This page permanently redirects to gemini://gemini.techrights.org/2015/09/28/catchup-before-resumption/.

● 09.28.15

● Links 28/9/2015: Last News Catchup Before Resumption

Posted in News Roundup at 5:54 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

=> ↺ The Anti-Microsoft Trend: China Creates Its Own OS That Looks and Feels like Windows XP

=> ↺ GNU/Linux Advances In China

• Yes, GNU/Linux is happening in China. After a decade or more of fits and starts, GNU/Linux has moved ahead. Thanks to Dell and other OEMs and governmental efforts to improve security and to stifle violation of copyright, 40% of delivered PCs bear GNU/Linux. It’s not just about price, either. That Other OS, illegally copied is virtually $0, too. This is about quality, getting IT done without being M$’s slave or being prey for malware. The Chinese can use FLOSS like everyone else and they can customize whichever way they need.

=> ↺ NeoKylin, a Linux OS which looks like Windows XP is now China’s “Official” OS

• China has developed an operating system “NeoKylin”, a Linux based OS for its users as a replacement to long used Windows XP.

Desktop

=> ↺ Intel: Inventec Confirmed It Is Making The Xiaomi Linux Laptop

• Well, Inventec Corp, the Original Design Manufacturer (ODM) from Taiwan, confirmed this rumor of a Xiaomi laptop. Richard Lee, Chairman of Inventec, made this official confirmation via Taipei Times three days ago.

=> ↺ 64-bit ARM Is Becoming Usable For Day-To-Day Linux Desktop

• If you’re lucky enough to find some capable 64-bit ARM (AArch64) hardware, the latest open-source Linux packages are working out well in the 64-bit ARM world for providing a decent Linux desktop experience.

=> ↺ U.S. Tech Companies Cozy Up to China

=> ↺ Dell Reportedly Shipping Ubuntu-Based Linux On 40%+ Of PCs In China

• A report in the Wall Street Journal states, “Han Naiping, chief executive of China Standard Software, said that Dell became the first Western brand to make personal computers running his company’s NeoKylin operating system after they began a partnership in the second half of last year. Mr. Huang said 42% of Dell’s computers sold in China now run NeoKylin.”

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux creator explains why a truly secure computing platform will never exist

• Twenty-four years ago this month, a Finnish developer with a sharp tongue who’s regarded by some as one of the most influential programmers alive today released version 0.01 of the Linux kernel to the Internet.

• Creator Linus Torvalds introduced it by posting a message in the days before its release to a Usenet newsgroup that famously began:I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu). Since then, the code base has of course expanded from 10,000+ lines of code to millions and it helps power everything from TVs to tablets to smartphones, routers and more.

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 3.4.109 LTS Has Lots of ARM, x86, PPC, and Btrfs Improvements, More

• After reporting the other day news about new Linux kernel maintenance releases, including Linux kernel 4.2.1, Linux kernel 4.1.8 LTS, and Linux kernel 3.10.89 LTS, today we’re informing you about the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.4.109 LTS.

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 3.10.89 LTS Is a Small Release That Adds Xtensa Improvements

• Immediately after announcing the general availability of Linux kernel 4.2.1 and Linux kernel 4.1.8 LTS, Greg Kroah-Hartman informed us all about the eighty-ninth maintenance release of the long-term supported Linux 3.10 kernel series.

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 4.1.8 LTS Has Numerous x86 Fixes, Updated Drivers, and Much More

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 3.12.48 LTS Brings More IPv6 and IPv4 Improvements, Updated Drivers

• Jiri Slaby, the maintainer of the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series, had the pleasure of announcing a few minutes ago that the forty-eighth maintenance release of the branch is now available for download.

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 2.6.32 LTS to Reach End of Life Soon, Users Urged to Move to Linux 4.1 LTS

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 3.14.53 LTS Updates Drivers, Improves the x86 and Xtensa Architectures

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 4.1 LTS to Be Supported for the Next Two Years

• Linux kernel developer and maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman felt the need to underline once more something that has been announced a while back, but still hasn’t registered with the community. Linux kernel 4.1 is an LTS version.

• The Linux kernel is the core component of Linux distributions and many developers usually choose a long-term kernel for their operating systems. These are announced ahead of time and it’s usually a big deal. Right now there are eight different branches that are still being supported, with 2.6.32.68 being the oldest.

=> ↺ Linux 4.3-rc3

• So as usual, rc3 is actually bigger than rc2 (fixes are starting to trickle in), but nothing particularly alarming stands out.

• Everything looks normal: the bulk is drivers (all over, but gpu and networking are the biggest parts) and architecture updates. There’s also networking and filesystem updates, along with documentation..

• Go get it,

=> ↺ System XVI Is A New, Modular Service Manager

• The newest open-source service/init manager trying to compete with systemd is System XVI.

=> ↺ Watch The Video About The State Of AMDGPU, Vulkan Linux Plans

=> ↺ Thanks Google for Open Source TCP Fix!

• The Google transport networking crew (QUIC, TCP, etc..) deserve a shout out for identifying and fixing a nearly decade old Linux kernel TCP bug that I think will have an outsized impact on performance and efficiency for the Internet.

=> ↺ Google Fixes A Longstanding, Important TCP Bug In The Linux Kernel

• Google engineers managed to recently uncover a high profile TCP bug in the Linux kernel that has huge implications on network performance and efficiency.

• Google landed this fix earlier this month into the Linux Git code. The issue and fix are well described via this blog post.

=> ↺ Systemd Notifications Support Being Worked On For Wayland’s Weston

• With Wayland 1.10 now open for development it’s time to start looking out for interesting new patches providing new functionality for Wayland and Weston. One of the new patches so far is for making use of systemd notifications in the Wayland compositor.

=> ↺ A Call To Stop Making FBDEV Linux Frame-Buffer Drivers

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 4.3 RC3 Released by Linus Torvalds

=> ↺ Linux 4.3-rc3 Released This Morning, Bigger Than RC2

• While Linus Torvalds commonly releases Linux kernel updates late into Sunday evenings, this week he’s done a Sunday morning release for kernel testers living in the US.

• Torvalds’ 4.3-rc3 release message was short and to the point: “So as usual, rc3 is actually bigger than rc2 (fixes are starting to trickle in), but nothing particularly alarming stands out. Everything looks normal: the bulk is drivers (all over, but gpu and networking are the biggest parts) and architecture updates. There’s also networking and filesystem updates, along with documentation.”

=> ↺ Linux 4.3-rc2 Has Been Released & Is Fairly Normal

• Linus Torvalds has tagged and released the Linux 4.3-rc2 kernel.

• According to Torvalds, 4.3-rc2 is “looking fairly normal” and “there’s some noise all over the tree due to the IRQ flow-handler cleanup…. But apart from that one-time thing, things are looking fairly calm and small.”

=> ↺ More Atomic Mode-Setting Work Coming For Linux 4.4

• More atomic mode-setting work is being queued up for eventual integration into what will become Linux 4.4 a few months down the road.

=> ↺ The Only Fallout I’ve Been Exposed To So Far On Linux 4.3

• Two AMD systems (both older systems, one a dual socket AMD Opteron 2384 box and the other an Athlon II X3 system) won’t boot up with the latest Linux 4.3 kernel code in the past few days due to what appears to be ehci-pci/ohci-pci problems. Early into the boot process are some “can’t setup: -12″ messages from the EHCI/OHCI PCI platform drivers followed by a failure in sata_nv and ultimately not being able to get to the root disk device.

Graphics Stack

=> ↺ Mesa 10.6.8 Has Mostly Nouveau, Intel i965, LLVMpipe, and GBM Fixes

• On September 20, Collabora’s Emil Velikov released the eighth maintenance release of the old-stable Mesa 3D Graphics Library 10.6 branch, despite the fact that Mesa 11.0.0 is out for a week now and users are urged to move to it as soon as possible.

=> ↺ Mesa 3D Graphics Library 11.0.1 Now Available for Download with Over 20 Bugfixes

=> ↺ Mesa 10.6.8 Is Focused On Nouveau Fixes

• For those that haven’t yet moved to Mesa 11.0 and aren’t riding on Mesa 11.1-devel Git, Mesa 10.6.8 is now the next best thing.

=> ↺ Intel Might Be Moving Closer With Their Mesa Tessellation Shader Support

=> ↺ Intel’s Mesa Driver Now Supports OpenGL 4.5 Texture Barrier

• One month after the Gallium3D drivers gained support for this extension, the Intel i965 driver now handles OpenGL 4.5′s ARB_texture_barrier.

• Prolific Mesa contributor Ilia Mirkin has added ARB_texture_barrier to i965 today. ARB_texture_barrier is identical to the NV_texture_barrier extension and was another easy extension for Ilia to implement.

=> ↺ Mesa 11′s First Point Release Is Now Available

=> ↺ The State Of Nouveau; Still Waiting On NVIDIA To Release Firmware

• NVIDIA’s interest in Nouveau mostly is on the mobile side with Tegra. Alexandre shared that the GM20B Tegra X1 work continues to be upstreamed, re-clocking and power management will come to the Tegra X1B soon, advanced features are planned, and a signed firmware release is imminent. With being based on the Maxwell GPU, the Tegra X1 is also plagued by needing signed firmware.

