Recently there's been more improvements for LibreOffice with its Qt5 integration to allow this open-source office suite to jive better with Qt5-based desktops like KDE Plasma and now LXQt.

On and off throughout the year we have seen a lot of improvements to the Qt5/KDE5 interface plug-in with LibreOffice. In the update shared earlier this month was initial accessibility support as well as Qt5 clipboard support. Since then, more code has been merged.

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• Sony starts rolling out Android Pie updates with the Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact
• New leak suggests Huawei's Mate 20 Pro could be the most exciting Android of the year
• 15 new and notable Android apps from the last week including Dig, Adaptive Brightness Tile, and DIY projects (10/6/18 ...
• Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL could soon lag behind their Android rivals for this vital reason
• This week's top stories: Pixel event roundup, Xiaomi's new Android TV box, Google+ dies, more

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• Linux 4.18.14
• Linux 4.14.76
• Linux 4.9.133
• Linux 4.4.161
• Linux 3.18.124

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Now on Kickstarter: Libre Computer’s smaller “La Frite” version of its Le Potato SBC offers a quad -A53, HD-only Amlogic S805X, a Raspberry Pi A+ footprint and GPIO connector, and mainline Linux support.

Libre Computer has gone to Kickstarter to successfully launch a smaller, less powerful follow-up to its Le Potato SBC. The 64 x 55mm La Frite is said to be loosely based on the 65 x 56mm Raspberry Pi Model A+. Unlike the very RPi 3 like Le Potato, which is now available publicly under the name Libre Computer Board (AML-S905X-CC), La Frite (AKA AML-S805X-AC) has a different layout and more real-world ports than the A+, although it offers a similar 40-pin expansion header.

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The 4.18.14, 4.14.76, 4.9.133, 4.4.161, and 3.18.124 stable kernels have all been released; each contains another pile of important fixes and updates.

• EPO Insider/Märpel Says President Campinos Already Acts Like Battistelli
• Quality of Patents Granted by the EPO is Still Low and Nobody Will Benefit Except Lawyers, Jubilant Over Growing Lenience on Software Patents
• 100 Days Into the Term of Campinos There is Already an EPO Suicide
• Links 13/10/2018: Ubuntu Touch OTA-5, MidnightBSD 1.0 Ready
• Links 11/10/2018: PostgreSQL 11 RC1 Released, Librem 5 Loves GNOME 3.32

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Hot off merging transform feedback into DXVK for supporting Direct3D 11 Stream Output, Philip Rebohle released DXVK 0.90...

Today is certainly a very exciting day in the Vulkan space...

The GCC9 compiler code as of Friday has an initial implementation of the C++ networking technical specification...

With the newly-announced Vulkan 1.1.88 that brings VK_EXT_transform_feedback, the DXVK Direct3D-on-Vulkan layer has already implemented the transform feedback support...

• Plasma and KDE neon Team Visit Deployments in Catalunya

  Last week developers from the KDE neon and Plasma teams visited Barcelona. We were there to meet with some KDE software projects we had heard about in the Catalan government and schools. Aleix Pol lives locally and works on Plasma and Discover. He invited Plasma release manager and KDE neon developer Jonathan Riddell, KDE neon continuous integration master Harald Sitter, and hardware enablement guru Rohan Garg to meet the teams evaluating our software and supporting our users.

  We first met Pablo who runs the Linkat project for the Catalan government. Linkat is a Linux distribution they offer to schools, and it currently runs lightweight, simple desktop environments. As Plasma 5 now tends to use as little or less memory and resources than many lightweight Linux desktops, the Linkat team is interested in trying it. We met with the officials from the education department and discussed accessibility needs, looking at Mycroft for voice control and integrating with phones using KDE Connect.

• KF5 Static Builds

  Static linking has long gone out of fashion, at least on the average Linux desktop distribution. There are however good reasons to still (or again) support this for our frameworks. One is the rise of application bundles (Flatpak, Android APK, AppImage, etc).

