Misc
today's leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 25th of January 2021 05:11:17 PM Filed under
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OpenBSD KDE Status Report
But today we can be happy about an up-to-date KDE stack in OpenBSD. Currently - at the end of January - our stack is very up-to-date: [...]
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Beneath the code: SUSE Enterprise Linux construction mechanics - Open Source Insider
As every good developer knows, when you want to learn more about what a platform or tools provider is bringing through the release pipeline: ignore the news, delete the press releases, don’t look at the advertisements… read the coder blogs instead.
Microsoft’s MSDN has adopted this approach for most of the last decade and it is – very arguably – where the real meat (or plant-based protein substitutes with soya-enrichment) is.
Also well versed in this practice is German open source operating system softwarehaus SUSE.
[...]
Last but not least, Moutoussamy talks about the openSUSE community and how SUSE wants to share more than just code.
“So next we will talk about some of the underlying processes glueing everything together but also about the great tool we are using: Open Build Service (build) and openQA (test),” he concludes.
Can we imagine that one day, all technology vendors will talk about the way they actually build code and perform rollout cadence and express the need to balance open source community and commercial requirements in a product that still, ultimately, progresses forward year-on-year? We can dream, surely.
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Easy Version Control rollback device-tree files
It is still a mystery to me how they work, but they are needed by the Raspberry Pi, and, as I discovered, getting the latest is important.
However, with Easy Version Control, if we roll back to an older version of Easy, we should really roll back the device-tree also. Ditto when roll forward.
The current device-tree files are in /boot/device-tree, which you can view in a running Easy. These are actually located inside easy.sfs. So, if roll back or forward to a different easy.sfs, then extract the device-tree files out of easy.sfs and copy them to the boot partition.
That is what Easy Version Control now does. The modified scripts are /usr/local/easy_version/easy-update and easy-version-control. -
Iustin Pop: Raspbian/Raspberry PI OS with initrd
While Raspbian, ahem, Raspberry PI OS is mostly Debian, the biggest difference is the kernel, both in terms of code and packaging.
The packaging is weird since it needs to deal with the fact that there’s no bootloader per se, the firmware parses /boot/config.txt and depending on the setting of 64bit and/or kernel line, it loads a specific file. Normally, one of kernel7.img, kernel7l.img or kernel8.img. While this configuration file supports an initrd, it doesn’t have a clean way to associate an initrd with a kernel, but rather you have to (like for the actual kernel) settle on a hard-coded initrd name.
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Open-Source Apache CloudStack 4.15 Gets New Look
The mature open-source cloud infrastructure platform project gets a major update, boasting a new user interface and improved storage subsystem features.
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Perceived Relations Between Gopher Gemini and HTTP
This piece is written with the expectation that it will attract:
* Those who are Gopher and Gemini enthusiasts,
* Those who are the above and have the opinion I'm wrong,
* Or those who have heard the two and want to know a bit more about them and their relation to the current web. -
3 stress-free steps to tackling your task list
In prior years, this annual series covered individual apps. This year, we are looking at all-in-one solutions in addition to strategies to help in 2021. Welcome to day 14 of 21 Days of Productivity in 2021.
[...]
Even then, I had to break these tasks down into smaller pieces—download the software, configure NGINX, validate the installs…you get the idea. And that's OK. A plan, or set of tasks, is not set in stone and can be changed as needed.
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Taking The Full Measure Of Power Servers - IT Jungle
It is with that in mind that we turn to IBM’s server sales in the fourth quarter of 2020, which were reported on late last week. IBM’s overall revenues continue to slide as it shrinks and it divests itself of businesses, and even as it adds Red Hat to the mix. Sales across all product lines and geographies were off 6.5 percent to $20.37 billion, and after a $2.04 billion restructuring writeoff, net income was down by 63.1 percent to $1.36 billion. By the time IBM has spun off its NewCo managed infrastructure services business, which has about $19 billion in sales later this year, it will pare down to about $59 billion in sales for the remaining company.
Overall sales of servers, storage, switching to IBM’s direct end user customers and its channel were $2.5 billion, down 17.8 percent, and internal sales of this stuff to other IBM divisions accounted for another $196 million. Total System group sales, therefore, were just under $2.7 billion, down 16.8 percent, with the hardware being $2.09 billion and operating systems being $408 million. The System group had a pre-tax income of $455 million, off 43.3 percent year on year. Not a great quarter, but there was a tough compare to the System z15 launch at the end of 2019 for one thing and a global pandemic for another. Neither Arvind Krishna, IBM’s chief executive officer, nor James Kavanaugh, the company’s chief financial officer, had much to say about the Power Systems line, although as usual they did chat a bit about the System z mainframe. Power Systems sales were off 16 percent at constant currency, and System z sales were down 24 percent, with storage down 17 percent.
