• Montreal Bug Squashing Party - Jan 19th & 20th 2019

  We are organising a BSP in Montréal in January! Unlike the one we organised for the Stretch release, this one will be over a whole weekend so hopefully folks from other provinces in Canada and from the USA can come.

• Debian Cloud Sprint 2018

  Recently we have made progress supporting cloud usage cases; grub and kernel optimised for cloud images help with reducing boot time and required memory footprint. There is also growing interest in non-x86 images, and FAI can now build such images.

  Discussion of support for LTS images, which started at the sprint, has now moved to the debian-cloud mailing list). We also discussed providing many image variants, which requires a more advanced and automated workflow, especially regarding testing. Further discussion touched upon providing newer kernels and software like cloud-init from backports. As interest in using secure boot is increasing, we might cooperate with other team and use work on UEFI to provide images signed boot loader and kernel.

• Third Point Release of Univention Corporate Server 4.3-3

  With UCS 4.3-3 the third point release for Univention Corporate Server (UCS) 4.3 is now available, which includes a number of important updates and various new features.

• Canonical Launches MicroK8s

  Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, has announced MicroK8s, a snap package of Kubernetes that supports more than 42 flavors of Linux.

  MicroK8s further simplifies the deployment of Kubernetes with its small disk and memory footprint. Users can deploy Kubernetes in a few seconds. It can run on the desktop, the server, an edge cloud, or an IoT device.

  Snap is a self-contained app package solution created by Canonical that competes with Flatpak, which is backed by Red Hat and Fedora. Snap offers macOS and Windows-like packages with all dependencies bundled with it. A snap package of Kubernetes means any Linux distribution that supports Snap can benefit from MicroK8s

• Compiz: Ubuntu Desktop's little known best friend

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• Android Open Source Project now includes the Fuchsia SDK and a Fuchsia ‘device’

   

  In a new commit posted today to Android’s Gerrit source code management, two Fuchsia-related repos have been added to the primary “manifest” for the Android Open Source Project. For the unfamiliar, this manifest is used to inform Google’s download tool “Repo” of what should be included when you download AOSP.

• Google Fuchsia: Why This New Operating System Solves a Huge Coding Problem

   

  The mobile layout has been code-named “Armadillo” and the other view has been dubbed “Capybara,” reported 9to5Google. Both sides of Fuchsia will work together using a tab system that will make up a majority of the user experience.

• Lessons in Vendor Lock-in: Shaving

  The power of open standards extends beyond today into the future. When my son gets old enough to shave, I can pass down one of my all-metal, decades-old antique razors to him, and it will still work. While everyone else in a decade will have to shave with some $20-per-blade disposable razor with three aloe strips, seven blades, and some weird vibrating and rotating motor, he will be able to pick any razor from my collection and find affordable replacement blades. This is the power of open standards and the freedom to avoid vendor lock-in.

• Help us to make document compatibility even better

  The Document Liberation Project (DLP) is a sister project to LibreOffice, and provides many software libraries for reading and writing a large range of file formats – such as files created by other productivity tools. Thanks to the DLP, LibreOffice (and other programs) can open many legacy, proprietary documents, but there’s always room for improvement! Check out this short video to learn more:

• GNU Guix: Back from SeaGL 2018

  SeaGL 2018 has concluded. Thank you to everyone in the local Seattle community who came to participate!

  As previously announced, Chris Marusich gave a talk introducing GNU Guix to people of all experience levels. Some very Guixy swag was handed out, including printed copies of this handy Guix reference card. The room was packed, the audience asked great questions, and overall it was tons of fun!

  If you weren't able to come to SeaGL this year, that's OK! You can watch a video of the talk below.

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• ​Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime released

  If you want to use a safe third-party container, smart people know they should turn to Bitnami. This company packages, deploys, and maintains applications in virtually any format for any platform. Now, at KubeCon in Seattle, Bitnami announced its Kubernetes release: Bitnami Kubernetes Production Runtime (BKPR) 1.0, a production-ready open source project.

  So, with everyone and their cloud provider offering Kubernetes, why should you care? Well, first, BKPR provides built-in monitoring, alerting, and metrics automatically, thereby enabling developers to avoid reinventing the wheel when they rollout a Kubernetes application.

• Why the Cloud-Native Market Is Expanding at KubeCon

  The KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America event is a beacon for news, with vendors showcasing their wares and making multiple announcements.

  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon runs here from Dec. 11-13 and has brought 8,000 attendees and more than 187 vendors into the exhibit hall. Kubernetes itself is part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which is also the home now to 31 open-source cloud projects.

  In this eWEEK Data Points article, we look at the major areas of innovation and new services announced at the conference.

• Add It Up: Enterprise Adoption of Kubernetes Is Growing

  A recently updated user survey from monitoring software provider Datadog confirms an increase in Kubernetes adoption. We believe this is the result of three factors: 1) more organizations using containers in production; 2) Kubernetes has emerged as the leading orchestration platform; 3) organizations are choosing to adopt Kubernetes earlier in cloud native voyage. There is also some evidence that Kubernetes adoption is more likely among organizations with more containers being deployed. This article highlights findings from several studies released in conjunction with KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America, a Kubernetes user conference being held this week in Seattle.

