• Version 67.0, first offered to Release channel users on May 21, 2019

• Latest Firefox Release is Faster than Ever

  With the introduction of the new Firefox Quantum browser in 2017 we changed the look, feel, and performance of our core product. Since then we have launched new products to complement your experience when you’re using Firefox and serve you beyond the browser. This includes Facebook Container, Firefox Monitor and Firefox Send. Collectively, they work to protect your privacy and keep you safe so you can do the things you love online with ease and peace of mind. We’ve been delivering on that promise to you for more than twenty years by putting your security and privacy first in the building of products that are open and accessible to all.

  Today’s new Firefox release continues to bring fast and private together right at the crossroads of performance and security. It includes improvements that continue to keep Firefox fast while giving you more control and assurance through new features that your personal information is safe while you’re online with us.

• Firefox 67.0 Released, ownCloud Announces New Server Version 10.2, Google Launches "Glass Enterprise Edition 2" Headset, Ubuntu Expands Its Kernel Uploader Team and Kenna Security Reports Almost 20% of Popular Docker Containers Have No Root Password

  Firefox 67.0 was released today. From the Mozilla blog: "Today's new Firefox release continues to bring fast and private together right at the crossroads of performance and security. It includes improvements that continue to keep Firefox fast while giving you more control and assurance through new features that your personal information is safe while you're online with us." You can download it from here, and see the release notes for details.

• Firefox 67.0 Released, Upgrading to Dav1d AV1 Decoder

  Mozilla Firefox 67.0 was released today with performance improvements and some new features.

• Firefox 67.0 Released With Better Performance, Switches To Dav1d AV1 Decoder

  Mozilla set sail Firefox 67.0 this morning as the newest version of this web browser and the update is heavy on the feature front.

  Firefox 67.0 brings a number of performance improvements, the ability to block known cryptominers/fingerprinters, better keyboard accessibility, usability/security enhancements to Private Browsing, various ease-of-use improvements, switching to DAV1D as its AV1 video decoder, FIDO U2F API support, security fixes, and various JavaScript API additions.

• Firefox 67 released

  The Mozilla blog takes a look at the Firefox 67 release.

• Getting started with the Satellite 6.5 reporting engine

• How to Build Docker Images with Dockerfile

• How To Install Apache Cassandra on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• How to Get IP Address in Linux

• How to Get Size of Directory in Linux

• How to Install Bludit CMS with NGINX on CentOS 7

• How to Install DataGrip on Ubuntu 18.04

• How to Install Notepad++ Editor on Ubuntu

• How to add podcasts to Vocal on Linux

• How to use iCloud on Linux

• Install RHEL8 on Virtual Box

This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.

Audeme has released a $6.50 “Raspberry Pi MOVI Adapter” board and API to enable a Raspberry Pi pairing with its MOVI Arduino Shield for offline speech recognition and synthesis.

We’re used to seeing Arduino compatible, MCU-driven HATs and other add-ons for the Raspberry Pi, but in 2015 Audeme flipped that combo on its head with a Linux-driven voice shield for the Arduino called the MOVI Arduino Shield Speech Recognizer and Speech Synthesizer. At last weekend’s at Maker Faire Bay Area 2019, the company released a $6.50 adapter board that lets the MOVI Arduino Shield work with a Raspberry Pi.

• Google plans to add scrolling screenshots in Android R

• Google suspends Huawei's Android license

• Huawei suffers major Android setback as Google pulls access to core apps and services

• Is Huawei Really Worried about the Loss of Google's Android OS?

• Honor 20: Huawei Android phone launch defies Donald Trump

• Google Calendar and Keep Get Dark Mode on Android

• Android 9 Pie is rolling out now to the Asus Zenfone Max M2

• Android automation: Set the “Rules” and Pixel phones will do incredible things automatically

• Your Phone for Android Supports Cellular Data Sync Now

• Android Q features you'll love: Better support for foldables

• How To Set An Emergency Contact On Your Android Or iPhone's Lock Screen

The HP Linux Imaging and Printing 3.19.5 software release is now available with support for a plethora of new HP printers, among which we can mention HP LaserJet Enterprise M507n, HP LaserJet Enterprise M507dn, HP LaserJet Enterprise M507x, HP LaserJet Enterprise M507dng, HP LaserJet Managed E50145dn, HP LaserJet Managed E50145x, and HP LaserJet Enterprise MFP M528dn.

