Over the last few months, I have been working as an Outreachy intern with the GNU Guix crowd to develop videos presenting and documenting the project. My goal in this round as an Outreachy intern for the December 2018 to March 2019 period consists of creating introductory documentation videos about different topics for people who would like to use GNU Guix, admins and/or those who would like to join Guix community and don’t know where to start. Even interested or having a clear documentation, they might feel overwhelmed by it. I experienced this issue in the past with people in another context.

My main tasks consist of creating a workflow for automating as much as possible the process of creating the videos, as well as, of course, creating the videos themselves. Creating the videos is not that easy as it might seem, I have to design them (I cannot automate that part), let the audio match the video, and matching the exact timing is quite difficult. Something very important that I should mention is that the workflow currently allows translations to other languages.

It is a work in progress for too many reasons, specially because it keeps being improved all the time.

The most promoted improvement in this release is the improved performance. Having worked or reviewed some these improvements myself, I found it a bit weird that some people were reporting enormous changes on performance. Of course, you should notice that GNOME Shell is smoother, and applications as well (when the compositor reliably sends frame ticks to applications, they also draw on time, and feel smoother as well.)

But people were telling me that these changes were game changing.

There is a grey line between the actual improvements, and people just happy and overly excited about it. And I thought the latter was the case.

But then I installed the non-debug packages from Arch repositories and this is actually a game changer release. I probably got used to using Mutter and GNOME Shell manually compiled with all the debug and development junk, and didn’t really notice how better it became.

Also:

• Entries in GTK 4

  One of the larger refactorings that recently landed in GTK master is re-doing the entry hierarchy. This post is summarizing what has changed, and why we think things are better this way.

• GTK4 Seeing Text Entry Improvements, Easier To Create Custom Entry Widgets

  Adding to the big list of changes to find with the yet-to-be-released GTK4 toolkit is some refactoring around the entry widgets to improve the text entry experience as well as making it easier to create custom entry widgets outside of GTK.

  [...]

  This comes on top of many other GTK4 changes ranging from Wayland improvements to a big GDK rework, a Vulkan renderer, CSS improvements, exclusively relies upon the Meson build system, the introduction of the GTK Scene Kit (GSK), and many other changes building up over the past roughly three years. After failing to materialize in 2018, it's expected GTK 4.0.0 will make it out this year.

• FPgM report: 2019-11

  I?ve set up weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. The Fedora 30 Beta Go/No-Go and Release Readiness meetings are next week.

• Two new policy proposals

  In addition, we realized that we don’t have an explicit policy about issuing bans in channels for persistent off-topic conversation. We want to give teams within Fedora autonomy to act on their own within the boundaries of our Four Foundations and community norms.

• Internationalization (i18n) features for Fedora 30

• GNU Tools Cauldron 2019

  Simon Marchi just announced that the next GNU Tools Cauldron will be in Montreal, Canada from Thursday September 12 till Sunday September 15.

• Yum vs. DNF Is Still Causing Headaches For Fedora Logistics

  While the DNF package manager as the "next-generation Yum" has been in development for over a half-decade and has been the default over traditional Yum for a number of Fedora releases, it's still causing headaches for some and a subset of users still desiring that DNF be renamed to Yum.

  On newer Fedora installations, yum does already point to dnf and the experience these days at least from my personal perspective has been quite good with DNF being the default now since Fedora 22... I haven't had any real DNF troubles now in years, though with RHEL8 Beta even still calling it "yum", there are some oddities from being so ingrained to Yum for the past two decades especially for system administrators.

• Mozilla statement on the Christchurch terror attack

  Like millions of people around the world, the Mozilla team has been deeply saddened by the news of the terrorist attack against the Muslim community in Christchurch, New Zealand.

  The news of dozens of people killed and injured while praying in their place of worship is truly upsetting and absolutely abhorrent.

• VP search update — and Europe

  A year ago, Mozilla Foundation started a search for a VP, Leadership Programs. The upshot of the job: work with people from around the world to build a movement to ensure our digital world stays open, healthy and humane. Over a year later, we’re in the second round of this search — finding the person to drive this work isn’t easy. However, we’re getting closer, so it’s time for an update.