=> ↺ Intel Has Been Working On DRM Color Management Support

=> ↺ Doing Graphics Hardware Acceleration With Microkernels

=> ↺ Updated Firmware Blobs Out For Intel Skylake & Broxton Linux Graphics

=> ↺ Mir Is Making Measurable Progress On Using Libinput

=> ↺ NVIDIA’s Latest Binary Driver Is Causing Problems For Some Skylake Linux Users

=> ↺ New Version Of The Etnaviv DRM Graphics Driver Published For Review

=> ↺ The Etnaviv Open-Source Driver Is Quietly Making Progress

=> ↺ AMD Has A Vulkan Linux Driver, But Will Be Closed-Source At First

=> ↺ AMD Releases New Open-Source Audio Support, ACP Driver

• ASoC audio support patches have been published for AMD GPUs.

• Alex Deucher sent out the new Radeon audio patches today while the actual patches were done by an AMD developer we haven’t seen anything major from before: Maruthi Bayyavarapu. The five patches add ASoC support for AMD APUs and includes a new ACP (Audio Co-Processor) driver.

=> ↺ Wayland’s Weston 1.10 Is Off To The Races With New Feature Work

=> ↺ Wayland 1.9 Tagged For Release

=> ↺ Wayland 1.10 Now Under Development, Planned Release In February

=> ↺ The OpenGL ARB Shader Storage Buffer Object Lands For Intel Mesa

=> ↺ What’s New With The X.Org Foundation? Not Too Much

=> ↺ The X.Org Foundation Has A New Secretary

=> ↺ Keith Packard Talks About Sustaining X11′s Development

• While many users and developers out there are looking for a time when Wayland rules the Linux desktop, Keith Packard remains focused on bettering X11/X.Org and keeping it going.

=> ↺ Two X.Org Vintage Drivers Finally Ship With X Server 1.17 Support

• X.Org Server 1.17 was released back in February while finally today two X.Org DDX drivers are finally shipping xorg-server 1.17 support in released form.

• The new driver updates this weekend are xf86-video-s3virge 1.10.7 and xf86-video-chips 1.2.6. These releases were done by Matt Turner who has still been caring for some of these X.Org drivers for obsolete graphics processors.

=> ↺ Alexander Larsson: Playing games with runtime extensions

• I hope to have stable builds out of the Freedesktop 1.2 and Gnome 3.18 runtimes shortly, so that other people can play with them. Unfortunately I’m not allowed to distribute the unreal editor app.

=> ↺ Optimizing Shaders On Mesa For Intel NIR With Shader-DB

=> ↺ Qualcomm’s QuIC Adds Open-Source DRM For Brand New Snapdragon 820

• Qualcomm’s Innovation Center (QuIC) sent out patches this morning for providing open-source hardware enablement for their new Snapdragon 820 (MSM8996) via the free software MSM DRM/KMS driver.

=> ↺ Experimental Nouveau DRM Branch Yields Better GDDR5 Kepler Re-Clocking

=> ↺ Wayland/Weston 1.9 Up To Release Candidate Phase

=> ↺ Wayland Continues Advancing On Features, But XWayland Could Use Some Help

• Taking some time away from preparing the upcoming Wayland/Weston 1.9 release, Bryce Harrington at Samsung’s Open-Source Group has written a blog post about the state of Wayland features and other ongoing work.

=> ↺ Libratbag: A New Library For Configurable Mice On Linux

=> ↺ More Details On The State Of Libinput & Libratbag For Linux Input

=> ↺ XDC2015 Kicks Off This Morning In Toronto

=> ↺ An Update On Atomic Mode-Setting For Linux

• There’s an update on the state of atomic mode-setting for Linux, for those that didn’t hear it earlier today at XDC2015 in Toronto.

• Daniel Vetter of Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center and the lead Intel DRM maintainer presented on the state of atomic mode-setting. For those out of the loop, one of the primary benefits of the DRM driver supporting atomic mode-setting is that it can allow a full mode-set operation to be tested prior to actually being committed to ensure it can be properly handled by the driver and display hardware. For end-users, this is meant to yield less problems and ideally avoid any display flickering. There’s also interesting atomic mode-setting endeavors being pursued within the Wayland world and other areas for innovation like asynchronous atomic mode-setting.

=> ↺ X.Org EVoC To Be Tightened Up, Limited To Existing Contributors

• To complement Google’s Summer of Code, the X.Org Foundation has long held the Endless Vacation of Code (EVoC) as a year-round, passive event where the foundation would fund students to get involved with X.Org/Wayland/Mesa projects. Sadly, however, it’s not been panning out and the rules are being tightened up even more due to past failures.

=> ↺ Intel Mesa Developers Working To Expose 16x MSAA For Skylake

=> ↺ Marek Talked About Shader Recompiles For RadeonSI

=> ↺ Does The NVIDIA Driver’s OpenGL Image Settings Affect The Performance Much?

• The proprietary NVIDIA Linux driver has a slider within its nvidia-settings utility for adjusting the OpenGL image settings, but do those settings have much of an affect on performance?

=> ↺ RadeonSI Now Supports Another OpenGL 4.5 Extension

=> ↺ NVIDIA Performance Counters Still Coming Along For Nouveau

• Samuel Pitoiset for the past few years has been on what seems like a one-man mission to implement NVIDIA’s hardware performance counters inside the open-source Nouveau driver. He continues making much progress and it’s starting to become a reality for developers who wish to profile their apps/workloads with Nouveau under Linux.

Benchmarks

=> ↺ AMD Catalyst 15.9 Linux Benchmarks

• With yesterday’s Catalyst 15.9 Linux driver release bringing fixes for a number of Steam Linux games, it’s been a busy night benchmarking this latest Catalyst Linux driver release. Here are some initial numbers.

=> ↺ AMD Catalyst 15.9 Includes Some Really Needed Fixes For Linux Gamers, Releases Soon

=> ↺ Catalyst 15.9 Tested On R7 370 4G

• First of all, Catalyst 15.9 fixes a problem that existed in 15.7 which was the inability to install the driver after a kernel update in Ubuntu 15.04. That means that 15.9 is now installable on such systems without extensive patching. This is definitely a very good thing, since something like a GPU driver shouldn’t be a preventing factor for kernel security updates. It apparently still doesn’t work with the brand new 4.x series kernels but I’m quite happy with my 3.19 at the moment.

=> ↺ How VP9 Video Encode/Decode Compares To H.264/H.265

=> ↺ VP9 encoding/decoding performance vs. HEVC/H.264

• A while ago, I posted about ffvp9, FFmpeg’s native for the VP9 video codec, which significantly outperforms Google’s decoder (part of libvpx). We also talked about encoding performance (quality, mainly), and showed VP9 significantly outperformed H.264, although it was much slower. The elephant-in-the-room question since then has always been: what about HEVC? I couldn’t address this question back then, because the blog post was primarily about decoders, and FFmpeg’s decoder for HEVC was immature (from a performance perspective). Fortunately, that concern has been addressed! So here, I will compare encoding (quality+speed) and decoding (speed) performance of VP9 vs. HEVC/H.264. [I previously presented this at VDD15, and a Youtube version of that talk is available also.]

Applications

=> ↺ The 6 Best Natural Language Processing Tools in the World Today

=> ↺ Fortigate SSL VPN support added to NetworkManager

• Both openfortivpn and the NetworkManager-fortisslvpn plugin will be available in Fedora in next few days; the other distributions will hopefully follow.

=> ↺ MKVToolNix 8.4.0 Cross-Platform MKV Manipulation Tool Adds New Features

• MKVToolNix’s Moritz Bunkus has introduced the fourth maintenance release of the MKVToolNix 8.x series, the most advanced, open-source, and cross-platform MKV (Matroska) manipulation software on the market.

=> ↺ MPlayer-Based MPV Open-Source Video Player Gets Improvements in Version 0.11.0

• The developers of the MPV open-source video player software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems have announced the release of version 0.11.0, which fixes bugs and adds improvements to the MPlayer-based software.

=> ↺ GStreamer 1.6 Arrives with OpenGL 3, Stereoscopic 3D and Multiview Video Support

• The developers of the open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework that is being used by numerous commercial and open source software projects were extremely proud to announce that GStreamer 1.6 is now available for download.

=> ↺ Why Epiphany isn’t my default browser (and how that just changed)

• GNOME has a collection of highly integrated applications that follows the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines and, for me, many of them aren’t quite useful. That’s pretty sad. Actually, that’s the reason that motivated me to start working with GNOME — to make the apps be useful to me, and craft new ones if they don’t exist.

=> ↺ Calibre 2.39 eBook Reader and Converter Supports the Latest Kobo Firmware

=> ↺ WadC 2.0 released

=> ↺ Laptop Mode Tools 1.68.1 Is Out to Extend Your Laptop’s Battery Life

=> ↺ Yeppp: A High-Performance Math Library

• Yeppp! is a very fast vector math library that works with a variety of programming languages, designed to work on a vast array of hardware across multiple architectures, and with that is designed to be super fast.

=> ↺ GnuCash Free Accounting Software to Be Ported to GTK+ 3 Soon

• The GnuCash Project had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the eighth maintenance release of the free, cross-platform, and open-source GnuCash 2.6 accounting software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows platforms.

=> 2.6.8 released ↺ GnuCash 2.6.8 released

• The GnuCash development team proudly announces GnuCash 2.6.8, the eighth maintenance release in the 2.6-stable series. Please take the tour of all the new features.

=> ↺ The Best And Worst Linux Email Clients

• Claws is the email client that I just haven’t found overly clever. For one trying to get it to work with GMail is an absolute nightmare.

• You need to go into your GMail settings and change settings to enable Claws to connect to it and even then there is no guarantee it will connect.

