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Posted in News Roundup at 5:45 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
Tuxedo Computers has announced the InfinityBook Pro 14 Linux laptop, Tuxedo, featuring a 3K high-resolution “Omnia” display packed with 2880×1800 pixels in a 16:10 aspect ratio.
According to the website, the additional vertical screen space afforded by the 16:10 aspect ratio provides more effective use of space for improved productivity, compared to a conventional aspect.
If you’re looking for a portable workhorse, look no further than the Entroware Proteus laptop.
Are you on the lookout for a Linux-powered laptop that can go the distance and exceed your needs of power, size, and battery life? If that sounds like the perfect machine to fill your dance card, and you’re not looking for the most brilliant display on the market, Entroware has the laptop for you.
In a recent video about Audacity I had a few people ask me what is means to have a vendored dependency, I had assumed this was common knowledge so I didn’t both explaining but here’s a dedicated video on the topic anyway.
Legendary Bash creator Brian Fox sits down with Jason to discuss the scary state of internet privacy and the dangers of centralized services. Brian’s new project is a decentralized, open-source VPN layer called Orchid.
Hello and welcome to the 414th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts discuss the Young Ham of the Year Award, new EM exposure limits in the UK, privacy at the FCC, the impending demise of Freenode, expensive keyboards, medical device hackers, wfview, js8call and much more.
**CVS** from the **d** software series of Slack.
In this episode, Josepha Haden Chomphosy provides a map of how to navigate WordPress teams and communication channels, along with her small list of big things.
Bodhi 6 64-bit release
https://www.bodhilinux.com/2021/05/12/bodhi-linux-6-0-0-released/
KDE Plasma 5.22 testing has begun:
https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.21.90
Zabbix 5.4 release:
https://www.zabbix.com/rn/rn5.4.0
NetBSD 9.2 released:
https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_9_2_released
The OpenPrinting project and CUPS printing system:
https://openprinting.github.io/OpenPrinting-News-March-2021/
Vulnerabilities in Please, the Rust alternative to sudo:
https://github.com/edneville/please
First release of DogLinux:
https://gumanzoy.blogspot.com/2021/05/liveusb-1100mb-doglinux-debian-11.html
Solaris 11.4 SRU33 available:
https://blogs.oracle.com/solaris/announcing-oracle-solaris-114-sru33
1Password password manager offers full Linux support:
https://blog.1password.com/welcoming-linux-to-the-1password-family/
GeckoLinux Distribution Release:
https://github.com/geckolinux/geckolinux-project/releases/tag/210517.999
Wayward – a custom wrapper based on Weston composite server:
https://github.com/varmd/wayward
Perl 5.34.0 released:
https://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2021/05/msg260110.html
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 Released:
https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/stability-plus-innovation-red-hat-enterprise-linux-84-now-ga
Lakka 3.0, for creating game consoles:
https://www.lakka.tv/articles/2021/05/22/lakka-3.0/
Intel engineers have been publishing open-source/Linux enablement patches around Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for nearly one year now. While Intel Xeon “Sapphire Rapids” with AMX support is expected around the end of this year, one of the key pieces yet to land is the Linux kernel support.
Sent out on Sunday was the fifth iteration of the kernel patches for supporting Intel Advanced Matrix Extensions. AMX is Intel’s new programming paradigm with a focus on better AI performance both for training and inference. AMX is built around the concept of “tiles” as a set of two-dimensional registers for representing a larger memory image and accelerators that can operate on said tiles. The initial AMX implementation is focused on BFloat16, TILE, and INT8 while the design is extensible for expanding in the future.
Intel’s Linux preparations for Alder Lake — and more broadly the concept of hybrid x86_64 CPUs with a mix of large Core and small Atom cores — continues with the P-State CPU frequency scaling driver seeing new work to prepare for Intel’s hybrid era.
The P-State CPU frequency scaling driver that is responsible for CPU frequency handling under Linux with modern Intel CPUs is being adapted to properly support hybrid architectures like the upcoming Alder Lake series.
Ethereum, the stupidly popular cryptocurrency is moving from a Proof-of-Work model which needs powerful machines to a Proof-of-Stake method which will cut actual electrical power use dramatically and need less computing power to work with.
Why is this important? Well, there’s a reason why NVIDIA have been making steps to reduce the Ethereum hash rate with new GPUs. Miners end up buying them, lots of them and it has been one of the primary causes of the ridiculous demand issues we’ve seen that end up stopping us all buying a new graphics card. Not only that, but it’s pushed up prices of existing cards too.
The first stable release of Sublime Text 4 is now available to download.
Sublime Text 4 comes packed with a wealth of workflow improvements, user interface tweaks, and even some new platform capabilities, including dark mode auto detection, side-by-side document viewing, and GPU acceleration. This release is also the first to offer support for 64-bit ARM Linux and Apple’s M1 processors.
“We’ve worked hard on providing improvements without losing focus on what makes Sublime Text great. There are some new major features that we hope will significantly improve your workflow and a countless number of minor improvements across the board,” the team behind the app say of its release.
