• Wine Announcement

  The Wine development release 1.9.20 is now available.

• Wine 1.9.20 Has New Clipboard API Reimplementation

  -
  Wine 1.9.20 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release of this cross-platform program to run Windows programs/games on other operating systems.

• Immunity of the European Patent Office and Lack of Oversight Within the Organisation Mean That It’s a Rogue Entity Above the Law
• Benoît Battistelli and Team UPC Are at War With European Democracy, Which They View as an Obstacle to Money and Power
• Links 1/10/2016: Linux 4.7.6 and 4.4.23, Blender 2.78

• Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac: the channel comparison

  Linux is open source meaning you can customise and modify the code any which way you like. This flexibility has made the system hugely popular amongst the developer community. This is not the same in Windows and Mac. Neither the Windows and Mac programmes nor the operating systems are open source.

  So there we have it, three entirely different operating systems offering unique experiences that can meet the differing demands of the modern user, whilst offering unique opportunities throughout the channel. So the real question now is, are you a Mac Linux or Windows user?

• How to install and run Dropbox from a headless Linux server

• Red Hat Inc. (NYSE:RHT) Receives $88.33 Consensus Target Price from Brokerages

• Pay Close Attention To These Analyst Ratings Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT), Oracle Corp. (NYSE:ORCL)

• Mintbox Mini Pro: A Cheap Linux Machine With Compelling Specs

  The Mintbox Mini has been received a major hardware upgrade and it is now called Mintbox Mini Pro. The Linux machine comes at a price of $395 and features an all-metal casing which eliminates the need for a cooling fan. Significant bumps having been given to the storage, RAM, processor, wireless, and other hardware components.

• Android Circuit: Note 7 Nightmare Haunts Samsung, Goodbye Faithful BlackBerry, New Galaxy S8 Leaks

• Google is finally kicking out unsupported cards from Android Pay in mid-October, causing people to freak out

• Yahoo open-sources machine learning porn filter

  Yahoo is the latest tech company to open source its computer vision code. The beleaguered outfit's application for it? Filtering porn. Yahoo hopes that its convolutional neural net (CNN) will empower others to better guard innocent eyes, but admits that because of the tech's very nature (and how the definition of "porn" can vary wildly), that the CNN isn't perfect.

  "This model is a general purpose reference model, which can be used for the preliminary filtering of pornographic images," a post on the Yahoo Engineering Tumblr says. "We do not provide guarantees of accuracy of output, rather, we make this available for developers to explore and enhance as an open source project." The code is available on Github at the moment, and if you need any testing material, well, there isn't exactly a shortage of it on Tumblr. Just ask Indonesia.

• Top Microsoft Open Source Projects You Must Know [Ed: when this site isn’t just plagiarising legit news sites it actually engages in Microsoft openwashing and promotion]

• A $5 Linux server, open source software in China, and more news

• The Linux Foundation Announces Session Lineup for ApacheCon(TM) Europe

• OpenShift Commons Gathering event preview

  We're just two months out from the OpenShift Commons Gathering coming up on November 7, 2016 in Seattle, Washington, co-located with KubeCon and CloudNativeCon.

  OpenShift Origin is a distribution of Kubernetes optimized for continuous application development and multi-tenant deployment. Origin adds developer and operations-centric tools on top of Kubernetes to enable rapid application development, easy deployment and scaling, and long-term lifecycle maintenance for small and large teams. And we're excited to say, the 1.3 GA release of OpenShift Origin, which includes Kubernetes 1.3, is out the door! Hear more about the release from Lead Architect for OpenShift Origin, Clayton Coleman.

• Report: Linux security must be upgraded to protect future tech

  The summit was used to expose a number of flaws in Linux's design that make it increasingly unsuitable to power modern devices. Linux is the operating system that runs most of the modern world. It is behind everything from web servers and supercomputers to mobile phones. Increasingly, it's also being used to run connected Internet of Things (IoT) devices, including products like cars and intelligent robots.

• security things in Linux v4.6

  Hector Marco-Gisbert removed a long-standing limitation to mmap ASLR on 32-bit x86, where setting an unlimited stack (e.g. “ulimit -s unlimited“) would turn off mmap ASLR (which provided a way to bypass ASLR when executing setuid processes). Given that ASLR entropy can now be controlled directly (see the v4.5 post), and that the cases where this created an actual problem are very rare, means that if a system sees collisions between unlimited stack and mmap ASLR, they can just adjust the 32-bit ASLR entropy instead.

