Some Of The Possible Changes Coming For The Desktop With Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

While we aren't even half-way through the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS development cycle yet, Ubuntu's Trello board provides a look at some of the changes and new features being at least considered for this next Ubuntu long-term support release. With Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the Focal Fossa, we've known about some items like working to drop Python 2 and never-ending GNOME performance work and continuing the great ZFS/Zsys integration introduced as experimental in Ubuntu 19.10. But there's also more coming to this next Ubuntu release due out in April. Also: Web application development with Juju charms: an interview with Marc André Audet from Absolunet

Sparky Bonsai – a portable edition of SparkyLinux

Sparky Bonsai is a GNU/Linux distribution based on Debian/Sparkylinux in a portable form. Taking advantage of the experience of portable distros such as Slax, Porteus, Puppy and DebianDog, we made a remix of our favor Debian-based distro SparkyLinux. The idea was to make a portable version of the linux distro having already installed at home, in cases we can’t, don’t need or wish to install it properly… …Sparky Bonsai lives in a USB flash 4GB minimum and run with 512 MB of RAM on x86 processors. At the moment it’s only available in 64bit version. It fits on a DVD or CD optical disk and runs in ext2/3/4, fat32, xfs, exFAT file systems. In order to load it to RAM, 1GB is recommended. It is a minimal Debian Buster file system using Debian linux kernel v. 4.19.0.6 with the BusterDog’s modules for porteus boot, live-boot-3x and aufs support. Kernel updates are not available the way they are on a properly installed linux system. As you may know, BusterDog uses the Antix Linux init system. Sparky Bonsai uses systemd as pure Debian and Sparky Linux. If you don’t wish to use systemd, check the BusterDog (based on Antix) or Beowolf (based on Devuan). Sparky Bonsai use PCmanFM as file/desktop manager and JWM as windows manager. JWM’s menu construction is based on xdgmenumaker. It comes with Pale Moon as the default web browser, Mousepad as the default text editor and LXterminal as default terminal emulator. All DebianDog’s module and remaster scripts are included as well.

Programming: AWK, Raspberry Pi, Python and CloudBees

• Another surprising AWK trick

  So why is AWK ignoring everything but the numbers in returning "626"? Because "Strings are converted to numbers and numbers are converted to strings, if the context of the awk program demands it". In this case AWK is told to subtract field 3 from field 2. Subtraction being a numbers operation, AWK treats the strings in the fields as numbers, and since " lid" and ")" aren't numbers, they're ignored.

• Interactive (Touch) Musical Christmas Tree

  In this video I should how to build a capacitive touch Christmas tree that allows you to play music just by touching the ornaments. All it takes is a little bit of Python code, a Raspberry Pi, and a Bare Conductive Pi Cap.

• How Machine Learning Will Generate up to $2 Trillion in Value for the Manufacturing Industry

  Open-Source Technologies Provide Innovative Solutions With the right skill set, data scientists in the manufacturing industry can provide a strategic advantage by implementing the use cases discussed here using Python and cutting edge open-source libraries like TensorFlow, scikit-learn, and scikit-image. For this reason, many manufacturing organizations would realize greater value from an enterprise machine learning platform that incorporates open-source libraries and tools rather than a point solution designed for a single use case.

• Significant changes for some error messages in Python 3.8

  As I work on including more exceptions in Friendly-traceback, I am mostly pleasantly surprised by generally more precise error messages. For example, in Python 3.7, the following __debug__ = 1 would yield "SyntaxError: assignment to keyword" which likely would baffle almost everyone looking up the list of Python keywords. In Python 3.8, that message has been replaced by the more precise: "SyntaxError: cannot assign to __debug__". Much better, in my opinion, even though one may be surprised to learn about this constant.

• SunPy Receives NASA Grant, Helps Generate Parker Solar Probe Results

  The one-year proposal, entitled “Supporting and extending SunPy for the heliophysics community,” will create a spectral datatype and provide more coordinate systems in SunPy. In addition, code snippets demonstrating the use of SunPy and other heliophysics-focused Python packages will also be created. Finally, an extensive analysis of the codebase will be performed in order to improve SunPy’s long-term maintainability. The PI is Jack Ireland (NASA GSFC), and the co-I is Andy Terrel (NumFOCUS). In addition, two SunPy affiliated packages were selected for funding from the same NASA program. [...] A co-author on one of the results papers, David Stansby, previously published a short paper called “Predicting Large-scale Coronal Structure for Parker Solar Probe Using Open Source Software.” That short paper provided a completely open toolkit (pfsspy), built on the NumFOCUS stack, to make predictions of the Sun’s magnetic field structure. One of the key results presented in the new Nature paper grew directly out of this work, which relies heavily on SunPy, NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib.

• The Apache Software Foundation Welcomes CloudBees as its Newest Targeted Sponsor at the Platinum Level

  The Apache® Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today that CloudBees has become an ASF Targeted Sponsor at the Platinum level.

Gammy – Adaptive screen brightness utility for Linux

All technology enthusiasts heartily greeted smartphones when they came around. Not only because it was all futuristic and attractive, but also because now you could do things that you could only do on your desktop or laptop. E-mailing, text messaging, sharing files, all became much easier. Even though it seems like smartphones are given features based on those possessed by notebooks, they have a world of their own. Now, even the computer world is learning things from smartphones. One such feature of smartphones that we all find helpful is automatic brightness adjustment. Having that on our Linux systems will be great, especially for those who move around with their laptops a lot. We present a program just for that task, Gammy.