A quite lot happened actually this week with some big released and a handful of application updates. Some major news as well. Here's the recap of this week from the Linux Universe.
Hello and welcome to this week's Linux Roundup.
We had another week filled with Linux Releases, Fedora 33, Linux Lite 5.2, Voyager Live 20.10, NixOS 20.09, and OpenIndiana 2020.10.
It’s the Halloween week, so Happy Halloween! I know I’m one day late, but since it’s still weekend why not celebrate Halloween for two days. This week was spooky and full of awesome releases, starting with the amazing Fedora 33 release and continuing with a new Linux phone, news about the next major Ubuntu release, Linux 5.10 as the next LTS kernel, as well as all the latest and greatest distribution and app releases.
Here are some interesting Linux, open source, and privacy news for the end of October 2020. This month, we have increased competition on GPUs, a lot of new distro releases with Ubuntu, Fedora, and PopOS, youtube-dl being taken down for alledged copyright infrigement. Oh and Google also get hit by a lawsuit for monopolistic practices.
I've been using Newsboat as my rss feed reader for quite a while but I wanted to see what else was out there so today we're taking a look at a little application called neix which while not being as feature complete as something like Newsboat it provides most of what you'd want from a terminal rss feed reader.
**normalize** (sometimes packaged as **normalize-audio** ) , **pa-mixer** , and **pm-utils** from the **ap** software set of Slackware Linux.
In this lengthy rant video, I address a few questions and comments that I've been receiving from viewers. Some of the topics include why I call Doom Emacs and Spacemacs "Emacs distributions", why I think Fish is the best shell, problems with YouTube recommendations, and how someone can learn to stop distro-hopping.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.9.3 kernel.
All users of the 5.9 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.9.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.9.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
At the Linux Foundation's KVM Forum 2020 this week, Stefano Garzarella of Red Hat presented on the possibility of speeding up virtual machine I/O performance by sharing the host's IO_uring queues with guests. In doing so the virtual machines have near bare-metal performance with the proposed patches.
IO_uring has been one of the most incredible innovations to the Linux kernel of the past decade. New use-cases continue to be explored for this interface to allow for more efficient I/O. Those unfamiliar with IO_uring can see this whitepaper by Facebook's Jens Axboe who spearheaded the design and continues to advance its capabilities.
Earlier this year the Linux kernel landed split lock detection for being able to detect and optionally kill processes leading to a split lock since it can cause measurable performance issues and even possible unprivileged denial of service.
Building off that in the middle of summer was then proposed bus lock detection. It's been a few months since then but the bus lock detection for the kernel continues to be worked on and a new version of the proposed patches were sent out this week by Intel's Fenghua Yu.
A bus lock as happens via split locked access to writeback memory or using locks to uncacheable memory. A bus lock can lead to performance more than one thousand cycles slower than an atomic operation within a cache line and will disrupt performance on other cores.
While Linux 5.10-rc2 is coming later today and a week past the merge window, a notable late pull request sent in this morning by Greg Kroah-Hartman is removing the Intel MIC (Many Integrated Core) architecture drivers, a.k.a. Xeon Phi.
Lightening up the kernel tree by nearly twenty-seven thousand lines of code is the removal of the Intel MIC drivers from the kernel. This is code for Intel's failed Intel MIC X100 (Knights Corner and beyond) that was the PCIe form factor add-in co-processor cards based on their Many Integrated Core architecture and derived from the earlier Larrabee project and more. Running on the accelerator cards themselves were their own Linux build. The drivers being removed from Linux 5.10 is all the code for interfacing with the these accelerators that during their short-lived time were marketed as Xeon Phi.
As usual, the start of the week after the merge window closed was pretty quiet, but things picked up in the last few days. Almost everything here got merged Friday or during the weekend.
Which is all normal, but a few things stand out.
One is that rc2 continues the pattern of this being a fairly large release - not outrageously so, but this is a slightly bigger rc2 than we usually have.
