Linux Mint 19.1 XFCE is the latest release of Linux Mint 19.1 that uses lightweight Xfce desktop environment 4.12. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable.

The Update Manager is able to list mainline kernels and to show their support status. The Software Sources tool was given a new look. Similar to the welcome screen, it’s now using an Xapp sidebar and a headerbar. The Language Settings and the Input Methods are now two separate applications and the user interface for the Input Methods tool was revamped. It uses an icon sidebar and now shows a dedicated page for each supported language.

Based on Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS an powered by Linux Kernel 4.19, Linux Mint 19.1 Xfce edition also include pre-installed applications Thunar File Manager 1.6.15, Mozilla Firefox 65, Archive Manager 3.28, Gnome Disk 3.28, Hexchat 2.14, Thundebird 60, GIMP 2.8, Transmission Torrent Client 2.92, Rythmbox Music Manager 3.4.2, VLC Player 3.0.4, Xfce Dictionary 0.8, Libre Office Suite 6.0.6, Xfce Terminal 0.8, GNOME Fonts 3.28, Synaptic package Manager 0.84.

• VirtualBox: resize hard disk - with modifyhd and snapshots

• 4 Methods To Change The HostName In Linux

• How to install Kitematic on Pop!_OS

• How to set up a DHCP server with Ubuntu server 18.04

• Etcher – Write .iso’s to USB sticks in 3 clicks

• [Update: Pulled] T-Mobile's Android 9 Pie updates for Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+ arrive with RCS Universal Profile in tow

• Poll: Is Your Phone on Android Pie Yet?

• Galaxy Note 8 full Android Pie update now rolling out in Eastern Europe

• OnePlus announces Google Duo integration for all its devices with Android 9.0 Pie update

• Nokia 6 and Indian Nokia 8 to get Android Pie next week

• Nokia's most exciting Android phone ever just leaked

• Nintendo Switch emulator released for Android

• There’s a Nintendo Switch emulator for Android out in the wild

• Eleven Sports adds Amazon Fire TV stick and Android TV apps

• Where is the best place to buy the Honor View 20?

• New Samsung smartwatch, fitness trackers, and earbuds all confirmed in major leak

• Android Messages vs SMS Organizer: How Do They Differ

• Google Chrome for Android is testing a new grid layout for tabs

• Happy Australian Birthday to Google’s Android as today marks 10 years since the HTC Dream release

• 10 years on, what was your first Android phone?

• Android Circuit: Galaxy S10 To Launch February 20th, On Sale Early March, Here Are The New Features

• System76 refreshes Serval WS Linux laptop with 9th Gen Intel Core CPUs and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-Series GPUs

  Nowadays, many consumers put a premium on having a thin and light computer. This is understandable, as no one wants to lug around a big and heavy notebook. With that said, some people only care about raw power -- weight and size be damned. System76's Serval WS is one such laptop -- insanely powerful, but boy howdy, it is a biggun! The 15-inch model weighs 7.5 pounds, while the 17-inch variant tips the scales at 8.6!

  Today, System76 launches a refreshed version of the Linux laptop. It features desktop-class 9th Generation Intel Core processors, which is cool, but arguably more intriguing is the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 20-Series GPU options -- 2060, 2070, or 2080. Yeah, this refreshed Serval WS is an absolute beast!

• HP Chromebook X2 down to $399 for My Best Buy members

  Wow. I just heard from Scott, an About Chromebooks reader, who tipped me off to a $200 savings on the HP Chromebook X2. This is specifically for my Best Buy members as part of an early access President’s Day sale, which is open to all consumers starting Friday. Normally priced at $599.00, the HP Chromebook X2 is down to $399 until midnight tonight, central time.

• Samsung Announces Galaxy Tab S5e Tablet with Android 9 Pie, Ultra Thin Design

  Samsung announced today the Galaxy Tab S5e tablet with a stylish and versatile design, and components to help you enjoy the best possible content from your favorite streaming services.
  The Galaxy Tab S5e tablet is built for connectivity and entertainment, says Samsung, which means that it comes with support for 4K UHD (Ultra HD) content so you won't have to make any compromise when watching your favorite TV shows and movies. Its 10.5-inch Edge to Edge Super AMOLED display features 16:10 screen ratio and UHD 4K (3840x2160) at 60fps video playback.

• Windows 10 Will Finally Offer Easy Access to Linux Files [Ed: No, this is more WSL entrapment. They try to prevent people from using proper GNU/Linux with the actual kernel, either standalone or dual-boot. This is also about surveillance on one's files, keys, keystrokes, everything.]

