• Richard Hughes: NVMe Firmware: I Need Your Data

  In a recent Google Plus post I asked what kind of hardware was most interesting to be focusing on next. UEFI updating is now working well with a large number of vendors, and the LVFS “onboarding” process is well established now. On that topic we’ll hopefully have some more announcements soon. Anyway, back to the topic in hand: The overwhelming result from the poll was that people wanted NVMe hardware supported, so that you can trivially update the firmware of your SSD. Firmware updates for SSDs are important, as most either address data consistency issues or provide nice performance fixes.

• Gnome Shell Android Integration Extension GSConnect V12 Released

  GSConnect v12 was released yesterday with changes like more resilient sshfs connections (which should make browsing your Android device from the desktop more reliable), fixed extension icon alignment, along with other improvements.

  GSConnect is a Gnome Shell extension that integrates your Android device(s) with the desktop. The tool makes use of the KDE Connect protocol but without using any KDE dependencies, keeping your desktop clean of unwanted packages.

• Linux Release Roundup: Communitheme, Cantata & VS Code

  GSconnect is a magical GNOME extension that lets your Android phone integrate with your Linux desktop. So good, in fact, that Ubuntu devs want to ship it as part of the upcoming Ubuntu 18.10 release (though last I heard it probably just end up in the repos instead).

  Anyway, a new version of GSconnect popped out this week. GSconnect v12 adds a nifty new features or two, as well as a few fixes here, and a few UI tweaks there.

• Red Hat Advances Container Storage

  Red Hat has moved to make storage a standard element of a container platform with the release of version 3.1 of Red Hat OpenShift Container Storage (OCS), previously known as Red Hat Container Native Storage.

  Irshad Raihan, senior manager for product marketing for Red Hat Storage, says Red Hat decided to rebrand its container storage offering to better reflect its tight integration with the Red Hat OpenShift platform. In addition, the term “container native” continues to lose relevance given all the different flavors of container storage that now exist, adds Raihan.

  The latest version of the container storage software from Red Hat adds arbiter volume support to enable high availability with efficient storage utilization and better performance, enhanced storage monitoring and configuration via the Red Hat implementation of the Prometheus container monitoring framework, and block-backed persistent volumes (PVs) that can be applied to both general application workloads and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) infrastructure workloads. Support for PVs is especially critical because to in the case of Red Hat OCS organizations can deploy more than 1,000 PVs per cluster, which helps to reduce cluster sprawl within the IT environment, says Raihan.

• Is Red Hat Inc’s (NYSE:RHT) ROE Of 20.72% Sustainable?

• FPgM report: 2018-33

• Infineon enables open source TSS ESAPI layer

  This is the first open source TPM middleware that complies with the Software Stack (TSS) Enhanced System API (ESAPI) specification of the Trusted Computing Group .

  “The ease of integration on Linux and other embedded platforms that comes with the release of the TPM 2.0 ESAPI stack speeds up the adoption of TPM 2.0 in embedded systems such as network equipment and industrial systems,” says Gordon Muehl, Global CTO Security at Huawei.

• Open source RDBMS uses spurred by lower costs, cloud options

  As the volumes of data generated by organizations get larger and larger, data professionals face a dilemma: Must database bills get bigger in the process? And, increasingly, IT shops with an eye on costs are looking to open source RDBMS platforms as a potential alternative to proprietary relational database technologies.

• Progress open sources ABL code in Spark Toolkit

  New England headquartered application development company Progress is flexing its programmer credentials this month.

  The Massachusetts-HQ’d firm has now come forward with its Progress Spark Toolkit… but what is it?

  The Progress Spark Toolkit is a set of open source ABL code combined with some recommended best-practices.

• Mixing software development roles produces great results

  Most open source communities don’t have a lot of formal roles. There are certainly people who help with sysadmin tasks, testing, writing documentation, and translating or developing code. But people in open source communities typically move among different roles, often fulfilling several at once.

  In contrast, team members at most traditional companies have defined roles, working on documentation, support, QA, and in other areas.

  Why do open source communities take a shared-role approach, and more importantly, how does this way of collaborating affect products and customers?

  Nextcloud has adopted this community-style practice of mixing roles, and we see large benefits for our customers and our users.

