• Ncmpcpp: The Best MPD Client With The Worst Name - YouTube

  I picked a good place to start with MPD client, I think it's fair to say that ncmpcpp might be one of the best mpd clients that exist, I'll be trying out other but I don't know how anything will top this one.

• Things I do: Proposal to add build graph output to GNU Make

  In 2015 I worked as a consultant at a large company in Lund. My position was with the build team and one of our responsibilities was managing and maintaining the build system for their Android based phones.

  The problem I was tasked with solving was the fact that running 'make' for a product after a successful build resulted in a lot of stuff being rebuilt unnecessarily.

  A stock Android build tree behaved nicely: a second run of 'make' only produced a line about everything being up-to-date. But the company products were taking a good 15 minutes for a rebuild even if nothing had been changed.

  The Android build system works by including all recipes to be built (programs / libraries / etc) using the GNU Make include directive, so that you end up with one giant Makefile that holds all rules for building the platform. Possibly to avoid the problems laid out in the paper Recursive make considered harmful.

• Sébastien Wilmet: gedit crowdfunding

  The gedit text editor has a long history of development, it has been created in 1998 at the beginnings of GNOME. So it is one of the oldest GNOME application still alive and usually installed by default with Linux distributions that provide GNOME as their desktop environment.

  It is this – the fact that many Linux users know and have gedit installed – that motivates me to improve it, to make it a top notch core application. It is not an easy undertaking though, the codebase is old and large, and there are several underlying software components (libraries) that are critical for the main functioning of gedit.

• For Better 'Tech Rights' in the United States (and the World at Large) the 'Orange Man' Needs to Go
• [Meme] Microsoft Never 'Brought' Skype to GNU/Linux (It Just Bought Skype) and It Never 'Brought' Edge to GNU/Linux Either (Google Did)
• It's Going to be a Long, Long Winter
• TechRadar is an Irresponsible Clickbait and Misinformation Site Disguised as 'News'
• Links 22/10/2020: LibreOffice 6.4.7, Septor 2020.5, Ubuntu 20.10 Released, FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report
• IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 21, 2020

• Google's made a change that impacts all Android users and some won't like the sound of it

• Apple iPhone 12's MagSafe charger works with some Android smartphones

• Android 11 comes to Samsung Galaxy Note 20 and Note 20 Ultra users with One UI 3.0 beta

• Upgrade Android Auto to Full Android with This Small USB Computer

• What is Focus Mode on Android and How to Use It?

• IOS vs Android: Who wins speed test? Know here

• Technicolor, Google accelerate Hybrid Android TV

• 10 more Xbox Game Pass titles have added touch controls for Android

• How to Create Custom Emoji Mashups on Android

This ~$50 USD graphics card is open-source friendly, can drive four display outputs simultaneously, passively cooled, and can fit in a PCI Express x1 slot. It's a unique card offering good value especially for those Linux users wanting open-source friendly hardware.

Earlier this year ASUS announced the GT710-4H-SL-2GD5. In the months since we didn't hear anything more about it given the pandemic but recently saw it became available via Internet retailers and picked one up for testing.

You probably have heard the news by now that Microsoft have released the Linux version of their new Chromium-based Edge web browser. Of course I’ve been waiting for this day ever since they announced the switcheroo to Chromium in order to bring Plasma Browser Integration to Edge users. It took Microsoft almost two decades to offer another web browser to a Unixoid desktop and this time around it’s based on KDE’s legacy – what a time to be alive!

You can already use Plasma Browser Integration just fine with Edge by installing it from the Chrome web store. Until Plasma 5.21 is out, however, it will only see it as yet another Chromium, meaning that KRunner, media controls, and so on might not map to the correct browser window or show only a generic icon.

• Webinar Recording: “virtualenv – a deep dive” with Bernat Gabor – PyCharm Blog | JetBrains

  PyCharm virtual environments are an important but challenging topic. We recently hosted Bernat Gabor to discuss this, as well as his rewrite of virtualenv, the hugely-popular command-line tool for creating virtual environment. The recording is now available.

  This was a very engaging webinar, with lots of questions, and many thanks to Bernat for taking the time to give thoughtful replies.

• Python Morsels: The 2 Types of "Change" in Python

  The word "change" is ambiguous in Python: we have two distinct types of "change" in Python.

  We can "change" a variable by changing which object that variable is pointing to. We do that through an assignment statement.

  We can also "change" an actual object through a mutation.

  Let's take a look at both types of change.

