The year is 2020, and Linux-based operating systems have never been more popular. All thanks to their increased security and privacy, smooth updates, and open-source nature, everyone wants to at least give a shot to its multitude of distributions. Now we have already covered some of the best Linux-based laptops that you can find in the market as of now. With that being said, we get it that they are not everyone’s cup of tea, so Linux PC desktops are also something that you should be taking a look at as well.

FaaS (Function-as-a-Service) is a category of cloud computing services. It’s a fairly new development that originated from PaaS. FaaS is a cloud computing model that abstracts server management and low-level infrastructure decisions away from developers, but takes it much further than PaaS. FaaS is a distinct technology. All allocation of resources is managed by the platform, allowing applications to be developed without any thought of implementation, load balancing, or scaling. It allows developers to execute small snippets of code in response to events without having to build complex infrastructure.

FaaS is often known as serverless. FaaS has been gaining popularity. The main advantage of this technology is the ability to create and run applications without the need for infrastructure management. In other words, when using a serverless architecture, developers no longer need to allocate resources, scale and maintain servers to run applications, or manage databases and storage systems.

Git is a popular version-control system, primarily used for code but popular in other disciplines, too. It can run locally on your computer for personal use, it can run on a server for collaboration, and it can also run as a hosted service for widespread public participation. There are many hosted services out there, and one of the most popular brands is GitHub.

GitHub is not open source. Pragmatically, this doesn't make much of a difference to most users. The vast majority of code put onto GitHub is, presumably, encouraged to be shared by everyone, so GitHub's primary function is a sort of public backup service. Should GitHub fold or drastically change its terms of service, recovering data would be relatively simple because it's expected that you have a local copy of the code you keep on GitHub. However, some organizations have come to rely on the non-Git parts of GitHub's service offerings, making migration away from GitHub difficult. That's an awkward place to be, so for many people and organizations, insurance against vendor lock-in is a worthwhile investment.

Do you suspect that your Android smartphone or tablet is infected with some malware or spyware? Well, there are several pointers that can indicate this is the case. For example, your device is unnecessarily slow and even freezes periodically, or displays popups. Experiencing these symptoms can mean that your device has been hacked but that is not always the case. Sometimes, devices act funny due to a handful of reasons including a security hack.

In today’s article, we give you five tips on how to check whether your phone is infected with malicious software as well as how to ensure that it is safe/protected.

Linux-based operating systems have a reputation for their high-security level. That's one of the reasons why the market share for Linux has been growing. The most commonly used operating systems such as Windows are often affected by targeted attacks in the form of ransomware infections, spyware, as well as worms, and malware.
As a result, many personal, as well as enterprise users, are turning to Linux-based operating systems such as the Ubuntu-based Linux OS for security purposes. While Linux based systems are not targeted as frequently as other popular operating systems, they are not completely foolproof. There are plenty of risks and vulnerabilities for all types of Linux devices which put your privacy as well as your identity at risk.

• Tuxera First to Bring Network Bandwidth-Saving SMB Compression Feature to Linux Environments

• Tuxera First to Bring Network Bandwidth-Saving SMB Compression Feature to Linux Environments

  Tuxera, a world-leader in quality-assured storage management and networking software, announced that the company's SMB server implementation, Fusion File Share by Tuxera, now offers transparent compression to platforms outside of Microsoft Windows. Compression is being rapidly and widely adopted in the storage industry as a feature in memory hardware, file system implementations, and also networking protocols such as Microsoft's server messaging block technology (SMB). The ability to compress files inline during transfer can significantly reduce bandwidth and transfer time. Microsoft released the transparent compression feature to their SMB protocol specification in early 2019. However, Tuxera is the first to implement SMB compression outside of Microsoft Windows, bringing this highly in-demand feature to Linux environments in enterprises around the world.

• Wake-on-LAN

  With Wake-on-LAN (WoL) it can be slightly easier to manage machines in-house. You can fire up the workstation and start the day’s compile jobs (to catch up with overnight work by the KDE community, say) while drinking an espresso downstairs and doomscrolling.

  [...]

  If all the administrative bits are in place, then the simple way to wake up a machine is wake <hostname>. This requires root, since it sends specially-crafted (broadcast) Ethernet packets, which isn’t something that regular users can do.

