It’s not that I doubt the company’s software development prowess or engineering nous (the stellar success of Pop!_OS with its homegrown embellishments prove they’re capable). It’s more that desktop environments are beastly, sprawling, labyrinthine affairs.
But judging by the progress they’re making thus far, it seems there’s little for me to worry about!
Introduction In today's era of big data, data analytics platforms play an indispensable role in the decision-making process. One such platform that has gained significant popularity over the years is Hue.
The push for free software takes years, maybe even generations. Brent gets the inside story from the Free Software Foundation Europe. Special Guest: Matthias Kirschner.
The KeePassXC password manager application released version 2.7.5 today! Here are the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu / Linux Mint users.
KeePassXC 2.7.5 add a new “Allow Screen Capture” option under “View” menu, though it seems to be for Microsoft Windows only. By enabling this option, allows to temporarily take screenshot of the app window.
history is a command which displays or manipulates the history list. We recommend alternatives to this command.
As one cannot use fwupd on Qubes OS to update firmwares this is a quick How-To for using fwupd on Grml for future me.
- boot into Grml.
- mount /boot/efi to /efi or set OverrideESPMountPoint=/boot/efi/EFI if you mount to the usual path.
- apt install fwupd-amd64-signed udisks2 policykit-1
- fwupdmgr get-devices
- fwupdmgr refresh
- fwupdmgr get-updates
- fwupdmgr update
- reboot into Qubes OS.
Joining video files (back-to-back) losslessly with FFmpeg is a surprisingly cumbersome operation. You can't just, like, write all the inputs on the command line or something; you need to use a special demuxer and then write all the names in a text file and override the security for that file, which is pretty crazy.
As you probably have seen from other people’s blog posts there was the 2023 Plasma Sprint last week. It was generously hosted by TUXEDO Computers in their offices in Augsburg, Germany. Many thanks to TUXEDO for that!
Other people have already well summarized what happend there, so let’s have a look at what I have been doing:
Together with Kai Uwe, Volker, and Ismael I looked at notifications. This includes internal simplifications in KNotifications, API design questions, a proposed V2 for the notification portal API, and a new UI for per-event configuration in the notification settings module.
Together with Marco I looked into some API design topics around the Applet class in plasma-framework, and worked on a proposed new API for applet actions.
The KDE Plasma Sprint 2023 took place this time at TUXEDO's offices. Developers have made headway towards #Plasma6. We asked a few developers for a personal interview - enjoy!
KDE developer/QA manager Nate Graham describes the week-long development sprint for the next major release of Plasma desktop environment. And one big focus was "better default settings" to "improve the UX out of the box."
About Me - I am Groot.
I’m Srirupa Datta, about to finish my undergraduate Electrical Engineering degree at Jadavpur University, India, in June. This year, I got selected for Google Summer of Code and will be working on improving the Bundle Creator in Krita.
My Introduction to Krita…
A descendant of one of the oldest desktop Linuxes around surprises… both by existing at all, as well as by being impressively good.
The newly released Freespire 9.5 is the latest version of the free member of the Linspire family. It's based on Ubuntu 22.04.2, including GNOME 42.5, heavily customised to resemble Windows via a suite of GNOME extensions. Linspire removes Ubuntu's Snap packaging system and replaces it with Flatpak, but has no Flatpaks preinstalled.
AlmaLinux is a community-driven alternative to RHEL and with the 9.2 (codenamed "Turquoise Kodkod") release, it brings an updated toolchain, security improvements, and plenty of other additions to make this an outstanding option for workloads, applications, and services for multiple environments.
AlmaLinux is a server-centric Linux distribution, and 9.2 includes Linux kernel 5.14, GCC 11.3.1, Glibc 2.34, Binutils 2.35.2, Python 3.11, NGINX 1.22, PostgreSQL 15, Git 2.39.1, GDB 10.2, elfutils 0.188, PCP 6.0.1, Grafana 9.0.9, Rust 1.66, Go 1.19.6, OpenSSL 3.0.7, SELinux 3.5, the realmd system role, a SCAP profile, Ansible content for enhanced system checks, an enhanced web console, and tools for improved development and management of containerized deployments.