• FOSS Project Spotlight: SIT (Serverless Information Tracker)

  In the past decade or so, we've learned to equate the ability to collaborate with the need to be online. The advent of SaaS clearly marked the departure from a decentralized collaboration model to a heavily centralized one. While on the surface this is a very convenient delivery model, it simply doesn't fit a number of scenarios well.

  As somebody once said, "you can't FTP to Mars", but we don't need to go as far. There are plenty of use cases here on Earth that are less than perfectly suited for this "online world". Lower power chips and sensors, vessel/offshore collaboration, disaster recovery, remote areas, sporadically reshaping groups—all these make use of central online services a challenge.

  Another challenge with centralization is somewhat less thought of—building software that can handle a lot of concurrent users and that stores and processes a lot of information and never goes down is challenging and expensive, and we, as consumers, pay dearly for that effort.

  And not least important, software in the cloud removes our ability to adapt it perfectly for use cases beyond its owner's vision, scope and profitability considerations. Convenience isn't free, and this goes way beyond the price tag.

• ProtonMail's open source encryption library, OpenPGPjs, passes independent audit

  ProtonMail, the secure email provider, has just had its credentials re-affirmed after its encryption library, OpenPGPjs, passed an independent security audit. The audit was carried out by the respected security firm, Cure53, after the developer community commissioned a review following the release of OpenPGPjs 3.0 back in March.

• Uber Announces Open Source Fusion.js Framework

  Uber Announces Fusion.js, an open source "Plugin-based Universal Web Framework." In the announcement, Uber senior software engineer Leo Horie explains that Uber builds hundreds of web-based applications, and with web technologies changing quickly and best practices continually evolving, it is a challenge to have hundreds of web engineers leverage modern language features while staying current with the dynamic nature of the web platform. Fusion.js is Uber's solution to this problem.

 

• ASAN And LSAN Work In rr

  AddressSanitizer has worked in rr for a while. I just found that LeakSanitizer wasn't working and landed a fix for that. This means you can record an ASAN build and if there's an ASAN error, or LSAN finds a leak, you can replay it in rr knowing the exact addresses of the data that leaked — along with the usual rr goodness of reverse execution, watchpoints, etc. Well, hopefully. Report an issue if you find more problems.

• Oracle Open-Sources GraphPipe to Support ML Development

  Oracle on Wednesday announced that it has open-sourced GraphPipe to enhance machine learning applications.

  The project's goal is to improve deployment results for machine learning models, noted Project Leader Vish Abrams. That process includes creating an open standard.

  The company has a questionable relationship with open source developers, so its decision to open-source GraphPipe might not receive a flood of interest.

  Oracle hopes developers will rally behind the project to simplify and standardize the deployment of machine learning models. GraphPipe consists of a set of libraries and tools for following a deployment standard.

• OERu makes a college education affordable

  Open, higher education courses are a boon to adults who don’t have the time, money, or confidence to enroll in traditional college courses but want to further their education for work or personal satisfaction. OERu is a great option for these learners. It allows people to take courses assembled by accredited colleges and universities for free, using open textbooks, and pay for assessment only when (and if) they want to apply for formal academic credit.

  I spoke with Dave Lane, open source technologist at the Open Education Resource Foundation, which is OERu’s parent organization, to learn more about the program. The OER Foundation is a nonprofit organization hosted by Otago Polytechnic in Dunedin, New Zealand. It partners with organizations around the globe to provide leadership, networking, and support to help advance open education principles.

• Tomu Is A Tiny, Open Source Computer That Easily Fits In Your USB Port

  There are a number of USB stick computers available in the market at varying prices. One of them that really stands out is Tomu — a teeny weeny ARM processor that can entirely fit inside your computer’s USB port.

  Tomu is based on Silicon Labs Happy Gecko EFM32HG309 Arm Cortex-M0+ microcontroller that runs at 25 MHz. It sports 8 kb of RAM and 60 kb of flash onboard. In spite of the small size, it supports two LEDs and two capacitance touch buttons.

• RcppArmadillo 0.9.100.5.0

  A new RcppArmadillo release 0.9.100.5.0, based on the new Armadillo release 9.100.5 from earlier today, is now on CRAN and in Debian.

  It once again follows our (and Conrad's) bi-monthly release schedule. Conrad started with a new 9.100.* series a few days ago. I ran reverse-depends checks and found an issue which he promptly addressed; CRAN found another which he also very promptly addressed. It remains a true pleasure to work with such experienced professionals as Conrad (with whom I finally had a beer around the recent useR! in his home town) and of course the CRAN team whose superb package repository truly is the bedrock of the R community.

