Devices With GNU/Linux

• Pinebook Pro, First Impressions

  After seeing it in action at FOSDEM (from afar, as the crowd was too large), I decided to buy a Pinebook Pro for personal use. From the beginning, the intention was to use it for pkgsrc development, with NetBSD as the main OS. It was finally delivered on Thursday, one day earlier than promised, so I thought I would write down my first impressions.

  If you have never heard of the Pinebook Pro: It is a cheap, open, hackable laptop with an ARM processor, the successor of the original Pinebook (which I thought was too low-end to be a useful daily driver) with generally more premium components.

• Let’s make art at home this week

• What’s the deal with edge computing?

  With over 41 billion IoT devices expected to be active by 2027 — that’s at least 5 devices for every person on the planet — edge computing has emerged as a tenable solution to prevent the impending snowballing of network traffic. Allow me to lift the veil on this buzzword and explain why it’s been gaining attention in tech circles lately. The concept IoT devices generate a lot of data. Smart home hubs constantly accrue information on voice commands, ambient noise, and auxiliary device output. Connected security cameras transfer several gigabytes of image data each day. And self-driving cars will, in all likelihood, be gathering hundreds of terabytes of data each year. The idea of edge computing is to process all this data at the location it is collected. Data that is only of ephemeral importance can (and should) be crunched on the device itself. This is in contrast to cloud computing, where data is sent to massive, far-away compute warehouses for processing.

• 10th Gen Comet Lake computer has GTX GPU and 10 GbE ports

  Sintrones’ fanless, Linux-ready “ABOX-5210G” transport PC features an up to 10-core Comet Lake-S CPU, Nvidia graphics, 3x M.2, 2x mini-PCIe, 3x DP, 2x HDMI, 2x SATA, and 10x GbE ports with optional PoE. Sintrones has announced the second embedded PC we’ve seen with an Intel 10th Gen Comet Lake-S processor after Vecow’s recent ECX-2000 Series. The fanless ABOX-5210G uses slightly lower powered, but more power-efficient Core TE Comet Lake-S models than the Vecow system, including a 2.0GHz/4.5GHz Core i9-10900TE. There is also a 2GHz/4.6GHz Xeon W-1290TE, which similarly offers 10x dual-threaded cores, 20MB Intel Smart Cache, and a 35W TDP.

Plasma Vault and gocryptfs

I promised gocryptfs support in Vault a long time ago, but I kept failing to deliver on that promise because of other obligations, life and work happenings. Now, the beauty of Free Software is that the users do not need to rely only on my free time for new Vault features. Martino Pilia sat down and wrote a gocryptfs backend for Plasma Vault which has been merged and will be available in Plasma 5.19. Many thanks for that!

KDE and GNOME GSoC Projects (Students Introduced)

• Status report: Week 1

  Hey all! This is my first report of the project’s Coding Period.

• Coding officially begins

  Today, the Community bonding period finally ended and GSoC’s three months coding period officially begins. In the last month, I made myself more familiar with git, qml and javascript. As KDE including Gcompris has been moved to Gitlab so I also changed the configuration of my local repository accordingly and tested it. I read codes of almost all the activities (hope I didn’t miss any) and I am quite comfortable with all now.

• Basic Subtitling Support in Kdenlive – GSoC ’20

  A month ago I was selected to participate as a student in Google Summer of Code with Kdenlive. The Community Bonding period is coming to an end and the coding period will soon commence. In this post, I am going to talk about what the project is about, how I plan to implement it, and what all I have done in the community bonding period to ensure a smooth and bump-free coding period.

• Chinmay Gurjar: Chapter 1: A New Tale Begins

  It was around 23:25(IST) on the 4th of May, my brother and I were glued to our phone screens, the GSoC webpage open, eagerly waiting for the results (he was visibly the more excited one). And BAM! 23:31, I saw my name on the GSoC website. Then followed a tsunami of “congratulations”. I’ve been accepted into GSoC to work with GNOME. I applied for the Music project under GNOME. I’ve always fancied music, making music and now I wanted to make a music player to play that music. So, when I saw the Music listed for GSoC, I knew, I just knew that it was the “one”. I started contributing to the project and made some minor fixes, here and there. Those fixes taught me a lot about open source.

• S Sai Vineet: GSoC 2020 with GNOME: a beginning

  I have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2020 with GNOME Foundation! I am grateful to my mentor albfan and the whole GNOME developer community to have helped me become capable enough to tackle this project. Can’t wait to get my hands dirty and become a strong member of the GNOME community!

• Adwait Rawat: GSoC 2020, Let’s GO!

  On 5th May 2020, I got an email from google, stating that I got accepted as a participant for Google Summer of Code 2020. The organisation I applied to was GNOME. Reason being, I have been contributing to GNOME since early 2019 to various projects such as gitg, libgit2-glib, GNOME Games etc. These contributions were usually minor fixes, but ended up being very educational for someone who was new to open-source.

• Mariana Pícolo: The beginning of a journey with GNOME on Google Summer of Code

  I'm so excited to announce that I'm being part of Summer of Code 2020 with GNOME! In this post, I'll talk about my experience during the student application period.

• Nour E-Din ElNhass: The Journey Begins

  Hello everyone, This is the first post in my blog of many up coming posts that will be documenting my journey through the open source world as I’ve been accepted to GSoC internship for 2020, contributing to Gnome organization. I’ll try to document every little detail as possible to try to give the same experience I had. So, who am I ? you may be wondering !! As said on the home page, I am Nour E-Din, an undergrad student, my first contribution to and open source application was to Evolution. Evolution is the official personal information manager for GNOME.It combines e-mail, address book, calendar, task list and note-taking features. It has been maintained for years, had developed a lot and has many users who use it daily.

• Apoorv Sachan: The first Contribution, GNOME & GSoC

  Well, why the ants ? Think teamwork, think team effort, interdependent efforts, voluntary involvement, the easy stuff, the hard stuff, the small and the large stuff, they all do it together, collectively and end up making what all of us call an ant-hill. A self sustaining ecosystem capable of supporting various ants, queen ant,the female workers, and male ants and the baby ants of-course. Who will in-turn help build a bigger ant-hill bootstrapped upon its previous design and so on into the future . . . . Well enough said about ants ! You get where I am going ! This post is about how I came to contribute to an open-source project, got started on a journey I had been looking forward to since ever.

• Nour E-Din ElNhass: The first steps

  It’s already been 3 weeks since I’ve received my acceptance email to GSoC internship. I am going to explain what progress have been made during this time and what I am willing on achieving on the upcoming days .

Android Leftovers

• MBC streaming service Shahid now available on TCL Android TVs

• Galaxy S20 Grabs Another Android Update With the Quickness

• Tech wrap: Mi Notebook launch, Android vulnerability and more

• How to Record the Screen on Your Android Phone

• Android update delivers new ‘Bedtime’ features focused on improving sleep

• Realme rolls out Android 10-based Realme UI update to Realme 5, Realme 5i, Realme 5s smartphones in India