In 1950, a television salesman named Robert Tarlton put together a consortium of TV merchants in the town of Lansford, Pennsylvania to erect an antenna tall enough to pull down signals from Philadelphia, about 90 miles to the southeast. The antenna connected to a web of cables that the consortium strung up and down the streets of Lansford, bringing big-city TV to their customers — and making TV ownership for Lansfordites far more attractive. Though hobbyists had been jury-rigging their own "community antenna television" networks since 1948, no one had ever tried to go into business with such an operation. The first commercial cable TV company was born.

The rise of cable over the following years kicked off decades of political controversy over whether the cable operators should be allowed to stay in business, seeing as they were retransmitting broadcast signals without payment or permission and collecting money for the service. Broadcasters took a dim view of people using their signals without permission, which is a little rich, given that the broadcasting industry itself owed its existence to the ability to play sound recordings over the air without permission or payment.

The FCC brokered a series of compromises in the years that followed, coming up with complex rules governing which signals a cable operator could retransmit, which ones they must retransmit, and how much all this would cost. The end result was a second way to get TV, one that made peace with—and grew alongside—broadcasters, eventually coming to dominate how we get cable TV in our homes.

By 1976, cable and broadcasters joined forces to fight a new technology: home video recorders, starting with Sony's Betamax recorders. In the eyes of the cable operators, broadcasters, and movie studios, these were as illegitimate as the playing of records over the air had been, or as retransmitting those broadcasts over cable had been. Lawsuits over the VCR continued for the next eight years. In 1984, the Supreme Court finally weighed in, legalizing the VCR, and finding that new technologies were not illegal under copyright law if they were "capable of substantial noninfringing uses."

• Pause Music When Locking The Screen And Resume On Unlock For Spotify, Rhythmbox, Others

  When you lock your computer screen (without suspending the system), most desktop audio players continue playback in the background, sometimes not emitting any sound ¹. Due to this you may unintentionally skip parts of podcasts or songs in a playlist, etc.

  Enter pause-on-lock, a Bash script that pauses your music player when you lock the screen and resumes playback once the screen is unlocked.

  pause-on-lock works on Unity, GNOME, Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments, and by default it supports Spotify and Rhythmbox. With the help of playerctl (a command line controller for controlling media players that support the MPRIS D-Bus interface), this script can extend its supported music players to many others, including Audacious, VLC, Cmus, and others.

• Easy Way to Screen Mirroring Android on Ubuntu!

  Screen Mirroring is one of the features found on smartphones, one of which is on Android. This feature serves to display the smartphone to a computer. This is very useful for example when used for demo applications that you make, or maybe for other things related to smartphones.

  In Ubuntu, we can do screen mirroring with applications available on Android, for example is AirDroid which can be used for screen mirroring through a browser. But I feel less optimal when using this instant method.

  Because there is a lag between activity on the smartphone and on the monitor screen on the computer, and the results are less than optimal. What might be the cause because it is opened through a browser and uses wi-fi? (Personal question).

  I am looking for another application for screen mirroring on Ubuntu, and one of the very good applications is Scrcpy. This application can be used for screen mirroring without a root device.

• Command line quick tips: Searching with grep

• How to Install Cezerin on Debian 9

• How to Create a Bootable USB Stick from the Ubuntu Terminal

• How to Install Git on Debian 10

• How to Copy/Move a Docker Container to Another Host

• Six practical use cases for Nmap

• The Next Stage of Flash Storage: Computational Storage

• NAS upgrade

  At some point in the future I hope to spend a little bit of time on the software side of things, as some of the features of my set up are no longer working as they should: I can't remote-decrypt the main disk via SSH on boot, and the first run of any backup fails due to some kind of race condition in the systemd unit dependencies. (The first attempt does not correctly mount the backup partition; the second attempt always succeeds).

• Storage Concepts And Technologies Explained In Detail

• Approved: Fedora 31 To Drop i686 Everything/Modular Repositories

  The month-old proposal for the upcoming Fedora 31 Linux distribution release to stop with their i686 repositories for Everything and Modules was voted on today by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee.

  The FESCo group gave their formal approval today for permitting these i686 repositories to be removed beginning with Fedora 31. This also goes in-step with Fedora 31 having already decided to stop with their i686 kernel builds.

