• Jonathan Carter: Running for DPL

  I am running for Debian Project Leader, my official platform is published on the Debian website (currently looks a bit weird, but a fix is pending publication), with a more readable version available on my website as well as a plain-text version.

  Shortly after I finished writing the first version of my platform page, I discovered an old talk from Ian Murdock at Microsoft Research where he said something that resonated well with me, and I think also my platform.

• Stephen Michael Kellat: Middle of March Meandering

  Eventually I intend to try Ubuntu Server installations to the three idle Raspberry Pi 3B+ boards. The ultimate goal there is for being able to offload video transcoding.

• Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 570

• Two-thirds of Android antivirus apps are worthless or worse

  Yes, you may as well change your wallpaper to say "no viruses allowed:" it'd be just as effective as the 170 antivirus products that detected fewer than 30 per cent of the 2000 malicious apps installed for testing purposes.

• Why foldable smartphones are more fad than forever devices

  I've been a part of many industries and, without fail, each industry eventually resorts to gimmicks to sell a product. In some instances, the gimmick convinces consumers that the new product and is the must-have of the industry.

  [...]

  The smartphone industry is no stranger to such snake-oil salesmanship. We've seen pop-up selfie cameras, Samsung Air View, built-in projectors, the HTC kickstand, the Amazon Fire Phone, the Ubuntu Phone, LG Modules, smart scroll, Alcatel disco lights, Blackberry Storm, Samsung edge display, KnockOn Password, HTC U11, and Pixel squeezable sides.

  The point being, the smartphone industry is keen on bringing to light a plethora of gimmicks to try and woo users away from their current devices.

• foss-north 2019: Training Day

  The 2019 incarnation of foss-north is less than a month away. This year we’re extending the conference in two directions: a training day and a community day. This time, I wanted to write about the training day.

  The training day, April 10, is an additional day for those who want to extend
  the conference with a day of dedicated training. I’m very happy to have two experienced and well known trainers on side: Michael Kerrisk and Chris Simmonds. Both has years of training experience.

  Michael will teach about the details in dynamic linking. The topic may seem trivial, but when you start scratching the surface, there are a lot of details to discover such as how to handle version compatibility, how symbol resolution really works, and so on. You can read more about the Building and Using Shared Libraries on Linux training here.

• Your guide to LibrePlanet 2019, March 23-24!

  Are you planning on joining us for LibrePlanet 2019, coming up this weekend, March 23-24, at the Stata Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)? If you haven't registered yet, there's still time -- registration is open through Tuesday, March 19 at 10:00 EDT, and we also welcome walk-ins (space permitting)! Remember, students and Free Software Foundation (FSF) associate members get in gratis.

  We also hope you'll join us for the Friday night open house at the FSF office, here in Boston -- you can pick up your badge early to skip the line Saturday morning (more details below).

• Will this new openness to open source heed past lessons?

   

  We set out to demonstrate how open source could work in the NHS for both vendors and users, and to dispel many of the myths that existed about open source. We created the NHS Open Source Foundation (now The Apperta Foundation), a not-for-profit designed to act as a custodian for quality assured NHS open source software, adapting the model developed by OSERA in the US for VistA.
   

  We identified a number of issues which we worked hard to address.

• France’s economic council wants a greater European role for free software

   

  The European Union should encourage the use of free software, for example by setting quotas in public procurement and financing its development, says France’s Economic, Social and Environmental Council (Conseil économique, social et environnemental, or CESE). The constitutional consultative assembly sees free software, sharing and reuse as strategic parts of the European digital culture.

• Release of Opinion Paper on Open Source and FRAND by OFA Fellow Simon Phipps

  The question if Open Source Software can be combined with a FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) regime is often at the centre of the debate. Possibly, this question though is not the deciding one, as such a legal compatibility would require that Open Source developers would collaborate under such a regime.

  OpenForum Europe is very excited to publish the Opinion Paper by OFA Fellow and President of the Open Source Initiative, Simon Phipps. In this paper Simon posits that the core issue of Open Source Software and FRAND is not a legal one, but that Open Source developers will not collaborate under a FRAND regime.

