• Internal Error: Unified Patent Court and Unitary Patent Incompatible With the Constitution and Basic Laws
• The EPO is Using Hype Wave and Buzzword to Promote Illegal Software Patents in a So-Called “Digital Conference”
• Dutch Delegation and German Delegation at the Administrative Council of the EPO Upset at the Office for Secrecy, Working Behind the Scenes to Crush Productive Staff
• Links 23/11/2020: GNU Guix 1.2.0, Evaluating Precursor’s Hardware Security, Kdenlive 20.08.3, Kodi 19.x Beta, Vulkan 1.2.162
• Links 23/11/2020: Linux 5.10-rc5, GIMP Turns 25, 4MLinux 34.2, Escuelas Linux 6.11, MPV Player 0.33
• How to Put on Airs of Professionalism Like a Boss
• IRC Proceedings: Sunday, November 22, 2020
• Legal Action at the European Patent Office (EPO) Leveraged Against Management... for Robbing EPO Staff and Robbing Europe, by Extension
• Cory Doctorow at Privacy Week 2020 on DRM, Freedom/Software Freedom, Regulation, Etc.
• Links 22/11/2020: KaOS 2020.11, Calindori 1.3, KStars 3.5.0

• Using Linux At University: Easier Than You Think - YouTube

  Since I'm done with uni now I thought I'd be fun to offer some advice on getting through university or college daily driving Linux, for the most part it'll be fine but there are some points where you'll run into some trouble in a software engineering context.

• Linus is about to REJECT YOUR PRIVILEGES!

    

• A chat with Trese Brothers Games about the upcoming cyberpunk Cyber Knights: Flashpoint | GamingOnLinux

  We have a chat with Trese Brothers Games who are currently developing Cyber Knights: Flashpoint following a successful Kickstarter campaign earlier in March 2020.

  

• Big adventures ahead - Little Big Adventures

  Once upon a time in the past - around the year 1994 - a software company called Adeline Software International released a game titled “Little Big Adventure” or “Relentless: Twinsen's Adventure”. This game, a classic pseudo-3D action adventure game with an epic story set on a fantastic planet, has now entered the testing stage in ScummVM. Please, note that a few features of the original game are not implemented yet. However, we also added a few features which are new for the game.

• Security updates for Monday

  Security updates have been issued by Debian (cimg, golang-1.7, golang-1.8, krb5, mediawiki, mupdf, php-pear, samba, thunderbird, and zabbix), Fedora (chromium, krb5, microcode_ctl, pngcheck, and rpki-client), Mageia (librepo, postgresql, python-twisted, raptor2, tcpdump, and thunderbird), openSUSE (blueman, java-11-openjdk, moinmoin-wiki, python, rmt-server, SDL, and tcpdump), Red Hat (chromium-browser and thunderbird), SUSE (c-ares, ceph, dash, firefox, java-1_8_0-openjdk, postgresql10, postgresql12, postgresql96, u-boot, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (openldap).

• 6 predictions for JavaScript build tools | Opensource.com

  Code used in production is different from development code. In production, you need to build packages that run fast, manage dependencies, automate tasks, load external modules, and more. JavaScript tools that make it possible to turn development code into production code are called build tools.

• The mysterious case of the SVt_PVIV | The Incredible Journey

  The other day I wanted to send my friend some silly emojis on LINE and so I updated my flaky old Unicode browser to the new-fangled Unicode with values above 0x10000, so that I could fetch the Emojis, which start around here. The thing also features a perl script which fetches values from Unicode::UCD using the charinfo function. I also updated to Perl 5.32 around the same time. Now the funny thing was that I started getting all kinds of errors about invalid JSON in the browser console. My Perl script was sending something of the form {... "script":Common ...} from my module JSON::Create, which is not valid JSON due to not having quotes around Common, and obviously my module was faulty.

• JSON::Create now features indentation | The Incredible Journey

  In version 0.27 of JSON::Create I added a new indentation feature. This was added basically out of necessity. Originally the purpose of the module was sending short bits of JSON over the internet, but I've been using JSON more and more for processing data too. I've spent quite a long time working on a web site for recognition of Chinese, and I've been using JSON more and more extensively. The basic data file for the web site is a 168 megabyte JSON file. Not indenting this kind of file makes for "interesting" problems if one accidentally opens it in an editor or on a terminal screen, a million characters all on one line tends to confuse the best-written text reading utilities. So after years of suffering the relief is tremendous, and now I have tab-based indentation in JSON::Create.

