If I had to pinpoint something to criticize, it's not something related to the actual hardware, but rather the operating system.
Offering Ubuntu 20.04 pre-installed is certainly a safe and sane choice, but other Linux PC companies like Star Labs, Slimbook and TUXEDO Computers offer a handful of distro options.
It's the year of Linux on the desktop! Thirty years into the life of Linux, it seems like people have said that every year. But now it's really true, and it's true because Linux found its real niche—not as a political statement about "free software," but as a practical way to enable capable, low-cost machines for millions.
Linux was founded on the desktop, as one man's project to create an alternative OS for his Intel-based PC. So it's understandable that Linux fans have been focused on desktops and laptops as a sign of success—and not, say, servers, or IoT, or drones. They can finally rest easy. Walk into any school now, and you'll see millions of Linux machines. They're called Chromebooks.
Chrome OS and Android are both based on the Linux kernel. They don't have the extra GNU software that distributions like Ubuntu have, but they're descended from Linus Torvalds' original work. Chromebooks are the fastest growing segment of the traditional PC market, according to Canalys. IDC points out that Canalys' estimates of 12 million Chromebooks shipped in Q1 2021 are only a fraction of the 63 million notebooks sold that quarter, but once again, they're where the growth is. Much of that is driven by schools, where Chromebooks dominate now.
Schoolkids don't generally need a million apps' worth of generic computing power. They need inexpensive, rugged ways to log into Google Classroom. Linux came to the rescue, enabling cheap, light, easy-to-manage PCs that don't have the Swiss Army Knife cruft of Windows or the premium price of Macs.
The Neptune 15 v2 from Juno Computers is a badass Linux laptop with a secret weapon: a dazzling 240Hz display. It might be the best gaming laptop I've used in 2021.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Kali Linux 2021.3 and some of the applications pre-installed.
The Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) in conjunction with FWUPD for offering easy-to-deploy firmware updates on Linux continues its meteoric rise.
The past few years LVFS/FWUPD has enjoyed growing adoption by hardware vendors for providing firmware updates to Linux users from various peripherals to motherboard UEFI firmware updates. LVFS/FWUPD has been instrumental in establishing the firmware updating ecosystem on Linux.
Along with bringing up DG2/Alchemist graphics card support on Linux, Intel engineers have been working to square away their support for the DG1 developer graphics card. This week thanks to XDC2021 is a fresh status update about what is working with this initial Intel graphics card on their open-source driver and what remains in the works.
As covered several times going back to the end of last year, ACPI Platform Profile support has materialized in recent versions of the Linux kernel for the core infrastructure and implementations that work with the latest laptops from the likes of Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, and HP. This platform profile support is becoming increasingly important with expressing your power/cooling/performance preference so that your laptop behaves as one would expect.
While it would be nice to have a modern, slim notebook that can run at full-speed without throttling so quickly, that unfortunately is increasingly rare with today's processors and vendors going for increasingly thin designs that means compromising thermals. Plus with today's increasingly complicated processors and Intel SoCs requiring Thermald and now with ACPI platform profiles becoming necessary, it has rather complicated the Linux support.
It looks like Intel's ISHTP_ECLITE driver will be ready for mainlining in Linux 5.16 as a driver for newer systems skipping out on a traditional embedded control (EC) and instead using this EC-like IP as part of their Programmable Service Engine subsystem.
This driver allows accessing the Intel Programmable Service Engine (PSE) using the Integrated Sensor Hub Transport Protocol (ISHTP) beginning with Intel's Elkhart Lake platform.
Longtime Mesa developer Karol Herbst who has worked extensively on the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver as well as the OpenCL/compute stack while being employed by Red Hat is now toying with the idea of Rust code inside Mesa.
Karol Herbst has begun investigating how Rust code, which is known for its memory safety and concurrency benefits, could be used within Mesa. Ultimately he's evaluating how Rust could be used inside Mesa as an API implementation as well as for leveraging existing Mesa code by Rust.
KWinFT as a fork of KDE's KWin X11/Wayland compositor code continues making progress on driving fundamental display improvements and ironing out the Wayland support.
KWinFT has been transitioning to use WLROOTS for its Wayland heavy-lifting and that process remains ongoing. KWinFT has also been working on splitting up its library code to make it more manageable and robust.
Among the features still desired by KWinFT and to be worked on include input methods, graphical tablet support, and PipeWire video stream integration. Currently there are two full-time developers working on the project but they hope to scale up to four to five full-time developers.
Ventoy 1.0.52 update now available with GUI on Linux, Ventoy is an open source tool for creating bootable USB drives. It was originally released as a command line program. A web UI was introduced later in March this year, but it wasn’t really functional or easy to use. These days the developers have announced the first version of Ventoy with a native Linux GUI.
An update to the official Spotify Linux client is rolling out.
Spotify doesn’t publish change-logs for Linux client updates but a couple of very noticeable improvements come bundled up in the latest build.
A LEMP Stack is a set of open-source software and frameworks or libraries that are used to host web applications on the internet. A stack consists of Linux operating system, Nginx web server, MariaDB/MySQL database server, and PHP language. A LEMP has good community support and is used in many highly scaled web applications around the globe.
In this post, we will show you how to install the LEMP stack on Debian 11.
It remains popular today because of its great flexibility. With more than 25,000 unique cards published over nearly three decades, there are enough cards for players to build hundreds of different decks for surprisingly unique gameplay experiences.