The HP LaserJet Enterprise MFP M528f, HP LaserJet Enterprise Flow MFP M528c, HP LaserJet Enterprise Flow MFP M528z, HP LaserJet Managed MFP E52645dn, HP LaserJet Managed Flow MFP E52645c, HP Color LaserJet Managed E75245dn, HP Color LaserJet Enterprise M751n, HP Color LaserJet Enterprise M751dn, and HP PageWide XL 3900PS MFP printers are also now supported by HPLIP.

What started as a summertime hobby seven years ago quickly grew into an awesome Linux distribution with an even more awesome community around it. Our goal was to make Arch Linux available to a wider audience of users by providing a streamlined, user friendly experience including a safe place for users to communicate, learn, and help one another. There have been 931,439 unique downloads of Antergos since 2014 (when we began keeping track). We think it’s safe to say we’ve accomplished our goal.

Today, we are announcing the end of this project. As many of you probably noticed over the past several months, we no longer have enough free time to properly maintain Antergos. We came to this decision because we believe that continuing to neglect the project would be a huge disservice to the community. Taking this action now, while the project’s code still works, provides an opportunity for interested developers to take what they find useful and start their own projects.

For existing Antergos users: there is no need to worry about your installed systems as they will continue to receive updates directly from Arch. Soon, we will release an update that will remove the Antergos repos from your system along with any Antergos-specific packages that no longer serve a purpose due to the project ending. Once that is completed, any packages installed from the Antergos repo that are in the AUR will begin to receive updates from there.

Also: Arch-Based Antergos Linux Distribution Calls It Quits

We are devastated by the tragic death of Martin Schwidefsky who died
in an accident last Saturday.

Martin was the most significant contributor to the initial s390 port
of the Linux Kernel and later the maintainer of the s390 architecture
backend. His technical expertise as well as his mentoring skills were
outstanding. Martin was well known for his positive mindset and his
willingness to help.

He will be greatly missed.

• This Week Twitter Taught Me: Thunderbird is Go, But Windows Text Editors are Not!

  Although it’s proving difficult to stay on (Linux related) topic, this series has proven a great success in only 3 weeks — so much so that I’m planning to launch three separate spin-offs!

  I mean, I might as well milk the franchise for all I can while the udders drip with goodwill, right?

  Keep an eye out for “This Week My Spam Folder Taught Me“, “This Fortnight a Disqus Bot Taught Me” (spoiler: bit repetitive that one) and, to serve the overlooked people-who-read-this-site-whilst-diving niche, “This Month Diving Taught Me”.

  I wouldn’t get your hopes up for the latter, though. I can’t swim, let alone dive…

• Timetable Scheduler App For Linux

  Timetable is a scheduling app available on flathub repositories. The app is maintained by the Elementary OS team and thus it’s User Interface looks like its own native OS. Might look a bit out of place on GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, etc but still yet the app works like a charm. Read on below to get more done with Timetable.

• Juan Luis Baptiste : New docker images for upcoming mageia 7

  I have added new docker images for the upcoming mageia 7 release. Thanks to the latest work on our image build tools, the images are available in all architectures mageia 7 supports:
  x86_64
  armv7hl
  aarch64

• Manas and Marek: Improving Fedora release process

  Manas Mangaonkar (pac23) is working on the Change Management Tool, a tool for the Fedora Program Managers and contributors to propose, edit, and approve changes per Fedora’s change process. He was selected for Google Summer of Code 2019.

  We asked Manas a few questions as he prepares for his next three months working with Ben Cotton, his mentor for the summer.

• Candy Tsai: Outreachy 2019 March-August Internship – The Application Process

  Really excited to be accepted for the project “Debian Continuous Integration: user experience improvements” (referred to as debci in this post) of the 2019 March-August round of the Outreachy internship! A huge thanks to my company and my manager Frank for letting me do this since I mentioned it out of the blue. Thanks to the Women Techmakers community for letting me know this program exists.

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 579

• Sony's Deal With Microsoft Blindsided Its Own PlayStation Team [iophk: "RIP Playstation"]

  Last week, the companies announced a strategic partnership to co-develop game streaming technology and host some of PlayStation’s online services on the Redmond-based company’s Azure cloud platform. It comes after PlayStation spent seven years developing its own cloud gaming offering, with limited success.

  Negotiations with Microsoft began last year and were handled directly by Sony’s senior management in Tokyo, largely without the involvement of the PlayStation unit, according to people familiar with the matter. Staff at the gaming division were caught off-guard by the news. Managers had to calm workers and assure them that plans for the company’s next-generation console weren’t affected, said the people, asking not to be identified discussing private matters.

