today's howtos and leftovers

• LibreOffice Writer: Starting The Program

• How to use the pipe in Linux commands

• How To Install LEMP Stack on CentOS 8

• OpenShift Scale-CI: Part 3 – OCP 4.1 and 4.2 Scale Run Highlights

• Toplip – A Very Strong File Encryption And Decryption CLI Utility

• Frédéric Wang: Review of my year 2019 at Igalia

  In 2016, I was among the new software engineers who joined Igalia. Three years later I applied to become co-owner of the company and the legal paperwork was completed in April. As my colleague Andy explained on his blog, this does not change a lot of things in practice because most of the decisions are taken within the assembly. However, I’m still very happy and proud of having achieved this step  One of my new duty has been to be the “mentor” of Miyoung Shin since February and to help with her integration at Igalia. Shin has been instrumental in Igalia’s project to improve Chromium’s Code Health with an impressive number of ~500 commits. You can watch the video of her BlinkOn lightning talk on YouTube. In addition to her excellent technical contribution she has also invested her energy in company’s life, helping with the organization of social activities during our summits, something which has really been appreciated by her colleagues. I’m really glad that she has recently entered the assembly and will be able to take a more active role in the company’s decisions!

Juju 2.7: Enhanced k8s experience, improved networking and more

Canonical is proud to announce the availability of Juju 2.7. This new release introduces a range of exciting features and several improvements which enhance Juju across various areas. To learn more about Juju, visit our page. Kubernetes extensions Juju is becoming the simplest way to deploy and manage your container-centric workloads. This release was aimed at bringing more Juju features to k8s charms and more k8s features to Juju. K8s charms can now define actions, introspect agents, and communicate back to Juju via the addition of juju-run within the pod’s PATH environmental variable. Experienced k8s operators will feel more at home with the ability to set secrets, administer service accounts, and other k8s-native features from their charms directly. Also: How using Charmed OSM helps telcos to accelerate their NFV transformation

Graphics: NVIDIA 440.44 Linux Driver, Microsoft Code, and WSL Performs Very Poorly

• NVIDIA 440.44 Linux Driver Brings Fixes, __GL_SYNC_DISPLAY_DEVICE Honored With Vulkan

  Out today is NVIDIA 440.44 as the latest stable Linux driver update in their new long-lived driver series.  Succeeding the 440.36 and 440.31 stable drivers, the 440.44 release isn't too exciting but at least NVIDIA should be introducing a new beta series shortly. 

• Intel's OpenSWR OpenGL Software Rasterizer Pulls In Tessellator From Microsoft Direct3D Code

  OpenSWR is Intel's performance-minded software rasterizer for purposes like workstation visualizations and is where it outperforms the likes of LLVMpipe. This CPU-based OpenGL implementation can make use of not only AVX/AVX2 but also AVX-512 and other optimizations to support speedy CPU-based GL operations from laptops to Xeon Scalable hardware. Like LLVMpipe, OpenSWR does leverage LLVM in part. Those unfamiliar with this long-standing Intel open-source project can learn more at OpenSWR.org.

• Windows Subsystem For Linux Performance At The End Of 2019

  Recently I wrapped up some benchmarks looking at the performance of Ubuntu on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux comparing WSL on Windows 10 Build 18362 (May 2019 Update) and then both WSL and WSL2 performance using the Windows 10 Build 19008 Insider's Preview (what will come as Windows 10 20H1 update) for looking at where the WSL performance is heading. Additionally, looking at the bare metal performance of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for which the WSL instances were based plus Ubuntu 19.10. As well, for the Windows-compatible tests also looking at how the Windows performance itself was outside of WSL/WSL2.

Testing IPFire 2.23 - Core Update 139 and Latest Security Patches

• IPFire 2.23 - Core Update 139 is available for testing

  the last Core Update for this decade is finally available for testing! If you have a couple of hours free over the holidays, please help us out by installing it and sending us your feedback!

• Security updates for Wednesday

  Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (crypto++ and thunderbird), Debian (cacti, freeimage, git, and jackson-databind), Fedora (nss), openSUSE (clamav, dnsmasq, munge, opencv, permissions, and shadowsocks-libev), Red Hat (nss, nss-softokn, nss-util, rh-maven35-jackson-databind, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (nss, nss-softokn, nss-util, nss-softokn, and thunderbird), SUSE (caasp-openstack-heat-templates, crowbar-core, crowbar-openstack, crowbar-ui, etcd, flannel, galera-3, mariadb, mariadb-connector-c, openstack-dashboard-theme-SUSE, openstack-heat-templates, openstack-neutron, openstack-nova, openstack-quickstart, patterns-cloud, python-oslo.messaging, python-oslo.utils, python-pysaml2, libssh, and strongswan), and Ubuntu (git, libpcap, libssh, and thunderbird).