Along with this flexibility, however, there comes a cost: many Magic: The Gathering players collect lots of cards so they can construct lots of different decks, which in turn lets them focus on different win conditions and try out different strategies.
It can be quite a job to keep track of 1,000 cards when you only need 60 to 100 for a deck, but the open source application Magic Assistant makes managing your Magic collection easy.
This article describes how to write, configure, and install a simple Kubernetes validating admission webhook. The webhook intercepts and validates PrometheusRule object creation requests to prevent users from creating rules with invalid fields.
A key benefit of this approach is that your clusters will only contain prevalidated user-defined rules, resulting in uncluttered configuration across environments. Additionally, imagine there is an external alerting system that leverages fields in these customer-provided rules to make alerting decisions. It is important to ensure the rules are properly formatted, so the alerts are forwarded to the appropriate teams with the correct information.
The example here is quite simple, but it can serve as a starting point to cleaner Prometheus installations with minimal errors.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install phpBB on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, phpBB is an open-source bulletin board package written in PHP. PhpBB can instantly establish a dedicated space for people to gather and communicate. It also supports popular database engines (MySQL, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL, etc.), flat message structures, hierarchical sub-forums, user groups, full-text search, plugins, and email notifications.
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 phpBB 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.
Itch.io is a website that allows independent developers to host, sell and distribute their video games. It is widely known for helping get indie games off the ground. Here’s how to play games with Itch.io on Linux!
Stretchly is an app that you can install on the Linux desktop to remind you to stand up, stretch and relax while working. In this guide, we’ll show you how to install Stretchly and how to use it too.
Here, we will learn to install Apache webserver with Debian 11. In the previous article, we learned to install the LAMP stack with Debian 11. Apache is among the most popular web server. Apache is easy to deploy and manages the servers.
Many of us ended up in an IT job without that original intent. I studied and got my degree and license in electronics and communications engineering, entered the telecom industry as a cadet engineer, and rotated to different teams. On the intelligent networks team, I was introduced to telco charging and billing apps running on proprietary Unix operating systems.
Many people starting their careers would probably wonder if is it worth shifting to the IT industry. They might think they're wasting some of the expertise and credentials they picked up from their academic studies. I'd say it depends on what drives you.
I feel lucky to have been given a chance to do it, ending up loving it and the perks it offers—pay grade, flexibility, more opportunities, and ultimately enjoying what I do. It also has its cons: being a sysadmin for mission-critical 24x7 systems, for example. It can come with extreme pressure and demands, but these challenging and stressful situations can help shape you for the bright career that lies ahead.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nvidia Drivers on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Installing NVIDIA drivers on AlmaLinux is an easy task that can be done in less than a minute. Nvidia driver is needed by your NVIDIA Graphics GPU to function with better performance. Some Linux distributions offer the proprietary driver pre-packaged as part of its standard package repository making the entire Nvidia Linux Driver procedure extremely easy to follow.
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 Nvidia Drivers on AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
APT checks the health of all the packages, dependencies of the package before installing it. APT fetches packages from one or more repositories. A repository (package source) is basically a network server. The term "package" refers to an individual file with a .deb extension that contains either all or part of an application. The normal installation comes with default repositories configured, but these contain only a few packages out of an ocean of free software available.
Linux users and system administrators will never fail to cross paths with file management routines. As the Linux system, programs, and user files grow from Megabytes to Gigabytes, there is always the need to zip or compress some of your OS-bound files.
Chromebooks are amazing little machines. Since they run a barebones operating system with just a browser on top, they are often inexpensive, low-powered, and incredibly useful. However, if you want to go beyond the extensions and Android apps Chrome OS offers, installing Linux is your best option.
By tapping into Linux-based apps, you can make your Chromebook far more versatile than it was before. However, installing Linux isn't a simple process, and you'll need a few things before getting started. Here's what you need and how to set it all up.
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Here's where things get a bit more complex. If you want to run Linux independently of Chrome OS—maybe you don't really want Chrome OS at all, or maybe you want a separate environment you can muck around in without endangering your Chrome installation—you can install Linux in a more traditional fashion by partitioning the drive and dual-booting it with Chrome OS.
Note that this will require dedicating quite a bit of extra space to your Linux installation, which may not be easy on Chromebooks with small amounts of storage. It'll also wipe your device, so back up important files now before continuing!
To dual-boot Linux, I recommend a tool call chrx, which will walk you through the necessary steps. By default, chrx installs GalliumOS, a lightweight distribution based on Xubuntu that's customized for low-powered Chromebook hardware. If you want things as snappy as possible, GalliumOS is a great choice. However, chrx can also install Ubuntu and Fedora (plus Ubuntu derivatives like Lubuntu and Kubuntu), if you prefer.
Before using chrx, you'll need to enable Developer Mode, as we did when installing Crouton. You may also need to disable write protection and install custom firmware on your laptop, depending on its CPU. Check out this page for compatibility information regarding your specific laptop, and what you'll need to do. (This custom firmware also allows you to wipe Chrome OS entirely and install Linux on its own, if you prefer that over dual-booting.)
Node.js is a cross-platform java-script runtime for server-side programing language. It's built on top of Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, allows you to execute JavaScript code on the server-side. As for developers, Node.js allows developers to create scalable backend applications using JavaScript. Also, it's one of the most popular JavaScript runtimes among full-stack and front-end developers.
