One of the latest thing we wanted to work on as we highlighted on our previous posts is the notification for new emails or download experience on the Shell. We already do ship the KStatusNotifier extension for application indicator, but need a way to signal the user (even if you are not looking at the screen when this happens) for new emails, IM or download/copy progress.

Andrea stepped up on this and worked with Dash to Dock upstream to implement the unity API for this. Working with them, as usual, was pleasing and we got the green flag that it’s going to merge to master, with possibly some tweaks, which will make this work available to every Dash to Dock users! It means that after this update, Thunderbird is handily showing the number of unread emails you have in your inbox, thanks to thunderbird-gnome-support that we seeded back with Sébastien.

The Kodi media center is facing a lot of scrutiny in the media lately. Some people feel that the negative coverage is "fake news." It is important to remember that Kodi is not illegal. With that said, it can be made so with piracy-related addons. Since Kodi is open source, even if the developers removed the ability to install addons, other people could easily fork the code to add it back. Pandora's box cannot be closed.

Many people that use Kodi do so with a dedicated Linux-based operating system, such as the excellent LibreELEC. You see, these distros exist only to run the open source media center, meaning there are no resources wasted on unnecessary things. Today, LibreELEC (Krypton) v8.1.2 BETA sees release. You can install it immediately, and don't worry -- your addons like Exodus and Covenant will work fine.

Arduino launched two 67.6 x 25mm boards for wireless IoT nodes based on Atmel’s SAM D21 MCU: The MKR WAN 1300 offers LoRa, and the MKR GSM 1400 provides 3G.

At the Maker Faire in New York this weekend, Arduino unveiled two new “MKR” IoT boards with the same 32-bit, Cortex-M0+ based Microchip/Atmel ATSAMD21 MCU used by last December’s MKRZero. Available for pre-order, with shipment in November, both the LoRa enabled, $39 Arduino MKR WAN 1300 and the 2G/3G ready, $69 Arduino MKR GSM 1400 measure 67.6 x 25mm. That’s only slightly larger than the 65 x 25mm MKRZero and earlier, WiFi-enabled MKR1000.

GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton has released a new build of his Android-x86 fork AndEX that leverages Google's Android Marshmallow 6.0.1 mobile operating system for 64-bit PCs with various updates and improvements.

• Future Proof Your SysAdmin Career: Advancing with Open Source

  For today’s system administrators, the future holds tremendous promise. In this ebook, we have covered many technical skills that can be big differentiators for sysadmins looking to advance their careers. But, increasingly, open source skillsets can also open new doors.

  A decade ago, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst predicted that open source tools and platforms would become pervasive in IT. Today, that prediction has come true, with profound implications for the employment market. Participating in open source projects -- through developing code, submitting a bug report, or contributing to documentation -- is an important way to demonstrate open source skills to hiring managers.

• FreeType Improvements For The Adobe Engine

  With FreeType 2.8.1 having been released last week, a lot of new code landed in the early hours of today to its Git repository.

  The code landed includes the work done this summer by Ewald Hew for Google Summer of Code (GSoC 17) adding support for Type 1 fonts to the Adobe CFF engine. Type 1 is an older, less maintained font format.

• Are You Fond Of HDR Photography? Try Luminance HDR Application In Ubuntu/Linux Mint

  Luminance HDR is an graphical user interface that is used for manipulation and creation of High Dynamic Range(HDR) images. It is based on Qt5 toolkit, it is cross-platform available for Linux, Windows and Mac, and released under the GNU GPL license. It provides a complete workflow for High Dynamic Range(HDR) as well as Low Dynamic Range (LDR) file formats.
  Prerequisite of HDR photography are several narrow-range digital images with different exposures. Luminance HDR combines these images and calculates a high-contrast image. In order to view this image on a regular computer monitor, Luminance HDR can convert it into a displayable LDR image format using a variety of methods, such as tone mapping.

• Opera Web Browser Now Has Built-in WhatsApp and FB Messenger, Install in Ubuntu/Linux Mint

• Enterprise open source comes of age

  In the age of digitalisation and data centre modernisation, open source has come of age.

  This is demonstrated by the growth that enterprise open source software provider SUSE has enjoyed over the last months.

  “SUSE is in good shape,” says Nils Brauckmann, CEO of SUSE. “In the last year, revenue grew at 21%, and it was profitable growth.”

