today's leftovers

• Submit a KSyntaxHighlighting Color Theme

  The KSyntaxHighlighting framework provides support for color themes. These color themes specify all colors (text/background/selection/…) and font style roles (italic/bold/…) that are used for the highlighting. The definition happens in some easy to understand JSON file format. Starting with the upcoming KDE Frameworks 5.75 release, all KTextEditor framework based application will support these color themes for their embedded editors. This includes Kate & KWrite, but naturally a lot more, like for example KDevelop, Kile and RKWard. [...] With the recent additions we already cover some more well known text editor color themes. But if you just search a bit around the internet or look what other text editors ship per default, we still lack a lot of well known ones. For example even our GitLab instance provides the Monokai theme in the configuration for its web highlighting that we still lack. Therefore, we are eager to get submissions for more MIT licensed color themes we can bundle with KSyntaxHighlighting. All users of applications using this framework will enjoy to be able to choose between more themes with ease if you help us! Therefore, take the chance and help us out, provide some more themes as merge request. License must be MIT, this seems to be no problem for most themes out there, at least it seems most of the ones I stumbled over are MIT licensed.

• FreeBSD Instant-workstation 2020

  A little over a year ago I published an instant-workstation script for FreeBSD. The idea is to have an installed FreeBSD system, then run a shell script that uses only base-system utilities and installs and configures a workstation setup for you. [...] The script is updated intermittently when new PRs come in, or when I have to reinstall a machine and things do not behave the way I think they should. If you want a quick live KDE Plasma experience with FreeBSD, head on over to FuryBSD which does live ISO images with a variety of environments.

• Three tips to implement Kubernetes with open standards

  The technologies chosen by enterprise IT departments today will have a long-term impact on their performance, operations and overall strategy. Sometimes it can take well over a decade to realize the full implications of a technology solution. This can put a great deal of weight on the shoulders of IT management, especially when it comes to emergent technologies whose utility, importance and trajectory may not yet be fully known. Placing a bad bet on new software can lead to difficult integrations and disruptions across an organisation’s entire tech stack, which in the long-term can lead to lost productivity, wasted budgets, and the likelihood of losing ground to competitors. Kubernetes, the open source container orchestration platform, was until recently regarded in the same way, with IT departments struggling to fully appraise its long-term value. However, with Kubernetes now running 86 per cent of container clusters, it has emerged as the de facto standard for cloud-native infrastructure. This means that the main concern for IT departments is not whether Kubernetes has a future, but how to ensure that their implementation of Kubernetes has a future which doesn't present a bottleneck to integrations, industry practices and use cases.

• openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/38

  An average week, with an average number of 5 snapshots (0910, 0914, 0915, 0916, and 0917 – with 0917 just being synced out). The content of these snapshots included: KDE Applications 20.08.1 Qt 5.15.1 PackageKit 1.2.1 Systemd 246.4 Virt-Manager 3.0.0

• Whonix 15.0.1.5.1 - for VirtualBox - Point Release!

• The Expandables – snapcraft extensions and the secret code

  If you’re a snap developer, you know that snap development is terribly easy. Or rather complex and difficult. Depending on your application code and requirements, it can take a lot of effort putting together the snapcraft.yaml file from which you will build your snap. One of our goals is to make snap development practically easier and more predictable for everyone. To that end, we created a framework of snap extensions, designed to make the snap journey simpler and more fun. In a nutshell, extensions abstract away a range of common code declarations you would normally put in your snapcraft.yaml file. They help developers avoid repetitive tasks, reduce the knowledge barrier needed to successfully build snaps, offer a common template for application builds, and most importantly, save time and effort. But what if you want – or need – to know what is behind the abstraction?

• DeskProto® releases free CAM software for Linux

  Delft Spline Systems announces that the DeskProto CAM software now also is available for Linux users, as native 64 bits AppImage file that will work on various Linux distributions. Projects made on Linux, on Mac and Windows are interchangeable. Licenses for DeskProto V7 can be used to activate DeskProto on all three platforms, so existing users can switch to a Linux without extra cost.

