● 12.06.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 7/12/2021: OpenIndiana Hipster 2021.10 and AppStream 0.15

Posted in News Roundup at 7:04 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Have you noticed that your Chromebook isn’t very responsive until a minute or so after startup? Depending on your hardware, you may not have as higher performing components could mask this. But Google has. And it has a solution to improve initial Chromebook performance in an upcoming Chrome OS update.

• The issue is laid out in a description in this code commit. ARCVM “continuously consumes CPU for several minutes on user login before user has even launched any Android app or playstore.”

• If you’re not familiar with the term, ARCVM is the virtual machine used to run Android apps on a Chromebook. Based on the description, this virtual machine launches when you boot your Chromebook. This occurs even if you don’t immediately open an Android app or the Google Play Store. And that causes the CPU in your Chromebook to spend most, if not all, of its resources firing up ARCVM.

Server

Audiocasts/Shows

• Joao and Jay talk about the worst healthcare breaches of 2021, and some lessons that can be learned from these events.

Kernel Space

• These latest AMD machine check error driver patches can be found on the kernel mailing list as they work their way towards the mainline Linux kernel.

• Back in 2019, ST released a brand new processor family, the STM32MP1, whose members are currently based on a dual Cortex-A7 to run Linux combined with one Cortex-M4 to run bare-metal applications, together with a wide range of peripherals.

• In 2022 we will very likely see the experimental Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel mainlined. Sent out this morning were the updated patches introducing the initial support and infrastructure around handling of Rust within the kernel.

• This summer saw the earlier patch series posted for review and discussion around introducing Rust programming language support in the Linux kernel to complement its longstanding C focus. In the months since there has been more progress on enabling Rust for the Linux kernel development, Linus Torvalds is not opposed to it, and others getting onboard with the effort. Rust for the Linux kernel remains of increasing interest to developers over security concerns with Rust affording more memory safety protections, potentially lowering the barrier to contributing to the kernel, and other related benefits.

Graphics Stack

• The Panfrost Gallium3D OpenGL driver and PanVK open-source drivers in Mesa have come a long way via reverse-engineering for Arm Mali graphics support. However, to this point the focus has been on Arm’s “Midgard” and “Bifrost” architectures while the newer “Valhall” architecture has been around the past two years. The Panfrost effort for bringing up Valhall is now getting underway.

• Alyssa Rosenzweig who has led the Panfrost effort for open-source Arm Mali graphics has been working for a while now on getting Arm’s Valhall architecture reverse-engineered and supported by the Linux graphics driver code. (That’s also in addition to her separate work on reverse-engineering the Apple M1 graphics as another ongoing open-source adventure.)

• It’s been a number of months since GRVK 0.4 as the open-source project re-implementing AMD’s defunct Mantle API over the modern Vulkan API that was originally based on the former. With Sunday’s release of GRVK 0.5, this Mantle-on-Vulkan translation layer is now capable of correctly rendering Battlefield 4.

• Battlefield 4 back in the day was one of the flagship titles having a native Mantle renderer for that AMD-specific graphics API. Battlefield 4 was a flagship title for Mantle and one of the few games using this API along with the likes of Battlefield Hardline, Thief, Sniper Elite III, and others.

• Landing in Mesa 22.0 on Sunday night was the Radeon Vulkan driver “RADV” support for the recently introduced VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering extension.

• VK_KHR_dynamic_rendering premiered last month with Vulkan 1.2.197. This new extension allows for creating single-pass render pass instances without the need of creating render pass objects or frame-buffers.

• The Khronos documentation on dynamic rendering explains, “If you’re not using multiple subpasses or input attachments though, go ahead, rip those render pass objects right out! Dynamic rendering offers similar rendering performance to a single pass render pass object but with a much simpler interface on all implementations. Hopefully this extension will make writing future Vulkan renderers just a bit more enjoyable.”

Applications

• On the road to AppStream 1.0, a lot of items from the long todo list have been done so far – only one major feature is remaining, external release descriptions, which is a tricky one to implement and specify. For AppStream 1.0 it needs to be present or be rejected though, as it would be a major change in how release data is handled in AppStream.

