One of Linux's biggest perks is the ability to revitalize older computers. A downside of this is that you don't necessarily know what you're getting before you dive in. You can do some reading online, but you can't go into a store and see for yourself how a PC is going to function.
This is a particular problem with 2-in-1 PCs, which none of the major Linux PC providers yet offer. But, it turns out, Linux on these touchscreen devices already provides a great experience. Here are some things to know before you dive in.
If you wanted to run multiple Linux systems on one machine, you had to install them using multi-booting. One great thing about Linux is that it plays nice with virtual machines. Linux virtual machines have a lot of hidden advantages that most users are unaware of.
One reason that Linux has become so widespread is that it can coexist with different systems. Virtualization makes that possible. You can create multiple Linux machines on one physical computer, and move them around as necessary. It's hard to imagine Linux being where it is without virtual machines.
VirtualBox is the premier open-source virtualization application, and there are ways to supercharge your Linux virtual machines to take full advantage of them.
The German Linux PC manufacturer has recently announced the third revision of its Tuxedo Polaris 15 and 17 gaming laptops.
The laptops primarily come in two different display sizes – 15.6 and 17.3 inches – hence the names. Featuring mid to high range specifications, these PCs come in various configurations, including an option to install Windows 10 other than the flagship Tuxedo OS 20.04 that’s based on Ubuntu 20.04.
The Linux-based Pangolin refreshes come with the Lucienne R5 5500U and R7 5700U APUs integrating Zen 2 cores. Other features include a 15.7-inch FHD display, up to 64 GB DDR4-3200 RAM, up to 2 TB NVMe SSD storage, Wi-Fi 6 and a GbE NIC. Prices start at $1,199.
System76 is updating its Pangolin lineup of Linux laptops with AMD’s Ryzen 5000U processors. These are not the Zen 3 models, unfortunately, so instead of the previous R5 4500U and R7 4700U, System76 now offers the Zen 2-based R5 5500U and R7 5700U with integrated Vega graphics. Still, the upgrade should provide a noticeable performance boost especially in multi-core workloads, as the new models enable hyperthreading and come with an improved memory controller.
This week, System76—probably the best-known Linux-only laptop vendor—announced the latest update to its lightweight 15-inch Pangolin laptop series. The newest models of Pangolin are available and shipping today; customers have a choice between a six-core Ryzen 5 5500U and an eight-core Ryzen 7 5700U processor.
Pangolin was already the first System76 laptop model to offer AMD Ryzen processors, with last-generation Ryzen 4500U and 4700U models announced last December. This year's model bumps up both the processor generation and asking price significantly—last year's Ryzen 4500U Pangolin started at $850, offering 8GiB of RAM and a 240GiB SSD in the entry-level trim. The new 5500U-powered Pangolin runs $1,200 for the same specs.
Framework is the high-performance, thin and light notebook that's "designed to last" with modular components along with a commitment to make it easy to repair and upgrade.
Today we are looking at the newly released MakuluLinux Droid. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.11, (i believe) based on Debian 11, Gnome 3.36, and uses about 1.7GB of ram when idling. Also, this release of Makulu Linux is special because it has Anbox built-in, and you can right-click on APKs in your file manager and install it if Anbox supports them.
In this video, we are looking at MakuluLinux Droid.
Former Linux Journal editor in chief Don Marti, who Doc Searls calls the world's greatest living authority on online advertising, speaks with Doc and Katherine Druckman about the rapidly changing adtech world. How are companies big and small coping with those changes today? Marti also discusses the "stack of principal agents" problem, why privacy is a massive issue not just for individuals, but for companies with billions of dependents, such as Apple with its iPhone customers.
Recent reports would have you believe Apple has made significant concessions to developers. Don't be fooled! We read between the lines and break down what is and what is not changing.
Plus, some thoughts on environmental PCs and the question we hate the most.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Pardus 21.0 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Just days after the 30th anniversary of the very first Linux announcement, Linus Torvalds released kernel version 5.14. In the current release announcement, Torvalds jokingly took up this coincidence. He understands that for the 30th anniversary everyone will certainly be busy with galas and fancy events, but has a nice change from glitter, champagne and Co. ready: a new kernel release to test and enjoy.
Linux 5.14, which falls between two emblematic anniversaries, namely the Linux announcement on August 25, 1991 and the very first kernel release on September 17 of the same year, is not a gigantic release compared to some of its recent predecessors. At first glance, it could even pass as a mere “standard update” with new and improved drivers. However, some less obvious but significant innovations deserve some attention – including the complete elimination of the old IDE driver system, so-called “core scheduling” as a defense against Specter attack variants and secret memory areas.
In addition to Btrfs sporting new features with Linux 5.15, the XFS and EROFS file-systems also have some shiny new features and improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel.
XFS for Linux 5.15 has "a lot in this cycle" from fixes to features. XFS with Linux 5.15 now has batch inode activations in per-CPU background threads that should improve directory tree deletion times. Pipelining has also been enabled for the XFS log that should help with performance around handling of lots of metadata updates. XFS also has proposed inode btree counters and support for dates beyond Year 2038 as being officially supported features. Both the inode btree counters and Y2038 handling should be enabled by default with future xfsprogs updates.
The Linux 5.15 hardware monitoring "HWMON" subsystem changes were sent out and now merged for this next kernel version. Particularly notable this cycle is AMD catching up on some of their sensors support.
First up, this HWMON update is the one that finally adds Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring support. The Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring is only landing now for the Linux 5.15 cycle even though these APUs have been found in desktops and laptops for months. It was just missing the necessary model ID in the k10temp driver but wasn't addressed until a community member sent in the patch for adding it to the driver.
The ACPI and power management changes have landed for the Linux 5.15 merge window.
As usual, Intel's Rafael Wysocki punctually submitted all his new feature pull requests for the new merge window. This time around though the power management changes aren't particularly exciting. No exciting changes around new hardware support or the like...
The staging updates for Linux 5.15 continue to have a lot of code churn including some drivers being promoted while one Realtek WiFi driver has been replaced.
Linux has long had the "rtl8188eu" driver as part of the kernel's staging area for supporting this Realtek RTL8188EU 802.11 b/g/n WiFi chip for USB adapters. The RTL8188EU can be found in a number of different USB WiFi adapters including some still available via retail channels while now its Linux staging driver has been replaced.
wayland-protocols 1.22 is now available.
This release includes a new staging protocol: DRM object leasing.
Besides that, various test and build system improvements are included, as well as a set of clarifications to the xdg-activation protocol and other protocols.
