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Last updated October 14, 2018 By Avimanyu Bandyopadhyay 4 Comments

Wishing A Very Happy Birthday to KDE!

Let us Celebrate this moment by looking back into its Glorious history with some Inspiring Facts on this legendary and much-loved Desktop Environment!

22 years ago, Matthias Ettrich (now a Computer Scientist and Software Engineer at Here), then a Computer Science student at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, was not quite happy as a Common Desktop Environment (CDE) user.

He wanted an interface that was more comfortable, simpler and easy to use, with a better look and feel. Thus, the Kool Desktop Environment (KDE) project was born!

Note that KDE is clearly some pun intended to CDE!

Trivia: The official mascot of KDE is Konqi who has a girlfriend named Katie. Previously there used to be a wizard named Kandalf but was later replaced by Konqi because many people loved and preferred the mascot to be this charming and friendly dragon!

Konqi from the early days who replaced Kandalf (right)

Some Interesting and Inspiring Facts on KDE

We’ve looked back into some Interesting yet Inspiring events that took place over the last 22 years of the KDE project:

Development

15 developers met in Arnsberg, Germany, in 1997, to work on the KDE project and discuss its future. This event came to be known as KDE One followed by KDE Two and KDE Three and so on in the later years. They even had one for a beta version.

The KDE Free Qt Foundation Agreement

The foundation agreement for the KDE Free Qt Foundation was signed by KDE e.V. and Trolltech, then owner of the Qt Foundation who ensured the permanent availability of Qt as Free Software.

First Stable Version

The first stable version of KDE was released in 1998, in addition to highlighting an application development framework, the KOM/OpenParts, and an office suite preview. KDE 1.x Screenshots are available here.

The KDE Women Initiative

The community women’s group, KDE Women, was created and announced in March 2001 with the primary goal to increase the number of women in free software communities, particularly in KDE.

1 Million Commits

The community reached 1 million commits within a span of only 19 months, from 500,000 in January 2006 and 750,000 in December 2007, with the launch of KDE 4 at the same time.

Release Candidate of Development Platform Announced

A release candidate of KDE’s development platform consisting of basic libraries and tools to develop KDE applications was announced on October 2007.

First KDE & Qt event in India

The first conference of the KDE and Qt community in India happened in Bengaluru in March 2011 that became an annual event henceforth.

GCompris and KDE

In December 2014, the educational software suite GCompris joined the project incubator of KDE community (We have previously discussed GCompris, which is bundled with Escuelas Linux, a comprehensive educational distro for teachers and students).

KDE Slimbooks

In 2016, the KDE community partnered with a Spanish laptop retailer and announced the launch of the KDE Slimbook, an ultrabook with KDE Plasma and KDE Applications pre-installed. Slimbook offers a pre-installed version of KDE Neon and can be purchased from their website.

Check out the entire timeline in detail here for a more comprehensive outline or you can take a look at this 19-year span coverage:

Today, KDE is
powered by three great projects:

KDE Plasma

Previously called Plasma Workspaces, KDE Plasma facilitates a unified workspace environment for running and managing applications on various devices like desktops, netbooks, tablets or even smartphones.

Currently, KDE Plasma 5.14 is the most recent version and was released some days ago. The KDE Plasma 5 project is the fifth generation of the desktop environment and is the successor to KDE Plasma 4.

KDE Applications

KDE Applications are a bundled set of applications and libraries designed by the KDE community. Most of these applications are cross-platform, though primarily made for Linux.

A very recent project in this category is a music player called Elisa focused on an optimised integration with Plasma.

KDE Development Platform

The KDE Development Platform is what significantly empowers the above two initiatives, and is a collection of libraries and software frameworks released by KDE to promote better collaboration among the community to develop KDE software.

A Personal Note

It was an honour covering this article on KDE’s Birthday and I would like to take this opportunity to brief some of my personal favourite KDE based apps and distros that I have extensively used in the past and continue to:

Favorite KDE Apps

Amarok

The best feature I
like about this legendary music player is how it compiles your music
collection and retrieves lyrics from an online database!