• PHP version 7.1.21 and 7.2.9

  RPM of PHP version 7.2.9 are available in remi repository for Fedora 28 and in remi-php72 repository for Fedora 25-27 and Enterprise Linux ≥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).

  RPM of PHP version 7.1.21 are available in remi repository for Fedora 26-27 and in remi-php71 repository for Fedora 25 and Enterprise Linux (RHEL, CentOS).

• Endless OS and Asus, Update on L1TF Exploit, Free Red Hat DevConf.US in Boston, Linux 4.19 Kernel Update
  

  Some of us may recall a time when ASUS used to ship a stripped down version of Xandros Linux with their line of Eee PC netbooks. Last week, the same company announced that Endless OS will be supporting non-OS offerings of their product. However it comes with a big disclaimer stating that ASUS will not officially support the operating system's compatibility issues.

• The Chromebook Grows Up

  What started out as a project to provide a cheap, functional, secure and fast laptop experience has become so much more. Chromebooks in general have suffered from a lack of street-cred acceptance. Yes, they did a great job of doing the everyday basics—web browsing and...well, that was about it. Today, with the integration of Android apps, all new and recently built Chrome OS devices do much more offline—nearly as much as a conventional laptop or desktop, be it video editing, photo editing or a way to switch to a Linux desktop for developers or those who just like to do that sort of thing.

• Windows 10 Linux Distribution Overload? We have just the thing [Ed: Microsoft is still striving to control and master GNU/Linux through malware, Vista 10]

• What Dropbox dropping Linux support says

  You've probably already heard by now that Dropbox is nixing support for all Linux file systems but unencrypted ext4. When this was announced, much of the open source crowd was up in arms—and rightfully so. Dropbox has supported Linux for a long time, so this move came as a massive surprise.

• Winds Beautifully Combines Feed Reader and Podcast Player in One Single App

  Billboard top 50 playlist is great for commuting. But I’m a nerd so I mostly prefer podcasts. Day after day, listening to podcasts on my phone has turned into a habit for the better and now, I crave my favorite podcasts even when I’m home, sitting in front of my computer. Thus began, my hunt for the perfect podcast app for Linux.

  Desktop Linux doesn’t have a huge selection of dedicated podcast applications. Of course, you can use Rhythmbox music player or VLC Media player to download podcasts (is there anything VLC can’t do?). There are even some great command line tools to download podcasts if you want to go down that road.

• VirtualBox 5.2.18 Maintenance Update fixed VM process termination on RDP client disconnect

  Virtualbox developers released a maintenance update for virtualization solution on the 14th of August, 2018. The latest update raised the version of VirtualBox to 5.2.18. The improvements and additions have been welcomed by several users as it makes the virtualization product even more convenient to use.

• The Internet of 200 Kilogram Things: Challenges of Managing a Fleet of Slot Machines

  In a previous post we talked about Finland's Linux powered slot machines. It was mentioned that there are about 20 000 of these machines in total. It turns out that managing and maintaining all those machines is a not as easy as it may first appear.

  In the modern time of The Cloud, 20 thousand machines might not seem like much. Basic cloud management software such as Kubernetes scales to hundreds of thousands, even millions of machines without even breaking a sweat. Having "only" 20 thousand machines may seem like a small and simple thing that can be managed by one intern in their spare time. In reality things get difficult as there are many unique challenges to managing slot machines as opposed to regular servers.

  [...]

  There are roughly two different ways of updating an operating system install: image based updates and package based updates. Neither of these works particularly well in slot machine usage. Games are big, so downloading full images is not feasible, especially for machines that have poor network connections. Package based updates have the major downside that they are not atomic. In desktop and server usage this is not really an issue because you can apply updates at a known good time. For remote devices this does not work because they can be powered off at any time without any warning. If this happens during an upgrade you have a broken machine requiring a physical visit from a maintenance person. As mentioned above this is slow and expensive.

• Security updates for Friday

• How to Crack WinRAR Password Protected Files In Simple Steps?

• A 16-Year-Old Hacked Apple Servers And Stored Data In Folder Named ‘hacky hack hack’

  Apple’s tall claims of keeping your data secured were shown mirror by an Australian teenager when he repeatedly hacked Apple servers and downloaded 90 GB of ‘secure files.’

