Debian: Stremio in Sparky Linux, Looking at Debian 10, and Package Usage Stats

• Stremio

  There is a new tool available for Sparkers: Stremio What is Stremio? Stremio is a one-stop hub for video content aggregation. Discover, organize and watch video from all kind of sources on any device that you own. Movies, TV shows, series, live television or web channels like YouTube and Twitch.tv – you can find all this on Stremio.

• Debian 10, the clean install

  Events have ended my upgrade procrastination. Last week my hard drive started having many errors. Fortunately it lasted long enough for me to copy all of its contents to my USB backup drive. (My /home/brad directory is automatically backed up daily, but I also have separate partitions for downloaded files, PDFs, Linux CD images, and archived photos from my digital camera...and those only get backed up now and then.) Then a quick trip to the store for a new SATA hard drive. I suppose I could have copied my old root partition over to the new drive. But I've been running 32-bit Debian 8 ("Jessie"), which is now two versions behind. And I've been noticing more and more applications that I want to run are only being distributed for 64-bit Linux. So I decided to do a clean install of 64-bit Debian 10 ("Buster"), with my preferred MATE desktop (now a standard option with Debian).

• gnu Linux Debian – top 1000 packages by install – popularity contest

  remember: only the installs are counted where the user said yes during setup to: „do you want to participate in popularity contest?“ (guess that many Linux users are privacy sensitive and a lot of them probably say „no“)

What is Kanban and How to use Kanban in Linux

in 1997, directly after University, I started as an IT specialist and have been working in this area ever since in different roles. During these more than 20 years of being part of and later also leading IT related projects, our teams were using several methods and supporting software to plan our projects in the best possible way. Not all were equally successful. Currently our teams are working in a Scrum approach which is part of the Agile methodology. To support this way of working we use among others a Kanban board to plan and monitor our work. Kanban is nothing new but seems extremely popular at the moment. It is not only a great approach for large and complex projects, but also on a smaller scale for your study and your personal projects. In this article, which will be a part of a series on productivity apps, I want to explain three topics: What is Kanban, Why should you use Kanban to be more productive and What are the best Kanban apps for Linux.

Red Hat: Kernel and dnf-automatic

• Red Hat Shows Off Their vDPA Kernel Patches For Better Ethernet Within VMs

  Red Hat engineers have been developing virtual data path acceleration (vDPA) as a standard data plane that is more flexible than VirtIO full hardware offloading. The goal is providing wire-speed Ethernet interfaces to virtual machines in an open manner. This patch series was sent out on Thursday by Red Hat's Jason Wang. This implements the vDPA bus for the Linux kernel as well as providing a vDPA device simulator and supporting vDPA-based transport within VirtIO.

• What is the latest kernel release for my version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

  I read an interesting question on the Red Hat Learning Community forums recently. What is the latest kernel version for my version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)? In this post we'll see how you can find out. Some users, trying to be helpful, gave a specific version of the kernel package. Unfortunately, that might only be valid at the time of writing. A better approach would be to understand where to get that information about the latest kernel version for a given version of RHEL. When Red Hat releases a major or minor update to RHEL, they ship it with a specific branch of the kernel version. This page in the customer portal shows the kernel version "branch" associated with a release of RHEL (e.g. RHEL7.6).

• dnf-automatic – Install Security Updates Automatically in CentOS 8

  Security updates play a crucial role in safeguarding your Linux system against cyber-attacks and breaches which can have a devastating effect on your critical files, databases and other resources on your system. You can manually apply security patches on your CentOS 8 system, but it is much easier as a system administrator to configure automatic updates. This will give you the confidence that your system will be periodically checking for any security patches or updates and applying them.

Devices: PCB, OpenCV/RasPi and NVIDIA Jetson Nano

• A beginner tries PCB assembly

  I wrote last year about my experience with making my first PCB using JLCPCB. I’ve now got 5 of the boards in production around my house, and another couple assembled on my desk for testing. I also did a much simpler board to mount a GPS module on my MapleBoard - basically just with a suitable DIP connector and mount point for the GPS module. At that point I ended up having to pay for shipping; not being in a hurry I went for the cheapest option which mean the total process took 2 weeks from order until it arrived. Still not bad for under $8! Just before Christmas I discovered that JLCPCB had expanded their SMT assembly option to beyond the Chinese market, and were offering coupons off (but even without that had much, much lower assembly/setup fees than anywhere else I’d seen). Despite being part of LCSC the parts library can be a bit limited (partly it seems there’s nothing complex to assemble such as connectors), with a set of “basic” components without setup fee and then “extended” options which have a $3 setup fee (because they’re not permanently loaded, AIUI).

• Digitizing a analog water meter

  Sadly, my meter is really dirt under the glass and i couldn’t manage to clean it. This will cause problems down the road. The initial idea was easy, add a webcam on top of the meter and read the number on the upper half it. But I soon realized that the project won’t be that simple. The number shows only the use of 1m^3 (1000 liters), this means that I would have a change only every couple of days, which is useless and boring. So, I had to read the analog gauges, which show the fraction in 0.0001, 0.001, 0.01 and 0.1 m^3. This discovery blocked me, and I was like “this is way to complicated”. I have no idea how I found or what reminded me of OpenCV, but that was the solution. OpenCV is an awesome tool for computer vision, it has many features like Facial recognition, Gesture recognition … and also shape recognition. What’s a analog gauge? It’s just a circle with an triangular arrow indicating the value.

• NVIDIA Jetson Nano Developer Kit-B01 Gets an Extra Camera Connector

  Launched in March 2019, NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer kit offered an AI development platform for an affordable $99.