The other is that the diffstat looks quite odd, since I merged the pull from Greg that removed the MIC drivers for hardware that never shipped. That is about half the patch, although it's not why I call rc2 big - it's just a single commit. There's also a few big ABI documentation formatting patches that look a bit odd, but make the docs more easily parsable by tools. Again, just a couple of patches, but a big part of the diff.
Anyway, if you ignore those things, the rest looks fairly normal, with small fixes all over the place. The shortlog below gives a flavor of the details, I don't think anything else particularly stands out.
Despite the size, I don't get the feeling that there's anything really odd going on, and so far the release seems to be going smoothly. But please test, that's how we find problems,
Linus
The second weekly release candidate to Linux 5.10 is now available for testing.
Linux 5.10-rc1 last Sunday marked the end of the two week merge window that saw a lot of new features introduced. In case you missed it, see our Linux 5.10 feature list for a look at all of the new functionality for this kernel slated to be released as stable in December.
Released on August 2nd, 2020, the Linux 5.8 kernel series was dubbed as “one of the biggest releases of all time by Linus Torvalds. It brought numerous new features and enhancements, such as support for LZO-RLE compression in the F2FS file system, inline encryption support for the block layer, a new faccessat2() system call, a new initrdmem= boot option for specifying an initial RAM disk image, and a new CAP_PERFMON functionality.
But, as all good things most come to an end, and since Linux kernel 5.8 was not a long-term supported branch, it will no longer receive further updates that address important bugs and security issues. Linux kernel 5.8.18 is the last update in the series, and if you’re using it you should consider upgrading to the latest Linux kernel 5.9 series as soon as possible after reading this.
From time to time, I like to try a new distribution of Linux, not because I am dissatisfied with openSUSE as that is NOT the case but like going to another town to visit and see what culinary options they have to offer. I like to try out another Plasma distribution or something that is quite different than what I am used to using. Part of the fun of Linux is all the options and therefore, I want to peruse the buffet from time to time. Also, as a non-card carrying member of the BDLL community, we do these weekly “challenges” and I like to participate from time to time in that.
The annoying part about testing distributions is that I have amassed a collection of USB flash drives with various distributions on it and I am often fumbling finding one that I don’t want to write over. The solution, Ventoy. This allows me to have multiple distributions on one USB drive and I also do not have to write the images to the device. I just have to drag and drop the ISO right onto. The system will scan the device recursively so I can still keep everything organized into folders.
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Ventoy is a fantastic utility, especially if you are regularly or even semi-regularly installing operating systems on machines. Setting up Ventoy is not difficult, so long as you understand the The installation is not difficult, so long as you understand the particulars. Since this isn’t something I would do every day, this little blathering is another note to future me and hopefully it works well for present you.
Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With Ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them. Both Legacy BIOS and UEFI are supported in the same way. Most type of OS supported (Windows/WinPE/Linux/Unix/Vmware/Xen...)
Looking for a Reddit client for Linux desktop? Giara is a modern new GTK app for Reddit written in Python 3 with GTK.
Giara is a free open-source software created with mobile Linux in mind. It comes with most Reddit features including new text, link, media posts, search subreddits and users, up vote, down vote, post rely, dark mode support, and more.
I've released man-pages-5.09. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.
This release resulted from patches, bug reports, reviews, and comments from more than 40 contributors. The release includes more than 500 commits that changed nearly 600 pages. Nine new pages were added in this release.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ClamAV on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, ClamAV is an open-source (GPL) antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware, adware, rootkits, and other malicious threats on Linux. It’s easy to use and best for Linux based Web and Mail server.
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 ClamAV antivirus on CentOS 8.
NVM or Node Version Manager is a command-line utility for installing and managing multiple node.js versions on Linux based systems. With the help of NVM, you can install any specific nodejs version on your system and use to run your application.
