Gone are the days when prototyping your electronic gadget required you to fiddle with the breadboard. Dirty design, unsteady wire connections and having to do too much to get simple stuff working. Arduino has solved all of that today.

Linux is an Operating System (more specifically a kernel) that provides an interface between the computer hardware and the user. Like Microsoft Windows and OS X, Linux provides a platform to the users, enabling them to carry out their daily chores on their beloved computer. And in case you dual-booted or installed Linux on your computer or are just curious to know how Linux can make your life easier, then, you are at the right place.

• Fedora 28 : Can you fix your Fedora !?

• Fedora AMIs gets ENA support

  It’s been a while that Amazon introduced Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) Support to their cloud. Amazon EC2 provides enhanced networking capabilities to C5, C5 with instance storage, F1, G3, H1, I3, m4.16xlarge, M5, P2, P3, R4, and X1 instances through the Elastic Network Adapter (ENA).

• Bodhi 3.8.0 released

• F28-20180524 Updated iso released

• Weekend Reading: Ansible

• Two Stocks Seeing A Clear Path Ahead: Workday, Inc. (WDAY), Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

• How Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) Delivered A Better ROE Than Its Industry

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) – Institutional Ownership and Transactions

• Taking a Look at the Operational Data for Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

• Igalia Continues Working On Wayland & Accelerated Media Decode In Chromium On Linux

  Months ago we had reported on Igalia's efforts for improving hardware video/media acceleration on the Chromium browser stack for Linux and getting Chromium ready for Wayland but it's been relatively quiet since then with no status updates. Fortunately, a Phoronix reader pointed to a fresh round of ongoing work in this space.

  Igalia is working on supporting the V4L2 VDA (Video Decode Acceleration) on the Linux desktop for video/image decode of H.264, VP8, VP9, etc. Up to now the V4L2 VDA support was just used on ARM and under Chrome OS. This is part of the consulting firm's work on delivering first-rate Wayland support for Chromium -- it's a task they have been working on for quite some time.

• Radeon GPU Profiler 1.2 Released With RenderDoc Interoperability

  AMD's GPUOpen group has announced the release of Radeon GPU Profiler 1.2, it's open-source GPU performance profiler. What's significant about this release is initial interoperability with the popular RenderDoc debugger.

  Beginning with Radeon GPU Profiler 1.2, there is beta support for allowing a profile be triggered from RenderDoc and for displaying data across the opposite tool along with synchronization between the two utilities.

• Mir Is Running On Arch Linux; Mir Also Progressing With EGLStreams Support

  Prominent Mir developer Alan Griffiths of Canonical has published his latest weekly update on the status of this Linux display server that continues working on supporting Wayland clients.

  First up, via the UBports community, Mir is now working on Arch Linux after some basic changes and packaging work. So similar to Ubuntu and Fedora and others, it's now easy to run Mir on Arch Linux if so desired.

• VK9 - Direct3D 9 Over Vulkan - Hits 26th Milestone

  It's been a wild week for the various Direct3D-over-Vulkan projects with VKD3D 1.0 being released for the initial Direct3D 12 over Vulkan bits from the ongoing work in the Wine project to DXVK continuing to get better at its D3D11-over-VLK support. There's also an update on the VK9 front.

• Wine-Staging 3.9 Fixes D3D 10/11 Gaming Performance Regressions

  One day after the exciting Wine 3.9 update with VKD3D work and more, the Wine-Staging code has been updated against this latest development release.

  While since the revival of Wine-Staging earlier this year there has been more than 900 out-of-tree/experimental patches against this Wine branch, with Wine-Staging 3.9 that patch count comes in at 895 patches. It's great to see with more of the changes working their way into upstream Wine after being vetted while other patches are no longer relevant. Also decided this week is that Wine-Staging developers will rely upon the WineHQ bug infrastructure for handling the submission of new Wine-Staging patches so that the work is much easier to track by users/developers in seeing the status and background on proposed patches for the staging tree.

• « The Microsoft Cyber Attack » : a German Documentary from the ARD on Relations Between Microsoft and Public Administration Now Available in English

  On February 19th, 2018, the German public broadcaster (ARD) aired a documentary on Microsoft relations with public administrations. Part of the inquiry is about the Open Bar agreement between Microsoft and the French ministry of Defense, including interviews of French Senator Joëlle Garriaud-Maylam, Leïla Miñano, a journalist, and Étienne Gonnu of April.

