Gammy, an adaptive screen brightness GUI tool that that was originally only available for Microsoft Windows, was ported to Linux (X11 only) recently.

The Qt5 application takes a screenshot periodically, then gradually adjusts the pixel brightness based on the screen (screenshot) contents, dimming the screen if its content is too bright, or brightening the screen if its content is too dark. This is especially useful for reducing eye strain when switching between dark and light windows.

The Gammy settings allows setting a minimum and maximum brightness, and an offset (the offset adds to the screen brightness, with a higher value meaning a brighter image). Also, because it conflicts with Redshift, the Gammy developer decided to add basic temperature control, which you'll also find in the application settings.

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There are a lot of free and open-source video players available for Ubuntu. Most of them do the basic job pretty well and you do not miss anything from Windows that you could use on Ubuntu. However, some players provide additional features and you can pick which one would suit you best depending on the feature list. In this article, we will give you an introduction to some famous video players for Ubuntu. We will also tell you where to find their websites and how to install them on Ubuntu. All of these players can be reliably downloaded graphically from the Ubuntu Software but we will also explain other methods of installation for educational purposes. Also, some methods let you install the latest available version of the software from the Internet so we will not miss out on those.

Also: Translatium – Simply Yet Powerful Translation Tool For Linux

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• Why You Need the 'Google Go' App on Your Older Android Device
• Google to blame for Android parking app hiccup, says Penang exco man
• Google deserts desserts: Android 10 is the official name for Android Q
• Google Drive for Android and iOS can now fill out PDF forms
• 10 best hunting games for Android!
• Denuvo Introduces Mobile Game Protection To Android Devices
• Nokia shares its Android 10 roadmap with updates starting in Q4 2019
• How to monitor and limit your data usage on an Android phone
• Samsung's Galaxy Note 10+ is the best Android phone you can buy

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• Linux Foundation’s Linux.com in 2019: Zero Articles (Nothing Original) and a Terrible, Rookie New Design
• Managing IP as Team UPC’s Megaphone and Lobbying Front
• No More Rights for EPO Staff?
• Some Patent Attorneys Dislike Techrights Not Because It’s Wrong But Because Software Patents Are Wrong (and Sometimes Illegal)
• Guarding and Rescuing the FSF Titanic: Distro-libre and feature-schema
• Links 22/8/2019: GNOME 3.33.91, Systemd 243 RC2, Cockpit 201, Ubuntu Touch OTA-10, FreeIPMI 1.6.4
• Links 21/8/2019: Dell’s XPS 13, Mesa 19.2 RC1, Librem Update

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The new Linux kernel security update is marked by the Red Hat Product Security team as having an "Important" security impact due to the fact that it patches several critical flaws, including the Spectre SWAPGS gadget vulnerability (CVE-2019-1125) affecting x86 processors.

Also patched are a security vulnerability (CVE-2019-5489) leading to page cache side-channel attacks, an issue in the Salsa20 encryption algorithm that could allow local attackers to cause a denial of service (CVE-2017-17805), and a flaw (CVE-2018-17972) that let unprivileged users inspect kernel stacks of arbitrary tasks.

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Max Huang has been GNOME since 2010, starting with forming a GNOME users group in Taiwan. Max has a story you may understand: being a user, meeting the right person, and slowly finding yourself more and more deeply involved with a community in terms of working together and making friends.

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The Raspberry Pi began life as a hacker's dream: a cheap, low-power, highly extendable, hackable PC that shipped as a bare circuit board. Intended as one part educational device, one part tinkering tool, it became something of a phenomenon that has been used to power everything from scaled-down Mars rovers to millions of science and hackday experiments in schools around the world.

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The Debian project has removed support for the MIPS architecture. This is the latest CPU architecture to be removed from Debian, betraying their tagline of being “The Universal Operating System”.

I take issue not only with their removal of the MIPS architecture, but of their reasoning for doing it.

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• Google's Chrome OS 76 Improves Support for Multiple Accounts on Chromebooks

  Google promoted the Chrome OS 76 operating system for supported Chromebook devices to the stable channel, and it is now rolling out to users from around the world with new features and improvements.
  Based on the latest Google Chrome 76 web browser release, which brings many new features and improvements on its own, Chrome OS 76's probably most exciting is a unified account management for those who use multiple Google accounts on their Chromebook, either by you or if the devices is shared with other people.

