Almost a year after Richard Stallman, the founding president of Free Software Foundation, was forced to resign, FSF board has finally elected a new president, Geoffrey Knauth.

• How to Fix the Broken Android Auto in Volkswagen Cars

• Google Pixel 4a review: All the phone you need, none of what you don't

• Google Docs gets Smart Compose, other improvements on Android and iOS

• Google v. Oracle Perspective: Google's Android 'Cheat Code' was to Copy Oracle's Code

• Google adds Smart compose to Docs, Sheets, & Slides on Android & iOS

• Wear OS will lose Google Play Music months before a YouTube Music app exists

• Mi TV Stick With Full-HD Streaming, Android TV 9 Launched in India, First Sale on August 7

• Android TV's new curated content row simplifies finding your next binge-worthy show

• Samsung guarantees three ‘generations’ of Android OS updates for some Galaxy phones

• Twitter Fixes Security Issue Affecting Some Android Devices

• OnePlus 7T Android Smartphone drops to new all-time low at $399 (Save $200)

• Galaxy Note20 and Note20 Ultra will get three major Android OS updates

• Researchers found another way to hack Android cellphones via Bluetooth

• Latest Android update will finally protect your most important files

• 14 Reasons Why OxygenOS on OnePlus Nord is Better Than Stock Android

• TeamViewer expands remote access and control capabilities to all Android devices

• Android and Chromebook users can finally match the iPhone and MacBook's best trick

I am mostly a self-taught programmer. When I was growing up in the late 1970s, our elementary school had a small resource room with an Apple II computer. My brother and I fell into a group of friends that liked computers, and we all helped each other learn the system.

We showed such promise that our parents bought us an Apple II+ clone called the Franklin ACE 1000. My brother and I taught ourselves how to program in AppleSoft BASIC. Our parents bought us books, and we devoured them. I learned every corner of BASIC by reading about something in the book, then writing a practice program. My favorite pastime was writing simulations and games.

I stayed with BASIC for a long time. Our next computer was an IBM PC clone with a version of BASIC on it. Much later, MS-DOS 5 introduced QBasic, which was a modern version of BASIC that finally eliminated line numbers.

Do you have an old laptop that has gathered layers of dust over time and you don’t exactly what to do with it? A good place to start would be to install a Linux distribution that will perfectly support its low-end hardware specifications without much of a hassle. You could still enjoy performing basic tasks such as web browsing, word processing, and watching videos, listening to your favourite music to mention a few.

In this guide, we feature some of the best Linux distributions that you can install on your old PC and breathe some life into it.

Open source software is now mainstream; long gone are the days when open source projects attracted developers alone. Nowadays, users across numerous industries are active consumers of open source software, and you can't expect everyone to know how to use the software just by reading the code.

Even for developers (including those with plenty of experience in other open source projects), good documentation serves as a valuable onboarding tool when people join a community. People who are interested in contributing to a project often start by working on documentation to get familiar with the project, the community, and the community workflow.

There's a saying about the cloud, and it goes something like this: The cloud is just somebody else's computer. While the cloud is actually more complex than that (it's a lot of computers), there's a lot of truth to the sentiment. When you move to the cloud, you're moving data and services and computing power to an entity you don't own or fully control. On the one hand, this frees you from having to perform administrative tasks you don't want to do, but, on the other hand, it could mean you no longer control your own computer.

This is why the open source world likes to talk about an open hybrid cloud, a model that allows you to choose your own infrastructure, select your own OS, and orchestrate your workloads as you see fit. However, if you don't happen to have an open hybrid cloud available to you, you can create your own—either to help you learn how the cloud works or to serve your local network.

• Linux commands for user management

• CONSOOM All Your PODCASTS From Your Terminal With Castero

• Install Blender 3D on Debian 10 (Buster)

• Things To Do After Installing openSUSE Leap 15.2

• GSoC Reports: Fuzzing Rumpkernel Syscalls, Part 2

  I have been working on Fuzzing Rumpkernel Syscalls. This blogpost details the work I have done during my second coding period.

