• Alfresco Helps George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust Begin Its Paperless Journey

  Alfresco Software, an open source content, process and governance software company, has announced the successful implementation of its Digital Business Platform by George Eliot Hospital NHS Trust to enable paperless processes. By digitising clinical and non-clinical forms, the Trust is able to make creation and changes quicker and easier, as well as give patients more control over their health and well-being. After just four months, patients and staff are seeing such a positive difference that there are plans to expand the usage of the Alfresco Digital Business Platform to digitise more processes.

• Should You Use Open-Source Document Management Software?

  A document management system (DMS) can play an integral role in the organization and efficiency of your business. Companies that want a paperless office or a streamlined way to store and access digital documents turn to document management software. The most useful systems allow you to perform a variety of tasks like scan paper documents, control file versions, organize various folders, set user permissions and collaborate with other team members.

  Not all applications are created equal; you must, therefore, choose a DMS that serves your needs and integrates with your other business platforms. Business owners and developers who want added flexibility and customization often turn to open-source DMS solutions.

• Drupal 8.8.0 is available

  The last normal feature release of Drupal 8 includes a stable Media Library as well as several improvements to workspaces and migrations. The new experimental Claro administration theme brings a fresh look to site management. This is also the first release to come with native Composer support.

• Drupal 8.8.0 Released, Acquia Acquires AgilOne and More Open Source CMS News

  Drupal 8.8.0 — the last normal feature release of Drupal 8 — is now available for download. Some of the updates in this release include:

• Google Research open sources NLP model ALBERT for increased performance

  ALBERT was developed by a group of research scientists at Google Research as an “upgrade to BERT.” The NLP model is designed to optimize the performance of natural language processing tasks as well as their efficiency, and now it has been made publicly available. Let’s take a closer look.

• How Facebook's New Open Sourced Codebase PySlowFast Is Helping Them Understand Videos Better [Ed: Facebook does video surveillance -- in many situations in direct violation of the privacy laws of countries -- so openwashing to the rescue?]

• Microsoft has made it easier to port games to DirectX 12 with open source layer [Ed: The openwashing of proprietary software trap (DX). So when Microsoft says “open” it means closed trap.]

• Fugue Open Sources Regula to Help Engineers Validate Terraform for Policy Compliance

• Fugue is open sourcing a new cloud security tool

• Fugue open sources Regula to evaluate Terraform for security misconfigurations and compliance violations

• Facebook's New Low Latency Speech Recognition Can Be A Disrupter

• Perfect Sense Open Sources Gyro to Automate Cloud Provisioning

  Perfect Sense has launched an open source project dubbed Gyro that provides an alternative approach to automating cloud infrastructure provisioning and management.

• Open source technologies introduces by Uber

• AWS Introduces Open Source AutoML Toolkit ‘AutoGluon’

• Lyft open sources Flyte for developing machine learning workflows

• CBNCloud STACK, the First Iconic Open-Source Cloud Computing Solution for Indonesia Market [Ed: This is not "open source" but a misuse of the label or openwashing of proprietary software]

• Preferred Networks Releases Optuna v1.0, Open-source Hyperparameter Optimization Framework for Machine Learning

  Preferred Networks, Inc. (PFN, Head Office: Tokyo, President & CEO: Toru Nishikawa) has released Optuna (TM) v1.0, the first major version of the open-source hyperparameter optimization framework for machine learning. Projects using the existing beta version can be updated to Optuna v1.0 with minimal changes to the code.

• The New Microsoft Edge Is a Third-Rate Chrome Knockoff

• Dynatrace ‘traces’ route to standardised (OpenTelemetry) observability with Google & Microsoft [Ed: Openwashing of surveillance with the euphemism "telemetry" (which means spying but makes it sound more scientific)]

  The organisation that calls itself a ‘software intelligence company’ is working with the two tech giants (Dynatrace is no tiddler, the firm now has over 2000 employees) on the OpenTelemetry project to shape the future of open standards-based observability.

  Dynatrace says it is contributing ‘transaction tracing’ know-how and manpower (Ed – we think they mean ‘personpower’) to the project.

• Microsoft Announces An Open-Source, Free Source Code Analyzer Tool

• Static Customization Of Function Signatures In Rust

  Sometimes I have a big function that does a lot, and in new code I need to do almost the same thing, but slightly differently. Often the best approach is to call the same function but add parameters (often described as "options") to select specific variations. This can get ugly when the function has optional outputs — results that are only produced when certain options were passed in — because typically there is the possibility of an error when code looks for an output (e.g. unwraps a Rust Option) at a site that did not request it. It would be great if the compiler could check that you only use an output when you passed in the option to enable it. Fortunately, some simple Rust coding patterns let us achieve this.

