• Little Misfortune is a sweet looking adventure, should hopefully get Linux support

  From the same developer who made Fran Bow (which supports Linux), Little Misfortune is what they're calling an interactive story. With a focus on exploration and the characters, including sweet and dark elements with choices that have consequences.

  With that in mind, when I spoke to the developer in regards to a Linux build they said "We will try to have it, yes! :)". Not solid, but a very positive response especially since they've supported Linux before.

• Luna and the Moonling is a sweet puzzle game that's now available on Linux

  Luna and the Moonling from Greyborn Studios is a colourful puzzle game with an aim to put a new spin on block-pushing puzzle gameplay. Note: Key provided by the developer.

  For those who aren't aware, some of the people from Greyborn Studios previously worked on some pretty major titles like System Shock 2, Thief, Skylanders, Red Faction and quite a few more.

  "From the moment we released in early access last year we’ve had requests from Linux gamers to support the platform," said Michael Ryan, CTO & Technical Director of Greyborn Studios. "We’re big fans of the platform ourselves and were happy to oblige. We really hope Linux users enjoy the game, and welcome them to the Greyborn community," Ryan said.

• Odd Realm is a sandbox settlement builder inspired by Dwarf Fortress and Rimworld with Linux support

• Valve gave out more details about Artifact, including some public APIs and pre-order is up

  Artifact, the multi-lane card game from Valve is closing in on release and so Valve have given out a bunch of new details on what to expect.

  Firstly, it's now up for pre-order on Steam for £15.99/$20 and for that price you will get 10 card packs, 5 event tickets, and two complete starter decks. Considering how much such packs cost for real-life card games, that price is actually quite reasonable I think. Additional packs of cards will be $1.99, each pack has 12 random cards. You will also be able to buy and sell cards on the Steam Market.

• Zeon 25, a retro-inspired hardcore shoot 'em up is now in Early Access

  The Doom-inspired UI bar along the bottom looked quite amusing, haven't really seen many games do something like that in recent years. Looks like it could be worth a shot, the action looks intense enough to keep me interested for sure.

  While it's in Early Access, they're hoping to add a co-op mode along with new maps, new enemies, new levels and so on. The full release is currently scheduled for Q1 2019 although that may change depending on how much feedback they get during development.

• Neuroslicers is a narrative driven, online competitive cyberpunk RTS that will have Linux support

  Neuroslicers from developer Dream Harvest seems like a very interesting title. A narrative driven, online competitive cyberpunk RTS and it will be coming to Linux.

• Feral Interactive have put out the system requirements for Total War: WARHAMMER II, due on Linux this month

  Ready your swords and your axe as Total War: WARHAMMER II is heading to Linux this month and Feral Interactive have now put up the system requirements.

• Here's What You Need to Play Total War: WARHAMMER II on Linux and macOS

  UK based video games publisher Feral Interactive revealed today the official system requirements of the Total War: WARHAMMER II video game for Linux and Mac systems.

  In mid-June, Feral Interactive teased Linux and Mac gamers with the upcoming release of the Total War: WARHAMMER II port for their beloved platforms, the sequel to the critically acclaimed Total War: WARHAMMER video game released more than two years ago. The company said that the Linux and macOS port is coming in November.

  Well, November is here, and now Feral Interactive has revealed the official system requirements for playing the Total War: WARHAMMER II video game on Linux and macOS-powered computers, saying that the port will be available on these two platforms later this month.

• Warhammer: Vermintide 2 ‘Back to Ubersreik’ DLC Remasters Three Maps From The First Game

  Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Fatshark’s first person rat-murdering action game, will be getting another DLC next month. The Back to Ubersreik DLC takes players to the setting of the first Vermintide game, and will feature remasters of three maps seen in the original Vermintide.

• Dungeon crawler Ebony Spire: Heresy has a rather nice Anniversary Update that's worth a look

  After managing to sell a few thousand copies, the dungeon crawler Ebony Spire: Heresy has a great update now available.

