Aruba finished 2021 as the most reliable hosting company site in December, with no failed requests and the second fastest average connection time. Aruba provides hosting, cloud and digital signature services, fibre optic internet, digital preservation, and much more, with data centres across Europe in the UK, Germany, Czechia, Poland, Italy and France.
The top five hosting company sites each responded to all of Netcraft’s requests in December and so are ranked on their average connection times. The top five is completed by Rackspace, Hyve Managed Hosting, ServerStack and Pair Networks. In second place, Rackspace appeared in the top 10 every month in 2021 and offers a variety of cloud hosting solutions from 19 data centres across five different continents in the Americas, Europe, Asia and Australia. Hyve Managed Hosting also appeared in the top 10 every month in 2021. Hyve offers cloud hosting, dedicated servers and managed services from data centres in 34 locations around the world.
Ubuntu might be taking gaming more seriously, more Mozilla missteps, why Her Majesty’s demise might be really bad news, a brand new segment, KDE Korner, and more.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to dig into the infamous Log4j vulnerability and attacks with Bo Weaver! Then we’re going to discuss the recent Solus Saga and what the community can expect. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
A senior Linux developer believes the platform can be a lot faster and more efficient - if its source code was lighter.
To make this happen, Ingo Molnar has announced the “Fast Kernel Headers” project, an attempt to clean up and rework Linux kernel's header hierarchy and header dependencies.
Linux apparently contains around 10,000 main .h header files with the include/ and arch/*/include hierarchies. Molnar says that over the years, these have “grown into a complicated & painful set of cross-dependencies we are affectionately calling 'Dependency Hell'."
The Linux kernel takes around 5 minutes (without modules) to build on an Intel Core i5 Jasper Lake mini PC with 16 GB RAM and a fast SSD based on our recent review of Beelink GTi 11 mini PC. Kernel developers may have to build for different targets and configurations, plus all modules so the build times may add up. While it is always possible to throw more hardware to quicken the builds, it would be good if significantly faster builts could be achieved with software optimizations.
That’s exactly what Ingo Molnar has been working on since late 2020 with his “Fast Kernel Headers” project aiming to eliminate the Linux kernel’s “Dependency Hell”. At the time he aimed for a 20% speedup, but a little over one year later, the results are much more impressive with 50 to 80% faster builds depending on the target platform (x86-64, arm64, etc…) and config.
Last week I called attention to the new "x86-android-tablets" driver being prepared for introduction in Linux 5.17. That driver aims to fix up the mess of various x86 Android-focused tablets failing to run off the mainline Linux kernel or having various device issues in doing so. Since that prior article, more patches have been posted to address additional tablet issues.
The forthcoming x86-android-tablets driver is focused on the issue of many x86 tablets having invalid entries within their ACPI DSDT tables. Due to these Android tablets relying on custom, device-specific kernel builds there is often hard-coded data within their kernel image rather than jiving properly with ACPI specifications and having valid tables, etc. This driver aims to carry as many of the device-specific quirks/workarounds as possible in order to allow more of these aging tablets to work fine on a mainline Linux kernel build.
A decade old patch is set to be mainlined in the upcoming Linux 5.17 that has been carried by Google's Chrome OS kernel build for years and can help with security on Linux systems not relying upon systemd's udev.
The change is introducing the new "DEVTMPFS_SAFE" kernel option that will mount DEVTMPFS with the noexec and nosuid mount options by default. The intent of this "safe" devtmpfs is to prevent code execution from happening from /dev or more broadly to prevent some kinds of code execution attacks from happening primarily on embedded systems.
Last year, several security vulnerabilities were discovered, making it difficult for system administrators to patch the systems without downtime quickly.
What if some improvements can be made to update some critical components for security/performance improvements without rebooting a system?
Intel aims to achieve that with its new PFRUT (Platform Firmware Runtime Update and Telemetry) driver.
With more organizations such as Alibaba configuring their servers to share CPU cores/resources among applications these days rather than exclusively assigning CPU cores to individual applications/tasks, the Chinese company is proposing a new "group balancer" for the Linux kernel scheduler.
The proposed Linux Group Balancer is focused on reducing resource conflicts when sharing resources among tasks. This balancer is focused on balancing groups of tasks across groups of CPU cores.
While most Linux gamers are making use of DXVK these days for efficiently mapping Direct3D 9/10/11 over Vulkan when running Wine/Proton for enjoying Windows games on Linux, Wine developers still maintain WineD3D for going from Direct3D to OpenGL for cross-platform compatibility. Out today is a new patch series improving the WineD3D performance.
Longtime Wine developer Stefan Dösinger of CodeWeavers sent out this new performance-focused WineD3D patch series today. The set of patches is focused on optimizing the command submission (CS) resource fencing code and there are plans to mainline it after Wine 7.0 debuts as stable.
