As a new alternative over XScreenSaver or using other desktop environments' screensaver functionality, xfce4-screensaver has out its first release albeit of alpha quality...

With the Linux 4.19-rc8 kernel release overnight, one change not to be found in this latest Linux 4.19 release candidate are any alterations to the new Code of Conduct. The latest proposal forbids discussing off-topic matters while protecting any sentient being in the universe...

DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been quite impressed with AMD's Threadripper 2 processors particularly the Threadripper 2990WX with 32-cores / 64-threads. Dillon has made various optimizations to DragonFly for helping out this processor in past months and overnight he made another significant improvement...

KDE Frameworks 5.51 is out today as the latest monthly update to this collection of KDE libraries complementing Qt5...

Greg Kroah-Hartman went ahead and released Linux 4.19-RC8 as the last test release of the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel...

• Vulkan Cracks 2,500 Projects On GitHub

  After cracking 2,000 projects referencing Vulkan on GitHub earlier this year, this week it passed the milestone of having more than 2,500 projects.

  Granted, some of these projects referencing Vulkan are still in their primitive stages, but of the 2,500+ projects are a lot of interesting Vulkan-using projects from RenderDoc to countless game engine initiatives, various code samples, the AMDVLK driver stack, and countless innovative efforts like GLOVE for OpenGL over Vulkan to Kazan for a Rust-written CPU-based Vulkan implementation and a heck of a lot more.

• GNOME's Geoclue 2.5 Brings Vala Support, WiFi Geolocation For City-Level Accuracy

  GNOME's Geoclue library that provides a D-Bus service for location information based on GPS receivers, 3G modems, GeoIP, or even WiFi-based geolocation has been baking a lot of changes.

• Geoclue 2.5.0

  Here is the first release in the 2.5 series.

 

• Wine-Staging 3.18 Released With Some New Patches While Other Code Got Upstreamed

  It has been a very exciting weekend for Linux gamers relying upon Wine for running Windows titles under Linux... There was the routine bi-weekly Wine 3.18 development release on Friday but yesterday brought transform feedback to Vulkan and in turn Stream Output to DXVK to fix up a number of D3D11 games. Today is now the Wine-Staging 3.18 release.

  Wine-Staging 3.18 doesn't incorporate any changes around the Vulkan code (there is a Wine patch needed by DXVK for this new functionality), but does include a lot of other stuff. Wine-Staging 3.18 implements more functions in the user32 code, including cascade windows, GetPointerType, and others. On the Direct3D front are a few additions to WineD3D, including the ability for the Direct3D 10 support to work with the legacy NVIDIA Linux driver. There is also a kernel fix for allowing Steam log-ins to work again with Wine Staging.

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• Cleaning up systemd journal logs on Fedora
• NVMe: A cheat sheet
• RcppCCTZ 0.2.5
• Google Cloud Print in Ubuntu
• How To Set Up an OpenVPN Server on Ubuntu 18.04
• 7 Practical Examples of cd Command in Linux
• HTG Explains: What is Port Scanning?
• How I Manage Music with Ubuntu Linux

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• Fedora Workstation 29 Is Looking Up To Be Another Impressive Release, Looking Great

  In addition to Ubuntu 18.10 releasing soon, Fedora 29 is set to be release by month's end if all goes well.

  I have been running the latest Fedora 29 packages on a number of test boxes and overall it's been running great. Yes, for the past few years I've been back to running Fedora on my main production system (after a few years of a falling out but besides that being a big user going back to the Fedora Core days), but Fedora 29 in particular is feeling really quite polished and great.

• NeuroFedora update: week 41

  In week 41, we finally announced NeuroFedora to the community on the mailing list and on the Fedora Community Blog. So, it is officially a thing!

  There is a lot of software available in NeuroFedora already. You can see the list here. If you use software that is not on our list, please suggest it to us using the suggestion form.

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• Summary of Seven Days

  Microsoft and the patents (Oct 10).  Megatotoro shared this article with me.   I was confused.  Either Microsoft is changing its position or it is a masked move that, in reality, does not help Linux at all.  Which one will be, I wonder?

• Tim Berners-Lee building a decentralized internet, Mojang opening Minecraft game code, and more news [Ed: Misleading headline that helps openwashing by Microsoft]
• Microsoft Open Sources Infer.NET AI Framework [For Humanity] [Ed: Not "For Humanity" but for openwashing of malicious surveillance carried out by Microsoft using this code, to make it seem "ethical"]
• Microsoft Open Sources Infer.NET
• Episode 3: Microsoft and Patents

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• Brave Browser Team Up With Tor

   

  TOR [sic] or The Onion Router uses technology that separates your computer from the website you’re viewing by routing the network traffic through 3 seperate servers before it reaches your computer. That being said Brave Core Beta hasn’t been fully tested yet so “users should not rely on it for serious use just yet,” Brave said.

