Games and GPL Enforcement

• Fantasy city-builder Songs of Syx added in reproduction and riots

  The very promising Early Access fantasy city-builder Songs of Syx has expanded in multiple ways in the latest update and you're going to need to prepare for a lot more people. With major new systems appearing including reproduction, so your people will now pair up with a procreation room and do the deed. After which you're left with a bunch of children running around, eating food and taking up your time. Thankfully there's also now an education system to give them something to do until they grow up and get to work. A new happiness system was also introduced so you need to keep people happy or they will riot and ruin everything. That plus a whole lot more.

• Humble releases a Tropico 20th Anniversary Bundle | GamingOnLinux

  Become El Presidente for cheaps as the latest Humble Bundle has arrived with the Tropico 20th Anniversary Bundle letting you build up your collection. As usual the amount of games you get depends on how much you pay, with this one split across three different tiers. Here's our usual breakdown of how they work on Linux.

• Enforcement of the GNU GPL with Till Jaeger

  With our 12th episode of the Software Freedom Podcast we dig into the history and the beginning of enforcing Free Software licences, especially the GNU General Public Licence (GNU GPL). Together with Till Jaeger, who has been working alongside Harald Welte for enforcing the GNU GPL in the first court cases in Germany, we talk about the long way we have come since those early days. Our guest, Till Jaeger, discusses with our host, Matthias Kirschner, how the decision to go to court and stand up for the rights of copyleft licences came about. Till and Matthias tell an exciting story about those first steps on this new legal ground. They also highlight the short term and long term impacts of the first court decision in favour of Free Software. For example, how more and more information about licensing and especially using a Free Software licence became available and publicly known. But also how workshops, like the FSFE's yearly Legal and Licensing Workshop were created for those interested in using and being compliant to Free Software licences. Discover together with us the changes that have come from those first steps to the acceptance of Free Software in companies. Till has been involved with Free Software licensing for a long time and provides a deep and well rounded insight into the history of enforcing the GNU GPL. To give this episode a perfect ending, Matthias and Till also talk about some of the most common misunderstandings of Free Software licensing. This is the perfect episode for everyone to get an insight into one of the most important events in the history of enforcing Free Software licences.

Linux Devices, Open Hardware, and DRM Setback

• Home Automation Terminal With Cyberpunk Style

  The OLKB-Terminal designed by [Jeff Eberl] doesn’t have a battery, can’t fold up (even if it seems like it could), and is only portable in the sense that you can literally pick it up and move it somewhere else. So arguably it’s not really a cyberdeck per se, but it certainly does look the part. If you need to be furiously typing out lines of code in a dimly lit near-future hacker’s den, this should do you nicely. [Jeff] has provided everything you’d need to recreate this slick little machine on your own, though he does warn that some of the hardware decisions were based simply on what he had on-hand at the time, and that better or cheaper options may exist. So for example if you don’t want to use the Raspberry Pi 4, you can easily swap it out for some other single-board computer. Though if you want to change something better integrated, like the LCD panel, it will probably require modifications to the 3D printed components.

• 4 most popular IoT Linux distros: Which is best for you?

  Linux is the operating system of choice for Internet of Things device manufacturers looking to fit their resource-constrained embedded devices with lightweight software systems. As an open-source project, Linux offers a stable, low-cost, secure, and up-to-date platform that can be run on a variety of microprocessor architectures, powering a range of devices from IoT sensors at the low end to powerful supercomputers.

• Nvidia cosies up to Open Robotics for hardware-accelerated ROS

  Nvidia has linked up with Open Robotics to drive new artificial intelligence capabilities in the Robot Operating System (ROS). The non-exclusive agreement will see Open Robotics extending ROS 2, the latest version of the open-source robotics framework, to better support Nvidia hardware – and in particular its Jetson range, low-power parts which combine Arm cores with the company's own GPU and deep-learning accelerator cores to drive edge and embedded artificial intelligence applications. "Our users have been building and simulating robots with Nvidia hardware for years, and we want to make sure that ROS 2 and Ignition work well on those platforms," Brian Gerkey, Open Robotics' chief exec, told The Register.

• UP Xtreme i11 Edge Compute Enabling Kit supports 5G, WiFi 6, Myriad X AI accelerator cards - CNX Software

  The computer is compatible with Microsoft Windows 10 full version, Yocto project 3.0/3.1 using Linux 5.4, and Ubuntu 20.04 with Linux 5.8, as well as Intel OpenVINO toolkit 2021 R1 with support for TensorFlow and Caffe AI frameworks. Ubuntu and OpenVINO are also part of the Intel Software Foundation Kit that may be installed on the device upon request, and also includes MRAA and UPM I/O and sensor libraries, Docker, k3s Kubernetes, AWS Greengrass, and more.

