I have written several times already about the recently-released Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (see my first impressions, how-to setup, my hands-on experience, and my thoughts two months in). Now I'm going to look at one of the practical aspects that I think a lot of people have been wondering about - is it (finally) good enough to use as an every-day desktop system?
We've been through this several times before, when the original Raspberry Pi, the Pi 2 and the Pi 3 came out - and each time the answer was "only if you have enough patience". Although the amount of patience required decreased each time, it was still too slow on many everyday tasks, or too limited in configuration (primarily memory) for most people to be satisfied using it. So maybe this time it will make the grade?
With companies of all sizes looking to boost their computing power, the amount of competition to provide such services is keener than ever.
20 years ago, the world’s most powerful computer was the Intel-powered ASCI Red. It had nearly 10,000 cores, a peak performance of 3.21 Tflops and had a cool price tag of $55 million.
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Ubuntu 18.04 is included as the default operating system and you can upgrade it to WIndows Server 2019. As with all Ionos dedicated servers, there's also a 1Gbps unlimited data pipe, and you can choose the location of your server (either US or Europe).
Our first DevNation Live regional event was held in Bengaluru, India in July. This free technology event focused on open source innovations, with sessions presented by elite Red Hat technologists.
Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for hybrid cloud portable application architecture, and in this session, Burr Sutter shows why Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift provide the ideal solution for deploying and managing microservices in your organization.
This live hands-on session is for any developer who is interested in Linux containers and cloud-native application architecture. Our examples will primarily be in Java, as there is some special “care and feeding” related to Java in a container, but the lessons are applicable to any programming language.
First up: all about mcookie, mesg, and namei from util-linux. Then, a discussion of how one might transition to running Linux exclusively. Do you have a story of how you switched to Linux full-time? Do you not run Linux and just run as much open source as possible?
Linux 5.3 was announced by Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (lkml) in the founder’s trademark modest style. No major “quotable” quips from Linus thus time around, save for background on the unplanned eighth release candidate.
This release follows the well-received Linux 5.2 release back in July and comes with a raft of improvements, optimisations, and new hardware support.
For instance, Linux 5.3 introduces early support for AMD Navi GPUs, makes 16 million new IPv4 addresses available, and is compatible with Intel Speed Select used in Intel Xeon servers.
Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds has finally announced the release of Linux 5.3, after eight release candidates and a delay of one week.
But that delay has been a good thing, according to Torvalds, because it gives kernel developers an important lesson in what's important and how to frame issues when reporting bugs.
Torvalds had a busy schedule last week, speaking with ZDNet's open-source authority, Steven J Vaughan-Nichols, at not one but two core Linux conferences – the Kernel Maintainers Summit and the Linux Plumbers Conference, held in Lisbon, Portugal last week.
The 5.3 kernel is available at last. The announcement includes a long discussion about user-space regressions — an ext4 filesystem performance improvement had caused some systems to fail booting due to a lack of entropy early after startup. "It's more that it's an instructive example of what counts as a regression, and what the whole 'no regressions' kernel rule means. The reverted commit didn't change any API's, and it didn't introduce any new bugs. But it ended up exposing another problem, and as such caused a kernel upgrade to fail for a user. So it got reverted."
I'm announcing the release of the 5.2.15 kernel.
All users of the 5.2 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.2.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.2.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
GNU Linux-libre 5.3-gnu sources and tarballs are now available at <http://www.fsfla.org/selibre/linux-libre/download/releases/5.3-gnu/>. It didn't require any deblobbing changes since -rc7-gnu, the first published rc-gnu. Freesh binaries are already available!, thanks to Jason Self; others are on the way.
Besides recognizing new false positives (sequences that our blob hunter would report as suspicious, but that are neither blobs nor requests for blobs), updating the deblobbing scripts for 5.3 required adjusting cleaned up drivers for updated blob names, recognizing one new Free piece of firmware with binary and corresponding sources embedded in the kernel sources, and disabling blob loading introduced in a few drivers: QCOM, DRM (HDCP), Allegro-DVT, and Meson-VDEC.
This last one was particularly disappointing: the firmware sources were supposed to be available from LibreELEC, and though the link to the alleged sources there is broken, I managed to find the "source" repo containing them, only to find out the "source" was just a binary blob encoded in C as an array of char, just like Linux used to do back when I got involved with Linux-libre. Oh well... Request disabled...
If anyone can find Freely-licensed actual source code for that, or for any other file whose loading we disable, please let us know, so that we can refrain from disabling its loading.
