Ubuntu 24.10 To See More Polishing, NVIDIA Wayland By Default & New Welcome Wizard

Oliver Smith who is serving as the Interim Engineering Director for the Ubuntu Desktop team at Canonical has shared some roadmap plans around Ubuntu 24.10. With this being the first post-LTS release following last month's Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support, they are more free to innovate this cycle and they have a lot of great plans for enhancing the Linux desktop experience...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-24.10-Roadmap

VMware Fusion Pro e WMware Workstation Pro diventano gratuiti per uso personale

Broadcom, nuova proprietaria di VMware, ha annunciato una bella notizia per tutti gli utenti di VMware Workstation per PC (Windows e Linux) e VMware Fusion (per macOS). Le versioni Pro dei rispettivi programmi ovvero Fusion Pro e Workstation Pro avranno ora due modelli di licenza: avremo ora  un abbonamento gratuito per uso personale o un abbonamento a pagamento per uso commerciale. Gli utenti decideranno in base al loro caso d'uso se è necessario un abbonamento commerciale.

Ciò significa che gli utenti comuni che desiderano un utilizzare la versione Pro su computer Mac, Windows o Linux possono farlo gratuitamente semplicemente registrandosi e scaricando l'installer dal nuovo portale di download all'indirizzo support.broadcom.com.

Per i clienti che utilizzano Fusion e Workstation per lavoro è richiesto un abbonamento commerciale a pagamento, che può essere acquistato tramite un partner Broadcom Advantage autorizzato.

Poiché i prodotti Pro sono stati resi gratuiti per uso personale e a pagamento per uso commerciale, VMware ha interrotto lo sviluppo delle controparti minori VMware Workstation Player e VMware Fusion Player che non saranno più disponibili per l'acquisto. Gli utenti dei nostri prodotti Player per uso personale possono passare alle versioni Pro più complete senza alcun costo. Workstation Player continuerà a essere fornito in bundle con Workstation Pro proprio come avviene oggi, quindi continuerà a essere un'applicazione.

http://www.marcosbox.org/2024/05/vmware-fusion-pro-e-wmware-workstation-diventano-gratuiti-uso-personale.html

The Art of Troubleshooting with Jason Maxham

With the right approach, you can probably fix anything. There are two approaches to repair. Sometimes, you know exactly what’s wrong: The screen has a big crack down the middle, or the CPU pins are bent, or the front fell off. Helping at that point is a lot of what we do here at iFixit—we’ll give you all the guides and parts and tools to get your thing working again as fast as possible.

Source

https://www.ifixit.com/News/95889/the-art-of-troubleshooting-with-jason-maxham

Abbonati a NordVPN e supporta Marco's Box



NordVPN è senza ombra di dubbio il servizio VPN più noto, apprezzato ed utilizzato al mondo. Fra tutti i servizi è quello che vi consiglio perché offre funzionalità avanzate e il miglior rapporto qualità prezzo. È il servizio che utilizzo anni e in tutto questo tempo si è sempre dimostrato veloce e affidabile.

NordVPN ha attualmente più di 6300 server sparsi in 111 paesi, è compatibile con Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, Android TV e Amazon Fire TV. Cosa non da trascurare è il supporto ai servizi di streaming come Netflix, Hulu, BBC iPlayer e Disney+.

Se volete supportare il blog potete acquistare o rinnovare NordVPN tramite il mio link affiliazione.

http://www.marcosbox.org/2024/05/abbonati-nordvpn-e-supporta-marcos-box.html

Renaming Git Files With Emacs Dired

Álvaro Ramírez has a really handy tip for renaming files under version control with wdired. If you don’t already know about wdired, stop whatever you’re doing and find out about it right now. It’s really magical. The TL;DR is that you can set a dired buffer to be editable and any changes you make—typically to the file names—will be reflected in the actual files. Mickey, over at Mastering Emacs, has a nice introduction.

Ramírez really likes being able to change file names with wdired but was unhappy that those changes weren’t reflected in git in a convenient way. Naturally he set out to remedy the situation. As he discovered, he needn’t have bothered. Wdired already has that handled: you just need to set dired-vc-rename-file non nil. Once you do that, git will show the files as renamed and ask you to commit the changes.

On the one hand, this is a small thing but Emacs, of course, makes it easy to do the right thing so even if your files are under version control—not just git—you can rename them and be sure that dired will inform your version control system of the changes. It makes wdired seem even more magical.

https://irreal.org/blog/?p=12179

Linux 6.10 Adds Support For Posted Interrupts On Bare Metal Hardware

Merged as part of the IRQ changes for the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel is support for posted interrupts on bare metal hardware...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.10-Posted-Interrupts

Allan Day: GNOME maintainers: here’s how to keep your issue tracker in good shape

One of the goals of the new GNOME project handbook is to provide effective guidelines for contributors. Most of the guidelines are based on recommendations that GNOME already had, which were then improved and updated. These improvements were based on input from others in the project, as well as by drawing on recommendations from elsewhere.

The best example of this effort was around issue management. Before the handbook, GNOME’s issue management guidelines were seriously out of date, and were incomplete in a number of areas. Now we have shiny new issue management guidelines which are full of good advice and wisdom!

The state of our issue trackers matters. An issue tracker with thousands of open issues is intimidating to a new contributor. Likewise, lots of issues without a clear status or resolution makes it difficult for potential contributors to know what to do. My hope is that, with effective issue management guidelines, GNOME can improve the overall state of its issue trackers.

