Variscite is prepping a headless version of its Linux-friendly DART-6UL module with NXP’s new i.MX6 ULZ SoC, a cheaper version of the i.MX6 UL without display or Ethernet features.

Variscite is spinning out yet another pin-compatible version of its 50 x 25mm DART-6UL computer-on-module, this time loaded with NXP’s headless new i.MX6 ULZ variant of the single Cortex-A7 core i.MX6 UL. Due for a Q4 launch, the unnamed module lacks display or LAN support. It’s billed as “a native solution for headless Linux-based embedded products such as IoT devices and smart home sensors requiring low power, low size, and rich connectivity options.”

• Linux 4.18.9

• Linux 4.14.71

• Linux 4.9.128

• Linux 4.4.157

• Scality Rolls Out Multi-Cloud Management Tool Zenko in Open Source and Enterprise Editions
  

  Scality today released Zenko 1.0, its multi-cloud data management tool, in an open source and an enterprise edition.

  The new subscription cloud data controller builds on an earlier open source version that Scality rolled out last year. But unlike that product, which was based on Docker Swarm, the new editions use a Kubernetes orchestration framework. “It gives us more flexibility and a larger ecosystem around Kubernetes to deploy on prem or in cloud,” said Wally MacDermid, VP of Scality’s cloud business.

• Scality releases Zenko 1.0 to help businesses manage multiple clouds

  San Francisco-based Scality, which is known for its data management software, today announced its first full release of a subscription cloud management tool.

  Zenko 1.0 is now generally available for enterprise users and is designed to help them control data as it moves between their private storage and various public clouds. For Scality, which made its name with Ring, (software for managing data on private servers), the release of Zenko is a bet that the future of its business will look quite a bit different from its past.

• Kong Announces Version 1.0 of its Open-Source Microservice API Gateway

• Blackboard Announces Rebrand of Open-Source Learning Management System [Ed: Evil Blackboard -- a patent bully connected to Microsoft -- continues its openwashing efforts to confuse the market]

• You can now show everyone your mad skills using Descenders' new Replay Mode

  Descenders, the downhill freeriding game has been updated with a Replay Mode so I took a look to see what fun things you could do with it.

• War Thunder’s “The Valkyries” update is now live, adding helicopters

  The vehicular combat MMO has released its 1.81 update which brings a number of goodies for players, including several helicopters that are available for testing.

• Virtme: The kernel developers' best friend

  When working on the Linux Kernel, testing via QEMU is pretty common. Many virtual drivers have been recently merged, useful either to test the kernel core code, or your application. These virtual drivers make QEMU even more attractive.

• 2018 Linux Audio Miniconference

  As in previous years we’re trying to organize an audio miniconference so we can get together and talk through issues, especially design decisons, face to face. This year’s event will be held on Sunday October 21st in Edinburgh, the day before ELC Europe starts there.

• How Writing Can Expand Your Skills and Grow Your Career [Ed: Linux Foundation article]

  At the recent Open Source Summit in Vancouver, I participated in a panel discussion called How Writing can Change Your Career for the Better (Even if You don't Identify as a Writer. The panel was moderated by Rikki Endsley, Community Manager and Editor for Opensource.com, and it included VM (Vicky) Brasseur, Open Source Strategy Consultant; Alex Williams, Founder, Editor in Chief, The New Stack; and Dawn Foster, Consultant, The Scale Factory.

• At the Crossroads of Open Source and Open Standards [Ed: Another Linux Foundation article]

  A new crop of high-value open source software projects stands ready to make a big impact in enterprise production, but structural issues like governance, IPR, and long-term maintenance plague OSS communities at every turn. Meanwhile, facing significant pressures from open source software and the industry groups that support them, standards development organizations are fighting harder than ever to retain members and publish innovative standards. What can these two vastly different philosophies learn from each other, and can they do it in time to ensure they remain relevant for the next 10 years?

• [Podcast] PodCTL #50 – Listener Mailbag Questions

  As the community around PodCTL has grown (~8000 weekly listeners) we’ve constantly asked them to give us feedback on topics to discuss and areas where they want to learn. This week we discussed and answered a number of questions about big data and analytics, application deployments, routing security, and storage deployment models.

• Security Embargos at Red Hat

  The software security industry uses the term Embargo to describe the period of time that a security flaw is known privately, prior to a deadline, after which time the details become known to the public. There are no concrete rules for handling embargoed security flaws, but Red Hat uses some industry standard guidelines on how we handle them.

