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today's leftovers

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  • [OpenMandriva] Additional desktop environments updated once again!

    I am pleased to announce that all currently the most popular desktops are available in the OpenMandriva repository and have been updated to the latest releases.

    So, if you don’t like the default Plasma 5, then you have option to use a different environment like Gnome, Cinnamon, Mate, Xfce, IceWM or i3. In addition @fedya has prepared Sway, and in the repository we can also find under the tutelage of @bero the LXQT and Lumina - both QT based environments. All desktop you can find in Cooker, Rolling* and in upcoming stable release Rock 4.1.

    [...]

    GNOME environment was updated to latest stable 3.34.3 along with most components that fall into this gtk stack.

  • Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 613

    Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 613 for the week of January 5 – 11, 2020. The full version of this issue is available here.

  • UVM gets $1 million from Google for open source research

    The school says the aim of the project is to broaden understanding of how people, teams and organizations thrive in technology-rich settings, particularly in open-source projects and communities.

  • Creative Commons and USAID Collaborate on Guide to Open Licensing

    Over the past two years, we’ve been working with USAID, the Global Book Alliance, the Global Digital Library, and the Global Reading Network on early childhood reading programs, with a focus on helping these programs to recognize the potential of open licensing to increase the reach and efficacy of resources that promote youth literacy. In the course of doing that work, we all realized that additional materials needed to be created for grantees of the programs to not only understand the open license grant requirements, but to undertake the practical steps of implementing open licenses. To respond to that need, we collaborated with USAID and the Global Reading Network to write and co-publish Open Licensing of Primary Grade Reading Materials: Considerations and Recommendations, a guide to open licenses that includes an introduction to the basics of copyright, an overview of the benefits of open licensing, and suggestions for choosing and implementing open licenses.

  • German Lawyer Niklas Plutte shares OSS tips

    Under the title « Open Source Software Recht: Große FAQ mit vielen Praxistipps” (in German language) the German lawyer Niklas Plutte (Rechtsanwalt) summarises the main questions related to open source licensing.

    In particular, the paper analyse how far open licences will produce a reciprocal (or copyleft) effect, meaning that in case or re-distribution of the program (as is, modified or in combination with other software) the copy, the modified or derivative work must be provided under the same licence and made available to the public in source code form, which could be shared and reused by anyone.

  • Cryptic Rumblings Ahead of First 2020 Patch Tuesday [iophk: why is Canonical not utilizing this already? Do they have too many microsofters inside the perimeter now?]

    According to sources, the vulnerability in question resides in a Windows component known as crypt32.dll, a Windows module that Microsoft says handles “certificate and cryptographic messaging functions in the CryptoAPI.” The Microsoft CryptoAPI provides services that enable developers to secure Windows-based applications using cryptography, and includes functionality for encrypting and decrypting data using digital certificates.

    A critical vulnerability in this Windows component could have wide-ranging security implications for a number of important Windows functions, including authentication on Windows desktops and servers, the protection of sensitive data handled by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer/Edge browsers, as well as a number of third-party applications and tools.

    Equally concerning, a flaw in crypt32.dll might also be abused to spoof the digital signature tied to a specific piece of software. Such a weakness could be exploited by attackers to make malware appear to be a benign program that was produced and signed by a legitimate software company.

  • Facebook Shares Its 2019 Year in Review for Open Source

    Facebook said it released 170 new open-source projects in 2019, bringing its total portfolio to 579 active repositories.

    Open-source developer advocate Dmitry Vinnik said in a blog post that the social network’s internal engineers contributed more than 82,000 commits in 2019, while some 2,500 external contributors committed over 32,000 changes.

    He added that almost 93,000 new people starred Facebook’s open-source projects last year.

  • Amazon accused of 'strip mining' open source software

    ust before the start of the festive season shut-down in mid-December, the New York Times published a long article accusing one of the world’s largest technology companies – Amazon – of nefarious business practices.

    Amazon reacted strongly, with Andi Gutmans, VP of Analytics and ElastiCache at Amazon Web Services (AWS) calling the NY Times article “skewed and misleading” as well as “silly and off-base”.

    Referring to open source companies that it said had complained about Amazon’s business practices, which included benefiting by integrating open source software pioneered by others into its own products, the NYTimes wrote: “Some of the companies have a phrase for what Amazon is doing: strip-mining software. By lifting other people’s innovations, trying to poach their engineers and profiting off what they made, Amazon is choking off the growth of would-be competitors and forcing them to reorient how they do business.”

  • Financial Services Firms Must Contribute More Software Repos, to Retain Staff and Stay Relevant [Ed: This article promotes the fiction that only code Microsoft controls counts as FOSS. It is a hostile and malicious takeover.]

    Does this tell us anything ? Overall, I was quite encouraged, but felt financial services firms in particular have more to do.

    My first observation regards firms not featuring on the list. Many Financial Services companies - banks, asset managers and other open source-consuming tier 1 hedge funds - are notable by their absence on Github, though in fairness some host repos elsewhere. While Goldman Sachs, for a long time active with Java, and JP Morgan are readily findable, many of their rivals sadly barely register. Kudos to those that have contributed, particularly the likes of Two Sigma and Man AHL, who have truly put money, time and effort where their mouths are.

    Vendors like Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters have found repos to be useful for promoting APIs to their databases, not unlike some internet services firm submissions represented in the list. They're doing well.