This tutorial will help you to install NVM on your Amazon Linux machine. Also helped you to basic uses of NVM for Amazon Linux systems.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nginx on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx is a powerful web server software that can be used on your server. It is also known for its high performance and low memory usage which will allow fewer resources to be used but getting the job done efficiently. A popular setup is to use it as a proxy for Apache, which can then serve application requests.
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 the Nginx web server on CentOS 8.
PrestaShop is one of the most well-known eCommerce platforms in the world. It’s free, open-source, and is built on top of PHP, while using a MySQL database to store the data. It helps small to large businesses to create and run a successful online store.
PrestaShop is simple, easy-to-use, easy to install, and is versatile – it provides a great platform for people around the world to create their online stores. Let’s begin with the installation.
This short article documents how I run Isso, the commenting system used by this blog, inside a Docker container on NixOS, a Linux distribution built on top of Nix. Nix is a declarative package manager for Linux and other Unix systems.
Today we are looking at how to install Photopea, a Photoshop alternative, 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.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Slack on Ubuntu 20.10.
As I posted last year, KDE 4 is my favorite. Surprisingly, Kubuntu 20.04 brings the legacy Oxygen theme built-in. Thanks to Gemlog on social media, I discovered it. Now I bring you how I do it.
Results first! There are my Kubuntu Focal machine with the legendary Oxygen theme I loved so much. It is amazing I can still enjoy this look and feel once again after eight years.
The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of TDE R14.0.9. Albeit being a maintenance release, this version brings along a bunch of new applications to expand the offer of the TDE desktop and provide a more modern look.
TDE is a complete software desktop environment designed for Unix-like operating systems, intended for computer users preferring a traditional desktop model, and is free/libre software. Born as a fork of KDE 3.5 back in 2010, TDE is now a fully independent project with its own personality and development team, available for various Linux distros, BSD and DilOS.
For those still fond of the once venerable KDE 3.5 desktop, the Trinity Desktop Environment is still maintaining its KDE 3.5 fork after more than one decade. Trinity Desktop R14.0.9 debuted today with some additional applications now included and other updates.
New applications included with Trinity Desktop R14.0.9 are the Codeine media player, TDEDocker, and TDEPacman. Codeine was the media player during the KDE 3.x players prior to becoming Dragon Player. TDEDocker allows docking any application to the system tray. TDEPacman is a Pacman game.
In 2018, I discussed the digital painting devices I had used up til then. These were a Lenovo Thinkpad X61t, a Lenovo Thinkpad Helix, a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, a Wacom Cintiq Hybrid Companion, an iPad Pro 12.9ââ¬Â³, a Wacom Mobile Studio Pro 16ââ¬Â³ and a Lenovo Yoga 920.
I didn’t discuss the Wacom Graphire, the Wacom Intuos 3, the Huion H610 or the Yiyniva MVP22U that I also had around, probably because apart from the Intuos 3, all of that hardware was stored in the Hardware Attic.
But recently, the Hybrid Companion became even more unusable (it was already bad because of the enormous parallax): the screen’s brightness just couldn’t reach visible levels anymore.
And the Wacom Mobile Studio Pro has been dying for over a year now — not good for expensive hardware bought only in 2017. When running as a computer, it would shut itself down randomly, probably because it was getting too hot. So I got myself a Wacom Link device so I could use it as a regular cintiq, but after two days of usage… The display would reset itself randomly and finally it wouldn’t power up anymore, at all.
This year Akademy was super easy to attend, no travel was necessary. It was all virtual and it was a blast! As usual Volker’s post about Akademy 2020 covers a bit PIM land.
One highlight of the discussions during the PIM BoF was the EteSync resource getting merge. This was the result of a GSoC, it’s always pleasant when those succeed so well.
There’s also been further discussion around our GnuPG and Kleopatra activities which was also a good opportunity to rejoice regarding the VS-NfD certification achieved last year.
Of course, the efforts regarding moving more of the PIM related libraries to KDE Frameworks are still on going. There’s overall more of a need to explore what’s left and make plans on how to split them up, a sprint might happen regarding this.
