EV3DEV Lego Linux Updated

The ev3dev Linux distribution got an update this month. The distribution targets the Lego EV3 which is a CPU Lego provides to drive their Mindstorm robots. The new release includes the most recent kernel and updates from Debian 8.8. It also contains tools needed for some Wi-Fi dongles and other updates.

Purism Librem 13 / 15 Laptops Hit GA Status

Purism has announced their privacy-minded Coreboot-friendly Librem laptops have reached a general availability state. Purism will now be holding an inventory of their Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops for quicker shipping rather than everything being made-to-order. While this means users will no longer need to wait "months" when ordering a Librem 13/15 laptop, it still doesn't sound like it will be a very quick turnaround time. Their press release announcing the GA state says, "will now arrive in user’s hands a few weeks after purchase."

Linux is Running on Almost All of the Top 500 Supercomputers

Linux is still running on more than 99% of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world. Same as last year, 498 out of top 500 supercomputers run Linux while remaining 2 run Unix.

Alioth moving toward pagure

Since 2003, the Debian project has been running a server called Alioth to host source code version control systems. The server will hit the end of life of the Debian LTS release (Wheezy) next year; that deadline raised some questions regarding the plans for the server over the coming years. Naturally, that led to a discussion regarding possible replacements. In response, the current Alioth maintainer, Alexander Wirt, announced a sprint to migrate to pagure, a free-software "Git-centered forge" written in Python for the Fedora project, which LWN covered last year. Alioth currently runs FusionForge, previously known as GForge, which is the free-software fork of the SourceForge code base when that service closed its source in 2001. Alioth hosts source code repositories, mainly Git and Subversion (SVN) and, like other "forge" sites, also offers forums, issue trackers, and mailing list services. While other alternatives are still being evaluated, a consensus has emerged on a migration plan from FusionForage to a more modern and minimal platform based on pagure.

elementary + GitHub

We’re excited to finally say that elementary has completed our move and now lives on GitHub! We’ve migrated over 70 repositories from Launchpad and bzr. So what does that really mean?

Ultimate Edition 5.4

For those who like a visually enhanced form of Linux then Ultimate Edition 5.4 is for you. The graphics are extremely nice compared to other versions of Linux I have seen. With animated cursors and having a desktop called ‘Budgie’ the Operating System (OS) is visually pleasing.

Google Summer of Code day 16

Google Summer of Code day 17

Running virt-controller locally

How to install and use Monit on Ubuntu/Debian Linux server as process supervision tool

AMDGPU VRAM Improvements Could Help DiRT Rally, Dying Light

A patch series posted on Friday could help games suffering from visible video memory pressure when using the AMDGPU DRM driver. Independent developer John Brooks has posted a set of nine patches for improving the driver's performance when limited CPU-visible video memory is under pressure.

Understanding Xwayland - Part 1 of 2

In this week’s article for my ongoing Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project I planned on writing about the basic idea behind the project, but I reconsidered and decided to first give an overview on how Xwayland functions on a high-level and in the next week take a look at its inner workings in detail. The reason for that is, that there is not much Xwayland documentation available right now. So these two articles are meant to fill this void in order to give interested beginners a helping hand. And in two weeks I’ll catch up on explaining the project’s idea. [...] In the second part next week we’ll have a close look at the Xwayland code to see how Xwayland fills its role as an Xserver in regards to its X based clients and at the same time acts as a Wayland client when facing the Wayland compositor.

Q&A: Flying the open source flag

Red Hat’s vice-president and general manager for the ASEAN region, Damien Wong, sheds light on the company’s strategy for tackling a market that is not used to paying for software

Coming off a strong quarter, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst talks public clouds and containers

Coming off a quarterly earnings report that shattered expectations, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst believes his company is as well-positioned to capitalize on the shift to cloud computing as it ever has been. Red Hat is in a very interesting place in 2017, with one foot in two different eras of enterprise computing but thriving in that position instead of feeling trapped. It still makes most of its money selling Red Hat Enterprise Linux to companies running their own data centers, but it has become the de facto leader of the OpenStack cloud computing project and has interesting DevOps products in Ansible (IT automation) and OpenShift (container management). On Tuesday, the company reported a 19 percent increase in both revenue and net income to $677 million and $73 million, respectively, during its first fiscal quarter of the year. Financial analysts, who peppered Whitehurst with more than their usual share of “Great quarter!” asides during a conference call, were expecting revenue of $648 million according to Marketwatch. The company also raised revenue guidance for its full fiscal year.

Fedora Games Spin 25

Fedora Games Spin can be downloaded from https://labs.fedoraproject.org/games/download/index.html. Here, you can choose from the 32- or 64-bit version of the OS. Download the version you need and save it to your hard disk.

Calibre 3.1 Open-Source Ebook Manager Released with Support for RAR 5.0 Archives

Last week's major Calibre 3.0 update made a lot of noise among the ebook community with its new support for reading books in-browser on your phone or tablet, and now developer Kovid Goyal announces the first point release to the series. Calibre 3.1 is out, and among the new features is ships with, we can mention support for reading RAR and CBR files compressed using the latest RAR 5.0 archiving format, a new option in the Tag browser to control the spacing between items, and new buttons to the Edit metadata dialog to easily set and clear the "Yes/No" columns.

conjure-up dev summary for week 25

We recently switched over to using a bundled LXD and with that change came a few hiccups in deployments. We've been monitoring the error reports coming in and have made several fixes to improve that journey. If you are one of the ones unable to deploy spells please give this release another go and get in touch with us if you still run into problems.

