Ramon explains everything about perspective, and Krita’s perspective tools this time!
This is the desktop deep dive of Plasma 5.21 full of my opinions, tweaks, suggestions and brief history with KDE Plasma.
Free software legend, Keith Packard, the prime mover behind the X Window System and Freedesktop.org joins Doc Searls and Simon Phipps on FLOSS Weekly. A range of topics are discussed including the controversy of Richard Stallman returning to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors. Packard also shares why it's important to get involved with hardware, working operating systems versus containers and even his rocketry hobby.
Recently Luke Smith did a reaction video to Distrotube's short about the Fish shell which surely had to have been a troll, at least I hope so I decided why not do a reaction to the reaction and just go full on YouTuber.
Get your fancy Razer mouse, keyboard, laptop and whatever else ready as OpenRazer 3.0.0 is out now to further expand what Razer devices are nicely supported on Linux.
It comes with some big improvements including persistent storage of effects in daemon, previously frontends had no way of reliably getting the effect that a device had set and support for DPI Stages for mice. A few bug fixes made it in too like the addition of missing HAS_MATRIX attribute for Tartarus V2, fixed volume control buttons on Razer Cynosa V2 and more.
AMD today released their Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 21.Q1 driver packages for Windows and Linux systems.
The Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise is AMD's driver package updated quarterly that is focused on their Radeon Pro products and older FirePro professional graphics while being derived from the same driver sources as their consumer Radeon Software drivers just with added QA and focus on enterprise use-cases. In the case of Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise for Linux, still offering both AMDGPU-Open and AMDGPU-PRO components.
In addition to AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors offering fantastic performance, another important highlight for these new Zen 3 server processors is SEV-SNP for upping the Secure Encrypted Virtualization capabilities. AMD has been offering SEV "Secure Nested Paging" patches via a GitHub repository while now they are working towards mainlining this feature for the Linux kernel.
AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization's Secure Nested Paging builds upon SEV/SEV-ES to offer integrity protections, including against malicious hypervisor attacks. This AMD whitepaper spells out SEV-SNP in more detail for those interested in all of the finer details of this feature round on EPYC 7003 series processors.
While the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source OpenGL driver for Linux systems is very well received and generally outperforming the proprietary AMD OpenGL driver on Linux/Windows and performing very strong against NVIDIA's proprietary OpenGL driver too, it's not game over for this older graphics API and AMD is still working to lower the CPU overhead even further for this open-source code.
RadeonSI Gallium3D allows for maximizing the OpenGL performance out of Radeon graphics cards under Linux. There has even been various remarks about the prospects of porting RadeonSI to Windows given how well this open-source OpenGL driver performs. We have seen various RadeonSI optimizations continue with newer Mesa releases even while newer Linux game ports tend to be Vulkan exclusive and Steam Play's DXVK/VKD3D-Proton are routing all newer Windows games on Linux by way of Direct3D over Vulkan.
qBittorrent 4.3.4 introduces a few interesting new capabilities to the open-source torrent downloader, including sthe ability to prioritize selected items by shown file order and to allow tab to escape the text box in the “Edit trackers” dialog, sub-sorting support in the Transfer List, as well as the ability to expose ToS setting from the libtorrent library.
On Linux, this release drops support for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), improves support for systemd system by implementing a new mechanism to wait for the local filesystems to be mounted first. Furthermore, qBittorrent 4.3.4 improves the handling of tracker entries, and adds support for Qt 5.12 LTS and libtorrent 1.2.12 as minimum requirements for building/installing the app.
I was recently asked why I haven’t mentioned anything about Yakuake on CubicleNate.com so I decided to take the time and cover some of its features, what I did to modify it a smidge and why I use it. For starters, I don’t think the terminal is a “power user” function. I truly believe it is an every-day user tool that doesn’t get the credit it deserves. There is a great discussion thread here on the Destination Linux Discourse forum about this subject.
It is my belief that the terminal should be an integrated part of every desktop. I believe a person should know to use the terminal to better understand how their computer works, even if they are not “into computers,” basic understanding of the computers workings with the ability to speak its language doesn’t have any drawbacks. If anything, it empowers you to know more and do more with these incredibly powerful tools.
Bottom Line Up Front: Yakuake is a great way to integrate the terminal into your desktop in such a way that keeps access to the most powerful tool just a keystroke away. Yakuake isn’t the only terminal emulator I use but it is that one I use most often due to how incredibly convenient it is.
TaskBoard is a free and open source software, inspired by the Kanban board, for keeping track of things that need to be done.
Kanban is a technique for visualizing the flow of work and organize a project, no matter what it is. In particular, in software development it provides a visual process management system to help in deciding how to organize the production.
In our previous guide, we fleshed out the differences between apt update and apt upgrade. In this tutorial, we look at apt-get upgrade and apt-get dist-upgrade commands and seek to understand the difference and when each is used.
