• mesa 17.2.1

• Mesa 17.2.1 Released With Restored RADV Vulkan RX Vega Support

  As anticipated, Mesa 17.2.1 is now available for those wanting to use the latest stable point release of Mesa3D for the best, stable open-source 3D graphics user experience on Linux and other operating systems.

• GNOME 3.26 is Available on Ubuntu Artful!

  GNOME is a modern desktop user interface which is free software available for GNU/Linux, with mobile-like style and many applications. GNOME is well-known for its file manager, Nautilus, and its audio player, Rhythmbox. The 3.26 is the current stable version of GNOME released at 13 September 2017.

• [Video] Checking out Ubuntu 17.10 beta 1 Gnome

Mageia 6 is very nice. While not much different from many of the other modern distributions, it comes with enough polish and extra features to make it worth checking out. The Welcome to Mageia application and Control Center make the distribution very friendly for new Linux users. Similarly, the ease of enabling non-free and tainted packages also makes it a good choice for anyone looking to quickly set up a fully functional system. While I cannot personally attest to their usefulness, users switching from Windows might find the various importing tools helpful for making their transition to Linux. If you are looking for a new distribution to try out, or want to take your first foray into the world of Linux, give Mageia 6 a try, you will not be disappointed.

​When it comes to penetration testing, the best way to go is Linux. Distros like Kali and Parrot are quite popular. Today we're going to look at another awesome penetration testing distro known as Blackarch. Blackarch Linux is an Arch Linux-based penetration testing distribution for penetration testers and security researchers. The Blackarch comes with a tools repository that contains over 1800 tools with new ones being added quite frequently. Let us take a brief look at this Linux distro.

While 8.0 Oreo is the latest version of Google's Android operating system for mobile devices, the free software minded Replicant OS that derives itself from the Android Open-Source Project code-base has re-released their version 6.0.

Months after their first Replicant 6.0 release derived from Android 6.0, a new Replicant release is now available that expands the device support and incorporates other improvements.

The re-released Replicant 6.0 supports devices including the Galaxy Note, Galaxy Nexus, the Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 and Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 while remaining true to being a free software OS.

• Linux Foundation head proclaims year of Linux desktop – from a Mac

  In what could well take the award for the most hypocritical tech statement of the year, Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin last week announced that 2017 was the year of the Linux desktop – while using a macOS machine for his presentation.

  Zemlin's statement was made during his keynote at the Open Source Summit 2017 that took place in Los Angeles from 11 to 14 September.

• Kernel prepatch 4.14-rc1

• The Exciting New Features Of The Linux 4.14 Kernel: Zstd, Vega Hugepages, AMD SME, New Drivers

• The Graphics Talks Of The 2017 Open-Source Summit NA

  This week the Linux Foundation hosted their annual Open-Source Summit 2017 North America. There were two graphics talks this year led by Collabora developers.

  The slides for many of the talks from the 2017 Open-Source Summit NA can be found via the schedule page if hovering over a track.

  I've already covered some of the interesting ones like the Clear Linux GCC/GLIBC optimization approach while there were also just two Linux graphics talks of interest this year.

• Experimental Nouveau Reclocking Patches Updated, Including For Maxwell GPUs

  Karol Herbst has sent out 29 updated patches on Friday for a major rework to the Nouveau clock related code for re-clocking and related functionality. This includes a "hacky workaround" for getting re-clocking to function on GeForce GTX 900 "Maxwell 2" GPUs.

  The 29 patches by this independent Nouveau contributor work on restoring clocks after a system suspend, fixed reclocking when entering suspend, initial support for thermal throttling and to trigger reclocking on temperature changes, the "hacky workaround" for Maxwell2 reclocking, a new debugfs file for changing the boost mode, and other related work.

• [Old] The beginning of the end of the RadeonHD driver

  Soon it will be a decade since we started the RadeonHD driver, where we pushed ATI to a point of no return, got a proper C coded graphics driver and freely accessible documentation out. We all know just what happened to this in the end, and i will make a rather complete write-up spanning multiple blog entries over the following months. But while i was digging out backed up home directories for information, i came across this...

• How To Get An Open Source/Linux Job? — 9 Things To Keep In Mind

  Open source is becoming the new norm in the technology industry. All the major technology companies are busy using open source technologies and sharing their code on GitHub to help the developers use their quality code. This has resulted in a mutual benefit.

  Open source technologies like Android, Docker, Linux, etc., have dominated different markets and helped in creating more opportunities for the open source professionals. Highlighting the same, The Linux Foundation, in partnership with the careers website Dice, has released the results of the latest Open Source Jobs Survey and Report

• Documentation needs usability, too

• The Realities of Being a FOSS Maintainer

 

• LinuxChix Meet up experience!

