• 5 Reasons Open Source Certification Matters More Than Ever

  In today’s technology landscape, open source is the new normal, with open source components and platforms driving mission-critical processes and everyday tasks at organizations of all sizes. As open source has become more pervasive, it has also profoundly impacted the job market. Across industries the skills gap is widening, making it ever more difficult to hire people with much needed job skills. In response, the demand for training and certification is growing.

• Developer Recruitment Drives Open Source Funding

  The latest 2018 Open Source Jobs Report points to several ways employers can help developers. For the study, the Linux Foundation and Dice surveyed over 750 hiring managers involved with recruiting open source professionals.

  Due to the survey’s subject, it is not surprising almost half of hiring managers (48 percent) say their company decided to financially support or contribute open source projects to help with recruitment. Although this sounds incredibly compelling, it is fair to question how much hiring managers actually know about open source management. Since 57 percent of hiring managers say their company contributes to open source projects, a back-of-the-envelope calculation says that 84 percent of companies that contribute to open source are doing so at least in part to get new employees.

  The New Stack and The Linux Foundation have teamed up to survey the community about ways to standardize and promote open source policies programmatically. We encourage readers to participate.

• Third Weekly Post

  I wonder if the palettes still need the tag system. All right, a question to ask in the next meeting.

  These 2 weeks have been great for me, because I had a change to really get myself familiarized with the Qt MVC system. I believe I’ll be confident when I need to use it in future projects.

  The next step is too make Krita store palettes used in a painting in its .kra file. There seems to be some annoying dependency stuff, but I should be able to handle.

• I’m going to KDE Akademy 2018

  Less than a month left until KDE Akademy 2018. As part of the local organization team, this is going to be a busy time, but having Akademy in such a great city as Vienna is gonna be awesome.

  You will over the next weeks find many more “I’m going to Akademy” posts on Planet KDE detailing the Akademy plans of other people. So here in this post I don’t want to look forward, but back and tell you the story of the (in retrospect quite long) process of how a few people from Vienna decided to put in a bid to organize Akademy 2018.

• I too am going to Akademy

  In about a month I’ll be in the beautiful city of Vienna, giving a talk on the weird stuff I make using ImageMagick, Kdenlive, Synfig and FFmpeg so I can construct videos so bad and campy you could almost confuse them for being ironic…

• An update on KDE's Streamlined Onboarding Goal, Akademy talk and first sprint

  As I described in the introductory post, KDE has been working towards a trinity of goals and I have been responsible for pushing forward the Streamlined onboarding of new contributors one.

  Half a year has passed since my initial blog post and with Akademy, KDE’s annual conference, coming up in a month this is a great time to post a quick update on related developments.

• Locks versus channels in concurrent Go

  In this article, a short look at goroutines, threads, and race conditions sets the scene for a look at two Go programs. In the first program, goroutines communicate through synchronized shared memory, and the second uses channels for the same purpose. The code is available from my website in a .zip file with a README.

• Pete Zaitcev: Guido van Rossum steps down

• Guido van Rossum Stepping Down from Role as Python's Benevolent Dictator For Life

  Python's Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) Guido van Rossum today announced he's stepping down from the role.

  On the Python mailing list today, van Rossum said, "I would like to remove myself entirely from the decision process. I'll still be there for a while as an ordinary core dev, and I'll still be available to mentor people—possibly more available. But I'm basically giving myself a permanent vacation from being BDFL, and you all will be on your own."

• GCC 8 Hasn't Been Performing As Fast As It Should For Skylake With "-march=native"

  It turns out that when using GCC 8 since April (or GCC 9 development code) if running on Intel Skylake (or newer architectures like the yet-to-be-out Cannonlake or Icelake) and compile your code with the "-march=native" flag for what should tune for your CPU microarchitecture's full capabilities, that hasn't entirely been the case. A fix is en route that can correct the performance by as much as 60%.

