes installed, by default, on nearly all Linux distributions. It is useful when you need to monitor changes in a command output over time. So instead of reading the whole output, you can keep an eye on the changes.
It was inevitable that the popularity of viral word guessing game Wordle would inspire clones, and thus only a matter of time before one of them popped up on Linux.
And lo, it has.
elementary OS gets to call first-dibs with Warble. Built by Andrew Vojak, Warble is described as a “native Linux word-guessing game built in Vala and Gtk for elementary OS.”
The aim? Just like Wordle (and the 80s gameshow Lingo) you need to figure out what a mystery five letter word is in as few guesses as possible. You smush in a (valid) word and see if it matches. Letters you get in the correct place are green (so you know they go there again), while letters that are the word but not in the right location are yellow.
Linux is fundamentally an open-source Operating System. Using open-source software on Linux is as peaceful as the Himalayas. Here we've discussed 5 such software that could be the best friend of a writer if done right.
If you collect anything, then you need to keep records to organize and track your collections.
Let's say you collect books, movies, stamps, or even coins, as your collection keeps growing, it will become difficult to organize.
Here comes Tellico, an outstanding collection manager app that helps you catalog everything and update all records when required.
Projectpad is constructed with Rust programming language for Linux and Unix systems, which can be installed either by building from source or using the Flatpak package from Flathub.
When I started my career in IT over 25 years ago, automation wasn't a popular concept. However, sysadmins would still automate parts of their jobs to increase their efficiency and effectiveness in managing their IT environments. At the time, writing scripts was the common way to address repetitive tasks, allowing admins to focus on other issues.
While scripts can get you a long way, Ansible is a versatile solution that makes automation even easier and more robust. Ansible abstracts the boring part of writing scripts away so that you can focus on your business needs instead of writing code to handle exceptions and special cases.
Looking at the top 10 Ansible articles from 2021, I see a common theme. Most of these articles are introductory, which means that IT professionals in general, and sysadmins in particular, are looking to learn Ansible and start automating their environment.
If this describes you, or if you've already started automating and are looking to improve your skills, this list contains some valuable information. Make sure to take a look at it.
As a follow-up to my RPM blog, here are instructions installing syslog-ng Open Source Edition (syslog-ng OSE) on the Debian / Ubuntu version. If you read my previous blog, skip to the installation part at the end, otherwise: read on.
The syslog-ng application is part of all major Linux distributions, and you can usually install syslog-ng from the official repositories. If you use just the core functionality of syslog-ng, use the package in your distribution repository (apt-get install syslog-ng), and you can stop reading here. However, if you want to use the features of newer syslog-ng versions (for example, send log messages to Elasticsearch or Apache Kafka), you have to either compile the syslog-ng from source, or install it from unofficial repositories. This post explains you how to do that.
NordVPN is one of the most common VPN providers in the world. They have a Linux version which works on both RPM-based and Debian-based distributions.
Sadly, they do not provide a GUI client for Linux, only a command line interface. That’s why it could be tricky to adjust NordVPN settings on Linux.
The Linux terminal is full of useful commands, but few are as powerful as the seemingly simple grep. It stands for Global Regular Expression Print, printing the results of user-defined system searches for collections of characters.
grep is extremely powerful but can be quite intimidating to use, so today, you'll learn some basics. If you are looking for some information within the documents on your machine, usually, you'll be looking for several words at once.
This article focuses on how to search multiple strings using grep and will show you a few similar tips and tricks for using grep in general.
Learn the commands to install the Vivaldi browser on RHEL based AlmaLinux 8 or Rocky Linux 8 using the command terminal.
Vivaldi is an interesting alternative to Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and other popular browsers. And like most of the other web browsers, this one is also available for Linux. The USP of Vivaldi is it offers a refreshing experience instead of the same monotonous approach. Instead of trying to please all users, the Norwegian company Vivaldi Technologies focuses on users for whom there are never enough functions. The idea for such a browser alternative came from Opera users who were dissatisfied with the radical slimming of “their” browser. The browser is now available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android app. Vivaldi’s in-built Mail client, a calendar, nice tab management, and a feed reader are some interesting features.
Today we are looking at how to install Firestorm Second Life on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
xRDP is a free and open-source implementation of Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), that started in 2004.
With RDP you can connect to a another computer over a network and control it through its graphical user interface, and use it almost as if you were sitting right in front of it. You also control the remote machine from operating systems that support RDP, which includes Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS.
xRDP allows non-Microsoft operating systems such as Linux and BSD to provide a fully-functional RDP-compliant remote desktop environment.