• Creating and using a custom Linux kernel on Guix System

  Guix is, at its core, a source based distribution with substitutes, and as such building packages from their source code is an expected part of regular package installations and upgrades. Given this starting point, it makes sense that efforts are made to reduce the amount of time spent compiling packages, and recent changes and upgrades to the building and distribution of substitutes continues to be a topic of discussion within Guix.

  One of the packages which I prefer to not build myself is the Linux-Libre kernel. The kernel, while not requiring an overabundance of RAM to build, does take a very long time on my build machine (which my children argue is actually their Kodi computer), and I will often delay reconfiguring my laptop while I want for a substitute to be prepared by the official build farm. The official kernel configuration, as is the case with many GNU/Linux distributions, errs on the side of inclusiveness, and this is really what causes the build to take such a long time when I build the package for myself.

  The Linux kernel, however, can also just be described as a package installed on my machine, and as such can be customized just like any other package. The procedure is a little bit different, although this is primarily due to the nature of how the package definition is written.

• Improved Logitech wireless device support in kernel 5.2

  The just released 5.2-rc1 kernel includes improved support for Logitech wireless keyboards and mice. Until now we were relying on the generic HID keyboard and mouse emulation for 27 MHz and non-unifying 2.4 GHz wireless receivers.

  Starting with the 5.2 kernel instead we actually look at the devices behind the receiver. This allows us to provide battery monitoring support and to have per device quirks, like device specific HID-code to evdev-code mappings where necessary. Until now device specific quirks where not possible because the receivers have a generic product-id which is the same independent of the device behind the receiver.

  The per device key-mapping is especially important for 27MHz wireless devices, these use the same HID-code for Fn + F1 to Fn + F12 for all devices, but the markings on the keys differ per model. Sofar it was impossible for Linux to get the mapping for this right, but now that we have per device product-ids for the devices behind the receiver we can finally fix this. As is the case with other devices with vendor specific mappings, the actual mapping is done in userspace through hwdb.

• The Better Logitech Wireless Device Support In The Linux 5.2 Kernel

  Red Hat's Hans de Goede who was involved in this latest Logitech support improvement work for the Linux 5.2 kernel has now blogged to share additional background information on the effort.

We are into May 2019, and it’s time for our monthly roundup of most downloaded Tizen apps and games for the previous month. The month of April 2019 did not see many new entrants making their way into that coveted Top 20 list, just three to be precise.

An action game named Zombie Derby made the biggest jump to find itself on the fourth spot, whereas another action game, Mountain Sniper Jungle, enters the Top 20 list in the sixteenth position. A train simulator game named Euro Train Driving is the last new entrant on the list at seventeenth. The list is led by the usual trio of WhatsApp, Facebook and Facebook Messenger. The rest of the story is also pretty much the same: Hancom Office Viewer, Opera Mini web browser, HERE Maps, Instagram, Smart Tutor, Xender etc.

Since the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 at the start of May we've been running various benchmarks of this latest enterprise Linux platform. Our tests to date have been with Intel Xeon hardware where it's been performing well and a nice speed-up over RHEL 7 with modern Xeon Scalable CPUs. Similarly, AMD EPYC is also much faster with RHEL 8.0 thanks to the much newer Linux kernel, compiler, and other software updates.

AMD EPYC screams on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 compared to RHEL 7.6. The modern AMD server platform performs much better thanks to the GCC 8.2 compiler replacing the older GCC 4.8 compiler that came well before any Zen support. The Linux 4.18 kernel is also a blessing for newer AMD (and Intel/IBM/ARM) hardware compared to the heavily-patched Linux 3.10 kernel of RHEL7. RHEL 8.0 also shifted over to the MQ-Deadline scheduler for SATA SSDs compared to the non-MQ deadline scheduler and the plethora of upgraded packages compared to RHEL7 also means a big deal for performance at large.

• One billion Linux desktops? [Ed: Pushing the nonsense that Linux counts only when it's spied on]

• Neil Williams: New directions

  Third, my job hunting has shown that the centralisation of decentralised version control is still a thing. As far as recruitment is concerned, if the code isn't visible on GitHub, it doesn't exist. (It's not the recruitment agencies asking for GitHub links, it is the company HR departments themselves.) So I had to add a bunch of projects to GitHub and there's a link now in the blog.

• We Are Tenants on Our Own Devices

  Today, we may think we own things because we paid for them and brought them home, but as long as they run software or have digital connectivity, the sellers continue to have control over the product. We are renters of our own objects, there by the grace of the true owner.