Daniel Stone (2): xdg-shell: Make xdg_surface fail when surface has role tests: Include libwayland cflags/ldflags
Issam E. Maghni (1): tests: use dynamic python path
Jonas Ãâ¦dahl (1): build: Bump version to 1.22
Manuel Stoeckl (1): xdg-output: fix minor calculation error
Roman Gilg (4): xdg-activation: use rst link xdg-activation: use rst inline code xdg-activation: correct sequence when X11 client spawns Wayland client xdg-activation: rewrite and move description of token forwarding
Simon Ser (8): members: add GitLab usernames readme: mention the DCO xdg-activation-v1: clarify set_{serial,surface} presentation-time: use enum entry description tags readme: fix unformatted label references build: declare dependency for use as a subproject build: fix indentation in tests/meson.build build: only require C/C++ compilers for host
Vlad Zahorodnii (1): xdg-activation: Fix an inconsistency
Xaver Hugl (1): staging/drm-lease: DRM lease protocol support
Xavier Claessens (1): tests: Fix build with -Wextra
git tag: 1.22
Designed with VR headsets in mind, Wayland-Protocols 1.22 was released today and adds the DRM leasing protocol to its staging area.
The DRM lease protocol is modeled around Linux's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) object leasing where the DRM master is able to "lease" a subset of resources to a client. In the case of this Wayland protocol it's about leasing DRM resources for exclusive use by a Wayland client.
RadeonSI Gallium3D as the official AMD OpenGL Linux driver has mirrored the unofficial RADV Vulkan driver in enabling DCC stores support for RDNA2 APUs in the name of greater performance.
This merge is the latest optimization to RadeonSI by well known AMD developer Marek Olšák. This follows the same approach as RADV around delta color compression stores to allow for better performance on RDNA2 APUs.
Intel's i965 classic DRI driver is still the default within Mesa for i965 through Haswell generations of Intel integrated graphics, but the new "Crocus" Gallium3D driver has been added to the default driver build list so it's now at least building by default on x86/x86_64 systems and thus trivial after that to override.
Crocus has come about nicely in a matter of months for providing an open-source Gallium3D driver for i965 through Haswell generations. Intel's Iris Gallium3D driver continues to be the official and default driver for Broadwell graphics and newer, but thanks to the community Crocus is now viable for older generations especially as Mesa developers have expressed possible interest in phasing out classic driver support in the future.
Microsoft’s stance for decades was that community creation and sharing of communal code (later to be known as free and open source software) represented a direct attack on their business. Their battle with Linux stretches back many years. Back in 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously tarnished Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”. Microsoft also initiated its “Get the Facts” marketing campaign from mid-2003, which specifically criticized Linux server usage, total cost of ownership, security, indemnification and reliability. The campaign was widely criticized for spreading misinformation.
However, in recent years, there has been a partial shift by Microsoft to embrace the open source software paradigm. For example, some of their code is open sourced. Examples include Visual Studio Code, .NET Framework, Atom, and PowerShell. They have also made investments in Linux development, server technology and organizations including the Linux Foundation and Open Source Initiative. They have made acquisitions such as Xamarin to help mobile app development, and GitHub a hugely popular code repository for open source developers. And they have partnered with Canonical, the developers of the popular Ubuntu distro. But many developers remain hugely sceptical about Microsoft and their apparent shift to embrace open source.
Web-based email clients (or Webmail clients) are the favorite solution for companies and teams. They help keep everything organized, archived on the server, which allow easily management and offer better protection.
Webmail is a web application that allow users to access their email through their web browser. Unlike, desktop email clients, webmail software is installed on a web server, and does not require desktop clients or even operating system to run. The only requirement is a web browser and the internet.
Not only the Linux distros are open-source but the apps for Linux are also free. Though some business apps come with a cost, most of the apps created for individuals don’t have any charges.
Want to know about some of the cool apps to download on your Linux machine?
This article walks you through 7 apps to download on Linux to make your life easier. Head over to the next section!
Consistency is an integral part of developing and maintaining habits. However, it is not easy to stay regular and motivated throughout your journey. While goals are good for setting a direction, building an efficient system is best for making progress. Looking at your past progress can help you push forward.
Linux-based operating systems are one of the most productive operating systems if used appropriately. To further enhance your productivity and cultivate good habits, here are two free habit-tracking applications that you should try on your Linux machine.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Solr on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Solr is the popular, blazing-fast, open-source enterprise search platform built on Apache Lucene. Solr is designed for scalability and fault tolerance. It is widely used for enterprise search and analytics use cases and has an active development community and regular releases.
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 Apache Solr on AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MySQL on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, MySQL is a relational database management system based on SQL (Structured Query Language). It is one of the most widely used database software for several well-known applications that utilize it. MariaDB is available as the default database in Debian 11. Therefore, you need to install the MySQL server with all its dependencies on your Debian 11 system.
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 MySQL 8 database on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Webmin on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Webmin is an open-source application platform that gives a web-based graphical user interface to manage Linux servers such as setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing, and much more. It has become a good open-source alternative for cPanel.
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 Webmin on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
The Cockpit web console is a tool to monitor the server’s overall status, performance, and health. You can install the Cockpit web console on your local machine and execute the web application through the web browser. You can monitor server services, accounts and set up network systems through the Cockpit Web console on Linux. If you’re a remote user, the Cockpit Web console allows you to log in through the secure shell (ssh). The Cockpit suggests using Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Gnome browser for loading the Cockpit web console on Linux. Installing the Cockpit web console on Linux distributions is easy, straightforward, and simple.
I am constantly preaching about how Ubuntu and Linux in general is awesome. The truth though is that no desktop operating system is perfect and one area in which Windows has Ubuntu beat is the number of fonts you get by default.
Most people who use Windows never even stop to think about it, but the fonts you see when you are for example doing graphic design or Word processing are bundled by Microsoft to make sure you have a great out of the box experience. It’s something Ubuntu and most Linux distros never do.
If you want extra fonts from the paltry default collection you have to roll up your sleeves and install them yourself. Yes, just like applications, fonts have to be installed too. Thanks to Google’s wonderful fonts collection it’s now easier to find and install free fonts on Ubuntu in order to augment the few that come installed by default.
o change or not to change swappiness – that is the question! But what is swappiness, and what role does it play on your Linux system? Well, for this read, we have put together a detailed guide on how and when you should consider changing swappiness on your MX Linux system.
Here is how to install the official Nvidia drivers on Rocky Linux and it works flawlessly.