The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3050 was announced as a successor to the GTX 1050. The RTX 3050 should be good enough for 60 FPS, 1080p gaming at $249 USD. The card will launch later this month (27 January) and is powerful enough for basic RTX gaming. The RTX 3050 has 8GB of GDDR6 video memory. The RTX 3050 is rated for 9 shader TFLOPS, 18 RT TFLOPS, and 73 Tensor TFLOPS.
CES 2022 continues with NVIDIA doing their presentation today where they announced more for their streaming service GeForce NOW, new monitors from parters with GSYNC and new GPUs.
Most of it was the usual marketing speak, along with showing off DLSS / RTX in a couple of titles like Rainbow Six Extraction, and an exclusive clip of Dying Light 2. However, they did eventually get to an actual announcement with the GeForce RTX 3050 with 8GB GDDR6 price starting $249 and availability expected on January 27.
It appears that Google created a handy tool that helps finding the command which causes a GPU hang/crash. It is called Graphics Flight Recorder (GFR) and was open-sourced a year ago but didn’t receive any attention.
Were you looking for some latest open-source app releases to start the new year week?
You’re lucky; Pinta announced their major upgrade right before the new year.
Pinta is a lightweight drawing app that serves as a simple image editing tool. One of the top open-source drawing and painting apps out there, Pinta’s new release shifts its base to GTK3 and .NET 6 and brings some new features and UI improvements.
AntiMicroX is a great open source app that helps you map your keyboard and mouse to gamepad inputs. It's the continuation of the original AntiMicro project, which was abandoned. Very useful for games that have spotty or no gamepad support, and there's a number of other uses.
In this tutorial guide, I will be taking through the installation of pgAdmin 4 version 6.3 on Ubuntu 20.04.
pgAdmin 4 is a free and open-source management tool for Postgres. Its desktop runtime written in NWjs allows it to run standalone for individual users, or the web applications code may be directly deployed on a web server for use by the web browser.
pgAdmin 4 is a complete rewrite of pgAdmin, built using Python and Java
Suppose you were born on 22 December 1995. Have you already had your 10000-day birthday, or is that still in the future? Here are three command-line ways to find out.
WildFly (formerly known as JBoss) is an application server written in Java and developed by Red Hat. It is an open source application server for JEE applications, it is fast and lightweight and particularly efficient for web and business applications.
The technology behind WildFly is also available in JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 7.
JBoss EAP is a hardened enterprise subscription with Red Hat’s world-class support, long multi-year maintenance cycles, and exclusive content.
This guide will help you to migrate in-place your current CentOS 8 installation to AlmaLinux 8 in a few simple steps.
As you know, CentOS 8 reached its End-of-Life on December 31, 2021. If you want to migrate your CentOS 8 server to AlmaLinux 8 which is a 1:1 binary compatible with CentOS and RHEL, then here are the steps to follow.
An in-place upgrade involves using the official AlmaLinux automated script to migrate your current CentOS 8 operating system files to AlmaLinux. In addition, an in-place upgrade does not require formatting of hard disk and due to that fact all settings, programs, and files on your current CentOS 8 system will be preserved.
Did you know that you can boot your Raspberry PI 4 directly from a USB drive? You get better disk I/O speed, you no longer need to worry about SD card corruption and you reduce cost, especially if you require large storage capacity. Best of all, recent Raspberry PI 4, 400 and Compute Module 4 boards support boot from USB by default. This article teaches you all you need to know about how to boot your Raspberry PI 4 from a USB drive.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Bugzilla on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Bugzilla is a free and open-source bug tracking system that allows us to track the bugs and collaborate with developers and other teams in our organization. Defect-tracking systems allow teams of developers to keep track of outstanding bugs, problems, issues, enhancement and other change requests in their products effectively.
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 Bugzilla Bug Tracker on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
This is a classic article written by Jack Wallen from the Linux.com archives. For more great SysAdmin tips and techniques check out our free intro to Linux course.
It goes without saying that every good Linux desktop environment offers the ability to search your file system for files and folders. If your default desktop doesn’t — because this is Linux — you can always install an app to make searching your directory hierarchy a breeze.
But what about the command line? If you happen to frequently work in the command line or you administer GUI-less Linux servers, where do you turn when you need to locate a file? Fortunately, Linux has exactly what you need to locate the files in question, built right into the system.
The command in question is find. To make the understanding of this command even more enticing, once you know it, you can start working it into your Bash scripts. That’s not only convenience, that’s power.
Let’s get up to speed with the find command so you can take control of locating files on your Linux servers and desktops, without the need of a GUI.
Adding Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) to a server is not required for the LFCS exam, but it does require you to authenticate users using LDAP. To be able to perform that function, you need LDAP on your test system.
You may not want to know how to do this procedure, but it never hurts to have an understanding of the process.
