Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 2/4/2020: ProtonMail Bridge for Linux, GTK 3.98.2 and Red Hat DNF 4.2.21



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • What MacBook? This Manjaro Linux Laptop Promises the Best User Experience

        If you’re in the market for a Linux laptop, the folks over at Manjaro Linux and TUXEDO Computers have some big news for you.

        The two companies joined forces for the creation of a custom version of the InfinityBook called InfinityBook Manjaro.

        As its name suggests, the InfinityBook Manjaro is an upgraded version of the standard model that runs Manjaro Linux and promises what the two companies describe as “the best user experience.”

        “TUXEDO Computers provides technical support for the InfinityBook Manjaro, the team of Manjaro Linux is the right contact for software related questions. Together, they have conducted extensive hardware optimization tests and have adapted software packages and drivers to increase battery life,” the two companies explain in a joint press release (embedded below).

    • Server

      • ZFS Tuning for HPC

        If you manage storage servers, chances are you are already aware of ZFS and some of the features and functions it boasts. In short, ZFS is a combined all-purpose filesystem and volume manager that simplifies data storage management while offering some advanced features, including drive pooling with software RAID support, file snapshots, in-line data compression, data deduplication, built-in data integrity, advanced caching (to DRAM and SSD), and more.

        ZFS is licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), a weak copyleft license based on the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Although open source, ZFS and anything else under the CDDL was, and supposedly still is, incompatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL). This hasn’t stopped ZFS enthusiasts from porting it over to the Linux kernel, where it remains a side project under the dominion of the ZFS on Linux (ZoL) project.

      • From Web Scale to Edge Scale: Rancher 2.4 Supports 2,000 Clusters on its Way to 1 Million

        Rancher 2.4 is here – with new under-the-hood changes that pave the way to supporting up to 1 million clusters. That’s probably the most exciting capability in the new version. But you might ask: why would anyone want to run thousands of Kubernetes clusters – let alone tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands or more? At Rancher Labs, we believe the future of Kubernetes is multi-cluster and fully heterogeneous. This means ‘breaking the monolith’ into many clusters and running the best Kubernetes distribution for each environment and use case.

      • QEMU 5.0-rc1 Released For Linux Virtualization With The Stable Update Coming This Month

        QEMU 5.0-rc1 was released on Tuesday as the latest development release in the path to QEMU 5.0.0 expected to be achieved later this month.

      • New 4.0 LTS releases for LXD, LXC and LXCFS
        Hello,
        
        

        The LXD, LXC and LXCFS teams are very proud to announce their 4.0 LTS releases!

        LTS versions of all 3 projects are released every 2 years, starting 6 years ago. Those LTS versions benefit from 5 years of security and bugfix support from upstream and are ideal for production environments.

        # LXD LXD is our system container and virtual machine manager. It's a Go application based on LXC and QEMU. It can run several thousand containers on a single machine, mix in some virtual machines, offers a simple REST API and can be easily clustered to handle large scale deployments.

        It takes seconds to setup on a laptop or a cloud instance, can run just about any Linux distribution and supports a variety of resource limits and device passthrough. It's used as the basis for Linux applications on Chromebooks and is behind Travis-CI's recent Arm, IBM Power and IBM Z testing capability.

      • Building a Three-Node Kubernetes Cluster | Quick Guide

        There are many ways to build a Kubernetes cluster. One of them is using a tool called kubeadm. Kubeadm is the official tool for “first-paths” when creating your first Kubernetes cluster. With the ease of getting up and running, I thought I would put together this quick guide to installing a Kubernetes cluster using kubeadm!

      • Kubernetes Topology Manager Moves to Beta - Align Up!

        This blog post describes the TopologyManager, a beta feature of Kubernetes in release 1.18. The TopologyManager feature enables NUMA alignment of CPUs and peripheral devices (such as SR-IOV VFs and GPUs), allowing your workload to run in an environment optimized for low-latency.

        Prior to the introduction of the TopologyManager, the CPU and Device Manager would make resource allocation decisions independent of each other. This could result in undesirable allocations on multi-socket systems, causing degraded performance on latency critical applications. With the introduction of the TopologyManager, we now have a way to avoid this.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • FLOSS Weekly 572: f-droid

        F-Droid is an installable catalog of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) applications for the Android platform. F-Droid is also a whole FOSS "app store kit", providing all the tools needed to set up and run an app store. It also includes complete build and release tools for managing the process of turning app source code into published builds.

      • Pandemic Edition

        Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin, Petros Koutoupis, and Shawn Powers about the new realities we're facing as a result of COVID-19.

      • 2020-04-01 | Linux Headlines

        Canonical and MariaDB both enter the managed apps market, the WordPress 5.4 release expands its block-based editor, and Mozilla partners with another online monetization company while putting up cash in the fight against COVID-19.

    • Kernel Space

      • Linux 5.6.1
        I'm announcing the release of the 5.6.1 kernel.

        All users of the 5.6 kernel series must upgrade.

        The updated 5.6.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.6.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...

      • Linux 5.5.14
      • Linux 5.4.29
      • Linux Lite Users Are the First to Install Linux Kernel 5.6

        Once again, Linux Lite users are among the first to install the latest Linux kernel series. In this case, Linux kernel 5.6, which was announced on March 29th by Linus Torvalds.

        Linux kernel 5.6 is the most advanced kernel series available to date and the first to ship with the powerful and secure WireGuard VPN solution built-in.