The Linux Shutdown Command is used to stop the operating system safely. Users logged in receive a message that the system will be shut down. The command allows the system to shut down immediately or according to a set period of time. In this tutorial you will learn the basic ways to use the shutdown command as well as the best practices in using it. In some of the newer distributions, the uptime command is associated with the system command systemctl. In addition we are going to explore how to reboot how to schedule reboots, how to warn logged in users and more.
In this tutorial we will show you the basics for working with Linux Users And Groups, we will slightly upgrade with additional knowledge where necessary and more.
Why do we need to understand user accounts in Linux? Linux is a multi-user platform, in which each user has different rights. Some can read, others can read and write, or have the right to see certain directories. Also, more than one user can be in the system at the same time.
Today we are looking at how to install Krita 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.
Anaconda is a Python-based data science platform. It comes in various editions, is open source, and installable on most Linux operating systems. In this guide, we’ll show you how to get Anaconda up and running on Ubuntu.
Are you using Debian and want to upgrade it to other releases like Testing, Unstable, or even Experimental, but don’t know how? We can help! Follow along as we show you how to upgrade Debian distros!
Every Linux system is running a Linux kernel, which serves as the foundation for a fully packaged operating system.
An optical disc image is a disk image that contains everything that would be written to an optical disc, disk sector by disc sector, including the optical disc file system.
There are times when you want to transfer files between your local system and a remote server. Several protocols and methods are available that allow you to handle file transmissions in a secure manner.
The scp command in Linux is one such tool that helps a user in sharing files remotely between local and remote hosts. In this article, we will discuss the scp command in detail, along with its usage and some additional features of the command.
One of the really nice things about working on the Linux command line is that you can get a lot of work done very quickly. With a handle on the most useful commands and some command-line savvy, you can take a lot of the tedium out of your daily work. This post will walk you through several handy tricks that can make your work load feel a little lighter and maybe be a little bit more enjoyable.
aaPanel is an outstanding tool for the management of websites, databases, FTP servers, cron jobs and more. One other feature that aaPanel is quite adept at is the deployment of Docker containers.
I want to show you how this feature can be added to aaPanel and then how to deploy your first container with the tool. I'll be demonstrating on Ubuntu Server 20.04, so you'll need to have aaPanel already deployed--find out how in my previous piece: How to install aaPanel. Once you have aaPanel deployed, you're ready to add Docker container support.
In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to change the default home directory of a user on Linux. By default, it is /home/username.
Uptime is a measure of system reliability, expressed as the percentage of time a machine, typically a computer, has been working and available. Uptime is the opposite of downtime. Conversely, long uptime may indicate negligence, because some critical updates can require reboots on some platforms.
Although PNG offers a better image quality compared with JPG, the large size factor is usually a concern for Internet users. This is typically why PNG images are converted to JPG.
[...]
In this article, you will learn how to convert multiple PNG images to JPG format from the Linux command line using ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick tools.
The Audacity audio editor 3.0.0 was released a week ago as the new major release. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu / Linux Mint via Flatpak package.
Audacity 3.0.0 features new all-in-one-file aup3 project file format, improved ‘Noise Gate’ effect, new ‘Label Sounds’ analyzer, and over 160 bug-fixes.
OPcache is an Apache module for the PHP interpreter. It is used to increase performance by storing precompiled scripts in shared memory space.
Generally, it is used to speed up the performance of WordPress and PHP-based applications. OPcache removing the need for PHP to load and parse scripts on each request.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure PHP OPcache on an Ubuntu 20.04 VPS.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install XFCE on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, XFCE is a free lightweight, fast, and easy to use software desktop environment for Unix/Linux-like operating systems. It is designed for productivity and aims to be fast and low on system resources. Unlike GNOME and KDE desktops which are heavier, but XFCE uses fewer system resources. XFCE desktop does not need a modern GPU and its CPU and takes up less RAM. You can also install and run XFCE on an old hardware system without any problems.
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 XFCE Desktop environment on a Debian 10 (Buster).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Vim Text Editor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Vim is a highly configurable text editor for efficiently creating and changing any kind of text. It is especially useful for editing config files and programs written in shell, python, Perl, c/c++, and more. The latest release of Vim includes a few new features, bug fixes, and documentation updates.
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 Vim Text Editor 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.
In our previous tutorial, we looked at the Linux head command and its example usages. The tail command is the complementary of the head command. It reads and prints out the last N lines in a file. Without any command options, it prints out the last 10 lines in a text file. In this guide, we will focus on the tail command and explore the various options that come with the command.
[...]
In this guide, we will learn Linux tail command with practical examples. Tail command is used to print last 10 lines of a file on the terminal.
Everyone has a flash drive. They’re great little things, and they make moving data around easy. However, sometimes flash drives can get corrupted or just flat-out quit working. Thankfully, if you’re using Linux, you already have access to an array of tools that can help you fix the problem. We are using Ubuntu for this tutorial, but everything applies to most modern Linux distributions. Here is how you can repair a corrupted USB drive in Linux.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Venom Linux 20210312.