• Python: Slice Notation on String

  The term slicing in programming usually refers to obtaining a substring, sub-tuple, or sublist from a string, tuple, or list respectively.

  Python offers an array of straightforward ways to slice not only these three but any iterable. An iterable is, as the name suggests, any object that can be iterated over.

  In this article, we'll go over everything you need to know about Slicing Strings in Python.

• R vs Python for Data Analysis — An Objective Comparison

  There are dozens articles out there that compare R vs. Python from a subjective, opinion-based perspective. Both Python and R are great options for data analysis, or any work in the data science field.

  But if your goal is to figure out which language is right for you, reading the opinion of someone else may not be helpful. One person's "easy" is another person's "hard," and vice versa.

  In this article, we're going to do something different. We'll take an objective look at how both languages handle everyday data science tasks so that you can look at them side-by-side, and see which one looks better for you.

  Keep in mind, you don't need to actually understand all of this code to make a judgment here! We'll give you R vs Python code snippets for each task — simply scan through the code and consider which one seems more "readable" to you. Read the explanations, and see if one language holds more appeal than the other.

• Hunt down other players in the competitive local multiplayer game Unspottable out now | GamingOnLinux

  Unspottable has you and friends all blended together amongst a crowd, and you each need to find the other to take them down. It's highly amusing and out now.

• Explore an open world with dynamic turn-based battles in Tenderfoot Tactics out now | GamingOnLinux

  I honestly feel like I need to take an entire week off just to play Tenderfoot Tactics, a mix of turn-based battling and open-world exploration that's out now. Note: key provided by the developer.

  Tenderfoot Tactics is a very strange mix of games. The open-world exploration is real-time, and it blends in party-based RPG mechanics with each of your goblins having levels, equipment, abilities and the option to evolve into something bigger and then when you get into the combat it flips that into a turn-based tactical battler. It works together so amazingly well though.

  "For a generation, the terrible Fog - one vast, voiceless, and cruel spirit - has been eating the once-thick forests of the mainland. Now, with nowhere left to call home, and granted magic by the friendly spirits of the archipelago, one small party of would-be adventurers sets out. Find a way to save the many goblin towns of the rocky coast, discover the truth of the Fog, and, if possible, put an end to it."

• Avoid getting cut up in an intergalactic slaughterhouse, Disc Room is out now

  Small rooms, lots of spinning blades - what could possibly go wrong? Disc Room is insane and I absolutely love it.

  [...]

  Just note, that it's made with Game Maker Studio which continues to have some weird dependency problems with libcurl. On Arch Linux for example, you can install the libcurl-compat package and then launch it like this...

• How to Install Arch Linux 2020.09 + Cinnamon Desktop + Apps + VMware Tools on VMware Workstation - SysAdmin

  This video tutorial shows how to install Arch Linux 2020.09 with Cinnamon Desktop on VMware Workstation step by step.

• How To Install Angular on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - idroot

  In this tutorial we will show you how to install Angular on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, as well as some extra required package by Angular

• How to Download DaVinci Resolve 16 and install on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - Linux Shout

  Follow the steps to download latest free davinci resolve 16 to install Linux distros such as Ubuntu 20.4, CentOS, RedHat, Debian, Linux Mint

• How to use TeamViewer on Ubuntu 20.04 Linux without installation - Linux Shout

  Learn how you can use the poratble TeamVIewer from Pen drive without installation on Linux such as Ubuntu 20.04, CentOS, Linux Mint, Debian.

• How To Turn Your Raspberry Pi into NAS Server [Guide]

  A NAS server will allow you to save data from anywhere. Follow this article step by step to turn your Raspberry Pi into a NAS Server.

• How to install Nextcloud 20 on Ubuntu Server 20.04

  Nextcloud is everywhere these days. There's a good reason for that--of all the on-premise cloud solutions on the market, the open source Nextcloud is the easiest to install, most flexible, scales from a single user to an enterprise environment and makes using the cloud as easy as any other tool.

  With the release of Nextcloud 20, there are a few new features you'll want to take advantage of such as the new Dashboard and Talk integrations. Instead of upgrading Nextcloud 19 to Nextcloud 20, why not go for a fresh installation. Let's do just that. I'll demonstrate on Ubuntu Server 20.04.

• How to deploy the ONLYOFFICE Workspace Community Edition on Ubuntu Server 20.04 - TechRepublic

  Jack Wallen shows you how to deploy a full-blown groupware suite for your LAN with ONLYOFFICE Workspace and Docker.

