Tuxedo is launching the InfinityBook S17 - Gen6 thin and light Linux laptops with Intel Tiger Lake-H processors. Even though these new models are touted as desktop replacement devices, they do not feature a discrete GPU. Nevertheless, users can benefit from the included Thunderbolt 4 connector that enables the use of external GPUs.
The InfinityBook S17 - Gen6 features a 17.3-inch Full-HD IPS display with thin screen bezels all around, so the screen-to-body factor almost matches that of a 15.6-inch model. Thus, its dimensions are quite compact at 395 x 250.7 x 19.8 mm, making it the smallest 17-incher in the Tuxedo portfolio, and it only weighs 2.25 kg (4.96 lbs).
Despite its lightness, the InfinityBook S17 - Gen6 still packs enough power to match your average desktop. Processor options include the Intel Core i5-11300H with Iris Xe G7 80 EUs iGPU and the Core i7-11370H with Iris Xe G7 96 EUs iGPU, which can be coupled with up to 64 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM and up to 4 TB of NVMe SSD storage through a PCIe 4.0 x4 + PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 2280 slot combo. Port selection comes with a Thunderbolt 4 connector with DP and power delivery capabilities, USB-C 3.2 Gen2x2, USB-A 3.2 Gen2, USB 2.0, HDMI 1.4b video output, 2-in-1 audio and GbE jacks, plus a handy microSD card reader.
Other notable features include an ergonomic and cooling-optimized Lift-Up hinge, a large 73 Wh battery that can last up to 6-7 hours in practical office workloads, a FlexiCharger BIOS option that can limit the battery charging to increase lifespan, Wi-Fi 6 + Bluetooth 5.2 + GbE NIC, HD webcam with Windows Hello support, and TPM 2.0 security.
I recently heard about Ubuntu Unity and I was curious how usable Unity 7 would be like in 2021, if it's exciting I might make a followup video about my thoughts.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of deepin 20.3 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Intel's open-source engineers today released the Compute-Runtime 21.47.21710 as their latest update to this open-source compute stack for Linux systems enabling their graphics processors to enjoy performant OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support.
Notable with today's Compute Runtime update is that v21.47.21710 is the first having DG2 "Alchemist" graphics card support in place. This goes along with other DG2/Alchemist enablement going on in the Linux kernel and Mesa, etc. When pairing the latest kernel now with Intel Compute-Runtime should yield preliminary support for OpenCL and oneAPI L0 on Alchemist but expect more refinements and optimizations to come over the months ahead.
For those that happen to have older ASUS Transformer tablets powered by a NVIDIA Tegra SoC, the Linux 5.17 kernel cycle early next year is enabling a number of them to work off the mainline kernel.
A batch of patches were sent out this week intended for the Linux 5.17 cycle for improving the older NVIDIA Tegra support with the mainline kernel.
With virtualization we can create multiple virtual machines over a single physical computer. The benefits of virtualization are countless, from being able to create virtual representation of different machines, to efficiently use the currently available hardware. Clearly a virtual machine, like any real computer, needs an operating system (OS). In this context it is called a Guest OS, as opposed to the one running on real hardware, called Host OS.
Running graphics applications in a Guest OS can be annoying as they are generally greedy of computing resources, and that can slow you down or give you a bad experience in terms of graphics performance. Being able to accelerate all this by offloading the workload to the hardware can be a great deal. The VirtIO-GPU virtual GPU device comes into play here, allowing a Guest OS to send graphics commands to it through OpenGL or Vulkan. While we are already there with OpenGL, we can not say the same for Vulkan. Well, until now.
When running on the very latest Linux 5.16 Git kernel paired with recent Mesa and various experimental components to the virtualization stack, it is possible getting at least basic Vulkan acceleration working within QEMU guest virtual machines that in turn is accelerated by the host.
Getting experimental Vulkan API support working within guest virtual machines on QEMU currently requires a number of steps, including the use of yet-to-be-upstreamed code in some areas.
Linux cross-platform packaging format Flatpak has come under the spotlight this week, with the "fundamental problems inherent in [its] design" criticised in a withering post by Canadian software dev Nicholas Fraser.