 

• Your RSS is grass: Mozilla euthanizes feed reader, Atom code in Firefox browser, claims it's old and unloved

  When Firefox 64 arrives in December, support for RSS, the once celebrated content syndication scheme, and its sibling, Atom, will be missing.

  "After considering the maintenance, performance and security costs of the feed preview and subscription features in Firefox, we’ve concluded that it is no longer sustainable to keep feed support in the core of the product," said Gijs Kruitbosch, a software engineer who works on Firefox at Mozilla, in a blog post on Thursday.

  RSS – which stands for Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication, as you see fit – is an XML-based format for publishing and subscribing to web content feeds. It dates back to 1999 and for a time was rather popular, but been disappearing from a variety of applications and services since then.

  Mozilla appears to have gotten the wrecking ball rolling in 2011 when it removed the RSS button from Firefox. The explanation then was the same as it is now: It's just not very popular.

• Cameron Kaiser: It's baaaaa-aaack: TenFourFox Intel

  It's back! It's undead! It's ugly! It's possibly functional! It's totally unsupported! It's ... TenFourFox for Intel Macs!

  Years ago as readers of this blog will recall, Claudio Leite built TenFourFox 17.0.2 for Intel, which the update check-in server shows some determined users are still running to this day on 10.5 and even 10.4 despite various problems such as issue 209. However, he didn't have time to maintain it, and a newer version was never built, though a few people since then have made various attempts and submitted some patches.

  One of these attempts is now far enough along to the point where I'm permitted to announce its existence. Riccardo Mottola has done substantial work on getting TenFourFox to build and run again on old Intel Macs with a focus on 32-bit compatibility, and his patches have been silently lurking in the source code repository for some time. Along with Ken Cunningham's additional work, who now also has a MacPorts portfile so you can build it yourself (PowerPC support in the portfile is coming, though you can still use the official instructions, of course), enough functions in the new Intel build that it can be used for basic tasks.

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• Yale users locked out of homes after 'smart' home app crashes

   

  While the app was down, customers complained of being 'stuck' in their homes, while others were forced to wait outside until the problem was fixed. Users also complained that they only learned of the problems when they were unable to open or lock doors, or disarm alarms - rather than receiving a push-notification or text message to warn them.

• Report: US weapons systems are highly vulnerable to cyber attacks

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• Using Google trends for your keyword research
• Transfer from an Android device to PC with this $10 SanDisk Ultra 32GB Dual Drive
• You can now ask an Assistant speaker to play Netflix on Android TV
• How to Create a Bluetooth PAN (Personal Area Network) on Android
• Nokia 5.1 Plus may get Android 9 Pie by the end of 2018, hints HMD Global chief

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• A Clean GTK Theme Specially Designed for Laptop and Desktop

  The search for cool and new themes never stops. While digging through the thousands of themes in websites, search results – I found this cool and simple GTK theme – Stylish. Stylish is designed for GTK 3, GTK 2 and GNOME Shell. It comes with 6 base types of combinations with 4 color variants.

• Linux Smartphone Librem 5 Will Ship With GNOME 3.32

  Last month, Purism announced that its Librem 5 Linux smartphone will ship in April 2019; earlier, it was scheduled to arrive in January 2019.

  It seems that the developers will now get sufficient time to ship their phone with GNOME 3.32. In a blog post, the project urged the app developers to “use libhandy 0.0.4 and up, use GTK+ 3.24.1 and up and target GNOME 3.32!”

• Redesign of the invite dialog in Fractal (part 1)

  This month, I’ve had some time to work on the redesign of the invite dialog in Fractal. There is a dialog used for inviting users in a room you are in or inviting a user to start a direct chat with them. In this dialog, you can search for users by usernames. The result of this search is shown in a list below the search entry and you can click on the GtkListBox‘s rows to select users (in the case of direct chat invitations, the latest selected user will be the only one selected) and you can then click on the button “Invite” to send invitations to all selected users.

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This month I spent some time digging through the waiting list and trimming projects that have not survived the harsh and demanding growing period of their first year of existence. Among them I found a project which seemed simple on the surface, an Antergos-based distribution offering even more install-time options than its parent. What caught my attention was the specific list of extra options: 15 desktop environments to choose from, able to run Android apps through the Anbox compatibility software, optional Flatpak support, and the Mycroft desktop assistant. All of this on a rolling release base provided by Arch Linux.

The distribution is called Reborn OS and I downloaded what was, at the time, the latest build. Reborn is available as a 64-bit build only. The ISO I downloaded was 1.5GB in size and, booting from this ISO brought up the Budgie desktop environment. At the top of the desktop is a panel with the application menu, a couple of quick-launch buttons and a system tray. The Budgie desktop seemed to respond well once it finished loading and I was eager to get started.

