• Networking in Berlin: Qt World Summit 2018

  At our little booth we showcased Plasma running on a variety of devices, ranging from a Nexus 5X running Plasma Mobile through two ARM laptops to the powerful KDE Slimbook. Plasma was praised for its performance and reliability and since the focus of the event was mostly on embedded systems, we could easily demonstrate with our selection of devices that Plasma and the KDE Frameworks are a viable option for an endeavor in this area, too.

  It was very interesting to see the diverse set of people presenting their products and roaming the stalls, to see where Qt is in use today without you even realizing. We were approached by several companies evaluating using KDE Frameworks in their products and also tried to lay a foundation for an eventual partnership. And then there was Daimler who just parked an A-Class in the hallway, whose MBUX infotainment system is also powered by Qt.

• Vincent Sanders: A very productive weekend

  I just hosted a NetSurf Developer weekend which is an opportunity for us to meet up and make use of all the benefits of working together. We find the ability to plan work and discuss solutions without loosing the nuances of body language generally results in better outcomes for the project.

  [...]

  We rounded the Saturday off by going out for a very pleasant meal with some mutual friends. Sunday started by adding a bunch of additional topics to consider and we made good progress addressing these.

  We performed a bug triage and managed to close several issues and commit to fixing a few more. We even managed to create a statement of work of things we would like to get done before the next meetup.

  My main achievement on the Sunday was to add WEBP image support. This uses the Google libwebp library to do all the heavy lifting and adding a new image content handler to NetSurf is pretty straightforward.

• First LibreOffice Asia Conference to Take Place May 25-26, 2019 in Tokyo, Japan

  The Document Foundation published today more information on when and where the first ever LibreOffice Asia Conference event will take place this year.

  LibreOffice Asia Conference 2019 will be the project's first conference event to take place in a country in the Asia region where the free and open source software movement is rapidly growing. The Document Foundation decided it's time to put together a conference in Asia after the massive success of the LibreOffice Conference Indonesia 2018 event.

  "It’s a real leap of faith," says Franklin Weng, an Asian member in the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation. "Asia is a rapidly growing area in adoptions of ODF and LibreOffice, but our ecosystem for LibreOffice and FOSS has not been good enough yet. In this conference, we’re not only trying to make the FOSS ecosystem in Asia more healthy but also to encourage Asian community members to show their potential.”

• RenPyWeb - Ren'Py in your HTML5 web browser

  I like the Ren'Py project, a popular game engine aimed at Visual Novels - that can also be used as a portable Python environment.

  One limitation was that it required downloading games, while nowadays people are used to Flash- or HTML5- based games that play in-browser without having to (de)install.

  Can this fixed? While maintaining compatibility with Ren'Py's several DSLs? And without rewriting everything in JavaScript?
  Can Emscripten help? While this is a Python/Cython project?
  After lots of experimenting, and full-stack patching/contributing, it turns out the answer is yes!

• OpenCL 2.2-10 Released With Fixes

  While "OpenCL-Next" will hopefully be on track for releasing later this year as the next big update to OpenCL, OpenCL 2.2-10 was released today by The Khronos Group as the latest maintenance update to the nearly two year old OpenCL 2.2 specification.

  OpenCL-Next can't come soon enough to hopefully bolster OpenCL GPU programming adoption and OpenCL 2.2 showing its age with the provisional specification for it approaching three years old. With today's OpenCL 2.2-10 update there are various fixes to community reported problems. Also, the KHR OpenCL extensions have been folded into the extensions specification.

• SPEED TEST: x86 vs. ARM for Web Crawling in Python

  Can you imagine if your job was to trawl competitor websites and jot prices down by hand, again and again and again? You’d burn your whole office down by lunchtime.

  So, little wonder web crawlers are huge these days. They can keep track of customer sentiment and trending topics, monitor job openings, real estate transactions, UFC results, all sorts of stuff.

  For those of a certain bent, this is fascinating stuff. Which is how I found myself playing around with Scrapy, an open source web crawling framework written in Python.

• The hard part in becoming a command line wizard

• How to Parse Hidden HTML With Selenium Headless Mode and Deploy it to Heroku

• PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #356 (Feb. 19, 2019)

• PyCon 2019 Tutorial Schedule! [Ed: OK, but it is already compromised. It took a bribe from Microsoft (the top sponsor) and posted Azure ads in its site in exchange. Appalling trend.]

