• Episode 43 | This Week in Linux

  On this episode of This Week in Linux we cover a big batch of releases from distros, apps, hardware and more. System76 launches the option to order their new Open Source Certified Desktop, Thelio. We got a big update from the Solus team about the future of the project. openSUSE announces the launch of their Legal Review System, Cavil. Fedora 29 has been released along with other releases like KDE Connect, Sailfish, i3 Window Manager, GIMP, VirtualBox and the Game Manager, Lutris. We’ll also take a look at some upcoming projects like Ubuntu 19.04, Cinnamon 4.0 and the Samsung DeX running Ubuntu. All that and much more!

• Hegemon – A Modular System Monitoring Tool for Linux

  There are all kinds of Linux system monitoring tools such as top, htop, atop and many more that provide different output of system data such as resource utilization, running processes, CPU temperature and others.

  In this article, we are going to review a modular monitoring tool called Hegemon. It’s an open source project written in Rust, which works are still in progress.

• Free Chess Club – A Modern Desktop App for Playing Chess Online

  It has been a while since we reviewed any games on FossMint. And even though I don’t know how many of our readers play chess, it is never too late for anyone to learn how to – especially since awesome services like the FICS exist. What, you’ve never heard about it? Read on.

  [...]

  Open Source: You can deploy the app to Heroku from GitHub.

• The alias And unalias Commands Explained With Examples

• Adding an optional install duration to LVFS firmware

• Automate Sysadmin Tasks with Python's os.walk Function

  I'm a web guy; I put together my first site in early 1993. And so, when I started to do Python training, I assumed that most of my students also were going to be web developers or aspiring web developers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although some of my students certainly are interested in web applications, the majority of them are software engineers, testers, data scientists and system administrators.

  This last group, the system administrators, usually comes into my course with the same story. The company they work for has been writing Bash scripts for several years, but they want to move to a higher-level language with greater expressiveness and a large number of third-party add-ons. (No offense to Bash users is intended; you can do amazing things with Bash, but I hope you'll agree that the scripts can become unwieldy and hard to maintain.)

  It turns out that with a few simple tools and ideas, these system administrators can use Python to do more with less code, as well as create reports and maintain servers. So in this article, I describe one particularly useful tool that's often overlooked: os.walk, a function that lets you walk through a tree of files and directories.

• Our achievements in 2018

  On October 12, we started our yearly donation campaign. Today, we summarize what we achieved with your help in 2018 and renew our call for donations.

• Twistlock Improves Cloud-Native Security With Discovery Tool

  There is a simple truism in much of IT, and that is that organizations can't manage what they're not aware of. As organizations increasingly make use of distributed teams that use cloud-native services, there is a nontrivial risk of application sprawl.

  On Nov. 13, container security vendor Twistlock announced its new open-source cloud-native discovery tool, in an effort to help identify and locate applications running on different public cloud services. The Cloud Discovery tool's initial release supports scanning on the three major public cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.

  "Most customers tend to have a multicloud cloud strategy and then you combine that with the fact that everybody has got multiple accounts for different projects or business units, and so forth," John Morello, chief technology officer at Twistlock, told eWEEK. "You get this big equation where organizations try to figure out all the possible things that could be out there deployed and running.

• Twistlock Releases Cloud Discovery Open Source Tool for Cloud Native Services

• Microsoft's New Open-Source Project Is "Shader Conductor" For Cross-Compiling HLSL [Ed: Why does Phoronix help Microsoft's openwashing of proprietary lock-in, DX?]

• Raspberry Pi's potential is wider than you think

  What do you get for the techie who has everything? How about giving them a Raspberry Pi and letting them make pretty much anything. Or better yet, do it for yourself with the Ultimate Raspberry Pi eBook Bundle.

• Systems Engineer Salary Rises Even Higher with Linux Experience

  Some companies treat “systems engineer” and “systems administrator” almost interchangeably, but there are significant differences between the two positions. In broadest terms, systems engineers must design and implement a company’s system (comprising the network, servers, devices, etc.), whereas systems administrators are largely charged with keeping everything running.

  To frame it another way, system administration is a very reactive role, with sysadmins constantly monitoring networks for issues. Systems engineers, on the other hand, can build a system that anticipates users’ needs (and potential problems). In certain cases, they must integrate existing technology stacks (e.g., following the merger of two companies), and prototype different aspects of the network before it goes “live.”

• New Linux-Targeting Crypto-Mining Malware Combines Hiding and Upgrading Capabilities [Ed: When your system gets cracked anything can happen afterwards; does not matter whether there's an upgrade or not? No.]

