Minimalist vs Modern - Linux Mint 20.1

It's time to check out the two desktop environments built for the latest release of Linux Mint 20.1 - MATE and Cinnamon!

Google Docs Replacement | Self-Hosted 36

Our favorite Google Docs killer with markdown support has a big update. We explain how we host it and why we love it.

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

openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2021/02 – Dominique a.k.a. DimStar (Dim*)

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers, Somewhere, I read, 2021 will be the year of the Linux desktop. Do you agree? Let’s make it the year of Tumbleweed on the desktop. In any case, Tumbleweed has been steadily rolling with 5 snapshots published during this week (0107, 0108, 0110, 0111, and 0113).

Ubuntu 21.04 To Expand The Use Of Phased Package Updates - Phoronix

With this spring's release of Ubuntu 21.04 there is more widespread use of "phased updates" for gradually rolling out new stable release updates to help avoid any regressions en masse from coming to light. For years the Ubuntu desktop has employed this phased updates strategy while now with it being plumbed into APT, Ubuntu Server and other versions will by default make use of phased updates. Going back a number of years in Ubuntu has been Phased Updates that wired into Update Manager has led to the gradual rollout of new stable release updates over a period of about two days. This has been done gradually to ensure that no regressions or potential big problems hit all Ubuntu users at once by over the course of many hours exposing more Ubuntu users to these updates.

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (flatpak, ruby-redcarpet, and wavpack), Fedora (dia, mingw-openjpeg2, and openjpeg2), Mageia (awstats, bison, cairo, kernel, kernel-linus, krb5, nvidia-current, nvidia390, php, and thunderbird), openSUSE (cobbler, firefox, kernel, libzypp, zypper, nodejs10, nodejs12, and nodejs14), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), Slackware (wavpack), SUSE (kernel, nodejs8, open-iscsi, openldap2, php7, php72, php74, slurm_20_02, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (ampache and linux, linux-hwe, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-hwe-5.8, linux-lts-xenial).

Project Zero: Introducing the In-the-Wild Series

At Project Zero we often refer to our goal simply as “make 0-day hard”. Members of the team approach this challenge mainly through the lens of offensive security research. And while we experiment a lot with new targets and methodologies in order to remain at the forefront of the field, it is important that the team doesn’t stray too far from the current state of the art. One of our efforts in this regard is the tracking of publicly known cases of zero-day vulnerabilities. We use this information to guide the research. Unfortunately, public 0-day reports rarely include captured exploits, which could provide invaluable insight into exploitation techniques and design decisions made by real-world attackers. In addition, we believe there to be a gap in the security community’s ability to detect 0-day exploits.

Google series on in-the-wild exploits

The Google Project Zero blog is carrying a six-part series exploring, in great detail, a set of sophisticated exploits discovered in the wild.

Debarshi Ray: Toolbox — After a gap of 15 months

About a year ago, Ondřej Míchal single-handedly rewrote Toolbox in Go, making it massively easier to work on the code compared to the previous POSIX shell implementation. Go comes with much nicer facilities for command line parsing, error handling, logging, parsing JSON, and in general is a lot more pleasant to program in. Plus all the container tools in the OCI ecosystem are written in Go anyway, so it was a natural fit. Other than the obvious benefits of Go, the rewrite immediately fixed a few bugs that were inherently very cumbersome to fix in the POSIX shell implementation. Something as simple as offering a –version option, or avoiding duplicate entries when listing containers or images was surprisingly difficult to achieve in the past. What’s more, we managed to pull this off by retaining full compatibility with the previous code. So users and distributors should have no hesitation to update.

Rav1e 0.4 Released For Faster Rust AV1 Encoding - But Still Is Quite Slow

Rav1e 0.4 was released on Wednesday as the latest version of this Rust-written AV1 video encoder. The rav1e 0.4 release represents a speed-up for the encoder but depending upon the preset level can still be at fractions of a frame per second. Rav1e 0.4 development was focused on providing faster performance for x86_64 and AArch64 (64-bit ARM) architectures. A wide variety of optimizations made faster performance possible depending upon the speed level.

LCA: Catch Talks by OSI Staff and Community

Linux.conf.au (aka LCA) is a lovely community conference based in Australasia that will be entering its 22nd year in 2021. The volunteer-run event is known for getting deeply technical on topics varying from the inner workings of the Linux kernel to the inner workings of dealing with communities. This year's event takes place on January 23rd - 25th and is accessible is digital and accessible to everyone, whether you live "down under" or not. Our General Manager, Deb Nicholson will be presenting on how to build and maintain kinder, gentler and more sustainable open source communities in her talk, "Move Slow and Try Not to Break Each Other." on Sunday at 11:40am.

Data@Mozilla: This Week in Glean: Proposals for Asynchronous Design

At last count there are 14 proposals for Firefox on Glean, the effort that, last year, brought the Glean SDK to Firefox Desktop. What in the world is a small, scrappy team in a small, scrappy company like Mozilla doing wasting so much time with old-school Waterfall Model overhead?! Because it’s cheaper than the alternative. Design is crucial before tackling difficult technological problems that affect multiple teams. At the very least you’re writing an API and you need to know what people want to do with it. So how do you get agreement? How do you reach the least bad design in the shortest time?

Mozilla Performance Blog: Performance Sheriff Newsletter (December 2020)

In December there were 241 alerts generated, resulting in 39 regression bugs being filed on average 6.4 days after the regressing change landed. Welcome to the December 2020 edition of the performance sheriffing newsletter. Here you’ll find the usual summary of our sheriffing efficiency metrics, followed by a review of the year. If you’re interested (and if you have access) you can view the full dashboard.

CIB spins off new allotropia software GmbH

“With everyone from SMBs to governments now going fully digital, we see significant demand for integrated, secure, and GDPR-conforming digital document lifecycle solutions,” says Uli Brandner, CEO and owner of CIB labs. “We have continuously invested into LibreOffice to play an important role in our solution stack, and are now taking the next step by setting up a dedicated company with a laser-sharp focus on delivering fully cloud-based versions – in-line with our ongoing push for browser-based products. Being able to build on the multi-decade value of existing OpenSource solutions, as well as the equally many years of experience of our LibreOffice engineering team there, gets us both a significant head start, and the confidence to deliver quality solutions.” LibreOffice engineering consultancy and “LibreOffice powered by CIB” will remain an important part in CIB’s portfolio, now being served and further improved by allotropia software GmbH. “For our customers, this generates the win-win-win situation of having an established, rock-solid partner like CIB, delivering state-of-the-art opensource software, plus the agility of an innovative startup developing new solutions”, adds Uli Brandner.

Open Source Management & Strategy Training Program Launched by The Linux Foundation

Start 2021 Off With a New Career in the Cloud! Cloud Engineering Bootcamps are on Sale

Instructor-Led Kubernetes Security Fundamentals Course Now Available

Kubernetes Security Essentials Course Now Available

New, Free Training Course Covering Basics of the WebAssembly Now Available

Tips for Starting Your New IT Career in 2021!

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.