• How to sync configuration files on Linux with Syncthing

  In the past on AddictiveTips, we’ve talked about Symbolize, a Linux app that works with Dropbox to keep your config files in sync. However, not everyone has a Dropbox account.

  If you do not have a Dropbox cloud account but still want your Linux configs to stay in sync, the next best tool to use is Syncthing. In this guide, we’ll show you how to set up a Syncthing system that will always keep your configuration files on Linux in sync.

• How to set up Adguard Home on Linux

  Adguard Home is a network-wide advertisement filtering system, much like Pi-Hole, which we’ve covered on AddictiveTips in the past. The main selling point for Adguard Home is that it doesn’t require using a client-side app (like the Adguard app you can install on Windows, Mac, etc.)

• How to create a new user with admin privileges on Linux - TechRepublic

  If you're a Linux system admin, you probably find yourself scrambling to keep everything in check every day. There's a lot to be done and doing this with a nod to security makes the task even more challenging. That's why you dole out tasks to those admins under you. After all, if you attempt to do everything yourself, eventually you're going to make a mistake, and mistakes can be disastrous in today's light speed world of business. You create new users on your Linux servers and let those admins do their thing.

• This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 361

• MDN Web Docs: Editorial strategy and community participation - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog

  Our updated editorial strategy has two main parts: the creation of content pillars and an editorial calendar.

  The MDN writers’ team has always been responsible for keeping the MDN web platform reference documentation up-to-date, including key areas such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Web APIs. We are breaking these key areas up into “content pillars”, which we will work on in turn to make sure that the significant new web platform updates are documented each month.

• L10n Report: October 2020 Edition | Mozilla L10N

  New content and projects What’s new or coming up in Firefox desktop

• Modern Web Standards Are Leaving Niche Web Browsers Behind - LinuxReviews

  There's plenty of web browsers to choose from on desktop computers but there's not much of a choice if you look beneath the surface. There's a ton of web browsers based on Google's Chromium code-base, a few mostly iOS and macOS browsers based on Apple's Webkit engine and then there's Firefox with it's own Quantum rendering engine. There also Pale Moon with it's own Goanna rendering engine. It is increasingly falling behind the bigger browsers and more and more websites are broken in it as web developers deploy web standards other browsers, but not Pale Moon, support.

  [...]

  The developer of the Pale Moon web browser announced that Pale Moon's source code is being migrated off Microsoft GitHub yesterday. The reason? Moonchild doesn't like that GitHub is increasingly relying on web standards the Pale Moon web browser doesn't support.

• US Department Of Justice Lawsuit Against Google Could Kill Firefox - LinuxReviews

  A US Department of Justice lawsuit against Google on the grounds that they are a "monopolist" could result in the death of the one realistic free software web browser alternative that's not based on the Google-controlled Chromium code-base and it's Blink rendering engine. Mozilla will need to find some other partner willing to pay them $400 million a year if they are forced to cancel their sweet "royalty" contract with Google.

  

• Linux 5.10 ARM64 Has A "8~20x" Performance Optimization Forgotten About For Two Years - Phoronix

  Last week was the main set of ARM 64-bit architecture updates for Linux 5.10 while today a second batch of changes were sent in for this kernel. That first round had the Memory Tagging Extension (MTE) and Pointer Authentication support among other improvements while this secondary pull has two notable performance optimizations. 

  First up is a performance optimization that the Arm developers acknowledge was seemingly forgotten about for some two years. Back in 2018 was a memory management speed-up by around 20x for the mremap system call on large memory regions. That work was merged but the feature never enabled for the ARM64 Linux kernel builds until now. 

  

• Kernel 5.9: Onwards and upwards

  With version 5.9 of the Linux Kernel now released, it is time to, once again, review Collabora's contributions to this release which contains many improvements, primarily in hardware support, multimedia, graphics, testing and continuous contributions to other subsystems.

  The importance of software maintenance has been highlighted in the last week with the discovery of a high-severity Bluetooth flaw. Whilst some reports have suggested that 5.9 contains the required fixes, many articles have been updated to reflect the fact that this is not the case. The required changes should be available as part of the 5.10 kernel when it is released and the kernel stable branches have picked them up. Many distributions are also now providing security releases covering this issue, we advise that you look out for (and apply) security fixes from your distribution of choice.