And last but not least, KAsync was mentioned. This is currently reworked by Dan mostly for Akonadi needs but it might appear in KDE Frameworks later on. We’ll see.
In here we have tried to explore how the idea of popular distros such as Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, SUSE, Ubuntu and many others came into being after the first Linux kernel became available.
As Linux was initially released in the form of a kernel in 1991, the distros we know today was made possible with the help of numerous collaborators throughout the world with the creation of shells, libraries, compilers and related packages to make it a complete Operating System.
We are pleased to announce the launch of Nitrux 1.3.4. This new version brings together the latest software updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and ready-to-use hardware support.
Nitrux 1.3.4 is available for immediate download.
Nitrux 1.3.4 isn't your regular monthly update, as the development team decided to jump ship and finally ditch the KDE Plasma 5.19 desktop environment series used in the last few releases for the latest and greatest KDE Plasma 5.20 series.
The newest point release, KDE Plasma 5.20.2, is included in this release by default, and it's been boosted with a new HUD functionality called plasma-hud, which lets users search through an application's app menu, but only if the respective apps expose their menubar to the Global Menu plasmoid.
A new version of Linux Lite is now available to download.
I don’t think I’ve written about this Ubuntu-based Linux distro on the site before, but seeing as it’s just pushed out a major update to download servers I thought “why not?!” — and here we are!
“This is the most feature rich, complete Linux Lite release to date. This is the release many people have been waiting for,” the project says in a release announcement.
Linux Lite 5.2 is based on Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS and Linux Kernel 5.4. Aimed at lower-end computers, Linux Lite ships a customised Xfce desktop and a careful set of curated apps, settings, and utilities.
Have just uploaded a release for November, usual thing updated packages and configs. Guide can now be viewed by using Super + g it includes some basic keybind shortcuts in i3. Firefox is back for now, while huge it does support many features that other lighter browsers do not have. Minor changes in abinstall fixes to remove installers from Conky post install.
We are very happy to announce that accessibility features have been added to our installation medium with archiso v49. From release 2020.11.01 onward these are available via the 2nd boot loader menu item. A specific installation guide can be found on the wiki.
Many thanks go to Alexander Epaneshnikov who integrated the features from the TalkingArch project into archiso's releng profile, which is used for creating the installation medium.
Allison's unique perspective on management stems from a passionate focus on empowerment and using guidelines and accountability systems to help her team connect to their own intrinsic motivation. In fact, a few years ago, Allison and I were part of a group of associates trying to support and advance the concept of empowerment in our organization. As a specific open management practice, empowerment is important for her and her team, specifically because the nature of their work varies so much—each person needs to be able to make decisions about their work within specific guidelines.
Here’s my (thirteenth) monthly update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
Sir Clive Sinclair, born in 1940 is an entrepreneur and inventor that many will know. You may know him for his quirky Sinclair C5 battery powered “velomobile” which was set to solve commuters problems in 1985. But many will know him for a range of electronic products that bear his name. Sinclair Radionics was formed in 1961 and it created cost effective electronic products such as pocket calculators and portable televisions.
But, in 1980, Sinclair's company released the ZX80 computer for €£99.95 and it was marketed as the “first personal computer for under €£100”. The ZX80 proved a cost effective means to get your first computer and learn how to code but it did have a few quirks, famously causing the screen to flicker as each key was pressed. The ZX81 released in 1981 and retailing for half the price of the ZX80 addressed this and other issues while providing a solid base for learners eager to code. An agreement with Timex saw the ZX81 hit the US market as the Timex Sinclair 1000, and an unauthorised clone, the TK85 was released in Brazil via Microdigital Eletronica.
