Almost exactly four months ago I announced Cage, my Wayland compositor for a kiosk-like environment. To the uninitiated: a kiosk is designed for running a single, maximized application and preventing the user from interacting with any other part of the system. You’ve probably seen many in your life in malls, stores or even the dentist (how satisfied are you with your service?). Kiosks can also be used for much cooler things, though, such as running home automation systems.

Also: "Cage" Sees Initial Test Release For Kiosk-Like Wayland Compositor

• On Cloud Nine in Denver

  Next week, members of the open source community will descend upon Denver in hordes unseen since the gold rush that resulted in the city being formed back in the late 1800’s (probably). That’s right, it’s the very first Open Infrastructure Summit – bringing together some of the finest minds across the open source community to discuss, demo and deliberate all things OpenStack, Kubernetes, ONAP, Kata Containers, Airship, Zuul, and much, much more.
  We’re particularly excited about this summit as we’ll be unveiling SUSE OpenStack Cloud 9 to the world there, having pre-announced it earlier in the month at SUSECON in Nashville. As the first company to produce an enterprise-ready OpenStack distribution back in 2012, we continue to work to make OpenStack easier for companies to implement in an enterprise environment, giving a stable, production-ready base for business-critical systems and applications to run on.

• Eirini and CF Containerization: a field guide

  The recent Cloud Foundry Summit in Philadelphia featured two talks that were crucial to understanding the future of Cloud Foundry as it relates to Kubernetes.

  [...]

  But there’s another problem. In talking to people in the hallways and at the SUSE booth, we found that there was considerable confusion about what the Eirini and CF Containerization projects were responsible for. Specifically, many people thought that Eirini was the project for containerizing the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime.

• SQL Server on SUSE Linux from A-Z: Data platform, High Availability and Containers [Ed: SUSE is advertising proprietary software from Microsoft]

• Top data recovery tools for linux

  Sadly sometimes we lose precious information by formatting a wrong partition or disk, due to hardware problems or transference errors. Luckily we have many free tools available to recover our lost data. This is not a tutorial but a fast review on the most popular free data recovery software available for Linux.

• QEMU 4.0 Released With CPU Support Improvements, Faster Crypto, Monitor EDID

  The big QEMU 4.0 release is now available for this critical piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.

  QEMU 4.0 is a particularly big release on the Arm front with many new ARMv8 extensions being supported, AArch64 processors can now boot from a kernel placed over 4GB into RAM, and a variety of other ARM emulation improvements and fixes. QEMU 4.0 is also big for other CPU architectures with seeing MIPS I6500 and I7200 CPU support, many PowerPC improvements, continuing to bring-up RISC-V support, and the x86 MPX support has been removed following GCC and the Linux kernel doing away with that support.

• rush @ Savannah: Version 1.9

  Version 1.9 is available for download from GNU and Puszcza archives. It should soon become available in the mirrors too. 

• Metasploit installation and basic commands

• Install Linux Mint Cinnamon

• How to Install Adobe Reader on Linux Mint

• How to Install October CMS with Nginx on Fedora 29

• How to install Minecraft on Ubuntu 19.04

• Designing Continuous Build Systems

• mintCast 307 – Encryption Part 1

  This is Leo and with me I have Joe, Moss, and the return of Rob for this episode! We’re recording on Sunday April 21st 2019.

  First up, in our Wanderings, I talk Kernel 5.0 and transfer speed, Joe reformats and loses Windows but gains NVidia peace of mind, and finally Moss digests more distros and has some success with migrating Kodi

  Then, our news is filled with updates from top to bottom.

  In our Innards section, we dive into file and disk encryption.

• Blame Joe | LINUX Unplugged 298

  This week we discover the good word of Xfce and admit Joe was right all along. And share our tips for making Xfce more modern.

  Plus a new Debian leader, the end of Scientific Linux, and behind the scenes of Librem 5 apps.

