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jimmacNew Cantarell Maintainer
GNOME's default UI typeface Cantarell gained a new maintainer, Nikolaus Waxweiler. Nikolaus was on a holy crusade to improve the state of text rendering on Linux by improving FreeType and lobbying for changes in different projects. While he continues on those efforts, bug reports hinted (pun intended) that GNOME's font rendered worse as FreeType improved so he went on to investigate why. It turns out that Cantarell had many metric related issues and its development was quite stagnant.
The process of making fonts look good even on our crappy LoDPI screens is commonly called hinting and it requires precision. Cantarell ships as an .otf font or OpenType font with Postscript-flavor. Hinting .otf fonts works differently from hinting common TrueType or .ttf fonts. You define several horizontal snapping zones, also called blue zones, like descender, x-height, capital height, ascender height, etc. so that they match your design. That means that the outlines you are designing must as a general rule be placed precisely within these blue zones or the hinting algorithm will ignore them. Blue zones must be constructed to contain everything they should contain. The idea is that a well designed typeface is consistent and regular enough that coarse blue zones describe the design well. The hinting algorithm of the font design application will then place stem information according to those blue zones, among other considerations. For a final rendering, glyphs are snapped to those horizontal blue zones, meaning they are only snapped on the Y-axis. Think ClearType.
Cantarell was full of off-by-ones-or-twos and technical don't-do-thats, diacritics were inconsistent and Cyrillics still need a look-over. The bold face was in an even poorer state. Back in June 2013 Adobe's contributed a new high-quality OpenType/Postscript-flavor hinting engine. The problems were only magnified because the new engine actually takes hinting information seriously and will spit out garbage when the font designer isn't careful.
Nikolaus has cleaned up the fonts considerably by fixing the blue zones, outline precision to fall within them and numerous other problems. You might also notice that letters like bdfklh are a bit taller for a more harmonious look. It should display consistently at all sizes now.
Oh, by the way: FreeType 2.6.2 brings more user-visible changes. If you are on a rolling-release distribution, you might have noticed them already. If you wish to read up more on those changes, Nikolaus wrote a lengthy article about the changes and future plans on freetype.org.
For a Cantarell 0.1.0 release we plan to have all accented glyphs fixed. Nikolaus has finished a first pass at diacritics and is now looking for testers. Anyone who deals with diacritics in his/her language, especially central European people, please get the .otf fonts from the git repo and report bugs to the GNOME bug tracker.
Do note that Nikolaus didn't just dive into maintainership, but wrote most of this post. My incentives to get him set up a blog and post on Planet GNOME have been fruitless so far.
KDE Plasma 5.5 released
Today the KDE team released a new version of it's desktop environment Plasma. It has now reached version 5.5 with a few nice new features.
New features in Plasma 5.5
For me the most important and most visible new feature is the update of Plasma's theme Breeze. This overhaul does not only mean that existing icons have been updated and improved and a few new icons have been added, but Breeze has been released for the GTK+2 and GTK+3 toolkits as well. This way GTK-based applications are now lo...
How to run Rails with PostgreSQL on openSUSE Leap 42.1
Install PostgreSQL:
sudo zypper install postgresql-server postgresql-devel
Start the database server:
sudo systemctl start postgresql
Enable server to be started on boot:
sudo systemctl enable postgresql
Switch to the postgres user to set up the database:
sudo su -l postgres
Create database user:
createuser -d USERNAME
Return to your normal user, exchange the database driver in the Gemfile from sqlite3 to pg and run
bundle install
Change the configuration of the database driver to something like:
default: &default
adapter: postgresql
username: cs
development:
<<: *default
database: APPNAME_development
test:
<<: *default
database: APPNAME_test
production:
<<: *default
database: APPNAME_production
Create the databases:rake db:create
rake db:migrate
rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test
That's it.
Proprietary AMD/ATI Catalyst fglrx rpms new release 15.11 (15.300.1025-1)
Time to get an update for fglrx: the new release has been build for 13.1, 13.2, Leap 42.1, and tumbleweed 20151201
Tumbleweed beware : broken Xorg
It seems since the release, that a number of report of broken xorg with gdm, ssdm and so… segfaulting
You can still use the previous version hanging on the server. But I doubt it would work better
As soon, with Sebastian Siebert we have a patch for, I will republish a new build
Informations & bugreport Sebastian’s blog or lizards.o.o
The proposed drivers support kernel up to version 4.4
AMD release note available
Sebastien Siebert making script
Sebastian Siebert posts about fglrx
If you have any problems with the driver, don’t be afraid to report to Sebastian (German and English bugreports are gladly accepted).
he will try, as far as I am able to reproduce the bug. Together with the necessary system information, he will go directly to the right place at AMD to have the bug fixed in the next driver release.
