Elementary OS June beta 2 is now available to download.

This second beta build of the Ubuntu-based Linux distribution touts a number of changes over the elementary OS june beta released back in July.

Due to the shifting sands on which Juno is built the elementary team advise those planning on testing the release to do so by making a fresh install rather than doing an upgrade from beta 1 or (worse) an older version of elementary OS.

• Check Ubuntu Hardware Info

• How to Install Cinnamon Desktop on Ubuntu

• How To Install Ruby on Debian 9

• Find How to Stop and Restart Apache on Linux Systems

• Customize Chrome’s New Tab Page, No Extensions Required

• Create Multiple OS USB with MultiBootUSB on GNU/Linux

You should never swear at people under you - I use the word under in the hierarchical sense. Colleagues? Well, probably not, although you should never hold back on your opinion. Those above you in the food chain? It's fair game. You risk it to biscuit it.

I say, Linus shouldn't have used the language he did in about 55-65% of the cases. In those 55-65% of the cases, he swore at people when he should have focused on swearing at the technical solution. The thing is, people can make bad products but that does not make them bad people. It is important to distinguish this. People often forget this. And yes, sometimes, there is genuine malice. My experience shows that malice usually comes with a smile and lots of sloganeering. The typical corporate setup is an excellent breeding ground for the aspiring ladder climber.

Speaking of Linus, it is also vital to remember that the choice of language does not always define people, especially when there are cultural differences - it's their actions. In the remainder of the cases where "bad" language was used (if we judge it based on the approved corporate lingo vocab), the exchange was completely impersonal - or personal from the start on all sides - in which case, it's a different game.

The problem is, it's the whole package. You don't selective get to pick a person's attributes. Genius comes with its flaws. If Linus was an extroverted stage speaker who liked to gushy-mushy chitchat and phrase work problems in empty statements full of "inspiring" and "quotable" one-liners, he probably wouldn't be the developer that he is, and we wouldn't have Linux.

So was he wrong in some of those cases? Yes. Should he have apologized? Yes, privately, because it's a private matter. Definitely not the way it was done. Not a corporate-approved kangaroo court.

The outcome of this story is disturbing. A public, humiliating apology is just as bad. It's part of the wider corporate show, where you say how sorry you are on screen (the actual remorse is irrelevant). Linus might actually be sorry, and he might actually be seeking to improve his communication style - empathy won't be part of that equation, I guarantee that.

But this case - and a few similar ones - set a precedence.

People will realize, if someone like Linus gets snubbed for voicing his opinion - and that's what it is after all, an opinion, regardless of the choice of words and expletives - how will they be judged if they do something similar. But not just judged. Placed in the (social) media spotlight and asked to dance to a tune of fake humility in order to satisfy the public thirst for theatrics.

You are not expected to just feel remorse. You need to do a whole stage grovel.

And once the seed of doubt creeps in, people start normalizing.

It's a paradox that it's the liberal, democratic societies that are putting so much strain on the freedom of communication and speech. People forget the harsh lessons of the past and the bloody struggles their nations went through to ensure people could freely express themselves. Now, we're seeing a partial reversal.

But it's happening. The basket of "not allowed" words is getting bigger by the day. This affects how people talk, how they frame their issues, how they express themselves. This directly affects their work. There is less and less distinction between professional disagreement and personal slight. In fact, people deliberately blur the lines so they can present their business ineptitude as some sort of Dreyfuss witchhunt against their glorious selves.

As an ordinary person slaving in an office so you can pay your bills and raise your mediocre children, you may actually not want to say something that may be construed as "offensive" even though it could be a legitimate complaint, related to your actual work. This leads to self-censored, mind-numbing normalization. People just swallow their pride, suppress their problems, focus on the paycheck, and just play the life-draining corporate game. Or they have an early stroke.

Also: Google Keeps Pushing ChromeOS and Android Closer Together

A while ago, we have written about a CLI news client named InstantNews that helps you to read news and latest headlines from commandline instantly. Today, I stumbled upon a similar utility named Clinews which serves the same purpose – reading news and latest headlines from popular websites, blogs from Terminal. You don’t need to install GUI applications or mobile apps. You can read what’s happening in the world right from your Terminal. It is free, open source utility written using NodeJS.

The v13 alpha release is a rewrite with changes to the architecture, settings and default behavior, and it includes new features like Do Not Disturb, experimental Bluetooth and SMS/Contacts sync, and more.

