The Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 NVMe solid-state drives are now available from Internet retailers. For those wondering how these SSDs compare with EXT4 under Linux against other PCIe 4.0/3.0 drives, here are a variety of benchmarks.

While Samsung hasn't sent out NVMe SSDs for Linux testing at Phoronix, we continue purchasing the new models due to their high performance state and needing some additional drives for various systems in the lab. When the Samsung 980 PRO reached retail channels this month I picked up the Samsung 980 PRO 500GB and 1TB drives and ran a series of benchmarks on them prior to commissioning.

There comes a time when you feel that you don’t fit anywhere. Where your ideas, principles, motivation and struggles simply don’t align with anyone else. For years, I felt part of something that was larger than myself, had the motivation to use a huge part of my free time to contribute to projects and in several cases, make personal sacrifices to help others, and even envisioned a future for myself in places where I thought it was impossible.

It’s that struggle trying to find our place in this huge Open Source world what usually ends up in personal meltdown and professional burnout. It’s not a secret that as fast as technologies evolve, the faster we end up being obsolete, unless we dedicate most of our time to keep up to date on every break through.

I’m not the exception to this, and after being an active contributor for almost 15 years, and then have my “time off” to be a full time mom and employee, what happened in the Projects I used to Contribute left me feeling way far from my comfort zone. I’m grateful that most of the places where I’ve contributed has been because people asks for my help, and even after a long absence it was not different from before.

I have a bit of a confession to make. Although Linux is my operating system of choice on the desktop, I tend to skip over my open source-powered laptop in favor of either a MacBook Pro or Chromebook when I'm working beyond my desk. I know...blasphemy, right? I've reached a point in my career and life where I need the tools to be able to get my jobs done as efficiently as possible and without frustration or headache.

To be absolutely fair, primary reasons why I overlook my one Linux laptop are because it's too big and the keyboard is absolutely terrible. Given I am a writer by profession, a bad keyboard can be a deal-breaker. Once again, in favor of honesty, the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard isn't much better. The "butterfly" keys are loud and way too prone to sticking. My 2015 Pixel was, at one point, an absolute dream machine, but the battery life is waning, and sometimes ChromeOS can be a bit flaky with the trackpad.

The Linux Foundation and , the leading online course company, released the 2020 Open Source Jobs Report on October 26. Once again, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for open-source technology skills is growing. 37% of hiring managers say they will hire more IT professionals in the next six months.

Specifically, 81% of hiring managers say hiring open source talent is a priority going forward. 56% of hiring managers plan to increase their hiring of open source pros in the next six months

Why? The answer to that is simple. As a recent Red Hat survey found, 86% of IT leaders said the most innovative companies are using open-source software, citing higher quality solutions, lower cost of ownership, improved security, and cloud-native capabilities as the top reasons for usage. So, even in these bad times, the demand for open-source savvy is higher than ever.

Opened to submissions since early August, the artwork proposals for Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye,” the next major release of the popular Debian GNU/Linux operating system, has reached its deadline last week on October 15th, and now the community can vote for the winner.

Jonathan Carter announced today that it’s time for the Debian community to choose the desktop artwork to be used in Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye.” The review period for the final proposals starts today, October 26th, until November 9th, and winners will be unveiled in mid-November.

• Map Your Gamepad Buttons With Keyboard, Mouse, or Macros/Scripts Using AntiMicroX in Linux - It's FOSS

  Gaming peripherals on Linux do not have a great reputation, but we do have some interesting open source tools that can make things easier for you. For instance, I’ve previously covered a tool Piper which lets you configure your gaming mouse.

  This time, let me introduce you to an exciting open source tool that lets you utilize your game pad by mapping it to your keyboard, mouse, scripts, or macros.

• GOG have put up their own spooky Halloween sale | GamingOnLinux

  If you weren't convinced by anything Humble Store are currently offering in their Halloween sale, take a look over on the DRM-free store GOG with their big Halloween sale now on.

  As usual, we've looked through to find some of the most interesting games that are supported on Linux and GOG to offer up a few suggestions to get you going.