Terraform is an open-source uniform configuration language that allows administrators to describe IT resources implementation in a “standardized” manner. It provides a command-line interface workflow to manage various types of cloud services such as Aws, Google Cloud, Vmware, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, Oracle Cloud, Digital Ocean, and more…
nnStat is a free and open-source app for servers and routers. It is a console-based network traffic monitor. It keeps a log of the 5-minute interval, hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly network traffic for the selected interface(s). Let us see how to install vnStat on the Alpine Linux server to keep a tab on bandwidth usage.
ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors is a free open-source office suite that contains viewers and editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. Along with offline work, it’s possible to connect the app to the cloud (ONLYOFFICE, Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile) and collaborate on docs online. The code repository is available on GitHub under AGPL v.3.0 license.
Several months ago, I came back to my desk after lunch and to my chagrin, my macOS was making a long constant blowing sound—the fan was on high speed. Now, mind you, I have a fairly new and beefy Mac. 2.4 GHz, 8-core, 64GB running Big Sur, 11.2.1. So what in the world could be triggering my fan to such a high level? I discovered that the culprit was Docker. And the only way to rid myself of the noise was a Docker restart.
Starting with Chrome 56, the browser developed by Google marks non-secure pages containing password and credit card input fields as Not Secure in the URL bar. It was almost one year ago, when the Mountain View giant announced this choice.
Of course, everybody knows that secure is better then insecure; but in this case, the big problem with HTTP is that it lacks a system for protecting communications between clients and servers. This exposes data to different kinds of attacks, for instance, the “Man in the middle” (MIM), in which the attacker intercepts your data. If you are using some transaction system with your bank, using credit card infos, or just entering a password to log in to a web site, this can become very dangerous.
Ncat command in Linux or NC command is used in the maintenance or diagnosis-related tasks for a network. Even though the ‘nc command’ or ‘ncat command’ are separate commands but they are similar to how they perform their functions & one can be used or replace by the other.
Similar to how CAT common in Linux has the ability to manipulate files, NC command in Linux has the ability to perform operations like read, write, or data redirections over the network.
Ncat command can be used as a utility to scan ports, monitoring or can also act as a basic TCP proxy. Organizations can utilize it to review the security of their networks, web servers, telnet servers, mail servers, etc, by checking the ports that are opened or unsecured and then secure them. NC command can also be used to capture information being sent by the system.
Sensu is a free and open source tool for composing a monitoring system. It is entirely written in Ruby. It uses RabbitMQ to handle messages and Redis to store its data.
Sensu focuses on composability and extensibility, allowing to reuse monitoring checks and plugins from tools like Nagios and Zabbix. This framework was designed to work with software like Puppet, Chef and Ansible, and it does not required additional workflow.
If you want to do some dungeon crawling, look no further today than Tangledeep. A sweet pixel-art experience that's highly rated, offers deep character progression and it's still being updated years after release.
"Tangledeep combines the 16-bit graphics and polish of classic SNES-era RPGs with elements from roguelikes and dungeon crawlers to create a magical experience for players of all skill levels. Trapped in underground villages with no memory of the world at the surface, you must survive an ever-changing labyrinth to discover what lies above."
MangoHud is a fantastic way to show off all sorts of details in games on Linux from frame timings to RAM use and plenty more. GOverlay continues making it more accessible with a full UI. GOverlay works with not just MangoHud but also the vkBasalt post-processing layer and the instant-replay solution ReplaySorcery too.
Ion Fury, the old-school first-person shooter developed by Voidpoint and published by 3D Realms and 1C Entertainment is getting a big full expansion named Aftershock. Releasing this Summer, Aftershock will offer a new "Arrange" game mode which offers up "enhanced with new enemies, weapons and more" good for first time players and returning players alike.
Did you love the classic Monkey Ball or Super Monkey Ball? A hugely popular series that gained something of a cult following and a close spiritual successor is out now with Rolled Out!
Okay so it's not the same and not by the same developer, Rolled Out! is an Early Access game from Polarbyte Games and Skymap Games but it seemed to be very promising and is gaining some good early reviews. Another title that has arrived following a successful crowdfunding campaign, as it was up on IndieGoGo back in 2019 with over €£40K in funding gained.
KaOS is very proud to announce the availability of the March release of a new stable ISO.
With almost 60 % percent of the packages updated since the last ISO and the last release being over two months old, a new ISO is more than due. News for Plasma 5.21 include a new application launcher featuring two panes to make it simple to locate your programs and comes with improved keyboard, mouse, and touch input, boosting accessibility across the board, Plasma System Monitor, a new app for monitoring system resources and the sound applet now displays the live microphone volume.
