• Warhammer 40,000: Gladius gets a new DLC, major update and Steam Workshop

  Proxy Studios and Slitherine continue supporting Warhammer 40,000: Gladius, with some major news dropping yesterday.

  Firstly, a new 'Assault Pack' DLC has been released that adds in a new unit for each faction. As the name leads on, it's focused on raw offensive power to give you new tactical options in battle. This pack is $4.99 / £3.99 / €3.99. Quite a small DLC and the appreciation of it likely depends on how big a fan of Gladius you are, seems a bit pricey for just a few units.

• Historically-accurate WWII adventure Attentat 1942 looking at Linux builds

  Attentat 1942, a historically-accurate adventure about World War 2 from developer Charles Games has recently switched to the Unity game engine and is looking into Linux support.

  Originally released in 2017, it was made using Adobe AIR which dropped Linux support many years ago and Adobe themselves won't even be supporting AIR at all directly as it's moving over to HARMAN. For game development, there's now far better tools available for cross-platform development. The developer actually made a little blog post on Gamasutra about moving to Unity.

• Darkest Dungeon gets a Free Weekend, Butcher's Circus on Linux later

  Darkest Dungeon got a big free new DLC recently with The Butcher's Circus but it comes with a caveat for Linux gamers.

  The Butcher's Circus adds the first PvP mode into Darkest Dungeon, one that's entirely separate to the main single-player game so it doesn't interfere with it. It's pretty much an arena mode, with two sides picking 4 heroes to battle with. Sounds fun though and with the Darkest Dungeon style I can never get enough of.

• Spacebase Startopia confirmed for launch on October 23

  Realmforge Studios and Kalypso Media have announced that Spacebase Startopia will be launching on October 23. This will be a simultaneous launch across Linux, macOS and Windows which is fantastic. Realmforge Studios did good work on Dungeon 3 which worked wonderfully on Linux so we expect good things again here,

  Spacebase Startopia is a fresh take on the classic and much loved Startopia from Mucky Foot Productions, which originally released in 2001. They say it will offer up a mixture of a building sim with city-building and base-management mixed in with some RTS-styled skirmishes.

• Path of Exile adds a Vulkan Beta, another step closer to Linux support

  Path of Exile, the free to play online action RPG just recently released a huge update that adds in a Beta version of their new Vulkan API rendering system.

  To be clear: while Path of Exile does not support Linux officially, getting Vulkan into it is progress towards it since it's a cross-platform open graphics API. The developer talked a bit about this in a previous interview we covered, when they were talking about Path of Exile 2 and Linux was directly mentioned.

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• Godot Editor Running In A Web Browser

  Hello Godotters! It's-a me, Fabio! In the last few months, thanks to the great sponsorship of Mozilla I've been working on a big surprise for Godot 4.0, namely making the editor available as an HTML5 application.

  This DOES NOT mean that we will move completely to the Web like other engines did. It will only be provided as a complementary option to the native editor, as a way to lower the entry barrier. Let me explain further.

• Mozilla Sponsored The Godot Game Engine To Port Their Editor As An HTML5 Web App

  While we have been eager for Godot 4.0 as the open-source game engine update bringing big renderer improvements and initial Vulkan support, it also turns out there will be a new offering on the editor front...

  Mozilla has been sponsoring a Godot developer for several months to make the game engine's editor available as an HTML5 application that can run within the browser. Godot intends to make this web-based editor complementary to their existing native application.

• Godot Engine running in a web browser is now a thing

  Godot Engine just keeps on advancing in new and interesting ways. This free and open source game engine can now be run in a web browser - yes really.

  Writing on the official blog, developer Fabio Alessandrelli mentioned that thanks to a sponsorship from Mozilla they've been able to make Godot Engine available as a HTML5 application. Currently, it needs either Firefox Nightly or a very recent Chromium based browser, due to the features it needs like Shared Array Buffer.

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The FSGSBASE Linux kernel patches that have the potential of helping performance going back to Intel Ivy Bridge era CPUs in select workloads have now hit their 13th revision to the series in the long-running effort to getting this support mainlined...

