Linux Action News

Linux Action News 299 Jul 06, 2023

Recent advances in embedded Linux, Canonical takes full control of LXD, ZFS gets a handy Btrfs feature, and updates on the show's production.

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Status of Embedded Linux — In this talk, Tim will give an overview of issues in the Linux in the embedded space that have come about in the past year
The 2023 State of The Embedded Linux Ecosystem
LXD Moves to Canonical — While the team behind Linux Containers regrets that decision and will be missing LXD as one of its projects, it does respect Canonical’s decision and is now in the process of moving the project over.
Ubuntu Maker Canonical Pulls In Control Of LXD
Nearly 40% of Linux gamers on Steam are on Steam Deck — Overall the Steam Deck has kind of taken over Linux gaming and June 2023's statistic are pretty striking.
Steam Deck on Twitter — “Hi all, just a quick note to celebrate a big milestone - we’ve just passed 10,000 Verified and Playable titles on Steam Deck! 🎉🥳🎉 A bunch of these titles are on sale (along with Steam Deck itself) at the Steam Summer Sale!
ZFS Block Cloning — Block Cloning allows to clone a file (or a subset of its blocks) into another (or the same) file by just creating additional references to the data blocks without copying the data itself. Block Cloning can be described as a fast, manual deduplication

Linux Action News 298 Jun 29, 2023

Why everyone is excited about the next Linux kernel, Valve's big hire, and Red Hat's clone war.

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Linux 6.4 Released — Released With Early Apple M2 Code, More WiFi 7, AMD Guided Autonomous Mode
Linux 6.4 Released, focus on 6.5 — Linus Torvalds on Sunday announced the release without making any comment at all on the state of the kernel, or the efforts that led to the release of this version. Indeed, he had little to say about the progress of version 6.4
Btrfs In Linux 6.5 May Bring A Cumulative Performance Improvement
Linux Kernel 6.4 Released with Interesting Mix of Changes
Bcachefs File-System Pull Request Submitted For Linux 6.5
Early access to the LXD graphical user interface — While we don’t yet advise you to use the LXD UI in a production setting, we made it available as an experimental feature and would like to invite you to take it out for a spin and share your feedback.
Early look at the LXD web UI - YouTube
Google Pixel 8 could debut Desktop Mode — The Pixel 8 series is expected to leverage DisplayPort alternate mode, although specific details are not yet available. Through code analysis, it is possible to speculate on Google’s intentions for this feature. One obvious use would be to transform a Pixel 8 phone into a desktop replacement.
Ubuntu Edge
Valve Contracts Another Prominent Open-Source Linux Graphics Driver Developer — Great to hear and given her vast experience will be exciting to see what open-source improvements she manages to further advance Linux gaming.
Red Hat’s commitment to open source: A response to the git.centos.org changes — Ultimately, we do not find value in a RHEL rebuild and we are not under any obligation to make things easier for rebuilders; this is our call to make. That brings me to CentOS Stream, of which there is immense confusion. I acknowledge that this is a change in a longstanding tradition where we went above and beyond, and change like this can cause some confusion.
Furthering the evolution of CentOS Stream
git.centos.org
A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model — We fear that be it through incompetence or malice, many RHEL salespeople and business development professionals may regularly violate GPL and no one knows about it. That said, the business model as described by IBM's Red Hat may well comply with the GPL — it's just so murky that any tweak to the model in any direction seems to definitely violate, in our experience.

Linux Action News 297 Jun 15, 2023

What we really like in Debian 12, the big players backing RISC-V, and the improvements in NextCloud Hub 5.

Note: Linux Action News will be off next week.

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Debian 12 “bookworm” released — This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as "obsolete". 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for "bookworm" is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code.
Debian 12 is nearly ready, and reassuringly boring
Debian 12 discussion on Hacker News
Linux Foundation & RISC-V International Launch RISC-V Fundamentals Course — This course prepares IT professionals to write assembly language code for RISC-V processors and use high-level languages like C to develop applications for RISC-V-based systems.
RISC-V Fundamentals Training Course — Learn everything you need to know about RISC-V, the open-source instruction set architecture that is predicted to become ubiquitous as it paves the way for the next 50 years of computing design and innovation.
Help Us Test Evolution — If you’re a bit more advanced user who would like to help with testing and you use Evolution from Flathub, consider switching to the beta channel. You wouldn’t switch to something broken. Milan doesn’t let low quality releases out. It’s for rather rare bugs that would be great to identify and fix before they hit everyone, or for early feedback when UX changes are being done.
Evolution Email App Wants Flatpak Beta Testers
Nextcloud Hub 5 — Hub 5 builds on all the improvements we introduced earlier this year, including the Smart Picker and it’s AI integrations, the cool new Nextcloud Tables app and more.
Nextcloud on Twitter — Announcing Hub 5: Self-hosted AI-powered digital workspace for everyone!

Linux Action News 296 Jun 08, 2023

Ubuntu gets serious about the immutable desktop, red flags from Red Hat, and the little tricks Apple used to patch Wine.

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Ubuntu Core as an immutable Linux Desktop base — In this blog post we discuss the architecture of immutable operating systems, their benefits and drawbacks, and the role of Ubuntu Core in the immutable Linux landscape.
Red Hat To Stop Shipping LibreOffice In Future RHEL, Limiting Fedora LO Involvement — However, the "tradeoff" to focusing on that is they will be pivoting away from less desktop application work and "cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHE version. This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora."
LibreOffice to be cut out of RHEL installs
Asahi: Big Updates — Get your updater ready!
OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux
Wine comes to macOS: Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit powered by CrossOver source code — We are ecstatic that Apple chose to use CrossOver’s source code as their emulation solution for the Game Porting Toolkit.
Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit is Wine
Apple Home Brew Repo — Using the game-porting-toolkit formula requires downloading the Game Porting Toolkit from developer.apple.com.
Game Porting Toolkit — Game Porting Toolkit is Apple's new translation layer which combines Wine with Apple's own D3DMetal which supports DirectX 9-12. Games that use anti-cheat or aggressive DRM generally don't work. Games that require AVX CPUs also do not work e.g. Last of Us.

Linux Action News 295 Jun 01, 2023

How the recent XFS bug was squashed, insights into why Microsoft built their own Linux from scratch, and recent attacks on Archive.org.

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Those Using The XFS File-System Will Want To Avoid Linux 6.3 For Now
XFS Metadata Corruption On Linux 6.3 Tracked Down To One Missing One-Line Patch — This is a bug fix that we thought just fixed a livelock on stripe aligned filesystems. I'm guessing that in certain circumstances instead of livelocking on repeated failed allocations, it results in a broken mapping being returned to the writeback code and hence misdirecting the writeback IO.
Linux 6.3.5 Released With XFS Metadata Corruption Fix — Making Linux 6.3.5 a notable point release is that it has back-ported the fix for the XFS metadata corruption bug that was plaguing the Linux 6.3 point releases.
Azure Linux - Microsoft revealed why it did not fork Fedora — Why did Microsoft create Azure Linux? “We needed a Linux distribution internally,” Perrin said. “We wanted a consistent platform for ourselves.” Now there is “one vendor to support the full AKS stack”.
Plasma 6 is Wayland only - No X11 for Plasma 6 — With Fedora KDE and Kinoite being fully Wayland by default from login (since F38) to desktop (since F34), it's now time to work toward eliminating our dependency on the Xorg server for Plasma 6.0.
Xorg server is deprecated since RHEL 9.0 — The X.org display server is deprecated, and will be removed in a future major RHEL release. The default desktop session is now the Wayland session in most cases.
Fedora 36 Changes: Replace the fbdev drivers with simpledrm and the DRM fbdev emulation layer — This change replaces the legacy Linux frame buffer device (fbdev) drivers that are still used in Fedora, with the latest simpledrm driver and the DRM fbdev emulation layer.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS end of standard support — Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, codenamed ‘Bionic Beaver,’ is approaching the end of its standard five-year maintenance period on 31 May 2023.
Let us serve you, but don’t bring us down — Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon’s AWS services. This activity brought archive.org down for all users for about an hour.
Internet Archive — Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

Linux Action News 294 May 25, 2023

Microsoft's new Linux server distro, Red Hat Summit 2023 highlights, big changes at CodeWeavers, and Podman catches up to Docker Desktop.

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Podman Desktop 1.0 Annouced — Podman Desktop offers a user-friendly interface for handling containers and integrating with Kubernetes from a local workstation.
Podman.io
Podman
Podman Desktop 1.0: Local container development made easy
Podman Desktop 1.0 Released As An Alternative To Docker Desktop
Podman Desktop 1.0: Local container development made easy
Introducing Azure Linux — This General Availability announcement follows our October preview announcement under the CBL-Mariner project codename. We’d like to thank the customers who provided valuable feedback and insight during our preview.
Introduction to the Azure Linux Container Host for AKS | Microsoft Learn
CodeWeavers An Employee Ownership Trust — As of April 12th, the the company has a new shareholder - the CodeWeavers Purpose Trust. This Trust will become the primary owner of CodeWeavers.
CodeWeavers Now Controlled By An Employee Ownership Trust
Red Hat Summit 2023 — Highlights — The Red Hat Summit 2023 witnessed the launch of OpenShift AI and Red Hat Ansible software, security cloud services, and Linux management features.
The moment for AI
Automation and the AI revolution — Generative AI is everywhere. But I cannot overstate how different our approach to all this has been.
Red Hat Summit 2023: Adolfo Rodriguez, Advance Auto Parts - YouTube — Adolfo Rodriguez, SVP of Technology Transformation at Advance Auto Parts joins theCUBE hosts John Furrier & Rob Strechay for our continuing coverage of Red Hat Summit 2023

Linux Action News 293 May 18, 2023

Bcachefs hits a major milestone, how the Red Hat cuts impact Fedora, Plasma 6 plans, and the software update bricking EV batteries.

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bcachefs out for review — I'm submitting the bcachefs filesystem for review and inclusion.
bcachefs TestServerSetup
Bcachefs Submitted For Review - Aims For Mainline
Fedora Program Manager Laid Off — On 24 April 2023, Red Hat announced a 4% reduction in global staff. As a member of that 4%, today is my last day at Red Hat.
Fedora Program Manager Laid Off As Part Of Red Hat Cuts
KDE Developers Planning For Plasma 6.0 — This week my fellow developers and I are in Germany for an in-person Plasma sprint–our first since 2019!
KDE Developers In Germany Planning For Plasma 6.0
KDE Plasma 6 to Ship with Floating Panel by Default, Double-Click for Opening Files
Tesla sued over battery-busting OTA patch in Model S, X — The named plaintiffs claim that, despite Tesla saying their batteries are supposed to last the life of the vehicle, the Musk-owned automaker "deliberately and significantly interfere[d] with the car's performance through software updates that reduce operating capacity."

Linux Action News 292 May 11, 2023

We get you up to speed on two serious flaws, Linux's recent gaming loss, Ubuntu doubling down on RISC-V, and news from the Open Source Summit North America.

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CVE - CVE-2023-28410 — Improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer in some Intel(R) i915 Graphics drivers for linux before kernel version 6.2.10 may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable escalation of privilege via local access.
INTEL-SA-00886
Intel Security Center
New NetFilter flaw gives attackers root privileges — A new Linux NetFilter kernel flaw has been discovered, allowing unprivileged local users to escalate their privileges to root level, allowing complete control over a system.
NVD - CVE-2023-32233
Goodbye to Roblox on Linux — I’m sorry to be such a downer about this, but it’s the reality. We have to spend our time porting to and supporting the platforms that will grow our community.
Proper support for the Linux platform - Feature Requests
Ubuntu 23.04 Now Works on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC — ”This partnership will provide users with a seamless development experience, allowing them to leverage the best of open source software and RISC-V through Ubuntu and VisionFive 2.”
Canonical enables Ubuntu on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V single board computer
Open Source Summit North America — Open Source Summit is a conference umbrella, composed of a collection of events covering the most important technologies, topics, and issues affecting open source today.
AWS open-sources snapshot fuzzing and policy authorization tools
Schedule - Linux Foundation Events
The Linux Foundation on Twitter

Linux Action News 291 May 03, 2023

The results from the recent HDR Hackfest, Mozilla's new acquisition, and the concerning crack down on free software encryption.

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HDR hackfest wrap-up — People from various organizations were on-site: Red Hat, KDE, System76, AMD, Igalia, Collabora, Canonical, etc. Some more people from NVIDIA, Intel and Google joined us remotely (some of them waking up at 2 AM due to their timezone!).
Fakespot is acquired by Mozilla — I have exciting news to share, Fakespot has been acquired by Mozilla! We are joining a company that develops one of the most popular browsers in the world in Firefox with a lineage that dates back to the origins of the internet.
Apple removes Fakespot from App Store after Amazon complains
More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.4 — New Rust code for Linux 6.4 includes the introduction of the pin-init API, which is for dealing with safe pinned initialization and allows reducing the amount of "unsafe" Rust code within the kernel.
Asahi Lina on Twitter: My Rust contributions for Linux 6.4 are finally merged upstream! 🦀🐧 — The next big challenge is going to be the DRM subsystem abstractions!
India blocks 14 mobile apps used by terrorists in Pakistan to send information in J-K — As inputs received that these applications are being used to further terror propaganda and incite youths in Jammu and Kashmir, the Central government blocked them under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
India removes ban on VLC media player after cybersecurity concerns addressed
Text of the RESTRICT Act — To authorize the Secretary of Commerce to review and prohibit certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries, and for other purposes...
Tell Congress: Don’t Outlaw Encrypted Applications

Linux Action News 290 Apr 27, 2023

What we know about the Red Hat layoffs, highlights of Linux 6.3, and Canonical's bold claim in Ubuntu 23.04.

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Red Hat Cutting “Hundreds Of Jobs” — The tech layoffs have now reached Red Hat with "hundreds of jobs" being cut and the initial round of layoffs being announced today.
Message to Red Hat associates today
IBM announces layoffs at Red Hat — "Our reductions will focus on general and administrative (G&A) and similar roles across all functions and represent a reduction of just under four percent in total," he said. "We will not reduce roles directly selling to customers or building our products."
Linux Kernel 6.3 Officially Released — Introduces a new Intel VPU DRM accelerated driver, BIG TCP support for IPv4, and native Steam Deck controller support.
Btrfs Receives A Very Important Last Minute Fix For Linux 6.3 — Ahead of the Linux 6.3 kernel being potentially released as stable on Sunday, two last-minute patches for the Btrfs file-system driver were submitted
Linux 6.3 Released With More Meteor Lake Enablement — Zen 4 Auto IBRS & Much More
Linux 6.3 Features Have A Lot For AMD & Intel — Also Steam Deck, ASUS Motherboards & More
Intel i219-LM Had Only Been Running At ~60% Of Max
The new Flathub Website — Welcome to Flathub, the home of hundreds of apps which can be easily installed on any Linux distribution.
Flathub Website Gets a Brand New Look
Docker Security Essentials eBook — This guide focuses on securing the Docker platform on Linux. Follow along with the techniques demonstrated in this guide. All you need is a Linux server with Docker installed and running.
Ubuntu 23.04 Released — Our focus, as always, has been improving quality, performance and enjoyment for all our users, whether that’s more elegant update handling for snaps, improved UI for installation and quick settings or a more accessible gaming experience.
Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster)
Ubuntu 23.04 with GNOME 44 and a stable Steam Snap — [The] Snap of Steam [is] being promoted to stable. Canonical said over 150,000 people downloaded the preview version, so there was plenty of interest in it. This Snap bundles a bunch of dependencies needed allowing you to run new and old titles without messing with PPAs.
Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar Lobster scuttles into public view — Lunar Lobster adds support for Microsoft Azure Active Directory — a first for a Linux desktop according to Canonical. The feature will allow users on Microsoft 365 Enterprise plans to authenticate Ubuntu Desktops using a common set of credentials.
Ubuntu 23.04 Flavors: What’s New — Arriving alongside the Ubuntu 23.04 release are new versions of official community flavors.
Azure AD authentication comes to Ubuntu Desktop 23.04 — Ubuntu Desktop 23.04 is the first and only Linux distribution to enable native user authentication with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).
aad-auth: Azure AD authentication module for Ubuntu — Azure AD User Authentication will be included as part of an Ubuntu Pro subscription in Ubuntu 23.04 before being backported to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and future LTS releases from 2023.
microsoft-authentication-library-for-go — The MSAL library for Go is part of the Microsoft identity platform for developers (formerly named Azure AD) v2.0. It enables you to acquire security tokens to call protected APIs. It uses industry-standard OAuth2 and OpenID Connect.
Next Ubuntu 23.10 Name — The Ubuntu release that will be delivered in October 2023, designated 23.10.

Linux Action News 289 Apr 20, 2023

What we like about Fedora 38, why the Rust foundation is in hot water, and more.

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Announcing Fedora Linux 38 — The Fedora Linux 38 release is here! With this release, we’re starting a new on-time streak. In fact, we’re ready a week early!
What’s new in Fedora Workstation 38
Rust Foundation apologizes for trademark policy confusion — The Rust Foundation on Monday apologized for confusion caused by the organization's proposed trademark policy changes.
A note on the Trademark Policy Draft
Rust Foundation - Rust Trademark Policy Draft Revision
Canonical Livepatch gets even better — Now supporting Hardware Enablement Kernels.
Proton 8.0-1 Published With More Game Support — Proton 8.0-1 is the much awaited re-base of Proton against the Wine 8.0 state
Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter — “Proton 8.0 is now available with many changes. Our biggest rebase to date! Note: it requires a GPU with Vulkan 1.3 support. Experimental-8.0 will follow sometime this week.
LFNW Call for Papers — We invite you to submit your proposal to speak at LFNW2023! We're seeking both experienced technical presenters, as well as first-timers to present to a hybrid audience.
LinuxFest Northwest 2023
In letter to EU, open source bodies say Cyber Resilience Act could have ‘chilling effect’ on software development — Penalties for non-compliance may include fines of up to €15 million, or 2.5% of global turnover.
Cyber Resilience Act

Linux Action News 288 Apr 13, 2023

A classic gadget gets a Linux-powered new lease on life, the next project getting Rusty, great news for Btrfs users, and more.

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Linux Tech Sustainability — The mainline Linux 6.4 kernel is set to see a new touchscreen driver for supporting the Novatek NVT-ts.
Acer Iconia One 7 B1-730
Unlocking the bootloader and disabling dm-verity on Android-X86 devices
Here Comes WebGPU — After years of development, the Chrome team ships WebGPU.
Chrome 113 To Ship WebGPU By Default
Muse on Twitter — Breaking news🚨 Chrome's Web GPU has launched after 6 years of development! 🚀
A Taste of WebGPU in Firefox
Plasma 6 Early Builds — I’ve now got a working Plasma 6 dev session on my machine. It’s still rough, but it’s usable.
Early KDE Plasma 6 Development State
Rust Support Is Being Worked On For V4L2 — Daniel Almeida of Collabora sent out initial Rust V4L2 support patches on Thursday. This provides just enough for working with a prototype VirtIO camera driver written in Rust along with a Rust sample driver.
Linux 6.4 Bringing Apple M2 Additions — Asahi Linux lead developer Hector Martin today sent in the Apple SoC DT updates targeting the Linux 6.4 cycle for queuing into the SoC tree ahead of the merge window opening around the end of the month.
Btrfs Improvments — This week a number of patches from SUSE engineer Qu Wenruo were queued into kdave's linux.git for-next branch of the Btrfs file-system driver development code.

Linux Action News 287 Apr 05, 2023

A fresh take on open-source funding, Fedora’s plan for better encryption out of the box, and our impressions of the latest Ubuntu Beta.

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New FOSS Fund to Support Free and Open Source Projects — To help maintain and sustain this ecosystem, companies and nonprofits alike have experimented with a framework called a FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Contributor Fund.
Bloomberg Launches Open-Source Funding Initiative
Encrypted Fedora — Owen Taylor of Red Hat laid out a mailing list post and Discourse thread today around the future of encryption with Fedora.
Google’s VM Turbo Charger — With this series, a workload running in a VM gets the same task placement and DVFS treatment as it would when running in the host.
Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 CPUfreq/sched and VM guest workload problems
Google Posts KVM-CPUFreq Driver To Dramatically Boost VM Performance, Power Efficiency
KDE Discuss — KDE Discuss is a place for questions, requests, suggestions, banter, and in general interacting closely with the people actively involved in KDE, as well as with fellow users.
KDE Discuss is a new discussion service from KDE for everybody who makes and uses KDE software
New MSI Laptop Driver — Functions handled by the embedded controller on recent MSI laptops.
new msi-ec driver patch
Ubuntu 23.04 Beta Hands On
Jupiter Broadcasting Meetup — Two meetups in the month of April, join us!

Linux Action News 286 Mar 30, 2023

What we're liking about GNOME 44, how Microsoft's Linux distro is trying to attract more users, and we bust a CentOS myth.

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GNOME 44 Released — GNOME 44 is code-named “Kuala Lumpur”, in recognition of the work done by the organizers of GNOME.Asia 2022.
GNOME 44 Released With Many Desktop Enhancements
GNOME 44 Getting New Background Apps UI
Ubuntu Touch OTA-1 Focal Release — This is the first OTA for Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal) with major features, this is an Opt-In and not mandatory update.
First Ubuntu Touch OTA Release Based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Is Out Now
Ubuntu Cinnamon Flavor Status Announcement — Ubuntu Cinnamon started as a small idea in my head, in 2019. I was ELEVEN.
ItzSwirlz (Joshua Peisach)
Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix Becomes Official Ubuntu Flavor
Microsoft’s CBL-Mariner Linux Distribution Continues Cultivating More Packages — With today's CBL-Mariner 2.0.20230321 they have continued cultivating more packages for the distribution.
CBL-Mariner GitHub
We’re no longer sunsetting the Free Team plan — After listening to feedback and consulting our community, it’s clear that we made the wrong decision in sunsetting our Free Team plan.
Google discloses CentOS Linux kernel vulnerabilities following failure to issue timely fixes — Google Project Zero's security researcher Jann Horn learned that kernel fixes made to stable trees are not backported to many enterprise versions of Linux.
Google Security Researchers Accuse CentOS of Failing to Backport Kernel Fixes
Project Zero Mailing List Thread on CentOS Kernel Patches
CVE-2023-0590
kernel-5.14.0-277.el9
CVE-2023-1249
CVE-2023-1252
Berlin Meet Up #2 - Nextcloud Hackfest & Dev Community Introduction, Fri, Mar 31, 2023 — NOTE: the time detailed on Meetup.com is strictly set to PST, so don't be confused by the interface!

Linux Action News 285 Mar 22, 2023

Nextcloud moves to the front of the pack with their new release, a moment to appreciate curl, and Amazon goes all in with Fedora.

Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

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curl 8.0.0 is Here — This a major version number bump but without any ground-breaking changes or fireworks. We decided it was about time to reset the minor number down to more a manageable level and doing it exactly on curl’s 25th birthday made it extra fun. There is no API nor ABI break in this version.
Twenty-five Tears of curl — Taking curl this far and being able to work full time on my hobby project is a dream come real. curl is a huge part of my life.
curl 8.0.0 with Daniel Stenberg [YouTube]
curl 8.0.1: because I jinxed it
Amazon Linux 2023 — When looking for a base to serve as a starting point for Amazon Linux 2023, Fedora was the best choice. We found that Fedora’s core tenets (Freedom, Friends, Features, First) resonate well with our vision for Amazon Linux.
Paving the Road to Vulkan on Asahi Linux — Today we’re releasing a big update to our GPU drivers for Asahi Linux, so I wanted to talk to you about what we’ve been working on since then, and what’s next!
Asahi Linux Continues Making Progress On Apple Silicon Graphics, Promising OpenGL Speed
Canonical joins the confidential computing consortium — Confidential computing is here to give you back control over the security guarantees of your workloads. As the consortium explains, confidential computing aims to “protect data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment.
Introduction to Confidential Computing [YouTube]
Hub 4 pioneers ethical AI integration for a more productive and collaborative future — Today, we are excited to announce a major step forward with Hub 4 – the very first on-premises collaboration platform to integrate intelligent features across its applications.
Develop for Nextcloud — Write new applications, extend Nextcloud or integrate other software.
Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating
Berlin Meet Up — Friday, March 24, 2023

Linux Action News 284 Mar 16, 2023

Docker's open-source crackdown, the Wayland regression solved this week, and why ipmitool's repo has been locked.

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Kali 2023.1 — Today we are releasing Kali 2023.1 (and on our 10th anniversary)!
Get Kali | Kali Linux Download
Kali Linux Introduces “Kali Purple” for Defensive Security Hardening
Qubes OS 4.1.2 — We’re pleased to announce the stable release of Qubes 4.1.2!
Wayland Crash Survivor — A change merged to Qt this week can allow for Wayland clients to survive compositor restarts, such as when the compositor crashes.
OpenMoon Ray Code Goes Live — MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer.
OpenMoonRay.org
ipmitool Repository Archived — Those navigating to ipmitool/ipmitool on GitHub as the official repository for this project will find that it's now in a "public archive" state.
Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know
Justin Cormack on Twitter — when we remove accounts we do not free up the namespace so squatting is not possible.
Some nuance for paid users
GHCR was having some issues this morning it seems
Red Hat’s Quay is maybe another option, they might offer free plans? public repos are free anyway
José Valimon Twitter
Deploy a registry server — This page contains information about hosting your own registry using the open source Docker Registry.

Linux Action News 283 Mar 09, 2023

Nextcloud's big new customer, some last-minute surprises in GNOME 44, and Flathub's ambitious plans for 2023.

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Nextcloud’s Big new Customer — After a silent migration of millions of users, Telekom and Nextcloud are now unveiling the first feature of the new MagentaCloud: a free office.
Last Minute GNOME Awesome — GNOME Shell and Mutter 44 have reached their release candidate milestone ahead of the official release in just two weeks, all is going to plan, and to our surprise, there have been several last-minute additions.
GNOME 44 Mutter Adds fractional_scale_v1 Wayland Support
GNOME Shell & Mutter Complete Their Migration Away From GTK3
wp-fractional-scale-v1: New protocol for fractional scaling — This protocols allows for communicating preferred fractional scales to surfaces, which in combination with wp_viewport can be used to render surfaces at fractional scales when applicable.
Asahi Linux Rust Drivers — This is my first take on the Rust abstractions for the DRM subsystem.
Flathub in 2023 — It’s been quite a few months since the most recent updates about Flathub last year. We’ve been busy behind the scenes, so I’d like to share what we’ve been up to at Flathub and why—and what’s coming up from us this year
Flathub in 2023 - Flathub Discourse

Linux Action News 282 Mar 02, 2023

FFmpeg gets new superpowers, Plasma’s switch to Qt6 gets official; what you need to know. Plus we round up the top features coming to Linux 6.3.

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Steam Deck one Year Later — The Steam Deck has been about a year on the market now (it started shipping at the end of February 2022). This first anniversary is a good chance to review what has happened since then.
FFmpeg 6.0 Released — 6.0 was released on 2023-02-27. It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 6.0 release branch, which was cut from master on 2023-02-19.
FFmpeg 6.0 Released With NVIDIA NVENC AV1, VA-API Improvements
FOSDEM 2023 - Dual presentation: FFmpeg 6 and VLC.js
Plasma Switches to Qt6 — The master branch for Plasma repos will be made Qt6-only tomorrow.
Hardware Noise “hwnoise” Tool for Linux 6.3 — hwnoise collects the periodic summary from the osnoise tracer running with *interrupts disabled*. By disabling interrupts, and the scheduling of threads as a consequence, only non-maskable interrupts and hardware-related noise is allowed.
More Rust Code Readied For Linux 6.3 — In the pull request Miguel Ojeda commented, "more core additions, getting closer to a point where the first Rust modules can be upstreamed."
EXT4 Getting Direct I/O Performance Improvements With 6.3 — Improved performance for ext4
Btrfs Enjoys More Performance With Linux 6.3 - Including Some 3~10x Speedups — Some of the performance work is quite juicy, as outlined in today's pull request.
Btrfs updates for 6.3 - David Sterba
Linux 6.3 Scheduler Updates Bring Fixes & Minor Optimizations
RISC-V With Linux 6.3 Lands Optimized String Functions Via Zbb Extension — RISC-V with Linux 6.3 has improved its extension detection and alternative patching infrastructure for dealing with non spec compliant extensions.

Linux Action News 281 Feb 22, 2023

Our favorite features in Linux 6.2, the Hollywood tool getting open-sourced, and a systemd update you need to know about.

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DreamWorks’ Renderer Used for ‘Puss in Boots’ is Going Open-Source — DreamWork animation company is making its in-house renderer open-source very soon
OpenMoonRay.org — MoonRay is DreamWorks’ open-source, award-winning, state-of-the-art production MCRT renderer, which has been used on feature films such as How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, Trolls World Tour, The Bad Guys, and Puss In Boots: The Last Wish.
MoonRay Documentation Home
Systemd 253 — Systemd 253 has been released. As always, the list of changes is extensive. Support for version-1 control groups and separate /usr systems is going away later this year. There is a new tool for working with unified kernel images, a number of new unit-file options have been added, and much more.
systemd 253: The future of enterprise Linux boot processes.
Debian Installer Testing Call — Starting with this release, official images include firmware packages from main and non-free-firmware, along with metadata to configure the installed system accordingly.
Linux 6.2 — Please do give 6.2 a testing. Maybe it's not a sexy LTS release like 6.1 ended up being, but all those regular pedestrian kernels want some test love too.
Linux_6.2 - Linux Kernel Newbies — This release includes faster mitigration of the Retbleed vulnerability and a new FineIBT mitigation feature; Btrfs RAID5/6 and performance improvements, sysfs knobs that allow controlling block device writeback, support for TCP Protective Load Balancing, improved Rust support, BPF features like User defined objects, the runtime verification tool, and some optional RCU power savings.
The Best Linux 6.2 Features From Intel Arc Graphics To Better Performance For Older PCs
LUP 500 Micro Brewery Meetup — Sat, Mar 4, 2023, 4:00 PM at 192 Brewing Company in Mount Vernon, WA

Linux Action News 280 Feb 16, 2023

Some Git flaws you need to know about, we reflect on 10 years of Steam on Linux, and then dive into the much anticipated Plasma 5.27.

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The Coder Robe — Celebrate Coder 500! The Robe, the Tumbler, and the Sticker are available for a limited time.
Git Vulnerabilities — Today, the Git project released new versions to address a pair of security vulnerabilities, (CVE-2023-22490 and CVE-2023-23946) that affect versions 2.39.1 and older.
10 Years of Steam — Feb 14, 2013–Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises (such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress) and leading technologies (such as Steam and Source), today announced the release of its Steam for Linux client. In celebration of the release, over 50 Linux titles are now 50-75% off until Thursday, February 21st at 10 AM PST.
Sabayon 9 Review | LAS | s22e08 - YouTube
Opening the Valve | LAS | s22e09 - YouTube
Ubuntu Gets Real — Canonical today announced the general availability of real-time Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Canonical Promotes Ubuntu’s Real-Time “RT” Kernel To General Availability
Here Comes GTK5 — Discussions around the GTK5 tool-kit also happened with some developers eager to begin work on that next major release in order to begin facilitating API breaks and removing deprecated code.
Plasma 5.27 — Plasma 5.27 is out and brings massive improvements to the desktop and all its tools. Another work of love from the KDE devs and contributors.
KDE Plasma 5.27 Released — Better Wayland Support, KWin Tiling, Multi-Monitor Overhaul
Final Version of KDE Plasma 5 Released – This is What’s New — Notably, this is expected to be the final release in the KDE Plasma 5.x series, with the following stable release set to be KDE Plasma 6.0, due for release towards the end of the year.

Linux Action News 279 Feb 09, 2023

We round up some news from FOSDEM 2023, update a 21-year-old project, and the Fedora fix that's been a few releases in the making.

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FOSDEM 2023: Matrix 2.0 — In this talk we will explain the fundamental changes which are landing in Matrix 2.0, which speeds up Matrix to be at least as snappy as the fastest proprietary messaging apps - all while handling thousands of rooms spanning millions of users.
FOSDEM 2023: Fedora Asahi — Asahi Fedora Remix exists to assist the Asahi community with Apple Silicon upstreaming and to provide a nifty ARM-based Fedora Workstation for those that own Apple Silicon hardware.
Fedora Asahi Aims To Provide The Fedora Workstation Experience For Apple Silicon Systems
SIGs/Asahi - Fedora Project Wiki
FOSDEM 2023: Podcasting 2.0 — In this talk we will show how the Podcasting 2.0 community is reinventing Podcasting by adding tons of new features, while keeping all this interoperable.
MythTV 33 Released — Some of the MythTV 33 highlights include a new web interface for the MythTV setup experience, a new waveform visualization for the MythMusic area, and switching to the latest upstream FFmpeg release.
MythTV, Open Source DVR
Linode's Green Light Beta Program — Get early access and test new Linode products before they hit the market, provide valuable feedback to influence product direction, and become part of a community of developers helping us build the cloud that works for you.
Fedora 38 Change: Unfiltered Flathub — This change would remove the filtering from our Flathub offering, so that users can enable a complete version of Flathub using the third party repositories feature.
Fedora 38 To Get Rid Of Its Flathub Filtering, Allowing Many More Apps On Fedora
The Coder Robe | Jupiter Broadcasting Garage Sale — The Coder Robe is black and is a one-size-fits-most robe made from 100% cotton terry velour for soft, cozy wear. It is embroidered on the left chest with a classic white on black Coder Radio logo.

Linux Action News 278 Feb 02, 2023

A lot happened in the free desktop world this week, we cover the impressive releases, changes, and surprises.

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elementary OS 7 Available Now — Today we’re proud to announce that OS 7, codenamed Horus, is available to download now and shipping soon on several high-quality computers.
Xfce Going Wayland — That’s right, work on Xfce 4.20 kicked off earlier this month with the release of libxfce4windowing, a new dependency for the Xfce desktop environment to provide support for the next-generation Wayland display protocol.
Xfce / libxfce4windowing
COSMIC DE has Speed — Alex here with the latest batch of updates from System76 engineers on the development of COSMIC DE, as well as some Settings mockups where you can explore some of the new changes.
System76 Adding XWayland Support & Other Improvements
Ubuntu Pro for All — First released in a beta version in October 2022.
helloSystem 0.8 — helloSystem is now based on FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE. A desktop system for creators that focuses on simplicity, elegance, and usability.
helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD — Since most applications I am using on a daily basis are cross-platform and many of them are written in Qt, it seemed logical to choose Qt as the native toolkit for helloSystem.

Linux Action News 277 Jan 25, 2023

An Ubuntu expiration date approaches, openSUSE has a new handy solution, and the container security issue that remains unfixed.

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Ubuntu 18.04 LTS End Of Life — Ubuntu 18.04 ‘Bionic Beaver’ is reaching End of Standard Support this April, also known sometimes as End Of Life (EOL).
Ubuntu 22.04.2 Point Release Delayed by 2 Weeks — Ubuntu 22.04.2 LTS was due for release on Thursday, February 9. However, the release has had to be delayed by two weeks, and is now scheduled to arrive on Thursday, February 23.
Ubuntu Pro
Ubuntu Extended Security Maintenance
Wine 8.0 is out now with major compatibility improvements — One of the major changes here is the conversion to the PE format for various modules. This format is used by Windows, and an important milestone for Wine to increase compatibility with copy protection, 32-bit applications on 64-bit hosts, Windows debuggers and more.
openSUSE Making It Easier To Install H.264 Codec Support — Inspired by the Fedora / Red Hat and Cisco collaboration around OpenH264 support, openSUSE/SUSE set out for a similar arrangement with Cicsco and its OpenH264 codecs.
Linux 6.2-rc5 Released — Due to an uptick in activity this week and the downtime around Christmas / end-of-year holidays, Torvalds is planning on this cycle spanning through Linux 6.2-rc8 before going gold.
Linux 6.3 To Remove Obsolete GPU Drivers: ATI Rage 128, 3Dfx, S3 Savage, i810 & More — Hitting the chopping block with the Linux 6.3 kernel are the following DRM drivers: i810, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx, and via.
Kernel Security Korner — The issue involved in that compromise became known as CVE-2019-5736 and a complex workaround was implemented in runC to prevent similar vulnerabilities in the future.

Linux Action News 276 Jan 19, 2023

A high-profile Linux kernel network flaw, we put JFS on a death watch, and break down the controversial Firefox update this week.

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A new privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel — The vulnerability consists of a stack buffer overflow due to an integer underflow vulnerability inside the nft_payload_copy_vlan function, which is invoked with nft_payload expressions as long as a VLAN tag is present in the current skb.
netfilter: nft_payload: add C-VLAN support · torvalds/linux@f6ae9f1
CVE-2023-0179
CVE-2023-0179- Red Hat Customer Portal
[net,3/3] netfilter: nft_payload: incorrect arithmetics when fetching VLAN header bits - Patchwork
oss-sec: Re: CVE-2023-0179: Linux kernel stack buffer overflow in nftables: PoC and writeup
libvirt 9.0 Released For Latest Linux Virtualization API — Libvirt 9.0 adds support for external snapshot deletion with QEMU using its existing API, libvirt 9.0 with QEMU now supports PASST as "Plug A Simple Socket Transport" for connecting an emulated network device to the host's network, QEMU external back-end support for SWTPM as a software Trusted Platform Module (TPM), support for passing file descriptors rather than passing files for the QEMU disk, and other additions.
JFS Filesystem’s Days are Numbered — IBM developed the JFS file-system originally in the 90's for AIX and the second-generation implementation then ported to Linux after it was made open-source.
Firefox 109.0 Ships Manifest Version 3 — Manifest Version 3 (MV3) extension support is now enabled by default (MV2 remains enabled/supported). This major update also ushers an exciting user interface change in the form of the new extensions button.
Here’s what’s going on in the world of extensions
Manage your extensions using the extensions button in the toolbar
Manifest v3 signing available November 21 on Firefox Nightly
Google delays start of Manifest V2 Chrome extension deprecation — The original plan called for Chrome Beta, Dev, and Canary builds to start experiments that turned off Manifest V2 extension support. Additionally, Manifest V3 would be required to get the “Featured” badge in the Chrome Web Store.
Firefox 109 Adds New Extensions Button, Manifest V3 Support — The biggest new feature is the new Unified Extensions button in the toolbar.
Chrome’s “Manifest V3” plan to limit ad-blocking extensions is delayed
Chrome Users Beware: Manifest V3 is Deceitful and Threatening — Manifest V3, or Mv3 for short, is outright harmful to privacy efforts. It will restrict the capabilities of web extensions

Linux Action News 275 Jan 12, 2023

OpenZFS has performance gains inbound, the end of a Linux era, and the achievement unlocked by the open-source NVIDIA driver.

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KDE Plasma 5.27 To Provide Better Multi-Monitor Support — KDE developer Marco Martin wrote a blog post today outlining some of the multi-monitor work that's been going into Plasma 5.27
This week in KDE: big UI improvements!
Schedules/Plasma 5 - KDE Community Wiki
KDE Kicks Off 2023 With UI Refinements, More Fixes
GNOME 44 Hopes and Dreams — GNOME devs are already working hard on the next major release, GNOME 44, due out in late March 2023 with more new features and enhancements.
Dynamic Triple Buffering Hopefully Will Land For GNOME 44
OpenZFS Performance Gains — With the combination of enabled prefetch and avoided memory copy this change improves sequential single-threaded read speed from a wide NVMe pool from 2049 to 3932 MiB/s. During write profiler shows 22% reduction of unhalted CPU cycles at the same throughput of 3653 MiB/s.
End of the 4.9 Series — Greg KH: I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.337 kernel. All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade.
Linux 6.1.4
Linux 4.9.337 Released To End Out The 2016 LTS Series
Open-Source NVIDIA Driver Starts to Play Games — Red Hat engineer and longtime open-source Nouveau developer Karol Herbst wrote on his chaos.social account about NVK running games and showing off a screenshot of The Talos Principle running with this open-source, "community" Vulkan driver.
karolherbst on Social
The Talos Principle — The Talos Principle is a philosophical first-person puzzle game from Croteam, the creators of the legendary Serious Sam series, written by Tom Jubert (FTL, The Swapper) and Jonas Kyratzes (The Sea Will Claim Everything).

Linux Action News 274 Jan 05, 2023

Android is getting RISC-Y, the handy new Google tool going open source, the next nail in the coffin for ZFS on Ubuntu, and why you were right about smart speakers all along.

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Android Gets RISC-Y — Google's keynote at the RISC-V Summit promises official, polished support.
Keynote: The Android Open Source Project and RISC-V - Lars Bergstrom, Google Director of Engineering
New Google Tool Goes Open — The OSV database is a distributed, open-source database that stores vulnerability information in the OSV format. The OSV-Scanner assesses a project's dependencies against the OSV database showing all vulnerabilities relating to the project.
Ubuntu’s New Installer Milestone — With Ubuntu 23.04 "Lunar Lobster" in April that new desktop installer is poised to finally be used by default.
HDR Beginning To Work For Linux Gaming — "New Linux gaming milestone: with the latest work from Josh Ashton, HDR can now be enabled for real games! Tested it tonight on my AMD desktop with Halo Infinite, Deep Rock Galactic, DEATH STRANDING DC. Very early and will still need some time to bake to be useful to most."
Red Hat Planning HDR Hackfest
GNOME Shell + Mutter 43 Alpha Released
VKD3D-Proton 2.7 Released With Eight Months Worth Of Changes
Google Home speakers allowed hackers to snoop on conversations — A bug in Google Home smart speaker allowed installing a backdoor account that could be used to control it remotely and to turn it into a snooping device by accessing the microphone feed.

Linux Action News 273 Dec 29, 2022

There are some stories so big they need a little more air time.

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Akademy 2022: Full Steam ahead! — In this talk I will share how Plasma fits into the Steamdeck and what aspects of KDE made us the right choice for their new userbase. I will then share some of the projects that contractors Blue Systems have been doing for Valve and how the work there benefits not just the Steamdeck but improves the ecosystem for all Plasma users.
GamingOnLinux category: Steam Deck
Anaconda Web UI preview image — Download the Anaconda Web UI preview image and boot it on VM or hardware that contains no important data.
Fedora 37 Hopes To Have A Preview Of The New Web-Based Install UI
Libadwaita in the Wild — It’s hard to believe, but Libadwaita is not even one year old, having first been released on December 31, 2021.
libadwaita — Building blocks for modern GNOME applications.
Why the open source driver release from NVIDIA is so important for Linux? — Today NVIDIA announced that they are releasing an open source kernel driver for their GPUs, so I want to share with you some background information and how I think this will impact Linux graphics and compute going forward.
Linux Action News 240 — NVIDIA has announced its plans for an open-source GPU driver. Christian Schaller, the Director for Desktop, Graphics, Infotainment and more at Red Hat, gives us the inside scoop on this historic announcement.
Nvidia Scraps ARM Acquisition After Regulatory Pressure, Owner SoftBank Prepares Chipmaker For IPO
Chips are down: Nvidia abandons $40 billion deal to purchase Arm Holdings

Linux Action News 272 Dec 22, 2022

Why we won't see a new Raspberry Pi until 2025, the first steps to Plasma 6 are being taken, and PipeWire gets a major Bluetooth upgrade.

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Raspberry Pi 5 Not Launching Until After 2023 — Don't expect a Pi 5 next year [2023]" Upton then expands and explains that 2023 is a "recovery year".
Eben Upton Interview: Raspberry Pi Availability & More! - YouTube
Raspberry Pi Adds 100,000 Units to Supply Chain, Back to Pre-pandemic Levels in 2023 | Tom’s Hardware — In the blog post, Upton acknowledged the patience of the community and offers the 100,000 units, made up of Raspberry Pi Zero W, 3A+ and Raspberry Pi 4 2GB and 4GB for single-unit sale. We don't know the breakdown of how many of each model there will be, but Upton does indicate that it is likely that Raspberry Pi Zero W will come back into stock first.
KDE Frameworks 5.101 Released — Per the plans laid out earlier this year at the Akademy developer conference, KDE Frameworks 5 feature development stops following the v5.101 release. KDE Frameworks 5 will now just see maintenance updates moving forward.
Xfce 4.18 Released — After almost two years of work, we are happy to announce the release of Xfce 4.18 !
Xfce 4.18 by muscaln · Pull Request #206282 · NixOS/nixpkgs
PipeWire Bluetooth Improvements — Most exciting with today's PipeWire 0.3.62 release is now supporting Bluetooth offloading.
Releases · PipeWire / wireplumber · GitLab
Feature Preview: Gitea Actions — Gitea Actions goes beyond just DevOps and lets you run workflows when other events happen in your repository.
act_runner — A runner for Gitea based on act.
act — Run your GitHub Actions locally 🚀

Linux Action News 271 Dec 15, 2022

Why the next kernel will be "the merge window from hell," a holiday gift for Wayland users, and how the open source community could do more to take on YouTube.