• AMD+SUSE Tackling Frequency Invariance For AMD EPYC 7002 CPUs - Phoronix

  Thanks to work by AMD and SUSE engineers, the Linux kernel could soon be seeing frequency invariance support for EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors for yielding greater performance and power efficiency.

  Over the past year we have seen a lot of Linux kernel work for dealing with frequency invariance but to now that on the x86 side has been focused on Intel Xeon processors. Now through the cooperation of AMD with patches led by SUSE, frequency invariance is being worked on for the EPYC 7002 "Rome" processors.

• Intel Begins Landing Their Open-Source Vulkan Driver Ray-Tracing Support

  This week marked the release of Vulkan 1.2.162 with the ray-tracing extensions now finalized. As such Intel's stellar open-source team has begun landing their work around Vulkan ray-tracing ahead of the Xe HPG hardware availability that will support this functionality.

  Back in October I wrote about Intel preparing their open-source driver support for Vulkan ray-tracing ahead of Xe HPG and now with the updated Vulkan spec out there they are able to push more of their work.

• Friends of GNOME Update – November 2020 – Getting to know GNOME

  The Seattle GNU/Linux Conference took place online this year and we were there. Executive Director Neil McGovern gave a presentation titled “Patently Obvious” about our legal case with a patent assertion entity and how the settlement impacts all of FOSS.

  Strategic Initiatives Manager M. de Blanc gave a surprise talk that had nothing to do with GNOME, but discussed the Foundation nonetheless.

  We also had talks at Linux Application Summit and GNOME.Asia, which you can read more about below.

 

• Support UserFreedom by purchasing gifts from the GNU Press Shop

  To celebrate this year's thirty-fifth anniversary of the FSF, we designed and issued an extremely cool undersea-themed 35th Anniversary T-shirt. The initial run sold out faster than a weekend scuba diving trip, but we've reprinted them in a new color scheme worthy of Neptune himself -- lots of these are in stock and ready to send to you.

  But that's not all! So excited are we on the occasion of FSF's coral anniversary that we also made new socks. Warm your toes with the brand new FSF thirty-fifth anniversary socks -- crew-length socks whose coral, black, and blue color scheme will match your FSF 35th Anniversary Poster. Orders for these limited edition socks will be accepted on a "pre-order" basis until December 9th -- we'll collect customer orders, then print the socks, which I'll then ship to you. Be sure to order socks within the above time frame if you want them, because we won't have a lot of surplus after the orders are filled.

  [...]

  Finally, a note about shipping. The current pandemic places a lot of obstacles to buying and selling merchandise at FSF, so your order may be shipped less punctually than before -- but it absolutely will be shipped. This time of year, many customers place orders hoping to have them in hand by December 25. If this is you, and you are in the United States, please place your order before December 4, in order to provide us with the necessary lead time to make sure that your gifts are shipped on time. In any circumstance, it's advisable to place any order as soon as you can; I will endeavor to ship it as promptly as circumstances permit. As always, don't hesitate to email sales@fsf.org with any questions or concerns about shipping, inventory, payment, suggestions for future items for sale, or anything else -- this email address is the first thing I check every work day, especially at this time of year.

• The Talospace Project: Firefox 83 on POWER

  LTO-PGO is still working great in Firefox 83, which expands in-browser PDF support, adds additional features to Picture-in-Picture (which is still one of my favourite tools in Firefox) and some miscellany developer changes. The exact same process, configs and patches to build a fully link-time and profile-guided optimized build work that was used in Firefox 82.

• Presenting Cockpit Wicked | YaST

  If you are into systems management, you most likely have heard about Cockpit at some point. In a nutshell, it offers a good looking web-based interface to perform system tasks like inspecting the logs, applying system updates, configuring the network, managing services, and so on. If you want to give it a try, you can install Cockpit in openSUSE Tumbleweed just by typing zypper in cockpit.

  [...]

  Cockpit already features a nice module to configure the network so you might be wondering why not extending the original instead of creating a new one. The module shipped with Cockpit is specific to NetworkManager and adapting it to a different backend can be hard.