• Upcoming git-crecord release

  More than 1½ years since the first release of git-crecord, I’m preparing a big update. Not aware how exactly many people are using it, I neglected the maintenance for some time, but last month I’ve decided I need to take action and fix some issues I’ve known since the first release.

• Profiling memory usage on Linux with Qt Creator 4.7

  You may have heard about the Performance Analyzer (called “CPU Usage Analyzer” in Qt Creator 4.6 and earlier). It is all about profiling applications using the excellent “perf” tool on Linux. You can use it locally on a Linux-based desktop system or on various embedded devices. perf can record a variety of events that may occur in your application. Among these are cache misses, memory loads, context switches, or the most common one, CPU cycles, which periodically records a stack sample after a number of CPU cycles have passed. The resulting profile shows you what functions in your application take the most CPU cycles. This is the Performance Analyzer’s most prominent use case, at least so far.

• The Linux Foundation Forms Open Source Energy Coalition

  The Linux Foundation formed a new open source coalition with support from European transmission power systems provider RTE, Vanderbilt University, the European Network of Transmission System Operators, and the Electric Power Research Institute.

  Called LF Energy, the coalition’s members seek to inform and expedite the energy transition, including the move to electric mobility as well as connected sensors and devices, while at the same time modernizing and protecting the grid, according to the Linux Foundation.

  The coalition intends to focus on reusable components, open APIs and interfaces through project communities that the energy sector can adopt into platforms and solutions, the foundation says.

  “LF Energy is an umbrella organization that will support and sustain multi-vendor collaboration and open source progress in the energy and electricity sectors to accelerate information and communication technologies (ICT) critical to balanced energy use and economic value,” says the Linux Foundation, which was founded in 2000 to accelerate open technology development and industry adoption.

• The Linux Foundation Transforms the Energy Industry with New Initiative: LF Energy

  We are thrilled to introduce the new LF Energy initiative to support and promote open source in the energy and electricity sectors. LF Energy is focused on accelerating the energy transition, including the move to renewable energy, electric mobility, demand response and more.

  Open source has transformed industries as vast and different as telecommunications, financial services, automobiles, healthcare, and consumer products. Now we are excited to bring the same level of open collaboration and shared innovation to the power systems industry.

• The Linux Foundation Launches LF ENERGY, New Open Source Coalition

  Just as open source software has transformed automobiles, telecommunications, financial services, and healthcare, The Linux Foundation today announces the formation of LF Energy with support from RTE, Europe's biggest transmission power systems provider, and other organizations, to speed technological innovation and transform the energy mix across the world.

  LF Energy also welcomes four new projects to be hosted at The Linux Foundation as part of the initiative, which will advance everything from smart assistants for system operators to smart grid controls software.

• Android P may be called Android Pistachio

• The 15th-anniversary Infobar is a beautiful Japanese Android feature phone

• Xiaomi Mi A2 and Mi A2 Lite Android One leaked online ahead of July 24 launch

• How to set up Android Auto on your phone so you'll actually use it

• How to access your PC from Android

• How to Make Your Mac Play Nice with Your Android Phone

• Breaking Down Today's Top 10 Android Apps

• Intex launches Infie 3 entry-level Android Go phone with 4.95″ 18:9 display in India

ARM, the incredibly successful developer of CPU designs, appears to be getting a little nervous about an open-source rival that’s gaining traction. At the end of June, ARM launched a website outlining why it’s better than its competitor’s offerings and it quickly blew up in its face. Realising the site was a bad look, ARM has now taken it down.

For the uninitiated, ARM Holdings designs various architectures and cores that it licenses to major chipmakers around the world. Its tech can be found in over 100 billion chips manufactured by huge names like Apple and Nvidia as well as many other lesser-known players in the low-power market. If ARM is Windows, you can think of RISC-V as an early Linux. Like ARM, it’s an architecture based on reduced instruction set computing (RISC), but it’s free to use and open to anyone to contribute or modify. While ARM has been around since 1991, RISC-V just got started in 2010 but it’s gaining a lot of ground and ARM’s pitiful website could easily be seen as a legitimising moment for the tech.

