• mintCast 300 Blast from the past

• Free as in Get Out | LINUX Unplugged 284

  ZFS on Linux is becoming the official upstream project of all major ZFS implementations, even the BSDs. But recent Kernel changes prevent ZFS from even building on Linux. Neal Gompa joins us to discuss why it all matters.

• The Optional Option | Coder Radio 340

  Wes joins Mike for a special Coder. They share thoughts on the costs and benefits of Optionals in Swift, uncover Mike’s secret love affair with F#, and debate the true value of serverless.

• AMDVLK Weekly Code Drop Brings A DXVK Fix, VK_EXT_debug_utils Support

  AMD developers maintaining their official Vulkan driver have carried out another weekly code push to the open-source AMDVLK code-base.

  Overall the changes for this week's worth of AMD Radeon Vulkan driver changes is fairly small, but there is a DXVK fix, one new Vulkan extension wired up, and a lot of low-level driver work.

• NVIDIA 415.27 Linux Driver Released With GeForce RTX 2060 Support

  With NVIDIA today officially shipping the GeForce RTX 2060 as the new $349 USD Turing graphics card, the 415.27 Linux driver was released today to officially support this new graphics card.

  The GeForce RTX 2060 actually works with former 415 driver series releases, but would just be identified as a NVIDIA "Device" as opposed to the GeForce RTX 2060. The product string is now in this driver plus any other small tweaks to officially support this lowest-cost RTX Turing graphics card to date.

• Mesa 18.3.2 release candidate

  The candidate for the Mesa 18.3.2 is now available. Currently we have:
  - 78 queued
  - 3 nominated (outstanding)
  - and 0 rejected patches

• Mesa 18.3.2 Is Finally En Route With 78+ Changes

  It's been more than a month since the debut of Mesa 18.3 and the emergency 18.3.1 release while due the holidays and the release manager being sick, the next point release fell off the tracks. Mesa 18.3.2 is now being crafted and should be out in the next few days. Given the time since the previous release, Mesa 18.3.2 is heavy on fixes.

  Emil Velikov announced the release today of Mesa 18.3.2 RC1 and plans for officially releasing this point update in the next day or two. This release candidate has 78 patches queued over the prior update.

The basic premise of the elementary OS Challenge is simple: ditch Windows, macOS or your current Linux OS of choice and exclusively use elementary OS 5 Juno as your daily driver for two weeks. Explore the curated AppCenter and the bundled software to get all of your working and playing done. For email, for music, for coding, for gaming, for whatever.

We’ll be taking this journey together, which hopefully means a two-way conversation to discuss the successes, discoveries, questions and potential stumbling blocks we encounter along the way.

Back in October, MongoDB announced the Server Side Public License v1 (SSPLv1) as their new license moving forward for this document-oriented database server over their existing AGPL code. SSPL was met with much controversy upon its unveiling and Fedora's legal team has now ruled it an invalid free software license for packaged software in its repositories.

The intent of MongoDB developing the Server Side Public License was to ensure that public cloud vendors and other companies using their software as a service are giving back to the community / the upstream project. SSPL v1 was based on the GPLv3 but lays clear that a company publicly offering the SSPL-licensed software as a service must in turn open-source their software that it uses to offer said service. That stipulation applies only to organizations making use of MongoDB for public software services.

• Managing pods and containers in a local container runtime

• How To Install Cinnamon Desktop On A Chromebook With Crouton

• How to connect ONLYOFFICE Desktop Editors to Nextcloud

• Install and Keep HexChat IRC Client Updated via Snap in Ubuntu

• How to Install the Official Slack Client on Linux

• How to Install IntelliJ IDEA IDE on CentOS 7

• How to Install Craft CMS on CentOS 7

• How to install Yaru Theme 19.04 on Ubuntu 18.04

• Augmented Reality and the Browser — An App Experiment

  We all want to build the next (or perhaps the first) great Augmented Reality app. But there be dragons! The space is new and not well defined. There aren’t any AR apps that people use every day to serve as starting points or examples. Your new ideas have to compete against an already very high quality bar of traditional 2d apps. And building a new app can be expensive, especially for native app environments. This makes AR apps still somewhat uncharted territory, requiring a higher initial investment of time, talent and treasure.

