• Building Bold New Worlds With Virtual Reality

  From rich text to video to podcasts, the Internet era offers an array of new ways for creators to build worlds. Here at Mozilla, we are particularly excited about virtual reality. Imagine moving beyond watching or listening to a story; imagine also feeling that story. Imagine being inside it with your entire mind and body. Now imagine sharing and entering that experience with something as simple as a web URL. That’s the potential before us.

• This Week in Mixed Reality: Issue 3

  This week we’re heads down focusing on adding features in the three broad areas of Browsers, Social and the Content Ecosystem.

• New to me: the Taskcluster team

  At this time last year, I had just moved on from Release Engineering to start managing the Sheriffs and the Developer Workflow teams. Shortly after the release of Firefox Quantum, I also inherited the Taskcluster team. The next few months were *ridiculously* busy as I tried to juggle the management responsibilities of three largely disparate groups.

• Taskcluster migration update: we're finished!

  Over the past few weeks we've hit a few major milestones in our project to migrate all of Firefox's CI and release automation to taskcluster.

  Firefox 60 and higher are now 100% on taskcluster!

• After the First US Transaction, Propy Announces an Open Source Developer Program

  California-based blockchain startup Propy, is bringing the commercial use of blockchain technology to the US. After facilitating the first US Blockchain-based real estate deed in Vermont, Propy announced a new open source Developer Program.

  The idea behind Propy: it allows anyone to buy or sell real estate, anywhere, online. Propy provides an efficient crypto and fiat payment and an immutable record on the blockchain, ensuring that title deeds and property rights will be there forever.

• Titus, the Netflix container management platform, is now open source

  Titus powers critical aspects of the Netflix business, from video streaming, recommendations and machine learning, big data, content encoding, studio technology, internal engineering tools, and other Netflix workloads. Titus offers a convenient model for managing compute resources, allows developers to maintain just their application artifacts, and provides a consistent developer experience from a developer’s laptop to production by leveraging Netflix container-focused engineering tools.

• Netflix's Container Management System Is Now Open Source

  On Thursday Netflix announced it's made its home grown container management system, Titus, open source.

• Lumina Networks on delivering open source SDN

  What kinds of companies should consider open source SDN, and what are the associated challenges in using such open source deployments? Lumina Networks has unrivalled expertise in working with customers and partners to deliver implementations, and explains its processes and outlines the benefits of using open source SDN.

• Luxoft launches PELUX 1.0 open source platform for automotive

  Luxoft’s automotive division has launched PELUX 1.0, an open source platform available to developers. This has been developed from its PELUX software suite as used by carmakers and tier 1 suppliers to build converged infotainment, autonomous driving, communication, HMI and car body control systems.

• Dev Preview: MongoDB Enterprise Running on OpenShift

  In order to compete and get products to market rapidly, enterprises today leverage cloud-ready and cloud-enabled technologies. Platforms as a Service (or PaaS) provide out-of-the-box capabilities which enable application developers to focus on their business logic and users instead of infrastructure and interoperability. This key ability separates successful projects from those which drown themselves in tangential work which never stops.

  In this blog post, we’ll cover MongoDB’s general PaaS and cloud enablement strategy as well as touch upon some new features of Red Hat’s OpenShift which enable you to run production-ready MongoDB clusters. We’re also excited to announce the developer preview of MongoDB Enterprise Server running on OpenShift. This preview allows you to test out how your applications will interact with MongoDB running on OpenShift.

• Is Open Source The AI Nirvana for Intel? [Ed: openwashing a malicious company using buzzwords and urban myths]

• Writing Chuck – Joke As A Service

  Recently I really got interested to learn Go, and to be honest I found it to be a beautiful language. I personally feel that it has that performance boost factor from a static language background and easy prototype and get things done philosophy from dynamic language background.

  The real inspiration to learn Go was these amazing number of tools written and the ease with which these tools perform although they seem to be quite heavy. One of the good examples is Docker. So I thought I would write some utility for fun, I have been using fortune, this is a Linux utility which gives random quotes from a database. I thought let me write something similar but let me do something with jokes, keeping this mind I was actually searching for what can I do and I landed up on jokes about Chuck Norris or as we say it facts about him. I landed up on chucknorris.io they have an API which can return different jokes about Chuck, and there it was my opportunity to put something up and I chose Go for it.

