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Linux Action News 91 Feb 03, 2019

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Firefox is standing out, Pine64 has a lot more cheap Linux hardware coming, and the good and the bad with the new Kodi Release.

Plus HP Joins LVFS, why you shouldn't expect a Raspberry Pi 4 in 2019, and more.

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Firefox 65 released — We’re happy to announce a new set of redesigned controls for the Content Blocking
Next version of Firefox might warn users of software that performs MitM attacks — The Firefox browser will soon come with a new security feature that will detect and then warn users when a third-party app is performing a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack by hijacking the user's HTTPS traffic.
Mozilla halts Firefox 65 distribution on Windows — The organization released Firefox 65.0 for all supported operating systems a few days ago on January 29, 2019.
CFR annoying some users
HP joins LVFS — If you’ve got a Z2, Z6, Z8, Z440, Z640 or Z840 system then you might want to check for an update in the GNOME Software updates panel or using fwupdmgr update in the terminal.
Pine64 to Launch $79 Linux Tablet, $199 PineBook Pro Laptop — Pine64, the company that gave us the $89 Pinebook Linux laptop, is branching out and is set to launch a Linux tablet this year for just $79. That's as well as a new Linux laptop, smartphone, camera, single board computers, and retro gaming kit.
Pine64 forum announcement
We won't see a Raspberry Pi 4 in 2019 — "I don’t have a route to do something this year," he told us. "I think we kind of understand what featureset we want [and] what would be involved in getting that featureset. I don’t think we have a defined plan for turning that into a product yet."
Kodi 18.0 Released — One of the big features of this release: support for gaming emulators, ROMs and controls.

Linux Action News 90 Jan 27, 2019

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Debian has a big fix, Chromium might block ads, Valve makes another big investment in Linux, and Google gets serious about bringing Fuchsia to market.

Plus we announce a new Linux podcast, and run down the many ways to run Ubuntu on Windows.

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Choose Linux - New JB Show — The show that captures the excitement of discovering Linux.
Steam For Linux Now Lets You Play Windows Games From Other Stores — Users can now launch Windows games purchased on platforms outside of Steam from inside the Steam for Linux client.
Looks like it’s still using Wine 3.16
Wine 4.0 Released — This release represents a year of development effort and over 6,000 individual changes.
Microsoft Employee Hints at Windows Core OS Open Source Components — The Security Program Manager then said that he "improved the security posture of Windows Open Source Components through initiatives that investigate vulnerabilities found and establish a process for remediation.”
Multipass for Win10 public beta — Multipass, at its core, is a service to manage Linux (in this case, Ubuntu) virtual machines in Windows 10 without the overhead of faffing about with Hyper-V (although Hyper-V is most definitely required to make the thing work).
Ubuntu Core 18 gets 10 years of support — Dell has been working closely with Canonical over the past three years to certify Ubuntu Core on all our Edge Gateway platforms.
Debian releases new images with apt fix — This point release incorporates the recent security update for APT, in order to help ensure that new installations of stretch are not vulnerable. No other updates are included.
It might be harder to block ads in Chromium — Google engineers have proposed changes to the open-source Chromium browser that will break content-blocking extensions, including ad blockers.
Google poaches 14-year Mac veteran from Apple to bring Fuchsia to market — Stevenson started at Apple in 2004 as a Product Release Engineer for OS X. In this role, he “triaged and diagnosed” application and framework issues, while also working with third-party developers.

Linux Action News 89 Jan 20, 2019

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Another troubling week for MongoDB, ZFS On Linux lands a kernel workaround, and 600 days of postmarketOS.

Plus our thoughts on the new Project Trident release, and Mozilla ending their Test Pilot program.

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MongoDB removed from major distros — Red Hat won't use MongoDB in Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora thanks to MongoDB's new Server Side Public License.
ZFS On Linux Landing Workaround For Linux 5.0 Kernel Support — There's no word yet on how this would affect ZFS Linux performance for end-users.
First release of Project Trident — This version is based off the 18.12-stable branch of TrueOS (FreeBSD 13-CURRENT), using the new TrueOS distribution framework with several add-ons by Project Trident itself.
Android-x86 8.1-r1 (Oreo-x86) released — Add Taskbar as an alternative launcher which puts a start menu and recent apps tray on top of your screen and support freeform window mode.
600 days of postmarketOS — postmarketOS is aiming for a ten year life-cycle for smartphones
Mozilla kills Test Pilot Program — So today, we are announcing that we will be moving to a new structure that will demonstrate our ability to innovate in exciting ways and as a result we are closing the Test Pilot program as we’ve known it.
Mozilla Kills Default Support for Adobe Flash in Firefox 69

Linux Action News 88 Jan 13, 2019

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Choose your own Linux is coming to Chrome OS, GitHub private repos go free, LVFS gets another win, and Amazon released their MongoDB competitor DocumentDB.

Plus Homebrew comes to Linux, the recent Ethereum Classic attack, and more.

