• Awesome CCleaner Alternatives For Ubuntu

  Ccleaner is one of the popular system optimizers and cleaning software for Windows operating system. In this post, we will have a look into the list of best CCleaner alternatives for Ubuntu based operating system.

• How to Enable TLS 1.3 in Apache and Nginx

• Commenting on images and charts in Writer

• Introducing ubuntu-wsl, the package making Ubuntu better and better on WSL [Ed: This was in Planet Ubuntu this morning. Let’s promote Vista 10 for Microsoft's benefit instead of real Ubuntu, GNU/Linux etc.]

• An Ansible reference guide, CI/CD with Ansible Tower and GitHub, and more news

• Windows 7 Enters the Last Six Months of Support [Ed: Microsoft propagandist (for ages) Bogdan Popa won't advise people to hop over to GNU/Linux (which he lies about, saying Microsoft "loves Linux")]

  According to third-party data provided by NetMarketShare, Windows 7 continues to be one of the most popular choices for desktop users.

• Security bootcamp: 8 must-read books for leaders

  The threat of cybercrime constantly looms over business leaders – and it becomes more urgent as cyber attacks become more sophisticated. In 2019, security breaches happen more frequently, and the associated financial hit has increased, according to research from Accenture.

  Notably, the report points out that hackers increasingly target humans – the “weakest link in cyber defenses” – at all levels of organizations, through tactics like ransomware and phishing. (Witness the recent wave of ransomware attacks against U.S. cities, large and small.) That’s why it’s becoming essential for everyone – not just security professionals – to be well-versed in risk and their organization’s security efforts.

• Security scanning your DevOps pipeline

  Security is one of the most important considerations for running in any environment, and using open source software is a great way to handle security without going over budget in your corporate environment or for your home setup. It is easy to talk about the concepts of security, but it's another thing to understand the tools that will get you there. This tutorial explains how to set up security using Jenkins with Anchore.

  There are many ways to run Kubernetes. Using Minikube, a prepackaged virtual machine (VM) environment designed for local testing, reduces the complexity of running an environment.

• This Is Why We Have Betas. iOS 13 Beta Shows Saved Passwords

  There’s a reason we have beta versions of software: all the kinks need to be worked out. This is also why using beta versions always come with warnings and disclaimers that you’re using the software at your own risk.

  Users of the iOS 13 beta have discovered that there’s a bug that makes it easy to access the data in “Website & App Passwords” in the Settings app. Certainly, this is something Apple needs to get fixed before the official release, expected for September.

• Hackers breached Bulgaria’s tax agency and leaked the data of 5M people

  Bulgaria has suffered what has been described as the biggest data leak in its history. The stolen data, which hackers emailed to local media on July 15, originates from the country’s tax reporting service – the National Revenue Agency (NRA).

  The breach contains the personal data of 5 million citizens, local outlet Capital reports. To put that into perspective, Bulgaria has a population of 7 million. Among other things, the trove includes personal identifiable numbers, addresses, and even income data.

• Acer Chromebook R 11

• ASUS Chromebook Flip C302CA

• ASUS Chromebook C202SA

• The 2019 MacBook Air Has 35% Slower SSD Than 2018 Model

  Tests were conducted on MacBook Air variants with different internal storage options and the drop in the write speeds were witnessed in every variant regardless of the internal storage.

• 11-Year-Old Girl’s iPhone 6 Exploded Burning Holes In Blanket

  With smartphones from various tech companies falling prey to the exploding game, it seems like it’s Apple’s turn, as this time an iPhone caught fire in Bakersfield, California.

  It is suggested that 11-year-old Kayla Ramos was sitting in her sister’s bedroom and was holding the iPhone 6 in her hands. She mostly used it for watching YouTube videos and sometimes gave it to her younger siblings.

• How many kinds of USB-C™ to USB-C™ cables are there?

  Why did it come to this? This problem was created because the USB-C connectors were designed to replace all of the previous USB connectors at the same time as vastly increasing what the cable could do in power, data, and display dimensions. The new connector may be and virtually impossible to plug in improperly (no USB superposition problem, no grabbing the wrong end of the cable), but sacrificed for that simplicity is the ability to intuitively know whether the system you've connected together has all of the functionality possible. The USB spec also cannot simply mandate that all USB-C cables have the maximum number of wires all the time because that would vastly increase BOM cost for cases where the cable is just used for charging primarily.

