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Top 20 Best Raspberry Pi Projects That You Can Start Right Now

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 22nd of July 2019 05:09:14 PM Filed under
Development
GNU
Linux
Hardware

The Rasberry Pi is a tiny little computer board that lets students, experts, and hobbyists build innovative computing projects at a very affordable cost. Since its inception 6 years ago, it has enjoyed widespread popularity, thanks to the infinite range of possibilities this system offers. The single-board computer is now in its third major version and is being widely used for numerous tech projects around the world. If you’re looking for the best raspberry pi projects to get you started with this fantastic platform, you’re at the right place. Today, we’ll present to you 20 raspberry pi projects you can take on, starting from basic level to advanced.

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Programming, OSS and GNU

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 22nd of July 2019 11:45:38 AM Filed under
Development
GNU
OSS
  • How to Split a String in Python
  • The 10 Best Software Engineering Books in 2019

    I’ll probably never forget my first day as a software engineer.

    Back in 2015, I got hired as a software engineer for a consulting company, in Luxembourg.

    I did not have much experience, but I was ready to tackle every single project I was assigned to.

  • GCC 10 Lands OpenRISC Support For Floating Point Instructions

    When it comes to open-source processor ISAs, RISC-V currently captures much of the spotlight but OpenRISC continues chugging along as another open-source CPU architecture. The OpenRISC GCC compiler back-end and other software tooling also continues to move along for this architecture that's been in the works since 2000.

    The OpenRISC back-end/target landed just at the end of 2018 for the current GCC 9 stable series. This OpenRISC "or1k" support continues maturing. It took so long for the OpenRISC support to land into GCC as the original developers of the compiler support wouldn't agree to their copyright assignment to the Free Software Foundation for getting the code merged. As a result, a clean-room rewrite of the GCC OpenRISC code was needed before it could be accepted into GCC.

  • Matthias Clasen: Westcoast hackfest; GTK updates

    old widget. It started out as a port of the tk text widget, and it has not seen a lot of architectural updates over the years. A few years ago, we added a pixel cache to it, to improve its scrolling, but on a high resolution display, its still a lot of pixels to shovel around.

    As we’ve moved widgets to GTK4’s rendering models, everybody avoided GtkTextView, so it was using the fallback cairo rendering path, even as we ported other text rendering in GTK to a new pango renderer which produces render nodes.

    Until yesterday. We decided to just have a look at how hard it would be to switch the text view over to the new pango renderer. This went much more smoothly than we expected, and the new code is in master today.

  • GTK4 Gets Smoother GPU-Accelerated Scrolling, Modern Cursor Blinking

    GNOME developers continue to be hard at work on GTK4 and trying to ensure this major tool-kit update will be a great success.

    Happening the past few days in Portland, Oregon was the "GTK West Coast Hackfest" where Matthias Clasen, Christian Hergert, and other GNOME developers took towards figuring out effectively last minute work for GTK 4.0.

  • GNU Hyperbole 7.0.3 is the latest release
    Hyperbole is an amazing hypertextual information management system 
that installs quickly and easily as an Emacs package.  It is part of 
GNU Elpa, the Emacs Lisp Package Archive. 
Hyperbole interlinks all your working information within Emacs for 
fast access and editing, not just within special modes.  An hour 
invested exploring Hyperbole's built-in interactive DEMO file will 
save you hundreds of hours in your future work.
  • Sylvain Beucler: Planet clean-up

    Re-sync Debian base config, scripts and packaging, update documentation; the planet-venus package is still in bad shape though, it's not officially orphaned but the maintainer is unreachable AFAICS

    Fetch all Savannah feeds using https

  • Takeaways from PX4 Open-Source Drone Developer Conference

    Last month at ETH Zurich, Auterion sponsored the first-ever PX4 developer conference for those interested in the open-source-based operating system for enterprise drones. The event, held June 20-21, included 200 attendees from the open-source community, including developers, researchers, and technical thought leaders in the unmanned systems space.

