The makers of Pop!_OS are currently in the early stages of creating a brand new, non-GNOME, desktop environment.
System76 is never one to settle. Consider what they’ve done to the GNOME desktop environment with their COSMIC treatment. Effectively, the company has made GNOME their own. But that wasn’t enough, so the developers have set out to create a brand new DE, from scratch, using Rust.
Why? Michael Murphy, Pop!_OS maintainer for System76, said, “There are things we’d like to do that we can’t simply achieve through extensions in GNOME. Extensions in general feel like a hack. And what we want to do with our desktop differs from GNOME, so it’s not like the option to merge pop-shell and COSMIC into GNOME Shell would be a welcome thing.”
Although the new desktop will not be a fork of GNOME, the developers do plan on reusing some of the current GNOME tooling, such as Mutter, KWin, and Wlroots. On this issue, Murphy said, “We’re already using gtk-rs for all of our stuff. My assumption is that it’s likely to see some components in GTK for the foreseeable future.” Murphy continues, “The shell itself though is lower level than a traditional desktop GUI toolkit. It’ll use primitives from the window manager it builds upon. If a mature Rust GUI turns up, then it could be used in the future of course. I’d generally like to use the best tools where possible.”
The System76 desktop will also be distribution-agnostic, so it won’t require Pop!_OS to run. As well, the developers plan on sticking to (when possible) the standards, set by FreeDesktop.
The 2021 Steering Committee Election is now complete. The Kubernetes Steering Committee consists of 7 seats, 4 of which were up for election in 2021. Incoming committee members serve a term of 2 years, and all members are elected by the Kubernetes Community.
This community body is significant since it oversees the governance of the entire Kubernetes project. With that great power comes great responsibility. You can learn more about the steering committee’s role in their charter.
Red Hat has been recognized by CRN€®, a brand of The Channel Company, as a winner of the 2021 CRN Tech Innovator Awards. Red Hat OpenShift came out on top in the Container Technology category, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux honored as a finalist for Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure.
This annual award program showcases innovative vendors in the IT channel across 47 different technology categories, in key areas ranging from cloud to storage to networking to security. To determine the winners, a panel of CRN editors reviewed hundreds of vendor products using multiple criteria, including key capabilities, uniqueness, technological ingenuity and ability to address customer and partner needs.
Few computing concepts are as ubiquitous as identity and access management. There isn’t a single day that goes by without us being asked for credentials, passwords or pin codes. Yet very few know the origins and the evolution of the technologies behind them.
This is the first of two blog posts where we will look at the history of open-source identity management. We will cover the main open-source protocols and standards that shaped it, from its origins to the modern days. This post will focus on the origins and the two major “legacy” protocols: Kerberos and LDAP.
Kubernetes has become the de facto system for organizations to manage their Linux containers. It works across multiple cloud environments, and you can use it to manage microservices and deploy applications.
This list of ubiquitous Kubernetes terminology can prepare you to work with Kubernetes and help you to better understand how exactly this popular container management platform functions.
AppImages certainly don't need a package manager to function but there are some advantages such as easier management that can be offered by them so today we're looking at Zap to see what it an do to help.
In this deep dive episode of Linux in the Ham Shack, we talk to Beth Lynn Eicher from the upcoming Ohio Linux Fest. We go over a bit of the history of OLF and then Beth Lynn gives our listeners the low down on everything that's going to happen at this year's event. The pandemic has made in-person conferences difficult but this time around it sounds like it's going to be a lot of fun with both a local and virtual presence. So if you're going to be around Columbus, Ohio on December 3-4 or you have some free time to visit online, make sure to come by the show.
The platform-drivers-x86 pull is exciting as usual for the in-development Linux 5.16 kernel.
The LXD team is very excited to announce the release of LXD 4.20!
This is one very busy release with a lot of new features.
VM users will be happy to see the initial implementation of live migration and core scheduling support. Container users are getting new configuration keys to set sysctls.
Then the bulk of the new features are all network related with peer network relationships, network zones for auto-generated DNS and SR-IOV accelerated OVN networks.
