Screensavers are beautiful for desktops and should be available to everyone as part of their preferred OS. However, if you are Ubuntu user, you might be noticing a blank screen for screensaver. This is because, in recent past, post GNOME 3, the developers decided to drop the screensaver and keep a blank screen. This basic guide would help you to install, change and autostart screensavers in Ubuntu.

• 5 best photography background apps and wallpaper apps for Android!

• These are the best Android Go and lightweight Android apps we could find

• Snapchat's much-needed Android overhaul is hiding in plain sight

• 6 easy steps to secure your android smartphone

• Sony explains why Android updates take so long

• Android Pie opens up recent apps customization for third-party launchers

• Huawei tries passing off DSLR shots as Nova 3 camera samples, gets caught in the most amusing way imaginable

• HealthLynked Corp. Announces Release of its Android App and New Features for Mobile Users

The Linux kernel turns another year older on Saturday, August 25. Twenty-six years ago it may have felt to the creator and BDFL Linus Torvalds that Linux would only amount to satisfying the needs of one. But today we know it has changed the lives of many.

To celebrate, thirty of our readers share what their first Linux distro and installation was like. Some of their stories are magical, some maniacal. And, it's no surprise that the tension and passion of these Linux lovers is palpable.

Healthcare is experiencing a revolution. In a tightly regulated and ancient industry, the use of free and open source software make it uniquely positioned to see a great deal of progress.

I work at a scrappy healthcare startup where cost savings are a top priority. Our primary challenge is how to safely and efficiently manage personally identifying information (PII), like names, addresses, insurance information, etc., and personal health information (PHI), like the reason for a recent clinical visit, under the regulations of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, HIPAA, which became mandatory in the United States in 2003.

• Indian Bank Hit in $13.5M Cyberheist After FBI ATM Cashout Warning

  But according to Indian news outlet Dailypionneer.com, there was a second attack carried out on August 13, when the Cosmos Bank hackers transferred nearly $2 million to the account of ALM Trading Limited at Hang Seng Bank in Hong Kong.

• How to Protect Yourself Against a SIM Swap Attack

  A sobering caveat: If a skilled SIM hijacker targets you, there’s realistically not much you can do to stop them, says Allison Nixon, threat research at security firm Flashpoint. “In most of the cases that we’ve seen, a sufficiently determined attacker can take over someone’s online footprint,” she says.

  That’s because ultimately, the machinations behind SIM swaps are largely out of your control. [...]

• Open Source Security Podcast: Episode 110 - Review of Black Hat, Defcon, and the effect of security policies

  Josh and Kurt talk about Black Hat and Defcon and how unexciting they have become. What happened with hotels at Defcon, and more importantly how many security policies have 2nd and 3rd level effects we often can't foresee. We end with important information about pizza, bananas, and can openers.

At this point I have only set up YunoHost, created a few user accounts and installed a handful of applications. While I may play with it further, my main focus going into this trial was how well the framework of the distribution functions. That is: is it easy to install, how hard is it for new users to add services and accounts, and is it straight forward to keep the system up to date? Basically, I wanted to know whether I could give this distribution to someone who wanted to set up home-based network services for the first time and expect them to be able to use it. Based on my experiences so far with YunoHost, my answer is: probably.

The distribution does make it pretty easy to create user accounts and install web-based services. In fact, YunoHost does this quite well. The admin panel is very streamlined, uncluttered and easy to navigate and getting something like a game of Hextris or a media streaming service installed is about as easy as a few mouse clicks. Managing the firewall, monitoring the system and creating backups are nearly as easy. The administrator still needs to figure out how to get backup archives off the disk to another location for safe keeping, but the bulk of the work in backing up and restoring the operating system is done for us.

