This goes over how to properly use Clonezilla to backup AND restore any system.
I've done prior videos on Snaps and AppImages and today we're covering the final of the 3 universal linux package systems, being flatpaks which from what I see online have the most community support and personally I like them as well. Flatpak's are quite comparable to Snaps so most of my comparison will be made towards those.
Seeing new AMDGPU targets added to mainline LLVM for aging Radeon GFX7/GFX8 graphics hardware wasn't what I expected to see this weekend.
On Friday Intel released Compute-Runtime 20.40.18075 as their latest OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero stack update with an updated IGC compiler and L0 loader. This release continues offering Level Zero 1.0 support for all hardware back to Skylake. On the OpenCL side, Intel continues providing OpenCL 3.0 support for the very latest Tiger Lake / Gen12 Xe Graphics while older generations are on OpenCL 2.1.
Intel's latest NEO OpenCL driver, now going by the name Compute-Runtime since it has gained support for more than just OpenCL compute, claims to have OpenCL 3.0 support on all Intel chips going back to Broadwell. It doesn't actually support OpenCL 3.0 on anything other than Intel's latest Tiger Lake chips, but it does claim to.
The Intel Media SDK provides their open-source C API for hardware-accelerated video encode/decode/filtering for their graphics hardware. As with the Intel Media Driver 20.3 release, the Media SDK 20.3 release is headlined by their API supporting AV1 video decoding support with the new driver. The API also has additions for Keem Bay platform support. The software developer kit also adds support for Rocket Lake platforms, adds the device IDs for Elkhart Lake, and adds support for DG1/SG1 discrete graphics cards.
It was in January that AMD finally published an open-source Linux driver for their Sensor Fusion Hub used by AMD Ryzen laptops for various sensor functionality. As we approach the end of the year this driver still hasn't been mainlined yet but a new revision was sent out on Friday.
Friday marked the eighth revision to the AMD "SFH" Linux kernel driver patches for supporting the sensor functionality on many Ryzen laptops. This was the first revision to the driver since the prior patches were sent out in August. This new version has cosmetic code changes, adds the initialization code within the probe function, and other code changes but seemingly nothing too major.
Adding to the growing list of Mesa 20.3 features is now RADV ACO supporting NGG GS. Or rather, the Radeon Vulkan driver with the ACO back-end now supports geometry shaders with Next-Gen Geometry (NGG) as found on newer AMD GPUs.
The NGG GS ACO support merged on Friday and is enabled by default. Along the way of wiring up this support new NIR capabilities were also introduced like the ability to count emitted primitives, filter out incomplete GS primitives, and other bits. There were also some ACO improvements too along the way aside from the actual NGG GS. There are also optimizations to reduce LDS bank conflicts and early GS space allocation.
Debugging is the process of finding and reducing the number of bugs in computer software and electronic hardware. When a program crashes, the debugger shows the position in the original code. A good debugger plays an essential role in software development.
Debugging can be more difficult when various subsystems are tightly coupled, as changes in one may cause bugs to appear in another.
This article examines three different types of debuggers: source-level debuggers, memory debuggers and bug tracking software.
The majority of BPM software is released under a proprietary software license. However, there are also open source BPM tools that offer the advantage of reduction in costs together with more flexible license terms.
The open source software featured in this article also offer workflow management software which enables organizations to automate processes across departments and systems. Some of the benefits include improved business outcomes, streamlining paperwork, and better utilization of resources.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled the following list of open source Business Process Management software. Here's our recommendations.
Linux Dash is a simple, powerful, and lightweight system resource monitoring tool for Linux distributions. You can install, configure, and use the Linux Dash tool on your system and monitor the parameters through your web browser interface. It would be best if you used the Linux Dash because it is very lightweight, and there are many extra features available inside the tool that you won't find in the default system monitor on your system. Moreover, some lightweight Linux distributions don't have the GUI system monitoring tool pre-installed, the Linux Dash is going to help them a lot. Installing and using Linux Dash is a straightforward process and doesn't require any programming skills.