  Today I got an opportunity to celebrate Linux's 26th anniversary (17th September 1991) with the LinuxChix India team (http://india.linuxchix.org/).

• Dash to Dock v61 Released with Unity-Style Launcher Backlights

  An updated version of Dash to Dock — the hugely popular desktop dock for GNOME Shell — is available to install.

  Dash to Dock v61 adds official support for the recent GNOME 3.26 release, an addition that will be of particular note to those of you running Ubuntu 17.10.

• Replacement Telegram Tray Icons for GNOME Shell

  This posts shows you how to replace the colorful Telegram tray icon on Linux with a GNOME Shell colored white set. It's a simple tweak that anyone can do.

• Librem 5 Crosses $400k In Funding After Plasma Mobile Announcement

  Since announcing earlier this week that KDE is working on Plasma Mobile support for the Librem 5, Purism has managed to raise over $100k more towards their goal of building a free software GNU/Linux smartphone, but remain around 1.1 million dollars short of their goal.

  The announcement of Plasma Mobile support -- while still planning to support GNOME on their device and it not being known yet if KDE/GNOME will be the default on the phone -- managed to gain a number of new supporters with crossing the $400k crowdfunding threshold this weekend.

• David Revoy teaches Krita course at local university in Paris

• Randa Report Part 2

  And now for the serious part: in my last blog post, I talked about achieving our main goal for this year’s Randa meetings – we successfully ported the entire Kontact away from the obsoleted KDateTime class. Since we finished this on Thursday, there was still enough time left to start working on something new and exciting.

  Volker and Frederik went on to work on a KWin plugin to simulate various kinds of color blindness which will help developers to see how visually impaired users see their software, I did a bit more code clean-up after the porting and a bit of code-review.

• Fun with fonts

• drat 0.1.3

• pinp 0.0.1: pinp is not PNAS

• Rename All Files and Directory Names to Lowercase in Linux

• dot-zed archive file format

• Switching Raspbian to Pixel desktop

• Fake A Hollywood Hacker Screen in Linux Terminal

  You might have heard this dialogue in almost every Hollywood movie that shows a hacking scene. There will be a dark terminal with ascii text, diagrams and hex code changing continuously and a hacker who is hitting the keyboards as if he/she is typing an angry forum response.

  But that’s Hollywood! Hackers break into a network system in minutes whereas it takes months of research to actually do that. But I’ll put the Hollywood hacking criticism aside for the moment.

• Oracle Now Supports Btrfs RAID5/6 On Their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel

  Besides incorporating the RHEL 7.4 changes from Red Hat into their recent Oracle Linux update, their Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) has received a few updates of its own.

  A Phoronix reader wrote in this morning to point out that Oracle is now supporting RAID 5/6 modes on Oracle Linux with UEK. It was just with Linux 4.12 that RAID 5/6 support was fixed or at least mostly, and that has now been backported to the Oracle Linux 7 Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. The Btrfs RAID5 and RAID6 modes were previously considered in bad shape.

• Texinfo 6.5 released

  We have released version 6.5 of Texinfo, the GNU documentation format.

• GCC 5.5 Status Report (2017-09-16)

• GCC 5.5 Will Come Before Killing Off GCC5

  Red Hat's Jakub Jelinek has announced that GCC 5.5 will be released soon.

  Jakub is planning to do a release candidate of GCC 5.5 at the end of next week followed by the official release. This will mark the end of the GCC 5 series.

• Lucrative Stocks in today’s market: Red Hat, Inc. : RHT

• Capital Counsel LLC NY Has $58.70 Million Stake in Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT)

• Red Hat Inc (RHT) Price Lingering Above the Cloud

• MACD in Focus: Red Hat Inc (RHT)

• Experimenting with a Personal Fedora Atomic and OpenShift Origin Server

  Last weekend I decided to play around with my old workstation that’s just been sitting around powered off for years now, mostly replaced by a RaspBerry Pi3 which handles most of my home network and storage. The workstation is from around 2009, isn’t particularly fast but has 6GB of RAM and doesn’t consume much power if you yank the video card. I have a small Rails 4 app running as a backend for one of my Android pet projects, and thought it might be fun to repurpose this machine to host it on OpenShift.

  I really don’t want to have to think about upgrades much, CentOS would then be a pretty good option but I thought it would be better to get a taste of what’s been going on with Project Atomic, a minimal OS just for running containers, which allows you to upgrade and rollback the whole OS filesystem as if you were using git.

