• [Rust] Diagnosing A Weak Memory Ordering Bug

  For the first time in my life I tracked a real bug's root cause to incorrect usage of weak memory orderings. Until now weak memory bugs were something I knew about but had subconciously felt were only relevant to wizards coding on big iron, partly because until recently I've spent most of my career using desktop x86 machines.

  Under heavy load a Pernosco service would assert in Rust's std::thread::Thread::unpark() with the error "inconsistent state in unpark". Inspecting the code led to the disturbing conclusion that the only way to trigger this assertion was memory corruption; the value of self.inner.state should always be between 0 and 2 inclusive, and if so then we shouldn't be able to reach the panic. The problem was nondeterministic but I was able to extract a test workload that reproduced the bug every few minutes. I tried recording it in rr chaos mode but was unable to reproduce it there (which is not surprising in hindsight since rr imposes sequential consistency).

• IEEE Survey Ranks Programming Languages

  It's been said that programming languages are akin to religion. Engineers and developers will go out of their way to defend the use of their favorite language. (Perhaps it's more the pain of learning a new language that keeps us using the old). Surely you've seen many surveys on programming language preferences. As with all surveys, the results depend on who was asked.

• Programming Languages May Finally Be Reaching a Status Quo

  The analyst firm RedMonk has tracked programmers' interest in various programming languages since 2011. During that time, Swift and Kotlin grew faster than any other language the firm tracked, including Google's Go and Mozilla's Rust. Earlier this year Swift, which Apple released in 2014, managed to tie with Apple's much more established Objective-C language for tenth place in RedMonk's rankings.

• Machine learning algorithms can identify anonymous programmers

  Rachel Greenstadt, associate professor of computer science at Drexel University, and Aylin Caliskan, an assistant professor at George Washington University, have found that code can be a form of stylistic expression, a bit like writing, reported Wired.

  As such, the researchers developed a machine learning algorithm to recognise the coding structure used by individual programmers based on samples of their work and spot their traits in compiled binaries or raw source code.

• Upcoming Google Chromebooks Will Come With Windows 10 Dual-boot

• Windows is coming to Chromebooks… with Google’s blessing [Ed: When Microsoft talks about "working with the Open Source community" what it means to say is bringing Microsoft/Windows to it, along with proprietary software that contains back doors]

• How to easily install open source software on macOS

  Before my shift to using macOS as my daily work operating system, I was using a myriad of GNU/Linux platforms. Linux (as well as FreeBSD and OpenBSD, upon which macOS is built) provided me with easy access to the various open source software via a package manager.

• Oppo R17 officially revealed: This is how to do a notch

• Best Android phones you can buy [August 2018]

• 25 Android smartphones from well-known brands come with severe vulnerabilities pre-installed

• Galaxy Note 9's screen receives record-setting rating from DisplayMate

• TECH BREAK: Google's latest Android OS is out

• Android Auto v3.5 fixes crashing on phones with Android 9 Pie [APK Download]

• Android 9 Pie seems to be messing with the Pixel XL's ability to fast charge

• Google 'won't fix' an Android P bug that kills Pixel XL fast charging

• Android 9 Pie adds support for Wi-Fi Direct printing

• Google's iOS and Android Apps Track and Store Location Data With Location History Disabled

• Google's 'My Activity' data: Avoiding privacy and compliance risk

In the first part of this three-part series using a Raspberry Pi for network-attached storage (NAS), we covered the fundamentals of the NAS setup, attached two 1TB hard drives (one for data and one for backups), and mounted the data drive on a remote device via the network filesystem (NFS). In part two, we will look at automating backups. Automated backups allow you to continually secure your data and recover from a hardware defect or accidental file removal.

Gaming has traditionally been one of Linux's weak points. That has changed somewhat in recent years thanks to Steam, GOG, and other efforts to bring commercial games to multiple operating systems, but those games are often not open source. Sure, the games can be played on an open source operating system, but that is not good enough for an open source purist.

