Jose plans on continuing to push open source initiatives such as cloud and container infrastructures. He will also continue teaching advanced Unix systems administration. “I am now helping a new generation of Red Hat Certified Professionals seek their place in the world of open source. It is indeed a joy when a student mentions they have obtained their certification because of what they were exposed to in my class.” He also plans on spending some more time with his art again.

Carlos would like to write for Fedora Magazine and help bring the magazine to the Latin American community. “I would like to contribute to Fedora Magazine. If possible I would like to help with the magazine in Spanish.”

Akinsola wants to hold a Fedora a release part in 2019. “I want make many people aware of Fedora, make them aware they can be part of the release and it is easy to do.” He would also like to ensure that new Fedora users have an easy time of adapting to their new OS.

Kevin is planning is excited about 2019 being a time of great change for Fedora. “In 2019 I am looking forward to seeing what and how we retool things to allow for lifecycle changes and more self service deliverables. I think it’s going to be a ton of work, but I am hopeful we will come out of it with a much better structure to carry us forward to the next period of Fedora success.” Kevin also had some words of appreciation for everyone in the Fedora community. “I’d like to thank everyone in the Fedora community for all their hard work on Fedora, it wouldn’t exist without the vibrant community we have.”

It’s 9am on a Tuesday, early morning by cybre.space’s standards. Few have logged on to the microblogging social network, and it shows: A follower feed filled with more than 31 users updates at a snail’s pace. It’s much slower than one would expect on Twitter. But then again, cybre.space isn’t Twitter. It runs off a decentralized social media software called Mastodon, and is part of a much larger network of Mastodon communities.

Over on Twitter, users post jokes about President Donald Trump, this time of a fast food feast he prepared for the Clemson Tigers football team amid the ongoing government shutdown. But the words “Trump” and “shutdown” only appear once each on cybre.space’s “local timeline,” which shows posts on the site and any other connected “instances,” or Mastodon communities. It’s even more barren on this reporter’s home timeline: No one is talking about hamberders.

Posting works differently on cybre.space than Twitter. It’s much more like living in a queer house, one that prefers to talk about political theory over current events. Some users chat about democratic socialism and queer identity, while others talk about games, music, fandom, or their difficulties navigating trans healthcare. One user posts a message that reads “re: hrt” with a few lines about their hormone replacement regimen hidden underneath, accessible only via the “show more” content warning (CW) button next to it. Another boosts a post praising Tallahassee by the Mountain Goats, calling it a “visceral experience.”

Cybre.space has just over 2,000 users. Over on Mastodon’s flagship community, Mastodon.social, there are over 300,000 users. But despite the larger userbase, discussions are even less political. On the community’s local timeline, one user troubleshoots installing a Linux distribution. Another shares a news story about a man who tried to turn his home into a restaurant. A third links to an article about Gearbox Software’s Randy Pitchford. Here, Trump is not the sun; tech, gaming, and the occasional NSFW post largely prevail. It’s as if the outside world doesn’t exist.

There are plenty of free, ad-supported email services available online. However, the majority of those email services are not exactly secure or privacy-minded. In this post-Snowden world, Tutanota offers a free, secure email service with a focus on privacy.

This new year has brought several updated packages to users of openSUSE’s rolling release Tumbleweed.

Three snapshots have been released in 2019 so far and among the packages updated in the snapshots are KDE’s Plasma, VIM, RE2, QEMU and curl.

The 20190112 snapshot brought a little more than a handful of packages. The new upstream Long-Term-Support version of nodejs10 10.15.0 addressed some timing vulnerabilities, updated a dependency with an upgrade to OpenSSL 1.1.0j and the versional also has a 40-seconds timeout that is now applied to servers receiving HTTP headers. The changelog listed several fixes for the highly configurable text editor with vim 8.1.0687, which should now be able to be built with Ruby 2.6.0 that was released at the end of December. Google’s re2 20190101 offered some performance tweaks and bug fixes. The fast real-time compression algorithm of zstd 1.3.8 has better decompression speed on large files. There was a change in the yast2-firewall package, which arrived in the the 20190110 snapshot, that allows new ‘forward_ports’, ‘rich_rules’ and ‘source_ports’ elements in zone entries with yast2-schema 4.1.0.

