I have a bit of a confession to make. Although Linux is my operating system of choice on the desktop, I tend to skip over my open source-powered laptop in favor of either a MacBook Pro or Chromebook when I'm working beyond my desk. I know...blasphemy, right? I've reached a point in my career and life where I need the tools to be able to get my jobs done as efficiently as possible and without frustration or headache.
To be absolutely fair, primary reasons why I overlook my one Linux laptop are because it's too big and the keyboard is absolutely terrible. Given I am a writer by profession, a bad keyboard can be a deal-breaker. Once again, in favor of honesty, the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard isn't much better. The "butterfly" keys are loud and way too prone to sticking. My 2015 Pixel was, at one point, an absolute dream machine, but the battery life is waning, and sometimes ChromeOS can be a bit flaky with the trackpad.
What's best for a new desktop computer with GNU/Linux nowadays? I'm looking for performances (CG arts/Krita), only Free/Libre drivers and around 1K€... Hard to find trusty info... If you have advice/recommendations, please let me know.
Pop!_OS 20.10 offers a current snapshot of the latest features of the popular desktop Linux distribution, and in this video we'll cover the entire installation process from start to finish. This procedure will show you how to replace your current operating system with Pop!_OS 20.10.
One thing that is obvious to anyone that has been around Linux for a number of years is that there is not the same level of excitement with the new Ubuntu releases as in the early years. What happened? Where did it all go wrong? And what changes could Ubuntu make to correct this?
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Ubuntu Kylin 20.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Select high-end Corsair power supplies such as their RMi / HXi / AXi series are able to expose various sensor metrics via USB interface to the system. To date this sensor functionality has only worked under Windows with their proprietary software but now an open-source driver is seeking mainline inclusion for supporting these sensors under Linux.
Independent developer Wilken Gottwalt reverse-engineered the micro-controller found on the Corsair RMi/HXi/AXi power supplies and found it to be a proprietary but simple USB HID protocol. The controller exposes temperatures, current, and voltage levels along with other information like power uptime, power used, and power supply fan speed. This protocol on select models can also allow configuring the fan mode and mono/multi-rail voltage handling, and over-current protection.
This is the first release candidate for Kernel 5.10 and we expect more RCs until the final release in December.
Linux Kernel 5.10 brings mostly driver updates and as usual, processor supports, performance improvements across storage, and networking modules.
This Rc1 concludes the Merge window for this release. It adds around 14k commints.
According to a recent tweet from renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, the next LTS (Long Term Support) kernel release will be Linux 5.10, which recently entered development with a first Release Candidate (RC) milestone already available for public testing.
This means that Linux kernel 5.10, which will probably see the light of day near the Christmas 2020 holidays, will receive updates for at least two years. But, as it happened with previous LTS kernel series, support could be extended to up to six years, probably until December 2026.
As expected, Linus Torvalds announced the first Release Candidate (RC) of the upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel series, which looks to be yet another big release with almost 14k commits, but not as big as Linux kernel 5.8 was. However, Linus Torvalds assures us that the merge window didn’t cause any unusual issues and things went “fairly smoothly.”
The most interesting change in Linux kernel 5.10 appears to be the removal of setf_fs() function, which was used to set the FS segment register of an x86 processor. For now, it was only removed from the x86, PowerPC, s390, and RISC-V architectures, with the rest to follow soon.
Linus Torvalds has kicked off yet another development cycle for the Linux kernel, announcing the release of 5.10-rc1, and this time with an historical twist. The new version of the kernel effectively marks the end of a decade-old feature that has long been made redundant after it was found to cause security bugs.
With the closing of the two-week-long merge window, which precedes the release of every new iteration of the Linux kernel, Torvalds shared his reflections on the Linux kernel mailing list, maintaining that "things seem to have gone fairly smoothly".
The Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid-state drives are now available from Internet retailers. For those wondering how these SSDs compare with EXT4 under Linux against other PCIe 4.0/3.0 drives, here are a variety of benchmarks.
While Samsung hasn't sent out NVMe SSDs for Linux testing at Phoronix, we continue purchasing the new models due to their high performance state and needing some additional drives for various systems in the lab. When the Samsung 980 PRO reached retail channels this month I picked up the Samsung 980 PRO 500GB and 1TB drives and ran a series of benchmarks on them prior to commissioning.
Joplin is a cross-platform note taking app that I use a lot to keep track of my projects, and to organize my notes and thoughts. Joplin allows you to create note books, and add an infinite number of notes to them. You can link between notes, link to external sources, add images, tables, etc. Everythin in markdown, very easy to learn and use. It’s basically an Evernote clone, without the subscription, and without one other thing that I’ll talk about later.
Vim is only content or text editing tool. That is it. In case you’re accustomed to utilizing Sublime Text for Windows/Mac, Notepad for Windows, Nano for Linux, Atom for Windows/Mac, or any content tool, Vim is simply one more program that permits you to compose and alter the text. Contrasted with other word processors, 2 viewpoints make Vim stick out are proficiency and universality. Vim is all about productivity. What’s more, there are two or three points from which it approaches productivity. Vim permits you to be proficient by driving you to utilize the console, and indeed, that implies no more using the mouse! Therefore, a perfect set of Vim books is undecipherably crucial to learn Vim.
Universality is likewise a pretty cool part of Vim, which is that it’s all over. It’s accessible on essentially every significant stage you can consider. Regardless of whether you’re utilizing a Mac, Windows, or some Linux conveyance, Vim has you secured. Specifically, if your everyday work includes working in the terminal meetings, Vim is your lone content manager accessible.
The system admins will usually schedule repetitive tasks to make their's and everyone's work easier! Scheduling repetitive tasks or jobs is crucial in many occasions, for example automating backups, cleaning disk space and other system maintenance tasks. Even if the admin is not around all the time, a scheduled job will keep running at a specific interval. The most widely used tool to schedule jobs in Linux is Cron. We already have published a beginners guide to Cron jobs. Cron is a command line utility, so the newbies may not fully understand the command line arguments. To mitigate this issue, a few standalone and web-based front-ends to Crontab have been developed. One such tool is Zeit.
Linux package managers, like Apt and DNF, are extremely powerful and intuitive, but that doesn’t mean things can’t go wrong. Occasionally, a package install goes wrong, and you’re left to pick up the pieces. Package managers have the ability to fix broken packages and skip broken updates to get your system working again and avoid troubles in the future. This article covers how to fix broken packages in Linux.
These tips and tricks should help you get unstuck in most instances. They’re all fairly universal, but every situation is different, so keep that in mind when trying to debug your own situation.
Snap packages are an excellent Linux technology that the community is embracing, as it offers a lot of features and benefits. However, sometimes Snap packages can cloud out your command-line output when the lsblk command runs in the terminal, and it can be incredibly annoying.
The sudo command is an excellent part of the Linux command-line. It allows users to execute root commands without needing to log into root, protecting their security. The problem is, to use the sudo command, you’ll need to enter your password.
