Voyager Live 10 overview | The spirit of open source in the heart of the digital world

In this video, I am going to show an overview of Voyager Live 10 and some of the applications pre-installed.

Cantor and the support for Jupyter notebooks at the finish line

Hello everyone! It's been almost three weeks since my last post and this is going to be my my final post in this blog. So, I want to summarize all my work done in this GSoC project. Just to remember again, the goal of the project was to add the support for Jupiter notebooks to Cantor. This format is widely used in the scientific and education areas, mostly by the application Jupyter, and there is a lot of content available on the internet in this format (for example, here). By adding the support of this format in Cantor we’ll allow Cantor users access this content. This is short description, if you more intersted, you can found more details in my proporsal.

[...]

This is all for the limitations, I think. Let's talk about future plans and perspectives. In my opinion, this project has reached its initial goals, is finished now and will only need maintenance and support in terms of bug fixing and adjustment to potential format changes in future.

When talking more generally, this project is part of the current overall development activities in Cantor to improve the usability and the stability of the application and to extend the feature set in order to enable more workflows and to reach to a bigger audience with this. See 19.08 and 18.12 release announcements to read more about the developments in the recent releases of Cantor. Support of the Jupyter notebook format is a big step into this direction but this not all. We have already many other items in our backlog like for the UX improvements, plots integration improvements going into this direction. Some of this items will be addressed soon. Some of them are something for the next GSoC project next year maybe?

I think, that's all for now. Thank you for reading this blog and thank you for your interest in my project. Working on this project was a very interesting and pleasant period of my life. I am happy that I had this opportunity and was able to contribute to KDE and especially to Cantor with the support of my mentor Alexander Semke.

My Open-Source Activities from January to August 2019

Debian is a general-purpose Linux distribution that is widely used on the planet. I am a Debian Developer who works on packages related to Android SDK and the Java ecosystem.

I started a new package in an attempt to build the Android framework android.jar using the upstream build systems involving Ninja, Soong and others. Since the beginning we have been writing our own (very simple) makefiles to build the binaries in AOSP because their build logic tends to be simple and straightforward, until we worked on android.jar. Building it requires digging in so much code that it became incredibly hard to maintain, which is why we still haven’t brought in any newer version since android-framework-23. This is problematic as developers can’t build any apps that target Android 7+.

After a month of work, this package is finally done. After all its dependencies are packaged in the future, it will be good to upload. This is where the students of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) come in!

iMars Black is an Inexpensive Bluetooth 5.0 USB Audio Transmitter & Receiver

This Linux computer plus router is the size of a ring box

The VoCore2 Mini Linux Computer packs a wireless router and 16M of onboard storage into a cube about the size of a coin. Just hook it up to any display monitor through a standard USB2.0 port, and you're ready to put it to work. With 128MB of DDR2 memory and an MT7628AN MIPS processor, it's equally useful as a streaming station, VPN gateway, data storage - you name it.

Dive into the life and legacy of Alan Turing: 5 books and more

Another well-known fact about Turing was his conviction for "gross indecency" because of his homosexuality, and the posthumous apology and pardon issued over more a half a decade after Turing’s death.

But beyond all of this, who was Alan Turing?

Here are six books that delve deeply into the life and legacy of Alan Turing. Collectively, these books cover his life, both professional and personal, and work others have done to build upon Turing’s ideas. Individually, or collectively, these works allow the reader to learn who Alan Turing was beyond just a few well-known, broad-stroke themes.

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (cups, nginx, and openjdk-7), Fedora (httpd, mod_md, nghttp2, and patch), and SUSE (rubygem-loofah).

Epyc Encryption | TechSNAP 410

It's CPU release season and we get excited about AMD's new line of server chips. Plus our take on AMD's approach to memory encryption, and our struggle to make sense of Intel's Comet Lake line.

Also, a few Windows worms you should know about, the end of the road for EV certs, and an embarrassing new Bluetooth attack.

Google's Chrome OS 76 Improves Support for Multiple Accounts on Chromebooks

Google promoted the Chrome OS 76 operating system for supported Chromebook devices to the stable channel, and it is now rolling out to users from around the world with new features and improvements.
Based on the latest Google Chrome 76 web browser release, which brings many new features and improvements on its own, Chrome OS 76's probably most exciting is a unified account management for those who use multiple Google accounts on their Chromebook, either by you or if the devices is shared with other people.