Thank you very much, Sebastian.
See below what to do in case of troubles.
Or you can also ping him on irc (freespacer)
Debugging troubles
I recommend in case of trouble the use of his script which can collect the whole informations needed to help you. then you just have to issue a simple commande in console to collect all informations, you can review them, and finally transmit them.
Check the website to get the latest.
su -c 'sh makerpm-amd-15.11.sh -ur' The system report 'amd-report.txt' was generated. [ OK ] Do you want to read the system report 'amd-report.txt' now? yes/no [y/n]: y Are you sure to upload the above-named system report to sprunge.us? yes/no [y/n]: y The report was uploaded to sprunge.us. The link is: http://sprunge.us/eMEB
Copy paste the link in the comment zone of Sebastian post
All proudly distributed by openSUSE powered server and sponsored by Ioda-Net Sàrl
Banana Pi M2 running openSUSE Tumbleweed
Following up from my earlier post about openSUSE LTSP on Banana Pi, Nora Lee from the manufacturer of the board got in touch with me and sent me a couple of their new boards- Banana Pi M2, runs on A31s quad-core CPU and has 1G RAM, powerful enough to run openSUSE Tumbleweed with Xfce Desktop.
Here is how you can get openSUSE running on Banana Pi M2.
* Extract the archive to get openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Bpi-M2-Xfce.img
* Dump openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Bpi-M2-Xfce.img on to a SD card
(dd if=/path/to/openSUSE-Tumbleweed-Bpi-M2-Xfce.img of=/dev/sdX bs=4M; sync #replace /dev/sdX with your actual SD card device)
* In case you have a bigger SD card, use yast2 disk(partitioner) to “expand” the second partition. You can use yast’s package manager to install more software. The default password for root is linux, you may want to change that first thing after booting.
I am unable to get sound on this hardware, probably their kernel is missing sound related modules, if you figure out how to get sound working drop me a line so I can include it in next release.Everything else(wifi, hdmi out, USB ports etc) works well enough.
openEMS packages
openEMS packages are available from Science repository and main Tumbleweed repository.
openEMS is a free and open electromagnetic field solver using the FDTD method. Matlab or Octave are used as an easy and flexible scripting interface.
It features:
- Fully 3D Cartesian and cylindrical coordinates graded mesh.
- Multi-threading, SIMD (SSE) and MPI support for high speed FDTD.
See official site to get more information – openems.de.
FOSS System Software in 2015
Prelude
About an year ago, I was playing around with Cassandra for a quick prototype in then dayjob. It opened up the world of distributed systems to me and I was piqued. Audaciously, I decided to implement a simple distributed database, Keeri, to have a grasp of the fundamentals of the implementation of distributed databases. In the past, I have implemented a simple filesystem which has helped me immensely when I was working as a filesystem engineer. Also, I have always been fascinated by the theory behind the database internals right from college days, but did not get my hands dirty.After a few weeks of work, I was able to implement a recursive-descent SQL parser, which analysed the incoming SELECT queries, made a tree with the subqueries properly branched as sub-trees. I made a simple columnar store that appends data (via an API as opposed to SQL) but without any atomicity guarantees. In short, it was a rudimentary, in-memory system that functions decently. However, I was nowhere near the initial goal of implementing a distributed database.
I realised that there were plenty of design choices in a distributed database implementation, right from architecture, replication, membership, consensus, CAP, etc. I even took a coursera course that helped me understand the basics in detail. As of today, I have enough confidence in my skills and knowledge to implement a distributed database which could serve as a good teaching material, if not as a production software. However, I have not made a single line of code in the past seven months to the project. Abandoning (at least temporarily) the project, hurts.
