If you want a basic Linux desktop, you can never go wrong with an all Intel-based mini computer -- such as that company's own NUC line. Things typically work without issue -- an Intel Wi-Fi card, for instance, shouldn't give you any headaches on Linux.
Intel is not the only game in town, however. Other companies manufacture and sell mini desktop computers too. Today, MSI unveils its latest, and it looks like a real winner. Called "Cubi 5," it comes with 10th gen Intel Comet Lake processors, USB-C, and supports Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax).
"Keeping in mind the needs of consumers, MSI announces the world's first energy-efficient Mini-PC to be equipped with Intel’s 10th gen Comet Lake processors: Cubi 5. The Cubi 5 delivers upgraded computing capability as well as improved functionality. Cubi 5 may be small, but its performance can be improved all the way up to Intel Core i7 processor (Comet Lake), which helps deliver computing capability that will keep you in the flow, wherever you go," says MSI.
I’ve just obtained a video that was shared inside the Deepin Telegram Group, and it contains some compelling evidence that the upcoming version of the slick Desktop Linux distribution may ship with an AI Voice Assistant. And a clever one, at that.
The video (which is entirely in Chinese), shows a user asking a series of questions and receiving responses in both voice and via text in a pop-up window. But as the video progresses, it becomes clear that the AI voice assistant also interfaces directly with Deepin system settings.
VXL, a leader in thin clients, endpoint management and digital signage software solutions, launches its new, low cost, CloudDesktop On the Go (CoGo). An ultra-compact and highly portable USB key, CoGo repurposes legacy PCs into a fully functional Linux thin client. Available with a lifetime perpetual license and priced at a highly competitive $77 including first year support, CoGo offers users up to a massive 50% saving over equivalent software solutions.
CoGo allows businesses to extend the life of ageing PC hardware by using it to access server-hosted computing sessions or virtual desktop infrastructure. Users simply plug CoGo into a PC and boot from it. The VXL Gio Linux firmware is instantly useable without overwriting the local OS and the converted PC can be managed as thin client.
Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux 8 Update 1. Individual RPM packages are available on the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) and the Oracle Linux yum server. ISO installation images will soon be available for download from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud and Docker images will soon be available via Oracle Container Registry and Docker Hub.
Oracle Linux 8 Update 1 ships with Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK) (kernel-4.18.0-147.el8) kernel packages for x86_64 Platform (Intel & AMD), that include bug fixes, security fixes, and enhancements; the 64-bit Arm (aarch64) platform is also available for installation as a developer preview release.
Fresh off the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 at the beginning of November, Oracle is now shipping Oracle Linux 8 Update 1 as their spin of RHEL 8.1 with various changes on top -- including their "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel" option.
As the market embraces edge computing and 5G networks, telecommunications service providers are increasingly looking for ways to migrate their monolithic services to microservices and containers. These providers are moving from legacy hardware appliances to virtualized network functions to containerized network functions on cloud infrastructure. Red Hat’s partnership with a rich ecosystem of software-defined networking (SDN) vendors, independent software vendors (ISVs), network equipment providers (NEPs), as well as its deep involvement in the open source projects powering these initiatives, give customers the choices and long-life support they need to build the services infrastructure that supports their business needs both today and tomorrow – as well as the journey in between.
5G. Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV). IoT. Edge computing. Much has been said about these technologies and the impact they will have on the telecommunications services of tomorrow. But it’s when they’re talked about together—as part of the broader digital transformation of service provider networks and business models—that things really get interesting. It’s a story that may impact every corner of the telecommunications ecosystem, from mobile network operators (MNOs), traditional service providers, and cable network operators to cellular tower companies, data center operators, managed services providers, and vendors.
SDN and NFV hold the promise of replacing enormous networks of proprietary, single-purpose appliances with racks of off-the-shelf compute and storage platforms that are running software from a variety of vendors for a variety of services. Progress on this front has been slowed by several issues, leaving operators looking for their next opportunity. It has emerged in the form of 5G, and whether they are early adopters or taking a wait-and-see approach, every telco company is looking for its 5G play.
An exciting new podcast episode is out: Reality 2.0 – On to Beer Number 3!. Katherine, Doc and I explore open source communities, the tragedy that is systemd and more.
GitHub launches a new virtual security lab, Debian Buster will soon be the default Linux environment on Chromebooks, and PinePhone pre-orders start today.
There are many, especially those who are newly orientated with Linux, think that it is an operating system. But, the fact is, it is not an operating system; instead, it is a kernel. A kernel is the central part of an operating system. The name of the OS is GNU Linux OS, which has many other derivatives like Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Kali Linux, and much more.
Last month a serious Linux Wi-Fi flaw (CVE-2019-17666) was uncovered that could have enabled an attacker to take over a Linux device using its Wi-Fi interface. At the time it was disclosed Naked Security decided to wait until a patch was available before writing about it.
Well, it’s been patched, but the journey from discovery to patch provides some insights into how the Linux open-source project (the world’s largest collaborative software development effort) manages bug fixes and the risks of disclosure.
The crypto code within the Linux kernel for the upcoming 5.5 cycle finishes converting the drivers to making full use of the four-year-old SKCIPHER interface so that the old ABLKCIPHER code can be removed.
SKCIPHER was introduced in 2015 to the mainline kernel to ultimately replace BLKCIPHER/ABLKCIPHER. This "symmetric key cipher" interface is a generic encrypt/decrypt wrapper for ciphers.
Making waves this afternoon is word of the NUVIA server CPU start-up landing its series A funding round and thus making more information known on this new silicon start-up.
The Intel developers working on their open-source compute run-time this morning released a new version as they continue making improvements to their Gen11 Ice Lake support as well as further bringing up the Gen12/Xe Tiger Lake support.
As part of the compute runtime is the Intel Graphics Compiler to which this morning they released IGC 1.0.2805. With this compiler update is a memory leak fix, an OpenCL fix, and minor fixes/improvements.
NVIDIA have pushed out the second Vulkan Beta Driver in the space of a week, with 435.27.07 now available for Linux.
Drew DeVault of Sway/WL-ROOTS notoriety and longtime Wayland developer Simon Ser have started development on WXRC, a new Wayland compositor.
