In 2017, we announced that we were going to bring the design and manufacturing of our products in-house. The driving purpose was to leverage our understanding of our users’ needs in order to engineer better products for them. In 2018, we shipped the first fruits of our labor and, over the course of the last two years, shipped hundreds of updates to the Thelio line as we continuously integrated improvements into our manufacturing. Establishing our factory in Colorado made this possible, but we were just getting started.
Early this year, we set off to engineer our workstation version of a Le Mans Hypercar. It started with a challenge: Engineer a quad-GPU workstation that doesn’t thermal throttle any of the GPUs. Three GPUs is pretty easy. Stack the forth one in there and it’s a completely different animal. Months of work and thousands of engineering hours later we accomplished our goal. Every detail was scrutinized. Every part is of the highest quality. And new factory capabilities, like milling, enabled us to introduce unique solutions to design challenges. The result is Thelio Mega. A compact, high-performance quad-GPU system that’s quiet enough to sit on your desk.
We started with simple fan placement experiments to determine the best location for intake and exhaust fans and sizes. Computer fluid dynamics simulations assisted to dial in air flow ducts followed by hundreds of fan placement iterations and thermal tests.
While there had been much speculation that Linux 5.9 would be the kernel's next long-term support release based on past timing, Linux 5.10 is going to be the LTS release.
Greg Kroah-Hartman who is the main stable maintainer for the Linux kernel confirmed at the Linux Foundation's Open-Source Summit Europe that Linux 5.10 will be the LTS release.
Linux 5.10-rc1 released yesterday and should debut as stable by mid-December. This kernel will then be maintained for the years ahead under the Linux LTS program.
With first release candidate of version 5.10 of the Linux kernel now available, Linus Torvalds says that it "looks to be a bigger release" than he expected.
Linux kernel 5.10-rc1 includes 14-15,000 merge commits -- depending on how you count them -- Torvalds notes in his weekly update to the Linux community. He shares the news that, for him, the most interesting change in this release is the removal of the setf_fs() addressing tool.
The creator of Linux has hailed the "historic" launch of the latest update as one of the most important in the software's history.
Linus Torvalds said that the release of Linux 5.10 was, "a bigger release than I expected", and could surpass version 5.8 to be the biggest software launch for the company yet.
The launch looks to make the open-source software platform more powerful and easier to use than ever before, offering a number of new additions, upgrades and features for users across the globe.
Set_fs() has been the source of various security problems over the years. Jonathan Corbet, a kernel contributor and editor of Linux news site LWN, published an article in 2017 titled ‘A farewell to set_fs()?’ in which he highlighted some of the aforementioned issues.
“Set_fs() is clearly the sort of interface that can easily create severe security bugs,” Corbet wrote. “It is also a tempting shortcut that tends to find its way into code of questionable quality such as out-of-tree drivers.”
The function has been part of Linux since around 1991 and enabled the kernel to override address spaces. In 2010, the National Institute of Standards and Technology detailed how it could be used to “overwrite arbitrary kernel memory locations and gain privileges”.
That particular bug was fixed in 2010 but set_fs() has continued to be a concern and many within the community have called for its removal for many years. However, there’s a lack of developers willing to do such deep infrastructural changes.
Other notable changes in the release include support for NVIDIA Orin SoCs designed for autonomous cars, improved support for the Broadcom BCM2711 chip used in the Raspberry Pi 4, support for upcoming Arm-based CPUs and GPUs, a fix for the ‘Year 2038 Problem’, virtualisation tweaks, and ending support for PowerPC 601 CPUs.
As I continue to describe in different postings how the ARM32 start-up sequence works, it becomes necessary to explain in-depth the basic kernel concepts around page tables and how it is implemented on ARM32 platforms.
