• Open Outlook: Middleware (part 1)

  Middleware, both as a term and as a concept, has been around for decades. As a term, like other terms in the Darwinian world of IT jargon, it has followed a typical fashion lifecycle and is perhaps somewhat past its apogee of vogue. As a concept, however, middleware is more relevant than ever, and while a memetic new label hasn't quite displaced the traditional term, the capabilities themselves are still very much at the heart of enterprise application development.

  Middleware is about making both developers and operators more productive. Analogous to standardized, widely-used, proven subassemblies in the manufacture of physical goods such as cars, middleware relieves developers from "reinventing the wheel" so that they can compose and innovate at higher levels of abstraction. For the staff responsible for operating applications in production, at scale, with high reliability and performance, the more such applications use standardized middleware components and services, the more efficient and reliable the running of the application can be.

• RHEL AUDITD
• Security updates for Tuesday

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• Vulkan 1.1.101 Released With Two New Extensions - Including Another To Help DXVK

  Coming just one week after the Vulkan 1.1.100 release and just days after the Vulkan API celebrated its third birthday, Vulkan 1.1.101 is now available.

  Vulkan 1.1.101 is a bit more eventful than 1.1.100 in that there are two new extensions introduced and then a number of issue corrections/clarifications to the documentation.

• In Save Koch, you are a mafia kingpin trapped inside your own panic room and it's coming to Linux

  Save Koch from developer Wooden Monkeys could be a very interesting one, a strategic sim that puts you in the shoes of a trapped mafia kingpin as you try to save your empire and your life.

• The 3D steampunk dungeon crawler 'Vaporum' just had a huge performance update

  I think Vaporum is a really great dungeon crawler, with good visuals and a rather interesting setting and it just keeps getting better.

  When I originally took a look at the game back in February last year, I noted how in terms of performance I was hitting around 50FPS. With today's update, that's often double what it was which is madness.

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• Organize Files In Filetype-Based Named Directories On Linux Using Organizer (GUI)

  Organizer is new and doesn't have a lot of features yet, but it can already be very helpful in organizing messy directories, like the Downloads or Desktop folders for example.

  Currently Organizer supports organizing directories containing the following type of files: images (jpg, png, etc.), documents (pdf, odt, doc/docx, etc.), spreadsheets (ods, xls/xlsx), presentations (odp, ppt/pptx), videos (mkv, mp4, webm, and so on), music (flac, mp3, etc.), archives (tar.gz, zip, rar, etc.) and other (for example AppImage and deb binaries).

• Handbrake Video Transcoder 1.2.1 Released (Ubuntu PPA)

  Handbrake video transcode 1.2.1 was released a few days ago with numerous bug-fixes and improvements.

• Connecting a physical host to libvirt NAT network
• Logical & in Bash
• Creating a cryptocurrency user interface project with python

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When patents and free software crop up together, the usual question is about patent licensing. Patent exhaustion — the principle that patent rights don't reach past the first sale of a product — is much less frequently discussed. At FOSDEM 2019, US lawyer Van Lindberg argued that several US court decisions related to exhaustion, most of them recent but some less so, could come together to have surprising beneficial effects for free software. He was clear that the argument applied only in the US but, since court systems tend to look to each other for consistency's sake, and because Lindberg is an engaging speaker, the talk was of great interest even in Brussels.

• Google revises proposed Chrome ad blocker changes after public outcry and legal threats
• Qualcomm working on QM215 chipset for Android Go devices: Report
• Qualcomm's Snapdragon X55 5G modem can reach 7Gbps download speeds
• Galaxy Note 8 Android Pie update released in more markets
• Galaxy S10 preview: One UI is the clean break from Android Samsung has always wanted
• How to Install Google Camera Mod on Any Android Phone

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Welcome to a regular series here at Forbes that zeroes in on your very first experience with a desktop Linux operating system: the installer. This time around I'm escaping my comfort zone and leaving Ubuntu-based distributions behind with openSUSE Leap 15.0.

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• digiKam 6.0.0 is released

  Dear digiKam fans and users, following the long stage of integrating a lots of work from students during the Summer of Code, and after 2 years of intensive developement, we hare proud to announce the new digiKam 6.0.0.

• DigiKam 6.0 Released With Video File Management, New Export/Import Options

  DigiKam 6.0 is now available as the Qt/KDE aligned open-source image organizer and with this new release has full support for video file management too.

  The DigiKam 6.0 release delivers support for video file management in the same manner as photo management, integration of import/export web-service tools in LightTable and Showfoto, expanded RAW image handling for more digital cameras, new tools for exporting to Pinterest / OneDrive / Box, and the ability to re-organize the icon-view contents manually.

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While I am a big fan of Intel's Clear Linux distribution for its raw performance on x86_64 hardware that for most workloads goes unsurpassed by any other Linux platform out-of-the-box, there has been a lot of Phoronix readers wondering how well it could function as a standard desktop Linux distribution. With upgrading my main production system earlier this month, I decided to try out Clear Linux and now with 200+ hours into using it as the OS on my main production system, I figured it'd be good to share my initial thoughts.