KDE e.V., the non-profit organisation supporting the KDE community, is looking for a documentation writer to help KDE improve its (online, technical) documentation. Please see the call for proposals for more details about this contract opportunity. We are looking forward to your application.
In the last days, I read the Qt Interest mailing list and was amazed about the very verbose discussion there about what is all bad with Qt in general and Qt 6. As for any mailing list discussion, that is not representative, but if you just read that, the world looks bleak.
A short (personal) digest could read like: Qt 5 => 6 is horrible, the Qt project (and company) doesn’t care for their (open source and other) users and the future is doomed for Qt.
As you might know, using 3rd party software in CMake code is done via packages, by using the find_package command.
find_package does what the name says: it finds a package. If the package doesn’t exist, it will set the _FOUND variable to FALSE, and if the package was REQUIRED the the CMake configuration will error out.
This is where a package manager comes into play. The setup of the package manager could be done in CMake code, by hard coding specific code, or by documenting how the environment needs to be setup before configuring the CMake project.
As per my last blog, the plan was to work more on Peruse Creator to extend it with a new functionality/approach to modify existing objects. So far, I’ve worked on extending the navigation between the visualized jump objects on Reader, extended Creator with a new component to handle modifying created objects, and refined some bits and pieces in Peruse generally. So, in this blog post, I’m going to describe briefly what have been done, and the future plans for the remaining days of SoK.
Just yesterday, we told you that Fedora 34 Beta was released, and it was notable for using the upcoming GNOME 40 desktop environment. Well, I have great news Linux fans -- today GNOME 40 is officially released, and yes, it will be used in the eventual stable version of Fedora 34.
But yo, wait, hold on, why is the newest version of GNOME being designated as 40? Wasn't the previous version 3.38? Yeah, that is factual, but no, the developers haven't gone crazy. Actually, as we told you last year, GNOME has a new versioning scheme. It is, understandably, a bit confusing to jump from 3.x to 40, but that's what it is, folks! You know what though? Who cares what it's called as long as it remains great. And once again, it looks to be.
GNOME 40 is out now to showcase the latest Linux desktop environment work from the GNOME Project, which includes a number of feature overhauls and improvements.
Safe to say this is one of their biggest releases, at least since the original redesign of GNOME Shell into what we know it as now. In total, the release incorporates 24571 changes, made by approximately 822 contributors. They also dedicated this release to the team behind the GNOME Asia Summit 2020.
The biggest user-facing change in GNOME 40 will be the new Activities Overview design where you see all your open applications, workspaces and search through installed applications. Workspaces are now arranged horizontally, while the overview and app grid are accessed vertically and there's plenty of keyboard shortcuts, mouse actions and support for touchpad gestures too. Here's some shots of it (click to enlarge)...
The GNOME team have announced GNOME 40. Along with this there’s a GNOME OS image to play with. You can grab that from here with the release notes. The release announcement firmly (in bold) suggests “Do not use any other version including the distro version. Only GNOME Boxes 3.38.0 from flathub is known to work.”. Personally I’ve never managed to have much success with GNOME Boxes, so I thought I’d test using something I already have installed, QEMU! I have used QEMU for many years. Here’s a screenshot of me running Windows XP, Windows 2000, NT Server, NT Workstation, Windows 98 and Windows 95, for lulz. This was all running on a Dell Inspiron XPS Gen 2 back in 2005 (15 years ago!). All under qemu on Ubuntu. How time flies.
The latest release of GNOME is here, and it moves away from the usual naming convention: no GNOME 3.40, it's just GNOME 40. This release is one of the biggest in recent years, and a lot has changed, so let's take a look at what's new.
GNOME 3.38 was the previous major release that came equipped with many improvements and a major performance boost. With the next release, GNOME 40, we’re getting major changes to the user interface along with performance boosts.
In case you were out of the loop, you might want to know that the GNOME team changed their version classification to a new system to avoid confusion with GTK 4.0 release and others. Now, every six month, a new release will increase the major version number by one like — GNOME 41, GNOME 42 and so on. The stable point releases will be like this — GNOME 40.1, GNOME 40.2, GNOME 40.3,etc.
GNOME 40 is releasing this week. It's time to take a look at all the new features in GNOME 40, specially the "horizontal" layout approach.
The latest release of GNOME is here. The changes in GNOME 40 are impressive with many improvements and alterations to the GNOME Shell.
[...]
Probably the most noticeable user experience change is when interacting with the GNOME shell overview. In GNOME 3.38 and earlier versions, the Activities Overview had a vertical layout, but in GNOME 40, everything goes horizontal. When you click on the application icon in GNOME, the workspaces are horizontal with a snapshot of the running windows. You can easily scroll through them and drag windows from one workspace to another. Moreover, within the new Activities Overview design, all the apps now show their icons so you’ll identify them much easier.