Node.js has become more popular and become an essential part of building server-side and networking applications, also became an industry standard. It can be used to create applications for different platforms, including backend/server applications, desktop applications, web applications/front-end, and mobile applications.
The revolutionary Raspberry Pi is the most popular single board computer. It has its very own Debian based operating system called Raspbian.
There are several other operating systems available for Raspberry Pi but almost all of them are lightweight. This was appropriate for the small factor and low end hardware of the Pi devices.
This changes with the introduction of Raspberry Pi 4B that flaunts 8 GB RAM and supports 4K display. The aim is to use Raspberry Pi as a regular desktop and it succeeds in doing so to a larger extent.
Before the 4B model, you could install the Ubuntu server on Raspberry Pi but the desktop version was not available. However, Ubuntu now provides official desktop image for Pi 4 models.
Microsoft is getting closer to replacing Windows 10 with the sleeker Windows 11, but if you're sick of embedded advertisements, constant updates, data collection, software lock-ins, and rising hardware requirements, we don't blame you. The good news is you have options.
If you've been thinking about making the jump to a different operating system, now is the perfect time. But you aren't stuck with the Windows-macOS binary, and don't have to settle for the browser-based Chrome OS. Instead, you can turn to the world of Linux.
First we need to know everyone does the same specific task everyday manually and that may waste a lot of time especially when we have important tasks or your day was busy with a lot of other tasks .. but we bring the best solution that will save a lot of time to do other important things.
So Let’s Start with (at): so at is a command on Linux used to execute command in a particular time once
Life problems come in many shapes and forms. One of them could be the login screen in your Plasma desktop. How? By not scaling up to the selected screen resolution of your system. Case in point, my recent endeavor with Kubuntu 20.04 on my IdeaPad Y50-70, with its Nvidia card and 4K screen. Long story short, while I managed to get the desktop resolution and UHD scaling just right, the login screen did not obey my settings, and only rendered in 4K, ergo tiny.
I spent a lot of time trying to fix this, and finally, came up with this guide. Now, in newer editions of Plasma, like say 5.20, where scaling works really great, you might not face this issue at all. In 5.18.5, I had to resort to a few ugly tricks to get everything working. Let's see what gives.
phpMyAdmin is a web-based application for interacting with MySQL database server. This tool provides you with a user interface to make MySQL operations so you don’t have to use the command line interface.
In this guide you are going to learn how to install phpMyAdmin with Apache on Ubuntu.20.04 and secure it.
There is plain old FTP protocol, but there is also FTPS and SFTP. So, how do they differ? Here’s a comparison of FTP vs FTPS vs SFTP.
FTP, FTPS, and SFTP are protocols that are used to transfer files over a network. While the acronyms for these protocols are similar, there are some key differences among them. The main ones are how data is exchanged, the level of security provided and firewall considerations.
While choosing between FTP, FTPS, and SFTP, weighing the pros and cons of each option will allow users to have a better understanding of the available choices.
Here is a head-to-head FTP vs FTPS vs SFTP comparison that overviews the advantages and limitations of each transfer protocol.
This post is about alert rules. Operators should ensure a baseline of observability for the software they operate. In this blog post, we cover Prometheus alert rules, how they work and their gotchas, and discuss how Prometheus alert rules can be embedded in Juju charms and how Juju topology enables the scoping of embedded alert rules to avoid inaccuracies.
In the first post of this series, we covered the general idea and benefits of model-driven observability with Juju. In the second post, we dived into the Juju topology and its benefits with respect to entity stability and metrics continuity. In the third post, we discussed how the Juju topology enables grouping and management of alerts, helps prevent alert storms, and how that relates with SRE practices.
This article is a short list of useful SQLite commands to make your life easier.
SQLite is an SQL engine intended mainly for embed on systems. It’s serverless, there isn’t a client-server process but direct access to the database file. Also, there aren’t configuration files and the whole system only depends on the C-Library.
One of the most difficult programming problems to diagnose and fix is when a library misbehaves because of incompatibilities with its dependencies. Fixing such issues can be time-consuming and might require developing domain knowledge about the libraries, which you should be able to treat as black boxes.
For Python programs, a solution is closer at hand thanks to Thoth, a project within the Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence (AICOE). Thoth is a recommendation engine for building robust Python software stacks. To make sure applications are shipped in a healthy state, the Thoth team developed Dependency Monkey, which builds and runs Python applications in test environments to uncover issues involving dependencies. This article looks at the reasons for Dependency Monkey and how it operates.
I am back with another status update on raytracing in RADV. And the good news is that things are finally starting to come together. After ~9 months of on and off work we’re now having games working with raytracing.
Not only is Intel progressing with its open-source ray-tracing driver support but the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" has been rounding out its RT code too and now has multiple games correctly rendering.
Bas Nieuwenhuizen has been spearheading the RADV work on Vulkan ray-tracing support and after more than a half-year tackling it things are starting to fall into place nicely.Games such as Quake II RTX with native Vulkan ray-tracing are working along with the game control via VKD3D-Proton for going from Direct3D 12 DXR to Vulkan RT. Metro Exodus is also working while Ghostrunner and Doom Eternal are two games tested that are not yet working.