  For those who missed the story, the developer Bearded Giant Games initially failed to really get anywhere with the game. They wrote a post on Gamasutra about it, where they said it had been a "a soul crushing experience". A pretty sobering reading, as game development has become so much harder in the past few years with stores being flooded with new games. Anyway, many months later they managed to hit over 6,000 sales and so this update is a thank you for keeping the developer going.

• Moving house and moving applications are not the same. Or are they?

  As a Solution Architect I see my job as many things, from supporting customers in adopting Red Hat technology, educating organisations about using open source technologies and the benefits it brings, to thinking of ways to solve business challenges using technology and culture change. However, these are all generally in the space of “green field” app development. But what about all the systems keeping the business going today?

  The challenges businesses face in dealing with these “legacy” systems are complex, multi-faceted, involve many teams, and often businesses face knowledge gaps in how everything works together.

  In the public sector, where I work, this problem of legacy systems is arguably larger and more challenging, with the need for organisations to share information, outlined by things like Digital Service Standard. But, it’s worked that way for years, so why change it?

• Red Hat at Supercomputing 2018: Bringing open source innovation from high performance computing to the enterprise

  All supercomputers on the coveted Top500 list run on Linux, a scalable operating system that has matured over the years to run some of the most critical workloads and in many cases has displaced proprietary operating systems in the process. For the past two decades, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has served as the foundation for building software stacks for many supercomputers. We are looking to continue this trend with the next generation of systems that seek to break the exascale threshold.

  SC18, a leading supercomputing conference, begins today. Red Hat hopes to hold conversations and share our insights on new supercomputers, including Summit and Sierra, nascent architectures, like Arm, and building more open computing environments that can further negate the need for proprietary and monolithic implementations. The updated Top500 list is an excellent example of how open technologies continue to proliferate in high performance computing (HPC) and highlights how the ongoing software optimization work performed on these systems can benefit their performance.

• New TOP500 List Lead by DOE Supercomputers

  The latest TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers is out, a remarkable ranking that shows five Department of Energy supercomputers in the top 10, with the first two captured by Summit at Oak Ridge and Sierra at Livermore. With the number one and number two systems on the planet, the “Rebel Alliance” vendors of IBM, Mellanox, and NVIDIA stand far and tall above the others.

• How IBM and Red Hat Will Impact Your Cloud Strategy

  Barring a heavy-handed approach to the recent acquisition, IBM and Red Hat can do some amazing things in the market.
  IBM is a long way from making physical machines. That part of the business went with Lenovo several years ago. So, what has been their focus ever since? Software and services. And, among those software pieces and services has been the cloud.

  Until today, you may have heard little about IBM’s cloud presence. Although I can assure you it’s there, it was really struggling to compete with the likes of AWS, Azure, and even GCP. Now, with predictions like those from Gartner stating that by 2020, 90% of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities and that the market in general could be worth $240 billion or more – this was as good a time as any to really take a dive into the cloud management and delivery ecosystem.

• Improved support information for RHEL on Azure: sosreport plugin updated [Ed: The author a "Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio" (Red Hat hiring them)]

AsciiDoc is a lightweight markup language for writing notes, documentation, articles, books, ebooks, slideshows, web pages, man pages and blogs. It’s a plain text human readable/writable document format that dates back to 2002.

AsciiDoc comes with a “converter program” that converts AsciiDoc documents to XHTML, DocBook or HTML. DocBook, in turn, can be converted to other formats such as PDF, TeX, Unix manpages and many more using the tool A2X which comes with AsciiDoc. Most of the Git documentation is written in AsciiDoc.

AsciiDoc is highly configurable: both the AsciiDoc source file syntax and the backend output markups (which can be almost any type of SGML/XML markup) can be customized and extended by the user.

• The Ceph storage project gets a dedicated open-source foundation

  Ceph is an open source technology for distributed storage that gets very little public attention but that provides the underlying storage services for many of the world’s largest container and OpenStack deployments. It’s used by financial institutions like Bloomberg and Fidelity, cloud service providers like Rackspace and Linode, telcos like Deutsche Telekom, car manufacturers like BMW and software firms like SAP and Salesforce.

