Slackware Lives! Upcoming Slackware 15.0 Beta is Out. Download and Test Now.

The oldest Linux distribution Slackware 15.0 beta is out, crashing many rumors that the project is dead.

LibreOffice and More

• Dates for LibreOffice Virtual Conference

  Our traditional LibreOffice Conference will be a fully virtual event for the second consecutive year, from September 23 (Thursday) to September 25 (Saturday), 2021. Unfortunately, the uncertainty still surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on travel, conference planning, logistics and possibility for attendees to come to the conference – coupled with the unpredictability of the current vaccination campaign – are reasons for shifting the event to online also in 2021.

• When online suites go down, we need options not on the cloud

  You could use Office 2019, or the forthcoming Office 2021. But let me offer up a better, more universal suggestion: LibreOffice. LibreOffice is an open-source office suite. It's based on OpenOffice, which it superseded years ago. It includes a word processor, Writer; a spreadsheet, Calc; a presentation creator, Impress; a vector graphics and flowchart editor, Draw; a simple database program, Base; and a mathematical formula editor, Math. If you can use other office programs, you can use LibreOffice. It supports most of today's popular document formats, including Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx), Excel (.xls, .xlsx), PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx); Adobe PDF and the Open Document Format (ODF). Admittedly, its support for Microsoft's formats isn't perfect. But if you ever read Microsoft's Office Open XML File Format "Standard" closely, you'll find even Microsoft doesn't fully support its own standard. Practically speaking, if you're doing very elaborate work in Word or Excel, you would be better off sticking with Office. On the other hand, LibreOffice won't cost you a single cent. It's also available on all major desktop operating systems. And, when I say all, I mean all. This includes Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and even ChromeOS. The last comes from LibreOffice's commercial partner Collabora via the Google Play Store.

• Dependencies to compile modem-manager-gui

  I posted a couple of days ago, that compiled dependencies for LibreOffice in OpenEmbedded, but compile LO itself in a running EasyOS. I am going to do the same with 'modem-manager-gui', as have found it to be cross-compiler-unfriendly. Actually, it only seems to be the usage of po4a that is unfriendly, so I could probably hack on it. But decided to take the easy path and compile in a running Easy. ModemManager GUI is a gtk+3 frontend to 'modemmanager'.

 

• People of WordPress: Tyler Lau

  In this People of WordPress contributor story, we chat to Tyler Lau from the US on his relationship building work in marketing and his WordPress journey. Read on to discover his story which shows it is often what you have learned from negative experiences in your life that can make you a major asset to a product team.

Programming Leftovers

• Niko Matsakis: Async Vision Doc Writing Sessions V

  This is an exciting week for the vision doc! As of this week, we are starting to draft “shiny future” stories, and we would like your help! (We are also still working on status quo stories, so there is no need to stop working on those.) There will be a blog post coming out on the main Rust blog soon with all the details, but you can go to the “How to vision: Shiny future” page now.

• What exactly was the point of [ “x$var” = “xval” ]?

  The x-hack was indeed useful and effective against several real and practical problems in multiple shells.

  However, the value was mostly gone by the mid-to-late 1990s, and the few remaining issues were cleaned up before 2010 — shockingly late, but still over a decade ago.

  The last one managed to stay until 2015, but only in the very specific case of comparing opening parenthesis to a closed parenthesis in one specific non-system shell.

  I think it’s time to retire this idiom, and ShellCheck now offers a style suggestion by default.

• Rakudo Weekly News: 2021.15 First Conf

  Andrew Shitov has announced the very first Raku Conference, to be held online on 7 August 2021. You can sign up if you want to attend, or want to give a presentation. Formats for presentations vary from a 5-minute lightning talk to an 8-hour workshop. The deadline for talk submissions is 15 July 2021. Of course, you can also sponsor this conference in various ways! Exciting to see our first Raku Conference planned like that!

