Open-source News

Why 2020 is the best time to use the Kate text editor

opensource.com - Sat, 12/05/2020 - 16:00

The KDE Plasma Desktop has a lot to offer—a great desktop, a flexible file manager, and tightly integrated applications. However, it can be easy to overlook its default text editors, one of which is Kate. On December 14, 2020, Kate turns 20 years old, and in its two decades of development, it has achieved a perfect balance between a straightforward editor and a modest Integrated Development Environment (IDE).


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Wasmer 1.0 Beta Released For Running WebAssembly Code Anywhere

Phoronix - Sat, 12/05/2020 - 15:36
Wasmer is one of the leading software solutions aiming to bring WebAssembly (WASM) to the desktop rather than largely isolated to the web browser as is the case now. Wasmer aims to allow WASM programs anywhere and on any client while quickly closing in on its 1.0 release...

Loongson64 Finally Seeing KASLR With Mainline Linux 5.11 Kernel

Phoronix - Sat, 12/05/2020 - 13:02
While the Linux kernel has supported Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR) for a decade and a half in varying forms, it hasn't been supported for all hardware targets. Only in 2021 is the mainline Linux kernel seeing KASLR working for the MIPS-based Loongson64 platform...

Wine 6.0-RC1 Released Following Last Minute Changes

Phoronix - Sat, 12/05/2020 - 05:02
As expected, the first release candidate of Wine 6.0 is now available for testing for this annual update to Wine for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other platforms...

Raspberry Pi OS Switches To PulseAudio, Updated Chromium

Phoronix - Sat, 12/05/2020 - 02:35
Just in time for any holiday Raspberry Pi purchases, an updated Raspberry Pi OS is available today for the Debian-based Linux distribution optimized for these budget ARM SBCs...

Google Opens Up "Atheris" To Automatically Find Bugs In Python Code

Phoronix - Sat, 12/05/2020 - 01:16
Google today is announcing the open-sourcing of Atheris, a Python fuzzer they developed internally for automatically finding bugs within Python code and native extensions...

Another Look At The Performance Impact To IBM's POWER9 L1d Flushing Change

Phoronix - Fri, 12/04/2020 - 23:00
Last week I provided some benchmarks looking at the IBM POWER9 mitigation for the L1 data cache needing to be flushed upon entering the kernel and on user accesses due to a recently disclosed vulnerability. POWER9 allows speculatively operating on validated data in the L1 cache, but when it comes to incompletely validated data paired with other side channels it could lead to local users potentially obtaining improper access to data in the L1 data cache. When benchmarking the impact on a POWER9 4c/16t CPU the overall impact was fairly modest while since then I fired up some benchmarks as well on a large POWER9 server with 44 cores / 176 threads to see the performance impact of this default Linux kernel change.

Mesa 21.0 Adds Radeon HEVC SAO Encode Support

Phoronix - Fri, 12/04/2020 - 21:22
For the "Video Core Next 2" hardware like Navi as well as Renoir APUs, HEVC "sample adaptive offset" support has landed in Mesa 21.0...

Try this Linux text editor for Emacs fans

opensource.com - Fri, 12/04/2020 - 20:45

GNU Emacs is a very famous editor, but not everyone knows that emacs is a tradition of text editors rather than just one specific application. The term "emacs" is actually a portmanteau of "Editor Macros," and the first one was programmed in 1976 as a set of macros for the TECO editor.


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