Linux Blimp

We’ve made significant strides toward the long-rumored paperless society, but we still need to print hard copies of documents from time to time. If you’re a Linux user and have a printer without a Linux installation disk or you’re in the market for a new device, you’re in luck. That’s because most Linux distributions (as well as MacOS) use the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), which contains drivers for most printers available today. This means Linux offers much wider support than Windows for printers.

Selecting a printer

If you’re buying a new printer, the best way to find out if it supports Linux is to check the documentation on the box or the manufacturer’s website. You can also search the

Open Printing

database. It’s a great resource for checking various printers’ compatibility with Linux.

Here are some Open Printing results for Linux-compatible Canon printers.

The screenshot below is Open Printing’s results for a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet 4050—according to the database, it should work “perfectly.” The recommended driver is listed along with generic instructions letting me know it works with CUPS, Line Printing Daemon (LPD), LPRng, and more.

In all cases, it’s best to check the manufacturer’s website and ask other Linux users before buying a printer.

Checking your connection

There are several ways to connect a printer to a computer. If your printer is connected through USB, it’s easy to check the connection by issuing lsusb at the Bash prompt.

$ lsusb

The command returns Bus 002 Device 004: ID 03f0:ad2a Hewlett-Packard—it’s not much information, but I can tell the printer is connected. I can get more information about the printer by entering the following command:

$ dmesg | grep -i usb

The results are much more verbose.

If you’re trying to connect your printer to a parallel port (assuming your computer has a parallel port—they’re rare these days), you can check the connection with this command:

$ dmesg | grep -i parport

The information returned can help me select the right driver for my printer. I have found that if I stick to popular, name-brand printers, most of the time I get good results.

Setting up your printer software

Both Fedora Linux and Ubuntu Linux contain easy printer setup tools. Fedora maintains an excellent wiki for answers to printing issues. The tools are easily launched from Settings in the GUI or by invoking system-config-printer on the command line.

Hewlett-Packard’s HP Linux Imaging and Printing (HPLIP) software, which supports Linux printing, is probably already installed on your Linux system; if not, you can download the latest version for your distribution. Printer manufacturers Epson and Brother also have web pages with Linux printer drivers and information.

What’s your favorite Linux printer? Please share your opinion in the comments.

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Intrinsyc’s Android 8.0 driven Open-Q 670 HDK mobile development kit for the octa-core Snapdragon 670 SoC features a 5.65-inch touchscreen, 6GB LPDDR4, 6GB eMMC, WiFi, BT, GPS, NFC, and optional camera and sensor boards.

The 170 x 170mm, Mini-ITX form-factor Open-Q 670 HDK is one of Intrynsic’s Android mobile “open frame” kits with a smartphone like touchscreen. Most recently, these include the Open-Q 845, which taps the high-end, AI-enhanced Snapdragon 845. The similarly Android 8.0 powered Open-Q 670 HDK is built around Qualcomm’s somewhat less powerful, but still octa-core Snapdragon 670, which was announced in August.

Open-Q 670 HDK, front and back

The Snapdragon 670 fills the space between the Snapdragon 660, which powers the

Open-Q 660 HDK

, and the newer Snapdragon 710. The Snapdragon 670 offers twice the performance of the 660, according to Intrinsyc.

The SoC has the same configuration as the Snapdragon 710: 2x 2GHz and 6x 1.7GHz Kryo 360 cores that are roughly equivalent to Arm’s high-end Cortex-A75 and Cortex-A55 cores, respectively. The Snapdragon 670 is further equipped with an Adreno 615 GPU, Hexagon 685 DSP, and Spectra 250 ISP for dual 16-megapixel cameras. On the Open-Q 670 HDK, the Snapdragon 670 can drive 4K30 8-bit encode and decode and can also perform simultaneous 4K30 decode and 1080p30 encode.