• Perl Weekly Challenge 108: Locate Memory and Bell Numbers

  In languages such as Perl and C, it is a fairly common task to take a reference or a pointer to a variable, and a reference or a pointer are essentially the memory addresses of such a variable (for some definition of memory address). In Raku, using the memory address of a variable is almost never necessary (except possibly for low-level debugging purpose). Actually, I originally wasn’t even completely sure I was going to find a way of doing that in Raku. However, the Metaobject Protocol (MOP) offers some metamethods, which are introspective macros that provide information about objects (including variables). One such metamethod is WHERE, which returns an Int representing the memory address of the object.

• Logica: organizing your data queries, making them universally reusable and fun

  We present Logica, a novel open source Logic Programming language. A successor to Yedalog (a language developed at Google earlier) it is a Datalog-like logic programming language. Logica code compiles to SQL and runs on Google BigQuery (with experimental support for PostgreSQL and SQLite), but it is much more concise and supports the clean and reusable abstraction mechanisms that SQL lacks. It supports modules and imports, it can be used from an interactive Python notebook and it even makes testing your queries natural and easy.

• Google Talks Up Logica As Open-Source Programming Language For Data Manipulation - Phoronix

  Google engineers are responsible for a number of programming languages like Go and Dart while their newest one to be made public is Logica. Logica is the successor to Yedalog, another language out of Google. Logica compiles to SQL and can run on Google BigQuery with experimental support for PostgreSQL and SQLite databases.

• Make Conway's Game of Life in WebAssembly | Opensource.com

  Conway's Game of Life is a popular programming exercise to create a cellular automaton, a system that consists of an infinite grid of cells. You don't play the game in the traditional sense; in fact, it is sometimes referred to as a game for zero players. Once you start the Game of Life, the game plays itself to multiply and sustain "life." In the game, digital cells representing lifeforms are allowed to change states as defined by a set of rules. When the rules are applied to cells through multiple iterations, they exhibit complex behavior and interesting patterns.

• 12 Backend Development Tools For Web Developers

  While Frontend Web Development is concerned with the designing of the user interface of the website using web technologies like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. – Backend Web Development (or you can say Server-Side Development) is responsible for the appropriate functioning of the website.

• Eclipse Foundation aims open VS Code registry at Microsoft

  VS Code)extension users and providers argue that the industry needs a fully open source marketplace for the extensions. That's because Microsoft forbids the use of its marketplace for non-Microsoft-branded products, as noted in the marketplace user agreement, which reads: "Marketplace Offerings are intended for use only with Visual Studio Products and Services and you may only install and use Marketplace Offerings with Visual Studio Products and Services."

• 5 dead programming languages we should never forget [Ed: Many programming languages that Chris Tozzi called "dead" are not dead at all! Is he trying to bury things alive?]

  Just as some spoken languages have faded into history, programming languages also face the risk of obsolescence and extinction. Though their profound influence on development techniques and coding styles certainly still resonates, languages like ALGOL and LISP don't enjoy nearly as much prominence and acclaim as they once did. It's only natural that some of the languages we use today will follow the same path. In no way does that mean these languages will disappear entirely. There will be plenty of legacy codebases written in these prophetically dead programming languages, and a need for developers with the know-how to understand and maintain them. Just look at legacy languages like COBOL, which still sits at the heart of countless enterprise software systems (including Fortune 500 companies). [...] Perl was conceived in the 1980s as a scripting language designed for Unix system administration tasks, and subsequently gained popularity as a general-purpose programming language. Despite its age, the language hovers in 19th place on the TIOBE index, as it remains important in areas like data science and analytics. However, Perl commands much less mindshare now than it did a decade ago. The release of Raku in 2019 -- a Perl spinoff designed by the language's creator, Larry Wall -- profoundly undercut community enthusiasm for Perl. Plans for future version releases counter the argument that Perl is already a dead programming language, but it is quickly turning into one that may find itself confined to legacy codebases.

