Welcome to this week's Linux Weekly Roundup. We had a full week in the world of Linux releases with ArcoLinux 22.07.03, Nitrux OS 20220629, Pisi Linux 2.3, and Condres OS 1.0.
As Linux users, we’re often spoiled for choice when it comes to software. There are some basic programs that we keep coming back to that are so integrated into the stack that we forget they’re even there. However, when it comes to things like desktop environments, it can be hard to determine the best option for exactly what you’re going to use it for. We have reviewed different Linux Desktop Environments, and there’s a lot of overlap between use cases. Here we show you the best Linux Desktop Environments for your particular use case.
In the past week, I have put in many hours of work preparing for the next evolution of DTOS.
There was once a time when Compiz was such a popular compositor but nowadays almost no one uses it so what happened and where did it go.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Natron on Pop!_OS 22.04.
What is the right metric to use when measuring a program's performance? There are various possibilities, from memory usage to branch prediction hit rates, but I'm going to pick on two that I see widely used: CPU instructions executed (what modern CPUs call "instructions retired") and wall-clock time (i.e. "how much time has elapsed in the real world?"). In this post, I'm going to try and compare both, showing why each has fundamental weaknesses, before explaining why I use each in different circumstances.
Mycorrhiza Wiki is an open-source wiki engine developed by Bouncepaw, who is assisted by other open-source contributors. Use Mycorrhiza for personal wikis, digital gardens and wikis for small teams or communities.
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Mycorrhiza Wiki is released under the AGPL-3.0 License.
GROWI is a new open-source Wiki engine for teams that supports real-time editing
It is built on top of Node.js and MongoDB. It also uses Redis, and ElasicSearch for full-text search functionality.
Digital Media Server is a DLNA compatible UPnP AV Media Server. It is capable of sharing digital video, audio and image resources to UPnP AV and DLNA capable devices.
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The project is released under the GPL-2.0 License.
Aether is currently available as an LV2 plug-in for Linux. It’s open-source, so you can also compile it for macOS and Windows if you’re tech-savvy.
Knowing how to select all content in Vim or the Vi editor enables you to complete routines like copying and pasting in Linux quickly. The process can be tricky if you don’t understand how to use the editors properly or bind keys.
For instance, you can select all in Vim/Vi by combining the gg, V, and G keys.
ggVG Before that, you must be in the normal mode and know what the groups of keys mean or do.
This article takes you through Vim/Vi modes, commands, and key bindings. You will find it simpler to select and use file contents with this knowledge.
Restic is an open-source, secure, and cross-platform backup program. Using Restic we can store multiple versions of files and directories in an encrypted repository. Restic can be used to back up data to an external device or to cloud storage.
Restic encrypts data with the AES-256 in counter mode and then authenticates it using the Poly1305-AES cryptographic message authentication code. This way Restic guarantees confidentiality and data integrity by utilizing cryptography.
Restic does incremental backups which makes it easier and faster compared to some other backup programs. What this means is that it stores a base backup image and then for each subsequent backup, it stores the difference between that base image and the source machine. This leads to increased backup speed as only the modified data is backed up. It also consumes less backup space.
Today we are looking at how to install PulseEffects 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.
I worked with a FreeBSD client this morning who’d messed up the pf rules on their VM firewall, and wanted to know how to fix them.
Discord is one of the sought-after social platform applications that provides voice, text and video chat services.
It is a digital community where users can create and join spaces called servers where the people communicate. The free application is available on heterogeneous platforms like Andriod, iOS, Windows, Mac and Linux.
This tutorial will demonstrate several methods to install Discord in Linux in Debian.
Linux comes equipped with a plethora of networking utilities to choose from. tcpdump is one such powerful networking tool that can capture and analyze network traffic should you need to troubleshoot network errors on Linux.
Let's get hands-on with the tcpdump command and explore how to use it to capture network traffic.
htop is a process viewer that lets the user monitor and manage the processes running in Unix and Unix-based environments. It is an alternative to the program called top, but htop is better off regarding process viewing flexibility and with features of additional manipulation.
htop provides a cleaner and colorful interface with horizontal and vertical scrolling support.
This tutorial will guide you with the steps of installing htop in Linux with the following methods.
This month saw quite a number of updates for OS 6.1 including some nice feature updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and more.
Team Porteus is finally able to announce the immediate availability of Porteus-v5.0 final in EIGHT desktop flavours.
RFID systems are common in our lives as they are widely used to secure access, monitor objects’ positions (IoT) and a lot of other applications. Their technology is so mature that they are today reliable components and easy to use. The RC522 module with Raspberry PI can bring to your hands this technology with a few steps and a cheap budget
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to connect and configure a Raspberry PI with an RFID RC522 module, using Python.