• Python Convert String to Int - Python Examples – TecAdmin

  Its a common uses of type conversion in any programming language. Python also provides inbuilt methods for type conversion. This tutorial will help to convert a string value to integer value with Python.

If you’re running 1.5.0 or 1.5.1 you probably want to update to this release now as it fixes a hard-to-debug hang we introduced in 1.5.0. If you’re running 1.4.x you might want to let the libcurl changes settle, although we’ve been using it without issue for more than a week on a ton of hardware here. Expect 1.5.3 in a few weeks time, assuming we’re all still alive by then.

The openSUSE distributions offer a variety of graphical desktop environments, one of them being the popular and lightweight Xfce. Up to now there was the stable tested branch available in Tumbleweed already during install. Furthermore, for interested users the development OBS repository xfce:next offered a preview state of what’s coming up next to Tumbleweed.

Xfce Development in openSUSE

Thanks to the hard work of openSUSE’s Xfce team there is a third option: Xfce Development Repository aka RAT In a playful way, a rat is meant to represent the unpolished nature of this release: a rat is scruffy looking compared to a mouse (the cute and beloved mascot of Xfce). And the RAT repository provides packages automatically built right from the Git Master Branch of Xfce upstream development. The goal of this project is to test and preview the new software so that bugs can be spotted and fixed ahead of time by contributing upstream. The packages pull in source code state on a daily basis and offer a quite convenient way to test and eventually help development. So this is where the team builds and tests the latest and unstable releases of Xfce Desktop Environment for openSUSE.

Last week we delivered AMD Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT Linux benchmarks and the performance was great both for Linux gaming as well as the OpenCL compute performance. But for as good as those Big Navi numbers were on the open-source Linux graphics driver stack, they are now even better.

That launch-day testing was based on the Linux state in the second-half of October when the cards arrived and initial (re-)testing began in preparing for the Radeon RX 6800 series reviews -- not only the Radeon RX 6800 series but re-testing all of the other AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards for the comparison too. Thanks to the rate of the open-source graphics driver progression and the newest code always being available, now just days after launch the numbers are even more compelling for Linux gamers with the slightly newer Linux 5.10 and Mesa Git compared to just weeks ago.

In particular were the last minute NGG fixes and other Big Navi tweaks along with an important Radeon RX 6800 (non-XT) fix. There has also been other RADV improvements and more that accumulated in Mesa 21.0-devel this month. On the kernel side, Linux 5.10 is still at play. Both the old and newer Mesa snapshots were also on LLVM 11.0.

Also: Intel: AMD Gimps On Battery-Powered Laptop Performance - But DPTF On Linux Still Sucks - Phoronix

• How to Install and Configure Hadoop on Ubuntu 20.04 – TecAdmin

  Hadoop is a free, open-source and Java-based software framework used for storage and processing of large datasets on clusters of machines. It uses HDFS to store its data and process these data using MapReduce. It is an ecosystem of Big Data tools that are primarily used for data mining and machine learning.

  Apache Hadoop 3.3 come with noticeable improvements any many bug fixes over the previous releases. It has four major components such as Hadoop Common, HDFS, YARN, and MapReduce.

• How to create a Cloudwatch Event Rule in AWS

  A near-real-time stream of system events that describe changes in AWS resources is delivered by CloudWatch Events. We can create a rule that matches events and route them to one or more target functions. We can use CloudWatch Events to schedule automated actions. These actions can be self-triggered at certain times using cron or rate expressions. We can have EC2 instances, Lambda functions, Kinesis Data Streams, ECS tasks, Batch jobs, SNS topics, SQS queues, and a few more services as target endpoints for CloudWatch Events. To know more about Cloudwatch events, visit the official AWS documentation here.

• How to use Bash file test operators in Linux

  File Test Operators are used in Linux to check and verify attributes of files like ownership or if they are a symlink. Every Test operator has a specific purpose. The most important operators are -e and -s. In this article, you will learn to test files using the if statement followed by some important test operators in Linux.

• How To Install Wireguard on CentOS 8 - idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Wireguard on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Wireguard is an open-source, dependable, advanced, VPN tunneling software you can install and use right now to create a secure, point-to-point connection to a server. It is cross-platform and can run almost anywhere, including Linux, Windows, Android, and macOS. Wireguard is a peer-to-peer VPN. it does not use the client-server model. Depending on its configuration, a peer can act as a traditional server or client.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of the Wireguard VPN on CentOS 8.

• How To Install NVM on CentOS/RHEL 7 – TecAdmin

  NVM stands for Node Version Manager is a command-line utility for managing Node versions. Sometimes you required to deploy multiple node application with different-2 versions.

  Managing the multiple Node.js versions for differnt-2 projects are a pain for the developers. But NVM helped to easily manage multiple active Node.js versions on a single system.

  This tutorial will explain you to install NVM on CentOS/RHEL 7/6 systems and manage multiple Node.js versions.

• How to install Kali Linux 2020.4 - YouTube

  In this video, I am going to show how to install Kali Linux 2020.4.

• How to make your own personal VPN in under 30 minutes

  In the Distribution box, choose the newest available Ubuntu LTS release — as of the time of writing, that's 20.04 LTS. Below that, pick the region you want your VPN to be located in. It's possible to change the location later, but you'll have to contact Linode support. For the plan, select 'Nanode 1GB' from the list of Shared CPU options. VPNs don't need much processing power, so this low-spec option will work just fine.

• Use nnn as a File Manager for Linux Terminal - Make Tech Easier

  If you have used the Linux terminal for an extended period of time, you probably know some of the useful commands, like cd to move into and out of folders, create new ones, and copy or move files. Still, you may prefer how desktop file managers are more user-friendly and quicker for some tasks. In that case, you’ll love nnn.

  nnn is the equivalent of a desktop file manager for the terminal. Although not an ultra-complex solution like Midnight Commander, nnn is light on resources, fast, and allows you to navigate your file system without having to type commands.

• PUBG Mobile India release for Android phones; unofficial teaser states that countdown has begun

• Google Is Testing End-to-End Encryption in Android Messages

• Google Gifts 5G Android Smartphones with 'the Mandalorian' AR App

• Google Podcasts reaches 50 million downloads on Android, so someone is clearly using it

• How to Transfer Music from Android to iPhone

• How To Install An Android Head Unit In A Car?

• How to Enable Google Verified Calls Feature on Android

• OriginOS: Features, availability, and everything you need to know (Updated)

• OnePlus 8T gets another battery life boost with latest OxygenOS update

• New Xiaomi Android 11 roadmap reveals that the Redmi Note 8 Pro and Redmi Note 8 duo may receive the update after all

• Android App GO SMS Pro Exposed Users' Private Messages Publicly

• 3 Ways to Open RAR Files on Android – Gadgets To Use

• Sony might be working on Android alternative to Apple iPhone 12 mini

• Flipboard Rolls Out Dark Mode for Android Users

• Study reveals Android users are ... - Manufacturers

• Should you buy a cheap Android phone on Black Friday?

I chalk this up to a few factors. First, Linux was practically born on the Web. In Linux’s infancy, Linus Torvalds not only made the kernel available online, but he attracted a throng of would-be contributors via Usenet who collaborated in Linux’s development. The Internet has been a significant distribution channel ever since, facilitating the obtainment and installation of desktop Linux distributions in the large majority of cases today.

Second, since one could not easily purchase a computer with Linux preinstalled until around the last decade, online communities were essential for fielding the questions of Linux initiates. It is comforting to know there are veterans who can help when setting up an entirely new OS, especially one so off the beaten path. This has traditionally been, and remains, Linux’s main analog to customer support that competing OSes offer.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, Linux simply offers so many choices. Windows gives you Windows the Windows way. On Mac, you get Mac the way Mac was intended. Not so with desktop Linux. Why? Simply put, there is no one “desktop Linux.” With Linux, every distribution gives you a completely different suite of user programs built atop the kernel, sometimes with its own repackaging of the kernel itself.