Where I feel the distribution runs into trouble is mostly little details, and a few general concepts. For example, asking the user to create an "admin" password but leaving the root password as the default is both likely to confuse people and leave a permanent security hole on the servers of most inexperienced hobbyist administrators. On the topic of accounts, it makes sense, from a security standpoint, to separate web accounts from system accounts. But, this means there may be some confusion as to why, once an account has been created, it cannot log into the system. Little concepts like this may throw new users and I don't feel these issues are well addressed by the documentation.

The first time through, the system installer failed during the partitioning section. It worked the second time though with the same settings, so I'm not sure if this is a semi-persistent bug or a one-time error with my system.

On the whole, YunoHost performs well. It's light on resources, it offers a lot of common network services home administrators will probably want and it is pretty easy to run and maintain. There are a few little wrinkles in the experience, but in general I found the distribution to be straight forward to use. For people looking to set up a home server, this is probably a good platform on which to build.

• GIMP 2.10.6 Introduces Vertical Text, New Filters, and GIMP Extension Public Repo

  A brand-new point release for popular photo editing software GIMP has been released today, bringing GIMP to version 2.10.6 – this update doesn’t bring a whole load of significant features, but there are some great improvements and new functionalities.

  For starters, GIMP 2.10.6 finally introduces support for vertical text (top to bottom), which has been a highly requested feature particularly for East-Asian writing systems. Thus, users can now set text in mixed orientation (as is typical in East-Asian vertical writing) or upright orientation (more common for Western vertical writing), with right-to-left, as well as left-to-right columns.

• Password Safe is a KeePass-Compatible Password Manager for Linux

  Password Safe is an open-source KeePass-compatible password manager for Linux, designed specifically for use on the GNOME desktop.

• Linux users finally get a decent podcasts app called, well, ‘Podcasts’

  Podcasts are a hugely popular form of “infotainment” these days, with almost any and every niche you can think of catered for with a show or a segment. If you’re not enjoying the wealth of podcasts out there, you’re really missing out. Podcasts provide you with the experience of a radio show, covering a wide range of topics ranging from gospel to science fiction to music and every thing in between. There are so many ways to enjoy your podcst. On mobile, popular apps such as PocketCast offer users a one-stop-shop for all the podcasts you can listen to. Many music streaming services like Apple Music and Spotify offer dedicated sections on Podcasts.

• How to install Linux applications on Chrome OS

• Easier Flatpak manifest editing with VSCode

• How To View/List The Available Packages Updates In Linux

• How to define and use functions in Linux Shell Script

• How to Install, Change, Autostart Screensaver in Ubuntu

• 8 Linux Tee Command with Examples

• Kate projects and out-of-source builds

  During Akademy I once more was a bit disappointed how bad the project plugin of Kate can cope with out-of-source builds.

  At work, we use in-source-builds, as we normally only build in one configuration and have no issues with left-overs in the source directories locally. For this use-case, the project plugin works really well. You have your project local terminal view and that allows you all normal things you need during work, e.g. building + using the git command line client for the version control work.

  On the other side, with out-of-source builds, that no longer is that nice to use. Either you use the .kateproject generated by the “Kate – Ninja” or “Kate – Unix Makefiles” CMake generators, then your terminal defaults to the build directory, which allows building just fine, but no version control stuff, or you use the .kateproject (or auto-project creation) in the source directory, which doesn’t allow you to build nicely inside the terminal prompt of Kate. There are workaround for that, like having shell magic to switch between source and build directory with ease, but that all feels a bit unnatural.

  Therefore, I added today a very simple “fix” for the issue: If you have a .kateproject that has a different base directory (the toplevel “directory” entry) than the directory the .kateproject file is located in, you will get two terminal tabs in the project view.

• Post Akademy

  So, it has been a busy week of Qt and KDE hacking in the beautiful city of Vienna.
  Besides getting quite some of the Viennese staple food, schnitzel, it was an interesting adventure of getting smarter.

• My First Akademy!

  That day I also attended Plasma Mycroft BoF, in which Aditya told us about various new development and gave us High-Level Overview about working of Mycroft and also How can we make it easier for developers to make Mycroft skills!

