Overall, aside from the system tools and the installation process, I did not see much not to like in running this BSD operating system. I experienced some annoyance when things failed to work just right, but I felt no frustrations that led me to give up on trying to use GhostBSD or find solutions to mishaps. I could provide a litany of Linux distros that did not measure up that well.

Some lingering problems for which I am still seeking workarounds are why my USB storage drives intermittently are not recognized and fail to mount. Another issue is why some of the preinstalled applications do not fully load. They either do not respond to launching at all, or crash before fully displaying anything beyond a white application window.

• Digital Wellbeing integration coming to Chrome on Android Q devices

• Digital Wellbeing arrives on the Nokia 6 and Nokia 8 with Android Pie

• Redmi Note 5 Pro, Redmi Note 6 Pro, Redmi Y2 Android Pie-Based MIUI 10 Global Beta Testing Kicks Off

• Pixel Experience based on Android Pie gets ported to the Exynos Samsung Galaxy Note 9

• Galaxy S10+ vs. Galaxy Note 9: Which should you buy?

• Best Samsung Phones (Besides the Galaxy S10) and Android Alternatives

• Android Widgets can be used on the Chrome OS desktop – Here’s how

• Best Case Picks from Spigen for your S10, S10+ & S10e

• Google may introduce system-wide dark mode in Android Q: Report

• Android newcomer teases a new monster phone that’ll go toe-to-toe with the Galaxy S10+

• Dirac announces Dirac Bass, Dirac Distortion Control, and updated Dirac 3D Audio for Android smartphones

• Oracle: Major ad scam 'DrainerBot' is rinsing Android users of their battery life and data

• Baba Is You, an award winning puzzle game is heading to Linux next month

  Baba Is You, a puzzle game with over 200 levels that won multiple awards is coming to Linux next month and it does look pretty unique.

  Originally created for the Nordic Game Jam 2017 which it won, it also won the Excellence in Design and Best Student Game awards at the Independent Games Festival 2018. It was a finalist for other awards too, so you know it's going to be something good. They've fully confirmed Linux support in their announcements, so it's quite exciting.

• Casual puzzle game 'Snakebird Primer' is out with Linux support

  For those who like their sweet casual puzzle games, Snakebird Primer has released today with Linux support.

• Hell is Other Demons looks like a mental bullet-hell platformer coming to Linux

  Hell is Other Demons from Swedish developer Cuddle Monster Games and publisher Kongregate might not be out for a few months yet but it sure does look exciting.

  Only announced yesterday, this bullet-hell action platformer has a seriously good style going for it, plus it mixes in a fantastic sounding synthwave soundtrack to hype up the experience.

• Robocraft, the fun free customisable robot battler has a huge agility physics overhaul

  This is something Robocraft has needed for a while, as some builds felt a little unfair previously when seriously powered up and also ridiculously fast. Feeling is believing though, they said it themselves you really do have to play it to see just how different it is with this change.

  They also recently introduced a starting "CPU limit" (the overall power of your robot) to the garages where you store them of 750 which is pretty low. They say this is to help newer players start off small and each garage can be upgraded using Robits (which you earn from playing the game), so it gives the feeling of more progression too.

• Cartacombs, an endless runner-shooter with you sat in a minecart is out

  Cartacombs from YawningDad is a rather simple endless runner-shooter that's now out with Linux support.

• The good looking beat 'em up 9 Monkeys of Shaolin still coming to Linux, releasing later this year

  While 9 Monkeys of Shaolin did have a pretty big delay, Sobaka Studio have just recently announced a new release date (including Linux support) along with help from Koch Media.

  Originally, it was supposed to release last Fall and they didn't give a reason for the delay but their latest announcement mentions "9 Monkeys of Shaolin will be released in the third quarter of 2019".

• Impressive space combat sim 'ASTROKILL' has its first major update in a year

  ASTROKILL, the Unreal Engine powered and impressive space combat sim is alive again, with a major update now available for this Early Access game.

