Graphics/GPU: OpenCL, Mesa, X.Org

• IWOCL OpenCL 2018 Videos Start Appearing Online

  There is the conference program for those that are curious about the sessions that took place during this annual OpenCL conference. Eventually, slide decks should be available from there too. The most prominent session video of interest to hobbyists and general OpenCL developers/users will likely be The Khronos Group's President, Neil Trevett, providing a "state of the nation" on CL...

• Mesa 18.1 Officially Released as the Most Advanced Linux Graphics Stack Series

  The development team behind the open-source Mesa graphics stack announced over the weekend the general availability of the final Mesa 18.1 release for Linux-based operating systems. The Mesa 18.1 series comes approximately two months after the 18.0 branch, which probably most GNU/Linux distributions are using these days, and which already received its fourth maintenance updates. Mesa 18.1 introduces a few new features across all supported graphics drivers, but it's mostly another stability update.

• Mach64 & Rendition Drivers Now Work With X.Org Server 1.20

  Anyone happening to have an ATI Mach 64 graphics card from the mid-90's or a 3Dfx-competitor Rendition graphics card also from the 90's can now enjoy the benefits of the recently released X.Org Server 1.20. Mach 64 and Rendition are among the X.Org DDX (2D) drivers still being maintained for the X.Org Server. Even though using either of these two decade old graphics cards would be painfully slow with a Linux desktop stack from today especially if paired with CPU and memory from that time-frame, the upstream X.Org developers still appear willing to maintain support for these vintage graphics processors. Well, at least as far as ensuring the drivers still build against the newest software -- we've seen before out of these old drivers that they are updated to work for new releases, but at times can actually be broken display support for years before anyone notices with said hardware.

Tesla Compliance

• It Only Took Six Years, But Tesla Is No Longer Screwing Up Basic Software Licenses

  Tesla is actually doing it. The electric car maker is starting to abide by open source software licenses that it had previously ignored, and releasing the code it’s sat on for over six years, according to Electrek. Tesla’s super smart cars, specifically the sporty Model S sedan and Model X SUV, incorporate a lot of open source software, from Linux, the open source operating system, to BusyBox, a collection of tools that are useful when working with Linux and other UNIX environments (like macOS). All open source software is released under licenses and one of the most popular licenses is the GPL, or General Public License.

• Tesla releases some of its software to comply with open source rules

  Tesla makes some of the most popular electric vehicles out there and the systems in those cars rely on open source software for operating systems and features. Some of that open source software that is used in Tesla products has a license agreement that requires Tesla to at least offer the user access to the source code. Tesla hasn’t been making that offer.

• Tesla open sources some of its Autopilot source code

  ELECTRIC CAR MAKER Tesla tends to keep the details of its work under lock and key, but now Elon Musk's company is plonking some of its automotive tech source code into the open source community. Tesla dumped some of its code used to build the foundations of its Autopilot semi-autonomous driving tech and the infotainment system found on the Model S and Model X cars, which makes uses of Nvidia's Tegra chipset, on GitHub. Even if you're code-savvy, don't go expecting to build your own autonomous driving platform on top of this source code, as Tesla has still kept the complete Autopilot framework under wraps, as well as deeper details of the infotainment system found in its cars. But it could give code wranglers a better look into how Tesla approaches building infotainment systems and giving its cars a dose of self-driving smarts.

• Tesla releases source code

  Tesla has taken its first step towards compliance with the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) by releasing some of its source code. The car maker has opened two GitHub repositories which contain the buildroot material used to build the system image on its Autopilot platform, and the kernel sources for the boards and the Nvidia-based infotainment system in the Model S and Model X.

Android Leftovers

• How to get bigger text on Android

• North Korean Hackers Spying on Defectors Using Facebook to Spread Android Malware

• Ditch The Tapes, Put An Android In Your Deck

• Android Data Usage Trends: 60% Increase in One Year

• Android 8.0 Oreo rolls out to unlocked Moto Z handsets in US

• The Android P beta might be hiding Google's Pixel 3 design

• Red Hydrogen One: $1300 but this Android phone's holographic display impresses

• LG's Q7 phones are an upgrade to its midrange Android offerings

• How to connect your Android device to your Linux desktop

• 'Roaming Mantis' Android Malware Evolves, Expands Targets

Ubuntu 18.10 Aims to Improve Laptop Battery Life

It's been less than a month since Ubuntu 18.04 LTS released, but when you work on a six-month release cycle the focus moves quickly to what comes next. Canonical is doing just that by telling us what we can expect to see in Ubuntu 18.10, which arrives in October. If you're only just getting used to Ubuntu 18.04, don't worry, Canonical hasn't forgotten about you. In a blog post, Canonical's desktop engineering manager, Will Cooke, details plans to release 18.04.1 in July. It will fix a number of bugs, but also introduce the ability to, among other things, unlock Ubuntu with your fingerprint.