08.26.19

Contents

• GNU/Linux
  • Distributions
  • Devices/Embedded
• Free Software/Open Source
• Leftovers

GNU/Linux

• 5 ways Linux changed our lives and we didn’t even know it

  Aug. 25, 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish student named Linus Torvalds announced to the internet that he was working on a project he said was “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional.” Less than one month later, Torvalds released the Linux kernel to the public. The world hasn’t been the same since.

  From how we interact with one another on a daily basis to preparing for the future of the human race, Linux is integral to our technological development. To commemorate the nearly 30 years that Linux has been available, we compiled a shortlist of ways Linux has fundamentally changed our lives.

• Samsung DeX is darn close to the “Chrome Phone” I’d like to see – About Chromebooks

  One of the touted features of the Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus (as well as other Galaxy S and Note phones since 2017) is Samsung Dex. If you’re not familiar with it, DeX stands for “Desktop Experience”. Essentially, when connecting your DeX supported phone to an external monitor, the DeX environment appears. It’s essentially a custom Android desktop experience with resizable windows.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Simon Steinbeiß of Xfce, Dalton Durst of UBports, KDE Apps 19.08, Huawei – Destination Linux 135

  • Open Source Security Podcast: Episode 158 – The mess that we call credit agencies in the US

    Josh and Kurt talk about the current state of credit security freezes in the US. We recount a thrilling tale of all the things Josh had to do to get new Internet service. It was all quite silly really.

• Kernel Space

  • Happy birthday to the Linux kernel: What’s your favorite release?

    Let’s take a trip back to August 1991, when history was in the making. The tech world faced many pivotal moments that continue to impact us today. An intriguing project called the World Wide Web was announced by Tim Berners-Lee and the first website was launched. Super Nintendo was released in the United States and a new chapter of gaming began for kids of all ages. At the University of Helsinki, a student named Linus Torvalds asked his peers for feedback on a new free operating system he had been developing as a hobby. It was then that the Linux kernel was born.

    Today, we can browse more than 1.5 billion websites, play with five additional Nintendo game consoles on our televisions, and maintain six longterm Linux kernels. Here’s what some of our writers had to say about their favorite Linux kernel release.

    “The one that introduced modules (was it 1.2?). It was a big step towards a successful Linux future.” —Milan Zamazal

    “2.6.9 as it was the version at the time when I joined Red Hat in 2006 (in RHEL4). But also a slightly bigger love for 2.6.18 (RHEL5) as it was the one which was deployed at massive scale / for mission critical workloads at all our largest customers (Telco, FSI). It also brought one of our biggest techno change with virtualization (Xen then KVM).” —Herve Lemaitre

  • Linux 5.3-rc6

    Hello everybody out there using Linux -
    
    Iâm doing a (free) operating system (more than just a hobby) for 486
    AT clones and a lot of other hardware. This has been brewing for the
    last 28 years, and is still not done. Iâd like any feedback on any
    bugs introduced this release (or older bugs too, for that matter).
    
    Linus
    
    PS. Yes, it's 28 years today since that original announcement
    paraphrased above. The shortlog below is obviously just for the last
    week, though.
    
    Nothing particularly surprising from the last week - most of the patch
    is drivers, with networking and rdma being most noticeable, but
    there's various other things in there too. I wish it was smaller than
    it is, but it's not _huge_.
    
    Bit if things don't calm down during the upcoming week, though, I may
    have to do an rc8.

  • Linux 5.3-rc6 Released – Marking Linux’s 28th Birthday

    Linus Torvalds today released the sixth weekly test release of the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel. It also happens to be 28 years to the day since Linus Torvalds announced the original Linux kernel.

  • Graphics Stack

    • Vulkan 1.1.121 Brings AMD Device Coherent Memory Extension

      Vulkan 1.1.121 is the newest Sunday morning update to the Vulkan graphics/compute API. In addition to various bug fixes/clarifications to the documentation, there is a new Vulkan extension around device coherent memory support from AMD.

    • Open-Source GPU Drivers For Embedded Have Been Improving But RE’ing Take A While

      Robert Foss of Collabora was back at the Linux Foundation’s Open-Source Summit this week to present the latest state of open-source graphics drivers in the embedded space.

