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Astronomy Software by Any Other Name

In this article, I introduce another option available for the astronomers out there—specifically, Cartes du Ciel, also known as SkyChart. Similar to other larger astronomy programs, you can use SkyChart from the desktop to the observatory.

Spy Games: the NSA and GCHQ Offer Their Software to the Open Source Community

Spies worth their salt are generally expected to be good at keeping secrets. With dead drops, encryption, cyanide pills and the like, openly sharing useful information isn’t supposed to be a part of the job description. So it caught more than a few of us off guard when a couple years ago, some of the top spy agencies began contributing code to GitHub, making it available to the masses by open-sourcing some of their software.

Purism Announces PureOS Is Now Convergent, LibreOffice 6.2.1 Now Available, Security Patch for Ubuntu 18.0.4 LTS, Bugfix Update for Plasma 5 and KaOS 2019.02 Recently Released

News briefs for March 6, 2019. Purism announces that PureOS is now convergent, which means "being able to make the same application code execute, and operate, both on mobile phones and laptops—adapting the applications to screen size and input devices". With PureOS, Purism "has laid the foundation for all future applications to run on both the Librem 5 phone and Librem laptops, from the same PureOS release".

Linux Kernel 5.0 Is Officially Out, ReactOS 0.4.11 Released, Python 2.7.16 Now Available, Some Linux Mint Updates and Rancher Labs Launches K3s

News briefs for March 4, 2019. Linux kernel 5.0 is out. Linus writes, "We have more than a handful of real fixes in the last week, but not enough to make me go "Hmm, things are really unstable". In fact, at least two thirds of the patches are marked as being fixes for previous releases, so it's not like 5.0 itself looks bad." The merge window for 5.1 is now open.