Tuxedo becomes a sponsor of KDE . Or what is the same, the free software project adds to its list of patrons the second brand specialized in Linux computers so far this year, after the Spanish Slimbook did the same.
In the case of Tuxedo, it is necessary to transfer him to Germany, where this company is from, very much in the style of the aforementioned Slimbook or, to a lesser extent, of the more veteran System76, which as you know even has its own Linux distribution, Pop !_YOU. For the rest, the profile is similar and their products too, which is normal, considering that we are not talking about giants in the technology sector.
The cybersecurity-focused Debian-based distro, Kali Linux, has received major upgrades in its latest release. This includes improvements to OpenSSL, Virtualization, and an upgrade to Kali Tools.
In addition, the TicHunter Pro – their first NetHunter smartwatch – has also been announced.
Five Tumbleweed snapshots became available to users of openSUSE’s rolling release this week.
A couple smaller- and medium-sized snapshots brought new software updates for Xfce’s Thunar, the Linux Kernel, Mozilla Firefox, PostgreSQL, Python and more.
The 20210915 snapshot had two package updates. There was an update of translations for the manpages-l10n package to version 4.11.0, which enabled Hungarian translations. The tool set package for accessing and modifying virtual machine images, libguestfs 1.44.2, had a large amount of changes; it added and removed several patches and relicensed setup.py to LGPLv2+ from its original GPLv2+ license.
Xfce’s Thunar package was updated in snapshot 20210914; the update to the file manager 4.16.9 version fixed a memory leak, updated translations and disabled automatic queueing of file transfers. Linux Kernel 5.14.2 had a few USB serial control fixes and a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures fix; the fix for CVE-2021-3640 could allow a privileged local user to crash the system or escalate their privileges on a system. The package for video and image frames, pfstools, updated to version 2.2.0 and provided many fixes allowing the package to work with newer versions of libraries. Also updated in the snapshot were aria2 1.36.0 and text browser links 2.24.
Today, I have to span again two weeks of reviews. As you can imagine, a lot has happened in Tumbleweed and we have published 10 snapshots (0902, 0904, 0906, 0907, 0908, 0910, 0912, 0913, 0914, and 0915).
SUSE announced its results for the third quarter of financial year 2021, which ended July 31, 2021. The company continued to see strong growth in Q3 with ACV growing across all business areas, most notably in the Emerging business where SUSE Rancher continues to gain traction. In the End User routes to market (RTM), the cloud service providers (CSPs), particularly the hyperscalers, contributed to strong growth.
The an Arch Linux-based GNU/Linux distribution, 21.1.3 Pahvo version of Manjaro, was announced by Philip Müller. Having launched Ornara earlier this year, the project believes that all the dev teams are working hard to release the next version of Manjaro, and the latest Pahvo version 21.1.3 has been reached. This release is known to include significant improvements to Calamares, including file system selection for automatic partitioning and improved support for btrfs, it is also reminded that the default subvolume layout has been improved for btrfs installations, for easier rollback and less wasted space in snapshots . The system said to be available with KDE Plasma, Frameworks, KDE Gear; The update to Gnome includes major work. For detailed information about Manjaro 21.1.3 Pahvo, you can release announcement review the .
Fedora 35 will not introduce any particular news, it is a moderate release that mostly fixes bugs and updates some packages. At the moment, the latest internal tests are underway and, next week, more precisely on September 14, the beta should arrive. The fallback date in case of a problem is September 21st. Similarly, the final release will arrive on October 19th with fallback on October 26th in case of anomalies. Most of the features that I am going to outline in the rest of the article are practically definitive.
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 have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
One of the areas where Linux has struggled on the desktop has been around HDR (high dynamic range) display support while that will hopefully be addressed in the coming months with Red Hat hiring an engineer to focus on that problem.
Linux has struggled for years with HDR display support while NVIDIA has worked on the problem for their proprietary driver stack and proposing a DeepColor Visual extension for X.Org, there has been some HDR work in the DRM code, work by Intel on HDR support for Wayland/Weston along with other Intel HDR driver work, and AMD driver work too.
On 13 September 2021, Red Hat’s Bugzilla team released updates to Bugzilla that included new functionality for pagination. There is also a change to the default number of results with the bug search API to support this feature. The default is now 20 but can be adjusted to 1000 by using the limit/offset parameters.
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The default Bug search API(REST/XMLRPC/JSONRPC) result in 20 bugs by default and users can change this by specifying the limit. The value of limit can be up to 1000 bugs. If you need results that are more than 1000, you can use the offset parameter. You can get default 1000 bugs by sending 0 as a limit parameter.
Additionally, they have introduced “total_matches”, “limit”, and “offset” values in the response. These give the total number of bugs qualified for the query and the number of results in the response.
As software delivery becomes more complex and organizations work to scale their DevOps transformations, the need for observability increases. While observability plays an important role in any DevOps journey, it is often confused with monitoring. Although both are typically discussed in the same context, they are not one and the same.
To help establish a clear picture, I asked SKILup Day participants and DevOps Institute ambassadors to clarify some of the key differences.
Becoming a leader of a team or an organization isn’t something you simply wake up and do. It’s an evolution. It starts with “leading” yourself and driving yourself to make an impact toward a mission – toward something bigger than yourself. It takes relentless focus and passion.
I’ve learned a lot of lessons over the years – sometimes by doing it right, sometimes by doing it wrong. Here are three that I keep coming back to.
