The Pinebook Pro is a $200 laptop with a 14 inch, full HD display, a Rockchip RK3399 processor, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage.
But unlike most laptops with specs like those, this isn’t a Chromebook (or a Windows laptop). It ships with the GNU/Linux-based Debian MATE instead.
First announced in January, the Pinebook Pro went up for pre-order this summer, and now it’s started shipping to customers.
listed here popular English-based GNU/Linux community's Telegram groups and also several FLOSS websites' Telegram channels like Kubuntu support group and OMG! Ubuntu site channel. To make it easier for you and me, I don't make distinction between official and unofficial ones. For some communities, like CentOS group below, I listed the non-English one while I didn't find the English one. I also listed more resources at the end so you can find more Telegram groups you would love. I wish everybody could join and make good friends there and I also want for more GNU/Linux communities to make their own Telegram groups. Enjoy!
I'm announcing the release of the 5.3.4 kernel.
All users of the 5.3 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.3.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.3.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
Back to the usual Sunday afternoon schedule, and -rc2 is out.
Nothing particularly stands out here. It's roughly one third arch updates, one third drivers, and one third "misc" (kvm selftests, networking, filesystems, core kernel, header files etc). No real theme, just random fixes all over the place.
The diffstat is pretty flat too, which is just another sign of "small fixes all over".
So nothing looks particularly worrisome, but usually rc2 is fairly calm and it takes a while for any regressions to be noticed. And this one was one of the nice small rc2's (5.2 and 5.3 rc2's were both larger than usual), but maybe it's because it was also a day shorter.
Anyway, nothing for it but to go out and test, people. Go at it!
Linus
Linus Torvalds is back on his Sunday release regiment with having just declared the Linux 5.4-rc2 test release and also took the opportunity to have some fun by shifting the kernel's codename to be the Nesting Opossum, replacing the Bobtail Squid.
As for this release candidate now one week past the Linux 5.4 merge window / feature cut-off, it's been a busy week of fixes. One set of "fixes" that does interest us is the Friday pull of DRM fixes that included enabling AMDGPU bulk moves for a performance gain across various graphics and compute workloads.
The second 5.4 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "So nothing looks particularly worrisome, but usually rc2 is fairly calm and it takes a while for any regressions to be noticed.
WFX is a new WiFi driver being added to the staging area with the Linux 5.5 cycle coming up in a few months.
WFX is the driver enabling support for the Silicon Labs' WF200 family of wireless transceivers and future products. The Silicon Labs WF200 series hardware is designed for low-power IoT WiFi use-cases and provides a 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n radio. The WF200 transceiver can interface via SPI and SDIO.
This WFX driver now queued in staging-next is fortunately being worked on by Silicon Labs themselves as opposed to just being an external/third-party effort.
In addition to the Tigerlake support being plumbed within the Linux kernel and other areas of the open-source Linux software stack, this week they pushed out their initial Gen12 Tiger Lake support into the NEO compute run-time that is for providing OpenCL support as well as the ongoing SYCL enablement and other work around their forthcoming oneAPI model.
Vulkan 1.1.124 is out this Sunday evening with two new extensions.
Beyond the usual assortment of corrections and clarifications, Vulkan 1.1.124 brings with it two new extensions:
VK_KHR_shader_clock - A joint AMD/NVIDIA extension to advertise SPIR-V support for allowing a shader to query a real-time or monotonically incrementing counter at the subgroup level or across the device level.
This week Intel released MKL-DNN 1.1 as their open-source deep learning library. They also rebranded the software project as the "Deep Neural Network Library" (DNNL) though its focus remains the same. I ran some initial benchmarks on MKL-DNN/DNNL 1.1 on AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon hardware for reference.
We've been running benchmarks of MKL-DNN since learning about it at the start of the year and already used it for Xeon Cascadelake and EPYC Rome benchmarking, but curious about the performance of the new release, some fresh tests were carried out.
On the dual EPYC 7601, EPYC 7742, and Xeon Platinum 8280 servers the MKL-DNN/DNNL 1.1 release was benchmarked using some of the popular DNNL drivers and also varying data type configurations.
With the bit of a surprise this past week of AMD flipping LRU bulk moves back on as a "fix" for Linux 5.4 and this now having landed in Linux 5.4 Git, here are some preliminary benchmarks of this feature being enabled on the newest 5.4 kernel builds since Friday.
This weekend having wrapped up the RADV ACO compiler benchmarks, with that same system and set of graphics cards (RX 580, RX Vega 56, Radeon VII), I proceeded to run some additional tests of keeping ACO enabled but upgrading to the latest Linux 5.4 Git code as of Saturday in order to have LRU bulk moves enabled.
Calibre 4.0 is the first major release of the app in nearly 2 years and succeeds Calibre 3.0, which was released back in 2017.
