Niryo has built a fantastic 6-axis robotic arm called ‘Niryo One’. It is a 3D-printed, affordable robotic arm focused mainly on educational purposes. Additionally, it is fully open source and based on ROS. On the hardware side, it is powered by a Raspberry Pi 3 and NiryoStepper motors, based on Arduino microcontrollers. When we found out all this, guess what we thought? This is a perfect target for Ubuntu Core and snaps!

When the robotic arm came to my hands, the first thing I did was play with Niryo Studio; a tool from Niryo that lets you move the robotic arm, teach sequences to it and store them, and many more things. You can programme the robotic arm with Python or with a graphical editor based on Google’s Blocky. Niryo Studio is a great tool that makes starting on robotics easy and pleasant.

Canonical announced Ubuntu snaps support for DJI’s second-gen Manifold companion computer for its Matrice drones. The Manifold 2 offers a choice of Jetson TX2 or Intel Coffee Lake-U chips.

DJI’s industry leading drones such as its Phantom and Matrice models are directed by flight controllers that run a proprietary operating system. Yet, in 2015, the company announced a Manifold development computer for its Matrice 100 drone that runs Ubuntu on an Nvidia Tegra K1. A few weeks ago, DJI unveiled a more powerful Manifold 2 computer with a choice of Nvidia Jetson TX2 and Intel Core i7-8550U processors (see farther below). Canonical has followed up by announcing that not only will Ubuntu 16.04 return as the pre-installed OS for the device, but that it will include support for Ubuntu snaps application packages.

Okay, okay. If you are sat there mouthing “what is i3?” at me with a confused, borderline-desperate look on your face, I’ll fill you in:

i3 is a tiling window manager created for X11 (the display manager most Linux distros use, including Ubuntu). i3 supports traditional horizontal vertical window tiling — think window snapping, but arranged and resized automatically — as well as stacking and tabbing.

The differences don’t end there, though.

Like me, you’re probably used to managing app windows with a mouse, but the i3 window manager is largely keyboard driven. The idea is that you use keyboard shortcuts to move, manage and arrange open apps and windows (though you can use a mouse too).

• Development in LXD

  Most of my development is done in LXD containers. I love this for a few reasons. It takes all of my development dependencies and makes it so that they're not installed on my host system, reducing the attack surface there. It means that I can do development on any Linux that I want (or several). But it also means that I can migrate my development environment from my laptop to my desktop depending on whether I need more CPU or whether I want it to be closer to where I'm working (usually when travelling).

  When I'm traveling I use my Pagekite SSH setup on a Raspberry Pi as the SSH gateway. So when I'm at home I want to connect to the desktop directly, but when away connect through the gateway.

• Snap Store Is Available for Ubuntu!, How to Install It?

  Snap is a software used to install software packages that can run on various Linux distributions. This time Snap Store can be installed and used like using the Software Center (on Ubuntu), or GNOME Software. This application was created specifically to make it easier for users when installing software packages on Snap.

  Actually, the Ubuntu Software Center and GNOME software can add the url of a software package and install it. But both of these applications will mix search results that are snap, flatpak and others.

• Use Font Finder to Install Google Fonts on Ubuntu

  If you are in search of finding and using some pretty fonts for your Ubuntu desktop, applications, and web pages, Font Finder is there for your help.

• An OpenJPEG Surprise

  My previous blog post seems to have resolved most concerns about my requests for Ubuntu stable release updates, but I again received rather a lot of criticism for the choice to make WebKit depend on OpenJPEG, even though my previous post explained clearly why there are are not any good alternatives.

  I was surprised to receive a pointer to ffmpeg, which has its own JPEG 2000 decoder that I did not know about. However, we can immediately dismiss this option due to legal problems with depending on ffmpeg. I also received a pointer to a resurrected libjasper, which is interesting, but since libjasper was removed from Ubuntu, its status is not currently better than OpenJPEG.

  But there is some good news! I have looked through Ubuntu’s security review of the OpenJPEG code and found some surprising results. Half the reported issues affect the library’s companion tools, not the library itself. And the other half of the issues affect the libmj2 library, a component of OpenJPEG that is not built by Ubuntu and not used by WebKit. So while these are real security issues that raise concerns about the quality of the OpenJPEG codebase, none of them actually affect OpenJPEG as used by WebKit. Yay!

• Call for testing: chromium-browser deb to snap transition

  The chromium browser has been available as a deb package for all supported Ubuntu releases and as a snap since version 60, and the time has come to start transitioning away from the debs.

• Canonical Announces Embedded Computer Manifold 2 for Drone Developers, Request For Help Testing Snap Package, PHP v7.4.0 Available, PyCharm 2019.2 EAP3 Released, Talks To Port Over Microsoft's Chromium-Based Edge browser To Linux

  Yesterday, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu announced the availability of Manifold 2, a high-performance embedded computer offered by leading enterprise drone manufacturer, DJI. This availability will allow developers access to containerized software packages (e.g. Snaps), allowing for infinite evolution and functionality changes.

  It looks as if Ubuntu is transitioning the Chromium Debian package to a Snap one. The community behind this effort is asking for assistance in testing the Snap package.