  How can we fix this? Unfortunately, it's a tough problem that has to involve user education. [...]

• Thread Synchronization in Linux and Windows Systems, Part 1

  In modern operating systems, each process has its own address space and one thread of control. However, in practice we often face situations requiring several concurrent tasks within a single process and with access to the same process components: structures, open file descriptors, etc.

• Intro to Black – The Uncompromising Python Code Formatter

  There are several Python code checkers available. For example, a lot of developers enjoy using Pylint or Flake8 to check their code for errors. These tools use static code analysis to check your code for bugs or naming issues. Flake8 will also check your code to see if you are adhering to PEP8, Python’s style guide.

• Report from the February 2019 ISO C++ meeting (Library)

  Back in February, I attended the WG21 C++ standards committee meeting in rainy Kona, Hawaii (yes, it rained most of the week). This report is so late that we’re now preparing for the next meeting, which will take place mid-July in Cologne.

  As usual, I spent the majority of my time in the Library Working Group (for LWG; for details on the various Working Groups and Study Groups see Standard C++: The Committee). The purpose of the LWG is to formalize the specification of the C++ Standard Library, i.e. the second “half” of the C++ standard (although in terms of page count it’s closer to three quarters than half). With a new C++20 standard on the horizon, and lots of new features that people want added to the standard library, the LWG has been very busy trying to process the backlog of new proposals forwarded by the Library Evolution Working Group (LEWG).

  One of the main tasks at the Kona meeting was to review the “Ranges Design Cleanup” proposal. The cleanup involves a number of fixes and improvements to the new Ranges library, addressing issues that came up during the review of the previous (much larger) proposal to add the Ranges library, which is one of the biggest additions to the C++20 library (most of the other significant additions to C++20 affect the core language, without much library impact). In fact, I’d say it’s one of the biggest additions to the C++ standard library since the first standard in 1998. The Ranges library work overhauls the parts of the standard that originated in the Standard Template Library (STL), i.e. iterators, algorithms, and containers, to re-specify them in terms of C++ Concepts. This has been a multi-year effort that has now landed in the C++20 working draft, following multiple proposals and several meetings of wording review by LWG.

• Save and load Python data with JSON

  JSON stands for JavaScript Object Notation. This format is a popular method of storing data in key-value arrangements so it can be parsed easily later. Don’t let the name fool you, though: You can use JSON in Python—not just JavaScript—as an easy way to store data, and this article demonstrates how to get started.

• Agent Smith Malware Infecting Android Apps

• Huawei Renames Android Replacement 'Harmony', Despite Execs Denying It Exists

• How to Back up Your Personal Data on iOS and Android

• Accelerate Android Build Times for Faster Time to Market

• After LG G6, LG V30 ThinQ Android Pie (9.0) beta build leaks

• Redmi S2/Redmi Y2 Android Pie 9.0 update rolling out once again, brings June security patch

• Motorola Moto G6 Android Pie (9.0) update arrives on US unlocked variants

• Early Android Pie beta build leaks for the LG V30, still no release info

• Huawei Y9 (2019) joins Honor 8X as its EMUI 9 (Android Pie) update goes on hold as well

• Huawei Says It's Not Actually Working on an Android Replacement

• TCL 55-inch P8E 4K AI Smart Android LED TV Launched in India, Priced at Rs. 40,990

• Blaupunkt launches 4K QLED Android 7 smart TV in India priced at Rs 69,999

• Exclusive: Android Q will bring One UI 2.0, Galaxy S11 will get One UI 2.1

• The Pixel 4 could be taking advantage of this new Android Q feature

• These Samsung Android Tablets are Up to 43% Off for Prime Day 2019, Deals from Just $119.99

• Note 10 may be the fastest Android alive as new Exynos 9825 and Snapdragon 855+ benchmarks leak

• Return of the Keyboard: This New Android Is Actually Not a BlackBerry

• The Nokia 2.2 offers the latest advances in AI and Android™ at an accessible price, now shipping in the United States

• Top best karaoke apps for Android

• The best remaining Amazon Prime Day Android phones that aren't sold out or backordered

In my previous two posts I looked at the Raspberry Pi 4 hardware and at the procedure for installing and booting the new Raspbian Buster Operating System on the Pi 4. With those basic steps out of the way, now it's time to look at both the hardware and software in more detail.