We’ve previously outlined the role of service providers in edge technology innovation and how constructing a robust ecosystem of partners multiply the opportunities to maximize functional and business opportunities while mitigating risk and investment.
In order to support a broad variety of use cases spanning multiple industries, edge computing requires collaboration across suppliers, service providers and application and content partners. Additionally, with widely distributed networks and physical presence, they remain uniquely positioned to deploy edge computing infrastructures that are close to the user and tightly integrated with transport and access networks.
The explosion and permutations of end-points, mobile applications, and distributed computing drives this need — all while meeting demanding functionality and quality of service expectations.
How might the rapidly changing edge technology landscape benefit from the adaptability provided by open source solutions?
Ubuntu 18.04.6 Update Available Download with Security fixes, The Ubuntu team has announced an updated version of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now available. The new media includes security fixes, including a fix for the BootHole security issues.
The unplanned Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS release is available today that was made on short notice for addressing unbootable media with Ubuntu 18.04.5.
This extra Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" LTS point release stems from the install media breaking due to key revocation. The issue stems from the BootHole vulnerability and the keys used by Ubuntu having been revoked and thus needing to issue Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS with new keys.
The Ubuntu team announced the six point release for Ubuntu 18.04 today for the Desktop and Server.
Ubuntu 18.04.6 refreshed the disc images for the amd64 and arm64 architecture, re-enabling the usage on Secure Boot enabled systems due to the key revocation related to the BootHole vulnerability.
Released back in April 26th, 2018, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS was supposed to get only five point releases, up to Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS, but since it’s supported until April 2023, Canonical decided to publish another point release that include patches for some serious security vulnerabilities affecting previous point releases.
As such, Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS is here as the sixth point release to the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system series with mitigations against the infamous BootHole security vulnerability discovered in the GRUB2 bootloader, which allows attackers to bypass UEFI Secure Boot.
Linux Mint is one of the best Linux distributions available while offering a modern user experience.
However, Linux Mint’s original website looked dated and potentially unattractive to new-age computer users.
Many suggested a visual makeover to reflect Linux Mint’s taste through a modern website design. And, only recently the developers started working on a redesign in collaboration with the community members, asking for feedback and getting insights on proposed designs.
Finally, a design was finalized and applied to Linux Mint’s official website.
The website looks clean and informative, great on desktop, and perfectly fits mobile phone browsers!
Most people will agree that Linux Mint is one of the most beginner-friendly and, especially among Windows converters, one of the most popular distributions. However, the Linux Mint website was long out of date and some new users were put off. Now the project has finally presented a new website that meets all modern standards and will greatly improve the first impression of Linux Mint for many newcomers.
In the current digital age, every serious project needs a well-designed website, especially if you are targeting beginners.
At Linux Mint, the old website no longer corresponded to the product offered.
But now Mint presents itself in a modern way, with a website that is kept uniform in Linux Mint green and corresponds to the latest design trends and of course is also adaptive.
Ubuntu 21.10’s new default wallpaper is now official with large animal mascot on it. Ubuntu 21.10 is due for release in mid October.
One of the major and controversial changes in the upcoming Ubuntu 21.10 is the conversion of Firefox from deb to snap.
Yes, you heard it right. The default Firefox will be a Snap application, not the regular DEB version.
As spotted by OMG! Ubuntu, this is done as per an agreement between Mozilla and Canonical (Ubuntu’s parent company).
The Asus Tinker Board 2 is a Raspberry Pi-shaped single-board computer powered by a Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor and featuring 2GB to 4GB of RAM. First announced almost a year ago, the Tinker Board 2 is finally available for $99 and up.
Asus also offers a Tinker Board 2S model that’s pretty similar except that it has 16GB of eMMC storage. Prices for that model start at about $120.
This week ended with the incredibly sad news of the passing of Sir Clive Sinclair. He was one of the founding fathers of home computing and got many of us at Raspberry Pi hooked on programming as kids.
Join us in sharing your Sinclair computing memories with us on Twitter and our blog, and we’ll see you next week.
Temperature and humidity sensors would normally connect to a gateway sending data to the cloud, the coin-cell battery-powered cuplTag NFC tag instead sends data to your smartphone after a tap.
CulpTag is controlled by an MSP430 16-bit microcontroller from Texas Instruments which reads and stores sensor data regularly into an EEPROM, and the data can then be read over NFC with the tag returning an URL with the data from the sensor and battery, then display everything on the phone’s web browser (no app needed).
Formally launched on Crowd Supply a little over a year ago, Microchip PolarFire SoC FPGA Icicle (codenamed MPFS-ICICLE-KIT-ES) was one of the first Linux & FreeBSD capable RISC-V development boards. The system is equipped with PolarFire SoC FPGA comprised a RISC-V CPU subsystem with four 64-bit RISC-V (RV64GC) application cores, one 64-bit RISC-V real-time core (RV64IMAC), as well as FPGA fabric.
Backers of the board have been able to play with it for several months ago, but Microchip is now sending the board to more people for evaluation/review, and I got one of my own to experiment with. That’s good to have a higher-end development board instead of the usual hobbyist-grade board. Today, I’ll just have a look at the kit content and main components on the board before playing with Linux and FPGA development tools in an upcoming or two posts.
