• Announcing CrossOver 18.5.0

  CrossOver 18.5 includes the FAudio library to provide superior audio support for games. FAudio is a reimplementation of XAudio2, a low-level audio library for Windows. This improvement broadens CrossOver’s game compatibility and resolves a wide variety of audio bugs on both macOS and Linux.

  CrossOver 18.5 resolves several Office 2010 bugs related to activation and licensing. The first involves a change which disrupted the activation status of Office 2010 bottles upgraded from CrossOver 17.x and earlier to CrossOver 18.x. Users who experienced persistent activation requests on earlier releases of CrossOver 18 should be able to successfully activate Office 2010 on CrossOver 18.5. We have also resolved a bug which caused Office 2010 to attempt and fail configuration on every launch for some users.

  On Linux, CrossOver 18.5 supports the very latest release of Office 365 and resolves a sign-in bug impacting Office 365 Home users.

  Finally, CrossOver 18.5 includes preliminary support for OneNote 2016 on Linux.

• CrossOver 18.5 Released - Based On Wine 4.0 While Pulling In FAudio

  CodeWeavers, the main sponsor/contributor to the Wine project, announced the release today of their commercial CrossOver 18.5 software for more easily running Windows games and applications on Linux and macOS.

• The GOG Spring Sale is now live, tons of titles discounted with flash deals each day

  Someone please lock away my wallet, as the GOG Spring Sale is live and it's full of discounted Linux games.

  For this huge sale, GOG are also doing Flash Deals so every 24 hours a couple of games will get a higher than usual discount so you will need to keep going back for the best.

• Valve show off their new Steam Library design and a new Events page

  At GDC today, Valve did their presentation and they finally showed off the new design coming for the Library page and more.

  For those with a growing backlog of games, the Steam Library as it is right now is so basic it's just incredibly unhelpful. Going by what they've shown off, it's actually looking a serious amount better. Firstly, it has a home page for your Steam Library, to go over some recent games and recently updated titles, as well as show a slice of your friends list. That's a pretty handy feature, especially if you have a game you play regularly enough it will probably be quicker and easier to get going the next time.

• You can now try XCOM 2 free until March 25th, also on a big sale

  Firaxis Games have put their strategy game XCOM 2 up to play for free between now and March 25th, so if you've been on the fence this is a great opportunity.

  It's quite easily my absolute favourite strategy game on Linux, much more interesting than the first of the newer XCOM games (although that's still damn fun too). It does have a few niggles and some performance issues here and there but that's not down to Feral Interactive's port as it's not much different on Windows.

• Humble Store are giving away Tacoma during their Indie Mega Week sale

  Humble Store has another free game from you to grab with Tacoma, along with their Indie Mega Week sale now live.

  I enjoyed my Tacoma play-through, done in a single sitting and I think it's worth grabbing and actually playing. You can see my previous thoughts here. You can grab your free copy here, which requires subbing to their newsletter.

• Python for NLP: Vocabulary and Phrase Matching with SpaCy

  This is the third article in this series of articles on Python for Natural Language Processing. In the previous article, we saw how Python's NLTK and spaCy libraries can be used to perform simple NLP tasks such as tokenization, stemming and lemmatization. We also saw how to perform parts of speech tagging, named entity recognition and noun-parsing. However, all of these operations are performed on individual words.

• Small history about QA

  To ensure of the quality of PHP, of no regression is a complex, long and serious work. Thanks to all the actors, developers, QA team and users, this works pretty well.
  So, if you use PHP in a development environment, it is essential to install the RC versions to detect and report us quickly any problem, so we can react before the finale version.
  For users of my repository, the RC versions of PHP and various extensions are nearly always available in the testing repositories.

• PHP version 7.2.17RC1 and 7.3.4RC1

• Talk Python to Me: #204 StaticFrame, like Pandas but safer

• Test and Code: 69: The Pragmatic Programmer - Andy Hunt

  Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas wrote the seminal software development book, The Pragmatic Programmer. Together they founded The Pragmatic Programmers and are well known as founders of the agile movement and authors of the Agile Manifesto. They founded the Pragmatic Bookshelf publishing business in 2003.