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Chrome OS may soon let companies choose their own distro for Linux apps — Device administrators will be able to designate a URL for Chrome OS to download the Linux distro from a hash to ensure the download was successful.
Github offers free private repos — Today we’re announcing two major updates to make GitHub more accessible to developers: unlimited free private repositories, and a simpler, unified Enterprise offering.
Homebrew comes to Linux — The most significant changes since 1.8.0 are Linux support, (optional) automatic brew cleanup and providing bottles (binary packages) to more Homebrew users.
Amazon launches Mongo-compatible DocumentDB — The launch of AWS DocumentDB – a fully managed document database service – comes just months after MongoDB announced a new licence
Phoenix joins the LVFS — Just like AMI, Phoenix is a huge firmware vendor, providing the firmware for millions of machines.
Ethereum Classic suffers 51-percent attack — Rollback attack let attackers spend 88,500 previously spent coins.
Coinbase Suspends Ethereum Classic

Linux Action News 87 Jan 06, 2019

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Raspberry Pi joins the RISC-V Foundation, MIPS is going open source, and Mozilla is experimenting with more ads in Firefox.

Plus the BSDs rebase their ZFS on the Linux implementation, the EU has bug bounties, and Thunderbird gets set to fly!

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Raspberry Pi joins RISC-V Foundation — We're excited to have joined the @risc_v Foundation as a silver member. Hoping to contribute to maturing the Linux kernel and @debian port for the world's leading free and open instruction set architecture.
Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Driver Finally Being Mainlined — The Raspberry Pi 7-inch touchscreen retails for about $60 USD and with the Linux 4.21 should be playing nicely with the mainline kernel.
MIPS to be open sourced — The MIPS Open initiative will help greatly expand the existing MIPS ecosystem comprised of thousands of developers and over 100 academic institutions worldwide by offering new opportunities to create innovative solutions from third-party tool vendors, software developers and universities.
Wave Computing takes funding over $200 million
EU Offers Bug Bounties For 14 Open Source Projects — As the bug bounty programs begin to roll out in January, security experts worry that the programs miss the mark on truly securing open source projects.
Mozilla "experimenting" with more ads in Firefox. — “This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner.”
Thunderbird ready to fly into 2019 — Welcome to 2019, and in this blog post we’ll look at what we got accomplished in 2018 and look forward to what we’re going to be working on this year.
FreeBSD admits that Linux is better (when it comes to ZFS) — In the past few years the vast majority of new development in ZFS has taken place in DelphixOS and zfsonlinux (ZoL). Earlier this year Delphix announced that they will be moving to ZoL. This shift means that there will be little to no net new development of Illumos.

Linux Action News 86 Dec 30, 2018

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We take a look back at our 2018 Linux predictions, and make some bold new ones for the year ahead.

Plus there’s no avoiding how far off we were when it came to Bitcoin last year, but that didn’t stop us having a go again this year!

Linux Action News 85 Dec 23, 2018

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It’s been a huge year for Linux and FOSS news, and we take a look at some of the major stories that shaped the industry over the last 12 months.

Acquisitions, solid releases, a revolution for gaming, politics in the kernel community, Chrome OS coming of age, and more.

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IBM to Acquire Red Hat — Most significant tech acquisition of 2018 will unlock true value of cloud for business
Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS — The world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc.
Welcome to Fedora CoreOS — This new thing will be “Fedora CoreOS” and serve as the upstream to Red Hat CoreOS.
Red Hat's Stratis Storage Project Reaches 1.0 — Stratis 1.0 was quietly released last week with the 1.0 version marking its initial stable release and where also the on-disk meta-data format has been stabilized.
Microsoft to acquire GitHub — Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced it has reached an agreement to acquire GitHub
Microsoft joins OIN — Microsoft is joining the Open Invention Network (“OIN”), a community dedicated to protecting Linux and other open source software programs from patent risk.
Microsoft’s Linux powered dev boards, Azure Sphere for sale — Azure Sphere is a solution for creating highly-secured, connected Microcontroller (MCU) devices, providing you with the confidence and the power to reimagine your business and create the future.
Ubuntu 18.04 released — The 'main' archive of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years until April 2023.
Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for 10 years — At OpenStack Summit in Berlin, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said in a keynote that Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support (LTS) support lifespan would be extended from five years to 10 years.
Valve’s “Steam Play” uses Vulkan to bring more Windows games to Linux — Valve announced today a beta of Steam Play, a new compatibility layer for Linux, to provide compatibility with a wide range of Windows-only games.
Steam Machines disappear from Valve's site — Valve is no longer highlighting Steam Machine hardware through the front page of its online Steam store, seemingly putting a final nail in the coffin of Valve's partnership with third-party PC builders.
Steam Link box discontinued — According to Valve, the inventory of Steam Links has fully depleted, meaning this one’s apparently gone for good.
Meltdown and Spectre — Meltdown and Spectre exploit critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. These hardware vulnerabilities allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer.
Linus takes a break and a new CoC for kernel devs — The revamped Linux code of conduct encourages behaviors like accepting constructive criticism gracefully, using inclusive language, and being respectful of “differing viewpoints and experiences.”
Linux apps on Chrome OS confirmed — Support for Linux will enable you to create, test and run Android and web app for phones, tablets and laptops all on one Chromebook. Run popular editors, code in your favorite language and launch projects to Google Cloud with the command-line. Everything works directly on a Chromebook.
Chrome OS tablet launched — The Pixel Slate is a Chrome OS tablet with a detachable keyboard cover that turns it into something very closely resembling a laptop.
Chrome OS 70 brings native network file share support — Mr. Beaufort points to a Chromium Gerrit commit that gives details of the feature that shows M70 of Chrome OS will have its NativeSmb flag to set to enabled by default.

