Advantech’s rugged “ICR-4453” 5G NR (New Radio) router runs Conel OS Linux on a Cortex-A72 SoC with 5x GbE ports, an SFP cage, 2x mini-PCIe, 2x SIM, and USB, serial, and CAN connections.
Advantech has announced a Linux-driven router and gateway equipped with a 5G NR (New Radio) modem. 3GPP’s 5G NR spec is a faster air interface for 5G compared to the 4G LTE infrastructure used by most 5G networks. Supporting extensions of 5G beyond 6GHz, 5G NR is particularly useful for low-latency “massive IoT” applications. (See farther below for more on 5G NR.)
Kubernetes has released version 1.20, featuring 42 enhancements, with 11 enhancements graduating to stable, 15 moving to beta, and 16 entering alpha.
Kubernetes 1.20 brings two important beta features, allowing Kubernetes admins and users alike to have more adequate control over how volume permissions are applied when a volume is mounted inside a Pod.
After KubeCon I've decided to give k3s a try. And I'm impressed!
K3s is a small distribution of Kubernetes (k8s), Linux container orchestrator system. It's really tiny while being functional. One starts with a single 52MiB binary and after few seconds there's a functional installation with half a dozen of system pods. It's a far cry from OKD and its resource hunger. Of course, compared to OKD, there's much less functionality in k3s, but enough for most cases (including mine).
First, I'm writing now, because only recently cgroupsv2 support was added to k3s. Previously it just didn't work on modern systems, like Fedora.
Second, the etcd database, widely perceived as a mandatory part of k8s, is optional in k3s! By default embedded SQLite is used – enough for simple scenarios. I'm particularly happy for Postgresql support. Yes, you can have your Kubernetes working with pgsql.
But K3s is not a single-node solution only. Adding worker nodes is simple; High-Availability solutions for control-plane looks sound (haven't tried yet, but it's on my TODO).
I've been using Matrix for a few weeks now so I thought I'd chat about what it actually, how it works with features like bridging or just general message sharing and why I absolutely believe that you're next chat should at least be bridged to Matrix
I've been playing a bit with my Doom Emacs configuration, so I thought I would go through my config files and explain what I'm doing. This could prove to be quite educational to those of you that are new to Emacs in general and especially Doom Emacs.
Hello and welcome to Episode 384 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this final episode of 2020, we invite listeners to join us via Discord for a discussion of amateur radio, technology, open source software and hardware and the year in review. We also make some predictions for 2021 and depart into hedonism for a while as well. We hope you enjoy this community-driven content, have a safe and happy holiday season and join us again when we re-start the show on January 7, 2021.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got some interesting and somewhat Rocky news for CentOS to talk about. There’s a new Flatpak App Store released this week called Souk. Linux Gaming news with Cyberpunk 2077 running on Linux thanks to Proton. We’ve also got many new releases this week from PAPPL 1.0, OpenRGB, Qt 6.0 toolkit, CRUX Linux, and QEMU. Then we’ll round out the show with some great deals from Humble Bundle. All that and much more coming up right now on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
Linux creator Linus Torvalds has announced version 5.10 of the Linux kernel with a bunch of driver updates and a message to developers to hold off submitting further fixes until 2020's Covid-stricken holiday season is over.
Linux 5.10 is a big release because it's the latest kernel with long-term support (LTS), meaning it will be supported for at least two years. But often LTS versions end up with six years' support.
Linux 5.10 has been released. In the new version, most of the patches are small, Linus Torvalds explained in a post.The biggest change is fixed pin mapping definitions for a pincontrol driver.
The fixes span networking, architecture, filesystems, and tooling. Torvalds also noted that the merge window for 5.11 will start tomorrow and that for the release he will be strict about the merging only thighs that are ready before the merge window starts.
Based on the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series, the GNU Linux-libre 5.10 kernel is now available for the GNU/Linux community to deblob any proprietary code and drivers from the upstream kernel release, providing us with a 100% free/libre kernel.
This release introduces deblobbing for a new firmware-loading primitive introduced in Linux kernel 5.10 LTS, disables new blobs in the AMDGPU open-source graphics driver for AMD GPUs and the Intel i915 video and Bluetooth HCI drivers, as well as in the Quallcomm ath11k, Intel iwlwifi, IMX SDMA, and MLXSW Spectrum drivers.
Following yesterday's release of the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel the GNU folks have released their "GNU Linux-libre 5.10-gnu" downstream that is the Linux kernel but without support for loading proprietary modules as well as preventing closed-source firmware binaries from being loaded on the system and related steps in the name of free software.
GNU Linux-libre 5.10-gnu remains popular in the FSF-endorsed distribution circles like Hyperbola, Trisequel, and GNU Guix, but for most modern hardware out there is simply won't work or less than optimally without the closed-source firmware/microcode support or in some cases missing out on security updates for hardware as a result.
GNU Linux-libre 5.10-gnu cleaning-up scripts, cleaned-up sources, and
cleaning-up logs (including tarball signatures) are now available from
our git-based release archive git://linux-libre.fsfla.org/releases.git/
tags {scripts,sources,logs}/v5.10-gnu.
Tarballs and incremental patches are also published at
<https://www.fsfla.org/selibre/linux-libre/download/releases/5.10-gnu/>.
The scripts are unchanged since first published for this cycle, last
weekend.
This was a reasonably busy cycle. A new firmware-loading primitive was
introduced upstream, precompiled bpf code was added to the upstream tree
along with corresponding sources; amdgpu had tree rearrangements beside
the usual addition of new blobs; Intel i915 video and bluetooth hci
drivers request new blobs (disabled); firmware loading was disabled in
newly-added drivers for Cadence MHDP8546 DPI/DP bridge and for Marvell
Prestera switch; IMX SDMA, MLXSW Spectrum; Intel iwlwifi; Quallcomm
ath11k; Broadcom STM DPFE memory and Intel Haswell and HiFi2 sound had
some rearrangement in their blob loading code; new blobs have been
disabled in qcom aarch64 ports.
For up-to-the-minute news, join us on #linux-libre of irc.gnu.org
(Freenode), or follow me (@lxoliva) on Twister <http://twister.net.co/>,
Secure Scuttlebutt, GNU social at social.libreplanet.org, Diaspora* at
pod.libreplanetbr.org or pump.io at identi.ca. Check the link in the
signature for direct links.
Linux Kernel 5.10 has just been released, just as 2020 is about to reach its end. As Linus himself commented, this was a bigger release than expected. This underlines the enormous driving force that open software has: even amidst the chaos and the uncertainty that this year brought, Linux Kernel development keeps moving forward at a constant and relentless pace, which is reassuring and a way of keeping us grounded and mindful that the world keeps spinning.
This version will be the next LTS release, you can find an overview of the significant changes it contains at LWN: part 1 and part 2.
As with every release, Collabora has contributed a good number of patches and remains active developing, maintaining, documenting and testing many parts of the kernel. Here are some of our contributions.
In Linux kernel 5.10 LTS, Collabora continues to show their love for the Rockchip media drivers by improving support for the RK3399 ISP driver, which is now ready for prime time and will be included by default in the upcoming Linux 5.11 kernel series, due for release in mid-February 2021.
They also added support for Mali Bifrost GPUs to the Panfrost free and open-source driver for Mali GPUs, improved support for the V4L2 (Video4Linux) H.264 uAPI by cleaning and stabilizing it to make it ready for mainstream.
