Mozilla Announces the Hubs Discord Bot, Unity 2019.1 Now Available, Qt 5.13 Beta Is Out, Whitewater Foundry Launches Pengwin and the Valve Index VR Headset to Support Linux
News briefs for April 16, 2019.
Mozilla this morning announces the Hubs Discord Bot. Hubs allows you "to create private spaces where your conversations, content, and data is protected". The integration with the Discord platform will provide text and voice chat for Hub communities. From the blog post: "Using Discord as a persistent platform that is open to the public gives us the ability to be open about our ongoing work and initiatives on the Hubs team and integrate the community's feedback into our product planning and development."
Unity 2019.1 is now available. This is the first TECH Stream release of the year and has more than 283 new features and improvements. The blog post notes that it includes "many new production-ready features such as the Burst Compiler, the Lightweight Render Pipeline (LWRP), and Shader Graph. Also, there are numerous innovations for animators, mobile developers, and graphics experts, and multiple updates that streamline project workflows and simplify Editor tasks." You can download 2019.1 from here.
Qt 5.13 beta is out. Phoronix reports that this version is "another big upgrade to Qt5 featuring Lottie support for playable animations gITF 2.0 import support for assets into Qt 3D, WebAssembly improvements, upgrades the Qt WebEngine against Chromium 73, adds fullscreen-shell-unstable-v1 to Qt Wayland, and removes the old Qt Canvas 3D module." See the Qt Wiki for more information.
Whitewater Foundry has launched Pengwin, "a Linux environment for Windows 10 built on work by Microsoft Research and the Debian project". According to ZDNet, Pengwin was formerly WLinux and primarily provides a shell. The article also notes that "To help Pengwin work well with WSL, it comes with wslu. This is a set of useful open-source utilities for bridging the gap between WSL and Windows 10." In addition, it includes "OpenStack command-line interface (CLI) tools, Amazon Web Services (AWS) CLI tools, and TerraForm."
Valve confirms Linux support for its Valve Index VR headset. GamingOnLinux reports that you will be able to pre-order the VR headset starting May 1st.
Jill Franklin is an editorial professional with more than 17 years experience in technical and scientific publishing, both print and digital. As Executive Editor of Linux Journal, she wrangles writers, develops content, manages projects, meets deadlines and makes sentences sparkle. She also was Managing Editor for TUX and Embedded Linux Journal, and the book Linux in the Workplace. Before entering the Linux and open-source realm, she was Managing Editor of several scientific and scholarly journals, including Veterinary Pathology, The Journal of Mammalogy, Toxicologic Pathology and The Journal of Scientific Exploration. In a previous life, she taught English literature and composition, managed a bookstore and tended bar. When she’s not bugging writers about deadlines or editing copy, she throws pots, gardens and reads.
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