• Implementing Dstat with Performance Co-Pilot

  Dstat is a beloved tool by many, and a staple when diagnosing system performance issues. However, the original dstat is no longer actively developed. This poses an immediate problem for distributions like Fedora moving to a Python 3 stack, as it lacks a Python 3 implementation (both the tool itself, and its many plugins). It is also problematic in that the plugin system was relatively simplistic and in need of a significant redesign and rewrite to add new desired features.

• Re-Imagining Virtualization with Kubernetes and KubeVirt – Part II

  KubeVirt exposes a VirtualMachine entity in Kubernetes. This entity is persistent and defines the configuration of a virtual machine. This allows one to create, edit, start, stop, and start again a virtual machine (which one cannot do with a Kubernetes Pod). When the virtual machine is started, a VirtualMachineInstance is created, manifesting in Pod and Container in which the virtual machine runs.

  The VirtualMachine entity allows one to define virtual machines “the way you would expect it” from a virtualization expert’s perspective. You can name them, describe the virtual hardware devices, define multiple disks and networks.

  Expect to find your regular virtualization features here: CPU, memory, NUMA, CPU pinning, hugepages, CPU model selection, virtio-rng, memory overcommit, custom SMBIOS, cloud-init, boot order, serial console, graphical (VNC) console, custom PCI addresses for virtio devices, I/O threads, guest agent integration, and more being worked on.

• Why agile integration is key for open banking

  Many banks are striving to be more agile in their operations, their business practices, and even in their ability to innovate to deliver new products and services. With greater agility, banks can better meet the demands of today’s digital-savvy customers and excel in an increasingly competitive market. Initiatives like open banking can help facilitate that agility.

  Open banking uses open application programming interfaces (APIs) for third party developers, gives users greater transparency, and provides a model for the use of open source to build out solutions. We think that agile integration – bringing together containers, distributed integration, and APIs – is the best path to deliver open banking.

• OpenShift 4: A NoOps Platform

  In the previous post I described the goals that helped shape the OpenShift 4 vision. We want to make the day to day of software operations effortless – for operations teams and for developers. How do we make that goal – a NoOps platform for operations – a reality? What does “NoOps” mean in this context?

  At a ten thousand foot level, “Serverless” or “NoOps” for developers is characterized by tools and services that hide or minimize the operational burden from the developer.

  [...]

  That is why I am happy to announce the Developer Preview of OpenShift 4 is now available for public trial. This is a sneak peek of the next version of OpenShift, with an easy to use installer for starting a cluster on AWS on top of Red Hat CoreOS. The preview requires only credentials to an AWS account to provision infrastructure and a set of credentials to access the images for the preview.

Intel developers have begun posting their Linux kernel patches for enabling multi-die/package topology support to the Linux kernel as part of their Cascade Lake AP upbringing.

Cascade Lake "Advanced Performance" is a multi-chip package of multiple Cascade Lake dies, expected to be up to 48 cores / 96 threads per package and twelve DDR4 memory channels. Cascade Lake SP and Cascade Lake X Linux support already has been in order -- or at least appears to be based upon previous commit activity -- while Cascade Lake AP is taking some additional work due to the new multi-die design. Cascade Lake dies are connected via Ultra Path Interconnect (UPI) links.

Also: Linux Seeing Support For The HyperBus

Out today are the first alpha releases for Wayland 1.17 and the Weston 6.0 reference compositor. This alpha release is about two weeks behind schedule but the developers have updated their plans to now ship the beta releases on 5 March, release candidates begin on 12 March, and potentially releasing the stable versions of Wayland 1.17.0 and Weston 6.0.0 on 19 March.

The Wayland 1.17 Alpha release adds to the protocol support for expressing an internal server error message as well as an updated wl_seat protocol. There are also memory leak fixes for the Wayland scanner and various test updates. Details on the 1.17 alpha via wayland-devel.

Also out today is the Weston 6.0 Alpha. On the Weston compositor front they have shifted to using the Meson build system while deprecating Autotools, XDG-Shell stable support, FreeRDP 2.0 updates, IVI shell improvements, and many other changes.

• NVIDIA 418.31.03 Linux Driver Has Fixes For Hitman 2 On DXVK, Warhammer II Linux Fix

  Following today's Vulkan 1.1.101 release, NVIDIA has debuted a new Vulkan beta driver for Linux (and Windows) users.

  The new NVIDIA Linux 418.31.03 driver update adds in the new VK_NV_cooperative_matrix and VK_EXT_depth_clip_enable extensions from today's 1.1.101 update. There are also two known fixes for games on Linux.