 

• It’s in the Air: The Corsair HS70 Wireless Headset & Linux

  Looking more widely at headset support in Linux, what can we expect? Unfortunately there’s a dearth of information, especially once you get away from the most popular models. Analog headsets will of course be fine (the joys of analog!), and Bluetooth should also work well, as long as you have that working. Though note that some Bluetooth audio devices prefer mobile, like some Jabra wireless earbuds that have spotty records of connecting to computers in general.

  Otherwise, though, there lacks any central database or way to find out what the support is like for a device you are interested in. You’ll have to rely on your search skills, maybe GitHub, and probably sorting out random forum or Reddit posts to figure out any issues. The Arch Wiki tends to be a great hardware reference, but here there’s just a page for Bluetooth headsets.

  These days it seems quite likely that your random USB audio device, even wireless, has a decent chance of working. But maybe not, and if you rely on any features that may require software or special drivers (controlling the device beyond volume, sound virtualization, etc.) it is still is a bit of a guessing game. At least HeadsetControl provides an indirect way of knowing if something will work, as they list many models of headsets which I assume means all the standard audio works already. When in doubt, make sure you check that return policy!

• Making the Grade with Linux and Cybersecurity at the Intelligent Edge

  As intelligent edge deployments accelerate, we have reached a crossroads where many are being forced to choose between the accessibility, ease of use, flexibility, and leading-edge capabilities of open source software and the safety and security of systems in the field. How we proceed has the potential to lead massive transformation in the embedded industry.

  “Using open source early in the proof-of-concept cycle means taking advantage of the rapid pace of open source innovation,” says Matt Jones, Chief Architect at Wind River. “Taking your solution to market comes with additional measures meant to protect your device throughout its lifecycle.”

• Security updates for Thursday [LWN.net]

  Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (freetype2), Debian (bluez, firefox-esr, and freetype), Fedora (firefox), openSUSE (chromium), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (java-11-openjdk), Slackware (kernel), SUSE (freetype2, gnutls, kernel, php7, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (flightgear, italc, libapache2-mod-auth-mellon, libetpan, and php-imagick).

• Snyk to automatically check Docker Official Images for security problems [Ed: ZDNet pushing FUD vendors again, ones connected to Microsoft]

• OpenDev’s Gerrit deployment back online after suspected admin account compromise

  OpenDev.org’s Gerrit deployment has been restored after being taken offline following the detection of malicious activity on its repositories.

  The repositories were disabled two hours after project maintainers were alerted to a suspected security breach on Tuesday morning (October 20).
  “We believe an admin account in Gerrit was compromised allowing an attacker to escalate privileges within Gerrit,” said Clark Boylan in a service announcement issued later that day.
  “Around 02:00 UTC October 20 suspicious review activity was noticed, and we were made aware of it shortly afterwards.

  “The involved account was disabled and removed from privileged Gerrit groups. After further investigation we decided that we needed to stop the service, this happened at about 04:00 UTC.”

Turing Machines unveiled a “Turin Pi 2” Mini-ITX board that clusters 4x Raspberry Pi CM4 modules with a Layer-2 managed switch along with 2x GbE, 4x USB, 2x mini-PCIe, and 2x SATA 3.0.

Turing Machines Inc., which earlier this month announced a final 1K run of its Turing Pi cluster board, announced a second-gen Turing Pi 2. Due to ship in 2021, the board offers 4x nodes to cluster Raspberry Pi Compute Modules, compared to 7x for the original Turing Pi. The Gen2 design supports the new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and is equipped with additional interfaces, including 2x mini-PCIe and 2x SATA 3.0.

A text editor is very important for any operating system. Be it taking quick notes, drafting a document, or even coding a script, it is the best tool for the job. For Linux, you’d be amazed by just how many different text editors there are out there. To help you decide which text editor you want to use, here we cover the best text editors on Linux.

[...]

Linux Text editors are serious business. Everyone has a strong opinion about what they feel is the best one. None of them are wrong, of course. Each editor has its strengths and weaknesses, and even if none of the text editors in the above list interest you, there are still many alternatives around, like the CherryTree Notepad, which didn’t make the list above.

• Top 15 best farming games for Android

• Technicolor partners with Google for Android TV hybrid device development

• Humax UK announces Aura 4K set-top-box DVR with Android TV and Freeview Play

• This Could Be the Only Android Auto and CarPlay Cable You Need

• Huawei Mate 40 Pro is the first Android phone with a 5nm chipset

• Avoid This Game-Breaking Android 11 Bug

Pine64’s $30 PineCube camera dev kit runs Linux on an Allwinner S3 and offers a 5MP, OmniVision OV5640 based M12 camera with IR night-vision plus audio I/O, WiFi, 10/100 LAN with PoE, USB, 26-pin GPIO, and optional battery and display.

