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In addition to Red Hat being busy working on their new web-based Anaconda installer for future Fedora and RHEL releases, SUSE engineers have also been pursuing their own web-based installer built atop YaST. D-Installer 0.4 was released recently as the latest improvements on that front...

In addition to Red Hat being busy working on their new web-based Anaconda installer for future Fedora and RHEL releases, SUSE engineers have also been pursuing their own web-based installer built atop YaST. D-Installer 0.4 was released recently as the latest improvements on that front...

SUSE's D-Installer Taking Shape As New Web-Based Linux Distro Installer  Phoronix

NVIDIA released new Vulkan beta driver builds last night for Linux and Windows users...

NVIDIA released new Vulkan beta driver builds last night for Linux and Windows users...

NVIDIA 515.49.10 Linux Driver Released With Vulkan Pipeline Robustness  Phoronix

Download Linux Mint 21 based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS to Test  Linux Shout

Dell's XPS 13 Plus is the first laptop certified for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS  The Verge

How I use the Linux fmt command to format text Jim Hall Thu, 07/21/2022 - 03:00 Register or Login to like Register or Login to like

When I write documentation for a project, I often write the Readme file and Install instructions in plain text. I don't need to use markup languages like HTML or Markdown to describe what a project does or how to compile it. But maintaining this documentation can be a pain. If I need to update the middle of a sentence in my Readme text file, I need to reformat the text so I don't end up with a really long or short line in the middle of my other text that's otherwise formatted to 75 columns. Some editors include a feature that will automatically reformat text to fill paragraphs, but not all do. That's where the Linux fmt command comes to the rescue.

More Linux resources Linux commands cheat sheet Advanced Linux commands cheat sheet Free online course: RHEL technical overview Linux networking cheat sheet SELinux cheat sheet Linux common commands cheat sheet What are Linux containers? Our latest Linux articles Format text with Linux fmt

The fmt command is a trivial text formatter; it collects words and fills paragraphs, but doesn't apply any other text styling such as italics or bold. It's all just plain text. With fmt, you can quickly adjust text so it's easier to read. Let's say I start with this familiar sample text:

$ cat trek.txt Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before!

In this sample file, lines have different lengths, and they are broken up in an odd way. You might have similar odd line breaks if you make lots of changes to a plain text file. To reformat this text, you can use the fmt command to fill the lines of the paragraph to a uniform length:

$ fmt trek.txt Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before!

By default, fmt will format text to 75 columns wide, but you can change that with the -w or --width option:

$ fmt -w 60 trek.txt Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds. To seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before!Format email replies with Linux fmt

I participate in an email list where we prefer plain text emails. That makes archiving emails on the list server much easier. But the reality is not everyone sends emails in plain text. And sometimes, when I reply to those emails as plain text, my email client puts an entire paragraph on one line. That makes it difficult to "quote" a reply in an email.

Here's a simple example. When I'm replying to an email as plain text, my email client "quotes" the other person's email by adding a > character before each line. For a short message, that might look like this:

> I like the idea of the interim development builds.

A long line that doesn't get "wrapped" properly will not display correctly in my plain text email reply, because it will be just one long line with a > character at the front, like this:

> I like the idea of the interim development builds. This should be a great way to test new changes that everyone can experiment with.

To fix this, I bring up a terminal and copy and paste the quoted text into a new file. Then I use the -p or --prefix option to tell fmt what character to use as a "prefix" before each line.

$ cat > email.txt > I like the idea of the interim development builds. This should be a great way to test new changes that everyone can experiment with. ^D $ fmt -p '>' email.txt > I like the idea of the interim development builds. This should be a > great way to test new changes that everyone can experiment with.

The fmt command is a very simple text formatter, but it can do lots of useful things that help in writing and updating documentation in plain text. Explore the other options such as -c or --crown-margin to match the indentation of the first two lines of a paragraph, such as bullet lists. Also try -t or --tagged-paragraph to preserve the indentation of the first line in a paragraph, like indented paragraphs. And the -u or --uniform-spacing option to use one space between words and two spaces between sentences.

The fmt command is a trivial text formatter. Here's how I use to format text and email replies.

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Original photo by Bob Doran via Flickr. Modified by Rikki Endsley. CC BY-SA 2.0.

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Build Design Thinking into your team processes Leigh Griffin Thu, 07/21/2022 - 03:00 Register or Login to like Register or Login to like

Teams require some kind of process to coordinate work and ensure that the output of many focuses on a singular goal. Within the software industry, this has taken the form of teams following a methodology such as Agile. In industries from pharmaceutical to manufacturing, Lean is the philosophy followed to ensure that a process is adhered to. The difficulty with a process is that it's prescriptive. It's designed in such a way that you stay on the tracks that it provides. If you do, you achieve the prescribed benefits and ultimately a form of success. That doesn't give much room for paradigm-level shifts in work behavior.

More open source career advice Open source cheat sheets Linux starter kit for developers 7 questions sysadmins should ask a potential employer before taking a job Resources for IT artchitects Cheat sheet: IT job interviews

In early 2020, one such shift hit the global workplace in the form of COVID-19. Many companies self-enforced a remote strategy as people were forced to adapt to working from home. Years later, that flexibility is here to stay. This disruptor has brought new challenges in how we facilitate our process, and the ceremonies associated with it. The engagement paradigm of trying to bring people together on a problem, and to keep them attentive, productive, and happy is challenging when your interaction medium is limited to the screenspace a person is using. Engagement through a camera lens masks the environmental conditions that could also be hampering participation, from suboptimal work space conditions to barking dogs, crying kids, or noisy neighbors. When you throw in the natural distractions that working on a computer can bring (instant messaging, emails, social media, cat memes, and more) the conditions for collaboration, innovation, and problem solving tends to suffer. Combining all of those elements gives you a perfect storm, especially when you ask a human to concentrate on just one topic for a prolonged period of time.

