KDE Plasma 5.20 Beta is out. Final Release Next Month.

The next installment of the Plasma desktop environment, KDE Plasma 5.20 Beta released. The final release is expected on October 13, 2020.

today's leftovers

• Submit a KSyntaxHighlighting Color Theme

  The KSyntaxHighlighting framework provides support for color themes. These color themes specify all colors (text/background/selection/…) and font style roles (italic/bold/…) that are used for the highlighting. The definition happens in some easy to understand JSON file format. Starting with the upcoming KDE Frameworks 5.75 release, all KTextEditor framework based application will support these color themes for their embedded editors. This includes Kate & KWrite, but naturally a lot more, like for example KDevelop, Kile and RKWard. [...] With the recent additions we already cover some more well known text editor color themes. But if you just search a bit around the internet or look what other text editors ship per default, we still lack a lot of well known ones. For example even our GitLab instance provides the Monokai theme in the configuration for its web highlighting that we still lack. Therefore, we are eager to get submissions for more MIT licensed color themes we can bundle with KSyntaxHighlighting. All users of applications using this framework will enjoy to be able to choose between more themes with ease if you help us! Therefore, take the chance and help us out, provide some more themes as merge request. License must be MIT, this seems to be no problem for most themes out there, at least it seems most of the ones I stumbled over are MIT licensed.

• FreeBSD Instant-workstation 2020

  A little over a year ago I published an instant-workstation script for FreeBSD. The idea is to have an installed FreeBSD system, then run a shell script that uses only base-system utilities and installs and configures a workstation setup for you. [...] The script is updated intermittently when new PRs come in, or when I have to reinstall a machine and things do not behave the way I think they should. If you want a quick live KDE Plasma experience with FreeBSD, head on over to FuryBSD which does live ISO images with a variety of environments.

• Three tips to implement Kubernetes with open standards

  The technologies chosen by enterprise IT departments today will have a long-term impact on their performance, operations and overall strategy. Sometimes it can take well over a decade to realize the full implications of a technology solution. This can put a great deal of weight on the shoulders of IT management, especially when it comes to emergent technologies whose utility, importance and trajectory may not yet be fully known. Placing a bad bet on new software can lead to difficult integrations and disruptions across an organisation’s entire tech stack, which in the long-term can lead to lost productivity, wasted budgets, and the likelihood of losing ground to competitors. Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration platform, was until recently regarded in the same way, with IT departments struggling to fully appraise its long-term value. However, with Kubernetes now running 86 per cent of container clusters, it has emerged as the de facto standard for cloud-native infrastructure. This means that the main concern for IT departments is not whether Kubernetes has a future, but how to ensure that their implementation of Kubernetes has a future which doesn't present a bottleneck to integrations, industry practices and use cases.

• openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/38

  An average week, with an average number of 5 snapshots (0910, 0914, 0915, 0916, and 0917 – with 0917 just being synced out). The content of these snapshots included: KDE Applications 20.08.1 Qt 5.15.1 PackageKit 1.2.1 Systemd 246.4 Virt-Manager 3.0.0

• Whonix 15.0.1.5.1 - for VirtualBox - Point Release!

• The Expandables – snapcraft extensions and the secret code

  If you’re a snap developer, you know that snap development is terribly easy. Or rather complex and difficult. Depending on your application code and requirements, it can take a lot of effort putting together the snapcraft.yaml file from which you will build your snap. One of our goals is to make snap development practically easier and more predictable for everyone. To that end, we created a framework of snap extensions, designed to make the snap journey simpler and more fun. In a nutshell, extensions abstract away a range of common code declarations you would normally put in your snapcraft.yaml file. They help developers avoid repetitive tasks, reduce the knowledge barrier needed to successfully build snaps, offer a common template for application builds, and most importantly, save time and effort. But what if you want – or need – to know what is behind the abstraction?

• DeskProto® releases free CAM software for Linux

  Delft Spline Systems announces that the DeskProto CAM software now also is available for Linux users, as native 64 bits AppImage file that will work on various Linux distributions. Projects made on Linux, on Mac and Windows are interchangeable. Licenses for DeskProto V7 can be used to activate DeskProto on all three platforms, so existing users can switch to a Linux without extra cost.

     

• Tor’s Bug Smash Fund, Year 2: $106,709 Raised!

         

           

  Let’s start this post with a rousing THANK YOU to the Tor community!

           

  This August, we asked you to help us fundraise for our second annual Bug Smash Fund campaign. This fund is designed to grow a healthy reserve earmarked for maintenance work, finding bugs, and smashing them—all tasks necessary to keep Tor Browser, the Tor network, and the many tools that rely on Tor strong, safe, and running smoothly.