For up-to-the-minute news, join us on #linux-libre of irc.gnu.org (Freenode), or follow me (@lxoliva) on Twister <http://twister.net.co/>, Secure Scuttlebutt, GNU social at social.libreplanet.org, Diaspora* at pod.libreplanetbr.org or pump.io at identi.ca. Check my web page (link in the signature) for direct links.
Be Free! with GNU Linux-libre.
Linux kernel engineer Eric Biggers of Google has sent in a pull request adding FS-VERITY support to the Linux 5.4 but it remains to be seen if Linus Torvalds is content with pulling the code at this stage.
FS-VERITY is the code Google has been working on for a while now in the context of Android. The focus is on providing transparent integrity/authenticity support for read-only files on an otherwise writable file-system. See this presentation to learn more on this file-based authenticity protection.
Due to a combination of poor timing and an oversight at AMD, the CPU temperature reporting under Linux for the Ryzen 3000 series processors isn't in order until this new Linux 5.4 cycle. Back at the Ryzen 3000 series launch event I was told everything was "all good" from the Linux support perspective for thermal monitoring, after having been closely following the situation for past Zen CPUs and ended up myself adding the Linux CPU temperature monitoring support for Threadripper 2 among other hudles in the past. That all-good though just ended up meaning that there is no Tcontrol offset needed for these new CPUs, which is great news no longer needing the temperature offset by an arbitrary amount. But the oversight was the Family 17h Model 70h ID was never added to the AMD k10temp driver. As a result, temperature monitoring wasn't actually working and took an extra kernel cycle before this trivial addition landed.
The Linux Foundation has announced the launch of the Reactive Foundation, a community of leaders established to accelerate technologies for building the next generation of networked applications. The foundation is made up of Alibaba, Lightbend, Netifi and Pivotal as initial members and includes the successful open source RSocket specification, along with programming language implementations.
The aim of reactive programming is to build applications that maintain a consistent user experience regardless of traffic on the network, infrastructure performance and different end-user devices (computers, tablets, smartphones). Reactive programming uses a message-driven approach to achieve the resiliency, scalability, and responsiveness that is required for today's networked cloud-native applications, independent of their underlying infrastructure. The Reactive Foundation establishes a formal open governance model and neutral ecosystem for supporting open source reactive programming projects.
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The aim of reactive programming is to build applications that maintain a consistent user experience regardless of traffic on the network, infrastructure performance and different end-user devices (computers, tablets, smartphones). Reactive programming uses a message-driven approach to achieve the resiliency, scalability, and responsiveness that is required for today's networked cloud-native applications, independent of their underlying infrastructure. The Reactive Foundation establishes a formal open governance model and neutral ecosystem for supporting open source reactive programming projects. "From the beginning of our work on RSocket during my time at Netflix, our intent was to have an open system that encouraged broad adoption, which is essential for networking technology. We're thrilled to be hosted at the Linux Foundation with commitment from leaders and disruptors in the industry, and are excited to make progress enabling reactive programming," said Ryland Degnan, Co-Founder, and CTO at Netifi and Foundation community chair.
WireGuard sadly isn't slated for the now-open Linux 5.4 merge window, but lead developer Jason Donenfeld has put out a new development snapshot of this open-source secure VPN tunnel.
Coming barely two weeks since the previous WireGuard snapshot, this newest development release isn't too heavy on the changes but the focus is on better portability/compatibility.
Released three months after the PulseAudio 12 series, PulseAudio 13 is here with support for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, support for the SteelSeries Arctis 5 USB headset, improved initial card profile selection for ALSA cards, as well as S/PDIF improvements for CMEDIA USB2.0 High-Speed True HD Audio.
The PulseAudio 13 series also adds several new module arguments, including "max_latency_msec" for module-loopback, "stream_name" for module-rtp-send, and "avoid_resampling" for module-udev-detect and module-alsa-card, and no longer uses persistent Bluetooth card profile choices by default, recommending users to use A2DP by default.
A new open-source smartwatch is in the works with a planned price of $25.
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But the PineTime isn't quite a reality yet. Pine64 said it is still "waiting for some love from developers" and that for now it is a side project, similar to the Pine64 CUBE, an open-source IoT camera.
Besides Apple, no Android smartphone maker besides perhaps Xiaomi has been able to carve out a dominant position in the smartwatch category.
The cheapest decent smartwatches today can be found generally for about $40, so Pine64's promise of a smartwatch that looks similar to the Apple Watch for $25 does sound interesting. And it runs on Arm MBed or FreeTOS, a sure selling point for those who want to avoid the mainstream.
The smartwatch announcement follows Pine64's plans to launch the PinePhone, a follow-up to its cheap Pinebook Pro laptops and its Raspberry Pi rival boards.
