June 2020
To-Do App With Built In Timer "Go For It!" Updated With Pomodoro Timer, Configurable Shortcuts
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 30th of June 2020 10:20:11 PM Filed under
Go For It! productivity application has been updated to version 1.8.0. The new release adds Pomodoro timer mode, configurable keyboard shortcuts, an option to log the time spent working on a task to the todo.txt files, and more.
Go For It! is a Gtk tool which includes a to-do list and a timer. It uses the Todo.txt format, which is supported by a plethora of applications, for both desktops and mobile devices; Todo.txt is a popular to-do list format in which the data is stored in a flat text file. The application is available for Windows and Linux.
The most important change in the latest Go For It! 1.8.0 is a new option to change the timer mode. The time break time or time between breaks doesn't have to be the same anymore - you can now set the timer mode to Simple, Pomodoro, or use a custom time schedule.
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Arc Menu 47 Released with New Layout, Other Improvements
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 30th of June 2020 10:16:40 PM Filed under
A new version of Arc Menu, the popular app launcher extension for GNOME Shell, is now available to download.
Arc Menu v47 includes a new menu layout (called “Tognee”, and pictured above), adds the option to rank installed software in alphabetical order (very handy), and introduces a new (and entirely opt-in) “frequent apps” view.
Mouse scrolling and keyboard navigation is said to be improved in this release; application context menus and tooltips boast better contrast; and there are new preset themes.
The icon picker, which lets you set a different menu icon, boasts some UI tweaks to make sifting through and finding glyphs a touch faster and saner. A selection of new panel icons are also said to be available include an openSUSE icon.
Also look out for new “Flip Layout Horizontally” and “Searchbar Location” options available in traditional panel layouts.
Finally, Arc Menu 47 requires GNOME 3.36. You can continue to use older versions of the menu on GNOME 3.34 and earlier, you just won’t get all of the ‘new’ stuff mentioned in this roundup.
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Tails 4.8 is out
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 30th of June 2020 10:14:09 PM Filed under

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.
Also: Tails 4.8 Anonymous OS Released with Linux Kernel 5.6, Improved Security
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Graphics: Khronos, AMD, Nir and Monado
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 30th of June 2020 10:01:37 PM Filed under
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Khronos Releases SYCL 2020 Provisional Specification
The Khronos Group has announced the provisional specification of SYCL 2020 as the newest version of this higher-level programming model originally designed for OpenCL that is based on pure single-source C++.
The SYCL 2020 provisional specification is available today and is now based on C++17 where as formerly SYCL had been based on C++11. SYCL 2020 is also bringing new programming abstractions like unified shared memory, group algorithms, sub-groups, and other features.
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AMDVLK 2020.Q2.6 Brings More Performance Tuning
The AMD Radeon Vulkan driver developers are ending out June by shipping their sixth open-source snapshot of the quarter.
With AMDVLK 2020.Q2.6, there are continued performance tuning/optimization efforts. There has been performance tuning going on to benefit Ghost Recon Breakpoint and Zombie Army 4: Dead War under Wine / Steam Play. There is also improved pipeline compiler performance with this Vulkan driver update.
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Mike Blumenkrantz: Nirly There
In yesterday’s post, I left off in saying that removing an assert() from the constant block index check wasn’t going to work quite right. Let’s see why that is.
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Monado: Multi application support with XR_EXTX_overlay
By implementing this extension we are exposing Monado's multi application support, which was recently merged to master.
In the video below you can see Monado compositing the rendering of Blender's VR view and the xrgears demo displaying a XrCompositionLayerProjection as overlay. The demo also showcases Monado's ability to deal with multiple graphics APIs as Blender uses OpenGL and xrgears Vulkan to submit its frames.
To enable the extension in xrgears only this small change was required, which enables the XR_EXTX_overlay extension and passes the XrSessionCreateInfoOverlayEXTX struct to the graphics bindings `next` field.
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Mozilla: Firefox 78.0, Nightly, OTF's Demise and Mozilla Localization (L10N)
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 30th of June 2020 09:53:00 PM Filed under
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Firefox 78
Firefox 78.0 has been released. This is an Extended Support Release (ESR). The Protections Dashboard has new features to track the number of breaches that were resolved from the dashboard and to see if any of your saved passwords may have been exposed in a breach. More details about this and other new features can be found in the release notes.
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Honza Bambas: Firefox enables link rel=”preload” support
We enabled the link preload web feature support in Firefox 78, at this time only at Nightly channel and Firefox Early Beta and not Firefox Release because of pending deeper product integrity checking and performance evaluation.
