KDE and GNOME: Kubuntu 18.04 Reviewed, Akademy, Cutelyst and GUADEC
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Kubuntu Linux has been my preferred Linux distribution for more than 10 years. My attraction to the KDE desktop and associated application set, has drawn from Kubuntu user, to a tester, teacher, developer, community manager and councilor. I feel really privileged to be part of, what can only be described as, a remarkable example of the free software, and community development of an exceptional product.
This latest release 18.04, effectively the April 2018 release, is a major milestone. It is the first LTS Long Term Support release of Kubuntu running the “Plasma 5” desktop.
The improvements are so considerable, in both performance and modern user interface ( UI ) design, that I was really excited about wanting to tell the world about it.
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Happy to participate in a tradition I’ve admired from afar but never been able to do myself… until this year. My tickets are bought, my passport is issued, and I’m going to Akademy! Hope to see you all there!
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Cutelyst, a C++ web framework based on Qt, has a new release. The update includes several bug fixes and some build issues with buildroot. See Dantti's Blog for all the details. Cutelyst is available on GitHub.
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At this year’s GUADEC in Almería we had a team of volunteers recording the talks in the second room. This was organized very last minute as initially the University were going to do this, but thanks to various efforts (thanks in particular to Adrien Plazas and Bin Li) we managed to record nearly all the talks. There were some issues with sound on both the Friday and Saturday, which Britt Yazel has done his best to overcome using science, and we are now ready to edit and upload the 19 talks that took place in the 2nd room.
To bring you the videos from last year we had a team of 5 volunteers from the local team who spent our whole weekend in the Codethink offices. (Although none of us had much prior video editing experience so the morning of the first day was largely spent trying out different video editors to see which had the features we needed and could run without crashing too often… and the afternoon was mostly figuring out how transitions worked in Kdenlive).
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This year I attended my second GUADEC in beautiful Almería, Spain. As with the last one I had the opportunity to meet many new people from the extended GNOME community which is always great and I can’t recommend it enough for anybody involved in the project.
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Flatpak continues to have a lot of healthy discussions at these events. @matthiasclasen made a post summarizing the BoF so check that out for the discussions of the soon landing 1.0 release.
So lets start with the Freedesktop 18.07 (date based versioning now!) runtime which is in a much better place than 1.6 and will be solving lots of problems such as multi-arch support and just long term maintainability. I was really pleased to see all of the investment in BuildStream and the runtime from CodeThink which is really needed in the long term.
| Red Hat and Fedora
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We are excited to announce the General Availability release of Red Hat JBoss Web Server 5.0 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Other platforms are will be released shortly. This release includes a technology preview of transactions processing through Narayana. JBoss Web Server 5 is available in the ZIP or RPM format from the JBoss Web Server 5.0 Maven repository and Container Catalog.
JBoss Web Server combines market-leading open source technologies with enterprise capabilities to provide a single solution for large-scale websites and lightweight web applications. It combines the world’s most deployed web server (Apache) with the top servlet engine (Tomcat) and the best support in middleware (from Red Hat).
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Android: Video Editors, Antitrust/Forks, and Fuchsia OS
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Look, you’re never going to be able to replace a full video editor on your computer with one on your phone, but KineMaster makes a good case for it.
With KineMaster, you can lay down multiple layers and add effects, trim clips on a frame-by-frame basis, tweak lighting, add audio, and a lot more. It really is the most desktop-like video editor on Android.
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Or if not thousands, then at least a good few. Alternative Androids like FireOS or Lineage OS (formerly CyanogenMod) would become a much more familiar sight.
| OSS Leftovers
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Mitre will deploy an open source tool to assess the cybersecurity capabilities of eight companies and subsequently release findings in October as part of an initiative by the nonprofit research organization, ExecutiveBiz reported Thursday.
The Washington Business Journal reported Tuesday that Mitre will utilize its Adversarial Tactics, Techniques and Common Knowledge platform to help conduct evaluations on the cyber offerings of Carbon Black (Nasdaq: CBLK), CounterTack, CrowdStrike, Cylance, Endgame, Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), RSA and SentinelOne.