OpenSUSE Leap 15.2 has progressed to its release candidate phase ahead of the official release planned for the first week of July...

While we have been eager for Godot 4.0 as the open-source game engine update bringing big renderer improvements and initial Vulkan support, it also turns out there will be a new offering on the editor front.....

• Cockpit 220

  Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 220.

• My exciting journey into Kubernetes’ history

  Choosing the right steps when working in the field of data science is truly no silver bullet. Most data scientists might have their custom workflow, which could be more or less automated, depending on their area of work. Using Kubernetes can be a tremendous enhancement when trying to automate workflows on a large scale. In this blog post, I would like to take you on my journey of doing data science while integrating the overall workflow into Kubernetes.

  The target of the research I did in the past few months was to find any useful information about all those thousands of GitHub issues and pull requests (PRs) we have in the Kubernetes repository. What I ended up with was a fully automated, in Kubernetes running Continuous Integration (CI) and Deployment (CD) data science workflow powered by Kubeflow and Prow. You may not know both of them, but we get to the point where I explain what they’re doing in detail. The source code of my work can be found in the kubernetes-analysis GitHub repository, which contains everything source code-related as well as the raw data. But how to retrieve this data I’m talking about? Well, this is where the story begins.

• First new Docker release under Mirantis appears
• Injustice 2 Now Playable With Proton GE

  It’s all good in the fighting game neighborhood. Quite a number of fighting games are now available to play on Linux thanks to Proton, and now we can add another to that list with Injustice 2, with a customized version of Proton: Glorious Eggroll.

• OpenBSD 6.7 and ffs2 FAQs

  In his mail, Otto clarifies some things about the latest release: [...]

• New Debian Developers and Maintainers (March and April 2020)

  The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

  Paride Legovini (paride)
  Ana Custura (acute)
  Felix Lechner (lechner)

  The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

  Sven Geuer
  Håvard Flaget Aasen
  Congratulations!

• Myriad X based AI accelerator module has a built-in 12MP, 4K camera

  Luxonis is crowdfunding an open source, $169 “megaAI” AI acceleration and camera module with an up to 4-TOPS Intel Myriad X VPU, a USB 3.0 port, and a 12-megapixel, 4K camera.

  When Luxonis launched its Intel Movidius Myriad X DepthAI AI acceleration module last November, an external 4K camera was optional. Now, Luxonis has gone to Crowd Supply to successfully launch a $169 megaAI module, which is like a DepthAI with an integrated 12-megapixel, 4K camera.

• UDOO BOLT GEAR AMD Ryzen Embedded V1605B Mini PC with Arduino Subsystem Launched for $399

  UDOO BOLT was one of the first AMD Ryzen Embedded V1000 SBC‘s ever announced with a choice of Ryzen Embedded V1202B or V1605B dual-core/quad-core processor, and a Microchip ATmega32U4 MCU for real-time I/Os and Arduino compatibility.

  The company has now launched UDOO BOLT GEAR mini PC based on UDOO BOLT V8 SBC at a promotional price of $399 excluding taxes and shipping.

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Notes taking is a good habit. A good note taking application makes the habit even better. Here are some of the best notes apps that you can use on Linux.

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• Release notes for the Genode OS Framework 20.05

  Genode 20.05 takes our road map's focus on the consolidation and optimization of the framework and its API to heart. It contains countless of under-the-hood improvements, mostly on the account of vastly intensified automated testing, the confrontation of Genode with increasingly complex software stacks, and stressful real-world work loads. You will find this theme throughout the release notes below. The result of this overhaul is captured in the updated version of the Genode Foundations book (Section New revision of the Genode Foundations book).

  [...]

  Even though Genode is able to run on top of the Linux kernel since the very beginning, Linux was solely meant as a development vehicle.

• Genode OS 20.05 Adds Capability-Based Security Using SECCOMP, Drops Python 2 + Rust

  Version 20.05 of the Genode open-source operating system framework is now available with many improvements.

