We've hand-picked a set of articles that highlight where we're at today. With a focus on cloud-native architectures and Kubernetes, these contributors paint a picture of what's here now, and what's on the horizon.
Styli.sh is a shell script that automates the tedious process of finding new wallpapers, downloading and setting them. Styli.sh searches for wallpapers from Unsplash and various sub-reddits and sets a random wallpaper or a wallpaper based on a search term.
Here is a video from the Morevna team that explain their work and process on their on-going project: converting the Episode 3 of Pepper&Carrot into a Motion Comic. The team use only Free/Libre and Open-Source tools and release their result under the Creative Commons Share-Alike license.
I really liked this polished video that shows all the team members and also all the steps necessary to make their Motion Comic. I also liked to see all the care they put to give life to my original artworks, and the way their process is publicly open. That's fantastic to see the tiny sequences animated!
For a reminder, the Morevna team already made in 2017 a motion comic adaptation of Episode 6. You can support their project, they propose right now to their supporter a blog-post to select what will be the next episode after episode 3.
There are plenty of use cases where people might need access to some specific windows apps, and running some of them on Linux can be a hassle. Wine has come a long way, but it still fails to run some of the most popular apps without a huge performance hit, like MS Office, or the Adobe Suite. Fortunately, there might be a solution to run these apps as if they were native to Linux.
Arm has released version 3.0 of its encoder for Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC), the lossy compression algorithm popular with OpenGL (ES) and Vulkan that is royalty-free and available through official extensions.
As with prior releases for Arm's ASTC command line compressor/decompressor, ASTC Encoder 3.0 is focused on more performance improvements. Arm engineers note that compared to ASTC Encoder 2.5, the new ASTC Encoder 3.0 should be "between 25% and 75% [faster]" depending upon the image quality and other settings. Using smaller block sizes and higher search qualities should yield the largest advantage in moving to ASTC Encoder 3.0. ASTC Encoder 3.0 aims to keep the image quality the same or better than ASTC Encoder 2.5.
Recently we have been running a number of compiler benchmarks looking at the recently released LLVM Clang 12 and GCC 11 open-source code compilers. There is as healthy and competitive competition as ever between GCC and Clang with the mainline Linux kernel these days working well under Clang, more software projects shifting to Clang by default, and the performance being as tight as ever between GCC and Clang for compiled C/C++ code on x86_64 and AArch64. In today's article are benchmarks of Clang 12 vs. GCC 11 on the dual Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 Ice Lake server.
Tests were run with the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 Ice Lake server running the recently released Fedora Server 34, which offers up both GCC 11.1 and LLVM Clang 12.0 as the newest compiler releases of the year.
Bodhi GNU/Linux is a Ubuntu-based distribution designed especially for Desktop computing and is best known for its elegant and lightweight nature. The Distribution philosophy is to provide a minimal base system that can be populated with the applications as per the user’s choice.
The Base System only include those applications which are essentially required viz., PCManFM, GNOME Web web browser, Terminology terminal emulator, ePhoto, and leafpad. Apt or AppCenter can be used to download and install lightweight applications in one go.
Today we are looking at how to install Flash Flash Revolution 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.
Has an Intel powered laptop or desktop PC with dedicated NVIDIA GPU? Installing the proprietary NVIDIA driver and switch between the GPUs is easy in Ubuntu.
Since Ubuntu now maintains the latest NVIDIA drivers via the restricted repositories, users can easily install the latest proprietary drivers in Ubuntu via a few clicks.
In this video, I am going to show how to Install DragonFly BSD 6.0.0 plus Xfce and some aplications
Let us say you want to repeat a character such as ‘-‘ OR ‘=‘ multiple times while writing bash script. Please note that I needed a quick script to work on Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD server to repeat a string/character n times.
The $PATH variable is a crucial component on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It specifies a list of directories that hold various executables on the system and tells the shell where to look for these executable files.
On a fresh Linux installation, the directories included in $PATH ensure that most programs you run work faultlessly. However, there may be times when you might want to quickly run custom scripts or programs on your system.
In such cases, you need to set the $PATH variable appropriately before running those programs.
Skype is one of the most popular communication applications in the world. It is cross-platform, available on Windows, Linux, and macOS. With Skype, you can make free online audio and video calls, and international calling to mobiles and landlines worldwide.