• Akademy retrospective

  I had an amazing time with the KDE community in Vienna this past week at Akademy. In fact it was my first Akademy despite contributing to KDE for so long, but Vienna was a great reason to make my first trip to Europe.

  [...]

  I led a BoF on this topic for kdesrc-build and participated in a few others as well. There’s a lot out there that we can do to improve our story here, in kdesrc-build and elsewhere, and I’m hopeful we can accomplish real improvement here over the next year. But it was also nice to see and hear a lot of the positive feedback our developers had about kdesrc-build.

• Customing time and date formats in the GNOME top bar

  Do you want another time and date format in the GNOME top bar than what is set in your default locale? The Clock Override extension for GNOME gives you full control of what and how time and data information is display in the top bar.

  The GNOME Shell for Linux doesn’t provide a lot of customization options out of the box. GNOME really don’t believe that anyone would ever want to customize their beautiful desktop shell. They’ve taken their design-by-omitting-customization paradigm so far that they’ve even left out the ability to customize the date and time format. Fortunately, the GNOME Shell is quite extensible and users always do find a way to change things the way that they want them.

• Face detection and recognition in shotwell

  After dabbling a bit with OpenFace, I wanted to add similar face detection and recognition abilities to a typical Linux desktop photo app. So I discovered Shotwell, which is a photo manager for Gnome. Shotwell had a partial implementation of face detection (no recognition) which was under a build define and not enabled in the releases. With that code as the starting point, I started integrating the ideas from OpenFace into Shotwell.

• Shobha Tyagi: GNOME.Asia Summit 2018

  GNOME.Asia Summit 2018 was co-hosted with COSCUP 2018 and openSUSE.Asia Summit in Taipei, Taiwan 11-12 August 2018.

• Umang Jain: GNOME Asia 2018, Taipei

  I am very pleased to attend to GNOME Asia(again!) that took place at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei this year. Its always great to see GNOME folks around, hanging out and have a social side of things. GNOME Asia was co-hosted with OpenSUSE Asia summit and COSCUP.

  [...]

  We had a GNOME BoF to address couple of issues around conferences: Mostly around standardization of conference organization, budget, effect of local team presence at potential conference venues etc.

Ubuntu Kylin 18.04 LTS is the latest version of Ubuntu Kylin. As part of Ubuntu 18.04 Flavor, this release ships with UKUI desktop environment 1.0 series. Linux kernel has been updated to 4.15. Besides, all the special software and the jointly developed software are updated to the new version, including Kylin Assistant, Ubuntu Kylin Software Center, Kylin Video, Youker Weather, Sougou Pinyin and WPS Office. Especially, Electronic Wechat and Burner have been added to the default normal install for better user experience in work and entertainment.

WPS Office is a suite of software which is made up of three primary components: WPS Writer, WPS Presentation, and WPS Spreadsheet. Ubuntu Kylin team is working with Kingsoft Corp to continue providing WPS for Ubuntu Kylin users for free. Foxit reader is based on the Foxit for Linux and designed for Chinese user to be simple during installation. It provides a way to view, create and sign PDF files, and add annotations to them.

On your next system upgrade you will receive all the latest versions of KDE’s Plasma, Applications and Frameworks, in addition to the usual package updates. There is a new series 18.08 out for for Applications, with improvements aimed at making your usability and productivity better, in addition to adding new features.