RainLoop Webmail is a simple, modern, and fast web-based email client. Written in PHP, RainLoop provides an easy way to check your emails using your web browser. It comes with full support of both IMAP and SMTP protocols (SSL, STARTTLS), sieve scripts support, integration with Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Dropbox, a multi-level caching system, plugin support, keyboard shortcut support, and many other additional features.
The installation is very simple. If you follow our instructions carefully, you can finish the RainLoop Webmail installation in less than 10 minutes. Let’s get started.
TYPO3 is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP. It is an enterprise-class CMS that combines open source code with reliability and true scalability. It runs on a web server and supports a lot of operating systems including, Windows, Linux, macOS, etc. It is a simple, responsive, mobile ready and secure CMS and can be easily customized and extended without writing any code. It is a very popular and great choice for getting your website up and running quickly.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TYPO3 CMS with Apache web server and Let's Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 20.04.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MailSpring on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Mailspring is a free desktop email client, available for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. Mailspring with modern features like unified inbox, snoozing, reminders, templates, offline search, and support for Gmail labels. It is free and supports all IMAP providers, including Gmail, Office 365, and iCloud. It also consists of a Pro Version which adds even more features into the already feature-rich application.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of MailSpring on a Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
Anbox is an Android emulator that is available for any GNU/Linux operating system. An android emulator offers the environment necessary for installing and running Android apps. Such emulators do not offer the portability of an Android smartphone, but in exchange, more powerful hardware can be used.In this article, we will show you how to install Anbox on Linux.
In this article, I will show you how to set timers, alarms, and stopwatches on your CentOS 8 system. We will perform these actions using two different ways.
In this article, learn everything you need to know to get started with Docker and Docker Compose on Raspberry Pi 4.
“Dash to Panel” is a GNOME Shell extension that can be installed in Ubuntu, Fedora and other GNOME Shell based Linux distributions. It aims to provide an alternative and much more customizable application dock / taskbar for managing pinned and running apps.
Until recently, Dash to Panel was limited to a single panel that combined application menus, taskbar and system tray. However, a new update for Dash to Panel was released a couple of months back, allowing users to create two panels. Using this new option, you can now emulate the classic GNOME2 layout, featuring a two panel setup for managing system tray and taskbar. This article will explain how to create this two panel layout using Dash to Panel GNOME Shell extension.
This video tutorial shows how to install LinuxFX Windowsfx 10 on VMware Workstation step by step. This tutorial is also helpful to install LinuxFX Windowsfx 10 on physical computer or laptop hardware.
There is a relation between temperature and performance in every electronic device. The lower the temperature, the better the performance. The higher the temperature, the lower the performance. Within a certain boundary, this effect is visible in electronic devices like a Raspberry Pi. So, it is essential to keep the temperature of the Raspberry Pi within a certain boundary.
Heat sinks are metal objects that are usually placed over the chips and processor of Raspberry Pi. The heat sinks help transfer the heat generated on the processors and other chips to the air. That way, the temperature of the processors and chips remain within a certain boundary that won’t hamper the productivity of the device.
In this article, I am going to show you how to install heat sinks on the Raspberry Pi. So, let’s get started.
In the Linux operating system, all the information about a file is stored in its respective inode. These inodes allow you to know all the metadata of a file. There is a concept of creating links to a file in Linux, just like we create pointers to the files in most of the popular programming languages. These links are basically of two types: the hard and the soft links. A hard link to a file is essentially an exact copy of the file, which means that a hard link to a file and the actual file will share the same inode. The biggest advantage of creating a hard link is that even if you accidentally delete the actual file, you will still be able to access its contents via its hard link.
On the other hand, a soft link or a symbolic link works exactly like a pointer or a shortcut to a file. It is not an accurate copy of the file but only points to the original file. A soft link to a file and the actual file will have different inode values. Moreover, if you delete the actual file at any time, you will not be able to access its contents via its soft link. Today, we will share with you the methods of creating a hard link and soft link to a file in Linux.
Note: We have used Linux Mint 20 for walking you through the methods shown below.
Explains how to install the VirtualBox app on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux for trying out new guest operating (Virtual Machines).
SSH provides a secure way to access and manage Linux servers. Sometimes while connecting to SSH servers, users often encounter “Connection refused” error by port 22. It happens because of several reasons like SSH service is not running, the port is blocked by the firewall, or the server is using a different port. It can also occur because of the IP conflict issue. In this article, we will discuss some of the solutions that you should try in order to fix the error.
Object cloning can be very useful for object-oriented programming. In this tutorial, we show you how to clone an object in PHP.
The bash history stores the records of all terminal commands which are executed by a user on the command-line Linux system. Using the history feature, you can easily locate the previously executed commands on your Linux system through the arrow keys navigation. In this article, how to clear command history in Linux is explained.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install HAProxy on your CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, HAProxy is a free HTTP/TCP high availability load balancer and proxy server. It spreads requests among multiple servers to mitigate issues resulting from a single server failure. HA Proxy is used by a number of high-profile websites including GitHub, Bitbucket, Stack Overflow, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and Tuenti, and is used in the OpsWorks product from Amazon Web Services.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation HAProxy on a CentOS 8.
Python is an object-oriented, high-level programming language. It is an open source with a large community. Python is used as key languages among the top tech companies like Google.
The Python 3.9 stable version has been released with several improvements and security updates. It included multiple new modules, improved existing modules and many other features.
You can choose deadsnakes PPA for Python installation on Ubuntu 20.04 system.
Use this tutorial to install Python 3.9 On Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux system via Apt-Get. You can also choose second method to install Python using source code.
YAML Ain't a Markup Language (YAML), and as configuration formats go, it's easy on the eyes. It has an intuitive visual structure, and its logic is pretty simple: indented bullet points inherit properties of parent bullet points.
But this apparent simplicity can be deceptive.
It's easy (and misleading) to think of YAML as just a list of related values, no more complex than a shopping list. There is a heading and some items beneath it. The items below the heading relate directly to it, right? Well, you can test this theory by writing a little bit of valid YAML.
The part of the operating system responsible for managing files and directories is called the file system. It organizes our data into files, which hold information, and directories (also called ‘folders’), which hold files or other directories. Several commands are frequently used to create, inspect, rename, and delete files and directories.
One of these commands is ls, which prints the names of the files and directories in the current directory. A directory is really just a file. It’s a special file with special rules. The ls utility appeared in the first version of AT&T UNIX.
Are you looking to liven up your shell? Want a bit more beauty on your terminal? colorls might be the ticket. colorls is a command-line utility that aims to improve on ls. color is written in Ruby.
Despite this feeling like the longest year ever, time continues moving on and there's been a number of great games released with Linux support in the last few months.
It's time to slow down a bit, and take a look at what developers have been bringing their games over to Linux officially because it's easy to get swallowed up in a sea of news. This will also serve as a nice starting point for anyone out for a new Linux game right now. Since this is a reminder listicle, we will link to previous articles.