Skype isn’t an open-source application, and not included in the standard Ubuntu repositories.
This guide shows two ways of installing Skype on Ubuntu 21.04. Skype canbe installed as a snap package via the Snapcraft store or as a deb package from the Skype repositories.
One of the biggest strengths in working with virtual machines is their portability. It’s great to be able to create VMs on one machine and move them to another, or you can create and clone an entire deployment of VMs. At the same time, you can find pre-configured virtual machines online that you can import in a snap and get working right away. Here we show you how to import and export OVA files in VirtualBox, which is one method of accomplishing this.
VirtualBox makes all of this very simple. If you’re not familiar, VirtualBox is VM management, called a Type 2 hypervisor, for the desktop. It’s a graphical application that you can use to create and manage your virtual machines easily on your desktop or workstation. There’s no complicated install or configuration necessary.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OBS Studio on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, OBS Studio is a free open source software for capturing, compositing, encoding, recording, and streaming video content, it is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.
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 the step-by-step installation of the OBS Studio 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.
As a Linux newbie, the preference for a Graphical User Interface (GUI) comes naturally. Also, shifting from Windows can be a bit difficult without a GUI. The unfamiliar syntax and the need to memorize the commands might scare you at first, but getting comfortable with the terminal will definitely be helpful in the long run.
More so, you can use the up and down arrows on your keyboard to navigate commands that you have entered before. This greatly simplifies your work and makes it more beginner-friendly. As you become a better developer, the need to use the Command Line Interface (CLI), commonly known as the terminal, will become more apparent.
ip command in Linux is present in the net-tools which is used for performing several network administration tasks. IP stands for Internet Protocol. This command is used to show or manipulate routing, devices, and tunnels. It is similar to ifconfig command but it is much more powerful with more functions and facilities attached to it. ifconfig is one of the deprecated commands in the net-tools of Linux that has not been maintained for many years. ip command is used to perform several tasks like assigning an address to a network interface or configuring network interface parameters.
Kodi is a cross-platform media player launched by XMBC in 2004. It is used for media streaming on all kinds of screens whether they are large TV screens or very compact mobile screens. It means that it is designed in such a way that it looks equally appealing no matter which device you are using it. In this article, I will show you how to install Kodi on a Linux Mint 20 desktop.
Snaps are confined, self-contained applications, designed with portability and security in mind. By default, strictly confined snaps run in isolation, with minimal access to system resources. For instance, they cannot access home, network, audio, or display. To make their snaps usable, developers and publishers can declare a set of interfaces, which allow granular, per-resource access to the underlying system in a secure, controlled manner.
In today’s article, we want to talk a bit more about the mechanics behind the interface. What happens when a developer declares an interface plug in snapcraft.yaml, and when that snap gets installed on a user’s machine?
The Wine development release 6.10 is now available.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - Mono engine updated to version 6.2.0, with upstream updates. - Shell folders naming scheme follows recent Windows. - WinePulse library converted to PE. - More math functions from Musl in the C runtime. - Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.10.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/6.x/wine-6.10.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
As another cork to pop on the Phoronix 17th birthday weekend, Wine 6.10 has been released for running Windows applications and games on Linux.
Wine 6.10 pulls in the Mono 6.2 engine with other updates, shell folders naming scheme now follows the latest Windows updates, the WinePulse library has been converted to PE (Portable Executable) format, more math functions from Musl libc have been added to the C run-time, and there are various bug-fixes.
Another Friday, another two weeks and so a fresh development release is out of the compatibility layer Wine. 6.10 is the name, and bringing more compatibility for Windows games and applications on Linux is the game. A tasty drink to enjoy responsibly and also awesome open source software.
As if it wasn't confusing enough travelling through the non-Euclidean of HyperRogue, it's now also available to play through in different VR modes.
Need a primer on HyperRogue? It's a roguelike, a traditional turn-based experience that you can play from different viewpoints (including first-person). What sets it apart is the wild geometry of the entire world taking place on the hyperbolic plane. Straight lines end up not being straight, going left can end up somewhere totally unexpected and the whole experience is just wacky. The game is "inspired by the roguelike genre (although in a very minimalist way), works of M. C. Escher, and by puzzle games such as Deadly Rooms of Death".
