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Corben wrote in to let us know that Diluvion [Steam], a deep-sea exploration game with RPG elements looks like it might be coming over to Linux.
I think it looks fantastic! Love the visual work, especially when it's dark and they find stuff that glows. Could be an awesome game to get lost in and just explore away. |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
GNU: The GNU C Library 2.28 and Guix on Android Glibc 2.28 Upstream Will Build/Run Cleanly On GNU Hurd While Linux distributions are still migrating to Glibc 2.27, in the two months since the release changes have continued building up for what will eventually become the GNU C Library 2.28. The Glibc 2.28 work queued thus far isn't nearly as exciting as all the performance optimizations and more introduced with Glibc 2.27, but it's a start. Most notable at this point for Glibc 2.28 is that it will now build and run cleanly on GNU/Hurd without requiring any out-of-tree patches. There has been a ton of Hurd-related commits to Glibc over the past month.
Guix on Android! Last year I thought to myself: since my phone is just a computer running an operating system called Android (or Replicant!), and that Android is based on a Linux kernel, it's just another foreign distribution I could install GNU Guix on, right? It turned out it was absolutely the case. Today I was reminded on IRC of my attempt last year at installing GNU Guix on my phone. Hence this blog post. I'll try to give you all the knowledge and commands required to install it on your own Android device.
GNU Guix Wrangled To Run On Android The GNU Guix transactional package manager can be made to run on Android smartphones/tablets, but not without lots of hoops to jump through first.
Node.js 10.9 and npm milestone Open Source Node.js Hits v10, with Better Security, Performance, More Speaking of which, the brand-new Node.js 10.0 is expected to soon support npm version 6 (currently Node.js ships with npm 5.7.x). The company npm Inc., which maintains the npm software package management application, today announced that major update, called npm@6. The npm company said its JavaScript software installer tool includes new security features for developers working with open source code.
Announcing npm@6 In coordination with today’s announcement of Node.js v10, we’re excited to announce npm@6. This major update to npm includes powerful new security features for every developer who works with open source code. Read on to understand why this matters. |
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 15th of February 2017 08:25:27 AM
Filed under
The city of Munich is currently considering a move away from Free Software back to Microsoft products. We consider this to be a mistake and urge the decision makers to reconsider.
For many years now the City of Munich has been using a mix of software by KDE, LibreOffice and Ubuntu, among others. Mayor Dieter Reiter (a self-proclaimed Microsoft-fan who helped Microsoft move offices to Munich) asked Accenture (a Microsoft partner) to produce a report about the situation of the City of Munich's IT infrastructure. That resulted in a 450-page document. This report is now being misused to push for a move away from Free Software. However the main issues listed in the report were identified to be organizational ones and not related to Free Software operating systems and applications.
[...]
The City of Munich has always been a poster child of Free Software in public administrations. It is a showcase of what can be done with Free Software in this setting. The step back by the City of Munich from Free Software would therefore not just be a blow for this particular deployment but also have more far-reaching effects into other similar deployments. |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
During his opening keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, made light of the mudslides that brought traffic to a crawl near Donner Pass on Monday evening. The trip at least was less arduous than it was last year, he said.
Zemlin's remarks amounted to an open-source victory lap. Some 99.4 per cent of the world's high performance computing systems, 90 per cent of the world's stock exchanges, and 64 per cent of mobile devices run on Linux, he said, adding that the foundation's projects have created $14.5 billion worth of value, as measured in cost per line of code. |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
KDE and GNOME: Kubuntu, Krita, GNOME Development Kubuntu 18.04 LTS Could Switch to Breeze-Dark Plasma Theme by Default, Test Now The latest daily build live ISO images that landed earlier today for Kubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) apparently uses the Breeze-Dark Plasma theme for the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment by default. However, we've been told that it's currently an experiment to get the pulse of the community. "Users running [Kubuntu] 18.04 development version who have not deliberately opted to use Breeze/Breeze-Light in their System Settings will also see the change after upgrading packages," said the devs. "Users can easily revert back to the Breeze/Breeze-Light Plasma themes by changing this in System Settings."
Interview with Rytelier The amount of convenience is very high compared to other programs. The amount of “this one should be designed in a better way, it annoys me” things is the smallest of all the programs I use, and if something is broken, then most of these functions are announced to improve in 4.0.
Grow your skills with GNOME For the past 3 years I’ve been working very hard because I fulfill a number of these roles for Builder. It’s exhausting and unsustainable. It contributes to burnout and hostile communication by putting too much responsibility on too few people’s shoulders.
GTK4, GNOME's Wayland Support & Vulkan Renderer Topped GNOME In 2017
A Lot Of Improvements Are Building Up For GIMP 2.9.8, Including Better Wayland Support It's been four months since the release of GIMP 2.9.6 and while GIMP 2.9 developments are sadly not too frequent, the next GIMP 2.9.8 release is preparing a host of changes. Of excitement to those trying to use GIMP in a Wayland-based Linux desktop environment, GIMP's color picker has just picked up support for working on KDE/Wayland as well as some other Color Picker improvements to help GNOME/Wayland too. GIMP's Screenshot plugin also now has support for taking screenshots on KDE/Wayland either as a full-screen or individual windows. Granted, GIMP won't be all nice and dandy on Wayland itself until seeing the long-awaited GTK3 (or straight to GTK4) port. |
Is it crazy that a Medium post about javascript bloat would have itself have megabytes of javascript and stylesheets? I wouldn’t know, since I didn’t see it. I have a little proxy like service running that rewrites its HTML. This particular service was an experiment to replace some python code with go, to evaluate suitability for future hacks.
I’ve been using the python lxml library for HTML parsing for ages. Seems to work pretty well. There’s actually a bunch of little one off scripts that share a similar skeleton, which is modified as needed. After all, the best code isn’t reusable, it’s reeditable. A little while ago that turned into a script to download Medium posts after I read them and save the important parts, so that sometime later when I want to read about the Riemann Hypothesis, it’s all still there in a place I can find it. |
A massive cyptocurrency mining botnet has taken over half a million machines, and may have made its cybercriminal controllers millions of dollars. The whole operation is powered by EternalBlue, the leaked NSA exploit which made the WannaCry ransomware outbreak so destructive.
The Smominru miner botnet turns infected machines into miners of the Monero cryptocurrency and is believed to have made its owners around $3.6m since it started operating in May 2017 -- about a month after EternalBlue leaked and around the same time as the WannaCry attack.
While it isn't uncommon for cybercriminals to leverage the power of hijacked networks of computers to acquire cryptocurrency, this particular network is significant due to its individual size -- double that of the Adylkuzz mining botnet. |
Purism's Librem 5 Linux Phone Will Support Ubuntu Touch, Thanks to UBports Lead by talented Linux developer Marius Gripsgard, the UBports Foundation keeps the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS developed by Canonical, the company behind the widely-used Ubuntu Linux operating system, alive for various popular smartphones, including Fairphone 2, Nexus 5, OnePlus One, as well as the BQ Aquaris M10 FHD tablet that was designed to run Ubuntu Touch in the first place. Now, Purism and UBports are partnering to offer the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system on the upcoming Librem 5 Linux phone, which raised more than $2 million last fall, promising to be the privacy and security-focused smartphone you've been expecting for a long time. While not the default OS, users will be able to easily run Ubuntu Touch on the Librem 5 phone. also: UBPorts Ubuntu Touch To Be Supported By The Purism Librem 5
Ubuntu-Based ExTiX Distro, the Ultimate Linux System, Updates Its Deepin Edition Based on the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, the ExTiX 18.4 Deepin Edition is now available and it ships updated components, including the latest Deepin 15.5 Desktop, the Calamares 3.1.12 universal installer framework, and a custom Linux 4.16.2 kernel with extra hardware support. "I’ve made a new extra version of ExTiX with Deepin 15.5 Desktop (made in China!)," said Arne Exton in the release announcement. "Only a minimum of packages is installed in ExTiX Deepin. You can, of course, install all the packages you want, even while running ExTiX Deepin live, i.e. from a DVD or USB stick." |
KDE and GNOME: Kubuntu, Krita, GNOME Development Kubuntu 18.04 LTS Could Switch to Breeze-Dark Plasma Theme by Default, Test Now The latest daily build live ISO images that landed earlier today for Kubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) apparently uses the Breeze-Dark Plasma theme for the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment by default. However, we've been told that it's currently an experiment to get the pulse of the community. "Users running [Kubuntu] 18.04 development version who have not deliberately opted to use Breeze/Breeze-Light in their System Settings will also see the change after upgrading packages," said the devs. "Users can easily revert back to the Breeze/Breeze-Light Plasma themes by changing this in System Settings."
Interview with Rytelier The amount of convenience is very high compared to other programs. The amount of “this one should be designed in a better way, it annoys me” things is the smallest of all the programs I use, and if something is broken, then most of these functions are announced to improve in 4.0.
Grow your skills with GNOME For the past 3 years I’ve been working very hard because I fulfill a number of these roles for Builder. It’s exhausting and unsustainable. It contributes to burnout and hostile communication by putting too much responsibility on too few people’s shoulders.
GTK4, GNOME's Wayland Support & Vulkan Renderer Topped GNOME In 2017
A Lot Of Improvements Are Building Up For GIMP 2.9.8, Including Better Wayland Support It's been four months since the release of GIMP 2.9.6 and while GIMP 2.9 developments are sadly not too frequent, the next GIMP 2.9.8 release is preparing a host of changes. Of excitement to those trying to use GIMP in a Wayland-based Linux desktop environment, GIMP's color picker has just picked up support for working on KDE/Wayland as well as some other Color Picker improvements to help GNOME/Wayland too. GIMP's Screenshot plugin also now has support for taking screenshots on KDE/Wayland either as a full-screen or individual windows. Granted, GIMP won't be all nice and dandy on Wayland itself until seeing the long-awaited GTK3 (or straight to GTK4) port. |
GNOME/GTK: Librsvg, BuildStream, GTK, GStreamer rsvg-bench - a benchmark for librsvg Librsvg 2.42.0 came out with a rather major performance regression compared to 2.40.20: SVGs with many transform attributes would slow it down. It was fixed in 2.42.1. We changed from using a parser that would recompile regexes each time it was called, to one that does simple string-based matching and parsing. When I rewrote librsvg's parser for the transform attribute from C to Rust, I was just learning about writing parsers in Rust. I chose lalrpop, an excellent, Yacc-like parser generator for Rust. It generates big, fast parsers, like what you would need for a compiler — but it compiles the tokenizer's regexes each time you call the parser. This is not a problem for a compiler, where you basically call the parser only once, but in librsvg, we may call it thousands of times for an SVG file with thousands of objects with transform attributes. So, for 2.42.1 I rewrote that parser using rust-cssparser. This is what Servo uses to parse CSS data; it's a simple tokenizer with an API that knows about CSS's particular constructs. This is exactly the kind of data that librsvg cares about. Today all of librsvg's internal parsers work using rust-cssparser, or they are so simple that they can be done with Rust's normal functions to split strings and such.
BuildStream Hackfest and FOSDEM I also wanted to sum up a last minute BuildStream hackfest which occurred in Manchester just a week ago. Bloomberg sent some of their Developer Experience engineering team members over to the Codethink office in Manchester where the whole BuildStream team was present, and we split up into groups to plan upcoming coding sprints, land some outstanding work and fix some bugs.
builders An idiom that has shown up in GTK4 development is the idea of immutable objects and builders. The idea behind an immutable object is that you can be sure that it doesn’t change under you, so you don’t need to track changes, you can expose it in your API without having to fear users of the API are gonna change that object under you, you can use it as a key when caching and last but not least you can pass it into multiple threads without requiring synchronization. Examples of immutable objects in GTK4 are GdkCursor, GdkTexture, GdkContentFormats or GskRenderNode.
GTK+ hackfest, day 2 The second day of the GTK+ hackfest in Brussels started with an hour of patch review. We then went through scattered items from the agenda and collected answers to some questions.
GTK+ 4.0 Targeted For Its Initial Release This Fall, GTK+ 5.0 Development To Follow A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place. The past few days prior to FOSDEM in Brussels was a GTK+ hackfest. Among the items discussed when not banging on code was a GTK+ 4.0 road-map and coming out of this event in Belgium is a more solid understanding now that the initial GTK+ 4.0 release will be targeted for the fall of this year. There isn't any firm release plan at this time but at GUADEC (taking place in Spain this summer) they will revisit their plans to verify they can still ship this fall.
GStreamer has grown a WebRTC implementation Late last year, we at Centricular announced a new implementation of WebRTC in GStreamer. Today we're happy to announce that after community review, that work has been merged into GStreamer itself! The plugin is called webrtcbin, and the library is, naturally, called gstwebrtc. The implementation has all the basic features, is transparently compatible with other WebRTC stacks (particularly in browsers), and has been well-tested with both Firefox and Chrome.
GStreamer Lands A WebRTC Plugin The GStreamer multimedia framework now has mainline support for WebRTC. WebRTC is the set of protocols/APIs for real-time audio/video communication over peer-to-peer connections. WebRTC is supported by all major web browsers and more while now there is support within GStreamer too.
Kraft Moving to KDE Frameworks: Beta Release! Kraft is KDE/Qt based desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well chosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local. Kraft is around for more than twelve years, but it has been a little quiet recently. However, Kraft is alive and kicking! I am very happy to announce the first public beta version of Kraft V. 0.80, the first Kraft version that is based on KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5.x. |
GNOME/GTK: Librsvg, BuildStream, GTK, GStreamer rsvg-bench - a benchmark for librsvg Librsvg 2.42.0 came out with a rather major performance regression compared to 2.40.20: SVGs with many transform attributes would slow it down. It was fixed in 2.42.1. We changed from using a parser that would recompile regexes each time it was called, to one that does simple string-based matching and parsing. When I rewrote librsvg's parser for the transform attribute from C to Rust, I was just learning about writing parsers in Rust. I chose lalrpop, an excellent, Yacc-like parser generator for Rust. It generates big, fast parsers, like what you would need for a compiler — but it compiles the tokenizer's regexes each time you call the parser. This is not a problem for a compiler, where you basically call the parser only once, but in librsvg, we may call it thousands of times for an SVG file with thousands of objects with transform attributes. So, for 2.42.1 I rewrote that parser using rust-cssparser. This is what Servo uses to parse CSS data; it's a simple tokenizer with an API that knows about CSS's particular constructs. This is exactly the kind of data that librsvg cares about. Today all of librsvg's internal parsers work using rust-cssparser, or they are so simple that they can be done with Rust's normal functions to split strings and such.
BuildStream Hackfest and FOSDEM I also wanted to sum up a last minute BuildStream hackfest which occurred in Manchester just a week ago. Bloomberg sent some of their Developer Experience engineering team members over to the Codethink office in Manchester where the whole BuildStream team was present, and we split up into groups to plan upcoming coding sprints, land some outstanding work and fix some bugs.
builders An idiom that has shown up in GTK4 development is the idea of immutable objects and builders. The idea behind an immutable object is that you can be sure that it doesn’t change under you, so you don’t need to track changes, you can expose it in your API without having to fear users of the API are gonna change that object under you, you can use it as a key when caching and last but not least you can pass it into multiple threads without requiring synchronization. Examples of immutable objects in GTK4 are GdkCursor, GdkTexture, GdkContentFormats or GskRenderNode.
GTK+ hackfest, day 2 The second day of the GTK+ hackfest in Brussels started with an hour of patch review. We then went through scattered items from the agenda and collected answers to some questions.
GTK+ 4.0 Targeted For Its Initial Release This Fall, GTK+ 5.0 Development To Follow A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place. The past few days prior to FOSDEM in Brussels was a GTK+ hackfest. Among the items discussed when not banging on code was a GTK+ 4.0 road-map and coming out of this event in Belgium is a more solid understanding now that the initial GTK+ 4.0 release will be targeted for the fall of this year. There isn't any firm release plan at this time but at GUADEC (taking place in Spain this summer) they will revisit their plans to verify they can still ship this fall.
GStreamer has grown a WebRTC implementation Late last year, we at Centricular announced a new implementation of WebRTC in GStreamer. Today we're happy to announce that after community review, that work has been merged into GStreamer itself! The plugin is called webrtcbin, and the library is, naturally, called gstwebrtc. The implementation has all the basic features, is transparently compatible with other WebRTC stacks (particularly in browsers), and has been well-tested with both Firefox and Chrome.
GStreamer Lands A WebRTC Plugin The GStreamer multimedia framework now has mainline support for WebRTC. WebRTC is the set of protocols/APIs for real-time audio/video communication over peer-to-peer connections. WebRTC is supported by all major web browsers and more while now there is support within GStreamer too.
Kraft Moving to KDE Frameworks: Beta Release! Kraft is KDE/Qt based desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well chosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local. Kraft is around for more than twelve years, but it has been a little quiet recently. However, Kraft is alive and kicking! I am very happy to announce the first public beta version of Kraft V. 0.80, the first Kraft version that is based on KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5.x. |
Linux Foundation News Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies During his opening keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, made light of the mudslides that brought traffic to a crawl near Donner Pass on Monday evening. The trip at least was less arduous than it was last year, he said. Zemlin's remarks amounted to an open-source victory lap. Some 99.4 per cent of the world's high performance computing systems, 90 per cent of the world's stock exchanges, and 64 per cent of mobile devices run on Linux, he said, adding that the foundation's projects have created $14.5 billion worth of value, as measured in cost per line of code.
Hart Invests in Open Source Development With Linux Foundation Gold Membership Hart develops HartOS, an API platform that allows healthcare providers and their vendors and partners to use health data from multiple computer systems in a HIPAA-compliant manner to provide rich digital experiences. These may include medical records, hospital information, radiology information, laboratory information, picture archiving, emergency department and other systems.
The Linux Foundation Releases Free Open Source Software Basics Publication Sampling of content from Fundamentals of Open Source Management training course provides a foundation for using open source software in professional organizations
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces 11 New Members At Annual Open Source Leadership Summit |
Graphics: NVIDIA, GLVND, Keith Packard, RadeonSI Nouveau Hopes For Basic Vulkan Driver This Year, NVIDIA To Release Some New Docs Soon Open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver developers Martin Peres, Pierre Moreau, and Karol Herbst took to the FOSDEM 2018 conference today to share a status update on their reverse-engineering and open-source driver writing work around this unofficial NVIDIA Linux driver.