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Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform to publish, store, subscribe, and process the records. Kafka is broadly used for real-time streaming of the data between systems or applications.
There are various applications in which Kafka is used like samza and confluent for Real-time Financial Alerts. Big brand names like The NewYork Times, Pinterest, Zalando, Rabobank, LINE, trivago are few of them who are using Kafka.
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Open source might be a relatively new trend in telecom, but it’s been around at least 20 years, and that’s something OSCON 2018 organizers want to make sure attendees here are aware.
The open source convention known as OSCON hosts developers, IT managers, system administrators and just plain geeks who want to learn the latest in blockchain, Kubernetes or other technical arenas and hear inspiring stories about open source. The convention is back in Portland this week after having been held in Austin, Texas, the past two years.
In telecom, operators want their vendors to deliver based on open source platforms. Various initiatives are under way, but not every vendor is rushing to the party. Through the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), for example, operators are developing reference designs so that everyone in the supply chain knows what solutions operators plan to procure and deploy.
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Perspecta (NYSE: PRSP) served as a sponsor of the 7th Annual Open Source Summit organized by the Open Source Electronic Health Record Alliance to discuss the use of open source software in industry and government, ExecutiveBiz reported July 13.
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Do you love Firefox, Linux, and the internet? Are you interested in earning money from the comfort of your own home? Are you OK with a special flavor of Firefox quietly gobbling up memory in a hunt for exploitable security bugs?
If so, Mozilla has a deal for you.
The open internet organization (and search licensing revenue addict) would like you to go about your usual browsing business with a special Firefox build designed to automatically report potential security flaws in the software back to the mothership.
If you do so, and the reported error turns out to be a legit exploitable vulnerability that Firefox engineers can fix, you'll be rewarded as if you'd submitted the errant code to Mozilla's bug bounty program.
That's right, kids. Your aimless online procrastination could be your ticket to riches through the ASan Nightly Project.
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It’s been a great “family reunion” of FOSS colleagues and peers in the OSCON hallway track this week. I had a conversation recently in which I was asked “Why did you choose ops as a career path?”, and this caused me to notice that I’ve never blogged about this rationale before.
I work in roles revolving around software and engineering because they fall into a cultural sweet spot offering smart and interesting colleagues, opportunities for great work-life balance, and exemplary compensation. I also happen to have taken the opportunity to spend over a decade building my skills and reputation in this industry, which helps me keep the desirable roles and avoid the undesirable ones. Yet, many people in my field prefer software development over operations work.
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I'm working on creating a list of free software extensions for Mozilla-based browsers on the Free Software Directory based on data from addons.mozilla.org. This is needed because the official extensions repository includes many proprietary extensions.
I found out that it's not possible to use the addons.mozilla.org API to list add-on collections, so I submitted a bug report for this. To my surprise they declined my suggestion, so I had to add a function to my program to parse it manually. Then I went on and wrote a detailed README file to describe the philosophy for the project to make it easy for anyone to contribute. I merged my source code to the Savannah GNU package called Free Software Directory, which also has scripts for importing data from Debian.
I started a collection of IceCat add-ons and recommended IceCat (and Abrowser) to use it in Tools -> Add-ons (about:addons) -> Get Add-ons.
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If you’re a developer, then you know your way around development tools. You’ve spent years studying one or more programming languages and have perfected your skills. You can develop with GUI tools or from the command line. On your own, nothing can stop you. You code as if your mind and your fingers are one to create elegant, perfectly commented, source for an app you know will take the world by storm.
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The unspoken question that this paper raises in my mind is whether it may be incorrect to speak of Open Source and standardization as separate activities at all. Instead, Open Source might correctly be viewed as a species of standardization activity, with particular license conditions and membership conditions. The success of Open Source activities—and other standards that implement royalty-free commitments, such as Bluetooth—shows that there’s a place in the continuum of standards policy for royalty-free licensing when participants wish that to be the case.
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linux
linux is pretty much dominant on servers and phones right now (with android using a patched linux kernel).