Here’s the MATE Desktop Running on the PinePhone – Video

Yes, you’re reading that right, it is apparently possible to put the MATE desktop environment on the PinePhone, and surprise, surprise, it runs very well, that if you can get used to the desktop experience on a small screen, of course. Disappointed by other distributions available for the PinePhone, a YouTube user apparently managed to put the MATE desktop on the mobile device the pmbootstrap installer from postmarketOS, a GNU/Linux distribution designed for phones. In the video below, you can see the MATE desktop in action on the PinePhone, running the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Onboard on-screen keyboard.

Meet CSI Linux: A Linux Distribution For Cyber Investigation And OSINT

With the steady rise of cybercrimes, companies and government agencies are involving themselves more in setting up cyber investigation labs to tackle the crime happening over the Internet. Software tools are like arms that play a significant role in the investigation process. Hence, Computer Forensics, Incident Response, and Competitive Intelligence professionals have developed a Cyber forensics focussed operating system called CSI Linux.

Today in Techrights

• Being Rich Does Not Imply Being Smart (Especially When One is Born Into Wealth)
• The Rise and Fall of Free Software
• Why You Should Adopt Debian 10, Not Vista 10 (Windows Vista With Microsoft’s Latest Surveillance Add-ons)
• Ethics by Exclusion
• Even Worse Than Microsoft Inside the Board of the OSI
• ZDNet Continues to Stuff Its ‘Linux’ Section With Proprietary Software of Microsoft
• Video: LinuxWorld 1999, Torvalds and Stallman
• GNU World Order is a Personal Sacrifice, LinuxWorld Just Business
• Links 22/2/2020: Polish Government Increases GNU/Linux Use, Samza 1.3.1
• Links 21/2/2020: EasyOS 2.2.11 Released, Microsoft’s Control of the Linux Foundation Increases and More Binary Blobs Arrive
• Links 20/2/2020: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU18, Mesa 20, VirtualBox 6.1.4
• IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 21, 2020
• IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 20, 2020

today's leftovers

• Word Embeddings Simplified

  Recently I have been dwelling with a lot of NLP problems and jargons. The more I read about it the more I find it intriguing and beautiful of how we humans try to transfer this knowledge of a language to machines. How much ever we try because of our laid back nature we try to use already existing knowledge or existing materials to be used to make machines understand a given language. But machines as we know it can only understand digits or lets be more precise binary(0s and 1s). When I first laid my hands on NLP this was my first question, how does a machine understand that something is a word or sentence or a character.

• Coronavirus wreaking havoc in the tech industry, including FOSS

  At FOSS Linux, you may wonder why we are covering the coronavirus and how it relates to Linux and open-source software? Aside from the apparent effect of the slowdown in components required for Linux to run on,  the coronavirus outbreak directly impacts several products featured in FOSS Linux over the past year. Purism – the brains behind the Librem 5 phones powered by PureOS are the most directly affected by the outbreak, suffering production delays. Dell – the titanic computer manufacturer, has hinted at a possibility of interruption of supplies, which could affect the availability of the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition preloaded with Ubuntu 18.04. System76 – these creators of Pop_OS! 19.10 recently announced their foray into the world of laptop design and manufacturing.  The coronavirus could adversely affect this endeavor. Pine64 – maker of the Pinebook Pro, the affordable laptop which supports most, if not all, Linux distros featured on FOSS Linux also is under threat of production delays.

• Announcing the release of Samza 1.3.1

  We have identified some issues with the previous release of Apache Samza 1.3.0.

• Scientists develop open-source software to analyze economics of biofuels, bioproducts

  BioSTEAM is available online through the Python Package Index, at Pypi.org. A life cycle assessment (LCA) add-on to BioSTEAM to quantify the environmental impacts of biorefineries -- developed by CABBI Postdoctoral Researcher Rui Shi and the Guest Research Group -- is also set to be released in March 2020. To further increase availability of these tools, Guest's team is also designing a website with a graphical user interface where researchers can plug new parameters for a biorefinery simulation into existing configurations, and download results within minutes.

  BioSTEAM's creators drew on open-source software developed by other researchers, including a data bank with 20,000 chemicals and their thermodynamic properties.

• Mirantis Joins Linux Foundation's LF Networking Community

  Mirantis, the open cloud company, today announced it has joined the Linux Foundation's LF Networking (LFN) community, which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open networking projects. LFN software and projects provide platforms and building blocks for Network Infrastructure and Services across Service Providers, Cloud Providers, Enterprises, Vendors, and System Integrators that enable rapid interoperability, deployment, and adoption. LF Networking supports the largest set of networking projects with the broadest community in the industry that collaborate on this opportunity.

• Google Announces The 200 Open-Source Projects For GSoC 2020

  Google's Summer of Code initiative for getting students involved with open-source development during the summer months is now into its sixteenth year. This week Google announced the 200 open-source projects participating in GSoC 2020.  Among the 200 projects catching our eye this year are GraphicsFuzz, Blender, Debian, FFmpeg, Fedora, FreeBSD, Gentoo, GNOME, Godot Engine, KDE, Mozilla, Pitivi, The GNU Project, VideoLAN, and X.Org. The complete list of GSoC 2020 organizations can be found here. 

• Myst (or, The Drawbacks to Success)

  After listening to the cultural dialog — or shouting match! — which has so long surrounded Myst, one’s first encounter with the actual artifact that spurred it all can be more than a little anticlimactic. Seen strictly as a computer game, Myst is… okay. Maybe even pretty good. It strikes this critic at least as far from the best or worst game of its year, much less of its decade, still less of all gaming history. Its imagery is well-composited and occasionally striking, its sound and music design equally apt. The sense of desolate, immersive beauty it all conveys can be strangely affecting, and it’s married to puzzle-design instincts that are reasonable and fair. Myst‘s reputation in some quarters as impossible, illogical, or essentially unplayable is unearned; apart from some pixel hunts and perhaps the one extended maze, there’s little to really complain about on that front. On the contrary: there’s a definite logic to its mechanical puzzles, and figuring out how its machinery works through trial and error and careful note-taking, then putting your deductions into practice, is genuinely rewarding, assuming you enjoy that sort of thing.

  At same time, though, there’s just not a whole lot of there there. Certainly there’s no deeper meaning to be found; Myst never tries to be about more than exploring a striking environment and solving intricate puzzles. “When we started, we wanted to make a [thematic] statement, but the project was so big and took so much effort that we didn’t have the energy or time to put much into that part of it,” admits Robyn Miller. “So, we decided to just make a neat world, a neat adventure, and say important things another time.” And indeed, a “neat world” and “neat adventure” are fine ways of describing Myst.