• Raspberry Pi launches new PIXEL desktop environment

• Raspberry Pi Launches New PIXEL User Interface For Desktops

• Raspberry Pi Adds Beautiful "Pixel" Desktop Environment To Raspbian Linux Distro

• Meet Pixel, a gorgeous, much-needed visual overhaul for Raspberry Pi's main distro

• Raspberry Pi's most popular operating system gets a visual overhaul

• The New Raspberry Pi OS Is Here, And It Looks Great

• Raspberry Pi gets its own official desktop environment: PIXEL

• 50 Great Raspberry Pi Projects In Latest Mag Pi Magazine

• Raspberry Pi gets VNC remote access bundle with Raspbian

• Raspbian PIXEL offers major UX overhaul for Raspberry Pi owners

• Raspberry Pi Pixel: Desktop Operating System Environment Built on Debian

• Raspberry Pi Gets 'More Visually Appealing' Pixel Desktop OS

• Raspberry Pi operating system gets a visual upgrade with the launch of PIXEL

• Trainline creates open source platform to help developers deploy apps and environments in AWS

  The Trainline, the independent rail ticket retailer, has created an open sourced standardised way for its developers to deploy and manage individual applications and environments in Amazon Web Services' public cloud.

  The company has 150 staff in its development area, who focus on improving user experience, and in order to ensure that its underlying infrastructure wasn't a constraint on time to market, the firm recently migrated all of its development, staging, UAT and production environments from a legacy private data centre to Amazon's public cloud.

• Trainline creates open source platform to let developers test apps in AWS

• 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

• 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.

• 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.

• Red Hat, Logicalis in digital transformation partnership in Latin America

  PromonLogicalis, a provider of information technology and communication solutions and services in Latin America, and Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, announced a collaboration that aim to help organizations navigate the digital transformation of their infrastructures to pave the way for cloud and the software-defined technologies, and to advance open source technology awareness in the region.

  Open source is delivering significant advancements in many areas of technology through community-powered innovation, including cloud computing, mobile, big data, and more. And, as companies embrace modern technology as a competitive advantage via digital transformation efforts, many are turning to open source because of the flexibility and agility it can enable.

• Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Downgraded by Zacks Investment Research to “Hold”

• An Easy Way To Try Intel & RADV Vulkan Drivers On Fedora 24

  Fedora 25 should have good support for the open-source Vulkan Linux drivers (particularly if it lands the next Mesa release) while Fedora 24 users can now more easily play with the latest Mesa Git RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers via a new repository.

  A Phoronix reader has setup a Fedora Copr repository that is building Intel's Vulkan driver from Mesa Git plus the RADV Radeon Vulkan driver re-based from its source (David Airlie's semi-interesting GitHub branch). Fedora COPR, for the uninformed, is the distribution's equivalent to Ubuntu PPA repositories.

• Meeting users, lots of users

  Every year, I introduce Fedora to new students at Brno Technical University. There are approx. 500 of them and a sizable amount of them then installs Fedora. We also organize a sort of installfest one week after the presentation where anyone who has had any difficulties with Fedora can come and ask for help. It’s a great opportunity to observe what things new users struggle with the most. Especially when you have such a high number of new users. What are my observations this year?

• 96Boards SBCs host Intel Joule and Curie IoT modules

  Gumstix announced two SBCs this week, based on Intel Joule and Curie IoT modules and built to 96Boards CE and IE form-factor specifications, respectively.

  At Linaro Connect Las Vegas 2016, where earlier this week Linaro’s 96Boards.org announced a new 96Boards IoT Edition (IE) spec, Gumstix announced support for 96Boards.org’s open SBC standards with two new single-board computers. Both SBCs will be available for purchase in October.

• ORWL — First Open Source And Physically Secure PC, Runs Linux And Windows

  ORWL is the first open source, physically secure computer. Using a secure microcontroller (MCU) and an ‘active clamshell mesh’, the device makes sure that nobody breaks the security of the system. Its maker, Design Shift, has also launched a crowdfunding campaign on Crowd Supply.