So, can someone who only uses free and open source software find games that are polished enough to present a solid gaming experience without compromising their open source ideals? Absolutely. While open source games are unlikely ever to rival some of the AAA commercial games developed with massive budgets, there are plenty of open source games, in many genres, that are fun to play and can be installed from the repositories of most major Linux distributions. Even if a particular game is not packaged for a particular distribution, it is usually easy to download the game from the project's website to install and play it.

• Virtlyst 1.2.0 released

  Virtlyst – a Web Interface to manage virtual machines build with Cutelyst/Qt/C++ got a new release.

  This new release includes a bunch of bug fixes, most importantly probably being the ability to warn user before doing important actions to help avoid doing mistakes.

  Most commits came from new contributor René Linder who is also working on a Bootstrap 4 theme and Lukas Steiner created a dockerfile for it. This is especially cool because Virtlyst repository now has 4 authors while Cutelyst which is way older has only 6.

• Blender 2.8 Planning Update

  At this point we will not have a feature complete Beta release ready in August as we had hoped. Instead, we invested most of our time improving the features that were already there and catching up with the bug tracker. This includes making the viewport and EEVEE work on more graphics cards and platforms.

  The Spring open movie team is also using Blender 2.8 in production, which is helping us ensure the new dependency graph and tools can handle complex production scenes.

• Blender 2.80 Now Coming In Early 2019 With Many Improvements

  The Blender 3D modeling software is facing a slight set-back in their release schedule for the big Blender 2.80 release, but it's moving along and they intend to have it ready by early next year.

• Dropbox will only Support the Ext4 File System In Linux in November

  Dropbox has announced that starting on November 7th 2018, only the ext4 file system will be supported in Linux for synchronizing folders in the Dropbox desktop app. Those Linux users who have synch on other file systems such as XFS, ext2, ext3, ZFS, and many others will no longer have working Dropbox synchronization after this date.

  This news came out after Linux dropbox users began seeing notifications stating "Dropbox Will Stop Syncing Ext4 File Systems in November." You can see an example of this alert in Swedish below.

• Dropbox scares users by shrinking synching options

  Dropbox has quietly announced it will soon stop synching files that reside on drives tended by some filesystems.

  The sync ‘n’ share service’s desktop client has recently produced warnings that the software will stop syncing in November 2018.

  Those warnings were sufficiently ambiguous that Dropbox took to its support forums to explain exactly what’s going on, namely that as of November 7th, 2018, “we’re ending support for Dropbox syncing to drives with certain uncommon file systems.”

• DaVinci Resolve 15 Video/Effects Editor Released With Linux Support

  DaVinci Resolve 15 has been released by Blackmagic Design as the company's professional-grade video editing, visual effects, motion graphics, and audio post-production software.

Not everyone thinks in binary or wants to mentally insert commas into large numbers to come to grips with the sizes of their files. So, it's not surprising that Linux commands have evolved over several decades to incorporate more human-friendly ways of displaying information to its users. In today’s post, we look at some of the options provided by various commands that make digesting data just a little easier.

• Linux bzip2 Command Tutorial for Beginners (6 Examples)

• How to Kill Zombie Processes in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• How to Install Anaconda on Ubuntu 18.04

• How to Install XWiki on Ubuntu 18.04

• WC Command Examples: Count Number of Lines, Words & Characters in Linux

• encode video with constant framerate

• The Joy of GSoC

  Wooo... this is the last day of coding phase of GSoC. I am writing this blog to share my experience and work done in the coding phase. I want to specially thank my mentor David Rosca for his help, suggestions and reviews. This was my first exposure to the KDE community and I am proud that it was great. I really enjoyed the whole program from proposal submission - intermediate evals - then now this final evaluation. Also, I had learned a lot working on my project. Frankly speaking, I didn't knew about i18n and l10n much but with the help of my mentor now I have a quite good understanding of how these works and are implemented. I can truly say this was one of my best summer vacations.