• Holger Levsen: DebConf7

  DebConf7 was also special because it had a very special night venue, which was in an ex-church in a rather normal building, operated as sort of community center or some such, while the old church interior was still very much visible as in everything new was build around the old stuff.

  And while the night venue was cool, it also ment we (video team) had no access to our machines over night (or for much of the evening), because we had to leave the university over night and the networking situation didn't allow remote access with the bandwidth needed to do anything video.

  The night venue had some very simple house rules, like don't rearrange stuff, don't break stuff, don't fix stuff and just a few little more and of course we broke them in the best possible way: Toresbe with the help of people I don't remember fixed the organ, which was broken for decades. And so the house sounded in some very nice new old tune and I think everybody was happy we broke that rule.

• Podcast: COBOL development on the mainframe

  Nic reached out when COBOL hit the news this spring to get some background on what COBOL is good for historically, and where it lives in the modern infrastructure stack. I was able to talk about the basics of COBOL and the COBOL standard, strengths today in concert with the latest mainframes, and how COBOL back-end code is now being integrated into front ends via intermediary databases and data-interchange formats like JSON, which COBOL natively supports.

• What I learned while teaching C programming on YouTube

  The act of breaking something down in order to teach it to others can be a great way to reacquaint yourself with some old concepts and, in many cases, gain new insights.

  I have a YouTube channel where I demonstrate FreeDOS programs and show off classic DOS applications and games. The channel has a small following, so I tend to explore the topics directly suggested by my audience. When several subscribers asked if I could do more videos about programming, I decided to launch a new video series to teach C programming. I learned a lot from teaching C, and in the process, I came across some meaningful takeaways I think others will appreciate.

  Make a plan

  For my day job, I lead training and workshops to help new and emerging IT leaders develop new skills. Outside of regular work, I also enjoy teaching as an adjunct professor. So I'm very comfortable constructing a course outline and designing a curriculum. That's where I started. If you want to teach a subject effectively, you can't just wing it.

  Start by writing an outline of what topics you want to cover and figure out how each new topic will build on the previous ones. The "building block" method of adding new knowledge is key to an effective training program.

• Google's Flutter 1.20 framework is out: VS Code extension and mobile autofill support

• Google Engineers Propose "Machine Function Splitter" For Faster Performance

  Google engineers have been working on the Machine Function Splitter as their means of making binaries up to a few percent faster thanks to this compiler-based approach. They are now seeking to upstream the Machine Function Splitter into LLVM.

  The Machine Function Splitter is a code generation optimization pass for splitting code functions into hot and cold parts. They are doing this stemming from research that in roughly half of code functions that more than 50% of the code bytes are never executed but generally loaded into the CPU's data cache.

• Modernize network function development with this Rust-based framework

  The world of networking has undergone monumental shifts over the past decade, particularly in the ongoing move from specialized hardware into software defined network functions (NFV) for data plane1 and packet processing. While the transition to software has fashioned the rise of SDN (Software-defined networking) and programmable networks, new challenges have arisen in making these functions flexible, efficient, easier to use, and fast (i.e. little to no performance overhead). Our team at Comcast wanted to both leverage what the network does best, especially with regards to its transport capacity and routing mechanisms, while also being able to develop network programs through a modern software lens—stressing testing, swift iteration, and deployment. So, with these goals in mind, we developed Capsule, a new framework for network function development, written in Rust, inspired by Berkeley's NetBricks research, and built-on Intel's Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK).

• This Week in Rust 350

• Firefox extended tracking protection

  This Mozilla Security Blog entry describes the new redirect-tracking protections soon to be provided by the Firefox browser.

• Karl Dubost: Browser developer tools timeline

  I was reading In a Land Before Dev Tools by Amber, and I thought, Oh here missing in the history the beautifully chiseled Opera Dragonfly and F12 for Internet Explorer. So let's see what are all the things I myself didn't know.

• Daniel Stenberg: Upcoming Webinar: curl: How to Make Your First Code Contribution

  Abstract: curl is a wildly popular and well-used open source tool and library, and is the result of more than 2,200 named contributors helping out. Over 800 individuals wrote at least one commit so far.