Gaming peripherals on Linux do not have a great reputation, but we do have some interesting open source tools that can make things easier for you. For instance, I’ve previously covered a tool Piper which lets you configure your gaming mouse.
This time, let me introduce you to an exciting open source tool that lets you utilize your game pad by mapping it to your keyboard, mouse, scripts, or macros.
If you weren't convinced by anything Humble Store are currently offering in their Halloween sale, take a look over on the DRM-free store GOG with their big Halloween sale now on.
As usual, we've looked through to find some of the most interesting games that are supported on Linux and GOG to offer up a few suggestions to get you going.
With an attention-grabbing art style, Life of Delta looks like it's going to be a very intriguing post-apocalyptic point and click adventure.
9 Monkeys of Shaolin gives us another wonderful beat 'em up with easy to use controls, thoroughly entertaining combat and some great visuals.
Cave-flying is a genre that was big a very long time ago, now though not so much but Gravity Ace from John Watson entered Early Access recently and it's absolutely brilliant.
The idea of cave flyers are that you're always fighting against gravity while you pilot some sort of spaceship. Developer John Watson took that basic idea with Gravity Ace, threw a load of code at Godot Engine and came out with an Early Access game that shows how timeless certain types of genres can be. Gravity Ace has you fly, fight, and manoeuvre through various tight levels with intense gravitational fields and cramped firefights and it looks awesome while doing so.
After your next local multiplayer game? Nonsense Soccer is out in Early Access and it's already a huge amount of fun if you're the competitive type.
Nonsense Soccer takes the classic sport and turns it into a side-on platformer-soccer-hybrid and the result is chaotic. Simple enough for anyone young and old to pick up their favourite gamepad and get kicking. It's actually been available for a little while already, with the new Steam release being their second major update.
Bound By Blades might look welcoming with the sweet colourful style and wonderful music, but this action-RPG gets quickly intense.
Inspired somewhat by Monster Hunter, it originally tried going through Kickstarter to gather funds back in 2019. It failed but the development has continued anyway. The idea is that you go through increasingly tough battles, slaying big creatures in the unique four-corner combat arena where you run between four corners, dodging enemy attacks and unleash your own. After a year of work, the new demo is out now.
Prepare for Halloween with some new games? It's not like you're able to go out much with the COVID19 disease still raging on so staying in and playing games sound great to me.
To help with that you can check out the Humble Store Halloween Sale, which has a number of big hits going on some pretty high discounts. While it's a Halloween sale, the majority of the titles oddly aren't really scary or much related to the event, still it's another good chance to build up your collection.
FreeBSD has a FUSE kernel module (Filesystems in User Space, I think), which allows it to use other filesystems – in user space – than it would normally do. Today it saved my bacon.
I do a lot of development work on a FreeBSD machine, with Linux as the target platform: that’s what you get (punishment?) for writing Linux installers, I guess. I have a handful of development and test VMs, all in VirtualBox, all with a ZFS volume (a reserved chunk of disk) as virtual disk. This normally gives me a lot of freedom in what I do with my VM’s HDDs: I can manipulate them easily from the host system. For testing purposes, that’s usually either zeroing them out or putting some partition table on them beforehand.
For whatever reason, today VirtualBox was giving me no end of trouble: as I boot each Linux VM, it gets a ton of I/O errors reading the disk, then ends up wedged somewhere in what looks like Plymouth in the guest, and then VBox tells me there was an error and gives up on the VM. It’s not physical I/O errors, since I can read all the data from the ZFS volume with dd, but how can I reach the data?
The mainframe computer, or ‘big iron’ in the computer industry, is the longest-running computer system in history. This technology has been substantially useful since the World War II era. In fact, the first mainframe computer was used mainly by the US Navy during the war. Like supercomputers, the mainframe computer addressed the need for an automatic, large-scale calculator as a more efficient and error-free way of computing. It was the invention of such machines that redefined the term ‘computer’ to refer to devices that can carry out automatic calculations of mathematical operations, a term that used to refer to humans who performed the manual calculations of such operations. Today, the importance of this technology in large-scale transaction processing remains unparalleled. Large industries in both the public and private sectors, from government and banking to aviation and healthcare, are in constant need of faster large-scale mainframes with higher stability and reliability. Consequently, big irons continue to evolve, as they remain at the core of every IT infrastructure.
Inspired by Babbage
Howard Aiken was a graduate student at Harvard when he came up with the concept of a device that can automatically calculate differential equations, after encountering difficulties in solving mathematical physics problems in his research. He envisioned a machine that could take in loads of mathematical inputs and produce precise and reliable results in a short time. After coming up with an initial design, he approached some manufacturers, but none were interested. Unabashed, Aiken explored other technological advances to improve his design. He eventually came upon Henry Babbage’s demonstration of his father’s Analytical Engine at Harvard, performed 70 years prior. Noticing the similarities between his design and that of Charles Babbage’s, Aiken studied Babbage’s work on the Analytical Engine and used his principles in the development of a new conceptual design. Aiken finished the design in 1937 and obtained the support of the Harvard faculty, who were impressed by his efforts. He presented his design to several manufacturers. Aiken eventually gained the nod from IBM in 1939 after Thomas Watson, then chairman of IBM, saw it as good publicity for the company and as an opportunity to showcase the company’s talents.
Today we tagged the 1.5.0 release of fwupd. Quite a bit has changed since the last release and I figured a blog post probably made sense to explain things.
From a firmware engineer point of view, the most useful is the ability to build composite images, for instance building a firmware.dfuse file from different A.dfu and B.dfu images. At the moment there are commands in fwupdtool to convert one file format to another, but not to merge or alter them. Many firmware files are really just containers which can store multiple images, each with optional id, index and addresses. This new fwupd feature also allows us to create very small complicated container binaries for fuzzing.
Version 1.5 of the Fwupd utility is available for updating various component firmware/BIOS natively on Linux and integrating with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for the easy distribution of said firmware images.
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Some of the hardware plug-in additions were motivated by Lenovo's increased support for Linux on their systems, which is great to see continuing.
Red Hat’s Brian Proffitt says the guidelines “reflect the values and culture of Red Hat in the most appropriate way possible: a collaboration of many associates working toward a common goal, documenting how Red Hat is committed to contributing to any free and open source project in the most collaborative ways possible.”
It’s hard to imagine now, but 20 years ago, enterprise support and use of Linux was a controversial choice. Executives had trouble seeing the value of investing resources in an unproven, open-source operating system when mainstream options achieved the same results with less perceived risk.
With the benefit of hindsight, so many enterprise clouds are run on Kubernetes containers with Linux that the initial concerns seem silly. The changes gave developers the capabilities to produce more agile, robust and innovative work than ever before. The success of the modern Linux cloud is due partly to IBM’s decision to support Linux on its mainframes 20 years ago. We spoke to Javier Perez, open-source program leader at IBM, about why and how IBM made this decision and what trends he thinks are going to influence the next 20 years for developers.
