We explained what Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage are in the article How Do They Stack? published over 2 years ago and while the technologies have improved a lot since that time, I’m evaluating them from the perspective of a software developer.

One of the recent XFS innovations under work and maturing with time has been Copy on Write (CoW) support for this mature Linux file-systems. The XFS CoW support continues to be improved upon and an "always CoW" option is being prepared to always force this behavior.

Christoph Hellwig has been among the XFS developers working on the copy-on-write improvements as well as adding an always_cow sysfs option. The latest XFS CoW patches were sent out on Monday for review.

Also: ACPI 6.3 Support Coming With The Linux 5.1 Kernel

• Install ImageMagick (Image Manipulation) Tool on RHEL/CentOS and Fedora

  ImageMagick is a free open source simple software suite for any kind of image manipulation that is used for creating, editing, converting, displaying image files.

  It can able to read and write over 200 image files such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, and Photo CD image formats and it is also used for thumbnail or captcha generation. It also includes command line options for creating transparent or animated gif image formats and many more feature like resize, sharpen, rotate or add special effects to an image.

  To use ImageMagick tool with PHP or Perl programming language, you will need to install ImageMagick with Imagick PHP extension for PHP and ImageMagick-Perl extension for Perl.

• Changes in Flathub land

  Flathub uses buildbot to to manage the builds, and we have updated and customized the UI a bit to be nicer for maintainers. For example, we now have a page listing all the apps ever built, with links to per-app pages showing builds of that app.

  We also integrated GitHub authentication so that maintainers of individual applications automatically have authority to do operations on their own apps and builds. For example, the home and per-app pages have buttons that let you start builds, which anyone with write permissions to the corresponding GitHub repository can use. Also, similarly they can cancel or retry the builds of their own apps. Previously you had to ask a Flathub administrator to restart or cancel a build, but no more!

• How to write an Ansible playbook

• Stephen Smoogen: 503's.. the cliffnotes version

Last year I wrote about Plasma Pass, a Plasma applet for the Pass password manager. Over the couple last months I got some emails from packagers from various distributions asking for a proper release so they can package it…so here it is, proudly announcing Plasma Pass 1.0.0.

• Shovel Knight's final two expansions King of Cards and Showdown have been delayed

  Yacht Club Games originally announced the final two expansions would be released in April but they've decided to delay them.

  For those not up to speed, King of Cards is the next and final expansion for Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove. You take on the role of King Knight, through 4 new worlds and more than 30 all new courses. Then we have Showdown, which is a mix of multiplayer madness for up to 4 players as well as giving another new story mode. Both are going to be free updates when released!

• GOG has another sale on for the 'Lantern Festival' with some good Linux games going cheap

  It seems there's a game sale for every possible event in the world now, not that I am complaining as it's good for our wallets.

  The current sale over on GOG is their 'Lantern Festival' to celebrate the Year of the Pig. So you too can pig-out out on some of the great deals going.

  This time, there's not a huge selection for Linux gamers, so I've picked out a few of the best deals.

• Blade Symphony patch 7 is out with experimental asset streaming, free to play release next month

  Some big news for Blade Symphony today, not only do they have another major patch release they've also announced the free to play release date.

  On March 7th, the flood gates will officially open on Steam for everyone to jump into Blade Symphony completely free. This is a huge milestone for Puny Human, something they've been solidly working towards for some time now.

• Monstrous programming puzzle game 'Monster Logic' is coming to Linux this year

  While it has no clear release date other than this year, Monster Logic certainly looks like a sweet programming puzzle game that's coming to Linux.

After 24 beta releases, Franz, an all-in-one messaging application, has reached version 5.0.0 stable.

Besides being the first Franz 5 stable release, the latest 5.0.0 version brings automatic spellcheck language detection, an option to quit Franz from the Windows taskbar, updated Electron to version 4.0.4 (from 4.0.2), and small bugfixes and improvements.

Franz is a free Electron application for Windows, Linux and Mac that combines almost 70 chat and messaging services into a single window that can run in the background, with multi-account support, notifications and a system tray, spell checking, and other useful features.