If you are here to know about Unix-based Operating Systems, then you are in the right place. Unix has a long history as an operating system. Actually, it is more appropriate if we call it an OS family rather than a single OS. Because, although it was built for internal usage at the AT&T Bell Labs in the 1970s, now it is powering up a lot of modern operating systems.
Some of them are proprietary, like macOS, and some are open-source. Unix was built with C language, and there are many advantages that many organizations took Unix as the base of their operating systems. Most of them are depreciated now. But some Unix-based OS is still functional even as an internal or private operating system.
The popular Arch-Linux based distribution, Manjaro’s latest stable release arrives with Linux 5.10 Kernel along with three fresh desktop environment choices – Gnome 3.38. KDE Plasma 5.21, Xfce 4.16, and other changes. This release is code-named ‘Ornara’ and comes after the last release Manjaro 20.2 Nibia.
In this video, we are looking at Fedora 34 Beta.
Today we are looking at Fedora 34 Beta. It comes with Gnome 40 rc, Linux kernel 5.11, and uses about 2GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
Fedora comes with multiple editions designed to address specific use cases for IT teams and modern developers. This also includes Fedora CoreOS – it addresses the requirements of cloud-native, containerized developers. In the case of desktops, the new version uses the new GNOME 40 desktop. Its enhancements include a better desktop arrangement for windows, search, workspaces, and applications.
Today we’re launching the second video in our Open Source Stories "Common Connections" series, "Common Connections: Making Robots Boring." The series features scholars, CEOs, educators, and engineers who've never met before coming together to find the common threads in their work, and exploring the potential for future open source innovation and building unexpected connections.
"Common Connections: Making Robots Boring" brings together Leila Takayama, Ph. D., human-robot interaction researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Chris Nicholson, founder and CEO of Pathmind. We first met Takayama in part four of our film "How to Start a Robot Revolution," when we explored how her work with the startup Willow Garage made a foundational piece of robotics software more user-friendly. While Nicholson showed up in our 2017 film, "Road to A.I.," which featured his work creating deep learning software tools that have contributed to the growth of autonomous driving.
There are many Radio Access Networks (RAN) organizations, some loosely organized (for example, industry alliances) and others more formally structured that define standards. Recent discussion has been growing about open RAN in the industry, spurred by developments, such as Rakuten building the industry’s first cloud-native infrastructure with the help of open source and open RAN.
The conversation is centering around what open RAN means: what is being done and how organizations can participate. We continue to see communications services providers (CSPs) and ecosystem players stating that open RAN and open source projects form the future foundation of the industry.
The latest release of Red Hat Integration is now available, and it brings several enhancements that we are pleased to share with you. With this release, we are continuing to focus on strengthening our customers' ability to respond faster, more efficiently and more intelligently to the world around them. Organizations are building out cloud-based, event-driven solutions that rely on streams of data flowing through the system. With Red Hat Integration we help customers to capture and process information as it's created. These advanced streaming processing applications are designed to take in more streams and more types of data to gain better insights and ultimately make more effective decisions.
Purism’s Librem 5 smartphone ships with a custom GNU/Linux distribution called PureOS. It’s the same software that runs on Purism’s Linux laptops, but it’s been adapted to work with phones like the Librem 5.
So far there are some key features that haven’t worked yet. Now Purism is announcing it’ll enable some of those things in the next release of PureOS, which is code-named Byzantium.
Among other things, Byzantium will bring support for full disk encryption and GPS navigation. There are also a bunch of software updates that’ll make it easier to not only use the Librem 5 as a phone, but also as a desktop computer.
Disk encryption will allow for the root disk to be password protected. With this setup, you’ll be asked to decrypt your device before it continues to the phone shell.
Valtrix Systems, the provider of design verification products for building functionally correct CPU and system-on-chip implementations, and Codasip, the leading supplier of customizable RISC-V€® embedded processor IP, announced today that they are cooperating on the verification of RISC-V-based systems.
Linaro’s 96Boards specification was first introduced in 2015 with the launch of Hikey SBC following 96Boards CE specification, which CE standing for Consumer Edition.
Linaro Ltd, the open-source collaborative engineering organization developing software for the Arm ecosystem, has announced the joint collaboration with Huawei on OpenHarmony. Linaro will collaborate with Huawei and the open-source community on the engineering work needed to make OpenHarmony fully open-source.
The company provides “Android 7.1 or above” for the board/card, and says it’s designed for digital signage or kiosk display solutions, smart display solutions, and system integration.
A few years ago, I was adventurous enough to get the ZTE Open C as my daily driver. The whole experience was interesting enough, but Firefox OS is sadly history now. However, Linux is still around and showing up on smartphones from time to time. Unfortunately, the PinePhone Beta Edition looks like another device that only targets hardcore fans.
After shipping tens of thousands of PinePhone Community Edition smartphones to enthusiasts, the folks at Pine64 ended the Community Edition program recently. Now you can buy a PinePhone Beta Edition, which will ship with Manjaro Linux and the KDE Plasma user interface pre-installed.