  When an issue is under embargo, Red Hat cannot share information about that issue prior to it becoming public after an agreed upon deadline. It is likely that any software project will have to deal with an embargoed security flaw at some point, and this is often the case for Red Hat.

• Transforming oil & gas: Exploration and production will reap the rewards

  Through advanced technologies based on open standards, Red Hat deliver solutions that can support oil and gas companies as they modernize their IT infrastructures and build a framework to meet market and technology challenges. Taking advantage of modern, open architectures can help oil and gas providers attract new customers and provide entry into markets where these kinds of services were technologically impossible a decade ago.

The BlackArch Linux penetration testing and ethical hacking computer operating system now has more than 2000 tools in its repositories, announced the project's developers recently.

Used by thousands of hundreds of hackers and security researchers all over the world, BlackArch Linux is one of the most acclaimed Linux-based operating systems for hacking and other security-related tasks. It has its own software repositories that contain thousands of tools.

The OS is based on the famous Arch Linux operating system and follows a rolling release model, where users install once and receive updates forever, or at least until they do something that can't be repaired and need to reinstall.

• Debian Outs Updated Intel Microcode to Mitigate Spectre V4 and V3a on More CPUs

  The Debian Project released an updated Intel microcode firmware for users of the Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system series to mitigate two of the latest Spectre vulnerabilities on more Intel CPUs.

  Last month, on August 16, Debian's Moritz Muehlenhoff announced the availability of an Intel microcode update that provided Speculative Store Bypass Disable (SSBD) support needed to address both the Spectre Variant 4 and Spectre Variant 3a security vulnerabilities.

  However, the Intel microcode update released last month was available only for some types of Intel CPUs, so now the Debian Project released an updated version that implements SSBD support for additional Intel CPU models to mitigate both Spectre V4 and V3a on Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" systems.

• Announcing Extended Security Maintenance for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS – “Trusty Tahr” [Ed: Canonical looking to profit from security flaws in Ubuntu like Microsoft does in Windows.]

  Ubuntu is the basis for the majority of cloud-based workloads today. With over 450 million public cloud instances launched since the release of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, a number that keeps accelerating on a day-per-day basis since, many of the largest web-scale deployments are using Ubuntu. This includes financial, big data, media, and many other workloads and use cases, which rely on the stability and continuity of the underlying operating system to provide the mission-critical service their customers rely on.

  Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) was introduced for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a way to extend the availability of critical and important security patches beyond the nominal End of Life date of Ubuntu 12.04. Organisations use ESM to address security compliance concerns while they manage the upgrade process to newer versions of Ubuntu under full support. The ability to plan application upgrades in a failsafe environment continues to be cited as the main value for adoption of ESM. With the End of Life of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in April 2019, and to support the planning efforts of developers worldwide, Canonical is announcing the availability of ESM for Ubuntu 14.04.

• Canonical Announces Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) Extended Security Maintenance

  Canonical announced today that it would extend its commercial Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) offering to the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) operating system series starting May 2019.

  Last year on April 28, 2017, when the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) operating system series reached end of life, Canonical announced a new way for corporate users and enterprises to receive security updates if they wanted to keep their current Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installations and had no plans to upgrade to a newer LTS (Long Term Support) release. The offering was called Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and had a great success among businesses.

• Initial NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Linux Benchmarks

  This article is going to be short and sweet as just receiving the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti yesterday and then not receiving the Linux driver build until earlier today... The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti has been busy now for a few hours with the Phoronix Test Suite on the Core i7 8086K system running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS with the latest drivers.

• NVIDIA Introduces A Number Of New OpenGL Extensions For Turing

  As part of the GeForce RTX 2080 series launching with the new GPU architecture, NVIDIA has published a number of new OpenGL extensions for making use of some of Turing's new capabilities.

• Vulkan 1.1.85 Released With Raytracing, Mesh Shaders & Other New NVIDIA Extensions

  Leading up to the Turing launch we weren't sure if NVIDIA was going to deliver same-day Vulkan support for RTX/ray-tracing with the GeForce RTX graphics cards or if it was going to be left up to Direct3D 12 on Windows for a while... Fortunately, as already reported, their new driver has Vulkan RTX support. Additionally, the NVX_raytracing extension and other NVIDIA updates made it into today's Vulkan 1.1.85 release.