Inspired by his time as a scorekeeper in elementary school, now-high schooler Collin Wentzien wanted to recreate this setup by building a DIY scoreboard several years ago. His idea involved making a bright display composed of several seven-segment displays that could all be controlled by an external device in order to set scores, start/stop the clock, and more.
The controller sits inside of a small custom box that contains a pair of button matrices, which either increment the score for the home/guest team or provides a keypad that can be used to enter numerical values and set the clock. Below its custom PCB is an Arduino Mega 2560 that handles all of the button inputs, along with a character LCD for showing what has been entered and an nRF24L01+ wireless transceiver for sending new data to the scoreboard.
Extensions coming to GNOME Web, some new Sailfish OS Community News, NOKIA causes a naming dispute and more!
WordPress powers like 40% of the internet or something, so I don’t think it will be going anywhere anytime soon. But what if Matt and the team decide to go in a direction I don’t agree with, like Ghost have?
My knee-jerk reaction would be to go back to Jekyll – it’s light and I know it fairly well. But like I said, managing content is painful and Ruby can be a bit of pig to manage.
Prominent statistician Frank Harrell has come out with a radically new R tutorial, rflow. The name is short for “R workflow,” but I call it “R in a box” –everything one needs for beginning serious usage of R, starting from little or no background.
By serious usage I mean real applications in which the user has a substantial computational need. This could be a grad student researcher, a person who needs to write data reports for her job, or simply a person who is doing personal analysis such as stock picking.
Like other tutorials/books, rflow covers data manipulation, generation of tables and graphics, etc. But UNLIKE many others, rflow empowers the user to handle general issues as they inevitably pop up, as opposed to just teaching a few basic, largely ungeneralizable operations. I’ve criticized the tidyverse in particular for that latter problem, but really no tutorial, including my own, has this key “R in a box” quality.
Deep learning have made dramatic improvements over the last decades. Part of this is attributed to improved methods that allowed training wider and deeper neural networks. This can also be attributed to better hardware, as well as the development of techniques to use this hardware efficiently. All of this leads to neural networks that grow exponentially in size. But is continuing down this path the best avenue for success?
Deep learning models have gotten bigger and bigger. The figure below shows the accuracy of convolutional neural networks (left) and the size and number of parameters used for the Imagenet competition (right). While the accuracy is increasing and reaching impressive levels, the models get both bigger and use more and more resources. In Schwartz et al., 2020, as a result of rewarding more accuracy than efficiency, it is stated that the amount of compute have increased 300k-fold in 6 years which implies environmental costs as well as increasing the barrier to entry in the field.
Mint is a refreshing programming language for the front-end web development. It is developed and maintained by a large community of experienced developers.
Actually... I'm sitting in my hotel room across the street right now, writing this post (which, despite how lame it might sound, sitting at a hotel desk at seven in the morning is turning out to be one of my favorite times to write).
For the first time, I decided to attend this convention alone instead of with a group of friends. I'm not entirely sure why, but getting away for a few days and experiencing something through only my eyes (instead of through the eyes of my companions) felt right.
I guess there's just something centering about being alone with your thoughts sometimes (even if that "alone" means you are surrounded by a few thousand strangers).
Ok, maybe I’m too strict with my way of thinking, because I try to ask myself why I do something before I do it. So, for me to feel good, I try to be distant (not isolated) from social networks.
A new arXiv paper investigates which building blocks of random forests, especially causal forests and model-based forests, make them work for heterogeneous treatment effect estimation, both in randomized trials and observational studies.
A study based on data from 749 cities estimates that compliance with WHO recommendations could prevent more than 3,600 deaths annually from ischaemic heart disease alone
Four and a half years ago now, I rolled out version 2 of HIBP's Pwned Passwords that implemented a really cool k-anonymity model courtesy of the brains at Cloudflare. Later in 2018, I did the same thing with the email address search feature used by Mozilla, 1Password and a handful of other paying subscribers. It works beautifully; it's ridiculously fast, efficient and above all, anonymous.
Others are abandoning their current period trackers and turning to apps like Stardust instead as a result of the company’s strong statement issued in light of the decision to overturn Roe. Stardust said it would implement end-to-end encryption so it would “not be able to hand over any of your period tracking data” to the government, helping to draw in hundreds of thousands of downloads over this weekend ahead of the release of the new, encryption-featured app version slated for release on Wednesday.
In one of his last moves as a senator, Rex Patrick has advanced his battle against the National Archives to release important documents relating to John Howard and Alexander Downer’s undermining of Timor-Leste in the early 2000s. Callum Foote reports on the latest efforts to end the persecution and secret trials of whistleblower Bernard Collaery.