To understand the paging setup, we need to repeat and extend some Linux paging lingo. Some good background is to read Mel Gormans description of the Linux page tables from his book “Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager”. This book was published in 2007 and is based on Mel’s PhD thesis from 2003. Some stuff has happened in the 13 years since then, but the basics still hold. It is necessary to also understand the new layers in the page tables such as the five layers of page tables currently used in the Linux kernel.
First a primer: the ARM32 architecture with a classic MMU has 2 levels of page tables and the more recent LPAE (Large Physical Address Extension) MMU has 3 levels of page tables.
Only some of the ARMv7 architectures have LPAE, and it is only conditionally enabled, i.e. the machines can also use the classic MMU if they want, they have both. It is not enabled by default on the multi_v7 configuration: your machine has to explicitly turn it on during compilation. The layout is so different that the same binary image can never support both classic and LPAE MMU in the same kernel image.
WireGuard is a modern VPN (Virtual Private Network) technology that utilizes state-of-the-art cryptography. Compared to other popular VPN solutions, such as IPsec and OpenVPN , WireGuard is faster, easier to configure, and has a smaller footprint. It is cross-platform and can run almost anywhere, including Linux, Windows, Android, and macOS.
Wireguard is a peer-to-peer VPN; it does not use the client-server model. Depending on its configuration, a peer can act as a traditional server or client. It works by creating a network interface on each peer device tha
Compressed files with the .zip extension are commonplace throughout Windows systems, as it's been the native file compression method for the operating system since many years ago. On a Linux system, the nearest equivalent would have to be tar files and various methods of compression like gzip.
You would like to remove MySQL database from your Ubuntu system ? In this short tutorial, you will learn how to safely uninstall MySQL .
Make sure however to create backups of your databases before starting the procedure.
openssl req -newkey rsa:2048 -nodes -keyout /etc/ssl/private/myblog.key -x509 -days 365 -out /etc/ssl/private/myblog.pem - (openssl Generate Self Signed SSL Certifcate generating self signed ssl certificate to use in dovecot postfix nginx Self signed certificates can be used for private encryptions between server and client and must be manually accepted on browser/ client). The best command line collection on the internet, submit yours and save your favorites.
At times, we need to write shell scripts that are interactive and user executing them need to monitor the progress. For such requirements, we can implement a simple progress bar that gives an idea about how much task has been completed by the script or how much the script has executed.
To implement it, we only need to use the “echo” command with the following options and a backslash-escaped character.
Firstly, we will enable 32-bit architecture on our device. Then we will update the system repositories. After that, we will install required 32bit packages. Lastly, with the last three commands, we will download and install Steam. Enjoy!
BASH has been good to me and I have enjoyed my time with BASH very much. I have learned so much about the inner workings of Linux through the terminal and BASH has been there my whole experience. “Tab” completion has been a marvelous gift to the terminal user experience. I have never had a complaint about BASH and therefore never looked elsewhere.
On the episode of BDL from 17 Oct 2020, I was told to try FISH as it would change my terminal life. I didn’t really believe it but proceeded to install it anyway. I also wasn’t ready to commit to it so I modified a profile in Konsole to use Fish instead of Bash. Typing in one solitary command and I was sold.
Today we are looking at how to install Sublime Text editor on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
I will admit that the original Monster Prom is something special as it remains as the only dating sim type of game I've enjoyed, and now there's a brand new helping of it out with Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp.
The original was an unexpected pleasure for me, as a genre I've rarely been able to enjoy. Let's face it, "In Monster Prom I was rejected even after letting a princess ride me", is not a typical GamingOnLinux headline. Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp was funded thanks to a Kickstarter campaign back in 2019, and it has released as of October 23 along with full Linux support as expected. Developer Beautiful Glitch mentioned how they've pretty much taken all that was tasty from the original, and threw in some spices to make Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp.
Releasing with Linux support on November 5 is Möbius Front '83 latest title from Zachtronics (SpaceChem, Infinifactory, Opus Magnum, Eliza). Unlike most of their previous titles, it's not a puzzle game. They say it's actually a conventional strategy game designed from scratch by the clever minds at Zachtronics, so it will have their own special feel to it.
