• Managing virtual environments with Vagrant

• ​How to upgrade to Ubuntu Linux 18.04

• How to install Mantis Bug Tracker on Ubuntu

• How to reset a root password on Fedora

• SystemTap’s BPF Backend Introduces Tracepoint Support

• Brains behind seL4 secure microkernel begin RISC-V chip port

  Last week, the first RISC-V port of its seL4 microkernel was released by the Data61 division of the Australian government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

  seL4 is an open-source and highly secure version of the L4 microkernel that aims to be mathematically proven to be bug free, in that it works as expected as per its specifications. Meanwhile, RISC-V is an open-source instruction-set architecture, and is used as the blueprint for various open-source processor core designs – some of which are now shipping as real usable silicon, such as chips from SiFive and Greenwaves.

• Dongwoon Anatech Licenses Codasip's Bk3 RISC-V Processor for Motor Control ICs for Mobile Camera

  Codasip, the leading supplier of RISC-V® embedded processor IP, announced today that Dongwoon Anatech, a technology leader in analog and power ICs for mobile phones, has selected Codasip’s Bk3 processor and Studio design tool for its next generation family of motor control IC products.

  Dongwoon Anatech, fabless analog semiconductor specialist, offers a wide range of analog products, including auto-focus driver IC for smartphones, AMOLED DC-DC converter, display power driver IC, and haptic driver IC.

• How to video conference without people hating you

  What about an integrated headset and microphone? This totally depends on the type. I tend to prefer the full sound of a real microphone but the boom mics on some of these headsets are quite good. If you have awesome heaphones already you can add a modmic to turn them into headsets. I find that even the most budget dedicated headsets sound better than earbud microphones.

• Learn about the open source efforts of Code.gov at this event

  The U.S. government has a department looking to spread open source projects, and members will be in Baltimore this week.

  Code.gov is looking to promote reuse of open source code within the government to cut down on duplicating development work, and spread use of the code throughout the country. On April 26 event at Spark Baltimore, team members from Code.gov, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the Presidential Innovation Fellowship are among those invited to be at a meetup to share more. Held from 12-3 p.m., the event will feature talks from the invited guests about what they’re working on and Federal Source Code Policy, as well as how it can apply locally, said organizing team member Melanie Shimano.

• LibreOffice Conference 2018 Takes Place in Tirana, Albania, for LibreOffice 6.1

  While working on the next major LibreOffice release, The Document Foundation is also prepping for this year's LibreOffice Conference, which will take place this fall in Albania.

  The LibreOffice Conference is the perfect opportunity for new and existing LibreOffice developers, users, supporters, and translators, as well as members of the Open Source community to meet up, share their knowledge, and plan the new features of the next major LibreOffice release, in this case LibreOffice 6.1, due in mid August 2018.

  A call for papers was announced over the weekend as The Document Foundation wants you to submit proposals for topics and tracks, along with a short description of yourself for the upcoming LibreOffice Conference 2018 event, which should be filed no later than June 30, 2018. More details can be found here.

• LibreOffice Conference Call for Paper

  The Document Foundation invites all members and contributors to submit talks, lectures and workshops for this year’s conference in Tirana (Albania). The event is scheduled for late September, from Wednesday 26 to Friday 28. Whether you are a seasoned presenter or have never spoken in public before, if you have something interesting to share about LibreOffice or the Document Liberation Project, we want to hear from you!

• GitLab Web IDE Goes GA and Open-Source in GitLab 10.7

  GitLab Web IDE, aimed to simplify the workflow of accepting merge requests, is generally available in GitLab 10.7, along with other features aimed to improve C++ and Go code security and improve Kubernets integration.

  The GitLab Web IDE was initially released as a beta in GitLab 10.4 Ultimate with the goal of streamlining the workflow to contribute small fixes and to resolve merge requests without requiring the developer to stash their changes and switch to a new branch locally, then back. This could be of particular interest to developers who have a significant number of PRs to review, as well as to developers starting their journey with Git.

• GitLab open sources its Web IDE

  GitLab has announced its Web IDE is now generally available and open sourced as part of the GitLab 10.7 release. The Web IDE was first introduced in GitLab Ultimate 10.4. It is designed to enable developers to change multiple files, preview Markdown, review changes and commit directly within a browser.

  “At GitLab, we want everyone to be able to contribute, whether you are working on your first commit and getting familiar with git, or an experienced developer reviewing a stack of changes. Setting up a local development environment, or needing to stash changes and switch branches locally, can add friction to the development process,” Joshua Lambert, senior product manager of monitoring and distribution at GitLab, wrote in a post.

