• How to Install IonCube Loader on Ubuntu - Cloudbooklet

  How to Install IonCube Loader on Ubuntu. IonCube Loader is a PHP extension used when you are using a PHP script that is encrypted using ionCube. IonCube needs to be installed in your webserver and made accessible to your PHP to use it.

  In this guide you are going to learn how to install ionCube loader on Ubuntu or Debian and configure your PHP or PHP-FPM and PHP-CLI to use it.

• How to Setup CentOS Stream from AWS Marketplace

  In the current trend of IT Infrastructure, Cloud Computing occupies a tremendous role. Most of the top companies are looking for Cloud Providers to have their Infrastructure. As per our requirement, we can provision our servers at any time. According to the server configuration, we will be charged per usage.

  Amazon Marketplace is the place where you can find software from qualified third-party vendors. It is like an online software store where you can buy software and use it as per your need.

  In this article, we will see the detailed steps to launch CentOS-Stream from AWS Marketplace.

• Create a MAN page for your own program or script with Pandoc - PragmaticLinux

  A MAN page is documentation for a software program or script, created in the groff typesetting system. Ever tried writing a MAN page? I bet you thought to yourself: “Yeez, there’s got to be an easier way to do this”. Luckily, there is. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to write a MAN page comfortably in Markdown. Then we’ll use Pandoc to create the actual MAN page for your program or script, properly formatted in the groff typesetting system.

• Looking into Linux user logins with lslogins

  One convenient way to list details about user logins on a Linux system is to use the lslogins command. You'll get a very useful and nicely formatted display that includes quite a few important details.

  On my system and likely most others, user accounts will start with UID 1000. To list just these accounts rather than include all of the service accounts like daemon, mail and syslog, add the -u option as shown in the example below.

• Coming in glibc 2.33: Reloadable nsswitch.conf

  In my previous article about nsswitch.conf I talked about how simple, perhaps too simple, this config file is to use. What I didn’t cover then was how simplistic its internal implementation is. Specifically, an application only loads this file once—the first time it’s needed.

  So, what do you do when nsswitch.conf needs to change? How do you update all of the running applications? You don’t! The only way to force a reload is to stop the application and restart it. That is not always an option, especially for critical applications that might take a long time to restart.

  Recent work behind the scenes in the GNU C library will change all of this. As of glibc version 2.33, this config file now reloads and reparses each time it changes, and only the configuration is reloaded. If the configuration calls for an external shared library to be loaded, that object is only ever loaded once. It may be called in a different sequence, or not called at all, but it is never unloaded. This behavior avoids a whole class of problems related to unloading shared objects that might still be in use.

• SEGGER's Complete J-Link Software Now Available for Linux on ARM

  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.”

• Bootstrappable builds

  The idea of Reproducible Builds—being able to recreate bit-for-bit identical binaries using the same source code—has gained momentum over the last few years. Reproducible builds provide some safeguards against bad actors in the software supply chain. But building software depends on the tools used to construct the binary, including compilers and build-automation tools, many of which depend on pre-existing binaries. Minimizing the reliance on opaque binaries for building our software ecosystem is the goal of the Bootstrappable Builds project.

  For example, GCC is written in C and C++, which means that it requires compilers for those two languages in order to be built from source. In practice, that generally means a distribution would use its existing binary executables of those tools to build a new GCC version, which would then be released to users. One of the concerns with that approach is described in Unix inventor Ken Thompson's Turing Award lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust" [PDF]. In a nutshell, Thompson said that trusting the output of a binary compiler is an act of faith that someone has not tampered with the creation of that binary—even if the source code is available.

  The Bootstrappable Builds project was started as an offshoot of the Reproducible Builds project during the latter's 2016 summit in Berlin. A bootstrappable build takes the idea of reproducibility one step further, in some sense. The build of a target binary can be reproduced alongside the build of the tools required to do so. It is, conceptually, almost like building a house from a large collection of atoms of different elements.

• Parasoft Accelerates CI/CD Pipeline Through Partnership With IAR Systems

  IAR Build Tools for Linux uses the leading build tools from IAR Embedded Workbench and empowers software developers who build safety-critical applications to work directly on the Linux host environment, eliminating toolchain version management.

• Josef Strzibny: Working with decimals in Elixir

  Integers are not enough, and floats are flawed? Decimals to the rescue! A short guide of what’s important when working with decimals in Elixir.

  This post is about the Decimal 2.0 module from decimal Hex package.