  Business is positive going forward, he adds, with SUSE now part of the larger mothership Micro Focus group following the completion this month of the HPE Software spin merger.

  “Micro focus is now the seventh-largest pure-play software vendor in the world, with revenues approaching $4,5-billion,” Brauckmann points out.

• Red Hat, Microsoft Extend Alliance to SQL Server

• UbuCon Europe 2017

  I’ve been to many Ubuntu related events before, but what surprises me every time about UbuCons is the outstanding work by the community organising these events.

  Earlier this month, I was in Paris for UbuCon Europe 2017. I had quite high expectations about the event/location and the talks, especially because the French Ubuntu community is known for hosting awesome events several times a year like Ubuntu Party and Ubuntu install parties.

 

• How to Install and Configure Check_MK (Monitoring Tool) on CentOS 7 / RHEL 7

• Using machine learning to name colors

• Advanced image viewing tricks with ImageMagick

• Linux Free Command Explained for Beginners (6 Examples)

• How to Install and Use Kliqqi on Ubuntu to Create Your Own Social Community

• 14 Methods To Check Number Of CPU Cores On Linux

• How Containers Scale: Service Mesh vs. Traditional Architecture

• Nine reasons to use Fedora Modules for your container images

• Korora 26 is Here!

• Linux Releases: “Lightweight” Tiny Core 8.2 And “Heavyweight” Korora 26 Distros Are Here

  Korora Linux distro is a derivative of popular Fedora operating system. It ships with lots of additional packages that are provided by Fedora community and helps the users to get a complete out-of-the-box experience.

  The developers of Korora Linux distro have just shipped Korora 26 “Bloat.” Bloat codename has been derived from the characters of the movie “Finding Nemo.”

• Based on Fedora 26, Korora 26 Linux Debuts with GNOME 3.24, Drops 32-Bit Support

  Korora developer Jim Dean announced the release and general availability of the Korora Linux 26 operating system for personal computers, a release based on the latest Fedora Linux version and packed full of goodies.

  Dubbed "Bloat," Korora Linux 26 comes more than nine months after the release of Korora 25, it's based on Red Hat's Fedora 26 Linux operating system and ships with the latest versions of popular desktop environments, including GNOME 3.24.

  Also included are the KDE Plasma 5.10, Xfce 4.12, Cinnamon 3.4, and MATE 1.18 desktop environments, all of them shipping pre-loaded with a brand-new backup tool designed to keep your most important files safe and secure from hackers or government agencies.

• New PocketBeagle Open Source Developer Board Unveiled (video)

  Anyone looking for a tiny development board may be interested in the new hardware unveiled by BeagleBoard the form of their open source PocketBeagle which is now available to purchase priced at just $25.

  The Raspberry Pi Zero sized PocketBeagle can be used in robotic applications, drones and 3D printers and is based on the Octavo Systems OSD3358 system-in-package (SiP), the same SiP that powers the credit card-sized BeagleBone Black Wireless, but is half the size.

• Driving Manufacturing Productivity through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)

  Samsung is a major manufacturer of electronic components for clients such as Apple, Sony, HTC, and Nokia. It is also the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile devices and happens to be the world’s largest memory chip manufacturer. In July 2017, Samsung Electronics overtook Intel as the largest semiconductor chip maker in the world.

• What is edge computing and how it’s changing the network

  Edge computing allows data produced by internet of things (IoT) devices to be processed closer to where it is created instead of sending it across long routes to data centers or clouds.

  Doing this computing closer to the edge of the network lets organizations analyze important data in near real-time – a need of organizations across many industries, including manufacturing, health care, telecommunications and finance.

• eCosCentric Limited's eCosPro

  The developer of eCos, eCosCentric Limited, recently announced the latest 4.1 release of eCosPro, the stable, fully tested and supported version of the operating system and RedBoot bootstrap firmware. The new 4.1 release of the eCosPro Developer's Kit includes the latest Eclipse Neon IDE, provides improvements to the eCosPro Eclipse plugin and development tools and integrates a variety of runtime enhancements.

• American International University, West Africa Extends Curriculum as Open Source Initiative Member

  The Open Source Initiative® (OSI), the global non-profit formed to educate about, and advocate for, the benefits of open source software and build bridges among different constituencies in the open source community, announced today that The American International University, West Africa's (AIUWA) has joined the organization as an Affiliate Member. AIUWA is a unique educational instituion of higher education, combining degree-seeking programs, along with professional development and certification. The program's mandatory academic and professional courses enable students to graduate with both academic credentials and professional qualifications. AIUWA also serves as a center for health, management, and information technology research and development in Africa.

