today's leftovers

• The 6th gen Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon on Linux is facing sleep mode issues, unofficial patch available for a while [Ed: typical Lenovo.]

  A problem that has been spotted in early March has resurfaced on Twitter this week, and Lenovo pointed the troubled customer to the official forum. Sadly, the 18-page discussion about the X1 Carbon's inability to use deep sleep on Linux also reveals that Lenovo's machines are unable to use LTE and the fingerprint reader when running this operating system.

• Chrome OS' Files App Redesigned to Support Viewing of Android and Linux Files

  Chromium evangelist at Google François Beaufort announced today that the Files app of the Chrome OS operating system was recently redesigned to accommodate viewing of Android and Linux files. Apparently, Google's Chrome OS team is working on redesigning the Files app of the Linux-based Chrome OS operating system for Chromebooks with a new "My Files" section that promises to help you better organize your local files, including those from any Android and Linux apps you might have installed. As you can see in the attached screenshot, the new "My Files" section will include the Recent, Takeout, Shortcuts, My Files (Downloads, Google Play/Android Files, and Linux Files), External or Mounted Volumes, Images, Videos, Audio, Google Drive (My Drive, Shared with me, and Offline), as well as Add new services entries.

• Arrcus Launches New Networking Operating System Platform

  "We are taking advantage of legacy, while simultaneously eliminating the superfluous functionality and/or capabilities that are no longer relevant in a modern networking construct," Garg said. On the Northbound interfaces, what ArcOS has it an open standard based programmable API, that enables organization sto harmonize different operating conditions. On the south side with the interfaces that connect with the underlying hardware, Garg said taht Arrcus takes advantage of the Linux kernel. Arrcus adds its own Data Plane Adaptation Layer (DPAL), which is an intelligent hardware abstraction layer, which allows ArcOS to interface into the underlying merchant silicon. "We are a control plane solution and what that means is our product runs on the microprocessor that is contained in the switch or router hardware," Garg said. "The majority of those processors are Intel based, but our architecture also supports ARM, we're hardware agnostic at the system level we're also hardware agnostic at the component level."

• Slackware turns 25

  On July 16th, 1993, Slackware Linux distribution was officially released. Based entirely on the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) system, it was designed for the machines with a 3.5" boot floppy.

• Slackware, The Oldest Active Linux Distro, Turns 25

  On July 16th, 1993, Slackware Linux distribution was officially released. Based entirely on the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) system, it was designed for the machines with a 3.5” boot floppy. Over the past 25 years, Slackware has turned out to be one of the most influential Linux distros around. The very first releases of SUSE Linux and other open source pioneers were based on Slackware; its effect is also seen on other operating systems with “do it yourself” motto.

• PGP Clean Room Beta

  This summer I’m working on the PGP Clean Room Live CD project. The goal of this project is to make it easy to create and maintain an offline GPG key. It creates and backs up your GPG key to USB drives which can be stored in a safe place, and exports subkeys for you to use, either via an export USB or a PGP smartcard. It also allows you to sign other people’s keys, revoke your own keys, and change your keys expiration dates. The live system is built on

• Get productive on the Linux desktop with 7 essential apps

  The Linux desktop is not just for people who like to mess with computers. With a wide range of enterprise class productivity and collaboration tools Linux users can enjoy computing parity with their peers and colleagues running other popular desktop computing platforms. Here are 7 apps that will boost your productivity and you’ll also find an additional 20 bonus apps mentioned throughout this article for you to discover.

• How to Manage Multi-Cloud Services with Juju

  Managing a service with deployments in multi-cloud environments can be a challenge in terms of troubleshooting and scalability due to the complexity of dealing with different public cloud providers. An effective way to manage services deployed cross-cloud is to use tools that allow you to define your service once and deploy anywhere: in the cloud, on bare metal, or locally inside containers. In this blog post I am going to describe how the Canonical SRE team has achieved this, the tools that we use and the way we apply them to manage the Ubuntu Archive Mirror service.

• Dell XPS 13: Windows 10 vs. Linux Distribution Benchmarks

  Recently I have published benchmarks looking at Windows Server and FreeBSD against eight Linux distributions as well as a 9-way Linux desktop OS benchmark comparison while the latest in this string of fresh Linux distribution benchmarks is looking at the Linux laptop performance impact, if any, between these operating systems. Up for this benchmarking dance was Microsoft Windows 10, Windows 10 when running Ubuntu 18.04 via WSL, Ubuntu 18.04 itself, Fedora Workstation 28, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux.

