Linux for Chromebooks has come a long way since Google introduced it in Chrome OS 69 a couple of years ago. On supported devices, it opened the door to an extensive library of desktop apps for users, like video editing tools and IDEs. GPU acceleration was an important milestone that made graphic intensive Linux app usable on Chrome OS. This is thanks to Virgil 3D, a component that allows the Linux container to tap into the hardware's GPU. In exciting news shared by Luke Short from VMware, Google is working on adding Vulkan passthrough into Virgil to improve app performance.
A round of commits spotted on GitLab shows that Google's Chia-l Wu has been working around a year to add Vulkan passthrough support into Virgil 3D from the QEMU hypervisor. Wu helped Valve in the past by submitting a set of patches for Mesa — an OpenGL library — to reduce load times in games. Work-in-progress code allows commercial and Proton-based Steam games to run on Chromebooks.
System76 does many things very well. One of those things is listen. The consumers have spoken and they wanted an AMD-powered version of their most popular laptop to date, the Pangolin. The Pangolin has the title of the first System76 laptop to be powered by the AMD Ryzen line of mobile processors. And with the Pangolin, you can configure a laptop all the way up to the Ryzen 7 4700 CPU and AMD Radeon graphics. As for memory and storage, the Pangolin can be spec’d up to 64GB of RAM and up to 2TB of NVMe storage.
The 15" laptop includes multi-colored backlit keys with tactile feedback, a large, multi-touch trackpad, and a 1080p matte display.
Here is a timelapse of a speedpainting using Krita that starts with a thumbnails in black and white; then most of the recoloring and painting of the main blocks is done at a distant zoom level. It helps at managing the overall aspect of the picture. To finish only a small part of the artwork was detailed: the characters. This way, the depth of field is not managed by a blur added (for eg. reducing the detailes of a colored line-art) , but by the lack of details all around. It's a technique that works fine with staged characters, little silhouette and background with organic shapes. It totally falls appart as soon as I apply that to a reaction shot for a comic, or on a complex perspective that require precise guideline. But I'll keep practising because I really like the feeling of 'freedom' this technique offers.
This week we’ve been migrating to Bitwarden and upgrading servers. We round up news from the Ubuntu community, events, and our picks from the tech news.
It’s Season 14 Episode 03 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
I've been a big supporter of LBRY since I first discovered it but a major change is coming to the platform. LBRY TV is being retired in favor of Odysee as the web client which I think is a great direction for the platform.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.10.26 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
When it comes to open-source Arm Mali graphics on Linux, the Panfrost Gallium3D driver is what's talked about the most given that it's for supporting newer generations of Mali graphics hardware. But the Lima Gallium3D driver effort remains ongoing for supporting older Mali 400/450 series hardware.
For those with older Mali 400 Utgard GPUs in various Allwinner SoCs particularly, the Lima Gallium3D effort continues maturing. The newest feature that is complete is an on-disk shader cache.
The latest AMD Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) stack brings a few new features for AMDs data-center customers. OpenCL, which is what most GNU/Linux desktop applications use for GPU compute, is not even mentioned in the "What's New" section of the release notes. There is, instead, a shiny new notice on the ROCm documentation website saying "GUI-based software applications are currently not supported".
It’s no secret that CPU renderers are slower than GPU renderers. But at the same time, CPU renderers are crucial for things like CI and also not hanging your current session by testing on a live GPU when you’re deep into Critical Rewrites.
So I’ve spent some time today doing some rewrites in the *pipe section of mesa, and let’s just say that the pipe was good with zink before, but it’s much, much better now.
The Panfrost project started as a reverse engineering effort to understand Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPU internals. It quickly evolved to focus on the development of a Gallium driver based on this reverse engineering effort, which was progressively extended to support new GLES and GL features (we recently reached a point where we are almost GLES 3.0 and GL 3.1 comformant, and GLES 3.1 is in the pipe). Last year, a new compiler backend was added to support Mali Bifrost GPUs.
With the Panfrost driver getting more and more mature, the natural next step was to work on an Open Source Vulkan driver for those GPUs.
Panfrost has been the Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL for Arm Mali Bifrost and Midgard GPus while now "PanVK" is in development as an open-source Vulkan driver.
Boris Brezillon formally announced the start of PanVK today. With Panfrost Gallium3D becoming quite mature, PanVK is the new focus in providing Vulkan API support for Arm Mali Midgard/Bifrost GPUs.
PanVK is already in good enough shape to run the basic Vulkan cube demo but is not yet a conformant driver nor running most real-world applications. Performance optimizations also haven't yet been a focus until all core features are in place.
Launched last week with the AMD EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors was the AOCC 3.0 code compiler as AMD's downstream of LLVM Clang with various patches now catering to optimized for Zen 3. Last week some preliminary benchmarks of AOCC 3.0 on the Ryzen 9 5950X were carried out to good results. Since then I have begun putting AOCC 3.0 through its paces on a AMD EPYC 7003 series server to overall great results.
The AMD Optimizing C/C++ Compiler 3.0 is catering to AMD EPYC 7003 (Zen 3) processors, re-based from LLVM Clang 11 to LLVM Clang 12, adds in tuning for the AMD Math Library (AMDLibM 3.7), and offers improved Fortran language support with the FLANG front-end. The extent of AMD's Zen 3 / Znver3 tuning though isn't clear given that AOCC remains a binary-only compiler without the sources being publicly available. In any case, the benchmarks we are seeing out of AOCC 3.0 on Zen 3 processors are looking quite favorable.
Mike, the zink dev, mentioned that swiftshader seemed slow at some stuff and I realised I've never expended much effort in checking swiftshader vs llvmpipe in benchmarks.