Linus Torvalds has released version 5.10 of the Linux kernel and given developers working on the project a pre-Christmas deadline to get their desired additions for 5.11 into his inbox.
Torvalds’ release announcement for version 5.10 stated: “I pretty much always wish that the last week was even calmer than it was, and that's true here too.” But as nothing in the release made him feel an extra week would be truly necessary, the new kernel was let loose upon a waiting world and the project avoided the holiday season collision that the Linux overseer feared in late November.
But Christmas is not completely saved: Torvalds has given kernel devs a strict timetable for submitting changes for version 5.11.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.10.1 kernel.
All users of the 5.10 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.10.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.10.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
It was just yesterday evening -- less than 24 hours ago -- that Linux 5.10 LTS was released but already the first point release has arrived due to bugs in the storage code.
Linux 5.10.1 as the first point release normally doesn't arrive for a few days or week after the initial kernel debut, but this time around it's coming one day later.
Linux 5.10.1 has just two fixes, both of which affect the storage code. There is a revert of a prior "fix" around RAID DISCARD limits for RAID1 and RAID10 within the Device Mapper code. The commit simply mentions "It causes problems :(." The other is fixing the MD code's chunk sectors variable from being an unsigned int to just an int, also on the basis that "it causes problems :(." The later MD code change ended up breaking mounting of at least RAID6 setups under Linux 5.10 and was quickly noticed by upstream developers when moving to the final kernel release.
The first set of major file-system material submitted for the newly opened Linux 5.11 merge window are the Btrfs updates.
Assuming Linus Torvalds has no last minute objections, the long-in-development Intel SGX support will be merged into the mainline Linux kernel.
Earlier this year work began on preparing SD Express card/host support for Linux and now with the Linux 5.11 kernel that will debut in early 2021 is this preliminary support.
SD Express promises faster transfer speeds thanks to support for PCI Express 4.0 and the NVMe 1.4 protocol. SD Express is to come to SDHC/SDXC/SDUC memory cards while retaining backwards compatibility with the legacy SD card interface. The Linux kernel needed to be adapted obviously and first initialize with the legacy SD interface and then checking host/card support for PCIe/NVMe support before making the connection upgrade.
Linux's Cedrus media driver that provides video decoding on various Allwinner SoCs is finally seeing support added for VP8. But given this addition for Linux 5.11 won't be out as stable until well into 2021 and most of the world has moved onto VP9, it may not be too beneficial at this stage.
The Cedrus media driver has been working out well for various Allwinner SoCs and supporting the likes of H.264/H.265 decoding. But with Linux 5.11 is the ability to handle VP8 content. Unfortunately rather late for mainline. Cedrus in Linux 5.11 is also seeing support for the Allwinner R40, V3s, and other improvements.
Today’s exploratory morning post is about sampling from stencil buffers.
What is sampling from stencil buffers, some of you might be asking.
Sampling in general is the reading of data from a resource. It’s most commonly used as an alternative to using a Copy command for transferring some amount of data from one resource to another in a specified way.
For example, extracting only stencil data from a resource which combines both depth and stencil data. In zink, this is an important operation because none of the Copy commands support multisampled resources containing both depth and stencil data, an OpenGL feature that the unit tests most certainly cover.
As with all things, zink has a tough time with this.
Back in October Intel announced Iris Xe MAX as discrete graphics for laptops. The overall Linux state for Xe MAX hasn't been too clear and we haven't had any hardware access to this Intel laptop discrete graphics hardware to report our own findings, but their developers have now cleared up the situation. The good news is the Xe MAX graphics can be used for a GPU-accelerated Linux virtual machine. The bad news is the Xe MAX support doesn't yet allow for dGPU usage by the host outside of a virtual machine context as it needs "two different [Linux] kernels" for operation in conjunction with the integrated graphics.
As a Linux user, you might have come across the terminology 'terminal emulator'. Automatically, you might be tempted to think that a terminal emulator is synonymous with the terminal. While these two are similar in almost every sense, a few subtle differences exist between these two.
What is a terminal emulator in Linux
The terminal emulator or simply TERM is an application that mimics or emulates the functionalities of a conventional terminal window. It is used to run shell commands, terminal-based graphical applications, and more.
The terminal emulator allows users to connect and access remote devices such as servers, routers and other PCs via command line using protocols such as SSH or telnet. Once connected or logged in to the host system, a user can perform administrative tasks such as installing, configuring, and running applications as well as carrying out file transfer between the host and the remote system.
Some emulators such as Terminix and terminator have a tiling feature allowing you to split multiple terminal sessions in one terminal window. You can easily switch from one terminal session to another and even split the terminal horizontally or vertically.
There are plenty of terminal programs to access the serial console from minicom or screen to Putty. But Willy Tarreau was not quite happy with those tools, so he decided to write his own: Bootterm.
[...]
Bootterm C program is still under development, and Willy plans to implement automatic speed switching and macros.
If you are a digital minimalist, you are most likely using or at least tried Taskwarrior; a command-line minimal yet features-rich to-do app.
Taskline is a new stylish successor for Taskwarrior with less complicated learning curve. Taskline turns your terminal into a powerful task management tool without a hustle.
Unlike Taskwarrior, It features board and timeline view with a set of useful features that include backup option and better control over tasks list.
It's a minimal lightweight application that does not require extensive hardware resources to run.
Linux offers a vast collection of open source small utilities that perform functions ranging from the obvious to the bizarre. It’s the quality and selection of these tools that help Linux stand out as a productive environment. A good utility cooperates with other applications, integrating seamlessly.
It has often been said that information confers power, and that the most important currency in our culture today is information. Keeping track of bits and pieces of information is a minefield.
In part, this is because of passable short term memory, coupled with what can only be described as ‘brain fog’. To combat this, we arm myself with open source software that helps us efficiently capture a lot of information. We generally prefer to keep our information local and cloud-free, primarily for security reasons. And we primarily advance software which doesn’t tie itself to any specific company or service, whether it’s Evernote, Google, or Microsoft.
TreeSheets is an open source tool that organizes data. The developer claims it’s suitable for any kind of data organization, such as todo lists, calendars, project management, brainstorming, organizing ideas, planning, requirements gathering, presentation of information, and more.
After almost two years of development, version 3.0 of QSoas is finally out ! It brings in a number of new features.
We are all software hunters and would like to immediately check out the updated app to get new features.
Most distributors do not have this feature due to the standard release path.
But this feature is present in Ubuntu and its derivatives because users can maintain and publish the latest software as Personal Package Archive (PPAs).
System logging is a very important aspect of maintaining a system and monitoring it for issues. Making logs, implementing your items to log and checking those logs can help you keep systems running smoothly.
mv command is used to move files from one directory to other directory. Also mv command is used to rename file in Linux systems. It is an frequently uses command by the Linux users. You must learn about mv command in Linux and its parameters.
Being able to build and tear down a public cloud environment is very useful, but most of us don’t have easy access to a public cloud. The next best thing would be to have a lab on your local machine, but even running on a local machine brings performance, flexibility, and other challenges. Most of the time, the additional workloads on our local machines interfere with doing our daily job, and they certainly prevent having a readily available environment to play and experiment with new software.
My team and I encountered this challenge a few years ago when we were starting to learn Ansible. We couldn’t find an environment that we could use individually, and our frustration with the situation caused some of us to stop experimenting. We knew we needed to find a solution.
OpenShift requires a load balancer for providing access to the hosted applications. Although I can run a three node cluster, I need a fourth location to provide a load balancer that can then provide access to the cluster.
