• An "obsessive," "anti-imperialist" Turing Complete computer language with only one command

  Daniel writes, "An obsessive programmer, frustrated with not only the inefficiencies of mainstream OSes like Windows, but what he sees as their 'imperialistic oppression,' built an entire operating system using a subleq architecture. Subleq is a OISC, a language with only a single command. It lacks the most basic features of programming languages, and yet is Turing Complete.

• PHP 7.3-RC1 Released, Benchmarks Looking Good For This Next PHP7 Update

  Released this week was the first RC milestone for the PHP 7.3 feature update due out before year's end. This weekend I ran some fresh PHP benchmarks looking at its performance.

  The PHP 7.3 release candidate is made up of many fixes ranging from memory corruption and segmentation faults to undefined symbols and other problems. The list of changes can be found via the NEWS entry.

• Louis-Philippe Véronneau: GIMP 2.10

  GIMP 2.10 landed in Debian Testing a few weeks ago and I have to say I'm very happy about it. The last major version of GIMP (2.8) was released in 2012 and the new version fixes a lot of bugs and improved the user interface.

• Political strategy game Democracy 4 announced with Linux support

  Positech Games have announced Democracy 4 [Official Site], the next evolution of their political strategy game and it's coming with Linux support. For those who think they can run a country or would like to have a go at it, this is probably the closest you will ever get.

  This is good to see, because we had Democracy 3 that supported Linux, but Democracy 3 Africa did not support Linux. A shame too, because I rather liked what I saw in Democracy 3 which is why I'm quite happy about this news.

• 7 Top free & open source web hosting control panel (Cpanel)

  Setting up a website is not an easy task especially when you have to maintain multiple websites including databases and other files. Its become more hectic, when you go for VPS servers or Cloud hosting those are not more than a just bare server machine with some Linux operating system such as CentOS or Ubuntu. Those are website developers or familiar to how to up and run a website on Linux server definitely looking for some kind of free & open source tools to manage a website’s hosting backend.

  To solve such situations we have web hosting control panels or admin panels software those comes really handy and helps to get rid of the command interface for setting up each and everything.

• Gavi's Song sheet music with TuxGuitar and LilyPond

  A year or two ago I bought Lindsey Stirling’s Album Brave Enough. It’s wonderful all around, but I really fell in love with Gavi’s Song.

  Three weeks ago I took a stab at playing this on my guitar. It’s technically not actually that difficult – After listening to the original and trying to repeat it for several days, I can now actually play through it without too many hiccups (still far from being YouTube’able, though). At least the first two thirds – but what I have is enough to get the feeling across, and it has a proper ending.

• How to Increase File Upload Size in PHP

• Simple guide to install PostGreSQL on Ubuntu

• Combating article theft by delaying RSS feeds

• Proposal: .editorconfig files in every KDE Repository

  There’s some discussion on D15383 about the use of editorconfig in our sources, I belive that we should have this little file in *all* of our projects (actually I would put this in *every single project that exists*. This is a small file that handles common code conventions per project, for instance the tab vs spaces thing.

• KDE Akademy 2018

  Yeah I am not in the picture, but I was there! You can find me over on the left there, where several of us were cut off Akademy was held in the lovely city of Vienna, Austria this year. Hats off to the akademy team for a great job!

  This year at akademy I spent much of my time catching up with the Blue Systems team and meeting with the KDE Sysadmin team. I am happy to report Ben Cooksley is real! Due to my flights, I missed the first and last day. It was still a productive akademy. I attended some good sysadmin and KDE Neon BoFs . I also did a bit of volunteering

  Even though I am mostly packaging for Debian directly these days, KDE Neon is still near and dear to my heart. I hope to be able to merge debian packaging into Neon soon so that we can have better collaboration within the team.

  I met with Ben in regards to getting back into sysadmin/CI work. I am working on Appimage tooling for KDE Binary factory to begin. I hope to utilize the craft tooling to make everyone’s lives easier. This of course is on my free time, but do keep an eye out!

• Krita Interview with Alyssa May

Linux Accessibility For The Visually Impaired. I received a comment from Milton asking me about text to speech options in Linux. He also wanted to know what I recommended for audio dictation under Linux. The first option is indeed, using FoSS awesomeness. However the later relies on Google’s Web Speech API. Also, here is that article on controlling your mouse cursor with your webcam and no hands.

