• My todo list for LibreOffice 6.4

  LibreOffice 6.3 isn’t release but I have already plans for the 6.4 winter release.

• LibreWaterloo: Building the LibreOffice community in Canada

  If you’ve seen our LibreOffice contributor map, you’ll note that we have a few community members in north America. (Of course, the map doesn’t show absolutely everyone in the LibreOffice project – just people we’ve interviewed recently.) So we want to grow this community! 

• OnlyOffice, an Open Source Office Suite for Windows, MacOS & Linux, Gets Updated

  A veritable surfeit of office suites have seen updates this past month, including WPS Office, SoftMaker Office 2018 and FreeOffice. Clearly not wanting to be left out, OnlyOffice has issued a new update too.

  OnlyOffice – which is supposed to be styled ONLYOFFICE, but I find that a bit too shouty – is a free, open-source office suite for Windows, macOS and (of course) Linux.

The PineBook Pro pre-orders go live next week, July 25, meaning now would be an apt time to get a closer look at how the hotly anticipated Linux laptop is shaping up.

And what do you know, Pine64’s Lukasz Erecinski has duly obliged! He shot and uploaded a short showcase of how some of the ARM laptop’s prowess is looking.

He demos the (smooth) 1080p and 4K video playback, WebGL demo, connecting to an external monitor through the USB Type-C port, plus offers some info about screen tearing and smoothness.

• John Goerzen: Tips for Upgrading to, And Securing, Debian Buster

  Wow.  Once again, a Debian release impresses me — a guy that’s been using Debian for more than 20 years.  For the first time I can ever recall, buster not only supported suspend-to-disk out of the box on my laptop, but it did so on an encrypted volume atop LVM.  Very impressive!

  For those upgrading from previous releases, I have a few tips to enhance the experience with buster.

• Clear Linux Could Soon Be Faster Within Containers On AVX2 Systems

  While Clear Linux as part of its standard bare metal installations has long defaulted to having an AVX2-optimized GNU C Library installed by default, it turns out that it wasn't part of the default os-core bundle as used by containers. That though is changing and should yield even better out-of-the-box performance when running Clear Linux within containers.

  Intel's William Douglas sent out the proposal for adding the AVX2 version of the Glibc libraries into the os-core bundle in order to get picked up by containers and other bare/lightweight Clear configurations.

• OpenSUSE Enables LTO By Default For Tumbleweed - Smaller & Faster Binaries

  The past few months openSUSE developers have been working on enabling LTO by default for its packages while now finally with the newest release of the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed this goal has been accomplished. 

  As of today, the latest openSUSE Tumbleweed release is using Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) by default. For end-users this should mean faster -- and smaller -- binaries thanks to the additional optimizations performed at link-time. Link-time optimizations allow for different optimizations to be performed at link-time for the different bits comprising a single module/binary for the entire program. Sadly not many Linux distributions are yet LTO'ing their entire package set besides the aggressive ones like Clear Linux. 

• Investigating why my 7-year old Windows 10 laptop became unbearably slow

  The laptop had also begun to run into blue screens of death (BSoD) whenever I used the built-in camera and when I opened Spotify or Netflix in a web browser. The slowdown and crashes were actually related, but I didn’t realize this at first. The camera-induced BSoD error message blamed the camera vendor’s driver without any further details. This sounds believable enough for a 7-year old laptop so I didn’t think any more of it.

• LHS Episode #292: Digital Operation Deep Dive

  Welcome to Episode 292 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts are joined by Rob, KA2PBT, in a deep disucussion of digital mode operation on the amateur radio bands including what modes are available, the technology behind the creation and operation of those modes and even dive into current controversy behind FCC rules regarding encryption, PACTOR-4 and much more. Thank you for tuning in and we hope you have a wonderful week.

• FLOSS Weekly 538: Leo Laporte

  Randal Schwartz and Jonathan Bennett talk to Leo Laporte about FLOSS's history and the TWiT Network.

• Test and Code: 81: TDD with flit

  In the last episode, we talked about going from script to supported package.
  I worked on a project called subark and did the packaging with flit.

  Today's episode is a continuation where we add new features to a supported package and how to develop and test a flit based package.

Kubuntu is my favorite derivative of all the Ubuntu-based operating systems. I can not point out any features as favorite because I like all of them. Everything mentioned above is part of my daily workflow.

Now when you know all of this it is worth trying them out. I was skeptical at first but later when I built my flow and learned how to utilize these features I can do everything faster, with fewer keystrokes and the most important thing is that I have a nicely organized desktop that helps me to minimize brain fatigue while doing my job.

