GNU/Linux is, hands down, the most highly acclaimed operating system for software engineering. It comes with an absolute ton of development tools and has unprecedented performance with regard to software development.
Linux, in case you are not aware, is a free, open-licensed operating system. This means that it is very developer-friendly and can be, to a certain extent, customized to your own desires.
But, it is not for everyone.
Linux comes with a large selection of distributions (called distros in the trade). Each one, unsurprisingly, has the Linux Kernel at its core, with other components built on top. Many Linux users will tend to switch between these distros until they find the perfect 'recipe' for their needs and tastes.
We will highlight a few of these towards the end of the article.
What are some of the pros of using Linux for software development?
1. One of the main benefits of Linux, not to mention the Linux ecosystem, according to software engineers, is the amount of choice and flexibility it provides. This really does make it the jewel in the crown of operating systems.
2. Linux is free and open-sourced. This means you don't have to fork out tons of cash on licenses for the OS and other apps used on it.
3. It is easy to install directly on your computer, or you can boot Linux from an external drive like a USB flash drive or CD. You can also install it with or inside Windows if you need both.
DevOps is morphing into DevSecOps, with development teams taking on the responsibility of delivering more secure code, and success dependent on aligned improvements in monitoring, automation, patching, and deployment. The operating systems you deploy, are a key foundational layer of your DevSecOps environment.
In this white paper, Marc Staimer of Dragon Slayer Consulting reviews known Linux issues and impacts to DevSecOps environments in the following areas:
● Security issues ● Performance impacts ● Deployment bottlenecks
In this white paper, the analyst company, Evaluator Group reviews Oracle Linux, taking a close look at what differentiates it based on input from users that have moved their environments from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Oracle Linux.
In-depth interviews were conducted with customers from healthcare, financial services, consumer and enterprise software, and insurance companies. The findings show the economic impact of Linux- specifically Oracle Linux in their environment, including:
● Increased application performance ● More stable operating environment–resulting in fewer outages ● Reduction in annual OS support costs by 20% to 50% ● Increased automation leading to faster deployment of new IT resources ● Reductions in IT management time
In this article, we will discuss how Pella transformed their IT infrastructure with a newly virtualized environment.
The Pella Corporation is a privately held window and door manufacturing company headquartered in Pella, Iowa. They have manufacturing and sales operations in a number of locations in the United States. Pella Corporation employs more than 8,000 people with 17 manufacturing sites and 200 showrooms throughout the United States and select regions of Canada.
Pella’s continuous business growth has proved to be a big challenge for the IT department. As the company’s needs increased, its older infrastructure, which was based on Unix physical servers, struggled to keep pace. Pella needed a more flexible platform that would allow them to easily build out capacity and improve functionality.
This provided a unique opportunity for the IT team. The team wanted a reliable infrastructure that could support both the current capacity, and easily expand to accommodate growth while keeping costs to a minimum. For these reasons, the IT team decided to move to a virtualized x86-server environment.
As a long time Oracle customer, Pella was already using Oracle applications and Oracle Database. Therefore, Pella was inclined to evaluate Oracle’s Virtualization and Linux solutions to facilitate their IT transformation. Oracle Linux was an obvious choice for Pella primarily because it is optimized for existing Oracle workloads. They also decided to virtualize their environment with Oracle VM mainly for the license structure advantages. With Oracle VM, Pella is able to pin CPUs to specific VMs, which in turn translated to saving on licensing costs for Oracle applications.