  Bundles often only contain a single executable, so there is no benefit of sharing a library (at least in most bundle formats, Flatpak is a bit different there). Still we need to ship everything the shared libraries provide, no matter if we need it or not.

  Static linking is of course not the magic solution to this, but it’s a fairly generic way of allowing the compiler to drop unused code, reducing the application size. As application bundles are usually updated as a whole, we also don’t benefit from the ability to update shared libraries independently, unlike with a conventional distribution.

  Besides application bundles, there are also single process embedded applications that can benefit from static linking, so this is relevant for the effort of bringing KF5 to Yocto. In particular on lower powered embedded devices the startup overhead of dynamic linking can be noticeable.

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Vulkan 1.1.88 is out this morning and it's an exciting Vulkan update. Say hello to Vulkan transform feedback!..

Xubuntu 18.04 LTS is an official flavor of Ubuntu Bionic Beaver which uses XFCE Desktop Environment. In this release, it's still as lightweight as before (~350MB of RAM at idle time), with user-friendliness you can expect as always. Yes, it still supports 32-bit so you don't have to buy new computer to upgrade or install it; for the next 3 years. It supports Snappy out of the box with GNOME Software integration. It brings Firefox 59, LibreOffice 6.0, and XFCE 4.12 for us, in only 1.3GB sized ISO image file. And yeah, in this review, I show you that Compiz works here with 3D Cube and stuffs we really missed from our old Ubuntu era.

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Recently there's been more improvements for LibreOffice with its Qt5 integration to allow this open-source office suite to jive better with Qt5-based desktops like KDE Plasma and now LXQt...

Zulip is an open source, powerful and easily extendable group or team chat application powered by Electron and React Native. It runs on every major operating system: Linux, Windows, MacOS; Android, iOS, and also has a web client.

It supports over 90 native integrations with external applications, under different categories including interactive bots, version control (Github, Codebase, Bitbucket etc.), communication, customer support, deployment, financial (Stripe), marketing, monitoring tools (Nagios and more), integration frameworks, productivity (Drop box, Google calender etc.) and so many others.

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• [Older] Cockpit 180

  Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 180.

• Destination Linux EP91 – CoC A Doodle Do

  On this special episode of Destination Linux, we are joined by a friend of the show, Liam from GamingonLinux.com to discuss the hottest topics in Linux Gaming! We also cover some interesting discussion topics about Security, Linus’s response to the community reactions, big mistakes we’ve made as Linux users, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s new project Solid. Then we’ll end the show with our Tips, Tricks and Software Spotlight picks. All that and much more!

• Impressions From The Road: Linux Foundation And Its Role In Network Transformation
• Kiwi TCMS team updates

  I am happy to announce that our team is steadily growing! As we work through our roadmap, status update here, and on-board new team members I start to feel the need for a bit more structure and organization behind the scenes. I also wish for consistent contributions to the project (commit early, commit often) so I can better estimate the resources that we have!

  I am also actively discussing Kiwi TCMS with lots of people at various conferences and generate many ideas for the future. The latest SEETEST in Belgrade was particularly fruitful. Some of these ideas are pulling into different directions and I need help to keep them under control!

 

• How to disable IPv6 through GRUB in Linux
• The future of AlternateTab, and why you need not worry

  Any time someone publishes a “The top n GNOME Shell extensions” article, there’s a fair chance that it will include the AlternateTab extension.

  That is a bit sad to be honest. Not because it would be wrong for users to prefer a more traditional switcher, mind you, but because the actual functionality has been built-in for years — all the extension does is intercept one keyboard shortcut and pretend that it was a different keyboard shortcut.

• GDA 6.0 progress

  GDA project has released 5.2.5 and tagged 5.2.6, with some improvements, but the real work is on master.

  Master is targeting 6.0, a new ABI/API release, providing better GObject Introspection support and code modernization.

  A new Meson build system is on the way to replace Autotools. Meson helped to implement, fix and test all changes in less time. Like on multi-threading, where is more easy to produce multiple parallel tests, helping to expose issues to fix. Master have big improvement on that matter.

