Author: root

Gedit is an open source text editor application for Linux-based operating systems. It is mostly used under the GNOME desktop environment, but you can also install it on other open source window managers.

It is more than a simple text editor, as it can be used by developers as a programmers’ editor. The software provides users with an uncluttered user interface that can be used by novices and expert users alike.

Recognizes numerous programming languages

Gedit features full support for internationalized text (UTF-8), configurable syntax highlighting for various languages, such as C, C++, Java, XML, HTML, Python, Perl, undo and redo functions, as well as the ability to load files from remote locations.

Talking about supported programming languages, the application automatically detects the syntax of a certain file, but it also allows users to choose one from the statusbar or the Highlights Mode entry of the View menu.

Features at a glance

Its main features include spell checking support with automatic highlighting of misspelled words, advanced document statistic functionality that displays the total number of lines, words, bytes, as well as characters, with or without spaces, in the entire document or the current selection.

Among other features we can mention file reverting, print and print preview support, clipboard support (cut, copy, paste), search and replace, go to specific line, auto indentation, text wrapping, line numbers, right margin, current line highlighting, bracket matching, file backup, and configurable colors and fonts.

Supported OSes and availability

While the application is distributed only as a source archive that can be configured, compiled and installed on any Linux flavor, users can find and install Gedit straight from the default software repositories of their distribution.

With a complete online user manual, Gedit can be easily used by programmers to successfully write and edit code. Besides Linux, the application also supports the Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

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Nowadays, you don’t have to put much effort into accessing your data. Whenever you create a file on your phone, laptop, or any other device, you can easily save it somewhere which all of your devices have access to. This makes it possible to access your important documents wherever you are, and this is something which people are getting far too used to. In fact, for some, moving data without the help of the internet sounds like witchcraft, especially when there isn’t a memory stick involved. To show you just how easy this is, this post will be exploring the three main operating systems, Linux, Mac OS, and Windows, giving you an idea of what to expect from their peer-to-peer data transfer systems.

Linux

Starting with the easiest option, Linux makes it very simple to move data between machines, as long as you’re used to using the OS in the first place. You’ll need to use

an SSH server

for this, enabling you to send and receive files using the command prompt. When this is setup properly, you will have access to all of the unrestricted files on the machine which you’re connected to. Unfortunately, thanks to this method requiring a server, the files will only be able to move one way without a switch each time you want to swap them around. This can be achieved without a single cable, as long as your machines are connected in some way.

Mac OS

True to their usual form, Apple make this process easier than anyone else. Using the normal iCloud app which is already installed on your machine, you can start transferring files to any other Mac which is logged into the same account. If you’d prefer to remain on seperate accounts, though, a tool called Forklift can be downloaded for free. You have been able to sync files between Macs without cloud for a long time. Only recently, though, have people been using systems like this as a replacement for sharing online.

Windows

Surprisingly, Windows makes this process a little harder than its alternatives. Instead of giving you a fancy tool to use out of the box, you have to configure your machines to use the same subnet and IP address range if you

want them to connect

. Along with this, they will also need to be on the same network, and the best results will be found if you use wired connections. There is a UI to help you with this, and it can be found in the Homegroup settings within Control Panel. Of course, though, even with a little bit of help, most inexperienced users will find this route impossible to follow without the right help.

Hopefully, this post will inspire you to start looking at new ways to share data between the machines you use. Even if you don’t have any issues with the Internet, this sort of system can be far more secure than relying on the cloud, making it perfect for those who need to share sensitive information around.

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In terms of security, Linux is definitely one of the tightest. The password system is one of the most important parts. Without the password, you’re not able to access a secure system and do anything. If you allow system access without a password, it is not secure. No password, no nothing, in terms of security. However, you may also need to change your password at any point. Let’s have a look at changing the password of your system.

Changing the password

This is the password that you have to enter when you’re logging into your account. This password isn’t the “root” password. Let’s fire up a terminal and run the following command –

This will prompt you to enter your current password. Then, you have to type your new password 2 times.

