• Improve your software product delivery process performance using metrics (II)

  During the previous article I explained the process to follow, using the simplest possible model to describe a software product delivery process, to measure and improve its performance, following a data driven improvement kata as a way to promote a continuous improvement culture .

  Despite providing extremely valuable information, once we have gone through the described process for a few iterations, the limitations of such a simple model will become evident. We will need to add complexity into our model, getting closer to the real software product delivery process.

• SEGGER’s complete J-Link software now available for Linux on ARM [Ed: Reposted from elsewhere (or press release)]

  SEGGER’s entire portfolio of J-Link software is now available for Linux on ARM, for both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms.

  This includes both the command-line programs and GUI tools such as J-Flash, J-Flash SPI, J-Scope, the J-Link Configurator and the GUI version of the GDB Server.

  “J-Link can now be used on Raspberry Pi and other ARM-based machines, without any limitations,” says Alex Grüner, CTO at SEGGER. “Small single-board ARM computers now offer the same functionality as x86 powered machines. The inexpensive Raspberry Pi and similar boards are now viable options, especially in test farms and production environments.”

• JavaScript survey: React everywhere, Jest, Webpack on the up... if only it had static typing, sigh developers • The Register

  The 2020 State of JavaScript report, a survey of over 23,000 developers globally, has revealed growing use of WebPack and Jest, continuing high use of React, Express and TypeScript, and that top of the wishlist is no longer better browser compatibility, but rather static typing.

  JavaScript is the most used programming language according to most rankings. Originally called LiveScript and designed in 10 days in 1995 by Netscape's Brendan Eich to work alongside Java Applets, the little language has become the universal language.

  Trends in the JavaScript ecosystem are therefore significant, but the fact that Webpack tops the list of most used technologies says a lot about modern JavaScript development. Webpack is a module bundler which runs on Node.js and has plugins for tasks such as minifying JavaScript using Terser. Webpack does tree shaking, meaning that it strips out unused code.

• YANUB: yet another (nearly) useless blog: Taking advantage of Ruby in QSoas

  First of all, let me all wish you a happy new year, with all my wishes of health and succes. I sincerely hope this year will be simpler for most people as last year !

• 10 reasons to develop Quarkus applications on Red Hat OpenShift - Red Hat Developer

  Combining Quarkus with Red Hat OpenShift provides an ideal environment for creating scalable, fast, and lightweight applications. Quarkus significantly increases developer productivity with tooling, pre-built integrations, application services, and more. This article presents 10 reasons why you should develop your Quarkus applications on OpenShift.

• PinePhone Mobian Community Edition goes up for pre-order Jan 18

  The next version of the PinePhone to ship will be the PinePhone Mobian Community Edition. It goes up for pre-order from the Pine64 Store January 18

  It’ll sell for $150 and up and the phone will ship with the Debian-based Mobian operating system pre-installed.

  [...]

  The Mobian build that will ship with the PinePhone Mobian Community Edition uses a mainline Linux kernel with some patches to ensure support for the phone’s hardware and the Phosh user interface.

  Like most mobile Linux projects, Mobian is still very much a work in progress. But it already supports all of the PinePhone’s key hardware including 4G LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, cameras, and USB. You can use it to make phone calls, surf the web, install and run applications, and it supports deep sleep.

• January Update: Happy New Gear!

  Happy New Year everyone! Let us all hope that the difficulties brought about by the COVID-19 virus are now waning and that more aspects of our lives will return to normal soon. 

  We start this year with announcing the last community edition of the PinePhone, an update on the Quartz64 single board computers, and with some good news regarding PineTab and Pinebook Pro production.  

  You can watch a synopsis of this month’s community update on Youtube (embedded below) but also on LBRY and Peertube. Stay up-to-date with PINE64 news and make sure to subscribe to this blog (bottom of the webpage), follow PINE64 Telegram News channel as well as our Twitter and Mastodon.

• Lilbits: Linux phones and laptops, S-Pen for more phones, and an RK3566 single-board computer

  Pine64, the company behind a line of geeky, inexpensive, and hackable smartphones, laptops, and single-board computers designed to run open source software tend to only publish one blog post each month. But it’s always a doozy, and the January update is no exception.

  

   

• Librem 14 Update: Shipping Starts in February with Extended Battery

  The Librem 14 is our dream laptop and we know many of you are looking forward to getting yours. In our last post we talked about some of the final tweaks we made that resulted in shipping being delayed until January. The bad news is that we won’t be able to start shipping Librem 14s until February, but the good news is that everyone will be getting our (as of yet unannounced) extended battery option by default! Read the rest of the article for details.

