today's leftovers

• Linux Unable To Boot Lenovo Yoga 900 & 900; Is Microsoft At Fault?

  The popular device developer Lenovo has verified the claims that Lenovo Yoga 900 and 900s unable to boot Linux OS but only Microsoft Windows 10. The new Lenovo convertible laptop, Lenovo Yoga 900 and 900s, would reject and decline any attempt to install Linux operating system, making users turn their heads to Microsoft as the suspect for this issue. [...] This issue about the OS started when an identity of BaronHK posted on Reddit about installing Linux on the latest Lenovo Yoga book in which BaronHK encountered being blocked by a locked solid state drive (SSD) which Linux cannot define itself, and come up to link the issue to Microsoft.

• How Ubuntu 16.10 Beta 2 Performance Compares To Some Other Linux Distros

  The final Ubuntu 16.10 Beta for "Yakkety Yak" was released this week and we found its performance doesn't differ much from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (with the exception of the newer graphics stack) while here are some results comparing it to other modern Linux distributions. Tested for this quick, one-page-article comparison were Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS, Ubuntu 16.10 Beta 2, Clear Linux 10660, Fedora 24, openSUSE Tumbleweed 20160927, and the Arch-based Antergos 16.9-Rolling release.

• Qt 3D WIP branches

• New Qt 3D Functionality Is Being Worked On

  Sean Harmer of KDAB is organizing work around some upcoming "major Qt 3D features" for the open-source toolkit. It's not known if the next round of Qt 3D features will be ready for the Qt 5.9 tool-kit release, but KDAB is looking to have these new branches for feature work with continuous integration coverage.

• Cross-compiling WebKit2GTK+ for ARM

  Of course, I know for a fact that many people use local recipes to cross-compile WebKit2GTK+ for ARM (or simply build in the target machine, which usually takes a looong time), but those are usually ad-hoc things and hard to reproduce environments locally (or at least hard for me) and, even worse, often bound to downstream projects, so I thought it would be nice to try to have something tested with upstream WebKit2GTK+ and publish it on trac.webkit.org,

• Should we drop Vala?

  Is it Vala development a waste of time? Is Vala suitable for long term support libraries?

• SUSECON 2016: Where Technology Reigns Supreme [Ed: “Article Sponsor: SUSE”]

• openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the Weeks 2016/39

• Free software activities in September 2016

Kernel Space/Linux

• Linux Kernel 4.7.6 Is Out with MIPS and OCFS2 Improvements, Updated Drivers

  Today, September 30, 2016, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of the sixth maintenance update to the latest stable Linux 4.7 kernel series. Linux kernel 4.7.6 comes only five days after the release of the previous maintenance version, Linux kernel 4.7.5, and, according to the appended shortlog and the diff from the last update, it changes a total of 76 files, with 539 insertions and 455 deletions. In summary, it updates multiple drivers, adds improvements to various filesystems and hardware architectures, and improves the networking stack.

• Linux Kernel 4.4.23 LTS Has ARM and MIPS Improvements, Updated Filesystems, More

  Immediately after announcing the release of Linux kernel 4.7.6, Greg Kroah-Hartman proudly informed the community about the general availability of the Linux 4.4.23 LTS kernel. The Linux 4.4 kernel is a long-term supported branch, the latest and most advanced one, used in many stable and reliable GNU/Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Alpine Linux 3.4. Therefore, it is imperative for it to receive regular updates that bring fixes to the most important issues, as well as other general improvements.

• From NFS to LizardFS

  If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll know that we started our data servers out using NFS on ext4 mirrored over DRBD, hit some load problems, switched to btrfs, hit load problems again, tried a hacky workaround, ran into problems, dropped DRBD for glusterfs, had a major disaster, switched back to NFS on ext4 mirrored over DRBD, hit more load problems, and finally dropped DRBD for ZFS.

• IBM's Ginni Rometty Tells Bankers Not To Rest On Their Digital Laurels

• BUS1, The Successor To KDBUS, Formally Unveiled -- Aiming For Mainline Linux Kernel

  BUS1 has been in development as an in-kernel IPC mechanism building off the failed KDBUS project. An "RFC" will soon be sent out to Linux kernel developers about BUS1 and the subject will be discussed at next month's Kernel Summit. David Herrmann, one of the BUS1 developers, presented at this week's systemd.conf conference about the new capability-based IPC for Linux. He talked about how BUS1 is superior to KDBUS, how BUS1 is similar to Android's Binder, Chrome's Mojo, Solaris' Doors, and other common IPC implementations.

• A New Wireless Daemon Is In Development To Potentially Replace wpa_supplicant

  In addition to the BUS1 presentation, also exciting from the systemd.conf 2016 conference is a thorough walkthrough of a new wireless daemon for Linux being developed by Intel's Open-Source Technology Center. Intel has been developing a new wireless daemon for Linux to potentially replace wpa_supplicant. This new daemon isn't yet public but the code repositories for it will be opened up in the next few weeks. This new daemon has improvements around persistency, WiFi management, reduced abstractions for different operating systems and legacy interfaces, and changes to operation. This daemon is designed to be very lightweight and work well for embedded Linux use-cases especially, including IoT applications.

Software and Games

• Blender 2.7.8 Released With Plenty of Improvements.

• Blender 2.78 Released: Works On VR Support, Adds Grease Pencil

  Blender 2.78 is now officially released to end out September for this open-source, cross-platform 3D/animation program. New to Blender 2.78 is spherical stereo rendering support for VR, a grease pencil for full 2D drawing and animations, viewport rendering improvements, freehand curves drawing over surfaces, bendy bones support, alembic support, new physics capabilities, and various new add-ons.

• Cacti vs Nagios vs Pandora FMS, in depth

• A Neat YouTube Subscriber Count Tracker for the Linux Terminal

• A Primer on OVN

  OVN is a virtual networking platform developed by the fine folks over at openvswitch.org. The project has been in the works for nearly two years now and is starting to mature to the point of being production ready. In this posting I’ll walk through the basics of configuring a simple layer-2 overlay network between 3 hosts. But first, a brief overview of how the system functions.

• Calibre 2.69 eBook Manager and Reader Supports Kobo Driver 4.1, Overdrive Books

  Today, September 30, 2016, Calibre developer Kovid Goyal announced the release and immediate availability for download of yet another maintenance update to the popular, free, and open source ebook library management software. Calibre 2.69 is now the latest and most advanced version of the application, and it comes two weeks after the release of Calibre 2.68, bringing support for firmware version 4.1 to the driver for Kobo e-book readers, along with support for Overdrive books on the device.

• [How To] See Which Terminal Commands You Use The Most

• How to install MediaWiki on an Ubuntu 16.04 VPS

• Perform Hot Backups of MySQL Databases with Percona XtraBackup on Ubuntu 16.04

• I think ‘Particle Fleet: Emergence’ just became my new Linux gaming addiction

  I’m a big strategy game fan, I like building stuff and especially destroying stuff. I did a quick check on new Steam releases today and came across ‘Particle Fleet: Emergence’ [Official Site, Steam] and I don’t want to put it down.

• It's Been Three Years Since Valve Announced SteamOS, Steam Machines

  This week marks three years since Valve publicly announced Steam Machines, SteamOS, and the Steam Controller. The Steam Controller seems to be gaining the most traction of these three efforts. This week the Steam Controller is on sale if you are looking at picking it up for just $35 rather than $50. The Steam Controller appears to still be going strong and there have been some indications Valve may be launching a new Steam Controller in the not too distant future.

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