Yesterday, my daughter decided to wake me up from my sleep after midnight, I spent the remaining night wide awake, while she slept, thinking why I have not made progress in keeri. I realised that I have been overwhelmed by the amount of things to do, that are not core to the system. For example, after I decided that the database has to be NEWSQL based, it is imperative that I needed a SQL parser. But there are a dozen types of parsing (LL, LR, Recursive Descent, ANTLR etc.) techniques. Understanding the pros and cons of the each type and finding the most suitable candidate is a non-trivial task. SQL Parsing is just one component of the system. There are other components such as the choice of datastructures (based on read/write ratio, type of load etc.) One approach is to proceed with the simplest choices for each component with well-defined borders. The individual components can be later replaced. By the time, I completed the SQL query to a decision tree code, I felt exhausted, even before I began the core database and distributed systems functionality.
Observations
From my past open source experience, I have known the synergic boost that developers experience in FOSS communities. It is always good to work in a like minded team of developers rather than individually when working on big problems. I started thinking what other FOSS projects exist for distributed databases (or any other large scale system software) that were created in the last 5-6 years. A few things that came to my mind were:Hadoop: An umbrella of projects, initially started by Yahoo, including core projects such as HDFS, HBase and a laundry list of supporting projects. Most of the code is now under the Apache project with a plenty of companies sponsoring the development and using the projects.
Docker: The coolest kid in the town. Initially started by Solomon Hykes funded by dotCloud as a side project. Arguably the most active project to date used heavily by almost all tech companies worth their salt. This spawned off a series of other projects too.
CoreOS: Linux re-thought for being a Cloud focussed distro. Backed by a company with the same name. Founded by ex SUSE, Rackspace people, collaborating with Greg KH himself.
Redis: Started by antirez, funded by vmware, pivotal and most recently redis labs. Probably the most used k-v database, probably challenged only by the older memcached.
Cassandra: Initially started by Facebook and later became an Apache project. Heavily used by companies like Netflix, Twitter, Applet etc. even after facebook has moved away.
Kafka: Initially started by Linkedin and later became an Apache project. Used by linkedin and almost every company today. Most of the original team that created the project have now jumped off to a new company named Confluent working on the project full time.
CockroachDB: A project that claims to be the open source equivalent for Google's Spanner. Started by ex-googlers. Development funded and managed by Cockroachlabs.
As I kept thinking about these (and a few other) projects in a state of semi-sleep, I had a eureka moment when I realised that all these projects, even though are open source, began funded by a company / investor money. This is in complete contrast to the FOSS projects of the previous generation like GNU, Linux, GNOME etc. It is a welcome change that developers are now not scared of becoming C*Os and spend time in management or bootstrapping a company. Perhaps, only today, we have companies like Zenefits (disclaimer: employer ;) ) making it easy to start a company and so more developers find it easier to start companies. VCs being in a bullish mindset also helps.
However, I have one concern. Unless the project usage explodes and gains contributors from multiple companies, there is a high chance that the projects may compromise on quality to accommodate a business need. For example, if Torvalds was working for Google, wakelocks *might* have merged into kernel much earlier to suit a Google release cycle. Torvalds being a neutral outsider, without having any commercial interests in any company (directly) has helped Linux immensely. If a FOSS project is started with a backing company in place, from day one, how high will the company's benefits influence the design / features / review processes of the FOSS project ?
As I think more, I realised that, most of these new system software are developed to address the pains of a "as a service" providers. So unless there is a business case, it is perhaps difficult to create a new modern system software, as the era of one size fits all is over. This also makes the previous concern about, the chief maintainer being company neutral, irrelevant. Only when a software is made, backed by a company, with real use cases and customers, instead of theoretical / intellectual curiosities we will get live data. Personal pet projects may have to be satisfied with machine generated data, which may not be the best testsuite for data intensive software like databases.
Questions
To sum up, I wonder if developers (students) any more interested / will be able to develop FOSS projects in their own hobby time, that could grow as big as Linux, without having a corporate backup, for the first few years at least, What do you think ?Also, if you think it is possible, any recommendations for developers with family and personal needs to spend time, off the regular day job, to persist with pet FOSS projects without exhaustion ? Are there any statistics available on contributor details for popular FOSS projects (similar to Kernel stats prepared by Greg KH and LWN) ?
Any other aspects that I have missed ?