      As all of you should know who follow Phoronix regularly, the embedded open-source graphics drivers have been improving a lot with especially Broadcom VC4/V3D, Freedreno for Qualcomm Adreno, and more recently the likes of Panfrost for newer Arm Mali hardware along with other reverse-engineered driver options like Etnaviv for Vivante graphics IP.

• Applications

  • Bookworm is a light-weight eBook reader for Linux

    While Calibre has a built-in reader, and is the absolute best when it comes to managing and converting eBooks, some people may prefer an alternative when it comes to reading ebooks. Bookworm, a lightweight ebook reader for Linux, offers a minimalist experience.

    Developed for Elementary OS, Bookworm is also available for other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu or OpenSUSE. Options to install from source or flatpack are provided as well.

  • Linux Candy: ASCIIQuarium – embrace marine life from the terminal

    Who loves eye candy? Don’t be shy — you can raise both hands!!

    Linux Candy is a new series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We’re only going to feature open-source software in this series.

    I’m not going to harp on about the tired proverb “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. But there’s a certain element of truth here. If you spend all day coding neural networks, mastering a new programming language, sit in meetings feeling bored witless, you’ll need some relief at the end of the day. And what better way by making your desktop environment a bit more memorable.

  • Instructionals/Technical

    • Create USB Multiboot GNU/Linux with GLIM

    • Rsync Command Line to Copy ISO Image from External HDD to USB Stick

    • How To Install Docker on Ubuntu 18.04 & Debian 10

    • Introduction to the Linux chown command

      Every file and directory on a Linux system is owned by someone, and the owner has complete control to change or delete the files they own. In addition to having an owning user, a file has an owning group.

      You can view the ownership of a file using the ls -l command:

      The third and fourth columns of the output are the owning user and group, which together are referred to as ownership. Both are pablo for the ISO file above.

      The ownership settings, set by the chmod command, control who is allowed to perform read, write, or execute actions. You can change ownership (one or both) with the chown command.

      Read more

• Desktop Environments/WMs

  • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

    • KDE Usability & Productivity: Week 85

      I’m not dead yet! KDE’s new goal proposals have been announced, and the voting has started. But in the meantime, the Usability & Productivity initiative continues, and we’re onto week 85!

    • KDE Ending Out August With Various Fixes & Other Enhancements

      As the end of the summer nears and KDE’s Akademy conference approaches, development is busy as ever on this open-source desktop environment.

      Some of the KDE development highlights for the past week include:

      - The Kate text editor’s search-and-replace regular expression matching now has an integrated regex builder/helper.

    • KSyntaxHighlighting – Over 300 Highlightings…

      I worked yesterday again on the Perl script that creates the highlighting update site used by e.g. Qt Creator.

      I thought it would be perhaps a good idea to create some simple human readable overview with all existing highlighting definitions, too.

  • GNOME Desktop/GTK

    • A 2019 documentation hackfest update

      The GNOME Documentation Team last met for a documentation hackfest back in 2015, following the Open Help Conference hosted by Shaun. After my not so successful attempt at organizing a meetup for both upstream and downstream (Ubuntu) teams to hack on GNOME docs some time in 2017, we finally succeeded in meeting in the upstream format for the West Coast Hackfest from 18th through 21st July 2019. That event organization was kicked off by the folks from the GNOME Engagement team and Foundation staff and gave us an opportunity to hold a co-located event with Documentation, Engagement and the GTK team sharing the venue and allowing for more focused cross-team collaboration.

• Distributions

  • Reviews

    • Review: Drauger OS 7.4.1, and EndeavourOS 2019.07.15

      This week I once again turned to the DistroWatch waiting list to sample new items I had not tried before. Near the top of the list of projects waiting for evaluation was Drauger OS, a Linux distribution based on Xubuntu. The project uses the Xfce desktop environment and is built to run on 64-bit (x86_64) computers. The project places a strong focus on offering easy access to games and, correspondingly, good desktop performance. To this end, Drauger ships with Steam installed by default, along with WINE and PlayOnLinux. Drauger OS also comes with the modified, low-latency, Liquorix Linux kernel, which is based off the ZEN kernel.

      According to the project’s documentation, the distribution can run on UEFI-enabled machines, but booting in legacy BIOS mode is recommended. The documentation also mentions that in place of the regular Xubuntu installer, Drauger uses the System Install utility to copy the operating system from the live media to the local hard drive.