  As with every module in Elixir, running h Module and Module.module_info in IEx is a good place to start.

• Swift Deploys: Dealing with Anti-Patterns and Unresolved Issues

  In a long end-of-the-year blog post, Charity Majors, co-founder and CTO of honeycomb.io, discussed lead time to deploy, or “the interval encompassing the time from when the code gets written and when it’s been deployed to production.”

• Perl weekly challenge 95

  You are given a number $N. Write a script to figure out if the given number is Palindrome. Print 1 if true otherwise 0.

• Perl Weekly Challenge 95: Palindrome Numbers and Demo Stack

• Learn awk by coding a "guess the number" game | Opensource.com

  Once you understand these concepts, you can start figuring the rest out. For example, most languages have a "way of doing things" supported by their design, and those ways can be quite different from one program to another. These ways include modularity (grouping related functionality together), declarative vs. imperative, object-orientation, low- vs. high-level syntactic features, and so on. An example familiar to many programmers is "ceremony," that is, the amount of work required to set the scene before tackling the problem. The Java programming language is said to have a significant ceremony requirement, stemming from its design, which requires all code to be defined within a class.

• The terminal, the console and the shell - what are they?

  The other day, as I was going through some of my old notes, I stumbled upon something I had written about the console, the terminal and the shell on Unix-like operating systems. I have decided to rewrite these notes in order to share them here on my website. So without further ado we will now stroll down memory lane and take a quick look at the origins of the Unix terminal and shell. And I will also give my advice to new users on Linux or BSD regarding the choice of terminal emulator and shell.

 

• Current status of EasyOS on the Pi4

  The videos seem to play OK though.

  Regarding the hanging, SM seems to be waiting on a response from youtube.com, so I don't know if that is a problem with youtube.com or the network interface.

  Regarding point-3, sometimes just replugging the USB-stick is sufficient to get it recognized. But sometimes replugging multiple times still does not work.

  

• Stripped-down Raspberry Pi 3B+ SBC powers YARH.IO Micro 2 DIY handheld PC

  We’ve already seen a few DIY Raspberry Pi-based handheld computers in the past with the likes of Zero Terminal V3 or hgTerm powered by a Raspberry Pi Zero and a stripped-down Raspberry Pi 3 board respectively.

  So why not another? YARH.IO Micro 2 DIY handheld PC is based on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ SBC stripped from its Ethernet port, whose double stack USB connectors have been replaced with single stack USB connectors. The DIY computer also adds off-the-shelf parts with a 4″ touch screen display and a Bluetooth keyboard without touchpad, and gets its power from a 3,500 mAh battery.

• Get VMware on Raspberry Pi

           

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

  Inkplate 10 also supports Peripheral Mode which allows you to control the display from another board such as Raspberry Pi or Arduino via commands sent over a UART or USB connection.

If you’ve been waiting for Xfce 4.16 to land in openSUSE Tumbleweed, I have some good news today as the wait is over and you can install the desktop environment right now from distribution’s software repositories and upgrade from Xfce 4.14.

Xfce 4.16 brings many goodies for fans of the lightweight desktop environment, including fractional scaling, dark mode for the Panel, CSD (Client-side decorations) support for all the Settings dialogs, a revamped About Xfce dialog with info about CPU, GPU and RAM, as well as a refreshed look with new icons and color palette.

My favorite pastime is to see an eclectic range of bands, solo artists, and orchestras live. It’s such a life-changing and exhilarating experience to be present. It’s one thing to be sitting at home listening to a CD or watching music videos on TV or on YouTube, but being with an audience, packed out in a stadium or music hall, takes it to another level. But it’s an expensive pastime, and still on hold given the current coronavirus pandemic. I’m therefore listening to music from my CD collection which I’ve encoded to FLAC, a lossless audio format, and stored locally.

Linux offers a huge array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks, but I’m endeavoring to explore every free music player in case there’s an undiscovered gem.

Carbon Player is a cross-platform media player written in JavaScript and uses Electron, an open-source software framework developed and maintained by GitHub. Let’s see how Carbon Player fares.

• Get a free copy of Bomber Crew during the Humble Winter Sale

  How about a free game for the coming weekend? Humble Store has Bomber Crew going free during their new Winter Sale so you can pick up some other cheap games too. Bomber Crew is a really highly rated and enjoyable game too, so it's a pretty good pick to get free!

