Sometimes we cover works of extreme technological merit here at Hackaday, other times we cover interesting projects that while they might not lie at the bleeding edge are interesting enough that they deserve a wider audience. Sometimes though, we bring you something in this field simply because it amuses us and we think it will you too. Such is the case with [Bryan Lunduke]’s look at making a Linux desktop look like Windows 95. And lest you think that it might be yet another skin to make Windows users transition to Linux a bit easier, the aim and result is to make it look exactly like Microsoft’s mid-90s desktop. Underneath it all is the relatively familiar xUbuntu distribution, with a deliciously troll-worthy project called Chicago95 atop it. This takes some existing Windows 95 theme and icon projects, and adds GTK themes, an MS-DOS shell theme, the ability to install those cheesy ’90s Plus! themes, and a Microsoft Office 95 theme for LibreOffice. It really does deliver an experience very close to the Redmond original.
Aruba had the most reliable hosting company site in February 2022, continuing to top the table for the third consecutive month. 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 nine hosting company sites each responded to all of Netcraft’s requests and were separated by average connection time.
Previous rumors have indicated that the AMD Instinct MI300 will feature a 4-GCD design based on the brand new CDNA 3 architecture. The upcoming Instinct MI200 was going to feature 128 compute units per die but that has changed to 110 compute units since last week's rumor. A total of 220 Compute Units would net 14,080 cores and if we take the exact number and multiply it by 4 (the number of GCDs on Instinct MI300), we end up with 440 Compute Units or an insane 28,160 cores.
Emacs is a very extensible piece of software. It can be your text editor, your email client and even your USENET reader. With Elfeed, you can also use Emacs as your RSS feed reader.
Wall command is used to send a message to currently logged-in users, and a system administrator mainly uses this command to notify other users about forthcoming maintenance updates. All users will be notified only if the terminal is working, but nowadays you can also get messages on the notification panel irrespective of whether the terminal is running. If you want to send a message to a specific user, then use the "write" command. In this article, you will see multiple ways to notify users using wall command.
The Synaptic Package Manager is a graphical tool that makes installing, updating, and removing packages easy. It’s perfect for those unfamiliar with command-line options because of its user-friendly interface, and you can begin to learn more in-depth about how packages work and system maintenance. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Synaptic Package Manager on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish for users that wish to use a feature packaged package manager GUI solution compared to Ubuntu’s default GUI package management or the command line terminal.
Vivaldi is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It had grown from the downfall of Opera with many disgruntled when it changed from the Presto layout engine to a Chromium-based browser. This platform angered traditional Opera users. Since then, Vivaldi has become one of the most popular alternative Internet Browsers amongst the big three Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Vivaldi promotes itself as a leading browser with faster navigation, clever bookmarking, more intelligent browsing, extensive tab management, and a more visual approach. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Vivaldi Browser on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal and also the option of Vivaldi stable or Vivaldi snapshot browser versions.
Comma-separated values aka CSV is a semi-structured data that uses comma as the delimiter to separate the words. CSV file formats are very popular among data professionals since they have to deal with a lot of CSV files and process it to create insights. In this article, we will be focusing on how to parse CSV files in Bash shell scripts in Linux. In most parts of this article, I will be using awk and sed tools for csv parsing instead of combining different commands like grep, cut, tr, etc. The awk utility reduces the complexity of piping multiple commands or writing a loop with logic to grab the data. Instead, you can write a one-liner code in awk to do the job.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to setup UFW Firewall on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall), is the most popular and easy-to-use command-line tool for configuring and managing a firewall on Debian-based distributions. Ufw protects the server by monitoring the incoming and outgoing traffic of the network connections of a server. 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 Setup UFW Firewall on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
ACPI is the acronym for Advanced Configuration and Power Interface; as a standard, it was first implemented in the year 1996, as a successor to APM (Advanced Power Management). As a main feature, it brought the ability to handle power management at the operating system level, whereas before it was handled in BIOS. Some ACPI events on Linux are, by default, handled via systemd-logind, but more complex configurations can be achieved by installing and running the acpid service. In this article we see how to configure systemd-logind and how to handle more specific ACPI events via the acpid daemon.
Valve hit us with a surprise a few days ago: they announced a new game set in the Portal universe — Aperture Desk Job. Even though it’s a demo designed to showcase the Steam Deck’s controls, desktop users aren’t excluded, and I got the chance to play it once it went live today. Available on Steam for both Windows and Linux. Though the game is set in the Portal universe, you’re not in control of a character who shoots portals. Rather, your job is to test a series of toilets, add water to them, make sure that they flush, then move on to the next one. Sounds boring, right? Well, after you’ve inspected a few, things get a little more interesting. Grady, the Aperture core that is your tutor, adds a turret mode to one of them later on. It will even shoot rockets. This improvised toilet — what Grady calls the “Mark II” — is in the hopes of impressing Cave Johnson, who returns from Portal 2, the CEO of Aperture Science. Grady thinks it will make the both of you rich.