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Giorgio Maone: Save Trust, Save OTF
As the readers of this blog almost surely know, I'm the author of NoScript, a web browser security enhancer which can be installed on Firefox and Chrome, and comes built-in with the Tor Browser.
NoScript has received support by the Open Technology Fund (OTF) for specific development efforts: especially, to make it cross-browser, better internationalized and ultimately serving a wider range of users.
OTF's mission is supporting technology to counter surveillance and censorship by repressive regimes and foster Internet Freedom. One critical and strict requirement, for OTF to fund or otherwise help software projects, is them being licensed as Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS), i.e. their code being publicly available for inspection, modification and reuse by anyone. Among the successful projects funded by OTF, you may know or use Signal, Tor, Let's Encrypt, Tails, QubeOS, Wireshark, OONI, GlobaLeaks, and millions of users all around the world, no matter their political views, trust them because they are FLOSS, making vulnerabilities and even intentionally malicious code harder to hide.
Now this virtuous modus operandi is facing an existential threat, started when the whole OTF leadership has been fired and replaced by Michael Pack, the controversial new CEO of USA Global Media (USAGM), the agency OTF reports to.
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Mozilla Localization (L10N): L10n Report: June 2020 Edition
Firefox 78 is currently in beta and will be released on June 30. The deadline to update localization was on Jun 16.
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Linux Foundation Latest News
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 30th of June 2020 09:46:44 PM Filed under
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Facebook, R3 and Others Join Linux Foundation’s Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC)
The new members of the CCC will be leverage confidential computing that aims at protecting confidential user data by having a separate storage place free from the main operating system.
Linux Foundation’s privacy-focused group – Confidential Computing Consortium (CCC) – continues its expansion with new members. Big names like Facebook, NVIDIA, R3, IoTex, Accenture and six other members have recently joined CCC.
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FinOps Foundation joins The Linux Foundation to nail down best cloud financial practices
"Technology and business leaders are seeking support for understanding how to manage cloud technologies and spending across their enterprises and the FinOps Foundation brings to bear the resources required to enable them to innovate inside their companies," said J.R. Storment, the FinOps Foundation executive director, in a statement. "With the Linux Foundation's support, especially across its world-class training organization, we can serve this growing community."
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Linux Foundation group that could improve privacy of facial biometrics adds members
A new data-security group founded by the Linux Foundation — and a new school of thought on data protection — has won new adherents, including AMD, Nvidia and Accenture.
The expansion could provide facial recognition a new layer of security, potentially mollifying those who oppose the biometric technology.
Monday, the Confidential Computing Consortium said its newest members are Anjuna, Anqlave, Cosmian, iExec, IoTeX, R3 and the three information technology giants mentioned above. -
Scality Announces its Founder Status of New Linux Foundation to Solve Data Management Challenges
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today's howtos
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 30th of June 2020 09:43:43 PM Filed under
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Deploying a static website with Ansible
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Stupid Bash tricks: History, reusing arguments, files and directories, functions, and more
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Convert Ubuntu Into Rolling Release Using Rolling Rhino
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Print Files Without Comments And Empty Lines In Linux
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Check the Raspberry PI CPU temperature
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Read and write data from anywhere with redirection in the Linux terminal
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Cura & Linux: How to Make Them Work Together
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How to install Wine 5.0.1 on Linux Mint 20
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Meet UbuntuEd 20.04, an Educational Ubuntu Flavor for Kids, Schools and Universities
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 30th of June 2020 09:39:32 PM Filed under
The team behind the Ubuntu Unity distribution have released today UbuntuEd 20.04, an unofficial, educational focused Ubuntu flavor for kids, schools and universities.
Meet UbuntuEd, an educational edition of Ubuntu Linux created by Rudra Saraswat, the same person who created Ubuntu Unity, and designed as a substitute for the discontinued Edubuntu flavor.
The first release of UbuntuEd is now available, based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) and featuring both GNOME and Unity7 desktop environments. In other words, you’re getting Ubuntu, Ubuntu Unity and Ubuntu Education in a single container.
Users will be able to choose the right desktop environment for them, GNOME or Unity7, from the login screen. However, it looks like Unity7 is the default session when booting the live system and after the installation.
As expected, UbuntuEd comes with a plethora of educational apps for kids, schools and universities. Four metapackages are also available for those who want to install additional educational apps if they need more. Moreover, it’s possible to install these metapackages on your existing Ubuntu systems.
