Creating the same apps and software for different platforms is not an easy task for the developers. To make an app run on desktops, developers need to write a source code. However, to make the same app run on mobile devices, the developers have to write a different source code. With the new MauiKit, developers would be able to build convergent apps, that can run on both platforms with the same source code.

• Canonical need a little testing hand for a newer Steam package on Ubuntu 20.04

  With Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" being released in the next few months, the team over at Canonical are looking for a little help testing their updated Steam package.

  To be clear, this is only for the 20.04 release, they're not looking for feedback for earlier versions of Ubuntu.

  It's not a drastic change to the Steam package with it pulling in an update from Debian, but this newer build does have updated udev rules for some devices. Canonical also did some of their own tweaks for NVIDIA due to the differences between Ubuntu and Debian.

  You will need to use a temporary PPA which will be removed when the test is over, found over here. They need people to try clean installs without any Steam, upgrading from an existing Steam install and purge removals of the steam package. Additionally, testing with a Steam Controller and supported VR devices would help them too.

• Popular free rhythm game 'osu!' now provides a Linux build with releases

  osu!, going under the current development name of osu!lazer is a very popular free rhythm game and they're now doing official builds for Linux gamers.

  It's actually inspired by an older game called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, which was released in 2005 for the Nintendo DS. osu! was originally only available for Windows, then ported to macOS and eventually they started work on osu!lazer as an open source remake of the original client to eventually replace it. There's been various unofficial builds out there, since it's open source and up on GitHub but they're now making Linux a bit more official.

• Norbert Preining: QOwnNotes for Debian

  QOwnNotes is a cross-platform plain text and markdown note taking application. By itself, it wouldn’t be something to talk about, we have vim and emacs and everything in between. But QOwnNotes integrates nicely with the Notes application from NextCloud and OwnCloud, as well as providing useful integration with NextCloud like old version of notes, access to deleted files, watching changes, etc.

• Searchmonkey – A powerful desktop search app for Linux

  In our day to day activities, we need to search for specific files in our Linux systems. These can be documents, texts, and even multimedia data including video and audio files. 

  Linux comes with a powerful command-line tool (Terminal), that enables users to search for data and text using various command-line arguments. One advantage of using the Terminal is it supports the use of regular expressions and scripting.

  Having said that, not everyone is well-versed with the many Linux commands; this brings forth the demand for having an interactive and reliable Graphical User Interface. One of such powerful tools is the Searchmonkey application.

• Remote Touchpad: Control Mouse & Keyboard from Your Phone

  Remote Touchpad is an open-source utility allows to remote control the mouse and keyboard connected to your computer from the web browser of a smartphone or any other device with a touchscreen.

  Remote Touchpad supports Flatpak’s RemoteDesktop portal (experimental), Windows and X11.

  Simply run the utility on your machine. It outputs an URL along with QR code in a terminal window. To take control open the displayed URL or scan the QR code in your phone.

• Top 10 Best Google Maps Plugin for WordPress (2020)

  A touch webpage is far more of use with an internet map. This guide shows the top 10 best Google maps plugin for WordPress. A traveling site will be that more pleasure for those who (and also you subscribers ) may view in a glance most of the locations you have already been. You will find a lot of motives to incorporate maps onto your own WordPress website, regardless of what your explanation is that you have to have a simple and effective means to perform nothing but that.

• Linux's FSCRYPT Working On Encryption + Case-Insensitive Support

  FSCRYPT as the file-system encryption framework for the Linux kernel and is currently wired up for EXT4, F2FS, and UBIFS to offer native encryption capabilities is currently seeing improvements so the separate casefolding (case-insensitive) file/folder support can work on encrypted directories.

• A Few More Linux Kernel Patches Floated This Week For AMD Family 19h (Zen 3)

  Going back to the start of 2020 we've been seeing a few patches here and there around AMD Family 19h, almost certainly Zen 3. That patch work has continued with a few more bits out this week while hopefully more bring-up is on the horizon ahead of the Linux 5.7 merge window opening in just over one month's time.