  With this fresh update out it brings in an upgraded Unreal Engine to 4.21.1, a completely new HUD with customisable colours, all asteroids and debris have been given a makeover to be more varied and realistic, mission loading time has been reduced, 4K display support, a new objectives system, new objectives in various missions, AI improvements and quite a lot more.

• What are good command line HTTP clients?

  The whole is greater than the sum of its parts is a very famous quote from Aristotle, a Greek philosopher and scientist. This quote is particularly pertinent to Linux. In my view, one of Linux’s biggest strengths is its synergy. The usefulness of Linux doesn’t derive only from the huge raft of open source (command line) utilities. Instead, it’s the synergy generated by using them together, sometimes in conjunction with larger applications.

  The Unix philosophy spawned a “software tools” movement which focused on developing concise, basic, clear, modular and extensible code that can be used for other projects.

  This philosophy remains an important element for many Linux projects.

  Good open source developers writing utilities seek to make sure the utility does its job as well as possible, and work well with other utilities. The goal is that users have a handful of tools, each of which seeks to excel at one thing. Some utilities work well independently.

  This article looks at 4 open source command line HTTP clients. These clients let you download files over the internet from the command line. But they can also be used for many more interesting purposes such as testing, debugging and interacting with HTTP servers and web applications. Working with HTTP from the command-line is a worthwhile skill for HTTP architects and API designers. If you need to play around with an API, HTTPie and curl will be invaluable.

• Microsoft publishes security alert on IIS bug that causes 100% CPU usage spikes

  The Microsoft Security Response Center published yesterday a security advisory about a denial of service (DOS) issue impacting IIS (Internet Information Services), Microsoft's web server technology.

• 5 things to master to be a DevOps engineer

  There's an increasing global demand for DevOps professionals, IT pros who are skilled in software development and operations. In fact, the Linux Foundation's Open Source Jobs Report ranked DevOps as the most in-demand skill, and DevOps career opportunities are thriving worldwide.

  The main focus of DevOps is bridging the gap between development and operations teams by reducing painful handoffs and increasing collaboration. This is not accomplished by making developers work on operations tasks nor by making system administrators work on development tasks. Instead, both of these roles are replaced by a single role, DevOps, that works on tasks within a cooperative team. As Dave Zwieback wrote in DevOps Hiring, "organizations that have embraced DevOps need people who would naturally resist organization silos."

Initially planned to ship in early 2019, the revolutionary Librem 5 mobile phone was delayed for April 2019, but now it suffered just one more delay due to the CPU choices the development team had to make to deliver a stable and reliable device that won't heat up or discharge too quickly.

Purism had to choose between the i.MX8M Quad or the i.MX8M Mini processors for their Librem 5 Linux-powered smartphone, but after many trials and errors they decided to go with the i.MX8M Quad CPU as manufacturer NXP recently released a new software stack solving all previous power consumption and heating issues.

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.9 Beta!

There are many improvements and fixes included in Qt Creator 4.9. I’ll just mention some highlights in this blog post. Please refer to our change log for a more thorough overview.

Recently my LibreOffice work is mostly focused on the Online. It's nice to see how it is growing with new features and has better UI. But when I was working on improving toolbars (eg. folding menubar or reorganization of items) I noticed one annoying thing from the developer perspective. After every small change, I had to restart the server to provide updated content for the browser. It takes few seconds for switching windows, killing old server then running new one which requires some tests to be passed.

Last week during the Hack Week funded by Collabora Productivity I was able to work on my own projects. It was a good opportunity for me to try to improve the process mentioned above.

I've heard previously about browsersync so I decided to try it out. It is a tool which can automatically reload used .css and .js files in all browser sessions after change detection. To make it work browsersync can start proxy server watching files on the original server and sending events to the browser clients if needed.

The GNOME 3.32 beta 2 release is here two weeks after the first beta version to add even more improvements and squash as many bugs as possible before the final release hits the streets next month. The second beta release of the GNOME 3.32 desktop environment also marks the beginning of the String Freeze development stage.