  These days, you can’t have a successful open source project without setting up a foundation that manages the many diverging interests of the community and so it’s maybe no surprise that Ceph is now getting its own foundation. Like so many other projects, the Ceph Foundation will be hosted by the Linux Foundation.

• The Linux Foundation Launches Ceph Foundation To Advance Open Source Storage

  The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announces over 30 global technology leaders are forming a new foundation to support the Ceph open source project community. The Ceph project develops a unified distributed storage system providing applications with object, block, and file system interfaces.

• Google dev hints Android Q previews could come to more users, sooner

• Google's data charts path to avoiding malware on Android

• Mi A2 Android P Update Release Spotted in Beta, Download Link Available

• Android Gets the Ability to Manually Back Up Data to Google Drive

• Cloudflare's speedy 1.1.1.1 DNS service now available on iOS and Android

• Android 9.0 pie update for Nokia 7.1 plus / Nokia X7 begins testing in closed beta

• How to make your own WhatsApp stickers on Android

• 7 of the best antivirus services for Android smartphones and tablets

With last week Amazon Web Services rolling out AMD EPYC cloud instances to EC2, I figured it would be an interesting time for a fresh benchmark look at how the AMD Linux cloud performance compares from some of the popular cloud providers. For this article are sixteen different instances benchmarked while looking at the raw performance as well as the value on each instance type relative to the benchmark performance and time consumed for the on-demand spot instancing. EPYC instances were tested from Amazon EC2, Packet.com, and SkySilk.

• SteamOS/Linux Requirements For Valve's Artifact Is Just A Vulkan Intel/AMD/NVIDIA GPU

  With just two weeks to go until Valve unleashes their latest original game, Artifact, it's now up for pre-order and there are also the system requirements published.

  This cross-platform online trading card game is available to pre-order for $19.99 USD. As known for a while, there is day-one Linux support alongside Windows and macOS.

• Intel "Iris" Gallium3D Continues Advancing As The Next-Gen Intel Linux OpenGL Driver

  While we haven't had much to talk about the Intel "Iris" Gallium3D driver in development as the future Mesa OpenGL driver for the company's graphics hardware, it has continued progressing nicely since its formal unveiling back in September.

  Iris Gallium3D driver is the new Intel Open-Source Technology Center project we discovered back in the summer as an effort to overhaul their open-source OpenGL driver support and one day will likely replace their mature "i965" classic Mesa driver.

• How Will the $34B IBM Acquisition Affect Red Hat Users?

  Red Hat users looking to maintain hybrid cloud or multi-cloud deployments because they can’t go “all in” on the cloud will benefit from IBM’s $34 billion acquisition of the enterprise open source solutions provider, Nintex chief evangelist Ryan Duguid told CMSWire.

  Duguid and others offer more thoughts how the largest software acquisition to date will have on Red Hat users.

• ICYMI: what's new on Talospace

  In the shameless plug category, in case you missed them, two original articles on Talospace, our sister blog: making your Talos II into an IBM pSeries (yes, you can run AIX on a Talos II with Linux KVM), and roadgeeking with the Talos II (because the haters gotta hate and say POWER9 isn't desktop ready, which is just FUD FUD FUD).

• Publishing Applications via F-Droid

  In 2016 I started working on a set of Python modules for reading and writing bytecode for the Dalvik virtual machine so that I could experiment with creating applications on Android without having to write them in Java. In the time since then, on and off, I have written a few small applications to learn about Android and explore the capabilities of the devices I own. Some of these were examples, demos and tests for the compiler framework, but others were intended to be useful to me. I could have just downloaded applications to perform the tasks I wanted to do, but I wanted minimal applications that I could understand and trust, so I wrote my own simple applications and was happy to install them locally on my phone.

  In September I had the need to back up some data from a phone I no longer use, so I wrote a few small applications to dump data to the phone's storage area, allowing me to retrieve it using the adb tool on my desktop computer. I wondered if other people might find applications like these useful and asked on the FSFE's Android mailing list. In the discussion that followed it was suggested that I try to publish my applications via F-Droid.

