News briefs for December 3, 2018.
NVIDIA is open-sourcing its PhysX physics simulation engine. According to Phoronix[1], NVIDIA says ""We're doing this because physics simulation—long key to immersive games and entertainment—turns out to be more important than we ever thought. Physics simulation dovetails with AI, robotics and computer vision, self-driving vehicles, and high-performance computing." See also the NVIDIA blog[2] for more details.
miniNodes is launching a new Raspberry Pi 3 CoM carrier board that will allow developers to create mini ARM clusters. ZDNet reports[3] that the board has slots for five RPi 3s in order to "bring extreme edge compute capacity' to cramped spaces, industrial IoT applications, and remote villages". It also can be used " on the desktop for learning about compute clustering, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, or development using Python, Arm, and Linux". The carrier board is available now for pre-order for $259 from miniNodes[4].
Linux Mint 19.1 beta is now available. This version features a new desktop layout and many other improvements. You can download it from here[5]. Note that this is a beta version for testing and shouldn't be considered stable. (Source: OMG! Ubuntu![6].)
Linux kernel 4.20-rc5 is out. Linus wrote "So it all looks a bit odd, although none of it is hugely _alarming_. One of the reasons the arch side is a bit bigger than usual at this stage is that we got the STIPB performance regression sorted out, for example." In addition, he addressed the timing of the final 4.20 release: "So my current suggestion is that we plan on a Christmas release, everybody gets their pull requests for the next merge window done *before* the holidays, and then we see what happens. I think we all want to have a calm holiday season without either the stress of