WXRC is the Wayland XR Compositor and is based on OpenXR and the open-source Monado implementation. This is better than the past Linux VR desktop efforts we've recently seen that relied on SteamVR. As of this week, WXRC has working 3D Wayland clients.
OnLogic (formerly known as Logic Supply until a recent rebranding) announced the Karbon 700 back in August as a durable Linux-friendly computer largely intended for industrial applications but nothing prevents the user from using it as a passively, well-built desktop PC either. OnLogic recently sent over the Karbon 700 and it's been working out very well even with passively cooling an Intel Xeon eight-core / sixteen-thread processor, 16GB of RAM, 512GB NVMe storage, and more.
In suiting the Karbon 700 for industrial applications, this high-performance rugged computer supports power over Ethernet (PoE), wireless, the ability to have an external graphics card (though that variant is no longer fanless), CAN bus support, dual COM RS-232, 8-bit DIO, and other interfaces in addition to triple Gigabit LAN, triple DisplayPort, USB 3.1 Gen 1, and other connectivity options.
A presentation software is a tool used to show information in the form of a slide show, a presentation of a series of still images.
Presentation software helps a speaker keep structure to a presentation when standing in front of an audience. Like any good composition tool, this type of application should help the presenter focus on the substance of the presentation. Effective presentation software will also help the audience follow the matters being discussed, whether it is being conducted in a business or personal setting. This type of software is a presenter’s best friend helping information to be communicated effectively at events, meetings, conferences, lectures, sales presentations, and more. Embellishing the presentation with smooth transitions, text, photo and video will help retain the attention of the audience, bring out the key ideas that are being shared, and make the presentation more professional.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 7 high quality open source Linux presentation software. The software listed below will help make your slides look stunning. Whether you are teaching a lesson, pitching a product, delivering a keynote, or trying to promote a worthy cause, these tools will help bring simplicity and engagement to your presentations. Hopefully there will be something of interest for anyone who needs to produce professional quality presentations.
The latest version of Google programming language Dart, numbered 2.6, extends support for native, ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation with the addition of dart2native, which enables the creation of command-line programs on Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
Importantly, dart2native generates self-contained binaries, meaning they do not require the Dart SDK to run. Another key feature of dart2native is it supports the whole set of Dart core libraries which are available on the rest of Dart-targeted platforms. dart2native is also compatible with dart:ffi, the C-interoperability layer introduced in Dart 2.5 to interface with C=compatible system functions available on a native platform.
Rufus for Linux, yes, everybody who has ever used this bootable USB creator tool which is only available for Windows, definitely wished to have it for Linux operating systems too. However, although it is not directly available for Linux, we can still use it with the help of Wine software. But again even after installing it using Wine on Ubuntu, in our case, it couldn’t recognize the attached USB drives, which again closed the door for normal users to use Rufus on Linux. Thus in such scenarios what do?
Don’t worry. The Rufus is not the only software for creating a bootable USB drives in the world. There are also few other best alternatives to Rufus that we can use easily on Linux operating systems. And here today we will discuss such opensource or free tools for creating bootable drives on Linux Distros.
Who remembers going to the planetarium? I was a kid when I visited one on a field trip. Stargazing isn't exactly my forte, though I like watching the night sky and try to identify some of the objects that I see.
Most of my space knowledge comes from sci-fi movies, shows, games, and the occasional news article or two. The most fun I had looking at the star-studded sky was probably when I used mobile apps like Sky Map.
But it's not really that easy to learn much while you're pointing a phone at the sky and trying to figure out what the celestial object you're looking at actually is.
There are a thousand and one note-taking applications in the market right now but not all note-taking applications are created equal and some are developed with a specific userbase in mind and are, thus, more efficient for certain tasks.
For example, a note-taking application aimed at coders typically features auto-complete and auto-correction, syntax highlighting, and support for a variety of programming languages.
Today, we bring you a list of the best note-taking applications designed with programmers and developers in mind listed in no particular order for mixing plain text with code snippets, regular expressions, etc.
You have a fancy game using Direct3D 11 and you want to port it to Linux? In future, DXVK may be able to help with that.
Currently, DXVK translates D3D11 and D3D10 into Vulkan when used with Wine. However, Joshua Ashton who developed D9VK which is the offshoot of DXVK to do the same for D3D9 put out word on Twitter that they've begun working on "a way to use DXVK on your native platform! (ie. D3D11 on Linux! :D)".
The DXVK Direct3D 10/11 over Vulkan implementation to date has been built as a Windows library run under Wine along with the game/software being rendered for converting the calls to Vulkan for execution by the host drivers. There is now experimental work for building DXVK as a native Linux library for converting D3D10/D3D11 calls to Vulkan outside of Wine.
Joshua Ashton who previously worked on DXUP and is well known for his work on D9VK for taking Direct3D 9 over Vulkan has been tackling this experimental DXVK support for running natively on Linux itself rather than within Wine.
The Wine development release 4.20 is now available.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - New version of the Mono engine with an FNA update. - Code persistence in VBScript and JScript. - Vulkan spec updates. - Improved support for LLVM MinGW. - Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/4.x/wine-4.20.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/4.x/wine-4.20.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
Wine 4.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development snapshot for this open-source project allowing Windows games and applications to run on Linux and other non-Microsoft platforms.
Wine 4.20 brings with it an updated Mono engine with newer FNA, code persistence within VBScript and JScript, Vulkan specification updates, improved support for LLVM MinGW, and a total of 37 bug fixes.
Step into the role of Valor, an old killer escorting a curious AI to infiltrate a terrorist network in the dark cyberpunk world of Resolutiion, which seems to be shaping up beautifully with a new trailer.
Loaded with gorgeous pixel art, dirty jokes, awesome tunes and hours of punishing combat, Resolutiion will be wrapped up in some exploration they say will be rewarding thanks to the layered storytelling.
Flax Engine, another game engine that supports Vulkan is going cross-platform with an upcoming release adding in Linux support.
In a fresh blog post today, the team noted that Linux support is coming and development builds of Flax are already running great on Ubuntu and cloud-based solutions. This comes with their Vulkan rendering engine and all core engine features working.