Fraser wrote in a blog published on 23 November that "these are not the future of desktop Linux apps," citing a litany of technical, security and usability problems. His assertions about disk usage and sharing of runtimes between apps were hotly disputed by Will Thompson, director of OS at Endless OS Foundation a day later in a post titled: "On Flatpak disk usage and deduplication," but there is no denying it is horribly inefficient.
Most people don't care about that any more, one could argue. But they should.
The Linux world has been trying to invent a cross-platform packaging format for years, but leading contenders – the older, vendor-neutral older, AppImage format as well as Ubuntu's Snap and Fedora's Flatpak – all have serious issues.
Hugin is an open-source image editing tool for Linux, Mac OS, Windows, and BSD. It allows users to stitch photographs together and create panoramas digitally. In this guide, we’ll show you how to install Hugin on Linux.
Total War: WARHAMMER II is the sequel to Total War: WARHAMMER. It is a turn-based real-time tactics video game developed by Creative Assembly and published by Sega. Here’s how you can play the game on your Linux system.
In Linux, you often need to run lengthy processes to execute in the background and independently (such as ping commands to a server for an extended period of time) .
Today we are looking at how to install VRoid Studio 1.0 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
The Linux terminal is a powerful tool that allows you to perform a wide range of operations using commands. These commands enable you to accomplish a variety of computing tasks, including file manipulation, program management, and service automation.
Ideally, when you need to run a bunch of terminal commands, you do it one-by-one. However, it turns out that there's a better way to do this, and it involves running multiple commands at once.
Follow along as we demonstrate the different ways to run multiple terminal commands in Linux.
This tutorial is about how to easily install and setup PowerDNS on Debian 11/Debian 10. PowerDNS “is a premier supplier of open source DNS software, services and support“. It provides both the Authoritative Server and the Recursor DNS products.
Keeping software on your device up to date is an important part of having a robust and secure system, but even more important is having an up-to-date time and date.
Accurate time and date on a system not only tells you the correct time but also allows you to execute automated tasks as expected and connect to services over the internet seamlessly.
This guide will show you how to review, adjust, and configure the time and date on Linux from the command line using the timedatectl command.
MediaWiki is a collaboration and documentation platform brought to you by a vibrant community.
It helps you collect and organize knowledge and make it available to people.
MediaWiki is a free and open source software that helps users collect and organize information. It is a centralized place where users collaborate and share knowledge. Wikipedia is an example of MediaWiki’s software use case, as it was initially developed for creating Wikipedia.
In this tutorial, We will show you how to install Mediawiki in your CentOS 8 system.
Nginx is a free open source high performing and lightweight web server that is used as the load balancer, reverse proxy, HTTP cache, and mail proxy. Although Nginx is quite new as compared to other web servers, its popularity is rising due to its high performance. With your default Nginx configuration, you might get fast performance but we can boost the Nginx performance at its best by changing some configurations.
In this article, you will get to know 8 different best ways to boost Nginx for better performance. To demonstrate the example in this article I have installed Nginx on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system.
This tutorial will explain step by step to install Parabola computer operating system with GNOME Desktop to a virtual machine. Let's practice!
Pritunl is an open-source VPN and IPsec server with user management and horizontal scaling for small and large organizations. It gives the user a choice to use OpenVPN and Wireguard protocols. It comes with an easy to use GUI interface and supports clients on most devices and platforms. All the traffic between clients and the server is encrypted. Pritunl is built on MongoDB, a reliable and scalable database that can be quickly deployed and with built-in support for replication, making deploying the Pritunl cluster easy.
This tutorial will teach you about how to install the Pritunl VPN server on Rocky Linux 8. We will also explore how to connect to the VPN using a Linux Client.
Teamspeak is a free voice chat software that can be used by teams, groups, and communities. It’s popular among gamers because it allows them to communicate complex strategies in real-time while playing their favorite game. Teamspeak has many other uses besides gaming though. It can also be used for running online conferences or meetings, distance learning courses, language lessons, and much more.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Zabbix on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Zabbix is an open-source monitoring tool for servers, applications, and network devices. It is used to monitor networks, servers, applications, services as well as cloud resources. It also supports the monitoring of storage devices, databases, virtual machines, telephony, IT security resources, and much more.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Zabbix open-source monitoring tool on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
MySQL doesn’t need any introduction, it has been around for years and widely used open source Database management system. Here we learn how to install MySQL server and client on Debian 11 Bullseye.
