• How to Create Bootable Ubuntu USB flash Drive from Terminal

• Using less to view text files at the Linux command line

• Running Jenkins builds in containers

• Full text searching Linux man pages with Elasticsearch

• Important Docker commands for Beginners

• How To Resize Active/Primary root Partition In Linux Using GParted Utility

FossMint is particular about FOSS and related projects or partnerships. Sadly, though, not all the applications that are vital to certain needs fall under that category. Maybe someday they will but until then, potential users deserve the right to know about all their alternatives.

All the listed software are free to use with similar features to the ones in Microsoft’s Office Suite and even documents that are compatible with the same.

Some are desktop software while others are browser-based so you have the option to choose which one better suits your setup.

A media server is simply a specialized file server or computer system for storing media (digital videos/movies, audio/music, and images) which can be accessed over a network.

In order to setup a media server, you need computer hardware (or perhaps a cloud server) as well as a software that enables you to organize your media files, and makes it easier to stream and/or share them with friends and family.

In this article, we will share with you a list of 10 best media server software for Linux systems. By the time you complete this article, you will be able to choose the most appropriate software to setup your home/office/cloud media server powered by a Linux system.

Also: 5 Reasons Kodi Users Should Just Switch To Plex Already

• Google explains new Private DNS setting in Android P

• Google enables Android Auto wireless for Pixel, Nexus devices

• Android Auto finally supports wireless, as long as you've got the right phone

• Must read: top 10 Android stories - Android Authority

• Huawei P20, Android security, Chromebooks, Huami Stratos, and Sony Xperia (MobileTechRoundup #429)

• From the Editor's Desk: Security, signal and noise

• Study finds over 3300 Android apps improperly tracking kids

• Android apps prove a goldmine for dodgy password practices

New versions of Ubuntu like 17.10, 18.04 etc don’t include the option to create a new text document in right-click context menu anymore. Here is how to bring that useful option back.

The FSF was founded in 1985, Perl in 1987 (happy 30th birthday, Perl!), and Linux in 1991. The term open source and the Open Source Initiative both came into being in 1998 (and turn 20 years old in 2018). Since then, free and open source software has grown to become the default choice for software development, enabling incredible innovation.

We, the greater open source community, have come of age. Millions of open source projects exist today, and each year the GitHub Octoverse reports millions of new public repositories. We rely on these projects every day, and many of us could not operate our services or our businesses without them.

So what happens when the leaders of these projects move on? How can we help ease those transitions while ensuring that the projects thrive? By teaching and encouraging succession planning.

Also:

• Introducing #postmarketOS-lowlevel

  As a community project, and one that encourages contributors to work on what they like, we have attracted people with a broad range of interests and skill levels. Recently a small hacking group #postmarketOS-lowlevel has emerged, and its masterminds @McBitter and @unrznbl are eager to introduce you to the madness that awaits when digging deeper and deeper in the embedded hardware and software stack.

  But before we get started, please keep in mind that these are moon shots. So while there is some little progress, it's mostly about letting fellow hackers know what we've tried and what we're up to, in the hopes of attracting more interested talent to our cause. After all, our philosophy is to keep the community informed and engaged during the development phase!

  For those new to postmarketOS, we are a group of developers, hackers, and hobbyists who have come together with a common goal of giving a ten year life cycle to mobile phones. This is accomplished by using a simple and sustainable architecture borrowed from typical Linux distributions, instead of using Android's build system. The project is at an early stage and isn't useful for most people at this point. Check out the newly-updated front page for more information, the previous blog post for recent achievements, and the closed pull requests to be informed about what's going on up to the current minute.

• What Are Some Android P Name Predictions? We Found 17 Desserts

• Fuchsia Friday: The dream team behind Google’s new OS

  On the Fuchsia team there are approximately 160 Google employees who have contributed to one of the four layers of Fuchsia. This is not counting managers and team leads who haven’t directly contributed code. Comparing it to other OS teams, this is not a significant number, and is a sign of the stage of development Google likely considers Fuchsia to be in.

What I tended to find with Neptune was if I stuck with the default settings and used applications in the normal or most straight forward fashion, then things went smoothly. But when I stepped off the straight and narrow path, things tended to unravel. Trying Enlightenment or Wayland sessions, for example, did not work well, but things went smoothly while using Plasma's X session. Checking for updates as soon as I logged in resulted in no packages being found, but if I waited for things to settle in the background and gave the operating system a few minutes, I'd eventually be told updates were available and could install them with a few clicks.

