Few days ago, someone posted GUADEC (the GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) invitation on Gnome Malaysia telegram group.

To be honest, I did’t alert too much what event happening around but I think GUADEC is worth to steal my attention because I am Gnome lover and this is good chances to join the event because this year, GUADEC 2020 will take place entirely online due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So you (me and someone else who far from europe) don’t need to go europe to join :P

This event is coming next month start from 22nd July - 28th July 2020. GUADEC, it’s a once-a-year event that brings us together to collaborate, celebrate, and learn; meet our colleagues and friends; and strengthen the most special part of the GNOME project.

Maybe most of participant actualy will be sad because unable see each other in person this year. But this will be open oppurtunity for someone who cannot affort for travel if held as usual but now they can!

We are very pleased to be continuing our support of @guadec this year as the conference moves into the digital space and we look forward to taking part!

Thanks to everyone putting in the effort to get the event ready online!https://t.co/URj7emUD30#opensource #linux @gnome

— Codethink (@codethink) May 21, 2020

You can check time table to know what time and what talk is about. Don’t forget to also import details event calendar. For me, who live in Malaysia, this event will be happen at night, so normally and expecting I have free time to join this event.

Oh yeah, don’t forget to register HERE (deadline: 28 Jul 2020). last not least, thank you Redhat, Codethink for sponsors and Gnome community for this event.

So far, the from latest discussion on discourse.gnome.org, GNOME will use BigBlueButton for this conference, all sessions will be recorded for everyone who won’t be able to attend talks due to timezones and conference start from 15:00 UTC to 20:15 UTC.

See you there!

Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

7 days – 6 snapshots. That’s the quick summary of the last week. Felt unspectacular from that point of view, even though, unfortunately, the Tumbleweed users did have to fight a few problems this time aroud. The 6 snapshots released were 0611, 0612, 0614, 0615, 0616 and 0617. No worries, we did not skip 0613 for superstitious reasons – it just so happened that OBS needed a bit more time to build 0612.

The releases brought you these changes:

• git 2.27.0
• OpenSSH 8.3p1
• PostgreSQL 12.3
• SQLite 3.32.2
• SSSD 2.3.0
• Linux kernel 5.7.1: failures when loading firmware for iwlwifi based cards. The next kernel should bring the fix for that. As a workaround, you could use the uncompressed kernel-firmware package (instead of kernel-firmware-*)
• KDE Applications 20.04.2
• KDE Frameworks 5.71.0
• Mesa 20.1.1

The following changes are being worked on in staging areas:

• Linux kernel 5.7.2
• VLC 3.0.11
• KDE Plasma 5.19.1
• LibreOffice 7.0 (beta)
• RPM change: %{_libexecdir} is being changed to /usr/libexec. This exposes quite a lot of packages that abuse %{_libexecdir} and fail to build
• openSSL 3.0

Build Tensorflow 2.1.1 with CUDA support

Tensorflow 2.1.1 is available in Tumbleweed and Leap 15.2 but has no CUDA support enabled, due to legal issues with NVIDIA. As CUDA support speeds up training and inference of neuronal networks a lot, it is desirable to have it enabled.

This post explains how to build a tensorflow package with CUDA support.

Prerequisites

The CUDA packages for building will be added via the -p flag to the osc command, but due to a bug you need at least version 0.169.1. This version is already included in Tumbleweed but for Leap 15.2 you will have to add the openSUSE Tools repository with the command and update osc

sudo zypper ar https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/openSUSE:/Tools/openSUSE_15.2/openSUSE:Tools.repo
sudo zypper ref
sudo zypper up --allow-vendor-change osc

It is also recommended to have a decent equipped machine for building as at least 10GB memory are needed and the build takes also a lot of time. On my twelve core machine it took more than two hours.

Create CUDA archive

In this step all the relevant CUDA packages are put into a single repository so that osc can access them. For this create the repository directory ($HOME/opt/cuda-10-1 in this case) with the command

mkdir -p $HOME/opt/cuda-10-1

The in next step downloaded work with Tumbleweed and openSUSE Leap 15.2.