• Once you use dark mode in these 7 Android apps, you'll never go back

• Google I/O 2019: Android Q, Pixel 3a, Stadia cloud gaming and other goodies Google is expected to unveil

• LG V35 ThinQ receives Android Pie update in South Korea

• Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 Receives Android 9 Pie Update, But Only The Wi-Fi Model

• How to clear cache on your Android smartphone for Chrome, Opera, and UC browsers

• Android TV box seller fined in landmark copyright infringement case

• Supreme Court of the UK, Which Habitually Throws Out European Patents, May Overturn Troublesome Unwired Planet v Huawei Decision
• German Federal Patent Court Curbs the Patent Maximalism of the EPO, Which Promotes Patents on Nature and/or Maths Every Single Day
• Any ‘Linux’ Foundation Needs to Be Managed by Geeks, Not Politicians and PR People

Many of us are familiar with Secure Shell (SSH), which allows us to connect to other systems using a key instead of a password. This guide will explain how to eliminate SSH keys and use a GNU Privacy Guard (GPG) subkey instead.

Using GPG does not make your SSH connections more secure. SSH is a secure protocol, and SSH keys are secure. Instead, it makes certain forms of key distribution and backup management easier. It also will not change your workflow for using SSH. All commands will continue to work as you expect, except that you will no longer have SSH private keys and you will unlock your GPG key instead.

• How to identify same-content files on Linux

• How to Mount an exFAT Drive on Ubuntu Linux

• How to create a live USB drive with persistent storage in Ubuntu

• How to make VirtualBox virtual machine boot from USB?

• How to search open tabs in Firefox

• Five Methods To Check Your Current Runlevel In Linux?

• The Free Software Directory needs you! IRC meetups every Friday

  The Free Software Directory is an essential catalog of free software online. The Directory is maintained by countless volunteers dedicated to the promotion of software that respects your personal liberty. As with any group composed of volunteers, the informal Directory team has people who come and go, and right now, it could really use some fresh new members to kick our efforts into high gear.

  Tens of thousands of people visit the Directory every month to discover free software and explore information about version control, documentation, and licensing. All of this information is also exported in machine-readable formats, making it a valuable source of data for the study of trends in free software. The Directory is powered by MediaWiki, the same software used by Wikipedia.

• Builder 3.33.1

  Our first 3.33 release has landed as we move towards 3.34. There is a lot to do this cycle in case you’re interested in contributing. The best way to get started is to dive into the code. We can help you with that on IRC.

  Lots of this release is code behind the scenes, so screenshots won’t do them justice. But there are some visible goodies too.

  We got a DBus Inspector inspired by D-feet. The long term goal is to merge that new code into D-feet itself.

• GtkSourceView moved to Meson

  The master branch of GtkSourceView (what will become 4.4) has moved to meson for development. I branched gtksourceview-4-2 for patch releases of 4.2.x which will remain autotools. Today’s release of gtksourceview-4.3.1 contains both autotools and meson. However 4.3.2 will remove autotools entirely.

• GPD Pocket 2 Max is an 8.9 inch laptop with Core m3-8100Y

  The computer features a 2560 x 1600 pixel display and it should ship with Windows 10 Home 64-bit software… although it’s interesting to see that the company’s promotional pictures show the Ubuntu MATE desktop. The folks behind that GNU/Linux-based operating system have made a habit of offering releases customized to support GPD Pocket computers.

• How to Try the New Adwaita Theme on Ubuntu 19.04

  Learn how to enable the new Adwaita theme in Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo. The updated Adwaita theme is a solid replacement for Ubuntu's Yaru theme.

• Canonical at Open Infrastructure Summit -Denver

  Open Infrastructure Summit is coming to Denver from April 29th to May 1st, 2019. Will you be there? We sure will! Come and visit us in Booth B1!

  Canonical experts will be swarming at the event ready to answer your questions and walk you through our booth demos.

  [...]

  Canonical CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, will be keynoting on Monday, April 29 at 10:25am. Come join us in the main hall to hear Mark’s view on open infrastructure and Canonical’s approach to driving down the cost of multi-cloud.

• Acquisition roundabout sees Zend Framework spun off to Linux Foundation

  The Zend Framework is to get a new name and a new home, under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, just a few months after its parent co was itself swallowed whole.

