“Aquaris supports the conventional air cooling of the notebook, resulting in significantly reduced surface and CPU and GPU temperatures and overall lower system fan noise. Alternatively, the additional cooling capacity can be invested in maximum CPU and GPU performance for rendering at record speeds,” the announcement states.
The unit weighs 1.39 kg with dimensions of 203x75x186 mm and is designed mainly for stationary use at the desk. The Aquaris additionally offers three fan speeds with control through a graphical user interface.
Thinkpads that won’t boot Linux by default, Lennart moves to Microsoft, the Firefox Snap is finally a lot faster, Reddit shows its true colours, KDE Korner, and more.
Xorg, Wayland, Pulseaudio, pipewire, dbus, mesa and many many more incredibly important linux desktop projects are developed under the banner of a single group, that group is Freedesktop
There are, right now, three new GstVA elements merged in main: vah264enc, vacompositor and vajpegdec.
Just to recap, GstVA is a GStreamer plugin in gst-plugins-bad (yes, we agree it’s not a great name anymore), to differentiate it from gstreamer-vaapi. Both plugins use libva to access stateless video processing operations; the main difference is, precisely, how stream’s state is handled: while GstVA uses GStreamer libraries shared by other hardware accelerated plugins (such as d3d11 and v4l2codecs), gstreamer-vaapi uses an internal, tightly coupled and convoluted library.
Also, note that right now (release 1.20) GstVA elements are ranked NONE, while gstreamer-vaapi ones are mostly PRIMARY+1.
Back to the three new elements in GstVA, the most complex one is vah264enc wrote almost completely by He Junyan, from Intel. For it, He had to write a H.264 bitwriter which is, until certain extend, the opposite for H.264 parser: construct the bitstream buffer from H.264 structures such as PPS, SPS, slice header, etc. This API is part of libgstcodecparsers, ready to be reused by other plugins or applications. Currently vah264enc is fairly complete and functional, dealing with profiles and rate controls, among other parameters. It still have rough spots, but we’re working on them. But He Junyan is restless and he already has in the pipeline an encoder common class along with a HEVC and AV1 encoders.
ownCloud is free and open-source software written in PHP that’s used for data synchronization and file sharing. ownCloud is very similar to DropBox and other cloud storage services such OneDrive, iCloud, and Google Drive.
The main difference is that this is self-hosted, which means that your data really only belongs to you. This of course is preferable if you want your data to be more secure.
When was the last time you had to create a zip file? Personally, I have to interact with those types of files all the time (either receiving or sending them to various clients, family, and friends). For most people, the creation of zip files is second nature. And even on the Linux operating system, working with such files isn't a challenge… once you know what you're doing.
Does the Lazarus IDE look a bit too old fashioned for your liking? Multiple windows all over your desktop. Don’t let this put you off. With just a few clicks you can reconfigure the Lazarus IDE for single window mode. Resulting in a sleek and modern looking developing environment for cross-platform rapid application development.
Wallpaper Downloader is a slick Linux wallpaper downloader and manager. It supports most Linux desktop environments and is very easy to use. This guide will show you how to download wallpapers to the Linux desktop with Wallpaper Downloader.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Audacity on Pop!_OS 22.04. Enjoy!
Today we are looking at how to install Dolphin Emulator 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.
With Pi-hole, your Raspberry Pi can filter ads before they reach any of your devices across your network. Here’s how to do it!
Ads on websites and applications are a common way of generating revenue. However, the truth is that many websites, including this one, would not exist without the income earned.
But the big truth is that ads have always been an unwanted “addition” for end users and their user experience.
Unfortunately, advertising is a necessary evil for the internet to exist in its current form. First, to be able to use all the resources it offers for free. To even be able to read this article.
Based on the results of previous research, I realize that Tesseract does various processing internally before doing the actual OCR. However, some instances still exist where Tesseract can result in a signification reduction in accuracy.
So in this post, I would like to introduce some pre-processing methods that apply directly before passing in Tesseract.