Atari has announced that the Atari VCS will be available at major US retailers starting from Tuesday, 15th June. As well as being available via the official website, US residents will be able to grab this 'console' from the likes of Best Buy, GameStop, and Micro Center. Each outlet will have its own launch day promotions.
Linux gamers using Valve’s Proton compatibility tool to run Windows games will be getting a performance upgrade in the future: Nvidia has announced that it’s working with Valve to bring FPS boosts using its DLSS technology featured on its RTX cards. It’s almost enough to make me want to revisit Linux gaming.
DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, is a technology that lets gamers get more performance without having to give up too much image quality. It does this by running the game at lower-than-native resolution (say, rendering the game at 1080p when your monitor is 4K), but then upscaling the image to native resolution using some mightily impressive algorithms.
The tech will, of course, be exciting for people with Linux gaming computers, but it’s also interesting considering the rumors of Valve creating a handheld gaming device. We argued that DLSS could make the next-gen Switch hit way above its weight-class, and the same would be true for a handheld PC without a ton of graphics horsepower, which would likely be running Linux.
Krunner is a multi-purpose application launcher built into the Plasma desktop. Fact. What makes it worthy of mention, you may ask? Well, first, because it's good. Really good. We talked about it in the past, and then I also did separate review of two other launchers of similar nature, both of which were non-default additions to this or that desktop. But we're not here to discuss these other projects, we're here to talk about Krunner and its merits.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece about Plasma, praising its many excellent features and tools. One of the entries I decided to include was Krunner. But since it's too complex and useful to review in just a few short, quick sentences, I decided to do a proper, separate article. Similar to my 2015-ish endeavor, I want to tell you more about Krunner and what it does. Has anything changed in the last six odd years? Let's have a look.
Recently KDE started to maintain a collection of patches for Qt 5. This is because Qt 5 came to end of life with Qt 6 now released (KDE Frameworks has started the slow process of moving to Qt 6). With many Qt 5 users out there the Qt Company are selling a maintained verson of Qt 5 but for the community KDE has started a collection of patches to fix the bugs. In KDE neon we like to build everything in KDE directly from KDE so we have now moved to building Qt too. This means our Qt now calls itself 5.15.3. We also updated PyQt to 5.14. Let us know if you find any problems.
This year, motivated by the success of virtual events like GNOME Asia and GNOME Onboard Africa, we decided to organize a GNOME LATAM (virtual) conference. The event was a success, with a nice mix of Spanish and Portuguese-speaking presenters. The recordings are now available and (if you understand Spanish or Portuguese) I highly encourage you to check what the Latin American GNOMies are up to.
Currently, I am working as an Outreachy Intern for May’21 tenure with GNOME community under the mentorship of Philip Chimento on the project “Make GNOME asynchronous!”. The next three months of the internship are going to be a great learning experience, and I’m really looking forward to it! My mentor at GNOME has been very welcoming, and I’m so glad to be selected as an intern here for the summer cohort.
Outreachy is a program that provide internship opportunities to work in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Outreachy internships are open to all applicants around the world. Internship focuses on programming, design, documentation, marketing, or other kinds of contributions. Interns work remotely and are not required to relocate. Interns are paid a comfortable stipend. Outreachy is open to women (both cis and trans), people of other gender identities that are minorities in open source (trans men, and gender-queer people) . This internship is offered twice a year and you do not have to be a student to apply for it. However, you must be available for a full-time, 40 hours a week during the internship period.
In the month of February, a good friend of mine from college mentioned the Outreachy internship opportunity to me. I checked out the Outreachy internship web-page, read a couple of past interns posts, and then applied for it. But due to academic work I couldn’t contribute to any organisation before the contribution period.
A few weeks ago, I announced the creation of a security response team for Alpine, of which I am presently the chair.
Since then, the team has been fully chartered by both the previous Alpine core team, and the new Alpine council, and we have gotten a few members on board working on security issues in Alpine. Once the Technical Steering Committee is fully formed, the security team will report to the TSC and fall under its purview.