This process is not a simple one. I wouldn't say it is difficult, just a little detailed. Make sure you do not skip steps. In my next article, we will be using the LDAP server to authenticate users from other systems by the server. The users and groups will be centralized on a single server and not by each system. The process is what most people term 'logging into the network'.
ClickHouse is a free, open-source, and column-oriented database management system. It is used for online analytical processing and allows you to generate analytical reports using SQL queries in real-time. It stores records in blocks grouped by columns instead of rows. Thus, it spends less time reading data while completing queries. Also, column-oriented databases can compute and return results much faster than traditional row-based systems for certain workloads.
In this post, we will show you how to install ClickHoust database on Debian 11.
A VPN “Virtual Private Network” is a private network that hides user identity, origin, and data using encryption. Its main use is data privacy of the user and secure connection to the internet. As it hides data, it lets you access data that is usually blocked by geo-restrictions.
OpenVPN is an open-source VPN software that is both a software and a protocol in itself. It is very highly regarded as it continues to bypass firewalls. This tutorial will show you step by step how to install and set up an OpenVPN server and connect it to the OpenVPN client. We will use a CentOS 8 server for the installation, the same procedure will work on Rocky Linux 8 and AlmaLinux 8 too.
Rust programming language is a multi-paradigm system programming language by Mozilla that focuses on having the best features of the C++ and Python languages with a focus on security.
Rust was designed to be a safe, concurrent, and practical language. It aims to ensure memory safety while still maintaining performance, without needing any garbage collector or runtime, thus making it possible to use Rust as an embedded system’s primary programming language. As such, Rust is used in many single-board computers, including Raspberry Pi and BeagleBone Black.
It’s quite common to end up with many copies of the same file on your computer while working with huge volumes of media and documents.
Eventually, you’ll end up with a mess of files and an additional storage shortage due to duplicate files, prompting you to run a duplicate file check on your system. Checking for duplicate files manually is not an option for obvious reasons. You can use a variety of programs to discover and delete duplicate files to accomplish this.
In this article, you will learn to manage your duplicate files with fdupes, which is a Linux software that not only detects duplicates but also gives you multiple options to deal with them.
DNS cache can be corrupted for a number of different reasons, including network attacks or viruses. When that happens, IP address mapping becomes corrupted for certain popular websites.
For example, instead of going to www.facebook.com, your browser may redirect you to an IP address of a malicious website that an attacker inserted in your computer’s DNS records. Or, you may get a large number of 404 errors.
Clearing DNS cache deletes all saved DNS lookup information. Your computer then gets updated data from DNS servers next time it sends a lookup request. Learn how to flush DNS on in macOS, Windows, & Linux below.
There are some situations where you may need to clear or purge all messages from a queue.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install VirtualBox on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, VirtualBox is a free, open-source, and cross-platform software that lets you create, run, and manage virtual machines on your system. VirtualBox brings feature-rich, high-performance products for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
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 VirtualBox 6.1 open-source virtualization on a Fedora 35.
Minio is a self-hosted object storage system that’s compatible with the Amazon S3 API interfaces. In this guide, we’ll use Minio to set up shared caching for GitLab Runner as an alternative to a cloud-hosted object storage solution.
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Shared caching ensures multiple jobs can access the cache simultaneously. Concurrent access isn’t supported when you’re using local caching with the Docker pipeline executor. This can cause reduced pipeline performance due to missed cache hits.
Although the cache restoration is intended to be on a “best effort” basis, meaning your jobs shouldn’t require a cache include content from an earlier job, in practice many people do use the cache field to pass data between their jobs. This doesn’t currently work when you have multiple jobs that run in parallel and try to restore the same cache.
Self-hosting a Minio installation alongside your GitLab instance lets you benefit from more reliable cache restoration that still works predictably with parallel jobs. Here’s how to install Minio and configure GitLab Runner to use it for caching.
SysMonTask is a graphical Linux system monitor application with the compactness and usefulness of Windows Task Manager to allow higher control and monitoring. Monitor Linux with SysMonTask just as task manager in windows. It will monitor and display the system resource usage and performance details of running processes, CPU, Memory, HDD/SSD, and Network interface cards. You can Monitor Linux system resource usage with SysMonTask with ease.
In this post you will learn How To List Filesystems In Linux with lfs.
Lfs is a commandline tool to display the information of the mounted disks in your Linux system. The developer of Lfs claims it is slightly a better alternative to df -h command. lfs tool can list filesystem in linux with better composition.
So, OKD is the community distribution of Kubernetes optimized for continuous application development and multi-tenant deployment. You can add developer and operations-centric tools on top of Kubernetes to enable rapid application development. Launching Openshift container lab on VirtualBox simplifies running and updating clusters with the tools containerized applications succeed.
XAMPP is a popular LAMP-stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) for building PHP-based web projects. It is open-source and supports Windows, Linux, and macOS. XAMPP is made up of Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl.