  Users can check out the new account management feature under Settings > Google Accounts, and they should keep in mind that they can now apply all the permissions and access granted to apps, add-ons, websites, Google Play, and in Chrome to all of their signed-in Google accounts.

  [...]

  Chrome OS 76 is now rolling out to all supported Chromebook devices. You can update your Chromebook to Chrome OS 76 by going to Chrome settings and accessing the About Chrome OS section. The new version will be automatically downloaded and installed on your Chromebook. A restart is required for Chrome OS 76 to be successfully installed.

• Netrunner 19.08 Run Through

  In this video, we are looking at Netrunner 19.08.

• Asterisk Celebrates 25 Million Downloads

  Sangoma Technologies Corporation (TSX VENTURE: STC), a trusted leader in delivering Unified Communications solutions for SMBs, Enterprises, OEMs, and Service Providers, both on-premises and in the cloud, today announced that September will mark the 25 millionth download of Asterisk, the world's most widely used open source communications software.

• Mozilla Mornings on the future of EU content regulation

  On 10 September, Mozilla will host the next installment of our EU Mozilla Mornings series – regular breakfast meetings where we bring together policy experts, policymakers and practitioners for insight and discussion on the latest EU digital policy developments.

  The next installment will focus on the future of EU content regulation. We’re bringing together a high-level panel to discuss how the European Commission should approach the mooted Digital Services Act, and to lay out a vision for a sustainable and rights-protective content regulation framework in Europe.

• FreeIPMI 1.6.4 Released

  o In libfreeipmi, add additional workarounds for packets that are
  re-ordered during sensor bridging.
  o In libfreeipmi, add additional sensor / event interpretations.
  o In libfreeipmi, fix error return value on bridging requests.
  o Add workaround in ipmi-sel for QuantaPlex T42D-2U motherboard,
  whichlists a SDR record that makes no sense.
  o Add workaround for Dell Poweredge FC830, which have an error
  when reading the last SDR record on a motherboard.
  o Support Supermicro X10 OEM dimm events.

• The world’s first mobile phone type crypto digital currency hardware cold wallet officially opened source code

  Recently, the world's first mobile phone type crypto digital asset hardware cold wallet SAFEGEM officially opened source code [...] The cryptography-based blockchain technology is characterized by openness, transparency, and traceability. As an crypto digital asset management system based on blockchain applications, it should have the same characteristics and should have higher security. Therefore, the SAFEGEM development team decided to open up all source code, open source follows the GPL agreement, defines the business boundary, uses open source code for commercial use, and chooses not to open source.

• Western Digital's Long Trip from Open Standards to Open Source Chips

  It started as a microprocessor pioneer in the 1970s. Now, the company is charting a new course in open source silicon.

• Excellent Free Books to Learn Go

  Go is a compiled, statically typed programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. It’s a general purpose programming language with modern features, clean syntax and a robust well-documented common library, making it a good candidate to learn as your first programming language. While it borrows ideas from other languages such as Algol and C, it has a very different character. It’s sometimes described as a simple language.

  Go is an open source project developed by a team at Google and many contributors from the open source community. Go’s first release was in 2009, and it’s distributed under a BSD-style license.

  This article selects the best open source books that will give readers a firm foundation in developing Go applications.

• Corner cases and exception types

  Some unanticipated corner cases with Python's new "walrus" operator—described in our Python 3.8 overview—have cropped up recently. The problematic uses of the operator will be turned into errors before the final release, but just what exception should be raised came into question. It seems that the exception specified in the PEP for the operator may not really be the best choice, as a recent discussion hashed out.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp now used by 1750 CRAN packages

  Since this morning, Rcpp stands at just over 1750 reverse-dependencies on CRAN. The graph on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo, but excluding Suggests) over time.