• How To Set Up a Firewall with GUFW on Linux

• How to Encrypt Replication Traffic in MariaDB Galera Cluster on Ubuntu

• How To Control Android Smartphone From Linux

• How to create a new application with Red Hat OpenShift Application Runtimes launcher

• Of debugging Ansible Tower and underlying cloud images

• Why You Need DevOps and the Cloud

• Security updates for Tuesday

• US Huawei Blackballing Efforts Stall Due To Lack Of 'Actual Facts'

  During the Trump era, the US government has dramatically ramped up claims that Chinese hardware vendor Huawei is a nefarious spy for the Chinese government, blackballing it from the U.S. telecom market. From pressuring U.S. carriers to drop plans to sell Huawei phones to the FCC's decision to ban companies from using Huawei gear if they want to receive federal subsidies, this effort hasn't been subtle.

  While Huawei should never be confused with a saint (what telecom company would be?) there's several problems with the effort. The biggest being that despite a decade of hand-wringing and one eighteen month investigation by the US government, there's still no public evidence Huawei uses its network gear to spy on Americans. That's not sitting well with countries we've asked to join along in the fun.

• Sorry, Linux. We know you want to be popular, but cyber-crooks are all about Microsoft for now

  Eight out of the ten most exploited vulnerabilities tracked by threat intelligence biz Recorded Future in 2018 targeted Microsoft products – though number two on its list was, surprise surprise, a Flash flaw.

  The most exploited vuln in the firm's hall of shame was a remote code execution flaw in Windows' VBScript engine that could pwn users who opened a booby-trapped web page with Internet Explorer.

  "Exploit kits associated with this vulnerability were noted to spread the malware Trickbot through phishing attacks," said Recorded Future in a report published today.

  The Flash vuln was none other than one exploited by North Korean state-backed hackers – first detected by South Korea's CERT, which discovered a flood of booby-trapped MS Office documents, web pages, spam messages and more.

• NVIDIA Shows Off Quake II Path-Traced Using Vulkan RTX/Ray-Tracing

  ne of the demos NVIDIA is showing off this week at their GPU Technology Conference is Quake II being path-traced using a Vulkan port of the game and adapted to handle VK_NV_ray_tracing functionality paired with the latest GeForce RTX GPUs.

  Q2VKPT is a path-traced version of Quake II started by a former NVIDIA intern and is rendered using Vulkan and does support Linux.

• Orbital: A PlayStation 4 Emulator That Is Emulating The PS4's AMD GPU Using Vulkan

  Orbital is an open-source project providing a virtualization-based PlayStation 4 emulator that is still in its early stages but what interests us is its technical details including the use of Vulkan/SPIR-V.

  Orbital leverages QEMU and other open-source components. At this stage it's not running any PS4 games but is able to boot into safe mode on PS4 5.xx kernels.

• Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead, a free and open source turn-based survival game had a huge update

  It occurred to me today, that no one here at GOL seems to have ever written about the free and open source turn-based survival game Cataclysm - Dark Days Ahead.

  Okay, so what is it? A classic roguelike with a survival theme, set in a post-apocalyptic procedurally generated world.

• System Shock 3 may see Linux support, OtherSide still working on Underworld Ascendant for Linux

  OtherSide Entertainment have teased out a new short video of System Shock 3 and it may see Linux support.

  Not to be confused with the crowdfunded System Shock reboot that Nightdive Studios are currently working on. System Shock 3 is being made with some of the original team behind the first two games as well like Warren Spector, so it should remain faithful to the series while being a rather nice upgrade in visuals.

• Linux 5.0.3

  I'm announcing the release of the 5.0.3 kernel.

  All users of the 5.0 kernel series must upgrade.

  The updated 5.0.y git tree can be found at:
  git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.0.y
  and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
  http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st...

• Linux 4.20.17

• Linux 4.19.30

• Linux 4.14.107

• Linux 4.9.164

Firefox now prevents websites from automatically playing sound. You can add individual sites to an exceptions list or turn blocking off.