• Zowe Makes Mainframe Evergreen [Ed: Swapnil Bhartiya greenwashing and openwashing 2-in-1]

  Zowe also offers a vendor-agnostic experience allowing users to mix and match tooling and technologies. It provides interoperability, through the latest web technologies, products, and solutions from multiple vendors, and it allows developers to use the familiar, industry-standard, open source tools to access mainframe resources and services.

• The ibmvnic driver with SR-IOV is now supported by SLES 12 and SLES 15 on IBM POWER9 processor-based systems

  The ibmvnic driver enables PowerVM Single Root I/O Virtualizations (SR-IOV) for improved network capabilities including reduced systems processor utilization, decreased network latency, and enforcement of network Quality of Service.

• Hollow Knight: Silksong Announced for PC, Mac, Linux, and Switch

  The new sequel is coming to Windows PC, Mac, and Linux, with no release date. Featured above, you can view the announcement trailer for the game.

• Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus Now Available for Mac, Linux

  The game launched for Windows PC via Steam back in November, and the developers have now updated the game with official Mac and Linux support. The developers have also teased some free content coming soon, including new Troops, additional maps, a new Discipline, and multiple difficulty settings. You can read the full patch notes here.

• Retro FPS Dusk is out on Mac and Linux

  Mac and Linux users can now get cracking in Dusk, a retro FPS inspired by classics like Doom and Quake.

• Archman – KDE Plasma Edition 2019.02 – Kararlı Sürüm Hazır

• ARCOLINUX -D -B 19.2

  Now the iso , packages and tutorials for Xmonad have been created, it was time to make the tutorials about deepin. It was an ideal time to take another look at deepin and see what we can improve before making the tuto’s.

  Deepin can be a very eye-candy desktop just of the box. With some minor tweaking you can change it to your liking.

• ArcoLinux 19.02 Run Through

  In this video, we look at ArcoLinux 19.02. Enjoy!

• Mir 1.1.1 - release candidate

  I’ve just kicked off the process for a bugfix release of Mir. An initial release-candidate is currently building in ppa:mir-tream/rc.

• Mir 1.1.1 RC1 Has Fixes For PostmarketOS, Demo Shells Using Wayland

  Mir 1.1 was released back in December as the first post-1.0 feature update while now preparing for release is the Mir 1.1.1 maintenance milestone.

  Canonical's Alan Griffiths has tagged the Mir 1.1.1 release candidate today as the newest bug-fix release. Highlights include:

  - Fixing issues with PostmarketOS support, particularly around its usage of the musl C library rather than Glibc. PostmarketOS is the mobile Linux distribution derived from Alpine Linux that's been having a steady following in recent times and running on the Nexus 5/7, Nokia N9, and other devices.

• The developer’s dilemma: Choosing between Go and Rust

  If you were to make a list of important programming languages that have appeared in the past decade, Go and Rust would almost certainly be featured on it.

  Similarly, if you were to sit down and think about which programming languages are best suited to developing secure, microservices-friendly frameworks or applications today, you might find yourself debating between Go and Rust.

  If you’re struggling to decide whether Go or Rust is a better language for your development needs, keep reading. This post compares Go and Rust, explaining how they are similar, how they’re different, and what each can do for you.

• pprint.isrecursive: Check if object requires recursive representation

• Performance benchmark on mdds R-tree

  I must say that I am overall very pleased with the performance of R-tree. I can already envision various use cases where R-tree will be immensely useful. One area I’m particularly interested in is spreadsheet application’s formula dependency tracking mechanism which involves tracing through chained dependency targets to broadcast cell value changes. Since the spreadsheet organizes its data in terms of row and column positions which is 2-dimensional in nature, R-tree can probably be useful for speeding things up in that area.

• In memory of Monty Hall

  To explore this a bit further and to have a nice exercise with R, a small simulation of games is created.

• Polishing Pitivi's viewer

  In the Pitivi video editor, the viewer is quite important, as it shows the video. Our viewer also shows a discreet frame around a clip selected in the timeline, making it easy to resize and position the video of the clip by dragging. Below is the story of the viewer updates in the past year.

  [...]

  Normally the viewer is used to display the project video at the playhead position, but we also use it to display the start or end margins of a clip when it is being trimmed.

  [...]

  Pitivi benefits from the GStreamer multimedia framework used on most Linux desktops and we contribute back in multiple ways. We could use some more hands on Pitivi. Contributions of any type would be greatly appreciated. Come chat with us. If you're a student, you can join us doing a GSoC internship this summer!

