I’m going to preface this review, and say that I liked Ubuntu 17.10 after using it for a few days. However, there were multiple issues with it, that ultimately ruined my experience; however, your mileage my vary.

Ubuntu 17.10, code-named Artful Aardvark, is the latest Ubuntu Linux release from Canonical, and was released Oct. 19.

It’s the first desktop release of the pure Ubuntu flavor, to not feature the Unity desktop, since Ubuntu 11.04. Now, Ubuntu uses the GNOME desktop environment now.

Also:

• Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) Desktop Installation Guide with Screenshots

• Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark Has Been Released (Download Links)

• Review: Google's Pixel 2 offers best of Android -- if you can find it

• Google will give you $1000 to hack Android's most popular apps

• From the Editor's Desk: Android 8.1 and Oreo's AI future

• Android getting “DNS over TLS” support to stop ISPs from knowing what websites you visit

• Developer Ports Xiaomi Mi A1's Android One ROM to the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4/4X

• Speaking of “Social Democracy” While Suffering Extreme Democratic Deficiency
• Management by Intimidation Has Caused Deaths at the European Patent Office (EPO)
• The Difference Between Alain Pompidou and Benoît Battistelli as EPO President
• The Darker Past of the Next President of the EPO – Part IV: Links Between CGD (Former Employer of António Campinos) and the INPI
• US Patents Appeal Board Attacked by the Patent ‘Industry’, Defended by Federal Courts, and Dodged by Patent Trolls
• In the United States, the Patent ‘Industry’ is a Dying Breed and China Adopts This Destructive Force
• Links 21/10/2017: Purism Against ME, Pop!_OS Ready

• Canada’s Spy Agency Releases its Cyber-Defense Tool for Public

• Canadian govt spooks open source anti-malware analytics tool

  The Communications Security Establishment (CSE) said the AssemblyLine tool is designed to analyse large volumes of files, and can automatically rebalance workloads.

• Microservices served on blockchain, in open source

  Cloud application marketplace company Wireline is working with open source blockchain project developer Qtum

  The new union is intended to provide a conduit to consuming microservices at [web] scale using blockchain at the core.

  As we know, microservices offer the ability to create Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) without having to manage the underlying hardware and software infrastructure.

  [...]

  The Qtum a blockchain application platform combines the functions of Bitcoin Core, an account abstraction layer allowing for multiple virtual machines and a proof-of-stake consensus protocol aimed at tackling industry-use cases.

  The Qtum Foundation, headquartered in Singapore, is the decision-making body that drives the project’s development.

• Rendering HTML5 video in Servo with GStreamer

  At the Web Engines Hackfest in A Coruña at the beginning of October 2017, I was working on adding some proof-of-concept code to Servo to render HTML5 videos with GStreamer. For the impatient, the results can be seen in this video here

• Working Intel CET Bits Now Land In GCC8

  A few days back I wrote about Intel's work on Control-flow Enforcement Technology beginning to land in GCC. This "CET" work for future Intel CPUs has now landed in full for GCC 8.

  The bits wiring up this control-flow instrumentation and enforcement support are now all present in mainline GCC SVN/Git for next year's GCC 8.1 release.

• Using Gitea and/or Github to host blog comments

  After having moved from FSFE’s wordpress instance I thought long about whether I still want to have comments on the new blog. And how I would be able to do it with a statically generated site. I think I have found/created a pretty good solution that I document below.

• Where Did That Software Come From?

  The article explores how cryptography, especially hashing and code signing, can be use to establish the source and integrity. It examines how source code control systems and automated build systems are a key part of the software provenance story. (Provenance means “a record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality.” It is increasingly being applied to software.)

• Judge: MalwareTech is no longer under curfew, GPS monitoring [Updated]

  A judge in Milwaukee has modified the pre-trial release conditions of Marcus Hutchins, also known online as "MalwareTech," who was indicted two months ago on federal criminal charges.

  Under US Magistrate Judge William Duffin’s Thursday order, Hutchins, who is currently living in Los Angeles, will no longer be subject to a curfew or to GPS monitoring.

• [Older] Leicester teen tries to hack CIA and FBI chiefs' computers

  A teenager attempted to hack senior US government officials' computers from his home.

  Kane Gamble, 18, from Coalville, Leicestershire, pleaded guilty to 10 charges relating to computer hacking.

  His targets included the then CIA director John Brennan and former FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano.

