Featuring a new flat UI while retaining the system-wide blur, Unity 7.6 promises major improvements like redesigned Unity Dash (app launcher) and HUD, as well as refreshed styles for dock’s menus and tooltips for a modern and slick look, and improved low graphics mode to make the Unity Dash faster.

The upcoming release also improves the app info and ratings in the Unity Dash preview, improves the “Empty Trash” button in Unity Dock to use the Nemo file manager instead of Nautilus, and lowers the RAM usage.

• Changes/StrongCryptoSettings3Forewarning1

  Cryptographic policies will be tightened in Fedora 38-39, SHA-1 signatures will no longer be trusted by default. Fedora 37 specifically doesn't come with any change of defaults, and this Fedora Change is an advance warning filed for extra visibility. Test your setup with FUTURE today and file bugs so you won't get bit by Fedora 38-39.

• Kubernetes backup with advanced cluster recovery for SUSE Rancher clusters | SUSE Communities

  SUSE Rancher includes a rancher-backup operator to easily backup, restore or migrate Rancher. However, for broad, ecosystem wide backup and disaster recovery, SUSE’s software development partners step in with application, data and workload-centric solutions addressing the needs of an entire Kubernetes computing landscape. Catalogic Software, a SUSE One Gold Innovate partner, delivers CloudCasa, a Kubernetes Backup and DR as a Service offering, and we’ve invited Catalogic to author a guest blog so you can learn more about their solution. ~Bret

• threads and libxcb, part 2

  I've been working on kopper recently, which is a complementary project to zink. Just as zink implements OpenGL in terms of Vulkan, kopper seeks to implement the GL window system bindings - like EGL and GLX - in terms of the Vulkan WSI extensions. There are several benefits to doing this, which I'll get into in a future post, but today's story is really about libX11 and libxcb.

  Yes, again.

  One important GLX feature is the ability to set the swap interval, which is how you get tear-free rendering by syncing buffer swaps to the vertical retrace. A swap interval of 1 is the typical case, where an image update happens once per frame. The Vulkan way to do this is to set the swapchain present mode to FIFO, since FIFO updates are implicitly synced to vblank. Mesa's WSI code for X11 uses a swapchain management thread for FIFO present modes. This thread is started from inside the vulkan driver, and it only uses libxcb to talk to the X server. But libGL is a libX11 client library, so in this scenario there is always an "xlib thread" as well.

  libX11 uses libxcb internally these days, because otherwise there would be no way to intermix xlib and xcb calls in the same process. But it does not use libxcb's reflection of the protocol, XGetGeometry does not call xcb_get_geometry for example. Instead, libxcb has an API to allow other code to take over the write side of the display socket, with a callback mechanism to get it back when another xcb client issues a request. The callback function libX11 uses here is straightforward: lock the Display, flush out any internally buffered requests, and return the sequence number of the last request written. Both libraries need this sequence number for various reasons internally, xcb for example uses it to make sure replies go back to the thread that issued the request.

• Hackaday Podcast 166: Engraving With The Sun, Explosive Welding, Juggling Chainsaws, And Torturing Wago Connectors

  Join Hackaday Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams and Staff Writer Dan Maloney as they dive into the last week of Hackaday articles. If you love things that go boom, you won’t want to miss the discussion about explosive welding. Ever use the sun to burn something with a magnifying glass? Now you can CNC that, if you dare. We’ll take a quick trip through the darkroom and look at analog-digital photography as well as a tactical enlarger you can build, watch someone do terrible things to Wago and Wago-adjacent connectors, and talk about how suborbital chainsaws can be leveraged into a mass storage medium. Not enough for you? Then don’t miss our bafflement at one corporation’s attitude toward 3D printing, the secret sauce of resin casting, and our rundown of the 2022 Sci-Fi Contest winners.

• GRAID SupremeRAID SR-1010: unleashes record-breaking 110GB/sec reads | TweakTown

  The huge 110GB/sec reads are also only in a Linux environment, and on a RAID 5, RAID 6, or RAID 10 array. If you are on a Windows environment then those super-fast read speeds drop rather significantly: 70GB/sec reads (versus 110GB/sec on Linux) and 35GB/sec reads (up from 25GB/sec on Linux).