Read on for an overview of the key changes, or skip to the download section to learn how to try Sublime Text 4 for yourself.
Here’s why I decided to move my passwords to a KeePass database file instead of using Bitwarden with a self-hosted server. It comes down to keeping my passwords out of the browser, and my setup simple and manageable.
For years, I was (and still am) unwilling to trust hosted password manager services. I eventually got with the time and started using LastPass. Three years ago, I migrated to Bitwarden as LastPass just kept cutting features and platform support.
Bitwarden is an open-source alternative to the proprietary LastPass password manager. Bitwarden offers browser extensions and apps for all common operating systems. Even the server-side synchronization component is open source. You could, theoretically, host the backend infrastructure yourself.
Only a few months back, Shutter had its first major release in years getting rid of the old libraries and dependencies.
Now, with a new 0.96 update, Shutter is prepping to make its way to the Ubuntu universe repository and other Linux distro repositories.
In case you did not know, Shutter was removed from the main Ubuntu repository and some other repos because outdated Gnome 2 libraries were dropped as well. Considering it is one of the best ways to take a screenshot in Linux, Shutter getting back to repositories will be a good thing.
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to move your first steps with Raspberry PI Pico, installing the open source Thonny IDE (integrated development environment) and running a very simple command.
Running PyQT5 CRUD (PostgreSQL 13.2 ) Application you might experience problem with importing psycopg2 . Posting below briefly provides the way to solve the issue and also describes in details database setup which is tuned specifically for Fedora 34 .
As we all know, the root user is king and wields unlimited privileges over the Linux system. However non-root users are limited to basic tasks. In addition, sudo users are only granted a certain degree of root privileges as deemed fit by the root user to perform specific elevated tasks.
Issues arise when regular users have uncontrolled access to resources or are escalated to root unintentionally. This is a serious security risk that could cause breaches, undesired modifications, and in the worst-case scenario, crashing of the system. Another potential risk is when files have less secure file permissions. For example, boot files with write permissions for global users could easily be modified or corrupted resulting in a broken system.
Whether I’m using a laptop my employer assigned to me or a workstation I built from vendor parts, I seem to have an endless capacity to forget my computer’s specifications. One of the great things about Linux is its /proc filesystem, a dynamically populated virtual expression of the system’s hardware. It’s convenient when you want to see the specifics of your CPU (cat /proc/cpuinfo), uptime (cat /proc/uptime), a list of mounted filesystems (ls -R /proc/fs/), and so on.
A modal dialog is a window that appears on top of a web page and requires a user’s interaction before it disappears. React has a couple of ways to help you generate and manage modals with minimal coding.
If you create them within a local scope, you must import modals into each component and then create a state to manage each modal’s opening and closing status.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nano on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, GNU Nano is a free, open-source command-line text editor for Unix-like operating systems. It was designed to be an easy-to-use replacement for the Pico text editor. Nano includes all the basic functionality same as other text editors such as UTF-8 encoding, syntax highlighting, search and replace with regular expression support, multiple buffers, spellchecking, and more.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Nano text editor on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
The Sqlite Browser is a GUI editor for SQLite databases. It is an excellent tool for any workstation that is used for heavy SQLite database manipulation, editing, etc. In this guide, we’ll go over how to set up the Sqlite Browser on Linux.
One of the things that’s most frustrating about building a new computer for Linux is peripherals, especially for gamers who are looking for lots of functionality out of their peripherals. If you have Razer peripherals, you may be in luck, because the OpenRazer project has a solution for you. Here we go over how to install OpenRazer on Linux.
Since Ubuntu replaced Chromium in its universe repository with Snap package, users are looking for deb package or apt method to install the browser.
The Linux Mint team has been maintaining the chromium deb package for a while. You can install the package in Ubuntu and keep updated. It’s stable and trustworthy, however the installing process is not as easy as an Ubuntu PPA does.
Another Ubuntu PPA now contains the latest packages (90.0.4430.212 at the moment) for Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 20.10. The PPA also contains most recent versions of other useful apps, e.g., avidemux, filezilla, youtube-dl, and more. And it’s also trusty.
Access Control Lists (ACLs) are a flexible method to set permissions in Linux. Every operating system has some level of ACLs, which assign permissions to users and groups on files and directories.
In most Linux variants, ACLs either exist, or a package can be installed to use them. With the use of ACLs, we can assign permissions to individual users.
For example, let’s assume we have two users, john and matt. We can assign read and write permissions to john and read, write, and execute permissions to matt. Let’s proceed to take a look at this concept.
When you log in to Linux, either by way of SSH or the console, you are greeted with a banner that offers up a few important bits of information. If you’re doing everything you can to secure that Linux server, the information shared by that banner can be a gold mine to ne’er do wells and would-be attackers. Information like kernel release, distribution type, available updates, and more can be revealed.
So how do you prevent that information from being displayed when users log into your Linux systems? Let me show you.
VirtualBox is a great way to install Linux distributions alongside other operating systems without having to reboot, but the system performance of a virtual machine is nothing compared to an installed operating system.
