Open-source News

The Performance Impact From Different Arch Linux Kernel Flavors  Phoronix

Arch Linux has five different officially supported kernel builds: stable, hardened, long-term. real-time, and Zen, but which of these is the fastest for desktop Arch Linux users? Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the performance out of these different kernel build options for Arch Linux and its derivatives.

How to schedule restarts and shutdowns on Linux  AddictiveTips

How to easily and quickly clean your system and free disk space with BleachBit  ZDNet

Atari announce another 80s classic revival with Caverns of Mars ...  GamingOnLinux

Google engineer Ilya Tocar has introduced the notion of "light" AVX support within the LLVM compiler infrastructure for utilizing some benefits of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) but trying to avoid the power/frequency impact that AVX-512 use has on older generations of Intel processors...

Ubuntu 23.04 Makes Telegram a Deb-to-Snap Transitional Package  OMG! Ubuntu!

Hitting the linux-firmware.git tree this morning were new AMDGPU firmware files for IP blocks found on upcoming hardware. It's likely these new firmware files are for the forthcoming Ryzen 7040 series mobile processors with RDNA3 graphics...

U-boot now supports booting Linux from an HTTP server  CNX Software

U-boot now supports booting Linux from an HTTP server  CNX Software

Why less may be more when building Web3  Cointelegraph

Lots more EA games get a Steam Deck Playable rating  GamingOnLinux

Intel Meteor Lake VPU Accelerator Support Ready For Linux 6.3  Phoronix

Among the numerous exciting aspects of Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake client processors is the introduction of the Versatile Processing Unit (VPU) inference accelerator for Computer Vision (CV) and Deep Learning (DL) workloads...

Factorio is about to increase in price so be quick  GamingOnLinux

After Microsoft engineers got Vulkan 1.0 conformance tests to nearly 100% for their Dozen "Dzn" Mesa driver, they have now enabled Vulkan 1.1 support as their next step for this Vulkan-atop-Direct3D 12 open-source implementation...

LLVM 16 feature development is now officially over with the code having been branched, LLVM 17.0 development now happening with the mainline code, and LLVM 16.0 stable hoping to officially release in early March...

Red Hat continues investing in Stratis Storage as their modern Linux storage solution built atop XFS and LVM with intentions of providing ZFS and Btrfs like functionality but atop a mature and proven base. Released on Tuesday was Stratis 3.5 as the latest version of their Rust-written daemon...

Celebrating the 2023 Opensource.com Community Choice authors AmyJune Wed, 01/25/2023 - 03:00

Often our first interaction with open source is through community knowledge bases.

This past year, I have had the fantastic opportunity to work with the many authors here at Opensource.com (and bring in some new ones!). I am fortunate enough to meet with our Correspondents program authors weekly and see some authors at in-person and virtual conferences. We are diverse in our knowledge, locations, backgrounds, and uniquely lived experiences.

Each January, we celebrate the community of authors at Opensource.com. So, (drumroll please), I’m pleased to present the People's Choice Award winners for 2022!

The methodology

The Opensource.com community votes with page views and engagement.

This year, the editorial team considered the top 12 categories by readership to find the most notable non-staff authors for each category.

• Linux
• Programming
• Accessibility
• Rust
• Education
• Git
• Alternatives
• Kubernetes / Containers
• Python
• Raspberry Pi
• Sustainability
• Automation
• Career / Business
• Community Management
• Honorable Mentions

Discover more about the authors and their many contributions by selecting their avatar.