  As reported by The Age, the teenager hacked Apple’s mainframe multiple times from his home because he was a fan of the iPhone maker company and dreamed of working for Apple.

• Melbourne teen hacked into Apple's secure computer network, court told

• SEI CERT releases open-source Source Code Analysis Laboratory for pinpointing vulnerabilities

  The Software Engineering Institute’s (SEI) CERT Division at Carnegie Mellon University released an open-source static analysis aggregator/correlator this week. Source Code Analysis application (SCALe) is designed to find vulnerabilities in application source code via multiple, independent static analysis tools.

• Two DDoS Friendly Bugs Fixed in Linux Kernel [Ed: It wasn’t even anything critical]

  Maintainers behind the Linux kernel have rolled out patches in the past weeks for two bugs that are just ideal for causing havoc via DDoS attacks.

  Both bugs affect the Linux kernel's TCP stack and are known to trigger excessive resource usage in Linux-based systems.

• Open-source vulnerabilities which will not die: Who is to blame? [Ed:  Charlie Osborne is amplifying several Microsoft proxies whose sole purpose is to attack and badmouth FOSS to help sell proprietary software]

• Open Source security comes to GitHub [Ed: Sonatype is helping Microsoft entrap FOSS developers with their proprietary software]

• More Open Source Automotive Grade Linux Members

• Automotive Grade Linux Extends Global Reach with Six New Members

  Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open platform for the connected car, is announcing that six new members have joined the project including Kinetica, Neusoft, NXM Technologies, NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Spireon Inc. and Veniam. With the addition of these companies and organizations, the project is 130 members strong.

  "We are delighted to see six new members deepen their investment in automotive open source," said Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux, The Linux Foundation. "As we continue to advance our platform through the release of AGL UCB 6.0, expanding our global community is crucial. We look forward to further leveraging their expertise in embedded automotive technologies as we advance the connected car ecosystem."

• Open Source Comes to Hollywood and a New Foundation is Formed

  In another sign of how mainstream “open source” technology has become, last Friday, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—you know, the folks who award the Oscars—officially partnered with the Linux Foundation to create the Academy Software Foundation, an open-source repository for film and media makers.

• Hollywood teams with Linux Foundation to fix open source

  Formation of a new industry body always begs the question why it was needed now and did not exist before and that certainly applies to the newly formed Academy Software Foundation (ASWF). It has been established by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) and the Linux Foundation to foster open source software development in the movie and video production businesses. It already has strong backing with premier founding members including Cisco, Google Cloud, Intel, Animal Logic, Blue Sky Studios, DreamWorks, Walt Disney Studios and Weta Digital, who are a combination of major content creators and video infrastructure vendors. The focus is on animation, audio and visual effects, for which 84% of studios already use open source software,…

• Instaclustr grabs $15 mln from Level Equity

• Open-source software services company Instaclustr lands $15M funding round

• Open-Source Software Program Providers Firm Instaclustr Lands $15M

• Open Source is Now a Big Data Service

  Open source technologies continue to make headway across a range of industries undergoing digital conversions. The big data sector has of course led the way with a growing list of Apache Foundation projects ranging from Hadoop to Spark that have made their way into data-centric enterprises coping with huge data volumes.

  Among the vendors seeking to make access to open source technologies a single-click service is the Silicon Valley startup Instaclustr, which touts its “Open Source-as-a-Service” platform as a way of hosting and managing big data technologies in their “100 percent open source form.”

• Invite me to your meetings

  I was invited by my boss to a dinner. He uses exchange or outlook365 or something like that. The KMail TNEF parser didn’t succeed in parsing all the info, so I’m kind of trying to fix it.

• Last week in Kube

• Akademy & Binary Factory

  During Akademy it was brought to my (and the other Kate developers) attention, that we should take a closer look on the Binary Factory for KDE. There were some blogs about the Binary Factory in the past but we somehow never really linked it on our homepage as potential source for up-to-date installers for the different operating systems. I feel a bit sorry for neglecting that area in the past year.

  Therefore, as we have now some time during Akademy together as team, we did take a look at the current state of the installers there for Windows and macOS.

• Akademy: closing time

  Akademy is always a whirlwind which is my excuse for not blogging! Today we wrapped up the program which leaves us in a nearly-empty venue and a bit of time after lunch to catch up.