The xRDP server is full-screen and doesn’t require any special client-side software to be installed. xRDP allows RDP clients to present an X Windows desktop to the user. It works by bridging graphics from an X Windows system (Unix-like OS) to the client (the one receiving commands) and relaying controls back from the client to X.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Google Chrome on Elementary OS 6.0.
In this guide we will learn how to install and configure Memcached in ROpenSUSE Leap 15.3.
Memcached is an open source, distributed memory object caching system. The system caches data and objects in memory to minimize the frequency with which an external database or API must be accessed. This alleviates database load and speeds up dynamic Web applications. It offers a mature, scalable, open-source solution for delivering sub-millisecond response times making it useful as a cache or session store. Memcached is a popular choice for powering real-time applications in Web, Mobile Apps, Gaming, Ad-Tech, and E-Commerce.
Unlike databases that store data on disk or SSDs, Memcached keeps its data in memory. By eliminating the need to access disks, in-memory key-value stores such as Memcached avoid seek time delays and can access data in microseconds. Memcached is also distributed, meaning that it is easy to scale out by adding new nodes. And since Memcached is multithreaded, you can easily scale up compute capacity. As a result of its speed and scalability as well as its simple design, efficient memory management, and API support for most popular languages Memcached is a popular choice for high-performance, large-scale caching use cases.
In this guide we will learn how to install and configure Squid Proxy server on a OpenSUSE Leap server.
Squid is a caching proxy for the Web supporting HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It reduces bandwidth and improves response times by caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages. Squid has extensive access controls and makes a great server accelerator. It runs on most available operating systems.
Squids reverse proxy is a service that sits between the Internet and the webserver (usually within a private network) that redirects inbound client requests to a server where data is stored for easier retrieval. If the caching server (proxy) does not have the cached data, it then forwards the request on to the web server where the data is actually stored. This type of caching allows for the collection of data and reproducing the original data values stored in a different location to provide for easier access.
In this guide we will learn how to install and configure MariaDB 10 in FreeBSD 13.
MariaDB is an open-source one of the most popular relational database management system (RDBMS) that is a highly compatible drop-in replacement of MySQL. It is built upon the values of performance, stability, and openness, and MariaDB Foundation ensures contributions will be accepted on technical merit.
MariaDB was developed as a software fork of MySQL in 2009 in response to Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL. MariaDB intends to remain free and open-source software under the GNU General Public License. It is part of most cloud offerings and the default in most Linux distributions.
Linus Torvalds announced the Linux Kernel 5.16 after a few weeks of development and it is available for general usage. Linux Kernel 5.16 released with new features, security and support.
It contains the new system feaures are futex_waitv() which improves the Gaming performance in Native Linux , for the compete changelog refer the link
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install Linux kernel 5.16 in Rocky Linux 8 , AlmaLinux 8 and Fedora 35
This tutorial is for educational purpose, please do not install the kernel in PRODUCTION Server.
Wireshark (formerly Ethereal) is a FOSS (free and open-source software) for network protocol analyzer. One can use it to troubleshoot network issues, analyze communication protocols like TCP, DNS, HTTP etc.
The Linux find command is great at searching for files and directories. But you can also pass the results of the search to other programs for further processing. We show you how.
You are likely to not find Vim editor installed in your Docker container. Here's how to get it.
It's almost certain that the Linux distribution you are running in a Docker container doesn't have Vim or any other text editor installed by default.
Drupal is an open-source and popular content management tool that is the foundation of many websites across the internet. It comes with a lot of modules that allow the creation of any and every type of website.
In this post, we are going to explain how to install the Drupal content management tool on Ubuntu OS. Note: The steps mentioned here have been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nload on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Nload is a command-line-based real-time network traffic and bandwidth usage monitor. It visualizes the in and outgoing traffic using two graphs and provides additional info like the total amount of transferred data and min/max network usage.
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 Nload monitors network traffic and bandwidth usage on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
The 1990s saw the emergence of the quintessential Real Time Strategy (RTS) game. Starting with Dune II, and finishing with Age of Empires II, the genre was born, defined, sculpted. Indeed, the RTS titles of the era, Warcraft, Command & Conquer and a few others became the gold standard of the build-research-destroy computerized fun, never eclipsed despite advancement in software, graphics and availability. Needless to say, I've played them all.