• DRM and terms-of-service have ended true ownership, turning us into "tenants of our own devices"

  Tufekci's analysis points out a serious problem in the "Surveillance Capitalism" critique that says that paying for devices and services (rather than getting them through an advertising subsidy) would restore dignity and balance to the tech world. When Apple charges you $1,000 for a phone and then spends millions killing Right to Repair legislation so that you'll be forced to buy repair services from Apple, who will therefore be able to decide when it's time to stop fixing your phone and for you to buy a new one, then it's clear that "if you're not paying for the product" is a serious misstatement, because in a world of Big Tech monopolies, even when you're paying for the product, you're still the product.

• SiFive RISC-V SoCs Can Now Be Paired With A GPU... Imagination's PowerVR

  If you want a SiFive SoC for the royalty-free, open-source RISC-V architecture it's now possible to pair it with graphics. Unfortunately, the graphics option is about as far from open-source as possible.

• WebRender newsletter #45

  WebRender is a GPU based 2D rendering engine for web written in Rust, currently powering Mozilla’s research web browser servo and on its way to becoming Firefox‘s rendering engine.

• Mozilla GFX: Graphics Team ships WebRender MVP!

  After many months of hard work and preparation, I’m pleased to announce the general availability of WebRender for selected Windows 10 devices. WebRender is a major rewrite of the Firefox rendering architecture using the same kind of GPU-based acceleration techniques used by games.

• SVT-AV1 0.5 Released As Intel's Speedy AV1 Video Encoder

  While we have been reporting on and benchmarking the Intel SVT video encoders since February, they were only officially announced last month and this Sunday marks their first tagged release for the AV1 encoder in the form of SVT-AV1 0.5.0.

  SVT-AV1 0.5 is easily one of the fastest AV1 CPU-based video encoders and has been performing excellent in our tests, including continued daily benchmarks of it in keeping track of its performance.

• Intel Graphics Compiler 1.0.4 Released With Fixes & Improvements

  Less than one month after releasing the Intel Graphics Compiler 1.0.3, the Intel team maintaining "IGC" today released version 1.0.4.

  The only changes to this LLVM-based graphics compiler for Intel GEN graphics hardware are "minor fixes and improvements."

• RadeonSI Primitive Culling Lands In Mesa 19.2

  The past few months AMD's Marek Olšák has been working on primitive culling support for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and last week that code was merged into the Mesa 19.2 development code.

  Marek has been working on primitive culling via asynchronous compute prior to the vertex shader process to eliminate geometry that ends up being invisible. Marek found that this functionality helps in workloads like the workstation ParaView software we use as part of our OpenGL test suite.

• X.Org's XDC2019 Issues Call For Proposals On Wayland, Mesa, X.Org, Etc

  X.Org's annual event, the X.Org Developers' Conference, is running like a well-oiled machined these days. While there are still months to go until XDC2019 in Montreal, a Call for Proposals has been issued for those wishing to speak at this annual gathering that pertains to Wayland, Mesa, libinput, Cairo, and related components as well, yes, the X.Org Server.

• Qt Design Studio 1.2 Beta Offers Bridge With Sketch Vector Graphics Editor

  Qt Design Studio 1.2 Beta also introduces gradients support for shape-based items and other changes. More details on the Qt Design Studio 1.2 Beta over on the Qt blog.

• Qt Design Studio 1.2 Beta released

  Qt Design Studio is a UI design and development tool that enables designers and developers to rapidly prototype and develop complex UIs. Both designers and developers use Qt Design Studio and this makes collaboration between the two a lot simpler and more streamlined. To get an impression, you should watch this video.

  The main addition for Qt Design Studio 1.2 is the Sketch Bridge. It is now possible to export your scenes from Sketch and import them to Qt Design Studio 1.2.

• ESR Switches To Threadripper But His GCC SVN-To-Git Conversion Could Still Take Months

  It looks like the saga of converting the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) source tree from SVN to Git isn't over yet and could still take months until completion. 

  As written about last week, a Linaro developer worked on a Bash script leveraging Git-SVN for converting GCC's SVN to Git as while Eric S Raymond has been working on the effort for many months using his homegrown "Reposurgeon" utility, it hasn't yet panned out. Reposurgeon in last year's form was too memory hungry and slow while ultimately he began rewriting the tool in Golang in hopes of addressing these issues.

• digest 0.6.19

  digest creates hash digests of arbitrary R objects (using the md5, sha-1, sha-256, sha-512, crc32, xxhash32, xxhash64, murmur32, and spookyhash algorithms) permitting easy comparison of R language objects.

  This version contains two new functions adding new digest functionality. First, Dmitriy Selivanov added a fast and vectorized digest2int to convert (arbitrary) strings into 32 bit integers using one-at-a-time hashing. Second, Kendon Bell, over a series of PRs, put together a nice implementation of spookyhash as a first streaming hash algorithm in digest. So big thanks to both Dmitriy and Kendon.

