• Jonathan Carter: GameMode in Debian

  About two years ago, I ran into some bugs running a game on Debian, so installed Windows 10 on a spare computer and ran it on there. I learned that when you launch a game in Windows 10, it automatically disables notifications, screensaver, reduces power saving measures and gives the game maximum priority. I thought “Oh, that’s actually quite nice, but we probably won’t see that kind of integration on Linux any time soon”. The very next week, I read the initial announcement of GameMode, a tool from Feral Interactive that does a bunch of tricks to maximise performance for games running on Linux.

• Mike Gabriel: No Debian LTS Work in July 2020

  In July 2020, I was originally assigned 8h of work on Debian LTS as a paid contributor, but holiday season overwhelmed me and I did not do any LTS work, at all.

• Opinion: Robots are proving themselves now more than ever

  By Rhys Davies, product manager for robotics, Snapcraft and Ubuntu Appliances at Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu

• Kubernetes 1.19 release candidate available for testing

  The Kubernetes 1.19 release candidate is now available for download and experimentation ahead of general availability later this month. You can try it now with MicroK8s.

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 643

  Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 643 for the week of August 2 – 8, 2020. The full version of this issue is available here.

For those not in the know, Redo Rescue is a great, free and easy to use live Linux system based on Debian GNU/Linux that can help you whenever your computer is broken by letting you backup and restore an entire system in just a few minutes.

For example, if your computer no longer boots after installing the recent BootHole patches for the GRUB2 bootloader, you can use Redo Rescue to repair the boot. Of course, there are a few other tools that can do the same, but Redo Rescue can also do bare metal restores by replacing the MBR and partition table, re-map original data to a different target partition and even verify the integrity of an existing backup image.

• DebConf5

  This was one of my most favorite DebConfs (though I basically loved them all) and I'm not really sure why, I guess it's because of the kind of community at the event. We stayed in some future dorms of the universtity, which were to be first used by some European athletics chamopionship and which we could use even before that, guests zero. Being in Finland there were of course saunas in the dorms, which we frequently used and greatly enjoyed. Still, one day we had to go on a trip to another sauna in the forest, because of course you cannot visit Finland and only see one sauna. Or at least, you should not.

  Another aspect which increased community bonding was that we had to authenticate using 802.10 (IIRC, please correct me) which was an authentication standard mostly used for wireless but which also works for wired ethernet, except that not many had used it on Linux before. Thus quite some related bugs were fixed in the first days of DebCamp...

• Advantech releases EPC-C301 for machine vision applications with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

  Advantech, a leading global provider of intelligent IoT systems and embedded platforms, is pleased to announce EPC-C301, a compact fanless box PC powered by 8th Gen. Intel® Core™ processor. This system features diverse domain-focused I/O and can operate in broad temperature ranges. EPC-C301 integrates Intel® and Canonical technologies, provides Ubuntu and OpenVINO toolkits, and is aimed at accelerating the advancement of AIoT. This powerful system is an excellent choice for machine vision applications, such as automated optical inspection (AOI), and automated plate number recognition (APNR).

• Design and Web team summary – 4th August 2020

  The web team here at Canonical run two week iterations. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.

  [...]

  I started writing code sometime around 1993 with Qbasic, dabbled in some C, C++, before ultimately ending up working with the various components of the web stack and working with PHP, Perl, Python, Go, Javascript. Day to day I’m working with Juju, JAAS and building the Juju Dashboard.

  Outside of a computer, I enjoy being outside and snow, wake and kiteboarding.

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 642

  Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 642 for the week of July 26 – August 1, 2020. The full version of this issue is available here.

After more than two years in development, BunsenLabs Linux Lithium release has finally hit the stable channel today for this OpenBox-based and lightweight Debian GNU/Linux derivative, a continuation of the acclaimed CrunchBang Linux.

The BunsenLabs Team is proud to announce today the official release of BunsenLabs Lithium, a new major release based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system series.

As expected, BunsenLabs Linux Lithium is packed with lots of goodies, including the ability to install the distribution on newer computers that use Secure Boot, a new look and feel featuring a brand-new dark theme with custom-colored Papirus icons by default, and more modularity for user to fully customize the distro to their needs.

For example, users can now replace the default Openbox window manager with another desktop environment and keep many of the settings, such as menu item, key bindings, and autostarted apps. Also, the BunsenLabs session now uses jgmenu by default and can coexist with a default Openbox or Xfce sessions.

[...]

The BunsenLabs Linux Lithium release is available for download right now from the official website as a 64-bit live ISO and a minimal, CD-sized 32-bit non-PAE version, which can be extended to full-size by installing the bunsen-meta-all or bunsen-meta-lite metapackages.

Direct: [STABLE RELEASE] BunsenLabs Lithium Official ISOs

Also: [Debian-Based SparkyLinux] July 2020 donation report