  In our case, we are trying to build something that could be adapted in the future to support more backends, but we are not sure how realistic this idea is.

• PHP 8.0 Ready To Ship With Many New Features, Even Better Performance - Phoronix

  PHP 8.0 is scheduled for release tomorrow on the US Thanksgiving day. PHP 8.0 brings with it many new language features on top of the opt-in JIT compiler support. Here is a look at some of the PHP 8.0 changes along with a quick look at the near final performance of PHP 8.0 on an AMD EPYC Linux server.

  PHP 8.0 is a very worthy successor to last year's PHP 7.4. Besides the JIT compiler there is a ton of work incorporated into this big version bump. Among the PHP 8.0 highlights are:

  - PHP8 introduces the much anticipated Just In Time (JIT) compiler for further enhancing the speed of PHP scripts. More details on PHP's JIT compiler via this Wiki page.

• Going from Android LinearLayout to CSS flexbox

  Are you an Android developer looking to learn web development? I find it easier to learn a new technology stack by comparing it to a stack I’m already familiar with. Android developers can layout views using the simple yet flexible LinearLayout class. The web platform has similar tools to layout elements using CSS, and some concepts are shared. Here’s some tips to learn web development using your Android knowledge.

• Software Diagrams Aren’t Always Correct and That’s OK

  Concretely, software is just bits in electronic storage that control and/or are manipulated by processors. Abstractions are the building blocks that enable humans to design and build complex software systems out of bits. Abstractions are products of out minds—they allow us to assign meaning to clusters (some large, some small) of bits. They allow us to build software systems without thinking about billions of bits or how processors work.

  We manifest some useful and generally simple abstractions (instructions, statements, functions, classes, modules, etc.) as “code” using other abstractions we call “languages.” Languages give us a common vocabulary for us to communicate about those abstract building blocks and to produce the corresponding bits. There are many useful tools that can and should be created to help us understand the code-level operation of a system.

  But most systems we build today are too complex to be fully understood at the level of code. In designing them we must use higher-level abstractions to conceptualize, compose, and organize code. Abstract machines, frameworks, patterns, roles, stereotypes, heuristics, constraints, etc. are examples of such higher-level abstractions.

  The languages we commonly use provide few, if any, mechanisms for directly identifying such higher-level abstractions. These abstractions may manifest as naming or other coding conventions but recognizing them as such depends upon a pre-existing shared understanding between the writer and readers of the code.

• How to Convert Integer into String in Python | Linuxize

  Python has several built-in data types. Sometimes, when writing Python code, you might need to convert one data type to another. For example, concatenate a string and integer, first, you’ll need to convert the integer into a string.

• How To Install PyCharm on Debian 10

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PyCharm on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, PyCharm is an intelligent and fully-featured IDE for Python developed by JetBrains. It also provides support for Javascript, Typescript, and CSS, etc. You can also extend PyCharm features by using plugins. By using PyCharm plugins you can also get support for frameworks like Django, Flask. We can also use PyCharm for other programming languages like HTML, SQL, Javascript, CSS, and more.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of PyCharm on a Debian 10 (Buster).

• This Week in Rust 366

• Allwinner H6 SBC offers dual Ethernet, four display outputs, M.2 expansion

  While the processor was introduced in 2017, there are only a few Allwinner H6 SBC’s on the market with, for instance, Orange Pi 3 or Pine H64 boards, and it never became as popular as solutions based Allwinner H3 processor.

  But Boardcon has now launched its own Allwinner H6 SBC targeting professionals with Boardcon EMH6 board combining a carrier board and a computer-on-module that can be integrated into products.

• Automotive Grade Linux Releases UCB 10 Software Platform with Yocto Long Term Support

  Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), an open source project developing a shared software platform for in-vehicle technology, today announced the latest code release of the AGL platform, UCB 10, also known under the codename "Jumping Jellyfish."

  Developed through a joint effort by dozens of member companies, the AGL Unified Code Base (UCB) is an open source software platform that can serve as the de facto industry standard for infotainment, telematics and instrument cluster applications.

• Arduino Blog » These cornhole boards react to your bean bag tosses

  The lawn game of cornhole has seen a surge in popularity over the last couple of decades. But if you’ve ever thought about raising its cool factor, then YouTuber Hardware Unknown has just what you’ve been waiting for: light and audio effects that react to your throws.

