Some nice widgets for your Plasma desktop

Plasma is an extremely extensible, flexible desktop environment, and it lets you customize and change anything and everything to the tiniest detail. You can go about mimicking other desktops and systems as you please, limited only by your imagination and patience. If you want a Mac-like look or a Unity look, you can. So I thought, I should revisit my old Plasma widgets article and explore some fresh applets out there, to see what else you can do here. Indeed, there are lots of hidden goodies lurking beneath the surface, and if you're curious, you will discover fresh tools and features that can make the Plasma desktop experience even more enjoyable.

Security Leftovers

• Security updates for Wednesday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache2 and unbound), Fedora (opendmarc, runc, and sudo), openSUSE (epiphany, GraphicsMagick, and libopenmpt), Oracle (kernel and sudo), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-openjdk, jss, kernel, kernel-rt, and kpatch-patch), SUSE (crowbar-core, crowbar-openstack, grafana, novnc, openstack-keystone, openstack-neutron, openstack-neutron-lbaas, openstack-nova, openstack-tempest, python-pysaml2, python-urllib3, rubygem-chef, rubygem-easy_diff, sleshammer, libpcap, sudo, and tcpdump), and Ubuntu (aspell and libsdl1.2).

• Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Increasing our self-awareness so we can improve security

  October has been National Cybersecurity Awareness Month since 2004. According to staysafeonline.org, this initiative was started by the National Cybersecurity Alliance and the US Department of Homeland Security to help all Americans stay safe and secure when online. This month is usually marked with a significant uptick in cybersecurity outreach and training. It’s also the one month of the year when you can get a significant amount of cybersecurity swag such as webcam covers, mugs, and pens. This event has an outward focus to raise awareness of security globally, Many other events have come into existence along with this. For example, there are numerous electronics recycling events that now occur in October where people can securely dispose of their old computers. Some municipalities have extended this to include safe disposal of old prescription medications, paints, and other hazardous materials. Recent events in the greater technology community, specifically the resignation of Richard Stallman from both MIT and the Free Software Foundation, have become character foils that show us that while we have come a long way, we still have a long way ahead of us to improve.

• Michael Tremer/IPFire: On quadrupling throughput of our Quality of Service

  There have been improvements to our Quality of Service (or QoS) which have made me very excited. Our QoS sometimes was a bottleneck. Enabling it could cut your bandwidth in half if you were unlucky. That normally was not a problem for larger users of IPFire, because if you are running a 1 Gigabit/s connection, you would not need any QoS in the first place, or your hardware was fast enough to handle the extra load. For the smaller users this was, however, becoming more and more of a problem. Smaller systems like the IPFire Mini Appliance are designed to be small (the clue is in the name) and to be very energy-efficient. And they are. They are popular with users with a standard DSL connection of up to 100 Megabit/s which is very common in Germany. You have nothing to worry about here. But if you are lucky to have a faster Internet connection, then this hardware and others that we have sold before might be running out of steam. There is only so much you can get out of them.

• The City Of Baltimore Blew Off A $76,000 Ransomware Demand Only To Find Out A Bunch Of Its Data Had Never Been Backed Up [Ed: Windows]

  The City of Baltimore was hit with a ransomware attack in May of this year. Criminals using remodeled and rebranded NSA exploits (EternalBlue) knocked out a "majority" of the city's servers and crippled many of its applications. More details didn't surface until September when the city's government began reshuffling the budget to cover the expenses of recovering from the attack.

Games: AI War 2, Dominus Galaxia, Sipho, Lonely Mountains: Downhill and More

• AI War 2, the massive RTS game confirmed for launch on October 22

  Arcen Games have now fully confirmed that October 22 is the final launch date for AI War 2 to leave Early Access. This is the sequel to the critically acclaimed AI War: Fleet Command released back in 2009, which eventually came to Linux too later in 2014. The release of AI War 2 is going to mark 10 years since the original! Funded on Kickstarter back in 2016 with the help of around 2,545 backers. AI War 2 is a grand strategy RTS hybrid against an overwhelming, inhuman enemy who has conquered the galaxy. The enemy has made only a single error: underestimating you. You must steal as much technology as you can, take enough territory to fortify your bases and launch your last stand.

