• Higher Ed needs to step up to stay relevant as Open Source floods the IT world [Ed: So this is where Patrick Masson moved to after he quit OSI; Danese Cooper Cooper, who worked for famous criminal Bill Gates, is there too]

  Grant money is pouring in to support institutions of higher education that are taking a strong position in the adoption of Open Source technologies. 82% of enterprise IT leaders are choosing to work with Open Source vendors, and higher education is stepping up and following suit. In order to stay competitive, campuses must take a critical look at how they manage IT portfolios and seriously consider a larger commitment to their own Open Source strategy.

• Registration Currently Sold Out, We’re Trying to Add More Places – Linux Plumbers Conference 2022

  Back in 2021 when we were planning this conference, everyone warned us that we’d still be doing social distancing and that in-person conferences were likely not to be as popular as they had been, so we lowered our headcount to fit within a socially distanced venue. Unfortunately the enthusiasm of the plumbers community didn’t follow this conventional wisdom so the available registrations sold out within days of being released. We’re now investigating how we might expand the venue capacity to accommodate some of the demand for in-person registration, so stay tuned for what we find out.

• SUSECON 2022 highlights include container management, edge [Ed: SUSE is selling complexity instead of GNU/Linux. It's also a proprietary software reseller.]

  SUSE's annual global conference, SUSECON, held virtually in June, was jam-packed with initiatives and information essential for the future of SUSE and for the open source market.

Fresh versions of three of the bigger open-source application suites just landed for those seeking to break free from proprietary office apps.

LibreOffice is the highest profile of them, and the project recently put out version 7.3.4, the latest release in the Community version of the suite.

The Document Foundation maintains two versions of LibreOffice; the other is the Enterprise branch.

Both versions are free. The difference is that the Community version is the faster-moving development branch. It's comparable to a free Linux distro, or a short-term Ubuntu release: there's no commercial support, but you may be able to get assistance from other users – in other words, the Community.

u-blox XPLR-IOT-1 explorer kit is an all-in-one IoT evaluation platform with cellular IoT, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy, and GNSS, plus some sensors to evaluate various IoT products and enable proofs of concepts such as logistics container trackers, industrial automation, sensor-to-cloud applications, and fleet management solutions.

The device’s main module is the u-blox NORA-B106 with a dual-core Arm Cortex M33 microcontroller and Bluetooth LE 5.2 radio that host the application software and control the other modules, namely the SARA-R510S module for LTE-M and NB-IoT cellular connectivity, NINA-W156 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi module, and the MAX-M10S GNNS module. The XPLR-IOT-1 platform is also equipped with an accelerometer, a gyroscope, a magnetometer, and
temperature, humidity, pressure, and ambient light sensors.

The open source Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs now supports the new Valhall architecture with fully-conformant OpenGL ES 3.1 on Mali-G57, a Valhall GPU. The final Mesa patches are landing today, and the required kernel patches are queued for merge upstream.

Mali-G57 features in new MediaTek Chromebooks with the MT8192 and MT8195 system-on-chips. Collaborans AngeloGioacchino Del Regno and Nícolas F. R. A. Prado are spearheading the mainlining effort for these devices. With Mesa 22.2 and an appropriate kernel, accelerated graphics will work out of the box on Linux on these laptops.