  Cloud Foundry’s most recent survey of IT decision makers shows container production usage jumping from 22 percent in early 2016 to 38 percent in late 2018, with these deployments increasingly being described as “broad.” The Cloud Foundry report also found an increase in the number of containers being deployed — in 2016, only 37 percent of cont

• Oracle Q&A: A Refresher on Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel

  Oracle caused quite a stir in 2010 when it announced its Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel for Oracle Linux. We’ve checked in with Sergio Leunissen, Vice President, Linux and VM Development at Oracle, for an update on the ABCs of this important introduction as well as the company’s latest take on Linux.

• Get the Skills You Need to Monitor Systems and Services with Prometheus

  Open source software isn’t just transforming technology infrastructure around the world, it is also creating profound opportunities for people with relevant skills. From Linux to OpenStack to Kubernetes, employers have called out significant skills gaps that make it hard for them to find people fluent with cutting-edge tools and platforms. The Linux Foundation not only offers self-paced training options for widely known tools and platforms, such as Linux and Git, but also offers options specifically targeting the rapidly growing cloud computing ecosystem. The latest offering in this area is Monitoring Systems and Services with Prometheus (LFS241).

  Prometheus is an open source monitoring system and time series database that is especially well suited for monitoring dynamic cloud environments. It contains a powerful query language and data model in addition to integrated alerting and service discovery support. The new course is specifically designed for software engineers and systems administrators wanting to learn how to use Prometheus to gain better insights into their systems and services.

• Red Hat Container Development Kit 3.7 now available
• CodeReady Workspaces for OpenShift (Beta) – It works on their machines too

  “It works on my machine.” If you write code with, for, or near anybody else, you’ve said those words at least once. Months ago I set up a library or package or environment variable or something on my machine and I haven’t thought about it since. So the code works for me, but it may take a long time to figure out what’s missing on your machine.

• OpenShift & Kubernetes: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Going Part 2

  The growth and innovation in the Kubernetes project, since it first launched just over four years ago, has been tremendous to see. In part 1 of my blog, I talked about how Red Hat has been a key contributor to Kubernetes since the launch of the project, detailed where we invested our resources and what drove those decisions. Today, that innovation continues and we are just as excited for what comes next. In this blog, I’d like to talk about where we are going and what we’re focused on, as we continue driving innovation in Kubernetes and the broader cloud native ecosystem and building the next generation of OpenShift.

• Red Hat OpenStack Platform and making it easier to manage bare metal

  Bare metal is making a comeback. At Red Hat we have been observing an increase of the use of bare metal in general. And we aren’t the only ones. In 2017’s OpenStack User Survey there had been a growth of bare metal in production environments from 9% to 20% of the production deployments. The 2018 survey says that adoption of Ironic is being driven by Kubernetes, with 37% of respondents who use Kubernetes on OpenStack using the bare metal provisioner.

  And there are many reasons for this growth. A great blog post about Kubernetes on metal with OpenShift by Joe Fernandes described this growth in the context of containers on bare metal with Kubernetes as a driver for this growth. But, it doesn’t stop there - High-Performance Compute (HPC), access to hardware devices or scientific workloads such as AI/ML or data lake management are also contributing to this increase.

• etcd finds new home at CNCF

  CoreOS has moved to secure the independence of etcd by donating the distributed key-value store to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation.

  The project was started by Core OS – now part of Red Hat – in 2013 to handle coordination between container instances so that a system reboot was possible without affecting the uptime of applications running on top. Its name can be seen as an hint to the management of configuration files, which over the years have grown to be stored in /etc directory in Unix systems.

• Kubernetes etcd data project joins CNCF

  How do you store data across a Kubernetes container cluster? With etcd. This essential part of Kubernetes has been managed by CoreOS/Red Hat. No longer. Now, the open-source etcd project has been moved from Red Hat to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

  What is etcd? No, it's not what happens when a cat tries to type a three-letter acronyms. Etcd (pronounced et-see-dee) was created by the CoreOS team in 2013. It's an open-source, distributed, consistent key-value database for shared configuration, service discovery, and scheduler coordination. It's built on the Raft consensus algorithm for replicated logs.

• Welcome etcd to CNCF

  Etcd has been written for distributed systems like Kubernetes as a fault-tolerant and reliable data base. Clients can easily watch certain keys and get notified when their values change which allows scaling to a large number of clients that can reconfigure themselves when a value changes.

• etcd: Current status and future roadmap

  etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to manage the coordination state of distributed systems. etcd was first announced in June 2013 by CoreOS (part of Red Hat as of 2018). Since its adoption in Kubernetes in 2014, etcd has become a fundamental part of the Kubernetes cluster management software design, and the etcd community has grown exponentially. etcd is now being used in production environments of multiple companies, including large cloud provider environments such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Azure, and other on-premises Kubernetes implementations. CNCF currently has 32 conformant Kubernetes platforms and distributions, all of which use etcd as the datastore.

  In this blog post, we’ll review some of the milestones achieved in latest etcd releases, and go over the future roadmap for etcd. Share your thoughts and feedback on features you consider important on the mailing list: etcd-dev@googlegroups.com.