It’s called Beta because the software is still a work in progress. But the hardware is pretty much finalized, and after encountering a series of potential delays due to component shortages, Pine64 announced recently that after going up for pre-order on March 24, production of the PinePhone Beta Edition should begin soon and the phone could ship to customers by late April.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today its 22nd Anniversary.
Originally established by the 21-member Apache Group, who oversaw the then-3-year-old Apache HTTP Server, the ASF today is the world's largest, vendor-neutral, Open Source foundation, comprising 800+ individual Members, 8,100+ Committers, and 40,000+ code contributors located on every continent. Conservatively valued at more than $22B, Apache’s 350+ projects and 37 incubating podlings are all freely-available to the public-at-large, at 100% no cost, and with no licensing fees.
"Over the past 22 years the ASF has evolved to meet the growing needs of the greater community," said Sander Striker, Board Chair of The Apache Software Foundation. "The ASF enables people from all over the world to collaborate, develop, and shepherd the projects and communities that are helping individuals, sustaining businesses, and transforming industries."
The Apache project was much more conscious of culture and group dynamics from the start. There was no opportunity to appoint a benevolent dictator, because the person who could have played that role had already left. This is an interesting side discussion in itself.
By 1992, the World Wide Web was recognized by internet users as a major force. But the software that supported it was in a fragile state. Tim Berners-Lee had developed a web server for the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN, after the French name), but it was designed for the needs of the organization, which involved sharing large data sets. The server was not appropriate for the kinds of publishing that the general public was starting to do in the early 1990s.
The NCSA was also a scientific organization, but its server had a broader appeal. In the development model typical of the time, its development rested on a single programmer, Rob McCool, and other programmers sent him their patches.
This changed after Marc Andreessen, the famous developer of web browsers, left the NCSA to form Netscape. (You may quite likely be using a descendant of his work, the Firefox web browser, to read this article.) A lot of NCSA staff followed him to Netscape, including McCool. Because Netscape was concerned only with a browser, suddenly no one was working on any web server at all.
From today's vantage point, it may seem strange that a critical part of internet infrastructure could be orphaned. But even though visionaries recognized great potential in the internet, it was still viewed as a research experiment by managers at most organizations. NCSA itself was concerned with supporting supercomputer researchers, and if it took interest in the web at all—Roy Fielding told me in an interview—they focused on the browser, just as Netscape did. NCSA didn't even announce that the web server had been effectively abandoned.
So in early 1995, according to Fielding, programmers began to notice that no one was responding when they emailed their patches to NCSA, and no updates were coming out. When they figured out what happened, they found each other over email and decided to pick up the project themselves.
The key characteristic of this oddly formed community was voluntarism. Nobody could be told what to work on. If they were interested, they wrote code. If not, they turned to other matters. One could jokingly call the team an anarcho-syndicalist commune (which fulfills the requirement of articles on computing to make at least one Monty Python reference).
This fundamental trait of the project led to the focus on respect, open communications, and other elements of what was later called The Apache Way.
In late August last year, to support the transition of Firefox for Android from the old engine (fennec) to the new one (fenix), we officially introduced a tool that we build in-house called the Respond Tool to support the Play Store Support campaign. The Respond Tool lets contributors and staff provide answers to reviews under 3-stars on the Google Play Store. That program was known as Play Store Support.
We learned a lot from the campaign and identified a number of improvements to functionality and user experience that were necessary. In the end, we decided to migrate the program from the Respond Tool to Conversocial, a third-party tool that we are already using with our community to support users on Twitter.
In the fall of 2016, Nandini Jammi co-founded Sleeping Giants to expose for brands how their digital advertisements were showing up on websites that they didn’t intend their marketing efforts — or dollars — to support. In-house marketing teams were often shocked and confused to see their ads on websites that peddle disinformation and conspiracy theories and would immediately pull their ads from circulation. Over the time, however, Jammi noticed that the problem of misplaced ads persisted. She began to wonder why systemic change wasn’t happening in the advertising industry to better protect brands.
Claire Atkin was also growing alarmed about how disinformation was being used to influence elections, and the role that digital advertising played in spreading it. Jammi and Atkin saw an opportunity to team up. If the ad industry wasn’t going to change, they decided to tackle the problem from the brand side.
Every time you are on the internet, IP addresses are playing an essential role in the information exchange to help you see the sites you are requesting. Yet, there is a chance you don’t know what one is, so we are breaking down the most commonly asked questions below.
In 2007, I started blogging. Back then I used a self-hosted Wordpress instance, running on my server. I was never really comfortable with the technology stack involved: a programming language I didn't speak, a DB I had little experience with, a relatively heavy setup and of course, the occasional security issues related to that setup. All that just to have a somewhat dynamic website with pingbacks and comments generated by your visitors... totally worth it and exciting times! You wrote something to the "lazyweb" department and people would actually comment with useful advice!