  Genode OS 20.05 contains various work particularly on the consolidation and optimization front. There is also better 64-bit Arm support, documentation improvements, and capability-based security using SECCOMP on Linux.

  Genode OS 20.05 has improvements to its consistent block encrypter, retired its Noux runtime environment, removed Rust support after no one has been maintaining its support in years, dropping Python 2 given its EOL status and Python 3 support being in good shape, MSI-X support on x86, and various other updates.

• Talk 9: big step forward for team calls, efficient work flows and open source back-end

  Nextcloud GmbH is glad to announce the upcoming major release of Nextcloud Talk that will include significant improvements for teams collaborating remotely, including easy document sharing with drag’n’drop, in-call collaborative document editing and significant modifications to facilitate calls with more participants. Together with this release, our partner Struktur AG makes the high-performance back-end available under the AGPL license. A first release candidate of Talk 9 is available today and the final release is expected in about two weeks. Most of the improvements in the area of performance and scalability have been backported to the stable Talk 8 series, making them available to users right now.

• Nextcloud Talk 9 Makes Sharing And Collaborative Editing Documents Easier

  The upcoming major release of Nextcloud Talk will include improvements for teams collaborating remotely, including easy document sharing with drag’n’drop, in-call collaborative document editing and significant modifications to facilitate calls with more participants.

• COVID-19 Crisis: FOSS Responders Raises $115,000 To Support Community

  Conference cancellations have caused financial loss, unmet fundraising trajectories and missed business opportunities. For example, the Open Source Institute, the organisation that ratifies open source licences, has indicated that it needs $600,000 to meet its funding goals for 2020 while the Drupal Association has had to layoff employees after cancelling events and needs to fundraise $500,000.

• GNUnet Hacker Meeting 2020

  We are happy to announce that we will have a GNUnet Hacker Meeting from 17-21 of June 2020 taking place online. For more information see here.

• It’s Time to Get Back Into RSS

  A lot of people who were on the internet in the early 2000’s remember something called RSS. It stands for really simple syndication, and it allowed content creators to publish updates to the world in a well-understood format.

  The idea—which seems strange to type out—is that millions of people in the world could create and publish ideas, thoughts, and content…and then people who enjoyed that content would collect sources into a reader, which was called, well, an RSS Reader.

  [...]

  But perhaps most devastating was the web’s move to an advertising model, which RSS runs directly counter to. With RSS you get the content itself, which your reader can choose to display in different ways. Advertisers hate that. They want you to see the original website so they can show you ads the way they want you to see them.

  I’m sure social media sites had an effect too, because—like aggregators—they were singular watering holes that guaranteed something exciting when you showed up. The common denominator is the move from more effort to less. It’s like in WALL-E, where we turn into morbidly obese people on hoverchairs being shuttled between stimuli.

  Regardless of the percentages, all those factors combined to destroy the model of getting raw content directly from the source.

  Well, it’s time to bring that back. It’s time to return to RSS.

  Google Reader is still dead, but if I remove my nostalgia glasses, feedly is probably better now than Reader ever was. It’s what I’ve been using for years now.

• Building a successful open source community: How coordination and facilitation helps projects scale and mature

  We tend to think of the primary goals of the Linux Foundation’s projects as producing open software, open hardware, open standards, or open data artifacts — the domain of participating programmers & engineers, system architects, and other technical contributors.

  However, successful projects engaging a broader ecosystem of commercial organizations, particularly when raising funds, benefit from active leadership besides pure technical contributions. Contributors often have work outside the project that often puts demands on their time. It takes real time to build and coordinate a commercial ecosystem, ensure stakeholders are engaged, recruiting and onboarding members, create a neutral governance culture (often amid competitors competing), and to keep various aspects of the ecosystem aligned such as when end users begin to participate.

  Many Linux Foundation projects fundraise to provide resources for their community. This is an excellent benefit for the technical community when the business ecosystem comes together to invest and help the community obtain resources to build a thriving community and ecosystem. A typical fundraising model in our community is to offer an annual membership structure that provides a yearly fund for the project.