The thing is CPU rendering is pretty much going to top out on memory bandwidth pretty quickly but I decided to do some rough napkin benchmarks using the vulkan samples from Sascha Willems.
I'd also thought that due to having a few devs and the fact that it was used instead of mesa by google for lots of things that llvmpipe would be slower since it hasn't really gotten dedicated development resources.
I picked a random smattering of Vulkan samples and ran them on my Ryzen
workstation without doing anything else, in their default window size.
The free and open-source BitTorrent client qBittorrent 4.3.4 was released. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10 via PPA.
qBittorrent 4.3.4 reworked the sorting logic. To get the old sorting order for the “queue number” column, first sort on the “Completed On” column and then sort on the “#”(queue number) column.
The new release now requires Qt >= 5.12. Ubuntu 18.04 is no longer supported via the official PPA due to outdated system libraries.
This week marked the hard feature freeze for QEMU 6.0 along with the tagging of QEMU 6.0-rc0. The QEMU 6.0 release should happen around the end of April for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.
QEMU 6.0 is a big feature update and will be seeing weekly release candidates until the stable release is ready to ship around the end of April.
Gigolo is a simple graphical program, primarily for the Xfce desktop environment, that let you bookmark, mount and unmount remote filesystems supported by GVfs. The latest version is mostly a bug-fix release with non-visible changes beneath the hood.
This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.9.1 and Istio 1.9.2.
HestiaCP is a free and open-source web server control panel and is a fork of the popular Vesta Control Panel. It provides a simple and clean web interface, and it offers the possibility for administrators to easily manage core features of their web server, including managing and deploying websites, mail accounts, DNS zones and databases.
HestiaCP also offers a command line interface that you can read more on in the HestiaCP docs.
A nice feature of HestiaCP is that it offers Quick Install Apps, which means it offers a quick way of installing popular web apps. At the time of writing it includes WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Opencart, Prestashop, Laravel, and Symfony.
Given that HestiaCP is relatively recent, it doesn’t have a documentation of all the features it offers. On the other hand, thanks to the fact that it’s a fork of Vesta, some solutions/answers coincide with that of Vesta.
Apache Solr is an open-source search platform developed in Java. Searching is a very important part of an application. When comes to searching terabytes of data it would be important to consider speed and availability. Solr provides a rich set of features for search.
xRDP is a free and open-source implementation of Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), that started in 2004.
With RDP you can connect to a another computer over a network and control it through its graphical user interface, and use it almost as if you were sitting right in front of it. You also control the remote machine from operating systems that support RDP, which includes Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iOS.
xRDP allows non-Microsoft operating systems such as Linux and BSD to provide a fully-functional RDP-compliant remote desktop environment.
The xRDP server is full-screen and doesn’t require any special client-side software to be installed. xRDP allows RDP clients to present an X Windows desktop to the user. It works by bridging graphics from an X Windows system (Unix-like OS) to the client (the one receiving commands) and relaying controls back from the client to X.
This tutorial explains how to install xRDP on a remote machine running Debian 10, how to install multiple desktop environments on the remote machine, how to connect to it from different operating systems, how to fix a few common issues, and a few optimizations you can make to possibly improve a laggy connection.
Valheim is an early access survival and sandbox video game by Swedish developer Iron Gate Studio. In the game, players are Vikings and have to craft tools and survive. The game works on Linux reasonably well. Here’s how to set it up on your system.
DBeaver is a sophisticated SQL client software management tool and database administration tool. It is open source and works on all platforms, including Linux. In this guide, we’ll show you how to install the DBeaver program on Ubuntu.
Python to copy items from one DynamoDB table to another. The same script can be used to copy items between DynamoDB tables in different accounts. Before we proceed with this article, it is assumed that you have a basic understanding of Python. You need not write anything on your own, you would just need to execute the script to get done with the copy operation. If you need to understand the script and the code written in it, then you need to have a basic understanding of Python.
You can execute this script from any machine with access to the internet and Python installed in it. You need to have Python and Boto3 installed on your system. This script is tested with Python 2.7.16, you can try with different versions available in Python 2.7.
Sysstat (system statistics) is one of the most lightweight and best system monitoring tools for Linux distributions. If you’re a system administrator, you might know that monitoring every single parameter of your system is important to keep it functional. As the Sysstat is a command-line-based system monitoring tool, it provides real-time system info. Furthermore, you can also troubleshoot your system through the Sysstat tool. Installing the Sysstat system monitoring tool is quick and hassle-free on a Linux system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Hestia Control Panel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Hestia Control Panel is designed to provide administrators an easy-to-use web and command-line interface, enabling them to quickly deploy and manage web domains, mail accounts, DNS zones, and databases from one central dashboard without the hassle of manually deploying and configuring individual components or services.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Hestia Control Panel 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.
CMake is an open-source, cross-platform family of tools designed to build, test, and package software. CMake is used to control the software compilation process using simple platform and compiler-independent configuration files, and generate native makefiles and workspaces that can be used in the compiler environment of your choice. The suite of CMake tools was created by Kitware in response to the need for a powerful, cross-platform build environment for open-source projects such as ITK and VTK.
Raspberry Pi Pico features a powerful RP2040 chip that supports a wide range of use cases. Machine learning is one such use case, as the board comes with a higher clock and SRAM compared to its previously-released competing boards. This tutorial guides you through integrating the neural network trained with Edge Impulse on your Raspberry Pi Pico.