  Supply Chain Challenges

  If you talk to anyone in manufacturing they will tell you that this has been a particularly challenging year for the supply chain. Whether you are talking about toilet paper, N95 masks, rubber gloves, or semiconductors, the global pandemic has made supply chains less reliable, and lead times and shipping times incredibly unpredictable. We already ran into supply chain challenges with the Librem 14 earlier when Intel announced CPU shortages, and most recently when we were preparing the first run of production Librem 14s we hit another issue: we couldn’t get the 3-cell batteries we were planning to use until after Chinese New Year! If you are familiar with manufacturing in China, you know that the entire country essentially shuts down for weeks, so this is far from ideal. However it turns out we could get our 4-cell extended battery in time.

  

• DIN-rail net appliances supply four GbE ports

  Axiomtek unveiled two Linux-ready DIN-rail network PCs with 4x GbE ports: the compact, rugged “iNA100” runs on Apollo Lake while the Coffee Lake based “iNA600” adds a 16-GbE port L2 managed switch and an optional PCIe x8 MXM slot.

  On Dec. 30, Axiomtek announced an iNA600 networking appliance based on Intel’s 8th Gen Coffee Lake processors. The company followed up yesterday with a much more compact iNA100 net appliance running Apollo Lake. Both systems run Linux or Windows, offer at least 4x Gigabit Ethernet ports, and can be mounted on DIN-rails.

  [...]

  The system runs a Yocto-based Linux or Win 10 on the dual-core, 1.3GHz/1.8GHz Atom x5-E3930, which has a low 6.5W TDP.

• Driving the organization towards Digital Innovation Excellence: 5 key dimensions to consider

  In our first post we introduced the three pillars to digital innovation success (automation, hybrid cloud and cloud native), in this next post we wanted to dive a little deeper into what digital innovation excellence means.

  Across Europe business leaders we talk to say that software is central to digital innovation and that organizations must become software producers at increasing speed and scale. As organizations evolve to become producers of software, the role of software development and delivery expands.

  Not only are organizations plugging into software development and delivery capabilities to increase organizational competitiveness by controlling a larger share of digital value creation, but software increasingly becomes part of the business's core product and services offerings. But that's not all. Software delivery is also expanding to support the ability to scale digital distribution and monetization of digital products and services through the digital ecosystem. This means that software can be delivered as a service, through direct sales channels, via APIs, open source repositories or via developer.com style platforms. Software is truly permeating the organization and digital innovation factories and supply chains become new organization requirements for digital resiliency.

• Ben Williams: F33-20210114 updated Live isos released [Ed: New builds of Fedora 33]

  The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F33-20210114-Live ISOs, carrying the 5.10.6-200 kernel.

  This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have about 800MB+ of updates)).

  A huge thank you goes out to irc nicks dowdle, dbristow, luna, yogoyo, Southern-Gentleman for testing these iso.

• Fedora 33 : Using the finch chat program.

  Finch is a TUI (text user interface) IM client for Linux which uses libpurple.
  This is very useful when you want to chat and don't have an environment to install Fedora on.
  Finch is built using the ncurses toolkit, which is a library designed especially to built text user interfaces.
  This program lets you sign on to Jabber, GoogleTalk, IRC, and other IM networks. 

• Red Hat and Intel expand 5G collaboration as new market opportunities emerge

  IBM Corp.’s Red Hat unit and Intel Corp. today announced an “evolution” of their partnership aimed at more closely aligning their product development activities in the 5G market.

  Carriers are spending billions of dollars to upgrade their networks to the 5G standard, which enables connections up to 100 times faster than LTE. The spending spree is creating new revenue opportunities for information technology suppliers such as Red Hat and Intel.

  The new collaboration, the companies said, will have several focus areas. One is to bring 5G features faster to key open-source technologies such as Kubernetes. Kubernetes eases the management of software container-based workloads, which can make it useful for carriers that are using containers to build the software powering their 5G networks.

• Your Easiest Decision in 2021

  The 3-way collaboration across IBM, SUSE and SAP go back many years. We have a deep engineering relationship that speaks to the dedication to customers, performance and engineering excellence that permeates all 3 company’s cultures. In 2020, even amidst this crazy pandemic, we have continued our regular working relationship – striving to provide the best product, and the best support.