The Open-Q 670 HDK is loaded with 6GB LPDDR4, 64GB eMMC 5.1, and a microSD slot. On top of the board is a 5.65-inch, 2160 x 1080 touchscreen driven by 4-lane MIPI-DSI. You also get HDMI and USB Type-C based DisplayPort 1.3 ports. Three 4-lane MIPI-CSI connections are bundled on a single connector, and an audio jack and headers are available.

Open-Q 670 HDK
The board provides USB 3.1 host and micro-USB serial ports, as well as sensor, I2C, SPI, GPIO, and UART headers. You can power the kit with a 12V/5A input or a 3000mAh Li-Ion battery.

Wireless features include a Qualcomm 2.4/5GHz 802.11a/b/g/n/ac module with 2X2 MIMO, supported by a PCB antenna and MH4L antenna connector. Bluetooth 5.x with BLE is also available. In addition, there’s an NFC header and a Qualcomm SDR660 GNSS receiver with GPS/GLONASS/COMPASS/Galileo support and its own PCB antenna and SMA connector option.

Two optional daughter boards are available. First is a camera board with an IMX318 rear camera, IMX258 front camera, and OV2281 Iris camera. There’s also a sensor board with gas, pressure, Hall, UV, ALSP, magnetometer, accelerometer/gyro, humidity, and temperature sensors.

Further information

The Open-Q 670 HDK is available for $1,199. More information may be found on Intrinsyc’s Open-Q 670 HDK product and shopping pages.

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Security researchers from Trend Micro have stumbled upon a new malware strain that mines cryptocurrency on Linux computers, but which is also different from previously seen cryptominers because it downloads a rootkit to alter the operating system’s behavior and hide the unwanted high CPU usage that usually comes with cryptocurrency mining.

Currently, Trend Micro has not identified the way through which the malware –which they named KORKERDS– infects systems, but they don’t believe this recent wave of infections is the result of an intrusive mass-hacking campaign.

Instead, researchers believe crooks are using poisoned Linux applications that have been modified to silently download and install the KORKERDS cryptominers during the installation process of a legitimate app. Which app? Trend Micro hasn’t figured that out yet.

But researcher did say that the KORKERDS samples they’ve recently analyzed would do more than just install a Monero miner –also downloading and installing a rootkit, which they described as “a slightly modified/repurposed version of publicly available code.”

Image: Trend Micro

Besides allowing KORKERDS to survive OS reboots, the rootkit component also contained code a slightly strange feature.

Trend Micro says that KORKERDS’ authors modified the rootkit to hide the cryptominer’s main process from Linux’s native process monitoring tools.

“The rootkit hooks the readdir and readdir64 application programming interfaces (APIs) of the libc library,” researchers said. “The rootkit will override the normal library file by replacing the normal readdir file with the rootkit’s own version of readdir.”

This malicious version of readdir works by hiding processes named “kworkerds” –which in this case is the cryptominers’ process.

Linux process monitoring tools will still show 100 percent CPU usage, but admins won’t be able to see (and kill) the kworkerds process causing the CPU resource consumption problems.

Linux process monitoring tool showing 100% CPU usage, but kworkerds process responsible for this problem

Image: Trend Micro

Trend Micro’s KORKERDS report contains a technical breakdown of the malware’s infection routine, including file names, processes, and file hashes that Linux users may be interested in tracking and using for debugging possibly-infected systems.

Based on the fact that KORKERDS is distributed inside legitimate apps, this also suggests the malware might also be a threat to Linux desktop users as well, and not only to servers, where almost all Linux cryptominers have been observed in the past two years.

Linux users weren’t the only ones that have been targeted by sneaky cryptocurrency-mining malware. Trend Micro also published a second report yesterday on another malware strain that targeted Windows users and which also used various techniques in an attempt of staying hidden as much as possible on infected systems.

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It appears that Ikey Doherty, the founder and lead dev of Solus, has left the project.

But don’t worry Solus is in good hands.

Some Background

If you have never heard of Ikey before, no worries. I’ll provide some background information about him.