• Explore post-apocalyptic Japan as a little robot finding a lost friend in Life of Delta | GamingOnLinux

  With an attention-grabbing art style, Life of Delta looks like it's going to be a very intriguing post-apocalyptic point and click adventure.

• 9 Monkeys of Shaolin is a great classic kung-fu movie inspired beat 'em up out now | GamingOnLinux

  9 Monkeys of Shaolin gives us another wonderful beat 'em up with easy to use controls, thoroughly entertaining combat and some great visuals.

• Gravity Ace is an excellent take on classic twin-stick cave-flying and it feels awesome | GamingOnLinux

  Cave-flying is a genre that was big a very long time ago, now though not so much but Gravity Ace from John Watson entered Early Access recently and it's absolutely brilliant.

  The idea of cave flyers are that you're always fighting against gravity while you pilot some sort of spaceship. Developer John Watson took that basic idea with Gravity Ace, threw a load of code at Godot Engine and came out with an Early Access game that shows how timeless certain types of genres can be. Gravity Ace has you fly, fight, and manoeuvre through various tight levels with intense gravitational fields and cramped firefights and it looks awesome while doing so.

• Installing Anbox on Linux to Run Android Apps – Linux Hint

  Anbox is an Android emulator that is available for any GNU/Linux operating system. An android emulator offers the environment necessary for installing and running Android apps. Such emulators do not offer the portability of an Android smartphone, but in exchange, more powerful hardware can be used.In this article, we will show you how to install Anbox on Linux.

• How to set Timers, Alarms, and Stopwatches on CentOS 8

  In this article, I will show you how to set timers, alarms, and stopwatches on your CentOS 8 system. We will perform these actions using two different ways.

• How to Install Docker on Raspberry Pi 4 – Linux Hint

  In this article, learn everything you need to know to get started with Docker and Docker Compose on Raspberry Pi 4.

• How to Create Two Panel Layout in GNOME Shell Us – Linux Hint

  “Dash to Panel” is a GNOME Shell extension that can be installed in Ubuntu, Fedora and other GNOME Shell based Linux distributions. It aims to provide an alternative and much more customizable application dock / taskbar for managing pinned and running apps.

  Until recently, Dash to Panel was limited to a single panel that combined application menus, taskbar and system tray. However, a new update for Dash to Panel was released a couple of months back, allowing users to create two panels. Using this new option, you can now emulate the classic GNOME2 layout, featuring a two panel setup for managing system tray and taskbar. This article will explain how to create this two panel layout using Dash to Panel GNOME Shell extension.

• How to Install LinuxFX Windowsfx 10 on VMware Workstation - SysAdmin

  This video tutorial shows how to install LinuxFX Windowsfx 10 on VMware Workstation step by step. This tutorial is also helpful to install LinuxFX Windowsfx 10 on physical computer or laptop hardware.

• How to Install Heat Sinks on the Raspberry Pi – Linux Hint

  There is a relation between temperature and performance in every electronic device. The lower the temperature, the better the performance. The higher the temperature, the lower the performance. Within a certain boundary, this effect is visible in electronic devices like a Raspberry Pi. So, it is essential to keep the temperature of the Raspberry Pi within a certain boundary.

  Heat sinks are metal objects that are usually placed over the chips and processor of Raspberry Pi. The heat sinks help transfer the heat generated on the processors and other chips to the air. That way, the temperature of the processors and chips remain within a certain boundary that won’t hamper the productivity of the device.

  In this article, I am going to show you how to install heat sinks on the Raspberry Pi. So, let’s get started.

• How to Create Hard Link and Soft Link in Linux? – Linux Hint

  In the Linux operating system, all the information about a file is stored in its respective inode. These inodes allow you to know all the metadata of a file. There is a concept of creating links to a file in Linux, just like we create pointers to the files in most of the popular programming languages. These links are basically of two types: the hard and the soft links. A hard link to a file is essentially an exact copy of the file, which means that a hard link to a file and the actual file will share the same inode. The biggest advantage of creating a hard link is that even if you accidentally delete the actual file, you will still be able to access its contents via its hard link.

