• SRT open-source video project adds transfer, multiplexing features that can reduce streaming costs

  The SRT Alliance, an open-source initiative focused on developing methods for low-latency video streaming, has released version 1.3 of the SRT video transport protocol.

  This version supports encrypted fast file transfer of VOD files and the multiplexing of streams within the same network port.

  Founded by streaming video providers Haivision and Wowza, the SRT Alliance is focused on developing an open source alternative to proprietary technologies.

• Redox OS 0.3.3 Released, Lowers RAM Usage

  The Rust-written Redox operating system is out with a new feature release.

  Redox OS 0.3.3 is the operating system's new version and its primary benefit is much lower memory use. Redox OS 0.3.3 is now using just about 480MB of RAM rather than around 1.3GB.

• Fast track Apache Spark

  These tips highlight Spark’s ability to deliver serious gains in productivity despite limited user computing capability. There is definitely an ideal Spark setup for each organization’s particular needs. One or all of the following will most likely be necessary once there is buy-in from stakeholders to create a robust analytics system: expanding to a cluster setup, building a data warehouse, and utilizing an infrastructure team. My hope is that this post has given you some tips to make it easier to create a proof-of-concept with Spark that justifies stakeholder investment, and that it has provided some pointers if you decide that a bare bones Spark setup is best for you.

• Magento’s Open Source Release

  On 14th September 2017, Magento released “Open Source” (Magento 2.1.9) which seeks to improve and upgrade current Magento software.

  According to the Magento team, the new release contains 40 security fixes and enhancements.

• Setup a desktop environment under OpenBSD with XFCE

• Reasons to Open Source Your Syllabus

• Linux, Docker Gain in Public Cloud Deployments

  As the enterprise application stack is fleshed out with micro-services and other emerging tiers, more applications are running in the cloud as the Linux operating system emerges as a "legitimate option" across leading public cloud platforms, a new report concludes.

• How AMD EPYC & Intel Xeon Gold Compare To Various Amazon EC2 Cloud Instances

  Last week we began with our EPYC 7601 Linux benchmarking of this high-end AMD server CPU featuring 32 cores / 64 threads per socket. Earlier this week were also some 10-year old Opteron vs. EPYC benchmarks and power efficiency tests while the latest in our EPYC Linux testing is seeing how the new AMD processor compares to various Amazon EC2 cloud instances.

• AWS to Sell Cloud Services by the Second

• New FSF membership benefit: LibreOffice certification

  The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that the opportunity to apply for LibreOffice certification for migrations and trainings is now available to FSF Associate Members.

  LibreOffice is a free software project of The Document Foundation (TDF), a non-profit based in Germany. An office suite, LibreOffice encompasses word processing, and programs for the creation and editing of spreadsheets, slideshows, databases, diagrams and drawings, and mathematical formulae. It uses the ISO standard OpenDocument file format (ODF).

• Marketing activities so far in 2017: Mike Saunders

  Thanks to donations to The Document Foundation, along with valued contributions from our community, we maintain a small team working on various aspects of LibreOffice including documentation, user interface design, quality assurance, release engineering and marketing. Together with Italo Vignoli, I help with the latter, and today I’ll summarise some of the achievements so far in 2017.

• There's Now a Windows 10 Installer for the Debian-Based Q4OS Linux Distribution

  The Q4OS development team is pleased to inform us today about the immediate availability for download of a Windows installer for their Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution, Q4OS, allowing users to create a dual-boot environment on their PCs.

  For those not familiar to Q4OS, it's an open-source and free Linux distro based on the popular Debian GNU/Linux operating system and built around the Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE), which resembles the look and feel of the old-school KDE 3.5 desktop environment.

  Created with an emphasis on Windows users who want to migrate to a free, open-source, and more secure operating system, Q4OS now lets them install the distribution alongside Microsoft Windows in an easy manner, without having to do any modifications to your personal computer or install any other apps.

• Ubuntu Dock Now Has Dynamic Transparency

  Ubuntu devs have listened to our gripe on the jarring contrast between GNOME 3.26's transparent top bar and the Ubuntu Dock.

• Ubuntu Dock Features Adaptive Transparency on Ubuntu 17.10, Here's How It Works

  Ubuntu contributor Didier Roche continues his development on the look and feel of the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, and today he announced that Ubuntu Dock is getting adaptive transparency.