Accordingly, I thought it would be prudent to start write monthly updates summarizing what I’ve been up to. This one is a little delayed because we’ve been focused on getting Alpine 3.14 out the door (first RC should come out on Monday)!
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Another project of mine personally is working to prove the reproducibility of Alpine package builds, as part of the Reproducible Builds project. To this end, I hope to have the Alpine 3.15 build fully reproducible. This will require some changes to abuild so that it produces buildinfo files, as well as a rebuilder backend. We plan to use the same buildinfo format as Arch, and will likely adapt some of the other reproducible builds work Arch has done to Alpine.
I plan to have a meeting within the next week or two to formulate an official reproducible builds team inside Alpine and lay out the next steps for what we need to do in order to get things going. In the meantime, join #alpine-reproducible on irc.oftc.net if you wish to follow along.
I plan for reproducible builds (perhaps getting all of main reproducible) to be a sprint in July, once the prerequisite infrastructure is in place to support it, so stay tuned on that.
Hello friends, fans and followers!
Following the release schedule of RetroArch we bring you updated version of Lakka, so you don’t stay behind.
As usual the release includes the latest RetroArch version at the time, which is currently 1.9.4, as well as updates to all the supported cores to the most recent versions. You can update your existing 3.0 installation using the built-in updater (except on Nintendo Switch; you have to update manually, but gavin_darkglider is working hard to implement updates for Lakka on your console). If you are using older (2.3.x) release, clean installation is recommended.
Latest version of openSUSE, Leap 15.3, released just yesterday with the headline Bridges Path to Enterprise. This is the third update to Leap 15 which is aligned with its enterprise family OS, SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3, which brings a lot of improvements and security fixes. It is an European, rich and wealthy computer operating system based on Free Libre Open Source Software which is available for almost all kinds of computer including desktop, laptop, server, and Internet of Things (IoT) with abilities to be installed both with and without internet access. From this release date to next six month, previous version 15.2 will reach end of life and should be upgraded to 15.3 to receive supports and updates. This article listed all the editions and versions including torrents you can immediately click and download. Happy downloading!
The openSUSE Project has a lot going on lately. The project just released Leap 15.3, had 24-hour release party in the openSUSE Bar and opened a survey to get feedback on the release of the new Leap version.
There are many other things happening and one of those is an online open house. Members of the community will have two sessions discussing openSUSE topics during SUSE Open House CZ 2021
The event will take place on June 15 from 13:00 UTC to 17:00 UTC. Leap release manager Lubos Kocman will give a talk about how openSUSE Leap 15.3 is made and community member Jason Evans will discuss how to contribute to openSUSE.
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
This week was definitively amongst the more interesting ones for Tumbleweed. There was a change of the basic filesystem layout called UsrMerge. Unfortunately, despite all planning and testing, some users still ran into issues. In some cases, it could be pointed to an ‘unexpected’ setup (root on zfs, /usr/lib/debug as sep mount point…) and in some cases, the reason for the failure is not yet fully understood. But this might sound scarier than it is: a lot of users have also reported that the process worked flawlessly on their systems. Together with a full rebuild using GCC 11 snapshot 0527 was definitively huge. Besides that, two more snapshots (0601, and 0602) were published.
CentOS now operates as a distribution independently of CentOS Stream and today the team behind it released CentOS 8 (2105) with some nice improvements.
Since 2004 CentOS has been a free downstream clone of RHEL. Red Hat’s decision late last year to repeal CentOS Linux, the widely used free version of its commercial RHEL, left a gap. Immediately after Red Hat made the announcement, several software companies did what was necessary to fill it.
AlmaLinux, the Linux distribution designed specifically as a CentOS replacement, just released version 8.4 as its second stable release last week.
Gregory Kurtzer, the originator behind CentOS, has come out with a Rocky Linux, distribution that will serve as a perfect replacement for CentOS. Rocky Linux also has officially been released as an RC candidate in May.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)!
I've been wanting and trying to create live media for EL8 since the initial 8.0 release of CentOS. The main problem I ran into is that RHEL has decided that their customers aren't interested in live media and they didn't produce any... and CentOS hasn't either. I've been using livecd-creator from the livecd-tools package for years for making personal remixes of Fedora and CentOS 7. In EL8, livecd-creator comes from EPEL and it has had various issues since the initial 8.0 release... and I've only been able to produce broken .iso media if I could get it to build at all. Luckily one or more Fedora developers have taken pity on me and been updating / fixing livecd-creator in EPEL recently.