While we've been benchmarking with Clear Linux for years, only over the past year or two have they really beefed up their bundles around the desktop and make it more appealing for desktop use along with support for Flatpaks, supporting the other DRM/Mesa drivers besides just Intel graphics, delivering a great GNOME Shell experience where as originally they defaulted to Xfce, and overall improving the experience for more use-cases. And, yes, it's even possible to run Steam on Clear Linux.

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Flatpak's Flathub finally supports the notion of application beta releases for application maintainers wanting to offer up early-access/testing versions of applications...

The KDE Plasma 5.15 desktop environment was released last week on February 12th with numerous new features and improvements, including a much-improved Discover package manager, improved integration with third-party technologies and apps like Firefox, refinements to the configuration interfaces, new options for complex network configurations, as well as redesigned icons.

The KDE Plasma 5.15.1 point release is a maintenance update addressing various issues in an attempt to offer users a more stable and reliable KDE Plasma 5.15 desktop environment. Highlights include restoring of legacy sessions, improvements to the Kickoff applications menu to return to the Favorites page after running a search, improved firmware update in Discover, and better comics support.

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• With a clear inspiration from Portal, the first-person puzzler HA/CK is out now

  Another developer has taken the basic layout and idea of Portal and moulded it into their own puzzler named HA/CK.

  While the heavy Portal inspiration is crystal clear complete with turrets and sticking blocks on buttons, it does have a number of differences and so the gameplay is quite different. The biggest difference being that you're "hacking" objects to proceed rather than jumping through portals.

• Agitate, a small indie game that's like a reverse city-builder with you playing as nature has Linux support

  A bit of an odd one to put a title to, Agitate [itch.io] from solo developer Tay has you build plants and try to survive the coming of the Hoomans.

• RogueCraft Squadron, a fast-paced space RTS has expanded and released with Linux support

  If you're after your next RTS fix, RogueCraft Squadron from Missing Sentinel Software is now officially out with Linux support.

  Originally available as a free game on itch.io (I covered it here) made during a gamejam in 2017, they decided to continue with it and expand it into the game it is now.

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DigiKam 6.0 is now available as the Qt/KDE aligned open-source image organizer and with this new release has full support for video file management too...

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, rdesktop, rssh, systemd, and uriparser), Fedora (bouncycastle, eclipse-jgit, eclipse-linuxtools, jackson-annotations, jackson-bom, jackson-core, jackson-databind, jackson-dataformat-xml, jackson-dataformats-binary, jackson-dataformats-text, jackson-datatype-jdk8, jackson-datatype-joda, jackson-datatypes-collections, jackson-jaxrs-providers, jackson-module-jsonSchema, jackson-modules-base, jackson-parent, moby-engine, and subversion), openSUSE (chromium, docker-runc, firefox, GraphicsMagick, kernel, LibVNCServer, php7, pspp, spread-sheet-widget, and runc), SUSE (kernel-firmware, qemu, and systemd), and Ubuntu (nss and systemd).

• Linux Professional Institute (LPI) transforming to a membership-based organisation

  LPI's goals over the years has been to help steer careers and entrepreneurship by proving the skills of practitioners working with open source software. Its focus has been on Linux distribution neutrality, training methods, and promoting open source.

  Under the new arrangement, certification holders will soon be able to become LPI members, which means they will have the ability to elect the LPI Board of Directors and steer the direction of the organisation.

• Script to create mount points in LVM
• nbdkit linuxdisk plugin
• How To Change The TimeZone In Linux
• Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #199

  strip-nondeterminism is our tool that post-processes files to remove known non-deterministic output. This week, Chris Lamb adjusted its behaviour to deduplicate hardlinks via stat(2) before processing to avoid issues when handling files in parallel; as the per-filetype handlers are yet currently guaranteed to be atomic, one process could temporarily truncate a file which can cause errors in other processes operating on the “same” file under a different pathname. This was thus causing package build failures in packages that de-duplicate hardlinks in their build process such as the Debian Administrator’s Handbook (#922168).

• How our non-profit works openly to make education accessible

  I'm lucky to work with a team of impressive students at Duke University who are leaders in their classrooms and beyond. As members of CSbyUs, a non-profit and student-run organization based at Duke, we connect university students to middle school students, mostly from title I schools across North Carolina's Research Triangle Park. Our mission is to fuel future change agents from under-resourced learning environments by fostering critical technology skills for thriving in the digital age.

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While I am a big fan of Intel's Clear Linux distribution for its raw performance on x86_64 hardware that for most workloads goes unsurpassed by any other Linux platform out-of-the-box, there has been a lot of Phoronix readers wondering how well it could function as a standard desktop Linux distribution. With upgrading my main production system earlier this month, I decided to try out Clear Linux and now with 200+ hours into using it as the OS on my main production system, I figured it'd be good to share my initial thoughts.