• Living my best 4 days: Flock to Fedora 2019

  Months of waiting came to an end and finally, it was time to meet people with whom I have been working for the last 4 months, being on the other side of the screen. Things seemed different when our last Wednesday conference call ended with “Meet you soon” instead of a “Good Day”. The excitement of attending Flock to Fedora, was not only because the virtual interaction is turning to the real meeting but also, it was my first ever International trip. With approaching the 6th of August, the fear of travelling solo was getting on the peak, and at one moment I started questioning if all the trouble I underwent during last month was even worth it. But the time I met Shraddha(another intern working on the same project)at Bangalore airport, we happened to click so much at our first conversation that it was certain that at least my journey will not be me, and my headphones all the time.

  Since I reached Budapest a day before when everyone arrived, I got a handful of time discovering places, getting to know their culture and try on things we never tried before. The excitement of being at such a beautiful place did not make me realise that I was sleep-deprived, I had a jet lag of 4 hours and I was hungry. I spent the entire day roaming the streets, enjoying a breath of fresh air and exploring the city and ways of commute as well.

  Next day we shifted to the hotel that was booked for us and where the conference will be held. The ambience of the whole place was really nice and we met other fellow attendees at the conference.

• rpminspect Presentation at Flock 2019

  Flock in Budapest was a great event. There were a lot of talks I wanted to attend, but could not make it to all of them. I did give one talk on my project called rpminspect.

  rpminspect is a project I started as a replacement for an internal Red Hat tool. I am working on integrating it in to the build workflow for Fedora but also allow package maintainers to use it locally as a build linter of sorts. Here is a link to the presentation I gave. I think there is video, but I am not sure where those are.

• Security updates for Monday

  Security updates have been issued by CentOS (kernel and openssl), Debian (ffmpeg, golang-1.11, imagemagick, kde4libs, openldap, and python3.4), Fedora (gradle, hostapd, kdelibs3, and mgetty), Gentoo (adobe-flash, hostapd, mariadb, patch, thunderbird, and vlc), Mageia (elfutils, mariadb, mythtv, postgresql, and redis), openSUSE (chromium, kernel, LibreOffice, and zypper, libzypp and libsolv), Oracle (ghostscript), Red Hat (rh-php71-php), SUSE (bzip2, evince, firefox, glib2, glibc, java-1_8_0-openjdk, polkit, postgresql10, python3, and squid), and Ubuntu (firefox).

• IPFire 2.23 - Core Update 135 is ready for testing

  after a little break with many things to fight, we are back with a brand new Core Update which is packed with various bug fixes and cleanup of a lot of code.

• Wladimir Palant: Kaspersky in the Middle - what could possibly go wrong?

  Roughly a decade ago I read an article that asked antivirus vendors to stop intercepting encrypted HTTPS connections, this practice actively hurting security and privacy. As you can certainly imagine, antivirus vendors agreed with the sensible argument and today no reasonable antivirus product would even consider intercepting HTTPS traffic. Just kidding… Of course they kept going, and so two years ago a study was published detailing the security issues introduced by interception of HTTPS connections. Google and Mozilla once again urged antivirus vendors to stop. Surely this time it worked?

  Of course not. So when I decided to look into Kaspersky Internet Security in December last year, I found it breaking up HTTPS connections so that it would get between the server and your browser in order to “protect” you. Expecting some deeply technical details about HTTPS protocol misimplementations now? Don’t worry, I don’t know enough myself to inspect Kaspersky software on this level. The vulnerabilities I found were far more mundane.

This is where Kubeflow comes in. They started by training their 3DGAN on an on-prem OpenStack cluster with 4 GPUs. To verify that they were not introducing overhead by using Kubeflow, they ran training first with native containers, then on Kubernetes, and finally on Kubeflow using the MPI operator. They then moved to an Exoscale cluster with 32 GPUs and ran the same experiments, recording only negligible performance overhead. This was enough to convince them that they had discovered a flexible, versatile means of deploying their models to a wide variety of physical environments.

Beyond the portability that they gained from Kubeflow, they were especially pleased with how straightforward it was to run their code. As part of the infrastructure team, Ricardo plugged Sofia’s existing Docker image into Kubeflow’s MPI operator. Ricardo gave Sofia all the credit for building a scalable model, whereas Sofia credited Ricardo for scaling her team’s model. Thanks to components like the MPI operator, Sofia’s team can focus on building better models and Ricardo can empower other physicists to scale their own models.

Also: Issue #2019.08.19 – Kubeflow at CERN

• The Document Foundation/LibreOffice Community Member Monday: Sanjog Sigdel

  I’m currently a Graduate Student pursuing my MTech. in IT degree here in Kathmandu University, Dhulikhel, Nepal. Besides that, I am also a part-time instructor in a private college near the University: NIST College Banepa.