Users can check out the new account management feature under Settings > Google Accounts, and they should keep in mind that they can now apply all the permissions and access granted to apps, add-ons, websites, Google Play, and in Chrome to all of their signed-in Google accounts.

[...]

Chrome OS 76 is now rolling out to all supported Chromebook devices. You can update your Chromebook to Chrome OS 76 by going to Chrome settings and accessing the About Chrome OS section. The new version will be automatically downloaded and installed on your Chromebook. A restart is required for Chrome OS 76 to be successfully installed.

Netrunner 19.08 Run Through

In this video, we are looking at Netrunner 19.08.

Asterisk Celebrates 25 Million Downloads

Sangoma Technologies Corporation (TSX VENTURE: STC), a trusted leader in delivering Unified Communications solutions for SMBs, Enterprises, OEMs, and Service Providers, both on-premises and in the cloud, today announced that September will mark the 25 millionth download of Asterisk, the world's most widely used open source communications software.

Mozilla Mornings on the future of EU content regulation

On 10 September, Mozilla will host the next installment of our EU Mozilla Mornings series – regular breakfast meetings where we bring together policy experts, policymakers and practitioners for insight and discussion on the latest EU digital policy developments.

The next installment will focus on the future of EU content regulation. We’re bringing together a high-level panel to discuss how the European Commission should approach the mooted Digital Services Act, and to lay out a vision for a sustainable and rights-protective content regulation framework in Europe.

FreeIPMI 1.6.4 Released

o In libfreeipmi, add additional workarounds for packets that are
re-ordered during sensor bridging.
o In libfreeipmi, add additional sensor / event interpretations.
o In libfreeipmi, fix error return value on bridging requests.
o Add workaround in ipmi-sel for QuantaPlex T42D-2U motherboard,
whichlists a SDR record that makes no sense.
o Add workaround for Dell Poweredge FC830, which have an error
when reading the last SDR record on a motherboard.
o Support Supermicro X10 OEM dimm events.

The world’s first mobile phone type crypto digital currency hardware cold wallet officially opened source code

Recently, the world's first mobile phone type crypto digital asset hardware cold wallet SAFEGEM officially opened source code [...] The cryptography-based blockchain technology is characterized by openness, transparency, and traceability. As an crypto digital asset management system based on blockchain applications, it should have the same characteristics and should have higher security. Therefore, the SAFEGEM development team decided to open up all source code, open source follows the GPL agreement, defines the business boundary, uses open source code for commercial use, and chooses not to open source.

Western Digital's Long Trip from Open Standards to Open Source Chips

It started as a microprocessor pioneer in the 1970s. Now, the company is charting a new course in open source silicon.

Excellent Free Books to Learn Go

Go is a compiled, statically typed programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. It’s a general purpose programming language with modern features, clean syntax and a robust well-documented common library, making it a good candidate to learn as your first programming language. While it borrows ideas from other languages such as Algol and C, it has a very different character. It’s sometimes described as a simple language.

Go is an open source project developed by a team at Google and many contributors from the open source community. Go’s first release was in 2009, and it’s distributed under a BSD-style license.

This article selects the best open source books that will give readers a firm foundation in developing Go applications.

Corner cases and exception types

Some unanticipated corner cases with Python's new "walrus" operator—described in our Python 3.8 overview—have cropped up recently. The problematic uses of the operator will be turned into errors before the final release, but just what exception should be raised came into question. It seems that the exception specified in the PEP for the operator may not really be the best choice, as a recent discussion hashed out.

Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp now used by 1750 CRAN packages

Since this morning, Rcpp stands at just over 1750 reverse-dependencies on CRAN. The graph on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo, but excluding Suggests) over time.

Rcpp was first released in November 2008. It probably cleared 50 packages around three years later in December 2011, 100 packages in January 2013, 200 packages in April 2014, and 300 packages in November 2014. It passed 400 packages in June 2015 (when I tweeted about it), 500 packages in late October 2015, 600 packages in March 2016, 700 packages last July 2016, 800 packages last October 2016, 900 packages early January 2017,
1000 packages in April 2017, 1250 packages in November 2017, and 1500 packages in November 2018. The chart extends to the very beginning via manually compiled data from CRANberries and checked with crandb. The next part uses manually saved entries. The core (and by far largest) part of the data set was generated semi-automatically via a short script appending updates to a small file-based backend. A list of packages using Rcpp is availble too.