• Adding More Policy Firepower to the Mozilla Network

  In June, Mozilla launched a new fellowship that brings together policy experts from around the world to advance crucial tech policy efforts. Today, we are excited to announce the appointment of seven advisors to help steer this fellowship into the future. We are also announcing one new fellow, bringing the cohort to 11 fellows from four countries who are already up to great work.

  Over the past three months, Mozilla’s Tech Policy Fellows have been digging into their projects to keep the Internet open and freely accessible to all. With most fellows joining directly out of government service, they’re continuing to move forward some of the urgent policy efforts they had been leading, and working to avoid any backsliding that might come with government transitions.

  The fellows’ work is focused on protecting net neutrality, advancing policies around artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, promoting affordable broadband service for vulnerable communities, and more. Amba Kak is our most recent addition, starting this month to work on promoting net neutrality in India.

  To advance this work, the fellows are meeting with policymakers inside and outside of government; they’re keynoting major events and giving press interviews about the importance of these topics; and in the coming weeks, they’ll share more about their work with the Mozilla network on our network blog.

• MongoDB’s Mongo Moment [Ed: Ridiculous. The "journalist" writing about MongoDB here has received many paychecks from the company.]

• OpenSSH 7.6 Is Ready For Testing & Finishes Gutting SSHv1

  OpenSSH 7.6 will be hitting the streets soon.

• New FreeBSD Committer

  So in a sense I have been part-time part of the FreeBSD Community for nearly 15 years as well. FreeBSD has reached Tier-1 status within KDE now, with the KDE FreeBSD CI, which much stronger upstreaming happening, and with Tobias and Raphael following new releases pretty closely. I’ve been pushing and prodding at our ports tree a lot, and chasing CMake releases (and reporting bugs), and trying to get some KDE KF5-based applications into the official ports tree. So I’m happy to now receive a FreeBSD ports commit bit, with Tobias and Raphael acting as mentors. I won’t pretend this will immediately lead to Qt 5.9 and KDE Applications 17.latest in the official FreeBSD ports tree, but it increases the (direct) effort we can expend on it.

• Free the Seed: An Open Source Approach to Food Crop Seed

  We Americans value the freedom to do what we want with our property. These days, our freedom of action in regard to what we own is increasingly being eroded and constrained by the expansion of corporate power and the evolving legal dimensions of ownership.

  Nowhere has this tendency to limit freedom to operate come into sharper focus than in farming. A farmer may buy a John Deere tractor, but ownership of the copyrighted software—without which the tractor cannot run and cannot be repaired—is retained by the company. According to Deere, the farmer has “an implied lease” to operate the tractor but is prohibited from making any repair or change involving use of the copyrighted code.

• Synthace raises a £7.3m Series A to bring open source to biotech

  Synthace, a UK startup using open source technology to make process in biotechnology move faster, has raises a £7.3m Series A round. New investors White Cloud Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners and Eleven Two Capital participated alongside existing investors that included Sofinnova Partners, SOSV and Bioeconomy Capital.

  The Company’s Antha operating system replaces processes which are currently done, almost, by hand.

  CEO Tim Fell says the company came out of the desire to better engineer biology: “Our need to heal, feed, fuel and manufacture for a growing population can be met by unlocking the near infinite power of biology but only by bringing software abstraction and more automation to biological R&D and manufacturing, and by enabling biologists to build atop their collective work. That is what the Antha platform does.”

• Runway to Open Source Machine Learning Research

• Accelerate Application Modernization with Node.js

  Node.js is much more than an application platform. In a 2016 Forrester report, the research firm talked with several Node.js users and developers to better understand the growth of Node within global enterprises across all a range of industries.

• GitLab v10 Integrates with Kubernetes

  It’s been six months and two million downloads since GitLab released version 9.0 of its developer-centric integrated application development platform. The company kept busy in the time since, polling nearly 1,000 users at client companies like VMWare, Sony and Ticketmaster to find out what capabilities their developers needed to power up the most enterprise-worthy GitLab release yet.

• Be Nice: Hyperledger’s Brian Behlendorf Offers Tips for Creating Sustainable Open Source Projects

  The Linux operating system was created some 26 years ago by a young Finnish engineer, and it now powers the global economy. Not only has Linux survived for more than quarter of a century, it continues to grow its influence and dominance.

