• PTAB and § 101 (Section 101) Have Locked the Patent Parasites Out of the Patent System
• Patents on Computer Software and Plants in the United States Indicative of Systemic Error
• Yesterday’s Misleading News From Team UPC and Its Aspiring Management of the Unified Patent Court (UPC)
• Time for the European Commission to Investigate EPO Corruption Because It May be Partly or Indirectly Connected to EU-IPO, an EU Agency
• Links 17/7/2018: Catfish 1.4.6 Released, ReactOS 0.4.9, Red Hat’s GPL Compliance Group Grows
• Links 16/7/2018: Linux 4.18 RC5, Latte Dock v0.8, Windows Back Doors Resurface

After it was decided earlier this year when the development of the next Lubuntu release, 18.10, kicked off that 32-bit installations will be dropped, Lubuntu developer Simon Quigley informs us that the team behind the lightweight GNU/Linux distribution wants to give 32-bit support one more chance if there's still demand from the community.

Starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) release, which is currently scheduled for an October 18, 2018, release, the official flavors won't be shipping with 32-bit installation images, except Lubuntu if users are interested in helping testing and 32-bit (i386) ISOs. Otherwise, Lubuntu 18.10 will not ship with 32-bit installation images.

Also: Lubuntu Needs Help Testing For 32-bit x86 Support To Continue

• How to play Steam games on Android

• Google Hid An Awesome Per-App Auto Rotate Feature in Android P

• Truecaller introduces call recording feature in the Android app

• Live Channels is the best thing on Android TV you're not using

• WhatsApp beta 2.18.216 brings mute feature on Android

• Xiaomi Mi A1 Android 8.1 Oreo update rolls out again with July security patches

• Essential Phone for just $250: High definition audio, Android P beta, superb built quality

• Warehouse Clearance Sale! Librem laptops starting at $999

  We sometimes get asked whether we will sell previous Librem models at a discount. The fact is that we normally don’t have a lot of Librem laptops lying around–the current stock sells out quickly and we order new batches. However, we also sometimes offer more than one type of Librem 13 or 15 laptop so customers can pick which hardware appeals most to them. Most recently this happened when we offered you the choice of i5 vs. i7 CPU and the choice of adding on a TPM chip. The demand for the i7 CPU and TPM chips were overwhelming to the point that both the i7 and TPM chip are now standard on our entire product line.

• Training Conundrum: Open Source Moves Faster Than Curriculum

  Just as service providers must reinvent their networks by using open source technologies, network engineers must also reinvent themselves to ensure they are qualified to handle this new world of software-defined networking (SDN).

  Engineers that are well-versed in SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) are in hot demand. According to a survey conducted in conjunction with SDxCentral’s 2018 NFV Report Series Part 1: NFV Infrastructure and VIM, 64 percent of respondents said that lack of training and in-house talent was hindering the adoption of NFV.

• Linux Foundation launches open source energy project to 'transform' the world's energy mix

• NVIDIA 390.77 Linux Driver Brings Updated Kernel Support, Fixes

  NVIDIA released today the 390.77 Linux driver, the latest in the 390 "long-lived" driver branch, for those not using the short-lived 396 bleeding-edge driver series.

  With the NVIDIA 390.77 Linux driver release it now works with up through the Linux 4.17 stable kernel series. Additionally, there are several pressing bug fixes.

• Igalia Aligns Latest Patches For Giving Intel's Mesa Driver OpenGL 4.6

  Igalia developers have been very involved with the Intel open-source developers on getting the long-awaited OpenGL 4.6 support into the "i965" Mesa driver. As has been the case for a while, out-of-tree patches can allow this to happen but with the Mesa 18.2 branching soon, it doesn't look like this will materialize ahead of this next release.

• KDE Applications 18.08 branches created

  Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Applications 18.08 release to them

  We're already past the dependency freeze.

  [...]

  August 16: KDE Applications 18.08 Release

• What Really Matters? – Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Electronic Arts Inc. (EA)?

• Fundamentals and Technicals Suggest More Upside: Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

• The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 536

  Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 536 for the week of July 8 – 14, 2018.

• Mi A2 Release Date: Xiaomi’s Android One Powered Device Coming On July 24

• Atari VCS Console Runs a Custom Linux Distro Called “AtariOS”

  Following criticism of its mediocre internal makeup the Ataris VCS console will now ship with 8GB RAM by default, up from the 4GB proposed during the funding push.

