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Posted in News Roundup at 8:10 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
Today, I’m taking a quick look at the recently released Elementary OS 6.0 “Odin”. Elementary is an Ubuntu-based Linux distro that has its own desktop environment and its own custom applications. It is very Mac-like in its “walled garden” approach to how a desktop should look and function.
KDE Gear 21.08 comes out Tomorrow! KG⚙️21.08 brings updates and new features to your favorite apps. We made ads for some of them, using different styles and perspectives. Here is an ad for Elisa, KDE’s simple, but fancy music player.
Is there a secret motive behind Apple’s announced plans to scan iMessage and iCloud Photo Library content?
Plus how using a common SDK just cost Zoom $85M.
It’s been less than one week since the AMDVLK 2021.Q3.3 update for this official open-source Radeon Vulkan Linux driver while today AMD has issued its latest update.
Given the short turnaround time since the prior update, when seeing AMDVLK 2021.Q3.4 tagged this morning, the immediate thought was this would be to provide official Radeon RX 6600 XT support given its retail launch today. That’s not the case and AMDVLK 2021.Q3.4 is just for shipping one driver fix.
And according to the list of changes to the Linux kernel, Intel is ironically removing support for its Cannon Lake graphics driver in the upcoming Linux kernel version 5.15. These chips were famously shipped without the integrated graphics engine active, meaning the graphics drivers weren’t even needed. Interestingly, the chips did have an integrated Gen 10 graphics engine, but Intel disabled the graphics in a sure sign that there were yield problems with its 10nm process that it wasn’t being entirely forthcoming about. In fact, Intel also limited these chips to the China region to keep them away from Western audiences. What followed was a long string of further 10nm delays that gave its competitor AMD a massive advantage, and Intel still hasn’t fully recovered from the impact.
Perhaps the biggest news, besides the enablement code for DG2, is the removal of support for Intel Cannon Lake graphics. The i915 GFX driver will no longer support Cannon Lake graphics in the upcoming Linux kernel version 5.15. This means that Intel considers Cannon Lake’s graphics driver as a bloated addition to the i915 GFX driver, and hence, it is removing it. The driver didn’t matter anyway — the graphics engine never worked.
With yesterday’s launch day Radeon RX 6600 XT Linux review the benchmarks were conducted using the popular Mesa RADV open-source driver used by many Linux gamers considering it’s the driver Valve has been relentlessly optimizing and is the default on most (or all) Linux distributions. For those wondering how the performance of RADV is comparing to that of AMD’s closed-source “PRO” Vulkan driver distributed as part of the “Radeon Software for Linux” package, here are some benchmarks exploring that difference.
Have you ever wondered how much time it takes for your system to boot? Maybe someone you know has claimed that their system boots faster than yours and you’re curious about the exact time. While not everyone is interested in the numbers, you might be. You’ll certainly want booting to be as fast as possible.
By the end of this guide, you’ll have a brief understanding of what affects your Linux system’s boot time and how to calculate its total duration. You’ll also learn ways to decrease the boot-up time and transform your computer into a fast and responsive beast.
Decreasing video sizes becomes necessary when space is limited in cloud services, disks, or personal storage drives. You can easily hold onto larger files by chopping them down to a lower size.
The world of open-source video editing tools is huge. So, choosing one can be tricky. This article explains how you can efficiently decrease video sizes using FFmpeg in Linux.
The official PPA for Shutter screenshot tool is back! So far contains packages for Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 21.04.
Shutter is one of the most popular screenshot tool for Linux. Other than basic screen capturing feature, it supports plugins, profiles, uploading to Imgur, Dropbox, etc., and has a built-in editor.
Following below is a brief set of instructions setting up KDE Plasma on RockyLinux along with Gnome Desktop Manager which is actually needed to support graphical login, otherwise system might be started via text login followed by “startx”
ImageMagick is a free and open-source image manipulation tool. It is mainly used to create, edit, compose or convert bitmap images. Its uses include resizing, rotating, shearing images, applying various special effects, or drawing text, lines, and curves. Most of its functionalities are performed from the command line.