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Sans Investigative Forensics Toolkit (SIFT)
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 30th of June 2020 09:36:15 PM Filed under

SIFT is a computer forensics distribution created by the SANS Forensics team for performing digital forensics. This distro includes most tools required for digital forensics analysis and incident response examinations. SIFT is open-source and publicly available for free on the internet. In today’s digital world, where crimes are committed every day using digital technology, attackers are becoming more and more stealthy and sophisticated. This can cause companies to lose important data, with millions of users exposed. Protecting your organization from these attacks requires strong forensic techniques and knowledge in your defense strategy. SIFT provides forensic tools for file systems, memory and network investigations to perform in-depth forensic investigations.
In 2007, SIFT was available for download and was hard coded, so whenever an update arrived, users had to download the newer version. With further innovation in 2014, SIFT became available as a robust package on Ubuntu, and can now be downloaded as a workstation. Later, in 2017, a version of SIFT came to market allowing greater functionality and providing users the ability to leverage data from other sources. This newer version contains more than 200 tools from third parties, and contains a package manager requiring users to type only one command to install a package. This version is more stable, more efficient, and provides better functionality in terms of memory analysis. SIFT is scriptable, meaning that users can combine certain commands to make it work according to their needs.
SIFT can run on any system running on Ubuntu or Windows OS. SIFT supports various evidence formats, including AFF, E01, and raw format (DD). Memory forensics images are also compatible with SIFT. For file systems, SIFT supports ext2, ext3 for linux, HFS for Mac and FAT, V-FAT, MS-DOS, and NTFS for Windows.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora Leftovers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 30th of June 2020 08:29:40 PM Filed under
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Ask the experts during Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience: Open House
One of the most popular activities during the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience was the Ask the Experts sessions, where attendees could engage with Red Hat experts and leadership in real time, so we're bringing it back for our Open House in July.
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Making open source more inclusive by eradicating problematic language
Open source has always been about differing voices coming together to share ideas, iterate, challenge the status quo, solve problems, and innovate quickly. That ethos is rooted in inclusion and the opportunity for everyone to meaningfully contribute, and open source technology is better because of the diverse perspectives and experiences that are represented in its communities. Red Hat is fortunate to be able to see the impact of this collaboration daily, and this is why our business has also always been rooted in these values.
Like so many others, Red Hatters have been coming together the last few weeks to talk about ongoing systemic injustice and racism. I’m personally thankful to Red Hat’s D+I communities for creating awareness and opportunities for Red Hatters to listen in order to learn, and I’m grateful that so many Red Hatters are taking those opportunities to seek understanding.
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The latest updates to Red Hat Runtimes
Today, we are happy to announce that the latest release of Red Hat Runtimes is now available. This release includes updates that build upon the work the team has done over the past year for building modern, cloud-native applications.
Red Hat Runtimes, part of the Red Hat Application Services portfolio, is a set of products, tools and components for developing and maintaining cloud-native applications. It offers lightweight runtimes and frameworks for highly-distributed cloud architectures, such as microservices or serverless applications. We continuously make updates and improvements to meet the changing needs of our customers, and to help developers better build business-critical applications. Read on for the latest.
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Kourier: A lightweight Knative Serving ingress
Until recently, Knative Serving used Istio as its default networking component for handling external cluster traffic and service-to-service communication. Istio is a great service mesh solution, but it can add unwanted complexity and resource use to your cluster if you don’t need it.
That’s why we created Kourier: To simplify the ingress side of Knative Serving. Knative recently adopted Kourier, so it is now a part of the Knative family! This article introduces Kourier and gets you started with using it as a simpler, more lightweight way to expose Knative applications to an external network.
Let’s begin with a brief overview of Knative and Knative Serving.
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CodeTheCurve: A blockchain-based supply chain solution to address PPE shortages
This past April, creative techies from all over the world gathered online for CodeTheCurve, a five-day virtual hackathon organized by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in partnership with IBM and SAP. Participants all worked toward the goal of creating digital solutions to address the global pandemic.
Our team focused on the goal of improving the efficiency of the personal protective equipment (PPE) supply chain in order to prevent shortages for health care workers. With the rise of the current global pandemic, supplies of medical equipment have become more critical, particularly PPE for medical workers. In many places, PPE shortages have been a serious problem. To address this challenge, we proposed that a blockchain-based supply chain could help make this process faster and more reliable, thereby connecting health ministries, hospitals, producers, and banks, and making it easier to track and report information on supplies.