There are a few rough edges here and there, but on the whole Neptune worked well. The stable Debian base combined with the latest version of Plasma, Chromium and LibreOffice were a good mixture. It gives us a solid base with lots of new features and I think that's a good combination, especially for me. There are some edge cases where I ran into minor problems and I didn't like that the settings panel didn't warn me before discarding changes, but otherwise I had a good week with Neptune. I think it's a good fit for relative newcomers to Linux and people looking for a balance between reliability and fresh desktop software.

• Kernel prepatch 4.17-rc1

  Linus has released 4.17-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release.

• Linux 4.17-rc1

• Linux 4.17-rc1

  So two weeks have passed, and the merge window was pretty normal and
  is now closed.

  This does not seem to be shaping up to be a particularly big release,
  and there seems to be nothing particularly special about it. The most
  special thing that happened is purely numerology: we've passed the six
  million git objects mark, and that is reason enough to call the next
  kernel 5.0. Except I probably won't, because I don't want to be too
  predictable. The version numbers are meaningless, which should mean
  that they don't even follow silly numerological rules - even if v3.0
  and v4.0 happened to be at the 2M and 4M mark respectively.

  But v5.0 will happen some day. And it should be meaningless. You have
  been warned.

  Anyway, we do have a *few* other things that happened, like Arnd
  getting rid of a number of architectures that seem to simply not
  matter any more. If it turns out that somebody wants to resurrect any
  of them, the code is all there in the git history, but you'll have to
  do the work and show that you'll maintain it and have a few users.

  And just to not make it *all* about removing old architectures,
  there's a new one in there too.

  The architectures that are gone are blackfin, cris, frv, m32r, metag,
  mn10300, score, and tile. And the new architecture is the nds32
  (Andes Technology 32-0bit RISC architecture).

  We actually have a fair amount of other removal and cleanups too. I
  was somewhat pleasantly surprised by the number of pull requests that
  actually ended up removing a lot of lines. Some of it was staging
  drivers that finally gave up the ghost (like irda), but we also got
  rid of some copyright language boiler-plate in favor of just the spdx
  lines. And some pre-shipped lexer/parser files are no more, we're
  better off just generating them.

  End result: we actually removed more lines than we added:

  13538 files changed, 627723 insertions(+), 818855 deletions(-)

  which is probably a first. Ever. In the history of the universe. Or at
  least kernel releases.

  I'd call it momentous, but I think the arch removal was most of it,
  and I'm sure people will quickly rectify that momentary glitch of
  actually shrinking the kernel source code.

  Go out and test,

  Linus

• Linux 4.17-rc1 Kernel Released: A Ton Of New Functionality While Shedding Old Code

  Just like clockwork the Linux 4.17-rc1 kernel was released tonight following the two week long merge window.

  See the Linux 4.17 features article published this morning to learn all about what's new in this kernel release. There is a ton of work from prominent AMD and Intel graphics driver updates to new hardware support and much more. As covered just a short time ago, Linux 4.17 power measurements are looking surprisingly good for lowering the power use while idling and also the power efficiency under load.

  More Linux 4.17 kernel benchmarks are on the way.

• Linux 4.17 Offers Some Promising Power-Savings Improvements

  Of the many improvements to be found in the in-development Linux 4.17 kernel -- nicely summarized in our Linux 4.17 feature overview -- one of the features I've been anxious the most to begin benchmarking has been the reported power management improvements. Here are my initial power/performance tests of Linux 4.17 that for some systems is seeing a measurable drop in power usage, even in some cases under load while without sacrificing the performance.

• The Many Great Features & Changes Coming For The Linux 4.17 Kernel

  Linus Torvalds is expected by the end of the day to release Linux 4.17-rc1, thereby marking the end of the two-week merge window that saw a lot of changes and new features land for Linux 4.17. Here is our original feature overview of the changes to be found in this next major release of the Linux kernel, which should premiere as stable by the middle of June.

  While many of you have likely not even upgraded yet to the feature-packed Linux 4.16, there is a lot more coming to look forward to with the Linux 4.17 kernel this summer. There are many Intel/AMD graphics driver improvements, support for obsolete CPU architectures being dropped, some new CPU support added including initial bits for the NVIDIA Xavier SoC, a potentially very big improvement for dropping Linux idle power usage, various file-system improvements, new hardware support, and even improvements for the Macintosh PowerBook 100 series from more than 20 years ago.