The open-spec PineCube was first revealed by Pine64 in early 2019 as a device called The CUBE with an 8-megapixel Sony iMX179 CMOS sensor. By early this year, it was recast as the CUBE IP Camera, which was promised for a delayed 2Q release due to issues with the Sony camera implementation. Since then, Pine64 switched to a 5MP OmniVision OV5640 sensor and a new PineCube name. The camera dev kit has now shipped for $30.

As part of the today’s Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) release, all the official Ubuntu flavors have been updated and I want you to be the first to read about their new features and improvements. The official flavors released as part of Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) include Kubuntu 20.10, Xubuntu 20.10, Lubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu Studio 20.10, Ubuntu MATE 20.10, Ubuntu Budgie 20.10, and Ubuntu Kylin 20.10. As expected, they come with all the core features of Ubuntu 20.10, as well as…

Kubuntu 20.04 LTS ships with the KDE Plasma 5.19.5 desktop environment, KDE Frameworks 5.74 and KDE Applications 20.08 software suites, as well as Qt 5.14.2. Among the included apps, there’s Elisa 20.08.1 as default music player instead of Cantata, LibreOffice 7.0 office suite, Mozilla Firefox 81 web browser, Latte Dock 0.9.10, KDE Connect 20.08.1, Krita 4.3.0, and KDevelop 5.5.2.

The latest Ubuntu 20.10 code-named "Groovy Gorilla" is available for download after a bit of delay due to last-minute bugs. The final announcement is due shortly today October 22 2020 from Canonical. Check out what's new.

Dubbed Groovy Gorilla, Ubuntu 20.10 has been in development for the past six months, continuing the six-month release cycle of Ubuntu. It supersedes the previous release, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), though being a long-term support series many will prefer not to upgrade since they’ll receive free updates for at least 4 and a half more years.

What’s new in Ubuntu 20.10? Well, being a short-lived release supported for only nine months, Ubuntu 20.10 comes with a handful of new features, including the latest and greatest GNOME 3.38 desktop environment which I previewed last month if you’re curious to see the differences from GNOME 3.36 used in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

• Doug Belshaw: Notification literacy?

  Some people have criticised the film as being light on practical responses that everyday people can make. They point out that while there are recommended steps, they come right at the end of the film while the credits are rolling.

  I thought it was excellent, and that the aim of the film was awareness-raising in the general population, with the main focus on politicians and people who make the laws in western societies (particularly the USA). To me, it showed that, far from being regulated as ‘publishers’, governments should instead consider regulating companies running social networks in the same way as they regulate gambling companies.

  As I’m not planning on running for political office anytime soon, I thought I’d stick to what I know (new literacies!) and think about what it means to talk about ‘notification literacy’. That particular term currently returns zero results in Google Scholar, a search engine for academic articles. If I search DuckDuckGo, one of my own posts from 2017 is in the top few results.

• These Weeks in Firefox: Issue 82 – Firefox Nightly News

  Highlights:

  Urlbar Update 2 enabled on Firefox Beta. This work includes Search Mode, refreshed one-offs, and tab-to-search results.

  We recently introduced tab-to-search results that are shown when a search ...

• How You can Have an Impact on European Openness Policy | ConsortiumInfo.org

  Are there political dimensions to open source software and hardware? Americans might be surprised to see such a question, given Washington’s almost complete indifference to the dramatic rise of these approaches to technology development. But that’s not the case in many other parts of the world, and particularly in Europe, where the European Commission (EC) and the governments of many constituent nations have taken great interest in not only promoting the uptake of open software, and, more recently hardware, but incorporating open source software and hardware into procurement decisions and inter-country communication platforms and protocols.

  This process continues, and you can have an impact on future decision making by participating in a survey commissioned by the EC to guide its future open source policy development.

  The survey questionnaire is targeted at developers and users of open source, takes about fifteen minutes to complete, and can be found here. Input from non-Europeans as well as Europeans is welcome and requested.

  The survey is part of an ongoing EC-commissioned OpenSource Impact Survey being conducted by OpenForum Europe, a Brussels-based policy think tank (of which I’ve been a Fellow for many years), and Fraunhofer ISI, a multi-location European research institute.