Looking for a Linux music player to manage large local collections? Mpz is a new open-source player that does the job.
The main feature is 3-columns UI allows you to quickly create playlists from folders via middle-click and switch between playlists.If you like to organize your music in folders, then this player might be for you. It doesn't try to index all the files into a library, but rather treats your files and folders as a library and provides a convenient way to create playlists directly from folders. Similar to Foobar2000's Album List, but it's not an attempt to clone.
Created by Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman, this was a game designed for free for the Unix System (ask Lex Murphy, she knows this). Later on programmer Ken Arnold would hop on with them and really helped flesh it out a bit more and over time the game spread around like a legend. As it was freely-distributed and featured open-source coding the game was put on all sorts of systems and, because so many people played it, became the inspiration for many other dungeon crawling games, quickly dubbed "Roguelike" in the game's honor.
Skellboy Refractured is the upcoming action-RPG from UmaikiGames, originally released just as Skellboy for the Nintendo Switch - it's getting a desktop release soon.
You play as Skippy, the square, flexible skeleton in this sweet action-RPG, to keep a heartbroken court magician from destroying the world with his army of monsters and undead. As you play through you get to swap body parts with those of slain enemies and friends to become the hero of Cubold Kingdom. It's genuinely charming and it has such a great visual style that we've been excited over this for some time.
While the ScummVM project was originally meant to cover 2D classics, ResidualVM was the companion project for 3D games and now they're going to combine into ScummVM.
In a fresh announcement, the ScummVM team mentioned how it's now been going for 19 years as the first-ever public release of ScummVM was back in 2001. Not a bad time to announce the merger of the two projects. This means that ScummVM will be embracing both 2D and 3D games, including RPGs and point-and-click adventures under one roof. They already shared a few developers so hopefully it will go smoothly.
Two Scoop Games are currently developing Kick Bot, a tough-as-nails precision platformer that currently has a demo in the Steam Game Festival: Autumn Edition, so we had a chat about it.
It's always good to find out a little more about what goes on behind the scenes, especially for games that offer full Linux support, so we can gain a little nugget of info on how people make their games and so it's great to have Alex and Eric from Two Scoop Games available for a chat.
Drive funny little trucks across difficult tracks using only your mouse in Frick, Inc. which is out now with Linux support, plus you get some free game assets as an extra. Created by developer Kenney, known for producing high-quality game assets for the public domain, as well as plenty you can purchase directly and the Asset Forge application to create models, this is actually their first solo commercial game.
[...]
It's available exclusively on itch.io for $3.99 with support for Linux and Windows.
We spent a ton of time this week polishing up Plasma 5.20 and fixing the last few regressions that were reported during the beta period. Hopefully this release should be much smoother and more stable than the last few have been! We've really been trying to up our QA game lately. And of course, we're already looking to the next version, and new features are starting to land...
KDE developers have been busy not only putting the finishing touches on the soon to be released Plasma 5.20 but also early feature work continues on what will be Plasma 5.21.
Most exciting of the latest batch of 5.21 feature work is, again, about Wayland. KDE Plasma 5.21 will allow iGPU multi-monitor functionality for simultaneously using both integrated and discrete graphics for driving multiple monitors. This is basically multi-GPU output support on Wayland with KDE Plasma by using Udev and the DRM back-end for making use of all available GPUs on the system.
KDE Frameworks 5.75 is packed, as expected, with numerous improvements and bug fixes to make your KDE Plasma experience more enjoyable, reliable, stable, and bug-free. It brings improvements to the Discover package manager to no longer crash or silently fail when trying to update certain add-ons from store.kde.org, when canceling the password dialog, or when visiting its Settings page immediately after launching an app.
