Open-source News

RISC-V Auto-Vectorization Support For The GCC Compiler Started

Phoronix - Fri, 03/03/2023 - 19:01
A set of patches sent out this morning lay out the initial foundation for RISC-V auto-vectorization support within the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)...

Arpwatch – Monitor Ethernet Activity {IP and Mac Address} in Linux

Tecmint - Fri, 03/03/2023 - 17:00
The post Arpwatch – Monitor Ethernet Activity {IP and Mac Address} in Linux first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides .

Arpwatch is an open-source computer software program that helps you to monitor Ethernet traffic activity (like Changing IP and MAC Addresses) on your network and maintains a database of ethernet/ip address pairings. It produces

The post Arpwatch – Monitor Ethernet Activity {IP and Mac Address} in Linux first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides.

A trivia vending machine made with a Raspberry Pi

opensource.com - Fri, 03/03/2023 - 16:00
A trivia vending machine made with a Raspberry Pi pshapiro Fri, 03/03/2023 - 03:00

As an educator working at a public library, I keep my eyes peeled for interesting uses of the Raspberry Pi. From where I sit, the Trivia Vending Machine project out of Dallas, Texas, is one of the most creative and interesting uses of these amazing devices. Using a Raspberry Pi to replace the coin box on a food vending machine is a stroke of genius by Greg Needel and his team. The potential uses of this idea are far-reaching. Check out this short YouTube video to see the Trivia Vending Machine in action.

The original Trivia Vending Machine focused on science questions, but you could build a Trivia Vending Machine with any questions—history, civics, literature, and so on. The most engaging uses will be if you encourage students to write their own questions—and answer each others' questions. And consider this: Instead of disbursing food, the vending machine could disburse coupons to local businesses. One way I earn a living is by teaching guitar lessons, and I'd gladly donate a guitar lesson as a coupon for a Trivia Vending Machine. However, a student must rack up a suitable amount of points to earn one of my guitar lessons.

Stretch your imagination a little further. Would it be possible to have logic puzzles for students to solve to get food (or coupons) from the vending machine? Yes, that would not be difficult to create. Maybe Sudoku puzzles, Wordle, KenKen, Sokoban, or any other puzzle. Students could play these puzzles with a touch screen. How about chess? Sure, students could solve chess puzzles to get food (or coupons).

Did you notice in the video that the original Trivia Vending Machine is large and heavy? Designing a smaller one—perhaps one-third the size that fits on a rolling cart—could make for easier transport between schools, libraries, museums, and maker faires.

The inside of a Trivia Vending Machine is composed of stepper motors. You can buy these used on the web. A web search for "used vending machine motors" turns up the Vending World and the VendMedic websites.

More on Raspberry Pi What is Raspberry Pi? eBook: Guide to Raspberry Pi Getting started with Raspberry Pi cheat sheet eBook: Running Kubernetes on your Raspberry Pi Whitepaper: Data-intensive intelligent applications in a hybrid cloud blueprint Understanding edge computing Our latest on Raspberry Pi

If you are a member of a makerspace, tell your fellow members about the Trivia Vending Machine. It's an open invention, not patented, so anyone can build it. (Thank you, Greg Needel.) I imagine the coding for such a device is not too difficult. It would be lovely if someone could create a GitHub repository of such code—and maybe some accompanying explanatory screencasts.

Although the Trivia Vending Machine did not win an award in the Red Bull Creations contest, this invention is still award-worthy. Someone should track down Greg Needel and give him a suitable prize. What should that award look like? It might look like $25k or $50k. I say three cheers for Greg Needel and his creative team. They took the Raspberry Pi in the direction that the inventors of this computer intended—a tinkerer's delight. Bold and beautiful. Bold, beautiful, and open. Could you ask for anything more?

One last thing. The Trivia Vending Machine was created several years ago with an early Raspberry Pi model. Current Raspberry Pi computers are much faster and more responsive. So, any lags in the interaction you notice in the above-mentioned video no longer exist on today's Raspberry Pi models.

Oh, I want one of those candy bars so bad. I'm smacking my lips together. Remind me; how many points do I need to earn to get a Snickers bar? Whatever it takes. I'll do whatever it takes.

Using a Raspberry Pi to replace the coin box on a food vending machine is a stroke of genius.

Image by:

Opensource.com

Raspberry Pi Education 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.

How I automate graphics creation with Inkscape

opensource.com - Fri, 03/03/2023 - 16:00
How I automate graphics creation with Inkscape mairin Fri, 03/03/2023 - 03:00

I recorded a 15-minute long tutorial demonstrating how to automate the production of graphics from a CSV file or spreadsheet (basically a mailmerge type deal for graphics) in Inkscape. It uses the Next Generator Inkscape extension from Maren Hachmann. 

