Essential Applications for GNU/Linux Users

So, you’ve made the switch from Windows or MacOSX to GNU/Linux, congratulations! There is a good chance that you’ve also installed a distribution like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Fedora, or perhaps Manjaro; and so you have a wide range of software already installed. However, There are a number of applications that don’t always ship by default, that I feel every user should have or at least be aware of, and some that people have by default but have not ventured to use; so I thought a list of essential applications was in order!

today's leftovers

• EV3DEV Lego Linux Updated

  The ev3dev Linux distribution got an update this month. The distribution targets the Lego EV3 which is a CPU Lego provides to drive their Mindstorm robots. The new release includes the most recent kernel and updates from Debian 8.8. It also contains tools needed for some Wi-Fi dongles and other updates.

• Purism Librem 13 / 15 Laptops Hit GA Status

  Purism has announced their privacy-minded Coreboot-friendly Librem laptops have reached a general availability state. Purism will now be holding an inventory of their Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops for quicker shipping rather than everything being made-to-order. While this means users will no longer need to wait "months" when ordering a Librem 13/15 laptop, it still doesn't sound like it will be a very quick turnaround time. Their press release announcing the GA state says, "will now arrive in user’s hands a few weeks after purchase."

• Linux is Running on Almost All of the Top 500 Supercomputers

  Linux is still running on more than 99% of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. Same as last year, 498 out of top 500 supercomputers run Linux while remaining 2 run Unix.

• Alioth moving toward pagure

  Since 2003, the Debian project has been running a server called Alioth to host source code version control systems. The server will hit the end of life of the Debian LTS release (Wheezy) next year; that deadline raised some questions regarding the plans for the server over the coming years. Naturally, that led to a discussion regarding possible replacements. In response, the current Alioth maintainer, Alexander Wirt, announced a sprint to migrate to pagure, a free-software "Git-centered forge" written in Python for the Fedora project, which LWN covered last year. Alioth currently runs FusionForge, previously known as GForge, which is the free-software fork of the SourceForge code base when that service closed its source in 2001. Alioth hosts source code repositories, mainly Git and Subversion (SVN) and, like other "forge" sites, also offers forums, issue trackers, and mailing list services. While other alternatives are still being evaluated, a consensus has emerged on a migration plan from FusionForage to a more modern and minimal platform based on pagure.

• elementary + GitHub

  We’re excited to finally say that elementary has completed our move and now lives on GitHub! We’ve migrated over 70 repositories from Launchpad and bzr. So what does that really mean?

• Ultimate Edition 5.4

  For those who like a visually enhanced form of Linux then Ultimate Edition 5.4 is for you. The graphics are extremely nice compared to other versions of Linux I have seen. With animated cursors and having a desktop called ‘Budgie’ the Operating System (OS) is visually pleasing.

• Google Summer of Code day 16

• Google Summer of Code day 17

• Running virt-controller locally

• How to install and use Monit on Ubuntu/Debian Linux server as process supervision tool

• AMDGPU VRAM Improvements Could Help DiRT Rally, Dying Light

  A patch series posted on Friday could help games suffering from visible video memory pressure when using the AMDGPU DRM driver. Independent developer John Brooks has posted a set of nine patches for improving the driver's performance when limited CPU-visible video memory is under pressure.

• Understanding Xwayland - Part 1 of 2

  In this week’s article for my ongoing Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project I planned on writing about the basic idea behind the project, but I reconsidered and decided to first give an overview on how Xwayland functions on a high-level and in the next week take a look at its inner workings in detail. The reason for that is, that there is not much Xwayland documentation available right now. So these two articles are meant to fill this void in order to give interested beginners a helping hand. And in two weeks I’ll catch up on explaining the project’s idea. [...] In the second part next week we’ll have a close look at the Xwayland code to see how Xwayland fills its role as an Xserver in regards to its X based clients and at the same time acts as a Wayland client when facing the Wayland compositor.

Flirting With Red Hat and Fedora Games Spin 25

• Q&A: Flying the open source flag

  Red Hat’s vice-president and general manager for the ASEAN region, Damien Wong, sheds light on the company’s strategy for tackling a market that is not used to paying for software

• Coming off a strong quarter, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst talks public clouds and containers

  Coming off a quarterly earnings report that shattered expectations, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst believes his company is as well-positioned to capitalize on the shift to cloud computing as it ever has been. Red Hat is in a very interesting place in 2017, with one foot in two different eras of enterprise computing but thriving in that position instead of feeling trapped. It still makes most of its money selling Red Hat Enterprise Linux to companies running their own data centers, but it has become the de facto leader of the OpenStack cloud computing project and has interesting DevOps products in Ansible (IT automation) and OpenShift (container management). On Tuesday, the company reported a 19 percent increase in both revenue and net income to $677 million and $73 million, respectively, during its first fiscal quarter of the year. Financial analysts, who peppered Whitehurst with more than their usual share of “Great quarter!” asides during a conference call, were expecting revenue of $648 million according to Marketwatch. The company also raised revenue guidance for its full fiscal year.

• Fedora Games Spin 25

  Fedora Games Spin can be downloaded from https://labs.fedoraproject.org/games/download/index.html. Here, you can choose from the 32- or 64-bit version of the OS. Download the version you need and save it to your hard disk.

Software: Calibre, juju, Wine, Castle Game Engine, Budgie and Latte Dock

• Calibre 3.1 Open-Source Ebook Manager Released with Support for RAR 5.0 Archives

  Last week's major Calibre 3.0 update made a lot of noise among the ebook community with its new support for reading books in-browser on your phone or tablet, and now developer Kovid Goyal announces the first point release to the series. Calibre 3.1 is out, and among the new features is ships with, we can mention support for reading RAR and CBR files compressed using the latest RAR 5.0 archiving format, a new option in the Tag browser to control the spacing between items, and new buttons to the Edit metadata dialog to easily set and clear the "Yes/No" columns.

• conjure-up dev summary for week 25

  We recently switched over to using a bundled LXD and with that change came a few hiccups in deployments. We've been monitoring the error reports coming in and have made several fixes to improve that journey. If you are one of the ones unable to deploy spells please give this release another go and get in touch with us if you still run into problems.

• Wine 2.11 Adds OpenGL Support in the Android Driver, Adobe Premiere Improvements

• Castle Game Engine 6.2 release

  We’re proud to announce the release of Castle Game Engine 6.2!

• Budgie Desktop User? Here’s 5 Applets You Should Be Using

  Are you a Budgie desktop user wanting to add a bit more functionality to your nimble, lightweight desktop? Well you can, by adding Budgie applets. Budgie applets are like little souped-up mini-apps that live in your panel. They provide additional features and functionality in an accessible and semi-uniform manner. You likely already have a small set of icons and applets nestled in the far reaches of your Budgie panel right now, such as the simple clock applet, Wi-Fi signal status, and volume control.

• Latte Dock Is Working On Wayland Support, New Features

  Latte Dock, the desktop dock based on KDE's Plasma Framework and Qt, is preparing for their next release at the end of August. Latte Dock 0.7 is expected to be the next major release of this dock and it's slated for availability by the end of August.

• Latte Dock accepts donations, what is coming...

  to cheer you up a bit for the upcoming 0.7 version which is scheduled for the end of August or maybe earlier ;) based on the effort...