     

• Tor’s Bug Smash Fund, Year 2: $106,709 Raised!

         

           

  Let’s start this post with a rousing THANK YOU to the Tor community!

           

  This August, we asked you to help us fundraise for our second annual Bug Smash Fund campaign. This fund is designed to grow a healthy reserve earmarked for maintenance work, finding bugs, and smashing them—all tasks necessary to keep Tor Browser, the Tor network, and the many tools that rely on Tor strong, safe, and running smoothly.

       

• Researchers were able to figure out which American phone numbers use Signal

         

           

  Privacy flaws in contact discovery have led to a research team being able to enumerate all American Signal users. Enumeration means that using the contact discovery built into the Signal app, researchers were able to perform a large-scale crawling attack and figure out which American phone numbers were attached to a Signal account. The new research paper was released by Christoph Hagen, Christian Weinert, Christoph Sendner, Alexandra Dmitrienko, and Thomas Schneider. It is titled: “All the Numbers are US: Large-scale Abuse of Contact Discovery in Mobile Messengers.”

• The ’90s are back: Gateway laptops have been resurrected as Walmart exclusives

  Remember Gateway laptops? If you grew up in the ’90s, they were probably the brand of your first laptop. Like a revival of your favorite childhood television show, the Gateway brand has been raised from the dead — cow imagery and all. The brand, which is owned by computer maker Acer, is making its own comeback with a line of new laptops, tablets, and convertibles that will be exclusive to Walmart.

  So, what’s forcing these cows out of hibernation? For Gateway parent Acer, its about new silicon from Intel and AMD, including the successsul new mobile Ryzen 4000 processors.

The Top 50 Programming Languages to Learn Coding

Gone are the days when a handful of people were considered as top computer programmers and developers. The dawn of the digital age has now made it possible to everyone to play with codes and write a computer program. What all this need is to have a solid grasp of emerging technology and programming languages. However, it is not as easy as it seems since there are a large number of programming languages out there and choosing one and master in it might be challenging. Thus, before getting started into the world of coding, you must make the right choice and come up with the one that best suited for you. Also: How to use C++ Pointers

Free Software and OSS Leftovers

• Benefits Of Using Odoo For Small Businesses

  In this tutorial, we will be showing you how using Odoo can benefit a small or medium-sized business. As times have progressed, businesses big and small have become more complex in their operations. With several departments having to function and share information to one another, the need for an integrated system has grown by leaps and bounds. More and more small business are implementing ERP systems. In fact, once an ERP system is implemented, it often becomes the backbone of many corporate-scale businesses. Such systems can seamlessly integrate business lifecycles, such as production, inventory management, order processes, and more. An example of this system would be Odoo, one of the most popular ERP systems currently available.

• Best WordPress Backup Plugins 2020

  It is at most important to keep multiple backups of your WordPress site. In case the website is compromised or any plugin update breaks your site, WordPress backups can help you restore it quickly. Mainly, a WordPress site consists of three important parts, the database, user-created files such as plugins, themes, and uploaded files, and finally the WordPress core files. If anyone of these three parts is missing or corrupted, the website will not function properly or will not function at all. When we create a backup, we create a backup of the site database and the user-created files. WordPress core files can be downloaded and installed separately.

• FSF: Volunteers needed: Help maintain our webmail page

  The Free Software Foundation (FSF) needs your help! We are looking for several reliable volunteers to keep our Free Software Webmail Systems page up to date, and respond to community questions about webmail programs as they come in. Between 1,000 and 2,000 visitors check out this resource every month, and we want to make sure our recommendations are accurate! If you're interested, please contact us at campaigns@fsf.org. Our Free Software Webmail Systems page is used to share resources for people interested in using their email over the Web without compromising their freedom. Many webmail systems meet at least some of our standards for respecting users, including compliance with GNU LibreJS standards, but they're constantly changing, and new services are popping up every day. When sites listed on this page change their services for the better or the worse, they don't tend to notify us, which means that some vigilance is required to make sure that this resource stays useful.