GSConnect is a Gnome Shell implementation of KDE Connect, which integrates Android devices with the Gnome desktop. Using it you can mirror notifications from your phone to your desktop (and the other way around), control a desktop music player from your phone, browse your phone wirelessly from your desktop, synchronize the clipboard between Android devices and your desktop, and much more.

GSConnect v13 alpha requires Gnome Shell version 3.28 or newer, and one of the most interesting changes for users is probably the new Do Not Disturb button which lets users silence mobile device notifications:

Embracing container orchestration has many implications for an enterprises’ technology stack. An image registry becomes a critical component of the deployment pipeline. Red Hat Quay is a mature enterprise-centric container image registry which has a rich history of meeting the needs of cloud native technologists.

When Red Hat acquired CoreOS earlier this year, we were looking to amplify our leadership in enterprise container-based solutions. CoreOS at the time had two primary products, Tectonic and Quay. Quay was added directly into Red Hat’s portfolio of products and renamed Red Hat Quay.

Also: FPgM report: 2018–38

• Leaked NSA Exploits Shifting From Ransomware To Cryptocurrency Mining

  This report, from Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch, says there's really no endpoint in sight for the unintended consequences of exploit hoarding. But at this point, it's really no longer the NSA or Microsoft to blame for the continued rampage. Stats from Shodan show more than 300,000 unpatched machines in the United States alone.

  EternalBlue-based malware still runs rampant, but the focus has shifted from ransom to cryptocurrency. An unnamed company recently watched the NSA's exploit turn its computers into CPU ATMs.

  [...]

  There will never be a full accounting of the damage done. Yes, the NSA never thought its secret stash would go public, but that doesn't excuse its informal policy of never disclosing massive vulnerabilities until it's able to wring every last piece of intel from their deployment. And there's a chance this will happen again in the future if the agency isn't more proactive on the disclosure front. It was foolhardy to believe its tools would remain secret indefinitely. It's especially insane to believe this now.

• The Rust Programming Language Blog: Security advisory for the standard library

  The Rust team was recently notified of a security vulnerability affecting the standard library’s str::repeat function. When passed a large number this function has an integer overflow which can lead to an out of bounds write. If you are not using str::repeat, you are not affected.

  We’re in the process of applying for a CVE number for this vulnerability. Fixes for this issue have landed in the Rust repository for the stable/beta/master branches. Nightlies and betas with the fix will be produced tonight, and 1.29.1 will be released on 2018-09-25 with the fix for stable Rust.

• Cloudflare Secures Time With Roughtime Protocol Service

  If time is money, then how important is it to secure the integrity of time itself? Time across many computing devices is often synchronized via the Network Time Protocol (NTP), which isn't a secure approach, but there is another option.

  On Sept. 21, Cloudflare announced that it is deploying a new authenticated time service called Roughtime, in an effort to secure certain timekeeping efforts. The publicly available service is based on an open-source project of the same name that was started by Google.

  "NTP is the dominant protocol used for time synchronisation and, although recent versions provide for the possibility of authentication, in practice that‘s not used," Google's project page for Roughtime states. " Most computers will trust an unauthenticated NTP reply to set the system clock meaning that a MITM [man-in-the-middle] attacker can control a victim’s clock and, probably, violate the security properties of some of the protocols listed above."

• DDoS Vulnerability Can Disrupt The Whole Bitcoin Infrastructure [Ed: Latest FUD about Bitcoin. A DDOS attack can disrupt anything at sufficient capacity levels, including Wall Street and ANY financial market.]

• Crippling DDoS vulnerability put the entire Bitcoin market at risk

• This Russian botnet mimics your click to prevent Android device factory resets

  According to researchers from Check Point, the botnet has been developed by a group of Russian-speaking hackers known as "The Lucy Gang," and demos have already been provided to potential subscribers to the system looking for Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) solutions.

  Botnets are a thorn in the side for cybersecurity firms, hosting providers, and everyday businesses alike. The systems are made up of enslaved devices including mobile devices, Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets, and PCs.

• The beautiful puzzle adventure 'The Gardens Between' is now out with native Linux support

  The Gardens Between from The Voxel Agents looks like a fantastic puzzle adventure and it's now available with native Linux support.