  Japanese multinational cybersecurity firm Trend Micro has detected a new strain of crypto-mining malware that targets PCs running Linux, according to a report published Nov. 8.
  The new strain is reportedly able to hide the malicious process of unauthorized cryptocurrency-mining through users’ CPU by implementing a rootkit component. The malware itself, detected by Trend Micro as Coinminer.Linux.KORKERDS.AB, is also reportedly capable of updating itself.

Among the various Linux on Android implementations, Samsung’s Linux on DeX definitely looks the most polished ready to use solution, even if it’s still in beta form. Although it uses a two-year-old version of Ubuntu, there is already a lot that can be done from that. Plus, just like Android users, Linux users can be pretty creative and only time will tell if they’ll be able to use Linux on DeX to make almost any Linux distro work.

• Google Could Make Android Q's Preview Available Much Earlier To Users

• Xiaomi Mi Box S review: This isn't doing Android TV justice

• Top 10 Android apps of 2018

• 5 tweaks only the Android pros know

• OnePlus 5/5T's Android Pie update is reportedly in beta testing in China

With GCC 9 embarking upon its third stage of development where the focus ships to working on bug/regression fixes in preparation for releasing the GCC 9.1 stable compiler likely around the end of Q1'2019, here is a fresh look at the GCC 9 performance with its latest development code as of this week compared to GCC 8.2.0 stable while using an Intel Core i9 7980XE test system running Ubuntu Linux. For good measure are also fresh results from LLVM Clang 7.0 stable as well as LLVM Clang 8.0 SVN for the latest development state of that competing C/C++ open-source compiler.

Hangzhou C-SKY has launched a “C-SKY Linux Development Board” for $5.60 and up, featuring a RISC-V derived, 574MHz C-SKY GX6605S CK610M SoC, 64MB DDR2, an HDMI port, and 2x USB 2.0 ports.

Last month, Hangzhou C-SKY Microsystems Co. announced Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel support for its new RISC-V based C-SKY CK810 SoC design. Now, Hangzhou C-SKY has launched a development board that runs Linux on a similar CK610M SoC. The C-SKY Linux Development Board sells for 39-40 Yuan ($5.60 to $7.05) on Taobao and $19.50 to $21.50 on AliExpress.

• 8 Reasons Why You Should Stick With Ubuntu Linux

  Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system remains the most popular version of desktop Linux. But once the company stopped developing its own Unity interface, its focus moved elsewhere. Canonical’s eyes are now set more on the cloud than the device you’re reading this on.

  If Canonical no longer seems to care all that much about the Ubuntu desktop, why should you? Turns out there are plenty of reasons to stick with this particular version of Linux.

• Using Juju to manage evolving complex software

  With developers increasingly moving towards microservices – and with the growing prevalence of the cloud as the default platform – software has become more complex than ever.

  While installing all of the interconnected applications that make up a modern software stack is becoming easier, the real sting in the tail comes on day two and beyond – when it is time to maintain, upgrade, and scale the deployment.

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 553

Michael Howard, Berkley grad and alumnus of Oracle and EMC, took the helm at open-source biz MariaDB almost three years ago. Reflecting on how things have changed, he reckons the biggest shift is in how both investors and enterprise have embrace open-source. Now, he has an IPO on his mind.

In an interview with El Reg, Howard – who, as noted at the time of his appointment, has worked for a number of companies who were slurped up by bigger businesses – said the end of 2018 will see the end of the first year of a three-year plan he devised for the firm.

Broadly, Howard sets out an overall roadmap of three pieces for the firm. Unsurprisingly, cloud native technology is first up. The other two are adaptive scalability, with the aim of supporting “mom and pop shops all the way to planet-scale processing for the largest social platforms”, and boosting the quality of service by professionalising people and technology, for instance through machine learning.

But in addition to these technical goals, there’s the business side of things, and the boss said the plan “is being able to go public; to be able to get the company buttoned up at the right revenue level to go public”.

“We have a voracious appetite for getting to our strategic goals, and part of that is revenue and going public.”

And what do roughly 95.6% of all websites run on? With the exception of Microsoft sites, the answer is Linux. Facebook? Linux. Google? Linux. Yahoo? Linux. Netflix? Linux. I can go on and on. You may use Windows on your desktop, but it’s effectively just a front end to Linux-based services and data. You might as well be using a Chromebook (running on Linux-based Chrome OS, by the way).

But as a matter of fact, Windows is no longer the top end-user operating system. Oh yes, it does still dominate the desktop, but the desktop hasn’t been king of the end-user hill for some time. By StatCounter’s reckoning, the most popular end-user operating system as of September 2018, with 40.85% market share, was — drum roll, please — Android. Which — guess what — is based on Linux.