CUDA

Download from https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-10.1-download-archive-update2 the rpm(local) for openSUSE and install it. After that copy the rpms to the local directory with

cp /var/cuda-repo-10-1-local-10.1.*/*rpm $HOME/opt/cuda-10-1

NCCL

Visit https://developer.nvidia.com/nccl/nccl-download and download Local installer for RedHat/CentOS 7. After you installed the downloaded rpm you have to copy the packages with the command

cp /var/nccl-repo-2.7.3-ga-cuda10.1/*rpm $HOME/opt/cuda-10-1

CUdnn

You have to register at NVIDA in order to download from https://developer.nvidia.com/cudnn . There download cuDNN Runtime Library for RedHat/Centos 7.3 (RPM) and cuDNN Developer Library for RedHat/Centos 7.3 (RPM). After that copyt the rpms to $HOME/opt/cuda-10-1.

Create local repository

Now you can create a local repository which can be used with osc with the commands

cd $HOME/opt/cuda-10-1 
createrepo .

where you might have to install the createrepo package.

Compile Tensorflow

With all the packages in place you have to get the tensorflow sources. This can be done with

osc co science:machinelearning/tensorflow2

Tensorflow can now compiled in the directory science:machinelearning/tensorflow2 with the command

osc build --ccache -p $HOME/opt/cuda-10-1 -k . -M cuda-10-1 openSUSE_Leap_15.2

which will start the build of the tensorflow package. You should always use the --ccache option as this speeds up rebuild. For Tumbleweed used the command

osc build --ccache -p $HOME/opt/cuda-10-1 -k . -M cuda-10-1 openSUSE_Tumbleweed

After some hours the build should have finished and the resulting tensorflow rpms should be in the directory where you have started the build.

Installation

For a proper installation copy the rpms to $HOME/opt/cuda-10-1 and rerun createrepo. You might want to add this repository to you system with

zypper ar $HOME/opt/cuda-10-1/repodata tensorflow

in order to install the package tensorflow2.

The SUSE office in Nuremberg will get disconnected from any former Microfocus network over the upcoming weekend (2020-06-20/21). Most of the changes should go unnoticed. But SUSE-IT needs to replace some hardware and they informed us that there might be short outages or curious network timeouts during this time. Especially around Sunday, 2020-06-21, in the afternoon.

We will keep you updated via our status page, if we get aware of any longer outage.

Organizers of the openSUSE + LibreOffice Conference have been slightly adjusted the conference dates from the original dates of Oct. 13 – 16 to the new dates of Oct. 15. - 17.

The new dates are a Thursday through a Saturday. Participants can submit talks for the live conference until July 21 when the Call for Papers is expected to close.

The length of the talks for the conference have also been changed. There will be a 15-minute short talk, a 30-minute normal talk and a 60-minute work group sessions to select. Organizers felt that shortening the talks were necessary to keep attendees engaged during the online conference. The change will also help with the scheduling of breaks, social video sessions and extra segments for Questions and Answers after each talk.

The live platform that will be used will allow presenters with limited bandwidth to play a talk they record should they wish not to present a live talk. The presenter will have the possibility to control the video as well as pause, rewind, fast-forward, etc., which is built into the system.

Organizers have online, live conference sponsorship packages available. Interested parties should contact ddemaio (at) opensuse.org for more information.

An exciting week of openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots have brought even more KDE software, a new stable kernel and more.

A week ago Plasma 5.19 arrived in the 20200609 snapshot and just a couple of days ago in snapshot 20200614 KDE’s 20.04.2 Apps Update arrived.