Kubuntu is a great distro to switch to if you’re coming from Windows. They have a quite similar UI, and Kubuntu has all the features Windows has, plus more.

• KDevelop 5.3.3 released

  We today provide a stabilization and bugfix release with version 5.3.3. This is a bugfix-only release, which introduces no new features and as such is a safe and recommended update for everyone currently using a previous version of KDevelop 5.3.

  You can find a Linux AppImage as well as the source code archives on our download page. Windows installers are no longer offered, we are looking for someone interested to take care of that.

• Latte, Documentation and Reports...

  First Latte beta release for v0.9.0 is getting ready and I am really happy about it . But today instead of talking for the beta release I am going to focus at two last minute "arrivals" for v0.9; that is Layouts Reports and Documentation. If you want to read first the previous article you can do so at Latte and "Flexible" settings...

• Kaidan 0.4.1 released!

  After some problems were encountered in Kaidan 0.4.1, we tried to fix the most urgent bugs.

• Kees Cook: security things in Linux v5.2

  Gustavo A. R. Silva is nearly done with marking (and fixing) all the implicit fall-through cases in the kernel. Based on the pull request from Gustavo, it looks very much like v5.3 will see -Wimplicit-fallthrough added to the global build flags and then this class of bug should stay extinct in the kernel.

  That’s it for now; let me know if you think I should add anything here. We’re almost to -rc1 for v5.3!

• Security updates for Wednesday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (libreoffice), Red Hat (thunderbird), SUSE (ardana and crowbar, firefox, libgcrypt, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (nss, squid3, and wavpack).

• Malicious Python libraries targeting Linux servers removed from PyPI [Ed: Python does not run only on Linux, but Microsoft-funded sites like ZDNet (CBS) look for ways to blame everything on "Linux", even malicious software that gets caught in the supply chain]

• Malicious Python Libraries Discovered on PyPI, Offensive Security Launches the Kali NetHunter App Store, IBM Livestreaming a Panel with Original Apollo 11 Technicians Today, Azul Systems Announces OpenJSSE and Krita 4.2.3 Released

  Offensive Security, the creators of open-source Kali Linux, has launched the Kali NetHunter App Store, "a new one stop shop for security relevant Android applications. Designed as an alternative to the Google Play store for Android devices, the NetHunter store is an installable catalogue of Android apps for pentesting and forensics". The press release also notes that the NetHunter store is a slightly modified version of F-Droid: "While F-Droid installs its clients with telemetry disabled and asks for consent before submitting crash reports, the NetHunter store goes a step further by removing the entire code to ensure that privacy cannot be accidentally compromised". See the Kali.org blog post for more details.

• Fedora, GNOME Software, and snap

  A question about the future of package distribution is at the heart of a disagreement about the snap plugin for the GNOME Software application in Fedora. In a Fedora devel mailing list thread, Richard Hughes raised multiple issues about the plugin and the direction that he sees Canonical taking with snaps for Ubuntu. He plans to remove support for the plugin for GNOME Software in Fedora 31.

  There are currently two major players for cross-distribution application bundles these days: snaps, which were developed by Canonical for Ubuntu and the Snap Store, and Flatpak, which was developed by Alexander Larsson of Red Hat as part of freedesktop.org. Both systems are available for multiple Linux distributions. They are meant to give an "app-like" experience, where users simply install an application, which comes with any dependencies it has that are not provided by the snap or Flatpak runtime.

  The GNOME Software application has a snap plugin that, when enabled, supports the distribution, installation, and management of snaps. The Fedora project currently provides the snap plugin as a package in Fedora 30, though it is not installed by default. Hughes is the Fedora maintainer for the plugin; he announced his intention to disable the plugin since, he says, he was told that Canonical was not going to be installing GNOME Software in the next Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) release.

• Molly de Blanc: Meet Sriram Ramkrishna

  Sriram Ramkrishna, frequently known as Sri, is perhaps GNOME’s oldest contributor. He’s been around the community for almost as long as it’s been around!

  [...]

  But more than that, GNOME was a project that if you think about it was audacious in its purpose. Building a desktop in 1997 around an operating system that was primitive in terms of user experience, tooling, and experience. I wanted to be part of that.

• Recent fixes to reduce backlog on Android phones

  Last week it seemed that all our limited resource machines were perpetually backlogged. I wrote yesterday to provide insight into what we run and some of our limitations. This post will be discussing the Android phones backlog last week specifically.

  The Android phones are hosted at Bitbar and we split them into pools (battery testing, unit testing, perf testing) with perf testing being the majority of the devices.

