Linux Blimp

Service management is something you don’t even think of when you use your Linux workstation or Linux server everyday, but when it’s not there you will really hate it. When you create for example a new server program that needs to run 24/7, doing this challenge without service management is a nightmare where you create in fact a small service system yourself, which will be obviously not as good as the manager developed by a full team during years, anyway.

With its services, systemd makes all of this easier, really easier. As soon as you want something monitoring your application and easy control of it, systemd is the way to go, and that’s what I’m going to explain here!

To add a new service, well, you need to answer this question. As always in systemd, it depends if the service is only for your user or the whole system. We’ll focus on how systemd works for whole system services.

The exact location depends of why and how the service got installed. If the service is installed by a package manager, it will be generally in /usr/lib/systemd/system. For software you develop or the ones that doesn’t support systemd by itself, you will put the service file in /usr/local/lib/systemd/system. Please keep in mind though that some distributions doesn’t support this folder in /usr/local. Finally, if you want to configure an existing systemd service, /etc/systemd/system is the way to go.

Inside these folders you can find multiple file extension such as *.socket, *.target or *.service. Obviously we’re going to focus on the last. systemd uses the filename as the name of the service when starting it or stopping it etc. So generally filenames in service only contains alphanumeric characters along with hyphens and underscores. During development I recommend to create it in your documents and then copy it to systemd location when done, that would avoid you problems if you save in middle of editing.

OK so please create your service file in your documents. Now we’re ready to review how to write this file.

[Unit]
Description=Penguins Web Application HTTP server (running in port 8080)
WantedBy=multi-user.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/penguin-web-app/main.py
Restart=always

The file format is in fact close to ini. I know it may be weird given ini files are often found in Windows but that’s how it works. The service file is first divided in 2 sections: [Unit] and [Service]. Each section configures a specific aspect of systemd: [Unit] contains elements shared by all systemd unit files while [Service] is only for configuration specific to setting up a new service.

Then the section is configured with properties such as Description= or ExecStart=. The value is separated from property name by the equal sign = without any space.

Let’s go back to the file shown above. It describes a service designed to run a web app written in Python about penguins. systemd will restart it whenever the process exits and starts the server upon server’s start-up if you enable it with systemctl enable command. Cool eh?

But you’re maybe your next web app isn’t about penguins — and that’s a shame — and it’s not written in Python. In this case you’ll want to learn more about the possible configurations.

Properties of Systemd Services

Let’s first focus about the properties in [Unit]:

Description= is just about giving a clear description of what service is doing. It’s displayed in service list, service logs so you want it to be descriptive but it should stay in one line and one sentence.

WantedBy= allows to say to systemd: when this thing is started, starts me as well. Generally you’ll put the name of a target. Examples of common targets:

1. multi-user.target: when server is OK and is ready to run command line applications
2. graphical.target: when GNOME or KDE is ready
3. network-up.target: when server is connected properly to a network

OK for the beginning these properties of [Unit] is enough. Let’s take a look on [Service] now.

Type= helps systemd in how to know if a service is running. Here are common types:

1. simple is probably the most commonly used: systemd considers the process you launch as the one doing the service. If the process stops, it considers the service stopped as well, etc.
2. forking is preferred for applications that were written to be a server but without the help of a service management system. Basically it expects the launched process to fork and that fork is considered the final process for the service. In order to be more accurate, you may also help systemd with a PID file, where the PID of the process to track is written by the launched application.

ExecStart= is probably the most important for a service: it precises what application to launch when starting the service. As you can see in the Penguin service, I have used /usr/bin/python3 and not python3 straight away. It’s because systemd documentation explicitly recommends to use absolute paths in order to avoid any surprises.

But that’s also for another reason. Other services’ management system tend to be based on Shell scripts. However systemd, for performance reason, doesn’t run a shell by default. So you can’t provide directly a shell command in ExecStart=. You can however still use a shell script by doing:

ExecStart=/usr/bin/bash /usr/local/bin/launch-penguin-server.sh

Not that hard right? Note that if you need to run some process to signal your service to stop cleanly, ExecStop= exists, as well as ExecReload= for reloading services.