  The documentary is now available in English thanks to Deutsche Welle (DW), the German public international broadcaster, on its Youtube channel dedicated to documentaries : The Microsoft Cyber Attack. It should be noted that April considers itself as a Free software advocate, rather than open source, as the voice-over suggests.

• VPNFilter UNIX Trojan – How to Remove It and Protect Your Network

  This article has been created to explain what exactly is the VPNFilter malware and how to secure your network against this massive infection by protecting your router as well as protecting your computers.

  A new malware, going by the name of VPNFilter has reportedly infected over 500 thousand router devices across most widely used brands such as Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR as well as TP-Link, mostly used in homes and offices. The cyber-sec researchers at Cisco Talos have reported that the threat is real and it is live, even thought the infected devices are under investigation at the moment. The malware reportedly has something to do with the BlackEnergy malware, which targeted multiple devices in Ukraine and Industrial Control Systems in the U.S.. If you want to learn more about the VPNFilter malware and learn how you can remove it from your network plus protect your network, we advise that you read this article.

• FBI: Reboot Your Router Now To Fight Malware That Affected 500,000 Routers

• Compliance is Not Synonymous With Security

  While the upcoming GDPR compliance deadline will mark an unprecedented milestone in security, it should also serve as a crucial reminder that compliance does not equal security. Along with the clear benefits to be gained from upholding the standards enforced by GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and other regulatory bodies often comes a shift toward a more compliance-centric security approach. But regardless of industry or regulatory body, achieving and maintaining compliance should never be the end goal of any security program. Here’s why:

• Dialing up security for Docker containers

  Docker containers are a convenient way to run almost any service, but admins need to be aware of the need to address some important security issues.

  Container systems like Docker are a powerful tool for system administrators, but Docker poses some security issues you won't face with a conventional virtual machine (VM) environment. For example, containers have direct access to directories such as /proc, /dev, or /sys, which increases the risk of intrusion. This article offers some tips on how you can enhance the security of your Docker environment.

• 11 Best Programming Fonts

  There are many posts and sites comparing fonts for programming and they are all amazing articles. So why I repeated the same subject here? Since I always found myself lost in dozens of fonts and could not finger out which one was best for me. So today I tried many fonts and picked up the following fonts for you. These fonts are pretty popular and easy to get. And most importantly, all these fonts are FREE!

• New open-source web apps available for students and faculty

  Jupyter is an open source web environment for writing code and visualizing data. Over the past few years, it has become increasingly popular across a wide range of academic disciplines.

  [...]

  JupyterHub is a variation of the Jupyter project, which adds support for user account management and enterprise authentication. The TLT instance allows students and faculty to log in with their credentials for full access to their own Jupyter environment and provides direct access to their Penn State Access Account Storage Space (PASS). Using PASS for storage provided a large persistent storage space that students and faculty were already familiar with and was easily accessible from the local lab systems or their personal devices.

• An Ultrasound Driver With Open Source FPGAs

  Ultrasound imaging has been around for decades, but Open Source ultrasound has not. While there are a ton of projects out there attempting to create open ultrasound devices, most of this is concentrated on the image-processing side of things, and not the exceptionally difficult problem of pinging a sensor at millions of times a second, listening for the echo, and running that through a very high speed ADC.

  For his entry into the Hackaday Prize, [kelu124] is doing just that. He’s building an ultrasound board that’s built around Open Hardware, a fancy Open Source FPGA, and a lot of very difficult signal processing. It also uses some Rick and Morty references, so you know this is going to be popular with the Internet peanut gallery.

  The design of the ultrasound system is based around an iCE40 FPGA, the only FPGA with an Open Source toolchain. Along with this, there are a ton of ADCs, a DAC, pulsers, and a high voltage section to drive the off-the-shelf ultrasound head. If you’re wondering how this ultrasound board interfaces with the outside world, there’s a header for a Raspberry Pi on there, too, so this project has the requisite amount of blog cred.

• Summer of Code: Advancing the prototyp

• Easily make a Windows bootable USB from with Linux Mint with WoeUSB

• How to install and use the Titan text-based password manager on Linux

• On collecting metrics

• Tracking Quota

• Trouble again with PulseAudio and Thunderbird sound notifications

• Google Summer of Code 2018 – Coding Period (May 14th to May 28th): Initial implementation of LVM VG creation in Calamares

• How to set up transmission-daemon on a Raspberry Pi and control it via web interface

• Customize GuixSD: Use Stock SSH Agent Everywhere!