Not least of the cornucopia of options that the desktop Linux world offers is that of desktop environments. Most distros present a handful of curated desktop environments. Between all the Linux distros out there, one will encounter literally dozens of them. The only hope a humble Linux user has of figuring out which one they might want, aside from taking them all for a spin, is to ask around. Users also really get into advocating for particular desktops. This is nearly always good-natured, leading to amusing, if not informative, discussion threads.

• NVIDIA Releases Beta Driver With Khronos Vulkan Ray Tracing Support

  While NVIDIA has supported its own vendor-specific Vulkan ray-tracing extension on Windows and Linux since the GeForce RTX GPUs originally debuted, they are moving quick to support the Khronos ray-tracing extensions for Vulkan given the industry adoption and games coming to market likely opting for using the KHR version.

  This morning with Vulkan 1.2.162 the Vulkan KHR ray-tracing extensions were made official after being out in provisional form since earlier this year. NVIDIA has now released beta drivers for Windows and Linux that support these finalized versions.

• Vulkan Ray Tracing becomes official with Vulkan 1.2.162 (updated) | GamingOnLinux

  The day has arrived, along with the release of Vulkan 1.2.162 being tagged in the Vulkan-Docs repository on GitHub the Vulkan Ray Tracing extensions are now officially released. From being announced as a provisional set in March 2020, The Khronos Group formally announced it's done.

  "Welcome to the era of portable, cross-vendor, cross-platform ray tracing acceleration!" - Daniel Koch, NVIDIA

• Vulkan 1.2.162 Released With Ray-Tracing Support Promoted - Phoronix

  Earlier this year Vulkan ray-tracing arrived in provisional form while with today's Vulkan 1.2.162 specification update this functionality has been promoted to stable and ready for broad industry support.

  The Vulkan ray-tracing support is now deemed final and out of the provisional guard. This includes the finalized versions of VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline, VK_KHR_ray_query, VK_KHR_pipeline_library, and VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations.

The folks at Pine64 are designing an official keyboard accessory for their Linux-powered smartphone. Eventually you’ll be able to purchase a physical keyboard that snaps onto the phone by replacing the back cover, and which will allow you to type with your thumbs without covering the display.

Or you could just 3D print your own keyboard for the PinePhone. That’s what one person seems to have done, and thanks to a series of design files posted a Thingiverse, you may be able to make your own… although there’s still some work required to make it fully functional.

The GPD Pocket and Pocket 2 are tiny laptops small enough to fold up and slide into (some) pockets… thus the name. With 7 inch touchscreen displays and QWERTY keyboards, they’re about as small as you can get while still supporting touch-typing on a laptop.

GPD ships the Pocket mini-laptops with Windows 10 software, but independent developers have been porting alternate operating systems for years. You can run GNU/Linux distributions (there’s even a version of Ubuntu MATE designed for these little PCs). And developer Keith Myers has been offering up builds of Chromium OS for those that want to turn their GPD devices into tiny Chromebooks.

• Order from chaos: Red Hat and Starburst come together to simplify data access

  Enterprises rely on data to bring order to their organizations through automation, business process management and optimization, and increased intelligence that leads to better decision making. Yet data can be difficult to access, especially when it exists in many places.

  Today, data can be found in data centers, the cloud, vendor environments, and in traditional and software-defined data sources. Data ingested from the network edge may be aggregated at remote locations, transactional databases and data warehouses typically live in the core datacenter, while cloud-native applications generally store data in a private and/or public cloud. Data stores can be found in distributed, hybrid cloud, traditional, and modern applications—in many cases within the same organization.

• Extending choice for more flexible, more secure open hybrid cloud: Red Hat Enterprise Linux on AWS Outposts

  Linux and open hybrid cloud go hand-in-hand - the power, flexibility and scale of hybrid cloud is made possible by the foundation of the Linux operating system. The world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), already delivers this foundation across nearly every public cloud, server architecture and virtualized environment, but customer needs aren’t static. As new options for hybrid cloud computing emerge, we work to extend RHEL to meet these deployments, highlighted by support today for RHEL on AWS Outposts.