Last month Senator Rex Patrick wrote to the new Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus, asking him to overturn a decision made by the Australian Appeals Tribunal to hold part of the trial and discussion of certain documents, in secret.
The decision was made, according to Dreyfus, by former attorney-general Michaelia Cash, who formed the view that “disclosure of the confidential evidence would be contrary to the public interest because it would prejudice the security, defence or international relations of Australia”.
June 26, 2022Some consumers may consider pressing the brakes on their road trips this summer as gas prices continue to skyrocket. In the United States, gas prices jumped nearly 50 percent year-over-year, driving up energy prices 34.6 percent. The war in Ukraine and supply chain effects have only exacerbated price pressures. These energy price increases, along with spikes in food prices and the shelter index, drove inflation to 8.6 percent in May. And while US inflation has quadrupled over the past two years, it’s risen considerably elsewhere, too, including Greece, Israel, Italy, and Spain. Check out these insights on the trends shaping the energy landscape and bookmark this special collection on inflation to stay up to speed.
As the death toll from the pandemic continued to mount, US corporations enjoyed the widest profit margins in more than 70 years during the second and third quarters of 2021.
US corporate profits before adjustments rose to a record high of $3.14 trillion at a seasonally adjusted annual rate in the third quarter of 2021. After tax and adjustments for inventory, profits rose to a record high $2.74 trillion, according to the most recent figures reported by the US Commerce Department.
"The socialist left now, as during earlier centuries, advocates for an economic system that does not yet exist in any nation. However, the socialist left does so with the knowledge of what happened to those experiments in socialism that turned out to be and still are forms of state capitalism. Hopefully, 21st-century socialism will not need to repeat those experiments."
Russia’s war on Ukraine both reflects and deepens a global split that should remind us of Karl Marx’s famous remark: “No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.” The United Kingdom already lost its particular social order—its empire—while the United States is now losing its. Despite differences, both of these social orders shared a mostly private form of capitalist relations of production (the organization of enterprises centered around private employers and employees). That social order has given way to a different, mostly public form of capitalist relations of production where state officials are major employers. The latter form of capitalism is developing most dramatically in China.
Although this is mostly a tech blog, from time to time I have used this platform to share my political opinion. I don't know if any of my readers really care one way or another, but today I'm going to talk about politics a bit. So if you don't want to hear it, cut loose now because this basically just a politically charged rant.
The basic jist of this post is this: I am done voting for the Democratic party. I swore off voting for the Republican party back in 2004 and since then I have been constantly and increasingly frustrated with the ineptness of the Democratic party. But the word ineptness doesn't really do this situation justice because that's not what the problem is.
No the problem is that the Democratic party is structured to operate purely as a foil to the cancerous regressive Republican party. Therefore every part of the platform, their campaigns and even their entire relationship with voters is basically predicated on the simple idea that they themselves are not Republicans.
So why not a third party? Well our first-past-the-post voting system pretty much makes having a viable third or fourth party impossible. Especially here in America where most of us seem to at least silently concur with the ole Ricky Bobby adage, "If you ain't first, you're last". So ignoring for a moment that the Libertarian and the Green parties are both kind of balls to the wall insane, they don't really have an actual snowball's chance in hell anyway.
Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday on the eve of events to celebrate 25 years since the former British colony returned to Chinese rule and the inauguration of the city's new leader John Lee.
After 9 years of Coalition rule, a Liberal stampede out of Parliament House means political upheaval in the nation's capital and a new guard
The visit of Penny Wong to her home town in Malaysia was a beautiful thing. The affection with which Australia’s Foreign Minister is held by the people of Kota Kinabalu, in Sabah, was apparent.
We witnessed a heartwarming homecoming to match those pilgrimages some US presidents make to Ireland. But why, and especially, why now?
There are certainly issues that can be canvassed on a visit to ”Kota”. It’s on the island of Borneo, a rainforest-rich island that has captured the Western imagination since the orang-utan established the myth of ”the wild man of Borneo”. Three nations occupy this island: Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei.
The biggest topic concerning in Borneo is the environment, an area where Australia is now proudly parading its credentials on the world stage. Deforestation on the world’s third biggest island is an environmental catastrophe. The logging contributes to the smoke haze that blankets south-east Asia with increasing regularity.
An escalating dispute between national Republicans and technology giant Google threatens to bring political heat on the company and could spur significant changes in political email practices.
Driving the news: The Republican National Committee fired the latest shot on Wednesday, when chairwoman Ronna McDaniel claimed in a statement to Axios that Google has "systematically attacked" its digital program.
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The details: The RNC shared internal data showing regular and dramatic increases in the number of its fundraising and voter-activation emails being sent to Gmail recipients' spam folder.
Many current college students have had social media accounts since they were young teens, regularly posting on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook without fear of repercussions.