  At a nuts and bolts level, the person in this role will support teams at Mozilla that drive our thought leadership, fellowships and events programs. This is a great deal of work, but fairly straightforward. The tricky part is helping all the people we touch through these programs connect up with each other and work like a movement — driving to real outcomes that make digital life better.

  While the position is global in scope, it will be based in Europe. This is in part because we want to work more globally, which means shifting our attention out of North America and towards African, European, Middle Eastern and South Asian time zones. Increasingly, it is also because we want to put a significant focus on Europe itself.

• These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 55

• Wine Announcement

  The Wine development release 4.4 is now available.

  What's new in this release (see below for details):
  - New MSIDB tool for manipulating MSI databases.
  - Support for custom draw buttons in common controls.
  - Many more Media Foundation APIs implemented.
  - Various bug fixes.

• Wine 4.4 Adds More Media Foundation APIs, Tool To Manipulate MSI Databases

  Wine 4.4 is out this evening as the latest bi-weekly point release for allowing Windows programs and games to run on Linux and other platforms.

  Wine 4.4 isn't particularly exciting on the gaming front but does have a new MSIDB tool for manipulating MSI databases, the ability to support custom draw buttons in common controls, more of the Windows Media Foundation APIs have been implemented, and the usual smattering of bug fixes.

• Wine 4.4 is now available with more Media Foundation API work

  The latest and greatest from the Wine team is now out. Wine 4.4 continues their biweekly development releases to eventually become Wine 5.0.

There is a new tool available for Sparkers: mkusb

Also: Purism Planning For Three Hardware Kill Switches With The Librem 5

• The Future of SUSE: A Home for Truly Open Open Source Solutions

  While this might look like a big change for SUSE, the fact is that for myself and the rest of the leadership team here, it’s a fulfillment of a path we’ve been following for a long time.
  In fact, there are no changes to the essence of our mission, vision and strategy. We will continue our focus on the success of our customers and our commitments to our partners and open source communities and projects.
  Events and trends in IT make it clear that open source has become more important for enterprises than ever. We believe this makes our position as the largest independent open source company more important than ever. SUSE’s independence is aligned with a single-minded focus on delivering what is best for our customers and partners, coupled with full control over our own destiny.

• SUSE Completes Move to Independence, Reaffirms Commitment to Customers, Partners and Open Source Communities as Industry’s Largest Independent Open Source Company

  SUSE® today announced the creation of the largest independent open source company following the completion of SUSE’s acquisition by growth investor EQT from Micro Focus. With its ongoing momentum, portfolio expansion and successful execution in the marketplace, as a standalone business SUSE is now even better positioned to focus on the needs of customers and partners as a leading provider of enterprise-grade, open source software-defined infrastructure and application delivery solutions that enable customer workloads anywhere – on premise, hybrid and multi-cloud – with exceptional service, value and flexibility.
  The newly independent SUSE has expanded its executive team, adding new leadership roles and experience to foster its continued momentum into this next stage of corporate development. Enrica Angelone has been named to the new post of chief financial officer, and Sander Huyts is SUSE’s new chief operations officer. Thomas Di Giacomo, formerly chief technology officer for SUSE, is now president of Engineering, Product and Innovation. All three report to SUSE CEO Nils Brauckmann.

• SUSE completes its management transition

  Here's a SUSE press release hyping its transition to being "the largest independent open-source company".

• SUSE Marks Its New Independence Under EQT Ownership

  It was in July of last year that Swedish private equity firm EQT Partners acquired SUSE from Micro Focus. That deal is now closed and SUSE is marking its independence today while proclaiming to be the largest independent open-source company.

If I look back now, it must be more than 20 years since I got fascinated with GNU/Linux ecosystem and started using it.

Back then, it was more curiosity of a young teenager and the excitement to learn something. There’s one thing that I have always admired/respected about Free Software’s values, is: Access for everyone to learn. This is something I never forget and still try to do my bit.

It was perfect timing and I was lucky to be part of it. Free Software was (and still is) a great platform to learn upon, if you have the willingness and desire for it.

Over the years, a lot lot lot has changed, evolved and improved. From the days of writing down the XF86Config configuration file to get the X server running, to a new world where now everything is almost dynamic, is a great milestone that we have achieved.

