• SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9 Release Candidate 1 is here!

• The New News on OpenShift 3.11

  Greetings fellow OpenShift enthusiasts! Not too long ago, Red Hat announced that OKD v3.11, the last release in the 3.x stream, is now generally available. The latest release of OpenShift enhances a number of current features that we know and love, as well as a number of interesting updates and technology previews for features that may or may not be included in OpenShift 4.0. Let’s take a look at one of the more exciting releases that may be part of The Great Updates coming in OpenShift 4.0.

• Red Hat Satellite 6.4.2 has just been released

  Red Hat Satellite 6.4.2 is now generally available. The main drivers for the 6.4.2 release are upgrade and stability fixes. Eighteen bugs have been addressed in this release - the complete list is at the end of the post. The most notable issue is support of cloning for Satellite 6.4.

  Cloning allows you to copy your Satellite installation to another host to facilitate testing or upgrading the underlying operating system. For example, when moving a Satellite installation from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. An overview of this feature is available on Red Hat’s Customer Portal.

• Chakra GNU/Linux Users Get KDE Plasma 5.15 Desktop and KDE Applications 18.12.2

  Users of the Chakra GNU/Linux distribution have received yet another batch of updates that bring them all the latest KDE technologies and security fixes.

  Less than a week after the previous update, which brought the KDE Plasma 5.14.5, KDE Frameworks 5.54.0, and KDE Applications 18.2.1 releases, Chakra GNU/Linux users can now install the recently released KDE Plasma 5.15 desktop environment, along with the KDE Frameworks 5.55.0 and KDE Applications 18.12.2 open-source software suites.

• A mobile Plasma Sprint

  I was last week in Berlin at the Plasma Mobile sprint, graciously hosted by Endocode, almost exactly 9 years after the first Plasma Mobile sprint in which we first started to explore Plasma and other software by KDE on mobile phones, which at the time were just starting to become powerful enough to run a full Linux stack (Hi N900!)

  Now the project got a wide breath of fresh air: the thing that impressed me the most was how many new faces came at the sprint and are now part of the project.

  [...]

  As for Plasma Mobile software in itself, we did many bugfixes on the main shell/homescreen to have a better first impact, and a significant improvement came in KWin about high DPI scaling when running on an Halium system.

  Also, many improvoements were done in the Kirigami framework, which is the main toolkit recommended to be used to build applications for Plasma Mobile: as developers of several applications that use Kirigami were present there, we could do very fast feedback and debug sessions.

In the proprietary software world, when software is released, and when users buy that software, they don’t usually buy the entire software, but instead, they buy what’s known as an end-user license agreement (EULA). This EULA gives them the right to do only some specific things with that software. Usually, users are not allowed to copy, redistribute, share or modify the software, which is the main difference between proprietary software and free software (as in freedom).

It’s extremely annoying and sad that in the 21st century, governments all around the world are still paying millions of dollars for software each year; It’s more sad, because they are not paying for software, they are paying for a license to use a software in a specific way on yearly basis. Now say you were a country with millions of machines, can you just imagine the amounts of money that we are spending worldwide just to get those computers working?

More importantly, you don’t get the software. You just get a usage license that you must renew after a year. While free software gives you the 4 basic freedoms: The ability to read, modify, redistribute and use the software in any way you want.

Choosing to run a proprietary software over free software-where alternatives do exist-is an extremely wrong decision that governments are doing worldwide. And by choosing proprietary software over free software, we are losing huge amounts of money that instead could’ve been spent on health, education, public infrastructure or anything else in the country.

More importantly, the money that’s going to to pay for this software and its support could’ve been invested in developing alternative free solutions their selves; How about instead of spending $50M per year on the EULAs of Microsoft Office because “LibreOffice is not good”, that you just try to invest $25M in LibreOffice itself for one time only and see what happens? As a country, your technical infrastructure will develop if you turn it not just to a user of free software, but a producer as well. And only free software would allow you to do that.

During the period of our investigation, we checked the financial reports of many governments worldwide and their spending on IT. The amounts of money that governments are paying per year for proprietary software is very huge. And most of it isn’t actually for the licenses of using that software, but for the support.

It’s an issue, because it’s not going to end. Governments are claiming problems and issues in transferring to free software, and in doing that, they keep paying millions and millions of dollars each year, and continue to do so indefinitely; They have no plans to switch to free (as in freedom) locally-developed alternatives.