ImageMagick supports a variety of image formats such as PNG, JPEG, GIF, HEIC, TIFF, DPX, EXR, WebP, Postscript, PDF, and SVG. ImageMagick is compatible with Linux, Windows, Mac Os X, iOS, Android OS, and others.
We all are aware of the most popular command called ‘useradd‘ or ‘adduser‘ in Linux. There are times when a Linux System Administrator is asked to create user accounts on Linux with some specific properties, limitations, or comments.
A process, in POSIX terminology, is an ongoing event being managed by an operating system’s kernel. A process is spawned when you launch an application, although there are many other processes running in the background of your computer, including programs to keep your system time accurate, to monitor for new filesystems, to index files, and so on.
Most operating systems have a system activity monitor of some kind so you can learn what processes are running at any give moment. Linux has a few for you to choose from, including GNOME System Monitor and KSysGuard. Both are useful applications on the desktop, but Linux also provides the ability to monitor your system in your terminal. Regardless of which you choose, it’s a common task for those who take an active role in managing their computer is to examine a specific process.
In this article, I demonstrate how to find the process ID (PID) of a program. The most common tools for this are provided by the procps-ng package, including the ps and pstree, pidof, and pgrep commands.
This one might seem obvious, but I’ve seen it go wrong several times. When organizing Terraform code, either standardizing the directory structure or defining naming conventions, it’s vital to consider the intended audience. Will your team be using these Terraform scripts and modules? Are you handing the work over to another team? Will new people be joining your team sooner or later? Are you working on this project solo? Will you be using this setup in six months or a year, or will it be assigned to someone else?
Questions like these affect several decisions. Ideally, you should have Remote State and State Locking in place regardless of the team size now or in the future. Remote State will ensure your laptop is not the only place your Terraform works, and State Locking will ensure that only one person at a time is changing the infrastructure.
The naming convention should make sense to the eventual owners of the project, not just the team that is writing the code. If the project is for another team, make sure they have a say in the naming convention. If non-technical stakeholders or internal security/GCR teams review the code, make sure they check the naming convention. In addition to resource names, you should leverage resource tags to highlight any data classification/privacy requirements (high, medium, low) for more careful examination by reviewers.
I have a cheap no-name UPS acquired from Jaycar and was wondering if I could get it to connect to my Synology DS918+. It rather unhelpfully identifies itself as MEC0003 and comes with some blob of non-working software on a CD; however some investigation found it could maybe work on my Synology NAS using the Network UPS Tools nutdrv_qx driver with the hunnox subdriver type.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Grafana on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Grafana is the open-source analytics and monitoring solution for every database such as Elasticsearch, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Prometheus, and InfluxDB. The application gives a beautiful dashboard and metric analytics.
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 Grafana open-source analytics & monitoring on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
Google Chrome is the most used Internet Explorer software on the earth, with a recent update in 2021 that Chrome is currently the primary browser of more than 2.65 billion internet users. As you would know, installing Rocky Linux 8, like most Linux distributions, only install Mozilla Firefox. However, installing Google Chrome on Rocky Linux 8 is a straightforward task.
For your Linux system, it’s possible to have multiple users connected to a computer at the same time. The good thing is, you can easily find out who is on board and connected to the system. Learn how to list logged-in users on your Linux computer.
I am going to make this section extra difficult, but the result will be all the more satisfying. First, getting Caesar III to run. Even in the XP days, things weren’t always trivial, and they got worse over time. In the Windows 7 era, you could use the compatibility mode to get things working. Now, interestingly, you can run it without any great tricks in Windows, thanks to Steam, but then, what about Linux?
