First the good news. As of Valentine’s Day 2020, Metro Exodus has been liberated from its Epic Games exclusivity agreement and is now available to purchase on Steam. And now the great news, especially for my regular readers: it looks like Deep Silver and developer 4A Games are working on bringing the post-apocalyptic shooter to Linux…. Read more at Forbes.
[Source: Forbes]
If you want a new Linux distro catering to gaming, check out the Simplicity Linux Gaming release. If you prefer a general-purpose computing platform without a gaming focus, try Simplicity’s revamped release. Either way, you will experience a no-nonsense Linux OS that requires no assembly.
Simplicity Linux, originating in the UK, is a Devuan-based distribution with Cinnamon as the default window manager desktop environment. Devuan is a fork of Debian Linux that replaces the systemd initialization processes. Disgruntled Debian community members rejected a Linux-wide trend to replace older init processes such as Upstart and System V with systemd. Initialization is a background process that starts when the computer boots and runs until the computer shuts down.
[Source: LinuxInsider.com]
Search giant Baidu has released an open-source tool to detect whether individuals in crowds are wearing face masks, as cities around the country impose rules requiring use of such protection in public spaces.
The face-scanning model uses artificial intelligence to identify people in real-time who are not wearing masks or those who are wearing them incorrectly, Baidu said on Thursday. The system can identify non-mask wearers with 96.5% accuracy, which meets the needs of routine inspections, according to the company.
Developers then only need a small amount of data to train the tool for their own use. The model was trained on a dataset of 100,000 faces, Baidu said.
[Source: TechNode]
A new driver already queued in the power management code for the Linux 5.7 cycle not opening up until April is a “tiny power button” driver. This ACPI tiny power button driver is not for a physically tiny power button, but rather a simple ACPI power button driver out of Intel intended for virtual machines and more basic than the generic ACPI button driver given the limited scope of VMs.
Virtual machines tend to rely on simulated ACPI power button events for having the VM power off gracefully but can rely on a daemon like acpid or systemd-logind for processing the said event.
[Source: Phoronix]
Developers already have numerous options from the likes of Microsoft and Google for learning how to code in the popular Python programming language. But now budding Python developers can read up on the National Security Agency’s own Python training materials.
Software engineer Chris Swenson filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the NSA for access to its Python training materials and received a lightly redacted 400-page printout of the agency’s COMP 3321 Python training course. Swenson has since scanned the documents, ran OCR on the text to make it searchable, and hosted it on Digital Oceans Spaces. The material has also been uploaded to the Internet Archive.
[Source: ZDNet]
On 03:14:08 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT, aka Coordinated Universal Time) January 19, 2038 (that’s a Tuesday), the world ends. Well, not in the biblical Book of Revelations sense. But, what will happen is the value for time in 32-bit based Unix-based operating systems, like Linux and older versions of macOS, runs out of numbers and starts counting time with negative numbers. That’s not good. We can expect 32-bit computers running these operating systems to have fits. Fortunately, Linux’s developers already had a fix ready to go.
The problem starts with how Unix tells time. Unix, and its relations — Linux, macOS, and other POSIX-compatible operating systems — date the beginning of time from the Epoch: 00:00:00 GMT on January 1, 1970. The Unix family measures time by the number of seconds since the Epoch.
[Source: ZDNet]
After undergoing a successful independent security audit earlier this year, IVPN has announced that it will open source all of its VPN clients. The VPN provider’s Android, macOS, iOS and Windows apps are now open source under the GPLv3 license.
However, this is just the first step in IVPN’s multi-year plan to open source many other parts of its service. The company’s next step is to release key parts of its infrastructure to the public with end goal of enabling anyone to set up and verify its VPN server configuration.
[Source: Techradar]
Technological transformation is increasingly becoming a competitive differentiator, with businesses across all sectors investing heavily in new platforms, tools and frameworks. In response, open source has emerged as the most viable, cost-effective and leading-edge solution in enabling organisations to gain the edge in innovation.
No longer do individual businesses need to purchase or build all the software they need in-house. Instead, developers can now benefit from and build on the work of entire development communities, harnessing their collective power instead of starting from scratch. This is enabling countless new strands of innovation and increasing the speed to market for new products. According to research, 69 per cent of IT leaders deem open source as very important to an organisation’s overall enterprise infrastructure software plans. But software development wasn’t always done this way.
[Source: ITProPortal]
Cloning a drive in Linux actually isn’t too terribly difficult–especially if you’re comfortable with the Linux command line interface. But how do you do it? First you’ll need a bootable ISO image, of just about any Linux distribution, on a flash drive. You’ll also need a new drive to clone to. That target drive must be as big or bjgger than the drive you’re cloning. I prefer to go with bigger, just to be safe.
Once you have all of that ready, boot the machine with the source drive, using the bootable Linux distribution. Once you’ve logged in, make sure to attach the target drive to the system and find out where the target drive is located with the command:
cat /proc/partitions
You should see a listing of all available drives, but they shouldn’t be mounted. You’ll need the name of the source and target drives.
[Source: TechRepublic]
AMD and Intel may be fierce competitors in the CPU space, but the two companies aren’t always trying to cut each other down. In fact, during the press briefing for AMD’s 64-core Ryzen Threadripper 3990X, it actually recommended using Intel’s in-house Linux distribution for best performance… Read more at Forbes.
[Source: Forbes]
