• Linux-friendly medical PC supports Nvidia graphics

  IEI’s Linux-ready “HTB-200-C236” medical vision computer has a 6th Gen Xeon or 7th Gen Core CPU, PCIe x16 and x4 slots for Nvidia or Mustang cards, and AetherAI pathology modules for bone marrow smear, cancer screening, and object detection.

  IEI has launched an edge AI computer aimed at the medical industry in collaboration with AetherAI, which is furnishing three preloaded AetherAI pathology modules. The HTB-200-C236 runs Linux or Win 10 on a 6th Gen Skylake Intel Xeon E3-1268LV with 4x 2.4GHz/3.4GHz cores and an Intel C326 chipset. An optional 7th Gen Kaby Lake, quad-core Core i5-7500T has the same 35W TDP.

• Lindenis V536 SoM & SBC Targets 4K Camera Applications

  Back in summer 2018, we wrote about Lindenis V5 single board computer based on Allwinner V5 quad-core Cortex-A7 processor with two MIPI CSI connectors and designed for 4K cameras.

• problem-oriented

  Don’t get me wrong; the MAAS doc is pretty solid. I just want to do more with it. As in not just update it for new versions, but make it come alive and show off what MAAS can do. I also want to pick up some of the mid-range applications and situations. MAAS is well-envisioned in large datacentres, and there are obviously hobbyists and small shops tinkering, but that’s not the bulk of people who could genuinely benefit from it. I want to dig into some of the middle-industry, small-to-medium-size possibilities.

  Since I already know something about small hospital datacentres, having worked with them for about ten years, that might be a good place to start. Hospitals from 50-200 beds tend to have the same requirements as a full-size facility, but the challenges of a somewhat smaller budget and lower IT headcount. It really feels like a good sample problem for MAAS.

• Security updates for Tuesday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (openconnect), Fedora (e2fsprogs, glibc, kernel, and nss), openSUSE (Mesa, php7, and slurm), Oracle (.NET Core, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, and thunderbird), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-openjdk, openvswitch, and openvswitch2.11), Scientific Linux (java-1.8.0-openjdk), SUSE (java-11-openjdk, libssh, libvpx, Mesa, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (libbsd and samba).

• KeePass2 2.44 Released with True Key 4 CSV Import

  KeePass 2.44 was released a days ago as the latest stable mono password manager. Users of any previous 2.x version are recommended to upgrade.

  KeePass Password Safe was a Windows only password manager. Through the use of Mono, KeePass 2.x works on Linux and Mac OS.

• Convenience over security: Mobile healthcare apps open up fresh risks to patients’ data

  Healthcare is increasingly going mobile, as hospitals and medical practitioners look to reduce waiting room times by harnessing the benefits of treatment on the go. But patients are often placing too much trust in these apps, which can often expose them to fresh security and privacy risks.

  The rapid growth of mobile healthcare app market was borne more out of necessity than any medical advancement, in the view of Adam Piper, a software developer working in the UK.

  “If I want to get a doctor’s appointment, it has to be today, and by 8.01am all the appointments are gone,” Piper told The Daily Swig.

An increasing number of IT groups are incorporating development tools, such as containers, in order to create cloud-native apps that operate in a constant manner across public, private, and hybrid clouds.

However, the trickiest part is to find the best container platforms for the organization. It is hard to make the correct decisions regarding container orchestration for managing lifecycles of the containers in order to function at scale and accelerate innovation.

Containers can be Linux

It is vital for every application to run on Linux since the containers are always running on a Linux host.

Containers that are used for managing their lifecycles, work best with Linux. However, these days, Kubernetes is the popular container orchestration platform that was built on Linux concepts and make use of Linux tooling and application programming interfaces (APIs) for managing the containers.

The companies are advised to opt for a Linux distribution that they know and trust before taking any decision on the OS for their container platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), an OS platform, suits well for operating company’s containers as it provides stability and security features simultaneously, allowing developers to be agile.

• Krita Weekly #9

  With everyone getting back into work, we have managed to control the number of bugs. There are 2 fewer bugs than what I reported last time. I know it is still not a lot, but with Dmitry not available for most of the time and team having to divide its time between the resource rewrite & bug fixing, it is pretty good that the number is decreasing.

• Reference lines and image elements

  We continue working on the plotting capabilities of LabPlot. In the next release we will be adding two new worksheet objects to provide more flexibility and features to create attractive looking visualizations. In this short blog post we want to report on this recent development.