Ikey made his marks on Linux over the years by contributing to a variety of projects (not limited to the Brisk Menu and Linux Steam Integration). He worked on Linux Mint for while before starting his own Ubuntu based distro. After running into development limitations, Ikey created his own Linux distro from scratch. He did this all while working for Intel on their Linux distro. Last June, Ikey took the huge step of leaving his job at Intel to work full time on Solus.

Besides being involved with Solus full-time, Ikey joined the Late Night Linux podcast. In August of 17, the show covered a news story about the Krita project running into problems with the tax man. In that episode, Ikey revealed that he intended to make sure that Solus would not suffer a similar situation. In fact, he wanted to make sure that if something happened to him, the project would survive. Kinda prophetic.

The Current Situation

In July of this year, Ikey had to move from Ireland to England for personal reasons. During this time, he began making sure that the other Solus devs (Joshua and Bryan) had access to the Solus infrastructure. The plan was to continue the following day, but scheduling conflicts delayed it. Matters were complicated further when Ikey discovered his new location had a poor internet connection and he was unable to contribute much to Solus. On top of that, he got sick with the flu.

Towards the end of August, the Solus servers encountered several outages. The Solus team was unable to contact Ikey, partly because he had either deleted or withdrawn from his social media accounts. The hosting company was initially evasive, but later revealed that the service had not been paid. Without access to the server control panel or the PayPal account, Joshua and Bryan decided to move the whole thing to a new URL (getsol.us), which Joshua had purchased for direct downloads. During the mammoth task of moving all the required services to new hosting, Ikey contacted the team on September 7th: “and i am very very sick atm. all will be paid up for the next 30 days and gives me time to get back out and transfer to you. ill speak with you tomorrow afternoon/evening”. Ikey never followed up on this message.

In the wake of the server outages, the Solus team decided to check to see what services they had access to. The list looks something like this:

1. Dediserve provided the Solus domain name and DNS. They refused to hand over control to the Solus team.
2. Fastly is a CDN service that made the Solus packages available worldwide. They provided the Solus team with the necessary access.
3. Google Apps for Business was used to provide email and document collaboration. Google did not respond.
4. OVH hosted the Solus build, repo, and web servers. The team only had partial access via SSH. OVH did not hand over control but kept the servers up so the Solus team could migrate to a new hosting service.
5. Patreon was used to raise money to pay Ikey to work on Solus full-time. At first, Patreon refused to hand control of the account over to the Solus team. However, that has since changed. Currently, the Solus Patreon campaign is frozen. The Solus team has decided to stop accepting donations for the time being.
6. Money withdrawn from Patreon was stored in PayPal. They are still working to “recover this account”. Until they do, they won’t know how much money is actually available to the project.
7. SendGrid was used as the mail delivery service for Phabricator and the Forums. SendGrid did not respond to the Solus team, but they created a new account.

As I mentioned above, the Solus team is no longer accepting donations. It appears that even though Ikey intended to put some legal protections in place for the project, he never got around to it. The Solus team is planning to fix that:

“Going forward, we will continue to not accept any monetary donations until decided otherwise, or we have a legal entity such as the Software Freedom Conservancy handling legal and financial matters for Solus. I want to thank everyone that has continued to offer their support for Solus, whether that be financial or otherwise. We look forward to providing more means of donating to the project in the future once we’ve returned to more normal development operations and have a legal entity working on behalf of the project.”

The Future

The current Solus Devs (Joshua, Bryan, Peter) plan to continue the Solus project. They are already planning the next release of Solus: Solus 4. Solus 4 will focus on finalizing Budgie 10.5. The Software Center will also receive work in the 4.x branch. They will also be working to improve “build tooling, including continued improvements and updates to cuppa and eopkg-deps”. They also plan to make other changes that may include “sol, a new Installer, a power management replacement for TLP, and yes even a GTK4-based Budgie 11”.