It took me a few years to appreciate console-based software. Repairing a broken system using the ubiquitous vi text editor was a turning point in my Linux journey. Now I spend a lot of time at the terminal, and listening to music. Best combine the two!
When it comes to console-based music software, I really admire musikcube, a wonderful audio engine, library, player and server written in C++.
This review looks at an alternative to musikcube. It’s called cmus. It shares many similarities with musikcube. Both are designed to run on a text-only user interface, reducing the resources required to run the application.
cmus is written in C.
Rclone Browser is a fairly popular cross-platform GUI for Rclone. Its development was stopped in 2017, but a Rclone Browser fork was created recently to fix some "small not working bits and pieces", like the transfer progress not working, while also adding some enhancements.
Let me tell you a few things about Rclone, in case you haven't heard of it, and then continue with Rclone Browser. Rclone is like rsync, but for cloud storage. The command line tool can synchronize files between your filesystem and cloud storage services like Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Nextcloud, Yandex Disk, Dropbox, Amazon Drive and S3, Mega, pCloud, and others (and having WebDAV, FTP and SFTP support), as well as directly between cloud storage services. It also supports mounting these cloud storage services so you can access your files using desktop applications.
Always on the lookout for my next strategy game fix, I recently came across It Stares Back after it pulled my in due to the wild visuals.
Currently, it's only available for Windows in Early Access on Steam. However, the developer confirmed to me on the Steam forum that it's planned for Linux just like their last game, Castle Battles. The Linux version should come once the game is complete.
Receiver is a name I've not heard in a long time, the indie FPS released back in 2013 by Wolfire Games and it's just seen a big update.
There's no new enemies or levels in this update, instead Wolfire focused on the tech that runs the game. In this case it's the Unity game engine and they gave it quite a big update. It also adds in some graphical prettiness and other bits like that.
Beyond Blue, the near-future ocean exploration game from E-Line Media (publisher of Never Alone) has a new story teaser.
If you've not heard of it before, this is not some survival game like Subnautica. Instead, it's a game about exploring the depths of our oceans. Think of it like Blue Planet: The Game, that sums it up quite well especially since they've teamed up with BBC Studios (who did the Blue Planet documentary).
The developer of NARWHAR Project Hornwhale emailed in recently about their new arcade style shoot 'em up being released with Linux support. It's a bit wild.
I'll admit the name, along with the setting of this thoroughly made me chuckle to no end. Space Narwhals that rule with an iron fist, with you playing as one of two Rays that shoot lasers? The damn Narwhals took away all the free milkshake, so naturally a rebellion happened. What's not to love about such a crazy setting?
Sometimes when you ask if a game is coming to Linux it's a no, others say it's planned and when it's Buoyancy the developer just puts up a build soon after asking.
Yep, that's what happened here. After asking about Linux support on Steam, developer replied to say "yes". When asking if they knew when, they went ahead and uploaded a build. If only it was always that easy…
Overcooked! 2 is no doubt one of the best, most hilarious and most infuriating co-op experiences around all in one. It just got bigger again too, with another great sound DLC out now.
One we completely missed from Gamescom is Shing!, a new beat 'em up from developer Mass Creation releasing next year and it looks like it's going to be a lot of fun.
Curiously, it appeared recently in my Steam searching with a SteamOS/Linux icon but the store page only has Windows system requirements. When going to message the developer, I checked the Steam forum and as expected someone asked about Linux support. The reply from the developer was a very clear "Yes - Shing will be available on Linux.".
They're saying it's so good, they've called it a "beat-em-up 2.0". With Shing! Mass Creation say they're mixing in classic arcade-style gameplay with modern graphics and an innovative control scheme. This is not going to be a button basher, instead you use the right stick of a gamepad to directly control your weapon. It sounds good on paper but does it look good? Sure does! Take a look at their recent gameplay reveal:
In my quest to improve the website of KDE, I updated the Plasma Desktop webpage. This is a huge improvement to the old website, which didn’t show any screenshots and didn’t list any Plasma features.
I already teased the improvements I made in the Plasma BoF in Milan to the Akademy.
The redesign got a lot of positive feedback by the Plasma team and after some small modifications the changes landed.
At one point I started to search for open source alternatives for the myriad number of programs I was using, and Krita was a recommendation somewhere to replace Photoshop, with high ratings from users.
Promising to make firmware updates easier to deploy, GNOME Firmware is a graphical application for power users that lets them check for new firmware for their devices, update or downgrade current firmware, as well as to install new firmware. GNOME Firmware is designed as an optional utility for GNOME users, as well as users of other desktop environments.