This works best on the default kernel that ships with Rocky Linux, if you have custom Kernel or modified setup, there might be need for extra steps. The extra steps are out of the scope of this article.
Now more than ever, page loading speed is crucial to any website owner. A few seconds of lag in loading your website will quickly send internet users to the next site leading to high bounce rates and reduced revenue. In fact, page loading speed is a crucial ranking aspect that Google uses to rank websites. The slower your website, the lower the rank it gets.
Varnish cache, also known as a caching reverse HTTP proxy, is a high-performance and blazing fast web application that speeds up your website by forwarding incoming HTTP requests to your webserver. It sits in front of a webserver and caches all the web traffic that is frequently accessed by users and stores it in memory. By so doing, it speeds up the retrieval time of the web pages. The cache also serves thousands of concurrent HTTP requests without crashing or overloading the webserver. It can boost your website speed by up to 300 – 100 times.
Let now install the Varnish cache on Ubuntu 20.04
ModSecurity or often referred to as Modsec is a free, open-source web application firewall (WAF). ModSecurity was created as a module for the Apache HTTP Server. However, since its early days, the WAF has grown and now covers an array of HyperText Transfer Protocol request and response filtering capabilities for various platforms such as Microsoft IIS, Nginx, and of course, Apache.
How the WAF works, the ModSecurity engine is deployed in front of the web application, allowing the engine to scan the incoming and outgoing HTTP connections. ModSecurity is most commonly used in conjunction with the OWASP Core Rule Set (CRS), an open-source set of rules written in ModSecurity’s SecRules language and is highly regarded among the security industry.
Curious about the recently released Debian 11 “bullseye”? Why not install it inside a VirtualBox virtual machine and give it a try? Just keep in mind that afterwards, you want to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions. This enables you to adjust the screen resolution to match your monitor’s. Furthermore, you can enable features such as the bi-directional clipboard and shared folders. In this article I’ll explain how to install the VirtualBox Guest Additions in Debian 11 “bullseye”.
In the previous article in this series, 8 steps to developing an Ansible role in Linux, I created an Ansible role to install Vim and configure it with some plugins and a static vimrc configuration file.
This article improves this role by replacing this static configuration file with a more flexible one, dynamically generated using an Ansible template.
As a beginner when you start working with Bash scripts, the first command you will probably learn and use is the echo command. You can think of bash echo command something similar to the print command in other programming languages. The echo command is a bash built-in and its purpose is to print the output to stdout (i.e. Terminal).
In this article, I will show you what is bash echo command and how to use it in your shell scripts. Before we get into the topic, let us see the difference between a Bash bulit-in and an external command.
We have a new episode out, with James Ramey from Codeweavers (the key company developing WINE, which is a major component of Proton)! We have talked to James many times before, he is almost like a regular guest of our podcast at this stage – but this time was a good time to catch up with him. The Steam Deck is about to be released later in this year by Valve, and we wanted to better understand the following....
ARK: Survival Evolved, the still incredibly popular open-world game from Studio Wildcard is now on Stadia and along with a few other games it's free for Stadia Pro subscribers.
Much like ARK ports to other platforms, their version on Stadia has plenty of issues. ARK has a history of being buggy, and their native desktop Linux version is pretty awful. It doesn't seem like their Stadia port is much better with graphical issues, graphics that look quite poor in a lot of places and yes even plenty of stuttering at times too. So, a pretty standard port of ARK then.
From the same developer that gave us To The Moon and Finding Paradise, prepare for another wild adventure with Impostor Factory as it's finally going to release on September 30.
I'm still confused on the story here. Is it somehow a follow-on from the previous games? The developer said "Maybe not. Maybe it's a sequel. Maybe it's a prequel. Maybe it's both. But again, there is no prerequisite to playing Impostor Factory." and yet they keep saying it's "Impostor Factory (To the Moon 3)" and so we just have to wait and see. They are at least telling us the story will "make you curse at the screen" so that's something.
ScummVM 2.3.0 is coming soon with many upgrades to this awesome free and open source project that keeps classic games alive. Now they need your help.
Plenty of newly supported games will come with this release including the likes of: Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey, Crusader: No Remorse, AGS Games versions 2.5+, Myst 3: Exile, The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time, Red Comrades 1 & 2 and more.
inXile Entertainment have released the big 1.5.0 update for Wasteland 3 with an aim to improve the experience of getting into the DLC content and also lots of improvements to the online co-op.
"As noted in the State of the Frozen Union article, Patch 1.5.0 is primarily focused on improving the co-op experience, as well as allowing those at the endgame to experience the Steeltown and Cult of the Holy Detonation expansion content. We’ve also taken a bright light to some of the underused quirks, perks, and backgrounds, balancing those with the intention of making them even more attractive options when you’re creating and evolving squad members. Rounding all this off is a bevy of overall polish, fixes, and other general improvements that aim to please."
After a fresh online multiplayer game to play and one that's family friendly too? The hide and seek game with prop hunting Run Prop, Run! recently became free to play.
These types of games obviously live and die by the amount of people they have playing, and it's extremely hard for such a game to cut through the noise when it has a cost attached to it. That's just how it is now with so many high quality free games already available so PlayTogether Studio set it free. Quite fun too with it adding its own spin on the genre with platforming, special abilities and more.
If you're using Arch Linux or anything based on it (or other rolling update distributions) and you've recently run updates that included freetype2, you might unfortunately notice that Steam is now quite broken.
When loading any part of the Steam client that depends on web views, it will just give you a rather unhelpful black screen. This is obviously a big problem and makes it all quite unusable. So what can you do? Well, if you're comfortable with your package managing you could downgrade freetype2 back to version 2.10.4 but that can then end up breaking future updates that depend on the newer version. Valve are hot on the issue though and they've already put up a fresh Steam Beta with a fix.
The Battle for Wesnoth is one of the longest running open source strategy games still in continuous development. With 17 single player campaigns, fully-fledged online multiplayer, and countless fan mods available through the game’s own downloadable content platform, Wesnoth can deliver endless hours of turn-based entertainment completely free of charge, while giving back to the community through its free and open source codebase and a rich pool of assets and artwork distributed under a Creative Commons license. For over 18 years Wesnoth has been a staple of classic Linux gaming, and it’s widely available over the repositories of every major distro.
Caves of Qud is probably one of the best modern roguelikes around and Freehold Games have put up a huge new Beta version with lots of goodies to play through.