Wine 2.11 Adds OpenGL Support in the Android Driver, Adobe Premiere Improvements

Castle Game Engine 6.2 release

We’re proud to announce the release of Castle Game Engine 6.2!

Budgie Desktop User? Here’s 5 Applets You Should Be Using

Are you a Budgie desktop user wanting to add a bit more functionality to your nimble, lightweight desktop? Well you can, by adding Budgie applets. Budgie applets are like little souped-up mini-apps that live in your panel. They provide additional features and functionality in an accessible and semi-uniform manner. You likely already have a small set of icons and applets nestled in the far reaches of your Budgie panel right now, such as the simple clock applet, Wi-Fi signal status, and volume control.

Latte Dock Is Working On Wayland Support, New Features

Latte Dock, the desktop dock based on KDE's Plasma Framework and Qt, is preparing for their next release at the end of August. Latte Dock 0.7 is expected to be the next major release of this dock and it's slated for availability by the end of August.

Latte Dock accepts donations, what is coming...

to cheer you up a bit for the upcoming 0.7 version which is scheduled for the end of August or maybe earlier ;) based on the effort...

[Older] Andy Rubin says Essential’s Ambient OS will be open source, just like Android

Playground CEO Andy Rubin, whose new company Essential unveiled a new premium Android smartphone and Amazon Echo competitor today, says his company’s Ambient OS smart home platform will be open source. That means that Rubin, who rose to fame in the tech industry for co-founding Android, essentially wants to apply the same open-source philosophy that made Android the most dominant mobile operating system to the smart home.

[Older] How to Build Open Source Communities

Seeing programming as a social activity changes how we build communities around programming. We should focus on building a community, and not on building a codebase, argued Ash Furrow at Craft. He suggested using a code of conduct, moving long or heated discussions into a Skype call or Google Hangout, avoiding fixing easy issues yourself, and distributing power and responsibilities.

[Older] R3’s open-source distributed ledger platform ‘Corda’ goes into public beta

R3, the financial innovation company that runs blockchain consortium, announced that it’s open-source, financial-grade, distributed ledger platform ‘Corda’ has entered into first public beta. The release of the public beta represents a step forward in the path of Corda, towards API stabilization for production applications. The announcement was first made by Richard Gendal Brown, Chief Technology Officer of R3, last week.

As Blockchain Advances, Developers Look To Open Source As A Solution

As the digitization of financial transactions becomes ever more mainstream, with Bitcoin’s core technology blockchain leading the way, the rapid adaptation raises security concerns at the same time its enhanced efficiency is being exploited. A recent Greenwich Associates survey highlights the conundrum but also points to solutions.

The perils of live demonstrations

Yesterday, I was giving a talk at the The South SF Bay Haskell User Group about how implementing lock-step simulation is trivial in Haskell and how Chris Smith and me are using this to make CodeWorld even more attractive to students. I gave the talk before, at Compose::Conference in New York City earlier this year, so I felt well prepared. On the flight to the West Coast I slightly extended the slides, and as I was too cheap to buy in-flight WiFi, I tested them only locally.

Announcing automatically updating Linux LibreOffice builds

I’m finally ready to announce LibreOffice daily builds for Linux that integrate our new automatic updater. The work on the automatic updater has been going on for nearly a year now and is finally in a shape that we produce builds on TDF hardware that will automatically update using delta updates. The current builds are 64-bit Linux builds created on SLES 12.2 and should run on most Linux distros. These builds are .tar.gz based archives that you can extract and just run. Note that we can’t update builds that are placed into locations that are not writeable by the current user (and due to missing support for signing executables and libraries on Linux there are no plans to change that).

A beta for PostgreSQL 10

PostgreSQL version 10 had its first beta release on May 18, just in time for the annual PGCon developer conference. The latest annual release comes with a host of major features, including new versions of replication and partitioning, and enhanced parallel query. Version 10 includes 451 commits, nearly half a million lines of code and documentation, and over 150 new or changed features since version 9.6. The PostgreSQL community will find a lot to get excited about in this release, as the project has delivered a long list of enhancements to existing functionality. There's also a few features aimed at fulfilling new use cases, particularly in the "big data" industry sector.

Firefox Focus for Android, Torvalds reflects on Linux, and more news

University of Missouri launches systemwide initiative to adopt affordable and open educational resources

On Wednesday, University of Missouri System President Mun Choi and Chancellors Leo Morton, Tom George, Garnett Stokes and Christopher Maples announced a plan that will save students significant amounts of money on textbooks and other course materials. This effort is designed to reduce the cost of attendance and enhance learning for students. The plan takes advantage of Open Educational Resources, or class materials that are free for students, and AutoAccess, which is a program that makes textbooks and class materials available online at a lower cost than traditional learning resources.

Textbook Costs to Drop Under University of Missouri Plan

University system President Mun Choi wants to use more open-source learning material written by experts, vetted by their peers and posted for free downloading. Choi spoke about the effort Wednesday at an event with members of the Board of Curators, administrators, lawmakers, faculty from all four campuses and student representatives, the Columbia Daily Tribune (http://bit.ly/2t2L4HQ ) reported.

Sudo or Sudo Not, There Is No (4th) Try

If you've been using Linux for any length of time, at some point in some tutorial or troubleshooting guide you've more than likely encountered Linux's magic word: "sudo". A casual observer probably can tell you that it's used to access restricted functions on your computer, but there is much more to it than that.