  In this presentation, curl’s lead developer Daniel Stenberg talks about how any developer can proceed in order to get their first code contribution submitted and ultimately landed in the curl git repository. Approach to code and commits, style, editing, pull-requests, using github etc. After you’ve seen this, you’ll know how to easily submit your improvement to curl and potentially end up running in ten billion installations world-wide.

• Zoombomber crashes court hearing on Twitter hack with Pornhub video

• Security updates for Wednesday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (net-snmp), Fedora (mingw-curl), openSUSE (firefox, ghostscript, and opera), Oracle (libvncserver and postgresql-jdbc), Scientific Linux (postgresql-jdbc), SUSE (firefox, kernel, libX11, xen, and xorg-x11-libX11), and Ubuntu (apport, grub2, grub2-signed, libssh, libvirt, mysql-8.0, ppp, tomcat8, and whoopsie).

• The CNCF etcd project reaches a significant milestone with completion of security audit

  This week, a third-party security audit was published on etcd, the open source distributed key-value store that plays a crucial role in scaling Kubernetes in the cloud. For etcd, this audit was important in multiple ways. The audit validates the project’s maturity and sheds light on some areas where the project can improve. This sort of audit is required criteria for any project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) to qualify for graduation from the CNCF.

  Read the CNCF blog post that I co-authored to learn more about the audit and what it uncovered. As one of the project maintainers and one of two members of the etcd Project Security Committee, I’d love to share a few reasons I’m hopeful for etcd’s future and why now is a great time to contribute to etcd’s open source community.

• Application Ecosystem Microconference Accepted into 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference

  We are pleased to announce that the Application Ecosystem Microconference has been accepted into the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference!

  The Linux kernel is the foundation of the Linux systems, but it is not much use without applications that run on top of it. The application experience relies on the kernel for performance, stability and responsiveness. Plumbers is the perfect venue to have the kernel and app ecosystems under one roof to discuss and learn together and make a better application experience on the Linux platform.

• Google Opens Patches For "METRICFS" That They Have Used Since 2012 For Telemetry Data

  The METRICFS file-system has been in use internally at Google since 2012 for exporting system statistics to their telemetry systems with around 200 statistics being exported per machine. They are now posting the METRICFS patches as open-source for review and possible upstreaming.

  A "request for comments" on METRICFS was sent out today on the Linux kernel mailing list. Their motives for now finally publishing these patches is as a result of the recent Statsfs proposal by a Red Hat engineer for a RAM-based file-system for exposing kernel statistics to user-space. METRICFS has a similar aim to Statsfs.

• FS-Cache Rewritten But Even Its Developers Are Hesitant About Landing It For Linux 5.9

  FS-Cache provides the Linux kernel with a general purpose cache for network file-systems like NFS and AFS but also other special use-cases like ISO9660 file-systems. FS-Cache has been rewritten for better performance and reliability, among other benefits, and while it has been sent in as a pull request for Linux 5.9 even its own developers provide some caution over landing it this cycle.

  FS-Cache has seen work to "massively overhaul" it with a variety of improvements. The new and improved FS-Cache will now use async direct I/O in place of snooping for updated pages that in turn means less virtual memory overhead. The new FS-Cache implementation has simpler object management, changes to object invalidation, and a variety of other work.

• Corsair Commander Pro Driver Sent In To Linux 5.9

  The hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem has a new driver that is likely to excite some enthusiasts wanting greater control over thermal monitoring and fan control for their systems.

  The previously covered Corsair Commander Pro Linux driver is now coming with Linux 5.9. The Commander Pro offers six 4-pin fan ports with PWM controls, two RGB LED channels, and four thermal sensors. An interested user/developer created this Linux driver without the support from Corsair. The thermal and fan control support is in place with this new HWMON driver while the RGB lighting controls are available from OpenRGB.

• mesa 20.1.5

  Hi all,
  
  I'd like to announce Mesa 20.1.5, the fifth bugfix release for the 20.1 branch.
  