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Wine on Wayland 2022 update: more games, more apps, more fun! — Significant improvement compared to last year is support for cross-process rendering, which is required by Chromium/CEF applications. Last year the driver was able to run Chrome with the "--in-process" command-line option. Chrome is now supported without any special flags, and is fully GPU accelerated on both OpenGL and Vulkan!
A Wayland driver for Wine
Wine on Wayland year-end update: improved functionality & stability
Wine’s Wayland Driver Is Becoming Mature, May Aim For Upstreaming Early Next Year
Linux 6.1 Released With MGLRU, Initial Rust Code — Linux 6.1 integrates the exciting Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) overhaul of the page reclamation code, the initial Rust programming language support
The 6.1 kernel is out [LWN.net]
Linux 6.2 Graphics Changes: Intel Arc Graphics Stable, Initial NVIDIA RTX 30 Acceleration
Linux 6.2 Addresses Another “Tasty Target For Attackers”
Linux 6.2 Expands Support For More Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs, Apple M1 Pro/Ultra/Max
Intel On Demand Driver Ready To Activate Your Licensed CPU Features With Linux 6.2
Btrfs With Linux 6.2 Bringing Performance Improvements, Better RAID 5/6 Reliability
CERN recommendation for Linux distribution — CERN and Fermilab jointly plan to provide AlmaLinux as the standard distribution for experiments at our facilities, reflecting recent experience and discussions with experiments and other stakeholders
CERN, Fermilab select AlmaLinux as standard for big science
AlmaLinux 9.1 - Now Available - AlmaLinux OS Blog
Stephan Dörner (in English) on Twitter — CERN and Fermilab jointly plan to provide AlmaLinux as the standard distribution for experiments at our facilities
GCC Rust “gccrs” Code Merged Into Mainline GCC 13 — Following last week's approval with the GCC Rust v4 patches for them to be merged, all of the "gccrs" code was upstreamed this morning for GNU Compiler Collection 13.
PeerTube v5: the result of 5 years’ handcrafting — Five years later, we are releasing PeerTube v5, a tool used by hundreds of thousands people on a thousand interconnected platforms to share over 850,000 videos.
Support Framasoft
Settings Link Missing after 5.0 Upgrade

Linux Action News 270 Dec 08, 2022

The Linux kernel has some exciting updates this week, including a significant Asahi milestone and some good news for Android. Then we take openSUSE's new web-based installer for a spin.

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Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux — We’ve been working hard over the past two years to bring this new driver to everyone, and we’re really proud to finally be here. This is still an alpha driver, but it’s already good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games
Asahi Linux Enables Early Apple GPU Driver Support - WIP OpenGL 2.1 + GLES 2.0
Apple Silicon CPUFreq Driver Heading To Linux 6.2 — Sent in yesterday were the Arm CPUFreq updates to queue in the Linux power management tree ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window.
[GIT PULL] cpufreq/arm updates for 6.2 - Viresh Kumar
Floppy Driver Update Ready For Linux 6.2 — This memory leak with the floppy disk driver has been in the mainline kernel since Linux 5.11
Android memory safety vulnerabilities declined as Rust usage grew — Specifically, the number of annual memory safety vulnerabilities fell from 223 to 85 between 2019 and 2022. They are now 35% of Android’s total vulnerabilities versus 76% four years ago. In fact, “2022 is the first year where memory safety vulnerabilities do not represent a majority of Android’s vulnerabilities.”
Google says Android runs better when covered in Rust
Fedora 38 Cleared To Produce “Mobility Phosh” Spins — The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has provided their blessing to begin creating new x86_64 and AArch64 ISO images for mobile devices that feature the Phosh Wayland compositor.
Ping bug potentially allows remote hack of FreeBSD systemsSecurity Affairs — A remote attacker can trigger the vulnerability, causing the ping program to crash and potentially leading to remote code execution in ping.
D-Installer needs your help — Today we published a new prototype of D-Installer, fixing several bugs reported by early testers and improving the usage experience in some areas like the configuration of passwords and users. But beyond those improvements, a couple of new features deserve some attention.
Bug 1205938 – D-Installer - Slowness initialization on real hardware
GitHub - yast/d-installer: A service-based Linux installer
openSUSE’s D-Installer Adds LVM & Full Disk Encryption Configuration

Linux Action News 269 Dec 01, 2022

Old school Ubuntu has a new cool, Google calls out Google, and some IoT news you can use.

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New versions of Ubuntu Touch, Mir, and Unity arrive — Various parts of Ubuntu's canceled desktop/fondleslab convergence project are all still ticking away – some officially and some thanks to user communities.
Ubuntu Touch OTA-24 Release
Mir release 2.10.0
Unity 7.6 is now available for Arch Linux
Ubuntu Touch OTA-24 Released for Ubuntu Phone Users
Google updates 2013 Chromecast for first time in over three years — In a new batch of Chromecast updates, Google has released new firmware for the first-generation Chromecast for the first time in years.
Chromecast firmware versions and release notes
Eufy cameras caught sending local footage to cloud — Paul Moore, a security researcher, posted on Twitter last week a frightening security situation with Eufy home security products including camera-equipped doorbells.
Google says Google should do a better job of patching Android phones — Project Zero calls out Android and Pixel for not fixing a GPU vulnerability.
ClamAV 1.0.0 Released — The first version of ClamAV, which is developed by the US-based tech company Cisco and the open-source community, was released back in 2002.
20 Years in the Making: ClamAV Finally Hits Version 1.0
Compute Accelerator Subsystem Being Introduced For Linux 6.2 — It's happening: the new "accel" compute accelerator subsystem is now queued for introduction with the Linux 6.2 kernel once that merge window opens in December.
Red Hat Developers Announce Work On New “Composefs” File-System — Red Hat is working on Composefs as a way to construct and use read-only images that are verifiable and have some immediate use-cases around sharing of Podman container layers and with the verification support for use by OSTree.
GitHub - composefs

Linux Action News 268 Nov 24, 2022

The contested subsystem coming soon, a sobering assessment of wireless support in Linux, and a triumph for free software.

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New subsystem for compute accelerator devices — This is the fourth (and hopefully last) version of the patch set to add the new subsystem for compute accelerators.
Compute Accelerator Subsystem Hopes To Be Ready For Linux 6.2
Peter's Talk at Linux Plumbers Conference — All types of wireless in Linux are terrible and why the vendors should feel bad - Peter Robinson
Intel’s IWD 2.0 Released For Modern Linux Wireless Daemon — Released this week was IWD 2.0 as the latest milestone for this open-source wireless daemon.
Phoronix Premium Black Friday Deal — For this year's deal, you can go premium for just $30 per year or $150 for a lifetime subscription.
Asahi Linux Updates — This month’s update is packed with new hardware support, new features, and fixes for longstanding pain points, as well as a new bleeding-edge kernel branch with long-awaited support for suspend and the display controller!
Feature Support · AsahiLinux/docs Wiki

Linux Action News 267 Nov 17, 2022

We tried Fedora 37 on the Pi 4, the Google surprise this week, and our thoughts on the WSL 1.0 release.

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Announcing Fedora Linux 37 — Fedora Editions are flagship offerings targeted at a particular “market”. With Fedora Linux 37, we’re adding two new Editions.
Fedora 37 Now Available With GNOME 43 Desktop, Official Raspberry Pi 4 Support
Meta OSS’ Sapling — A new source control system with Git-compatible client.
Get ready for Google Summer of Code 2023! — We are thrilled to announce the 2023 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and share the timeline with you to get involved! 2023 will be our 19th consecutive year of hosting GSoC.
Google Summer of Code
Rust in the Kernel Update — This patch series is the first batch of changes to upstream the rest of the Rust support.
Rust Developers Preparing To Upstream More Code Into The Linux Kernel
WSL 1.0 Released — Microsoft announces it is removing the Preview label and making WSL in the Microsoft Store "generally available".
Release Notes for WSL kernel

Linux Action News 266 Nov 10, 2022

Microsoft's new goodies for Linux users, the Ubuntu Summit wraps up, and our takeaways from the recent fireside chat with Linus Torvalds.

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The Ubuntu Summit Just Wrapped Up — Vulture Towers Central Europe are in Prague – which, handily, is also the location for Canonical's 2022 Ubuntu Summit.
Ubuntu Summit 2022 - Day 1! - YouTube
Ubuntu Summit 2022 - Day 2! - YouTube
Ubuntu Summit 2022 - Day 3! - YouTube
Microsoft .NET 7 Released With Better Linux Support — Microsoft .NET 7 brings improved performance, enhanced .NET support on Linux throughout, native support for ARM64, developer productivity enhancements, better cross-platform mobile/desktop app support, HTTP/3 improvements for cloud native apps, 64-bit IBM Power support on Linux, and a variety of other run-time improvements.
Microsoft Launches a Microsoft Teams PWA on Linux — The PWA enables us to ship the latest Microsoft Teams features faster to our Linux customers and helps us bridge the gaps between the Teams desktop client on Linux and Windows.
Khronos Unveils Kamaros — An open, royalty-free standard for controlling camera system runtimes in embedded, mobile, industrial, XR, automotive, and scientific markets.
The Khronos Group Announces “Kamaros” As Their Newest Forthcoming API
Fwupd 1.8.7 is a Big Update — Linux firmware updating utility fwupd 1.8.7 has been released adding support for new devices, as well as various improvements.
Fwupd 1.8.7 Adds Support for More Star Labs Linux Laptops, Intel Discrete GPU
Pat Gelsinger and Linus Torvalds talk Linux, open source, technology and more - YouTube — Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger sat down with Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux who is also known as “the godfather of Open-Source,” to talk about everything from the beginning of Linux to Linus’ advice for Intel and why he chose a penguin as the Linux mascot.

Linux Action News 265 Nov 03, 2022

What you need to know about that new OpenSSL vulnerability, the big bcachefs update we've been waiting for, and why the community is creating a Gitea fork.

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OpenSSL 3.0.7 Released Fixing Critical Flaw — Today we published an advisory about CVE-2022-3786 (“X.509 Email Address Variable Length Buffer Overflow”) and CVE-2022-3602 (“X.509 Email Address 4-byte Buffer Overflow”).
OpenSSL version 3.0.7 published
/news/openssl-3.0-notes.html
Fedora 37 Release Delayed To Mid-November Over Critical OpenSSL Vulnerability
Linux 6.2 Power-Savings While Idle Or Lightly Loaded — The short story for Linux end-users is the Lazy RCU work can provide 5~10% power-savings for idle or lightly-loaded systems by this lazy/batching functionality.
Linux 6.2 Picking Up Mainline Support For Apple M1 Pro/Max/Ultra Hardware — This gets the high-end Mac Studio systems with those premium SoCs now compatible with the mainline kernel.
Hector's Deleted Tweet — I'm getting tired of arguing with kernel maintainers. The other day I spent 6 hours arguing on IRC about what should've been a 30 minute fix patch.
Hector Martin on Twitter Follow Up Tweet — Like dude, if you aren't going to step into my world and actually understand what I'm trying to do here, just suck it up and ack my patch. It is not my job to drag you kicking and screaming until you either give up or have a lightbulb moment.
Seems some Kernel Maintainers Noticed the Twitter Rant — Well they saw my tweets and apparently didn't like them 🤷‍♂️
Bcachefs Rolling Out New Allocator, Performance Continues Improving — Bcachefs developer Kent Overstreet on Friday published a new status update on this original file-system born out of Linux's block cache (BCache) code.
FreeBSD Re-Introduces WireGuard Support Into Its Kernel — As of Friday, a new WireGuard driver implementation has been re-introduced with many fixes/improvements over the code state from 2020.
Open Letter to Gitea - Restoring Trust in the Gitea Project — This unfortunately concludes the Gitea Open Letter has failed and there is no alternative but forking the project under a new name, with a healthy democratic governance.

Linux Action News 264 Oct 27, 2022

The focus of the new Ubuntu release, Gitea's surprising announcement, and Linux prepares to drop another architecture.

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Ubuntu 22.10 Released — Codenamed “Kinetic Kudu”, this interim release improves the experience of enterprise developers and IT administrators. It also includes the latest toolchains and applications with a particular focus on the IoT ecosystem.
LINUX Unplugged 481: Just a Prompt Away — We take a look at Ubuntu 22.10 on a ODRID H3+
Ubuntu 22.10 Pi Focused Features
Ubuntu 22.10 (Kinetic Kudu) Is Now Available for Download
Open source sustainment and the future of Gitea — We’d like to announce that we have formed a company, Gitea Limited, to ensure the goals are met.
Apple CPUFreq Driver Updated For Linux - Initial M2 Support Added — The new v3 patches have addressed feedback raised during prior review. One notable addition with the new patches is adding initial support for the Apple M2 SoC (T8112).
Asahi Lina on Twitter — My Linux M1 GPU driver passes >99% of the dEQP-GLES2 compliance tests!
Hector Martin on Twitter
Linus Torvalds may pull '486 support from Linux kernel — As Torvalds surveyed contributors' code, he appears to have been frustrated by the need to include workarounds that cater to older CPUs. He therefore suggested ending support for old kit could be an easier way to solve memory matters.
Red Hat releases a virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktop on AWS — Red Hat is positioning the service as suitable for processing-intensive workloads like animation rendering or data visualization but without the associated hardware costs.
Stratis Storage 3.3 Released — Stratis 3.3.0 includes one significant enhancement and several smaller enhancements as well as number of stability and efficiency improvements.
Stratis Storage
Matthew Miller on Twitter — Heads up: we are very likely to slip the official Fedora Linux 37 release in order to integrate fixes for the upcoming critical openssl vulnerability. Official decision on this tomorrow.
Forthcoming OpenSSL Releases — OpenSSL 3.0.7 is a security-fix release. The highest severity issue fixed in this release is CRITICAL

Linux Action News 263 Oct 20, 2022

What makes Google's new OS so secure, a critical WiFi vulnerability in the Kernel, and why Linus is tapping the hype breaks for Linux 6.1.

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Announcing KataOS and Sparrow — Our team in Google Research has set out to solve this problem by building a provably secure platform that's optimized for embedded devices that run ML applications.
Google launches KataOS
Google Announces KataOS As Security-Focused OS, Leveraging Rust & seL4 Microkernel
Some remotely exploitable kernel WiFi vulnerabilities — It would appear that there is a set of memory-related vulnerabilities in the kernel's WiFi stack that can be exploited over the air via malicious packets; five CVE numbers have been assigned to the set.
Linux Gets Patched For WiFi Vulnerabilities That Can Be Exploited By Malicious Packets - Phoronix
Firefox 106 Brings Improved WebRTC - Better Screen Sharing On Wayland — Firefox 106 upgrades its WebRTC capabilities to now make use of libwebrtc 103.
impervious.ai — A Suite of Peer-to-Peer Tools for Communications, Data Transport, and Payments, Built Directly Into the Web Browser
Impervious Ai GitHub
You’re invited to the Fedora Linux 37 Release Party! — Please register on Hopin and join us on November 4th and 5th for a short program of informational sessions and social activities.
Fedora Linux 37 Release Party Registration
Linus Torvalds to Linux devs: Stop pulling all-nighters — "Let me just say that after I got my machine sorted out and caught up with the merge window, I was somewhat frustrated with various late pull requests. I've mentioned this before, but it's _really_ quite annoying to get quite a few pull requests in the last few days of the merge window"
Linux 6.1 Features Include Initial Rust Code, MGLRU, New AMD CPU Features, More Security
Linux 6.1 Will Likely Be This Year’s LTS Kernel Release
Taming the Beast - LUP 480
Send a Boost — Upgrade to a Podcasting 2.0 compatible app, and send a Boost and enjoy other improvements to your podcasts.

Linux Action News 262 Oct 13, 2022

Plasma 5.26's standout features, Canonical flips the script on Red Hat, and why Android is leaking traffic outside VPNs.

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Plasma 5.26 Released — Plasma 5.26 comes with new and tweaked widgets, improves the desktop experience leaps and bounds, and Plasma Big Screen's app family grows
These weeks in KDE: Akademy and Plasma 5.26
Google Reveals ‘First Laptops Built For Cloud Gaming’ — Google says the Acer Chromebook 516 GE, ASUS Chromebook Vibe CX55 Flip and Lenovo Ideapad Gaming Chromebook all have refresh rates of at least 120Hz, displays with up to 1600p resolution, immersive audio and, critically for cloud gaming, WiFi 6 or 6E connectivity.
Intel Arc Graphics - A750 and A770 GPUs Release — The Intel Arc A750 and A770 GPUs officially launch today, October 12th in select markets. Everyone at Intel is beyond thrilled to get graphics cards with modern features and extremely competitive performance-per-dollar into your hands.
Intel Arc Graphics Running On Fully Open-Source Linux Driver
Canonical Launches Free Ubuntu Pro Subscriptions for Everyone — Ubuntu Pro is available for every supported Ubuntu LTS version, starting with Ubuntu 16.04 ESM and up to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Android leaks some traffic even when ‘Always-on VPN’ is enabled — The data being leaked outside VPN tunnels includes source IP addresses, DNS lookups, HTTPS traffic, and likely also NTP traffic.
Incorrect VPN lockdown documentation [249990229] - Visible to Public - Issue Tracker
Android leaks connectivity check traffic — As a closing note, we would like to recommend Google to adopt the ability to disable the connectivity checks, like on GrapheneOS, into stock Android.
iOS VPN apps have another flaw: excluding many Apple apps — We confirm that iOS 16 does communicate with Apple services outside an active VPN tunnel. Worse, it leaks DNS requests. Apple services that escape the VPN connection include Health, Maps, and Wallet.

Linux Action News 261 Oct 06, 2022

Our thoughts on IBM slicing up more of Red Hat, what stands out in Nextcloud Hub 3, and a few essential fixes finally landing in the Linux kernel.

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IBM Takes Over Red Hat Storage to IBM Offerings — IBM announced today it will add Red Hat storage product roadmaps and Red Hat associate teams to the IBM Storage business unit, bringing consistent application and data storage across on-premises infrastructure and cloud.
Why Whitehurst is stepping away from IBM
IBM Does A “Quasi-Acquisition” Of Red Hat Storage — Red Hat OpenShift Data Foundation is also being absorbed into IBM Spectrum Fusion. IBM is assuming the Premier Sponsorship role of the Ceph Foundation from Red Hat.
Announcing Nextcloud Hub 3 — Our design always followed three principles. Focus on content, ease of use, and great accessibility. For this refresh, we added a fourth: make it your own.
Introducing NVK — NVK is a new open-source Vulkan driver for NVIDIA hardware in Mesa.
Debian’s firmware vote results — The winning option allows the installer image to include firmware necessary to use the system.
Intel Laptop Users Should Avoid Linux 5.19.12 — After looking at some logs we do end up with potentially bogus panel power sequencing delays, which may harm the LCD panel.
Intel Laptop Users Should Avoid Linux 5.19.12 To Avoid Potentially Damaging The Display - Phoronix
Linux 6.0 Released With Many Intel & AMD Driver Additions — Linus Torvalds just promoted Linux 6.0 to stable on-schedule and thereby now ushering in the Linux 6.1 merge window to officially get underway tomorrow.
Some 6.0 development statistics — A total of 2,034 developers contributed to the 6.0 release; of those, 236 made their first contribution during this cycle. The total number of developers is just short of the record (2,086) set for 5.19, but the number of first-time contributors is the lowest seen since the 5.6 release (216) in 2020.
Linux 6.0 Supporting New Intel/AMD Hardware
Btrfs Brings Some Great Performance Improvements With Linux 6.1
The Initial Rust Infrastructure Has Been Merged Into Linux 6.1 — As a follow-up to the Rust infrastructure pull request for Linux 6.1, Linus Torvalds pulled the initial Rust code into the mainline Linux kernel this evening.

Linux Action News 260 Sep 29, 2022

The controversial change for the GNU Toolchain, critical vulnerabilities in popular Matrix clients, and the significant milestone for the Ingenuity LinuxCopter this week.

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Announcing the GNU Toolchain Infrastructure Project — Linux Foundation IT services plans for the GNU Toolchain include Git repositories, mailing lists, issue tracking, web sites, and CI/CD, implemented with strong authentication, attestation, and security posture. Utilizing the experience and infrastructure of the LF IT team that is already used by the Linux kernel community will provide the most effective solution and best experience for the GNU Toolchain developer community.
Sourceware.org
GNU Toolchain Plans Move To The Linux Foundation’s Infrastructure
Two visions for the future of sourceware.org
Plasma Mobile Gear Update — The Plasma Mobile team is happy to announce the developments integrated into Plasma Mobile between July-September 2022.
The Work-In-Progress Rust-Written Apple DRM Driver Manages To Start Wayland’s Weston — After passing the initial spinning cube milestone this past weekend, Asahi Lina has been working on bringing up more of this reverse-engineered kernel DRM/KMS driver.
Asahi Lina on Twitter — 🚀 Weston/Wayland works!!! 🚀 KDE doesn’t start all the way yet, but on X at least it showed the splash screen ^^
Upgrade now to address E2EE vulnerabilities in matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk and matrix-android-sdk2 — Two critical severity vulnerabilities in end-to-end encryption were found in the SDKs which power Element, Beeper, Cinny, SchildiChat, Circuli, Synod.im and any other clients based on matrix-js-sdk, matrix-ios-sdk or matrix-android-sdk2.
Akamai Turns Linode Up Past 11
Over the weekend, #MarsHelicopter successfully completed Flight 33 — The rotorcraft reached an altitude of 10 meters (33 ft) and traveled 111.24 meters (365 ft) in 55.2 seconds.
There will be up to five flights in the 31-day test period. — The NASAPersevere rover will attempt to capture video of those flights.
NASA’s Asteroid-Striking DART Mission Team Has JPL Members — JPL’s navigation section is experienced at getting spacecraft to faraway locations accurately.
How JPL’s role in NASA’s DART asteroid impact could save the earth one day – Pasadena Star News
DART’s Impact with Asteroid Dimorphos (Official NASA Broadcast)

Linux Action News 259 Sep 22, 2022

GNOME 43 highlights, Canonical's new hardware partner, and why we're disappointed in the Framework Chromebook.

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GNOME 43 Release Notes — After 6 months of hard work, the GNOME project is proud to present version 43. This latest GNOME release comes with improvements across the board, ranging from a new quick settings menu, a redesigned Files app, and hardware security integration. GNOME 43 continues the trend of GNOME apps migrating from GTK 3 to GTK 4, and includes many other smaller enhancements.
GNOME 43 Released With More Apps Ported To GTK4, Wayland Enhancements
GNOME 43 Notes for Developers
System76 Launches Redesigned Thelio Desktop — System76 today is announcing the Thelio, Thelio Mira, and Thelio Major with a full-chassis redesign.
system76
Next steps for Rust in the kernel — At the 2022 Linux Kernel Maintainers Summit, Miguel Ojeda updated the group on the status of the project with the goal of reaching a conclusion on when this merge might happen. The answer that came back was clear enough: Rust in the kernel will be happening soon indeed.
Rust Porting Begins For Intel’s “e1000” Linux Network Driver — Adding to the growing examples and early drivers being worked on for the Linux kernel to showcase the possibilities of using the Rust programming language within the kernel, an early port of Intel's e1000 wired networking driver has started.
Linux kernel’s eBPF feature put to unexpected new uses
ASUS & Canonical Partner On The IoT — Adding to the growing examples and early drivers being worked on for the Linux kernel to showcase the possibilities of using the Rust programming language within the kernel, an early port of Intel's e1000 wired networking driver has started.
OpenJDK Java 19 Released With RISC-V Linux Port, Foreign Function API — OpenJDK Java 19 in its general availability form while adding a number of new features.
Introducing the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition — Today, we are excited to announce that we have partnered with Google to create the Framework Laptop Chromebook Edition. We’ve taken the best parts of the Framework Laptop and merged those with the powerful simplicity of ChromeOS to create a high-performance, upgradeable, repairable, customizable Chromebook.