  It’s a decent increase in memory that should help the system cope better with more intensive indie games (don’t expect AAA titles to play nicely on the machine with the middling AMD Bristol Ridge APU).

• Humble Store is doing a 'Pixel Perfect Platformers Sale' and it has some top Linux games for cheap

  For those of you who love your platformers, regardless of them being 2D, 3D, puzzle or action adventures there's bound to be something for the bored Linux gamer in the Humble Store Pixel Perfect Platformers Sale.

• TUNG (The Ultimate Nerd Game) made me realise how stupid I really am

  The Ultimate Nerd Game or TUNG for short, is a first-person sandbox game about building intricate machines and it made me feel so very dumb.

  If you loved Minecraft's Redstone circuits or anything remotely similar, this is probably a free game you're going to love. For me, it was an exercise in frying my brain like it's in a microwave.

• Pharmaceutical industry gets first open source platform for Level 4 serialization

  Pharmaceutical companies today for the first time have an open source alternative for level 4 serialization with the launch of QU4RTET, a platform that provides them with new flexibility, transparency and affordability as they comply with global drug anti-counterfeiting laws.

• Kontron Uses Open Source to Move Beyond Bare Metal

  Kontron, a company known for its embedded computing technology, is leveraging virtualization and open source to become a direct supplier to large service providers, promising to integrate hardware and operating system software with best-of-breed virtual network functions.

  That new sales strategy has evolved to support containers, particularly as they fit at the edge of the network, which for Kontron AG is the cell tower. In May, Kontron announced that its integrated SYMKLOUD open source platform now supports the latest versions of OpenStack for virtual machines and bare metal, as well as Kubernetes v1.10 for Docker and containers, via its distribution partnership with Canonical.

• Open Source Expands In Finance With The FINOS Platform

• Global Open Source Services Market Forecast to 2025 Published by Marketresearchnest

• Synopsys ARC HS4x Processors Now Supported By GCC

  The GCC 8 compiler brought the Synopsys ARC CPU target while for the GCC 9 release is going to be support for the company's HS4x processors.

  Merged today to mainline GCC is support for the HS4x CPUs within the ARC target. Adding this newer generation of ARC processors to the GNU Compiler Collection code-base was just a few hundred lines of code with building off the existing target code.

• GPL Cooperation Commitment gets more support for open source licensing

  Red Hat has announced its open source license enforcement initiative is making new strides. As part of the GPL Cooperation Commitment, 14 new companies have joined the effort to promote greater predictability for GPLv2 and LGPLv2.x licenses.

  “Through this initiative, we hope ultimately to increase participation in the use and development of open source software by helping to ensure that enforcement, when it takes place, is fair and predictable,” according to the commitment’s website.

• The Global IP Exchange: Human ingenuity and open source technology

  He said: “Customers do increasingly care about open source, and if you don’t comply you are at risk of upsetting authors, as well as litigation and injunctions.”

  “If you’re just distributing internally, then you’re fine, but as soon as it leaves your company, then you’ve triggered an obligation.”

  For those who don’t comply, he warned that either the licensor, or the Free Software Foundation will find out.

• How to Setup Python Virtual Environment on Ubuntu 18.04

  Python is a versatile programming language that can be used for many different programming projects(Web - Mobile - Desktop).

  Easy to set up, and written in a relatively straightforward style with immediate feedback on errors, Python is a great choice for beginners and experienced developers alike. Python 3 is the most current version of the language and is considered to be the future of Python.

  This article will guide you through installing Python 3 on your local Linux machine and setting up a programming virtual environment via the command line. This article will explicitly cover the installation procedures for Ubuntu 18.04, but the general principles apply to any other distribution of Debian Linux.

• How expensive is globbing for sources in large projects

  Since we have the measurement script, let's use it for something more interesting. Modules are an upcoming C++ feature to increase build times and a ton of other coolness depending on who you ask. The current specification works by having a kind of "module export declaration" at the beginning of source files. The idea is that you first compile those to generate a sort of a module declaration file and then you can start the actual compilation that uses said files.

  If you thought "waitaminute, that sounds exactly like how FORTRAN is compiled", you are correct. Because of this it has the same problem that you can't compile source files in an arbitrary order, but instead you must first somehow scan them to find out the interdependencies between source (not header) files. In practice what this means is that instead of single-phase compilation all files must be processed twice. All scan operations must be done before any compilation jobs can start because otherwise you might start to compile a file before its dependencies are fully processed.