    Here are three takeaway messages from the conference – for those interested in learning more about PX4 and ROS (the largest open-source drone and robotics communities), you can view all of the presentations on PX4’s YouTube channel.

  • Synchronize bookmarks: Syncmarx is now Open Source
  • SuperFreezZ is an open source alternative to Greenify that kills apps running in the background

    Task managers are widely viewed as unnecessary on Android smartphones. Most of us may agree with that view, but the reality is there are still a lot of misbehaving Android apps out there, most task “killers” don’t actually do anything useful besides clearing the recent apps view (which doesn’t really “kill” apps anyway), and a lot of users have yet to upgrade to newer Android versions that have implemented more restrictions on background apps. That’s why, to this very day, apps like Greenify and Brevent remain incredibly popular. Many users swear by both Greenify and Brevent, but since they’re closed source, some users are wary of them. If you’re looking for an open source alternative, check out SuperFreezZ by XDA Junior Member hcur.

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The Status of Fractional Scaling (HiDPI) Between Windows & Linux

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 21st of July 2019 08:51:19 PM Filed under
GNU
Graphics/Benchmarks
Linux

There’s a special type of displays commonly called “HiDPI“, which means that the number of pixels in the screen is doubled (vertically and horizontally), making everything drawn on the screen look sharper and better. One of the most common examples of HiDPI are Apple’s Retina displays, which do come with their desktops and laptops.

However, one issue with HiDPI is that the default screen resolutions are too small to be displayed on them, so we need what’s called as “scaling”; Which is simply also doubling the drawn pixels from the OS side so that they can match that of the display. Otherwise, displaying a 400×400 program window on a 3840×2160 display will give a very horrible user experience, so the OS will need to scale that window (and everything) by a factor of 2x, to make it 800×800, which would make it better.

Fractional scaling is the process of doing the previous work, but by using fractional scaling numbers (E.g 1.25, 1.4, 1.75.. etc), so that they can be customized better according to the user’s setup and needs.

Now where’s the issue, you may ask? Windows operating system has been supporting such kind of displays natively for a very long time, but Linux distributions do lack a lot of things in this field. There are many drawbacks, issues and other things to consider. This article will take you in a tour about that.

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Also: Vulkan 1.1.116 Published With Subgroup Size Control Extension

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Devices: 'IoT', SparkFun and Beelink L55

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 21st of July 2019 12:52:59 PM Filed under
GNU
Linux
Hardware
  • Top 20 Best Internet of Things Projects (IoT Projects) That You can Make Right Now

    Internet of Things (IoT) is a new predominant technology for this advanced world. This technology can change the lifestyle people lead. Question is what the Internet of Things is? IoT can be described as a network of physical objects connected through the internet. Physical objects could be anything that contains embedded electronics, software, sensor, etc. with the internet. Using the IP addresses, those smart objects can exchange data among the network and can make a decision. A significant number of researches is going on over the IoT trends and projects. In this article, we will talk about a few IoT project ideas based on standard IoT protocols, so that readers get the basic knowledge about the Internet of Things. These internet of things example are keen, useful, and interesting to build.

  • Open-Source SparkFun Module Supports Low-Power TensorFlow Machine Learning

    SparkFun has released the SparkFun Artemis, Engineering Version, an open-source embedded development kit that supports the TensorFlow machine learning environment. Designed for toolchain-agnostic, low-power machine learning development, the 15.5 mm x 10.5 mm Artemis board includes...

    [...]

    In addition to a secure firmware update system, flexible, serial peripherals, a suite of clock sources, and camera compatibility, the Artemis board features large SMD pads that support carrier board implementations. SparkFun has launched three carrier boards in conjunction with the release of the Artemis, Engineering version board: the BlackBoard Artemis (Arduino Uno footprint); BlackBoard Artemis Nano (smallest form factor); and BlackBoard Artemis ATP (with 48 GPIO pins).