Linux Action News 258 Sep 15, 2022

The Linux Foundation takes a victory lap, Google kills another community-loved project, and key moments from the Linux Plumbers Conference.

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Shikitega - AT&T Alien Labs — New stealthy malware targeting Linux
LINUX Unplugged 474: Linux’s Malware Inevitability
New Linux malware combines unusual stealth with a full suite of capabilities — "Threat actors continue to search for ways to deliver malware in new ways to stay under the radar and avoid detection," AT&T Alien Labs researcher Ofer Caspi wrote.
New Linux malware evades detection using multi-stage deployment
Shape-shifting cryptominer savaging Linux endpoints and IoT — The malware was dubbed "Shikitega" for its extensive use of the popular Shikata Ga Nai polymorphic encoder, which allows the malware to "mutate" its code to avoid detection. Shikitega alters its code each time it runs through one of several decoding loops that AT&T said each deliver multiple attacks, beginning with an ELF file that's just 370 bytes.
Next-Gen Linux Malware Takes Over Devices With Unique Tool Set
OpenWrt 22.03 Released With Updated Firewall, Support For 180+ New Devices - Phoronix
[OpenWrt Wiki] OpenWrt 22.03.0 - First Stable Release - 6 September 2022
Linux Foundation Announces Open Wallet Foundation — The Linux Foundation, a global nonprofit organization enabling innovation through open source, today announced the intention to form the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF), a new collaborative effort to develop open source software to support interoperability for a wide range of wallet use cases.
Linux Foundation announces the OpenWallet Foundation to develop interoperable digital wallets
Welcoming PyTorch to the Linux Foundation
Facebook Transfers PyTorch AI Framework to Linux Foundation for Governance — Today we are more than thrilled to welcome PyTorch to the Linux Foundation. Honestly, it’s hard to capture how big a deal this is for us in a single post but I’ll try.
PyTorch strengthens its governance by joining the Linux Foundation
Google Pixelbook is no more, proving the world wasn’t ready for premium Chromebooks | TechRadar
Linux Plumbers Conference - YouTube
LPC 2022: Rust Linux Drivers Capable Of Achieving Performance Comparable To C Code - Phoronix
IO_uring Continues To Prove Very Exciting: Promising io_uring_spawn Announced — It also continues to be relentlessly optimized by Jens Axboe and others for maximum performance potential. The latest innovation around IO_uring that was announced this week at Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 in Dublin is io_uring_spawn.
An io_uring-based user-space block driver
A pair of Rust kernel modules
Compiling Rust with GCC: an update
Mesa’s Rust OpenCL Implementation Merged
Adding rusticl (!15439) · Merge requests · Mesa / mesa · GitLab
LPC 2022 - Kernel Summit - Lansdowne - YouTube

Linux Action News 257 Sep 08, 2022

Linux goes underwater, Microsoft kills the Teams' Linux app, and the nasty GRUB bug some of us could not avoid.

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Mircosoft Teams desktop client on Linux is being retired — We are updating this message to indicate we will be retiring the Microsoft Teams desktop client on Linux in 90 days
Rish Tandon on Twitter — “With this change, we are taking a major step in #MicrosoftTeams Teams architecture. We are moving away from Electron to Edge Webview2. Teams will continue to remain a hybrid app but now it will be powered by #MicrosoftEdge. Also Angular is gone. We are now 100% on reactjs”
Teams 2.0 Moves Away from Electron to Embrace Edge WebView2
Full transparency on the Grub issue — After updating to grub 2.06.r322 many users reported that their machines could fail to boot or booted directly into the BIOS or another OS.
Problem with booting after last upgrade to Grub 2.06.r322
Grub bootloader upgrade and configuration incompatibilities - Arch News
Latest Grub update - Testing Repo - couldnt boot
grub.git - GNU GRUB
Possible Fix for those Impacted
PipeWire 0.3.57 Released — An AAC decoder was added so that PipeWire can now also function as an A2DP AAC receiver.
PipeWire 0.3.57 Adds AAC Decoder, Opus For Bluetooth
Nmap 7.93 the 25th anniversary edition has been released — Twenty five years ago, I released the first version of Nmap in a Phrack article named The Art of Port Scanning.
SUSE turns 30 — From our start in Nuremberg on September 2, 1992 to our record-breaking IPO in 2021 and continued growth, SUSE has always put community first, including our employee community.
Commercial underwater datacenter goes online this year — The company claims that placing its datacenter modules underwater can reduce power consumption and carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent, as well as lowering latency by allowing the datacenter to be located closer to metropolitan areas, many of which are located near the coast.
Subsea Cloud announces three underwater data center projects - DCD
Underwater data centres are coming. Can they slash CO2 emissions and make the Internet faster? | Euronews

Linux Action News 256 Sep 01, 2022

Debian’s firmware future is up for debate, Pine64 teases a RISC-V SBC, and some of your favorite tools just got new tricks.

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New fwupd 1.8.4 starts work on BIOS control — fwupd now reads your system BIOS settings, and has the ability to change them if the user desires (and has authorization to do).
Fwupd 1.8.4 Supports More Hardware, Starts Allowing To Make BIOS Changes From Linux
Canonical Continues Snap’ing Up Linux Gaming For Ubuntu — Canonical has been indicating they want to improve the Linux gaming experience on Ubuntu (and hiring for it) and ensure its a dominant platform for Linux gaming.
Pine’ Star64 RISC-V based Single Board Computer
Pine64 reveals the Star64 RISC-V based Single Board Computer — Along the long leading edges you’ll find PCIe on one end and GPIO on the other. At one end of the board you’ll find a digital video output, a double-stacked Gigabit Ethernet port and a 12V barrel plug for power. On the opposite side, you’ll find 3x USB 2.0, 1x USB 3.0, an audio jack as well as a power button. There are also two U.FL ports for antennas – one for bluetooth and the other for WiFi.
NetworkManager 1.40 Released With Multi-Path TCP Support — Multi-Path TCP has come together in the kernel over the past two years for this standard, allowing TCP connections to use multiple paths for greater performance/efficiency and added redundancy.
Debian General Resolution To Decide What To Do With Non-Free Firmware — The basic problem is that the use of downloadable firmware in computer systems is on the rise and most of that firmware is not free software. The official Debian installer only incorporates free software (and firmware), which leads to serious problems for many users.
Debian Proposes Better Discovery of non-free Firmware Images
General Resolution: non-free firmware
Office Hours 11 — We launch our new site LIVE!

Linux Action News 255 Aug 25, 2022

Details on two new efforts in the Linux kernel, the Pi-like RISC-V board that just hit its funding goal, and a significant milestone for Asahi GPU driver development.

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Experimental Kernel Patches — Patches sent out today clean-up the code taken on those architectures for bringing CPU cores down and allow for parallelism. With these patches and an 80-core Arm server, a Kexec reboot can go from taking around 15 seconds to now just around one second.
ByteDance Working To Make It Faster Kexec Booting The Linux Kernel
[RFC 00/10] arm64/riscv: Introduce fast kexec reboot - Pingfan Liu
[PATCH 0/4] faster kexec reboot - Albert Huang
VisionFive 2 — Kickstarter — High-performance quad-core RISC-V single board computer (SBC) with an integrated 3D GPU, 2G/4G/8G LPDDR.
Linux Foundation TAB election: call for nominees — The 2022 election for members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) will be held during the Linux Plumbers Conference, September 12 to 14.
Webmin 2.0 Released — Webmin is a web-based system administration tool for Unix-like servers and services with over 1,000,000 installations worldwide.
Flatpak 1.14.0 Released — Flatpak 1.14 brings a variety of mostly small and lower-level improvements to this Linux app sandboxing tech
Flatpak 1.14 Released With Improvements For Sandboxed Linux Apps
Firefox 104.0 — The Firefox UI itself will now be throttled for performance and battery usage when minimized or occluded, in the same way background tabs are.
Rosenzweig – Clip control on the Apple GPU — After a year in development, the open source “Asahi” driver for the Apple GPU is running real games.
Asahi Linux May Have OpenGL 2.1 For Apple M1/M2 By Year’s End — " I’m optimistic that we’ll have native OpenGL 2.1 in Asahi Linux by the end of the year."

Linux Action News 254 Aug 18, 2022

A Linux jailbreak that's a win for Right to Repair, our favorite things in Android 13, and the major features that just missed the Linux 6.0 window.

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Android 13 is in AOSP — Today we’re pushing the Android 13 source to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and officially releasing the newest version of Android.
Android 13 Sources Released To AOSP
Glibc 2.36 Dropping DT_HASH Has Been Breaking Easy Anti Cheat Games — The breakage stems from the DT_HASH section being dropped in GNU C Library but EAC being among the few software still expecting that section rather than DT_GNU_HASH.
Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter — Unfortunate that upstream glibc discussion on DT_HASH isn't coming out strongly in favor of prioritizing compatibility with pre-existing applications. Every such instance contributes to damaging the idea of desktop Linux as a viable target for third-party developers.
Carlos O’Donell on Twitter — How far should Linux ELF follow the generic ELF standard (gABI)? We recently let distributions drop DT_HASH from glibc builds (mandatory under the gABI). This broke EPIC's Easy Anti-Cheat. We *should* ask the gABI for DT_HASH to be optional.
GLIBC update broke EAC for most games that use it — Issue #6051 · ValveSoftware/Proton
Should we make DT_HASH dynamic section for glibc?
gapi discussion: Making DT_HASH optional?
Linux 6.0 debuts, missing some Rusty bits — Emperor Penguin Linus Torvalds has released the first release candidate for Linux 6.0, but doesn't mind what you call it.
Linux 6.0 arrives with performance improvements and more Rust coming
Linux 6.0-rc1 Released With Exciting Performance Optimizations
Real-Time “PREEMPT_RT” Not in 6.0-rc1 — Of the 50 patches, it's not too bad either as there are five patches for example that are rather trivial for just enabling real-time (RT) support in the Kconfig files for ARM / ARM64 / POWER / x86 / x86_64. There are also a handful of patches each specific to POWER and the i915 graphics driver code.
Debian turns 29! — Today is Debian's 29th anniversary. We recently wrote about some ideas to celebrate DebianDay, and several events have been planned in more than 14 locations.
LocalGroups - Debian Wiki
A New Jailbreak for John Deere Tractors Rides the Right-to-Repair Wave — An exploit that provides root access to two popular models of the company’s farm equipment.
mu on Twitter — Sick Codes has jailbroken a John Deere, and this is just the beginning. Turns out our entire food system is built on outdated, unpatched Linux and Windows CE hardware with LTE modems.
How a version of Doom running on a John Deere tractor champions the right-to-repair movement — Sick Codes achieved this by working with different tractor control touchscreen consoles, narrowing it down to a select few models, and finding a way to exploit these devices.
Right to repair movement goes Deere hunting
The debate over right to repair in 2022 | Successful Farming
Deere Hit with Class Action Lawsuit Over Right to Repair
Late Night Linux – Episode 190

Linux Action News 253 Aug 11, 2022

GitHub steps in it this week, Microsoft's Linux distribution now runs on bare metal, FFmpeg gets IPFS support, and the odd thing going on with the kernel.

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Microsoft Continues Improving Its Internal Linux Distro With Another Update — Microsoft has kept up with issuing one or more CBL-Mariner updates per month. This summer they rolled out CBL-Mariner 2.0 with many changes over its former 1.0 state, which continues to be maintained too. CBL-Mariner relies upon RPM SPEC files and other assets from Fedora, Photon OS, Openmamba, and Linux From Scratch. This week marked the release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 July 2022 Update 2.
CBL-Mariner GitHub
GitHub Moves to Guard Open Source Against Supply Chain Attacks — The popular Microsoft-owned code repository plans to roll out code signing, which will help beef up the security of open source projects.
GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash — GitHub over the past week has tested the trust of its users by enacting policies that call into question its commitment to free speech and privacy.
‘It Doesn’t Change Anything’ Says Tornado Cash After Code Disappears From GitHub
Projects impacted by Tornando cash ban — TIL the creator address of the Eth2.0 Deposit contract was funded with Tornado cash, created the contract and donated the rest to Wikileaks
Samuel JJ Gosling on Twitter — “@TornadoCash For those looking to host the frontend locally, I’ve uploaded the source code to @IPFS as I suspected this happening. Disclaimer: I’m a contributor to tornado but you should still verify the source code.
Lucas Garron on Twitter
Privacy Statement Updates September 2022 by olholder
IPFS Supported In FFmpeg 5.1, IPFS Devs Envision Support In More Open-Source Projects — July's release of FFmpeg 5.1 introduced native IPFS support for this distributed peer-to-peer protocol.
IPFS.io
Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Delayed Due To An OEM Install Issue Leading To Broken Snaps — Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS had been due for release today but has now been pushed back by one week after discovering an installer issue that led to Snaps like the default Mozilla Firefox browser failing to launch once installed.
Linux 5.20 Likely To Be Called Linux 6.0 — With Linus Torvalds' modern versioning after 19~20 point releases has been when he bumps to the next major version number... Linux 4.0 succeeded Linux 3.19 while Linux 5.0 came after Linux 4.20.
An io_uring-based user-space block driver [LWN.net] — The ublk driver starts by creating a special device called /dev/ublk-control. The user-space server (or servers, there can be more than one) starts by opening that device and setting up an io_uring ring to communicate with it.
Linus' kernel source tree

Linux Action News 252 Aug 04, 2022

The real story behind the "Massive GitHub Malware attack," significant updates for the Steam Deck, and the inside scoop on Lenovo's big Linux ambitions.

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Massive GitHub Malware Attack? — It was revealed by Stephen Lacy in his tweet, he shared his findings of a large-scale campaign targeting random GitHub repositories with project clones containing credential stealing malware and remote shell execution on top of the original code.
Stephen Lacy on Twitter — “I am uncovering what seems to be a massive widespread malware attack on @github. - Currently over 35k repositories are infected - So far found in projects including: crypto, golang, python, js, bash, docker, k8s - It is added to npm scripts, docker images and install docs”
Checkmarx on Twitter — “A recent tweet uncovered a widespread malware attack on @github. This turned out to be a false alarm of sorts, as the infected repositories are simply forks and clones of the original ones - which were mostly deleted by Github by now. Stay safe!"
No, Linus Torvalds is not Bitcoin’s legendary creator Satoshi Nakamoto
Steam Deck Client Update and SteamOS 3.3 — We have just shipped SteamOS 3.3 and an updated Steam Client to the Stable channel. This update includes all the changes and improvements that have been undergoing testing in the Beta and Preview channels.
SteamOS 3.3 Now Available With Many Improvements For The Steam Deck
Steam For Linux In July Shows A 1.23% Marketshare — AMD CPUs Now More Common Than Intel On Linux
DXVK 1.10.3 Released With Shared Fences
Chris’ Steam Deck Review LINUX Unplugged 467
Lenovo Expects 30+ Platforms With Linux Support This Year, Both AMD & Intel Systems — Lenovo's Mark Pearson provided an update on Linux for their laptops/PCs, including 30+ platforms for 2022 with Linux support.
Lenovo Linux 2022 - DebConf 22
Fedora Pi Support Gets Real — The work around Raspberry Pi 4 has been on going for a number of years, but we've never officially supported it due to lack of accelerated graphics and other key features. With Fedora 37, Raspberry Pi 4 is now officially supported, including accelerated graphics using the V3D GPU.
Fedora 37 To Offer Official Support On Raspberry Pi 4 Devices
Linux 5.19 Released
Some 5.19 development statistics
Linux Kernel 5.19 Released with Major Networking Tweaks
Rust Code For The Linux Kernel Updated With More Features
Asahi Linux Confirms M2 MBA on Twitter — Linus is using an M2 MacBook Air, running ARM64 Fedora. He does his own kernel builds, of course, with our Asahi kernel branch merged in, and he's been building and testing kernels on it.
Asahi Alternative Distros docs

Linux Action News 251 Jul 29, 2022

Red Hat hints at its future direction, why realtime might finally come to Linux after all these years, and our reaction to Google's ambitious new programing language.

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Red Hat’s next steps, according to its new CEO — "We expect to see an 800% increase in edge applications built by 2024. We want those applications to be part of the open hybrid cloud. We think we have a unique position to connect end devices back to the assets that you have in your data centers and cloud that you use to run your company today."
PREEMPT_RT Might Be Ready To Finally Land In Linux 5.20 — The Linux real-time patch series has been getting smaller with time and quite close to crossing the finish line with just around 50 patches to be merged.
Google Engineers Go Big on Carbon - A Hopeful Successor To C++ — The Carbon programming language hopes to be the gradual successor to C++ and makes for an easy transition path moving forward.
ByteDance Working To Make Kernel Booting Faster — This patch series touching around 100 lines of Linux kernel code is what they are now hoping to upstreamed.
Happy Birthday This Week in GNOME — I am pleased to announce that TWIG is having its first anniversary!
This Week in GNOME
This Week in KDE
#53 GUADEC 2022 · This Week in GNOME
Btrfs Native Encryption Being Worked On — My goal in sending out this RFC is to get feedback on whether these are going in a reasonable direction; while there are a couple of additional parts, they're fundamentally minor compared to this.

Linux Action News 250 Jul 21, 2022

Microsoft makes a hard about-face, a significant fix for Ubuntu 22.04 is in the works, and the recent breakthrough by the Asahi Linux project.

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Microsoft changes its mind about open source monetization — Microsoft was trying to do the right thing, but it turns out doing nothing is better.
Giorgio Sardo on Twitter — To clarify our intent, we removed the previous mention to open source pricing. We're committed to building an open Store and enabling dev choice and flexibility. If there are intellectual property concerns about an app, please report it.
An Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Fix Is Coming For A Very Annoying & Serious APT Problem — "installing the package libudev1 results in a large number of critical packages being removed and rendering the system essentially unusable."
Bug #1974196 “Installing libudev1 on a new Jammy installation"
Draft: Mark broken reverse depends for upgrade (!248) · Merge requests
Drop-in, drop-out chats with Video Rooms in Element — This has been a long time coming and, frankly, we’re really excited to be introducing Video Rooms to you. It’s a major step towards richer video (and soon voice) rooms!
SCALE 19x — SCaLE 19x is coming up July 28th - the 31st at the LAX Hilton. Promo code LAS50
M2 is here! July 2022 Release & Progress Report — Welcome to another long overdue progress report! As usual, things have been busier than expected… and we have some big news! We’ve just released a new Asahi Linux update with Mac Studio, Bluetooth, and M2 support!
Asahi Linux Update Brings Experimental Apple M2 Support

Linux Action News 249 Jul 14, 2022

Why Google says we should all go rolling, Red Hat's got a new boss, Microsoft gets called out, and why it might be the year of Linux hardware.

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How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops — Today, the life of a gLinux team member looks very different. We have reduced the amount of engineering time and energy required for releases to one on-duty release engineer that rotates among team members. We no longer have a big push to upgrade our entire fleet. No more need for multi stage alpha, betas and GAs for new LTS releases while simultaneously chasing down older machines that still were running Ubuntu Precise or Lucid.
Red Hat names new CEO — In a move many will find surprising, Red Hat announced that Paul Cormier, the company's CEO and president since 2020, is stepping over to become chairman of the board. Matt Hicks, a Red Hat veteran and the company's head of products and technologies, will replace Cormier as president and CEO.
KDE Announces Powerful Slimbook 4 Linux Laptop — The laptops are powered by AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor with eight cores. They use USB-C for charging and power, like many other modern laptops. There are two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, an HDMI port, and a wired Ethernet jack.
System76 Launch Lite Teaser — Launch, but Lite. Launch Lite is the everyperson's keeb — comfortable, portable, and configurable.
System76 Teases the Launch Lite Open-Source Configurable Keyboard, Coming July 14th
AMD Is Hiring To Improve Its Linux Graphics Driver Installation Experience — In addition to their recent hiring for a open-source Linux GPU driver developer with multimedia experience, this week they have posted a new role looking for Linux build engineer(s) to focus on their graphics driver.
Linux Build Engineer — Our team works on open-source GPU drivers for Linux. We are leading contributors to the Radeon Mesa graphics and multimedia drivers included in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and Debian. Our software is used in exciting products such as the Tesla Model S and the Steam Deck.
Matthew Garrett: Responsible stewardship of the UEFI secure boot ecosystem — So, to have Microsoft, the self-appointed steward of the UEFI Secure Boot ecosystem, turn round and say that a bunch of binaries that have been reviewed through processes developed in negotiation with Microsoft, implementing technologies designed to make management of revocation easier for Microsoft, and incorporating fixes for vulnerabilities discovered by the developers of those binaries who notified Microsoft of these issues despite having no obligation to do so, and which have then been signed by Microsoft are now considered by Microsoft to be insecure is, uh, kind of impolite?
X.Org Server Hit By New Local Privilege Escalation, Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities — CVE-2022-2319 and CVE-2022-2320 were made public this morning and both deal with the X.Org Server's Xkb keyboard extension not properly validating input that could lead to out-of-bounds memory writes. Hopefully though in 2022 you aren't relying on your xorg-server running as root.
Many Old X.Org Components Saw New Releases This Weekend - Phoronix
Boycott Wayland. It breaks everything! — tl;dr: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet, and maybe never will. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better of not using Wayland at this point.
X.Org Security Advisory: July 12, 2022

Linux Action News 248 Jul 07, 2022

The new movement to leave GitHub, an Ubuntu bug biting 22.04 users, the hardware platform Fedora might start taking seriously, and a major desktop dev departs Red Hat.

