-- Leo's gemini proxy
-- Connecting to gemini.techrights.org:1965...
-- Connected
-- Sending request
-- Meta line: 20 text/gemini;lang=en-GB
Gemini version available ♊︎
Posted in News Roundup at 7:53 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
The Tuxedo Nano Pro Gen 11 is a mini PC that measures 4.6″ x 4.3″ x 1.9″ and ships with a choice of Ubuntu Linux or the Ubuntu-based Tuxedo_OS.
It’s the latest in a line of Linux PCs from Tuxedo Computers, and the company says the little desktop is one of the smallest available with an AMD Ryzen 4000U processor. It’s available from Tuxedo for 640 Euros and up, taxes included.
Doc Searls, Jonathan Bennett and Aaron Newcomb are together on FLOSS Weekly taking a look at the challenges of switching to Linux, even though Linux runs on many things used in everyday life. System76 has decided to build a non-Gnome desktop for its distro. Why? Bennett addresses the allegations of Intel being optimized for Windows 11, but not taking Linux into consideration. It’s a fun discussion on this episode of FLOSS Weekly.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Lubuntu 21.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
I’m guessing, given the fact that I’ve posted a considerable amount of content on it already, that you know what the MiSTer is. Here’s a presentation from the Retro World Expo 2021 (just a few days ago) by two prominent retro YouTubers.
We get some spicy emails, dig into why Mike just picked up another Linux laptop, and then share our real thoughts on Web3.
System76 looks to be ditching GNOME and building its own Desktop Environment.
Streamlabs is in the news today due to several companies claiming that Streamlabs copied their work. Those companies include Lightstream, Elgato and OBS, the maker of the free and open source Open Broadcaster Software. Additionally, OBS claims that Streamlabs is using the OBS name without their permission.
For the longest time I thought that StreamLabs OBS was a partnership with OBS but apparently that’s not the case and OBS is not happy about them using the name, along with this they’ve allegedly been copying other competitors.
The recently-ended Linux 5.16 merge window saw significant I/O improvements driven primarily by maintainer Jens Axboe’s recent focus on relentlessly optimizing the block and IO_uring code for record-setting per-core IOPS. As good as those improvements are, Linux 5.17 should be even better.
Linux 5.16 saw much of Axboe’s work merged around the I/O optimizations in his quest for maximizing the per-core IOPS out of his new Ryzen 9 5950X system with dual Intel Optane NVMe solid-state drives. But there is still more work pending that in turn should be ready for Linux 5.17.
The x86 instruction set is large, but that doesn’t mean it can’t get bigger yet. Upcoming Intel processors will feature a new set of instructions under the name of “Advanced Matrix Extensions” (AMX) that can be used to operate on matrix data. After a somewhat bumpy development process, support for AMX has found its way into the upcoming 5.16 kernel. Using it will, naturally, require some changes by application developers.
AMX (which is described in this document) is meant to be a general architecture for the acceleration of matrix operations on x86 processors. In its initial form, it implements a set of up to eight “tiles”, which are arrays of 16 64-byte rows. Programmers can store matrices in these tiles of any dimension that will fit therein; a matrix of 16×16 32-bit floating-point values would work, but other geometries are supported too. The one supported operation currently will multiply the matrices stored in two tiles, then add the result to a third tile. By chaining these operations, multiplication of matrices of any size can be implemented. Evidently other operations are meant to come in the future.
While AMX may seem like a feature aimed at numerical analysis, the real target use case would appear to be machine-learning applications. That would explain why 16-bit floating-point arithmetic is supported, but 64-bit is not.
The design of AMX gives the kernel control over whether these features can be used by any given process. There are a couple of reasons for this, one being that AMX instructions, as one might imagine, use a lot of processor resources. A process doing heavy AMX work on a shared computer may adversely affect other processes. But AMX also cannot be supported properly unless both the kernel and the user-space process are ready for it.