Did you know there are ways to increase the performance of VirtualBox and make your virtual machines more useful? We’ll find out in this article.
In a multi-container setup, the services running in the containers communicate with each other over a common network. In the same setup, some containers also interact with the outside world.
This internal and external communication is handled with exposed and published ports in Docker respectively.
In this tutorial, I’ll discuss dealing with ports in Docker. I’ll go on to the difference between exposing and publishing ports, why they are used and how to use them.
This guide gives you a brief introduction to “n”, an unofficial node version management tool and then explains how to easily manage nodejs versions with n in Linux operating systems.
Default application launcher on almost all Linux distributions limits itself to only searching and launching apps installed on your system.
But if you want your app launcher to do more than what it can offer, Ulauncher is a Linux productivity software that you should check out right now.
Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. Helm uses a packaging format called charts, which include all of the Kubernetes resources that are required to deploy an application, such as deployments, services, ingress, etc. Helm charts are very useful for installing applications and performing upgrades on a Kubernetes cluster.
In this article, I will show you how to deploy a Helm chart using Jenkins continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and Red Hat OpenShift 4. Figure 1 shows a high-level view of the process.
Powerlevel10k is a prompt for Zsh. It contains some powerful features, is astoundingly fast, and easy to customize. I am quite amazed at the skills of its main author. Be sure to also have a look at Zsh for Humans, a complete Zsh configuration including this theme.
One of the nice features of Powerlevel10k is transient prompts: past prompts are reduced to a more minimal configuration to save space by removing unneeded information.
What would your initial reaction be if someone asked you if a six-year-old with no prior Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) experience or knowledge would be able to create a new user account, reset the root account’s password, start the chronyd service, turn on SELinux, and install updates on a RHEL 8 server?
Your initial thought might be that there is simply no possible way an untrained six-year-old could complete these tasks. I recently put this to the test and you might be surprised by the results.
Provisioners are tools that allow you to automate your workflow when you are booting up a virtual machine. Vagrant support provisioners like file, shell, ansible, puppet, and salt stack. You can use any of these tools and automate your virtual machine deployment workflow.
Although while writing this tutorial the Debian 11 Bullseye was in RC1 state, however, it doesn’t matter you can use the steps given here even to upgrade Debian 10 Buster to 11, once you have the stable release…
We have tried to make the tutorial- how to upgrade Debian 10 to 11 as simple as possible. Here, we have simply changed the repository to perform the upgrading process. Well, while performing the steps given here we didn’t face any problem but we recommend you backup your system before following this article.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is an open-source, cross-platform, document-oriented database management system. MongoDB features include full index support, replication, high availability, and auto-sharding. It is cross-platform and it makes the process of data integration faster and much easier. Since it is free and open-source, MongoDB is used by a number of websites and organizations.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of MongoDB NoSQL database management on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
Doctor needed in the surgery! CorsixTH, the wonderful free and open source game engine reimplementation for the incredible classic that is Theme Hospital has a big new Beta out.
This will be the first release of CorsixTH in almost a year, so there’s quite a lot to look forward to. Why use CorsixTH though? Well, on top of adding native support for modern operating systems it offers up many enhancements like high resolution, more translations, new game modes, bigger maps and so much more.
Now and then I go back to the big long list of games that was included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality and come across a gem. This time it’s Code 7, a really engrossing hacking adventure.
Okay, to be truthful, I was poked about this by our contributor and podcast co-op star Samsai who mentioned some time ago how good it is. Sadly, it continued slipping down my list until I said — no more! I’m seriously glad I put my gaming finger down and clicked play because Code 7 is genuinely great. A massive surprise that you should seriously check out if you like a wild story adventure.
Misfits Attic, developer of Duskers are celebrating the well-received game hitting five years and they’re returning to indie development once again. We also have sales info across platforms.
What is Duskers? It’s a space sci-fi game where you take on the role of a drone pilot. You pilot drones into derelict spaceships to find the means to survive and piece together how the universe became a giant graveyard. It’s incredibly atmospheric and feeling a bit Alien-like and a previous contributor of ours liked it a lot.
GZDoom continues maturing as a game engine to play the classics including the Doom series, Heretic and Hexen and more along with developers using it to make their own games (like the upcoming Selaco).
The latest and greatest is out now with GZDoom 4.6.0 as it continues to polish up the experience.
Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread from Allods Team Arcade and publisher MY.GAMES has recently been confirmed as getting a Linux version.
Ready to blast your way through another colourful action adventure? Blast Brigade vs. the Evil Legion of Dr. Cread sounds like it will be pretty sweet, even though that name is a tad on the long-winded side and not exactly easy to remember.
Why is it so hard to have a proper download manager in today’s day ? We had it in the previous decade. Or do tech giants self-proclaim that the world lives only in their cloud.
At one point, there used to be great download managers for all major web browsers, either in-built, or external. Then came the latest trend with Chrome and Firefox, where they make it difficult to have an external download manager work proper. On either one’s extension store, I find it difficult to see a proper download manager.