Let’s see some examples of how governments worldwide are spending their money on software.

• Security updates for Thursday

• Hacks.Mozilla.Org: Fearless Security: Thread Safety

  While this allows programs to do more faster, it comes with a set of synchronization problems, namely deadlocks and data races. From a security standpoint, why do we care about thread safety? Memory safety bugs and thread safety bugs have the same core problem: invalid resource use. Concurrency attacks can lead to similar consequences as memory attacks, including privilege escalation, arbitrary code execution (ACE), and bypassing security checks.

  Concurrency bugs, like implementation bugs, are closely related to program correctness. While memory vulnerabilities are nearly always dangerous, implementation/logic bugs don’t always indicate a security concern, unless they occur in the part of the code that deals with ensuring security contracts are upheld (e.g. allowing a security check bypass). However, while security problems stemming from logic errors often occur near the error in sequential code, concurrency bugs often happen in different functions from their corresponding vulnerability, making them difficult to trace and resolve. Another complication is the overlap between mishandling memory and concurrency flaws, which we see in data races.

  Programming languages have evolved different concurrency strategies to help developers manage both the performance and security challenges of multi-threaded applications.

• Consistent security by crypto policies in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

  Software development teams, whether open or closed source, are often composed of many groups that own individual components. Database applications typically come from a different team than ones developed by HTTP or SSH services, and others. Each group chooses libraries, languages, utilities, and cryptographic providers for their solution. Having specialized teams contributing to an application may improve the final product, but it often makes it challenging to enforce a consistent cryptographic policy on a system.

• How to Install Nextcloud with OnlyOffice Integration in Ubuntu

• How to Flush DNS Cache on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• How to Use LVM for Home Directories in Multiuser Environment

• How to Install NetBeans on Ubuntu

• HTTP analysis using Wireshark

• Make Container Management Easy With Cockpit

• MariaDB multi master replication

Android Things will now focus solely on OEM-built smart speakers and displays. Google is discontinuing public access to i.MX8M, Snapdragon, and MediaTek based production modules for the OS.

Google announced it is scaling back Android Things as a general-purpose IoT platform. The Arm-based production boards from Innocomm, Intrinsyc, and MediaTek that that Google was reselling to vendors with pre-loaded Android Things will no longer be publicly supported. Instead: “Given the successes we have seen with our partners in smart speakers and smart displays, we are refocusing Android Things as a platform for OEM partners to build devices in those categories moving forward,” wrote Dave Smith, Google’s Developer Advocate for IoT.

• Futatabi video out

  After some delay, the video of my FOSDEM talk about Futatabi, my instant replay system, is out on YouTube. Actually, the official recording has been out for a while, but this is a special edit; nearly all of the computer content has been replaced with clean 720p59.94 versions.

• Meeks of The Document Foundation

  Valentine's day release of Collabora Online 4.0 with an associated CODE update too. Tons of rather excellent work from the team there - its a privilege to be able work with them, and to fund almost all of that at Collabora. Then again - if you'd like to help out with both the funding, and directing the next round of feature work, we'd really appreciate you as a partner or customer.

• RIP Dr. Bernard L. Peuto, Porting Android 9 Pie Go Stack to Rpi 3, LibreOffice v6.2 Coming Soon, Red Hat Virtualization Platform 4.3 Beta Released, Deepin Desktop Environment

  LibreOffice version 6.2 is right around the corner and the killer feature it will be sporting is a new tabbed layout for the menu items, making it similar to the competitive Microsoft Office suite.

• Snapd flaw gives attackers root access on Linux systems

• Dimitri John Ledkov: Encrypt all the things

  Went into blogger settings and enabled TLS on my custom domain blogger blog. So it is now finally a https://blog.surgut.co.uk However, I do use feedburner and syndicate that to the planet. I am not sure if that is end-to-end TLS connections, thus I will look into removing feedburner between my blog and the ubuntu/debian planets. My experience with changing feeds in the planets is that I end up spamming everyone. I wonder, if I should make a new tag and add that one, and add both feeds to the planet config to avoid spamming old posts.