  I love knowing how new technologies work and also love exploring new places. Unitil now I have traveled almost 30 districts of Nepal via trekking, project monitoring and tours. I’ve been using Linux-based operating systems (mainly Ubuntu) since 2012. And I am also a FOSS activist/volunteer. I teach my students to use open source software and most of them are using Linux, LibreOffice, and Python programming in the Nano text editor

• Debugging Python Applications with the PDB Module

  In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to use Python's PDB module for debugging Python applications. Debugging refers to the process of removing software and hardware errors from a software application. PDB stands for "Python Debugger", and is a built-in interactive source code debugger with a wide range of features, like pausing a program, viewing variable values at specific instances, changing those values, etc.

  In this article, we will be covering the most commonly used functionalities of the PDB module.

• Mike Driscoll: PyDev of the Week: Paul Ganssle

  This week we welcome Paul Ganssle (@pganssle) as our PyDev of the Week. Paul is the maintainer of the dateutil package and also a maintainer of the setuptools project. You can catch up with Paul on his website or check out some of his talks. Let’s take a few moments to get to know Paul better!

• Image Process Plugin 1.2.0 for Pelican Released

  Image Process is a plugin for Pelican, a static site generator written in Python.

  Image Process let you automate the processing of images based on their class attribute. Use this plugin to minimize the overall page weight and to save you a trip to Gimp or Photoshop each time you include an image in your post.

  Image Process is used by this blog’s theme to resize the source images so they are the correct size for thumbnails on the main index page and the larger size they are displayed at on top of the articles.

• Top 7 Compelling Reasons to Hire Ukrainian Developers

  Many people consider offshore development. They seek quality for a lower cost and look where to hire developers. Customers search online, read reviews, or ask for referrals to find the software development team that best fits their goals. Ukraine has become one of the top locations where customers across Europe, Asia, and North America go for developers to build their products from scratch.

• How to Find and Hire a Python/Django Development Company

  Even though there are about 22 million developers in the world (according to a Nexten.io study), good Python/Django developers aren’t easy to find and can be quite expensive. But there are many job marketplaces for software development companies and individual Python developers. Where you can find profiles of software development companies and their projects, reviews and ratings from current and former clients.

• These fraudulent Android apps were downloaded 8 million times

• Google Android Adware Warning Issued To 8 Million Play Store Users

• Malicious Android photography, gaming apps downloaded 8 million times from Google Play

• Android rival - Here's why Google's software could soon be outclassed

• OnePlus 7 vs OnePlus 6T: Which is right for you?

• Visible R2 phone review: You get what you pay for

• Fossil Gen 5 Smartwatch review: Wear OS at its finest

• Google stops sending Android cell signal data over privacy concerns

• Google Duo to officially gain low light mode this week on Android and iOS

• Huawei P Smart Pro Surfaces on Android Enterprise Directory, Key Specifications Revealed

• Huawei phone with a 5.71-inch waterdrop notch display, Android Pie gets TENAA certification

• [Update: Available, but OTA paused] Original Razer Phone gets Android Pie in the ‘coming weeks’

• Best dating apps of 2019 for iOS and Android

• Best Wireless Charger for Android Phones

• 10 best archery games for Android!

• 12 Best Android Custom ROMs That You Must Try

• 6 best ways to lock down a kid's phone in 2019

• Reviewed: The New JBL LINK Bar With Built-In Android TV And Google Voice Assistant

• OnePlus Is Launching A New 5G Smartphone; OnePlus TV Will Have Android OS, 4 Sizes!

• Xumo Launches on Comcast Xfinity Set-Tops, Android TV Devices

• Disney+ will have apps for iOS, Apple TV, Android and Xbox One

• Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo join forces to make Android file transfers easier

• Xiaomi Mi A3 India prices, colours and storage variants leaked: Stock Android fans could be happy

• How to snooze notifications and get less distracted on Android phones

• Why Google’s rivals refuse to pay for a slice of the Android search market

• Amazon wants to challenge CarPlay and Android Auto

• Motorola One Action is a stylish Android One phone with a clutch camera trick

• GeForce Now levels up for Android and RTX servers

Exposing a huge framework such as Qt to another language is not an easy task and this was the main reason for the slow porting from the old PySide version in Qt 4 to Qt 5.
Many developers hours were spent in adapting to new Qt 5 APIs, and more importantly, the binding generator tool such that everything can be handled properly.