• Some Android GPS apps are just showing ads on top of Google Maps

• Google is working with Unity on an ‘Android Game SDK’

• Google acquires Fossil’s smartwatch tech and Wear OS team

• Nokia X5 Android Pie update in China brings system optimization, camera upgrade and more

• LG G7 Android 9 Pie update rolls out with a surprise

• Galaxy S9 Android 9 Pie update is here - how to get these new features on your phone now

• Galaxy A8 (2018) and Galaxy A9 (2018) also certified with Android Pie

• Mysterious Lenovo phone with Android Pie gets benchmarked

• Galaxy A8 (2018) and Galaxy A9 (2018) Android Pie update is already in testing

• New Samsung tablet SM-T515 with Android 9 Pie spotted on Geekbench

• Indians download most number of Android apps in the world: AppAnnie

• These malicious Android apps will only strike when you move your smartphone

• Top 10 Apple and Android smartphones you can buy for under $300

• SwiftKey on Android finally lets users remove the search bar with latest update

• Shinco set to launch a 65-inch Android-powered smart 4K LED TV in India for Rs 49,990

Being able to install Linux apps on Chrome OS opens up some fascinating new possibilities — particularly if you're an advanced user.

After all, while a Chromebook's standard combo of web apps, Chrome apps, and Android apps is more than sufficient for most folks' needs, some of us still require (or maybe just prefer) traditional local programs for certain specific purposes. The presence of Linux apps on Chrome OS means we can have our cake and eat it, too — by enjoying the speed, simplicity, and security of a Chromebook while also embracing the occasional heavy-duty desktop app.

Many of you are Windows 7 users. I get it. Windows 7 just works. But the clock is ticking for Windows 7. In less than a year, Windows 7's free support ends.

Come that day, you'll have a choice: You can either run it without being certain you'll get vital security patches (that would be really stupid), or you can pay for Windows 7 Extended Security Updates (ESUs) on a per-device basis, with the price increasing each year. We don't know how much that will be, but I think we can safely assume it won't be cheap. Or, you can migrate to Windows 10. And, yes, for now, you can still update to Windows 10 for free from Windows 7.

Making the news rounds a few months back was "WLinux", which was the first Linux distribution designed for Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) on Windows 10. But is this pay-to-play Linux distribution any faster than the likes of Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Debian already available from the Microsoft Store? Here are some benchmarks of these different Linux distribution options with WSL.

WLinux is a Linux distribution derived from Debian that is focused on offering an optimal WSL experience. This distribution isn't spun by Microsoft but a startup called Whitewater Foundry. WLinux focuses on providing good defaults for WSL with the catering of its default package set while the Debian archive via APT is still accessible. There is also support for graphical applications when paired with a Windows-based X client. For this easy-setup, quick-to-get-going Linux distribution on WSL, it retails for $19.99 USD from the Microsoft Store though often sells for $9.99 USD.

However, in the name of opening your eyes to maybe something a bit different, I’m going to approach this a bit differently. I want to consider a list of possible distributions that are not only outstanding candidates but also easy to use, and that can serve many functions within your business. In some cases, my choices are drop-in replacements for other operating systems, whereas others require a bit of work to get them up to speed.

Some of my choices are community editions of enterprise-grade servers, which could be considered gateways to purchasing a much more powerful platform. You’ll even find one or two entries here to be duty-specific platforms. Most importantly, however, what you’ll find on this list isn’t the usual fare.

• Stable release: HardenedBSD-stable 11-STABLE v1100056.12

• EPYC Server Battle | BSD Now 281

  SCP client vulnerabilities, BSDs vs Linux benchmarks on a Tyan EPYC Server, fame for the Unix inventors, Die IPv4, GhostBSD 18.12 released, Unix in pictures, and more.

• mintCast 300.2 interview 2 Rothgar

• Touch-panel PCs offer a choice of Skylake or Bay Trail chips

  EVOC’s P15 and P17 panel PCs provide Intel Skylake-U or Bay Trail CPUs with IP66 protected 15- or 17-inch resistive displays, plus 2x to 4x GbE ports, up to 8x USB and 6x COM ports, and HDMI, VGA, mini-PCIe, and SATA.

  Like EVOC’s 15.6-inch PPC-1561 touch-panel PC from May 2008, EVOC’s fanless P15/P17 touch-panel PCs run on 6th Gen Skylake-U or Bay Trail Celeron J1900 processors. The 15-inch P15 and 17-inch P17 offer 5-wire resistive touch and a “next generation design” with “true flat display surface and narrow bezel,” says China-based EVOC. The front aluminum alloy panel offers IP66 waterproofing, dustproofing, and anti-vibration support, as well as over 7H-mohs hardness to prevent scratches, oil, dust, metal chip, and water mist damage.

• Newt-Duino: Newt on an Arduino

  Here's our target system. The venerable Arduino Duemilanove. Designed in 2009, this board comes with the Atmel ATmega328 system on chip, and not a lot else. This 8-bit microcontroller sports 32kB of flash, 2kB of RAM and another 1kB of EEPROM. Squeezing even a tiny version of Python onto this device took some doing.