• Red Hat contributes etcd, the cornerstone of Kubernetes, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation

  Today Red Hat is thrilled to announce our contribution of etcd, an open source project that is a key component of Kubernetes, and its acceptance into the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a vendor-neutral foundation housed under The Linux Foundation to drive the adoption of cloud native systems.

  The etcd project’s focus is safely storing critical data of a distributed system and it demonstrated its quality early on. It is most notably the primary datastore of Kubernetes, the de facto standard system for container orchestration. Today we're excited to transfer stewardship of etcd to the same body that cares for the growth and maintenance of Kubernetes. Given that etcd powers every Kubernetes cluster, this move brings etcd to the community that relies on it most at the CNCF.

• Banks take next steps to digital refinement

  The financial services industry (FSI) has gotten the message: customer expectations have changed radically. They want to experience banking services through multiple digital channels, and they want those services to go well beyond the generic products that traditional banks typically offer. Customers are looking for personalization, are comfortable with service automation, and are eager to get what they need quickly and easily.

  As the value chain for financial institutions’ services expands along with the need to deliver new and relevant customer offerings, their dexterity is being put to the test, according to an article by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). To enable the flexibility and agility they need to support a dynamic environment, they’ve begun to create a culture of continuous delivery (CD). This allows for continuous cross-channel development, may allow deployment of features in hours rather than months, and lends support for performing system upgrades with zero downtime and without disturbing the customer experience.

• CentOS 7-1810 "Gnome" overview | The community enterprise operating system
• How to prepare for digital transformation with Red Hat Virtualization and Veeam

  Red Hat has a history of helping organizations reduce the cost of IT, from infrastructure to applications, while also helping to lay the foundation for open source digital transformation. More recently, Red Hat has sought to help organizations reduce the cost of virtualization, aiming to make it easier to accelerate their digital transformation journey through innovative technologies such as Red Hat Ansible Automation or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Red Hat’s comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes Platform.

• Red Hat schedules stockholder meeting to vote on $34B IBM deal
• INVESTIGATION NOTICE: Kaskela Law LLC Announces Shareholder Investigation of Red Hat, Inc.
• Red Hat sets date for stockholders to vote on the merger with IBM
• Arista Works With Red Hat and Tigera on Container Environments for Enterprises

  Arista Networks is working with Red Hat and Tigera to help enterprises adopt containers in both private and public clouds. The three companies are demonstrating a preview of their upcoming offering this week at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018 in Seattle.

  The integrated product will include Arista’s containerized Extensible Operating System (cEOS) and CloudVision software along with Red Hat’s OpenShift Container Platform and Tigera’s Secure Enterprise Edition.

• Knative Meshes Kubernetes with Serverless Workloads

  Google Cloud’s Knative initiative launched in July is expanding to include an updated version of Google’s first commercial Knative offering along with a batch of new distributions based on serverless computing framework.

  Knative is a Kubernetes-based platform for building and managing serverless workloads in which cloud infrastructure acts as a server for managing the allocation of computing and storage resources. It is being offered as an add-on to Kubernetes Engine used to orchestrate application containers.

• Red Hat Steps Up with HPC Software Solutions at SC18

  In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Yan Fisher and Dan McGuan from Red Hat describe the company’s powerful software solutions for HPC and Ai workloads.

• RedHat contributes etcd, a distributed key-value store project, to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon

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Odkrili superprevodnik pri običajnih zimskih temperaturah

• Matej Huš :: včeraj ob 00:22
• Znanost in tehnologija

Slo-Tech - Na Inštitutu za kemijo Max Planck v nemškem Mainzu so postavili nov rekord v visokotemperaturni superprevodnosti. Odkrili so, da vzorci lantanovega hidrida (LaH10) zadržijo superprevoden značaj vse do temperature -23 °C, če jih izpostavimo dovolj visokemu tlaku. S tem so rekord iz leta 2015 dvignili za skoraj petdeset stopinj, kar nas navdaja z optimizmom, da tudi superprevodnosti pri sobni temperaturi ni več daleč. Nekoliko manj optimistična pa je opomba, da so morali za trenutni dosežek vzorec izpostaviti tlaku 170 GPa, kar je 1,7-milijonkrat več kot na površju Zemlje. Več na Slo-Techu.

Huaweijeva finančna direktorica Meng Wanzhou bo na odločitev počakala na prostosti

• Matej Huš :: včeraj ob 00:21
• Ostale najave

Slo-Tech - Huaweijevo finančni direktorico Meng Wanzhou so izpustili iz kanadskega pripora, potem ko je sodišče določilo varščino v višini 10 milijonov kanadskih dolarjev - sedem milijonov v gotovini, preostanek pa v obliki poroštev, ki jih je dal njen soprog Liu Xiaozong. Sodišče je po tridnevnem zaslišanju ocenilo, da lahko Mengova na odločitev glede izročitve počaka na prostosti. Mengova je osumljena kršenja ameriških sankcij zoper Iran. Več na Slo-Techu.