  Next up went into gandi LiveDNS platform and enabled DNSSEC on my domain. It propagated quite quickly, but I believe my domain is now correctly signed with DNSSEC stuff. Next up I guess, is to fix DNSSEC with captive portals. I guess what we really want to have on "wifi" like devices, is to first connect to wifi and not set it as default route. Perform captive portal check, potentially with a reduced DNS server capabilities (ie. no EDNS, no DNSSEC, etc) and only route traffic to the captive portal to authenticate. Once past the captive portal, test and upgrade connectivity to have DNSSEC on. In the cloud, and on the wired connections, I'd expect that DNSSEC should just work, and if it does we should be enforcing DNSSEC validation by default.

  So I'll start enforcing DNSSEC on my laptop I think, and will start reporting issues to all of the UK banks if they dare not to have DNSSEC. If I managed to do it, on my own domain, so should they!

• Cameron Kaiser: So long, Opportunity rover

  Both Opportunity and Spirit were powered by the 20MHz BAE RAD6000, a radiation-hardened version of the original IBM POWER1 RISC Single Chip CPU and the indirect ancestor of the PowerPC 601. Many PowerPC-based spacecraft are still in operation, both with the original RAD6000 and its successor the RAD750, a radiation-hardened version of the G3.

• Six Hallmarks Of Successful Crowdfunding Campaigns

  While crowdfunding can be a good way to raise funds, it is risky. Here are six hallmarks of successful projects which you can use to hotrod your own campaigns.

  forbes.com

• Welcoming a new Firefox/Toolkit peer

  Please join me in welcoming Bianca Danforth to the set of peers blessed with reviewing patches to Firefox and Toolkit. She’s been doing great work making testing experiment extensions easy and so it’s time for her to level-up.

• BSD Strategy | BSD Now 285

  Strategic thinking to keep FreeBSD relevant, reflecting on the soul of a new machine, 10GbE Benchmarks On Nine Linux Distros and FreeBSD, NetBSD integrating LLVM sanitizers in base, FreeNAS 11.2 distrowatch review, and more.

• FLOSS Weekly 517: Liverpool MakeFest

  Caroline is the co-founder of the free event called Liverpool Makefest, a festival to promote stem, foss and maker-education for young people. The festival is now in its fifth year has attracted over 20,000 visitors and is being expanded across the national libraries within the UK.

• LHS Episode #271: The Discord Accord

  Welcome to Episode 271 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this week's episode, the hosts discuss ARISS Phase 2, the Peanut Android app for D-STAR and DMR linking, a geostationary satellite from Qatar, open source software in the public sector, a new open-source color management tool, Linux distributions for ham radio and much more. Thank you to everyone for listening and don't forget our Hamvention 2019 fundraiser!

• MakuluLinux 2019.01.25 overview

• Netrunner 19.01 Core Run Through

  In this video we look at Netrunner 19.01 Core. Enjoy!

• Google Chrome is getting virtual desktops (probably)

  If you’re the sort of person who regularly runs a bunch of programs on your computer at once, you may already be a fan of using multiple monitors. You can put one set of apps on one screen and a different set on another and tilt your head a bit to switch your focus from one to the other.

  But if you have a laptop, you’re probably confined to using a single screen from time to time (unless you have a portable monitor that you take everywhere you go).

  Enter virtual desktops. Most modern operating systems offer a way to create multiple virtual workspaces that you can flip between. It’s not quite as seamless as using multiple displays, but it’s certainly more compact (and more energy efficient, for that matter).

• The long, slow death of commercial Unix [Ed: Microsoft propagandist Andy Patrizio should also do an article about the death of Windows Server.]

  In the 1990s and well into the 2000s, if you had mission-critical applications that required zero downtime, resiliency, failover and high performance, but didn’t want a mainframe, Unix was your go-to solution.

  If your database, ERP, HR, payroll, accounting, and other line-of-business apps weren’t run on a mainframe, chances are they ran on Unix systems from four dominant vendors: Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM and SGI. Each had its own flavor of Unix and its own custom RISC processor. Servers running an x86 chip were at best used for file and print or maybe low-end departmental servers.

• What is Server Virtualization: Is It Right For Your Business?

  In the modern world of IT application deployment, server virtualization is a commonly used term. But what exactly is server virtualization and is it right for your business?