A speech-to-text (STT) system is as its name implies; A way of transforming the spoken words via sound into textual files that can be used later for any purpose.

Speech-to-text technology is extremely useful. It can be used for a lot of applications such as a automation of transcription, writing books/texts using your own sound only, enabling complicated analyses on information using the generated textual files and a lot of other things.

In the past, the speech-to-text technology was dominated by proprietary software and libraries; Open source alternatives didn’t exist or existed with extreme limitations and no community around. This is changing, today there are a lot of open source speech-to-text tools and libraries that you can use right now.

Here we list 5 of them.

• 3 tools for viewing files at the command line

  I always say you don't need to use the command line to use Linux effectively—I know many Linux users who never crack open a terminal window and are quite happy. However, even though I don't consider myself a techie, I spend about 20% of my computing time at the command line, manipulating files, processing text, and using utilities.

  One thing I often do in a terminal window is viewing files, whether text or word processor files. Sometimes it's just easier to use a command line utility than to fire up a text editor or a word processor.

  Here are three of the utilities I use to view files at the command line.

• 5 Excellent Free Mind Mapping Software

  Structured thinking is a process of setting a framework to an unstructured problem. Having a structure not only helps to understand a particular problem, it also helps to identify areas which need more understanding. Structured thinking allows us to map ideas in structured fashion, thereby enabling the identification of areas which require the most thought.

  Mind mapping is a fairly free flowing concept. This means you need software that is versatile, and can adapt to your requirements. Your idea of a neat and tidy mind map might be another person’s idea of bamboozling. A map can concentrate very complex content in a small space such as a piece of paper. It helps to use both sides of your brain: the logical side and also the creative side. It’s a technique to help organize the way you think and stimulate your creativity: It can help you by developing, sorting and helping to memorize your ideas.

  Mind mapping software therefore offers an excellent way of capturing your thoughts in a structured way, brainstorming new ideas. Move away from simple lists, and use this software to link ideas in different ways. By thinking creatively, not linearly, we can seize on our big ideas.

• How to install Sophos Antivirus for Linux [Ed: Installing proprietary software on GNU/Linux would likely cause security issues and/or add back doors, not improve real security]

  Seeing the Ubuntu popularity between both Desktops and serves, here we are using Ubuntu to show how to install Sophos Antivirus for Linux.

• Down productivity tools: Microsoft Teams takes a Monday tumble

  Microsoft's collaborative Slack-alike, Teams, is having a difficult start to the week, with users unable to log in to share their hopes, dreams and Word documents with their co-workers.

  Problems started at around 13:00 UTC, as users found themselves presented with connection errors as they attempted to hook up to the service. Naturally, they took to Twitter to share their experience.

• Microsoft is going all-in on 'Inner Source' [Ed: Microsoft's de facto PR person at CBS on how Microsoft will keep giving malicious software with NSA back doors while calling it "open". Dr. Glyn Moody, to his credit, warned about it over a decade ago in Linux Journal when he said Microsoft would bamboozle nontechnical people/officials by claiming it itself is its competition and is "open source" (even when it's proprietary, with back doors).]

• After Open Source, Microsoft Wants “Inner Source” For A Better Future [Ed: Having bribed OSI and others, Microsoft is now trying to redefine and totally control FOSS (all products proprietary but with openwashing for marketing purposes). Remember "Shared Source"? Microsoft keeps rebranding. Microsoft: we’re sort of kind of like “open”. We bought some things. BP: we’re sort of green. We changed our logo and mentioned words like “climate”.]

• One liner scripts to ease your Linux tasks

• Discrete Fourier Transform in Calc

• How to List Installed Packages on Ubuntu and Debian [Quick Tip]

• Simple guide to install MySQL WorkBench for Linux (Ubuntu & RHEL/CentOS)

• How to install Yarn NPM Client on Ubuntu and Manage Dependencies through it

• How To Automatically Change GNOME Background In Intervals Using BASH

• 4 secrets management tools for Git encryption

• Final touch up for the boy boundary detection mechanism

  Sorry for not posting yesterday as I am terribly sick, although I am still sick today mine condition is a lot more better now. After the previous article we have basically developed a boundary detection mechanism for the player object and in this article, we will do the final touch up for that mechanism. Here are the final rules that we need to apply in order to complete the boundary detection mechanism for the boy.