• Coding for Time Zones & Daylight Saving Time — Oh, the Horror

• Deep-dive tutorial series on React, TypeScript, and TDD

• How to debug code in CodeReady Workspaces

• Intro to Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) in Python

Following my Plasma 5.15 distros list, this is a list of GNOME 3.32 distros which are available as installation LiveCD. GNOME 3.32 has been released recently at 13 March 2019 and rapidly being made available into several GNU/Linux distros for desktop, either within the ISO or in the repository. At this moment, you can download any of Ubuntu 19.04 and Fedora Rawhide (for installable LiveCD), followed by openSUSE Tumbleweed, Debian Experimental, Manjaro GNOME, and Mageia 7 (by manually upgrading from respective repositories) in order to quickly test GNOME 3.32. However, please note that this is based on today's data and can be changed rapidly over time. I wish this list helps you. Go ahead, happy downloading, happy testing!

• How to Configure Mouse Settings in Ubuntu

• How to Install and Configure Pydio on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• How to use recovery mode on Ubuntu

• Magic Wormhole – Send files with ease

• A Guide to Kubernetes Admission Controllers

• Installing Debian with encrypted boot using GRML

• How to install Minecraft on Linux Mint 19.1

• How to Install Slack on Ubuntu 18.04

Based on Debian GNU/Linux and Raspberry Pi's Raspbian operating systems, RaspEX Kodi Build 190321 is now available with the latest Kodi 18.1 "Leia" media center software featuring add-ons for watching Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Plex, as well as the lightweight LXDE desktop environment with VLC media player and NetworkManager.

RaspEX Kodi Build 190321 is also powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.0 kernel series, which apparently works very well with the recently launched Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ single-board computer. However, while Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is recommended for RaspEX, you can also install it on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B or the older Raspberry Pi 2 Model B.

• 8 Best Photoshop Alternatives For Android In 2019

• Best Android controllers of 2019

• Redmi Y3 gets Wi-Fi certification, will come with Android Pie

• Factory images and kernel source code now available for the Razer Phone 2’s Android Pie update

• Xiaomi is working on two Android One phones with in-display fingerprint scanners

• Chrome for Android’s tab groups are an easy way to organize tasks, here’s a sneak peek [Video]

• Android owners are boosting the sales of smartwatch makers, forecast says

• How to clear the cache on your Android phone to make it run faster

SparkyLinux gives you an operating system that is out-of-the-box ready for use. It comes with multimedia plugins, selected sets of apps, and its own custom tools to ease different tasks.

SparkyLinux is a well-thought-out Linux OS. It has straightforward controls that let you get your work done without distractions. The user interface is friendly, intuitive and efficient.

SparkyLinux is a very functional Linux OS. It is a solid choice for use as an all-purpose home edition with all the tools, codecs, plugins and drivers preinstalled.

You may not need the USB installation. However, if your computer runs Microsoft Windows or another Linux distro, putting SparkyLinux on a USB stick is much easier than setting up a dual boot on the hard drive or replacing whatever is running on that computer already.

Since smartphone came into our life, it has been influencing almost every spectrum of our socio-cultural movements. As a Linux power user, being able to run smartphone applications right into your computer means a lot to many. Android, the de-facto smartphone operating system used by people worldwide also leverages the Linux ecosystem to achieve its objectives. Android emulators are pieces of computer applications that let you run your favorite Android apps or games directly from your Linux system. In this guide, we’ll outline the top 10 best Android Emulators for Linux that you can use today to run playstore apps right into your Linux machine.