• Google Might Let You Test Android Q “Before” Its Release

  GSI is kind of like pure, unmodified version of the build that gets available on AOSP. And it’s a necessary part of Project Treble that we have discussed many times. As part of Project treble Project, all the supported devices have to go through specific tests like CTS-on-GSI (Compatibility Test Suite on Generic System Image) and VTS (Vendor Test Suite) to test the compatibility of the software before it gets out.

• TeXConf 2018 – the meeting of the Japanese TeX Users

  Having attended several international TeX conferences, I am always surprised how many Japanese TeX users find their way to this yearly meeting. This year we were about 80 participants (wild guess). We had five full talks and two lightning talks, followed by a very enjoyable dinner and after-party.

• Why We Paired Open Source and Managed Services to Optimize Our Database

  Launching Peloton has certainly been a tremendous ride – one that’s included an exhilarating acceleration resulting in two-fold year-over-year growth and a tripled subscriber base in under a year. Among the steepest hills climbed along this journey, though, has been keeping up with our database requirements and pushing through the pains experienced throughout intensely-paced user growth.

  Our challenge managing an exponentially growing user base has been kicked into a higher gear by the fact that our consumer product utilizes so much user data. The idea for Peloton was born out of the founders’ desire to bring studio-style, group fitness classes home that still included the feeling – and benefits – of actual in-person classes. In practice, this has resulted in storing vast volumes of personal fitness data. As customers exercise on their home bikes and experience live or on-demand cycling classes, we need to continuously collect and retain a swath of telemetric data that includes pedaling speed, heart rate, the selected resistance setting, and many other metrics germane to the experience. This data is important to both our product and our customers, providing feedback that helps us shape the user experience and enabling us to deliver performance information to each customer via statistics, graphs, achievements, lists of top rides and routines, etc.

  [...]

  The managed provider route helped us diagnose and fix our production issues on day one; the overly dense production nodes and environment were adjusted for better (and noticeable) optimization. With our database back to running smoothly, we faced a choice as to how we’d acquire the Cassandra expertise we clearly needed in the long term: either investing to build that expertise in-house or relying on managed services going forward. Given the higher expenditures in both time and money, and the focus building an in-house team would take away from our product, it was an easy decision to stick with the managed provider route for our Cassandra production environment.

• Migrating my website from Drupal 7 to Hugo

  My first interaction with Drupal was with its WSOD. That was it until I revisited it when evaluating different FOSS web tools to build a community site for one of my previous employer.

  Back then, we tried multiple tools: Jive, Joomla, Wordpress and many more. But finally, resorted to Drupal. What the requirement was was to have something which would filter content under nested categories. Then, of the many things tried, the only one which seemed to be able to do it was Drupal with its Taxonomy feature, along with a couple of community driven add-on modules.

  We built it but there were other challenges. It was hard to find people who were good with Drupal. I remember to have interviewed around 10-15 people, who could take over the web portal and maintain it, and still not able to fill the position. Eventually, I ended up maintaining the portal by myself.

• Showing a Gigabit OpenBSD Firewall Some Monitoring Love

  Now that the machine was up and running (and fast!), I wanted to know what it was doing. Over the years, I’ve always relied on the venerable pfstat software to give me an overview of my traffic, blocked packets, etc. It looks like this: [...]

• How To Install and Configure GitLab on CentOS 7

• Show allocated disk space:

• Show used disk space:

• Uninstall bloatware on your android device without root.

• Find ASCII files and extract IP addresses

• Reinstall a Synology NAS without loosing any data from commandline.

• Print compile time in seconds package by package (Gentoo Distros)

• Completely wipe all data on your Synology NAS and reinstall DSM. (BE CAREFUL)

• List all global top level modles, then remove ALL npm packages with xargs

• Hacking the Technicolor TG799vac (and unlocking features for openwrt)

• Calculate your total world compile time. (Gentoo Distros)

• Android: Google message to developers is about dark themes

• Google rolling out manual Google Drive device backup

• Google Might Let You Test Android Q “Before” Its Release

• Sony Xperia XZ Premium, XZ1, and XZ1 Compact now receiving Android 9 Pie update

• Xiaomi Mi A2 starts getting Android 9 Pie beta update

Can you have Linux containers without Docker? Without OpenShift? Without Kubernetes?