• Perl Weekly: Issue #443 - 2020-01-20 - New Book: Mojolicious Web Clients

  brian d foy has just let me know that his new book, "Mojolicious Web Clients" is now available for puchase. You can buy it on Amazon and on LeanPub as well.

  I'd recommend you buy it from LeanPub as they give him a much larger percentage of the sales and they also let you easily tip brian with extra money. IMHO the $5.99 he is asking for is ridiculously low.

  LeanPub also allows brian to update the book and easily distribute it to everyone who purchased an earlier revision of it.

• [Old] Building a search engine from scratch

  The previous blog post in this series explored our journey so far in building an independent, alternative search engine. If you haven’t read it yet, we would highly recommend checking it out first!

  It is no secret that Google search is one of the most lucrative businesses on the planet. With quarterly revenues of Alphabet Inc. exceeding $40 Billion[1] and a big portion of that driven by the advertising revenue on Google’s search properties, it might be a little surprising to see the lack of competition to Google in this area[2]. We at Cliqz believe that this is partly due to the web search bootstrapping problem: the entry barriers in this field are so massive that the biggest, most successful companies in the world with the resources to tackle the problem shy away from it. This post attempts to detail the bootstrapping problem and explain the Cliqz approach to overcoming it. But let us first start by defining the search problem.

• What's wrong with computational notebooks?

  Computational notebooks, such as Jupyter Notebooks, Azure Notebooks, and Databricks, are wildly popular with data scientists. But as these notebooks are used for more and more complex tasks, data scientists run into more and more pain points. In this post I will very briefly summarize our method, findings, and some opportunities for tools.

• How to Check If String Contains Substring in PHP

• How to Get Current Date & Time in JavaScript

• Che: A Revolutionary IDE for the Mainframe

  Tools such as the green screens of ISPF and the Eclipse desktop IDE, enhanced with proprietary plug-ins, have served mainframe application developers well over the years and, for those comfortable with them, will continue to do so. However, changes in the broader world of development are creating the conditions for a revolution in mainframe tooling.

  [...]

  Finally, as the velocity of overall software delivery increases, mainframe is a critical component of digital transformation initiatives. According to 451 Research, 24% of companies are releasing application software daily or hourly while, similarly, DORA’s 2019 State of DevOps survey shows 20% of teams are deploying multiple times per day. Software delivery expectations have changed with continuous deployment becoming the new normal and, to remain a vital computing platform for the long term, mainframe app development needs to support this paradigm.

• How developers will work in 2020

  Software development is perpetually in a state of flux. Coders are constantly fighting a battle to keep their skills relevant. Each year brings new methodologies, frameworks, and languages to learn. Within the context of a highly-complex and rapidly changing industry, it’s important to find out which skills, tools, and trends are worthy of your time.

• Setup Your Local Environment for Open Source Package Contributions

  One of the most important steps to get started in contributing to an open source package is to set up your local environment.

  [...]

  Now that you’ve pulled down your forked version of the package, let’s composer require your fork of the package locally. This will allow you to make changes to your local version of the package, and they will immediately be reflected in your local Laravel project without needing to run composer update.

• SaltStack Introduces Plugin Oriented Programming with New Open-Source Innovation Modules to Power Scalable Automation and Artificial Intelligence

• SaltStack Advances Automation Stack With 3 Open-Source Software Modules

  SaltStack, the makers of intelligent automation for IT operations roll out three new Open-Source projects to drive machine learning and data stream processing.

• Perl Weekly Challenge 43: Olympic Rings and Self-Descripting Numbers

  These are some answers to the Week 43 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

  Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days (January 19, 2020). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

• Industry Speaks: IBM i Predictions for 2020, Part 1

  We are three weeks into 2020, and that New Year smell hasn’t worn off yet. As time rolls on, the IBM i community will certainly get down to business. In the meantime, here are industry predictions from nine community members to read.

  For Alan Seiden, the CEO of Seiden Group and an IBM Champion for Power, risk management will be a common theme for how they approach IT staffing in 2020.