Also: Firefox 66 Arrives - Blocks Auto-Playing Sounds, Hides Title Bar By Default For Linux

• Today’s Firefox Aims to Reduce Your Online Annoyances

  Almost a hundred years ago, John Maynard Keyes suggested that the industrial revolution would effectively end work for humans within a couple of generations, and our biggest challenge would be figuring what to do with that time. That definitely hasn’t happened, and we always seem to have lots to do, much of it online. When you’re on the web, you’re trying to get stuff done, and therefore online annoyances are just annoyances. Whether it’s autoplaying videos, page jumps or finding a topic within all your multiple tabs, Firefox can help. Today’s Firefox release minimizes those online inconveniences, and puts you back in control.

• This Week In Servo 127

  In the past week, we merged 50 PRs in the Servo organization’s repositories.

• Passwordless Web Authentication Support via Windows Hello

  Firefox 66, being released this week, supports using the Windows Hello feature for Web Authentication on Windows 10, enabling a passwordless experience on the web that is hassle-free and more secure. Firefox has supported Web Authentication for all desktop platforms since version 60, but Windows 10 marks our first platform to support the new FIDO2 “passwordless” capabilities for Web Authentication.

One interesting thing about the hobbyist 3D printing market is that it was founded on free software and open hardware ideals starting with the RepRap project. The idea behind that project was to design a 3D printer from off-the-shelf parts that could print as many of its own parts as possible (especially more complex, custom parts like gears). Because of this, the first generation of 3D printers were all homemade using Arduinos, stepper motors, 3D-printed gears and hardware you could find in the local hardware store.

As the movement grew, a few individuals started small businesses selling 3D printer kits that collected all the hardware plus the 3D printed parts and electronics for you to assemble at home. Later, these kits turned into fully assembled and supported printers, and after the successful Printrbot kickstarter campaign, the race was on to create cheaper and more user-friendly printers with each iteration. Sites like Thingiverse and YouMagine allowed people to create and share their designs, so even if you didn't have any design skills yourself, you could download and print everyone else's. These sites even provided the hardware diagrams for some of the more popular 3D printers. The Free Software ethos was everywhere you looked.

• 5 best Android Q beta features to get excited about

• How to Safely Opt Your Device Out of the Android Q Beta Program

• 6 New Features to Enjoy on Nokia 3.1 after Android 9 Pie Update

• Android 9 Pie begins rolling out to the Nokia 5.1

• Make-Believe: Too Late For Google To Make Android A Privacy-Oriented OS

A long time ago I wrote a blog post about how to maintain a Flatpak repository.

It is still a nice, mostly up to date, description of how Flatpak repositories work. However, it doesn’t really have a great answer to the issue called syncing updates in the post. In other words, it really is more about how to maintain a repository on one machine.

In practice, at least on a larger scale (like e.g. Flathub) you don’t want to do all the work on a single machine like this. Instead you have an entire build-system where the repository is the last piece.

• VMware demos hypervisor running on a network card

  VMware has demonstrated Linux running on a network card.

  Speaking at the VMware user group convention in Sydney today, Chris Wolf, chief technology officer, global field and industry demonstrated a VMware’s ESXi hypervisor and a Ubuntu guest VM running on a Mellanox SmartNIC.

• Aurora Will Be The First Exascale Supercomputer Of America

  The exascale supercomputer has the ability to make use of high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) in various areas such as cancer research, climate modeling, and veterans’ health treatments, and more. Aurora will be specially designed to analyze the large amount of data generated by DOE-owned equipment like particle accelerators, telescopes, and other detectors.

• Intel Xe Graphics Being Part Of The First US Exascale Supercomputer Is Great For Linux

  Announced on Monday was that the US Department of Energy in cooperation with Argonne National Laboratory will see the "Aurora" supercomputer as the first US Exascale SC coming online in 2021 and featuring Intel's highly anticipated Xe Graphics.