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Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part II
Less than a month ago, I began investigating the Apple M1 GPU in hopes of developing a free and open-source driver. This week, I’ve reached a second milestone: drawing a triangle with my own open-source code. The vertex and fragment shaders are handwritten in machine code, and I interface with the hardware via the IOKit kernel driver in an identical fashion to the system’s Metal userspace driver.
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today's leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 24th of January 2021 06:27:10 AM Filed under
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Running MS OFFICE on Linux - Is it enough to justify paying for Wine?
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FOSS Projects Live Off Community Support
If there's a project you like you don't just have to be a developer to help support and help that project grow, there are plenty of other ways in which a regular person can help out a FOSS project.
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Routing and Firewalling VLANS with FreeBSD
When first experimenting, it is important to start with something simple. It can sometimes be far too easy to model very complex setups and then have to spend a lot of time debugging to understand what is not configured correctly.
These example networks offer both an introduction on how to set up VNET jails with VLANs and show some of the power of their use. A production network built from this would want to give each jail its own file system, this step was skipped to make it easier to follow along.
The BSD Router project has an example VLAN and VNET multi-tennant set up on their website that includes multiple different virtual machine frameworks. This example is well worth study and this article has hopefully provided the background to help you understand how this network is set up.
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[Old] FreeBSD On A Raspberry Pi 4 With 4GB Of RAM
This is the story of how I managed to get FreeBSD running on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB of RAM, though I think the setup story is pretty similar for those with 2GB and 8GB.1
I also managed to get Rust built from source, (kind of) which is nice because the default Rust installer doesn’t seem to work for FreeBSD running on a Raspberry Pi.
If there’s anything awry with these steps, please contact me so I can fix it.
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GNU Linux – how to mount single disk failed RAID1
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Sylvain Beucler: Android Emulator Rebuild
Android Rebuilds provides freely-licensed builds of Android development tools from a Mountain View-based company.
The Emulator package moved to a separate component and build system.
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The Surprising Power of Business Experimentation
We’ve long associated innovation breakthroughs with science and technology coming out of R&D labs, e.g., the transistor, penicillin, DNA sequencing, TCP/IP protocols, and so on. Such major lab-based breakthroughs are at one end of the innovation spectrum. At the other end are market-facing innovations, whose purpose is to create appealing and intuitive user experiences, new business models, and compelling market-based strategies.
Lab-based innovations were generally born when scientists, mathematicians or engineers developed new theories, technologies, algorithms or programs in an R&D lab. Over time, often years, the innovations found their way to the marketplace. Since technology and markets advanced at a relatively slow pace, there was little pressure to reduce the transition times from lab to market. This was the prevailing innovation model through most of the 20th century.
It all started to change in the 1980s as the rate and pace of technology advances significantly accelerated. The hand-offs and elapsed times to take an innovation from lab to market were no longer competitive, especially with products based on fast changing digital technologies. Start-up companies significantly shortened the time-to-market for new products and services, putting huge pressure on companies still operating under the old rules.
These competitive pressures, were further exacerbated by the explosive growth of the Internet in the 1990s, as I personally learned when becoming general manager of the newly established IBM Internet Division in December of 1995. A lot was starting to happen around the Internet, but it was not clear where things were heading, and in particular what the implications would be to the world of business. With the Internet, there was no one technology or product you could work on in the labs that would make you a success in the marketplace. This time around, the strategy itself had to come from the marketplace, not the labs.
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SeaMonkey on Pi4 no longer freezes
Ans now SM is behaving nicely, no appreciable freezing. I am testing version 2.6.1, and playing around on youtube.com do get a segmentation fault sometimes. I can live with that, better than freezing. Running SM 2.53.5.1.
One other thing: The SM cache is in /root/.mozilla, not happy with this, as always trying to reduce writes to the drive. So have changed it to /tmp. SM creates a folder named /tmp/Cache2. In EasyOS, /tmp is a tmpfs, in RAM. The downside of this is the cache will be lost at shutdown. Probably an upside is a possible security benefit.
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Cameron Kaiser: TenFourFox FPR30 SPR1 available
With the Quad G5 now back in working order after the Floodgap Power Supply Kablooey of 2020, TenFourFox Feature Parity Release "30.1" (SPR 1) is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes).
