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Your source for GNU/Linux news, reviews and HOWTO guides. And some K-pop news too.

Top Story

• The Current State Of Gamescope
  
  
  Gamescope is a bare-bones Wayland compositor that lets you up-scale or otherwise alter games and other graphical applications so they are displayed correctly, or just larger, on modern displays with higher resolutions. It is being developed by Valve-employed Pierre-Loup A Griffais who gave a interesting talk about the current state of Gamescope at the X.Org Developers Conference 2020. Gamescope will currently only work on AMD graphics cards using the RADV Vulkan driver. It can be used under both Xorg/X11 and Wayland.

Breaking News

• Linux Desktop Users Who Use Qt or KDE Software May Want To Hard-Code QT AUTO SCREEN SCALE FACTOR and XCURSOR SIZE
  
  
  Programs using recent KDE Frameworks versions combined with recent Qt version like to randomly apply display scaling. The result is that some programs have their fonts and/or icons (depending no KDE Frameworks and Qt version) scaled while others are not scaled. Programs using Qt 5.15.1 also enjoy ignoring the systems mouse pointer size. One solution for anyone using anything using the ridiculously buggy recent Qt and KDE versions is to set QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR to either 0 or 1, depending on your preference, and XCURSOR_SIZE has an environment variable.
• KDE Launches Plasma Widget Tutorial Website
  
  
  The KDE team has launched a new tutorial portal for developers and non-developers alike who want to learn how to make widgets for the KDE Plasma desktop environment. The site has many examples and a friendly introduction KDE Frameworks API. It s a nice resource if you want to make your first widget program and you know a little or even no C++.
• AMD ROCm 3.8 Is Released
  
  
  The latest AMD Radeon Open Compute graphics stack offers absolutely dismal OpenCL performance in the LuksMark benchmark compared to the Mesa Clover OpenCL library from the newly released Mesa 20.2.0 graphics stack. It does have one thing going for it: It does support OpenCL 2.0, something Mesa Clover does not.
• YouTube Regrets - from Corbett Report
  
  
  Mozilla has launched a new campaign against YouTube called "YouTube Regrets". Investigative journalist James Corbett reports that their motives may be a bit questionable and points out some moral issues with Mozilla's desire to control and dictate what you can and can't see on the Internet. It seems a bit odd than an organization that claims to be for a free and open Internet would be in favor of something like that.
• Rockit Girl Wishes You A Very Happy Chuseok Harvest Festival Holiday
  
  
  Today is the first day of the South Korean Chuseok (추석) harvest festival holiday. Many South Korean pop and rock idols have made public statements wishing their fans a very happy Chuseok, including the lovely and very talented Han LeeSeul (한이슬) from Rockit Girl. We wish you a very happy Chuseok (추석) harvest holiday and we hope your days will be filled with lots of joy and happiness.
• Fake News Detector For Firefox Is Coming After The Harvest Festival Holiday
  
  
  The excellent "Fake News Detector" web browser extension is currently only available for the NAVER whale and Microsoft Edge web browsers. "Fake News Detector" developer Suh Kwangho (서광호) from the SoundsGreat Research and Development department told us that this will change after the Korean Chuseok (추석) harvest festival holiday when a Firefox version will become available. He also told us about the motivation for creating the "Fake News Detector" and SoundsGreat's future plans for it.

Quote of the week

"But while I do now know of any remaining gating issues any more, the fixes came in fairly late. So unless I feel insanely optimistic and/or a burning bush tells me that everything is bug-free, my plan right now is that I'll do another rc next Sunday rather than the final 5.9 release. And btw, please no more burning bushes. We're kind of sensitive about those on the West coast right now."

Linus Torvalds announcing Linux 5.9-rc7. Sunday September 27th, 2020

Latest software reviews

• Fake News Detector
  
  
  Fake News Detector is a very nice and handy web browser extension for NAVER whale and Microsoft Edge that lets you know if a web page contains fact or fiction. It is entirely user-driven, others using the Fake News Detector extension can vote on news stories and share if they think a news story, or other web content, is "Fake" or "Fact".
• Sonic Robo Blast 2
  
  
  Sonic Robo Blast 2 3D platform game with all the concepts of a classic 2D platform game in a 3D world. The main character you play is a hedgehog called Sonic. The objective is to run around and collect rings and avoid monsters. The game-play is not very exciting and the graphics is mediocre by today's standards.
• Grep
  
  
  grep is a very old and very handy command line utility that prints any lines matting a regular expression. The most widely used modern grep implementation is GNU grep which supports search recursive file trees, basic regular expressions, extended regular expressions, fixed strings and Perl-compatible regular expressions.

"Of course I added a hidden segfault specifically to annoy Chaekyung, which was the entire goal of this commit, and which is why it will never be fixed. Read() fails and the negative value is added to len, so of course that'll crash."

mpv developer wm4
explaining his reasoning behind mpv commit 602384348e71 which introduced a segfault

Hot News

• GNU grep 3.5 Is Released
  
  
  The latest version of GNU grep changes three output messages and the --files-without-match (-L) has been changed so it succeeds when a file is selected, not when a file is listed. There's also six bug-fixes.
• Mesa 20.2.0 Is Released
  
  
  There is a lot to of new features in the latest Linux graphics stack. Mesa 20.2 offers Vulkan 1.2 support, OpenGL 4.5 support for llvmpipe, faster NIR performance and the ACO shader compiler for Vulkan on AMD hardware is now the default shader compiler for the AMD RADV Vulkan driver.
• Linux 5.9-rc7 Is A Total Disaster On Machines With Intel Graphics
  