  The Intel Xe Graphics are expected to put Aurora over the edge in being the first exascale super computer at least within the United States. Aurora will also feature Optane persistent DIMMs and next-generation Xeon processors. Intel is partnered with Cray on this design for the half a billion USD super computer.

• Career advice for engineers: Step away from the keyboard

  Over the course of my career, I've had two to three major mindset shifts in how I approach my work. At first, I just focused on engineering—trying to know the most about whatever language or libraries I was using, being very "trivia" focused, and ultimately ignoring the concerns of others in an effort to just write good code. This wasn't to say I didn't try to get along with my coworkers or help them out, but my efforts to improve were all about me; after all, the team and the company do better as I become better. And to be fair, this approach isn't totally unfounded in its merits. As engineers, we must constantly evolve, learn more, and improve because the industry is getting harder with bigger problems that need more technical solutions every day. This approach worked well enough for me for the first half of my career, where I was junior enough to have such selfish (albeit well-meaning) motivations.

  Then I took a job where I worked with more engineers in one office than I had worked with in my entire career to date. This job nearly broke me. I went from being one of the better people in my role to barely scraping by… for nearly two years. I struggled to succeed, I constantly felt outclassed by the people around me, and many days I couldn't figure out why they even hired me (a feeling, it turns out, that some of my co-workers shared). But there was no big epiphany, no single defining moment that turned it around. Just a series of hard, abject failures from which I had two choices—give up or learn and grow. I did my best to do the latter. As I moved back to a smaller startup, I saw firsthand just how important it is to cement a culture, from the ground up, based around these lessons.

  My final mindset shift happened when I transitioned into management after the startup was acquired by a larger company. I didn't choose to be a manager; management chose me, in that I was offered the position. I was also told that, while everyone really believed in me, the ultimate reason they chose me was that they felt it would be less tumultuous to promote someone from within than hiring someone from outside. We had a very aggressive timeframe after the acquisition, and my new company didn't want to risk things by bringing in an outside leader who didn't have the team's trust. I found that this phase reinforced everything I had learned before about being effective in an engineering role—and turned up the dial on how hard I need to apply these lessons every minute of every day.

• Why you should take the jobs no one else wants

  So often, we describe open organizations as places overflowing with highly engaged people—places where leaders emerge spontaneously to tackle urgent problems, where people opt-in to challenging initiatives they know they can influence and drive, where teams act with initiative and few top-down mandates.

  And it's all true. I see it regularly at Red Hat.

• OpenShift 4 ISV Operators

  In Red Hat OpenShift 4, the Operator Hub provides access to community and certified operators that facilitate the deployment and configuration of potentially complex applications. In this video, we take a look at creating and scaling a Couchbase cluster using the operator shipped with OpenShift 4.

• Contribution opportunity! Quick docs!

  Quick docs are meant to be short articles on the official Fedora documentation site that cover commonly used workflows/tools.

  Unlike wiki pages which are generally unreviewed, information on quick-docs follows the PR (peer-review + pull request) process. So the new information that is added there is more trustworthy and should be too, given that quick docs is listed on the official Fedora documentation website.

• We did it again – Our HA solution is SAP Certified

  One of the main differences is that the new setup is now also supported for clusters with more than two nodes (n>2). We recommend to use an odd number of nodes to guarantee that always a majority of the cluster could proceed after cluster separations.

I am happy to announce that Qt 5.13.0 Beta1 is released today. As earlier we release updates as Beta N regularly until we are ready for RC. Current estimation for RC is 7th May 2019, see the schedule from 5.13 wiki.

Beta1 (and later releases) can be installed by using online installer as usual. Commercial users can found online installer from their Qt Account and Opensource users from download.qt.io. We are not planning to blog next Beta releases or RC so please follow mailing lists to get the notification when new ones are available. And of course you can use maintenance tool’s update option to check if there is update already available.

Also: Qt 5.13 Beta Released

• Kodi Foundation Joins The Linux Foundation to Help Grow the Open Source Movement

  The Kodi Foundation was proud to announce today that it finally decided to join The Linux Foundation in their attempt to enrich the Open Source software ecosystem.