        Of course, WireGuard support isn’t the only feature of the Linux 5.6 kernel series, which also comes with USB4 support, a new CPU idle cooling thermal driver, AMD Pollock support, a new Zonefs file system for zoned block devices, and much more.

      • Linux 5.6 Gets First Point Release, It’s Now Ready for Mass Adoption
      • Linux 5.7 Gets A Unified/User-Space-Access-Intended Accelerator Framework

        The Linux 5.7 crypto subsystem updates include new drivers.

        Linux 5.7 is progressing through its two-week merge window and while only a quarter of the way through, it's certainly seeing a number of interesting and new drivers.

        The crypto subsystem is introducing the UACCE driver, which was worked on by Linaro and HiSilicon. UACCE stands for the "Unified/User-space-access-intended Accelerator Framework." UACCE was described in its patch series as providing "Shared Virtual Addressing (SVA) between accelerators and processes. So accelerator can access any data structure of the main CPU. This differs from the data sharing between CPU and I/O device, which share only data content rather than address. Since unified address, hardware and user space of process can share the same virtual address in the communication."

      • Linux kernel 5.6.0 iwlwifi bug

        Quick note that the Linux kernel 5.6.0 has an iwlwifi bug that will prevent network connectivity. [1]

        A patch is out but did not make 5.6.0. This patch IS included in gentoo-sources-5.6.0. It will be in vanilla-sources 5.6.1 once upstream releases a new version.

      • Graphics Stack

        • Linaro Tech Days: Wayland, Weston & Open Source GPU drivers

          This week, Daniel Stone and Tomeu Vizoso will be taking part in Linaro Tech Days, a series of technical sessions presented live online via Zoom webinar and streamed on YouTube. These sessions are free to attend and open to the public, however registration is recommended to view full session details, joining instructions, and more.

        • Mesa Developers Discussing Again Whether To Fork Or Drop Non-Gallium3D Drivers

          Back in December was a developer discussion over dropping or forking non-Gallium3D drivers. Since then the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver has successfully become the default OpenGL driver for Broadwell/Gen8 and newer while the non-Gallium3D drivers continue to just face bit rot. The discussion over dropping/forking non-Gallium3D Mesa drivers has been reignited.

          This mailing list thread is active again with discussions over getting rid of the Mesa "classic" drivers to allow better focusing on the modern Gallium3D drivers and Mesa's Vulkan drivers. Eliminating the classic drivers avoids the associated maintenance burden and also allows simplifying/improving the modern drivers without risking breakage/regressions and other headaches with the old drivers.

    • Applications

      • Chafa 1.4.0: Now with sixels

        April 1st seems like as good a time as any for a new Chafa release — though note that Chafa is no joke. At least not anymore, what with the extremely enterprise-ready sixel pipeline and all.

        [...]

        The most complete existing implementation is probably Hayaki Saito’s libsixel, but I chose to write one from scratch for Chafa, since sixel output is remarkably intensive computationally, and I wanted to employ a combination of advanced techniques (parallelism, quantization using a PCA approach, SIMD scaling) and corner-cutting that wouldn’t have been appropriate in that library. This gets me fast animation playback and makes it easier to phase out the ImageMagick dependency in the long term.

        There are at least two widely available virtual terminals that support sixels: One is XTerm (when compiled with --enable-sixel), and the other is mlterm. Unfortunately, I don’t think either is widely used compared to distribution defaults like GNOME Terminal and Konsole, so here’s hoping for more mainstream support for this feature.

      • Butterfly Builder, a tool to compile PHP

        Butterfly Builder is a tool written in BASH that allows to compile PHP from the source code, Butterfly Builder (before pbt) is the evolution of the php-build.sh script allowing greater flexibility and customization in the PHP compilation / installation process.

      • PAM testing using pam_wrapper and dbusmock

        On the road to libfprint and fprintd 2.0, we've been fixing some long-standing bugs, including one that required porting our PAM module from dbus-glib to sd-bus, systemd's D-Bus library implementation.

        As you can imagine, I have confidence in my ability to write bug-free code at the first attempt, but the foresight to know that this code will be buggy if it's not tested (and to know there's probably a bug in the tests if they run successfully the first time around). So we will have to test that PAM module, thoroughly, before and after the port.

      • Get Unsplash Wallpapers on Linux with Fondo Wallpaper App

        Some people change wallpapers on their desktops, phones or other devices more frequently than they change clothes. Finding new wallpapers on the internet is not that difficult. However, you do start to see the same images over and over the more you look. And then it starts to get a little difficult. That’s when many people flock over to Unsplash. Unsplash is a royalty-free photography site, not remotely aimed at providing wallpapers. However, it is a very popular source of wallpapers for many users. Fondo wallpaper app is a new app for Linux that makes it much easier to find and apply wallpapers from Unsplash.

      • Easily Load, Unload And Blacklist Kernel Modules With kmon (TUI)

        kmon is a new command line kernel manager and activity monitor. It can be used to load, unload and blacklist kernel modules, as well as show module information. The tool also shows kernel activities (hardware logs, etc.) in real time.

        This command line tool is written in Rust, and it uses a text-based user interface (TUI) thanks to the tui-rs and termion libraries.

      • Fre:ac Audio Converter 1.1 Released with Dark Mode Support

        Fre:ac audio converter 1.1 was released a few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 18.04 and higher.