So, in several senses, Linux has been the top end-user operating system for some time.

But not on the desktop, where Windows still reigns.

Why? There are many reasons.

Back when desktop Linux got its start, Microsoft kept it a niche operating system by using strong-arm tactics with PC vendors. For instance, when Linux-powered netbooks gave Microsoft serious competition on low-end laptops in the late ’00s, Microsoft dug XP Home up from the graveyard to stop it in its tracks.

But Microsoft’s avid competitiveness is only part of the story. In fact, Microsoft has gotten quite chummy with Linux lately. It’s fair to say that it’s no longer trying to stop the Linux desktop from gaining ground.

Also: Palliative care for Windows 10 Mobile like a Crimean field hospital, but with even less effort

• Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #185

• D-Link’s Central Wifi-Manager Seems To Be Vulnerable To Privilege Escalation Attacks Through Trojan File

  D-Link’s Central Wifi-Manager is quite a nifty tool. It’s a web-based wireless Access Point management tool, enabling you to create and manage multi-site, multi-tenancy wireless networks. Whether deployed on local computer or hosted in the cloud. But it seems there might have been a security issue with the software.

• Kaspersky starts processing threat data in Europe as part of trust reboot

• Capsicum

  I spent a couple of years evangelizing about Capsicum. I wrote many articles about it. So, it is very natural that I would also like to update you on this blog about the progress of the Capsicum project in FreeBSD, because this is what I’m doing in my free time. That said I feel that this blog wouldn’t be completed without some introduction to what Capsicum is. This post should fill this gap. Over the next weeks and months we will extend this topic and discuss different parts of Capsicum. Without further introduction let’s jump into the topic

• Elisa in FreeBSD

  Elisa (product page, release announcements blog) is a music player designer for excellent integration into the KDE Plasma desktop (but of course it runs everywhere, including some non-Free platforms). I had used it a few times, but had not gotten around to packaging it. So today I threw together a FreeBSD port of Elisa, and you’ll be able to install it from official packages whenever the package cluster gets around to it.

Void also comes in musl C flavors, which use the musl C library, a lightweight alternative to the popular glibc library.

Did you know you can run Void in the cloud? We provide ready to upload images for Google Cloud Platform that are compatible with the always free tier! You can also easily build images for other cloud providers from our ready to run x64 tarballs.

Our rootfs tarballs can also be used anywhere you want a Void Linux chroot and are available for all architectures we currently compile for.

You can find all images and rootfs tarballs at https://alpha.de.repo.voidlinux.org/live/current, or in the /live/current directory on any mirror near you.

• What does IBM's Red Hat purchase mean for the data center?

  RedHat was one of the first big open source businesses. It’s grown over the years to encompass more than Linux, building out a complete developer stack that stretches from IoT to hyperscale clouds. It’s a reach that goes well beyond IBM’s, but at a very different, much smaller scale. Where IBM has been a one-stop shop for all your data center needs, RedHat has been a company that’s relied on partnerships and on industry collaboration.

• Could Red Hat deal be a 'distraction' for IBM? Unisys CEO hopes so

• Red Hat Accelerates Back Office Processes and Unifies Global Workforce with FinancialForce

  FinancialForce, a leading customer-centric ERP and Professional Services Automation (PSA) cloud solution native to the Salesforce Platform, announced that Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, is successfully unifying its global workforce and accelerating back-office processes with FinancialForce PSA.

• DLT Awarded Coveted 2018 Red Hat Public Sector Partner of the Year Award

• Total Chaos Doom II Mod Now Available On Flathub

  Total Chaos, a Doom II mod that runs on the GZDoom source port, is now available for easy Linux installation from FlatHub.

  Flathub is an app store and build service for Linux that distributes applications as Flatpak packages, which allows them to run on almost any Linux distribution.

  After nearly a decade of development, the open world survival horror mod was officially released two weeks ago, and it includes 6 chapters set on a remote island known as Fort Oasis. The Total Chaos mod introduces many new graphical features, including 3D models and high resolution textures.

• On Heels of IBM Deal, Red Hat Boosts Community Linux With Fedora 29

• ARMv8.5 Support Lands In GCC Compiler With Latest Spectre Protection

  Landing just in time with the GCC 9 branching being imminent is ARMv8.5-A support in the GNU Compiler Collection's ARM64/AArch64 back-end.

  This ARMv8.5-A support is an incremental upgrade over the existing ARMv8 support. The ARMv8.5 additions are similar to what we already saw land for LLVM / Clang.