  As of today, The Kodi Foundation, the makers of the free, open-source, and cross-platform media center software known as Kodi (formerly XBMC), is now an Associate Member of The Linux Foundation in attempt to contribute their code to the Open Source software community and help similar projects evolve.

  "It seemed natural for us to join, given the fact that we are strong believers in the benefits of open-source software. We strongly believe that open-source is the best way to achieve awesome things. That was and still is what moves Kodi forward," stated The Kodi Foundation in a press release.

• The Kodi Foundation joined the Linux Foundation

  The Kodi Foundation is very proud to announce that it has joined the Linux Foundation as an Associate Member. It seemed natural for us to join, given the fact that we are strong believers in the benefits of open-source software.

  We strongly believe that open-source is the best way to achieve awesome things. That was and still is what moves Kodi forward. Ever since XBMP, where this project started, a small group of like-minded individuals from different backgrounds have worked together to achieve a goal, taking advantage of each other's merits and talents.

• Community Demos at ONS to Highlight LFN Project Harmonization and More

  A little more than one year since LF Networking (LFN) came together, the project continues to demonstrate strategic growth, with Telstra coming on in November, and the umbrella project representing ~70% of the world’s mobile subscribers. Working side by side with service providers in the technical projects has been critical to ensure that work coming out of LFN is relevant and useful for meeting their requirements. A small sample of these integrations and innovations will be on display once again in the LF Networking Booth at the Open Networking Summit Event, April 3-5 in San Jose, CA.

While NetBSD has more than a half-dozen tier-one supported architectures and dozens more of tier two ports, DragonFlyBSD has been largely centered on x86_64 since their dropping of 32-bit x86 a while ago. Arm has largely remained off their radar but there seems to be some growing interest around seeing DragonFlyBSD on AArch64.

• Two Point Hospital: Pebberley Island is out, giving you more weird illnesses to conquer

  Two Point Studios and SEGA have put out the first expansion for Two Point Hospital with Pebberley Island.

• Convoy, the game that mixes Mad Max and FTL has more free content & gamepad support

  Convoy seems to be seeing some good post-release support from developer Convoy Games, with a free content update now available.

  For those who've never played it or even heard of it, our contributor Samsai did take a good look at it some time ago which you can see here. It is directly inspired by both Mad Max and FTL and if you liked FTL you will probably enjoy this too.

• Gloomhaven, the dungeon-crawling adaptation of the board game should see Linux support at release

  Last year, we wrote a small bit on how the developer of Gloomhaven was keeping an eye on all the requests for Linux support. It seems they've taken notice.

• GOG have another weekly sale live, some interesting Linux games going cheaper

  For those who love their DRM-free gaming, GOG have just recently put up their latest weekly sale with quite a few Linux games available.

• The Culling, one of the first Battle Royale games on Linux is shutting down

  It did look pretty good graphically, the crafting system was interesting and some of the fights were intense but it didn't offer enough. The Linux version was also always left in a very rough state too, which didn't help.

  Originally a paid game, Xaviant later dropped it in favour of developing The Culling 2 which was a pretty bad decision considering how players had already felt burned by the original with its many issues and lack of a player-base.

  After the sequel flopped, Xaviant returned to the original and made it free to play with very few actual changes. You can't just take a paid game that's not already somewhat popular, make it free to play with cosmetics and expect it to suddenly flourish. It's needs to have something to really pull people in.

• Dev Diary: So Long, Farewell!

  The game’s servers have run continuously (with the stray outage here and there) for three years, but the time has come for us to announce that we will be taking The Culling offline on May 15th, 2019.

SiFive has announced an upgraded Freedom Everywhere SoC as well as the HiFive1 Revision B developer board using this FE310-G002 SoC.

The HiFive1 Revision B isn't to be confused with their HiFive Unleashed more that retails for $999 USD and is more akin to the traditional Arm developer boards we see that offer video output and other features. The HiFive1 is a mini development board without video output and can be connected to Arduino-compatible accessories and designed for real-time embedded use-cases. But this small embedded development board is available for $49 USD.