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Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come! — Today, we take a stronger stance. We are ending all our own uses of GitHub, and announcing a long-term plan to assist FOSS projects to migrate away from GitHub.
Roma, one of the first RISC-V laptops, may ship in September — As for the specs, the Roma laptop will, we're told, come with a quad-core RISC-V processor, an Arm security enclave core, a GPU/NPU accelerator for video and AI workloads, up to 16GB of LPDDR4 or LPDDR4X memory, and up to 256GB of storage.
System76 Announces New Alder Lake Laptop With Coreboot Firmware — System76 has announced a new Lemur Pro laptop model that is now offering 12th Gen "Alder Lake" Intel processors while continuing to feature Coreboot firmware.
System76.com
Fedora May Finally Provide Official Support For The Raspberry Pi 4 — The hope with this change proposal is to provide more "official" support for Fedora Linux on the Raspberry Pi 4B / 400 / CM4 hardware.
Changes/RaspberryPi4 - Fedora Project Wiki
Fedora 37 Proposing To Allow Unrestricted Access To Flathub
Fedora 37 Looks To Better Manage Its 175MB+ Of Linux Firmware Blobs
Fedora 37 Gets A Batch Of New Features Approved
New Ubuntu MATE Release — Improved compositor and video playback performance, zswap (lz4) by default & optimised image sizes
Systemd Creator Lands At Microsoft — The prominent open-source developer responsible for several prominent projects joined Microsoft and is continuing his focus on systemd development.
Lennart Poettering - systemd + PulseAudio Creator - Departed Red Hat
Linode Now Supports Kali Linux
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Has A Change On The Way For Systemd-OOMD Being Kill-Happy With Apps
ManagedOOMSwap docs
Discussion: systemd-oomd issues on desktop
249.11-0ubuntu3.4 : systemd package : Ubuntu

Linux Action News 247 Jun 30, 2022

Fedora gets serious about its server editions, our thoughts on Valve's increased Steam Deck production, and the surprising results of booting Linux on the Apple M2 SoC.

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Fedora 37 Gets A Batch Of New Features Approved — Fedora 37 is working its way toward release before the end of October.
The Performance Cost To A Proposed Fedora 37 CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS Change
Fedora CoreOS Hopes To Become An Official Edition With Fedora 37
Fedora 37 Looks To Ship With Stratis Storage 3.1 Support
Fedora 37 Proposing To Allow Unrestricted Access To Flathub
Fedora Magazine: Accessibility in Fedora Workstation — I am very happy to announce that Red Hat has just hired Lukas Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer, to lead our effort in making sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation has excellent accessibility support!
Firefox 102 Available With Transform Streams, Geoclue On Linux — Firefox 102.0 isn't the most exciting end-user update but does have some developer additions like Transform Streams support and support for Geoclue with Firefox Linux builds for geolocation.
Thunderbird 102 Released With Big Improvements To This Leading Open-Source Mail Client — Thunderbird 102 introduces a new address book implementation, a new spaces toolbar, a new import/export wizard, a redesigned message header, and other "quality of life" updates. There are also some extras with Thunderbird 102 like adding Matrix chat support.
Matrix.org Security release: Synapse 1.61.1 — Today we're exceptionally releasing Synapse 1.61.1, which comes as a security release. Server administrators are encouraged to update as soon as possible.
Synapse Release v1.61.1
Synapse Advisory — URL previews of unusual or maliciously-crafted pages can crash Synapse media repositories or Synapse monoliths.
Valve More Than Doubles Steam Deck Production, Q3 Reservations Starting Soon — Valve just tweeted out some great news for SteamDeck fans, saying it has more than doubled the number of Steam Decks being produced every week. The company also says it just sent out the last batch of Q2 reservation emails and is prepared to start kicking off Q3 reservations on June 30th 2022.
Check Your Steam Deck Order Status
Vim 9.0 — The main goal of Vim9 script is to drastically improve performance. This is accomplished by compiling commands into instructions that can be efficiently executed. An increase in execution speed of 10 to 100 times can be expected.
Vim 9.0 Released With New Vim9 Script For 10~100x Execution Speed
Linode Security Digest — June 20-26, 2022
Apple M2 Enablement For Linux Begins With Good Progress — Hector Martin on Monday began his Linux M2 bring-up effort, including with a livestream of this reverse engineering / debugging / kernel hacking effort. Hector confirmed NVMe, USB, and SMC functionality are working for the M2 on the first day of the effort.
M2 Asahi Linux bring-up YouTube Stream

Linux Action News 246 Jun 23, 2022

Some highlights from Linus' recent fireside chat, Qt gets a new leader and a Linux botnet we should probably take seriously.

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Akamai Warns Of “Panchan” Linux Botnet — The botnet introduces a unique (and possibly novel) approach to lateral movement by harvesting of SSH keys. Instead of just using brute force or dictionary attacks on randomized IP addresses like most botnets do, the malware also reads the id_rsa and known_hosts files to harvest existing credentials and use them to move laterally across the network.
Canonical Continues Working On Ubuntu’s Firefox Snap Performance — On the Ubuntu blog is a new post by Canonical's Oliver Smith about their latest efforts to improve the Firefox Snap performance and other outstanding issues with this sandboxed version of the Mozilla web browser.
Lars Knoll Announces His Successor For Qt Chief Maintainer — The voting period for the new Chief Maintainer has ended yesterday. This means Volker Hilsheimer will be our new Chief Maintainer. Congratulations!
New Chief Maintainer for the Qt Project
Talisman: Debut of X — I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W.
X Window System Turns 38 Years Old — It was on 19 June 1984 that Bob Scheifler announced the initial X window system release "X1" at MIT.
X Windows System Design Principles, a lecture by James Gettys
A Political History of X - Keith Packard (LCA 2020)
Linus Torvalds: Rust For The Kernel Could Possibly Be Merged For Linux 5.20 — Torvalds commented that real soon they expect to have the Rust infrastructure merged within the kernel, possibly even for the next release -- meaning Linux 5.20.
Open Source Summit North America 2022: Keynote: Linus Torvalds
How are we improving Firefox Snap performance? Part 2

Linux Action News 245 Jun 16, 2022

We get the details behind Thunderbird acquiring K-9 Mail, share the best new features of Plasma 5.25, check-in on Ubuntu's RISC-V development status, and discuss Photoshop coming to Linux via the web.

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K9 mail to become Thunderbird on Android — Ultimately, K-9 Mail will transform into Thunderbird on Android.
K-9 Mail – Open Source Email App for Android
K-9 Mail joins the Thunderbird family
Frequently Asked Questions: Thunderbird Mobile and K-9 Mail
Ubuntu Working To Provide Good Support For The VisionFive Low-Cost RISC-V Board — The Starfive VisionFive is a currently $179 USD RISC-V board that is intended to run full-blown RISC-V Linux distributions.
Fedora 37 Looks To Boost Its Cloud Posture As An Official Edition — Approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee this week is returning Fedora Cloud base to be listed as an official Fedora edition.
Plasma 5.25 - Released — Plasma 5.25 brings new features and concepts to the desktop environment.
5 Neat New Features in KDE Plasma 5.25, Released Today
Ventoy 1.0.76 — Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.
Super UEFIinSecureBoot Disk: Boot any OS or .efi file without disabling UEFI Secure Boot
Adobe Plans To Make Photoshop on the Web Free To Everyone — The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes the service as “freemium” and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop’s core functions.
Photopea | Online Photo Editor

Linux Action News 244 Jun 09, 2022

SUSE Enterprise is already switching to the new NVIDIA open kernel driver, a Matrix-powered Walkie-Talkie, and the details on Apple's Rosetta for Linux.

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SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 Released - Switches To NVIDIA’s Open Kernel Driver — Notable with SLE 15 SP4, SUSE is already switching to using NVIDIA's open-source GPU kernel-mode driver that NVIDIA open-sourced last month
openSUSE Leap 15.4 Released
Element Call Beta 2 includes lots of exciting new updates! — In a walkie-talkie call, videos are disabled, and everyone is muted by default. To speak, press the ‘push-to-talk’ (PTT) button, either by pressing it on the screen or by holding the spacebar. The catch is that, just like a walkie-talkie or two-way radio, only one person can speak at a time. When someone else is speaking, your PTT button will be disabled, and if you try to push it you’ll hear a warning beep.
Fedora and Ubuntu EOL announcements — If you are running Fedora 34, the time has come to move on; that distribution will reach the end of its support life on June 7. Users of Ubuntu 21.10 have a little longer, but that release loses support on July 14 and users should update to 22.04.
Fedora 34 is going EOL in one week
Ubuntu 21.10 reaches End of Life on July 14 2022
HP Dev One Now Shipping — Unplug and work from any location. At 3.24 lbs, with up to 12 hours of battery life and an ultra-bright display, HP Dev One was made to perform on the go.
Managed PostgreSQL and MongoDB are Here | Linode
Apple will allow Linux VMs to run Intel apps with Rosetta in macOS Ventura — You can even use Rosetta with non-Apple Arm CPUs, though you probably shouldn't.
Running Intel Binaries in Linux VMs with Rosetta
Hector Martin on Twitter — “Huh, so Rosetta is now a Linux app. Without Linux kernel patches this can’t use any special M1 features, so if this runs significantly better than FOSS offerings that should help dispel the myth that “the M1 has magic make-Rosetta-fast features”.
Longhorn on Twitter — Well. Rosetta 2 needs a quite recent CPU (post v8.2) to work because of the instructions used. Does it work on non-Apple arm64 CPUs? 🤔 Yes. (allows to settle the argument once and for all that this needs anything Apple specific outside of TSO support*. Answer is a no.)

Linux Action News 243 Jun 02, 2022

Our thoughts on NixOS' new GUI installer, winning hearts and minds one firmware update at a time, the performance bug that hit Linux 5.18, and preparation begins for the open-source NVIDIA driver.

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LVFS Has Served More Than 52 Million Firmware Files To Linux Users — LVFS has served up 52.1 million firmware files to end-users over its lifetime. There has also been over a 99% success rate on the firmware being deployed correctly to users.
Fwupd 1.8.1 Released With Firmware Updating For More HP, Corsair, PixArt, Lenovo Devices
A Fix Is On The Way For A Previously-Reported Linux 5.18 Performance Regression — Back during the Linux 5.18 merge window in March I wrote about a big NUMA benchmark performance regression I noticed and bisected.
Nouveau Begins Shifting Around Code For Use By New Driver — "This just moves the codegen build into a separate library, this is just prep work for a future where another drivers wants to reuse this code. this isn't perfect for plugging into a vulkan driver, but doing that requires more in depth surgery."
NVIDIA 515.48.07 Linux Driver Released As Stable With Open Kernel Driver Option
Welcoming Rocket.Chat to Matrix! — We just wanted to take a moment to welcome Rocket.Chat to Matrix, given the recent announcement that they are switching to using Matrix for standards-based interoperable federation!
Rocket.Chat Leverages The Matrix Protocol for Decentralized and Interoperable Communications
AlmaLinux 9.0 Released — AlmaLinux OS 9.0 is based on upstream kernel version 5.14 and contains enhancements around cloud and container development and improvements to the web console.
AlmaLinux 9 Now Available! - AlmaLinux OS Blog
GPU Price-Performance Benchmarking Report
NixOS 22.05 Released With New Graphical Installer — NixOS 22.05 builds atop the Nix 2.8 package manager, which brings better performance, general improvements, the experimental nix fmt command that applies a formatter defined by the flake output to the Nix expressions in a flake, and other additions.
NixOS GUI Configuration Editor — A simple NixOS configuration editor application built with libadwaita, GTK4, and Relm4. The goal of this project is to provide a simple graphical tool for modifying and managing desktop NixOS configurations.
NixOS - Blog → Announcements
Calamares Installer — Calamares aims to be easy, usable, beautiful, pragmatic, inclusive and distribution-agnostic
NixOS Calamares PR: fix calamares modules, add nixos modules, and add new iso by vlinkz
NixOS/calamares-nixos-extensions: NixOS Calamares Extensions

Linux Action News 242 May 26, 2022

The controversial Intel code now shipping in Linux, why F-Droid is getting more attractive for developers, and the rumor that could change the industry.

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Linux 5.18 Released With Intel SDSi, New CPU & GPU Features — Linux 5.18 brings the controversial Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) functionality.
Thoughts on software-defined silicon — Its purpose is to disable access to specific processor capabilities in the absence of a certificate from Intel saying otherwise.
Statistics from the 5.18 development cycle
Btrfs Gets Some Buttery Good Improvements With Linux 5.19 — David Sterba of SUSE has submitted the ~4k lines of code worth of feature changes for the Btrfs file-system driver in the Linux 5.19 kernel.
Our build and release infrastructure, and upcoming updates — This work will be incrementally deployed as each bit is finished. So be patient, and you will notice releases happening faster and faster!
Google Summer of Code (GSOC 2022) Highlights of FOSS Projects — Google announced the GSoC 2022 projects, and the list includes some exciting improvements to the mainstream foss projects such as GNOME, Xfce, LibreOffice, etc.
Ubuntu 22.10 Makes PipeWire Default for Audio — “That’s right, as of today the Kinetic ISO (pending, not yet current since the changes were just made) has been updated to run only PipeWire and not PulseAudio […] you can look forward to this for Kinetic”
Broadcom-VMware Deal Said to Be Ready as Soon as This Week — Broadcom Inc. could announce an agreement to acquire cloud-computing company VMware Inc. as soon as this week
Broadcom’s Potential VMware Acquisition: 5 Things About Dell, Stock Prices And Hock Tan To Know
Broadcom in Talks to Pay About $60 Billion for VMware
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Has Mixed Feelings on a Broadcom-VMware Deal

Linux Action News 241 May 19, 2022

Why Google's new open-source security effort might fall a bit short, the Arch snag this week, a big win for Right to Repair, and why you might soon have a new favorite filesystem.

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New from Google Cloud: Assured Open Source Software service — Assured OSS enables enterprise and public sector users of open source software to easily incorporate the same OSS packages that Google uses into their own developer workflows.
OSS-Fuzz — continuous fuzzing for open source software.
Google will start distributing a security-vetted collection of open-source software libraries
Shared success in building a safer open source community
White House joins OpenSSF and the Linux Foundation in securing open-source software
Software Freedom Conservancy right-to-repair lawsuit against California TV manufacturer Vizio, Inc. remanded to California State Court - Software Freedom Conservancy — "The ruling is a watershed moment in the history of copyleft licensing. This ruling shows that the GPL agreements function both as copyright licenses and as contractual agreements" says Karen M. Sandler, executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy.
Arch Linux Temporarily Steps Back From WirePlumber After Snafu — With the recent attempt to switch to WirePlumber, that modern session manager was unconditionally taking over audio responsibilities even if the user had configured their system to use PulseAudio or ALSA directly.
Arch Linux News — Undone replacement of pipewire-media-session with wireplumber.
Bringing bcachefs to the mainline — Bcachefs is a longstanding out-of-tree filesystem that grew out of the bcache caching layer that has been in the kernel for nearly ten years. Based on a session led by Kent Overstreet at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), though, it would seem that bcachefs is likely to be heading upstream soon. He intends to start the process toward mainline inclusion over the next six months or so.
bcachefs Principles of Operation

Linux Action News 240 May 11, 2022

NVIDIA has announced its plans for an open-source GPU driver. Christian Schaller, the Director for Desktop, Graphics, Infotainment and more at Red Hat, gives us the inside scoop on this historic announcement.

Special Guest: Christian F.K. Schaller.

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Why is the open source driver release from NVidia so important for Linux? | Christian F.K. Schaller — Today NVidia announced that they are releasing an open source kernel driver for their GPUs, so I want to share with you some background information and how this will impact Linux graphics and compute going forward.
NVIDIA Releases Open-Source GPU Kernel Modules — This release is a significant step toward improving the experience of using NVIDIA GPUs in Linux, for tighter integration with the OS and for developers to debug, integrate, and contribute back.
NVIDIA Transitioning To Official, Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Driver — NVIDIA's open kernel modules is already considered "production ready, opt-in" for data center GPUs. For GeForce and workstation GPUs, the open kernel module code is considered "alpha quality" but will be ramped up moving forward with future releases.

Linux Action News 239 May 06, 2022

New firmware superpowers are coming to a future Linux kernel, why Google is working on encrypted hibernation support, and a sneak peek at SteamOS 3.

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Google Working On Linux Encrypted Hibernation Support — Google engineers are working on "enabling hibernation in some new scenarios."
Encrypted Hibernation - Evan Green
Update on Linux hibernation support when lockdown is enabled
uswsusp - ArchWiki
Rewritten Apple Silicon CPUFreq Driver Posted For Linux — The new patches posted today are a "complete rewrite" of the earlier Apple SoC CPUFreq driver attempt.
Apple Silicon Exclusively Hit With World-First “Augury” DMP Vulnerability — Apple's DMP can potentially leak the entire memory content even if it's not being actively accessed.
Linux 5.19 Adding Ability To Initiate Firmware Updates Using Sysfs — Thanks to Intel there is firmware-upload support being added to sysfs that user-space software can use for initiating a firmware update.
0.34.0 security release for matrix-appservice-irc — Incorrect handling of a CR character allowed for making part of the message be sent to the IRC server verbatim rather than as a message to the channel.
Adopting Matrix at the GNOME Foundation
IRC, Matrix, and thanks for all the kicks
holoiso: SteamOS 3 — This project attempts to bring Steam Deck's Holo OS into a generic, installable format and replicate close-to-official SteamOS experience.
HoloISO brings Valve’s SteamOS 3 from the Steam Deck to everyone

Linux Action News 238 Apr 28, 2022

Pop_OS! 22.04 has a surprise you might not have noticed, we get the details on Ubuntu’s new Real-Time kernel, and the clever idea from the Framework laptop team.

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Pop!_OS 22.04 by System76 — Pop!_OS is designed for fast navigation, easy workspace organization, and fluid, convenient workflow. Your operating system should encourage discovery, not obstruct it.
System Updater Nix Support
Pop System Updater
Ubuntu Outlines How To Use Its Real-Time Kernel Beta - It Requires Ubuntu Advantage — The RT kernel for x86_64 and AArch64 is tailored to meet the low latency needs and other guarantees for the teclo industry, robotics, critical infrastructure, and other industries.
Concerns Raised Over The “New” NTFS Linux Driver That Merged Last Year — Less than one year later, concerns have been raised that the driver is already effectively orphaned and not being maintained.
Steam Deck Client and OS Updates — Today's update includes Steam, OS, and firmware updates, and may take a few minutes to apply after restarting. Please be patient while your Steam Deck updates.
Order Email Megathread (04/14/2022) : SteamDeck
Proton 7.0-2 Out — . Proton 7.0-2 is the new main stable version, not to be confused with Proton Experimental that was also updated recently.
Element Introduces Threads in Beta — Threads help you separate conversations from the main timeline. Starting a new Thread opens the thread view where you can continue your conversations without interruption from other messages or topics pinging through in the timeline.
Linux Action News Feedback - Matrix Channel — A place to provide real-time feedback on the show, stories, and more.
Framework Mainboard Availability and Open Source Release — The Framework Laptop Mainboard is now available in the Framework Marketplace 69. You can order one today in the US and Canada with newly reduced pricing.
Framework Mainboards
Framework Mainboar Developer Giveaway Program — To accelerate the ecosystem of projects using Framework Laptop Mainboards, we’re giving away 100 i5-1135G7 Mainboards for free to creators and developers!

Linux Action News 237 Apr 21, 2022

Our take on why Fedora's Legacy BIOS plans have stirred up such a strong debate, how NVIDIA's Linux strategy seems to be changing, and a surprising kernel patch from Sony.

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NVIDIA Posts Open-Source DRM Kernel Driver For NVDLA — NVIDIA has posted 13k lines of new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel driver code for review for supporting their NVDLA IP block.
Sony Contributes ~73%+ Performance Improvement For exFAT Linux Driver — In turn this improved block request handling leads to 73% and higher performance improvements for tests carried out by Sony engineer Yuezhang Mo on an Arm test platform with SD card storage that is common for Microsoft exFAT file-system usage.
KDE Has Many Plasma Wayland Fixes — It was a mostly bugfixy week, without so much feature and UI work.
Google Chrome/Chromium Experimenting With A Qt Back-End — It looks like Google is at least evaluating the prospects of Qt toolkit support for the Chromium/Chrome UI. A Phoronix reader tipped us off to newly-started Gerrit code reviews for Qt support with Chromium.
Legacy BIOS Support Remains Important For Some On Fedora, May Shift Responsibility To SIG — Earlier this month the change proposal was laid out for Fedora 37 looking to deprecate legacy BIOS support.
LINUX Unplugged 454: Double Distro Details — Has Fedora pulled ahead of Ubuntu? We take a look at the new Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 releases.

Linux Action News 236 Apr 14, 2022

SUSE has a skunkworks distro in development, the transition Debian is struggling with, and some long-awaited improvements to Raspberry Pi OS.

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openSUSE Developing “Adaptable Linux Platform” For Next-Gen SUSE Linux Enterprise — Another important point is that we intend to split what was a more generic, everything is closely intertwined into two parts: One smaller hardware enabling piece, a kind of "host OS", and the and the layer providing and supporting applications, which will be container (and VM) based.
Update on next generation of SLE - openSUSE Mailing Lists
An update to Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye — With this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image. This is in line with the way most operating systems work nowadays, and, while it may cause a few issues where software (and documentation) assumes the existence of the “pi” user, it feels like a sensible change to make at this point.
PipeWire 0.3.50 — WINE applications using the JACK backend should no longer crash.
OpenSSH 9.0 released — It is claimed to be primarily a bug-fix release, but it also switches to a new, quantum-computer-proof key-exchange protocol by default and includes a number of sftp changes, some of which may create some compatibility issues with scp.
Reiser5 Issues New Development Release, Performance Numbers For Scaling Out — Shishkin published an new Reiser5 unstable snapshot today that targets Linux 5.16 kernel compatibility. Along with updating Reiser5 for newer kernel compatibility and other changes since its prior snapshot, Shishkin accompanied today's announcement with some benchmark numbers.
New NVIDIA Open-Source Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Appears — Appearing with NVIDIA's latest Linux4Tegra code drop is a new open-source kernel graphics driver not previously published. This driver isn't based on the existing Nouveau driver but rather appears to be derived from their internal driver code-base with some copyright references going back to 90's.
NVIDIA Publishes Signed Ampere Firmware To Finally Allow Accelerated Open-Source Support — Even with the signed firmware images, there are still complications around re-clocking the GPU to get off the rather low boot clock frequencies. Those complications around power management in the context of signed firmware images have meant the GTX 900 series and newer hasn't been able to operate with the open-source driver at its optimal clock frequencies...
Debian still having trouble with merged /usr — The addition of the "/usr merge" feature has been something of longstanding mess in the Debian world. It seems like a relatively innocuous change, but ever since we first covered the feature introduction for Debian—more than six years ago—it has a been a recurring series of headaches within that community. Recent events have seemingly simply prolonged the pain, though perhaps the end is in sight.
Usr move status in various distros
The Case For The Usr Merge

Linux Action News 235 Apr 07, 2022

Docker surprises everyone, new Fedora tools in the works, and an old debate with a fresh take.