Restart= allows you to explicitly tell when the service should be restarted. This is one of the important features of systemd: it ensures that your service stays up as long as you wish to, so pay close attention to this option.

Restart=	Meaning
always	systemd will keep restarting it whenever it terminates or crashes. Well, until you do systemctl stop service-name.service. It’s perfect for servers and online services as you prefer few useless restarts over having to manually restart the service without any reason.
on-abnormal	When the service process crashes, restart the service. However, if the application exits cleanly, don’t restart it. It’s more useful for cron-jobs like services that needs to do a task reliably but don’t need to run all the time.
on-failure	Much like on-abnormal, but it also restarts the service when the application exits cleanly but with a non-zero exit code. Non-zero exit codes generally means an error happened.
no	systemd will not restart the service automatically. Generally useful to get access to other systemd features such as logging without the restart feature.

WorkingDirectory= can enforce a working directory when launching your application. The value must be an absolute directory path. Working directory is used when you use relative paths in your application’s code. For our penguins service, it could be:

WorkingDirectory=/srv/penguin-web-app/

Then, security is important so you generally want to not launch your service with root privileges. User= and Group= enables you to set the user or group name or UID/GID under which your application will be launched. For example:

User=penguin-web
Group=penguin-web

EnvironmentFile= is a powerful option. Applications running as services often needs configuration and environment files allows to set that configuration in two ways:

1. The application can read directly the environment variable.
2. But also you can set different command line arguments to your application without changing the service file.

The syntax of this file is simple: you type the environment variable name, the equal sign = and then its value. Then you put the absolute path of your environment file into EnvironmentFile property.

So example:

EnvironmentFile=/etc/penguin-web-app/environment

And the /etc/penguin-web-app/environment file contains:

Then our penguins web app will have access to LISTEN_PORT environment variable and listen to the expected port.

Save and Start the Newly Created Systemd Service

So if you followed my advice, you edited your service file in your home directory. Once you’re satisfied, copy that file to /usr/local/lib/systemd/system, assuming your distribution supports that path. The filename of your service file will be its service name. This filename have to end with .service. For example, for our penguins server, it would be penguin-web-app.service.

Then, you have to tell systemd you added a new service, so you need to type this command:

$ sudo systemctl daemon-reload

Okay now systemd is aware of your new service, assuming your file doesn’t contain a syntax error. After all, it’s your first file so it’s likely you’ll make mistakes. You have to run this command above on every update in your service file.

Now, time to start the service:

$ sudo systemctl start penguin-web-app.service

If it fails with a Unit not found error such as this one:

$ sudo systemctl start penguin-web-app.service
Failed to start penguin-web-app.service: Unit not found.

It means that your distribution doesn’t support the directory or you didn’t named correctly your service file. Be sure to check out.

If you set up your service with WantedBy= and wants that your service starts automatically, you have to enable it, with this command:

$ sudo systemctl enable penguin-web-app.service

The cool thing with a service is that it runs in background. The problem: how to know if it runs properly and if it’s running if it’s running in background? Don’t worry, systemd team thought about that too and provided a command to see if it runs properly, since how much time, etc:

$ systemctl status penguin-web-app.service

Conclusion

Congrats! You can now have your applications managed without you caring about restarting it manually every time. Now, I recommend you to read our other article about systemd logs: Master journalctl: understand systemd logs. With that you can use the powerful logging system on your new service and build more reliable servers!

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Every year, the question pops up; which Linux distribution is best? The reason that question persists the way it does is because there is no singular concrete answer. Most distributions are purpose built for certain situations, and even when they aren’t, there are bound to be conditions that they’re better and worse in.

This list attempts to pin down the best distributions for common use cases and situations. These are by no means the only options, but they are arguably the best as of now. Things in the Linux world always change, so keep an eye out for new developments.