  The next bugfix release is planned for 2 weeks from now, on 2020-08-19.
  
  Cheers,
  Eric
  
  

• Mesa 20.1.5 Released For The Latest Stable Open-Source Vulkan / OpenGL Drivers

  Mesa 20.1.5 provides the latest stable open-source Vulkan/OpenGL graphics drivers for the Linux desktop as the newest bi-weekly milestone.

  Mesa 20.2 remains under development as this quarter's feature release due out in about one month's time. Mesa 20.2 is running behind schedule as it should have been branched around the end of July but has yet to happen. In any case, more Mesa 20.2 feature work continues to land and more than likely will ship sometime in September. But until that occurs, Mesa 20.1 is the latest stable series.

• Intel Workaround For Graphics Driver Regression: "The Platform Problem Going Crazy"

  Sent out over the weekend was a patch series for the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver entitled "Time, where did it go?" This set of 42 patches aims to provide incremental improvements to the driver to offset a performance regression in Linux 5.7 that Intel hasn't been able to track down. This increased complication of the driver to offset the regression is now under the microscope.

  The set of 42 patches by longtime Intel open-source developer Chris Wilson provides incremental improvements to reduce the execution latency. He was upfront that the intent of these improvements are to "basically offsets the small regressions incurred when compared to [Linux kernel] 5.7."

• RadeonSI Resorts To Disabling SDMA For GFX9/Vega Due To APU Issues

  AMD's RadeonSI Gallium3D driver has resorted to disabling SDMA (System DMA) async DMA engine support for all GFX9/Vega hardware due to issues plaguing some APUs.

  While SDMA has the potential of helping performance, GFX9 (Vega) is now seeing the support disabled due to bugs seeming to only affect APUs. Though it's not entirely surprising as the open-source AMD Radeon Linux driver also is not enabling SDMA at this point for GFX8 (Polaris) or GFX10 (Navi) hardware either.

  Opened three months ago was the merge request for disabling SDMA on GFX9 and to back-port it to the stable series as well. Longtime AMD open-source developer Marek Olsak noted, "This is somewhat a radical step. All opinions welcome."

       

• Destination Linux 185: Let’s Fix Linux Tech Support

  On this week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re transitioning from the topic of Bug Reporting last week to Tech Support in Linux this week. We’re going to check in on Wayland’s progress with Plasma’s new release, we have an sandbox MMO for gaming, and our popular tips/tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more, coming up right now on Destination Linux.

                

• FLOSS Weekly 590: Rensselaer Center for Open Software - A Community of Open Source Developers

  RCOS is a group of RPI students who work on open-source projects. The goal of RCOS is to empower students to develop open-source solutions to real-world problems. They have created 300+ open source projects over the years. Doc Searls and Simon Phipps talk with Wes Turner, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and the Director of the Rensselaer Center for Open Source. They discuss teaching open source and the hardships that come along with that, especially with e-learning. They also discuss what the future could look like if we could have more open-source programs like RCOS in other universities.

       

• The Best Raspberry Pi Laptop Kit | CrowPi 2 Review

  The Best Raspberry Pi Laptop Kit | CrowPi 2 Review of the kit, usage, and examples. 

       

• 2020-08-05 | Linux Headlines

  LibreOffice 7 dodges its rebranding controversy, the Pinta bitmap editor sees its first new version in 5 years, Red Hat accommodates certification seekers with new pandemic-friendly rules, and ownCloud 10.5 brings background sync changes to the platform.

Linux has always been seen as a rather rigid operating system for gaming. Many games used to be unavailable on Linux, and the ones that you could play used to have all sorts of bugs. However, the situation’s not the same anymore with Ubuntu 20.04.

The OS is way better for gaming than you may think. In certain situations, games even run better on Linux than on Windows. This is quite impressive so let’s see what lead to Linux’s improvements.