Hello Friday, welcome back into our lives. Here's a look at what you can pick up cheap across this weekend and what's free.
First up, Company of Heroes 2 is free to pick up on Steam and keep forever! This deal will last until Sunday, November 17 at 6PM UTC. Relic Entertainment are also giving out the Victory At Stalingrad DLC as a free extra if you join their newsletter. This could mean there's a new one on the way. It has a Linux port from Feral Interactive and it's a huge amount of fun.
A world stitched together with a clumsy stuffed animal for a protagonist, a flying mechanical bug companion and a softly spoken rhyming narrator, the adventure game Woven certainly has a lot of initial charm and it's out now.
The developers said it's like "platform, point-and-click and action-adventure games without being exactly like any of them". To me though, it felt a lot simpler than that, more like a walking sim with basic puzzle elements.
The biggest problem for a lot of multiplayer games, even when they're free is pulling in players. To help with that, Pirates, Vikings, and Knights II now supports playing with AI bots.
In the latest update released this month, it adds in bot support for when playing both offline and online. Now servers can fill up with bots and be replaced by players so you're not waiting around for anyone to join. There's also new achievements to do with the bots too, based on how many bot kills you get and one for if a bot manages to dominate you in the game.
11 bit studios are celebrating their dark and depressing survival game This War of Mine turning five years old, so they've given everyone a huge free Final Cut update.
Adding in all the maps from the Stories DLC packs into the main game making each run now have more possibilities, new quests and events for those added locations, a new classic scenario, a new character, remastered versions of the original locations along with various visual improvements, UI improvements and an opt-in Beta on Steam to play the original "Vanilla" game without all this and more.
For a long time now GamingOnLinux has been providing daily (and often on Weekends too) Linux gaming news, tips, reviews, interviews and more.
A few months ago, we passed the ten year mark! We would very much like to be here for another ten years and more, with your support that will be possible. A call for donations and support isn't something we do directly often either, as we prefer to spend our time chatting with developers and getting news out for you to read. Thanks to all the existing support, we have no need to have any adverts keeping your browsing experience nice and clean.
The next installment of XFCE desktop environment version 4.16 enters dev phase.
With the release of recent XFCE 4.14, the stage is set for the next major XFCE release – version 4.16. XFCE 4.16 would be significant considering number of core changes that is slotted to be worked upon.
Here’s a list of items we can expect in XFCE 4.16. Remember, features are rolling at the moment and would change in the final XFCE 4.16 release which would be released on June 2020.
Few GTK theme makers are as prolific as ~vinceliuice, an open source designer based in Jinan, China.
Vince’s theme portfolio is wildly unlike anyone else’s. It’s packed full of eye catching designs boasting dramatic visual elements and modern design sensibilities.
So good, in fact, that I’ve written this post to spotlight 5 of the best themes made by vinceliuice — themes that showcase this designer’s colourful creativity and theme crafting skill.
Kali Linux is a popular term for anyone related to computer security. It is the most renowned tool for advanced Penetration Testing, Ethical Hacking and network security assessments.
To know more about Kali Linux more closely, we recently had a quick chat with Glen D. Singh, a cyber security instructor and an Infosec author with Learn Kali Linux 2019 being his latest book. In his book, Glen explains how Kali Linux can be used to detect vulnerabilities and secure your system by applying penetration testing techniques of varying complexity.
Talking to us about Kali Linux, Glen said that the inclusion of 300 pre-installed tools makes Kali Linux an arsenal for any cybersecurity professional. In addition to talking about certification options for both novice and experienced cybersecurity professionals, Glen also shared his favorite features from the latest Kali Linux version 2019.3 among other things in this deeply informative discussion.
The OpenWrt community is proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming OpenWrt 19.07 stable version series. It incorporates over 3700 commits since branching the previous OpenWrt 18.06 release and has been under development for about one a half years.
With this release the OpenWrt project brings all supported targets back to a single common kernel version and further refines and broadens existing device support. It also provides initial support for the new ath79 target, the future device tree based successor of the popular ar71xx target.
OpenWrt 19.07 is on the way as the next feature release to this router/network focused Linux distribution that remains quite popular with hobbyists.
The release candidate of OpenWrt 19.07 was made available this week and it features all hardware targets now converging on the same kernel version (Linux 4.14.151) where as previous releases saw a mix of Linux branches used depending upon the hardware. GCC 7.4, musl libc 1.1.24, and Binutils 2.31.1 are among the other components powering OpenWrt 19.07 RC1.
ALT Linux may have a problem with getting English language updates on some of its most recent product releases. The primary geographic audience it serves may not make English a top priority. Yet many of its products are available with the English language intact.
The great variety of Linux distros available make ALT Linux a very viable source of options for anyone looking to sample the flexibility the Linux operating system offers. I like the starter kit inventory maintained by the ALT Linux developers.
Distro hoppers particularly can focus on trying dozens of desktop varieties without having to adjust to separate distro designs. All of the ALT Linux distros share a common, simple design for ease of use and reliability.
German multinational open source software company SUSE that develops and sells Linux products is doubling up investment almost every year in India. In the last 3 years, it has grown five-times and manpower is up by three-times. According to a senior executive, the open source giant has significantly invested in the support system and now looking to leverage it to broaden the company’s reach in the government vertical in India.
SUSE€® Manager 4 is a best-in-class open source infrastructure management solution that lowers costs, enhances availability and reduces complexity for life-cycle management of Linux systems in large, complex and dynamic IT landscapes. You can use SUSE Manager to configure, deploy and administer thousands of Linux systems running on hypervisors, as containers, on bare metal systems, IoT devices and third-party cloud platforms. SUSE Manager also allows you to manage virtual machines (VMs).
Virtualization is the means by which IT administrators create virtual resources, such as hardware platforms, storage devices, network resources and more. There are quite a few tools that enable the creation of virtual resources (such as Xen and KVM), but what about the management of those tools? That’s where SUSE Manager comes in.
Sometimes there are occasions where direct internet access is not possible (proxy/offline/airgapped). Even in this setups it is possible to deploy and use Kubernetes with openSUSE Kubic and a local private registry.