2023 People's Choice Award for Linux Alison Chaiken Anamika David Both Tom Oliver Jim Hall Jonathan Garrido Kenneth Aaron Paul Sahana Sreeram Tomasz Waraksa 2023 People's Choice Award for Programming Jessica Cherry Alex Borsody Chris Hermansen Hunter Coleman Jayashree Huttanagoudar Joël Krähemann Martin Kopec Richard Conn Howard Fosdick Sergio Mijatovic 2023 People's Choice Award for Accessibility Amar Gandhi Ayush Sharma Blake Bertuccelli Chris Emezue Peter Cheer Phil Shapiro Rikard Grossman-Nielsen Sachin Samal Vojtech Polasek 2023 People's Choice Award for Rust Gaurav Kamathe Marty Kalin Nitish Tiwari 2023 People's Choice Award for Education Anita Ihuman Candace Sheremeta Don Watkins Gordon Haff Joshua Pearce Sara Cemazar Stefan Miklosovic 2023 People's Choice Award for Git Agil Antony Alan Formy-Duval Benny Ifeanyi Iheagwara Dwayne McDaniel Evan Slatis Jonathan Daggerhart Manaswini Das Vaishnavi R 2023 People's Choice Award for Alternatives Ben Slater Heike Jurzik Laryn Kragt Bakker Manuela Massochin Michael Korotaev Tim Erickson 2023 People's Choice Award for Kubernetes / Containers Bobby Gryzynger Camilla Conte Daniel Oh Kendall Nelson Michael Anello Nived Velayudhan Noaa Barki Randy Fay Will Kelly Yasu Katsuno 2023 People's Choice Award for Python Alena Gerasimova Andy Oram Fridolin Pokorny Mark Meyer Moshe Zadka Sofiia Tarhonska Stephan Avenwedde 2023 People's Choice Award for Raspberry Pi Brian McCafferty DJ Billings Giuseppe Cassibba Martin Anderson-Clutz Peter Czanik 2023 People's Choice Award for Sustainability Alberto Corsín Jiménez Christopher Snider Hannah Smith Ron McFarland Tobias Augspurger Tom Greenwood 2023 People's Choice Award for Automation Antoine Craske Florian Robert Kevin Sonney Maximilian Kolb Nicolas Mengin Rom Adams Servesha Dudhgaonkar Sumantro Mukherjee 2023 People's Choice Award for Career / Business Ben Rometsch Jesse White Josh Salomon Kelsea Zhang Mike Bursell Shebuel Inyang Suzanne Dergacheva Thabang Mashologu Trishna Victor Coisne 2023 People's Choice Award for Community Management Angie Byron Ben Cotton Bolaji Ayodeji John E. Picozzi Paloma Oliveira Ray Paik Rich Bowen Rizel Scarlett Ruth Cheesley Sean P. Goggins 2023 People's Choice Honorable Mentions Dave Stokes Joshua Allen Holm Josip Almasi Liv Erickson Lorna Mitchell Toni Freger

 

Thank you to all Opensource.com contributors!

We want to thank all of the Opensource.com community who shared articles, made comments, liked posts, and helped us curate our awards. 

Our authors donate their time and knowledge to the open source community as a whole. For more authors and great articles, check out a few of our other favorite categories:

• CI/CD
• Data Science
• Java
• JavaScript
• Security
• Science
• Sysadmin
• and more!

On the 13th anniversary of Opensource.com, we are grateful to honor our community of authors.

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Opensource.com

Opensource.com community What to read next Congratulations to the 2022 Opensource.com Community Award recipients Top 50 authors: Opensource.com Community Awards 2021 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International License. Register or Login to post a comment.

Count magical bunnies with LibreOffice Calc Jim Hall Wed, 01/25/2023 - 03:00

I love working with spreadsheets, and my favorite spreadsheet application is LibreOffice Calc. A spreadsheet is a grid of cells where each column is represented by letters and rows are numbered. You can perform all kinds of calculations using a spreadsheet. If you can perform a calculation based on other values, you can do that in a spreadsheet.

Here I illustrate how to use the LibreOffice Calc spreadsheet to perform a particular calculation called the Fibonacci Sequence. Fibonacci Sequence numbers pop up everywhere in mathematics and the sciences and are often used to model a simple population growth.