For my home lab set up, this means I want to run one on my bastion host….but it is already running HTTP and (FreeIPA) Red Hat IdM. I don’t want to break that. So, I want to add a second IP address to the bastion host, and have all of the existing services make use of the existing IP address. Only the new HA Proxy instance will use the new IP address.
This would be trivial for a simple Ethernet port, but I am using a Bridge, which makes it a touch trickier, but not terribly so.
In a nutshell, an archive is a single file that contains a collection of other files and/or directories. Archive files are typically used for a transfer (locally or over the internet) or make a backup copy of a collection of files and directories which allow you to work with only one file (if compressed, it has a lower size than the sum of all files within it) instead of many. Likewise, archives are used for software application packaging. This single file can be easily compressed for ease of transfer while the files in the archive retain the structure and permissions of the original files.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nvidia Driver on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, The performance of graphics processing units (GPUs) mainly depends on drivers. Ubuntu by default use open source video driver Nouveau which has limited support and features when compared with proprietary Nvidia drivers. Installing NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu is an easy task that can be done in less than a minute. Ubuntu includes a tool that can detect the graphics card model and install the appropriate NVIDIA drivers. Alternatively, you can download and install the drivers from the NVIDIA site.
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 Nvidia Driver on a Debian 10 (Buster).
If you are a frequent reader of this website, you will know by now that I am a fan of productivity applications, such as to do lists and Kanban boards. In recent months I have paid attention to the open source To Do applications named Planner and Super Productivity, both of which I think are superb productivity applications for Linux, with both their own specific qualities. In this new blog post I pay attention to the To Do app from Zenkit, which is an alternative to the once popular but decommissioned Wunderlist app, which is not open source and is only partly free. Although I think open source as a concept is important, I am not a closed source purist. In my opinion the availability of quality closed source applications are of great importance for a wide acceptance and a growing success of Linux on the desktop, because it can attract existing macOS and Windows users who already use these apps and just can switch over to Linux without the need to immediately search for alternatives. In this article I want to share how to use Zenkit To Do on Linux to support your productive life.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Kubuntu 20.10.
The "How to Homelab" series helps you plan your very own home server setup for world domination (or for even just hosting some apps). In the third episode, we look into networking and how to plan your layout.
In this video, we are looking at how to install GeForce Now on Ubuntu 20.04.
Cron allows you to run commands, programs, and scripts automatically at defined points in time or on a schedule. It’s powerful, it’s light, and it’s also hard to wrap your head around. That’s why you can find front-ends that try to simplify the use of crontab, and Zeit is one of the best ones.
Zeit’s sole goal is to make adding and managing your cron jobs very easy. With Zeit, running commands and scripts is as straightforward as adding a new entry to a task list. Let’s see how it allows you to easily create cron jobs in Linux.
Linus Torvalds announced the Linux Kernel 5.10 after seven weeks in development and available for general usage with new features and improvements.
As per Linus Torvalds for Kernel 5.10
I pretty much always wish that the last week was even calmer than it was, and that’s true here too. There’s a fair amount of fixes in here, including a few last-minute reverts for things that didn’t get fixed, but nothing makes me go “we need another week”. Things look fairly normal.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install kernel 5.10 in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and LinuxMint 19.3 /20.
The Apache HTTP Server Project is a community effort to develop and maintain a "free software" HTTP server for modern operating systems (UNIX, GNU / Linux, BSD, Windows).
In this post we're going to configure Apache as a reverse proxy in front of PHP-FPM service.
Spotify is an audio streaming and media services provider, that allows users to listen to millions of songs on the go using the Internet. The users don’t need to download, everything is in the cloud and what they need is the Spotify client, an account with it, and of course an internet connection. In addition, you can create playlists, incorporate your own music stored locally on the PC or find out about new records, the latest charts, and news from the music scene.
There are also ready-made playlists of different genres arranged in different categories so that users can play them according to mode or event such as “summer”, “fitness” or “romance”. “Spotify radios” are just as useful; these are playlists that match an artist or an album. The free version i.e “Spotify Free”, comes with advertisements between the tracks, if you want the ad-free version switched to “Spotify Premium. After having a subscription, you can also down download your music to your PC or mobile device such as an iPad or Android smartphone and listen to it offline.
Skype is one of the most decent and reliable audio-calling, video calling, and chatting application that you can install on your Linux system without any hesitation. People have been using Skype for many purposes. Besides getting connected with your friends and family through Skype, you can also use it for professional works. Many private companies consider the Skype application to take the candidate’s interviews and presentations. As Skype is a cross-platform application, you can install it on almost every smart device. The sync speed and user interface are awe-inspiring. Installing Skype on your Linux system might give you a havoc free option to chat and call.
Today we are looking at how to install Stencyl 4.0 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.
Echo Command in Linux is one of the most used commands in Bash scripting. It is used to display the text that has been passed as argument for the command. Mostly it is used as a input for the next command or to send output to a file.
Redis is an open-source in-memory key-value data structure store that can be used as a cache server, message broker, etc. We can use a number of data types with redis like strings, lists, maps, sets, sorted sets, HyperLogs, bitmaps, streams, and spatial indexes.
After downloading the .deb file your thinking about how to install the package on your Ubuntu or Debian-based system.
Not to think much We are here to guide you just follow any 5 methods to install the .deb file.
Without taking any more time Let’s Begin.
Method 1: How to install a .deb file using the apt command When you download any file .deb file from the Internet the basic way to install the application using the apt command.
A multi-tier application is an application distributed among more than one layer. It logically separates the operational layers. The number of layers varies with business and application requirements. In this article, we will see an application divided into 2 layers, backend and frontend layer. We will use MongoDB as a backend to store data and Python Flask as a frontend Webserver. We will deploy these two applications using deployments in Kubernetes and have services to forward requests to them.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to convert CentOS 8 to CentOS Stream. For those of you who didn’t know, For those relying on CentOS 8 to enjoy the reliability and features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 but without the licensing costs, etc, that will end in 2021. At the end of 2021, CentOS 8 will no longer be maintained but CentOS 7 will stick around in a supported maintenance state until 2024. The CentOS Project will be focused moving forward just on CentOS Stream as the upstream/development branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
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 migrate your CentOS 8 Linux to CentOS Stream on CentOS 8.
In Ansible, Playbook files are usually used in executing tasks in remote hosts. These tasks range from installing and configuring services such as web and database servers to simple tasks such as checking uptime. However, when it comes to executing simple tasks in Ansible, ad hoc commands come very much in handy. Ad hoc commands enable you to quickly execute simple tasks on the fly without writing playbook files. In this guide, we show you how you can make the most of Ansible ad hoc commands.
MySQL is an relation database management system. At the writing time of this tutorial MySQL 8 is the latest version available. This tutorial help you to check MySQL server version running on your system.
As you may already, Vagrant is an open source application to build and maintain virtual software development environments. You can quickly spin up a virtual machine using a pre-configured Vagrant box and copy the same Vagrant box to other systems to deploy a exact replica of the current development environment. Once you're done exploring your development environment, you can simply reset the Vagrant machine back to it's original default state. So you don't have to download the same Vagrant box over and over.
API development or integration is not an easy task and takes a lot of effort, especially when developing/integrating larger APIs. Many steps are involved in the development process, like designing, virtualizing, documenting, etc. The most difficult task is to test out the APIs, but luckily, there is a lot of software that can save you time. One such software is Postman.