• Skipping functions from entire directories while debugging (e.g. skip all functions from system headers)

  So, today I got finally so tired of navigating (or explicitly stepping over) all the internal functions in gdb (you know, all the inline functions from STL containers, from Boost, from this pointer wrapper class, that string class) that I finally googled 'gdb skip system functions'. And guess what, it's been there since gdb 7.12, from 3 years ago, and it's almost trivial, just adding something like this to ~/.gdbinit:

• Wine 5.0 Released

  The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 5.0 is now available.

  This release represents a year of development effort and over 7,400 individual changes. It contains a large number of improvements that are listed in the release notes below. The main highlights are:

  - Builtin modules in PE format.
  - Multi-monitor support.
  - XAudio2 reimplementation.
  - Vulkan 1.1 support.

  This release is dedicated to the memory of Józef Kucia, who passed away in August 2019 at the young age of 30. Józef was a major contributor to Wine's Direct3D implementation, and the lead developer of the vkd3d project. His skills and his kindness are sorely missed by all of us.

• Wine release 5.0

  What's new in Wine 5.0
  ======================
  
  
  *** PE modules
  
  - Most modules are built in PE format (Portable Executable, the
    Windows binary format) instead of ELF when the MinGW compiler is
    available. This helps various copy protection schemes that check
    that the on-disk and in-memory contents of system modules are
    identical.
  
  - The actual PE binaries are copied into the Wine prefix instead of
    the fake DLL files. This makes the prefix look more like a real
    Windows installation, at the cost of some extra disk space.
  
  - Modules that have been converted to PE can use standard wide-char C
    functions, as well as wide-char character constants like L"abc".
    This makes the code easier to read.
  
  - Not all modules have been converted to PE yet; this is an ongoing
    process that will continue during the Wine 5.x development series.
  
  - The Wine C runtime is updated to support linking to MinGW-compiled
    binaries; it is used by default instead of the MinGW runtime when
    building DLLs.
  
  
  *** Graphics
  
  - Multiple display adapters and monitors are properly supported,
    including dynamic configuration changes.
  
  - The Vulkan driver supports up to version 1.1.126 of the Vulkan spec.
  
  - The WindowsCodecs library is able to convert more bitmap formats,
    including palette-indexed formats.
  
  
  *** Direct3D
  
  - Fullscreen Direct3D applications inhibit the screensaver.
  
  - DXGI swapchain presents inform the application when the
    corresponding window is minimized. This typically allows
    applications to reduce CPU usage while minimized, and is in some
    cases required to allow the application window to be restored again.
  
  - Switching between fullscreen and windowed modes using the standard
    Alt+Enter combination is implemented for DXGI applications.
  
  - The following features are implemented for Direct3D 12 applications:
    - Switching between fullscreen and windowed.
    - Changing display modes.
    - Scaled presents.
    - Swap intervals.
    These features were previously already implemented for earlier
    versions of the Direct3D API.
  
  - The handling of various edge cases is improved. Among others:
    - Out of range reference values for the alpha and stencil tests.
    - Sampling 2D resources with 3D samplers and vice versa.
    - Drawing with mapped textures and buffers.
    - Usage of invalid DirectDraw clipper objects.
    - Creating Direct3D devices on invalid Windows, like the desktop
      window.
    - Viewports with a minimum Z larger than or equal to the maximum Z.
    - Resources bound through both shader-resource views and
      render-target or depth-stencil views at the same time.
    - Blits between formats with and without alpha components.
    Since well-behaved applications don't rely on these edge cases, they
    typically only affect one or two applications each. There are
    nevertheless quite a number of them.
  
  - Dirty texture regions are tracked more accurately for Direct3D 8 and 9
    texture uploads.
  
  - Uploads of S3TC-compressed 3D textures require less address space.
    Since 3D textures can be potentially large, and address space
    exhaustion is a concern for 32-bit applications, S3TC-compressed 3D
    textures are uploaded per-slice, instead of in a single upload.
  
  - The ID3D11Multithread interface is implemented.
  
  - Various lighting calculation fixes and improvements for older
    DirectDraw applications have been made.
  
  - Limited support for blits across swapchains is implemented.
  
  - More shader reflection APIs are implemented.
  