• The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) Helps Prevent Frivolous Software Patent Lawsuits
• Abstract Patents (Things One Can Do With Pen and Paper, Sometimes an Abacus) Are a Waste of Money as Courts Disregard Them
• “Blockchain” Hype and “FinTech”-Like Buzzwords Usher in Software Patents Everywhere, Even Where Such Patents Are Obviously Bunk
• Qualcomm’s Patent Aggression Threatens Rationality of Patent Scope in Europe and Elsewhere
• Months After Oil States the Patent Maximalists Are Still Desperate to Crush PTAB in the Courts, Not Just in Congress and the Office
• IAM, Watchtroll and the EPO Still Spread the Mentality of Patent Maximalism
• Watchtroll and Other Proponents of Patent Trolls Are Trying to Change the Law Outside the Courts in Order to Bypass Patent Justice

• 16 best new Android games released this week including Chaos Reborn: Adventures, Vampire's Fall: Origins, and ...

• This week in Android: The good, the bad, and the beauty of OnePlus

• Google changed the settings on Android phones without their owners' permission

• What do Android users think about the upcoming Apple partnership?

• Championing Android for BYOD Market

• Gboard's Glide Typing Feature Is Broken for Some Android Users, Google Details Method to Fix Bug

• Mobility MEA becomes first Android Zero-Touch Enrolment partner

• How Apple's New Lineup and iPhone XR will Influence Android Trends, for Better and Worse

While the paperless world isn't here quite yet, more and more people are getting rid of paper by scanning documents and photos. Having a scanner isn't enough to do the deed, though. You need software to drive that scanner.

But the catch is many scanner makers don't have Linux versions of the software they bundle with their devices. For the most part, that doesn't matter. Why? Because there are good scanning applications available for the Linux desktop. They work with a variety of scanners and do a good job.

• Initial Flatpak support arrives for Windows Subsystem for Linux

• Aussie banks dragged into the 'open source' era via GitHub

  The open banking Data Standards Body, which is being run by the CSIRO's Data61 unit, is using the online service to manage feedback and comments for the technical standards that will govern the movement of data in the new economy. All decision proposals and final decisions for the open banking standards will be published on GitHub.

• eBay Replatforming to Kubernetes, Envoy and Kafka: Intending to Open Source Hardware and Software

  eBay have discussed how they are conducting a replatforming initiative across their entire technology stack, which includes building and releasing as open source both the new hardware and software created. Open source is "fueling the transformation" of eBay's infrastructure, and they intend to use cloud native technologies like Kubernetes, Envoy, MongoDB, Docker and Apache Kafka.

  As part of a three-year effort to replatform and modernise their backend infrastructure, eBay has recently announced that they are building their own custom-designed servers "built by eBay, for eBay". The plan also includes making eBay's servers available to the public via open source in the fourth quarter of this year. Although many large scale technical organisations and cloud vendors custom build their own hardware, including Google, AWS and Azure, they do not typically release this as open source. eBay have stated that they "are using servers and hardware that we designed, reducing our dependence on third parties".

No more F-words and angry outbursts from Torvalds anymore? Linux creator Linus Torvalds is taking a break from Linux kernel development in order to take professional help for improving his behavior.

• Cryptocurrency mining attacks using leaked NSA hacking tools are still highly active a year later

  Yet, more than a year since Microsoft released patches that slammed the backdoor shut, almost a million computers and networks are still unpatched and vulnerable to attack.

• Leaked NSA exploits are still used to infect at least 919K servers with cryptojacking malware [Ed: Microsoft gave the NSA back doors. It was inevitable that crackers who do not work for the US government would get in too.]

  Although Microsoft indicated that they have closed the backdoor used by this ransomware, more computers globally are not fully secured to prevent the infection by the malware. Interestingly, the hackers have shifted their game from asking for ransom and are now infecting new computers with cryptojacking malware.

• Cybersecurity Is Only 1 Part of Election Security

  The DEF CON 2018 Voting Machine Hacking Village aimed to raise awareness in voting security through a full day of speakers and panel discussions along with a challenge for attendees to hack more than 30 pieces of voting equipment. A partnership with rOOtz Asylum offered youths between 8 and 16 years old an opportunity to hack replicas of the websites of secretaries of state to demonstrate that even hackers with limited years of experience can easily compromise critical systems. The goal was to break as many voting machine pieces as possible in order to draw attention to the vulnerabilities that will be present in the upcoming 2018 elections.