=> ↺ phpMyAdmin 4.5.0

=> ↺ phpMyAdmin 4.5.0 Released: Supports Virtual Columns, Improved Console Feature

=> ↺ NGINX Open Source 1.9.5 Released with HTTP/2 Support

• Earlier this year we released an early-alpha patch to enable HTTP/2 support in our open source NGINX product and last week a fully-supported implementation of HTTP/2 in NGINX Plus. Today we proudly announce that HTTP/2 has been committed to the open source repo and is now officially available as part of NGINX version 1.9.5.

=> ↺ Nginx Web Server Announces nginScript

• Developers behind the high-performance Nginx web server project have announced nginScript, a JavaScript-derived scripting language to do more with this open-source web server.

=> ↺ MPV Video Player Has OpenGL Output Improvements, Fixes

=> ↺ Kodi 15.2 Is Near, RC2 Released

=> ↺ PulseAudio 7.0 Released, Adds More Flexible Jack Detection

=> ↺ GStreamer 1.6 Officially Released

Proprietary

=> ↺ Opera 34 Web Browser Now in Development, Introduces URL Suggestions

=> ↺ Opera 32 Lands Password Sync, SurfEasy VPN Integration

=> ↺ Vivaldi Web Browser Gets Visual Polishing, Improved History, and More

• Vivaldi, a web browser developed by one of the Opera founders and a numerous team has been upgraded and is now ready for download. This is still a development version, so major changes are still being made.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ There is nothing like (missing) iptables (rules) to make you use tor

=> ↺ How to Install Dotclear on a Debian 8 VPS

=> ↺ How to automount optical media on Debian Linux for Kodi

=> ↺ Userops Acid Test v0.1

=> ↺ Pro tip: Easy file encryption on your Chromebook with miniLock

=> ↺ Linux Continues Making Progress With System Firmware Updating

=> ↺ Update of Asus X550ZE status

=> ↺ Setting up a network scanner using SANE

=> ↺ Visualize your OpenStack cloud: Gnocchi & Grafana

=> ↺ Rendering into VA-API surfaces

=> ↺ How to install Drupal with PostgreSQL on a Debian 8 VPS

=> ↺ Bitcoin Aware Barber’s Pole

=> ↺ A Library of Binary Tree Algorithms as Mixable Scala Traits

=> ↺ Keystone Unit Tests

=> ↺ Using the ipa CLI from an unenrolled workstation

=> ↺ Importing KVM guests to oVirt or RHEV

=> ↺ How to rebuild libguestfs from source on RHEL or CentOS 7

=> ↺ micro-webapps: Support for load-balancing

=> ↺ pcp and grafana v2

=> ↺ An Update on Firmware Updates

=> ↺ A tale of inexplicable GDB racy FAILs

=> ↺ Pelican and github pages – a quickstart

=> ↺ From a diary of AArch porter – PAGE_SIZE

=> ↺ Opportunistic encryption (prototype) with libreswan 3.14

=> ↺ HOWTO Reduce a LVM ext4 filesystem

=> ↺ GIF file animated with open-source software.

=> ↺ kubernetes skydns setup for testing on a single node

=> ↺ Bisection, part 2

• As described before, bisection works by taking a series of commits and testing systematically to find which commit introduced the regression. This doesn’t match well with the current development model of the Fedora kernel and makes bisection difficult.

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ Wine To Switch To Yearly, Time-Based Releases

=> ↺ Wine-Staging To Become A More Official Part Of Wine

=> ↺ The State of Wine For ARM, MIPS, PowerPC

=> ↺ Stella 4.6.5 Multi-Platform and Free Atari 2600 VCS Emulator Officially Released

• The developers of the Stella open-source, cross-platform, and free Atari 2600 VCS emulator software for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems, have announced the release of Stella 4.6.5.

Games

=> ↺ Alien: Isolation’s Linux and Mac system requirements appear from the shadows

=> ↺ Yes, It Looks Like Alien Isolation Is Coming Soon For Linux

• With this week’s release of Catalyst 15.9 for Linux the change-log mentioned a fix for Alien: Isolation… The only problem is, it’s not publicly released yet for Linux.

• There’s many wanting the game for Linux but there hasn’t been an official announcement yet. Since the Catalyst 15.9 release notes mentioning Alien: Isolation, which have since been redacted on the AMD site, many Phoronix readers have written in with excitement.

=> ↺ Stunt Rally 2.6 Brings New Tracks & Brand New Sound System

=> ↺ Alien Isolation Is Just The Latest NVIDIA-Only Linux Game

=> ↺ Insurgency FPS Game Being Ported To Linux, SteamOS

=> ↺ Alien: Isolation Is Being Released For Linux Next Week

=> ↺ The Graphics Cards For Linux Gaming With The Best Value & Efficiency At Higher Resolutions

=> ↺ The Graphics Cards On Open-Source Linux Drivers With The Best Value + Power Efficiency

=> ↺ The Best, Most Efficient Graphics Cards For 1080p Linux Gamers

=> ↺ Epic Games Makes The Awesome Infiltrator Available For Developers To Study, Use

=> ↺ AMD’s Catalyst 15.9 Now Available For Linux Gamers

=> ↺ Catalyst 15.9 Is Imminent With Many Steam Linux Game Fixes

=> ↺ OpenMandriva Is Sort Of Trying To Make It Easier To Game On Linux

=> ↺ Calling Arma 3 Linux Gamers

=> ↺ Wine to Get a Stable Release Once a Year

• The Wine developers are putting some order into their project, and they have decided to switch the project to a time-based release model, with major releases coming only once a year.

=> ↺ Postal 2 Paradise Lost DLC Finally Released For Linux!

• Good news for Postal fans, as RWS has finally released the Paradise Lost DLC for Linux gamers. This DLC adds a lot of content to the game.

=> ↺ Company Of Heroes 2 Reviewed For Linux

=> ↺ GOL Survey Results: August

• KDE is back on top again and Gnome is back in third, with Unity second. It seems the normal order of things has been restored. Also, before I get a scolding, the i3 option was removed long ago, but this survey was written way back in July, so this will be the last time it is seen on GOL .

=> ↺ Team Fortress 2 Gets Update on Steam for Linux

• The Team Fortress 2 multiplayer game developed by Valve has been upgraded once more, and developers have integrated a large number of suggestions from the community.

=> ↺ New Steam for Linux Update Brings OS Filtering in Big Picture

=> ↺ Vendetta Online 1.8.351 Space Combat MMORPG Adds “Ship Livery” Skinning System

=> ↺ TowerFall Ascension Is an Archery Brawler for Linux, 75% Off on Steam

=> ↺ Humble Weekly Bundle Brings Games and Their Source Code

• A new Humble Weekly Bundle has been released, and it comes with a ton of Linux games. Furthermore, some of the games that are available in this collection also come with the source code.

=> ↺ Stunt Rally 2.6 Open-Source Racing Game Adds New Sound Engine, 5 Tracks and 2 Vehicles

=> ↺ Alien: Isolation – The Collection Officially Announced for Linux

=> ↺ Valve Fixes All Xbox 360 and Xbox One Controllers Issues for SteamOS

=> ↺ Postal 2 Finally Released on Linux Alongside the Paradise Lost DLC

=> ↺ SOMA Is a Terrifying and Beautiful Horror Game for Linux Players

• The developers of the famous Amnesia: The Dark Descent have returned with a new atmospheric and terrifying first-person game called SOMA, and they’ve also released it for Linux users.

=> ↺ Grand Ages: Medieval Strategy Game Released For Linux, Some Thoughts

=> ↺ Have You Tried DreadOut? It’s A Rather Freaky Game On Linux

=> ↺ Solar Shifter EX A Beautiful & Very Flawed Bullet Hell Shooter On Linux

=> ↺ Rack N Ruin Top Down Action & Adventure Game Released For Linux

• The art style is charming and it was created by a former Blizzard artist Tyler Hunter, whose work you may have seen in World of Warcraft, Starcraft 2, Diablo 3 and Prey. The game seems to feature a good deal of humor. Those of you, who like bullet hell gameplay mechanics, you won’t be disappointed either.

=> ↺ Exploration Adventure Game ‘Else Heart.Break()’ Released DRM Free And On Steam For Linux

• You take on the role of the young Sebastian, who gets a job as a soda salesman in the remote and strange city of Dorisburg. The city is vast, with plenty of large indoor areas, and just tracking down your new employer proves to be a challenge. I spent my first hour of playing trying to find my way around the city and talking to everyone I met, without any real sense of my objective, so the game is a bit of a slow burner. It’s apparent that a lot of work has gone into making an interesting city with many venues for exploration and interactions though, so if you enjoy a game world you can get lost in, this game seems like it might fit the bill.

=> ↺ BRAWL Is A Reasonably Amusing Updated Version Of Bomberman For Linux

=> ↺ Gaming: The Talos Principle

• Maybe its only me because it was the first game of this quality I have played. And above all, I could actually play it on my normal Intel GPU laptop (but surprisingly only on Linux, the Windows version refused to play on my under-powered laptop).

=> ↺ Plans for Vulkan driver, OpenMandriva game portal, and more open gaming news

=> ↺ Steam for Linux Beta Client Gets a Fix for the Audio Wizard

• The Steam client is approaching another stable release, and developers have just added a number of general fixes and improvements, with a little something for the Linux platform.

=> ↺ Grand Ages: Medieval Strategy Game Released for SteamOS

• Grand Ages: Medieval is a new strategy game that combines both turn-based elements and real-time battles into a single experience. It’s developed by Gaming Minds Studios and published by Kalypso Media Digital.