  The scanning can be done in one of two ways. Either the build system scans the sources meaning it needs to understand the syntax of source files or the compiler can be invoked in a special preprocessing mode. Note that build systems such as Ninja do not do any such operations by themselves but instead always invoke external processes to do their work.

• Security updates for Monday

• Newsboat: A Snazzy Text-Based RSS Feed Reader

  Newsboat is a sleek, open source RSS/Atom feed reader for the text console. It’s a fork of Newsbeuter. RSS and Atom are a number of widely-used XML formats to transmit, publish and syndicate articles, typically news or blog articles.

  Newsboat is designed to be used on text terminals on Unix or Unix-like systems. It’s entirely controlled by the keyboard.

  The software has an internal commandline to modify configuration variables and to run commands.

• FreeFileSync – Data Backup and File Synchronization App

  FreeFileSync is a free data backup and file synchronization app which is available in Linux systems enables you to seamlessly sync your backup data with the source data.

  When you take a backup of your HD, or any other disk drive, you should keep it in sync for the file changes you do from time to time. It is often difficult to remember which file/directories you have changed/deleted/updated since the last backup. FreeFileSync solves that problem and it can determine and sync only those changed/deleted/updated files in your backup.

• Corebird Twitter Client – to Stop Working

  Corebird, the best native GTK+ Twitter client available for Linux desktops including Ubuntu will stop working on August 2018. This has been recently reported by the Corebird developer in patreon as well as in GitHub. This is mainly due to the policy change from Twitter which will remove UserStream API which is used by Corebird and other third party Twitter clients.

  In the patreon post, the developer stated that, the new API by Twitter named Accounts Activity API is too difficult to implement and he may not have much time available for development.

• FileZilla – Best FTP Client for Linux, Ubuntu Releases version 3.34.0

  FileZilla is a free and open source FTP client available for Ubuntu, Mint and other Linux systems. FileZilla is the go-to software when you need a FTP client for your need. FileZilla is loaded with supports for FTP, SFTP, FTPS protocols and it is cross platform. It comes with nice user friendly and easy to use GUI.

• nomacs 3.10.2

  nomacs is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 and available for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac, and OS/2.

• RAV1E: The "Fastest & Safest" AV1 Encoder

  Following the news about VP9 and AV1 having more room to improve particularly for alternative architectures like POWER and ARM, a Phoronix reader pointed out an effort that Mozilla is behind on developing the "rav1e" encoder.

  AV1 up to this point for encoding on CPUs has been - unfortunately - extremely slow. But it turns out Mozilla and others are working on RAV1E as what they are billing as the fastest and safest AV1 encoder. RAV1E has been in development for a while now but has seemingly flown under our radar.

• Users, Groups and Other Linux Beasts: Part 2

• How To Install Ruby on Ubuntu 18.04

• How to Benchmark Your Linux System

• Linux history Command Tutorial for Beginners (8 Examples)

• The Perfect Server - Ubuntu 18.04 (Nginx, MySQL, PHP, Postfix, BIND, Dovecot, Pure-FTPD and ISPConfig 3.1)

• Speech Recognition to Text in Linux, Ubuntu using Google Docs

• How to Fix Flatpak Installation Error

• 30 Bash Script Examples

While Docker Inc and its eponymous container engine helped to create the modern container approach, Red Hat has multiple efforts of its own that it is now actively developing.

The core component for containers is the runtime engine, which for Docker is the Docker Engine which is now based on the Docker-led containerd project that is hosted at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Red Hat has built its own container engine called CRI-O, which hit its 1.0 release back in October 2017.

For building images, Red Hat has a project called Buildah, which reached its 1.0 milestone on June 6.

• How The Update Framework Improves Software Distribution Security

  In recent years that there been multiple cyber-attacks that compromised a software developer's network to enable the delivery of malware inside of software updates. That's a situation that Justin Cappos, founder of The Update Framework (TUF) open-source project, has been working hard to help solve.

  Cappos, an assistant professor at New York University (NYU), started TUF nearly a decade ago. TUF is now implemented by multiple software projects, including the Docker Notary project for secure container application updates and has implementations that are being purpose-built to help secure automotive software as well.