Smart devices are everywhere around us. We carry one in our pocket, watch movies on another while a third cooks us dinner. Every day there are thousands of new devices connecting to the Internet. Research shows that by 2025, more than 150,000 IoT devices will come online every minute. With such vast numbers it is impossible to keep everything in working order just on your own. This brings the need for IoT device management. But what is IoT device management? To answer this question we first need to understand what the Internet of Things (IoT) is.
Beelink says the system ships with Windows 10, but it should also supports Linux.
Beelink U59 is an upcoming Jasper Lake mini PC based on the Intel Celeron N5095 15W quad-core processor that will ship with up to 16GB RAM, and 512 GB M.2 SSD storage.
The mini PC will also offer two 4K HDMI 2.0 ports, a Gigabit Ethernet port, WiFi 5, as well as four USB 3.0 ports, and support for 2.5-inch SATA drives up to 7mm thick.
Solder joints on PCBs don’t usually require extra protection, but loose wires are a different story. Because they can move around and touch each other or the enclosure, you need to protect the bare wire from shorts. Most people use either electrical tape or heat shrink tubing for the job. But cutting heat shrink tubing to length can be a time-consuming process if you have many wires to protect. That’s why Mr Innovative used an Arduino to build this handy machine that cuts heat shrink tubing automatically.
Mr Innovative built similar machines in the past, including one that feeds four different wire spools and cuts them to desired lengths. This machine is similar, but works with a single spool of heat shrink tubing. The user inserts one end of the tubing into the machine, sets the length via a touchscreen interface, and the machine takes care of the rest. It will continue to snip off sections of tubing, all of the same length, until it runs out of heat shrink to work with.
If [samsungite] has any more Arduinos lying around, he might appreciate this tea inventory tracker.
With the prevalence of libraries, it has never been easier to communicate with hundreds of different sensors, displays, and submodules. But what is really happening when you type SPI.begin() into the Arduino IDE? In his most recent video, [Ben Eater] explores the Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI) and how it really works.
Most Hackaday readers probably know [Ben] from his breadboard-based computers, such as the 6502 build we featured in 2019. Since then he has been hard at work, adding new and interesting additions to his breadboard computer, as well as diving into different communication protocols to better understand and implement them. For this video, [Ben] set the goal of connecting the BME280, a common pressure, temperature, and humidity sensor with an SPI interface, to his breadboard 6502 computer. Along the way, [Ben] discusses how exactly SPI works, and why there is so much conflicting nomenclature and operations when looking at different SPI devices.
We all interact with the sewer system at multiple points throughout the day, and having it fail can lead to catastrophic results. Every year in the United States alone, an estimated 23,000 to 75,000 sewer pipe failures are reported, which means billions of gallons of untreated and hazardous waste is released into the environment. But rather than having a person constantly inspect the system on location, Huy Mai came up with a way to use computer vision in conjunction with embedded machine learning to automatically detect when a defect has occurred.
Arduino Cloud’s dashboards and widgets are some of its most popular features. It’s what turns the Cloud into your ultimate control center for all kinds of projects, from home automation to industrial monitoring.
We’re constantly looking for ways to improve the user experience, and we’ve just rolled out some small, but very important tweaks. Combined with the new historical data download process, your Arduino Cloud experience will now be even smoother.
Version 3.34.1 of syslog-ng has been released with many interesting new features. There is now a new parser that can parse messages with regular expressions. The throughput of the Redis destination driver has increased drastically.
The networking startup says the new platform is aimed at 'the other side of the house' from its usual network engineering customers.
We are only three days away from the start of LPC 2021!
Thank you to all that made our conference possible: – Our generous Sponsors, listed here on the right – The Linux Foundation, which provides as always impeccable support – Our speakers and leaders, who are providing a lot of great content and planning great discussions
As you can see, the schedule is finalized now. There are going to be seven parallel tracks each day, lasting four hours each. We have a total of 23 different tracks and Microconferences, with 191 sessions.
At this time we are closing the CfPs for all tracks. We have still room for a limited number of Birds of a Feather sessions. If you want to propose one, even during the conference, and the necessary participants are all registered, please send an email to our lpc-contact@lists.linuxplumbersconf.org mailing list.
Rust has a long tradition of articulating its values. This is why we have a Code of Conduct. This is why we wrote blog posts like Fearless Concurrency, Stability as a Deliverable and Rust Once, Run Anywhere. Looking past the “engineering side” of Rust, aturon’s classic blog posts on listening and trust (part 1, part 2, part 3) did a great job of talking about what it is like to be on a Rust team. And who could forget the whole “fireflowers” debate?1
(“This Week in Glean” is a series of blog posts that the Glean Team at Mozilla is using to try to communicate better about our work. They could be release notes, documentation, hopes, dreams, or whatever: so long as it is inspired by Glean.) All "This Week in Glean" blog posts are listed in the TWiG index (and on the Mozilla Data blog). This article is cross-posted on the Mozilla Data blog.
This unblocks further work now. Currently Gecko simply stubs out all calls to Glean when compiled for Android, but we will enable recording Glean metrics within Gecko and exposing them in pings sent from Fenix. We will also start work on moving other Rust components into mozilla-central in order for them to use the Rust API of Glean directly. Changing how we deliver the Rust code also made testing Glean changes across these different components a bit more challenging, so I want to invest some time to make that easier again.