GLXVND Server Module / Server-Side GLVND Updated For X.Org Server For the better part of a year NVIDIA developers and Adam Jackson at Red Hat have been working on "server-side GLVND" and this new X.Org Server feature might finally be close to landing. After spearheading GLVND as the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch library for allowing multiple OpenGL drivers to co-exist happily on the same system, developers have been working on a similar implementation for the X.Org Server. This is for allowing different drivers to support different X screens within the same running X.Org Server.
Keith Packard Exploring "Semi-Automatic Compositing" For The X.Org Server Keith Packard's latest work for Valve on improving the Linux display stack is on what he's exploring around "semi-automatic compositing" but at this point it's still a risky bet with the new protocol yet to be written. Keith is broadly working on trying to improve composite acceleration within the X.Org Server to reduce the number of copies needed to get an application's contents to the screen, being able to get the screen contents delivered on time and for the application to know that, and to improve this overall process.
Composite acceleration in the X server One of the persistent problems with the modern X desktop is the number of moving parts required to display application content.
RadeonSI NIR Gets Compute Shader Support Timothy Arceri of Valve's Linux GPU driver team continues getting the RadeonSI NIR support up to scratch. Timothy spearheaded the work on tessellation shaders for RadeonSI's NIR back-end and also took this experimental code path to GLSL 4.50 support, among other improvements to the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver.
GNOME/GTK: Librsvg, BuildStream, GTK, GStreamer rsvg-bench - a benchmark for librsvg Librsvg 2.42.0 came out with a rather major performance regression compared to 2.40.20: SVGs with many transform attributes would slow it down. It was fixed in 2.42.1. We changed from using a parser that would recompile regexes each time it was called, to one that does simple string-based matching and parsing. When I rewrote librsvg's parser for the transform attribute from C to Rust, I was just learning about writing parsers in Rust. I chose lalrpop, an excellent, Yacc-like parser generator for Rust. It generates big, fast parsers, like what you would need for a compiler — but it compiles the tokenizer's regexes each time you call the parser. This is not a problem for a compiler, where you basically call the parser only once, but in librsvg, we may call it thousands of times for an SVG file with thousands of objects with transform attributes. So, for 2.42.1 I rewrote that parser using rust-cssparser. This is what Servo uses to parse CSS data; it's a simple tokenizer with an API that knows about CSS's particular constructs. This is exactly the kind of data that librsvg cares about. Today all of librsvg's internal parsers work using rust-cssparser, or they are so simple that they can be done with Rust's normal functions to split strings and such.
BuildStream Hackfest and FOSDEM I also wanted to sum up a last minute BuildStream hackfest which occurred in Manchester just a week ago. Bloomberg sent some of their Developer Experience engineering team members over to the Codethink office in Manchester where the whole BuildStream team was present, and we split up into groups to plan upcoming coding sprints, land some outstanding work and fix some bugs.
builders An idiom that has shown up in GTK4 development is the idea of immutable objects and builders. The idea behind an immutable object is that you can be sure that it doesn’t change under you, so you don’t need to track changes, you can expose it in your API without having to fear users of the API are gonna change that object under you, you can use it as a key when caching and last but not least you can pass it into multiple threads without requiring synchronization. Examples of immutable objects in GTK4 are GdkCursor, GdkTexture, GdkContentFormats or GskRenderNode.
GTK+ hackfest, day 2 The second day of the GTK+ hackfest in Brussels started with an hour of patch review. We then went through scattered items from the agenda and collected answers to some questions.
GTK+ 4.0 Targeted For Its Initial Release This Fall, GTK+ 5.0 Development To Follow A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place. The past few days prior to FOSDEM in Brussels was a GTK+ hackfest. Among the items discussed when not banging on code was a GTK+ 4.0 road-map and coming out of this event in Belgium is a more solid understanding now that the initial GTK+ 4.0 release will be targeted for the fall of this year. There isn't any firm release plan at this time but at GUADEC (taking place in Spain this summer) they will revisit their plans to verify they can still ship this fall.
GStreamer has grown a WebRTC implementation Late last year, we at Centricular announced a new implementation of WebRTC in GStreamer. Today we're happy to announce that after community review, that work has been merged into GStreamer itself! The plugin is called webrtcbin, and the library is, naturally, called gstwebrtc. The implementation has all the basic features, is transparently compatible with other WebRTC stacks (particularly in browsers), and has been well-tested with both Firefox and Chrome.
GStreamer Lands A WebRTC Plugin The GStreamer multimedia framework now has mainline support for WebRTC. WebRTC is the set of protocols/APIs for real-time audio/video communication over peer-to-peer connections. WebRTC is supported by all major web browsers and more while now there is support within GStreamer too. |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
Linux Foundation News Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies During his opening keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, made light of the mudslides that brought traffic to a crawl near Donner Pass on Monday evening. The trip at least was less arduous than it was last year, he said. Zemlin's remarks amounted to an open-source victory lap. Some 99.4 per cent of the world's high performance computing systems, 90 per cent of the world's stock exchanges, and 64 per cent of mobile devices run on Linux, he said, adding that the foundation's projects have created $14.5 billion worth of value, as measured in cost per line of code.
Hart Invests in Open Source Development With Linux Foundation Gold Membership Hart develops HartOS, an API platform that allows healthcare providers and their vendors and partners to use health data from multiple computer systems in a HIPAA-compliant manner to provide rich digital experiences. These may include medical records, hospital information, radiology information, laboratory information, picture archiving, emergency department and other systems.
The Linux Foundation Releases Free Open Source Software Basics Publication Sampling of content from Fundamentals of Open Source Management training course provides a foundation for using open source software in professional organizations
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces 11 New Members At Annual Open Source Leadership Summit |
Linux Foundation News Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies During his opening keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, made light of the mudslides that brought traffic to a crawl near Donner Pass on Monday evening. The trip at least was less arduous than it was last year, he said. Zemlin's remarks amounted to an open-source victory lap. Some 99.4 per cent of the world's high performance computing systems, 90 per cent of the world's stock exchanges, and 64 per cent of mobile devices run on Linux, he said, adding that the foundation's projects have created $14.5 billion worth of value, as measured in cost per line of code.
Hart Invests in Open Source Development With Linux Foundation Gold Membership Hart develops HartOS, an API platform that allows healthcare providers and their vendors and partners to use health data from multiple computer systems in a HIPAA-compliant manner to provide rich digital experiences. These may include medical records, hospital information, radiology information, laboratory information, picture archiving, emergency department and other systems.
The Linux Foundation Releases Free Open Source Software Basics Publication Sampling of content from Fundamentals of Open Source Management training course provides a foundation for using open source software in professional organizations
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces 11 New Members At Annual Open Source Leadership Summit |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
Linux Foundation News Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies During his opening keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, made light of the mudslides that brought traffic to a crawl near Donner Pass on Monday evening. The trip at least was less arduous than it was last year, he said. Zemlin's remarks amounted to an open-source victory lap. Some 99.4 per cent of the world's high performance computing systems, 90 per cent of the world's stock exchanges, and 64 per cent of mobile devices run on Linux, he said, adding that the foundation's projects have created $14.5 billion worth of value, as measured in cost per line of code.
Hart Invests in Open Source Development With Linux Foundation Gold Membership Hart develops HartOS, an API platform that allows healthcare providers and their vendors and partners to use health data from multiple computer systems in a HIPAA-compliant manner to provide rich digital experiences. These may include medical records, hospital information, radiology information, laboratory information, picture archiving, emergency department and other systems.
The Linux Foundation Releases Free Open Source Software Basics Publication Sampling of content from Fundamentals of Open Source Management training course provides a foundation for using open source software in professional organizations
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces 11 New Members At Annual Open Source Leadership Summit |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
Mozilla: Dark Theme Darkening, Google Tier 1 Search in Firefox for Android Nightly, Google's Attitude Dark Theme Darkening: Better Theming for Firefox Quantum Project Dark Theme Darkening was part of Michigan State University’s Computer Science capstone experience. Twenty-four groups of five students were each assigned an industry sponsor based on preference and skill set. We had the privilege of working with Mozilla on Firefox Quantum’s Theming API. Our project increases a user’s ability to customize the appearance of the Firefox browser.
Google Tier 1 Search in Firefox for Android Nightly Bug 975444 is one of the most-duped web compat bugs, which documents the fact that the version of Google Search that Firefox for Android users receive is a less rich version than the one served to Chrome Mobile. And people notice (hence all the dupes). In order to turn this situation around, we've been working on a number of platform interop bugs (in collaboration with some friendly members of the Blink team) and have hopes in making progress towards receiving Tier 1 search by default. Part of the plan is to sniff out bugs we don't know about (or new bugs, as the site changes very quickly) by exposing the Nightly population to the spoofed Tier 1 version for 4 weeks (which should be July 27, 2018). If things get too bad, we can back out the addon earlier.
Google to developers: We take down your extension - because we can Not sure why Google chose the wrong email address to contact me about this (the account is associated with another email address) but luckily this email found me. I opened the extension listing and the description is there, as is the icon. What’s missing is a screenshot, simply because creating one for an extension without a user interface isn’t trivial. No problem, spent a bit of time making something that will do to illustrate the principle. |
Programming/Development: fwupd, LLVM and More CSR devices now supported in fwupd The BlueCore CSR chips are used everywhere. If you have a “wireless” speaker or headphones that uses Bluetooth there is a high probability that it’s using a CSR chip inside. This makes the addition of CSR support into fwupd a big deal to access a lot of vendors. It’s a lot easier to say “just upload firmware” rather than “you have to write code” so I think it’s useful to have done this work.
Skylake Server Scheduler Model Updated In LLVM 6.0 Along With Other Intel CPU Updates
Most Software Code Will Be Written By Machines By 2040, Researchers Predict Imagine a scenario where a programmer needs to follow a couple of tried and tested procedures to write code that becomes a part of a bigger program that needs some insightful contribution from another programmer. So, is the first programmer really needed? Can’t we find a robotic replacement for the same? In the past, GitHub CEO had already made a prediction which says that future of coding is no coding at all. A similar speculation has been made by the researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, who have said that machines will write most of their own code by 2040.
Hazelcast joins Eclipse, JCache is key focal point Open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has joined the Eclipse Foundation – and it has done so for a reason. Hazelcast’s primary focus will be on JCache the Eclipse MicroProfile and EE4J. In particular, Hazelcast will be collaborating with members to popularize JCache, a Java Specification Request (JSR-107). So what place does JCache fill in the universe then?
Software: Darktable, VLC, Mesa, Audacity, Toplip, GNUstep Darktable 2.4-RC1 Rolls Out With Windows Support, OpenCL Improvements The open-source Darktable RAW photography software that's long been available for Linux and macOS has finally been ported to Microsoft Windows. But fortunately that's not all to be found in Darktable 2.4. While Windows support is their big headline feature of Darktable 2.4, the RC1 release that came out today is also packed with other improvements.
Linux Release Roundup: VLC, Mesa, Audacity + More Another week has flown by, making it time for another round-up of pertinent Linux app releases that didn’t manage to wangle a full post’s worth of waffle on this site. This week’s crop of curios includes updates to the world’s most popular open-source video player, the world’s most popular open-source audio editor, and the world’s most popular open-source graphics drivers.
Toplip – A Very Strong File Encryption And Decryption CLI Utility There are numerous file encryption tools available on the market to protect your files. We have already reviewed some encryption tools such as Cryptomater, Cryptkeeper, CryptGo, Cryptr, Tomb, and GnuPG etc. Today, we will be discussing yet another file encryption and decryption command line utility named “Toplip”. It is a free and open source encryption utility that uses a very strong encryption method called AES256, along with an XTS-AES design to safeguard your confidential data. Also, it uses Scrypt, a password-based key derivation function, to protect your passphrases against brute-force attacks.
GNUstep Takes Another Step Forward For Implementing Apple's Cocoa Frameworks GNUstep is the long-standing free software project working to implement Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks used by macOS. The GNU project has made new releases of their GUI and Back libraries. GNUstep GUI 0.26 is out this morning as the latest update to their graphical user-interface library. GNUstep GUI 0.26 has a number of compatibility improvements, translation updates, mouse tracking logic improvements, bug fixes, and other work. |
GNU: The GNU C Library 2.28 and Guix on Android Glibc 2.28 Upstream Will Build/Run Cleanly On GNU Hurd While Linux distributions are still migrating to Glibc 2.27, in the two months since the release changes have continued building up for what will eventually become the GNU C Library 2.28. The Glibc 2.28 work queued thus far isn't nearly as exciting as all the performance optimizations and more introduced with Glibc 2.27, but it's a start. Most notable at this point for Glibc 2.28 is that it will now build and run cleanly on GNU/Hurd without requiring any out-of-tree patches. There has been a ton of Hurd-related commits to Glibc over the past month.
Guix on Android! Last year I thought to myself: since my phone is just a computer running an operating system called Android (or Replicant!), and that Android is based on a Linux kernel, it's just another foreign distribution I could install GNU Guix on, right? It turned out it was absolutely the case. Today I was reminded on IRC of my attempt last year at installing GNU Guix on my phone. Hence this blog post. I'll try to give you all the knowledge and commands required to install it on your own Android device.
GNU Guix Wrangled To Run On Android The GNU Guix transactional package manager can be made to run on Android smartphones/tablets, but not without lots of hoops to jump through first.
Node.js 10.9 and npm milestone Open Source Node.js Hits v10, with Better Security, Performance, More Speaking of which, the brand-new Node.js 10.0 is expected to soon support npm version 6 (currently Node.js ships with npm 5.7.x). The company npm Inc., which maintains the npm software package management application, today announced that major update, called npm@6. The npm company said its JavaScript software installer tool includes new security features for developers working with open source code.
Announcing npm@6 In coordination with today’s announcement of Node.js v10, we’re excited to announce npm@6. This major update to npm includes powerful new security features for every developer who works with open source code. Read on to understand why this matters. |
Programming/Development: fwupd, LLVM and More CSR devices now supported in fwupd The BlueCore CSR chips are used everywhere. If you have a “wireless” speaker or headphones that uses Bluetooth there is a high probability that it’s using a CSR chip inside. This makes the addition of CSR support into fwupd a big deal to access a lot of vendors. It’s a lot easier to say “just upload firmware” rather than “you have to write code” so I think it’s useful to have done this work.
Skylake Server Scheduler Model Updated In LLVM 6.0 Along With Other Intel CPU Updates
Most Software Code Will Be Written By Machines By 2040, Researchers Predict Imagine a scenario where a programmer needs to follow a couple of tried and tested procedures to write code that becomes a part of a bigger program that needs some insightful contribution from another programmer. So, is the first programmer really needed? Can’t we find a robotic replacement for the same? In the past, GitHub CEO had already made a prediction which says that future of coding is no coding at all. A similar speculation has been made by the researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, who have said that machines will write most of their own code by 2040.
Hazelcast joins Eclipse, JCache is key focal point Open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has joined the Eclipse Foundation – and it has done so for a reason. Hazelcast’s primary focus will be on JCache the Eclipse MicroProfile and EE4J. In particular, Hazelcast will be collaborating with members to popularize JCache, a Java Specification Request (JSR-107). So what place does JCache fill in the universe then?
Software: Darktable, VLC, Mesa, Audacity, Toplip, GNUstep Darktable 2.4-RC1 Rolls Out With Windows Support, OpenCL Improvements The open-source Darktable RAW photography software that's long been available for Linux and macOS has finally been ported to Microsoft Windows. But fortunately that's not all to be found in Darktable 2.4. While Windows support is their big headline feature of Darktable 2.4, the RC1 release that came out today is also packed with other improvements.
Linux Release Roundup: VLC, Mesa, Audacity + More Another week has flown by, making it time for another round-up of pertinent Linux app releases that didn’t manage to wangle a full post’s worth of waffle on this site. This week’s crop of curios includes updates to the world’s most popular open-source video player, the world’s most popular open-source audio editor, and the world’s most popular open-source graphics drivers.
Toplip – A Very Strong File Encryption And Decryption CLI Utility There are numerous file encryption tools available on the market to protect your files. We have already reviewed some encryption tools such as Cryptomater, Cryptkeeper, CryptGo, Cryptr, Tomb, and GnuPG etc. Today, we will be discussing yet another file encryption and decryption command line utility named “Toplip”. It is a free and open source encryption utility that uses a very strong encryption method called AES256, along with an XTS-AES design to safeguard your confidential data. Also, it uses Scrypt, a password-based key derivation function, to protect your passphrases against brute-force attacks.
GNUstep Takes Another Step Forward For Implementing Apple's Cocoa Frameworks GNUstep is the long-standing free software project working to implement Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks used by macOS. The GNU project has made new releases of their GUI and Back libraries. GNUstep GUI 0.26 is out this morning as the latest update to their graphical user-interface library. GNUstep GUI 0.26 has a number of compatibility improvements, translation updates, mouse tracking logic improvements, bug fixes, and other work. |
Free Electrons becomes Bootlin (After Trademark Bullying/Trolling by FREE SAS)
The services we offer are different, we target a different audience (professionals instead of individuals), and most of our communication efforts are in English, to reach an international audience. Therefore Michael Opdenacker and Free Electrons’ management believe that there is no risk of confusion between Free Electrons and FREE SAS. However, FREE SAS has filed in excess of 100 oppositions and District Court actions against trademarks or name containing “free”. In view of the resources needed to fight this case, Free Electrons has decided to change name without waiting for the decision of the District Court. This will allow us to stay focused on our projects rather than exhausting ourselves fighting a long legal battle. [...] Nothing else changes in the company. We are the same engineers, the same Linux kernel contributors and maintainers (now 6 of us have their names in the Linux MAINTAINERS file), with the same technical skills and appetite for new technical challenges. More than ever, we remain united by the passion we all share in the company since the beginning: working with hardware and low-level software, working together with the free software community, and sharing the experience with others so that they can at least get the best of what the community offers and hopefully one day become active contributors too. “Get the best of the community” is effectively one of our slogans.
today's howtos
Ubuntu: Ubuntu 18.04, Snapcraft Summit, and Microsoft Exploiting Snaps to Promote (in the Media) Malicious Software |
KDE and GNOME: Kubuntu, Krita, GNOME Development Kubuntu 18.04 LTS Could Switch to Breeze-Dark Plasma Theme by Default, Test Now The latest daily build live ISO images that landed earlier today for Kubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) apparently uses the Breeze-Dark Plasma theme for the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment by default. However, we've been told that it's currently an experiment to get the pulse of the community. "Users running [Kubuntu] 18.04 development version who have not deliberately opted to use Breeze/Breeze-Light in their System Settings will also see the change after upgrading packages," said the devs. "Users can easily revert back to the Breeze/Breeze-Light Plasma themes by changing this in System Settings."