You will need three components to build the use cases explained in this tutorial: Raspberry Pi Pico, Seeed’s Grove Shield for Pi Pico v1.0, and Seeed’s Grove – Light Sensor v1.2 – LS06-S phototransistor. You will also need an Edge Impulse account for deploying purposes.
When talking about the Future of Technology, many seasoned techs know that virtualization and containerization are very much that path. They allow for greater application and service security, and they’re easily managed through other services that allow for snapshotting, templates, and greater customization than you get with the one-server-per-application model. However, it’s not always completely clear how you should get started with virtualization and containerization. We’ve covered virtualization on Linux, Windows, and macOS many times before, but containerization tends to be a bit of a different beast. We’re providing you in this article with a beginner’s guide to Podman on Linux, a great tool for containerization.
Today we are looking at how to install Friday Night Funkin' Hatsune Miku / Full Week 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.
Many Linux users would like to use Arch Linux, but its intense DIY philosophy can seem intimidating. What if there was a distro that wasn't just Arch-based, but one that actively trained you to become a full-blown Arch user?
Enter ArcoLinux, a distro that's also an educational course. Today we'll explore ArcoLinux along with its unique philosophy and features.
Yup, it’s here, and with the update comes quite a long list of changes. Buckle up, we’ve got a lot to cover in this massive 2.0 update.
Though Them’s Fightin’ Herds — a 2D fighting game featuring ungulates — works flawlessly through Proton, I’m happy to report that, as promised from their Indiegogo campaign, the Linux version has finally made it. After personally testing it I can confirm it runs just fine on Arch with NVIDIA; no stutters whatsoever throughout the time I played the game, and online multiplayer works.
Feral Interactive have turned from porter to a full game developer here with the announcement of Total War: ROME REMASTERED, bringing over one of the few Total War titles we didn't already have. This is not some minor revamp either, Feral Interactive went back and upgraded all parts of the game for a full release across Linux, macOS and Windows.
Originally created by Creative Assembly in partnership with SEGA Europe, this brings a lot of fun sounding enhancements to a very popular game along with Linux and macOS support.
"Working to remaster a classic such as Rome has been an exhilarating challenge: a bit like re-cutting the crown jewels" says David Stephen, Managing Director of Feral Interactive. "We are delighted with the result and hope that fans of this fantastic franchise will be too."
Besides Valheim, there hasn't been much in the way of native Linux game releases recently to really get excited about with much of the activity these days being through Valve's Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux. But in April there will be at least two high profile native Linux game releases.
First up, Metro Exodus will make its native Linux debut. Metro Exodus was released by 4A Games back in February 2019 as the newest Metro game under Windows. While users have been successful in getting Metro Exodus working with Steam Play / Proton, 4A Games has been working on native ports to Linux and macOS.
I was recently asked by a reader to review the latest Xfce (version 4.16). Although I haven't used this particular desktop environment for quite a while, I thought it'd be a treat to spin up a virtual machine and give it a go--I'm glad I did.
I opted to test the Xfce desktop on Manjaro, so I can be sure to get the latest version of everything needed to get the most out of the environment. Be aware, this isn't a review of Manjaro (which is an outstanding Linux distribution), but rather, Xfce. However, I will say that Manjaro helped to make the process quite pleasant. This also isn't a review wherein I get into the technical nuts and bolts of the desktop. This is about end-users and useability, but that's a story for another day.
For some time Plasma Wayland had built-in support for Qt Virtual Keyboard. This got dropped for better support based on the Wayland input method protocols. An application supporting this protocol is maliit. In this blog post I want to describe how to enable and configure maliit in a Plasma Wayland session.
The support for Qt Virtual Keyboard was added by me as it is quite important to offer first class virtual keyboard support out of the box. Unfortunately the best technical option, maliit, was unavailable back then in most distributions. This made it rather impossible to built on it and instead Qt Virtual Keyboard was used. Given that I am very happy that now maliit support gets added to distributions. When installing maliit please make sure to install the newer maliit-keyboard instead of the older maliit-framework and make sure that it has an up to date git snapshot.
GNOME 40 is the latest version of GNOME, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 24571 changes, made by approximately 822 contributors.
This release is dedicated to the team behind the GNOME Asia Summit 2020. GNOME Asia is the major annual GNOME conference in the Asia/Pacific part of the world, and is only possible thanks to the hard work of many volunteers. This year’s event was forced to be held online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We are very much looking forward to meeting our friends from all around the world again in person in the near future.
I am pleased to witness the coming of GNOME 40 (also spelled Forty) the user interface of most prestigious GNU/Linux computer operating systems. Below you can download and quickly try it from the latest GNOME OS or alternatively Fedora or openSUSE in live session right from the bootable medium or simply run it on a virtual machine. Welcome GNOME Forty and congratulations to all GNOME developer for this awesome release!
And boy is it impressive.
The minute-long clip whisks watchers through a number of reasons why they might want to use GNOME 40 to help them be productive.
In a break with previous GNOME release videos the new one does not use narration. It also doesn’t call out specific changes and instead focuses on relaying more general improvements, like “intuitive gestures” rather than a description of which gestures they mean.
You can see the new clip here...
GNOME 40 was released this week, and I couldn't wait to check it out. In this video, I go over some of the new features and will give you a look at the new activities overview and workspace arrangement. This video goes over the final version of GNOME 40, tested on Fedora 34 (beta).
Jay from LearnLinuxTV on YouTube does a pretty good job showing off GNOME 40. Enjoy.
GNOME 40 is out! Like you, we are also excited about the possibilities and new features that it brings to the table. We have followed GNOME releases in the past. However, if you focus on the numbering, you will find that the last one we covered was GNOME 3.38, and now we have GNOME 40. This new numbering system is one of the changes you will see in the latest releases onwards.