Since version 2.5, it becomes possible to reset the clone's database state to a specific snapshot if multiple snapshots are available. See DLE CLI reference. There is also a new option for the reset command, --latest, that allows resetting to the latest available state not knowing the snapshot name. This can be very useful in situations when a clone lives long, occupying a specific port, and some applications (e.g., analytical tools) are configured to work with it – users can periodically switch to the freshest database state without a need to reconfigure their applications.
Last year Kiwi TCMS started partnering with the MLH Fellowship open source program. During the span of 3 semesters fellows received mentorship and career advice from us. They were also able to work on 20+ issues the majority of which have been complete.
For that we kindly ask the open source community to nominate Kiwi TCMS at the MLH Open Source Awards.
WordPress contributors around the world are celebrating the sixth Global WordPress Translation Day throughout the entire month of September! That’s 30 days dedicated to help and encourage people to translate the software and its related resources. One of the highlights is a series of exciting core global events, starting on September 17 2021 and finishing on the United Nations’ International Translation Day itself on September 30, 2021.
Everyone is welcome to watch these events live on YouTube and to share their translation stories which will be featured during the celebrations and beyond. The global events will be in English and include presentations on how and why to you should join the thousands of translators in the project, tips and tools, interviews, and much more.
There are now 205 locales translating in what is a remarkable open source effort, bringing the opportunities of the software and its community to people in their own native languages.
As many of you know, Apple has now released an AArch64-based version of macOS and desktop/laptop platforms using the ‘M1’ chip to support it. This is in addition to the existing iOS mobile platforms (but shares some of their constraints).
There is considerable interest in the user-base for a GCC port (starting with https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=96168) - and, of great kudos to the gfortran team, one of the main drivers is folks using Fortran.
Fortunately, I was able to obtain access to one of the DTKs, courtesy of the OSS folks, and using that managed to draft an initial attempt at the port last year (however, nowhere near ready for presentation in GCC11). Nevertheless (as an aside) despite being a prototype, the port is in use with many via hombrew, macports or self-builds - which has shaken out some of the fixable bugs.
The work done in the prototype identified three issues that could not be coded around without work on generic parts of the compiler.
I am very happy to say that two of our colleagues, Andrew Burgess and Maxim Blinov (both from embecosm) have joined me in drafting a postable version of the port and we are seeking sponsorship to finish this in the GCC12 timeframe.
Maxim has a lightning talk on the GNU tools track at LPC (right after the steering committee session) that will focus on the two generic issues that we’re tackling (1 and 2 below).
Here is a short summary of the issues and proposed solutions (detailed discussion of any of the parts below would better be in new threads).
Developers are hoping for next year's GCC 12 release they will have Apple AArch64 support on Darwin in place for being able to support Apple Silicon -- initially the M1 SoC -- on macOS with GCC.
LLVM/Clang has long been supporting AArch64 on macOS given that Apple leverages LLVM/Clang as part of their official Xcode toolchain as the basis for their compiler across macOS to iOS and other products. While the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) supports AArch64 and macOS/Darwin, it hasn't supported the two of them together but there is a port in progress to change it.
Another small release of the tidyCpp package arrived on CRAN overnight. The packages offers a clean C++ layer (as well as one small C++ helper class) on top of the C API for R which aims to make use of this robust (if awkward) C API a little easier and more consistent. See the vignette for motivating examples.
The Protect class now uses the default methods for copy and move constructors and assignment allowing for wide use of the class. The small NumVec class now uses it for its data member.
With Qt 6.2 there is, for the first time, a comprehensive build system API that allows you to specify a QML module as a complete, encapsulated unit. This is a significant improvement, but as the concept of QML modules was rather under-developed in Qt 5, even seasoned QML developers might now ask "What exactly is a QML module". In our previous post we have scratched the surface by introducing the CMake API used to define them. We'll take a closer look in this post.
YAML (YAML Ain't Markup Language) is a human-readable data serialization language. Its syntax is simple and human-readable. It does not contain quotation marks, opening and closing tags, or braces. It does not contain anything which might make it harder for humans to parse nesting rules. You can scan your YAML document and immediately know what's going on.
[...]
At this point, you know enough YAML to get started. You can play around with the online YAML parser to test yourself. If you work with YAML daily, then this handy cheatsheet will be helpful.
C programming language is one of the popular programming languages for novice programmers. It is a structured programming language that was mainly developed for UNIX operating system. It supports different types of operating systems, and it is very easy to learn. 40 useful C programming examples have been shown in this tutorial for the users who want to learn C programming from the beginning.
Arm microprocessors power billions of phones, cars, Amazon servers and countless other devices.
Until 2016, Arm was a British owned and headquartered company. Then another company called SoftBank bought it and formed a joint venture with a consortium of Chinese investors, to enter that market.
Congestion in China is even worse, partly due to stricter COVID protocols for arriving vessels.
The delta variant-fueled COVID-19 wave that is slamming communities nationwide and flooding ICUs is a glimpse of the endless pandemic to come unless the Biden administration secures a waiver to significantly boost production of vaccines, tests...
Recently, Manjaro Cinnamon made the decision to use Vivaldi as their default web browser. There is one big problem with this decision. Vivaldi is NOT free and open source software. Vivaldi is a proprietary web browser. Is it OK for Linux distros to default to proprietary software when there are great free and open source alternatives?