The latest snapshot of the week, 20190219, had more than a dozen packages updated. A new Kerberos database module using the Lightning Memory-Mapped Database library (LMDB) has was added with the krb5 1.17 package, which brought some major changes for the administration experience for the network authentication protocol Kerberos. The permissions package update 20190212 removed several old entries and the kernel-space and user-space code package tgt 1.0.74 fixed builds with the newer glibc. A couple xf86 packages were updated. The 1.4.0 version of xf86-video-chips was a bug fix release for X.Org Server. There was an X Server crash bug with the version 1.3 affecting devices older than the HiQVideo generation. The change log said the code may not compile against X Server 1.20 since it no longer supports 24-bit color. A few other YaST packages were updated in the snapshot like yast2-installation 4.1.36, which had an update that saves the used repositories at the end of installation so as not to offer the driver packages again.

The 20190217 snapshot had just three packages updated. The keyboard management library libgnomekbd 3.26.1 fixed a build with new GLib and updated translations. VMcore extraction tool makedumpfile 1.6.5 added some patches, bug fixes and improved support for arm64 systems with Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR). The jump in the release of yast2-storage-ng from 4.1.53 to 4.1.59 provided quite a few changes like allowing the partitioner to create block cache (bcache) devices without a caching set and the newest version limits bcache support to x86_64.

FriendlyElec’s open-spec, 60 x 55.5mm “NanoPi R1” SBC runs mainline Linux on a quad -A7 Allwinner H3 and offers GbE and Fast Ethernet ports, WiFi/BT, 3x USB ports, and a standard metal case with antenna.

FriendlyElec has launched a hacker board aimed at low-cost IoT gateway duty. The open-spec, Linux-driven NanoPi R1 combines 10/100 and 10/100/1000Mbps Ethernet ports along with 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0. The SBC runs FriendlyCore with Linux-4.14-LTS or OpenWrt on the Allwinner H3 SoC.

STMicroelectronics announced its first Cortex-A SoC and first Linux- and Android-driven processor. The STM32MP1 SoC intends to ease the transition for developers moving from its STM32 microprocessor unit (MCU) family to more complex embedded systems. Development boards based on the SoC will be available in April.

Aimed at industrial, consumer, smart home, health, and wellness applications, the STM32MP1 features dual, 650MHz Cortex-A7 cores running a new “mainlined, open-sourced” OpenSTLinux distro with Yocto Project and OpenEmbedded underpinnings. There’s also a 209MHz Cortex-M4 chip with an FPU, MPU, and DSP instructions. The Cortex-M4 is supported by an enhanced version of ST’s STM32Cube development tools that support the Cortex-A7 cores in addition to the M4 (see below).

Variscite reveals the portfolio of its new i.MX based products that will be presented next week at the Embedded World 2019 exhibition & conference.

• Buildah: Build containers fast and easy without Docker

  Linux containers are gaining an ever stronger foothold in the IT of modern companies. For this reason, developers need a simple way of creating containerized applications. Buildah makes it easy to build containers without the need for the overhead required by Docker.
  Linux containers are an efficient means of developing and deploying new applications. Container technologies package and isolate apps together with the entire runtime environment. As a result, the containers are quickly ready for operation and even more portable than traditional applications since they contain the entire application environment.

  There are two aspects of the container environment that are very important: On the one hand, Linux containers are undergoing continued development; in particular, the Open Container Initiative (OCI) is a key driver for innovation. On the other hand, several misunderstandings regarding the Linux container architecture persist. The following needs to be made clear: Containers do not run on Docker. Containers are processes that run on the Linux kernel. Therefore, containers are Linux. Moreover, Docker daemon is only one of many user space tools and libraries that communicate with the Linux kernel in order to create containers.

  Buildah is an excellent example of these two aspects: when creating containers and for innovative ongoing refinement. Buildah makes it possible to create containers without using Docker, which means that users can implement Docker- and OCI-compliant container images with Buildah without the need for executing a container runtime daemon.

• Awards roll call: Red Hat awards, November 2018 - February 2019

  With the new year comes new excitement, including Red Hat winning new industry award accolades. Since our last award round up, Red Hat has been honored with over twenty-five new award wins across our organization. Our latest roll call includes recognition in categories from our unique culture and why it is a special place to work, to the design and creative strategies behind Open Source Stories, and the depth of our product portfolio.