• NVIDIA has a new Vulkan beta driver, fixes for Hitman 2 with DXVK and Total War Warhammer II

  NVIDIA have again pushed out a brand new Vulkan beta driver, with version 418.31.03 now available with game fixes and new extensions.

  As a reminder, these drivers are a special series all by themselves, done outside of their normal driver series to test new features, new API extensions and other interesting stuff.

Vincross has launched a Kickstarter campaign for a modular “MIND Kit” robotics kit ranging from $89 for the Linux-driven, quad -A53 compute unit to $799 for a complete kit with servo controller, motors, battery, bases, sensors, lidar, and a mic array.

Vincross, which was founded in 2014 by Tsinghua University AI scientist Tianqi Sun, went to Kickstarter last year to launch its six-legged, all-terrain HEXA robot, controlled by a Linux-based MIND SDK. Now, the company has returned with a smarter and more modular MIND Kit robotics kit with an updated MIND 2.0 SDK. The company also announced a $10 funding round led by Lenovo (see farther below).

• Here’s our first look at the LG V50: 5G, triple camera, and a 4,000mAh battery

• An Android flagship you won’t be able to buy will ‘rewrite the rules’ in March

• Android Authority’s big book of smartphone firsts!

• Google announces expansion of its Android Enterprise Recommended program

• Android update - Google could soon make a very controversial change to your phone

• Thousands of Android apps bypass Advertising ID to track users

• Samsung’s One UI is the best software it’s ever put on a smartphone

• Alldocube X Android Tablet Quick Look: Low-Cost OLED

• Honor 8X vs. Moto G7: Which should you buy?

• A developer is working on turning a Nintendo Switch into an Android tablet

• Next Windows update brings better Linux integration [Ed: Disappointing to see even SJVN calling this "Linux" even though it is not Linux, it's Vista 10 hijacking the brand]

  The Windows 10 April 2019 Update boasts many improvements, not least of which is Windows Subsystem for Linux's new ability to let you access Linux files safely from Windows.

• The Future of Artificial Intelligence at Scale

  For this week’s episode of the The New Stack Analysts podcast, TNS editorial director Libby Clark and TNS London correspondent Jennifer Riggins sat down (via Zoom) with futurist Martin Ford, author of “Architects of Intelligence: The truth about AI from the people building it,” and Ofer Hermoni, chair of the technical advisory council for The Linux Foundation’s Deep Learning Foundation projects, to talk about the current state of AI, how it will scale, and its consequences.

• ArcticFox has working DevTools again

  The past release of 27.9.15 ArcticFox has the Developer Tools working again, they were broken previously because of excessive work on Private browsing.

• FOSDEM 2019 video presentations are online

  LibreOffice developers and other community members were present at FOSDEM 2019, the biggest European meetup of free and open source software developers. Check out the talks that they gave! Click a link to find out more and watch the videos…

• Open Outlook: Middleware (part 1)

  Middleware, both as a term and as a concept, has been around for decades. As a term, like other terms in the Darwinian world of IT jargon, it has followed a typical fashion lifecycle and is perhaps somewhat past its apogee of vogue. As a concept, however, middleware is more relevant than ever, and while a memetic new label hasn't quite displaced the traditional term, the capabilities themselves are still very much at the heart of enterprise application development.

  Middleware is about making both developers and operators more productive. Analogous to standardized, widely-used, proven subassemblies in the manufacture of physical goods such as cars, middleware relieves developers from "reinventing the wheel" so that they can compose and innovate at higher levels of abstraction. For the staff responsible for operating applications in production, at scale, with high reliability and performance, the more such applications use standardized middleware components and services, the more efficient and reliable the running of the application can be.

• RHEL AUDITD

• Security updates for Tuesday

• Vulkan 1.1.101 Released With Two New Extensions - Including Another To Help DXVK

  Coming just one week after the Vulkan 1.1.100 release and just days after the Vulkan API celebrated its third birthday, Vulkan 1.1.101 is now available.

  Vulkan 1.1.101 is a bit more eventful than 1.1.100 in that there are two new extensions introduced and then a number of issue corrections/clarifications to the documentation.

• In Save Koch, you are a mafia kingpin trapped inside your own panic room and it's coming to Linux

  Save Koch from developer Wooden Monkeys could be a very interesting one, a strategic sim that puts you in the shoes of a trapped mafia kingpin as you try to save your empire and your life.

• The 3D steampunk dungeon crawler 'Vaporum' just had a huge performance update

  I think Vaporum is a really great dungeon crawler, with good visuals and a rather interesting setting and it just keeps getting better.