  • Beelink L55 Review – An Intel Core i3-5005U Mini PC Tested with Windows 10 & Ubuntu 18.04

    With the shortage of Gemini Lake processors, some manufacturers have taken to releasing new mini PCs using older CPUs

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Linux distributions: Can we do without hooks and triggers?

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 20th of July 2019 07:32:20 PM Filed under
GNU
Linux

Hooks are an extension feature provided by all package managers that are used in larger Linux distributions. For example, Debian uses apt, which has various maintainer scripts. Fedora uses rpm, which has scriptlets. Different package managers use different names for the concept, but all of them offer package maintainers the ability to run arbitrary code during package installation and upgrades. Example hook use cases include adding daemon user accounts to your system (e.g. postgres), or generating/updating cache files.

Triggers are a kind of hook which run when other packages are installed. For example, on Debian, the man(1) package comes with a trigger which regenerates the search database index whenever any package installs a manpage. When, for example, the nginx(8) package is installed, a trigger provided by the man(1) package runs.

Over the past few decades, Open Source software has become more and more uniform: instead of each piece of software defining its own rules, a small number of build systems are now widely adopted.

Hence, I think it makes sense to revisit whether offering extension via hooks and triggers is a net win or net loss.

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Orange Pi and Raspberry Pi 4

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 20th of July 2019 02:54:58 PM Filed under
GNU
Linux
Hardware
  • Orange Pi Zero-LTS Allwinner H2+ SBC Gets More Efficient and Cooler

    Orange Pi Zero is a cool little Arm Linux board based on Allwinner H2+ processor for headless applications requiring WiFi and/or Ethernet that was first.

  • Raspberry Pi 4 Specs, Release Date, Price and More

    The Raspberry Pi 4 began rolling out across the globe last month, giving cause for celebration to innumerable tinkerers and techies who like to experiment with the most robust piece of computing tech you can find for under $60.

    To get you up to speed on the Raspberry Pi 4 and everything you need to know about it – specs, price, new hardware ports, you-name-it – we’ve gathered all the info you need to know right here.

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Cross Architecture Linux Containers

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 20th of July 2019 02:19:24 PM Filed under
GNU
Linux
Debian

With more ARM based devices in the market, and with them getting more powerful every day, it is more common to see more of ARM images for your favorite Linux distribution. Of them, Debian has become the default choice for individuals and companies to base their work on. It must have to do with Debian’s long history of trying to support many more architectures than the rest of the distributions. Debian also tends to have a much wider user/developer mindshare even though it does not have a direct backing from any of the big Linux distribution companies.

Some of my work involves doing packaging and integration work which reflects on all architectures and image types; ARM included. So having the respective environment readily available is really important to get work done quicker.

I still recollect back in 2004, when I was much newer to Linux Enterprise while working at a big Computer Hardware Company, I had heard about the Itanium 64 architecture. Back then, trying out anything other than x86 would mean you need access to physical hardware. Or be a DD and have shell access the Debian Machines.
With Linux Virtualization, a lot seems to have improved over time.

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Hardware With GNU/Linux

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 19th of July 2019 06:46:06 PM Filed under
GNU
Linux
  • Linux Foundation ? where do thou go? ? Stay out of the Desktop and you shalt be paid
  • Acer Chromebook R 11 C738T
  • Samsung Chromebook 3 - XE500C13-K02US
  • Acer Chromebook 14
  • HP Chromebook 11 G5 - X9U02UT
  • Acer Chromebook Spin 15
  • HP Chromebook x2
  • ASUS Chromebook Flip C213SA
  • Samsung Chromebook Plus - XE513C24-K01US
  • Samsung Chromebook Pro - XE510C25-K01US
  • ASUS Chromebit CS10
  • ASUS Chromebook Flip C434 - C434TA-DSM4T
  • Lenovo Chromebook S330 - 81JW0001US
  • Data in a Flash, Part IV: the Future of Memory Technologies

    As it relates to memory technologies, the future looks very promising and very exciting. Will the SSD completely replace the traditional spinning HDD? I doubt it. Look at tape technology. It's still around and continues to find a place in the archival storage space. The HDD most likely will have a similar fate. Although until then, the HDD will continue to compete with the SSD in both price and capacity.