GSOC is in full swing and here is my first progress update! I’ve been spending time getting familiar with the Krita code base. The first step in my project was making SVG appear as an export option to test start testing the export code. While this may seem straight forward (I certainly thought it would be) there are a few things that we’ll need to do.
First, how does Krita know what files it can import/export as? Well that is easy enough to answer, in a database. Specifically Krita has a class KisMimeDatabase that stores all available file formats Krita supports. Adding a new option to this database is fairly easy as there are plenty of examples in the KisMimeDatabase.cpp. We can mostly copy/paste how other options are added but replace that file name with svg. Neat :).
Summer is here!
All my creative energy has gone into wrapping up a difficult project at Codethink, and the rest of the time I’ve been enjoying sunshine and festivals. I was able to dedicate some time to learning the basics of async Rust but I don’t have much to share from the last month. Instead, let me focus on some projects I’m keeping an eye on.
Firstly, in the Tracker search engine, Carlos Garnacho has landed some important features and refactors. The main one being stream-based serializers and deserializers.
This allows more easily backing up and importing data in and out the tracker-store, and cleaning up some cruft like multiple different implementations of Turtle. It seems ideal having a totally stream-based codec so you can process an effectively infinite amount of data, but there is a tradeoff if you serialize data triple-by-triple – the serialized output is much less human-readable and in some cases larger than if you do some buffering and group related statements together. For this reason we didn’t yet land the JSON-LD support.
This is my second GSoC update blog, in the 2 weeks since my last update, and we have reached further in the port progress.
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In my last update, I said that we will move on to changing the version to GTK4 once the event controllers are implemented, but it didn't go well, not all event controllers were backported and one of the most used ones had a different name in GTK3+ thus, for the time being, we have delayed event controller implementations and moved onto changing the dependencies to GTK4, officially starting the Breaking Phase.
Just a regular ISO update
July release fixes a bunch of issue, updated packages etc.
With new version 9.0 Rocky Linux joins the list of ppc64le-compatible CentOS clones, along with the already extant AlmaLinux 9 and Circle Linux based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (itself based on Fedora 34). Rocky Linux explicitly requires a POWER9 CPU. Other than that, the big difference is the branding and the governance, but more choice is always good. Download ISOs are available.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Rocky Linux 9.0 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Rocky Linux is on a roll. A few days after Rocky Linux 9 arrived, Google Cloud recommended Rocky Linux as a replacement for CentOS 7.
Now, CentOS 7, unlike CentOS 8, which got an abrupt end of life in December 2021, will still be supported until June 30, 2024. But that's soon enough for big companies like Facebook, Disney, GoDaddy, RackSpace, Toyota, and Verizon, which had depended on CentOS, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone, to look at alternatives. And Rocky Linux is 100% compatible with RHEL.
CentOS is hosting an in-person Dojo at DevConf.US. Dojos are free mini-conferences with sessions on a range of topics in the Enterprise Linux ecosystem. This Dojo takes place on August 17 at Boston University. Registration is free but strongly recommended. We also have a room block at the nearby Residence Inn. See the event page for details.
Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 18 July at 1300 UTC The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend.
After two years of virtual gatherings, we’re excited to announce that AnsibleFest 2022 is returning to an in-person gathering, happening October 18 and 19 in Chicago, Illinois.
AnsibleFest is one of our favorite events because it brings together our customers, partners, community members and Red Hatters to talk about the latest happenings and about what’s possible for the future of automation and open source technologies.
This year’s event will have multiple content tracks covering topics for everyone from Ansible beginners to automation experts. It will also be a great opportunity to network with industry pros and to get expert answers for all of your automation questions.
In the world of operating systems, the strangest name would have to go to System76's in-house version of Linux, called Pop!_OS. This is the OS that ships with their desktop and laptop systems and make for remarkably seamless integration. In fact, I would go so far as to say that with Pop!_OS, System76 has done for Linux what Apple did for its operating system, only with the addition of making everything open-source. With Pop!_OS running on System76 hardware (such as my Thelio desktop machine -- which is, hands down, my favorite desktop PC I've ever owned), it goes well beyond the "everything just works" mantra and into the realm of "everything works to perfection."