Qud has some of the craziest possible characters you can make, seriously it has. To help show it off a little more, Freehold have upgraded and overhauled the character generation system. It's now "more sensible, highly moddable, and use an all-new, responsive, fully keyboardable AND mousable UI" and I do have to say it looks pretty good. It also now gives you some preset character builds to help new players.
KDE e.V., the non-profit organisation supporting the KDE community, is looking for a someone to help shape products based on KDE software.
We are looking for people who can start working on the projects soon, we expect this to be a part-time position. Please see the call for proposals for the KDE Hardware integration project for more details about this contracting opportunity.
Akademy 2022 is on its way and, despite the continuing pandemic, we are aiming for some in-person aspect for our next conference.
For the upcoming Akademy, we are looking to host it later in 2022, as we expect travel to be a bit more attainable and safe by then. Ideal dates would be in late summer or autumn 2022, specifically late August through October.
If you are interested in hosting Akademy in your city, please send a letter of intent or interest before a full bid by the middle of October 2021. In addition, we ask that you assemble a team of at least 3 people before applying.
I was looking for a way to get WebP image thumbnails in GTK applications (especially Nautilus / GNOME Files), and most solutions I found were 'hacky', until I found the rather unknown WebP GDK Pixbuf Loader library. So I thought I'd write about it here on Linux Uprising, in case some of you are also interested in this.
This library / WebP thumbnailer currently only supports static WebP images, but there is work to add support for animated WebP image thumbnails.
The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.11.12, 3.12.8 and 3.13.6 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
Those releases include fixes for apk-tools CVE-2021-36159 and openssl CVE-2021-3711 and CVE-2021-3712.
Anyone. Period. That's how good ZorinOS 16 is. It doesn't matter what level of skill you have, ZorinOS 16 is ready to help make your desktop experience a delightful romp through the world of Linux. Since it's based on Ubuntu 20.04.3, it includes all the usual Ubuntu user-friendliness under the hood. But don't worry, if you are new to Linux you shouldn't have to bother with things like the command-line interface, as the ZorinOS 16 desktop UI will hold your hand just enough to keep you from getting lost in the muck and mire better suited to the Linux devotees.
ZorinOS 16 is as good a desktop operating system as you'll find. That might sound like hyperbole, but I honestly cannot think of a desktop OS that is as beautiful as it is functional and usable. If you're looking for a new desktop distribution to challenge what you think Linux is, give ZorinOS 16 a try and see if it doesn't very quickly win you over.
The team announced the release of the latest version of Linux Lite 5.6 with new improvements, programs, package updates and more. Here's a quick recap and review.
The monthly Nitrux ISO releases continue, and the Nitrux 1.6 release is here as a major update to the distribution that brings many new GNU/Linux technologies, updated apps, and lots of improvements, making Nitrux one of the best distros for home and office use.
First and foremost, Nitrux 1.6 is one of the first GNU/Linux distributions out there to ship a live ISO image powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.14 kernel series by default. Not only that, but Nitrux now supports Linux 5.4 and 5.10 LTS kernels, as well as the Linux-libre 5.10 and 5.13 kernels.
We are pleased to announce the launch of Nitrux 1.6.0. This new version brings together the latest software updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and ready-to-use hardware support.
Nitrux 1.6.0 is available for immediate download.
More than 75,000 people downloaded elementary OS 6 last month. Those who installed the Ubuntu-based distro (and stuck with it) can enjoy a batch of “free fix and feature updates”, which begin rolling out to the system from September 1.
Highlights within the update set include...
A slew of bug fixes also feature, including patches to solve an issue causing problems when resuming elementary OS 6 from sleep; quirks while renaming files in the Files app sidebar; and the system not updating the GRUB boot loader to show newer kernels.
Additionally, there are plans to update elementary OS for the Pinebook Pro and Raspberry Pi devices. These will, as before, provided as ‘early access‘ builds.
When SUSE acquired Rancher Labs and its popular Kubernetes management program, Rancher, the latest release of its popular Kubernetes management platform, SUSE promised it would continue to deliver 100% true open-source software with no vendor lock-in. Now, with the first release of Rancher under SUSE, Rancher 2.6, SUSE has kept its promise.
CloudLinux today announced it will provide updates and support for CentOS 8 through December 31, 2025 – providing a lifeline for those systems that have just four more months of support from the CentOS community through the end of the year when CentOS reaches end-of-life.
When Red Hat, CentOS's Linux parent company, announced it was "shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream," which is essentially a beta RHEL rolling release Linux distribution, CentOS users were upset. When CentOS 8 users discovered they'd only get support until the end of 2021, instead of 2029, they were ticked off. Now, CloudLinux has come to CentOS 8 users' rescue.
Why does Linux remain vastly invisible to ordinary folks who make general use of computers? This article steps through the process to move to Fedora Linux Workstation for non-Linux users.
It also describes features of the GUI (Graphic User Interface) and CLI (Command Line Interface) for the newcomer. This is a quick introduction, not an in-depth course.
Edward Cahn, asset manager at TSG (The SCO Group) has submitted a document to the bankruptcy court of the US state of Delaware, according to which the litigation that has been smoldering since 2003 between TSG as the legal successor to the Unix producer SCO and IBM resulted in the payment of 14.25 Million dollars is ended by IBM. In return, TSG undertakes not to assert any further claims against IBM.
The agreement between the two parties does not affect the claims of the Xinuos company. Under the name uniXis, TSG bought the rights and source code for the Openserver and Unixware products in 2011 with the promise to stay out of the legal dispute. The promise held until April 1, 2021, when Xinuos sued IBM. The company bought the Linux distributor Red Hat in order to be able to “harass” consumers, innovative competitors and all innovations in general. Xinuos also wants compensation because Openserver and Unixware would have been the leading Unix systems on the market until 2008.
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly.
Here are the release notes from Cockpit 252:
I know how fortunate I was to have had great access to education and technology from an early age. My mother was a K-6 teacher and later an administrator for the early childhood learning program, Head Start. My father was an electrical engineer (I followed in his footsteps) and later studied nights to become a college professor, ensuring that my two sisters and I had the opportunity to earn our college degrees without cost. Tagging along with them growing up, education was such a big part of our lives, and I got to spend a great deal of time in learning environments beyond my own schools.
Very large IBM mainframes/servers were taking 30+ minutes to boot the Linux kernel... No, just not for POST'ing the system with memory training and the like, but for loading Linux. Fortunately, with the Linux 5.15 kernel there is a set of scalability enhancements to allow these large IBM systems to be able to boot in around five minutes.