  As for the new Humble Winter Sale, it's a big one with lots of publishers big and small joining in. Plus there's of course masses of fantastic indie games that deserve plenty of attention. If you want to look over what the bigger lot have take a look at the sales for SEGA, 2K, Deep Silver, Humble Games, Codemasters, THQ Nordic, Kalypso Media and also Team17 have an existing sale still on.

• Prison Architect: Going Green announced for release on January 28

  Paradox Interactive and Double Eleven have announced the next expansion and free update for Prison Architect with the Prison Architect: Going Green DLC launching on January 28.

  Seems like bit of a theme with Paradox published games. We had the Cities: Skylines - Green Cities DLC in 2017, the Surviving Mars: Green Planet DLC in 2019 and now prisons are going green too. You will be able to create a more environmentally friendly prison with farming and all sorts.

• 【Xonotic】Let The Mayhem Commence Again

  I had a lot of fun in the last Xonotic stream we did so I thought I'd be fun to try that again, I tried to test out my server with other people on it and it seems like it's working this time but we'll truly see when the open source arena shooter mayhem begins

• The State of Virtual Reality on Linux

  …Until after some life changes, an unexpected influx of money, and curious about all the news about Half-Life next installment (Alyx) and Valve’s own VR system, the Valve Index, and the claims that it is supported on Linux, I took the plunge and bought it. I got it on my house on April 30, 2020, an exact year after its debut.

  What happened to me next was extraordinary. I met new worlds, I felt new things, I traveled to many places in the hardest months of the Lock-downs. It is not easy to describe, since it is so linked to the senses, so real and at the same time so abstract. In this article, I’ll try to laboriously describe what I felt — without ever leaving Linux — and give numerous examples. For that, though, I have to start with boring stuff. Stay with me and you won’t regret.

  So. This article will try to convey how Virtual Reality on Linux became viable, what are its challenges and limitations, which applications and games run on it, what are the terms and technologies associated to it and what to expect from the future. And also give a light whether it’s worth investing on this technology today, instead of waiting for it to mature as most people must think.

• Valve Is Planning Something Special For Linux Gaming In 2021

  Before we get to that carrot Valve is dangling in front of us for 2021, let’s begin with a sobering observation. Despite two straight years of incredible advancements in Linux gaming — specifically Proton, the compatibility layer that lets us easily run thousands of Windows games on Linux — there has been a negligible increase in Linux gaming adoption. As marketing-centric scribe James Mawson so poignantly states, it’s a “growth so feeble, it’s difficult to separate from statistical noise; Linux isn’t even a serious threat to the Mac in this space.”

  Wow. Sobering indeed.

  Clearly We Have Work To Do

  Proton 5 now ships with the Steam for Linux client, and it introduces improved performance, support for DX12 and much more. As Valve’s informative 2020 recap points out, an increase in developers testing their games against Proton (without needing to invest huge time and resources into developing native ports) resulted in some big AAA titles like Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077 and others being playable on Linux at or shortly after their native Windows releases.

  That’s wonderful for gamers already immersed in the Linux gaming ecosystem, but let’s be honest with ourselves and admit that there are still many reasons to dual-boot Windows. Maybe it’s the lure of popular games that rely on anti-cheat software or invasive DRM. Maybe it’s the subpar support for brand new hardware like the Radeon RX 6000 GPUs.

• Axiom Verge gets a first ever free update six years later with the Randomizer Mode

  While work continues on the sequel, Axiom Verge has a first ever free content update following the release back in 2015 with a new Randomizer Mode. Never played Axiom Verge? You're missing out. A true love-letter to the classic metroidvanias!

  This brand new update is currently in Beta, requiring you on Steam to opt into it in the usual way. Right click the game, go to Properties and hit Betas on the left panel and find it there. As the name of the update might suggest, it makes things a bit more random but "in a very sophisticated way". This mode is smart enough so you won't get stuck because of needing a certain item to progress onwards.

  How did it come about so long after release? Thanks to the speedrunning community, along with a developer of a mod that gave players an unofficial version of this but it needed a copy of the game. They teamed up to add it into the base game with the modder refusing any compensation for it. How nice for all of us!

• Stockholm to host the 2021 CS:GO Major, with the biggest ever prize pool

  Valve along with PGL have announced the return of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive's next Major Championship that will take place this year in Sweden.

  Not only has competitive esport CS:GO returned, it's coming back with a bang too. This will be the biggest single prize pool in CS:GO history with twenty four teams competing for 2 million dollars USD. Not only that, this will also be the first event that is broadcast live in 4K resolution. The main event will be during November 4-7, so they're leaving enough time to hopefully see COVID-19 get a little more under control as this will be an in-person event with a live audience.