In this blog I will explain how to setup a local server which acts as private registry providing all the container images needed to deploy Kubernetes with openSUSE Kubic.
This has been a busy week, with 5 successfully tested snapshots delivered to you, the users (1107, 1109, 1110, 1111 and 1112).
Today, icedtea-3.14.0 was released. IcedTea is a software build framework which allows easy compilation of OpenJDK.
The new IcedTea release will build you the latest Java8: OpenJDK 8u232_b09. This release syncs the OpenJDK support in IcedTea to the official October 2019 security fixes that Oracle released for Java. The release announcement in the mailing list for distro packagers has details about all the security issues and vulnerabilities that are addressed.
I have built Slackware packages for the new Java 8 Update 232 and uploaded them already. Please upgrade at your earliest convenience. Java is still widespread which makes it a popular target for vulnerability attacks.
Here is PoC based on qubesadmin API which can auto attach USB devices to any VM as required. By default Qubes auto attaches any device to the sys-usb VM, that helps with bad/malware full USB devices. But, in special cases, we may want to select special devices to be auto attached to certain VMs. In this PoC example, we are attaching any USB storage device, but, we can add some checks to mark only selected devices (by adding more checks), or we can mark few vms where no device can be attached.
Very large packages (VLPs) are something I am working on with rpminspect. For example, the kernel package. A full build of the kernel source package generates a lot of files. I am working on improving rpminspect's speed and fixing issues found with individual inspections. These are only showing up when I do test runs comparing VLPs. The downside here is that it takes a little longer than with any other typical package.
A pastebin lets you save text on a website for a length of time. This helps you exchange data easily with other users. For example, you can post error messages for help with a bug or other issue.
The CentOS Pastebin is a community-maintained service that keeps pastes around for up to 24 hours. It also offers syntax highlighting for a large number of programming and markup languages.
ProcDump is a nifty debugging utility which is able to dump the core of a running application once a user-specified CPU or memory usage threshold is triggered. For instance, the invocation procdump -C 90 -p $MYPID instructs ProcDump to monitor the process with ID $MYPID, waiting for a 90 % CPU usage spike. Once it hits, it creates the coredump and exits. This allows you to later inspect the backtrace and memory state in the moment of the spike without having to attach a debugger to the process, helping you determine which parts of your code might be causing performance issues.
I've written before about what goes into Fedora's kernel-devel package. Briefly, it consists of files that come out of the kernel's build process that are needed to build kernel modules.
In contrast to kernel-devel, the headers package is for userspace programs. This package provides #defines and structure definitions for use by userspace programs to be compatible with the kernel. The system libc comes with a set of headers for platform independent libc purposes (think printf and the like) whereas the kernel headers are more focused on providing for the kernel API. There's often some overlap for things like system calls which are tied to both the libc and the kernel. Sometimes the decision to support them in one place vs the other comes down to developer choices.
While the in-kernel API is not guaranteed to be stable, the userspace API must not be broken. There was an effort a few years ago to have a strict split between headers that are part of the userspace API and those that are for in-kernel use only.
Unlike how kernel-devel gets packaged, there are proper make targets to generate the kernel-headers (thankfully). make headers_install will take care of all the magic. These headers get installed under /usr/include
Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora Program Management this week. Fedora 29 will reach end of life on 26 November. Elections voting begins next week. Candidates must submit their interviews before the deadline or they will not be on the ballot.
Canonical announced high availability clustering in MicroK8s, its single-node Kubernetes environment for prototyping k8s applications and running edge containers on IoT gateways. The feature is enabled using Dqlite.
Last month with the release of Ubuntu 19.10, Canonical announced “strict confinement” support for Canonical’s MicroK8s Kubernetes environment for single-node clusters, thereby enabling easier deployment on edge devices. Now, Canonical has announced high availability (HA) clustering in MicroK8s.
High availability clustering enables a group of hosts that act like a single platform. It’s often used to ensure continuous uptime via load balancing, backup, and failover strategies. All the HA-clustered hosts need to be able to access the same storage.
Debian's APT package manager has supported the --no-install-recommends for years so only the main dependencies are installed and not the "recommended" packages. Seemingly it's taken Canonical until now to figure out how practical that option is for reducing the size of their Docker containers.
In an official Ubuntu.com blog post they announced their Ubuntu Docker images were reduced by 60% via the use of using the --no-install-recommends option within their Docker files. The option has been in APT and just a matter of making use of that option as opposed to announcing a new development or capability.
Here at Canonical, we use Dockerfiles on a daily basis for all our web projects. Something that caught our attention recently was the amount of space that we were using for each Docker image, and we realized that we were installing more dependencies than we needed.
In this article, I’ll explain how we improved our image build time and reduced the image size by using the flag --no-install-recommend in our Dockerfiles.
Boardcon has launched a “EM-IMX8M-MINI” SBC built around a “SOM-IMX8M-MINI” module that runs Linux on a quad -A53 i.MX8M Mini with 2GB LPDDR4, 8GB eMMC, and WiFi/BT. The SBC adds MIPI-DSI/CSI, GbE, USB, serial, CAN, and M.2.
Boardcon has produced a lot of Samsung and Rockchip based embedded boards, such as its recent, Rockchip RK3399 based CM3399 module and Idea3399 SBC, but the EM-IMX8M-MINI SBC and its SOM-IMX8M-MINI module are its first i.MX8 family boards. The i.MX8M Mini based EM-IMX8M-MINI, which like the Idea3399 is a sandwich-style, COM-and-carrier product, follows earlier NXP-based SBCs that we missed including the i.MX7-based EINK-IMX7 and i.MX6 UL powered EM6ul. We did cover its earlier i.MX287-based MINI287 module.
The development team at Popcorn Computer have this week announced they will be launching a new Linux mini PC next year sometime during 2020 with prices starting from just $199. If your budget will stretch and you would like LoRa connectivity than the price increases to $249. Hopefully the new mini PC will be launched early next year and shipping is expected to take place sometime around May 2020.
It’s not sure whether the Linux mini PC will be made available via a crowdfunding site or directly from the Popcorn Computer website. The mini PC is expected to be equipped with a 4.95 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS LCD touchscreen display and powered by a 1.2 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 64-bit processor supported by 2GB of RAM and equipped with 32GB of eMMC storage.