• PackageKit is dead, long live, well, something else

  It’s probably no surprise to many of you that PackageKit has been in maintenance mode for quite some time. Although started over ten years ago (!) it’s not really had active maintenance since about 2014. Of course, I’ve still been merging PRs and have been slinging tarballs over the wall every few months, but nothing new was happening with the project, and I’ve worked on many other things since.

  I think it’s useful for a little retrospective. PackageKit was conceived as an abstraction layer over about a dozen different package management frameworks. Initially it succeeded, with a lot of front ends UIs being written for the PackageKit API, making the Linux desktop a much nicer place for many years. Over the years, most package managers have withered and died, and for the desktop at least really only two remain, .rpm and .deb. The former being handled by the dnf PackageKit backend, and the latter by aptcc.

• How to watch for releases of upstream projects

  Do you want to know when a new version of your favorite project is released? Do you want to make your job as packager easier? If so, this article is for you. It introduces you to the world of release-monitoring.org. You’ll see how it can help you catch up with upstream releases.

• 23 Electron Applications You Should Know About

  Here we present the best Electron applications available for Linux desktops, including Ubuntu, as well as macOS and Windows too.

  We’ve written about a lot of diverse Electron apps over the past few years, ranging from desktop podcast clients to popular IDEs.

  Not everyone appreciates Electron’s cross-platform versatility as much as we do. Heck, I once wrote an opinion piece explaining why Electron apps aren’t evil. Some have issues with the amount of memory Electron apps use up, the CPU cycles they eat up, and the disk size they take up.

  But there are those who don’t mind using the odd Electron app here or there, to plug a gap. So I figured a roundup spotlighting some to the very best Electron applications available for Linux (and other OSes) could still be of interest.

• 10 Benefits of Publishing Your App in the Snap Store [Video]

  Canonical's Alan Pope lists 10 benefits of publishing apps in the Snap store. His talk was recorded at the FOSDEM Linux conference in Belgium.

• NFV, virtualized central offices, and the Need for VNF Data Protection

  Network Function Virtualization (NFV) is designed to provide value around modularity and flexibility. NFV can allow different radio access networks and customer applications to run on one physical network so that the 5G revolution becomes a reality. Critical enterprise compliance requirements, including data protection and disaster recovery, must still be met during this race to modernization.

• Little Backup Box: A Handful of Improvements and a Dash of PHP

  My every Little Backup Box improvement project starts with the same thought, It does the job but... This time around I wanted to fix and improve several things. Firstly, since the DLNA feature wasn't working at all, I removed it altogether a while ago. Subsequently, I missed the ability to browse and view freshly backed up photos on many occasions. Secondly, I'm not a big fan of Python. There is no particular reason for that, I just never really warmed up to the language. On the other hand, PHP has always been my personal favorite and go-to scripting language, no matter what some professional developers think of it. So I wanted to swap the Python-based Little Backup Box web interface with a simpler, and arguably more elegant, version written in PHP. Finally, Little Backup Box theoretically can be installed on any Linux machine running a Debian-based Linux distribution. But due to some values hard-wired in the scripts, deploying Little Backup Box on any system other than Raspbian requires some manual tweaking. This is something I wanted to fix as well.

• What is Oracle Linux? And where to Download it

  Oracle Linux is based on and fully compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux ( source code and binaries ). It has the exact same package as the same version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and has the exact same source code as the Red Hat distribution. There are approximately 1000 packages in the distribution. Even if the source code of the two is compared byte by byte, there is no difference. The only change is to remove the trademark and copyright information. So, that’s why we can call it an Oracle Enterprise Linux.

  Oracle Linux, the first version of Oracle released in early 2006, one of the Linux distributions, to better support Oracle software and hardware support. Because of the enterprise-level support plan UBL (Unbreakable Linux) provided by Oracle, many people called it an indestructible Linux.

• Linux chops are crucial in containerized world, says Red Hat executive

  How are companies in 2019 going to make multicloud a practical reality? The jury seems to have selected containers (a virtualized method for running distribute applications). This is why legacies and startups alike are flooding the market with container products. Which should companies choose?

  Ever see those Red Hat Inc. T-shirts that say “Containers Are Linux”? That pretty much sums up Red Hat’s bid for the containerization championship.

  “As you move into that space of Kubernetes, and containers and orchestration, you really want someone who knows Linux,” said Stefanie Chiras (pictured), vice president and general manager of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux business unit, known as RHEL, at Red Hat.

  Chiras spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed RHEL 8 and the crucial importance of Linux for containers. (* Disclosure below.)