The XAMPP stack can be used to create PHP applications that are driven by frameworks like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop, and others. The XAMPP server is very easy to set up and requires little configuration, which makes it perfect for software development or prototyping.
This tutorial will show you how to set up a LAMP server using XAMPP on Ubuntu.
Today, in this tutorial we will learn how to install rocket chat with Ubuntu 20.10. With a good chat app, Team members’ ability to communicate easily and quickly can only be a good thing. Essentially effective collaboration must include chat, data, sharing, and security. The email simply cannot replicate the speed of communication that these tools provide. Rocket Chat is a free and open-source product. In-house installation of chap application help to harden securities.
Let go step by step and see how to install Rocket.Chat server for in-house use.
So, In this article we are going to add SMS notification in Nagios.
Nagios is the most used open source Network and Server Monitoring tool. So, we use Nagios to monitor different type of SNMP enabled hosts like Switch, Routers, Servers for critical services. Moreover, Nagios can also fetch server performance data using NRPE agent. Furthermore visual web portal and sound alarm, we can send email notification using Nagios. So, now we will send SMS notification from Nagios using Kannel SMS Gateway.
We already have a Nagios server installed and running. So, to install and configure Nagios Monitoring server please check our other topics on Nagios Installation and configuration.
This is the seventh part of Inkscape for Students the series. After we had discussed Guides Use previously, now we will learn to crop images in various ways. You will learn to cut shapes and then bitmap pictures. These cropping basics are useful for many projects. Now let's practice it!
We assume that the reader is familiar with Linux as a user and also, possibly, as a system administrator, especially for individual systems. In this article, we are going to outline the way this operating system is designed.
One can be interested in the design of Linux for four reasons: by intellectual curiosity, to understand how one designs an operating system, to participate in the development of the Linux kernel, or to be inspired by it to develop another system. Our goal here is above all to satisfy the first two motivations.
The advantage of a linux based operating system is that the sources are public and that, beyond the main principles, we will be able to visualize the implementation of the system’s functionalities from these sources and to experiment by changing such implementation.
Between 2021-12-28 and 2022-01-04 there were 13 new games released on Steam with Linux clients. For reference, during the same time, there were 157 games released for Windows on Steam, so the Linux versions represent about 8.3 % of total released titles. Here’s a quick pick of the most interesting ones:
It seems there continues to be no stopping Steam's growth, with it only just recently hitting a brand new all-time high for concurrent users online.
The new high recorded by SteamDB on January 2 was 27,942,036 so it's getting real close to hitting another massive milestone. A number we expect to be beaten again later this year, especially with the Steam Deck beginning to roll out during February and continuing throughout the year. When the new high was hit, Steam saw 8,219,950 gamers actually playing something.
One we don't cover or hear about too often is SuperTux, a free and open source platformer that's been around for some time now and it's getting a Steam release.
"Run and jump through SuperTux, the sidescrolling 2D platformer starring Tux, the Linux mascot. Squish and knock out enemies, collect powerups, and solve platforming puzzles throughout the Icy Island and the Rooted Forest, as Tux tries to save his beloved Penny from her kidnapper, Nolok!"
To begin 2022, let's take a fresh look at the current top 100 Steam games and see how well (or not) the run on Linux.
As part of a series we shall be doing, where we first took a proper look at this back in October 2021, including games that are both Native to Linux and Windows games that are run through the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer. With help from ProtonDB reports to investigate.
Something to keep in mind is that while the top 5-10 games doesn't change too often on Steam, the rest do fluctuate quite a lot as it often depends on some of the bigger releases that appear. We are once again going by the numbers on SteamDB using their 24 hour peak-player count. Take this as your snapshot of how things are a month before the Steam Deck releases to see what you might expect to work or not.
Project Zomboid has been hanging around in Early Access on Steam since the first year that Early Access was even thing, and after a long development period it seems it's finally seeing its popularity explode.
Going from an average of around 5-6 thousand players online, since the recent huge overhaul release it has skyrocketed upwards into Steam's top 100 list with it now regularly seeing over 50,000 players online. That's an astronomical increase and it seems it's been doing just as well on Twitch too with tens of thousands of viewers, which puts it in Twitch's top 20 constantly now beating the likes of Dead by Daylight and World of Warcraft. It's similar in a way to what happened with Among Us, for a game to suddenly become massively popular.
Do you love games like Slay the Spire? I sure do and so seeing a new free and open source game appear that's inspired by it has me a little excited. This is Hypnagonia. It's currently in development, although playable, it has plenty of work to be done to flesh it out into a full complete experience. Even so, you can easily see that the promise is there.
Three days into the NewYear, KaOS is very proud to announce the availability of a first ISO for 2022.
For the installer Calamares there are three major changes. Biggest one is the addition of a bootloader selection module. For UEFI installs it is now possible to select between systemd-boot, rEFInd, or no bootloader, all presented in a nice, QML based GUI. Second change is the addition of an interactive keyboard preview in the keyboard setup page. And third is the porting of the License page to QML.