  - The wined3d CPU blitter can handle compressed source resources.
    Support for compressed destination resources was already implemented
    in a previous release.
  

• Wine 5.0 Released With Big Improvements For Gaming, Countless Application Fixes

  Wine 5.0 has been released as stable as the annual timed release of this software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.

  Wine 5.0 is another big step forward in allowing modern Windows applications to run well particularly on Linux and macOS. Thanks to CodeWeavers and funding by Valve for their work on the Wine-based Proton downstream, there are many game fixes that have been incorporated over the past year especially. So Windows games are in better shape plus there is Vulkan 1.1 support, FAudio integration, and countless other improvements.

• The bottle for Wine 5.0 has officially been popped open as it's out now

  The day has arrived, the official stable release of Wine 5.0 has arrived bringing thousands of improvements and a bunch of new features.

  [...]

  Wine 5.0 as a release is also being dedicated to the memory of Józef Kucia, a major contributor to Wine's Direct3D implementation and he lead developer of the vkd3d project who sadly passed away in August 2019.

• Git Update Improves DevOps with Partial Cloning Feature

  On Jan. 13, Git 2.25 was released, bringing to one of the most commonly used developer tools new capabilities that will help improve performance and overall developer productivity.

• Solving Python Error- KeyError: 'key_name'

  As per Python 3 official documentation a key error is raised when a mapping (dictionary) key is not found in the set of existing keys.

• Python's Execution Time Is Close To C++ And Go Language: Study

  Python is the most preferred programming language for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, but it is also the least preferred for being slow to solve certain problems that involve loops.

  To challenge this fact, researchers at EPFL Computer Vision Laboratory published a report in which they presented the competitiveness of Python against C++ and Go by solving the popular N-queens puzzle.

• PHP in 2020

  It's no secret among web developers and programmers in general: PHP doesn't have the best reputation. Despite still being one of the most used languages to build web applications; over the years PHP has managed to get itself a reputation of messy codebases, inexperienced developers, insecure code, an inconsistent core library, and what not.

  While many of the arguments against PHP still stand today, there's also a bright side: you can write clean and maintainable, fast and reliable applications in PHP.

  In this post, I want to look at this bright side of PHP development. I want to show you that, despite its many shortcomings, PHP is a worthwhile language to learn. I want you to know that the PHP 5 era is coming to an end. That, if you want to, you can write modern and clean PHP code, and leave behind much of the mess it was 10 years ago.

But can you trust your VPN service provider? On more than one occasion, the VPN providers have been caught logging, snooping or sharing data with third party. What to do in such cases?

I have shared a list of privacy focused VPNs for Linux in the past and ProtonVPN is one of them. The good news is that ProtonVPN has just open sourced all its apps and underwent an independent security audit.

• Android Game SDK: What it is and how to use it in your apps

• 5 things I’d change about OnePlus’ OxygenOS Android skin

• This week in Android: Galaxy S20 leaks, Poco F2 details, and more!

• 7 things your Android phone can do that iPhone owners can only dream of

• Galaxy M40 Android 10 release nears as it picks up key certification

• Android Smartphone Trends We Expect to See This Year

• The wild $36 camera that lets your iPhone or Android see inside anything is down to $29

• Top 5 Utility Apps 2019 (Android/ iOS)

• [Update: 3 more] Google releases new digital wellbeing apps for Android

• iPhone 12 is getting a big redesign, but it’s falling behind Android in a way we never expected

• Realme XT Starts Receiving Android 10 Update With Realme UI in India

• Software Freedom Podcast #4 about REUSE with Carmen Bianca Bakker

  In the monthly Software Freedom Podcast we talk with people who have inspiring ideas about software freedom. In this episode, we talk with Carmen Bianca Bakker about the REUSE project. By this we are covering the very broad topic of software licensing and the problems there, which REUSE is able to solve with three simple steps.
  OPUS FeedMP3 Feed

• Brunch with Brent: Jim Salter | Jupiter Extras 48

  Brent sits down with Jim Salter, co-host of Jupiter Broadcasting’s TechSNAP and technology reporter at Ars Technica. We explore his relationship with computers via the US Navy, when code has it’s place in either proprietary or open source licensing, the value in being a social gadfly, and Jim’s motivations behind his writing and who he is hoping to reach and inspire.