• Put Everything on Fire and Make Friends with the Robots

  From 29 August to 1 September 2017 Fedora contributors from all over the world flocked to Hyannis, Massachusetts to meet and work on improving Fedora. I was lucky to be part of it.

• Test Days: Internationalization (i18n) features for Fedora 27

• PHP version 7.0.24RC1 and 7.1.10RC1

• Website and portfolio design

• Internationalization Track at Flock 2017

• Patent Trolls Update: Eolas, Conversant (MOSAID), Leigh Rothschild, and Electronic Communication Technologies
• Microsoft is Promoting Software Patents in India in Another Effort to Undermine Free/Open Source Software, Microsoft-Connected Trolls Are Still Suing
• Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) Under Attack by IBM and Other Patent Parasites Who Undermine Patent Quality
• Why the Mohawk Tribe Should Fire Its Lawyers and Dump the Patents Which Now Tarnish Its Name
• Amazon and Google Have Both Become Part of the Software Patents Problem
• Unless Physical, Inventions Are No Longer Patent-Eligible in US Courts, But USPTO Ignores Precedence
• Citing the European Patent Convention, Spanish Court Tosses Lawsuit With EPO-Granted European Patent

In fact, ROS is not actually an operating system at all – it’s a set of software frameworks, or a software development kit, to be installed into an operating system like Ubuntu.

As Mike Bell, executive vice president of internet of things and devices at Canonical, explains in an exclusive interview: “It’s a bit confusing because it’s called Robot Operating System, but the reason is because if you’re developing robot applications, you don’t need to worry about the fact that it’s running on Ubuntu.

Sick of Android? Don’t want to be part of a proprietary ecosystem? Security and privacy are becoming increasingly important for smartphone users, but what is the answer? For some, abandoning Android and switching to a phone that can run a Linux mobile operating system is the answer.

With security improvements and a better attitude towards privacy and open source, Linux smartphone operating systems are available. They’re just not particularly well known. (Although Android is based on the Linux kernel, it cannot really be considered Linux.)

• Canonical Adds Support for GNOME's JHBuild Tool to Its Snapcraft Snappy Creator

  Canonical's Sergio Schvezov released a new update to the Snapcraft tool that application developers can use to package their apps as Snaps for easy distribution on Ubuntu and other Snappy-capable GNU/Linux distros.

  Snapcraft 2.34 has been released this week and it's now available in the main repositories of various Ubuntu Linux releases that support the Snappy technologies, bringing a new plugin to support GNOME's JHBuild tool for building the entire GNOME desktop environment or select packages from the version control system.

• Wavebox, the Powerful Email Client, Is Now Available as a Snap on Ubuntu Linux

  If you've ever dreamed of having a central hub for all your web communication tools, you should know that the powerful Wavebox web app is now available for installation on Ubuntu Linux systems as a Snap.

  That's right, Wavebox was finally ported to Canonical's Snappy technologies that let application developers package their apps as Snaps to make their distribution easy across multiple GNU/Linux operating systems. And now, it looks Wavebox arrive in the Snappy Store and can be installed on Ubuntu and other supported distros.

• Python explosion blamed on pandas

  Not content to bait developers by declaring that Python is the fastest-growing major programming language, coding community site Stack Overflow has revealed the reason for its metastasis.

  Coming a day after Programmer Day, which falls on the 256th day of the year – except January 7: – the explanatory post by data scientist David Robinson could be flagged as an off-by-one error.

  But his case for the rise and rise of Python is no less plausible for its tardiness. Programmers love pandas.

  Not the black-and-white bamboo eaters, but the Python data science library. "Pandas is by a large margin the tag most visited by Python developers, which isn't surprising after we saw its earlier growth," Robinson explained.

• Devs unknowingly use “malicious” modules snuck into official Python repository

  The official repository for the widely used Python programming language has been tainted with modified code packages, a computer security authority in Slovakia warned. The authority also said the packages have been downloaded by unwitting developers who incorporated them into software over the past three months.

  Multiple code packages were uploaded to the Python Package Index, often abbreviated as PyPI, and were subsequently incorporated into software multiple times from June through this month, Slovakia's National Security Authority said in an advisory published Thursday. The unidentified people who made available the code packages gave them names that closely resembled those used for packages found in the standard Python library. The packages contained the exact same code as the upstream libraries except for an installation script, which was changed to include a "malicious (but relatively benign) code."

To little surprise, when starting things off with a SQLite database insertion test, EXT4 on RAID0 with the NVMe drives was the fastest but not much faster than the standalone MP500 on EXT4. F2FS was also competing very well with EXT4. Btrfs was the slowest file-system, due to its copy-on-write nature that by default it doesn't tend to be as performant with database type workloads. Interestingly, using F2FS with RAID1 caused a significant performance regression. At least in all the configurations except Btrfs, using the Corsair MP500 NVMe drives were a big upgrade over the Samsung 850 PRO.