Then came the spammers. First, it was just a little, and you could easily fight it off with the askimet plugin. Over the years, however the spam-to-useful-comments-ratio shifted to ridiculous levels and the comment section itself became a burden. Hosting the comments on a separate platform like disqus was not an option for me, so I finally turned the comments off.
Without the need for a comment section, the whole idea of storing mostly textual content in a DB just to have it served as a website, suddenly seemed like overkill and an unnecessary security risk. So I started looking for alternatives.
I wanted to maintain my content as plain text files. Text files are cool because they are future proof, portable and can be managed in git. Consequently, I was searching for a static site generator.
More than 1,500 people have signed a petition calling for Richard Stallman to be removed from positions of leadership in free software.
I have a lot more to say about this--but this is about as much as I can say without getting incredibly angry. Here's my simple, level-headed reasoning why RMS is a hindrance to the free software movement and the mission of the Free Software Foundation and why he should've left the FSF for good a long time ago.
Richard Stallman recently announced on a video that he's back. He's back at the Free Software Foundation and is reinstated as a board member. And the haters are out in full force, actively trying to cancel Richard again.
Dear FSF, I write this letter to support Dr. Richard Stallman as a board member of FSF. Dr. Richard Stallman has been a strong leader in Free Software Movement ever since the beginning of free software. He has been always thinking from the free software point of view, and has been constantly promoting free software and free software community. This is what we need in Free Software Foundation. This is what we need to inspire people to work for the goal of Free Software Foundation. I am expecting Dr. Richard Stall to do his best in FSF and wish him all the best. best regards, wxie
In KDE e.V., directors are appointed by the full membership, by majority vote. Changes in the composition of our board of directors are participatory and transparent. Today we have doubts that corresponding processes within the FSF hold up to this common standard, which we believe to be critical to functional, sustainable governance given 23 years of our own experience as an organization.
Organized activity in the wider Free Software community continues to be important. Participation and representation are necessary ingredients. KDE e.V. will stay involved in the discussion, with our partners and others, on where to take Free Software next.
Since then we setup the GNU Assembly without any resources from the FSF. And created the GNU Social Contract for GNU maintainers and developers to promote the GNU system and create a welcome environment for everybody to be able to create more user freedom. The FSF never officially helped or even replied to our requests to formulate an open and welcoming working relationship with us as GNU volunteers.
Many people (me included, naturally) in the Free Software world are very angry about this announcement. There is a call for signatures for a position statement presented by several free software leaders that has gathered, as I write this message, over 400 signatures. The Open Source Initiative has presented its institutional position statement. And I can only forecast this rejection will continue to grow.
When I hear Stallman saying "and I'm not planning to resign a second time", the only thing I can see is a dangerous person making a power move. I'll be wary of FSF from now on.
We are pleased to announce the release of Cuirass version 1.0, after almost five years of development and around 700 commits from 14 contributors.
Cuirass is the GNU Guix continuous integration software. It's a general purpose build automation server written in GNU Guile that checks out sources from VCS repositories, execute build jobs and store build results in a database. Cuirass also provides a web interface to monitor the build results.
Cuirass is running on the GNU Guix build farm.
Since January, the project is funded through the NGI0 PET Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation, as explained here.
Thanks to this support, we were able to speed up the developments and finally propose a first release of this software. Many things have changed in Cuirass over the years and now is the perfect time to give it a try.
This license introduces a time-delay for the commercial use of its code for “up to two years”. After this, the code will remain as an open-source GPL license allowing other projects to build upon it.
React is one of the most popular and simple JavaScript libraries for building user interfaces (UIs) because it allows you to create reusable UI components.
Components in React are independent, reusable pieces of code that serve as building blocks for an application. React functional components are JavaScript functions that separate the presentation layer from the business logic.
When we talk about getting better at programming, we often talk about testing, writing reusable code, design patterns, and readability.
All of those things are important. But in this blog post, I want to talk about a different way to get better at programming: learning how the systems you’re using work! This is the main way I approach getting better at programming.
When you're scripting with Bash, sometimes you need to read data from or write data to a file. Sometimes a file may contain configuration options, and other times the file is the data your user is creating with your application. Every language handles this task a little differently, and this article demonstrates how to handle data files with Bash and other POSIX shells.
Are you looking for some quick and easy Python projects to build?
Earlier this year, the Rust compiler gained support for LLVM source-base code coverage. This feature is called source-base because it operates on AST and preprocessor information directly, producing more precise coverage data compared to the traditional gcov coverage technique.
GitLab provides built-in integration of coverage information allowing for example reviewers to check if a MR is changing tested code or if it's increasing or decreasing the total coverage of the project. In this post we'll explain how to setup a CI job in a Rust project to feed source-base coverage information to GitLab.
Generating coverage profiles
The frst step is to add a new job to your CI pipeline, which will take care of generating the coverage reports. See the GitLab documentation if your project does not have any CI setup yet.