Well, just like Debian 10 Buster, the 11 Bullseye also got the MariaDB as the default MySQL variant to install. Yes, you won’t be able to install the Oracle MySQL using the default repository of Debain 11. Well, being a fork of MySQL, MariaDB will work similar and also stable. And compatible with all application that required the MYSQL.
Nevertheles, still those who want Oracle’s MySQL and only its features they can add its repository manually using this tutorial to get it.
Last week was a bitter for bit System76 . Aside from its conflict with GNOME , the company had to see its operating system, Pop! _OS , being exposed on the YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips after an attempt to install Steam took away the desktop environment.
Linus Sebastian, the protagonist of the Linus Tech Tips channel, tried to use or test Linux as a desktop operating system. To do this, he first opted for Pop! _OS, one of NVIDIA’s most user-friendly and graphics-friendly distributions. Everything seemed to be going apparently fine until he started installing Steam . He first tried the store, but after failing, he tried through APT. Despite the warning that jumped him, Linus decided to go ahead with the installation of the application, which resulted in the uninstallation of the desktop environment . After rebooting, obviously, there was no graphical interface.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install phpIPAM on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, phpIPAM is a free PHP-based web IP Address management tool whose goal is to provide modern, lightweight, and useful IP address management and administration. It is a PHP-based application with MySQL database backend, using jQuery libraries, ajax, and some HTML5/CSS3 features.
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 phpIPAM free open-source IP address management application 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.
In this article, I will show you how to use Terraform to create an S3 bucket on AWS. Before proceeding, I assume that you are familiar with S3 bucket if not then you can click here to see the steps to create an S3 bucket from the AWS console.
File attributes are certain properties that are associated with the file. The attributes allow a file to have some characteristics that are valid for all users.
You may be familiar with the file permissions on Linux. As Linux is a multi-user operating system, it is possible to assign different file or folder permissions for different users.
File attributes are quite similar to permissions on Linux. However, while basic permissions are only limited to read, write, and execute, the attribute allows the files or folders to have some extended sets of rules that apply on them.
We can change or modify file/folder permissions with the chmod command. If you are not familiar with the Linux permissions, we recommend you to take a look at our comprehensive guide on the matter. Knowledge of file or folder permissions are not required to follow this tutorial. An important thing to remember about the attributes is that the attributes generally apply to all the users in the system (even root).
For example, if a file were to be assigned the read-only attribute, that file would not allow any user (including root) to modify it. Obviously, the root user could modify the file, but only after removing the read-only attribute.
As a regular Ubuntu or Debian Linux user, you might have noticed that some package installer, removal, or updating commands use the apt command instead of the apt-get command. Now, as a day-to-day Linux user, you would not get to know what they are and which command is used for what! But as a power Linux/Ubuntu user, you definitely must know the difference between apt vs apt-get commands.
In the default command lists of Ubuntu, the apt-get command has been widely used for a long while. The new apt command was introduced a few years ago to increase the work efficiency and make the commands process simpler. Though there are some packages that only work with apt-get, hence most cache loading and cache removing or updating functions are nowadays done by the apt command.
Ajenti 2 is an open-source, web-based control panel that can be used for a large variety of server management tasks. It can install packages and run commands, and you can view basic server information such as RAM in use, free disk space, etc. All this can be accessed from a web browser. Optionally, an add-on package called Ajenti V allows you to manage multiple websites from the same control panel.
In this tutorial, we are going to install Ajenti 2 on our Debian 11 server.
Developers usually think of timezones, but European summertime changes can be easily overlooked. I have to admit I overlooked them when parsing dates with DateTime.from_naive!/2.
What’s the issue, you ask?
Thrive is a free and open source evolution sim, that is now available from the itch.io and Steam stores where you can pay to support the development. It's in Early Access and they have a very long road ahead until it's complete, and they're estimating multiple years to go yet until it's finished.