• What’s next for WikiToLearn?

  Google Summer of Code is finishing and many things have been done on WikiToLearn since previous post. A little recap is needed.

  Talking with mentors has been crucial because they told me to focus on finishing CRUD interaction with API backend instead of working on “history mode” viewer.

• GSoC 2018 Final Evaluation

  As GSoC is coming to an end, I am required to put my work altogether in order for it to be easily available and hopefully help fellow/potential contributors work on their own projects. 

  [...]

  At its prestige, through this project we will have tests both for most critical and used operations of Nautilus, and for the search engines we use. Further on, I’ll provide links for all of my merge requests and dwell a bit on their ins and outs while posting links to my commits:

• GTK+ 4 and Nautilus </GSoC>

  Another summer here at GNOME HQ comes to an end. While certainly eventful, it unfortunately did not result in a production-ready Nautilus port to GTK+ 4 (unless you don’t intend to use the location entry or any other entry, but more on that later).

• Pitivi Video Editor Gains UI Polish, Video Preview Resizing

  The latest Google Summer of Code 2018 is allowing some excellent work to be done on some excellent open source projects.

  Among them Pitivi, the non-linear video editor built using GTK and Gstreamer and offering up a basic video editing feature set.

  Over the past few months, Harish Fulara, a Computer Science student, has worked on improving the application’s greeter dialog and on adding support dynamic resizing of the video preview box.

• OpenPGP key expiration is not a security measure

  There seems to be some recurring confusion among Gentoo developers regarding the topic of OpenPGP key expiration dates. Some developers seem to believe them to be some kind of security measure — and start arguing about its weaknesses. Furthermore, some people seem to think of it as rotation mechanism, and believe that they are expected to generate new keys. The truth is, expiration date is neither of those.

• Vulnerability in Java VM Component of Oracle Database allows for Whole System Compromise

• #DEFCON Vote Hacking Village Refute NASS 'Unfair' Claims

  DEFCON has hit back at criticisms levied at it by the National Association of Secretaries of State (NASS) over the introduction of an area designed to test voting machines.

  In a statement released on 9th August, the NASS said that while it applauded “the goal of DEFCON attendees to find and report vulnerabilities in election systems" it felt it was important to point out that work has been done by states' own information technology teams, and also named the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC), the private sector, the National Guard and universities as being involved “to enhance and reinforce their cyber postures with penetration testing, risk and vulnerability assessments and many other tools.”

• How to hack an election, according to a former NSA hacker

  As we find out more about Russia's interference in the 2016 United States presidential election, former NSA hacker and TrustedSec CEO David Kennedy reveals what it would take to hack an election. Kennedy also reveals how France was able to protect themselves. Following is a transcript of the video.

  David Kennedy: What's interesting with the election systems is that as they become more and more electronic, and people can use computer systems to actively go in and cast your votes at the actual ballots, those are all susceptible to attack.

  What the government has tried to do is a technique called air gapping, which means that they're not supposed to be hooked up to the internet or have the ability to communicate the internet, so they can be not hacked by hackers. Essential databases that are used to count the ballots and actually cast votes is connected to multiple networks and the internet. And we're seeing intrusions occur, and so as we're using electronic voting as a method to conduct actual voter ballots, it's a very, very susceptible system. Most of the systems are out of date. Most of the systems aren't protected against hacks. There's definitely possibilities for other influences to have a direct impact on our elections themselves.

• Faxploit: Breaking the Unthinkable

• HP Fax Protocol Flaw Exposes Whole Enterprise Network to Exploit

  Check Point has discovered a new vulnerability in HP’s range of office fax machines that allow hackers to exploit a fax number related flaw and gain access to the remainder of the company’s enterprise network. This exploit is not limited to any one product or any particular company’s setup, but it encompasses all of HP’s office fax machines and all-in-one devices that have a faxing system integrated within them.