  I did manage to gather photos together in Google Photos: https://photos.app.goo.gl/qHPwehW8C1zPGuav7

  Thanks again to the KDE e.V. for sponsoring my hostel and the Ubuntu Community Fund for part of my travel expenses. This allowed me to attend. Meeting Popey from the Ubuntu community and the Limux team was great, although we didn't do as much Kubuntu work as in past years. However, attending the Distro BoF was a great experience; very friendly and collaborative.

• Akademy 2018 Wrap-Up

  The Akademy 2018 ends today.

  Like each Akademy I attended, it was an interesting experience. As the location switches around each year, so does the set of people attending change every year, too.

  That is actually nice, as you get always to meet some of your old “friends” but additionally new members of the KDE community. I think this kind of “conferences” or “meetings” are an important way to get some more cohesion in the community, which is sometimes a bit lacking between people only meeting online via mail/…

• Memories from Akademy 2018

  Here is my semi-traditional "memories from Akademy" post for this year. I have to admit I don't manage to do it consistently each year but this edition was special enough that for sure it deserves one.

  First of all, it was the first time I did live sketchnoting of the sessions I attended. I posted the result on social media as soon as the talk was over and I also had a special blog post to present them. I think it was all well received which is motivating. I will likely do it again I think.

• How To Setup Latest Oracle OpenJDK On Linux

• Designing your garden with Edraw Max

• How to Install OpenMeetings on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• Kubernetes Design and Development Explained

• GPIO on Fedora, or how to turn on an LED

• How to Install Odoo 10 on Ubuntu 16.04 with Nginx as a Reverse Proxy

• How To Lock The Keyboard And Mouse, But Not The Screen In Linux

• How to Use GNU bc (Basic Calculator) in Linux

• Install LXD pure-container hypervisor on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• Give Your Desktop a Flat Look Using Arc Theme

• Linux File Permissions and Ownership Explained with Examples

• Linux iotop Check What’s Stressing & Increasing Load On Hard Disks

• Linux mount an LVM volume / partition command

LMCE 19 has a new star for the future: Timeshift. It makes updating now less-worrisome and will encourage users to experiment more without afraid to break anything. We can revert back easily now! A method to make stable system more stable and to prevent broken system easier for end-user. This is a very good thing for both long-time and new users, even I hope this feature to be exist on other distros as well. Second star, it supports HiDPI better now, which means Linux Mint will embrace more users from Retina Display-alike computers and more! Other features, such as faster Nemo and more extensive Software Manager, will make you love Linux Mint even more. It's really quick to install (15 minutes or less) and brings complete set of apps (LibreOffice, Firefox, and so on). Finally, I recommend Mint users to upgrade to this version or at least try it on LiveCD session. Enjoy!

• AMD Begins Staging AMDGPU Patches For Linux 4.20/5.0, Including FreeSync Refactoring

  With the DRM feature work for Linux 4.19 now in the kernel, AMD's stellar open-source driver team has begun staging their work-in-progress changes for the AMDGPU Direct Rendering Manager driver for the next kernel cycle.

  There is now drm-next-4.20-wip as part of AMD's development Git tree of the Linux kernel for Radeon/AMDGPU development. That's for "Linux 4.20" that will almost surely be renamed to "Linux 5.0" given Linus Torvalds' expressed versioning preference of bumping the major kernel version once hitting that number equal to all of his fingers and toes.

• More AMDGPU Work For Linux 4.19 Has VCN + PSP Firmware Hookup For Future Hardware

  The good news is that the open-source AMD graphics team continues working on support for upcoming hardware, but the bad news is that it looks like their VCN video hardware might be a bit more locked down than it is now.

  With current Raven Ridge APUs there is VCN as "Video Core Next" as a replacement to UVD and VCE for video decoding and encoding, respectively. This dedicated hardware core for video encode/decode has been supported well now for some months on the open-source Linux graphics driver stack. The latest patches hitting the mailing list for hopeful integration to Linux 4.19 are a bit interesting and reveal a change for future hardware.

• POWER Changes On The Way To Linux 4.19 Include More Spectre Work

  The POWER architecture changes have been submitted for the in-development Linux 4.19 kernel.

• Qualcomm Adreno 600 Series Support Submitted For Linux 4.19

  Following the main DRM features update for Linux 4.19, a secondary pull request has now been submitted that offers up the nine thousand lines of code for bringing up the Adreno 600 series support for supporting the very latest Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs.