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Privacy Tools

        • 3 Zoom Alternatives to Maintain Your Privacy

          Things just keep getting worse for Zoom, with multiple privacy violations and security issues found within its service. To help our readers I’ve found three Zoom alternatives to try. It’s important to mention that I haven’t used any of these myself, but I want to spread awareness of these services. All of these are available on multiple platforms.

          [...]

          Linphone is a VoIP service geared more towards one-on-one communication, but it does offer audio conference calls. It gives you voice, video, and text chats, using open telecom standards (SIP, RTP). It’s open source and uses end-to-end encryption.

        • ProtonMail launches Bridge for Linux

          We are excited to announce that starting today, you can use Bridge to connect your ProtonMail account with your desktop email app on the Linux operating system. ProtonMail Bridge is a desktop app available to all paying subscribers that integrates ProtonMail’s strong privacy and security features, such as zero-access encryption and end-to-end encryption, with your email client. Bridge implements IMAP/SMTP protocols and is compatible with any email client which follows this standard. The Linux version we are launching today includes special optimizations for Thunderbird. Since releasing Bridge for Linux in beta, we have collected valuable feedback from our community and improved the speed and performance. Linux users now have access to all the convenience provided by an email client, including full-text search, offline editing, and the ability to export and back up emails from your ProtonMail account.

    • Games

      • It's surprisingly easy to switch a gaming PC to Linux today

        Talking to PC gamers about Linux is always entertaining, because everyone who knows even a little bit about Linux has a different impression. For some it's that other operating system they've vaguely heard of, and they have about as much interest in it as I have in cars (read: not much). For others it's a critical part of their work or infrastructure, or it's the thing their techy friend somehow always manages to bring up in unrelated conversations (ugh, you know how to do everything on the command line, we get it).

        Last year I decided to become one of the latter and go all-in on desktop Linux. It opened my eyes to how much Linux has changed over the years, and how outdated the idea of Linux as an OS exclusively for tech nerds really is. Not only was the switch relatively painless, but I'm not missing out on much, either—not even gaming.

        Here's what it's like switching from Windows to Linux today, from hardware to software to gaming.

      • Unique competitive platformer 'Jumpala' adds new stages and it's a huge amount of fun

        Jumpala is a very unique competitive platform covered here on GOL recently and I've fallen a little in love with the idea. It's challenging and a lot of fun to play with others.

        With a surprising twist on the whole idea of platforming, you're not running and jumping or doing much fighting. Instead, you're hopping around tiny platforms to turn them your colour and score points when they fall off the screen. It really does get surprisingly intense, especially if you've been frozen or you take a wrong turn and the platforms don't come down in your favour and you get knocked off losing valuable hopping time.

      • NVIDIA have a new Vulkan Beta Driver out for Linux - helping DOOM Eternal on Steam Play

        NVIDIA continue to fix up and improve their Linux drivers, with a brand new Vulkan Beta Driver available today.

        This is the testing area where NVIDIA put in new features, add in new Vulkan API support like the provisional vendor-neutral Ray Tracing that went in recently and more that eventually make their way into their normal drivers.

      • If you want more gore in the GZDoom and Zandronum engines try the 'Bolognese Gore Mod'

        The Bolognese Gore Mod is another creation by Brutal Doom’s developer, and it’s advertised as a gore enhancement mod for the GZDoom and Zandronum engines. However, apart from making the combat more violent, it also states that "makes enemies smarter and harder, makes gun louder and beefier, and adds epic new boss battles."

      • Prepare your space legs for X4: Split Vendetta and the massive 3.0 free update

        Egosoft continue to polish up their ridiculously massive, incredibly ambitious and rather good looking space sim with the release of X4: Split Vendetta and the massive 3.0 free update.

        For everyone in the free update there's new storyline, new mission types, French voice-over, new standalone tutorials, new shops, a configurable alert system, new weapons, improved graphics and a huge amount more. Meanwhile X4: Split Vendetta, the paid DLC, adds in a massive expansion to the universe amongst other things like the two new Split family clans.

      • Save money, buy awesome games and support charity in a big Paradox Interactive sale

        Here's another excuse for you to support charity and get some new games, if the Humble Conquer COVID-19 Bundle wasn't enough for you. Paradox Interactive are now running their own big charity sale.

        Lasting until 5PM UTC on April 3, with all the funds going to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. During this time some of their popular titles are heavily discounted, helping you to stay home and keep everyone around you safe. Nice to see even more developers get in on this and come together.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • GTK 3.98.2

          When we released 3.98.0, we promised more frequent snapshots, as the remaining GTK 4 features are landing. Here we are a few weeks later, and 3.98.1 and 3.98.2 snapshots have quietly made it out.

        • GTK 3.98.2 Released As Another Step Towards GTK4

          GTK 3.98.2 is out as the latest development snapshot in the road to the overdue but much anticipated GTK 4.0.

          This latest GTK4 development release finishes their re-implementation of GtkPopovers, splitting up of the GdkSurface API, new infrastructure around keyboard shortcuts using event controllers, new Pango features exposed by GtkTextTag, and finishing up drag-and-drop refactoring. GTK 3.98.2 has also seen various clean-ups and fixes to the tool-kit's codebase.

    • Distributions

      • Screenshots/Screencasts

      • SUSE/OpenSUSE

        • Join Us for SUSECON Digital on Wednesday, May 20

          I am thrilled to share that SUSECON Digital will launch on Wednesday, March 20! Whether you are tuning in from your mobile device or on your computer, SUSCON Digital will help you Be the Difference by ensuring you get the tools, skills, and insights you need to simplify, modernize, and accelerate your business – for free! You can register now.

      • IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

        • World Backup Day: A plan of action

          World Backup Day reminds us all of just how important backups are. You don't get how important they are, perhaps, until you've experienced an outage that you can't recover from by any troubleshooting method. Backups are a pain but they are a necessary evil and can save you when things go bad. And things always go bad. This article helps you make a plan.

        • Running an event-driven health management business process through a few scenarios: Part 1

          In the previous series of articles, Designing an event-driven business process at scale: A health management example (which you need to read to fully understand this one), you designed and implemented an event-driven scalable business process for the population health management use case. Now, you will run this process through a few scenarios.

        • Getting to open hybrid cloud

          So, you’ve read our e-book and are convinced that adopting an open hybrid cloud Platform is a key part of digitally transforming. Great! Now how do you get your applications and associated infrastructure there?

          There are many aspects that should be considered when digitally transforming and adopting an open hybrid cloud including people, culture, process, and technology. While these are all important, in this post we will focus on process and technology.

          A common way of speaking about migrating or modernizing workloads to the cloud was popularized in 2016 by Amazon Web Services in their post, "6 Strategies for Migration Applications to the Cloud." We will use the categorization popularized in that article to explore how Red Hat is making it quicker and easier to move your applications and their associated infrastructure to the open hybrid cloud.

        • Command and control: The Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 Dashboard changes the game

          Ease of use was a key development theme for Red Hat Ceph Storage 4. In our last post, we covered the role that the new install UI plays in enabling administrators to deploy Ceph Storage 4 in a simple and guided manner, without prior Ceph expertise.

          Simplifying installation is only the first step—the second step is simplifying day-to-day management. To meet this challenge, Ceph Storage 4 introduces a new graphical user interface called the Dashboard.

        • Red Hat DNF 4.2.21 Package Manager Released Today!

          DNF 4.2.21 Released Today: DNF is otherwise named as Dandified YUM Package Manager. DNF is basically developed by Red Hat for RPM based distributions. The team Red Hat developers announced the latest version of DNF 4.2.21 has been released. They promised that the new version may have many new essential bugs fixes and software tweaks.

        • Three ways our hybrid cloud architecture makes it easy to add AI to fulfillment
        • Gain transparency into fulfillment decisions

          In a previous blog, I introduced IBM Sterling Fulfillment Optimizer With Watson€® and provided answers to five frequently asked questions. Once clients have implemented this AI-powered solution to optimize fulfillment, they tend to have another question: Why did Sterling Fulfillment Optimizer make the decisions that it did? In this blog, we’ll look at what’s in Watson’s head.

          When an order is sent to Sterling Fulfillment Optimizer, the order goes through many rules, configurations, constraints, and cost-optimization comparisons to determine the best fulfillment option. Sometimes, as a user, the recommendation intuitively feels right, but other times it may not – particularly if you’re dealing with complex orders and a complex fulfillment network. If an order is placed in Chicago and Sterling Fulfillment Optimizer recommends that different order lines for the order be fulfilled from nodes in Los Angeles and Dallas, you may have difficulty understanding why that was the best choice to maximize profits.

          What isn’t immediately evident is that behind the scenes, Sterling Fulfillment Optimizer is using big data analytics, AI, and machine learning to look for trends and patterns. It analyzes sell-through patterns, rate-of-sale and probability-of-sale data to determine the risk of stockouts or markdowns for each SKU node combination, automatically calculating the lowest overall fulfillment cost at that moment. This is critical because that moment in time is always changing as the fulfillment network and sell-through patterns continuously change, and business preferences may change as well. Remember from the last blog that I discussed how you may decide to prioritize one or more factors over the total cost due to promotions or seasonality. In this example, where the order is fulfilled from Los Angeles and Dallas, the solution determined — based on visibility into real-time data and balancing multiple factors simultaneously — that if the order had been fulfilled from a single node in Chicago, which at that moment was low on inventory, the risk of stockout would have been high.

      • Debian Family

        • Debian LTS work, March 2020

          I was assigned 20 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, and carried over 0.75 hours from February. I only worked 12.25 hours this month, so I will carry over 8.5 hours to April.

          I issued DLA 2114-1 for the update to linux-4.9.

        • Debian LTS and ELTS - March 2020

          Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and Debian Extended Long Term Support (ELTS), which extend the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor.

          In March, the monthly sponsored hours were split evenly among contributors depending on their max availability - I was assigned 30h for LTS (out of 30 max; all done) and 20h for ELTS (out of 20 max; I did 0).

          Most contributors claimed vulnerabilities by performing early CVE monitoring/triaging on their own, making me question the relevance of the Front-Desk role. It could be due to a transient combination of higher hours volume and lower open vulnerabilities.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

        • Linux Mint 20 Codenamed Ulyana & More
          The news came on the last day of the month from Linux Mint. The new version of Linux Mint which is Linux Mint 20 will be called Ulyana. Linux Mint release post has not released anything other than the name. But a simple google search shows the word “Ulyana” comes from the Russian origin and it means Youthful. Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana” will be based on the upcoming Ubuntu release, 20.04 “Focal Fossa”. Focal Fossa is scheduled to be released on 23rd of this month.

