Games: Strange Loop Games and City Builder

• The perils of crowdfunding for Linux games: Eco edition

  When crowdfunding games, there's always a risk that something will go wrong. Sometimes games get cancelled, sometimes the Linux version gets cancelled and in the case of Eco from Strange Loop Games they're not exactly filling me with confidence.

• Humble Store have a nice City Builder sale going on this weekend

  Just a quick tip before it's over, Humble Store are currently doing a sale with a City Builder theme and it includes some great Linux games.

Debian GNU/Linux riscv64 port in mid 2019

As it can be seen in the first graph, perhaps with some difficulty, is that the percent of arch-dependent packages built for riscv64 (grey line) has been around or higher than 80% since mid 2018, just a few months after the port was added to the infrastructure. Given than the arch-dependent packages are about half of the Debian['s main, unstable] archive and that (in simple terms) arch-independent packages can be used by all ports (provided that the software that they rely on is present, e.g. a programming language interpreter), this means that around 90% of packages of the whole archive has been available for this architecture from early on.

Latest Security FUD

• Microsoft warns Azure customers of Exim worm [Ed: Microsoft should also warn "customers" of Windows back doors for the NSA, but it does not (this one was patched ages ago; the Microsoft back doors aren't). Shouldn't Microsoft ask its proxies and partners, as usual, to come up with buzzwords and logos and Web sites for bugs in FOSS, then talk about how FOSS is the end of the world?]

• Week in review: DevSecOps readiness, human bias in cybersecurity, Linux servers under attack [Ed: Actually, it's Exim -- not Linux -- under "attack" and it's only effective if one neglected to patch the bug for over a week]

• Common Hacker Tool Hit with Hackable Vulnerability [Ed: This is very difficult to exploit and may require tricking developers, but the media framed this as a total and utter disaster]

Software: Synapse, Qmmp and LibreOffice

• How to install and use Synapse, the MacOS Spotlight alternative for Linux

  Mac OS is everybody’s favorite, and there are several reasons behind it. One of the most useful utilities you can find on Mac OS is Spotlight, which makes searching for things a piece of cake, all directly from the desktop. While most developers have already designed similar utilities for Windows, the open-source Linux based operating systems are no exception, as well. Most Linux operating systems like Ubuntu have its own search functionality, but it can sometimes be troublesome to reach there and isn’t as powerful as Spotlight. So with Synapse for Linux, you can do just that, and boost the power of the search functionality on your system. With Synapse for Ubuntu, you can even search for things on the web, which is cool, as well. Some Linux distros like Lubuntu, don’t offer decent search functionality, and Synapse can be a great solution in such cases. With Synapse, searching is easy with just the navigation buttons on your keyboard, and you are ready to go. Synapse can be downloaded and installed from the Linux official repository. Synapse can also be configured to run on startup so that too don’t need to search for, and open Synapse, each time you need to use it.

• Qmmp 1.3.3 Released with Floating PulseAudio, ALSA, OSS4 Support

  Qmmp, Qt based audio player, released version 1.3.3 with improvements and bug fixes. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 18.10, Ubuntu 19.04.

• Office Suites for Ubuntu 18.04

  Today we are looking at different office suites for Ubuntu 18.04. LibreOffice is the default LibreOffice suite for Ubuntu but it is by all means not the only one. In this article, we will look at different office suites for Ubuntu and all of its pros and cons. All these Office Suites are available for at least all Ubuntu based distros, and the installation method is the same for all the Ubuntu based distros.

• Week 3 Report

  I continue working on Rewriting the logger messages with the new DSL grammar: