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The XP-PEN Deco L is a recently launched graphics drawing tablet with its Linux support backed by a user-space binary blob package. But thanks to some USB reverse engineering from a community developer and discovering the hardware's "magic data" needed for initialization, this drawing tablet will be supported by a proper kernel driver in the next Linux kernel cycle...

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The Bizarre Case Of Zstd's Very Slow Performance On Arch Linux  Phoronix

How Wordle inspired me to create a 3D printing wiki the open source way Adam Bute Sat, 06/18/2022 - 03:00 Register or Login to like Register or Login to like

You decide to buy a 3D printer. You do your research, and you settle on an open system that uses resin as its material. You spend a nice chunk of money, and after a few weeks of waiting, it finally arrives.

You unbox it. It's gorgeous. You do some small assembly, pour in the liquid resin, and you're ready to go. You fire up the software. It asks you to type in the correct parameters for the material. You check the bottle but you can't see any parameters. You check online, but still can't find anything.

A bit confused, you write an email to the manufacturer, asking if they could point you in the right direction. The manufacturer tells you they also don't know the parameters, but they are pretty sure they exist, and you should try to guess them yourself. Baffled, you start wondering whether this is really what resin printing is like, or if you've been duped by this company.

A bad game of Wordle

Unfortunately, this is really what resin printing is like. When you buy a new material, you have to do what's called resin validation. It's essentially making a guess for the parameters and adjusting the numbers based on your results. That's if your guess was decent and anything even comes out of the printer.

It's a lot like playing a game of Wordle, except none of the blocks ever turn green. All you can do is eyeball whether the print looks slightly better or worse with each iteration, and then try again. Finally, at one point you say “looks good to me,” and that's that.

Image by:

( Adam Bute, CC BY-SA 40)

If that sounds like a deeply unsatisfying game to you, you'd be correct. It's also way too long, often taking days, and wasting a good amount of resin in the process. Resin is expensive. At least Wordle is free.

A little help from above?

So why don't these manufacturers, who know their material best, share the print parameters? Well, their arguments are somewhat reasonable. There are millions of possible combinations of printers and resins, and they can't possibly cover all of them. And even between two printers which are the same model, there can be tiny variations, which affect the numbers slightly.

But ‘slightly' is an important word. If users got a good baseline, they could easily adjust the settings if they needed to. At least it would be much quicker than starting from scratch. To be fair, some companies do give recommended settings, but it's hard to trust even these numbers. There are many crafty manufacturers who publish fake, untested settings, just to lure customers in.

The truth is that resin validation is expensive. Resin companies are almost invariably small businesses, strapped for cash, who just can't afford to spend on resin validation. So, they outsource this work to the end user. But this creates a kind of absurd situation in the resin printing world. Instead of one man at one company doing the validation work once, hundreds of people do the same work over and over again just to come to the same conclusion.

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 Makers to the rescue

So what does the maker community do? They try to fix the problem themselves. Reddit and Facebook groups are full of people happily sharing screenshots of a new setting they figured out. Nice gesture, but not very useful. Some ingenious community members created live resin setting spreadsheets that are updated based on user submissions. These are fantastic resources, and universally loved, but they too have their limitations.

They are messy, rarely updated, and there's no way to tell whether the settings actually work. And because anonymous users host them, they are sometimes turned into spam, or randomly deleted. Most recently the biggest community spreadsheet was unexpectedly deleted, erasing years' worth of crowdsourced data with it.

Image by:

(Adam Bute, CC BY-SA 40)

Making a resin setting database

I'm a bit of an egghead myself and I really enjoy organizing things. I had the idea to collect all these settings from manufacturers and communities, and put it on a nice website. I registered the domain makertrainer.com and used two awesome open source tools to build the site: MediaWiki and DataTables.

Image by:

(Adam Bute, CC BY-SA 40)

I made it a wiki so that anyone could contribute, but made certain spam or vandalism could be easily undone. I also added some buttons to allow users to vote on whether a setting worked or not. I posted it in some communities to see if people would find it useful, and the response has been overwhelming. I didn't realize this at the time, but I accidentally created the biggest resin setting database on the internet. Users kept spreading it on social media, blog posts, YouTube and so on. With so many people submitting new settings, the database grows larger daily.

Image by:

(Adam Bute, CC BY-SA 40)

The fact that people are so enthusiastic shows just how much of a void there is for documentation in 3D printing. There's a lot of practical experience scattered amongst makers, most of which is never written down or shared publicly. Everyone needs to do a better job recording practical knowledge in addition to theory. Otherwise, the next generation of makers will commit the same mistakes again. The database is a small contribution in this regard, but I hope it can continue to grow, and make 3D printing just a little easier for everyone.