• Parsing PAN-OS logs using syslog-ng

  Version 3.29 of syslog-ng was released recently including a user-contributed feature: the panos-parser(). It is parsing log messages from PAN-OS (Palo Alto Networks Operating System). Unlike some other networking devices, the message headers of PAN-OS syslog messages are standards-compliant. However, if you want to act on your messages (filtering, alerting), you still need to parse the message part. The panos-parser() helps you create name-value pairs from the message part of the logs. From this blog you can learn why it is useful to parse PAN-OS log messages and how to use the panos-parser().

• Intel Releases HAXM 7.6.5 Execution Manager

  Intel has debuted a new version of HAXM, its Hardware-Accelerated Execution Manager that serves as an accelerator for the Android Emulator and QEMU via Intel VT enabled CPUs.

• Update devices remotely with this open source tool

  The ability to access, connect, and manage multiple devices remotely through a single account is important. Going a step further, being able to completely update devices remotely is another way for sysadmins to reduce effort and minimize headaches. UpdateHub is an open source solution that allows you to do complete device updates, including firmware and bootloaders, remotely. Its goal is to make it easier to do device updates and reduce rework and risk, whether you're updating thousands of devices or managing small deployments. UpdateHub handles all aspects of over-the-air (OTA) updates, including package integrity and authenticity, while you take care of your other work.

• Daniel Stenberg: My first 15,000 curl commits

  I’ve long maintained that persistence is one of the main qualities you need in order to succeed with your (software) project. In order to manage to ship a product that truly conquers the world. By continuously and never-ending keeping at it: polishing away flaws and adding good features. On and on and on.

Graphics: Taiwins 0.2, Etnaviv, V3DV, Libre-SOC, X.Org/FreeDesktop.org and More

• Taiwins 0.2 is out

  Hi all,
  
  A long while ago [1]. I introduced the Taiwins wayland compositor. It was
  built upon libweston. It turned out despite my attempts, I couldn't get my
  patches to merge in libweston. Libweston has quite a few bugs and missing
  features to fit the role of a daily driver.
  
  These past few months, Taiwins was going through a long refactoring process
  in migrating from libweston. Today, taiwins uses a very thin layer of
  wlroots for hardware abstraction, the next release will target on removing
  the reliance of wlroots as well. Today it has the features of:
  
  - dynamic window management.
  - extensible and easy configuration through lua.
  - very efficient GL renderer, updates only the damages.
  - a widget system and you can create widgets through lua as well.
  - built-in shell and application launcher.
  - configurable theme.
  - emacs-like key sequence based binding system.
  - built-in profiler and rendering debugger.
  
  Along the way, I developed Twobjects [2], a backend agnostic wayland object
  implementation for compositors. This library implements basic wayland
  protocols as well as various other wayland protocols like 'xdg-shell' and
  many more. Using twobjects, you can focus on building your own unique
  features for the compositor and let it handle the most tedious protocol
  implementations.It doesn't expose everything as `wl_signals` like wlroots
  does, so you don't need to write additional glue code for it.
  
  Taiwins is still in development but missing features are getting less and
  less, you can check out its website https://taiwins.org or if you would
  like to help, check out the project page https://github.com/taiwins/taiwins
  for getting started.
  
  Thanks,
  Xichen
  
  

• Taiwins 0.2 Released As Modular Wayland Compositor That Supports Lua Scripting

  Back in May the Taiwins Wayland compositor was announced as a compact compositor based on Libweston while Thursday marked its second release. With Taiwins 0.2 the switch was made from using libweston as a basis for the compositor to now using Sway's WLROOTS library. Libweston was dropped over open bugs and other issues and in part the ability to get patches easily merged back into upstream libweston. So with the shortcomings of the Weston library, Taiwins 0.2 is now running on WLROOTS. However, by the next release they hope to have their thin layer over WLROOTS removed so that library isn't needed either.