  
  The latest Linux 5.9 release candidate won't even let you start the X display server on machines with integrated Intel graphics. Running Linux on machines with integrated Intel graphics has been problematic since Linux 5.0. All those problems remained an issue with Linux 5.9-rc6. Linux 5.9-rc7 takes it one step further, it won't even let you get into a graphical environment without crashing the i915 kernel display driver for Intel GPU chips. It is a complete and utter disaster for people using integrated Intel graphics.
• Linux 5.9 Will Be Delayed One Week
  
  
  The Linux 5.9 release cycle has not gone as smoothly as earlier release cycles. There has been some unfortunate virtual memory management issues and slab corruption issues during the 5.9 release cycle which are, hopefully, fixed in 5.9 rc7. Linus Torvalds wants to delay the final 5.9 release just to be sure those are gone. He neglected to mention that 5.9 rc7 introduced a regression that prevents certain Intel integrated graphics chips from being used as more than coasters.
• The GNU Operating System Turns 37
  
  
  Honorary Doctor Richard Stallman announced his total plan to create a free Unix-line operating system called GNU 37 years ago today. "I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free(1) to everyone who can use it.". The result of his hard work is the family of operating systems we now call GNU/Linux, or, in most cases, just Linux.
• From the FSF Bulletin: Trial by proprietary software
  
  
  There has been so much to worry about during the COVID-19 pandemic, even just within the category of technology policy. At the FSF, our role is to worry specifically about the impact of software on human freedom. Software can be a tremendous tool for solving social and scientific problems, but only when the terms of its distribution and use allow everyone to inspect how it works, share copies of it, modify it for their own purposes, and share those improvements or tweaks with others.
• 42.9 GB Of Microsoft Source Code Leaked: Historicans Can Now Study The Source Code For MS-Dos 3.3 To Windows XP
  
  
  The mother-lode of Microsoft source code hit the web today. A 42.9 GiB torrent with MS-DOS 3.3, MS-DOS 6, Windows NT 3.5 & 5, Windows CE 6 & 7, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, and some XBox code, can now be acquired from your local friendly BitTorrent site.
• Korean Trot Singer Kang Hye Yeon's Latest Cover Brings Attention To Lonely Single Mothers
  
  
  Many single mothers struggle with trying to make ends meet because their husband left them with a child to raise on their own. South Korean pop sensation Kang Hye Yeon brings awareness to women in this very unfortunate situation with her new wonderfully performed cover of the tradition Korean trot song "Golden Grass - Mother's Song" (금잔디 - 엄마의 노래).
• Frictional Games Has Released Source Code For Two Amnesia Games As FOSS Under The GNU GPLv3
  
  
  Swedish Frictional Games AB has released the source code for their Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs (2013) games as free open source software under the GNU GPLv3 license. The game assets have not been made available under any free license so the full games remain proprietary software.

Check out the news archive for more news.

Recent software reviews

• Liquid Prompt
  
  
  Liquid Prompt is a adaptive and configurable command-line shell prompt extension. It provides a nice prompt with colors that displays a variety of information depending on what you are doing and how your box is doing. The default prompt is a short and simple one similar to the default bash prompt, but with colors. Liquid Prompt is a great alternative to manually setting the shell prompt using $PS1= that can enrich the everyday command-line experience.
• DOSBox
  
  
  DOSBox is both a x86 and DOS emulator which lets you run old MS-DOS software on modern computers and phones running just about any operating system, DOSBox supports more operating systems and platform than most software. DOSBox emulates old PC hardware, it does not run any code natively, which is why it can run MS-DOS programs on just about any hardware/OS combination. DOSBox is mostly known for enabling you to play older games, but it is also very capable to run spreadsheet programs and all kinds of other programs. It will run the vast majority of all MS-DOS software perfectly.
• Fr-041: d e b r i s
  
  
  Fr-041: debris is a PC scene demo for Windows using DirectX 9 to render graphics. It was released by the German demo group farbrauch on April 11th, 2007. It had very impressive graphics for the time when it was released and it is still a very good-looking and generally very nice PC demo with a decent, but not superb, audio track.
• Fr-063: Magellan
  
  
  Fr-063: Magellan is a pc scene demo by the German demo group farbrauch. It was released in December 2018. The screenshots of it on sites like pouet and scene.org look pretty nice. Running in it in Wine results in disaster.
• Isolated, in sunlight
  
  
  isolated, in sunlight is a Windows scene demo made for the Revision 2020 Party demo competitions. It is not very exciting or very impressive, it is, in fact, kind of boring. The only remotely interesting about it is that it's a piece of Windows software with graphics which makes it a fun thing to test in Wine staging and development versions just to see if it runs or not.
• Blue Nebula
  
  
  Blue Nebula is a free very fast-paced online teamed first person shooter with decent graphics. There are many game-modes like death-match and capture the flat to choose between. It has very few hardware requirements making it a really cool and nice game to play either at high resolutions at high frame-rates on modern hardware or standard 1080p resolution on old and/or modest hardware.
• GNOME Web
  
  
  GNOME Web, or just "Web" as it appears in desktop menus, formally known as Epiphany before the GNOME team decided to rename everything according to general names resembling their function, is the default web browser in the GNOME desktop environment. It is built on top of the WebKitGTK rendering toolkit which, as the name implies, is based on Apple's WebKit rendering engine. It is, much like the default Edge browser on Windows, only suitable for downloading a better web browser.

• See Latest Software Reviews for more reviews.
• See the HOWTO category for the latest HOWTOs.

Video Recommendations

• The secret battle of encryption algorithms - In this video from LibrePlanet 2019 Amanda Sopkin explains some cryptography basics and dilemmas.
• Overtaking Proprietary Software Without Writing Code - "a few rough insights on sharpening free software". This lecture was given by Olivier Cleynen at the CCC in December 2007. The points in it were very good and remain relevant more than a decade later.

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