The first thing I want to mention is that when I wrote the previous post about Raspbian, I had not noticed that there is an updated version of Raspbian Buster (2019-07-10) available. This version was released sort of quietly (without the usual blog post announcing and explaining it), although there are release notes for it if you are interested. This release is extremely good news, because it fixes some of the biggest problems that I mentioned in my previous post...

The Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team recently wrote about our face-to-face meeting where we developed a team mission statement and developed a framework for making our workload more manageable. Having more focus will allow us to progress higher priority work for multiple stakeholders and move the needle on more initiatives in a more efficient manner than how we are working right now.

During the F2F we walked through the process of how to gracefully remove ourselves from applications that are not fitting our mission statement. The next couple of months will be a transition phase as we want to ensure continuity and cause minimum disruption to the community. To assist in that strategy, we analysed our applications and came up with four classifications to which they could belong.

Clonezilla live 2.6.2-15 Released on 12-July-2019, which includes Major Enhancements and Bug Fixes.

Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program similar to True Image or Norton Ghost. It allows users to do system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery.

• A Vulkan Extension Is Being Worked On To Acquire Exclusive Control Of A Wayland Display

  Drew DeVault of Sway/WLROOTS fame has been dabbling with his first Vulkan extension as part of work with other upstream Wayland developers on DRM lease support and better supporting VR headsets under Wayland.

  Being worked on in-step with DRM lease protocol support for Wayland, Drew is also drafting a "VK_EXT_acquire_wl_display" extension for Vulkan. That new extension is akin to VK_EXT_acquire_xlib_display for X11 but for working on Wayland. The existing VK_EXT_acquire_xlib_display extension allows a Vulkan application / game engine to take exclusive control of a display currently associated with an X11 screen. This goes along with the DRM lease support and was spearheaded by Red Hat, Valve, NVIDIA, and Intel as part of Steam VR support on Linux.

• AMDGPU DC Gets A Number Of Fixes For Navi & Other Clean-Ups

  The past few weeks while AMD open-source developers were busy getting their Navi enablement code public and aligned for the Linux 5.3 merge window, the display core "DC" frequent code drops ceased. Every so often AMD developers volley their DC patches from their internal development trees to the public mailing list for queuing ahead of the next cycle. Now that Navi is out there and getting stabilized, they've issued a new set of DC patches and it's coming in heavy.

  Given that it's been a while during Navi review and upstreaming, the AMDGPU DC patches sent out on Monday are 87 patches that add nearly ten thousand lines of new code.

• AMDVLK 2019.Q3.2 Released With Navi 10 Support

  Just over one week after the Radeon RX 5700/5700XT "Navi" graphics cards began shipping, the AMDVLK open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan Linux driver support is now available for these first RDNA offerings.

  AMDVLK is the official open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver and is based on the same sources as the Windows/Linux Radeon Software Vulkan driver. The open-source AMDVLK, however, uses their LLVM-based shader compiler rather than AMD's long-standing proprietary shader compiler. AMDVLK is an alternative to the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver maintained by the "community" (principally, Red Hat, Google, and Valve) that did see launch-day support last week for Navi.

The word "Arduino" often invokes a wide range of opinions and sometimes emotion. For many, it represents a very low bar to entry into the world of microcontrollers. This world before 2003 often required costly, obscure and closed-source development tools. Arduino has been a great equalizer, blowing the doors off the walled garden. Arduino now represents a huge ecosystem of hardware that speaks a (mostly) common language and eases transition from one hardware platform to another. Today, if you are a company that sells microcontrollers, it's in your best interest to get your dev boards working with Arduino. It offers a low-friction path to getting your products into lots of hands quickly.

It's also important to note that Arduino's simplicity does not inhibit digging deep into the microcontroller. Nothing stops you from directly twiddling registers and using advanced features. It does, however, decrease your portability between boards.

Also: First the E-Bike, Next the Flying Car

• Roguelike dungeon crawler "Emberlight" sounds like it has an interesting gameplay loop

  Emberlight, a roguelike dungeon crawler from Quarter Onion Games is releasing with Linux support on August 13th and it does sound like it could be interesting.