For more details and the full changelogs on KDE’s software releases, you can read the official announcements:

Plasma 5.13.4
Applications 18.08.0
Frameworks 5.49.0

• From the Eastern District of Texas (US) to Australia Patent Quality Remains a Problem
• Alice/35 U.S.C. § 101 and PTAB Are Here to Stay and Even Their Critics (Patent Maximalists) Have Come to Accept That
• Patent Trolls Roundup: Conversant Wireless Licensing (Formerly Core Wireless) and Blackbird ‘Technologies’ Still Prey on Real Companies
• David Ruschke, the PTAB’s Chief, is Moving So the Patent Maximalists Push Their Anti-PTAB Agenda
• If David Chiles Turned the USPTO Into a ‘Microsoft Shop’ That Might Explain Three Days (or More) of Outages
• Links 19/8/2018: Skrooge 2.15.0, Wine 3.14, End of Akademy 2018
• Links 17/8/2018: GNU/Linux From ASUS, Debian at 25, Lubuntu Plans
• Links 16/8/2018: MAAS 2.4.1, Mesa 18.2 RC3

• Dragon Ball: 20 Strange Things About Android 18's Body

• Google Pixel 3 release - Everything we think we know about upcoming Android flagship

• Delayed Android updates? Here's why it happens on non-Google phones

• Why does it take so long to get the latest Android updates on non-Google phones?

• Quindim, quiche or quesito? What will Android Q be called?

• Android Giants: Samsung Note 9 vs. Huawei P20 Pro, which one should you go for?

This past week we looked at the Windows 10 vs. Linux performance for AMD's just-launched Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX and given the interest from that then ran some Windows Server benchmarks to see if the performance of this 64-thread CPU would be more competitive to Linux. From those Windows vs. Linux tests there has been much speculation that the performance disparity is due to Windows scheduler being less optimized for high core/thread count processors and its NUMA awareness being less vetted than the Linux kernel. For getting a better idea, here are benchmarks of Windows Server 2019 preview versus Ubuntu Linux when testing varying thread/core counts for the AMD Threadripper 2990WX.

Toggled via the BIOS was SMT as well as various CCX configurations and each step of the way comparing the Windows Server 2019 Build 17733 performance to that of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the Linux 4.18 kernel in various multi-threaded benchmarks supported under both operating systems.

• RISC-V's Linux Kernel Support Is Getting Into Good Shape, Userspace Starting To Work

  The RISC-V open-source processor ISA support within the mainline kernel is getting into good shape, just a few releases after this new architecture port was originally added to the Linux Git tree.

  The RISC-V code for Linux 4.19 includes the ISA-mandated timers and first-level interrupt controllers, which are needed to actually get user-space up and running. Besides the RISC-V first-level interrupt controller, Linux 4.19 also adds support for SiFive's platform-level interrupt controller that interfaces with the actual devices.

• A Hearty Batch Of KVM Updates Land In Linux 4.19

  There is a lot of new feature work for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) within the Linux 4.19 kernel.

Even with KDE's annual Akademy conference happening this past week in Vienna, KDE development has been going strong especially on the usability front. The Kate text editor and the KTextEditor component within KDE Frameworks 5 have been the largest benefactors of recent improvements.

This KDE text editing code now has support for disabling syntax highlighting entirely if preferred. When using syntax highlighting, there have been many KTextEditor enhancements to improve the experience as well as improvements to the highlighting for a variety of languages from JavaScript to YAML to AppArmor files.

KStars 2.9.8 is released for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. It is a hotfix release that contains bug fixes and stability improvements over the last release.

Also: KDE Itinerary - How did we get here?

• Project curl governance

  Over time, we've slowly been adjusting the curl project and its documentation so that we might at some point actually qualify to the CII open source Best Practices at silver level.

  We qualified at the base level a while ago as one of the first projects which did that.

  Recently, one of those issues we fixed was documenting the governance of the curl project. How exactly the curl project is run, what the key roles are and how decisions are made. That document is now in our git repo.

• How to install OwnCloud 10 on CentOS 7 and RHEL 7

• How to Get Google Camera Port for Asus ZenFone Max Pro M1

• How to check your CentOS Version

• 5 Practical Examples of chgrp command in Linux

• Trinity Desktop R14.0.5 Brings Modern Compiler Support and Security Fixes

  Trinity Desktop, the Linux desktop environment which is forked from KDE 3, has just released an update bringing Trinity Desktop to version R14.0.5.

