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Google's Stadia cloud gaming service since its 2019 launch has relied upon custom Vega-based GPUs in their Linux servers but now it looks like they may be quietly transitioning to using NVIDIA GPUs...

Following this week's Chrome 103 release, Google has now promoted Chrome 104 to beta...

Windows, macOS and Linux: Krita 5.1 and digiKam 7.7 released for all platforms  Research Snipers

How I sketchnote with open source tools Amrita Sakthivel Fri, 06/24/2022 - 03:00 3 readers like this 3 readers like this

Sketchnoting, also called visual notetaking, is a method of taking notes using illustrations, symbols, graphic layouts, and text. It's meant to be a creative and engaging way to record your thoughts. It can work well in your personal life as well as in your work life. You don't need to be an artist to create a sketchnote, but you do need to listen, and visually combine and summarize ideas through text and drawings.

Why sketchnotes?

Here are some interesting facts about why visual aids are so helpful:

• The picture superiority effect is when people remember and retain pictures and images more than just plain old words.
• Writing is complicated and takes a long time to get good at.
• Visual information can be processed 60,000 times faster than text. This is one reason that iconography is so prevalent and has been throughout history.
• Researchers state that people remember only 20% of what they read, whilst 37% are visual learners.

An example of how visual aids and regular text process in the mind

A SMART goal is used to help guide goal setting. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Therefore, a SMART goal incorporates all of these criteria to help focus your efforts and increase the chances of achieving your goal.

Image by:

(Amrita Sakthivel, CC BY-SA 40)

Which form of information did you retain more easily? Was it the visual or the text version that held your attention more? What does this say about how you process information?

4 open source sketchnote tools

A sketchnote is just a drawing, so you don't need any special application to start making them yourself. However, if you're an avid digital creator, you might want to try these open source illustration applications:

• Mypaint: Simple and elegant. It's you, your stylus, and a blank canvas.
• Krita: You, your stylus, a blank canvas, and an art supply store.
• Inkscape: Grab some clip art or create your own and let the layout begin.
• Drawpile: Make collaborative sketchnotes.

How I use sketchnotes

I recently contributed to a presentation about customer support and Knowledge-centered support (KCS) analysis. I did two versions:

Image by:

(Amrita Sakthivel, CC BY-SA 40)

Image by:

(Amrita Sakthivel, CC BY-SA 40)

I created a sketchnote to demonstrate the differences between OpenShift and Kubernetes.

Image by:

(Amrita Sakthivel, CC BY-SA 40)

As a technical writer, my objective is to write documentation from a user perspective so that the user gets the optional usage of the product or feature.

Image by:

(Amrita Sakthivel, CC BY-SA 40)

How to best convey information through a visual medium

1. Plan what you want to convey.
2. Decide the structure you want to use for for the sketchnote.
3. Start with the text first, then add icons and visuals.
4. Use color combinations to help show the content effectively.

Sometimes, using plain text to convey easy concepts can be inelegant in comparison to a simple visual aid. Visual aids are an easier and faster way to display information to your audience. They can also be helpful when taking your own notes. Give it a try.

More resources

• Verbal to Visual: What is sketchnoting?
• Noun Project
• Creative Market: 50+ Awesome Resources to Create Visual Notes, Graphic Recordings & Sketchnotes
• Sketchnote Love: Mini Sketchnotes Tutorial

Sketchnoting, or visual notetaking, is a method of taking notes using illustrations, symbols, graphic layouts, and text. Here's why I love sketchnotes and you should too.

Image by:

Opensource.com

Art and design Tools What to read next This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

Create a more diverse and equitable open source project with open standards Paloma Oliveira Fri, 06/24/2022 - 03:00 1 reader likes this 1 reader likes this

This article is intended to serve as a reference so that you can understand everything you need to be proud of your repository and make your open source project more open. By using open standards, an open source project improves its quality and shareability, since such standards exist to foster better communication between creators and consumers of the project. Most importantly, open standards can guide technology development by gently enforcing space for diversity and equity.

What is open source?

The term open source started in the late 80's as a way to guarantee access to technological development by legally guaranteeing the right to copy, modify, and redistribute software. This idea has expanded and today it is about fostering a culture of sharing that supports everything from political actions to a billion dollar technology industry.

The projects and their communities, which give the projects their value, have become much more complex than just the code. Today, it is impossible to think of a project outside of what I prefer to define as its ecosystem. "Ecosystem" sounds to me like a proper definition, because it acknowledges the complexity of technical things, like code and configuration, and also of people.