The magic bunny

Imagine a baby bunny who has moved into a new forest home. The forest is empty of all other bunnies; the bunny is alone. But this is a magic bunny — it is born pregnant, and all its children will also be born pregnant. Rabbits breed quickly, but especially so for this breed of magic bunny, which produces a new generation every year.

Let's call the year before the bunny arrived "year zero" or "iteration zero," when you had zero bunnies. A year later, you are at "year one" or "iteration one," with our first bunny.

The population of our magic bunny grows in this way: A baby bunny grows into an adult bunny after one year. An adult bunny will remain into the next generation but will produce another baby bunny. In other words, the rules for counting the bunny population are:

• baby bunny (b) → adult bunny (A)

• adult bunny (A) → adult bunny (A) plus a baby bunny (b)

Over time, the bunny population grows like this:

Iteration Population Count 0 - 0 1 b 1 2 A 1 3 Ab 2 4 AbA 3

As you can see, the bunny population grows very quickly. The forest will quickly be filled with magic bunnies.

Counting bunnies in a spreadsheet

How many bunnies will there be after five, ten, or 20 years? Looking at each iteration, the number of bunnies in any year is the sum of the previous two years. Fibonacci described this growth using this definition:

Fib(n) = Fib(n-1) + Fib(n-2) and: Fib(0) = 0 Fib(1) = 1

You can calculate this using LibreOffice Calc! Here's how.

Start with an empty spreadsheet and enter the first two iterations: 0 and 1. Label these with a column header called "n." To enter this into LibreOffice Calc, type "n" into cell A1, the value 0 in cell A2, and 1 in cell A3:

Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

Enter the first two iterations of the magic bunny. In year zero, there were zero bunnies. In year one, there was one bunny. You can write that mathematically as Fib(0) = 0 and Fib(1) = 1. You can label this with a column header called "Fib(n)." Enter this into LibreOffice Calc by typing "Fib(n)" into cell B1, the number 0 in cell B2, and 1 in cell B3:

Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

To calculate the bunny population in the next iteration, use a spreadsheet formula to calculate Fib(n) for year two. Since the count in any year is the sum of the counts of the previous two years, you can enter into cell B4 the spreadsheet formula =B3+B2. This is the sum of B3 and B2 using addition. LibreOffice Calc will perform the calculation and enter the final result into cell B4:

Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

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 Use AutoFill to calculate future generations

Having entered the first few "n" and "Fib(n)" values, and the calculation for the next iteration, you can let LibreOffice Calc do the rest of the calculations. Notice that when you click on each cell in the spreadsheet, the cell outline has a small box in the lower-right corner. You can grab this box with your mouse and "stretch" the box to fill other cells in the spreadsheet.

When you stretch a cell to fill other cells, LibreOffice Calc uses a feature called "AutoFill" to enter values into the new cells. If you stretch a cell with a single value, AutoFill will iterate the number by one until it reaches the end of the series. For example, you can stretch cell A3 to fill other cells below it, which will fill the range with 2, 3, 4, and so on:

Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

If you stretch a cell that has a calculation in it, LibreOffice Calc will try to extend the calculation for you. For example, if you stretch your calculation in B4 into cell B5, the new B5 will contain the formula =B4+B3. In other words, AutoFill translates the calculation. Each successive Fib(n) calculation will be the sum of the two cells above it:

Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

You can continue to stretch the cells down, and AutoFill will continue the calculations:

Image by:

(Jim Hall, CC BY-SA 4.0)

So you learn that after 20 iterations, you will have 6,765 magic bunnies. That's a lot of bunnies! Over 6,000 bunnies in 20 years represent a very fast population growth, but it demonstrates how quickly the Fibonacci Sequence can add up to a forest full of magic bunnies. The calculation is relatively simple using LibreOffice Calc.

Follow along with this LibreOffice Calc tutorial to perform the Fibonacci Sequence calculation.

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Flickr, by Anssi Koskinen CC BY 2.0

LibreOffice 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.