"GNOME Firmware is designed to be a not-installed-by-default power-user tool to investigate, upgrade, downgrade and re install firmware," said Richard Hughes in a blog post. "GNOME Software will continue to be used for updates as before. Vendor helpdesks can ask users to install GNOME Firmware rather than getting them to look at command line output."
That's all for now. As always, I love how simple and beautiful GNOME release announcement was. After testing in 3 days, I immediately like this version more than the previous one for the speed improvement and I hope Ubuntu and other distros adopt it soon. Ah, I forgot, regarding Ubuntu, good news for us: next October's Ubuntu Eoan Ermine will feature 3.34! Regarding GNOME, I don't know if this is coincidence or what, but this year's KDE Plasma is faster and smoother and so is GNOME. I think next GNOME 3.36 will be faster and better as well. Finally I would love to say thank you GNOME developers! You all did well in last 6 month.
How do you think about 3.34? Let me know in the comment section!
Chuwi is likely not a brand familiar to many, though the Chinese firm has established its abilities in producing budget-focused notebooks and tablets—essentially, attempting to provide a full Windows experience at a price point of an average Chromebook. Chuwi's upmarket Chuwi Aerobook could be the right price for an Ultrabook form factor at a $500 price point.
Support for Linux on fundamentally consumer hardware has improved considerably over the last decade, largely preventing the need to perform extensive manual configuration. In 2019, minor compatibility issues—tiny papercut-like problems that are harder to actually solve—can pop up for specific hardware configurations. Depending on the return policies of your preferred marketplace, it might be impossible or cost-prohibitive to return a product like this if it doesn't work with Linux.
If you don’t follow the fortunes of Linux distributions, you might think that the days of Debian’s dominance are long since gone. However, superficial appearances can be deceiving. Not only does Debian consistently appear in the top ten of Distrowatch’s page hit ranking, it’s used as the base of the majority of other distributions as well, far eclipsing rivals like Fedora and Red Hat or openSuse. In fact, Debian might be said to be the most influential distro ever.
That may seem an overstatement, but the figures are hard to argue with. For at least eight years, Debian has been by far the most dominant distribution. Some details of its dominance have changed, but the overall pattern has been constant. Without Debian, modern Linux would be vastly different.
LINUX SMARTPHONES have hardly set the world on fire in the last few years (unless you're Russian). Yes, yes, we know Android is a Linux-based system but it hardly counts - and when Ubuntu can't make it work, who can?
Nevertheless, plucky little operations like Pine64 have been offering the prospect of Linux laptops for years, and now they plan to bring their own handset too.
But the really interesting bit is that Pine is also working on its equivalent of WearOS and the first fruits are being previewed in the form of a Linux smartwatch.
PineTime (almost impossible to say in any voice but Kath & Kim) is set to run ARM Mbed or FreeRTOS and is specifically designed as a companion to Linux smartphones. If only we knew of any companies planning one of those… la la la….
If you think it's about time we had an open source Linux smartwatch, Pine64 is set to offer us just that for a mere $25.
We’ve already seen MINIX showcased a fanless Gemini Lake mini PC at IFA 2019, but the company also had two upcoming Amlogic TV boxes on display at the event.
Hello Mozillians!
As you may already know, Friday, September 13th – we held a new Testday event, for Firefox 70 Beta 6.
Thank you all for helping us make Mozilla a better place: Gabriela (gaby2300), Dan Caseley (Fishbowler) and Aishwarya Narasimhan!
Result: Several test cases were executed for Protection Report and Privacy Panel UI Updates.
Last week was the LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almeria, Spain. It was an awesome event, and great to see so many community members – a big thanks to everyone who took part! We already posted some photos from the first day, along with the video of the opening session. Now we have some photos from the second and third days, starting with the special bus that took us to the conference location every day…
Open saucy messiah Richard Stallman has found himself in a bit of a mess after he was quoted as defending Marvin Minsky's association with dead sex-pest Jeffrey Epstein.
On MIT's internal Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) listserv, Stallman had seen the description of a protest of Marvin Minsky which said Minsky was "accused of assaulting" one of Epstein's victims. Stallman argued that "the most plausible scenario" is that "she presented herself to him as entirely willing" -- even if Epstein coerced her into doing so -- whereas the phrase "assaulting" implies the use of force or violence, faciliating what he calls "accusation inflation... Whatever conduct you want to criticise, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism."
Of the exciting changes so far for Qt 5.14, one of the big ticket items on the path to Qt 6 is the experimental implementation of Qt's new graphics API independent scenegraph renderer. Rather than being limited to OpenGL, Qt 5.14+ can target Vulkan, Direct3D 11, and even Apple's Metal API for rendering.
There are a number of ways you can take to get current date. We will use date class of the datetime module to accomplish this task.
This week we welcome Veronica Hanus (@veronica_hanus) as our PyDev of the Week! Veronica is a regular tech speaker at Python and other tech conferences and meetups. You can see some of her talks and her schedule on her website. She has been active in the Python community for the past few years. Let’s take a few moments to get to know her better!
The September KB4515384 update is already a menace. Introduced to fix CPU spiking, reports state it has broken Windows 10 search, the Start Menu, Action Centre, USB connections and caused audio problems. And now it is gunning for your Internet access.
Windows Latest has spotted that users are reporting on Microsoft’s community forum, Windows 10’s Feedback Hub and social networks that network adapters have stopped working after applying this update. Impacted users primarily appear to have Intel chipsets (Asus, MSI and Gigabyte motherboards are mentioned) and both their Ethernet and WiFi connections are affected.
“Cumulative update (KB4515384) causes the NIC to fail to enable with a code 10 error,” warns one user on the Windows 10 Feedback Hub. “Reinstalling network drivers from Intel or Windows Update sources does not resolve the issue. However removing the update through the ‘Programs & Software’ panel or using a recovery point set *before* the update fully resolves the issue.”
In three of Moscow’s voting districts, the city’s September 8 legislative elections also served as a test for a new online voting system. In one of those districts, the online vote proved decisive: While independent candidate Roman Yuneman won the most paper ballots in District 30, he lost to pro-regime candidate Margarita Rusetskaya thanks to the latter’s electronic results. Moscow City Hall published the results of the city’s online voting but did not provide access to the raw voting data behind those results. We found the key to that data, decrypted all of Moscow’s online votes, and reconstructed the three races that used online voting down to the minute.
Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has reportedly obtained a complete list of the Moscow residents who were registered to vote online during the city’s limited run of a new Internet election system on September 8. The list includes 12,000 names (9,810 people ultimately submitted online ballots) as well as contact information.
A statement on Navalny’s website did not specify how the FBK had obtained the list. Moscow city officials said they would investigate the matter. They did not confirm or deny the list’s authenticity, saying only that their official voter list was stored in a different format.
"I would like to return to the United States. That is the ultimate goal. But if I'm gonna spend the rest of my life in prison, the one bottom line demand that we have to agree to is that at least I get a fair trial. And that is the one thing the government has refused to guarantee because they won't provide access to what's called a public interest defense," Snowden told "CBS This Morning."
The former NSA contractor is shedding new light on his decision to reveal classified documents about the U.S. government's mass surveillance program back in 2013. Snowden disclosed government programs that collected Americans' emails, phone calls and internet activity in the name of national security and was subsequently charged under the Espionage Act for doing so. A congressional report said his disclosures "caused tremendous damage to national security."
In his new memoir, "Permanent Record," Snowden tells his story in detail for the first time and speaks about his life in exile in Russia. Snowden, who now identifies himself as a privacy advocate, said his biggest issue with standing trial in the U.S. is that the government won't allow the jury to consider his motivations.
One of the features that render the European Union’s Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC) unique in comparison to similar legal instruments in other jurisdictions, including the United States and Japan, is that there is no legal provision expressly calling for any specific relationship or agreement between the patent proprietor (and SPC applicant) on the one hand, and the holder of the marketing authorization relied upon for the SPC filing on the other hand. In line with this, and following the CJEU’s judgment in Biogen (C-181/95), it has become common practice that SPCs are granted to patent proprietors who rely on a marketing authorization held by a third party, including even a competitor, without the consent of that third party. Yet, the validity of this practice has stirred controversy for more than 20 years, which has never been fully resolved.
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While this result is not entirely unexpected, it is deeply disappointing that the fundamental question whether or not the consent of the holder of a marketing authorization is required for the filing of an SPC remains unresolved. Yet, chances are that this same question could be referred to the CJEU again in the near future, possibly in contentious proceedings between the same parties in another EU member state or in the context of a different case with similar factual circumstances, of which there are more than a few.
The issue is not whether the university's patents can be challenged, because the State has asserted these patents against Respondent in district court litigation. The issue, according to the brief, is that the State has the constitutional right to choose the forum before which its patents are put at issue. This position is contrary to the Federal Circuit's blanket determination (begging for Supreme Court review) that IPRs are not subject to any sort of sovereign immunity, based on the appellate court's decision in St. Regis Mohawk Tribe v. Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc.