You can watch it on the Fedora Design Team Linux Rocks PeerTube channel (PeerTube is open source!) or the embedded YouTube video below:

In this article, I provide some context for how this tutorial is useful. I also include a very high-level summary of the content in the video in case you'd rather skim text and not watch a video.

Conference talk card graphics

Each Flock/Nest needs a graphic for each talk for the online platform you use to host a virtual conference. There are usually about 50 or more talks for large events like this. That's a lot of graphics to produce manually.

With this tutorial, you learn how to make a template like this in Inkscape:

Image by:

(Máirín Duffy, CC BY-SA 4.0)

And a CSV file like this:

  CONFERENCENAME TALKNAME PRESENTERNAMES BestCon The Pandas Are Marching Beefy D. Miracle Fedora Nest Why Fedora is the Best Linux Colúr and Badger BambooFest 2022 Bamboo Tastes Better with Fedora Panda AwesomeCon The Best Talk You Ever Heard Dr. Ver E. Awesome

Combine them to generate one graphic per row in the CSV, like so:

Image by:

(Máirín Duffy, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Conference graphics are a good example of how you can apply this tutorial. You could also use it to generate business cards (it outputs a PDF), personalized birthday invitations, personalized graphics for students in your classroom (like student name cards for their desks), and signage for your office. You can use it to create graphics for labeling items, too. You can even use it to create awesome banners and graphics for Fedora as a member of the Fedora Design Team! There are a ton of possibilities for how you can apply this technique, so let your imagination soar.

Open multimedia and art resources Music and video at the Linux terminal 26 open source creative apps to try this year Film series: Open Source Stories Blender cheat sheet Kdenlive cheat sheet GIMP cheat sheet Latest audio and music articles Latest video editing articles The Inkscape Next Generator extension

The first step to create these images is to install the Next Generator extension for Inkscape created by Maren Hachmann:

  1. Go to the website and download the next_gen.inx and next_gen.py from the top level of the repo.
  2. Then go into the Edit > Preferences > System dialog in Inkscape. Search for the User Extensions directory listing and click the Open icon. Drag the .inx and .py files into that folder.
  3. Finally, you should close all open Inkscape windows and restart Inkscape. The new extension is under the Extensions menu: Extensions > Export > Next Generator.
Create a template

Each header of your CSV file (in my example: ConferenceName, TalkName, PresenterNames) is a variable you can place in an Inkscape file that serves as your template. Take a look at the example SVG template file for directions. If you want the TalkName to appear in your template, create a text object in Inkscape and put the following content into it:

%VAR_TalkName%

When you run the extension, the %VAR_TalkName% text is replaced with the TalkName listed for each row of the CSV. So for the first row, %VAR_TalkName% is replaced with the text The Pandas Are Marching for the first graphic. For the second graphic, the TalkName is Why Fedora is the Best Linux. You continue doing this until you get to the TalkName column for each graphic.

Run the generator

Once your template is ready, run the Next Generator extension by loading your CSV. Then, select which variables (header names) you want to use in each file name and hit the Apply button.

In a future article, I will provide a tutorial on more advanced use of this extension, like changing colors and graphics included in each file.

This article was originally published on the author's blog and has been republished with permission.

Follow along this Inkscape tutorial to create conference talk card graphics at scale.

Image by:

Ray Smith

Art and design Video editing Inkscape Open Studio 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.

6 Wc Command to Count Number of Lines, Words, and Characters in File

Tecmint - Fri, 03/03/2023 - 14:00
The post 6 Wc Command to Count Number of Lines, Words, and Characters in File first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides .

wc (short for word count) is a command line tool in Unix/Linux operating systems, which is used to find out the number of newline count, word count, byte and character count in the files

The post 6 Wc Command to Count Number of Lines, Words, and Characters in File first appeared on Tecmint: Linux Howtos, Tutorials & Guides.

New Threaded/Atomic Console Patches Posted For Linux - Precursor For Mainlining RT

Phoronix - Fri, 03/03/2023 - 05:30
Posted today was the "v1" patch series implementing threaded/atomic console infrastructure for printk. This is one of the last steps needed before the real-time (PREEMPT_RT) support can be finally mainlined into the Linux kernel...

AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D Linux Gaming Performance

Phoronix - Fri, 03/03/2023 - 03:30
After earlier this week providing the initial Linux benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D across many Linux gaming tests as well as nearly 400 other tests, in today's article I am looking at the AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D as the 12-core / 24-thread processor with the hefty 128MB L3 cache on this Zen 4 desktop processor. Due to having less time with the 7900X3D thus far, today's article is just getting things started in looking at the Linux gaming performance -- both native Linux games as well as many Windows games running on Linux thanks to Valve's wonderful Steam Play (Proton + DXVK / VKD3D-Proton) software.

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