• IBM's new Nabla containers are designed for security first

  Companies love containers because they enable them to run more jobs on servers. But businesses also hate containers, because they fear they're less secure than virtual machines (VM)s. IBM thinks it has an answer to that: Nabla containers, which are more secure by design than rival container concepts.

  James Bottomley, an IBM Research distinguished engineer and top Linux kernel developer, first outlines that there are two kind of fundamental kinds of container and virtual machine (VM) security problems. These are described as Vertical Attack Profile (VAP) and Horizontal Attack Profile (HAP).

• [Podcast] PodCTL #42 – Kubernetes 1.11 Released

  Like clockwork, the Kubernetes community continues to release quarterly updates to the rapidly expanding project. With the 1.11 release, we see a number of new capabilities being added across a number of different domains – infrastructure services, scheduling services, routing services, storage services, and broader CRD versioning capabilities that will improve the ability to not only deploy Operators for the platform and applications. Links for all these new features, as well as in-depth blog posts from Red Hat and the Kubernetes community are included in the show notes.

  As always, it’s important to remember that not every new feature being released is considered “General Availability”, so be sure to check the detailed release notes before considering the use of any feature in a production or high-availability environment.

• Popular Firefox extensions now available in 7 new locales

  Firefox is available in over 90 languages, giving millions of people around the world access to the web in words they understand. Our community of translators and localizers do this because they believe that the web belongs to everyone, not just those who speak a popular tongue.

• No Longer Lost in Translation

  You might have noticed that while Firefox supports 90 languages, many extensions and their listings on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) are only available in English.

  At present, we don’t have a way to connect extension developers with the translation community at scale, and Pontoon, Mozilla’s tool for localizing products and websites, currently only supports translating the AMO site itself.

  What we do have, however, is a desire to make translation resources available, a longstanding and active community of localizers, and friends on Mozilla’s Open Innovation team who specialize in putting the two together. Part of Open Innovation’s work is to explore new ways to connect communities of enthusiastic non-coding contributors to meaningful projects within Mozilla. Together with Rubén Martín, we ran a campaign to localize an initial group of top Firefox extensions into the 7 most popular languages of Firefox users.

• Measuring Localization Time (in CI)

  As we all know, measuring things is a good way to get concrete information. Now that Firefox CI is fully on Taskcluster this was a good opportunity to measure and see what we can learn about timing in localization tasks.

  The code that generated the following charts and data is viewable in my Github repo, though as of this writing the code is rough and was modified manually to help generate the related graphs in various configurations. I’m working on adjusting them to be more general purpose and have better actual testing around logic.

• Mozilla Reps Community

  The Reps program is working to prepare the ground for Mission Driven Mozillians and there are different tasks and issues to face for that.

  The most important point for the Reps Council is the Roles of Reps inside the communities. We know that in Mozilla there are a lot of international communities, local community and project specific communities, and we need to understand and be ready to support all of them.

• QMO: Firefox 62 Beta 8 Testday Results

• Librem 5 progress report #15

  These last few weeks, the Librem 5 team has been hard at work improving the current software stack as well as making great strides towards finalizing the development kit schematic. Here are the highlights of the exciting progress that has been made.

• Librem 5 Development Boards Won't Be Shipping Now Until At Least August

  Purism has offered a status update on their software/hardware efforts around the Librem 5 smart-phone they have been working on that is security-minded, open-source, and that they plan to begin shipping in January of 2019.

  Among the highlights from their latest update include:

  - The i.MX6 experimental software images now use their Phosh Wayland Shell and are experimenting with the PureOS base rather than Debian Buster testing.

  - In terms of the support for the i.MX8 hardware they actually want to use for the finished phone, at this stage they can now get their i.MX8 software image booting "a very basic mainline kernel" over the vendor-supplied kernel.

• Raspbian OS And Why Everyone Is So Attached To It

  ​The Raspberry is a Debian based Linux distribution created for the Raspberry Pi. It is worth to mention that the Raspberry is designed to only function with the raspberry, however, to account for the rest of alternatives out there, it is all about competition and making the PI more adaptable and flexible.

• Renegade Elite Mini PC Hits Indiegogo From $99

  After first being unveiled back in June 2018, the Renegade Elite single-board mini PC crowdfunding campaign via Indiegogo is now underway, offering pledges from $99. The Renegade Elite mini PC is a low-profile high-performance 4K capable 64-bit ARM computer with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM capable of running desktop-class Linux based operating systems like Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Android 8.1, and more.