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today's leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 23rd of January 2021 04:51:36 PM Filed under
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Skul: The Hero Slayer is a delightful repeatable head-swapping action rogue-lite out now
After being in Early Access since February 2020, SouthPAW Games have now released their head-swapping rogue-lite action platformer Skul: The Hero Slayer.
Taking place in a world where it seems that things are a bit backwards. The heroes appear to be going on a rampage, enslaving other creatures to help with their dirty work and destroy the demons once and for all. Everyone has been taken prisoner, except for you, a little little Skul. With action comparable to the likes of Dead Cells which I adore, and Hollow Knight, this is a rogue-lite you're going to want to keep on playing.
You're no ordinary fighter though, as you can swap your regular boring old skul with another. When you do this, you gain some pretty impressive abilities and there's quite a lot of different skul's to find. This makes it quite unique because it can end up being very different on each run.
[...]
I should note that the current build on Linux has an issue of a black screen instead of the main menu, although all it does it get you to click a button to load back into the game which does work so it's not a big problem. I've let the developer know.
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New release candidate: Tor 0.4.5.4-rc
There's a new release candidate available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.5.4-rc from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release likely around this coming Tuesday.
Tor 0.4.5.4-rc is the second release candidate in its series. It fixes several bugs present in previous releases.
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Must 'completely free' mean 'hard to install'? Newbie gripe sparks some soul-searching among Debian community
A post on the Debian developer list about issues installing the operating system on a laptop sparked a debate about whether Debian's free software principles have become a blocker to adoption.
Wanting to convert his laptop from Windows 10 to Debian, Dan Pal clicked "Download" on the Linux distro's homepage. It did not install because his wireless chipset was not supported. He succeeded eventually by downloading a DVD image, but had to hunt for it. "The current policy of hiding other versions of Debian is limiting the adoption of your OS by people like me who are interested in moving from Windows 10," he said.
There is a distributable driver for this wireless card but it is non-free, which means it is not officially part of Debian. It is a good principle, but works against users if it completely blocks installation.
The issue has been debated before. "I idly wonder if we could call it firmware and call it a day. I tried to propose that a bunch of times and was not successful," said a reply to the post.
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today's leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 22nd of January 2021 10:31:43 PM Filed under
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Daniel Stenberg: More on less curl memory
Back in September 2020 I wrote about my work to trim curl allocations done for FTP transfers. Now I’m back again on the memory use in curl topic, from a different angle.
This time, I learned about the awesome tool pahole, which can (among other things) show structs and their sizes from a built library – and when embracing this fun toy, I ran some scripts on a range of historic curl releases to get a sense of how we’re doing over time – memory size and memory allocations wise.
The task I set out to myself was: figure out how the sizes of key structs in curl have changed over time, and correlate that with the number and size of allocations done at run-time. To make sure that trimming down the size of a specific struct doesn’t just get allocated by another one instead, thus nullifying the gain. I want to make sure we’re not slowly degrading – and if we do, we should at least know about it!
Also: we keep developing curl at a fairly good pace and we’re adding features in almost every release. Some growth is to expected and should be tolerated I think. We also keep the build process very configurable so users with particular needs and requirements can switch off features and thus also gain memory.
[...]
The gain in 7.62.0 was mostly the removal of the default allocation of the upload buffer, which isn’t used in this test…
The current size tells me several things. We’re at a memory consumption level that is probably at its lowest point in the last decade – while at the same time having more features and being better than ever before. If we deduct the download buffer we have 30427 additional bytes allocated. Compare this to 7.50.0 which allocated 68089 bytes on top of the download buffer!
If I change my curl to use the smallest download buffer size allowed by libcurl (1KB) instead of the default 100KB, it ends up peaking at: 31451 bytes. That’s 37% of the memory needed by 7.50.0.
In my opinion, this is very good.
It might also be worth to reiterate that this is with a full featured libcurl build. We can shrink even further if we switch off undesired features or just go tiny-curl.
I hope this goes without saying, but of course all of this work has been done with the API and ABI still intact.
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Ubuntu Blog: Compact and Bijou
Snaps are designed to be self-contained packages of binaries, libraries and other assets. A snap might end up being quite bulky if the primary application it contains has many additional dependencies. This is a by-product of the snap needing to run on any Linux distribution where dependencies cannot always be expected to be installed.
This is offset by the snap being compressed on disk, and the Snap Store delivering delta updates rather than force a full download on each update. Furthermore the concept of “shared content” or “platform” snaps allows for common bundles of libraries to be installed only once and then reused across multiple snaps.
