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Jump to navigationJump to search- Kdenlive 21.04.0 Is Released With Speech To Text Support And Nicer Zoom BarThe latest version of the free Kdenlive video editor for Linux and Windows can do speech to text conversion for subtitles or transcripts. Manual module installation is required, and kdenlive won't recognize them, so it won't do you any good. The online resource module which provides easy access to sound clips from Freesound and other sources has been rewritten, the Zoom bar has been improved and there are a lot of bug-fixes.
- XMRig 6.12.1 Is ReleasedThe latest version of the GNU GPL v3 licensed multiple digital currency miner XMRig adds one tiny fix for the assembly code used to mine uPlexa curency on the CPU. XMRig 6.12.0, released less than a week ago, added support for mining the uPlexa (UPX) currency on CPUs and GPUs, optimizations for the RandomX algorithm and a fix for showing the total hashrate correctly when it is compiled without OpenCL support.
- How I Fought To Graduate Without Using Nonfree SoftwareAs a university student, I have struggled during the pandemic like everyone else. Many have experienced deaths in their families, or have lost their jobs. While studying informatics at the AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, Poland, I have been fighting another, seemingly less important battle, but one I passionately feel is vital to our future freedoms. I describe my fight below, so as to encourage and inspire others.
- AMD Radeon Software For Linux 21.10 Is ReleasedA new proprietary AMD GPU driver package for Linux is out and it is not a very exciting release. The only highlights mentioned in the release notes are "full support for Ubuntu 20.04.2" and "preview of the Vulkan Ray Tracing Extensions supported on compatible AMD RDNA 2 based graphics products". The actual driver package appears to be a mix of Mesa drivers, the OpenCL library from Radeon Open Compute, an older "legacy" OpenCL library, a AMD-specific LLVM fork, the free AMDVLK Vulkan driver and "Pro" Vulkan driver, and some tools.
- Trying to Understand the Lynching of Stallman: for an Uncompromising Defense of Free/Libre SoftwareSome people taking part in the mob lynching RMS for sure hate his guts. Because he is “weird” and they think he is “creepy”, because he doesn't obey to any of the social conventions of our times, because he isn’t considerate towards them, etc. anti-conformists, anarchists and neuro-divergent people often face this kind of hate. Some take part because they want to get the social credit of being on the side of “justice”.
- You know what? I support RMS. Hate me if you will"I have decided I won’t keep lying to myself, nor I will cancel myself because of people whose respect I will probably lose after writing this. Remember I said I supported him but thought he should resign? Guess what? It was bullshit, I was lying to myself and to everyone."
- Linux Kernel Developers Were Not Amused By Faulty Patches Sent By University of Minnesota ResearchersResearches at the American University of Minnesota submitted a series of faulty patches to the Linux kernel last year and published a research paper about their effort. They tried to send more faulty patches to the Linux Kernel Mailing List earlier this month. Greg Kroah-Hartman, Trond Myklebust and other seasoned kernel developers were not amused.
- Peruse 2.0 Beta 1 Is Released: A KDE Comic Book Reader DisasterPeruse is, supposedly, a "easy and pleasant" desktop and mobile comic book reader built using the KDE Kirigami interface framework by a Danish developer. Something is rotten in Denmark and everything that could go wrong did go wrong with the first Peruse 2.0 beta release. It is completely bug riddled, it Krashes half the time you click on something and it far from being "easy" or "pleasant" to use.
- Nginx 1.20.0 Is ReleasedNginx developer Maxim Dounin has announced a new stable release of the by-far most popular web server on the Internet with a brief change-log listing "1.20.x stable branch" as the only changes. There is a bit more to the latest Nginx 1.20.0 release than that.
- Mozilla Firefox 88 Is ReleasedFirefox 88 enables the Webrender compositor by default on GNU+Linux operating systems. It provides dismal performance out of the box which can be improved using a hidden new EGL configuration key. Pinch-zoom touchpad support has also been added to the Linux version and there are 11 security fixes with "high" and "moderate" impact in this release.
- HOWTO Make Mozilla Firefox Blazing Fast On LinuxThe Firefox web browser is, by default, much, much slower than it can be on Linux. There is, luckily, several ways to make it a whole lot faster by changing one or more configuration options that are not so easy to find or understand. Newly released Firefox 88 made it easier, though you can make older Firefox versions and Firefox LTS versions faster with some trickery. Here's the options you have and the performance they provide.
- IBM Appears To Believe They Own Their Employees "100% of the time"IBM is, in an odd move that violates the labor laws of most countries, telling employees who work on Linux kernel drivers in their spare time that they are "an IBM employee 100% of the time" and "not allowed to use your personal email account as a "hobby"."
- Jonathan Carter Has Been Re-Elected As Debian Project LeaderThe Debian developer community, who develops the popular Debian GNU+Linux operating system, has re-elected South African developer Jonathan Carter as their great leader with a 210 votes favoring him over the Indian challenger Sruthi Chandran. The Debian community has also voted against participating in any ongoing online mob bullying targeting elderly individuals.
- GNOME Commander 1.12.1 Is ReleasedGNOME Commander is a graphical file manager in the two-pane style. It is like a graphical version of the GNU Midnight Commander. Boomers will remember this style of file managers from classic DOS software such as the Norton Commander. The latest version has six small bug-fixes and minor updates to the translations for five different languages.
- HOWTO Make Mozilla Firefox Stop Nagging You About Updates And Other Annoying IdiocyMozilla, the company behind Firefox, has intentionally made it somewhere between hard and impossible to stop recent Firefox versions from nagging you about updates on a regular basis. That is you use the Beta or Nightly channels. It used to be possible to disable the nagging using in-browser configurable settings, but Mozilla decided that it gave Firefox users too much control so they took it away. Luckily, there is another lesser-know way Linux users can use to make Firefox stop nagging about updates and other lunacy.