As outlined in a Steam blog post, ports for Mac and Linux versions of the game are currently in Beta, with the developers asking for help with playtesting. All owners of Inscryption on Steam can playtest the ports by right-clicking the game in their library, selecting Properties and entering the code “mealwormsigil” in the Betas tab. Players are then asked to report any bugs or issues within the Beta, which can be done in-game by pressing F11 or in the Daniel Mullins Games Discord Server via the Inscryption Mac bugs channel.
Linux gamers have been hoping to see Destiny 2 work on Linux using Proton or SteamPlay. This is because BattleEye and other anti-cheat engines announced official support for Proton. Basically, with the resources available with Bungie (especially now under Sony), it should not be a big deal to enable proton support.
Klei Entertainment did say in their January Roadmap that support for the Steam Deck would come, and some of that work has now be made live. This doesn't sound like they're done yet but it all sounds like good work towards it. The update actually landed on the Steam Deck launch day, which I missed as of course that day was ridiculously busy to keep track of everything.
Since news moves fast, here's a chance for you to grab a breather and get a look at my ongoing Steam Deck content. Here's what has been shown off so far.
Virgo Versus The Zodiac, what the developer says is an "unforgiving timed actions turn-based JRPG", has been released officially for Linux (and macOS). Inspired by the Mario & Luigi RPG series and the Mother RPG series. "The game features traditional turn-based combat with real-time execution of moves: blocking, countering and timing your attacks carefully as well as predicting your foes' moves is essential to succeed in Virgo’s twisted and unforgiving cosmic quest to bring back the Golden Age, a period of peace, symmetry and balance, or so she thinks."
Bomb Club Deluxe from Antoine Latour and Lozange Lab is a fresh and quality puzzle game, all about setting off explosive chain reactions to solve a level.
Inspired by the Thief series, The Dark Mod is a brilliant free and open source game and game engine for people to make various levels with. The Dark Mod version 2.10 is out now and it's BIG.
Dragon Evo is a fresh entry into the deck-building tactical card game genre and it's now available in Early Access, along with Linux support too. Inspired by RPGs with a little sprinkle of RTS with the, it's actually quite a unique game although it does have some rough edges with it not being complete yet. There's quite a lot to take in right away too with their health and action system. Card have different attack categories including close combat, ranged, flying or burrowing attacks. Each has a strength and weakness too, so you're always thinking and planning while playing. It's a deck-builder, so you get to make up your own pack and you earn more while you play too.
Most of the design concepts are done, but my C++ QtStyle foomagic is lower than zero ;) so muhhhh heee... do you want to help? Janet extraordinaire yesterday helped a bit and adjusted the old Oxygen painting to do a preliminary implementation of the noise O€² needs for its background, but that is only the very beginning of is needed.
KDE invites you to get your software project certified with Germany's top seal of approval for eco-friendly products: the Blauer Engel eco-label. Software may be immaterial, but it determines the energy consumption of hardware, and making software resource efficient is crucial. The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) sector is reported to contribute as much C02 to the environment as the aviation industry -- and the numbers continue to rise. Sustainability, as reflected in the Blauer Engel criteria for software eco-certification, must be considered holistically: user autonomy and transparency, hallmarks of Free and Open-Source Software, are a part of that.
Since the last summary two month ago we have seen the 21.12.3 patch releases of Kontact, and more than 1200 changes by 35 contributors have been integrated. Around 20 people helped to process nearly 120 merge requests the last 2 months, reviewing and finally merging over 80 of them. Calendaring The new notification-based reminder service can now launch KOrganizer or Kalendar respectively to view or edit the corresponding event. The Notifications with geolocation data attached to your event or task will now open your default mapping application. The reminder service is planned to replace the previous dialog-based one for 22.04. The identity management library has been restructured to reduce the runtime dependencies of the reminder daemon as well as other background services. The public holidays list for several countries has been updated.
We test-drive the development version of GNOME Files version 43 and give you details about its looks, features and performance.
From China, comes a new Linux distro, cutefishOS, creating quite a buzz in the Linux community. The Debian 11 Bullseye-based distro is currently still in beta, however. Its desktop environment is quite elegant, yet simple. The 0.8 beta release teases that the final product will be a hit with new Linux users, especially Apple converts, as the GUI is remarkably similar to that of Apple's Catalina. The stated goal of the cutefishOS developers is “… to provide users with a comfortable interface design, better user experience and a better choice.”