GNOME 40 is released on 24th March 2021 while showcasing the new numbering system.
In this post, we will be taking a look at the top new features of GNOME 40.
The release of AlmaLinux in 2021 was spurred by the change of CentOS Linux from an enterprise-stable operating system to an upstream development branch of RHEL.
With AlmaLinux being branded as a replacement for CentOS, and giving users the option to migrate to AlmaLinux from CentOS, you may be wondering what the differences are between these operating systems.
In this guide, we'll look at what makes AlmaLinux and CentOS so similar, and why new differences between the distributions are causing many to distro hop.
The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.13.3 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
Today we are looking at Manjaro 21.0. It comes with XFCE 4.16, Linux Kernel 5.10, and uses about 700MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at Manjaro 21.0.
The way we work has changed dramatically over the last 12 months. What’s more, those challenges are likely to stay for much of 2021. But there are organizations who are using this opportunity to double down on their digital transformation.
I asked two of our Platinum partners – Mark de Groot, CEO of BPSOLUTIONS, based in the Netherlands, and Nicolas Christener, CEO & CTO, Adfinis Sygroup, based in Switzerland, about how we can and are helping our customers be more agile and innovative in the face of difficult marketing operating conditions.
In the not-so-distant past, everyone had a standard operating environment. SOEs—which typically include the base operating system (kernel and user space programs), custom configuration files, standard applications used within an organization, software updates, and service packs—are designed to increase the security posture of the environment, simplify processes and automate code. Admins implement an SOE as a disk image, kickstart, or virtual machine image for mass deployment within an organization.
Today we're thrilled to announce that the RHEL System Roles Collection is now certified with Ansible Automation Platform and is being delivered to organizations through Ansible Automation Hub. Starting with the forthcoming RHEL 8.4, this means that the system roles Collection is immediately available under technology preview support and planned to be fully supported by both RHEL and Ansible Automation Platform product support experts.
As a part of the Community Outreach Revamp the Objective co-leads, Mariana (marianab) and Sumantro (sumantrom) along with FCIAC, Marie Nordin (riecatnor), tried to capture the “bright spots” of what motivated the engagement of Fedora Ambassadors. The team approached the situation by developing a set of questions and implementing a community survey.
The latest PinePhone is now available for pre-order. It is priced at US $149.99, with estimated shipping in late April 2021.
Linaro has posted a 96Boards CE v2.0 spec that adds LAN support and the option for a second high-speed connector with SPI, USB 3.0, 2x PCIe, and a second CSI-2. Beiqi is prepping the first two v.2.0-compliant SBCs based on the Rockchip RV1126 and RK3568.
[...]
96Boards hardware partner Beiqui has posted preliminary specs for the first two 96Boards CE v2.0 SBCs. Due in May are a TB-96AIoT-1126CE CE standard board based on Rockchip’s Cortex-A7-based RV1126 and a TB-96AI-3568-CE extended board based on Rockchip’s quad-A55 RK3568. Both SoCs provide NPUs for AI acceleration (see farther below).
We are surrounded by electronic devices that make the modern world work. Almost all of these devices and the systems they run are “Embedded Systems”, which are small purpose-built computers designed to solve specific problems. These computers don’t look like what most people think of as a computer; they don’t have a keyboard, mouse nor monitor. They might even be hidden in normal, everyday objects that you use around the house. The reality is that many of the more powerful embedded systems are running Linux and any “smart devices” around your home or work are almost certainly running embedded Linux.
Embedded systems tend to be smaller, resource-constrained, power-limited, and have a very defined and narrow purpose. Among things, they are your TV, internet modem, wifi access point, smart thermostat, car infotainment system, or home automation system. Everything from smart parking meters to security systems, to the drink dispensers in the cafeteria, and so much of the industrial automation that manufacture and deliver all the things that drive our modern lives, are embedded systems; the vast majority of which run Embedded Linux.
Open source artificial intelligence projects don’t always get a lot of publicity, but they play a vital role in the development of artificial intelligence. Because these open source projects are often pursued as passion projects by developers (sometimes in colleges and universities), the advances are creative and particularly forward-looking.
Typically freed from the constraints of a corporate setting (though some are supported by companies), these open source AI projects can dream big – and often deliver ground-breaking machine learning (ML) and AI advances.
I’m pleased to announce our newest Friend of Add-ons, Mélanie Chauvel! After becoming interested in free and open source software in 2012, Mélanie started contributing code to Tab Center Redux, a Firefox extension that displays tabs vertically on the sidebar. When the developer stopped maintaining it, she forked a version and released it as Tab Center Reborn.
As she worked on Tab Center Reborn, Mélanie became thoroughly acquainted with the tabs API. After running into a number of issues where the API didn’t behave as expected, or didn’t provide the functionality her extension needed, she started filing bugs and proposing new features for the WebExtensions API.
Changing code in Firefox can be scary to new contributors because of the size and complexity of the codebase. As she started looking into her pain points, Mélanie realized that she could make some of the changes she wanted to see. “WebExtensions APIs are implemented in JavaScript and are relatively isolated from the rest of the codebase,” she says. “I saw that I could fix some of the issues that bothered me and took a stab at it.”
Since we last talked about MDN localization, a lot of progress has been made. In this post we’ll talk you through the unfreezing of Tier 1 locales, and the next steps in our plans to stop displaying non-active and unmaintained locales.
In other words, Carnegie doesn't propose a Code of Conduct, shaming with a petition, punishment and quest for submission: he proposes respect.