Few devices are more iconic in the maker community than the Arduino Uno board. To celebrate the Uno’s history and beloved status, we released the UNO Mini Limited Edition in late 2021. This little board is a tiny replica of the standard Uno, but with a special black and gold color scheme. While the UNO Mini LE is collectible, it is also a fully functional development board. Hari Wiguna took advantage of that fact to create this LED cube circuit sculpture shield for it.
The UNO Mini LE’s specs are almost identical to the standard Uno Rev3, since they share the same Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller (just in a different package). But the small size of the UNO Mini LE means that it isn’t compatible with normal Uno shields. Wiguna’s shield fits on the UNO Mini LE and provides a flashing circuit sculpture cube of LED goodness.
Happy Monday, everyone -- let’s review the Apache community’s activities from the past week...
Cutelyst the Qt Web framework just got a new license, the more permissive BSD-3-Clause. Back in 2013 when I started the project the LGPL was a perfectly fine license as software on servers can be closed as long they are not AGPL, thus it was permissive enough for the web and REST backends use-cases I had in mind.
Fast-forward almost 10 years and I have used for a few of projects where it was embedded into another application, and I realized that there might be users with commercial Qt license that would like to use it but can’t due the current license.
Software Freedom Conservancy congratulates Microsoft for changing the terms of their app store to again allow commercial distribution of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Microsoft deleted their previously proposed text (originally slated to go into effect over the weekend) which would have prohibited “profit[ing] from open-source … [when that] software … is otherwise generally available for free”.
Last week, we explained the disaster that would ensue if the policy was enacted. While some argued that the policy was essential to avoid the problem of “clones” of FOSS programs on app stores, our Policy Fellow also explained how the FOSS community has long used trademark policies and enforcement to mitigate this problem in “app stores”. We remain open to discussing this in detail with app store policy-makers, including Microsoft.
Hello there! It’s been a hot July week in Amsterdam, and I expect hotter days are still to come. I wish air conditioning was more popular in Europe, but alas. This month of FOSS development enjoyed a lot of small improvements in a lot of different projects.
For Hare, I have introduced a number of improvements. I wrote a new standard library module for string templates, strings::template, and a new third-party library for working with pixel buffers, pixbuf. The templating is pretty simple — as is typical for the standard library — but allows a fairly wide range of formatting options. We’ll be extending this a little bit more in the future, but it will not be a complete solution like you see in things like Jinja2. Nevertheless, it makes some use-cases, like code generation, a lot cleaner, without introducing a weighty or complex dependency.
pixbuf is pretty neat, and is the first in a line of work I have planned for graphics on Hare. It’s similar to pixman, but with a much smaller scope — it only deals with pixel buffers, handling pixel format conversions and doing small operations like fill and copy. In the future I will add simple buffer compositing as well, and extending modules like hare-png to support loading data into these buffers. Later, I plan on writing a simple vector graphics library, capable at least of rendering TinyVG images and perhaps later TinySVG as well. I’m also working on hare-wayland again, to provide a place to display these buffers.
We have a Database Independent Interface aka DBI and a Unified Cache Handling Interface aka CHI which both provide a generalized interface to similar backend services. Similarly we have AnyEvent - the DBI of event loop programming and Log::Any. With the Nopaste cli provides an agnostic tool to send data to pastebin like services.
This is a reflection on my inner desire for a “links” section on my blog. However, it applies more broadly to any of my writing.
I go back and forth on having a “links” section on my blog separate from my “posts”. Instead of my monthly readingNotes, each of which is one blog post with a collection of links in it, I want split those out into individual links I can post at any moment.
However, I enjoy my current process where I note stuff down and then come back to it at the end of the month and read it with fresh eyes. It requires an editing process to the whole thing. Sometimes I cut links out completely. Sometimes I end up commenting on the excerpt so much, I pull it out into its own blog post with additional commentary.
