Progress on Plasma Wayland for 5.13

In February after Plasma 5.12 was released we held a meeting on how we want to improve Wayland support in Plasma 5.13. Since its beta is now less than one month away it is time for a status report on what has been achieved and what we still plan to work on. Also today started a week-long Plasma Sprint in Berlin, what will hopefully accelerate the Wayland work for 5.13. So in order to kick-start the sprint this is a good opportunity to sum up where we stand now.

First set of Bionic (sort-of) RC images for 18.04.

Adam Conrad of the Ubuntu Release Team is pleased to announce the first set of Bionic RC images for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Over the next couple of hours, builds for Bionic Final should be added to the tracker[1] for all flavours. The builds have some intentional omissions, but please do test them anyway. Known issues that will be addressed Sunday/Monday: – Volume label still set to Beta – base-files still not the final version – kernel will have (at least) one more revision Despite the above, please, please, please test your images. Do not wait for a “final” build to test, as that guarantees your final build will be broken. We need you testing now, iterating uploads to get your bugs fixed, filing bugs and escalating where you need help. Again: DO NOT DELAY, TEST NOW, FIX BUGS, FILE BUGS, ESCALATE FOR HELP. Happy testing everyone, and here’s hoping we push out another smooth and stress-free release on Thursday. … Adam Conrad

Collaboration Events: Pakistan Open Source Summit, GNOME+Rust Hackfest, DataworksSummit Berlin

• Pakistan Open Source Summit 2018 concludes [Ed: Not about software]

  A large number of attendees from industry, academia, government, and students participated in the summit. Portuguese Ambassador to Pakistan Dr Joao Sabido Costa was the chief guest at the opening ceremony while former Naval Chief Admiral (r) Asif Sandila graced the occasion as the chief guest at the closing ceremony.

• ‘Open Summit key to create industry-academy linkages’

  Ambassador of Portugal to Pakistan Dr Joao Sabido Costa has said that events such as the Open Source Summit are excellent for spreading awareness and for creating industry-academia linkages and enhancement of the information technology. He stated this while addressing a concluding ceremony of the two-day informative ‘Pakistan Open Source Summit 2018’ attended by large number of people from industry, academia, government and students. Former naval chief Admiral (R) Asif Sandila co-chaired the concluding session. Dr Joao Sabido Costa said that the organisations should utilise open source platforms to build their IT infrastructures in future. To build open source culture in Pakistan, he recommended roadmap with future activities and timelines for spreading open source.

• Madrid GNOME+Rust Hackfest, part 2

  Yesterday we went to the Madrid Rust Meetup, a regular meeting of rustaceans here. Martin talked about WebRender; I talked about refactoring C to port it to Rust, and then Alex talked about Rust's plans for 2018. Fun times.

• DataworksSummit Berlin - Wednesday morning

  Data strategy - cloud strategy - business strategy: Aligning the three was one of the main themes (initially put forward in his opening keynote by CTO of Hortonworks Scott Gnau) thoughout this weeks Dataworks Summit Berlin kindly organised and hosted by Hortonworks. The event was attended by over 1000 attendees joining from 51 countries. The inspiration hat was put forward in the first keynote by Scott was to take a closer look at the data lifecycle - including the fact that a lot of data is being created (and made available) outside the control of those using it: Smart farming users are using a combination of weather data, information on soil conditions gathered through sensors out in the field in order to inform daily decisions. Manufacturing is moving towards closer monitoring of production lines to spot inefficiencies. Cities are starting to deploy systems that allow for better integration of public services. UX is being optimized through extensive automation.

Today in Techrights

• Is Andy Ramer’s Departure the End of Cantor Fitzgerald’s Patent Trolls-Feeding Operations and Ambitions?
• EPO Hoards Billions of Euros (Taken From the Public), Decreases Quality to Get More Money, Reduces Payments to Staff
• Short: Calling Battistelli’s Town (Where He Works) “Force for Innovation” to Justify the Funneling of EPO Funds to It
• Short: EPO Bribes the Media and Then Brags About the Paid-for Outcome to Staff
• Short: EPO’s “Working Party for Quality” is to Quality What the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” is to Democracy
• Short: This Spring’s Message From the EPO’s President (Corrected)
• Short: Highly Misleading and Unscientific Graphics From the EPO for an Illusion of Growth
• Short: EPO Explains to Examiners Why They Should and Apparently Can Grant Software Patents (in Spite of EPC)
• As USPTO Director, Andrei Iancu Gives Three Months for Public Comments on 35 U.S.C. § 101 (Software Patenting Impacted)
• In Keith Raniere v Microsoft Both Sides Are Evil But for Different Reasons
• Links 21/4/2018: Linux 4.9.95, FFmpeg 4.0, OpenBSD Foundation 2018 Fundraising Campaign
• Links 20/4/2018: Atom 1.26, MySQL 8.0
• Links 19/4/2018: Mesa 17.3.9 and 18.0.1, Trisquel 8.0 LTS Flidas, Elections for openSUSE Board