On the challenges of censorship, I feel that public speaking is a powerful tool. In fact, many of the people who have been subject to public shaming in the free software community have been attacked after standing up to speak. In my case, I had asked a question at a UN forum and within a few weeks, all kinds of people were running around in the shadows looking for ways to hide my blog or censor mailing lists.
The fact that these people behave like this suggests that they fear independent volunteers with leadership skills. They simply want to have their cake and eat it too. When somebody is doing the wrong thing, they need to spend many hours on a shared document crafting an email that has a semblence of credibility. When somebody is acting with integrity, they have less fear about standing up to speak in front of a group.
Public speaking is a powerful buffer against censorship and oppression. Whenever students and interns ask me for advice now, instead of recommending a program like Google Summer of Code, I suggest they start by joining a Toastmasters group before they become too involved in free software.
Being a successful speaker is a skill that is honed with practice. Giving very short speeches every week, in a Toastmasters group or any other setting, is like adhering to a fitness training program or regularly practicing a musical instrument.
[...]
Rather than running around with petitions and vendettas, if somebody develops a better philosophy than Richard Stallman and has a better way to communicate it, Stallman himself may become one of your followers. That is the means of change envisaged by Carnegie.
Honorary doctor Richard Stallman set out to create a truly free computer operating system on September 28th, 1983. He begun writing all the necessary components, including core components like the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc), and made them freely available under a new kind of license he invented called the GNU General Public License. Linus Torvalds came along with his Linux kernel much later. The combination of Torvalds Linux kernel and the already-existing GNU operating system, which lacked a kernel of its own, is what become what we today think of as "Linux distributions" such as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora and Linux Mint.
Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation on October 4th, 1985. Stallman was pressured into resigning from his position as president of the FSF in September 2019 following some silly çâ¢Â½Ã¥Â·Â¦ overblown drama over some comments Stallman wrote on a MIT mailing-list and some low grade "journalism".
Stallman recently announced that he is back on the FSF board as a regular board member, not president, in a live video stream at the virtual LibrePlanet 2021 conference. Big tech didn't like that and they are currently trying very hard to make the FSF board reverse that decision.
"An open letter in support of Richard M. Stallman", which can be read in full at rms-support-letter.github.io, urges the Free Software Foundation to keep honorary doctor Richard Stallman on its board. The letter has been signed by over two thousand people thus far, and support is growing. You can sign the letter by adding a comment to rms-support-letter at codeberg.org.
Red Hat is a long-time donor and contributor to projects stewarded by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), with hundreds of contributors and millions of lines of code contributed. Considering the circumstances of Richard Stallman’s original resignation in 2019, Red Hat was appalled to learn that he had rejoined the FSF board of directors. As a result, we are immediately suspending all Red Hat funding of the FSF and any FSF-hosted events. In addition, many Red Hat contributors have told us they no longer plan to participate in FSF-led or backed events, and we stand behind them.
The world's biggest open source company, Red Hat, has pulled funding from the Free Software Foundation and any events hosted by the foundation due to its allowing its founder, Richard Stallman, to rejoin the board.
A group of supporters of Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman has hit back at those calling for his ouster from the FSF, by putting up their own open letter calling for him to stay on in his current position.
The pro-Stallman letter, initially published on 23 March (US time), has gathered 1897 signatures from individuals as of this writing. Unlike the anti-Stallman missive, there are no original signatories or organisations on this list.
German open source vendor SUSE has become the most prominent FOSS organisation to add its voice to the push for Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman and the entire FSF board to resign.
In 2019, Richard Stallman was forced out of the FSF, the organization he started. This after he called Jeffrey Epstein's victims of sex trafficking as "entirely willing". This week, Stallman announced that he is reappointed.
Dear LibreOffice Community, Dear FOSS Community,
All of us at The Document Foundation are following the discussion in the global free software community about Richard M. Stallman’s return to the Free Software Foundation (FSF) board of directors. We do share your concerns, and we do take this situation very seriously.
Our worldwide community is strongly committed to have a safe, welcoming, harmonious and inclusive environment, based on dignity and support. We absolutely do not tolerate harassment of any kind. Working together in trust requires mutual respect and understanding. These standards are also part of our guiding statutes that we expect all our community members and affiliates to follow.
Richard Stallman's return to the board of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), from which he parted ways less than two years ago, has not been well received.
Following word that Stallman – who resigned from the FSF amid an outcry over his offensive remarks, past behavior, and warped opinions – had returned to the fold, open source organizations and members of the technical community responded with disbelief and dismay.
The Free Software Foundation has announced changes in how its board of directors is selected. "We will adopt a transparent, formal process for identifying candidates and appointing new board members who are wise, capable, and committed to the FSF's mission. We will establish ways for our supporters to contribute to the discussion. We will require all existing board members to go through this process as soon as possible, in stages, to decide which of them remain on the board."
I’ve been asking those who signed letter to remove RMS from all leadership positions whether they’ve read RMS statement/email that lead to all the controversies we’re now experiencing but not a single person have read the complete message/statement.
This is madness. All those who I asked have got their info on the matter from news sites that only quoted very specific part of RMS’ message out of context. They’re asking RMS to step down from his job simply because they don’t know what he said exactly.
Let me give you a backstory.
[...]
Few days ago, RMS announced that he’s back. Many people cheered this decision and announcement and some were upset. Well, many were upset and many are asking FSF board and RMS himself to resign over this decision. Complete idiocy.
This makes me mad not because I’m a fan of RMS’ work but because of idiotic cancel culture that is going on software libre world. Misleading media and news, among those who just hate RMS are pushing lots of pressure on FSF and Stallman to make them resign from their jobs.