  When I originally took a look at the game back in February last year, I noted how in terms of performance I was hitting around 50FPS. With today's update, that's often double what it was which is madness.

• Organize Files In Filetype-Based Named Directories On Linux Using Organizer (GUI)

  Organizer is new and doesn't have a lot of features yet, but it can already be very helpful in organizing messy directories, like the Downloads or Desktop folders for example.

  Currently Organizer supports organizing directories containing the following type of files: images (jpg, png, etc.), documents (pdf, odt, doc/docx, etc.), spreadsheets (ods, xls/xlsx), presentations (odp, ppt/pptx), videos (mkv, mp4, webm, and so on), music (flac, mp3, etc.), archives (tar.gz, zip, rar, etc.) and other (for example AppImage and deb binaries).

• Handbrake Video Transcoder 1.2.1 Released (Ubuntu PPA)

  Handbrake video transcode 1.2.1 was released a few days ago with numerous bug-fixes and improvements.

• Connecting a physical host to libvirt NAT network

• Logical & in Bash

• Creating a cryptocurrency user interface project with python

• Google revises proposed Chrome ad blocker changes after public outcry and legal threats

• Qualcomm working on QM215 chipset for Android Go devices: Report

• Qualcomm's Snapdragon X55 5G modem can reach 7Gbps download speeds

• Galaxy Note 8 Android Pie update released in more markets

• Galaxy S10 preview: One UI is the clean break from Android Samsung has always wanted

• How to Install Google Camera Mod on Any Android Phone

Welcome to a regular series here at Forbes that zeroes in on your very first experience with a desktop Linux operating system: the installer. This time around I'm escaping my comfort zone and leaving Ubuntu-based distributions behind with openSUSE Leap 15.0.

• digiKam 6.0.0 is released

  Dear digiKam fans and users, following the long stage of integrating a lots of work from students during the Summer of Code, and after 2 years of intensive developement, we hare proud to announce the new digiKam 6.0.0.

• DigiKam 6.0 Released With Video File Management, New Export/Import Options

  DigiKam 6.0 is now available as the Qt/KDE aligned open-source image organizer and with this new release has full support for video file management too.

  The DigiKam 6.0 release delivers support for video file management in the same manner as photo management, integration of import/export web-service tools in LightTable and Showfoto, expanded RAW image handling for more digital cameras, new tools for exporting to Pinterest / OneDrive / Box, and the ability to re-organize the icon-view contents manually.

While I am a big fan of Intel's Clear Linux distribution for its raw performance on x86_64 hardware that for most workloads goes unsurpassed by any other Linux platform out-of-the-box, there has been a lot of Phoronix readers wondering how well it could function as a standard desktop Linux distribution. With upgrading my main production system earlier this month, I decided to try out Clear Linux and now with 200+ hours into using it as the OS on my main production system, I figured it'd be good to share my initial thoughts.

While we've been benchmarking with Clear Linux for years, only over the past year or two have they really beefed up their bundles around the desktop and make it more appealing for desktop use along with support for Flatpaks, supporting the other DRM/Mesa drivers besides just Intel graphics, delivering a great GNOME Shell experience where as originally they defaulted to Xfce, and overall improving the experience for more use-cases. And, yes, it's even possible to run Steam on Clear Linux.

The KDE Plasma 5.15 desktop environment was released last week on February 12th with numerous new features and improvements, including a much-improved Discover package manager, improved integration with third-party technologies and apps like Firefox, refinements to the configuration interfaces, new options for complex network configurations, as well as redesigned icons.

The KDE Plasma 5.15.1 point release is a maintenance update addressing various issues in an attempt to offer users a more stable and reliable KDE Plasma 5.15 desktop environment. Highlights include restoring of legacy sessions, improvements to the Kickoff applications menu to return to the Favorites page after running a search, improved firmware update in Discover, and better comics support.

• With a clear inspiration from Portal, the first-person puzzler HA/CK is out now

  Another developer has taken the basic layout and idea of Portal and moulded it into their own puzzler named HA/CK.

  While the heavy Portal inspiration is crystal clear complete with turrets and sticking blocks on buttons, it does have a number of differences and so the gameplay is quite different. The biggest difference being that you're "hacking" objects to proceed rather than jumping through portals.

• Agitate, a small indie game that's like a reverse city-builder with you playing as nature has Linux support

  A bit of an odd one to put a title to, Agitate [itch.io] from solo developer Tay has you build plants and try to survive the coming of the Hoomans.

• RogueCraft Squadron, a fast-paced space RTS has expanded and released with Linux support

  If you're after your next RTS fix, RogueCraft Squadron from Missing Sentinel Software is now officially out with Linux support.

