8 Practical Examples of the usermod Command in Linux

The usermod command in Linux allows you to modify a user account in various ways. Check out what settings you can modify in this tutorial.

Games: Slay the Spire, Humble Australia Fire Relief Bundle, Stadia, Open Surge and Boxtron

• A Long Way Down blends together Slay the Spire card combat with maze building - now in Early Access

  One thing is for sure, Slay the Spire truly has kicked off a deck-building indie game revolution of sorts. More and more are releasing with deck-building and A Long Way Down seems like one of the better ones so far. Note: Key provided by the publisher, Goblinz Studio. Quite derivative I would say though, in the nicest way possible. The deck-building card-based combat from Slay the Spire is merged in with maze building in a similar fashion to what's seen in Guild of Dungeoneering.

• The Humble Australia Fire Relief Bundle is up with 100% going to charity

  Humble are back with a new bundle, although this is a 100% charity bundle to help deal with the sad situation in Australia. The Humble Australia Fire Relief Bundle only has one tier at $25, which does include quite a lot of games. Here's what's included, I've highlighted in bold text those with Linux support....

• Google plan over 120 Stadia games this year, 10 coming to Stadia before other platforms

  In their latest community update, the Stadia Team have given a small insight into what's coming to the Linux-powered game streaming service Stadia across 2020. Missed our first impressions of Stadia? Check them out here. They said "more than" 120 games will be coming to Stadia this year, more interestingly though they also mentioned that 10 will be arriving in the "first half of this year" that will "only" be on Stadia when they launch. So that's presumably some timed-exclusives they have going. No names were mentioned, so we just have to wait and see.

• Move over Sonic, Surge has arrived with Open Surge - a game engine and retro platformer

  I grew up playing the early Sonic games so Open Surge really speaks to me. A retro Sonic-inspired platformer (that's actually quite polished already) and a game engine for others to create with it. Open Surge is free and open source software (GPL license), so anyone can grab it from GitHub and do whatever they wish. Written from scratch in C, using the cross-platform Allegro programming library.

• Boxtron, the Steam Play tool to run games through a native DOSBox on Linux has a new release

  Boxtron is another awesome Steam Play tool! Covered here a few times now, like Proton it enables you to play games on Linux that don't have a Linux build setup on Steam only this is for DOSBox games. Rather than running DOSBox-powered games on Steam through Proton when they don't have a Linux build of it all up, using Boxtron should give a better experience. Today a new release went up with Boxtron 0.5.4 fixing multiple issues including: games that use multiple CD images not starting like The Dame Was Loaded (and probably other FMV titles), they tweaked Retro City Rampage 486 to use "aspect=false", several bugs around parsing user-supplied regex for MIDI synthesiser detection were fixed, they also fixed a bug preventing MIDI port detection if there are no soundfonts installed and there's now several fallback soundfont names for various Linux distributions.

Graphics: CVE-2019-14615, Mir 1.7 Release, Panfrost Talk ("Liberating ARM GPUs")

• Red Hat Recommends Disabling The Intel Linux Graphics Driver Over Hardware Flaw

  It's been another day testing and investigating CVE-2019-14615, a.k.a. the Intel graphics hardware issue where for Gen9 all turned out to be okay but for Gen7 graphics leads to some big performance hits. Besides the Core i7 tests published yesterday in the aforelinked article, tests on relevant Core i3 and i5 CPUs are currently being carried out for seeing the impact there (so far, it's looking to be equally brutal). The contents of CVE-2019-14615 are still marked private, but the Red Hat Customer Portal has opened their guidance on this graphics flaw. Red Hat rates this CVE as having moderate impact. This Red Hat bug report does shed some more light onto the issue.

• Mir 1.7 Released With Improvements For Running X11 Software

  Mir 1.7 was released today as the newest feature release for this Ubuntu-focused display stack that for the past two years now has focused on serving viable Wayland support. With the Mir 1.7 release there are a number of X11 client improvements, including the ability to show basic window decorations, a new configuration knob for specifying the XWayland executable to utilize for the support, and various code clean-ups.

• Panfrost: Liberating ARM GPUs @ Linux Conf Au

  This talk covers the history, future and internals of the Panfrost driver for ARM GPUs.

Red Hat Leftovers

• Red Hat Accelerates Cloud-Native Development with Unified Hybrid Cloud Storage for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform

  Enhanced with Multi-Cloud Object Gateway from Red Hat’s 2018 acquisition of NooBaa, Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage 4 offers greater abstraction and flexibility so customers have the freedom to choose data services across multiple public clouds, while still operating from a unified Kubernetes-based control plane for applications and storage. In addition to helping customers avoid public cloud lock-in, this enables developers to keep their data close to applications through improved accessibility, delivering a more efficient developer experience. With a consistent Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) interface, enterprises now have built-in object storage and scalability needed to support portability for data-intensive applications across the hybrid cloud on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, previously unavailable through any container storage vendor in the OpenShift OperatorHub.

• OpenShift and Kubernetes, with Clayton Coleman

  Five years ago, Clayton Coleman took a bet on a new open source project that Google was about to announce. He became the first external contributor to Kubernetes, and the architect of Red Hat’s reinvention of OpenShift from PaaS to “enterprise Kubernetes”. Hosts Adam Glick and Craig Box return for 2020 with the story of OpenShift, and their picks for Game of the Holidays.

• Command Line Heroes season 4 trailer

  No one ever said hardware was easy. In Season 4, Command Line Heroes is telling 7 special stories about people and teams who dared to change the rules of hardware and in the process changed how we all interact with technology. The first episode drops January 28, 2020. Subscribe today and sign up for the newsletter to get the latest updates and bonus content.

• Deploying applications in the OpenShift 4.3 Developer perspective

  In this article, we take a look at user flow improvements for deploying applications in Red Hat OpenShift 4.3‘s Developer perspective. You can learn more about all of the developer-focused console improvements in the OpenShift 4.3 release article here. Since the initial launch of the Developer perspective in the OpenShift 4.2 release, we’ve had frequent feedback sessions with developers, developer advocates, stakeholders, and other community members to better understand how the experience meets their needs. While, overall, the user interface has been well received, we continue to gather and use the feedback to enhance our flows.

• A ‘fail fast’ solution for end-to-end machine learning

  Enterprise AI solutions are characterized by an end-to-end workflow that involves data sourcing, querying, ETL, feature engineering, and training the machine learning algorithms. Did you know there’s an end-to-end machine learning pipeline, which can be built using Pythonic frameworks, that allows you to fail fast at TeraScale data levels?