  Like the earlier Family 19h EDAC bring-up, this week's work isn't too juicy besides it being refreshing to see AMD punctually getting out Linux kernel patches for forthcoming hardware. The patches this week involve a few additions to AMD's perf subsystem code around the uncore bits. No enticing details of Family 19h are revealed but just shifting code around for supporting the L3 thread mask for the forthcoming CPUs and also the L3 PMU.

• Broadcom Bringing Up Linux Support For VK Accelerators

  Broadcom developers have been recently volleying open-source Linux driver patches for enabling their "VK Accelerators" on the platform.

  Broadcom VK Accelerators are PCI Express offload engines for supporting video transcoding on multiple streams in parallel. These VK Accelerators offer various video offload processing features and are exposed to user-space via specialized /dev/bcm-vk.X devices. We haven't yet seen user-space patches to see if Broadcom intends to support any of the common APIs or will be developing their own customized solution.

  This Broadcom VK offload engine relies upon seemingly closed-source firmware files to be loaded for running the logic on these accelerators.

GNU Parallel 20200222 ('BrexitDay') [stable] has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/parallel/
No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release.
GNU Parallel is 10 years old next year on 2020-04-22. You are here by invited to a reception on Friday 2020-04-17.

• Using 'LXPanel' as a UI for Crostini

  If you are used to a menu-driven user interface in Linux or find the Chrome OS application launcher not quite to your liking for accessing Crostini Linux applications then one option you could try is LXPanel.

  The panel generates a menu for installed applications automatically from '*.desktop' files and can itself be incorporated in its own '.desktop' file which if pinned to the Chrome OS shelf can also be used as a means to start the 'penguin' container after booting.

  Unfortunately it is not quite perfect as the panel is displayed in the middle of the screen and doesn't respond well to changing its position under geometry in its panel settings. However you can toggle its visibility by clicking the panel's icon on the shelf. Also closing the panel (by right clicking the icon) only closes the 'LXPanel' application in Chrome OS so to terminate it fully you need to use 'killall lxpanel' in a terminal session.

• Linux apps on Chromebooks may be reason enough for external GPU support

  We’ve been tracking a device known only as ‘Mushu’ for about a month at this point, and it brings with it a very specific and interesting addition to the Chrome OS ecosystem: a discrete GPU (or dGPU for short). When we first reported on this device being in development, I suggested that I don’t see a ton of use cases for a Chromebook with a dGPU for most users. Without a proper video editor or tons of ways to play locally-stored games, its hard to make a case for dGPUs when existing Chromebooks are already so fast at what they do.

• NVIDIA talk up bringing DirectX Ray Tracing to Vulkan

  With Ray Tracing becoming ever more popular, NVIDIA have written up a technical post on bringing DirectX Ray Tracing to Vulkan to encourage more developers to do it.

  The blog post, titled "Bringing HLSL Ray Tracing to Vulkan" mentions that porting content requires both the API calls (so DirectX to Vulkan) and the Shaders (HLSL to SPIR-V). Something that's not so difficult now, with the SPIR-V backend to Microsoft's open source DirectXCompiler (DXC).

  Since last year, NVIDIA added ray tracing support to DXC's SPIR-V back-end too using their SPV_NV_ray_tracing extension and there's already titles shipping with it like Quake II RTX and Wolfenstein: Youngblood. While this is all NVIDIA-only for now, The Khronos Group is having discussions to get a cross-vendor version of the Vulkan ray tracing extension implemented and NVIDIA expect the work already done can be used with it which does sound good.

• NVIDIA Demonstrates Porting Of DirectX Ray-Tracing To Vulkan

  NVIDIA has written a new technical blog post on bringing HLSL ray-tracing to Vulkan with the same capabilities of DirextX Ray-Tracing. This effort is made feasible by Microsoft's existing open-source DirectXCompiler (DXC) with SPIR-V back-end for consumption by Vulkan drivers. Last year NVIDIA contributed to the open-source DXC support for SPV_NV_ray_tracing. This in turn with the open-source tooling allows converting DXR HLSL shaders into SPIR-V modules for Vulkan.