• C++ Russia 2018 and template meta-programming in modern C++

• Add ‘New Document’ Option in Right Click Context Menu in Ubuntu 18.04 [Quick Tip]

• Back to Basics Part 6 -- Using the ip command in GNU/Linux for beginners

• x86 ISA Extensions part II: SSE

• #18: Adding Intel MKL easily via a simple script

• MirBSD's Korn Shell on Plan9 Jehanne

• What is Serverless? Understanding AWS Lambda and other similar FaaS infrastructure.

Today we are very happy to announce the release of Black Lab Enterprise Linux Mate released. Our Mate desktop is based on Ubuntu MATE 16.04.3 with a lot of other enhancements and fixes.. Black Lab Mate is available for download today and you can get it from our ibiblio download servers.

• Into The Unknown - My Departure from RedHat

  In May 2006, a young starry eyed intern walked into the large corporate lobby of RedHat's Centential Campus in Raleigh, NC, beginning what would be a 12 years journey full of ups and downs, break-throughs and setbacks, and many many memories. Flash forward to April 2018, when the "intern-turned-hardend-software-enginner" filed his resignation and ended his tenure at RedHat to venture into the risky but exciting world of self-employment / entrepreneurship... Incase you were wondering that former-intern / Software Engineer is myself, and after nearly 12 years at RedHat, I finished my last day of employment on Friday April 13th, 2018.

  Overall RedHat has been a great experience, I was able to work on many ground-breaking products and technologies, with many very talented individuals from across the spectrum and globe, in a manner that facilitated maximum professional and personal growth. It wasn't all sunshine and lolipops though, there were many setbacks, including many cancelled projects and dead-ends. That being said, I felt I was always able to speak my mind without fear of reprocussion, and always strived to work on those items that mattered the most and had the furthest reaching impact.

• Wedbush Securities Cut Its Abbvie (ABBV) Holding; Red Hat (RHT)’s Sentiment Is 1.12

• Red Hat, Inc. (RHT) held by 74 SEC 13F Filers

• Fedora Infrastructure hackfest 2018

  Last week I had the pleasure of attending the 2018 Infrastructure Hackfest in Fredricksberg, VA. It was a very productive week and very nice to meet up face to face with a lot of folks I work with mostly over IRC and email.

  Travel went pretty well for me (direct flights, 4-5 hours each way) and the hotel worked out nicely. I liked that the hotel had a big table (with power!) in the corner of the lobby for us to use in evenings for more hacking. Our day workspace was a classroom at a nearby grad college. Aside from some firewall issues monday morning (They were blocking everything but 80/443) it worked pretty well too. Lots of tables we could move around, and whiteboards/projector.

• Fedora 28 Anaconda Test Day 2018-04-16

• Fedora 28 : The VS Code on Fedora.

• Egmde: keymap and wallpaper

  I recently (re)introduced a simple shell based on Mir: egmde. This shell is just the code needed to illustrate these articles and, maybe, inspire others to build on it but it is not intended to be a product.

  At the end of the last article we could run egmde as a desktop and run and use Wayland based applications.
  Those of us in Europe (or elsewhere outside the USA) will soon notice that the keyboard layout has defaulted to US, so I’ll show how to fix that. And the black background is rather depressing, so I’ll show how to implement a simple wallpaper; and, finally, how to allow the user to customize the wallpaper.

• Hacking With Mir's EGMDE Desktop To Support Different Keymaps, Custom Wallpapers

  At the end of March longtime Mir developer Alan Griffiths of Canonical announced EGMDE, the Mir Desktop Environment as a desktop example implementing Mir/MirAL APIs and supporting Wayland clients. Griffiths has now put out his latest article in guiding interested developers in working with the code.

• Want to make Ubuntu look like Windows 10?

  As a man with a keen eye for aesthetic details, I do like the concept of trying to make operating systems mimic their rivals, provided this can be done with elegance, style, quality and attention to detail. A great example would be the Macbuntu transformation pack. Including but not limited to.

  Now, Windows 10. Say what you will about it, it ain't ugly. It's actually a reasonably pretty distro, although the whole flatness deal is a bit overplayed. But since Linux can be made to look like anything, I set about testing, in Ubuntu, Kubuntu and even Linux Mint, to see whether this is something worth your time and decorative skills in the first place. Will this work? An open question. After me.