Now with Qt 6 things will be different, because the development of Qt for Python is progressing side-by-side to the C++ and QML stories in Qt 6. Hopefully, there will be a lot fewer surprises this time around. In fact, this effect can be seen with current 5.x releases, PySide2 is available almost at the same time as the Qt release, having in some cases a few days delays.

Since the official release in Qt 5.12.0, the downloads of Qt for Python has been increasing day-by-day, which translates on the community adopting and enjoying the project.

Also: Qt 6 Will Bring Improvements To The Toolkit's Python Support

• PHP version 7.2.22RC1 and 7.3.9RC1

  Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests (for x86_64 only), and also as base packages.

  RPM of PHP version 7.3.9RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 30 or remi-php73-test repository for Fedora 28-29 and Enterprise Linux.

  RPM of PHP version 7.2.22RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 28-29 or remi-php72-test repository for Enterprise Linux.

• Self-Serviced, End-to-End Encryption for Kubernetes Applications, Part 2: a Practical Example

  In part one of this series, we saw three approaches to fully automate the provisioning of certificates and create end-to-end encryption. Based on feedback from the community suggesting the post was a bit too theoretical and not immediately actionable, this article will illustrate a practical example. You can see a recording of the demo here.

• The Tiger that interned at Red Hat

  From the start, Tiger just had the right idea about looking for a college. Instead of reading US World News’ rankings, basing his decisions on sports teams, or even aiming for the Ivy Leagues, Tiger set out to make his college search a data driven effort. He asked himself, first, where he wanted to work. For him, that was an almost typical answer for an aspiring young technology student: Google, Facebook, Red Hat and other big name tech firms.

  [...]

  Tiger's real name is Passawit Kaovilai, and he's now entering his third year at NC State. He said that many people in his native Thailand have nicknames, and that his translates well into any language, and is understood immediately. He was also born in the year of the tiger, so the name is a natural fit.

  Here at Red Hat, Tiger has taken on the duties of a technical marketing intern. That means he's been diving into Red Hat OpenShift 4 to help create documentation and learning tools for users in the field. That also means contributing to open source projects, and getting his handle out there on GitHub, however modestly.

A couple of weeks ago, the KDE community fixed a security vulnerability discovered by Dominik Penner in the KConfig component, the configuration settings framework of the KDE Plasma desktop environment, which could allow an attacker to execute malicious code through a specially crafted .desktop file included in an archive that was opened in the file manager.

"Dominik Penner discovered that KConfig supported a feature to define shell command execution in .desktop files. If a user is provided with a malformed .desktop file (e.g. if it's embedded into a downloaded archive and it gets opened in a file browser) arbitrary commands could get executed. This update removes this feature," reads the Debian security advisory.

Chrome OS started out as a browser-based operating system that could run web apps only. Eventually Google added support for Android apps, and then for Linux apps, making Chromebooks more useful as general-purpose laptops.

But while most new Chromebooks feature out-of-the-box support for Android and Linux apps, many older models do not… and it looked like they never would.

It turns out that may not be true after all: 9to5Google reports that Google seems to be testing an update that would bring Linux app support to the 2015 Chromebook Pixel, along with a number of other models released that year.

• Onenuts Nut 9 TV Box Runs Android TV, Doubles as a Smart Speaker

  We’ve previously covered HF10 2-in-1 Android speaker and TV box that looks more like a speaker than a TV box, and since we’ve posted about it several years got improved to work as a smart...

• Allwinner R328 Smart Speaker & System-on-Module Spotted in China

  Earlier this year, Allwinner introduced some AIoT (AI + IoT) processors including Allwinner R328 dual-core Cortex-A7 processor for “low-cost voice interaction solutions” aka low-cost...

• Socionext 24 GHz Radar Sensor for IoT Measures Distance and Angle (Video)

  Last year, we wrote about Socionext MN87900 24 GHz radio wave radar module for IoT with Rx & Tx antennas and a crytal unit that measured just 12×7 mm.

For those wondering how ARM and IBM POWER hardware stack up against AMD's new EPYC "Rome" processors and that of Intel's existing Xeon "Cascade Lake" processors, here is a round of tests from the POWER9 Talos II, Ampere eMAG, and Cavium ThunderX in looking at the cross-architecture Linux CPU performance currently in the server space.

Our AMD EPYC Rome benchmarks this month have been focused on the performance compared to earlier AMD EPYC and Intel Xeon processors, but given the broader architecture support on Linux and there also being significant interest in the likes of IBM POWER / OpenPOWER thanks to more open-source designs when paired with motherboards from Raptor Computing Systems, here are some initial numbers for ARM and POWER9 performance against the new x86_64 server CPUs.