Software, howtos and GNOME

• whowatch – Monitor Linux Users and Processes in Real Time

  whowatch is a simple, easy-to-use interactive who-like command line program for monitoring processes and users on a Linux system. It shows who is logged on to your system and what they are doing, in a similar fashion as the w command in real-time. It shows total number of users on the system and number of users per connection type (local, telnet, ssh and others). whowatch also shows system uptime and displays information such as user’s login name, tty, host, processes as well as the type of the connection.

• Notes/Domino is alive! Second beta of version 10 is imminent

  IBM’s effort to make its Notes/Domino platform relevant for the future kicks up a gear this week, as the company prepares a second beta of a new version 10. Notes combined messaging and an application development environment, which set hearts a-fluttering in the early-to-mid 1990s. IBM laid out a then-record $3bn to acquire Lotus, which invented Notes, and drove the product to great prominence. IBM re-branded Notes’ back end as Domino and kept the Notes name for the client. But once Microsoft launched Outlook, bound it to Exchange and web-based development took off, both faded. And faded and faded until October 2017 when IBM decided it had had enough and did a deal with HCL that saw the latter company pledge to take on future development work.

• Curse of the CSV monster

• Curl Command Examples

• How to Install and Use GIMP 2.10 on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• What is Hostname in Linux and How Can You Change It?

• How to install Ubuntu Minimal Server

• Five-or-More Modernisation - Progress Report

  Over the course of the past couple of months, I was able to achieve a promising progress in modernising Five or More, although I would have to say there is a fair share of aspects to tackle yet. I opted for rewriting the code module by module, without combining C and Vala code. There was was an old attempt to port Five or More to Vala, but I chose not to use it due to the fact that the partial port was 4 years old and it definitely needed an update, which might have taken quite some time, and might have produced some nasty bugs. While doing so, I paid extra attention to keep things nicely separated: all of the currently ported modules separate the game logic from the drawing logic and the UI. I also managed to port the app menu and the preferences window. However, due to the new design gudelines, which are currently only in the state of a proposal, the app menu might require future alterations.

• GUADEC18 Developer Center BoF Part 2: Possible Audiences

  This is Part 2 of a blog post series summarizing the Developer Center BoF. See also Part 1: The Developer Experience. Hi Again! As promised I will now cover our discussion of possible audiences at the GUADEC Developer Center BoF.

Red Hat Leftovers

• Optimized Clear Linux Kernel Now Available for Fedora 28 and Fedora Rawhide

  It’s interesting for Fedora developers, as there is a little bit of debate whether or not Clear Linux kernels actually improve performance in any significant way, or if its entirely negligible. For example, when Phoronix tried a Clear Linux kernel for Ubuntu, all they managed to achieve was decreased boot times, but nearly all other tests showed only minuscule gains compared to the stock Ubuntu kernel. Thus, its important to remember that finely-tuned kernels are only one small part of the overall puzzle. There are many other tweaks involved, particularly amongst the Intel development team working on Clear Linux, where they apply various packages to the kernel, and some vital components such as Glibc, GCC, and compiler optimizations revolving around LTO, FMV, and PGO.

• Red Hat discusses the road to digital transformation

  Recently at the Red Hat APAC partner conference, I had the opportunity to sit in on several keynotes. One of my favourite moments from the talks was when Red Hat discussed the road to digital transformation and why CIOs are often wary of taking the initial leap.

• When will the slump end? Deere & Company (DE), Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

• Susquehanna International Group Llp Cut Its Red Hat (RHT) Position; News – Class A (NWSA) SI Decreased By 0.54%

• Red Hat’s open source movement gains momentum; adds more vendors for greater predictability in open source licensing

• 14 firms join pact to give GPL violators time to comply

  Fourteen companies have joined a group of 10 others in pledging not to indulge in harsh tactics to enforce open-source licences and adopting a deal known as the GPL Co-operation Commitment. The 14 firms, listed by Red Hat in a statement on Monday, are Amazon, Arm, Canonical, GitLab, Intel Corporation, Liferay, Linaro, MariaDB, NEC, Pivotal, Royal Philips, SAS, Toyota and VMware. The Commitment was rolled out initially in November 2017, with Red Hat, IBM, Facebook and Google joining up. In March this year, CA Technologies, Cisco, HPE, Microsoft, SAP, and SUSE joined the group.

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