  • Jonathan McDowell: Upgrading my home server

    At the end of last year I decided it was time to upgrade my home server. I built it back in 2013 as an all-in-one device to be my only always-on machine, with some attempt towards low power consumption. It was starting to creak a bit - the motherboard is limited to 16G RAM and the i3-3220T is somewhat ancient (though has served me well). So it was time to think about something more up to date. Additionally since then my needs have changed; my internet connection is VDSL2 (BT Fibre-to-the-Cabinet) so I have an BT HomeHub 5 running OpenWRT to drive that and provide core routing/firewalling. My wifi is provided by a pair of UniFi APs at opposite ends of the house. I also decided I could use something low power to run Kodi and access my ripped DVD collection, rather than having the main machine in the living room. That meant what I wanted was much closer to just a standard server rather than having any special needs.

    The first thing to consider was a case. My ADSL terminates in what I call the “comms room” - it has the electricity meter / distribution board and gas boiler, as well as being where one of the UniFi’s lives and where the downstairs ethernet terminates. In short it’s the right room for a server to live in. I don’t want a full rack, however, and ideally wanted something that could sit alongside the meter cabinet without protruding from the wall any further. A tower case would have worked, but only if turned sideways, which would have made it a bit awkward to access. I tried in vain to find a wall mount case with side access that was shallow enough, but failed. However in the process I discovered a 4U vertical wall mount. This was about the same depth as the meter cabinet, so an ideal choice. I paired it with a basic 2U case from X-Case, giving me a couple of spare U should I decide I want another rack-mount machine or two.

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New Releases of GNU/Linux: Clonezilla, EasyOS and ARCOLINUX

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 19th of July 2019 06:42:38 PM Filed under
GNU
Linux
»

Ubuntu MATE 19.10 Alpha Arrives, But Only for the GPD MicroPC

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 19th of July 2019 06:07:40 PM Filed under
GNU
Linux
Ubuntu
Gadgets

Did you know that Ubuntu MATE is besties with the GPD Pocket & Pocket 2?

Well it is; the pair of pocket-sized PCs, which were made possible through various crowdfunding efforts, got their own, customised, and 100% official Ubuntu MATE 18.10 install image last year, and a follow-up with the 19.04 release this year.

I guess making a custom-spun ISO is the distro equivalent of weaving a friendship bracelet!

Accordingly, it’s no major surprise to learn Ubuntu MATE 19.10 will also come tailored for use on China-based GPD’s latest mini-marvel, the GPD MicroPC.

Interestingly, the device is sold with Ubuntu MATE 18.10 pre-loaded.

Read more

»
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More in Tux Machines

today's leftovers

  • Linux Weekly Roundup #35

    Hello and welcome to this week's Linux Roundup and what a wonderful week we had! We have plenty of Linux Distro releases and LibreOffice 6.3 RC1. The Linux distros with releases this week are Q4OS 3.8, SparkyLinux 5.8, Mageia 7.1, ArcoLinux 19.07.11, Deepin 15.11, ArchBang 2107-beta, Bluestar 5.2.1, Slackel 7.2 "Openbox" and Endeavour OS 2019.07.15. I looked at most of these Linux Distros, links below, I will look at some of them in the new week and some I will unfortunately not have a look at, for download links and more, please visit distrowatch.com Well, this is this week's Linux Roundup, thank you so much for your time! Have a great week!

  • Full Circle Magazine: Full Circle Weekly News #140
  • Christopher Allan Webber: ActivityPub Conf 2019

    That's right! We're hosting the first ever ActivityPub Conf. It's immediately following Rebooting Web of Trust in Prague. There's no admission fee to attend. (Relatedly, the conference is kind of being done on the cheap, because it is being funded by organizers who are themselves barely funded.) The venue, however, is quite cool: it's at the DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, which is itself exploring the ways the digital world is affecting our lives. If you plan on attending (and maybe also speaking), you should get in your application soon (see the flier for details). We've never done one of these, and we have no idea what the response will be like, so this is going to be a smaller gathering (about 40 people). In some ways, it will be somewhere between a conference and a gathering of people-who-are-interested-in-activitypub. As said in the flier, by attending, you are agreeing to the code of conduct, so be sure to read that.