All through these years, I always used GNU/Linux platform as my primary computing platform. The CLI, Shell and Tools, have all been a great source of learning. Most of the stuff was (and to an extent, still is) standardized and focus was usually on a single project.

There was less competition on that front, rather there was more collaboration. For example, standard tools like: sed, awk, grep etc were single tools. Like you didn’t have 2 variants of it. So, enhancements to these tools was timely and consistent and learning these tools was an incremental task.

• NetworkManager 1.16 released, adding WPA3-Personal and WireGuard support

  NetworkManager needs no introduction. In fifteen years since its initial release, it has reached the status of the standard Linux network configuration daemon of choice of all major Linux distributions. What, on the other hand, may need some introduction, are the features of its 28th major release.

  Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome: NetworkManager-1.16.

• NetworkManager 1.16 Brings WireGuard Support, WiFi Direct/P2P

  NetworkManager 1.16 is now available as the newest feature release for this widely used Linux networking configuration component.

  NetworkManager 1.16 is a big feature release bringing support for WireGuard VPN tunnels, WiFi direction connections (WiFi P2P), SAE authentication, AP and ad-hoc support for the Intel IWD back-end, improved handling of DHCP router options, enhancements around network boot, and a lot of other enhancements.

• WireGuard in NetworkManager

  NetworkManager 1.16 got native support for WireGuard VPN tunnels (NEWS). WireGuard is a novel VPN tunnel protocol and implementation that spawned a lot of interest. Here I will not explain how WireGuard itself works. You can find very good documentation and introduction at wireguard.com.

• Haller: WireGuard in NetworkManager

  Thomas Haller writes about the WireGuard integration in NetworkManager 1.16.

People have been celebrating Pi Day on March 14 for more than 30 years, and 10 years ago it became an official national holiday in the United States. A quick Twitter or Google search will likely uncover dozens of pizza and pie deals in your area from retailers getting into the spirit. But many people like to take the celebration a step further by engaging a budding mathematician or technologist in a Pi-related project or challenge.

We thought we’d focus on another popular Pi in the tech world: the Raspberry Pi – a small computer that aims to put the power of digital tinkering into the hands of everyone. Below are five projects you can take on with your team or your kids on Pi Day or any day of the year. Of course, feel free to eat a slice of pie while you work.

• Android Q developer options include accent color, font, and icon shape customization

• Android Q wallpapers and ringtones are available for download

• Android Q Files app gets much-needed overhaul

• Android Q Beta: What’s new for the Google Pixel smartphones

• Nokia 3.1 gets updated to Android 9 Pie

• OnePlus 3 / 3T Pie update (Android 9.0) imminent, as exec shares official screenshot

• Xiaomi Mi Note 3 and Mi Mix 2 will get Android Pie as early as next month

• Huawei Has an Android Alternative, But It Doesn't Want to Use It

• PrimeOS Is An Android-based Desktop Operating System For Old PCs

• Huawei has developed its own OS just to combat any potential Android ban

• Android Go-powered Samsung Galaxy A2 Core leaked

• Fubo TV now supports Android TV for 4K streaming

• Headlines: Google's Android beta; Epic store roadmap; Oracle revenue down; Huawei's OS; Wall Street tech love

• The best IPTV apps for your Android device

• Android Circuit: New Samsung Galaxy Leaks, Huawei P30 Pro Specs Revealed, iPhone XS Fights Nokia 9

If you own a Raspberry Pi, chances are you may already have experimented with physical computing—writing code to interact with the real, physical world, like blinking some LEDs or controlling a servo motor. You may also have used GPIO Zero, a Python library that provides a simple interface to GPIO devices from Raspberry Pi with a friendly Python API. GPIO Zero is developed by Opensource.com community moderator Ben Nuttall.

I am working on rust_gpiozero, a port of the awesome GPIO Zero library that uses the Rust programming language. It is still a work in progress, but it already includes some useful components.

• Android Q beta will roll out to more smartphones than Android Pie beta

• Android Q lets you share and connect to WiFi networks with QR codes

• Did you download the Android Q beta?