• Test and Code: 98: pytest-testmon - selects tests affected by changed files and methods

  pytest-testmon is a pytest plugin which selects and executes only tests you need to run. It does this by collecting dependencies between tests and all executed code (internally using Coverage.py) and comparing the dependencies against changes. testmon updates its database on each test execution, so it works independently of version control.

  In this episode, I talk with testmon creator Tibor Arpas about testmon, about it's use and how it works.

• PCLinuxOS 2020.01 overview | So cool ice cubes are jealous.

  In this video, I am going to show an overview of PCLinuxOS 2020.01 and some of the applications pre-installed.

• RHEL gold images in Azure and user experience improvements for Red Hat Cloud Access

  Red Hat’s Cloud Access program is one of the ways that Red Hat helps its customers use their Red Hat subscriptions in the public cloud. In the last few weeks we’ve introduced significant enhancements and new features we don’t want you to miss, including self-service access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) gold images directly in Microsoft Azure, and a number of customer experience improvements.

• First steps with the data virtualization Operator for Red Hat OpenShift

  The Red Hat Integration Q4 release adds many new features and capabilities with an increasing focus around cloud-native data integration. The features I’m most excited about are the introduction of the schema registry, the advancement of change data capture capabilities based on Debezium to technical preview, and data virtualization (technical preview) capabilities.

  Data integration is a topic that has not received much attention from the cloud-native community so far, and we will cover it in more detail in future posts. Here, we jump straight into demonstrating the latest release of data virtualization (DV) capabilities on Red Hat OpenShift 4. This is a step-by-step visual tutorial describing how to create a simple virtual database using Red Hat Integration’s data virtualization Operator.

• Never enough: Working openly with anxiety

  I've spent most of my career in an organization built on openness and transparency, and yet I have rarely spoken about my mental health and how it might impact my work. In sharing these stories now, I hope to help reduce the stigma of mental health at work and connect with others who may be experiencing similar or related situations. Given the prevalence of mental illness globally, chances are good that if you don't experience a mental health condition first hand, then you're likely working on a daily basis with someone who does.

• Fedora's Scientific & Audio/Music Spins Could Be On Their Last Leg

  Fedora 32 could be two spins lighter with two little known variants of Fedora Linux set to be removed unless maintainers step up. 

  Fedora Jam, a spin of Fedora catered to audio/music enthusiasts, is set to be eliminated with Fedora 32 if their existing or new maintainers don't step up to work on it. Likewise, Fedora Scientific, a spin catered to shipping scientific software out-of-the-box, is also on the chopping block unless there is maintenance happening. 

For years, Nextcloud has set the standard for run-your-own Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) private clouds. Now with the open-source Nextcloud Hub, it's taking on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) office programs such as Google Docs and Office 365.

Nextcloud has long offered Collabora Online Office, a SaaS version of the open-source LibreOffice office suite to its customers. Hub, though, is a new product. It combines Nextcloud's outstanding cloud file system, Nextcloud Files, with Ascensio System's ONLYOFFICE. Together they are a complete productivity office suite with word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software document management, project management, customer relationship management (CRM), calendar, and mail.

• Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About inodes on Linux

  By definition, a file system needs to store files, and they also contain directories. The files are stored within the directories, and these directories can have subdirectories. Something, somewhere, has to record where all the files are located within the file system, what they’re called, which accounts they belong to, which permissions they have, and much more. This information is called metadata because it’s data that describes other data.

  In the Linux ext4 file system, the inode and directory structures work together to provide an underpinning framework that stores all the metadata for every file and directory. They make the metadata available to anyone who requires it, whether that’s the kernel, user applications, or Linux utilities, such as ls, stat, and df.

• Install Roundcube Webmail on CentOS 8/RHEL 8 with Apache/Nginx

• How to cut video footage in Kdenlive on Linux

• How to install Gnome Drawing on Linux

• Guide to Install and Use LibreOffice on elementary OS

• Install Racket Programming Language On Linux

• How to Install Visual Studio Code - Server IDE on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• How to Install and Configure WildFly (JBoss) on Debian 10

• How to Use Access Control Lists to Control File Permissions on Linux

• How to Install Papper Flash on Linux Mint 19

• Startpage/System1 Almost Definitely Pay for People to Lie About Their Surveillance
• The Internet is an Appalling Medium for News and It Has Only Gotten Worse
• Media Reactions to the EPO Coming to Grips With Fake Patents That It Granted (Spoiler: the Media is Controlled by Lawyers of Monopolists and EPO Partners)
• IRC Proceedings: Monday, January 20, 2020
• Links 21/1/2020: EarlyOOM Fedora Decision and AMD Zen 3 Microcode
• Links 20/1/2020: MNT Reform, Linux 5.5 RC7, KMyMoney 5.0.8

So, to help fill in the knowledge gap, KDE is including a new feedback tool in the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.18 release, due in February.

