Akademy 2019

At this year's Akademy I had great moments with new and already known people. Akedemy gives me much power for hopefully the rest of the year. I really enjoyed the daytrip to the lake. It was calm and beautiful environment. The daytrip helped me to calm down again. Together with Leiner, Florian and Valorie we sat down to discuss issues for newcomers attending Akademy the first time while having an amazing lunch. Is it often hard to remember how hard it can be to attend the Akademy the first time without knowing lots of people. The outcome of this discussion will feed back to community after some more cleanup of our notes. Hopefully we can make the next Akademy even better for newcomers next year! My highlights from the first two days of great talks are Kirogi and "Developers Italia". I really enjoyed seeing that Open Source reaches more and more domains and now you can even control your drone with Open Source named Kirogi. The software itself looks already quite usable and I'm looking forward what features we will see there in future... "Developers Italia" was an eye opener, in how governments can change the laws so administrations must invest in Open Source. In Italy, administrations are forced to search for an existing solution in Open Source and then use this solution. If the software does not work for them they can pay developers to implement their needed features, but still the code will be owned by the administration and they need to publish the code afterwards under an Open Source license. I'm very interested to see how this will develop in future, because at the moment I still have the bad feeling that some big companies may have the ability and also the desire to destroy this revolutionary idea, with the result that only some big companies will get all the big grants, and the result will be bloated unusable Open Source software. But none the less, let's give the Italy administrations a warm welcome and give them a hand to become good Open Source citizens. I also enjoyed the talk by Albert about the status of fuzzing KDE software. Albert explained, that the first Frameworks are covered by fuzzing, and the results that were found by the fuzzer. The first days and weeks spit out a lot of interesting issues, but nowadays, the fuzzer takes a lot of time to find new issues. So it is time now to add the next set ready to be fuzzed. I talked with Albert about what would be the most valuable parts of KDEPIM that should be covered by fuzzing. The first set is KMime, KContacts and KCalenderCore as they handle input without any user interaction.

Games: Plague Inc: Evolved, Dungeon 2 and OBS Studio

• Trick the world in the Fake News update to Plague Inc: Evolved

  Plague Inc: Evolved just got another big free update with a fun new Fake News scenario giving you a chance to deceive the whole world. A great game you could already have a lot of fun with, as I did before naming a Bacteria after someone close. Now though, you're not dealing with coughs and colds but the spread of misinformation. Starting off with only one person being Deceived, you begin writing your Fake News Manifesto to evolve the information and it shall begin to spread. I decided to spread some fake news in the USA, that was started by Aliens because they just wanted to watch the world burn. You certainly can make some amusing things with it.

• In AI Dungeon 2 the game is created as you play and it can be both impressive and ridiculous

  I can't even begin to understand the fancy AI learning stuff behind the scenes, but AI Dungeon 2 is certainly a very fun idea and a possible look into the future of games. AI Dungeon 2 is a text adventure, like the classics but with a huge twist as it's built with OpenAI opening up a huge amount of ever-expanding actions that are possible. It can be impressive, there's some really surprising and amusing interactions you can have with it.

• OBS Studio 24.0.4 is out with numerous bug fixes, better Linux Window Capture

  A few days ago, a "Hotfix" update was released for the video capture and livestreaming FOSS application OBS Studio. OBS Studio 24.0.4 is quite a small release, but for those of you creating video content on Linux you might find this version working a lot better. For Linux especially, the Window Capture function got multiple fixes like certain windows just not appearing and sometimes multiple 0x0 windows would appear. Display Capture on Linux was also fixed up where the crop value would shift the cursor's captured position incorrectly.

Red Hat, IBM and Fedora's Kernel

• CodeReady Workspaces devfile, demystified

  With the exciting advent of CodeReady Workspaces (CRW) 2.0 comes some important changes. Based on the upstream project Eclipse Che 7, CRW brings even more of the “Infrastructure as Code” idea to fruition. Workspaces mimic the environment of a PC, an operating system, programming language support, the tools needed, and an editor. The real power comes by defining a workspace using a YAML file—a text file that can be stored and versioned in a source control system such as Git. This file, called devfile.yaml, is powerful and complex. This article will attempt to demystify the devfile.

• Building freely distributed containers with Podman and Red Hat UBI

  DevNation tech talks are hosted by the Red Hat technologists who create our products. These sessions include real solutions and code and sample projects to help you get started. In this talk, you’ll learn about building containers with Podman and Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) from Scott McCarty and Burr Sutter. We will cover how to build and run containers based on UBI using just your regular user account—no daemon, no root, no fuss. Finally, we will order the de-resolution of all of our containers with a really cool command. After this talk, you will have new tools at the ready to help you find, run, build, and share container images.

• Backfitting SLES 12 for IBM z15 – It’s in Our DNA

  For 20 years, SUSE has partnered with IBM to advance Linux on Z. From the early days of the IBM Linux Tech Center to an elaborate open source ecosystem, you might say that supporting IBM Z is part of our DNA. Several months ago, SUSE included support for the newly announced IBM z15 and IBM LinuxONE III systems as part of SLES 15. Now, with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM Z and LinuxONE 12 SP5, we are backfitting all the latest IBM Z support for pervasive encryption and more. The latest IBM z15 system is designed to support your mission-critical initiatives and allow you to be innovative as you design and scale your environment. Combined with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM Z and LinuxONE, these state-of-the-art systems provide an ultra-secure data serving platform to support the global economic growth we are seeing today.

• Contribute at the Fedora Test Week for Kernel 5.4

  The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.4. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. This version has many security fixes included. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Monday, December 09, 2019 through Monday, December 16, 2019. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.