Typically in documentation we detail building snaps with the command line tool snapcraft. Snapcraft has logic to pull in and stage any required dependencies. We generally recommend using snapcraft because it helps automate things, and make the snapping process more reliable.
But what if your application has minimal, or no dependencies?. Your program might be a single binary written in a modern language like go or rust. Maybe it’s a simple shell or python script, which requires no additional dependencies. Well, there’s a couple of other interesting ways to build a snap we should look at.
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Dev Interview: Launching a career as an enterprise developer in Austin, Chapter 4
In our last Dev Interview chapter, our trio of young developers discussed what it was like joining the corporate world along with their first impressions. As a developer, you’ll often be part of a smaller squad or you may form your own squad around more personal reasons. Given Luc, Da-In and Diana all have recently moved to Austin and started working at IBM in the summer of 2019, it’s pretty natural for the three to bond together over shared experiences. And provide support to each other during such interesting times. Let’s see what Da-In, Diana, and Luc have been up to as they discuss some of the more personal aspects of life and office friendships in corporate America.
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CUPS-PDF | Print to PDF from any Application
I’m sure this isn’t new to anyone, certainly not to me but after using another operating system for a bit I was really annoyed and wanted to just highlight what a wonderful thing this “printer” is for openSUSE and any other Linux distribution, for that matter. Sometimes, I think it is good to reflect on the the great things we take for granted here in Linux land.
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Libre Arts - This is 2021: what's coming in free/libre software
The fork is just rebranding and no new features or UX fixes (unless removing the bell pepper brush is your idea of finally making it right for everyone), and then Glimpse-NX — at least for the public eye — exists only as UI mockups. They did get Bilal Elmoussaoui (GNOME team) to create Rust bindings to GEGL for them last autumn, but that’s all as far as I can tell.
So the current pace of the project is not very impressive (again, as a GIMP contributor, I’m biased) and I’m not sure how much we are going to see in 2021.
That said, I think having a whole new image editor based on GEGL would be lovely. I don’t see why Glimpse-NX couldn’t be that project. A proof-of-concept application that would load an image, apply a filter, and export it back sounds feasible. It’s something one could iterate upon. So maybe that’s how they are going to play it.
The fine folks over at Krita posted a 2020 report where they listed major challenges they will be facing this year: the completion of resources management rewrite that currently blocks v5.0 release, the port to Apple M1, the launching of a new development fund (akin to that of Blender), and more.
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This is 2021: what’s coming in free/libre software (Libre Arts)
Libre Arts (formerly Libre Graphics World) has posted a comprehensive survey of what 2021 might hold for a wide range of free content-creation software.
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today's leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 21st of January 2021 02:27:48 AM Filed under
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Adding Your Cringe Stickers To Matrix
Unlike discord, Matrix doesn't make you pay to use your own custom emotes or stickers, you just need to go and host them yourself. Luckily doing so is surprisignly [sic] easy and can be done for free.
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FLOSS Weekly 613: EteSync and Etebase - Tom Hacohen, EteSync and Etebase
Etebase is a set of client libraries and a server for building end-to-end encrypted applications. Tom Hacohen, who previously appeared on FLOSS Weekly episode 524 to talk about securely syncing contacts, calendars, tasks and notes with his product EteSync, is back to talk about his new baby: Etebase. This is a great discussion as more and more consumers and users are interested in encryption and securing their private information across all platforms they use today.
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My 10-year-old HP Pavilion doesn't boot modern distros anymore
I like round-number milestones. Especially if they allow one to showcase nice things. For example, sometime ago, I managed to revitalize my fairly ancient LG laptop by installing MX Linux on it. This restored a great deal of speed and nimbleness to the system, allowing it to remain modern and relevant for a bit longer.
Now that my HP machine has reached its double-digit age, I thought of upgrading its Linux system. At the moment, the machine dual-boots Windows 7 (indeed, relax) and Kubuntu 20.04. Things work reasonably well. Spec-wise, the 2010 laptop comes with a first-gen i5 processor, 4 GB of RAM, 7,200rpm hard disk, and Nvidia graphics. Technically, not bad at all, even today. Well, I decided to try some modern distro flavors, to see what gives.
[...]
Trawling through the online forums, I've found a few other mentions of similar problems. Of course, almost every legacy system issue is rather unique, so I can't draw any concrete conclusions here. But it does feel like Linux is leaving old stuff behind. 'Tis a paradox really. On one hand, Linux is well-known for being able to run (and pride itself for being able to do so) on ancient, low-end hardware. On the other hand, providing and maintaining support for an infinite amount of ancient systems is difficult.
