If you are a high-end software developer, system admin, or content creator who changed their Alien ID to the Linux world, then this article piece is for you. There is no worse enemy to a committed Linux enthusiast than data loss. To deal with data loss, you must understand the essential services of backup tools software.

You might be thinking, well, my machine system has several partitions. One has my Linux operating system installed, and the remaining ones I use to back up the data that I continuously use and develop. Moreover, you might be considerate enough to acquire an external hard disk drive to store your important files. However, the game of data loss is like playing chess against a supercomputer. The odds are never in our favor. It is usually when everything is going smoothly that an unfortunate event tends to introduce itself.

An unstable surge could occur and put your entire machine system in an ICU state. Such circumstances tend to corrupt or put your important data in an irretrievable state. Furthermore, a filled coffee mug that puts your ingenious mind in an active and productive state could accidentally spill on your machine or external HDD and commit the highest level of treason. This coffee that keeps our minds awake could have the opposite effect on our machines and any other external storage devices. Worse still, you will be forced to stay awake the whole night to mourn your data loss because the dark shades of coffee you took are still in your system.

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

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

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

Linux offers a mouthwatering array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks, but I’m endeavoring to explore every free music player in case there’s an undiscovered gem.

MPD is a powerful server-side application for playing music. In a home environment, you can connect an MPD server to a Hi-Fi system, and control the server using a notebook or smartphone. You can, of course, play audio files on remote clients. MPD can be started system-wide or on a per-user basis.

I’ve covered a fair few MPD clients over the past year or so including Cantata, Ymuse, ncmpy, and ncmpc. My favorite of them is Cantata although Ymuse is a simple alternative. There’s lots of differences between these front-ends. For example, Cantata uses the Qt widget set, whereas Ymuse offers a GTK front-end. And ncmpy and ncmpc are terminal-based clients.

ympd takes a different route. It’s a web-based client. This software lets you use your web browser to interact with MPD. ympd runs without a dedicated web server or interpreters like PHP, NodeJS or Ruby. It’s tuned for minimal resource usage and has minimal dependencies. The software uses Websockets and Bootstrap/JavaScript.

• GNU Parallel 20201122 ('Biden') released [stable]

  GNU Parallel 20201122 ('Biden') [stable] has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/parallel/
  No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release.
  Please help spreading GNU Parallel by making a testimonial video like Juan Sierra Pons: http://www.elsotanillo.net/wp-content/uploads/GnuParallel_JuanSierraPons.mp4
  It does not have to be as detailed as Juan's. It is perfectly fine if you just say your name, and what field you are using GNU Parallel for.

• MPV Player 0.33 Brings Nearly A Year's Worth Of Improvements

  MPV as the open-source, cross-platform media player based long ago off the MPlayer/MPlayer2 code-base is out with a new feature release ahead of the holiday season.

  MPV 0.33 is the first release since MPV 0.32 that happened back in January, thus there are a lot of changes in store.

• Musical Midi Accompaniment: Understanding the Format | Adam Young’s Web Log

  Saxophone is a solo instrument. Unless you are into the sounds of Saxophone multiphonics, harmony requires playing with some other instrument. For Jazz, this tends to be a rhythms section of Piano, Bass, and Drums. As a kid, my practicing (without a live Rhythm section) required playing along with pre-recordings of tunes. I had my share of Jamie Aebersold records.

  Nowadays, the tool of choice for most Jazz muscians, myself included is iReal Pro. A lovely little app for the phone. All of the Real Book tunes have their chord progressions been posted and generated. The format is simple enough.

  But it is a proprietary app. While I continue to support and use it, I am also looking for alternatives that let me get more involved. One such tool is Musical MIDI Accompaniment. I’m just getting started with it, and I want to keep my notes here.

  First is just getting it to play. Whether you get the tarball or checkout from Git, there is a trick that you need to do in order to even play examples: regenerate the libraries.

• Flatpak's New Repo Format For Greater Flathub Scalability, More Architectures To Come

  Flatpak and the Flathub "app store" and build service are rolling out a new repository format in order to scale better now that there are around one thousand applications on Flathub.

  Flathub continues seeing new Flatpak packages added to the service and thus better scalability is on the mind of developers, especially in wanting to support additional CPU architectures.