• Q&A: Igniting imaginations and putting VR in the hands of students with Kai Frazier

  When you were in school, you may have taken a trip to a museum or a local park, but you probably never got to see an active volcano or watch great whites hunt. As Virtual Reality grows, this could be the way your kids will learn — using headsets the way we use computers.

  When you were in school, you may have gone on a trip to the museum, but you probably never stood next to an erupting volcano, watching molten lava pouring down its sides. As Virtual Reality (VR) grows, learning by going into the educational experience could be the way children will learn — using VR headsets the way we use computers.

  This kind of technology holds huge potential in shaping young minds, but like with most technology, not all public schools get the same access. For those who come from underserved communities, the high costs to technology could widen an already existing gap in learning, and future incomes.

• This Week in Rust 295 [Ed: Just delete GitHub , Mozila, And why you're at it, stop using proprietary software and imposing it on Rust contributors.]

  This Week in Rust is openly developed on GitHub.

• How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2019

  libsyntax has three tables in a global data structure, called Globals, storing information about spans (code locations), symbols, and hygiene data (which relates to macro expansion). Accessing these tables is moderately expensive, so I found various ways to improve things.

• Generate a List of Random Integers in Python

  This tutorial explains several ways to generate random numbers list in Python. Here, we’ll mainly use three Python random number generation functions. These are random.randint(), random.randrange(), and random.sample().

  You can find full details of these methods here: Generate random numbers in Python. All these functions are part of the Random module. It employs a fast pseudorandom number generator which uses the Mersenne Twister algorithm.

  However today, we’ll focus on producing a list of non-repeating integers only. Go through the below bullets to continue.

• Coverage.py 5.0a6: context reporting

  I’ve released another alpha of coverage.py 5.0: coverage.py 5.0a6. There are some design decisions ahead that I could use feedback on.

  [...]

  I know this is a lot, and the 5.0 alpha series has been going on for a while. The features are shaping up to be powerful and useful. All of your feedback has been very helpful, keep it coming.

• Gradient Boosting Classifiers in Python with Scikit-Learn

  Gradient boosting classifiers are a group of machine learning algorithms that combine many weak learning models together to create a strong predictive model. Decision trees are usually used when doing gradient boosting. Gradient boosting models are becoming popular because of their effectiveness at classifying complex datasets, and have recently been used to win many Kaggle data science competitions.

  The Python machine learning library, Scikit-Learn, supports different implementations of gradient boosting classifiers, including XGBoost.

• What are *args and **kwargs and How to use them

• Create a Flask Application With Google Login

  You’ve probably seen the option for Google Login on various websites. Some sites also have more options like Facebook Login or GitHub Login. All these options allow users to utilize existing accounts to use a new service.

  In this article, you’ll work through the creation of a Flask web application. Your application will allow a user to log in using their Google identity instead of creating a new account. There are tons of benefits with this method of user management. It’s going to be safer and simpler than managing the traditional username and password combinations.

  This article will be more straightforward if you already understand the basics of Python. It would also help to know a bit about web frameworks and HTTP requests, but that’s not strictly necessary.

• How to Setup Apache ZooKeeper Cluster on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• How To Add Swap Space on Debian 10 Linux

• How to Install Snap Applications in Arch Linux

• How to set up a firewall on Ubuntu

• How to Install Conky and Conky Manager on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• How to Connect an Accelerometer with Arduino

• From Red Hat Developer Blog: Using a custom builder image on Red Hat OpenShift with OpenShift Do

• Checksum – File Integrity Check on Linux Command Line

• Compling ARM stuff without an ARM board / Build PyTorch for the Raspberry Pi

• Expect One UI 2.0 With Android Q, Version 2.1 With Galaxy S11

• The Best Android Tablet Available Is $150 Off Today - Amazon Prime Day 2019

• Mid Android Developer

• Android Developers Delayed Marshmallow Upgrade To Harvest And Sell Data

• Moto G6 Play follows regular G6 on official Android Pie bandwagon in the US at last

• Honor 8 Pro EMUI 9/Android Pie update pulled; Huawei Nova 3i EMUI 9 on hold as well

• How to access and use emoji on Android

Having a game run on Linux that isn't built for Linux? That's certainly a cool thing. Performance is another thing entirely. It's not a compelling enough argument for Linux enthusiasts to tell their Windows-using friends that "hey, but the games you play run on Linux!" They have to run well. Maybe the notion of switching to Linux is an enticing one for the stability and increased privacy control, but you can't show me an enthusiast gamer who'll willingly trade that for a 20% drop in the framerates they're used to on their hardware, right?