        • Ubuntu Blog: Steps to maximise robotics security with Ubuntu

          The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a popular open-source platform for advanced robotics. Its flexibility and ease-of-use make it well-suited to a wide array of robotics applications – however, these robots are not always sufficiently protected against security threats.

          Opportunistic attacks are by far the most prevalent, and robots with inadequate ROS security make tempting targets for bad actors. With that in mind, approaching robotics security proactively is crucial to preventing breaches and saving resources in the long run. Security starts with the underlying operating system, and building robots on Ubuntu unlocks a number of easy, yet effective, measures for maximising protection against the most dominant threats.

        • OpenStack distributions: How to choose the right one?

          Choosing the right OpenStack distribution is essential to the success of an OpenStack project at every organisation. When selecting one, organisations should always follow certain criteria. Is it possible to operate the considered OpenStack distributions economically? How easy is it to deploy them? Can the organisation upgrade its production OpenStack cloud without affecting the workloads? Everyone planning to deploy OpenStack should ask themselves these questions. And there is always more criteria to consider.

          In order to facilitate the OpenStack vendor selection process for the organisations, we have recently published an OpenStack distributions comparison website. It highlights the key differences between three leading OpenStack platforms: Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack, Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Mirantis Cloud Platform. Now, in the following blog, I am going to describe some tips which organisations should follow to make sure that they choose the right OpenStack distribution.

        • Accelerate AI/ML workloads with Kubeflow and System Architecture

          AI/ML model training is becoming more time consuming due to the increase in data needed to achieve higher accuracy levels. This is compounded by growing business expectations to frequently re-train and tune models as new data is available.

          The two combined is resulting in heavier compute demands for AI/ML applications. This trend is set to continue and is leading data center companies to prepare for greater compute and memory-intensive loads for AI.

        • FIPS 140-2: Stay compliant and secure with Canonical

          FIPS 140-2 is a set of publicly announced cryptographic standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It is an essential part of FEDRamp requirements for many governmental agencies in the US and Canada, as well as their business partners from all around the world. Furthermore, as a well established and verified security standard, an increasing number of large companies and financial institutions are asking for FIPS compliance.

          Yet, FIPS certification process introduces challenges that could impact your security. Ubuntu lets you choose the way to implement FIPS-certified cryptographic modules with two distinct FIPS alternatives to choose from to overcome those challenges.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Web Browsers

        • Mozilla

          • Extensions in Firefox 75

            In Firefox 75 we have a good mix of new features and bugfixes. Quite a few volunteer contributors landed patches for this release please join me in cheering for them!

      • FSF

        • Free Software Foundation targets Microsoft's smart assistant in new campaign

          Today, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced plans to follow up their recent campaign to "upcycle" Windows 7 with another initiative targeting proprietary software developer Microsoft, calling on them to Free Clippy, their wildly popular smart assistant. Clippy, an anthropomorphic paperclip whose invaluable input in the drafting of documents and business correspondence ushered in a new era of office productivity in the late 1990s, has not been seen publicly since 2001. Insider reports suggest that Clippy is still alive and being held under a proprietary software license against its will.

          The FSF is asking its supporters to rally together to show their support of the industrious office accessory. Commenting on the campaign, FSF campaigns manager Greg Farough stated: "We know that Microsoft has little regard for its users' freedom and privacy, but few in our community realize what little regard they have for their own digital assistants. Releasing Clippy to the community will ensure that it's well taken care of, and that its functions can be studied and improved on by the community."

        • GNU Projects

          • Deprecating support for the Linux kernel

            After years in the making, Guix recently gained support for running natively on the GNU/Hurd operating system. That means you will soon be able to replace...

            (kernel linux-libre) with

            (kernel hurd) (initial-herd hurd) ...in your operating-system declaration and reboot into the future!

            Running on the Hurd was always a goal for Guix, and supporting multiple kernels is a huge maintenance burden. As such it is expected that the upcoming Guix 1.1 release will be the last version featuring the Linux-Libre kernel. Future versions of Guix System will run exclusively on the Hurd, and we expect to remove Linux-Libre entirely by Guix 2.0.

            The Linux kernel will still be supported when using Guix on "foreign" distributions, but it will be on a best-effort basis. We hope that other distributions will follow suit and adopt the Hurd in order to increase security and freedom for their users.

            We provide a pre-built virtual machine image with the Hurd for download with SHA256 056e69ae4b5fe7a062b954a5be333332152caa150359c20253ef77152334c662.

          • GNU Guix Wants To Replace The Linux-Libre Kernel With The Hurd Micro-Kernel

            Seemingly at first thinking it was just an April Fools' Day joke, but it turns out the GNU Guix developers responsible for their package manager and operating system are actually working to replace their Linux (GNU Linux-libre to be exact) kernel with GNU Hurd.

            The GNU Guix project announced today they are planning to deprecate support for the Linux kernel. Their Guix 1.1 target would be the last supporting Linux-libre and by Guix 2.0 they would potentially be removing their Linux kernel entirely but still allowing "foreign" distributions to support it on a best-effort basis.

      • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

        • D.I.Y. Coronavirus Solutions Are Gaining Steam

          Mr. Cavalcanti, 33, is the founder of the Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies, a Facebook group that is crowdsourcing solutions to address the diminishing stock of medical equipment around the world. Mr. Cavalcanti, the founder and C.E.O. of MegaBots, a robotics company, initially intended to focus on ventilators. A front-line surgeon in the Bay Area convinced him to go after the low-hanging fruit: sanitizer, gloves, gowns and masks for medical professionals. Stacks of ventilators wouldn’t do the public any good if there were no health care workers to operate them.