• Intel "Compute Walker" Support Lands For Xe HP In Linux Drivers - Phoronix

  A new compute code path has been merged into Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan and "iris" Gallium3D drivers for the forthcoming Xe HP graphics hardware.

  The initial "COMPUTE_WALKER" code has been in development at Intel for the past 1~2 years while the merge request was just submitted a few days ago to replace the "legacy" compute path from the upcoming Gen12.5 Xe HP hardware. The check is for newer than Gen12 or GEN12HP, so the new compute path will trickle down to lower-tier parts outside of the Xe HP scope moving forward after the existing Gen12 parts like Tiger Lake or the upcoming Rocket Lake still flagged as Gen12 (not 12.5).

• AMD Sends In More "New Stuff" For Radeon Graphics With Linux 5.12 - Phoronix

  Sent in last week were many AMD graphics driver updates slated for Linux 5.12 including the likes of Radeon RX 6000 series OverDrive support. This week marks another batch of AMDGPU kernel driver changes being submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 5.12 cycle.

  Among the "new stuff" for AMDGPU in Linux 5.12 include more code warning fixes, enabling of GPU reset and recovery for Navy Flounder yet-to-be-released RDNA 2 SKUs, SMU workload profile fixes for APUs, various display code updates, SR-IOV fixes, various VanGogh APU updates, another Renoir device ID being added, the new bits around Secure Display TA, another Green Sardine device ID being added, and a range of other code improvements.

• Mesa's RADV ACO Adds Support For Rapid Packed Math - Phoronix

  Hitting the Mesa tree when Mesa 21.0 was being branched (but looks like it will still make it now part of "staging/21.0") is support for AMD's "rapid packed math" with the RADV driver's ACO compiler back-end.

  Rapid Packed Math is the AMD terminology for allowing two FP16 operations within a single FP32 operation. ACO, which is the default shader compiler back-end since last year in Mesa's RADV driver, now supports this functionality for Vec2 16-bit operations.

• WRATH: Aeon of Ruin launching along with Linux support this Summer, third update out now | GamingOnLinux

  WRATH: Aeon of Ruin is a dark fantasy-horror FPS powered by the original Quake engine from publishers 3D Realms and 1C Entertainment and developer KillPixel Games.

  The full release across all platforms (Windows currently supported in Early Access) has been delayed until "Summer 2021", this is due to COVID-19 as some of their team sadly caught it and needed recovery time. Even so, they've managed to push out a third content update.

  “While delays are never ideal, we wanted to release one awesome final update before going heads down to knock this out of the park,” said Frederik Schreiber, Vice President of 3D Realms and Producer on WRATH. “Summer may seem far away, but we are working diligently to make WRATH the best game it can be.”

• Rocket Shipment is a slick homage to Thrust and Crazy Gravity now in Early Access | GamingOnLinux

  Rocket Shipment is a tricky, physics based, space delivery game. The game is a love letter to the old style lander games like Thrust, Solar Jetman and Crazy Gravity. After being in development for two years now, it has entered Early Access on Steam and will remain there until closer to the end of 2021 when the full content gets added in.

  It's simple and right to the point, keeping the game mechanics nicely glued together. The main mechanic is using a physics based grappling cable to move packages and other object around, while managing your fuel levels. There's also a built in level editor, and Steam Workshop support to upload and download extra levels.

• Valve's Source 2 shows early teasers of Ray Tracing - weirdly in Artifact updates

  We know that Source 2 from Valve is a pretty capable game engine, and we've seen what they've been able to do with it over the years (and Half-Life: Alyx turned it up a notch) but what's next? Ray Tracing perhaps.

  

• Beamdog need your help to test Enhanced Editions of Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate | GamingOnLinux

  Getting real close to release now is the huge 2.6 upgrade for the Beamdog classic RPGs now including Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition, Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear and Baldur's Gate II: Enhanced Edition.

  They've gradually moved from one game to the next, opening up an opt-in Beta you can try for each right now on Steam. Each of them needing some feedback to ensure you can properly play it including double-checking the save system is working correctly.

  [...]

  Want to get involved? They need Linux testing too (the Beta is Steam only, other stores when ready).

KeePassXC, cross-platform community fork of KeePass password manager, release version 2.6.3 a few days ago with new features and improvements.

KeePassXC 2.6.3 features Argon2id KDF and version 2 XML key files support.