• Next C++ workshop: Binary Search Trees, 23 May at 18:00 UTC

  Learn C++ features with the help of LibreOffice developers! We’re running regular workshops which focus on a specific topic, and are accompanied by a real-time IRC meeting. 

• Apache Camel development on Eclipse Che 7

  Apache Camel development is improving on Eclipse Che 7 compared to Che 6. On Che 6, it is limited to XML DSL and without classical XSD-based XML support. With Che 7, Camel Java DSL is available and XSD-based XML support is working nicely with the Camel XML DSL support. Please note that Che 7 is still in beta.

• level up yo py/js adhd af research blaggin

• Episode 4: A Conversation with Steve George

  Steve joined Weaveworks in February 2017 as COO. In a career spanning 20 years, Steve has worked in a range of roles in the technology sector, most recently leading Canonical’s operations and corporate development. His interest and support for FOSS goes back to 1997, when he got hold of his first copy of Slackware on floppy disk.

• Rule-Based Matching In Natural Language Processing

  SpaCy is an open-source software library for advanced Natural Language Processing, written in Python and Cython. Here it is used to build a rule-based matcher that always classifies the word "iPhone" as a product entity

• Eclipse IoT Surveys Developer Community

• MIME type "text/vnd.sosi" for SOSI map data

  As part of my involvement in the work to standardise a REST based API for Noark 5, the Norwegian archiving standard, I spent some time the last few months to try to register a MIME type and PRONOM code for the SOSI file format. The background is that there is a set of formats approved for long term storage and archiving in Norway, and among these formats, SOSI is the only format missing a MIME type and PRONOM code.

• 3 Ways to Reboot Ubuntu through the Command Line

• How to Create and Manage Cron Jobs on Linux

• How to Setup Secure Private Chat Server with Ytalk over SSH

• Scan all open ports without any required program

• Container Domains (Types)

• How to install Minecraft server on RHEL 8 Linux

• How to watch Netflix on Linux

Higher secondary students will now be able to undertake physics experiments in digital form, courtesy the Kerala Infrastructure and Technology for Education (KITE).

KITE will make available a free and open source software (FOSS) and hardware ‘ExpEYES’ (Experiments for Young Engineers and Scientists) that can be connected to laptops. This facility for physics studies is in addition to the Maths IT labs that will be introduced this year.

At present, 36 practical activities have been stipulated for higher secondary students.

In addition to lab experiments, students can easily undertake electronics, electrical, mechanical, thermal, and sound experiments through ExpEYES, a recent statement from KITE said.

As I write this, Bloomberg has learned that other U.S-based tech giants like Intel, Qualcomm and Broadcom will cut off their supply of components to Huawei. Losing access to Intel processors will obviously affect future Huawei laptops, but what about the operating system Huawei will ship on these devices? What about the installation of Windows 10 you currently have on your Huawei laptop?

[...]

Linux Out Of The Box?

We know that Huawei has prepared for this situation by developing its own in-house alternative operating systems to both Android and Windows, though the state of said development is unknown.

Its Windows alternative is almost certainly a custom Linux distribution. And it's not far-fetched to speculate that Huawei has it playing nicely on its own processors.

Kinvolk.io, a software consultancy specializing in cloud tech for Linux, announced their Kubernetes distribution Lokomotive on May 17, 2019. Under an open source license, Lokomotiv aims towards production-ready performance and a secure, stable Kubernetes distribution.

According to Kinvolk, the fully supported release and commercial support with lokoctl and Lokomotive Components pulls into the station sometime this summer. For now, let us have a look at what’s under the hood and the project’s goals.

Also: Kubernetes, Cloud Native, and the Future of Software

The GNU/Linux community is blessed with 100+ distributions and we do our best to cover only the best of them on FossMint so if you haven’t checked out titles like the Best Linux Distros for Laptops in 2019, 5 Operating Systems for the IoT, and the Top 10 GNU/Linux Distros for Privacy & Security then you probably should.

Today, our attention is Linux distros that are perfect for running from USB sticks (and potentially other portable external storage devices) which means that we’ll be concentrating on portable Operating Systems.

These are Operating Systems that are designed to be minimalist in their resource requirements i.e. they can run on hardware with little secondary storage space and/or little RAM.

Portable Operating Systems also typically come in small enough sizes to fit on USB drives and CDs without losing the quality of their performance even when running on old machines. With that being said, here’s my list of the best portable Linux distributions.