That 20% is an important number, albeit not a scientific one. When I got into Linux last year, that's the figure I kept seeing thrown around. "Sure, it runs on Linux but about 15% to 20% lower FPS." With constant improvements to the kernel, Vulkan drivers and Steam Proton, however, I think the situation has changed.

Enough of my rambling. Here's what we're looking at today...

• Telkomsel looks to increase B2B market share with Google's Android solution

• Best Graphics Games On Android That Will Please The Design Perfectionist In You

• Niantic allegedly fixed Android Q incompatibility in Ingress; Pokemon Go & Harry Potter Wizards Unite up next?

• Android Q's parental controls are going live with latest Digital Wellbeing beta [APK Download]

• Motorola Moto G6 Android Pie (9.0) update triggered lag/freezing issue, say users

• These are the new Android emoji you'll be using on your phone later this year

• Emoji are getting more inclusive on your iPhone and Android phone—even if you're a vampire

Three years ago we checked out the CompuLab Airtop as a high-performance fanless PC. Back then it was exciting to passively cool an Intel Core i7 5775C, 16GB of RAM, SATA 3.0 SSD, and a GeForce GTX 950 graphics card. But now in 2019 thanks to the continued design improvements by CompuLab and ever advancing tech, their newly-launched CompuLab 3 can accommodate an eight-core / sixteen-thread Xeon CPU, 64GB of RAM, NVMe SSD storage, and a NVIDIA Quadro RTX 4000 graphics card without any fans!

The Airtop 3 just arrived from Israel earlier this month and I've begun putting it through its paces with our Linux benchmarks. Over the weeks ahead I'll begin posting more benchmarks from this passively-cooled, industrial-grade PC with Intel Xeon E-2288G processor and RTX 4000 Turing graphics, but given the reader interest when CompuLab announced the Airtop 3 back in April, I'm just sharing some initial impressions and first round of performance data today.

• Systemd 243 Is Getting Buttoned Up For Release With New Features & Fixes

  While it would have been nice seeing this next systemd release sooner due to the Zen 2 + RdRand issue with systemd yielding an unbootable system (that is now also being worked around with a BIOS upgrade), the systemd 243 release looks like it will take place in the near future.

• VIRTIO-IOMMU Driver Merged For Linux 5.3 Kernel

  With the VirtIO standard for cross-hypervisor compatibility of different virtualized components there is a virtual IOMMU device that is now backed by a working driver in the Linux 5.3 kernel.

  The VirtIO specification provides for a virtual IOMMU device as of the v0.8 specification that is platform agnostic and manages direct memory accesses from emulated or physical devices in an efficient manner.

• Linux Kernel Looks To Remove 32-bit Xen PV Guest Support

  Coming soon to a kernel near you could be the removal of 32-bit Xen PV guest support as better jiving with Xen's architectural improvements and more of the Linux/open-source community continuing to shift focus to 64-bit x86 with trying to finally sunset 32-bit x86.

Alexander Wirt (formorer) has tried to justify censoring the mailing list in various ways. Wirt is also one of Debian's GSoC administrators and mentors, it appears he has a massive conflict of interest when censoring posts about Google.

Wirt has also made public threats to censor other discussions, for example, the DebConf Israel debate. The challenges of holding a successful event in that particular region require a far more mature approach.

Why are these donations and conflicts of interest hidden from the free software community who rely on, interact with contribute to Debian in so many ways? Why doesn't Debian provide a level playing field, why does money from Google get this veil of secrecy?

[...]

Google also operates a mailing list for mentors in Google Summer of Code. It looks a lot like any other free software community mailing list except for one thing: censorship.

Look through the "Received" headers of messages on the mailing list and you can find examples of messages that were delayed for some hours waiting for approval. It is not clear how many messages were silently censored, never appearing at all.

Recent attempts to discuss the issue on Google's own mailing list produced an unsurprising result: more censorship.

• OpenShift 4: Image Builds

  One of the key differentiators of Red Hat OpenShift as a Kubernetes distribution is the ability to build container images using the platform via first class APIs. This means there is no separate infrastructure or manual build processes required to create images that will be run on the platform. Instead, the same infrastructure can be used to produce the images and run them. For developers, this means one less barrier to getting their code deployed.

  With OpenShift 4, we have significantly redesigned how this build infrastructure works. Before that sets off alarm bells, I should emphasize that for a consumer of the build APIs and resulting images, the experience is nearly identical. What has changed is what happens under the covers when a build is executed and source code is turned into a runnable image.