• Purism Is Still Hoping To Build A GNU/Linux Free Software Librem Smartphone

  Purism, the startup behind the Librem laptops with a focus on free software and user privacy/freedom, still has their minds set on coming up with a GNU/Linux smartphone.

  Purism continues selling their high-priced laptops and their Librem 11 is forthcoming as an Intel-based tablet/convertible device with stocking station. Next on their horizon they want to produce "the ideal no-carrier, Free Software phone running a bona fide GNU+Linux stack."

• Asterisk 14 Improves Open-Source VoIP

  Digium, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Asterisk open source PBX project announced the release Asterisk 14 this week, continuing to evolve the decade old effort, making it easier to use and deploy.

• Yahoo open-sources a deep learning model for classifying pornographic images

  Yahoo today announced its latest open-source release: a model that can figure out if images are specifically pornographic in nature.

  The system uses a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning, which involves training artificial neural networks on lots of data (like dirty images) and getting them to make inferences about new data. The model that’s now available on GitHub under a BSD 2-Clause license comes pre-trained, so users only have to fine-tune it if they so choose. The model works with the widely used Caffe open source deep learning framework. The team trained the model using its now open source CaffeOnSpark system.

  The new model could be interesting to look at for developers maintaining applications like Instagram and Pinterest that are keen to minimize smut. Search engine operators like Google and Microsoft might also want to check out what’s under the hood here.

  “To the best of our knowledge, there is no open source model or algorithm for identifying NSFW images,” Yahoo research engineer Jay Mahadeokar and senior director of product management Gerry Pesavento wrote in a blog post.

• Cloudera, Hortonworks, and Uber to Keynote at Apache Big Data and ApacheCon Europe

• Vendors Pile on Big Data News at Strata

  Cloudera, Pentaho and Alation are among vendors making Big Data announcements at this week's Strata event.

  Vendors big and small are making news at this week's Strata + Hadoop event as they try to expand their portion of the Big Data market.

  Cloudera highlighted a trio of Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects to which it contributes. Among them is Spark 2.0, which benefits from a new Dataset API that offers the promise of better usability and performance as well as new machine learning libraries.

• New alliances focus on open-source, data science empowerment

  How can data science make a true market impact? Partnerships, particularly amongst open source communities. As IBM solidifies its enterprise strategies around data demands, two new partnerships emerge: one with Continuum Analytics, Inc., advancing open-source analytics for the enterprise; and another with Galvanize, initiating a Data Science for Executives program.

  Continuum Analytics, the creator and driving force behind Anaconda — a leading open data science platform powered by Python — has allied with IBM to advance open-source analytics for the enterprise. Data scientists and data engineers in open-source communities can now embrace Python and R to develop analytic and machine learning models in the Spark environment through its integration with IBM’s DataWorks Project.

  The new agreement between IBM and Galvanize, which provides a dynamic learning community for technology, will offer an assessment, analysis and training element for Galvanize’s Data Science for Executives program. This program empowers corporations to better understand, use and maximize the value of their data. The program will support IBM’s DataFirst Method, a methodology that IBM says provides the strategy, expertise and game plan to help ensure enterprise customers’ succeed on their journey to become a data-driven business.

• Apache Spot: open source big data analytics for cyber

• Chinese open source blockchain startup Antshares raises $4.5M through crowdsourcing [Ed: Microsoft-connected]

• August and September 2016: photos from Pittsburgh and Fresno

• Libre Learn Lab: a summit on freely licensed resources for education

  Libre Learn Lab is a two-day summit for people who create, use and implement freely licensed resources for K-12 education, bringing together educators, policy experts, software developers, hardware hackers, and activists to share best practices and address the challenges of widespread adoption of these resources in education. The 2nd biennial conference is Saturday, October 8th, and Sunday, October 9th, at the MIT Tang Center.

  The keynote addresses will be delivered by the FSF’s own Richard M. Stallman, former Chief Open Education Advisor Andrew Marcinek and founder of HacKIDemia Stefania Druga. At the event, there will be a special tribute to Dr. Seymour Papert (the father of educational computing) by Dr. Cynthia Solomon.

• Friday's security advisories

• ICANN grinds forward on crucial DNS root zone signing key update

  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers is moving -- carefully -- to upgrade the DNS root zone key by which all domains can be authenticated under the DNS Security Extensions protocol.