And cyber criminals are doing just that, with security researchers at F-Secure identifying tens of thousands of attacks targeting organisations around the world that are still running vulnerable Microsoft Exchange Server every day. According to F-Secure analytics, only about half of the Exchange servers visible on the internet have applied the Microsoft patches for these vulnerabilities.
"Tens of thousands of servers have been hacked around the world. They're being hacked faster than we can count. Globally, this is a disaster in the making," said Antti Laatikainen, senior security consultant at F-Secure.
The fear is that an attack that successfully compromises a Microsoft Exchange Server not only gains access to sensitive information that's core to how businesses are run, but could also open the door for additional attacks – including ransomware campaigns.
In order to avoid falling victim to cyber attackers exploiting the Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities, it's recommended that organisations apply the critical updates as quickly as possible, because the longer the patches aren't applied, the more time cyber criminals will have to potentially exploit the vulnerabilities as part of an attack.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (imagemagick and squid), Fedora (jasper and kernel), Red Hat (pki-core), SUSE (gnutls, go1.15, go1.16, hawk2, jetty-minimal, libass, nghttp2, openssl, ruby2.5, sudo, and wavpack), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.4, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke-5.3, linux-gke-5.4, linux-gkeop, linux-gkeop-5.4, linux-hwe, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-hwe-5.8, linux-kvm, linux-oem-5.10, linux-oem-5.6, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, linux-raspi, linux-raspi-5.4, linux-raspi2-5.3).
Deb Nicholson, the OSI's interim general manager, wrote that a "vulnerability in our voting processes was exploited and had an impact on the outcome of the recent Board Election. That vulnerability has now been closed. OSI will engage an independent expert to do a forensic investigation to help us understand how this happened and put measures in place to keep it from ever happening again."
Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winning submission for U.S. Patent 9,355,412. The patent is owned by Sanderling Management Ltd., an NPE., and relates to forwarding a processing function, such as an overlay, to a user's mobile image processing application when the user's mobile device indicates a certain GPS reading. The ‘412 patent is currently being asserted against Snap, Inc.
The conflict between monetization-focused standard-essential patent (SEP) holders and implementers (the latterg group also including major SEP holders who are nevertheless primarily interested in making products) appears to be everlasting. At times it even looks like both sides are ever more deeply entrenched. But at least they're still talking to each other, and not just about each other.
Yesterday the IP policy unit of the European Commission's Directorate-General for the Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (DG GROW) held a webinar on "FRAND licensing & valuation" with a very balanced roster of high-profile speakers and a sizable worldwide audience. The webinar took place via Microsoft Teams and was moderated by DG GROW official Elena Kostadinova, who might have been a TV news anchor in a former life.
You can find the detailed agenda on this webpage. If time permitted, I could have done a post on each of the three parts.
A survey by the Commission crystallized what SEP holders and implementers are primarily interested in. Among implementers, "license to all" was by far the most popular subject. I know I'm a bit difficult to please with terminology, and in my recent commentary on the SEP Expert Group report I explained why I oppose the terms "access for all"/"license to all" as "access for all" paints too rosy a picture while "license to all" sounds like built-in redundancy (though it's actually about giving the implementing side the choice of the level at which to take a license). But I recognize I'm the only one out there to criticize those terms, so to my dismay they're here to stay.
The component-level licensing panel--the third and final part of yesterday's webinar--was indeed the one where the different views of the two camps became clearest, not only in the webinar itself but also in the parallel Q&A chat.
Professor Damien Geradin, founder of the Geradin Partners antitrust boutique, acknowledged that both sides of the debate make interesting arguments. In his experience, "most reasonable people" agree that license agreements shouldn't be concluded at multiple levels of a given supply chain--but there are divergent views on which level it should be.
New Article 15a of the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA) on oral proceedings by videoconference enters into force on 1 April 2021.
On Monday, Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Tom Cotton (R-AR) sent a letter to Drew Hirshfeld, the Commissioner for Patents at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, to propose that the USPTO conduct a pilot program on a sequenced approach to patent examination. In their letter, Sen. Tillis (at right), the Ranking Member of the Senate Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, and Sen. Cotton (at left), a member of the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, suggest that a sequenced approach to patent examination, in which applications are first examined for compliance with 35 U.S.C. ۤۤ 102, 103, and 112, and then for compliance with 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101, could "avoid unnecessary and inefficient rejections on grounds of patent eligibility."
The Senators express their concern that "by conducting an eligibility analysis as per current practice, patent examiners may be issuing Section 101 rejections without the benefit of addressing prior art, clarity and enablement issues that may well inform the examiner that the claim is eligible under Section 101." While stating that examination under ۤۤ 102, 103, and 112 is based on "well-developed and objective criteria under the law," the Senators assert that "current patent eligibility jurisprudence lacks the clarity, consistency, and objectiveness the other grounds of patentability possess."