• Red Hat Delivers Unified Integration Platform for Cloud-Native Application Development

• Red Hat Extends Datacenter Infrastructure Control, Automation with Latest Version of Red Hat CloudForms

There are major hurdles to overcome when bringing a new processor architecture to market. Today’s fast-paced development practices demand that processor offerings be stable with the promise of a long market lifetime. Further, they must come to market with substantial support in the form of development tools, software libraries, operating systems, emulators, debuggers, and more. The emerging RISC-V instruction set architecture has faced and is overcoming those hurdles and is poised to rapidly gain broad acceptance across the design industry.

There are several reasons the RISC-V ISA has been garnering a lot of interest. For one, the ISA is open source, meaning that anyone can design a processor to implement the ISA without paying a licensing fee. This opens the ISA to a huge, worldwide design community that can review, correct, and enhance the architecture over time. Yet because only the ISA is open source, developers are free to safeguard their hardware design’s intellectual property and keep it proprietary for commercialization.

Also: Data Conspiracy RISC | User Error 59

• Sheeva64 is an $89 tiny headless PC that plugs into an AC outlet

  Plug Computers are tiny PCs that you could easily mistake for an AC power adapter, because they plug directly into a wall outlet and typically don’t include video output. Instead these small, low power, “headless” computers usually run some sort of Linux-based operating system allowing you to use the little PCs as file servers or for other simple jobs.

  One popular option about a decade ago was called the SheevaPlug, and it was a device built around a 1.2 GHz Marvell Kirkwood 6281 ARM9 processor.

• i.MX8M-driven Pico-ITX SBC features dual-DSP audio module

  Estone is launching an “EMB-2238” Pico-ITX board for audio and voice control applications that runs Linux on an i.MX8M and offers a dual-DSP audio hub and DAC, 40-pin GPIO, and optional PoE and second GbE.

  Toledo, Ohio based Estone Technology (known for its former Habey brand) offers a variety of Linux-friendly Pico-ITX boards, including boards based on the i.MX6 (EMB-2230), i.MX6 UL (EMB2200) models, and Intel Cherry Trail EMB-2610. The company recently announced (via Electronics Weekly) an EMB-2238 board with the same 100 x 72mm form factor. The SBC builds on the audio strengths of NXP’s i.MX8M SoC with the help of high-end audio circuitry from Cirrus Logic.

• How Purism avoids the FaceTime remote camera viewing

  is not Free Software – with its source code released so that anyone can verify their security claims, like the one we use at Purism – how can you trust what cannot be verified?

  At Purism, both our Librem laptops, and the upcoming Librem 5 phone include this rather simple switch, that makes it remarkably easy to guarantee that the camera and microphone have no electrical circuit enabled.

  See? Powerful simple privacy protection built into all Purism products by default.

• Security updates for Friday

• Hacker Exploits Snapd Flaw to Obtain Access on Linux System

• Australian channel player finds big Linux bug

• Flaw in runC could allow malicious containers to infect host environment

  A vulnerability discovered in the runC container management tool has exposed multiple privileged container systems to a potential exploit through which attackers could allow malware to escape a container and compromise an entire host system.

• Wine Announcement

  The Wine development release 4.2 is now available.

• Wine 4.2 Released With Unicode String Normalization & ECC Crypto Key Support

  The second bi-weekly development release following last month's stable debut of Wine 4.0 is now available for testing.

  Wine 4.2 was just release and adds Unicode string normalization support, support for ECC cryptographic keys, support for mixing 32/64-bit DLLs in the load path, futex-based implementations of more synchronization primitives, and the usual smothering of bug fixes.

• GNOME Security Internship - Update 5

  This project started with a simple on/off switch in control center that entirely enabled or disabled the USB protection. A respectively so called always on and always off.

  Later on we introduced a smarter protection level that was active only when the user session was locked.

  While an always on protection seemed a good idea on paper it turned out that the advantages compared to the lock screen protection were very slim.

  When the screen is locked both protections have the same behaviour. They only differentiate when the user session is unlocked.

• Pick a clock, any clock.

  After listening to the latest episode of Emmanuel’s podcast on the History of GNOME, nostalgia got the better of me, and I decided to dig out the GNOME 1.4 usability study that we ran at Sun Microsystems in March 2001, and make it available online again.

• Who wrote librsvg?

  The shitty thing about a gradual rewrite is that a few people end up "owning" all the lines of source code. Hopefully this post is a little acknowledgment of the people that made librsvg possible.

