What’s New in Ubuntu Budgie 18.04 LTS

Ubuntu Budgie 18.04 LTS is the latest release of Ubuntu budgie. As part of Ubuntu 18.04 flavor this release ships with latest Budgie desktop 10.4 as default desktop environment. Powered by Linux 4.15 kernel and shipping with the same internals as Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), the Ubuntu Budgie 18.04 LTS official flavor will be supported for 3 years, until April 2021. Prominent new features include support for adding OpenVNC connections through the NetworkManager applet, better font handling for Chinese and Korean languages, improved keyboard shortcuts, color emoji support for GNOME Characters and other GNOME apps, as well as window-shuffler capability. Ubuntu Budgie 18.04 LTS also ships with a new exciting GTK+ theme by default called Pocillo, support for dynamic workspaces, as well as a “minimal installation” option in the graphical installer that lets users install Ubuntu Budgie with only the Chromium web browser and a handful of basic system utilities.

Red Hat: Boston, US Government, OpenShift Route, VirtualBox and More

• BU Spark! teams up with Red Hat, hosts software design workshop

  Students traveled across Boston to its Fort Point neighborhood to attend a BU Spark! workshop about interaction design Friday. There they delved into interaction design and explored how to develop user-friendly software. BU Spark! and Red Hat Inc. hosted the Interaction Design Bootcamp jointly at Red Hat’s Boston office. BU students and Spark! Interaction design fellows attended. Red Hat is a software company that specializes in information technology and has a research relationship with Boston University that includes educational elements. The programs taught by Red Hat focus on user experience design, one of Red Hat’s specializations, according to their website.

• Open source can spark innovative business transformation in government, Red Hat leaders say

  The federal government, largely hamstrung by legacy systems, is in need of a major digital transformation. Open source technology can be the spark that sets off that revolution, leaders from open-source software company Red Hat said Tuesday. “The types of technologies that you choose matter,” said Mike Walker, global director of Open Innovation Labs at Red Hat. “It will influence the way your business operates and open new doors to new business process, and ultimately allow you to become a software company that can achieve some of those innovations and reductions in cost and time.”

• Kubernetes Ingress vs OpenShift Route

  Although pods and services have their own IP addresses on Kubernetes, these IP addresses are only reachable within the Kubernetes cluster and not accessible to the outside clients. The Ingress object in Kubernetes, although still in beta, is designed to signal the Kubernetes platform that a certain service needs to be accessible to the outside world and it contains the configuration needed such as an externally-reachable URL, SSL, and more. Creating an ingress object should not have any effects on its own and requires an ingress controller on the Kubernetes platform in order to fulfill the configurations defined by the ingress object. Here at Red Hat, we saw the need for enabling external access to services before the introduction of ingress objects in Kubernetes, and created a concept called Route for the same purpose (with additional capabilities such as splitting traffic between multiple backends, sticky sessions, etc). Red Hat is one of the top contributors to the Kubernetes community and contributed the design principles behind Routes to the community which heavily influenced the Ingress design.

• VirtualBox DRM/KMS Driver Proceeding With Atomic Mode-Setting Support

  The "vboxvideo" DRM/KMS driver for use by VirtualBox guest virtual machines that has been part of the mainline Linux kernel the past several cycles will soon see atomic mode-setting support. Hans de Goede of Red Hat, who has been stewarding this driver into the Linux kernel after Oracle has failed to do so, is tackling the atomic mode-setting as his latest advancement to this driver important for a VirtualBox desktop VM experience. Published today were initial patches preparing the move to atomic mode-setting but not yet the full migration to this modern display API that offers numerous benefits.

• A Roadblock Ahead? – Red Hat, Inc. (RHT), Ingersoll-Rand Plc (IR)

• Red Hat Shares Have Even Upside-Downside Profile, JPMorgan Says In Downgrade

• Earnings Preview: Red Hat poised to deliver earnings growth for Q2

• J.P. Morgan Securities Slams Red Hat Stock With Downgrade Before Earnings

• Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Moves Lower on Volume Spike for September 18

IBM Looking to Distract From Recent Reports That it Helped Police Racially Profile the Public (by Openwashing)

• IBM launches tool aimed at detecting AI bias

  The Fairness 360 Kit will also scan for signs of bias and recommend adjustments. There is increasing concern that algorithms used by both tech giants and other firms are not always fair in their decision-making.

• IBM launches tools to detect AI fairness, bias and open sources some code

  IBM said it will launch cloud software designed to manage artificial intelligence deployments, detect bias in models and mitigate its impact and monitor decision across multiple frameworks. The move by IBM highlights how AI management is becoming more of an issue as companies deploy machine learning and various models to make decisions. Executives are likely to have trouble understanding models and the data science under the hood.

• IBM Debuts Tools to Help Prevent Bias In Artificial Intelligence

Linux, the Linux Foundation and Graphics

• Linux Patches Surface For Supporting The Creative Sound BlasterX AE-5

  Last year Creative Labs introduced the Sound BlasterX AE-5 PCI Express gaming sound card while finally there are some patches pending for supporting this high-end sound card in Linux. Connor McAdams who most recently got the Creative Recon3D support into good shape on Linux has now been working on getting the Sound BlasterX AE-5 working well on Linux.

• Blockchain Training Takes Off

  Meanwhile, job postings related to blockchain and Hyperledger are taking off, and knowledge in these areas is translating into opportunity. Careers website Glassdoor lists thousands of job posts related to blockchain.

• AMD Picasso Support Comes To The RadeonSI OpenGL Driver

  Last week AMD sent out initial support for yet-to-be-released "Picasso" APUs with the Linux AMDGPU kernel graphics driver. Today on the user-space side the support was merged for the OpenGL RadeonSI Gallium3D driver. Picasso details are still fairly light but they are expected to be similar to Raven Ridge and for the AM4 processor socket as well as an edition for notebooks. On the same day as publishing the Picasso AMDGPU kernel patches, AMD also went ahead and published the Linux patches for the "Raven 2" APUs too.

• The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Arrives For Linux Benchmarking

  It looks like NVIDIA has their launch-day Linux support in order for the GeForce RTX 2080 "Turing" graphics cards slated to ship later this week as arriving today at Phoronix was the RTX 2080 Ti. The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is NVIDIA's new flagship desktop GPU with the Turing GPU architecture, 4352 CUDA cores, a 1635MHz boost clock speed rating for this Founder's Edition model, 11GB of GDDR6 video memory yielding a 616 GB/s memory bandwidth rating, and designed to suit real-time ray-tracing workloads with their RTX technology. Pricing on the RTX 2080 Ti Founder's Edition is $1,199 USD. Last week NVIDIA published more details on the Turing architecture for those interested as well as on the new mesh shader capability.