gdiffmk for producing diffs of groff files. glilypond for integrating lilypond musical notation into grof files: $ glilypond --pdf2eps -t ./b -- example.1 > example.ps.1 $ groff -p -Tps example.ps.1 > out.ps $ okular out.ps The **grap2graph** command to convert grap graphs to a bitmap. This requires the **grap** command, which does not ship with Slackware. $ cat internet.d | grap2graph -format jpg -density 300 > my.jpg The **grn** command is a preprocessor for Gremlin files. It appears to be non- functional, but it's possible that an additional back-end is required. The **grodvi** command converts Groff to DVI for TeX. It's basically a shortcut for groff -Tdvi . Have your computer guess what groff command you need with **grog** $ grog blah.1 groff -man blah.1 $ grog -Thtml blah.1 groff -Thtml -man blah.1
00:00:00 Intro 00:00:53 Host Introductions 00:01:24 What Michael has been up to 00:03:45 What Noah has been up to 00:05:45 What Ryan has been up to 00:13:24 Sponsored by Digital Ocean €· [do.co/dln] 00:14:34 Community Feedback: In Defense of Rolling Release by Nice Micro 00:15:21 Excerpts from Nice Micro’s Video 00:18:15 Our Responses to Nice Micro 00:23:48 How To Send Us Community Feedback 00:23:58 CentOS 8.2 Released & Noah Explains Why This Is Important 00:25:11 Fedora getting updated Mesa drivers 00:25:19 Discussion: Is Red Hat becoming more focused on the Desktop? 00:35:41 Windows’ Fresh Start Tool Breaking Windows 00:37:35 Discussion: Why we’re talking about Windows & WSL 00:38:57 Discussion: Windows Users seem to never blame Windows even while aware of its problems 00:40:34 Michael’s story about helping someone who said Linux was slow when comparing a Brand New Laptop to a 10 Year Old Laptop 00:42:34 Main Topic: Ask Us Anything from the DLN Forum 00:43:25 Q: Why doesn’t Noah have a beard? 00:44:03 Q: Thoughts about Blender being used as a Video Editor? 00:49:34 Q: What’s Your Favorite Guilty Pleasure Music or Movie? 00:51:14 Q: Do any of you listen to offline / local music? 00:52:03 Noah offers a simple way industries could eliminate piracy 00:54:24 Ryan’s Answer to offline music (turns out he’s a hipster lol) 00:56:08 Q: Microsoft buys Canonical what do you do? 00:56:36 Noah plays devil’s advocate on Microsoft buying Canonical 00:59:55 “it’s been this long since . . . “ 01:00:08 Q: Which superhero would you be? 01:00:50 Q: Why did you make your own Network instead joining a network? 01:03:47 Q: Are there any Microsoft products you guys would actually prefer to use if it were available on linux? 01:05:10 What non-tech-related hobbies do you guys have? 01:05:37 How often does @dasgeek have to replace/refill the bottles behind his monitor? 01:06:20 Do you guys read fiction and if so what are some of your favorite books/series? 01:07:58 Q: you are given a choice for all of your computers to be completely replaced with Windows 8.0 or Linux Mint 19.3 on BTRFS? 01:09:26 Q: What old media-format would you bring back to have it somehow popularized today? 01:10:15 Noah’s dream for a new media format 01:11:45 Gaming: System Shock Reboot 01:12:31 Michael tells his story about finding PC Gaming 01:13:36 Our response to viewers who skip the Gaming section and why you should care about Linux Gaming 01:19:26 Software Spotlight: Photopea (photoshop alternative webapp) 01:24:17 Tip of the Week: fzf (command line search) 01:26:04 Outro 01:26:09 Get more DL like Live Streams Unedited Episodes Join the Patron Post Show & More by Becoming a DL Patron 01:26:27 Show Your Love of Linux & Open Source with DL Swag from the DLN Store 01:26:51 Join Us in the DLN Community (we gave Noah a silly script on this outro and it was totally gold!) 01:27:55 Check out the DestinationLinux.Network for more awesome content! 01:28:14 Check out FrontPageLinux.com for Articles Tutorials Videos and more 01:28:24 the Journey Itself . . . 01:28:35 Patron Post Show (become a Patron to Join us each week!)