• History of FreeBSD: Part 2: BSDi and USL Lawsuits

  In the late 1950s, AT&T was forced to accept a consent decree from the US government to end an anti-trust lawsuit. As part of that consent decree, AT&T had to limit its business endeavours to its national telephone system and special projects for the federal government. Once educational institutions became aware of AT&T’s Unix system in the 1970s, they requested access to it for their computer labs. Legally AT&T couldn’t be in the computer business. So, AT&T’s lawyers came up with a workaround. They would license Unix to universities, but they would operate under a “no advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance” plan.

  Since the educational institutions that licensed Unix couldn’t expect support from the creators of the system, many of them shared bug fixes and improvements. Thus the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) was born.

  In the early 1990s, the US government broke up AT&T and removed the consent decree. Now AT&T could move into other business ventures. UNIX System Laboratories or USL was one of those ventures. This subsidiary was created solely to develop and sell Unix. When USL caught wind of BSDi’s marketing strategy, their lawyers jumped into action. They sent a letter demanding that BSDi do two things: drop the 1-800-ITS-Unix phone number and make it clear in the advertisements that BSDi’s product was not Unix. There are differing accounts as to whether or, not they got rid of the phone number, but they did fulfil the second part of USL’s demand.

  USL was still not content with the fact that BSDi was selling a competing product, so they decided to take them to court. The suit filed by USL alleged that BSDi’s product included code and trade secrets that belonged to USL. They also asked for an injunction to prevent BSDi from selling their product until the lawsuit had been resolved because it could damage USL.

• Open Access Must Be the Rule, Not the Exception

  The COVID-19 pandemic demands that governments, scientific researchers, and industry work together to bring life-saving technology to the public regardless of who can afford it. But even as we take steps to make medical technology and treatments available to everyone, we shouldn’t forget that more crises will come after COVID-19. There will be future public health disasters; in fact, experts expect pandemics to become more frequent. As climate change continues to threaten human life, there will be other kind of disasters too. A patch for the current crisis is not enough; we need a fundamental change in how scientific research is funded, published, and licensed. As we celebrate Open Access Week, let’s remember that open access must be the rule, not the exception.

  We wrote earlier this year about the Open COVID Pledge, a promise that a company can make not to assert its patents or copyrights against anyone helping to fight COVID-19. Companies that take the pledge agree to license their patents and/or copyrights under a license that allows for “diagnosing, preventing, containing, and treating COVID-19.” When we last wrote about the Open COVID Pledge, it had just been introduced and had only a few adopters—most notably, tech giant Intel. Since then, many big tech companies have taken the pledge, including Facebook, Uber, Amazon, and Microsoft. And the list of licensed technology on the Open COVID Pledge website continues to grow.

• Ventoy 1.0.25

  Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files. With Ventoy, you don't need to format the disk over and over, you just need to copy the ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)EFI files to the USB drive and boot them directly. You can copy many files at a time and ventoy will give you a boot menu to select them. Both Legacy BIOS and UEFI are supported in the same way. Most type of OS supported (Windows/WinPE/Linux/Unix/Vmware/Xen...)

• Spotify open-sources Klio, a framework for AI audio research

  This week at the 2020 International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference, Spotify open-sourced Klio, an ecosystem that allows data scientists to process audio files (or any binary files) easily and at scale. It was built to run Spotify’s large-scale audio intelligence systems and is leveraged by the company’s engineers and audio scientists to help develop and deploy next-generation audio algorithms.

• Phoronix Test Suite 10.0.1 Released - Phoronix

  Following last week's big Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 and the new OpenBenchmarking.org, a small update is out this week to address some initial hiccups.

  Phoronix Test Suite 10.0.1 fixes support if using the stock PHP package of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7 / CentOS 7) and other distributions relying on dated versions of PHP that there could be an error on installation of tests.

  

• LLVM Clang 12 Merges Support For x86_64 Microarchitecture Levels - Phoronix

  In an effort to better cater towards newer and common x86_64 instruction set extensions, open-source toolchain developers are moving ahead with the work on x86_64 micro-architecture feature levels for being able to target a handful of different "levels" beyond the base x86_64 instruction set. 

  The x86_64 feature levels are for easily segregating different classes of x86_64 Intel/AMD CPUs in hopes of making it easier for Linux distributions to increase their base requirements beyond just x86_64/AMD64 and improving compiler toolchains with a common set of possible levels / hardware capabilities in generating optimized libraries. This goes along with work pursued by Red Hat in raising the x86_64 CPU requirements for new RHEL/Fedora releases and for optimization initiatives like the glibc HWCAPS in supporting a few different optimization levels rather than having to target every possible Intel/AMD CPU microarchitecture family as is currently done for code optimization/tuning. 