• LunarG's Vulkan developer survey results out now - Vulkan also turns 4

  LunarG, the software company that Valve sponsors who work on building out the ecosystem for the Vulkan API recently conducted a Vulkan developer survey with the results out now.

  Before going over the results, just a reminder that Vulkan just recently turned four years old! The 1.0 specification went public on February 16, 2016. Since then, we've seen some pretty amazing things thanks to it. We've had Linux ports that perform really nicely, the mighty DXVK translation layer advanced dramatically, to the vkBasalt post-processing layer and so on—there's been a lot going on. However, as a graphics API do remember it's pretty young and has a long life ahead of it.

  As for the LunarG survey: there were 349 replies to it, and while not a huge amount it gives us an interesting insight into what some developers think and feel about how Vulkan is doing as a whole. Overall, it gives quite a positive picture on the health of Vulkan with over 60% feeling the overall quality of the Vulkan ecosystem as "Good" and almost 20% rating it as "Excellent".

• AMDVLK 2020.Q1.2 Released With Vulkan 1.2 Support

  AMDVLK 2020.Q1.2 is out as the first official AMD open-source Vulkan Linux driver code drop in one month.

  AMDVLK has been off its wagon this quarter with their previous weekly/bi-weekly code drops of AMDVLK but that just means the v2020.Q1.2 is quite a big one. First up, AMDVLK 2020.Q1.2 now is supporting Vulkan 1.2 that debuted back in January and with Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver already having supported it for weeks.

• Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 20.Q1.1 for Linux Released

  AMD's Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 20.Q1.1 Linux driver release was made available this week as their newest quarterly driver installment intended for use with Radeon Pro graphics hardware.

Supported workflows for example include visiting a restaurant website where dropping them a call to ask for a table should be no more than two clicks away, or when surfing a trade show website, adding the dates to your calendar should be straightforward. If you want to read more about how the data gathering and processing in the background works, check out my previous blog post on the subject.

If you want to give it a try, install a recent kitinerary library (something along the lines of libkpimitinerary5), check out the itinerary branch of the plasma-browser-integration repository and follow the “How to install” instructions from source code on its wiki page. Once up and running, visit your favorite event, restaurant, and hotel sites and see if they have any structured data we can process! If you click “Inspect Element” in the popup’s context menu, the developer console will have some basic debugging information on the extractor.

Intrinsyc’s “Snapdragon 865 Mobile HDK” runs Android 10 on the 7nm, octa-core, 2.84GHz Snapdragon 865 with 15-TOPS AI. The kit offers 6GB LPDDR5, WiFi-ax, and an optional 6-inch touchscreen and triple camera board.

In its first product announcement since being acquired by Lantronix, long-time Qualcomm hardware partner Intrinsyc has launched a Mobile Hardware Development Kit (HDK) that showcases Qualcomm’s latest, greatest mobile SoC, the Snapdragon 865. The Snapdragon 865 Mobile HDK runs Android 10, which will soon be followed by Android 11, featuring a Conversations tool and improved security. Android 11 was released a few days ago in a developer preview.

• How to install the Cloudy GTK theme on Linux

• How to customize the Linux terminal with bash aliases

• How to Install Vanilla Forums on Ubuntu 18.04

• How to Install TensorFlow on CentOS 8

• How to install Apache web server on Android?

• Automate (offline) backups with restic and systemd

• How to install Debian, expert mode

• Best vim color schemes and how to install

• Browsing the web from the Linux terminal

• Playing media in Linux terminal

Sometimes, I wonder if I should stop testing Linux distributions for good. The soul toll is immense. Not just the fact that things can fail, which can be okay now and then, but the whole unnecessary rollercoaster of pointless regressions and unpredictability. My expectation is that systems should be simple, reliable - and more than that, they should be a product. A complete box of functionality that allows the user to work and have fun. Alas, every year, we're getting farther and farther away from that. It's not even the question of the Year of the Linux, or anything like that. It's the question of basic stability without which there's no foundation for anything meaningful. It's depressing me, and it's self-inflicted.