• Android Q's quietly important improvements

• Android Q: What you need to know about the new Android OS and how to get it

• How Android Q Will Boost Smartphone Cameras

• Android Q's new feature flags modify the power menu, make audio output switching easier, and allow for other tweaks

• Android Q Beta 1: App info page gets slight redesign w/ notification stats, ‘open’ button

• Android Q adds Digital Wellbeing-like features to third-party launchers

• Podcast: S10 Reviews and Android Q!

• Chrome for Android’s Data Saver now works with HTTPS as ‘Lite’ pages labeled in Omnibar

• HMD Global keeps delivering with Android 9 Pie now on Nokia 3.1

• A bunch of Xiaomi phones are set to receive Android Pie

• Nokia 3.1 is HMD Global’s latest smartphone to get Android Pie

• Samsung’s next Android Go smartphone revealed in leaked press render

• Moto G7 vs. Moto G6: Should you upgrade? - Android Central

• Most Android TV devices should now be controllable by Google Home 2019/03/15 6:44am

• Most Android Anti-Malware Apps Don't Offer Any Protection

• Walmart is planning to launch its own low-cost Android tablet

• Best Android Phones Under $200

• PSA: Smart Lock on-body detection leaves your Android device unlocked longer while charging

Gaming. It’s one of the two main reasons people cite for not making the jump into desktop Linux waters (the other being the notable absence of Adobe creative software). Despite the significant steps Valve and other developers have taken toward Linux being recognized as a first-class citizen when it comes to PC gaming, it’s not quite there yet.

I recently posted a somewhat scathing look at the state of gaming on Linux. It took some folks by surprise. As I said in that piece, I’m a Linux advocate but I’m also a critic.

However, it would be a shame if I wasn’t equally critical of myself. In that piece I applauded the massive selection of available games on the platform and directed my frustration at the state of graphics drivers. I used Ubuntu as my main example and was (fairly) called out for lumping Linux into a single basket based on my experience with one popular distribution.

Scaleway, the European cloud company we previously have talked about on Phoronix for their usage of Coreboot on servers, this week announced new "general purpose" VMs powered by AMD EPYC processors. Curious about the performance, I fired up some benchmarks.

Scaleway's new general purpose virtual instances are powered by AMD EPYC CPUs with NVMe SSD storage and range from the petite "GP1-XS" with just four AMD EPYC cores / 16GB RAM / 150GB NVMe storage / 400 MBits/s bandwidth at €0.078/hr to the "GP1-XL" with 48 EPYC cores / 256GB RAM / 600GB NVMe / 2 Gbit/s bandwidth at €1.138/hr. The pricing for these EPYC instances is quite competitive compared to the Intel/AMD VM pricing at other cloud providers, notably Amazon EC2, as will be shown by some performance-per-dollar tests in this article.

Kernel development is truly impossible to keep track of. The main mailing list alone is vast beyond belief. Then there are all the side lists and IRC channels, not to mention all the corporate mailing lists dedicated to kernel development that never see the light of day. In some ways, kernel development has become fundamentally mysterious.

Once in a while, some lunatic decides to try to reach back into the past and study as much of the corpus of kernel discussion as he or she can find. One such person is Joey Pabalinas, who recently wanted to gather everything together in Maildir format, so he could do searches, calculate statistics, generate pseudo-hacker AI bots and whatnot.

I’ve been using Linux long enough to remember Linux Mandrake. I recall, at one of my first-ever Linux conventions, hanging out with the MandrakeSoft crew and being starstruck to think that they were creating a Linux distribution that was sure to bring about world domination for the open source platform.

Well, that didn’t happen. In fact, Linux Mandrake didn’t even stand the test of time. It was renamed Mandriva and rebranded. Mandriva retained popularity but eventually came to a halt in 2011. The company disbanded, sending all those star developers to other projects. Of course, rising from the ashes of Mandrake Linux came the likes of OpenMandriva, as well as another distribution called Mageia Linux.

I am pleased to announce that the second patch release of Qt 5.12 LTS, the Qt 5.12.2 is released today. While not adding new features, the Qt 5.12.2 release provides a number of bug fixes and other improvements.

Compared to Qt 5.12.1, the new Qt 5.12.2 contains more than 250 bug fixes. For details of the most important changes, please check the Change files of Qt 5.12.2.