Several companies are planning to ship Linux smartphones in the coming months. The PinePhone is by far the cheapest — and it could be one of the first to ship… if you’re OK spending money on a developer/early adopter edition phone.
The PinePhone “BraveHeart” Limited Edition smartphone is now available for purchase for $150.
It’s set to ship in late December or early January.
PINE64’s PinePhone, the affordable Linux-based smartphone is now available for pre-order for everyone. Previously, the smartphone was available to developers and hackers only, who are quite satisfied with the phone so far.
Despite being surrounded by manufacturing issues and “just good ‘ol bad luck”, PinePhone is finally being able to deliver to their promise. Currently, those who are interested in using a Linux-based phone can visit the PINE64 official store to pre-order the device for $149. PinePhone will start shipping in December.
While Android 10 is the latest release of Google's mobile operating system, the downstream Android-x86 has been on the Android 8 "Oreo" series for stable while now the first release candidate of Android-x86 9.0 is available for testing.
Purism is working to solve no shortage of problems; making a phone with a never-before used CPU for mobile, to authoring an entire mobile OS, to designing the hardware from scratch. Not to forget forging a social purpose company, avoiding toxic funding, and solving digital civil rights by creating products that are convenient to use and look good. All because of your continued support.
Many of our customers are interested in what goes on behind the scenes when making a phone, so we wanted to share for transparency the kinds of issues that can come up. For instance, with our Birch batch, we sent our hardware engineers the very first phones off of the line ahead of schedule so they could perform quality control testing. We discovered a 10ké resistor was missing from the PCBA!
Librem 5 "Birch" batch was supposed to be shipping from 29 October to 26 November. They are now preparing to start shipping this second iteration of the Librem 5 Linux smartphone after early units in this batch were missing a resistor.
The missing resistor on the Librem 5 phone PCB led to a non-working USB port. It's not clear how the resistor ended up missing from this batch or if it had been in place for the Aspen batch or not.
The Librem 5 software team were busy in October, improving power consumption and heat generation through kernel and driver changes. The team also refactored and improved integration between various apps by using libfolks as a common foundation, added new features to keyboard, Settings, Shell and Compositor and squashed many bugs.
Purism has finally published their blog post outlining the software work they accomplished during October on bringing up the Librem 5 smartphone.
October's software efforts included kernel items like working to improve the battery life and reduce the heat output of the work-in-progress Librem 5 as well as maturing their user-space components.
In October, work was quite busy, though a lot of it was behind-the-scenes stuff I cannot yet update you on. It was also very busy with a very exciting trip I took that had absolutely nothing to do with free software. If you’re ever going to Kyoto or Tokyo and looking for some recommendations for coffee, cocktail bars, restaurants, or general things to do, hmu.
Corteza Service Cloud features: Case Management, Account & Contact Management, including entitlements, Product management, including entitlement templates for products, Knowledge Base, Process Automation, Advanced role-based permissions, Notifications, Advanced reporting, Record importing and exporting, Mobile ready (responsive design), and Enterprise messaging (via Corteza Messaging).
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I have regular meetings with Patrick Masson, the general manager of the OSI. We made most of them in October. I did some writing for the OSI. Not all of it is published at this point. I worked on crafting drafts of organizational policies for the OSI, including staffing, travel, and a whistle blower policy. I hope to be able to arrange for an HR specialist or employment lawyer to review these. The OSI has two new board members! In order to make this happen, I contacted all of the nominees for whom I had contact information. I spoke with them about the OSI, the Board and it’s activities, and how they saw their potential involvement. Basically I interviewed a bunch of ~fancy~ people. It was so much fun talking with every one of them and I learned so much during the process. The Debian Community Team had some meetings, wrote some emails, and discussed The Future together and with the greater Debian community.
Corteza today announced the release of Corteza Service Cloud, the free, open-source and self-hosted Salesforce Service Cloud alternative. Corteza Service Cloud is a customer service desk, built on the Corteza Low-Code platform. It enables businesses to deliver faster and more personalised service to their clients, across multiple channels.
Dear readers, I am truly happy to announce the publication of my latest technical book. It comes with a lengthy but important title - System Administration Ethics: Ten Commandments for Security and Compliance in a Modern Cyber World. A colleague and I have been writing this book over the past year and a bit, and we've jotted down what we believe are the most critical dos and don'ts of information technology.
Ethics has never been more important - just look around, and you'll see the Wild Wild West of the digital world, breach here, breach there, data this, data that. Amidst this chaos, you will find techies, afloat, lost, confused, angry, and wondering how their work and passion has become the spearpoint of social dissent and mistrust. I hope this book can provide the right pointers.
The Linux App Summit (LAS) is a great event that bring together a lot of linux application developers, from the bigger communities, it's organized by GNOME and KDE in collaboration and it's a good place to talk about the Linux desktop, application distribution and development.
The Capitole Du Libre is a french event that takes place at INP-ENSEEIHT in Toulouse. It is an event dedicated to free and open source softwares. The Capitole Du Libre 2019 will happen this weekend on 16th-17th November.
There will be a Debian booth with the DebianFrance team, I will be there to help them. A lot of interesting talks will be presented, see the schedule here.
Next day, we got up early to move to the Universidade Federal da Bahia and began the Lakademy. Some members went to buy some groceries and some went directly and prepared the room. After a round of presentations, Lakademy was declared online! I spent most of the time reviewing ROCS code and wrote some fixes for redundant code and a problem with the interface that was introduced in the last commits. After that, I listed some tasks that could be done this week. We ended the first day with some good drinks in some fun places in Salvador. :)
The browser promises to not only block adverts and trackers but to also offer Brave Ads, which are a form of adverts that will pay people to view them and not gobble their data. Such ads are delivered through push notifications rather than intrusive web page banner ads.
It's a somewhat novel approach and one that will see targeted ads that won't spill data out of the browser's hands and into the grubby mitts of third parties.
Folks who opt into Brave Ads will get blockchain tokens as a reward. These can be cashed in for vouchers or gift cards through Brave's partner Upload, or they can be given to an article's writer or website creator.