The aforementioned gold standard is so high that it seems impossible to beat. In fact, many a game company has simply stopped trying, and instead decided to play the game of nostalgia instead. Release these supreme classics as modern titles, complete with all the tech bits that have changed in the past 20 years. Mostly extra power and high-def graphics. Age of Empires II and its Definitive Edition are a great example of a timeless success. Now, we also have Red Alert Remastered, the oldie goldie in 4K.
Welcome to a new Godot showcase developer interview to start off the new year! This time, we asked Justin Arnold about his experience developing and releasing his project RPG in a Box. This "engine within an engine" demonstrates that Godot is not only capable for game development, but also for creating applications with complex user interfaces.
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Hello! My name is Justin Arnold and I'm a solo developer working on RPG in a Box. I've always loved programming since my dad got me interested in learning BASIC on our C64 as a child. As I got older I developed a strong desire to build an RPG-focused tool that would allow others to easily create their own worlds and adventures. This idea has gone through several iterations over the past two decades and I'm excited to finally be bringing it to fruition through RPG in a Box!
SimulaVR, the startup behind its own open-source VR Linux distro, is creating a VR headset that aims to bring the full power of a PC to the standalone format. The powerful little standalone is definitely going to cost a pretty penny though, as it’s set to include a detachable compute unit featuring the guts of an Intel 11th gen NUC, which sports a Core i7 mobile processor.
It’s been about a month since we first learned about Simula One, a headset that’s squarely targeted at developers and people who want to use Linux natively on a virtual screen for work (re: not gamers or consumers). Now the company has released price and specs ahead of its Kickstarter campaign, which is slated to launch at some point this month.
Monster Hunter Rise has just released on Steam today from Capcom and the good news is - it appears to run very nicely out of the box with Steam Play Proton on Linux. That's another tick in the box for a big AAA title.
Tested with Proton Experimental, the only issue currently encountered is a small intro video not playing. This is a reoccurring issue and will be for the Steam Deck, for titles that use things like Media Foundation. If such things bother you, it worked just fine with Proton GE which you can easily download with ProtonUp-Qt.
Yuzu is another incredibly promising open source project, emulating the Nintendo Switch which is not exactly a small job (not that emulation ever is) and it's improving at a rapid pace.
Some good news for NVIDIA users came, with some major problems now being solved. Recently NVIDIA dropped support for some older cards, and the driver changes towards it introduced issues for Yuzu. The devs explain "The root of the problem in NVIDIA’s drivers seems to be in negation of integer and floating point values, and bitwise conversions of input values." - but thankfully all known issues have been worked around. As it turns out, what they ended up doing fixes it for Intel too and was also an optimization so they're now doing it for all APIs.
Neko Ghost, Jump! shows you what you can get when you blend together new and old, with this platformer having both a 2D and 3D mixture of gameplay in each level.
This is no gimmick either. Levels are designed around needing both 2D and 3D viewpoints, with some areas only being accessible with one viewpoint. Not only that, you also have physical and ghost forms to switch between to solve puzzles and combat enemies too.
If you’ve been reading this site for a while you may have noticed that I’m rather fond of desktop wallpapers, particularly the ‘default’ ones used by Ubuntu and related distros, and those shipped by desktop environments like GNOME and KDE Plasma.
I don’t profess that wallpapers are interesting or worthy of as much attention as I give them, but hey: we all have our little quirks.
It should be noted that users of PCLinuxOS have the following services available: – 25GB Cloud storage – Email – Graphic Image Hosting – Chat messenger
Flatpak 1.12.3 is an important update as it fixes two critical security issues found in Flatpak, such as CVE-2021-4386, a vulnerability that could allow a malicious repository to send invalid application metadata in a way that the app’s permissions are hidden during the installation.
Also fixed is an issue affecting the flatpak-builder component of Flatpak, which can cause the flatpak-builder --mirror-screenshots-url commands to access files outside the build directory.
The beginning of any new year brings a wealth of new opportunities for growth and change, which is equally valid for organizations across all industries. So, rather than falling into the same old routines, now is the time to focus on integrating and practicing more robust DevOps approaches and updating archaic practices.
Throughout 2021, Red Hat Services worked closely with customers and partners across many industries and engagements, both in-person and online, to provide consulting and technology solutions. These interactions have helped refine our observations, advancements, and key takeaways for future engagements, technology utilization, and implementation practices. Out of all of these, four stand out as the most significant focus areas that can bring the biggest impact to your organization's DevOps plan in 2022.