  ICANN is the organization responsible for managing the Domain Name System, and DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) authenticates DNS responses, preventing man-in-the-middle attacks in which the attacker hijacks legitimate domain resolution requests and replaces them with fraudulent domain addresses.

  DNSSEC still relies on the original DNS root zone key generated in 2010. That 1024-bit RSA key is scheduled to be replaced with a 2048-bit RSA key next October. Although experts are split over the effectiveness of DNSSEC, the update of the current root zone key signing key (KSK) is long overdue.

• Cybersecurity isn't an IT problem, it's a business problem

  The emergence of the CISO is a relatively recent phenomenon at many companies. Their success often relies upon educating the business from the ground up. In the process, companies become a lot better about how to handle security and certainly learn how not to handle it.

  As a CIO, knowing the pulse of security is critical. I oversee a monthly technology steering committee that all the executives attend. The CISO reports during this meeting on the state of the security program. He also does an excellent job of putting risk metrics out there, color coded by red, yellow, and green. This kind of color grading allows us to focus attention on where we are and what we’re doing about it.

• Dig into DNS: Part 4

• How to Install Nagios Server Monitoring on Ubuntu 16.04

• What is if __name__ == ‘__main__’ ?

• ScreenFetch – Fetch Linux System Information on Terminal with Distribution ASCII art logo

• Blessed are the diffs: for they shall inherit the earth

• Weechat-Tmux

• Best Android Phone Under $700

  The Galaxy S7 is the best version of Samsung's flagship yet. It's equipped with a powerful Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 3,000mAh battery pack. Its 12-megapixel rear-facing Dual Pixel camera is particularly impressive, and you'll appreciate its performance in low light.

  Of course, as is the case with most versions of Android that aren't directly developed by Google, Samsung's version of Android is polarizing. The newly dubbed Grace UI offers some helpful features, but the extra software that comes bundled is redundant. At the very least, you can disable and hide any apps you don't care for.

• Best Android Phones with Expandable Memory

  The Galaxy S7 edge is the total package. The phone features a stunning metal-and-glass exterior backed by an excellent 5.5-inch display. The dual curved display is easily one of the best you'll find on a phone, and differentiates the S7 edge from the pack. The handset is powered by Qualcomm's beastly Snapdragon 820 SoC, and offers 4GB of RAM along with 32GB storage. The 12MP camera is outstanding, and the 3600mAh battery ensures you get at least a day's worth of usage from a full charge.

  Best of all, Samsung re-introduced the microSD slot after leaving it out on the Galaxy S6 series. The phone accommodates microSD cards up to 256GB, which should be more than sufficient for all your movie or music needs. If all that isn't enough, the S7 edge is water resistant with an IP68 rating.

• Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P Troubled By Android 7.0 Nougat Problems

• The reason this lifelong Android user jumped ship to the iPhone 7 Plus is surprising

• Android Wear 2.0 dev preview 3 images are ready to download

• Video: Six years of Nexus - A Google phone history

• Android malware that can infiltrate corporate networks is spreading

• Google officially rebrands 'Google for Work' as 'Google Cloud' and 'Google Apps for Work' as 'G Suite'

• Action Launcher 3 update adds Android 7.1's launcher shortcut feature

• Google Maps for Android Gets Voice Search and Commands

• Samsung Gear Watch Designer Beta v 1.2.1 Released

  Samsung Gear Watch Designer is a software application used to create watch faces for supported Gear Smartwatch devices such as the Gear S, S2, S3, and Fit2. The app has been updated to version 1.2.1, which is available for both Windows and Mac Operating Systems (OS), but still there is no Linux option for those that prefer our little Tux friend.

• Smart View SDK update – Offers New version of DMP and Wireless speaker support

  The new version of Smart view SDK has just rollout. This update has an updated version of the Default Media Player (DMP), which allows new support for music, photo contents and playlists. Now, Samsung wireless speakers will also be a part of Samsung’s smart view enabled devices.

  With this update developers can easily implement casting features and get much easier control over playlist control. Users will now be able to enjoy casting a variety types of content with simple controls. The casting features are basically two different types, App casting and Media casting. App casting will allow you to discover and launch TV applications on a compatible Samsung Smart TV by the use of a smartphone using the relevant APIs, and Media casting will allow you to Send photos to the TV, Play and control videos as well as music.