• Musings on Hybrid Cloud

  I believe working with a Hybrid/Cross cloud tools like OpenShift gives customers the best tools to prevent lock-in to any of the big cloud vendors. OpenShift will allow users to move workloads between the big cloud vendors, their private data centers and the specialty clouds. The best of local retail along with the commodity retail. Run your application where it makes sense and protect it against vendor lock-in.

• Arm Takes On Intel With Neoverse Platforms For Edge, Cloud And 5G

• These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 53

• Mozilla Future Releases Blog: Enhanced Tracking Protection Testing: Protecting users’ privacy by default

  Over the past couple of months since we announced that we would broaden our approach to anti-tracking we’ve been experimenting and testing Enhanced Tracking Protection, a feature that blocks cookies and storage access from third-party trackers. Recently, we published a set of policies that define which tracking practices will be blocked in Firefox, and a new set of redesigned controls for the Content Blocking section where users can choose their desired level of privacy protection. As the next step in our path to enable Enhanced Tracking Protection by default, this week we launched a study to observe how enabling this functionality for a group of Firefox users in our Release Channel would impact the online experience.

• I am up to no good.

  am a user of “the darknet”. I use Tor to secure my communications from curious eyes. At the latest since Edward Snowden’s leaks we know, that this might be a good idea. There are many other valid, legal use-cases for using Tor. Circumventing censorship is one of them.

  But German state secretary Günter Krings (49, CDU) believes something else. Certainly he “understand[s], that the darknet may have a use in autocratic systems, but in my opinion there is no legitimate use for it in a free, open democracy. Whoever uses the darknet is usually up to no good.”

  [...]

  Instead of trying to ban our democratic people from using tor, we should celebrate the fact that we are a democracy that can afford having citizens who can avoid surveillance and that have access to uncensored information.

• Purism’s CEO Todd Weaver Testifies at California Congressional Privacy Commission

  My name is Todd Weaver, and I think you’ll find I’m an unusual witness here today, while I may be sitting side-by-side with impressive privacy protection groups, I am here as the CEO of a rapidly growing technology company based in California.

  I am here calling for much stronger consumer privacy protections – starting with giving consumers the power to opt IN rather than opt OUT of sharing their personal data.

  I am here to tell you it’s time for California’s extraordinary tech industry to stop harvesting and “sharing” our most personal private data without our meaningful consent and knowledge.

  I am not here to tell you AB 375 (or stronger) protections are tough to implement, history is filled with wrongdoers complaining that doing right will put them out of business only to comply and thrive later. Incidentally, this same tech industry complained about Europe’s GDPR that certainly did not put them out of business.

  I am here to tell you the new law (or stronger) is easy to technically comply with – if we companies simply begin to honor our customer’s privacy rights and design our services to be privacy-protecting rather than privacy-exploiting.

• How to Exclude Files and Directories with Rsync

• How to add a PPA in Elementary OS 5.0

• Creating a Plasma Mobile application

• Using a Linux Command Line Dictionary

• Make a dedicated folder for each zip file

• Building security into cloud native apps with NGINX

• Surviving Mars gains official modding support outside of Steam

  For those players who picked up Surviving Mars outside of Steam through stores like GOG or the Paradox Store (to use in the Paradox Launcher), you can now add in some mods.

  Just announced a few hours earlier today, the new Paradox Mods system brings official modding support to a wider set of players. This is quite important, as modding support for games can make them so much more interesting and having mods locked to one store really isn't great.

• OpenMW progresses towards supporting Oblivion, Skyrim and Fallout plus shadows are back

• Concurrency management in BPF

  In the beginning, programs run on the in-kernel BPF virtual machine had no persistent internal state and no data that was shared with any other part of the system. The arrival of eBPF and, in particular, its maps functionality, has changed that situation, though, since a map can be shared between two or more BPF programs as well as with processes running in user space. That sharing naturally leads to concurrency problems, so the BPF developers have found themselves needing to add primitives to manage concurrency (the "exchange and add" or XADD instruction, for example). The next step is the addition of a spinlock mechanism to protect data structures, which has also led to some wider discussions on what the BPF memory model should look like.