• MIPS Changes Submitted For Linux 4.14: NI 169445, Omega2+, MT7628A Support

  There are many MIPS updates to find with the in-development Linux 4.14 kernel.

• Linux 4.14 Dropping In-Tree Firmware

  Linux 4.14 is getting rid of its in-kernel firmware/ tree.

  For years now most everyone has been relying upon the external Linux-Firmware.Git tree for managing the firmware binaries needed by the Linux kernel device drivers. But prior to that was the in-tree firmware/ destination.

• The DRM Changes For The Linux 4.14 Kernel

  With the Linux 4.14 merge window period combined with the fact of the DRM pull request having been submitted early this cycle, I didn't have a chance to provide a recap of the Direct Rendering Manager changes for 4.14. Here's that overview for those not in tune with the many individual articles that had been written about the different Linux 4.14 graphics driver changes.

• Linux 4.14 Gets A Driver For PWM-Controlled Vibrators

  Dmitry Torokhov has sent in a second helping of input updates for the Linux 4.14 merge window that is closing this weekend.

• Save the human race as a giant, indestructible, and incredibly clumsy robot in 'Jettomero: Hero of the Universe'

  Here's a game for the weekend that looks really quite unique. In Jettomero: Hero of the Universe [itch.io, Official Site], you play as a giant, indestructible, and incredibly clumsy robot who's trying to save the human race.

• The Humble Store is having a huge sale right now, some seriously good Linux deals on

  Now is a really good opportunity to fill up your schedule with some awesome games! Humble Store has a fantastic sale going.

• Kingdoms and Castles has a pretty decent free content update

• Stealing cars, helicopters and blowing stuff up in Voxel Turf, some thoughts

• GNU lightning 2.1.1 released!

  GNU lightning is a library to aid in making portable programs that compile assembly code at run time.

• Gnuastro 0.4 released

  I am happy to announce that the fourth release of Gnuastro now available.

  GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) is an official GNU package consisting of various command-line programs and library functions for the manipulation and analysis of astronomical data. All the programs share the same basic command-line user interface for the comfort of both the users and developers.

• GNU libffcall 2.0 is released

  libffcall version 2.0 is released.

• Introducing Jitter, an efficient language Virtual Machine generator

  During the last few months of this long silence I’ve been busy working on a new project. Of course it is free software, and I plan to propose it soon as an official GNU project.

• Unifont 10.0.06 Released

  Unifont 10.0.06 is now available. This version has many glyph improvements, most of which were contributed by David Corbett. This version also has make files with Mike Gilbert's modifications to allow parallel make, and corrects a bug in unifontpic for generation of the large Unifont graphic images. See the ChangeLog for further details.

• Announcing Guix-HPC

  Today, Inria, the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC), and the Utrecht Bioinformatics Center (UBC) are announcing a joint effort to consolidate GNU Guix for reproducible scientific workflows in high-performance computing (HPC). The three research institutes have been using Guix and contributing to it. The new effort, dubbed Guix-HPC, hopes to extend Guix functionality to better address the needs of HPC users, as well as augmenting its package collection.

  Guix was not initially designed with HPC in mind. However, we believe it has many good properties both for flexible software deployment on clusters, and as a foundation for reproducible scientific workflows. The Guix-HPC blog will regularly feature articles with HPC “howtos” and stories about our achievements. We are thrilled by the opportunities this new effort offers!

• GNU Remotecontrol: Newsletter – September 2017

• GNUHealthCon 2017 and Social Medicine Awards nominations

  GNUHealthCon 2017 (www.gnuhealthcon.org) is coming up this November in Las Palmas ! We are very excited, and working hard on the preparations so we can make it a success again.

  On Saturday night (Nov 25th), we will celebrate the GNU Health Social Medicine Awards 2017 ceremony. Besides having a great time with our colleagues from around the world, we will announce the winners of the Social Medicine Awards. The awards are a way to recognize the work of individuals and organizations that fight for social justice and freedom in this world, and a source of inspiration for all of us.

• GNU Health 3.2.3 patchset released

The first RC build of the 10.4-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

Installation images are available for:

o amd64 GENERIC
o i386 GENERIC
o ia64 GENERIC
o powerpc GENERIC
o powerpc64 GENERIC64
o sparc64 GENERIC
o armv6 BEAGLEBONE
o armv6 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD
o armv6 GUMSTIX
o armv6 PANDABOARD
o armv6 RPI-B
o armv6 WANDBOARD