today's leftovers

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Could Linux help overcome blockchain's usability challenge
Android, developed on Linux, is the biggest mobile operating system by far, used by 85 percent of users. Given its credentials as an extremely popular open-source and free operating system, Linux could provide the most powerful opportunity to build a bridge between blockchain and the real world.
Although it’s not widely used as a desktop operating system, Linux has been released for more hardware platforms than any OS in history. The chances are you’re already using it in some format, as Linux is embedded into hardware such as TVs, game consoles, routers, smartwatches, and more.
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How to Download and Install KaOS linux on VirtualBox
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MX Linux 19: The Best XFCE Distro?
MX Linux is taking the industry by storm, is MX Linux 19 worth all the hype? In this video, I'll show off this new version of the mega-popular Linux distribution and you'll see it in action, installed on real hardware. Is MX Linux 19 the best XFCE distro available today?
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Insider 2019-11: logging to Elasticsearch; PE 6 to 7 upgrade; Elastic 7; in-list(); off-line deb; Splunk conf;
This is the 76th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.
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WordPress introduces a new way for bloggers to get paid
WordPress, one of the internet’s leading purveyors of blog infrastructure and hosting, has taken a step toward making blogging more sustainable by allowing sites to easily accept recurring payments. Think: subscriptions. The tool will be available to anyone with a paid WordPress site and to sites that use the company’s Jetpack toolkit.
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Digging for license information with FOSSology
For a number of years FOSSology was distributed and maintained by HP, until it became an LF project in 2015. It is easier for companies to collaborate on software in a project at an organization like the LF, he said, it makes for a safer harbor for competitors to work together—in Germany, at least. He works for Siemens AG, which is a rather large Germany company.
Breaking up archive files into their constituent files—some of which may need to be unpacked themselves—then scanning the individual source and other files for their licenses is the basic task of FOSSology. It has a powerful license scanner, he said. Its web-based interface can then give an overview of the contents—which licenses apply to various parts of the tree, for example—and allow users to drill down into the file hierarchy to the individual files to see their copyrights and license-relevant text. When looking at the file, FOSSology highlights that license-relevant text and shows a comparison with the reference text of the license it has determined for the file.
Determining the license that applies to a file is challenging, however. Files have a wide variety of license-relevant text in them, some of which is ambiguous. It depends on the kind of source code you are working with, but the scanner is unable to decide on a license for up to 30% of files it sees, so it is up to a human reviewer to tag the right license. It is then important to also track what reviewers decide on files in the FOSSology database.
The Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) format is used to describe various things in a package, including licensing information. FOSSology can both import and export SPDX information, which allows exchanging information between two FOSSology users to share analysis work. FOSSology is one of a few tools that can consume SPDX information; it can be used to review what another party has concluded about the licensing of a code base. In addition, when a package gets updated, the previous analysis can be used as a starting point; the new dependencies and other changes can be incorporated into that rather than starting from scratch.
[...]
Huber handed the microphone back to Jaeger to wrap up the presentation. He said that FOSSology participated in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for 2019; the project had three GSoC participants working on various projects. FOSSology has been working on integrating with three different open-source projects as well. Software Heritage is a repository of published software, while ClearlyDefined is a repository of metadata about published software. In both cases, FOSSology has plans to interact with them via their REST APIs. The third project is not as well known, he said. Atarashi takes a new approach in scanning for licenses. Instead of using regular expressions and rules, it uses text statistics and information-retrieval techniques.
Another initiative that the project has undertaken is FOSSology Slides, which is a site for gathering slides that can be used to talk and teach about FOSSology. They are all licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 (as are the slides [PDF] from the OSS EU talk). They can be used as is, or adapted for other uses; he encouraged anyone to contribute their FOSSology slides as well. One nice outcome of that is that some Japanese FOSSology users translated slides from FOSSology Slides to that language and contributed them back, Jaeger said. Other translations would be welcome for those who want to contribute to the project but are not software developers.
A FOSSology user in the audience pointed out that the tool is only able to analyze the code it is given, so package dependencies have to be figured out separately. Jaeger agreed, noting that FOSSology is focused on understanding the licenses in the code it is given; there are other tools that can help figure out what the dependencies are and there are no plans to add that to FOSSology. He suggested the OSS Review Toolkit (ORT) as one possibility.
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digiKam 7.7.0 is released
After three months of active maintenance and another bug triage, the digiKam team is proud to present version 7.7.0 of its open source digital photo manager. See below the list of most important features coming with this release.
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Dilution and Misuse of the "Linux" Brand
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Samsung, Red Hat to Work on Linux Drivers for Future Tech
The metaverse is expected to uproot system design as we know it, and Samsung is one of many hardware vendors re-imagining data center infrastructure in preparation for a parallel 3D world.
Samsung is working on new memory technologies that provide faster bandwidth inside hardware for data to travel between CPUs, storage and other computing resources. The company also announced it was partnering with Red Hat to ensure these technologies have Linux compatibility.
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today's howtos
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