Best Linux Distro For Beginners: Linux Mint

Linux Mint

Linux Mint has always been a big favorite among Linux beginners, and that’s for good reason. Mint is Ubuntu, but with all the polish that you could want. Linux Mint comes pre-configured with common third party packages already installed and configured for you. There’s no need to know the ins and outs of a Linux system or which packages do what. That’s all taken care of for you. The Linux Mint team went to even greater lengths to create a seriously user friendly desktop experience. They developed their own desktop environment, Cinnamon, to provide a design and philosophy that new and veteran Linux users alike would be at home in. Cinnamon has grown well beyond it’s Mint roots, and is now one of the most popular Linux desktop environments on any distribution.

Mint also benefits greatly from its Ubuntu base. Ubuntu is easily the most popular Linux distribution in the world(unless you count Android) and receives tons of third party support from software developers and the community alike. That support results in a wide array of packages for nearly every situation with regular updates. It’s hard to find software that supports Linux but not Ubuntu, and Mint, in turn, receives the exact same support.

Even if you’ve never used Linux a day in your life, you can pick up Mint and feel comfortable. As an Ubuntu and Debian derived distribution, it will also afford you plenty of room to grow over time, and explore what Linux has to offer.

Best Linux Distro For Gaming: Arch Linux

Antergos

Gaming on Linux has been something of a hot button issue for years. Gamers are still divided on whether or not Linux is a viable operating system for gaming, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that with the right support, Linux is definitely a serious contender.

You can game on any Linux distribution. There’s nothing holding you back. That said, there are a few that make the endeavor much easier, and the Arch Linux based distributions stand above the rest. Arch has a massive and active community, similar to Ubuntu, but it also benefits from a bleeding edge rolling release schedule that provides all the latest software that helps to boost your system’s gaming performance. Arch and its derivatives like Manjaro and Antergos are lightweight and simple distributions. They also afford nearly limitless customization. Lightweight and customizable distributions are excellent for gaming because they allow you to free up system resources for your games to use while still configuring your layout for an optimal gaming experience.

Arch empowers you to build your ideal gaming system and still have access to all the latest packages and software for everything you could possibly need. Even if there’s something Arch doesn’t package, the AUR will probably have you covered.

Best Linux Distro For Servers: Debian

Debian

Server admins can be particular. They all have their distribution of choice, and a lot of that comes down to familiarity. That said, unless you’re working in an enterprise environment that demands third party enterprise support, Debian is always a great option.

Debian is one of the longest running distributions, and it’s spawned countless distributions along the way, including Ubuntu. A big part of the reason Debian has lasted as long as it has and remained relevant is its focus on stability. There’s no need to ever question the stability of a Debian release. Debian may not have corporate backing, but it does have a gigantic community around it that support and develop the venerable distribution. That support leads to a gigantic package library, and even more third party package support. So, even though Debian’s repositories usually contain older packages, as with most server distros, there usually are updated versions available when you need them.

Best Linux Distro For Balance: Fedora

Fedora

Some more experienced Linux users want a more balanced experience from their distribution. They’re not looking to have their hand held as much as a newbie, but they also don’t want to configure every little thing. The distributions that usually meet this need are often referred to as “intermediate distros” because the experience required to use them effectively usually falls somewhere between a beginner an expert. That said, plenty of experts prefer these type of distributions because of the time and work they save without sacrificing much in the way of control.

Fedora is currently the best option here for a whole host of reasons. First, Fedora’s got one of the best installers in the Linux world, Anaconda. The real strength of Anaconda comes from the fact that it can be as simple or detailed an install process as you need. You can run through Anaconda, use all the defaults, and get a perfectly functional system. At the same time, you can customize nearly everything about your installation and select from nearly all the available packages in Fedora to install as you set up your system, resulting in a perfectly tailored install from the start. Fedora also has a fair amount of third party support and a wealth of packages available. Those packages are usually very well updated, and you shouldn’t have a hard time finding anything that you need in Fedora’s extended repository network with repos like RPMFusion included.