  On GuixSD, I like to use the GNOME desktop environment. GNOME is just one of the various desktop environments that GuixSD supports. By default, the GNOME desktop environment on GuixSD comes with a lot of goodies, including the GNOME Keyring, which is GNOME's integrated solution for securely storing secrets, passwords, keys, and certificates.

  The GNOME Keyring has many useful features. One of those is its SSH Agent feature. This feature allows you to use the GNOME Keyring as an SSH agent. This means that when you invoke a command like ssh-add, it will add the private key identities to the GNOME Keyring. Usually this is quite convenient, since it means that GNOME users basically get an SSH agent for free!

• IBM pledges $30M, Calls for Coders to Join Global Effort Combating Natural Disasters

• Admins Aren't Patching Open Source Says Black Duck Security Report [Ed: More FUD from Microsoft-connected Black Duck]

• Closing the gap between open-source and enterprise-ready [Ed: SAP perpetuating the myth that Free software means "not suitable for enterprise use"]

• Open-Source Licensing: Mitigate Your Risk

  Large software companies actively police their rights with license audits and true-up demands. Non-compliance is frequently found, and getting caught flat-footed on a software audit can be a million-dollar-plus problem. Even seemingly unrelated events, like moving to a cloud-based solution, can have a cascade effect on existing software licenses, and not proactively recognizing that creates unnecessary risk. Similarly, the free open-source software tools and applications used to efficiently create new products may need to be re-licensed on paid commercial terms when transitioning to a distribution or SaaS deployment phase.

• Why should we care about cutting and pasting open source code?

  It’s common for developers to want to give credit where credit is due. The problem with how this is commonly done is that often the original copyright and licence aren’t brought along with the snippet, and the developer may give credit in a flippant way using language such as “code stolen from xyz” or “shamelessly lifted from the Foo project”.  While this language is taken badly by the legal team, it’s often a sign of the developer trying to carve out attribution for this copied code. It’s important to provide clear guidance on how to properly bring in code snippets for licensing and security review purposes. Preserving or adding the proper copyright and license information is important to remain in compliance. It’s also invaluable for future readers of the source code to understand who wrote what.

• Tesla's GPL compliance, a new open source AI from Tencent, and more

• Eudora saved thanks to open sourcing

  It took the organisation some five years of wrangling with the Eudora's IP owner Qualcomm, but eventually the once much-loved Mac then more software got given the open source greenlight.

  Eudora was created in 1988 by Steve Dorner while he was working at the University of Illinois. As email started to get big in the world of computing so too did Eudora in the mid-1990s. Qualcomm licensed the software from the University of Illinois and hired Dorner.

• Top 10 Weirdest Names for Open Source Projects

  In the early stages of developing a new open source project, most developers rarely take the time to think about their future branding strategy. After all, a great idea, top notch code, and a passionate following are the winning formula when you’re getting a project underway.

  However the name you choose for your project can play a role in picking up a loyal following and attracting the curious.

  Names have power. They indicate tone and the intent. They can, if chosen well, inspire and unify action. They’re an important part of a project’s brand and tone of voice.

• SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Katran

  While engineers are likely to implement hardware-based solutions for handling network load balance, Facebook’s scale of operation far outweighed the practicality of hardware load balancing, instead requiring the development of a lightweight software solution. The current result of Facebook’s efforts is its latest open-source release, scalable network load balancer Katran.

• How Far Is Far Enough?

  Now, a new project from the Memento team holds out the promise of similar optimizations for more generic Web sites. The concept for Memento Tracer is to crowd-source a database of webrecorder.io-like crawls of complex Web sites in a form that can be analyzed to generate abstract templates similar to the platform templates on which LOCKSS plugins are mostly based. [...]

• American Express Integrates Blockchain To Its Membership Rewards Program

  Financial services corporation American Express (AmEx) has announced a blockchain application to its Membership Rewards program in partnership with online merchant Boxed, Associated Press reported May 23.

  AmEx announced that it is integrating blockchain technology developed by Hyperledger, an open source blockchain project under the Linux Foundation, to let merchants design customized offers for AmEx cardholders in order to increase customer engagement.

• Interview: Riccardo Spagni co-founder of a new open source blockchain

  South African cryptocurrency expert and lead maintainer of the Monero project Riccardo “fluffypony” Spagni has co-founded a new open source blockchain protocol named Tari.

  Tari is being built as a blockchain protocol for managing, transferring, and using digital assets, and is stewarded by a team based in Johannesburg.