Tuesday, 4 January 2022. Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.23.5.
Plasma 5.23 was released in October 2021 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds a month's worth of new translations and fixes from KDE's contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include:
In the mood to try a new desktop shell? Well, the folks behind Nitrux have formally announced Maui Shell and it sure does look pretty.
A desktop environment with an aim to scale and look good across a wide range of different devices including mobiles, tables and desktop computers. They said the aim is to have "no need for multiple versions targeting different form factors" and it's seriously slick. Worth noting at this point, it is far from finished with plenty of missing features. The developers have announced it to get some early testing and feedback.
When I got bored with Microsoft Paint and other third-party programs that ran through Adobe Flash (RIP) or HTML 5, I wanted to do something different. So, I went to my search provider and typed up the best drawing programs that you can find.
The list showed mostly pay-to-use programs such as Photoshop and Procreate. But then I found this one free program on the list called Krita. It was reviewed as easy to use, easy to navigate, and had a wonderful community. So, I chose Krita after reading the review, and I never said the choice was a mistake. It was a gift.
Once upon a time, Stephen King said of writer Clive Barker, "I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker." What does that have to do with tech? Not much, but it is apropos to what I'm about to discuss.
Recently, the Linux community found itself with a new upstart darling in the mix. That darling is called Maui Desktop.
Great. Another desktop to compete in an already flooded field? Hold up … this one is special.
It's all about convergence.
Great. Another attempt to resuscitate a previously failed concept. You might as well have started this out with "Wuzzzup?" or "Talk to the hand."
OK, enough with the pop culture references, what's the big deal?
Over the Christmas holidays, I was mostly occupied with the literal care and feeding of small humans, but I found a bit of time for the metaphorical care and feeding of Initial Setup for GNOME 42 as well. Besides a bit of review and build and CI housekeeping, I wrote some patches to update it for API changes in libgnome-desktop (merged) and libgweather (pending). The net result is an app which looks and works exactly the same, complete with a copy of the widget formerly known as GWeatherLocationEntry (RIP) with its serial numbers filed off.
EasyOS has MPV video player 0.32.0. I have now compiled 0.34.1 in OpenEmbedded, and added libass, lua and luajit dependencies -- these are needed for OSC and OSD (On Screen Control, On Screen Display).
If you are a longtime FreeBSD user, you probably know everything I have to say, and, what’s more, you can probably add a few more points. But hopefully, there will be some Linux or even Windows users among readers who might learn something new!
FreeBSD is not just a kernel but a complete operating system. It has everything to boot and use the system: networking utilities, text editors, development tools and more. Why is that a big deal? Well, because all these components are developed together, they work perfectly together! And a well-polished system is also easier to document. One of my favorite pieces of documentation is the FreeBSD Handbook which covers most of the operating system and is (most of the time) up to date.
When it comes to open-source OSes, you can choose between Linux and BSD. Here are some of the best BSD-based distributions you can install for free.
Bell Labs' Unix source code inspired the creation of Berkeley Software Distribution, commonly known as BSD. Ever since, BSD has spawned a long list of distros that empowered open-source computing back in the 90s.
Despite being similar to the more general-purpose Linux, Unix commands a demographic of its own. Today, BSD systems are operating under the hood of modern computing and have even inspired the codebase for premium desktop and non-desktop platforms.
The number of commits to the main ::gentoo repository has once more clearly grown in 2021, from 104507 to 126920, i.e., by 21%. While the number of commits by external contributors, 11775, has remained roughly constant, this number now distributes across 435 unique external authors compared to 391 last year. We may have recruited some of the top contributors. ;)
Contributions to GURU, our user-curated repository with a trusted user model, have increased enormously. We count 4702 commits, up by 73% from 2725 in 2020. The number of contributors has grown even more, to 119, up by 116% from 55 in 2020. Please join us there and help packaging the latest and greatest software!
On our bugtracker bugs.gentoo.org, the number of new bug reports decreased slightly, with 24056 bugs opened in 2021, compared to 25500 in 2020. However, more reports were closed this year, with 24076 bugs resolved in 2021, compared to 23500 in 2020. The ongoing tinderbox efforts as well as the overall high level of activity seem to be paying off!
We had two candidates for two available seats. As per the board election rules, in such a case, each candidate should receive at least 50% of the total number of votes to be considered as elected.
Both Attila Pinter and Maurizio Galli received good support from the community members. We had 542 eligible voters, out of which 147 voted in the election.
Quick heads up, the GNOME Nightly Flatpak repository is currently undergoing maintenance, during which you may notice that some applications are currently missing from the repo.
For a couple of months now we have been plagued by a few bugs that have made maintenance of the repo very hard, and CI builds were constantly failing due to a lack of available space. In order to resolve this we had to wipe the majority of the refs/objects in the repository and start again with safeguards in place.