• Feral Interactive are teasing ANOTHER new Linux port

  As a reminder, Feral Interactive have only recently release Life is Strange: Before the Storm and Total War: Warhammer II is confirmed to be coming this autumn. On top of that, last month they also put up another teaser that we're still guessing.

  I wouldn't be surprised if they do try to get more ports out earlier now, especially with Steam Play which would eat into their Linux port sales. Anyway…looks like 2018 really will be another great year for Linux gaming!

  The amount of Linux games Feral has ported now is kind of ridiculous: XCOM, XCOM 2, Tomb Raider, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Mad Max, Shadow of Mordor, HITMAN, F1 2017, Life is Strange, Life is Strange: Before the Storm, Dawn of War II, Dawn of War III, DiRT Rally and the list goes on.

Nitrux is a Linux distribution with a focus on portable, application formats like AppImages. Nitrux uses KDE Plasma 5 and KDE Applications, and it also uses our in-house software suite Nomad Desktop.

For eligible students or others with time to participate, the winter 2018 round of the Outreachy program openened this week for applications.

This next round of the Outreachy program runs from December to March and accepted participants receive a $5,500 USD stipend as well as a $500 travel allowance. As is always the case with Outreachy, the program isn't limited to programming tasks but also include documentation, UI/UX work, illustrations, and other areas. These projects are very diverse and range from a coloring book to this year's VKMS work.

Quite a feat for modern open-source projects with large C/C++ code-bases developed over the years, Mesa3D can almost be compiled now without any warnings -- there's just one remaining.

When paired with the latest GCC 8 stable compiler, Mesa paired with some pending patches is down to just one compiler warning left in the build process -- quite an improvement compared to in the past with older versions of GCC and Mesa.

• IBM open source ‘anti-bias’ AI tool to combat racist robot fear factor [Ed: IBM continues to googlebomb the news with PR lies]

• Moodlerooms Becomes Blackboard Open LMS [Ed: Anti-FOSS actor (and Microsoft-connected) Blackboard is openwashing itself and EEEing the competition, Moodle]

• Blackboard Reports Surprisingly Strong Growth Among Open-Source Clients [Ed: The equivalent of "Microsoft loves Linux" or milking one's competition to kill it by hijacking it]

• MicroBitcoin Open Source Community Signs an Exclusive Contract with the Korea Association of Care Workers (KACW) to Expand its Usability to One and a Half Million Users [Ed: Calling oneself "MicroBitcoin Open Source Community" for openwashing and painting oneself as "community"]

• Managing Open Source Risks [Ed: Veracode is a career basher of FOSS, now working with Microsoft too]

• What Embedded Developers Need to Know About Open Source [Ed: Rogue Wave Software is still rogue and anti-FOSS. Article also starts by talking about Microsoft.]

• Sonali's Internship work on the Free Software Directory, part 2

• Internship work on the Free Software Directory, part 2

• Office Hours #0: Debugging with GDB

  This is a report on the first “office hours”, in which we discussed debugging Rust programs with gdb. I’m very grateful to Ramana Venkata for suggesting the topic, and to Tom Tromey, who joined in. (Tom has been doing a lot of the work of integrating rustc into gdb and lldb lately.)

  This blog post is just going to be a quick summary of the basic workflow of using Rust with gdb on the command line. I’m assuming you are using Linux here, since I think otherwise you would prefer a different debugger. There are probably also nifty graphical tools you can use and maybe even IDE integrations, I’m not sure.

• Red Hat (RHT) Announces Kevin M. Murai to Board

• Red Hat Appoints Kevin M. Murai to Its Board of Directors

  Murai has been employed by Synnex Corporation (“Synnex”), a company providing distribution, logistics and integration services for the technology industry and outsourced services focused on customer engagement, since March 2008. He served as president and CEO (December 2008 - March 1, 2018), and president and co-CEO (March 2008 - December 2008). Murai has been a director of Synnex since March 2008 and has served as chairman of its board since March 1, 2018. Prior to joining Synnex, he held several executive management positions over the course of 19 years at Ingram Micro Inc., a provider of global technology and supply chain services, including president, chief operating officer and a member of its board of directors.

• Microsoft and Red Hat hit on winning growth formula [Ed: This is a puff piece (see 'author'), not an actual article; Microsoft engages in bribery and corruption in the whole world. But having hired from Microsoft (for top management, Red Hat sees no trouble with this.]