• libinput's new thumb detection code

  The average user has approximately one thumb per hand. That thumb comes in handy for a number of touchpad interactions. For example, moving the cursor with the index finger and clicking a button with the thumb. On so-called Clickpads we don't have separate buttons though. The touchpad itself acts as a button and software decides whether it's a left, right, or middle click by counting fingers and/or finger locations. Hence the need for thumb detection, because you may have two fingers on the touchpad (usually right click) but if those are the index and thumb, then really, it's just a single finger click.

  libinput has had some thumb detection since the early days when we were still hand-carving bits with stone tools. But it was quite simplistic, as the old documentation illustrates: two zones on the touchpad, a touch started in the lower zone was always a thumb. Where a touch started in the upper thumb area, a timeout and movement thresholds would decide whether it was a thumb. Internally, the thumb states were, Schrödinger-esque, "NO", "YES", and "MAYBE". On top of that, we also had speed-based thumb detection - where a finger was moving fast enough, a new touch would always default to being a thumb. On the grounds that you have no business dropping fingers in the middle of a fast interaction. Such a simplistic approach worked well enough for a bunch of use-cases but failed gloriously in other cases.

• 21 to 1: How Red Hat amplifies partner revenue

  At Red Hat Summit, we announced new research from IDC looking at the contributions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to the global economy. The study, sponsored by Red Hat, found that the workloads running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux are expected to "touch" more than $10 trillion worth of global business revenues in 2019 - powering roughly 5% of the worldwide economy. While that statistic alone is eye popping, these numbers, according to the report, are only expected to grow in the coming years, fueled by more organizations embracing hybrid cloud infrastructures. As a result, there is immense opportunity for Red Hat partners and potential partners to capitalize on the growth and power of RHEL.

• Executing .NET Core functions in a separate process [Ed: IBM/Red Hat is pushing Microsoft patent traps again (and yes, Microsoft still suing]

• DevNation Live: 17-million downloads of Visual Studio Code Java extension [Ed: Also celebrating for Microsoft again (as if helping the proprietary MSVS 'ecosystem' is their goal now)]

• The NeuroFedora Blog: NEURON in NeuroFedora needs testing

  We have been working on including the NEURON simulator in NeuroFedora for a while now. The build process that NEURON uses has certain peculiarities that make it a little harder to build.

  For those that are interested in the technical details, while the main NEURON core is built using the standard ./configure; make ; make install process that cleanly differentiates the "build" and "install" phases, the Python bits are built as a "post-install hook". That is to say, they are built after the other bits in the "install" step instead of the "build" step. This implies that the build is not quite straightforward and must be slightly tweaked to ensure that the Fedora packaging guidelines are met.

• Best Free Web Based Genome Browsers

  In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is the genetic material of an organism. It consists of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). Each genome contains all of the information needed to build and maintain that organism. In humans, a copy of the entire genome—more than 3 billion DNA base pairs—is contained in all cells that have a nucleus. The study of the genome is called genomics.

  In bioinformatics, a genome browser is a graphical interface for display of information from a biological database for genomic data. They are important tools for studying genomes given the vast amounts of data available. They typically load very large files, such as whole genome FASTA files and display them in a way that users can make sense of the information there. They can be used to visualize a variety of different data types.

  Genome browsers enable researchers to visualize and browse entire genomes with annotated data including gene prediction and structure, proteins, expression, regulation, variation, comparative analysis, etc. They use a visual, high-level overview of complex data in a form that can be grasped at a glance and provide the means to explore the data in increasing resolution from megabase scales down to the level of individual elements of the DNA sequence.

  There’s a wide range of web based genome browsers. We’re going to restrict our selection to the top 4.

• Get going with EtherCalc, a web-based alternative to Google Sheets

  EtherCalc is an open source spreadsheet that makes it easy to work remotely and collaborate with others.

• Daniel Stenberg: curl 7.65.2 fixes even more

  Six weeks after our previous bug-fix release, we ship a second release in a row with nothing but bug-fixes. We call it 7.65.2. We decided to go through this full release cycle with a focus on fixing bugs (and not merge any new features) since even after 7.65.1 shipped as a bug-fix only release we still seemed to get reports indicating problems we wanted fixed once and for all.

  Download curl from curl.haxx.se as always!

  Also, I personally had a vacation already planned to happen during this period (and I did) so it worked out pretty good to take this cycle as a slightly calmer one.

  Of the numbers below, we can especially celebrate that we’ve now received code commits by more than 700 persons!

Normal Linux user knows almost all the basic Linux day-to-day use commands to perform basic task such as installing any application, copying files from one directory to another, etc. But in this article I’m going to list 100 essential Linux commands which can be useful for every Linux user right from the noobs to the professional Linux developers and system administrators.So before wasting any time let’s get started with this huge list of essential Linux commands.