Yes, you can. Years before Docker made containers a household term (if you live in a data center, that is), the LXC project developed the concept of running a kind of virtual operating system, sharing the same kernel, but contained within defined groups of processes.

Docker built on LXC, and today there are plenty of platforms that leverage the work of LXC both directly and indirectly. Most of these platforms make creating and maintaining containers sublimely simple, and for large deployments, it makes sense to use such specialized services. However, not everyone's managing a large deployment or has access to big services to learn about containerization. The good news is that you can create, use, and learn containers with nothing more than a PC running Linux and this article. This article will help you understand containers by looking at LXC, how it works, why it works, and how to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.

Fedora 29 is a good release, but there are some issues with it. Users who are interested in trying out new things and are okay with the the occasional bug should feel comfortable trying out Fedora 29 Workstation. However, users wanting a polished experience might want to hold off until a few more bugs are fixed.

I would be okay with a few rough edges if they were just limited to the new features, but the two show-stopper bugs I had were playing full-screen video with GNOME Videos and being able to install texlive-scheme-full. Only the latter has been fixed, while video playback remains an issue. Playing full-screen videos in GNOME Videos on Wayland has worked perfectly on my hardware for the last several Fedora releases, but in Fedora 29 it is unusable. The video playback bug has already been reported in Red Hat’s Bugzilla, but the bug is still classified as new.

Overall, Fedora 29 Workstation is worth checking out, but I have to say "buyer beware" and encourage people to check to make sure all of the things they need are in a functional state before making the switch or upgrade. Things should be fixed in a few weeks, but I have honestly run beta releases of previous Fedora versions that had fewer issues than the final release of Fedora 29.

• Compile any C++ program 10× faster with this one weird trick!
  

  The main reason that C++ compiles slowly has to do with headers. Merely including a few headers in the standard library brings in tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of code that must be parsed, verified, converted to an AST and codegenerated in every translation unit. This is extremely wasteful especially given that most of that work is not used but is instead thrown away.

  With an Unity build every #include is processed only once regardless of how many times it is used in the component source files.

  Basically this amounts to a caching problem, which is one of the two really hard problems in computer science in addition to naming things and off by one errors.

• Future Developments in clang-query

  I am not aware of any similar series existing which covers creation of clang-tidy checks, and use of clang-query to inspect the Clang AST and assist in the construction of AST Matcher expressions. I hope the series is useful to anyone attempting to write clang-tidy checks. Several people have reported to me that they have previously tried and failed to create clang-tidy extensions, due to various issues, including lack of information tying it all together.

  Other issues with clang-tidy include the fact that it relies on the “mental model” a compiler has of C++ source code, which might differ from the “mental model” of regular C++ developers. The compiler needs to have a very exact representation of the code, and needs to have a consistent design for the class hierarchy representing each standard-required feature. This leads to many classes and class hierarchies, and a difficulty in discovering what is relevant to a particular problem to be solved.

• The GNOME (and WebKitGTK+) Networking Stack

  One guess which of those we’re going to be talking about in this post. Yeah, of course, libsoup! If you’re not familiar with libsoup, it’s the GNOME HTTP library. Why is it called libsoup? Because before it was an HTTP library, it was a SOAP library. And apparently somebody thought that when Mexican people say “soap,” it often sounds like “soup,” and also thought that this was somehow both funny and a good basis for naming a software library. You can’t make this stuff up.

  [...]

  Haha no, it uses a dynamically-loadable extension point system to allow you to pick your choice of OpenSSL or GnuTLS! (Support for NSS was started but never finished.) This is OK because embedded systems vendors don’t use GPL applications and have no problems with OpenSSL, while desktop Linux users don’t produce tivoized embedded systems and have no problems with LGPLv3. So if you’re using desktop Linux and point WebKitGTK+ at an HTTPS address, then GLib is going to load a GIO extension point called glib-networking, which implements all of GIO’s TLS APIs — notably GTlsConnection and GTlsCertificate — using GnuTLS. But if you’re building an embedded system, you simply don’t build or install glib-networking, and instead build a different GIO extension point called glib-openssl, and libsoup will create GTlsConnection and GTlsCertificate objects based on OpenSSL instead. Nice! And if you’re Centricular and you’re building GStreamer for Windows, you can use yet another GIO extension point, glib-schannel, for your native Windows TLS goodness, all hidden behind GTlsConnection so that GStreamer (or whatever application you’re writing) doesn’t have to know about SChannel or OpenSSL or GnuTLS or any of that sad complexity.