• Comparing The Quality Of Debug Information Produced By Clang And Gcc

  I've had an intuition that clang produces generally worse debuginfo than gcc for optimized C++ code. It seems that clang builds have more variables "optimized out" — i.e. when stopped inside a function where a variable is in scope, the compiler's generated debuginfo does not describe the value of the variable. This makes debuggers less effective, so I've attempted some qualitative analysis of the issue.

  I chose to measure, for each parameter and local variable, the range of instruction bytes within its function over which the debuginfo can produce a value for this variable, and also the range of instruction bytes over which the debuginfo says the variable is in scope (i.e. the number of instruction bytes in the enclosing lexical block or function). I add those up over all variables, and compute the ratio of variable-defined-bytes to variable-in-scope-bytes. The higher this "definition coverage" ratio, the better.

• Quo vadis, Perl?

  By losing the sight of the strategies in play, I feel the discussion degenerated very early in personal accusations that certainly leave scars while not resulting in even a hint of progress. We are not unique in this situation, see the recent example of the toll it took on Guido van Rossum. I can only sympathize with Larry is feeling these days.

• Track Prices and Send One-Step Email Links With Firefox’s New Test Pilot Experiments

  Firefox Test Pilot is Mozilla’s way to test out interesting new features. Some of these features see the light of the day, and others just vanish into thin air. However, that doesn’t stop the Firefox Pilot team from experimenting with browser.

  Today, Firefox announced two new such experiments — namely Price Wise and Email Tabs. Both are ridiculously useful for a user who would like to crack tedious work in mere seconds.

• Shop intelligently with Price Wise

  Tell Price Wise to keep an eye on a product, and it’s added to your watch list.
  Price Wise will automatically monitor the prices of products on your watch list. When they drop, we’ll let you know:

  When the price drops, Price Wise alerts you with a colorful heads-up.
  Price checks are done locally, so your shopping data never leaves Firefox. We’re particularly excited about that; Price Wise is the first Firefox feature designed around Fathom, a toolkit for understanding the content of webpages you browse.
  Existing software like this works by tracking you across the web, and it’s often run by advertisers and social networks seeking to learn more about you. Your browser can do these checks for you, while making sure the gathered information never leaves your computer. We know it’s possible to deliver great utility while protecting your privacy, and want you to get a great deal without getting a raw deal.

• Mozilla Reps Community: New Council Members – Fall 2018 Elections

  We are very happy to announce that our 2 new Council members Monica Bonilla and Yofie Setiawan are fully on-boarded and already working moving the Mozilla Reps program forward. A warm welcome from all of us. We we are very excited to have you and can’t wait to build the program together.

• Stay classy: Amazon's Jassy gets sassy with Larry

  Amazon’s consumer business has switched off its Oracle data warehouse and will be almost Big Red-free by Christmas – at least according to AWS boss Andy Jassy.

  The claims – made over Twitter, so it must be true – were then doubled down on by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who said that the database was one of the largest in the world, adding “RIP”.

  It’s the latest in a long-running war of words between the rival tech giants that normally sees Oracle CTO Larry Ellison smack-talking the online marketplace-cum-cloud vendor.

• U.S Supercomputers Lead Top500 Performance Ranking

  The IBM POWER9 based Summit system has retained its crown that it first achieved in the June 2018 ranking. Summit is installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and now has performance of 143.5 petaflops per second, up from the 122.3 petaflops the system had when it first came online.

  [...]

  Though China doesn't hold the top spot on the list, it now has more supercomputers than any other other nation with 227. In contrast, there are now only 109 systems on the Top500 list that are located in the U.S., which is an all-time low.

  That said, thanks to the enormous power of Summit and Sierra at the top, the U.S. is home to 38 percent of the total aggregate supercomputing power on the top500 list, while China's systems account for 31 percent.

• Introducing Red Hat virtual central office solution: An open pathway to modern telecommunications services

  Digital transformation and technology modernization aren’t trends that are limited just to the enterprise world. Behind the walls of proprietary stacks, many telecommunications service providers also want to use open innovation to evolve their infrastructure and services in an agile, flexible fashion. But these closed stacks are a problem and one that extends from the core datacenter all the way to the central offices.

  Central offices are the local “hubs” of many telecommunications networks, often handling “last-mile” operations like telephone switching, copper, and optical terminations. These operations lean on purpose-built equipment that can be rigid and complex. Coupled with a lack of open standards, these devices can struggle to interact with each other, making the life of operations teams in central offices harder, especially in the face of demand for modern services expected from 5G. These differentiated services increasingly require virtualized environments and computing power at the network edge, leading to substantial demand for resources, flexibility and operational simplicity.