• Mesa 18.0.1 release candidate

• Mesa 18.0.1 Being Released In A Few Days With About Four Dozen Fixes

  Mesa 18.0.1 is being planned for release on Wednesday as the first stable point release / maintenance update for this quarterly installment to Mesa 3D.

  Over Mesa 18.0 that premiered at the end of March there is so far 46 changes queued with today's Mesa 18.0.1 release candidate.

• AMD's GPUOpen Has Opened The Window System Agent Library

  As part of the AMDVLK/XGL/PAL driver stack is now the WSA library.

  AMD's open-source developers maintaining their official Vulkan driver put out the source this week to WSA, the Window System Agent. WSA encapsulates windowing system details and basically serves as an abstraction layer so that e.g. AMDVLK can simply target WSA and doesn't need to deal with the underlying windowing system details itself.

• Vulkan now fully functional on ASUS X550ZE

  Vulkan smoketest running on RADV
  Some minor issues need be to addressed like occasional glitches. Otherwise the performance is stable enough for dail use.

• Testing RADV's Out-of-Order Rasterization Vulkan Performance

  With the RADV Vulkan driver recently landing improvements to its out-of-order rasterization support, I ran some performance benchmarks of this non-default feature to see if it made much of a deal for today's Vulkan Linux games.

• Mesa's Gallium HUD Gets A Simple Option

  The Gallium3D Heads-Up Display (HUD) has matured into quite a useful option for Mesa users over the past several years. There is now a Gallium HUD "simple" option.

• cleartext passwords and transparency

  So let me just jump in with Lars blog post where he talks about cleartext passwords. While he has actually surmised and shared what a security problem they are, the pity is we come to know of this only because the people in question tacitly admitted to bad practises. How many more such bad actors are there, developers putting user credentials in cleartext god only knows. There was even an April Fool’s joke in 2014 which shared why putting passwords in cleartext is bad.

• 911 operator suspended over teen’s death griped about working overtime.

  Plush called 911 again around 3:35 p.m., this time giving Smith a description of the vehicle, a gold Honda Odyssey in the parking lot at Seven Hills — information that never made it to the officers at the scene.

  “This is not a joke,” the teen told Smith. “I’m almost dead.”

  Smith tried to document the call when it came in but her computer screen had frozen, preventing her from entering information immediately, the review found.

• Defense contractors face more aggressive ransomware attacks

  The rise of ransomware attacks against defense contractors coincides with a rise in the use of ransomware in general. Attacks can spread even after the original target has been hit, hurting unintended victims.

• A Look At The Meltdown Performance Impact With DragonFlyBSD 5.2

  Besides looking at the HAMMER2 performance in DragonFlyBSD 5.2, another prominent change with this new BSD operating system release is the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations being shipped. In this article are some tests looking at the performance cost of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 for mitigating the Meltdown Intel CPU vulnerability.

  With DragonFlyBSD 5.2 there is the machdep.meltdown_mitigation sysctl for checking on the Meltdown mitigation presence and toggling it. Back in January we ran some tests of DragonFlyBSD's Meltdown mitigation using the page table isolation approach while now testing was done using the DragonFlyBSD 5.2 stable release.

• A Last Minute Linux 4.17 Pull To Help Non-PCID Systems With KPTI Meltdown Performance

  While the Linux 4.17 kernel merge window is closing today and is already carrying a lot of interesting changes as covered by our Linux 4.17 feature overview, Thomas Gleixner today sent in a final round of x86 (K)PTI updates for Meltdown mitigation with this upcoming kernel release.

  This latest round of page-table isolation updates should help out systems lacking PCID, Process Context Identifiers. The KPTI code makes use of PCID for reducing the performance overhead of this Meltdown mitigation technique. PCID has been around since the Intel Westmere days, but now the latest kernel patches will help offset the KPTI performance impact for systems lacking PCID.

• OpenCL C++ / OpenCL 2.2 Support Begins Its Journey To Mainline LLVM Clang

  A few weeks back we reported on plans for OpenCL C++ support to be mainlined in LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler front-end and that work is now happening.

  Hitting mainline Clang this week is the initial support to be able to target OpenCL C++ with the -std=c++ option when passing OpenCL C++14 code to Clang.

