today's leftovers

• 6th Birthday of It’s FOSS: Win Linux Laptop, Stickers and more Gifts

• Five Useful Features That Are On Their Way To The Chrome OS

• HackUp is a Desktop Hacker News Client for Linux

  Avid readers of social news sharing site Hacker News might be interested in a new app recently added to Flathub. Called HackUp, it is a Hacker News desktop client written in Vala. It lets you browse and read Hacker News submissions without needing to open a web browser (which for a legendary procrastinator like me, is a good thing).

• Why use Chef for automation and orchestration

  Chef has been a leading open source tool for automating the provisioning and configuration of servers for the better part of a decade. In recent years the company added InSpec and Habitat to the portfolio, open source projects that automate policy compliance testing and the deployment and configuration of applications, respectively. The company’s flagship commercial offering, Chef Automate, brings all of these pieces together.  

• Xfdesktop 4.13.2 Released As Another Step Towards Xfce 4.14

  As another step towards the long-awaited Xfce 4.14 desktop environment release, Xfdesktop 4.13.2 is now available as the latest development release for this important piece of the Xfce desktop stack. Xfdesktop is the component that manages the desktop background, the pop-up list of applications, drawing icons on the desktop, etc. Xfdesktop 4.13.2 is the first development release since Xfdesktop 4.13.1 one year ago.

• Monday Markdown

  I’ve spent the first portion of the coding period focused on improving the documentation browser for GNOME Javascript. In 2015/16 ptomato began porting GIR sources (the source of most GJS documentation) to [DevDocs.io], an open-source documentation browser, using g-ir-doc-tool in gobject-introspection. He did excellent work and produced a functioning product that now lives at [devdocs.baznga.org]. My goals were to take the current product and incorporate GNOME theming, fix issues with incorrect documentation, rebase the project on upstream, and reorient some of the project’s features to better serve an object oriented and GNOME model.

• Refactor: Backend and UI

  Fractal is currently structured into two parts: The API part (fractal-matrix-api) and GTK part (fractal-gtk). The first one mostly just does the https calls to the Matrix server, the GTK part does everything else. This post will not talk about the API part since that will remain more or less the same (at least for now).

• Open source board lets you analyze SPI connections on a USB-connected laptop

  Excamera Labs has launched an open source, $27 and up “SPIDriver” board on Crowd Supply for analyzing and testing SPI-connected displays, sensors, flash, and other components on a laptop or via a built-in color LCD display. Monitoring SPI devices such as LCD panels, LED arrays, sensors, and SPI flash may not be quite as gnarly as managing I2C gizmos, but either of these short-distance, serial data transfer protocols can be a hassle. While Arduino boards provide libraries for SPI monitoring, there’s still a lot of guesswork involved due to lack of real-time feedback about the SPI bus state.

 

• Cooperative Learning

  I’ve got some under-utilised KVM servers that I could use to provide test VMs for network software, my original idea was to use those for members of my local LUG. But that doesn’t scale well. If a larger group people are to be involved they would have to run their own virtual machines, use physical hardware, or use trial accounts from VM companies. The general idea would be for two broad categories of sessions, ones where an expert provides a training session (assigning tasks to students and providing suggestions when they get stuck) and ones where the coordinator has no particular expertise and everyone just learns together (like “let’s all download a random BSD Unix and see how it compares to Linux”). [...] There is a Wikipedia page about Cooperative Learning. While that’s interesting I don’t think it has much relevance on what I’m trying to do. The Wikipedia article has some good information on the benefits of cooperative education and situations where it doesn’t work well. My idea is to have a self-selecting people who choose it because of their own personal goals in terms of fun and learning. So it doesn’t have to work for everyone, just for enough people to have a good group.

• Chinese search giant Baidu creates an open-source A.I. for detecting cancer

  “We hope this open-sourced algorithm can serve as a high-quality baseline for future research in this area,” Li said. “The algorithm is only evaluated on a limited number of public datasets at this stage. However, the algorithm needs to be further assessed using much more clinically relevant data to prove it still maintains higher accuracy than experienced pathologists. Our team will continue improving the algorithm and collaborating with researchers with whom we can share new datasets.”

• Fynd organizes Hackxagon Open Source Challenge for its Engineers

  As an initiative to give back to the open source community, Fynd, the unique fashion e-commerce portal had launched gofynd.io, a few months ago. This project enabled the engineers of the fashion e-commerce portal to learn new technologies, improve the core infrastructure and enhance the Fynd platform.

• Netfilter Workshop 2018 Berlin summary

  Lots of interesting talks happened, mostly surrounding nftables and how to move forward from the iptables legacy world to the new, modern nft framework. In a nutshell, the Netfilter project, the FLOSS community driven project, has agreed to consider iptables as a legacy tool. This confidence comes from the maturity of the nftables framework, which is fairly fully-compliant with the old iptables API, including extensions (matches and targets).

• Using W10Privacy To Boost Ubuntu WSL Performance On Windows 10

• Get the latest in libre from the FSF Bulletin

  The biannual Free Software Foundation (FSF) Bulletin is now available online. We hope you find it enlightening and entertaining!

