today's leftovers

• openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/48 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

  After last week being filled with problems, this week felt like a ‘relaxing one’ – not that there would be fewer changes incoming, but we could focus on those changes instead of cuddling the infrastructure. And so it comes that we managed to publish 5 snapshots during this week (1119, 1121, 1123, 1124, and 1125).

• Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7.9 brings Apache Kafka integration and more - Red Hat Developer

  Red Hat Process Automation Manager 7.9 brings bug fixes, performance improvements, and new features for process and case management, business and decision automation, and business optimization. This article introduces you to Process Automation Manager’s out-of-the-box integration with Apache Kafka, revamped business automation management capabilities, and support for multiple decision requirements diagrams (DRDs). I will also guide you through setting up and using the new drools-metric module for analyzing business rules performance, and I’ll briefly touch on Spring Boot integration in Process Automation Manager 7.9.

• Getting started with Fedora CoreOS

  Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) came from the merging of CoreOS Container Linux and Fedora Atomic Host. It is a minimal and monolithic OS focused on running containerized applications. Security being a first class citizen, FCOS provides automatic updates and comes with SELinux hardening. For automatic updates to work well they need to be very robust. The goal being that servers running FCOS won’t break after an update. This is achieved by using different release streams (stable, testing and next). Each stream is released every 2 weeks and content is promoted from one stream to the other (next -> testing -> stable). That way updates landing in the stable stream have had the opportunity to be tested over a long period of time.

• Slimjet – SparkyLinux

  Slimjet is built on top of the Chromium open-source project on which Google Chrome is also based. It enjoys the same speed and reliablity provided by the underlying blink engine as Google Chrome. However, many additional features and options have been added in Slimjet to make it more powerful, intelligent and customizable than Chrome. In addition to that, Slimjet DOES NOT send any usage statistics back to Google’s server like Google Chrome, which is a growing concern for many Chrome users due to the ubiquitous presence and reach of the advertising empire. Slimjet is compatible with all extensions and plugins designed for Google Chrome available from the Chrome web store.

• Better handling of cached field results in Writer

  Writer now has much better support for preserving the cached result of fields in documents. This is especially beneficial for Word formats where the input document may have a field result which is not only a cache, but re-calculating the formula would yield a different result, even in Word. [...] Collabora intends to continue supporting and contributing to LibreOffice, the code is merged so we expect all of this work will be available in TDF’s next release too (7.1).

• Argus: The Linux Commander – Manila Bulletin

  If you are like me who uses a Mac to manage Linux servers, then you may find this little menu bar tool a little nifty. Argus, currently on version 1.3, is a free download from https://argus-app.net. Argus already supports Big Sur and the new Apple Silicon M1 SoC. Installing Argus is just like any other MacOS application — drag and drop. Since this is a monitoring tool for remote Linux servers, you will need to add basic server information so Argus can set it up and gather the data from it. Argus creates an SSH tunnel to the server, so it requires SSH credentials (of course this means that the remote server has SSH properly configured). You can use your username-password pair, but I’d advise that you set up your certificates first to make it more secure (and easier). Once you have provided the server information and SSH credentials, Argus will connect to it and start downloading the Argus daemon. Installing the daemon will require root privileges, so make sure that you have sudo access, as your password will be asked during the install. Configure all the other remote servers that you wish to monitor through the Preferences pane.

• Additional Linux Power For SAP Business One

  The migration from ERP/ECC 6.0 to S/4 Hana continues to be one of the main challenges in the SAP community. It is worthwhile to also take a look at SAP Business One on Hana in this context. It’s well known that more and more companies of all shapes and sizes are taking the first step towards S/4 Hana or are already operating it. What’s not as well known, however, is that Business One (B1), a solution for smaller and mid-sized companies, has been on a steep growth trajectory for a few years now. Experts put the estimated number of B1 installations at 100,000 worldwide.

• Master boot vinyl record: It just gives DOS on my IBM PC a warmer, more authentic tone

  Looking for something to do in quarantine? How about booting DOS from a 10-inch vinyl record? While booting an operating system nowadays usually sees the software loaded from disk or flash memory, some of us of a certain age recall the delights of shovelling bytes in memory via the medium of tape, such as an audio cassette sending noise into the RAM of a home computer. Tinkerer Jozef Bogin has taken things a little further by booting an elderly IBM PC from a record player. Bogin used an old IBM PC and took advantage of a boot loader that would cause the hardware to fall back to the PC's cassette interface should everything else (floppies etc) fail. An analogue recording of bootable, read-only RAM drive was played through the interface, containing a version of FreeDOS tweaked by Bogin to fit into the memory constraints, a tiny COMMAND.COM and a patched version of INTERLINK to shovel data through the printer cable.