So, I tried setting up Caesar III using Proton. Great success! This worked absolutely fine. But as I mentioned, the resolution is limited to the best of Windows 98 at the time of Caesar’s release. This is where Julius comes in. The project lives on GitHub, and it’s had, unsurprisingly, quite an active development. There are versions available for all major operating systems, Linux included.
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Julius is a great contribution to humanity. Like OpenTTD, it’s a blessing. And also evidence that awesome games never really die. Caesar III remains the ultimate city builder. You may say, wait a minute. What about SimCity 4, Cities Skylines and Workers & Resources? Yup, those are amazing in their own right. But while they focus more on transport or industry or society, Caesar III has the perfect balance of all. Aesthetic, style, music, gameplay difficulty, variety. And you just can’t beat the simple elegance of the Roman architecture.
If you were or are a fan of Caesar III, you can still play it today. GOG and Steam already let you do that. Julius helps you bring the excitement and fun to a new level, with a fullscreen, wholescreen experience. So here we have, a game made 23 years ago, and today, it’s even more brilliant than ever. It’s these moment of joy that redeem the modern technology. I’m done here. Your turn. What are you waiting for?
Did I just see what I think I saw??? The Back 4 Blood Open Beta begins August 12, and there’s a nice surprise waiting for you.
Unity Technologies, maker of the Unity game engine, has entered an agreement to acquire the streaming service Parsec.
Parsec has proven to be rather popular, especially with quarantines forcing people to work remotely. Not only that but Parsec also does gaming services too, allowing you to rent a server from them to host games that you then connect to which works like GeForce NOW and Stadia but it uses all of your own stuff. We actually tested Parsec on Linux back in 2017 and it was really impressive.
Another interesting use of Parsec has been AAA studios using it to demo their games. Again, due to the quarantines going on thanks to COVID-19. Some, like Ubisoft, had accounts with Parsec setup and ready for press to take a look. There’s lot of different ways it’s being used and they’ve seen strong year-over-year growth.
Unity are buying them for around $320 million in cash, with the deal expected to close (pending all the usual regulation stuff) during their third quarter.
You have to hand it to Creative Assembly and Feral Interactive for their commitment to Total War: ROME REMASTERED, with version 2.0.2 out now and it’s absolutely massive. Since this was developed directly with Feral, we don’t need to wait around for patches either, the Linux support is first-class here.
This patch touches on practically all parts of the game with major modding improvements adding in expanded limits, new features, new modding tools and documentation, plus a number of bug fixes. Features previously only in the expansions were added to the main game for modders to hook into including: swimming, shield wall, religion, hording, loyalty and much more. Overall there’s just a lot more that modders can now do with the game.
DXVK has proven to be a huge success for improving the experience of running Windows Direct3D 9/10/11 games on Linux by translating those D3D calls to Vulkan. DXVK-Native meanwhile is the newer spin-off effort around providing a DXVK-based build native for Linux to help in game ports that still can then rely on their Direct3D renderer path.
DXVK-Native is what Valve is already using for offering a Vulkan rendering path with Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead 2 on Linux and even Windows. There are also a few other games so far relying on DXVK-Native for Linux and/or Google Stadia support.
In one of our previous blog posts we wrote about the new development in the spreadsheet and the extension in the statistics dialog that now make use of new visualization elements. One of these elements is the Box Plot…
Of course, this new visualization type is not only available in the statistics dialog in the spreadsheet, but it can also be used in the Worksheet, in the area where LabPlot plots the data. In this blog post we will introduce this important new development, as it is going to be part of the next release.
A box plot (also known as a box-and-whisker plot) provides a quick visual summary of the important aspects of a distribution of values contained in a data set…
he Linux distribution elementary OS 6 Odin is finally here, coming in years after their last release and honestly – it really is a thing of absolute beauty. elementary OS 6 is built on top of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS with the 5.11 Linux Kernel making it good to use for years to come.