  The charts are made with the incredible tool git-of-theseus — thanks to @norwin@mastodon.art for digging it up! Its README also points to a Hercules plotter with awesome graphs. You know, for if you needed something to keep your computer busy during the weekend.

• Lumina Desktop will be removed from my -current repository

  The Lumina Desktop is part of the TrueOS project, a FreeBSD variant. I packaged version 1.4.0.p1 for Slackware and it is part of the Plasma5 variant of my Slackware Live Edition.

  I noticed a while ago that Lumina would no longer start but it was low on my priority list to try and fix it.

  Today I found the time to look into this, but a recompilation against the latest Qt5 and other libraries, altough error-free, would not make the Lumina Desktop start successfully: it will start to load, but then you’ll hear a beep and you’re dumped at the command prompt or at the graphical login screen without evidence of what happened.

• Valentine present for Slackers

  Today is Valentine’s Day. A moment to give some extra attention to people that are dear to you.

  In my case, that’s everyone who loves, uses, supports, advocates or develops Slackware Linux. For all of you, I uploaded “KDE-5_19.02” to the ‘ktown‘ repository. There’s some updates in there that might interest you, see below.
  If you do not (want to) run or install Slackware-current, I will make sure that a new ISO of the Slackware Live Plasma5 Edition will be available around the weekend. That way, you can safely try it out without having to touch your hard drive.

  As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2.

• Networking Tool Comics!

• How to Play Playstation 2 Games on Linux with PCSX2

• How to Install GNU Emacs 26.1 in Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, 18.10

• Create multiple subfolders in one command.

• How to Create Bootable Ubuntu 18.04 USB Stick on Linux

• Everyday Regular Expressions

• Deploying HA MongoDB on OpenShift using Portworx

• Debugging experience in Debian

• Proposed Change to EPEL Policies: Minor Release Based Composes

  The change moves EPEL composes to biannual based composes and adds an updates tree for consumers. Package trees will have a naming structure similar to Fedora release names, and will be regularly archived off to /pub/archives after the next minor release.

  Package lifetimes will be similarly affected with the expected minimum 'support' lifetime of any package to be that of a minor release.

• Fedora Community Blog: FPgM report: 2019-07

  Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora Program Management this week.

  I’ve set up weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else.

• Fedora 30 Might Enable DNF's "Best" Mode By Default

  Under a late change proposal for Fedora 30, the DNF package manager's "best" mode might be enabled by default.

  The --best option for DNF always tries to upgrade to the highest version available even if dependencies cannot be satisfied. While it may make sense for DNF to always try going for the latest and greatest package version which is in line with most other Linux package managers, the current behavior aims for the latest version where all package dependencies can be satisfied. If a newer package version is available but with unmet dependencies, the current default DNF behavior will silently ignore that newer version.

• Bodhi 3.13.0 released

• SFK, OSCAL and Toastmasters expanding into Kosovo

  Back in August 2017, I had the privilege of being invited to support the hackathon for women in Prizren, Kosovo. One of the things that caught my attention at this event was the enthusiasm with which people from each team demonstrated their projects in five minute presentations at the end of the event.

  This encouraged me to think about further steps to support them. One idea that came to mind was introducing them to the Toastmasters organization. Toastmasters is not simply about speaking, it is about developing leadership skills that can be useful for anything from promoting free software to building successful organizations.

• Julian Sparber: An other year, an other FOSDEM

  I have come a long way since my first time at FOSDEM a couple of years ago. The first time it was all new and unknown. I tried to attend as many talks as possible, but could only see half of the talks i wanted to go (amazing how many people there are at FOSDEM). Every year I listened to fewer and fewer talks, because conversations I had outside of talks are so much more fun and appealing. I think the biggest thing which changed is that I’m no longer just a user of free software, but an active contributor.

  This year, I spent a lot of the time at the GNOME booth, which is always fun. The GNOME beers event is also awesome, though it was really crowded this year (let’s hope we get a bigger space next year). On Friday we also had a great lunch at a Libanese restaurant. Thanks to Adrien for organizing, and thanks to Purism for offering lunch.

• FOSDEM 2019 - Recorded presentations (videos)

  If you weren't able to attend FOSDEM earlier this month, you're in luck as all presentations were recorded! From the latest on Open Source projects Zink (OpenGL on Vulkan) and VirGL (virtual 3D GPU for QEMU), to a state of the union on GStreamer embedded, and a look at how the KernelCI project is getting a second breath, Collaborans presented in five devrooms at FOSDEM 2019. Below is the full list of talks given at Collaborans during the two-day conference in Brussels, with direct links to each recording.