Automating backups on a Raspberry Pi NAS

In the first part of this three-part series using a Raspberry Pi for network-attached storage (NAS), we covered the fundamentals of the NAS setup, attached two 1TB hard drives (one for data and one for backups), and mounted the data drive on a remote device via the network filesystem (NFS). In part two, we will look at automating backups. Automated backups allow you to continually secure your data and recover from a hardware defect or accidental file removal.

5 open source strategy and simulation games for Linux

Gaming has traditionally been one of Linux's weak points. That has changed somewhat in recent years thanks to Steam, GOG, and other efforts to bring commercial games to multiple operating systems, but those games are often not open source. Sure, the games can be played on an open source operating system, but that is not good enough for an open source purist. So, can someone who only uses free and open source software find games that are polished enough to present a solid gaming experience without compromising their open source ideals? Absolutely. While open source games are unlikely ever to rival some of the AAA commercial games developed with massive budgets, there are plenty of open source games, in many genres, that are fun to play and can be installed from the repositories of most major Linux distributions. Even if a particular game is not packaged for a particular distribution, it is usually easy to download the game from the project's website to install and play it.

Software: Virtlyst 1.2.0, Blender 2.8 Plan, Dropbox Gets Worse and DaVinci Resolve 15 Targets GNU/Linux

• Virtlyst 1.2.0 released

  Virtlyst – a Web Interface to manage virtual machines build with Cutelyst/Qt/C++ got a new release. This new release includes a bunch of bug fixes, most importantly probably being the ability to warn user before doing important actions to help avoid doing mistakes. Most commits came from new contributor René Linder who is also working on a Bootstrap 4 theme and Lukas Steiner created a dockerfile for it. This is especially cool because Virtlyst repository now has 4 authors while Cutelyst which is way older has only 6.

• Blender 2.8 Planning Update

  At this point we will not have a feature complete Beta release ready in August as we had hoped. Instead, we invested most of our time improving the features that were already there and catching up with the bug tracker. This includes making the viewport and EEVEE work on more graphics cards and platforms. The Spring open movie team is also using Blender 2.8 in production, which is helping us ensure the new dependency graph and tools can handle complex production scenes.

• Blender 2.80 Now Coming In Early 2019 With Many Improvements

  The Blender 3D modeling software is facing a slight set-back in their release schedule for the big Blender 2.80 release, but it's moving along and they intend to have it ready by early next year.

• Dropbox will only Support the Ext4 File System In Linux in November

  Dropbox has announced that starting on November 7th 2018, only the ext4 file system will be supported in Linux for synchronizing folders in the Dropbox desktop app. Those Linux users who have synch on other file systems such as XFS, ext2, ext3, ZFS, and many others will no longer have working Dropbox synchronization after this date. This news came out after Linux dropbox users began seeing notifications stating "Dropbox Will Stop Syncing Ext4 File Systems in November." You can see an example of this alert in Swedish below.

• Dropbox scares users by shrinking synching options

  Dropbox has quietly announced it will soon stop synching files that reside on drives tended by some filesystems. The sync ‘n’ share service’s desktop client has recently produced warnings that the software will stop syncing in November 2018. Those warnings were sufficiently ambiguous that Dropbox took to its support forums to explain exactly what’s going on, namely that as of November 7th, 2018, “we’re ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems.”

• DaVinci Resolve 15 Video/Effects Editor Released With Linux Support

  DaVinci Resolve 15 has been released by Blackmagic Design as the company's professional-grade video editing, visual effects, motion graphics, and audio post-production software.

How to display data in a human-friendly way on Linux

Not everyone thinks in binary or wants to mentally insert commas into large numbers to come to grips with the sizes of their files. So, it's not surprising that Linux commands have evolved over several decades to incorporate more human-friendly ways of displaying information to its users. In today’s post, we look at some of the options provided by various commands that make digesting data just a little easier.