• Chan Zuckerberg Initiative drops $3.8M on 23 biomedical open-source projects [Ed: A surveillance scion is openwashing the family's dirty 'surveillance capitalism' empire]
• Oracle’s open-source alter ego behind some of its most popular products

  Open-source innovation may not be the words evoked by a legacy technology company such as Oracle, a company turning 43 years old next month. But the fact is that — like many companies — Oracle’s paid products and services are actually loaded with ingredients from open-source communities, including Linux, to which it is also a contributor.

  This circular ecosystem of contributing and borrowing back enables some of the versatility and cross-environment compatibility in the company’s latest database and hybrid-cloud offerings.

• Christian Schaller: Into the world of Robo vacums and Robo mops

  So to conclude, would I recommend robot vacuums and robot mops to other parents with you kids? I would say yes, it has definitely helped us keep the house cleaner and nicer and let us spend less time cleaning the house. But it is not a miracle cure in any way or form, it still takes time and effort to prepare and set up the house and sometimes you still need to do especially the mopping yourself to get things really clean. As for the question of iRobot versus other brands I have no input as I haven’t really tested any other brands. iRobot is a local company so their vacuums are available in a lot of stores around me and I drive by their HQ on a regular basis, so that is the more or less random reason I ended up with their products as opposed to competing ones.

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• Xiaomi Mi 8 SE/9 SE/9 Lite and Mi 8 Lite/Max 3 Android 10 kernel source code now available
• Android 11 Beta launch event will be live streamed on June 3rd
• Free Android screen mirroring app “scrcpy” adds seamless copy-paste, stay awake option, and more
• 100 Million Android users are affected by this Chinese Spyware App
• Uninstall these shady media editing Android apps right away to stop your data from being misused
• Instagram crashing? Learn how to fix Instagram crashing on Android

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The regression was introduced with the latest security updates released last week for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), as well as Ubuntu 19.10 and 18.04.4 LTS. The regression affected Linux kernel’s OverlayFS file system implementation causing the Docker registry to keep restarting.

Affected kernels are Linux 5.4 (generic, generic-lpae, lowlatency, oem and virtual flavors) in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS 64-bit installations and Linux 5.3 (generic, generic-lpae, lowlatency, raspi2 and snapdragon flavors) in Ubuntu 19.10 and Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS 32-bit, 64-bit and ARM (Raspberry Pi (V7)) systems.

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Many of us, admittedly, only use computers because they're fun. But some people use computers to get stuff done, and their theory is computers are supposed to make things faster, better, and more organized. In practice, though, computers don't necessarily improve our lives without a little manual reconfiguration to match our individual work styles.

Kevin Sonney likes to design systems, not just for networks but for improving his own workday, and this year he covered 18 different productivity tools in a series of 20 articles. This article gets all of Kevin's favorite tools in one place and provides a quick summary of what each one can do for you.

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Creating a great user experience (UX) for your applications is a tough job, especially if you are developing embedded applications. Today, there are two types of graphical user interface (GUI) tools generally available for developing embedded software: either they involve complex technologies, or they are extremely expensive.

However, we have created a proof of concept (PoC) for a new way to use existing, well-established tools to build user interfaces (UIs) for applications that run on desktop, mobile, embedded devices, and low-power Linux ARM devices. Our method uses Android Studio to draw the UI; TotalCross to render the Android XML on the device; a new TotalCross API called KnowCode; and a Raspberry Pi 4 to execute the application.

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No matter what you do — taking notes is always a good habit. Yes, there are a lot of note taking apps to help you achieve that. But, what about some open-source note taking apps for Linux?

Fret not, you don’t need to endlessly search the Internet to find the best note taking app for Linux. Here, I’ve picked some of the most impressive open-source note taking apps available.

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• Gaël Varoquaux: Technical discussions are hard; a few tips

  This post discuss the difficulties of communicating while developing open-source projects and tries to gives some simple advice.