"In Thrive, you take control of an organism on an alien planet, beginning with the Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA). Your goal is to survive in the environment, adapt your species by adding mutations, and thrive. Other species will emerge to compete with yours. They will evolve via a population dynamics driven simulation with random mutations - you must improve and spread your species to surpass them. The success of your species depends both on your skill in surviving as an individual cell and the changes you make in the editor."
The latest version of Proton comes with full support for Nvidia DLSS, among other benefits such as better compatibility with anti-cheat software.
For the uninitiated, Proton is the compatibility layer which allows Windows games to be played under Valve’s SteamOS operating system, and version 6.3-8 delivers official support for DLSS in DX11 and DX12 games. This follows Nvidia making its frame rate boosting tech available for Vulkan titles earlier in the year (meaning the likes of Doom Eternal got the benefit of DLSS).
In the Linux Release Roundup series, we summarize the new distribution and application version releases in the past week. This keeps you informed of the latest developments in the Linux world.
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Proton compatibility layer 6.3-8 release introduces support for a bunch of new games that include Age of Empires 4, Assassin’s Creed, COD: Black Ops II, and many more.
Godot 3.4 was released earlier this month, and it went fairly smoothly! Many thanks to all the contributors who worked on it, including all testers who tried beta and RC releases to ensure that the 3.4-stable branch would be an easy and worthwhile upgrade path for all users.
No software release is perfect though, so there will always be some things to iron out, which is why we usually provide maintenance releases for stable branches, focusing on bugfixing and preserving compatibility (see our release policy). A number of fixes have been queued already in the 3.4 branch for Godot 3.4.1, so here's a first release candidate to validate them.
"Encountering and interacting with previously unknown, lawless pirate and scavenger factions, will challenge your perception of social order and justice in the X universe. In new sectors and dangerous regions, you will not only discover new ships and stations, but also encounter stellar phenomena that will significantly influence your plans and actions. What is it all about, and who are the mysterious manipulators that have learned to master a rare and vital resource? Your journey will lead you towards the answers. Set out and discover a new chapter of X4: Foundations."
Expect to see the likes of a "terrifying pirate battleship with an experimental and unusual energy source" and the complete opposite with an "incredibly lavish and luxurious yacht". Plus you will also get the ability to salvage shipwrecks to recycle resources.
Looks like Canonical, the creator of Ubuntu, want to get in on more Linux Gaming with their Desktop Product Manager starting a new series of blog posts and your feedback is needed.
The first blog post goes over using Steam and Proton, which won't be news to any of our readers, especially with our full guide existing for some time now. What's interesting though, that I had no idea, is that their Desktop Product Manager is Oliver Smith, who previously worked for Creative Assembly as a Producer on the likes of Alien Isolation - which got ported natively to Linux by Feral Interactive.
As for the actual guide, it's a pretty good intro for those who need to point newer users to get setup ready with Steam and try out Proton.
The anti-Black Friday event is live once again on the itch.io store, where developers get 100% of purchases as itch forgoes its cut for a day.
Continuing to buck the trend here, itch always does things a bit differently. They have an open revenue sharing model, where by default itch only takes a 10% cut but developers can set it to whatever they want — even zero.
As more developers get their hands on a Steam Deck devkit, we're seeing plenty more show their games and now Capcom has taken a turn with Devil May Cry 5.
Unlike a lot of what we've seen previously via small clips or plain pictures on Twitter, Capcom went a tiny step further by making a video on their official Capcom USA YouTube Channel - that's quite a bit of extra advertisement power there for the Steam Deck.
Augustus is an open source game engine re-implementation for Caesar III, forked from another called Julius that aims to add in new features.
Version 3.1 is out now adding in plenty of new goodies like: a volume slider, a Hippodrome betting system, roofed garden walls, palisades for cheaper walls, a new difficulty option to adjust the max number of allowed grand temples per city, new hotkeys, resource stockpiling is now an option to production buildings and warehouses, an option to have number separators for larger numbers and many more improvements and bug fixes. It's making it easily one of the best ways to play the classic city-builder.
As was the method for Blue Ocean on the desktop widgets and design, the icons will be a gradual rollout over a few releases. We do have a strategy in place to ensure that this won’t be too jarring or inconsistent during the transition. The current plan is to update both all mimetypes and all places in time for the 5.24 release.