  The Johannesburg-based team will work on building a blockchain protocol as a second-layer solution on top of Monero, leveraging the existing cryptocurrency’s security while offering a scalable and dynamic platform for digital assets.

• CheapAir Ditches BitPay For Open-Source Bitcoin Payments

  Travel and accommodation website CheapAir.com has appeared to choose self-hosted payment processor BTCPay for its Bitcoin payments, shunning industry stalwart BitPay.

  [...]

  Coinbase revealed it was retiring its merchant processing function in April, a move which the cryptocurrency industry condemned for its disruptive consequences.

  BitPay, a processor which along with Coinbase continues to be arguably the best-known option for Bitcoin payments, appeared to miss out on wooing CheapAir, meanwhile, which has offered Bitcoin since 2014 and was the first ever travel agency world-wide to accept bitcoin.

• Ontology (ONT) Develops its Open-source Triones Consensus System economic model

  The Ontology (ONT) team uses the blockchain technology and the Internet to explore in-depth levels of the information industry. The team’s plans include developing an open-source distributed trust ecosystem called Triones Consensus System that’s based on the Ontology chain network.

• Linux 4.16.12

• Linux 4.14.44

• Linux 4.9.103

• Linux 4.4.133

• Linux 3.18.110

• Wine Announcement

  The Wine development release 3.9 is now available.

• Wine 3.9 Defaults To OpenGL Core Contexts For D3D, Plumbing For VKD3D

  Wine 3.9 is out as the project's latest bi-weekly development release. This latest build is certainly on the interesting side of the 3.x series.

  Two days ago marked VKD3D 1.0 being released as the initial version of Wine's Direct3D 12 over Vulkan translation layer for getting their D3D12 support efforts going. With today's Wine 3.9 release there is some of the initial plumbing for being able to support VKD3D.

• Wine 3.9 released adding in the start of Direct 3D 12 over Vulkan support with vkd3d

  Wine 3.9 is now officially out and it's actually quite an exciting release, especially as it pulls in the recently release vkd3d for Direct 3D 12 with Vulkan.

• Testing GNU FreeDink in your browser

  This is a first version that can be polished further but it works quite well.
  This is the original C/C++/SDL2 code with a few tweaks, cross-compiled to WebAssembly (and an alternate version in asm.js) with emscripten.
  Nothing brand new I know, but things are getting smoother, and WebAssembly is definitely a performance boost.

  I like distributed and autonomous tools, so I'm generally not inclined to web-based solutions.
  In this case however, this is a local version of the game. There's no server side. Savegames are in your browser local storage. Even importing D-Mods (game add-ons) is performed purely locally in the in-memory virtual FS with a custom .tar.bz2 extractor cross-compiled to WebAssembly.

• Welcome Punam to the Test pilot team!

  A couple months ago Punam transferred from another team at Mozilla to join the Test Pilot team. Below she answers some questions about her experience and what she’s looking forward to. Welcome, Punam!

  [...]

  Before Mozilla I have worked with SonicWall, eBay and Symantec doing web development.

• This week in Mixed Reality: Issue 7

  Missed us last week? Our team met in Chicago for a work week. If you had the chance to come and meet us at the CHIVR / AR Chicago meetup, thanks for swinging by. We strategized our short and long term plans and we're really excited to share what we're unfolding in the coming weeks.

• Why bootstrap?

  Over the next few quarters, I'm going to focus my attention on Mozilla's experimentation platform. One of the first questions we need to answer is how we're going to calculate and report the necessary measures of variance. Any experimentation platform needs to be able to compare metrics between two groups.

  For example, say we're looking at retention for a control and experiment group. Control shows a retention of 88.45% and experiment shows a retention of 90.11%. Did the experimental treatment cause a real increase in retention or did the experiment branch just get lucky when we assigned users? We need to calculate some measure of variance to be able to decide.

  The two most common methods to do this calculation are the frequentist's two-sample t-test or some form of the bootstrap.

  In ye olden days, we'd be forced to use the two-sample t-test. The bootstrap requires a lot of compute power that just wasn't available until recently. As you can imagine, the bootstrap is all the rage in the Data Science world. Of course it is. We get to replace statistics with raw compute power! That's the dream!

For those of you with some extra time over this US holiday weekend due to Memorial Day, FreeBSD 11.2 Beta 3 is now available for testing.

This third weekly beta release of FreeBSD 11.2 comes with various updates to the LLVM compiler stack, support for setting service types for outgoing RDMA connections via the KRPING utility, fixing a SPARC64 boot issue, and a variety of other bug fixes.