We should resist this. This is very dangerous. Giving organizations power to control literally the future of software libre movement is dangerous. I would support a debate between RMS and anybody who wants to debate him on his claims and statements but quoting only part of his statement out of context to cancel someone is dangerous to all of us.
Imagine this. You say “those who say ‘rape is good’ are bad people.” Then I write a blog post about your statement and quote “rape is good” from you and ask people to cancel you. You literally said the opposite but because I quoted only specific part of your saying out of context, people get mad and try to ruin everything you stand for or have.
RMS is a diamond for software libre world and we should keep him. Nobody can lead the movement and the Free Software Foundation better than RMS. I’ve always said, the difference between us and Open Source people is our principals. We stand by our principals and values no matter what.
inspired by the computing page of rms
Computers
My librebooted ThinkPad X200 computer is the machine I use the most and where I do most of my computing. I also have the privilege of having access to a fleet of servers through our school's Computer Science Club that I use for some more computationally intensive tasks every now and again, and also for hosting this very website.
GNU/Linux distribution
I used a wide variety of distros over the years; but I have since found Trisquel to be my favourite and it's put my "distro-hopping" days behind me. Sometimes I pair it up with GNU Guix. For the kernel, I usually use GNU Linux-libre from jxself's APT repository.
I am giving my very first LibrePlanet talk today on March 20th. I will be talking about Jami, the GNU package for universal communication that respects the freedoms and privacy of its users. I'll be giving an introduction to Jami and its architecture, sharing important and exciting development news from the Jami team about rendezvous points, JAMS, the plugin SDK, Swarm chats, and more; and how these features each help empower users to communicate with their loved ones without sacrificing their privacy or freedom.
[...]
I have been an attendee of LibrePlanet for some years, and am very excited to be giving my first ever talk at LibrePlanet 2021 this year! You can watch my talk and other speakers' talks live this weekend, from the LibrePlanet 2021 - Live page. Attendance is gratis (no cost), and you can register at https://u.fsf.org/lp21-sp.
Functional programming is not a new approach to coding, but it has grown in popularity in recent years.
This is because, once programmers understand the basics behind the technique (and are able to write clean and reliable code using it), applications written using a functional approach are much easier to work with.
Because of this, it’s worth gaining an understanding of functional programming once you’ve worked through this JavaScript beginners’ handbook.
If you are frequently working with JavaScript, using this approach can save you time, and can make your code easier to work with and potentially more secure.
In this article, we’ll look at the basic principles of functional programming, and then outline a few of the key tools for using this approach in JavaScript.
The best way to learn a new programming language is to build projects.
I have created a list of 40 beginner friendly project tutorials in Vanilla JavaScript, React, and TypeScript.
My advice for tutorials would be to watch the video, build the project, break it apart and rebuild it your own way. Experiment with adding new features or using different methods.
That will test if you have really learned the concepts or not.
You can click on any of the projects listed below to jump to that section of the article.
On Wednesday, Bastien Nocera, the maintainer of a software library called shared-mime-info, informed Daniel Mendler, maintainer of a Ruby library called mimemagic, which incorporates Nocera's code, that he was shipping mimemagic under an incompatible software license.
The shared-mime-info library is licensed under the GPLv2 license and mimemagic was listed as an MIT licensed project.
"Using a GPL file as a source makes your whole codebase a derived work, making it all GPL, so I think it's pretty important that this problem gets corrected before somebody uses it in a pure MIT codebase, or a closed-source application," wrote Nocera in an Issues post.
Python has become the most preferred language for Natural Language Processing (NLP) because of its great library ecosystem, platform independence, and ease of use. In this post let's find out what are the common real-world uses of NLP and what open-source Python tools and libraries are available for the NLP tasks.
Like many other programming languages, Python works well with JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data. It can pull this data in from a few sources and work with it like any other file. This is helpful when you want to pretty print a JSON file in Python.
In this post, we show you how to pretty print a JSON file in two ways. Both will involve using the Terminal and command line, although you may not need Python knowledge at all for one of them.
As of now, the Linux kernel is written in the C programming language—essentially, the same language used to write kernels for Unix and Unix-like operating systems since the 1970s. The great thing about C is that it's not assembly language—it's considerably easier to read and write, and it's generally much closer to directly portable between hardware architectures. However, C still opens you up to nearly the entire range of catastrophic errors possible in assembly.
In particular, as a nonmemory-managed language, C opens the programmer up to memory leaks and buffer overflows. When you're done with a variable you've created, you must explicitly destroy it—otherwise, old orphaned variables accumulate until the system crashes. Similarly, you must allocate memory to store data in—and if your attempt to put too much data into too-small an area of RAM, you'll end up overwriting locations you shouldn't.
The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.51.0. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
If you have a previous version of Rust installed via rustup, getting Rust 1.51.0 is as easy as:
rustup update stable If you don't have it already, you can get rustup from the appropriate page on our website, and check out the detailed release notes for 1.51.0 on GitHub.
Java is one of the most popular programming languages. It can run on all the major operating systems and can be used to write native Android apps.
We posted a beginner's Java course on the freeCodeCamp.org YouTube channel.
This course was developed by Matt Speake. Matt has been programming for over 20 years. He has many popular courses on Udemy and other platforms.
The Association for Molecular Pathology released a survey last week regarding the state of reimbursement for medical diagnostic testing, according to GenomeWeb.