Even though Ikey is no longer at the head, the team is very much led by his vision:

“Ikey’s vision for Solus is one that all of us on the Core Team share. Solus is a selfish, pragmatic obsession with building a technically excellent linux distribution. This vision is what attracted us all to the project in the first place. We each bring our own unique experiences and expertise to the table, with Ikey’s phenomenal mentoring over the years giving us an incredible foundation to build on.”

Ikey Speaks

The same day that the Solus team posted their second message about the transition, Phoronix published a message from Ikey. Right off the bat, he wants to set the record straight, “I’d like to start out by thanking the Solus team for all their hard work and passion over the years. By way of response to their recent blog post, I in no way see what they’ve done as a “hostile takeover”, rather, a natural evolution of the project.”

In fact, he seems to hand over all ownership of the Solus Project. “If one is to look at the timeline analysis from the Solus team, it is crystal clear that they are more passionate about the project than anyone, and will survive anything. For this reason I happily condone their leadership in the project, and assign any and all intellectual, naming and branding rights relating to the ownership of Solus to their collective with immediate and permanent effect, acknowledging them as the official owners and leadership of the project. “

Ikey does not come out and say what happened to him while he was out of touch with everyone else. Nor does he explain what made him disappear from social media, though this might point in the right direction, “I ask that they stay strong to their cause, and rise above the toxicity and politics that plague the Linux desktop world”.

It does appear that Ikey has started a family. “it’s unlikely I’ll be seeking personal project involvement of any description – as a new parent I must plan to father my child and support my family through work, instead of fathering my work and rely on my family supporting me.”

Final Thoughts

I was drawn to Solus in part by Ikey. He always seemed to look at some part of current computing wisdom and say, “Why are we doing that when this would work so much better? Why didn’t we do this before?” I also liked the fact that Solus was the little distro that wanted to succeed in a field full of almost carbon copies. On the other hand, Ikey always made sure that his innovations helped all Linux not just Solus.

I wish the team at Solus well. They have big shoes to fill, but they sound like they are cut from the same cloth as Ikey. I will keep Solus as one of my main distros for the foreseeable future.

I would like to address my final comment to Ikey (though I doubt he will ever see it). Ikey, my prayers are with you and your new family. I pray that you find happiness and peace on your new path. You may have encountered toxicity in the Linux community, but remember that you also helped a great number of people through your efforts. Always remember, the time that you spent working on Solus was not wasted.

Have you ever used Solus? What do you think of these recent events? Let us know in the comments below.

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Fedora Design Suite Live is an open source and free operating system based on the latest Fedora technologies and built around the stylish and compelling GNOME desktop environment. Intially developed for the Fedora Design Team, the distribution aims to help artists of all kind to freely express their artistic visions.

Availability, boot options and supported platforms

It can be downloaded from the dedicated download section (see above) as two Live DVD ISO images of approximately 1.5GB in size, allowing users to deploy them on USB flash drives of 2GB or higher capacity, or burn them onto blank DVD discs.

The most important feature of a Live CD is that users can try the operating system without installing anything on their computers. In addition, it is also possible to start an existing OS from the first disk or run a memory diagnostic test.

The only Live CD tailored for designers

The Live CD comes with many useful and open source applications, which can be used for multimedia production and publishing. An interesting feature is that all applications are organized into categories, such as Accessories, Games, Graphics, Internet, Office, Programming, Sound & Video, Sundry, System Tools, Utilities, and Other.

Among the pre-installed graphical applications, we can mention GIMP image editor, Inkscape vector graphics editor, Scribus desktop publishing software, Synfig Studio 2D animation software, Phatch batch image processor, Dia diagram creator, Blender 3D animation renderer, Darktable RAW image editor, Entangle tethered shooting utility, and the entire Hugin suite.