Stream Control Transmission Protocol over User Datagram Protocol (SCTP over UDP, also known as UDP encapsulation of SCTP) is a feature defined in RFC6951 and implemented in the Linux kernel space since 5.11.0. It is planned to be supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.5.0 and 9.0.
This article is a quick introduction to SCTP over UDP in the Linux kernel.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted our lives and business activities for more than a year now. While vaccine distribution is raising optimism, the reality is that many variables are still in play. And even after the virus is fully under control, our lives won’t automatically reset back to 2019. Processes have changed during the pandemic, and as business leaders, we’ve changed too.
Much has been written about how software, Zoom calls, digital outreach, etc., have helped leaders maintain business continuity. Three cheers for technology — just imagine how events would have unfolded if coronavirus had hit in 2000 instead of 2020. But we don’t talk enough about the pandemic’s impact on our personal sense of control and the implications that has on how we lead our teams.
The Fedora Linux 34 election cycle has concluded. Here are the results for each election. Congratulations to the winning candidates, and thank you all candidates for running in this election!
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), initially popularized by Google, is an operating model to solve complex operational issues associated with scalable and highly reliable data center sites. As a development practice founded in engineering, SRE has been a method helpful in industries such as banking align business objectives with technical development and operations goals.
As our topic of discussion, we’re introducing the concept of "Service Reliability Engineering" (SvRE), which incorporates financial service regulatory requirements as part of providing a highly scalable and reliable digital banking service.
According to the American Cancer Society, roughly 4,950 new cases get diagnosed each day, in the United States alone. No matter what type or stage, cancer is a devastating disease that has an impact on not just the individual diagnosed, but also their family, friends and colleagues. The sad reality is that at some point in your career, you may be in the challenging position of either navigating a cancer diagnosis or supporting a friend or colleague with their cancer journey.
At Red Hat, we understand that our colleagues are humans who exist outside of the (home) office. This is why we have an internal, self-organized and informal group dedicated to individuals who have a connection to cancer—whether they are patients, survivors, or caregivers. This group is a safe space to discuss cancer-related challenges, celebrate each other's milestones, and sadly, sometimes grieve each other’s losses.
It won't be the first CentOS replacement out the door, but it's being designed to become much more than a RHEL clone.
Aetina’s “DeviceEdge Mini Series” edge AI systems run Ubuntu on Nvidia’s Jetson Nano, Xavier NX, or TX2 NX and offers M.2 with NVMe and options for up to 8x USB or up to 2x PoE. Aetina also announced Intel-based “SuperEdge” and “MegaEdge” systems with slots for Nvidia cards.
Aetina announced a “DeviceEdge Mini Series,” starting with three embedded mini-PCs, each of which run Ubuntu 18.04 on a choice of Nvidia’s Jetson Nano, Jetson Xavier NX, or the newest member of the Jetson family, the Jetson TX2 NX. We also take a brief look at two Intel-based Aetina AI inference systems revealed earlier this year that support Nvidia graphics cards: a SuperEdge system with a Xeon-D and support for Nvidia T4 cards and a MegaEdge with Coffee Lake and GEForce RTX-3900 support (see farther below).
DFI RNO171 is a mini-ITX industrial motherboard powered by an AMD Ryzen Embedded V2000 processor with up to 64GB RAM, two SATA ports, four DisplayPort++ video outputs, and plenty of I/Os including dual GbE, a PCIe x16 expansion slot, multiple USB and serial ports, and more.
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DFI says the board can run Microsoft Windows 10 and Linux. Target applications are not listed but should include embedded, industrial, and edge applications benefiting from high-end multimedia capabilities in retail, automation, automotive, entertainment, etc…
We’ve seen plenty of systems-on-module based on NXP i.MX 8M Plus AI processor announced at Embedded World 2021 either with edge or board-to-board connectors.
TQ TQMa8MPxL is a bit different as an i.MX 8M Plus LGA (Land Grid Array) system-on-module meant to be soldered on a carrier board. The company also took the occasion to unveil STKa8MPxL evaluation kit based on TQMa8MxML in single board computer format to demonstrate its new LGA module.
