Mozilla: Diversity & Inclusion in Open Source, VR, Phabricator, Rust and WebRender

• Call for Feedback! Draft of Goal-Metrics for Diversity & Inclusion in Open Source (CHAOSS)

  In the last few months, Mozilla has invested in collaboration with other open source project leaders and academics who care about improving diversity & inclusion in Open Source through the CHAOSS D&I working group. Contributors so far include: Alexander Serebrenik (Eindhoven University of Technology) , Akshita Gupta (Outreachy), Amy Marrich (OpenStack), Anita Sarma (Oregon State University), Bhagashree Uday (Fedora), Daniel Izquierdo (Bitergia), Emma Irwin (Mozilla), Georg Link (University of Nebraska at Omaha), Gina Helfrich (NumFOCUS), Nicole Huesman (Intel) and Sean Goggins ((University of Missouri).

• Introducing A-Terrain - a cartography component for A-Frame

  Have you ever wanted to make a small web app to share your favorite places with your friends? For example your favorite photographs attached to a hike, or just a view of your favorite peak, or your favorite places downtown, or a suggested itinerary for friends visiting?

• Setting up Arcanist for Mozilla development on Windows

• Taming Phabricator

  So Mozilla is going all-in on Phabricator and Differential as a code review tool. I have mixed feelings on this, not least because it’s support for patch series is more manual than I’d like. But since this is the choice Mozilla has made I might as well start to get used to it. One of the first things you see when you log into Phabricator is a default view full of information.

• This Week in Rust 239

  This week's crate is SIMDNoise, a crate to use modern CPU vector instructions to generate various types of noise really fast. Thanks to gregwtmtno for the suggestion!

• WebRender newsletter #20

Canonical: GNOME Software, Buzzwords, Ubuntu Server, Themes and Zenkit

• Report from the GNOME Software design sprint

  A couple of weeks ago representatives from across Canonical met in London to talk about ideas to improve the user experience of GNOME Software. We had people from the store team, snap advocacy, snapd, design and from the desktop team. We were also fortunate enough to be joined by Richard Hughes representing upstream GNOME Software.

• Emerging Trends in Financial Services: IoT, AI and Blockchain

  The answer has its roots at both an infrastructure level, where legacy technology is being replaced with something more akin to what is seen in challengers banks or in technology leaders from Silicon Valley, and in changing mentalities, where a new mindset can be just as important as the technology that’s adopted. Of course, to say that this is simply a technological problem is naive, often, technology implementation is the easy part, with the larger challenge coming with organisational acceptance of the need to change. Often, the case is that an organisation isn’t culturally ready for change, resulting in projects that fail and negatively impact the ability to evolve with an increasingly tumultuous market that is being impacted by regulatory changes and a technology revolution. Mark Baker, Field Product Manager at Canonical, said: “We tend to find that the technology is the easy part once we’ve got the business aligned around a common goal with common sets of objectives and accepting of the change.” However, once an organisation is culturally aligned around a common goal and is accepting of technological change, then it is possible to work with a technology partner like Canonical in order to deploying the technology simple.

• Ubuntu Server development summary – 19 June 2018

  The purpose of this communication is to provide a status update and highlights for any interesting subjects from the Ubuntu Server Team.

• Simple Dark/Light GTK/Gnome Shell Theme for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver)

  There are many dark themes for GTK with a simple and good color scheme. But, I have been looking for a simple dark theme especially for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver). I tried many Dark themes on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and my mind was set on Qogir Dark theme. The simple design and the comfort of the dark colors scheme is quite amazing and gives a relief looking for the desktop environment. Qogir comes with a Dark and Light Theme for GTK 2.0 / GTK 3.0 and Gnome Shell. The Dark or the Light theme integration with the default installed applications such as Nautilus file manager, LibreOffice and Mozilla Firefox are quite good.

• Zenkit: The influence of developer communities in progressing snaps

  Last month, Zenkit published their project management tool as a snap. For those not familiar with Zenkit, they introduced themselves in a guest blog at the time the snap was published which can be read here. Since then, we caught up with Philipp Beck, Full Stack Developer at Zenkit, to discover his opinion on snaps and the publishing experience. Philipp was introduced to snaps via a developer friend of his and could immediately appreciate the potential benefits for Zenkit to pursue and the advantages it would offer their users. For the former, Philipp comments: “The biggest draw for us was the ease at which we could reach a diverse range of Linux users, without having to specifically package Zenkit for each distribution. There are obvious benefits here in terms of time saved in updating multiple Linux packages too.”

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Updated

• Tumbleweed Delivers New Kernel, Applications, Plasma, libvirt

  The past week brought a total of three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots and a bunch of new features and improvements for KDE users. Snapshot 20180618 updated just a few packages to include an updated GNU Compiler Collection 7, which fixes support for 32-bit AddressSanitizer with glibc 2.27+. Both perl-File-ShareDir and python-numpy were the other two packages that gave users minor fixes. The snapshots earlier in the week were more KDE centric. Snapshot 20180615 delivered KDE Applications 18.04.2. The updated applications focused on bugfixes, improvements and translations for Dolphin, Gwenview, KGpg, Kig, Konsole, Lokalize, Okular and many more. KGpg no longer fails to decrypt messages without a version header and image with Gwenview can now be redone after undoing them. The Linux Kernel jumped from 4.16.12 to 4.17.1 and fixed some btrfs and KVM issues. The newer kernel also ported an arm fix for HDMI output routing and fixed an atomic sequence handling with spi-nor and intel-spi. The hwinfo package tried a more aggressive way to catch all usb platform controllers with the 21.55 version. Libvirt 4.4.0 added support for migration of Virtual Machines with non-shared storage over Thread-Local Storage (TLS) and introduced a new virDomainDetachDevice Alias. Lenovo, HP and Dell tablets gaining greater support with the updated libwacom 0.30 package. Add support for PostgreSQL-style UPSERT were made available with sqlite3 3.24.0. Other tools like mercurial 4.6.1, snapper 0.5.5 were also updated in the snapshot.

• OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Jumps On Linux 4.17, KDE Plasma 5.13 Riding Well

  For users of openSUSE's Tumbleweed rolling-release Linux distribution, it's been a very busy month on the update front. Last week openSUSE Tumbleweed already upgraded to the phenomenal KDE Plasma 5.13 release as its default desktop along with KDE Applications 18.04.2.

CentOS Atomic Host 7.5 Released for Those Who Want to Run Linux Containers

Coming about a month after the release of the CentOS Linux 7.5 (1804) operating system for 64-bit (x86_64), 32-bit (i386), ARM64 (AArch64), PowerPC 64-bit (ppc64), PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian (ppc64le), and ARM-hfp (armhfp) compatible machines, CentOS Atomic Host 7.5 (7.1805) is now available to download. CentOS Atomic Host 7.5 (7.1805) is built from standard CentOS Linux 7 RPMs and the upstream packages included in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host 7.5 operating system. CentOS Linux is a free and open-source computer operating system for desktops and servers that's always based on the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases.