today's howtos

• How to properly restore the Manjaro GRUB bootloader on UEFI systems ?

• Enabling CI/CD for Red Hat Decision Manager on OpenShift

• How to build cloud-native CI/CD pipelines with Tekton on Kubernetes

• How to set up automatic updates for Ubuntu Linux 18.04

• What is Phase Change Memory?

Programming, OSS and GNU

• How to Split a String in Python

• The 10 Best Software Engineering Books in 2019

  I’ll probably never forget my first day as a software engineer. Back in 2015, I got hired as a software engineer for a consulting company, in Luxembourg. I did not have much experience, but I was ready to tackle every single project I was assigned to.

• GCC 10 Lands OpenRISC Support For Floating Point Instructions

  When it comes to open-source processor ISAs, RISC-V currently captures much of the spotlight but OpenRISC continues chugging along as another open-source CPU architecture. The OpenRISC GCC compiler back-end and other software tooling also continues to move along for this architecture that's been in the works since 2000. The OpenRISC back-end/target landed just at the end of 2018 for the current GCC 9 stable series. This OpenRISC "or1k" support continues maturing. It took so long for the OpenRISC support to land into GCC as the original developers of the compiler support wouldn't agree to their copyright assignment to the Free Software Foundation for getting the code merged. As a result, a clean-room rewrite of the GCC OpenRISC code was needed before it could be accepted into GCC.

• Matthias Clasen: Westcoast hackfest; GTK updates

  old widget. It started out as a port of the tk text widget, and it has not seen a lot of architectural updates over the years. A few years ago, we added a pixel cache to it, to improve its scrolling, but on a high resolution display, its still a lot of pixels to shovel around. As we’ve moved widgets to GTK4’s rendering models, everybody avoided GtkTextView, so it was using the fallback cairo rendering path, even as we ported other text rendering in GTK to a new pango renderer which produces render nodes. Until yesterday. We decided to just have a look at how hard it would be to switch the text view over to the new pango renderer. This went much more smoothly than we expected, and the new code is in master today.

• GTK4 Gets Smoother GPU-Accelerated Scrolling, Modern Cursor Blinking

  GNOME developers continue to be hard at work on GTK4 and trying to ensure this major tool-kit update will be a great success. Happening the past few days in Portland, Oregon was the "GTK West Coast Hackfest" where Matthias Clasen, Christian Hergert, and other GNOME developers took towards figuring out effectively last minute work for GTK 4.0.

• GNU Hyperbole 7.0.3 is the latest release

  Hyperbole is an amazing hypertextual information management system 
  that installs quickly and easily as an Emacs package.  It is part of 
  GNU Elpa, the Emacs Lisp Package Archive. 
  Hyperbole interlinks all your working information within Emacs for 
  fast access and editing, not just within special modes.  An hour 
  invested exploring Hyperbole's built-in interactive DEMO file will 
  save you hundreds of hours in your future work. 
  
  

• Sylvain Beucler: Planet clean-up

  Re-sync Debian base config, scripts and packaging, update documentation; the planet-venus package is still in bad shape though, it's not officially orphaned but the maintainer is unreachable AFAICS Fetch all Savannah feeds using https

• Takeaways from PX4 Open-Source Drone Developer Conference

  Last month at ETH Zurich, Auterion sponsored the first-ever PX4 developer conference for those interested in the open-source-based operating system for enterprise drones. The event, held June 20-21, included 200 attendees from the open-source community, including developers, researchers, and technical thought leaders in the unmanned systems space. Here are three takeaway messages from the conference – for those interested in learning more about PX4 and ROS (the largest open-source drone and robotics communities), you can view all of the presentations on PX4’s YouTube channel.

• Synchronize bookmarks: Syncmarx is now Open Source

• SuperFreezZ is an open source alternative to Greenify that kills apps running in the background

  Task managers are widely viewed as unnecessary on Android smartphones. Most of us may agree with that view, but the reality is there are still a lot of misbehaving Android apps out there, most task “killers” don’t actually do anything useful besides clearing the recent apps view (which doesn’t really “kill” apps anyway), and a lot of users have yet to upgrade to newer Android versions that have implemented more restrictions on background apps. That’s why, to this very day, apps like Greenify and Brevent remain incredibly popular. Many users swear by both Greenify and Brevent, but since they’re closed source, some users are wary of them. If you’re looking for an open source alternative, check out SuperFreezZ by XDA Junior Member hcur.

Proprietary Spyware From Microsoft and Dropbox Targets GNU/Linux

• Microsoft Teams client for Linux 0.4 Released with Stability Fixes

  Teams for Linux is an unofficial Microsoft Teams client for Linux using Electron. It uses the Web App and wraps it as a standalone application using Electron.

• Dropbox Brings Back Support For ZFS, XFS, BTFS And eCryptFS On Linux [Ed: The NSA wants to slurp in all your files, irrespective of what file system you use]

  Dropbox stopped supporting folder syncing to drives with filesystems which it deemed "uncommon", which on Linux meant anything but Ext4, upsetting quite a few users. The reason cited for this was that "a supported file system is required as Dropbox relies on extended attributes (X-attrs) to identify files in the Dropbox folder and keep them in sync", which doesn't really make sense since there are many filesystems that support xattr (extended attributes) on Linux.