It also improves the trashing of files on external disks to use the trash folder for the respective disk directly, makes the tab switching and highlight animations of the Kickoff Application Launcher and System Tray more responsive, and fixes blurred user avatars in the new System Settings Users page and Kickoff App Launcher.
A bad snapshot in KDE neon user edition today caused an incomplete build to get into user editions. If you are affected downgrade with
sudo apt-get install libkwaylandserver5=5.19.5-0xneon+20.04+focal+build10
Sorry about that, we'll add additional QA checks to prevent similar issues from happening again.
It's been two months since Redo Rescue 2.0.4 was released with a built-in SSH server and NFS network share support, and while version 2.0.5 only fixed a couple of bugs and added a virtual keyboard for touchscreen and POS devices, Redo Rescue 2.0.6 is here with more interesting changes.
Highlights include support for mounting exFAT and F2FS (Flash-Friendly File System) filesystems. This is great, because Redo Rescue can now be used in more scenarios when you're attempting to backup and recovery a broken operating system.
Pale Moon is an Open Source, Firefox-based web browser available for Linux, focusing on efficiency and ease of use. Make sure to get the most out of your browser!
The annual Arch Linux conference take place virtually this weekend. You can tune in via live streams provided by either C3VOC (Chaos Computer Club) or Amazon Twitch and enjoy talks such as "Making servers go brrrrr", "Rolling your own security team for fun and no profit at all" and "Arch Linux: Past, Present and Future". The conference starts at 10.00 UTC (12.00 CET, 03:00 PDT).
Allan McRae gave a very detailed overview of the 18 years of Arch Linux and Levente Polyak gave insights into the current state of Arch and it's potential future in a joint presentation at Arch Conf 2020 on October 10th, 2020. It's a great watch if you want to learn the history of Arch and know what changes it may potentially have in the future.
Sven-Hendrik Haaase gave an enlightening talk about the servers and the infrastructure used by Arch Linux to serve packages, The Arch Linux Wiki and the rest of the services the Arch Linux team provides at the Arch Linux Conf 2020 on Saturday October 10th, 2020. The video is about 30 minutes + 15 minutes of Q&A.
The Arch Linux infrastructure is mostly hosted at the German provider Hetzner using 6 bare-metal server and 17 Hetzner cloud servers. They've also got 2 other backup servers for the Borg and 5 servers sponsored by Kape.
May the Force Be With You has become part of popular culture since the words were first uttered in the 1977 Star Wars film. As we know, The Force is a source of power for those who, like the Jedi, feel its flow. "The network force is similar," wrote Silicon Valley network expert and entrepreneur James Currier in Your Life is Driven by Network Effects. "You don't always see it, but it is exerting itself on you. It wants something from you. Your network force proactively guides you down a path."
"When you start to see that dialogue between you and your network, the push-pull, you see it everywhere. The chaos of the world diminishes a bit and becomes more understandable and predictable. And you understand more why things are the way they are and why they stay that way. Hopefully, it will also give you insights as to where you can push to change things that should be changed, not just about you, but about your company, your city, and your world."
Over the past few decades, network forces have been influencing many aspects of business, the economy, and our social interactions. The Internet's universal reach and connectivity have led to increasingly powerful network effects, such as, for example, platform economies.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with the contributions I've made in the past year. Historically, my F/LOSS activity had been somewhat sporadic, sometimes with months passing in between contributions. But looking through my notes from the past year, it appears that I made contributions every single month, with no skipped months. Of course, I would have liked to have done more, but I consider the improvement in consistency to be a solid win.
As for the blog, well... Judging by the most recent year-long gap (as well as the gaps before that), I'm not likely to start regularly writing posts anytime soon. But then again, if sporadic F/LOSS contribtutions can turn into regular F/LOSS contributions, then maybe sporadic blog posts can turn into regular blog posts, too. Time will tell.
The Kubuntu Focus team, announce the immediate availability of their second generation laptop, the Kubuntu Focus M2.