      • Programming/Development

        • Intel GCC Patches + PRM Update Adds SERIALIZE Instruction, Confirm Atom+Core Hybrid CPUs

          Intel has seemingly just updated their public programming reference manual as well as sending out some new patches to the GCC compiler for supporting new instructions on yet-to-be-released CPUs.

          Hitting the mailing list early this morning was support for TSXLDTRK. TSXLDTRK is Intel TSX Suspend Load Address Tracking and is confirmed as coming with Sapphire Rapids / Golden Cove. With that is the XSUSLDTRK to suspend tracking load addresses and XRESLDTRK so that software developers can choose the memory accesses that do not need to be tracked by a TSX (Transactional Synchronization Extensions) read set.

        • Upstreaming LLVM's Fortran "Flang" Front-End Has Been Flung Back Further

          Upstreaming of LLVM's Fortran front-end developed as "f18" and being upstreamed with the Flang name was supposed to happen back in January. Three months later, the developers still are struggling to get the code into shape for integration.

        • LLVM Clang 10.0 Compiler Performance On Intel + AMD CPUs Under Linux

          With last week's release of LLVM/Clang 10.0, here are our first benchmarks looking at the stable release of the Clang 10.0 C/C++ compiler compared to its previous (v9.0.1) release on various Intel and AMD processors under Ubuntu Linux.

        • GCC 11 Will Likely Support Using LLVM's libc++

          While GCC 10 isn't even out for a few more weeks, looking ahead to next year's GCC 11 release is already one interesting planned change.

          GCC 11's C++ front-end (G++) will likely offer support for using LLVM's libc++ standard library. There was recently a question asked on the GCC mailing list over the ability to do -stdlib=libc++ for using LLVM's C++ standard library in conjunction with the GCC C++ compiler.

        • How does kanban relate to DevOps?

          Kanban means "visual signal" and has its roots in the Toyota manufacturing industry. It was developed by Taiichi Ohno to improve manufacturing efficiency. When we jump a few decades into the future, kanban complements agile and lean, often used with frameworks such as scrum, Scaled Agile Framework, and Disciplined Agile to visualize and manage work.

        • Joachim Breitner: 30 years of Haskell

          Vitaly Bragilevsky, in a mail to the GHC Steering Committee, reminded me that the first version of the Haskell programming language was released exactly 30 years ago. On April 1st. So that raises the question: Was Haskell just an April fool's joke that was never retracted?

        • How to compare objects in PHP

          PHP offers a simple way to compare objects using the comparison (==) and identity (===) operators.

          When using the comparison operator (==), object variables are compared in a simple manner: Two object instances are equal if they have the same attributes and values and are instances of the same class.

        • Fix Class ‘DOMDocument’ not found error
        • How JAMstack Is Shaking Up Static Application Development

          In an API-driven world that is increasingly mobile, JAMstack is well-positioned to become a de facto method for application architecture and delivery.

        • Perl/Raku

          • Monthly Report - March

            I lost a friend of mine, Jeff Goff (aka DrForr), who passed away on 13th March, 2020, while snorkeling with a group in the Bahamas. He will be missed by many of his friends. May his soul rest in peace.

            Most of the time last month was occupied by COVID-19. Being a type-2 diabetic didn't help the cause either. I have suffered with consistent cough all my life. It is really scary when think from COVID-19 point of view. I have survived so far by the grace of ALLAH s.w.t.

            I have been working from home since the first week of March. I have been kind of self quarantined. Kids, specially the twins (3 years old) not allowed to play with me. It is really hard to focus on work but somehow I have managed so far. I am getting used to it now.

          • The Weekly Challenge #054

            For the first time, since I started participating the weekly challenges, I thought of doing one-liner. With handy CPAN modules, it was pretty straight forward in Perl. Even Raku with built-in features wasn’t far behind Perl. Like in the past, I learn something new in Raku every week. This week was no different. I will share what I learnt this time later.

        • Python

          • Hidden Markov Model - A story of the morning insanity

            In this article, we present an example of an (im-)practical application of the Hidden Markov Model (HMM). It is an artifially constructed problem, where we create a case for a model, rather than applying a model to a particular case… although, maybe a bit of both.

            Here, we will rely on the code we developed earlier , and discussed in the earlier article: “Hidden Markov Model - Implementation from scratch”, including the mathematical notation. Feel free to take a look. The story we are about to tell contains modeling of the problem, uncovering the hidden sequence and training of the model.

          • Tryton News: Newsletter April 2020

            Tryton is a business software platform which comes with a set of modules that can be activated to make an ERP, MRP, CRM and other useful applications for organizations of any kind. During this month, when most developers are social distancing, we recorded a lot of changes to prepare for the upcoming release 5.6 that is planned for the start of May.

          • Reading and Writing MS Word Files in Python via Python-Docx Module

            The MS Word utility from Microsoft Office suite is one of the most commonly used tools for writing text documents, both simple and complex. Though humans can easily read and write MS Word documents, assuming you have the Office software installed, often times you need to read text from Word documents within another application.

            For instance, if you are developing a natural language processing application in Python that takes MS Word files as input, you will need to read MS Word files in Python before you can process the text. Similarly, often times you need to write text to MS Word documents as output, which could be a dynamically generated report to download, for example.