But posts riddled with profanity or raucous party photos can come back to haunt them once they start looking for a job. According to a 2020 survey from the Harris Poll, a global market research and consulting firm, 71 percent of those who make hiring decisions in the U.S. agreed that looking at social media profiles is an effective way to screen job applicants. Among employers that use social media to vet candidates, 55 percent said they have found content that caused them to turn down an applicant.
Now a new company called Filtari is partnering with institutions to help students clean up their social media profiles before they start the job-search process. Filtari works by using artificial intelligence to scan and identify written posts and photos on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook that an employer might deem inappropriate or harmful.
Reports on Friday that Amazon had asked employees to delete TikTok from their phones spread like wildfire—TikTok’s security woes have been the viral story of the month. Amazon quickly retracted the news—an internal memo had been released in error—but the implication that TikTok, an app installed by hundreds of millions, might be tapping into emails had resonated. That’s where we now find ourselves.
The culture war raged most hotly from the ’70s to the next century’s ’20s. It polarized American society, dividing men from women, rural from urban, religious from secular, Anglo-Americans from more recent immigrant groups. At length, but only after a titanic constitutional struggle, the rural and religious side of the culture imposed its will on the urban and secular side. A decisive victory had been won, or so it seemed.
The culture war I’m talking about is the culture war over alcohol prohibition. From the end of Reconstruction to the First World War, probably more state and local elections turned on that one issue than on any other. The long struggle seemingly culminated in 1919, with the ratification of the Eighteenth Amendment and enactment by Congress of the National Prohibition Act, or the Volstead Act (as it became known). The amendment and the act together outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages in the United States and all its subject territories. Many urban and secular Americans experienced those events with the same feeling of doom as pro-choice Americans may feel today after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Jackson has ascended to the court at a critical time, with both the institution and the country rife with division.
Republicans in Ohio attempt to keep 10 year old girl pregnant with a fetus that was the result of rape, and possibly incest.
After the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision went into effect, Ohio’s 6 week abortion ban law went into effect, with no exceptions for rape and incest.
On the Crapification of Literary Contracts
I don’t want to pretend that freelance writing contracts were ever great, but in the 34 years since I sold my first short story — at 17 — I’ve observed firsthand how manifestly unfair contractual terms have become standard, and worse, non-negotiable.
The 68000 processor in the Amiga and ST is a hybrid 16/32 bit CISC processor; 32bit instruction set, on a 16bit bus. Unlike modern processors, it has no Floating-Point Unit [FPU], so processing numbers with fractional values is slow in comparison to integer based math.
3D graphics calculates a lot of angles/positions that rely on these fractional values, so we need a way to trade mathematical precision for processing speed. Fixed-Point is a decent compromise.
In fixed-point, numbers are stored in standard C types (ints, short and long, etc.) but the content of the variable differs from that of a normal int type. Fixed-point implies a position within the variable where the decimal point would be, and this is kinda arbitrary. For example, a signed 16bit integer normally has the range -32768 to 32767. If we create a fixed-point type of 8.8 – 8 bits for the integer part, 8bits for the fractional part – the integer range is reduced to -128, 127, but we’ve gained 8 bits of fractional precision.
I noticed that web font-sizes on my Android phone often don't look right. Plenty of sites are ok, but plain simple HTML doesn't always work. After digging, mobile browsers have a feature called "Font Boosting" to prevent problems with either tiny fonts or zooming in and srolling left and right. There's some logic in there that does (or doesn't) increase the font size to make text readable without zooming.
Australian scientists have created the world's first-ever quantum computer circuit – one that contains all the essential components found on a classical computer chip but at the quantum scale.
The landmark discovery, published in Nature today, was nine years in the making.
Imagine a more sustainable future, where cellphones, smartwatches, and other wearable devices don’t have to be shelved or discarded for a newer model. Instead, they could be upgraded with the latest sensors and processors that would snap onto a device’s internal chip — like LEGO bricks incorporated into an existing build. Such reconfigurable chipware could keep devices up to date while reducing our electronic waste.
Now MIT engineers have taken a step toward that modular vision with a LEGO-like design for a stackable, reconfigurable artificial intelligence chip.
The design comprises alternating layers of sensing and processing elements, along with light-emitting diodes (LED) that allow for the chip’s layers to communicate optically. Other modular chip designs employ conventional wiring to relay signals between layers. Such intricate connections are difficult if not impossible to sever and rewire, making such stackable designs not reconfigurable.
The MIT design uses light, rather than physical wires, to transmit information through the chip. The chip can therefore be reconfigured, with layers that can be swapped out or stacked on, for instance to add new sensors or updated processors.
Quantum computing hardware specialists at UNSW have built a quantum processor in silicon to simulate an organic molecule with astounding precision.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.