And lastly, on the clustering front, it’s now possible to better control what servers will be receiving new workloads.
In this tutorial, we’ll explore the dirname command and how to use dirname $0 to get the location of the running bash script. Furthermore, we will discuss how to retrieve an absolute path using the dirname command.
The Ubuntu Software app in Ubuntu 21.10 Impish has an ugly font rendering on default Wayland. The text in the app looks a bit pixelated.
I found the issue firstly when Impish was in beta stage. The issue was reported to also affect LibreOffice, Chromium, and other Snap apps, though most of them has been updated with it fixed.
The libvirt and qemu versions in Debian Bullseye support a new feature that allows for easier backup and recovery of virtual machines. Instead of using snapshots for backup operation, its now possible to enable dirty bitmaps. Other hypervisors tend to call this “changed block tracking”.
Using the new backup begin approach, its not only possible to create live full backups (without having to create an snapshot) but also track the changes between so called checkpoints, which is very useful for incremental backups.
Over the course of the last few months, i have been working on a simple backup and recovery utility called virtnbdbackup
This morning we realised that a test case failed on Fedora 34 only (the link is in Italian) and we set to debugging.
In this video, we are looking at how to install ONLYOFFICE on Elementary OS 6.0.
Today we are looking at how to install Wizard101 on a Chromebook with Crossover 21. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This is a quick tutorial on how to configure OpenVPN clients to use specific DNS server. OpenVPN server can be configured to enable the clients to use specific DNS server for hostname resolution.
The previous article covered Managing Users. Administrators need to be able to not only manage new and existing users, but also the Groups that the users can belong to on a system.
Keep in mind that these skills are more beneficial in a larger network in a domain-style environment than on a single system. If you worked in a corporation with multiple departments then it is much easier to place all users in a department into a single Group for that department. Once you assign permissions to the Group then all users have the same permissions. Of course, if you assign more permissions to specific Users, then those Users will have more permissions above the Group permissions.
Contao is a powerful open source content management system (CMS) that is easy to use, intuitive, and versatile and it allows you to create websites in multiple languages and themes. Contao can also be integrated into a regular Symfony application. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Contao on Ubuntu 20.04.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install HPLIP 3.21.10 in Ubuntu 21.04, DEBIAN 11, and Zorion OS 16 & 15.
HPLIP – HP Linux Image and Printing, developed by HP for Printing, scanning, and faxing with HP inkjet and laser-based printers in Linux platforms.
The latest version of HPLIP 3.21.10 contains new printer support and added support to the new Distro’s and the hplip installer is available for download from SourceForge.
Varnish cache is also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. Varnish cache will boost your server to load web pages very fast, and this is the one of the key factor by Google to rank higher. It is an open-source, high-performance HTTP accelerator designed for speeding up web servers.
Hi guys ! In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to Install Varnish Cache for Nginx on CentOS 8. Varnish cache is used to increase the speed or accelerate web servers to serve the web pages. So, Varnish cache is a free web application accelerator. Varnish cache saves the web pages in-memory so that every time when a user request/access any web pages it will be loaded from in-memory instead of a refresh.
Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites as well as APIs. In contrast to other web accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a client-side cache, or Apache and nginx, which are primarily origin servers,
We will go with Nginx in this tutorial. Let’s begin !
OpenLiteSpeed is an easy-to-use, open-source web server. It offers unbeatable features and performance to your sites along with top-notch security. The server understands all the apache rewrite rules and has intelligent cache acceleration features that let you implement the fastest caching on your server. In this tutorial, we will install & access the openlitespeed GUI. We have used 21.10 server
Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux are the top replacement Operating system for CentOS. This project came into existence once CentOS moved from an enterprise-stable operating system to an upstream development branch of RHEL.
Sudo stands for "substitute user do" or "super user do". This gives a current user to run programs with security privileges temporarily, by default the root user. The sudoers file is located at /etc/sudoers which contains the security policy for system users and groups to determine sudo privileges.
In this tutorial learn how to add a user to sudoers in AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux.