I am quite sad. I was really looking forward to testing Legacy OS. I like quirky, unique stuff, and the Magic Scripts impressed me so much back in the day that I was more than enthused giving this distro a go. Alas, all my expectations were shattered. From boot problems to network problems to basic browsers, the karma just wasn't there. This feels like an ancient project resurrected into the modern era, but not well adapted to it.

Hopefully, these issues can be ironed out, and then I'll take Legacy OS for another spin. At the moment, the 2017 edition feels wrong, and it doesn't have enough critical quality to warrant testing and tweaking and trying to work around some of the inherent issues. Just too much trouble. Ah well. Maybe some day. Take care.

When it comes to desktop environments, there is a set of popular DEs like GNOME, KDE, Xfce etc. Perhaps Lumina was one of the newest addition to the desktop environment family, until now.

Let me introduce Velt/OS to you. It’s a material design inspired desktop environment mainly for Arch Linux. The project is in the experimental phase and being ‘slowly’ developed.

• May the Source Be with You: NVIDIA Open Sources Material Definition Language SDK

  Security, customizability, flexibility and cost are a few of the benefits of open-source software for developers.

  They’ll get all these and more from NVIDIA’s Material Definition Language software development kit, which is available starting today as open source.

  MDL software — a set of tools that integrate the precise look and feel of real-world materials into rendering applications — has long been supported by developers. It gives end-users the freedom to share physically based materials and lights between supporting applications.

  For example, an MDL material — such as a specific piece of carpeting, upholstery or clothing — created in Allegorithmic Substance Designer can be saved to a library and then used in any other supporting application, like Adobe Dimension CC.

• NVIDIA Announces Open-Source MDL SDK

  In addition to announcing the Turing-based Quadro RTX GPUs with GDDR6 memory, NVIDIA used SIGGRAPH 2018 to announce their open-sourcing of the MDL SDK.

  The MDL SDK is the Material Definition Language and is a programming language for defining physically-based materials for rendering, The MDL code can then be converted into GLSL, NVIDIA PTX, x86 instructions, or LLVM IR for making these assets more portable.

• Mesa 18.1.6 Released With Build System Updates, Various OpenGL/Vulkan Driver Fixes

  Mesa 18.1.6 is now available as the latest point release for Mesa 18.1 as the Q2'2018 release of this collection of open-source graphics drivers/infrastructure.

  Mesa 18.1.6 just ships with over three dozen fixes compared to v18.1.5 from a few weeks back. The Mesa 18.1.6 release includes various Gallium3D fixes, different Autotools/Meson build system updates, corrections to MSAA corruption with AMD Vega, a DRIRC option to allow Metro Redux to work properly (again), support for using INTEL_DEBUG for setting Intel shader disk cache flags, and various other random fixes throughout.

• Vulkan 1.1.83 Released With Minor Documentation Updates For SIGGRAPH

  The Khronos Group has released Vulkan 1.1.83 as a routine maintenance update to the Vulkan 1.1 graphics/compute API to coincide with the start of ACM SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver.

  Vulkan 1.1.83 doesn't introduce any new extensions but just corrects a variety of documentation issues. It does prepare for some new extensions though as some extra bits are now reserved for pending vendor extensions. These reserved bits appear to be for some NVIDIA extension work.

• XArray Proposed For Merging In The Linux 4.19 Kernel

  Matthew Wilcox who most recently has been employed by Microsoft is looking to get the new XArray data structure added to the Linux 4.19 kernel.

  Earlier this year Wilcox was hoping for XArray in Linux 4.17 but that didn't pan out but he believes it is ready for Linux 4.19. XArray is intended to eventually replace the radix tree data structure in the Linux kernel. XArray's advantages include locking support as part of its design, memory not being pre-loaded, and page cache improvements in using XArray.

• Btrfs Gets Fixes & Low-Level Improvements With Linux 4.19

  David Sterba of SUSE sent in the Btrfs file-system updates today for the Linux 4.19 kernel merge window.