=> ↺ Fresh Team Fortress 2 Update Released by Valve

=> ↺ Valve Keeps the Mystery About the November 10 Launch of the Steam Machines

• Valve is supposed to launch the new Steam Machines on November 10, and users have started to wonder why there isn’t a lot more excitement coming from the company.

• The release of the Steam Machines, the new consoles from Valve, powered by SteamOS, a Linux distribution based on Debian, is supposed to happen in less than 2 months and the company has yet to make any kind of announcement regarding the events from that day. People are now starting to wonder if Valve is really serious about this thing or if it’s just another phase.

=> ↺ The Astronauts Looking to Port The Vanishing of Ethan Carter for Linux Users

• The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a beautiful first-person adventure game developed by a studio named The Astronauts, and it looks like they are finally willing to take a closer look at Linux support.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ KDE Sprints – Randa, 2015

=> ↺ The Big Forum Cleaning

• In the past week, the KDE Community Forums administrators had been discussing how to improve the current forum layout. There are a few reasons in favor of a reorganization. First of all, to reflect better what KDE is (a community that produces software). Secondly, to provide a better organinzation for all kinds of people: those that require support, those that offer support, and those who want to contribute. All of this within a (hopefully) logical structure.

=> ↺ KDE Now Features Huge Collection of Almost 5,000 Icons

• The KDE project now has a full complement of icons, and it would be very difficult to find a known app that doesn’t have its own icon. The issue with most themes and especially icon packs is that they don’t usually provide icons for every conceivable application, and that’s a problem with desktops like KDE.

=> ↺ Krita Port to KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5 Almost Done, Krita 3.0 Coming Later This Year

• Krita developer Boudewijn Rempt reports on the work done by him and other devs that are part of the team responsible for porting the famous open-source and cross-platform digital painting software to the next-generation KDE Frameworks 5 and Qt 5 technologies.

=> ↺ KDE Applications 15.08.1 Lands in Kubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) Ahead of Final Beta

=> ↺ First Point Release of KDE Applications 15.08 Arrives with over 40 Bugfixes

=> ↺ KDE’s Breeze Icons Are Finished

=> ↺ KDE dinner in Berlin – October 3

• This weekend the KDE e.V. board is going to have an in-person board meeting in Berlin.

=> ↺ There’s Rapid Progress Being Made On KDE For Wayland

• KDE on Wayland has been making a lot of progress recently to the point that it’s becoming usable and with KDE Plasma 5.5 it looks like it will be in very good shape.

• I was tipped off today about the “rapid progress” being made in making KDE day-to-day usable under Wayland and is starting to get up to par with KDE on X11.

=> ↺ Only two weeks from Randa, so many changes for me!

=> ↺ KDE / Qt Fiber Web Browser To Take The Reasonable Approach To Dealing With Ads

• Fiber, the new open-source web browser aligned with Qt/KDE and is generating a fair amount of interest, has laid out details regarding their planned ad policy.

=> ↺ Krita 3.0 Nearing Reality With Port To Qt5/KF5

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ GNOME 3.18′s Evolution Email Client Gets an Application Menu, More Bugfixes

• The GNOME developers are hard at work these days preparing to unleash the Release Candidate (RC) build of the anticipated GNOME 3.18 open-source desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.

=> ↺ GNOME 3.20 to Implement ownCloud Support in the GNOME Music App, More

• Now that GNOME 3.18 is out and we’ve informed you guys about the new features it brings, the time has come to write more articles about the upcoming features of the next major release of the open-source desktop environment, GNOME 3.20.

=> ↺ GNOME Flashback 3.18.0 Gives a Classic Look to the GNOME 3.18 Desktop Environment

• Today, September 25, Alberts Muktupāvels has announced that his GNOME Flashback project that transforms the modern GNOME 3 desktop environment into a classic session has reached version 3.18, supporting the recently released GNOME 3.18 project.

=> ↺ GTK+ Gets a Hotfix Update for the GNOME 3.16 Desktop Environment

=> ↺ GTK+ 3.18 Gets Ready for GNOME 3.18 with More Wayland and Adwaita Improvements

• As part of the soon-to-be-released GNOME 3.18 RC (Release Candidate) build of the acclaimed open-source desktop environment, the GTK+ developers prepared a new milestone towards GTK+ 3.18.

=> ↺ GTK+ 3.18.0 Officially Released as Part of the GNOME 3.18 Desktop Environment

=> ↺ GNOME 3.18 Supports the $9 C.H.I.P. Linux Computer, Windows Tablets, More

=> ↺ GNOME’s Nautilus File Manager Has Just Gained Support for Google Drive

=> ↺ GNOME 3.18 Has Just Received Last.fm Support, Implemented in GNOME Music

=> ↺ GNOME Shell and Mutter Prepare for the Final Release of GNOME 3.18 with Bugfixes

=> ↺ GNOME Builder Gets Ready for GNOME 3.18 with New Plugin Engine, Printer Support

=> ↺ GNOME’s Rygel Open-Source DLNA Media Server Removes WMV Support

• The sixth snapshot towards Rygel 0.28 Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) media server software has been announced on September 14, 2015, and it is available for download and testing as we speak.

=> ↺ Parsix GNU/Linux 8.5 (Atticus) Announced, It Will be Based on GNOME 3.18

• Now that the Parsix GNU/Linux 8.0 (Mumble) distribution has been released, and that the highly anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment hit the streets with its numerous new and attractive features, the developers of Parsix GNU/Linux teased users on Twitter about the upcoming release of the Debian-based operating system.

=> ↺ Open Help Conference 2015

• I’m here again in Cincinnati, OH for the 2015 Open Help Conference and GNOME Docs hackfest. The venue for this year’s conference is at the beautiful Mercantile Library in downtown Cincinnati.

=> ↺ Chrome Lands GTK3 Theme Integration

=> ↺ The Outreach Program Still Aiming For Other Underrepresented Backgrounds

=> ↺ Clutter 1.24 Fixes Support For Embedding It In Other Toolkits

=> ↺ Red Hat Continues Dominating GTK+ Development

=> ↺ HiDPI Cursor Scaling Gets Fixed Ahead Of GNOME 3.18

=> ↺ GNOME 3.18 Release Candidate Arrives

=> ↺ WebKitGTK+ 2.10 Is Ready With Many Features

=> ↺ Fedora 23 Beta & GNOME 3.18 Are Doing Terrific

=> ↺ Features To Look Forward To With GNOME 3.18

=> ↺ GNOME 3.18 On Fedora 23: X.Org vs. Wayland Performance

=> ↺ GNOME 3.20 Feature Planning Heats Up

=> ↺ GNOME 3.18 Officially Released

=> ↺ GNOME Flashback 3.18 Released, Remains Unofficial Project

=> ↺ GNOME Shell and Mutter Prepare for the Final Release of GNOME 3.18 with Bugfixes

• The GNOME Project is about to release the RC (Release Candidate) development milestone for the forthcoming GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, so many of the project’s core components and applications have received various improvements and new features.

=> ↺ Orca Open-Source Screen Reader Gets Ready for GNOME 3.18 with New Features

• As part of the soon-to-be-released RC (Release Candidate) build of the anticipated GNOME 3.18 desktop environment, the developers behind the popular Orca screen reader and magnifier applications have announced a new version.

=> ↺ Clutter 1.24 Fixes Support For Embedding It In Other Toolkits

• Clutter 1.24.0 was released today in time for the upcoming release of GNOME 3.18.0.

=> ↺ Cinnamon 2.8 to Feature a Better Sound Applet with Media Controls

• After announcing the visual workspace switcher applet, Clement Lefebvre, the lead developer of the Linux Mint and Cinnamon projects, had the great pleasure of announcing the new and improved sound applet of the upcoming Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment.

Distributions

=> ↺ Black Lab Appliance Server Is a New Open Standard Platform for Linux Applications

• We’ve been informed by Black Lab Software, the company behind the Black Lab Linux operating system, about their new product, Black Lab Appliance Server, a new open standard platform for Linux applications.

New Releases

=> ↺ Arch-Based Antergos Working On New Package Management UI

=> ↺ Antergos Is Getting Its Own Package Manager and It Looks Great

• Antergos is a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux, and its developers are preparing a new package manager that should really change everything about the way packages are handled in this distro, and, why not, in other operating systems as well.

=> ↺ Solus OS Will Get a New Logo Soon, Budgie Desktop Might Support Wayland

• Solus Project’s Joshua Strobl posted a very informative article on his website about the work done by the team in preparation for the final build of the Solus 1.0 GNU/Linux operating system, due for release on October 1, 2015.

=> ↺ 4MLinux 14.0 Core Enters Beta with Support for GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) 5.2.0

• We have been informed earlier today by Zbigniew Konojacki, lead developer and maintainer of the 4MLinux independent and open-source distribution, that the Beta release of the next major version of the OS, 4MLinux 14.0, is now available for download and testing.

=> ↺ 4MLinux 14.0 Independent Distro Enters Beta with Firefox 40.0.3 and LibreOffice 5.0

• Zbigniew Konojacki, the creator and lead developer of the 4MLinux project, had the great pleasure of informing us earlier today, September 22, about the immediate availability for download and testing of the Beta build of 4MLinux 14.0.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

=> ↺ OpenMandriva Launches Gaming Portal to Help Users Install Windows Games

• OpenMandriva’s Kate Lebedeff had the great pleasure of announcing a new portal for Linux gamers who install the OpenMandriva Lx GNU/Linux operating system and want an easy way of playing their favorite Windows games.