• Links 21/3/2019: Wayland 1.17.0, Samba 4.10.0, OpenShot 2.4.4 and Zorin Beta
• Team UPC (Unitary Patent) is a Headless Chicken
• António Campinos Makes Up Claims About Patent Quality, Only to be Rebutted by Examiners, Union (Anyone But the ‘Puff Pieces’ Industry)
• Links 20/3/2019: Google Announces ‘Stadia’, Tails 3.13

• Android Q could bork Tasker, IFTTT functionality

• What's your favorite new thing in Android 10 Q? (results)

• OnePlus 3/3T Pie update (Android 9.0) beta testing recruitment goes live in China

• Samsung Galaxy A6+ (2018) receiving Android Pie update

• Android Pie for OnePlus 3/3T being tested in China, global rollout likely very soon

• Google Doodle Showing Up on Search Widget for Some Android Users

• Motorola is reportedly working on a new Android One phone

• Now you can unlock your android phone

If you live in the EU and have been wanting to explore IBM POWER hardware on Linux, a load of Tyan Habanero servers recently became available through a German retailer for 269 EUR (~$306 USD) that comes equipped with a 10-core POWER8 processor. While not POWER9, it's still an interesting Linux-capable beast and the price is unbeatable if you have been wanting to add POWER hardware to your collection. Phoronix reader Lauri Kasanen recently bought one of these IBM POWER servers at the 269 EUR price point and has shared thoughts on this server as well as some benchmarks. Here is Lauri's guest post checking out this low-cost 2U IBM server.

Recently a batch of refurbished POWER8 servers became available for very affordable prices. Always eager to play with power, especially for netbook-class prices, I grabbed one, and decided to run some benchmarks for everyone. For comparison data I used Michael's POWER9 benchmark from November, recent enough that software versions are close enough.

• Google is winning in education, but Apple and Microsoft are battling for market share

  Apple used to have the most devices in U.S. schools, but Google soared to the top after the release of the Chromebook in 2011. In 2018, Chromebooks made up 60 percent of all laptops and tablets purchased for U.S. K-12 classrooms, up from just 5 percent in 2012. Microsoft is second at 22 percent, followed by Apple, with 18 percent of shipments to U.S. schools in 2018, according to data from Futuresource Consulting.

• Design and Web team summary – 15 March 2019

  This was a fairly busy two weeks for the Web & design team at Canonical.

  [...]

  We maintain the Vanilla css framework that most of the websites at Ubuntu and Canonical use. Here are a few patterns and websites that were updated.

• The New York Times has released an open-source tool to let you manage all your internal knowledge more easily

  Library is a wiki at heart, but it uses the familiar Google Docs as its backend and editing interface, easing maintenance for a wide population of users (“we wanted to meet people where they already were, rather than trying to teach them something entirely new”).

• We Built a Collaborative Documentation Site. Deploy Your Own With the Push of a Button.

  Our solution to this problem has worked well for us. We hope others will find value in the technology we built, so we’re releasing Library to the open source community.

• foss-north 2019: Community Day

  I don’t dare to count the days until foss-north 2019, but it is very soon. One of the changes to this year is that we expand the conference with an additional community day.

  The idea with the community day here is that we arrange for conference rooms all across town and invite open source projects to use them for workshops, install fests, hackathons, dev sprints or whatever else they see fit. It is basically a day of mini-conferences spread out across town.

  The community day is on April 7, the day before the conference days, and is free of charge.

• FSFE Newsletter March 2019

  This month's newsletter highlights the new project the FSFE recently joined and the funding opportunities it offers, that you may want to take advantage of. You can get the latest updates on the Copyright Directive reform and the hottest news regarding Article 13, as well as a short summary of what else has happened during the past month. In the Editor's choice section this month you can find interesting news on developments with the Radio Equipment Directive, and find out who else have expressed their support for our "Public Money? Public Code!" campaign and what they have to say about it.

• Google Open Sources Sandboxed API

  Google on Monday announced that it has made available its Sandboxed API as open source in an effort to make it easier for software developers to create secure products.

  It’s not uncommon for applications to be affected by memory corruption or other types of vulnerabilities that can be exploited for remote code execution and other purposes. Using a sandbox ensures that the code responsible for processing user input can only access the resources it needs to, which mitigates the impact of a flaw by containing the exploit to a restricted environment and preventing it from interacting with other software components.