It seems that the state is parlous, with reimbursement for "data analysis, test interpretation, and reporting requirements" being inadequate. This reflects a need for "qualified molecular laboratory professionals" and of course reimbursement for these efforts. These efforts are significant, with the majority (65%) of respondents reporting that these reports require extra effort (compared with more conventional diagnostic laboratory tests) and greater time burdens. The only exceptions are so-called "single-gene tests," and oncology tests were typically delivered most rapidly (reflecting adequate time and personnel and, perhaps, their importance to proper diagnosis of what is, despite recent developments, frequently a deadly disease).
[...]
So maybe patents on genes weren't the problem after all, Myriad not the avaricious monster AMP made them out to be, and being permitted to infringe with impunity not the pot of gold they expected. Which was not entirely unexpected (see "The ACLU, Working for the Man").
The remarkable news of record-breaking COVID-19 vaccine development has been clouded by the increasing emergence of new variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Like other viruses, SARS-CoV-2 mutates over time, due to random errors in copying its genetic sequence. When one of these mutations helps the virus survive and reproduce—such as by making the virus more transmissible—that variant will spread more rapidly than the original virus through natural selection. The global effort to control the pandemic has thus been framed as a race between the vaccines and the variants: can the world be vaccinated before the virus evolves to evade the vaccines? In this post, we examine how COVID-19 vaccine developers are responding to the spread of variants, how the FDA plans to regulate updates to the vaccines, and other innovation policies governments should consider to combat the variant spread.
[...]
Once variants exist, it is important to know what, where, and how widespread they are. This means genetic surveillance—sequencing infected patients to know which variant they have contracted. Genetic surveillance is a problem of nonexcludable innovation, which suggests that private actors are unlikely to spend enough on it, leaving governments to fill the gap. Some governments do genetic surveillance very well; the United States doesn’t, at least nationally. Such surveillance should also help scientists understand how effective existing vaccines are in managing the spread of variants.
Better understanding the performance of vaccines suggests its own potential policy intervention. Each vaccine was tested in a different time frame, with different populations, in different places, and—crucially—with different variants at different levels circulating in the population. As a result, despite headlines trumpeting different vaccine performances (and some policy reactions), no one really knows whether Johnson & Johnson’s or AstraZeneca’s vaccines are actually less effective than Moderna’s and Pfizer–BioNTech’s. Even less is known about how a vaccine modified to address a variant would compare with any of them. Running comparative randomized controlled trials between multiple different vaccines seems unlikely—indeed, comparative trials are underfunded generally—but at the very least policymakers should consider robust systems for collecting observational data to understand how different vaccines perform.
Once vaccines are approved, getting them made remains a challenge—and with variant vaccines, that challenge will continue. Flexible manufacturing platforms should make it easier to get variant vaccines into scaled-up production more rapidly, and further investment in such platforms could help with that challenge. As we’ve noted, older processes to manufacture vaccines were materials intensive—some involve incubating viruses in chicken eggs. mRNA vaccines, on the other hand, are less resource intensive and seem especially well suited to variants, since the encapsulated mRNA sequence can be easily altered without changing other production parameters. Government efforts to improve manufacturing generally, and especially around mRNA or other flexible manufacturing platforms, could be essential to producing variant vaccines if COVID becomes endemic and continues to change.
Finally, getting vaccines into arms is always the last step, without which nothing matters; investing in better vaccine roll-out is essential if variant boosters will become routine. An example for this exists, of course: the annual flu vaccine. Someday we all may get annual COVID vaccines, tailored to that year’s new variants. But for that to work, the health system would need to do a better job keeping track of who gets what, whether first and second vaccine shots can be mixed and matched, and how to insure that ongoing distribution is efficient, affordable, and equitable.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr and lxml), Fedora (jasper), openSUSE (gnutls, hawk2, ldb, libass, nghttp2, and ruby2.5), Oracle (pki-core:10.6), Red Hat (firefox and thunderbird), SUSE (evolution-data-server, ldb, python3, and zstd), and Ubuntu (ldb, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-dell300x, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-signed, linux-snapdragon, and linux, linux-lts-xenial).
The open-source OpenSSL project has released an updated version of its software, 1.1.1k, to fix two vulnerabilities, the severity of both of which has been described as "high".
In an advisory issued on Thursday US time, the project said the issue had been reported by Akamai's Benjamin Kaduk and was found by Xiang Ding of the same firm.
The vulnerability was a CA certificate check bypass with X509_V_FLAG_X509_STRICT flag. This was because of an error in the implementation of an additional check to disallow certificates in the chain that have explicitly encoded elliptic curve parameters.
Red Hat's Tomáš Mráz created a fix for this vulnerability.
The OpenSSL developers made one very unfortunate and very embarrassing mistake between version 1.1.1g and 1.1.1h that rendered the entire security OpenSSL is supposed to provide moot. The latest OpenSSL 1.1.1k security release fixes that and an equally serious security problem, present in all OpenSSL 1.1.1 versions, that could allow services that allow TLS 1.2 to be crashed with a evil renegotation ClientHello message. Upgrading is a great idea.
Beware the Ides of March. On the heels of the ongoing SUNBURST supply chain campaign, several other impactful campaigns came into full light this month. While the Halfnium MS Exchange attacks dominated headlines, there were other equally disturbing supply chain revelations like the damaging Accellion FTA device extortion campaign. This was carried out by the Russian TA505 (aka ‘CLOP’ group), who set aside their own ransomware in favor of a much more direct technique: targeting the firmware of hundreds of devices to exfiltrate files and extort victims.
Never down for the count, the TrickBot group raised eyebrows with yet another massive campaign, with CISA releasing an alert making direct mention of TrickBot’s UEFI-targeting TrickBoot module. This alert coincided with an eye-opening report from Switzerland that ties the recent SolarWinds activity to a host of potential criminal actors, ranging from TrickBot, to EvilCorp, to TA505/CLOP. Shared infrastructure and tactics across these groups further illustrates the convergent trend between APT and criminal actor activity.