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Analyze your Spark application using explain
It is important that you have some understanding of Spark execution plan when you are optimizing your Spark applications. Spark provides an explain API to look at the Spark execution plan for your Spark SQL query. In this blog, I will show you how to get the Spark query plan using the explain API so you can debug and analyze your Apache Spark application. The explain API is available on the Dataset API. You can use it to know what execution plan Spark will use for your Spark query without actually running it. Spark also provides a Spark UI where you can view the execution plan and other details when the job is running. For Spark jobs that have finished running, you can view the Spark plan that was used if you have the Spark history server set up and enabled on your cluster. This is useful when tuning your Spark jobs for performance optimizations.
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What’s new in Apache Spark 3.0
The Apache Spark community announced the release of Spark 3.0 on June 18 and is the first major release of the 3.x series. The release contains many new features and improvements. It is a result of more than 3,400 fixes and improvements from more than 440 contributors worldwide. IBM Center of Open Source for Data and AI Technology (CODAIT) focuses on a number of selective open source technologies on machine learning, AI workflow, trusted AI, metadata, and big data process platform, etc. has delivered approximate hundreds of commits, including a couple of key features in this release.
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GSoC Progress Report: Dashboard for Packit
Hi, I am Anchit, a 19 y.o. from Chandigarh, India. I love programming, self-hosting, gaming, reading comic books, and watching comic-book based movies/tv.
The first version of Fedora I tried was 21 when I came across it during my distro-hopping spree. I used it for a couple of months and then moved on to other distros. I came back to Fedora in 2017 after a couple of people on Telegram recommended it and have been using it ever since. A big reason why I stuck with Fedora this time is the community. Shout out to @fedora on Telegram. They’re nice, wholesome and helpful. They also got me into self-hosting and basic sys-admin stuff.
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Fedora Looking To Offer Better Upstream Solution For Hiding/Showing GRUB Menu
Fedora for the past few releases doesn't show the GRUB boot-loader menu by default when only Fedora is installed on the system as there is little purpose for most users and it just interrupts the boot flow. But for those wanting to access the GRUB bootloader menu on reboot, they offer integration in GNOME to easily reboot into this menu. The other exception is the menu will be shown if the previous boot failed. This functionality has relied on downstream patches but now they are working towards a better upstream solution.
Hans de Goede of Red Hat who led the original GRUB hidden boot menu functionality is looking to clean up this feature for Fedora 33. The hope is to get the relevant bits upstream into GNOME and systemd for avoiding the downstream patches they have been carrying. This reduces their technical debt and also makes it easier for other distributions to provide similar functionality.
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Fedora Developers Discussing Possibility Of Dropping Legacy BIOS Support
Fedora stakeholders are debating the merits of potentially ending legacy BIOS support for the Linux distribution and to only support UEFI-based installations.
Given Fedora 33 GRUB changes planned and things being easier if they were to just switch to the UEFI-based systemd sd-boot as well as Intel planning to end legacy BIOS support in 2020 and UEFI being very common to x86_64 systems for many years now, Fedora developers are discussing whether it's a good time yet for their bleeding-edge platform to also begin phasing out legacy BIOS support.
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Kali Linux 2021.1 Release (Command-Not-Found)
How you choose to interact with Kali is completely up to you. You may want to access Kali locally or remotely, either graphically or on the command line. Even when you pick a method, there are still options you can choose from, such as a desktop environment.
By default, Kali uses Xfce, but during the setup process, allows for GNOME, KDE, or no GUI to be selected. After the setup is complete, you can install even more. We have pre-configurations for Enlightenment, i3, LXDE, and MATE as well.
[...]
When we use Kali, we spend a significant amount of time using the command line. A lot of the time, we do it using a local terminal (rather than in a console or remote SSH). With the options of desktop environments, there are also choices when it comes to the terminals (same with what shell to use).
| Kernel: Millennium Prize, Compute Express Link 2.0, HP Platform Profile Support
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Open Source Community Critical Of Chessbase, Fat Fritz 2
The development teams behind the two most successful and influential open-source chess programs, Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero, have issued statements denouncing the commercial program Fat Fritz 2 and the company Chessbase that is selling the program for 99,90 euros.
The statements (Stockfish blog, lichess announcement) assert that the engine in Fat Fritz 2 is Stockfish with minimal changes, that Fat Fritz 2 has violated the GNU General Public License under which Stockfish is released, and that Chessbase's marketing has made false claims about Fat Fritz 2's playing strength.
| Videos/Audiocasts/Shows: Password Managers, Rust, and Laptops as Servers
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