Open-source News

Linus Torvalds' Latest Commentary Against -O3'ing The Linux Kernel  Phoronix

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers remain very busy preparing the open-source driver stack for Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist hardware. While much of the base enablement work is complete and now with Linux 5.19 the compute support is even exposed to user-space, one of the areas seeing more work in recent times has been around power management...

6 Reasons Flatpaks and Snaps Are Great for Linux  MUO - MakeUseOf

CZ Says BTC Might Hit $70k in Few Months or Years, ShibaSwap's BONE Trackable on Binance, Cardano Joins Linux Foundation as Gold Member: Crypto News Digest by U.Today  U.Today

Foundries.io looks to $1bn IPO  eeNews Europe

Linus Torvalds: Rust is coming to the Linux kernel 'real soon'  TechRadar

Startup rattles tin for e-paper monitor with display fast enough to play video  The Register

The 5 Best Dictionary Apps for Linux  MUO - MakeUseOf

LF Edge Releases Industry-Defining Edge Computing White Paper to Accelerate Edge/ IoT Deployments  PR Newswire

Linux Full Disk Encryption Performance For The AMD Ryzen 7 PRO / HP Dev One  Phoronix

One of the great defaults when installing Pop!_OS or receiving a pre-loaded laptop/desktop from System76 or the new HP Dev One is that it encourages full-disk encryption and prominently shown during the install process. I highly recommend full-disk encryption especially for laptops. As it's been a few years since running benchmarks looking at the overhead of LUKS encryption, here are some benchmarks of Pop!_OS 22.04 on the HP Dev One with the full disk encryption enabled and then a fresh install without encryption.

Hackers Exploit Mitel VoIP Zero-Day Bug to Deploy Ransomware  The Hacker News

While many Red Hat open-source projects end up being relatively instant successes that then end up being widely adopted in the open-source community, Red Hat's Stratis Storage effort seems to be trending as one of the exceptions. Red Hat continues investing in Stratis but it doesn't seem to have the sizable adoption or widespread interest that tends to come with most of their projects. In any event, Fedora 37 later this year should ship with the newest Stratis tech...

Top 6 Visual Studio Themes You Should Try  MUO - MakeUseOf

Onlive Server Presents The Linux and Windows OS Based Hong Kong VPS Server Hosting With KVM VPS  EIN News

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.

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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.