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Docker rebounds with $105m Series C funding and $2.1b value — Troubled container company may escape confines of its doldrums
LXD 5.0 LTS has been released — This is our 4th LTS release and quite an exciting one for anyone coming from LXD 4.0 as it significantly steps up LXD’s abilities, especially when operating in clustered environments.
Anaconda is getting a new suit and a wizard — Before starting the redesign work for the Anaconda installer, the team reviewed user feedback and usability study data that we’ve gathered over the years.
Fedora Workstation Brainstorming A Possible GUI-Based Linux Recovery Environment — This currently hypothetical GUI-driven recovery environment sounds like it could almost be like Apple's macOS recovery mode in that there may be the possibility of even downloading a new system image from this environment.
Fwupd 1.7.7 Released For Firmware Updating More Logitech Devices On Linux - Phoronix
Lutris 0.5.10 Released With Steam Deck Support — Lutris 0.5.10 brings proper Steam Deck support thanks to their collaboration with Valve and receiving a Steam Deck developer kit. Lutris' Flatpak version is still being improved upon as the next step in enhancing the Steam Deck support for this game manager.
Mathieu Comandon on Twitter — We gotta stop this culture of "only install Flatpaks / using root is dangerous" before it extends beyond the Steam Deck. Last thing I want is for desktop Linux to become like Android or ChromeOS.
meetup.com/jupiterbroadcasting

Linux Action News 234 Mar 31, 2022

A new rolling remix of Ubuntu is grabbing attention, AMD has big Linux plans, and why Linux 5.18 looks like another barn burner release.

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Ubuntu gets a new rolling-release remix — The new flavor is the brainchild of MrBeeBenson, building on work by Martin Wimpress, who is the project leader of the Ubuntu MATE remix.
AMD Recruiting More Linux Engineers For Debug, CXL Enablement & More — Notable with their latest batch of Linux openings is hiring a CXL engineer. This role will focus on AMD's support for Compute Express Link (CXL) hardware enablement under Linux.
WirePlumber 0.4.9 Fixes Surround Sound For Some Linux Games — It was reported that some games within Steam were not able to enjoy 5.1 surround sound with PipeWire in a year-old bug report. A fix landed in WirePlumber a month ago to relax the format parsing within the si-audio-adapter module and this appears to fix up that issue
New Linux kernel patch speeds up server shutdowns — The problem is caused by the relatively long time it takes to properly shut down an NVMe drive: apparently, as much as four-and-a-half seconds.
Linux 5.18 Hardens The Kernel For 64-bit Arm With Shadow Call Stack Support — With the Linux 5.18 hardening updates there is support added for ARM64 (AArch64) Shadow Call Stack support when building the Linux kernel with GCC 12 and newer.
Linux 5.18 Power Management Brings Improvements For Both Intel & AMD — Intel's P-State driver will now use the default default Energy Performance Preference (EPP) exposed by the firmware, and over on the AMD CPU side, the CPUPower utility that lives within the kernel source tree now supports running in conjunction with the AMD P-State driver.
Linux 5.18 Moves Ahead With Deprecating ReiserFS — The plan is to treat it as deprecated and formally remove it from the mainline Linux kernel in 2025.
XFS Online Repair Functionality To Undergo A Massive Design Review — XFS online repair has been talked about for years along with online scrubbing and it looks like it's about all buttoned up. Darrick Wong will be spending the next roughly two months focusing on the "massive" design review for XFS online repair code.
Problems emerge for a unified /dev/*random — A bunch of changes for the kernel random-number generator (RNG) were merged by Linus Torvalds on March 21. Unfortunately a user-space regression surfaced that led Torvalds to say that he would revert the patch. The idea was good, but it "causes problems for various platforms that can't do jitter entropy and have nothing else happening either".

Linux Action News 233 Mar 23, 2022

A significant follow-up to one of the biggest Linux stories, the Pandora's box the MIT Technology Review claims open-source devs just opened, and Linux on the M1 finally ships.

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Documentation/process: Add Researcher Guidelines — This document seeks to clarify what the Linux kernel community considers acceptable and non-acceptable practices when conducting such research. At the very least, such research and related activities should follow standard research ethics rules.
Guidelines for research on the kernel community [LWN.net]
Activists are targeting Russians with open-source "protestware" — At least one open-source software project has had malicious code added which aimed to wipe computers located in Russia and Belarus.
Activists are targeting Russians with open-source "protestware"
SiFive bags $175m to further challenge Arm with RISC-V — The Silicon Valley-based chip designer said Wednesday it had raised a $175m Series F financing round at a more than $2.5bn valuation
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Will Default To Wayland With NVIDIA — Ubuntu 22.04 LTS will now default to using the GNOME Wayland session when running the NVIDIA proprietary driver.
The first Asahi Linux Alpha Release is here! — We’re really excited to finally take this step and start bringing Linux on Apple Silicon to everyone. This is only the beginning, and things will move even more quickly going forward!
Hector Martin on Twitter — We've been getting a steady trickle of users with the installation failing because the APFS resizer does a fsck and finds corruption. This confirms my personal experience that Apple's APFS code is just buggy... it seems a lot of people have latent filesystem corruption :(
Apple M1 Performance On Linux: Benchmarks Better Than Expected For Its Alpha State — I eagerly loaded up Asahi Linux on an M1-powered Apple Mac Mini knowing the various early limitations of the Linux kernel support that is still settling. Overall the Apple M1 Linux performance ended up exceeding my expectations for the performance in its early alpha state.
Jupiter Broadcasting East Coast Meetup — Let's hang out at the park across the street from Prime BBQ.
Howto Install NixOS on Apple Silicon Macs

Linux Action News 232 Mar 17, 2022

Steam comes to ChromeOS, our thoughts on Arch turning 20, and our first look at GNOME 42.

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Arch Linux turned 20 years old
Steam for Chrome OS teased at Google for Games Developer Summit — Steam for Chrome OS was announced as being available "right now" at the Google for Games Developer Summit on March 15, 2022.
Google Finally Announces Steam For Chrome OS
Valve sent the developer of Lutris a Steam Deck to help development
Steam Survey Results For February 2022 Put Linux Right Above 1.0%
Roadtest Proposed As A New Driver Testing Framework For Linux — Roadtest is a device driver testing framework whereby drivers are tested under User-Mode Linux against mocked/modelled hardware.
GNOME 42 News
The Best New Features in GNOME 42
Download Fedora 36 Beta
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) Daily Build
Bump version to 42.0
Mutter Bump version to 42.0

Linux Action News 231 Mar 10, 2022

Why Dirty Pipe is a dirty dog, the explosive adoption of Linux at AMD, and an important update on elementary OS.

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Linux has been bitten by its most high-severity vulnerability in years — Dirty Pipe has the potential to smudge people using Linux and Linux derivitives.
Catalin Cimpanu on Twitter — “DirtyPipe (CVE-2022-0847) is a vulnerability in the Linux kernel since 5.8 which allows overwriting data in arbitrary read-only files. This leads to privilege escalation. It is similar to CVE-2016-5195 “Dirty Cow” but is easier to exploit.
Ron Amadeo on Twitter — “By my count, Dirty Pipe affects only brand-new Android 12 devices like the Pixel 6 and S22. Linux 5.8 and above has only been an Android option for five months."
Canonical Patches “Dirty Pipe” Vulnerability in Ubuntu 21.10 and 20.04 LTS
BLASTY on Twitter: “Hacked up a quick Dirty Pipe PoC that spawns a shell by hijacking (and restoring) the contents of a setuid binary.”
The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability — The Dirty Pipe Vulnerability documentation
AMD Posts Some New Linux Job Openings From Client CPU To Server — AMD would need a lot more Linux engineers to achieve the same level of timely Linux support and low-level kernel enhancements that Intel has been focused on for years, especially when it comes to Intel's open-source work beyond just the actual hardware device enablement.
Introducing Native Matrix VoIP with Element Call! — What’s more, Element Call is built entirely on Matrix: it doesn’t need any additional servers to get going. You can run it against your existing Matrix homeserver to provide complete self-sovereignty… while still being able to talk to anyone else anywhere on the wider Matrix network! We will also be able to automatically use Matrix’s end-to-end encryption to secure all Element Call conferences
call.element.io
https://github.com/vector-im/element-call/issues
Extending Matrix’s E2EE calls to multiparty
Danielle Foré on Twitter — Okay it’s been a full month and this situation still isn’t resolved, and it sucks for you to just be completely in the dark and it’s pretty obvious something is up and people are asking what’s going on, so here is my side of the story 🧵
Danielle gives an update on elementary Reddit Thread
Jupiter Broadcasting East Coast Meetup

Linux Action News 230 Mar 03, 2022

Why it might be time to lower your RISC-V expectations, Intel's moves to close up CPU firmware, and a quick state of the Deck.

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Valve expect to make ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Steam Decks next month — The good news is though, production is quickly ramping up. Yang mentioned how "in production terms it'll ramp very quickly, in the first month very quickly we'll be in the tens of thousands, by the second month we'll be in the hundreds of thousands and beyond that it'll grow even quicker".
Steam Deck gets an OS update to help solve stick drift
Bungie rejects Steam Deck’s Linux, threatens to ban Destiny 2 players there
Collabora talk briefly about their work with Valve on SteamOS, Steam Deck — With its new “A/B” design, there are now two operating system partitions, with two different versions of SteamOS. When upgrading, a new operating system image is written to whichever partition is not currently in use, before rebooting the system. A specialized bootloader module then automatically selects the newer operating system and boots into it.
Portable Linux gaming with the Steam Deck
Linux kernel edges closer to dropping ReiserFS — The problem was that ReiserFS code in the kernel used some API calls that nothing else did, preventing them from being changed or enhanced. For now, one of the other ReiserFS developers has contributed a patch that removes the issue.
CentOS New “AutoSD” Distribution Announced For In-Vehicle Linux Distro — CentOS Automotive Stream Distribution is their binary distribution that will serve as a public, in-development preview of Red Hat's upcoming in-vehicle operating system. CentOS formed their Automotive SIG last year with Red Hat working on a RHEL-based in-vehicle Linux platform that is yet to be publicly released.
Future Intel Systems To Reportedly Be Even Less Friendly For Open-Source Firmware
Zaolin on Twitter — For everyone wondering what’s @IntelSoftware planning for the Firmware Support Package 3.0 #fsp and USF is basically going fully closed-source on the firmware side. This means Intel’s #fsp decides to drop #OSF open-source firmware. It’s really a shame…
Why RISC-V Is Succeeding
Intel’s software-defined silicon set to debut in Linux 5.18 — The existence of software-defined silicon (SDSI) emerged in October 2021 when Intel staffers posted to the Linux Kernel mailing list with hints about new functionality that would allow users to purchase licenses that turned on capabilities physically present in processors, but which are not available to use out of the box.

Linux Action News 229 Feb 24, 2022

The Linux secret behind the new TrueNAS release, Intel acquires a major Kernel contributor and our thoughts on Podman 4.0.

Plus why the Simula One VR Linux computer could be worth a serious look.

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TrueNAS Scale 22.02 Released and Resetting the NAS Paradigm — First off, let us start with what is TrueNAS Scale, and where are we in the process. TrueNAS Scale is based on Linux instead of FreeBSD like TrueNAS. We get all of the storage features we would expect in a modern solution like snapshotting, replication, iSCSI, SMB, NFS, and S3-compatible object storage.
TrueCharts.org
SCALE 22.02.0
Intel Acquires Team behind PREMPT_RT patches — Linutronix is comprised of a team of highly qualified and motivated employees with a wealth of experience and involvement in the ongoing development of Linux. Led by CEO Heinz Egger and CTO Thomas Gleixner, Linutronix is the architect of PREEMPT_RT (Real Time) and the leading technology provider for industrial Linux. Gleixner has been the principal maintainer of x86 architecture in the Linux kernel since 2008.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=PREEMPT_RT-Lack-Of-Funds
Podman 4.0 | Hacker News
Release v4.0.0 · containers/podman
Neil McGovern Stepping down in 6 Months — Now, nearly 5 years later, I’ve decided the timing is right for me to step back and for GNOME to start looking for its next leader.
Linux Action News 182
GNOME 42 Beta Released
Steam for Chrome OS gets minimum hardware specs — If you follow Chrome Unboxed or Chrome OS development in general, the name ‘Borealis‘ may provoke some feelings of excitement and anticipation.
Here’s which Chromebooks should support gaming w/ Steam
HP and Lenovo Chromebooks expected to support Steam
SimulaVR
https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula
Show HN: Simula One – Portable Linux VR Computer
Hacking on Simula (in Simula): Implementing proper window resizing - YouTube

Linux Action News 228 Feb 17, 2022

Canonical has a big week, why bcachefs looks like it's taking another step forward, and ChromeOS Flex for PCs is released.

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Proton 7.0 out with Easy Anti-Cheat improvements — Proton 7.0 pulls in Wine 7.0 which it's based upon along with: upgrades to DXVK 1.9.4 for DirectX 9 / 10 / 11, newer VKD3D-Proton for DirectX 12 to Vulkan
Pierre-Loup Griffais on Twitter
Proton 7.0-1: A Major Milestone for Linux Gaming
Canonical Will Begin Certifying Gigabyte Servers For Ubuntu Linux — Moving forward Gigabyte's server platforms are expected to obtain Ubuntu Server certification.
GIGABYTE Partners with Canonical to Certify Servers for Ubuntu
Canonical at MWC 2022
Bcachefs Might Be Ready For Upstreaming In Linux This Year — The Bcachefs file-system that was born out of the Linux kernel's block cache code has over the past few years matured greatly. Now in 2022 the core fundamentals of the file-system are "pretty close to done" and will hopefully be mainlined this calendar year into the Linux kernel.
Linux On The Apple M1 Preparing Better Performance With In-Development CPUFreq Driver — Fortunately, a proper CPUFreq driver for the Apple M1 is in development for Linux and is allowing for a combination of enticing performance and good battery life for this community-driven, open-source support around the Apple Silicon.
Get Chrome OS Flex for PC or Mac — Chrome OS Flex is a free and sustainable way to modernize devices you already own. It’s easy to deploy across your fleet or simply try it to see what a cloud-first OS has to offer.
Google announces Chrome OS Flex for ordinary PCs, Macs • The Register
Chrome OS Flex is an ideal off-ramp for millions of PCs that can’t run Windows 11
Google’s free Chrome OS Flex could breathe new life into old PCs and Macs

Linux Action News 227 Feb 10, 2022

A last-minute kernel patch for the Steam Deck, why Intel is supporting RISC-V development, and we go hands-on with Plasma 5.24.

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$66 billion deal for Nvidia to purchase Arm collapses — SoftBank’s $66 billion sale of UK-based chip business Arm to Nvidia collapsed on Monday after regulators in the US, UK, and EU raised serious concerns about its effects on competition in the global semiconductor industry, according to three people with direct knowledge of the transaction.
Analysis: Relief and challenges for chipmakers as Nvidia-Arm megadeal collapses
What Nvidia Can’t Buy, It Can Still Get Through An Arm Partnership — While a $1.25 billion hit to the Nvidia books after the company terminated its $40 billion deal to acquire chip designer Arm Holdings from Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group this week is a big deal
The Collapse of the Nvidia Deal Leaves Arm Exposed
Steam Deck Platform Driver Posted For The Linux Kernel — This platform driver is for supporting the Steam Deck Specific "VLV0100" device presented by the embedded controller (EC) firmware. This is ultimately used for functionality like CPU/device fan control, access to DDIC registers, battery temperature measurements, display-related settings, and USB Type-C event notifications.
Engineer hired back in 2018 to work on kernel projects
Open-Source Firmware Foundation Established For Advancing Open Firmware — The Open-Source Firmware Foundation (OSFF) is getting up and running with hopes of expanding open-source firmware usage throughout the industry.
Open Source Firmware Foundation on Twitter
FreeCAD Also Gets a Foundtation
Intel Joins RISC-V International, Will Help With RISC-V Open-Source Software — Intel is joining the RISC-V International organization as a Premier member.
Intel Promotes RISC-V, Pledges $1B to Help Chip Startups | Tom’s Hardware
RAID-Z Expansion Feature for ZFS In the Home Stretch — While all capabilities of this feature have been implemented and all tests so far have been passed, there are still a few loose ends to tie up.
RAIDZ Expansion Feature Pull Request by ahrens
ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon
Plasma 5.24 - Released — Plasma 5.24 improves in looks, ease of use and consistency.
KDE Plasma 5.24 Released With Wayland Support In Increasingly Great Shape — KDE Plasma 5.24 is out as the newest version of this popular open-source desktop environment that will also be their new Long-Term Support (LTS) release.
Try a New Podcast App

Linux Action News 226 Feb 03, 2022

System76 reveals a new tool to make Pop's desktop faster than the rest, and we break down that recent Btrfs defrag infinite loop bug.

Plus, a batch of essential project updates.

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system76-scheduler — Auto-configure CFS and process priorities for improved desktop responsiveness
System76-Scheduler Is A New Pop!_OS Rust Effort To Improve Desktop Responsiveness
Improve desktop application and game performance with system76-scheduler
Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit — Over the past year, we’ve been trialling a beta of Raspberry Pi OS in glorious 64-bit. Now it’s time to open it up to a wider audience.
Framework’s Series A and the Years Ahead — We’ve just raised an $18M Series A round to pull in the future of consumer electronics, with Spark Capital as our lead investor.
Framework Laptop Now Enjoys Open-Source EC Firmware
Docker Desktop for Linux (Tech Preview) — Docker Desktop is an easy-to-install application that enables you to build and share containerized applications and microservices
Docker makes comeback with over $50M in ARR two years into restructuring
SUSE unveils Rancher Desktop 1.0 for Kubernetes on your PC
Trio of Rust Core Team members hit the road — This week has kicked off with three of Core Team taking their leave.
Mod team resigns back in Nov 2021
Redis 7.0 Is Near With “Significant Performance Optimizations” — Redis 7.0-rc1 comes with performance optimizations and more but as well a number of changes that break backwards compatibility support for this popular open-source project.
Release 7.0-rc1 · GitHub
MariaDB Corporation Ab to Become a Publicly Traded Company — In the transaction, Angel Pond will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Mangomill plc, an Irish public limited company (which will be renamed MariaDB plc), through a domestication merger with a wholly owned subsidiary of MariaDB plc. Immediately following such domestication merger, the current MariaDB will merge with and into MariaDB plc. Angel Pond will then be liquidated.
MariaDB announces intent to go public
Linux 5.16.5 Released To Fix Up Btrfs’ Botched Up Defragging — Btrfs up to now on Linux 5.16 was consuming high amounts of I/O and causing performance degradation of the
Btrfs Extent Tree v2 Work Progressing For Improving The File-System’s On-Disk Format

Linux Action News 225 Jan 27, 2022

The big disruption that looks like a bust, a security issue you need to pay attention to, and some great news for the Steam Deck.

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Nvidia is reportedly preparing to abandon its $40 billion takeover of Arm — The deal has faced close scrutiny from regulators around the world, who worry it would give Nvidia an unfair advantage in the semiconductor industry.
SiFive Shifting Production Focus To Next-Gen HiFive Development Board — "With such great ecosystem adoption, demand has exceeded our already high expectations, and we’re close to selling out our production inventory. Given the challenge of supply chain issues that we overcame for the first run of these boards (issues that we continue to face), we’ve decided to focus on the next generation SiFive HiFive development systems rather than trying to put together another build of the HiFive Unmatched platform in 2022."
Linux system service bug gives root on all major distros, exploit released — Qualys has uncovered a truly dangerous memory corruption vulnerability in polkit's pkexec, CVE-2021-4034. Polkit, formerly known as PolicyKit, is a systemd SUID-root program.
Major Linux PolicyKit Security Vulnerability Uncovered: Pwnkit
KDE-Powering Qt’s New Framework Lets Developers Bring Ads Into Their Apps — Qt, the framework that powers the KDE desktop, is announcing support for ads in client-side applications.
Qt Digital Advertising Platform
Steam Deck launches February 25, weekly purchase invites planned — Valve has today officially announced their Steam Deck handheld will launch officially on February 25.
Steam Dynamic Cloud Sync — Dynamic Cloud Sync is now live on Steam, and it's a first for any gaming platform currently in operation. It appears to be inspired by a specific use case: playing your favorite PC game on the go via the Steam Deck, then resuming that same game later on your home PC.
Valve sponsors more work to improve Linux graphics drivers

Linux Action News 224 Jan 20, 2022

We explain SUSE Liberty Linux and contemplate why the community seems to be selecting distributions with newer kernels.

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LVFS Activity Going Wild Ahead Of New Security Disclosure Requiring Firmware Update — Last summer LVFS shot up with activity and when that huge uptick in LVFS activity occurred it ended up being due to Dell BIOS/UEFI updates due to new security vulnerabilities.
Fwupd 1.7.4 Supports More Hardware For Firmware Updating On Linux — The Fwupd 1.7.4 release adds firmware branch support for ModemManager devices, support for firmware engineers to be able to patch files at known offsets, and a variety of bug fixes.
GNOME 42 Desktop Environment Is Now Available for Public Testing — The next development release in the GNOME 42 cycle will be the beta version, currently scheduled for release on mid-February. The final release of the GNOME 42 desktop environment is expected on March 23rd, 2022.
GNOME 42.alpha released — The gnome-desktop module can be built against GTK 4 now and the internals were split in 3 libraries.
SUSE Liberty Linux Announced For Mixed Linux Environments — With SUSE Liberty Linux, you get trusted support with optional proven management tools that are optimized for mixed Linux environments, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and as you would expect openSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
Wine 7.0 Released with Tons of Improvements, Including a New Theme — This release represents a year of development effort and over 9,100 individual changes.
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 7.0
Intel’s Former Vulkan Driver Lead Dev Lands Great Role For Improving Linux Graphics — "I’m now free to put my effort wherever it’s needed in the stack without concern for corporate priorities."
Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Planning To Stick With Linux 5.15 By Default — In the discussion over Ubuntu 22.04's GNOME plans, it was mentioned by Sebastien Bacher of Canonical that "the plan is to use 5.15 for the LTS but the oem and hwe variants will get 5.17 as some point."
oss-security - Linux kernel: Heap buffer overflow in fs_context.c since version 5.1 — Exploitation relies on the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability; however, the permission only needs to be granted in the current namespace. An unprivileged user can use unshare(CLONE_NEWNS|CLONE_NEWUSER) to enter a namespace with the CAP_SYS_ADMIN permission, and then proceed with exploitation to root the system.
CVE-2022-0185- Red Hat Customer Portal
CVE-2022-0185 | Ubuntu
All Roads Lead to Arch: The Evolution of Linux Distros Used for Gaming Over Time — Not only has Arch Linux gained progressively some share to be solidly at 20% now for several months, but the whole landscape looks a lot like Arch derivatives now. Manjaro is almost as big as Arch (but seems to be stagnating in adoption below 20%) and Garuda Linux and EndeavourOS add 6-7% to the mix. In effect, almost half of the gamers on ProtonDB are running some form of Arch.
Linux Mint’s Brand New Edge ISO is Available to Download! — Linux Mint 20.3 now offers a separate Edge ISO for the Cinnamon Edition to help users with latest-gen hardware.

Linux Action News 223 Jan 13, 2022

Fedora and Red Hat users are getting a web-based installer, and a new legal situation for Bitcoin smells like retro SCO FUD.