KolourPaint

There are so many ways in which this beautiful program is a lot better than MS Paint!

Kaffeine

A KDE based
multimedia player with simple and easy to use features with support
for digital TV.

Favorite KDE-based Distros

Kubuntu

Many of you might be already aware of it. Instead of GNOME, this Ubuntu-based distro uses KDE as its default desktop environment.

SimplyMepis

SimplyMepis is a Debian based Linux that was started by Warren Woodford in 2003. SimplyMepis 11 uses Plasma 4 as its default desktop environment.

Some more lesser known but great apps are enlisted here. Many of these apps made to our list of best applications for Ubuntu.

Hope you liked our favourite moments in KDE history on their 22nd Anniversary! Please do write about any thoughts you might have about any of your memorable experiences with KDE in the comments below.

About Avimanyu Bandyopadhyay

Avimanyu is a Doctoral Researcher on GPU-based Bioinformatics and a big-time Linux fan. He strongly believes in the significance of Linux and FOSS in Scientific Research. Deep Learning with GPUs is his new excitement! He is a very passionate video gamer (his other side) and loves playing games on Linux, Windows and PS4 while wishing that all Windows/Xbox One/PS4 exclusive games get support on Linux some day! Both his research and PC gaming are powered by his own home-built computer. He is also a former Ubisoft Star Player (2016) and mostly goes by the tag “avimanyu786” on web indexes.

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VyOS is a freely distributed and open source Linux-based operating system that uses the latest upstream Vyatta release to provide system administrators with a network OS that includes only open source software for transforming any computer into a viable and reliable network router or firewall.

Distributed as 32-bit and 64-bit installable only CDs

While the distribution is available for download as installable only CD ISO image or approximately 200MB in size each, designed to run on physical 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, it is distributed as virtual ISO images that run on virtual platforms.

Text-mode boot loader with useful information

The CD ISO images can be burned onto blank CD discs or written on USB flash drives of at least 512MB capacity in order to boot them from the BIOS of the PC. From the boot prompt, press the F1 key to get more information about the available boot options or boot the operating system, login with the “vyos” username and password combination and start the text-mode installation.

Text-mode installation for experienced users

As expected, the entire installation process is interactive and text based, requiring the user to partition the disk drive, copy the configuration files from the bootable medium to the local drive, setup users and passwords and install the bootloader.

After a reboot, the machine will boot directly into the newly installed VyOS operating system. You can log in using the “vyos” username (without quotes) and the password set during the installation process.

Bottom line

If you’ve always wanted to install the Vyatta operating system on your computer, but did not have to money to buy a fully supported edition, do not hesitate to grab the VyOS Linux distribution from Softpedia, as it is completely free and open source, and supports paravirtual drivers and runs perfectly on virtual platforms.

Vyatta fork Network firewall Network router Vyatta Firewall Router VPN

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Intro

If you’ve been following security news, you’d know that Mac OS High Sierra has a security bug. Most of the articles have done a fine job explaining all the fluff, so I’ll get straight to the point.

If you have no password for the root account (as is the case for most users, since they haven’t explicitly set up a root account and password on their system), then Mac will accept a blank password for logging into root.

A demo is better than a 1000 words, and I’ll show you one real quick-

Demo

Step 1 : Go to a place requiring admin privilege authentication. For example, Users and Groups in System Preferences.

Step 2 : Click on the lock, and you’d be prompted to login.

Step 3 : Change username to root, leave the password field blank (After changing username to root, press tab to move to the password field, then tab again to go back to username field, and then click unlock, otherwise this won’t work).

That’s it. You can get creative regarding what all you can accomplish with this. I haven’t tried it, but I’ve heard that this attack (bug :p) works remotely!

Fix

Seeing as how this bug puts your system at risk, I’m sure you are curious as to how to fix it. One way is to give your root account a password.

However, on 29th Nov apple released a security update for this bug. We’ll simply use that. Here’s the update –

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208315

(the section below uses info from the linked page)

Let’s first check if the update is installed.