• A handy way to add free books to your eReader

• A Perl module for better debugging

• [From Arch] glibc 2.27-2 and pam 1.3.0-2 may require manual intervention

• How to start developing on Java in Fedora

• Use Peek to take quick GIF screencasts

• Deploying to OpenShift – Our latest free eBook

• Managing OPA

• How to Install Log.io Realtime Log Monitoring Tool on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

• How to patch Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities on FreeBSD

• How To Remove Password From A PDF File in Linux

• Security updates for Friday

• IBM Security launches open-source AI

  IBM Security unveiled an open-source toolkit at RSA 2018 that will allow the cyber community to test their AI-based security defenses against a strong and complex opponent in order to help build resilience and dependability into their systems.

• Elytron: A New Security Framework in WildFly/JBoss EAP

  Elytron is a new security framework that ships with WildFly version 10 and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP) 7.1. This project is a complete replacement of PicketBox and JAAS. Elytron is a single security framework that will be usable for securing management access to the server and for securing applications deployed in WildFly. You can still use the legacy security framework, which is PicketBox, but it is a deprecated module; hence, there is no guarantee that PicketBox will be included in future releases of WildFly. In this article, we will explore the components of Elytron and how to configure them in Wildfly.

• PodCTL #32 – Container Vulnerability Scanning

It's a busy month for the BSDs with DragonFlyBSD 5.2 having come along with OpenBSD 6.3 and right before that was TrueOS 18.03. Now there's finally the release candidate of the long-awaited NetBSD 8.0 update.

NetBSD 7.0 arrived back in October 2015 while the NetBSD 8.0 release should not be too much further out. Arguably most interesting with NetBSD 8.0 is its finally bring initial USB 3.0 support though the change-log currently just describes it as "some USB 3 support."

• FFmpeg 4.0 released

  Version 4.0 of the FFmpeg multimedia toolkit is out. There is a long list of new filters, formats, and more; see the announcement for details.

• April 20th, 2018, FFmpeg 4.0 "Wu"

• FFmpeg 4.0 Released With New Encoders/Decoders, NVIDIA NVDEC Decoding

  FFmpeg 4.0 is now available as the latest major release for this widely-used open-source multimedia encode/decoder library.

  FFmpeg 4.0 introduces NVIDIA NVDEC GPU-based decoding for H264 / MJPEG / HEVC / MPEG-1/2/4, VC1, VP8, and VP9 formats. This release also adds an Intel QSV accelerated overlay filter, an OpenCL overlay filter, VA-API MJPEG and VP8 decoding support, new VA-API filters, and many other accelerated code path improvements.

• AMDGPU DC Fixes For Linux 4.17 Take Care Of "The Dark Screen Issue"

  AMD's Alex Deucher has sent in a small set of fixes for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver in the Linux 4.17 kernel.

  The three patches are for fixing a dark screen issue with AMDGPU DC, a fix for clock/voltage dependency tracking for WattMan, and an updated SMU interface for the yet-to-be-announced Vega 12 GPU.

• Intel KVMGT 2018-Q1 Release Offers Mediated GPU Pass-Through Improvements

  While the relevant bits for supporting Intel GPU mediated pass-through to virtual machines with KVM are now upstream in the Linux kernel as well as in QEMU 2.12, Intel developers have just announced their quarterly release of "KVMGT" for those wanting the officially blessed configuration for running Intel virtual GPU support with KVM virtual machines.

• RADV Vulkan Driver Adds Vega M Support

  Following RadeonSI adding "Vega M" support for the new Radeon graphics appearing embedded on select Intel Kabylake processor packages, the RADV developers have similarly staged their Vega M support in this open-source Vulkan driver.

• The Forge Now Offers Full-Featured Vulkan Support On Linux

  Earlier this month we covered "The Forge" picking up initial Linux support and now they have rounded out their full-featured Linux support with Vulkan rendering.

• What you need to know about blockchain technology and gaming

  To say that blockchain technology is big news is an understatement. It is the technology to be involved with right now if you’re interested in a disruptive technology. As a refresher, it is the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. It is also behind an emerging trend in gaming called blockchain gaming, or crypto gaming.

  Blockchain is simply a transaction that is recorded and added to a previous transaction, forming a chain of data. Each transaction added to the chain can account for many different things. For example, with Bitcoin, the transaction that makes up blockchain data here is the movement/discovery of units of the cryptocurrency.

• Don't Bother Trying AMDVLK Vulkan With Rise of the Tomb Raider Right Now

  Following yesterday's 20-way graphics card comparison for Rise of the Tomb Raider that debuted yesterday on Linux and is exclusively powered by Vulkan, my next benchmarking objective was trying out the official AMD Vulkan driver, AMDVLK, to see how it would work given the successes of RADV on launch-day for this latest Feral Interactive game port.