  Server virtualization in 2019 is a more complicated and involved topic than it was when the concept first started to become a popular approach nearly two decades ago. However, the core basic concepts and promises remain the same.

• Transitioning Red Hat SSO to a highly-available hybrid cloud deployment

  About two years ago, Red Hat IT finished migrating our customer-facing authentication system to Red Hat Single Sign-On (Red Hat SSO). As a result, we were quite pleased with the performance and flexibility of the new platform. Due to some architectural decisions that were made in order to optimize for uptime using the technologies at our disposal, we were unable to take full advantage of Red Hat SSO’s robust feature set until now. This article describes how we’re now addressing database and session replication between global sites.

• Red Hat named to Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list

  People come to work at Red Hat for our brand, but they stay for the people and the culture. It's integral to our success as an organization. It's what makes the experience of being a Red Hatter and working with other Red Hatters different. And it's what makes us so passionate about our customers’ and Red Hat’s success. In recognition of that, Red Hat has been ranked No. 50 on Fortune Magazine's list of 100 Best Companies to Work For! Hats off--red fedoras, of course--to all Red Hatters!

• News from Fedora Infrastructure

  One of the first tasks we have achieved is to move as many application we maintain to use CentOS CI for our Continuous Integration pipeline. CentOS CI provides us with a Jenkins instance that is running in an OpenShift cluster, you can have a look at the this instance here.

  Since a good majority of our application are developed in Python, we agreed on using tox to execute our CI tests. Adopting tox on our application allows us to use a really convenient way to configure the CI pipeline in Jenkins. In fact we only needed to create .cico.pipeline file in the application repository with the following.

• Mirantis to Help Build AT&T's Edge Computing Network for 5G On Open Source

  The two companies hope other telcos will follow AT&T's lead in building their 5G networks on open source software.

• The Telecom Industry Has Moved to Open Source

  The telecom industry is at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution. Whether it’s connected IoT devices or mobile entertainment, the modern economy runs on the Internet.
  However, the backbone of networking has been running on legacy technologies. Some telecom companies are centuries old, and they have a massive infrastructure that needs to be modernized.
  The great news is that this industry is already at the forefront of emerging technologies. Companies such as AT&T, Verizon, China Mobile, DTK, and others have embraced open source technologies to move faster into the future. And LF Networking is at the heart of this transformation.
  “2018 has been a fantastic year,” said Arpit Joshipura, General Manager of Networking at Linux Foundation, speaking at Open Source Summit in Vancouver last fall. “We have seen a 140-year-old telecom industry move from proprietary and legacy technologies to open source technologies with LF Networking.”

• Monroe Electronics Releases Completely Redesigned HALO Version 2.0

  With improvements including a new web-based interface and its shift to a unified web-server platform, HALO V2.0 simplifies and streamlines all of these critical processes. The new web-based interface for HALO V2.0 allows users to work with their preferred web browser (e.g., Chrome, Firefox, Safari). The central HALO server now runs on a Linux OS (Ubuntu and CentOS 7) using a PostgreSQL database.

• PostgreSQL 11.2, 10.7, 9.6.12, 9.5.16, and 9.4.21 released

  The PostgreSQL project has put out updated releases for all supported versions. "This release changes the behavior in how PostgreSQL interfaces with 'fsync()' and includes fixes for partitioning and over 70 other bugs that were reported over the past three months."

• Shipments of 3D sensing-enabled Android smartphones to boom, says

• How to update the software on your Honor 8X

• Samsung Galaxy A20 Android Go smartphone shows up on Geekbench listing

• All about Android upgrades (and why they're late) | TECH(talk)

• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE gets stable MIUI 10 update based on Android Pie

• Xiaomi Mi 9 with 48MP camera will be unveiled at MWC

• India To Investigate Google For Monopolistic Practices With Android

• 5 obscure Android features you need to start using

Using Linux is anything but boring, especially when it comes to personalizing your OS. That extends way beyond just the ability to install multiple Desktop Environments like Budgie, Pantheon and KDE Plasma. Sure I've tinkered with them, tweaked the appearance a bit, installed some cool desktop widgets. But nothing prepared me for my first trip to /r/unixporn.

I repeatedly insist that Linux makes your PC feel personal again, but the level of customization and pure creative beauty on display below left my jaw on the floor, and me with a desire to learn how to accomplish what's been done here.