LG Gram je najlažji 17-palčni prenosnik

• Matej Huš :: včeraj ob 00:21
• Ostale najave

LG - LG je še pred CES-om, ki se začenja drugi teden v letu, predstavil nova ultralahka prenosnika. LG Gram 2-in-1 je večnamenski prenosnik, ki ima 360-stopinski tečaj za monitor in se lahko uporablja kot običajni prenosnik ali kot tablica. LG Gram 17 pa bo najlažji 17-palčni prenosnik, saj bo tehtal vsega 1340 gramov (to je toliko, kot tehta 13-palčni MacBook Pro), medtem ko imajo običajni 17-palčniki poltretji kilogram. Več na Slo-Techu.

• IRS Not Yet Ready to Move to Linux Due to Its Own Errors [Ed: Bogdan Popa, "Microsoft News Editor" (euphemism for Microsoft PR/propagandist), continues to shamelessly attack GNU/Linux. Remember this when Microsoft says it "loves Linux".]
• OpenSSH, now a part of the Windows Server 2019
• Windows Server 2019 to support OpenSSH natively [Ed: Platform with NSA back doors and remote controls to hold private SSH keys]
• Microsoft Now Supports OpenSSH in Windows Server 2019 [Ed: This weakens OpenSSH as a whole, across platforms]
• Microsoft Goes Open Source with Web Browsers [Ed: Swapnil Bhartiya got the story wrong, became akin to a propaganda tool for Microsoft. No, the browser remains proprietary, they just 'leverage' Google's code and they didn't do this out of choice; they had lost the market they abused.]
• Phippy + Cloud Native Friends Make CNCF Their Home [Ed: Microsoft entryism]

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• For now, the experimental Linux (and Mac) port of ARMA 3 will not see any more updates

  Sad news for those who purchased ARMA 3 due to the experimental Linux (and Mac) version, as Bohemia Interactive have announced a halt to the updates for it.

• There's a brand new Steam Play Beta version out with FAudio, also a Steam Play whitelist update

  The day I'm sure many have waited for has arrived, a new Steam Play beta has been officially released today which includes the important FAudio project. On top of that, even more titles have entered the Steam Play whitelist.

  Don't know what the heck Steam Play is? The "too long; didn't read" is that it enables you to play a lot of Windows games on Linux.

• Valve Rolls Out New Steam Play Proton 3.16 Beta, 29 More Games Supported

  A new beta relase of Proton 3.16 is now available, the Wine-based software that powers Valve's Steam Play for running many Windows games on Linux.

• Volcanoids, a steampunk base-building survival game may come to Linux, developer testing

  I know what you're going to say, something about yet another survival game! However, Volcanoids really does look like something you want to pay attention to.

  I forget who, but someone mentioned this game to me a while ago. The developer seemed interested, but I didn't see them say much about it—until now thanks to another tip. On Steam, a user posted in their forum asking about Linux support and the developer replied showing a screenshot of their progress on a Linux build. The skybox is missing, plus a few other issues but it's promising.

• Desert Child is a thrilling racing adventure now available with Linux support

  Developed by Oscar Brittain, Desert Child is a fantastic pixel art racing adventure that just released with Linux support.

• Koruldia Heritage, the awesome looking pixel-painted adventure RPG is fully funded and heading to Linux

  Fully funded on Kickstarter and heading to Linux, the pixel-painted adventure RPG Koruldia Heritage is looking awesome.

  Against their initial goal of £10K they've smoothly sailed over £15K and so with 6 days left they've done pretty well. It's still not a large amount of money for a team to make such an ambitious game, but it has been in development for a few years already. The funding here, is for some additional help towards the finishing line.

• The super sweet survival and base-builder 'MewnBase' is now on Steam

  For those who prefer their survival games to be single-player and a little sweeter, MewnBase is now on Steam.

  Currently, the developer says it's mostly a spare-time gig and so updates aren't always that frequent. It's in Early Access and so it's not finished, with an end-date projected to be by the end of 2019. Hopefully with the Steam release, it will give the developer some additional sales and exposure to progress forwards.

• The absolutely excellent platformer Slime-san now has a level editor

  Easily one of the best and trickiest platformers around, Slime-san is a seriously underappreciated gem. Another big update recently released, adding in a level editor.

  Honestly, I don't understand why it has so few reviews and followers. Slime-san is practically one of the best platformers around if you're looking for a true challenge that won't be over quickly.

• The Universim continues advancing with a crime system, firefighters and more

  Just recently, they put out a whopper of an update which makes the game perform a lot better thanks to a number of optimisations. It performs consistently well above 100FPS and feels noticeably smooth now. They even fixed the issue I noted with the saving system causing massive stuttering, so that's great. Still not sold on needing a building to save, it's a gimmick that doesn't appeal to me but it's a minor gripe.

  As for the bigger parts of the update, they've introduced a full crime system with police stations where your people can become officers, prisons with guards and so on. You will need to catch criminals quickly, as things can soon escalate from minor crimes to setting everything on fire—ouch! There's two ways to deal with your "nuggets" (your people), you can either fry them up using brutal methods like the electric chair or my preferred method with a Rehabilitation Centre for some therapy to help them deal with their issues.