Arch Family

=> ↺ Manjaro 15.09 Released, Provides Calamares Install Option

• Manjaro 15.09 was released this morning with its Xfce, KDE, and net installer spins. Manjaro 15.09 is their first major update since June and is codenamed Bellatrix for this Arch-based distribution.

• With this release the Manjaro team has decided to begin their versions based on date tags rather than their former versioning scheme. This Manjaro release also adds the Calamares installer framework as an alternate installer. Philip Müller of Manjaro now believes this cross-distribution installer framework initiative is stable for production purposes, “It is now stable enough to be used on productive systems. You can still use Thus. Also our terminal installer got some small improvements.”

=> ↺ Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.09 Release Candidate 4 Is Now Available for Download

=> ↺ Manjaro KDE 15.09 to Feature a Beautiful KDE 5.4.1 Customized Desktop

=> ↺ Latest Manjaro Linux Update Brings Linux Kernel 4.2.1 and KDE Applications 15.08.1

• After announcing the release of the fourth and last Release Candidate of the Manjaro Linux Xfce 15.09 and Manjaro Linux KDE 15.09, Philip Müller comes now with news about a new update for the upcoming GNU/Linux distribution.

=> ↺ Manjaro Linux KDE 15.09 (Bellatrix) Ships with the KDE Plasma 5.4.1 Desktop

=> ↺ Manjaro 15.09 Is Out, Based on Linux Kernel 4.1 and Xfce 4.12

• A new stable version of the Arch Linux-based Manjaro operating system has been released, with a lot of changes, improvements, and a new installer.

=> ↺ Manjaro Linux Netinstall 15.09 (Bellatrix) Offers Support for Linux Kernel 4.3

Ballnux/SUSE

=> ↺ OpenSUSE 42.1 “Leap” Now In Beta

• Announced this morning was the much anticipated beta of openSUSE 42.1 “Leap”.

• Today’s openSUSE Leap Beta has changes to GRUB, Plymouth, and other packages. Found currently in openSUSE Leap is the Linux 4.1 kernel, KDE Frameworks 5.13, XDM 1.1.10, and more.

=> ↺ openSUSE Leap 42.1 Beta Based on Linux Kernel 4.1 LTS

• The openSUSE Project announces openSUSE Leap 42.1 Beta operating system has been released and is now available for download and testing.

Slackware Family

=> ↺ Absolute Linux 14.12 Is One of the Few Slackware Distros Still Maintained

• There aren’t too many Linux distributions out there that still use Slackaware as the base and that’s a real shame. It used to be a lot higher in the user preferences, but it sort of faded away in the past few years. Absolute Linux is probably the only one that still managed to get some exposure in the news, but only because it’s upgraded quite often, although not as often as we’d like.

Red Hat Family

=> ↺ ClearOS 7.1 to Offer a Replacement for Microsoft Active Directory, IPv6 and Btrfs Support

• ClearFoundation’ David Loper comes today with news about the immediate availability for download of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming ClearOS 7.1.0 enterprise-class, server oriented GNU/Linux distribution based on CentOS 7.

=> ↺ How Red Hat Became One Of The Best Names In Tech

• But that can’t keep me from appreciating the company, and it won’t stop me from recommending it as the stock continues to make a steady rise as the company delivered yet another quarter of earnings beat on Monday.

=> ↺ Analysts Set Red Hat Price Target at $82.57 (NYSE:RHT)

• Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) traded down 0.33% on Wednesday, reaching $72.92. 1,281,705 shares of the company’s stock were exchanged. The company has a market cap of $13.36 billion and a price-to-earnings ratio of 70.05. The stock’s 50 day moving average is $73.15 and its 200 day moving average is $75.43. Red Hat has a 52 week low of $52.53 and a 52 week high of $81.49.

=> ↺ Putting meritocracy to the test: Open Org book club, chapter 4

=> ↺ Monthly GlusterFS 3.5 release, fixing two bugs

Fedora

=> ↺ Unit Testing Example – Bad Stub Design in DNF

• In software testing, usually unit testing, test stubs are programs that simulate the behaviors of external dependencies that a module undergoing the test depends on. Test stubs provide canned answers to calls made during the test.

=> ↺ Fedora 22 libvirt with bridge

• Fedora 22 comes with libvirt and NetworkManager and it is pre-configured with “default” NAT network. That’s fine, until you want to reach the NATed servers from your LAN.

• Good solution is network interface bridging. It was always a pain to configure this, but in Fedora 21 most of bugs were fixed and now it is possible to configure everything via NetworkManager.

=> ↺ Fedora 22 chrooted on an LG G4 phone

• Rooting this phone was ton of hassle. You have to ask LG to send you the unlock code! (My phone, not under contract). As most of the unrooting guides miss out this vital step, here is a guide to doing that.

=> ↺ What FUDCon is really about?

=> ↺ Building a better FUDcon experience

• FUDcon has always been a way to interact with other, to meet those contributors that were your coworkers for the past year (and in many cases, for longer periods). As the time goes by, Fedora has experienced a series of changes that sometimes are way to fast to keep track, specially since most of the contributors have a life outside the community.

=> ↺ Why Fedora needs a place for developers

• I would like to share with you my own opinion on why I initially joined Petr Hráček in pursuing the idea of a portal for developers running Fedora and why I think that this project will help new and existing developers to take advantage of everything Fedora Workstation has to offer.

=> ↺ Fedora in the Software Freedom Day

=> ↺ Bodhi2 and it’s much faster updates flow

=> ↺ First Design clinic results

=> ↺ Voted in the supplemental wallpapers election for the Fedora 23 release

=> ↺ Gnome 3.18 Wallpapers + Fedora Logo

=> ↺ Supplemental Wallpaper Winners!

=> ↺ Fedora Developer Website Design

=> ↺ Submitting Conference Videos To Fedora

=> ↺ 4000+ Bugs in Fedora – Checksec Failures

=> ↺ How come MCS Confinement is not working in SELinux even in enforcing mode?

=> ↺ FUDCon Cordoba 2015 – day 0

=> ↺ Apache HTTP Server and load balancing to PHP FPM

=> ↺ Fedora Atomic Logo Idea

=> ↺ Cloud Atomic Test Day on Tuesday (2015-09-22)

=> ↺ Identifying Fedora media redux: What is Atomic?

• Reading the Project Atomic site, it seems I was kind of working from an outdated understanding of the “Atomic” concept. I’d always understood it as being more or less a branding of ostree, i.e. an “Atomic” system was just one that used the ostree deployment method. But it seems the concept has now been somewhat changed upstream. To quote the Introduction to Project Atomic:

=> ↺ A fully ansible powered Fedora Infrastructure

• Just a week or so shy of 3 years ago, Fedora Infrastructure embarked on a journey to migrate to using ansible to manage all our hosts. It’s been a long road and one we could have done faster, but we wanted to do things in a transparent and measured way, not rushing and making quick decisions and changes that we would have to clean up later. Today that journey is completed.

=> ↺ BalCCon 2k15

• Second day started off with a great talk from Onuralp and Serdar about awesome possibilities for controlling Fedora (or other OSes) without touching. There was huge interest and people shown great enthusiasm with the devices presented (Myo and Leap Motion) as well as the software that ran all the pieces which was Python based on top of Fedora. There was a ton of questions during and after the talk, and later at the booth as well.

=> ↺ Fedora 23 Beta Officially Released and Ready for Testing

• The Fedora Project has just revealed that the first Beta for Fedora 23 has been released and is now ready for download and testing. The project just got a lot nearer to the stable version and it already looks like it’s going to be a winner.

=> ↺ The Fedora 23 Beta Has Been Officially Released

=> ↺ It’s Getting Time To Try Out Fedora 23 Beta

• Planned for release next Tuesday, 22 September, is the Fedora 23 Beta. This Thursday will be the Go/No-Go meeting to decide if the F23 Beta is ready for release or needs to be pushed out for another day.

=> ↺ How Fedora monitors upstream releases

• Have you updated your Fedora system recently? Hopefully you do this regularly. Updates fix various bugs and even add new features to your most loved applications. An update, to our users, is generally a notification from the Software application. If you’re an advanced user and prefer the command line, the process is simple:

Debian Family

=> ↺ Debian/TeX Live 2015.20150917-1

• Most importantly the fix for unicode-math that was broken for a short time, and for the Japanese users it seems that the LaTeX3 packages have gained support for upTeX. Good to hear.

=> ↺ Debian To Stop Spinning New CD ISOs

=> ↺ Reproducible builds: week 22 in Stretch cycle

• The following 22 packages became reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: breathe, cdi-api, geronimo-jpa-2.0-spec, geronimo-validation-1.0-spec, gradle-propdeps-plugin, jansi, javaparser, libjsr311-api-java, mac-widgets, mockito, mojarra, pastescript, plexus-utils2, powerline, python-psutil, python-sfml, python-tldap, pythondialog, tox, trident, truffle, zookeeper.

=> ↺ Debian 8, Linux 3.18 Now Available For The MIPS CI20

=> ↺ Reproducible builds: week 20 in Stretch cycle

• The sensationalist “How Debian Is Trying to Shut Down the CIA” got started a few rants here…

Derivatives

=> ↺ Semplice Linux 2015.2 Is Out, Based on Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 and Linux Kernel 4.1.7 LTS

• The development team of the Debian-based Semplice Linux distribution has announced earlier today, September 18, the release and immediate availability for download of the Semplice for Workstations 2015.2 operating system.