Best Linux Distro For Advanced Users: Gentoo

Gentoo

There are a select few distributions that cater almost exclusively to advanced Linux users. These distributions aren’t necessarily hard to use, but they do place the bulk of choice and power in the user’s hands without determining too many things for you. While this kind of setup gives you a lot more control, it also opens the door to mistakes.

While Arch and Slackware are excellent distributions, Gentoo stands out in terms of unbeatable flexibility and control. Gentoo isn’t a traditional distribution. It even refers to itself as a meta-distribtion because Gentoo doesn’t provide you with a complete install. Instead, Gentoo provides you with a toolbox and instructions and lets you build and maintain your own distribution with relative ease.

Gentoo doesn’t have many of the same boundaries and limitations that other distributions do. Gentoo doesn’t have a release schedule. Gentoo doesn’t even have a set pace for its rolling packages. All of that is in your hands. If you’d rather run the newest version of Firefox, great! Unmask it. Do you want to hold back the latest PHP release to check your code? You can do that too. That philosophy extends to which packages you build your system with. Most distributions let you pick things like the desktop environment. Gentoo lets you pick your kernel, init system, libraries, and just about anything that does into a Linux distribution. It also gives you the freedom to build your packages the way you want, with only the features you need. With Gentoo, your system is truly your own.

Best Linus Distro For Privacy: Tails

Tails

If you’re looking for the absolute best option for online privacy, it’d be hard to beat Tails. Tails is engineered from a Debian base with privacy as the central focus. It even refers to itself as the amnesiac distribution because Tails doesn’t store any data by default.

Tails is configured to work in conjunction with Tor for all network connections out of the box. It can easily be run from a USB drive, and it can even disguise itself to look like Windows in public.

No, Tails isn’t a great daily driver distribution, but when you’re in need of the best privacy protection possible, Tails should be your go-to choice.

Closing Thoughts

There is no “best” Linux distribution, but these few are excellent options. You can always experiment and try some of them out on virtual machines. Don’t forget that things do change, and new distributions are always popping up, so there may be more options in any of these categories in the future.

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Tecmint: Fzf is a tiny, blazing fast, general-purpose, and cross-platform command-line fuzzy finder, that helps you to search and open files quickly in Linux and Windows operating system. It is portable with no dependencies and has a flexible layout with support for Vim/Neovim plugin, key bindings, and fuzzy auto-completion.

Complete Story

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It’s taken Valve a while to get there but they’ve new added the new Steam Chat into Steam’s Big Picture Mode.

One thing to note, is that for the new key-binds to actually work on the Steam Controller, I had to go into Steam’s settings and re-select the official Steam Controller config. Do this by going into Big Picture Mode > Settings > Base Configurations > Big Picture configuration and then simply select the official one again and apply it. I’ve opened an issue on the Valve GitHub for it.

Once I did that, it worked better, although not exactly as they describe. The D-pad binds don’t seem to work correctly, you’re supposed to be able to do a long press on the D-pad or the stick for certain actions. This works for the stick, but the D-pad always picks up like you’re pressing Left to open/close the actual friends list. On top of that, it was basically unusable with a Logitech F310. The Steam Chat system is still new to Big Picture, so there will be teething issues.

This should mean that SteamOS itself will now have the new Steam Chat too, for those of you using it. Even so, it’s a shame they basically shoehorned the existing UI into Big Picture Mode without making it work any better.

Another Steam Input change, is now having per-game settings into the desktop client’s game properties:

See here for the full details, including key-binds.

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Tracker is an open source command-line software that can crawl through your disk drive, index files and store data to be easily accessible at a later time. It has been specifically engineered for the GNOME desktop environment. The application is known as the default search engine, metadata storage system and search tool for the freely distributed GNOME project. It deeply integrates with the GNOME Shell user interface.

Features at a glance

Its key highlights include thread safety, UTF-8 support, internationalization, documentation, and localization. It also features full text search functionality, with support for case folding, unaccenting, and Unicode normalization, fle notification support, as well as support for numerous file formats. Actually, end users normally don’t even interact with this application when using the GNOME desktop environment, as it runs in the background as a daemon, indexing each new file or installed application.