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox and thunderbird), Fedora (haproxy, wordpress, and xen), openSUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, fail2ban, ghostscript, haserl, libcroco, nextcloud, and wireshark), Oracle (kernel and kernel-container), Slackware (httpd), SUSE (crmsh, gtk-vnc, libcroco, Mesa, postgresql12, postgresql13, and transfig), and Ubuntu (libgcrypt20, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-oem-5.13, python3.4, python3.5, and qtbase-opensource-src).
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 184. This version includes the following changes:
[ Chris Lamb ] * Fix the semantic comparison of R's .rdb files after a refactoring of temporary directory handling in a previous version. * Support a newer format version of R's .rds files. * Update tests for OCaml 4.12. (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#274) * Move diffoscope.versions to diffoscope.tests.utils.versions. * Use assert_diff in tests/comparators/test_rdata.py. * Reformat various modules with Black.
[ Zbigniew JÃâ¢drzejewski-Szmek ] * Stop using the deprecated distutils module by adding a version comparison class based on the RPM version rules. * Update invocations of llvm-objdump for the latest version of LLVM. * Adjust a test with one-byte text file for file(1) version 5.40. * Improve the parsing of the version of OpenSSH.
[ Benjamin Peterson ] * Add a --diff-context option to control the unified diff context size. (reproducible-builds/diffoscope!88)
A particularly nasty 0-day was discovered in the wild, CVE-2021-40444, a flaw in how Microsoft’s MSHTML engine handled Office documents. Not all of the details are clear yet, but the result is that opening a office document can trigger a remote code execution. It gets worse, though, because the exploit can work when simply previewing a file in Explorer, making this a potential 0-click exploit. So far the attack has been used against specific targets, but a POC has been published.
It appears that there are multiple tricks that should be discrete CVEs behind the exploit. First, a simple invocation of mshtml:http in an Office document triggers the download and processing of that URL via the Trident engine, AKA our old friend IE. The real juicy problem is that in Trident, an iframe can be constructed with a .cpl URI pointing at an inf or dll file, and that gets executed without any prompt. This is demonstrated here by [Will Dormann]. A patch was included with this month’s roundup of fixes for Patch Tuesday, so make sure to update.
IT administrators overseeing certain Microsoft Azure Linux virtual machines are being urged to make sure patches are installed after the discovery of four zero-day vulnerabilities that could allow systems to be compromised.
A malicious implementation of a popular pentesting tool suggests that advanced threat actors may be involved.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies received a hefty sum from Alion Science as part of a military-related contract.
Just a few weeks ago, Russia’s federal censor blocked the website for Alexey Navalny’s voting initiative “Smart Vote.” On September 15, Navalny’s team went ahead and released their list of recommended candidates regardless, uploading it to a Google Doc. Later that evening, Google Docs became temporarily unavailable inside Russia. On the first day of voting in the State Duma elections, September 17, tech giants Apple and Google caved to pressure from the Russian authorities and pulled Navalny’s mobile app from the App Store and Google Play. What’s more, Apple disabled its new “Private Relay” feature for users inside Russia. To find out more about whether or not Apple and Google had a choice in these matters — and what this mean for the future of the RuNet — Meduza spoke to lawyer Sarkis Darbinyan from the digital rights group Roskomsvoboda.
Mr T. M. Krishna, a prominent Carnatic music vocalist, cultural critic, and writer, had approached us to file a writ petition before the Madras High Court challenging the entirety of the IT Rules, 2021. The writ petition was admitted on June 10, 2021. On September 16,2021 the Madras High Court heard the counsels for the parties including Mr Rajshekhar Rao who represented Mr T.M Krishna. The Court also found merit in Mr Krishna’s contention that Part II of the Rules violated the right to speech, and held that any action taken under Rule 3 read with Rule 7 shall be subject to the decision in the petition. The Court also affirmed the previous stay on Rule 9. The Court has now listed these cases for final hearing on October 27, 2021.
[...]
On June 10, 2021, Mr Krishna's petition was listed for the first time. On that day, the Madras High Court issued notice. Subsequently, the Respondents, the Ministry of Electronic and Information Technology (‘MeitY’’) and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (‘MIB’) filed their respective replies, after a delay of almost 8 weeks, on August 25 and August 26. The affidavit filed by MietY defended Part II of the IT Rules, 2021 which seeks to regulate intermediaries. Whereas, the affidavit filed by MIB defended Part III of the Rules which seeks to regulate digital new media and OTT platforms.
The matter came up for hearing on September 16, 2021. The Court heard extensive submissions from the counsels, including Mr Rajshekhar Rao who was representing Mr TM Krishna.
[...]
The case is now listed for October 27, 2021 for final hearing. The interim decision passed by the Madras High Court is welcomed. Like the decision by the Bombay High Court, it provides much needed relief to users on the internet, news writers, editors and content creators. However, this is an interim relief and final hearing awaits. We will continue to provide legal support to Mr T.M Krishna and LiveLaw Media Pvt. Ltd., whom we are representing before the Kerala High Court, in their efforts to protect the right to speech and privacy of Indians on the internet.
We thank Mr. T. M. Krishna for giving us an opportunity to lend our expertise in this important case and are deeply grateful to all the lawyers who worked on this petition and especially Senior Advocate, Rajshekhar Rao who led the legal team, comprising Suhrith Parthasarathy, Vrinda Bhandari, Abhinav Sekhri, Tanmay Singh, Krishnesh Bapat and Anandita Mishra.