The election process for the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors is currently underway. Three positions are up for election this year, and Foundation members are able to nominate themselves until May 31st.
I’ve been sitting on the board since 2015, and have been acting as chair for the past two years. In this post, I’m going to talk a bit about how the board has evolved in the past year, and what sitting on the board involves.
Board Evolution
As I’ve talked about previously, the GNOME Foundation Board has been evolving over recent years. When I first joined the board in 2015 we had a staff of one and a half, and the board was busy keeping the organisation running. We approved conference proposals, helped to organise events, dealt with legal issues when they arose, and attempted to manage our staff.
Nowadays we thankfully don’t have to do these things, because we have an Executive Director and their staff to do them for us. This has allowed the board to increasing move into the role that a board is supposed to have: that is, governance and oversight.
This is of vital importance since, to have a successful Foundation, we need to have a group which is responsible for taking a hard look at its strategy, plans and organisational health. This isn’t something that a board that is focused on day-to-day operations is able to do.
Linux gaming has always been a hot topic in the Linux community. Thanks to the combined effort of the community, Linux can run most of the AAA titles available on Windows, for instance, GTA V and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. But there is another category of Linux people that hold great affection for retro console games, and that’s why we have distros like Lakka and RetroPie.
In this article, let’s talk about the recent Lakka Linux release, Lakka 3.0, the new features it brings to the table to make the retro gaming experience better on devices like the Raspberry Pi.
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The developers are also working on bringing the 64-bit release of Lakka 3.0 for Raspberry Pi 3 in the upcoming versions. Apart from that, developers will also push new versions of Lakka with updated cores twice a month. The next major release will be based on LibreELEC 10.
Lakka is a lightweight Linux distribution that transforms a small computer into a full blown retrogaming console, and it’s the official RetroArch Linux distribution. Good for the Raspberry Pi and other small devices.
If you’ve got a low-end device laying around, or a single-board like the RPi, then Lakka might be a great way this week to revive it and turn it into a lovely retro-gaming media centre. Over a year since the last release, Lakka 3.0 is out bringing with it a ridiculously huge amount of upgrades.
Lakka is a lightweight Linux distribution that transforms a small PC or Raspberry Pi into a full blown retro gaming console.
Lakka is built purely for turning your Raspberry Pi into a finely tuned retro gaming console. It only contains the packages and services required to run the RetroArch software allowing the Raspberry Pi’s hardware to run as fast it can. Lakka features numerous features that make it a fantastic choice for setting your Raspberry Pi into console for gaming.
Built on top of LibreELEC, Lakka uses RetroArch to emulate a huge selection of retro gaming systems. It’s designed to operate out-of-the-box and comes only with cores that work with whatever architecture you choose to download. Cores contain the code necessary to emulate a specific system like NES or PlayStation.
In addition, Akka has plenty of features like USB controller recognition, custom wallpapers, and online multiplayer, that turns your Raspberry Pi into a full blown retro gaming console.
In early April, the OpenMandriva team announced their plans to release one more point release for the OpenMandriva Lx 4 series before they move to the OpenMandriva Lx 5 branch, which is currently in heavy development.
As such, OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 “Nickel” is now taking shape as the third installment in the OpenMandriva Lx 4 series, shipping with the latest Linux 5.12 kernel and KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environment series, which is accompanied by the recently released KDE Gear 21.04.1 and KDE Frameworks 5.82 software suites, all compiled against the Qt 5.15.3 application framework with all patches proposed by the KDE Project.
We have good news: Cooker, our development branch, is working very well right now. Our internal testers have been reporting that the system looks very responsive and already brings many user visible advantages over OMLx 4.2.
Hence we decided to publish a unscheduled stable release to permit the Rock users to enjoy of a good amount of updates they would otherwise not get (unless they upgrade to Rolling) before moving ahead with the more ambitious plans for OMLx 5.0.
Here is the Release Candidate.
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Another feature that will be interesting to some is that we’ve fully integrated support for the new JPEG-XL picture file format. JPEG-XL is significantly more efficient than traditional JPEG, and also adds all major features of PNG (such as transparent images and support for lossless compression).
With the OpenMandriva Lx 4.3 release candidate they have upgraded to the Linux 5.12 kernel (currently v5.12.4), they make use of LLVM 12 as their main compiler toolchain, systemd 248, KDE Plasma 5.21.5 + KDE Frameworks 5.82 + Qt 5.15.3, Mesa 21.1.1 provides the latest open-source graphics drivers, and there are a variety of other package updates. Beyond bumping to the latest packages, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is adding fully integrated support for JPEG-XL images, AMDVLK is now available as an alternative AMD Vulkan driver, and OpenMandriva’s port to the PinePhone continues to be improved upon.
As some of you may have read over the past days, there has been an ownership dispute over the freenode.net network. The IRC network has been used by Arch Linux and many other projects over the past decades as a platform for discussion and support
Users of the Fedora Linux 34 operating system rejoice! The latest and greatest Linux 5.12 kernel series has landed in the stable software repositories of the distribution, and you can now update your installations to replace the now deprecated Linux 5.11 kernel.
