If you want to display different wallpapers on multiple monitors on Ubuntu 18.04 or any other Linux distribution with GNOME, MATE or Budgie desktop environment, this nifty tool will help you achieve this.

• Red Hat certifies multiple Ribbon VNFs on Open Stack platform 10

  Ribbon Communications Inc., a global provider of secure and intelligent cloud communications, announced that its Session Border Controller Software Edition (SBC SWe), Insight Element Management System (EMS) and Centralised Policy and Routing Software Edition (PSX SWe) are certified on Red Hat® OpenStack® Platform 10.

  Ribbon’s relationship with Red Hat Inc., a provider of open source solutions that bring Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) to the market, includes membership in the Red Hat Connect for Technology Partners and Red Hat Connect for Business Partners programs.

• Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud launches

  Red Hat expanded its hyper-converged infrastructure product line to target cloud environments by combining its supported OpenStack Platform and Ceph storage software distributions.

• Red Hat powers Tata Comm’s IZO Private Cloud

  To offer its enterprise customers a reliable hybrid cloud experience across the globe, Tata Communications has selected Red Hat Cloud Suite to enhance its IZO Private Cloud service.

  Today, enterprises are adopting private and hybrid cloud strategies to help address the complexity and competitive pressures created by the evolution of new technologies. Tata Communications’ IZO Private Cloud is an integrated cloud platform that allows enterprises to build a hybrid cloud environment with the flexibility to burst to public cloud with enterprise-grade control and security. It is part of Tata Communications’ IZO cloud enablement platform that is underpinned by the company’s global network and partnerships with the world’s biggest cloud companies.

• Open sass: Ubuntu/Red Hat drama erupts at Openstack

  Canonical founder and part-time hobby astronaut Mark Shuttleworth began his Openstack keynote this week by criticising Red Hat for being too expensive.

  Among the nervous laughter someone at the front yelled "fact check!" - but speaking with Computerworld UK, Shuttleworth insists no one has refuted his numbers.

  "Good luck to it," he commented when asked about the fact-check-heckler. "Everything I put out there is supported by customers. There have been a number of analyst surveys of cloud economics that put Canonical on top of the list in terms of doing it efficiently.

• Red Hat’s David Egts, Unisys’ Peter O’Donoghue Outline DevOps Challenges in Public Sector

  David Egts, chief technologist for Red Hat‘s public sector business, has said public sector organizations may encounter challenges in adopting DevOps in their information technology systems due to a culture that focuses on long-term initiatives.

• BlackBerry teaser shows the KEY2 Android phone with dual cameras

• Huawei says it'll stop offering bootloader unlock codes

• Explore new features of Android P

• The Nvidia Shield gets a new UI with Android Oreo update

• Essential Phone 2 reportedly canceled, Android founder may sell company

• Why Android P gestures are a risk worth taking

• Qualcomm's new processor means next year's cheap Android phones will suck a little less

• Pioneer NEX receivers first with wireless Android Auto, CarPlay

• The Trusted Places Smart Lock has shown back up in Android

In my job I've heard professionals in tech, from C-level executives to everyone in between, say they want their own kids to learn more about Linux and open source. Some of them seem to have an easy time with their kids following closely in their footsteps. And some have a tough time getting their kids to see what makes Linux and open source so cool. Maybe their time will come, maybe it won't. There's a lot of interesting, valuable stuff out there in this big world.

• [Crackers] infect 500,000 consumer routers all over the world with malware

  VPNFilter—as the modular, multi-stage malware has been dubbed—works on consumer-grade routers made by Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, TP-Link, and on network-attached storage devices from QNAP, Cisco researchers said in an advisory. It’s one of the few pieces of Internet-of-things malware that can survive a reboot. Infections in at least 54 countries have been slowly building since at least 2016, and Cisco researchers have been monitoring them for several months. The attacks drastically ramped up during the past three weeks, including two major assaults on devices located in Ukraine. The spike, combined with the advanced capabilities of the malware, prompted Cisco to release Wednesday’s report before the research is completed.