Back in September, LWN reported on a series of block-layer optimizations that enabled a suitably equipped system to sustain 3.5 million I/O operations per second (IOPS). That optimization work has continued since then, and those 3.5 million IOPS would be a deeply disappointing result now. A recent disagreement over the addition of a new feature has highlighted the potential cost of a heavily optimized block layer, though; when is a feature deemed important enough to outweigh the drive for maximum performance?
Block subsystem maintainer Jens Axboe has continued working to make block I/O operations go faster. A recent round of patches tweaked various fast paths, changed the plugging mechanism to use a singly linked list, and made various other little changes. Each is a small optimization, but the work adds up over time; the claimed level of performance is now 8.2 million IOPS — well over September’s rate, which looked good at the time. This work has since found its way into the mainline as part of the block pull request for 5.16.
So far, so good; few people will argue with massive performance improvements. But they might argue with changes that threaten to interfere, even in a tiny way, with those improvements.
Consider, for example, this patch set from Jane Chu. It adds a new flag (RWF_RECOVERY_DATA) to the preadv2() and pwritev2() system calls that can be used by applications trying to recover from nonvolatile-memory “poisoning”. Implementations of nonvolatile memory have different ways of detecting and coping with data corruption; Intel memory, it seems, will poison the affected range, meaning that it cannot be accessed without generating an error (which then turns into a SIGBUS signal). An application can respond to that error by reading or writing the poisoned range with the new flag; a read will replace the poisoned data with zeroes (allowing the application to obtain whatever data is still readable), while a write will overwrite that data and attempt to clear the poisoned status. Either way, the application can attempt to recover from the problem and continue running.
As of this writing, Linus Torvalds has pulled exactly 6,800 non-merge changesets into the mainline repository for the 5.16 kernel release. That is probably a little over half of what will arrive during this merge window, so this is a good time to catch up on what has been pulled so far. There are many significant changes and some large-scale restructuring of internal kernel code, but relatively few ground-breaking new features.
Mesa 21.3 is here three and a half months after Mesa 21.2 to further improve Linux’s number one graphics stack. It brings many great improvements, starting with official OpenGL ES 3.1 compliance for Collabora’s Panfrost driver, threaded shader compilation for the Iris driver, OpenGL ES 3.2 support for the Zink driver, and support for AV1 videos for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API ).
Universal Scalable Firmware intends to extend its scope beyond just system firmware but is also planned for use by Intel discrete graphics processors. USF is also designed to offer greater firmware security than the status quo. The key planned features/components right now include a Universal Payload that can work across different operating systems and boot loaders, the Platform Orchestration Layer with simplified ACPI support and interfaces with the Rust programming language and configured with YAML, and the SoC FSP. Intel is hoping USF will reduce development costs, improve firmware quality and security, and push forward other new firmware innovations.
Mesa 21.3 is now out as the latest quarterly feature release to this collection of open-source graphics drivers.
Mesa 21.3 as the Q4’2021 update brings a number of exciting improvements and new features like:
- Radeon RADV ray-tracing support landed along with experimental shader-based ray-tracing for older Radeon GPUs. Note though that this RADV ray-tracing code hasn’t yet been well optimized and the performance is likely to be slow and there may still be various game issues. In any case, at least it’s finally maturing now in mainline in experimental form.
Following the news from last week of experimental Zink code running Wayland’s Weston compositor over this Mesa-based OpenGL-on-Vulkan implementation, developer Mike Blumenkrantz has opened up about some of the ongoing work to improve the efficiency of Zink and making such advancements a reality.
In particular, the ongoing Zink Gallium3D improvements by Blumenkrantz and others along with the work of Red Hat’s Adam Jackson on the new “Copper” DRI interface extension. The “Copper” effort has been ongoing for a while and should allow for some simplifications to the architecture for how Zink functions and in turn allow for greater efficiency as well as broader platform coverage. With that, the ability to handle Wayland compositors like Weston.
NVIDIA today released their latest Vulkan beta drivers for Windows and Linux.
