Software and Games: Cloud Hypervisor, Joplin, Kodi, MuseScore, Bashtop, Grounded

• Intel Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9 Brings io_uring Block Device Support For Faster Performance

  Intel's Cloud Hypervisor focused on being a Rustlang-based hypervisor focused for cloud workloads is closing in on the 1.0 milestone. With this week's release of Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9 there is one very exciting feature in particular but also a lot of other interesting changes. 

• Joplin

  Joplin is a free, open source note taking and to-do application, which can handle a large number of notes organised into notebooks. The notes are searchable, can be copied, tagged and modified either from the applications directly or from your own text editor. The notes are in Markdown format. Notes exported from Evernote via .enex files can be imported into Joplin, including the formatted content (which is converted to Markdown), resources (images, attachments, etc.) and complete metadata (geolocation, updated time, created time, etc.). Plain Markdown files can also be imported. The notes can be synchronized with various cloud services including Nextcloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, WebDAV or the file system (for example with a network directory). When synchronizing the notes, notebooks, tags and other metadata are saved to plain text files which can be easily inspected, backed up and moved around.

         

• Kodi 19 Alpha 1 Released With AV1 Decoding, Many Other HTPC Improvements

  Kodi 19 "Matrix" Alpha 1 has been released for this very popular, cross-platform open-source HTPC software.  Kodi 19 is bringing many exciting improvements as a major update to this open-source home theater software. 

       

• Scorewriter MuseScore 3.5 Released with Chord Symbol Playback

  MuseScore, free music composition and notation software, released version 3.5 with long list of new features, bug fixes, and other improvements. MuseScore 3.5 contains one of the most requested features: Chord Symbol Playback. The feature is disabled by default so far. You can enable it by going to Edit > Preferences > Note Input.

       

• Bashtop: An Htop Like System Monitor But Much More Useful

  As cool as Htop there is one thing that it's seriously lacking in and that is system monitoring tools, this may not be a problem for you but if you want a system monitor than bashtop is a much better option to choose, it let's you do most of the process management stuff that you want from htop but it comes with things like hard drive usage, network usage and cpu usage statistics. 

• An Early Look at Grounded

  You’re in control of a child, who looks like he/she hasn’t entered the teenager years just yet. Among four different children — two boys and two girls — they’ve got a big problem: they’ve been shrunk to the size of an insect. Join them in their adventure — either by yourself or with a group of online friends — as they fight to survive in someone’s backyard, trying to build shelters whilst defending against bugs, and figure out why they’ve shrunk in the first place. Enter Grounded, developed by Obsidian Entertainment — the studio that brought us such titles as Pillars of Eternity, The Outer Worlds, and Star Wars: KOTOR2.

Fedora: LTO, Nest and More

• Fedora 33 Moving Closer To LTO-Optimizing Packages

  Going back to last year Fedora has been working to enable link-time optimizations by default for their packages. That goal wasn't achieved for Fedora 32 but for Fedora 33 this autumn they still have chances of marking that feature off their TODO list.  LTO'ing the Fedora package set can offer not only performance advantages but in some cases smaller binaries as well. This is all about applying the compiler optimizations at link-time on the binary as a whole for yielding often sizable performance benefits and other optimizations not otherwise possible. LTO is great as we often show in benchmarks, especially in the latest GCC and LLVM Clang compilers. 

• Zamir SUN: Report for session 1 of FZUG @ Nest with Fedora

  Last month, Alick suggested the Fedora Zhongwen User Group (FZUG) can do a online meetup during Nest with Fedora. And based on the survey, people registered for two time slots, the first one is 9:00 PM Saturday evening UTC+8 which is not a good time for Alick, so I take up the coordinating role for this session. As for the tool, we decided to use Jitsi, as it should work fine for most of us and do not have any limitations. What’s more, it’s totally open source. During the meeting, I firstly introduced Nest with Fedora and it’s previous offline version, Flock to Fedora, to the attendees. It’s interesting to see that during the past years, we not only have new users in China, but also new contributors. One attendee shares that his motivation of being a packager is that deploying packages for their research in the lab is cumbersome before. So he decided to package all into Fedora and then he can just simply install them on every machine. It is good to know that people contribute back because they want to solve their own problems. Maybe this can be a talking point to attract more contributors in the future. After the self introduction, we continue by sharing our interesting stores with Linux. That is a lot of fun.