• Etnaviv Gallium3D Adds On-Disk Shader Cache Support

  Etnaviv as the open-source, reverse-engineered OpenGL graphics driver for Vivante graphics IP now has support for an on-disk shader cache.

• V3DV Developers Lay Out Plans For Upstreaming The Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan Driver In Mesa

  Building off the V3DV driver talk at XDC2020 about this open-source Vulkan driver for the Raspberry Pi 4 driver, the Igalia developers responsible for this creation have laid out their plans on getting this driver upstream within Mesa. In a mailing list post today they note they are down to just 18 test cases failing for the Vulkan CTS while 106,776 tests are passing for this Vulkan Conformance Test Suite. Vulkan games like the respun versions of Quake 1-3 and OpenArena are working along with various game emulators. Various Vulkan demos also run well too.

• Libre-SOC Still Persevering To Be A Hybrid CPU/GPU That's 100% Open-Source

  The project that started off as Libre-RISC-V with aims to be a Vulkan accelerator but then decided on the OpenPOWER ISA rather than RISC-V is still moving ahead under the "Libre-SOC" branding. Libre-SOC continues to be led by Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton and this week he presented both at the OpenPOWER Summit and X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC2020) on his Libre-SOC dreams of having a 100% fully open SoC on both the software and hardware sides while being a hybrid CPU/GPU. Similar to the original plans when targeting RISC-V that it would effectively be a SoC but with new vector instructions optimized for graphics workloads, that's still the plan albeit now using OpenPOWER as a base.

• X.Org Is Getting Their Cloud / Continuous Integration Costs Under Control

  You may recall from earlier this year that the X.Org/FreeDesktop.org cloud costs were growing out of control primarily due to their continuous integration setup. They were seeking sponsorships to help out with these costs but ultimately they've attracted new sponsors while also better configuring/optimizing their CI configuration in order to get those costs back at more manageable levels.

• Intel Submits More Graphics Driver Updates For Linux 5.10

  Building off their earlier Intel graphics driver pull request of new material queuing ahead of the Linux 5.10 cycle, another round of updates were submitted on Friday.

• Mike Blumenkrantz: Long Week

  Once again, I ended up not blogging for most of the week. When this happens, there’s one of two possibilities: I’m either taking a break or I’m so deep into some code that I’ve forgotten about everything else in my life including sleep. This time was the latter. I delved into the deepest parts of zink and discovered that the driver is, in fact, functioning only through a combination of sheer luck and a truly unbelievable amount of driver stalls that provide enough forced synchronization and slow things down enough that we don’t explode into a flaming mess every other frame. Oops. I’ve fixed all of the crazy things I found, and, in the process, made some sizable performance gains that I’m planning to spend a while blogging about in considerable depth next week. And when I say sizable, I’m talking in the range of 50-100% fps gains.

• Watch the ACO shader compiler and Vulkan Ray Tracing talks from XDC 2020

  With XDC 2020 (X.Org Developers Conference) in full swing, we've been going over the various presentations to gather some interesting bits for you. Here's more on the ACO shader compiler and Vulkan Ray Tracing. You can find more info on XDC 2020 in the previous article, and be sure not to miss our round-up of Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais talk about Gamescope. More talks were done across yesterday, with the first one we're mentioning here being from Timur Kristóf who is currently a contractor for Valve who talked about ACO (the newer Mesa shader compiler for AMD graphics). The idea behind ACO which Valve announced back in 2019, for those not aware, is to give a smoother Linux gaming experience with less (or no) stuttering with Vulkan with faster compile times for shaders. Kristóf goes over lots of intricate details from being in the experimental stages to eventually the default in Mesa with it now having support across 5 different generations of AMD GPUs.