In July 2016, Callahan wrote to us that he is looking for new team members to join his project to continue full-scale work on Chromium OS for SBCs. Unfortunately, that didn't happen as a few months after the announcement we published back then, Flint Innovations Limited informed us that Chromium OS for SBCs was forked into Flint OS.

Flint Innovations had some big plans for Flint OS, supporting not only Raspberry Pi boards, but also x86 computers with Intel and Nvidia GPUs, and also promised to let users run Android apps, a Google initiative that's now mainstream on Chrome OS and already supported by most Chromebooks out there. In March 2018, Flint OS was bought by Neverware.

The core support for the i.MX6SX SoC and the UDOO Neo is pretty reasonable, with the MMC fixes it’s been very stable, all the core bits are working as expected, included wired and wireless network, thermal, cpufreq, crypto and it looks like the display should work fine. There’s a few quirks that I need to investigate further which should provide for a fun evening or weekend hacking. There has also been recently merged support for the i.MX6SX Cortex-M4 land upstream in Zephyr upstream for the 1.13 release, so getting that running and communication using Open-AMP between Fedora and Zephyr should also be an interesting addition. I think this will be a welcome addition to Fedora 29, and not a moment too soon!!

Machine learning and IoT in particular offer huge opportunities for developers, especially those facing the crowded markets of other platforms, to engage with a sizeable untapped audience.

That Linux is open source makes it an amazing breeding ground for innovation. Developers aren’t constrained by closed ecosystems, meaning that Linux has long been the operating system of choice for developers. So by engaging with Linux, businesses can attract the best available developer skills.

The Linux ecosystem has always strived for a high degree of quality. Historically it was the Linux community taking sole responsibility for packaging software, gating each application update with careful review to ensure it worked as advertised on each distribution of Linux. This proved difficult for all sides.

I like the approach. I really do. It's sensible, it's practical, it's the right thing for ordinary people, and it can help avoid dependency nightmares when one little library breaks and then the damage propagates across the entire distro stack. But for the time being, the standalone app mechanisms aren't robust enough, and my latest CentOS escapade with Flatpak shows it. Not bad but needs improvement.

Specifically, installations should be entirely GUI - no fiddling - and if the GUI package managers in this or that distro can't handle it, then Flatpak ought to provide its own frontend. There should be no games with command line and ugly dot separated package names. Programs ought to work seamlessly - and be equivalent in quality and capabilities to the ordinary repo stock. Finally, the question of fragmentation remains, because if we end with a dozen Snap-like or Flatpak-like tools, we haven't really done anything. You should try Flatpak in your CentOS, and you will be able to grab some nice and cool applications, but be aware that the experience is still rough, and the road to seamless fun is still long. Take care.

• Red Hat APAC partner conference photo gallery

  Recently I had the opportunity to attend the Red Hat APAC partner conference in Bali and simply put it was unforgettable.

  From long beaches to light shows and regional dinners the conference really did offer it all to partners.

  On top of the beautiful setting, the conference also focussed on highlighting partners, their success with Red Hat and how they interact and elevate each other.

• Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13: five things you need to know about networking

  Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13, based on the upstream Queens release, is now Generally Available. Of course this version brings in many improvements and enhancements across the stack, but in this blog post I’m going to focus on the five biggest and most exciting networking features found this latest release.