Like our current icons the new icons have adaptive capabilities. Beyond that some additional select icons such as the new desktop icon are also adaptive, and there are plans for other icons to also take advantage of this feature where it would not be obnoxious. Compared to existing icons the refreshed content will be softer, more detailed, and less flat. These icons are also prepared with future capabilities in mind, and as enhancements are made to KDE Frameworks these icons may expose new and interesting features.
Finally, we’re expanding the number of sizes the icons come in, so they look ideal at more zoom levels in your file browser. Currently colour places icons are offered in 32, 48, 64, and 96 pixel sizes, and mimetypes are offered in 32 and 64 pixel sizes. Refreshed icons in both places and mimetypes will be offered in 32, 48, 64, 96, 128, and 256 pixel sizes with no missing graphics. We already have all folders in all of the above sizes, and in under a month while also writing our software we have over doubled the number of folder icons in Breeze. We’re estimating we will more than triple in the number of mimetype icons.
To get this work done we’ve built new tools for the express purpose of making mass iconography far easier for even individual artists, so I’m very pleased to state that a new icon and SVG pipeline is underway and despite being unfinished is producing results. This Python-written pipeline is capable of adding guides, rulers, and setting up grids for existing icons, standardizing existing icon colours, assembling entirely new icons from templates and components, and aggressively optimizing icons. With this authors will be able to have a “golden copy” of their icon sets where they can focus purely on design, letting the software take care of cleaning up the documents and assembling the individual pieces. The folders in the above image were assembled by the pipeline, with no hand-tuning.
With the near infinite customization options you have on any given Linux distribution, the most visually noticeable difference is customizing the theme. Let’s take a look at some of the GTK themes with dark mode.
Yeah, we have covered the best Linux themes in the past but this one is specifically dedicated to the dark themes. There was a time when only programmers and sysadmins preferred dark mode but that’s not the case anymore. Dark mode is loved by normal people as well and hence I compiled this list of dark themes for desktop Linux users like you.
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McMojave is a GTK theme which takes inspiration from the macOS style user interface. This theme is offered in dark mode, obviously, but also in light mode, for… umm… whoever may want it.
The McMojave GTK theme obviously supports GTK based Desktop Environments like Pantheon, Gnome, XFCE, Mate etc; but, this theme is also available for KDE users.
Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 19 to November 26.
We review the Debian/Ubuntu based Cutefish OS Linux Distribution that features the stunning Cutefish Desktop.
Today, we are releasing a brand new version of IPFire: 2.27 - Core Update 161. Amongst a huge performance improvement for the Intrusion Prevention System, it comes with a brand new kernel and various security and bug fixes.
Before we talk about what is new, I would like to ask you for your support. IPFire is a small team of people and like many of our open source friends, we’ve taken a hit this year and would like to ask you to help us out. Please follow the link below where your donation can help fund our continued development: https://www.ipfire.org/donate.
Please note, that this update will reconnect any PPP connections and we recommend performing a reboot after the update has been installed.
This new ISO contains kernel, OS, and software updates. In addition, I added a new command-line software called ghostbsd-version that gives you the GhostBSD version, FreeBSD version, kernel version, and OS version. At the date of this release, if you run ghostbsd-version or ghostbsd-version -v, it should output 21.11.24. This version number will be increment by the date of new packages built on packages every update performed. The ISO version is now following the last package's build version instead of an ISO's build date in the hope of removing confusion about the ISO version.
openSUSE Tumbleweed gave rolling release users a snapshot every day this past week.
The latest snapshot to be released was 20211124. This snapshot brought systemd 249.7, which focused on package tests and updated dependencies for the testsuite. The text editor vim had a minor update to version 8.2.3640, but it was filled with many fixes; some of the fixes included taking care of a memory leak, crashes and performance issues related to GTK. The removal of a redundant script header was made in the update of dracut and optimal compression parameters were made for zstd in the Linux-boot process package. Other packages to update in the snapshot were autoyast2 4.4.22, embedded Linux library ell 0.46, GNOME’s document viewer evince 41.3 and gtk-vnc 1.3.0.