The bittersweet result: I may be free of the operating system release cycle, but have spent far more time fussing over my rolling distro than I ever would have fussed to upgrade from point release A to point release B. openSUSE impresses, but I probably should have (sigh …) adopted their point release distro Leap instead, or stood pat with Mint. (Although I’ll likely Tumble from here on in, now that I’ve hacked my way through the worst of the Tumbleweed learning curve.)

If also tempted by the Tumbleweed bleeding edge: Dost thou know how to make and restore a disk image, either via the fabulous free Clonezilla or a commercial equivalent? Canst thou partition a disk, and, perhaps, fix a broken boot loader? I’ll dare to name these skills as entry bars for Tumbleweed adoption, especially the first one. I figured out how to do this stuff, still judge my knowledge as barely adequate to drive Tumbleweed daily. (Although one can install the Tumbleweed ISO in a virtual machine, fiddle to one’s heart’s content.)

For many early Linux users, Slackware was their introduction. One user told me her first Linux install was Slackware—and she had to use a hex editor to fix the partition tables so that Slackware would install. Support for her hardware was added in a later release. Another got his start building the data center that would power one of the first internet-enabled real estate sites. In the mid-1990s, Slackware was one of the easiest distributions to get and didn't require a lot of effort to get IP masquerading to work correctly. A third person mentioned going to sleep while a kernel compile job ran, only to find out it had failed when he woke up.

All of these anecdotes would suggest a hard-to-use operating system. But Slackware fans don't see it that way. The project's website says the two top priorities are "ease of use and stability." For Slackware, "ease of use" means simplicity. Slackware does not include a graphical installer. Its package manager does not perform any dependency resolution. This can be jarring for new users, particularly within the last few years, but it also enables a deeper understanding of the system.

The different take on ease of use isn't the only thing unique about Slackware. It also does not have a public bug tracker, code repository, or well-defined method of community contribution. Volkerding and a small team of contributors maintain the tree in a rolling release called "-current" and publish a release when it meets the feature and stability goals they've set.

• Why Android is Google's Trojan horse

• These phone models have highest failure rate: is your device on the list?

• Huawei Android tablet discount bonanza!

• BlackBerry begins Android Oreo beta rollout for KEYone

• BANKEX Scan Offers Ethereum Blockchain Explorer for Android

• Motorola Announces Moto E5 Play with Android Go Software

• Pro Tip: Perform Google Search with Spotlight on MacOS

• Best Amazon Prime Day Android smartphone deals for every carrier

Axiomtek’s “eBOX560-900-FL” fanless AI computer runs Ubuntu 16.04 on Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 module, and adds 2x GbE ports and single USB, HDMI 2.0, mini-PCIe, and M.2 with optional NVM. The fanless system offers IP40 protection, vibration resistance, and -10 to 50°C support.

There have been a lot of carrier boards designed for Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 module, but the eBOX560-900-FL is the first complete Jetson TX2-based embedded computer we’ve covered. Axiomtek’s compact, rugged box computer, which follows earlier Ebox products such as the Intel Haswell based eBOX560-880-FL, is designed for AI computing, machine vision, deep learning, and edge computing.

There had been plans drafted to finish dropping Yum 3 in Fedora now that DNF is quite mature as the next-generation package manager, but that isn't happening now until at least Fedora 30.

Fedora 29 isn't eliminating Yum since it's a fairly disruptive change at this point in the cycle, there still are some important infrastructure components depending upon Yum like Koji, Pungi, and others, among other logistics to work through.

• Petr Kovar: GUADEC 2018

  Back from GUADEC, held in the beautiful Andalusian city of Almería, Spain, from 6th July through 11th July, 2018, I wanted to share a few notes wrt documentation and localization activities at the conference and during the traditional post-conference hacking days.

• GUADEC18 Developer Center BoF Part 1: The Developer Experience

  At this year’s GUADEC lightning talks I spontaneously announced and arranged a Developer Center BoF (Birds of a Feather) session. We were six attendants who met together Wednesday the 11th September. I think it is important that we communicate our doings to the rest of the community, so I will make a few short blog posts based on our meeting notes and my own thoughts on the subject.