• Dominus Galaxia, a 4x strategy game heavily inspired by Master of Orion 1 has a Linux demo up

  Their aim with Dominus Galaxia is to be an upgraded spiritual successor to the original Master of Orion, they said to think of it like if Master of Orion 2 was a proper sequel and not a "a radical re-imagining". It's currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter which has 10 days to go with nearly 50% of the funding needed, with a bit of a stretch it may be able to make it. Just recently, they put up a full demo of the game with Linux support on itch.io.

• Creature building action and survival game 'Sipho' adds some fun new zooids for your monstrosity

  Swim, kill, adapt and hopefully survive. That's the aim of the game in Sipho and the recent update adds in some new pieces for you to unlock to build your horrific sea creature with. It's such a strange game, blending together furious action with a creature builder where you unlock different parts and species. Based on real science, inspired by the Siphonophorae with your creature being built with zooids, an animal that forms part of a colony that all move together.

• No Linux version of Lonely Mountains: Downhill yet due to IL2CPP in Unity

  Megagon Industries have now confirmed the status of Lonely Mountains: Downhill for Linux and currently it's not good news. This is a game that was funded on Kickstarter, that had Linux as a platform for release. If this sounds familiar, it's because we wrote about this game recently where the developer seemed a bit confused on the Linux version and they weren't clear on what they were doing.

• Project RIP, a new FPS released recently with Linux support and it looks action-packed

  Fight off waves of demons in Project RIP from developer Storming Tech, a new Unreal Engine first-person shooter that has Linux support. This is the same developer who also made Escape Legacy: Ancient Scrolls, an escape room puzzle game which also seemed quite good.

• The Northgard free Conquest expansion is launching October 22

  The huge free Conquest expansion for the strategy game Northgard is now confirmed to be releasing on October 22. As announced before this free update is going to include a new standalone game mode, which can be played solo or in co-op. Offering up a series of missions, offering a what they claim is "100+" hours of extra possible play time. The missions don't seem to be linked, offering up something new each time with specific victory conditions and rule sets.

• The impressively smooth roguelike Jupiter Hell has a big AI upgrade and a first sale

  ChaosForge continue advancing their turn-based shooter roguelike shooter Jupiter Hell, with another big update now available. A big focus has been on the AI to actually make it a bit smarter. Humanoid enemies will now attempt to take cover and not always run in a straight line at you, which can make it a little more difficult for sure. Most enemies will also react to noise you and other NPCs make. The demon-like enemies will now track you by smell, so you can't hide from them. You might find the need to retreat more often, to find a better position.

Red Hat and Fedora: syslog-ng, Ansible, Libinput and Fedora Community

• syslog-ng in two words at One Identity UNITE: reduce and simplify

  UNITE is the partner and user conference of One Identity, the company behind syslog-ng. This time the conference took place in Phoenix, Arizona where I talked to a number of American business customers and partners about syslog-ng. They were really enthusiastic about syslog-ng and emphasized two major reasons why they use syslog-ng or plan to introduce it to their infrastructure: syslog-ng allows them to reduce the log data volume and greatly simplify their infrastructure by introducing a separate log management layer. [...] When you collect log messages to a central location using syslog-ng, you can archive all of the messages there. If you add a new log analysis application to your infrastructure, you can just point syslog-ng at it and forward the necessary subset of log data there. Life at both security and operations in your environment becomes easier, as there is only a single software to check for security problems and distribute on your systems instead of many.

• Ansible vs Terraform vs Juju: Fight or cooperation?