I support various multimedia applications, and earlier this year, I started recommending that my clients install many of them as Flatpaks. I did this mostly because the Flatpak releases of these applications were quicker at integrating support for media codecs than the packages available elsewhere, and that's an essential feature for content creators using the latest gear on set. The results have been uniformly successful, but for one snag: Launching a Flatpak from the terminal isn't always the easiest thing to do.
The issue is well documented, but in short, a Flatpak application's formal name is essentially a reverse domain name. However, there's no standard for details like capitalization or naming schemes. That can make it difficult to remember, and the command itself isn't exactly terse:
The CIO role isn’t easy – and the transition to remote and hybrid workforces has made it even harder, creating new and often unforeseen challenges. Today’s CIO needs to have a full, 360-degree view of their organization so that they can spot inefficiencies and identify ways that new technology and infrastructure can streamline workflow. That challenge becomes exponentially harder when teams are dispersed.
To overcome new obstacles, CIOs are depending more and more on soft skills. By tapping into highly developed interpersonal abilities and communication tactics, CIOs and IT managers can stay integrated with their teams and retain the comprehensive view that is critical to success.
Deepin 20.3 has been around for a while now with some essential improvements and subtle visual changes.
But, if you were looking to get your hands on the latest Deepin desktop experience on top of Ubuntu? UbuntuDDE Remix 21.10 “Impirish Indri” has finally arrived.
Probably one of the exciting releases to start the new year week, eh?
We love it when an Open Source hardware project grows up and turns into a sustainable business, bootstrapped with nothing but hard work and great ideas, but it’s a really tough prospect to do it using your own money, ploughing the profits from any sales back into development and not taking a dime in wages whilst you do so. People obviously need an income to live off, and that time spent working on a startup is time you can’t spend earning your keep. So it’s with great pleasure that we can bring you the latest news from [Stephen Hawes] and his pick-and-place machine plans. In the year since we last checked in with the project, development has continued at a steady pace, with the guys quickly outgrowing the garage workspace, whilst they prepare PnP machine kits ready for sale.
In a recent retrospective video, [Phil] from Phil’s Lab goes through a number of his early PCB designs, to critique and comment on what he likes and doesn’t like in these designs. Even though it’s only been a few a few years, he founds plenty that’s wrong. From poor and inconsistent formatting in the schematic, to sloppy and outright broken PCB layouts. It’s a fascinating look at years of lessons learned.
[Phil] comments on the importance of clear labeling and organization of sections and pages in the schematic to make it obvious what the function of a block is. Other lessons include the labeling of nets to make PCB routing a lot easier, making good use of PCB planes, getting all relevant information on components and layout in the schematic as a comment, and connecting decoupling capacitors to their relevant pins.
The story is one we’ve all lived: We see a piece of commercial technology and we want it, but the price tag makes us wonder if it isn’t made with gold pressed latinum. The object of [Zach]’s desire? A single wheel powered skateboard sold by a company called Onewheel. But as you can see in the video below the break, and his excellent website, Zach took the wallet-light but time-heavy approach and built his own prototype he calls the Openwheel.
Starting with a single powered wheel, [Zach] used aluminum, very large 3D printed pieces, and a really slick off the shelf controller package to control the Openwheel. Balance is handled by the controller, while a massive 48 V LiPo battery is fed through a beefy electronic speed controller that allows advanced features like regenerative braking.
We won’t spoil the results, but [Zach]’s Openwheel came out very nice, even exceeding some specifications of the commercial unit. You’ll want to watch his YouTube series about the build to get an idea of all the work that goes into such a device even as a prototype.
If tank track tread is more your jam, check out this tank track skateboard that we featured some time back!
The last two years have demonstrated even more clearly that technology is the crucial fabric that weaves society and the economy together. From video conferencing to online shopping and delivery to remote collaboration tools for work, technology helped society continue to function throughout the pandemic in 2020 and the continuing uncertainty of 2021. All that technology (and more) is powered, quite literally, by open source, in one way or another. Software is eating the world and open source software is becoming the dominant part of software, from the operating system to the database and messaging layer up to the frameworks that drive the user experience. Few, if any, organizations and enterprises could run operations today without relying on open source.
Not surprisingly, as it becomes more pervasive and mission-critical, open source is also proving to be a larger economic force. Public and private companies focused on selling open source software or services now have a collective market value approaching half a trillion dollars. There is no easy way to account for the total economic value of open source consumed by all businesses, individuals, nonprofits, and governments; the value enabled is likely well into the trillions of dollars. Open source powers cloud computing, the Internet, Android phones, mobile apps, cars — even the Mars helicopter launched by NASA. Open source also powers much of consumer electronics on the market today.
2021 has come to an end, a year that everyone will most likely consider as somewhat complicated and unusual, even though the current situation seems to now becoming the new normal. The switch to a new year is generally a good moment to take a step back, and review what happened in the past year, and draw some directions for the coming year.