Customers experience power out of the box acclaimed by both experts and new users alike. The finely-tuned Focus virtually eliminates the need to configure the OS, applications, or updates. Kubuntu combines industry standard Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with the beautiful yet familiar KDE desktop. With dozens of Guided Solutions and unparalleled support, the shortest path to Linux success is the Focus.
The M2 is available now and is smaller, lighter, and faster than the prior generation M1. The 8c/16t i7-10875H CPU is faster by 17% single-core and 58% multi-core.
The $150 PinePhone is already the most affordable, accessible smartphone designed to run GNU/Linux software. But software is still very much a work in progress, which makes it an interesting development platform at the moment, but not a great... you know... phone.
Now the makers of the PinePhone want to make a new handheld communication device called the PineCom.
In some ways, it'll be like a smaller, cheaper PinePhone that could sell for as little as $100. But it'll be different in at least one key way: the PineCom is not a phone and it cannot make phone calls over cellular networks.
Hello testers, as you know our friends at Pionir are working on physical hardware which can be used for interactive training and explanation of the Black-box testing technique. The inspiration comes from James Lyndsay's Black Box Puzzles and Claudiu Draghia.
In this article we will create a python function which will take in three arguments, the first one is the number which will be divided by the other two. If the number is divisible by the other two numbers then this function will return true or else it will return false.
The key point here is to check whether that number will leave any remainder or not after it gets divided by two other numbers.
Five days ago, a new release of version 3.9 appeared with a series of improvements and new python packages, see the official website. You can install easily on Fedora 32 with dnf tool.
ABlog v0.10 is released with the main focus being to support the latest version of Sphinx as well as Python 3 only support.
Ablog V0.9.X will no longer be supported as Python 2 comes to an end in a few months and it is time people upgraded.
ABlog can support markdown pages using myst-parser. This page is a markdown file underneath.
A few days ago Python 3.9.0 has been released and I really wanted to test ist latest features (maybe I will do a separate post to talk about them) without messing my system with another Python version.
To manage my Python versions I've been using pyenv for a while and once configured, it's very easy to install a new Python version.
Twilio's Programmable Voice API is commonly used to initiate and receive phone calls, but the transcription accuracy for recordings often leaves a lot to be desired. In this tutorial, we'll see how to connect an outbound phone call powered by the Twilio Voice API with AssemblyAI's deep learning transcription API to get significantly more accurate speech-to-text output.
Python introduces two new operators for dictionaries named union used in code with pipe operator | and in-place union used in python code with this |=.
As a programmer, you might have to work with different files to store and manipulate data. One basic file manipulation task involves removing the whitespaces in files. Whitespaces are composed of spaces, blank lines, nbsp, and tabs. Programmers often need to remove whitespaces so that only the necessary data is stored and unnecessary whitespaces can be eliminated. The whitespaces can either leading (at the start of the line) or trailing (at the end of the line) spaces.
The Bash acts as the default command-line interpreter in most of the Linux distributions including Ubuntu 20.04. The Bash commands are considered as very powerful and efficient in terms of their processing. At times while running different commands in Bash, you need to save the output of a command to a variable for using it later on for some other purpose. Therefore, in this article, we will explore the method of assigning the output to a variable in Bash.
International Business Machines Corp is splitting itself into two public companies, capping a years-long effort by the world's first big computing firm to diversify away from its legacy businesses to focus on high-margin cloud computing.
IBM will list its IT infrastructure services unit, which provides technical support for 4,600 clients in 115 countries and has a backlog of $60 billion, as a separate company with a new name by the end of 2021.
The new company will have 90,000 employees and its leadership structure will be decided in a few months, Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh told Reuters.
The company highlights the low-latency of WiFi 6 that makes IW62X "ideal for advanced gaming consoles that demand high-performance Wi-Fi with near zero wireless controller lag time and low-latency multiplayer gaming experiences (via a single, in-room console) over wireless networks". NXP also keep referring to the "world's first WiFI 6 gaming console" in the press release without naming it, but it should probably mean IW620 is integrated in the upcoming Sony Playstation 5.