Canonical/Ubuntu

=> ↺ Canonical, GE Partner on Crowdsourced IoT Standards for Smart Home

=> ↺ Ubuntu 14.04 php-apcu 4.0.7 backport

=> ↺ Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) Final Beta Has Been Officially Released – Screenshot Tour

=> ↺ QEMU Vulnerabilities Closed in All Ubuntu-Supported OSes

=> ↺ Canonical Fixes Vulnerability in Apport for All Ubuntu Systems

=> ↺ Canonical Drops All Ubuntu-Specific Firefox Extensions

• Ubuntu developers have finally decided to drop the support for Unity Integration for Firefox, Unity Websites Integration, and Ubuntu Online Accounts extension, and they have been removed from Ubuntu 15.04 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

=> ↺ Lubuntu 15.10 Will Remain Based on LXDE, Beta 2 Now Available for Download

• Canonical has announced the release of the Ubuntu 15.10 Final Beta for Ubuntu and some of its most important flavors, including Lubuntu, which is built around the LXDE desktop environment.

=> ↺ Ubuntu MATE 15.10 Has Been Fully Migrated to MATE 1.10, Beta 2 Out Now

=> ↺ Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 Beta 2 Features GNOME Shell 3.16 and Most of GNOME 3.16

• The development team of the Ubuntu GNOME distribution has just released the second and last Beta build of the Wily Werewolf release cycle, as part of today’s Ubuntu 15.10 Final Beta releases.

=> ↺ Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 Beta 2 Screenshot Tour – A GNOME 3.16 Desktop Done Right

• First of all, let’s get the obvious thing out of the way. Ubuntu GNOME is based on the GNOME 3.16 branch, which is not the latest version available right now. Just a few days ago, GNOME 3.18 was made available, and there are always a few people out there that will criticize the fact that Ubuntu GNOME won’t integrate it by default.

=> ↺ Kubuntu 15.10 Beta 2 Screenshot Tour – Possibly the Last Release as Official Flavor

=> ↺ Kubuntu 15.10 Beta 2 Arrives with LibreOffice 5.0, Firefox 41.0, and KDE Plasma 5.4.1

=> ↺ Xubuntu 15.10 Beta 2 Now Available for Download with Linux Kernel 4.2.1 and Xfce 4.12

=> ↺ Xubuntu 15.10 Beta 2 Screenshot Tour – Change Is Not on the Menu

• Xubuntu 15.10 Beta 2 was released by its developers yesterday, but don’t expect to see anything out of the ordinary in this new iteration. The gallery posted below will make this quite clear.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Touch Weather App Reboot Approved, File Manager to Receive Samba Support

• We’ve just received a very interesting email from Canonical’s David Plannella, who writes about the things achieved by the Ubuntu Community Team during the week that has just passed, keeping everyone up to date.

=> ↺ Introducing Pinguy Builder, a Remastersys Alternative for Remixing Ubuntu

• The Pinguy OS developers have just announced the release of a brand new tool that many of you out there will love, an alternative, or a fork if you want to call it that, to the very popular Remastersys utility for backing up or remixing Ubuntu distros.

=> ↺ Ubuntu 15.10 Just Hit Its Final Beta

=> ↺ Users Are Reporting Great Battery Life for Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition

=> ↺ Unity Settings Daemon Problem Fixed in Ubuntu 15.04 and Ubuntu 14.04

• Canonical has revealed that a vulnerability that affected the Unity Settings Daemon Daemon has been closed in Ubuntu 15.04 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS by the developers.

=> ↺ Snappy Ubuntu Core 15.04 Receives Its Fifth Update

=> ↺ Canonical’s Ubuntu One Project Forked into Magicicada

• Canonical has recently released the source code behind that file synchronization server for Ubuntu One and it looks like the project has been put to good use.

=> ↺ FreeType Vulnerabilities Closed in All Supported Ubuntu OSes

=> ↺ ICU Security Issues Fixed in Ubuntu Systems

• Details about a couple of ICU vulnerabilities that have been found and repaired in Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS have been published by Canonical.

=> ↺ Watch: Unity 8 and Mir Running on a Nexus 7 Tablet Connected to an External Monitor

• We’ve talked a lot about the Ubuntu convergence in the last couple of years, since Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Canonical and Ubuntu, announced back in December 2013 that Ubuntu 15.04 would achieve full convergence before Windows.

=> ↺ Big Bug Bonanza Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

• The vast majority of Ubuntu desktop users prefer to stick with a long term support release (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LTS) rather than the regular 6 monthly releases, so 16.04 LTS represents the next big upgrade for most Ubuntu users. 16.04 LTS will be running Unity 7 by default as it has done for the last six years and our focus for the Unity 7 stack is fixing bugs which adversely affect the user experience of the desktop.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Needs Help Fixing Thousands Of Unity/Compiz Bugs For 16.04 LTS

• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS shipping next April on the desktop will be using Unity 7 by default along with the Compiz window manager atop an X.Org Server. While this isn’t as big of a change as switching to Unity 8 on the desktop with Mir, there’s still thousands of outstanding bugs.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Snappy Core 15.04 Has a New and Improved Raspberry Pi 2 Image

• Canonical’s Oliver Grawert had the great pleasure of announcing the general availability of the new and improved Raspberry Pi 2 image of the Ubuntu Snappy Core 15.04 operating system.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Phone Marketshare Estimated At Around 25 Thousand Users

• Canonical sadly hasn’t made public any sales numbers about the number of Ubuntu Phone devices out in the wild, but an estimate based upon update reporting pegs the number of current Ubuntu Phone users at around 25,000.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Community Developer Estimates Number of Ubuntu Phones at 25K

=> ↺ Canonical’s Ubuntu Web Browser Is Getting Much Better for Desktop Users

• Apart from its OS plans, Canonical is also working on a new Internet browser named the Ubuntu browser, and they’ve just pushed a number of important changes and improvements this past week.

=> ↺ Ubuntu Is Making Progress With Their Unity 8 Greeter On The Desktop

Flavours and Variants

=> ↺ Linux Mint 17.3 to Ship with Six Window Managers, Users Can Change on the Fly

Devices/Embedded

=> ↺ Rugged SBC runs Linux on 5th Gen Core, expands via StackPC

• Perfectron’s new EPIC SBC runs Linux on 5th Gen Core CPUs, expands modularly with a rare PCe/104 fork called StackPC, and supports -40 to 85°C operation.

=> ↺ The super cheap $9 Linux based Chip PC starts shipping from today

• If you want a super cheap Linux based computer, now is the chance to get it. Chip, a $9 Linux-based, super-cheap computer that raised some $2 Million beyond a pledge goal of just $50,000 on Kickstarter can soon be yours. After its successful Kickstarter campaign, now, the first run of devices is beginning to be distributed to backers.

=> ↺ Kobo firmware 3.18.0 mega update (KSM, nickel patch, ssh, fonts)

• In short succession a new firmware from Kobo, this time 3.18.0. And here is my mega-update. On request from a reader I have now prepared updates for all three hardwares, Mark4 (Glo), Mark5 (Aura), and Mark6 (GloHD).

=> ↺ Orange Pi PC is an Open-Source Single-Board Computer That Runs Android and Ubuntu

• The guys over Orange Pi have announced a new, cheaper version of their well-known Orange Pi 2 SBC (Single-Board Computer), which is dubbed Orange Pi PC, it’s open source, and it’s available for only $15 (€13).

Phones

Tizen

=> ↺ Korean preorders for the Samsung Gear S2 Smartwatch out of stock within 2 hours

• The Samsung Gear S2, the company’s first round-face smartwatch, has received some great and warm reviews from the tech world so far. Now it seems that consumers in the homeland of Samsung (Korea) are also Interested in some round Tizen bling.

=> ↺ [Video Tutorial] Developers, Learn more about the Localisation API in Tizen 2.4

=> ↺ Tizen 3.0 Milestone Released, Finishes Replacing X.Org With Wayland

Android

=> ↺ Top Android news of the week: $50 tablet, Android Auto, BlackBerry Priv

=> ↺ Five Most Popular Apps for Android Devices

=> ↺ LG Nexus 5 and Motorola Nexus 6 To Receive The Android 6.0 Marshmallow Next Month

=> ↺ BlackBerry confirms Android-powered Priv smartphone will launch this year

=> ↺ The Android Phone Turns Seven: Google Celebrates With Free Wallpapers

=> ↺ These HTC devices are expected to get Android 6.0 Marshmallow with Sense 7

=> ↺ 11 New Languages in Android Next Month, Including Gujarati: Sundar Pichai

• Google will introduce 11 new languages in Android next month, including Gujarati, its chief Sundar Pichai announced today as Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited its headquarters in California’s Mountain View as part of his Digital India push.

=> ↺ Mobile Operating System Marketshare War News: iOS vs. Android

• Android is seen to be dominating the worldwide smartphone marketshare by 82.8 percent, with iOS trailing behind at 13.9 percent.

=> ↺ Clamshell Android powered phone by Xiaomi gets certified by TENAA; listing shows 8GB of RAM inside (UPDATE)

• A gold colored clamshell phone made by Xiaomi, has been certified by TENAA in China. Samsung recently released a similar handset, the SM-G9198, that was powered by Android 5.1.1. Xiaomi’s clamshell features gold trim and apparently comes with a removable battery. But the most interesting part of the phone’s listing on TENAA is the 8GB of RAM that supposedly is inside the phone. And yes, that is RAM, not ROM.