  While sandboxing can be highly useful, Google says it’s often not easy to implement. That is why the internet giant has decided to open source its Sandboxed API, which should make it easier to sandbox C and C++ libraries. The company has also open sourced its core sandboxing project, Sandbox2, which can be used on its own to secure Linux processes.

• BMC Touches Clouds with Job Scheduler

  Clouds are growing quickly as IT executives look to find more flexibility and cut costs by adopting cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications. But most enterprises aren’t getting rid of all their on-premise systems, which means somebody needs to connect those cloud and on-premise systems. One of those “somebodies” is BMC Software.

• Midnight Commander Comes To IBM i

  IBM i professionals who work extensively with files in the IFS will be happy to hear a new software utility has been ported to the IBM i PASE environment that could save them a bunch of time. The open source software, called Midnight Commander, gives developers and administrators a handy command line experience that can help speed up tasks, especially when giving commands to large number of files stored on remote machines.

  Midnight Commander was originally developed in 1994 as a file utility for UNIX, which was beginning to emerge from software labs to challenge minicomputer platforms of the day, such as the AS/400, as well as early Windows operating systems. Miguel de Icaza, who’s known for founding the Mono project (among others), is credited with creating Midnight Commander, but over the years development of the product has become a group effort.

  The utility, which is distributed via a GNU license from www.midnightcommander.org, was largely modeled off Norton Commander, an MS-DOS utility developed in the 1980s by Norton. But Midnight Commander has evolved into its own thing over the years, and the resemblance to that old Norton product today largely is only in the name.

A recent Global Market Insights report projects the single board computer market will grow from $600 million in 2018 to $1 billion by 2025. Yet, you don’t need to read a market research report to realize the SBC market is booming. Driven by the trends toward IoT and AI-enabled edge computing, new boards keep rolling off the assembly lines, many of them tailored for highly specific applications.

Much of the action has been in Linux-compatible boards, including the insanely popular Raspberry Pi. The number of different vendors and models has exploded thanks in part to the rise of community-backed, open-spec SBCs.

Here we examine 10 of the most intriguing, Linux-driven SBCs among the many products announced in the last four weeks that bookended the recent Embedded World show in Nuremberg. (There was also some interesting Linux software news at the show.) Two of the SBCs—the Intel Whiskey Lake based UP Xtreme and Nvidia Jetson Nano driven Jetson Nano Dev Kit—were announced only this week.

• Systemd's Nspawn Lands OCI Runtime Support

  Merged this morning into the systemd code-base was a big feature addition that's been in the works for the better part of one year by Lennart Poettering and other developers.

  Merged into the systemd tree is now the OCI runtime support for nspawn. Systemd's Nspawn, their tool that can be used for starting an OS within a lightweight container, now has support for the OCI run-time specification.

• AskFedora refresh: we’ve moved to Discourse!

• Packages of varnish-6.2.0 with matching vmods, for el6 and el7

• Sharing our Common Voices

  From the onset, our vision for Common Voice has been to build the world’s most diverse voice dataset, optimized for building voice technologies. We also made a promise of openness: we would make the high quality, transcribed voice data that was collected publicly available to startups, researchers, and anyone interested in voice-enabled technologies.

  Today, we’re excited to share our first multi-language dataset with 18 languages represented, including English, French, German and Mandarin Chinese (Traditional), but also for example Welsh and Kabyle. Altogether, the new dataset includes approximately 1,400 hours of voice clips from more than 42,000 people.

  With this release, the continuously growing Common Voice dataset is now the largest ever of its kind, with tens of thousands of people contributing their voices and original written sentences to the public domain (CC0). Moving forward, the full dataset will be available for download on the Common Voice site.

• Mozilla GFX: WebRender newsletter #42

  WebRender is a GPU based 2D rendering engine for web written in Rust, currently powering Mozilla’s research web browser servo and on its way to becoming Firefox‘s rendering engine.

• Firefox UX: Look over here! Results from a Firefox user research study about interruptions.

  The Attention War. There have been many headlines related to it in the past decade. This is the idea that apps and companies are stealing attention. It’s the idea that technologists throw up ads on websites in a feeble attempt to get the attention of the people who visit the website.