  A large software project is above all a social exercise in which technical experts try to reach good decisions together, for instance on github pull requests. But communication is difficult, in particular between diverging points of view. It is easy to underestimate how much well-intended persons can misunderstand each-other and get hurt, in open source as elsewhere. Knowing why there are communication challenges can help, as well as applying a few simple rules.

• Float/String Conversion in Picolibc

  When linked together, getting from float to string and back to float is a “round trip”, and an exact pair of algorithms does this for every floating point value.

  Solutions for both directions were published in the proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1990 conference on Programming language design and implementation, with the string-to-float version written by William Clinger and the float-to-string version written by Guy Steele and Jon White. These solutions rely on very high precision integer arithmetic to get every case correct, with float-to-string requiring up to 1050 bits for the 64-bit IEEE floating point format.

  That's a lot of bits.

• Fortran newsletter: May 2020

  Welcome to the first monthly Fortran newsletter. It will come out on the first calendar day of every month, detailing Fortran news from the previous month.

  [...]

  If you came to this newsletter from elsewhere, welcome to the new Fortran website. We built this site mid-April and hope for it to be the home of Fortran on the [I]nternet, which traditionally there hasn’t been any to date. Look around and let us know if you have any suggestions for improvement. Specifically, Learn and Packages are the pages that we’ll be focusing on in the coming months. Please help us make them better!

• Android Studio 4.0 Released With Overhauled CPU Profiler, Clangd For C++ Code

  Android Studio 4.0 is out today with this IDE bringing a number of improvements for developing Google Android apps.

  Android Studio 4.0 comes with a new motion editor, an upgraded layout inspector, enhancements to its built-in CPU profiler, smart editor features, Clangd support for C++ language analysis, new feature handling support, continued expansion of Kotlin support, and much more.

• Looking for C-to-anything transpilers

  I’m looking for languages that have three properties:

  (1) Must have weak memory safety. The language is permitted to crash on an out -of-bounds array reference or null pointer, but may not corrupt or overwrite memory as a result.

• Peeking Inside Executables And Libraries To Make Debugging Easier

  At first glance, both the executables that a compiler produces, and the libraries that are used during the building process seem like they’re not very accessible. They are these black boxes that make an application go, or make the linker happy when you hand it the ‘right’ library file. There is also a lot to be said for not digging too deeply into either, as normally things will Just Work™ without having to bother with such additional details.

  The thing is that both executables and libraries contain a lot of information that normally is just used by the OS, toolchain, debuggers and similar tools. Whether these files are in Windows PE format, old-school Linux a.out or modern-day .elf, when things go south during development, sometimes one has to break out the right tools to inspect them in order to make sense of what is happening.

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Assuming no last minute concerns, the Linux 5.7 kernel is set to debut as stable this weekend. Given all the weeks since the merge window and our many articles covering all the feature activity at that point (and not to be confused with our activity of new work being queued for the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle), here is a look back at some of the top features of the Linux 5.7 kernel...

• What is the Difference Between Soft link vs Hard link in Linux?
• An Introduction to the io_uring Asynchronous I/O Framework
• New features for running containers on NFS with rootless Podman
• Upgrading my home server uplink
• How to Install Notepad++ on Fedora 32/31/30
• How to install Lightworks on Ubuntu
• How to Install Zip and Unzip in Linux

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• Arizona lawsuit claims Google illegally tracked Android smartphones
• Arm’s new GPU offerings to power high-end Android smartphones of 2021
• How to get the Citra Nintendo 3DS emulator to work on Android smartphones
• How to get dark mode on the Apple Music app on your iPhone or Android device
• 5 simple ways towards Android smartphone personalization
• Top Android App Development Tools That Helps In Creating Unique Apps
• Android Tablet Users Can Now Create Google Duo Account Without Phone Number: Report
• Citra 3DS Emulator Now Available on Android Devices
• Huawei P20 Pro and Mate 10 are now getting Android 10 with EMUI 10 globally
• The Android 11 Beta Launch party will be livestreamed on June 3

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In addition to the AMD Zen "amd_energy" driver coming for Linux 5.8, another late change now queued into hwmon staging is introducing notification support for the hardware monitoring subsystem...