Fedora Linux 34 was officially released on April 27th, 2021, and it shipped with the Linux kernel 5.11 by default. Since then, users received regular updates almost every week, but now that Linux kernel 5.11 reached end of life, it’s time to say goodbye and upgrade to Linux kernel 5.12.
Red Hat engineers have scored an impressive performance optimization to the DeviceMapper (DM) code that is now queued up for merging with the Linux 5.14 cycle.
The commit dm space maps: improve performance with inc/dec on ranges of blocks was summed up as, “When we break sharing on btree nodes we typically need to increment the reference counts to every value held in the node. This can cause a lot of repeated calls to the space maps. Fix this by changing the interface to the space map inc/dec methods to take ranges of adjacent blocks to be operated on.”
Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBI) contain the full Red Hat build of OpenJDK. Universal Base Images is available to anyone under the terms of the UBI end user license agreement and is fully supported for Red Hat customers. These “builder” images are designed to be suitable for building and running a wide range of Java-based applications, particularly when used in a Red Hat OpenShift environment. They contain the full Java Development Kit (JDK) including the development tools, Java compiler, Maven, and related build tooling.
The OpenShift source-to-image (S2I) process makes it straightforward to build and update your application’s source code within an OpenShift cluster, and your deployments will be updated whenever the underlying image or your application sources are updated. With this workflow, the application is layered on top of the builder image, so the deployment contains the full JDK and Maven tooling. Some developers want their deployments to be based on a slimmer base image; perhaps without Maven, or without the full JDK tooling, or both.
To address this need, Red Hat has released new OpenJDK runtime container images, which do not contain the full JDK or other build tooling. This article explains how to use these new images within an OpenShift environment to automatically deploy your application using the S2I workflow. We will use a Quarkus quickstart as the application source.
Performance is a critical focus area of improvement with every release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). With RHEL 8.4, we introduced several key performance enhancements for system administrators and performance engineers to enable simpler troubleshooting experiences, richer visualization of performance metrics, and deeper performance insights. In this blog, we will go over some of these capabilities.
Evolved for the digital economy, IBM LinuxONE gives businesses the security of confidential computing, lightning-fast processing speed, and unparalleled reliability and availability features.
IBM recently announced IBM LinuxONE III Express, the latest edition to the LinuxONE family, and for the first time, LinuxONE is available in an off-the-shelf configuration that is designed to get clients up and running quickly. This new system, coupled with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM Z and LinuxONE, now affords every business the security, performance, and open source critically needed in an open hybrid cloud. It presents a viable consolidation platform that both saves on licensing costs and enables technologies such as virtualization, cloud, containerization, and cryptography that are vital to surviving in today’s economy.
This matters if you care about IRC, the internet, open protocols, decentralisation, and, to a certain extent, federation as well. It also touches on who has the right on network resources: the people who “own” it (through money) or the people who make it work (through their labor). I am biased towards open protocols, the internet, federation, and worker power, and this might taint this analysis.
I cooked together a new compression format over the weekend; it’s based on experiences I had way back when I worked on Snappy, and intends to be as kind as possible to the branch predictor. I don’t intend to productionize it because it isn’t competitive (see below), but I still think the idea is interesting enough to put out there.
The implementation isn’t much; it’s generally slightly less dense than Snappy, but decompresses faster than it, but it thoroughly trounced by LZ4 still (factor 2–3x!). I don’t know if that’s LZ4′s format being inherently faster or just if it’s about the massive amount of tuning in the implementation; back when we open-sourced Snappy, it was in the same league as LZ4 (well, faster to begin with, and then LZ4 picked up a lot of the same tricks and had a simpler format), so evidently, a lot of things have happened, and I don’t have the patience anymore to tweak individual cycles.
There is a new application available for Sparkers: RiseupVPN
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License: GNU General Public License v3.0
Raspberry Pi announced a second-gen “Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT” that keeps the $20 price while advancing to 802.3at PoE+ for powering the Pi with up to 25.5W. A new diode rectifier enables cool running.
For the first time we can recall, Raspberry Pi Trading has announced a new product without supplying an order button. The replacement for the original Raspberry Pi PoE HAT will be available in June for Raspberry Pi 3B+ and 4 models, selling at same $20 price as the original.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced the Raspberry Pi PoE+ HAT compliant with 802.3at (aka PoE+) and 802.3af standards and support for up to 25.5 Watts input.
It will replace the Raspberry Pi PoE HAT introduced in 2018 which was limited to 802.3af standard with a maximum of 15.4 Watts input and will become available around mid-June for $20 plus taxes and shipping.
ASRock has revealed that its 10th Gen Comet Lake based “IMB-1222” Mini-ITX board is being used by Dynamis PRC for a Linux-driven autonomous driving system participating in the 2022 Formula Student Championship.
ASRock Industrial has announced a design win with Dynamis PRC Team, the Formula SAE championship racing team from the Politecnico di Milano. ASRock is providing its IMB-1222 Mini-ITX board, built around Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake-S as the mainboard for a self-driving car system prototype that will compete in the 2022 Formula Student Championship.