“It has been two years since calibre 3.0. This time has been spent mostly in making the calibre Content server ever more capable as well as migrating calibre itself from Qt WebKit to Qt WebEngine, because the former is no longer maintained,” writes Kovid Goyal, Calibre’s chief developer.
Among the new features and improvements that are on offer in Calibre 4.0 is a new ‘distraction free’ ebook viewer that, early feedback suggests, is a step down from the previous one (and also apparently much slower).
Calibre is an amazing software: it allows users to manage ebooks on your desktop and a multitude of ebook readers. It's used by Linux geeks as well as Windows power-users and vastly surpasses any native app shipped by ebook manufacturers. I know almost exactly zero people that have an ebook reader that do not use Calibre.
As the name suggests, a server control panel lets you control your server graphically, and provides you important server statistics, manage websites, databases, email accounts, etc. right in your browser without having to pass long commands.
You can do pretty much everything from the control panel. It makes handling complex and time-consuming server tasks extremely easy.
In this series, I will cover open source, free, and paid Linux control panels. If you need more features, you may need to support the development by giving a few dollars per year.
Who loves eye candy? Don’t be shy — you can raise both hands!! Both feet too if you’re sufficiently pliant.
Linux Candy is a new series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We’re only going to feature open-source software in this series.
I’m not going to harp on about the tired proverb “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. But there’s a certain element of truth here. If you spend all day coding neural networks, mastering a new programming language, sit in meetings feeling bored witless, you’ll need some relief at the end of the day. And what better way by making your desktop environment a bit more memorable.
With months of development behind them, Godot Engine 3.2 hits the first Alpha release with a ton of new and improved features for this FOSS game engine.
They're a bit behind on their schedule for this release, which they said was due to work done on their build infrastructure. Due to this, the Alpha/Beta phases should be quite short as technically it has been in Alpha for a while.
After close to 7 months of development and over 4,000 commits since the 3.1 release, we are now happy to release Godot 3.2 alpha 1, our first milestone towards the next stable installment of our free and open source game engine.
This first alpha build comes relatively late in our planned release schedule, mostly because of work done on our official build infrastructure to adapt to 3.2 requirements (changes to the Android buildsystem and packaging, especially with the new C# support), as well as a build server upgrade. But we have been in the alpha stage since August 31, and testers and developers were not idle in the meantime, so the master branch from which 3.2 will be released is already quite stable. As such we expect the alpha and beta phases to be quite short for Godot 3.2, and a stable release within one or two months should be possible.
The alpha stage corresponds for us to a feature freeze, as announced on GitHub a month ago, which means that we will no longer consider pull requests with new features for merge in the master branch, and that until Godot 3.2 is released. This way, we can focus on what we already have, finish and polish the major features which are still in progress, and fix many of the old and new bugs reported by the community.
Alpha snapshots will be released regularly during this phase, to continuously test the master branch and make sure that it keeps getting more stable, reliable and ready for production.
Note: While we are behind schedule, we still plan to release Godot 3.1.2 as soon as time permits.
While we are eager to see Godot 4.0 with its new Vulkan renderer and other improvements, Godot 3.2 is coming out first and this weekend marks the alpha release for this latest update to this leading open-source, cross-platform game engine.
Joining Rust, Natural Selection 2 and Forager this year is Throne of Lies from Imperium42 Game Studio who have decided to end Linux support for their online multiplayer game.
Posted in their Discord today in the Linux channel, which you only see if you've added yourself to a special role, was an announcement about Linux support ending. They've also already removed the SteamOS icon from the Steam store page.
Why? Well, it seems they've been having some issues with hackers recently.
IceWM is a very lightweight desktop. It’s been around for over 20 years, and its goals today are still the same as back then: speed, simplicity, and getting out of the users way.
I used to add IceWM to Scientific Linux, for a lightweight desktop. At the time, it was only a .5 Meg rpm. When running, it used only 5 Meg of memory. Over the years, IceWM has grown a little bit. The rpm package is now 1 Meg. When running, IceWM now uses 10 Meg of memory. Even though it literally doubled in size in the past 10 years, it is still extremely small.
What do you get in such a small package? Exactly what it says, a Window Manager. Not much else. You have a toolbar with a menu or icons to launch programs. You have speed. And finally you have themes and options. Besides the few goodies in the toolbar, that’s about it.
As every year during Akademy we held the general assembly of KDE e.V. and elected new board members for the two open positions. I’m delighted to welcome Adriaan and Neofytos to the board.