• Do Not Use sha256crypt / sha512crypt - They're Dangerous

  I'd like to demonstrate why I think using sha256crypt or sha512crypt on current GNU/Linux operating systems is dangerous, and why I think the developers of GLIBC should move to scrypt or Argon2, or at least bcrypt or PBKDF2.

• Intel CPU Bug Affecting rr Watchpoints

  I investigated an rr bug report and discovered an annoying Intel CPU bug that affects rr replay using data watchpoints. It doesn't seem to be hit very often in practice, which is good because I don't know any way to work around it. It turns out that the bug is probably covered by an existing Intel erratum for Skylake and Kaby Lake (and probably later generations, but I'm not sure), which I even blogged about previously! However, the erratum does not mention watchpoints and the bug I've found definitely depends on data watchpoints being set.

  I was able to write a stand-alone testcase to characterize the bug. The issue seems to be that if a rep stos (and probably rep movs) instruction writes between 1 and 64 bytes (inclusive), and you have a read or write watchpoint in the range [64, 128) bytes from the start of the writes (i.e., not triggered by the instruction), then one spurious retired conditional branch is (usually) counted. The alignment of the writes does not matter, and it's not related to speculative execution.

Robin "Roblimo" Miller was a clever, friendly, and very amicable individual who everyone I know has plenty of positive things to say about. I had the pleasure of speaking to him for several hours about anything from personal life and professional views. Miller was a very knowledgeable person whose trade as a journalist and video producer I often envied. I have seen him facing his critics in his capacity as a journalist over a decade ago when he arranged a debate about OOXML (on live radio). Miller, to me, will always be remembered as a strong-minded and investigative journalist who "did the right thing" as the cliché goes, irrespective of financial gain -- something which can sometimes be detrimental to one's longterm health. Miller sacrificed many of his later years to a cause worth fighting for. This is what we ought to remember him for. Miller was - and always will be - a FOSS hero.

May everything you fought for be fulfilled, Mr. Miller. I already miss you. █

• Privacy Statement
• Saint-Germain’s Poisonous Legacy of “Toxic Loans”: The SIDRU “Toxic Loan” Débâcle and Criticism of Lamy From Local Opposition Groups
• New EPO Caricature: The Rubber Stamp
• Links 24/5/2018: RIP Robin “Roblimo” Miller, Qt 5.11 Released

Summary: Today, May 25th, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into full effect; we hereby make a statement on privacy

AS a matter of strict principle, this site never has and never will accumulate data on visitors (e.g. access logs) for longer than 28 days. The servers are configured to permanently delete all access data after this period of time. No 'offline' copies are being made. Temporary logging is only required in case of DDOS attacks and cracking attempts -- the sole purpose of such access. Additionally, we never have and never will sell any data pertaining to anything. We never received demands for such data from authorities; even if we had, we would openly declare this (publicly, a la Canary) and decline to comply. Privacy is extremely important to us, which is why pages contain little or no cross-site channels (such as Google Analytics, 'interactive' buttons for 'social' media etc.) and won't be adding any. Google may be able to 'see' what pages people visit because of Google Translate (top left of every page), but that is not much worse than one's ISP 'seeing' the same thing. We are aware of this caveat.

Shall readers have any further questions on such matters, do not hesitate to contact us. █

• S11E12 – Twelve Years a Slave

  It’s Season 11 Episode 12 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.

• Porting guide from Qt 1.0 to 5.11

  We do try to keep breakages to a minimum, even in the major releases, but the changes do add up. This raises the question: How hard would it be to port a Qt application from Qt 1.0 to 5.11?

• Thunderbolt Networking on Linux

  Thunderbolt allows for peer-to-peer network connections by connecting two computers directly via a thunderbolt cable. Mika from Intel added support for this to the 4.15 kernel. Recently, Thomas Haller from NetworkManager and I worked together to figure out what needs to be done in userspace to make it work. As it turns out, it was not that hard and the pull-request was merged swiftly.

• What’s new in openSUSE Leap 15 – part 1

  openSUSE Leap 15 will be released on the 25th of May 2018! A new openSUSE release is always an exciting event. This means that I get to play with all kinds of new and improved software packages.