       

• Researchers were able to figure out which American phone numbers use Signal

         

           

  Privacy flaws in contact discovery have led to a research team being able to enumerate all American Signal users. Enumeration means that using the contact discovery built into the Signal app, researchers were able to perform a large-scale crawling attack and figure out which American phone numbers were attached to a Signal account. The new research paper was released by Christoph Hagen, Christian Weinert, Christoph Sendner, Alexandra Dmitrienko, and Thomas Schneider. It is titled: “All the Numbers are US: Large-scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers.”

• The ’90s are back: Gateway laptops have been resurrected as Walmart exclusives

  Remember Gateway laptops? If you grew up in the ’90s, they were probably the brand of your first laptop. Like a revival of your favorite childhood television show, the Gateway brand has been raised from the dead — cow imagery and all. The brand, which is owned by computer maker Acer, is making its own comeback with a line of new laptops, tablets, and convertibles that will be exclusive to Walmart.

  So, what’s forcing these cows out of hibernation? For Gateway parent Acer, its about new silicon from Intel and AMD, including the successsul new mobile Ryzen 4000 processors.

The Top 50 Programming Languages to Learn Coding

Gone are the days when a handful of people were considered as top computer programmers and developers. The dawn of the digital age has now made it possible to everyone to play with codes and write a computer program. What all this need is to have a solid grasp of emerging technology and programming languages. However, it is not as easy as it seems since there are a large number of programming languages out there and choosing one and master in it might be challenging. Thus, before getting started into the world of coding, you must make the right choice and come up with the one that best suited for you. Also: How to use C++ Pointers

Free Software and OSS Leftovers

• Benefits Of Using Odoo For Small Businesses

  In this tutorial, we will be showing you how using Odoo can benefit a small or medium-sized business. As times have progressed, businesses big and small have become more complex in their operations. With several departments having to function and share information to one another, the need for an integrated system has grown by leaps and bounds. More and more small business are implementing ERP systems. In fact, once an ERP system is implemented, it often becomes the backbone of many corporate-scale businesses. Such systems can seamlessly integrate business lifecycles, such as production, inventory management, order processes, and more. An example of this system would be Odoo, one of the most popular ERP systems currently available.

• Best WordPress Backup Plugins 2020

  It is at most important to keep multiple backups of your WordPress site. In case the website is compromised or any plugin update breaks your site, WordPress backups can help you restore it quickly. Mainly, a WordPress site consists of three important parts, the database, user-created files such as plugins, themes, and uploaded files, and finally the WordPress core files. If anyone of these three parts is missing or corrupted, the website will not function properly or will not function at all. When we create a backup, we create a backup of the site database and the user-created files. WordPress core files can be downloaded and installed separately.

• FSF: Volunteers needed: Help maintain our webmail page

  The Free Software Foundation (FSF) needs your help! We are looking for several reliable volunteers to keep our Free Software Webmail Systems page up to date, and respond to community questions about webmail programs as they come in. Between 1,000 and 2,000 visitors check out this resource every month, and we want to make sure our recommendations are accurate! If you're interested, please contact us at campaigns@fsf.org. Our Free Software Webmail Systems page is used to share resources for people interested in using their email over the Web without compromising their freedom. Many webmail systems meet at least some of our standards for respecting users, including compliance with GNU LibreJS standards, but they're constantly changing, and new services are popping up every day. When sites listed on this page change their services for the better or the worse, they don't tend to notify us, which means that some vigilance is required to make sure that this resource stays useful.

• Parsing PAN-OS logs using syslog-ng

  Version 3.29 of syslog-ng was released recently including a user-contributed feature: the panos-parser(). It is parsing log messages from PAN-OS (Palo Alto Networks Operating System). Unlike some other networking devices, the message headers of PAN-OS syslog messages are standards-compliant. However, if you want to act on your messages (filtering, alerting), you still need to parse the message part. The panos-parser() helps you create name-value pairs from the message part of the logs. From this blog you can learn why it is useful to parse PAN-OS log messages and how to use the panos-parser().

• Intel Releases HAXM 7.6.5 Execution Manager

  Intel has debuted a new version of HAXM, its Hardware-Accelerated Execution Manager that serves as an accelerator for the Android Emulator and QEMU via Intel VT enabled CPUs.

• Update devices remotely with this open source tool

  The ability to access, connect, and manage multiple devices remotely through a single account is important. Going a step further, being able to completely update devices remotely is another way for sysadmins to reduce effort and minimize headaches. UpdateHub is an open source solution that allows you to do complete device updates, including firmware and bootloaders, remotely. Its goal is to make it easier to do device updates and reduce rework and risk, whether you're updating thousands of devices or managing small deployments. UpdateHub handles all aspects of over-the-air (OTA) updates, including package integrity and authenticity, while you take care of your other work.

• Daniel Stenberg: My first 15,000 curl commits

  I’ve long maintained that persistence is one of the main qualities you need in order to succeed with your (software) project. In order to manage to ship a product that truly conquers the world. By continuously and never-ending keeping at it: polishing away flaws and adding good features. On and on and on.