• A Technical Look At 2 Stocks: Starbucks Corporation (SBUX), Red Hat, Inc. (RHT)

• Red Hat Inc. (RHT) Rises 3.45% for July 12

• Tower Bridge Advisors Upped By $2.23 Billion Its Chevron (CVX) Position; Red Hat (RHT)’s Sentiment Is 0.86

• How to watch Amazon Instant Video on Chromecast or Android TV

• Chrome OS will start recommending Android apps optimized for Chromebooks during setup

• Android Auto arrives in Hyundai, Kia cars in Korea

• Twitter rolling out a bottom bar on Android, removes swiping between tabs [Gallery]

• YouTube gets covert with new Incognito mode for Android

• Constitutionality and CJEU as Barriers, the UPC Agreement (UPCA) is Already Moot in the United Kingdom
• It’s Not About EPO ‘Backlog’ But About Faking ‘Production’ by Lowering Standards
• Links 12/7/2018: GTK+ 4.0 Plans, OpenBSD Gains Wi-Fi “Auto-Join”

• Vega 20 Support Added To RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver

  With the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel release due out in August there is the AMDGPU kernel driver support for Vega 20, the yet-to-be-released Vega GPU said to be the 7nm part launching later this year in Radeon Instinct products and featuring 32GB of HBM2 and adding some new deep learning instructions. Now the RadeonSI Gallium3D user-space driver for OpenGL within Mesa has Vega 20 support.

• NVIDIA 396.24.10 Linux Driver Brings Vulkan 8-Bit / Renderpass2 / Conditional Render

  NVIDIA developers today released the 396.24.10 driver, their latest beta driver for Linux focused on the latest Vulkan innovations and improvements and is joined by the Windows 398.58 driver.

  The NVIDIA 396.24.10 Linux driver (and 398.58 beta for Windows) are focused on delivering the functionality added with the recent Vulkan 1.1.80 specification update.

• Vega 20 Support Added To RadeonSI Gallium3D Driver

  With the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel release due out in August there is the AMDGPU kernel driver support for Vega 20, the yet-to-be-released Vega GPU said to be the 7nm part launching later this year in Radeon Instinct products and featuring 32GB of HBM2 and adding some new deep learning instructions. Now the RadeonSI Gallium3D user-space driver for OpenGL within Mesa has Vega 20 support.

• NVIDIA 396.24.10 Linux Driver Brings Vulkan 8-Bit / Renderpass2 / Conditional Render

  NVIDIA developers today released the 396.24.10 driver, their latest beta driver for Linux focused on the latest Vulkan innovations and improvements and is joined by the Windows 398.58 driver.

  The NVIDIA 396.24.10 Linux driver (and 398.58 beta for Windows) are focused on delivering the functionality added with the recent Vulkan 1.1.80 specification update.

Cluster computer projects are increasingly looking beyond the Raspberry Pi to build devices with faster cluster-friendly SBCs. Here’s a 96-core monster that taps the octa-core NanoPi Fire3.

Cluster computers constructed of Raspberry Pi SBCs have been around for years, ranging from supercomputer-like behemoths to simple hobbyist rigs. More recently, we’ve seen cluster designs that use other open-spec hacker boards, many of which offer higher computer power and faster networking at the same or lower price. Farther below, we’ll examine one recent open source design from Paul Smith at Climbers.net that combines 12 octa-core NanoPi-Fire3 SBCs for a 96-core cluster.

Also: Low-profile Apollo Lake Mini-ITX board runs Linux

• Opening Graphical Application with Root Permission – gksu Alternatives in Ubuntu 18.04

  Recently, Ubuntu 18.04 removed gksu from its repositories, causing panic in anyone who relied on the utility on a regular basis. What many people didn’t realize, though, was gksu hadn’t been maintained in a long time. It was already a dead program. Ubuntu finally just made the move to cut ties with it.

• bootiso: Easy ISO To Bootable USB Drive From The Command Line

  If you're looking for a command line tool that is able to create a bootable USB drive from both hybrid and non-hybrid ISO images (it should work with any Linux distribution ISO as well as Microsoft Windows ISO files), with some safety checks in place, you may want to give Bootiso a try.