• Weekly #LinuxPhone Update (17/2022): Plasma Mobile Gear 22.04, Nemo Mobile 0.9 and Phosh gesture support is inching closer!

  It's saturday, Linux App Summit is taking place. There's some bad news regarding open modem firmware and I am writing this in a train slowly but surely taking me to the sea for some time off.

• Self Hosted forum with phpBB and Raspberry PI

  King of self-hosted forum platforms, phpBB has a strong story and is spreadly used. As its name suggests, it is based on PHP and is so light that you can run your self-hosted forum with phpBB on Raspberry PI

  In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install phpBB and configure your very first topic on a cheap Raspberry PI Zero W.

  phpBB is an open-source (Licensed under the GPLv2) forum software, built with a bulletin board logic, that can link a group of people or can power an entire website. Its features can be extended using extensions that can be installed and configured with few clicks.
  PhpBB includes a customizable registration process for your users, allowing administrators to manage permissions up to a fine level.

• Improving the Stability and Reliability with a Modular Modem in the Librem 5 – Purism

  Usually we can fully rely on our phones to be reachable at any time—given cellular reception of course—and we take that for granted.

  You surely know situations in your life where that becomes especially critical. Be it when you’re expecting an important call or when you need to be able to receive “emergency” calls in general. The Librem 5 phone is the primary device for the majority of our team, therefore the stability and reliability for us is equally as important for us as our customers.

  The Librem 5 phone is a pretty exceptional device. It’s a general- purpose computer running the same software that laptops run. Plug in a cellular modem into a laptop and you have roughly the same thing in just a different form factor.

  One of the hardest things these days is to get a removable cellular modem card that does audio calls in the first place. It’s a tough market full of proprietary hardware and software where licensing requirements inhibit modems from doing audio calling. For the Librem 5 phone we found one but we can really consider ourselves fortunate as it was and will continue to be a supply chain challenge.

• DIY SBC cases and SBC Case Builder tool based on OpenSCAD - CNX Software

  Since you can’t always rely on single board computer (SBC) vendors to provide a case to match your needs, some went the DIY route. Willy Tarreau designed some laser-cut enclosures with Inkscape for various SBCs, while hominoids went a step further by developing the “SBC Case Builder” tool to automatically generate various types of 3D printable enclosures using OpenSCAD.

• Firmware updates, part 1: Bootloader

  This is the first post in a series about doing device firmware updates (DFU) over the air (OTA) and continuous delivery of firmware for embedded devices. We'll explore the different parts of a complete end-to-end system with this capability.

  This post will be about a fundamental component in such a system: the bootloader.

• Shedding light on power plant control networks

  Like all critical infrastructure sectors, the energy sector has become reliant on automation techniques to monitor and control its networks. However, not much is publicly known about these techniques or the networks that tend to use proprietary protocols and operate in closed settings.

  To address this knowledge gap, we at the Brandenburg University of Technology, recently conducted a project to study the design of industrial control networks that run power plants. Below are some of our key takeaways that we presented recently at PAM 2022.

• How effective is HTTPS/TLS usage in the consumer IoT ecosystem?

  Unfortunately, little is known about the degree of effectiveness with which IoT devices use TLS. What’s more worrisome is that TLS usage in other non-browser software has been found to be particularly problematic, with some experts calling it “the most dangerous code in the world”.

  To fill this knowledge gap, we at Northeastern University and IMDEA Networks studied ~17M TLS IoT device connections. The following post offers a brief snapshot of what we discovered and presented at IMC 2021.

• Arduino And Git: Two Views

  You can’t do much development without running into Git, the version control management system. Part of that is because so much code lives on GitHub which uses Git, although you don’t need to know anything about that if all you want to do is download code. [Dr. Torq] has a good primer on using Git with the Arduino IDE, if you need to get your toes wet.

The effort is currently only a pilot, but it represents the EU’s goal of supporting private and open-source software capable of rivaling mainstream social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. On the same day, the European Commission also launched an account for PeerTube, another decentralized platform that revolves around video sharing.