• The fun indie FPS 'Ballistic Overkill' adds a new amusing game mode called Juggernaut

  While not as popular as it once was, Ballistic Overkill is still a reasonably good online shooter that I've spent a lot of time in. The latest update sounds quite amusing.

  If the normal team modes aren't for you, the Juggernaut mode just might be. In this mode, there's a special golden Chainsaw on each map waiting to be grabbed. Once picked up, that player turns into the Juggernaut, a special class with a lot of health. You gain points for the length of time you stay in this mode, however, every other player will know where you are and will try to take you down.

• ReignMaker 2 combines Match-3 gameplay with Tower Defense and more genres spliced together

  Frogdice, developer of ReignMaker, Stash, Dungeon of Elements and more is back with a new Kickstarter campaign for their genre bending game ReignMaker 2.

  With a low goal of £799, they've already crossed the finishing line and then some with over £3K pledged so it looks like it's good to go. They're planning Linux support like with their past games, so we should see it sometime around April next year.

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• WireGuardians of the Galaxy | LINUX Unplugged 279

  We have a WireGuard success story to share, and it’s probably not what you’re expecting.

  Plus we check in on Ubuntu 19.04, start the search for an Emby replacement, and how to use Reddit on the commandline.

• Episode #108: Spilled data? Call the PyJanitor
• Coder Radio 335

  Estimates can be a very tricky thing to get right, but their vitally important. Peter Kretzman joins us to make it all a bit easier and clearer.

  Plus Chris thinks he knows why Microsoft is willing to kill off their Edge browser engine and switch it out for Chromium. But can he convince Mike?

• Python 101: Episode #37 – How to Add Your Code to PyPI
• Python 101: Episode #38 – The Python egg
• LearnLinux: Channel Update, my weight loss, karate, what I've been up to, and more

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Java initially appeared in 1995, evolving from a 1991 innovation called "Oak." It was apparently the right time for engineers looking to grow distributed systems. Some of the more popular languages back then — C, C++, and even Cobol for some efforts — involved steep learning curves. Java's multi-threading, allowing the concurrent execution of two or more parts of a program, ended the struggle to get multi-tasking working.

Java quickly became the de facto language for mission-critical systems. Since that time, new languages have come and gone, but Java has remained entrenched and hard to replace. In fact, Java has stood as one of the top two computing languages practically since its initial appearance, as this Top Programming Languages article suggests.

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• Security updates for Wednesday
• How Internet Savvy are Your Leaders?
• Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #189
• Security And Open-Source Hardware

  Semiconductor Engineering sat down with Helena Handschuh, a Rambus fellow; Richard Newell, senior principal product architect at Microsemi, a Microchip Company; and Joseph Kiniry, principal scientist at Galois. What follows are excerpts of that conversation.

• Hackers Crack Open Sony PlayStation Classic With Ease

  Sony launched PlayStation Classic to bring back the nostalgia but was heavily criticized for not including popular titles such as Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider.

  Now, hackers have taken the things into their own hands, and, surprisingly, it is extremely easy to hack the plug-and-play console. Moreover, it is found that Sony has lacked in implementing the basic security features in the console, leading to easy hacking of the device.

• Microsoft Account Bug Left It Wide Open To Be Hijacked By Anyone

  A massive bug reported by Sahad Nk could have allowed hackers to take over Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Store, or Microsoft Sway account just by asking users to click on the desired link.

  Upon a little inspection, the India-based bug hunter discovered that a Microsoft subdomain, “success.office.com,” was pointing towards Azure service with its CNAME record.

• Now Windows 10 Has C, B, and D Updates. What is Microsoft Smoking?

  According to Microsoft, Windows 10 has “B,” “C,” and “D” updates—but never “A” updates! These updates are released at different times, contain different things, and are offered to different people. Let’s break all this down.

• PhpMyAdmin Releases Security Update 4.8.4, Patches XSRF and XSS vulnerabilities

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• Linux I/O Schedulers

  The Linux kernel I/O schedulers attempt to balance the need to get the best possible I/O performance while also trying to ensure the I/O requests are "fairly" shared among the I/O consumers.  There are several I/O schedulers in Linux, each try to solve the I/O scheduling issues using different mechanisms/heuristics and each has their own set of strengths and weaknesses.

  For traditional spinning media it makes sense to try and order I/O operations so that they are close together to reduce read/write head movement and hence decrease latency.  However, this reordering means that some I/O requests may get delayed, and the usual solution is to schedule these delayed requests after a specific time.   Faster non-volatile memory devices can generally handle random I/O requests very easily and hence do not require reordering.

• Btrfs Restoring Support For Swap Files With Linux 4.21

  The Btrfs file-system hasn't supported Swap files on it in early a decade, but that support will be restored again with the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel. 

  Btrfs hasn't supported Swap files on it since 2009 thus making swap partitions necessary unless having a mix of file-systems on your box (or not caring about any swap capabilities), but now with Linux 4.21 that support will be restored for allowing swap files to be reside on Btrfs.

• Intel's IWD Linux Wireless Daemon 0.13 Adds Opportunistic Wireless Encryption

  Intel's promising IWD open-source wireless daemon continues picking up additional functionality in its trek towards potentially replacing wpa_supplicant. Out this week is IWD 0.13. 