• Red Hat CEO Optimistic About OpenShift 4.0 as RHEL Lags

  Red Hat's business model has long been founded on sales of its core Linux platform, but moving forward that might shift somewhat as organizations increasingly move to the company's OpenShift container platform.

  Red Hat reported its second quarter fiscal 2019 financial results on Sept. 19, with revenue coming in at $823 million, for a 14 percent year-over-year gain.

  Looking forward, the company provided third quarter guidance for revenue to be in the range of $848 million to $856 million, which is up approximately 13 to 14 percent. Analysts on Red Hat's earning call were concerned about an apparent deceleration in the company's renewals for its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform.

  "The better OpenShift does and the more time we're spending on that, the less time we're selling RHEL," Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said during his company's earnings call. "There's just so much momentum around OpenShift right now that it does kind of eat into selling time on RHEL; we feel really good about the macro trends around Linux, and it’s just about the ability of us to have the bandwidth to pick it all up."

• Red Hat (RHT) Q2 Earnings Beat, Revenues Miss Estimates

• Red Hat Is Stuck In Neutral as BTIG Questions Subscription Model

• Investors are upbeat on the prospect of these stock’s: Red Hat, Inc., (NYSE: RHT), Lennar Corporation, (NYSE: LEN)

• U.S. STOCKS ON THE MOVE-GE, Red Hat, Under Armour, Eventbrite, U.S. defense stocks

• Under Armour, Herman Miller rise; Red Hat, Stitch Fix fall

• Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Dips 6.53% for September 20

• Red Hat: Not Exactly A Warning

• Security updates for Friday

• Mirai botnet hackers [sic] avoid jail time by helping FBI

  The three men, Josiah White, 21, Dalton Norman, 22, and Paras Jha, 22, all from the US, managed to avoid the clink by providing "substantial assistance in other complex cybercrime investigations", according to the US Department of Justice. Who'd have thought young hacker [sic] types would roll over and show their bellies when faced with prison time....

• A healthcare IT foundation built on gooey clay

  Today, there was a report from the Solicitor General of Singapore about the data breach of the SingHealth systems that happened in July.

  These systems have been in place for many years. They are almost exclusively running Microsoft Windows along with a mix of other proprietary software including Citrix and Allscript. The article referred to above failed to highlight that the compromised “end-user workstation” was a Windows machine. That is the very crucial information that always gets left out in all of these reports of breaches.

  I have had the privilege of being part of an IT advisory committee for a local hospital since about 2004 (that committee has disbanded a couple of years ago, btw).

  [...]

  Part of the reason is because decision makers (then and now) only have experience in dealing with proprietary vendor solutions. Some of it might be the only ones available and the open source world has not created equivalent or better offerings. But where there are possibly good enough or even superior open source offerings, they would never be considered – “Rather go with the devil I know, than the devil I don’t know. After all, this is only a job. When I leave, it is someone else’s problem.” (Yeah, I am paraphrasing many conversations and not only from the healthcare sector).

  I recall a project that I was involved with – before being a Red Hatter – to create a solution to create a “computer on wheels” solution to help with blood collection. As part of that solution, there was a need to check the particulars of the patient who the nurse was taking samples from. That patient info was stored on some admission system that did not provide a means for remote, API-based query. The vendor of that system wanted tens of thousands of dollars to just allow the query to happen. Daylight robbery. I worked around it – did screen scrapping to extract the relevant information.

  Healthcare IT providers look at healthcare systems as a cashcow and want to milk it to the fullest extent possible (the end consumer bears the cost in the end).

  Add that to the dearth of technical IT skills supporting the healthcare providers, you quickly fall into that vendor lock-in scenario where the healthcare systems are at the total mercy of the proprietary vendors.

We wrote on various search tools recently like in 9 Productivity Tools for Linux That Are Worth Your Attention and FSearch, and readers suggested awesome alternatives. Today, we bring you an app that can find text anywhere in your computer in grand style – Recoll.

Recoll is an open-source GUI search utility app with an outstanding full-text search capability.

You can use it to search for keywords and file names on Linux distros and Windows. It supports most of the document formats and plugins for text extraction.

• Distributed tracing in a microservices world

• Tracking and Controlling Microservice Dependencies

  In search of a cappuccino, cheese bread, and a place to check her email, Silvia walked into a coffee shop. Upon connecting to the Wi-Fi hotspot, a captive portal prompted her to log in and offered a few third-party authentication options. When she clicked on one of the access token providers, her browser showed a "No Internet Connection" error. Since she didn't have access to the network, she couldn't get an OAuth token—and she couldn't access the network without one.