    Particularly pleasing for me were two "proprietary" software firms active in Financial Services, MathWorks and SAS, both releasing significant numbers of high calibre code repos, not least because I worked many years for one of them. Predictably, most repos from my former company are in their own proprietary though openly-viewable and editable language, MATLAB. For SAS, somewhat less predictably to my mind at least, more code submissions were in Python and JavaScript than SAS code itself. Kudos therefore to my former competitors at SAS ! It seems they understand the programming languages preferred by their staff's children and grandchildren, a bit like my using DuckDuckGo, chatting with gamers on Discord and shouting "boomer" at anyone over the age of 33.

  • Spotify Accidentally Leaks Details on Its Home Thing Smart Speaker

    A leak may have revealed Spotify’s upcoming foray into smart home speakers. New setup images for something called ‘Spotify Home Thing’ have appeared online.

  • Bay Staters Continue to Lead in Right to Repair, and EFF Is There to Help

    Massachusetts has long been a leader in the Right to Repair movement, thanks to a combination of principled lawmakers and a motivated citizenry that refuses to back down when well-heeled lobbyists subvert the legislative process.

    In 2012, Massachusetts became the first US state to enact Right to Repair legislation, with an automotive law that protected the right of drivers to get their cars repaired by independent mechanics if they preferred them to the manufacturers' service depots. Though wildly popular, it took the threat of a ballot initiative to get the legislature to act, an initiative that ultimately garnered 86% of the vote. The initiative led to strong protections for independent repair in Massachusetts and set the stage for a compromise agreement leading to better access to repair information for most of the country.

  • Enjoy this peaceful 4 hour long trailer for THE LONGING, a game that takes 400 days to beat

    A curious one this, a game that has a clock that counts down from 400 days as soon as you start it and you don't even need to play it to get to the ending, as time continues when you're not playing. I've played some slow games before but this is an all new kind of sloth.

    It's called THE LONGING and you play as Shade, the last lonely servant of a King who once ruled an underground kingdom. The King's powers have faded and he sleeps for 400 days to regain strength and you're supposed to stick around until he awakens. Announced today, Studio Seufz have now given it a release date of March 5 and you can see the wonderful four hour long trailer below. The trailer is obviously a joke, at how you can just sit around and do nothing.

  • Feral Interactive are asking what you want ported to Linux again

    Feral Interactive, the porting studio behind a lot of great games available on Linux are asking for some feedback again on where they should go next.

    In the past, they've teased how they feed port requests into "THE REQUESTINATOR". Looks like my number three from when they asked in November 2018 turned out okay with Shadow of the Tomb Raider. As always though, we want additional ports to buy and more varied titles to play through.

  • OpenStack’s Complicated Kubernetes Relationship

    2020 may be the year the OpenStack community comes to terms with Kubernetes

    As the open source community heads into 2020, loyalties between OpenStack and Kubernetes are likely to become increasingly divided. Contributors to open source projects are trying to determine where to prioritize their efforts, while IT organizations are wondering to what degree they will need a framework such as OpenStack to deploy Kubernetes.

    Most Kubernetes deployments thus far have been on top of open source virtual machines or commercial platforms from VMware. Most of those decisions have been driven by the need to isolate Kubernetes environments sharing the same infrastructure. In addition, many IT organizations lacked the tools or expertise required to manage Kubernetes natively, so it became easier to simply extend existing tools to manage Kubernetes as an extension of a virtual machine-based platform.

    The debate now is to what degree that approach will continue as organizations become first more familiar with native Kubernetes toolsets and alternative approaches to isolating workloads using lighter-weight virtual machines emerge.

    Lighter-weight alternatives to OpenStack and VMware for deploying Kubernetes clusters already exist, notes Rob Hirschfeld, CEO of RackN, a provider of an infrastructure automation platform based on open source Digital Rebar software.

    At the same time, managed service providers such as Mirantis have begun rolling out highly distributed services based on Kubernetes that make no use of OpenStack at all.

More in Tux Machines

digiKam 7.7.0 is released

After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release. Read more

Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand

Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech

The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world. Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility. Read more

today's howtos

  • How to install go1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04 – NextGenTips

    In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Ubuntu 22.04 Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions. Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.19beta on Ubuntu 22.04. Go 1.19beta1 is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.

  • molecule test: failed to connect to bus in systemd container - openQA bites

    Ansible Molecule is a project to help you test your ansible roles. I’m using molecule for automatically testing the ansible roles of geekoops.

  • How To Install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9 - idroot

    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on AlmaLinux 9. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a high-performance, highly scalable document-oriented NoSQL database. Unlike in SQL databases where data is stored in rows and columns inside tables, in MongoDB, data is structured in JSON-like format inside records which are referred to as documents. The open-source attribute of MongoDB as a database software makes it an ideal candidate for almost any database-related project. This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB NoSQL database on AlmaLinux 9. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

  • An introduction (and how-to) to Plugin Loader for the Steam Deck. - Invidious
  • Self-host a Ghost Blog With Traefik

    Ghost is a very popular open-source content management system. Started as an alternative to WordPress and it went on to become an alternative to Substack by focusing on membership and newsletter. The creators of Ghost offer managed Pro hosting but it may not fit everyone's budget. Alternatively, you can self-host it on your own cloud servers. On Linux handbook, we already have a guide on deploying Ghost with Docker in a reverse proxy setup. Instead of Ngnix reverse proxy, you can also use another software called Traefik with Docker. It is a popular open-source cloud-native application proxy, API Gateway, Edge-router, and more. I use Traefik to secure my websites using an SSL certificate obtained from Let's Encrypt. Once deployed, Traefik can automatically manage your certificates and their renewals. In this tutorial, I'll share the necessary steps for deploying a Ghost blog with Docker and Traefik.