"The year is 1983 and the United States of America must defend itself from an enemy it could have never imagined— an America from an alternate universe that will stop at nothing to seize control of the country’s heartland!"
League Of Legends is a game made into a snap, meaning that the software package can be installed and executed across different Linux distributions. Being among the largest footprints of any game in streaming media communities on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, installing it in your Linux system will be great. For our case, we will install it in Ubuntu distro.
One of the most common topics to land in my inbox is Linux fonts. And more often than not, people ask me about what I normally do to make font clarity and contrast higher in this or that distribution. Then, more prevalent than all are questions about my modified Plasma Breeze theme, aptly titled Brooze.
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This is all it takes to have pure black fonts and enjoy good text clarity in Plasma. I don't understand why low-contrast fonts are such a fad. Hint: Plasma is actually doing a relatively decent job. In general, most distros and desktop environments come with atrociously pale fonts, gray on gray. But then ergonomics has never been strong in the Linux desktop, as it's not typically developed as a product, and certainly not with the end user in mind, unless the end user is a dark-theme-loving software developer. Anyway, if you are someone who actually spends a lot of time reading or writing, and values their eyes, then you may want to implement Brooze. I hope you find this innocent little article useful.
rpminspect 1.2 is now available. In addition to four new inspections, a lot of improvements have been made to how the program runs and reports results.
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A number of improvements are present in this release. The big one is the detection of rebased builds and the reading of the rebaseable list from the rpminspect-data package. A rebase is found when the before and after builds have matching package names but different version and release numbers. If the package name and version are the same but the release number is different, this is considered a maintenance update. This check determines reporting thresholds. For instance, changes in config files may report as VERIFY for a maintenance update but they report as INFO for a rebase. The assumption here is that rebased packages will bring a lot of changes and while rpminspect will find those, we do not want it to alarm as strictly as it would for a maintenance update.
When using the -d option to get debugging output, you no longer see the config file settings dumped at the beginning of the output. That output has been moved to the -D/--dump-config option. You may not always want to see that so you now need to specify -D to also get the config file output.
Support for SHA-224, SHA-384, and SHA-512 message digests is now present in librpminspect. There is a DEFAULT_MESSAGE_DIGEST macro in constants.h that sets the default the program will use. This is intended to help prepare for changes down the road where the message digest used for various tasks in packaging will change.
The first release candidate of systemd 247 is now available for testing and it's a huge feature release.
This big systemd 247 release is introducing systemd-oomd for out-of-memory daemon handling, systemd-homed now defaults to using Btrfs, there is a new capability with systemd of secure credentials handling, and much more. Below is a look at the highlights for systemd 247:
- The new systemd-oomd service has been added for monitoring resource contention and can kill processes when memory/swap pressure is above the defined limits. For now this is experimental and just enabled in the developer mode.
- Systemd-homed defaults to using the Btrfs file-system when available for creating home directories in LUKS volumes. The DefaultFileSystemType= option for homed.conf remains available for changing off the default/ Btrfs was chosen since it can grow and shrink the file-system online.
Lantronix has launched an “Open-Q 610 üSOM” module and $995 dev kit that run Linux on Qualcomm’s camera-focused, AI-enabled octa-core QCS610 SoC with triple 4-lane MIPI-CSI interfaces.
The Intrinsyc division of Lantronix has announced a tiny Open-Q 610 üSOM compute module and Open-Q 610 üSOM Development Kit that run Yocto Linux on a new Qualcomm QCS610 SoC aimed at smart camera applications. Camera features include staggered HDR, lens de-warp, dual camera stitching, image de-fog, and 360-degree panoramic views. The kit is available starting at $995, with shipments due in November.
Axiomtek’s 3.5-inch “CAPA520” SBC runs Linux or Win 10 on 8th and 9th Gen Coffee Lake CPUs with triple display and -20 to 60€°C support plus up to 3x GbE, 6x USB, 2x SATA, and mini-PCIe and ZIO expansion.