Many organizations have a requirement to configure a mail transfer agent (MTA) on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers. This is frequently done to enable servers to send out notifications or reports over email. For example, you might configure a script to email out a notification after an event occurs, or you might have a script to email out a monthly report after it is generated.
RHEL 7, 8 and 9 provide two options for MTAs: Postfix and Sendmail. Sendmail has been deprecated, and this post will be focusing on Postfix.
It is possible to install and configure Postfix on RHEL systems manually, following the documentation, however this can be time-consuming and prone to error. Red Hat introduced the postfix RHEL System Role to provide an automated solution to install and configure Postfix. The postfix RHEL System Role was introduced in RHEL 7.6 as a technology preview feature. With the release of RHEL 8.5, the postfix RHEL System Role is now fully supported.
2021 was quite challenging overall. It started with four weeks of distance learning at school. Luckily at least at school things got back to "some kind of normal" afterwards.
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For obvious reasons plenty of concerts I was looking forward didn’t take place. With my parents we at least managed to attend a concert performance of Puccinis Tosca with Jonas Kaufmann at Schloßbergbühne Kasematten/Graz, and with the kids we saw "Robin Hood" in Oper Graz and "Pippi Langstrumpf" at Studiobühne of Oper Graz. The lack of concerts and rehearsals once again and still severely impacts my playing the drums, including at HTU BigBand Graz. :-/
Grml-wise we managed to publish release 2021.07, codename JauKerl. Debian-wise we got version 11 AKA bullseye released as new stable release in August.
The Raspberry Pi series of single-board computers might be the most popular Linux-based PCs of all time, thanks to their super-low prices, educational resources, and versatility. The first few models weren’t that great at functioning like desktop computers, due to the low-power processors and limited RAM, but newer iterations (like the Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM) are perfectly capable budget PCs. Ubuntu, one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions, is now preparing some Pi-specific performance tweaks for the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 release.
Ubuntu Desktop is available for Raspberry Pi 4 boards since Ubuntu 20.10 release. However, to get a comfortable experience and use it as a desktop/server, Canonical officially recommends 4/8 GB RAM variants of the board.
After all, memory requirements by modern distributions are gradually increasing. So, it only makes sense not to expect a desktop setup with a 2 GB RAM Raspberry Pi board.
But, it looks like Canonical has plans to make that happen with a feature enabled in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, scheduled for release in April 2022.
The Explorer Edition of Pine64's flagship Linux-powered PinePhone Pro is available today for pre-order.
Pine64, the makers of popular single-board computers, the Pine Phone KDE edition and the Pinebook Pro, is gearing up to ship the PinePhone Pro Explorer Edition. Pine64 shipped the PinePhone Pro to developers in Q4 2021 for $399 and is now offering the Explorer Edition at the same price to more mainstream Linux fans. However, it is primarily aimed at seasoned Linux enthusiasts and developers with embedded systems experience.
Rockchip RK3588S is a cost-optimized version of the RK3588 octa-core Cortex-A76/A55 processor with fewer peripherals, and I’ve been told it’s been designed for tablets, but as we’ll see below, the processor will probably find its way into many other applications.
We first saw RK3588S during the Rockchip Developer Event last December, but at the time we did not have any information, except it would be a lower-cost version. I’ve now received an RK3588S datasheet, so let’s have a look at the block diagram and specifications to find out what’s different.
[Love Hultén]’s latest piece of interactive art is the SYNTH#BOI, a super-clean build with something of the semi-cyberdeck, semi-vintage computing vibe to it. The device is a combination synthesizer and visualizer, with a 15-inch display, MIDI keyboard, and based on an Intel NUC i5 small form factor PC.
There are not many details about the internal workings of the device, but the high quality of the build is very evident. Photos show a fantastic-looking enclosure with clean lines and sharp finish; it’s a reminder that careful measuring and attention to detail can be the difference between something that looks like a hack job, and something that looks like a finished product.
With a new Matrix movie now in cinemas, we’ve all been reminded of those screensavers that were just the coolest thing ever when the original film dropped in 1999. [en0b] decided to recreate the classic “digital rain” effect on the Raspberry Pi Pico, using up all the little microcontroller’s storage in the process.