The ZX81 was a success and from that initial success more “ZX” machines were released with better graphics, and infamous rubber keys. The first ZX spectrum, released in 1982 introduced the rubber keys and diminutive size of the iconic classic computer. It is here where we start our journey into emulating the ZX Spectrum machines, chiefly the 48K and 128K aka “The Toastrack”. Can emulation give us the same nostalgic glow, can we create BASIC code projects and what is the best way to emulate a ZX Spectrum? Below, we show you two methods: one which turns your Raspberry Pi into a Spectrum and another which gives you a simple emulator that should work in Ubuntu and other flavors of Linux.
Ubuntu Desktop 20.10 is now fully supported on the Raspberry Pi 4, which can be transformed into a complete Ubuntu workstation, says Ubuntu. Ubuntu 20.10 also introduces Micro Clouds for on-demand compute at the edge.
Ubuntu 20.10 is the first Ubuntu image built as a full desktop image, rather than being a server image like previous releases. According to Tom's Hardware, Ubuntu 20.10 is easy to install and use on the Raspberry Pi and represents a solid foundation for future releases, although it is unlikely it will replace Raspberry Pi OS soon.
Raspberry Pi is a great mini-computer that helps you explore computing without spending too much on a machine. With a size as small as a credit card, it offers numerous I/O ports, unlike Appl.. (*cough) $3000 machines that offer only two USB Type-C ports.
Raspberry Pi can run Ubuntu and its own operating system Raspbian, which, as the name suggests, is also based on Debian. But now, thanks to OmniROM, the first Android 11 port for Raspberry Pi 4 has arrived.
After a relatively quiet first year of existence, it seems like you can barely swing a cat without running into a new operating system distribution for the Raspberry Pi 4. Raspbian Buster has been around since the beginning, but last weekend Canonical announced a version of Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla desktop for the most popular single-board computer. Now, Android developers have gotten in on the act with the first builds of the OmniROM Android 11 custom ROM for Raspberry Pi.
A mobile operating system might seem a little weird for a small desktop platform, but we'd be remiss if we didn't remember that the Raspberry Pi 4 is more than just a small computer. With the right add-on hardware, like the RasPad 3, it can provide a full tablet experience. For that reason it's probably no surprise to find that the OmniROM developers have created this distribution with a tablet profile rather than building it for desktop use as something like an Android TV. While it's unconventional wedge shape and overall heft might be a little weird as a traditional tablet, the RasPad 3 seems like an ideal kiosk, something that for which Android seems like a good fit.
We’ve previously seen compact Rockchip RK3399 powered single board computer with support for dual displays with the likes of Rock Pi 4 and NanoPi M4B thanks to HDMI and MIPI DSI interfaces.
Novasom M9 is another compact RK3399 SBC with both HDMI and MIPI DSI, as well as DisplayPort or embedded DisplayPort (eDP) for a wider choice of display interfaces, although as I understand it is still limited to dual independent display configurations. Another differentiating feature is the option for a wider -20 to +85€°C operating temperature meaning it can be equipped with Rockchip RK3399K processor instead of RK3399, and the board also happens to come with an M.2 socket for NVMe SSDs just like Rock Pi 4 board.
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The company can provide Android and Linux BSP for the board. There’s limited public information about the software, but M9 should be compatible with other “RASPMOOD” boards from the company that come with an SDK that makes software development similar to what you’d do with Raspberry Pi OS.
Developed by bunnie Huang and Sean “xobx” Cross, the Precursor designed to be a pocket-sized, mobile device that gives owners complete control. If you have the technical know-how to inspect the code or program the device, you don’t have to trust that the chip designers, OS developer, or anyone else is protecting your privacy – all code can be inspected, and you can “compile your CPU” from source using the FPGA.
That said, the Precursor probably isn’t powerful enough to use as a replacement for a modern smartphone. It has modern features like a USB Type-C port, but out of the box the FPGA will work like a 100 MHz, 32-bit RISC-V processor. It can be configured to operate like many other older chips, but with a top speed of 100 MHz, the Precursor has the computing power of a 15-year-old smartphone, PDA, or handheld game console like a Palm Treo 600, BlackBerry 8700, or Nintendo DS.