Axiomtek has announced a 3.5-inch, Intel Coffee Lake SBC that follows its similar, 6th and 7th Gen CAPA500. Like that model, the Linux-ready CAPA520 features Axiomtek’s ZIO expansion interface for optional I/O modules. The SBC supports industrial IoT-related applications in the embedded market, such as industrial control, machine vision, self-service terminal, digital signage, and medical imaging.
Today we are excited to announce the launch of a read/write API for our Open Source Hardware Certification program. This API will make it easier to apply for certification directly from where you already document your hardware, as well as empower research, visualizations, and explorations of currently certified hardware.
OSHWA’s Open Source Hardware Certification program has long been an easy way for creators and users alike to identify hardware that complies with the community definition of open source hardware. Since its creation in 2016, this free program has certified hardware from over 45 countries on every continent except Antarctica. Whenever you see the certification logo on hardware:
I work full time on open source and this is how.
Background
I started learning how to program in my teens, well over thirty years ago and I’ve worked as a software engineer and developer since the early 1990s. My first employment as a developer was in 1993. I’ve since worked for and with lots of companies and I’ve worked on a huge amount of (proprietary) software products and devices over many years. Meaning: I certainly didn’t start my life open source. I had to earn it.
When I was 20 years old I did my (then mandatory) military service in Sweden. After having endured that, I applied to the university while at the same time I was offered a job at IBM. I hesitated, but took the job. I figured I could always go to university later – but life took other turns and I never did. I didn’t do a single day of university. I haven’t regretted it.
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I’d like to emphasize that I worked as a contract and consultant developer for many years (over 20!), primarily on proprietary software and custom solutions, before I managed to land myself a position where I could primarily write open source as part of my job.
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My work setup with Mozilla made it possible for me to spend even more time on curl, apart from the (still going) two daily spare time hours. Nobody at Mozilla cared much about (my work with) curl and no one there even asked me about it. I worked on Firefox for a living.
For anyone wanting to do open source as part of their work, getting a job at a company that already does a lot of open source is probably the best path forward. Even if that might not be easy either, and it might also mean that you would have to accept working on some open source projects that you might not yourself be completely sold on.
In late 2018 I quit Mozilla, in part because I wanted to try to work with curl “for real” (and part other reasons that I’ll leave out here). curl was then already over twenty years old and was used more than ever before.
The web is getting darker. It is being weaponized by trolls, bullies and bad actors and, as we’ve witnessed, this can have extremely grave consequences for individuals, groups, sometimes entire countries. So far, most of the counter-measures proposed by either governments or private actors are even scarier.
The creators of the Matrix protocol have recently published the most promising plan I have seen. One that I believe stands a chance of making real headway in this fight, while respecting openness, decentralization, open-source and privacy.
I have been offered the opportunity to work on this plan. For this reason, after 9 years as an employee at Mozilla, I’ll be moving to Element, where I’ll try and contribute to making the web a better place. My last day at Mozilla will be October 30th.
Possibly you are an artist or a graphic designer and you have created a beautiful presentation template using shapes, images and your great talent. Like these Indonesian people from that site.
All templatess look very good. Really, I much like it. But if you'll download for example that template, then (after unzipping) you'll see that its size is 16 mb! And it's only a presentation template! Without any your data, images, tables or charts! It's too much anyway.
We’ve edited and uploaded the first batch of videos from our recent joint conference. Here’s the playlist – use the button in the top-right corner to switch videos:
Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.
At the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference I had the opportunity to give a talk about “On sessions, statutes and software – A glimpse behind the scenes at TDF”.
Most people are familiar with the term “DevOps,” but they don’t know how to really utilize it. There’s more to DevOps than just development and operational teams. There’s an essential element of DevOps that is often missing from the equation; IT security. Security should be included in the lifecycle of apps.