With the NVIDIA 470.62.12 beta driver released today there is updated Vulkan Video API support based on the upstream spec as of the newly-released Vulkan 1.2.199. There are some subtle changes to the Vulkan Video capabilities for specification compliance. NVIDIA’s Vulkan beta driver remains the leading driver for Vulkan Video API support right now and they were quick in supporting the provisional extensions since their debut earlier this year. Finally at least Vulkan Video is seeing movement by Mesa drivers.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install NumPy on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, NumPy (Numerical Python) is an open-source library for the Python programming language. It is used for scientific computing and working with arrays. It offers the following and much 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 NumPy 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.
Yesterday I ran into a weird error where I ran a program and got the error “file not found” even though the program I was running existed. It’s something I’ve run into before, but every time I’m very surprised and confused by it (what do you MEAN file not found, the file is RIGHT THERE???!!??)
So let’s talk about what happened and why!
Earlier this week, I updated pg_dirtyread to work with PostgreSQL 14. pg_dirtyread is a PostgreSQL extension that allows reading “dead” rows from tables, i.e. rows that have already been deleted, or updated. Of course that works only if the table has not been cleaned-up yet by a VACUUM command or autovacuum, which is PostgreSQL’s garbage collection machinery.
RPM Fusion is a repository specifically for Fedora Linux. It is an amalgamation of the software repositories Livna, Freshrpms, and Dribble to bundle resources. Among other things, the repo provides packages for multimedia and the required codecs. The repo is divided into “free” and “non-free“.
USB keys will sometimes display less memory than is actually available, even after the drive has been completely wiped. When this happens, it’s helpful to reformat your USB flash drive to restore your device to its full capacity. Formatting your USB will open up the drive’s storage space and even increase its efficiency. USB keys can be formatted in several different ways.
Today we are looking at how to install Parsec on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Flowblade Video Editor on Elementary OS 6.0.
I am impressed with the well-deserved rise of Sourcehut, a minimalist and open source alternative to Github and Gitlab. I like their unbiased performance comparison with other JavaScript-heavy Git forges. I am impressed by their substantial contributions to Free Software. And I like that the main developers, Drew DeVault and Simon Ser, both post monthly status update blog posts on their respective blogs.
Oracle® Linux 8: Release Notes for Oracle Linux 8.5 provides information about the new features and known issues in the Oracle Linux 8.5 release. This document may be updated after it is released.
Sysadmins trying to ride herd over tens, hundreds or thousands of systems need tools to help keep systems in compliance with policies and security standards. In this post we’ll look at using Red Hat Insights compliance service to manage compliance at scale.
Verifying that your organization’s systems satisfy your compliance requirements is something that takes time and effort. Too often it’s only done on an ad hoc basis. That approach may work for organizations with a limited number of hosts, but performing this task at scale is problematic with complex environments and limited resources.
Fortunately, organizations that use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in a standard operating environment (SOE) can take advantage of Red Hat Insights and its Compliance service to proactively and efficiently manage their regulatory compliance requirements at scale.
Combining Red Hat Insights with Red Hat Smart Management and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to create an automated process for compliance configuration, validation, and remediation can lessen the administrative burden of your compliance workload.
Massive amounts of data are racing towards us at an unheard of velocity. But processing this data quickly, at a centralized location, is no longer possible for most organizations. How might we better act on this data to preserve its relevance? The answer lies in acting on the data as close to the source as possible. This means making data-driven decisions or getting answers to the most pressing questions in real-time, across all of your computing environments – from the edge to the exascale.
If you’re processing massive amounts of data at scale with multiple tasks running simultaneously, you are likely already using high-performance computing (HPC). Oil & gas exploration, complex financial modeling and DNA mapping and sequencing are just a few modern workstreams that have massive data requirements and rely on HPC to drive breakthrough discoveries.
With HPC, running advanced and computational problems and simulations in parallel on highly optimized hardware and super fast networks can help deliver answers and create outcomes more quickly. Because of HPC’s sheer scale, it would be challenging for the traditional datacenter infrastructure to deliver similar results. And also because its massive scale “just works,” HPC has largely gone unchanged over the past 20 years. Today, however, we are seeing HPC undergo a transformation as it faces increased demand from the applications running on it.