  With the IWD 0.13 release there are fixes as well as support for Opportunistic Wireless Encryption and support for the common EAP-TLS framework.

• Intel Developing "oneAPI" For Optimized Code Across CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs & More

  Intel's 2018 Architecture Day was primarily focused on the company's hardware architecture road-map, but one of the software (pre)announcements was their oneAPI software stack. 

• Intel Working On Open-Sourcing The FSP - Would Be Huge Win For Coreboot & Security

  Intel's Architecture Day on Tuesday was delightfully filled with an overwhelming amount of valuable hardware information, but Intel's software efforts were also briefly touched on too. In fact, Raja Koduri reinforced how software is a big part of Intel technology and goes in-hand with their security, interconnect, memory, architecture, and process pillars and that's where their new oneAPI initiative will fit in. But what learning afterwards was most exciting on the software front.

• Linux Is Already In Good Shape For The New Features Of Intel Gen11 Graphics & Icelake

  Besides seeing Icelake demos at the Intel Architecture Day that were running on Ubuntu, with closely tracking the Linux kernel's development most of the new features presented for Sunny Cove and Gen11 graphics have already been merged or at least available in patch form for some months within the Linux ecosystem. Here's a look at the features talked about yesterday and their state on Linux.

• Intel Details Gen11 Graphics & Sunny Cove For Icelake

  At Intel's architecture day, the company finally detailed their "Gen 11" graphics that we've been seeing open-source Linux graphics driver patches for many months (Intel OTC posted their initial open-source display driver code in early January and has continued the enablement work since) albeit elusive in substantive user details and hardware until Icelake. But today at least we can share more about the significant improvements with Gen11 graphics.

• mesa 18.3.1

  This version disables the VK_EXT_pci_bus_info extension due to last minute issues spotted in the specification.

• Mesa 18.3.1 Released To Disable Botched Vulkan Extension

  Mesa 18.3 was released less than a week ago while today Mesa 18.3.1 was issued due to an error in the Vulkan specification.

  The motivating factor for this quick Mesa 18.3.1 release was to disable the VK_EXT_pci_bus_info extension that had just been introduced weeks ago. The Vulkan working group mistakenly assumed that PCI domains are 16-bit even though they could potentially be 32-bit values. The next Vulkan spec update will change the relevant structure to be 32-bit, which is a backwards-incompatible change.

• High resolution wheel scrolling on Linux v4.21

  Most wheel mice have a physical feature to stop the wheel from spinning freely. That feature is called detents, notches, wheel clicks, stops, or something like that. On your average mouse that is 24 wheel clicks per full rotation, resulting in the wheel rotating by 15 degrees before its motion is arrested. On some other mice that angle is 18 degrees, so you get 20 clicks per full rotation.

  Of course, the world wouldn't be complete without fancy hardware features. Over the last 10 or so years devices have added free-wheeling scroll wheels or scroll wheels without distinct stops. In many cases wheel behaviour can be configured on the device, e.g. with Logitech's HID++ protocol. A few weeks back, Harry Cutts from the chromium team sent patches to enable Logitech high-resolution wheel scrolling in the kernel. Succinctly, these patches added another axis next to the existing REL_WHEEL named REL_WHEEL_HI_RES. Where available, the latter axis would provide finer-grained scroll information than the click-by-click REL_WHEEL. At the same time I accidentally stumbled across the documentation for the HID Resolution Multiplier Feature. A few patch revisions later and we now have everything queued up for v4.21. Below is a summary of the new behaviour.

  The kernel will continue to provide REL_WHEEL as axis for "wheel clicks", just as before. This axis provides the logical wheel clicks, (almost) nothing changes here. In addition, a REL_WHEEL_HI_RES axis is available which allows for finer-grained resolution. On this axis, the magic value 120 represents one logical traditional wheel click but a device may send a fraction of 120 for a smaller motion. Userspace can either accumulate the values until it hits a full 120 for one wheel click or it can scroll by a few pixels on each event for a smoother experience. The same principle is applied to REL_HWHEEL and REL_HWHEEL_HI_RES for horizontal scroll wheels (which these days is just tilting the wheel). The REL_WHEEL axis is now emulated by the kernel and simply sent out whenever we have accumulated 120.

• Nouveau Lands Initial Open-Source NVIDIA Turing Support - But No GPU Acceleration

  Just in time for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel, the developers working on the reverse-engineered, open-source support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX "Turing" GPUs have published their preliminary code. But before getting too excited, there isn't GPU hardware acceleration working yet.

  Ben Skeggs of Red Hat spearheaded this enablement work. He's got the initial support working right now for the TU104 and TU106 chipsets, but not yet TU102 due to hardware access. The TU106 is the RTX 2060/2070 series while the TU104 is the GeForce RTX 2080 and the TU102 is the RTX 2080 Ti and TITAN RTX. Back on launch day the Nouveau community crew started their Turing reverse-engineering work. NVIDIA doesn't support nor hinder the Nouveau driver work, though these days do sample hardware to the developers and are occasionally able to answer technical questions for them.

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• How to Install InvoicePlane with Nginx on CentOS 7
• How to Install Jitsi Meet Video Conference Platform on Ubuntu
• How to Set Up Mattermost Slack Alternative on a Ubuntu Server
• Install Blender 2.80 Beta in Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, 18.10
• Face Recognition Based on *dlib* in a KVM Guest
• Triggering a travis-ci build on another repo
• Gitea on OpenShift with NodePort SSH access
• Non-blocking bittorrent plugin for vlc
• 3 Ways To Install Arch Linux
• How to Build a Netboot Server, Part 2
• [Howto] Launch traefik as a docker container in a secure way
• Getting Started with KubeVirt Containers and Virtual Machines Together
• Re-Imagining Virtualization with Kubernetes and KubeVirt

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• Bootstrapping Rust
• This Week in Rust 264
• Nick Fitzgerald: Rust 2019: Think Bigger

  Rust shines when we find ways to have our cake and eat it too: memory safety without runtime garbage collection, abstraction without overhead, threading without data races. We must find new ways to continue this tradition for Rust 2019 and beyond.

  On a day-to-day basis, I am dedicated to small, incremental progress. If a pull request is an improvement over the status quo, merge it now! Don’t wait for the pull request to be perfectly pristine or the feature to be 100% complete. Each day we drag reality inch by inch towards the ideal.

  However, when planning on the scale of years, our vision must not be weighed down by discussion of incremental improvements: we must rise and collectively define the lofty ideals we aim for. It requires avoiding local maxima. Nick Cameron’s Rust in 2022 post, where he starts with what we might want in a Rust 2022 edition and then works backwards from there, is a great example.

  With that out of the way, I will make a couple suggestions for the Rust 2019 roadmap. I will leave my thoughts for the Rust and WebAssembly domain working group’s 2019 roadmap for a future post.

• 7 Programming Languages Your Developers Need to Know

  At the heart of dev work, you’ll see a team of developers who utilize critical thinking, creative approaches, and technical know-how in designing products that can bring your company closer to its end-goals. Thus, it’s crucial that you have a team of developers who are dedicated to updating their skill sets based on current trends, tools, and technologies. That said, here’s a list of programming languages that your developers need to know, so they can stay ahead of the learning curve.

• PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #346 (Dec. 11, 2018)
• PyConZA 2018 – a beautiful community in South Africa
• RQuantLib 0.4.7: Now with corrected Windows library
• Reminder: Webinar this Thursday, “Automating Build, Test and Release Workflows with tox” with Oliver Bestwalter
• Recommendation: Dash for your docs
• PYthon Piedmont Triad User Group
• Python 3.7.2rc1 and 3.6.8rc1 now available for testing
• Matthew Palmer: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Pagination
• Announcing libchirp
• Tell the user how many duplicate files have the python program deleted
• Open a text file then write the game level onto it with python
• PyCharm 2018.3.2 RC
• Remove duplicate files project is ready
• Writing better Spring applications using SpringFu
• The Beginner-Friendly Python Editor
• Fedora 29 : Using pytorch on Fedora distro.

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• New Ebook Offers Comprehensive Guide to Open Source Compliance

  The Linux Foundation has released the second edition of Open Source Compliance in the Enterprise by Ibrahim Haddad, which offers organizations a practical guide to using open source code and participating in open source communities while complying with both the spirit and the letter of open source licensing.

  This fully updated ebook — with new contributions from Shane Coughlan and Kate Stewart — provides detailed information on issues related to the licensing, development, and reuse of open source software. The new edition also includes all new chapters on OpenChain, which focuses on increasing open source compliance in the supply chain, and SPDX, which is a set of standard formats for communicating the components, licenses, and copyrights of software packages.

  “Open source compliance is the process by which users, integrators, and developers of open source observe copyright notices and satisfy license obligations for their open source software components,” Haddad states in the book.

• Inaugural Hyperledger Global Forum Showcases Strong Community Momentum

  Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, today kicked off the first day of its Hyperledger Global Forum. The event has drawn more than 650 attendees from as far as Australia and Argentina for an extended conversation about the state of open source enterprise blockchain and vision for the Hyperledger community and technologies.

  Headlined by keynotes like Leanne Kemp, CEO of Everledger, Hyperledger Global Forum addresses a wide range of business and technical topics. Key topics include use cases, production blockchain deployments and live demos of Hyperledger in a range of new systems. Hands-on workshops and technical talks will serve as fuel for the community development at the core of Hyperledger.

• Hyperledger Adds Alibaba Cloud, Citi, Deutsche Telekom, we.trade and 12 more New Members at Hyperledger Global Forum

  Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, today announced Alibaba Cloud, Citi, Deutsche Telekom, we.trade and 12 more organizations have joined the project. This news came during day one of the inaugural Hyperledger Global Forum in Basel, Switzerland.

  “We are starting Global Forum off with a bang with this impressive line-up of new members,” said Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director, Hyperledger. “The growing Hyperledger community reflects the increasing importance of open source efforts to build enterprise blockchain technologies across industries and markets. The latest members showcase the widening interest in and impact of DLT and Hyperledger.”