• Besides 1.0 preparation work, the recent 0.15 release and the releases before it come with their very own large set of changes, that are worth a look and may be interesting for your application to support. But first, for a change that affects the implementation and not the XML format…

• Browsing websites from the command line has a niche following from seasoned Linux users. In the early days, users could access the websites from a terminal using text-only browsers like Lynx. At the time, most people used low-powered PCs with slow internet connections. Fast forward, Linux users are spoilt for choices with many modern GUI web browsers like Firefox, Chromium, Brave, or lightweight browsers like Midori, Otter. However, browsing from the terminal is still much practiced.

• The article describes some of the best text-based web browsers and how to install them in your Linux distribution.

• A text-based web browser displays the text content of a website. The majority of its niche community are seasoned Linux command line users who want to get everything done from the terminal. Text-based browsers provide faster loading and minimum bandwidth usage, which is great for low bandwidth connections. Another use case of command-line browsers is for system administrators who only interact with a terminal console.

• We are happy to announce that MAAS 3.1 has been released. MAAS 3.1 brings some of the most frequently-requested features into the product. A lot of this is serendipity — or maybe you could say that it’s about like minds tracking the same problem. Either way, we’re doing our best to provide features that match our users’ needs, as soon as we possibly can.

• In any case, the details of these features are a little big for one blog, so we’ll be taking a detailed look at one feature a week over the next seven or eight weeks (not counting the Christmas break). In this introductory blog, we’ll be introducing these requested features and linking you to more information in the product documentation.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this guide, we are going to learn how to install and set up Grafana OSS in Debian 11.

• Grafana is a multi-platform open source analytics and interactive visualization web application. It provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.

• In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to install MySQL on your Ubuntu 20.04 and how to use it with the basic MySQL commands. MySQL is an open-source relational database management system and with its popularity is used widely on different systems for storing data.

• In this post you will learn more about logging to MySQL with or without root user, database creation, user creation, granting privileges, external access to your databases, importing a database, making a dump of a database and etc. Let’s get started!

• In this video, we are looking at how to install WPS Office 2019 on Elementary OS 6.0.

• Today we are looking at how to install Scratch on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• Apache HTTP Server is a free and open-source cross-platform web server software. The goal of Apache is to provide a secure, efficient, and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.

• The main job of the Apache web server is to establish connections between the server and a browser. This aids in the transfer of files between the server and the client.

• Apache provides many modules that allow server administrators to turn on and off some functionalities. It has modules such as those for security, caching, password authentication, URL rewriting, etc.

• In this tutorial guide, I will take you through the installation steps of the Apache webserver on the Fedora 35 server.

• Sometimes it’s nice to be able to change the text, or foreground, color when working with shell scripts or the Linux command line. This is a useful trick as it allows us to make the text more readable and the output more interesting. This can be done using ansi escape codes. Let’s take a look at a quick example.

Games

• AssaultCube hasn’t seen a new release since 2013, but now it’s back with AssaultCube 1.3 Lockdown Edition to the delight of all Linux fans.

• AssaultCube is a name which probably plenty of Linux users know but haven’t heard anything of in a long time. For those of you unaware, it’s a free multiplayer first-person shooter game, based on the CUBE engine. The game is available free of charge to download for Microsoft Windows, Linux and macOS.

• Although the main focus of AssaultCube is multiplayer online gaming, a single player mode consists of computer-controlled bots. The game has a ton of fan made maps, and the game comes with like 45.

• Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun – Aiko’s Choice, the new standalone addon to the very popular stealth tactics game Shadow Tactics is out now.

• Focusing on one of the main game’s protagonists: the kunoichi adept Aiko. She is a master of camouflage and distracts enemies disguised as a geisha. While Aiko was certain that she left her old life behind, her former sensei, the cunning spymaster Lady Chiyo, reappears from the shadows to challenge her. Together with her friends—a group of deadly assassins—she sets out to hunt down the ghosts of her past.

• We’re back for the 3rd part of the Linux Tech Tips linux challenge and this week went surprisingly well, I mean really well I didn’t even have anything to say about most of the video. For basic user tasks Linus and Luke have sort of got used to using Linux.

• in 2018 I talked about some hack I’d made to the classic computer game Doom from 1993. I’ve done several hacks to Doom that I could probably talk about except I’ve become a bit uncomfortable about increasingly being thought of as “that doom guy”. I’d been reflecting on why it was that I continued to mess about with that game in the first place and I realised it was a form of expression: I was treating Doom like a canvas.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Fly Pie is a GNOME Shell launcher (available as an extension) designed for users who have one hand on the mouse most of the time. It can be used to launch applications, URLs, recent files, simulate hotkeys, access the clipboard, and more. It works under both X11 and Wayland.