  Rcpp was first released in November 2008. It probably cleared 50 packages around three years later in December 2011, 100 packages in January 2013, 200 packages in April 2014, and 300 packages in November 2014. It passed 400 packages in June 2015 (when I tweeted about it), 500 packages in late October 2015, 600 packages in March 2016, 700 packages last July 2016, 800 packages last October 2016, 900 packages early January 2017,
  1000 packages in April 2017, 1250 packages in November 2017, and 1500 packages in November 2018. The chart extends to the very beginning via manually compiled data from CRANberries and checked with crandb. The next part uses manually saved entries. The core (and by far largest) part of the data set was generated semi-automatically via a short script appending updates to a small file-based backend. A list of packages using Rcpp is availble too.

  Also displayed in the graph is the relative proportion of CRAN packages using Rcpp. The four per-cent hurdle was cleared just before useR! 2014 where I showed a similar graph (as two distinct graphs) in my invited talk. We passed five percent in December of 2014, six percent July of 2015, seven percent just before Christmas 2015, eight percent last summer, nine percent mid-December 2016, cracked ten percent in the summer of 2017 and eleven percent in 2018. We are currently at 11.83 percent: a little over one in nine packages. There is more detail in the chart: how CRAN seems to be pushing back more and removing more aggressively (which my CRANberries tracks but not in as much detail as it could), how the growth of Rcpp seems to be slowing somewhat outright and even more so as a proportion of CRAN – just like one would expect a growth curve to.

• GSoC final report

  The idea of this GSoC project was to implement new Domain-Specific language for LibreOffice to be used in UI testing by logging the user interactions with LO applications then generate the python code needed for the python UI framework which asaswill make testing easier. Also, the project aims to improve the logger that logs all the user interaction to be logged in the new DSL syntax to be more readable. Then we can use this replaying all the user interactions as a UI test.

• Day 88 [Ed: Karina Passos on her time in KDE GSoC]

  Today, I’ll talk about my GSoC experience and won’t focus so much on Khipu, even because i still have some things to do, so in the next days I’ll publish a post about Khipu and what I’ve done.

  As I said in the old posts, the begin was the most complicated part for me. I made a project thinking that I’d be able to complete, I started studying the code and the things I’d make many weeks before the start. But I couldn’t understand the code and I think it’s my fault. I even lost three weeks after the start stuck in this situation. It was hard for me, because I was really scared about failing and at the same time dealing with my college stuff, because in Brazil, our summer (and our summer vacation), is in December-February, in July we have a three week vacation, but GSoC lasts three months. I wasn’t having a good time at college as well, but with the help of my therapist and my mentors I found a way to deal with the both things and as everything went well.

  After this complicated start, to not fail, my mentor suggested that I could change my project. My initial project was to create new features to Khipu and Analitza (Khipu’s main library) to make it a better application and move it out from beta. Then, my new project was to refactor Khipu (using C++ and QML). I was scared because I didn’t know if I’d be able to complete it, but the simplicity of QML helped me a lot, and before the first evaluation (approx. two weeks after I decided my new project) I finished the interface, or at least most of it.

  [...]

  And, of course, I’d like to say to KDE, Google and my mentors: thanks for this opportunity.

• How To Check Your IP Address in Ubuntu [Beginner’s Tip]
• Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 Milestone 2 Released, OpenBenchmarking.org Serves 42 Millionth Download

  The second development release of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 9.0-Asker is now available for testing.

  Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 Milestone 2 continued evolving the brand new result viewer being introduced with PTS 9.0 and various new graphing visualizations. Various fixes and other improvements have landed into this new release. Screenshots and more details on the new result viewing experience soon.

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Following Chromebooks switching to BFQ and other distributions weighing this I/O scheduler for better responsiveness while maintaining good throughput capabilities, beginning with Fedora 31 there will be BFQ used as well...

Anybody using Webmin, a web-based system-administration tool, will want to update now, as it turns out that the system has been backdoored for over a year. "At some time in April 2018, the Webmin development build server was exploited and a vulnerability added to the password_change.cgi script. Because the timestamp on the file was set back, it did not show up in any Git diffs. This was included in the Webmin 1.890 release."