• MakuluLinux LinDoz New Build is Live

  The Latest ISO of Makulu Lindoz is now available for download, This build mainly addresses issues some users had with installing Lindoz onto a Virtual machine. Previously we had Squashfs problems when booting live mode on Virtual machines, this bug has now been fixed.

• How Network Slicing, Microservices & Open Source Technologies Will Make 5G Services Profitable
• Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Rises 4.37% for October 12
• FPgM report: 2018-41
• binb 0.0.3: Now with Monash

  The third release of the binb package just arrived on CRAN, and it comes with a new (and very crispy) theme: Monash. With that we are also thrilled to welcome Rob Hyndman as a co-author.

• Google Summer of code at Debian Final Report

  Virtual LTSP server project automates installation and configuration of LTSP server with vagrant. It is the easiest way to create LTSP setup. We have developed the project to do the same for Linux mint 19 and Debian 9. We also created several scripts for testing, create ltsp client, manage accounts, etc. Also created packer scripts to create vagrant boxes that we will use in the project.

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• Dropping commercial open source lowers PaaS costs at Fidelity [Ed:  Cliff Saran still cannot tell the difference between "commercial" and "proprietary"]

  Fidelity International has made considerable savings by switching from a commercially supported distribution of Cloud Foundry to the free open source version.

• Guarda makes available 15 open-source mobile crypto wallets

  Guarda, a custody free blockchain asset security and technology company today announced that it has made available now on GitHub 15 open-source cryptocurrency mobile Android SPV wallets for your disposal.

• source{d} Engine: A Simple, Elegant Way to Analyze your Code

  From minute one, using source{d} Engine was an easy, efficient process. I ran source{d} Engine chiefly on a virtual machine running Ubuntu 14.04 but also installed it on MacOS and Ubuntu 16.04 for comparison purposes. On all three, install was completely painless, although the Ubuntu versions seemed to run slightly faster. The source{d} Engine documentation is accurate and thorough. It correctly warned me that the first time initializing the engine would take a fair amount of time so I was prepared for the wait. I did have to debug a few errors, all relating to my having a previous SQL instance running so some more thorough troubleshooting documentation might be warranted.

• The Things Gateway - It's All About The Timing

  In my last posting, I talked about creating an External Rule System for the Things Gateway from Mozilla. This is a key component of the Automation part of a Smart Home system. Of course, the Things Gateway already has a rule system of its own. However, because it is GUI based, it has a complexity ceiling that is rather low by the standards of programmers.

  My External Rule System provides an alternative for more sophisticated rules that leverage the full power and readability of the Python programming language. However, I must ensure the capabilities are a proper superset of the built in Thing Gateway capabilities. The built in GUI Rule System has a special object called the "Clock" that can trigger a rule every day at a specific time. This is for the classic "turn the porch light on in the evening" home automation idea. My External Rule System needs the same capabilities, but as you'll see, it is easy to extend beyond basic time of day idea.

• How OpenStack Barbican deployment options secure your cloud

  your internal information security policy or trying to meet regulatory requirements such as GDPR, ANSSI, PCI DSS, HIPAA, or NIST, you are likely looking for ways to protect the privacy and integrity of your data and software. That solution can be found in encryption. OpenStack provides all the ingredients necessary to deploy privacy and integrity solutions, but it is up to the operator to deploy them securely. This requires a key-management solution (KMS) to manage and protect the encryption keys.

  Barbican is the OpenStack service that allows operators and users to manage and store secrets securely. It consists of an OpenStack API that provides keystone authentication, oslo.policy and quotas, and backends where the secret is stored. But secrets are only as secure as the storage backend deployed behind Barbican. This article will discuss Barbican deployment options and explore how each affects the security of your cloud.