• Firefox 64 Now Available, SoftMaker Office Announces "Load and Help" Fundraising Campaign, the Joint Development Foundation Has Joined The Linux Foundation, Google+ to End in April 2019 and Valve Releases Proton 3.16 (Beta)

  The Joint Development Foundation has joined The Linux Foundation family to "make it easier to collaborate through both open source and standards development". The press release quotes Executive Director of The Linux Foundation Jim Zemlin: "Leveraging the capabilities of the Joint Development Foundation will enable us to provide open source projects with another path to standardization, driving greater industry adoption of standards and specifications to speed adoption."

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With just over one week to go until the expected Linux 4.20 kernel release, Alex Deucher of AMD today sent in the latest batch of fixes to the DRM tree for landing at the end of this cycle...

• Bosch Group expands Digital Services with SAP HANA on SUSE
  

  SUSE has just published a new success story with Bosch Group, a global supplier of technology and services.
  Bosch Group is an innovation leader with expertise in sensor technology, software, and services, as well as its own IoT cloud, offers customers connected and cross-domain solutions. Taking advantage of the digital transformation happening across all industries, Bosch wants to build on its high-quality solutions and expand its offerings with new, digital services.

• SUSE Cloud Application Platform v1.3 released

  SUSE Cloud Application Platform v1.3 is now available! If you’re in Seattle for Kubecon this week, be sure to stop by our booth for a new pair of socks, a demo, or to learn more. The new version focuses on our continuing effort to provide a cloud native developer experience to Kubernetes users, an improved UI, additional services brokers, and more.

  You can now graphically track metrics and see into the underlying Kubernetes infrastructure with an updated version of Stratos UI. Stratos is a UI web console that manages Cloud Foundry clusters, and the workloads running on them, and is adding additional Kubernetes integration with each release. In this newest version, application and Kubernetes pod attributes such as CPU and memory usage are tracked in a graph over time, and the status of the underlying Kubernetes cluster is now available.

• Tis the Season for My Top 10 Predictions for 2019

  Tis the season for spending time with loved ones, reminiscing about the past year and of course, technology forecasts and predictions. Whether we like it or not, nothing ever stays the same, in life and in business.

  [...]

  10. Open source software will continue to thrive and play a pivotal role in all of these predictions

  Why? Because open source communities have become the vanguard of innovation. Open source software plays a pivotal role in all the dominant technology trends and is increasingly relied on by enterprise businesses around the globe.

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Fedora 29 fresh installation was a completely different experience from the in-vivo upgrade. The latter builds on months of work, tuning, tweaking and making everything behave well, so all of that didn't come to bear in my first review. But it did here, making the overall impression much, much less than before. Networking, media, performance, graphics drivers, none of these were good. The last two are action killers.

I also had to invest a lot of effort making the distro look and behave, and this can be a fun exercise, but it's ultimately a futile one, because there's no reason why there shouldn't be sane, simple defaults that work well for ordinary folks. There were some nice points, but they can't offset the overall negative feeling. I mean, I have a box that hardly copes with workload, I can't use the graphics card, and it takes effort making it do the basics.

Alas, Fedora is still a distro for hardcore veterans, most of whom will never care or see the stuff I'm testing, because they will have been upgrading since about Fedora 2, and won't find anything in their daily routines to relate to the 99% of people out there - nor will they relate to Fedora. I am still happy with my first attempt, and I'll show you how to customize the distro to perfection, but in general, this ain't the distro for you. Or me. Shame. Because it started nice, and then just went nowhere. Here comes the rain again.

Also: Fedora’s Strategic Direction: An Update from the Council

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• Daniel Stenberg: [Curl] 7.63.0 – another step down the endless path

  This curl release was developed and put together over a period of six weeks (two weeks less than usual). This was done to accommodate to my personal traveling plans – and to avoid doing a release too close to Christmas in case we would ship any security fixes, but ironically, we have no security advisories this time!

• Top 5 configuration management tools

  DevOps is evolving and gaining traction as organizations discover how it enables them to produce better applications and reduce their software products' time to market.

• moneyGuru – free personal finance management software

  moneyGuru is an open source personal finance management application. With this software, you can evaluate your financial situation and then make informed financial decisions. It has the double-entry accounting system.

  Rather than having reports which you have to configure (or find out which pre-configured report is the right one), your important financial data (net worth, profit) is constantly up-to-date and “in your face”.

  moneyGuru used to run on Windows and Mac OS. But it’s now only a Linux affair.

• TLP – An Advanced Power Management Tool That Improve Battery Life On Linux Laptop

  Laptop battery is highly optimized for Windows OS, that i had realized when i was using Windows OS in my laptop but it’s not same for Linux.

  Over the years Linux has improved a lot for battery optimization but still we need make some necessary things to improve laptop battery life in Linux.

  When i think about battery life, i got few options for that but i felt TLP is a better solutions for me so, i’m going with it.

  In this tutorial we are going to discuss about TLP in details to improve battery life.

• Taking notes with Standard Notes

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GNOME 3.31.3 was released today as the latest development stepping stone towards next March's GNOME 3.32 desktop environment update...