Lack of diversity is a problem in open source

Without open source, the technology industry would collapse, or it wouldn't even exist. That's the scope of importance that open source has today. What a powerful feeling it is to know that we are all "standing on the shoulders of giants"? We are all benefiting from the power of the commons, using collective labor and intelligence to make something better for everyone.

What's rarely spoken of is that such important initiatives, in most cases, depend solely on the volunteer labor of its maintainers. This creates a huge imbalance, both from work and diversity aspects.

Open source is intrinsically a power to foster diversity within the development industry by valuing the contributions of what is contributed over who is contributing it. The reality is, though, that free time is often a rare commodity for many people. Many people are too busy working to generate income, caring for families and loved ones, looking for work, fighting social injustice, and are unable to dedicate time to contribute to software.

The very opportunity to contribute to the system depends on you being one of the lucky ones who can be part of this system. This is not a reality for many others because of their gender, skin color, or social status. Historically, women accumulate unpaid work that's invisible, but which requires a substantial proportion of their energy and time. Underprivileged people have little free time because they have to work more hours, often having more than one job.

This is reflected in the numbers. Only 4.5% of open source maintainers are not white males, according to research into the field. So we know that this billion dollar industry, shaping technological development, is composed of a homogeneous environment. But we also know that diversity renders robust innovative results.The question is, how can this be changed?

More great content Free online course: RHEL technical overview Learn advanced Linux commands Download cheat sheets Find an open source alternative Explore open source resources Intentional communication with your open source community

Communication is key. Build a structure with transparency of communication and governance for your project. Clear, concise and respectful communication makes your project accessible to users and contributors. It helps project maintainers devote their time focusing on what they need to do. It helps interested people feel welcome and start contributing faster and more consistently, and it attracts diversity to your community.

Sounds great, but how can this be obtained? I grouped the rules of good practice into three categories procedural, daily, and long term. These practices are in part strategic, but if you and your community don't have the capacity to be strategic, it's also possible to substantially change your project by adding a few simple files to your repository.

But which files are those, and what happens when you already have several projects under your management? A few of them are:

• Code of conduct
• License
• Readme
• Changelog
• Contributing
• Ownership
• Test directory
• Issues
• Pull request templates
• Security
• Support

To help you get started, there are many projects that offer templates. By simply cloning them, you create a repository with these documents.

Another tool, designed to help open source software (OSS) maintainers and open source program offices (OSPO) is check-my-repo. Created by us at Sauce Labs' OSPO Community, it's an automated tool built on Repolinter that verifies whether the main necessary parameters to comply with open source best practices (including the files mentioned above and a few other rules), are present in your repositories. The web app also explains why each file needs to exist.

Procedural best practices

As the name implies, this is about the process:

• Maintain a single public issue tracker.
• Allow open access to the issues identified by the project.
• Have mechanisms for feedback and to discuss new features.
• Offer public meeting spaces scheduled in advance and have them recorded.

Here are some files that relate to the procedural logic:

• README: Make it easier for anyone who lands on your project to get started.
• Code of conduct: Establish expectations and facilitate a healthy and constructive community.
• Ownership: Make sure that someone is put in charge of the project to prevent it from being forgotten.

Daily tasks

This is about the day-to-day aspects, including:

• Check the status of the project.
• Explain how to submit issues, propose enhancements, and add new features.
• Show how to contribute to the project.

Files related to the daily aspects of project management are:

• Contributing: A step by step guideline on how to contribute.
• Changelog: Notable changes need to be logged.
• Security: Show how to report a security vulnerability.
• Support: How the project is being maintained.

Long term goals

This has information that guarantees the history and continuation of the project, such as a mission statement, key concepts and goals, a list of features and requirements, and a project roadmap.

Relevant files are:

• License: It's essential for users to know their limits, and for you to protect yourself legally.
• Test directory: Use this to avoid regression, breaks, and many other issues.

Creating and maintaining your open source project

Now imagine a project with all of these factors. Will it help you build and keep a community? Will noise in communication be mitigated? Will it save maintainers tons of time so they can onboard people and solve issues? Will people feel welcome?

Creating and maintaining an open source project is very rewarding. Creating collaboratively is an incredible experience and has the intrinsic potential to take such creation into possibilities that one person alone, or a small group could never achieve. But working openly and collaboratively is also a challenge for the maintainers and a responsibility for the community to ensure that this space is equitable and diverse.

There's a lot of work ahead. The result of surveys on the health of open source communities often reflect the worst of the technology industry. That's why ensuring that these standards are used is so important. To help mitigate this situation, I am betting on standards. They're a powerful tool to align our intentions and to guide us to an equitable, transparent, and shareable space. Will you join me?