A large amount of the packages updated in snapshot 20200614 were Applications 20.04.2 packages, which included improvements to the music player Elisa, search tags for the file manager Dolphin and faster editing with KDE’s advanced video-editing application Kdenlive. Several other packages were included in the snapshot like an update to image editor gimp 2.10.20, which now allows the tool-group menu that hovers to expand. The Generic Graphics Library, gegl, 0.4.24 added new horizontal and vertical shapes for vignettes. Other packages updated in the snapshot were autoyast2 4.3.13, pam 1.4.0, instant messaging client pidgin 2.14.1 and GNOME document reader evince 3.36.5. The snapshot is trending unstable with a few known issues like a bootloop and a failure to build vmware modules. The current rating was at 68 during the release of this article, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

The arrival of Linux Kernel 5.7.1 came in snapshot 20200612, which is also trending unstable at a rating of 76, and could affect people relying on iwlwifi. The Linux tool used to diagnose issues with power consumption and power management, powertop, was updated to version 2.13, and the perl-Mojolicious package was updated to version 8.53 in the snapshot, which added an experimental extname method to Mojo::File.

Moving back to the Tumbleweed snapshots that were trending stable, snapshot 20200611 was trending at a 98 rating and brought multiple new packages to include updates of ImageMagick 7.0.10.18, which had a colorspace change that removes the ICC profile and frees up memory, and an update to virtualbox 6.1.10 that fixed the resizing and multi monitor handling for Wayland guests. The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture 1.2.3 package addressed issue #34 and makes ALSA relocatable in the filesystem. OpenSSH has new features in its 8.3p1 release and removes the “ssh-rsa” (RSA/SHA1) algorithm from those accepted for certificate signatures (i.e. the client and server CASignatureAlgorithms option) and will use the rsa-sha2-512 signature algorithm by default when the ssh-keygen(1) CA signs new certificates. Among some of the notable package to update in the snapshot were a new major version of Google’s API tool package nodejs-common 4.0, git 2.27.0, postgresql 12.3, redis 6.0.5, sqlite 3.32.2 and GnuTLS 3.6.14, which fixed a memory leak that could have lead to a DoS attack against Samba servers.

Snapshot 20200610 had several YaST packages update to include the Yast2 4.2.84 package which improved the stop and start of a system service, and yast2-bootloader 4.3.3, which enhanced disk type detection to cover multipath in s390 secure boot. Plus four months of translations for the yast2-trans package were updated. Regular expression library RE2 had a month worth of updates and rebootmgr 1.2 made a change to depend on dbus and not the network regarding disabled etcd support. The snapshot is likely to record a stable rating of 96, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

The excitement around the release of Plasma 5.19 didn’t disappoint as the widgets and wallpaper provided an eye-catching background. The arrival of the “Polished Plasma” was well received and the features look fantastic. Plasma packages weren’t the only packages to arrive in snapshot 20200609. A new major version of Mozilla Firefox 77.0.1 allows for an easier way to view and manage web certificates. Stability improvements were made with the minor update of Mozilla Thunderbird 68.9.0. BitTorrent client transmission updated to a 3.0 major version and allows the Remote Procedure Call server to listen on an IPv6 address. Among the other packages to update in the snapshot were harfbuzz 2.6.7, poppler 0.89.0, nodejs14 14.4.0, iptables 1.8.5 and several GNOME packages to include a minor update of gnome-software to version 3.36.1 and gnome-shell 3.36.3. The snapshot recorded a stable rating of 91, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.

Vor einiger Zeit führte unsere Schule im Zuge der Notwendigkeit durch die Corona Pandemie die Messenger App “Untis Messenger” zur schulinternen Kommunikation ein. Hierbei handelt es sich um den neu gebrandeten Messenger der Österreichischen Firma Grape, der eigentlich für den Einsatz in Unternehmen konzipiert ist.

Das Problem mit dem Datenschutz

Beim lesen der Datenschutz-Bestimmungen jedoch stieß ich auf folgenden Absatz:

!!! quote “Zitat nach grape.io/privacy” Some service providers are situated outside of the European Union, namely the USA. Therefore, Data is transferred to recipients in third countries, all of which adhere to the EU-US privacy shield.

