Matthew Arnold: Why I switched to Fedora

To a veteran user of other distributions, Fedora can be a challenge. Many things are not where you expect them to be. The default LVM volume allocations are a bit tricky. And packages including the kernel are frequently upgraded. So why switch after years of using other distributions? In my case, for a variety of technical and political reasons, Fedora was the best option if I wanted to continue using Linux as my daily driver. If you are making the transition from another distribution, here are some observations and tips to get you started.

AWOW AK41 Mini Desktop PC – Gaming – Week 5

This is a weekly blog chronicling my experiences of running the AWOW AK41 Mini Desktop PC on Linux. I’ve already touched on the graphics capabilities of the AWOW AK41. To recap, this Mini PC uses the Intel UHD Graphics 605, an integrated processor graphics unit from the Gemini Lake generation. Performance of the graphics unit is widely reported as in the low-end segment and rarely sufficient for modern games. It’s often touted that integrated graphics are not meant for gaming. But what does that really mean? There are tons of free games available for Linux. Many of them aren’t that graphically demanding.

today's leftovers

• Clarissa Borges: Which library is the GNOME UI extending from?

  About two weeks ago I did some research and learned about some libraries to choose one to extend from to use on my GSoC GNOME UI library project, and it turned out to be a very interesting topic that I’d like to share and take the opportunity to talk about how’s the project going, as it’s been a while since I don’t blog :P In case you don’t know what my project is about, I recommend you to visit my first post where I provide an explanation of the project goals.

• KDE Plasma 5.20 Pre-Beta Run Through

  In this video, we are looking at KDE Plasma 5.20 Pre-Beta. Enjoy!

• DebConf6 (20200804-debconf6)

  DebConf6 was my 4th DebConf and took place in Oaxtepec, Mexico. I'm a bit exhausted right now which is probably quite fitting to write something about DebConf6... many things in life are a question of perception, so I will mention the waterfall and the big swirl and the band playing with the fireworks during the conference dinner, the joy that we finally could use the local fiber network (after asking for months) just after discovering that the 6h shopping tour forgot to bring the essential pig tail connectors to connect the wireless antennas to the cards, which we needed to provide network to the rooms where the talks would take place. DebConf6 was the first DebConf with live streaming using dvswitch (written by Ben Hutchings and removed from unstable in 2015 as the world had moved to voctomix, which is yet another story to be told eventually). The first years (so DebConf6 and some) the videoteam focussed on getting the post processing done and the videos released, and streaming was optional, even though it was an exciting new feature and we still managed to stream mostly all we recorded and sometimes more...

• DSLR Motion Capture with Raspberry Pi and OpenCV

• mOLOID is a pet like no other

  As a part of their masters program at the University of Stuttgart, Jan Ingo Haller and Lorin Samija created a robotic pet that moves in a manner that may not be immediately evident. With the internals obscured by a cloth covering, the moving OLOID, or mOLOID, seems to roll from one vague lobe section to another like some sort of claymation creature. The mOLOID’s unique locomotion is due to an internal “oloid” structure, an arrangement of two circles at 90°. Two servos move weights around the perimeter of each circle to vary its center of gravity, causing it to flop back and forth.

• How to speed up the Rust compiler some more in 2020

  First up is a process change: I have started doing weekly performance triage. Each Tuesday I have been looking at the performance results of all the PRs merged in the past week. For each PR that has regressed or improved performance by a non-negligible amount, I add a comment to the PR with a link to the measurements. I also gather these results into a weekly report, which is mentioned in This Week in Rust, and also looked at in the weekly compiler team meeting. The goal of this is to ensure that regressions are caught quickly and appropriate action is taken, and to raise awareness of performance issues in general. It takes me about 45 minutes each time. The instructions are written in such a way that anyone can do it, though it will take a bit of practice for newcomers to become comfortable with the process. I have started sharing the task around, with Mark Rousskov doing the most recent triage. This process change was inspired by the “Regressions prevented” section of an excellent blost post from Nikita Popov (a.k.a. nikic), about the work they have been doing to improve the speed of LLVM. (The process also takes some ideas from the Firefox Nightly crash triage that I set up a few years ago when I was leading Project Uptime.)

• Data@Mozilla: Experimental integration Glean with Unity applications

  You might notice Firefox Reality PC Preview has been released in HTC’s Viveport store. That is a VR web browser that provides 2D overlay browsing alongside immersive content and supports web-based immersive experiences for PC-connected VR headsets. In order to easily deploy our product into the Viveport store, we take advantage of Unity to help make our application launcher. Also because of that, it brings us another challenge about how to use Mozilla’s existing telemetry system. As we know, Glean SDK has provided language bindings for different programming language requirements that include Kotlin, Swift, and Python. However, when we are talking about supporting applications that use Unity as their development toolkit, there are no existing bindings available to help us achieve it. Unity allows users using a Python interpreter to embed Python scripts in a Unity project; however, due to Unity’s technology being based on the Mono framework, that is not the same as our familiar Python runtime for running Python scripts. So, the alternative way we need to find out is how to run Python on .Net Framework or exactly on Mono framework. If we are discussing possible approaches to run Python script in the main process, using IronPython is the only solution. However, it is only available for Python 2.7, and the Glean SDK Python language binding needs Python 3.6. Hence, we start our plans to develop a new Glean binding for C#.

• WordPress 5.5 Release Candidate 2

  The second release candidate for WordPress 5.5 is here! WordPress 5.5 is slated for release on August 11, 2020, but we need your help to get there—if you haven’t tried 5.5 yet, now is the time!

• Podcast: CLUECON SPECIAL FEATURE – OrecX not only delivers top shelf stereo recording, but delivers a huge ecosystem of add on technology that may already provide the capability you want to use

  Bruce and OrecX have also been attending the ClueCON Conference from the beginning. The founders of OrecX are open source recording pioneers, launching the Oreka GPL in 2005 (used today by millions in over 190 countries).