• Change Healthcare Releases Healthcare Blockchain Solution

• Change Healthcare Introduces Enterprise Blockchain for Healthcare

 

• Unclench fists, open arms: Dirk Hohndel on VMware open source shift [Ed: Another sickening openwashing piece for a GPL violator and back doors facilitator]

• Facebook backtracks on anti-patent troll license [Ed: Terrible, terrible article; headline is a lie. See [1, 2]]

• Facebook re-licenses React under MIT license after developer backlash

• Facebook relicenses React in the face of open-source dev backlash

• Facebook buckles under pressure over hated React license

• Developers Need to Start Paying Attention to Licenses

  Anyone who claims to be a fan of mashups (which, admittedly, had their moment that seems to have passed) knows Girl Talk. Girl Talk (aka Gregg Michael Gillis) had a crazy style of mashup made up of short, somewhat chaotic samples, usually blended together into one full "album"-worth of music.

• Millionlights to provide open source education via YuppTV [Ed: Openwashing]

  Millionlights has partnerships with Microsoft, RedHat, CompTIA, Saylor and other leading Indian and foreign universities for their content.

• Security updates for Monday

• CCleaner malware may be from Chinese group: Avast

  Security company Avast says it has found similarities between the code injected into CCleaner and the APT17/Aurora malware created by a Chinese advanced persistent threat group in 2014/2015.

• Capsule8 Raises New Funds to Help Improve Container Security

  Container security startup Capsule8 is moving forward with beta customer deployments and a Series A round of funding, to help achieve its vision of providing a secure, production-grade approach to container security.

  The Series A round of funding was announced on Sept. 19, with the company raising $6 million, led by Bessemer and ClearSky, bringing total funding to date up to $8.5 million. Capsule8 first emerged from stealth in February 2017, though its' core technology product still remains in private beta as the company fine-tunes the platform for production workload requirements.

• Mesa 17.1.10

  Mesa 17.1.10 is now available.

• Mesa 17.1.10 Released, Time To Upgrade To Mesa 17.2

  Mesa 17.1.10 just hit the wire and is the last planned update for the Mesa 17.1 series.

  Mesa 17.1.10 features some build system improvements, various Gallium3D fixes, Intel OpenGL and Vulkan fixes, RadeonSI and RADV fixes around eEQP compliance, and a variety of other fixes and minor updates.

• A Recap Of XDC2017: Advancing Wayland, Mesa & Yes The X.Org Server

  The annual X.Org Developers' Conference wrapped up on Friday as the meeting of key contributors to components including the xorg-server, Wayland, Mesa, and other crucial components of the Linux desktop stack.

• AMD Rebrands CrossFire As Just mGPU

  While not particularly relevant to Linux gamers at this point in time, AMD is dropping their CrossFire branding in favor of just calling it their mGPU technology.

• Kazan Continues Making Progress As A CPU-Based Vulkan Implementation

  While Google Summer of Code ended one month ago, Jacob Lifshay has continued working on his "Vulkan-CPU" project now known as Kazan. He's certainly making progress on this CPU-based Vulkan implementation

“Strong demand for our technologies that enable hybrid cloud computing has contributed to accelerated revenue growth in the first half of the fiscal year. In the second quarter, we delivered total revenue growth of 21%, fueled by over 40% growth in our Application Development-related and other emerging technology revenue," stated Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat. "IT organizations continued to turn to Red Hat as a strategic technology partner to help them transform and modernize their applications and infrastructure for the hybrid cloud."

"Strong execution and global demand for Red Hat technologies continued to drive financial results which exceeded expectations for the second quarter and the first half of fiscal year 2018," stated Eric Shander, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Red Hat. "For the first half of fiscal 2018, Red Hat delivered a powerful combination of 20% total revenue growth, 41% GAAP operating income growth, 26% non-GAAP operating income growth, and 22% operating cash flow growth. Given our first half results and ongoing momentum, we are increasing our outlook for the full year."

• Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator is now on Linux

  Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator [Steam], a game about a Dad looking to date another Dad is now on Linux.

• Morphite, the casual and stylish FPS is now on Linux, hold off for now

  I've been excited to try Morphite [Steam, Official Site], the low poly stylized FPS that people keep comparing to No Man's Sky and now it's on Linux here's some initial thoughts.