In this blog post, we’d like to do exactly this for Bootlin, which has seen a number of significant changes this year, as well as a continuation of its usual activities.
FOSDEM is a non-commercial, volunteer-organized European event centered on free and open-source software development – and one of the biggest such events of its kind. Normally it takes place in Brussels, but due to the pandemic, it’ll be online this year.
And the LibreOffice community will be there! We’ll have 25 talks about the technology behind the suite, open standards, and other topics.
For software like Mozilla Firefox that relies on the cross-vendor Video Acceleration API (VA-API) for hardware GPU-based video decoding and doesn't support NVIDIA's proprietary NVDEC interface for video decoding, there is an in-development VA-API implementation that works atop NVIDIA NVDEC.
A first-time ruling by Italian courts on Dec. 13, 2021 rejected a claim by two former software company developers that their modified code release complied with open-source license requirements.
The law court of Venice, Italy affirmed the legal enforceability of open-source software licenses. The case involved the GNU General Public License in a test case within the country.
Ovation, an Italy-based limited liability company and the plaintiff in the case, said in a press release after the court ruling that it marks an important step in strengthening the protection of intellectual works distributed through free software licenses in all their forms.
The case involved Ovation’s GPL licensed Dynamic.ooo software, a plugin for the open-source Elementor platform for building WordPress websites. The company filed a civil suit against two former employees and Venezia, Italy-based Nerds Farm, which is owned by one of the two former employees.
Ovation claimed the defendants redistributed the software without including acknowledgment of the original work, including information about changes the defendants had made to the software, and made no mention of the software’s copyright holders. Ovation also contended the defendants ignored the formal termination notice. That notice, according to Ovation, is the first protection tool to safeguard the developers who decide to share their code in a free form.
The court ordered the defendants to cease distribution of the software until it complies with the license and imposed a fine of about US$113 for each day the defendants delay before bringing the software into compliance for the first 15 days. That fine increases to $339 daily afterward.
In addition, the court ordered the defendants to publish an excerpt of the order on a page of their website with a reference on the site’s home page that is displayed twice the normal character size of the site. The same rules apply to the company’s Facebook page. In addition, the court ordered the defendants to pay the plaintiff’s litigation costs, an amount that exceeds $5,664.
Open source licensing expert and IP attorney Heather Meeker recently discussed various topics relating to the APGL in a FOSSA-hosted webinar titled “Truth Social, AGPL, and OSS License Compliance.”
In the Q&A with FOSSA’s Andy Drukarev, Meeker examines how the AGPL compares to the GPL and LGPL, explains the ongoing controversy surrounding Truth Social’s use of Mastodon software, and explores Google’s strict prohibition of AGPL-licensed code.
Anyone can get started in programming. We all started somewhere, and you don't need to have a computer science background to learn to code. That's the power of Linux and open source—anyone can learn a bit of coding.
If you want to learn a new programming language, we have several great articles to get you started. Below are a few of our most popular articles to help you.
We have released Qt 5.15.8 LTS for commercial license holders today. As a patch release, Qt 5.15.8 does not add any new functionality but provides bug fixes and other improvements.
Previously I setup a CC2531 as a Zigbee coordinator for my home automation. This has turned out to be a good move, with the 4 gang wireless switch being particularly useful. However the range of the CC2531 is fairly poor; it has a simple PCB antenna. It’s also a very basic device. I set about trying to improve the range and scalability and settled upon a CC2538 + CC2592 device, which feature an MMCX antenna connector. This device also has the advantage that it’s ARM based, which I’m hopeful means I might be able to build some firmware myself using a standard GCC toolchain.
For now I fetched the JetHome firmware from https://github.com/jethome-ru/zigbee-firmware/tree/master/ti/coordinator/cc2538_cc2592 (JH_2538_2592_ZNP_UART_20211222.hex) - while it’s possible to do USB directly with the CC2538 my board doesn’t have those bits so going the external USB UART route is easier.
Version 1.22.0 of the NumPy scientific computing module is out. "NumPy 1.22.0 is a big release featuring the work of 153 contributors spread over 609 pull requests. There have been many improvements". Those improvements include the "essentially complete" annotation of the main namespace, a preliminary version of the proposed Array API, and more.
An intrinsic property of paintings, that makes them both wonderful and very annoying, is the fact that they are physical objects. Sometimes they survive across the ages as amazing artifacts of their era, but they are also susceptible to being lost and even destroyed. Sometimes this destruction is deliberate, such as when a painting is painted over.
Artists reuse canvas all the time — painting over what was already there. Sometimes they might be coerced by a client into altering a painting, or removing entire elements from a scene. Fortunately, nowadays we have many techniques, involving x-rays and infrared radiation, that can analyze paintings to determine not only the composition of what we can see with the naked eye, but also that what lies underneath.