Integrates with GNOME Shell

When you use the GNOME Shell overview mode to search for a specific file or program, it is actually Tracker that you interact with. It can seach for files, folders, music tracks, music artists, music albums, image files, video files, document files, emails, contacts, software, feeds, bookmarks, and software categories.

Supports a wide range of ontologies

Among the supported ontologies, we can mention XML Schema Document (xsd), Simplified Calendar Ontology (scal), Dublin Core meta-data (dc), Resource Description Framework (rdf), Multimedia Transfer Protocol (mtp), and Tracker specific annotations (tracker). Several Nepomuk and Maemo ontologies are also supported. In addition, the application is known to comply with several desktop technology standards, including D-Bus, XDG, SPARQL, Nepomuk, as well as the thumbnailer, base directory, shared configuration, shared file meta-data and auto-start specification.

Bottom line

All in all, Tracker is a very important component of the GNOME desktop environment. It automatically stores, organizes and categorizes your files, folders and applications, so you can easily find them whenever you want, with a single mouse click.

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New live/install iso images of SparkyLinux 4.9 “Tyche” are available to download.
Sparky 4 is based on Debian stable line “Stretch” and built around the Openbox window manager.

Sparky 4.9 offers a fully featured operating system with a lightweight LXDE desktop environment; and minimal images of MinimalGUI (Openbox) and MinimalCLI (text mode) which lets you install the base system with a desktop of your choice with a minimal set of applications, via the Sparky Advanced Installer.

Sparky 4.9 armhf offers a fully featured operating system for single board mini computers RaspberryPi; with the Openbox window manager as default; and a minimal, text mode CLI image to customize it as you like.

Additionally, Sparky 4.9 is offered as a special edition with the code name “100” as well. This is a very special edition, commemorating the 100 anniversary of Poland’s independence. A purpose of it is a memorable stuff which provides some informations about Polish history to users of all the world.

New iso images features security updates and small improvements, such as:
– full system upgrade from Debian stable repos as of November 8, 2018
– Linux kernel 4.9.110 (PC)
– Linux kernel 4.14.71 (ARM)
– added key bindings of configuration of monitor brightness (Openbox)
– added key bindings of configuration of system sound (Openbox & LXDE)
– added cron configuration to APTus Upgrade Checker

Added packages:
– xfce4-power-manager for power management
– sparky-libinput for tap to click configuration for touchpads
– xfce4-notifyd for desktop notifications
– ‘sparky-artwork-nature’ package features 10 more new nature wallpapers of Poland

Changes in the „100” special edition:
– added „sparky100” theme pack, which provides a special background to: desktop, Lightdm login manager, GRUB/ISOLINUX boot manager and Plymouth
– added a sub-menu called „100”, separated in English and Polish, which provides menu entries to Wikipedia, to let you find out about Polish National Independence Day and others, important informations from Polish history as well.

There is no need to reinstall existing Sparky installations of 4.x line, simply make full system upgrade.

Sparky PC:
user: live
password: live
root password is empty

Sparky ARM:
user: pi
password: sparky
root password: toor

New iso/zip images of the stable edition can be downloaded from the download/stable page.

Many thanks go to Szymon “lami07” for testings, modifications and various improvements.

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tr is a very useful UNIX command. It is used to transform string or delete characters from the string. Various type of transformation can be done by using this command, such as searching and replacing text, transforming string from uppercase to lowercase or vice versa, removing repeated characters from the string etc. The command can be used for some complicated transformation also. The different uses of

tr command are shown in this tutorial.

Syntax:

tr [option] stringValue1 [stringValue2]

option and stringValue2 are optional for tr command. You can use -c, -s and -d option with tr command to do different types of tasks.

You can change the case of the string very easily by using tr command. To define uppercase, you can use [:upper:] or [A-Z] and to define lowercase you can define [:lower:] or [a-z].

tr command can be used in the following way to convert any string from uppercase to lowercase.

tr [:upper:] [:lower:]

You can use tr command in the following way also to convert any string from lowercase to uppercase.

tr a-z A-Z

Run the following command to convert every small letter of the string,’linuxhint’ into the capital letter.

