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Kernel Summit: Last Friday (just before Labor Day) I learned that Linus had gotten confused about when and where the Maintainer's Summit was going to be held this year.

eWEEK: Mozilla's latest web browser release provides new web standards support for developers, speed improvements on Windows and patches for nine security issues.

Adobe will end support for Flash Media Player in 2020, but there are still a lot of Flash videos out there that need to be watched

 opensource.com: To build a successful DevOps environment, you must eliminate blame

Charts and other visualizations make it easier to convey information from your data.

Learn how to use configuration files to improve your work environment.

HowToForge: Pluck is a free, open source, small and simple content management system that can be used to manage your own website without knowledge of programming languages.

This tutorial shows how to check internet speed in Ubuntu on the shell.

 Tecmint: Learn how to easily identify Docker containers and name or rename containers in Linux.

Linuxconfig: Server-sent events is an HTML5 technology which allows a client to automatically monitor event notifications from a server, and react as needed.

News briefs for September 6, 2018.

GNOME announced the release of version 3.30, code-named Almería, yesterday. This version represents six months of work by the GNOME community and contains several improvements and new features, such as "new content reader mode in the Web application, search enhancements in the Files application, and improvements to screen recording and screen sharing. The Settings application now has a Thunderbolt panel to manage devices and dynamically shows hardware-related panels only when relevant hardware is detected". See release notes for more details.

Feral Interactive announces that Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, the award-winning narrative adventure game, will be released for Linux and macOS on September 13, 2018. You can pre-order the game from the Feral Interactive Store and view the trailer from Feral's YouTube Channel.

Tails 3.9, the "biggest release of the year" is out. With this new version, you can now install additional software automatically when starting Tails. Tails 3.9 also includes VeraCrypt integration. The release also contains many security fixes, so update now, if you haven't already. Download Tails from here.

GNOME recently received a $400,000 donation from Handshake.org and transferred $100,000 to GIMP. GIMP plans to use the funds for a "much overdue hardware upgrade for the core team members and organize the next hackfest to bring the team together, as well as sponsor the next instance of Libre Graphics Meeting".

SoftMaker Office is making its SoftMaker Office 2018 for Linux and Windows free for schools, universities and teachers. According to the press release, "Educational institutions can use the campus license not only in class, but also in administration. Teachers are also entitled to obtain a free license of the powerful Office package for private use." Collective orders from at least 10 students will receive the package at a discounted US$/EUR 9.95 per license instead of the regular US$/EUR 69.95.

 opensource.com: Manage your applications throughout their lifecycles with these key commands.

Forget all of those magical command-line PDF incantations and edit your PDFs easily with Xournal.

Somehow, despite all the issues with proprietary clients and the history of security issues with Acrobat, PDFs have become the de facto standard for your average print-ready document shared around the office. Sure, people might use some kind of open document format or a cloud editor if they intend to edit a document, but if the goal is to print the document or lock its contents in place, most people these days will export it to a PDF.

Reading PDFs is typically fine on Linux, because Linux has plenty of applications that can open PDFs for viewing, and you easily can print PDFs under Linux as well. Even Adobe supplied a proprietary (and somewhat outdated) port of its Acrobat Reader for Linux. Some distributions also offer the ability to create a special software printer that converts any print job sent to it into a local PDF file.

The problem comes when people want to turn read-only print-ready PDFs into read-write documents you need to modify. As more people work in paperless offices with strictly digital documents and fewer people own fax machines, you are more likely to find official documents like contracts show up in your INBOX in PDF format. These contracts likely were created with a proprietary PDF editor tool, and they usually have blanks for you to fill in and often signature lines so you can add a real signature. Unfortunately, for the longest time, even if you were using Adobe's own Linux port of Acrobat Reader, you couldn't reliably edit these PDFs, and you certainly couldn't easily add a real signature.

A lot of Linux applications claim the ability to edit PDFs from graphical tools like GIMP, or the aforementioned Acrobat Reader or tools like Inkscape. In the past, I've even gone so far as to use command-line tools to convert a PDF into multiple pages of a different format, edit that format, then use the command-line tools to convert it back to a PDF.

Then I discovered Xournal. Xournal is a graphical tool that's designed for note-taking and sketching either with a keyboard and mouse or even with a tablet and stylus. This program is pretty common, and you should be able to install it in any major Linux distribution, but otherwise, you can download the software from its Sourceforge page.

 LinuxUprising: The Rclone 1.43 release adds a new cloud storage backend, Jottacloud, a new copyurl command, reworked configuration for backends, and much more.

HowToForge: In Linux, block devices are special files that refer to or represent a device (which could be anything from a hard drive to a USB drive).