Released earlier this month, Ubuntu MATE 18.04.3 LTS is the third instalment in the long-term supported Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system series, shipping with updated kernel and graphics stacks from the more recent Ubuntu MATE 19.04 (Disco Dingo) operating system, including Linux 5.0.

While until now users were able to download Ubuntu MATE 18.04.3 LTS for 64-bit and 32-bit computers, starting today the operating system is also available to download for SOFTWIN's GPD Pocket and GPD Pocket 2 gaming computers, as well as for the Topjoy Falcon mini laptop.

Tails 4.0 recently entered beta testing and it's the first release to be based on the just released Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" operating system series, which means that all the pre-installed packages have been updated to newer versions to support the latest hardware components, especially recent Nvidia and ATI/AMD graphics cards, as well as Mac computers.

Tails 4.0 also promises support for Thunderbolt 3 devices, which is now integrated into the latest GNOME 3 desktop environment, with which the upcoming major Tails release will ship by default. Users who own a Thunderbolt device are urged to test the implementation by navigating to Choose Devices > Thunderbolt from the GNOME Settings utility.

After a well deserved summer break, the Kdenlive community is happy to announce the first major release after the code refactoring. This version comes with a big amount of fixes and nifty new features which will lay the groundwork for the 3 point editing system planned for this cycle. The Project Bin received improvements to the icon view mode and new features were added like the ability to seek while hovering over clips with the mouse cursor and now it is possible to add a whole folder hierarchy. On the usability front the a menu option was added to reset the Kdenlive config file and now you can search for effects from all tabs instead of only the selected tab. Head to our download page for AppImage and Windows packages.

Wayland support is inching ahead on NetBSD for this secure, modern next-generation successor to running an X.Org Server.

NetBSD has seen a lot of interesting developments this year on the desktop front from DRM graphics driver improvements to better Wine support and now the first Wayland bits are proving successful on this BSD operating system.

• How to Change Hostname in Debian

• How to Install and Configure OpenShift Origin PaaS Server on Ubuntu

• How to Setup Free SSL Certificate for Apache on Debian 10

• Copying Arabic Text Correctly from Zekr to LibreOffice

• The Easiest Data Cleaning Method using Python & Pandas

  In this post we are going to learn how to do simplify our data preprocessing work using the Python package Pyjanitor. 

• Weekly Python Exercise A3 (beginner objects) is open

  If you’ve been programming in Python for any length of time, then you’ve undoubtedly heard that “everything is an object.”

  But what does that mean? And who cares?  And what effect does that have on you as a developer — or on Python, as a language?

  Indeed, how can (and should) you take advantage of Python’s object-oriented facilities to make your code more readable, maintainable, standard, and (dare I say it) Pythonic?

• Get started with Eclipse Che 7 and Quarkus: An overview

  In this short video tutorial, hosted by Doug Tidwell, we’ll take a look at the new Eclipse Che 7 interface along with Quarkus, the revolutionary new technology that can make Java applications very small and very fast.

  In the course of this demo, we’ll show how to set up a running workspace and run a simple app. To get started, we’ll also be using Minikube version 1.2.0 and Helm version 2.14.1, both of which you’ll need to have installed. For Che 7, we’re using the chectl tool; note that we’re using the July 30 build of chectl version 0.0.2. Finally, we assume you have wget installed as part of your operating system.

• CMake: the Case when the Project's Quality is Unforgivable

  CMake is a cross-platform system for automating project builds. This system is much older than the PVS-Studio static code analyzer, but no one has tried to apply the analyzer on its code and review the errors. As it turned out, there are a lot of them. The CMake audience is huge. New projects start on it and old ones are ported. I shudder to think of how many developers could have had any given error.

• The situation with Blood: Fresh Supply getting a Linux version is looking a little unclear

  Blood: Fresh Supply is the revamp of the classic 90's first-person shooter Blood, released by Nightdive Studios in May this year.

  In the most recent update on Steam, the team mentioned "For future issues, we will have to recommend contacting Atari about them.". Their wording is interesting, which seems to indicate that Nightdive will not be making any further additions to Blood: Fresh Supply. Presumably then, this would mean the Linux version they previously confirmed back in May will not be happening either.

• Spacebase Startopia is the next title from Realmforge and Kalypso Media, coming to Linux

  Set Phasers to fun sci-fi fans, as Realmforge (Dungeons 3) and Kalypso Media just announced Spacebase Startopia and it's confirmed to be supporting Linux.