I was invited by Sandra Persing to participate to the Mozilla Developer Roadshow 2019 in Asia. The event is going through 5 cities: Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Singapore, Bangkok. I committed to participate to Tokyo and Seoul. The other speakers are still on the road. As I'm writing this, they are speaking in Taipei, when I'm back home.
Let's go through the talk and then some random notes about the audience, people and cities.
As a software engineer at YouTube in 2010, Sugu Sougoumarane realized that scaling the MySQL database for the cloud was a tough challenge. His realization helped lead to the creation of the open source Vitess project, which hit a major milestone with the release of Vitess 4.0.
The Vitess project joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is home to the Kubernetes container orchestration project, in February 2018. At the same time, Sougoumarane co-founded PlanetScale, a commercial service supporting Vitess and its deployment.
Just over a year and a half later, on Nov. 5, 2019, the Vitess project graduated from the CNCF, marking a major milestone for the project. CNCF graduation is the highest level of project status within the CNCF and is an indicator of the maturity of the project code and processes. With graduation, Vitess 4.0 became generally available, providing users with new features.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation€® (CNCF€®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced that Helm, the package manager for Kubernetes, has released its third major update with Helm 3.
Helm 3 builds on the core features of Helm 2, with improvements to chart repositories, release management, security, and library charts. With this release, the Helm maintainers incorporated feedback and requests from the community to better address the needs of Kubernetes users and the broad cloud native ecosystem.
Guido van Rossum (1956) is the founding father of the Python programming language, one of the most popular development tools in the world. In 2019 CWI will award him the Dijkstra Fellowship.
What led you to come up with a brand new programming language during your time at CWI?
“I started at CWI as a junior programmer on a research team with Lambert Meertens, Leo Geurts and Steven Pemberton. They wanted to develop a language which would enable people without programming experience – such as scientists – to start writing computer programs fairly quickly.”
“It was at the time that Basic was on the rise due to the arrival of the microcomputer. Meertens looked at this inadequate language with horror. ‘Stamp out Basic!’ Was his motto. In the end, ABC, as our language was called, would not work. The target group could not use it on their microcomputers, which were not powerful enough for it, while Unix users already had other tools. Those users thought ABC was an odd man out.”
“Then I came across the so-called Amoeba project. That was a distributed operating system based on a microkernel, developed by Andrew Tanenbaum at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Sape Mullender at CWI. Not aiming at popularizing their operating system, their first and foremost goal was writing papers. Scientifically it was a breakthrough indeed: those papers are still being studied. I myself was not a researcher but a programmer on that project. I must say thought that there was an atmosphere at CWI in which programmers had a major input in the projects.”
At the November 2019 Python Frederick event, Conor Jenkins showed the group how mass spectrometry works and how Python saves huge amounts of time when processing the large amount of data produced by a mass spec analysis.
Wing 7.1.3 adds improved and expanded documentation and support for matplotlib, improves the accuracy of code warnings, fixes automatically debugging child processes on Windows with Python 3.8, fixes installing the remote agent from .rpm or .deb installations, solves several issues with runtime type introinspection, allows Open from Project and similar navigation commands from non-Browse vi mode, improves debugger reliability, and fixes about 30 other minor usability issues.
Another quick matplotlib tip today: specifically, how easily specify colours from the standard matplotlib colour cycle.
A while back, when matplotlib overhauled their themes and colour schemes, they changed the default cycle of colours used for lines in matplotlib. Previously the first line was pure blue (color='b' in matplotlib syntax), then red, then green etc. They, very sensibly, changed this to a far nicer selection of colours.
Following the recent introduction of Python type annotations (aka "type hints") in Mercurial (see, e.g. this changeset by Augie Fackler), I've been playing a bit with this and pytype.
pytype is a static type analyzer for Python code. It compares with the more popular mypy but I don't have enough perspective to make a meaningful comparison at the moment. In this post, I'll illustrate how I worked with pytype to gradually add type hints in a Mercurial module and while doing so, fix bugs!
The module I focused on is mercurial.mail, which contains mail utilities and that I know quite well. Other modules are also being worked on, this one is a good starting point because it has a limited number of "internal" dependencies, which both makes it faster to iterate with pytype and reduces side effects of other modules not being correctly typed already.
The Kivy Python GUI framework is intriguing.
Not only it’s cross-platform but also supports Android. Java is too verbose and low level for me and Kivy is an opportunity for developing native Android apps without leaving Python.
Outside of the Kivy project documentation, there are few third-party advanced tutorials that go in more depth than the official tutorials. So, before diving into the code of the Kivy demos, I wanted some books to explore more features and get a broader picture of the framework and what it can do.
I found two potentially interesting books: Building Android Apps in Python Using Kivy with Android Studio: With Pyjnius, Plyer, and Buildozer by Ahmed Fawzy Mohamed Gad (Apress, 2019), and Kivy - Interactive Applications and Games in Python - Second Edition by Roberto Ulloa (Packt, 2015).
A question that comes up from time to time is about how to log to a GUI application. The Qt framework is a popular cross-platform UI framework with Python bindings using PySide2 or PyQt5 libraries.
The following example shows how to log to a Qt GUI. This introduces a simple QtHandler class which takes a callable, which should be a slot in the main thread that does GUI updates. A worker thread is also created to show how you can log to the GUI from both the UI itself (via a button for manual logging) as well as a worker thread doing work in the background (here, just logging messages at random levels with random short delays in between).
Longtime X11 developer Keith Packard has spent a lot of time in recent months while being employed by SiFive working on Picolibc as a new C library for embedded systems.
Picolibc is designed solely for embedded use-cases at this point and was formerly developed by Keith under the name newlib-nano. Picolibc 1.1 is out now as the project's second stable release.
Picolibc development is settling down at last. With the addition of a simple 'hello world' demo app, it seems like a good time to stamp the current code as 'version 1.1'.
it’s possible to handle Java-originating exceptions in Swift for j2objc-based projects. Scroll to the end for example code.
It’s getting more common to call j2objc-generated Objective-C code from Swift as iOS development shifts to this modern language. At a high level, we can imagine this means calling Java code from Swift. But Objective-C is an important link in this chain and it shapes the way Swift interacts with the code that started its life as Java.