3D printing is a lot like a game of Wordle. I aim to solve the puzzle by creating crowdsourced documentation and databases.

Image by:

Opensource.com

3D printing What to read next Open source tools to make your Wordle results accessible Solve Wordle using the Linux command line This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

How to Fix “A JNI Error Has Occurred” in Minecraft on All Versions  Beebom

Wine 7.11 is out as the newest version of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

Popular Linux Distro Ubuntu spotted running on a Google Nest Hub  Chrome Unboxed

NVIDIA today published the 515.49.05 beta driver as their first Vulkan beta driver update for Linux in one month and also their first re-base against the R515 series. As part of that re-base to the new series, this is the first Vulkan beta driver now supporting NVIDIA's new open-source GPU kernel driver...

This post originally appeared on the LF Energy’s blog. LF Energy is a project at the Linux Foundation that provides a neutral, collaborative community to build the shared digital investments that will transform the world’s relationship to energy.

The energy sector is amid a huge transformation that will impact the entire world and grid operators need new innovations to match those needs.

That’s why we’re especially excited to see the recognition awarded Antonello Monti, Director of the Institute for Automation of Complex Power Systems at RWTH Aachen University and group Leader at Center for Digital Energy, Fraunhofer FIT, for his leadership with SOGNO, the “Service-based Open-source Grid automation platform for Network Operation” of the future.

Monti received the second most prestigious award given by the German government, the innovation prize of North Rhine-Westphalia. Awarded annually, this prize recognizes outstanding achievements and excellent research.

We are so proud of the work Monti, who also serves at the Technical Advisory Committee Chair for LF Energy, and Markus Mirz have undertaken. We also want to extend our congratulations to the many individuals, companies, and the European Commission who funded the original work for SOGNO (meaning “dream” in Italian).

SOGNO is an LF Energy project that is creating plug-and-play, cloud-native, micro-services to implement our next generation of data-driven monitoring and control systems. It will simplify the life of distribution utilities by enabling them to optimize their network operations through open source to deliver cost-effectively, and seamless, secure power to customers.

A breakthrough innovation is that SOGNO introduces the idea of grid automation as a modular system in which components can be added through time. This is in opposition to classical monolithic solutions, which weren’t constructed with today’s energy landscape in mind.

Today, as more renewables come onto the grid, the flow of energy moves from just one way, which was true in the past, to both ways on and off the grid.In the future, power system networks will be composed of assets whose profiles may shift between loads, resources, and the ability to provide flexibility back to the grid.

Reinforcing the current system is not sufficient to deal with the increasing complexity of distribution systems. Rather, we are at the cusp of needing deployment of advanced distribution management systems that can be implemented as centralized but even better as distributed architecture.

We reiterate our deep gratitude and support for this project, and the people and entities who’re making it happen.

Read here for more information

The post The SOGNO Project Wins Prestigious Award for Focus on Modular Grid Automation appeared first on Linux Foundation.

In-Car Infotainment System Market Growth Prospect and Future Scenario by Key Players- IBM Corporation, Microsoft Corporation, Linux Foundation – Indian Defence News  Indian Defence News

Open source communities are driven by a mutual interest in collaboration and sharing around a common solution. They are filled with passion and energy. As a result, today’s world is powered by open source software, powering the Internet, databases, programming languages, and so much more. It is revolutionizing industries and tackling the toughest challenges. Just check out the projects fostered here at the Linux Foundation for a peek into what is possible. 

What is the challenge? 

As the communities and the projects they support grow and mature, active community engagement to recruit, mentor, and enable an active community is critical. Organizations are now recognizing this as they are more and more dependent on open source communities. Yet, while the ethos of open source is transparency and collaboration, the tool chain to automate, visualize, analyze, and manage open source software production remains scattered, siloed, and of varying quality.

How do we address these challenges?

And now, involvement and engagement in open source communities goes beyond software developers and extends to engineers, architects, documentation writers, designers, Open Source Program Office professionals, lawyers, and more. To help everyone stay coordinated and engaged, a centralized source of information about their activities, tooling to simplify and streamline information from multiple sources, and a solution to visualize and analyze key parameters and indicators is critical. It can help: 

• Organizations wishing to better understand how to coordinate internal participation in open source and measure outcomes
• CTOs and engineering leads looking to build a cohesive open source strategy 
• Project maintainers needing to wrangle the legal and operational sides of the project
• Individual keeping track of their open source impacts

Enter the Linux Foundation’s LFX Platform – LFX operationalizes this approach, providing tools built to facilitate every aspect of open source development and empowers projects to standardize, automate, analyze, and self-manage while preserving their choice of tools and development workflows in a vendor-neutral platform.