ZDNet reports on the discovery of a set of malicious libraries in the RubyGems repository. "The individual behind this scheme was active for more than a month, and their actions were not detected. Things changed when the hacker managed to gain access to the RubyGems account of one of the rest-client developers, which he used to push four malicious versions of rest-client on RubyGems. However, by targeting such a high-profile project that has over 113 million total downloads on RubyGems, the hacker also brought a lot of light to their operation, which was taken down within a few hours after users first spotted the malicious code in the rest-client library."

• Nvidia’s GeForce Now service launches on Android by the end of 2019
• 10 Best GPS Phone Trackers For Android
• [Update: Rolling out in US] HTC U11, U11+ and U12+ will get Android Pie by Q2 2019
• Google Android Warning As Devious Spyware Hits The Play Store, Twice
• Airtel to offer Android set-top-box, free TV to counter Reliance JioFiber: report
• Android Gaming: Google Adds Support To Xbox Elite Controller On USB
• Mate 30 Pro will run Google's Android at launch, unless the ban forces Huawei to resort to plan B
• Six things the 2019 iPhone 11 needs to keep up with Android – but will Apple deliver?

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Security updates have been issued by Fedora (nginx), openSUSE (ImageMagick and putty), Red Hat (Ansible, atomic-openshift-web-console, ceph, and qemu-kvm-rhev), SUSE (kvm, libssh2_org, postgresql96, qemu, and wavpack), and Ubuntu (libzstd and openjpeg2).

• Linux Begins Preparing For Intel's New "Lightning Mountain" SoC

  Linux kernel development activity has shown light on a new Intel SoC we haven't anything about to date... Lightning Mountain. 

  We haven't seen Intel Lightning Mountain referenced elsewhere yet but in our original monitoring of the various Linux kernel patch flow, this is a new Atom SoC on the way. 

• ARB_gl_spirv and ARB_spirv_extension support for i965 landed Mesa master

  And something more visible thanks to that: now the Intel Mesa driver exposes OpenGL 4.6 support, the most recent version of OpenGL.

  As perhaps you could recall, the i965 Intel driver became 4.6 conformant last year. You have more details about that, and what being conformant means in this Iago blog post. On that blog post Iago mentioned that it was passing with an early version of the ARB_gl_spirv support, that we were improving and interating during this time so it could be included on Mesa master. At the same time, the CTS tests were only testing the specifics of the extensions, and we wanted a more detailed testing, so we also were adding more tests on the piglit test suite, written manually for ARB_gl_spirv or translated from existing GLSL tests.

• Compulab CL-SOM-iMX8X SoM & SBC Feature NXP i.MX 8QuadXPlus Quad Core Cortex-A35 Processor

  NXP i.MX 8X Cortex-A35 processor designed for automotive infotainment and a variety of industrial applications was officially announced in early 2017...

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• Flock’19 Budapest

  This was the first occurrence of the conference for me to attend. Its an annual Fedora Community gathering, which happens in a new city of Europe every year. This time it was in Budapest, the capital of Hungary, last year it was hosted in Dresden. Dates for the same were: 8th Aug through 11th Aug 2019. Also I got an opportunity to present there on my proposal: “Getting Started with Fedora QA”.

  Day 1 Started with a Keynote by Mathew Miller (mattdm). In here he spoke about where we as a community are and where we need to go further. It was a knowledgeable discussion for a first timer like me who was always looking out for the Vision and Mission of Fedora community. There are people who are with Fedora since its first release and you get to meet them here at the annual gathering.

  [...]

  Groups were formed and people decided for themselves where they wanted to go for the evening hangout on the Day 1. We were 7 people who decided to hangout at the Atmosphere Klub near the V.Kerulet and left at around 9:00 pm by walk.

  Day 2 started with a keynote by Denise Dumas, Vice President, Operating System Platform, Red Hat. She spoke on “Fedora, Red Hat and IBM”. I woke up late, 20 minutes before the first session as I went to bed late last night and had walked for around 11 kms the day before.

• Fedora 30 : Set up the Linux Malware Detect.
• Cockpit 201

  It’s now again possible to stop a service, without disabling it. Reloading is now available only when the service allows it.

  Furthermore, disabling or masking a service removes any lingering “failed” state, reducing noise.