Changing the “root” password

The “root” is the ultimate user account for any Linux system that offers the most control over the system, even allowing access to sensitive system files and other files. For changing the “root” password, run the following command –

# OR

Then, restart your system.

Changing password without the current “root” access

In cases, you may not be able to access to your system because you forgot the “root” password. It’s also possible to change the password without having access to the system. Restart your system.

Keep holding “Shift” to access the GRUB menu.

Press “E” for editing the startup command.

Get to the line “linux /boot”.

At the end of “ro”, type the following text –

Press “Ctrl + X” to boot with the modified startup command. Run the following commands –

mount -o remount,rw /
passwd

Enter your new password. After password changing is successful, run the following command for restarting your system –

Voila! Your password is changed successfully!

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VTE (Virtual Terminal Emulator) is an open source and totally free library software that has been designed from the ground up to act as a terminal emulator widget for the GTK+ 2.0 (or higher) toolkit. It can be used by GNOME developers to inject terminal capability strings inside a tree of tables.

It is used by GNOME Terminal

VTE is a terminal widget used by the GNOME Terminal application, but it can also be used to embed a console/terminal in editors, IDEs, games, etc. VTE includes libvte, a library that implements a terminal emulator widget for GTK+, and the vte program, a sample application that wraps that widget in a GTK window.

Application options

The application features several options, such as the ability to disable the use of anti-aliasing, specify a background image, monitor /dev/console, highlight URLs inside a terminal emulator, disable rewrapping on resize, execute commands in the terminal, as well as to disable double-buffering.

Additionally, users will be able to disable spawning of a shell inside the terminal emulator, enable the use of a transparent background, use visible and audible alerts, enable the use of various debugging checks, set the position and size of the terminal and enable a distinct highlight color for selections.

The GNOME virtual terminal editor

Being associated with the GNOME project, VTE is also known as a virtual terminal editor program for the controversial GNOME graphical desktop environment, as well as for the powerful GTK+ toolkit.

Under the hood and availability

The software is written entirely in the C programming language and it’s distributed along with the GNOME project. It can be downloaded from its official website or via Softpedia as a universal tarball, which can be installed in any GNU/Linux distribution. VTE is also available on the default software repositories of many Linux distributions.

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Imagine what the world would look like if growth, innovation, and development were free from fear. Innovation without fear is fostered by consistent, predictable, and fair license enforcement. That is what the GPL Cooperation Commitment aims to accomplish.

Last year, I wrote an article about licensing effects on downstream users of open source software. As I was conducting research for that article, it became apparent that license enforcement is infrequent and often unpredictable. In that article, I offered potential solutions to the need to make open source license enforcement consistent and predictable. However, I only considered “traditional” methods (e.g., through the court system or some form of legislative action) that a law student might consider.

In November 2017, Red Hat, IBM, Google, and Facebook proposed the the “non-traditional” solution I had not considered: the GPL Cooperation Commitment, which provides for fair and consistent enforcement of the GPL. I believe the GPL Cooperation Commitment is critical for two reasons: First, consistent and fair license enforcement is crucial for growth in the open source community; second, unpredictability is undesirable in the legal community.

Understanding the GPL

To understand the GPL Cooperation Commitment, you must first understand the GPL’s history. GPL is short for GNU General Public License. The GPL is a “copyleft” open source license, meaning that a software’s distributor must make the source code available to downstream users. The GPL also prohibits placing restrictions on downstream use. These requirements keep individual users from denying freedoms (to use, study, share, and improve the software) to others. Under the GPL, a license to use the code is granted to all downstream users, provided they meet the requirements and conditions of the license. If a licensee does not meet the license’s requirements, they are non-compliant.

Under the second version of the GPL (GPLv2), a license automatically terminates upon any non-compliance, which causes some software developers to shy away from using the GPL. However, the third version of the GPL (GPLv3) added a “cure provision” that gives a 30-day period for a licensee to remediate any GPL violation. If the violation is cured within 30 days following notification of non-compliance, the license is not terminated.