Unlike a lot of other Linux distributions elementary OS is a lot more than a different style and a few tweaked packages. It has their own desktop environment with Pantheon, which has a very clean and clear design. The Pantheon desktop gives you a bottom icon-style dock with a top panel that gives you access to their applications menu, time / date and indicators. All together, it does look very slick.
After two years of development, the Elementary OS team has released the new version of its Linux distribution. Elementary OS 6 is code-named “Odin”. The developers have further refined the look and now enable users to adapt the given user interface more closely to their own preferences. However, many changes have an effect in the background. The new AppCenter programs are now only imported as flat packs. The updated base on Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS ensures better hardware support.
The first noticeable change is the new installer. Instead of Ubuntu’s Ubiquity, its own front end ensures a simple installation in just a few steps. The installation routine only asks for the language settings, the desired installation target and recommends the optional data carrier encryption. Partitions can also be specifically selected for installation; the installer uses GParted to make changes to the partition table. The network connection and user account are only set up after the actual installation after the first reboot, which means that the installation is done very quickly. When you log in for the first time, an assistant greets you and helps you with the first steps.
The latest release of elementary OS is now available for download, and according to the announcement by James Cassidy Blaede, it’s the biggest update to the platform yet.
elementary OS is designed to be easy to use but also “empower you to take control of your own devices and data,” Blaede says.
In this post we’ll explore how to monitor a Red Hat Virtualization environment so you can visualize performance, resources and trends.
As an administrator, it can be difficult to get the right level of visibility across your infrastructure. With the Red Hat Virtualization monitoring portal and Grafana dashboards, you can see resources that are about to run out and catch problems early, see underutilized resources to ensure they are used efficiently, and view trends over time to see the big picture. Your infrastructure activity can be seen from a minute back to five years of history.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has offered the ability to encrypt disks for many years, but the network bound disk encryption (NBDE) functionality, which can automatically unlock volumes by utilizing one or more network servers (referred to as Tang servers), can make implementing disk encryption easier. This post will cover how to get started with the NBDE Client and NBDE Server roles by walking through a simple implementation with a single Tang server.
Microservices are a hot topic. Web pages, architectural dissertations, conference talks… The amount of information and number of opinions is staggering, and it can be overwhelming. If ever there was a hot topic in IT, microservices are “it” right now. Create super-small services. Use Functions as a service (FaaS). Embrace serverless. Spread the workload, loosely coupled and written in any mix of software development languages. Go forth and be micro!
But have you noticed that very few are talking about the data part of all this? “Distribute the data, one database per microservice” is the standard, one-size-fits-all (which, at least in clothing, means “one size fits no one”) answer.
Yeah. Sure. That’s easy for you to say.
One of the conveniences offered by Red Hat 3scale API Management is simplified load balancing on API gateways. This article shows how to use a route on Red Hat OpenShift and 3scale API Management to load balance two API gateways installed on an OpenShift instance.
While Libre-SoC began as “Libre RISC-V” envisioned as a low-power graphics/Vulkan accelerator, it has morphed into a hybrid CPU/GPU design built on OpenPOWER and in very early form seeing test fabrication on a TSMC 180nm process. The latest funding received is now working on adding cryptographic improvements to it and/or the upstream OpenPOWER ISA.
Organizations seeing the most benefits from Artificial Intelligence (AI) work are more likely to be true believers in cognitive capabilities. Indeed, AI high performers, as identified by McKinsey, invested more of their digital budgets in AI than their counterparts, were more likely to increase their AI investments in the next three years, and employ more AI-related talent, such as data engineers, data architects, and translators, than their counterparts.
“Winning support for AI across the business is crucial for CIOs and other IT leaders hoping to scale their programs.” Winning over the end users of AI-enabled capabilities is just as – if not more – important to your success.
“Winning support for AI across the business is crucial for CIOs and other IT leaders hoping to scale their programs,” says Dan Simion, vice president of AI & Analytics at Capgemini North America.
Several issues were brought before the Debian Community team regarding responsiveness, tone, and needed software updates to forums.debian.net. The question was asked, ‘who’s in charge?’