Wörtlich genannt werden die Unternehmen IXOLIT GmbH, Google Inc., Amazon Web Services Inc., Zendesk Inc., Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp. und Hubspot Inc.. Auf seiner Webseite jedoch schreibt der österreichische Softwareentwickler folgendes (Zitat nach untis.at/produkte/webuntis-das-grundpaket/messenger):

Ihre Daten werden sicher aufbewahrt und verlassen nicht die Europäische Union.

Kontaktaufnahme zu Untis

Da sich diese Aussagen wiedersprechen, wandte ich mich am 4. Juni 2020 per E-Mail an Untis. Ich forderte das Unternehmen auf, diese Unklarheiten zu erklären. Als ich auch am 14. Juni, über eine Woche später, noch keine Antwort erhalten hatte, wandte ich mich erneut per Mail an Untis, diesmal an den Datenschutzbeauftragten Dr. David Huemer. In dieser E-Mail erwähnte ich außerdem die ausgebliebene Antwort des Untis Büros. Eine Kopie dieser Mail schickte ich erneut an office@untis.at. Wenige Minuten später erhielt ich eine Bestätigung über den Eingang meiner Mail, mit der Information, dass das Büro bis zum 6.1.2020 nur eingeschränkt besetzt sei, und man wünschte mir “erholsame Feiertage und einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr.”

Antworten des Unternehmens

Am Tag darauf, nämlich heute, am 15.06.2020, gingen dann zwei Antworten bei mir ein. Der Datenschutzbeauftragte erzählte mir, dass es sich bei Untis Messenger um eine angepasste Version des Messengers von Grape handle, weshalb auch auf dessen Datenschutzrichtlinien verwiesen worden sei. Diese Information war mir zwar nicht neu, lässt sie sich doch nach einiger Recherche leicht finden, zeigt jedoch den guten Willen. Auch erklärte Dr. Huemmer, für den Untis Messenger gälten besondere Bedingungen, die Daten würden ausschließlich innerhalb der EU verarbeitet. Grape habe allerdings für diesen Fall keine angepassten Datenschutzhinweise. Eine Ausnahme gelte jedoch für Push Benachichtigungen: Da es derzeit keine anderen technischen Möglichkeiten gäbe, Push Nachichten zu versenden, außer die jeweiligen Services von Google und Apple zu verwenden, würden keine Alternativen eingesetzt. Das stimmt nicht ganz, wie z.B. dieser StackOverflow Beitrag zeigt, jedoch ist in den meisten Fällen die Nutzung von Firebase Cloud Messaging die einfachste und energiesparenste Lösung.

Auch ging eine weitere Mail ein, diesmal aus dem Büro. In ihr ist genau gennant, wozu welche Dienstleister verwendet werden:

• Aplitude: Die Grape Software hat auch einen Video Teil integriert (“jitsi”), dieser verwendet diesen Tracker, voip ist für Untis nicht aktiv und wird somit nicht verwendet. Danke jedoch für diese Info, dieser Tracker wurde bereits deaktiviert.
• Appdynamics: Dabei handelt es sich um eine Performance profiling und Error Reporting Methode und steht ausschliesslich für on Premises Kunden zur Verwendung frei, die ihren eigenen Server betreiben und Daten in Appdynamics loggen wollen. Der Untis Server hat Appdynamics nicht konfiguriert.
• Google Analytics: Ebenso nicht aktiv für Untis, wurde bereits komplett vom Code entfernt (Danke für den Hinweis).
• Google Crashlytics: Ausschliesslich für Fehler reporting um die Applikation stabiler zu machen. Je weniger Daten wir hier reinbekommen, desto glücklicher sind wir.
• Google Firebase Analytics: Wird nicht benutzt, jedoch schlägt dieser Tracker an weil firebase.core und firebase.messaging (FCM, push notification) importiert wird.
• Google Tag Manager: Teil von Google Playservices Analytics was für die Cloud Variante verwendet wurde und wird nun auch entfernt.