  On the other hand, a soft link or a symbolic link works exactly like a pointer or a shortcut to a file. It is not an accurate copy of the file but only points to the original file. A soft link to a file and the actual file will have different inode values. Moreover, if you delete the actual file at any time, you will not be able to access its contents via its soft link. Today, we will share with you the methods of creating a hard link and soft link to a file in Linux.

  Note: We have used Linux Mint 20 for walking you through the methods shown below.

• How to install VirtualBox on Ubuntu 20.04 Linux LTS - nixCraft

  Explains how to install the VirtualBox app on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux for trying out new guest operating (Virtual Machines).

• How to fix: Connection refused by port 22 Debian/Ubuntu – Linux Hint

  SSH provides a secure way to access and manage Linux servers. Sometimes while connecting to SSH servers, users often encounter “Connection refused” error by port 22. It happens because of several reasons like SSH service is not running, the port is blocked by the firewall, or the server is using a different port. It can also occur because of the IP conflict issue. In this article, we will discuss some of the solutions that you should try in order to fix the error.

• How to clone an object in PHP – Linux Hint

  Object cloning can be very useful for object-oriented programming. In this tutorial, we show you how to clone an object in PHP.

• How to clear command history in Linux – Linux Hint

  The bash history stores the records of all terminal commands which are executed by a user on the command-line Linux system. Using the history feature, you can easily locate the previously executed commands on your Linux system through the arrow keys navigation. In this article, how to clear command history in Linux is explained.

According to a recent tweet from renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, the next LTS (Long Term Support) kernel release will be Linux 5.10, which recently entered development with a first Release Candidate (RC) milestone already available for public testing.

This means that Linux kernel 5.10, which will probably see the light of day near the Christmas 2020 holidays, will receive updates for at least two years. But, as it happened with previous LTS kernel series, support could be extended to up to six years, probably until December 2026.

Following the Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) release, there will be Ubuntu 21.04, whose codename will start with the word “Hirsute” followed by an animal name, which will probably be voted by the community soon. If you want to give the Ubuntu developers some suggestions on the H animal, check out this Ubuntu Discourse topic.

Until the codename is decided, development on Ubuntu 21.04 will kick off later this week on October 29th with the toolchain upload, based, of course, on the current release, Ubuntu 20.10. And, as its version number suggests, the final release will be expected in April (04) 2021.

As expected, Linus Torvalds announced the first Release Candidate (RC) of the upcoming Linux 5.10 kernel series, which looks to be yet another big release with almost 14k commits, but not as big as Linux kernel 5.8 was. However, Linus Torvalds assures us that the merge window didn’t cause any unusual issues and things went “fairly smoothly.”

The most interesting change in Linux kernel 5.10 appears to be the removal of setf_fs() function, which was used to set the FS segment register of an x86 processor. For now, it was only removed from the x86, PowerPC, s390, and RISC-V architectures, with the rest to follow soon.

• Graphics in Qt 6.0: QRhi, Qt Quick, Qt Quick 3D

  Last year we had a three part blog series about Qt's new approach to working with 3D graphics APIs and shading languages: part 1, part 2, part 3. For Qt Quick, an early, opt-in preview of the new rendering architecture was shipped in Qt 5.14, with some improvements in Qt 5.15. With the release of Qt 6.0 upcoming, let's see what has happened since Qt 5.15. It will not be possible to cover every detail of the graphics stack improvements for Qt Quick here, let alone dive into the vast amount of Qt Quick 3D features, many of which are new or improved in Qt 6.0. Rather, the aim is just to give an overview of what can be expected from the graphics stack perspective when Qt 6.0 ships later this year.

• Multi-Layer Perceptron & Backpropagation - Implemented from scratch

  Writing a custom implementation of a popular algorithm can be compared to playing a musical standard. For as long as the code reflects upon the equations, the functionality remains unchanged. It is, indeed, just like playing from notes. However, it lets you master your tools and practice your ability to hear and think.

  In this post, we are going to re-play the classic Multi-Layer Perceptron. Most importantly, we will play the solo called backpropagation, which is, indeed, one of the machine-learning standards.

  As usual, we are going to show how the math translates into code. In other words, we will take the notes (equations) and play them using bare-bone numpy.