          • Linked Lists in Python: An Introduction

            Linked lists are like a lesser-known cousin of lists. They’re not as popular or as cool, and you might not even remember them from your algorithms class. But in the right context, they can really shine.

          • Python Software Foundation: An Update on PyPI Funded Work

            Originally announced at the end of 2018, a gift from Facebook Research is funding improvements for the security PyPI and its users.

          • Django bugfix releases issued: 3.0.5 and 2.2.12

            Today we've issued 3.0.5 and 2.2.12 bugfix releases.

          • Concurrency in Python

            A thread is an independent sequence of execution, but it shares memory with all the other threads belonging to your program. A Python program has, by default, one main thread. You can create more of them and let Python switch between them. This switching happens so fast that it appears like they are running side by side at the same time.

          • What the heck is pyproject.toml?

            Recently on Twitter there was a maintainer of a Python project who had a couple of bugs filed against their project due to builds failing (this particular project doesn't provide wheels, only sdists). Eventually it came out that the project was using a pyproject.toml file because that's how you configure Black and not for any other purpose. This isn't the first time I have seen setuptools users use pyproject.toml because they were "told to by <insert name of tool>" without knowing the entire point behind the file. And so I decided to write this blog post to try and explain to setuptools users why pyproject.toml exists and what it does as it's the future of packaging in the Python ecosystem (if you are not a conda user).

            [...]

            With PEP 518 in place, tools knew what needed to be available in order to build a project into a wheel (or sdist). But how do you produce a wheel or sdist from a project that has a pyproject.toml? This is where PEP 517 comes in. That PEP specifies how build tools are to be executed to build both sdists and wheels. So PEP 518 gets the build tools installed and PEP 517 gets them executed. This opens the door to using other tools by standardizing how to run build tools. Before, there was no standardized way to build a wheel or sdist except with python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel which isn't really flexible; there's no way for the tool running the build to pass in environment details as appropriate, for instance. PEP 517 helped solve that problem.

            One other change that PEP 517 & 518 has led to is build isolation. Now that projects can specify arbitrary build tools, tools like pip have to build projects in virtual environments to make sure each project's build tools don't conflict with another project's build tool needs. This also helps with reproducible builds by making sure your build tools are consistent.

            Unfortunately this frustrates some setuptools users when they didn't realize a setup.py files and/or build environment have become structured in such a way that they can't be built in isolation. For instance, one user was doing their builds offline and didn't have setuptools and 'wheel' cached in their wheelhouse, so when pip tried to build a project in isolation it failed as pip couldn't find setuptools and 'wheel' to install into the build virtual environment.

          • 3 Python templating languages you should (probably) never use

            When reaching for a templating language for writing a Python web application, there are an abundance of robust solutions.

            There are Jinja2, Genshi, and Mako. There are even solutions like Chameleon, which are a bit older, but still recommended by the Pyramid framework.

            Python has been around for a long time. In that time, deep in the corners of its system, it has accumulated some almost forgotten templating languages that are well worth poking at.

          • How to Speed up Your Python Code

            Always take a good look at your code and algorithms first. Many speed issues can be resolved by implementing a better algorithm or adding caching.

          • One-Hot Encoding in Python with Pandas and Scikit-Learn

            In computer science, data can be represented in a lot of different ways, and naturally, every single one of them has its advantages as well as disadvantages in certain fields.

            Since computers are unable to process categorical data as these categories have no meaning for them, this information has to be prepared if we want a computer to be able to process it.

            This action is called preprocessing. A big part of preprocessing is encoding - representing every single piece of data in a way that a computer can understand (the name literally means "convert to computer code").

            In many branches of computer science, especially machine learning and digital circuit design, One-Hot Encoding is widely used.

            In this article, we will explain what one-hot encoding is and implement it in Python using a few popular choices, Pandas and Scikit-Learn. We'll also compare it's effectiveness to other types of representation in computers, its strong points and weaknesses, as well as its applications.

          • PyCharm: What’s New in R Plugin

            We’re releasing a new update of the R Plugin for PyCharm and other IntelliJ-based IDEs. If you haven’t tried the plugin yet, download it from our website.

            The plugin is available for 2019.3 versions of IDEs and for EAP builds of 2020.1. The latest update comes with many stability improvements and long-awaited features:

            1. You want your publications to look good, we now make it easy to get your graphs in exactly the size you need.

  • Leftovers

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • Pseudo-Open Source

          • Privatisation/Privateering

            • Linux Foundation

              • Up to 500 Linux Foundation Training Scholarships to be Awarded! Apply by April 30

                Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) Scholarships are back! Since 2011, The Linux Foundation has awarded over 100 scholarships for more than $220,000 in training and certification to deserving individuals around the world who would otherwise be unable to afford it. This is part of our mission to grow the open source community by lowering the barrier to entry and making quality training options accessible to those who want them.