Interview with Rytelier The amount of convenience is very high compared to other programs. The amount of “this one should be designed in a better way, it annoys me” things is the smallest of all the programs I use, and if something is broken, then most of these functions are announced to improve in 4.0.
Grow your skills with GNOME For the past 3 years I’ve been working very hard because I fulfill a number of these roles for Builder. It’s exhausting and unsustainable. It contributes to burnout and hostile communication by putting too much responsibility on too few people’s shoulders.
GTK4, GNOME's Wayland Support & Vulkan Renderer Topped GNOME In 2017
A Lot Of Improvements Are Building Up For GIMP 2.9.8, Including Better Wayland Support It's been four months since the release of GIMP 2.9.6 and while GIMP 2.9 developments are sadly not too frequent, the next GIMP 2.9.8 release is preparing a host of changes. Of excitement to those trying to use GIMP in a Wayland-based Linux desktop environment, GIMP's color picker has just picked up support for working on KDE/Wayland as well as some other Color Picker improvements to help GNOME/Wayland too. GIMP's Screenshot plugin also now has support for taking screenshots on KDE/Wayland either as a full-screen or individual windows. Granted, GIMP won't be all nice and dandy on Wayland itself until seeing the long-awaited GTK3 (or straight to GTK4) port. |
Bug 975444 is one of the most-duped web compat bugs, which documents the fact that the version of Google Search that Firefox for Android users receive is a less rich version than the one served to Chrome Mobile. And people notice (hence all the dupes).
In order to turn this situation around, we've been working on a number of platform interop bugs (in collaboration with some friendly members of the Blink team) and have hopes in making progress towards receiving Tier 1 search by default.
Part of the plan is to sniff out bugs we don't know about (or new bugs, as the site changes very quickly) by exposing the Nightly population to the spoofed Tier 1 version for 4 weeks (which should be July 27, 2018). If things get too bad, we can back out the addon earlier. |
Linux Foundation News Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies During his opening keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, made light of the mudslides that brought traffic to a crawl near Donner Pass on Monday evening. The trip at least was less arduous than it was last year, he said. Zemlin's remarks amounted to an open-source victory lap. Some 99.4 per cent of the world's high performance computing systems, 90 per cent of the world's stock exchanges, and 64 per cent of mobile devices run on Linux, he said, adding that the foundation's projects have created $14.5 billion worth of value, as measured in cost per line of code.
Hart Invests in Open Source Development With Linux Foundation Gold Membership Hart develops HartOS, an API platform that allows healthcare providers and their vendors and partners to use health data from multiple computer systems in a HIPAA-compliant manner to provide rich digital experiences. These may include medical records, hospital information, radiology information, laboratory information, picture archiving, emergency department and other systems.
The Linux Foundation Releases Free Open Source Software Basics Publication Sampling of content from Fundamentals of Open Source Management training course provides a foundation for using open source software in professional organizations
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces 11 New Members At Annual Open Source Leadership Summit |
Mozilla Leftovers These Weeks in Dev-Tools, issue 3 These Weeks in Dev-Tools will keep you up to date with all the exciting dev tools news. We plan to have a new issue every few weeks. If you have any news you'd like us to report, please comment on the tracking issue.
These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 31
Understanding Extension Permission Requests An extension is software developed by a third party that modifies how you experience the web in Firefox. Since they work by tapping into the inner workings of Firefox, but are not built by Mozilla, it’s good practice to understand the permissions they ask for and how to make decisions about what to install. While rare, a malicious extension can do things like steal your data or track your browsing across the web without you realizing it. We have been taking steps to reduce the risk of extensions, the most significant of which was moving to a WebExtensions architecture with the release of Firefox 57 last fall. The new APIs limit an extension’s ability to access certain parts of the browser and the information they process. We also have a variety of security measures in place, such as a review process that is designed to make it difficult for malicious developers to publish extensions. Nevertheless, these systems cannot guarantee that extensions will be 100% safe.
Janitor project - Newsletter 10 We hope you’ve had a smooth start into the year, and wish you all the best in your life and projects. This is your recurrent burst of good news about Janitor.
Switch from Chrome to Firefox in just a Few Minutes You’ve heard about how fast the new Firefox is. You’ve heard it’s made by people who want the web to be awesome for everyone. You like that, you’re curious to try, but you hesitate. Moving from Chrome to Firefox seems like work. Fussy, computer-y IT work. Ugh. ”What about all my “stuff”? I don’t want to set all this up again.”
Glibc 2.27 and everything you didn't know about FSFE in a picture Glibc 2.27 Released With Many Optimizations, Support For Static PIE Executables Being released right on time is Glibc 2.27, version 2.27 of the GNU C Library. As we have been covering the past few months, exciting us a lot about Glibc 2.27 are many performance optimizations with a number of functions receiving AVX/FMA tuning and other performance tweaks particularly for x86_64. But even on the ARM64/AArch64 side are also some performance optimizations as well as for POWER and SPARC.
GNU C Library 2.27 released The GNU C Library version 2.27 is now available. The GNU C Library is used as *the* C library in the GNU system and in GNU/Linux systems, as well as many other systems that use Linux as the kernel.
Everything you didn't know about FSFE in a picture As FSFE's community begins exploring our future, I thought it would be helpful to start with a visual guide to the current structure. All the information I've gathered here is publicly available but people rarely see it in one place, hence the heading. There is no suggestion that anything has been deliberately hidden. |
GNU: The GNU C Library 2.28 and Guix on Android Glibc 2.28 Upstream Will Build/Run Cleanly On GNU Hurd While Linux distributions are still migrating to Glibc 2.27, in the two months since the release changes have continued building up for what will eventually become the GNU C Library 2.28. The Glibc 2.28 work queued thus far isn't nearly as exciting as all the performance optimizations and more introduced with Glibc 2.27, but it's a start. Most notable at this point for Glibc 2.28 is that it will now build and run cleanly on GNU/Hurd without requiring any out-of-tree patches. There has been a ton of Hurd-related commits to Glibc over the past month.
Guix on Android! Last year I thought to myself: since my phone is just a computer running an operating system called Android (or Replicant!), and that Android is based on a Linux kernel, it's just another foreign distribution I could install GNU Guix on, right? It turned out it was absolutely the case. Today I was reminded on IRC of my attempt last year at installing GNU Guix on my phone. Hence this blog post. I'll try to give you all the knowledge and commands required to install it on your own Android device.
GNU Guix Wrangled To Run On Android The GNU Guix transactional package manager can be made to run on Android smartphones/tablets, but not without lots of hoops to jump through first.
Node.js 10.9 and npm milestone Open Source Node.js Hits v10, with Better Security, Performance, More Speaking of which, the brand-new Node.js 10.0 is expected to soon support npm version 6 (currently Node.js ships with npm 5.7.x). The company npm Inc., which maintains the npm software package management application, today announced that major update, called npm@6. The npm company said its JavaScript software installer tool includes new security features for developers working with open source code.
Announcing npm@6 In coordination with today’s announcement of Node.js v10, we’re excited to announce npm@6. This major update to npm includes powerful new security features for every developer who works with open source code. Read on to understand why this matters. |
Graphics: NVIDIA, GLVND, Keith Packard, RadeonSI Nouveau Hopes For Basic Vulkan Driver This Year, NVIDIA To Release Some New Docs Soon Open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver developers Martin Peres, Pierre Moreau, and Karol Herbst took to the FOSDEM 2018 conference today to share a status update on their reverse-engineering and open-source driver writing work around this unofficial NVIDIA Linux driver.
GLXVND Server Module / Server-Side GLVND Updated For X.Org Server For the better part of a year NVIDIA developers and Adam Jackson at Red Hat have been working on "server-side GLVND" and this new X.Org Server feature might finally be close to landing. After spearheading GLVND as the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch library for allowing multiple OpenGL drivers to co-exist happily on the same system, developers have been working on a similar implementation for the X.Org Server. This is for allowing different drivers to support different X screens within the same running X.Org Server.
Keith Packard Exploring "Semi-Automatic Compositing" For The X.Org Server Keith Packard's latest work for Valve on improving the Linux display stack is on what he's exploring around "semi-automatic compositing" but at this point it's still a risky bet with the new protocol yet to be written. Keith is broadly working on trying to improve composite acceleration within the X.Org Server to reduce the number of copies needed to get an application's contents to the screen, being able to get the screen contents delivered on time and for the application to know that, and to improve this overall process.
Composite acceleration in the X server One of the persistent problems with the modern X desktop is the number of moving parts required to display application content.
RadeonSI NIR Gets Compute Shader Support Timothy Arceri of Valve's Linux GPU driver team continues getting the RadeonSI NIR support up to scratch. Timothy spearheaded the work on tessellation shaders for RadeonSI's NIR back-end and also took this experimental code path to GLSL 4.50 support, among other improvements to the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver.
GNOME/GTK: Librsvg, BuildStream, GTK, GStreamer rsvg-bench - a benchmark for librsvg Librsvg 2.42.0 came out with a rather major performance regression compared to 2.40.20: SVGs with many transform attributes would slow it down. It was fixed in 2.42.1. We changed from using a parser that would recompile regexes each time it was called, to one that does simple string-based matching and parsing. When I rewrote librsvg's parser for the transform attribute from C to Rust, I was just learning about writing parsers in Rust. I chose lalrpop, an excellent, Yacc-like parser generator for Rust. It generates big, fast parsers, like what you would need for a compiler — but it compiles the tokenizer's regexes each time you call the parser. This is not a problem for a compiler, where you basically call the parser only once, but in librsvg, we may call it thousands of times for an SVG file with thousands of objects with transform attributes. So, for 2.42.1 I rewrote that parser using rust-cssparser. This is what Servo uses to parse CSS data; it's a simple tokenizer with an API that knows about CSS's particular constructs. This is exactly the kind of data that librsvg cares about. Today all of librsvg's internal parsers work using rust-cssparser, or they are so simple that they can be done with Rust's normal functions to split strings and such.
BuildStream Hackfest and FOSDEM I also wanted to sum up a last minute BuildStream hackfest which occurred in Manchester just a week ago. Bloomberg sent some of their Developer Experience engineering team members over to the Codethink office in Manchester where the whole BuildStream team was present, and we split up into groups to plan upcoming coding sprints, land some outstanding work and fix some bugs.
builders An idiom that has shown up in GTK4 development is the idea of immutable objects and builders. The idea behind an immutable object is that you can be sure that it doesn’t change under you, so you don’t need to track changes, you can expose it in your API without having to fear users of the API are gonna change that object under you, you can use it as a key when caching and last but not least you can pass it into multiple threads without requiring synchronization. Examples of immutable objects in GTK4 are GdkCursor, GdkTexture, GdkContentFormats or GskRenderNode.
GTK+ hackfest, day 2 The second day of the GTK+ hackfest in Brussels started with an hour of patch review. We then went through scattered items from the agenda and collected answers to some questions.
GTK+ 4.0 Targeted For Its Initial Release This Fall, GTK+ 5.0 Development To Follow A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place. The past few days prior to FOSDEM in Brussels was a GTK+ hackfest. Among the items discussed when not banging on code was a GTK+ 4.0 road-map and coming out of this event in Belgium is a more solid understanding now that the initial GTK+ 4.0 release will be targeted for the fall of this year. There isn't any firm release plan at this time but at GUADEC (taking place in Spain this summer) they will revisit their plans to verify they can still ship this fall.
GStreamer has grown a WebRTC implementation Late last year, we at Centricular announced a new implementation of WebRTC in GStreamer. Today we're happy to announce that after community review, that work has been merged into GStreamer itself! The plugin is called webrtcbin, and the library is, naturally, called gstwebrtc. The implementation has all the basic features, is transparently compatible with other WebRTC stacks (particularly in browsers), and has been well-tested with both Firefox and Chrome.
GStreamer Lands A WebRTC Plugin The GStreamer multimedia framework now has mainline support for WebRTC. WebRTC is the set of protocols/APIs for real-time audio/video communication over peer-to-peer connections. WebRTC is supported by all major web browsers and more while now there is support within GStreamer too. |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
Mozilla: Dark Theme Darkening, Google Tier 1 Search in Firefox for Android Nightly, Google's Attitude Dark Theme Darkening: Better Theming for Firefox Quantum Project Dark Theme Darkening was part of Michigan State University’s Computer Science capstone experience. Twenty-four groups of five students were each assigned an industry sponsor based on preference and skill set. We had the privilege of working with Mozilla on Firefox Quantum’s Theming API. Our project increases a user’s ability to customize the appearance of the Firefox browser.
Google Tier 1 Search in Firefox for Android Nightly Bug 975444 is one of the most-duped web compat bugs, which documents the fact that the version of Google Search that Firefox for Android users receive is a less rich version than the one served to Chrome Mobile. And people notice (hence all the dupes). In order to turn this situation around, we've been working on a number of platform interop bugs (in collaboration with some friendly members of the Blink team) and have hopes in making progress towards receiving Tier 1 search by default. Part of the plan is to sniff out bugs we don't know about (or new bugs, as the site changes very quickly) by exposing the Nightly population to the spoofed Tier 1 version for 4 weeks (which should be July 27, 2018). If things get too bad, we can back out the addon earlier.
Google to developers: We take down your extension - because we can Not sure why Google chose the wrong email address to contact me about this (the account is associated with another email address) but luckily this email found me. I opened the extension listing and the description is there, as is the icon. What’s missing is a screenshot, simply because creating one for an extension without a user interface isn’t trivial. No problem, spent a bit of time making something that will do to illustrate the principle. |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
Linux Foundation News Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies During his opening keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, made light of the mudslides that brought traffic to a crawl near Donner Pass on Monday evening. The trip at least was less arduous than it was last year, he said. Zemlin's remarks amounted to an open-source victory lap. Some 99.4 per cent of the world's high performance computing systems, 90 per cent of the world's stock exchanges, and 64 per cent of mobile devices run on Linux, he said, adding that the foundation's projects have created $14.5 billion worth of value, as measured in cost per line of code.
Hart Invests in Open Source Development With Linux Foundation Gold Membership Hart develops HartOS, an API platform that allows healthcare providers and their vendors and partners to use health data from multiple computer systems in a HIPAA-compliant manner to provide rich digital experiences. These may include medical records, hospital information, radiology information, laboratory information, picture archiving, emergency department and other systems.
The Linux Foundation Releases Free Open Source Software Basics Publication Sampling of content from Fundamentals of Open Source Management training course provides a foundation for using open source software in professional organizations
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces 11 New Members At Annual Open Source Leadership Summit |
Programming/Development: fwupd, LLVM and More CSR devices now supported in fwupd The BlueCore CSR chips are used everywhere. If you have a “wireless” speaker or headphones that uses Bluetooth there is a high probability that it’s using a CSR chip inside. This makes the addition of CSR support into fwupd a big deal to access a lot of vendors. It’s a lot easier to say “just upload firmware” rather than “you have to write code” so I think it’s useful to have done this work.
Skylake Server Scheduler Model Updated In LLVM 6.0 Along With Other Intel CPU Updates
Most Software Code Will Be Written By Machines By 2040, Researchers Predict Imagine a scenario where a programmer needs to follow a couple of tried and tested procedures to write code that becomes a part of a bigger program that needs some insightful contribution from another programmer. So, is the first programmer really needed? Can’t we find a robotic replacement for the same? In the past, GitHub CEO had already made a prediction which says that future of coding is no coding at all. A similar speculation has been made by the researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, who have said that machines will write most of their own code by 2040.
Hazelcast joins Eclipse, JCache is key focal point Open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has joined the Eclipse Foundation – and it has done so for a reason. Hazelcast’s primary focus will be on JCache the Eclipse MicroProfile and EE4J. In particular, Hazelcast will be collaborating with members to popularize JCache, a Java Specification Request (JSR-107). So what place does JCache fill in the universe then?
Software: Darktable, VLC, Mesa, Audacity, Toplip, GNUstep Darktable 2.4-RC1 Rolls Out With Windows Support, OpenCL Improvements The open-source Darktable RAW photography software that's long been available for Linux and macOS has finally been ported to Microsoft Windows. But fortunately that's not all to be found in Darktable 2.4. While Windows support is their big headline feature of Darktable 2.4, the RC1 release that came out today is also packed with other improvements.
Linux Release Roundup: VLC, Mesa, Audacity + More Another week has flown by, making it time for another round-up of pertinent Linux app releases that didn’t manage to wangle a full post’s worth of waffle on this site. This week’s crop of curios includes updates to the world’s most popular open-source video player, the world’s most popular open-source audio editor, and the world’s most popular open-source graphics drivers.
Toplip – A Very Strong File Encryption And Decryption CLI Utility There are numerous file encryption tools available on the market to protect your files. We have already reviewed some encryption tools such as Cryptomater, Cryptkeeper, CryptGo, Cryptr, Tomb, and GnuPG etc. Today, we will be discussing yet another file encryption and decryption command line utility named “Toplip”. It is a free and open source encryption utility that uses a very strong encryption method called AES256, along with an XTS-AES design to safeguard your confidential data. Also, it uses Scrypt, a password-based key derivation function, to protect your passphrases against brute-force attacks.
GNUstep Takes Another Step Forward For Implementing Apple's Cocoa Frameworks GNUstep is the long-standing free software project working to implement Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks used by macOS. The GNU project has made new releases of their GUI and Back libraries. GNUstep GUI 0.26 is out this morning as the latest update to their graphical user-interface library. GNUstep GUI 0.26 has a number of compatibility improvements, translation updates, mouse tracking logic improvements, bug fixes, and other work. |
KDE and GNOME: Kubuntu, Krita, GNOME Development Kubuntu 18.04 LTS Could Switch to Breeze-Dark Plasma Theme by Default, Test Now The latest daily build live ISO images that landed earlier today for Kubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) apparently uses the Breeze-Dark Plasma theme for the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment by default. However, we've been told that it's currently an experiment to get the pulse of the community. "Users running [Kubuntu] 18.04 development version who have not deliberately opted to use Breeze/Breeze-Light in their System Settings will also see the change after upgrading packages," said the devs. "Users can easily revert back to the Breeze/Breeze-Light Plasma themes by changing this in System Settings."
Interview with Rytelier The amount of convenience is very high compared to other programs. The amount of “this one should be designed in a better way, it annoys me” things is the smallest of all the programs I use, and if something is broken, then most of these functions are announced to improve in 4.0.
Grow your skills with GNOME For the past 3 years I’ve been working very hard because I fulfill a number of these roles for Builder. It’s exhausting and unsustainable. It contributes to burnout and hostile communication by putting too much responsibility on too few people’s shoulders.