• Attackers Leverage Open Source in New BYOB Attack [Ed: A "phishing site impersonating the Office 365 login page," but hey, let's blame "open source"]

  An attack leveraging the open-source Build Your Own Botnet (BYOB) framework has reportedly been intercepted by Israeli cybersecurity firm Perception Point’s incident response team. According to the team, this appears to be the first time the BYOB framework has been found to be used for fraudulent activity in the wild.

  While these tactics and techniques have historically been limited in used to financially backed advanced persistent threat (APT) groups, they are now more easily accessed by novice criminals, in part because of the more widespread popularity of plug-and-play hacking kits, researchers said.

• Try ‘Puffer’: An Open-Source Free Live TV Streaming Service By Stanford

  A new free TV streaming service called “Puffer” has been launched as a part of a nonprofit academic research study by a group of Stanford researchers.

  The team, led by Francis Yan, a doctoral student from the computer science department at Stanford Universty, aims at improving Internet transmission and video-streaming algorithms by using AI.

• H2O.ai Empowers MarketAxess to Innovate and Inform Trading Strategies

  H2O.ai, the open source leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), today announced that its open source platform, H2O, provides critical machine learning capabilities to MarketAxess, the operator of a leading electronic trading platform for fixed-income securities and the provider of market data and post-trade services for the global fixed-income markets. MarketAxess' Composite+, powered by H2O open source, delivers greater insight and price discovery in real-time, globally, for over 24,000 corporate bonds. Composite+ has won several awards for its use of AI including the Risk Markets Technology Award for Electronic Trading Support Product of the Year and the Waters Technology American Financial Technology Award for Best Artificial Intelligence Technology Initiative.

• 2019 AI Trend To Watch: Open Source and RAPIDS

  Nvidia aims to increase its GPU platform usage by offering open source tools to help accelerate machine learning workloads.

• How to Preserve Your Privacy on Android Without Tearing Your Hair Out

  It can seem intimidating, but you can gain some semblance of mobile privacy with a few quick tweaks.

  [...]

  If you had unlimited time and some familiarity with the Android platform, you could go to extremes like rooting to disable system components, flashing custom ROMs, or even building your own privacy-focused ROM. For most people, that’s not feasible. Not only are such activities incredibly complex, but they also make your phone less useful.

  The fact of the matter is, most Android users want access to the Play Store, Google apps, and high-security apps (e.g. banking) that rely on Google’s TrustZone system. However, you can make some simple but not always obvious changes to Android phones to preserve your privacy.

• Blast from the Past: Retrieving Old Game Source Code

  Way back in 1985, I created games on the ZX Spectrum/Timex and CBM-64. A friend and I set up a small software house, and in addition to creating our own games, we also (and more lucratively) converted games for other publishers from CBM-64 to other formats.

  During this period, I wrote several original games in Z80 and 6502 assembler. I kept their sources on 5 1/4″ floppy disks, but after a few years I lost the floppy drive that could read the disks, and they were shoved in a cupboard. Somewhere between house moves, I lost the disks for all time.

  Fast-forward to this past December. In a store, I spotted a cheap game console for roughly $100 (get a look at this absolute unit, sold under the brand name “RetroPi”). It came with 18,000 games for various old computers and consoles, including SNES, ZX Spectrum and CBM-64. The hardware was a Raspberry PI clone in a case, and included Nintendo-type game controllers, along with HDMI and USB power cables.

  [...]

  I priced out the hardware for the console, and reckon it would cost about $70 for the Pi, controllers and cables, so I don’t feel ripped off… especially as it gave me a chance to play “Legend of Zelda” and “Secret of Mana” for the first time in 25 years via the SNES emulator!

• How Open Source Culture Is Battling Skepticism Successfully

  The software industry has also witnessed vital changes. One of the biggest methods of evangelising this grown lies in open sourcing. One may think open source is just about free software and data, but, that is not the only thing; open source is about the code that becomes publicly available for people to modify and use it.

• VLC, that magic open source video player, might be making a play for more consoles

  Speaking to VentureBeat, Jean-Baptiste Kempf revealed that VLC had reached three billion downloads to date and will continue to push HDR support as much as they can via the AV1 format, and further support VR videos.

  As far as gaming devices go, Kempf says that in addition to their already existing Xbox app they're also interested in releasing VLC for the Switch, Roku devices and the PS4. As VentureBeat points out these aren't a top priority given that only 12 people actually contribute to the VLC project, but it's something they're thinking about.