• Radeon/GPUOpen OCAT 1.2 Released But No Linux Support Yet

  A new feature release is out for the Radeon/GPUOpen "OCAT" open-source capture and analytics tool.

  OCAT 1.2 is their first release of the year and includes VR head-mounted display (HMD) support, new visualization tools, system information detection, new settings, and other enhancements.

• Security updates for Wednesday

• State Department Still Sucks At Basic Cybersecurity And Senators Want To Know Why

  The senators are hoping the State Department will have answers to a handful of cybersecurity-related questions by October 12th, but given the agency's progress to compliance with a law that's been on the book for two years at this point, I wouldn't expect responses to be delivered in a timelier fashion.

  The agency's track record on security isn't great and these recent developments only further cement its reputation as a government ripe for exploitation. The agency's asset-tracking program only tracks Windows devices, its employees are routinely careless with their handling of classified info, and, lest we forget, its former boss ran her own email server, rather than use the agency's. Of course, given this long list of security failures, there's a good possibility an off-site server had more baked-in security than the agency's homebrew.

• EternalBlue Vulnerability Puts Pirated Windows Systems at Malware Risk [Ed: Microsoft's collusion with the NSA (for US-controlled back doors) continues to cost billions... paid by people who foolishly chose or accepted PCs with Windows.]

  A particular vulnerability that has been codenamed EternalBlue is to be blamed for this misfortune. The malware risk especially affects computers which use pirated Windows versions. This gap in security has its traces back in the legacies of US secret service NSA. Even after several years, many systems continue to be vulnerable. For more than three years, US intelligence was using it for performing hidden attacks on all kinds of targets. The agency finally had to leak the vulnerability to Microsoft due to the danger of hacking by a famous hacker group, Shadow Brokers. Microsoft then consequently had to abandon a patch day for the very first time in the company’s history for filling in the gap as quickly as possible.

• CentOS / RHEL See Detailed History Of yum history Commands

• Docker Guide: Dockerizing Nodejs Express Application on Ubuntu 18.04

• Linux find largest file in directory recursively using find/du

• Linux pushd and popd Command Tutorial for Beginners (3 Examples)

• Streama – Setup Your Own Streaming Media Server In Minutes

• Ubuntu Tweak: Install It On Your Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial/14.04 Trusty/Linux Mint 18/17

• Web Server Guides for Linux Beginners

• mmdebstrap: unprivileged reproducible multi-mirror Debian chroot in 11 s

One reason became clear recently when Linus Torvalds asked developers to add an entirely new system of dependency checks to the Kconfig language, specifically testing the capabilities of the GCC compiler.

It's actually an important issue. The Linux kernel wants to support as many versions of GCC as possible—so long as doing so would not require too much insanity in the kernel code itself—but different versions of GCC support different features. The GCC developers always are tweaking and adjusting, and GCC releases also sometimes have bugs that need to be worked around. Some Linux kernel features can only be built using one version of the compiler or another. And, some features build better or faster if they can take advantage of various GCC features that exist only in certain versions.

Up until this year, the kernel build system has had to check all those compiler features by hand, using many hacky methods. The art of probing a tool to find out if it supports a given feature dates back decades and is filled with insanity. Imagine giving a command that you know will fail, but giving it anyway because the specific manner of failure will tell you what you need to know for a future command to work. Now imagine hundreds of hacks like that in the Linux kernel build system.

I am quite pleased with the final result of this transformation. But it also requires a lot of non-standard changes, which is a shame, because none of what I did, subjective taste elements aside, is super complicated. Imagine a Fedora, or for that any which distro, that has everything really nicely tailored for max. efficiency, ergonomics, productivity, and fun.

My journey encompasses the use of third-party repos, extra software, Gnome Tweak Tool, about a dozen extensions, new themes, icons, and fonts, the use of a dock, plus some extra visual polish. In the end, though, Fedora 28 looks and behaves the part. This is something I could happily show to other people, and I am convinced they would be inclined to try it. Well, there you go. The guide. Hopefully, you'll find it useful, and perhaps it may even hype up your enthusiasm for Linux. In these dreary times, an injection of fanboyese is quite needed. Take care.

• Linux provider Red Hat's profit falls 10.5 pct on higher costs

  Linux operating system distributor Red Hat Inc reported a 10.5 percent fall in quarterly profit on Wednesday, hurt by a rise in expenses.

  The company’s profit fell to $86.85 million, or 46 cents per share, in the second quarter ended Aug. 31, from $97.09 million, or 53 cents per share, a year earlier.