  I am aware that I can simply install openSUSE Tumbleweed and have a new release 4 or 5 times a week. But when using openSUSE Tumbleweed some time ago, I noticed that I was installing Gigabytes of new software packages multiple times per week. The reason for that is that I have the complete opposite of a minimum install. I always install a lot of applications to play / experiment with (including a lot of open source games). I am using openSUSE since 2009 and it covers all of my needs and then some. I am already happy with the available software, so there is no real reason for me to move with the speed of a rolling release. Therefore I prefer to move with the slower pace of the Leap releases.

• GNOME Terminal: a little something for Fedora 29

  Can you spot what that is?

• UBports To Work On Unity 8 / Mir / Wayland After OTA-4

  The UBports team have put out their latest batch of answers to common questions around this project that's still working to maintain the Ubuntu Touch software stack.

  Among the project's recent work has included getting QtWebEngine working on Mir and before their Ubuntu 16.04 LTS based release they still need to figure out Chromium crashes and to resolve that as well as updating the browser. For their first release of UBports derived from Ubuntu 16.04 "Xenial" they are still going to rely upon Oxide while later on should migrate to a new browser.

• 8 Best App Locks For Android To Secure Your Device In 2018

• These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 39

• What's Coming in OpenStack Rocky?

  The OpenStack Rocky release is currently scheduled to become generally available on August 30th, and it's expected to add a host of new and enhanced capabilities to the open-source cloud platform.

  At the OpenStack Summit here, Anne Bertucio, marketing manager at the OpenStack Foundation, and Pete Chadwick, director of product management at SUSE, outlined some of the features currently on the Rocky roadmap.

  Bertucio began the session by warning the audience that the roadmap is not prescriptive, but rather is intended to provide a general idea of the direction the next OpenStack release is taking.

• PostgreSQL 11 Is Continuing With More Performance Improvements, JIT'ing

  PostgreSQL 11 is the next major feature release of this open-source database SQL server due out later in 2018. While it's not out yet, their release notes were recently updated for providing an overview of what's coming as part of this next major update.

  To little surprise, performance improvements remain a big focus for PostgreSQL 11 with various optimizations as well as continued parallelization work and also the recently introduced just-in-time (JIT) compilation support.

• Tidelift Secures $15M in Series A Funding

  Tidelift, a Boston, MA-based open source software startup, secured $15m in Series A funding.

• Tesla disclosed some of its autopilot source code after GPL violation

  Tesla, a technology company, and the independent automaker are well known for offering the safest, quickest electric cars. The company uses a lot of open source software to build its operating system and features, such as Linux Kernel, Buildroot, Busybox, QT, etc also they have always been taciturn about the finer details and tech of its popular artefacts, such as Model S, Model X, but now Elon Musk’s company has just released some of its automotive tech source code into the open source community.

• Open Source Underwater Distributed Sensor Network

  One way to design an underwater monitoring device is to take inspiration from nature and emulate an underwater creature. [Michael Barton-Sweeney] is making devices in the shape of, and functioning somewhat like, clams for his open source underwater distributed sensor network.

• Security Researchers Discover Two New Variants of the Spectre Vulnerability

• Security updates for Thursday

• Detecting String Truncation with GCC 8

• How To Permanently Change The MAC Address On Linux

• How to change hostname in Fedora Linux permanently

• Chrome Has a Hidden Password Creation Tool, Here’s How to Use It

• How To Change Your Gmail or Google Password

• Visualizing Molecules with EasyChem

• Grab 'Hacknet - Deluxe' for free in the Humble Spring Sale Encore

  For the next day or so you can grab Hacknet - Deluxe absolutely free as the Humble Store is doing a Spring Sale Encore.

  Always nice to grab a free game, especially when it will give you a Steam key and a DRM free build as well!

• Full Metal Furies should perform a lot better on Linux now

  Full Metal Furies, the cooperative action RPG from Cellar Door Games is damn fun, but the initial Linux release did have performance issues which now seem to be solved.