Seco unveiled a highly customizable, Linux-friendly “SBC-C61” with a quad -A53, up to 1.8GHz i.MX8M Mini, up to 4GB LPDDR4 and 64GB eMMC, and optional LAN, WiFi/BT, cellular, serial, and CAN interfaces.

Italy-based Seco calls its SBC-C61 single board computer the “crown jewel” of its multi-board Embedded World product launch. Considering that its 2019 lineup includes the world’s first i.MX8 QuadMax SBC — the SBC-C43 — the company must highly prize the i.MX8M Mini, which is NXP’s newest i.MX8 family SoC, not counting the upcoming i.MX8M Nano. Seco praises the quad -A53 Mini for its Heterogeneous Multi-core Processing Architecture.

• Any Steam game can now use Valve’s low-latency, DoS-proofed networking

  Valve is opening up its latency-reducing, DoS-protecting network relay infrastructure to every developer using its Steamworks platform.

  A few years ago, large-scale denial-of-service attacks against game servers were making the news and becoming a frustratingly frequent occurrence in online gaming and e-sports. To protect its own games, Valve has for a number of years been working on developing a networking infrastructure that makes the system more resilient against denial-of-service attacks and lower latency to boot, and the company is using this system for both Dota 2 and CS:GO.

  At 30 different locations around the world, Valve has established relaying servers that route networking traffic between clients and servers. These relay points provide DoS-resilience in several ways. They're equipped with an aggregate of several terabits of bandwidth, so they can handle a certain amount of flooding in any case. Games can also switch from one relay to another without necessarily interrupting their connection. This switching can be to another relay in the same location or even to another point-of-presence entirely.

• Feral Interactive have put out a big update to their 'GameMode' Linux gaming performance tool

  We all want to get the best performance out of our Linux games and Feral Interactive's GameMode tool continues to help towards this. While the initial release of GameMode was quite limited, they haven't stopped working on it.

  They've just announced the release of GameMode 1.3, which adds in a bunch of pretty useful features including: disabling the screen-saver, a "gamemoderun" helper script to do the necessary setup (set LD_PRELOAD) to enable GameMode on games which do not support it themselves and increase I/O priority of game processes.

• GameMode 1.3 Released For Optimizing Your Linux Gaming Experience

  Feral Interactive has released GameMode 1.3 as the newest feature release to this open-source Linux system daemon to dynamically optimize the CPU/GPU/system state when launching Linux games and to return the system to its normal state when you are done gaming.

  GameMode continues to be worked on predominantly by Feral Interactive developers who started the project last year along with Marc Di Luzio who is no longer at Feral but working on GameMode improvements under contract with Valve. With GameMode 1.3 comes several new features.

• Jetstream looks like a pretty sweet puzzle game, releasing for Linux next month

  Clockwork Acorn revealed yesterday that their rather lovely looking puzzler Jetstream will release on April 2nd, with Linux support right away.

• OpenRA for classic Command & Conquer games has a fresh release now out

  OpenRA, the open source game engine for the classics Command & Conquer titles (and a personal favourite) has a brand new release available.

  This update brings in all the changes from the last few test releases which include fixes to some long standing issues, as well as improve how fluid the gameplay is. A small change, yet one that's pretty major for the gameplay is how Tanks and other units with turrets will now automatically target enemy units while moving, which also takes the Fog of War into account.

• Tactical action game 'Gunslugs:Rogue Tactics' coming to Linux from Orangepixel and it looks awesome

  Orangepixel are working on their next title, a tactical action game going by the name Gunslugs:Rogue Tactics and Linux support is in.

• Turn-based tactical RPG 'Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark' prepares to leave Early Access with a massive update

  Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a turn-based tactical RPG from 1C Entertainment and 6 Eyes Studio that's supposed to be like a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy Tactics is getting ready to leave Early Access.

  From the press details we've received, the full release is going to be sometime in Spring 2019 and today it's getting a pretty big update "adding a huge amount of optional content to further flesh out its world". They say this update will make the game "nearly feature and content complete, offering up all the missions, classes, gear and optional content planned for release". However, the final encounter and some surprises are being left until the final launch.