  Canonical confirmed that Ubuntu 17.10 would come with the GNOME 3.26 desktop environment by default, though the default session has suffered numerous modifications compared to the vanilla one to make things easier for those using the Unity interface on Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) or Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus).

  Most probably, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS users won't upgrade to Ubuntu 17.10, but we're sure Ubuntu 17.04 users will because it'll reach end of life in about four months from the moment of writing, sometime in January 2018. Therefore, Canonical wants to make their Unity to GNOME transition as painless as possible.

• LXD: Weekly Status #15

  This week has been pretty quiet as far as upstream changes since half the team was attending the Open Source Summity, the Linux Plumbers Conference and the Linux Security Summit in Los Angeles, California.

• KMyMoney’s Łukasz Wojniłowicz in Randa

  Please read the following guest post from Łukasz who joined me last week in Randa to work on KMyMoney.

• Randa 2017 – Databases are back to KMyMoney

  On the morning of Day 5 we chased and fixed a problem that was introduced a long time ago but never caused any trouble. The code goes back into the KDE3 version of KMyMoney and was caused by some changes inside Qt5. The fix prevents a crash when saving a transaction which opens an additional dialog to gather more information (e.g. price information). With the help of other devs here in Randa, we were able to drill down the problem and update the code to work on KF5/Qt5 keeping the existing functionality.

• Randa 2017 – Days 3 and 4

  On Day 3, we started out at 7:02 as usual with the team responsible for breakfast meeting in the kitchen.

  KMyMoney wise, we worked some more on keyboard navigation and porting to KF5. The dialog to open a database and the logic around it have been rewritten/fixed, so that it is now possible to collect the information from the user and proceed with opening. The database I have on file for testing does not open though due to another problem which I still need to investigate.

• Watch the Keynote Videos from Open Source Summit in Los Angeles

  If you weren’t able to attend Open Source Summit North America 2017 in Los Angeles, don’t worry! We’ve rounded up the following keynote presentations so you can hear from the experts about the growing impact of open source software.

• uniprof: Transparent Unikernel for Performance Profiling and Debugging

  Unikernels are small and fast and give Docker a run for its money, while at the same time still giving stronger features of isolation, says Florian Schmidt, a researcher at NEC Europe, who has developed uniprof, a unikernel performance profiler that can also be used for debugging. Schmidt explained more in his presentation at Xen Summit in Budapest in July.

  Most developers think that unikernels are hard to create and debug. This is not entirely true: Unikernels are a single linked binary that come with a shared address space, which mean you can use gdb. That said, developers do lack tools, such as effective profilers, that would help create and maintain unikernels.

• GNOME partners with Purism on Librem 5 Linux-based privacy-focused smartphone

  The Librem 5 smartphone by Purism has a long and difficult road ahead of it. Competing against the likes of Apple and Google on the mobile market has proven to be a death sentence for many platforms -- including Microsoft with its failed Windows 10 Mobile. With that said, I am rooting for Purism and its Pure OS, as the world would benefit from a device that uses Linux and focuses on both privacy and security. Such an alternative to iPhone and Android would be a breath of fresh air.

  Luckily, Purism has found itself a new partner on this project -- one of the most important organizations in the Linux community -- The GNOME Foundation. Yes, the maker of the absolute best desktop environment is offering to assist with the Librem 5 -- if it is successfully crowdfunded, that is. To date, it is only about 33-percent funded, although there is still more than a month to go.

• GNOME Foundation Gives its Backing to Purism’s Linux Phone

  The GNOME Foundation has today given its backing to Purism's ambition of building a free, open-source smartphone with user privacy and encryption as a central feature.

• Why deploying own FAF

• Manage access control using Redis Bitfields

• Linux Groups Command for Beginners (with Examples)

• Import RPM repository GPG keys from other keyservers temporarily

• Local Development Environment for Kubernetes using Minikube

• Linux Weather Forecast

  This page is an attempt to track ongoing developments in the Linux development community that have a good chance of appearing in a mainline kernel and/or major distributions sometime in the near future. Your "chief meteorologist" is Jonathan Corbet, Executive Editor at LWN.net. If you have suggestions on improving the forecast (and particularly if you have a project or patchset that you think should be tracked), please add your comments below.

• A New DRM Driver Is Coming For Linux 4.15

  TVE200 is a new Direct Rendering Manager driver being queued for Linux 4.15.

  The TVE200 DRM driver is for the Faraday Tech TVE200 "TV encoder" block. This mini driver was written by Linus Walleij of Linaro.