• Wine D3D Code Now Defaults To OpenGL 4.4 Contexts

  Wine's Direct3D to OpenGL translation layer will now default to using OpenGL 4.4 contexts rather than legacy OpenGL contexts.

• Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro kernel source code for the Android 8.1 Oreo release is now available

• Android Trusted Places disappears after months of headaches

• Apple CarPlay vs. Android Auto

• Study of Android users: Mobile security messages 20 percent more effective if warnings vary in appearance

• Nvidia Shield updates to Android TV Oreo 8.0 with custom menus

• NVIDIA Shield TV finally gets Android 8.0 Oreo update

• TicWatch Pro announced with battery-saving second screen and NFC

• Vevo Shuttering iOS and Android Apps to Focus Music Video Business on YouTube

• Fuchsia and the future of Android

• Best Memorial Day apps for Android

• Some low-cost Android phones shipped with malware built in

• Samsung might save Android smartwatches from irrelevance

• Samsung watches running Wear OS spotted on employee’s wrists

• XWayland Gets Patches For Better EGLStreams Handling

  While the recently released X.Org Server 1.20 has initial support for XWayland with EGLStreams so X11 applications/games on Wayland can still benefit from hardware acceleration, in its current state it doesn't integrate too well with Wayland desktop compositors wishing to support it. That's changing with a new patch series.

• Intel Mesa Driver Finally Supports Threaded OpenGL

  Based off the Gallium3D "mesa_glthread" work for threaded OpenGL that can provide a measurable win in some scenarios, the Intel i965 Mesa driver has implemented this support now too.

  Following the work squared away last year led in the RadeonSI driver, the Intel i965 OpenGL driver supports threaded OpenGL when the mesa_glthread=true environment variable is set.

• Geometry & Tessellation Shaders For Mesa's OpenGL Compatibility Context

  With the recent Mesa 18.1 release there is OpenGL 3.1 support with the ARB_compatibility context for the key Gallium3D drivers, but Marek Olšák at AMD continues working on extending that functionality under the OpenGL compatibility context mode.

• Mesa Begins Its Transition To Gitlab

  Following the news from earlier this month that FreeDesktop.org would move its infrastructure to Gitlab, the Mesa3D project has begun the process of adopting this Git-centered software.

Comment Ubuntu 18.04, launched last month, included a new Welcome application that runs the first time you boot into your new install. The Welcome app does several things, including offering to opt you out of Canonical's new data collection tool.

The tool also provides a quick overview of the new GNOME interface, and offers to set up Livepatch (for kernel patching without a reboot).

In my review I called the opt-out a ham-fisted decision, but did note that if Canonical wanted to actually gather data, opt-out was probably the best choice.

CERN really needs no introduction. Among other things, the European Organization for Nuclear Research created the World Wide Web and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest particle accelerator, which was used in discovery of the Higgs boson. Tim Bell, who is responsible for the organization’s IT Operating Systems and Infrastructure group, says the goal of his team is “to provide the compute facility for 13,000 physicists around the world to analyze those collisions, understand what the universe is made of and how it works.”

WhiteSource on Tuesday launched its next-generation software composition analysis (SCA) technology, dubbed "Effective Usage Analysis," with the promise that it can reduce open source vulnerability alerts by 70 percent.

The newly developed technology provides details beyond which components are present in the application. It provides actionable insights into how components are being used. It also evaluates their impact on the security of the application.

The new solution shows which vulnerabilities are effective. For instance, it can identify which vulnerabilities get calls from the proprietary code.

I’m pleased to announce that a non-profit organization has been incorporated to support the project: e Foundation.

“e Foundation” will host core eelo assets and fuel the development of eelo software.

This non-profit organization will be able to receive private and public grants, as well as donations from individuals, from anywhere in the world. We’re also working to add a legal way so that donations could benefit from tax cuts, as it’s often possible when donating to “in the public interest” organizations.

As soon as a bank account will be ready for “e Foundation”, we will move there all donations and our “in demand” crowdfunding campaign.