- The Best Linux Vulkan Driver For AMD GPUs: Mesa RADV vs AMDVLKThere are two Vulkan drivers for AMD graphics cards available: The RADV driver that comes with Mesa and the AMDVLK driver from AMD. Here is a test of the latest AMDVLK 2021.Q2.1 driver against the latest Mesa 21.0.3 RADV driver in some graphical and compute applications.
- LXQt Desktop 0.17 Is ReleasedBetter power management options, the ability to only auto-hide the panel when it is covered by a window and better session management are the highlights in the latest version of the very light-weight LXQt desktop environment.
- Linux Kernel Runtime Guard 0.9.0 Is ReleasedLinux Kernel Runtime Guard (LKRG) is a security module for the Linux kernel developed by Openwall. The latest release adds compatibility with Linux kernels up to soon to be released 5.12, support for building LKRG into kernel images, support for old 32-bit x86 machines and more. Loading the LKRG 0.9.0 module will cause a kernel panic and a complete halt if SELinux is enabled.
- The State Of OpenCL To Vulkan Compute Layers On Linux In April 2021It is, in theory, possible to run OpenCL applications on Linux using any graphics driver capable of doing Vulkan Compute. We have examined the alternatives for doing so and found them to be technically interesting and practically useless. It may become possible to run Blender with OpenCL compute using Vulkan at some point in the far distant future. Don't expect to be able to do that today or next month.
- Google Is Working On A New And Possibly Better LRU Memory Management Framework For The Linux KernelLinux loves to fill all available system memory with all sorts of caches. Memory used by caches needs to be freed if a program needs it. That task is handled by the Linux kernels Least Recently Used (LRU) framkework. Google is now proposing a new and, in some cases, better way to decide what should and shouldn't be thrown out of memory in case an application needs it.
- Oil Shell 0.8.9 Is ReleasedOil Shell is a not-really drop-in replacement for Bash with its own programming language for "serious" shell programming. The latest release has some very minor changes to the oil-language and that's about it. It may be worth a look if you want a shell language where you can use variables without quotes.
- Mesa 21.1.0-rc1 Is Released With Variable Rate Shading Support For AMD GPUs, New Vulkan Extensions And MoreThe first release candidate for Mesa 21.1, is scheduled to be released on May 5th, has been set in stone. It is a good indication of what the final 21.1 release will have: Variable Rate Shading support on the very latest AMD RX 6000 GPUs, new Vulkan features, OpenGL 4.6 support in the OpenGL-To-Vulkan translation layer, graphics optimizations for Intel's 12th generation GPUs/CPUs and a bit more.
- Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about powerA restrictive end-user license agreement is one way a company can exert power over the user. When the free software movement was founded thirty years ago, these restrictive licenses were the primary user-hostile power dynamic, so permissive and copyleft licenses emerged as synonyms to software freedom. Licensing does matter; user autonomy is lost with subscription models, revocable licenses, binary-only software, and onerous legal clauses. Yet these issues pertinent to desktop software do not scratch the surface of today’s digital power dynamics.
- A New Gigabyte Motherboard WMI Temperature Driver Will Likely Arrive In Linux 5.13Linux users with newer Gigabyte and ASUS motherboards for AMD processors have to compile a out-of-tree version of the
it87to get hardware sensors and fan control working, and sensor support for the very newest motherboards is a shot in the dark even if you do that. That may change for Gigabyte-users with Linux 5.13 as a new, Gigabyte-specific WMI driver has been merged into the Linux kernels platform drivers git tree. It will likely be merged into Linux 5.13 when the merge window opens.
- Nvidia Display Driver 465.24.02 For Linux Is ReleasedNvidia's latest proprietary binary blob driver for using Nvidia graphics hardware on Linux adds support for three new Vulkan extensions, Nvidia's upcoming RTX A4000 and A5000 GPUs, better X11 DrawText() performance, numerous bug-fixes and some new Vulkan extensions.
- FSF India Board Statement On RMS Re-joining The FSF BoardThe Free Software Foundation of India has released a statement in support of Richard Stallman and his return to the FSF's board. They call the recent attempts at vilifying Richard Stallman "dangerous".
- Free Software Projects Are Not Allowed To Ask For Donations On The Google Play App StoreFree software developer Aurélien Gâteau reports that his free software 2D racing game Pixel Wheels got flagged on the Google Play app-store for the horrible crime of asking for donations. Pixel Wheels is also available for GNU/Linux, Windows, macoS (but not ARM based Macs).
- RMS addresses the free software community"I've learned something from this about how to be kind to people who have been hurt. In the future, that will help me be kind to people in other situations, which is what I hope to do."
- Amazon Has Released OpenSearch, An Apache Licensed Alternative To The SSPL Licensed ElasticSearch Search PlatformElastic re-licensed the ElasticSearch search engine to a dual license model where rather restrictive Server Side Public License (SSPL) license as the only copyleft option in January 2021. Amazon has now released a fork of the last Apache licensed ElasticSearch version called OpenSearch and made it available under the much more liberal Apache 2.0 license.
- 6250+ Free Software Users Have Signed A Letter In Support Of Honorary Doctor Richard Stallman And The FSF Stands By Their Re-Election Of RMS To Their BoardThe grass-roots support for honorary doctor Richard Stallman, who started the free software movement and popularized the term "free software", has been overwhelming since he announced that he will return to the Free Software Foundations board in a LibrePlanet 2021 live-stream on March 22nd. More than 6200 free software users have, thus far, signed a letter in support of Richard Stallman. Free Software Foundation released a statement affirming their re-election of RMS on April 12th.