What’s one to do? Write about it, of course! It helps me think.
[...]
This results in a queue of thoughts, many of which never get published.
The technologist in me wants to find a way to automate this.
Farmers like Rajiv Kumar Ojha in Bihar face high volatility in crop prices, made worse by the absence of APMCs in the state. Their situation predicts the future when the new farm laws take full effect across India
CISA has updated the joint CISA-United States Coast Guard Cyber Command (CGCYBER) Cybersecurity Advisory AA22-174A: Malicious Cyber Actors Continue to Exploit Log4Shell in VMware Horizon, originally released June 23, 2022. The advisory now includes IOCs provided in Malware Analysis Report (MAR)-10382580-2.
For those want to check PC hardware specs in Linux, CPU-X is a good choice for user switching from Microsoft Windows.
It’s a free open-source system profiling and monitoring application, that looks quite similar to CPU-Z for Windows. With it, you can check your CPU specification, vendor, codename, clocks, and L1/L2/L3 caches.
The Evals results can tell you, for example, whether a particular endpoint security product succeeded in blocking privilege escalation or failed to block password harvesting. Highly successful threat actors such as those emulated by the Engenuity tests use attacks involving dozens of steps, and the Evals results track the outcome of each step.
Because the results and methodologies of the evaluations are freely posted on the MITRE website, organizations that are considering new endpoint security products and are also familiar with the MITRE ATT&CK framework can pore over the results to see how well specific offerings did, and which might be the best fit for their individual security postures.
GM is in very serious financial trouble, and thinks that the solution is to force every new Buick and GMC owner into a $1500 three year OnStar subscription.
Buick and GMC fans are furious. General Motors is in bad fiscal trouble again after the stock collapsed over the past six months and analysts are warning about “earnings misses” and “recessions” this morning related to GM and large investors are dumping the stock.
GM learned nothing the last time it went bankrupt and re-emerged. Some structural problems were fixed, such as having too many brands that were basically all the same car, and some were not.
The biggest problems “New GM” faced were that the Obama Administration managed the bankruptcy and they had to agree to carry over many of their legacy problems into the new company, which continued to drain their coffers.
While nobody should want retirees/pensioners and current workers to “take a bath” on their pay and benefits, at the same time, none of GM’s main rivals in the auto industry have to deal with anything like it.
Then came the government mandates to build compliance and electric cars that nobody (at the time) wanted, because gas was cheap, so GM killed them off as soon as Obama was gone. Then gas got very expensive again, and it forced them to stop what they were doing and run a crash program to get efficient and electric vehicles to market.
Obama allowed the GM bankruptcy to go through while allowing all of the people who ran them into bankruptcy to remain at their posts without punishment.
The appointment of a former NSW deputy premier over a more qualified candidate to a plum overseas posting is rightly being lashed. But the John Barilaro saga is just one example of the energetic outreach to the world by our state governments. Public good or puffed-up parochialism? Mark Sawyer examines the reach of the program.
For generations of Australians in London and missing home, it was a nice little perk. If it had been too long since you had heard about the goings-on back home, there was a place to go. Lob into the magnificent lobby of Australia House in The Strand, flash the passport and perhaps work that accent, and next you know, you’re in a comfortable armchair with an Australian newspaper on your lap. News from home, Aussie news, and only a week old!
Simpler times – and maybe you had to be a news junkie. Anyway, in the past three decades, the need for such a service has, not surprisingly, subsided.
Our hedgehog, Kino, was initially quite scared of us. He has grown more friendly and curious in recent months, but he still does not like to be touched. We take hin outside using a fabric bag called a "snuggle sack", and a few nights ago he emerged from the sack into the darkness of the backyard.
I didn't get what this was until I looked at the picture. In England, that would be called Yorkshire pudding, and it's a savoury thing that you serve with a roast dinner. You'd normally make it in a baking tray instead of a pan with a handle, which might save burns.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.