Most people are familiar with the term “DevOps,” but they don’t know how to really utilize it. There’s more to DevOps than just development and operational teams. There’s an essential element of DevOps that is often missing from the equation; IT security. Security should be included in the lifecycle of apps.  The reason you need to include security is that security was once assigned to one team that integrated security near the end-stages of development. Taking such a lax approach to security wasn’t such a problem when apps were developed in months or years. The average development cycle has changed quite a bit, though, and apps can be developed in a matter of days or weeks. Outdated security practices like leaving security too late can bring DevOps initiatives to their knees. 

Starting with good news, the Meson Manual has been updated to a third edition. In addition to the usual set of typo fixes, there is an entirely new chapter on converting projects from an existing build system to Meson. Not only are there tips and tricks on each part of the conversion, there is even guidance on how to get it done on projects that are too big to be converted in one go.

Percepio announced the availability of Tracealyzer version 4.4 with support for embedded Linux. Tracealyzer gives developers insight during software debugging and verification at the system level by enabling visual exploratory analysis from the top down. This makes the software suitable for spotting issues during full system testing and drill down into the details to find the cause. Version 4.4 adds several views optimized for Linux tracing, in addition to a set of visualizations already in Tracealyzer, and leverages Common Trace Format (CTF) and the widely supported LTTng, an open source tracing framework.

LLVM has merged an experimental MLIR-based SPIR-V CPU runner that the developers are working towards being able to handle CPU-based execution of GPU kernels.  This new SPIR-V runner is built around the MLIR intermediate representation (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation) with a focus of going from GPU-focused code translated through SPIR-V and to LLVM and then executed on the CPU. The runner focus is similar to that of the MLIR-based runners for NVIDIA CUDA, AMD ROCm, and Vulkan, but just executing on the CPU itself. It was earlier this year LLVM added the MLIR-Vulkan-Runner for handling MLIR on Vulkan hardware. 

Python supports a wide range of arithmetic operators that you can use when working with numbers in your code. One of these operators is the modulo operator (%), which returns the remainder of dividing two numbers.

Wearable technology is not just smart consumer devices like watches and activity trackers. Wearable tech also includes one off projects by designers, makers, and hackers and there are more and more people producing tutorials on how to get started. Wearable tech is also a great way to get both kids and adults excited about coding, electronics, and in general, engineering skills. Sophy Wong is a designer who makes really cool stuff using code, technology, costuming, soldering, and even jewelry techniques to get tech onto the human body.

Some days ago, Dunja Lalic rewrote the continuous integration scripts to be much faster. A complete pipeline used to take about 90 minutes to run, now it takes about 15 minutes on average. [...] The most complicated thing to port was the reference tests. These are the most important ones; each test loads an SVG document, renders it, and compares the result to a reference PNG image. There are some complications in the tests; they have to create a special configuration for Fontconfig and Pango, so as to have reproducible font rendering. The pango-rs bindings do not cover this part of Pango, so we had to do some things by hand.

As I continue to describe in different postings how the ARM32 start-up sequence works, it becomes necessary to explain in-depth the basic kernel concepts around page tables and how it is implemented on ARM32 platforms. To understand the paging setup, we need to repeat and extend some Linux paging lingo. Some good background is to read Mel Gormans description of the Linux page tables from his book “Understanding the Linux Virtual Memory Manager”. This book was published in 2007 and is based on Mel’s PhD thesis from 2003. Some stuff has happened in the 13 years since then, but the basics still hold. It is necessary to also understand the new layers in the page tables such as the five layers of page tables currently used in the Linux kernel. First a primer: the ARM32 architecture with a classic MMU has 2 levels of page tables and the more recent LPAE (Large Physical Address Extension) MMU has 3 levels of page tables. Only some of the ARMv7 architectures have LPAE, and it is only conditionally enabled, i.e. the machines can also use the classic MMU if they want, they have both. It is not enabled by default on the multi_v7 configuration: your machine has to explicitly turn it on during compilation. The layout is so different that the same binary image can never support both classic and LPAE MMU in the same kernel image.

Today we are excited to announce the launch of a read/write API for our Open Source Hardware Certification program. This API will make it easier to apply for certification directly from where you already document your hardware, as well as empower research, visualizations, and explorations of currently certified hardware. OSHWA’s Open Source Hardware Certification program has long been an easy way for creators and users alike to identify hardware that complies with the community definition of open source hardware. Since its creation in 2016, this free program has certified hardware from over 45 countries on every continent except Antarctica. Whenever you see the certification logo on hardware:

Possibly you are an artist or a graphic designer and you have created a beautiful presentation template using shapes, images and your great talent. Like these Indonesian people from that site.  All templatess look very good. Really, I much like it. But if you'll download for example that template, then (after unzipping) you'll see that its size is 16 mb! And it's only a presentation template! Without any your data, images, tables or charts! It's too much anyway.

We’ve edited and uploaded the first batch of videos from our recent joint conference. Here’s the playlist – use the button in the top-right corner to switch videos: Please confirm that you want to play a YouTube video. By accepting, you will be accessing content from YouTube, a service provided by an external third party.

At the openSUSE + LibreOffice Virtual Conference I had the opportunity to give a talk about “On sessions, statutes and software – A glimpse behind the scenes at TDF”.

I will admit that the original Monster Prom is something special as it remains as the only dating sim type of game I've enjoyed, and now there's a brand new helping of it out with Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp. The original was an unexpected pleasure for me, as a genre I've rarely been able to enjoy. Let's face it, "In Monster Prom I was rejected even after letting a princess ride me", is not a typical GamingOnLinux headline. Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp was funded thanks to a Kickstarter campaign back in 2019, and it has released as of October 23 along with full Linux support as expected. Developer Beautiful Glitch mentioned how they've pretty much taken all that was tasty from the original, and threw in some spices to make Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp.

Releasing with Linux support on November 5 is Möbius Front '83 latest title from Zachtronics (SpaceChem, Infinifactory, Opus Magnum, Eliza). Unlike most of their previous titles, it's not a puzzle game. They say it's actually a conventional strategy game designed from scratch by the clever minds at Zachtronics, so it will have their own special feel to it. "The year is 1983 and the United States of America must defend itself from an enemy it could have never imagined— an America from an alternate universe that will stop at nothing to seize control of the country’s heartland!"

League Of Legends is a game made into a snap, meaning that the software package can be installed and executed across different Linux distributions. Being among the largest footprints of any game in streaming media communities on platforms like Twitch and YouTube, installing it in your Linux system will be great. For our case, we will install it in Ubuntu distro.