LWDW 147: Linux In 2019

NVIDIA open sources PhysX! Blender 2.8 Beta opens for testing, project Sputnik turns six and a rooted Tesla Model 3 running Ubuntu.

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Colour key – Venn Jill Pedro

Linux in 2019

2019 is the year that AI will go mainstream, and Linux is not only driving the cloud infrastructure for AI, but the super computers that run them.
Linux conventions are not only growing in attendance, but more conferences with a greater diversity of topics are slated for 2019!
Yeah, machine learning is the hot new thing and everyone wants to push for dominance on what only recently became a market segment all of its own.
Linux, as Jill mentions, is king of the server and supercomputer.
If you’re going to run massive workloads on beefy processors and GPUs, you are most likely going to want to penguin it up.
People using Linux without ever knowing it does not = people using Linux.
Would have said people running Linux.
Datalakes, AI, supercomputing Kernel 5.0 and conferences.

Open physics

License is 3-clause BSD.
It’s compatible with GPL and approved by FSF and OSI.
Something something drivers grumble grumble.
Guessing it’s now considered a dead tech by NVIDIA.
- Dead tech with quite a few games using it over the past few years…
Good on you NVidia!
If this is your way to get some positive press after the 2080ti artifacting kerfuffle, you got it.
PhysX 4.0 will be faster and more stable and improve functionality in the Unity and Unreal game engines.
Nvidia clearly understands that AI and big data all run on open source engines and Linux and they want to be a part of that.
PhysX is being open sourced.
Now Steam Play and Wine Windows games on Linux might launch faster!
Thank you Scott Michaud in shat for the great article at PC Perspective.
It’s important to remember that PhysX is not dependant on NVIDIA hardware.
It can be run by a CPU as well.
Could see adoption in AI for synthetic data creation and possibly games?
Only 60 or so games have used it since 2006.

Blending 2.8

It works.
I have no idea what I’m doing here but running the BMW render worked just fine on the X230.
This is a major update that us animators have been looking forward to for a very long time! Here are just a few of the major important upgrades:
- First off, the user interface has major changes which keep Blender inline with the workflow of propriety animation software.
  - Left click to select, interactive object gizmos and separate workspaces for modeling, animating, sculpting, texture painting etc.
- EEVEE is a new physically based real time renderer. It works both as a renderer for final frames, and as the engine driving Blender’s realtime viewport for creating assets.
- The 2D Animation Grease Pencil has now been fully integrated with the 3D workflow, and this puts Blender way ahead of any proprietary software in the industry.
- Raytracing render engine Cycles now renders 30% faster and lets you combine GPU and CPU rendering! This is a first in the industry!
The UI reminds me a lot of the original 3D Studio for DOS and Lightwave in my early years of animating.
The video editing portion is still as non intuitive as ever.

Multimedia guides

If the rest of the course is as well explained and as in depth as this article, it certainly is worth the price if you want to have a copy for yourself.
This is a great tutorial, and animated masking is a one of the techniques I teach my beginning animation students, and is required knowledge to work in the field.
Because of the beauty and complexity of graphics programs there are several ways to accomplish this technique with Kdenlive.
You can also use the Gimp or Inkscape to create a mask animation.
And as Paul Brown points out you can even use FFmpeg to create an animated mask.
This is also known as creating an animated alpha channel, and I have been using this in animation and editing since the early 90’s.
Using Kdenlive and ImageMagick to create animation masks falls squarely in a category I call, technically possible.
It’s a good learning experiment and will give you an idea of how things work.

Audio pretty

If you’re compiling on Ubuntu 19.04 beta, it looks for the default files in /etc/xdg/xdg-ubuntu/glava
I don’t think I need to point out why that is wrong.
That said, after you fix that bit of code to say just /etc/xdg it works:
- https://i.imgur.com/zZ4PLpJ.jpg
We can use more OpenGL audio spectrum visualizers on Linux!
I still enjoy using visualizers in VLC and Audacious, which used to be XMMS.

Six years of Sputnik

Dell was the first major computer hardware vendor to see the potential of Linux on the desktop for frontend software engineers and developers and not just as a backend for servers and IT.
Linux on Dell servers and workstations is a huge money maker, so it was worth it for them to try selling Linux on consumer desktops.
Founder and lead of project Sputnik, Barton George, and his team are huge advocates of Linux and open source.
On November 29, 2012 the Dell XPS 13 developer edition was born.
The XPS 13 is now in its 7th generation, comes with Ubuntu 18.04.

More Linux phones

Availability is still TBA
I’ve mentioned before I’m willing to buy a second hand Nexus 5 or 4 to try Ubuntu Touch, if they’re willing to send me one to review… I can’t promise I won’t point every single thing that’s wrong with it.
But I do promise I’ll give it a fair shake.
Necuno is less ambitious than the Purism phone and may have a good chance of success in the Libre phone market.

This ends well

Both terrifying and exciting.
Tesla with probably nerf this with a quickness.
I am sure Elon’s inner uber nerd would approve, but knows it is not safe for the average motorist.
Yes, you can run Doom!

Don’t

Because of Google Drives open API, there are a lot of third party GDrive backup and sync apps for the desktop and CLI.
I have been using Tux Drive on the console for quite some time.
I also love Rclone because it can backup to most of the popular cloud services, including Google Drive, Amazon S3, OneDrive, Dropbox, Mega, Box, etc.
As Jill points out, Rclone does a very good job of rsync’ing whichever folder you tell it to all the services without having to use their gimped clients!

RIP paywall blocker

To be fair this is in essence exploiting the cookie checker to see if you’re subscribed or not
I can see how this could be a bad precedent to allow and thus open the door to lawyers looking to cash in.
Cory Doctorow points out that there are 2 other Bypass Paywall extensions still available in the Mozilla Add-Ons Store.
Bypass Paywalls is still available in the Chrome’s add-on store.
Release and Beta versions of Firefox do not allow unsigned extensions to be installed.
Unpopular opinion: If you are using a site to the point of triggering their paywall consider giving them a few shekels because let’s face, you are already running an ad blocker.

Crossing the streams

A little plug for the original data bits used to create our solution.
Did I mention we’re streaming on Twitch?
NGINX server for the win!
We’re using Nginx server with RTMP to stream to Twitch and the Youtube.
Could also ass other services like Bookface and hitbox if we wanted.
Heck we could spool up our own player if need be.
Moral of the story is this is something that can be done on a $10 instance.
Or a Raspberry Pi if you have the bandwidth.

Slice of Pi

Beowulf

The miniNodes Raspberry Pi 3 CoM Carrier Board can accommodate up to 5 Raspberry Pi Computer on Modules (CoM) in a small, easy to use platform.
There is an integrated gigabit switch for networking.
It can be used for AI, containers, IoT and other industries that require remote computing, or as a great way to learn computer clustering.
It’s nice to see another awesome application for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module.
Hmm . . . I use to dream of the day of having my own Beowulf cluster! Oh wait, that is what my animation render farm is . . .

Pi cubed