Games: Fragment's Moonrise, Steam, Overcooked! 2 and Tropico 6

• Fragment's Moonrise is a free Early Access open-world strategy game

  With some promising ideas that could be great when further developed, Fragment's Moonrise is a new open-world real-time strategy game out now in Early Access. It's a little weird but the basic idea is pretty interesting. You control groups like you would in a traditional RTS, or perhaps more like a real-time tactics game and then upgrade like in an RPG. The genre blending here is what's interesting, while you explore a randomly generated world each time.

• Boiling Steam Does Steam Summer Sale 2020

  There are certain constants of summer for the Boiling Steam staff: heat, humidity, and of course the Steam Summer Sale. After all, nothing says the changing of seasons like a new Steam sale. Below are a few quick thoughts on some games we’ve picked up, as well as others we’ve played recently that we can recommend while they are on sale (until July 9th, 10am Pacific). SteamDB, IsThereAnyDeal, or CheapShark can help you figure out if the sale price is the best you can get.

• The 2020 Steam Summer Sale ends soon, here's some final picks

  Stuck for what to pick up? With the huge Steam Summer Sale ending tomorrow at 5PM UTC, here's a little helping hand for you on what's good. I get why you might be stuck, with well over six thousand games on Steam alone that support Linux, it's easy to get completely swallowed up in the vast sea of games. Especially true if you're looking to pick up a game on sale, as there's close to five thousand of those discounted!

• Suns Out, Buns Out is another awesome Overcooked! 2 update

  Get your fire extinguishers ready and try not to set your kitchen ablaze in the latest free content update to the co-op cooking game Overcooked! 2 with Suns Out, Buns Out. One of the absolute best co-op games on any platform, Overcooked! 2 just keeps on giving. While the base game is good and they have some fun DLC expansions, it's always nice to see some extra free content for everyone. In the Suns Out, Buns Out update which is out now you get more kitchens to play through, more recipes and a whole lot of fun.

• Tropico 6 gets a few new features plus a Linux release on GOG

  Want to take on the role of El Presidente? Well if you've been holding out for a Linux release on GOG we've got good news, plus it continues to be updated. Tropico 6 was released back in March 2019 going onto receiving some pretty good reviews overall and I certainly enjoyed it (and quite a bit more than Tropico 5 too). Sadly the GOG release had been missing a Linux build but it seemed to get quietly rolled out towards the end of last month!

Btrfs in Next Fedora

• Btrfs by default, the compression option

  Hi, The change proposal has a 'compression option' and we kinda need to get organized. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/BtrfsByDefault#Compression - Compression saves space, significantly reduces write amplification and therefore increases flash lifespan, and in some cases increases performance. - Desired but not a requirement of the change proposal. 1. Goal: probably the goal performance wise is to perform as good or better than now. Is it OK if there's a write time performance hit for a small percent of folks, for a high value target like usr that isn't updated that often, and is also updated out of band (offline updates typically, but also isn't something directly related to the daily workload)? How to decide this? 2. Benchmarking: this is hard. A simple tool for doing comparisons among algorithms on a specific bit of hardware is lzbench. https://github.com/inikep/lzbench How to compile on F32. https://github.com/inikep/lzbench/issues/69 But is that adequate? How do we confirm/deny on a wide variety of hardware that this meets the goal? And how is this test going to account for parallelization, and read ahead? Do we need a lot of data or is it adequate to get a sample "around the edges" (e.g. slow cpu fast drive; fast cpu slow drive; fast cpu fast drive; slow cpu slow drive). What algorithm? 3. Improvements and upgrades. We'll do plan A, but learn new things later, and come up with plan B. How do we get the plan A folks upgraded to plan B? Or just don't worry? 4. The whole file system (using a mount option) or curated (using an XATTR set on specific "high value" directories)? This part is elaborated below. A. do this with a mount option '-o compress=zstd:1' - dilemma: it doesn't always lead to equal or better performance. On some systems and workloads, write performance is slightly reduced. What about LZO? B. do this with per directory XATTR - dilemma: the target directories don't exist at install time, depending on whether the installation is rsync, rpm, or unsquashfs based. C. do the install with '-o compres=zstd', then set XATTR post-install - dilemma: the installed files won't have XATTR set, only new files inherit; does a 'dnf update' overwrite files and therefore the XATTR is not inherited, or are they new files and do inherit the XATTR? D. Which directories? Some may be outside of the installer's scope. /usr /var/lib/flatpak ~/.local/share/flatpak /var/lib/containers/ ~/.local/share/containers/ ~/.var ~/.cache (Plausible this list should be reversed. While compressing ~/.cache may not save much space, it's likely hammered with more changes than other locations, hence more benefit in terms of reducing write amplification.) For reference, the above is mostly from the description in the RFE bug attached to the feature's tracker bug. But I think it's best to have most discussion here and leave the bug for implementing+testing the implementation details. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1851276 Thanks, -- Chris Murphy

• Fedora Developers Evaluating Compression Options For Btrfs-By-Default Proposal

  The proposal for using Btrfs by default on the Fedora desktop is gaining a fair amount of traction and interest from the community and could possibly move ahead but further testing and decisions are still to be made. First of all, today marks a Fedora Btrfs test day for those wanting to help in evaluating this change proposal. Check it out if you have spare system(s) and interested in helping make the decision whether Fedora desktop spins should transition from EXT4 to Btrfs by default.

• Btrfs to be the Default Filesystem on Fedora? Fedora 33 Starts Testing Btrfs Switch

  While we’re months away from Fedora’s next stable release (Fedora 33), there are a few changes worth keeping tabs on. Among all the other accepted system-wide changes for Fedora 33, the proposal of having Btrfs as the default filesystem for desktop variants is the most interesting one.

today's howtos

• Change the Default Docker Subnet with SystemD

• How to push/send message to iOS and Android from Linux CLI

• How to Setup OpenNMS Network Monitoring Solution on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

• Labels and Selectors in Kubernetes

• How to Setup NGINX Ingress Controller in Kubernetes

• How to Install Jenkins on Ubuntu 20.04 with Nginx and SSL

• How to Increase SSH Connection Timeout in Linux

• Learn CentOS - Monitoring System Resources

• Linux password generator

• 7 Steps to Get Started with Git

• [Old] Learn X in Y minutes: Where X=M (MUMPS)

  M, or MUMPS (Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System) is a procedural language with a built-in NoSQL database. Or, it’s a database with an integrated language optimized for accessing and manipulating that database. A key feature of M is that accessing local variables in memory and persistent storage use the same basic syntax, so there’s no separate query language to remember. This makes it fast to program with, especially for beginners. M’s syntax was designed to be concise in an era where computer memory was expensive and limited. This concise style means that a lot more fits on one screen without scrolling.

  The M database is a hierarchical key-value store designed for high-throughput transaction processing. The database is organized into tree structures called “globals”, which are sparse data structures with parallels to modern formats like JSON.

  Originally designed in 1966 for the healthcare applications, M continues to be used widely by healthcare systems and financial institutions for high-throughput real-time applications.