Also: Narrative-driven adventure Impostor Factory has new teaser trailer

• nRF9160 Feather LTE IoT and GPS Board Launched for $99

  The board is certified by the Open Source Hardware Association with the hardware licensed with CERN 1.2, mcuboot firmware with Apache 2.0, and documentation with CC-SA-4.0. While we noted in the introduction the board runs on Zephyr and nRF Connect SDK, support for other toolchains and languages should be released soon.

• Arduino X-ray imaging phantom simulates lung movement

  Imaging phantoms are used to evaluate and test medical devices, such as X-ray machinery, where a human subject would be impractical and/or dangerous. In order to simulate the motion and deformation of a lung, Stefan Grimm created an Arduino-powered phantom at a materials cost of around $350 USD.

  Much of the project’s structure is printed with dissolvable PVA, used as a form for silicone that mimics tissue and plaster for bone. Movement is controlled via three linear and rotary actuator setups outlined here, and the structure can either be pre-programmed or manipulated in real-time using a USB cable and PC.

• The Science Journal is graduating from Google — coming to Arduino this fall!

  Arduino and Google are excited to announce that the Science Journal app will be transferring from Google to Arduino this September! Arduino’s existing experience with the Science Journal and a long-standing commitment to open source and hands-on science has been crucial to the transfer ownership of the open source project over to Arduino.

  The Google versions of the app will officially cease support and updates on December 11th, 2020, with Arduino continuing all support and app development moving forward, including a brand new Arduino integration for iOS.

  Arduino Science Journal will include support for the Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense board, as well as the Arduino Science Kit, with students able to document science experiments and record observations using their own Android or iOS device. The Science Journal actively encourages students to learn outside of the classroom, delivering accessible resources to support both teachers and students for remote or in person activities. For developers, the Arduino version will continue to be open: codes, APIs, and firmware to help them create innovative new projects.

• This stepper-driven mechanical clock can be set to two different time zones

  Clocks normally tell you the time in your particular location, but what about that person that you know across the country or even on the other side the world? What time is it there? While it’s easy enough to do a web search or do a calculation, in order to find this out at an instant, Jeremy Cook made his own mechanical dual time zone clock.

  The device is powered by an Arduino Nano, which drives a stepper motor to advance each minute. Using physical gear reduction, dual hour gears move at 1/12th the rate of the minute indicator gear, which can be offset to the secondary time zone of your choosing.

• ThinkCentre M75n IoT Nano Desktop Features a 6W AMD Athlon Silver 3050e Processor

  Earlier today, we wrote about AMD 3015e dual-core/quad-thread Zen processor with 6W TDP found in some upcoming education laptops from Lenovo. We also noted that two other recent 6W AMD processors had been introduced by the company AMD 3020e and AMD Athlon Silver 3050e.

  When looking for AMD 3020e I got ACER ASPIRE A314-22-A8ST 14″ laptop with 4GB RAM and 256GB SSD listed for 9,590 Baht ($309 inc. 7% VAT) – but out of stock – on several Thai websites, but after switching to a US VPN all product reference disappeared, except for Lenovo Ideapad 3 soon getting an AMD 3020e model. None of the laptops are available now, but at least that means AMD does not only target the education market with its 6W SKUs.

  [...]

  The company offers the computer with Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro, but I suppose both Ubuntu or Red Hat Linux distributions should work just fine since those two operating systems are certified for the mini PC…

• Wolf Audio Systems Releases Alpha 3 SX Music Server

  It features a modified-for-audio Windows 10 Pro or the new, proprietary Linux-based WolfOS operating system and offers 4TB storage capacity (expandable to 32TB), 24-bit and DSD playback capability, an upgraded Flux Capacitor 24 MHz master clock and additional improvements. It is a one-chassis design that fits easily into any audio or home entertainment system, and can play back a wide variety of stereo and multichannel audio formats including FLAC, WAV, AIFF, ALAC, SACD, DSF, DFF and (PCM) from 16 - 32 bits, 44.1, 88.2, 96, 176.4, 192 and 384 kHz audio and DSD Native up to DSD1024.