In some cases, we can then reconstruct what was previously hidden, returning to physical reality paintings and sketches which haven’t seen the light of day for sometimes centuries.
Seco’s CHPC-D80-CSA uses the smaller COM-HPC Client Size A variant. Like the Adlink products, it supports Linux and Windows (see farther below).
Microsoft has released a fix for a harebrained Exchange Server bug that shut down on-premises mail delivery around the world just as clocks were chiming in the new year.
The mass disruption stemmed from a date check failure in Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 that made it impossible for servers to accommodate the year 2022, prompting some to call it the Y2K22 bug. The mail programs stored dates and times as signed integers, which max out at 2147483647, or 231 - 1. Microsoft uses the first two numbers of an update version to denote the year it was released. As long as the year was 2021 or earlier, everything worked fine.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (salt and thunderbird), Red Hat (xorg-x11-server), and Scientific Linux (xorg-x11-server).
Since our last report for the month of November, IFF has filed 21 RTI requests and 5 first appeals. Here, we give you an overview of the requests filed and an analysis of the responses we have received from the different public authorities. This report highlights why demanding transparency and accountability from Government authorities is one of the key elements in our fight to protect digital rights.
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The Right to Information (RTI) Act is thus one of the most important tools at the disposal of the public to engage with, and demand transparency and accountability from, the Government. We use the Act to routinely extract information about various ongoing policies and projects that the Government launches. In the month of December, we have filed 21 RTI requests and 5 First Appeals electronically with authorities at the Central level as well as through speed posts with relevant authorities at the States’ levels, concerning the various issues on which we engage with the Government.
Are you in the market for a national digital identity system, but cannot make up your mind? We take a look back at the issues affecting your options.
2021 has seen progress – at different speeds – among identity schemes of all shapes, sizes and formats. The traditional method of having a central store of data comprising the identities of all of a country’s residents has developed dramatically over the decades as it has been digitized, to a place where more and more aspects of governance can be linked to it.
A different approach emerged, where the individuals have control of their own identities. Estonia is the go-to example for a more decentralized architecture, although other countries have adopted some of the same tools.
But what if neither of these feel right for your country? What if you feel a government digital ID system would be politically or culturally awkward? Then establishing a Trust Framework and leaving it to the private sector, competition and customer choice might be your best choice.
Recently a relative who owned a 50ââ¬Â³ Plasma TV asked me for advice on getting a new TV. Looking at the options all the TVs seem to be smart TVs (running Android with built in support for YouTube and Netflix) and most of them seem to be 4K resolution. 4K doesn’t provide much benefit now as most people don’t have BlueRay DVD players and discs, there aren’t a lot of 4K YouTube videos, and most streaming services don’t offer 4K resolution. But as 4K doesn’t cost much more it doesn’t make sense not to get it.
I gave my relative a list of good options from Kogan (the Australian company that has the cheapest consumer electronics) and they chose a 65ââ¬Â³ 4K Smart TV from Kogan. That only cost $709 plus delivery which is reasonably affordable for something that will presumably last for a long time and be used by many people.
Netflix on a web browser won’t do more than FullHD resolution unless you use Edge on Windows 10. But Netflix on the smart tv has a row advertising 4K shows which indicates that 4K is supported. There are some 4K videos on YouTube but not a lot at this time.
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Android wasn’t designed for TVs and doesn’t work that well on them. Having buttons on the remote for Netflix and YouTube is handy, but it would be nice if there were programmable buttons for other commonly used apps or a way to switch between the last few apps (like ALT-TAB on a PC).
One good feature of Android for TV is that it can display a set of rows of shows (similar to the Netflix method of displaying) where each row is from a different app. The apps I’ve installed on that TV which support the row view are Netflix, YouTube, YouTube Music, ABC iView (that’s Australian ABC), 7plus, 9now, and SBS on Demand. That’s nice, now we just need channel 10’s app to support that to have coverage for all Australian free TV stations in the Android TV interface.
Conclusion
It’s a nice TV and it generally works well. Android is OK for TV use but far from great. It is running Android version 9, maybe a newer version of Android works better on TVs.
It’s too large for reasonable people to use in a home. I’ve seen smaller TVs used for 20 people in an office in a video conference. It’s cheap enough that most people can afford it, but it’s easier and more convenient to have something smaller and lighter.
As some of us squat, shove, and crunch our way toward new resolutions — while others arrive at the relieving conclusion that their Christmas kettlebell purchase makes for the perfect doorstop — we might wonder, with gratitude or suspicion, why and when gym going became such a widespread phenomenon. Long before Muscle Beach, tubs of whey protein powder, or the distinct grade of shame that emanates from an unused fitness club card, Dr. Gustaf Zander (1835–1920) was helping his pupils tone their pecs in his Stockholm Mechanico-Therapeutic Institute.