  But this also creates a sense of opportunity; a chance to participate early before the space is fully saturated.

  From our point of view the questions are: What kinds of tools do artists, developers, designers, entrepreneurs and creatives of all flavors need to be able to easily make augmented reality experiences? What kinds of apps can people build with tools we provide?

  For example: Can I watch Trevor Noah on the Daily Show this evening, and then release an app tomorrow that is a riff on a joke he made the previous night? A measure of success is being able to speak in rich media quickly and easily, to be a timely part of a global conversation.

• Adios, Amigo

  Firefox Test Pilot is flying off into the sunset on January 22nd, 2019. Currently active experiments will remain installed for all users, and will be available on addons.mozilla.org after this date. Non-extension experiments like Firefox Lockbox and Firefox Send will continue in active development as standalone products. In fact, both products will have significant launches in the near future. Stay tuned for updates in the coming months.

• Evolving Firefox’s Culture of Experimentation: A Thank You from the Test Pilot Program

  For the last three years Firefox has invested heavily in innovation, and our users have been an essential part of this journey. Through the Test Pilot Program, Firefox users have been able to help us test and evaluate a variety of potential Firefox features. Building on the success of this program, we’re proud to announce today that we’re evolving our approach to experimentation even further.

• Samba 4.10 RC1 Released: Adds Offline Domain Backups, Now Defaults To Python 3

  Samba 4.10 release candidate 1 was announced today as the open-source SMB implementation with support for Windows Server and Active Directory domains.

  The Samba 4.10 release is bringing export/restore features for Group Policy Objects (GPO), pre-fork process model improvements, support for offline domain backups with the samba-tool domain backup command now supporting an offline option, support for group membership statistics within a domain, Python 3 is now considered the default Python implementation while Python 2 support is retained, JSON logging improvements, and other work.

• newt-lola

  Bison and Flex (or any of the yacc/lex family members) are a quick way to generate reliable parsers and lexers for language development. It's easy to write a token recognizer in Flex and a grammar in Bison, and you can readily hook code up to the resulting parsing operation. However, neither Bison nor Flex are really designed for embedded systems where memory is limited and malloc is to be avoided.

  When starting Newt, I didn't hesitate to use them though; it's was nice to use well tested and debugged tools so that I could focus on other parts of the implementation.

  With the rest of Newt working well, I decided to go take another look at the cost of lexing and parsing to see if I could reduce their impact on the system.

• Kano Scores a Disney Partnership, Announces a Star Wars Kit for Later This Year

  Kano creates killer little sets to teach kids how to code and beyond (like the awesome Harry Potter Coding Kit), and today the company is announcing a Disney partnership. The first product will be a Star Wars kit.

  While other info is scant at the time, Kano says the Star Wars kit will be out “in the second half of 2019.” Alex Klein, Kano’s CEO and co-founder, only teased other details, saying that “Collaborating with Disney is a blessing. We can combine connected, creative technologies with some of the most memorable stories ever told.”

• GDA and GObject Introspection: Remember 1

• No really, pathlib is great

• Top Seven Apps Built With Python

• Turn video into black and white with python

• Happy Mu Year 2019!

• Python 101: Episode #42 – Creating Executables with cx_Freeze

  In this screencast, we will learn how to turn your Python code into a Windows executable file using the cx_Freeze project.

• PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #351 (Jan. 15, 2019)

• Demonizer, a rather intense shoot 'em up on itch has Linux support and a demo

  For those who enjoy their classic shoot 'em up experiences, Demonizer on itch is pretty retro looking and the action is rather intense.

  Currently in-development so it's an Early Access title, Demonizer is estimated to be completed sometime midway through this year. Take a look at some quick gameplay of the demo version running on Ubuntu...