Postman is a platform that makes the API development process much easier through its API Client, Automated Testing, and documentation. In this article, let’s look at how to install Postman on Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Mattermost on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Mattermost is an open-source and self-hosted messaging application used for chat, file sharing, search, and integrations written in Golang and React. It an alternative to Slack and provides a chat service with file sharing, search, and integrations. It is designed for organizations and companies and allows teams to communicate and collaborate securely from everywhere.
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 Mattermost on 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.
If you are a conscientious system administrator, you have probably already wondered how you can make your files secure.
Nowadays, as system attacks get more and more frequent, it isn’t probably a bad idea to think about encrypting your files.
On Linux, there are multiple of encrypting files, directories or filesystems : namely using the LUKS disk encryption specification or simple tools such as GnuPG.
In this tutorial, you will learn how you can easily encrypt files and directories on Linux using the GnuPG tool as well as the zip utility.
This week, Red Hat created a huge public outcry over its announcement regarding the future of CentOS. Red Hat, in a shocking move, is discontinuing CentOS Project in favor of the rolling release, CentOS Stream.
The focus now shifts to CentOS Stream as the main CentOS distribution. In fact, at the end of 2021, curtains close on CentOS 8 which is a rebuild of RHEL 8, to pave the way for CentOS Stream which will serve the upstream branch of RHEL. In short, there won’t be CentOS 9 based on RHEL 9 or any other CentOS point release going forward.
Do you often manipulate images as part of your daily job?
I personally need to do the graphics work for this website before uploading it to my blog.
One of the most common image editing tasks is resizing, which tremendously reduces the image size from MB to KB.
This allows images to load quickly on the web even if someone uses a slow internet.
Linux Kernel 5.10 was released a day ago as the latest LTS (Long Term Support) release. Here’s how to install in Ubuntu & Linux Mint.
Linus Torvalds announced the release of Kernel 5.10: “Ok, here it is – 5.10 is tagged and pushed out. I pretty much always wish that the last week was even calmer than it was, and that’s true here too. There’s a fair amount of fixes in here, including a few last-minute reverts for things that didn’t get fixed, but nothing makes me go “we need another week”. Things look fairly normal.”
Docker Compose is a tool for defining and running multi-container applications. A typical example, and one which we will use later, would be a web server container and a database container configured to work together to provide a web application. Docker Compose then allows you to start the whole application with a single command!
You start by creating a Dockerfile, to build docker images of your application – or you can use existing images from a registry. You then define your docker services that you need to run your app in a docker-compose.yml file (see example later). Finally, you can run the whole thing using the docker-compose up command!
You can still install the old wallpapers from Submicron. The repository still exists.
It is just not in the /etc/pacman.conf anymore for one obvious reason. Everyone has their own set of wallpapers.
You will need to change your /etc/pacman.conf if you want to install them via pacman.
There are multiple methods you can use to securely copy files between Linux hosts. SCP and SFTP are two you need to know.
While the selection available to play on Stadia from Ubisoft isn't currently very big, Ubisoft+ has now started rolling out on Stadia and it doesn't need Stadia Pro either.
What looks like one to watch - NIGHT/SHADE is an upcoming romantic visual novel thriller from KingAsphy Studio.
"NIGHT/SHADE is a visual novel about overcoming the toxicity within interpersonal relationships as well as within oneself. This character driven plot explores the complexities of love and loss in the form of a romantic thriller through the eyes of our main character, Sasha, while he navigates life's darker elements and tries not to get caught in the crossfire of two ruthless crime syndicates."
With a strange otter/cat as the protagonist, Shield Cat seems like one to keep on your watch list with some really charming visuals and you can try the free demo.
"Shield Cat is an Action Adventure game with light RPG elements. You play as Lance, an otter/cat who must go on a quest to rescue his friends and the Cat Kingdom! Along the way you'll solve puzzles, gain new abilities, meet new friends, and collect stuff!"
It feels a bit like a classic Zelda title, one with plenty of exploration and secrets to find as you explore. Shield Cat is not a finished game though, with the developer mentioning it's still a prototype but it's fully playable and quite enjoyable to run around in. Such a ridiculously sweet atmosphere I absolutely love it. There's already a plenty to explore, along with character ability customization. Shield Cat has all the makings of the next action-adventure hit.
The what: paired up with the Wine and Steam Play Proton translation layers, VKD3D-Proton will translate Direct3D 12 to Vulkan and hopefully allow you to run some more advanced Windows-only games and apps on Linux. VKD3D-Proton is the Valve fork of the original project from the Wine developers, with a priority on performance and game compatibility.
Valve's VKD3D-Proton continues speeding along as their downstream of VKD3D for mapping Direct3D 12 over Vulkan. VKD3D-Proton 2.1 was just released and besides enhancing the GPU-bound performance there are more prominent DX12 games now working with this translation layer.
VKD3D-Proton 2.1 can see around 15% better GPU-bound uplift in games like Ghostrunner and other Unreal Engine 4 titles. There are also slight improvements in fully GPU bound scenarios for both AMD and NVIDIA graphics, other optimizations that will benefit RADV, and also lower multi-threaded CPU overhead with some situations. This release also makes use of the recent VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type Vulkan extension that should also further lower the overhead.
My article about learning different programming languages lists five things you need to understand when starting a new language. An important part of learning a language, of course, is knowing what you intend to do with it.
I've found that simple games are both fun to write and useful in exploring a language's abilities. In this article, I demonstrate how to create a simple guessing game in Java.
As announced before, Kate turned twenty today.
Here again my initial request to the KWrite maintainer about my work on a ‘MDI KWrite’ later called Kate (sorry, German & spelling mistakes)...
Funny enough, if you look at the timestamp of the mail, it got mailed out at “18:38:42”. I was 18 then, now I am 38 and 42 is always a good number, I couldn’t have faked that timestamp better!
Folks have been finding way to run GNU/Linux distributions on smartphones for years. But it’s only in the past few years that phone makers have started to produce phones designed to run operating systems that use a mainline Linux kernel.
So projects like Halium arose to simplify the process of getting a Linux-based operating system like Ubuntu Touch or KDE Neon to run on an off-the-shelf Android phone like a Google Nexus 5X by providing a bridge that allowed the operating system to communicate with a phone’s hardware using the Linux kernel provided by phone makers and Android services.
In August 2015, we announced the Plasma Mobile project at Akademy 2015 in A Coruña, Spain. In ~5 years, the project has evolved quite a lot, from an initial prototype, to being a fully functional mobile software system.
The initial prototype was created by replacing components from the Ubuntu Touch userspace which ran on the Google Nexus 5 device. This prototype system used the minimal Android userspace confined in an LXC container to access various drivers, like graphics, modem, wifi, sensors among others.
In the following years, we revisited the initial prototype architecture multiple times. You can read about some of the details in the following blogposts by Bhushan Shah.
The Calamares team is happy to announce a re-vamp of the Calamares website. Thanks to Anke Boersma (better known as the driving force behind KaOS) the design, layout and technology behind the website have jumped forward.
21 months after the release of the first version of NuTyX 11, I am very happy to announce the new version of NuTyX 20.12.0 and cards 2.4.123. The 64-bit version is a complete new project.
The compilation chain is completely rebuilt in addition to glibc 2.32, gcc 10.2.0 and binutils 2.34
The xorg-server graphics server version 1.20.10, the Mesa 3D library in 20.3.0, gtk3 3.24.24 and qt 5.15.2 are also in their latest versions.