  In tech, or any industry really, people often say something to the effect of, “well if the person using this product or service only read the instructions, or clicked on the message, or read our email, they’d understand and wouldn’t have any problems”. We need people’s attention to provide a product experience or service. We’re all in the “attention war”, product designers and users alike.

  And what’s a sure-fire way to grab someone’s attention? Interruptions. Regardless if they’re good, bad, or neutral. Interruptions are not necessarily a “bad” thing, they can also lead to good behavior, actions, or knowledge.

• Google Releases Chrome 73 Update for Linux, Windows, and macOS

  Google has just released an update for Chrome 73, the major update of the browser that was shipped to all supported platforms earlier this month.

  Now at version 73.0.3683.86, Google Chrome comes with under-the-hood improvements on Windows, Linux, and macOS, and you can download it using the links here.

• Google will implement a Microsoft-style browser picker for EU Android devices

   

  We don't have many details on exactly how Google's new search and browser picker will work; there's just a single paragraph in the company's blog post. Google says it will "do more to ensure that Android phone owners know about the wide choice of browsers and search engines available to download to their phones. This will involve asking users of existing and new Android devices in Europe which browser and search apps they would like to use."

• EU hits Google with fine for abuse of AdSense service

   

  The European Commission has hit search giant Google with a third fine, related to abuse of its AdSense advertising service, and told the company to fork out €1.49 billion (A$2.38 billion) for breaching EU anti-trust rules.  

• The EU fines Google $1.69 billion for bundling search and advertising

   

  Google and the EU's European Commission are making all sorts of announcements lately. Fresh off the revelation that Google would implement a browser and search-engine picker in EU-sold Android devices, Google's advertising division is getting slapped with a fine next, to the tune of €1.5 billion ($1.69 billion). The European Commission's latest antitrust ruling says that Google's bundling of its advertising platform with its custom search engine program is anti-competitive toward other ad providers.

• How to Be a Tech-Savvy

  Learn how to write a program:
  You cannot make anything new in the computer world without programming skills. You can create windows, apps, websites, a desktop application using programming languages. Some programming languages that you can learn in your beginning level of becoming tech-savvy is Java, C, C++, Html, CSS, JAVASCRIPT, PHP, PYTHON. You can enhance your programming skills by sitting home by taking online tutorials.

  Use a Linux or Unix Operating System:
  If you want to be a tech- savvy I recommend using Unix operating system because a techy person mostly uses the Unix operating system in the world. Unix operating system is open source anyone can use it, and you can view its code too. So, it will help in enhancing your programming skills and learning about technical skills.

• JDK 12: The new features in Java 12

  The production release of Java Development Kit 12, based on Java SE (Standard Edition) 12, is now available. JDK 12 builds are available from Oracle for Linux, Windows, and MacOS. 

  [...]

  Open source builds are provided under the GNU General Public License v2, with Classpath Exception. Commercial builds of JDK 12 from Oracle can be found on the Oracle Technology network under a non-open source license.

• Python dictionary "addition" and "subtraction"

  A proposal to add a new dictionary operator for Python has spawned a PEP and two large threads on the python-ideas mailing list. To a certain extent, it is starting to look a bit like the "PEP 572 mess"; there are plenty of opinions on whether the feature should be implemented and how it should be spelled, for example. As yet, there has been no formal decision made on how the new steering council will be handling PEP pronouncements, though a review of open PEPs is the council's "highest priority". This PEP will presumably be added into the process; it is likely too late to be included in Python 3.8 even if it were accepted soon, so there is plenty of time to figure it all out before 3.9 is released sometime in 2021.

• Debugging and Profiling Python Scripts [Tutorial]

  Debugging and profiling play an important role in Python development. The debugger helps programmers to analyze the complete code. The debugger sets the breakpoints whereas the profilers run our code and give us the details of the execution time. The profilers will identify the bottlenecks in your programs. In this tutorial, we’ll learn about the pdb  Python debugger, cProfile module, and timeit module to time the execution of Python code.