  Zend – as was – is an open source, object-oriented web application framework implemented in PHP 7. It was synonymous with Zend Technologies, which was taken over by Rogue Wave Software in 2015. Rogue Wave Software was itself acquired by private equity outfit Clear Lake Capital earlier this year.

  According to the website for the new organisation, “To take it to the next step of adoption and innovation, we are happy to announce that we are transitioning Zend Framework and all its subprojects to an open source project hosted at the Linux Foundation.”

• Five RESTful web service client examples for developers

  How do you access a RESTful web service? That depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

  If you just want to test connectivity, a terminal-based utility like curl is a great RESTful web service client. If you want to inspect the JSON a service returns to you, a browser-based plugin will probably be a better fit. And if you are in the midst of application development, you'll likely need to use JAX-RS, Spring or a similar framework.

• 5 Best Reasons to Opt for PHP Web Development

  Many companies now are choosing PHP web development to realize their IT needs. According to research, almost 83 percent of web services are using PHP, and it is the preferred choice of industry stalwarts such as BlaBlaCar, Slack, and Spotify. PHP is open source and comes with a great community, and it is continuously upgrading. There is no doubt about the same.

• It’s Complicated: Mozilla’s 2019 Internet Health Report

  The Report paints a mixed picture of what life online looks like today. We’re more connected than ever, with humanity passing the ‘50% of us are now online’ mark earlier this year. And, while almost all of us enjoy the upsides of being connected, we also worry about how the internet and social media are impacting our children, our jobs and our democracies.

  When we published last year’s Report, the world was watching the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal unfold — and these worries were starting to grow. Millions of people were realizing that widespread, laissez-faire sharing of our personal data, the massive growth and centralization of the tech industry, and the misuse of online ads and social media was adding up to a big mess.

  Over the past year, more and more people started asking: what are we going to do about this mess? How do we push the digital world in a better direction?

  As people asked these questions, our ability to see the underlying problems with the system — and to imagine solutions — has evolved tremendously. Recently, we’ve seen governments across Europe step up efforts to monitor and thwart disinformation ahead of the upcoming EU elections. We’ve seen the big tech companies try everything from making ads more transparent to improving content recommendation algorithms to setting up ethics boards (albeit with limited effect and with critics saying ‘you need to do much more!’). And, we’ve seen CEOs and policymakers and activists wrestling with each other over where to go next. We have not ‘fixed’ the problems, but it does feel like we’ve entered a new, sustained era of debate about what a healthy digital society should look like.

• RADV Vulkan Driver Lands FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync For Mesa 19.1

  While on the kernel-side there has been FreeSync support with the AMDGPU DRM driver since Linux 5.0 and for the OpenGL driver with RadeonSI there has been this functionality in Mesa 19.0 when paired with a supported kernel, the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver has missed out on this action until now. But landing just in time for the Mesa 19.1 feature freeze is now the FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync enablement for RADV.

• A Decade Later, Mesa Wiring In Support For Qualcomm/AMD's ATC Texture Compression

  Adding to the list of Mesa 19.1 changes is now AMD_compressed_ATC_texture being plumbed into Mesa/Gallium3D primarily with a focus on the Freedreno driver.

  AMD_compressed_ATC_texture is the extension worked on a decade ago by AMD/Qualcomm for ATC compressed texture formats. ATC was AMD's proprietary compression algorithm with a focus on mobile devices for power and memory bandwidth savings. That was right around the time ATI/AMD Imageon IP was sold off to Qualcom to form the Adreno graphics processors for the company's SoCs.

• How secure are your containerized apps? [Ed: Why does SJVN promote the Microsoft-connected anti-FOSS firm Snyk?]

• IPFire 2.23 - Core Update 131 is available for testing

  Finally, the next major version of IPFire is ready to testing. We consider our new Intrusion Prevention System such an important change, that we are calling it "IPFire 2.23" from now on. This update also contains a number of other bug fixes and enhancements.

• How hacking threats spurred secret U.S. blacklist

  U.S. energy regulators are pursuing a risky plan to share with electric utilities a secret "don't buy" list of foreign technology suppliers, according to multiple sources.