• How to Install and Use Xrdp Server (Remote Desktop) on Linux System

  The Xrdp server is the RDP tool (Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol) for Linux distributions. You can install it on your Linux system to connect your server or desktop over the internet. The Xrdp server allows you to use the multi-channel connection through a graphical user interface (GUI). Besides these, the Xrdp server also allows you to connect and restart sessions if your connection gets lost. If you are a network engineer or a Linux system administrator, you can install the Xrdp server on your Linux system and access your server or desktop from anywhere over the internet.

  [...]

  If you are using a Linux server; probably, you might need to get a desktop environment installed on your system to use the Xrdp server on your machine. You can use either the Gnome DE or the Xfce desktop environment on your Linux server. Here, I am using a Gnome desktop environment on my Ubuntu machine.

  However, run the following command-lines given below to install your desired desktop environment on your server.

• Petter Reinholdtsen: Latest Jami back in Debian Testing, and scriptable using dbus

  After a lot of hard work by its maintainer Alexandre Viau and others, the decentralized communication platform Jami (earlier known as Ring), managed to get its latest version into Debian Testing. Several of its dependencies has caused build and propagation problems, which all seem to be solved now.

  In addition to the fact that Jami is decentralized, similar to how bittorrent is decentralized, I first of all like how it is not connected to external IDs like phone numbers. This allow me to set up computers to send me notifications using Jami without having to find get a phone number for each computer. Automatic notification via Jami is also made trivial thanks to the provided client side API (as a DBus service). Here is my bourne shell script demonstrating how to let any system send a message to any Jami address. It will create a new identity before sending the message, if no Jami identity exist already...

• PSI and Cgroup2

  In the comments on my post about Load Average Monitoring [1] an anonymous person recommended that I investigate PSI. As an aside, why do I get so many great comments anonymously? Don’t people want to get credit for having good ideas and learning about new technology before others?

  PSI is the Pressure Stall Information subsystem for Linux that is included in kernels 4.20 and above, if you want to use it in Debian then you need a kernel from Testing or Unstable (Bullseye has kernel 4.19). The place to start reading about PSI is the main Facebook page about it, it was originally developed at Facebook [2].

  I am a little confused by the actual numbers I get out of PSI, while for the load average I can often see where they come from (EG have 2 processes each taking 100% of a core and the load average will be about 2) it’s difficult to work out where the PSI numbers come from. For my own use I decided to treat them as unscaled numbers that just indicate problems, higher number is worse and not worry too much about what the number really means.

• How to Create a New Virtual Machine using VMware

• How To Install phpMyAdmin on Linux Mint 20 - idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install phpMyAdmin on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, phpMyAdmin is a web interface based database management tool for MySQL. Using phpMyAdmin users can interact with MySQL easily. phpMyAdmin provides the most useful functions to interact with the MySQL database.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of phpMyAdmin on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).

• How to install Garuda KDE Dr460nized 210107 - YouTube

  In this video, I am going to show how to install Garuda KDE Dr460nized 210107.

• How to check NetworkManager version on Ubuntu

  NetworkManager is a standard network configuration daemon for Linux, whose primary goal is to keep network connectivity active at all time. Unlike stationary server environment, typical Linux laptop/desktop can connect to the network via more than one physical (wired/wireless) or virtual (VPN, VLAN, VxLAN) network interfaces, and can switch from one interface to another dynamically, depending on locations and user preferences. That is when NetworkManager really makes your life easy by enabling automatic connection setup and migration.

• How to Install Discourse Forum with Docker on CentOS 8

  Discourse is a free and open-source platform built for the next decade of the Internet. It is a modern forum software that can be used as a mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and more. It uses Ruby on Rails for the backend, Ember.js for the front end, PostgreSQL as a data store, and Redis as a caching server. It is simple, efficient, mobile-friendly, customizable, and makes online discussion easy and fun.

• How to Install ELK stack on Ubuntu 20.04

  The ELK stack is an acronym of three popular open-source projects: Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. It is an open-source and one of the most popular log management platform that collects, processes,sem

  and visualizes data from multiple data sources. It is mainly used for log analysis in IT environments. It is very helpful for a system administrator to search and analyze a large volume of data to make real-time decisions-all the time.

  Elasticsearch: It is a search engine used to store all of the collected data.
  Kibana: It provides a web-based interface used to search and visualize your data.
  Logstash: It is a data processing interface used to collect data from several sources concurrently then sends the data to your desired stash.

