Debian 11 “Bullseye” To Begin Code Freeze In Early 2021

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March 13, 2020

The Debian release team has published their tentative freeze dates for the next major version of their Linux operating system, Debian 11 Bullseye.

In their draft calendar published this morning, the first milestone for Debian 11.0 would be the transition and build-essentials freeze set for 12 January 2021. The second milestone is the soft code freeze one month later on 12 February 2021. The third milestone is the actual hard freeze for the key packages and other packages lacking automated testing, which would be on 12 March.

[Source: Phoronix]

How to Install Netbeans on Ubuntu and Other Linux

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 13, 2020

NetBeans is an open source integrated development environment that comes with good cross-platform support. This tool has been recognized by the Java and C/C++ development community widely.

The development environment is quite flexible. You can configure this tool to support a wide array of development objectives. Practically, you can develop Web, Desktop and Mobile Applications without leaving this platform. It’s amazing, isn’t it? Besides this, the user can add a wide array of known languages such as PHP, C, C++, HTML, Ajax, JavaScript, JSP, Ruby on Rails and the list goes on and on!

If you are looking to install Netbeans on Linux, you have several ways to do that. I have written this tutorial primarily for Ubuntu but some installation methods are applicable to other distributions as well.

[Source: It’s FOSS]

10 Open-Source Datasets For Text Classification

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 13, 2020

One of the popular fields of research, text classification is the method of analysing textual data to gain meaningful information. According to sources, the global text analytics market is expected to post a CAGR of more than 20% during the period 2020-2024. Text classification can be used in a number of applications such as automating CRM tasks, improving web browsing, e-commerce, among others.

Check out 10 open-source datasets, which can be used for text classification. The Amazon Review dataset, for instance, consists of a few million Amazon customer reviews (input text) and star ratings (output labels) for learning how to train fastText for sentiment analysis. The size of the dataset is 493MB.

[Source: Analytics India Magazine]

Chrome OS 82 will bring major Linux terminal improvements

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 13, 2020

Google has been allowing Chrome OS users to run Linux apps for a few years. But the optional “Crostini” feature which makes this possible sort of feels tacked onto Chrome OS as an afterthought (which… to be fair, it was).

That could change when Chrome OS 82 is released on May 5th. It’s expected to include a major update to the Linux terminal app and user experience. The folks at Chrome Unboxed have published a sneak peek.

[Source: Liliputing]

Open Source vulnerabilities up almost 50 per cent

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 13, 2020

The number of vulnerabilities in open source projects surged almost 50 per cent in 2019, according to security biz WhiteSource, which can be seen as good news in the sense that you don’t find what you’re not looking for.

In its annual vulnerability report, the biz attributes the growing vulnerability count with increased awareness of open source security. That’s a consequence of widespread adoption of open source components and the overall growth of the community in recent years, not to mention media attention of data exposure. In other words, the bugs were always there but they’re more visible because we’re paying closer attention.

[Source: The Register]

How to enable the zRAM module for faster swapping on Linux

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 12, 2020

If you’ve dealt with Linux long enough, you are fully aware of swap. If you’re relatively new to Linux, this is what you need to understand about a swap partition: The swap partition is a dedicated partition to be used when a system runs out of RAM. When this happens, inactive pages are moved out of RAM and into the swap partition.

The problem with swap is that it typically resides on drives that are slower than the RAM installed on a system. Of course, this is Linux, so there’s always a way around this. Said way is the zRAM module. What this does is dedicate a portion of RAM to serve as the swap space.

[Source: TechRepublic]

AWS launches Bottlerocket, a Linux-based OS for container hosting

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 12, 2020

AWS has launched its own open-source operating system for running containers on both virtual machines and bare metal hosts. Bottlerocket, as the new OS is called, is basically a stripped-down Linux distribution that’s akin to projects like CoreOS’s now-defunct Container Linux and Google’s container-optimized OS. The OS is currently in its developer preview phase, but you can test it as an Amazon Machine Image for EC2 (and by extension, under Amazon EKS, too).

As AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr notes in his announcement, Bottlerocket supports Docker images and images that conform to the Open Container Initiative image format, which means it’ll basically run all Linux-based containers you can throw at it.

[Source: TechCrunch]

Open Group delivers new platform for the improved use of open source software

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 12, 2020

The Open Group, the vendor-neutral technology consortium, and the University of L’Aquila announced a partnership with a consortium of leading European research organizations, technology developers, industrial software developers, and open source forge providers. Together, they have addressed the complexity of selecting and utilizing open source software (OSS) projects available from leading online providers, including Eclipse.org, OW2, GitHub, and many others.

Supported by the European Union, the Developer-Centric Knowledge Mining from Large Open-Source Software Repositories (CROSSMINER) project has invested €4.5 million (US$4.9 million) to develop an innovative platform that examines the programming code and interactions surrounding OSS projects.

[Source: Help Net Security]

Project OWL To Offer Relief In Disaster

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 12, 2020

The Linux Foundation has announced Project OWL’s IoT device firmware effort will be hosted at the Foundation and is inviting developers worldwide to build mesh network nodes for global emergency communications networks. Project OWL, the winner of Call for Code 2018, is a cloud-based analytics tool that helps facilitate organization, whereabouts, and logistics for disaster response.

Project OWL envisions the nodes creating large-scale communications networks in the wake of natural disasters. The open source release of OWL’s firmware can quickly turn a cheap wireless device into a DuckLink, a mesh network node capable of connecting to any other Ducks physically around it.

[Source: TFiR]

Failings in open source disclosure puts users at risk

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Swapnil Bhartiya

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March 12, 2020

There has been a 50% rise in open source vulnerabilities, according to a study from platform provider WhiteSource. According to the State of open source security vulnerabilities report, more than 55% of reported open source vulnerabilities in 2019 were classified as “high” or “critical” severity, which WhiteSource said affected IT teams’ ability to prioritise vulnerability remediation.

The study found that the number of disclosed open source software vulnerabilities in 2019 skyrocketed to exceed 6,000. The research, which uses the WhiteSource database, is based on reported vulnerabilities, combining vulnerability reports from the US National Vulnerabilities Database (NVD), security advisories, peer-reviewed vulnerability databases and open source issue trackers.

[Source: ComputerWeekly.com]