  Originally available as a free game on itch.io (I covered it here) made during a gamejam in 2017, they decided to continue with it and expand it into the game it is now.

• Linux Professional Institute (LPI) transforming to a membership-based organisation

  LPI's goals over the years has been to help steer careers and entrepreneurship by proving the skills of practitioners working with open source software. Its focus has been on Linux distribution neutrality, training methods, and promoting open source.

  Under the new arrangement, certification holders will soon be able to become LPI members, which means they will have the ability to elect the LPI Board of Directors and steer the direction of the organisation.

• Script to create mount points in LVM

• nbdkit linuxdisk plugin

• How To Change The TimeZone In Linux

• Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #199

  strip-nondeterminism is our tool that post-processes files to remove known non-deterministic output. This week, Chris Lamb adjusted its behaviour to deduplicate hardlinks via stat(2) before processing to avoid issues when handling files in parallel; as the per-filetype handlers are yet currently guaranteed to be atomic, one process could temporarily truncate a file which can cause errors in other processes operating on the “same” file under a different pathname. This was thus causing package build failures in packages that de-duplicate hardlinks in their build process such as the Debian Administrator’s Handbook (#922168).

• How our non-profit works openly to make education accessible

  I'm lucky to work with a team of impressive students at Duke University who are leaders in their classrooms and beyond. As members of CSbyUs, a non-profit and student-run organization based at Duke, we connect university students to middle school students, mostly from title I schools across North Carolina's Research Triangle Park. Our mission is to fuel future change agents from under-resourced learning environments by fostering critical technology skills for thriving in the digital age.

• Register Transfer Language for CRuby

  For the last two years, I have been trying to improve CRuby performance. I have been working simultaneously on two major fronts: introducing register transfer language (RTL) for the CRuby virtual machine (VM) and just-in-time (JIT) compilation. For background on the goal of having Ruby 3 be 3 times faster than version 2 (3X3), see my previous article, “Towards the Ruby 3×3 Performance Goal“.

  The JIT project (MJIT) is advancing successfully. The JIT approach and engine I proposed and implemented has been adopted by the CRuby community. Takashi Kokubun hardened the code and adapted it to the current CRuby stack machine and recently MJIT became an experimental feature of the CRuby 2.6 release.

  Introducing a Register Transfer Language (RTL) to the CRuby VM turned out to be an even harder task than introducing the initial JIT compiler. The required changes to the VM are far more invasive than the ones needed for the JIT compiler.

• Template meta-programming: Some testing and debugging tricks

  There are only a few things more fun in this world than doing template meta-programming (TMP) and reading all those long poems that the compiler writes out when we make even the smallest mistake.

  While we don’t usually welcome these messages, there are ways to make them useful.

  One of the main causes of errors in TMP code are unexpected types – types that the compiler is deducing instead of the types that we expect it to deduce.

  This results in error messages occurring in seemingly random places in our code.

• Open Science, Open Source and R

  Psychology changed forever on the August 27, 2015. For the previous four years, the 270 psychologists of the Open Science Collaboration had been quietly re-running 100 published psychology experiments. Now, finally, they were ready to share their findings. The results were shocking. Less than half of the re-run experiments had worked.

  When someone tries to re-run an experiment, and it doesn't work, we call this a failure to replicate. Scientists had known about failures to replicate for a while, but it was only quite recently that the extent of the problem became apparent. Now, an almost existential crisis loomed. That crisis even gained a name: the Replication Crisis. Soon, people started asking the same questions about other areas of science. Often, they got similar answers. Only half of results in economics replicated. In pre-clinical cancer studies, it was worse; only 11% replicated.

• Qt Design Studio 1.1 released

  We are happy to announce the release of Qt Design Studio 1.1 !

  Qt Design Studio is a UI design and development tool that enables designers and developers to rapidly prototype and develop complex UIs. Both designers and developers use Qt Design Studio and this makes collaboration between the two a lot simpler and more streamlined. To get an impression, you should watch this video.

  Since the Qt Design Studio 1.0 release last year we worked hard on bug fixes and new features.

• Sublime Text and Language Server Protocol

  LSP - protocol for interactions between IDE and language server. The latter provides such means like autocompletion, goto implementation and etc. When IDE needs to show autocomplete choices on, for example, python language - it sends a request to the special server. And it responds with the necessary data. The cool part here is that it is an initiative of a big company - Microsoft.

• C Programming Tutorial Part 5 - Character variables