• Another Rust-y OS: Theseus joins Redox in pursuit of safer, more resilient systems

  Rust, a modern system programming language focused on performance, safety and concurrency, seems an ideal choice for creating a new operating system, and several such projects already exist. Now there is a new one, Theseus, described by creator Kevin Boos as "an Experiment in Operating System Structure and State Management."

  The key thinking behind Theseus is to avoid what Boos and three other contributors from Rice and Yale universities call "state spill".

• This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 373

• Socorro Engineering: Half in Review 2020 h2 and 2020 retrospective

  2020h1 was rough. 2020h2 was also rough: more layoffs, 2 re-orgs, Covid-19.

  I (and Socorro and Tecken) got re-orged into the Data Org. Data Org manages the Telemetry ingestion pipeline as well as all the things related to it. There's a lot of overlap between Socorro and Telemetry and being in the Data Org might help reduce that overlap and ease maintenance.

  [...]

  2020 sucked. At the end, I was feeling completely demoralized and deflated.

• Reimagine Open: Building a Healthier Internet

  Does the “openness” that made the [Internet] so successful also inevitably lead to harms online? Is an open [Internet] inherently a haven for illegal speech, for eroding privacy and security, or for inequitable access? Is “open” still a useful concept as we chart a future path for the [Internet]?

  A new paper from Mozilla seeks to answer these questions. Reimagine Open: Building Better Internet Experiences explores the evolution of the open [Internet] and the challenges it faces today. The report catalogs findings from a year-long project of outreach led by Mozilla’s Chairwoman and CEO, Mitchell Baker. Its conclusion: We need not break faith with the values embedded in the open [Internet]. But we do need to return to the original conceptions of openness, now eroded online. And we do need to reimagine the open [Internet], to address today’s need for accountability and online health.

• 5.11 Merge window, part 2

  Linus Torvalds released the 5.11-rc1 prepatch and closed the 5.11 merge window on December 27. By that time, 12,498 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline; nearly 2,500 of those wandered in after the first merge-window summary was written. Activity slowed down in the second week, as expected, but there were still a number of interesting features that found their way into the mainline.

• Portable and reproducible kernel builds with TuxMake

  TuxMake is an open-source project from Linaro that began in May 2020 and is designed to make building Linux kernels easier. It provides a command-line interface and a Python library, along with a full set of curated portable build environments distributed as container images. With TuxMake, a developer can build any supported combination of target architecture, toolchain, kernel configuration, and make targets.

  Building a Linux kernel is not difficult. Follow the documentation, install the dependencies, and run a couple of make commands. However, if a developer wants to build for multiple architectures, with multiple toolchains, things get complicated quickly. Most developers and maintainers have a set of custom scripts that they have written and maintained to perform their required set of builds. TuxMake provides a common layer of abstraction to reduce the need for every developer to write their own build scripts.

  TuxMake publishes containers for various toolchain/architecture combinations. These containers eliminate the need for individual developers to source and install multiple toolchains and toolchain versions on their systems. It also makes builds reproducible and portable because now the environment in which a kernel is built is versioned and shareable across the internet and on mailing lists.

  TuxMake has two goals. First, remove the friction that may cause developers, especially new developers, to skip build testing for uncommon toolchain/architecture combinations. Second, to make it easier for builds and build problems to be described and reproduced.

• Linux 5.12 To Allow Disabling Intel Graphics Security Mitigations - Phoronix

  The Linux 5.12 kernel will allow optional, run-time disabling of Intel graphics driver security mitigations, which so far is just in regards to last year's iGPU Leak vulnerability. This i915.mitigations= module parameter control is being added as part of finally fixing the Haswell GT1 graphics support that was fallout from this mitigaion.

  The drm-intel-gt-next pull request to DRM-Next for Linux 5.12 was sent in. Most notable is that fixing of the Haswell GT1 support that came from the clear residual security mitigations. Since that iGPU Leak mitigation for Gen7/Gen7.5 graphics was merged last year, Haswell GT1 graphics have resulted in hangs at boot. That's finally fixed up. Besides being in Linux 5.12, it should also get back-ported to recent stable kernel series as well.

• Open-Source "Nouveau" Driver Now Supports NVIDIA Ampere - But Without 3D Acceleration - Phoronix

  Patches were sent out today that provide the open-source Linux kernel "Nouveau" driver with support for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series "Ampere" graphics cards. But at the moment there is no 3D acceleration and the developers are blocked still by signed firmware requirements, so it's basically just a matter of having kernel mode-setting display support.