Jacquard looms revolutionized the weaving process by independently controlling each heddle’s position. That made it possible to weave complex patterns. But modern Jacquard looms are very expensive, because they require a solenoid or other means of actuation for each and every heddle. Lea Albaugh and her team at Carnegie Mellon University found an affordable way to build a Jacquard loom from 3D printer parts — including an Arduino-based controller.
The key development for this Jacquard loom was a special bistable switch for each heddle. Those switches keep their heddles in the position in which they were last set. That makes it possible to set the heddle positions sequentially, instead of simultaneously with a multitude of solenoids. All of the heddle positions can be set by a single solenoid, which slides back and forth across the loom. This keeps costs down and makes it possible to build a Jacquard loom for about $200 using common 3D printer components.
The Librem 13 and 14 come in a similar footprint, but with some notable improvements in this latest generation.
Portable air conditioners are amazing, especially as we head into the hot summer months. But one big downside is having to place them close to a window that will fit the guard, otherwise it’s really tough getting the hot exhaust air out of the room. This is exactly the problem Hackaday user vincentmakes ran into when he set up a portable AC unit, as his window was the wrong shape. To solve it, he created a little system that allows the AC unit to be plugged in on one side and then match its air flow to shoot hot air out of the window.
It all started in 2016 with a simple quip that initially appeared on the Fuchsia development page: Pink + Purple = Fuchsia (a new Operating System).
There was some meaning behind that simple sentence. Project Pink was a name that engineers from Apple and IBM gave to a new OS that used a new interface because the notes were written on pink index cards. Project Purple was the name given to prototype devices that eventually became the iPhone. These projects were new ideas that turned out to be wildly successful, and the original developers of Fuchsia, Google's latest operating system were involved in them.
Thousands of IT startups, small businesses, large enterprises, and individual professionals use dotProject for project management. The software is freely available to download under the GNU General Public License program.
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Besides the standalone software package, the app is currently under the cloud development phase and will be released soon. You can opt-in as a beta tester for the upcoming cloud web app by subscribing to the ProjectLibre website.
The tool comes with an open-source user license, and it’s legitimate for business usage. Many Fortune 500 companies, NGOs, Governments, small to medium businesses, and individual professionals utilize this free Gantt chart maker in comprehensive projects.
Hello, it’s time for the May activity report!
Before starting the report, we would like to thank our donors for their donations. Your donations help us cover our expenses and help us reach our goal to hire people to work on Haiku full-time. We would also like to thank all the community for their countless hours of effort of implementing new features, triaging bugs, translating, supporting other users, and spreading the Haiku word all around.
This report covers revisions hrev55070-hrev55129.
The Haiku open-source operating system inspired by BeOS continues advancing with work ranging from their hardware support and low-level kernel features up through user-interface work.
The Haiku project just published their May 2021 status report where they outlined their recent accomplishments.
Hello, June --let's take a look at what the Apache community has been up to over the past week...
The Open Source Initiative will be holding a half-day virtual event on September 16th to discuss Practical Open Source Information (POSI). Our audience for this series is companies, nonprofits and academic institutions that are interested in using more open source. By hearing from current practitioners, new adopters will be able to get up to speed more quickly and (hopefully) avoid some of the mistakes others have made.
In a victory for security research and other public interest work, yesterday the U.S Supreme Court held that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act’s (CFAA) “exceeding authorized access” provision should be narrowly interpreted and cannot be used to criminalize every single violation of a computer-use policy. This is encouraging news for journalists, bug bounty hunters, social science researchers, and many other practitioners who could legitimately access information in a myriad of ways but were at the risk of being prosecuted as criminals.
As we stated in our joint amicus brief to the Court in July 2020, over the years some federal circuit courts had interpreted the CFAA so broadly as to threaten important practices to protect the public, including research and disclosure of software vulnerabilities by those in the security community. The scope of such broad interpretation went beyond security management and has also been used to stifle legitimate public interest research, such as looking into the advertising practices of online platforms, something Mozilla has pushed back against in the past.
Firefox 89 is a major update that involves UI makeover along with several new features and improvements.