• Strategic RPG 'For The King' has left Early Access and is now on Linux

  For The King, a strategic RPG with tabletop and roguelike elements has recently left Early Access, it seems they also published the Linux version too.

  We've reached out to the developer for a review key, so hopefully we can give it some proper thoughts in good time. At least early indications are that it's quite good, going by what users think of it.

• Hollow Knight: Lifeblood is out as another free update and it's looking good

  Hollow Knight: Lifeblood has just released aiming to make the already amazing action adventure game even better. I must say,

• Basingstoke, the new tense stealth and action title from Puppy Games to release April 27th

  Puppy Games latest game Basingstoke, which mixes in stealth and action is going to release April 27th with full Linux support.

• God game 'The Universim' to enter Steam Early Access in August with Linux support

  I spoke to Alex Koshelkov, Founder & CEO Crytivo last night. They confirmed to me that the Steam Early Access release will indeed have a Linux version, which will not use their current updater (which requires a mono-complete install to work) since it will update via Steam directly which is going to be much nicer. The actual game is built from Unity, so it should be fine.

• Graveyard Keeper looks weird and interesting in their new gameplay reveal

  Graveyard Keeper [Official Site], from Lazy Bear Games and tinyBuild finally has some proper gameplay to show off and it's equal parts weird, grim and quite interesting.

• Want to try Wild Terra Online? We have another load of keys to give away

• Taking a look at Red Hat’s ‘radically open brand evolution project’

  The project was disclosed by Red Hat in a blog post in February as part of what the Hatters describe themselves as a “radically open brand project.” The Linux and cloud services firm ran a survey seeking “input. It closed Feb. 25.

• Fedoras forever? A logo change at Red Hat is coming this year.

  As corporate logos go, Red Hat's fedora-sporting "Shadowman" is about as iconic as they come, but he could be living on borrowed time.

  The software company, based in downtown Raleigh, is in the midst of an "open brand project" and in October is due to roll out an all-new logo. The color red, and a hat, are likely to figure in it somehow presuming in-house designers follow the advice they're getting from customers and employees.

  But Shadowman's survival is far from assured, as the company has already said its research suggests he's "seen as more secretive than open, and more villainous than heroic."

• 2 Stocks Taking a Gut Shot: Urban Outfitters, Inc. (URBN), Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

• Risk Malaise Alert in Option Market: Red Hat Inc Implied Price Swing Hits A Weakened Level

• How open source databases are sucking revenue out of legacy vendors’ pockets

  In other words, the value of the open source database market to customers/users is measured in the tens of billions, or even hundreds of billions, of dollars. One other way of thinking about this? That's tens or hundreds of billions of dollars that proprietary vendors will never capture.

• Has the time finally come for PostgreSQL?

  For nearly 30 years, PostgreSQL (a.k.a., Postgres) has arguably been the most common SQL open source database that you have never heard of. Call it the Zelig of databases, its technology either sat behind or acted as the starting point behind an array of nearly a dozen commercial database offerings from EnterpriseDB to Redshift, Greenplum, Netezza, CockroachDB and a host of others. And PostgreSQL has distinguished lineage as one of the brainchilds of Turing Award winner and database legend Dr. Michael Stonebraker, who started the PostgreSQL project based on the lessons learned from his previous database venture, Ingres.

Kodi originated as Xbox Media Center, or XBMC. However, it evolved into what’s now Kodi. The utilitarian open-source media center plays pretty much any audio and video file you throw at it.

Plus, Kodi add-ons serve as apps similar to what’s found on streaming devices like Roku. For instance, the Plex for Kodi add-on provides access to your Plex media server library, while the Funimation Now add-on lets you stream Funimation from Kodi. Furthermore, the robust Kodi media center provides plenty of options to access networked media files.

As a Kodi-based Linux distro, Kodibuntu is a fusion of Kodi and Lubuntu, a lightweight Ubuntu derivative. Yet Kodibuntu differs from the likes of OpenELEC, LibreELEC, and OSMC in that it’s a full on Linux distro with a desktop environment. While the main focus is media center use, you benefit from the ability to access and edit system files.

Thus, it’s more comprehensive than most Kodi OSes. If you’ve used Ubuntu, then Kodibuntu should present a familiar experience. Learn more about Kodi with our complete A-Z of Kodi guide!