Also displayed in the graph is the relative proportion of CRAN packages using Rcpp. The four per-cent hurdle was cleared just before useR! 2014 where I showed a similar graph (as two distinct graphs) in my invited talk. We passed five percent in December of 2014, six percent July of 2015, seven percent just before Christmas 2015, eight percent last summer, nine percent mid-December 2016, cracked ten percent in the summer of 2017 and eleven percent in 2018. We are currently at 11.83 percent: a little over one in nine packages. There is more detail in the chart: how CRAN seems to be pushing back more and removing more aggressively (which my CRANberries tracks but not in as much detail as it could), how the growth of Rcpp seems to be slowing somewhat outright and even more so as a proportion of CRAN – just like one would expect a growth curve to.

GSoC final report

The idea of this GSoC project was to implement new Domain-Specific language for LibreOffice to be used in UI testing by logging the user interactions with LO applications then generate the python code needed for the python UI framework which asaswill make testing easier. Also, the project aims to improve the logger that logs all the user interaction to be logged in the new DSL syntax to be more readable. Then we can use this replaying all the user interactions as a UI test.

Day 88 [Ed: Karina Passos on her time in KDE GSoC]

Today, I’ll talk about my GSoC experience and won’t focus so much on Khipu, even because i still have some things to do, so in the next days I’ll publish a post about Khipu and what I’ve done.

As I said in the old posts, the begin was the most complicated part for me. I made a project thinking that I’d be able to complete, I started studying the code and the things I’d make many weeks before the start. But I couldn’t understand the code and I think it’s my fault. I even lost three weeks after the start stuck in this situation. It was hard for me, because I was really scared about failing and at the same time dealing with my college stuff, because in Brazil, our summer (and our summer vacation), is in December-February, in July we have a three week vacation, but GSoC lasts three months. I wasn’t having a good time at college as well, but with the help of my therapist and my mentors I found a way to deal with the both things and as everything went well.

After this complicated start, to not fail, my mentor suggested that I could change my project. My initial project was to create new features to Khipu and Analitza (Khipu’s main library) to make it a better application and move it out from beta. Then, my new project was to refactor Khipu (using C++ and QML). I was scared because I didn’t know if I’d be able to complete it, but the simplicity of QML helped me a lot, and before the first evaluation (approx. two weeks after I decided my new project) I finished the interface, or at least most of it.

[...]

And, of course, I’d like to say to KDE, Google and my mentors: thanks for this opportunity.

How To Check Your IP Address in Ubuntu [Beginner’s Tip]

Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 Milestone 2 Released, OpenBenchmarking.org Serves 42 Millionth Download

The second development release of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 9.0-Asker is now available for testing.

Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 Milestone 2 continued evolving the brand new result viewer being introduced with PTS 9.0 and various new graphing visualizations. Various fixes and other improvements have landed into this new release. Screenshots and more details on the new result viewing experience soon.

Chris and Wes React to LINUX Unplugged | Jupiter Extras 3

Nothing is worse than your past self. So we play old clips of LINUX Unplugged and react.

Linux Mint 19.2 "Xfce" overview | Light, simple, efficient

In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Mint 19.2 "Xfce" and some of the applications pre-installed.

embedded computing mission-critical Linux

Aitech Defense Systems, Inc. in Chatsworth, Calif., has ported the open-source Linux operating system...

[...]

With the combination of the SDK and the SFF's modular expansion design, the Ai-RIO enables users to create custom embedded systems that offer high performance, design flexibility and low-cost development. The embedded computing system is available in both ruggedized military or space-qualified versions.

Embedded in San Diego

Starting tomorrow, Collabora will be exhibiting & speaking at Embedded Linux Conference North America (ELCNA) in San Diego, California. Co-located with the Open Source Summit North America, ELCNA is the premier vendor-neutral technical conference for companies and developers using embedded Linux.

If you are planning on attending either conference, make sure to stop by our booth to see what our team has been working on! This year, we'll be showcasing how Panfrost, the open source driver for Arm Mali GPUs, turns a RK3399 SoC (in this case, the versatile ROCK Pi 4), into a very attractive platform to try out Wayland on ARM devices.

Amazon DocumentDB Speeds Up With Slow Queries Logging

Amazon continues to add extra supports to its non-relational database store DocumentDB with the addition of slow queries logging.

Slow queries logging allows user to monitor their slowest queries in the cluster. This helps to improve overall performance of the cluster and the individual query.

Once the user has enabled a set profiler for the query the system will monitor operations and if any queries run longer than the customer-defined threshold, set at 100ms by default, the system will log their execution time and send an alert to the CloudWatch Logs.