  Last week Freedreno/MSM founder and maintainer Rob Clark proposed getting A6xx support into Linux 4.19 after this Direct Rendering Manager code has been reviewed and revised for months on mailing lists. These code contributions in part come from Qualcomm / Code Aurora and there are also Google developers working on it too, including the bring-up of A6xx support within the Freedreno Gallium3D driver. This A6xx device support is good enough for running various OpenGL test cases and other basic code. The Adreno 600 series hardware can be found in Snapdragon SoCs like the new Snapdragon 845, 730, and others.

Canonical's team responsible for continuing to advance the Mir display server has been making good progress this summer on fleshing out some missing functionality.

This week partial support for the NVIDIA proprietary driver was merged. In particular, the EGLStreams platform support. This is the initial bits for getting the NVIDIA proprietary driver to play along with Mir, but isn't yet the full implementation required to get OpenGL clients working on Mir with the NVIDIA driver. That work is still being pursued and is a work-in-progress. Mir's path for NVIDIA support is similar to that of the Wayland compositors with needing to implement EGLStreams and there not yet being any new Unix device memory allocation API that NVIDIA has been pushing for years to create the best of both worlds -- in terms of EGLStreams and GBM APIs for all driver vendors to agree upon.

Direct: Mir News: 17th August 2018

• Lubuntu Planning Switch To Wayland, Porting Openbox To Mir

  Ubuntu derivative Lubuntu that is now using the LXQt desktop environment has laid out more of their plans to switch over to Wayland rather than the existing X.Org based session.

  In order to achieve their Wayland support with the LXQt desktop, they intend to port the Openbox window manager to using the Mir display server and also leveraging QtLayerShell. Mir, of course, has been focused on Wayland compatibility the past year and is becoming quite solid as of late with its core Wayland protocol support.

• Lubuntu Development Newsletter #9

  We’ve been polishing the desktop more, but work has been blocked by the still ongoing Qt transition.

  The 16.04 to 18.04 upgrade has now been enabled! Please do let us know if there’s any issues. Here’s a video we made when 17.04 went End of Life; the instructions are still current.

  Our main developer, Simon Quigley, became an Ubuntu Core Developer this past Monday! He now has access to the entire Ubuntu archive.

• A Raspberry Pi-style computer you can build yourself: Blueberry Pi

  If buying a Raspberry Pi or one of the many other single-board computers available isn't a tough enough challenge, hacker Marcel Thürmer has sketched out enough details about his Blueberry Pi open-source hardware project to help the like-minded take things to the next level.

  As Thürmer wryly notes on the GitHub page where he's left the Blueberry Pi's schematics, this is just "another fruit single-board computer" based on the Allwinner V3s system on chip (SoC).

  However, while some single-board computer makers have open-sourced their hardware designs, unless you're building a large enough quantity, it's probably not worth the cost or effort.

• Ethical aesthetics – Librem 5 design report #7

  You may have noticed that there is no obvious visual branding on the Librem laptops. While this was at first a technical limitation on the very first Librem model (back in 2015), the subtle and minimalistic branding that began on newer models in 2016 was a conscious design decision.

  Now, we’re hoping to refine the physical branding further.
  One reason for a minimalist design is aesthetic. Just like on a piece of hand-made jewelry, we wish the branding to be made in the form of an inconspicuous marking that doesn’t interfere with the natural beauty of the overall shape.

• Intel launches seven NUCs with Coffee Lake and 10nm Canyon Lake CPUs

  Intel has launched five, barebones “Bean Canyon” NUC mini-PC kits equipped with 14nm, 8th Gen “Coffee Lake” CPUs starting at $299. It also unveiled two configured, Windows 10 equipped NUCs that tap its 10nm “Canyon Lake” chips.

• Rugged, Linux-friendly embedded PC plugs you into the CANBus

  IEI announced an IP40-protected “DRPC-130-AL” DIN-rail computer with an Atom x5-E3930, CANBus, SATA, eMMC, 4x USB 3.0, dual HDMI and GbE, extended temperature support, and shock and vibration resistance.

  IEI’s fanless DRPC-130-AL may be the quintessential compact industrial embedded PC. Nothing much stands out except for the CANBus port, but IEI Technology has crammed a lot into a compact, 1.4 kg, 174 x 130 x 58.8mm chassis.