• pk4: a new tool to avail the Debian source package producing the specified package

  UNIX distributions used to come with the system source code in /usr/src. This is a concept which fascinates me: if you want to change something in any part of your system, just make your change in the corresponding directory, recomile, reinstall, and you can immediately see your changes in action.

• Freexian’s report about Debian Long Term Support, September 2017

  Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.

• Sal Mubarak 2074

  Wishing all Debian people a prosperous and auspicious Gujarati new year (V.S. 2074 called Saumya.)

• ZenStates Allows Adjusting Zen P-States, Other Tweaking Under Linux

  ZenStates is an independent effort to offer P-States-based overclocking from the Linux desktop of AMD Ryzen processors and other tuning.

  ZenStates-Linux is an open-source Python script inspired by some available Windows programs for offering Ryzen/Zen CPU overclocking from the desktop by manipulating the performance states of the processor.

• AMDGPU DC Gets A Final Batch Of Changes Before Linux 4.15

  The AMDGPU DC display code has a final batch of feature updates that were sent in this weekend for DRM-Next staging and is the last set besides fixes for the "DC" code for the 4.15 target.

• Valve Developer Lands VK_EXT_global_priority For RADV Vulkan Driver

• Vulkan 1.0.64 Adds In Another AMD-Developed Extension

  Vulkan 1.0.64 is out this weekend as the newest specification refinement to this high-performance graphics/compute API.

  As usual, most of the changes for this minor Vulkan revision are just documentation clarifications and corrections. This week's update brings just under a dozen fixes.

• NVIDIA TX2 / Tegra186 Display Support Isn't Ready For Linux 4.15

  While the Jetson TX2 has been out since this past March and it's a phenomenal ARM development board, sadly the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver support for it still isn't ready with the mainline Linux kernel.

  Thierry Reding of NVIDIA sent in the Tegra DRM driver changes for DRM-Next that in turn is staged for Linux 4.15. Reding commented that there is prepatory work for the TX2 (Tegra186) but it's not all ready for upstream yet.

• Mir running on Fedora

  Last week we released Mir 0.28 and this week we settled down to tidy up a few bugs fixes and feature requests that didn’t make the release. I’ve started collecting these for a Mir 0.28.1 release to come in the next few weeks.

  The most interesting of these comes from conversations at the Ubuntu Rally: there were several requests from community members around getting Mir working (or even building!) on other distributions.

• Ubuntu Developer Gets Mir Running On Fedora

  Lead Mir developer Alan Griffiths has spent the time getting the Mir display server running on Fedora. This is part of a broader feature request of getting Mir running on more Linux distributions than just Ubuntu.

  The changes to get Mir running on at least Fedora should be merged for the upcoming Mir 0.28.1 point release. Mir 0.28.1 will also incorporate other bug fixes.

• How To Remove the Unity Desktop from Ubuntu 17.10

• 9 Things to do After Installing Ubuntu 17.10

• How To Install Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark

Tomorrow marks the end of the crowdfunding campaign for Purism's Librem 5 smartphone campaign.

The campaign is looking like it will close at around two million dollars with the current tally as of this morning being at $1,962,517 in funds raised for this effort to build an original GNU/Linux smartphone stack with either GNOME Shell or KDE Plasma Mobile comprising the UI/UX elements.

• The Linux beta of 'The Coma: Recut' is running nicely, should be out properly soon

  The Coma: Recut [Steam] is coming to Linux, with it currently in beta. I've tested the beta and it is running pretty well.

• Some thoughts on the fast-paced strategy game Mushroom Wars 2

  Mushroom Wars 2 [Steam] released for Linux recently, this fast-paced strategy game is a little on the different side so here's some thoughts.

• The 'Jungle Inferno' update for Team Fortress 2 has landed

  Team Fortress 2 [Steam], the free to play shooter from Valve has been updated once again with the Jungle Inferno update.

• Release 2.19

  The Wine Staging release 2.19 is now available.

• Wine Staging 2.19 Brings More D3D11 Bits, Extra Fixes

  Building off last week's Wine 2.19 development update is now a new version of Wine-Staging that includes its wide assortment of extra experimental/testing patches.

  The new changes introduced with Wine-Staging 2.19 include support for depth bias clamping in Direct3D 11, the ability to verify RSA signatures with bcrypt, and various bug fixes and other improvements.

• Wine Staging 2.19 is now available with more D3D11 work

We recently published a post summarizing why the Beelink S1’s hardware specs look so promising for an inexpensive Linux mini PC. But I hit a brick wall when trying to install any flavour of Linux on the machine. I simply could not get the machine to boot a live Linux distro, either from a USB DVD or USB key.