  The most noticeable change with Btrfs for Linux 4.19 is that it now supports defragging opened read-only files that have read-write permissions. Btrfs in Linux 4.19 is also carrying some validation improvements, error code handling improvements, tree checker improvements, some fsync fixes, a possible deadlock fix, resetting the on-disk device stats value after replacing a drive, and a variety of other code clean-ups and bug fixes.

• Linux 4.18 Benefits from Energy-Aware Scheduling on ARM

  The fourth major milestone release for the Linux kernel was officially announced by Linus Torvalds on Aug. 12 with the general availability of Linux 4.18.

  Linux 4.18, required a somewhat uncommon eight release candidates and follows the Linux 4.17 release that was announced on June 3.

  "One week late(r) and here we are - 4.18 is out there," Linus Torvalds wrote in his release announcement. "It was a very calm week, and arguably I could just have released on schedule last week, but we did have some minor updates."

  [...]

  Linux 4.18 also integrated a new asynchronous I/O interface that improves system polling performance.

• Linux Kernel 4.18 Keeps Things Solid and Secure

  Linus Torvalds published the 4.18 kernel on Sunday, one week later than expected. This has a been a rocky release... and it’s all Android's fault (more or less).

  You see, Android systems lack tmpfs, the temporary file systems you usually see hanging off your /tmp directory. In regular Linux systems, a tmpfs is stored in memory and holds data that applications may need to retrieve at short notice or share with other programs. Instead, Android allocates a chunk of memory (called ashmem) that does the same thing. However, a change introduced to ashmem in 4.18-rc7 made the open source version of Android crash. Unfortunately, all this came to light the week before the final release of 4.18 was due. Nine patches later and the problem was still not totally resolved, so Linus decided to roll back the whole thing and wait another week for the things to calm down.

• Licensing Edgecases

  While I’m not a lawyer – and I’m definitely not your lawyer – licensing questions are on my plate these days. As I’ve been digging into one, I’ve come across what looks like a strange edge case in GPL licensing compliance that I’ve been trying to understand. Unfortunately it looks like it’s one of those Affero-style, unforeseen edge cases that (as far as I can find…) nobody’s tested legally yet.

  I spent some time trying to understand how the definition of “linking” applies in projects where, say, different parts of the codebase use disparate, potentially conflicting open source licenses, but all the code is interpreted. I’m relatively new to this area, but generally speaking outside of copying and pasting, “linking” appears to be the critical threshold for whether or not the obligations imposed by the GPL kick in and I don’t understand what that means for, say, Javascript or Python.

• TLS 1.3 Published: in Firefox Today

  On friday the IETF published TLS 1.3 as RFC 8446. It’s already shipping in Firefox and you can use it today. This version of TLS incorporates significant improvements in both security and speed.

  Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the protocol that powers every secure transaction on the Web. The version of TLS in widest use, TLS 1.2, is ten years old this month and hasn’t really changed that much from its roots in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, designed back in the mid-1990s. Despite the minor number version bump, this isn’t the minor revision it appears to be. TLS 1.3 is a major revision that represents more than 20 years of experience with communication security protocols, and four years of careful work from the standards, security, implementation, and research communities (see Nick Sullivan’s great post for the cool details).

• Chatting with your website visitors through Chatra

  When I started the blog, I didn’t add a message board below each article because I don’t have the time to deal with spam. Due to broken windows theory, if I leave the spam unattended my blog will soon become a landfill for spammers. But nowadays many e-commerce site or brand sites have a live chatting box, which will solve my problem because I can simply ignore spam, while interested readers can ask questions and provide feedbacks easily. That’s why when my sponsor, Chatra.io, approached me with their great tool, I fell in love with it right away and must share it with everyone.