Once again, KDE and GNOME are teaming up to bring you THE conference for people interested in establishing Linux as a great end-user platform. At the Linux App Summit we work on making app creation for users easy and worthwhile.

Since travel is complicated nowadays, we decided to make LAS 2020 a virtual conference. The event will open Thursday, 12th November and we'll wrap up on Saturday, 14th November. Our goal is to engage people in multiple time zones and make the content available online after the conclusion.

The Call for Talks is now open! Please take a look at the suggested topics and send in your ideas. We encourage new speakers, so don’t hesitate to submit a proposal!

Save the date on your calendar and we look forward to seeing you at LAS 2020!

Also: KBibTeX 0.10-alpha2 aka 0.9.81

Being well past the half-way point for the year, here is a look at how Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux distribution is performing compared to its rolling state last December. Plus there are also benchmarks looking at how the current Clear Linux is performing against other rolling-release distributions.

• PAM by example: Use authconfig to modify PAM

• Learning NFS through server and client configuration

• World domination with cgroups part 8: down and dirty with cgroup v2

  Thanks for joining me again as we continue to look at cgroup v2, which became available with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. This time around, I’d like to take a very deep look at the virtual file system used to control the cgroup controllers and the special files inside. Understanding this will be necessary for doing custom work that used to be the domain of libcgroup (first introduced in RHEL 6, and not recommended for use in RHEL 8). We’re also going to try some fun with cpusets, which are now fully working with RHEL and systemd for the first time ever!

• Build secure applications with OpenShift 4.3 on public cloud

  Building secure applications that ensure data privacy and security when deployed to a cloud environment is crucial for businesses that collect customer data, particularly for regulated industries like finance, retail, banking, and others. In this article, I introduce you to an example credit card application my team built to explore and share approaches for creating secure cloud-based applications with OpenShift 4.3 on IBM Cloud.

  We built the example credit card application with just a few straight-forward microservices that record dynamic user transactions in a PostgreSQL database. The JavaScript simulator application presents a Web-based view of a mobile application run by a Node.js service running inside an OpenShift cluster.

• Ben Williams: F32-20200804 updated Live isos Released

  The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F32-20200804-Live ISOs, carrying the 5.7.11-200 kernel.

  This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have about 900+MB of updates)).

  A huge thank you goes out to irc nicks dowdle, dbristow, Southern-Gentleman for testing these iso.

• Dan Williams: Kubernetes Watches will ghost you without warning

  Alternate title: if you’re ahead of Clayton you’re doing well, at least for a few hours.

  [...]

  Watches can and do terminate at any time, gracefully or not. Sometimes a new apiserver leader is elected and the old one terminates watches and clients must reconnect to the new leader. Sometimes the leader just goes away because its node got rebooted. Sometimes there’s a network hiccup and the HTTP connection backing the watch times out. Regardless of the cause, they happen and your code needs to handle them. OpenShift CI forces frequent leader elections to specifically catch these issues before they get to customers.

  A watch stuffs events into a Go channel. The code using the watch reads events out of the channel, usually in a for loop (to continuously grab events) with a select block (to ensure individual read operations don’t block which enables cancelation when the channel returned by ctx.Done() is closed). Reading from a Go channel (case event := <-pvcWatch.ResultChan()) returns an optional second boolean indicating whether the channel has been closed.

  The testcase loop doesn’t exit until either the testcase times out and the ctx.Done() channel is closed, one of the event handler cases fails the testcase, or the PersistentVolumeClaim is deleted. So what happens if the Watch is closed unexpectedly and nothing checks whether the channel is closed?

• Copr: EOL Copr APIv1 and APIv2

  During Copr history, we got three APIs. For a long time, we maintained all versions.

  We decided that it is time to remove the old versions. We are going to start with APiv1.

• Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 To Be Generally Available This Week

  Red Hat has announced that Red Hat Virtualization 4.4, the latest update to its virtualization solution for traditional virtual machine (VM)-based workloads, will be generally available this week.

  With this latest release, Red Hat Virtualization is now rebased to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2. It is said to offer a more seamless integration with Red Hat OpenShift, providing a solution that can launch the next-generation of cloud-native applications while providing a foundation for VMs today.