Direct: FreeBSD 11.2-BETA3 Now Available

Now in 2018, Cumulus' model of enabling white box networking with a Linux based distribution has increasingly become the norm and along with that shift, Cumulus has become increasingly successful. Cumulus has raised a total of $129 million in funding, including a $43 million Series D round that was announced on Jan. 23.

In a video interview with EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet at the 2018 OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, Rivers outlines how the company has evolved in recent years and where it is going next.

"We have help to change the world around with the concept of buying switching hardware and software separately," Rivers said.

Also: Open source networking startup Lumina Networks raises $10 million Series A round from Verizon Ventures

• QNAP Launches 16-Bay AMD Ryzen-Based TS-1677X NAS with 10 GbE

  QNAP will offer four models of the TS-1677X NAS with various CPUs and different amount of memory. The manufacturer did not disclose prices, but since we are talking about enterprise-grade NAS, they are not going to be low.

• Latest ReSpeaker mic array offers improved barge-in and full duplex operation

  Seeed has launched an upgraded, $69 “ReSpeaker Mic Array v2.0” for far-field voice control that works with any Linux, Mac, or Windows computer. It enables simultaneous playback and recording and offers improved barge-in voice recognition.

  [...]

  Seeed launched the ReSpeaker microphone array on Kickstarter in 2016, and followed up a year later with the $25 ReSpeaker 4-Mic Array for Raspberry Pi add-on board. Seeed’s new v.2.0 is an upgrade to the original ReSpeaker, but like the Raspberry Pi version, it’s not an SBC boardset, but is instead controlled via a separate attached computer.

• Microchip – New SOM simplifies industrial-grade Linux designs (SAMA5D27)

  The Microchip SAMA5D27 SOM removes the complexity of managing signal integrity, EMI and ESD for high-speed interfaces and power management in MPU-based industrial Linux designs.

One of the ongoing system administration controversies in Linux is that there is an ongoing effort to obsolete the old, cross-Unix standard network administration and diagnosis commands of ifconfig, netstat and the like and replace them with fresh new Linux specific things like ss and the ip suite. Old sysadmins are generally grumpy about this; they consider it yet another sign of Linux's 'not invented here' attitude that sees Linux breaking from well-established Unix norms to go its own way. Although I'm an old sysadmin myself, I don't have this reaction. Instead, I think that it might be both sensible and honest for Linux to go off in this direction. There are two reasons for this, one ostensible and one subtle.

The ostensible surface issue is that the current code for netstat, ifconfig, and so on operates in an inefficient way. Per various people, netstat et al operate by reading various files in /proc, and doing this is not the most efficient thing in the world (either on the kernel side or on netstat's side). You won't notice this on a small system, but apparently there are real impacts on large ones. Modern commands like ss and ip use Linux's netlink sockets, which are much more efficient. In theory netstat, ifconfig, and company could be rewritten to use netlink too; in practice this doesn't seem to have happened and there may be political issues involving different groups of developers with different opinions on which way to go.

• openSUSE Donates 10 More Raspberry Pis to GNU Health

  The openSUSE Project once again donated 10 Raspberry Pis to GNU Health Project, which were handed over to the project’s founder Luis Falcon at the openSUSE Conference today.

  Last year, the openSUSE Project donated 10 Raspberry Pis to the non-profit, non-government organizations (NGO) that delivers free open-source software for health practitioners, health institutions and governments worldwide.

• Uyuni: Forking Spacewalk with Salt and Containers

  Members of a new open source community project called Uyuni announced today at openSUSE Conference that a fork of the open-source systems management solution Spacewalk is on its way.

• OpenSUSE Leap 15 released (Linux with enterprise features)

  The latest version of OpenSUSE is out today, bringing a new installer, improvements for cloud usage, and support for the GNOME and KDE desktop environments.

  OpenSUSE Leap 15 is also more closely aligned with SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE), making it easy for users to migrate from the community-based operating system to the professional version that offers better stability and long-term support, among other things.

• How to Use Steam Link on Android

• Pioneer's new NEX in-dash receivers take CarPlay or Android Auto fully wireless

• How to install Android P beta on the Sony Xperia XZ2

• Android Go: Is Android's light version for cheap phones any good?

• Fuchsia Friday: How ad targeting might be a hidden cost of Fuchsia's structure

The latest openSUSE release Leap 15 is here with updated software, Wayland support and an easier upgrade procedure to the famed SUSE Linux Enterprise Edition.