  The focus on election equipment, however, ignores the greater danger caused by hacking into the diverse collection of sensitive information that flows through political campaigns and the electoral process, and using that to influence and sow distrust among voters. While changing a vote or voting results can be traced back to a particular stakeholder, changing people's understanding of facts is far more insidious.

• Open Source Security Podcast: Episode 114 - Review of "Click Here to Kill Everybody"

  Josh and Kurt review Bruce Schneier's new book Click Here to Kill Everybody. It's a book everyone could benefit from reading. It does a nice job explaining many existing security problems in a simple manner.

In a surprising move, Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, is taking a break on his Linux kernel work to work on his behavior to other developers. In a note to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), Torvalds wrote, "I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely."

If you follow the trials and tribulations of Linux's developments, this is mind-blowing. For the almost 30-years Torvalds has been working on the kernel, he's been famous--or infamous--for his outbursts towards programmers and others who didn't meet his high expectations.

Over the decades, Torvalds has torn into security developers, open-source lawyers, and other kernel developers, such as Sage, formerly Sarah, Sharp. Every few months, there would be another four-letter Torvalds eruption. This became publicly accepted, but privately it left bad blood.

On the whole, I liked running LMDE 3 a lot. The distribution was easy to set up, I liked the quick access to common tools in the welcome window. The change from ranked upgrades to having the system safeguarded by Timeshift snapshots may make things a little harder for newcomers (it's harder to recover a system than to not have it break in the first place), but the new approach probably offers better security in the long run.

One thing I appreciated about LMDE 3 is that it looks beautiful. I usually don't focus much on a theme, or icon style, but Mint looks incredible to me. Everything is high contrast and attractive. The fonts are a little thin for my taste, but this can be easily changed with a few clicks in the settings panel.

I was a little disappointed the system installer defaults to using ext4 instead of Btrfs. Since Mint recommends and relies on Timeshift for system recovery, and Btrfs snapshots are much more efficient than rsync snapshots, it makes sense to me to use Btrfs by default. On a related note, when Timeshift is set up to use rsync snapshots, the rsync command will drag down system performance for about 20 minutes at a time. Having the snapshots run as a lower priority in the background would have avoided slowing down the desktop once a day.

I would have preferred if LMDE had shipped with MATE instead of Cinnamon. I realize Cinnamon is an in-house desktop project and it makes sense for the Mint developers to focus on using and promoting Cinnamon. However, since I suspect many of the people who want to use the Debian branch over the Ubuntu branch will be doing so for performance reasons, I think MATE would make the sensible default. MATE is lighter than Cinnamon, does not require special video driver/hardware support and will run better in virtual environments. Cinnamon is a solid desktop and I think it looks and performs wonderfully on physical hardware, it just doesn't feel like the optimal choice for people who want to run the lighter, more conservative Debian branch of Mint.

Finally, I want to give credit to the Mint team for integrating Flatpak support into the software manager. It is easy to find Flatpaks without having them blend in with other packages, potentially confusing users. I think Flatpak support was handled well by the Mint team.

On the whole, the above points are minor style preferences for a distribution that I was impressed by. Mint's Debian edition performed smoothly, offered a lot of great software out of the box and was easy to use. I think the Debian branch might be slightly less appealing to beginners than the main, Ubuntu-based edition, but there are few practical differences and most people will probably find either branch works for them. I think LMDE will be a good fit for most people, whether beginners or more experienced users.

• How to Install and Configure Nginx ‘Web Server’ on Ubuntu 18.04 / Debian 9

• Fedora 28 : Using AdonisJs web framework.

• How to Install Chamilo on Debian 9

• How to Install and Configure VNC on CentOS 7

• Printing Two-Sided from the Command Line

• Browsing your mail with Rust and Qt

• SQLite Release 3.25.0 On 2018-09-15

• SQLite 3.25 Released With Window Functions, Optimizations & Geopoly Module

  SQLite 3.25 was released this weekend as the newest feature update to this embed-friendly SQL database library.

  The big feature to SQLite 3.25 is support for window functions inspired by PostgreSQL where input values are taken from a "window" of 1+ rows in the results set of a SELECT query. SQLite window functions should be compatible with similar PostgreSQL queries and described well in the documentation.