• Send: Going Bigger

  Send encrypts your files in the browser. This is good for your privacy because it means only you and the people you share the key with can decrypt it. For me, as a software engineer, the challenge with doing it this way is the limited API set available in the browser to “go full circle”. There’s a few things that make it a difficult problem.

  The biggest limitation on Send today is the size of the file. This is because we load the entire thing into memory and encrypt it all at once. It’s a simple and effective way to handle small files but it makes large files prone to failure from running out of memory. What size of file is too big also varies by device. We’d like everyone to be able to send large files securely regardless of what device they use. So how can we do it?

  The first challenge is to not load and encrypt the file all at once. RFC 8188 specifies a standard for an encrypted content encoding over HTTP that is designed for streaming. This ensures we won’t run out of memory during encryption and decryption by breaking the file into smaller chunks. Implementing the RFC as a Stream give us a nice way to represent our encrypted content.

• Never patterns, exhaustive matching, and uninhabited types (oh my!)

  One of the long-standing issues that we’ve been wrestling with in Rust is how to integrate the concept of an “uninhabited type” – that is, a type which has no values at all. Uninhabited types are useful to represent the “result” of some computation you know will never execute – for example, if you have to define an error type for some computation, but this particular computation can never fail, you might use an uninhabited type.

• 25 Smartphone Models Found Shipping With Severe Firmware Flaws: Defcon 2018

  Smartphones from small as well as big OEMs are under the radar. OEMs such as ZTE, Leagoo, and Doogee have been included in the list of insecure Android device manufacturers previously as well. Leagoo and Doogee have been reported to come preinstalled with apps that have banking trojans.

• Aporeto Security and Red Hat OpenShift in Action

  In this short video, we demonstrate how Aporeto integrates with Red Hat OpenShift and leverages the platform’s native capabilities to extract application identity metadata to enforce security.

  Aporeto enforces security uniformly in hybrid and multi-cloud environments and abstracts away the complexities of the underlying infrastructure. As you leverage OpenShift to expand beyond the data center, you can use Aporeto to extend your security policies no matter where your application and its services run.

• Oracle has flagged a vulnerability that could “completely compromise” customer databases

  Oracle is calling on its customers to immediately patch a security vulnerability that can lead to “complete compromise of the Oracle Database”.

  The vulnerability was found in the Java VM component of the vendor’s database server, but attacks may “significantly impact additional products”, according to a notice on the US National Vulnerability Database.

• Hacknet gets 'Educational' pricing plan to help teach students about cyber security

  Although primarily intended for entertainment, Hacknet’s simulation is based on real cyber-security principles, while its user interface implements actual Unix commands

• Security updates for Monday

• Open-source tech has gained significance in powering startup tech infrastructure

  In the last decade or so, there has been an explosion in the number of mobile applications with the total number of apps available on the App Store reaching 2.2 million in January 2017. Mobile experience reached the next level after the launch of the first iPhone in 2007. Since then, there have been a lot of companies creating excellent smartphones enabling users to seamlessly use these applications. A majority of these mobile applications are B2C in nature, i.e they target consumers and not businesses. There is a distinctive characteristic of these consumer-facing apps—SCALE.

• Tesla Will Open Up Vehicle Security Software To All Automakers

• Elon Musk says Tesla will open part of its self-driving software to the public as a safety measure

  Tesla CEO Elon Musk told a hacker conference in Las Vegas he plans to "open source" the software Tesla uses to secure autonomous-driving features from hacks or takeovers, eventually allowing other carmakers to use it.

  It's a bid to make autonomous vehicle software safer by opening the software to more scrutiny, he told a private audience of around 100 people on Friday at DEFCON, an annual cybersecurity defense conference held in Las Vegas.

• Elon Musk plans to open source Tesla's self-driving software

  The Tesla code, once licenced to manufacturers, could turn out to be the beginning of an open standard which would drive down costs. Plus of course every firm that licenced the tech would be adding its expertise to locking it down securely, such is the beauty of the open source.