After the election it was time to decide on the board positions. I have been on the board of KDE e.V. for 8 years now and the president for 5 years. Leading this organisation has been one of the most important things I have done so far and I believe I have made an impact. At the same time I am convinced that it is not healthy for an organisation to be lead by the same person for too long. That’s why at the start of my current term we discussed how we see the future of the organisation and our role in it. It was clear that Aleix has been doing invaluable work on the board as the vice president and would clearly be a good choice to lead the organisation in the future. We decided that we will have at least one year at the end of our current term where I will be on the board to support and advice and ensure a smooth transition for Aleix. This time has come now. I would like to ask you all welcome Aleix as the new president of KDE e.V. and provide him with all the support he needs. I am looking forward to working with our new Board and see where we will take KDE e.V. together in the next years.
So when a bunch of you mailed in to to tell me there was new release (appreciated, btw!) I just had to check it out and give it a bit of a write-up here.
And what a release it is!
ArcMenu 33 (labelled as v34 on EGO) is a pretty substantial update packed full of welcome improvements — so much so that the app menu’s developers bill this update as a milestone release.
So what’s new?
Arc Menu now lets you select from a number of different menu layouts, including those more akin to Windows as well as those more akin to launchers found on DEs, such as Unity dash, Linux Mint’s Cinnamon menu, and the Solus OS Brisk Menu.
Kdux boots to a console environment where we can once against sign in as the root user without a password. (Passwords can be set once we login.) The default installation is fairly minimal. The operating system uses just 2.5GB of space and consumes 35MB of memory. The GNU command line tools and manual pages are installed. The systemd init software and an up to date Linux kernel are installed. There is no compiler or development tools.
By default there is no network connection enabled. We can run the dhcpcd command to get a dynamic, wired address. Otherwise we need to manually set up networking. Once we get on-line, the Pacman package manager can be used to install and upgrade packages. Pacman connects to the Arch Linux repositories.
At this point, as far as I could tell, there is virtually no difference between running Arch Linux with the zsh shell and running Kdux. We have the same base packages, the same repositories, the same Arch documentation seems to be relevant. We are given the bare minimum building blocks for a distribution and left to build whatever operating system we want from the pieces.
Hardware support, out of the box is limited. Kdux was unable to detect my laptop's wireless card, preventing me from getting on-line. The distribution ran smoothly in a VirtualBox instance, but was unable to use more than a 800x600 resolution.
I'm not sure I see many benefits to using Kdux instead of plain Arch. The install process is less flexible and at least as cryptic, but once it is up and running, Kdux and Arch appear to be virtually identical. The one perk to using Kdux seems to be the Desktop edition which allows us to test our hardware prior to installing. However, this benefit is somewhat balanced by the apparent lack of installer on the Desktop edition, meaning I had to download the Desktop edition to test Kdux on my hardware and then use the Standard edition to install the distribution. I could have set up Arch in a similar amount of time with one download and without wiping out the contents of my hard drive.
In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu Kylin 19.10 Beta. Enjoy!
Hardware tokens with digital signature are used for filing various financial documents in Govt of India portals. The major tokens supported by eMudhra are WatchData ProxKey, ePass 2003, Aladdin, Safenet, TrustKey etc. Many of these hardware tokens come (in CDROM image mode) with drivers and utilities to manage the signatures, unfortunately only in Windows platform.
Sometime in 2017, I tried to make these tokens work for signing GST returns under GNU/Linux, using the de-facto pcsc tool. I got a WatchData PROXKey, which doesn’t work out-of-the-box with pcsc. Digging further brings up this report and it seems the driver is a spinoff of upstream (LGPL licensed), but no source code made available, so there is no hope of using these hardware tokens with upstream tools. The only option is depending on vendor provided drivers, unfortunately. There are some instructions by a retailer to get this working under Ubuntu.
Now, for the record, it doesn’t seem that Alexa only likes Ubuntu.
Amazon’s AI assistant appears to have a couple of stock responses to this particular question, the majority of which “avoid” being specific, proffering up a generic non-committal answer instead.
But when Alexa does choose to be specific she often mentions Ubuntu — though depending on how the Alexa account was configured she’s also reported to have a preference for Windows too (boo).
Still, it’s nice to hear that Ubuntu figures at all. She doesn’t, from replies to Stuart’s original tweet, appear to mention macOS, Android, iOS or even FireOS, Amazon’s in-house Android fork.
Perhaps Ubuntu’s dominance in cloud workloads — Alexa Skills run in the cloud — has suitably impressed the versatile voice assistant?
With the advent of DevOps, engineering teams are taking on more and more ownership of the reliability of their services. While some chafe at the increased operational burden, others welcome the opportunity to treat service reliability as a key feature, invest in the necessary capabilities to measure and improve reliability, and deliver the best possible customer experiences.
This change is measured explicitly in the 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps Report. One of its most interesting conclusions (as written in the summary) is...