• Managing Linux in the Cloud

  SUSE Manager extends the ideals of DevOps to the cloud environment, unlocking a world of rapid deployment and automation.

• Where next for SUSE?

  Where next for SUSE? The company mentioned its independence no less than 12 times in a recent notice to the press. Flush with investor money, can the business finally steer its own ship to success?

• SUSECON 2019: These Industry Kingpins Have Something to Say

  I really learned a lot at this event. The access to people who know their stuff is something I did not expect. They are really helpful!

  I loved it. It was interesting and fun. Very good to meet other people and exchange experiences.

Medical imaging is an essential, non-invasive, routine activity performed by radiographers and radiologic technologists. It’s a discipline of the health profession which involves using technology to capture images of the human body.

There are a number of reasons why capturing these images are important to our well-being. First, the images help in the identification and examination of diseases, and physical injuries such as broken bones and ruptured blood vessels, as well as assisting in diagnosing suitable treatments. Medical imaging is also crucial in an educational role.

Imaging capturing devices for medical purposes use the DICOM image format. DICOM is an acronym for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. It’s the standard open image format used to handle, store, print and transmit information in medical imaging. This article focuses on software that lets you view images generated from DICOM devices.

• 20 Most Useful Tools for Programmers and Developers

  Programming can be a very hectic task, especially if you are handling a complex project. Sometimes even small projects can give you a hard time. Have you ever found yourself at the verge of giving up in the middle of a project?

  There are different programming tools that can simplify the coding process and improve your levels of productivity. Here are the 20 most helpful tools for programmers.

• 10 Programming Languages That Are In Demand Among Top Hiring Companies

  Coding continues to be one of the most in-demand skills in the job market. Many professionals are considering getting into the field. Possessing the required skills in coding can open doors to some of the highest-paying jobs. One of the main questions that professionals have before getting started is about finding out which programming language to choose and what steps to take to get into coding. The best way to get started is by first understanding which languages are presently in demand, to make this easy online learning platform Simplilearn says that it has come up with a list of ten programming languages that developers and coding enthusiasts should look out for in 2019 to upskill themselves for a bigger paycheck and to excel at their job roles.

• Google open-sources project for sandboxing C/C++ libraries on Linux

  Google has open-sourced today a project for sandboxing C and C++ libraries running on Linux systems. The project's name is the Sandboxed API, a tool that Google has been using internally for its data centers for years.

  The Sandboxed API is now available on GitHub, together with the documentation needed to help other programmers sandbox their C and C++ libraries and protect them from malicious user input and exploits.

  For ZDNet users unfamiliar with the term, "sandboxing" refers to running an app or source code inside a "sandbox."

• What’s new in OpenMP 5.0

  A new version of the OpenMP standard, 5.0, was released in November 2018 and brings several new constructs to the users. OpenMP is an API consisting of compiler directives and library routines for high-level parallelism in C, C++, and Fortran programs. The upcoming version of GCC adds support for some parts of this newest version of the standard.

  This article highlights some of the latest features, changes, and “gotchas” to look for in the OpenMP standard.

• Radicle – A P2P Stack for Code Collaboration

  Not too long ago I wrote an article about Codeanywhere, a cross-platform cloud IDE that features code collaboration. I recently came across an experimental project that is bound to change collaboration workflow and it goes by the name of Radicle.

  Radicle is a free and open-source P2P stack for code collaboration designed to be offline first, cryptographically secure, and programmable. It is written in a similarly-named programming language which is a deterministic Lisp derivative designed for creating P2P software.

  Radicle aims to transform the code collaboration experience by giving programmers a platform that encourages experimentation as they shape their workflow around specific contexts or projects.

• Plotting the average directional movement index rating line with python

• Get only the latest live match from NBA with python

• Django Authentication — Login, Logout and Password Change/Reset

• Linux C Programming Tutorial Part 13 - Bitwise Operators (Basics)