This provision eliminates the fear of termination due to an innocent mistake, thus fostering development and innovation by bringing peace of mind to users and distributors of the software.

What the GPL Cooperation Commitment does

The GPL Cooperation Commitment applies the GPLv3’s cure provisions to GPLv2-licensed software, thereby protecting licensees of GPLv2 code from the automatic termination of their license, consistent with the protections afforded by the GPLv3.

The GPL Cooperation Commitment is important because, while software engineers typically want to do the right thing and maintain compliance, they sometimes misunderstand how to do so. This agreement enables developers to avoid termination when they are non-compliant due to confusion or simple mistakes.

The GPL Cooperation Commitment spawned from an announcement in 2017 by the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board that the Linux kernel project would adopt the cure provision from GPLv3. With the GPL Cooperation Commitment, many major technology companies and individual developers made the same commitment and expanded it by applying the cure period to all of their software licensed under GPLv2 (and LGPLv2.1), not only to contributions to the Linux kernel.

Broad adoption of the GPL Cooperation Commitment will have a positive impact on the open source community because a significant amount of software is licensed under GPLv2. An increasing number of companies and individuals are expected to adopt the GPL Cooperation Commitment, which will lead to a significant amount of GPLv2 (and LGPLv2.1) code under license terms that promote fair and predictable approaches to license enforcement.

In fact, as of November 2018, more than 40 companies, including industry leaders IBM, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Tencent, Intel, and Red Hat, have signed onto the GPL Cooperation Commitment and are working collaboratively to create a standard of fair and predictable enforcement within the open source community. The GPL Cooperation Commitment is just one example of how the community comes together to ensure the future of open source.

The GPL Cooperation Commitment tells downstream licensees that you respect their good intentions and that your GPLv2 code is safe for them to use. More information, including about how you can add your name to the commitment, is available on the GPL Cooperation Commitment website.

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There was a time when deploying software was an event, a ceremony because of the difficulty that was required to keep this consistency. Teams spent a lot of time making the destination environments run the software as the source environment. They thereafter prayed that the gods kept the software running perfectly in production as in development.

With containers, deployments are more frequent because we package our applications with their libraries as a unit making them portable thereby helping us maintain consistency and reliability when moving software between environments. For developers, this is improved productivity, portability and ease of scaling.

Because of this portability, containers have become the universal language of the cloud allowing us to move software from one cloud to another without much trouble.

In this article, I will discuss two major concepts to note while working with containers in Ruby. I will discuss how to create small container images and how to test them.

Read more at The New Stack

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Four years on from the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, open source software company Red Hat Inc. finally announced today that version 8 of its computer server operating system is now in beta.

A lot has changed in the world of Linux during that time, with vastly more workloads running in public clouds and more agile software development practices increasingly becoming the norm. The new RHEL reflects those differences.

Whereas the RHEL 7 release was all about better support for virtual machines and improved Windows interoperability, today’s version gives a nod to the fact that most information technology operations are increasingly all about the cloud and software containers.

The public beta release of RHEL 8 is important because Linux is the most dominant server operating system for both on-premises and cloud infrastructure, Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE. And of the companies that sell Linux OS platforms, Red Hat is one of the biggest. Late last month, IBM Corp. said it signed a deal to acquire the company for $34 billion, though the acquisition won’t close until well into next year.

“When a key vendor like RedHat updates its Linux OS, executives pay close attention to the rate of innovation and how much it has future-proofed the platform,” Mueller said. “We expect RedHat to get good grades in both regards, thanks to its focus on changing the underlying platform to receive more granular updates and [the improved] container capabilities.”

As always, Red Hat has made literally hundreds of improvements to its flagship software platform. Still, one stands out from the pack.

RHEL 8 introduces a new concept called Application Streams, which are designed to deliver “userspace packages.” That refers to independent software code that runs outside of the OS’s kernel, more easily and with greater flexibility.