TOPTON D3 is an AMD Ryzen 5 4500U mini (desktop) PC that adds to the list of compact computers such as ASRock Mars 4000U or ASRock 4×4 BOX-4800U based on 15W AMD Ryzen 4000-series mobile processors.
The mini PC offers two DDR4 SODIMM sockets, NVMe SSD storage, two Gigabit Ethernet ports, WiFI 6, as well as three 4K video outputs through HDMI, DisplayPort, and USB-C ports.
PureOS 10 is going to be our new release for the Librem 14, Librem 5, and Librem Mini. You may already be familiar with its code name “Byzantium” but what happens next is that it moves to our stable release and stops being our rolling release. This means that the character of updates changes from drinking from the firehose to a steady drumbeat of security and stability updates. It also means that it will have had some testing on our hardware and working with other Purism innovations like PureBoot. I’m writing this on my Purism Mini running PureOS 10 and I’ve never been so happy to eat my own dog food.
Aside from the myriad small changes in the various packages in PureOS, a number of rather large changes are worth mention. The most important is the way that GNOME applications have learned to adapt to multiple window sizes. The software library libhandy was built for our Librem 5 phone but works on all our devices. It enables the various chat, email, and other application windows to resize their contents to elegantly present the information inside them. While this has obvious uses on our phone, it can be useful on any device including your car or TV. Simply resize your libhandy enabled app and you’ll find you can use your laptop screen real estate efficiently without important info scrolling off the sides. All this magic is called “convergence”.
But if you don’t remember what was hard about something, not all is lost! It’s definitely possible to write about a topic that somebody else is struggling with. I find that the easiest way to do this is to first teach the topic, so here’s a quick story about that.
In 2019, I wrote a zine about SQL. When I started, I thought it would be easy because I was pretty comfortable with SQL – I’d done a LOT of data analysis in SQL and so I thought I could explain it.
But I couldn’t have been more wrong. It turned out that when I started I had no idea what was actually challenging about learning SQL.
I spent a lot of time talking to a friend who was new to SQL about how it worked, and we realized that one of the blockers was that it wasn’t obvious to them in what order a given SQL query was running. So I wrote SQL queries don’t start with SELECT, and a bunch of related examples and that helped a lot of people understand SQL queries better!
The cool thing about this is that when I dig into something that I think is easy but someone else is struggling with, often I learn something new too. For example I did sort of know in what order SQL queries ran but I’d never really thought about it explicitly. And being more explicit about how it worked helped me understand window functions better, which was something I was a bit shaky on!
A bit late to the game on the Rocket Lake side but ahead as usual when it comes to Alder Lake S, Intel’s engineers maintaining the open-source Compute Runtime for Linux systems have now flipped on the Level Zero support.
Rocket Lake and forthcoming Alder Lake S processors with Xe Graphics should now have working Level Zero support with Intel Compute Runtime 21.20.19883. Enabling Rocket Lake and Alder Lake S Level Zero support is the main highlight of today’s Compute-Runtime update plus the cl_intel_sharing_format_query extension is also now enabled.
For the eighth consecutive year we run the annual curl user survey again in 2021. The form just went up and I would love to have you spend 10 minutes of your busy life to tell us how you think curl works, what doesn’t work and what we should do next.
We have no tracking on the website and we have no metrics or usage measurements of the curl tool or the libcurl library. The only proper way we have left to learn how users and people in general think of us and how curl works, is to ask. So this is what we do, and we limit the asking to once per year.
May 27th will be Canonical’s first time at a DockerCon event. That’s exciting!
Since our joint announcement back in November, the relationship between Canonical and Docker has become stronger as more projects arise. There’s still a lot to be done in a cloud-native world to make Open Source available to everyone in its purest form.
We strongly believe in Open Source Software, and our mission hasn’t changed. Our vision, however, has been more focused recently on Cloud and Security. Now is a very special time as we’ve got the motivation, the ability, and the opportunity.
The Call for Papers for KDAB’s upcoming event, Qt DevCon, is now open. We are planning to make this our first in-person event after the shut-down. The event will take place September 28-30, featuring 1 training day and 2 days of technical talks from developers, for developers.
[...]
This conference aims to help the attendees become even better Qt programmers. Talks about general aspects of programming may be off-topic for this conference (as interesting as they may be). For instance, a talk like “C# for Qt developers” is off-topic; a talk like “Here’s what Qt should steal from WForms” could be accepted.
A lot of people rely on the Web these days not just to say informed or connected but also to work. Web browsers have become critical pieces of software on any platform, so when those break, the Internet is filled with complaints and demands for explanations. That is what transpired over the weekend when Google Chrome on Windows 10 started crashing left and right. Google did quickly push out a fix and its solution is just as strange as the bug it fixes.
The UBI OpenJDK containers are full fat developer containers: they’ve got the full OpenJDK distribution in them (including javac etc.); they include Maven and there are various quality-of-life additions such as a Prometheus agent for metrics gathering in OpenShift and a run-java script to control launching the eventual application, as well as OpenShift Source-To-Image (S2I) integration.