• Spreadtrum Acknowledges SC9830i LTE SOC adopted in Samsung Z2

  The System On a Chip (SOC) that Samsung had used in the Z2 Tizen smartphone was a tight secret despite most of the details of the phone was leaked prior to its launch. Rumors were also spread that the device could possibly employ one of its own Exynos SOC. However, post the launch of the device it was found that Samsung had continued with a Spreadtrum SOC. The Z2 has the Spreadtrum SC9830i SOC and although the world already knows this fact, Spreadtrum Communications recently took some time to talk about it at an event in Shanghai, China.

• Samsung Gear Watch Designer Beta v 1.2.1 Released

  Samsung Gear Watch Designer is a software application used to create watch faces for supported Gear Smartwatch devices such as the Gear S, S2, S3, and Fit2. The app has been updated to version 1.2.1, which is available for both Windows and Mac Operating Systems (OS), but still there is no Linux option for those that prefer our little Tux friend.

• Smart View SDK update – Offers New version of DMP and Wireless speaker support

  The new version of Smart view SDK has just rollout. This update has an updated version of the Default Media Player (DMP), which allows new support for music, photo contents and playlists. Now, Samsung wireless speakers will also be a part of Samsung’s smart view enabled devices.

  With this update developers can easily implement casting features and get much easier control over playlist control. Users will now be able to enjoy casting a variety types of content with simple controls. The casting features are basically two different types, App casting and Media casting. App casting will allow you to discover and launch TV applications on a compatible Samsung Smart TV by the use of a smartphone using the relevant APIs, and Media casting will allow you to Send photos to the TV, Play and control videos as well as music.

• Spreadtrum Acknowledges SC9830i LTE SOC adopted in Samsung Z2

  The System On a Chip (SOC) that Samsung had used in the Z2 Tizen smartphone was a tight secret despite most of the details of the phone was leaked prior to its launch. Rumors were also spread that the device could possibly employ one of its own Exynos SOC. However, post the launch of the device it was found that Samsung had continued with a Spreadtrum SOC. The Z2 has the Spreadtrum SC9830i SOC and although the world already knows this fact, Spreadtrum Communications recently took some time to talk about it at an event in Shanghai, China.

ownCloud is still alive and kicking, and they've recently released a new maintenance update of the ownCloud Desktop Client, version 2.2.4, bringing some much-needed improvements and patching various annoying issues.

While Linux 4.9 will not officially open for development until next week, the DRM-Next code is ready to roll with all major feature work having been committed by the different open-source Direct Rendering Manager drivers. In this article is some preliminary testing of this DRM-Next code as of 29 September when testing various AMD GPUs with the Radeon and AMDGPU DRM drivers.

Linux 4.9 does bring compile-time-offered experimental support for the AMD Southern Islands GCN 1.0 hardware on AMDGPU, but that isn't the focus of this article. A follow-up comparison is being done with GCN 1.0/1.1 experimental support enabled to see the Radeon vs. AMDGPU performance difference on that hardware. For today's testing was a Radeon R7 370 to look at the Radeon DRM performance and for AMDGPU testing was the Radeon R9 285, R9 Fury, and RX 480. Benchmarks were done from the Linux 4.8 Git and Linux DRM-Next kernels as of 29 September.

Every Linux administrator has to eventually (and manually) edit a configuration file. Whether you are setting up a web server, configuring a service to connect to a database, tweaking a bash script, or troubleshooting a network connection, you cannot avoid a dive deep into the heart of one or more configuration files. To some, the prospect of manually editing configuration files is akin to a nightmare. Wading through what seems like countless lines of options and comments can put you on the fast track for hair and sanity loss.

Which, of course, isn’t true. In fact, most Linux administrators enjoy a good debugging or configuration challenge. Sifting through the minutiae of how a server or software functions is a great way to pass time. But this process doesn’t have to be an exercise in ineffective inefficiency. In fact, tools are available to you that go a very long way to make the editing of config files much, much easier. I’m going to introduce you to a few such tools, to ease some of the burden of your Linux admin duties. I’ll first discuss the command-line tools that are invaluable to the task of making configuration more efficient.