• This robotic bartender serves up drinks using a Nano RP2040 Connect and the Arduino Cloud | Arduino Blog

  Mixing up perfect, custom cocktails often requires months or even years of training, in addition to having to know a plethora of recipes. But Jithin Sanal wanted to pour his favorite drinks without spending the extra time and effort, so he concocted a robotic cocktail mixer to perform this task for him. It operates by using a series of ingredient reservoirs, pumps, an Arduino Nano RP2040 Connect, and a few relays to dispense a precise quantity of the desired ingredient into a container. Sanal also designed and fabricated his own circuit board to connect each component together in a circuit. Rather than having a bunch of physical buttons on the front of the robotic cocktail mixer, Sanal instead opted to use the Arduino Cloud with five virtual ones that each correspond to a single drink. When a button is pressed, a function is executed on the Nano RP2040 Connect that activates the correct pumps in the specified order for a certain duration. By utilizing this method, users can be confident their drink is perfectly made every single time. More drinks can be added to the system simply by adding another button within the IoT Cloud and creating the associated function in the RP2040’s code.

• Firmware Find Hints At Subscription Plan for reMarkable Tablet

  To their credit, at least reMarkable is being upfront by admitting a subscription model is being considered. It also sounds like existing users will be grandfathered in when it goes live, which should come as some comfort to current owners. But for prospective buyers, this could literally change everything. It’s bad enough that cloud synchronization of documents would potentially be time-limited, though we’ll admit there’s some justification in that the company is obviously incurring costs by hosting these files. Limiting features based on subscription tier on the other hand is simply a step too far, especially on a device that the user purchased outright. We’ve already seen the first tentative steps towards developing a free and open source operating system for the reMarkable tablet, and this news is only going to redouble the efforts of those who wish to liberate this very promising piece of hardware from the overbearing software it ships with. What worries us is how the company is likely to respond to such projects if they’ve found themselves in a situation where recurring charges have become necessary to balance the books. We’ve already seen a motorcycle airbag that will only deploy if the wearer has paid up for the year, so is a tablet that won’t let you install additional applications unless you’ve sprung for the premium membership really that far fetched? Sadly, we all know the answer.

Programming Leftovers

• Jakub Kadlčík: Building RHEL packages with Tito

  Are you a Fedora packager and consider Tito to be a valuable asset in your toolbox? Do you know it can be used for maintaining RHEL packages as well? Or any downstream packaging? I didn’t. This article explains how it can be done.

• linuxium.com.au: New release of 'isorespin.sh'

  Following news of the GRUB2 Secure Boot Bypass 2021 and as a result of Google's security changes on Google Drive together with the first daily build's from Canonical of Ubuntu 21.10 (impish) and point releases for 20.04.3 and 18.04.6 I've updated my ‘isorespin.sh‘ script and respun some ISOs suitable for Intel Atom and Intel Apollo Lake devices.

• PHP maintains an enormous lead in server-side programming languages

  The venerable web programming language PHP is a source of frequent complaints and frustration, but according to a report W3Techs released today, it doesn't seem to be going away any time soon. W3Techs' web server survey looks for technologies in use by sites in Alexa's top 10 million list; today's report includes a year-on-year chart beginning with January 2010, running all the way through 2021. The survey only includes top sites not out of elitism, but as one part of its effort to avoid data-skewing returns from domain-parking services and spammers, which would otherwise dominate legitimate websites through sheer volume. Within that dataset, the story told is clear. Apart from PHP—which held a 72.5 percent share in 2010 and holds a 78.9 percent share as of today—only one other server-side language ever broke a 10 percent share. That one competitor is ASP.NET, which held an impressive 24.4 percent share in 2010 but was down to 9.3 percent in January and 8.3 percent this month. Amongst the small fry, the only truly impressive growth to be seen is in Ruby—which at 5.2 percent this month is still seeing continued uninterrupted growth in W3Techs' survey. This might come as a shock if you're mostly familiar with Ruby on Rails, which itself remains viable but seems to be on the decline in popularity.

• PHP Holds Impressive Lead Among Server-Side Languages

  This share constitutes an enormous lead over PHP’s rivals, with only one other server-side language ever reaching a 10 percent share. As Jim Salter reports, ASP.NET held a 24 percent share in 2010 but usage has now declined to 8.3 percent.

• 10 Best Open Source Linux Code Editors [Ed: Very bad list. The first two in the list are Microsoft and even proprietary software with surveillance or 'telemetry' that spies on coders]

  Coding is part of every developer’s life and IDE (Integrated Development Environment) makes this job easier for them. IDEs come with tons of handy features and support programming of various languages within the same environment. Furthermore, IDEs provide users with plug-ins for adding the extra capability to the program and auto-complete tags and classes to make programming faster. Users can also utilize the pre-provided piece of code in their programs. IDEs make coding faster and easier and hence today we’re here to discuss the 10 best Code Editors (IDEs) available for Linux.