• Running Bash Commands in the Background the Right Way

  There’s nothing more annoying than running a command in your terminal and having it run for minutes, sometimes hours, and not be able to use your terminal again. Sure, you can use tabs, but that’s a clunky solution, and it’s not always optimal because you may want to see updates as you’re working. Here we show you a few different ways to run bash commands in the background in Linux.

• Install Wine 6.0 In Ubuntu 20.04 & Linux Mint | Tips On UNIX

  WineHQ is open-source and capable of installing Windows applications on Linux, BSD, and macOS.

  The wine team released a new Stable version 6.0 and this release represents a year of development effort and over 8,300 individual changes and it contains a larger number of improvements.

  This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install wine 6.0 in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, and LinuxMint 20.1.

• Time lapse video from Raspberry PI camera - peppe8o

  One of most common Raspberry PI accessories is the Raspberry PI Camera. Beside common usages (like videoconferencing), RPI gives a lot of advanced functions. One of most intrigating is getting a time lapse video from Raspberry PI camera

  In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to create a time lapse video with a Raspberry PI board and Camera. We’ll use Raspicam commands to get images and ffmpeg library to create new time-lapse video.

  Before digging in technical commands, a breaf introduction in what time lapse video is.

• How to Create and Manage Archive Files in Linux - Linux.com

  In a nutshell, an archive is a single file that contains a collection of other files and/or directories. Archive files are typically used for a transfer (locally or over the internet) or make a backup copy of a collection of files and directories which allow you to work with only one file (if compressed, it has a lower size than the sum of all files within it) instead of many. Likewise, archives are used for software application packaging. This single file can be easily compressed for ease of transfer while the files in the archive retain the structure and permissions of the original files.

• How to Use Crontab to Automate Repetitive Tasks in Linux

  Take advantage of the crontab Linux command to automate various mundane and repetitive tasks, simplifying your life. This excellent and easy to use tool, combined with some scripting, can not only automate all sorts of tasks, but also help avoid simple human errors or forgetfulness.

• How To Install DokuWiki on CentOS Stream 8 with Apache and PHP 8

  In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to install and configure DokuWiki on CentOS Stream 8 with the Apache webserver and the (currently) latest PHP 8.0.

  DokuWiki is a popular open-source wiki software that you can extend and customize with lots of plugins and themes. It doesn’t use a database, it’s lightweight, and DokuWiki has great syntax.

• H2 Net Card adds four 2.5 GbE ports to ODROID-H2/H2+ SBC

  ODROID-H2+ is already a cool single board computer with an Intel Gemini Lake Refresh processor, up to 32GB RAM, dual 2.5GbE networking, support for SATA and NVMe storage, dual 4K video output, and more.

  But in recent days, I’ve read people complaining recently announced WiFI 6 or WiFi 6E routers only had one 2.5 Gbps or 5 Gbps Ethernet jack and wanted all/more RJ45 connectors to be 2.5 GbE ports or greater. But if even the two 2.5GbE ports on ODROID-H2+ are not quite enough for your needs, Hardkernel H2 Net Card triples that amount by adding four extra 2.5 GbE to the x86 SBC. It also works on ODROID-H2, meaning you’d get the existing dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, plus the four 2.5GbE ports from the M.2 card.

• WRT54G History: The Router That Accidentally Went Open Source

  How Linksys’ most famous router, the WRT54G, tripped into legendary status because of an undocumented feature that slipped through during a merger.

  [...]

  Intentionally or not, the WRT54G was hiding something fundamental on the router’s firmware: Software based on Linux.

• Tough little Apollo Lake mini-PCs offer up to triple displays

  The mini-PCs run Linux or Win 10 on Intel’s quad-core, 1.5GHz/2.3GHz Celeron J3455 or dual-core, up to 1.1GHz/2.4GHz Celeron N3350. You can load up to 8GB DDR3L-1866 via a single socket.

• Apollo Lake maker board with dual GbE and dual SATA starts at $70

  The SBC is pre-installed with “Linux” and supports OpenWrt, LibreELEC, Android, Windows, and the open source pfSense firewall software. The project aspires to be “open,” but it is unclear if that means open source hardware or community support features.

• USB2IO high-speed interface explorer tool combines Intel Cyclone 10 FPGA and STM32H7 MCU

  USB2IO is seen as a USB HID device (virtual COM port) on the host PC that can transmit data using ASCII or RAW protocols. Both the FPGA and MCU firmware can be upgraded. The tool can be controlled from any computer running Windows. MacOS, or Linux with a GUI application, and DAB Embedded also provides Python and C++ SDKs for developers who need to implement automated testing for instance.