LFX tools do not disrupt a project’s existing toolchain but rather integrate a project’s community tools and ecosystem to provide a common control plane with APIs from numerous distributed data sources and operations tools. It also adds intelligence to drive outcome-driven KPIs and utilizes a best practices-driven, vendor-agnostic tools chain. It is the place to go for active community engagement and open source activity, enabling the already powerful open source movement to be even more successful.

How does it work? 

Much of the data and information that makes up the open source universe is, not surprisingly, open to see. For instance, GitHub and GitLab both offer APIs that allow third-parties to track all activity on open projects. Social media and public chat channels, blog posts, documentation, and conference talks are also easily captured. For projects hosted at a foundation, such as the Linux Foundation, there is an opportunity to aggregate the public and semi-private data into a privacy respecting, opt-in unified data layer. 

More specifically to an organization or project, LFX is modular, extensible, and API-driven. It is pluggable and can easily integrate the data sources and tools that are already in use by organizations rather than force them to change their work processes. For instance:

• Source control software (e.g. Git, GitHub, or GitLab)
• CI/CD platforms (e.g. Jenkins, CircleCI, Travis CI, and GitHub Actions)
• Project management (e.g. Jira, GitHub Issues)
• Registries  (e.g. Docker Hub)
• Documentation  (e.g. Confluence Wiki)
• Marketing automation (e.g. social media and blogging platforms)
• Event management platforms (e.g. physical event attendance, speaking engagements, sponsorships, webinar attendance, and webinar presentations)

This holistic and configurable view of projects, organizations, foundations, and more make it much easier to understand what is happening in open source, from the most granular to the universal. 

What do real-world users think? 

Part of LFX is a community forum to ask questions, share solutions, and more. Recently, Jessica Wagantall shared about the Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP). She notes:

ONAP is part of the LF Networking umbrella and consists of 30+ components working together towards the same goal since 2017. Since then, we have faced situations where we have to evaluate if the components are getting enough support during release schedules and if we are identifying our key contributors to the project.

In this time, we have learned a lot as we grow, and we have had the chance to have tools and resources that we can rely on every step of the way. One of these tools is LFX Insights.

We rely on LFX Insights tools to guide the internal decisions and keep the project growing and the contributions flowing.

LFX Insights has become a potent tool that gives us an overview of the project as well as statistics of where our project stands and the changes that we have encountered when we evaluate release content and contribution trends.

Read Jessica’s full post for some specific examples of how LFX Insights helps her and the whole team. 

John Mertic is a seasoned open source project manager. One of his jobs currently is helping to manage the Academy Software Foundation. John shares: 

The Academy Software Foundation was formed in 2018 in partnership with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to provide a vendor-neutral home for open source software in the visual effects and motion picture industries.

A challenge this industry was having was that there were many key open source projects used in the industry, such as OpenVDB, OpenColorIO, and OpenEXR, that were cornerstones to production but lacked developers and resources to maintain them. These projects were predominantly single vendor owned and led, and my experience with other open source projects in other verticals and horizontal industries causes this situation, which leads to sustainability concerns, security issues, and lack of future development and innovation.

As the project hit its 3rd anniversary in 2021, the Governing Board was wanting to assess the impact the foundation has had on increasing the sustainability of these projects. There were three primary dimensions being assessed.

• Contributor growth

• Contribution growth

• Contributor diversity

We at the LF know that seeing those metrics increasing is a good sign for a healthy, sustainable project.

Academy Software Foundation projects use LFX Insights as a tool for measuring community health. Using this tool enabled us to build some helpful charts which illustrated the impacts of being a part of the Academy Software Foundation.

We took the approach of looking at before and after data on the contributor, contribution, and contributor diversity.

Here is one of the charts that John shared. You can view all of them on his post. 

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Conclusion 

LFX will improve communication and collaboration, simplify management, surface the best projects and project leaders, and provide insightful guidance based on real data captured at scale, across the widest variety of projects ever collected into a single source of information. And it is available to you – all Linux Foundation members and projects have access to LFX. 

To learn more about what it can do for you and your organization and project(s), read our white paper (LINK), read posts in the LFX Community Forum, or just log in with your free LFID and give it a spin. And check back here on the LF Blog for more articles in the coming months on LFX – digging in deeper. 

If you would like to talk to someone at the Linux Foundation about LFX or membership, reach out to Jen Shelby at jshelby@linuxfoundation.org. 

The post One Place to Manage Your Open Source Projects and Communities appeared first on Linux Foundation.

How to Back Up Your Data With Déjà Dup on Linux  MUO - MakeUseOf