This week has been really great for Linux news and releases. We kicked off with a new major Firefox release, pre-orders of the PinePhone Pro Linux smartphone for everyone, and a new GNU Linux-libre kernel for those who want to build a 100% free computer without any proprietary code or drivers.
We also got a new major FFmpeg release with lots of goodies for all your multimedia creation, a new major NetworkManager release with great stuff for all your networking needs, and a new major release of the SystemRescue live Linux system for all your system rescue and recovery needs.
I hope that you are doing well.
We had a peaceful week in the world of Linux releases with the releases of Sparky Linux 5.16, Bluestar Linux 5.16.0, and Slackware 15.0-rc3.
Have you ever thought modern graphics are just too much and want to go back to a simpler time a time where we just played games using ascii symbols in our terminal, well now you can.
In this video, we are looking at how to install FreeOffice on Elementary OS 6.0.
The following Kernels are available for PCLinuxOS. Kernel 5.15.15, Kernel LTS 5.10.92 and Kernel LTS 5.4.172.
Based on observed behaviour on Android and Chrome OS, Google began working on a new page reclamation strategy for its Linux-based OSes aimed to improve how the virtual memory subsystem reclaims unused memory pages. More recent work shows the new MGLRU policy can benefit server environments, too.
Rnote is a seriously impressive freehand note taking app written in Rust and GTK4.
I came across it on Flathub this week and, within seconds of installing it, I knew I had to give it a bit of a spotlight. If you’ve got a laptop with a stylus or touch-enabled screen and you use GNOME Shell you have to try it out.
Rnote is billed by its developer as a “simple note taking application written in Rust and GTK4”. I spent about 20 minutes playing around with it (albeit with a mouse as primary input) and it’s really quite polished considering that it’s likely far from feature complete.
We are proud to present you with the first stable release of the Mumble 1.4.x release series, which brings many new features, bug fixes and general improvements.
You can download the new version from our Downloads page or the GitHub release page or from within your Windows client or software package management system.
It's been over two years since Mumble 1.3 was released for this open-source VoIP / voice chat program that is popular with gamers and open-source enthusiasts while today it's been succeeded by Mumble 1.4.
Mumble 1.4 has reached stable and comes with a new plug-in framework for extending this high quality voice chat software. This new framework can be used for extending the functionality offered by Mumble and can be used for a variety of general purpose use-cases. Mumble 1.4 also adds a full-featured search dialog, channel listeners, TalkingUI as a convenient non-gamer overlay for showing who is talking, various other UI improvements, stereo audio streams support, and support for Markdown in text messages.
Spectator is a free, open-source (Libre) REST-API testing program for Linux. It is written in Vala programming language and GTK.
The app allows developers to make requests to test their web endpoints, create custom environments, and save everything within a collection.
Samba is a suite of open source applications that implements the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. Many operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, use the SMB protocol for client-server networking. Samba enables Linux / Unix machines to communicate with Windows machines in a network. Samba provides file and print services for various Microsoft Windows clients and can integrate with a Microsoft Windows Server domain, either as a Domain Controller (DC) or as a domain member.
Sharing files is an essential part of server administration. It allows sharing of resources across the network which are needed by users to carry out their tasks. Samba server is usually installed on central Linux server where information is stored in variety of media and accessed using windows client or Linux using Samba client.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FTP Server on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, The vsftpd FTP Server is one of the most trusted applications among the Linux professionals. The official website of vsftpd FTP Server claims that the security, stability and performance is the key points due to which it has gained much popularity among the Linux users.
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 FTP Server on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
What can come among the top 5 open source firewalls? Yes, this I was thinking of! Of course, there are lots of services and ready use os available. Deciding
In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to install Cpanel on Ubuntu 20.04. Also, I will show you the free alternatives to Cpanel. This will make a big impact while trying to choose which free web hosting to use without worrying about the licenses. Cpanel provides a way where you can send emails by providing email hosting services which makes it easy to communicate with your customers.
Cpanel is a web hosting control panel. It provides a GUI interface where administrators key in the information they want to configure, this simplifies the process of hosting a web site to the website end-user.
Today we are looking at how to install Steam 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.
Last release of SFXR-Qt was in September 2019. I kept using it for Pixel Wheels, it had its quirks and bugs but I did not have the time and motivation to work on it, so the poor app was left on its own for more than two years.
Fast forward to November 2021: SFXR-Qt was added to Debian! It always feels good to see an app getting more widespread, with the minor issue that I learned about it because tests did not pass on big-endian machines... Working on that bug was a bit frustrating because I do not own a big-endian machine and failed to setup a working big-endian VM to test my changes on, but after a few blind fixes I eventually got it fixed. Kudos to Alex Myczko, the bug reporter, for the responsiveness in testing my changes.