For the half dozen or so of people that might manage to care, I have decided to start synchronizing my piddly YouTube content over to LBRY. I’d say this is nothing against YouTube but actually, it is. Although I will still use and enjoy YouTube, many of their decisions have shaken my confidence in their ability to be a truly open platform, therefore, I am following the lead of many other “content creators” and also putting my stuff on LBRY.
LBRY is a decentralized video platform that uses blockchain (that cryptocurrency magic) to distribute the video content. That said, I don’t really understand or frankly care how it works, but I do wonder if some videos will eventually get lost in the ether due to this decentralized nature.
Bottom Line Up front: I am not expecting much to come from it and since most of the people I personally enjoy are on YouTube. I am starting to use LBRY a bit, from time to time, because, why not. It’s something somewhat new and shiny and I want to see some sort of competitor to rise up and challenge the top dog.
While Ubuntu continues in their path of OpenZFS integration, Fedora is revisiting the possibility of using Btrfs on the desktop, Red Hat is continuing to invest in Stratis, and Reiser5 is being developed, Bcachefs as the file-system born out of the Linux block cache code is continuing to evolve.
It's been some months since there was last any news on Bcachefs while last week marked the first time this year that there's been a status update passed along on the Patreon blog. Bcachefs development continues to be led by Kent Overstreet who wrote the latest status update on this currently out-of-tree file-system.
The Linux kernel is seeing some modern work done to its driver for supporting the Apple Desktop Bus on Macintosh II era systems.
Along with the likes of the Apple PowerBook 100 series seeing Linux driver improvements once in a while, this Sunday developer Finn Thain sent out a set of patches improving the kernel's via-macii driver that contains "fixes for all known bugs" to this driver.
Well, we had a big merge window, and we have a fairly big rc3 here too. The calm period for rc2 is clearly over.
That said, I don't think there's anything _particularly_ scary in here, and the size of this rc is probably simply a direct result of the fact that 5.8 is a big release. It's too early to say if this will mean that we'll have a longer rc period as a result, I'll just have to keep an eye out for how this all progresses.
The stats all look fairly normal: about half is drivers (networking is a big chunk, but there's really a bit of everything in there: gpu, sound, usb, you name it).
Outside of drivers, we have the usual suspects: arch updates (x86 and arm stand out), core networking, but also core kernel and VM updates. And a fair amount of tooling updates (mostly selftests, but also objtool and virtio).
Go forth and test,
Linus
Linus Torvalds just pushed out Linux 5.8-rc3 as the newest weekly test candidate for the upcoming Linux 5.8 that should debut as stable around early August.
Linux 5.8 is one of the biggest kernel updates ever and while 5.8-rc2 was fairly light, 5.8-rc3 saw many changes merged over the past week with various bug/regression fixes.
The third 5.8 kernel prepatch is out for testing.
Intel's open-source media team has released a new development snapshot of their media driver that provides GPU-accelerated video encode/decode capabilities on Linux.
Intel Media Driver 2020Q2 Pre-release 20.2.pre4 is this new version out Sunday. The Intel Media Driver 20.2.pre4 doesn't have any formal change-log but in digging through the recent patches, the big highlight is certainly initial support for the DG1 developer graphics card as the first Xe Graphics dGPU offering, but there are also other changes as part of this 20.2.pre4 release...
While we are most excited about Godot 4.0 for its Vulkan renderer for this leading open-source game engine, there continues to be a lot of other improvements building up for this major release.
The latest feature hitting the Godot 4.0 code-base is SDF-based real-time global illumination. This Signed Distance Field Global Illumination (SDFGI) functionality is a new technique for lighting and similar to a dynamic real-time lightmap.
As work progresses on Godot 4.0 at a steady pace, a new and novel method of creating full-scene global illumination has been added in the master branch.
Tomorrow (29/06/2020) begins the first evaluation of the Google Summer of Code 2020. Last GSoC, when I was participating as a student, I wrote in my final report a set of future proposals that could be done in the ROCS graph IDE (Section What’s Next?). This year, some students got interested in these ideas but only one could enter the program (we didn’t have enough mentors for more than one project).