Winter has come – at least that’s what I heard some colleagues talk about these days. Luckily, for me, there is no snow out yet and Tumbleweed has sufficient grip to roll ahead without getting stuck. As such, we have published 7 snapshots this week (1118…1124).
EuroLinux 8.5 is the first minor release created in a continuous way. It was also the first version when we deployed our engineer to remote sites (in most cases virtual) to provide support for organisations that rebuild RHEL/EuroLinux from sources with Gaia build system. This version code name is Tirana - the capital city of Albania.
Below you can find the essential changes in EuroLinux 8.5 release for x86_64 architecture. The aarch64 GA release is slightly delayed. Release notes for aarch64 will be provided in a separate document.
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)!
Fedora Linux 33 will reach end of life on Tuesday 30 November. The F35 retrospective survey is open through 4 December.
Ansible is well-known for automating traditional IT tasks, like server administration, networking, application deployments, and more. But Ansible can do a whole lot more. In Jeff Geerling's AnsibleFest 2021 presentation, Automating the uncommon—Ansible automates everything, he shared some of the creative ways he uses Ansible.
Throughout the ages, humans have always used simpler tools and materials to create more complex ones. Wood and stone for smelting bronze and iron; iron to create steel; vacuum tubes to create logical gates; logical gates to create advanced arithmetic engines, and so on. Modern software is no different.
With Snapcraft in particular, the snap building process comprises a number of steps. Source artifacts are collected, there’s compilation and assembly of binary products, and then, these are packaged into a single final archive. This process is very similar to how various other Canonical solutions work, and applicable to many different use cases outside of the snap world. To that end, the Snapcraft team has created a portable, reusable mechanism called Craft Parts.
Since it’s inception the Raspberry Pi has evolved from it’s start as a nifty sounding hobby board to a rather powerful multi-core small form factor computer which is capable of quite a lot. The enhancement to it’s capabilities has continued to expand at a pace roughly equal to it’s growing popularity, to the point where there is an effective compute module which can be added to the your Pi to give it more versatility.
Thanks to the compatibility improvements for that computer module we will see in 5.16 release of the Linux kernel, the Raspberry Pi will be capable of yet another impressive feat with the help of a product from a Canadian company called ALFTEL. Their Seaberry Compute Module 4 carrier board will give your Raspberry Pi 4 PCIe support. Once attached, your Pi will have access to a variety of PCIe interfaces including a 16x slot with a single PCIe lane, four PCIe 1x Mini slots, four M.2 Key E with two lanes each and one single lane PCIe M.2 Key M port.
I briefly mentioned postmarketOS in my Pinephone review two years ago, but after getting my Dutch SIM card set up in my Pinephone and having another go at using postmarketOS, I reckon they deserve special attention.
Let’s first consider the kind of ecosystem into which postmarketOS emerged: smartphone hacking in the XDA Forums era. This era was dominated by amateur hackers working independently for personal prestige, with little to no regard for the values of free software or collaboration. It was common to see hacked-together binary images shipped behind adfly links in XDA forum threads in blatant disregard of the GPL, with pages and pages of users asking redundant questions and receiving poor answers to the endless problems caused by this arrangement.
The XDA ecosystem is based on Android, which is a mess in and of itself. It’s an enormous, poorly documented ball of Google code, mixed with vendor drivers and private kernel trees, full of crappy workarounds and locked-down hardware. Most smart phones are essentially badly put-together black boxes and most smart phone hackers are working with their legs cut off. Not to mention that the software ecosystem which runs on the platform is full of scammers and ads and theft of private user information. Android may be Linux in implementation, but it’s about as far from the spirit of free software as you can get.
postmarketOS, on the other hand, is based on Alpine Linux, which happens to be my favorite Linux distribution. Instead of haphazard forum threads collecting inscrutable ports for dozens of devices, they have a single git repository where all of their ports are maintained under version control, complete with issue trackers and merge requests, plus a detailed centralized wiki providing a wealth of open technical info on their supported platforms. And, by virtue of being a proper Linux distribution, they essentially opt-out of the mess of predatory mobile apps and instead promote a culture of trusted applications which respect the user and are built by and for the community instead of by and for a corporation.
A new weird little problem has landed into my lap. On one of me Windows boxes, I upgraded Thunderbird, the mail client program, to the new release. I went from 78.x to 91.x, and in the process, I also received a gratis error message.