Join me in a brief but drool-worthy tour of some truly unique Linux desktops.

• Rusty's reminiscences

  Rusty Russell was one of the first developers paid to work on the Linux kernel and the founder of the conference now known as linux.conf.au (LCA); he is one of the most highly respected figures in the Australian free-software community. The 2019 LCA was the 20th edition of this long-lived event; the organizers felt that it was an appropriate time to invite Russell to deliver the closing keynote talk. He used the opportunity to review his path into free software and the creation of LCA, but first a change of clothing was required.

  [...]

  He found his way into the Unix world in 1992, working on an X terminal connected to a SunOS server. SunOS was becoming the dominant Unix variant at that time, and there were a number of "legendary hackers" working at Sun to make that happen. But then Russell discovered another, different operating system: Emacs. This system was unique in that it was packaged with a manifesto describing a different way to create software. The idea of writing an entire operating system and giving it away for free seemed fantastical at the time, but the existence of Emacs meant that it couldn't be dismissed.

  Even so, he took the normal path for a few more years, working on other, proprietary Unix systems; toward the end he ended up leading a research project developed in C++. The proprietary compilers were too expensive, so he was naturally using GCC instead. He did some digging in preparation for this talk and found his first free-software contribution, which was a patch to GCC in 1995. The experience of collaborating to build better software for everybody was exhilarating, but even with as much fun as he was having there was another level to aim for.

• Fixing page-cache side channels, second attempt

  The kernel's page cache, which holds copies of data stored in filesystems, is crucial to the performance of the system as a whole. But, as has recently been demonstrated, it can also be exploited to learn about what other users in the system are doing and extract information that should be kept secret. In January, the behavior of the mincore() system call was changed in an attempt to close this vulnerability, but that solution was shown to break existing applications while not fully solving the problem. A better solution will have to wait for the 5.1 development cycle, but the shape of the proposed changes has started to come into focus.
  The mincore() change for 5.0 caused this system call to report only the pages that are mapped into the calling process's address space rather than all pages currently resident in the page cache. That change does indeed take away the ability for an attacker to nondestructively test whether specific pages are present in the cache (using mincore() at least), but it also turned out to break some user-space applications that legitimately needed to know about all of the resident pages. The kernel community is unwilling to accept such regressions unless there is absolutely no other solution, so this change could not remain; it was thus duly reverted for 5.0-rc4.

  Regressions are against the community's policy, but so is allowing known security holes to remain open. A replacement for the mincore() change is thus needed; it can probably be found in this patch set posted by Vlastimil Babka at the end of January. It applies a new test to determine whether mincore() will report on the presence of pages in the page cache; in particular, it will only provide that information for memory regions that (1) are anonymous memory, or (2) are backed by a file that the calling process would be allowed to open for write access. In the first case, anonymous mappings should not be shared across security boundaries, so there should be no need to protect information about page-cache residency. For the second case, the ability to write a given file would give an attacker the ability to create all kinds of mischief, of which learning about which pages are cached is relatively minor.

• Linux Kernel Getting io_uring To Deliver Fast & Efficient I/O

  The Linux kernel is getting a new ring for Valentine's Day... io_uring. The purpose of io_uring is to deliver faster and more efficient I/O operations on Linux and should be coming with the next kernel cycle. 

  Linux block maintainer and developer behind io_uring, Jens Axboe of Facebook, queued the new interface overnight into the linux-block/for-next on Git. The io_uring interface provides submission and completion queue rings that are shared between the application and kernel to avoid excess copies. The new interface has just two new system calls (io_uring_setup and io_uring_enter) for dealing with I/O. Axboe previously worked on this code under the "aioring" name.

• AMDGPU DC Gets Fixes For Seamless Boot, Disappearing Cursor On Raven Ridge

  Should you be running into any display problems or just want to help in testing out the open-source AMD Linux driver's display code, a new round of patches were published today.

If you want to run BackBox Linux in the cloud, on your AWS account, you should know that the ethical hacking operating system is now available on the Amazon Web Services cloud platform as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) virtual appliance that you can install with a few mouse clicks.

The BackBox Linux operating system promises to offer Amazon Web Services users an optimal environment for professional penetration testing operations as it puts together a collection of some of the best ethical hacking tools, which are already configured and ready for production use.