I contacted Shenzhen AZW Technology Co. Ltd., the manufacturer of the Beelink S1, twice to see if they could offer any support. They replied recommending I get used to running Windows 10, as they contend Ubuntu is difficult to install on this mini PC. The second email has yet to elicit a response. I must have exhausted my support quota. Undeterred, I made a call for help to Linux enthusiasts. And half a dozen good folk promptly stepped forward to offer a simple solution, which I’ll detail below. This is one reason why I love Linux; the community.

The developers of the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment (LXQt) were proud to announce today the release and immediate availability for download of the LXQt 0.12.0 desktop environment.

Also: LXQt 0.12 released With Better HiDPI Support, More Robust

GNOME 3.25.1, the first unstable release in the 3.28 development
cycle, is now available.
The porting of more modules to meson continues (which is great!), but
It's still causing some problems for some modules. See below.

If you want to compile GNOME 3.27.1 by yourself, you can use the
JHBuild modulesets available here:

Also: GNOME 3.27.1 Released

• Another Million Learn About GNU/Linux

  Ordinarily, I would not notice or even recommend a brief article in a magazine but this is Popular Science, the Bible of DIY types especially the young and restless who might actually take the plunge into FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software). It’s a general magazine with a million subscribers.

• Chromium 62 ready for download

  chromium_iconEarlier this week, Google released a security update for its chrome/chromium browser. The new version 62.0.3202.62 plugs the holes of 35 more or less serious issues, several of them have a CVE rating.

  When the topic of Chromium 62 came up in the comments section of a previous post, I mentioned that I was unable to compile it on Slackware 14.2. Errors like “error: static assertion failed: Bound argument |i| of type |Arg| cannot be converted and bound as |Storage|” yield some results when looked up on the Internet, and they indicate that Slackware’s own gcc-5.3.0 package is too old to compile chromium 62.

• Playing with the pine64

   

  So I went for OpenBSD because I know the stuff and who to har^Wkindly ask for help. Spoiler alert, it's boring because it just works.

• PrismTech Moves Market-Leading Proven DDS Solution to Open Source as Eclipse Cyclone

• Nana Oforiatta Ayim’s Open-Source Encyclopedia of African History Starts With Ghana

  It is a rare kind of woman who enjoys a project so vast that it’s practically unfinishable, but Nana Oforiatta Ayim, a Ghanaian gallerist, writer, and historian, never quits what she has started. She’s discussing her work on the "Cultural Encyclopaedia", an attempt to “facilitate the re/ordering of knowledge, narratives, and representations from and about the African continent” through an online resource that includes an A-to-Z index and vertices of clickable images for entries. Eventually, a 54-volume book series—one for each country on the continent—will be published with selections from the encyclopedia's long, long list. Oforiatta Ayim is working with a small team of editors, and, starting with her native country, she has taken on the task of documenting all significant cultural touchstones in the thousands of years of African history. Plus, it will be open source to prevent it from having a top-down logic. “I’m a little bit crazy to take it on,” she says. “But if I’m not going to do it, who is going to be as crazy as me?”

• The Only Person I’ll Pair Program with is my Cat

   

  I could argue (to varying degrees of success) that pair programming isn’t productive. Productivity of a practice is an easy thing to attack because, in our capitalist dystopia, it’s the end-all-be-all metric. But I hate pair programming, and it’s not just because I don’t feel productive. It’s a lot more than that.

• Reaper: IoT botnet 'worse than Mirai' infects one million organisations worldwide

   

  Check Point first unearthed the botnet, codenamed 'IoT_reaper', at the beginning of September and claims that, since, it's already enslaved millions of IoT devices including routers and IP cameras from firms including GoAhead, D-Link, TP-Link, Avtech, Netgear, MikroTik, Linksys and Synology.

• Google will pay out bounties for bad Android app flaws

   

  "Google Play is working with the independent bug bounty platform, HackerOne, and the developers of popular Android apps to implement the Google Play Security Reward Program. Developers of popular Android apps are invited to opt-in to the program, which will incentivize security research in a bug bounty model," says HackerOne.