In Linux, tasks can be automated by writing several commands in one script and then executing the script whenever the same set of commands are needed. These scripts accept a variety of command-line arguments, which are often passed collectively when the script is executed.
The good thing is that a built-in function (called getopts) is available in Linux that is used to parse these command-line arguments. In this tutorial, you will learn about the getopts function in detail and how to use it to handle command-line arguments very effectively. This is explained with the help of several examples.
The getopts function is used to parse the arguments that are passed to a script through the command line. In other words, getopts look for all the options that your script might take in. Keep in mind that when the options are passed to a script, they are passed using a dash (-). This is analogous to using options when you use Linux commands. For instance, you can consider the example of ls or cd commands which take a variety of options to provide different outputs (e.g., ls -l).
VS Codium is a binary releases of VS Code without MS branding, telemetry andlicensing. It is a source-code editor made by Microsoft for Windows, Linux and macOS. The VSCodium project exists so that you don’t have to download+build from source. This project includes special build scripts that clone Microsoft’s vscode repo, run the build commands, and upload the resulting binaries for you to GitHub releases. These binaries are licensed under the MIT license. Telemetry is disabled.
It is a streamlined code editor with support for development operations like debugging, task running, and version control. It aims to provide just the tools a developer needs for a quick code-build-debug cycle and leaves more complex workflows to fuller featured IDEs, such as Visual Studio IDE.
Installing Steam in a Linux distro should be easy, right? Well. Even though, technically, it ought to be a simple one mouse click or one-liner in a terminal window, things aren't always quite as trivial. A while back, I had issues with missing 32-bit libraries for Steam (and some other programs) in Linux Mint. The likes of Fedora or AlmaLinux need third-party repositories. I had issues with Steam not running under Nouveau. Manjaro had different versions of Steam available, and they didn't always work perfectly.
With KDE neon, just recently, I encountered a new problem. When I search for Steam on the command line, I get no results. It would appear that Steam isn't there. Which is strange, because neon is based on Ubuntu, and Steam has been in the repos since day one. All right, let's analyze and fix this issue.
Short tutorial showing how to install Steam in KDE neon by adding 32-bit architecture support
MAAS (Metal as a Service) gives you the ability to provision physical and virtual servers via an easy to use web console. You can use MAAS to deploy Ubuntu with ease, and it even supports PXE boot in order to provide you with a full deployment solution. In this video, you'll get an overview of MAAS and how to set it up. Thanks to Linode for sponsoring this tutorial.
A little later than expected but DUSK now has The New and Old Update available in the native Linux version. This is the free update that came along with the Nintendo Switch release of the game, adding in numerous enhancements that were done for it.
Surviving Mars: Below and Beyond released back in early September, and to say the reviews have been poor would be quite the understatement but they're continuing to try and improve it.
Released on November 4 was the first content update for Below and Beyond, where they said the first focus was around making it easier to use the Underground, Asteroid Lander and Elevator. Not only that, they're trying to give you more of a point to doing either for your main colony. That is probably the biggest issue with the expansion, it added other places to explore and build, which sounded nice but for so little gain.
Ahead of another week of survival, Iron Gate has updated their popular co-op survival game Valheim with a mixture of different improvements but no major changes.
For starters they upgrade the Unity game engine from 2019.4.24f1 to 2019.4.31f1, which was "long-awaited" that should help fix some random crash bugs to do with pathfinding. Hooray for more stability! Additionally the comfort calculation was performance optimized, Mead bases show status effects on tooltip and some localization updates.
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Looks like the popularity of Valheim is holding pretty stable now at around 30,000 players online each day. The most recent Hearth & Home major update seemed to bring back quite a lot of players.
We review the LXQt 1.0.0 Desktop with release highlights, installation instructions.
The last maintenance release of the 21.08 series is out fixing many same track transition issues. Other noteworthy improvements include loop zones don’t stop playback when adding effects, added ability to set clip thumbnails when hover seeking clips in the Project Bin and proxies can now be automatically generated for .mlt files.
Please make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the 21.12 releases to them.
We're already past the dependency freeze, so no new dependencies or increasing of dependency versions in the stable branches.