• RStudio is a refreshingly intuitive IDE | Christian Kastner

  I currently need to dabble with R for a smallish thing. I have previously dabbled with R only once, for an afternoon, and that was about a decade ago, so I had no prior experience to speak of regarding the language and its surrounding ecosystem.

  Somebody recommended that I try out RStudio, a popular IDE for R. I was happy to see that an open-source community edition exists, in the form of a .deb package no less, so I installed it and gave it a try.

  [...]

  This, and many other features that pop up here and there, like the live-rendering of LaTeX equations, contributed to what has to be one of the most positive experiences with an IDE that I've had so far.

• Engaging in an "Open First" remote internship at Collabora

  The COVID-19 pandemic has forced companies to move very quickly to a partial or even full home office regime. In this context, Collabora is at a very privileged position, since remote work has always been at the core of our day to day operations. Over 80% of our people work remotely from all over the world even when our offices are open.

  As the pandemic continues to wreak havoc across the world, many students' scholarships have been impacted one way or the other. As the world economy is being shaken, many of them are facing challenges finding internships and entering into the professional life.

  At Collabora, and despite of COVID-19, we want remote internships to have the power to get students, regardless of where they live, into a dream job. Or, at the very least, provide them with informative venues for exploring and confirming (or not) professional interests. Our internships also connect students with a larger ecosystem of FLOSS projects and vendors, serving as a good way to improve their visibility and networking.

• Nibble Stew: Cargo-style dependency management for C, C++ and other languages with Meson

  My previous blog post about modern C++ got a surprising amount of feedback. Some people even reimplemented the program in other languages, including one in Go, two different ones in Rust and even this slightly brain bending C++ reimplementation as a declarative style pipeline. It also got talked about on Reddit and Hacker news. Two major comments that kept popping up were the following.

  [...]

  One notable downside of this approach is that WrapDB does not have all that many packages yet. However I have been told that given the next Meson release (in a few weeks) and some upstream patches, it is possible to build the entire GTK widget toolkit as a subproject, even on Windows. 

  If anyone wants to contribute to the project, contributions are most welcome. You can for example convert existing projects and submit them to wrapdb or become a reviewer. The Meson web site has the relevant documentation. 

• Percepio Releases Tracealyzer Visual Trace Diagnostics Solution Version 4.4 with Support for Embedded Linux

  -Percepio, the leader in visual trace diagnostics for embedded and IoT software systems, today announced the immediate availability of Tracealyzer version 4.4 with support for embedded Linux. Tracealyzer gives developers a high level of insight during software debugging and verification at the system level by enabling visual exploratory analysis from the top down. This makes it easy to spot issues during full system testing and drill down into the details to find the cause.

• Facebook Is Looking To Upstream Their BOLT Binary Performance Optimizer Into LLVM - Phoronix

  Facebook's BOLT is a multi-year project focused on speeding up the performance of binaries. This open-source project initially focused on being able to better optimize Linux x86_64/ARM64 ELF binaries as a post-link optimizer. BOLT has been seeing much success with even Google using it now for better performance and now there is work to upstream it as part of the LLVM project. 

  Facebook engineers are hoping to see BOLT added to LLVM as a binary optimization framework. Google has reported with their own workloads that BOLT can normally provide 2~6% uplift on top of the abilities of compiler optimizations. Other organizations and academia also have been using BOLT in varying capacities. 

  

• 5 steps to learn any programming language | Opensource.com

  Some people love learning new programming languages. Other people can't imagine having to learn even one. In this article, I'm going to show you how to think like a coder so that you can confidently learn any programming language you want.

  [...]

  With just a little programming experience, which you can gain from any one of several introductory articles here on Opensource.com, you can go on to learn any programming language in just a few days (sometimes less). Now, this isn't magic, and you do have to put some effort into it. And admittedly, it takes a lot longer than just a few days to learn every library available to a language or to learn the nuances of packaging your code for delivery. But getting started is easier than you might think, and the rest comes naturally with practice.

  When experienced programmers sit down to learn a new language, they're looking for five things. Once you know those five things, you're ready to start coding.

• RcppZiggurat 0.1.6

  The RcppZiggurat package updates the code for the Ziggurat generator by Marsaglia and other which provides very fast draws from a Normal distribution. The package provides a simple C++ wrapper class for the generator improving on the very basic macros, and permits comparison among several existing Ziggurat implementations. This can be seen in the figure where Ziggurat from this package dominates accessing the implementations from the GSL, QuantLib and Gretl—all of which are still way faster than the default Normal generator in R (which is of course of higher code complexity).