• Tesla's Open Source Security Could Protect Against an Autonomous Car Hack

• Hortonworks Supports JIDO Effort to Adopt Open Source for Capability Dev’t; Shaun Bierweiler Comments

  Hortonworks has helped the Defense Department‘s Joint Improvised Threat Defeat Organization deploy an enterprise information technology platform built on the Hadoop data management software and other open source technologies, ExecutiveBiz reported July 30.

  Federal News Radio reported July 27 that the open source project is in line with JIDO’s effort to deliver capabilities to warfighters and provide updates more quickly amid emerging threats.

• Amazon Releases Open Source Alexa Auto SDK [Ed: Amazon is openwashing malicious surveillance trap that records the conversations or activities of maybe a billion people]

• Open-world vehicle builder 'TerraTech' has left Early Access

  I absolutely love games that let me build something, drive around and blow stuff up so I've been enjoying my time with TerraTech which is now out.

  Unlike Robocraft, TerraTech isn't just about building a powerful vehicle and destroying everyone. While it does have a PvP multiplayer mode, the main dish is actually the open-world single-player environment. That's not all it has to offer, as it also has creative mode to do whatever you want, a sumo fighting mode and a gauntlet challenge mode as well.

• Rings of Saturn is a hard sci-fi, top-down space simulator coming soon to Linux

  Space sim Rings of Saturn [Official Site] was announced earlier this month, with a promise of a realistic top-down experience and it actually looks surprisingly good.

  Seems to have come out of nowhere, at least to me, I can't remember hearing literally anything about this before discovering it today. While the trailer doesn't really offer all that much, what it does show makes me firmly want to know more.

• SC Controller, incredibly useful UI/Driver for the Steam Controller has a new release

  If you ever have issues with games not picking up your Steam Controller correctly, you should probably take a look at the excellent SC Controller [GitHub] project.

  The latest release v0.4.4, that was made available yesterday adds in some interesting new features. A pretty important one, is the new "relative joystick camera" mode, which acts just like the Joystick Camera mode on Steam. Some games (like twin-stick shooters) don't always hold the position of your thumb on the right pad to continually fire, this mode should fix it for games where it doesn't work as expected.

• Insurgency: Sandstorm is looking real good in the latest videos, Linux version should come in the first couple updates

  Insurgency: Sandstorm [Steam] is the new tactical FPS from New World Interactive that will be coming to Linux. There's new videos out to show it off and we have an update for you about Linux support.

• DXVK Merges Direct3D 10 API Support

  Separate from the "DXUP" initiative, the popular DXVK project for accelerating Direct3D 11 atop Vulkan now has support itself for Direct3D 10.

• DXVK expands with Direct3D 10 over Vulkan in Wine, also info on the new Direct3D 9-to-11 project

  There's so many incredible things going on around Wine right now it's hard to keep track. DXVK is now expanding to support Direct3D 10 over Vulkan in Wine.

  Talking about it on the official GitHub account in this issue, the main developer of DXVK said it works in a similar way to DXUP with it being a "very thin wrapper around the existing D3D11 interfaces, while allowing for better interoperability between the two APIs.".

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter 540

• Deploying Kubernetes on Public Clouds is hard – or is it?

  Recently, there’s been talk about how Kubernetes has become hard to deploy and run on virtual substrates such as those offered by the public clouds. Indeed, the cloud-specific quirks around infrastructure provisioning, including storage, networking assets such as load balancers, and overall access control (IAM) differs from cloud to cloud provider. It is safe to assume that it also differs between your on-prem IaaS implementation or virtualized infrastructure and the public cloud APIs.

  With all the public Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) offerings available to you, why would you deploy Kubernetes to a generic IaaS substrate anyway? There are many reasons for doing so.

• Design and Web team summary – 13 August 2018

  Welcome to the latest work and updates from the design and web team.

  The team manages all web projects across Canonical. From www.ubuntu.com to the Juju GUI we help to bring beauty and consistency to all the web projects.