A couple of weeks ago I stumbled across a Template Haskell question on the Haskell sub-reddit. This was quite exciting because I rarely see TH questions, and this one was by someone working on something which was quite similar to what I had done: they were writing a code generator, and had pure functions of type Exp -> Exp -> Exp, but wanted to leverage TH’s quasi-quotation syntax (e.g. [| \p -> p + 1 |]) as a syntactic short-hand. Alas these quasi-quotes are of type Q Exp, so the question becomes, how to escape Q?
Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra aiming towards a good balance between speed and ease of use with a syntax deliberately close to a Matlab. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 865 other packages on CRAN.
This new release brings Armadillo 10.5.0 which was released early on Friday. We had done one full test in the ‘10.5 rc1’ prerelease one week earlier, and did another test on 10.5.0 and this 0.10.5.0.0 RcppArmadillo release just for added rigour. The package was then uploaded to CRAN late Friday (my timezone). The automated process flagged one NOTE as a false positive (yet another instance of the well-known (yet dreaded) issue of ‘Suggests != Depends’ by one these 865 packages). This lead to a need of an inspection by one of the CRAN maintainers, and the weekend being the weekend it was only processed just now.
I am trying R 4.1 in a schroot experimental container, while waiting that Bullseye’s release will allow the package to be uploaded to Sid and the needed dependencies to be recompiled.
It took over 80 developers to review the Linux kernel and ensure it was free of tainted code recently submitted by University of Minnesota (UNM) researchers.
The “Hypocrite Commits” row erupted last month when senior kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman urged the community to review all contributions made by UNM after catching researchers from the university deliberately sending compromised code submissions to the kernel.
Turning in a set of fixes for the current under development kernel release, Kroah-Hartman last week, noted that the majority of the changes are the result of the thorough review.
PowerShell was the source of more than a third of critical threats detected on endpoints in the second half of 2020, according to a Cisco research study released at the RSA Conference today.
The top category of threats detected across endpoints by Cisco Secure Endpoint was dual-use tools leveraged for exploitation and post-exploitation tasks. PowerShell Empire, Cobalt Strike, PowerSploit, Metasploit and other such tools have legitimate uses, Cisco noted in the report, but they’ve become part of the attacker toolkit too. Such “living off the land” tactics can avoid detection when deploying foreign tools or code to compromise systems.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libx11, prosody, and ring), Fedora (ceph, glibc, kernel, libxml2, python-pip, slurm, and tpm2-tss), Mageia (bind, libx11, mediawiki, openjpeg2, postgresql, and thunderbird), openSUSE (Botan, cacti, cacti-spine, chromium, djvulibre, fribidi, graphviz, java-1_8_0-openj9, kernel, libass, libxml2, lz4, and python-httplib2), and Slackware (expat).
As this nation recovers from a deadly pandemic and rightwing hate groups that are trying to provoke a second Civil War, let’s remember how this all came about. And all for a few extra pieces of gold.
“Republican discourse is a never-ending torrent of lies, idiocies, and absurdities—the very antithesis of Reason.”
“Beyond the censorious power of the right, there’s something else in corporate journalism’s culture to blame here, and that is its obsession with ‘objectivity’.”
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 190-2. In 2015 I delivered this talk: “On Life without Patents and Copyright: Or, Who Would Pick The Cotton?” at the Property and Freedom Society, 10th Annual Meeting, Bodrum, Turkey (Sep. 13, 2015), which is here: KOL190 | On Life without Patents and Copyright: Or, But Who Would Pick the Cotton? (PFS 2015). There was a panel discussion with Q&A from the speakers for that day, to-wit: Hans-Hermann Hoppe, David Dürr, Stephan Kinsella, Frank van Dun, Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple). Transcript below.
CRISPR patents continue to face priority challenges in Europe. Following an earlier revocation of CRISPR patent EP2771468 based on a successful priority challenge, another foundational CRISPR patent EP3241902, co-owned by University of California Berkeley (UCB), was revoked in its entirety last month by the European Patent Office (EPO) based on an invalid priority claim. This is the first significant loss of UCB’s CRISPR patent rights in Europe.
UCB patent EP3241902 (“the ‘902 patent”) has been revoked following oral proceedings at the EPO on April 12 and 13, 2021. As is common for CRISPR patent challenges at the EPO, multiple opponents sought revocation of the patent on multiple grounds. While the written decision setting out the grounds for revocation by the EPO Opposition Division (OD) has not yet been published, preliminary non-binding opinions by the OD cite a pivotal June 28, 2012 UCB publication (“Jinek 2012”) as potentially relevant prior art to support revocation of the patent on the basis of lack of inventive step under Article 56 EPC.