For that, type this on your terminal and hit enter-

what /usr/libexec/opendirectoryd

If your output is something like this, then you have an old version of the update installed-

If it’s one of these two, or a more recent version (higher numbers), then you’re good

opendirectoryd-483.1.5 on macOS High Sierra 10.13opendirectoryd-483.20.7 on macOS High Sierra 10.13.1
So, if you have and old version like me, let’s head to the app store and install the update.

Sure enough, here’s the update we need. It’ll take a bit to get installed.

Once that’s done, let’s just run the same command again and verify that the version number increased to our liking. Now we’re all good.

Verify-

Bug seems fixed. That’s it for the post.

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If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Henry David Thoreau

When I think about IT or Digital Transformation, I often think of this quote. To survive, your business must meet the needs of the digital economy; that is, it must keep up with the pace of the smartphone-toting, social-media posting empowered customer. And, your job is to provide the foundation for this. So let’s talk a little about what you need to do to start this transformation.

What is Transforming?

Before we can talk about starting to transform, we have to start with what you are transforming. IT transformation is the process of aligning IT services and business applications so they are in lock-step with the new normal of customer expectations – providing business intelligence, business agility, and the promise of customer-centricity. In many cases, this means more than just a technology shift; it means you also need to review your processes, application architectures, and even organization model – not only your platforms, to align them with the new normal of your business. From process to information to platform, transformation only works if it happens across all dimensions of your enterprise.

Transformational IT: The New Normal

In most businesses, IT is typically heavy on the technical side of the business, while LOB end-users are often the nontechnical experts of the business. However, in the businesses that are embracing transformational IT, the lines between the technical and nontechnical sides of the business become blurred. IT metrics become less focused on response time and problem resolution but more on customer success and revenue growth. This is the new normal — the role of IT shifting so it becomes the technology advisor for the entire organization, providing the tools and solutions required to meet the needs of the digital economy.

Where are the Skills?

Because digital businesses are customer focused, IT departments must provide the tools for responsive and agile behavior. These solutions must be open, providing the ability to engage with a broad ecosystem of partners, suppliers and customers. Additionally IT must also be able to take advantage of technologies such as AI, IoT and blockchain. They must provide new platforms that support delivery of modern, cloud native applications that can evolve rapidly to meet ever-changing demands, and at the same time, they must maintain their core legacy systems.

451 Research Group indicates that “cloud platforms and information security emerged as top areas of IT expertise gaps in 2017.” Couple that with “acute skills shortages in cloud native environments for container and microservices technologies” and it quickly becomes apparent that there is a lack of skills to make the transformation your business desperately needs you to make.

SUSE – Your Complete Solution for IT Transformation

So where do you start? Start with SUSE.

SUSE’s software-defined infrastructure and application delivery roadmap provides all the right solutions to help assist in your transformation – from SUSE OpenStack Cloud to SUSE Enterprise Storage and SUSE Cloud Application Platform to SUSE CaaS Platform.

SUSE Global Services provides flexible consulting delivery solutions and premium support services options to maximize your value from your SUSE solution investments. From SUSE Start consulting engagements to Premium Support Services options, our team has the technical expertise to assist in transforming and supporting your infrastructure. We will help your organization plan and implement your new solutions, facilitating all aspects of your IT transformation.

Our services offerings provide direct access to technical and product experts with whom you can build a trusted relationship. As trusted advisors, our services team helps your organization plan and implement new solutions, facilitating all aspects of your IT transformation.

With SUSE as your trusted partner, you not only get the right software for your transformation, you have access to the right people to get you to your end game. Make SUSE Global Services a part of your total solution. After all, your business has built “castles in the air,” it’s your job to put foundations under them.

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Oct 16, 2018, 15:00 (0 Talkback[s])

(Other stories by Linuxize)

Whether you want to access the Internet safely and securely while connected on an untrusty public Wi-Fi network, bypass Geo-restricted content or allow your coworkers to connect securely to your company network when working remotely, using a VPN is the best solution. VPN allows you to connect to remote VPN servers, making your connection encrypted and secure and surf the web anonymously by keeping your traffic data private. This tutorial will walk you through the process of setting up your own VPN server by installing and configuring OpenVPN. We will also show you how to generate clients certificates and create configuration files.