  Red Hat's Ben Skeggs sent out the pull request today that provides kernel mode-setting support for the RTX 30 "Ampere" graphics cards with the long-standing open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver

I founded the curl project early 1998 but had already then been working on the code since November 1996. The source code was always open, free and available to the world. The term “open source” actually wasn’t even coined until early 1998, just weeks before curl was born.

In the beginning of course, the first few years or so, this project wasn’t seen or discovered by many and just grew slowly and silently in a dusty corner of the Internet.

Already when I shipped the first versions I wanted the code to be open and freely available. For years I had seen the cool free software put out the in the world by others and I wanted to my work to help build this communal treasure trove.

Also: GStreamer 1.18.3 stable bug fix release

I am a Linux ambassador of sorts. I’ve been using the Linux computer operating system since 2013. I can still remember the light feeling I had the day I broke free of the Microsoft Windows operating system.

No more constant worries about viruses hijacking or corrupting my computer. No more outlays to pay for each upgrade. No more worries that the next upgrade will be really lousy and buggy and remain so for months or even years. And, above all, no more freezes in the middle of my work and work lost as a result.

Now eight years into my Linux adventure I am wildly satisfied with that choice. That remains the case even though my most recent upgrade did not go as planned and got stretched out over several days. But this latest upgrade has made me think hard about why I stick with Linux and what the Linux way of doing things can tell us about a possible, better future.

I think some of the principles and structures I’m seeing are found in practically every pursuit, agriculture, education, the arts, politics, and commerce. If you are growing some of your own food, you are practicing these principles and creating similar structures. If you are teaching outside existing educational systems, you are likely doing the same. If you are writing, painting, singing, dancing or somehow expressing yourself artistically, you are probably already moving toward the world that the Linux community is pioneering in its own corner. If you created a business not only to have a livelihood, but because you want to change the world, you are almost certainly on the same path.

Let me explain a little about Linux, and then try to relate that to the broader world.

First, I tell people who decide to try Linux that they are not merely loading a piece of software on their computer; they are joining a community. This is a very important distinction.

Also: Behind the Scenes of System76: Customer Happiness Team

• 5 of the best messaging apps for Android and iPhone

• 10 Best Personal Finance Apps for iPhone and Android (Free and Paid)

• 5 Android apps you can’t be without

• 5 best games like PUBG Mobile Lite for 2 GB RAM Android devices in 2021

• 4 must-have apps for your new Android phone

• Huawei Is Gunning For Acquiring A Fifth Of Android's Userbase With Its Own HarmonyOS!

• How to connect AirPods to your Android phone

• Moshi reveals how to get fast charging for your Android phone; updated for 2021

• CBORD expands mobile credential support to Android phones

• Google app for Android testing in-app browser redesign with bottom bar

• Realme Android bootloader unlock tools & kernel source code tracker

• Researchers Explain How Locked Android, iOS Phone Encryption Gets Bypassed

• Android phones still need Internet security

• [Update: Jan. 15] Waiting for Motorola One Macro Android 10 update? Here's the status so far

• OnePlus OxygenOS 11 (Android 11) update tracker: Devices that have received the stable

• Sony Xperia 5 & Xperia 1 Android 11 update begins rolling out

• [Update: Jan. 15] Sony Android 11 update tracker: List of eligible devices & release date

• [Update: Jan. 15] Optus Android 11 (Android R) update tracker & list of eligible devices

• Thomson launches its first TV with Android TV operating system in India

Containerization has gained in popularity over the past few years. However, the subject still remains elusive for some. There are many different opinions revolving around this architectural paradigm, spanning from "containers are just a way to obfuscate bad code" to "you are a dinosaur if your entire infrastructure isn't already containerized."

If you have one of these strong opinions, this post probably is not for you. The following is for those who have not had the time nor bandwidth to research the topic and are not sure how the architecture might help within their organization. In this article, I give a simple explanation of some of the advantages of adopting a container strategy within your infrastructure and give you some quick and simple tips to get started. There are, in fact, many advantages of containerization within your infrastructure, both from a technical perspective and the development lifecycle perspective.

This is an edited excerpt from my forthcoming book on Trust in Computing and the Cloud for Wiley and leads on from a previous article I wrote called Trust & choosing open source.