Hello KDE people. First phase evaluations is due from today onward until 3rd of July. It has been coupe of weeks since I had posted about my project. I was quite busy writing code implementing the documentation panel for the various backends supported by Cantor. In the last post I have explained about how I generated the help files namely qhc (Qt Help Collection) and qch (Qt Compressed Help) from the documentation's source file. In today's post I will explain how I utilized Maxima's help files to actually display help inside the Cantor application itself. So here are the things done:-
Hi Everyone! It’s been a while since my last post and during this period I continued adding MMS support in KDE Connect SMS app. After the addition of MMS support in android app, My next step was to enable the desktop SMS client to allow users to reply to multi-target messages. I had some discussion with my mentors related to the structure of the network packets to allow sending multimedia files from android to desktop. Since the Attachment field should be an optional field and replacing the current packet type entirely was not feasible keeping in mind the backward compatibility for the desktop app. Simon suggested a nice idea of converting the thumbnails into Base64 encoded string and then adding it into the network packet. This solved the issue of replacing the entire method of pushing the messages to the desktop.
After successfully completing and testing the code on android studio, I added the support to receive and display the optional attachment object on the desktop side. The desktop side was mostly straight forward except transferring the QImage from C++ to QML but at the end I figured it out.
Packaging a big stack like the software from the KDE community – Frameworks, Plasma, and all the applications and libraries and tools from the KDE Release Service – takes a fair bit of time and energy. The KDE-FreeBSD team works on both packaging and porting – making sure that KDE applications behave well on FreeBSD just like on other operating systems.
The majority of the work of compatibility happens in Qt, which is also maintained by the KDE-FreeBSD team. Then the KDE frameworks – 80 or so libraries that are small, lightweight, tiered-so-you-know-about-dependencies and LGPL-licensed – pile a bunch of compatibility on top of that for desktop purposes.
But sometimes, an application needs to dig into the system itself. A text editor edits text regardless of the underlying system, but a memory-usage monitor needs to know how to ask the OS about memory-usage.
So this week I spent a fair bit of time in the KSysGuard codebase, because there’s a FreeBSD bug report that says that the memory-usage monitor shows nothing, and another report that says the graph and the status bar don’t match.
Today, I released version 0.13.0 of scikit-survival. Most notably, this release adds sksurv.metrics.brier_score and sksurv.metrics.integrated_brier_score, an updated PEP 517/518 compatible build system, and support for scikit-learn 0.23.
For a full list of changes in scikit-survival 0.13.0, please see the release notes.
We are pleased to announce the launch of Nitrux 1.3.0. This new version brings together the latest software updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and ready-to-use hardware support.
Nitrux 1.3.0 is available for immediate download.
As expected, Nitrux 1.3.0 is here one month after the release of Nitrux 1.2.9, and it introduces updates to various packages, starting with the Linux kernel, which was bumped to version 5.6.0-1017, and continuing with the latest Inkscape 1.0 SVG graphics editor and Mozilla Firefox 77.0.1 web browser.
But what’s most important in this release is the fact that the default desktop environment saw a major upgrade. Nitrux 1.3.0 now ships with the latest KDE Plasma 5.19.2 desktop, which is accompanied by the KDE Applications 20.04.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.71.0 open-source software suites.
Coming into the Linux world, the first and the most challenging task is to decide which distribution you want to use. There are a lot of options to choose from, each having its advantages and drawbacks. Two of the most popular distributions that exist are Ubuntu and Debian.
They are both highly used, and it is a little difficult to choose between them. We would like to help you by providing some facts and features of both for a bit of comparison so that you can decide what you want.
The team behind the popular Linux distribution Linux Mint has released Linux Mint 20, codename Ulyana, to the public on June 27, 2020. The new version of the distribution comes in Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce editions that users can install on their devices.