• Taste of Power, a new and rather rough real-time strategy game is in Early Access

  Taste of Power, a real-time strategy game from OneOcean LLC arrived on Steam back in December in Early Access, I took a look.

• Road to your City, the city-builder with a heavy emphasis on Football has a new trailer and Steam page

  Road to your City is a city-builder I highlighted here on GOL back in November, as it's going to set itself apart with a focus on Football (Soccer) and it's starting to look pretty good.

• The 'Linux Steam Integration' project has a fresh minor release out

  Back to work at Intel, developer Ikey Doherty has put out a fresh release of the Linux Steam Integration project.

  For those unaware, the LSI project is basically a helper to make Steam and games run through Steam work better on Linux. It helps to work around game-specific annoyances, game engine issues and plenty more.

• The Humble Double Fine Presents Bundle is out with some nice games

  Another week and another new bundle has appeared! The Humble Double Fine Presents Bundle is up for two weeks and there's some pretty good games going.

• Software Security is a Civil Right!

• Security isn’t a feature

  As CES draws to a close, I’ve seen more than one security person complain that nobody at the show was talking about security. There were an incredible number of consumer devices unveiled, no doubt there is no security in any of them. I think we get caught up in the security world sometimes so we forget that the VAST majority of people don’t care if something has zero security. People want interesting features that amuse them or make their lives easier. Security is rarely either of these, generally it makes their lives worse so it’s an anti-feature to many.

  Now the first thing many security people think goes something like this “if there’s no security they’ll be sorry when their lightbulb steals their wallet and dumps the milk on the floor!!!” The reality is that argument will convince nobody, it’s not even very funny so they’re laughing at us, not with us. Our thoughts by very nature blame all the wrong people and we try to scare them into listening to us. It’s never worked. Ever. That one time you think it worked they were only pretended to care so you would go away.

  So it brings us to the idea that security isn’t a feature. Turning your lights on is a feature. Cooking you dinner is a feature. Driving your car is a feature. Not bursting into flames is not a feature. Well it sort of is, but nobody talks about it. Security is a lot like the bursting into flames thing. Security really is about something not happening, things not happening is the fundamental problem we have when we try to talk about all this. You can’t build a plausible story around an event that may or may not happen. Trying to build a narrative around something that may or may not happen is incredibly confusing. This isn’t how feature work, features do positive things, they don’t not do negative things (I don’t even know if that’s right). Security isn’t a feature.

  So the question you should be asking then is how do we make products being created contain more of this thing we keep calling security. The reality is we can’t make this happen given our current strategies. There are two ways products will be produced that are less insecure (see what I did there). Either the market demands it, which given the current trends isn’t happening anytime soon. People just don’t care about security. The second way is a government creates regulations that demand it. Given the current state of the world’s governments, I’m not confident that will happen either.

• Metasploit, popular hacking and security tool, gets long-awaited update

  The open-source Metasploit Framework 5.0 has long been used by hackers and security professionals alike to break into systems. Now, this popular system penetration testing platform, which enables you to find, exploit, and validate security holes, has been given a long-delayed refresh.

  Rapid7, Metasploit's parent company, announced this first major release since 2011. It brings many new features and a fresh release cadence to the program. While the Framework has remained the same for years, the program was kept up to date and useful with weekly module updates.

• Security updates for Tuesday

• [Slackware] New VLC and Flash

  AV1 is a new video codec by the Alliance for Open Media, composed of most of the important Web companies (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla…). AV1 has the potential to be up to 20% better than the HEVC codec, but the patents license is totally free. VLC supports AV1 since version 3.0.0 but I never added the ‘aom‘ decoder/encoder to my vlc package, since ‘aom’ is the reference implementation of the video format and it does not really perform.
  The VideoLAN and FFmpeg communities are collaborating on ‘dav1d’ to make this a reference optimized decoder for AV1. Now that ‘dav1d’ has an official release I thought it would be cool to have in the VLC package. Mozilla and Google browsers already have the support for AV1 video playback built-in, so… overdue here.