The reason you need to include security is that security was once assigned to one team that integrated security near the end-stages of development. Taking such a lax approach to security wasn’t such a problem when apps were developed in months or years. The average development cycle has changed quite a bit, though, and apps can be developed in a matter of days or weeks. Outdated security practices like leaving security too late can bring DevOps initiatives to their knees.
Starting with good news, the Meson Manual has been updated to a third edition. In addition to the usual set of typo fixes, there is an entirely new chapter on converting projects from an existing build system to Meson. Not only are there tips and tricks on each part of the conversion, there is even guidance on how to get it done on projects that are too big to be converted in one go.
Percepio announced the availability of Tracealyzer version 4.4 with support for embedded Linux. Tracealyzer gives developers insight during software debugging and verification at the system level by enabling visual exploratory analysis from the top down. This makes the software suitable for spotting issues during full system testing and drill down into the details to find the cause.
Version 4.4 adds several views optimized for Linux tracing, in addition to a set of visualizations already in Tracealyzer, and leverages Common Trace Format (CTF) and the widely supported LTTng, an open source tracing framework.
LLVM has merged an experimental MLIR-based SPIR-V CPU runner that the developers are working towards being able to handle CPU-based execution of GPU kernels.
This new SPIR-V runner is built around the MLIR intermediate representation (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation) with a focus of going from GPU-focused code translated through SPIR-V and to LLVM and then executed on the CPU. The runner focus is similar to that of the MLIR-based runners for NVIDIA CUDA, AMD ROCm, and Vulkan, but just executing on the CPU itself. It was earlier this year LLVM added the MLIR-Vulkan-Runner for handling MLIR on Vulkan hardware.
Python supports a wide range of arithmetic operators that you can use when working with numbers in your code. One of these operators is the modulo operator (%), which returns the remainder of dividing two numbers.
Wearable technology is not just smart consumer devices like watches and activity trackers.
Wearable tech also includes one off projects by designers, makers, and hackers and there are more and more people producing tutorials on how to get started. Wearable tech is also a great way to get both kids and adults excited about coding, electronics, and in general, engineering skills.
Sophy Wong is a designer who makes really cool stuff using code, technology, costuming, soldering, and even jewelry techniques to get tech onto the human body.
Some days ago, Dunja Lalic rewrote the continuous integration scripts to be much faster. A complete pipeline used to take about 90 minutes to run, now it takes about 15 minutes on average.
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The most complicated thing to port was the reference tests. These are the most important ones; each test loads an SVG document, renders it, and compares the result to a reference PNG image. There are some complications in the tests; they have to create a special configuration for Fontconfig and Pango, so as to have reproducible font rendering. The pango-rs bindings do not cover this part of Pango, so we had to do some things by hand.
A cold front that dumped several inches of snow in the Pike Peak region Sunday into Monday is expected to pludge temperatures into a record-breaking cold overnight, the National Weather service in Pueblo predicts.
Colorado Springs broke the record low temperture for Oct. 26 by 10 degrees. The pervious record was set in 1913 at 16 degrees. Monday's low was measured at 6 degrees, and the brutal cold is forecast to continue.
For most, the winter-like weather means a hindrance on the roads and running the thermostat higher, but single digit-temperatures can be more than just an inconvenience for those who are homeless.
A fire was set Sunday in a Boston ballot drop box holding more than 120 ballots in what Massachusetts election officials said appears to have been a “deliberate attack,” now under investigation by the FBI.
The fire that was set around 4 a.m. in a ballot drop box outside the Boston Public Library downtown, Massachusetts Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin's office said.
There were 122 ballots inside the box when it was emptied Sunday morning, and 87 of them were still legible and able to be processed, Galvin’s office said. The box had last been emptied around 2:30 p.m. on Saturday.
When we talk about the digital self, we are talking about the self as it exists within digital spaces. This holds differently for different people, as some of us prefer to live within an pseudonymous or anonymous identity online, divested from our physical selves, while others consider the digital a more holistic identity that extends from the physical.