GTK4, GNOME's Wayland Support & Vulkan Renderer Topped GNOME In 2017
A Lot Of Improvements Are Building Up For GIMP 2.9.8, Including Better Wayland Support It's been four months since the release of GIMP 2.9.6 and while GIMP 2.9 developments are sadly not too frequent, the next GIMP 2.9.8 release is preparing a host of changes. Of excitement to those trying to use GIMP in a Wayland-based Linux desktop environment, GIMP's color picker has just picked up support for working on KDE/Wayland as well as some other Color Picker improvements to help GNOME/Wayland too. GIMP's Screenshot plugin also now has support for taking screenshots on KDE/Wayland either as a full-screen or individual windows. Granted, GIMP won't be all nice and dandy on Wayland itself until seeing the long-awaited GTK3 (or straight to GTK4) port. |
Comparing Twine and Ren'Py for creating interactive fiction
Any experienced technology educator knows engagement and motivation are key to a student's learning. Of the many techniques for stimulating engagement and motivation among learners, storytelling and game creation have good track records of success, and writing interactive fiction is a great way to combine both of those techniques. Interactive fiction has a respectable history in computing, stretching back to the text-only adventure games of the early 1980s, and it's enjoyed a new popularity recently. There are many technology tools that can be used for writing interactive fiction, but the two that will be considered here, Twine and Ren'Py, are ideal for the task. Each has different strengths that make it more attractive for particular types of projects.
Fedora 29 For ARM Eyeing ZRAM Support, ARMv7 UEFI Booting
When it comes to the growing number of changes slated for Fedora 29, while most of the feature plans benefit all supported CPU architectures, there are also some ARM-specific improvements planned. There are two main ARM feature proposals so far for Fedora 29: enabling ZRAM for ARMv7/AArch64 and using UEFI for ARMv7 device booting.
Games Leftovers |
GNU: The GNU C Library 2.28 and Guix on Android Glibc 2.28 Upstream Will Build/Run Cleanly On GNU Hurd While Linux distributions are still migrating to Glibc 2.27, in the two months since the release changes have continued building up for what will eventually become the GNU C Library 2.28. The Glibc 2.28 work queued thus far isn't nearly as exciting as all the performance optimizations and more introduced with Glibc 2.27, but it's a start. Most notable at this point for Glibc 2.28 is that it will now build and run cleanly on GNU/Hurd without requiring any out-of-tree patches. There has been a ton of Hurd-related commits to Glibc over the past month.
Guix on Android! Last year I thought to myself: since my phone is just a computer running an operating system called Android (or Replicant!), and that Android is based on a Linux kernel, it's just another foreign distribution I could install GNU Guix on, right? It turned out it was absolutely the case. Today I was reminded on IRC of my attempt last year at installing GNU Guix on my phone. Hence this blog post. I'll try to give you all the knowledge and commands required to install it on your own Android device.
GNU Guix Wrangled To Run On Android The GNU Guix transactional package manager can be made to run on Android smartphones/tablets, but not without lots of hoops to jump through first.
Node.js 10.9 and npm milestone Open Source Node.js Hits v10, with Better Security, Performance, More Speaking of which, the brand-new Node.js 10.0 is expected to soon support npm version 6 (currently Node.js ships with npm 5.7.x). The company npm Inc., which maintains the npm software package management application, today announced that major update, called npm@6. The npm company said its JavaScript software installer tool includes new security features for developers working with open source code.
Announcing npm@6 In coordination with today’s announcement of Node.js v10, we’re excited to announce npm@6. This major update to npm includes powerful new security features for every developer who works with open source code. Read on to understand why this matters. |
Linux Foundation News Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies During his opening keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, made light of the mudslides that brought traffic to a crawl near Donner Pass on Monday evening. The trip at least was less arduous than it was last year, he said. Zemlin's remarks amounted to an open-source victory lap. Some 99.4 per cent of the world's high performance computing systems, 90 per cent of the world's stock exchanges, and 64 per cent of mobile devices run on Linux, he said, adding that the foundation's projects have created $14.5 billion worth of value, as measured in cost per line of code.
Hart Invests in Open Source Development With Linux Foundation Gold Membership Hart develops HartOS, an API platform that allows healthcare providers and their vendors and partners to use health data from multiple computer systems in a HIPAA-compliant manner to provide rich digital experiences. These may include medical records, hospital information, radiology information, laboratory information, picture archiving, emergency department and other systems.
The Linux Foundation Releases Free Open Source Software Basics Publication Sampling of content from Fundamentals of Open Source Management training course provides a foundation for using open source software in professional organizations
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces 11 New Members At Annual Open Source Leadership Summit |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
KDE and GNOME: Kubuntu, Krita, GNOME Development Kubuntu 18.04 LTS Could Switch to Breeze-Dark Plasma Theme by Default, Test Now The latest daily build live ISO images that landed earlier today for Kubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) apparently uses the Breeze-Dark Plasma theme for the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment by default. However, we've been told that it's currently an experiment to get the pulse of the community. "Users running [Kubuntu] 18.04 development version who have not deliberately opted to use Breeze/Breeze-Light in their System Settings will also see the change after upgrading packages," said the devs. "Users can easily revert back to the Breeze/Breeze-Light Plasma themes by changing this in System Settings."
Interview with Rytelier The amount of convenience is very high compared to other programs. The amount of “this one should be designed in a better way, it annoys me” things is the smallest of all the programs I use, and if something is broken, then most of these functions are announced to improve in 4.0.
Grow your skills with GNOME For the past 3 years I’ve been working very hard because I fulfill a number of these roles for Builder. It’s exhausting and unsustainable. It contributes to burnout and hostile communication by putting too much responsibility on too few people’s shoulders.
GTK4, GNOME's Wayland Support & Vulkan Renderer Topped GNOME In 2017
A Lot Of Improvements Are Building Up For GIMP 2.9.8, Including Better Wayland Support It's been four months since the release of GIMP 2.9.6 and while GIMP 2.9 developments are sadly not too frequent, the next GIMP 2.9.8 release is preparing a host of changes. Of excitement to those trying to use GIMP in a Wayland-based Linux desktop environment, GIMP's color picker has just picked up support for working on KDE/Wayland as well as some other Color Picker improvements to help GNOME/Wayland too. GIMP's Screenshot plugin also now has support for taking screenshots on KDE/Wayland either as a full-screen or individual windows. Granted, GIMP won't be all nice and dandy on Wayland itself until seeing the long-awaited GTK3 (or straight to GTK4) port. |
As some of you might already know, I’ve been focusing lately on Flatpak and its integration into KDE. You can check my work on Flatpak KDE portals, which are being currently included in our KDE runtimes and repositories were migrated to KDE git so there has been made some progress since last time I talked about them. Recently I started looking into adding Flatpak support to KDE Discover, to have same support for Flatpak as Gnome has with gnome-software. From the begining it was a nightmare for me as I have never used any glib based library so that slowed me down little bit. I also went through gnome-software code to understand how flatpak integration is done there to get some inspiration. Things went well since then and I have already quite nice stuff to share with you. We currently support most common functionality, like listing available/installed flatpak applications in Discover with possibilities to install/remove/update and of course launch them. We also support flatpak bundles and flatpakref files already. |
GNOME/GTK: Librsvg, BuildStream, GTK, GStreamer rsvg-bench - a benchmark for librsvg Librsvg 2.42.0 came out with a rather major performance regression compared to 2.40.20: SVGs with many transform attributes would slow it down. It was fixed in 2.42.1. We changed from using a parser that would recompile regexes each time it was called, to one that does simple string-based matching and parsing. When I rewrote librsvg's parser for the transform attribute from C to Rust, I was just learning about writing parsers in Rust. I chose lalrpop, an excellent, Yacc-like parser generator for Rust. It generates big, fast parsers, like what you would need for a compiler — but it compiles the tokenizer's regexes each time you call the parser. This is not a problem for a compiler, where you basically call the parser only once, but in librsvg, we may call it thousands of times for an SVG file with thousands of objects with transform attributes. So, for 2.42.1 I rewrote that parser using rust-cssparser. This is what Servo uses to parse CSS data; it's a simple tokenizer with an API that knows about CSS's particular constructs. This is exactly the kind of data that librsvg cares about. Today all of librsvg's internal parsers work using rust-cssparser, or they are so simple that they can be done with Rust's normal functions to split strings and such.
BuildStream Hackfest and FOSDEM I also wanted to sum up a last minute BuildStream hackfest which occurred in Manchester just a week ago. Bloomberg sent some of their Developer Experience engineering team members over to the Codethink office in Manchester where the whole BuildStream team was present, and we split up into groups to plan upcoming coding sprints, land some outstanding work and fix some bugs.
builders An idiom that has shown up in GTK4 development is the idea of immutable objects and builders. The idea behind an immutable object is that you can be sure that it doesn’t change under you, so you don’t need to track changes, you can expose it in your API without having to fear users of the API are gonna change that object under you, you can use it as a key when caching and last but not least you can pass it into multiple threads without requiring synchronization. Examples of immutable objects in GTK4 are GdkCursor, GdkTexture, GdkContentFormats or GskRenderNode.
GTK+ hackfest, day 2 The second day of the GTK+ hackfest in Brussels started with an hour of patch review. We then went through scattered items from the agenda and collected answers to some questions.
GTK+ 4.0 Targeted For Its Initial Release This Fall, GTK+ 5.0 Development To Follow A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place. The past few days prior to FOSDEM in Brussels was a GTK+ hackfest. Among the items discussed when not banging on code was a GTK+ 4.0 road-map and coming out of this event in Belgium is a more solid understanding now that the initial GTK+ 4.0 release will be targeted for the fall of this year. There isn't any firm release plan at this time but at GUADEC (taking place in Spain this summer) they will revisit their plans to verify they can still ship this fall.
GStreamer has grown a WebRTC implementation Late last year, we at Centricular announced a new implementation of WebRTC in GStreamer. Today we're happy to announce that after community review, that work has been merged into GStreamer itself! The plugin is called webrtcbin, and the library is, naturally, called gstwebrtc. The implementation has all the basic features, is transparently compatible with other WebRTC stacks (particularly in browsers), and has been well-tested with both Firefox and Chrome.
GStreamer Lands A WebRTC Plugin The GStreamer multimedia framework now has mainline support for WebRTC. WebRTC is the set of protocols/APIs for real-time audio/video communication over peer-to-peer connections. WebRTC is supported by all major web browsers and more while now there is support within GStreamer too.
Kraft Moving to KDE Frameworks: Beta Release! Kraft is KDE/Qt based desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well chosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local. Kraft is around for more than twelve years, but it has been a little quiet recently. However, Kraft is alive and kicking! I am very happy to announce the first public beta version of Kraft V. 0.80, the first Kraft version that is based on KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5.x. |
Mozilla Leftovers These Weeks in Dev-Tools, issue 3 These Weeks in Dev-Tools will keep you up to date with all the exciting dev tools news. We plan to have a new issue every few weeks. If you have any news you'd like us to report, please comment on the tracking issue.
These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 31
Understanding Extension Permission Requests An extension is software developed by a third party that modifies how you experience the web in Firefox. Since they work by tapping into the inner workings of Firefox, but are not built by Mozilla, it’s good practice to understand the permissions they ask for and how to make decisions about what to install. While rare, a malicious extension can do things like steal your data or track your browsing across the web without you realizing it. We have been taking steps to reduce the risk of extensions, the most significant of which was moving to a WebExtensions architecture with the release of Firefox 57 last fall. The new APIs limit an extension’s ability to access certain parts of the browser and the information they process. We also have a variety of security measures in place, such as a review process that is designed to make it difficult for malicious developers to publish extensions. Nevertheless, these systems cannot guarantee that extensions will be 100% safe.
Janitor project - Newsletter 10 We hope you’ve had a smooth start into the year, and wish you all the best in your life and projects. This is your recurrent burst of good news about Janitor.
Switch from Chrome to Firefox in just a Few Minutes You’ve heard about how fast the new Firefox is. You’ve heard it’s made by people who want the web to be awesome for everyone. You like that, you’re curious to try, but you hesitate. Moving from Chrome to Firefox seems like work. Fussy, computer-y IT work. Ugh. ”What about all my “stuff”? I don’t want to set all this up again.”
Glibc 2.27 and everything you didn't know about FSFE in a picture Glibc 2.27 Released With Many Optimizations, Support For Static PIE Executables Being released right on time is Glibc 2.27, version 2.27 of the GNU C Library. As we have been covering the past few months, exciting us a lot about Glibc 2.27 are many performance optimizations with a number of functions receiving AVX/FMA tuning and other performance tweaks particularly for x86_64. But even on the ARM64/AArch64 side are also some performance optimizations as well as for POWER and SPARC.
GNU C Library 2.27 released The GNU C Library version 2.27 is now available. The GNU C Library is used as *the* C library in the GNU system and in GNU/Linux systems, as well as many other systems that use Linux as the kernel.
Everything you didn't know about FSFE in a picture As FSFE's community begins exploring our future, I thought it would be helpful to start with a visual guide to the current structure. All the information I've gathered here is publicly available but people rarely see it in one place, hence the heading. There is no suggestion that anything has been deliberately hidden. |
KDE: Randa Meetings and KDE Edu Sprint 2017 Looking Back at Randa Meetings 2017: Accessibility for Everyone Randa Meetings are a yearly collection of KDE Community contributor sprints that take place in Randa, Switzerland. With origins dating back to a Plasma meeting in 2009, Randa is one of the most important developer-related events in the community.
KDE Edu Sprint 2017 Two months ago I attended to KDE Edu Sprint 2017 at Berlin. It was my first KDE sprint (really, I send code to KDE software since 2010 and never went to a sprint!) so I was really excited for the event. KDE Edu is the an umbrella for specific educational software of KDE. There are a lot of them and it is the main educational software suite in free software world. Despite it, KDE Edu has received little attention in organization side, for instance the previous KDE Edu sprint occurred several years ago, our website has some problems, and more. Therefore, this sprint was an opportunity not only for developers work in software development, but for works in organization side as well. In organization work side, we discuss about the rebranding of some software more related to university work than for “education” itself, like Cantor and Labplot. There was a wish to create something like a KDE Research/Science in order to put software like them and others like Kile and KBibTex in a same umbrella. There is a discussion about this theme.
Programming/Development: fwupd, LLVM and More CSR devices now supported in fwupd The BlueCore CSR chips are used everywhere. If you have a “wireless” speaker or headphones that uses Bluetooth there is a high probability that it’s using a CSR chip inside. This makes the addition of CSR support into fwupd a big deal to access a lot of vendors. It’s a lot easier to say “just upload firmware” rather than “you have to write code” so I think it’s useful to have done this work.
Skylake Server Scheduler Model Updated In LLVM 6.0 Along With Other Intel CPU Updates
Most Software Code Will Be Written By Machines By 2040, Researchers Predict Imagine a scenario where a programmer needs to follow a couple of tried and tested procedures to write code that becomes a part of a bigger program that needs some insightful contribution from another programmer. So, is the first programmer really needed? Can’t we find a robotic replacement for the same? In the past, GitHub CEO had already made a prediction which says that future of coding is no coding at all. A similar speculation has been made by the researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, who have said that machines will write most of their own code by 2040.
Hazelcast joins Eclipse, JCache is key focal point Open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has joined the Eclipse Foundation – and it has done so for a reason. Hazelcast’s primary focus will be on JCache the Eclipse MicroProfile and EE4J. In particular, Hazelcast will be collaborating with members to popularize JCache, a Java Specification Request (JSR-107). So what place does JCache fill in the universe then? |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
Mozilla Leftovers These Weeks in Dev-Tools, issue 3 These Weeks in Dev-Tools will keep you up to date with all the exciting dev tools news. We plan to have a new issue every few weeks. If you have any news you'd like us to report, please comment on the tracking issue.
These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 31
Understanding Extension Permission Requests An extension is software developed by a third party that modifies how you experience the web in Firefox. Since they work by tapping into the inner workings of Firefox, but are not built by Mozilla, it’s good practice to understand the permissions they ask for and how to make decisions about what to install. While rare, a malicious extension can do things like steal your data or track your browsing across the web without you realizing it. We have been taking steps to reduce the risk of extensions, the most significant of which was moving to a WebExtensions architecture with the release of Firefox 57 last fall. The new APIs limit an extension’s ability to access certain parts of the browser and the information they process. We also have a variety of security measures in place, such as a review process that is designed to make it difficult for malicious developers to publish extensions. Nevertheless, these systems cannot guarantee that extensions will be 100% safe.
Janitor project - Newsletter 10 We hope you’ve had a smooth start into the year, and wish you all the best in your life and projects. This is your recurrent burst of good news about Janitor.
Switch from Chrome to Firefox in just a Few Minutes You’ve heard about how fast the new Firefox is. You’ve heard it’s made by people who want the web to be awesome for everyone. You like that, you’re curious to try, but you hesitate. Moving from Chrome to Firefox seems like work. Fussy, computer-y IT work. Ugh. ”What about all my “stuff”? I don’t want to set all this up again.”
Glibc 2.27 and everything you didn't know about FSFE in a picture Glibc 2.27 Released With Many Optimizations, Support For Static PIE Executables Being released right on time is Glibc 2.27, version 2.27 of the GNU C Library. As we have been covering the past few months, exciting us a lot about Glibc 2.27 are many performance optimizations with a number of functions receiving AVX/FMA tuning and other performance tweaks particularly for x86_64. But even on the ARM64/AArch64 side are also some performance optimizations as well as for POWER and SPARC.
GNU C Library 2.27 released The GNU C Library version 2.27 is now available. The GNU C Library is used as *the* C library in the GNU system and in GNU/Linux systems, as well as many other systems that use Linux as the kernel.
Everything you didn't know about FSFE in a picture As FSFE's community begins exploring our future, I thought it would be helpful to start with a visual guide to the current structure. All the information I've gathered here is publicly available but people rarely see it in one place, hence the heading. There is no suggestion that anything has been deliberately hidden. |
Tom Callaway, the Fedora Legal chair, will talk about the past, present, and future of licensing and legal issues in the Fedora community. Tom is not a lawyer, nor does he play one on TV, but he does consult with lawyers, and occasionally, go drinking with them. Bring your questions, and he'll do his best to answer them. I am not a lawyer, so nothing in my presentation should be (or could be) construed as legal advice.