Tiny Core Linux is as lightweight as a GUI-based Linux distribution can be. Jack Wallen walks you through the installation that makes this operating system unique. One thing that makes Linux special is that there’s a distribution crafted for nearly every conceivable use case. You’ve got Linux for science, games, productivity, edge, cloud, containers, embedded, big data, networking, security … if you can think of a need, Linux can cover it.
Mothballed my D630 when I got this HP EliteBook about a year ago. I intended on keeping the machine updated about every 3 to 6 months but time hasn’t permitted. I located the laptop in a plastic tote with other laptops from yester-year. Plugged in and powered up the machine. Just as it was when I retired it The battery had discharged itself sitting for a year, even though it was off, which I found rather surprising. Not a huge deal but still surprising. The machine took much longer to start up than I remembered taking I realized that this computer still had a “spinning rust” drive in it as it was only in the last few years that I have gone all SSD on my laptops. When the machine booted up, it was just as I had let it. I would call it like a time capsule but that is what my offline backup tool, Back In Time is used for. I clicked around a bit and lamented the ropey open source Nouveau graphics drivers. When the Nvidia Quadro NVS 135M GPU in this was supported, I had a fantastic experience with it. Now, not so much. I still have high hopes for Nouveau, I hope that it can be worked on to the point that I can get non-glitchy performance out of it yet.
Advantech, a leading provider of embedded IoT solutions, has collaborated with Canonical in the provision of Ubuntu pre-loaded and certified embedded boards and systems for diverse edge computing applications. By certifying Advantech products, Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, guarantees up to 10 years of Linux security and update capabilities for users in the AI robotics, industrial manufacturing, and mission-critical application sectors.
It’s not every day that an open-source, portable Linux handheld computer gets announced, so I couldn’t resist placing an order for the DevTerm by ClockworkPi back when we first learned about the stylish little terminal, which includes a 1280 x 480 screen (double-wide VGA) and a modular little thermal printer. Of course, the global semiconductor shortage combined with shipping slowdowns led to delays, but things did ultimately come together for the project. I’ve always been a sucker for small-format machines, especially ones that come as a well-designed kit, and that means I can tell you all about what it was like to put it together and turn it on. There’s a lot to look at, so let’s get started.
LED and LCD displays are a technological marvel. They’ve brought the price of televisions and monitors down to unheard-of levels since the days of CRTs, but this upside arguably comes with an aesthetic cost. When everything is covered in bland computer screens, the world tends to look a lot more monotonous. Not so several decades ago when there were many sharply contrasting ways of displaying information. One example of this different time comes to us by way of this split-flap display that [Erich] has been recreating.
The classic tabletop game of air hockey has existed in its current form for decades, and while it can be fun initially, the lack of exciting components can make it dull after a while. So, in order to exercise his creative and technical skills, Silas Hansen decided to create his own spin on the game by making an air football table. His project was designed and built from scratch with some very innovative fabrication techniques. The base of the air football table was crafted by laser cutting various pieces of MDF board into the side panels and the second layer of the top. To ensure smoothness, the top layer was cut from a solid panel of acrylic that also had a series of holes for air to pass through. Lastly, the corner supports, mounts, and game pieces were 3D-printed.
We survey a broad panel of IT decision makers about the state of enterprise open source every year. We also have many thousands of conversations with customers, prospects, analysts, and industry peers. So it takes a lot to surprise us. Yet, every year that we run this survey there are usually one or two results that we didn’t really expect. Here are a couple from this year’s The State of Enterprise Open Source 2022 report, for which we surveyed nearly 1,300 IT decision makers at medium to large enterprises worldwide.
Here on the blog we’ve been sharing stories of why our sponsors have chosen to support OSI. Today I’m flipping the script to explain why OSI has chosen to become an associate member of one of our own members, the Open Infrastructure (OpenInfra) Foundation. You can read more about their new affiliate members here.
19 new GNU releases in the last month (as of February 27, 2022): auctex-13.1 autoconf-archive-2022.02.11 binutils-2.38 ed-1.18 findutils-4.9.0 gdbm-1.23 glibc-2.35 gnunet-0.16.0 guile-3.0.8 guile-sdl-0.6.1 hello-2.12 help2man-1.49.1 libredwg-0.12.5 nano-6.2 parallel-20220222 poke-2.1 rcs-5.10.1 screen-4.9.0 wget-1.21.3
At KDAB, we have been investigating how to integrate Rust with Qt in a safe and idiomatic way. The solution we are currently working on is called CXX-Qt. It’s available in the GitHub and on crates.io. This blog post discusses the journey of CXX-Qt — where it started, where it can be used right now, and the future direction of the project. If you would like to get started with code examples, visit our Rust book.