  While many organizations are able to reach outside of the confines of their datacenter to explore public and hybrid cloud options, some cannot due to unique security or compliance needs. Outposts bring the scale and power of Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud to corporate datacenters in an appliance managed by AWS experts. Now, the organizations using Outposts can turn to RHEL to provide greater consistency across their IT estate, from traditional bare-metal servers, virtualized environments, private cloud infrastructure and their gateway to public cloud resources.

  [...]

  Our goal with RHEL is to deliver an operating system that spans the open hybrid cloud, regardless of the path that an organization takes or the tools that they choose to use. With this new support for AWS Outposts, we have continued to drive customer choice in how they build hybrid cloud deployments with a single common platform in RHEL.

• Run serverless functions, Kubernetes ingress controllers comparisons, and more industry trends | Opensource.com

  As part of my role as a principal communication strategist at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends. Here are some of my and their favorite articles from that update.

• Fedora 34 Change: Route all Audio to PipeWire (System-Wide Change)

• Fedora 34 Might Try To Use PipeWire By Default To Replace PulseAudio/JACK

  Red Hat for several years now has been working on PipeWire to overhaul audio/video stream management on Linux while being able to fill the duties currently managed by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK and being engineered with Wayland and Flatpak security in mind among other modern Linux technologies. With Fedora 34 next spring they may try to ship PipeWire by default in place of JACK, PulseAudio, and even legacy ALSA.

  For a while now Fedora has offered PipeWire packages but not yet used by default when it comes to audio handling. A pending change proposal for Fedora 34 would now route all audio through PipeWire rather than the existing JACK and PulseAudio.

  With the proposed plan, Fedora 34 next spring with PipeWire would take over all desktop audio duties by default from PulseAudio. PipeWire provides a functionally compatible implementation of the PulseAudio daemon so existing Linux software should continue to work fine. Similarly, PipeWire would provide F34's JACK support for professional audio needs. For legacy ALSA clients, an ALSA plug-in for PipeWire allows routing audio through it as well.

• Linux-driven module and starter kit tap Renesas RZ/G2

  TQ’s “TQMaRZG2x” module runs Linux on a dual- to octa-core, Cortex-A57 and -A53 based RZ/G2 processor with up to 8GB LPDDR4 and 64GB eMMC plus an optional dev kit and -40 to 85°C support.

  When reporting on the SMARC 2.0 SoM collaboration between Renesas and RelySys last week featuring Renesas’ scalable, 64-bit RZ/G2 processor, we saw that we missed a September announcement from TQ Embedded about its own RZ/G2 module. The 77 x 50mm TQMaRZG2x is listed as “new” and is available with an optional new Embedded Starterkit STKaRZG2x evaluation board. The module is the first of several Renesas based products from TQ.

• Mass-Produced, Librem 5 Linux Smartphone Begins Shipping to Customers

  Their announcement notes their work on software making desktop applications "adaptive" to phone form factors, adding "This suite of software has now become the most popular software stack to use on other handheld Linux hardware." And they close with an appreciative comment from Purism's founder and CEO Todd Weaver:

  "Shipping the Librem 5 has been an immense multi-year developmental effort. It is the culmination of people's desire to see an alternative to Android and iOS and fund it, coupled with dedication from a team of experts addressing hardware, kernel, operating system, and applications that has turned a lofty near-impossible goal into reality. We have built a strong foundation and with the continued support of customers, the community, and developers, we will continue to deliver revolutionary products like the Librem 5 running PureOS."

• Understanding Open Source Hardware

  Open source hardware is “a set of design principles and legal practices, not a specific type of object,” says Opensource.com. Thus, although the term is often associated with electronics, it can apply to other objects as well, including boats, houses, industrial machines, and medical devices.

  The main principles defining open source hardware are similar to those of open source software. The Open Source Hardware (OSHW) Definition 1.0 is in fact “based on the Open Source Definition for Open Source Software, which was created by Bruce Perens and the Debian developers as the Debian Free Software Guidelines.”