With the driver core changes for Linux 5.15 is a set of patches working on enhancing the performance of Kernfs for functionality used around pseudo file-systems like sysfs. Leading to this Kernfs locking and concurrency improvements were engineers finding that large IBM Power mainframe systems with "several hundred CPUs and 64TB of RAM" were taking 30+ minutes to just boot the Linux kernel. Extra kernel parameters were also needed to avoid the kernel timing out on boot.
Less is more. This is often the perspective behind requests we see that involve the words "light weight." I’ve come to loosely translate this to mean, "install and/or run only the applications I care about with no fluff."
The motivation can be any number of problems around decreasing the installed footprint for security purposes, maximizing system resources, or perceived stability improvements from using less software (less to go wrong).
Each of these points have their merit in any environment, but they are especially relevant in edge computing which is why we have a new means of deploying RHEL that helps tackle these concerns.
Today we’re launching the next video in our Open Source Stories "Common Connections" series, "Common Connections: Healthcare Made Human." The series features scholars, CEOs, educators, and engineers coming together to find the common threads in their work, and exploring the potential for future open source innovation and building unexpected connections.
"Common Connections: Healthcare Made Human" brings together Dr. Tom Delbanco, co-founder of OpenNotes, Liz Salmi, senior strategist of Research Dissemination for OpenNotes and Jan Walker, co-founder of OpenNotes who first met after appearing together in our film, "The Open Patient: Healing through sharing." Five years after their initial meeting, the three are now working together to make their vision for greater transparency in healthcare a reality.
We’ve invited the OpenNotes team to share their recollections on their initial meeting and the impact it has made on their cause.
Red Hat's Products and Technologies organization is doing game-changing work in the IT industry. In showcasing the unique stories of Red Hatters around the world, it's clear that there's no one path to finding success at Red Hat. For each of us, it's about open collaboration and building something together.
Red Hat CodeReady Containers supports local development and testing on a Red Hat OpenShift cluster. We recently released CodeReady Containers 1.31.2, which is the first version based on the major OpenShift 4.8 release. The CodeReady Containers team doesn't publicly report our advances on a regular basis, so this article is a good opportunity to learn about the biggest changes to CodeReady Containers during the past several months.
Armbian provides stable releases every four months, and Armbian 21.08 has just been released offering minimal, server or XFCE, Cinnamon and Budgie desktop Linux 5.10 LTS images for Arm boards, as well as a build system to customize your own image.
If you’ve been using an Arm SBC that is NOT a Raspberry Pi board, you’ve probably been told to use Armbian, as the community is providing Debian and Ubuntu images for over 100 Arm boards that are either “Supported”, “WIP” (suitable for testing), or “CSC” (no official support, aka you’re on your own).
The 8th monthly Sparky project and donate report of 2021: – Linux kernel updated up to version 5.14.0 – Added to repos: Cinerella video editor, Gammy screen brightness/temperature tool, Pinta graphics editor, Ulauncher – Sparky 6.0 “Po Tolo” released – new repos of Sparky 7 “Orion Belt” (next stable; semi-rolling/testing now) created
Many thanks to all of you for supporting our open-source projects. Your donations help keeping them alive.
Many thanks to all of you for your support and for your donations.
New website
The new website which design was presented last month is now 75% finished. The vast majority of pages were written. Work continues on the logos, the font contrast and addressing the remaining issues.
You can follow our progress on this project at https://github.com/linuxmint/website-wizixo/issues/31.
We’ll deploy it on our server this month and transition our current website towards it.
The first release candidate for Linux Lite 5.6 came out back in July. After a long wait, the stable release of the same is out now, and it brings a bunch of new features and improvements.
For starters, Linux Lite is a distribution that’s targeted at an audience with ancient PCs. Thanks to its lightweight nature, it can run on almost any ancient computer.
Linux Lite 5.6: What’s New?
The release includes an updated Help Manual for beginners. Apart from that, the Papirus icon theme has been updated.
Two new features have been added to Lite Tweaks. A new model called “Pay what you want” has been introduced.
Linux Lite 5.6, based on the recently released Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS is now available for download. Here’s what’s new.
Linux Lite is based on Ubuntu and comes with a super lightweight Xfce desktop environment. It is specifically developed to ease Windows users and more precisely those with old machines into the world of Linux.
As the name symbolizes, this is a very lightweight Linux distribution which is easy to run on ancient hardware as well. It requires both a 1.5GHz processor and at least 1GB of RAM to run smoothly.
Today, Linux Lite 5.6 finally becomes available, and it is based on Ubuntu 20.04.3. Because this is a maintenance release, the updates are somewhat minimal.
The cybersecurity state of affairs can be described as too complex today. There is an enormous number of threats endangering sensitive data for the average IT team to cope with. Threats ranging from exposure of physical assets stored in an office, to “social engineering” attacks resulting in unauthorized access, or even threats that exploit obscure software vulnerabilities. Irrespective of the threat vector used in an attack, the result of a data breach can be severe; in the Colonial pipeline case operations were seriously compromised, while on an Airline hack private data and credit card information of 3.5 million customers were exposed. Despite the complex landscape and the high visibility attacks, a fraction of all organizations suffer data breaches, with some having adapted to the landscape better than others.
Scale and complexity brings similar challenges, big or small. Hybrid cloud, public cloud, on-prem only large datacenter or highly distributed infrastructure are all on the radar of telecom service providers. In order to meet any current or future use-cases, from OpenRAN, next generation Core (5G and beyond) or AI at the edge you need to stay up to date with the latest technology. Most of them are now coming from the open source world and as Canonical we want to make it consumable for enterprises. In this podcast/videocast you will learn the latest news from telecom space, with experts’ commentary and explanation so that you can efficiently drive innovation in your company.
We are working on multiple projects with our customers and want to bring some insights to the wider community. It’s also an opportunity to get your questions answered, feel free to post them on our social media with hashtag #opensourcetelco .
Lindenis V833 is an AI video/camra development board based on Allwinner V833 single-core Cortex-A7 processor with a 400 MOPS AI accelerator (NPU) and running OpenWrt-based Tina Linux or Melis RTOS based on the RT-Thread kernel.
The board comes with up to 3GB RAM, a MicroSD card socket, MIPI DSI, MIPI CSI, and BT1120 interfaces for video output and input, Gigabit Ethernet, 2.4 GHz WiFi, and a few other I/Os.