A new chapter in the short but intense history of global ASI disputes is opening. Anyone that files an anti-suit injunction as an SEP implementer – for example at a Chinese court – can expect the Regional Court Munich to treat them as an unwilling licensee in future.
But there could be dramatic consequences. In patent infringement proceedings, the Munich judges would no longer examine whether the SEP holder had made a FRAND-compliant offer. Instead, the court would charge the implementer directly with patent infringement. Then would emerge a threat of a German-style automatic injunction, and a sales ban in Europe’s strongest economy. That would make any smart businessperson think twice.
[...]
In Germany, the ruling in InterDigital vs. Xiaomi is providing some clarity. JUVE Patent has learned from sources at Chinese companies that they are examining more closely whether to file for an ASI in China. Whether this marks the beginning of a trend reversal remains to be seen.
From what JUVE Patent hears, Xiaomi has not yet filed an appeal against the Munich ruling. But observers expect the Chinese company to do so in the near future, due to the far-reaching consequences of the ruling.
Whether its InterDigital against Xiaomi, or Ericsson against Samsung, no party has yet gained a decisive advantage in the major ASI disputes. So far, observers are convinced that the main parties to financially benefit from ASI disputes are the courts and the lawyers.
Markkaya Gullett was killed in a Ford Explorer crash near her home in Montana. Gullett’s estate sued Ford on a product liability type claims. Ford argued that the state lacks personal jurisdiction over the global auto company. The Supreme Court has sided with Gullett’s estate — finding that the 14th Amendment does not prohibit this case from moving forward.
Over the past decade, the Supreme Court has tightened-up the 14th Amendment personal jurisdiction test both in terms of General Jurisdiction and Specific Jurisdiction. Although the U.S. Constitution serves as the foundational basis for the large number of precedential cases, the text is quite short: “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Constitutional requirements of personal jurisdiction are due process requirements.
General Jurisdiction: Ford has a longstanding permanent relationship with Montana, advertises heavily in the state, and receives hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars in revenue from in-state sales. Still, under Daimler AG v. Bauman, 571 U. S. 117 (2014), state courts will not have General Jurisdiction over the the company since it still isn’t “at home” in the state.
With Specific Jurisdiction, the Court’s recent decision in Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. v. Superior Court of Cal., San Francisco Cty., 582 U. S. ___ (2017) refocused attention on a required nexus between the the defendant’s contacts with the forum state and the cause of action. The decision suggested to many that defendant’s connections should have a causal-link with the cause of action. BMS also rejected a sliding-scale approach that would allow for fewer related minimum contacts in situations where the defendant has many ongoing unrelated contacts with the forum state.
[...]
The majority opinion was authored by Justice Kagan and joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kavanaugh. Justices Alito and Gorsuch both wrote concurring opinions with Justice Thomas joining Justice Justice Gorsuch’s opinion.
Justice Alito, who penned the BMS decision explained that the difference between those cases is whether the state has a “legitimate interest” in hearing the case at hand. Here, he found that no question — injury on Montana roads is enough to give Montana a state interest. And, there is nothing fundamentally unfair about having Ford litigate these cases in the state.
While the EPO received 180,250 patent applications in 2020, 0.7% fewer than in 2019, demand remained high, in some fields more than others.
The strongest growth was recorded in pharmaceuticals (+10.2%) and biotechnology (+6.3%), while medical technology recorded a +2.6% increase in inventions. The previous year, the strongest growing sectors were digital communications and computer technology. Transport showed the strongest decline at -5.5%, particularly in the sub-sectors of aviation and aerospace (-24.7%).
The European Patent Office (EPO) last week published the patent index for 2020. According to the data published, patenting activity in 2020 was primarily driven by innovation in healthcare and medical technology. While, medical technology emerged as the leading field for inventions in terms of volume, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology were the fastest-growing areas. In terms of geographic origin of inventions, the top five countries filing into Europe were USA (44 293 applications), Germany (25 954), Japan (21 841), China (13 432) and France (10 554).
On March 10, in decision G1/19, the European Patent Office (EPO) Enlarged Board of Appeal held that computer-implemented simulations are not per se unpatentable and warrant the same treatment as other computer-implemented inventions. Like other computer-implemented inventions, simulations may be patentable if an inventive step is based on features contributing to the technical character of the claimed simulation.
The application at issue, European patent application 03793825.5, relates to simulation of a pedestrian’s movements in an environment. According to the application, while prior art approaches modeled crowds from a macroscopic perspective, the subject application took a more granular approach, modeling multiple individual pedestrians having, e.g., individual intentions, preferred walking speeds, step lengths, and even preferred clearance tolerance or personal space. Simulating the movement of pedestrians in this manner, as described in the application, may be used to verify whether a building design meets certain requirements, for example, in case of evacuation. The claims recited, in part, a method of simulating movement of an autonomous entity through an environment. The claims as filed did not recite specific inputs or outputs rooted in physical parameters.
On March 19, 2021, Unified Patents filed a Chinese invalidation request for CN103238328B owned by Velos Media. CN103238328B is related to U.S. Patent 8,768,077, and its extended patent family is the largest family known to be owned by Velos.
On March 19, 2021, Unified Patents filed a Chinese invalidation request for CN1312936C owned by IdeaHub, Inc. CN1312936C has been designated as essential in the SISVEL’s VP9 and AV1 pools and as essential to HEVC Advance. The patent is part of a large family of patents with several members designated as essential to those pools as well.