Using open standards improves your project's quality and shareability. Most importantly, they can guide technology development by gently enforcing space for diversity and equity.

Image by:

Monsterkoi. Modified by Opensource.com. CC BY-SA 4.0

Diversity and inclusion Community management What to read next A beginner's guide to cloud-native open source communities This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

Linux Operating System Market Size 2022 by Top Companies, Upcoming Demand, Revenue Trends, Business Growth and Opportunity, Regional Share Forecast till 2029  Digital Journal

AlmaLinux Build System: What You Need to Know  ITPro Today

Embedded Linux Market Estimated to Soar Higher During 2022 – 2028 | ENEA, IBM, Microchip, Siemens, Green Hills Software, Intel, etc – Indian Defence News  Indian Defence News

Red Hatters should be able to access quality healthcare no matter where they live. We're working with our U.S. benefits provider to reimburse associates and their dependents covered by a Red Hat medical plan for travel to access several healthcare services that may not be available everywhere.

Effective July 1, 2022, our U.S. benefits provider will cover up to $10,000 maximum (lifetime) in travel expenses for an associate and a companion if they must travel greater than 60 miles from their home to access in-network care.

The post The Beginner’s Guide to IPTables (Linux Firewall) Commands first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides .

If you are using Computers for while, you must be familiar with the word “Firewall”. We know that things do seem complex from the surface but through this tutorial, we are going to explain

The post The Beginner’s Guide to IPTables (Linux Firewall) Commands first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides.

With the recent release of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS it is shipping systemd-oomd by default on their desktop for trying to better handle low-memory / out-of-memory situations. However, in real-world use systemd-oomd is too easily killing user-space applications like Firefox and Chrome when approaching memory pressure. This is a poor Ubuntu 22.04 user experience but the developers now have an idea for their approach to addressing this solution...

How to View Hidden Files and Folders on Linux  MUO - MakeUseOf

In a new white paper, the Cardea Project at Linux Foundation Public Health demonstrates a complete, decentralized, open source system for sharing medical data in a privacy-preserving way with machine readable governance for establishing trust.

The Cardea Project began as a response to the global Covid-19 pandemic and the need for countries and airlines to admit travelers. As Covid shut down air travel and presented an existential threat to countries whose economies depended on tourism, SITA Aero, the largest provider of IT technology to the air transport sector, saw decentralized identity technology as the ideal solution to manage a proof of Covid test status for travel.

With a verifiable credential, a traveler could hold their health data and not only prove they had a specific test at a specific time, they could use it—or a derivative credential—to prove their test status to enter hotels and hospitality spaces without having to divulge any personal information. Entities that needed to verify a traveler’s test status could, in turn, avoid the complexity of direct integrations with healthcare providers and the challenge of complying with onerous health data privacy law.

Developed by Indicio with SITA and the government of Aruba, the technology was successfully trialed in 2021 and the code specifically developed for the project was donated to Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) as a way for any public health authority to implement an open source, privacy-preserving way to manage Covid test and vaccination data. The Cardea codebase continues to develop at LFPH as Indicio, SITA, and the Cardea Community Group extend its features and applications beyond Covid-related data.

On May 22, 2022 at the 15th KuppingerCole European Identity and Cloud Conference in Berlin, SITA won the Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identity Award for its implementation of decentralized identity in Aruba.

The new white paper from the Cardea Project provides an in-depth examination of the background to Cardea, the transformational power of decentralized identity technology, how it works, the implementation in Aruba, and how it can be deployed to authenticate and share multiple kinds of health data in privacy-preserving ways. As the white paper notes:

“…Cardea is more than a solution for managing COVID-19 testing; it is a way to manage any health-related process where critical and personal information needs to be shared and verified in a way that enables privacy and enhances security. It is able to meet the requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act and Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, and in doing so enable use cases that range from simple proof of identity to interoperating ecosystems encompassing multiple cloud services, organizations, and sectors, where data needs to be, and can be, shared in immediately actionable ways.

Open source, interoperable decentralized identity technology is the only viable way to manage both the challenges of the present—where entire health systems can be held at ransom through identity-based breaches—and the opportunities presented by a digital future where digital twins, smart hospitals, and spatial web applications will reshape how healthcare is managed and delivered.”

The white paper is available here. The community development group meets weekly on Thursdays at 9:00am PST—please join us!

This article was originally published on the Linux Foundation Public Health project’s blog. 

The post Sharing Health Data while Preserving Privacy: The Cardea Project appeared first on Linux Foundation.