 

. And that period of engagement extends beyond ergonomic best practices for working at computers, meaning this becomes not just a mental challenge, but a physical challenge.

[ Also read: 5 ways to better leverage remote teams ]

Team health governs a range of concerns from the happiness of team members to their social interactions with each other. Team-centric work is fundamentally based on a social contract of respecting each other, operating as a team, and looking out for one another. That's underpinned by an attempt to generate an environment where people enjoy turning up to work, or at a minimum don't dread when Monday morning comes around. If you can achieve that, and tap into what people are passionate about, then you have the means to move motivated teams towards goals.

Fun at work can often feel forced, with team-building activities, but it can help to take the engagement paradigm that is Design Thinking, and bake it into your process. This allows you to not just progress the key ceremonies and events that your processes demand, but it allows you to do so in a manner that engages people, keeps them attentive in a remote capacity, and allows them to enjoy turning up to these sessions. You can build sessions where your participants can be the stars of the show.

In our next article, we'll talk about how movie posters helped us stay organized and engaged.

Fun at work can often feel forced, with team-building activities, but it can help to take the engagement paradigm that is Design Thinking, and bake it into your process.

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Community management Agile What to read next Put Design Thinking into practice with the Open Practice Library This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. 61 points Waterford, Ireland

Product Owner on the Community Platform Engineering team at Red Hat from Waterford, Ireland and in my spare time I'm a retired showjumper but full time 'groom' for my son who has followed in my hoof-prints - ah, foot-prints!

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Experienced People and Project Manager with over 20 years of working in the information technology and services industries.

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Dell XPS Plus 13 Developer Edition is certified for Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS  BetaNews

1. Dell XPS Plus 13 Developer Edition is certified for Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS  BetaNews
2. The Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition will soon arrive with Ubuntu Linux 22.04  ZDNet
3. You Can Now Buy the Dell XPS 13 Plus With Ubuntu Linux 22.04  How-To Geek
4. Dell's XPS 13 Plus is the first laptop certified for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS  The Verge
5. Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition Laptop Is Now Certified for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS  9to5Linux
6. View Full Coverage on Google News

You Can Now Buy the Dell XPS 13 Plus With Ubuntu Linux 22.04  How-To Geek

You Can Now Buy the Dell XPS 13 Plus With Ubuntu Linux 22.04  How-To Geek

Canonical and Dell are jointly announcing that the new Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop has been officially certified for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

Canonical and Dell are jointly announcing that the new Dell XPS 13 Plus Developer Edition laptop has been officially certified for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS...

Merged this afternoon to the mainline Linux 5.19 Git kernel and set for back-porting is a fix for a new security bug. Oracle made public CVE-2022-21505 on Tuesday as a trivial bypass to the Linux kernel's lockdown mode...

Merged this afternoon to the mainline Linux 5.19 Git kernel and set for back-porting is a fix for a new security bug. Oracle made public CVE-2022-21505 on Tuesday as a trivial bypass to the Linux kernel's lockdown mode...

Linux Lands Fix For A Trivial Lockdown Bypass Bug  Phoronix

It’s tough sourcing enough talent today to meet growing IT team needs, but life finds a way. Our recent 10th Annual Open Source Jobs Report found 93% of employers are struggling to find enough employees with open source skills. It doesn’t help that 73% of professionals feel it would be easy to find another job, and they are demanding higher salaries than ever before to stay put. Between an overwhelming talent shortage and competition from other employers, many companies’ IT teams are at risk of “going extinct”.

93% of employers are struggling to find enough employees with open source skills.

There is a way to address this situation however. The Open Source Jobs Report  also found:

• 74% of professionals are asking for more training opportunities so they can keep up with current technologies
• 62% said training is the thing their employer can provide that would help them be more successful, a higher percentage than any other option
• 81% of professionals want to add new certifications to their resumes this year
• 90% of employers are willing to help them pay for them

Companies need to keep up by providing formal training and certification opportunities to their employees or risk giving them one more reason to leave.

62% said training is the thing their employer can provide that would help them be more successful, a higher percentage than any other option.

It should be kept in mind that providing training and certifications not only makes employees happier by demonstrating an employer’s willingness to invest in them and their career opportunities, but these opportunities also benefiSavet the employer. Having a better skilled team means you will be more successful in achieving your technology goals, and having more certified professionals on staff means your customers can have more confidence in your teams’ abilities.

Providing training and certifications not only makes employees happier by demonstrating an employer’s willingness to invest in them and their career opportunities, but these opportunities also benefit the employer.

Linux Foundation Training & Certification offers a wide catalog of training and certification in the most important open source technologies, from cloud to system administration to networking, blockchain, web development and more. This SysAdmin Day, give your team what they really want and provide them with training and/or certification that will help both you and them achieve your goals. We provide group classes, team discounts and more to help you be successful when it comes to upskilling. Learn more and contact us here.

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