• The Don't Starve: Hamlet expansion is now available with Linux support, not quite finished yet

  I'm a huge fan of Don't Starve, when it initially came to Linux I was absolutely hooked and lost a great many hours to it. It's a survival experience like literally nothing else. If you don't usually like survival games, you might very well enjoy this. The style and setting are simply fantastic.

• The Long Dark's third story episode has been delayed, revamp of first two episodes due next month

  The Long Dark is a brutal, cold and unforgiving survival adventure that has an episodic story survival mode as well as a full sandbox survival mode. Sadly, the third episode has been delayed but there is some good news.

• The incredible looking Zelda-like 'Hazelnut Bastille' has been fully funded

  With an initial goal of $65K, they're currently sitting at around $90K which means they've pushed through two stretch goals. It's now going to get at least two more levels, more items and more cinematics. On top of that, they're also going to get some translations done for Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese.

• This week in Android: It's all about the foldables

• OnePlus' 5G smartphone will not be the OnePlus 7

• Sony Xperia XZ Premium, XZ1/XZ1 Compact now getting Android Pie update

• Google Weather and Search no longer displaying air quality data on Android or web

Over the past year we have looked extensively at the performance impact of Spectre mitigations on x86_64 CPUs but now with having the Raptor Talos II in our labs, here are some benchmarks to see the performance impact of IBM's varying levels of Spectre mitigation for POWER9.

By default, Raptor Computing Systems ships their system in the safest mode of providing full kernel and user-space protection against Spectre Variant Two. But by editing a file from the OpenBMC environment it's possible to control the Spectre protections on their libre hardware. Besides the full/user protection against Spectre there is also kernel-only protection that is more akin to the protection found on x86_64 CPUs. Additionally, there is the ability to completely disable the protection for yielding the greatest performance (or what would be considered standard pre-2018) but leaving your hardware vulnerable to Spectre. More details on controlling the Spectre protections on Talos II hardware can be found via the RaptorCS.com Wiki.

Fairly normal week, aside from me traveling.

Shortlog appended, but it all looks fine: about half drivers, wih the
rest being the usual architecture updates, tooling, networking, and
some filesystem updates.

Also: Linux 4.20-rc2 Released With EXT4 Bug Fixes, New NVIDIA Turing USB-C Driver

• Automation of Searches Will Not Solve the Legitimacy Problem Caused by Patents Lust
• The Federal Circuit and PTAB Are Not Slowing Down; Patent Maximalists Claim It’s ‘Harassment’ to Question a Patent’s Validity
• Patent Maximalists Will Latch Onto Return Mail v US Postal Service in an Effort to Weaken or Limit Post-Grant Reviews of US Patents
• Guest Post: EPO Spins Censorship of Staff Representation

• How to install the Amarok Music Player on Ubuntu.

• RuCTFe 2018 laberator

• Factory reset your android device via commandline.

• Installing Vundle: The Plugin Manager For Vim

• DXVK 0.92 is out with fixes for LA Noire, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and more

  DXVK, the excellent Vulkan-based D3D11 and D3D10 implementation used together with Wine that forms part of Valve's Steam Play has a fresh brew ready. The progress is amazing as always, that's the twenty-sixth release this year!

• DXVK 0.92 Released With Fixes For Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Other Games

  DXVK 0.92 is the newly-minuted release and it adds support for bit-accurate clears for 11G11B10 UAVs in order to take care of an error message with the Shadow of the Tomb Raider game. DXVK 0.92 also has build issue fixes in conjunction with select versions of Meson, support for the DMOVC instruction that should help out some situations, rendering fixes for LA Noire, and visual issues have been resolved with Lords of the Fallen and The Surge.