The feature freeze, tagging and release of the beta (21.11.80) is in four days,11 November.
This week (Nov 8 – 12) I am participating in Endless Orange Week, a program where the entire Endless team engages in projects designed to grow our collective learning related to our skills, work and mission.
We propose a project, that could be anything, and then work during the whole week, without distraction. I've choosed to work on the Hack project, that's a really nice project that needs some love, because since the past year, we have other priorities, so there's no time to improve the Hack app.
Some months back (in March to be precise), I completed an amazing outreachy internship at GNOME. The months after that have been full of activity. In July I had the opportunity of presenting at the first open source conference I ever attended- GNOME’s Annual Developer Conference (GUADEC). Here I shared the contributions I made to the community by working on GNOME’s JavaScript Debugger where I wrote JavaScript code, improved on some areas of the documentation and helped new contributors find their way when I could.
When it comes to digital security, you could either trust that everything is protected or confirm this for yourself. You might even be the person other people go to, to confirm their security for them. Either way, a Linux distribution focused on penetration testing provides the tools you need for the job.
Kali Linux, BackBox, and Parrot OS are three of the most popular options available for ethical hacking and security testing. Need help making a decision? Let's dive in.
NemoMobile 0.6 was released. Horay! What else? We have new boot splash, reworked device lock, new policy kit agent and old-new package manager, updates of bluetooth, pulse audio, the translations was updated. PineTab initial support.
Jolla Phone is not supported anymore. OS release 3.4.0 was the last one for this device launched 7 years ago. The lowest supported kernel version of Sailfish 4 in the remaining Sailfish OS devices is 3.10. It is in Jolla C, Jolla Tablet and Xperia X.
The instructions for installing Sailfish OS to Sony Xperia X, Xperia XA2, Xperia 10, and Xperia 10 II (mark 2) devices are here - covering Windows, Linux, and macOS computers.
Over the years, the distutils stdlib module has been used to build setup.py scripts for Python packages. In addition to the baseline functions providing a build system CLI for the package, it provided the ability to easily extend the build system. This led both to growth of heavily customized setup.py scripts as part of some packages, as well as third-party build systems based on distutils, most notably setuptools.
This eventually led to deprecation of distutils themselves (see: PEP 632). Python 3.10 is already warning of distutils deprecation, and the current plan is to remove it in Python 3.12. Ahead of that, the development has moved to a dedicated pypa/distutils repository, and the copy of that is bundled within setuptools.
setuptools still uses the stdlib distutils by default. However, some packages already switch to the bundled copy, and upstream plans on using it by default in the future (see: Porting from Distutils).
At this point, I don’t think there is an explicit need for Gentoo to act here. However, it seems reasonable to avoid using distutils as the build system for Gentoo projects. Since the setuptools copy of distutils is different from the one included in CPython (and PyPy) and at the moment it does not carry the full set of historical Gentoo patches, it probably makes sense to test package compatibility with it nevertheless.
The newly released icedtea 2.6.28 and 3.21.0 build OpenJDK 7u321_b01 and OpenJDK 8u312_b07 respectively. These releases include the October 2021 security fixes for Java 7 and 8 from Oracle.
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My Java 7 and Java 8 packages (e.g. openjdk7 and openjdk… or openjre7 and openjre) can not co-exist on your computer because they use the same installation directory. You must install either Java 7 or Java 8.
Remember that I release packages for the JRE (runtime environment) and the JDK (development kit) simultaneously, but you only need to install one of the two. The JRE is sufficient if you only want to run Java programs (including Java web plugins). Only in case where you’d want to develop Java programs and need a Java compiler, you are in need of the JDK package.
Secure Boot is part of the UEFI specification and first appeared in the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) 2.3.1 specification (Errata C). It is meant to prevent the execution of unauthorized code upon boot of a computer. Most modern Personal Computers will have a way of enabling Secure Boot in UEFI, but it is common to leave it disabled if you are not running a Microsoft OS on it since Microsoft controls Secure Boot.