The Linux Foundation Artificial Intelligence Foundation (LF AI) is merging with ODPi, which has a focus on big data in the enterprise, including governance, business intelligence, and data science education. The merged foundation will be called LF AI and Data. IBM believes this move is great for the AI and data open source space and that the new LF AI and Data Foundation will pave the way for stronger, safer open source AI and data projects.
Why is this important?
The world’s technology increasingly runs on open source software and data. Open source AI software development has led to advances in AI pattern recognition, including image recognition, speech recognition, and entity extraction in text, that were only possible because researchers were able to use open data sets and open source software to benchmark and compare systems and approaches.
The data you or your organization create influences and is influenced by AI. Increasingly, both productivity and quality of service depends on data-driven AI systems across business and society. And those AI systems are largely based on open source software and data sets at their core.
As a consultant, I’ve learned that consulting requires forming a customer relationship built upon trust. The client and the consultant usually establish trust through shared experiences. The most common shared experience is working through contract delivery. However, only focusing on contract delivery may cause the clients or clients to miss additional opportunities.
I’ve laid out some low-cost or free opportunities for building trust below. These are not just for one party or the other to initiate! If you are the client, I encourage you to engage your consultants to find mutual interests. Likewise, if you’re the consultant, look for ways to add value for your customer by sharing your expertise.
With Red Hat Accelerators, there’s a strong community feel with benefits for practitioners to expand their expertise, offer a voice to influence offerings and a seat at the table during industry events. Check out a few examples of how Red Hat Accelerators have been involved since the program’s inception.
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Red Hat Accelerators have the opportunity to join briefings and other sessions, hearing from and sharing with teams from across the company, including engineers, marketing, product managers, executives and more. These in-depth discussions and forums have included opportunities to engage with Red Hatters like Chris Wright (senior vice president and CTO), Stefanie Chiras (senior vice president and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), and Paul Cormier (Red Hat’s president and CEO).
Forming deeper relationships with customers means engaging Red Hatters from every direction, so customers in the Accelerators program can pick their brains and access candid, unfiltered information on any topic, big or small (or hybrid).
Debian is looking for the community to partake in the quick voting process around selecting the default artwork for the upcoming Debian 11 "Bullseye" release.
Debian 11 will enter its code freeze in early 2021 and should debut as stable later in the year. Given the upcoming freeze, Debian has just commenced voting to decide the default artwork for this next major Debian GNU/Linux operating system release.
Opened to submissions since early August, the artwork proposals for Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye,” the next major release of the popular Debian GNU/Linux operating system, has reached its deadline last week on October 15th, and now the community can vote for the winner.
Jonathan Carter announced today that it’s time for the Debian community to choose the desktop artwork to be used in Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye.” The review period for the final proposals starts today, October 26th, until November 9th, and winners will be unveiled in mid-November.
The Linux distribution from System 76 has converted over to the friendlier apt format.
Most users of Debian-based distributions are familiar with the single line apt repository format which includes all of the information for a repository. With the new DEB822 format, those single lines are converted to multi-line entries, which allow more flexibility and extensibility over the standard for Debian software repositories.
In fact, the single-line format standard is planned for depreciation, so most distributions will eventually convert over. For Pop!_OS users, that time is now. Pop!_OS is the Linux distribution created by System 76 as both a developer and general usage desktop operating system. Up until 20.10, Pop!_OS defaulted to the single-line style of repository entries. Now, instead of the /etc/apt/sources.list file, you’ll find those repository entries in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/system.sources.
The Xubuntu team is happy to announce the immediate release of Xubuntu 20.10!
Xubuntu 20.10, codenamed Groovy Gorilla, is a regular release and will be supported for 9 months, until July 2021. If you need a stable environment with longer support time we recommend that you use Xubuntu 20.04 LTS instead.
The final release images are available as torrents and direct downloads from xubuntu.org/download/.
As the main server might be busy in the first few days after the release, we recommend using the torrents if possible.
Xubuntu Core, our minimal installation option, is available to download from unit193.net/xubuntu/core/ [torrent, magnet]. Find out more about Xubuntu Core here.
We’d like to thank everybody who contributed to this release of Xubuntu!
Version 20.10 of Ubuntu from Canonical on the Raspberry Pi 4 card and module for the first time supports cloud software such as Kubernetes for distributed cloud software at the edge the network for industrial applications. A new version of Linux is enabling edge cloud capability on the latest Raspberry Pi compute card.
Version 20.10 of Ubuntu from Canonical for the first time provides full desktop Linux on the Raspberry Pi4 board and Compute module, but also supports cloud software such as Kubernetes. This has the potential to put distributed cloud software at the edge of the network for industrial applications.
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On a Raspberry Pi, users can start with MicroK8s, to orchestrate highly available workloads at the edge or with LXD to build a home lab appliance using LXD’s clustering and virtual machine management capabilities. The Ubuntu 20.10 release introduces users a way to experiment, test, or develop with full cloud capabilities through the Raspberry Pi, including robotics and AI/ML.
Following the Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) release, there will be Ubuntu 21.04, whose codename will start with the word “Hirsute” followed by an animal name, which will probably be voted by the community soon. If you want to give the Ubuntu developers some suggestions on the H animal, check out this Ubuntu Discourse topic.
Until the codename is decided, development on Ubuntu 21.04 will kick off later this week on October 29th with the toolchain upload, based, of course, on the current release, Ubuntu 20.10. And, as its version number suggests, the final release will be expected in April (04) 2021.
Coming hot on the heels of the Ubuntu Touch OTA-13 update, which arrived last month with support for the Sony Xperia X family and the OnePlus 3 and 3T devices, the upcoming Ubuntu Touch OTA-14 software update is currently scheduled for November 4th, 2020.
In this release, the UBports development team focused their efforts on improving support for Android 9 devices, most specifically for the forthcoming Volla Phone, which will start shipping to backers next month and will also offer a variant powered by Ubuntu Touch.
Techbase has opened $272 and up pre-orders on a modular “ModBerry 500 CM4” industrial controller based on the Raspberry Pi CM4. Basic features include GbE, serial, 8-bit DIO, USB, and 1-Wire and options include NVMe, 5G, fieldbus, and digital and analog I/Os.
Poland-based Techbase has upgraded its ModBerry 500 line of passively cooled DIN-rail automation controllers with a ModBerry 500 CM4 model that supports the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4. The new controller follows earlier models such as its RPi CM3 based ModBerry 500 M3 and ModBerry 500 with ESP32.
Last July, we missed Qualcomm’s announcement of QCS410 and QCS610 processors designed to bring “premium camera technology, including powerful artificial intelligence and machine learning features formerly only available to high-end devices, into mid-tier camera segments”. The new SoC’s were recently brought to our attention by Lantronix as they have just introduced a new Open-Q 610 micro system-on-module (üSOM) based on Qualcomm QCS610 processor, as well as a development kit designed to bring such smart cameras to market.