      While most of the project’s listed features are technical in nature, one of the main talking points goes a bit over the top when describing Drauger’s security advantage: “Drauger OS is far more secure than the leading desktop operating system. This means that you can game without fear of trolls hacking into your computer, getting a virus, or losing your data.” Of course Linux systems can be hacked and certainly may lose data due to various bugs, security breaches or hardware failure. The developers’ claims strike me as being optimistic, at best.

      Drauger is available in one edition and the distribution’s ISO file is a 3.2GB download. Booting from the disc brings up a menu asking if we would like to run a live desktop session or launch a system installer. The live option shows the Ubuntu boot screen, which identifies the distribution as “Ubuntu 7.4.1″. The system then presents us with a graphical login screen where we are given the choice of using a “user” account or a “guest” account. In either case we can sign in without a password.

      Drauger’s live mode uses the Xfce 4.12 desktop. Once the desktop loads, a welcome screen appears, showing buttons that open links to the distribution’s website, launch a tool for installing third-party drivers, open a readme file, and link to some on-line resources. There is also a tutorial button which opens a series of pop-up messages about the desktop elements. We can only move forward through the tutorial tips one at a time, and cannot go back to previous pop-ups. The Additional Drivers button opens the Ubuntu software sources, updates and driver utility. On-line resources and documentation are opened in the Firefox web browser. The welcome window is pretty straight forward to use and navigate and I like that we are put in touch with both on-line and off-line resources.

  • Debian Family

    • Farewell, GSoC o/

      In the span of last 3 months, I worked on creating a package of Loomio for the Debian repositories. Loomio is a big, complex software to package.
      With over 484 directories and 4607 files as a part of it’s code base, it has a huge number of Ruby and Node dependencies, along with a couple of fonts that it uses.
      Out of which, around 72 ruby gems, 58 node modules, 3 fonts, and other 27 packages which were the reverse dependencies needed work. Both, including packaged and unpackaged libraries.

    • Molly de Blanc: Free software activities (July 2019)

      Debian AH rebranded to the Debian Community Team (CT) after our sprint back in June. We had meetings, both following up on things that happened at the meeting and covering typical business. We created a draft of a new team mission statement, which was premiered, so to speak, at DebConf19.

• Devices/Embedded

  • Android

    • 7 tips to improve iPhone and Android performance

    • Huawei will stick with Android for its next smartphone, confirms HarmonyOS watch

    • Huawei Mate 30 will stay on Android, but a Harmony OS smartwatch is on the way

    • HarmonyOS v/s Android v/s iOS: What are the differences?

    • Hackers have at least 193 ways to take ‘control’ of your Android phone

    • How to record calls on your Android phone

    • This week in Android: Android’s big rebrand and a tour of Huawei’s $1.5b HQ

    • Week 34 in review: Redmi 8 and Redmi Note 8 Pro leaks aplenty, Android 10 official

    • OnePlus TV specs and Android TV ambition revealed

    • Goodbye Android Desserts, You Were An Island Of Fun In An Ocean Of Corporate Blandness

    • 10 best educational Android games for kids!

    • Android 10 release date: List of smartphones which will get the update first

    • Android Q quits sweet naming tradition. Is now Android 10

    • Shiny new toys take backseat in Android Studio 3.5 for now as ’600 bugs’ squished

    • Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus review: A powerhouse productivity machine

    • Samsung Galaxy Note 10 Plus review: The most premium Android phone for your money

    • How to Add Emergency Information to your Android smartphone

    • It looks like Huawei is going to cling to Android for as long as possible after being blacklisted in the US

    • Vision brings Android TV

    • Chrome will be launching a new feature to search with Google Lens for Android users

    • Android Studio 3.5 arrives with better performance and full Chrome OS support

    • Android 10? Google is trying to grow up and it’s really, really hard

    • Android Gets Part of Focus Mode for Digital Wellbeing

    • Harmony OS ‘will fail’ if it is an Android alternative, says Huawei exec

    • Nokia outlines its Android 10 upgrade roadmap

    • Nokia will roll out Android 10 ‘starting Q4 2019′

    • How to Play on Android | Game Rant

    • Cafe Bazaar, the Largest Android Marketplace in the Middle East Seeks Cooperation with Chinese Game Developers

    • Xiaomi to offer ‘loans’, new phones from Motorola, Realme, big ‘change’ for Android users and more

Free Software/Open Source

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • TenFourFox FPR16b1 available

      FPR16 got delayed because I really tried very hard to make some progress on our two biggest JavaScript deficiencies, the infamous issues 521 (async and await) and 533 (this is undefined). Unfortunately, not only did I make little progress on either, but the speculative fix I tried for issue 533 turned out to be the patch that unsettled the optimized build and had to be backed out. There is some partial work on issue 521, though, including a fully working parser patch. The problem is plumbing this into the browser runtime which is ripe for all kinds of regressions and is not currently implemented (instead, for compatibility, async functions get turned into a bytecode of null throw null return, essentially making any call to an async function throw an exception because it wouldn’t have worked in the first place).