• Android Studio 3.3 includes official Navigation Editor support and more than 200 bug fixes

• The Snapdragon 855 is a benchmarking beast in a year that needs the power

• Nokia & OnePlus Accused Of Being Too Aggressive On Background Processes

• If an Android phone costs as much as an iPhone, it should be supported for four years

• The Redmi Note 5 is set to get Android Pie soon

• You can now easily reset Adaptive Brightness in Android 9 Pie to factory defaults

• 2019 Android Security Trends

• Top 9 things to do after setting up your Android phone

Sometimes it takes more than a few tweaks to turn an old-style desktop design into a fresh new Linux distribution. That is the case with the public release of Blue Collar Linux.

"The guidance and design were shaped by real people -- blue collar people," Blue Collar developer Steven A. Auringer told LinuxInsider. "Think useful and guided by Joe and Jane Whitebread in Suburbia."

Blue Collar Linux has been under development for the last four years. Until its public release this week, it has circulated only through an invitation for private use by the developer's family, friends and associates looking for an alternative to the Windows nightmare.

Forlinx’s “FCU1101” is a compact embedded gateway with -35 to 70℃ support that runs Linux on an i.MX6 UL and offers 4x isolated RS485 ports, a LAN port, and WiFi, 4G, LoRa, and ZigBee.

A year ago, the wireless studded, serial connected FCU1101 might have been called an IoT gateway, but the name seems to be going out of fashion. A similar system with a more powerful processor than the FCU1101‘s power-efficient, Cortex-A7 based NXP i.MX6 UltraLite (UL) might today be called an edge server. Forlinx calls its mini-PC sized, 105 x 100 x 33mm device what we used to call them back in the day: an embedded computer.

• Google Zapping Android Apps That Access Call and Text Logs

• Qualcomm Snapdragon 855: The first benchmark results - compared to Galaxy Note9, Pixel 3, OnePlus 6T, and more

• Android Pie beta now rolling out to Samsung Galaxy Note 8

• Galaxy S10 Preview: Samsung Wants Its Android Crown Back

• 5 ways to repurpose your retired Android tablet

• Where Can IT Get Expert Guidance for Managing Android in the Enterprise?

• Three Radiangames Titles Coming To Android This Month

• Are There Any Solutions Based on Android Mobile Phones Using Bluetooth-Supported Passive RFID for Last-Mile Deliveries of Consumable Items?

• IBM, Which Will Soon be Buying Red Hat, is Promoting Software Patents in Europe
• Team UPC on Dead UPC: Choosing Gowns for Corpses
• Links 15/1/2019: MX Linux MX-18 Continuum Reviewed, Mageia 7 Artwork Voting<

The NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 is shipping today as the most affordable Turing GPU option to date at $349 USD. Last week we posted our initial GeForce RTX 2060 Linux review and followed-up with more 1080p and 1440p Linux gaming benchmarks after having more time with the card. In this article is a side-by-side performance comparison of the GeForce RTX 2060 up against the GTX 1060 Pascal, GTX 960 Maxwell, and GTX 760 Kepler graphics cards. Not only are we looking at the raw OpenGL, Vulkan, and OpenCL/CUDA compute performance between these four generations, but also the power consumption and performance-per-Watt.

Let's face it: writing one-liners and scripts using shell commands can be confusing. Many of the names of the tools at your disposal are far from obvious in terms of what they do (grep, tee and awk, anyone?) and, when you combine two or more, the resulting "sentence" looks like some kind of alien gobbledygook.

None of the above is helped by the fact that many of the symbols you use to build a chain of instructions can mean different things depending on their context.

VirtualBox 6.0 brought numerous new features and improvements to the open-source and cross-platform virtualization software used by millions of computer users worldwide to run multiple operating systems on their PCs. These include a major user interface revamp, the ability to export virtual machines to the Oracle Cloud infrastructure, better 4K/HiDPI support for high-end displays, and support for Linux kernel 4.20.