So userspace packages, which could be the latest version of a programming language, for example, can now be updated without needing to wait for a new version of Red Hat’s operating system to come out. The idea is that this will help enterprises become more agile and customize their IT infrastructure better, without breaking anything along the way.

Application Streams also allow companies to use more than one version of the same userspace package simultaneously. This allows for much greater freedom, as it means developers can work with the latest release of a new database for example, while production apps keep running the stable release developers are sure the new one works smoothly.

Red Hat has also improved networking for containers, which are isolated development environments used to build applications that can run on any platform. The release introduces a new Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol or TCP/IP stack that increases bandwidth and boosts other networking functions, with the aim of providing superior performance for video streaming and other services.

There’s also a new container toolkit for developers to play with. It includes the latest version of Buildah, which is used to create containers; Podman, which is used to get them up and running; and Skopeo, which is a tool for sharing containerized apps. The idea is to help developers build, run and share their container-based apps more easily.

On the security side, RHEL 8 brings the latest OpenSSL 1.1.1 and Transport Layer Security 1.3 releases to the table. OpenSSL is a software library for applications that secure communications over computer networks against eavesdropping or need to identify the party at the other end. Meanwhile, TLS is a cryptographic protocol that provides end-to-end communications security over networks and is widely used for internet communications and online transactions. Red Hat said it hopes the updates here can ease headaches around regulatory compliance issues.

RHEL 8 should also be simpler to manage due to the addition of single user control via the Web Console, while the new RHEL Composer provides a way for users to create and deploy container images across multiple cloud platforms, including private, public and virtual ones.

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After running a lot of tests and then bisecting the Linux 4.20 kernel merge window, the reason for the significant slowdowns in the Linux 4.20 kernel for many real-world workloads is now known…

This latest Linux 4.20 testing endeavor started out with seeing the Intel Core i9 performance pulling back in many synthetic and real-world tests. This ranged from Rodinia scientific OpenMP tests taking 30% longer to Java-based DaCapo tests taking up to ~50% more time to complete to code compilation tests taking measurably longer to lower PostgreSQL database server performance to longer Blender3D rendering times. That happened with a Core i9 7960X and Core i9 7980XE test systems while the AMD Threadripper 2990WX performance was unaffected by the Linux 4.20 upgrade.

In some cases this Linux 4.20 slowdown is enough where the Threadripper 2990WX is able to pick up extra wins over the Core i9 7980XE.

 

When digging through more of my test system data, a set of systems I have running the latest Linux kernel Git benchmarks every other day also saw a significant pullback in performance from the early days of the Linux 4.20 merge window up through the very latest kernel code as of today. Those affected systems weren’t high-end HEDT boxes but included a low-end Core i3 7100 as well as a Xeon E5 v3 and Core i7 systems. AMD systems though still didn’t appear impacted. Those tests also found workloads like the Smallpt renderer to slowdown significant, PHP performance to take a major dive, and other scientific workloads like HMMer also faced a major setback compared to the current Linux 4.19 stable series.

Bisecting the Linux 4.20 kernel slowdown… The sizable difference during that process.

With seeing clear performance regressions on a number of systems when running the latest Linux 4.20 code, and especially with being able to reproduce it on high-core-count hardware (thus significantly cutting down the kernel build times), this morning I kicked off the kernel bisecting process to see why this new kernel is causing many workloads to run so much slower than Linux 4.19. With the Phoronix Test Suite doing the heavy-lifting, the problematic commit was quickly uncovered.

Going into this testing my thinking was perhaps an Intel P-State CPU frequency scaling driver regression as something that has caused some performance regressions in the past or perhaps a scheduler change. There’s also been a lot of Linux 4.20 changes in general that some unintentional regression must have slipped in there somewhere primarily hurting the Intel Linux performance… As a reminder, Linux 4.20 is the biggest kernel release of the year in terms of lines of code changed with more than 354 thousand lines of new code added at the end of October when this merge window opened.

 

As outlined in the Linux 4.20 feature overview, there are a lot of exciting changes with this kernel. But why is it slower? More work on f!*#(# Spectre!

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