While whatever you heard bump in the night was probably nothing to be concerned about, if you see a suspicious blob of clothing on the floor, you might give it another look. Although not particularly dangerous, YouTuber “Sciencish” has come up with a robot that causes a pile of clothes to turn and face, then travel towards the light source you used to check it out.
The device features four photoresistors, along with an Arduino Uno and two steppers on a robotic chassis for movement. It also accommodates a filament or wire frame on which clothing can rest. When a light is shined at it, the LDRs pick up this “signal” through the clothes. The robot then waits until the lights are off, pauses a bit more, and then rotates to face the person and incrementally advances.
We’re excited to announce the launch of the Arduino Oplà Kit, the first open programmable IoT platform that allows you to add smart connectivity to the devices around your home or workplace and build custom IoT devices.
The Oplà IoT Kit contains all the hardware necessary to create eight connected applications, access to an online platform with assembly instructions, and a 12-month subscription to the Arduino Create Maker Plan. This kit is perfect for beginners with basic DIY experience, while more advanced users can leverage it to customize and hack their smart applications and devices, with full control of their data and processes.
I proudly announce that ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired Jérôme Gardou to work full-time on the ReactOS kernel’s memory manager for the next 3 months.
Jérôme is a ReactOS veteran who has been contributing to the project since 2009. He has deep expertise into nearly all parts of ReactOS, ranging from various user-mode components (mostly related to low-level graphics) over their kernel-mode counterparts and down to bare-metal components like the kernel memory manager.
During the upcoming months, Jérôme is going to overhaul the Mm (Memory Manager) and Cc (Cache Controller) components of the kernel. Both of them are core parts of the operating system, which are involved in every memory request and file operation. Improving them is expected to have a substantial effect on the overall stability and performance of ReactOS.
ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired one of their long-time contributors to work full-time on the "open-source Windows" implementation's memory management for the next quarter.
ReactOS is funding longtime contributor Jérôme Gardou to work full-time for the next three months on the open-source operating system's memory manager and cache controller code within its kernel.
ReactOS hopes this overhaul to the MM/CS code will yield "a substantial effect on the overall stability and performance of ReactOS."
There comes a time when you feel that you don’t fit anywhere. Where your ideas, principles, motivation and struggles simply don’t align with anyone else. For years, I felt part of something that was larger than myself, had the motivation to use a huge part of my free time to contribute to projects and in several cases, make personal sacrifices to help others, and even envisioned a future for myself in places where I thought it was impossible.
It’s that struggle trying to find our place in this huge Open Source world what usually ends up in personal meltdown and professional burnout. It’s not a secret that as fast as technologies evolve, the faster we end up being obsolete, unless we dedicate most of our time to keep up to date on every break through.
I’m not the exception to this, and after being an active contributor for almost 15 years, and then have my “time off” to be a full time mom and employee, what happened in the Projects I used to Contribute left me feeling way far from my comfort zone. I’m grateful that most of the places where I’ve contributed has been because people asks for my help, and even after a long absence it was not different from before.
We are happy to announce that Kiwi TCMS has been downloaded more than 200000 times via Docker Hub!
Last year we had a three part blog series about Qt's new approach to working with 3D graphics APIs and shading languages: part 1, part 2, part 3. For Qt Quick, an early, opt-in preview of the new rendering architecture was shipped in Qt 5.14, with some improvements in Qt 5.15. With the release of Qt 6.0 upcoming, let's see what has happened since Qt 5.15. It will not be possible to cover every detail of the graphics stack improvements for Qt Quick here, let alone dive into the vast amount of Qt Quick 3D features, many of which are new or improved in Qt 6.0. Rather, the aim is just to give an overview of what can be expected from the graphics stack perspective when Qt 6.0 ships later this year.
If all goes well Qt 6.0 will make its official debut in December. One of the areas much talked about for Qt 6 development has been the graphics architecture changes and better supporting more APIs besides OpenGL.
Qt developer Laszlo Agocs has written a blog post outlining some of the fundamental graphics changes that have made the cut for Qt 6.0...
Javascript is the most known language of the web. Javascript is widely used in front-end development as well as in the back-end. Javascript provides a lot of built-in objects, functions, and methods to help in web development. In this article, we are going to learn one of the javascript’s built-in confirm() method, which is used to show pop-ups over the screen and get the user’s response. The confirm box is a bit different if we try to compare it with the alert box. It is a pop-up that contains a message/text with two buttons, “OK” and “Cancel”. The user won’t be able to do any task while a confirm box is over the screen, and he/she clicks the “OK” or “Cancel” button. This is the reason behind not recommending it’s often used. So, let’s have a look at what is a confirm box and what are the different ways to use it.
The confirm() is basically a method, which is used to show a pop-up box over the web page, and it contains a message or text and two buttons, “OK” & “Cancel”. On the click of the “OK” button, the confirm method returns “true”. Similarly, on the click of the “Cancel” button, it returns false.
JavaScript is a lightweight programming language, and as with any programming language, when developing JavaScript programs, we often need to work with arrays to store data. In this article, we will introduce JavaScript’s built-in splice function and discuss how we can use it to manipulate an array. As data are generated, the structures used for storage must be updated. For this reason, a programmer must often add elements to or remove elements from an array.
Javascript is a scripting or programming language, which is used both on the client-side and back-end of the web. Just like any other language, strings are an important type of the variables, and we often need to manipulate or alter strings as per our needs. While getting data from the user in the form fields, a programmer has to take care of a lot of things. In this article, we will have a look at javascript’s trim() function. We will learn how this function helps in beautifying the strings in javascript and how can we get rid of extra spaces. So, let’s take a look at what is a string and how we can trim the strings.
There are many tools for exploring executable files of ELF format. Most of them intended for providing sole piece of information extracted from a binary in the mentioned format. They are great, but sometimes we need a kind of an universal and yet highly specialized tool allowing to do much more than standard tools are able to. This is a moment when pyelftools come into play. In this article I would like to show some usage examples of of pyelftools. I don’t show how to use pyelftools itself, that is, its classes and other features, as you can find it in the documentation and source code itself. Instead I concentrate on applications of this tool for particular purposes.
Javascript has become a massively used programming language due to the expansion of the internet and the web at an unbelievable pace. In the modern world of the web, we can do almost every task in one single browser, and Javascript is used in every single website we see in our daily routine life. We frequently used to see the date and time at almost every website. In this article, we are going to have a look at how we can get the current time in Javascript and what are the different ways to get the date and time according to our requirement.
Javascript provides a built-in object Date, which helps in managing all the date and time. Later, we can extract whatever we want according to our needs using different built-in methods. So, let’s just straight jump into the process and learn the different techniques to extract the current date and time.
The null coalescing operator (??), one of the new features of PHP 7, can be used as an alternative to the ternary operator and isset() function. It is used to check whether a value is assigned to a variable, and it returns a default value when no value is defined for a variable. This operator can also be used to see if $_GET[] and $_POST[], which receive user inputs, are set. Furthermore, it can check the value of more than one variable via chaining.