• Modern web applications on OpenShift: Part 3 — Openshift as a development environment

  Welcome back to the final part of this multipart series about deploying modern web applications on Red Hat OpenShift. In the first post, we took a look at how to deploy a modern web application using the fewest commands.

  In the second part, we took a deeper look into how the new source-to-image (S2I) web app builder works and how to use it as part of a chained build.

  This third and final part will take a look at how you can run your app’s “development workflow” on OpenShift.

• Survey Indicates Container Security Concerns Limit Adoption

  A new survey indicates that 60 percent of IT pros working with containers experienced at least one container security incident in the last year.

• SUSE teams with Intel & SAP on persistent memory in the datacentre

  SUSE has announced support for Intel Optane DC persistent memory with SAP HANA.

  Persistent memory is typically defined as any method or apparatus for storing data structures such that they can continue to be accessed using memory instructions or memory APIs even after the end of the process that created or last modified them – and that often means ‘when the power is off’.

  Running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, SAP HANA users can now use Intel Optane DC persistent memory in the data centre.

• Red Hat Shareholders Greenlight $34B IBM Acquisition

  IBM's $34 billion deal to acquire Red Hat took a big step closer to completion, as Red Hat shareholders nearly unanimously approved the deal on Wednesday.

• How VMware Is Advancing Kubernetes Cloud-Native Technology With Heptio

• Check Out the 2019 Linux Foundation Events and Expand Your Open Source Experience

  The Linux Foundation just recently announced its 2019 events schedule, featuring all your favorite events as well as some brand-new ones to cover the latest technologies. Make plans now to speak or attend and expand your experience with open source.

• The Role of Hyperledger in the Development of Smart Contracts

  Businesses constantly look to improve. A great part of that improvement is optimizing the costs-to-revenue ratio, which obviously favors revenue. Developing decentralized applications (dApps) with smart contracts has opened exciting avenues for businesses. Blockchain developers are exploring this practical aspect of smart contracts to create dApps that solve several issues current businesses struggle with: too many intermediaries, too much time, and too many conditions attached to executing a business transaction.

  The sum of these issues comes down to spending too much money on completing business contracts. Expectedly, the solution would be to reduce most of the complicated aspects to do business in a more affordable way than ever before.

  [...]

  The Hyperledger is different from other blockchain endeavors. It not only offers a dApp platform for creating practical solutions but it also provides collaborative partnership and unique smart contract technology as well as rich resources such as plug-in tools and frameworks that businesses can use in the process of dApp development. In the spirit of Linux, it also features a very active online community.

  Despite the permissioned blockchain model, it’s important to keep in mind Hyperledger’s open-source software orientation, which means the platform offers its newly developed code to partners for free. Apart from the membership fee, there are no additional fees for licenses and royalties. In a way, seeing blockchains as completely open or partially open networks is similar to the conundrum associated with the different benefits of open-source and proprietary software.

• Radeon GCN Compiler Backend Merged Into GCC 9 - To Allow OpenMP/OpenACC Offloading

  The long-in-development AMD "GCN" back-end for the GNU Compiler Collection that allows targeting recent generations of Radeon GPUs for compute offloading has been merged into the upcoming GCC 9 release.

  This AMD Radeon GCN back-end is what has been in development for many months by Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics with the ultimate goal of allowing Fortran/C/C++ compute work to be offloaded Radeon graphics processors via the OpenMP and OpenACC APIs, similar to the NVPTX offload support within GCC already for NVIDIA GPUs as well as Xeon Phi offloading on the Intel front.

• Getting Started with MySQL and Python

  For any fully functional deployable application, the persistence of data is indispensable. A trivial way of storing data would be to write it to a file in the hard disk, but one would prefer writing the application specific data to a database for obvious reasons. Python provides language support for writing data to a wide range of databases.

• Webinar Recording: “Live Development of a PyCharm Plugin” with Joachim Ansorg

• How to implement Download Manager in python

• "It's not a bug, it's a feature." - Differentiating between bugs and non-bugs using machine learning

• Beyond the “hello, world” of Python’s “print” function

• Leaving Mozilla and (most of) the Rust project

• RcppArmadillo 0.9.200.7.0

• Lost in Sky: Violent Seed Bringing Co-Op Puzzle Platforming to Linux & Windows

  While action-platformers aren't in short supply in today's gaming market, there is a definite lack of co-op games in the genre despite that being a natural fit. Thankfully, the team behind List in Sky: Violent Seed saw that and is setting out to bring a new IP into the industry alongside a merging of numerous gaming concepts. In a sci-fi setting, you and a partner will team up and not only battle a ton of nasty-looking mutants, but also team up to solve puzzles. Puzzle-platformers have seen an upswing in popularity, but co-op ones haven't really been done before. That sub-genre is an even more natural fit than a co-op action-platformer since it's much easier to solve puzzles when you put your minds together.