$ echo linuxhint | tr [:lower:] [:upper:]

You can apply tr command for converting the content of any text file from upper to lower or lower to upper. Suppose, you have text file named, items.txt with the following contents.

1. Monitor
2. Keyboard
3. Mouse
4. Scanner
5. HDD

Run the following commands from the terminal to display the content of items.txt and the output of tr command after converting the content of that file from lower to upper case. The following tr command will not modify the original content of the file.

$ cat items.txt
$ tr a-z A-Z < items.txt

You can run the following command to store the output of the tr command into another file named ‘output.txt’.

$ tr [:upper:] [:lower:] < items.txt > output.txt
$ cat output.txt

Example-2: Translate character

tr command can be used to search and replace any particular character from any text. The following command is used to convert each space of the text, “Welcome to Linuxhint” by newline (n).

$ echo “Welcome To Linuxhint” | tr [:space:] ‘n’

Example-3: Using –c option

tr command can be used with -c option to replace those characters with the second character that don’t match with the first character value. In the following example, tr command is used to search those characters in the string ‘bash’ that don’t match with the character ‘b’ and replace them by ‘a’. The output is ‘baaaa’. Four characters are converted here. These are ,’a’,’s’,’h’ and ‘n’.

$ echo “bash” | tr -c ‘b’ ‘a’

Example-4: Using –s option

tr command uses –s option for search and replace any string from a text. In the following example, space (‘ ‘) is replaced by tab (‘t’).

$ echo “BASH Programming” | tr -s ‘ ‘ ‘t’

You can use both -c and -s options together with tr command. In the following example, the range of small letter is used as the first string value. For –c option, tr command will search and replace each capital letter by newline (‘n’) of the file, items.txt and store the output of the command in the file, output.txt.

$ cat items.txt
$ tr -cs [a-z] “n” < items.txt > output.txt
$ cat output.txt

Example-5: Using –d option

-d option used with tr command to search and delete any character or string from a text. In the following example, tr command will search ‘P’, ‘y’ and ‘t’ in the string “Python is a Programming language” and delete those characters.

$ echo “Python is a Programming language” | tr -d ‘Pyt’

-c option can be used with –d option in the tr command to complement the search like precious –cs command. In the following example, tr command with –cd will search all non-digit characters from the string, “Phone No: 985634854” and delete them.

$ echo “Phone No: 985634854” | tr -cd ‘0-9’

In a similar way, you can run use -cd option in tr command like the following command to remove the non-printable characters from a file. No nonprintable character exists in items.txt. So the output will be the same as the file content.

$ tr -cd “[:print:]” < items.txt

Conclusion

The basic uses of tr command are explained here by using various examples. Hope, this tutorial will help you to learn the purposes of using this command.

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Intrinsyc has launched an Android-based Open-Q 2500 SOM module and development kit for smartwatches based on the Snapdragon 2500. Meanwhile, Fossil unveiled the first watch to run Wear OS on the next-gen Snapdragon 3100.

Intrinsyc has followed up on last year’s smartwatch oriented Open‐Q 2100 SOM, featuring Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Wear 2100 SoC, with a new Open-Q 2500 SOM and Open-Q 624A Development Kit for this year’s kids-watch focused Snapdragon Wear 2500 (SDW2500). You can ore-order an early adopter version of the $795 kit due in mid-November. Meanwhile, Qualcomm has already moved on to a new Snapdragon Wear 3100, which powers a new Fossil Sport Smartwatch running Wear OS (see farther below).

Open-Q 2500 Development Kit (left) and Open-Q 2500 SOM

Intrinsyc, which also this week released an

Open-Q 670 HDK

kit for the Snapdragon 670 smartphone SoC, does not use the name

Wear OS

(formerly Android Wear) for the Open-Q 2100 module and kit. Instead, the long-time Qualcomm collaborator says the Open-Q 2500 module and kit are designed for “a range of Android based wearable devices including pet, children, and elderly trackers, high-end fitness trackers, smartwatches, connected headsets, smart eyewear, and more.”