Thankfully, my bet on j2objc proved to be a good one. It's actively maintained by very helpful developers and works as expected. I've completed most of the risky work in porting the core of my app to iOS and any work I do on that core benefits the apps on both platforms.
There are very few compromises I have to make because language features in Java map surprisingly well to both Objective-C and Swift.
But one important exception remained. I'll cover that in a subsequent post.
Last week I attended a meeting of the ISO C++ Standards Committee (also known as WG21) in Belfast, Northern Ireland. This was the third and last committee meeting in 2019; you can find my reports on preceding meetings here (July 2019, Cologne) and here (February 2019, Kona), and previous ones linked from those. These reports, particularly the Cologne one, provide useful context for this post.
At the last meeting, the committee approved and published the C++20 Committee Draft (CD), a feature-complete draft of the C++20 standard which includes wording for all of the new features we plan to ship in C++20. The CD was then sent out to national standards bodies for a formal ISO ballot, where they have the opportunity to file technical comments on it, called “NB (national body) comments”.
We have 10-15 national standards bodies actively participating in C++ standardization, and together they have filed several hundred comments on the CD. This meeting in Belfast was the first of two ballot resolution meetings, where the committee processes the NB comments and approves any changes to the C++20 working draft needed to address them. At the end of the next meeting, a revised draft will be published as a Draft International Standard (DIS), which will likely be the final draft of C++20.
NB comments typically ask for bug and consistency fixes related to new features added to C++20. Some of them ask for fixes to longer-standing bugs and consistency issues, and some for editorial changes such as fixes to illustrative examples. Importantly, they cannot ask for new features to be added (or at least, such comments are summarily rejected, though the boundary between bug fix and feature can sometimes be blurry).
Occasionally, NB comments ask for a newly added feature to be pulled from the working draft due to it not being ready. In this case, there were comments requesting that Modules and Coroutines (among other things) be postponed to C++23 so they can be better-baked. I’m pleased to report that no major features were pulled from C++20 at this meeting. In cases where there were specific technical issues with a feature, we worked hard to address them. In cases of general “this is not baked yet” comments, we did discuss each one (at length in some cases), but ultimately decided that waiting another 3 years was unlikely to be a net win for the community.
Altogether, over half of the NB comments have been addressed at this meeting, putting us on track to finish addressing all of them by the end of the next meeting, as per our standardization schedule.
While C++20 NB comments were prioritized above all else, some subgroups did have time to process C++23 proposals as well. No proposals were merged into the C++23 working draft at this time (in fact, a “C++23 working draft” doesn’t exist yet; it will be forked from C++20 after the C++20 DIS is published at the end of the next meeting).
By running the name through an Ohio law-enforcement database, the investigators learned that Haas had been reported missing seven weeks earlier. Haas had lived in Columbus, 80 miles from where his remains were discovered, but he'd last been seen at a gas station one county over from O'Bryan's sprawling property. He'd disappeared along with a black backpack in which he carried the tools of his career as a computer programmer: three smartphones, two Dell laptops, an Amazon tablet, and an array of USB sticks and cables. He never let the backpack out of his sight; even on trips to the office bathroom, the bag stayed glued to his shoulder. But the backpack was nowhere to be found in the woods.
Quinn is part of an audio porn renaissance. The old format, popularized by red-light chat lines, has reemerged, riding the wave of the podcast boom. Today there are as many forms of audio erotica as the sexual preferences it represents. Some companies like the venture-backed Dipsea produce narrative audio stories that people can subscribe to for a monthly fee. Others like the less glossy Literotica get authors to read their erotic literature aloud. Quinn’s biggest competitor is Reddit, where a community of more than 300,000 people upvote erotic audio clips on r/GoneWildAudio.
Usenet — Netnews — was conceived almost exactly 40 years ago this month. To understand where it came from and why certain decisions were made the way they were, it's important to understand the technological constraints of the time. Metanote: this is a personal history as I remember it. None of us were taking notes at the time; it's entirely possible that errors have crept in, especially since my brain cells do not even have parity checking, let alone ECC. Please send any corrections. In 1979, mainframes still walked the earth. In fact, they were the dominant form of computing. The IBM PC was about two years in the future; the microcomputers of the time, as they were known, had too little capability for more or less anything serious. For some purposes, especially in research labs and process control systems, so-called minicomputers — which were small, only the size of one or two full-size refrigerators — were used. So-called "super-minis," which had the raw CPU power of a mainframe though not the I/O bandwidth, were starting to become available.
For the last several years, scientists have taken an acute interest in her nose. Milne, after all, is also able to smell diseases. People with Alzheimer's smell to her like rye bread, diabetes like nail polish, cancer like mushrooms and tuberculosis like damp cardboard. Having provided care to thousands of sick people in her life, she has had plenty of contact with various illnesses. Milne, though, is most familiar with the smell of Parkinson's. It's the disease that killed her husband Leslie and his mother, who she also cared for during her illness.
We are happy to announce the release of IPFire 2.23 - Core Update 137. It comes with an updated kernel, a reworked Quality of Service and various bug and security fixes.
Development around the Quality of Service and tackling some of the bugs required an exceptional amount of team effort in very short time and I am very happy that we are now able to deliver the result to you to improve your networks. Please help us to keep these things coming to you with your donation!
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel), Debian (ghostscript, mesa, and postgresql-common), Fedora (chromium, php-robrichards-xmlseclibs, php-robrichards-xmlseclibs3, samba, scap-security-guide, and wpa_supplicant), Mageia (cpio, fribidi, libapreq2, python-numpy, webkit2, and zeromq), openSUSE (ImageMagick, kernel, libtomcrypt, qemu, ucode-intel, and xen), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (ghostscript, kernel, and kernel-rt), Scientific Linux (ghostscript and kernel), SUSE (bash, enigmail, ghostscript, ImageMagick, kernel, libjpeg-turbo, openconnect, and squid), and Ubuntu (ghostscript, imagemagick, and postgresql-common).