• Systemd 243 RC2 Released

  Released nearly one month ago was the systemd 243 release candidate while the official update has yet to materialize. It looks though like it may be on the horizon with a second release candidate being posted today.

  Red Hat's Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek has just tagged systemd 243-RC2 as the newest test release for this new version of this de facto Linux init system. Over the past month have been new hardware database (HWDB) additions, various fixes, new network settings, resolvectl zsh shell completion support, bumping timedated to always run at the highest priority, and other changes.

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• Announcing Qt for MCUs

  Today we announce the launch of Qt for MCUs – a comprehensive toolkit to deliver smartphone-like user experience on displays powered by microcontrollers. What started as a research project is now in the final leg of its journey to being released as a product.

  Connected devices found in vehicles, wearables, smart home, industrial and healthcare often have requirements that include real-time processing capabilities, low power consumption, instant boot time and low bill of materials. These requirements can be fulfilled by a microcontroller architecture. However, as devices get smarter and offer more features and capabilities, users expect an enhanced and intuitive experience on par with today’s smartphones. Qt for MCUs delivers an immersive and enriching user interface by utilizing a new runtime specifically developed for ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers and leveraging on-chip 2D graphics accelerators such as PxP on NXP’s i.MX RT series, Chrom-Art Accelerator on STM32 series and RGL on Renesas RH850.

• Qt for MCUs – Qt Announces support for Microcontrollers

  About Qt for MCUs Qt- The well known opensource toolkit for creating graphical interface announced their new release: Qt for MCUs, targeting MCU’s.

• The Qt Company Is Now Working On Qt For Microcontrollers

  There have been a lot of announcements pertaining to Qt as of late, most of which have been about forthcoming efforts around Qt 6 development. A new announcement out of The Qt Company catching us off-guard is their plans for the tool-kit on micro-controllers.

  Qt for MCUs is the company's newest commercial endeavour. In particular, they are working on the Qt tool-kit for displays powered by micro-controllers for smartphone-like user experiences. Qt for MCUs has been a research project at the company but is now being worked out as a new commercial offering. Considering how well though Qt works on mobile devices, it's only another step down catering it to low-power micro-controllers.

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• Little Red Dog Games announce Rogue State Revolution, a political thriller roguelike

  Little Red Dog Games (Precipice, Deep Sixed, Rogue State) have announced Rogue State Revolution, what they say is the "first" political roguelike game.

  It's being published by Modern Wolf, a new indie publisher who doesn't believe in crunch who say they treat their developers "like partners, not like cogs in a machine".

  [...]

  Doesn't seem to have a trailer yet, will let you know what it does. They're also continuing to use the FOSS game engine Godot Engine again, nice to see!

• Hello Games appear to be keeping an eye on Steam Play with No Man's Sky, temp fix needed for NVIDIA

  No Man's Sky recently had an absolutely ridiculous update to add in tons of new features and greatly expanded multiplayer. This update also added in Vulkan support too!

  It seems Hello Games are keeping an eye on Steam Play as well, with a recent update changelog noting "Fixed Steam VR in Linux.". Quite interesting! However, there is a bit of a problem for NVIDIA users with Steam Play on Linux, with the game performing quite poorly. Although, there's a slightly amusing workaround.

• Things are about to get weird in the Two Point Hospital: Close Encounters expansion

  Two Point Studios and SEGA just announced the next expansion for their amusing hospital building sim with Two Point Hospital: Close Encounters.

  It's coming soon too! Their plan is to release it on August 29th next week. This will be the third expansion following on from Bigfoot and Pebberley Island. Two Point Hospital is already quite weird but this is really…out there. It will be adding in 3 new hospitals full of patients to cure, 34 new illnesses although they say only 11 of these are new visually along with a promise of "new" gameplay, new music and so on.

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Released nearly one month ago was the systemd 243 release candidate while the official update has yet to materialize. It looks though like it may be on the horizon with a second release candidate being posted today...

There have been a lot of announcements pertaining to Qt as of late, most of which have been about forthcoming efforts around Qt 6 development. A new announcement out of The Qt Company catching us off-guard is their plans for the tool-kit on micro-controllers...