• Introducing PyInstaller

  If you're used to working with a compiled language, the notion that you would need to have a programming language around, not just for development but also for running an application, seems a bit weird. Just because a program was written in C doesn't mean you need a C compiler in order to run it, right? But of course, interpreted and byte-compiled languages do require the original language, or a version of it, in order to run. True, Java programs are compiled, but they're compiled into bytecodes then executed by the JVM. Similarly, .NET programs cannot run unless the CLR is present. Even so, many of the students in my Python courses are surprised to discover that if you want to run a Python program, you need to have the Python language installed. If you're running Linux, this isn't a problem. Python has come with every distribution I've used since 1995. Sometimes the Python version isn't as modern as I'd like, but the notion of "this computer can't run Python programs" isn't something I've had to deal with very often.

• Demoting multi-factor authentication

  Authentication was done via a Java applet, as there needs to be a verifiably(?)-secure way to ensure the certificate was properly checked at the client without transfering it over the network. Good thing! [...] Anyway I accepted, as losing so much time to grade is just too much. And... Yes, many people will be happy. Partly, I'm releieved by this (I have managed to hate Java for over 20 years). I am just saddened by the fact we have lost an almost-decent-enough electronic signature implementation and fallen back to just a user-password scheme. There are many ways to do crypto verification on the client side nowadays; I know JavaScript is sandboxed and cannot escape to touch my filesystem, but... It is amazing we are losing this simple and proven use case.

Linux, the Linux Foundation and Graphics

• Linux literally loses its Lustre – HPC filesystem ditched in new kernel

  Linux has literally lost its Lustre – the filesystem favoured by HPC types has vanished in the first release candidate of version 4.18 of the Linux kernel. Linus Torvalds’ announcement of the new release lauds the fact it’s shrunk markedly, much of which can be attributed to the removal of Lustre. “The removal of Lustre may not be all that notable, because it does look like a lot of the development has been happening out of tree, which may be why it never really ended up working as well as people hoped in the staging tree,” Torvalds wrote. “ Greg [ Kroah-Hartman] clearly got pretty frustrated about it, so now it's gone.” How frustrated? Kroah-Hartman explained Lustre's omission by saying it has "been in the kernel tree for over 5 years now" but "has not really moved forward into the 'this is in shape to get out of staging' despite many half-completed attempts."

• Harmonising open source and standards in the telecom world [Ed: Phone surveillance company pays LF and then (mis)appropriates the “Linux” brand to push its “whitepapers” (marketing)]

  Standards have played a major role in telecommunications technology adoption for many years, validating the commercial viability of new technologies, facilitating multi-vendor interoperability, improving product quality, and expediting the introduction of technologies that would otherwise proliferate in a sea of proprietary alternatives.

• OpenGL Floating Point Textures No Longer Encumbered By Patents, Enabled In Mesa

  Back in 2012 when talking with Gabe Newell of Valve about open-source/Linux challenges one of the topics he was awed about was patents encumbering the open-source graphics driver progress. Six years later, Timothy Arceri working on the Valve Linux graphics driver team has freed Mesa's ARB_texture_float support from being built conditionally due to these patent fears.

• Vulkan 1.1.78 Released With Various Issues Resolved

  Vulkan 1.1.78 is now available as the newest version of the Vulkan specification. The Vulkan 1.1.78 spec update is another fairly small update that doesn't introduce any new VK extensions or any major changes. Vulkan 1.1.78 has minor documentation fixes, resumes publishing of the Vulkan 1.0 + KHR extension documentation, clears up some behavior in some Vulkan usage, and other changes.

• AMDGPU Performance Tests With New WattMan-Like Settings, Power Capping

  With the recent stable debut of the Linux 4.17 kernel, one of the most common performance test requests coming in has been for checking out the Radeon WattMan-like support that was introduced with the Linux 4.17 AMDGPU code for recent generations of Radeon graphics card. Here are some benchmarks of that and on a somewhat related note also some Linux gaming benchmark results when carrying out some power capping tests to restrict the graphics card to a given Wattage.

• Phoronix Test Suite 8.0.1 Is Coming Next Week

  Just a heads up that Phoronix Test Suite 8.0.1 is slated for release next week if there are any last minute bug reports or requests.

11 Best Linux Gaming Distros You Need To Use In 2018 and Fortnite Coming to Android

• 11 Best Linux Gaming Distros You Need To Use In 2018

  Gaming on Linux scene is improving each year with better hardware support and increasing support from game developers. Apart from established distros like Ubuntu and Arch Linux, gamers are using Linux gaming distros like Steam OS to get a better experience. The other popular gaming operating systems are Sparky Linux – Gameover edition, Ubuntu GamePack, Lakka Linux, etc. Apart from many general-purpose Linux distributions, there exists a crop of distros for specific purposes. Gaming Linux distros too belong to one such category. These distros are specifically built to address your gaming needs, thanks to better hardware support and tons of preinstalled tools.

• Fortnite: After Nitendo Switch, Android Is The Next Stop

  While the E3 concluded with lots of surprises and striking gaming news, Nitendo came up with its own pandora box. In its E3 presentation, Nitendo released Fortnite version for Switch which can be downloaded through Nitendo eShop. It is now absolutely clear that next stop of Epic Games Fortnite would be Android Devices. According to the Fortnite blog, developers are very rigid on summer release of its Android version. In the month of March, Fortnite revealed its iOS version adding to the list of platforms including Xbox One, PS4, PC, iOS and now Nitendo Switch.

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