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Red Hat / Fedora Anaconda Installer Shifting To A Web Based UI — Anaconda has long been GTK-based but as part of modernizing it they are now looking at rewriting the UI to be a web browser-based UI that makes use of Red Hat's Cockpit project.
Anaconda is getting a new suit – Fedora Community Blog
GNOME Shell & Mutter Prepare For GNOME 42 Alpha With Exciting Improvements
Linux Mint 20.3 released promising security updates until 2025 — Linux Mint has released version 20.3, codenamed 'Una,' as a long-term support version that will receive security updates until 2025.
Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” Cinnamon released!
Linux Mint is reverting Firefox to Mozilla config after partnership signed
Jack Dorsey spearheads new fund to defend Bitcoin developers against legal action — In an email addressed to developers, sent early on January 12, Dorsey described the open-source community as “especially susceptible to legal pressure.”
[bitcoin-dev] Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund
Jupiter Extras: Road Trip Memories

Linux Action News 222 Jan 06, 2022

GnuPG has some great news, Libadwaita 1.0 has arrived and we share our thoughts, plus a big batch of updates from the Matrix project.

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Koch: A New Future for GnuPG — Longtime GnuPG maintainer Werner Koch has posted an update on the project, mostly focused on the new associated "GnuPG VS-Desktop" business that is, it seems, going quite well.
A Short introduction to Fuchsia — FuchsiaOS, by now just Fuchsia, was designed to be an entirely modular system, allowing its libraries and applications to be entirely removed, updated and added on it without the system get affected .
fimage — Portable Fuchsia Emulator
More Troublesome x86 Android Tablets Being Fixed Up By New Linux Driver — The forthcoming x86-android-tablets driver is focused on the issue of many x86 tablets having invalid entries within their ACPI DSDT tables.
Libadwaita 1.0 Released For Kicking Off A New Year Of GNOME App Development — GNOME's libadwaita 1.0 has been released for this library implementing the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and complementary to the GTK toolkit.
The Mega Matrix Holiday Special 2021 — Looking back at 2021, it’s unbelievable how much stuff has been going on in the core team.

Linux Action News 221 Dec 27, 2021

We kick off our annual predictions episode with what we got right and wrong this year and then attempt to predict what will happen in 2022.

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Linux Action News 220 Dec 19, 2021

The nasty Log4Shell vulnerability isn't solved yet, this week saw a new round of attacks and patches.

Plus how the work to port Linux to the Apple M1 resulted in fixing a bug that impacted all Linux distros.

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Log4j 2.15.0 and previously suggested mitigations may not be enough — It was discovered that version 2.15.0 would still be vulnerable when the configuration has a pattern layout containing a Context Lookup.
Statement from CISA Director Easterly on “Log4j” Vulnerability
PipeWire 0.3.41 Offers Improved Flatpak & JACK Compatibility, Apple AirPlay Streaming — PipeWire 0.3.41 also adds a new RAOP module (raop-sink and raop-discover) that can be used for streaming to Apple AirPlay devices.
EXT4 Prepared To Switch To Linux’s New Mount API — Linux's new mount API is what came about in recent times as a set of system calls offering more flexibility than the long-standing mount syscall that is a one-shot effort while this new multi-step mounting procedure allows for more options.
The End-Of-Year 2021 State Of Linux On Apple’s M1 SoC — The Asahi Linux project has published their October and November status update to provide an overview of where the Apple Silicon / Apple M1 open-source support is now at as we approach the end of 2021.
Asahi Linux looks forward to exciting 2022 on Apple silicon
Hector Martin on Twitter — Looks like Apple changed the requirements for Mach-O kernel files in 12.1, breaking our existing installation process... and they *also* added a raw image mode that will never break again and doesn't require Mach-Os. And people said they wouldn't help. This is intended for us.
Podcastindex.org — The Podcast Index is here to preserve, protect and extend the open, independent podcasting ecosystem.
Linux Action News on Podcastindex.org

Linux Action News 219 Dec 12, 2021

The Log4Shell vulnerability is making waves this week; we'll explain why and break down how it works.

Plus, some good news for the Desktop and systemd-homed gets one step closer.

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GNOME 42 To Finally Allow Input Events To Happen Full-Rate — Up to now GNOME Shell has been compressing pointer motion events so they are synchronized to the monitor refresh rate, which can be anywhere from around 30 to 144 events per second depending upon display.
An Eventful Instant – GNOME Shell & Mutter
Do not throttle input in wayland event delivery
FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE Announcement — The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/12 branch.
systemd 250 Is Coming With A Boat Load Of New Features — systemd 250 is packing a rather large number of new features and changes across the board for this dominant Linux init system and service manager.
Log4Shell — RCE 0-day exploit found in log4j2, a popular Java logging package
Apache - The ASF on Twitter — “Did you know that Ingenuity, the Mars 2020 Helicopter mission, is powered by Apache Log4j? https://t.co/gV0uyE1ylk #Apache #OpenSource #innovation #community #logging #services
Tom (^-^) on Twitter
Kevin Beaumont on Twitter — “Starting a new thread for log4j security vulnerability and fallout. Spoiler: although this emerged as a Minecraft issue (lol) there is going to be impacts across a wide range of enterprise software for some time.”
Log4jAttackSurface MEMES

Linux Action News 218 Dec 05, 2021

Industry-changing open-source project releases, and why the new CentOS Stream 9 might be more noteworthy than you realize.

Special Guest: Carl George.

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Blender 3.0 Released — Blender Foundation announces the release of Blender 3.0, to mark the beginning of a new era for open source 2D/3D content creation.
Blender - YouTube
Blender 3.0 Shines As A Huge Update For This Leading Open-Source 3D Modeling Software
Blender 3.0 is out now with a visual refresh, huge new features
Firmware “Best Known Configuration” in fwupd — These are used by server vendors to identify a known-working (or commercially supported) set of firmware on the machine. This is currently opt-in for each vendor to avoid the UI clutter on the components view, and so if you’re a vendor reading this post and realize you want this feature, let me know and it’s two clicks on the admin panel.
FWUPD Linux Firmware Updater Prepares “Best Known Configuration” Feature
Linux Vendor Firmware Service Serves Up 40 Millionth Download
Introducing CentOS Stream 9
CentOS Stream 9 Now Available To Live On The Bleeding-Edge Of RHEL9
EPEL 9 is now available
Carl George on Twitter — "I've been explaining the relationship between @Fedora, @CentOS, and #RHEL for years, long before I was hired by Red Hat. It usually happened in the form of drawing on a dry-erase board. Of course, CentOS Stream changes things. 🧵"

Linux Action News 217 Nov 28, 2021

Fedora's massive endorsement this week that went unnoticed, why RISC-V mobile devices might be getting near, and the significant change coming to a critical open-source tool.

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The world’s first RISC-V phone might be just around the corner — The Sipeed Maix Amigo kit from 2020 was among the first RISC-V PDAs
A $16.90 Allwinner D1 Linux RISC-V board
Sipeed’s $17 LycheeRV Board Has Allwinner RISC-V Processor
LLVM Is Still Working On Relicensing, Needs Help Locating Some Past Contributors — LLVM is seeking help in trying to track down some past individual contributors and organizations so they can proceed with their relicensing of the massive code-base.
LLVM relicensing - long tail - Google Sheets
The LLVM Project Blog
German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice — The north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch to open source software, including LibreOffice, in its administration and schools.
Amazon Linux 2022 Released - Based On Fedora With Changes — Amazon Linux / Amazon Linux 2 had been based on a combination of RHEL and Fedora packages while in today's Amazon Linux 2022 release they note it's explicitly based on Fedora.
amazon-linux-2022: Amazon Linux 2022
Announcing preview of Amazon Linux 2022

Linux Action News 216 Nov 21, 2021

Just how severe is this DNS cache poisoning attack revealed this week? We'll break it down and explain why Linux is affected. Plus, the feature now removed from APT, more performance patches in the Kernel, and a big batch of project updates.

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Linux has a serious security problem that once again enables DNS cache poisoning — We can actually guess the ephemeral port in the embedded UDP packet and package it in an ICMP probe to a DNS resolver. If the guessed port is correct, it causes some global resource in the Linux kernel to change, which can be indirectly observed. This is how the attacker can infer which ephemeral port is used.
Ubuntu Maker Canonical Planning To Vastly Improve Its Documentation — This is a permanent, on-going commitment. It’s work that will never end. It has already started, and will become part of the fundamental Canonical discipline of making software.
The future of documentation at Canonical
APT 2.3.12 package manager released, will no longer let you break everything — After the issues that happened with Linus from Linus Tech Tips breaking Pop!_OS during the switch to Linux challenge, the APT package manager has been upgraded to prevent future issues happening.
KDE Discover gets update to prevent you breaking your Linux system — Another change to make things look a bit friendlier in Discover is if you have issues upgrading, it will instantly shove a load of technical details in your face. To normal consumers, that's clearly not going to do much to help and probably scare them away. Now, instead, it will provide a very clear and friendly message, with the option to get more details to report the issue.
Add support for list issue - Jens Axboe — With the support in 5.16-rc1 for allocating and completing batches of IO, the one missing piece is passing down a list of requests for issue.
Linux 5.17 To Continue With I/O Optimizations, 5~6% Improvement Pending For NVMe — With the merge window for 5.16 closed, time to submit for review some of the performance optimizations that didn't make this release. Here's batched issue for blk-mq with an NVMe implementation included. 5-6% improvement.
Linux 5.17 To Boast A Big TCP Performance Optimization
Linux 5.17 To Bring DRM Privacy-Screen Support, Intel VESA PWM Backlight Handling — The Linux 5.16 merge window now past, an initial batch of changes from drm-misc-next has been sent in to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 5.17 cycle kicks off around the start of the new year.
Ubuntu Touch OTA-20 Released for Linux Phones, Here’s What’s New — The UBports Foundation released today the Ubuntu Touch OTA-20 software update for Ubuntu Phone devices with various improvements and more bug fixes.
FWUPD 1.7.2 Released With Fixes, Faster & Smaller Daemon — FWUPD 1.7.2 adds support for handling exported MTD block devices, tweaking the compiler flags to reduce the install size by around 300 Kb, speeding up the FWUPD daemon startup by ~40% by postponing some work, and a variety of fixes. The fixes range from a possible DFU crash to DLI download troubles and other device-specific corrections.
Alma and Rocky Linux release 8.5 builds, Rocky catches up with secure boot — AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, both of which provide community builds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), have released builds matching RHEL 8.5, with Rocky's work catching up with Alma by being signed for secure boot.
Proxmox VE 7.1 released! — Proxmox VE 7.1 is based on Debian 11 but uses a newer Linux kernel, 5.13, QEMU 6.1, and OpenZFS 2.1.
Proxmox 7.1 release notes
Proxmox Downloads

Linux Action News 215 Nov 14, 2021

A desktop from Linux past has a surprising update this week, AlmaLinux pulls ahead of the pack, and Canonical ships software for the Apple M1.

Plus, the new tech in SteamOS 3 that might make it a great desktop OS.

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Raspberry Pi OS hits the bullseye — Raspberry Pi announced the release of a new version of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian), which advances to the Debian 11 “bullseye” release.
What’s new in RHEL 8.5 — Customers running Microsoft SQL Server on RHEL will see a number of enhancements to help configure, manage and operate RHEL more efficiently.
Major Changes in 8.5
Red Hat 8.5 released with SQL Server and .NET 6
AlmaLinux OS 8.5 Stable Now Available — AlmaLinux OS 8.5 includes features and improvements to container tools to reduce friction and make the build and deploy processes more flexible, support for OpenJDK 17, additional OpenSCAP profiles for hardening and security compliance, new system roles, and Network Time Security (NTS) for NTP, amongst other additions and enhancement.
Canonical Makes It Easier to Run Ubuntu VMs on Apple M1 Macs with Multipass — Multipass promises to offer Apple M1 MacBook developers interesting in developing apps for the Linux/Ubuntu desktop the fastest way to run Linux cross-platform, running a Ubuntu VM in as little as 20 seconds.
Hector Martin on Twitter — Say hi to an M1 Pro 14" MacBook Pro running KDE Plasma 5 on Arch Linux ARM! Notch compatible! I made NVMe work today and decided it's time to properly install a distro ;)
Hector Martin on Twitter: “It’s been running the glxgears demo (60% all-core CPU usage) all night, lid closed, no display sleep. It’s barely warm to the touch, and I can only hear the fan if I put my ear 15cm away from the vents. This is why I’m putting Linux on these machines :-) https://t.co/HPBDskirSf” / Twitter
Big Btrfs Changes in the Works — I’m working on a large set of on-disk format changes to address some of the more painful parts of Btrfs’s design. There’s a lot of discrete changes here, but they’ll all go under the single umbrella of “extent-tree-v2.”
On-Disk Format Changes Ahead To Improve “Painful” Parts Of Btrfs Design
Steam Deck Release Pushed Back To February 2022 — For those that pre-ordered the Steam Deck your position in the queue remains, but is now all shifted back by approximately two months.
Valve Shares New Steam Deck Details, Proton Update Available For Testing — Steam Deck will use an immutable root file-system, albeit can be changed for developers/enthusiasts wanting more control over the system state. The immutable root file-system approach is similar to the likes of Fedora Silverblue.
Valve Says SteamOS 3.0 Will Be Available for Everyone to Download and Install
Steam Deck Development Live Stream - YouTube
Valve adds documentation for Steam Deck development, suggests Manjaro Linux for now

Linux Action News 214 Nov 07, 2021

Significant changes at GitHub, Ubuntu starts work on a new desktop tool, why WirePlumber is a big deal, and we bust some Red Hat FUD.

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Nat Friedman quits as CEO of GitHub — GitHub CEO Nat Friedman announced today he's leaving the organization on November 15 and will be replaced by chief product officer Thomas Dohmke.
GitHub gets a new CEO
Google Will Now Pay $31,337 To $50,337 For New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities — Google is effectively tripling its previous reward amounts and promise to honor it for at least the next three months. They are hoping these $31,337 or $50,337 rewards will encourage more security researchers to explore the kernel and report their findings.
Ubuntu is Building a New Firmware Updater App — This new GUI utility is being built using Flutter and Dart, further cementing Ubuntu’s commitment to go all in on Flutter for future desktop apps. The tool will be distributed as a Snap and provide a Ubuntu-style front-end to the fwupd tool and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service.
canonical/firmware-updater
Desktop Team Updates - Monday 1st November 2021 - Desktop / Team Updates
Ubuntu Continues Work On Flutter+Dart Written Firmware-Updater Utility
Asahi Linux Boots on M1 Pro — Linux on the M1 Pro status: boots to a shell with working USB ports Working: SMP, IRQs, IPIs, framebuffer console, DART, USB, USB-PD, I²C, GPIO. Next I'm looking at PCIe (WiFi & SD card reader).
Apple M1 PCIe Driver Leads The PCI Changes For Linux 5.16
WirePlumber in Fedora 35 — Today marks an exciting day as Fedora 35 has now been released, with WirePlumber as the default session manager for PipeWire!
Master your PipeWire streams with WirePlumber | Linaro Virtual Connect Fall 2021
LXQt 1.0.0 Desktop Environment Released After 8 Years of Development — The LXQt team proudly announced today the release and general availability of the LXQt 1.0.0 desktop environment as a major release bringing new features and improvements.
LXQt 1.0 Released For Lightweight Qt5 Desktop
Release 1.0.0 · lxqt/lxqt
Red Hat to hire fewer senior engineers after budget frozen — Next year, IBM's Red Hat plans to cut back on hiring senior engineers in an effort largely aimed at controlling costs.
Next year, IBM’s Red Hat plans to cut back on hiring senior engineers in an effort aimed largely at controlling costs. : linux
The first fruits of CentOS Stream: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Enters Beta with Exciting New Features and Many Improvements

Linux Action News 213 Oct 31, 2021

New Raspberry Pi hardware has a few surprises, the most impressive things in Linux 5.15, and our reaction to classic functionality under consideration for removal from Fedora.

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New product: Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W on sale now at $15 — Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC die as the launch version of Raspberry Pi 3, with Arm cores slightly down-clocked to 1GHz, bundled into a single space-saving package alongside 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM.
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with Ubuntu Server 21.10 support is here
Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Launches As Newer, Faster $10 Single Board Computer
Microsoft Edge finally arrives on Linux – “Official” build lands in repos — We’re happy to see Edge for Linux finally make Stable and Official status, because we find it handy to have two distinct browsers on any operating system platform we use.
Element One - Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place — Element One is a huge step change. It’s a very affordable, unlimited usage way for people to have all of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place - that’s a combined three billion users!
Element 1.9.1 - Chat Export is finally here!!
The 15 Most Interesting Linux 5.15 Kernel Features From NTFS3 To KSMBD — Linus Torvalds went ahead and released Linux 5.15 today on Halloween rather than delaying the kernel for another week.
Linux 5.15 Released
Fedora considers removing NIS support — The change proposal does note that: "For some users this change may be a bit disruptive and it may require some learning curve for switching to alternative solutions".
What is the support status of Network Information Service — As seen from the RHEL8.3 release notes the yp rpms (ypserv, ypbind, yp-tools) have been marked as deprecated. Furthermore those components will no longer be available in RHEL-9.
Fedora 35 Cleared For Release Next Week — Confirmation of Fedora 35 being ready to ship next week was announced today.

Linux Action News 212 Oct 26, 2021

Major performance milestones are being hit with new code inbound for Linux, Plasma and GNOME desktops are set to run Wayland on NVIDIA's binary driver, and why the SFC's new GPL fight could have implications for you.

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Newest Linux Optimizations Can Achieve 10M IOPS Per-Core With IO_uring — These optimizations today were primarily within the kernel's block / NVMe / IO_uring code but also some touching the memory management code. All of these optimizations he has been pursuing for achieving the best possible per-core I/O performance can be found via linux-block's perf-wip branch.
Jens Axboe on Twitter — That’s it. 10M IOPS, one physical core. #io_uring #linux
Linux 5.15 Delivers Many Features With New NTFS Driver, In-Kernel SMB3 Server, New Hardware — Here is a more detailed look at all of the Linux 5.15 changes coming for this next stable kernel.
Linux 5.15 Lands Memcg Performance Regression Fix
Apple Silicon PCIe Driver Queued For Linux 5.16
Linux 5.16 To Support The 2021 Apple Magic Keyboard
KDE Plasma Readies Its NVIDIA GBM Support, Fingerprint Authentication Added — Initial support for the NVIDIA driver with KDE Plasma 5.23.2's GBM back-end. In conjunction with the NVIDIA 495 Linux driver beta exposing Generic Buffer Manager support, Plasma 5.23.2+ will play nicely with that new driver support on Wayland.
NVIDIA 495 Linux Beta Driver Released With GBM Support
Fedora 35 has Wayland + GBM + NVIDIA
Copyleft Compliance Projects - Software Freedom Conservancy — Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit organization focused on ethical technology, is filing the lawsuit as the purchaser of a product which has copylefted code. This approach makes it the first legal case that focuses on the rights of individual consumers as third-party beneficiaries of the GPL.

Linux Action News 211 Oct 17, 2021

We cover what's special about Plasma's 25th-anniversary edition, chat with CloudLinux's CEO, and detail why Apple supporting Blender is good for all of us.

Plus, why we're worried Ubuntu is losing its charm for developers.

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Plasma - 25th Anniversary Edition — Plasma - 25th Anniversary Edition brings new looks, features and enhancements to the classic free desktop.
KDE Plasma 5.23 Released In Marking 25 Years Of KDE
New Project: Kool Desktop Environment. Programmers wanted!
Apple joins Blender Development Fund — The Blender Foundation, the organization behind the popular open source 3D creation tool “Blender”, today announced that Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member to support continued core development for Blender.
Apple Pledges Support for 3D Graphics Tool Blender
Why I have decided to step down from the AlmaLinux OS Foundation Board — When we created the concept of AlmaLinux back in December, shortly after Red Hat announced EOL for CentOS 8, the most important part for us was to make it community-owned, not just "community-controlled".
AlmaLinuxFoundation chair Igor Seletskiy ste down
Announcing AlmaLinux OS 8.5 Beta
How to Use a Block Storage Volume with Plex Media Server — Plex is a media server that allows you to store your media on a remote server and stream it to your devices. This guide shows how to attach a Block Storage Volume to an existing Linode in order to meet the demands of a growing media library.
Ubuntu 21.10 is Now Available to Download — This release — the 35th Ubuntu release for those keeping count — is backed by 9 months of security updates, critical fixes, and select software updates.
Ubuntu 21.10 Official Flavors Released, Here’s What’s New
SeaGL 2021 Schedule Published! — We’ll see you Friday November 5 & Saturday November 6 for SeaGL 2021, all virtual! As always, SeaGL is completely free to attend and no registration is required.

Linux Action News 210 Oct 10, 2021

Apple M1 Linux development reaches a key milestone and boots a usable desktop; Ubuntu reveals a new product, and the secret SUSE project that leaked this week.

Plus, the essential RISC-V code landing in the Linux kernel.

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Asahi Linux On The Apple M1: “Usable As A Basic Linux Desktop” — With the progress made over the past month, "Asahi Linux is usable as a basic Linux desktop (without GPU acceleration)!"
Progress Report: September 2021 - Asahi Linux
Asahi Linux emits usable basic desktop on Apple’s M1
Linux 5.16 KVM To Land RISC-V Hypervisor Support — Given that it's taken a while to freeze, there isn't yet any performant RISC-V processors out there actually implementing the complete extension and so for now and during development, it's been a function of running it on simulators.
Canonical launches Ubuntu Frame, the foundation for embedded displays — Canonical announces the release of Ubuntu Frame, a solution that allows developers to easily build and deploy graphical applications for interactive kiosks, digital signage solutions, or any other products that require a graphical output.
Ubuntu Frame is a secure display server for embedded systems
Building graphical applications in embedded devices
Software Engineer - Toolbox (containers / desktop / golang) — The Red Hat Desktop team is looking for a Software Engineer to join us. In this role, you will develop and maintain containerization technologies for software development like toolbox.
SUSE Working on a CentOS Clone? — I like looking in dnf countme data to see the various distros requesting EPEL repos. There are often many weird distro names showing up in the single digits. But this one jumped out at me with 38 hits last week
DNF Better Counting
Index of /csv-reports/countme
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) — High-quality packages that have been developed, tested, and improved in Fedora available for RHEL and compatible derivatives such as CentOS and Scientific Linux.
SUSE Has been Rebuilding RHEL Packages for Years
Will Furnass on Twitter — “Interesting that CERN are proposing to adopt @CentOS Steam 8 for new systems"
PowerPoint Presentation

Linux Action News 209 Oct 03, 2021

Why Linus believes keeping Linux fun is critical, the massive investment Fedora is about to make in video, and why we suspect Cloudflare's R2 service will make Amazon squirm.

Plus a low key update to the Raspberry Pi 4, and the changes in the new Docker Compose 2.0.