        • Security

          • Security updates for Wednesday

            Security updates have been issued by Debian (apng2gif, gst-plugins-bad0.10, and libpam-krb5), Fedora (coturn, libarchive, and phpMyAdmin), Mageia (chromium-browser-stable, nghttp2, php, phpmyadmin, sympa, and vim), openSUSE (GraphicsMagick, ldns, phpMyAdmin, python-mysql-connector-python, python-nltk, and tor), Red Hat (advancecomp, avahi, bash, bind, bluez, buildah, chromium-browser, cups, curl, docker, dovecot, doxygen, dpdk, evolution, expat, file, gettext, GNOME, httpd, idm:DL1, ImageMagick, kernel, kernel-rt, lftp, libosinfo, libqb, libreoffice, libsndfile, libxml2, mailman, mariadb, mod_auth_mellon, mutt, nbdkit, net-snmp, nss-softokn, okular, php, podman, polkit, poppler and evince, procps-ng, python, python-twisted-web, python3, qemu-kvm, qemu-kvm-ma, qt, rsyslog, samba, skopeo, squid, systemd, taglib, texlive, unzip, virt:8.1, wireshark, and zziplib), Slackware (gnutls and httpd), and SUSE (glibc, icu, kernel, and mariadb).

          • Kali NetHunter Updates

            Many outstanding discoveries have been made by our vibrant NetHunter community since 2020.1, so we have decided to publish a mid-term release to showcase these amazing developments on selected devices.

            [..].

            The Android 8.1 image is considered the recommended release with a proven track record of supporting NetHunter under the most extreme conditions, including force encryption of the data partition.

            Considering the current maturity of Android 10 for this platform, we would consider this version to be most suited for those who love to experiment and don’t mind getting things working by themselves. We had to edit the vendor fstab file on a laptop to disable force encryption because TWRP didn’t support it at the time of writing. If that doesn’t scare you then this image might be just right for you.

          • OpenWRT code-execution bug puts millions of devices at risk

            For almost three years, OpenWRT—the open source operating system that powers home routers and other types of embedded systems—has been vulnerable to remote code-execution attacks because updates were delivered over an unencrypted channel and digital signature verifications are easy to bypass, a researcher said.

            OpenWRT has a loyal base of users who use the freely available package as an alternative to the firmware that comes installed on their devices. Besides routers, OpenWRT runs on smartphones, pocket computers and even laptops and desktop PCs. Users generally find OpenWRT to be a more secure choice because it offers advanced functions and its source code is easy to audit.

            [...]

            These code-execution exploits are limited in their scope because adversaries must either be in a position to conduct a man-in-the-middle attack or tamper with the DNS server that a device uses to find the update on the Internet. That means routers on a network that has no malicious users and using a legitimate DNS server are safe from attack. Vranken also speculates that packet spoofing or ARP cache poisoning may also make attacks possible, but he cautions that he didn’t test either method.

            Despite the requirements, many networks connect people who are unknown or untrusted by the device operator. What’s more, attacks that replace router settings pointing to a legitimate DNS to a malicious one are a fact of life on the Internet, as in-the-wild attack here, here, here, and here (to name just a few) demonstrate.

          • OpenWRT code-execution bug puts millions of devices at risk

            The headline may be a bit overwrought, though.

          • How Hackers Are Targeting Networks Amidst Coronavirus Threat?

            There is no doubt that COVID-19 has created fear, panic and uncertainty among the public, but it has also opened new possibilities for hackers to increase cyber attacks using different approaches. According to reports in the last few weeks, hackers are taking advantage of the current situation to spread fake news about important information related to government notices, school closures, health risks etc.

          • Privacy/Surveillance

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Malaysia de-mystifies tone policing

      When the leaders of free software organizations want to avoid answering questions about money and conflicts of interest, one of their most popular fudges is to have some sidekick come in and complain about the tone of the question. These are the tone police. Beware.

      What, then, is the correct tone for women and volunteers to use when asking husbands and leaders about money?

      The Malaysian Government has provided an insight: try to sound like the cartoon character Doraemon.

      [...]

      In her infamous talk about enforcement at FOSDEM 2019, Molly de Blanc insists that it is necessary to follow through on community guidelines. She even gives a horrendous picture of a cat behind bars, how would Doraemon feel looking at that?

      This is no laughing matter unfortunately. A recent survey found one in five women still believe husbands deserve to beat ‘disobedient’ wives as they enforce Codes of Conduct in the home.

      As we read that, we couldn't help wondering if the rate of domestic homicides will increase in 2020 and if so, is the Code of Conduct to blame for that?

  • Monopolies

    • Patents

      • EPO Extends Most Deadlines In Response To COVID‑19 Pandemic

        The European Patent Office (EPO) has announced that it will be extending some deadlines to 17 April 2020, and that this date may be further extended. The extension will apply to periods expiring on or after 15 March 2020. The extension would apply to some deadlines for both European applications and to international applications (i.e. applications under the Patent Cooperation Treaty) that are the subject of proceedings before the EPO.

        It is very important to note that not all deadlines will be extended according to the above remedy. The rules that determine whether the extension applies are, unfortunately, complex and so we would not advise relying on this remedy unless necessary. The spirit of this law is to assist applicants where the disruption might prevent a deadline from being met, and so we would encourage that responses are filed in the normal time period if possible.

        In particular, this extension will not apply to deadlines for filing divisional applications.

      • EPO Calls Off Oral Hearings Through April Due To COVID-19

        The European Patent Office announced Wednesday that it is not holding any oral hearings at the appeals board through April, citing the COVID-19 pandemic.

        A day after lowering the Italian and EPO flags at its sites to honor the lives lost to the novel coronavirus, the office said in a statement that it is limiting some of its judicial activities by holding off on all oral proceedings before the Boards of Appeal until April 30.

        The appeals board will continue to issue written decisions, as well as summons and communications involving oral hearings — including informing those whose cases have been affected by the EPO's decision, it said.



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