• The Homer Car, But It's leinir's Laptop

  We are now into week three of me sitting in a virtual machine on my better half's laptop, while we wait for my replacement Dell XPS 13 2-in-1 (2019) to arrive, after Dell conceded that they could not fix the old one. Short version: The graphics fan went wonky and stopped spinning, so they sent an engineer out to replace the mainboard (because everything is soldered on, including the fan assembly), and then it stopped booting. So they sent out another, and that also immediately failed to post, and then decided that wasn't worth trying again, so they would send me a replacement laptop. Three weeks later, and i have a tracking number, with no updates for a couple of days, though it also isn't past the estimate they gave me for getting it (two weeks for an in stock item, from Ireland to England, nice...).

GNOME and KDE librsvg, calculator and more

• Do not use librsvg 2.40.x

  Please do not use librsvg 2.40.x; it cannot render recent Adwaita icon themes correctly. The librsvg 2.40.x series is the last "C only" version of the library; it was deprecated in 2017. During the port to Rust, I rewrote the path parser to be spec-compliant, and fixed a few cases that the C version did not handle. One of this cases is for compact Arc data. The SVG path grammar allows one to remove whitespace between numbers if the next number starts with a sign. For example, 23-45 gets parsed as two numbers 23 -45. In addition, the arguments of the Arc commands have two flags in the middle of a bunch of numbers. The flags can be 0 or 1, and there may be no whitespace between the flags and the next number. For example, A1.98 1.98 0 0015 13.96 gets parsed as A1.98 1.98 0 0 0 15 13.96 — note the two 0 0 flags before the 15. [...] Please use at least librsvg 2.48.x; any earlier versions are not supported. Generally I keep an eye on the last two stable release sets (2.48.x and 2.50.x as of this writing), but only commit fixes to the latest stable series (2.50.x currently).

• Pranali Deshmukh: GSoD Weekly Summary 9

  The idea here was to consolidate all documentation regarding the different operational modes of the calculator into a single section consisting of an overview page along with dedicated pages for each of the operational modes: Basic, Advanced, Financial, Programming and Keyboard modes.

• Please give us your 20.12 releases features

  The KDE release service will make another bundle of releases next month on Dec 10th.

Devices and Open Hardware: Chomebox, MNT Reform, Arduino and More

• ASUS Chromebox 4 features Intel Comet Lake processor, WiFi 6, up to 16GB RAM

  Chrome OS devices, be it Chromebook laptops, Chomebox mini PCs, or Chromebit PC sticks, used to be relatively low-cost devices designed to run the Chrome browser. But over the years. the versatility of the platform has increased with more powerful, yet still with low-power consumption, hardware, and improved software with support for Android apps, the Google Play Store, and even Linux programs. [...] I could not quite remember what BC 1.2 meant, and it stands for “Battery Charging 1.2” technology meant you’ll be able to charge your smartphone or other battery-powered devices faster through compatible ports.

• How to choose a wireless protocol for home automation

  In the second article in this series, I talked about local control vs. cloud connectivity and some things to consider for your home automation setup. In this third article, I will discuss the underlying technology for connecting devices to Home Assistant, including the dominant protocols that smart devices use to communicate and some things to think about before purchasing smart devices.

• MNT Reform Production Update November 2020 — MNT Research

  Shortly after the conclusion of the Crowd Supply campaign, we shipped 8 hand-built beta devices and collected some last minute feedback. Based on the feedback and our own learnings during this last test assembly phase, we further refined some aspects of the MNT Reform design.

• uSVC Arduino VGA board – a portable and programmable retro-gaming console (crowdfunding)

  Itaca Innovation previously launched uChip, an Arduino-compatible board that has a Cortex M0+ MCU that features 0.3” spacing between rows. Now, next-hack joined Itaca Innovation to come up with an expansion board for uChip. The uChip Simple VGA Console (uSVC) Arduino based retro-gaming console is open hardware and is a programmable console. It will allow creating and playing retro “9-bit” games with standard USB controllers and keyboards.

• Arduino Blog » Controlling a gas convection heater with a custom thermostat

  Redditor “Higgs8” had a gas convection heater that is (or was) controlled manually, but they wanted something a bit more. To accomplish this, they came up with a small Arduino-based thermostat. This allows you to set the desired temperature using a potentiometer, and it senses the current temperature value via a DS18B20 thermometer unit. It then adjusts the formerly manual knob with a stepper motor and custom gear reduction in response, maintaining the desired comfort level.