Forlinx’s “OKMX8MP-C” SBC delivers NXP’s i.MX8M Plus via an “FETMX8MP-C SoM.” The SBC offers 2x GbE, 3x USB 3.0, HDMI 2.0, MIPI DSI/CSI, M.2, mini-PCIe, PCIe, and -40 to 85€°C support.
Earlier this year, China-based Forlinx introduced sandwich-style OKMX8MM-C and OKMX8MQ-C SBCs based on NXP’s i.MX8M Mini and i.MX8M Quad, respectively. Now it has launched another feature-rich, COM-and-carrier SBC built around another i.MX8 family processor. The OKMX8MP-C SBC’s FETMX8MP-C SoM is equipped with an NPU-equipped i.MX8M Plus, which we most recently saw on Ibase’s IBR215 Pico-ITX SBC.
Tachyum, a San Jose-based start-up company promising to deliver a "universal" processor for HPC and AI computation, has today posted progress on its work and shared what the current state of the processor is. According to the company press release, the processor has successfully booted the Linux kernel on the emulated design that runs on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA).
With this processor called Prodigy, Tachyum wants to create a universal solution for hyperscale, HPC, and AI purposes. The current situation requires dedicated accelerators for these kinds of workloads and the solution is to use CPU in combination with a dedicated accelerator. That is what Tachym is trying to change with its Prodigy processor.
According to today's announcement by the company, we are getting the first Linux boot up on the hardware, although a slight emulation. Tachyum has booted Linux on an FPGA, meaning that it is not a real silicon implementation, but rather a close emulation of it.
People who suffer from physical disabilities that leave them unable to speak or communicate effectively can end up frustrated or largely ignored. In response to this issue, Hackaday users Malte, Marco, and Tim R wanted to create a small device that can turn small eye movements into simple commands and phrases for easier communication, which they call the “Speak4Me.”
At the most basic level, the Speak4Me consists of an Arduino Nano board that controls a set of four infrared sensors which are pointed at the user’s eye within a single glass lens. Then once every 100 milliseconds, a measurement is taken to determine the location of the pupil and thus the direction being focused on. The word or phrase is chosen by first selecting a profile containing four groups of four elements each, for a total of sixteen possible combinations per profile. As an example, the caretaker profile has elements such as “yes,” “I want to sit,” and even “I need medical treatment.”
Techbase’s “ClusBerry Rack” rackmount cluster system can load up to 4x hot-swap RPi CM4 modules, each with GbE, USB 2.0, micro-USB, serial, 5V, and optional PoE, M.2, and wireless. Meanwhile, the dual CM4 “ClusBerry-2M” ships in a few weeks.
In February, Techbase launched a series of ClusBerry clustering systems for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, including desktop and DIN-rail models for up to 8x CM4 modules. Now, the company has unveiled a ClusBerry Rack rackmount model for up to 4x CM4 modules, each with its own set of modular I/Os.
In this project, we’re going to be building an automated IoT indoor hydroponic farm using the Quantum Integration system. We’re going to try to automate the grow house so that the flood cycles and grow light timing happen automatically, all we’ll need to do is keep an eye on the nutrient solution level.
MailSlurper is a lightweight SMTP mail server and a client solution for geeks, teams, developers and hackers.
It offers a responsive user-interface which works smoothly on desktop browsers as well as small screen navigators.
MailSlurper is developed by Adam Presley who generously released it to the world for free as an open-source project.
Welcome to the latest monthly overview of events from the Apache community. Here's a summary of what happened in August...
UbuCon or Ubuntu Conference is an event organized by the Ubuntu Communities. This event is for everyone who is involved and interested in Ubuntu, Linux, and other Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) technologies. This year, UbuCon Asia will be held and organized by Ubuntu Communities and FOSS communities in Asia. UbuCon Asia is also a place for Ubuntu people from Asia to connect, learn, and share their knowledge with each other.
LibreOffice Conference will open on September 23 at noon CEST and will close on September 25 at 5:30PM CEST. The schedule has been finalized, and is available at the following link: https://events.documentfoundation.org/libocon2021/schedule/. Of course, we may have last minute changes until September 12, when the schedule will be frozen. Sometime after that date, the schedule will also be available on Android mobiles (we will announce the availability of the app on Google Play and F-Droid in due time).
September's busy conference schedule kicks off next week with the Fall edition of Linaro Virtual Connect. Join us for a look at how to master your PipeWire streams with WirePlumber, and de-mystify GFX virtualization with VirGL!
Taking place entirely online from September 8-10, the event "brings together developers and maintainers of both hardware and software to discuss and learn about the leading software topics, challenges and opportunities in the Arm Ecosystem today".
Among the 70+ technical keynotes and sessions are two from Collabora's George Kiagiadakis and Gert Wollny! Here's a look at what they will be discussing.
Google Chrome users will see a new update available in the form of version 93, bringing more refinements to tab groups while dropping support for Ubuntu 16.04.
While there’s smaller features coming to Chrome in this update, there’s welcome changes that make it even easier to manage tabs, alongside a new context menu on iOS.
However, with browsers such as Opera appearing on Google’s own Chrome OS operating system for Chromebooks, ready for students to use, it’s time for Google to see whether Chrome’s reputation for being a battery hog can finally be vanquished.
Recently Google Chrome ran a test for their new privacy friendly user tracking known as FLoC or federated cohort of learning shich certainly doesn't make browser fingerprinting vastly easier.
Today, Mozilla published an independent security audit of its Mozilla VPN, which provides encryption and device-level protection of your connection and information when you are on the Web, from Cure53, an unbiased cybersecurity firm based in Berlin with more than 15 years of running software testing and code auditing. Mozilla periodically works with third-party organizations to complement our internal security programs and help improve the overall security of our products. During the independent audit, there were two medium and one high severity issues that were discovered. We have addressed these in this blog post and published the security audit report.
I'd like to announce the first release of postgresql-wheel, a Python package containing an entire compiled PostgreSQL server in a single pip installable file.
We are immensely proud to release on PyPI the first beta package of Psycopg 3!
Psycopg 3 is a complete rewrite of Psycopg 2, maintaining the same fundamental libpq wrapper architecture and DB-API interface design, but exposing new features to better work with the newer versions of Python and PostgreSQL.
On the Python side, Psycopg 3 allows the use of asyncio-based concurrency and static typing. Many improvement to the Python interface make the library much simpler and more idiomatic to use,
On the PostgreSQL side, Psycopg 3 makes use of server-side parameters, prepared statements, binary parameters, and great support for COPY operations.