• MAP_STACK Stack Register Checking Committed to -current

• The bsdly.net traplist dumps are now served https only (forced redirect)'

• Run OpenBSD on your web server

• Wine-Staging 3.6 Released, Carrying ~930 Patches, Fixes For CSMT Toggling & Dead Rising

  Based off Friday's release of Wine 3.6 is now a new Wine-Staging release that is carrying about 930 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base.

• DXVK 0.42 Brings DXGI Gamma Control, HLSL Bits For Tessellation/Geometry Shaders

  DXVK 0.42 is now available as the open-source project implementing the Direct3D 11 API over Vulkan for the benefit of Wine-based gamers.

  The DXVK 0.42 release adds support for DXGI Gamma Control functions in order to handle any gamma settings in different games. There's also a change to avoid compiling the same DXBC shader multiple times, thereby conserving CPU resources.

• The Oracle vs. Google Case Is Concerning Some Wine Developers

  At the end of March the US Federal Court of Appeals made a reversal in the long-running Oracle vs. Google battle over the use of Java APIs within Android. The appeals court determined that Google's use of some Java APIs were not under fair-use, which could set a dangerous precedent for some open-source projects.

  For those not familiar with the recent ruling in the Oracle vs. Google case on appeal, there is a brief summary available on Wikipedia for those interested.

• KDE Plasma 5.13 Is Getting Further Polished Ahead Of Its June Release

  KDE Plasma 5.13 will be starting up even faster, focusing more on Wayland improvements, improved monitor hot-plugging, GTK global menu support, and a lot of polishing throughout.

• Modern KDE Applications on FreeBSD

  After the shoving is done — and it is, for the most part — it is time to fill up the void left behind by the KDE4 ports that have been shoved aside. In other words, all over the place has been shoved aside to -kde4, and now it’s time to reintroduce , but in the modern KDE Applications form. For instance, there is now a science/kalzium-kde4 (the old stuff) and a science/kalzium (the new stuff). It’s not 100% complete, but most of the applications are there.

• This week in Usability & Productivity, part 14

  Time for your weekly dose of Usability & Productivity! We’ve got some good stuff today, including some nice improvements for the Open & Save dialogs–with a lot more on that front to come soon!

  Additionally, another major bug worth highlighting has been fixed! Previously, image slideshows used for the desktop wallpaper or in a media frame widget would leak memory like crazy, eventually crashing the system. Veteran KDE developer David Edmundson traced this to a Qt bug and submitted a patch that’s been accepted! It’ll go into Qt 5.11 which hasn’t been released yet, so go bug your distros to backport the fix into their Qt 5.9.x or 5.10.x branches, as we plan to do for the upcoming Kubuntu 18.04 release. Soon KDE Plasma users will once again be able to use slideshow wallpapers without blowing up their computers!

• Plasma Vault with KDE Connect, and more

  There have been a few smaller improvements to the Plasma Vault pushed to master in the past few days, scheduled for release in Plasma 5.13.

• First GNOME 3.28 Point Release Is Now Rolling Out

  Developers have issued the first point release to GNOME 3.28, which was released last month.

  GNOME 3.28.1 brings a boat load of bug fixes for a stack of GNOME desktop components, modules and apps.

  And, because I know you’ll want ask, the answer is no: a fix for the big GNOME memory leak issue is not part of this update (though work is taking place to address it, so don’t panic).

• GNOME 3.28.1 released

  Here comes our first update to GNOME 3.28, with many bug fixes,
  improvements, documentation and translation updates.

If you plan on renting a copy of Maze Runner: The Death Cure when it hits home media later this month, you may spot something familiar that’ll have you spitting your popcorn out.

An eagle-eyed Reddit user spotted Ubuntu, complete with the Unity desktop, being used in the latest instalment of the Maze Runner film franchise.

I have not seen any of the Maze Runner films (or read the books, but I can’t imagine Ubuntu is specified in them) so I’ve zero idea about the context for Ubuntu’s appearance in ‘Maze Runner: The Death Cure‘.

But based on the well-worn Hollywood tropes we can see in this screenshot, i.e the green-tinged screen and various command line prompts, I’m guessing some sort of “hacking” is taking place.

Admittedly we’re not talking high-level, elite hack0rz here though as if you look at the output of GNOME terminal closely you’ll see the user has just run sudo apt upgrade.