  The move reflects the federal government's growing concern that hackers and foreign spies are targeting America's vital energy infrastructure. And it's also raised new questions about the value of top-secret U.S. intelligence if it can't get into the hands of power industry executives who can act on it to avoid high-risk vendors.

  Joseph McClelland, director of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's Office of Energy Infrastructure Security, told a Department of Energy advisory committee last month that officials are working on "an open-source procurement list" for utilities to use when deciding where to source their software and equipment.

• What do companies expect from Python devs in 2019?

  Python is everywhere.

  According to the 2019’s StackOverflow’s Developer Survey, it is the 2nd most loved programming language in the world.

• Sending Emails With Python

• PyCoder’s Weekly: Issue #365 (April 23, 2019)

• Rust's 2019 roadmap

  Each year the Rust community comes together to set out a roadmap. This year, in addition to the survey, we put out a call for blog posts in December, which resulted in 73 blog posts written over the span of a few weeks. The end result is the recently-merged 2019 roadmap RFC. To get all of the details, please give it a read, but this post lays out some of the highlights.

• Why AI + consumer tech?

  After talking to nearly 100 AI experts and activists, this consumer tech focus feels right for Mozilla. But it also raises a number of questions: what do we mean by consumer tech? What is in scope for this work? And what is not? Are we missing something important with this focus?

  At its simplest, the consumer tech platforms that we are talking about are general purpose internet products and services aimed at a wide audience for personal use. These include things like social networks, search engines, retail e-commerce, home assistants, computers, smartphones, fitness trackers, self-driving cars, etc. — almost all of which are connected to the internet and are fueled by our personal data. The leading players in these areas are companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple in the US as well as companies like Baidu, TenCent, and AliBaba in China. These companies are also amongst the biggest developers and users of AI, setting trends and shipping technology that shapes the whole of the tech industry. And, as long as we remain in the era of machine learning, these companies have a disproportionate advantage in AI development as they control huge amounts for data and computing power that can be used to train automated systems.

• Airtop3 Manages A Passively-Cooled Core i9 9900K + Quadro RTX 4000

  CompuLab today announced the Airtop3, the latest in their series of industrial-grade, excellently built fanless PCs. The CompuLab Airtop we benchmarked back in 2016 while showing its age now with the Core i7 5775C Broadwell processor is still running strong with its original design and even after what's been hundreds if not thousands of hours of benchmarking workloads still is running strong. Then again, that isn't too surprising as we continue to be improved by their build quality now after benchmarking their systems with Linux for the past decade.

• Fanless mini-tower runs Linux Mint on up to 5GHz octa-core i9-9900K

  Compulab’s passively cooled, Linux-friendly “Airtop3” mini-tower builds on a 9th Gen, octa-core Intel Core i9-9900K with Quadro RTX 4000 graphics plus up to 128GB DDR4, NVMe and SATA storage, triple displays, 2x GbE, 6x USB 3.1, and -40 to 70°C support.

  Compulab has launched a redesigned Airtop IoT edge server that accomplishes the challenging task of passively cooling Intel’s high-end, 9th Gen Core i9-9900K processor. The Airtop3 is “nearly” twice as powerful as the 7th Gen Kaby Lake based Airtop2 mini-tower while maintaining the fanless, embedded-oriented design, says Compulab. Linux Mint and Windows 10 Pro are available.

• Jonathan McDowell: Making my first PCB

  I then started to notice I was getting JLCPCB ads while web browsing, offering 10 PCBs for $2. That seemed like a good deal, and I thought if I did things right I could find the right case and then make sure the PCB fitted in it. I found a small vented white case available from CPC. This allows me to put a temperature sensor inside for some devices. KiCad seemed like a good option for trying to design my basic schematic and lay it out, so I installed it and set to work trying to figure out what I wanted to put on the board, and how to actually drive KiCad.