  Hardware Unknown’s foldable boards each feature an Arduino Nano for control. A vibration sensor is used to tell when a bean bag hits the board, and an IR break-beam setup senses when one goes into the hole.

A headless CMS (content management system) is a backend system which works the content available through API (RESTful API or GraphQL). It's built to give the developers the possibilities to create what they want.

The API-driven headless approach is trending right now especially for enterprise users and developers.

Headless CMS programs can be used as a backend for mobile apps, static generated websites with frameworks like Next, Nuxt, Gridsome and Hugo which also supports server-side rendering. They can be also used to manage IoT (Internet of Things) applications.

Also: 17 Best Open-source Self-hosted Commenting Systems

• Security updates for Wednesday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (spip and webkit2gtk), Fedora (kernel and libexif), openSUSE (chromium and rclone), Slackware (mutt), SUSE (kernel, mariadb, and slurm), and Ubuntu (igraph).

• Top Tips to Protect Your Linux System

  Linux-based operating systems have a reputation for their high-security level. That's one of the reasons why the market share for Linux has been growing. The most commonly used operating systems such as Windows are often affected by targeted attacks in the form of ransomware infections, spyware, as well as worms, and malware.

  As a result, many personal, as well as enterprise users, are turning to Linux-based operating systems such as the Ubuntu-based Linux OS for security purposes. While Linux based systems are not targeted as frequently as other popular operating systems, they are not completely foolproof. There are plenty of risks and vulnerabilities for all types of Linux devices which put your privacy as well as your identity at risk.

• Building a healthy relationship between security and sysadmins | Enable Sysadmin

  Learn how to bridge the gap between operations/development and security.

• How to get Linux kernel 5.8 and 5.9 in Debian 10

  Debian 10 sits at Linux kernel 4.19. While this kernel version isn’t exactly the oldest release ever, it’s undoubtedly out of date. However, it is possible to install more modern versions of the kernel.

• How to install Reaper on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install Reaper on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

  Reaper is a very powerful tool for audio editing, but it is difficult to learn, so please use their startup guide. You can also use it as a voice-changer, for discord, etc.

• How to install Lyrebird on Linux Mint 20 - a Voice Changer for Discord - YouTube

  In this video, we are looking at how to install Lyrebird on Linux Mint 20, which is a voice changer for Discord.

• Oracle VirtualBox – how to clone virtual machine terminal bash command line – how to tidy up snapshots and consolidate free disk space

• How to Install and Use Thonny Python IDE on Linux

  Thonny is an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Python beginners. It is created with Python and released under MIT License. It is cross-platform and can run in Linux, macOS, Windows.

• How to easily install git on Linux | 2021 - LinuxH2O

  This article is a quick guide on how to install git on different Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, etc.

  Git is an open-source, cross-platform version control system. It is used to track and maintain changes for a set of files. The tool is mainly popular with programmers for their projects. However, the tool can also be used for any sort of scenario that requires changes to files from time to time.

  Git was developed by Linus Torvalds in 2005 to manage the Linux kernel development.

• Unfettered Freedom Ep. 12 - Linus on M1 Mac, Snaps 2020, Funtoo, Sabayon, Fedora Pipewire, Systemd

  Unfettered Freedom is a video podcast that focuses on news and topics about GNU/Linux, free software and open source software.

• Smoked Laptops | Coder Radio 389

  Mike buys a laptop live on air while Chris worries about the turkey.

• The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 882

  thanksgiving, ardor, odin, ready player two

• FLOSS Weekly 606: The Future of Stuff - Digital Ownership and Rights

  In our conversation about The Future of Stuff with its author Vinay Gupta, we discuss the founding role of Free Software in the digital world. We'll also talk about the need to list and protect human rights that were barely imaginable in the old physical world—and the radical ways we might make that happen. Vinay is the founder of Mattereum, a London-based fintech company using legally-enforceable smart contracts to enable the sale, lease, and transfer of physical property and other legal rights. He is a technologist and policy analyst interested in how specific technologies can close or create new avenues for decision-makers. This interest has taken him through cryptography, energy policy, defense, security, resilience, and disaster management arenas. He is perhaps best known for his work on the Hexayurt Project, a public domain disaster relief shelter designed to be built from commonly-available materials, and Ethereum, a distributed network designed to handle smart contracts.