• Red Hat falls after revenue disappoints

• Red Hat Q2 Profit Down On Costs, Outlook Weak

• Red Hat (RHT) Gets a Buy Rating from RBC Capital

• Stocks making the biggest moves after hours: Tilray, Red Hat and more

• Red Hat (RHT) Tops Q2 Earnings Estimates

• Red Hat Reports Second Quarter Results for Fiscal Year 2019

• Red Hat Inc. Q2 adjusted earnings Beat Estimates

• Red Hat Inc.: Red Hat Reports Second Quarter Results for Fiscal Year 2019

• Red Hat: Buy Some Before Q2 Earnings And Some After

• Red Hat stock drops on revenue miss, weak outlook

• Red Hat (RHT) 2nd Quarter Earnings: What to Expect

• What to Expect When Red Hat Reports After the Close

• Momentum Stock in Focus (RSI – A Momentum Oscillator) – Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT)

• 4 factors to rethink when leading innovation

• Red Hat Q2 19 Earnings Conference Call At 5:00 PM ET

• Red Hat earnings preview: what to expect

• CORPORATE REPORT: Red Hat; Herman Miller; Danske bank

• Red Hat Earnings: 6 Things to Know About Q2

• Opus 1.3 Codec Library Nears, New Tools Release

  Back in June was the first release candidate of Opus 1.3 (libopus v1.3) with this open-source audio codec allowing to use SILK down to bitrates of about 5kb/s, wideband encoding down to 9kb/s, improved security, improved Ambisonics support, and much more. Libopus 1.3 RC2 is now available along with some tooling updates.

  Libopus 1.3 RC2 was released on Tuesday to fix issues with bandwidth detection, enable Ambisonics support by default, and enables security hardening by default.

• Akademy 2018

  I had the awesome opportunity to attend Akademy in Vienna this year. First off, a big thank you to the organising team for pulling off this years Akademy without a hitch.

  This Akademy was a bit more special, since it was decided to switch up the format, which in my opinion worked quite well. There were training’s that ran alongside the talk’s and BoF’s, which I think was a great idea. I signed up to the Public Speaking Training and the Non Violent Communication training, which I think were run exceptionally. I hope that these training sessions are run again next Akademy because I found them exceptionally valuable.

• NetworkManager Merges An Initrd Generator For Early Boot Handling

  Days following the NetworkManager 1.14 release, feature activity on the next release is progressing and the newest addition is nm-initrd-generator.

  The NetworkManager Initrd Generator is used to generate an early-boot NetworkManager configuration. This new utility scans the command line for supported options and from there generates a network configuration and the necessary configuration files to handle an early instance of NetworkManager that runs from the initial ramdisk during the system's early boot stage.

• Mageia at fête de l’humanité 2018

  The booths were in a different place from previous years, and we had a lot more visitors. We gave out all the flyers we brought by Saturday evening – there was only one left for Sunday – so we gave out Mageia stickers instead. We did not sell any T-shirts, but we sold two USB sticks.

  Many people asked for general information; I spoke so much that I lost my voice! We had strong interest, coming from people already using a Linux distribution as well as from people wishing to turn to free software.

• Troubleshooting FDB table wrapping in Open vSwitch

  When most people deploy an Open vSwitch configuration for virtual networking using the NORMAL rule, that is, using L2 learning, they do not think about configuring the size of the Forwarding DataBase (FDB).

• Test Day: Fedora Silverblue

  Fedora Silverblue is a new variant of Fedora Workstation with rpm-ostree at its core to provide fully atomic upgrades. Furthermore, Fedora Silverblue is immutable and upgrades as a whole, providing easy rollbacks from updates if something goes wrong. Fedora Silverblue is great for developers using Fedora with good support for container-focused workflows.

  Additionally, Fedora Silverblue delivers desktop applications as Flatpaks. This provides better isolation/sandboxing of applications, and streamlines updating applications — Flatpaks can be safely updated without reboot.

• Understand Fedora memory usage with top

  Have you used the top utility in a terminal to see memory usage on your Fedora system? If so, you might be surprised to see some of the numbers there. It might look like a lot more memory is consumed than your system has available. This article will explain a little more about memory usage, and how to read these numbers.

  [...]

  Your system has another facility it uses to store information, which is swap. Typically this is an area of slower storage (like a hard disk). If the physical memory on the system fills up as needs increase, the OS looks for portions of memory that haven’t been needed in a while. It writes them out to the swap area, where they sit until needed later.