At times system administrators and developers need to use many, complex and lengthy commands in order to perform a critical task. Most of the users will copy those commands and output generated by those respective commands in a text file for review or future reference. Of course, “history” feature of the shell will help you in getting the list of commands used in the past but it won’t help in getting the output generated for those commands.

As part of preparing my last two talks at LCA on the kernel community, “Burning Down the Castle” and “Maintainers Don’t Scale”, I have looked into how the Kernel’s maintainer structure can be measured. One very interesting approach is looking at the pull request flows, for example done in the LWN article “How 4.4’s patches got to the mainline”. Note that in the linux kernel process, pull requests are only used to submit development from entire subsystems, not individual contributions. What I’m trying to work out here isn’t so much the overall patch flow, but focusing on how maintainers work, and how that’s different in different subsystems.

• Security updates for Monday

• iOS Trustjacking – A Dangerous New iOS Vulnerability

  An iPhone user's worst nightmare is to have someone gain persistent control over his/her device, including the ability to record and control all activity without even needing to be in the same room. In this blog post, we present a new vulnerability called “Trustjacking”, which allows an attacker to do exactly that.

  This vulnerability exploits an iOS feature called iTunes Wi-Fi sync, which allows a user to manage their iOS device without physically connecting it to their computer. A single tap by the iOS device owner when the two are connected to the same network allows an attacker to gain permanent control over the device. In addition, we will walk through past related vulnerabilities and show the changes that Apple has made in order to mitigate them, and why these are not enough to prevent similar attacks.

• What Is ‘Trustjacking’? How This New iOS Vulnerability Allows Remote Hacking?

  This new vulnerability called trustjacking exploits a convenient WiFi feature, which allows iOS device owners to manage their devices and access data, even when they are not in the same location anymore.

• Breach detection with Linux filesystem forensics

  Forensic analysis of a Linux disk image is often part of incident response to determine if a breach has occurred. Linux forensics is a different and fascinating world compared to Microsoft Windows forensics. In this article, I will analyze a disk image from a potentially compromised Linux system in order to determine the who, what, when, where, why, and how of the incident and create event and filesystem timelines. Finally, I will extract artifacts of interest from the disk image.

  In this tutorial, we will use some new tools and some old tools in creative, new ways to perform a forensic analysis of a disk image.

While SUSE is working hard on the major SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 release, they recently announced that the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing (HPC) platform is now a dedicated SUSE Linux Enterprise product based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, available for public testing on 64-bit and ARM 64-bit architectures.

SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 will introduce numerous new features and improvements, including a brand new installer that offers a single unified method to install one of the supported SUSE Linux Enterprise products, including the SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing module, which comes with a set of components used in high-performance computing environments.

Also: SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Prepares HPC Module

• ThreadStack: Yet Another C++ Project Trying To Make Multi-Threading Easier

  ThreadStack is yet another C++ project trying to make it easier dealing with multiple CPU threads.

  This latest open-source C++ threading project comes out of academia research. ThreadStack is self-described by its developer, Erkam Murat Bozkurt, as "an innovative software which produces a class library for C++ multi-thread programming and the outcome of the ThreadStack acts as an autonomous management system for the thread synchronization tasks. ThreadStack has a nice and useful graphical user interface and includes a short tutorial and code examples. ThreadStack offers a new way for multi-thread computing and it uses a meta program in order to produce an application specific thread synchronization library." Erkam has been working the rounds trying to raise awareness for this research on the GCC and LLVM mailing lists.

• Beta for Qt for WebAssembly Technology Preview

  WebAssembly is a bytecode format intended to be executed in a web browser. This allows an application to be deployed to a device with a compliant web browser without going through any explicit installation steps. The application will be running inside a secure sandbox in the web browser, making it appropriate for applications that do not need full access to the device capabilities, but benefits from a swift and uncomplicated installation process.

• Qt for WebAssembly Tech Preview Reaches Beta

  As part of next month's Qt 5.11 tool-kit update, a new technology preview module will be WebAssembly support for running Qt5 user-interfaces within your web-browser.

• AWS S3 + GitLab CI = automatic deploy for every branch of your static website

• How to Stop Ubuntu From Collecting Data About Your PC

• How To Upgrade Ubuntu from 16.04 LTS to 18.04 LTS using Command Lines

• Install Dropbox In Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Desktop

• Linux id Command Tutorial for Beginners (5 Examples)

• An introduction to Python bytecode

• Swift Language: How to easily install SWIFT on Linux

• How to install Coppermine Photo Gallery on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

• Raspberry Pi Series Part 1: Laying Out The Basics

• BUS1 Still Remains Out Of The Mainline Linux Kernel, But DBus-Broker Continues

  The BUS1 in-kernel IPC mechanism born out of the ashes of KDBUS still hasn't been mainlined in the Linux kernel, but its code is still improved upon from time to time. At least though DBus-Broker as a new performance-oriented D-Bus implementation continues gaining ground in user-space.