For dual-boot scenario’s the story is different however. Microsoft Windows 8 and 10 advise to have Secure Boot enabled but don’t enforce it, but as far as I know, for Microsoft Windows 11 enabling Secure Boot will be a requirement to get full upgrade support.
As a developer advocate, one of the largest challenges I face is how to teach people to use our company’s products. To do this well, you need to create workshops and disposable environments so your students can get their hands on the actual technology. As an IBM employee, I use the IBM Cloud, but it is designed for long-term production usage, not the ephemeral infrastructures that a workshop requires.
We often create systems to work around the limitations. Recently in updating the deployment process of such a system, I realized I had created a full serverless stack — completely by accident. This blog post details how I accidentally built an automated serverless automation and introduces you to the technology I used.
While at the Linux Foundation Members Summit in Napa, California, I was bemused to find that an open-source savvy intellectual property attorney had never heard of SCO vs. IBM. You know, the lawsuit that at one time threatened to end Linux in the cradle? Well, at least some people thought so anyway. More fool they. But now, after SCO went bankrupt; court after court dismissing SCO's crazy copyright claims; and closing in on 20-years into the saga, the U.S. District Court of Utah has finally put a period to the SCO vs. IBM lawsuit.
Red Hat's Products and Technologies organization is doing game-changing work in the IT industry, so we're taking a closer look at some of the talented Red Hatters from around the world who are enabling our continued evolution. In showcasing their unique stories, it's clear that there's no one path to finding success as a Red Hatter. For each of us, it's about open collaboration and building something together.
Associate Software Quality Engineer Dita Stehlikova has seen the enablement that comes with open source technology firsthand. "I've had my laptop since my university days, and it constantly had recurring problems. I’d get anxious with every update. Is this going to be the fix for my problem? But each time the issues would come right back. It was quite stressful. So I switched my operating system to Fedora, and it was like a miracle. Those recurring issues just stopped. That laptop still runs like clockwork to this day.
"Looking back, it’s a small thing, but that really was when I saw how incredible the open source model could be. It’s a good system that allows everyone to contribute to making things better. That’s when I fell in love with the concept of open source, and it’s been a big part of my career ever since."
Red Hat has announced the beta release of the next major update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform. Based on upstream kernel version 5.14, RHEL 9 Beta is designed for demanding hybrid multicloud deployments that range from physical, on-premises, public cloud to edge.
RHEL 9 Beta will run on four different hardware architectures: Intel/AMD64 (x86_64), ARM 64-bit (aarch64), IBM Power LE (ppc64le) and IBM Z (s390x).
It features enhanced web console performance metrics allowing you to better identify the potential causes of performance bottlenecks; Kernel live patching via the web console; and several image builder improvements, including the ability to build RHEL 8 and RHEL 9 images via a single build node, better support for customized file systems (non-LVM mount points) and bare metal deployments.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 708 for the week of October 31 – November 6, 2021.
Pine64 launched an RPi CM4-like “SOQuartz” module for $35 (2GB) to $75 (8GB) with WiFi/BT and SATA support. Meanwhile, Radxa revealed a similarly RK3566-equipped “Radxa CM3” that also adds USB 3.0. Both modules can use CM4 carriers.
In June, when Pine64 launched its Quartz64 model-A SBC, the company revealed preliminary details for a SOQuartz compute module, which similarly runs Linux or Android on the quad-core, Cortex-A55 Rockchip RK3566. Aimed initially at developers, the SOQuartz has now launched in 2GB LPDDR4 ($40), 4GB ($50), and 8GB ($75) variants, which are priced the same as equivalent RPI CM4 modules. The module has dual 100-pin B2B connectors like the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4, enabling users to plug into a CM4 carrier board, much like Antmicro’s upcoming, RISC-V based (StarFive 71Ãâ0) ARVSOM module.
Can you really buy a full-fledged personal computer for $70? Yes you can. With an all-in-one design reminiscent of classic 1980s/1990s home computers, Raspberry Pi 400 is built into a keyboard and can be connected to any monitor or TV with an HDMI socket.
Based on the same quad-core system-on-chip as the Raspberry Pi 4, it can run a host of desktop applications in the official Raspberry Pi OS based on Debian Linux.