• Operator Overload is due out this week promising 'complex combinatoric conundrums'

• Unbalance, a very minimalist puzzle game that's super cheap and quite good is on Linux

  Unbalance [Steam] is a minimalist puzzle game about spinning things around to drop a red ball onto something, it's actually quite clever.

• KTextEditorPreviewPlugin 0.1.0

  The KTextEditorPreviewPlugin software provides the KTextEditor Document Preview Plugin, a plugin for the editor Kate, the IDE KDevelop, or other software using the KTextEditor framework.

  The plugin enables a live preview of the currently edited text document in the final format. For the display it uses the KParts plugin which is currently selected as the preferred one for the MIME type of the document. If there is no matching KParts plugin, no preview is possible.

• Quick Look at KDE Plasma 5.11

  KDE released Plasma 5.11 beta version at 14 September 2017. The new star feature here is Plasma Vault, an ability to protect your folder with password. You can try it on the latest KDE neon before the Plasma finally released next October. Here is a quick look to the new things on KDE Plasma on neon dev-unstable.

Antergos 17.9 is a weird distro, full of polarities. It comes with a weak live session, and it does not really demo what it can do. The installer is good, robust, and if offers some neat tricks, including extra software and proprietary graphics driver. I'm really impressed by that. The installed system behaved reasonably, but with some oddities.

Hardware support isn't the best, most notably touchpad and what happened after waking from suspend. On the other hand, you get good smartphone and media support, a colorful and practical software selection, a moderately reasonable package manager with some tiny dependency hiccups, pretty looks, okay performance, and nowhere does it advertise its Archness. Much better than I expected, not as good as it should be. Well, taking everything into consideration, I guess it deserves something like 7.5/10. Antergos needs a livelier live session, more hardware love out of the box, and a handful of small tweaks around desktop usability. Shouldn't be too hard to nail. Worth watching.

This is the third beta for our 8.2 release. It addresses minor findings related to the Samba bump: we now detect and avoid invalid Samba v3 configurations, old samba.conf.sample templates are overwritten with the new v4 template, and remote SMB shares are mounted using SMB2 or where possible SMB3. The release also adds support for the Raspberry Pi IQAudIO Digi+ board and a Xiaomi BT remote, and includes security fixes for the Blueborne Linux/BlueZ vulnerability. This is hopefully the final 8.1.x beta release; next will be 8.2.0.

• Android file management: An easy-to-follow guide

• The Best Android Tablets

• Paragon exFAT NTFS USB Android review: Read native Mac disks from Android TVs and devices

• Sony Xperia XZ1 with 3D scanning and Android Oreo launches in India

• Some Android Messages Users Stopped Receiving Notifications

• Android SMS Notifications No Longer Working For Some Users

• Why you should never use an unlock pattern to protect your Android phone

• This bank data stealing Android malware is back - and it's now even sneakier

• Microsoft and Red Hat strengthen alliance with SQL Server on Linux

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or RHEL, will be a reference platform for SQL Server 2017, which has been fully tested for performance, security and reliability. Benchmarks performed by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Co. found that SQL Server 2017 actually ran faster on Linux than on Windows, with a lower overall cost of ownership.

• Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat

  Today I attended Red Hat’s European analyst day at the Tate Modern art gallery. Here are some of thoughts based on what I heard.

  So it turns out Red Hat is pretty good at being Red Hat. By that I mean Red Hat sticks to the knitting, carries water and chops wood, and generally just does a good job of packaging open source technology for enterprise adoption. It’s fashionable these days to decry open source – “it’s not a business”. Maybe not for you, but for Red Hat it sure is.

  Enterprises trust Red Hat precisely because it makes open source boring. Exciting and cool, on the other hand, often means getting paged in the middle of the night. Enterprise people generally don’t like that kind of thing.

• Red Hat updates its open source patent promise

• Red Hat (RHT) 2nd Quarter Earnings: What To Expect

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) registers a price change of -0.51% while Rambus Inc. (RMBS) finishes with a flow of -2.32%

• Red Hat, Inc. (NASDAQ:RHT) Expected To Report Earnings On Monday

• Imagination Technologies, Red Hat, MabVax Therapeutics Holdings and more - AFTER HOURS

• In-Depth Technical Analysis: Zoe’s Kitchen, Inc. (ZOES), Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

• The Important Messages From Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) and Snap Inc. (SNAP) Have Been Divulged By Its Data