And if you do recall my older content, I had a somewhat similar problem on my T42 laptop. Back when it had its tenth birthday, I booted it up after a long pause, and tried using Linux on it yet again. And I had problems finding Linux drivers for its ATI card - Windows drivers were easily and readily available. The problems aren't identical, but they are definitely indicative. Oh well. I may continue testing and playing with the old HP Pavilion, but I might not be able to really show you how well it carries into modern age. Hopefully, you found something useful in this wee sad article.
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Madeline Peck: January Blog Post (New Year New Bloggin!)
Today I actually also attended the super low key design team video chat, which involved a brain storm session for Fedora 35 that was exciting!
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Accessing the Public Cloud Update Infrastructure via a Proxy
SUSE provides public cloud customers with PAYG (Pay-As-You-Go) images on AWS, Azure, and GCP. Instances created from these images connect to a managed update infrastructure. So if you need to update your instances with the latest software updates or install that needed package using zypper, usually you can be assured that the underlying repositories are there with no further hassles. There are exceptions, though. Instances configured to utilize a proxy server or traverse firewalls, NAT gateways, proxies, security rules, Zscalar, or other security and network devices may run into problems. The purpose of this post is to address some of the more commonly occurring configuration issues seen with public cloud environments.
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How SUSE builds its Enterprise Linux distribution - PART 5 | SUSE Communities
This is the fifth blog of a series that provides insight into SUSE Linux Enterprise product development. You will get a first-hand overview of SUSE, the SLE products, what the engineering team does to tackle the challenges coming from the increasing pace of open source projects, and the new requirements from our customers, partners and business-related constraints.
[...]
Based on our joint schedule, openSUSE Leap and SLE have a predictable release time frame: a release every 12 months and a 6 months support overlap for the former and new release, thus when the time is ready a snapshot of openSUSE Tumbleweed is made and both openSUSE and SLE will use this snapshot to create our next distributions versions.
With this picture, we are not talking about our distribution per se yet, it’s only a pool of packages sources that we will use to build our respective distribution. But before going into how it’s built, note that it’s a simplified view because of course, there is always some back and forth between for instance openSUSE Leap/SLE and openSUSE Tumbleweed; it’s not just a one-way sync because during the development phase of our distributions, bugs are found and of course fixes are submitted back to Factory so openSUSE Tumbleweed also receives fixes from the process. For the sake of simplifying the picture we did not add these contributions as arrows.
Also at SUSE, Open source is in our genes so we have always contributed to openSUSE but, since 2017, our SUSE Release Team had enforce a rule called “Factory First Policy“, which force code submissions for SLE to be pushed to Factory first before it lands in SLE. This is a continuation of the “Upstream First” principle on the distribution level. It reduces maintenance effort and leverages the community. -
Valve have multiple games in development they will announce says Gabe Newell
Gabe Newell of Valve Software (Steam) recently spoke to 1 NEWS in New Zealand about everything that has been going on and teased a few fun details. For those who didn't know, Newell has been staying in New Zealand since early 2020 and decided to stay after a holiday when COVID-19 got much worse.
Newell continues to talk very highly of New Zealand, even somewhat jokingly mentioning that some Valve staffers appear to strongly want to move their work over there now too. Newell mentioned why there's no reason other game companies couldn't move to New Zealand, and joked how they're a producer of "not-stupidium" seemingly referring to how well New Zealand has dealt with COVID-19.
[...]
Nice to see they continue to keep Linux in their sights for games too with all their recent games (Artifact, Underlords and Half-Life: Alyx) all having Linux builds, although Alyx is not directly mentioned on the store page for Linux it is available.
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Vietnam joins Civilization VI in the next DLC for the New Frontier Pass on January 28
Firaxis has confirmed the next DLC that forms part of the New Frontier Pass for Civilization VI will be releasing on January 28. Here's some highlights of what's to come.
While the full details are yet to be released, Firaxis did a developer update video to tease some of it. There's going to be a new civilization with Vietnam joining the world, two new leaders for existing civilizations (China and Mongolia), a new "Monopolies and Corporations" game mode with expanded economic options which sounds really quite interesting.
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today's leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 20th of January 2021 09:00:31 PM Filed under
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Problem with Open-source Downloads
Open-source downloads not working currently due to disk system failure at our cloud service provider.