With the rebase of KDE neon on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) on September 2018, the development team have decided it's time to put the old series based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) to rest once and for all as most users already managed to upgrade their systems to the new KDE neon series based on Canonical's latest Ubuntu LTS release.

"KDE neon was rebased onto Ubuntu bionic/18.04 last year and upgrades have gone generally smooth. We have removed xenial/16.04 build from our machines (they only hang around for as long as they did because it took a while to move the Snap builds away from them) and the apt repo will remove soon," said the devs.

Stemming from Clear Linux detailing how they optimize Python's performance using various techniques, there's been reader interest in seeing just how their Python build stacks up. Here's a look at the Clear Linux Python performance compared to a few other configurations as well as Ubuntu Linux.

For this quick Python benchmarking roundabout, the following configurations were tested while using an Intel Core i9 7980XE system throughout:

- Clear Linux's default Python build with the performance optimizations they recently outlined to how they ship their Python binary.

• Saving birds with technology

  Two members of the Cacophony Project came to linux.conf.au 2019 to give an overview of what the project is doing to increase the amount of bird life in New Zealand. The idea is to use computer vision and machine learning to identify and eventually eliminate predators in order to help bird populations; one measure of success will be the volume and variety of bird song throughout the islands. The endemic avian species in New Zealand evolved without the presence of predatory mammals, so many of them have been decimated by the predation of birds and their eggs. The Cacophony Project is looking at ways to reverse that.

• Mozilla's initiatives for non-creepy deep learning

  Jack Moffitt started off his 2019 linux.conf.au talk by calling attention to Facebook's "Portal" device. It is, he said, a cool product, but raises an important question: why would anybody in their right mind put a surveillance device made by Facebook in their kitchen? There are a lot of devices out there — including the Portal — using deep-learning techniques; they offer useful functionality, but also bring a lot of problems. We as a community need to figure out a way to solve those problems; he was there to highlight a set of Mozilla projects working toward that goal.
  He defined machine learning as the process of making decisions and/or predictions by modeling from input data. Systems using these techniques can perform all kinds of tasks, including language detection and (bad) poetry generation. The classic machine-learning task is spam filtering, based on the idea that certain words tend to appear more often in spam and can be used to detect unwanted email. With more modern neural networks, though, there is no need to do that sort of feature engineering; the net itself can figure out what the interesting features are. It is, he said, "pretty magical".

• Lisp and the foundations of computing

  At the start of his linux.conf.au 2019 talk, Kristoffer Grönlund said that he would be taking attendees back 60 years or more. That is not quite to the dawn of computing history, but it is close—farther back than most of us were alive to remember. He encountered John McCarthy's famous Lisp paper [PDF] via Papers We Love and it led him to dig deeply into the Lisp world; he brought back a report for the LCA crowd.

  Grönlund noted that this was his third LCA visit over the years. He was pleased that his 2017 LCA talk "Package managers all the way down" was written up in LWN. He also gave his "Everyone gets a pony!" talk at LCA 2018. He works for SUSE, which he thanked for sending him to the conference, but the company is not responsible for anything in the talk, he said with a grin.

• Shobha Tyagi: Workshop on Road to Become a GNOME/Open Source Contributor

  On Friday 18, January 2019, We organised the workshop on Road to Become a GNOME/ Open Source Contributor at Department of Computer Science and Technology, Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Manav Rachna International Institute of Research & Studies, Faridabad.

• WebKitGTK 2.23.90 Adds Support For JPEG2000, More Touchpad Gestures

  It missed the GNOME 3.32 Beta by a week, but out today is the WebKitGTK 2.23.90 release, the downstream of the WebKit web layout engine focused on GTK integration and used by the likes of GNOME Web (Epiphany).

  Interestingly, this WebKitGTK release adds support for JPEG2000. That support is a bit surprising considering outside of Apple's Safari browsers, JPEG2000 isn't really supported by other web browsers for this offshoot of JPEG that has never been widely adopted. But now nearly two decades after JPEG2000 was published, it's at least supported by WebKitGTK.

• Chakrma: Frameworks 5.55.0, Plasma 5.15.0, and Applications 18.12.2 by KDE are now available

  Most of our mirrors synchronize with the central repositories on the origin server within 24 hours. Use the mirror status web page to see when your mirror of choice last synchronized.