In this article, the differences between the ternary and null coalescing operators are discussed, and the null coalescing operator is used as an alternative to the ternary operator and isset() function.
In this tutorial, we'll go over how to plot a scatter plot in Seaborn and Python. We'll go over simple plotting examples, as well as multi-faceted plotting of multiple plots and 3D plots using Seaborn and Matplotlib.
if __name__ == "__main__" is used to control the behavior of our Python code when it's executed directly or imported as a module. This tutorial explains how.
Python is a very versatile high-level programming language that is most widely used in Data Sciences, Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. Python provides great support through built-in modules and functions where we need to play with the numbers. The Python round() function rounds off the floating-point number to the stated number of decimals and returns it.For example, we have a floating-point number 6.677, and we need to round it off to the 2 decimal points, then the round() function will do the job and round off the number to 6.68.
Writing a custom implementation of a popular algorithm can be compared to playing a musical standard. For as long as the code reflects upon the equations, the functionality remains unchanged. It is, indeed, just like playing from notes. However, it lets you master your tools and practice your ability to hear and think.
In this post, we are going to re-play the classic Multi-Layer Perceptron. Most importantly, we will play the solo called backpropagation, which is, indeed, one of the machine-learning standards.
As usual, we are going to show how the math translates into code. In other words, we will take the notes (equations) and play them using bare-bone numpy.
This week we welcome William Horton (@hortonhearsafoo) as our PyDev of the Week! William is a Backend Engineer at Compass and has spoken at several local Python conferences. He is a contributor to PyTorch and fastai.
Let’s spend some time getting to know William better!
Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):
A little about myself: people might be surprised about my educational background–I didn’t study computer science. I have a bachelors in the social sciences. So by the time I finished undergrad, the most programming I had done was probably doing regressions in Stata to finish my thesis. I decided against grad school, and instead signed up for a coding bootcamp (App Academy) in NYC. The day I’m writing this, September 28, is actually 5 years to the day that I started at App Academy.
Since then I’ve worked at a few different startups in NYC, across various industries: first investment banking, then online pharmacy, and now real estate. I’m currently a senior engineer on the AI Services team at Compass, working on machine learning solutions for our real estate agents and consumers.
I like to spend my free time on a few different hobbies. I’m a competitive powerlifter, so I like to get into the gym a few times a week (although with the pandemic in NYC I didn’t lift for six months or so). I’ve actually found powerlifting to be a pretty common hobby among software engineers. Every time someone new joined my gym, it seemed like they came from a different startup. I love to play basketball. And I’m passionate about music: I’ve been a singer almost my whole life, and most recently was performing with an a cappella group in NYC. And in the last year I’ve picked up the guitar, after not touching it since I was a teenager, and that has been very fulfilling.
This year’s annual international conference organized by TeX Users Group — TUG2020 — was held completely online due to the raging pandemic. In TUG2020, I have presented a talk on some important Malayalam typeface design factors and considerations.
The idea and its articulation of the talk originated with K.H. Hussain, designer of well-known fonts such as Rachana, Meera, Meera Inimai, TNJoy etc. In a number of discussions that ensued, this idea was developed and later presented at TUG2020.
Opening keynote to TUG2020 was delivered by Steve Matteson, about the design of Noto fonts. He mentioned that Noto was originally envisaged to be developed as a single font containing all Unicode scripts; but that was changed due to a couple of reasons: (1) huge size of resulting font and (2) the design of many South/South-East Asian characters do not fit well within its Latin font metrics.
A French doctor warned Monday that his country has “lost control of the epidemic,” a day after health authorities reported more than 52,000 new coronavirus cases as nations across Europe enact more sweeping restrictions to try to slow surging infection rates.
Spain — the first European country to surpass 1 million confirmed COVID-19 cases — declared a state of emergency Sunday that included a nationwide overnight curfew, a cap of six people on social gatherings and possible travel bans in and out of the hardest-hit regions.
The effect was clear on Barcelona's famed Las Ramblas promenade, which was deserted Sunday night when it normally would have been teeming with people.
In two major Italian cities, people took to the streets amid a pushback from small sections of society to new restrictions. On Friday, demonstrators in Naples protested a locally imposed 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew and clashed with police. On Saturday night, far-right and neo-fascist groups led a similar protest in Rome against a curfew. Another protest is planned for Tuesday in Milan.
LF AI Foundation (LF AI), the organization building an ecosystem to enable and sustain open source innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL), and ODPi, a nonprofit organization accelerating the open ecosystem of big data solutions, today announced they will come together under the new LF AI & Data Foundation. The LF AI & Data The Linux Foundation’s AI Foundation & ODPi merge to support growing portfolio of technologies and drive open source collaboration across AI and data
Foundation will build and support an open community and a growing ecosystem of open source AI, data and analytics projects, by accelerating development and innovation, enabling collaboration and the creation of new opportunities for all the members of the community.
As one entity under the Linux Foundation, this consolidated and focused effort will enable additional collaboration and integration in the space of AI/ML/DL and Data. With the creation of LF AI & Data, both communities will now support a growing ecosystem of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning and data technologies. AI and Data are inseparable and codependent on each other. Combining efforts in both spaces will bring developers and projects under a single roof, orchestrated by a single Technical Advisory Council and several committees (Trusted AI, BI & AI), to work together towards building the open source AI & Data ecosystem and accelerating development and innovation. Hosting projects under a single umbrella enables closer collaboration, integration, and interoperability across projects and is a proven recipe for building strong open ecosystems. At the same time, it will provide a unified guidance for end users on tools, interoperability, integration, standards, and the future of AI, Data and Analytics as its use continues to grow in every industry. Furthermore, as member driven organizations, joining forces under LF AI & Data will allow greater efficiency for members across the various services we offer to our hosted projects.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and edX, the trusted platform for learning, have released the 2020 Open Source Jobs Report, examining demand for open source talent and trends amongst open source professionals.
Despite the pandemic, demand for open source technology skills continues to be strong. Companies and organizations continue to increase their recruitment of open source technology talent while offering increased educational opportunities for existing staff to fill skills gaps. 93% of hiring managers report difficulty finding open source talent, and 63% say their organizations have begun to support open source projects with code or other resources for the explicit reason of recruiting individuals with those software skills, a significant jump from the 48% who stated this in 2018. DevOps has also become the top role hiring managers are looking to fill (65% are looking to hire DevOps talent), moving demand for developers to second (59%) for the first time in this report’s history. 74% of employers are now offering to pay for employee certifications, up from 55% in 2018, 47% in 2017, and only 34% in 2016.
The Linux Foundation and , the leading online course company, released the 2020 Open Source Jobs Report on October 26. Once again, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for open-source technology skills is growing. 37% of hiring managers say they will hire more IT professionals in the next six months.
Specifically, 81% of hiring managers say hiring open source talent is a priority going forward. 56% of hiring managers plan to increase their hiring of open source pros in the next six months
Why? The answer to that is simple. As a recent Red Hat survey found, 86% of IT leaders said the most innovative companies are using open-source software, citing higher quality solutions, lower cost of ownership, improved security, and cloud-native capabilities as the top reasons for usage. So, even in these bad times, the demand for open-source savvy is higher than ever.