 

• PyDev of the Week: William Horton

  This week we welcome William Horton (@hortonhearsafoo) as our PyDev of the Week! William is a Backend Engineer at Compass and has spoken at several local Python conferences. He is a contributor to PyTorch and fastai.

  Let’s spend some time getting to know William better!

  Can you tell us a little about yourself (hobbies, education, etc):

  A little about myself: people might be surprised about my educational background–I didn’t study computer science. I have a bachelors in the social sciences. So by the time I finished undergrad, the most programming I had done was probably doing regressions in Stata to finish my thesis. I decided against grad school, and instead signed up for a coding bootcamp (App Academy) in NYC. The day I’m writing this, September 28, is actually 5 years to the day that I started at App Academy.

  Since then I’ve worked at a few different startups in NYC, across various industries: first investment banking, then online pharmacy, and now real estate. I’m currently a senior engineer on the AI Services team at Compass, working on machine learning solutions for our real estate agents and consumers.

  I like to spend my free time on a few different hobbies. I’m a competitive powerlifter, so I like to get into the gym a few times a week (although with the pandemic in NYC I didn’t lift for six months or so). I’ve actually found powerlifting to be a pretty common hobby among software engineers. Every time someone new joined my gym, it seemed like they came from a different startup. I love to play basketball. And I’m passionate about music: I’ve been a singer almost my whole life, and most recently was performing with an a cappella group in NYC. And in the last year I’ve picked up the guitar, after not touching it since I was a teenager, and that has been very fulfilling.

• Malayalam fonts: Beyond Latin font metrics | Soliloquies

  This year’s annual international conference organized by TeX Users Group — TUG2020 — was held completely online due to the raging pandemic. In TUG2020, I have presented a talk on some important Malayalam typeface design factors and considerations.

  The idea and its articulation of the talk originated with K.H. Hussain, designer of well-known fonts such as Rachana, Meera, Meera Inimai, TNJoy etc. In a number of discussions that ensued, this idea was developed and later presented at TUG2020.

  Opening keynote to TUG2020 was delivered by Steve Matteson, about the design of Noto fonts. He mentioned that Noto was originally envisaged to be developed as a single font containing all Unicode scripts; but that was changed due to a couple of reasons: (1) huge size of resulting font and (2) the design of many South/South-East Asian characters do not fit well within its Latin font metrics.

• Jérôme Gardou hired full-time to work on the memory manager

  I proudly announce that ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired Jérôme Gardou to work full-time on the ReactOS kernel’s memory manager for the next 3 months.

  Jérôme is a ReactOS veteran who has been contributing to the project since 2009. He has deep expertise into nearly all parts of ReactOS, ranging from various user-mode components (mostly related to low-level graphics) over their kernel-mode counterparts and down to bare-metal components like the kernel memory manager.

  During the upcoming months, Jérôme is going to overhaul the Mm (Memory Manager) and Cc (Cache Controller) components of the kernel. Both of them are core parts of the operating system, which are involved in every memory request and file operation. Improving them is expected to have a substantial effect on the overall stability and performance of ReactOS.

• "Open-Source Windows" ReactOS To See Improved Memory Management - Phoronix

  ReactOS Deutschland e.V. has hired one of their long-time contributors to work full-time on the "open-source Windows" implementation's memory management for the next quarter.

  ReactOS is funding longtime contributor Jérôme Gardou to work full-time for the next three months on the open-source operating system's memory manager and cache controller code within its kernel.

  ReactOS hopes this overhaul to the MM/CS code will yield "a substantial effect on the overall stability and performance of ReactOS."

Select high-end Corsair power supplies such as their RMi / HXi / AXi series are able to expose various sensor metrics via USB interface to the system. To date this sensor functionality has only worked under Windows with their proprietary software but now an open-source driver is seeking mainline inclusion for supporting these sensors under Linux.

Independent developer Wilken Gottwalt reverse-engineered the micro-controller found on the Corsair RMi/HXi/AXi power supplies and found it to be a proprietary but simple USB HID protocol. The controller exposes temperatures, current, and voltage levels along with other information like power uptime, power used, and power supply fan speed. This protocol on select models can also allow configuring the fan mode and mono/multi-rail voltage handling, and over-current protection.