  A BPF map can be thought of as a sort of array or hash-table data structure. The actual data stored in a map can be of an arbitrary type, including structures. If a complex structure is read from a map while it is being modified, the result may be internally inconsistent, with surprising (and probably unwelcome) results. In an attempt to prevent such problems, Alexei Starovoitov introduced BPF spinlocks in mid-January; after a number of quick review cycles, version 7 of the patch set was applied on February 1. If all goes well, this feature will be included in the 5.1 kernel.

• Intel Ready To Add Their Experimental "Iris" Gallium3D Driver To Mesa

  For just over the past year Intel open-source driver developers have been developing a new Gallium3D-based OpenGL driver for Linux systems as the eventual replacement to their long-standing "i965 classic" Mesa driver. The Intel developers are now confident enough in the state of this new driver dubbed Iris that they are looking to merge the driver into mainline Mesa proper. 

  The Iris Gallium3D driver has now matured enough that Kenneth Graunke, the Intel OTC developer who originally started Iris in late 2017, is looking to merge the driver into the mainline code-base of Mesa. The driver isn't yet complete but it's already in good enough shape that he's looking for it to be merged albeit marked experimental.

• Hallo Nürnberg!

  Collabora is headed to Nuremberg, Germany next week to take part in the 2019 edition of Embedded World, "the leading international fair for embedded systems". Following a successful first attendance in 2018, we are very much looking forward to our second visit! If you are planning on attending, please come say hello in Hall 4, booth 4-280!

  This year, we will be showcasing a state-of-the-art infrastructure for end-to-end, embedded software production. From the birth of a software platform, to reproducible continuous builds, to automated testing on hardware, get a firsthand look at our platform building expertise and see how we use continuous integration to increase productivity and quality control in embedded Linux.

• KASAN Spots Another Kernel Vulnerability From Early Linux 2.6 Through 4.20

  The Kernel Address Sanitizer (KASAN) that detects dynamic memory errors within the Linux kernel code has just picked up another win with uncovering a use-after-free vulnerability that's been around since the early Linux 2.6 kernels.

  KASAN (along with the other sanitizers) have already proven quite valuable in spotting various coding mistakes hopefully before they are exploited in the real-world. The Kernel Address Sanitizer picked up another feather in its hat with being responsible for the CVE-2019-8912 discovery.

• io_uring, SCM_RIGHTS, and reference-count cycles

  The io_uring mechanism that was described here in January has been through a number of revisions since then; those changes have generally been fixing implementation issues rather than changing the user-space API. In particular, this patch set seems to have received more than the usual amount of security-related review, which can only be a good thing. Security concerns became a bit of an obstacle for io_uring, though, when virtual filesystem (VFS) maintainer Al Viro threatened to veto the merging of the whole thing. It turns out that there were some reference-counting issues that required his unique experience to straighten out.
  The VFS layer is a complicated beast; it must manage the complexities of the filesystem namespace in a way that provides the highest possible performance while maintaining security and correctness. Achieving that requires making use of almost all of the locking and concurrency-management mechanisms that the kernel offers, plus a couple more implemented internally. It is fair to say that the number of kernel developers who thoroughly understand how it works is extremely small; indeed, sometimes it seems like Viro is the only one with the full picture.

  In keeping with time-honored kernel tradition, little of this complexity is documented, so when Viro gets a moment to write down how some of it works, it's worth paying attention. In a long "brain dump", Viro described how file reference counts are managed, how reference-count cycles can come about, and what the kernel does to break them. For those with the time to beat their brains against it for a while, Viro's explanation (along with a few corrections) is well worth reading. For the rest of us, a lighter version follows.