• Yay – Yet Another Reliable AUR Helper Written In Go

  Howdy Arch Users! I’ve got a good news for you. Today, I stumbled upon yet another reliable AUR helper called “Yay”. Yep! the name of this AUR helper is Yay. In the past, I was using Pacaur for installing AUR packages. It did a great job and I really liked it. I have also used some other AUR helpers such as Packer and Yaourt as well. But, they are all now discontinued and not recommended to use anymore. After reading about Yay features, I thought to give “Yay” a try and see how things works. So, here we go!

• freenode Launches New Job Board, Two More Spectre Security Holes Discovered, Debian Joins KDE's Advisory Board, Android Malware Found in the Google Play Store and Stable Kernels Released

  Two new Spectre-type security holes have been discovered. ZDNet reports that this affects any operating system running on AMD, ARM and Intel processors. Vladimir Kiriansky, PhD candidate at MIT, and independent researcher Carl Waldspurger found the new vulnerabilities and published a paper. ZDNet also notes that so far, no known attacks have occurred making use of these bugs, but that likely will change soon.

• Android security: Password-stealing malware sneaks in Google Play store in bogus apps

  A cyber crime group has sneaked apps onto the official Google Play Store which then serve up Trojan banking malware to Android users, security researchers have revealed.

  Uncovered in June, the campaign delivered Anubis malware designed to steal login credentials for banking apps, e-wallets and payment cards. The payload was hidden in applications which claimed to offer services ranging from online shopping to live stock-market monitoring.

• Google Chrome Will Start Using 10% More RAM Now, Thanks to Spectre

  Soon Google Chrome is going to use even more of your RAM, assuming that it’s even possible to use more than it already does. This is because of Chrome 67’s new Site Isolation feature to protect against Spectre.

• Security in Open Source Software Isn’t Automatic – but It Should Be [Ed: WhiteSource wants to sell its crap. Pretends only FOSS has bugs, as usual. Might as well say, "Security in Proprietary Software Isn’t Automatic"]

• Simple streaming the Linux desktop to Kodi using GStreamer and RTP

• How Setup and Configure Docker Swarm Cluster on Ubuntu

• How to install PostgreSQL on Ubuntu 18.04

• It’s All In The Libs – Building A Plugin System Using Dynamic Loading

  Shared libraries are our best friends to extend the functionality of C programs without reinventing the wheel. They offer a collection of exported functions, variables, and other symbols that we can use inside our own program as if the content of the shared library was a direct part of our code. The usual way to use such libraries is to simply link against them at compile time, and let the linker resolve all external symbols and make sure everything is in place when creating our executable file. Whenever we then run our executable, the loader, a part of the operating system, will try to resolve again all the symbols, and load every required library into memory, along with our executable itself.

  But what if we didn’t want to add libraries at compile time, but instead load them ourselves as needed during runtime? Instead of a predefined dependency on a library, we could make its presence optional and adjust our program’s functionality accordingly. Well, we can do just that with the concept of dynamic loading. In this article, we will look into dynamic loading, how to use it, and what to do with it — including building our own plugin system. But first, we will have a closer look at shared libraries and create one ourselves.

  Note that some details may vary on different architectures, and all examples in here are focusing on x86_64 Linux, although the main principles should be identical on other systems, including Linux on ARM (Raspberry Pi) and other Unix-like systems.

• Road to RHCA--Preparation Meets Opportunity

• Ten Linux process management commands that simplify admin workflows

• How to install mcrypt for PHP 7.2

• How To Install Git on CentOS 7

Trisquel 8.0 is a success in reaching freedom goal (meaning: no proprietary at all) for overall computer users, especially desktop. It is a 100% free distro which is complete, user friendly, and instant. Compared to regular distros, it's at least equally low in requirements but high in usability; compared to common free distros, it's active (not dormant) and long-standing (since 2007). This operating system can be used by general computer users, produced in mass computers (i.e. sold in a PC/laptop), and especially software freedom people. This year, 2018, anybody wants the true free distro would be happy with Trisquel.