The recording of the May CentOS Board meeting is now available. Watch the recording Read the minutes The recording has timestamps so you can skip to the parts that interest you.
For anyone that doesn't know him - Caolán has contributed amazing work on the LibreOffice code-base for over two decades, latterly for RedHat.
We will be applying updates and rebooting various servers as well as re-installing some. Services may be up and down in the outage window and package maintainers are advised to avoid submmiting builds.
If you have not already – now is the best time to read through the first part of the event report before getting into the second part here.
Day 2
Wednesday, 22nd March 2023
The team members decided to start a bit late on the second day to ensure that everyone gets enough rest after the adventurous first day. Once the joint breakfast was completed in the hotel restaurant, the members started heading off to the office by 10 in the morning. They were were gracefully served Catalonian snacks by Lenka Segura, Japanese souvenirs by David Kirwan, and German sweets by Julia Bley for the duration of the meeting. Matthew Miller started the second day with his talk about the Fedora Project strategy and how Community Platform Engineering fits into the picture. This talk was followed by the one by Tomas Hrcka about how the Fedora Release Engineering team addresses its responsibilities. The team took a short break after the first couple of sessions, before heading into the next set.
Multipass is a cross-platform, lightweight Ubuntu virtual machine (VIM) manager that runs on Linux, Windows, and macOS. It builds cloud-style Ubuntu VMs, allowing developers
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 787 for the week of May 7 - 13, 2023. The full version of this issue is available here.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 787 for the week of May 7 – 13, 2023.
Linux Lite is a free, easy-to-use, and open-source Linux distribution based on the Ubuntu LTS series of releases. By design, it is a lightweight
Single-board computers (SBCs) have transformed the world of electronics, offering an inexpensive, versatile, and accessible means of creating projects ranging from home automation systems to robots.
Most SBCs are credit card-sized or smaller, fitting a complete computer onto a single board. Unlike microcontroller boards such as the Arduino, which are designed for specific tasks, SBCs like the Raspberry Pi and Orange Pi serve as general-purpose platforms, so they’re capable of running a full operating system and a wide range of applications.
It’s worth noting that there are a variety of formats when it comes to Orange Pi and Raspberry Pi SBCs, like the Orange Pi 5 and the Raspberry Pi 4, among others, all of which offer different functionalities.
Tailwind is a utility-first CSS framework that helps developers create responsive and scalable user interfaces. It is designed to simplify the process of styling HTML elements by providing pre-defined classes that can be easily applied to the markup.
Tailwind's key advantage is its flexibility. It allows developers to create custom
What is Tutti Quanti Shelf?
Tutti Quanti Shelf is a collection of miscellaneous developer-oriented utilities wrapped into one single app, built with Electron.
This desktop application works on macOS, Linux and Windows operating systems.
While tech companies are laying off staff claiming that they are cutting costs because of “economic headwinds” they do not seem that keen to let their open saucers go.
The LinuxCNC project is making headway these days. A lot of patches and issues have seen activity on the project github pages recently. A few weeks ago there was a developer gathering over at the Tormach headquarter in Wisconsin, and now we are planning a new gathering in Norway. If you wonder what LinuxCNC is, lets quote Wikipedia: [...]
Sourceware.org, which has long played host to many important projects, has announced that it has become a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy — a move that has been in the works for some time.
We are happy to share that the RcppSimdJson package has been updated to release 0.1.10.
RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.
LibreOffice's QA (Quality Assurance) community helps to identify and fix bugs in the software. Every week, Ilmari Lauhakangas from The Document Foundation (the non-profit entity behind LibreOffice) live-streams bug triaging sessions, so that others can see how he works on bug reports, and ask him questions.
In the final chapter of the Rust Basics Series, recall the concepts you learned and write a somewhat complex Rust program.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (golang-websocket, kernel, postgresql-11, and thunderbird), Fedora (firefox, kernel, libreswan, libssh, tcpreplay, and thunderbird), SUSE (dcmtk, gradle, libraw, postgresql12, postgresql13, postgresql14, and postgresql15), and Ubuntu (firefox, nova, and thunderbird).
The confidentiality of NHS medical records has been thrown into doubt after a “stalker” hospital doctor accessed and shared highly sensitive information about a woman who had started dating her ex-boyfriend, despite not being involved in her care.