Fedora, as the evolution of Red Hat Linux, is one of the oldest and most well known Linux distributions in existence today. For more than 10 years, I have been the Fedora Legal representative who investigates licenses, negotiates with lawyers, advises our community, and does everything in my power to not have to tell people "no" without a very good reasoning. |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
GNU: The GNU C Library 2.28 and Guix on Android Glibc 2.28 Upstream Will Build/Run Cleanly On GNU Hurd While Linux distributions are still migrating to Glibc 2.27, in the two months since the release changes have continued building up for what will eventually become the GNU C Library 2.28. The Glibc 2.28 work queued thus far isn't nearly as exciting as all the performance optimizations and more introduced with Glibc 2.27, but it's a start. Most notable at this point for Glibc 2.28 is that it will now build and run cleanly on GNU/Hurd without requiring any out-of-tree patches. There has been a ton of Hurd-related commits to Glibc over the past month.
Guix on Android! Last year I thought to myself: since my phone is just a computer running an operating system called Android (or Replicant!), and that Android is based on a Linux kernel, it's just another foreign distribution I could install GNU Guix on, right? It turned out it was absolutely the case. Today I was reminded on IRC of my attempt last year at installing GNU Guix on my phone. Hence this blog post. I'll try to give you all the knowledge and commands required to install it on your own Android device.
GNU Guix Wrangled To Run On Android The GNU Guix transactional package manager can be made to run on Android smartphones/tablets, but not without lots of hoops to jump through first.
Node.js 10.9 and npm milestone Open Source Node.js Hits v10, with Better Security, Performance, More Speaking of which, the brand-new Node.js 10.0 is expected to soon support npm version 6 (currently Node.js ships with npm 5.7.x). The company npm Inc., which maintains the npm software package management application, today announced that major update, called npm@6. The npm company said its JavaScript software installer tool includes new security features for developers working with open source code.
Announcing npm@6 In coordination with today’s announcement of Node.js v10, we’re excited to announce npm@6. This major update to npm includes powerful new security features for every developer who works with open source code. Read on to understand why this matters. |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
GNOME/GTK: Librsvg, BuildStream, GTK, GStreamer rsvg-bench - a benchmark for librsvg Librsvg 2.42.0 came out with a rather major performance regression compared to 2.40.20: SVGs with many transform attributes would slow it down. It was fixed in 2.42.1. We changed from using a parser that would recompile regexes each time it was called, to one that does simple string-based matching and parsing. When I rewrote librsvg's parser for the transform attribute from C to Rust, I was just learning about writing parsers in Rust. I chose lalrpop, an excellent, Yacc-like parser generator for Rust. It generates big, fast parsers, like what you would need for a compiler — but it compiles the tokenizer's regexes each time you call the parser. This is not a problem for a compiler, where you basically call the parser only once, but in librsvg, we may call it thousands of times for an SVG file with thousands of objects with transform attributes. So, for 2.42.1 I rewrote that parser using rust-cssparser. This is what Servo uses to parse CSS data; it's a simple tokenizer with an API that knows about CSS's particular constructs. This is exactly the kind of data that librsvg cares about. Today all of librsvg's internal parsers work using rust-cssparser, or they are so simple that they can be done with Rust's normal functions to split strings and such.
BuildStream Hackfest and FOSDEM I also wanted to sum up a last minute BuildStream hackfest which occurred in Manchester just a week ago. Bloomberg sent some of their Developer Experience engineering team members over to the Codethink office in Manchester where the whole BuildStream team was present, and we split up into groups to plan upcoming coding sprints, land some outstanding work and fix some bugs.
builders An idiom that has shown up in GTK4 development is the idea of immutable objects and builders. The idea behind an immutable object is that you can be sure that it doesn’t change under you, so you don’t need to track changes, you can expose it in your API without having to fear users of the API are gonna change that object under you, you can use it as a key when caching and last but not least you can pass it into multiple threads without requiring synchronization. Examples of immutable objects in GTK4 are GdkCursor, GdkTexture, GdkContentFormats or GskRenderNode.
GTK+ hackfest, day 2 The second day of the GTK+ hackfest in Brussels started with an hour of patch review. We then went through scattered items from the agenda and collected answers to some questions.
GTK+ 4.0 Targeted For Its Initial Release This Fall, GTK+ 5.0 Development To Follow A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place. The past few days prior to FOSDEM in Brussels was a GTK+ hackfest. Among the items discussed when not banging on code was a GTK+ 4.0 road-map and coming out of this event in Belgium is a more solid understanding now that the initial GTK+ 4.0 release will be targeted for the fall of this year. There isn't any firm release plan at this time but at GUADEC (taking place in Spain this summer) they will revisit their plans to verify they can still ship this fall.
GStreamer has grown a WebRTC implementation Late last year, we at Centricular announced a new implementation of WebRTC in GStreamer. Today we're happy to announce that after community review, that work has been merged into GStreamer itself! The plugin is called webrtcbin, and the library is, naturally, called gstwebrtc. The implementation has all the basic features, is transparently compatible with other WebRTC stacks (particularly in browsers), and has been well-tested with both Firefox and Chrome.
GStreamer Lands A WebRTC Plugin The GStreamer multimedia framework now has mainline support for WebRTC. WebRTC is the set of protocols/APIs for real-time audio/video communication over peer-to-peer connections. WebRTC is supported by all major web browsers and more while now there is support within GStreamer too.
Kraft Moving to KDE Frameworks: Beta Release! Kraft is KDE/Qt based desktop software to manage documents like quotes and invoices in the small business. It focuses on ease of use through an intuitive GUI, a well chosen feature set and ensures privacy by keeping data local. Kraft is around for more than twelve years, but it has been a little quiet recently. However, Kraft is alive and kicking! I am very happy to announce the first public beta version of Kraft V. 0.80, the first Kraft version that is based on KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5.x. |
Graphics: NVIDIA, GLVND, Keith Packard, RadeonSI Nouveau Hopes For Basic Vulkan Driver This Year, NVIDIA To Release Some New Docs Soon Open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver developers Martin Peres, Pierre Moreau, and Karol Herbst took to the FOSDEM 2018 conference today to share a status update on their reverse-engineering and open-source driver writing work around this unofficial NVIDIA Linux driver.
GLXVND Server Module / Server-Side GLVND Updated For X.Org Server For the better part of a year NVIDIA developers and Adam Jackson at Red Hat have been working on "server-side GLVND" and this new X.Org Server feature might finally be close to landing. After spearheading GLVND as the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch library for allowing multiple OpenGL drivers to co-exist happily on the same system, developers have been working on a similar implementation for the X.Org Server. This is for allowing different drivers to support different X screens within the same running X.Org Server.
Keith Packard Exploring "Semi-Automatic Compositing" For The X.Org Server Keith Packard's latest work for Valve on improving the Linux display stack is on what he's exploring around "semi-automatic compositing" but at this point it's still a risky bet with the new protocol yet to be written. Keith is broadly working on trying to improve composite acceleration within the X.Org Server to reduce the number of copies needed to get an application's contents to the screen, being able to get the screen contents delivered on time and for the application to know that, and to improve this overall process.
Composite acceleration in the X server One of the persistent problems with the modern X desktop is the number of moving parts required to display application content.
RadeonSI NIR Gets Compute Shader Support Timothy Arceri of Valve's Linux GPU driver team continues getting the RadeonSI NIR support up to scratch. Timothy spearheaded the work on tessellation shaders for RadeonSI's NIR back-end and also took this experimental code path to GLSL 4.50 support, among other improvements to the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver.
GNOME/GTK: Librsvg, BuildStream, GTK, GStreamer rsvg-bench - a benchmark for librsvg Librsvg 2.42.0 came out with a rather major performance regression compared to 2.40.20: SVGs with many transform attributes would slow it down. It was fixed in 2.42.1. We changed from using a parser that would recompile regexes each time it was called, to one that does simple string-based matching and parsing. When I rewrote librsvg's parser for the transform attribute from C to Rust, I was just learning about writing parsers in Rust. I chose lalrpop, an excellent, Yacc-like parser generator for Rust. It generates big, fast parsers, like what you would need for a compiler — but it compiles the tokenizer's regexes each time you call the parser. This is not a problem for a compiler, where you basically call the parser only once, but in librsvg, we may call it thousands of times for an SVG file with thousands of objects with transform attributes. So, for 2.42.1 I rewrote that parser using rust-cssparser. This is what Servo uses to parse CSS data; it's a simple tokenizer with an API that knows about CSS's particular constructs. This is exactly the kind of data that librsvg cares about. Today all of librsvg's internal parsers work using rust-cssparser, or they are so simple that they can be done with Rust's normal functions to split strings and such.
BuildStream Hackfest and FOSDEM I also wanted to sum up a last minute BuildStream hackfest which occurred in Manchester just a week ago. Bloomberg sent some of their Developer Experience engineering team members over to the Codethink office in Manchester where the whole BuildStream team was present, and we split up into groups to plan upcoming coding sprints, land some outstanding work and fix some bugs.
builders An idiom that has shown up in GTK4 development is the idea of immutable objects and builders. The idea behind an immutable object is that you can be sure that it doesn’t change under you, so you don’t need to track changes, you can expose it in your API without having to fear users of the API are gonna change that object under you, you can use it as a key when caching and last but not least you can pass it into multiple threads without requiring synchronization. Examples of immutable objects in GTK4 are GdkCursor, GdkTexture, GdkContentFormats or GskRenderNode.
GTK+ hackfest, day 2 The second day of the GTK+ hackfest in Brussels started with an hour of patch review. We then went through scattered items from the agenda and collected answers to some questions.
GTK+ 4.0 Targeted For Its Initial Release This Fall, GTK+ 5.0 Development To Follow A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place. The past few days prior to FOSDEM in Brussels was a GTK+ hackfest. Among the items discussed when not banging on code was a GTK+ 4.0 road-map and coming out of this event in Belgium is a more solid understanding now that the initial GTK+ 4.0 release will be targeted for the fall of this year. There isn't any firm release plan at this time but at GUADEC (taking place in Spain this summer) they will revisit their plans to verify they can still ship this fall.
GStreamer has grown a WebRTC implementation Late last year, we at Centricular announced a new implementation of WebRTC in GStreamer. Today we're happy to announce that after community review, that work has been merged into GStreamer itself! The plugin is called webrtcbin, and the library is, naturally, called gstwebrtc. The implementation has all the basic features, is transparently compatible with other WebRTC stacks (particularly in browsers), and has been well-tested with both Firefox and Chrome.
GStreamer Lands A WebRTC Plugin The GStreamer multimedia framework now has mainline support for WebRTC. WebRTC is the set of protocols/APIs for real-time audio/video communication over peer-to-peer connections. WebRTC is supported by all major web browsers and more while now there is support within GStreamer too. |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
Purism's Librem 5 Linux Phone Will Support Ubuntu Touch, Thanks to UBports Lead by talented Linux developer Marius Gripsgard, the UBports Foundation keeps the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS developed by Canonical, the company behind the widely-used Ubuntu Linux operating system, alive for various popular smartphones, including Fairphone 2, Nexus 5, OnePlus One, as well as the BQ Aquaris M10 FHD tablet that was designed to run Ubuntu Touch in the first place. Now, Purism and UBports are partnering to offer the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system on the upcoming Librem 5 Linux phone, which raised more than $2 million last fall, promising to be the privacy and security-focused smartphone you've been expecting for a long time. While not the default OS, users will be able to easily run Ubuntu Touch on the Librem 5 phone. also: UBPorts Ubuntu Touch To Be Supported By The Purism Librem 5
Ubuntu-Based ExTiX Distro, the Ultimate Linux System, Updates Its Deepin Edition Based on the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, the ExTiX 18.4 Deepin Edition is now available and it ships updated components, including the latest Deepin 15.5 Desktop, the Calamares 3.1.12 universal installer framework, and a custom Linux 4.16.2 kernel with extra hardware support. "I’ve made a new extra version of ExTiX with Deepin 15.5 Desktop (made in China!)," said Arne Exton in the release announcement. "Only a minimum of packages is installed in ExTiX Deepin. You can, of course, install all the packages you want, even while running ExTiX Deepin live, i.e. from a DVD or USB stick." |
Programming/Development: fwupd, LLVM and More CSR devices now supported in fwupd The BlueCore CSR chips are used everywhere. If you have a “wireless” speaker or headphones that uses Bluetooth there is a high probability that it’s using a CSR chip inside. This makes the addition of CSR support into fwupd a big deal to access a lot of vendors. It’s a lot easier to say “just upload firmware” rather than “you have to write code” so I think it’s useful to have done this work.
Skylake Server Scheduler Model Updated In LLVM 6.0 Along With Other Intel CPU Updates
Most Software Code Will Be Written By Machines By 2040, Researchers Predict Imagine a scenario where a programmer needs to follow a couple of tried and tested procedures to write code that becomes a part of a bigger program that needs some insightful contribution from another programmer. So, is the first programmer really needed? Can’t we find a robotic replacement for the same? In the past, GitHub CEO had already made a prediction which says that future of coding is no coding at all. A similar speculation has been made by the researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, who have said that machines will write most of their own code by 2040.
Hazelcast joins Eclipse, JCache is key focal point Open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has joined the Eclipse Foundation – and it has done so for a reason. Hazelcast’s primary focus will be on JCache the Eclipse MicroProfile and EE4J. In particular, Hazelcast will be collaborating with members to popularize JCache, a Java Specification Request (JSR-107). So what place does JCache fill in the universe then?
Software: Darktable, VLC, Mesa, Audacity, Toplip, GNUstep Darktable 2.4-RC1 Rolls Out With Windows Support, OpenCL Improvements The open-source Darktable RAW photography software that's long been available for Linux and macOS has finally been ported to Microsoft Windows. But fortunately that's not all to be found in Darktable 2.4. While Windows support is their big headline feature of Darktable 2.4, the RC1 release that came out today is also packed with other improvements.
Linux Release Roundup: VLC, Mesa, Audacity + More Another week has flown by, making it time for another round-up of pertinent Linux app releases that didn’t manage to wangle a full post’s worth of waffle on this site. This week’s crop of curios includes updates to the world’s most popular open-source video player, the world’s most popular open-source audio editor, and the world’s most popular open-source graphics drivers.
Toplip – A Very Strong File Encryption And Decryption CLI Utility There are numerous file encryption tools available on the market to protect your files. We have already reviewed some encryption tools such as Cryptomater, Cryptkeeper, CryptGo, Cryptr, Tomb, and GnuPG etc. Today, we will be discussing yet another file encryption and decryption command line utility named “Toplip”. It is a free and open source encryption utility that uses a very strong encryption method called AES256, along with an XTS-AES design to safeguard your confidential data. Also, it uses Scrypt, a password-based key derivation function, to protect your passphrases against brute-force attacks.
GNUstep Takes Another Step Forward For Implementing Apple's Cocoa Frameworks GNUstep is the long-standing free software project working to implement Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks used by macOS. The GNU project has made new releases of their GUI and Back libraries. GNUstep GUI 0.26 is out this morning as the latest update to their graphical user-interface library. GNUstep GUI 0.26 has a number of compatibility improvements, translation updates, mouse tracking logic improvements, bug fixes, and other work. |
Free Electrons becomes Bootlin (After Trademark Bullying/Trolling by FREE SAS)
The services we offer are different, we target a different audience (professionals instead of individuals), and most of our communication efforts are in English, to reach an international audience. Therefore Michael Opdenacker and Free Electrons’ management believe that there is no risk of confusion between Free Electrons and FREE SAS. However, FREE SAS has filed in excess of 100 oppositions and District Court actions against trademarks or name containing “free”. In view of the resources needed to fight this case, Free Electrons has decided to change name without waiting for the decision of the District Court. This will allow us to stay focused on our projects rather than exhausting ourselves fighting a long legal battle. [...] Nothing else changes in the company. We are the same engineers, the same Linux kernel contributors and maintainers (now 6 of us have their names in the Linux MAINTAINERS file), with the same technical skills and appetite for new technical challenges. More than ever, we remain united by the passion we all share in the company since the beginning: working with hardware and low-level software, working together with the free software community, and sharing the experience with others so that they can at least get the best of what the community offers and hopefully one day become active contributors too. “Get the best of the community” is effectively one of our slogans.
today's howtos
Ubuntu: Ubuntu 18.04, Snapcraft Summit, and Microsoft Exploiting Snaps to Promote (in the Media) Malicious Software |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
Free Electrons becomes Bootlin (After Trademark Bullying/Trolling by FREE SAS)
The services we offer are different, we target a different audience (professionals instead of individuals), and most of our communication efforts are in English, to reach an international audience. Therefore Michael Opdenacker and Free Electrons’ management believe that there is no risk of confusion between Free Electrons and FREE SAS. However, FREE SAS has filed in excess of 100 oppositions and District Court actions against trademarks or name containing “free”. In view of the resources needed to fight this case, Free Electrons has decided to change name without waiting for the decision of the District Court. This will allow us to stay focused on our projects rather than exhausting ourselves fighting a long legal battle. [...] Nothing else changes in the company. We are the same engineers, the same Linux kernel contributors and maintainers (now 6 of us have their names in the Linux MAINTAINERS file), with the same technical skills and appetite for new technical challenges. More than ever, we remain united by the passion we all share in the company since the beginning: working with hardware and low-level software, working together with the free software community, and sharing the experience with others so that they can at least get the best of what the community offers and hopefully one day become active contributors too. “Get the best of the community” is effectively one of our slogans.
today's howtos
Ubuntu: Ubuntu 18.04, Snapcraft Summit, and Microsoft Exploiting Snaps to Promote (in the Media) Malicious Software |
Comparing Twine and Ren'Py for creating interactive fiction
Any experienced technology educator knows engagement and motivation are key to a student's learning. Of the many techniques for stimulating engagement and motivation among learners, storytelling and game creation have good track records of success, and writing interactive fiction is a great way to combine both of those techniques. Interactive fiction has a respectable history in computing, stretching back to the text-only adventure games of the early 1980s, and it's enjoyed a new popularity recently. There are many technology tools that can be used for writing interactive fiction, but the two that will be considered here, Twine and Ren'Py, are ideal for the task. Each has different strengths that make it more attractive for particular types of projects.
Fedora 29 For ARM Eyeing ZRAM Support, ARMv7 UEFI Booting
When it comes to the growing number of changes slated for Fedora 29, while most of the feature plans benefit all supported CPU architectures, there are also some ARM-specific improvements planned. There are two main ARM feature proposals so far for Fedora 29: enabling ZRAM for ARMv7/AArch64 and using UEFI for ARMv7 device booting.
