Open Source Fonts Are Love Letters to the Design Community

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March 30, 2020

Font families can sell for hundreds of dollars. Gotham, a popular typeface used by President Barack Obama’s campaign and many others, costs nearly $1,000 to license a complete set of 66 different styles. But The League of Moveable Type, gives all of its fonts away for free. What’s more, it makes them open source, so that other people can modify the fonts and make their own versions of them.

And people have. Raleway, designed by Matt McInerney and released in 2010, was expanded from a single weight into a family with nine weights, from “thin” to bold to “black,” each with matching italics, in 2012 by Pablo Impallari, Rodrigo Fuenzalida, and Igino Marini. It’s now one of the most popular font families on Google Fonts, a collection of free fonts hosted by the search giant.

[Source: WIRED]

Developers take on COVID-19 with open-source projects, hackathons

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 30, 2020

In the past few weeks the coronavirus pandemic has taken hold in the United States, and the disease will continue to have a massive impact around the world for the foreseeable future. But even in the midst of panic and uncertainty, communities are coming together to do what they can. People are 3D printing face shields and sewing masks for healthcare workers, offering to buy groceries and household supplies for the elderly or immunocompromised, and even donating their computer’s GPU power to the cause.

And developers aren’t absent from this list of people trying to do whatever they can to help. A quick glance into the trending section of GitHub shows that a good portion are COVID-19-related, and there are a number more than that living on GitHub. While medical professionals are on the front lines of the COVID-19 fight, developers are fighting the disease from their computers.

[Source: SDTimes.com]

Some Of The Features To Look Forward To With Linux 5.7

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 27, 2020

With the Linux 5.7 cycle kicking off in April with its merge window opening upon the release of Linux 5.6, here is a look at some of the changes and new features that have been on our radar for this next version of the Linux kernel.

Among the items we have been tracking that should be landing in Linux 5.7 based upon being queued in the respective “-next” trees, those items tentatively for the 5.7 kernel include the likes of: The new Samsung-developed Microsoft exFAT file-system driver is queued and ready to go. This replaces the current staging exFAT driver.

[Source: Phoronix]

The Warren Campaign Is Gone—but Its Tech May Live On

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 27, 2020

Before it ended earlier this month, Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign developed a reputation for two things: detailed plans to solve concrete problems, and a robust ground game. Those attributes came together on the campaign’s tech team, which built a grassroots organizing machine on the back end. That wasn’t enough to win Warren the nomination, but veterans from the team are trying to make sure their work wasn’t all for nothing. They’re making seven in-house software projects available to everyone for free on GitHub, the most popular destination for open-source software on the web, in the hope that other Democratic campaigns can build on what they developed during the campaign.

“We believe we’ll be the biggest open-sourcing of political tech that has happened,” said Mike Conlow, who was the campaign’s chief technology strategist. Few political campaigns are big and well-funded enough to develop their own software. Fewer still make that software open source.

[Source: WIRED]

Coronavirus Will Change The Way We Build IT Infrastructure

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 27, 2020

COVID-19 has disrupted business-as-usual for organisations globally. While the long-term ramifications of the corona pandemic are yet to be ascertained, there are crucial lessons for businesses, vendors, and technology leaders to learn from the fallout.

In an exclusive interaction with TFIR, Rob Hirschfeld, Founder & CEO, RackN, shares his thoughts on how the corona scourge will impact business and technology, and how corporates can be better prepared to overcome the impending challenges.

“COVID-19 has led to a lockdown. As a result, all IT has to be rethought with the lens of – “I can’t get there, I can’t touch the gear, I can’t send people out”. Against such a backdrop, we have to build systems that are much more resilient, efficient, self-automated and self-repairing. There has to be more out-of-the-box capability,” says Hirschfeld.

[Source: TFiR]

The exFAT filesystem is coming to Linux

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 27, 2020

When software and operating system giant Microsoft announced its support for inclusion of the exFAT filesystem directly into the Linux kernel back in August, it didn’t get a ton of press coverage. But filesystem vendor Paragon Software clearly noticed this month’s merge of the Microsoft-approved, largely Samsung-authored version of exFAT into the VFS for-next repository, which will in turn merge into Linux 5.7—and Paragon doesn’t seem happy about it.

Yesterday, Paragon issued a press release about European gateway-modem vendor Sagemcom adopting its version of exFAT into an upcoming series of Linux-based routers. Unfortunately, it chose to preface the announcement with a stream of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Steve Ballmer’s letterhead in the 1990s.

[Source: Ars Technica]

Tricks for getting around your Linux file system

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 27, 2020

Whether you’re moving around the file system, looking for files or trying to move into important directories, Linux can provide a lot of help. In this post, we’ll look at a number of tricks to make moving around the file system and both finding and using commands that you need a little easier.

One of the easiest and most useful ways to ensure that you don’t have to invest a lot of time into finding commands on a Linux system is to add the proper directories to your $PATH variable. The order of directories that you add to your $PATH variable is, however, very important. They determine the order in which the system will look through the directories to find the command to run — stopping when it finds the first match.

[Source: Network World]

SUSE Offers Its Technologies For Free To Combat COVID-19

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 27, 2020

SUSE, one of the major open source software companies, is extending a helping hand to organizations that are producing medical devices to fight COVID-19.

“The current global pandemic requires more from us than simply trying to survive as companies and individuals,” said SUSE CEO Melissa Di Donato. “We have cutting-edge open source technology and know-how that can help others in the fight to save lives, and we will share it immediately and without charge.”

SUSE is offering free services such as support and maintenance for its operating system and container technologies to be embedded in and run those medical devices. These SUSE solutions are available immediately to help speed time to market for device manufacturers.

[Source: TFiR]

MIT-based team works on rapid deployment of open-source, low-cost ventilator

By

Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 27, 2020

One of the most pressing shortages facing hospitals during the Covid-19 emergency is a lack of ventilators. These machines can keep patients breathing when they no longer can on their own, and they can cost around $30,000 each. Now, a rapidly assembled volunteer team of engineers, physicians, computer scientists, and others, centered at MIT, is working to implement a safe, inexpensive alternative for emergency use, which could be built quickly around the world.

The team, called MIT E-Vent (for emergency ventilator), was formed on March 12 in response to the rapid spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its members were brought together by the exhortations of doctors, friends, and a sudden flood of mail referencing a project done a decade ago in the MIT class 2.75 (Medical Device Design).

[Source: MIT News]

Modern GNU/Linux Systems Should Run Old Games: Open Source Community

By

Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 27, 2020

LibrePlanet 2020 ended on a high note with its second conference on 15 March 2020. There were a lot of things that were discussed in the online conference. However, one topic of discussion at the conference was centered on gaming on GNU/Linux systems. Developer Dennis Payne tried to look back and pointed out that Modern GNU/Linux no longer runs “older” free software games. There are workarounds to play old Linux games on the Modern GNU/Linux system, like installing the older version of the library. However, this process usually consumes a lot of time, and sometimes, it doesn’t even work.

Now, we all know that despite improving a little bit, Linux lags behind Windows in terms of gaming. Although various Linux distribution or platforms such as Pop!_OS, Manjaro Linux, Steam OS, GOG, Wine focuses more on strengthening gaming on Linux.

[Source: Fossbytes]