It would pop up on every program startup, and it reads: There is no email program associated to perform the requested action. Please install an email program or, if one is already installed, create an association in the Default Programs control panel. Clunky language aside, Control Panel is sadly no longer the goto place for default apps in Windows 10/11. Plus, the error shows up during Thunderbird startup. Every time. Let's fix this.
In October there were 303 alerts generated, resulting in 45 regression bugs being filed on average 5.2 days after the regressing change landed.
Welcome to the October 2021 edition of the performance sheriffing newsletter. Here you’ll find the usual summary of our sheriffing efficiency metrics. If you’re interested (and if you have access) you can view the full dashboard.
We're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 10.5 which celebrates the very positive reception we had at WebSummit 2021!
PHP 8.1 has been officially released and brings numerous innovations, such as enumerations, fibers and performance improvements.
PHP is a server side scripting language that is used to develop web applications. According to W3Techs’ data, PHP is used by 78.2% of all websites with a known server-side programming language. In other words, almost 8 out of every 10 websites that you visit on the Internet are using PHP in some way.
The language continues to evolve, by releasing their newest PHP 8.1 update, just a couple of days after the formation of a PHP Foundation was announced. This new version, released November 25, 2021, contains many new features, including enums, readonly properties, first-class callable syntax, fibers, intersection types, performance improvements and more.
Let’s take a quick look at some of the new features, performance tweaks and other reasons why you should migrate to PHP 8.1.
LLVM developers have been working recently to land their new ThreadSanitizer run-time. The TSan as a reminder is the compiler instrumentation with associated run-time library for being able to detect data races.
ThreadSanitizer is successful at detecting data race conditions even within large and complex code-bases. But unfortunately it's quite burdensome to enable with performance slowing down in the range of 5~15x while the run-time memory overhead can be in the range of 5~10x.
The PHP Foundation is an effort by 10 key PHP vendors to assure adequate funding to keep the popular scripting language viable.
We have released Qt 5.12.12 today. This is the last release from Qt 5.12 LTS series and the standard support of Qt 5.12 LTS ends in December 2021.
Qt 5.12.12 contains ~ 30 bug fixes compared to the Qt 5.12.11. Please check details about the release from Qt 5.12.12 Release Note.
Note that Qt 5.12 LTS standard support ends in December 2021. It has been quite a long journey with it; big thanks to everyone involved!
Perl has had experimental features ever since I started using it at about version 5.6. These were things that were considered useful, but about which there was doubt -- about their final form, whether a satisfactory implementation existed, or whatever.
Until Perl 5.18, experimental features were simply documented as experimental. At that point, an experimental warning category was added, with sub-categories experimental::lexical_subs, experimental::lexical_topic, experimental::regex_sets, and experimental::smartmatch.
Most of the features covered by the original Perl 5.18 warning categories were actually introduced in Perl 5.10 as back-ports from Raku (or Perl 6, as it was then called), and not documented as experimental. My impression was that the relevant experimental:: warnings were introduced becaue the corresponding features were recognized as being more experimental than originally believed. Programmers already familiar with a feature might not notice an extra sentence in the documentation, but they will surely notice if their code starts spitting out experimental warnings.
This guide will show you how to add requirements and dependencies for a Python project using OpenFaaS.
Python dependencies are software components that your project needs for it to work. You can manually use PyPI (the Python Package Index) to provide packages that you need, but OpenFaaS can automate this for you.
The part to note in this definition is that LWJGL provides access to native APIs through Java. That it is a wrapper over the APIs doesn't mean that you should not be familiar with the semantics of the underlying API. Hence to get the most out of LWJGL a good understanding of the native APIs is essential too.
At this point it is important to disambiguate between a library and a framework. LWJGL is a library and as such is low level; it is not a gamedev framework like libgdx (which itself uses LWJGL under the covers!) or a gamedev engine like GoDot which provide higher level of abstractions. For this reason, it is not recommended for novice programmers to start out writing games with it.
And, of course, it is debatable whether Java is a good language for gamedev over the classic value of C++. Some advantages of using Java are its support of multiple operating systems and, of course, the easy learning curve in comparison to C++. Minuses could be garbage collection, performance and a smaller dev community. In any case, it depends on the use case; as they say, choose the best tool for the job at hand.