Will it be enough to convince Chrome users to switch? You should check out our coverage to find out.
Firefox 89 released this week! This version includes a major UI redesign and thoughtful touches throughout. See the release notes here.
pgtt is a PostgreSQL extension to create, manage and use DB2 or Oracle-style Global Temporary Tables. Once created the use is just like with the other RDBMS.
HypoPG is a PostgreSQL extension adding support for hypothetical indexes.
I have created full books using both LaTeX and Scribus. I have never done it with LibreOffice, though. The closest I've ever come was watching people write their masters' theses in Word, failing miserably and swearing profusely. To find out what it's really like, I chose to typeset an entire book from scratch using nothing else but LibreOffice.
The unfortunate thing about LibreOffice (which it inherits from MS Word compatibility) is that there is a "correct" way to use it which is the exact opposite way of how people instinctively want to use it. The proper way is to use styles for everything as opposed to applying fonts, sizes, spacing et al by hand. In practice every time I am given a Word document I check how it has been formatted. I have never seen a single document in the wild that would have gotten this right. Even something as simple as chapter indentation is almost always done with spaces.
I have created full books using both LaTeX and Scribus. I have never done it with LibreOffice, though. The closest I've ever come was watching people write their masters' theses in Word, failing miserably and swearing profusely. To find out what it's really like, I chose to typeset an entire book from scratch using nothing else but LibreOffice.
The unfortunate thing about LibreOffice (which it inherits from MS Word compatibility) is that there is a "correct" way to use it which is the exact opposite way of how people instinctively want to use it. The proper way is to use styles for everything as opposed to applying fonts, sizes, spacing et al by hand. In practice every time I am given a Word document I check how it has been formatted. I have never seen a single document in the wild that would have gotten this right. Even something as simple as chapter indentation is almost always done with spaces.
More MenuButton features working under GTK4. Now with working radio entries in GtkPopoverMenu dropdowns.
LibreOffice Conference Call for Papers is open until June 30, 2021. Thanks to the efforts of TDF infra team led by Guilhem Moulin, you can now submit your proposal using TDF brand new event management platform at https://events.documentfoundation.org/libocon2021/cfp. We know that you were all eager to use that platform for your proposals, and now you don’t have any excuse for a further delay of your submission!
Last week I got the PineTime, a free/libre smartwatch. In the past months, I’ve been working on MyGNUHealth and porting it to the PinePhone.
Why doing so? Because running free/libre operating systems and having control of the applications on your mobile phones and wearables is the right thing to do.
Yesterday, I told myself: “This is the day to move away from Android and take control over my phone”. And I made the switch. Now I am using a PinePhone on Manjaro running KDE plasma mobile. I have also switched my smartwatch to the PineTime.
The mobile phone and smartwatch were the last pieces of hardware and software to liberate. All my computing is now libre. No proprietary operating systems, no closed-source applications. Not on my laptop, not in my desktop, not on my phone.
Facing and overcoming the social pressure
At the moment I ditched Android, I felt an immense sense of relief and happiness. It took me back 30 years ago, early FreeBSD and GNU/Linux times, being in control of every component of my computer.
The GCC Steering Committee updated its copyright assignment policy by relaxing the requirement to assign copyright to all changes to the Free Software Foundation (FSF).
The project will still continue to exist under the GNU General Public License v3.0 and will now accept contributions with or without an FSF copyright assignment.
The change is consistent with the policies of other major Free Software Projects. Additional details are available here.
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Software) is flat-out one of the best editing applications available anywhere — for any price. Its suite of features is impressively full, and more are being added all the time.
From layers, masks, and curves to brushes, clone stamps, and perspective changes, there is not a whole lot that GIMP can’t do compared to Adobe’s counterpart. Better yet, it is an open-source editor, meaning the huge community of users has created an extensive array of plugins that expand the functionality and abilities of GIMP. Some of these plugins come preinstalled, but there are tons more in its glossary that you can install in addition. If that weren’t enough, you can also use Photoshop plugins!
Like Photoshop, however, this isn’t the greatest program for beginners as there is a rather steep learning curve.
emacs tramp mode for chroot. I saw tramp for docker and lxc so I figured it must be possible to write a mode for chroot. I wrote one for cros_sdk and that made my life much easier. I can build and run inside chroot from emacs transparently. Seems like it should also be possible to write something for dchroot.