  This short story illustrates a critical detail of system design that can easily go unnoticed until an outage takes place: cyclic dependencies.

  Dependency cycles will be familiar to you if you have ever locked your keys inside your house or car. You can't open the lock without the key, but you can't get the key without opening the lock. Some cycles are obvious, but more complex dependency cycles can be challenging to find before they lead to outages. Strategies for tracking and controlling dependencies are necessary for maintaining reliable systems.

• How to set up LDAP authentication for the Red Hat AMQ 7 management console

• How to Create a Swap File in Linux

• calcurse – free calendar and scheduling application for the command line

• What is Istio?

• How to install Paperwork on Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

• How to Create an HTTP Proxy Using Squid on CentOS 7

• How to Install the Latest VLC Player in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• Install Lightning Calendar Addon in Icedove Mail Client

• loop files with SPACES on their names

• Linux pkill Command Tutorial for Beginners (5 Examples)

• Open Source Summit EU Registration Deadline, Sept. 22, Register Now to Save $150 [Ed: Microsoft is the "DIAMOND" sponsor of this event, the highest sponsorship level! Linux Foundation, or the Zemlin PAC, seems to be more about Microsoft than about Linux.]

• Building a Secure Ecosystem for Node.js [Ed: Earlier today the Zemlin PAC did this puff piece for Microsoft (a sponsor)]

• The Human Side of Digital Transformation: 7 Recommendations and 3 Pitfalls [Ed: New Zemlin PAC-sponsored and self-serving puff piece]

  Not so long ago, business leaders repeatedly asked: “What exactly is digital transformation and what will it do for my business?” Today we’re more likely to hear, “How do we chart a course?”

  Our answer: the path to digital involves more than selecting a cloud application platform. Instead, digital, at its heart, is a human journey. It’s about cultivating a mindset, processes, organization and culture that encourages constant innovation to meet ever-changing customer expectations and business goals.

  In this two-part blog series we’ll share seven guidelines for getting digital right. Read on for the first three.

• Fedora 29 Beta Will Be Released Next Week

  After slipping last week, the highly anticipated Fedora 29 beta release will set sail next week.

  At Thursday's meeting on the state of the Fedora 29 beta bugs, it was decided that the beta is ready to ship. After five release candidates of the beta, the blocker bugs around installation problems, some GNOME bugs, and other blockers have been resolved.

• Fedora Is Looking For Help Testing Their New Silverblue

  Fedora is hosting a test day today for testing their new Silverblue spin, formerly known as Fedora Atomic Workstation.

  With the Fedora 29 release due out in about one month it will be their first under the new Silverblue branding. Fedora Silverblue should be pretty much usable today, but by Fedora 30 next spring they are aiming for it to be in great shape.

  Silverblue sets up Fedora to excel at container-based computing, rely upon Flatpaks for desktop applications, support a variety of technologies and workflows via GNOME Software, and other modern approaches to OS development and software deployment.

• Software Freedom Day – SFD

  Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a Technology Event held annually worldwide to promote and disseminate the benefits of Free Software, its Philosophy and related Technologies.

  On September 15th, I was invited to give a talk about Fedora, this event that took place at the National University of San Luis Gonzaga, Ica.

A significant update to the Q4OS Centaurus testing version is available for download, you can find 64bit iso image at the dedicated Testing releases site. Anybody is invited to try it out and report bugs and glitches.

This release brings quite significant changes and improvements, the most important one is that Q4OS switched to the Calamares installer. That offers nice new installation features, for example fully encrypt target system, easy disk drive partitioning and many others. Another important change is move to the new Trinity 14.0.6 development version. All dependencies from the current stable Q4OS Scorpion has been removed, so the Centaurus now becomes fully independent getting its own repositories and dependencies. Secure boot support has been improved too. The Calamares installer detects, if secure boot is active and adjusts the target system accordingly. If secure boot is switched off in the firmware, no Secure boot stuff is installed.

Q4OS Centaurus 3.4 is based on the current Debian 'Buster' and Trinity desktop 14.0.6 development branches. Q4OS Centaurus will be in development until Debian Buster becomes stable, and will be supported at least five years from the official release date.