• GSoC 2018: Safe Shared Access to Cairo Image Surfaces

  I’m working on librsvg, a GNOME SVG rendering library, to port the SVG filter effects and related infrastructure from C to Rust. Librsvg uses Cairo, a 2D graphics library, for most of its drawing operations. Cairo can draw to a number of different surfaces like XCB and Xlib windows and pixmaps, PDF documents and PostScript files.

• Have you ever commented while angry?

  Here’s my proposal (feature request for GitLab / irssi?

• Apache Cassandra at 10: Making a community believe in NoSQL

  Ten years ago this month, when Lehman Brothers was still just about in business and the term NoSQL wasn't even widely known, let alone an irritant, Facebook engineers open-sourced a distributed database system named Cassandra.

  Back then, the idea that huge numbers of companies would need a scalable database was almost laughable – and that grip of traditional relational database systems is reflected in the mythical moniker given to what would become one of the first of many databases designed to run on a cluster of machines.

  Named after the Greek figure who was cursed to utter the truth but was never believed, Cassandra might seem an odd choice for a system whose raison d'être is believability – but it delivered a nice dig at the stalwarts of the RDBMS world… and their trust in a false Oracle.

• Google Launches Jib, Automated Container Packaging for Java Apps

  Google has released software that could automate the packaging of a Java program so that it can be run in the cloud-native environment.

  Jib is an open-source Java “containerizer,” one that handles all the steps of packaging your application into a container image, according to Appu Goundan and Qingyang Chen, two Google engineers who co-wrote a blog post announcing the new technology.

  Created over two decades ago at Sun Microsystems, Java was introduced as a “write once, run anywhere” programming language, where all the code would be packaged in a JAR file, and run by a Java Virtual Machine on any platform. The requirements for running code anywhere have expanded with the introduction of containerization, however. Few shops are Java-only these days, and many are turning to containerization for true application portability,

• WSO2 Summer 2018 Release Brings Agility to Secure Microservices Integration

• New Operations in Mexico Extend WSO2’s Reach Across Latin America

• How Open Source Became The Default Business Model For Software

• 10 Best Kodi Addons You Should Install In 2018 | Legal Addons

  Kodi is one of the most popular media player software which enables you to access videos, music, and pictures via the internet or local storage on a host of platforms. Managed by XBMC foundation, Kodi is an open source software. However, its reputation has been soiled by labeling it as a piracy bearer, and that is why many ask “Is Kodi legal?” You can read more about Kodi and whether it is legal or not here.

• Summer of Code: Plan for the grand finale

  To get that done, I have to polish up my smack-openpgp branch which has grown to a size of 7000 loc. There are still some minor quirks, but Florian recommended to focus on the big picture instead of spending too much time on small details and edge cases.

  I also have to release pgpainless to maven central and establish some kind of release cycle. It will be a future challenge for me personally to synchronize the releases of smack-openpgp and pgpainless.

• Collaborative World Shaping: Why Open-Source Tech Matters in a For-Impact Future

  How many lives could be saved if there was a way to vastly cut down inefficiency and through bureaucracy, by problem solving at a global scale? Could technology help us reach more individuals in need more meaningfully, substantially helping people affected by disasters – in less time?

  The technology is already out there – but not enough people know about it.

  In 2017, Hurricane Irma—the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean—made landfall; with widespread, “catastrophic” damage, disaster relief organizations were overwhelmed. “A lot of traditional means of crisis response are very top down, and they didn’t really kick in — we saw headlines about how the Red Cross didn’t show up to shelters,” said Greg Bloom, a community organizer and civic hacker who knew he had to step in to assist.

• The First Open-Source Smart Contract Platform to be Started by Rootstock

  RSK Labs, formerly known as Rootstock, an Argentinian startup building the first open-source smart contract platform with a 2-way peg to Bitcoin.RSK Labs CEO Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar on Bitcoin Smart Contracts Sidechain and Crypto Industry Challenges.

  Even though at this point of time the 2-way peg security of the RSK blockchain is still relying on a group of third parties called ‘Federation’, in the future the developers promise to bring a “trustless” automatic peg. How fast this happens to some degree depends on the overall miners support.

  The company says its goal is to add value and functionality to the Bitcoin ecosystem by enabling Ethereum-like smart-contracts, near instant payments and higher-scalability, and this past January after almost two years of development its mainnet dubbed Bamboo was finally launched.