Entering Debian probably gave a bit more exposure to the app, because I then received a bug report for that crash I had known for a long time but never got to fix... Now that someone else reported it, I finally fixed it.
Currently only bringing up this erase-exceptions window when do a rollback to pristine first bootup, but perhaps should consider it for other rollback choices -- such as rollback to an earlier version of EasyOS or a snapshot.
Note, the "Web browser profile" checkbox will save all firefox, seamonkey, chrome and chromium profiles under /home, as well as all mozilla profiles running as root (/root/.mozilla).
I recently moved into a new place, and discovered that my friend and I live in buildings that face each other. We’re about a kilometer apart, but both our balconies have line of sight to each other. I’ve always wanted to build a communications network with my friends since I was a kid, so I dusted off an old book about Morse, one of my Raspberry P’s and got to work. I’m a big fan of mixing old and new technologies, so instead of using something modern, I decided to use Morse code.
This tutorial is the first in a two part series for building a building-to-building morse code communications system. In it, we’ll explore how to create a morse code transmitter using a Raspberry Pi and a DJ light.
Welcome to 2022! This is the first service pack of the year bringing some of the improvements from edge to stable. This also brings a few nice new features to the v21.12 release that were not ready for inclusion yet when the last stable release was made.
Certain pictures draw attention like no other, and that’s what happened when we stumbled upon a Twitter post about “resuscitating supermarket garlic” by [Robots Everywhere]. The more we looked at this photo, the more questions popped up, and we couldn’t resist contacting the author on Twitter – here’s what we’ve learned!
This is an aeroponics cell – a contraption that creates suitable conditions for a plant to grow. The difference of aeroponics, when compared to soil or hydroponics methods, is that the plant isn’t being submerged in soil or water. Instead, its roots are held in the air and sprayed with water mist, providing both plenty of water but also an excess of oxygen, as well as a low-resistance space for accelerated root growth – all of these factors that dramatically accelerate nutrient absorption and development of the plant. This cell design only takes up a tiny bit of space on the kitchen countertop, and, in a week’s time, at least half of the cloves have sprouted!
Back in Dec 2020 we wrote about the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) magnetic fusion reactor’s record-breaking feat of heating hydrogen plasma up to 100 megakelvins for 20 seconds. Last month it broke its own record, extending that to 30 seconds. The target of the program is 300 seconds by 2026. There is a bit of competition going, as KSTAR’s Chinese partner in the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) did a run a week later reaching 70 million degrees for 1056 seconds. It should be noted that KSTAR is reaching these temperatures by heating ions in the plasma, while EAST takes a different approach acting on the electrons.
We’re currently in the midst of New Year’s Resolutions season, which means an abundance of spanking new treadmills and exercise bikes. And one thing becomes quickly obvious while using those machines: the instruments on them are, at best, only approximately useful for measuring things like your pulse rate, and in the case of estimating the calories burned by your workout, are sometimes wildly optimistic.
Josh and Kurt talk about the faker and colors NPM events. There is a lot of discussion around open source being broken or somehow failing because of these events. The real answer is open source is an experience. How we interact with our dependencies determines what the experience looks like.
What can come among the top 5 open source firewalls? Yes, this I was thinking of! Of course, there are lots of services and ready use os available. Deciding to deploy any firewall can be difficult. Why difficult? Well, the reason is simple, we never know what consequences will be there while not taking care of security. From the very beginning of the Linux era, things started with Squid, where Administrators were supposed to manage everything manually. I remember still, how we were supposed to get install service with RPM manually. How all ACLs, IP address ranges were supposed to take care of very precisely. Getting access to logs, reports was altogether a tedious job. Applying IPTable to provide extra layer security made Linux admins feel like some sort of saviors.
IP rights are valuable assets to any business. Patents and utility models protect new technologies and give you a monopoly over them. Trademarks protect your brand and ensure that only you can use it. Industrial design rights protect the appearance of a given product and gives you exclusive rights over it. These rights provide significant commercial advantages which can lead to higher revenues and profits.
How patent law and corporate profits keep variants crawling the globe
Turning first to Figure 1 below, which shows EU patenting trends across the aforementioned subsystems, the data indicates that the ENE and INF areas have remained relatively stable in terms of patent filings, but that CCS and RST have seen significant increases in patent filings since around 2010. Of note, the “High value inventions” referred to on the Y-axis of Figure 1 represents patent families “that include patent applications filed in more than one patent office”.
Back in 2010, I wrote an article with Prof Rob Merges titled Operating Efficiently Post-Bilski by Ordering Patent Doctrine Decision-Making. We suggested that patent examiners often lack capacity to judge metaphysical questions centered around abstractness and laws of nature. In addition, we noted that many eligibility questions substantially overlap with bread-and-butter patent doctrines such as obviousness, enablement, and indefiniteness. What that means is that delaying eligibility decisions can often result in entirely avoiding eligibility decisions. In a 2019 article, Professor Chien provided more detailed guidance on how this could be accomplished.