Now, before anyone gets antsy about it, let me stress that this new data collection feature is strictly opt-in (just like Ubuntu’s system reporting). It’s also up to distribution maintainers to decide whether to package the relevant module as part of the Plasma desktop.

• 7 Android tricks the iPhone doesn't have, and how to do them

• 7 things your Android phone can do iPhones owners can only dream of

• Download: POCO F1 gets official Android 10 with MIUI 11 update

• Galaxy Note 9 Android 10 update breaks cover in the UK

• WhatsApp has monumental Android news and its rivals can only dream of matching it

Today, we’re pleased to announce that the latest beta version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.2, is now available. Maintaining our commitment to a predictable, six-month release cadence for minor platform releases, RHEL 8.2 Beta is designed to make it easier for IT organizations to adopt new, production-ready innovations faster. This same cadence and engineering process is also intended to help our hardware partners more quickly deliver supported hardware configurations, furthering customer choice for their datacenter estates.

Beyond the continued benefits of the regular release cadence, RHEL 8.2 drives enhancements to the user experience for both new and existing customers, extends monitoring and performance capabilities and adds new supported developer languages and tools.

As announced back at CES, the Radeon RX 5600 XT is being launched as the newest Navi graphics card to fill the void between the original RX 5700 series and the budget RX 5500 XT. The Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards are beginning to ship today at $279+ USD price point and offers great Linux support but with one last minute -- and hopefully very temporary -- caveat.

The Radeon RX 5600 XT features 36 compute units, 2304 stream processors, up to 7.19 TFLOPs, a 1375MHz game clock, 6GB of GDDR6 video memory, and a total board power of around 150 Watts. The Radeon RX 5600 XT like the rest of the RDNA/Navi line-up is a 7nm part, supports PCI Express 4.0, and other common RDNA features.

The kindest interpretation of this situation is that the Linux Foundation has a public relations problem that it is unaware of and is overdue to correct. A more cynical interpretation is that, from its very start, the Linux Foundation has been a slow coup, gradually usurping an authority to which it has no right. Ask me on alternate days which one I believe.

Whatever the case, the solutions are the same. A concerted effort to get community members elected to at-large positions might help, although they would still be a minority. Many, too, might not want to legitimize the foundation by participating in it. A more promising response might be to see that community organizations are strengthened to provide a counter-balance, but that would be a slow solution if it worked at all.

I don’t pretend to have an answer. But I believe that free software owes its success to the fact that it is diverse. Centralizing the authority in the community means an end to free software as we know it — and that is something to be avoided at all cost. The very real good that the Linux Foundation does cannot disguise the harm that its orientation may cause.

• How to set up a Wear OS smartwatch with your Android phone

• These are all the Huawei phones getting EMUI 10 this year

• Want To Get Rid Of Navigation Issues In Android 10? Use gesturePlus App

• These Huawei smartphones will get the Android 10 and EMUI 10 update

• Realme XT Starts Receiving Android 10 Update With Realme UI in India

• Samsung Galaxy A60 and M40 Could Get Android 10 Update Ahead of Schedule

• Download: POCO F1 gets official Android 10 with MIUI 11 update

• Android 10 shows signs of life on the Xiaomi Pocophone F1

• Warning! These 30 top Android camera apps may be secretly spying on you

• Qualcomm launches three chipsets with Isro's Navic GPS for Android smartphones

• Best Android Auto head unit 2020: improve your in-car entertainment

Canonical's Daniel Van Vugt continues working on a variety of interesting performance optimizations for upstream GNOME as well as other usability enhancements for this desktop environment. One of the latest items being tackled is improving the quality of background images on GNOME.

Long story short, for where the background/wallpaper image is larger than the desktop resolution, OpenGL is used for downscaling the image. But the existing means of downscaling could lead to blurry images or just not as sharp as possible images. But now with patches pending, the mipmap level is being limited to still downscale with OpenGL but to have the maximum sharpness possible for the display.