If you’re looking for a super fast file search tool for Ubuntu that’s similar to the Everything Search Engine on Windows you’re in the right place.
FSearch is exactly what you’re looking for.
The utility’s developer, Christian Boxdörfer, is even upfront about the inspiration, explaining on the project homepage: “[Everything Search Engine] provides instant results as you type for all your files and lots of useful features (regex, filters, bookmarks, …). On Linux however I couldn’t find anything that’s even remotely as fast and powerful.”
Christian says he a slew of Linux file search tools (including standalone ones like Catfish and ANGRYSearch, as well as the file-finding features baked into file managers like Nautilus) first, as he didn’t want to create “yet-another” file-search tool for Linux.
Sadly, none of them were what he wanted, or catered to different use cases.
So he built his own.
It’s a truth universally acknowledged that sometimes a little music can add much to a nice afternoon picnic. It’s also well-known that meat cooked over hot coals should be turned regularly to allow for even cooking. This barbecue grille project from [Handy Geng] delivers on both counts.
The project uses a full 88 motors, activated by pressing keys on an electronic piano. The technique used is simple; rather than interface with the keyboard electronically or over MIDI, instead, a microswitch is installed under each individual key.
Due to the ongoing pandemic, Nathaniel Felleke’s family dog, Clairette, had gotten used to having people around her all the time and thus developed separation anxiety when the family would leave the house. But thanks to some clever thinking, Felleke came up with the idea to automatically detect when his dog started to bark and play some sounds of his family speaking to calm her down.
There’s going to be a new Matrix movie in theaters next month, and you know what that means: we’re about to see a whole new generation get obsessed with the franchise’s iconic “Digital Rain” effect. Thanks to modern advertisement technology, expect to see lines of glittering text pouring down the displays of everything from billboards to gas pumps pretty soon.
For busy people, keeping track of all the tasks on your to-do list can be a daunting task in itself. Luckily there’s software to help you keep organized, but it’s always nice to have a physical artifact as well. Inspired by some beautiful nixie clock designs, [Bertrand Fan] decided to build a nixie indicator that tells him how many open items are on his to-do list, giving a shot of instant gratification as it counts down with each finished task.
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 3.0.8 — the latest point release in the Firebird 3.0 series.
This sub-release offers many bug fixes and also adds a few improvements, please refer to the Release Notes for the full list of changes.
The Julia programming language has its roots in high-performance scientific computing, so it is no surprise that it has facilities for concurrent processing. Those features are not well-known outside of the Julia community, though, so it is interesting to see the different types of parallel and concurrent computation that the language supports. In addition, the upcoming release of Julia version 1.7 brings an improvement to the language’s concurrent-computation palette, in the form of “task migration”.
David H. Adler passed away yesterday.
David was a gentleman and a scholar: a gentle, warm, erudite, funny, clever, and deeply kind man. And one who has made a vast contribution to our Perl and Raku communities over more than quarter of a century.
Python supports default values for arguments to functions, but those defaults are evaluated at function-definition time. A proposal to add defaults that are evaluated when the function is called has been discussed at some length on the python-ideas mailing list. The idea came about, in part, due to yet another resurrection of the proposal for None-aware operators in Python. Late-bound defaults would help with one use case for those operators, but there are other, stronger reasons to consider their addition to the language.
In Python, the defaults for arguments to a function can be specified in the function definition, but, importantly, they are evaluated in the scope where the function is defined. So default arguments cannot refer to other arguments to the function, as those are only available in the scope of the function itself when it gets called.
One could be excused for thinking sometimes that the concept of connecting devices with other devices for automation purposes is a fairly recent invention. Yet for all the (relatively) recent hype of the Internet of Things and the ‘smart home’, laboratories have been wiring up their gear to run complicated measurement and test sequences for many decades now, along with factories doing much the same for automating production processes.