  As the core I chose an ESP-07 ESP8266 module. I’ve used a few of them before and they’re cheap and convenient. I added an LDO voltage regulator (LD1117) so I could use a 5V PSU (and I’m hoping with a heatsink I can get away with a 12V supply as well, even if it’s more inefficient). That gave enough to get a basic schematic once I’d added the necessary pull-up/down resistors for the ESP8266 and decoupling capacitors. I included a DC barrel jack for the PSU, and pin headers for the serial port, SPI pins and GPIO0 for boot selection. One of my use cases is to make an LED strip controller, so I threw in a screw terminal block for power + control - the board is laid out to allow a MOSFET for a simple white 12V LED strip, or the same GPIO taken straight to the terminal block for controlling a WS2812 strip. By including a couple of extra pull-up resistors I added the option of I2C for further expansion.

  After I had the basic schematic I moved to layout. Luckily Hammond provide 2D CAD files for the case, so I figured I would import them into KiCad’s PCB layout tool to make sure things would fit. That took a little bit of effort to go from DWG to DXF and trim it down (I found a web tool to do the initial conversion and then had to strip out the bits of the case that weren’t related to the PCB size + mounting points). I wasn’t confident enough that the edge cuts layer would include the mounting holes, so I manually placed some from KiCad over the right spots.

• How to back up the Dropbox sync folder on Linux

• How to automatically start programs on Mate

• Learn Linux by Doing with New Linux Hands-On Training!

• How to install feren OS 2019.04

• What is Load Balancing and How Does it Work?

  From the earliest days of the Internet era, it was painfully obvious that having a single application on a single server can't handle high-traffic situations. This limited set up simply could not provide high-availability.

  No matter how powerful the underlying infrastructure of a single server instance of a given application or website, the reality is that concurrent traffic can overwhelm a single server. A solitary instance for application availability is quite literally a single point of failure.

  To handle this load, the technique commonly referred to as load balancing was developed. It's an approach that enables organizations to execute workload balancing across different server and compute resources. The benefit of load balancing is that traffic and workload delivery are "balanced" or spread across available resources in an effort to provide higher resilience and availability.

  In recent years, load balancing has become a feature of a broader class of technology, known as Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) which aims to provide multiple advanced load balancing features to ensure workload balancing, along with an overall high quality of application delivery.

• Ansible: Generate Crypted Passwords for the User Module

• Brute force against SSH and FTP services: attacking and defending SSH and FTP

• Bash For Loop With Examples

• Ansible Interview Questions & Answers for Devops

• Killer Chambers looks like an insane challenge to make you throw your gamepad, now available on Linux

  Think you're made of tougher stuff? Killer Chambers will probably test you, given how you need some seriously slick reaction times and a good memory to survive it.

• BATTLETECH is going to the city with the Urban Warfare expansion due in June

  Paradox Interactive and Harebrained Schemes have announced that you will soon be blowing up cities in BATTLETECH, with the Urban Warfare expansion.

  I have to admit, this one does sound rather exciting especially considering they're saying every single building in a city will be "fully destructible". Considering your line of sight can be blocked, taking down a few buildings is going to end up essential to your survival in this. Not just that, there will also be things of interest littered around like explosive fuel trucks, so battles here will be quite intense.

• Minecraft just had a seriously huge update named Village & Pillage

• How to Install Google Chrome Extensions/Plug-Ins On Your Android Phone

• Pre-installed Apps on Android Show Why Privacy is No Longer Guaranteed

• Sony confirms pricing on latest Android TV models, tops out w/ $70,000 98-inch 8K HDR TV

• Xiaomi Mi 6 receives its first Android Pie beta

• US Galaxy Tab S4 Wi-Fi model now receiving Android 9 Pie update

• Exclusive: Chrome screenshots confirm ‘touchless’ Android based on Oreo [Gallery]

It’s spring again! Leaves are budding and updates are blooming for Pop!_OS. Here’s what’s new in Pop!_OS 19.04:

-The Slim Mode option maximizes your screen real estate by reducing the height of the header on application windows

-Dark Mode gives your applications a relaxing ambience for nighttime viewing. Both Dark Mode and Slim Mode can be activated in the Appearance settings menu.

Also: System76 Releases Pop!_OS 19.04 for Its Linux PCs, Based on Ubuntu 19.04