• How to Run Commands from Standard Input Using Tee and Xargs in Linux

• How to Fix “firewall-cmd: command not found” Error in RHEL/CentOS 7

• How to Run Commands from Standard Input Using Tee and Xargs in Linux

• How to Install and Configure latest version of Ansible on Ubuntu Linux

The Linux desktop needs a reset. We're now in a post-Ubuntu world, with Unity gone, and we're back in sad and forlorn 2005. There isn't a single major project out there where you can look and say, wow, there's gonna be a fun and exciting year ahead of us. Well, maybe one or two. The rest? Just run-of-the-mill stuff. The forums are quiet, because there isn't anything to report, and rehashing kernel versions and desktop versions isn't really worth anyone's time.

I think elementary OS represents this crisis quite well. On its own, it's a badly cobbled release, with too many issues and inconsistencies and a dreadful approach to ergonomics, making it useless to most people, all other things notwithstanding. But it was too buggy for me to even attempt to install it. Not going well. Alas, unless something cardinal changes, I cannot recommend this one at all. The combo of visual glitches, mediocre performance and middling hardware support does not warrant a longer adventure. Perhaps one day this will change, but for now, you're better off with stock Ubuntu. And by that I mean up to Zesty, ad I haven't tried Aardvark yet. Take care, and stay golden.

Also: Newbie's Guide to Ubuntu 17.10 Part 3

Whatsapp may be the best player in the game when it comes to instant messaging apps, but Telegram Messenger is the entire game itself.

​All kinds of software are currently available on Linux but every now and then, there is that Windows software or Game which is not available or has no equivalent on Linux Wine makes it possible to run those Windows programs and Games on your Linux desktop. So let’s look at how to install Wine on Linux and run Windows apps on Linux desktop.

• Open source software group for modernizing factory robots seeks SA industry partners

• Room for Improvement: Areas Where Open Source Can Get Even Better

  Open source software delivers a huge amount of value. But it stands to offer even more. Here's a list of the ways open source can evolve to meet the needs of developers and organizations even better than it does today.

• What Lightning Will Look Like: Lightning Labs Has Announced Its User Interface Wallet

  As part of the announcement, Lightning Labs also introduced Neutrino, the new open-source Bitcoin light client that powers the Lightning Desktop App. As a main benefit, Neutrino users don’t need to download the entire Bitcoin blockchain, which is currently over 140 gigabytes in size. This makes the desktop app much more accessible to regular users who transact small amounts, for which the lightning network is particularly suited. And because Neutrino uses a new method of transaction filtering (client side instead of bloom filters), it offers more privacy than most light clients, too.

• Suite of free, open-source tools to help even non-experts monitor large-scale land use change

  Collect Earth is part of Open Foris, a set of free and open-source software tools developed by FAO with Google Earth, Bing Maps and GEE to facilitate flexible and efficient data collection, analysis and reporting. It is hosted on GitHub, a platform for collaborative software development.

• Wall Street likes databases, as MongoDB soars over 30 percent in its IPO

  Shares of fast-growing cloud database provider MongoDB closed well above the initial asking price of $24, finishing the day at $32.07 after the company successfully raised $192 million in an initial public offering Thursday.

• Digital Impact Alliance Announces Formation of New Open Source Center and First Round of Catalytic Funding for ICT4D Projects

  Today, the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) announced the formation of its new Open Source Center (OSC), and two partners - Digital Square and Software Freedom Conservancy - who will support the Center's work. The Center will act as a resource to open source software projects serving international development and humanitarian response, providing a variety of shared services, insights and mentorship from partners, as well as funding opportunities. The Center is currently offering its first round of catalytic grants to address a range of challenges including effectiveness and momentum. In this first round, four grants will be made, up to $25,000 each, to projects that foster a healthy, sustainable open source community and products. Applications for funding of new participating members is now available, with a November 8 deadline for initial letters of interest.

• AdaptiveScale Releases LXDUI as an Open Source Project.

  As part of AdaptiveScale's newly released Custer Manager 1.3 software, we are proud to announce that we have released LXDUI as an open source project under the Apache 2.0 license.

• Facebook open-sources RacerD tool to prevent pesky programming problems

• RacerD detects hard-to-find race conditions in Java code

• Facebook tackles race hate problem head on with programming tool

• Facebook open sources RacerD: A tool that's already squashed 1,000 bugs in concurrent code

• Lamden Announces Open Source Blockchain Development Suite and Token Sale

  Lamden, the Switzerland-based technology company behind a new innovative blockchain development suite for enterprise applications, has just announced the token sale of their Lamden Tau Token.

• Security updates for Friday

• Security Central: Open Source Risks Examined [Ed: Is Flexera pulling a Black Duck now? Badmouthing FOSS while ignoring worse issues with proprietary software?]