  Ansible vs Terraform vs Juju vs Chef vs SaltStack vs Puppet vs CloudFormation – there are so many tools available out there. What are these tools? Do I need all of them? Are they fighting with each other or cooperating? The answer is not really straightforward. It usually depends on your needs and the particular use case. While some of these tools (Ansible, Chef, StaltStack, Puppet) are pure configuration management solutions, the others (Juju, Terraform, CloudFormation) focus more on services orchestration. For the purpose of this blog, we’re going to focus on Ansible vs Terraform vs Juju comparison – the three major players which have dominated the market. [...] Contrary to both Ansible and Terraform, Juju is an application modelling tool, developed and maintained by Canonical. You can use it to model and automate deployments of even very complex environments consisting of various interconnected applications. Examples of such environments include OpenStack, Kubernetes or Ceph clusters. Apart from the initial deployment, you can also use Juju to orchestrate deployed services too. Thanks to Juju you can backup, upgrade or scale-out your applications as easily as executing a single command. Like Terraform, Juju uses a declarative approach, but it brings it beyond the providers up to the applications layer. You can not only declare a number of machines to be deployed or number of application units, but also configuration options for deployed applications, relations between them, etc. Juju takes care of the rest of the job. This allows you to focus on shaping your application instead of struggling with the exact routines and recipes for deploying them. Forget the “How?” and focus on the “What?”.

• libinput's bus factor is 1

  Let's arbitrarily pick the 1.9.0 release (roughly 2 years ago) and look at the numbers: of the ~1200 commits since 1.9.0, just under 990 were done by me. In those 2 years we had 76 contributors in total, but only 24 of which have more than one commit and only 6 contributors have more than 5 commits. The numbers don't really change much even if we go all the way back to 1.0.0 in 2015. These numbers do not include the non-development work: release maintenance for new releases and point releases, reviewing CI failures [1], writing documentation (including the stuff on this blog), testing and bug triage. Right now, this is effectively all done by one person. This is... less than ideal. At this point libinput is more-or-less the only input stack we have [2] and all major distributions rely on it. It drives mice, touchpads, tablets, keyboards, touchscreens, trackballs, etc. so basically everything except joysticks.

• Contribute to Fedora Magazine

  Do you love Linux and open source? Do you have ideas to share, enjoy writing, or want to help run a blog with over 60k visits every week? Then you’re at the right place! Fedora Magazine is looking for contributors. This article walks you through various options of contributing and guides you through the process of becoming a contributor.

• Fabiano Fidêncio: Libosinfo (Part I)

  Libosinfo is the operating system information database. As a project, it consists of three different parts, with the goal to provide a single place containing all the required information about an operating system in order to provision and manage it in a virtualized environment.

• Τι κάνεις FOSSCOMM 2019

  When the students visited our Fedora booth, they were excited to take some Fedora gifts, especially the tattoo sticker. I was asking how many of them used Fedora, and most of them were using Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Kali Linux and Elementary OS. It was an opportunity to share the Fedora 30 edition and give the beginner’s guide that the Fedora community wrote in a little book. Most of them enjoyed taking photos with the Linux frame I did in Edinburgh... [...] I was planning to teach the use of the GTK library with C, Python, and Vala. However, because of the time and the preference of the attendees, we only worked with C. The workshop was supported by Alex Angelo who also traduced some of my expressions in Greek. I was flexible in using different Operating Systems such as Linux Mint, Ubuntu, Kubuntu among other distros. There were only two users that used Fedora. Almost half of the audience did not bring a laptop, and then I grouped in groups to work together. I enjoyed to see young students eager to learn, they took their own notes, and asked questions. You might see the video of the workshop that was recorded by the organizers.

• Extending the Minimization objective

  Earlier this summer, the Fedora Council approved the first phase of the Minimization objective. Minimization looks at package dependencies and tries to minimize the footprint for a variety of use cases. The first phase resulted in the development of a feedback pipeline, a better understanding of the problem space, and some initial ideas for policy improvements.