• Evaluating Precursor’s Hardware Security « bunnie's blog

  Hardware security is a multi-faceted problem. First, there is the question of “can I trust this piece of hardware was built correctly?”; specifically, are there implants and back doors buried in the hardware? We refer to this as the “supply chain problem”. It is a particularly challenging problem, given the global nature of our supply chains, with parts pulled from the four corners of the world, passing through hundreds of hands before reaching our doorstep. Precursor addresses this problem head-on with open, verifiable hardware: the keyboard, display, and motherboard are easy to access and visually inspect for correct construction. No factory or third-party tool is ever trusted with secret material. Precursor is capable of generating its own secret keys and sealing them within the hardware, without additional tools.

  We also use a special kind of logic chip for the CPU – an FPGA – configured by the user, not the factory, to be exactly the CPU that the user specified. Crucially, most users have no evidence-based reason to trust that a CPU contains exactly what it claims to contain; few have the inspection capability to verify a chip in a non-destructive manner. On the other hand, with an FPGA, individual users can craft and inspect CPU bitstreams with readily available tools. Furthermore, the design can be modified and upgraded to incorporate countermeasures against hardware exploits discovered in the FPGA’s underlying fabric. In other words, the current trustability situation for an ASIC-style CPU is basically “I surrender”, whereas with an FPGA, users have the power to configure and patch their CPUs.

  [...]

  Once Precursor has been glued shut, we propose the easiest method to recover the ciphertext and to gain access to the JTAG ports is to put the Precursor device into a precision CNC milling machine, mill out the PCB from the back side, and then place the remaining assembly into a pogo-pin based mechanism to perform the readout. This of course destroys the Precursor device in the process, but it is probably the most direct and reliable method of recovering the encryption keys, as it is very similar to an existing technique used for certain types of attacks on iPhones. Storing keys in BBRAM can greatly complicate the task of milling out the PCB by creating a high risk of accidental key erasure, but a sufficiently precise CNC with a non-conductive ceramic bit, or a precision laser-based ablation milling system can reduce the risk of key loss substantially. Cryogenic cooling of the FPGA chip itself may also help to preserve key material in the case of very short accidental power glitches.

• ASUS unveils Tinker Board 2 SBC with faster Rockchip RK3399 / OP1 processor

  ASUS surprised the maker community in 2017 with the introduction of the Rochchip RK3288 powered Tinker Board to compete as Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. It was followed by Tinker Board S with built-in storage and other new features, as well as Tinker Board Edge T and Edge R SBC’s both with an AI accelerator namely Google Edge TPU and the NPU inside Rockchip RK3399Pro. The company has now launched a new model called Tinker Board 2 without AI accelerator, but featuring Rockchip RK3399, or more exactly the higher grade Rockchip OP1 used in Chromebooks, delivering 96% faster single-thread performance and a 64% boost in multi-core performance compared to the Rockchip RK3288 processor found in the original Tinker Board, while the GPU is around 28% faster with glmark2-es2 off-screen benchmark.

• $89 Lite3DP resin 3D printer fits in the palm of your hand (Crowdfunding)

  I thought Selpic A-star 3D printer we recently covered was already small, but if you’re looking for an ultra-portable printer, it will be hard to beat the Arduino-based, open-source hardware Lite3DP resin 3D printer that can fit in the palm of your hand, and weighs just around 350 grams.

Switching operating systems is no small feat. You have to learn to find your way around the alien environment, traverse a new applications menu, and navigate through the nooks and crannies of the system settings to set up your new digs as per your requirements.

It can be an inundating experience, especially for people coming from proprietary operating systems like Windows. Linux distributions, thanks to their open source nature, offer a lot more access than their closed source cousins, which makes the transition particularly difficult for many users.

This is where these specialized distros, designed for Windows users, come into the picture. Their objective is to allow users to experience the goodness of Linux while minimizing the learning curve that’s associated when switching to a different operating system. They all take various steps to ensure that the transition is as effortless as possible.

• Linux in 2020 [Ed: This is clearly conflating the kernel (Linux) with GNU, which predates it by almost one decade. It also perpetuates the myth that only Ubuntu brought GNU/Linux to the masses.]

  Hello. Today I would like to share with you, my perspective of Linux. Please take note that this is all my opinions and the way I see it. If you feel that I missed something very important or have a fact or two wrong, please let me know.