The python interpreters are ent 3.9.0 and 2.7.18.
The XFCE desktop environment is updated to version 4.14.3.
The MATE desktop environment is also updated to version 1.24, the latest version available.
The KDE desktop environment is available in Plasma 5.20.4, Framework 5.76.0 and applications in 20.12.0. et les applications en 20.12.0.
Available browsers are: firefox 83.0, chromium 87.0.4280.88, falkon 3.1.0, epiphany 3.38.2, etc
Many desktop applications have been updated as well like thunderbird 78.5.1, Scribus 1.5.6, libreoffice 7.0.3.2, gimp 2.10.22, etc.
Core NuTyX ships with Long Term Support (LTS) kernels: 4.9.248, 4.14.212, 4.19.163, 5.4.83, and 5.10.0 and the latest stable version 5.9.14.
It has been more than a year since the last stable release of Mageia Linux distribution as the upcoming Mageia version 8 is still under development and inching closer to its stable build slow and steady.
However, as the year 2020 is about to end, Mageia team has finally announced the second beta build of the next Mageia 8. The latest Beta 2 includes updates to packages, Kernel, Java, and the graphical stack, and the base system upgrade.
Users of the community enterprise distributions can be confident in the direction of openSUSE Leap for those who might be hunting for a stable Linux distribution that offers predictability and longevity.
Minor releases like openSUSE Leap 15.2 sometimes get compared to a major release. The minor releases are essentially updates that people can choose rather than have forced updates.
Major versions of Leap receive long periods of maintenance and security updates; the release cycle has additional overlap that is greater than that of alternatives. Major releases are coming roughly every three to four years and minor releases come usually once a year, which leads to a life cycle of about 18 months of maintenance and security updates per minor release. Many of the package’s versions are the same as in previous minor releases.
Leap aligns with SUSE Linux Enterprise and its Service Packs (SP), which keeps the system updated, stable and patched. openSUSE and SUSE have been collaborating to bring openSUSE Leap 15.3 and SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3 even closer together to make them fully compatible.
As the openSUSE Board election is drawing closer, with the ballots opening on December 15 already, we want to invite the openSUSE community to a “meet-and-greet” and QA live session with the candidates.
In the past weeks there have been passionate discussions on the election and candidates, and we felt we had to answer the community’s interest with a proper setting.
In this video call the candidates will introduces themselves, present their openSUSE board election platforms and answer questions. While this might sound a bit formal we really want to keep it very informal and relaxed for everyone. The goal is to give the community a better picture of the candidates so they can decide whom to vote for.
The Red Hat, Inc decided to prematurely end the life of CentOS 8 "stable" by December 2021 which was earlier planned for EOL as of 2029. CentOS 8 is now replaced by the rolling release based CentOS Stream. Sever administrators across the world are in a decision-making stage based on their respective infrastructures and dependency. To help everyone, here are the top 5 free Linux distribution for CentOS replacement for you - applicable for both servers and desktop.
CentOS is one of the most popular server distributions in the world. It is an open source fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and provides the goodness of RHEL without the cost associated with RHEL.
However, things have changed recently. Red Hat is converting a stable CentOS to a rolling release model in the form of CentOS Stream. CentOS 8 was supposed to be supported till 2029 but it is now forced discontinued by the end of 2021.
If you are using CentOS for your servers, it may make you wonder where to go from here.
Choosing an operating system for your server or business is not an easy task, especially if you are looking to use a Linux distribution. This is because there are hundreds of versions available for Linux, each with their own benefits. Out of the hundreds of options, the most popular choices for web servers are Ubuntu and CentOS. Knowing the differences between Ubuntu vs. CentOS for small businesses can help you decide which will work best for your business’ use case.
If you are reading this blog, you are probably a CentOS user and are in the position where you need to look at alternatives going forward.
Switching to Oracle Linux is easy, so here are a few reasons to consider why you should.
Free to download, use, and distribute — for more than 14 years Since the debut of Oracle Linux release 4, in 2006, it has been completely free to use and easy to download. Major and update release have been free for more than 14 years. Errata releases have been freely available since 2012. Free source code, free binaries, free updates, free errata, freely redistributable and free to use in production — all without having to sign any documents with Oracle and without any need to remove trademarks and copyrights.
Oracle Linux has an equivalent release for every major Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version: 4, 5, 6, 7, and most recently 8. Oracle Linux releases consistently track Red Hat with errata typically released within 24 hours, update releases usually available within five business days, and major version releases within three months.
Red Hat announced changes to CentOS Linux release structure last week, and I like everyone else around is working through what that means. I have worked with and on CentOS since 2005, and saw a lot of my work in EPEL as helping people in that community able to get things done. This has been a real kick to the guts for a lot of people, and I do not have the words to express myself on this. That said, as a System Administrator, you have to take the Tango Charlie Foxtrot's as they are handed to you, plan what to do next, and execute as efficiently as possible.
Red Hat recently announced that CentOS 8 Linux a head to head version to Red Hat 8 Enterprise version will no longer be supported and discontinued at the end of 2021. And on its place, the rolling version CentOS Stream as the downstream branch of RHEL, launched in 2019, will continue to find out bugs to make the upstream version more stable and secure.
However, CentOS 7 running servers, will not get affected and have the updates in parallel to the RHEL 7 life cycle. RHEL 7 will end its last maintenance cycles in 2024.
However, if you are using CentOS 8, then what are the alternatives in 2021? Unfortunately, even though if you find the one then migration of server applications will be another challenge. Yet, here are some options to replace CentOS in 2021.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has signed off on the proposal for defaulting to PipeWire with Fedora 34 due out next spring.
The proposal is for Fedora 34 to default to PipeWire in place of PulseAudio and JACK. After Red Hat has been investing in PipeWire the past several years as the audio/video stream management solution and designed to securely fit the needs of Wayland, Flatpak, and other modern Linux technologies, they feel it's ready for the limelight.
Subscription management, in general, can be anywhere on the spectrum from unnoticeably simple to unbearably painful depending on what company you’re working with, how involved you are with their subscription components, and oftentimes, how educated you are in their policies.
Here at Red Hat, we understand it hasn't been all rainbows and butterflies when it comes to managing a Red Hat Subscription. But we are working on making this process as smooth and painless as possible for all of our users, regardless of their role, involvement, or training levels.
I’m here to tell you, we’re working with a goal to achieve "absolute zero" when it comes to how much we require from our customers in order to manage their Red Hat Subscriptions.
We’ve seen the terrifying (COVID-19, "murder" hornets), the hopeful (promising COVID-19 vaccine trial results, a global reawakening to issues related to racial inequity), the thought-provoking ("unidentified aerial phenomena" videos released by the U.S. government), and the downright weird (a puppy born with green fur, a drumming duck named Ben Afquack).
While we didn’t film UFOs or train waterfowl to play percussion instruments, Red Hat Shares did cover some timely and important technology topics this yearââ¬â¢from edge computing to Kubernetes to automationââ¬â¢as well as our first virtual Red Hat Summit.
In our end-of-year issue, check out the top 10 Red Hat Shares stories from 2020, Red Hat’s 2021 Global Tech Outlook, advice on how to prepare your IT infrastructure for the next 10 years, how we’re helping fight COVID-19, and more.
Linux Mint 20.1 Beta just popped up on the main download servers of the popular Ubuntu-based distribution, so I was able to grab the ISO images to take a look at the changes and publish a few words and some screenshots before the Linux Mint team will officially announce the release on their blog with more details on what’s new.