P.S: I was sharing the gist of this post with a friend who shrugged off saying, "Get a job in the company which works on a project which appeals to you". However, it is not that simple, considering most of these young companies do not even have an office anywhere outside the developed world. Also after a certain point in life, switching jobs is not trivial and depends on various other factors.
Use your distro's kernel in OBS
/.build.kernel.kvm # used by KVM workers
/.build.kernel.xen # used by Xen workers
/.build.initrd.kvm
/.build.initrd.xen
So you just need this package and make sure it is installed in the VM using the VMinstall: tag in the project config.
If the build service worker script detects that after preparing the VM, such a kernel and initrd are present, they will be used for booting the worker VM that finally builds your package or image. If it is *not* detected, then the kernel the worker server is running with (usually a SUSE kernel) will also be used for the VM.
In the openSUSE Buildservice instance, all "recent" SUSE distributions are configured for that: they use the kernel-obs-build package, which gets created automatically when building the kernel rpms.
Now I am right now using a buildservice instance for cross-distribution package- and imagebuilds. The challenges of trying to build RHEL/CentOS 7 images with KIWI in OBS warrant at least one additional blog post, but one thing I noticed was, that some of the kiwi stuff, when done with a CentOS 7 userland, apparently also needs a CentOS kernel, otherwise kiwi's parted calls, for example, will exit with code 1 (without issuing an error message, btw).
So I have built a kernel-obs-build from the CentOS 7 kernel and configured my OBS instance to use it, which brought me quite some steps further to building CentOS images with KIWI in OBS.
The code (or rather: the spec files) to "convert" the CentOS kernel to an OBS kernel is at https://github.com/seife/kernel-obs-build, a short README on how to use it is included.
Note that right now it only works with KVM workers as I was not able to get the worker code to boot the kernel correctly in a Xen VM, even though drivers are all there, the reason is probably that the obs worker scripts rely on some of the specifics of a Xen-specific kernel (e.g. the device name of the block devices being passed through to the VM from the config, which is not true for a generic PV-capable kernel).
But I guess this will improve soon, now that openSUSE has dropped the kernel-xen package, they will face the same issues and hopefully someone will fix them ;)
Hi how are you doing? Sorry you can’t get through. Just leave your name and you number and I’ll get back to you
No.. I haven’t forget you! I think of you every day, night and if I’m honest all the time. You and you and you and especially you who are reading these lines. This is going to be sort blog entry. I want you to know what you should start doing! Yes just stop being social in internet. Get out of your comfort zone and start spank the monkey (oh.. sorry not spank the monkey this is children approved blog..) er.. learning new stuff.
Start you maker project and learn how to 3D with Blender (it’s marvelous 3D application). After Blender there is no excuse and it’s free (but remember if you really like it give something back). Are you on more on CAD? Learn 3D CAD with FreeCAD (Again amazing tool). Want to ride IoT wave but you don’t have too much money then get new shiny Tiny $5 Raspberry Pi Zero or 9$ C.H.I.P and make your Fritzing electric boogie with ease (and by the way you can commit those boards to library. It’s open source!). You are in music how about doing some DJ:n with linux? Mixxx just got shiny 2.0 RC1 out. Are you more reading type and need something to manage you e-books: Calibre is here to help. Huh so much to do so less time!
Where to get them? openSUSE have RPM for all of them just learn to search them from Packman or from OBS. Sorry to say Raspberry Pi Zero is currently not supported but you can help to add it to ARM boards working with openSUSE same problems with C.H.I.P (If you have Raspberry Pi 1/2 just get image for them from openSUSE ARM image and start hacking). You should learn how to add new repos to YaST2 and add Packman repo for new FreeCAD, Fritzing and Mixxx. Yes! most of them run also on Windows and Mac OS X. Now smile on, thumbs up and get your groove on with title song: De La Soul – Ring Ring Ring (Ha Ha Hey)
Kurz práce v příkazové řádce Linuxu nejen pro MetaCentrum 2016
Don’t be afraid of command line! It is friendly and powerful tool. Practically identical is command line also in Mac OS X, BSD and another UNIX-based systems, not only in Linux. Basic knowledge of Linux is not conditional. Course will be taught in Linux, but most of the point are applicable also for another UNIX systems like Mac OS X. Knowledge of Linux/UNIX is useful e.g. for working with molecular and another data. MetaCentrum is service provided by CESNET allowing access to huge computational capacity.