  So Linux was announced for the first time, on the 25 of August 1991 by a Finnish student, called Linus Torvalds. Little did he know, and the world knows that 30 years later the world would be using it on a daily basis.

  So From 1991, Linux has been maturing several Linux Distros (operating systems) came and went away, with a few of the first ones still around today. But it was mainly/only for those who are computer "geeks" and not for everyday users. But that all changed in October 2004, when the first version of Ubuntu was released.

• Reiser5 Logical Volume Management - Updates

    Reiser5 Logical Volume Management - Updates
  
  
  I am happy to inform, that Logical Volumes stuff has become more
  stable. Also we introduce the following changes, which make logical
  volumes administration more flexible and simple:
  
  
                    1. No balancing by default
  
  
  Now all volume operations except brick removal don't invoke balancing
  by default. Instead, they mark volume as "unbalanced". To complete any
  operation with balancing specify option -B (--with-balance), or run
  volume.reiser4(8) utility with the option -b (--balance) later.
  
  This allows to speed up more than one operations over logical volume
  being performed at once. For example, if you want to add more than one
  brick to your volume at once, first add all the bricks, then run
  balancing. There is no need to balance a volume between the addition
  operations.
  
  
                      2. Removal completion
  
  
  Operation of brick removal always includes balancing procedure as its
  part. This procedure moves out all data block from the brick to be
  removed to remaining bricks of the volume. Thus, brick removal is
  usually a long operation, which may be interrupted for various reasons
  In such cases the volume is automatically marked with an "incomplete
  removal" flag.
  
  It is not allowed to perform essential volume operations on a volume
  marked as "with incomplete removal": first, user should complete
  removal by running volume.reiser4 utility with option
  -R (--finish-removal). Otherwise, the operation will return error
  (-EBUSY).
  
  There is no other restrictions: you are allowed to add a brick to
  unbalanced volume, and even remove a brick from an unbalanced volume
  (assuming it is not incomplete removal).
  
  Comment. "--finish-removal" is a temporary option. In the future the
  file system will detect incomplete removal and automatically perform
  removal completion by itself.
  
  
                  3. Balancing is always defined
  
  
  Operation of volume balancing (regardless of its balanced status) is
  always defined, and can be launched at any moment. If the volume is
  balanced, then the balancing procedure just scans the volume without
  any useful work.
  
  It is allowed to run more than one balancing threads on the same
  volume, however currently it will be inefficient: other threads will
  be always going after the single leader without doing useful work.
  Efficient volume balancing by many threads (true parallelism) is not a
  trivial task. We estimate its complexity as 2/5.
  
  
            4. Restore regular distribution on the volume
  
  
  Custom (defined by user) file migration can break fairness of data
  distribution among the bricks. To restore regular (fair) distribution
  on the volume, run volume.reiser4 utility with the option -S
  (--restore-regular). It launches a balancing procedure, which performs
  mandatory data migration of all files (including the ones marked as
  "immobile") in accordance with regular distribution policy on the
  volume. Moreover, when the balancing procedure encounters a file
  marked as "immobile", its "immobile" flag is cleared up.
  
  
                           5. How to test
  
  
  The new functionality is available starting with the kernel patch
  reiser4-for-linux-5.10-rc3 and reiser4progs-2.0.4 (Software Framework
  Release number of both is 5.1.3).
  

• Reiser5 Stabilizing Its Logical Volume Functionality - Phoronix

  This New Year's Eve will mark one year since the announcement of the in-development Reiser5 file-system. While the outlook for getting Reiser5 upstreamed into the mainline kernel remains murky given the out-of-tree status of Reiser4, Edward Shishkin does continue advancing this latest Reiser file-system iteration.

  Since last year's initial Reiser5 announcement, more features continue to be ironed out for this evolution of Reiser4. The latest Reiser5 functionality hitting a point of stability is its logical volume management.

We are pleased to announce the release of GNU Guix version 1.2.0, right in time to celebrate the eighth anniversary of Guix!

The release comes with ISO-9660 installation images, a virtual machine image, and with tarballs to install the package manager on top of your GNU/Linux distro, either from source or from binaries. Guix users can update by running guix pull.