Solus 4.1 has some really cool points. I liked what I saw last year. But in 2020, things are different. Clear fonts are no longer clear. Go figure. Some library or something got changed without any testing. The problems I raised back then remain. New problems abound. And then, it killed GRUB and left my machine unbootable. All in all, Solus 4.1 is pretty, and offers reasonable connectivity out of the box, and comes with some unique features against the vastness of mediocrity that grips the Linux desktop. But these are more than offset by glitches, bugs and the installation trouble. It's a no-go. Dedoimedo, sad and out.

The present review on Linux distributions for low resources computers isn’t oriented to Linux users only, but to anyone with an old hardware PC with possibilities to be recycled. This includes regular Windows users who have not this possibility with OS offered by modern Windows OS, without Linux distributions oriented to low resources devices Windows users could only install old, outdated and unsafe Windows versions such as XP with a lot of compatibility issues with modern software and hardware.If Linux is a great, and maybe the best option for everyone, Linux distributions for low resources devices seems to be the only well-supported option for old computers.

• Google is cracking down on Android apps that track your location in the background

• Learn How to Build Your Own iOS and Android Apps From Scratch

• 18 new and notable Android apps from the last two weeks including Firefox Private Network VPN, Socratic by Google, and PotatoNotes (2/08/20 - 2/22/20)

• Honor 20 Lite gets EMUI 10 update based on Android 10

• [Date revealed] Realme X & Realme 5 Pro Realme UI (Android 10) update rollout set for February last week

• Six things we know about Android 11: Security, notifications and all the new features

• Suunto 7: Android's new benchmark for situational awareness

• Vu Launches Premium Tvs With Android TV 9 Pie In India

Yes, you’re reading that right, it is apparently possible to put the MATE desktop environment on the PinePhone, and surprise, surprise, it runs very well, that if you can get used to the desktop experience on a small screen, of course.

Disappointed by other distributions available for the PinePhone, a YouTube user apparently managed to put the MATE desktop on the mobile device the pmbootstrap installer from postmarketOS, a GNU/Linux distribution designed for phones.

In the video below, you can see the MATE desktop in action on the PinePhone, running the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Onboard on-screen keyboard.

With the steady rise of cybercrimes, companies and government agencies are involving themselves more in setting up cyber investigation labs to tackle the crime happening over the Internet.

Software tools are like arms that play a significant role in the investigation process. Hence, Computer Forensics, Incident Response, and Competitive Intelligence professionals have developed a Cyber forensics focussed operating system called CSI Linux.

• Being Rich Does Not Imply Being Smart (Especially When One is Born Into Wealth)
• The Rise and Fall of Free Software
• Why You Should Adopt Debian 10, Not Vista 10 (Windows Vista With Microsoft’s Latest Surveillance Add-ons)
• Ethics by Exclusion
• Even Worse Than Microsoft Inside the Board of the OSI
• ZDNet Continues to Stuff Its ‘Linux’ Section With Proprietary Software of Microsoft
• Video: LinuxWorld 1999, Torvalds and Stallman
• GNU World Order is a Personal Sacrifice, LinuxWorld Just Business
• Links 22/2/2020: Polish Government Increases GNU/Linux Use, Samza 1.3.1
• Links 21/2/2020: EasyOS 2.2.11 Released, Microsoft’s Control of the Linux Foundation Increases and More Binary Blobs Arrive
• Links 20/2/2020: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU18, Mesa 20, VirtualBox 6.1.4
• IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 21, 2020
• IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 20, 2020

• Word Embeddings Simplified

  Recently I have been dwelling with a lot of NLP problems and jargons. The more I read about it the more I find it intriguing and beautiful of how we humans try to transfer this knowledge of a language to machines.

  How much ever we try because of our laid back nature we try to use already existing knowledge or existing materials to be used to make machines understand a given language.

  But machines as we know it can only understand digits or lets be more precise binary(0s and 1s). When I first laid my hands on NLP this was my first question, how does a machine understand that something is a word or sentence or a character.

• Coronavirus wreaking havoc in the tech industry, including FOSS

  At FOSS Linux, you may wonder why we are covering the coronavirus and how it relates to Linux and open-source software?