Games Leftovers |
Free Electrons becomes Bootlin (After Trademark Bullying/Trolling by FREE SAS)
The services we offer are different, we target a different audience (professionals instead of individuals), and most of our communication efforts are in English, to reach an international audience. Therefore Michael Opdenacker and Free Electrons’ management believe that there is no risk of confusion between Free Electrons and FREE SAS. However, FREE SAS has filed in excess of 100 oppositions and District Court actions against trademarks or name containing “free”. In view of the resources needed to fight this case, Free Electrons has decided to change name without waiting for the decision of the District Court. This will allow us to stay focused on our projects rather than exhausting ourselves fighting a long legal battle. [...] Nothing else changes in the company. We are the same engineers, the same Linux kernel contributors and maintainers (now 6 of us have their names in the Linux MAINTAINERS file), with the same technical skills and appetite for new technical challenges. More than ever, we remain united by the passion we all share in the company since the beginning: working with hardware and low-level software, working together with the free software community, and sharing the experience with others so that they can at least get the best of what the community offers and hopefully one day become active contributors too. “Get the best of the community” is effectively one of our slogans.
today's howtos
Ubuntu: Ubuntu 18.04, Snapcraft Summit, and Microsoft Exploiting Snaps to Promote (in the Media) Malicious Software |
Programming/Development: fwupd, LLVM and More CSR devices now supported in fwupd The BlueCore CSR chips are used everywhere. If you have a “wireless” speaker or headphones that uses Bluetooth there is a high probability that it’s using a CSR chip inside. This makes the addition of CSR support into fwupd a big deal to access a lot of vendors. It’s a lot easier to say “just upload firmware” rather than “you have to write code” so I think it’s useful to have done this work.
Skylake Server Scheduler Model Updated In LLVM 6.0 Along With Other Intel CPU Updates
Most Software Code Will Be Written By Machines By 2040, Researchers Predict Imagine a scenario where a programmer needs to follow a couple of tried and tested procedures to write code that becomes a part of a bigger program that needs some insightful contribution from another programmer. So, is the first programmer really needed? Can’t we find a robotic replacement for the same? In the past, GitHub CEO had already made a prediction which says that future of coding is no coding at all. A similar speculation has been made by the researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, who have said that machines will write most of their own code by 2040.
Hazelcast joins Eclipse, JCache is key focal point Open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has joined the Eclipse Foundation – and it has done so for a reason. Hazelcast’s primary focus will be on JCache the Eclipse MicroProfile and EE4J. In particular, Hazelcast will be collaborating with members to popularize JCache, a Java Specification Request (JSR-107). So what place does JCache fill in the universe then?
Software: Darktable, VLC, Mesa, Audacity, Toplip, GNUstep Darktable 2.4-RC1 Rolls Out With Windows Support, OpenCL Improvements The open-source Darktable RAW photography software that's long been available for Linux and macOS has finally been ported to Microsoft Windows. But fortunately that's not all to be found in Darktable 2.4. While Windows support is their big headline feature of Darktable 2.4, the RC1 release that came out today is also packed with other improvements.
Linux Release Roundup: VLC, Mesa, Audacity + More Another week has flown by, making it time for another round-up of pertinent Linux app releases that didn’t manage to wangle a full post’s worth of waffle on this site. This week’s crop of curios includes updates to the world’s most popular open-source video player, the world’s most popular open-source audio editor, and the world’s most popular open-source graphics drivers.
Toplip – A Very Strong File Encryption And Decryption CLI Utility There are numerous file encryption tools available on the market to protect your files. We have already reviewed some encryption tools such as Cryptomater, Cryptkeeper, CryptGo, Cryptr, Tomb, and GnuPG etc. Today, we will be discussing yet another file encryption and decryption command line utility named “Toplip”. It is a free and open source encryption utility that uses a very strong encryption method called AES256, along with an XTS-AES design to safeguard your confidential data. Also, it uses Scrypt, a password-based key derivation function, to protect your passphrases against brute-force attacks.
GNUstep Takes Another Step Forward For Implementing Apple's Cocoa Frameworks GNUstep is the long-standing free software project working to implement Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks used by macOS. The GNU project has made new releases of their GUI and Back libraries. GNUstep GUI 0.26 is out this morning as the latest update to their graphical user-interface library. GNUstep GUI 0.26 has a number of compatibility improvements, translation updates, mouse tracking logic improvements, bug fixes, and other work. |
Linux Foundation News Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies During his opening keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, made light of the mudslides that brought traffic to a crawl near Donner Pass on Monday evening. The trip at least was less arduous than it was last year, he said. Zemlin's remarks amounted to an open-source victory lap. Some 99.4 per cent of the world's high performance computing systems, 90 per cent of the world's stock exchanges, and 64 per cent of mobile devices run on Linux, he said, adding that the foundation's projects have created $14.5 billion worth of value, as measured in cost per line of code.
Hart Invests in Open Source Development With Linux Foundation Gold Membership Hart develops HartOS, an API platform that allows healthcare providers and their vendors and partners to use health data from multiple computer systems in a HIPAA-compliant manner to provide rich digital experiences. These may include medical records, hospital information, radiology information, laboratory information, picture archiving, emergency department and other systems.
The Linux Foundation Releases Free Open Source Software Basics Publication Sampling of content from Fundamentals of Open Source Management training course provides a foundation for using open source software in professional organizations
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces 11 New Members At Annual Open Source Leadership Summit |
Graphics: VC4 and AMDVLK Driver VC4 display, VC5 kernel submitted For VC5, I renamed the kernel driver to “v3d” and submitted it to the kernel. Daniel Vetter came back right away with a bunch of useful feedback, and next week I’m resolving that feedback and continuing to work on the GMP support. On the vc4 front, I did the investigation of the HDL to determine that the OLED matrix applies before the gamma tables, so we can expose it in the DRM for Android’s color correction. Stefan was also interested in reworking his fencing patches to use syncobjs, so hopefully we can merge those and get DRM HWC support in mainline soon. I also pushed Gustavo’s patch for using the new core DRM infrastructure for async cursor updates. This doesn’t simplify our code much yet, but Boris has a series he’s working on that gets rid of a lot of custom vc4 display code by switching more code over to the new async support.
V3D DRM Driver Revised As It Works To Get Into The Mainline Kernel Eric Anholt of Broadcom has sent out his revised patches for the "V3D" DRM driver, which up until last week was known as the VC5 DRM driver. As explained last week, the VC5 driver components are being renamed to V3D since it ends up supporting more than just VC5 with Broadcom VC6 hardware already being supported too. Eric is making preparations to get this VideoCore driver into the mainline Linux kernel and he will then also rename the VC5 Gallium3D driver to V3D Gallium3D.
AMDVLK Driver Gets Fixed For Rise of the Tomb Raider Using Application Profiles With last week's release of Rise of the Tomb Raider on Linux ported by Feral Interactive, when it came to Radeon GPU support for this Vulkan-only Linux game port the Mesa RADV driver was supported while the official AMDVLK driver would lead to GPU hangs. That's now been fixed. With the latest AMDVLK/XGL source code as of today, the GPU hang issue for Rise of the Tomb Raider should now be resolved. |
GNU: The GNU C Library 2.28 and Guix on Android Glibc 2.28 Upstream Will Build/Run Cleanly On GNU Hurd While Linux distributions are still migrating to Glibc 2.27, in the two months since the release changes have continued building up for what will eventually become the GNU C Library 2.28. The Glibc 2.28 work queued thus far isn't nearly as exciting as all the performance optimizations and more introduced with Glibc 2.27, but it's a start. Most notable at this point for Glibc 2.28 is that it will now build and run cleanly on GNU/Hurd without requiring any out-of-tree patches. There has been a ton of Hurd-related commits to Glibc over the past month.
Guix on Android! Last year I thought to myself: since my phone is just a computer running an operating system called Android (or Replicant!), and that Android is based on a Linux kernel, it's just another foreign distribution I could install GNU Guix on, right? It turned out it was absolutely the case. Today I was reminded on IRC of my attempt last year at installing GNU Guix on my phone. Hence this blog post. I'll try to give you all the knowledge and commands required to install it on your own Android device.
GNU Guix Wrangled To Run On Android The GNU Guix transactional package manager can be made to run on Android smartphones/tablets, but not without lots of hoops to jump through first.
Node.js 10.9 and npm milestone Open Source Node.js Hits v10, with Better Security, Performance, More Speaking of which, the brand-new Node.js 10.0 is expected to soon support npm version 6 (currently Node.js ships with npm 5.7.x). The company npm Inc., which maintains the npm software package management application, today announced that major update, called npm@6. The npm company said its JavaScript software installer tool includes new security features for developers working with open source code.
Announcing npm@6 In coordination with today’s announcement of Node.js v10, we’re excited to announce npm@6. This major update to npm includes powerful new security features for every developer who works with open source code. Read on to understand why this matters. |
Mozilla Leftovers These Weeks in Dev-Tools, issue 3 These Weeks in Dev-Tools will keep you up to date with all the exciting dev tools news. We plan to have a new issue every few weeks. If you have any news you'd like us to report, please comment on the tracking issue.
These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 31
Understanding Extension Permission Requests An extension is software developed by a third party that modifies how you experience the web in Firefox. Since they work by tapping into the inner workings of Firefox, but are not built by Mozilla, it’s good practice to understand the permissions they ask for and how to make decisions about what to install. While rare, a malicious extension can do things like steal your data or track your browsing across the web without you realizing it. We have been taking steps to reduce the risk of extensions, the most significant of which was moving to a WebExtensions architecture with the release of Firefox 57 last fall. The new APIs limit an extension’s ability to access certain parts of the browser and the information they process. We also have a variety of security measures in place, such as a review process that is designed to make it difficult for malicious developers to publish extensions. Nevertheless, these systems cannot guarantee that extensions will be 100% safe.
Janitor project - Newsletter 10 We hope you’ve had a smooth start into the year, and wish you all the best in your life and projects. This is your recurrent burst of good news about Janitor.
Switch from Chrome to Firefox in just a Few Minutes You’ve heard about how fast the new Firefox is. You’ve heard it’s made by people who want the web to be awesome for everyone. You like that, you’re curious to try, but you hesitate. Moving from Chrome to Firefox seems like work. Fussy, computer-y IT work. Ugh. ”What about all my “stuff”? I don’t want to set all this up again.”
Glibc 2.27 and everything you didn't know about FSFE in a picture Glibc 2.27 Released With Many Optimizations, Support For Static PIE Executables Being released right on time is Glibc 2.27, version 2.27 of the GNU C Library. As we have been covering the past few months, exciting us a lot about Glibc 2.27 are many performance optimizations with a number of functions receiving AVX/FMA tuning and other performance tweaks particularly for x86_64. But even on the ARM64/AArch64 side are also some performance optimizations as well as for POWER and SPARC.
GNU C Library 2.27 released The GNU C Library version 2.27 is now available. The GNU C Library is used as *the* C library in the GNU system and in GNU/Linux systems, as well as many other systems that use Linux as the kernel.
Everything you didn't know about FSFE in a picture As FSFE's community begins exploring our future, I thought it would be helpful to start with a visual guide to the current structure. All the information I've gathered here is publicly available but people rarely see it in one place, hence the heading. There is no suggestion that anything has been deliberately hidden. |
Mozilla: Dark Theme Darkening, Google Tier 1 Search in Firefox for Android Nightly, Google's Attitude Dark Theme Darkening: Better Theming for Firefox Quantum Project Dark Theme Darkening was part of Michigan State University’s Computer Science capstone experience. Twenty-four groups of five students were each assigned an industry sponsor based on preference and skill set. We had the privilege of working with Mozilla on Firefox Quantum’s Theming API. Our project increases a user’s ability to customize the appearance of the Firefox browser.
Google Tier 1 Search in Firefox for Android Nightly Bug 975444 is one of the most-duped web compat bugs, which documents the fact that the version of Google Search that Firefox for Android users receive is a less rich version than the one served to Chrome Mobile. And people notice (hence all the dupes). In order to turn this situation around, we've been working on a number of platform interop bugs (in collaboration with some friendly members of the Blink team) and have hopes in making progress towards receiving Tier 1 search by default. Part of the plan is to sniff out bugs we don't know about (or new bugs, as the site changes very quickly) by exposing the Nightly population to the spoofed Tier 1 version for 4 weeks (which should be July 27, 2018). If things get too bad, we can back out the addon earlier.
Google to developers: We take down your extension - because we can Not sure why Google chose the wrong email address to contact me about this (the account is associated with another email address) but luckily this email found me. I opened the extension listing and the description is there, as is the icon. What’s missing is a screenshot, simply because creating one for an extension without a user interface isn’t trivial. No problem, spent a bit of time making something that will do to illustrate the principle. |
Programming/Development: fwupd, LLVM and More CSR devices now supported in fwupd The BlueCore CSR chips are used everywhere. If you have a “wireless” speaker or headphones that uses Bluetooth there is a high probability that it’s using a CSR chip inside. This makes the addition of CSR support into fwupd a big deal to access a lot of vendors. It’s a lot easier to say “just upload firmware” rather than “you have to write code” so I think it’s useful to have done this work.
Skylake Server Scheduler Model Updated In LLVM 6.0 Along With Other Intel CPU Updates
Most Software Code Will Be Written By Machines By 2040, Researchers Predict Imagine a scenario where a programmer needs to follow a couple of tried and tested procedures to write code that becomes a part of a bigger program that needs some insightful contribution from another programmer. So, is the first programmer really needed? Can’t we find a robotic replacement for the same? In the past, GitHub CEO had already made a prediction which says that future of coding is no coding at all. A similar speculation has been made by the researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, who have said that machines will write most of their own code by 2040.
Hazelcast joins Eclipse, JCache is key focal point Open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has joined the Eclipse Foundation – and it has done so for a reason. Hazelcast’s primary focus will be on JCache the Eclipse MicroProfile and EE4J. In particular, Hazelcast will be collaborating with members to popularize JCache, a Java Specification Request (JSR-107). So what place does JCache fill in the universe then?
Software: Darktable, VLC, Mesa, Audacity, Toplip, GNUstep Darktable 2.4-RC1 Rolls Out With Windows Support, OpenCL Improvements The open-source Darktable RAW photography software that's long been available for Linux and macOS has finally been ported to Microsoft Windows. But fortunately that's not all to be found in Darktable 2.4. While Windows support is their big headline feature of Darktable 2.4, the RC1 release that came out today is also packed with other improvements.
Linux Release Roundup: VLC, Mesa, Audacity + More Another week has flown by, making it time for another round-up of pertinent Linux app releases that didn’t manage to wangle a full post’s worth of waffle on this site. This week’s crop of curios includes updates to the world’s most popular open-source video player, the world’s most popular open-source audio editor, and the world’s most popular open-source graphics drivers.
Toplip – A Very Strong File Encryption And Decryption CLI Utility There are numerous file encryption tools available on the market to protect your files. We have already reviewed some encryption tools such as Cryptomater, Cryptkeeper, CryptGo, Cryptr, Tomb, and GnuPG etc. Today, we will be discussing yet another file encryption and decryption command line utility named “Toplip”. It is a free and open source encryption utility that uses a very strong encryption method called AES256, along with an XTS-AES design to safeguard your confidential data. Also, it uses Scrypt, a password-based key derivation function, to protect your passphrases against brute-force attacks.
GNUstep Takes Another Step Forward For Implementing Apple's Cocoa Frameworks GNUstep is the long-standing free software project working to implement Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks used by macOS. The GNU project has made new releases of their GUI and Back libraries. GNUstep GUI 0.26 is out this morning as the latest update to their graphical user-interface library. GNUstep GUI 0.26 has a number of compatibility improvements, translation updates, mouse tracking logic improvements, bug fixes, and other work. |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
Programming/Development: fwupd, LLVM and More CSR devices now supported in fwupd The BlueCore CSR chips are used everywhere. If you have a “wireless” speaker or headphones that uses Bluetooth there is a high probability that it’s using a CSR chip inside. This makes the addition of CSR support into fwupd a big deal to access a lot of vendors. It’s a lot easier to say “just upload firmware” rather than “you have to write code” so I think it’s useful to have done this work.
Skylake Server Scheduler Model Updated In LLVM 6.0 Along With Other Intel CPU Updates
Most Software Code Will Be Written By Machines By 2040, Researchers Predict Imagine a scenario where a programmer needs to follow a couple of tried and tested procedures to write code that becomes a part of a bigger program that needs some insightful contribution from another programmer. So, is the first programmer really needed? Can’t we find a robotic replacement for the same? In the past, GitHub CEO had already made a prediction which says that future of coding is no coding at all. A similar speculation has been made by the researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, who have said that machines will write most of their own code by 2040.
Hazelcast joins Eclipse, JCache is key focal point Open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has joined the Eclipse Foundation – and it has done so for a reason. Hazelcast’s primary focus will be on JCache the Eclipse MicroProfile and EE4J. In particular, Hazelcast will be collaborating with members to popularize JCache, a Java Specification Request (JSR-107). So what place does JCache fill in the universe then?
Software: Darktable, VLC, Mesa, Audacity, Toplip, GNUstep Darktable 2.4-RC1 Rolls Out With Windows Support, OpenCL Improvements The open-source Darktable RAW photography software that's long been available for Linux and macOS has finally been ported to Microsoft Windows. But fortunately that's not all to be found in Darktable 2.4. While Windows support is their big headline feature of Darktable 2.4, the RC1 release that came out today is also packed with other improvements.
Linux Release Roundup: VLC, Mesa, Audacity + More Another week has flown by, making it time for another round-up of pertinent Linux app releases that didn’t manage to wangle a full post’s worth of waffle on this site. This week’s crop of curios includes updates to the world’s most popular open-source video player, the world’s most popular open-source audio editor, and the world’s most popular open-source graphics drivers.
Toplip – A Very Strong File Encryption And Decryption CLI Utility There are numerous file encryption tools available on the market to protect your files. We have already reviewed some encryption tools such as Cryptomater, Cryptkeeper, CryptGo, Cryptr, Tomb, and GnuPG etc. Today, we will be discussing yet another file encryption and decryption command line utility named “Toplip”. It is a free and open source encryption utility that uses a very strong encryption method called AES256, along with an XTS-AES design to safeguard your confidential data. Also, it uses Scrypt, a password-based key derivation function, to protect your passphrases against brute-force attacks.