As you know, the Linux Mint team released the Cinnamon 4.8 desktop environment about two weeks ago, so the biggest new features is that the flagship Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint 20.1 beta comes with Cinnamon 4.8.3 by default.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 661 for the week of December 6 – 12, 2020.
Single board computer? It’s time for Single board servers. A new product, ZimaBoard, is being prepared for its crowdfunding campaign to give you a “hackable single board server”.
ZimaBoard: Like Raspberry Pi but focused on home servers
Single-board computers (SBCs) have been around for a while performing a range of educational, commercial, and industrial applications. Their popularity increased in recent years among hobbyists and DIY enthusiasts looking for low-cost devices that get the job done with efficiency.
While Raspberry Pi has started eyeing on the entry-level desktop market with the recent Raspberry Pi 400 like devices, it is interesting to see someone focusing on server devices with ZimaBoard. The makers even term is as “single board server” instead of the usual “single board computer”.
Orders placed now will be shipped on April 30, 2021. The Ubuntu Linux version of the board is exclusive to CrowdSupply and won't be offered once the funding campaign (which has already reached its goal) ends. There's nothing to stop you purchasing the Windows 10 Pro version and switching to a Linux distro, though.
Anyone looking to get a HackBoard 2 should back the crowd supply campaign for $140, with Windows 10 Pro, or $99 for the Ubuntu Linux version.
And then there’s Sxmo. Described as a “collection of simple and suckless X programs and scripts,” this made-for-Pinephone software lets you navigate using the phone’s power and volume keys. For example, you can open an application-specific context menu by tapping the volume up key, then use the up and down arrows to navigate and the power button to select your choice.
It’s… honestly kind of tedious.
Fortunately Sxmo also supports touch input. So you can, for example, tap the power button once to bring up an on-screen keyboard and then type out a search or command.
And now, starting with Sxmo version 1.2.0, you can also use gesture-based navigation for a bunch of actions.
Even if a child doesn’t have a phone of their own, they often borrow their parent’s phone to play games or watch videos. Most phones don’t distinguish between children or adults when it comes to the data they collect.
The Librem 5 respects the privacy of you and your children by running free software that does not track you. The Librem 5’s hardware kill switches allow you to disable the network completely with a flip of the switch so your child doesn’t accidentally end up online, making it the best phone for a child’s privacy.
Axiomtek’s “NA347” network appliance runs Linux or Win 10 on a dual-core Celeron N3350 with up to 8GB RAM, 3x GbE, 2x USB 3.0, HDMI, M.2 for SATA, and mini-PCIe and nano-SIM for wireless.
Axiomtek has released an even smaller, 146 x 118.2 x 26mm variation on its quad-port, 146 x 118.2 x 33.5mm NA346 network appliance. The NA347 similarly runs Yocto-based Linux or Win 10 on a dual-core, up to 2.4GHz Celeron N3350 Apollo Lake SoC with a a 6W TDP. The 3-port system is designed as an entry-level SD-WAN, VPN, and security gateway for small and home offices and other IIoT security applications
Last September, we wrote Banana Pi team was working on an Amlogic S905X3 SBC called BPI-M5 and very similar to Hardkernel ODROID-C4 board launched in April 2020. At the time, we noted the Banana Pi BPI-M5 did add a 16GB eMMC flash on-board by default, while ODROID-C4 requires booting from a MicroSD card or a separate eMMC flash module.
Kaleb Clark, like many of us, works with others from all around the globe. While he could view any number of websites or commercial options to see what time it is for these other people, he decided to make a world clock to get this info at a glance.
What he came up with uses a 3.5ââ¬Â³ SPI TFT screen to show eight time zones in the device’s main section, plus a pair of 7-segment displays for two more “slots.” The unit runs on an Arduino Nano 33 IoT, which checks the time over WiFi via the Network Time Protocol, or NTP.
Firefox 84 had a small release cycle with only eight beta versions and comes a month after Firefox 83, which added a HTTPS-Only mode to make your web browsing more secure. The biggest change in Firefox 84 for Linux users appears to be the enablement of WebRender by default on Linux/GNOME/X11.
Yes, you’re reading that right, Mozilla said that the WebRender feature will be enabled on GNU/Linux systems using the GNOME desktop environment and running on top of X.Org Server (X11), not Wayland.
Websites are divided into static and dynamic websites. Dynamic websites are usually powered by a CMS (Content Management System) like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. CMS builds the page from the database and HTML templates every time a user requests it. On the other hand, Static Sites are websites that are served from a web server to the client without any changes. Static Sites are on the rise nowadays because they offer more speed, security, and simplicity in development than dynamic websites.
Static Site Generators are a set of tools which simplify the process of generating static webpages from HTML, CSS, and Markdown. The following is a list of the top free and open source Static Site Generators.
I've built a 3.3.52 alpha, this will become the stable 3.4 release in a few weeks if nothing critical is found. I'll be on vacation for a bit, I may not do this until mid-January. Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]: http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/parted/parted-3.3.52.tar.xz http://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/parted/parted-3.3.52.tar.xz.sig Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth: https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html [*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the .sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this: gpg --verify parted-3.3.52.tar.xz.sig If that command fails because you don't have the required public key, then run this command to import it: gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 117E8C168EFE3A7F and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command. This release was bootstrapped with the following tools: Autoconf 2.69 Automake 1.16.1 Gettext 0.21 Gnulib v0.1-4130-g8183682cc Gperf 3.1 NEWS Noteworthy changes in release 3.3.52 (2020-12-14) [alpha] New Features Add a new partition type flag, chromeos_kernel, for use with ChromeOS machines. This is a GPT-only flag and sets the type GUID to FE3A2A5D-4F32-41A7-B725-ACCC3285A309. Add a new partition flag for Linux Boot Loader Specification /boot partitions. The bls_boot flag will set the msdos partition type to 0xea and the GPT partition type GUID to bc13c2ff-59e6-4262-a352-b275fd6f7172.
A California district court dismissed a trademark infringement defense based on allegations that the trademark owner had abandoned its trademark rights through “naked licensing,” but here the court found the open-source license granted by the owner of trademarks was in fact a copyright license, not a trademark license.
Node.js is an incredible platform for creating seamless high performing, and scalable websites. It is an excellent platform for connecting a huge range of devices in recent days through centralized API. Node.js has a wide range of applications in recent days for web application building and development. Thereby, to have a proper guideline for learning Node.js, a perfect set of Node.js books is indecipherably important. People who know basic node application wants to explore deeper and work with this interesting tool further.
Perl’s object system is not one of its most admired qualities. Included in the 1993 Perl 5.0 release, objects were a bolt-on. A big improvement at the time, in today’s context the Perl 5 object system requires too much boilerplate and is under-powered compared to other language offerings (no private state, no type checking, no traits, no multimethods). Perl programmers have been trying to upgrade it for years (Cor is a recent example).
Combining a few concepts can lead to great power; 60 years ago in the LISP Programmer’s Manual John McCarthy showed how a Lisp interpreter could be created from simple parsing rules, a few types and just five (!) elementary functions.
Two things Perl 5 got right was its lexical scoping rules and support for anonymous functions (“lambdas”). Combine those features and you can make closures. And just what are closures good for? Well it turns out they’re pretty damn powerful; powerful enough, in fact to make a better object system than Perl’s built-in offering.
Hi, here’s my Raku breakfast with the solutions of Week 91 of The Weekly Challenge.