Let’s take a closer look at the Pi 400’s capabilities and what you can use it for.
A fresh new service pack bringing some nice features from edge to stable. This is the last service pack in the v21.06 release cycle, we plan to publish a new postmarketOS v21.12 release in December, based on the upcoming Alpine 3.15 and a soon-to-be-created new branch from postmarketOS edge.
The developers of postmarketOS also have a new release featuring Phosh 0.14 user interface. This latest update to the stable channel of postmarketOS also brings a feature-complete multi-factor authentication app, an improved modem helper daemon, and more. This will be the last service pack for postmarketOS v21.06, with the next stable release expected to be v21.12, which should launch in December.
The OnePlus 5 is a popular high-end phone from 2017, featuring the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 SoC and Adreno 540. It has a 1080p display and up to 8GB of RAM. Mainline support for the device has been around for a while, since early 2020 in fact. Unfortunately, the Snapdragon 835 SoC it is based on lacks the same interest upstream that has benefited SDM845 devices so much, requiring a lot of work to reach a usable level of functionality.
Despite that, after a lot of time and effort from Jami Kettunen and several other Snapdragon 835 developers, we can finally welcome a postmarketOS port based on a close-to-mainline kernel! A surprising amount of the hardware already works, although there are a few known stability issues, such as the requirement to run diag-router, a tool meant for debugging the modem to prevent WiFi from crashing.
The all-in-one Raspberry Pi 400 computer is a capable device, but those seeking its maximum power may be disappointed by its 4 GB of memory. When the Pi 4 and Compute Module 4 have double that figure, surely the Pi 400 could catch up! A reddit user called [Pi800] rose to the challenge by replacing the 4 GB chip from the Pi 400 with the 8 GB chip from a Pi Compute Module, resulting in the so-called Pi 800, a working 8 GB all-in-one Pi.
As a piece of work it’s a deceptively straightforward yet extremely fiddly piece of soldering that requires a steady hand for even the most skilled of solderers. What takes it beyond the norm though is the reballing process. A ball-grid-array chip has a grid of small balls of solder on its underside that make the contacts, and these melt when it is soldered so require replacement before reworking. This is normally done with a template of carefully aligned holes to line up balls of solder in a stream of hot air, but lacking the template in this case the job was done by hand, laboriously ball by ball. A soldering task we’d hesitate to take on ourselves, so we’re impressed.
Portwell’s Linux-ready “PCOM-B657VGL” Basic Type 6 module runs on an 11th Gen H-series CPU with up to 64GB DDR4, quad and 8K display support, 2.5GbE, 4x SATA, PCIe Gen4 x16, 8x PCIe Gen3, and 4x USB 3.2 Gen 2.
Portwell announced a COM Express Basic Type 6 module equipped with Intel’s 11th Gen H-series (Tiger Lake-H) processors. The PCOM-B657VGL is designed for mission critical use conditions and AI edge computing applications in industrial automation, machine vision, communication, IoT, edge computing, medical equipment, transportation, and automated test equipment. The module is also suitable for graphic-intensive applications including gaming, digital signage, smart retail, and more.
I’ve just been notified about an inexpensive board (HLK-W806) based on WinnerMicro W806 32-bit XT804 (XuanTie E804) microcontroller clocked at up to 240 MHz and equipped with 1MB flash and 288KB RAM.
XuanTie is the microcontroller family from Alibaba’s subsidiary T-Head Semiconductor, notably XuanTie RISC-V cores, but I’ve just learned not all XuanTie cores are based on the RISC-V architecture, and as we’ll see below, Xuantie E804 core appears to be based on the C-Sky architecture. It may still be interesting, as it’s in the STM32 board price range (pre-2020), but with a much higher frequency, so let’s have a look.
Making a small number of things with an embedded application is pretty straightforward, you usually simply plug in a programmer or debugger dongle (such as an AVRISP2) into your board with an appropriate adaptor cable, load your code into whatever IDE tool is appropriate for the device and hit the program button. But when you scale up a bit to hundreds or thousands of units, this way of working just won’t cut it. Add in any functional or defect-oriented testing you need, and you’re going to need a custom programming rig.