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How to Set Up Btrfs RAID – Linux Hint
Btrfs is a modern Copy-on-Write (CoW) filesystem with built-in RAID support. So, you do not need any third-party tools to create software RAIDs on a Btrfs filesystem.
The Btrfs filesystem keeps the filesystem metadata and data separately. You can use different RAID levels for the data and metadata at the same time. This is a major advantage of the Btrfs filesystem.This article shows you how to set up Btrfs RAIDs in the RAID-0, RAID-1, RAID-1C3, RAID-1C4, RAID-10, RAID-5, and RAID-6 configurations.
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How to Co-author Documents in Linux with ONLYOFFICE Docs
Document collaboration as the practice of multiple people working simultaneously on a single document is really important in today’s technologically advanced age. Using document collaboration tools, users can view, edit, and work simultaneously on a document without sending emailing attachments to each other all day. Document collaboration is sometimes called co-authoring. Real-time document co-authoring is not possible without special software.
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Chrome Releases: Stable Channel Update for Desktop
The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 88 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.
Chrome 88.0.4324.96 contains a number of fixes and improvements -- a list of changes is available in the log. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 88
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Chrome 88 Released With Security Fixes, Adobe Flash Removed - Phoronix
Google has released Chrome 88 as the latest stable version of their cross-platform web browser.
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mintCast 352.5 – One Night with Ulyssa
In our Innards section, we talk about the first 24 hours with Linux Mint 20.1
And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions
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today's leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 20th of January 2021 07:18:10 AM Filed under
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Ubuntu Fridge | Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 666
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 666 for the week of January 10 – 16, 2021.
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Simple-Mail Qt library 2.3 released
SimpleMail is a small Qt library for sending mails, this release makes sure it compiles fine with Qt6, and has some small issues fixed.
I thought this would give me a bit of work but was mostly changing CMakeLists.txt and including one header.
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Block spammers/abusive IPs with Pf-badhost in OpenBSD. A 'must have' security tool!
But how does it do all this? By periodically pulling IP addresses from well-known and well-respected spammer-IPs databases, where bad IP addresses are frequently logged (dangerous IPs reported by internet users) and stored.
Then adding all collected IP addresses to the PF firewall (as an IP-table) that is already active on your server (hopefully?), and through that way, prevents their access to your server. So sort of works with the PF firewall.
The blocklists are pulled from quality, trusted sources. The 'Spamhaus', 'Firehol', 'Emerging Threats' and 'Binary Defense' block lists are used as they are popular, regularly updated lists of the internet's most egregious offenders.
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Harder Butter Faster Stronger | LINUX Unplugged 389
We showcase a tool that will change your Linux game.
Plus our thoughts on the recent Btrfs FUD, a bunch of feedback, and a handy pick.
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Free Software Leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 20th of January 2021 07:14:58 AM Filed under
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linux.conf.au 2021 ~ 23-25 January 2021 ~ Online, Worldwide
SUSE is proud to be a Royal Penguin sponsor at the upcoming Australian Linux User Conference held virtually on the 23 – 25 January 2021.
In its 22nd year, the event focus is on Linux and the community built up around it and the values it represents. Being a technical conference, topics to be covered will vary from the Linux kernel’s inner workings to dealing with communities’ inner workings. -
One weekend, two conferences
Join us as our 2021 conference schedule gets underway this weekend with the virtual editions of linux.conf.au and MiniDebConf India! Collaborans will be giving talks on recent projects including futex2, pristine-lfs, apt-offline, and Open Source AI video analytics with Panfrost.
Sponsored by Collabora, linux.conf.au is "a conference with a focus on Linux and the community that has built up around it and the values that it represents. It is a deeply technical conference covering topics varying from the inner workings of the Linux kernel to the inner workings of dealing with communities". Held online from January 23-25, it be run in the Australian Eastern Daylight Time (UTC+11) timezone.
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The Apache CloudStack Project Releases Apache® CloudStack® v4.15
The Apache CloudStack Project announced today v4.15 of Apache® CloudStack®, the mature, turnkey Open Source enterprise Cloud orchestration platform.
Apache CloudStack is the proven, highly scalable IaaS platform of choice to rapidly and easily create private, public, and hybrid Cloud environments: it "just works".
Apache CloudStack powers mission-critical clouds for the world’s largest users and service providers, including Alcatel-Lucent, Apple, Autodesk, Bell Canada, BT, China Telecom, Dell, Disney, Fujitsu, Huawei, INRIA, Juniper Networks, Korea Telecom, Leaseweb, Melbourne University, Nokia, NTT, Orange, SAP, Schuberg Philis, Taiwan Mobile, Tata, TrendMicro, Verizon, WebMD, and countless others.