• The four things you must be able to do in nano

  Text editing is essential to Linux users. Historically, the Vim text editor has been the default tool for managing file contents. Today, many systems and many sysadmins prefer to use the nano text editor.

  [...]

  In some ways, using nano is more like using the keyboard shortcuts in Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer. Nano is significantly more powerful than I am showing here, so be sure to check the documentation for more tricks. If you're a Vim user and you find yourself on a distribution that only has nano available, at least you'll know these simple functions.

  I guess I'm old school (or just old), but I prefer Vim, even for very short and simple edits. I acknowledge that nano is easier, but I am in the habit of using Vim. In fact, I have it installed on my Mac and Windows computers, too.

  

• Sysadmin careers: the correlation between mentors and success | Enable Sysadmin

  Typically, the more information you have about a situation, the more successful you will be in navigating it. The same can be said about the level of experience you have in dealing with specific problems. This is what inspired me to explore the experience of other industry professionals. I had several great mentors over the years, and I always felt that the time spent learning from them paid off exponentially. It's not always some intellectual atom bomb that reshapes your skillset. Many times, the most powerful lessons are in the wisdom gained over time. Having the skill to act is great, but it helps to know when and how to act as well.

  We asked a group of our core contributors about their mentors and the impact of these experiences on their careers. Some had specific people in mind; however, an equal number stated that a close-knit team can be just as valuable as a single guiding force.

 

• Steinar H. Gunderson: plocate in testing

  plocate hit testing today, so it's officially on its way to bullseye I'd love to add a backport to stable, but bpo policy says only to backport packages with a “notable userbase”, and I guess 19 installations in popcon isn't that It's also hit Arch Linux, obviously Ubuntu universe, and seemingly also other distributions like Manjaro. No Fedora yet, but hopefully, some Fedora maintainer will pick it up.

• A PHP syntax for discardable assignments [LWN.net]

  Recently, John Bafford revived a years-long conversation on expanding the syntax of the PHP foreach statement to include iterating solely over keys. Bafford, who wrote a patch and request for comments (RFC) on the matter back in 2016, hopes to update his work and convince the community to adopt the abbreviated syntax in PHP 8.1. The community took Bafford's general idea and expanded it into other areas of the language.

• Kata Containers rewritten in Rust gets a major speed boost

  Kata provides container isolation and security without the overhead of running them in a VM. Usually, containers are run in VMs for security, but that removes some of the advantages of using containers with their small resources footprint. Kata containers, however, can run on bare metal. 

  The purpose of runV was to make VMs run like containers. In Kata, this approach is combined with Intel's Clear Containers, which uses Intel built-in chip Virtual Technology (VT), to launch containers in lightweight virtual machines (VMs). With Kata, those containers are launched in runV.

  Despite the Intel connection, Kata Containers are hardware agnostic. Kata Containers are also built to be compatible with the Open Container Initiative (OCI) specification, and Kubernetes' container runtime interface (CRI).

• Forlinx OK1028A-C networking SBC supports LVDS displays, 4G/5G modules

  Forlinx released two networking SBC’s with 10Gbps Ethernet powered by NXP LS1043A and LS1046A processor nearly exactly one year ago. Like many other networking SBCs they do not come with video output so configuration is done via a computer or laptop either through a UART interface or a web interface. But in some cases, such boards may be integrated into machines that require a display for human-machine interaction. That’s why Forlinx has now released a new networking board – OK1028A-C – powered by NXP QorIQ Layerscape LS1028A dual-core Cortex-A72 processor that natively supports video output up to 4K UHD resolution via an eDP/DisplayPort interface which the company used to provide an LVDS header.

• Flex Logix InferX X1 AI Inference Accelerator Takes on NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX

  When it comes to AI inference accelerators, NVIDIA has captured the market as drones, intelligent high-resolution sensors, network video recorders, portable medical devices, and other industrial IoT systems use NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX. This might change as Flex Logix’s InferX X1 AI inference accelerator has been shown to outperform Jetson Xavier NX as well as Tesla T4. During the Linley Fall Conference 2020, Flex Logix showcased InferX X1 AI Inference Accelerator, its performance, and how it outperformed other edge inference chips. It is the most powerful edge inference coprocessor with high throughput, low latency, high accuracy, large model megapixels images, and small die for embedded computing devices at the edge.