• Mini-ITX SBC with Tiger Lake UP3 CPU offers dual 2.5GbE, quad display support

I know many of you out there have been waiting on a Debian-powered PinePhone, so here it is. PinePhone Mobian Community Edition is running Mobian Linux, an embedded operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux’s ARM64 (AArch64) port.

Mobian offers a pure Debian GNU/Linux experience on mobile devices and uses Purism’s GNOME-based Phosh (Phone Shell) user interface by default. Mobian Linux on the PinePhone has been tweaked to greet users with an installer where they can choose a password and enable full disk encryption.

Linux Mint is known for its cinnamon desktop environment. It is a free and open-source desktop environment designed and developed based on GNOME 3.

If you are having Ubuntu on your desktop and get tried of using GNOME 3. Then you can easily switch to the cinnamon desktop in Ubuntu with few lines of command.

 

• Join Us: Design Team Sessions Live!

  Just before the Christmas holidays, you may have participated in one of three impromptu live design sessions / video chats I held. In the first session, a group of Fedorans did a critique on one of the Fedora 34 wallpaper mockups. In the second session, another group of us did a collaborative design session for a custom Fedora Discourse theme. In the last session, we did a live digital painting session. 

 

• Fedora 34 Planning For Better Font Rendering By Enabling HarfBuzz In FreeType

  Fedora plans to flip on the HarfBuzz text shaping engine support with the FreeType font rasterization engine. In doing so, this should yield improved hinting of glyphs especially with languages that need more complicated text shaping. FreeType has supported HarfBuzz for more than a half-decade (after HarfBuzz was originally was born out of that project) while Fedora hasn't enabled its usage until the planned change for Fedora 34 this spring. 

• Fedora 32 : Can be better? part 012.

  Pidgin is a chat program that lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. 
  Pidgin can be installed on multiple operating systems and platforms. 
  Pidgin is compatible with the following chat networks out of the box: I.R.C., Jabber/XMPP, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, and Zephyr.

• Samsung unveils its new high-end 5G Android phones in answer to iPhone 12

• Samsung is bringing SmartThings to Android Auto

• Android Auto Is Getting Support For Samsung SmartThings

• Samsung is bringing SmartThings dashboard to Android Auto

• Samsung SmartThings now lets you control your car with Android Auto

• Samsung’s SmartThings will soon be integrated with Android Auto

• Samsung's One UI 3 brings Android 11 and other features to your Galaxy devices

• Sony seeding stable Android 11 to Xperia 1 and Xperia 5 units

• CBORD Expands Mobile Credential Support to Include Android Phones

• Google ditches dangerous Android apps from Play Store that tried to over charge users

• Why You Should Stop Using Your Default Android Browser

Fedora Kinoite is an immutable desktop operating system featuring the KDE Plasma desktop. In short, Fedora Kinoite is like Fedora Silverblue but with KDE instead of GNOME. It is an emerging variant of Fedora, based on the same technologies as Fedora Silverblue (rpm-ostree, Flatpak, podman) and created exclusively from official RPM packages from Fedora.

Earlier this week we looked at the performance of Intel's Clear Linux over the past year but how does that compare to the likes of say Fedora and Ubuntu? This article is looking at the performance of Fedora Workstation, Ubuntu, and Clear Linux on the same hardware over the past year.

This testing off the same platform (Core i9 7980XE, ASUS PRIME X299-A, Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe SSD, 4 x 4GB DDR4-3200) is intended to provide a look at how the Ubuntu and Fedora performance has evolved since the end of 2019 to see the direction of these tier-one Linux distributions up against Intel's performance-focused Clear Linux.
For the EOY2019 state with Clear Linux was 31890 to 34150 for EOY2020. For the Ubuntu look was Ubuntu a 20.04 development snapshot at EOY2019 when that testing took place for a prior article to now Ubuntu 20.10 with all stable release updates. Meanwhile Fedora was from Fedora 31 with all stable release updates at end of 2019 when testing happened for a prior article to Fedora 33 with all stable release updates as of testing time.

Here’s a fun blog post where I get possibly irrationally annoyed by people who use a web page incorrectly. Let me get this off my chest and then move on to better topics tomorrow.

Distrowatch is a popular website among Linux enthusiasts. The main page consists of reverse-chronological news articles of interest to Linux users. Often this consists of new stable and development release announcements, reviews and weekly roundups.