Adafruit have a fair bit of experience with building embedded boards and dealing with the appropriate testing and programming, and now they’ve updated their AVR Programming library to support the latest devices which have moved to the UPDI (Unified Programming and Debug Interface) programming interface. UPDI is a single-wire bidirectional asynchronous serial interface which enables programming and debugging of embedded applications on slew of the new AVR branded devices from Microchip. An example would be the AVR128DAxx which this scribe has been tinkering with lately because it is cheap, has excellent capacitive touch support, and is available in a prototype-friendly 28-pin SOIC package, making it easy peasy to solder.
The Things Stack (TTS) and Arduino Cloud are now fully interfaced and open up a world of connected opportunities. When you configure a LoRaWAN device now, it’ll automatically be registered on The Things Stack platform, too.
Umple is a cross-platform open-source model-oriented programming system that enables the developer to create UML models without breaking a sweat.
Welcome November --we've closed October with another great week. Here are the latest updates on the Apache community's activities...
SpiderMonkey is the JavaScript engine used in Mozilla Firefox. This newsletter gives an overview of the JavaScript and WebAssembly work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 94 and 95 Nightly release cycles.
Whenever an internet connection is cut in a country or city, the safety and security of millions of people may be at stake. Documenting outages helps internet access defenders understand when and where they took place even when authorities or service providers may deny them.
When large numbers of Firefox users experience connection failures for any reason, this produces an anomaly in the recorded telemetry data. At the country or city level, this can provide a corroborative signal of whether an outage or intentional shutdown occurred.
Several large technology companies, including Google and Cloudflare, publicly share data about outages of consumer-facing products in different ways. But researchers and journalists can usually only hone in on the exact nature of an outage by combining data from multiple sources.
With something like 15 billion mobile phones in the world, our collective thumbs are getting a workout from swiping and tapping tiny screens all day. Check out some of our favorite pro tips and tricks for getting the most out of Firefox on your phone and tablet that might also give your thumbs and your brain a break.
Let's start with why I want to switch from Firefox to something else. First, Firefox is adding ads in the browser. Firefox has telemetry enabled out of the box
Eric started his career at The Walt Disney Company, where he held various leadership roles over more than 15 years, including spending three years as an expatriate in China managing the expansion of Disney English, the company’s China-based learning center business. Following his tenure at Disney, Eric was CFO at Helix Education, a provider of technologies and services to power data-driven higher education growth, and at the programmatic advertising exchange OpenX Technologies.
I’ve been working in IT since the mid 1980s, spread across the aerospace, defence, science and financial services sectors. In the beginning I was mostly coding and testing, but as time went by I found myself working on requirements, designing systems and documenting them as much as doing any actual coding.
I first learned to program using Fortran on a VAX computer running the VMS operating system. Since then I’ve used all sorts of hardware and programming languages, even including a brief spell updating an ancient legacy system written in Algol running on an Elliott computer of late 1960’s vintage, for which the program was loaded from paper tape. This was an experience that gave me enormous respect for the programmers of the past for whom that was hi-tech.
Having worked on some extremely complex systems over the years I have come to value simplicity. When I am developing software for my own use my tool of choice these days is Gambas – an amazing but surprisingly little-known IDE, best described as “Visual Basic for Linux”, only Gambas is far superior to VB and leaves Python for dead in terms of productivity and performance.
Away from IT I am a musician – playing flamenco and blues guitar, and also the piano. In parallel with IT I’ve worked on the fringes of the art world, helping to organise four large-scale public art shows in recent years.
Although originally from London, I am blessed to live in rural South Shropshire, surrounded by farmland and arguably the most beautiful scenery the UK has to offer.
There is no specific answer to this question, as the GUI and CLI both have pros and cons. Choosing an interface to use depends on what task you need to execute on your computer. Although the GUI is easy to learn and popular, learning the basics of the command-line interface is useful, whether you end up using it as your go-to interface option.