• Register Transfer Language for CRuby

  For the last two years, I have been trying to improve CRuby performance. I have been working simultaneously on two major fronts: introducing register transfer language (RTL) for the CRuby virtual machine (VM) and just-in-time (JIT) compilation. For background on the goal of having Ruby 3 be 3 times faster than version 2 (3X3), see my previous article, “Towards the Ruby 3×3 Performance Goal“.

  The JIT project (MJIT) is advancing successfully. The JIT approach and engine I proposed and implemented has been adopted by the CRuby community. Takashi Kokubun hardened the code and adapted it to the current CRuby stack machine and recently MJIT became an experimental feature of the CRuby 2.6 release.

  Introducing a Register Transfer Language (RTL) to the CRuby VM turned out to be an even harder task than introducing the initial JIT compiler. The required changes to the VM are far more invasive than the ones needed for the JIT compiler.

• Template meta-programming: Some testing and debugging tricks

  There are only a few things more fun in this world than doing template meta-programming (TMP) and reading all those long poems that the compiler writes out when we make even the smallest mistake.

  While we don’t usually welcome these messages, there are ways to make them useful.

  One of the main causes of errors in TMP code are unexpected types – types that the compiler is deducing instead of the types that we expect it to deduce.

  This results in error messages occurring in seemingly random places in our code.

• Open Science, Open Source and R

  Psychology changed forever on the August 27, 2015. For the previous four years, the 270 psychologists of the Open Science Collaboration had been quietly re-running 100 published psychology experiments. Now, finally, they were ready to share their findings. The results were shocking. Less than half of the re-run experiments had worked.

  When someone tries to re-run an experiment, and it doesn't work, we call this a failure to replicate. Scientists had known about failures to replicate for a while, but it was only quite recently that the extent of the problem became apparent. Now, an almost existential crisis loomed. That crisis even gained a name: the Replication Crisis. Soon, people started asking the same questions about other areas of science. Often, they got similar answers. Only half of results in economics replicated. In pre-clinical cancer studies, it was worse; only 11% replicated.

• Qt Design Studio 1.1 released

  We are happy to announce the release of Qt Design Studio 1.1 !

  Qt Design Studio is a UI design and development tool that enables designers and developers to rapidly prototype and develop complex UIs. Both designers and developers use Qt Design Studio and this makes collaboration between the two a lot simpler and more streamlined. To get an impression, you should watch this video.

  Since the Qt Design Studio 1.0 release last year we worked hard on bug fixes and new features.

• Sublime Text and Language Server Protocol

  LSP - protocol for interactions between IDE and language server. The latter provides such means like autocompletion, goto implementation and etc. When IDE needs to show autocomplete choices on, for example, python language - it sends a request to the special server. And it responds with the necessary data. The cool part here is that it is an initiative of a big company - Microsoft.

• C Programming Tutorial Part 5 - Character variables

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We explained what Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage are in the article How Do They Stack? published over 2 years ago and while the technologies have improved a lot since that time, I’m evaluating them from the perspective of a software developer.

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One of the recent XFS innovations under work and maturing with time has been Copy on Write (CoW) support for this mature Linux file-systems. The XFS CoW support continues to be improved upon and an "always CoW" option is being prepared to always force this behavior.

Christoph Hellwig has been among the XFS developers working on the copy-on-write improvements as well as adding an always_cow sysfs option. The latest XFS CoW patches were sent out on Monday for review.

Also: ACPI 6.3 Support Coming With The Linux 5.1 Kernel

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• Install ImageMagick (Image Manipulation) Tool on RHEL/CentOS and Fedora

  ImageMagick is a free open source simple software suite for any kind of image manipulation that is used for creating, editing, converting, displaying image files.

  It can able to read and write over 200 image files such as JPEG, GIF, PNG, TIFF, and Photo CD image formats and it is also used for thumbnail or captcha generation. It also includes command line options for creating transparent or animated gif image formats and many more feature like resize, sharpen, rotate or add special effects to an image.

  To use ImageMagick tool with PHP or Perl programming language, you will need to install ImageMagick with Imagick PHP extension for PHP and ImageMagick-Perl extension for Perl.

• Changes in Flathub land

  Flathub uses buildbot to to manage the builds, and we have updated and customized the UI a bit to be nicer for maintainers. For example, we now have a page listing all the apps ever built, with links to per-app pages showing builds of that app.

  We also integrated GitHub authentication so that maintainers of individual applications automatically have authority to do operations on their own apps and builds. For example, the home and per-app pages have buttons that let you start builds, which anyone with write permissions to the corresponding GitHub repository can use. Also, similarly they can cancel or retry the builds of their own apps. Previously you had to ask a Flathub administrator to restart or cancel a build, but no more!

• How to write an Ansible playbook
• Stephen Smoogen: 503's.. the cliffnotes version

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Last year I wrote about Plasma Pass, a Plasma applet for the Pass password manager. Over the couple last months I got some emails from packagers from various distributions asking for a proper release so they can package it…so here it is, proudly announcing Plasma Pass 1.0.0.

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