  Quarter Onion Games are saying it will be a "true roguelike dungeon crawler" and while they don't go on to explain what makes it "true" versus other games, I still love the sound of it. The gameplay loop in this especially, as you will absorb abilities used by enemies which eventually corrupts you. Eventually turning to darkness, you become the boss for the next run-through along with everything you provided them with.

• Looks like supporting multiple platforms has been worth it for Rings of Saturn

  Rings of Saturn from Kodera Software is something I've written about a couple of times and it seems like supporting Linux and Mac has been worth it for the developer.

  It's currently doing a hybrid crowdfunding/Early Access model on itch.io, with it just recently breaking one thousand dollars. The developer recently shared this on Twitter, showing that close to half of the backers have been from Linux and Mac...

• Tower Defense game "Defend The Keep" is out with same-day Linux support

  Defend The Keep from Vanille Games offers a familiar Tower Defense formula, with a few extra spices thrown in to make it worthy of your attention.

• Live and survive as a dinosaur in "Path of Titans", a new survival game coming to Linux

  Ah yes, now I can live out my dream of not just walking with the dinosaurs but to actually live and breathe as one. Path of Titans is planning full Linux support.

• Kind Words, a game about writing nice letters to people arrives on Steam this September

  Kind Words from Popcannibal (Girls Like Robots, Make Sail) is a pretty sweet chilled out game, one where you write letters while listening to some seriously chilled out beats.

• Kingdoms of the Dump, a trash-filled SNES-styled RPG made by janitors is planned for Linux

  Well, this is certainly something unique. Kingdoms of the Dump, a SNES-styled RPG with plenty of modern touches is currently on Kickstarter. Two things make it interesting: It's made with the FOSS game engine Godot Engine and the two main creators are actual janitors chasing their dream.

• Microsoft is ‘Doing Kamikaze’ (神風) on Linux
• The ‘New’ Linux.com Sometimes Feels Like a Microsoft Promotion Site
• IBM is a Threat to the Internet, Not Just to Software Development (Due to Software Patents Aggression)
• EPO Looney Tunes – Part 1: Is D-Day Approaching for Battistelli’s “Difficult Legacy”?
• Microsoft Office 360 Banned
• Microsoft, in Its Own Words…
• Microsoft’s WSL is Designed to Weaken GNU/Linux (on the Desktop/Laptop) and Strengthen Vista 10
• 25,500 Blog Posts and Pages
• With WSL Microsoft is Doing to GNU/Linux What It Did to Netscape
• Allowing Bad Guests to Become the Hosts
• Honesty and Collaboration Make Free Software Stronger, Microsoft is Inherently a Misfit
• Links 14/7/2019: Linux 5.2.1, Unreal Engine 4.23 Preview, Linux Mint 19.2 Beta
• Links 16/7/2019: LXD 3.15, Q4OS 3.8 and D9VK 0.13f
• Links 15/7/2019: Vulkan 1.1.115 and Facebook Openwashing

All the recent features of ONLYOFFICE online editors are now also available in the free open-source desktop suite, with several new features exclusive to the desktop app.

• Android Q Beta 5: Apps are granted full location access in deliberate test

• Hongmeng or ArkOS is not an Android alternative, says Huawei Executive

• Hongmeng OS Not An Android Replacement According To Huawei Chairman

• Huawei's Android alternative might arrive as 'Harmony' in Europe

• Meet 'Harmony' -- Huawei Names Android OS Replacement in Europe

• Huawei’s Android Alternative may be Named Harmony

• Xiaomi Mi A3 is Chinese OEM’s next Android One phone

• The Xiaomi Mi A3 could be the Android One phone we’ve been waiting for

• Realme X, Realme 3i Announced With Dual Rear Cameras and Android Pie

• Cubot R19: New budget device with Android 9 Pie coming at the end of the month

• An early Android 9 Pie beta also leaks for the LG V30

• AMD Link adds support for streaming PC games on Android TV

• AirTV Mini is a little Android TV box that loves Sling TV

• Pick Up This 43-Inch Sony 4K TV With Android TV For Just $379 - Amazon Prime Day 2019