Ogniloud has added a number of Raku sections on Wikipedia, specifically to the Iterator and Iterator pattern lemmas. What a great idea! Yours truly is hoping to see more of these high quality additions to Wikipedia highlighting Raku features (/r/rakulang comments)!
During the spring of 2010, I applied for a job at Mozilla Labs. They were looking for a Python developer to re-write the Firefox Sync service (called Weave back then) into Python. They wanted to move all of their web services from PHP to Python, and looked for a Python expert to help them.
The interviews went very well, and they were planning to fly me over for an onsite day, and then everything went to a full stop because the Eyjafjallajökull volcano blocked all transatlantic flights. I was really worried I would miss that opportunity. But I was eventually able to fly there, on Castro street, at the Mozilla Office that used to be the Netscape office back in the old days.
Last week we kicked off the Foundation Conversation, a week-long period of Q&A forums and live broadcasts with the goal of explaining our vision for the Foundation and finding out what sorts of questions people had. We used those questions to help build a draft Foundation FAQ, and if you’ve not seen it yet, you should definitely take a look -- it’s chock full of good information. Thanks to everyone for asking such great questions!
We’ve created a new survey that asks about how people experienced the Foundation Conversation. Please take a moment to fill it out! We’re planning a similar event for this January, so your feedback will be really helpful.
This post is going to discuss how the Foundation and the Rust project relate to one another.
Here is something very new for our team: We are rotating the leadership. Niko Matsakis will be stepping down from their role as co-lead, and Wesley Wiser will be joining Felix Klock as the co-leads for the team.
Niko remains a compiler team member and will continue his contributions, especially on the RFC 2229, Polonius and Chalk projects. Niko's blog post discusses their motivations for stepping down in more detail.
It’s time for the 13th installment of the chronicle of me doing programming puzzles from Advent of Code 2020 to teach myself the Rust programming language.
Looking at the lessons that I learned from previous days, today I resolve to be more systematic about debugging. If I get the wrong answer I will try my program on the example input first, before changing up a bunch of other things.
Last week I officially joined the Site Reliability Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation. I'll be working with the Service Operations team, which "...takes care of public and “user-visible” services."
[...]
P.S.: I created a new userbox about Rust on mediawiki.org.
I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in NetBeans, a Java IDE (integrated development environment) maintained by the Apache Foundation. I find it’s got a good mix of automated abstraction and manual configuration that helps me keep my Java projects organized and optimized. Not all IDEs give much thought to text files, but XML is frequently used in Java projects, so XML support in NetBeans is an important feature. It occurred to me that NetBeans, in addition to being an excellent Java IDE, could make for a nice XML editor, with the added benefit of being contained in a familiar application I already use.
For my PhD work, I've been working on preparing an experimental branch of StrIoT for merging down to the main branch. This has been a long-lived branch (a year!) within which I've been exploring some ideas. Some of the code I want to keep, and some I don't.
The history of the experimental branch is consequently messy. Looking it over and considering what a reviewer needs to see, there's a lot of things that are irrelevant and potentially distracting. And so, I've been going through an iterative process of steadily whittling down the history to the stuff that matters: some strings of commits are dropped, others squashed together, and others re-ordered. The resulting branch is a historic fiction.
Over the past decade, genetic archeology has revealed two branches of the human family tree, one known since the 19th Century (the Neanderthals) and the other more recently discovered (the Denisovans, an Asian relative of the Neanderthal population). These populations evolved without genetic intermingling with Homo sapiens sapiens for about 500,000 years, which resulted in the accumulation of genetic variants specific for these populations. But the migration of modern human populations out of Africa and throughout the world resulted in interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals or Denisovans about 60,00-40,000 years ago, and as a result there are genetic sequences inherited from them in modern human DNA that can be distinguished on the basis of these population-specific genetic alterations (see, e.g., Inherited Neanderthal Gene Encodes Genetic Risk for COVID-19).
Recent work* has found a cluster of genetic alterations ultimately inherited by modern humans from Neanderthals in a paper entitled "A Neanderthal Sodium Channel Increases Pain Sensitivity in Present-Day Humans," published in Cell Current Biology 30: P3465-69. These alterations were found in a Neanderthal version of a gene, the SCN9A gene, that encodes Nav1.7 voltage-gated sodium ion channel involved in nerve transmission in peripheral nerves and implicated in pain sensation. In modern humans, mutations in this gene causing a "loss of function" phenotype (inactivation of this gene) are associated with pain insensitivity and anosmia, while "gain of function" mutations (increased activity) are associated with idiopathic small-fiber neuropathy and increased sensitivity to pain.
No one comes out of a crisis without being changed in some way, and this pandemic is a crisis on a scale we have rarely seen: It has put years of progress in human development at stake; inequity is at its worst.
If we have to prioritise one thing, it should be ensuring that girls don’t go back to despair, teenage motherhood, and premature death. Girls must have the chance to flourish and pursue a bright future in spite of COVID-19.
Girls are profoundly impacted by the pandemic in multiple ways: by the economic effects on their families and the resulting food insecurity, by the increase in domestic violence and child marriage, or by the closing of schools, among other factors. In Bangladesh, for instance, research by the Power and Participation Research Centre and the BRAC Institute of Governance and Development shows that COVID-19 is creating millions of “new poor” – people whose income was 40 percent above the poverty line but have fallen below it as economies are disrupted. A recent study by the Centre for Research and Information, a Dhaka-based non-profit, estimates that the “new poor” now totals 38 million – roughly one in five Bangladeshis.
Two new Web browsing alternatives widen the field of browser choices for Linux users. The recent introduction of Microsoft Edge for Linux, and the Dec. 8 release of Vivaldi version 3.5 offer the freedom to experience a Google-free vehicle to navigate the Internet.
I reviewed much earlier versions of Vivaldi several years ago. At that time I was searching for a powerhouse replacement for the plain-Jane Chromium browser. I found much to really like with Vivaldi. The current Vivaldi is even more impressive.
Back in the days when I still had a thing for the Microsoft Windows platform, I shunned the default Internet Explorer browser for Firefox. Microsoft recently replaced its outdated Web browser with its own version of the open-source Chromium Web browser that Google built out to create its proprietary Chrome browser.
This new Microsoft replacement is now available for the Linux platform. Still undergoing fine tuning in the Dev Channel, it works remarkably well on Linux OSes, despite a lot of its moving parts still being a work in progress, or outright missing.
Nevertheless, Edge on Linux has the potential for widespread adoption once it matures. It should be especially attractive to former Windows 10 users making the transition to Linux.
This talk was given by Raul Tosa & Daniel Ticle, Bitdefender at the Xen Developer and Design Summit in July 2020. In July, Bitdefender open sourced Hypervisor Memory Introspection (HVMI). This talk provided a preview. Security solutions like Hypervisor Memory Introspection (HVMI) require dedicated hypervisor support. One example is the possibility to apply specific memory permissions to certain memory pages, and to be notified when the guest OS tries to violate those permissions. During the development of HVMI technology, Bitdefender required a hypervisor that was developed in-house, codenamed Napoca, which could be quickly and easily adapted for HVMI requirements. As a “how-to” hypervisor support model, Raul and Daniel previewed the release of the source code to the open-source community with the hope that it would serve as inspiration for future HVMI-related functionality in Xen Hypervisor.
Prepr is excited to announce a new partnership with The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, that will give work-integrated learning experiences to youth facing employment barriers.