• PyCon 2020-2021 Location

• What Happened in the United States Now Happens in Europe: Lots of Patents Turn Out to Be Bunk, Fake, Bogus, Invalid and Thus Worthless
• Stephen Rowan’s and Nellie Simon’s Letter to EPO Staff: eDossier Has “Not Reached the Required Quality Levels.”
• Search Matters Not at the European Patent Office
• António Campinos Still Needs to Undo Battistelli’s Union-Busting Activities at the EPO
• António Campinos Still Needs to Hold Team Battistelli Accountable for Illegally Bringing Weapons to the EPO
• Links 18/2/2019: Linux 5.0 RC7, RISC-V Spreading Fast

• Nest is locking customers out of accounts until they fix their security

  Emails were sent last night to all users that may have been affected by recent [breaches], with a new password being mandatory, as it tries to avoid the "I'll do it later" attitude that means that often vulnerable passwords remain in use for months or years.

• A Moment of Truth for Cyber Insurance

  Mondelez’s claim represents just a fraction of the billions of dollars in collateral damage caused by NotPetya, a destructive, indiscriminate cyberattack of unprecedented scale, widely suspected to have been launched by Russia with the aim of hurting Ukraine and its business partners. A compromised piece of Ukrainian accounting software allowed NotPetya to spread rapidly around the world, disrupting business operations and causing permanent damage to property of Mondelez and many others. According to reports, Zurich apparently rejected Mondelez’s claim on the grounds that NotPetya was an act of war and, therefore, excluded from coverage under its policy agreement. If the question of whether and how war risk exemptions apply is left to the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis, this creates a profound source of uncertainty for policyholders about the coverage they obtain.

• A Deep Dive on the Recent Widespread DNS Hijacking Attacks

  The U.S. government — along with a number of leading security companies — recently warned about a series of highly complex and widespread attacks that allowed suspected Iranian hackers to siphon huge volumes of email passwords and other sensitive data from multiple governments and private companies. But to date, the specifics of exactly how that attack went down and who was hit have remained shrouded in secrecy.

  This post seeks to document the extent of those attacks, and traces the origins of this overwhelmingly successful cyber espionage campaign back to a cascading series of breaches at key Internet infrastructure providers.

• With elections weeks away, someone “sophisticated” [cracked] Australia’s politicians

  With elections just three months away, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced on February 18 that the networks of the three major national political parties had been breached by what Australian security officials described as a "sophisticated state actor."

• Australia's major political parties [cracked] in 'sophisticated' attack ahead of election

  Sources are describing the level of sophistication as "unprecedented" but are unable to say yet which foreign government is behind the attack.

• Parliament attackers appear to have used Web shells

  Attackers who infiltrated the Australian Parliament network and also the systems of the Liberal, National and Labor Parties appear to have used Web shells – scripts that can be uploaded to a Web server to enable remote administration of a machine.

• Xiaomi is back with its transparent-phone fakery for the upcoming Mi 9

• Tor traffic from individual Android apps detected with 97 percent accuracy

• Android bug allows hackers to attack devices using PNG file

• Android Q may change the back button to a gesture

• 9to5Google Daily 225: Android Q is set for more gesture nav tweaks

• Android Pie is causing a major slowdown in Chrome OS, here’s how to avoid it

• You can now pick up the Nokia 5.1 Plus in the US

• YouTube Music 3.03 adds Android Auto support, continues work on playing on-device files [APK Insight]

• 10 Best Calorie Counter Apps for Android in 2019

• Qualcomm QM215 chipset under testing for Android Go phones

If you've ever wondered how your Linux computer stacks up against other Linux, Windows, and MacOS machines or searched for reviews of Linux-compatible hardware, you're probably familiar with Phoronix. Along with its website, which attracts more than 250 million visitors a year to its Linux reviews and news, the company also offers the Phoronix Test Suite, an open source hardware benchmarking tool, and OpenBenchmarking.org, where test result data is stored.