  From the press release sent over by Kalypso Media, they confirmed it's "an all-new take on the 2001 cult classic" Startopia from Mucky Foot Productions.

• wsPublish, an open source Steam Workshop Interop Library released

  How about a little open source news to get your Monday flowing? Game porter Ethan Lee recently announced the release of wsPublish, an open source Steam Workshop Interop Library with a little history.

• Incredibly stylish twin-stick shooter Devader is launching next month

  With some really wild enemy designs and action that just don't stop, Devader is a damn fun game and it's releasing officially next month.

• Planetary Annihilation: TITANS still seeing updates, Mesa issues on Linux being looked into

  Celebrating one year since Planetary Annihilation Inc took over development of Planetary Annihilation: TITANS from Uber Entertainment, the team have given an update.

  The post goes over what they've been able to achieve and it is quite impressive. Before Planetary Annihilation Inc appeared, it did seem like the game was left on life support so they've given it a big boost. A fair amount of Planetary Annihilation: TITANS was getting old, so their first point of action was to upgrade the underlying tech to be more modern. Along with that they also upgraded the AI, put a fair amount of effort into their servers to improve performance, gave it more multi-threading and so on.

• Based on the classic FPS Warsow, the new Warfork is now live in Early Access

  Fast-paced arena shooter Warsow has been forked, updated under the name of Warfork and it's now in Early Access on Steam.

  If you're curious why they forked it and put it on Steam, according to the team behind Warfork the owner of Warsow is apparently opposed to a Steam release (see the additional notes below on that). Not just that, but until recently Warsow saw very little in the way of updates and seemed a bit dead overall. In addition, the developers of Warfork are planning lots of work to make Warfork more easily adjusted with mods.

• Open-world vehicle-based survival game Project 5: Sightseer has been officially released

  Set on a huge procedurally generated world, Project 5: Sightseer from the developer of Windward is a sandbox open-world survival game where you pilot various vehicles.

  Instead of running around as person like in other survival sims, Project 5: Sightseer is more about technology. Starting you off in a rather crap land vehicle, you eventually build up an outpost and research much better transportation including those that enable you to fly vast distances easily.

• GOG are celebrating their Community Wishlist feature with a big sale

  The DRM-free store GOG are currently doing a bit of patting themselves on the back with a sale celebrating their Community Wishlist feature.

  Allowing gamers to suggest, discuss and vote on games they want to see come to GOG it's a pretty fun feature for a curated store to have. GOG say they have completed "over 2 million wishes" and they have "no plans on slowing down" with it. They of course can't fulfil every wish, but it's a good way for them to see what classics people want revived.

• Warfork Letting Warsow Live On Under Steam

  Going back a decade one of the interesting open-source FPS games of its time was Warsow. Development on Warsow has seemingly been tremulous over the past few years (edit: though the core developer has recently released a new beta) for this Qfusion (Quake 2 code base) engine powered game that started in 2005, but now there is Warfork as a fork of Warsow that is being developed and also available via Steam. 

  Hitting Steam this past week was the release of Warfork for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The game is free to play and with it going up on Steam will hopefully attract new gamers to this shooter title who may not be otherwise following the open-source scene. 

• KDE sprints in summer heat

  It was great to see many new faces at the Plasma sprint. Most of these new contributors were working on the Plasma and KDE Apps Ui and Ux and we definitely need some new blood in these areas. KDE's Visual Design Group, the VDG, thinned out over the last two years because some leading figures left. But now seeing new talented and motivated people joining as designers and Ux experts I am optimistic that there will be a revival of the golden time of the VDG that brought us Breeze and Plasma 5.

  In regards to technical topics there is always a wide field of different challenges and technologies to combine at a Plasma sprint. From my side I wanted to discuss current topics in KWin but of course not everyone at the sprint is directly working on KWin and some topics require deeper technical knowledge about it. Still there were some fruitful discussions, of course in particular with David, who was the second KWin core contributor present besides me.

  As a direct product of the sprint my work on dma-buf support in KWin and KWayland can be counted. I started work on that at the sprint mostly because it was a feature requested already for quite a long time by Plasma Mobile developers who need it on some of their devices to get them to work. But this should in general improve in our Wayland session the performance and energy consumption on many devices. Like always such larger features need time so I was not able to finish them at the sprint. But last week I landed them.

• My Free Software Activities in July 2019

  Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you’re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.