• Creality’s Ender 3 3D Printer is Now Fully Open Source

  Creality3D, founded in 2014, is a 3D printer manufacturer based in China, offering more than 20 products. Their popular Ender 3 was recently voted “Best 3D Printer Under $200” by All3DP (review here).

  Now, the company is making their most popular 3D printer, the Ender 3, completely open source.

  This makes it the first Open Source Hardware Association certified 3D printer in China. This means not just a few files have been shared, but all hardware, CAD files, board schematics and firmware files are available. You can find the updated versions on the company’s GitHub page.

• Charité's researchers integrate open-source platform into the 'Human Brain Project'

  Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) are pleased to announce that 'The Virtual Brain' neuroinformatics platform has joined the EU's Flagship 'Human Brain Project'. With financial support from the EU's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, Charité's researchers are now integrating their open-source platform into the 'Human Brain Project'. This will provide participating researchers with a research infrastructure that promotes efficiency and reproducibility. The researchers will focus on refining the theoretical underpinnings of the computer models used, developing efficient simulation technology, and working on neuroinformatics solutions that enhance the reproducibility of studies.

• PDS 0.98s release

  PDS 0.98s is released with the following changes

  1. Fix compilation issue on raspberry pi.
  2. Minor rework and optimization on balance code path.
  3. Fix wrong nr_max_tries in migrate_pending_tasks.

  This is mainly a bug fix and minor optimization release for 4.17. The rework of balance code doesn't go well, it actually make more overhead than current implement. Another rework which based on current implement is still on going, hopefully be included in next release.

• PDS-MQ CPU Scheduler Revised For The Linux 4.17 Kernel With Minor Optimizations

  Alfred Chen announced this week the release of PDS-mq 0.98s, his latest patch-set of this CPU scheduler against the Linux 4.17 upstream code-base and includes minor optimization work and bug fixes.

  The PDS scheduler stands for the "Priority and Deadline based Skiplist multiple queue scheduler" that is derived from Con Kolivas' former BFS scheduler with Variable Run Queue (VRQ) support. PDS design principles are to be a simple CPU process scheduler yet efficient and scalable. PDS-mq differs from Con Kolivas' current MuQSS scheduler.

• Add infrastructure for Vblank and page flip events in vkms simulated by hrtimer

  Since the beginning of May 2018, I have been diving into the DRM subsystem. In the beginning, nothing made sense to me, and I had to fight hard to understand how things work. Fortunately, I was not alone, and I had great support from Gustavo Padovan, Daniel Vetter, Haneen Mohammed, and the entire community. Recently, I finally delivered a new feature for VKMS: the infrastructure for Vblank and page flip events.

  At this moment, VKMS have regular Vblank events simulated through hrtimers (see drm-misc-next), which is a feature required by VKMS to mimic real hardware [6]. The development approach was entirely driven by the tests provided by IGT, more specifically the kms_flip. I modified IGT to read a module name via command line and force the use of it, instead of using only the modules defined in the code (patch submitted to IGT, see [1]). With this modification in the IGT, my development process to add a Vblank infrastructure to VKMS had three main steps as Figure 1 describes.

• The State Of The VKMS Driver, Preparations For vBlank & Page Flip Events

  One of the exciting additions to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle is the virtual "VKMS" kernel mode-setting driver. The driver is still a work-in-progress, but multiple developers are working on it.

• NIR Continues To Be Prepped For OpenCL Support

  Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst who joined Red Hat several months ago has been working on Nouveau NIR support as stepping towards SPIR-V/compute support and this summer the work very much remains an active target.

• Nouveau Gallium3D Moves Closer Towards OpenGL 4.5 Compliance

  While the RadeonSI and Intel i965 Mesa drivers have been at OpenGL 4.5 compliance for a while now, the Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver has been bound to OpenGL 4.3 officially.

  This Nouveau Gallium3D driver for NVIDIA "Fermi" graphics hardware and newer has effectively supported all of the OpenGL 4.4/4.5 extensions, but not officially. Originally the NVC0 problem for OpenGL 4.4 and newer was the requirement of passing the OpenGL Conformance Test Suite (CTS), which at first wasn't open-source. But now The Khronos Group has made it available to everyone as open-source. Additionally, the proper legal wrangling is in place so the Nouveau driver could become a conforming Khronos adopter under the X.Org Foundation without any associated costs/fees with Nouveau being purely open-source and primarily considered a community driver.