      This wouldn’t seem very useful except that effectively what the whole shebang does is convert a compile-time error into a runtime warning, such that other functions that previously might not have been able to load because of the error can now be parsed and hopefully run. With luck this should improve the functionality of sites using these functions even if everything still doesn’t fully work, as a down payment hopefully on a future implementation. It may not be technically possible but it’s a start.

• BSD

  • DragonFlyBSD Pulls In AMD Radeon Graphics Code From Linux The 4.7 Kernel

    It was just last month that DragonFlyBSD pulled in Radeon’s Linux 4.4 kernel driver code as an upgrade from the Linux 3.19 era code they had been using for their open-source AMD graphics support. This week that’s now up to a Linux 4.7 era port.

    François Tigeot who continues doing amazing work on pulling in updates to DragonFlyBSD’s graphics driver now upgraded the Radeon DRM code to match that of what is found in the upstream Linux 4.7.10 kernel.

  • FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report

    We also provide some up to date information about the status of our IRC channels

  • FreeBSD In Q2’2019 Saw Updated Graphics Drivers, Continued Linux Compatibility Layer

    The FreeBSD project has published their Q2’2019 summary that outlines the various accomplishments for this open-source operating system project over the past quarter.

• FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

  • GNU Guile 2.9.4 (beta) released

    We are delighted to announce GNU Guile 2.9.4, the fourth beta release in preparation for the upcoming 3.0 stable series. See the release announcement for full details and a download link.

    This release enables inlining of references to top-level definitions within a compilation unit, speeding up some programs by impressive amounts. It also improves compilation of floating-point routines like sin, implements the Ghuloum/Dybvig “Fixing Letrec (reloaded)” algorithm, and allows mixed definitions and expressions within lexical contours, as is the case at the top level. Try it out, it’s good times!

    GNU Guile 2.9.4 is a beta release, and as such offers no API or ABI stability guarantees. Users needing a stable Guile are advised to stay on the stable 2.2 series.

    Experience reports with GNU Guile 2.9.4, good or bad, are very welcome; send them to guile-devel@gnu.org. If you know you found a bug, please do send a note to bug-guile@gnu.org. Happy hacking!

Leftovers

• Security

  • VMware Is Exploring Reducing Meltdown/PTI Overhead With Deferred Flushes

    VMware engineer Nadav Amit who previously pursued “Optpolines” and other possible performance optimizations in light of Spectre / Meltdown vulnerabilities is now proposing patches for deferring PTI flushes to help with addressing the performance overhead caused by Meltdown.

    Kernel page table isolation (PTI) for mitigating Meltdown caused a sizable hit in affected workloads while now Nadav is hoping that improving the behavior around flushes could help in offsetting some of that slowdown.

• Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

  • Amazon wildfires: Full scale of rainforest devastation is impossible to tell

    It was only after the wrath of world leaders was unleashed on Friday that the Brazilian president responded with meaningful action.

    Initially, Jair Bolsonaro denied the very existence of the fires – and since then, Brazilians have listened to days of arguments about who had started them.

    Now President Jair Bolsonaro has authorised the mobilisation of 43,000 troops to try and put them out.

• Privacy/Surveillance

  • Best Email Services For Privacy Concerned People

    Email services like Gmail, Outlook, and a couple of other email service providers are quite popular. Well, they’re definitely secure in a way – but not necessarily private (i.e they do not respect your privacy with utmost care).

    Maybe, you want to share something confidential and you want it to be well-protected. Or, maybe, you just want to talk about Area 51? (shh, CIA wants to know your location!) Or you just don’t want to the service providers to read your emails to serve you ads.

    No matter what. If you are concerned about the privacy and security of your email conversation and want them to be as private as possible – this article shall help you find the best email services for the job.