• Air TV has a cheap new Android TV device, but it’s aimed at the US market

• Save over $200 on the Galaxy S10 and other Android phones with Verizon's Prime Day deal

• I'm Ready for Android Foldables too, Google

• Google killing AdSense on Android and iOS this year for the web

• Aussie Android phone users targeted by vicious new malware called Agent Smith

• Unihertz Titan Is An Android-Fueled BlackBerry Passport Clone For Keyboard Lovers

• Lenovo Chromebook C330 2-in-1

  Today we are looking at the Lenovo Chromebook C330 (81HY0000US), it is a 2-1 device, a notebook but it can also be converted into a tablet.

  It comes with a fanless quad-core MediaTek MT8173C CPU, an 11.6 inch, 1366x768, IPS display, and touch screen. It has 4gb of RAM and 64GB eMMC SSD.

• Foliate Ebook Reader Picks Up Mobi & Amazon Kindle Support

  The Foliate ebook reader app for Linux has added support for additional ebook formats, including those used by the Amazon Kindle.

  Now, I’m conscious that I’ve mentioned Foliate a lot recently. I generally don’t like to do that — anyone remember the omg! docky! days? — but some developers are so dang prolific, able to knock out notable update after notable update at a regular clip, that I have no choice!

  Foliate’s developer, John Factotum, is one such dev — nice work!

• Install & Run Xampp on Ubuntu 19.04 using Terminal

• How to scan your Docker installment with docker-bench-test

• KDE Applications 19.08 branches created

  Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Applications 19.08 release to them

• OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 Aiming To PGO More Packages, Use IWD For WiFi Connections

  While OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 was just released last month, we are already looking forward to OpenMandriva 4.1 for a number of improvements and some new features.

  OpenMandriva's developer board provides an interesting look at what's ahead for OpenMandriva Lx 4.1. Already completed for this next milestone include migrating to LLVM Clang 9, and using LD.lld and BFD as the default linkers.

• Installing Debian 10

  Debian 10 Buster was released recently. It is the newest version on Debian operating system. Debian 10 comes with Linux Kernel 4.19. It also comes with latest Linux graphical desktop environment such as GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, Cinnamon 3.8, LXDE 0.99.2, LxQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, Xfce 4.12 and many more. Debian 10 also comes with awesome new artworks.
  In this article, I am going to show you how to install Debian 10 Buster on your computer.

• Workload Consolidation: The Entire IoT in One Box

  To deliver the benefits of workload consolidation while ensuring robust partitioning, congatec has developed a proof of concept based on a six-core Core i7-based COM Express module, a type 1 hypervisor from Real-Time Systems, and Ubuntu Linux.

• 100,985,047 have been invited to the Evite data breach “party”

  Did you get an invitation to the latest data breach? Over the weekend it was disclosed that Evite, the online invitation platform that has sent more than a few birthday and pizza party invitations over the years, suffered a data breach that included over 100 million accounts.

• The Gecko Hacker's Guide to Taskcluster

  I spent a good chunk of this year fiddling with taskcluster configurations in order to get various bits of continuous integration stood up for WebRender. Taskcluster configuration is very flexible and powerful, but can also be daunting at first. This guide is intended to give you a mental model of how it works, and how to add new jobs and modify existing ones. I'll try and cover things in detail where I believe the detail would be helpful, but in the interest of brevity I'll skip over things that should be mostly obvious by inspection or experimentation if you actually start digging around in the configurations. I also try and walk through examples and provide links to code as much as possible.

• Plasma sprint, 2019 edition; personal updates

  In June, I had a great time at a series of KDE events held in the offices of Slimbook, makers of fantastic Neon-powered laptops, at the outskirts of Valencia, Spain. Following on from a two-day KDE e.V. board of directors meeting, the main event was the 2019 edition of the Plasma development sprint. The location proved to be quite ideal for everything. Slimbook graciously provided us with two lovely adjacent meeting rooms for Plasma and the co-located KDE Usability & Productivity sprint, allowing the groups to mix and seperate as our topics demanded - a well-conceived spatial analog for the tight relationship and overlap between the two.

  [...]