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10 ways big data and data science impacted the world in 2020
Big data’s one of many domains where open source shines. From open source alternatives for Google Analytics to new features in MySQL, 2020 brought several ways for open source enthusiasts to learn big data skills.
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Firefox Nightly: These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 86
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Chris H-C: Doubling the Speed of Windows Firefox Builds using sccache-dist
I’m one of the many users but few developers of Firefox on Windows. One of the biggest obstacles stopping me from doing more development on Windows instead of this beefy Linux desktop I have sitting under my table is how slow builds are.
Luckily, distributed compilation (and caching) using sccache is here to help. This post is a step-by-step version of the rather-more-scattered docs I found on the github repo and in Firefox’s documentation. Those guides are excellent and have all of the same information (though they forgot to remind me to put the ports on the url config variables), but they have to satisfy many audiences with many platforms and many use cases so I found myself having to switch between all three to get myself set up.
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Join the LibreOffice Team as a Development Mentor (m/f/d), 20-40h per week, remote (#202101-01)
The Document Foundation (TDF) is the non-profit entity behind the world's leading open source office suite, LibreOffice. We are truly passionate about free software, the open source culture and about bringing new companies and people with fresh ideas into our community, especially as we are about to enter the second decade of our project.
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today's leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 19th of January 2021 10:50:46 PM Filed under
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Parler Tricks: Making Software Disappear
Much has been written and broadcast about the recent actions from Google and Apple to remove the Parler app from their app stores. Apps get removed from these app stores all the time, but more than almost any past move by these companies, this one has brought the power Big Tech companies wield over everyone’s lives to the minds of every day people. Journalists have done a good job overall in presenting the challenges and concerns with this move, as well as addressing the censorship and anti-trust issues at play. If you want a good summary of the issues, I found Cory Doctorow’s post on the subject a great primer.
[...]
This is part of the article where Android users feel smug. After all, while much more of their data gets captured and sold than on iOS, in exchange they still (sometimes) have the option of rooting their phones and (sometimes) “sideloading” applications (installing applications outside of Google’s App Store). If Google bans an app, all a user has to do is follow a list of complicated (and often sketchy) procedures, sometimes involving disabling protections or installing sketchy software on another computer, and they can wrench back a bit of control over their phones. Of course in doing so they are disabling security features that are the foundation for the rest of Android security, at which point many Android security experts will throw up their hands and say “you’re on your own.”
[...]
The Librem 5 phone runs the same PureOS operating system as Librem laptops, and it features the PureOS Store which provides a curated list of applications known to work well on the phone’s screen. Even so, you can use the search function to find the full list of all available software in PureOS. After all, you might want that software to be available when you dock your Librem 5 to a larger screen.
We aim to provide software in the PureOS store that respects people’s freedom, security, and privacy and will audit software that’s included in the store with that in mind. That way people have a convenient way to discover software that not only works well on the phone but also respects them. Yet you are still free to install any third-party software outside of the PureOS Store that works on the phone, even if it’s proprietary software we don’t approve of.
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Apple Mulls Podcast Subscription Push Amid Spotify's Land Grab
The talks, first reported by The Information, have been ongoing since at least last fall, sources tell to The Hollywood Reporter, and ultimately could end up taking several different forms. Regardless, it’s clear that Tim Cook-led Apple — after spending the last two years watching rival-in-music-streaming Spotify invest hundreds of millions of dollars to align itself with some of the most prolific producers and most popular personalities in podcasting — is no longer content sitting on the sideline. “There’s a huge opportunity sitting under their nose with 1.4 million iOS devices globally,” says Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives, “and they don’t want to lose out.” Apple declined to comment about its podcasting plans.
Much of the growth of the podcasting industry over the last decade can be traced back to Apple and its former CEO Steve Jobs, who in 2005 declared that he was “bringing podcasting mainstream” by adding support for the medium to iTunes. A few years later, the company introduced a separate Podcasts app that quickly became the leading distribution platform for the medium. But Apple, which netted $275 billion in sales in fiscal 2020, has refrained from turning podcasting — still a relatively small industry that the Interactive Advertising Bureau estimated would bring in nearly $1 billion in U.S. advertising revenue last year — into a moneymaking venture.