Dr. Scott Atlas, Trump's advisor on COVID-19, was not wearing a mask at Saturday's rally.
The most recent disruptions seem to be primarily affecting US users, with some individuals noting that they are struggling to access their admin centre dashboards. There were also reports that a number of Microsoft 365 services, as well as Azure Active Directory and Azure Networking services, were experiencing issues.
When you create a text file with content "ID;;", save it with extension .slk, then open it with Excel, Excel will crash.
This tells me they're thinking big and long-term with this thing, and not just as a replacement for a local banning tool.
So the bottom line--at the very miniumum--is that we seem to have a modern replacement for Fail2Ban, and over time that may turn into something more.
Last month there was excitement when the source code for Windows XP was leaked online. The big question, however, was how quickly Microsoft would act to have it disappeared from the web. The partial answer is that the company took 10 days to have one public repository taken down. And that was hosted on Github, a platform owned by Microsoft itself.
The combination of different techniques will provide police authorities with a powerful surveillance tool. Persons can then be located in intercepted telephone conversations. The technology uses extensive metadata that people leave behind in public places or the Internet.
On Saturday Finance Minister Matti Vanhanen told Yle's talk show Ykkösaamu he was in favour of using location data to introduce tolls on certain roads.
Finland is in the middle of planning an overhaul to traffic-related taxes due to be rolled out next spring.
The original warrant sent to Google is still sealed, but the report provides another example of a growing trend of data requests to the search engine giant in which investigators demand data on a large group of users rather than a specific request on a single suspect.
"This 'keyword warrant' evades the Fourth Amendment checks on police surveillance," said Albert Fox Cahn, the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. "When a court authorizes a data dump of every person who searched for a specific term or address, it's likely unconstitutional."
The keyword warrants are similar to geofence warrants, in which police make requests to Google for data on all devices logged in at a specific area and time. Google received 15 times more geofence warrant requests in 2018 compared with 2017, and five times more in 2019 than 2018. The rise in reverse requests from police have troubled Google staffers, according to internal emails.
The U.S. should support a ceasefire and a lasting and stable negotiated peace that respects the human rights and self-determination of all the people of Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Democratic candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have not issued a major statement on the plot and did not even refer to it at a campaign rally Thursday night in Phoenix, Arizona.
The Democratic Party and the corporate press have raised no questions about the potential role of Trump's fascist advisers or where the plotters obtained the money to plan their operations and buy equipment. Unlike Watergate, there is to be no investigation or congressional hearings into the connections between the plotters and top operatives in and around the Trump administration. No Democrat has called for subpoenaing Roger Stone, Stephen Miller, Steven Bannon, Erik Prince, or any other aides with ties to fascist groups. The position of the Democratic Party is: "nothing to see here."
Living in Louisiana, reconciling the environmental harm caused by the state's often celebrated oil and petrochemical sectors amounts to cognitive "gaslighting."
Across the country, electric utilities have worked the levers of power to win favorable treatment from state policymakers.
This week, a Richmond Times-Dispatch and ProPublica investigation found that Dominion Energy, Virginia's largest public utility, successfully lobbied to reshape a major climate bill to cover its massive offshore wind project. The move shifted risk from the company's shareholders to its ratepayers. As a result of the legislation, a typical residential customer's bill is projected to increase by nearly $30 per month over the next decade.
When university presidents were surveyed in spring of 2020 about what they felt were the most pressing concerns of COVID-19, college students going hungry didn't rank very high.
"Damn! Just get organized and get everyone to vote #Biden"
When Celia Rodriguez headed to the post office on Sept. 28, she brought with her two stamped envelopes containing her and her daughter's mail-in ballots for the November election.