  “IBM i shops have traditionally operated in a lean manner, relying on key individuals who knew their systems intimately,” Seiden says. “Now, with IT staff managing more projects than ever, new technology entering, and senior staff retiring, companies are looking for reliable partner organizations to supplement internal continuity and support. In the same vein, I see DevOps automation and disaster recovery solutions on the minds of CIOs.”

• IBM joins LOT Network to thwart patent trolls

  IBM on Tuesday announced it's joining the LOT Network, a nonprofit group of companies that aims to thwart patent trolls. The move is a commitment to open innovation from IBM, which received a record 9,262 US patents in 2019 alone.

  The LOT Network was founded in 2014, with Red Hat (which IBM acquired in 2019) as a founding member. The organization aims to protect its members from patent assertion entities (PAEs) -- entities that genereate more than half of their annual revenue from patent litigation.

  With a membership of more than 600 companies of all sizes, the LOT Network includes more than 2 million patent assets. If any of them fall into the hands of a PAE, LOT Network members automatically receive a license to that patent. Consequently, the PAE won't be able to sue LOT members for alleged infringement of that patent.

  Since 1920, IBM has collected more than 140,000 US patents. It's adding more than 80,000 patents and patent applications to the LOT Network.

• Red Hat Announces OpenShift Container Platform 4.3

  Today, Red Hat announced plans to release OpenShift Container Platform 4.3. OpenShift Container Platform, sometimes shortened to just OpenShift, is Red Hat's Kubernetes based open-source software container application. When Red Hat says open-source, they mean open source. You can find the current full release notes here alongside the source code in their GitHub repository. Red Hat was founded in 1993 as an open-source software provider and advocate. Today it provides a wide range of home and enterprise software products and services, including a Linux operating system and 24/7 support subscriptions.

• Christopher Allan Webber: Terminal Phase 1.0

  I'm pleased to announce that Terminal Phase, a space shooter game you can play in your terminal, has achieved version 1.0. The game is completely playable and is a fun game (well, at least a number of playtesters told me they thought it was fun). It includes two levels (one of which is more balanced than the other), and more content is on its way (1.0 isn't the end!). You can see it being played above in cool-retro-term but it works in all sorts of terminals, including gnome-terminal and etc.

  I also released a video recently (archive.org mirror) of me doing a live playtest of the game and also showing off how to make new levels and program new enemies (which serves as kind of an introduction, but probably not the best one, to Spritely Goblins).

  Terminal Phase was actually a reward for hitting the $500/mo milestone on my Patreon account, which we achieved a little over a week ago. I aimed to get 1.0 out the door by midnight on Wednesday but I actually released it a couple of hours later, closer to 2:30am, because I was trying to make the credits look cool:

  Terminal Phase Credits

  I think I succeeded, right? Maybe you would like your name in there; you can still do so by selecting a tier on my Patreon account. I released the game as FOSS, so whether you donate or not, you can still reap the benefits. But I figure making the credits look cool and putting peoples' names in there would be a good way of making people feel motivated. And there are more releases on the way; I'll be adding to this now and then and releasing more stuff occasionally. In fact you may notice the cool parallax scrolling starfield in the gif at the top of this post; I added that after 1.0. I guess it's a bit sneaky to put that on top of a post labeled 1.0, but the good news is that this means that 1.1 is not far away, which will include some new enemies (maybe a boss?), new levels, and yes, parallax starfields (and maybe your name in the credits if it isn't already).

• Indie Game VVVVVV Goes Open Source In Honor Of Its Tenth Anniversary

  Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV is an action-platform game that has offered players a tough challenge for almost ten years.

  On January 10, 2020, VVVVVV celebrated its tenth anniversary in a blog post. With the blog post came a big surprise for longtime fans of the game.

• Indie smash hit VVVVVV is now open source

  The popular Indie platformer VVVVVV is now open source and available on GitHub. Terry Cavanagh, the creator of the game, detailed the process of porting the original Adobe Flash release to C++ for release on PC on his blog. It's an entertaining read, especially for fans of the game.

• Indie Platforming Classic VVVVV Is Now Open Source

  Creative game developer Terry Cavanaugh has recently decided to release the source code for his beloved gravity-bending platformer VVVVV in honor of the game's tenth anniversary.

• Catalogic Software Announces KubeDR – Open Source Kubernetes Disaster Recovery

  Catalogic Software, a developer of innovative data protection solutions, today announced the introduction of its Catalogic open source utility, KubeDR, built to provide backup and disaster recovery for Kubernetes cluster configuration, certificates and metadata. Kubernetes is the fastest growing and most popular platform for managing containerized workloads in hybrid cloud environments. Catalogic is also launching cLabs to support new products, open source initiatives and innovations, such as KubeDR.