• From hype to action: Next steps for edge computing

  Edge computing has gradually climbed the hype curve over the last couple of years, and it now stands at the center of why we do new things and launch new technologies. Why is it so important, what does it mean, where is the money behind the movement, and what does it mean to you? These are all good questions, and there is no simple answer to any of them.

  Edge is what happens when we start to look at how we take advantage of all the computing capacity across networks and enterprises—the same way cloud has done in a data center—as a real problem to be solved.

• Tips for DBAs Managing Open Source Databases

  Companies are now managing a variety of open source and non-relational databases alongside relational databases like SQL Server and Oracle.

  While managing these systems involve the same set of challenges most DBAs are used to: ensuring availability, diagnosing performance problems and managing capacity, just to name a few, each database platform has its own set of processes and workflows for collecting and analyzing information.

• The completion of Sonali's Outreachy internship work on the Free Software Directory

  I spent the last several weeks of my internship completing the upgrade and improvements to the directory.

  For context, see the previous blog post, Sonali's Internship work on the Free Software Directory, part 2

  After much work, I finally completed the upgrade of the Directory from the previous long term support version of MediaWiki, 1.27, to the current one, 1.31, which was released shortly after my internship started. I also made some general improvements.

• Illinois Tech School of Applied Technology to Host Richard Stallman

  Illinois Tech’s School of Applied Technology will host Richard Stallman, activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation, on Monday, October 15 at 7 p.m. in Hermann Hall Auditorium. He will discuss the topic of freedom and privacy from computing. This event is open to the public at no charge.

• DGSE ready to contribute to open source software
• Open source pharma: How to stop the rot in drug discovery

  Here's the case for a more caring, sharing pharmaceutical industry — one that works with academia, and other public bodies, in the public interest to discover the medicinal drugs and vaccines our global society urgently needs. And not just for the interests of shareholders.

  It's a model for open source pharma — an alternative way of funding and working in drug discovery.

  For some it's a naive idea, for others it's the only way forward, and has been for some time. 

  "Thinking in particular about neglected diseases, or poverty-related diseases, we have long accepted that there is a need for alternative models," says Els Torreele, executive director of Medecins Sans Frontieres' Access Campaign. "And in fact for the last 20 years there have been several successful experiments in piloting different ways of doing research and development to ensure drugs are developed even where there's no market incentive."

  That includes ensuring the drugs are affordable and available to those that need them.

  "We've shown it's possible in a not-for-profit way, with public and philanthropic resources, so there's no reason not to do it for 'profitable' disease, or any diseases," says Torreele. 

  But that's still not how we do business today.

• The Oasis 3DP Brings Open Source Binder Jetting to Makers

  The 2018 Hackaday Prize will soon be wrapping up, and as always, the contest has yielded some wonderfully innovative and promising ideas. One entry, submitted by Yvo de Haas, aims to make binder jetting accessible to everyone. Binder jetting, in which a liquid binding agent is deposited to bind powder particles together, is an effective method of 3D printing whose benefits include not requiring supports. It’s not a technology, however, that is typically accessible to the average maker. De Haas decided to change that with the development of the Oasis 3DP, an open source binder jetting 3D printer that he built himself.

• An Open Source Toy Synth

  If you thought the future of electronic musical instruments was massive Emerson-class modular synths, giant MPCs with pads the size of Dance Dance Revolution machines, or hilariously expensive polysynths, you couldn’t be more wrong. The future is, effectively, toys. Those tiny little Korgs you can stuff in your pocket are selling like hot cakes, and Pocket Operators are king of the hill. One of the more interesting musical toys is the Organelle, an aluminum enclosure with maple buttons laid out in a keyboard configuration. It’s a synth, it’s a sound engine, and it does produce some interesting noises. All the software is Open Source, but the hardware isn’t. That leaves it up to someone else to make the hardware for the rest of us. That’s exactly what [mitchell] is doing for his Hackaday Prize entry.

• Hedera Hashgraph Releases Open Source SDK And Announces Final Speaker Lineup For Hedera18 Developer Conference

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As a possible performance win, Jason Ekstrand as the lead developer of the Intel ANV open-source Vulkan driver has been developing a NIR cache...