Full-fledged Linux distributions may also be executable on a simple ARM Cortex A9, but there they waste unnecessary storage space. The Yocto modular system has established itself for resource-saving implementations. Thanks to the modularization of the functions in working levels (layers), it allows the creation of compact embedded distributions. The functionality of Yocto is hardly inferior to full Linux versions. In the Yocto working levels, developers can, for example, accommodate graphic QT applications, which the compiler then translates as well.
WASM3 v0.5 released this week for that WebAssembly interpreter that claims to be the fastest. The Wasmer WebAssembly runtime for WASI/EmScripten meanwhile released its initial 2.0 release candidates this week where it's been upping the performance.
It has been a long time since I last blog. The main reason behind the blog is put forward my views in response to the questions raised earlier. It did hurt me to read about it. Havind said, I do my best not to upset anyone knowingly. It would have been lot better if it was addressed to me and not public.
The mission PWC came into existence to fill the void created by the closure of “Pull Request Challenge” ran by Neil Bowers. Also being co-editor of the Perl Weekly newsletter, I was having difficult time to look for Perl related blog post. Irrespective of quality, there was time when I couldn’t find more than just one or two. Also there was so much negativity around Perl on various social platform. On top of that there wss rivalry between Perl and Raku supporters. Around that time, I had lots of spare time as well, so I decided to start the project PWC keeping in mind many goals as listed in no particular order.
So this all got me wondering what my funky PHP/HTML sample would look like in a fully fledged Cro / Raku style… in the spirit of keeping this post briefish, I will skip the Cro Templates and CSS parsing for now and hope to cover them in subsequent missives…
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Personally I love to write (and read) html when done in this kind of programmatic style. Not least it has cut 19 lines of embedded code to 10 lines (and that means I can squish more code into my screen and into my brain). No longer do I have to dance my right pinkie around the < / > keys or worry about leaving out the closing end tags!! Another neat helper is the Raku pair syntax, so if I define a scalar with the same name as the attribute name, I can avoid repetitive typing and the consequent opportunity to make a mistake… e.g. the :$action attribute in the form tag.
Bash scripting remains a staple of my endeavors in Linux as a system administrator, and I use it every day to ease my workload. One of my most commonly used type of shell scripts involves a for-loop which processes and applies commands to servers based on a text file I've created containing the target host names.
A useful feature in almost every command-line environment is the environment variable. Some of these variables allow you to control the behavior or features of the command line, and other variables simply allow you to store data that you might need to reference later. Environment variables are also used in FreeDOS.
Hector Levesque of University of Toronto and Moshe Vardi of Rice University have been named as the 2020 recipients of the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award. They share the $10,000 prize, co-funded by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
The ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award is named in honor of Allen Newell one of the founding pioneers of the field of Artificial Intelligence and from 1979-80 the inaugural President of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the former name of the AAAI. It has been presented annually since 1994 to one or more individuals selected for career contributions that have breadth within computer science, or that bridge computer science and other disciplines.
Developing improved materials for things such as energy storage and drug discovery is of interest to researchers and society alike. Quantum mechanics (QM), a theory that describes the physical properties of nature on the atomic and subatomic scale, is the basis for molecular and materials scientists who develop these useful, futuristic products.
Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) have announced that their three Kubernetes certification exams will now include access to an exam simulator, enabling those registered for an exam to experience the exam environment before actually sitting for the exam.
2021 has been tough for Apple, security-wise, as it relates to zero-day exploits. The latest round of malware is able to create an app in Zoom that can secretly record video or audio, take screen shots and gain full disk access. Since the beginning of the year, Apple has had to issue a couple of security patches, first with macOS 11.3 and most recently with MacOS 11.4, both "Big Sur" releases.
Decades of underfunding and misdirected oversight have hampered the IRS's ability to achieve its core tax collection mission, much less its growing role in social welfare policy. Providing the IRS with greater and more stable funding, combined with organizational reforms to better delineate revenue collection from benefit administration, represents an untapped opportunity to improve taxpayer services and tax enforcement simultaneously