Updates to the new version will become available soon so that existing installations can be upgraded. Users may also download the latest version from the official project website or one of the official mirror sites to run a Live version or install it on a device.
Finally, this is my review of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa on its Panorama, Power, and Life for all users divided in three parts after I used it in enough period of time. I go from the point of view of twelve years ago the legendary 8.04 Hardy Heron version and the slogan Just Work we easily find when installing this amazing operating system. Once one part finished, I will update this preface article until all parts finished. I am enjoying writing this and I hope you also enjoy this review series even better. Happy reading!
Linux Mint has announced its LTS (Long Term Version) release named “Ulyana“, Linux Mint 20.0. According to the Linux Mint team, this version is going to be based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. As it is a LTS release so we will get latest updates and patches for the next 5 years (till 2025). While Ubuntu comes with a set release date every time, it is not the case with Linux Mint. In this article, we’ll see all the new features in Linux Mint 20 along with a step-by-step installation guide for Linux Mint 20.0 (Ulyana). For this article purpose, we’ll discuss about the new features and installation guide for the Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon release.
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That’s it, you’ve successfully completed the installation of Linux Mint 20 Cinnamon on your system. Explore all the new features of Linux Mint 20.0 “Ulyana”.
If you still have any queries or doubts or if you do face any issues during the installation process, please post your questions in the feedback section below. We’ll try to answer all your queries at the earliest.
Ubuntu desktop lead Martin Wimpress has created a tool called Rolling Rhino. Its aim: convert an Ubuntu daily build image into a “rolling release” distro by opting into and tracking the devel series of changes/packages.
“Rolling Rhino is intended for Ubuntu developers and experienced Ubuntu users who want to install Ubuntu once and the track all development updates with automatic tracking of subsequent series,” he says of the tool.
This month: * Command & Conquer * How-To : Python, Ubuntu On a 2-in-1 Tablet, and Rawtherapee * Graphics : Inkscape * Graphics : Krita for Old Photos * Linux Loopback * Everyday Ubuntu : Starting Again *
Ubports Touch* Review : Kubuntu, and Xubuntu 20.04 * Ubuntu Games : Into The Breach plus: News, My Opinion, The Daily Waddle, Q&A, and more.
Bootlin has been a participant at the Embedded Linux Conference for many years, and despite the special conditions this year, we will again be participating to this online event, from June 29 to July 1.
Texas Instruments unveiled their first 64-bit processor in 2018 with TI AM654 “Keystone III” quad-core Arm Cortex-A53 + dual lockstep Cortex-R5F processor designed for general embedded and industrial applications.
The company is now working on a more powerful processor with J721E SoC with Cortex-A72 cores belonging to the K3 Multicore SoC architecture platform appearing in TI Linux git repository. Ti J721E is a monster of an SoC, not necessarily in terms of CPU processing power, but it has an amazing amount of features and peripherals.
I’ve recently bought a Garmin Fenix Multisport Smartwatch. The watch offers support for navigation and maps. By default it came with some topo maps for Europe. However I wanted to use more detailed maps from OpenStreetMap.
[...]
Also there had been problems with the map on fenix. The draw order really matters and I needed to draw forests earlier as they didn’t show up on smartwatch, but worked fine when loaded in QMapShack. My current problem is that building aren’t rendered on the device. The question is if we really want them or leave them out.
[...]
Just download the file and copy it to the GARMIN folder on the device using MTP. In case you want a map for your region you can build it yourself using the MDE.
Google Analytics is perhaps the analytics platform of our time. But should it be? It’s many features and the free plan is what made it popular, but its invasion of user privacy should not be overlooked. Here are some good alternatives for 2020.
First, I want to mention privacy-oriented self-hosted solutions. Their Open Source nature provides you an option to host them yourself instead of sending the data to someone else. Second, we look at some of the viable closed-source alternatives.
As its name suggests, Fosshost is a not-for-profit hosting provider for FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) projects. But what makes it stand out is that it’s free to use. Yes, you read it right, it’s absolutely free!