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• Support KDE via AmazonSmile

  For quite some time, the KDE e.V. – KDE’s non-profit organization – is listed in the AmazonSmile program.

• The Last Day of the Krita Sprint and the Last Day of the Krita Fundraiser

  We fully intended to make a post every day to keep everyone posted on what’s happening here in sunny Deventer, the Netherlands.

• Who is Hiring?

  Just as quick info: For some time, there is a sticky thread on r/cpp about who is hiring C++ developers. This thread gets cleaned quarterly, so all the open jobs listed there are likely still open.

• KDE chalks up another year with cash to back community

  The KDE Project, a group that puts out a desktop environment that is used by numerous GNU/Linux distributions, has received two big donations that will enable it to do more to support the community, according to the president of the project, Lydia Pintscher.

  In a Twitter thread to mark the 22nd birthday of the project — which came to life on 14 October 1996 — Pintscher said over the past year the project had rallied behind the three goals that it cared about: privacy, onboarding and usability and productivity.

  KDE was started by German software developer Matthias Ettrich with the aim of providing GNU/Linux users with all the functionality that Windows had at the time.

• Screen reader accessibility for the Plasma desktop

  It’s been rather quiet when it comes to accessibility in KDE land for a while. But I’m very happy to see some movement and fresh energy, moving in a good direction.

  If you’re curious about making our software available to more users, improving it for everyone (for example keyboard usability), now is the time to join. We are talking on the accessibility mailing list. It’s still to early to say what the exact plan will look like, but there will be progress. Thanks to the last Randa meeting, we reached the point where a few things in Plasma do work with a screen reader, enough to let a few brave souls experiment with it. Now we’ll have to structure what needs improvements, I could imaging defining some workflows.

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• Spritely: towards secure social spaces as virtual worlds

  If you follow me on the fediverse, maybe you already know. I've sent an announcement to my work that I am switching to doing a project named Spritely on my own full time. (Actually I'm still going to be doing some contracting with my old job, so I'll still have some income, but I'll be putting a full 40 hours a week into Spritely.)

  tl;dr: I'm working on building the next generation of the fediverse as a distributed game. You can support this work if you so wish.

• The demise of G+ and return to blogging (w/ mastodon integration)

  I’m back to blogging, after shutting down my wordpress.com hosted blog in spring. This time, fully privacy aware, self hosted, and integrated with mastodon.

  Let’s talk details: In spring, I shutdown my wordpress.com hosted blog, due to concerns about GDPR implications with comment hosting and ads and stuff. I’d like to apologize for using that, back when I did this (in 2007), it was the easiest way to get into blogging. Please forgive me for subjecting you to that!

  Recently, Google announced the end of Google+. As some of you might know, I posted a lot of medium-long posts there, rather than doing blog posts; especially after I disabled the wordpress site.

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• You Can Help Ubuntu This Weekend Test The Near-Final Cosmic Cuttlefish

  If all goes well, the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" release will happen on 18 October but for that to happen they could use your help this weekend testing their release candidate spins.

  Running a few days behind with ideally their RC builds should have been spinning on Thursday (11 October) but instead being announced on Saturday (13 October), there are non-final but test-friendly Cosmic RC builds now coming out for all Ubuntu 18.10 flavors.

• Help test Lubuntu 18.10 Release Candidates!

  Please, help us test Lubuntu Release Candidates. You can find the link to the dailies on our downloads page. When you’re done, so we know you tested, please get an Ubuntu SSO account (if you don’t have one already) and report the result on iso.qa.ubuntu.com. This means you, i386 testers. It’s your time to shine!

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In addition to Ubuntu 18.10 releasing soon, Fedora 29 is set to be release by month's end if all goes well...

We are excited to announce that the KDE e.V. received a donation of 300,000 USD from the Handshake Foundation. Quite appropriate for a birthday present, as the KDE project just turned 22 this last weekend!

The Calligra office suite project will
be receiving 100,000 USD.

Of the total donation amount, 100,000 USD will be specifically allocated to pursue the development of the Calligra office suite.

"Handshake is pleased to be able to support KDE's international community of dedicated volunteers and their continued commitment to a free desktop environment with the current release of KDE Plasma 5 and the Calligra office suite", says Rob Myers from the Handshake Foundation.

The fruits of this contribution will soon become visible and available to everyone. Meanwhile, don't hesitate to join the KDE Community and be part of our mission to help everyone protect their privacy and control their digital lives with Free Software.

Stay tuned for more updates, and tell us how you celebrated KDE's 22nd birthday!