Rather than rely on existing graphics libraries, [en0b] set about using a high-quality GIF for the animation. The original file was 8 MB, which was far too big to fit on the Pico. After some finagling in an image editor and with the help of a custom Python script, however, [en0b] managed to fit the 127-frame animation at 240 x 135 resolution into the 2 MB Flash onboard the chip. With the microcontroller hooked up to the 1.14ââ¬Â³ IPS “Pico Display” from Pimoroni, the final looks great and faithfully recreates the aesthetic seen in the film.
When you need to monitor a fire initialization, Smoke Sensor is the best way to detect the percentage of carbon monoxide (CO) in parts per million (PPM). The smoke sensor gives an analog voltage which can be monitored by Analog Pin of Arduino Uno
In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to interface an MQ-2 Smoke sensor with Arduino Uno. Results of the smoke sensor are displayed over the serial monitor.
This tutorial explains how you can work with Calc, the spreadsheet program of LibreOffice, by learning its basic formula examples. In this first part, we will learn the most basic ones namely SUM, COUNT and AVERAGE. Let's start!
Creative, exciting applications of open source software can be found worldwide, and who better to share the details of new use cases than the practitioners themselves. In this blog series we’ll feature guests who told their open source stories during Practical Open Source Information (POSI) 2021, an online conference hosted by OSI.
The Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) not only offers a minor in free and open source software and free culture, but it also recently created an official Center of Excellence called Open@RIT. It’s dedicated to fostering the collaborative engine for faculty, staff, and students working on open source projects. The goal is to discover and grow the footprint of RIT’s impact on all things open across many disciplines, both within the university and beyond. This includes open source software, open data, open science, open hardware, and open educational resources and creative commons licensed efforts, which collectively they refer to as Open Work.
We did it! We’re welcoming 1,354 new members to the Open Source Initiative. The membership drive we launched at the end of 2021 surpassed our expectations. These new members are mostly “free” members and don’t have voting rights to elect the next board members; however, there is time to become a full member by the next election cycle in March.
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The majority of traffic to the campaign was through the website, with social media traffic being quite small by comparison. The impact of social media on promotions like this is often overestimated. Social channels are great for engaging with the community, “reinforcing the brand”, and connecting with “influencers”: basically, social media helps make people aware that we exist, but isn’t a particularly effective tool to convince them to take an action. Therefore, we’ll emphasize our website for future promotions, and social media channels will continue to be a part of the promotional mix, but not the primary focus.
Mozilla Firefox 96.0 was released today. The new release focuses on performance and security improvements.
Firefox 96.0 significantly reduced the main-thread load, improved noise suppression and automatic gain control for better overall experience.
It now enforces the Cookie Policy: Same-Site=lax by default which helps defend against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.
The release also fixed some issues, including video quality degradation issues on certain sites, issue where WebRTC downgrades screen sharing resolution, and video intermittently drops SSRC. As well, there are various security fixes.
Linux Mint announced that it will keep Mozilla Firefox as its distribution’s default web browser, but with some major changes. It describes the deal as a “commercial and technical partnership.”
“Linux Mint signed a new partnership with Mozilla,” the announcement post explains. “It’s a real pleasure for us to join forces with Mozilla and to start this partnership.”
I’m not fully versed in the politics behind this new partnership, but it goes something like this: Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, and is one of the more popular Linux distributions. It has offered Firefox as the default browser for years, but with Ubuntu switching to a new container-based Snap app packaging format that Mint is not a fan of, it needed to find a different distribution method. And it had been packaging Firefox itself using the .deb packaging technology.
Going forward, Firefox will continue to be distributed through the official Linux Mint repositories, using .deb, but this work will be done by Mozilla. And that means there will be some changes to how the browser is configured. Instead of Mint’s highly customized install, Mint users will now get the Mozilla defaults.
A Swedish developer has published code that promises to avoid application downtime during PostgreSQL schema migrations.
Using "views" in the popular open-source database to encapsulate tables and create a versioned interface, Fabian Lindfors, a final year MSc student in computer science at Lund University, has produced a tool that he hopes can automate zero-downtime migrations.
LibreOffice 7.2.4 and LibreOffice 7.1.8 were released on December 6 providing an important security fix
A large part of our work is possible thanks to the contribution of our volunteers. This was not the exception. Our Public Money? Public Code! brochure is now translated into Spanish, and we hosted an event to share this great news with our community. GNUHealth, Pica Pica HackLab, Lliurex, Linkat, and KDE took part in our event.