  Aside from the apparent effect of the slowdown in components required for Linux to run on,  the coronavirus outbreak directly impacts several products featured in FOSS Linux over the past year.

  Purism – the brains behind the Librem 5 phones powered by PureOS are the most directly affected by the outbreak, suffering production delays.
  Dell – the titanic computer manufacturer, has hinted at a possibility of interruption of supplies, which could affect the availability of the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition preloaded with Ubuntu 18.04.
  System76 – these creators of Pop_OS! 19.10 recently announced their foray into the world of laptop design and manufacturing.  The coronavirus could adversely affect this endeavor.
  Pine64 – maker of the Pinebook Pro, the affordable laptop which supports most, if not all, Linux distros featured on FOSS Linux also is under threat of production delays.

• Announcing the release of Samza 1.3.1

  We have identified some issues with the previous release of Apache Samza 1.3.0.

• Scientists develop open-source software to analyze economics of biofuels, bioproducts

  BioSTEAM is available online through the Python Package Index, at Pypi.org. A life cycle assessment (LCA) add-on to BioSTEAM to quantify the environmental impacts of biorefineries -- developed by CABBI Postdoctoral Researcher Rui Shi and the Guest Research Group -- is also set to be released in March 2020. To further increase availability of these tools, Guest's team is also designing a website with a graphical user interface where researchers can plug new parameters for a biorefinery simulation into existing configurations, and download results within minutes.

  BioSTEAM's creators drew on open-source software developed by other researchers, including a data bank with 20,000 chemicals and their thermodynamic properties.

• Mirantis Joins Linux Foundation's LF Networking Community

  Mirantis, the open cloud company, today announced it has joined the Linux Foundation's LF Networking (LFN) community, which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open networking projects.

  LFN software and projects provide platforms and building blocks for Network Infrastructure and Services across Service Providers, Cloud Providers, Enterprises, Vendors, and System Integrators that enable rapid interoperability, deployment, and adoption. LF Networking supports the largest set of networking projects with the broadest community in the industry that collaborate on this opportunity.

• Google Announces The 200 Open-Source Projects For GSoC 2020

  Google's Summer of Code initiative for getting students involved with open-source development during the summer months is now into its sixteenth year. This week Google announced the 200 open-source projects participating in GSoC 2020. 

  Among the 200 projects catching our eye this year are GraphicsFuzz, Blender, Debian, FFmpeg, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, GNOME, Godot Engine, KDE, Mozilla, Pitivi, The GNU Project, VideoLAN, and X.Org. The complete list of GSoC 2020 organizations can be found here. 

• Myst (or, The Drawbacks to Success)

  After listening to the cultural dialog — or shouting match! — which has so long surrounded Myst, one’s first encounter with the actual artifact that spurred it all can be more than a little anticlimactic. Seen strictly as a computer game, Myst is… okay. Maybe even pretty good. It strikes this critic at least as far from the best or worst game of its year, much less of its decade, still less of all gaming history. Its imagery is well-composited and occasionally striking, its sound and music design equally apt. The sense of desolate, immersive beauty it all conveys can be strangely affecting, and it’s married to puzzle-design instincts that are reasonable and fair. Myst‘s reputation in some quarters as impossible, illogical, or essentially unplayable is unearned; apart from some pixel hunts and perhaps the one extended maze, there’s little to really complain about on that front. On the contrary: there’s a definite logic to its mechanical puzzles, and figuring out how its machinery works through trial and error and careful note-taking, then putting your deductions into practice, is genuinely rewarding, assuming you enjoy that sort of thing.

  At same time, though, there’s just not a whole lot of there there. Certainly there’s no deeper meaning to be found; Myst never tries to be about more than exploring a striking environment and solving intricate puzzles. “When we started, we wanted to make a [thematic] statement, but the project was so big and took so much effort that we didn’t have the energy or time to put much into that part of it,” admits Robyn Miller. “So, we decided to just make a neat world, a neat adventure, and say important things another time.” And indeed, a “neat world” and “neat adventure” are fine ways of describing Myst.

• DStv Now working on Linux streaming problems

  MyBroadband readers have complained of problems when trying to stream DStv Now on Linux devices.