Here we are. My initial satisfaction with the laptop's default offering has gone down some. I am quite disappointed with how Microsoft chooses to promote Windows 10. Yes, it rules the desktop market, so it can do pretty much what it pleases, but this is a long game. And in the long game, they are not winning themselves any loyalty. If Linux ever achieves functionality parity, off I go. The same goes for Lenovo. I don't mind a vendor offering its tools and solutions. That's fine. But if I choose to have those tools removed, then there are no two ways about it. I'm most likely not going to buy any Lenovo machine again, because I don't appreciate being treated like a potato.

In this regard, Linux does a much friendlier job - to be let down by random erraticism. I'm talking about the sound config I had to handle, plus the VLC quirk. And let's not forget Secure Boot - even though it does not affect my two installed distros at the moment. Hardware wise, the keyboard quirks are quite annoying, and the screen can do only so much. Other than that, the laptop is robust and neat, fast, and the CPU fans don't rev too much. The battery life is pretty good, but I need more data to verify if the original numbers hold true.

Well, there you go. This is my satisfaction report a week into the laptop's usage. I am certain there will be more lovely surprises, twists and turns along the way, but then, part of the experience is figuring out issues early. This way, if and when I deploy software in my production setup, I will have all the right workarounds in place, and my seven-digit IQ will not be affected. Stay tuned for more good stuff. See ya.

For those wanting to run a micro-kernel operating system for your low-cost, open-source friendly PinePhone, the Genode OS framework plans to port to the PinePhone this year. Genode OS and its Sculpt general purpose platform are also wanting to better embrace GPU support in 2021.

The Genode operating system framework that features an original, open-source micro-kernel abstraction layer and a set of user-space components in development since 2008, published their road-map for the year.

Like many in the open-source community, Genode OS developers and users have been intrigued by PINE64's PinePhone that offers an Allwinner A64-powered open-source smartphone with 2GB of RAM, 16GB eMMC, and other basics for just $149~199 USD. While there are many Linux distributions supporting the PinePhone, Genode OS wants in on the action too and plans to port their operating system framework to it this year. They want Genode on PinePhone to serve as "a feature phone, covering basic web-browsing needs, placing calls, and SMS."

Also: Genode OS Framework is adding PinePhone support

KaOS Linux 2021.01 is now available for download, the first ISO release of this KDE focused and desktop oriented rolling GNU/Linux distribution inspired by Arch Linux to ship with the latest and greatest Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series, which, as expected, provides state-of-the-art hardware support.

In addition, KaOS Linux 2021.01 is the first ISO release to ship with the latest Qt 6 open-source and cross-platform application framework, which is already used by some apps, including Poppler, Qtkeychain, Qsynth, Strawberry, and others. Qt 6 is accompanied by the PyQt 6.0 stack, which includes PyQt6-sip, PyQt-Builder, and Sip 6.

• Google alerts Android fans about critical flaw on their phones - update your device NOW

• Google's Android and TV leads chat Samsung, RCS and CES

• Using Android with profiles and dual-SIMs is possible but needs work

• iTel Vision 1 Pro with Android 10 Go launched in India: Price, features

• T-Mobile OnePlus 8 enters Android 11 (OxygenOS 11) testing phase

• [Updated] Over two months later, T-Mobile OnePlus 8 Android 11 update still awaited

• OPPO ColorOS 11 update (Android 11) tracker

• Asus Android 11 update tracker: Devices received beta/stable OS so far

• [New incremental update] Asus ZenFone 6 Android 11 update

• Asus ZenFone 6 second Android 11 update brings bug-fixes & VoWiFi on multiple networks

• Asus 6Z/ZenFone 6 bags Android 11 stable update (Download link inside)

• Android 11 is now rolling out to the OG Sony Xperia 1 and Xperia 5

• Android 12 release date, rumors and what we want to see

• How to hide chats in Signal app: A detailed guide for Android and iOS users

• Kafka destination improved with template support in syslog-ng - Blog - syslog-ng Community - syslog-ng Community

  The C implementation of the Kafka destination in syslog-ng has been improved in version 3.30. Support for templates in topic names was added as a result of a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. The advantage of the new template support feature is that you no longer have to use a static topic name. For example, you can include the name of your host or the application sending the log in the topic name.

  From this blog you can learn about a minimal Kafka setup, configuring syslog-ng and testing syslog-ng with Kafka.