In the framework of our Public Money? Public Code! initiative, we have an exhaustive brochure dedicated to public administrations. It summarises the FSFE's long-term expertise with additional knowledge from leading experts in various ICT areas. It helps readers understand Free Software and its benefits for a modern digital public infrastructure. Hot topics covered include the avoidance of vendor lock-in, improvement of IT security through openness, exploring different business models, handling of procurement issues, and learning from innovative approaches to smart cities.
Now, thanks to the work of our volunteers, this brochure is also available in Spanish, which means a broader audience that can read about the benefits of modernising public infrastructure with public code in their own language, and that is a highlight to us.
To share this good news, we organised an event dedicated to our Spanish speaking community. We had the participation of experts such as Luis Falcón, founder of GNUHealth, Ricardo Muñoz from Lliurex, Alexis Puente Montiel from Pica Pica HackLab, Francesc Busquets in representation of Linkat, and Aleix Pol Gonzalez, president of KDE. Our speakers and panelist also had the chance to discuss the challenges that still lie ahead for Free Software in the public sector with a special focus on Spain.
2021 was a successful year for the Qt - we managed to do important releases like Qt 6.2 and Qt Creator 6 on time and with the planned content. That is however not only because of my colleagues at The Qt Company. A lot of community members are also contributing, be it by writing diligent bug reports, contributing patches, giving technical advise, or helping out other users in forums and mailing lists. Thanks to all of you - you are an important part of what makes Qt so great!
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) that serves as the default system compiler on most Linux distributions is nearing its annual update with GCC 12. GCC 12 has been in a general bug fixing period since November while beginning next week will be onto its final phase of focusing just on regression and documentation fixes to the compiler.
GCC 12 release manager Richard Biener announced that the general bug fixing "stage 3" period will end on 16 January followed by the stage 4 period of just regression/documentation fixing. At the moment there are about 30 P1 regressions of the highest priority, 307 P2 regressions, and 279 P3 regressions.
As the web and applications become more complex, JavaScript and Node.js are increasingly becoming commonplace requirements in a developer’s repertoire. To improve your code-foo and minimize the headaches you encounter, you can define some functions early in your code that quickly accomplish simple tasks.
Frameworks have become an essential part of web development, as the standards of web applications are always rising, so does the complexity of the technology needed. It’s completely unreasonable to reinvent the wheel for such sophisticated techniques -assuming that you can reinvent all that. That’s why using frameworks endorsed by thousands of developers around the world is a very sensible approach for building rich and interactive web applications. A web app has a backend (server-side) and a frontend (client-side), so we discuss both best Backend frameworks as well as frontend frameworks.
Version 8.0 of the IPython read-eval-print-loop implementation for Python is out.
This major release comes with many improvements to the existing codebase and several new features. These new features are code reformatting with Black in the CLI, ghost suggestions, and better tracebacks which highlight the error node, thus making complex expressions easier to debug.
I am interested in Flowblade video editor, and chasing up it's dependencies. It looks like need an extra three python modules, so have compiled these in OpenEmbedded
Say what you will about the last two years, but it’s fascinating how quickly the future caught up with our immediate needs. We had to rebuild entire infrastructures, entire businesses, in the blink of an eye, and some were more successful at riding this unusual economic wave than others. (I repeatedly think how this never would have been possible even 10, 15 years earlier.) We haven’t really stepped back, as a society, and given these success stories their due. So, let’s do that. During the holiday break, I found myself chatting over Zoom with a founder of a company that three years ago was barely even digital in the sense that you might think of it—its approach was structured almost entirely around groups of people being in the same room. And in a matter of literal weeks, his company had to move the whole show onto webcams and chat rooms, and figure out a way to make it work. Somehow, they did—so well, in fact, that the business was acquired last year by a company that has always been digital. And I think the reason they pulled it off says a lot about the way we learn online. Today’s Tedium talks about One Day University, innovating on the fly, and the state of consumer-focused digital education.
It seems like creating a vacuum should be a pretty easy job, but it turns out that sucking all the air out of something is harder than it seems. A cheap vacuum pump will get you part of the way there, but to really pull a hard vacuum, you need an oil diffusion pump that costs multiple tens of thousands of dollars.