  This tutorial is an excerpt from a book written by Ganesh Sanjiv Naik titled Mastering Python Scripting for System Administrators. This book will show you how to leverage Python for tasks ranging from text processing, network administration, building GUI, web-scraping as well as database administration including data analytics & reporting.

• VLANs and More Added to AccessEnforcer UTM Firewall

  AccessEnforcer Version 4.1 also updates firewall's operating system to OpenBSD 6.3. OpenBSD is one of the most secure operating systems in the world. Version 6.3 provides additional mitigations against the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities and also mitigates against return-oriented programming and other memory corruption attacks. 

• Norwegian aluminium firm slowly recovering from ransomware attack

   

  Norwegian aluminium maker Norsk Hydro says it has made some progress restoring its systems back to normal after being hit by Windows ransomware known as LockerGoGa on Monday evening.  

• Spammers Send Junk Mail to Thousands of Printers

  Spam has been with us since the very first days of email, but a Russian marketing agency recently took things a stage further by sending good old-fashioned paper-based junk mail over the internet.

  The company claims to have advertised a graphic design course for its client Skillbox using a software bot that searched for online printers. It printed a one-page promotion on every device it found, directing them to a website boasting about its exploits.

  The website for the company's marketing campaign, which I am deliberately not linking to here, explains that "by the 2024", it is "94% likely" that bots will replace accountants, auditors, and financial analysts by the million. Consequently, it says, accountants (or anyone else worried about being replaced by AI) should learn graphic design instead. The stats come from a five-year-old Oxford Martin School report, but that needn't concern us here.

  What's more interesting is another statistic: 600,000. That’s how many printers the marketing agency claim to have clogged up with advertising, according to this report from Graham Cluley.

  [...]

  It wouldn't be the first time that someone had spammed printers online. In December, a hacker calling himself TheHackerGiraffe spammed 50,000 printers promoting popular YouTube celebrity PewDiePie. Other incidents have been much darker. Nazi nerd Andrew Aurenheimer, a.k.a. Weev, sent white supremacist messages to every printer in North America that he could find instead of using Shodan, he used Masscan, which is a mass IP port scanner. 

• Android clampdown on calls and texts access trashes bunch of apps

  Android looks a little less open now that Google has begun to enforce draconian new rules on accessing a phone's call and text logs.

  Developers have been forced to remove features or in some cases change the fundamental nature of the application. One example is BlackBerry's Hub, an email client which also aggregated notifications from a variety of apps and presented them chronologically in a timeline. This application has lost its ability to includes calls and texts in that timeline.

  Exceptions created by Google don't seem to be honoured, developers complained. One said that an enterprise archiving app – a category specifically exempt from the clampdown – has been broken.

  Another developer, Miroslav Novosvetsky of MobileSoft, rued that he might have to withdraw his Callistics usage monitor app altogether.

• The martian packet case in our Neutron floating IP setup

  A community member opened a bug the other day related to a weird networking behavior in the Cloud VPS service, offered by the Cloud Services team at Wikimedia Foundation. This VPS hosting service is based on Openstack, and we implement the networking bits by means of Neutron.

  Our current setup is based on Openstack Mitaka (old, I know) and the networking architecture we use is extensively described in our docs. What is interesting today is our floating IP setup, which Neutron uses by means of the Netfilter NAT engine.

  Neutron creates a couple of NAT rules for each floating IP, to implement both SNAT and DNAT. In our setup, if a VM uses a floating IP, then all its traffic to and from The Internet will use this floating IP. In our case, the floating IP range is made of public IPv4 addresses.

Wayland 1.17 is released, with no changes (except the version) since RC1.

Also: Wayland 1.17 Released With Updated Protocol & Other Improvements

I am proud to announce the immediate release of OpenShot 2.4.4, the absolute best version yet! This is going to be a long post, but here is a quick summary for those who are short on time. This release brings huge performance and stability improvements, along with some major bug fixes, lots of polish, and many new features.

Also: OpenShot 2.4.4 Released With Better SVG Rendering, Preview Performance