  DBus-Broker was announced last year as a new message bus implementation of D-Bus focused on high performance and reliability while continuing to offer compatibility with the original D-Bus implementation.

• Linux 4.17-rc2 Kernel Released With Mostly Routine Changes

  Linus Torvalds has announced the availability of the second weekly test release for what is becoming the Linux 4.17 kernel.

• Wayland's Weston Gets Optimizations For Its Pixman Renderer

  Wayland's Weston reference compositor with its Pixman software-based renderer back-end has received a number of performance optimizations.

  Fabien Lahoudere of Collabora posted a set of patches today to optimize the Pixman renderer for Weston. In particular, there are optimizations around compositing damage to the screen as well as optimizing the shadow buffer usage. The Weston Pixman renderer is often used as a software accelerated fallback in cases where no GPU hardware acceleration may be available. As implied by the name, it uses the long-standing Pixman library that is also used by Cairo, the X.Org Server, etc, for pixel manipulation on the CPU.

• Panfrost Gallium3D Driver For ARM Mali Can Now Render A Cube

  The Panfrost open-source driver project previously known as "Chai" for creating an open-source 3D driver stack for ARM's Mali Midgard hardware now has a working shaded cube being rendered using the open-source code as part of its new "half-way" driver based on Gallium3D.

• The state of Thunderbolt 3 in Fedora 28

  Fedora 28 is around the corner and I wanted to highlight what we did to make the Thunderbolt 3 experience as smooth as possible. Although this post focuses on Fedora 28 for what is currently packaged and shipping, all changes are of course available upstream and should hit other distributions in the future.

• Thunderbolt 3 Support Is In Great Shape For Fedora 28

  Red Hat developers have managed to deliver on their goals around improving Thunderbolt support on the Linux desktop with the upcoming Fedora 28 distribution update.

  This has been part of their goal of having secure Thunderbolt support where users can authorize devices and/or restrict access to certain capabilities on a per-device basis, which is part of Red Hat's Bolt project and currently has UI elements for the GNOME desktop.

• Introducing Heptio Gimbal: Bridging cloud native and traditional infrastructure

  Today we are excited to announce Heptio Gimbal, an open source initiative to unify and manage internet traffic into hybrid cloud environments consisting of multiple Kubernetes clusters and traditional infrastructure technologies including OpenStack. Gimbal builds on established open source projects like Kubernetes, Heptio Contour, and Envoy to provide a robust multi-team load balancing solution that enables businesses to manage traffic across traditional and container-based infrastructure.

• Heptio launches new open-source load-balancing project with Kubernetes in mind

  Heptio added a new load balancer to its stable of open-source projects Monday, targeting Kubernetes users who are managing multiple clusters of the container-orchestration tool alongside older infrastructure.

  Gimbal, developed in conjunction with Heptio customer Actapio, was designed to route network traffic within Kubernetes environments set up alongside OpenStack, said Craig McLuckie, co-founder and CEO of Heptio. It can replace expensive hardware load-balancers — which manage the flow of incoming internet traffic across multiple servers — and allow companies with outdated but stable infrastructure to take advantage of the scale that Kubernetes can allow.

• Yahoo Japan US Subsidiary Actapio Takes Cloud Native Approach to Upgrade On-Premise Infrastructure to Manage High Scale Web Workloads through Heptio partnership

• Heptio launches Gimbal to help enterprises load balance Kubernetes and OpenStack

• Heptio Announces Gimbal, Netflix Open-Sources Titus, Linux 4.15 Reaches End of Life and More

  Heptio this morning announces Gimbal, "an open source initiative to unify and scale the flow of network traffic into hybrid environments consisting of multiple Kubernetes clusters and traditional infrastructure technologies including OpenStack". The initiative is in collaboration with Actapio, a subsidiary of Yahoo Japan Corporation, and according to Craig McLuckie, founder and CEO of Heptio, "This collaboration demonstrates the full potential of cloud native technologies and open source as a way to not only manage applications, but address broader infrastructure considerations."

• ASUS unveils the ZenFone Max Pro M1 in India with Snapdragon 636, 5000mAh battery, and Android 8.1 Oreo

• Xiaomi Mi 6X listed on Android.com, price revealed

• Sign up for Google's User Research program and help guide Android's future — Here's how!