• XDC2017 Kicks Off With X.Org, Wayland & Graphics Talks

  The X.Org Developers Conference kicked off a short time ago at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. But even if you are not at the event, there is a livestream.

• Mesa Sees An Initial Meson Build System Port

  A few months ago was a vibrant discussion about a Meson proposal for libdrm/Mesa while today the initial patches were posted in bringing a possible Meson build system port for Mesa.

• NVIDIA Offers Update On Their Proposed Unix Device Memory Allocation Library

  James Jones of NVIDIA presented this morning at XDC2017 with their annual update on a new Unix device memory allocation library. As a reminder, this library originated from NVIDIA's concerns over the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM) currently used by Wayland compositors not being suitable for use with their driver's architecture and then the other driver developers not being interested in switching to EGLStreams, NVIDIA's original push for supporting Wayland.

• NVIDIA Legacy Linux Drivers Updated With Newer Kernel Support

  NVIDIA has issued new releases of its two legacy drivers for Linux.

  The NVIDIA 340.104 driver is now available for older Tesla architecture graphics processors while the NVIDIA 304.137 is out for the GeForce 6 and GeForce 7 generations.

• HTC suspends shares in wake of Alphabet takeover rumours

• It sure looks like Google is about to buy HTC (or at least its phone division)

• Google to buy HTC's Pixel-making expertise, HTC retains the brand

Linux offers so much for users to sink their teeth into that even among desktop and more casual users, it's easy to get caught up in the tradecraft. It's only too tempting to put your system's technical capabilities to the test by trying out a new program or practicing a new command. As with any other interest, though, Linux is not much fun unless you can revel in it with fellow fans and enjoy the camaraderie.

Here's a short tour of some of the major cultural hallmarks of the vibrant Linux world, and some of the hubs where you can witness and indulge in the Linux life.

​Devede is an open source program that allows the creation of video CDs and DVDs from an MPEG, AVI and similar formats suitable for home DVD players. Devede uses Mplayer, Mencoder, DVDAuthor, and VCDimager, so you can use any video playable with Mplayer. It is available for multiple platforms including Windows and Linux.

• Sony Xperia XZ1 hits Amazon with Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box

• HTC might announce its acquisition by Google tomorrow

• OnePlus 3T Receives Leaked Build of HydrogenOS Based on Android 8.0 Oreo

• Google is Preparing for Tighter Android/Chrome OS VPN Integration

• Motorola's Moto X4 is Project Fi's first Android One smartphone

• Mingis on Tech: Android vs. iOS – How the two mobile OSes compare

According to Droid Life, on October 4, Google will release the first new retail version of the Chromebook Pixel since 2015, the Pixelbook.

The Chomebook Pixel was the Rolls-Royce of Chromebooks. It was faster, more powerful, and came with a better display than any other laptop in its day. Google, however, decided that, while the company would still release new Pixels for in-house use, it wouldn't sell them.

Thanks to Chromebook Pixel fans, Google has elected to start selling this luxury Chromebook again.

This comparison really only scratches the surface. And don't get me wrong, there are areas where Windows 10 bests Linux (few, but they do exist). In the end, however, the choice is yours. Chances are you'll be making the choice based on which platform will allow you get more work done and do so with a certain level of efficiency and reliability. I would highly recommend, to anyone, if Linux can enable you to get your work done...give it a go and see if you don't find it more dependable and predictable.

GNOME developer Bastien Nocera talks in his latest blog post about the enhancements he managed to implement in the past few weeks to the Bluetooth stack of the Fedora Linux operating system.

• Stylish FPS 'Morphite' released without Linux support, but it's coming

  Sadly, Morphite [Steam] has seen a delay with the Linux version. Thankfully, the developer was quick to respond and it's still coming.

• The Mooseman, a short side-scrolling adventure just released for Linux

  In the mood for something a little out there? Well, The Mooseman [Steam] a short side-scroller might just hit the spot.

• Arma 3 1.76 for Linux is planned, work on it to start "soon"

  Bohemia Interactive have announced in their latest "SITREP" that the Linux version of Arma 3 will be updated to the latest version of 1.76, work is set to start on it "soon".

• Sony's PlayStation 4 DualShock Controller Now Supported in Fedora Linux, GNOME

  GNOME developer Bastien Nocera talks in his latest blog post about the enhancements he managed to implement in the past few weeks to the Bluetooth stack of the Fedora Linux operating system.