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• Networking with OpenVPN(Dec 31, 2009)
• OpenVPN Counters Censorship(Aug 18, 2008)
• OSNews: Introduction to OpenVPN(Jan 27, 2004)
• Troubleshooting OpenVPN 2: Configurations(Feb 27, 2011)
• Virtual Private Network and OpenVPN(Feb 27, 2009)
• Install and Configure OpenVPN Server on Linux(Jun 15, 2011)

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As traditional multi-tier enterprise software is adapting to new realities of cloud infrastructure, it also needs to make use of the latest advances in computational and hardware capabilities. Red Hat has been working with major ISVs and partners, like SAP, on digital transformation scenarios while simultaneously helping them to extract additional performance from their hardware with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

As part of the quest for enhanced performance, the focus for database and analytics applications has been shifting to in-memory execution, a deployment model that SAP HANA is offering. In the future, that trend is likely to include even more complex designs that incorporate entire software frameworks for processing information in-memory, and that is where SAP Data Hub comes into play. As a result, last year Red Hat introduced an enhanced offering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions, that is designed to assist our customers in simplifying their adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and to cater to various use cases they may have, including running SAP S/4 HANA.

To further aid customers and partners in planning, sizing and configuring their environments, SAP and Red Hat, along with other software and hardware partners, have historically used a suite of performance benchmarks. For traditional multi-tier deployments, the Sales and Distribution (SD) module became a “gold standard” for benchmarking across largest enterprises and small businesses alike. With a long history of collaboration with SAP and our mutual hardware OEM partners, like HPE and Dell EMC, among others, Red Hat is no stranger to delivering leading results on these benchmarks across multiple server sizes.

To demonstrate performance and provide additional scalability and sizing information for SAP HANA applications and workloads, SAP introduced the Business Warehouse (BW) edition of SAP HANA Standard Application Benchmark. Presently on version 2, this benchmark simulates a variety of users with different analytical requirements and measures the key performance indicator (KPI) relevant to each of the three benchmark phases defined as follows:

1. Data load phase, testing data latency and load performance (lower is better)
2. Query throughput phase, testing query throughput with moderately complex queries (higher is better)
3. Query runtime phase, testing the performance of running very complex queries (lower is better)

As a result of close collaboration with our OEM partners, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was used in several recent publications of the above benchmark.

Specifically, processing 1.3 billion initial records (a popular dataset size) using a single Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa server, demonstrated that running the workload on Red Hat Enterprise Linux could deliver the best performance across all three benchmark KPIs and outperform similarly configured servers (see Table 1).

Table 1. Results in scale-up category running SAP BW Edition for SAP HANA Standard Application Benchmark, Version 2 with 1.3B initial records

	Phase 1 (lower is better)	Phase 2 (higher is better)	Phase 3 (lower is better)	Technology Release	Database Release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 [1]	13,421 sec	10,544	99 sec	SAP NetWeaver 7.50	SAP HANA 1.0
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 [2]	14,333 sec	6,901	102 sec	SAP NetWeaver 7.50	SAP HANA 1.0
Red Hat Enterprise Linux advantage	7%	53%	3%	—	—

Additionally, in a much larger dataset size of 5.2 billion initial records, Dell EMC PowerEdge R840 server running Red Hat Enterprise Linux also outscored similarly configured server on two out of three benchmark KPIs demonstrating better dataset load time and query processing throughput (see Table 2).