  “Based on RHEL 8.2, Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 inherits all of the stability, performance and security improvements that you trust for your most business critical workloads while adding new capabilities that make it even easier to manage a large virtual environment,” the company said.

Members of the openSUSE community will have two retrospective meeting on the release of openSUSE Leap 15.2 after receiving feedback from the recent survey.

The meetings are scheduled for tomorrow, Thursday, at 06:00 - 08:00 UTC and 15:00 - 17:00 UTC.

Release Manager Luboš Kocman provided a short summary about the feedback received and information about the meeting in an email this week to the project.

“Thanks to everyone who participated in our openSUSE Leap 15.2 release retrospective that took place on survey.opensuse.org,” Kocman wrote. “The survey was fully anonymous and questions were: What went well and What didn’t go too well.

Also: SUSE Documentation Survey 2020 – Second Take. Your Call to Action to Help Us Improve.

In my path to Chrome OS enlightenment, I’ve explored many method with which users can run non-native applications and even alternative operating systems. My most recent endeavor involved installing a full-blown version of Windows 10 inside the Linux container on Chrome OS. While I have absolutely no use for such a monstrosity, the path that brought me there was fun and I believe a lot of users were excited about the premise of running Windows alongside Chrome OS. All of this was made possible thanks to an update to the Linux kernel that is available to some users inside the Chrome OS Linux container. My first theory was that this was being tested exclusively on ‘Hatch’ devices that are equipped with the Comet Lake family of processors. After some input from some colleagues, it appears that the ability to run qemu/kvm in a nested environment is more widely available than I presumed. I have seen reports that users have successfully installed Windows on devices ranging from a Core i5 Pixel Slate to the aging Dell Chromebook 13 that has a Broadwell CPU. Perhaps it is the Core i CPU that is the key. Who knows?

[...]

Elementary OS is an Ubuntu-based OS but make no mistake, it stands out as its own operating system. Many have called the the macOS of Linux but as you can read in a blog post from the Elementary CEO, the OS design and function are very intentional and quite unique in its own right. All of that is neither here nor there. Elementary OS caught my eye as a distinct and very different distro that I had never used and I wanted to give it a try and see how it ran on Chrome OS. My Windows experiment was a success, for the most part, but Windows is chunky and often times I found the OS struggling to work well inside the VM. Elementary OS is a “pay what’s fair” platform which means exactly what you’d think. While you can technically download the .iso image for free, a donation of your choosing is recommended and I’m sure, well appreciated as it is open-source software.

• Responding to SMS Text Messages with Python & Flask

  Short Message Service (SMS) text messages are easy to send from Python applications with a web application programming interface (API). Flask applications can also receive incoming text messages and respond back to the sender with just a few lines of Python code.

• How to Send SMS Text Messages with Python

  Short Message Service (SMS) text messages are ubiquitous for communication all over the world. It is easy to send SMS text messages from a Python application using a web application programming interface (API). Let's take a look at the tools we need to quickly add SMS capability to our Python apps.

• What Are Python Wheels and Why Should You Care?

  Python .whl files, or wheels, are a little-discussed part of Python, but they’ve been a boon to the installation process for Python packages. If you’ve installed a Python package using pip, then chances are that a wheel has made the installation faster and more efficient.

  Wheels are a component of the Python ecosystem that helps to make package installs just work. They allow for faster installations and more stability in the package distribution process. In this tutorial, you’ll dive into what wheels are, what good they serve, and how they’ve gained traction and made Python even more of a joy to work with.

• PyCharm: Webinar Recording: “Simplify Your Tests With Fixtures” with Oliver Bestwalter

  Enjoy pytest and curious about fixtures? Last week we hosted Oliver Bestwalter for a webinar on how to use pytest fixtures to simplify your test code. The recording is now available.

• Python 101 – Learning About Sets (Video)

  In this video you will learn about the basics of Python’s dictionary data type.

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Blog Post | Gsoc'2020 | #10

• PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Check-In #10