• With Fly Pie, you use a keyboard shortcut to open a menu, then use the mouse to do the rest. Once you open a menu, there are three alternative selection modes: point and click (select an item by clicking on it), marking mode (select items by drawing gestures) and turbo mode (draw gestures while holding Ctrl, Shift or Alt without having to press your mouse button).

Distributions

• Another 6 months have passed and we are proud to announce the release of our 2021.10 snapshot. The images are available at the usual place. As usual we have automatically received all updates that have been integrated into illumos-gate.

• The new images are interesting for people with newer hardware that hasn’t been supported in the past. There is no necessity to re-install from newer images as OpenIndiana Hipster is a rolling release and will bring all updates with a simple call of “pfexec pkg update -v”.

• More details will follow when time permits…

• OpenIndiana as the open-source operating system forked from what was Sun’s OpenSolaris and now based on Illumos is out with its latest half-year update.

• What’s in store with OpenIndiana 2021.10? Improved hardware support, which is great to see. Upstream Solaris these days hasn’t had robust and timely hardware support like many years ago during the great Sun Microsystems days, but for the community-based open-source Solaris/Illumos-based platforms maintaining modern hardware support has been even more of a challenge. The release announcement notes, “The new images are interesting for people with newer hardware that hasn’t been supported in the past.”

• We’re excited to release v94.4 today. This release will go out to all channels for the Home, Education, and Enterprise Editions of CloudReady.

• Reminder: We’ll slowly roll out updates on stable channels for all editions to reduce the chance of any unidentified issues affecting users. Only a few devices will receive the update right away, with more following over time. We understand, though, that some users will want to see this new update without waiting.

New Releases

• We take a look at what’s new in Makulu Shift, some News and Release Date details confirmed, enjoy the Video…

Screenshots/Screencasts

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Endless OS 4.0.0 and some of the applications pre-installed.

IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

• While many aspects of edge computing aren’t new, the overall picture continues to evolve quickly. For example, “edge computing” encompasses the distributed retail store branch systems that have been around for decades. The term has also swallowed all manner of local factory floor and telecommunications provider computing systems, albeit in a more connected and less proprietary fashion than was the historical norm.

• Edge computing helps IT and business leaders solve problems as both sensor data and machine learning data proliferates.

• However, even if we see echoes of older architectures in certain edge computing deployments, we also see developing edge trends that are genuinely new or at least quite different from what existed previously. And they’re helping IT and business leaders solve problems in industries ranging from telco to automotive, for example, as both sensor data and machine learning data proliferates.

• For any digital transformation project to succeed, you need a well-laid-out road map, clear objectives, and bite-sized goals to mark the milestones. And it’s important to put those plans into action and measure their success against the pre-defined relevant metrics.

• The pandemic made the pace of digital transformation a key performance metric by making it urgent for enterprises to embrace and accelerate digital. Now it’s time to think beyond speed and measure the success of digital transformation against metrics that align with business goals.

• Which came first: the culture or the technology? Many companies are facing this Catch 22 as they modernize to better meet customer demands. It doesn’t have to be one before the other—actually, they should kind of go hand in hand.

• This month our customer success spotlights, which span from Europe to Southeast Asia, demonstrate how Red Hat helps customers focus on two critical components of success: helping their people learn new skills and implementing new technology. Let’s see how Red Hat OpenShift and Online Partner Enablement Network have helped customers and partners modernize their environments to keep up with growing market demands.

• In today’s world where organizations frequently use multiple cloud providers, datacenters, and systems in edge environments, secure communication between these distributed systems is essential. Host-to-host VPN tunnels allow for encrypted communication between systems, and are frequently used when traffic needs to traverse untrusted networks such as the public internet.

• While host-to-host VPN tunnels can be implemented on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) manually, this can be time consuming and error-prone. Red Hat introduced the VPN RHEL System Role in RHEL 8.5 to provide an automated solution to implement host-to-host VPN connections, as well as opportunistic mesh VPNs.