We have a new Chief Judge at the Federal Circuit: Chief Judge Kimberly Moore. Prior to law school, Judge Moore worked as an electrical engineer for the Navy’s Naval Surface Warfare Center. Her BSEE and MS are both from MIT. Judge Moore then attended Georgetown Law Center; clerked for Judge Archer at the Federal Circuit; and also worked for a short time at Kirkland & Ellis. She was a law professor from 1997-2006 (Chicago-Kent; Maryland, and then George Mason) before being appointed to the Federal Circuit by President George W Bush with unanimous consent from the Senate. Throughout the past 30 years, Chief Judge Moore has primarily focused her attention on patent law issues.
The legal basis for compulsory licenses under Japanese Patent Law is Article 83 of the Japanese Patent Act (Patent Act), which stipulates that, “Where a patented invention is not sufficiently and continuously worked for 3 years or longer in Japan, a person intending to work the patented invention may request the patentee or the exclusive licensee to hold consultations to discuss granting a non-exclusive license; provided, however, that this shall not apply unless 4 years have lapsed from the filing date of the patent application in which the patented invention was filed.”
Additionally, Article 92 of the Patent Act stipulates that, (1) Where a patented invention falls under any of the cases as provided in Article 72[1], the patentee or exclusive licensee may request the other person under the said Article to hold consultations to discuss granting a non-exclusive license to work the patented invention or a non-exclusive license on the utility model right or the design right.
In the recent appeal proceedings T 2255/15 before the European Patent Office´s Boards of Appeal, third party observations (TPO) were submitted only during the appeal stage. The (recently tightened) Rules of Proceedings of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA) on late-filing only impose constraints on late-file submissions by parties, as does Art. 114(2) EPC. A third party does not become party to the proceedings; so there arose the question: are these rules on late filing applicable to Third Party Observations?
The deciding Board of Appeal in T 2255/15 said: they can (and must).
Albeit observations by third parties pursuant to Article 115 EPC can in principle be filed during the appeal stage, Article 115 EPC must not be interpreted in such a way as to grant third parties rights which extend beyond those of the parties to proceedings (a finding that was already issued before, e.g., in G 2/19). Hence, the criteria laid down in Article 12(2) RPBA 2020 for parties to the proceedings are to be taken into consideration in deciding whether and to what extent Third Party Observations must be considered.
The Australian economy is dominated by SMEs, which account for 99 per cent of all companies, and thus have the potential to play a key role in re-building post-COVID-19.
As we look for ways to build the post-COVID-19 economy, a recent comprehensive study by the European Patent Office (EPO) has provided some insights on the positive role that innovation and Intellectual Property (IP) rights plays in increasing profitability and creating jobs.
ALTHOUGH historically, chemical engineering has primarily focussed on process engineering, the discipline now encompasses high-performance material design and is frequently linked with biological or biomedical engineering. As the sector continues to develop, new strategies are required to protect the intellectual property that’s created. In this article I explore what these new strategies involve.
Intellectual property (IP) rights created by a chemical engineering company may encompass technologies not only at the borderline of chemistry and engineering, but also physical processes, and biotechnology. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) classifies patents according to the different areas of technology they involve. Patents relating to chemical engineering cover a huge range of classifications, from “performing operations” such as “physical or chemical processes or apparatus in general”, “separation of solid materials”, “centrifugal apparatus or machines for carrying out physical or chemical processes”, and “cleaning” – to categories relating to textile treatment, mechanical engineering, electricity production and specific areas of chemistry. It’s clear just how diverse the technologies are when you consider the companies which are filing the most patent applications in chemical engineering (see Figure 1).
Gnubiotics Sciences SA (Gnubiotics), a Swiss biotech company pioneering novel microbiome targeted solutions for humans and companion animals, today announced the allowance from the European Patent Office (EPO) for its patent application 19812838.1 (EPO pubication 3695018). This is a key patent filing covering the microbiome-based prediction, identification and treatment of feline obesity.
With July marking the end of a project that filters patent cases for certain judges, counsel set out how litigation plans might change
IN 2015, Finchley applied to register the word mark BLUE INDUSTRY for its apparel. P&S opposed registration — arguing both confusion and dilution. Opposition proceedings are initially decided by a panel of Trademark Trial & Appeal Board (TTAB) judges. In this case, the judges sided with Finchley and found no likelihood of confusion and no potential for dilution. On appeal, the Federal Circuit has affirmed.
As readers may know, Germany passed their implementation of Article 17 of the Digital Single Market (DSM) Copyright Directive on Thursday 20th May 2021. This new copyright legislation is controversial and has potentially dramatic implications for copyright users, rightsholders and platforms. As such, I am extremely grateful to our friend Ansgar Kaiser, who is a Junior Research Fellow at Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, who has kindly provided us with this detailed explainer of just what exactly it all means:
On May 20th 2021, the German Parliament passed a bill containing the most relevant copyright reform in years: the implementation of Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive) into German law. Many important copyright topics including platform liability, text and data mining, caricature, pastiche, parody, contractual provisions and new related rights for publishers were addressed.
Already at the European level, the Directive was controversially debated by stakeholders, including citizens, politicians and researchers. The implementation into German law was, and still is, the equally debated sequel on a national level. From the beginning, the most controversial topic was the use of copyright protected works on certain internet platforms, now regulated in Art. 17 DSM Directive.
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