Or, you need a bunch of thrift store junk, a TIG welder, and a can of WD-40. At least that’s what [Lucas] put into his homebrew oil diffusion pump. The idea of such a contraption is to vaporize oil in a chamber such that the oil droplets entrain any remaining gas molecules toward an exhaust port. His low-budget realization of this principle involved a lot of thrift store stainless steel cookware, welded together with varying degrees of success, with liberal applications of epoxy to seal up any leaks. And an electric smores cooker for the heating element, which was a nice touch. The low-budget approach extended even to the oil for the pump; rather than shelling out for expensive specialty oil, [Lucas] distilled some from a WD-40 silicone spray lubricant.
In many ways, the human body is like any other machine in that it requires constant refueling and maintenance to keep functioning. Much of this happens without our intervention beyond us selecting what to eat that day. There are however times when due to an accident, physical illness or aging the automatic repair mechanisms of our body become overwhelmed, fail to do their task correctly, or outright fall short in repairing damage.
Most of us know that lizards can regrow tails, some starfish regenerate into as many new starfish as the pieces which they were chopped into, and axolotl can regenerate limbs and even parts of their brain. Yet humans too have an amazing regenerating ability, although for us it is mostly contained within the liver, which can regenerate even when three-quarters are removed.
In the field of regenerative medicine, the goal is to either induce regeneration in damaged tissues, or to replace damaged organs and tissues with externally grown ones, using the patient’s own genetic material. This could offer us a future in which replacement organs are always available at demand, and many types of injuries are no longer permanent, including paralysis.
Research projects have a funny way of getting blown out of proportion by the non-experts, over-promising the often relatively small success that the dedicated folks doing the science have managed to eke out. Scaling-up cost-effectively is one of the biggest killers for commercializing research, which is why recent developments in creating carbon nanotube transistors have us hopeful.
Currently, most cutting-edge processes use FETs (Field Effect Transistors). As they’ve gotten smaller, we’ve added fins and other tricks to get around the fact that things get weird when they’re small. The industry is looking to move to GAAFETs (Gate All Around FET) as Intel and Samsung have declared their 3 nm processes (or equivalent) will use the new type of gate. As transistors have shrunk, the “off-state” leakage current has grown. GAAFETs are multi-gate devices, allowing better control of that leakage, among other things.
"2021 was a watershed year in the history of the PC market, with the PCs place at the center of work, learning and leisure truly cemented," said Ishan Dutt, senior analyst at Canalys, in a statement.
According to the figures, Lenovo declined 6.5 per cent in Q4 to 21.7 million units and HP was down 3 per cent to 18.64 million. Canalys didn't indicate why either shrank but presumably it is related to the scarce supply of parts including integrated circuits and panels. We asked both vendors.
Who can’t resist snapping up a piece of really expensive laboratory testing gear for next to nothing when browsing eBay or similar? Maybe it’s giving you mournful eyes when browsing through a yard sale. Often such gear is sold for cheap because it’s defective, but with a bit of attention, can be brought back to life. This is how [Roberto Barrios] ended up with a Rohde & Schwarz FSIQ 7 signal analyzer lounging around his place for a few months until he got it fixed.
It’s been exactly four years since I built my last keyboard. It has been a good keyboard that has served me well over the years, but it was time for a long awaited upgrade.
I have actually been waiting for a long time for some new switches that would be both buttery smooth and affordable. Too much excitement, that day is finally here!
We interrupt the flow of Keebin’ with Kristina to bring you this special bulletin. When three different people alert you to a keyboard within 48 hours or so, it calls for more than just a paragraph in the roundup column. So here are several paragraphs, an animated GIF, and some extended commentary about the Charachorder, a new kind of input that came up through Kickstarter in 2021.
Driving this hype train are some short viral videos that show the founder hitting 500+ WPM on this crazy thing. FYI, that is fast enough to get you banned from typing competitions, including the monkeytype leaderboard. Those apes forbid chorded input altogether, and automatically throw out entries above 300 WPM. It acheives these insane speeds through clever mechanical design and, of course, firmware.
U.S. Cyber Command’s Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) has identified multiple open-source tools used by an Iranian advanced persistent threat (APT) group known as MuddyWater. According to CNMF, “MuddyWater has been seen using a variety of techniques to maintain access to victim networks. These include side-loading DLLs in order to trick legitimate programs into running malware and obfuscating PowerShell scripts to hide command and control functions.” U.S. Cyber Command has released malware samples attributed to MuddyWater to the malware aggregation tool and repository, VirusTotal.
Norfolk County Council will have to wait a bit longer for that a-ha moment when it finally turns on its new €£18m cloud-based Oracle ERP system as the go-live date is delayed until April.