GNUstep Takes Another Step Forward For Implementing Apple's Cocoa Frameworks GNUstep is the long-standing free software project working to implement Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks used by macOS. The GNU project has made new releases of their GUI and Back libraries. GNUstep GUI 0.26 is out this morning as the latest update to their graphical user-interface library. GNUstep GUI 0.26 has a number of compatibility improvements, translation updates, mouse tracking logic improvements, bug fixes, and other work. |
Free Electrons becomes Bootlin (After Trademark Bullying/Trolling by FREE SAS)
The services we offer are different, we target a different audience (professionals instead of individuals), and most of our communication efforts are in English, to reach an international audience. Therefore Michael Opdenacker and Free Electrons’ management believe that there is no risk of confusion between Free Electrons and FREE SAS. However, FREE SAS has filed in excess of 100 oppositions and District Court actions against trademarks or name containing “free”. In view of the resources needed to fight this case, Free Electrons has decided to change name without waiting for the decision of the District Court. This will allow us to stay focused on our projects rather than exhausting ourselves fighting a long legal battle. [...] Nothing else changes in the company. We are the same engineers, the same Linux kernel contributors and maintainers (now 6 of us have their names in the Linux MAINTAINERS file), with the same technical skills and appetite for new technical challenges. More than ever, we remain united by the passion we all share in the company since the beginning: working with hardware and low-level software, working together with the free software community, and sharing the experience with others so that they can at least get the best of what the community offers and hopefully one day become active contributors too. “Get the best of the community” is effectively one of our slogans.
today's howtos
Ubuntu: Ubuntu 18.04, Snapcraft Summit, and Microsoft Exploiting Snaps to Promote (in the Media) Malicious Software |
Mozilla Leftovers These Weeks in Dev-Tools, issue 3 These Weeks in Dev-Tools will keep you up to date with all the exciting dev tools news. We plan to have a new issue every few weeks. If you have any news you'd like us to report, please comment on the tracking issue.
These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 31
Understanding Extension Permission Requests An extension is software developed by a third party that modifies how you experience the web in Firefox. Since they work by tapping into the inner workings of Firefox, but are not built by Mozilla, it’s good practice to understand the permissions they ask for and how to make decisions about what to install. While rare, a malicious extension can do things like steal your data or track your browsing across the web without you realizing it. We have been taking steps to reduce the risk of extensions, the most significant of which was moving to a WebExtensions architecture with the release of Firefox 57 last fall. The new APIs limit an extension’s ability to access certain parts of the browser and the information they process. We also have a variety of security measures in place, such as a review process that is designed to make it difficult for malicious developers to publish extensions. Nevertheless, these systems cannot guarantee that extensions will be 100% safe.
Janitor project - Newsletter 10 We hope you’ve had a smooth start into the year, and wish you all the best in your life and projects. This is your recurrent burst of good news about Janitor.
Switch from Chrome to Firefox in just a Few Minutes You’ve heard about how fast the new Firefox is. You’ve heard it’s made by people who want the web to be awesome for everyone. You like that, you’re curious to try, but you hesitate. Moving from Chrome to Firefox seems like work. Fussy, computer-y IT work. Ugh. ”What about all my “stuff”? I don’t want to set all this up again.”
Glibc 2.27 and everything you didn't know about FSFE in a picture Glibc 2.27 Released With Many Optimizations, Support For Static PIE Executables Being released right on time is Glibc 2.27, version 2.27 of the GNU C Library. As we have been covering the past few months, exciting us a lot about Glibc 2.27 are many performance optimizations with a number of functions receiving AVX/FMA tuning and other performance tweaks particularly for x86_64. But even on the ARM64/AArch64 side are also some performance optimizations as well as for POWER and SPARC.
GNU C Library 2.27 released The GNU C Library version 2.27 is now available. The GNU C Library is used as *the* C library in the GNU system and in GNU/Linux systems, as well as many other systems that use Linux as the kernel.
Everything you didn't know about FSFE in a picture As FSFE's community begins exploring our future, I thought it would be helpful to start with a visual guide to the current structure. All the information I've gathered here is publicly available but people rarely see it in one place, hence the heading. There is no suggestion that anything has been deliberately hidden. |
Programming/Development: fwupd, LLVM and More CSR devices now supported in fwupd The BlueCore CSR chips are used everywhere. If you have a “wireless” speaker or headphones that uses Bluetooth there is a high probability that it’s using a CSR chip inside. This makes the addition of CSR support into fwupd a big deal to access a lot of vendors. It’s a lot easier to say “just upload firmware” rather than “you have to write code” so I think it’s useful to have done this work.
Skylake Server Scheduler Model Updated In LLVM 6.0 Along With Other Intel CPU Updates
Most Software Code Will Be Written By Machines By 2040, Researchers Predict Imagine a scenario where a programmer needs to follow a couple of tried and tested procedures to write code that becomes a part of a bigger program that needs some insightful contribution from another programmer. So, is the first programmer really needed? Can’t we find a robotic replacement for the same? In the past, GitHub CEO had already made a prediction which says that future of coding is no coding at all. A similar speculation has been made by the researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, who have said that machines will write most of their own code by 2040.
Hazelcast joins Eclipse, JCache is key focal point Open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has joined the Eclipse Foundation – and it has done so for a reason. Hazelcast’s primary focus will be on JCache the Eclipse MicroProfile and EE4J. In particular, Hazelcast will be collaborating with members to popularize JCache, a Java Specification Request (JSR-107). So what place does JCache fill in the universe then?
Software: Darktable, VLC, Mesa, Audacity, Toplip, GNUstep Darktable 2.4-RC1 Rolls Out With Windows Support, OpenCL Improvements The open-source Darktable RAW photography software that's long been available for Linux and macOS has finally been ported to Microsoft Windows. But fortunately that's not all to be found in Darktable 2.4. While Windows support is their big headline feature of Darktable 2.4, the RC1 release that came out today is also packed with other improvements.
Linux Release Roundup: VLC, Mesa, Audacity + More Another week has flown by, making it time for another round-up of pertinent Linux app releases that didn’t manage to wangle a full post’s worth of waffle on this site. This week’s crop of curios includes updates to the world’s most popular open-source video player, the world’s most popular open-source audio editor, and the world’s most popular open-source graphics drivers.
Toplip – A Very Strong File Encryption And Decryption CLI Utility There are numerous file encryption tools available on the market to protect your files. We have already reviewed some encryption tools such as Cryptomater, Cryptkeeper, CryptGo, Cryptr, Tomb, and GnuPG etc. Today, we will be discussing yet another file encryption and decryption command line utility named “Toplip”. It is a free and open source encryption utility that uses a very strong encryption method called AES256, along with an XTS-AES design to safeguard your confidential data. Also, it uses Scrypt, a password-based key derivation function, to protect your passphrases against brute-force attacks.
GNUstep Takes Another Step Forward For Implementing Apple's Cocoa Frameworks GNUstep is the long-standing free software project working to implement Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks used by macOS. The GNU project has made new releases of their GUI and Back libraries. GNUstep GUI 0.26 is out this morning as the latest update to their graphical user-interface library. GNUstep GUI 0.26 has a number of compatibility improvements, translation updates, mouse tracking logic improvements, bug fixes, and other work. |
GNU: The GNU C Library 2.28 and Guix on Android Glibc 2.28 Upstream Will Build/Run Cleanly On GNU Hurd While Linux distributions are still migrating to Glibc 2.27, in the two months since the release changes have continued building up for what will eventually become the GNU C Library 2.28. The Glibc 2.28 work queued thus far isn't nearly as exciting as all the performance optimizations and more introduced with Glibc 2.27, but it's a start. Most notable at this point for Glibc 2.28 is that it will now build and run cleanly on GNU/Hurd without requiring any out-of-tree patches. There has been a ton of Hurd-related commits to Glibc over the past month.
Guix on Android! Last year I thought to myself: since my phone is just a computer running an operating system called Android (or Replicant!), and that Android is based on a Linux kernel, it's just another foreign distribution I could install GNU Guix on, right? It turned out it was absolutely the case. Today I was reminded on IRC of my attempt last year at installing GNU Guix on my phone. Hence this blog post. I'll try to give you all the knowledge and commands required to install it on your own Android device.
GNU Guix Wrangled To Run On Android The GNU Guix transactional package manager can be made to run on Android smartphones/tablets, but not without lots of hoops to jump through first.
Node.js 10.9 and npm milestone Open Source Node.js Hits v10, with Better Security, Performance, More Speaking of which, the brand-new Node.js 10.0 is expected to soon support npm version 6 (currently Node.js ships with npm 5.7.x). The company npm Inc., which maintains the npm software package management application, today announced that major update, called npm@6. The npm company said its JavaScript software installer tool includes new security features for developers working with open source code.
Announcing npm@6 In coordination with today’s announcement of Node.js v10, we’re excited to announce npm@6. This major update to npm includes powerful new security features for every developer who works with open source code. Read on to understand why this matters. |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
Programming/Development: fwupd, LLVM and More CSR devices now supported in fwupd The BlueCore CSR chips are used everywhere. If you have a “wireless” speaker or headphones that uses Bluetooth there is a high probability that it’s using a CSR chip inside. This makes the addition of CSR support into fwupd a big deal to access a lot of vendors. It’s a lot easier to say “just upload firmware” rather than “you have to write code” so I think it’s useful to have done this work.
Skylake Server Scheduler Model Updated In LLVM 6.0 Along With Other Intel CPU Updates
Most Software Code Will Be Written By Machines By 2040, Researchers Predict Imagine a scenario where a programmer needs to follow a couple of tried and tested procedures to write code that becomes a part of a bigger program that needs some insightful contribution from another programmer. So, is the first programmer really needed? Can’t we find a robotic replacement for the same? In the past, GitHub CEO had already made a prediction which says that future of coding is no coding at all. A similar speculation has been made by the researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, who have said that machines will write most of their own code by 2040.
Hazelcast joins Eclipse, JCache is key focal point Open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has joined the Eclipse Foundation – and it has done so for a reason. Hazelcast’s primary focus will be on JCache the Eclipse MicroProfile and EE4J. In particular, Hazelcast will be collaborating with members to popularize JCache, a Java Specification Request (JSR-107). So what place does JCache fill in the universe then?
Software: Darktable, VLC, Mesa, Audacity, Toplip, GNUstep Darktable 2.4-RC1 Rolls Out With Windows Support, OpenCL Improvements The open-source Darktable RAW photography software that's long been available for Linux and macOS has finally been ported to Microsoft Windows. But fortunately that's not all to be found in Darktable 2.4. While Windows support is their big headline feature of Darktable 2.4, the RC1 release that came out today is also packed with other improvements.
Linux Release Roundup: VLC, Mesa, Audacity + More Another week has flown by, making it time for another round-up of pertinent Linux app releases that didn’t manage to wangle a full post’s worth of waffle on this site. This week’s crop of curios includes updates to the world’s most popular open-source video player, the world’s most popular open-source audio editor, and the world’s most popular open-source graphics drivers.
Toplip – A Very Strong File Encryption And Decryption CLI Utility There are numerous file encryption tools available on the market to protect your files. We have already reviewed some encryption tools such as Cryptomater, Cryptkeeper, CryptGo, Cryptr, Tomb, and GnuPG etc. Today, we will be discussing yet another file encryption and decryption command line utility named “Toplip”. It is a free and open source encryption utility that uses a very strong encryption method called AES256, along with an XTS-AES design to safeguard your confidential data. Also, it uses Scrypt, a password-based key derivation function, to protect your passphrases against brute-force attacks.
GNUstep Takes Another Step Forward For Implementing Apple's Cocoa Frameworks GNUstep is the long-standing free software project working to implement Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks used by macOS. The GNU project has made new releases of their GUI and Back libraries. GNUstep GUI 0.26 is out this morning as the latest update to their graphical user-interface library. GNUstep GUI 0.26 has a number of compatibility improvements, translation updates, mouse tracking logic improvements, bug fixes, and other work. |
Graphics: NVIDIA, GLVND, Keith Packard, RadeonSI Nouveau Hopes For Basic Vulkan Driver This Year, NVIDIA To Release Some New Docs Soon Open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver developers Martin Peres, Pierre Moreau, and Karol Herbst took to the FOSDEM 2018 conference today to share a status update on their reverse-engineering and open-source driver writing work around this unofficial NVIDIA Linux driver.
GLXVND Server Module / Server-Side GLVND Updated For X.Org Server For the better part of a year NVIDIA developers and Adam Jackson at Red Hat have been working on "server-side GLVND" and this new X.Org Server feature might finally be close to landing. After spearheading GLVND as the OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch library for allowing multiple OpenGL drivers to co-exist happily on the same system, developers have been working on a similar implementation for the X.Org Server. This is for allowing different drivers to support different X screens within the same running X.Org Server.
Keith Packard Exploring "Semi-Automatic Compositing" For The X.Org Server Keith Packard's latest work for Valve on improving the Linux display stack is on what he's exploring around "semi-automatic compositing" but at this point it's still a risky bet with the new protocol yet to be written. Keith is broadly working on trying to improve composite acceleration within the X.Org Server to reduce the number of copies needed to get an application's contents to the screen, being able to get the screen contents delivered on time and for the application to know that, and to improve this overall process.
Composite acceleration in the X server One of the persistent problems with the modern X desktop is the number of moving parts required to display application content.
RadeonSI NIR Gets Compute Shader Support Timothy Arceri of Valve's Linux GPU driver team continues getting the RadeonSI NIR support up to scratch. Timothy spearheaded the work on tessellation shaders for RadeonSI's NIR back-end and also took this experimental code path to GLSL 4.50 support, among other improvements to the open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver.
GNOME/GTK: Librsvg, BuildStream, GTK, GStreamer rsvg-bench - a benchmark for librsvg Librsvg 2.42.0 came out with a rather major performance regression compared to 2.40.20: SVGs with many transform attributes would slow it down. It was fixed in 2.42.1. We changed from using a parser that would recompile regexes each time it was called, to one that does simple string-based matching and parsing. When I rewrote librsvg's parser for the transform attribute from C to Rust, I was just learning about writing parsers in Rust. I chose lalrpop, an excellent, Yacc-like parser generator for Rust. It generates big, fast parsers, like what you would need for a compiler — but it compiles the tokenizer's regexes each time you call the parser. This is not a problem for a compiler, where you basically call the parser only once, but in librsvg, we may call it thousands of times for an SVG file with thousands of objects with transform attributes. So, for 2.42.1 I rewrote that parser using rust-cssparser. This is what Servo uses to parse CSS data; it's a simple tokenizer with an API that knows about CSS's particular constructs. This is exactly the kind of data that librsvg cares about. Today all of librsvg's internal parsers work using rust-cssparser, or they are so simple that they can be done with Rust's normal functions to split strings and such.
BuildStream Hackfest and FOSDEM I also wanted to sum up a last minute BuildStream hackfest which occurred in Manchester just a week ago. Bloomberg sent some of their Developer Experience engineering team members over to the Codethink office in Manchester where the whole BuildStream team was present, and we split up into groups to plan upcoming coding sprints, land some outstanding work and fix some bugs.
builders An idiom that has shown up in GTK4 development is the idea of immutable objects and builders. The idea behind an immutable object is that you can be sure that it doesn’t change under you, so you don’t need to track changes, you can expose it in your API without having to fear users of the API are gonna change that object under you, you can use it as a key when caching and last but not least you can pass it into multiple threads without requiring synchronization. Examples of immutable objects in GTK4 are GdkCursor, GdkTexture, GdkContentFormats or GskRenderNode.
GTK+ hackfest, day 2 The second day of the GTK+ hackfest in Brussels started with an hour of patch review. We then went through scattered items from the agenda and collected answers to some questions.
GTK+ 4.0 Targeted For Its Initial Release This Fall, GTK+ 5.0 Development To Follow A few days back I wrote about how GTK+ 4.0 is being talked about for release this year and now a bit more specific timeline is in place. The past few days prior to FOSDEM in Brussels was a GTK+ hackfest. Among the items discussed when not banging on code was a GTK+ 4.0 road-map and coming out of this event in Belgium is a more solid understanding now that the initial GTK+ 4.0 release will be targeted for the fall of this year. There isn't any firm release plan at this time but at GUADEC (taking place in Spain this summer) they will revisit their plans to verify they can still ship this fall.
GStreamer has grown a WebRTC implementation Late last year, we at Centricular announced a new implementation of WebRTC in GStreamer. Today we're happy to announce that after community review, that work has been merged into GStreamer itself! The plugin is called webrtcbin, and the library is, naturally, called gstwebrtc. The implementation has all the basic features, is transparently compatible with other WebRTC stacks (particularly in browsers), and has been well-tested with both Firefox and Chrome.
GStreamer Lands A WebRTC Plugin The GStreamer multimedia framework now has mainline support for WebRTC. WebRTC is the set of protocols/APIs for real-time audio/video communication over peer-to-peer connections. WebRTC is supported by all major web browsers and more while now there is support within GStreamer too. |
Linux Foundation News Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies During his opening keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, made light of the mudslides that brought traffic to a crawl near Donner Pass on Monday evening. The trip at least was less arduous than it was last year, he said. Zemlin's remarks amounted to an open-source victory lap. Some 99.4 per cent of the world's high performance computing systems, 90 per cent of the world's stock exchanges, and 64 per cent of mobile devices run on Linux, he said, adding that the foundation's projects have created $14.5 billion worth of value, as measured in cost per line of code.
Hart Invests in Open Source Development With Linux Foundation Gold Membership Hart develops HartOS, an API platform that allows healthcare providers and their vendors and partners to use health data from multiple computer systems in a HIPAA-compliant manner to provide rich digital experiences. These may include medical records, hospital information, radiology information, laboratory information, picture archiving, emergency department and other systems.
The Linux Foundation Releases Free Open Source Software Basics Publication Sampling of content from Fundamentals of Open Source Management training course provides a foundation for using open source software in professional organizations
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces 11 New Members At Annual Open Source Leadership Summit |
Mozilla: Dark Theme Darkening, Google Tier 1 Search in Firefox for Android Nightly, Google's Attitude Dark Theme Darkening: Better Theming for Firefox Quantum Project Dark Theme Darkening was part of Michigan State University’s Computer Science capstone experience. Twenty-four groups of five students were each assigned an industry sponsor based on preference and skill set. We had the privilege of working with Mozilla on Firefox Quantum’s Theming API. Our project increases a user’s ability to customize the appearance of the Firefox browser.
Google Tier 1 Search in Firefox for Android Nightly Bug 975444 is one of the most-duped web compat bugs, which documents the fact that the version of Google Search that Firefox for Android users receive is a less rich version than the one served to Chrome Mobile. And people notice (hence all the dupes). In order to turn this situation around, we've been working on a number of platform interop bugs (in collaboration with some friendly members of the Blink team) and have hopes in making progress towards receiving Tier 1 search by default. Part of the plan is to sniff out bugs we don't know about (or new bugs, as the site changes very quickly) by exposing the Nightly population to the spoofed Tier 1 version for 4 weeks (which should be July 27, 2018). If things get too bad, we can back out the addon earlier.