Much like the chaotic universe of IoT devices, lab equipment from different manufacturers feature a wide number of incompatible protocol and interface standards. Ultimately these would coalesce into IEEE-488.1 (GPIB) as the physical layer and by 1990 the first Standard Commands for Programmable Instruments (SCPI) standard was released that built on top of IEEE-488.
So this is awkward for VMware. The virtualization giant has pulled an update to its flagship vSphere suite because it didn’t fix the problems it was released to address, and may have made them worse.
The upgrade was vSphere 7 Update 3b, which on November 15 was the subject of a VMware blog post headed “Important Update.” It offered a fix for issues that could cause vSphere to crash, or prevent some upgrades from completing successfully. That post has been taken down – but The Register retrieved it [PDF] from Google’s cache.
Zero Motorcycles announced their groundbreaking new battery “technology”, in which they sell you a large capacity battery in a motorcycle with powerful motors and advanced traction control systems, and then lock all that away behind a software paywall that you can unlock (for a fee) in their app.
This is a major win for right-to-repair, and I’m very happy Aplpe caved to regulatory, shareholder, and public pressure. Momentum behind right-to-repair has been growing for years now, and it’s satisfying to see it bear fruit. Of course, we’ll have to wait and see if there’s any catch – insane NDAs, crazy high prices, little to no stock – but if not, this could be a model for other companies to follow.
Every month we review the work funded by Freexian’s Debian LTS offering. Please find the report for October below.
The Linux Random Number Generator (LRNG), which relies on several computing functions to act as a source of entropy, is designed to be a drop-in replacement for the long-established /dev/random function.
The technology is designed to offer both API (application programming interface) and ABI (application binary interface) compatibility with its /dev/random predecessor, while offering several performance and utility advantages.
CISA has added four new vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog, which require remediation from federal civilian executive branch (FCEB) agencies by December 1, 2021. CISA has evidence that threat actors are actively exploiting the vulnerabilities listed in the table below. These types of vulnerabilities are a frequent attack vector for malicious cyber actors of all types and pose significant risk to the federal enterprise.
Reportedly, a new kind of botnet called Abcbot has been observed in the dark web world. According to the sources, this botnet has some worm-like propagation features to infect Linux systems. The main target of the botnet is to launch malicious denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on the devices.
Since early September, Josh Muir and five other maintainers of the noblox.js package, have been trying to prevent cybercriminals from distributing ransomware through similarly named code libraries.
Boffins at ETH Zurich, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and Qualcomm Technologies have found that varying the order, regularity, and intensity of rowhammer attacks on memory chips can defeat defenses, thereby compromising security on any device with DRAM.
On the morning of November 15, a Russian missile destroyed a satellite in orbit above Earth. The successful test of the anti-satellite weapon has infuriated many in the space industry, put astronauts and cosmonauts alike at risk, and caught the attention of virtually every public and private space organisation on the planet.
It’s yet another chapter in the controversial history of military anti-satellite operations, and one with important implications for future space missions. Let’s examine what happened, and explore the greater context of the operation.
As world leaders, celebrities, business moguls and activists alike descend on Scotland for the COP26 climate summit, behind the scenes powerful financial groups are attempting to rewrite the rules of international trade and to privatize nature under the guise of sustainability.
While high politics has understandably made the headlines, a cartel of international bankers is attempting to use the crisis to rewrite international capitalism for their own benefit.
By now, you have heard the hype about blockchain technology. The inherent capabilities of blockchain are vast in its ability to securely, transparently, and efficiently transmit information.
The need to improve service delivery in the insurance industry led the Linux Foundation (LF) and AAIS (the American Association of Insurance Services) to use this distributed ledger to launch OpenDIL (Open Insurance Data Link). So what is OpenIDL, and what is its aim? Here, we will discuss that and more.
General Constantine Chiwenga could be a head of state anytime if Mnangagwa became incapacitated or for any other reason. We have people in the government in 2021 who could be well described as primitive and backward: Some fossils of five hundred years left behind by time, this is the calibre of leadership who have no values of Ubuntu.
Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink Send this to a friend
----------
➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.
-- Response ended
-- Page fetched on Mon May 13 18:35:50 2024