Your digital self is gestalt, in that it exists across whatever mediums, web sites, and services you use. These bits are pieces together to form a whole picture of what it means to be you, or some aspect of you. This may be carefully curated, or it may be an emergent property of who you are.
The way your physical self has rights, so too does your digital self. Or, perhaps, it would be more accurate to say that your rights extend to your digital self. I do not personally consider that there is a separation between these selves when it comes to rights, as both are aspects of you and you have rights. I am explicitly not going to list what these rights are, because I have my own ideas about them and yours may differ. Instead, I will briefly talk about consent.
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Our digital autonomy is not the only thing at stake when we look at digital consent. The ways we interact in digital spaces impact our whole selves, and exploitation of our consent too impacts our whole selves.
One year ago, the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court) celebrated the tenth anniversary of its Patent Local Rules ("Münchner Verfahren"). On that occasion, the court announced an "evaluation" study by the Max Planck Institute in order to find out how practitioners view the court's performance. Last week, the court officially presented the results in a videoconference. As of today, access to the recording (which the court originally made available to the public via YouTube) has been restricted.
Maybe someone decided to hide the presentation because the results are all too embarrassing--and even I, as a critic of the court's exceedingly patentee-friendly decisions, disagree in some ways.
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But in patent cases, which involve far more complex technical questions and have huge economic implications, German judges rarely appoint experts. Does it make sense? No. It simply stinks. It's an agenda-driven system, and the administration of justice is nowhere near the top of the list.
To be fair, the practice of adjudicating cases without hearing expert witnesses is not unique to the Munich court. In Dusseldorf and Mannheim, it's just the same. Nevertheless, the court's own outline of its patent litigation procedures is shockingly forthright.
The latest absurdity is that a patentee enforcing an injunction during the appellate proceedings just has to make a deposit of a few million dollars to do what would amount to a multi-billion dollar damage to a car maker such as Daimler, with the court arguing that the defendant should simply take a license (which would, however, end the case).
Back to that "evaluation" study of the Munich court's performance in patent cases. The responses to the Max Planck Institute's survey suggest that Munich has shortcomings with respect to the quality of its legal work and its technical understanding, where Dusseldorf and Mannheim are rated more highly, but that Munich is still a popular venue because it's a rocket docket and very plaintiff-friendly.
But should the study be taken seriously at all? Not really. There were only 65 respondents, and there is no indication of any effort having been made to ensure this small sample is statistically representative. Based on where the respondents said they filed their offensive cases over the past five years, it's at least a possibility that practitioners with a strong preference for Dusseldorf were particularly active--and seized this opportunity to make Munich look bad by comparison with their home court. It's also possible that many lawyers' understandable frustration with the ever more plaintiff-friendly approach of the Munich court--especially (but not only) when it comes to standard-essential patents--informed their ratings of the judges' competence in their field.
I believe that this "study" (if one wants to use that term at all for a survey with only 65 non-representative repondents) underrates the Munich judges. In terms of technical competence, the Mannheim judges are clearly the best with respect to wireless patents. In other fields of technology, there may not be much of a gap. What I've heard from legal practitioners doesn't suggest that the Dusseldorf judges have a better grasp of technical matters than their Munich-based colleagues.
Ecogensus, LLC ("Ecogensus" or the "Company"), a leading technology company in the resource recovery and waste management industry, today announced the European Patent Office's issuance of a notice that it intends to grant a patent for the Company's process of converting solid wastes into fuel (European Patent Application No. 15 854 145.8).
Ecogensus has a full suite of patents granted in the United States as well as countries in Asia and South America in the areas of waste recycling and resource recovery ("waste-to-value"). The new European patent covers the foundational process for conversion of solid wastes into a fuel, a process which enables diversion from waste from landfills and displacement of coal with Ecogensus' waste-derived fuel.