Also: Will You Upgrade to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS? [Poll]

• Android Go review—Google's scattershot attempt at a low-end Android OS

• Verizon promises Oreo update for Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge but does not deliver

• The Moto G6 should've been an Android One device

• Google Photos is rolling out a friendlier and more powerful movie editor

• Vergecast: Android Chat, Nintendo Labo, and Motorola (like a) G6

• Google is launching an Android chat service to replace SMS

Quite a few snapshots have been released this week and the last one for OpenSuSE Tumbleweed, bringing some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software. Among these, we can mention the recently released Linux 4.16 kernel series as the operating system is now powered by Linux kernel 4.16.2.

"The 4.16.2 Linux Kernel made ip_tunnel, ipv6, ip6_gre, ip6_tunnel and vti6 better to validate user provided tunnel names. Due to a build system failure, not all 4.16.2 binaries were built correctly; this will be resolved in the 20180417 snapshot, which will be released shortly," said Douglas DeMaio in a recent report.

The help desk market is crowded and dominated by player like Zendesk, Salesforce and Spiceworks, but there are some solid open source alternatives for smaller businesses with the time and patience.

A good piece of help desk software should allow any business to log, track and respond to customer support queries across a range of platforms.

Open source solutions may not be as feature rich or fully formed out of the box, and they won't look as good as Zendesk or Salesforce, but they give great customisation options and are much more cost effective than closed source solutions.

After a very busy cycle due to the Meltdown and Spectre security vulnerabilities, which were publicly disclosed earlier this year and later discovered to put billions of devices using modern processors at risk of attacks, the Linux 4.15 kernel series was released at the of January heavily redesign against two critical hardware bugs.

Now, nearly three months and only eighteen maintenance updates later, the Linux 4.15 kernel series reached end of life and it will no longer receive support. As such, all those using a kernel from the Linux 4.15 branch on their GNU/Linux distributions are urged to upgrade to the latest Linux 4.16 kernel series as soon as possible.

Work on the next big release of the widely-used open-source and cross-platform office suite for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating systems, LibreOffice 6.1, has already begun this week with a focus on revamping the online experience and improving the Writer and Calc components.

A first bug hunting session was scheduled for the end of next week, on April 27, 2018, when developers will hack on the first alpha milestone of LibreOffice 6.1, which should be available to download for all supported platforms a few days before the event. During the bug hunting session, devs will try to fix as many bugs as possible.

It was just last year that open-source RadeonSI/RADV developers were trying to get the Radeon RX 580 "Polaris" GPU to be competitive with the GeForce GTX 1060 as it is under Windows given each GPU's capabilities. We've seen the RX 580 and GTX 1060 dancing under Linux the past few months and yesterday's 20-way GPU comparison with Rise of the Tomb Raider was quite significant -- perhaps most surprising being how well the RX 580 performed. Heck, just one or two years ago it was an accomplishment seeing any official Radeon driver support at-launch for new Linux game releases. So here are some extensive tests looking closer at the GTX 1060 vs. RX 580 battle in this latest Vulkan-powered Linux game port.

I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.95 kernel.

All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.

The updated 4.9.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st...

• Apple unleashes FoundationDB as an open source project [Ed: Apple openwashing its own, self-controlled DB]

  Apple has open-sourced FoundationDB, a distributed ACID-compliant NoSQL datastore, three years after acquiring the company that developed the technology.

  At the time, developers who used the database voiced resentment that Apple had taken a useful tool off the market and left companies using the software without support.

  For Apple, that's water under the bridge. In a post to the FoundationDB project's newborn blog, the fruit-themed computer maker said, "We believe FoundationDB can become the foundation of the next generation of distributed databases."

  To make that happen, Apple is counting on community contributions and support.

• Apple open-sources its FoundationDB database technology

• Apple finally open-sources FoundationDB

• Apple Open-Sources NoSQL Database FoundationDB

• Apple open-sources FoundationDB database to build open development community

• Microsoft Brings Linux Driven IoT Security to Azure [Ed: Way to sell Windows and Visual Studio while carrying out traffic intercepts/surveillance]

• Windows 10: Microsoft to boost Linux app security with Windows Defender firewall [Ed: At ZDNet today the lemmings keep googlebombing Linux for Microsoft, selling proprietary malware while calling it or dressing it up as "Linux"]

Do you remember Crunchbang Linux? Crunchbang (often referred to as #!) was a fan-favorite, Debian-based distribution that focused on using a bare minimum of resources. This was accomplished by discarding the standard desktop environment and using a modified version of the Openbox Window Manager. For some, Crunchbang was a lightweight Linux dream come true. It was lightning fast, easy to use, and hearkened back to the Linux of old.