  Kubernetes stores cluster data in etcd, an interface that collects configuration data for distributed systems. While there are solutions focused on protecting persistent volumes, the cluster configuration data is often forgotten in existing industry solutions. There is a market need to provide the specific requirements of backup and support for Kubernetes cluster data stored in etcd. Catalogic’s new KubeDR is a user-friendly, secure, scalable and an open source solution for backup and disaster recovery designed specifically for Kubernetes applications.

• Elastic Brings Observability Platform to Kubernetes

  Elastic N.V. announced this week that Elastic Cloud, a subscription instance of an observability platform based on the open source Elasticsearch engine, is generally available on Kubernetes.

  Anurag Gupta, principal product manager for Elastic Cloud, deploying Elastic Cloud for Kubernetes (ECK) eliminates the need to invoke an instance of the platform running outside their Kubernetes environment.

• Kubernetes Launches Bug Bounty

  Kubernetes, the open-source container management system, has opened up its formerly private bug bounty program and is asking hackers to look for bugs not just in the core Kubernetes code, but also in the supply chain that feeds into the project.

  The new bounty program is supported by Google, which originally wrote Kubernetes, and it’s an extension of what had until now been an invitation-only program. Google has lent financial support and security expertise to other bug bounty programs for open source projects. The range of rewards is from $100 to $10,000 and the scope of what’s considered a valid target is unusual.

• Google Partners With CNCF, HackerOne on Kubernetes Bug Bounty

• CNCF, Google, and HackerOne launch Kubernetes bug bounty program

  Bug bounty programs motivate individuals and hacker groups to not only find flaws but disclose them properly, instead of using them maliciously or selling them to parties that will. Originally designed by Google and now run by the CNCF, Kubernetes is an open source container orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management. Given the hundreds of startups and enterprises that use Kubernetes in their tech stacks, it’s significantly cheaper to proactively plug security holes than to deal with the aftermath of breaches.

• Why Open Source Licenses With A Commons Clause May Become Less Common

  The Commons Clause also is ambiguous in its prohibition against selling "hosting or consulting/support services related to the Software" for any product or service whose value derives entirely or substantially from the software's functionality. A plain reading of this provision suggests that a cloud service provider cannot host the licensed software for free and charge a fee for customer support or consulting relating to the software's functionality (e.g., how to use the software). The Commons Clause documentation refers to a discussion board suggesting that consulting may be permitted, but the language of the clause and the contents of that online discussion appear to suggest otherwise.

• Manage Your OSS Security Using a Free Scanning Tool [Ed: "Enterprise License Optimization Blog" is Flexera marketing rubbish; it likes to talk all about "Open Source" (FUD), but its own stuff is 100% proprietary]

• Sonatype: improving software with open source technology

• Open source licence series - R3: The world needs audit licenses [Ed: Typical old nonsense of proprietary software firms, looking to portray a licensing question as pertaining only to FOSS]

  The so-called ‘open core’ model is hard to get right.

  [As we know, the open-core model primarily involves offering a “core” or feature-limited version of a software product as free and open-source software, while offering “commercial” versions or add-ons as proprietary software.]

• Google Chrome may soon let you copy images directly to Android's clipboard

• Android beauty apps could give your phone a black eye

• Google Pixel 4 caught running Android 11 ahead of Developer Preview 1 release

• Xiaomi Mi A1 January update arrives amid Android 10 anticipation (Download link inside)

• Modern Android App Architecture with JetPack and Dropbox Store

• Xiaomi Mi A3 Android 10 update delay confirmed as Pie-based January 2020 patch goes live (Download link inside)

• Realme rolls out Android 10 with Realme UI to the Realme XT

• Realme XT Starts Receiving Android 10-Based Realme UI Update in India

• Redmi Note 7 Pro running Android 10 spotted on Geekbench

• Android 10 Is Now Rolling Out To Huawei P30 Lite

• More Nokia phones on Android 10

• Samsung Galaxy A60 and M40 to Get Android 10 Update Soon

• Xiaomi's Poco is now an independent smartphone brand

• The Pixel 4a is putting Google in an unwinnable war — with itself

• Android virus that sends offensive messages from infected phones

• YouTube Rolls Out Profile Cards Feature On Android

• TranslateMe launches network reward campaign for Android mobile users

• 7 things your Android phone can do iPhones owners can only dream of

• HOW TO ENABLE “DEVELOPER OPTIONS” ON YOUR ANDROID SMARTPHONE

Last month, we talked about SimpleVideoCutter. This time, we'll be looking at a more advanced video editor called Shotcut.