Linux Journal has learned fellow journalist and long-time voice of the Linux community Robin "Roblimo" Miller has passed away. Miller was perhaps best known by the community for his roll as Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008. He went on to write and do video interviews for FOSS Force, penned articles for several publications, and authored three books, The Online Rules of Successful Companies, Point & Click Linux!, and Point & Click OpenOffice.org, all published by Prentice Hall.

• 3.5-inch Apollo Lake SBC supports industrial temperatures

  Ibase’s Linux-compatible, 3.5-inch “IB818” SBC provides a dual- or quad-core Apollo Lake SoC, plus 2x GbE, 4x USB 3.0, 2x SATA, 2x mini-PCIe, triple display support, wide-range power, and -40 to 85°C support.

• AsteroidOS and OpenWatch offer open alternatives to smartwatch stacks

  The open source, Linux based “AsteroidOS” alternative to Wear OS arrives in a stable 1.0 release, and Block spins off some of its Android smartwatch stack as an open source OpenWatch Project.

  The AsteroidOS project has released version 1.0 of its open source, Linux-based smartwatch distribution. Designed for after-market installation on “Wear OS by Google” (formerly Android Wear) watches, AsteroidOS can now be dual booted on seven different models. The release follows the late March announcement of an OpenWatch Project for building Android based open source custom ROMs on Wear OS watches.

• Purism Publishes Librem 5 Dev Kit Details, Small Batch Order Going In Soon

  Purism has published their nearly final specifications on their limited-run Librem 5 Dev Kit. The cutoff for ordering a developer kit is next week as they are placing their hardware order and planning on only this single, limited run of the developer kit prior to the phones becoming available next year.

  Their deadline for ordering a developer kit is the end of the month and the kit price has raised to $399 USD. In the process, Purism believes they are still on track for their January 2019 for coming up with having the phone's actual hardware ready.

• Delivering Container Storage-as-a-Service

  Today, Pure Storage is excited to announce Pure Service Orchestrator. It is now possible to deliver container storage-as-a-service to empower your developers to build and deploy scale-out, microservices applications. The agility that your developers expect they could only get from the public cloud is now possible, on premise!

  In this blog, we’ll discuss why the adoption of containers is exploding, how the the lack of persistent storage threatens to slow adoption, and why a newer, smarter approach to storage delivery for containerized application environments is needed.

• Best practices for engaging with Red Hat Support

  With a Red Hat subscription, you get the latest enterprise-ready software, expert knowledge, product security and technical support from trusted engineers making software the open source way. Red Hat Support makes sure our enterprise technology works in your environment, and helps you minimize the impact to your business if an issue occurs. If you need to open a support case, it will be routed to engineers that are specialized in the product that you use, so your issue can be efficiently resolved by experts.

• Red Hat Certifies Multiple Ribbon Virtual Network Functions on Open Stack Platform 10

• Red Hat intros hyperconverged infrastructure for cloud

  Red Hat has introduced Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud, an integrated solution for customers seeking to co-locate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments. The new offering combines Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 in a single user experience, supported by a common lifecycle for greater operational and organizational efficiency.

• How Red Hat has accelerated open source adoption to hit 25-year milestone

  The firm recently celebrated 25 years in business, and according to Miles, Red Hat is as strong as ever. Four years into his tenure at the company here in the Middle East, he has been “pleasantly surprised” and “very impressed” that regional organisations are already pursuing strong strategies in open source.

• Red Hat rolls out OpenStack HCI platform for telco and enterprise hybrid clouds

  Red Hat launched a new hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) platform for telcos and enterprises that combines OpenStack compute with its Ceph storage.

  Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Cloud is an open, integrated platform for customers seeking to co-locate compute and storage functions in OpenStack environments.

  Announced Tuesday at the OpenStack Summit, the new platform blends Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13 and Red Hat Ceph Storage 3 into a single user experience for hyperconvergence in the hybrid cloud. Red Hat said it was the biggest contributor to both open source projects.

• Gramercy Property Trust (GPT) Valuation Down While Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) Valuation Up