Intel Icelake Thunderbolt Support Still Being Squared Away For Linux - Hopefully For 5.4

Intel Icelake laptops will soon be hitting store shelves and a vast majority of the Linux support has been squared away for many months. Unfortunately one bit still not mainlined is the Thunderbolt support.

Back in July we wrote about the Icelake Thunderbolt support still not merged yet while Icelake's Gen11 graphics and other new processor features have all been squared away for several kernel releases in ensuring good launch-day support. With Icelake, the Thunderbolt functionality has moved onto the SoC itself (sans the Thunderbolt power delivery) and that's taken additional time for getting the Linux kernel support in order.

OBS Studio 24.0 Will Let You Pause While Recording, Other New Options

For those using OBS Studio for cross-platform live-streaming and screen recording needs, OBS Studio 24.0 is on the way but out first is their release candidate to vet the new features coming into this big update.

Kontact and Google Integration Issues

Lately there were some issues with the Google integration in Kontact which caused that it is no longer possible to add new Google Calendar or Gmail account in Kontact because the log in process will fail. This is due to an oversight on our side which lead to Google blocking Kontact as it did not comply with Google’s policies. We are working on resolving the situation, but it will take a little bit.

Existing users should not be affected by this - if you already had Google Calendar or Gmail set up in Kontact, the sync should continue to work. It is only new accounts that cannot be created.

In case of Gmail the problem can mostly be worked around when setting up the IMAP account in KMail by selecting PLAIN authentication1 method in the Advanced tab and using your email and password. You may need to enable Less Secure Applications in your Google account settings in order to be able to log in with regular email address and password.

rpminspect-0.3 released

Released rpminspect-0.3 today with bugs reported and fixed during Flock Budapest 2019.

Kevin Fenzi: Flock 2019

Flock time is upon is! This time in lovely Budapest. As always when flock is in europe, it’s a long flight for me, but otherwise travel was uneventfull: Drive 2 hours to PDX, then PDX to AMS, then a short layover for coffee and stoupwaffles and then AMS to BUD, and finally a taxi ride to the hotel.

The hotel is quite lovely. It’s right next to the danube river and has a nice view. The AC is working nicely too (it’s quite hot outside here right now). After getting into the hotel yesterday and a quick dinner at a very nice place down the road, I managed to sleep for 10+ hours.

Design and Web team summary – 16 August 2019

This iteration was the Web & design team’s first iteration of the second half of our roadmap cycle, after returning from the mid-cycle roadmap sprint in Toronto 2 weeks ago.

Priorities have moved around a bit since before the cycle, and we made a good start on the new priorities for the next 3 months.

Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 592

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 592 for the week of August 11 – 17, 2019. The full version of this issue is available here.

KNOB attack: Is my Bluetooth device insecure?

A recent attack against Bluetooth, called KNOB, has been making waves last week. In essence, it allows an attacker to downgrade the security of a Bluetooth so much that it's possible for the attacker to break the encryption key and spy on all the traffic. The attack is so devastating that some have described it as the "stop using bluetooth" flaw.

This is my attempt at answering my own lingering questions about "can I still use Bluetooth now?" Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in Bluetooth at all, and just base this analysis on my own (limited) knowledge of the protocol, and some articles (including the paper) I read on the topic.

Dear sysadmins: Patch Webmin now – zero-day exploit emerges for potential hijack hole in server control panel

The bug appears to have been revealed on Saturday, August 10, by Özkan Mustafa Akkuş at DEF CON and to have been made available as an exploit in a module for the Metasploit framework. The Webmin maintainers didn't hear about it until Saturday, August 17, when they noticed people discussing the issue on Twitter and Reddit. The CVE was created Thursday, August 15.

Webmin has about 215,000 installations, according to a Shodan search (account required), and about 13,000 instances of the particularly vulnerable version 1.890.

[...]

According to Cooper, the malicious code was introduced into Webmin and Usermin through the project's build infrastructure. "We're still investigating how and when, but the exploitable code has never existed in our GitHub repositories, so we've rebuilt from git source on new infrastructure," he said.

In an email to The Register, Cooper said the malicious code – which appeared in the Sourceforge repo but not the GitHub repo – was introduced to Webmin on local package build infrastructure before it reached Sourceforge.

Backdoor found in Webmin, a popular web-based utility for managing Unix servers [Ed: No, it is not a backdoor and it's not there by design]