The victim was left in “fear, shock and horror” when she learned that the doctor had used her hospital’s medical records system to look at the woman’s GP records and read – and share – intimate details, known only to a few people, about her and her children.
“I felt violated when I learned that this woman, who I didn’t know, had managed to access on a number of occasions details of my life that I had shared with my GP and only my family and very closest friends. It was about something sensitive involving myself and my children, about a family tragedy,” the woman said.
North Korean hackers have stolen $721 million from Japan since 2017, accounting for 30% of the crypto thefts worldwide. According to a study by a U.K.-based compliance specialist, North Korea employs hacking and ransomware to steal crypto assets, especially in Japan, Vietnam and Hong Kong, the leading Asian crypto hubs.
The Philadelphia Inquirer experienced the most significant disruption to its operations in 27 years due to what the newspaper calls a cyberattack.
The company was working to restore print operations after a cyber incursion that prevented the printing of the newspaper’s Sunday print edition, the Inquirer reported on its website.
CrowStrike discovered a new ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) group — MichaelKors (formerly Qilin) — targeting VMWare ESXi servers since last month.
The VMWare ESXi is a hypervisor that runs and manages virtual machines (VMs) directly on a dedicated host’s hardware. The products associated with the ESXi platform include VMware vSphere Hypervisor, vCenter, ONE Access or Identity Manager and Horizon.
Ransomware actors aim to spend the shortest amount of time possible inside your systems, and that means the encryption they employ is shoddy and often corrupts your data. That in turn means restoration after paying ransoms is often a more expensive chore than just deciding not to pay and working from our own backups.
In April 2023, the class action lawsuit against Illuminate Education was thrown out because the judge in the case determined that the people whose data was impacted by the breach could not show any harm, or any instances of identity theft, from the breach. This decision is both fully in line with past situations where companies have been let off the hook, and completely misrepresents and underestimates the various, different ways people get hurt by data breaches.
To put it in a different way: the judge’s decision shows how, in some cases, things that are defined as legal don’t come close to what is right. The way we define harm is harmful.
Some background on the Illuminate data breach, and what can only be described as an epically inept response stretching across months. The impacts of this breach were first observed in New York City public schools in early January.
Months after agreeing to pay $38.5 million to settle federal charges it violated the False Claims Act by improperly originating and underwriting mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration, Utah-headquartered Academy Mortgage now finds itself in the also-unenviable position of having its sensitive files dumped on the dark web by the AlphV (BlackCat) ransomware group.
Cred-owned startup Happay has reportedly laid off 15% of its workforce. Cred's Kunal Shah acquired the business expense management solutions Happay in 2021. The company has laid off the employees in a restructuring exercise. As reported by The Economic Times, the exact number of impacted employees is not known right now. However, the company has reportedly laid off about 10 to 15% workforce.
The job cuts have impacted employees across product, operations and marketing teams. Happay had a headcount of about 450-500 before the layoffs. "Over the last four to five months, Cred has been cutting costs while actively looking to reduce its overall cash burn… Now this exercise has reached people centers, with the focus first on the headcount of acquired entities," mentioned the report.
On January 26, 2023, Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., who sought to invalidate Amgen Inc.’s Japanese patent (JP5705288) covering an isolated monoclonal antibody used as cholesterol medication, won an appeal case in the IP High Court (Case No. 2021 (Gyo-ke) 10093).
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has proposed a rule to create a separate design patent practitioner bar. The USPTO is publishing this proposal in the Federal Register on May 16, 2023 (link below to the prepub).
As it stands today, there is a single patent bar that applies to those practicing in patent matters before the USPTO, covering utility, plant, and design patents.€ And, even though design patents cover ornamentally, the current rules require that the€ design patent practitioner be an engineer or scientist.
In spite of robust amicus backing, including from the US Solicitor General, the Supreme Court has declined to review two pending patent-eligibility petitions: Interactive Wearables v. Polar and Tropp v. Travel Sentry. These cases contended that the Alice/Mayo framework produced (1) instability and unpredictability in the law; (2) facilitated non-evidence based judgments by district courts; and (3) prohibited patenting of subject matter that has traditionally been eligible for patents.