The most significant difference with the new platform is that we’ve decentralized the content from a SQL database to files in a git repository. To edit content, you now submit pull requests against the https://github.com/mdn/content repo, rather than editing the wiki using the old WYSIWYG editor.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (lxml, openexr, openssl, and openssl1.0), Fedora (libpri, libxls, mediawiki, nodejs, opensc, php-wikimedia-assert, php-zordius-lightncandy, squeezelite, and wireshark), openSUSE (curl, openssh, openssl-1_0_0, python-urllib3, and rpmlint), Red Hat (libexif, libpq, and thunderbird), Slackware (p11), SUSE (kernel, Kubernetes, etcd, helm, openssl, openssl-1_0_0, and python), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-gke-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-snapdragon, and linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi).
The newly discovered Python-based malware family targets the Outlook processes, and browser credentials, of Microsoft Windows victims.
Researchers have discovered a new information-stealing trojan, which targets Microsoft Windows systems with an onslaught of data-exfiltration capabilities– from collecting browser credentials to targeting Outlook files.
The trojan, called PyMicropsia (due to it being built with Python) has been developed by threat group AridViper, researchers said, which is known for targeting organizations in the Middle East.
“AridViper is an active threat group that continues developing new tools as part of their arsenal,” researchers with Palo Alto’s Unit42 research team said in a Monday analysis. “Also, based on different aspects of PyMicropsia that we analyzed, several sections of the malware are still not used, indicating that it is likely a malware family under active development by this actor.”
I wrote a blog post about looking back, and I have a bit of snark in there where I talk about slowing down the future. I wanted to explain this a bit more and give everyone some food for thought around how we used to do things and how we should do them moving forward. There are groups and people that exist to slow things down. Sometimes that’s on purpose for good reasons, sometimes it’s on purpose for bad reasons, sometimes it’s not on purpose at all.
I want to start with the idea that a lot of standards are there to slow us down on purpose. This isn’t meant to be a hot take, this is the actual truth and it’s a good thing. Standards exist to help everyone work together. If standards change too quickly it creates barriers instead of opportunities. Imagine if HTTP or TCP/IP changed drastically every year. It would be horrible, the internet wouldn’t look anything like it does today.
Now, there are times when slow change is the opposite of what we want to do. Emerging technologies are a great example of this. Imagine if the Linux Kernel API changes had to pass a standards committee. There would be no progress, development would grind to a halt and nobody would want to contribute to such a project. The project wouldn’t be the success it is today.
There are some standards groups where being slow actually helps progress, and there are some groups that hurt progress by moving slowly. For the purpose of this blog post, let’s focus on new technologies. New technology needs to move fast and iterate without a committee telling them what to do. New technologies should work more like an open source project to move forward. In the world of open source it’s easier to build an example then talk about what the example does. The work is fast and the work itself is the discussion. This model has mostly taken over the world. It is fast, open, and makes it easy to help.
“We believe PGMiner is the first cryptocurrency mining botnet that is delivered via PostgreSQL,” note the Palo Alto Networks Unit42 researchers.
The researchers explain that PGMiner hunts for PostgreSQL installations whose administrators have forgotten to disable the default ‘postgres’ administrator user account. It then brute-forces its way to the account’s password, before exploiting PostgreSQL’s controversial copy from program feature to start mining.
In Part I we looked at desirable properties for voting system. In this post, I want to look at the details of a specific system: hand-counted paper ballots.
Researchers from Forescout research labs have published a set of new software vulnerabilities that affect embedded TCP/IP stacks.
The set of vulnerabilities, called AMNESIA:33, only affects small parts of the SUSE Linux Enterprise set of packages.
Linux ransomware is on the rise, but ransomware risk is still significantly lower for Linux users than for their Windows- and MacOS-using counterparts. Although Linux is becoming an increasingly attractive target among ransomware developers and operators, the vast majority of ransomware still targets Windows systems, and as a result of the privilege system that Linux adheres to, the impact of a ransomware attack exploiting a vulnerable Linux web server is generally much smaller than a ransomware attack affecting a Windows system.
In addition, because Linux is an open-source OS, Linux source code undergoes constant scrutiny from the “many eyes” of the global open-source community. As a result, vulnerabilities in Linux that could potentially be exploited in ransomware attacks are generally identified and fixed much faster than security bugs that exist in proprietary OSes.
More than three months ago, Liberian President George Weah declared rape a national emergency at a keynote conference, vowing to improve support for rape survivors and strengthen the country’s prosecution system.
But few concrete steps have been taken since and Weah’s ambitious-sounding promises were quickly drowned out by the din of campaigning in the run-up to last week’s Senate elections: Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) hardly featured as an issue.
The appointment of a Special Prosecutor for rape, the creation of a National Sex Offenders Registry, and the establishment of a National Security Task Force on SGBV are all now stalled initiatives. “There has not been any progress made on the government’s part,” said a disappointed Benita Urey, a 22-year-old student, blogger, and charity worker.
Democratic principles demand that the president should be elected by the people on the basis of one-person, one-vote. But today the Electoral College will elect the president based on an anachronistic anti-democratic 18th century system where some people’s votes count a lot more than others.
For example, Wyoming has a population of 579,759 and three electoral votes. California has a population of 39,512,223 and 55 electoral votes. Do the math and you find that a vote in Wyoming counts 3.6 times more than a vote in California in the Electoral College.
The Electoral College originated in the racist three-fifths compromise in the US Constitution that added enslaved people who couldn’t vote to the population of the slave states, which gave the slave states disproportionate representation and power in the federal government. This distortion continued for another century after slavery during the years of Jim Crow disenfranchisement of black voters. The racial bias of the Electoral College continues to this day by giving extra power to the smaller states that tend to have disproportionately white electorates.
It is time to end this insult to the democratic principle of political equality. Every citizen should get one equally-weighted vote.
In this non-precedential decision, the Federal Circuit has affirmed the lower court’s finding that Adaptive’s asserted claims are ineligible under Section 101. In 2019, Adaptive sued Netflix in C.D. Cal. for patent infringement. Rather than filing its answer, Netflix immediately filed a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. Fed. R. Civ. Pro. 12(b)(6). That motion was granted — case dismissed.
The patent claims a personal broadcasting system that transcribes an incoming video into a more usable format. Us7047305 (1999 priority date). I subscribed to Netflix back in 2001 — receiving rental DVDs in the mail each month. Netflix has changed dramatically — and one bit of its process appears to be a user-based translation engine.
Claim 39 at issue here requires a “broadcasting server” coupled to a “processor” with the capability of transcoding an incoming video signal from a first compression format into a second compression format “more suitable” for the client device — and available in multiple video stream outputs. A dependent claim includes the functionality of changing the compression output “in response to a change in bandwidth conditions.”
Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winners, Sachin Srivastava and Preeti Dua, who split a cash prize of $2,000 for their prior art submissions for U.S. Patent 9,026,673. The patent is owned by SITO Mobile R&D IP, LLC, an NPE. The '673 patent generally relates to the transmission of multiple digital media streams from a server to a client device, e.g., where one media stream may be a piece of requested media, and another media stream may be an advertisement. This patent has been asserted in district court against Hulu, Blue Scout Media, and FloSports for their respective streaming platforms and content distribution methods.
On December 14, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 10,491,679, owned by Voice Tech Corp, an NPE. The ’679 patent relates to voice-activated computing. The patent is currently asserted against Mycroft AI Inc. for using open source, voice-related technologies.