Sysadmin Appreciation Day, IBM and Fedora

  • Gift ideas for Sysadmin Appreciation Day

    Sysadmin Appreciation Day is coming up this Friday, July 26. To help honor sysadmins everywhere, we want you to share your best gift ideas. What would be the best way a team member or customer could show their appreciation for you? As a sysadmin, what was the best gift you've ever received? We asked our writers the same question, and here are their answers: "Whilst working in the Ubuntu community on Edubuntu, I took it upon myself to develop the startup/shutdown sound scheme, which became the default in Ubuntu for, from what I can understand, the next decade. Whilst people had a love-hate relationship with my sound scheme, and rightly so, I had a love-hate relationship with my sound card during the development. At the time I had recorded all my sound samples using one sample rate, but my new sound card, as my motherboard had exploded a few days earlier, did not support it. I had two choices, resample all my samples (which I didn't really want to do) or buy a new sound card.

  • Red Hat OpenStack Platform with Red Hat Ceph Storage: Radosbench baseline performance evaluation

    Red Hat Ceph Storage is popular storage for Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Customers around the world run their hyperscale, production workloads on Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat OpenStack Platform. This is driven by the high level of integration between Ceph storage and OpenStack private cloud platforms. With each release of both platforms, the level of integration has grown and performance and automation has increased. As the customer's storage and compute needs for footprints have grown, we have seen more interest towards running compute and storage as one unit and providing a hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) layer based on OpenStack and Ceph. [...] Continuing the benchmarking series, in the next post you’ll learn performance insights of running multi-instance MySQL database on Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Ceph Storage across decoupled and hyperconverged architectures. We’ll also compare results from a near-equal environment backed by all-flash cluster nodes.

  • The State of Java in Flathub

    For maintainers of Java-based applications in Flathub, it's worth noting that even if you consume the Latest OpenJDK extension in your application, users will not be broken by major updates because OpenJDK is bundled into your Flatpak. The implication of this for users is that they won't see updates to their Java version until the application maintainer rebuilds the application in Flathub. If you maintain a Java-based Flatpak application on Flathub, you can consume the latest version of your chosen OpenJDK stream (either LTS or Latest) simply by rebuilding; the latest version of that OpenJDK steam will be pulled in automatically.

  • Fedora Magazine: Contribute at the Fedora Test Week for kernel 5.2

    The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.1. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. This version has many security fixes included. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Monday, Jul 22, 2019 through Monday, Jul 29, 2019. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.

Debian and Ubuntu Leftovers

  • Bootstrappable Debian BoF

    Greetings from DebConf 19 in Curitiba! Just a quick reminder that I will run a Bootstrappable Debian BoF on Tuesday 23rd, at 13.30 Brasilia time (which is 16.30 UTC, if I am not mistaken). If you are curious about bootstrappability in Debian, why do we want it and where we are right now, you are welcome to come in person if you are at DebCon or to follow the streaming.

  • Candy Tsai: Outreachy Week 6 – Week 7: Getting Code Merge

    You can’t overhear what others are doing or learn something about your colleagues through gossip over lunch break when working remotely. So after being stuck for quite a bit, terceiro suggested that we try pair programming. After our first remote pair programming session, I think there should be no difference in pair programming in person. We shared the same terminal, looked at the same code and discussed just like people standing side by side. Through our pair programming session, I found out that I had a bad habit. I didn’t run tests on my code that often, so when I had failing tests that didn’t fail before, I spent more time debugging than I should have. Pair programming gave insight to how others work and I think little improvements go a long way.