According to Michael Larabel, who started Phoronix in 2004, the site "is frequently cited as being the leading source for those interested in computer hardware and Linux. It offers insights regarding the development of the Linux kernel, product reviews, interviews, and news regarding free and open source software."

• Outreachy Summer 2019 Applications Open With Expanded Eligibility

  But beginning this round, they are also opening the application process to "anyone who faces systemic bias or discrimination in the technology industry of their country is invited to apply." For evaluating the systemic bias or discrimination, an essay question was added to the application process about what discrimination they may have faced or otherwise think they could face in seeking employment.

  Also different beginning this round is only students (update: for non-student participants, this restriction does not apply) from the Northern Hemisphere can apply to this May to August round while the Southern Hemisphere round is being deemed the December to March round moving forward.

• VkRunner at FOSDEM

  I attended FOSDEM again this year thanks to funding from Igalia. This time I gave a talk about VkRunner in the graphics dev room. It’s now available on Igalia’s YouTube channel below:

  I thought this might be a good opportunity to give a small status update of what has happened since my last blog post nearly a year ago.

• First LibreOffice Asia Conference

  The First LibreOffice Asia Conference Will Be Held On May 25-26, 2019 In Nihonbashi, Tokyo, Japan

  This is the first ever LibreOffice conference covering Asia, a rapidly-growing area for free and open source software. The call for papers will be launched soon.

  Berlin, February 18, 2019 – After the huge success of the LibreOffice Conference Indonesia in 2018, members of the Asian communities have decided to raise the bar in 2019 with the first ever LibreOffice Asia Conference in Nihonbashi – the very center of Tokyo, Japan – on May 25-26.

  One of the main organizers, Naruhiko Ogasawara, a member of the Japanese LibreOffice community and The Document Foundation, can’t hide his excitement: “When we launched the LibreOffice Mini Conference Japan in 2013 as a local event, we knew little about communities in other parts of Asia. In recent years we have attended the LibreOffice Conference and other Asian events like OpenSUSE Asia, COSCUP etc. We have realized that many of our colleagues are active and that our community should learn a lot from them. We are proud to be able to hold the first Asia Conference with our colleagues to further strengthen that partnership.”

Since November we haven't heard much about Google's effort around FS-VERITY as transparent integrity / authenticity support for read-only files on a writable file-system. Fortunately, the effort didn't stop and new patches are pending for this implementation that complements DM-VERITY.

FS-VERITY offers read-only, file-based authenticity protection on a per-file basis that can reside on a read-write file-system, like DM-VERITY being at the block level. FS-VERITY is being implemented as its own framework akin to fs-crypt for file-system encryption. The initial Linux file-systems that Google cares about for hooking into FS-VERITY are EXT4 and F2FS, both of which are used by Android devices.

• Sigil Epub Ebook Editor 0.9.11 Released (How to Install)

  Sigil ebook editor released version 0.9.11 a few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 18.10, Ubuntu 16.04, and Linux Mint 19.x.

• Create multiple subfolders in one command.

• Linux as NAT server in two easy steps

• Set the default route via nmcli

• Modern USB gadget on Linux - and how to integrate it with systemd (Part 1)

• Monte Carlo Simulation with Python

  There are many sophisticated models people can build for solving a forecasting problem. However, they frequently stick to simple Excel models based on average historical values, intuition and some high level domain-specific heuristics. This approach may be precise enough for the problem at hand but there are alternatives that can add more information to the prediction with a reasonable amount of additional effort.

  One approach that can produce a better understanding of the range of potential outcomes and help avoid the “flaw of averages” is a Monte Carlo simulation. The rest of this article will describe how to use python with pandas and numpy to build a Monte Carlo simulation to predict the range of potential values for a sales compensation budget. This approach is meant to be simple enough that it can be used for other problems you might encounter but also powerful enough to provide insights that a basic “gut-feel” model can not provide on its own.

• PyCon 2019 Tutorial Schedule!