So what magic sauce does the handbook recommend to turn an out of control and burdensome issue tracker into a source of calm and delight, I hear you ask? The formula is fairly simple:

● Review all incoming issues, and regularly conduct reviews of old issues, in order to weed out reports which are ambiguous, obsolete, duplicates, and so on
● Close issues which haven’t seen activity in over a year
● Apply the “needs design” and “needs info” labels as needed
● Close issues that have been labelled “need info” for 6 weeks
● Issues labelled “needs design” get closed after 1 year of inactivity, like any other
● Recruit contributors to help with issue management

To some readers this is probably controversial advice, and likely conflicts with their existing practice. However, there’s nothing new about these issue management procedures. The current incarnation has been in place since 2009, and some aspects of them are even older. Also, personally speaking, I’m of the view that effective issue management requires taking a strong line (being strong doesn’t mean being impolite, I should add – quite the opposite). From a project perspective, it is more important to keep the issue tracker focused than it is to maintain a database of every single tiny flaw in its software.

The guidelines definitely need some more work. There will undoubtedly be some cases where an issue needs to be kept open despite it being untouched for a year, for example, and we should figure out how to reflect that in the guidelines. I also feel that the existing guidelines could be simplified, to make them easier to read and consume.

I’d be really interested to hear what changes people think are necessary. It is important for the guidelines to be something that maintainers feel that they can realistically implement. The guidelines are not set in stone.

That said, it would also be awesome if more maintainers were to put the current issue management guidelines into practice in their modules. I do think that they represent a good way to get control of an issue tracker, and this could be a really powerful way for us to make GNOME more approachable to new contributors.

https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2024/05/17/gnome-maintainers-heres-how-to-keep-your-issue-tracker-in-good-shape/

Start of Rails 8 development, 7.0.8.2 & 7.1.3.3 released, Kamal by default, and lots more!

Hey everyone, Happy Friday!

Vipul here with the latest updates for This Week in Rails. Let’s dive in.

Development of Rails 8.0 starts now 🎉
This week marks the official start of Rails 8.0 development. Stay tuned for more updates on Rails 8.0 features and changes ahead 🎉.

Rails 8 will target Ruby 3.3+ only for new apps

Add Kamal by default to Rails 8
This PR adds Kamal for deployment by default, which includes generating a Rails-specific config/deploy.yml. This can be skipped using --skip-kamal. Check out more about Kamal on its official site.

Add support for :if_not_exists and :force options to create_schema
This change adds missing support for :if_not_exists and :force options to create_schema.

7.0.8.2 and 7.1.3.3 have been released
Two new Rails version have been released upgrading Trix to 2.1.1 to fix CVE-2024-34341

Check here for more details - XSS Vulnerabilities in Trix Editor

Fix ActiveRecord::Relation#touch_all with custom attribute aliased as attribute for update
Before this change if we had something like

create_table :users do |t|
  t.timestamp :legacy_updated_at
end

class User < ActiveRecord::Base
  alias_attribute :updated_at, :legacy_updated_at
end

User.touch_all(:updated_at)

then ActiveRecord would not resolve updated_at to its alias correctly and resulted to a query that updates the same column twice. This PR fixes the behavior to correctly resolve the alias.

Support duration in ActiveSupport::XmlMini
Before this change ActiveSupport::XmlMini could not handle duration type in XML, which is one of the primitive data type. This PR adds support for duration type using ActiveSupport::Duration.

Support touch_all in batches
This change adds support for touch_all in batches. This is similarly supported for update_all/delete_all/etc)

  Post.in_batches.touch_all

You can view the whole list of changes here.
We had 27 contributors to the Rails codebase this past week!

Until next time!

Subscribe to get these updates mailed to you.

https://rubyonrails.org/2024/5/17/this-week-in-rails

EFF Urges Ninth Circuit to Hold Montana’s TikTok Ban Unconstitutional

Montana’s TikTok ban violates the First Amendment, EFF and others told the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in a friend-of-the-court brief and urged the court to affirm a trial court’s holding from December 2023 to that effect.

Montana’s ban (which EFF and others opposed) prohibits TikTok from operating anywhere within the state and imposes financial penalties on TikTok or any mobile application store that allows users to access TikTok. The district court recognized that Montana’s law “bans TikTok outright and, in doing so, it limits constitutionally protected First Amendment speech,” and blocked Montana’s ban from going into effect. Last year, EFF—along with the ACLU, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Reason Foundation, and the Center for Democracy and Technology—filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of TikTok and Montana TikTok users’ challenge to this law at the trial court level.

As the brief explains, Montana’s TikTok ban is a prior restraint on speech that prohibits Montana TikTok users—and TikTok itself—from posting on the platform. The law also prohibits TikTok’s ability to make decisions about curating its platform.

Prior restraints such as Montana’s ban are presumptively unconstitutional. For a court to uphold a prior restraint, the First Amendment requires it to satisfy the most exacting scrutiny. The prior restraint must be necessary to further an urgent interest of the highest magnitude, and the narrowest possible way for the government to accomplish its precise interest. Montana’s TikTok ban fails to meet this demanding standard.

Even if the ban is not a prior restraint, the brief illustrates that it would still violate the First Amendment. Montana’s law is a “total ban” on speech: it completely forecloses TikTok users’ speech with respect to the entire medium of expression that is TikTok. As a result, Montana’s ban is subject to an exacting tailoring requirement: it must target and eliminate “no more than the exact source of the ‘evil’ it seeks to remedy.” Montana’s law is undeniably overbroad and fails to satisfy this scrutiny.

This appeal is happening in the immediate aftermath of President Biden signing into law federal legislation that effectively bans TikTok in its current form, by requiring TikTok to divest of any Chinese ownership within 270 days. This federal law raises many of the same First Amendment concerns as Montana’s.

It’s important that the Ninth Circuit take this opportunity to make clear that the First Amendment requires the government to satisfy a very demanding standard before it can impose these types of extreme restrictions on Americans’ speech.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/05/eff-urges-ninth-circuit-hold-montanas-tiktok-ban-unconstitutional