• The Communist Dogifesto, an open source first-person shooter has a big update

  The Communist Dogifesto has quite an amusing setting, with Russian space dogs aboard a space station becoming really rather intelligent and taking it over. It's open source and it just had a rather big update.

• Strategy game Oligopoly: Industrial Revolution is now out in Early Access

  Inspired by the likes of Transport Tycoon and Industry Giant, Oligopoly: Industrial Revolution is out in Early Access on Steam today with Linux support.

• Steampunk-ish detective adventure 'Lamplight City' confirmed to be on Linux at launch on September 13th

  Great news for those looking forward to another good looking point and click adventure, as Application Systems Heidelberg have announced that Linux support for Lamplight City [Official Site] is now confirmed for the release date.

• Subsideria aims to modernise classic space shooters, releasing with Linux support on August 24th

  Are you a fan of arcade space shooters? Subsideria [Official Site] might be your cup as the developer said their aim is to put a modern spin on it with boss battles, different game modes and so on.

• DXVK 0.70 is out with support for Direct3D 10 over Vulkan in Wine

  DXVK [GitHub] continues the amazing progress towards helping Linux gamers play their favourite Windows-only games on Linux.

  Just released minutes ago, DXVK 0.70 adds in the previously announced Direct3D 10 support (more info here). In addition to this, it also adds in support for the D3D11.1 ClearView method and D3D11.1 extended double instructions.

• DXVK 0.70 Released With Initial Direct3D 10 Over Vulkan Support

  Just in time for any weekend Linux gamers, a new release of DXVK is available that maps the Direct3D API to Vulkan for allowing faster Windows gaming performance under Wine.

  DXVK started out with a focus on supporting the Direct3D 11 API and it's been doing a wonderful job at supporting a massive collection of D3D11 Windows games running at great speeds under Wine+DXVK thanks to Vulkan. Recently it started adding Direct3D 10 support using a small wrapper. With today's DXVK 0.70, it's the initial release that includes this preliminary Direct3D 10 support.

• Confidential Mode comes to Gmail Android app

• These Android phones have security defects out of the box, researchers say

• Five premium Android games worth every cent

• The week's best Android games to distract you from Earth's impending doom

• Sony Xperia Android 9 Pie release news as upgrade date announced

• Android 9 Pie review: Google gets more thoughtful

While yesterday were the benchmarks showing how Linux games struggle to scale past a few CPU cores/threads, in this article is a look at the scaling performance of various applications/workloads under Linux up to 64 threads using the AMD Threadripper 2990WX. Here's a look at how the Linux performance changes in a variety of applications from one to sixty-four threads with this new HEDT processor.

The benchmarks today are for mostly curiosity sake about Linux and the Threadripper 2990WX, particularly on the impact of 32 threads (cores) to 64 threads with SMT, etc. In the next few days is a much more interesting comparison and that is looking at the Windows Server 2019 vs. Linux performance on the Threadripper 2990WX at various SMT and CCX configurations. That should reveal a lot about Windows' scaling abilities given the immense interest this week in the Windows vs. Linux Threadripper performance. But for today are just these reference numbers.

I’ll be honest, if you’re just a standard desktop user, AryaLinux is not for you. Although you can certainly get right to work on the desktop, if you need anything outside of the default applications, you might find it a bit too much trouble to bother with. If, on the other hand, you’re a developer, AryaLinux might be a great platform for you. Or, if you just want to see what it’s like to build a Linux distribution from scratch, AryaLinux is a pretty easy route.

Even with its quirks, AryaLinux holds a lot of promise as both a Linux distribution and platform. If the developers can see to it to build a GUI front-end for the alps package manager, AryaLinux could make some serious noise.

Lennart Jern is a Swedish-speaking Finn, who has been living in Umeå, Sweden, for about three years. He was born and raised in southern Finland where he obtained his master’s degree in applied mathematics. His time at university exposed Lennart’s true passion. “While at the university, I realized that computer science was really what I wanted to work with.” In order to follow his dream of working in computer science he moved to Sweden with his wife to pursue a master’s program in computer science. After a short while he had learned enough to land a job with a local startup. “I’m working with cloud/distributed systems, specifically with tools like kubernetes and OpenShift.”

Lennart’s first contact with Linux was in 2006. Some of the computers in his high school were running OpenSuse. He installed Ubuntu’s Hardy Heron in 2008 and has been using Linux ever since.