• PHP HTML Tidy ironically doesn’t tidy up after itself

• Multi-Stage Dockerfiles and Python Virtualenvs

• Video: Container Mythbusters

  Michael Jennings has been a UNIX/Linux sysadmin and software engineer for over 20 years. He has been the author of or a contributor to numerous open source software projects, including Charliecloud, Mezzanine, Eterm, RPM, Warewulf/PERCEUS, and TORQUE. Additionally, he co-founded the Caos Foundation, creators of CentOS, and has been the lead developer on 3 separate Linux distributions. He currently serves as the Platforms Team Lead in the HPC Systems group at Los Alamos National Laboratory, responsible for managing some of our nation’s most powerful supercomputers and is the primary author/maintainer for the LBNL Node Health Check (NHC) project. He is also the Vice President of HPCXXL, the extreme-scale HPC Users group.

• Assessing App Portfolios for Onboarding to OpenShift

  Most professionals who’ve spent enough time in the IT industry have seen organizational silos in action. The classic silos are the ones created by Development and Operations organizations; silos we aim to break down through DevOps-style collaboration. But how many organizations pursuing digital transformation are continuing that siloed thinking when it comes to evaluating the application portfolio for cloud migration and modernization?

  Application Development, Database Operations, Infrastructure, and the various lines of business have portions of the application portfolio for which they take responsibility. When organizations think about modernization, they need to deemphasize the silos and develop a comprehensive approach that evaluates the entire portfolio, and the teams that support those applications. Otherwise, they’re leaving money on the table in the form of missed opportunities for cost savings and application improvements that generate revenue and increase customer engagement.

  A comprehensive approach takes into account the full range of workloads supported by the IT organization and starts making tough decisions about: which workloads can/should be modernized, which should be rehosted to take advantage of more efficient cloud platforms, and which should be left as is or even retired because they’re outlived their usefulness.

• Big Blue Finally Brings IBM i To Its Own Public Cloud

  Well, that took quite a long time. After what seems like eons of nudging and cajoling and pushing, IBM is making the IBM i operating system and its integrated database management system, as well as the application development tools and other systems software, available on its self-branded IBM Cloud public cloud.

  Big Blue previewed its plans to bring both IBM i and AIX to the IBM Cloud at its annual Think conference in Las Vegas, on scale out machines aimed at small and medium businesses as well as to customers who want to run clusters of machines, and on scale up systems that have NUMA electronics that more tightly cluster them into shared memory systems.

• Firefox Monitor: Mozilla Firefox’s New Safety Feature Will Show You Notifications When You Visit Breached Sites

  Mozilla recently launched Firefox Monitor, a service that allows users to find out if their account has been been part of a data breach and has been compromised. Firefox Monitor provides data from the popular service Have I Been Pwned. Mozilla has been working hard day and night to improve the Firefox browser and as a part of security improvements, comes Firefox Monitors’s integration with the Firefox desktop browsers.

  Back in November last year, Mozilla announced in a blog post that the Firefox Monitor service was being integrated with the Firefox desktop browser to warn users with a notification when visiting sites that were known to be involved in a data breach. The company said that the update was going to be rolled out to all Firefox users in the coming weeks. According to Techdows, as of February 18, 2019, all the Firefox desktop users have received the Firefox Monitor integration update.

• Vulnerability Scanning – Roadmap to Securing Your Infrastructure

• 92 Million Accounts Put Up For Sale on the Dark Web by Well Known Hacker Group

  Gnosticplayers has been on fire recently, having put 620 million accounts for sale and then followed it up by another 127 million accounts. The asking price for the first round of data hack was about $20,000 while for the second round it was around $14,500.

• Security updates for Monday

Ubuntu 17.10 dropped its i386 / 32-bit x86 installer image while the i386 port has remained part of the package archive. Other Ubuntu derivatives over the past year have also moved to drop their 32-bit installer images and with Lubuntu/Xubuntu now ending their ISOs for that port, it's hitting the end of the road. Now for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, there might not even be the i386 port.

Canonical's Steve Langasek has restarted the discussion about whether to include i386 for next year's Ubuntu 20.04 Long-Term Support release. Langasek commented today, "The real question is whether i386 is still supportable (and justifiable) as a release architecture at all in the 20.04 timeframe. There are significant technical concerns raised about whether we can continue to provide the expected security support for i386 over the lifetime of Ubuntu 20.04."

Also: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 566