But the most outstanding feature of the project is not a technical one: Psycopg 3 was made possible by the great generosity of many sponsors, who have funded the development of the project. Among the many backers, we are especially grateful to Postgres Professional and Command Prompt, Inc, which have given the most outstanding support. But many other companies and individuals, each one in their capacity, have shown concrete support for free software development and progress. We sincerely hope that you will find this work useful and that you will feel proud for having contributed to it.
pg_dbms_job 1.0.1, an extension to create, manage and use Oracle-style DBMS_JOB scheduled jobs, released.
dbMigration .NET v14.4, a database migration and sync tool, released.
WAL-G 1.1 a backup management system for PostgreSQL and other databases written in Go, released.
pglogical 2.4.0, a logical-WAL-based replication system for PostgreSQL, released.
Crunchy PostgreSQL Operator 5.0.0, a system for deploying and managing open source PostgreSQL clusters on Kubernetes, released.
set_user 2.0.1, an extension allowing privilege escalation with enhanced logging and control, released
AGE 0.5.0, a PostgreSQL extension that provides graph database functionality, released
pg_msvc_generator 1.0.0 beta, a tool for making Windows versions of extensions, released.
pg_dbms_job is a PostgreSQL extension to create, manage and use Oracle-style DBMS_JOB scheduled job. The use and behavior is just like with the DBMS_JOB Oracle package.
pg_dbms_job v1.1.0 has been released, this is a maintenance release to fix some possible wrong behaviors, give control over other ones and improve the documentation.
What can I say? LibreOffice 7.2 feels better than its predecessor, but then, it feels like an entirely self-made situation. You have a sub-par release, with lots of bugs and problems, so when these get fixed in a new version, one can perceive these as progress or improvement. Which is true, but it also doesn't take away from the fact none of these issues should have existed in the first place.
The new suite does bring some goodies to the table - better Microsoft format support, more visual consistency. However, it's also significantly more sluggish, and the support for the non-native formats is average at best. You may be lucky and get a file to display correctly, after a while, or it may look totally messed up. These aren't strong selling points, I must say. Do they give me the functionality I need, and thus independence from Microsoft Office? Nope. Quite the opposite. Overall, LibreOffice 7.2 is okay, and I'd like to hope it will be an upward trajectory from here on. But the road to where it needs to be - providing an ubiquitous solution to everyday office requirements - is long and twisty. And thus we conclude this article.
The popular open source office suite ONLYOFFICE Docs 6.4 is now available for the download. Here’s what’s new.
We all have used Microsoft Office at some point in our lives. Fortunately, there are various free and open-source alternatives available. Among these is ONLYOFFICE, which is a business-class productivity platform designed for internal team collaboration. It is great application which includes three of the most widely used editors:
HackConf is one of the premium developer conferences in Bulgaria. Over the years Kiwi TCMS and HackConf have collaborated multiple times and our history goes way back to before the first edition of the conference! We're happy to announce that Kiwi TCMS will be giving away 6 SUPERFAN tickets for HackConf 2021 in order to celebrate their 6th anniversary!
A limitation is that the static web pages are built with inline CSS, so if I want to change the CSS then have to regenerate all of the pages. Ditto, there is some text at the footer of each page that I would like to separate out to another file, so can change if desired and not have to rebuild all the pages.
13 new GNU releases in the last month (as of August 29, 2021): diffutils-3.8 gcc-11.2 glibc-2.34 gnunet-0.15.3 gnupg-2.3.2 grep-3.7 help2man-1.48.5 mailutils-3.13 mcron-1.2.1 mtools-4.0.35 mygnuhealth-1.0.4 parallel-20210822 taler-0.8
As a beginner when you start working with Bash scripts, the first command you will probably learn and use is the echo command. You can think of bash echo command something similar to the print command in other programming languages. The echo command is a bash built-in and its purpose is to print the output to stdout (i.e. Terminal).
I am happy to announce that we have released the Qt 6.1.3 today.
One day after work, Karen Wickre's colleagues at Google headed out for a night of karaoke. But that was the last thing she wanted to do.
It wasn't because she didn't think it sounded like fun — it would give her a chance to get to know her co-workers, and socializing after work is still technically work. But Wickre was one of the oldest on her team, and her idea of fun just wasn't the same as theirs.
"I did go along and was a good sport about it — and looked forward to it being over," she said jokingly. But Wickre added that management should be careful about sanctioned post-work "fun," since a lot of it isn't very inclusive. "There might be single moms who can't stay after work, or somebody with a disability who can't do whatever the fun physical game is."
A Fortune 500 company ditched Microsoft’s security products and deployed CrowdStrike’s managed detection and response (MDR) platform after suffering a crippling ransomware attack.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (bind, GNOME, hivex, kernel, and sssd), Debian (gpac and squashfs-tools), Fedora (c-ares and openssl), openSUSE (dovecot23), Oracle (bind, hivex, kernel, and sssd), Red Hat (kernel), Scientific Linux (bind, hivex, kernel, libsndfile, libX11, and sssd), Slackware (ntfs), SUSE (dovecot23), and Ubuntu (ntfs-3g).
Whitney is joined by Tom Luongo to discuss his recent analyses of the chaos in Afghanistan, what it means for international geopolitics and the future of Biden's presidency going forward.
Well, it’s been a week since my landlord weed whacked my Comcast line.
He said I could have them fix it but he’d remove it again if he didn’t like how they put it back in, so instead of escalating the argument, I decided to let it go and get T-Mobile’s home internet plan.
Even in my basement apartment, I’m able to get a 3/5 bar signal strength and RSRP of 100-102 at what appears to be the ideal part of my basement apartment, which is in the middle of the picture window. I checked with both the device and my cell phone, which is also using T-Mobile, to scout out various areas of my home, to see if there were any surprises. Hell, if I could make it go a little faster by planting it on the refrigerator, I would… Alas, T-Mobile was correct that the optimal spot is somewhere in or near a window.
On promo, they offered home internet for $50 a month, equipment included, with a promise that the cost would never go up for the life of the account. They said it was for the “inconvenience” of having to wait a while for my modem to ship, but in the end it only took 6 days from placing the order to getting their “trash can” modem, made by Nokia apparently. (Trash can is what people on Reddit call it, because it looks a lot like those trash can Mac Pros.)
[...]
Meanwhile, Google uses a DRM called Widevine. You notice a pattern with the Sandvines and the Widevines. They’re like kudzu vines for the internet. A noxious, pestilent weed that insists on killing the entire forest until nothing can ever grow there again. Such is the modern web.