The products run run a version of “Android for Wearables” that is much like Wear OS but optimized for kids. Wear OS has appeared on a variety of new smartwatch models since we last checked in on Google’s Wear 2.0 update in early 2017.

When Qualcomm announced the SDW2500 in June, the media reception was muted. The technical improvements are modest compared to the SDW2100 — or to the SDW2100’s leap over the Snapdragon 400. Since the SoC is marketed at the kids watch segment, it is not the breakthrough release that might have given the struggling Wear OS a fighting chance against the market leading Apple Watch. Yet, Qualcomm’s SDW3100 may prove more competitive.

Apple recently jumped ahead again with a well-regarded Apple Watch Series 4 model. Meanwhile, Samsung continues to run a viable third-party candidacy with its latest Tizen-based Samsung Galaxy Watch.

Snapdragon Wear 2500

Like Qualcomm’s SDW2100, as well as the new SDW3100, the SDW2500 runs on 4x 1.2GHz Cortex-A7 cores with Adreno 304 graphics and support for 640 x 480 pixel displays. However, the 28nm fabricated chip offers an updated 5th gen 4G multi-mode LTE modem option in addition to 802.11n, Bluetooth 4.1 BLE, and a new NXP NFC chip. It also provides 14 percent longer battery life than the SDW2100, thanks in part to an improved PMIC.

Other features focused on children (or at least parents trying to keep track of them) include a low power RF Front End (RFFE) location tracking chip and support for up to 5-megapixel cameras per Qualcomm and 8-megapixel cameras, according to Intrinsyc. The SDW2500 also integrates Qualcomm Voice Activation technology with support for popular AI assistants such as Google Assistant.

The SDW2500 provides an integrated, DSP-driven sensor hub driven by an with pre-optimized algorithms aimed at kids health and fitness tracking. Gesture based gaming is also available.

Open-Q 2500 module and development kit

The Open-Q 2500 SOM module that powers the new Open-Q 2500 Development Kit encapsulates the SDW2500 is a tiny 31.5 x 15mm footprint. Intrinsyc clocks the SoC to 1.1GHz instead of 1.2GHz. The module provides 1GB LPDDR3 and 8GB eMMC in a PoP package.

Open-Q 2500 SOM

The Open-Q 2500 SOM supports the WiFi/BT module and Qualcomm Gen 8C GNSS location chip with respective U.FL antenna connectors. The module provides 4-lane MIPI-DSI for up to 720p at 60fps video and 2-lane MIPI-CSI for cameras. Dual I2S interfaces and a DMIC input support digital audio.

Other features include GPIO, BLSP, sensor I/O, SDIO, and a USB 2.0 Type-C with 3.6V to 4.2V power input and battery charging support. Dual 100-pin connectors hook up to the dev kit.

Open-Q 2500 Development Kit, front and back

The Open-Q 2500 Development Kit ships an optional, smartphone like MIPI-DSI-based touchscreen with 640 x 480 resolution as well as an optional camera kit. The 170 x 170mm board adds a microSD slot, a micro-USB serial debug port, and expansion headers for all I/O. You also get 2x digital mics, and an I2S-based mono speaker amp with terminals.

The 0 to 50°C tolerant board is further equipped with PCB antennas for WiFi/BT and a GNSS receiver and antenna for location. There’s a 12V/3A input and a USB Type-C port for charging (batteries not included).

Fossil Sport Smartwatch

Snapdragon Wear 3100 and Fossil Sport Smartwatch

Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon Wear 3100 SoC was designed in close collaboration with Google, according to a Tom’s Guide report. The big change is the up to two-day battery life enabled by a co-processor that offloads tasks such as time displays and fitness features like step counting.

Other features include more customized color watch faces and improved fitness-tracking. As noted, however, basic specs haven’t changed much from the SDW2500.