  Because Trinity Desktop is a “traditional desktop” based on KDE 3 and focuses on function rather than a lot of special effects, its benefits are typically things like increased battery life on laptops, and just overall efficiency for the user.

• This week in Usability & Productivity, part 32

  I’m back from Akademy, and I can’t wait to share some of the cool stuff that happened there over the past week. I’m going to post the video of my talk as soon as it’s up. But first, I know what you’re all really waiting for: this week’s Usability & Productivity update. Though we were all quite busy, somehow everyone managed to accomplish an enormous amount of work, too!

• Reminder: Shotwell Facebook publishing no longer working

  As announced earlier, since August 1st, 2018 Shotwell cannot publish to Facebook any more. The API that Shotwell used for that was removed and it is currently not clear to me how developers that do not use Android, iOS or Facebook’s web SDKs should provide similar functionality.

• Gentoo on Integricloud

  Integricloud gave me access to their infrastructure to track some issues on ppc64 and ppc64le.

  Since some of the issues are related to the compilers, I obviously installed Gentoo on it and in the process I started to fix some issues with catalyst to get a working install media, but that’s for another blogpost.

  Today I’m just giving a walk-through on how to get a ppc64le (and ppc64 soon) VM up and running.

• Industrial Mini-ITX board pumps up with Coffee Lake

  Commell’s “LV-67X” Mini-ITX board runs on 8th Gen “Coffee Lake” processors, with up to 32GB DDR4, 3x SATA, triple 4K displays, USB 3.1, and PCIe x16 and mini-PCIe expansion.

  The LV-67X, which shares some of the layout and feature set of its Intel Apollo Lake based LV-67U board, is the first industrial Mini-ITX board we’ve seen with Intel’s 8th Gen Coffee Lake CPUs. (Going forward, we’ll likely use the caffeinated nickname rather than “8th Gen” because Intel also applies the 8th Gen tag to the transitional and similarly 14nm Kaby Lake-G chips as well as the new, 10nm Cannon Lake processors.)

• Unofficial OpenGApps for Android Pie 9.0 Released for ARM and ARM64 Platforms

• Red Hat's Jim Whitehurst on strategy and culture

  Red Hat Inc. is a successful, public open source software company. It’s the first open source company to crack $1b in revenue and is closing in on $3b. Here is some advice from the CEO for your own business.

  Red Hat gives away all its intellectual property and products. Where it makes money is from support. To be clearer, Red Hat takes the free Linux operating system and other open source projects and makes them more robust, more scalable and more secure for enterprise and government. It sells subscriptions to its software along with support, and with the guaranteed long-term stability of the product.

  Red Hat is the first company with this open source model to crack one billion US dollars in revenue and is closing in on $3b per annum.

  iTWire had the opportunity to speak directly with the CEO, Jim Whitehurst, during the annual Red Hat Summit in San Francisco earlier this year, asking what can a company like Red Hat teach other companies about strategy, planning and culture.

• Elk Creek Partners Stake in Nuvasive (NUVA) Increased as Share Value Rose; As Red Hat (RHT) Market Valuation Rose, Holder Davis R M Trimmed Stake by $3.46 Million

• $827.44 Million in Sales Expected for Red Hat Inc (RHT) This Quarter

• Analysts Expect Red Hat Inc (RHT) Will Post Earnings of $0.81 Per Share

• Silverblue Still Aiming To Be In Great Shape By Fedora 30 Next Spring

  DevConf.US is happening this weekend in Boston, a Red Hat sponsored event for free and open-source software. Among the interesting talks is Red Hat's Matthias Clasen providing an update on the Fedora Silverblue initiative.

  Silverblue as a refresher is what was formally Fedora Atomic Workstation But now there's this new branding for the container-based Fedora Workstation built around RPM-OSTree and envisioning what a future operating system stack could look like, albeit fully working today with leveraging Flatpak, RPM-OSTree, etc.

• FLOCK 2018 – Dresden Germany [Latam in Flock]