VirtualBox 6.0.2 is the first maintenance update to the VirtualBox 6.0 series, adding support for building the VirtualBox drivers on the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12.4 operating system, implementing a new virtual optical disk creation window in the UI, making the VirtualBoxVM command accessible on Linux and macOS hosts, supporting older Linux kernels for building the shared folder driver, and fixing resetting of USB devices on Linux guests.

A set of 36-year-old vulnerabilities has been uncovered in the Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) implementation of many client applications that can be exploited by malicious servers to overwrite arbitrary files in the SCP client target directory unauthorizedly.

Session Control Protocol (SCP), also known as secure copy, is a network protocol that allows users to securely transfer files between a local host and a remote host using RCP (Remote Copy Protocol) and SSH protocol.

In other terms, SCP, which dates back to 1983, is a secure version of RCP that uses authentication and encryption of SSH protocol to transfer files between a server and a client.

Discovered by Harry Sintonen, one of F-Secure's Senior Security Consultants, the vulnerabilities exist due to poor validations performed by the SCP clients, which can be abused by malicious servers or man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attackers to drop or overwrite arbitrary files on the client's system.

• Android Pie va sosi și pe terminalele Xiaomi Redmi Note 5, Redmi 6 Pro, Mi 6x și Redmi S2

• Samsung Galaxy S9, Galaxy S9+, Galaxy Note 9 Now Receiving 'One UI' Android Pie Update in India and South Korea

• OPPO To Introduce Futuristic 10x Optical Zoom Camera Tech Tomorrow

• Mozilla Fenix: New Android browser's intriguing details start to surface

• Should you buy an international Moto G6 Plus in 2019?

• LG G8: News, Rumors, Release Date, Specs, and More!

• Archman 2019.01 Openbox Run Through

  In this video, we look at Archman 2019.01 Openbox.

• And the Race is On! 2018-2019 openSUSE Board Elections Enter Campaign Phase

  Marina is a very active Italian openSUSE Advocate, involved in the Project since 2009, deeply involved in LibreOffice.  She relocated to Munich last June, where she is working for CIB mainly on its LibreOffice team as Senior Migrations & Deployments Engineer.  You may read more about Marina on her Wiki User page.

  Marina joins an already impressive line-up of Quality Candidates who announced they were stepping up during the past week, adding to what will be very tough decisions for the Voters in the upcoming Elections.  Official openSUSE Members in Good Standing are qualified to vote in the Elections, and they will have to make difficult choices for who should take the three open Board Seats, choosing between Marina, incumbent Christian Boltz aka cboltz, Dr. Axel Braun aka DocB, incumbent Sarah Julia Kriesch aka AdaLovelace, Sébastien Poher aka sogal, Vinzenz Vietzke aka vinzv, and Nathan Wolf aka futureboy and CubicleNate on IRC.

  Sarah and Sébastien’s run for the Board was announced in last Wednesday’s openSUSE News, while the Candidacies of Christian, Dr. Braun, Vinzenz, and  Nathan were announced in the next day’s news article.

• Entry-level Bay Trail SBC ready for workhorse duty

  Acrosser’s 3.5-inch “AMB-BT19S1” SBC runs on an Intel Bay Trail SoC and offers up to 8GB RAM, dual display support, plus SATA, mSATA, mini-PCIe, serial, USB 3.0, and GbE ports.

  With newer Atom processor families such as Cherry Trail, Braswell, Apollo Lake, and now Gemini Lake, the popular, five-year old Bay Trail product line appears to be close to “legacy” status. Yet, aside from graphics capabilities and support for the latest memories and peripherals, there’s not that much separating Bay Trail from Gemini Lake in terms of CPU performance and power consumption. Depending on the price, an “entry level” Bay Trail SBC like Acrosser’s 3.5-inch AMB-BT19S1 board could be the smart move for some applications.