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Blacks In Technology and The Linux Foundation Partner to Offer up to $100,000 in Training & Certification to Deserving Individuals [Ed: Linux Foundation exploits blacks for PR, even though it does just about nothing for blacks [1, 2]]
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, and The Blacks In Technology Foundation, the largest community of Black technologists globally, today announced the launch of a new scholarship program to help more Black individuals get started with an IT career.
Blacks in Technology will award 50 scholarships per quarter to promising individuals. The Linux Foundation will provide each of these recipients with a voucher to register for any Linux Foundation administered certification exam at no charge, such as the Linux Foundation Certified IT Associate, Certified Kubernetes Administrator, Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator and more. Associated online training courses will also be provided at no cost when available for the exam selected. Each recipient will additionally receive one-on-one coaching with a Blacks In Technology mentor each month to help them stay on track in preparing for their exam.
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the tragedy of gemini
While everything I have seen served via Gemini is friendly and sociable, the technical barriers of what-is-a-command-line and how-do-I-use-one are a fence put up that keep out the riffraff. Certainly, you can walk around the corner and go through the gate, but ultimately the geminiverse is lovely because it is underpopulated, slower-paced, and literate. It is difficult enough to access that those who can use it can be welcoming without worrying its smallness will be compromised.
The tragedy is that I don’t think many of its denizens would claim that they only want to hear from technical, educated people, but in order to use a small [Internet], an August [Internet], they have let the fence keep out anyone else.
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today's leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 18th of January 2021 09:17:06 PM Filed under
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Meetup Will Discuss Survey Results, Project Improvements
The openSUSE Project welcomes our followers to participate in two planned meetups to discuss results from the End of the Year Community Survey on Jan. 23 and Jan. 30.
Both sessions will start at 13:00 UTC on openSUSE’s Jitsi instance and go for 1:30 hours.
Members of the “let’s improve the openSUSE learning experience” initiative will share results and analysis from the survey.
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LF Edge Adds New Members
LF Edge has announced the addition of four new general members (FII, HCL, OpenNebula, and Robin.io) and one new Associate member (Shanghai Open Source Information Technology Association).
Additionally, Home Edge has released its third platform update with new Data Storage and Mult-NAT Edge Device Communications (MNDEC) features.
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Text Encoding Menu in 2021
In mid-January 2021, the Text Encoding menu in Firefox looks like this:
Automatic
Unicode
Western
Arabic (Windows)
Arabic (ISO)
Baltic (Windows)
Baltic (ISO)
Central European (Windows)
Central European (ISO)
Chinese, Simplified
Chinese, Traditional
Cyrillic (Windows)
Cyrillic (KOI8-U)
Cyrillic (KOI8-R)
Cyrillic (ISO)
Cyrillic (DOS)
Greek (Windows)
Greek (ISO)
Hebrew, Visual
Hebrew
Japanese
Korean
Thai
Turkish
Vietnamese[...]
For users who have telemetry enabled, we collect data about whether the item “Automatic” was used at least once in given Firefox subsession, whether an item other than “Automatic” was used at least once in a given Firefox subsession, and a characterization of how the encoding that is being overridden was determined (from HTTP, from meta, from chardetng running without the user triggering it, from chardetng as triggered by the user by having chosen “Automatic” previously, etc.). If things go well, the telemetry can be analyzed when Firefox 87 is released (i.e. when 86 has spent its time on the release channel). The current expectation for this is 2021-03-23.
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Wikipedia is twenty. It’s time to start covering it better. - Columbia Journalism Review
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Jimmy Wales: “Wikipedia is from a different era”
As the online encyclopedia turns 20-years-old, its founder reflects on the internet’s halcyon days.
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Fact check: As Wikipedia turns 20, how credible is it?
Wikipedia, which has been referred to as a world treasure, turns 20 on Friday. According to research conducted over the years — including a scientific study published by the journal Nature in 2005 and a report commissioned by the site's Wikimedia Foundation in 2012 — Wikipedia's entries are comparable in quality to those in prestigious encyclopedias such as Britannica. However, it is difficult to measure the consistency of information that can be altered at any time.
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Odin is finally pleased so the open-world survival game Valheim releases on February 2 | GamingOnLinux
Odin has finally had enough sacrifices and shall be releasing Valheim from Iron Gate AB will enter Early Access with Linux and Windows support on February 2.
What is it? A brutal multiplayer exploration and survival game set in a procedurally-generated purgatory inspired by viking culture. Battle, build, and conquer your way to a saga worthy of Odin’s patronage! With low-poly artwork and a very flexible building system it looks absolutely brilliant. The early builds they had available were seriously promising back in 2018 so I'm personally excited to see how far they've progress with it in that time.
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