In that article, I asked the question: What are we doing when we say, "I trust open source software"? In reply, I suggested that what we are doing is making a determination that enough of the people who have written and tested it have similar requirements to mine, and that their expertise, combined, is such that the risk to my using the software is acceptable. I also introduced the idea of distributed trust.

The concept of distributing trust across a community is an application of the wisdom of the crowd theory posited by Aristotle, where the assumption is that the opinions of many typically show more wisdom than the opinion of one or a few. While demonstrably false in its simplest form in some situations—the most obvious example being examples of popular support for totalitarian regimes—this principle can provide a very effective mechanism for establishing certain information.

tomboy-ng is a free and open-source note-taking application for Linux, Mac, and Windows desktops. It is built with simplicity in mind which makes it easy to use for organizing different ideas and managing notes using typical note-taking features such as rich text markup, spell check, printing, import and export, MarkDown editing, and backup recovery.

tomboy-ng is a fork of the now-discontinued note-taking app, Tomboy, whose best ‘selling point‘ was its ability to relate notes together thanks to its WikiWiki-like linking system. All you need to do in order to digitize your idea in an organized manner is to type a name. When you press the link button, tomboy-ng create a branch of the main idea, and all branches (as links) won’t break even when you rename or reorganize them.

WhatsApp introduces its new privacy policy recently due to which signal emphasizing and getting much more attention for its privacy and security it offers. If you make your mind to

Affecting Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla), Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), and Ubuntu 14.04 ESM (Trusty Tahr), the new security vulnerability (CVE-2020-28374) was discovered in Linux kernel’s LIO SCSI target implementation.

Due to this security issue, the LIO SCSI target implementation failed to perform sufficient identifier checking in certain XCOPY requests, allowing an attacker with access to one or more LUNs in a multiple backstore environment to either expose sensitive information or modify data.

This is Proton’s first release in 2021 and brings quite a bunch of goodies from Proton Experimental, including support for world sounds in Cyberpunk 2077, support for a new OpenXR virtual reality API to use the VR mode of the Microsoft Flight Simulator game on AMD hardware, and online play in Red Dead Online and Read Dead Redemption 2.

Haruna is a free and open source Qt / QML video player for Linux that makes use of mpv (libmpv) for video playback.

libmpv makes it possible to embed mpv into other programs as the video / audio playback backend. New to mpv? This is a free and open source media player based on MPlayer, mplayer2 and FFmpeg, that runs on Linux, *BSD, macOS and Microsoft Windows, and there's also an Android port.
mpv has become quite popular in recent years thanks to features like high quality video output (using OpenGL as well as the new Vulkan API, which supports over 100 options for controlling playback quality, including the use of advanced upscaling filters, color management, etc.) with optional hardware acceleration.

Recently, people got awareness to leave popular proprietary software WhatsApp. We even saw # Delete Whatsapp hashtags on social networks. For Ubuntu users who want to switch away from it here's alternatives, namely Telegram and Element, which are free and easy, and available for Ubuntu too. Fortunately, today both are also available for users who use Debian, Mint GNU/Linux, and other Ubuntu-family computers. For Android users, both are already available at F-Droid. They are Free Libre Open Source Software also known as FLOSS. We hope these will always be friendly and useful for us forever. Please share this with your friends!

Also: WhatsApp New Policy And the Backlash From “Common” People Will Cooldown

• Sven-Hendrik Haase: Manual pages indexing service

  We are happy to announce our newest public service: A manual pages indexing site at man.archlinux.org that publishes the man pages of all our packages and allows you to search and browse them. Check out, for example, the man page of tar.

• Find new ways

  Sometimes it is time to critically question things and look for new ways. This is what we as the Ubuntu Community Council have initiated with the existing Local Communities (LoCo) project.
  The LoCos have been an integral part of the Ubuntu family since almost the beginning of Ubuntu. The aim of the LoCos is that people who are involved with Ubuntu find contact persons and like-minded people in their area, so that they are included in the Ubuntu community and also get help with possible questions or problems with Ubuntu.It is also the aim that these local units fill Ubuntu with life and organise events. In the past years they have been an important institution in building the community around Ubuntu.
  Last year, we at the newly elected Community Council wanted to re-staff the international council that oversees this LoCo and called for nominations. Unfortunately, there were not enough candidates so that we could re-staff this council.

• Linux Foundation Launches Open Source Management & Strategy Training Program

  The Linux Foundation has announced a new training program designed to introduce open source best practices to management and technical staff within organizations, Open Source Management & Strategy.