Put together by a group of awesome people, Fosshost is trying to help the free and open source software community, especially projects who can’t afford to pay for hosting, with semi-dedicated virtual private servers, shared mirrors, storage and even domain registration.
Among the FOSS project that are already benefiting from Fosshost’s hosting services, there’s The GNOME Project, Xubuntu, The Xfce Desktop, Manjaro, Xiph.Org Foundation (Icecast, Opus, Speex), ActivityPub (W3), and many others.
Kyle Ambroff-Kao continues his work on improving our unit tests, fixing some remaining problems with handling of symlinks.
The ext2 driver now properly report the filesystem name as ext2, 3 or 4 depending on which disk is mounted. This does not change the behavior, but avoids some confusion as previously it always said ext2. We have a single driver for all 3 versions of the filesystem as they are in fact quite similar and share a very large part of the code.
The work on XFS and UFS2 from our GSoC students is also being merged, with initial work towards listing the content of the root directory in progress.
The open-source Haiku operating system that continues maintaining compatibility with BeOS and inspiration from its design has continued in its quest of better supporting modern hardware.
Haiku R1 beta 2 shipped earlier this month while in addition the developers have been working on some modern hardware support improvements.
Handling of modern x86 CPU features has been in the works including for the likes of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), XSAVE, and others. Aside from supporting modern CPU instruction set extensions, Haiku has been seeing new drivers for WMI and SMBios handling.
Thunderbird Conversations is an add-on for Thunderbird that provides a conversation view for messages. It groups message threads together, including those stored in different folders, and allows easier reading and control for a more efficient workflow.
[...]
The one feature that is currently missing after the rewrite is inline quick reply. This has been of lower priority, as we have focussed on being able to keep the main part of the add-on running with the newer versions of Thunderbird. However, now that 3.1 is stable, I hope to be able to start work on a new version of quick reply soon.
TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 24 final is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). There are no additional changes other than outstanding security updates. Assuming all goes well, it will go live on Monday afternoon/evening Pacific time.
We got a nice note from Michelle Thompson this week thanking us for mentioning the GNU Radio Conference in last week’s Links article, and in particular for mentioning the virtual CTF challenge that they’re planning. It turns out that Michelle is deeply involved in designing the virtual CTF challenge, after having worked on the IRL challenges at previous conferences. She shared a few details of how the conference team made the decision to go forward with the virtual challenge, inspired in part by the success of the Hack-A-Sat qualifying rounds, which were also held remotely. It sounds like the GNU Radio CTF challenge will be pretty amazing, with IQ files being distributed to participants in lieu of actually setting up receivers. We wish Michelle and the other challenge coordinators the best of luck with the virtual con, and we really hope a Hackaday reader wins.
In this video, you will learn the basics of using the Jupyter Notebook. How to change cells, edit cells, run cells, and much more!
Note that Python 3.8 is now the latest feature release series of Python 3. After two years of quarterly 3.7.x bugfix releases and with the successful release and adoption of Python 3.8 over the last year, 3.7.8 is expected to be the last bugfix release in the 3.7 series. You should consider upgrading to 3.8 as soon as practical. Get the latest release of 3.8.x here.
Following our release support policy, after 3.7.8 we plan to provide security fixes for 3.7 as needed until mid-year 2023, five years after its initial release. More details are available in PEP 537, the Python 3.7 Release Schedule.
Since we can parse a shell script into statements now. We need to fiter the install command and extact what will be installed in the command.
Almost 400 organizations have signed an open letter asking Congress to protect the funding of open source projects following some recent US political turmoil.
Notable signatories include organizations like the Wikimedia Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Tor Project, Red Hat, Gnome, Digital Ocean, TunnelBear, the Open Source Initiative, AccessNow, Human Rights Watch, and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
More than 2,300 individuals from the open source and human rights communities have also signed the letter in their names.