• RHEL System Roles are a collection of Ansible roles and modules that are included in RHEL to help provide consistent workflows and streamline the execution of manual tasks. For more information on VPNs in RHEL, refer to the configuring a VPN with IPsec documentation.

• Red Hat OpenShift Service Mesh 2.1 requires using WebAssembly extensions instead of Istio Mixer to extend Service Mesh functionality. The 2.11 release of Red Hat 3scale API Management also supports using WebAssembly extensions. Thus, the latest release of the 3scale integration for Istio uses the WebAssembly proxy instead of the Istio Mixer component.

• Developers can use WebAssembly extensions in OpenShift Service Mesh and 3scale to add features directly to the Envoy proxy, thereby moving common functionality out of applications and into the sidecar.

• Camel Quarkus is a subproject in the Apache Camel community that enables Camel to run on Quarkus. Apache Camel is the most popular open source community project aimed at solving all things integration. Quarkus is a Java framework tailored for OpenJDK HotSpot and GraalVM, boasting lightning-fast boot times and low memory utilization.

• This article explains how Camel has evolved over time and why it is now embracing Quarkus. I’ve included a quick getting started guide that will show you how easy it is to create a Camel Quarkus project and experience the significant performance benefits for yourself.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Guess what, folks? Freespire 8.0 is available to download immediately. This version of the Ubuntu-based operating system utilizes Linux kernel 5.4.0-91 LTS while using Xfce 4.16 as its desktop environment. This no-nonsense distribution is fairly lightweight and easy to use, making it a good choice for Linux newbies; particularly with aging (not obsolete) hardware.

• Surprisingly, the developers have decided to focus heavily on Google with this release. This includes the search giant’s services (Translate, News, etc.) and the Chrome browser. Apparently, this new focus is a result of reading user feedback. While this may scare some privacy-zealots away, it should make the operating system more appealing to the average home computer user. Let’s be honest, shall we? Google services are rather essential for many people.

• It’s that time of the year again: many folks are panic buying cans of windscreen de-icer spray and thermal underwear, bringing pine trees into the front room and preparing to enjoy an extended break with the family. So we thought to ourselves, what better time than now to take a look back at the year gone by on the Canonical Data Platform?

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 712 for the week of November 28 – December 4, 2021. The full version of this issue is available here.

• Since I wrote Launch Ubuntu Desktop on Google Cloud last week, I kept thinking about putting Ubuntu Desktop into containers. A container is an independent unit of software packages and their dependencies so that the application on the container can run reliably in different computing environments. Docker, an open-source project launched in 2013, made Container technology popular all over the world in just a few years. Why? Let’s compare Containers and Virtual Machines.

Devices/Embedded

• The NCA-1040 runs Linux on Intel’s quad-core, 1.5GHz/3.0GHz Atom x6413E or quad-core, 1.2GHz/3.0GHz Pentium N6415. Both Elkhart Lake processors provide Intel’s new AES-NI instruction set for network security, notes Lanner. The “fanless multi-service gateway” is aimed at “edge environment, branch offices and retail settings for applications such as routing, VoIP, VPN, firewall, IPS/IDS, web filtering, email server, high-volume storage and wireless networking hub,” says the company.

• Like Aaeon’s very similarly equipped FWS-2280, but unlike the previous Lanner systems, the NCA-1040 supports up to 32GB DDR4 3200 via a single slot. The 4x GbE ports use Intel i211 controllers. There is also an RJ45 console port.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Arduino is an open-source electronics platform. Originally created for educational purposes, it has since expanded its range of boards for makers as well as some commercial use.

• Some Arduino boards have a small form factor and are ideal for wearable projects. Let’s take a look at some wearables made with the Arduino.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

SaaS/Back End/Databases

• Version 5.2 of pgFormatter, a free and reliable tool used to format SQL and PLPGSQL code, has been officially released and is publicly available for download. A demonstration site is available online at http://sqlformat.darold.net/

• pgFormatter is the most advanced SQL and PlPgsql code formatter and beautifier dedicated to PostgreSQL. It is provided as a CLI or a CGI program.

• This is a maintenance release to fix issues reported by users since the last three months. As usual there is also some improvements and new features.

• We are excited to announce that pgDay Paris is back for 2022 – live and in person on March 24!

• That’s right – COVID-19 may have stopped us last year, but this year, we’re back and we’re looking forward to seeing you there.