  In KDE e.V. news, briefly we stole one of the sprint rooms for a convenient gathering of most of our Financial Working Group, reviewing the implementation of the annual budget plan of the organization. We also had a chance to work with the Usability goal crew (have you heard about KDE goals yet?) on a plan for the use of their remaining budget -- it's going to be exciting.

  As a closing note, it was fantastic to see many new faces at this year's sprint. It's hard to believe for how many attendees it was their first KDE sprint ever, as it couldn't have been more comfortable to have them on board. It's great to see our team grow.

• Real Python at PyCon US 2019

• Quansight presence at SciPy'19

  Yesterday the SciPy'19 conference ended. It was a lot of fun, and very productive. You can really feel that there's a lot of energy in the community, and that it's growing and maturing. This post is just a quick update to summarize Quansight's presence and contributions, as well as some of the more interesting things I noticed.

• ASG! 2019 CfP Re-Opened!

  Due to popular request we have re-opened the Call for Participation (CFP) for All Systems Go! 2019 for one day. It will close again TODAY, on 15 of July 2019, midnight Central European Summit Time! If you missed the deadline so far, we’d like to invite you to submit your proposals for consideration to the CFP submission site quickly! (And yes, this is the last extension, there's not going to be any more extensions.)

• Gaurav Agrawal: GSOC Progress by Mid July

  July Marked the beginning of II GSOC coding month. This month our goal is to make the diff bar model as accurate and intuitive as possible.

  One of the biggest thing which I learnt so far is how to contribute on upstream repositories on which our project depends.

  In our case this was with Libgit2, we discovered a bug in Libgit2 while doing our project, and Albfan made this a perfect example to show me how to contribute on upstream, how to raise bugs and how to do discussions for getting it solved.

• Jean-François Fortin Tam: Available for hire, 2019 edition

  Sometime after the end of my second term on the GNOME Foundation, I was contacted by a mysterious computer vendor that ships a vanilla GNOME on their laptops, Purism.

• Array copying and extending in GLib 2.61.2

  A slightly more in-depth post in the mini-series this time, about various new functions which Emmanuel Fleury has landed in GLib 2.61.2 (which is due to be released soon), based on some old but not-quite-finished patches from others.

• How to integrate jenkins with webhook

• Serving Gifs With Discord Bot - Reading Time: 12 Mins

• Python Snippet 1: More Uses For Else

• Python Celery Guide

• Python String Find()

• PyCharm 2019.2 Beta #2

  It hasn’t been long since we published PyCharm 2019.2 Beta, and now we’re ready to share with you the second Beta build! The final release date is getting closer and closer, and while you wait, give PyCharm 2019.2 Beta #2 a go! Get the PyCharm 2019.2 Beta build from our website and try all the latest functionality.

• Vimrc Tutorial

  In this article, we’re going to dive deep into the vimrc file of Vim. Once you’re inside the vimscript, it’s easy to mess things up. That’s why this rule of thumb will always be helpful in your journey with Vim. Don’t put any line in vimrc that you don’t understand.

• CPU atomics and orderings explained

  Sometimes the question comes up about how CPU memory orderings work, and what they do. I hope this post explains it in a really accessible way.

• You can't say Go without Google – specifically, our little logo, Chocolate Factory insists

  Back in 2009, Google chose to name its latest programming language Go, a decision that is still giving it a migraine

  It could have called it "Google Go" to avoid confusion with Frank McCabe's Go! programming language. Despite criticism, it didn't do so. After almost a year of online grumbling, Google software engineer Russ Cox, in 2010, closed GitHub Issue #9, dismissing the complaints as "unfortunate."

  And the headaches over the thing's name still won't go away (no pun intended.) Last week, Google rebuffed a request to remove its logo from the Go website, golang.org, a change supported by some developers who feel Google takes Go developers for granted.

• Kubernetes: The Video Game

  Grant Shipley was recently in China for KubeCon, where he gave a keynote talk explaining the Kubernetes ecosystem within the context of Video Games. It’s a fun way to examine the entire world of Kubernetes, from end to end, while also enabling Grant to make Mavis Beacon and Commodore 64 references. Take a gander!

• Please, a tense ten-minute experience has a Linux build available

  Got a few minutes to burn? Why not try out the short experimental experience that Please offers. Developed by somewhat, it delivers something quite surreal and freaky.