It’s been almost 7 months since the last release, during which 200 people contributed code and packages, and a number of people contributed to other important tasks—code review, system administration, translation, web site updates, Outreachy mentoring, you name it!

There’s been more than 10,200 commits in that time frame and it is the challenge of these release notes to summarize all that activity.

With Wine on an annual stable release cadence for shipping new stable feature releases generally at the beginning of each calendar year after a year's worth of bi-weekly development snapshots, Wine 6.0 is due for release around January.

Following Friday's Wine 5.22 release, Wine project founder and leader Alexandre Julliard sent out word this morning that the processes will soon begin rolling for that Wine 6.0 release.

Two weeks from now for the next development release will also mark the start of the code freeze for Wine 6.0. Following that, the Wine 6.0 release candidates will continue until the official Wine 6.0.0 release is ready to ship.

• An introduction to Prometheus metrics and performance monitoring | Enable Sysadmin

  Use Prometheus to gather metrics into usable, actionable entries, giving you the data you need to manage alerts and performance information in your environment.

• Why does Wireshark say no interfaces found – Linux Hint

  Wireshark is a very famous, open-source network capturing and analyzing tool. While using Wireshark, we may face many common issues. One of the common issues is “No Interfaces are listed in Wireshark”. Let’s understand the issue and find a solution in Linux OS.If you do not know Wireshark basic, then check Wireshark Basic first, then come back here.

• How to Solve “Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)” In Ubuntu

  It’s not uncommon to run into an issue of broken packages in Ubuntu and other Debian-based distributions. Sometimes, when you upgrade the system or install a software package, you may encounter the ‘Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code’ error.

  For example, a while back, I tried to upgrade Ubuntu 18.04 and I bumped into the dpkg error as shown below.

  [...]

  This type of dpkg error points to an issue with the package installer usually caused by the interruption of an installation process or a corrupt dpkg database.

  Any of the above-mentioned solutions should fix this error. If you have come this far, then it’s our hope that the issue has been successfully resolved and that you were able to reinstall your software package.

• inttf NVIDIA Patcher [BASH Script] – If Not True Then False

  This is a BASH script, which download NVIDIA installer, extract it, patch it and make new patched installer package. This is very quickly tested alpha version so if you have any problems please let me know or if this works as it should you can also let me know. I use here currently Isaak I. Aleksandrov patches with my own modifications.

• How to increase the size of your swapfile | Arcolinux.com

  Always think out of the box. Do not restrict yourself to just Arch Linux articles or ArcoLinux articles.

• How to Install and Use PHP Composer on Linux Distributions

  The PHP composer is a dependency manager of the PHP framework that you can use on your Linux system to install PHP modules, applications, and packages. The PHP composer is a command-line based tool for Linux. If you are a programmer, you might know that different languages use different package dependency managers to install and update modules inside the system. Like, Python uses Pip, RUBY uses Bundler; in the same way, you can use the composer tool to install the PHP modules and packages on your system.

• Synchronize Files Between Multiple Systems With Syncthing - OSTechNix

  In this step by step tutorial, we are going to learn what is Syncthing, how to install Syncthing on Linux, how to synchronize files between multiple systems in real time, and finally how to troubleshoot common Syncthing problems.

• Install the XFCE desktop on your Raspberry PI - PragmaticLinux

  In this article you’ll learn how to install the XFCE desktop on your Raspberry PI. We’ll take a minimal install of the Raspberry PI operating system as a starting point. The XFCE installation on your Raspberry PI includes setting up all necessary building blocks, such as: display server, display manager, session manager, window manager and desktop environment.

Lights! Camera! Action!

... nearly. It's Beta time for Kodi 19.x "Matrix", so let's take another step towards the Great Unveiling.

As we now move into Beta, this release is much more about fixes than features: while there will be the odd new functionality, we're concentrating very much more on getting everything working properly from this point.

To recap, then, one of the main objectives of 19.x "Matrix" is to release a production version of Kodi with Python 3 addons as early in 2021 as we can. That can only happen with enthusiastic community support, lots of good humour and willingness to see the best in others - well, that and coffee/beer (delete as applicable), of course!

Also: Kodi 19 Now In Beta With Python 3 Addons, AV1 Software Decoding