The Linux kernel supports a wide variety of filesystem types, many of which have not seen significant use — or maintenance — in many years. Developers in the openSUSE project have concluded that many of these filesystem types are, at this point, more useful to attackers than to openSUSE users and are proposing to blacklist many of them by default. Such changes can be controversial, but it's probably still fair to say that few people expected the massive discussion that resulted, covering everything from the number of OS/2 users to how openSUSE fits into the distribution marketplace.
On January 30, Martin Wilck started the discussion with a proposal to add a blacklist preventing the automatic loading of a set of kernel modules implementing (mostly) old filesystems. These include filesystems like JFS, Minix, cramfs, AFFS, and F2FS. For most of these, the logic is that the filesystems are essentially unused and the modules implementing them have seen little maintenance in recent decades. But those modules can still be automatically loaded if a user inserts a removable drive containing one of those filesystem types. There are a number of fuzz-testing efforts underway in the kernel community, but it seems relatively unlikely that any of them are targeting, say, FreeVxFS filesystem images. So it is not unreasonable to suspect that there just might be exploitable bugs in those modules. Preventing modules for ancient, unmaintained filesystems from automatically loading may thus protect some users against flash-drive attacks.

If there were to be a fight over a proposal like this, one would ordinarily expect it to be concerned with the specific list of unwelcome modules. But there was relatively little of that. One possible exception is F2FS, the presence of which raised some eyebrows since it is under active development, having received 44 changes in the 5.0 development cycle, for example. Interestingly, it turns out that openSUSE stopped shipping F2FS in September. While the filesystem is being actively developed, it seems that, with rare exceptions, nobody is actively backporting fixes, and the filesystem also lacks a mechanism to prevent an old F2FS implementation from being confused by a filesystem created by a newer version. Rather than deal with these issues, openSUSE decided to just drop the filesystem altogether. As it happens, the blacklist proposal looks likely to allow F2FS to return to the distribution since it can be blacklisted by default.

Are you tired of not owning the data or the platform you use for social postings? I know I am.

It's hard to say when I "first" used a social network. I've been on email for about 30 years and one of the early ad-hoc forms of social networks were chain emails. Over the years I was asked to join all sorts of "social" things such as IRC, ICQ, Skype, MSN Messenger, etc. and eventually things like Orkut, MySpace, Facebook, etc. I'll readily admit that I'm not the type of person that happily jumps onto every new social bandwagon that appears on the Internet. I often prefer preserving the quietness of my own thoughts. That, though, hasn't stopped me from finding some meaningfulness participating in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and more recently Google+. Twitter was in fact the first social network that I truly embraced. And it would've remained my primary social network had they not killed their own community by culling the swell of independently-developed Twitter clients that existed. That and their increased control of their API effectively made me look for something else. Right around that time Google+ was being introduced and many in the open source community started participating in that, in some ways to find a fresh place where techies can aggregate away from the noise and sometimes over-the-top nature of Facebook. Eventually I took to that too and started using G+ as my primary social network. That is, until Google recently decided to pull the plug on G+.

While Google+ might not have represented a success for Google, it had become a good place for sharing information among the technically-inclined. As such, I found it quite useful for learning and hearing about new things in my field. Soon-to-be-former users of G+ have gone in all sorts of directions. Some have adopted a "c'mon guys, get over it, Facebook is the spot" attitude, others have adopted things like Mastodon, others have fallen back to their existing IDs on Twitter, and yet others, like me, are still looking.

A lot of people probably remember the 1990s palmtop computers made by Psion fondly. The clamshell-design palmtops were pocketable, black and white, but had a working stylus and a fantastic tactile foldout QWERTY keyboard that you could type pretty substantial documents on or even write code with. A different company -- Planet Computers -- has now produced a spiritual successor to the old Psion palmtops called the Gemini PDA that is much like an old Psion but with the latest Android smartphone hardware in it and a virtually identical tactile keyboard. It can also dual boot to Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Sailfish) alongside Android. The technical specs are a MediaTek deca-core processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB storage (plus microSD slot), 4G, 802.11c Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, eSIM support, and 4,220mAh battery. The screen measures in at 5.99-inches with a 2,160 x 1,080 (403ppi) resolution. The only thing missing seems to be the stylus -- but perhaps that would have complicated manufacturing of this niche-device in its first production run.