After almost 6 months of development we have released the new OpenIndiana Hipster snapshot 2020.10 right on time on October 31st, 2020.
September marked a decade since the OpenIndiana project was announced for continuing on with the OpenSolaris code-base (and ultimately based on Illumos) in being born out of the justified and proven accurate concerns when Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.10 was released this weekend as the newest version of this open-source operating system.
I must confess I do cry and cry like a baby. It feels nice afterwards, I must say.
Last month was really difficult for me, on personal and professional front. On personal level, I am undergoing therapy for Depression and Anxiety.
On professional front, I missed many things. For the first time, I couldn't take part in Hacktoberfest in the same passion as before.
Another low point, I stopped contributing in Swift for The Weekly Challenge.
Then I stopped taking part in the weekly challenge completely. No weekly blog either talking about my contributions.
I didn't stop there, I even stopped doing live session video.
At one point, I even decided not to do monthly report.
With all the negativity, I received plenty of support and helping hands. Thanks everyone.
Python has many data types like integer, float, string, list, tuple, etc. In this tutorial, we will learn about the list data type. Lists are one of the most used data types of python and can be used for many operations.
To follow this tutorial, it is recommended to have the latest python version installed in your system. You can follow our guide on installing the latest version of python. Most of the code in this tutorial can be run in the python shell, but it is recommended to have an IDE to write python code. You can check our comparison on the top 10 IDE for writing code.
Many of the “Django tips” articles that I see online are geared towards beginners not intermediate or advanced Django developers. I hope to demonstrate some of Django’s depth, specifically around the ORM, and you’ll need to have an intermediate understanding of Django. Let’s start by looking at the example models.
I wanted to learn Python because Python is a object oriented programming language and is used widely in Programming.
Suppose you need to scrape data from a website after translating the web page in R and Python. In google chrome, there is an option (or functionality) to translate any foreign language. If you are an english speaker and don't know any other foreign language and you want to extract data from the website which does not have option to convert language to English, this article would help you how to perform translation of a webpage.
To celebrate the birth of Kerala on November 1st, the southernmost state in India with around 35 million people speaking its language Malayalam; Rachana Institute of Typography is announcing the release of ‘Ezhuthu/à ´Žà ´´à µÂà ´¤à µÂà ´¤à µ’ — a handwriting/script style Unicode font with traditional orthography.
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The glyphs are drawn by famed calligrapher Narayana Bhattathiri. The hand-drawn characters are turned to vector graphics which are then transformed to font shapes and this typography is done by Hussain KH who lead the Rachana Aksharavedi movement and designed popular fonts such as Rachana, Meera, Meera Inimai etc. The fine tuned typeface need OpenType shaping to correctly shape and render advanced conjunct character formations in Malayalam. The OpenType feature development, integration and technical infrastructure is worked on by me, Rajeesh. Ashok Kumar and CVR made key contributions to the font development.
A twoââ¬âyear pilot between the European Patent Office (EPO) and the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) will enable nationals and residents of China to select the EPO as their International Searching Authority (ISA) for applications filed in English under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).
The pilot, which starts on 1 December 2020, will be open to applicants filing with either the CNIPA or the World Intellectual Property Organization's International Bureau (IB) as receiving Office and limited to a total of 2 500 applications in the first 12 months and 3 000 applications in the second 12 months.
The European Patent Office (EPO) Technical Boards of Appeal has ruled in Sanofi and Regeneron's favor, invalidating certain claims of Amgen's European patent (EP 2 215 124) directed to PCSK9 (proprotein convertase subtilisin/Kexin type 9) antibodies relevant to Praluent (alirocumab). Praluent will continue to be available in European countries where it is approved for use and for sale.
"We are pleased with today's decision by the European Patent Office, which upholds the rigorous standard for pharmaceutical patents that we argued for in this case, affirming that Amgen's asserted claims against Sanofi in Europe are invalid," said Karen Linehan, Executive Vice President, Legal Affairs and General Counsel, Sanofi.