• New Android phones are such blatant iPhone X copycats, people are shocked when one isn't

According to a Reddit thread, a Chromebook user recently spotted a new Terminal app added to the app drawer when running on the latest Chrome OS Dev channel. Clicking the icon would apparently prompt the user to install the Terminal app, which requires about 200 MB of disk space.

The installation prompt notes the fact that the Terminal app can be used to develop on your Chromebook. It also suggests that users will be able to run native apps and command-line tools seamlessly and securely. Considering the fact that Chrome OS is powered by the Linux kernel, this can only mean one thing.

Orchard Audio’s “ApplePi DAC” audio HAT add-on for the Raspberry Pi is available for $175 on Kickstarter, featuring two Burr Brown PCM1794A monoaural DACs, a 128dB SNR, and both balanced and unbalanced outputs.

Orchard Audio quickly surpassed its $5K Kickstarter goal for its ApplePi DAC HAT board, which it is promoting as “the most advanced and highest performance sound card hat for the Raspberry Pi.” It didn’t hurt that Orchard posted a couple of favorable reviews, including one from Volumio co-founder Michelangelo, who wrote: “This DAC is producing the most detailed sound to ever come out of my Raspberry Pi.”

With only three days left before Canonical's highly anticipated Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system hits the streets, today we're taking a first look at one of its newest features.

As the headline implies, the next Ubuntu release will ship with a brand new Welcome screen, for the first time in the history of the Linux-based operating system. After installing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on your personal computer, you'll be greeted by a welcome screen to help you set up a few things.

Welcome screens have been used before in the Ubuntu world, by the Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu Budgie official flavors for example, and are also being used by numerous other GNU/Linux distributions out there to provide a one-stop solution for setting up your freshly installed operating system.

Ubuntu itself never used a welcome screen, but with the forthcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release things change in this regard. The new welcome screen in Bionic Beaver will help new and returning users better understand how the brand-new GNOME user interface works, as well as to set up things like Canonical Livepatch.

• The new GOG profile system is out, looks quite slick

  DRM free store GOG has just released their new profile system and it's surprisingly slick to look at.

• Brutal Hexen-inspired FPS 'Apocryph' is planning to release on April 27th

  Remember Apocryph? The brutal FPS inspired by the likes of Hexen, Heretic, Painkiller and so on. Much like its inspiration, it's set in a brutal dark fantasy world, one that you're going to turn red. Well the developer has announced that they're aiming for an April 27th release!

• Six-degree-of-freedom shooter 'Overload' to release May 31st

  Overload, the fantastic six-degree-of-freedom shooter from the creators of Descent is due to officially release May 31st with full Linux support.

• Paradox has announced Stellaris: Distant Stars, a new story pack

  Space is about to get bigger again, as Paradox has announced Stellaris: Distant Stars, a new story pack for the space grand strategy game.

  I've said many times they needed more overall content and they've gradually delivered bit by bit. This has me quite excited, as the last big expansion was pretty damn fun to play around with.

• Microsoft picks Linux over Windows for IoT cloud connectivity and security product Azure Sphere [Ed: No, that still requires Windows and Microsoft subscription/surveillance among other Microsoft proprietary software. They just (mis)use the brand "Linux" to promote words like "Azure" with "security". A sort of googlebombing of many terms that are hoping to latch onto.]

• gksu Removed From Ubuntu, Here’s What You Can Use Instead

  gksu is deprecated. It is removed from Debian, Ubuntu 18.04 and other newer Linux distribution version. You can achieve the gksu functionality with gvfs admin backend. Here’s how to do that.

  I am exploring Ubuntu 18.04 these days. And when I was trying to suppress the Ubuntu crash report, I tried to use a command with gksu.

 

• [Slackware] MSB and CSB Mass Rebuilt

• Fedora 28 : The OpenShot video editor.

• Fedora Infrastructure Hackfest 2018 Recap

• Open Source Security Podcast: Episode 93 - Security flaws in beep and patch, how did we get here?

• How I accidentally wrote a Wikipedia page on a layover in Dublin

  A most unusual but wonderful experience happened to me recently on a return trip from Europe to the United States.

  A series of heavy Nor'easters hit the U.S. East Coast over the last couple weeks, one of which coincided with my trip back to Rochester, NY. While we didn’t have flooding, we had a lot of snow. A lot of snow means canceled flights.

  As I made my way through border control in Dublin, Ireland on March 7, I discovered my connection to New York City would likely be canceled. A meander from baggage claim to the check-in desk confirmed this. Fortunately, Aer Lingus had no issue putting me up in a hotel overnight, with dinner and breakfast, so that I could catch the next flight to New York the following day.