• 11 Open Source DevOps Tools We Love For 2021

  DevOps isn’t just a cultural shift — it requires great tools to come to fruition. Below, we’ve pulled together a list of some of the most well-loved DevOps tools available today. But, throwing loads of money into fancy SaaS solutions can quickly gobble up the cloud budget. These DevOps tools all are open source, and enable everything from container builds and orchestration to microservices networking, configuration management, CI/CD automation, full-stack monitoring and more. Here are some of our favorite open source DevOps tools for 2021.

• Excellent Free Tutorials to Learn Haml - LinuxLinks

  Haml (HTML Abstraction Markup Language) is a markup language that’s used to cleanly and simply describe the HTML of any web document, without the use of inline code.

• Steinar H. Gunderson: plocate 1.1.6 released

  I've released version 1.1.6 of plocate with some minor fixes; changelog follows.

• Tools and Practices I Use In Every Real-World Software Project

  There are very few books written for junior-to-mid level developers that answer the question “How do I run a real-world software project?”. Industry best practices often arise as the result of cross-pollination and institutional/tacit knowledge rather than explicitly prescribed rules that you can read about in a book.

  For developers working alone or in small organizations such as startups, these norms may not be obvious. Knowing which tools one needs to deploy a production-scale application is crucial knowledge.

  In 2019 I published the article “Software Tools for Hobby-Scale Projects.” It is still one of my most popular blog entries. This post will explore the same idea within a professional context and hopefully help new or solo developers get guidance on tools and practices for new projects at small to mid-scale organizations.

  Objective: Provide a list of tools and practices that apply to a majority of real-world software projects.

  Intended audience: Developers familiar with software authorship wishing to learn about real-world software deployments and practices.

• The Sacred “Back” Button

  Younger readers will find it hard to conceive of a time in which every application screen didn’t have a way to “Go Back”. This universal affordance was there, a new thing, in the first Web browser that anyone saw, and pretty soon after that, more or less everything had it. It’s a crucial part of the user experience and, unfortunately, a lot of popular software is doing it imperfectly. Let’s demand perfection.

  Why it matters · Nobody anywhere is smart enough to build an application that won’t, in some situations, confuse its users. The Back option removes fear and makes people more willing to explore features, because they know they can always back out. It was one of the reasons why the nascent browsers were so much better than the Visual Basic, X11, and character-based interface dinosaurs that then stomped the earth.

  Thus I was delighted, at the advent of Android, that the early phones had physical “back” buttons.

• An easy to use MTP implementation for your next embedded Linux project

  Did you know you could run a permissively-licensed MTP implementation with minimal dependencies on an embedded device? Here's a step-by-step guide on how to easily run cmtp-responder on a Rock Pi 4 or any other board equipped with a UDC. To recap: In part1 of this series I introduced you to the concept of USB gadgets, their configfs composition interface, available opensource tools and basic systemd integration. In part2 I wrote about one particular USB gadget function - FunctionFS - and its integration with systemd. Then I presented cmtp-responder, a permisively-licensed MTP responder implementation and showed how to play with it on your PC with dummy_hcd driver. It is in this latter post that I promised you running cmtp-responder on real hardware. You can also watch me talking about USB gadgets at ELC 2019 and Linux Piter 2019.

• Gradle Release Notes

  This release enables file system watching by default to make your incremental builds faster, expands support for building projects with Java 16, and adds support for building on Macs using Apple Silicon processors (such as M1).

• Gradle 7.0 released

  The latest release of the Gradle build tool is now available. Gradle 7.0 enables file system watching by default to make incremental builds faster and expands support for building projects with Java 16 as well as Apple Silicon support. When the file system is enabled in the new version, Gradle keeps what it learned from the file system in memory and skips reading from the file system on each build, reducing the amount of disk I/O needed to determine what has changed, the team explained. The release also introduces a feature preview for centralized dependency versions and it enables build validation errors to make builds more reliable.