This is a general package update to the CURRENT release repository based upon TrueOS 19.10
A few were active GNU/Linux users. Some had never heard of free software before and others had fleeting experiences with it many years ago. Especially the outlook on having software that they can trust seemed to motivate people to consider a closer look into it. Therefore, our introductory leaflets were taken with much interest. Many people wanted to free their Android phones and try email encryption. But as always, our distribution overview leaflet with an explanation on why open standards matter on the other side were very important. Of course the email self defense leaflets and the freedom leaflets were gladly taken too too.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNU Project were both started by Richard M. Stallman (RMS), and he served until recently as the head of both. Because of that, the relationship between the FSF and GNU has been fluid.
As part of our commitment to supporting the development and distribution of fully free operating systems, the FSF provides GNU with services like fiscal sponsorship, technical infrastructure, promotion, copyright assignment, and volunteer management.
GNU decision-making has largely been in the hands of GNU leadership. Since RMS resigned as president of the FSF, but not as head of GNU ("Chief GNUisance"), the FSF is now working with GNU leadership on a shared understanding of the relationship for the future. As part of that, we invite comments from free software community members at fsf-and-gnu@fsf.org.
This is a major release, the first beta, adding the new dxf importer, and dxf2dwg (experimental), the first usage of the new dynapi and the encoder.
Although there are over 200+ programming languages to help developers all over the world, millions of developers are taken away by the benefits of JavaScript. JavaScript has been a popular programming language for the web over the past two decades now. Developers are widely influenced by the high-level compatibility this language has to offer. Moreover, it comes with a large number of frameworks and libraries that are extremely useful. And each month, dozens of javascript frameworks and libraries are regularly being created.
While the GNAT Ada front-end for GCC is in quite good shape, AdaCore has been experimenting with bringing their GNAT front-end to LLVM for allowing Ada code compilation with the LLVM compiler stack.
AdaCore has been working on this LLVM port to expand the outreach of the Ada programming language to the LLVM ecosystem. This is complementary to the GNAT GCC support with AdaCore planning to continue their Ada GCC compiler support.
If you think nothing happens in LibreOffice, that’s not true. I for example prepair some new Templates and Galleries for LibreOffice.
We are happy to announce that the Qt 3D Studio 2.5 Beta is now available via the online installer. Here’s a quick summary of the new features and functions in 2.5 release. For detailed information about the Qt 3D Studio, visit the online documentation page.
The Qt Company this week released the public beta of the forthcoming Qt 3D Studio for this development tool focused on creating rich 3D user interfaces with the Qt tool-kit.
The Nmap Security Scanner has appeared in many major motion pictures (as well as more obscure films). This gallery provides screen shots and details for each movie.
Josh and Kurt about DNS over HTTPS and how it may or may not destroy civilization. We also discuss the disruption of cloud in the context of security and touch on the news that GitHub is now a CVE CNA!
The 2015 Paris agreement on climate change set the goal of keeping global, average temperature rise “well below” 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-Industrial Age levels, and hopefully below 1.5 degrees Celsius. This month, new research published by scientists from the University of Hamburg predicts how these temperature changes will affect water availability in Pakistan.They found that the timing and abundance of water availability in Pakistan will be much altered in warmer world, and that means of adaptation will be crucial.
The study, published in the September issue of Advances in Water Resources, assesses three Himalayan watersheds in Pakistan: the Jhelum, the Kabul, and the Upper Indus River Basin. The Indus River Basin is estimated to supply water for 90 percent of Pakistan’s food production, and glacier melt is responsible for 50-80 percent of water flow in the basin.
For the men and women in the Nike Oregon Project who became whistle-blowers in the case against Alberto Salazar, it has been a long 10 years.
They have been ridiculed, castigated and dismissed, as those who take on people in positions of power often are. Then, last Monday, some measure of validation finally arrived. After a six-year investigation that included a two-year legal battle, the United States Anti-Doping Agency suspended Salazar, the coach and famed former runner, for four years, along with Jeffrey Brown, a Houston endocrinologist who treated many of the project’s top runners.
The wife of a US diplomat who fatally hit a British teenager and left the country is Anne Sacoolas, Sky News can reveal.
Mrs Sacoolas, 42, has claimed diplomatic immunity and left the UK for America after 19-year-old Harry Dunn was killed in a head-on collision while riding his motorbike.
Police believe Mrs Sacoolas was on the wrong side of the road as she emerged from Northamptonshire's RAF Croughton on 27 August.
A special deal is in place between the UK and the US which gives diplomats and their families based at RAF Croughton diplomatic immunity, Sky News understands.
Usually, diplomatic immunity only covers those diplomats and their dependants based in London.
However, Sky News has been told there has been a special arrangement in place as early as 1994 between the UK and US for this particular base in Northamptonshire.