Expected to accrue between €£20m and €£31m in savings over 10 years, the project joins a list of local authorities with late-running enterprise application projects including Surrey County Council and West Sussex.
In May 2020, Norfolk council published deals including €£13.5m for Big Red's software and €£4.4m for the "service partner" Insight Direct.
It promised a fully integrated ERP SaaS system including UK local government HR, finance, procurement, payroll and analytics services.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (cfrpki, gdal, and lighttpd), Fedora (perl-CPAN and roundcubemail), Mageia (firefox), openSUSE (jawn, kernel, and thunderbird), Oracle (kernel, openssl, and webkitgtk4), Red Hat (cpio, idm:DL1, kernel, kernel-rt, openssl, virt:av and virt-devel:av, webkit2gtk3, and webkitgtk4), Scientific Linux (openssl and webkitgtk4), SUSE (kernel and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (apache-log4j2, ghostscript, and lxml).
A C++-based malware, SysJoker is delivered via a dropper file from a remote server that, upon execution, is engineered to gather information about the compromised host, such as MAC address, user name, physical media serial number, and IP address, all of which are encoded and transmitted back to the server.
Netcraft has seen a large increase in survey scams impersonating well-known banks as a lure. These are often run under the guise of a prize in celebration of the bank’s anniversary, though in some cases a reward is promised just for participating.
These scams first came to Netcraft’s attention around 16 months ago, when businesses that were particularly useful during lockdown such as supermarkets, mobile phone networks, and delivery companies were targeted. The expansion of these attacks to use banks as a lure started in October 2021. To date we have seen over 75 distinct banks used as lures for these survey scams, with a global spread including banks from US, UK, Asia, and the Middle East.
Survey scams mislead victims into thinking they are being marketed to by a well-known company or brand and will receive a high-value reward or prize by answering a few simple questions. These sites usually pose as either market research for the company or as a quiz contest e.g. “To win all you need to do is answer these questions”.
After answering these questions, the victim is told they have won, and then redirected to another scam or a third-party affiliate link under the guise of redeeming their prize. For example, they may be asked to pay a small shipping and handling fee in order to claim their prize but are instead unknowingly signed up for an unwanted subscription service with recurring payments. Alternatively, the user may be tricked into giving away personal information or installing malicious software.
About 3 in 5 Democrats and 1 in 2 Republicans said they support a plan to rein in social media companies’ use of algorithms that recommend content based on personal data
Apple has finally caved to Korea's telecommunication regulator and agreed to allow third-party in-app billing systems in South Korea thus complying with a local law.
A state-imposed internet shutdown in Kazakhstan entered a sixth day on Monday, leaving millions of people struggling to access basic services and information about anti-government protests that have rocked the country, digital rights groups said.
Connectivity was restored nationwide for a few hours on Monday, according to Internet blockage observatory NetBlocks, before being cut off soon after in the Central Asian nation following last week's wave of unrest.
"Earlier today, some users briefly came online for the first time in five days," the group said on Twitter.
The streets of Kazakhstan's biggest city Almaty returned to near-normal on Monday after the worst violence in three decades of post-Soviet independence, with thousands of people detained and some public buildings torched.
Recently, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said the agency would consider moving ahead with a proposal to establish “broadband labels” that would help customers easily see information about internet-service provider’s (ISPs) prices, data allowances, and internet speeds.
While this is clearly a great way to help everyday consumers sift through the muck of internet plans, it only address part of a larger problem.
In a recent letter, Rosenworcel said the FCC would discuss the labels at its open meeting on Jan. 27. The idea of creating labels for broadband plans isn’t new.
President Joe Biden urged the FCC to move forward with the labels in his July executive order regarding competition, and in 2016 the FCC introduced voluntary broadband labels that were modeled after the nutrition labels you see on various food products.
But when the FCC repealed net neutrality rules, it also nixed transparency requirements that were part of the 2015 Open Internet order.
Just a few years after The Waste Land appeared — a poem whose difficulty critics compared to some “pompous cross-word puzzle” — Edward Powys Mathers (alias: Torquemada) pioneered the cryptic: a puzzle form that, like modernist poetry, unwove language and rewove it anew. Roddy Howland Jackson reveals the pleasures and imaginative creatures lurking in Torquemada's lively grids.
Some Japanese texts use a rebus-style script for teaching the illiterate to recite the *Heart Sūtra*, and other sacred texts, in Chinese.