The first watch to use the SDW3100 is the 4th Gen, $255 Fossil Sport Smartwatch. This will be followed by the Montblanc Summit 2, as well as a Louis Vuitton model and additional Fossil models.

Fossil promises only all-day battery life for its 350mAh battery under normal usage. The Wear OS watch is available in six colors, 28 strap styles, and two sizes (41mm and 43mm). Other features include improved NFC, GPS, and heart rate sensor. The water resistant watch has 4GB storage, WiFi, and Bluetooth, but lacks a 4G option.

Further information

The Open-Q 2500 Development Kit is available for pre-order at $795 for an early adopter kit with shipments due in mid-November. More information may be found on Intrinsyc’s Open-Q 2500 Development Kit and Open-Q 2500 SOM product pages.

Source

stretchly is an open source, cross-platform break time reminder. The Electron application sits in your tray, reminding you to take breaks from working on the computer.

The application is designed to be easy to use, but also flexible. You can start using it as soon as you install it, without having to dig into its settings. After 10 minutes, it notifies you to take a 20 second break. It does this every 10 minutes, with a larger 5-minute break every 30 minutes.

The break duration and interval can be customized, along with various other aspects, like only enabling microbreaks or breaks, enabling or disabling strict mode (breaks can’t be finished early), and more advanced options.

You can pause break reminders for 1 hour, 2 hours, 5 hours, until morning, or indefinitely, from the stretchly tray icon menu.

A microbreak notification

Break ideas (like “Stretch your arms”, “Slowly look all the way left, then right”, “Slowly tilt head to side and hold for 5-10 seconds”, and so on) are shown by default, but can be turned off from the application settings.

The application also allows choosing from 5 color themes, as well as pick from 3 sounds (or silence) to be played at the end of a break:

Full-screen mode for breaks is available, but it does not work on Linux.

For future releases, the plan is to add a history / timeline of breaks, as well as implement a color picker, allowing users to apply any color they wish to the break notifications background.

To use stretchly on Gnome Shell, you’ll need an extension like the AppIndicator support extension that’s shipped by default in Ubuntu. In elementary OS 5.0 Juno you can follow these instructions for re-enabling Ayatana AppIndicators.

Download stretchly

The developer provides offline and web installers for Windows, and a DMG for macOS. For Linux, the

GitHub releases

page has binaries like AppImage, RPM, and DEB.

To get stretchly installed from DEB or RPM package to run on startup, open Startup Applications or equivalent, click Add, and add stretchly with the following command: /opt/stretchly/stretchly.

Source

GDM (short for GNOME Display Manager) is an open source graphical login manager specifically designed to be used as a display manager for the GNOME desktop environment. It is used in many well known Linux distributions. It’s comprised of a system service responsible for providing graphical log-ins, as well as for managing both local and remote displays, and the graphical login part that features a face browser, a language/session type selector and an optional logo.

Protects your computer from pesky people

There’s not much to say about a login manager, because it runs at boot time and you interact with it maybe a few times a day, when you login and when you lock your screen. But it’s there, it protects your computer from intruders or pesky people.

Helps you easily switch between multiple desktop sessions

In addition, the login manager usually allows a Linux user to switch between different desktop environment that are installed in the respective operating system. It also lets you to quickly login as a different user, use a guest account or the remote login function.

Looks very professional

When compared with other similar products, we can immediately notice that this project looks very professional, and provides users with state-of-the-art functionality. In our opinion, LightDM can be made to look even more professional than GDM, and provides some extra functionality.

Designed for GNOME

By default, GDM (GNOME Display Manager) is distributed as part of the GNOME desktop environment, but it can also be used as a standalone application that provides login capabilities for other desktop environments or Linux operating systems. However, GDM supports any Linux-based operating system and several desktop environments, including Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, Openbox, Fluxbox, KDE, LXDE, and others.

Bottom line

We suggest GDM if you want a mature and full-featured login manager for your Linux distribution. But, if you operating system supports LightDM, we feel obliged to urge users to stick with it because it’s much more powerful and provides state-of-the-art and modern functionality.

Source