Over the course of the discussion several Debian Developers volunteered to help by providing a presence on the forums from Debian and to assist with the necessary changes to keep the service up and running.
We are happy to announce the following changes to the (NEW!) forums.debian.net, which have and should address most of the prior concerns with accountability, tone, use, and reliability:
Debian Developers: Paulo Henrique de Lima Santana (phls), Felix Lechner (lechner), and Donald Norwood (donald) have been added to the forum’s Server and Administration teams.
The server instance is now running directly within Debian’s infrastructure.
The forum software and back-end have been updated to the most recent versions where applicable.
Igalia developers have been continuing to work on the Mesa V3DV driver under contract with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Over this summer they have been implementing many more Vulkan extensions including ones around dedicated allocations, external fences and semaphores, multi-view, variable pointers, and others as required by Vulkan 1.1. Notably is also basic support for sub-groups and geometry shaders.
Geniatech’s “DB10” AI dev kit runs Android 11 or Linux on Amlogic’s hexa-core -A73 and -A53 A311D with up to 4GB LPDDR4 and 64GB eMMC plus HDMI in and out, MIPI-CSI, USB, GbE with PoE, 802.11ac, and mini-PCIe.
Aaeon’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake powered” UP Xtreme x11” SBC is open for pre-order starting at $299 (barebones), with shipments due in September. Highlights include 3x M.2, PCIe x4, 1GbE, 2.5GbE, 3x USB 3.2 Gen2, and USB 4.0 Type-C.
Last November, Aaeon Europe’s UP! Bridge the Gap community announced the UP Xtreme i11 SBC based on Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake-U processors with plans to start pre-orders in 1Q 2021. The SBC has finally opened for pre-order with prices ranging from $299 to $969 without RAM, storage, or wireless. Shipments are expected next month.
I also really liked the updated webOS 5 interface. WebOS is a Linux-based system that could have been a smartphone and tablet contender, but its original creator, HP, gave up on it. Fortunately, LG saw its potential. Today, webOS is my favorite smart TV interface over both Android and Roku. Combined with the newest LG Magic remote, it’s a pleasure to use. In addition, the remote supports both Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.
Our Individual seat winners are Aeva Black and Catharina Maracke — both new to the OSI Board. We are also welcoming Hong Phuc Dang back and are excited to have Thierry Carrez join us as a new Affiliate Board Member. Thank you to all our members and affiliates for your discussions, your participation and your votes.
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Board member seats expire at different times so that we can maintain some continuity. Our next election will take place early next year. There will be two Individual seats and one Affiliate seat up next year.
One of the most popular destinations in syslog-ng is Elasticsearch. Due to the license change of the Elastic stack, some people changed quickly to Grafana/Loki and other technologies. However, most syslog-ng users decided to wait and see. Version 1.0.0 of OpenSearch, a fork of the Elastic code base from before the license change is now available. Elastic also published a new release last week.
Firefox 91 is the seventh major browser update in 2021. Let’s cover some of the notable changes in this new browser update.
Firefox is one of the few remaining browsers with its own rendering engine. Firefox 90 arrived last month with new rendering features and new update system, and now Firefox 91 is starting to roll out.
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With the release of Firefox 91, Mozilla has introduced a bigger hammer for smashing the cookies that websites, advertisers and tracking companies can use to record your online behavior. The new feature, called enhanced cookie clearing, is designed to block tracking not just from a website, but also from third parties whose code appears on the site.
Mozilla Firefox 91.0 is available with more than 1200 bug-fixes, new major privacy enhancement, and other features.
The release introduced more comprehensive logic for clearing cookies. With Firefox Strict Mode, you can clear a site data including embed content, such as images, videos and scripts, from other websites. This “cross-site” content was previously left behind.