Companies and organizations continue to increase their recruitment of open source technology talent while offering increased educational opportunities for existing staff to fill skills gaps. The Linux Foundation and edX have released the 2020 Open Source Jobs Report which reveals spike in demand for DevOps talent and continued dearth of open source skills.
According to the report, 93% of hiring managers report difficulty finding open source talent and 63% say their organizations have begun to support open source projects with code or other resources for the explicit reason of recruiting individuals with those software skills, a significant jump from the 48% who stated this in 2018.
LF AI Foundation and ODPi have announced plans to come together under the new LF AI & Data Foundation. As one entity under the Linux Foundation, this consolidated and focused effort will enable additional collaboration and integration in the space of AI/ML/DL and Data.
With the creation of LF AI & Data, both communities will now support a growing ecosystem of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning and data technologies.
Open Source Summit Europe, October 26, 2020 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the Software Developer Diversity and Inclusion (SDDI) project. SDDI will explore, evaluate, and promote best practices from research and industry to increase diversity and inclusion in software engineering. Founding contributors include Comcast, Facebook, GitHub, Intel and VMware and research professors from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Eindhoven University of Technology, Oregon State University, University of Auckland and University of Victoria.
According to StackOverflow’s 2020 survey of more than 65,000 developers, 91.7 percent identify as male and 70.7 percent as white or of European descent. There is a tremendous amount of work to be done to create inclusive environments that can lead to a more diverse community building the software that is the foundation for our digital society. Research indicates that racially diverse groups make better decisions, diverse open source projects are more productive and that working on gender diverse teams improves attitudes towards women.
“While there are a variety of important diversity and inclusion initiatives in the technology industry, none are focused on increasing diversity across categories – race, gender, age and cognitive ability – in software engineering and informed by science and research,” said Kate Stewart, senior director of strategic programs at Linux Foundation. “We have optimism about the future of the open source community and our collective ability to increase diversity and inclusion. The work we do today can influence the vibrancy of the community and effectiveness of our technologies tomorrow.”
Recently the RIAA filed a DMCA takedown notice to GitHub for the removal of YouTube-dl an archiving tool for downloading videos from youtube along with other websites so today we're going to read through this letter and see what case is being made.
The Recording Industry Association of America, Inc. (RIAA) filed a request for removal regarding the popular youtube-dl project, which allows developers to download the source files for YouTube videos.
Free Range Routing is a fully open project, and always looking for contributors for documentation, software or the discussion. You can submit documentation updates via Github, join their mailing list or join the community Slack channel.
If you want an easy way to try out FRR yourself, Nvidia provides a free, cloud-hosted lab of their Nvidia Cumulus Linux software running FRR. You can use Nvidia Cumulus in the Cloud today or get a guided tour including using FRR with the Nvidia Cumulus Linux On Demand labs.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (fastd, freetype, openjdk-11, phpmyadmin, and thunderbird), Fedora (ant, firefox, freetype, kde-partitionmanager, kpmcore, mupdf, python-PyMuPDF, singularity, suricata, and zathura-pdf-mupdf), Mageia (claws-mail, nss, firefox, pdns-recursor, and thunderbird), openSUSE (atftp, chromium, firefox, freetype2, gnutls, hunspell, kleopatra, and opera), Oracle (firefox, java-11-openjdk, and kernel), Red Hat (firefox and kpatch-patch), SUSE (bluez, firefox, glibc, libcdio, rmt-server, and SDL), and Ubuntu (freetype, pam-python, and perl).
Please join us on the #reproducible-builds channel on irc.oftc.net — an agenda is available. As mentioned in our previous meeting announcement, due to the unprecedented events in 2020, there will be no in-person Reproducible Builds event this year, but we plan to run these IRC meetings every fortnight.
President Trump’s approach to Africa rightly elicits outrage. His conception of the continent ranges from disinterest—he has only mentioned it three times out of around 20,000 tweets—to outright contempt, such as when he referred to African nations as “shithole countries.” For eighteen months, the office of the assistant secretary of state for African affairs was empty or occupied by a temporary official. Almost two years into his administration, there was no ambassador deployed to twenty of Africa’s fifty-four countries. Trump has only met with two heads of state from sub-Saharan Africa in the White House. He has proposed large budget cuts for humanitarian funding—including for the flagship President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) and UN peacekeeping operations—although these attempts were mostly foiled by bipartisan efforts in Congress. In January, he extended his travel ban to four additional African countries, including Nigeria, the continent’s most populous nation and its largest economy, affecting nearly a quarter of the 1.3 billion people on the continent.
Appearances, however, are deceptive. While Trump’s Africa policy may seem to be a departure, its broad contours have changed little from recent administrations. Since the end of the Cold War, both Republican and Democratic administrations have embraced a mixture of military intervention, free trade, and humanitarian aid on the continent. As a result, Washington has often ended up backing authoritarian regimes, all the while halfheartedly projecting democratic values.
Meanwhile, the continent is undergoing transformative changes. Much like Latin America during the 2000s, many African countries once drawn into the U.S. orbit are drifting out of it. With COVID-19 threatening to destabilize African economies and political systems, now is the time for a progressive reset in relations with the continent: a new foreign policy, centered on economic justice and the democratic aspirations of African youth. With the presidential election looming and Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, expected to place Obama-era stalwarts such as Susan Rice and Samantha Power in top foreign policy positions if he wins in November, progressives must push for a new direction for U.S.–Africa relations or risk entrenching the problematic policies of the past.
Due to months of military clampdowns and coronavirus lockdowns, there’s no shortage of material for the political cartoonists documenting Kahsmir’s unrest and its humanitarian fallout, even as press freedom shrinks.
In August 2019, India’s government stripped the former state of Jammu and Kashmir of its semi-autonomous status. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the move was aimed at ending separatism, but it escalated tensions in a region that has weathered years of conflict, protests, and crackdowns on an anti-government insurgency.
The ensuing months have seen extended curfews, disruptions to schooling, a crumbling economy, continuing restrictions on high-speed mobile internet, surging border tensions with China in nearby Ladakh, and a health system struggling to contain the pandemic.
The following letter to Congress appears to have substantial support from patent owners. The basics of the letter is to say that Dir. Iancu’s changes to the IPR process have been positive and should stick. Part of the issue here is that Dir. Iancu is a political appointee who is on his way out in 2021 if President Trump loses (and would likely leave in 2021 regardless).
In this week’s Patent News – Patents (Amendment) Rules, 2020 come into force; Nokia seeks injunction against Lenovo for patent infringement; LDC’s request WTO to extend transition period under the TRIP’s for 12 years; CNIPA and EPO to launch pilot program for Chinese Applicants to designate EPO as an additional ISA.