Google to developers: We take down your extension - because we can Not sure why Google chose the wrong email address to contact me about this (the account is associated with another email address) but luckily this email found me. I opened the extension listing and the description is there, as is the icon. What’s missing is a screenshot, simply because creating one for an extension without a user interface isn’t trivial. No problem, spent a bit of time making something that will do to illustrate the principle. |
KDE and GNOME: Kubuntu, Krita, GNOME Development Kubuntu 18.04 LTS Could Switch to Breeze-Dark Plasma Theme by Default, Test Now The latest daily build live ISO images that landed earlier today for Kubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) apparently uses the Breeze-Dark Plasma theme for the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment by default. However, we've been told that it's currently an experiment to get the pulse of the community. "Users running [Kubuntu] 18.04 development version who have not deliberately opted to use Breeze/Breeze-Light in their System Settings will also see the change after upgrading packages," said the devs. "Users can easily revert back to the Breeze/Breeze-Light Plasma themes by changing this in System Settings."
Interview with Rytelier The amount of convenience is very high compared to other programs. The amount of “this one should be designed in a better way, it annoys me” things is the smallest of all the programs I use, and if something is broken, then most of these functions are announced to improve in 4.0.
Grow your skills with GNOME For the past 3 years I’ve been working very hard because I fulfill a number of these roles for Builder. It’s exhausting and unsustainable. It contributes to burnout and hostile communication by putting too much responsibility on too few people’s shoulders.
GTK4, GNOME's Wayland Support & Vulkan Renderer Topped GNOME In 2017
A Lot Of Improvements Are Building Up For GIMP 2.9.8, Including Better Wayland Support It's been four months since the release of GIMP 2.9.6 and while GIMP 2.9 developments are sadly not too frequent, the next GIMP 2.9.8 release is preparing a host of changes. Of excitement to those trying to use GIMP in a Wayland-based Linux desktop environment, GIMP's color picker has just picked up support for working on KDE/Wayland as well as some other Color Picker improvements to help GNOME/Wayland too. GIMP's Screenshot plugin also now has support for taking screenshots on KDE/Wayland either as a full-screen or individual windows. Granted, GIMP won't be all nice and dandy on Wayland itself until seeing the long-awaited GTK3 (or straight to GTK4) port. |
Programming/Development: fwupd, LLVM and More CSR devices now supported in fwupd The BlueCore CSR chips are used everywhere. If you have a “wireless” speaker or headphones that uses Bluetooth there is a high probability that it’s using a CSR chip inside. This makes the addition of CSR support into fwupd a big deal to access a lot of vendors. It’s a lot easier to say “just upload firmware” rather than “you have to write code” so I think it’s useful to have done this work.
Skylake Server Scheduler Model Updated In LLVM 6.0 Along With Other Intel CPU Updates
Most Software Code Will Be Written By Machines By 2040, Researchers Predict Imagine a scenario where a programmer needs to follow a couple of tried and tested procedures to write code that becomes a part of a bigger program that needs some insightful contribution from another programmer. So, is the first programmer really needed? Can’t we find a robotic replacement for the same? In the past, GitHub CEO had already made a prediction which says that future of coding is no coding at all. A similar speculation has been made by the researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee, who have said that machines will write most of their own code by 2040.
Hazelcast joins Eclipse, JCache is key focal point Open source In-Memory Data Grid (IMDG) company Hazelcast has joined the Eclipse Foundation – and it has done so for a reason. Hazelcast’s primary focus will be on JCache the Eclipse MicroProfile and EE4J. In particular, Hazelcast will be collaborating with members to popularize JCache, a Java Specification Request (JSR-107). So what place does JCache fill in the universe then?
Software: Darktable, VLC, Mesa, Audacity, Toplip, GNUstep Darktable 2.4-RC1 Rolls Out With Windows Support, OpenCL Improvements The open-source Darktable RAW photography software that's long been available for Linux and macOS has finally been ported to Microsoft Windows. But fortunately that's not all to be found in Darktable 2.4. While Windows support is their big headline feature of Darktable 2.4, the RC1 release that came out today is also packed with other improvements.
Linux Release Roundup: VLC, Mesa, Audacity + More Another week has flown by, making it time for another round-up of pertinent Linux app releases that didn’t manage to wangle a full post’s worth of waffle on this site. This week’s crop of curios includes updates to the world’s most popular open-source video player, the world’s most popular open-source audio editor, and the world’s most popular open-source graphics drivers.
Toplip – A Very Strong File Encryption And Decryption CLI Utility There are numerous file encryption tools available on the market to protect your files. We have already reviewed some encryption tools such as Cryptomater, Cryptkeeper, CryptGo, Cryptr, Tomb, and GnuPG etc. Today, we will be discussing yet another file encryption and decryption command line utility named “Toplip”. It is a free and open source encryption utility that uses a very strong encryption method called AES256, along with an XTS-AES design to safeguard your confidential data. Also, it uses Scrypt, a password-based key derivation function, to protect your passphrases against brute-force attacks.
GNUstep Takes Another Step Forward For Implementing Apple's Cocoa Frameworks GNUstep is the long-standing free software project working to implement Apple's Cocoa Objective-C frameworks used by macOS. The GNU project has made new releases of their GUI and Back libraries. GNUstep GUI 0.26 is out this morning as the latest update to their graphical user-interface library. GNUstep GUI 0.26 has a number of compatibility improvements, translation updates, mouse tracking logic improvements, bug fixes, and other work. |
GNU: The GNU C Library 2.28 and Guix on Android Glibc 2.28 Upstream Will Build/Run Cleanly On GNU Hurd While Linux distributions are still migrating to Glibc 2.27, in the two months since the release changes have continued building up for what will eventually become the GNU C Library 2.28. The Glibc 2.28 work queued thus far isn't nearly as exciting as all the performance optimizations and more introduced with Glibc 2.27, but it's a start. Most notable at this point for Glibc 2.28 is that it will now build and run cleanly on GNU/Hurd without requiring any out-of-tree patches. There has been a ton of Hurd-related commits to Glibc over the past month.
Guix on Android! Last year I thought to myself: since my phone is just a computer running an operating system called Android (or Replicant!), and that Android is based on a Linux kernel, it's just another foreign distribution I could install GNU Guix on, right? It turned out it was absolutely the case. Today I was reminded on IRC of my attempt last year at installing GNU Guix on my phone. Hence this blog post. I'll try to give you all the knowledge and commands required to install it on your own Android device.
GNU Guix Wrangled To Run On Android The GNU Guix transactional package manager can be made to run on Android smartphones/tablets, but not without lots of hoops to jump through first.
Node.js 10.9 and npm milestone Open Source Node.js Hits v10, with Better Security, Performance, More Speaking of which, the brand-new Node.js 10.0 is expected to soon support npm version 6 (currently Node.js ships with npm 5.7.x). The company npm Inc., which maintains the npm software package management application, today announced that major update, called npm@6. The npm company said its JavaScript software installer tool includes new security features for developers working with open source code.
Announcing npm@6 In coordination with today’s announcement of Node.js v10, we’re excited to announce npm@6. This major update to npm includes powerful new security features for every developer who works with open source code. Read on to understand why this matters. |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
Purism's Librem 5 Linux Phone Will Support Ubuntu Touch, Thanks to UBports Lead by talented Linux developer Marius Gripsgard, the UBports Foundation keeps the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS developed by Canonical, the company behind the widely-used Ubuntu Linux operating system, alive for various popular smartphones, including Fairphone 2, Nexus 5, OnePlus One, as well as the BQ Aquaris M10 FHD tablet that was designed to run Ubuntu Touch in the first place. Now, Purism and UBports are partnering to offer the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system on the upcoming Librem 5 Linux phone, which raised more than $2 million last fall, promising to be the privacy and security-focused smartphone you've been expecting for a long time. While not the default OS, users will be able to easily run Ubuntu Touch on the Librem 5 phone. also: UBPorts Ubuntu Touch To Be Supported By The Purism Librem 5
Ubuntu-Based ExTiX Distro, the Ultimate Linux System, Updates Its Deepin Edition Based on the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, the ExTiX 18.4 Deepin Edition is now available and it ships updated components, including the latest Deepin 15.5 Desktop, the Calamares 3.1.12 universal installer framework, and a custom Linux 4.16.2 kernel with extra hardware support. "I’ve made a new extra version of ExTiX with Deepin 15.5 Desktop (made in China!)," said Arne Exton in the release announcement. "Only a minimum of packages is installed in ExTiX Deepin. You can, of course, install all the packages you want, even while running ExTiX Deepin live, i.e. from a DVD or USB stick." |
Keshav Bhatt, the developer of the open-source Snapcraft GUI app and many other tools, is informing Softpedia today about the availability of Ktube Media Downloader 1.0.
Ktube Media Downloader appears to be the successor of Ultimate Media Downloader, another video downloader utility that the developer created a long time ago. However, the new app is a lot more powerful, featuring a modern and dark graphical user interface, and lots of attractive new features. |
Linux Foundation News Bruce Schneier: The US government is coming for YOUR code, techies During his opening keynote, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, made light of the mudslides that brought traffic to a crawl near Donner Pass on Monday evening. The trip at least was less arduous than it was last year, he said. Zemlin's remarks amounted to an open-source victory lap. Some 99.4 per cent of the world's high performance computing systems, 90 per cent of the world's stock exchanges, and 64 per cent of mobile devices run on Linux, he said, adding that the foundation's projects have created $14.5 billion worth of value, as measured in cost per line of code.
Hart Invests in Open Source Development With Linux Foundation Gold Membership Hart develops HartOS, an API platform that allows healthcare providers and their vendors and partners to use health data from multiple computer systems in a HIPAA-compliant manner to provide rich digital experiences. These may include medical records, hospital information, radiology information, laboratory information, picture archiving, emergency department and other systems.
The Linux Foundation Releases Free Open Source Software Basics Publication Sampling of content from Fundamentals of Open Source Management training course provides a foundation for using open source software in professional organizations
Cloud Native Computing Foundation Announces 11 New Members At Annual Open Source Leadership Summit |
Mozilla Leftovers These Weeks in Dev-Tools, issue 3 These Weeks in Dev-Tools will keep you up to date with all the exciting dev tools news. We plan to have a new issue every few weeks. If you have any news you'd like us to report, please comment on the tracking issue.
These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 31
Understanding Extension Permission Requests An extension is software developed by a third party that modifies how you experience the web in Firefox. Since they work by tapping into the inner workings of Firefox, but are not built by Mozilla, it’s good practice to understand the permissions they ask for and how to make decisions about what to install. While rare, a malicious extension can do things like steal your data or track your browsing across the web without you realizing it. We have been taking steps to reduce the risk of extensions, the most significant of which was moving to a WebExtensions architecture with the release of Firefox 57 last fall. The new APIs limit an extension’s ability to access certain parts of the browser and the information they process. We also have a variety of security measures in place, such as a review process that is designed to make it difficult for malicious developers to publish extensions. Nevertheless, these systems cannot guarantee that extensions will be 100% safe.
Janitor project - Newsletter 10 We hope you’ve had a smooth start into the year, and wish you all the best in your life and projects. This is your recurrent burst of good news about Janitor.
Switch from Chrome to Firefox in just a Few Minutes You’ve heard about how fast the new Firefox is. You’ve heard it’s made by people who want the web to be awesome for everyone. You like that, you’re curious to try, but you hesitate. Moving from Chrome to Firefox seems like work. Fussy, computer-y IT work. Ugh. ”What about all my “stuff”? I don’t want to set all this up again.”
Glibc 2.27 and everything you didn't know about FSFE in a picture Glibc 2.27 Released With Many Optimizations, Support For Static PIE Executables Being released right on time is Glibc 2.27, version 2.27 of the GNU C Library. As we have been covering the past few months, exciting us a lot about Glibc 2.27 are many performance optimizations with a number of functions receiving AVX/FMA tuning and other performance tweaks particularly for x86_64. But even on the ARM64/AArch64 side are also some performance optimizations as well as for POWER and SPARC.
GNU C Library 2.27 released The GNU C Library version 2.27 is now available. The GNU C Library is used as *the* C library in the GNU system and in GNU/Linux systems, as well as many other systems that use Linux as the kernel.
Everything you didn't know about FSFE in a picture As FSFE's community begins exploring our future, I thought it would be helpful to start with a visual guide to the current structure. All the information I've gathered here is publicly available but people rarely see it in one place, hence the heading. There is no suggestion that anything has been deliberately hidden. |
I noticed that the icons were new and the DE is more responsive that the beta that I had installed previously. I particularly loved the new icon for the Mageia Control Center (it reminded me of the nazar in Pisi Linux).
I used the system a bit to see if I could detect certain glitches even though I know this is not a final version. My intention is not to write a review, but to assess potential problems and, most importantly, to get more familiar with Mageia running Plasma 5. |
Purism's Librem 5 Linux Phone Will Support Ubuntu Touch, Thanks to UBports Lead by talented Linux developer Marius Gripsgard, the UBports Foundation keeps the Ubuntu Touch mobile OS developed by Canonical, the company behind the widely-used Ubuntu Linux operating system, alive for various popular smartphones, including Fairphone 2, Nexus 5, OnePlus One, as well as the BQ Aquaris M10 FHD tablet that was designed to run Ubuntu Touch in the first place. Now, Purism and UBports are partnering to offer the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system on the upcoming Librem 5 Linux phone, which raised more than $2 million last fall, promising to be the privacy and security-focused smartphone you've been expecting for a long time. While not the default OS, users will be able to easily run Ubuntu Touch on the Librem 5 phone. also: UBPorts Ubuntu Touch To Be Supported By The Purism Librem 5
Ubuntu-Based ExTiX Distro, the Ultimate Linux System, Updates Its Deepin Edition Based on the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, the ExTiX 18.4 Deepin Edition is now available and it ships updated components, including the latest Deepin 15.5 Desktop, the Calamares 3.1.12 universal installer framework, and a custom Linux 4.16.2 kernel with extra hardware support. "I’ve made a new extra version of ExTiX with Deepin 15.5 Desktop (made in China!)," said Arne Exton in the release announcement. "Only a minimum of packages is installed in ExTiX Deepin. You can, of course, install all the packages you want, even while running ExTiX Deepin live, i.e. from a DVD or USB stick." |
The Document Foundation is an independent, charitable entity and the home of LibreOffice. We have followed the developments in Munich with great concerns and like to express our disappointment to see a minority of politicians apparently ignoring the expert advice for which they’ve sought.
Rumours of the City of Munich returning to Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office have been regularly leaking since the election of Mayor Dieter Reiter, who was described as a “Microsoft fan” when interviewed by StadtBild magazine in 2014.
[...]
In spite of the suggestions, on Wednesday, February 15, Munich City Council will discuss a proposal – filed by a minority of city councillors – to install Windows 10 and MS Office 2016 on all workstations by 2020. This would cost taxpayers close to 90 million euro over the next six years, with a 35% aggravation over the 66 million euro figure suggested by Accenture.
[...]
Based on the above considerations, The Document Foundation thinks that the proposal to be discussed on Wednesday, February 15, represents a significant step backwards for the City of Munich, with a substantial increase in expenditure, an unknown amount of hidden cost related to interoperability, and a questionable usage of taxpayers money. |
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 15th of February 2017 08:10:26 AM
Filed under
CloudLinux's Mykola Naugolnyi announced today the availability of a new kernel update for CloudLinux 7 operating system series, urging users to update their machines immediately.
CloudLinux 7's kernel packages have been updated to version 3.10.0-427.36.1.lve1.4.37, which has been marked as ready for production and is available from the stable repositories of the operating system.
Today's kernel replaces version 3.10.0-427.18.2.lve1.4.27 that most CloudLinux 7 users might have installed on their machines, and it fixes a memory leak related to LVE Lightweight Virtual Environment) deletion.
Also (direct): CloudLinux 7 kernel updated |
A Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop It goes without saying that if you go to a computer store downtown to buy a new laptop, you will be offered a notebook with Windows preinstalled, or a Mac. Either way, you’ll be forced to pay an extra fee – either for a Microsoft license or for the Apple logo on the back. On the other hand, you have the option to buy a laptop and install a distribution of your choice. However, the hardest part may be to find the right hardware that will get along nicely with the operating system. On top of that, we also need to consider the availability of drivers for the hardware. So what do you do? The answer is simple: buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled. Also: The Open-Source / Linux Letdowns Of 2016
Linux 4.10 RC2 Linux 4.10-rc2 Released To Kick Off Kernel Testing For 2017 Linus Torvalds has issued the second test release of the in-development Linux 4.10 kernel. Linux 4.10-rc2 marks the first kernel release of 2017.
Linux 4.10-rc2 Hey, it's been a really slow week between Christmas Day and New Years Day, and I am not complaining at all. It does mean that rc2 is ridiculously and unrealistically small. I almost decided to skip rc2 entirely, but a small little meaningless release every once in a while never hurt anybody. So here it is. The only even remotely noticeable work here is the DAX fixups that really arguably should have been merge window material but depended on stuff during this merge window and were delayed until rc2 due to that. Even that wasn't big, and the rest is trivial small fixes. I'm expecting things to start picking up next week as people recover from the holidays. Linus |
Free Electrons becomes Bootlin (After Trademark Bullying/Trolling by FREE SAS)
The services we offer are different, we target a different audience (professionals instead of individuals), and most of our communication efforts are in English, to reach an international audience. Therefore Michael Opdenacker and Free Electrons’ management believe that there is no risk of confusion between Free Electrons and FREE SAS. However, FREE SAS has filed in excess of 100 oppositions and District Court actions against trademarks or name containing “free”. In view of the resources needed to fight this case, Free Electrons has decided to change name without waiting for the decision of the District Court. This will allow us to stay focused on our projects rather than exhausting ourselves fighting a long legal battle. [...] Nothing else changes in the company. We are the same engineers, the same Linux kernel contributors and maintainers (now 6 of us have their names in the Linux MAINTAINERS file), with the same technical skills and appetite for new technical challenges. More than ever, we remain united by the passion we all share in the company since the beginning: working with hardware and low-level software, working together with the free software community, and sharing the experience with others so that they can at least get the best of what the community offers and hopefully one day become active contributors too. “Get the best of the community” is effectively one of our slogans.
today's howtos
Ubuntu: Ubuntu 18.04, Snapcraft Summit, and Microsoft Exploiting Snaps to Promote (in the Media) Malicious Software |