  Therefore, prolonged, high swap usage usually means a system is suffering from too little memory for its demands. Sometimes an errant application may be at fault. Or, if you see this often on your system, consider upgrading your machine’s memory, or restricting what you run.

• Global Open-Source Learning Management Systems Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022

• The Commons Clause vs. Open Source controversy, explained [iophk: "if it has the "Commons Clause" in it then it does not qualify as Open Source"]

  So, what is Commons Clause and why isn’t it the same thing as open source?

Linux appeals to a certain kind of computer user: if you like computers enough to read about or tinker with them in your free time, then there’s a good chance you’ll find something to like about Linux. Otherwise, you will probably consider it too much work to bother.

Endless Computer’s Endless OS aims to provide a complete desktop experience that’s versatile enough to serve families. Is this the ideal way to introduce newcomers to Linux?

• Host your own cloud with Raspberry Pi NAS

• How to Create Python Virtual Environments on Ubuntu 18.04

• How to Change Cursor Size on Ubuntu Desktop

• Delivering cron and logwatch emails to gmail in RHEL

• Using ARP via netlink to detect presence

• How to Install Croogo CMS on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• How to Make Android as Secure as Possible

• Complete guide for creating Vagrant boxes with VirtualBox

• Caddy – A HTTP/2 Web Server with Automatic HTTPS for Websites

• Bash get basename of filename or directory name

• How to Manually Mount/UnMount a USB Device on Ubuntu

Since this blog is starting after the beginning of my contributions to KDE, the first few regular posts will be explaining my prior contributions, before moving into the present.

• Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, August 2018

• Linux 3.16~4.18.8 Affected By Another Potential Local Privilege Escalation Bug

• Encryption bill endorsed by govt party room

  Barely one week of parliamentary sitting days after the date for comment ended, the Federal Government's party room has endorsed the contentious encryption bill and it could be introduced into the House of Representatives as early as Thursday.

• The IT Security Mistakes that Led to the Equifax Breach

  The Equifax data breach that exposed the sensitive personal information of more than 145 million consumers was one of the worst data breaches of recent years, both for the amount of information exposed and the ease with which hackers moved about the company's systems.

  The breach was publicly disclosed on Sept. 7, 2017, and details on the breach slowly trickled out for months afterwards. Now a year later, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released a 40-page report outlining what happened. The retrospective look at the breach provides insights into how the breach occurred and what types of controls and technologies might have helped prevent it.

• NVIDIA Vulkan Beta Adds New KHR_driver_properties & KHR_shader_atomic_int64

  Not to be confused with the new NVIDIA Linux/Windows drivers that should be out today for RTX 2070/2080 "Turing" support and also initial RTX ray-tracing support, there is also out a new Vulkan beta driver this morning.

  The NVIDIA 396.54.06 driver is this new Vulkan beta and as implied by the version number is still on the current stable branch and not in the Turing era. But this driver release is quite exciting as it does bring support for two new extensions... These extensions are very fresh and not yet in the official Vulkan specification: VK_KHR_driver_properties and VK_KHR_shader_atomic_int64.

• GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Linux Benchmarks Coming Today, NVIDIA Driver Bringing Vulkan RTX

  NVIDIA's review/performance embargo has now lifted on the GeForce RTX 2080 series ahead of the cards shipping tomorrow. I should have out initial Linux benchmarks later today, assuming Linux driver availability.

  As wrote about yesterday, just yesterday I ended up receiving the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti for Linux benchmarking. But, unfortunately, no Linux driver yet... But I am told it will be posted publicly soon with the Windows driver. Assuming that happens within the hours ahead, I'll still have initial RTX 2080 Ti benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux out by today's end -- thanks to the Phoronix Test Suite and recently wrapping up other NVIDIA/AMD GPU comparison tests on the current drivers.

• Intel's New Iris Gallium3D Driver Picks Up Experimental Icelake Bits, GL Features

  One of the talks we are most interested in at XDC2018 is on the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver we discovered last month was in development.

  We stumbled across the Iris Gallium3D driver that's been in development for months as a potential replacement to their "i965" classic Mesa driver. But they haven't really detailed their intentions in full, but we should learn more next week. This is particularly exciting the prospects of an official Intel Gallium3D driver as the company is also expected to introduce their discrete GPUs beginning in 2020 and this new driver could be part of that plan.