As you may or may not know about me, I have strong opinions on how word processors and text editors should work. I also have a fascination with failed (or at least, declining) file formats—and having written a couple of these lists, I’ve found them to be deeply enjoyable as well as a great way to highlight forgotten software that people probably haven’t used in a long time. (Some would argue they’re trolling opportunities, to which I plead the fifth.) So perhaps it’s time to combine those two things into a list that highlights some word processors that time forgot, or that most of us moved on from. But I of course need to hedge this slightly, by pointing out that when I decide on what shows up in this list, I work within basic parameters: it tends to be specialized, obfuscated, uncommon, or unloved—in a combination that, together makes it optional for the average person. Let’s dig into some documents that might be hard to open with a standard word processor.
Red Hat is thrilled to congratulate Knative on its acceptance as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project. This begins a new chapter in the evolution of a leading containerized serverless platform. As one of the co-founders of the Knative project and creators of its sandbox Functions subproject, Red Hat believes that Knative has a bright future as part of the CNCF.
Today, IBM joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Knative community in welcoming Knative as the newest incubating project to the umbrella open source organization. This important milestone is crucial for the future of Knative and the CNCF. As mentioned in a previous blog post, by joining the CNCF, the Knative community gains a vibrant open source organization which allows it to grow and gain more users. By accepting Knative as an incubating project, the CNCF gains a project that extends, simplifies, and enhances the Kubernetes platform for serverless and event-driven workloads. This is a win-win combination.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (mingw-expat and seamonkey), openSUSE (mc, mysql-connector-java, nodejs12, and sphinx), Red Hat (kernel and kpatch-patch), SUSE (cyrus-sasl, kernel, nodejs12, and php74), and Ubuntu (glibc).
TechCrunch is reporting — but not describing in detail — a vulnerability in a series of stalkerware apps that exposes personal information of the victims. The vulnerability isn’t in the apps installed on the victims’ phones, but in the website the stalker goes to view the information the app collects. The article is worth reading, less for the description of the vulnerability and more for the shadowy string of companies behind these stalkerware apps.
Google has released Chrome version 99.0.4844.51 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This version addresses vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit to take control of an affected system. CISA encourages users and administrators to review the Chrome Release Note and apply the necessary updates.
As always, we end on a positive note by focusing on some new research that can help defenders. By mapping observed malware in 2021, FortiGuard Labs was able to identify a handful of techniques, that, if blocked, could prevent most attacks. This is crucial information for defenders, as it eases the challenges of dealing with information asymmetry, where attackers have traditionally had the advantage over defenders.
We are daily seeing the brutal attack on Ukraine, on TV and the Internet and newspapers -- except you won't be seeing this, or rather you will be seeing a censored version of events, if you live in certain countries that control the media. These events have reminded me of my step-mother's escape from Hungary, in 1956. She was a young single woman, age 23, and she and her sister had employment working in a clothing manufacturing factory in Budapest. One day she was waiting in a queue to use a public telephone, when suddenly a fight erupted between Hungarian freedom fighters and Russian soldiers. A stray bullet hit my step-mother in the stomach. She was taken to a hospital, and operated on. Russian soldiers came to the hospital, looking for anyone who had been admitted with gunshot wounds. They walked around the wards, and the Doctor told them she had just been operated on for appendicitis -- fortunately, the wound was just in that same place.
Mykhailo Fedorov, the nation’s youngest cabinet minister, turned a staid government Twitter account into a cannon to shame the world’s biggest tech companies
The European Union must do everything in its power to ensure the safety and wellbeing of people affected by Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Through an open letter, Access Now has laid out clear actions for working with tech platforms and telecoms operators to uphold connectivity, access to accurate information, data protection, and non-discrimination at the border. “Russia’s war on Ukraine is affecting millions of people, and the European Union has both the power and the responsibility to ensure the internet and all telecommunications are accessible for all. Decisions and interventions must come now,” said Fanny Hidvegi, Europe Policy Director at Access Now. Brett Solomon, Executive Director at Access Now, had a clear message for online platforms operating throughout the war on Ukraine, and in crises, “keep the internet open,” he said on the ABC’s The Drum.
Today, Public Knowledge filed a Petition for Declaratory Ruling urging the Federal Communications Commission to declare Voice over Internet Protocol as a Title II “common carrier” telecommunications service. Communications Workers of America, Center for Rural Strategies, National Association of State Utility Consumer Advocates, Next Century Cities, The Public Utility Law Project of New York, and The Utility Reform Network joined the filing. Congress created a broad, technology-agnostic definition of a telecommunications service in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 so that consumers using future technologies such as VoIP would still receive the same level of protection and service quality as traditional communications networks. Without this reclassification, consumers risk losing valuable protections including fair pricing, service quality standards, and reliable emergency services. Public Knowledge calls on the agency to act to ensure everyone has access to reliable, quality voice service no matter what technology provides it.