Die einzigen Daten, die von Grape über amerikanische Server laufen, sind Push Notifications, da es technisch keine andere, zuverlässige, Lösung am Markt gibt. wir sind selber Meinung, dass Abhilfe geschaffen werden muss um ein komplett Google-freies Smartphone zu haben, jedoch ist der derzeitig komplizierteste Teil eine stabile Alternative zu FCM Push Notification zu finden. Jedoch haben wir einen Auftragsverarbeitungsvertrag mit Google bezüglich Push Notifications.

Alles in allem waren die Mitarbeiter des Unternehmens sehr freundlich und hilfsbereit, man bot mir sogar an, telefonisch mit mir über das Thema zu sprechen, wozu ich jedoch keine Notwendigkeit mehr sehe.

Weitere Informationen

Ich veröffentliche diese Informationen hier, um anderen Nutzern mit ähnlichen Bedenken die Arbeit zu ersparen, sich selber an Untis zu wenden. Sollte das Unternehmen etwas gegen die Veröffentlichung auf dieser Homepage einzuwenden haben, so nehme ich diesen Artikel selbstverständlich vom Netz.

Quellen

• Grape Privacy Policies
• Untis Webseite
• Mitarbeiter der Untis GmbH

Quick and dirty

• Install python3-virtualenvwrapper (via pip or via package manager)
• Export a workon directory: export WORKON_HOME=/home/foursixnine/Projects/python-virtualenv
• source virtualenvwrapper

foursixnine@deimos:~/Projects> source virtualenvwrapper    
virtualenvwrapper.user_scripts creating /home/foursixnine/Projects/python-virtualenv/premkproject
...
virtualenvwrapper.user_scripts creating /home/foursixnine/Projects/python-virtualenv/get_env_details

• mkvirtualenv newenv

foursixnine@deimos:~/Projects> mkvirtualenv newenv
created virtual environment CPython3.8.3.final.0-64 in 115ms
  creator CPython3Posix(dest=/home/foursixnine/Projects/python-virtualenv/newenv, clear=False, global=False)
  seeder FromAppData(download=False, pip=latest, setuptools=latest, wheel=latest, via=copy, app_data_dir=/home/foursixnine/.local/share/virtualenv/seed-app-data/v1.0.1)
  activators BashActivator,CShellActivator,FishActivator,PowerShellActivator,PythonActivator,XonshActivator
virtualenvwrapper.user_scripts creating /home/foursixnine/Projects/python-virtualenv/newenv/bin/predeactivate
...
virtualenvwrapper.user_scripts creating /home/foursixnine/Projects/python-virtualenv/newenv/bin/get_env_details

• By this point, you’re already inside newenv:

(newenv) foursixnine@deimos:~/Projects> 

• You can create multiple virtual environments and switch among them using workon $env so long as you have sourced virtualenvwrapper and your $WORKON_HOME is properly defined.

Real business

• Now, if you want to use vscode, remember that you will need to define properly python.PythonPath for your workspace/project (I’m new to this, don’t hang me in a public square ok?), in this case, my env is called linkedinlearningaiml

{
    "python.pythonPath": "/home/foursixnine/Projects/python-virtualenv/linkedinlearningaiml/bin/python"
}

Now your python code will be executed within the context of your virtual environment, so you can get down to serious (or not at all) python development, without screweing up your host or polluting the dependencies and stuff.

PS: Since wanted to be able to run standalone python files, I also needed to change a bit my launch.json (Maybe this is not needed?)

    "version": "0.2.0",
    "configurations": [
        {
            "name": "Python: Current File",
            "type": "python",
            "request": "launch",
            "program": "${file}",
            "console": "integratedTerminal",
            "cwd": "${fileDirname}"
        }
    ]
}

And off you go, how to use python virtualenv inside vscode

Et voilà, ma chérie!