=> ↺ Paranoid Android redux: “going dark” with Silent Circle’s Blackphone 2

• For the majority of smartphone manufacturers, security and privacy are check boxes on a feature list. For Blackphone, they’re the main attraction. Launched last year as a joint venture between the secure communications service Silent Circle and the Spanish specialty phone manufacturer Geeksphone, Blackphone’s eponymous first product was an Android-based smartphone intended to provide the security and privacy that were lacking in Google’s mobile operating system. Last June, we got an exclusive first look at that device and found it to be largely what it claimed to be. Unsurprisingly for a security-minding phone, the original Blackphone felt somewhat lacking in the usability department and somewhat janky in the hardware department.

=> ↺ iBall Andi HD6 Express Review: A large screen Android phone for basic use

• The iBall Andi HD6 is a large phone for a small price. At Rs. 6,999, it’s one of the few phones to pack a gargantuan 6-inch screen. But is that enough?

=> ↺ Android 6.0 Marshmallow to roll out from 5 October on some devices

• We are just a few days away from Google’s big event which is scheduled for in San Francisco on September 29. During the event, Google is expected to unveil the much talked about Nexus smartphones built by LG and Huawei (LG Nexus 5X and Huawei Nexus 6P). Reportedly, Android 6.0 Marshmallow will roll out to the following devices on October 5.

=> ↺ Five Upcoming Android Phones to Launch in the Market Soon

• Don’t go buying a new Android phone yet as there are some amazing Android phones releasing in the coming few months.

=> ↺ Run Android 5.1 Lollipop with Google Play Store on Raspberry Pi 2 Using RaspAnd

• Arne Exton was more than happy to drop an email to Softpedia HQ about the new release of his commercial RaspAnd project that lets users install Google’s Android 5.1 Lollipop mobile operating system on a Raspberry Pi 2 SBC (Single-Board Computer).

=> ↺ The inside story of London’s contribution to Android

• Google is gearing up for a bevy of big announcements next week. The tech giant is expected to launch two new flagship smartphones, the Nexus 5x and Nexus 6p — and likely alongside them, Android Marshmallow, the latest update to its mobile operating system (OS).

=> ↺ Software release schedule from Telus suggests Android M rollout to begin October 5th

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

=> ↺ Jolla Prepares To Begin Shipping Its Highly-Anticipated Tablet

• Jolla has begun fulfilling their orders on the crowd-funded Jolla Tablet.

• Jolla wrote in a blog post they’re sailing and that contributors to their crowd-funded campaign are being contacted now for completing the order so that the devices can begin shipping. However, for later backers, it still could be a few weeks before being invited to complete the order.

Free Software/Open Source

=> ↺ Being smart about open source: 5 practical tips for government use

• There is much written about the pros and cons of using open source software, generally with more emphasis on the pros. Open source evangelists have even convinced foreign governments (India and the United Kingdom, to name a few) to go so far as mandating the use of open source software. To make smart decisions, however, government agencies must carefully consider the project in question. Here are five tips for making sure important questions are not overlooked.

=> ↺ Github Open Sources a Tool That Will Teach Students to Code

• John Britton is Github’s “education liaison”, which means that he assists in bringing Github to schools and college campuses. The sweeping online service in the last few years have changed the way the way coders build software across Silicon Valley and beyond. According to Britton, it’s transforming the way that teachers teach coding now. In the end, Github is all about collaborating on code together.

=> ↺ Adblock Fast: A free and open source ad blocker for iOS 9

=> ↺ Adblock Fast is a free and open source way to banish ads in iOS 9

=> ↺ Open Source and Haiti: A Story of Care

=> ↺ Dropbox open-sources Zulip, the group chat app it acquired last year

• Dropbox has released Zulip, a group chat app, under an open-source Apache license. The move, announced today, comes after Dropbox acquired Zulip in March 2014.

• The client and server code is available on GitHub. You can download the client for Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android here.

=> ↺ Study Reveals Insights About Enterprise Use of Open Source

• How is open source used in the large enterprise environment? A recent study from WIPRO and Oxford Economics titled “The Open Source Era” provided insights into that question. The report revealed that 21 percent of enterprises use open source software and 25 percent have deployed it in a business unit. However, 54 percent are in the planning phase of open source adoption.

=> ↺ Latest Brocade ODL controller, apps ease use of open source in cloud

• An OVSDB interface lets the Brocade controller direct a virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) topology, which is an overlay network on existing Layer 3 infrastructure. VXLAN technology makes it easier for network engineers to scale out a cloud-computing environment.

=> ↺ Google, Twitter Reportedly Developing Open Source Instant Article Solution

=> ↺ Facebook Open Sources React Native For Android So Devs Can Reuse Code Across Web And iOS

=> ↺ Pinterest open-sources Terrapin, a tool for serving data from Hadoop

• Pinterest today announced the availability of Terrapin, a new piece of open-source software that’s designed to more efficiently push data out of the Hadoop open-source big data software and make it available for other systems to use.

• Engineers at Pinterest designed Terrapin as a replacement for the open-source HBase NoSQL database for this particular process, because HBase had proven slow and didn’t perform well beyond 100GB of data. The company looked at open-source key-value store ElephantDB as a possible alternative, but that wasn’t perfect, either.

=> ↺ DreamFactory: Building a better backend for your apps

• A free, open source solution for connecting mobile, IoT, or Web apps to backend server data and services

=> ↺ Could VW scandal lead to open-source software for better automobile cybersecurity?

• Could fallout from Volkswagen’s cheating lead to vehicle manufacturers open-sourcing millions of lines of code for the sake of enhanced automobile cybersecurity?

=> ↺ Price – One Measure Of Lock-in

• For many, ignorance is the key lock-in. Folks born and raised as slaves may not appreciate there is any other life. Slaves may feel any competition to their slave-master is a threat to their way of life. Education is key. Students exposed to FLOSS at school will certainly know there is another way, a better way to do IT. Students I taught even knew how to install GNU/Linux and applications like LibreOffice. Today, there are many more retail shelves bearing GNU/Linux and LibreOffice than the bad old days. The stats show it. LibreOffice has over 100 million users. GNU/Linux as the classic desktop and Chrome OS are slowly but surely taking share in the world. Android/Linux is kicking butt.

=> ↺ Dropbox releases its chat app Zulip under an open-source license

=> ↺ Google Launches “Brotli” Compression Algorithm For The Web

=> ↺ Mycroft Aims to Be the First Truly Open AI That Belongs to Everyone

• Mycroft is a very successful project defined as an AI and home automation system, but its makers are hoping that it’s going be a lot more than just that.

=> ↺ Mycroft AI Home Automation Needs a Mascot, Competition Organized

• The Mycroft AI home automation system has been gathering quite a following, especially after it completed a Kickstarter campaign. Now, its makers are looking to find a fitting mascot for the Mycroft.

Events

=> ↺ My Dance Card for “All Things Open”

• Systemv Startup vs systemd: With all the continuing brouhaha surrounding systemd, this is a must on my list. From the abstract on this talk, it appears as if this will be a positive take on systemd — pragmatic, since it seems to be here to stay, like it or not 00 and will seek to explain not only how it works and how to configure it, but to explain why its development was deemed necessary. This one is being conducted by open source software and Linux advocate David Both, who’s byline has appeared on OS/2 Magazine, Linux Magazine, Linux Journal, and OpenSource.com.

=> ↺ FUDCon Cordoba 2015

=> ↺ FUDCon LATAM 2015 – Cordoba

• FUDCon LATAM 2015 was held in Córdoba Argentina, and hosted by Valentin Basel, Matias Maceira and Laura Fontanesi, and all the local volunteers that helped make the event could happen.

=> ↺ DjangoGirls workshop in Pune

• During FUDCon, I heard that later in the year we might get a Django Girls workshop in Pune. If you never heard about Django Girls before, here is a quote from the website:

=> ↺ Dronecode workshop to be held at LinuxCon/ELCE in Dublin

• In a nod to the proliferation of Linux in drones, the Dronecode Project will host a workshop in conjunction with LinuxCon and the ELC in Dublin next month.

Web Browsers

Chrome

=> ↺ How WebGL Works In Chromium

• If you’ve been curious how WebGL works in Chromium or other modern web browsers prior to hitting the graphics driver, here’s a lengthy explanation.

Mozilla

=> ↺ Firefox 41 Released With Many Small Improvements

=> ↺ Mozilla Releases SeaMonkey 2.38

• It’s not too often these days that we hear about SeaMonkey, Mozilla’s all-in-one Internet Suite, but an update to it is available this weekend.

• SeaMonkey continues to come equippped with email, IRC, HTML editing. and web browsing functionality and is powered by the latest Gecko engine release from Firefox. It was just earlier this week that Firefox 41 was released.

=> ↺ Firefox OS post-mortem

• So, it happened. My Flame stopped working, it just doesn’t react to anything (power off switch, power cable), and of course being a weird unknown China-only thing, no local repair shop would touch it. I probably could ask somebody at Mozilla for another one, but I already knew I wouldn’t. Let me write couple of words why I gave up on Firefox OS (not on Firefox or Mozilla!).

=> ↺ Mozilla’s Project Candle Aiming To Improve Firefox’s Power Efficiency

=> ↺ Webconverger Kiosk Devs Found Out Firefox Is Leaking Info

• “Prompted by the disturbing privacy defaults in Windows 10 and an inquiry whether Webconverger leaked any intranet information, we reviewed Firefox defaults. This review was accomplished with Wireshark, a tool that allows us to analyse every packet leaving and entering a Webconverger instance. Strictly speaking these Firefox defaults don’t leak any private information and elements like safe browsing should give an extra layer of malware protection, but in practice the network noise generated by these services are too risky for security,” reads the official announcement.