I’ve tried a lot of the “newer” languages and, somehow, I’m always happiest when I go back to C++ or even C. However, there is one thing that gets a little on my nerves when I go back: the need to have header files with a declaration and then a separate file with almost the same information duplicated. I constantly make a change and forget to update the header, and many other languages take care of that for you. So I went looking for a way to automate things. Sure, some IDEs will automatically insert declarations but I’ve never been very happy with those for a variety of reasons. I wanted something lightweight that I could use in lots of different toolsets.
I found an older tool, however, that does a pretty good job, although there are a few limitations. The tool seems to be a little obscure, so I thought I’d show you what makeheaders — part of the Fossil software configuration management system. The program dates back to 1993 when [Dwayne Richard Hipp] — the same guy that wrote SQLite — created it for his own use. It isn’t very complex — the whole thing lives in one fairly large C source file but it can scan a directory and create header files for everything. In some cases, you won’t need to make big changes to your source code, but if you are willing, there are several things you can do.
With only being a few hours late to make it to last week’s Rakudo Weekly News, Oleksandr Kyriukhin was nonetheless glad to be able to announce another release of the Comma IDE for subscribers, as well as a new free Comma Community Edition! Check out the changes! And if you don’t know about Comma, check out the FAQ!
SMALLER SIZE MEANS BETTER PERFORMANCE
Over the past century, electronic engineering has improved massively. In the 1920s, a state-of-the-art AM radio contained several vacuum tubes, a few enormous inductors, capacitors and resistors, several dozen meters of wire to act as an antenna, and a big bank of batteries to power the whole thing. Today, you can listen to a dozen music streaming services on a device that fits in your pocket and can do a gazillion more things. But miniaturization is not just done for ease of carrying: it is absolutely necessary to achieve the performance we’ve come to expect of our devices today.
Given the proclivities of our community, it’s no surprise that this is hardly the first powerful flashlight we’ve seen. This one broke the 100-Watt barrier with a single COB LED, while this ammo-can version sports an even higher light output. Neither of them looks much like a traditional flashlight, though, which is where [Maciej]’s build has the edge.
Linux Foundation Membership Summit — The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, announced the new Project OpenBytes spearheaded by Graviti. Project OpenBytes is dedicated to making open data more available and accessible through the creation of data standards and formats.
Cybersecurity researchers have helped fix a critical heap-overflow security vulnerability in the Linux kernel that could be exploited either locally or through remote code execution (RCE) to compromise the vulnerable Linux computers.
Discovered by SentinelLabs’ researcher Max Van Amerongen, the vulnerability tracked as CVE-2021-43267 exists in the Transparent Inter Process Communication (TIPC) module of the kernel, specifically in a message type that allows nodes to send cryptographic keys to each other.
The following statement condemning the use of Pegasus spyware against six Palestinian human rights defenders was issued today by seven human rights organizations, including Access Now...
Access Now and a coalition of human rights organizations condemn the hacking of six Palestinian human rights defenders’ devices with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, demand a moratorium on spyware sales, and call for immediate U.N. intervention.
“The evidence keeps mounting — Israel’s use and creation of spyware is unsafe,” said Marwa Fatafta, MENA Policy Manager at Access Now. “The world cannot sit back and watch NSO Group technology target and persecute Palestinians any longer, we’re calling on the U.N. and global actors to denounce these unlawful attacks, and ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
Gen Burhan — the chairman of the Sudanese Sovereign Council — led a military coup in Sudan on October 25, 2021. Gen Burhan has justified Monday's coup, saying it was necessary to “avoid civil war” and blamed political infighting. The forces behind the coup arrested Prime minister Abdalla Hamdok, along with many ministers and politicians.
The international community responded to the coup in several ways. The US condemned the coup and suspended 700 million US dollars in aid for Sudan. The UK and EU each condemned the military coup and The African Union suspended Sudan's membership and described the coup as “unconstitutional.”
From using international SIM cards to deploying relatives in the diaspora to relay information, Sudanese citizens are finding ways to communicate in a bid to circumvent telecommunications restrictions imposed after the military seized power last week.
Senators are coalescing behind the recent House version of legislation aimed at cleaning up online marketplaces.