Also: Qualcomm QCS610 micro SoM and devkit to power AI and ML smart cameras

• Nonsense Soccer is a highly amusing local multiplayer platformer-soccer-hybrid | GamingOnLinux

  After your next local multiplayer game? Nonsense Soccer is out in Early Access and it's already a huge amount of fun if you're the competitive type.

  Nonsense Soccer takes the classic sport and turns it into a side-on platformer-soccer-hybrid and the result is chaotic. Simple enough for anyone young and old to pick up their favourite gamepad and get kicking. It's actually been available for a little while already, with the new Steam release being their second major update.

• Check out the fresh demo of Bound By Blades and take down some fierce monsters | GamingOnLinux

  Bound By Blades might look welcoming with the sweet colourful style and wonderful music, but this action-RPG gets quickly intense.

  Inspired somewhat by Monster Hunter, it originally tried going through Kickstarter to gather funds back in 2019. It failed but the development has continued anyway. The idea is that you go through increasingly tough battles, slaying big creatures in the unique four-corner combat arena where you run between four corners, dodging enemy attacks and unleash your own. After a year of work, the new demo is out now.

• Humble Store has a big Halloween sale on right now | GamingOnLinux

  Prepare for Halloween with some new games? It's not like you're able to go out much with the COVID19 disease still raging on so staying in and playing games sound great to me.

  To help with that you can check out the Humble Store Halloween Sale, which has a number of big hits going on some pretty high discounts. While it's a Halloween sale, the majority of the titles oddly aren't really scary or much related to the event, still it's another good chance to build up your collection.

• How To Install HAProxy on CentOS 8 - idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install HAProxy on your CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, HAProxy is a free HTTP/TCP high availability load balancer and proxy server. It spreads requests among multiple servers to mitigate issues resulting from a single server failure. HA Proxy is used by a number of high-profile websites including GitHub, Bitbucket, Stack Overflow, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter, and Tuenti, and is used in the OpsWorks product from Amazon Web Services.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation HAProxy on a CentOS 8.

• How To Install Python 3.9 on Ubuntu 20.04 – TecAdmin

  Python is an object-oriented, high-level programming language. It is an open source with a large community. Python is used as key languages among the top tech companies like Google.

  The Python 3.9 stable version has been released with several improvements and security updates. It included multiple new modules, improved existing modules and many other features.

  You can choose deadsnakes PPA for Python installation on Ubuntu 20.04 system.

  Use this tutorial to install Python 3.9 On Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux system via Apt-Get. You can also choose second method to install Python using source code.

• YAML for beginners | Enable Sysadmin

  YAML Ain't a Markup Language (YAML), and as configuration formats go, it's easy on the eyes. It has an intuitive visual structure, and its logic is pretty simple: indented bullet points inherit properties of parent bullet points.

  But this apparent simplicity can be deceptive.

  It's easy (and misleading) to think of YAML as just a list of related values, no more complex than a shopping list. There is a heading and some items beneath it. The items below the heading relate directly to it, right? Well, you can test this theory by writing a little bit of valid YAML.

• colorls – turbocharged alternative to ls

  The part of the operating system responsible for managing files and directories is called the file system. It organizes our data into files, which hold information, and directories (also called ‘folders’), which hold files or other directories. Several commands are frequently used to create, inspect, rename, and delete files and directories.

  One of these commands is ls, which prints the names of the files and directories in the current directory. A directory is really just a file. It’s a special file with special rules. The ls utility appeared in the first version of AT&T UNIX.

  Are you looking to liven up your shell? Want a bit more beauty on your terminal? colorls might be the ticket. colorls is a command-line utility that aims to improve on ls. color is written in Ruby.

Building off a set of "request for comments" patches from September, a set of patches were sent out on Sunday for providing brute force attack mitigation around the fork system call.

With attacks aiming to break Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and similar attacks often relying on the fork system call in order to keep replicating the memory contents of the parent process, these patches aim to detect the behavior where fork is being exploited for these nefarious purposes.