Table 2. Results in scale-up category running SAP BW Edition for SAP HANA Standard Application Benchmark, Version 2 with 5.2B initial records

	Phase 1 (lower is better)	Phase 2 (higher is better)	Phase 3 (lower is better)	Technology Release	Database Release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 [3]	74,827 sec	3,095	175 sec	SAP NetWeaver 7.50	SAP HANA 2.0
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 [4]	84,744 sec	2,916	172 sec	SAP NetWeaver 7.50	SAP HANA 2.0
Red Hat Enterprise Linux advantage	13%	6%	-1.75%	—	—

These results demonstrate Red Hat’s commitment to helping OEM partners and ISVs deliver high-performing solutions to our mutual customers, and showcase close alignment between Red Hat and Dell EMC that, in collaboration with SAP, led to the creation of certified, single-source solutions for SAP HANA. Available in both single-server and larger, scale-out configurations, Dell EMC’s solution is optimized with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions.

Learn more: https://www.redhat.com/en/partners/dell and https://www.redhat.com/en/resources/red-hat-enterprise-linux-sap-solutions-technology-overview

Results as of July 30, 2018. SAP and SAP HANA are the registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. See http://www.sap.com/benchmark for more information.

[1] Dell EMC PowerEdge R940xa (4 processor / 112 cores / 224 threads, Intel Xeon
Platinum 8180M processor, 2.50 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 1024 KB L2 cache per core, 38.5 MB L3 cache per processor, 1536 GB main memory). Certification number #2018023

[2] FUJITSU Server PRIMERGY RX4770 M4 (4 processor / 112 cores / 224 threads, Intel Xeon
Platinum 8180 processor, 2.50 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 1024 KB L2 cache per core, 38.5 MB L3 cache per processor, 1536 GB main memory). Certification number #2018017

[3] Dell EMC PowerEdge R840 (4 processor / 112 cores / 224 threads, Intel Xeon
Platinum 8180M processor, 2.50 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 1024 KB L2 cache per core, 38.5 MB L3 cache per processor, 3072 GB main memory). Certification number #2018028

[4] HPE Superdome Flex (4 processor / 112 cores / 224 threads, Intel Xeon
Platinum 8180 processor, 2.50 GHz, 64 KB L1 cache and 1024 KB L2 cache per core, 38.5 MB L3 cache per processor, 3072 GB main memory). Certification number #2018025

42.579258
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Plex for Linux Now Available as a Snap (betanews.com)

Posted by msmash
on Thursday October 11, 2018 @03:05PM
from the small-steps dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report:
Today, a very popular app, Plex Media Server, gets the Snap treatment. In other words, you can install the media server program without any headaches — right from the Snap store. “In adopting the universal Linux app packaging format, Plex will make its multimedia platform available to an ever-growing community of Linux users, including those on KDE Neon, Debian, Fedora, Manjaro, OpenSUSE, Zorin and Ubuntu. Automatic updates and rollback capabilities are staples of Snap software, meaning Plex users will always have the best and latest version running,” says Canonical.

Organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon compounds. Biochemistry
is the study of carbon compounds that crawl.
— Mike Adams

Working…
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The newly formed studio, Planetary Annihilation Inc, has pushed out their first upgrade for the strategy game Planetary Annihilation: TITANS.

For those not clued up, Planetary Annihilation: TITANS is now being run by a dedicated studio that are going to give it a new life with continued support and plenty of updates. The original Planetary Annihilation is no longer available to buy, with a permanent discount to upgrade to TITANS.

This new “PTE” (public test environment) build is available to opt-in on Steam with no password required. Their aim is to focus on “speed and stability” before upgrading the main tech behind the game. With that in mind they’ve fixed some server-side crash issues, adjusted some balance issues along with some interesting AI changes. The AI, for example, will look to engage in more fights it thinks it can win as well as being better at gathering and using intel.

There’s plenty more multi-threading for servers, improved crash reporting for all platforms, a number of adjustments to improve performance and so on. Overall, it might not sound like a big deal, but it’s a good step forward. You can see the full changes here.

I’ve given the beta version a test for a few hours and it does seem to work fine. Really happy to see the game continue to live on, as it really is quite good. I actually forgot just how much I enjoy this game, watching hundreds on units travel across a world destroying everything in their path.

You can pick up Planetary Annihilation: TITANS on Humble Store and Steam.

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