Nmap is a well-known utility that is bundled with many Linux distributions and that is also available for Windows and several other platforms. Essentially a scanning and mapping tool, there’s a lot that Nmap can do for you.
Today, we’re having a look as using Nmap for port scanning which, incidentally, is the tool’s primary usage. Port scanning is an essential task of network management as it ensures that no backdoors are left unaddressed. It is one of the most basic forms of securing the network.
Before we get into the how-to part of this post, we’ll sidetrack a little and first introduce Nmap and its GUI cousin Zenmap. We’ll then explain what ports are and how you need to be careful not to leave unused ports open on your devices. Then, we’ll get to the essence of this post and show you how to use Nmap for port scanning. And since there are quite a few other tools that can be viable alternatives to Nmap for port scanning—some of them much better or easier to use tools—we’ll finally review some of the very best Nmap alternatives for port scanning.
The Americans returned with tanks only to check the oil wells and prevent the Syrian army from regaining possession, while in the region "insecurity is growing. We too in Aleppo - he concludes - are the object of bombing and only two days ago a little girl died. Rebels and jihadists are still in the suburbs and continue the attacks. We are exhausted!".
The UN rights experts’ assessment shows that as more and more details of China’s abuses in Xinjiang emerge and international outrage escalates, China increasingly faces an uphill battle.
Why then are the audit inspections blacked out? These are inspections of public documents, of public financial accounts for this country’s largest corporations yet the findings remain largely secret.
ASIC looked at 49 audits for “Listed entities and other public interest entities” and found failures across the board.
In the KPMG inspection, for instance, 19 of the audits were dodgy, or to quote the ASIC narrative from the bits which were not blacked out, “In our view, the auditor did not obtain reasonable assurance that the financial report was free of material misstatement in 15 of the 70 key areas reviewed in total across 19 audits”.
Twice as many people are dying from antibiotic-resistant infections, also known as superbugs, than previously thought, according to a report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
The report, published on Wednesday, states that nearly 3.1 million antibiotic-resistant infections happen each year in the United States. As a result, an estimated 48,700 people die. The findings are based on data from millions of patient health records, and are an update to a 2013 report in which the public health agency raised concerns about these superbugs.
So when some kind of unfairness is threatening one’s livelihood, what’s to be done if the authorities can’t be counted on to fix it? How, as a society, do we deal with injustice when no institution can actually solve it or enforce the rules that are already there?
There are plenty of places in Mexico where large companies and factories, expensive resorts, and yes, the land and businesses of wealthy families, have all the water they need, even when scarcity in the area is a problem.
Those who live in surrounding areas often go without, or have to figure out other solutions to the unequal distribution.
India’s water woes, though, stem largely from its over-dependence on groundwater, and here, the climate links are less pronounced because underground aquifers take much longer to react to changes in temperature and rainfall. India is the world’s largest user of groundwater, extracting 250 cubic km of groundwater annually, and has 20 million wells and tube wells. Most of our cities depend on groundwater, and our irrigation is overwhelmingly groundwater dependent. The risk of linking our water crisis to climate change is that policymakers can throw their hands up and say that there is little that they can do. And that’s a dangerous road, because, so much of our water crisis originates from misplaced policies.
First, India’s cities. In almost all our cities, wetlands, lakes and ponds have been encroached upon, and this, when added to mostly concrete surfaces, drastically reduces groundwater recharge, causing the kind of water crisis we saw in Chennai this past summer, and also paradoxically, urban floods of the kind that Mumbai witnessed this year, and every other year. We need policies that incentivise urban municipalities to implement nature-based solutions such as rejuvenating water bodies, to demarcate areas where recharge happens as protected places, and provide incentives to urban residents and industries to undertake rainwater harvesting and reuse waste water.
Australia’s bushfires are feeding on heat from the climate change happening in the tropics, but its government doesn’t want to know.
In the paper, Networks of Opposition: A Structural Analysis of U.S. Climate Change Countermovement Coalitions 1989-2015, author Robert Brulle, looks at “key political coalitions that worked to oppose climate action. In conjunction with their allied trade associations, these coalitions have served as a central coordination mechanism in efforts opposed to mandatory limits on carbon€ emissions.”
The Rybovich superyacht marina lies on the West Palm Beach, Florida, waterfront, a short drive north from Mar-a-Lago. Superyachts, floating mansions that can stretch more than 300 feet and cost over $100 million, are serviced at the marina, and their owners enjoy Rybovich’s luxury resort amenities. Its Instagram account offers a glimpse into the rarefied world of the global 0.1% — as one post puts it, “What’s better than owning a yacht, owning a yacht with a helicopter of course!”
Rybovich owner Wayne Huizenga Jr., son of the Waste Management and Blockbuster video billionaire Wayne Huizenga Sr., has long planned to build luxury apartment towers on the site, part of a development dubbed Marina Village.
We only know her as “A,” and she is dead. The court ruled this week in the case of a€ young woman in South Korea who killed herself€ after learning she had been secretly filmed in a changing room of the hospital where she worked.
Private.sh is a new private search engine that uses cryptography to ensure that your search history cannot be tracked by anyone – even us. Private.sh comes from the same privacy committed makers of Private Internet Access in partnership with GigaBlast – one of the few companies to have their own index of the internet available for search.
Well, it does what it says. If you leave this option checked when you export your image, any pixels you erased will be saved in the exported image. They will not be truly erased, just made fully transparent. In other words, the data that describes the color of each pixel will be preserved, they will just be made invisible. This option has privacy implications. With it enabled, what you erase from an image may still be present in transparent pixels.
GL.inet has made routers for a long time, and its latest product is called Mudi which they promote as a “4G LTE Privacy Router for Road Warriors”.
The Canadian Federal Court has dismissed a motion from Voltage Pictures to go after alleged BitTorrent pirates through a reverse class action lawsuit. The case in question started in 2016, in an attempt to sue alleged pirates at reduced cost. However, the court rejected this approach, as it's not suitable for file-sharing cases.
Two groups involved in the distribution of third-party Kodi addons and 'builds' have shut down citing legal pressure. KodiUKTV and OneNation both ran so-called repositories where software could be downloaded but that activity will not continue into the future. TorrentFreak has been able to confirm that FACT was behind the action.