I went and stood in line to return Comcast’s “free” Flex streaming box to avoid a “$500 fee” on my last bill (when everyone has a streaming box for $30-50.). It wasn’t even good and the power management on it sucked. It never even turned itself off, so it would just keep playing even if the TV went off, and it would sit there using at least enough juice to stay warm all the time. Bet that’s great for their carbon footprint.
Recruitment of judges and top officials of the Unified Patent Court, training of staff and work on the CMS are some of the tasks that lay ahead now that the Period of Provisional Application of the UPC is approaching. Alexander Ramsay, chairman of the UPC Preparatory Committee, has said this in an interview with Kluwer IP Law. Ramsay said that the problems which have risen due to the Brexit need to be dealt with by the State Parties in accordance with international law. He is “hopeful that this can be done in a pragmatic way that will avoid any further delay.”
It was not just a question of sucession. This week, Bérénice Thom was appointed presiding judge of Patent Chamber 4a. She follows Tim Crummenerl, after his move to the Federal Court of Justice in April. The three presiding judges of Düsseldorf Regional Court’s patent chambers used Thom’s appointment to make a clear statement. From now on, proceedings will no longer differ between the three chambers.
“We can do without the early first hearing for economic and ecological reasons,” says Daniel Voss, presiding judge of Chamber 4b, in an interview with JUVE Patent. “We want uniform procedural management of all three patent chambers.” Unlike in the Munich Procedure, for example, judges and parties used this hearing to clarify administrative rather than substantive issues. In future, the proceedings are to be uniformly faster and more efficient. Abolishing this early hearing means lawyers will have one less hearing to attend. The court has thereby responded to a frequently expressed wish from the legal community.
[...]
It also speaks volumes that Munich is the only German first-instance patent court to see an increase in filings. As a result, the court recently established a third patent chamber.
Today the EPO is launching a user survey on its pilot project for oral proceedings by videoconference (VICO) before EPO opposition divisions. You can submit your comments in English, French or German until 30 September 2021.
Gathering feedback from the patent profession and other users has proven crucial to the success of the pilot project to date. So we sincerely hope you will take this opportunity to share your experiences of oral proceedings by VICO in opposition to date and your expectations.
The pilot project was launched back in May 2020. Since 1 January 2021, when the consent of all parties was no longer required for oral proceedings to be held by VICO in opposition, over 2 300 proceedings have taken place online.
Turkish Patent and Trademark Office's ("TPTO") online system no longer allows recording a trademark attorney as a representative to the IR applications designated to Turkey. The applicants are still going to be represented by trademark attorneys during the course of opposition and other proceedings; however, the communication on the IR applications is going to be carried through WIPO.
Industrial Property Law numbered 6769 ("IP Law") introduced a non-use defense tool within the scope of opposition proceedings. In opposition proceedings based on similarity, where the opponent's trademark has been registered for at least five years, TPTO is entitled to ask (at the applicant's request) for proof of the use, as of the filing date or date of priority of the later trademark application. The applicant is required to raise this defense by filing a response against the opposition within one month that follows the notification on the opposition. Non-use defense can only be raised at this phase and not responding the opposition causes loss of the right of raising this defense.
In an interesting decision (O/557/21) rendered following an appeal against a decision of an Hearing Officer of the UK Intellectual Property Office (UK IPO), the Appointed Person upheld the Hearing Officer’s decision ((O/474/20) and declared the appellant’s trade mark invalid on the basis of a likelihood of confusion between the marks at issue. In particular, the declaration of invalidity could be based on a prior international trade mark, even if the decision concerning the declaration of invalidity was given after the United Kingdom had left the European Union. The Appointed Person also considered that the goods in question (therapeutic blankets) were similar to bedding blankets.
[...]
The appellant had submitted that the Hearing Officer should have found that the goods covered by Gravity Products LLC’s mark were dissimilar to those covered by the earlier trade marks, rather than considering that they possessed a medium degree of similarity.
The question before the Appointed Person was whether a therapeutic blanket was similar to straightforward bedding used to cover a bed and keep a person warm. The Hearing Officer had highlighted the different purposes to which the two goods would be put (therapeutic rather than bed covering) and the fact that the therapeutic blankets might have additional properties and be made of different materials. The Hearing Officer had also held that there would be different trade channels. She had further suggested that users of the goods were likely to overlap, in that both types of blankets could be used by members of the general public but that they were not in competition or complimentary to each other.
The Appointed Person considered that the Hearing Officer had gone too far: a “conventional” blanket could never serve as a substitute for a weighted blanket. Where a weighted blanket was used, it would be used instead of a conventional bed covering. For instance, if a weighted blanket was added to an existing blanket arrangement at least one of the conventional blankets would be removed; that is, it would have been replaced by the weighted blanket. Accordingly, there is some competition between the goods even if it is limited and only going one way. This means, in respect of this factor, that the similarity would be slightly greater between the goods than suggested by the Hearing Officer.
All this said, the Appointed Person concluded that the Hearing Officer had considered the right factors and her factual assessments were sound as she had assessed the distinctions made by the appellant in relation to the differences between the goods. Accordingly, the Hearing Officer was entitled to reach the conclusion that she did. The appeal was thus dismissed.
Mr. Tang—Yes, IPOS looks at IP not simply from the legal point of view, which is important, of course, but from a broader perspective. The ultimate purpose of IP is to change people's lives for the better, help people grow their businesses, improve society, and contribute to national economic development.
Stated otherwise, we wanted to connect IP to the greater ecosystem, of which it is a part. Maybe this view reflects my background as an economist masquerading as a lawyer, where I chaired the IP aspects of several multilateral trade negotiations. There, I saw how more and more countries see the connection between IP and commerce and finance more broadly, and to look to IP as an important engine of social and economic growth.
[...]
Mr. Tang-- Overall, the reaction has been positive, both at WIPO and among its member states. When I was on the road during the selection process for the new Director General, I was struck by the positive reaction to the call to take WIPO to a broader audience and make it more relevant in our daily lives, in addition to the excellent work that it does at the more technical level of IP rights.
Ultimately, what helps make WIPO more relevant will be exciting for the organization and its members. The challenge is how to implement this vision of IP on the ground to these broader audiences.
Despite the pandemic, statistics from the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) indicate a growing interest in the EU trademark and industrial design protection system. In 2020, the EUIPO received 176,987 applications for EU trademark (EUTM), which is a record number and an increase of more than 10% compared to 2019. In the case of community designs (RCDs), the annual increase in the number of applications was at a lower level – 3.62%, with 111,598 applications in 2020.