Shotcut is an open source video editor for the Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. The application has a ton of features, and in this review, I'm giving you an overview of the program's main functionality.

The start screen of the application looks complex, but once you get past it, the program turns out to be user-friendly. First things first: select the project folder, name and video mode (resolution) and click on the Start button. There are some panels on the left and right sides of the screen, these are the Filters, Peak Meter and the Recent panes. You can close these if you don't need them, they can be recalled from the toolbar at the top. The GUI should look simpler already.

The KMyMoney development team today announces the immediate availability of version 5.0.8 of its open source Personal Finance Manager.

Despite even more testing we understand that some bugs may have slipped past our best efforts. If you find one of them, please forgive us, and be sure to report it, either to the mailing list or on bugs.kde.org.

Besides the software itself, the KMyMoney website was refurbished and now has a more modern clean look. Thanks to all who were involved in the process.

Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

I love social networking and microblogging. It's quick, it's easy, and I can share my thoughts with the world really quickly. The drawback is, of course, that almost all the desktop options for non-Windows users are wrappers around the website. Twitter has a lot of clients, but what I really want is something lightweight, easy to use, and most importantly, attractive.

Manjaro Lead Project Developer Philip Müller confirmed in an interview with Forbes that a partnership with Tuxedo Computers will bring us several new Linux laptops powered by Intel’s 10th Generation Core i7 chips.

In essence updated versions of the InfinityBook Pro 15 model, the Manjaro-powered laptops will boast a maximum of 64GB RAM and feature 2TB SSD storage thanks to a Samsung EVO Plus NVMe drive.

Like several other Tuxedo Computers, all devices support aftermarket upgrades without losing warranty.

Elephant Robotics MarsCat is a robotic cat that tries to mimic the behavior of actual cats through artificial intelligence. It can have a life of its own roaming the house, and you can also interact with it as it will play with toys/teasers through its camera, and you can send voice command to ask it to walk, run, look at you, be quiet. etc… but the trick is that it may not always obey like a real cat, and its personality will evolve depending on how you interact with it.

Beside being a bionic pet, MarsCat can also be used to teach/learn robotics as the company will release an open-source SDK allowing you to change the Python code running on the Raspberry Pi 3 board powering the cat, and access API’s to control the camera, microphone, touch sensors, as well as the 16 servos connected to a Microchip ATMega2560 MCU via two servo boards. Visual programming for the robot will be made possible through Scratch 3.0 program.

• Mansion of Pedophilia – Addendum: Accessing and Assessing Court Documents
• Mansion of Pedophilia – Addendum: Progress on Police Request
• Mansion of Pedophilia – Part VIII: More Than 4 Months of Waiting for Police Department to Send Over the Files They Claim to Have an Issue Opening
• Starting a GNU Replacement for GitHub, Possibly Based on GitLab
• European Commission Pushes for Even Greater Patent Maximalism Instead of Rationality, Patent Zealots’ Site Cherry-Picks China as Whipping Boy
• CRISPR Patents Disallowed, But Where Are the Journalists?
• Judges Reject EPO Patents on Life as Constitutional Complaints Against the EPO Pile Up in Germany
• StartPage (System1) Found New Spin Allies. Some Have Been Offered StartPage Jobs. Some Might Already be Working for StartPage in Secret.
• IRC Proceedings: Sunday, January 19, 2020
• IRC Proceedings: Saturday, January 18, 2020
• IRC Proceedings: Friday, January 17, 2020
• IRC Proceedings: Thursday, January 16, 2020
• Links 19/1/2020: Wine 5.0 RC6, Alpine 3.11.3
• Links 18/1/2020: Mir 1.7 and GNU Guile 3.0.0
• Links 16/1/2020: Mozilla Layoffs, PinePhone Braveheart Shipping, KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS Reaches Beta

Bash if statement, if else statement, if elif else statement and nested if statement used to execute code based on a certain condition. Condition making statement is one of the most fundamental concepts of any computer programming. Moreover, the decision making statement is evaluating an expression and decide whether to perform an action or not.