• La Frite mini PC by Libre Computer Project from $10

  La Frite is a new open source development board created by the Libre Computer Project which has this week launched via Kickstarter and offers a miniaturised version of the popular Le Potato SBC supported by mainline Linux and Android 8 operating system.

  La Frite is a modern low power mini PC with four 64-bit cores, and can be equipped with up to a gigabyte of DDR4 RAM, supported by ARM Mali GPU powering high definition HDMI. It is loosely based on the Raspberry Pi Model A+ and maintains similar GPIO header arrangement. Connections on the mini PC include 2 x USB ports and Ethernet.

• Libre Computer’s La Frite is a $20 single board computer ($5 and up during crowdfunding)

  Libre Computer’s latest Linux-friendly single-board computer features a 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A53 quad-core processor, ARM Mali-450 graphics, and a target price of $20 when the Le Frite goes on sale at Amazon later this year.

  But folks who pre-order one through the company’s Kickstarter campaign might be able to score one for as little as $5.

• Libre sets La Frite mini computer board free

  China's Libre Computer has hit Kickstarter for an alternative to the Raspberry Pi Zero called La Frite. Essentially a smaller version of the company's Le Potato computer board, which also launched on Kickstarter last year, the 2.5 x 2.2 inch (6.4 x 5.5 cm) development board is aimed squarely at makers on a tight budget.

• A $10 Raspberry Pi alternative? La Frite packs Pi-like specs into low-cost Linux board

  The $10 La Frite comes close to matching some key specs of the $35 Pi 3 B+, using the same underlying Arm-based CPU and even offering faster DDR4 memory.

  On paper, the La Frite also promises comparable video playback performance to the Pi 3 B+, can output to 1080p displays via HDMI 1.4, and offers two USB 2.0 ports.

  As you'd expect for the price there are various cutbacks. The board is missing the Pi 3 B+'s Wi-Fi support, and offers a slightly slower wired Ethernet connection than the Pi 3 B+. While the underlying CPU is the same, a quad-core Arm Cortex A53-based processor, the La Frite's CPU runs slightly slower than the Pi's, 1.2GHz compared to 1.4GHz.

• Airtame raises $1.26 million in crowdfunding for its wireless HDMI dongle. What is it, and what’s next?

  Danish startup Airtame couldn’t have had a better beginning of the year.

  A relatively obscure company that was started in Copenhagen a mere seven months ago, Airtame kicked off a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo at the end of last year to raise a modest $160,000 to help turn its wireless HDMI dongle into a real product.

  What they got is a lot of attention from media and potential customers, the coveted ‘Best Startup of CES 2014’ award from Engadget, and a lot more capital to work with than they had initially anticipated.

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• Evaluating Open Source Software to Build a Connected Autonomous Vehicle [Ed: Lawyers badmouthing FOSS to attract 'sales']
• 4 Key Takeaways: Blockchain and Open Source [Ed: As above]
• Minecraft will be making two of its libraries open source [Ed: So they can call proprietary game "open"]
• Infer.NET Machine Learning Framework Now Open Source [Ed: MIcrosoft is openwashing a surveillance component used "in a number of Microsoft products in Office, Xbox and Azure."]
• SD Times Open-Source Project of the Week: Skip [Ed: Facebook skips pretence of being "open"]

  Built by a team of veteran open-source contributors within Facebook, Skip is described by the developer team as “a programming language to skip the things you have already computed.” After three years, the project has left active development and has been open sourced.

  The team wrote that the statically-typed language is experimental, with a goal to “explore language and runtime support for correct, efficient memoization-based caching and cache invalidation.”

  [...]

  The team also highlights the project’s support for “efficient and predictable” garbage collection utilizing “a novel approach to memory management that combines aspects of typical garbage collectors with more straightforward linear (bump) allocation schemes,” which minimizes memory scanning by only focusing on memory reachable from the root of a computation.

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