• Achievement Unlocked: RetroArch is Coming to Steam

  Fans of retro (and not so retro) gaming will be pleased to hear that RetroArch is coming to Steam.

  Not familiar with RetroArch? It’s a user-friendly GUI that makes use of the libretro API. That API allows developers to create, among other things, modular ‘libretro’ cores that act as game emulators for systems like the SNES, Mega Drive and Game Boy.

  The famed front-end for the popular Libretro API will be available to install on Steam for Windows from July 30. Linux and macOS versions will follow.

  The libretro cores that power RetroArch can be used with other compatible frontends (like GNOME Games app) but RetroArch is arguably the best one.

• IBM Takes A Hands Off Approach With Red Hat

  IBM has been around long enough in the IT racket that it doesn’t have any trouble maintaining distinct portfolios of products that have overlapping and often incompatible functions. The System/3, which debuted in 1969, is only five years older than the System/360, which laid the foundation and set the pace for corporate computing when it launched in 1964. Both styles of machines continue to exist today as the IBM i on Power Systems platform and the System z.

  With the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, which closed last week, neither of those two legacy products are under threat and IBM does not seem to be inclined whatsoever in ceasing development of the legacy operating system and middleware stacks embodied in the IBM i and System z lines.

  As Arvind Krishna, senior vice president in charge of IBM’s cloud and cognitive software products, put it bluntly in a call after the deal closed, IBM’s customers expect for Big Blue to maintain its own operating systems, middleware, storage, databases, and security software in the IBM i, AIX, and System z lines, and that is precisely what Big Blue is going to do. Krisha estimated that there is only about 5 percent overlap in products between Big Blue and Red Hat – something we talked about at length when the deal was announced last October – and added that in many enterprise accounts that use both Red Hat and IBM platforms, companies invest in both sets of software for different purposes – perhaps using JBoss in one case and WebSphere in another, for instance.

• Tech cos go for Edtech tie-ups to get that ready workforce

  Companies like Wipro, Accenture, IBM and others are tying up with edtech partners like upGrad, Simplilearn and Udacity to have a ready-trained workforce they can deploy on projects. Additional benefits include minimal training cost incurred post recruitment and a lesser churn as learners develop more ownership in their roles.

  The edtech firms provide campus recruits the required platform, content, assignments and project work in their last semester of college to ensure they are prepared with programming skills and emerging digital skills before they join.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 improves performance for modern workloads

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 can provide significant performance improvements over RHEL 7 across a range of modern workloads. To put this in context, we used RHEL 7.6 to execute multiple benchmarks with Intel's 2nd generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and our hardware partners set 35 new world record performance results using the same OS version. This post will highlight RHEL 8 performance gains over RHEL 7.

  How did we get here? The performance engineering team at Red Hat collaborates with software partners and hardware OEMs to measure and optimize performance across workloads that range from high-end databases, NoSQL databases packaged in RHEL, Java applications, and third party databases and applications from Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, SAS, and SAP HANA ERP applications.

  We run multiple benchmarks and measure the performance of CPU, memory, disk I/O and networking. Testing includes the filesystems we ship with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, such as XFS, Ext4, GFS2, Gluster and Ceph.

• Federation V2 is now KubeFed

  Some time ago we talked about how Federation V2 on Red Hat OpenShift 3.11 enables users to spread their applications and services across multiple locales or clusters. As a fast moving project, lots of changes happened since our last blog post. Among those changes, Federation V2 has been renamed to KubeFed and we have released OpenShift 4.

  In today’s blog post we are going to look at KubeFed from an OpenShift 4 perspective, as well as show you a stateful demo application deployed across multiple clusters connected with KubeFed.

  There are still some unknowns around KubeFed; specifically in storage and networking. We are evaluating different solutions because we want to we deliver a top-notch product to manage your clusters across multiple regions/clouds in a clear and user-friendly way. Stay tuned for more information to come!

• Duplicity 0.8.01

  Duplicity 0.8.01 is now in rawhide. The big change here is that it now uses Python 3. I’ve tested it in my own environment, both on it’s own and with deja-dup, and both work.

  Please test and file bugs. I expect there will be more, but with Python 2 reaching EOL soon, it’s important to move everything we can to Python 3.