Thunderbird 91 comes a little over a year after the Thunderbird 78 series and brings a revamped account setup wizard with support for setting up signatures, encryption and CalDAV calendars, a new user interface for adding attachments, the ability to change the order of accounts in the UI, and the ability to redirect emails.
This new Thunderbird release also allow you to encrypt your emails to BCC recipients, though these will be exposed in the list of keys. New keyboard shortcuts are now available to access the To, CC and BCC fields of the compose window, and Thunderbird now allows showing of empty CC and BCC rows in the compose window.
LibreOffice Start Center working with GTK4 widgets
Pooja Mistry focuses on partner developer advocacy, specifically around hybrid cloud and application modernization. She has worked with startups and enterprise-level partners as well as ISVs like Infosys and TCS to promote best practices in AI, machine learning, and microservices. I sat down with Pooja to talk about her recent experiences in DevRel and how a focus on partners helps drive metrics for developer advocacy programs.
A few days ago, contributors to Opensource.com were asked to share our personal stories about how we got into programming. Many entertaining and fascinating responses were submitted. It would be interesting to quantify these data in time. Intriguing patterns emerged. The 70s generation was nostalgic about Fortran, punch cards, and dial-up access to shared mainframes. 80s kids (amongst which I qualify) shared stories of C, BASIC, or Pascal and their beloved Atari and Commodore computers. Surprisingly few stories from the 90s arrived. Almost like there’s a generation gap. Maybe teenagers were running away in horror from C++, MFC, and the dreaded Hungarian notation, which was the order of the day. Then there’s strange silence from the youngest generation. Maybe our young Raspberry Pi enthusiasts are too busy making things.
Amlogic A311D hexa-core Cortex-A73/A55 AI processor has found its way into a limited number of platforms including Khadas VIM3 SBC, Zora P1 development board for Orbbec 3D cameras, as well as the upcoming Jevois Pro AI camera.
Another development board that takes advantage of the Amlogic A311D processor is Geniatech DB10 which ships with up to 4GB LPDDR4, up to 64GB eMMC flash, and offers interesting features like a digital TV tuner, HDMI input, support for 3G/4G modems, and more.
The need to strengthen and secure the software supply chain has gained heightened awareness in recent months. The Biden administration, for example, issued an executive order that outlined security measures for critical software use and specifically mentioned open source provenance and the need for companies to provide a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) as part of their efforts to improve software supply chain security.
In this article, we’ll explain what an SBOM is and point you to additional resources outlining best practices and other key information.
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The transparency made possible by an SBOM, however, is not about dictating what is good or bad, says Friedman. “It is about allowing everyone to make the right, risk-based decisions… And, you can’t make good risk-based decisions unless you know what you have.”
As NTIA states, an “SBOM will not solve all software security problems, but will form a foundational data layer on which further security tools, practices, and assurances can be built.”
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and co-host Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a nonprofit whose mission is to accelerate adoption of open source software, standards and best practices in financial services, today announced the conference agenda for Open Source Strategy Forum London 2021 (OSSF). The event takes place October 4-5 in London, England. The schedule can be viewed here.
The event will gather experts from financial services, technology and open source who will come together for thought-provoking insights and conversations, providing unique opportunities to hear from and engage with those who are leveraging open source software to solve industry challenges. OSSF is the only conference dedicated to driving collaboration and innovation in financial services through open source.
I recently picked up this portable projector for a reasonable price. It might also be called a “M5″ projector, but I can not find one canonical source. In terms of projection, it performs as well as a 5cm cube could be expected to. They made a poor choice to eschew adding an external video input which severely limits the device’s usefulness.
David A. Wheeler lists some of the security-related projects he is overseeing at the Linux Foundation.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ceph), Fedora (buildah, containernetworking-plugins, and podman), openSUSE (chromium, kernel, php7, python-CairoSVG, python-Pillow, seamonkey, and transfig), Red Hat (microcode_ctl), SUSE (kernel and libcares2), and Ubuntu (c-ares).
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