What happens when a single bit gets corrupted in an image file you cherish? The results can range from absolutely nothing to an imperceptible visual change to a complete loss of the image. The hero image below is somewhere in the middle of the scale; where the top half of the image is perfect, and the lower half is reduced to meaningless digital noise.
Whether due to mechanical failure or transmission interference like cosmic radiation: bitrot happens. A rotted bit, or flipped bit, is when one bit of RAM or persistent storage unintentionally flips its state between zero and one. You can only do so much to protect your system from random failure. Multiple backups and data verification is the only proven strategy to protect against it.
Traditional JPEG images (referred to as JPEG troughing the article as opposed to JXL), especially with progressive encoding, handle bitrot remarkably well. You might see a single pixel shift its color almost imperceptibly, or one of the encoding layers may shift slightly. The effects are so well understood that you can even find free software that can automatically recover corrupted JPEG photos.
However, the next-generation image formats pack data much more densely than in the legacy image formats. There’s isn’t just less redundancy, but every single bit means more to the complete image. This means the effects of bitrot produce a much greater loss of visual fidelity and decodes to more abstract results. The newer encoding techniques include predictive models that can get thrown off completely by a single bit out of place. The digital hellfire in the lower half of the above hero image is a perfect example of this.
naive users without deeper knowledge of technology might want to click that button.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (freerdp, gnome-boxes, gnome-connections, gnome-remote-desktop, guacamole-server, hydra, java-1.8.0-openjdk-aarch32, medusa, mingw-gstreamer1, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-base, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, php, pidgin-sipe, remmina, vinagre, and weston), openSUSE (kernel and netcdf), and SUSE (kernel and netcdf).
Following California’s lead, a new UK law would ban default passwords in IoT devices.
In the last few weeks, I’ve heard from many - mainly not technical - people the expression “Web3”. In a way, it is excellent that people that are not tech-savvy start to learn about the Web, how it works, and where it might go, since they are using it consciously or not to perform the majority of tasks in their lives. The issue I have with this, though, is that no one of them could explain how it would work or why they are so confident that the future is going in that direction. The only thing they could associate with Web3 was that cryptocurrencies would be the future, and their value would go to the moon.
I’m not a pessimist about the future of cryptocurrency and blockchain, but I’m not sure that it will happen either. I’ve been interested in the technology space for the last 20 years, and I have seen many technologies been proposed as the game-changer failing and being completely forgotten. Some were inherently flawed, others were technically sound, but they did not deliver on the promised success. Those 20 years taught me to approach any new technology that promises to change the world with a healthy amount of skepticism, and blockchain and cryptocurrency are no exception.
Whitney joins Tim Dillon to discuss vaccine mandates, digital ID and the 4th industrial revolution and how their implementation threatens human society and freedom globally.
A coalition of EU software and cloud businesses joined Nextcloud GmbH in respect of their formal complaint to the European Commission about Microsoft’s anti-competitive behavior in respect of its OneDrive (cloud) offering. In a repeat from earlier monopolistic actions, Microsoft is bundling its OneDrive, Teams and other services with Windows and aggressively pushing consumers to sign up and hand over their data to Microsoft. This limits consumer choice and creates a barrier for other companies offering competing services.
Over the last few years have grown their market share to 66% of the EU market, while local providers lost out from 26 to 16%. By heavily favoring their own products and services (so-called “self-preferencing”) or outright blocking other vendors they leverage their position as gate keepers to extend their reach in more and more neighbouring markets and push users deeper into their ecosystems. Local, more specialised vendors are unable to compete “on the merits” as the key to success is not a good product but the ability to distort competition and block market access.
“This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed competition in the browser market, stopping nearly all browser innovation for over a decade. Copy an innovators’ product, bundle it with your own dominant product and kill their business, then stop innovating. This kind of behavior is bad for the consumer, for the market and, of course, for local businesses in the EU. Together with the other members of the coalition, we are asking the antitrust authorities in Europe to enforce a level playing field, giving customers a free choice and to give competition a fair chance,” said Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud GmbH