Default applications include the FileZilla file transfer client, Mozilla Firefox web browser, Bluefish HTML editor, Empathy instant messenger, LibreOffice office suite, Evolution email and calendar client, Totem video player, Brasero CD/DVD burning software, Cheese webcam viewer, Audacity audio editor, PiTiVi video editor, and Rhythmbox music player.

Bottom line

No matter if you want to create CD sleeves, design websites, build GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) for applications, create desktop backgrounds, flyers and posters, the Fedora Design Suite Live CD is here to help you achieve all this and much more with minimum effort and without having to pay for expensive products.

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The AGL Unified Code Base has been selected in the Software and Mobile Apps category

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, November 9, 2018 – Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open platform for the connected car, today announced that it has been named a CES® 2019 Innovation Awards Honoree for its Unified Code Base (UCB) platform. As an open source project hosted at The Linux Foundation, AGL is bringing together automakers, suppliers and technology companies to accelerate the development and adoption of a fully open software stack for all technology in the vehicle.

“We are very excited to be recognized as a CES 2019 Innovation Award Honoree, and it’s a testament to the power of open source software and industry collaboration,” said Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux at The Linux Foundation. “The credit really goes to all of the members who support AGL, and the developers who have invested the time and effort to build a robust platform that has quickly become the de facto industry standard.”

Developed through a joint effort by dozens of member companies, the AGL Unified Code Base (UCB) is an open source software platform for infotainment, telematics and instrument cluster applications. Sharing a single software platform across the industry reduces fragmentation and accelerates time-to-market by encouraging the growth of a global ecosystem of developers and application providers that can build a product once and have it work for multiple automakers.

Many AGL members have already started integrating the UCB into their production plans. Mercedes-Benz Vans is using AGL as a foundation for a new onboard operating system for its commercial vehicles, and Toyota’s AGL-based infotainment system is now in Toyota and Lexus vehicles globally.

The AGL UCB platform will be on display at CES 2019, January 8-11, 2019 in Las Vegas, in the Automotive Grade Linux booth in the Westgate Hotel Pavilion, booth 1614. To schedule a demo or meeting to learn more about joining AGL, please contact pr@automotivelinux.org.

About Automotive Grade Linux (AGL)

Automotive Grade Linux is a collaborative open source project that is bringing together automakers, suppliers and technology companies to accelerate the development and adoption of a fully open software stack for the connected car. With Linux at its core, AGL is developing an open platform from the ground up that can serve as the de facto industry standard to enable rapid development of new features and technologies. Although initially focused on In-Vehicle-Infotainment (IVI), AGL is the only organization planning to address all software in the vehicle, including instrument cluster, heads up display, telematics, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving. The AGL platform is available to all, and anyone can participate in its development. Learn more: https://www.automotivelinux.org/

Automotive Grade Linux is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems. www.linuxfoundation.org

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The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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Published: November 9, 2018
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We’re running out of time to tackle climate change. Could an open source, distributed approach build the necessary momentum? Executive director of LF Energy tells Techworld about the new initiative which already has some enterprises on board.

The prospects from the UN’s most recent climate report are bleak. There are less than two decades until the point of no return for the planet’s climate, and the leaders of major countries seem to be retracting political willingness to fix the existential threat.

But, the roadblocks might not be as daunting as they first appear. Shuli Goodman, executive director of the newly created LF Energy group, hopes to fundamentally transform the way energy is distributed, reduce waste, and build new models that could be scaled out with an open source framework.

Read more at TechWorld

Click Here!

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Basic Ingest optimizes data flow for high volume data ingestion workloads by removing the pub/sub Message Broker from the ingestion path. As a result, customers now have a more cost effective option to send device data to other AWS services while continuing to benefit from all the security and data processing features of AWS IoT Core.

Basic Ingest is now available in AWS GovCloud (US), US East (N Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), China (Beijing) operated by Sinnet, EU (Frankfurt), EU (Dublin), and EU (London) AWS regions.

Visit the Basic Ingest Documentation to learn more about this feature. For more information about AWS IoT Core, visit the product page.

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