• Keep a journal of your activities with this Python program

  Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I'm taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

• Perl Weekly Challenge 43: Olympic Rings and Self-Descripting Numbers

  These are some answers to the Week 43 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

  Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a couple of days (January 19, 2020). This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

• SaltStack Introduces Plugin Oriented Programming with New Open-Source Innovation Modules to Power Scalable Automation and Artificial Intelligence

• JFrog Launches Free ConanCenter to Improve C/C++ DevOps Package Search and Discovery English

  JFrog, the Universal DevOps technology leader known for enabling liquid software via continuous updates, announces today the launch of the free ConanCenter, enabling better search and discovery while streamlining C/C++ package management. Conan is an open-source, decentralized, and multi-platform package manager for developers to create and share native binaries.

• Rav1e Kicks Off 2020 With Speed Improvements For Rust-Based AV1 Encoding

  Xiph.org's Rustlang-written "Rav1e" AV1 video encoder is back on track with delivering weekly pre-releases after missing them over the past month due to the holidays. With Rav1e p20200115 are not only performance improvements but also binary side and build speed enhancements.

  The new Rav1e pre-release should be roughly 30% faster while also delivering slight enhancements to the image quality at the highest speed (10). That's a winning combination with speed and image quality improvements together!

• RPushbullet 0.3.3

  Release 0.3.3 of the RPushbullet package just got to CRAN. RPushbullet offers an interface to the neat Pushbullet service for inter-device messaging, communication, and more. It lets you easily send (programmatic) alerts like the one to the left to your browser, phone, tablet, … – or all at once.

  This release further robustifies operations via two contributed PRs. The first by Chan-Yub ensures we set UTF-8 encoding on pushes. The second by Alexandre permits to downgrade from http/2 to http/1.1 which he needed for some operations with a particular backend. I made that PR a bit more general by turning the downgrade into one driven by a new options() toggle. Special thanks also to Jeroen in help debugging this issue. See below for more details.

• How to install WPS Office 2019 on elementary OS 5.1 Hera

• How to Secure an Outdated Web Application in 5 Minutes

• Smarter reusable IPFS chunks from HTML documents

• How To Setup OpenLDAP Server on Debian 10

• Number word sequences

Zorin OS is an Ubuntu-based operating system that aims to make Linux easy for Windows and macOS users. In the words of Zorin, it is "the alternative to Windows and macOS designed to make your computer faster, more powerful, secure and privacy respecting". Zorin's main product is the paid-for "Ultimate" edition, which will set you back €39 and comes with macOS, Windows, Linux and "Touch" layouts (i.e. themes) as well as a relatively large collection of software and "installation support". Other editions of Zorin are free but come with less pre-installed software and fewer desktop layouts.

For this review I dusted off a MacBook that dates from late 2009 and installed the "Lite" edition which, as the name suggests, is designed to breathe new life into older hardware. The laptop is one of the plastic, white MacBooks. It has an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU and 4GB of RAM - I doubled the amount of RAM a few months ago. The laptop has mostly been running Fedora with the MATE desktop and the i3 window manager as an alternative environment, both of which ran fine. Zorin's Lite edition uses Xfce as the desktop environment.

First impressions and installation

Zorin's website is either modern and clean or yet another bootstrap site, depending on your view. There are just three links in the navigation menu: Download, Computers and Help (the Computers section links to vendors that sell laptops with Zorin pre-installed). The Download section lists Zorin's Ultimate edition first, followed by the Core, Lite and Education editions.

Clicking any of the Download links for the free versions triggers a "Sign up to our newsletter & Download" pop-up window featuring a huge "Sign up & Download" button and a very small "Skip to download" link. I am not a fan of this type of marketing. I don't mind that they ask if I maybe want to sign up to their mailing list, but I take issue with the fact that the dialogue window has been designed to make the "No thanks" option easy to miss. Such marketing techniques assume that users need to be tricked into signing up to receiving marketing materials, which reflects poorly on the project as a whole.

Since Linux 4.17, I have been working on an online filesystem checking feature for XFS. As I mentioned in the previous update, the online fsck tool (named xfs_scrub) walks all internal filesystem metadata records. Each record is checked for obvious corruptions before being cross-referenced with all other metadata in the filesystem. If problems are found, they are reported to the system administrator through both xfs_scrub and the health reporting system.

As of Linux 5.3 and xfsprogs 5.3, online checking is feature complete and has entered the stabilization and performance optimization stage. For the moment it remains tagged experimental, though it should be stable. We seek early adopters to try out this new functionality and give us feedback.