• Steam Beta Update Now Allows Per-Game Enabling Of Steam Play, Other Improvements

  It was just yesterday that Valve dropped a big Steam client update including several long sought improvements for Linux gamers. Today that's been succeeded by another rather nice beta upgrade. It was just yesterday that Valve dropped a big Steam client update including several long sought improvements for Linux gamers. Today that's been succeeded by another rather nice beta upgrade.

  [...]

  This update also fixes the incorrect scroll offset for the in-game overlay with Steam on Linux. Outside of the Linux-specific work are some Big Picture fixes and on Steam Input is support for the HORI Battle Pad and HORI Wireless Switch Pad.

• Phoenicis PlayOnLinux 5.0 - Alpha 2 has been released

  We have rewritten from scratch our winebuild platform. To make it short, it is more reliable, more transparent, easier to setup and cross-platform compatible. Any project that needs to use wine could now potentially use it and take advantage of the 1828 different builds. (We admit that some of them are outdated, though).

  The winebuild project is open source, uses containers. You can install it on your machine in no time if you want to build wine by yourself.

• How to download and install Blender in Ubuntu

• Pyvoc – A Command line Dictionary And Vocabulary Building Tool

• multi-coloured Fedoras

• mStream – A Personal Streaming Server to Stream Music from Anywhere

  mStream is a free, open source and cross-platform personal music streaming server that lets you sync and stream music between all your devices. It consists of a lightweight music streaming server written with NodeJS; you can use it to stream your music from your home computer to any device, anywhere.

• How To Copy A File/Folder From A Local System To Remote System In Linux?

• How to Install Yarn on Debian 9

• AdamW’s Debugging Adventures: The Mysterious Disappearing /proc

• Android Q Leak Confirms System-Wide Dark Theme, Experimental Desktop Mode

  It's been confirmed many times that Google is working on a system-wide dark theme for a future version of its Linux-based Android mobile operating system, but the latest leak of Android Q gives a first look at the new dark mode and other upcoming features.
  Just two weeks ago, a Google engineer revealed the fact the a dark mode is now in development at Google for the upcoming Android Q release, which should see the light of day later this year, but while some of us are still waiting impatiently for Google to release the first Android Q Developer Preview, XDA Developers managed to get their hands on an early build of the mobile OS.

• Google is Going to Buy Fossil’s Smartwatch Tech for $40 Million

• Google Just Paid $40 Million To Buy Fossil’s Secret Smartwatch Tech

  We all have only been hearing rumors about a Google Pixel watch. It seems like it would soon be turning into a reality. Today, Fossil announced that it would sell some of its “intellectual property” to Google, in a whopping $40 million deal.

• Google Will Deprecate 32-Bit Android Apps on 64-Bit Devices Starting August 2021

• Google To End 32-Bit App Support In 2021; Shifts Focus To 64-Bits Apps

• Love streaming pirated stuff on your Android box? It's going to be illegal in S'pore soon

• Pre-production Pixel 3 Lite shown off in video with headphone jack and plastic body

• Fix Problems on your Android

• How to root Android phones and tablets

• Google buys undisclosed smartwatch technology from Fossil for $40 million, includes some personnel

• Google, it’s time to kill off the Android tablet

• Google extends Android enterprise partner program

• A Twitter bug exposed some Android users’ protected tweets for years

• Twitter's reverse-chronological feed finally makes it to Android

• LG G7 ThinQ gets stable Android 9 Pie update in South Korea

• LG Reveals Android Pie Roadmap; LG G7 ThinQ Starts Receiving Pie Update in South Korea: Reports

• Moto G7 Spotted on Geekbench With 3GB RAM, Snapdragon 660, and Android Pie

• A complete guide to Android Do Not Disturb feature

• This new portable display connects to your Android phone, won’t break the bank

I'm always looking for new projects to create with my 3D printer. When I recently saw a new design for a computer numeric code (CNC) milling machine that mostly uses 3D printed parts, I was intrigued. When I saw that the machine works with open source software and the controller is an Arduino running open source software, I knew I had to make one.

CNC milling machines are precision cutting tools used in creating dies, engravings, and models. Unlike other milling tools, CNC machines can move on three axes: the Z axis moves vertically, the X axis moves horizontally, and the Y axis moves backward and forward.