With Trump trailing Biden both in national polls and key swing state polls, some within his campaign have, apparently, begun formulating a strategy to attempt to bypass the popular vote and simply hand-generate their own loyalists to send to the Electoral College.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy's Steve Wamhoff about Donald Trump and taxes for the October 2, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
The New York Times continued its explosive reporting on President Donald Trump's tax records on Friday by divulging that he engineered an eight-figure windfall shortly before contributing $10 million to his "self-funded" 2016 presidential campaign -- which sparked fresh calls for probing the president's tax and business practices.
Check out all installments in the OppArt series.
When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Judiciary Committee member Jamie Raskin appeared before reporters Friday and proposed a plan to evaluate the mental fitness of presidents, they were peppered with predictable questions about Donald Trump.
At their debate, Kamala Harris shows Mike Pence what sanity looks like.
Civil groups have reported that journalists were assaulted by law enforcement officers while covering protests against the highly controversial Job Creation Law on Thursday (Oct 7).
The Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI) reported on Friday that at least seven journalists were attacked by police officers while covering the protests in Jakarta.
The division of Red and Blue America need not be permanent.
During the first presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, President Trump stated that some of Amy Coney Barrett's "biggest endorsers are very liberal people from Notre Dame." As a former law student of the Supreme Court nominee, and as the former Notre Dame LGBT Law Forum president, I disagree with this characterization of Professor Barrett's support -- and I would note that Professor Barrett refused numerous opportunities to support the LGBTQ students of Notre Dame.
Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris released detailed plans to uphold federal trust responsibilities by addressing health disparities, restoring tribal lands and providing economic opportunity for tribal nations Thursday.
The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) and federal agents used disproportionate and excessive force against both protestors and medics at the Portland, Oregon protests in July, according to a new investigation published today by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR). The report finds that law enforcement's deployment of crowd-control weapons and obstruction of medical care at the protests resulted in severe injuries and psychological trauma to both medics and protestors. This excessive use of force escalated tensions at demonstrations and impeded the right to peaceful assembly and expression.
Conversely, Brexit will not impact European utility patents and pending applications because these are filed and granted through a centralized organization separate from the EU, namely, the European Patent Office ("EPO"). The EPO was established through a multilateral treaty known as the European Patent Convention, of which the UK remains a member. Accordingly, granted EPO utility patents that were validated in the UK will remain in force and pending utility applications, once granted by the EPO, can still be validated in the UK even after Brexit.
Finally, Brexit may impact the scope of agreements which are, by their terms, enforceable within the EU. The impact of Brexit on such agreements will depend on the specific language of the agreement. Agreements should be reviewed with this possibility in mind.
US Kidney Research Corporation (USKRC) U.S. Application No. 15/732,169 was approved and a patent was granted by the US Patent Office on October 2, 2020. The patent was granted for their Dialysate Free Artificial Kidney Device, the company's waterless renal replacement therapy technology.
Founder/CEO Roland Ludlow said "We are very pleased to finally have our US Patent granted. It was a long process. Due to the amount of patents processed by the USPTO, it was a 2 €½ year wait before the initial patent examination took place. Fortunately, with the excellent help from our patent attorneys at Morrison Forester, the final examination and approval was completed in less than 6 months from the initial examination. The entire process took nearly 3 years from start to finish".
The microbes present on our skin, the skin microbiome, is increasingly being prioritised in the next generation of personal healthcare and cosmetic products. Over the last decade, efforts such as the Human Microbiome Project have highlighted enormous diversity within the beneficial microbes that live in or on our bodies. The microbiome is of enormous interest to the health and personal care, food and agriculture sectors. The cosmetics/ personal care sector, fuelled by consumer demand, is recognising the value in developing microbiome friendly skincare products. Such products include those containing specific beneficial microbes or those that encourage the maintenance of healthy skin microbiome.
In other countries, the UK is often used as a prime example of how pirate site-blocking injunctions can function effectively. However, over the past several years, movie and music companies haven't requested any new blocks. As a result, new pirate sites can flourish, for now.