=> ↺ Rust 1.3 Further Stabilizes The API, More Efficient Substring Matcher

SaaS/Big Data

=> ↺ Building enterprise data applications with open source components

• I first found myself having to learn Scala when I started using Spark (version 0.5). Prior to Spark, I’d peruse books on Scala but just never found an excuse to delve into it. In the early days of Spark, Scala was a necessity — I quickly came to appreciate it and have continued to use it enthusiastically.

=> ↺ Survey shows huge popularity spike for Apache Spark

• One popular number often noted by the Spark community is that its roughly 600 contributors make it the most active project in the entire Apache Software Foundation, a major governing body for open source software, in terms of number of contributors. That’s no small feat considering the number of popular enterprise database and infrastructure projects currently governed by Apache.

• And new numbers released this week as part of survey from Databricks, a software startup founded by the creators of Spark, shed some new light on just how popular the technology has become. One of the standout statistics has to do with attendance at user conferences, which are usually a good sign of interest in a technology and who’s using it. In 2015, attendance at Spark Summit events grew 156% to nearly 3,000, and the number of companies represented grew 152% to more than 1,100.

=> ↺ Ossipee

• OpenStack is a big distributed system. FreeIPA is designed for security in distributed system. In order to develop and test each of them, separately or together, I need a distributed system. Virtualization has been a key technology for making this kind of work possible. OpenStack is great of managing virtualization. Added to that is the benefits found when one “Fly our own airplanes.” Thus, I am using OpenStack to develop OpenStack.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

=> ↺ vertical text columns preview

• My small contribution to last night’s LibreOffice conference hack-fest. In vertical text mode, the column view for pages now previews in the correct direction.

=> ↺ LibreOffice 5.0.2 Officially Released with a Ton of Fixes

• The Document Foundation just announced that LibreOffice 5.0.2, the second minor release for the 5.0 branch, has been released and is now available for download.

Education

=> ↺ Making the case for Free Software at Universities

• Delivering this talk represented a challenge for me. My audience are freshman, that have been in college for all of three to four weeks. Your regular presentation is not going to work. My audience have left home, making new friends, and enjoying new freedoms, making adult decisions. For most freshman, their journey is just beginning and if I were to use my own experience, constantly evolving. Where you started out might be completely different and that could be said to continue even in your adult life. We are after all works in progress. The other challenge is that perception of Free Software / Open Source is applicable only to computer science. That is of course patently untrue, considering how this concept has now spread to so many other sectors. Creating something requires a wide range of skillsets and its just not about coding.

BSD

=> ↺ Pkg 1.6.0 Is Coming Soon To FreeBSD

• Pkg 1.6.0 is set to introduce a number of improvements to their solver, improved support for partial upgrades, improved zsh completion support, improved Linux support, context-aware messages, and many other changes along with the usual bug-fixes and code clean-ups.

=> ↺ MidnightBSD 0.7 Adds LZ4 Compression and TRIM Support to ZFS, More

• MidnightBSD’s Lucas Holt had the great pleasure of announcing this past weekend the release of version 0.7 of his BSD-based computer operating system, which adds numerous new features and under-the-hood improvements.

=> ↺ LibreSSL 2.3 Released: Completely Nukes SSLv3 Support

=> ↺ The State Of DRM/KMS Drivers On Solaris Sounds Worse Off Than The BSD Drivers

• Randy Fishel of Oracle presented at this week’s XDC2015 conference about the state of the DRM/KMS graphics drivers on Solaris.

=> ↺ OpenBSD Adds Intel Broadwell Graphics Support

• The latest OpenBSD kernel finally adds support for Broadwell graphics while Skylake support is still a ways out for this BSD operating system.

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

=> ↺ State of the Goblin: September 2015

• Hello everyone! It’s been a while since a comprehensive update of what’s happening in MediaGoblin land. Despite the quiet, there is a lot to report, so let’s get down to business and start reporting!

=> ↺ GNU ddrescue 1.20 Has Many Changes

=> ↺ Full-time developer available

=> ↺ A Developer Is Going To Focus On Improving GNU Hurd’s Hardware Support

• Bruno is specifically hoping to work on improving Hurd’s hardware support, “I’m interested in improving Hurd’s hardware support, probably working on the development of user-space device drivers, most likely the rump kernel integration. I see that Robert Millan has made some remarkable progress in that area, and I’d like to help.”

Openness/Sharing

=> ↺ Irish Social Democrats: openness and transparency to reform political system

• The Irish Social Democrats have made open government one of their core issues. The party states that it wants to reform the political system, so that it serves the people rather than the political establishment. Developing a culture centred around openness and transparency is the first step in this process.

=> ↺ Google’s Brotli compression algorithm, C++ Core Guidelines, and more news

Leftovers

Hardware

=> ↺ AArch64 desktop: day one

• Nowadays if you are lucky you can even have AArch64 hardware. The problem is that there is no desktop class one still. Mustang and Seattle are server boards, Juno is development platform, Hikey is out of stock, Dragonboard 410c has 1GB of memory (same as Hikey) and rest of “publicly available” AArch64 hardware is in Android or iOS devices.

=> ↺ AArch64 desktop: day two

=> ↺ AArch64 desktop — last day

Health/Nutrition

=> ↺ U.S. drug company sues Canada for trying to lower cost of $700K-a-year drug

• A U.S. drug company is taking the Canadian government to court for its attempt to lower the price of what has been called the world’s most expensive drug.

• Alexion Pharmaceuticals has filed a motion in Federal Court, arguing that Canada’s drug price watchdog has no authority to force the company to lower its price for Soliris.

Security

=> ↺ 1blu hack and the usual TLS certificate key madness

• Some weeks ago the german low cost hoster 1blu got hacked…

Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression

=> ↺ Jeremy Corbyn loses the battle on Trident after trade unionists side with Labour MPs to block the move

• Jeremy Corbyn will avoid a divisive vote on the Labour party’s policy on Britain’s nuclear deterrent at its conference this week after major unions said they would block the new leader’s attempts to adopt an anti-Trident stance.

• Labour party delegates were expected to vote on whether to renew Trident nuclear weapons or scrap them as party policy on 30 September, but the motion failed to win the support needed from activists in a ballot selecting which topics the party will debate at its conference in Brighton.

=> ↺ Labour party torpedoes Trident debate in blow to Jeremy Corbyn

• Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was handed an embarrassing defeat yesterday afternoon, as his own party members voted against debating the renewal of the UK’s Trident nuclear weapons system.

• Corbyn has long campaigned against replacing Trident, and it had widely been expected that delegates at the Labour party’s annual conference in Brighton this week would vote on a motion backing the newly elected leader’s views.

=> ↺ Jeremy Corbyn suffers blow as Trident vote rejected at conference

Finance

=> ↺ Opinion: Secret Trade Negotiations Threaten Sustainable Development Goals

• Yet as the United Nations announce goals to be achieved by 2030, a crucial but secret trade meeting is taking place to advance the Trans Pacific Partnership, which will set the economic rules for 40 percent of the world economy, and threatens to undermine the U.N. goals before they have even begun.

• The Sustainable Development Goals, or SDGs, are made up of 17 general goals with 169 targets, including an end to extreme poverty and hunger, providing universal access to clean water and protecting the world’s oceans. The initiative is supported by 193 countries, the United Nations, the World Bank and countless non-profits, and establishes the international development agenda for the next 15 years.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

=> ↺ Traveling to North Korea – 15 Myths You Shouldn’t Believe

• There is probably no other place on this planet which receives so much negative press as North Korea. Given the totalitarian nature of DPRK’s government and the country’s isolation, one can easily understood why the country receives so little love. However, what’s really worrying though is that a lot of media outlets do not even make the slightest effort to really understand the country and its people or even pay a visit to the Hermit Kingdom to see how the country looks from inside.

• As a result, there are a lot of myths circulating around the web concerning traveling to North Korea. Some of them are totally ridiculous, others make a bit more sense. When I visited North Korea in August 2015, I had the unique opportunity to challenge some of the misconceptions about tourism in DPRK. As usual, I did my best to keep the mind open and at least for the time being, forget a lot what I had heard about traveling to North Korea before.

Privacy

=> ↺ RFC: Using video conferencing for GPG key signing events

• I have a geographically-diverse team that uses GPG to provide integrity of their messages. Usually, a team like this would all huddle together and do a formal key-signing event. With several large bodies of water separating many of the team members, however, it’s unlikely that we could even make that work.

=> ↺ Purism Librem 13 Funded, But Will Likely Fail To Provide Freedom & Privacy

• This known backdoor, the Intel Management Engine, is signed by Intel. This means that you can’t run your own version without Intel’s permission. Purism claims to be working on unlocking it (presumably to remove these nasty features), but customers who previously bought a librem (hundreds of librem 15 customers, myself included, and the hundreds of people that bought the librem 13) will be stuck with a locked Management Engine. If Purism is successful in unlocking the ME to run unsigned modified versions, that will only affect newer laptops shipped by the company, not older ones that were sold previously.

Internet/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Hey FCC, Don’t Lock Down Our Wi-Fi Routers

• On the coastal edge of Tunisia, a signal bounces between 11 rooftops and 12 routers, forming an invisible net that covers 70 percent of the city of Sayada. Strategically placed, the routers link together community centers–from the main street to the marketplace. Not long ago, the Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali government censored access to the Internet. The regime is gone now. And this free network gives the community unfettered access to thousands of books, secure chat and file sharing applications, street maps, and more.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

=> Techrights

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.