  Previously, users running Linux operating systems were able to watch DStv Now through a web browser such as Chrome or Firefox.

  However, since the beginning of 2020, these users have been unable to watch shows on the platform, likely due to a change in the Widevine DRM system.

  Similar problems with international streaming platforms have been reported this year, indicating that the issue could be a common DRM issue rather than individual platform changes.

• A Tale of Four Laptops, or, How Lenovo’s Digital River Customer Support Sucks

  In September, I made a mistake… We needed new laptops for Dmitry and Agata, and after much deliberation, we decided upon Lenovo Yoga C940’s. These are very cool devices, with HDR screens, nice keyboard, built-in pen, two-in-one convertible — everything in short for the discerning Krita hacker.

  I accidentally ordered the S940 instead — two of them. These are very awful devices, without a pen, no touch-screen, don’t fold, don’t have HDR, don’t even have normal USB ports. Overpriced, under-powered — why the heck does Lenovo call these Ideapads yoga’s? I have no idea.

  Well, no problem, I thought. I’ll just return them and ordered the C940 instead. The C940’s arrived in time for our BlenderCon sprintlet, and were all what one expected them to be. And I filled in Lenovo’s web form to return the S940’s.

  [...]

  I’ve bought Yoga’s, Thinkpads and even Ideapads in great numbers in the past twenty years… But I think it’s time to make a change.

• Mesa's RADV Vulkan Driver Adding Compatibility For Use With The AMD Radeon GPU Profiler

  To date the Mesa "RADV" Radeon Vulkan driver hasn't supported AMD's GPUOpen Radeon GPU Profiler but that is changing.

  With RADV being developed by the community -- principally by the likes of Valve, Red Hat, and Google -- this Mesa Vulkan driver hasn't supported all of the tooling AMD makes available under the GPUOpen umbrella and is tailored for their official AMD Linux/Windows Vulkan drivers. While AMDVLK and the Radeon Software for Linux driver have supported the company's Radeon GPU Profiler, RADV is now adding compatibility for this profiler.

• Intel Compute Runtime Adds OCLOC Multi-Device Compilation

  Version 20.07.15711 of the Intel Compute Runtime was released this morning.

  The Intel Compute Runtime 20.07.15711 is what principally provides their modern OpenCL implementation for Broadwell graphics hardware and newer with current at OpenCL 2.1 for all generations from Broadwell through the yet-to-be-released Gen12 Tiger Lake.

• openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/08

  After a week of hacking on different stuff and being in the background for Tumbleweed while Oliver took on the role of Release Manager, I am back with you. And we have released three snapshots this week (0214, 0218 and 0219). The gap between 0214 and 0218 was the integration of glibc 2.31. But of course, there was more happening this week. So here comes the list:

• Fedora program update: 2020-08

  I have weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else.

     

• Colour us bewildered

         
  

           

  A Russian-speaking friend over at Farnell pointed us at this video. Apparently it’s been made by Amperot.ru, a Russian Raspberry Pi Approved Reseller, who are running a t-shirt giveaway. We got our hands on a subtitled video, and…words fail me. Please turn the sound up before you start watching.

      

• Automating Everything With Python: Reading Time: 3 Mins

  Python is a general language for beginners to get started with programming. Python is used for automation due to a built-in standard library and other tools within the Python ecosystem.

  Which can be useful for anyone besides just a system administrator to automate certain parts of their process to make work much efficient. From data wrangling to just gathering market research data.

  Due to this ease of picking up and the python ecosystem. Python is used as part of DevOps, Data Science, Marketing.

• Python 3.7.5 : This python package can work with ArcGIS platform.

• Weekly Python StackOverflow Report: (ccxvi) stackoverflow python report

• Anatomy of a generic function in Rust

  It can handle different input types and thus it's called a generic function. The generic data type is represented by the capital letter T in this example. T is an arbitrary placeholder. It could be have been another letter, X, Y or V, but when using T it can be easier to remeber that it refers to a "type".

  I don't usually write code but I do enjoy reading and here the syntax of the function definition can be daunting at first. Let's have a look at a simpler version.