• Jesień Linuksowa 2018

  Last weekend I participated in the conference Jesień Linuksowa 2018 in Krakow, Poland. It was my first time in a country with so much tragic historical experiences.

  On the hand, I was impressed by the community members and the organization of the event. We celebrated another edition of Linux Autumn in the hotel Gwarek and my post-event wrap up will take into consideration seven basic points:

  Organizers

  This time I was accompanied by my friend Ana Garcia, who is a student at the University of Edinburgh and the members of the organization were supportive and kind all the time with us. We felt a warm environment since we arrive at night in the middle of the fog at midnight. They helped us with our talks and workshops we offer related to parallelization.

  We meet new friends! Thanks to Dominik, Rafal, Filip, Linter and Matej from Red Hat.

• Sustain OSS 2018: quick rewind

  This year, I attended the second edition of the Sustain Open Source Summit (a.k.a. Sustain OSS) on October 25th, 2018 in London. Sustain OSS is a one-day discussion on various topics about sustainability in open source ecosystems. It’s also a collection of diverse roles across the world of open source. From small project maintainers to open source program managers at the largest tech companies in the world, designers to government employees, there is a mix of backgrounds in the room. Yet there is a shared context around the most systemic problems faced by open source projects, communities, and people around the world.

  The shared context is the most valuable piece of the conference. As a first-time attendee, I was blown away by the depth and range of topics covered by attendees. This blog post covers a narrow perspective of Sustain OSS through the sessions I participated and co-facilitated in.

• A Review of Hacktoberfest Year 5!

• Hacktoberfest Celebrates 5th Anniversary

  Five years ago the community team at DigitalOcean wanted to create a program to inspire open source contributions. That first year, in 2014, the first Hacktoberfest participants were asked for 50 commits, and those who completed the challenge received a reward of swag. 676 people signed up and 505 forged ahead to the finish line, earning stickers and a custom limited-edition T-shirt.

  This year that number is an astounding 46,088 completions out of 106,582 sign-ups. We’ve seen it become an entry point to developers contributing to open source projects: much more than a program, it’s clear that Hacktoberfest has become a global community movement with a shared set of values and passion for giving back.

The latest feature on deck for the long overdue Xfce 4.14 desktop update is support for the RandR primary display/output functionality.

The X11 Resize and Rotate (RandR) protocol has long had baked into it the concept of a primary output/display, which is intended to be where the desktop panel(s), icons, notifications and other central functionality of the desktop would reside. Basically, of a multi-monitor configuration, the display head that is most important for your workflow.

• Project Hospital is a more serious hospital building game out with Linux support

  For those who found Two Point Hospital a little too cute and lacking in depth, Project Hospital might be what the doctor ordered.

  Don't get me wrong, I like Two Point Hospital quite a lot. However, Project Hospital is an entirely different beast altogether. There's a lot more to learn and you can even be a Doctor yourself. It makes it really quite interesting, although a little of your own patience is needed.

• The Fertile Crescent is an indie RTS in development that looks quite promising

  With a style that resembles the original Age of Empires a little, The Fertile Crescent is an RTS set during the Bronze Age in the Ancient Near East. Currently available for free on itch.

• The excellent theme park sim 'Parkitect' to leave Early Access November 29th with a campaign mode

  I've been waiting on this day for quite some time! Parkitect is a truly great theme park management sim and it's getting set to leave Early Access.

  November 29th is the day and this will also see the game finally get the campaign mode. Sounds like it's going to be pretty interesting too, with 26 scenarios with unique and varied settings that is spread across a world-map with branching paths.

• The open source racer 'SuperTuxKart' is looking for testers to try their new online play

  hey're also now asking for testers.

  There's one caveat though, you will for now need to download and compile it yourself until it's properly released or someone provides it ready made for us. The developers said their next release isn't actually too far off, as they're busy working on a beta/release candidate so hopefully that won't be too long.

  Currently, they have around 20 servers up with various game modes for people to jump in and test and you can also host your own.

• Deadly Days, the strategic zombie survival rogue-lite has changed dramatically, we have keys to give away

  It's been a good few months since I last looked at the Early Access strategic zombie survival rogue-lite called Deadly Days. During this time, it's changed a lot. Note: My own copy was personally purchased.

  Sometime in the future, the fast food chain MKing put some secret addictive additives to their meat. Tasty, sure, but it had a rather devastating affect on the population. It practically shut down the brains of people who ate it and so the apocalypse began.

• Feral Interactive are asking you to send the game port suggestions again

  Feral Interactive, one of the only companies to be porting AAA games to Linux have put out a request for more port suggestions.