Issue #207 / Feb 2018

Welcome

Linux Mint 18.3 Cinnamon (64-bit) and Ubuntu Mate 17.10 (32-bit)

This month in the news: KubeCon concludes in Austin, Texas, Dell to disable Intel’s insecure IME, Linus Torvalds’ advice to security experts, GPLv3 comes to the rescue of GPL violators, and Linux Kernel 4.14 released. 

Zack Brown discusses how to be a maintainer, power-up/power-down control, and smoothing out disk caching.

Compilers translate source code into executable programs and libraries. Inside modern compiler suites, a multistage process analyzes the source code, points out errors, generates intermediate code and tables, rearranges a large amount of data, and adapts the code to the target processor.

Due to the fast pace of updates of the C++ standards, compiler builders have been busy. How do the most popular compilers fit with the standards and what are the differences?

LibreOffice 5.4 is the last major release before the big jump to version 6. In addition to a number of updates, you can now sign Writer documents with OpenPGP.

Ubuntu is back to the first letter of the alphabet – and back to the Gnome desktop. But you'll also find lots of new stuff in the latest release.

Setting up a comprehensive firewall with netfilter and iptables is complicated. Graphic user interfaces seek to take the worries out of this demanding task.

The well-known Monty Hall game show problem can be a rewarding maiden voyage for prospective statisticians. But is it possible to teach a neural network to choose between goats and cars with a few practice sessions?