Coming two months after the first point release, GNOME 3.38.2 is here with better support for the GNOME OS project that lets developers and user test drive upcoming features of the popular desktop environment.

This support was implemented in the GNOME Boxes software, which now comes with up-to-date download URLs for GNOME OS, the ability to install GNOME OS under the osinfo custom database, as well as updated recommended downloads for the latest Linux distro releases and improved handling of file extensions.

• PUBG Mobile India Now Registered in India, Initially to be Available For Android Users Only

• Google is working to speed up installing important apps on a new Android phone

• Google TV Android app is mysteriously blocking Netflix

• Some very lucky Android TV owners can now stream YouTube in 8K

• [Update: November 2020] The best Android phones you can buy today

• Bogus Modpacks for Minecraft Infect 1 Million Android Devices With Adware

• The Best Wireless Chargers for Your Android or iPhone

• Best Android phones at Good2Go Mobile (November 2020)

• iPhone Ringtone MP3 Download for Android: How To Download iPhone Ringtone On Your Android Smartphone

• Allwinner H6 SBC offers dual Ethernet, four display outputs, M.2 expansion

The site's security writer, Catalin Cimpanu, has form [1, 2, 3] in screwing up when he writes about Linux. And ZDNet has a person on staff, Stephen J. Vaughan-Nicholls, who knows the Linux very well. So why exactly the kind of dross that was published on 24 November was ever allowed to pass the editor's knife is puzzling.

To details. In this case, Cimpanu was writing about a botnet known as Stantinko, a new version of which has apparently been detected by the Israeli security firm Intezer and detailed in a blog post which was shared with Cimpanu before being made available to world+dog.

Before I go any further, let me say that i have reported on Intezer at least thrice, and they are sound when it comes to their research. There is no hyperbole and when they say something, they have enough evidence to do so.

Highlights of Blender 2.91 include better cloth sculpting with collision support for the Sculpt Cloth brush and filter, a new Sculpt Trim tool for cutting and adding geometry using box or lasso gestures, new Simulation Target property for simulating cloth effects, and new Boundary brush for controlling the shape of mesh boundaries.

To improve modeling, a new Exact solver is included in this release to handle complex geometry, along with better Intersect Knife and Intersect Boolean, the ability to use a collection as boolean, new options for the Subdivision Surface modifier, better loop select tools in UV Editor, as well as Split Viewport and Render Resolution in Ocean Modifier.

Dubbed Tamandua, the November 2020 release of Armbian Linux is here and it comes about three months after the previous version, Armbian 20.08. The biggest news is the fact that most supported kernels (except for sunxi and mvebu) have been updated to the latest and greatest Linux 5.9 kernel series.

On top of that, this new major release updates the U-Boot open-source boot loader for embedded devices to version 2020.10, which requires users to manually update it on their installations using the armbian-config tool.

Based on the latest MX Linux 19.3 “Patito Feo” release, AV Linux MX Edition is here about six months after the last update to the project with many new and updated tools for audio production and musicians. The distro is still based on Debian GNU/Linux, but not derived from it anymore, but instead from MX Linux.

This means that AV Linux now inherits many of MX Linux’s goodies, including the fact that it doesn’t ship with the systemd init system by default. Of course, it also includes the many great tools and utilities of MX Linux.

The PinePhone is designed to make distro hopping easy. Whether you order a model that comes with Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, Manjaro, or KDE Neon pre-installed, the phone is designed to boot first from any properly prepared microSD card.

That means you can install an alternate OS on a card, insert it, and turn on the phone to try a different operating system. If you like it, you can use JumpDrive to install it to the phone’s built-in eMMC storage, which should bring at least a modest boost in speed.

Just want to try out a bunch of different operating systems without committing to one or constantly flashing microSD cards? That’s where Megi’s multi-distro demo image comes in. The developer offers a single image with a bunch of different operating systems pre-installed.

Megi released a new version of November 23, 2020 and it has 17 different operating systems crammed into a 6GB disk image.