• Qt on CMake Workshop Summary – Feb 2019

  Last Monday and Tuesday a few brave souls from both the Qt Company and KDAB gathered together in the KDAB Berlin office premises to work on the CMake build system for building Qt. There was Mikhail, Liang, Tobias, Kai (QtCompany) as well as Jean-Michaël, Allen, Volker and me (KDAB) sitting together in a tight room, focusing solely on the CMake port of Qt.

• Python 3.8 alpha in Fedora

• Fedora 31 Is Already Planning Ahead For Python 3.8

  While Fedora 30 isn't debuting for another three months, with the system-wide change deadline already having passed on that release, ambitious Fedora developers are already thinking about early feature plans for Fedora 31 that will debut in November.

  One of the first Fedora 31 system-wide change proposals is for upgrading from Python 3.7 to Python 3.8. Python 3.7 was released just last summer and the Python 3.8.0 release isn't even expected until the end of October, but given it will be another big update to Python3, Fedora developers are working on coordinating the upgrade early to prevent possible fallout late in the cycle.

• What You Don't Know About Python Variables

  The first time you get introduced to Python’s variable, it is usually defined as “parts of your computer’s memory where you store some information.” Some define it as a “storage placeholder for texts and numbers.” We will soon find out that Python’s variable is deeper than this.

• Some Attention to Detail

• Mozilla GFX: WebRender newsletter #40

• A GPIOZero Theramin for Valentine's Day

• Using systemd timer instead of cron

• How to Configure and Install Webmin on Ubuntu

• How to Use Reverse SSH Tunnel to Allow External Connections to Your PC

• Some pretty useful YUM tips & tricks

• Modeling the Entire Universe

  For this article, I want to look at the largest thing possible, the whole universe. At least, that's the claim made by Celestia, the software package I'm introducing here. In all seriousness though, Celestia is a very well done astronomical simulator, similar to other software packages like Stellarium. Celestia is completely open source and is licensed under the GPL.

• Adding entries to the udev hwdb

• Using fwupd and updating firmware without using the LVFS

• 6 Ways to Open Folders in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• C Programming Tutorial Part 3 - Variables basics

• Serve current directory tree at http://$HOSTNAME:8000/

The lone snapshot of the week was 20190209. ModemManager made the jump from version 1.6.14 to 1.10.0 and consolidated common tag names among all the supported plugins as well as provided a new tag to allow specifying flow control settings to use in serial ports. The Mozilla Thunderbird 60.5.0 package gave more search engine options in certain locations offering Google and DuckDuckGo available by default. The email client also added Thunderbird FileLink with WeTransfer to upload large attachments. Thunderbird Filelink provides support for online storage services and allows upload attachments to an online storage service and then replaces the attachment in the message with a link. General-purpose parser generator bison 3.3.1 removed support for the 32-bit C/C++ development system DJGPP. The compiler cache, ccache 3.6, which speeds up recompilation by caching previous compilations, fixed a problem due to Clang, which is a C language family frontend for LLVM, overwriting the output file when compiling an assembler file and added support for GNU Compiler Collection‘s `-ffile-prefix-map` option. The 1.12.12 version update for dbus stopped a few memory leaks and added a couple patches. The epson-inkjet-printer-escpr 1.6.35 version added support for new printer models EcoTank ET-M1100 and Epson WorkForce ST-2000. GNU C Library glibc 2.29 added getcpu wrapper function, which returns the currently used CPU and NUMA node, and optimized the generic exp, exp2, log, log2, pow, sinf, cosf, sincosf and tanf functions. Cross-platform widget toolkit gtk3 3.24.5 implement gdk_window_present for Wayland, updated translations and refreshed the theme. The health-checker 1.1 package added new plugins for cri-o and kubelet. Users of the professional-quality vector-graphics application Inkscape can now use the 0.92.4 version; the new version improves preferences of the measuring tool when grids are visible and fixes a crash that would happen when a user does a Shift/Ctrl-click when handling shapes. Tumbleweed users will have 1.7x faster performance with Ruby 2.6 as the default as compared to Ruby 2.5. Other library packages updated in the snapshot were libosinfo 1.3.0, libsodium 1.0.17, libsolv 0.7.3, libstorage-ng 4.1.86 and libzypp 17.11.1.