• Red Cross urges halt to cyberattacks on healthcare sector amid COVID-19 [iophk: Windows TCO]

  The Red Cross called for an end to cyberattacks on healthcare and medical research facilities during the coronavirus pandemic, in a letter published Tuesday and signed by a group of political and business figures.

  Such attacks endanger human lives and governments must take “immediate and decisive action” to stop them, the letter stated.

• FBI offers US companies more details from investigations of health care [cr]acking

  Criminal and state actors continue to target U.S. clinical trial data, trade secrets, and the “sensitive data and proprietary research of U.S. universities and research facilities,” the FBI told industry in an advisory this week. “Likely due to the current global public health crisis, the FBI has observed some nation-states shifting cyber resources to collect against the [health care and public health] sector, while criminals are targeting similar entities for financial gain.”

  The advisory, which CyberScoop obtained, includes multiple examples since February of state-linked [attackers] trying to compromise and retain access to the networks of organizations in the U.S. health care and public health sector. It is the latest in a series of warnings from U.S. officials about similar cybersecurity incidents as the race for a coronavirus vaccine intensifies.

• Microsoft copied its new Windows Package Manager from rival AppGet, claims developer

  Beigi interviewed in December, and then never heard anything back from the company for nearly six months until he received a 24-hour heads up that Microsoft was launching winget last week. “When I finally saw the announcement and the GitHub repositories, I was shocked? Upset? I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at,” says Beigi.

  Beigi claims the “core mechanics, terminology, the manifest format and structure, even the package repository’s folder structure” of Microsoft’s winget are all heavily inspired by AppGet. Microsoft only briefly mentions AppGet once in its announcement, in a throwaway line that lists other Windows package managers.

  “What was copied with no credit is the foundation of the project. How it actually works,” explains Beigi in a separate Reddit post. “And I don’t mean the general concept of package / app managers... WinGet works pretty much identical to the way AppGet works.”

• The Day AppGet Died.

  TLDR; I’m no longer going to be developing AppGet. The client and backend services will go into maintenance mode immediately until August 1st, 2020, at which point they’ll be shut down permanently.

• Apache Pulsar joins Kafka in Splunk Data Stream Processor

  Splunk built out its event streaming capabilities with a new update, released Wednesday, to its Data Stream Processor to bring in more data for analysis on the Splunk platform.

  The DSP technology is a foundational component of the information security and event management vendor's Data-to-Everything approach.

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• Wayland in 2020

  It is nearly a year since my last blog article about Wayland on Linux. Thus I thought it is time for an update on how my desktop with sway developed. What happened?

• Mainline Linux Kernel Starts Seeing A NVIDIA Tegra X1 Video Input Driver

  While the Tegra X1 SoC (Tegra210) has been available for several years, finally with the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel is a mainline driver contributed by NVIDIA for the video input support.

  The Tegra X1 features a high-end video input controller that can support up to six MIPI CSI camera sensors concurrently.

• AMDVLK 2020.Q2.4 Released With TMZ Enabled, Improved Memory Allocation

  As the first open-source code drop in two weeks, AMDVLK 2020.Q2.4 is out today as the latest update to this official open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver stack for Linux.

  AMDVLK 2020.Q2.4 comes with improved memory allocation for systems not using any local invisible memory, command buffer prefetch is now disabled for local memory, TMZ is enabled, and a back-end optimization for kills is used. There are also several bug fixes concerning the Radeon Graphics Profiler and other targeted bug fixes.

• Khronos Releases OpenVG 1.1 Lite For High Quality Vector Graphics On Mobile

  It's been a while since hearing of OpenVG as The Khronos Group's hardware-accelerated 2D vector graphics API. But today they announced a "Lite" version of OpenVG 1.1.

  OpenVG 1.1 as their latest version came back in 2008 and since then there hasn't been much to report on this vector graphics API besides maintenance tasks and a short-lived OpenVG Gallium3D state tracker. Out today though is the provisional specification of OpenVG 1.1 Lite.

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