Serstech has filed nine patent applications to the European patent office over the last two weeks. The patent applications are filed to protect the newly launched Serstech Arx products and the next generation product platform that is currently under development. Due to ongoing and expected sales opportunities in particularly the US market, Serstech recently decided to ramp up its IPR efforts to better protect its innovations.
With news that the Austrian parliament has ratified the Protocol on the provisional application of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court on 2 December 2020, the #UPC opening in 2022 is becoming more likely.
Rumors about Mazda building a new rotary-engined sports car have proliferated ever since Mazda pulled the RX-8 after 2012. Mazda stoked those rumors with their spectacular RX-Vision rotary sports car concept they unveiled in Tokyo in 2015, and the company has affirmed the desire to build such a rotary sports cars — if it becomes feasible. Now, however, we have some new evidence the brand has been working on one behind the scenes.
Everyone's been waiting for a new rotary-powered Mazda since the RX-8 bowed out in 2012. Mazda itself even built an RX-Vision Concept that many believed would preview an eventual RX-9; that was way back in 2015, though, and we still haven't seen anything like it enter production. The car world had more or less accepted that rotaries would only have a future as EV range extenders—that is, until Friday when a patent application was unveiled showing what looks like a hybrid rotary engine that drives the rear wheels.
Detailed patent drawings from Europe were published on a Japanese Hatena blog, which pointed out key details that hint this may be a three-rotor engine. Indeed, there are what look like three spark plug holes and three rotor housings, so it would likely be pretty potent. Factor in the electrification aspect and it's doubtful anyone would call it underwhelming like they did with the naturally aspirated RX-8.
In a notable decision on an apparently mundane legal topic, a Technical Board of Appeal of the EPO recently decided (in T 1989/18) that requiring applicants to amend their description so that it is consistent with the claims has no basis in the EPC. This decision may help to consign this practice to history, streamlining the prosecution process at the EPO in a way that will be welcomed by applicants and attorneys alike.
It is a historic feature of European practice that the description of a patent application must be amended so that it is consistent with the claims. The Guidelines for Examination at the EPO refer to a number of examples of inconsistencies that must be corrected. One example includes inconsistencies where a statement in the description suggests that the invention is limited to a particular feature, but the claims are not so limited. Another example is where it is stated or implied in the description that certain features are essential to the invention when those features are not present in the claims. A further example is where parts of the description give the impression that they disclose ways of carrying out the invention, when those examples are no longer within the scope of the claims. Examiners can be particularly enthusiastic in pursuing these objections. In order to overcome these objections it is often necessary to make amendments wherever the word “embodiment” or “invention” appears. It can also be necessary to delete passages or to indicate in the description that certain examples are not within the scope of the claims.
Russian law stipulates that if an owner does not use a trademark within three years, it can be cancelled. To avoid this happening, some owners try to keep their marks alive by producing evidence of use, though in very small volumes. However, token use is generally insufficient to establish that a trademark is, in fact, being used. The IP Court of the Russian Federation often issues rulings to this effect, and has published some criteria for what it defines as 'token use'.
Proving the reputation of a trademark is not an easy task. The owner must prove that the mark is recognised by a significant share of the population in a substantial part of the territory in which it is registered. In the European Union this is mainly assessed using quantitative criteria. However in Poland, one must also provide qualitative criteria to prove recognition.
The reputation of a mark is not defined by the EU Trademark Regulation, nor by Polish industrial law. Pursuant to case law, a well-known mark must have sufficient recognition that the relevant public, when confronted by a similar mark, may possibly make an association between the two, even when they are used for non-similar products or services, consequently damaging the reputation of the established mark (14/09/1999, C-375/97, Chevy, EU:C:1999:408, ۤ 22-23). There is no EU case law specifying that a qualitative threshold must be met in order to enjoy protection deriving from reputation.
Law No. 7346 aims to redraw the boundaries of criminal liability by expanding the scope of the acts stipulated in Article 72 of the Copyright Law.
‘What you see is what you get’ is one of the vital principles of EU (and German) design law. Particularly in relation to designs for component parts of a complex product (ie, parts used in or incorporated into a complex product, eg, a car hood), EU design law ties availability of design protection to visibility of such parts during normal use. This ‘visibility criterion’ has massive practical relevance in design law. Still, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) – despite a few incidental remarks in the more recent Ferrari ruling (C-123/20) on unregistered EU designs – has not yet had the chance to give specific guidance on how ‘visibility’ is to be assessed. Upon a referral (I ZB 31/20) from the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH), an inconspicuous bicycle saddle might now write history in that it could trigger the CJEU to define the contours of the visibility criterion in more detail.