  • about your wiki page on I/O schedulers and BFQ
    Hi,
this is basically to report outdated statements in your wiki page on
I/O schedulers [1].

The main problematic statement is that BFQ "...  is not ideal for
devices with slow CPUs or high throughput I/O devices" because too
heavy.  BFQ is definitely more sophisticated than any of the other I/O
schedulers.  We have designed it that way to provide an incomparably
better service quality, at a very low overhead.  As reported in [2],
the execution time of BFQ on an old laptop CPU is 0.6 us per I/O
event, against 0.2 us for mq-deadline (which is the lightest Linux I/O
scheduler).

To put these figures into context, BFQ proved to be so good for
"devices with slow CPUs" that, e.g., Chromium OS migrated to BFQ a few
months ago.  In particular, Google crew got convinced by a demo [3] I
made for them, on one of the cheapest and slowest Chromebook on the
market.  In the demo, a fast download is performed.  Without BFQ, the
download makes the device completely unresponsive.  With BFQ, the
device remains as responsive as if it was totally idle.

As for the other part of the statement, "...  not ideal for ...  high
throughput I/O devices", a few days ago I ran benchmarks (on Ubuntu)
also with one of the fastest consumer-grade NVMe SSDs: a Samsung SSD
970 PRO.  Results [4] can be summarized as follows.  Throughput with
BFQ is about the same as with the other I/O schedulers (it couldn't be
higher, because this kind of drives just wants the scheduler to stay
as aside as possible, when it comes to throughput).  But, in the
presence of writes as background workload, start-up times with BFQ are
at least 16 times as low as with the other I/O schedulers.  In
absolute terms, gnome-terminal starts in ~1.8 seconds with BFQ, while
it takes at least 28.7 (!) seconds with the other I/O schedulers.
Finally, only with BFQ, no frame gets lost in video-playing
benchmarks.

BFQ then provides other important benefits, such as from 5x to 10X
throughput boost in multi-client server workloads [5].

So, is there any chance that the outdated/wrong information on your
wiki page [1] gets updated somehow?  If I may, I'd be glad to update
it myself, after providing you with all the results you may ask.

In addition, why doesn't Ubuntu too consider switching to BFQ as
default I/O scheduler, for all drives that BFQ supports (namely all
drives with a maximum speed not above ~500 KIOPS)?

Looking forward to your feedback,
Paolo
  • Should Ubuntu Use The BFQ I/O Scheduler?

    The BFQ I/O scheduler is working out fairly well these days as shown in our benchmarks. The Budget Fair Queueing scheduler supports both throughput and low-latency modes while working particularly well for consumer-grade hardware. Should the Ubuntu desktop be using BFQ by default? [...] But in addition to wanting to correct that Wiki information, Paolo pops the question of why doesn't Ubuntu switch to BFQ as the default I/O scheduler for supported drives. Though as of yet, no Ubuntu kernel developers have yet commented on the prospect of switching to BFQ.

Devices With Linux Support

  • Quest Releases KACE SDA & SMA Updates

    The update to 7.0 for KACE Systems Deployment Appliance is primarily about bringing a scope of endpoint management capabilities with new support for Linux devices to the table.

  • Rugged, Kaby Lake transport computer has a 10-port LAN switch with PoE

    Axiomtek’s Linux-ready “tBOX400-510-FL” transportation system has a 7th Gen Intel CPU and a 10-port managed switch with 8x M12-style 10/100Mbps PoE and 2x GbE ports. The rugged system also has 3x mini-PCIe slots and dual swappable SATA drives. Axiomtek has launched a fanless, Kaby Lake-U based transportation computer with a choice of power supplies designed for in-vehicle, marine, or railway applications. The rugged tBOX400-510-FL features a Qualcomm-driven, Layer 2 managed PoE switch with support for IP surveillance and video management applications. “Customers can connect IP cameras directly without installing an extra PoE switch, minimizing overall deployment costs and installation space onboard,” stated Axiomtek product manager Sharon Huang.

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