• Potential speaker?

• Got an idea for a presentation? We’re now accepting proposals for talks 45 minutes in length, on any PostgreSQL-related topic. Check out our past conferences to get some ideas if you think you might want to give a talk but don’t know where to start.

Programming/Development

• Attention testers! On behalf of Testing and Automation devroom we’d like to announce that call for participation is now open.

• While the performance of LLVM/Clang has improved a lot over the years and for x86_64 and AArch64 can be neck-and-neck with the GCC compiler, the fierce performance battle is not over. With LLVM/Clang 14.0 due out in the early months of 2022 will be more performance work with one recent commit in particular showing a lot of promise.

• LLVM developer Djordje Todorovic recently landed an improvement to LLVM’s Loop Invariant Code Motion (LICM) Pass for being able to hoist a LOAD without STORE. The patch explains, “When doing load/store promotion within LICM, if we cannot prove that it is safe to sink the store we won’t hoist the load, even though we can prove the load could be dereferenced and moved outside the loop. This patch implements the load promotion by moving it in the loop preheader by inserting proper PHI in the loop. The store is kept as is in the loop. By doing this, we avoid doing the load from a memory location in each iteration.” The improvement to this pass helps to address this bug report around missed opportunities for register promotion.

• Another small release of the tidyCpp package arrived on CRAN this morning. The packages offers a clean C++ layer (as well as one small C++ helper class) on top of the C API for R which aims to make use of this robust (if awkward) C API a little easier and more consistent. See the vignette for motivating examples.

• This release makes a tiny code change, remove a YAML file for the disgraced former continuous integration service we shall not name (yet that we all used to use). And just like digest five days ago, drat four days ago, littler three days ago, RcppAPT two days ago, and RcppSpdlog yesterday, we converted the vignettes from using the minidown package to the (fairly new) simplermarkdown package which is so much more appropriate for our use of the minimal water.css style.

• Seems Vino is deprecated in Fedora 35 because of the security issue and gnome-remote-desktop is the replacement but there are a few document to setup the VNC server and let me summarize the setup and differences.

• There are no Easter eggs in curl. For the good.

• I’ve been asked about this many times. Among the enthusiast community, people seem to generally like the concept of Easter eggs and hidden treasures, features and jokes in software and devices. Having such an embedded surprise is considered fun and curl being a cool and interesting project should be fun too!

• With the risk of completely ruining my chances of ever being considered a fun person, I’ll take you through my thought process on why curl does not feature any such Easter eggs and why it will not have any in the future either.

• When it comes to electronic design, breadboarding a circuit is the fun part — the creative juices flow, parts come and go, jumpers build into a tangled mess, but it’s all worth it when the circuit finally comes to life. Then comes the “What have I done?” phase, where you’ve got to backtrack through the circuit to document exactly how you built it. If only there was a better way.

• Thanks to [Nick Bild], there is, in the form of the “Schematic-o-matic”, which aims to automate the breadboard documentation process. The trick is using a breadboard where each bus bar is connected to an IO pin on an Arduino Due. A program runs through each point on the breadboard, running a continuity test to see if there’s a jumper connecting them. A Python program then uses the connection list, along with some basic information about where components are plugged into the board, to generate a KiCad schematic.

• While multiplication is defined in the context of repeated addition, implementing it that way algorithmically is not nearly as efficient as some other approaches. One algorithm for multiplication that is an order of magnitude faster is to halve one number while doubling the other. I gave myself the challenge of implementing this algorithm in AARCH64 Assembly, and it was not too hard.

• Welcome, December –we’re opening the month with another great week. Here’s what the Apache community has been up to…

• In this article, I will show you how to install Apache JMeter and how to use it to do load testing on websites. JMeter is an open-source Java-based load testing tool. It is useful to check and improve the performance after developing a new website. With load tests, it checks the performance of the system and helps to stimulate the weight of the load. As it is mainly focused on testing web applications, one can make a better website for all the users. But now, it is also used for different other purposes like functional testing and database testing.

• Now let’s see how to install the Apache JMeter and use it on Ubuntu 20.04.

Perl/Raku

• On IRC vasko asked how to handle a –verbose-flag. This is quite simple.

Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

• Welcome to part 3 of Bash Shell Scripting at a beginner level. This final article will look at a few more items that will get you primed for your continued personal development. It will touch on functions, using comparisons with if/elif statements, and will wrap up with looking into the while loop.

Leftovers

Hardware

• When starting a new electronics project today, one of the first things that we tend to do is pick the integrated circuits that make up the core of the design. This can be anything from a microcontroller and various controller ICs to a sprinkling of MOSFETs, opamps, and possibly some 7400- or 4000-series logic ICs to tie things together. Yet it hasn’t been that long since this level of high integration and miniaturization was firmly in the realm of science-fiction, with even NORBIT modules seeming futuristic.

• Starting with the construction of the first point-contact transistor in 1947 and the bipolar junction transistor (BJT) in 1948 at Bell Labs, the electronics world would soon see the beginning of its biggest transformation to that point. Yet due to the interesting geopolitical circumstances of the 20th century, this led to a fascinating situation of parallel development, blatant copying of designs, and one of the most fascinating stories in technology history on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

• Conductive filament exists, but it takes more than that to 3D print something like a circuit board. The main issue is that traces made from conductive filament are basically resistors; they don’t act like wires. [hobochild]’s interesting way around this problem is to use electroplating to coat 3D-printed traces with metal, therefore creating a kind of 3D-printed circuit board. [hobochild] doesn’t yet have a lot of nitty-gritty detail to share (update: here’s the project page with more detail), but his process seems fairly clear.

• The usual problem with electroplating is that the object to be coated needs to be conductive. [hobochild] addresses this by using two different materials to create his test board. The base layer is printed in regular (non-conductive) plastic, and the board’s extra-thick traces are printed in conductive filament. Electroplating takes care of coating the conductive traces, resulting in a pretty good-looking 3D-printed circuit board whose conductors feature actual metal. [hobochild] used conductive filament from Proto-pasta and the board is a proof-of-concept flashing LED circuit. Soldering might be a challenge given the fact that the underlying material is still plastic, but the dual-material print is an interesting angle that even allows for plated vias and through-holes.

• The microcontroller can be programmed with Arm Keil SecurCore SC000 software development tools that include an instruction set simulator (ISS) and a C compiler. STMicroelectronics also provides a time-accurate hardware emulator controlled by the Keil debugger and the ST development environment, as well as a product simulator based on Keil’s ISS simulator for the Arm SecurCore SC000 CPU.

• More details can be found on the product page. The solution was also on display on November 30 – December 2 at Trustech 2021 in Paris, with STMicro showing a secure biometric payment based on STPay-Topaz-Bio “ready-to-use payment solution”, which the company also called a “Biometric System-on-Card (BSoC) solution”, equipped with ST31N600 MCU and an STM32L4 microcontroller embedded in an EMV (Eurocard Mastercard Visa) module.

• Amlogic has decided to enter the automotive market with the Amlogic V901D quad-core Cortex-A55 processor designed for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) applications such as car dashboards, multi-camera dashcam systems, automotive multimedia players, and so on.

• Also equipped with an Arm Mali-G31 MP2, a 1 TOPS NPU, support for 4K AV1 video decoding, and a 12nm manufacturing processor, Amlogic V901D may look like a rebranded Amlogic S905X4 at first glance, but as we’ll see below, it includes some features specific to the automotive infotainment market.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• When the Vivaldi browser folks sent me an email late in the day last week saying “we turn five today” my heart sank, because I’m the type of person who hates to have to offer belated happy birthday greetings. Turns out, the “we turn five” wasn’t really a reference to the browser’s age (although the browser did, indeed, have its fifth birthday in April of this year), but an announcement of the release of Vivaldi 5.0, the latest and greatest version of the Chrome-based browser.

• Norway-based Vivaldi Technologies was started by Tatsuki Tomita and Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, who is now the company’s CEO. Von Tetzchner was also the co-founder and CEO of Opera, and started Vivaldi as a virtual community after new owners at Opera shut down the My Opera virtual community. The community and browser company is named after the 17th and 18th century composer, Antonio Vivaldi, who’s widely known for his operas — for those who didn’t catch the connection.

• Percepio®, the leader in visual trace diagnostics for embedded systems and the Internet of Things (IoT), has been awarded the prestigious Elektra Award 2021 for its visual trace diagnostics tool Tracealyzer for Linux.

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