 

• Announcing Istio 1.8.2

  This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.8.1 and Istio 1.8.2

• 2.5-inch "Industrial Pi" Pico-ITX SBC offers PoE , mini DP++ port

  The company also provides a 15mm thick heat spreader for fanless operation, and support for Windows 10 IoT Enterprise (64-bit) and Linux operating systems.

  

• ZimaBoard Intel Apollo Lake SBC and micro server goes for $69.99 and up (Crowdfunding)

  The board is passively cooled by its enclosure acting as a heatsink, and ships with Linux by default, although we’re not being told which distribution, possibly Ubuntu 20.04.

      

• Algolia Search in Jekyll

  I am relieved and delighted to have finally managed the Algolia search setup for Unix Tutorial. I’ve been looking to upgrade search for a long time but had not enough JavaScript and CSS knownledge to replace the default search with Algolia’s one.

  I’m going through a short technical course about Vue (JavaScript framework), so this must have put me into the right mindset.

 

• Partners Feel ‘Betrayed,’ ‘Taken Aback’ By Microsoft’s Direct Calls To Customers

  A California MSP learned a lesson years ago when a software vendor tried to go direct with his end users. So when Microsoft demanded contact information for his customers, he gave them an email address that went directly to him instead. Earlier this week that email account, which was set up about 18 months ago in the hopes that it would not be used, received a message from a Microsoft business development specialist offering his customer “free training.” “That’s exactly what I would do if I was trying to steal someone else’s business,” said the MSP, who asked not to be named because he fears retribution from Microsoft for speaking out. “It’s just wrong. It’s just wrong. Plain and simple.”

 

• Windows 10 bug corrupts your hard drive on seeing this file's icon

  In August 2020, October 2020, and finally this week, infosec researcher Jonas L drew attention to an NTFS vulnerability impacting Windows 10 that has not been fixed.

  When exploited, this vulnerability can be triggered by a single-line command to instantly corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive, with Windows prompting the user to restart their computer to repair the corrupted disk records.

  The researcher told BleepingComputer that the flaw became exploitable starting around Windows 10 build 1803, the Windows 10 April 2018 Update, and continues to work in the latest version.

  What's worse is, the vulnerability can be triggered by standard and low privileged user accounts on Windows 10 systems.

• The Linux Foundation launches 7-part open source management training program

• Open source software security in an ICT context – benefits, risks, and safeguards

  In a recent report, contributors to free and open source software (FOSS) claimed they spent only 2.27 percent of their contribution time on security. In our latest blog post, we delve into open source software security, and discuss why it’s key for building robust and open interoperable networks.

  [...]

  Is open source software better than proprietary software when it comes to security vulnerabilities? Elias Levy, the person behind the infamous (vulnerability) full disclosure mailing list, Bugtraq, said two decades ago: “No. Open Source Software certainly does have the potential to be more secure than its closed source counterpart. But make no mistake, simply being open source is no guarantee of security”.

  Building and delivering complex system software without security vulnerabilities requires investment and due diligence, regardless if the code is open sourced or proprietary (see figure 1, below). As the Mozilla Foundation states: “Security is a process. To have substantial and lasting benefit, we need to invest in education, best practices, and a host of other areas”.

  Tools and resources are available. With safeguards in place, OSS can be used effectively at low risk to realize its intended benefits. ICT products relying on OSS must be developed using methodologies and safeguards that ensure the expected level of security is met. OSS can accelerate innovation, reduce the development timeline, speed time to market, realize cost savings, and be secure. ICT vendors must take responsibility and practice a higher level of due diligence when using OSS components.

• Email is the messenger you should migrate to

  But the most important thing: Delta Chat allows you to communicate even with people who don’t use Delta Chat at all, all you need is an email address! If you write to someone without Delta Chat, they will just get a normal email. I would argue that even beats Matrix or XMPP.

  Conclusion: If you are concerned about security when chatting and would rather use a decentralized messenger (no silo), you are in good hands with email and Delta Chat.

• IMAPS specialisations – call for participation in the public review of LIMAPS, OIMAPS, SIMAPS and TIMAPS!

  The objective of this public consultation is to produce updated releases of the IMAPS specialisations, which will provide insights on specific interoperability viewpoints of the digital public service, i.e. the legal, organisational, technical and semantic interoperability viewpoints. Both IMAPS and its specialisations assess the various areas of a digital public service in terms of behavioural interoperability specifications, capabilities and manifestations. The update of the releases of the IMAPS specialisations will be based on change requests coming from stakeholders interested in the solutions.