  The patches submitted by the developer to the Bluetooth packages in the latest Fedora Linux release promise to bring improvements to the way PlayStation 3 DualShock controllers are set up in the environment if you're using the GNOME desktop environment.

  Until now, to set up a DualShock 3 controller, users had to plug it in via USB, then disconnect it, and then press the "P" button on the joypad, which would have popped-up a dialog to confirm the Bluetooth connection. But this method had some quirks though.

• Free software log (July and August 2017)

  August was DebConf, which included a ton of Policy work thanks to Sean Whitton's energy and encouragement. During DebConf, we incorporated work from Hideki Yamane to convert Policy to reStructuredText, which has already made it far easier to maintain. (Thanks also to David Bremner for a lot of proofreading of the result.) We also did a massive bug triage and closed a ton of older bugs on which there had been no forward progress for many years.

  After DebConf, as expected, we flushed out various bugs in the reStructuredText conversion and build infrastructure. I fixed a variety of build and packaging issues and started doing some more formatting cleanup, including moving some footnotes to make the resulting document more readable.

• Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, August 2017

  Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

• Reproducible Builds: Weekly report #125

  16 package reviews have been added, 99 have been updated and 92 have been removed in this week, adding to our knowledge about identified issues.

• GNOME Foundation partners with Purism to support its efforts to build the Librem 5 smartphone

  The GNOME Foundation has provided their endorsement and support of Purism’s efforts to build the Librem 5, which if successful will be the world’s first free and open smartphone with end-to-end encryption and enhanced user protections. The Librem 5 is a hardware platform the Foundation is interested in advancing as a GNOME/GTK phone device. The GNOME Foundation is committed to partnering with Purism to create hackfests, tools, emulators, and build awareness that surround moving GNOME/GTK onto the Librem 5 phone.

  As part of the collaboration, if the campaign is successful the GNOME Foundation plans to enhance GNOME shell and general performance of the system with Purism to enable features on the Librem 5.

• Now GNOME Foundation Wants to Support Purism's Privacy-Focused Linux Smartphone

  GNOME Foundation, the non-profit organization behind the popular GNOME desktop environment designed for Linux-based operating systems, announced on Wednesday that they plan on supporting Purism's Librem 5 smartphone.

  The announcement comes only a week after KDE unveiled their plans to work with Purism on an implementation of their Plasma Mobile interface into the security- and privacy-focused Librem 5 Linux smartphone, and now GNOME is interested in advancing the Librem 5 hardware platform as a GNOME/GTK+ phone device.

  "Having a Free/Libre and Open Source software stack on a mobile device is a dream-come-true for so many people, and Purism has the proven team to make this happen. We are very pleased to see Purism and the Librem 5 hardware be built to support GNOME," said Neil McGovern, Executive Director, GNOME Foundation.

• GNOME Joins The Librem 5 Party, Still Needs To Raise One Million More Dollars

  One week after announcing KDE cooperation on the proposed Librem 5 smartphone with plans to get Plasma Mobile on the device if successful, the GNOME Foundation has sent out their official endorsement of Purism's smartphone dream.

  Purism had been planning to use GNOME from the start for their GNU/Linux-powered privacy-minded smartphone while as of today they have the official backing of the GNOME Foundation.

• Release 2.17

  The Wine Staging release 2.17 is now available.

• Wine Staging 2.17 Released With More Direct3D 11 Functionality

  Wine Staging 2.17 is now available as the latest experimental/testing build of Wine with various patches added in.

Halfway through the semester, Dr. Margaret Broadwater was excited by the progress her students were making in her course Open Source Software Development. Working with open source software projects and development communities gave her students hands-on experience with software development practices, technology frameworks, data structures, and product development. Students also completed installation exercises for open source projects from both developers’ and users’ perspectives, followed by finding and patching bugs in the software. Broadwater knew that her students were learning more than just how to work their way around code. In talking with students she emphasized that open source code was the heart of applications that had become ubiquitous in business and education, including Chrome and Firefox, and was the driver for software like the Apache web server, Fedora Linux, and OpenSSL. Moreover, open source had gained purchase in use by companies, organizations, and government agencies and was thus something they would need to know once they entered the workplace as software devel- opers and engineers. Broadwater knew that by working on open source projects in depth, her students were also learning about the ethos of building code in a community of developers—and, indeed, were becoming part of that community.