How to Install and Play Rocket League on Linux  MUO - MakeUseOf

1. Linus Torvalds says Rust is coming to the Linux kernel 'real soon now'  The Register
2. Linus Torvalds: After 30 years, Linux is not a dead project  VentureBeat
3. Rust in the Linux Kernel by 2023, Linus Torvalds Predicts  thenewstack.io
4. Linus Torvalds Expects to See Rust Support in the Kernel Soon  It's FOSS News
5. Cardano and Linux Creator Linus Torvalds Meet in Fireside Chat  U.Today
6. View Full Coverage on Google News

Linus Torvalds says Rust is coming to the Linux kernel 'real soon now'  The Register

Lilbits: Linux on iPhones and iPads, Brave Search emerges from beta, and a DIY retro audio player made with modern tech  Liliputing

Fedora developers are weighing adding an option to the default compilation flags for Fedora 37 that can enhance the performance profiling and debug-ability of generated packages but possible performance overhead implications -- possibly a few percent based on prior figures...

So, I am old enough to remember when the U.S. Congress temporarily intervened in a patent dispute over the technology that powered BlackBerries. A U.S. Federal judge ordered the BlackBerry service to shutdown until the matter was resolved, and Congress determined that BlackBerry service was too integral to commerce to be allowed to be turned off. Eventually, RIM settled the patent dispute and the BlackBerry rode off into technology oblivion. 

I am not here to argue the merits of this nearly 20-year-old case (in fact, I coincidentally had friends on both legal teams), but it was when I was introduced to the idea of companies that purchase patents with the goal of using this purchased right to extract money from other companies. 

Patents are an important legal protection to foster innovation, but, like all systems, it isn’t perfect. 

At this week’s  Open Source Summit North America, we heard from Kevin Jakel with Unified Patents. Kevin is a patent attorney who saw the damage being done to innovation by patent trolls – more kindly known as non-practicing entities (NPEs). 

Kevin points out that patents are intellectual property designed to protect inventions, granting a time-bound legal monopoly, but they are only a sword, not a shield. You can use it to stop people, but it doesn’t give you a right to do anything. He emphasizes, “You are vulnerable even if you invented something. Someone can come at you with other patents.” 

Kevin has watched a whole industry develop where patents are purchased by other entities, who then go after successful individuals or companies who they claim are infringing on the patents they now legally own (but is not something they invented). In fact, 88% of all high-tech patent litigation is from an NPE.

NPEs are rational actors using the legal system to their advantage, and they are driven by the fact that almost all of the time the defendant decides to settle to avoid the costs of defending the litigation. This perpetuates the problem by both reducing the risk to the NPEs and also giving them funds to purchase additional patents for future campaigns. 

In regards to open source software, the problem is on the rise and is only going to get worse without strategic, consistent action to combat it.

Kevin started Unified Patents with the goal of solving this problem without incentivizing further NPE activity. He wants to increase the risk for NPEs so that they are incentivized to not pursue non-existent claims. Because NPEs are rational actors, they are going to weigh risks vs. rewards before making any decisions. 

How does Unified Patents do this? They use a three-step process: 

• Detect – Patent Troll Campaigns
• Disrupt – Patent Troll Assertions
• Deter – Further Patent Troll Investment 

Unified Patents works on behalf of 11 technology areas (they call them Zones). They added an Open Source Zone in 2019 with the help of the Linux Foundation, Open Invention Network, and Microsoft. They look for demands being filed in court, and then they selectively pick patent trolls out of the group and challenge them, attempting to disrupt the process. They take the patent back to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and see if the patent should have ever existed in the first place. Typically, patent trolls look for broad patents so they can sue lots of companies, making their investment more profitable and less risky. This means it is so broad that it probably should never have been awarded in the first place. 

The result – they end up killing a lot of patents that should have never been issued but are being exploited by patent trolls, stifling innovation. The goal is to slow them down and eventually bring them to a stop as quickly as they can. Then, the next time they go to look for a patent, they look somewhere else.

And it is working. The image below shows some of the open source projects that Unified Patents has actively protected since 2019.

The Linux Foundation participates in Unified Patents’ Open Source Zone to help protect the individuals and organizations innovating every day. We encourage you to join the fight and create a true deterrence for patent trolls. It is the only way to extinguish this threat. 

Learn more at unifiedpatents.com/join. 

And if you are a die-hard fan of the BlackBerry’s iconic keyboard, my apologies for dredging up the painful memory of your loss. 

The post Ensuring Patents Foster Innovation in Open Source appeared first on Linux Foundation.

Ubuntu Touch OTA-23 is coming: Have a rummage in the drawer – can you test it?  The Register