Prior to releasing Linux 4.19-rc4 and Linus Torvalds taking a temporary leave of absence to reflect on his behavior / colorful language, he did apply a Code of Conduct to the Linux kernel.

Previously the Linux kernel had a "Code of Conflict" that some might feel is rather harsh. But now it's been replaced by a Code of Conduct that is derived from the Contributor Covenant that has been used by the X.Org Foundation / FreeDesktop.org projects, among others.

After writing yesterday about kernel contributions of AMD vs. NVIDIA vs. Intel, I kicked off the hours-long process of gitstats analyzing the Linux kernel Git repository for some fresh numbers on the current kernel development trends.

Even on an EPYC server with Optane 900p NVMe SSD storage, the gitstats process on the hearty Linux kernel repository is quite a task. But the process is done and offering a fresh look at the current Linux kernel activity in Git. Here are some of the findings:

The kernel repository is at 782,487 commits in total from around 19.009 different authors. The repository is made up of 61,725 files and from there around 25,584,633 lines -- keep in mind there is also documentation, Kconfig build files, various helpers/utilities, etc.

I am also mindful of ego. None of us like to admit we have an ago, but we all do. You don’t get to build one of the most fundamental technologies in the last thirty years and not have an ego. He built it…they came…and a revolution was energized because of what he created. While Linus’s ego is more subtle, and thankfully doesn’t extend to faddish self-promotion, overly expensive suits, and forays into Hollywood (quite the opposite), his ego has naturally resulted in abrupt opinions on how his project should run, sometimes plugging fingers in his ears to particularly challenging viewpoints from others. His post today is a clear example of him putting Linux as a project ahead of his own personal ego.

This is important for a few reasons. Firstly, being in such a public position and accepting your personal flaws isn’t a problem many people face, and isn’t a situation many people handle well. I work with a lot of CEOs, and they often say it is the loneliest job on the planet. I have heard American presidents say the same in interviews. This is because they are the top of the tree with all the responsibility and expectations on their shoulders. Put yourself in Linus’s position: his little project has blown up into a global phenomenon, and he didn’t necessarily have the social tools to be able to handle this change. Ego forces these internal struggles under the surface and to push them down and avoid them. So, to accept them as publicly and openly as he did today is a very firm step in the right direction. Now, the true test will be results, but we need to all provide the breathing space for him to accomplish them.

So, I would encourage everyone to give Linus a shot. This doesn’t mean the frustrations of the past are erased, and he has acknowledged and apologized for these mistakes as a first step. He has accepted he struggles with understanding other’s emotions, and a desire to help improve this for the betterment of the project and himself. He is a human, and the best tonic for humans to resolve their own internal struggles is the support and encouragement of other humans. This is not unique to Linus, but to anyone who faces similar struggles.

Also: Kernel prepatch 4.19-rc4; Linus taking a break

Another week, another rc.

Nothing particularly odd stands out on the technical side in the
kernel updates for last week - rc4 looks fairly average in size for
this stage in the release cycle, and all the other statistics look
pretty normal too.

We've got roughly two thirds driver fixes (gpu and networking look to
be the bulk of it, but there's smaller changes all over in various
driver subsystems), with the rest being the usual mix: core
networking, perf tooling updates, arch updates, Documentation, some
filesystem, vm and minor core kernel fixes.

So it's all fairly small and normal for this stage. As usual, I'm
appending the shortlog at the bottom for people who want to get an
overview of the details without actually having to go dig in the git
tree.

Also: Linux 4.19-rc4 Released As Linus Temporarily Steps Away From Kernel Maintainership

• Xiaomi Poco F1 spotted on Geekbench running Android 9.0 Pie, beta could come out soon

• Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Pro now receiving Android 8.1 Oreo based MIUI 10 stable update

• POCO F1 may soon get Android 9 Pie update

• Pixel 3 release - Some of the best details about this Android flagship revealed

• OnePlus 6 gets Android 9.0 Pie-based OxygenOS Open Beta3 with new Google Assistant shortcut

• Android WARNING: Google smartphone users alerted about DOZENS of fake apps

• This week in Android: The good, the bad, and the beauty of OnePlus

• How to control notifications in Android Pie

• iPhone to Android: The ultimate switching guide

• Linux 4.18.8

• Linux 4.14.70

• Linux 4.9.127

• Linux 4.4.156