This work is inspired in part by some patches carried by GrSecurity where a delay around the fork system call will be imposed if a child died from a fatal error. These patches propose collecting statistical data shared across all the processes with the same memory contents and analyzing the timing of any children processes crashing. When the code determines such an exploit may be underway leveraging fork, all of the processes using the same memory contents are killed to stop whatever malicious activity may be happening.

• Poll of The Week: Does Android need a small flagship phone like the iPhone 12 Mini?

• Android phones become payments terminals as Aussie app takes on Square

• Android users alert! 21 gaming apps with adware identified on Google Play Store - Check full list

• Google removes 3 android apps with over 20 million downloads

• Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 review: Reliable mid-range Android tablet

• GTA 5: How to download GTA 5 on PC and Android smartphones from Steam and Epic Games store?

Pulp is an open source repository management tool that helps you fetch, mirror, upload, and publish content within your organization. It can be used to manage various types of content such as software packages (from RPM packages to Ruby gems), as well as Ansible collections, container images, and even arbitrary files.

A typical workflow starts with fetching software packages from an existing repository (for example, http://mirror.centos.org/centos/7/os/x86_64/) or adding packages manually (for private packages built within your organization). Then Pulp helps you make arbitrary collections of software packages that are consumable by clients. With it, you...

Official documentation of applications or commands is always the best way to learn about them if you want to know every detail, which a blog or article can’t provide.

And in the Linux community, we can’t deny Arch Wiki is truly a go-to place for anything you want to learn about Linux. Besides Arch, there are other documentations as well which you may also want to prefer like Gentoo or FreeBSD.

So, whether you want to know about a command or jargon in Linux, you can refer to any of the Wiki sites available. But if you’re looking for something that can provide documentation not only of Arch Linux but also of Gentoo, FreeBSD, and others to read in an offline mode, meet Wikiman.

• Episode 221 – Security, magic, and FaceID – Open Source Security

  Josh and Kurt talk about how to get started in security. It’s like the hero’s journey, but with security instead of magic. We then talk about what Webkit bringing Face ID and Touch ID to the browsers will mean.

• GNU World Order 377

  Fedora Silverblue.

• LHS Episode #375: No Deliveries | Linux in the Ham Shack

  Welcome to the 375th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short-topics episode, the hosts discuss the FCC relocating its offices, Logbook of the World, the new FST4 mode, Peertube, Hashicorp, RustyLinux, Ubuntu DragonOS, QRadioLink and much more. Thank you for tuning in and we hope you have a wonderful week.

• Linux Action News 160

  Ubuntu 20.10 is out, with official Raspberry Pi 4 desktop support. We try it out and report back. And our thoughts on the youtube-dl takedown.

  Plus Edge is out for Linux, and PayPal gets bitcoin fever.

• Bash Process Substitution: How to Use it

  Multiple commands and input/output redirections can be effectively used with bash process substitution.

• How to Install Linux on Chromebook?

  Chromebooks have gotten better since their launch and Linux support has made them even better. Hence, let's look at how you can install Linux on Chromebook.

• How to Use Docker Run Command with Examples - LinuxBuz

  The docker run command is one the most important command you should become familiar with. The docker run command is used to launch Docker containers from a specified image.

• Running SecureDrop inside of podman containers on Fedora 33

  Last week, while setting up a Fedora 33 system, I thought of running the SecureDrop development container there, but using podman instead of the Docker setup we have.

  I tried to make minimal changes to our existing scripts. Added a ~/bin/docker file, with podman $@ inside (and the sha-bang line).

• Adapting Docker and Kubernetes containers to run on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform - Red Hat Developer

  Adapt existing Docker and Kubernetes containers to run on Red Hat OpenShift, and how to create new Kubernetes containers that can also run on OpenShift.

• 10 Ansible modules for Linux system automation | Opensource.com

  These handy modules save time and hassle by automating many of your daily tasks, and they're easy to implement with a few commands.

• 7 Git tricks that changed my life | Opensource.com

  These helpful tips will change the way you work with the popular version control system.

• Manage content using Pulp Debian | Opensource.com

  Mirror, sync, upload, and publish collections of software packages with the Pulp_Deb plugin.