• Jon Chiappetta: Last piece of relay software needed for my home bridged network

  If you are running a bridged/relayd network with macs on it you may need to also forward the multicast broadcasts (mDNS related) that allow the devices to automatically discover each other. On the WRT wifi client side, there is a pkg called avahi-daemon and you can configure to operate in “reflector” mode to forward these broadcasts across the specified interfaces. Running this service along with the dhcprb C program which takes care of layer 2 arp requests & dhcp gateway forwarding has been pretty smooth so far!

Perl Programming: Exercises and DocKnot Release

• The [Perl] Weekly Challenge #072

  I am glad, this week focus was more Array/List related. Technical speaking Array and List aren’t the same in Perl. I must admit until I read the article by brian d foy, I thought they were the same. As the famous saying, you learn something new every day.

• Perl Weekly Challenge 72: One-Liners for Trailing Zeros and Line Ranges

  These are some answers to the Week 72 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar. Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few hours. This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

• Russ Allbery: DocKnot 3.05

  I keep telling myself that the next release of DocKnot will be the one where I convert everything to YAML and then feel confident about uploading it to Debian, and then I keep finding one more thing to fix to release another package I'm working on. Anyway, this is the package I use to generate software documentation and, in the long run, will subsume my static web site generator and software release workflow. This release tweaks a heuristic for wrapping paragraphs in text documents, fixes the status badge for software with Debian packages to do what I had intended, and updates dependencies based on the advice of Perl::Critic::Freenode.

Review: Zentyal Server 6.2

Zentyal is an Ubuntu-based server distribution which is designed to be easy to set up and then manage using a friendly, web-based interface. The distribution targets small and medium office and business environments. The Zentyal distribution is intended to take on such tasks a as a storage server, Internet gateway, or to provide other office IT infrastructure - all through a convenient, point-n-click web portal. The latest version of Zentyal is based on Ubuntu 18.04.4 and mostly features minor updates. There are new anti-virus packages, improved DNS management, easier management of hard drives, and the AppArmor security software is enabled by default. The download for Zentyal is 1GB in size and is available for 64-bit (x86_64) machines only. Booting from the install media brings up a menu asking us to select our preferred language from a list. Then we are given the choice of wiping the hard drive and installing Zentyal or launching an expert installer. Both menu options launch a text-based installer which should be familiar to people who have set up Ubuntu Server or used Debian's text installer. [...] After my second failed attempt at using Zentyal, and some troubleshooting, I came to the realization the distribution was not going to work as expected and put it aside. According to the documentation, I should be able to simply install the distribution and connect to it using a web browser, but this did not work, either locally or over the LAN. This was disappointing as I have used Zentyal in the past and generally had positive experiences with it. I've even recommended the distribution to a few people who wanted to run a light office server with an easy, point-n-click interface. I have three theories as to why Zentyal did not work for me this time around. One is that the documentation is out of date (or updated in places I'm not looking) and additional steps are now required to set up the web portal service. The second is that there is a bug in the web portal software that is preventing it from running. Personally, I suspect neither of these are true and, instead, something (or multiple somethings) are going wrong during the setup phase. While the installer appears to finish copying its files to my hard drive and reports it is done, the fact the system does not shut down cleanly afterwards suggests something is not finished in the background. The shutdown services never conclude and, while disk and CPU activity was virtually non-existent all twenty minutes I waited, I suspect additional configuration steps were supposed to be happening during that time. It is hard to say for certain though since no status messages are displayed and the installer claims to be finished. I would also consider it odd for services to be enabled during the shutdown phase of the live media, but stranger things have happened. Whatever the case, Zentyal did not work for me and, unfortunately, did not display any errors or status messages which would help explain why. The documentation, while normally helpful, did not offer any tips to help me get going. In the past Zentyal has proven to be easy for me to use, but this version has left me with a server-sized void to fill.