As Bob Hudec explained in his legendary The GATT Legal System and World Trade Diplomacy, GATT’s (since 1995, WTO) long-standing practice of seeking to adopt decisions by consensus finds its roots in 1947, when the then 23 parties to GATT were a small club of good friends. The proposition that a friend might impose a decision via a majority approval on another friend was not quite in line with the friendly atmosphere that delegates enjoyed at the headquarters of GATT, a charming building situated in front of lac Leman. This spirit of consensus, which, of course, has advantages (no losers) and disadvantages (ambiguous legal texts), has lasted to this day.
Last week, word got around that a proposal made by India and South Africa during the last meeting of the TRIPS Council aimed at introducing rules that would waive certain intellectual property rights (“IPR”) to ease access to Covid-19 vaccines was initially rejected due to a lack of consensus. For example, according to the United Kingdom (“UK”) government, the proposal was “an extreme measure to address an unproven problem”. The European Union, the United States and Australia backed the UK, while other delegations, such as Kenya, supported the proposal. Clearly, the days where GATT was a small club of good friends are gone, although disagreement is not necessarily indicative of an unfriendly mood. And, most likely, the struggle to arrive at a consensus will continue in future meetings.
But was this proposal necessary in the first place? Interestingly, on 15 October 2020, the WTO published an “Informative Note” under the title The TRIPS Agreement and COVID-19, the reading of which casts doubts on whether any time and energy devoted to another useless modification of the TRIPS Agreement, such as the introduction of Article 31 bis (waivers for export purposes), would be worth it. Why was so much time, effort and so many newspaper headlines consumed in that amendment of the TRIPS Agreement to introduce export waivers, if nobody uses them?
Joining the majority of European courts, the Paris Court of Justice ruled that Eli Lilly’s patent, which relates to the combined administration of pemetrexed disodium and vitamin B12, was infringed by the marketing of Fresenius’ pemetrexed diacid. It also awarded a record amount of damages of €28,000,000: a first in Europe.
1. The pemetrexed “saga” is one of the most closely followed and resounding in European patent litigation in recent years. After several decisions, notably in the Netherlands [1], the UK [2] and Germany [3], it is now the turn of the French Court to rule in a landmark judgment. In its decision of 11 September 2020, the Paris High Court (the “Tribunal Judiciaire de Paris”) agreed with the position taken in the majority of European countries, ruling that patent EP 1,313,508 (EP 508), which relates to the combined administration of pemetrexed disodium vitamin B 12 for the treatment of lung cancer (sold under the Alimta€® trademark), was infringed by the marketing of pemetrexed diacid by Fresenius Kabi. In addition, the Court awarded the plaintiff €28,000,000 in damages, a record in Europe, where this is the first time such an amount has been awarded in patent litigation.
2. The patent EP 508 invoked in this case relates to the combined administration of the drug pemetrexed disodium (sold under the brand name Alimta€®) with vitamin B 12, and possibly with folic acid, to treat two types of lung cancer. Claim 1 reads as follows:
€« 1. Use of pemetrexed disodium in the manufacture of a medicament for use in combination therapy for inhibiting tumor growth in mammals to which said medicament is to be administered in combination with vitamin B12 or a pharmaceutical derivative thereof, said pharmaceutical derivative of vitamin B12 being hydroxocobalamin, cyano-10-chlorocobalamin, aquocobalamin perchlorate, aquo-10-chlorocobalamin perchlorate, azidocobalamin, chlorocobalamin or cobalamin. €»
Sources suggest that governmental pressure compelled the USPTO to drop allegedly controversial rules the day before it published a request for comments
For quite some time, the German patent judiciary has had a reputation of being plaintiff-friendly, but this year the system has simply gone off the deep end in terms of highly problematic decisions, all the way up to the Federal Court of Justice, which hit a new low with its Sisvel v. Haier ruling. Those courts should faithfully apply the law, but more than anything else they are simply agenda-driven.
[...]
If you transplanted those German patent courts to a small market, such as Switzerland, they'd lose most of their "business" (all other things being equal). And if those judges had the intellectual honesty to rely to a reasonable extent on technical expert witnesses (like their counterparts in various other jurisdictions) as opposed to claiming they can resolve pretty much everything (except validity, as they prefer not to stay their cases over validity doubts) as a matter of law, those courts could no longer claim to be "rocket dockets."
It's undeniable that the huge number of cases those judges get to decide (about two in three European patent infringement actions are brought in Germany) enables them to build extensive experience. But the broken system--with the future Unified Patent Court promising more lucrative and more prestigious posts---incentivizes bad decisions in favor of plaintiffs ("forum selling") over well-reasoned decisions. What's going on right now is a race to the bottom between certain courts that come up with ever more troubling and far-fetched theories only to please patent holders.
With all that's going wrong there, this post is part of a continuing effort to to expose and discuss certain issues. Some of this may help policy makers to better understand the extent of the problem of a patent judiciary that pursues its own interests in attracting infringement cases at the expense of the economy and to the detriment of innovation. The makers of the world's most innovative products dread the German patent judiciary that offers itself as a tool to patent trolls looking for extortionate leverage.
Unified is pleased to announce the addition of Ellyar Barazesh to its growing team of patent attorneys and IP professionals. Ellyar, as Senior Legal Counsel, comes to us by way of WilmerHale and Finnegan, Henderson, Farabow, Garrett & Dunner, with a wealth of experience and technical expertise to assist Unified’s ever-expanding mission to deter patent abuse wherever it is found.
On Friday, the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court) entered a final (though appealable) judgment in a Conversant v. Daimler standard-essential patent (SEP) infringement case in which Conversant was asserting a former Nokia patent (or, to be precise, a derivative of a former Nokia patent). I've meanwhile obtained a copy of the ruling, and its final part (Section H) reveals that a settlement between Huawei--an indirect Daimler supplier--and the Nokia-fed patent troll has been reached.
The written decision says that on October 21, 2020 (just two days prior to the ruling date), defendant Daimler and intervenor Huawei (referred to as "intervenor no. 8") brought parallel motions asking the court to postpone the decision by two weeks in light of an agreement between Huawei and Conversant. The court denied these motions because Daimler's and Huawei's representations didn't go into sufficient legal detail, and because the settlement agreement comes with conditions precedent that weren't specified (Daimler, in fact, requested the court to ensure that the agreement would enter the record). Furthermore, the court notes that just one day prior to that motion, Huawei had filed a pleading according to which it denied having received a licensing offer from Conversant.
In most if not all German SEP cases against Daimler, Huawei intervened in its capacity as a tier 2 (indirect) supplier. Huawei makes network access devices (NADs), or connectivity modules, which some of Daimler's tier 1 (= direct) suppliers such as Continental and Samsung subsidiary Harman incorporate into the telematics control units (TCUs) they sell to the Mercedes maker. Effectively, cellular SEPs are implemented by the baseband chip (tier 3), so if a tier 3 or tier 2 supplier is licensed, so are the tier 1 supplier (TCU maker) and, by ultimate extension, Daimler.