Linux Action News 84 Dec 16, 2018

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Intel developers are working to open source the FSP, Fuchsia SDK and device repos show up in Android AOSP, and our BSD buddies have some big news.

Plus the pending removal of the x32 sub-architecture from Linux, why Uber is joining up with the Linux Foundation, and more.

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Intel Working On Open-Sourcing The FSP — Firmware support package (FSP) for initializing the Intel silicon - the CPU, memory controller, chipset.
Intel introduces the deep learning reference stack — The Deep Learning Reference Stack is highly-tuned and built for cloud native environments.
Uber brings Horovod project for distributed deep learning to Linux Foundation — Uber has used Horovod to support self-driving vehicles, fraud detection, and trip forecasting. Contributors to the project include Amazon, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia.
The x32 subarchitecture may be removed — The x32 subarchitecture is a software variant of x86-64; it runs the processor in the 64-bit mode, but uses 32-bit pointers and arithmetic.
Android Open Source Project now includes the Fuchsia SDK and a Fuchsia ‘device’ — This means that everyone who downloads AOSP, going forward, will download these two Fuchsia related repos.
FreeBSD 12.0 released — The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/12 branch.
Ho, Ho, Ho - 12.0 | BSD Now 276

Linux Action News 83 Dec 09, 2018

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Microsoft is moving to Chromium, and Mozilla isn't too thrilled about it.

Plus the Kernel team's clever Spectre slowdown fix, Emby goes proprietary, Steam Link lives on, and more.

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Microsoft Edge to move to a Chromium base — Today we’re announcing that we intend to adopt the Chromium open source project in the development of Microsoft Edge on the desktop to create better web compatibility for our customers and less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.
Mozilla not exactly thrilled about it — Microsoft is officially giving up on an independent shared platform for the internet.
Chrome and Firefox to have native Arm builds on Win10 — Mozilla announced today it is working on bringing a native version of Firefox to Windows 10 on ARM. The organization is doing so in cooperation with Qualcomm.
WordPress 5 Released — The new block-based editor won’t change the way any of your content looks to your visitors. What it will do is let you insert any type of multimedia in a snap and rearrange to your heart’s content.
Emby becomes proprietary — we are modularizing and open sourcing as many standalone components as we possibly can.
Spectre slowdown fix — Linux 4.20-rc5 addresses the performance issue by making the security defense optional.
NVIDIA open sources PhysX — We’re doing this because physics simulation — long key to immersive games and entertainment — turns out to be more important than we ever thought.
Steam Link lives on via the Raspberry Pi — The Steam Link app is now available in beta on the Raspberry Pi 3 and 3 B+ running Raspbian Stretch

Linux Action News 82 Dec 02, 2018

Show notes

Clear Linux doubles down on the desktop, Fedora 31 is likely canceled or delayed, and why Firecracker is being called the new "Docker killer".

Plus AMP's new governance model kicks in, and the Necuno Mobile Plasma tease.

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Clear Linux now easier to try and to install — The addition of the desktop-live image itself is also certainly a welcome addition for those planning a desktop install rather than first having to install the basic Clear Linux without any desktop environment, especially if you first want to verify your system's hardware support/compatibility before proceeding with the installation. From their downloads area the new images are the "live-desktop-beta" images.
Fedora 31 Will Likely Be Cancelled Or Significantly Delayed — Following the release of Fedora 30 in May, there might not be another major Fedora Linux release for about one year's time.
Fedora may move to annual releases — Not formally drafted besides a mailing list thread, there is a new proposal about moving Fedora to an annual platform release following Fedora 30. This was suggested by Red Hat's RHEL development coordinator, Brendan Conoboy.
AMP Project’s new governance model now in effect — Two key features of AMP’s new governance model are the Technical Steering Committee (TSC) and the Advisory Committee (AC). We have endeavored to ensure that these committees consist of people who bring a wide variety of perspectives, with representatives from different AMP constituencies.
Necuno Mobile: An open phone with Plasma Mobile — With a focus on openness, security and privacy, the Necuno Mobile is built around an ARM® Cortex®-A9 NXP i.MX6 Quad and a Vivante GPU. According to Necuno, none of the closed firmware has access to the memory.
Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation Announce Joint Collaboration — This partnership with the Linux Foundation will enable the RISC-V Foundation to grow the RISC-V ecosystem with improved support for the development of new applications and architectures across all computing platforms.
Firecracker mini VMs tipped to the next big thing — Firecracker can launch user space or application code in less than 125ms and microVMs at a rate of 150 per second per host. It churns out fairly compact microVMs too, with each requiring less than 5MiB of memory overhead, so thousands can co-exist on a single server.

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