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Linus Torvalds on Community, Rust and Linux’s Longevity — The ceremony opened by acknowledging a special moment in time with a birthday cake ceremoniously delivered to Torvalds to mark Linux’s 30th anniversary, drawing a round of applause from the audience.
Fedora To Focus On Driving New Linux Video Improvements Around PipeWire — The ceremony opened by acknowledging a special moment in time with a birthday cake ceremoniously delivered to Torvalds to mark Linux’s 30th anniversary, drawing a round of applause from the audience.
PipeWire and fixing the Linux Video Capture stack | Christian F.K. Schaller
Docker Compose 2.0
docker - compose-switch
Raspberry Pi 4 model Bs arriving with newer ‘C0’ stepping — The local Micro Center only had the 8 GB model in stock, so I went a little over budget and bought it. When I arrived home, I checked the board, and noticed a bit of a difference on the Broadcom SoC
What’s In A Raspberry Pi Processor Update?
Linode on Twitter — We’re rolling out ultra-fast, better-performing, and more reliable NVMe block storage across all 11 of our global data centers
Ubuntu Community on Twitter — An experimental open-source/libre snap server and wrapper by @RudraSaraswat1 is ready with the name 'lol'. You can daily-drive it on most distributions which support snaps.
Announcing Project Kebe
Announcing Cloudflare R2 Storage: Object Storage, minus the egress fees — Cloudflare R2 Storage includes full S3 API compatibility, working with existing tools and applications as built.
Sad Server Stories | LINUX Unplugged 425 — Sometimes things go wrong; this week, we admit we've got a problem.

Linux Action News 208 Sep 26, 2021

Canonical gives Linux admins a lucky break, the details on Android's slow shift to an upstream Kernel, a breakthrough for Linux gaming, and our take on GNOME 41.

Plus how AlmaLinux just rounded out their offering.

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Canonical extends support for 14.04 and 16.04 LTS • The Register — Users still running on 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr), released back in April 2014, now have until April 2024 (up from 2022) to make the move to something more recent. 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), which dropped into Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) in April this year, has had this extended from April 2024 to April 2026.
Google Finally Shifting To “Upstream First” Linux Kernel Approach For Android Features — Google's Todd Kjos talked today during Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC2021) around their Generic Kernel Image initiative.
LPC 2021 - Android MC - YouTube
Epic Games announce full Easy Anti-Cheat support for Linux including Wine & Proton — Easy Anti-Cheat from Epic Games / Epic Online Services has officially announced a full expansion for Linux including native builds and Wine + Proton. This is big for Linux Gaming and the Steam Deck.
Epic Online Services launches Anti-Cheat support for Linux, Mac, and Steam Deck
BattlEye on Twitter — “BattlEye has provided native Linux and Mac support for a long time and we can announce that we will also support the upcoming Steam Deck (Proton). This will be done on an opt-in basis with game developers choosing whether they want to allow it or not.”
Valve Publishes New Steam Deck FAQ With A Few New Details Shared
Steam Client Beta updated with PipeWire desktop capture for Remote Play
AlmaLinux Container Images Update - Full RHEL UBI Compatibility — We are thrilled to announce that as of today, AlmaLinux now provides fully compatible alternatives for Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBI)!
Linode on Twitter — “We’re rolling out ultra-fast, better-performing, and more reliable NVMe block storage across all 11 of our global data centers 🚀
GNOME 41 Released With Wayland Improvements, More Performance Tuning — This morning's GNOME 41 release announcement sums up the new release as "Highlights in this release include improvements to the Software app, new multitasking settings and enhanced power management. Beyond that, there is a new Connections application, a refreshed Music application, performance improvements from the compositor to the toolkit, and much more."
GNOME 41 Released: The Most Popular Linux Desktop Environment Gets Better
GNOME 41 Released with New Settings, Power Savings, and More
GNOME 41 Desktop Environment Officially Released, This Is What’s New
Fedora Linux 35 Beta is GO
Contact the Show

Linux Action News 207 Sep 19, 2021

Desktop Linux graphics are about to get a significant investment, Mozilla and Canonical work together on a Firefox Snap, and some key new insights into the Linux port to Apple’s M1.

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Red Hat - Senior Software Engineer - HDR Enablement — The Red Hat Workstation Engineering team is looking for an experienced Senior Software Engineer to work on desktop, compositor, and GPU support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) formats and displays for Linux.
Jared Domínguez on Twitter — "It's that time again. I'm looking for someone to join my team to work on enabling HDR support in upstream Linux, Fedora and RHEL. Global applicants welcome. Underrepresented minorities highly encouraged."
Ubuntu to Make Firefox Snap Default in 21.10 — “Per Canonical’s distribution agreement with Mozilla, we’re making the snap the default installation of firefox on desktop ISOs starting with Ubuntu 21.10.”
Bug #1943840 “[FFe] Update the ubuntu-desktop-minimal seed to us…”
Feature Freeze Exception: Seeding the official Firefox snap in Ubuntu Desktop — This is the result of cooperation and collaboration between the Desktop and Snap teams at Canonical and Mozilla developers, and is the first step towards a deb-to-snap transition that will take place during the 22.04 development cycle.
Reverse Engineering, Open-Source Driver Writing Continues For Apple’s M1 GPU — Alyssa Rosenzweig spoke at the virtual X.Org Developers Conference about the ongoing work for bringing up Linux display and graphics support on the Apple M1 graphics processor.
XDC 2021 - Day 1 - September 15, 2021 - YouTube
Apple M1 USB Type-C Linux Support Code Sent Out For Testing — Sven Peter has sent out the initial USB Type-C enablement work for the Apple ACE1/2 chips used by Apple M1 systems.
Apple Silicon / M1 Port Planned For GCC 12 — While the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) supports AArch64 and macOS/Darwin, it hasn't supported the two of them together but there is a port in progress to change it.
Alyssa Rosenzweig on Twitter — Hello from Linux on my M1's internal storage! Thank you to @svenpeter42 for the NVMe driver. My daily driver now supports internal storage plus hotpluggable HDMI (native resolution), USB, and Ethernet.
X.Org Could Use More Help Improving & Addressing Its Security
LVFS Serves Up 2+ Million Firmware Downloads In The Past Month — Over the past thirty days, LVFS has served up more than two million firmware files to users.
LVFS joins Linux Foundation — The Linux Foundation welcomes the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) as a new project.
Richard wrote on twitter — We hit 2 million firmware downloads in the last 30 days for the first time. There are now over 3000 firmware files available on the LVFS, with over 100 vendors using 50 different protocols. It's been a huge amount of work but it feels pretty awesome.
LVFS Supported Device List
Researchers Find Malware Hiding in Windows Subsystem for Linux | Tom’s Hardware
There’s now malware for Windows Subsystem for Linux — "These files acted as loaders running a payload that was either embedded within the sample or retrieved from a remote server and was then injected into a running process using Windows API calls,
KSMBD In-Kernel File Server Already Needs Important Security Fix - Phoronix — This "important security fix" was sent in today for the Linux 5.15 kernel, potentially landing in time for 5.15-rc2 later today.

Linux Action News 206 Sep 12, 2021

Linus Torvalds attempts to get kernel developers to clean up their code, the performance regression that almost shipped, and the major production struggle Red Hat acknowledged this week.

Plus, we try out Microsoft’s Linux distro, and some thoughts on our editorial style.

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5.15 Merge window — 3,440 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 5.15 development cycle.
Amazon’s DAMON Merged Into Linux 5.15
Linux 5.15 Hit By Some Early Performance Regressions
AMD Posts New “AMD-PSTATE” CPUFreq Driver — Leveraging CPPC For Better Perf-Per-Watt
Linux 5.15 Readies More Code For Compile & Run-Time Detection Of Buffer Overflows
AMD Finally Releases Overdue Linux CPPC Driver
OverlayFS On Linux 5.15 Improves Performance
Linux 5.15’s New “-Werror” Behavior Is Causing A Lot Of Pain — That compiler flag addition makes all warnings be treated as errors, which in turn stops the kernel build.
Re: [GIT PULL] ntfs3: new NTFS driver for 5.15 - Linus Torvalds
Red Hat will officially support EPEL in the future — The new team is being formed and is expected to start work in October.
History and Philosophy of EPEL - Fedora Project Wiki
Microsoft Releases Its August Update For The CBL-Mariner Linux Distribution — One of the big fundamental changes with CBL-Mariner August 2021 is Microsoft now provides a public ISO to download of this Linux distribution.
CBL-Mariner: Linux OS for Azure 1P services and edge appliances

Linux Action News 205 Sep 05, 2021

SUSE's new era kicks off this week, CentOS users get some relief, and how Docker managed to piss off their users.

Plus RISC-V gets a surprising benefactor, and the kernel feature we never thought would get merged that was just approved by Linus.

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SUSE Rancher 2.6 Launches After the Acquisition of Rancher Labs — The number of Kubernetes distributions SUSE Rancher 2.6 can support has been raised by two, with the addition of Microsoft Azure’s AKS and Google Cloud Platform’s GKE. Rancher 2.6 also will add support for SLE’s Base Container Images.
SUSE Updates Rancher Platform for Kubernetes — Version 2.6 of SUSE Rancher adds a revamped user interface with improved logic-based workflows along with providing integration with SUSE Linux Enterprise Base Container Images (SLE BCI), a repository for container images for SUSE Linux.
SUSE Rancher 2.6 Brings Enterprise Customers Improved Interoperability Across Multi-Cloud Cluster Environments
Docker Desktop no longer free for large companies: New ‘Business’ subscription is here — Docker will restrict use of the free version of its Docker Desktop utility to individuals or small businesses, and has introduced a new more expensive subscription, as it searches for a sustainable business model.
Docker is Updating and Extending Our Product Subscriptions - Docker Blog — The new Docker Personal subscription replaces the Docker Free subscription. With its focus on open source communities, individual developers, education, and small businesses – which together account for more than half of Docker users – Docker Personal is free for these communities.
MongoDB tops $30 billion market cap in banner week for open source — MongoDB said second-quarter revenue climbed 44% to $199 million, while its Atlas cloud database grew 83% and now makes up more than half of total revenue.
[Video] MongoDB CEO — "We now have 29,000 customers."
CloudLinux offers CentOS 8 users a support lifeline — CloudLinux has announced it will provide updates and support for CentOS 8 through December 31, 2025.
Linux on the Framework Laptop — We recommend using 5.12 or newer for a kernel to get solid platform, WiFi, and bluetooth functionality, along with libfprint 1.92.0 or newer for the fingerprint reader. All of the other hardware like speakers, microphones, headphones, webcam, hardware privacy switches, keyboard media keys, ambient light sensor, and all of the Expansion Cards should work completely.
Apple Possibly Exploring Open-Source Alternative to Arm Architecture — According to a newly posted job alert, spotted by Tom's Hardware, Apple is looking for an engineer that specializes in RISC-V, an open-source architecture instruction set that allows device makers to build their own chips without having to pay a license or royalty.
Apple M1 IOMMU Driver Merged For Linux 5.15, Intel Scalable Mode By Default — This IOMMU on the Apple M1 has been a bit challenging for the developers to deal with as the hardware is fixed to using a 16K pagesize while there is ongoing work to improve the infrastructure so it will play happy when using a kernel with 4K CPU pagesize.
[Twitter] The M1 IOMMU driver (required for PCIe,WiFi,USB,display and almost everything else) was just merged by Linus — "Thanks again to Robin Murphy and @alyssarzg for reviewing and testing and ofc to @joergroedel for accepting it!"
Merge tag 'iommu-updates-v5.15'
KSMBD As An In-Kernel SMB3 File Server Merged For Linux 5.15 — KSMBD, developed by Samsung, is focused on delivering speedy SMB3 file serving performance and also supporting features more implemented in kernel-space, like RDMA support for SMB Direct. KSMBD doesn't aim to be as comprehensive as well known Samba for CIFS/SMB support in user-space but is just focused on the performance and kernel feature angle.
KSMBD Kernel Docs

Linux Action News 204 Aug 29, 2021

Why the Linux kernel received so much mainstream attention this week, some of our favorite open-source projects get great updates, and why we're concerned about Linux Foundation members transferring innovation from Linux to closed source software at an industrial scale.

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Linux 5.14 set to boost future enterprise application security — A particular area of interest for both enterprise and cloud users is always security and to that end, Linux 5.14 will help with several new capabilities. Mike McGrath, vice president, Linux Engineering at Red Hat told TechCrunch that the kernel update includes a feature known as core scheduling, which is intended to help mitigate processor-level vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown
Linux 5.14 Features Aplenty With New AMD GPUs, SmartShift, More Alder Lake, Core Scheduling
QEMU 6.1 Released With RISC-V Improvements, AMD Emulation Fixes — RISC-V on QEMU has updates around OpenTitan platform support, support for VirtIO VGA, and a variety of other architecture improvements.
PipeWire 0.3.34 Released — Bluetooth battery status support for head-set profile and using Apple extensions. aptX-LL and FastStream codec support was added.
CodeWeavers still hiring for a ‘General Wine Developer' — CodeWeavers announced recently they need a bit of help on finding more developers, with a spot still currently open for a 'General Wine Developer' who will work on Wine and Proton.
Microsoft, Google partner on eBPF — Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the new eBPF Foundation, which was unveiled August 12, plans to expand eBPF and extend it beyond Linux.
eBPF Summit 2021
The State & Future of eBPF - Thomas Graf
eBPF for Windows - Dave Thaler (Microsoft)
Linux On The Apple M1 Can Now Boot To The GNOME Desktop — Alyssa Rosenweig, who has been working on reverse engineering the Apple M1 GPU since January, has now posted a screenshot of "GNOME Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal."
‘Not great, but usable’: GNOME desktop boots on Asahi Linux for Apple M1
30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat
Linux turns 30: Linus Torvalds on his “just a hobby” operating system
Happy birthday – 30 Years of Linux
Happy Birthday, Linux: From a Bedroom Project To Billions of Devices in 30 Years
30th Anniversary of Linux - Linux Foundation
Happy birthday, Linux: From a bedroom project to billions of devices in 30 years • The Register
Linode Joins Jupiter Broadcasting In Denver - YouTube
Chris remains on the road! Track is trip live: colonytracker.live

Linux Action News 203 Aug 22, 2021

What’s coming next for the Linux desktop, and some exclusive news from System76.

Plus, we try out Element’s new voice messages and share our thoughts.

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This week in KDE — The KDE Project released today KDE Gear 21.08 as the newest series of their open-source software suite for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and other projects.
KDE Gear 21.08 Brings Improvements to Dolphin, Konsole, Okular, and Many Other KDE Apps
KDE Plasma Introduces A New Overview Effect, Many Wayland Fixes - Phoronix
#6 Sharing, Caring · This Week in GNOME
Ubuntu 21.10 Likely Sticking To The GNOME 40 Desktop — Ideally we would have updated to 41 but feature freeze is today and we didn’t really have the resources available for the update.
MATE 1.26 Desktop Released With Some Wayland Support — After one and a half years in development of MATE 1.26 as a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop components, this release is now available with initial Wayland support and more.
Element introduces Voice Messages — This has been one of our oldest and most upvoted feature requests ever, so we are incredibly happy to unleash our first version of it at last.
Join the Jupiter Broadcasting Matrix Server
Tenacity Update
LINUX Unplugged 419: What’s Cookin’ at System76
Launch Configurable Keyboard | System76 — The Launch Configurable Keyboard is engineered to be comfortable, fully customizable, and make your workflow more efficient.

Linux Action News 202 Aug 15, 2021

What's new in Debian 11, and an example of the Linux Foundation funneling free software to their corporate friends.

Plus, why Western Digital might be to thank for your next ultimate Linux workstation.

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Debian 11 “bullseye” Released — After 2 years, 1 month, and 9 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 11 (code name bullseye), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.
Phoronix: Debian 11 “Bullseye” Released
Debian Live install images
Microsoft & Others Form The eBPF Foundation - Phoronix — For driving eBPF usage moving forward for these sandboxed programs within the Linux kernel, the eBPF Foundation has been formed with backing from The Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, Google, and others.
Linux Foundation Press Release
eBPF - Introduction, Tutorials & Community Resources
RISC-V Developers Continue Working On KVM Support — This KVM RISC-V support has been led by Western Digital who remains very active with various elements of RISC-V Linux support.
Progress Report: August 2021 - Asahi Linux
Restore/upgrade firmware of iOS devices
Apple M1 PCIe Driver Under Review For The Linux Kernel
Elementary OS 6 Odin released on a ‘pay what you want’ basis • The Register
Pantheon-tweaks: A system settings panel for the Pantheon desktop environment.

Linux Action News 201 Aug 08, 2021

Since the announcement of the Steam Deck, things around Linux have started changing, including some big items this week.

Plus how PipeWire will improve day-to-day desktop life, Google's push for more kernel investments, and a lot more.

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Google Calls On Companies To Devote More Engineers To Upstream Linux, Toolchains — The post notes that stable Linux kernel releases see close to 100 new fixes each week, but given that rate of change vendors are not always picking up the latest fixes or in some cases just trying to cherry-pick the "important" fixes. Besides acknowledging the need for more upstream kernel developers, the post also encourages vendors to go the route of chasing the latest Linux stable or LTS kernel releases in order to incorporate all fixes.
Google Online Security Blog: Linux Kernel Security Done Right
It’s time to improve Linux’s security | ZDNet
Google slams Linux kernel, says it needs major security investment | TechRadar
Bug in Lynx’ SSL certificate validation
Intel Proposes Linux Kernel Driver Allow/Deny Filtering — Given the VMM is an untrusted entity and the VMM presents emulated hardware to the guest, a threat vector similar to Thunderclap [1] is present. Also, for ease of deployment, it is useful to be able to use the same kernel binary on host and guest, but that presents a wide attack surface given the range of hardware supported in typical builds.
[PATCH v1] driver: base: Add driver filter support
PipeWire 0.3.33 Released — Bluetooth can now automatically switch between headset and audio profile
0.3.33 · PipeWire / pipewire · GitLab
Samsung's In-Kernel SMB3 Server Gets Closer to Real — Samsung has been developing "KSMBD" (formerly also known as CIFSD) as an in-kernel SMB3 file sharing server.
I tried Steam Deck early and it’s AWESOME! - YouTube — It's my lucky day! Valve let me try the Steam Deck early - And it destroyed my expectations. Just how good is it? Let me explain...
I Have MORE to Say About Steam Deck - WAN Show August 6, 2021 - YouTube
A major bug fix week over at the KDE project — We are really trying to improve the stability of our software now that it’s starting to be used in more 3rd-party products like the Steam Deck.
Lutris 0.5.9 Beta Released With Epic Games Store Support — The Lutris 0.5.9 beta delivers on initial support for the Epic Games Store, support for DXVK-NVAPI and DLSS, FidelityFX Super Resolution is now an exposed option for compatible Wine versions, Valve's Gamescope Wayland game compositor is now an option, Esync usage is now enabled by default, the Dolphin emulator is now available as a game source, improved process monitoring, and other enhancements. It's quite a hearty update for this game manager.
Many Interesting Talks On Deck For The X.Org Developers Conference 2021 - Phoronix
Join our Telegram Group — jupiterbroadcasting.com/telegram
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Linux Action News 200 Aug 01, 2021

Microsoft's next kernel patch fixes a long-standing Linux issue, we'll share the details. Plus ChromeOS's next power user feature you haven't heard of, and Valve's broader plans that came into focus this week.

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Linux Action News Sticker
Microsoft Effort For A Global Counter On Block/Disk Changes — This global counter for block device changes is sought after to better correlate events for devices that may end up re-using the same device, commonly for cases like /dev/sda or /dev/loop0 when a device is detached and then later reattached but not necessarily the same device.
linux-block - Linux 5.x block layer tree(s)
The New NTFS Driver Looks Like It Will Finally Be Ready With Linux 5.15 — Following those v27 patches, on Friday there was Paragon developer Konstantin Komarov who responded to Torvalds and reaffirmed the company's support for maintaining this driver.
Microsoft: Component Shortages Not Going Away Any Time Soon — Supply-chain pressures also will continue to impact Microsoft's Xbox gaming consoles and PCs made by its partners, company officials conceded. Hood told analysts to expect Windows OEM revenues in Q1 FY22 to decline mid to high single digits and Surface revenue to decline by low teens.
Mozilla VPN unveils major security boost — Split tunneling is now available in Mozilla VPN on iOS and Android.
Steam Beta Brings New Downloads Page, Linux Container Updates — This Steam beta update is a bit meatier than normal with a new downloads page implementation, several Linux-specific updates.
Steam Community :: Group :: Steam Client Beta
Chrome OS persistent desk bar receives a vital pre-release fix — Last month, the Chrome OS development team decided that virtual desks weren’t being used enough by well, practically anyone, so they created what’s called Bento – or the ‘Persistent Desk Bar’.
Alyssa Rosenzweig gets Debian running on the M1 — Debian GNU/Linux running bare metal on the Apple M1 with a mainline kernel.
HackerSploit Docker Security Essentials eBook — This guide focuses on securing the Docker platform on Linux.
Google to Officially Announce Subsea Cable to Connect Europe and Asia — The laying of the cable is part of the arms race between the tech giants, with Google competing against Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft in the cloud and data center sectors. Owning a cable, as opposed to renting one, secures a company’s control of the traffic on the cable and ensures the company can serve its clients first before sharing traffic with its competitors.
How Hyperscale Cloud Platforms Reshaped the Submarine Cable Industry — For a lot more on how hyperscalers are changing the game in the world of submarine cables, listen to our interview with TeleGeography’s Alan Mauldin in full on The Data Center Podcast.

Linux Action News 199 Jul 25, 2021

We share the facts about a recent systemd vulnerability, the new details we've learned this week about the Steam Deck, and then dig into the reviews of the Framework Laptop.

Plus, how hard is it to port Linux software to Fucshia? We get the answer from Google's Adam Barth.

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Denial of Service in systemd — The Qualys Research Team has discovered a stack exhaustion denial-of-service vulnerability in systemd, a near-ubiquitous utility available on major Linux operating systems. Any unprivileged user can exploit this vulnerability to crash systemd and hence the entire operating system (a kernel panic).
Nasty Linux systemd security bug revealed — It works by enabling attackers to misuse the alloca() function in a way that would result in memory corruption. This, in turn, allows a hacker to crash systemd and hence the entire operating system.
Debian 11.0 “Bullseye” Gets An August Release Date — Debian developers are aiming to release Debian 11.0 "Bullseye" on Saturday, August 14th, 2021.
Audacity publishes updated Privacy Policy and an Apology — The update addresses the main points of criticism leveled against the previous version of the privacy policy.
Apologetic Audacity rewrites privacy policy after ‘significant lapse in communication’ — Open-source audio editor Audacity this week posted an apology on GitHub in response to the entirely predictable furore over the platform's privacy policy.
Valve corrects the RAM specs for the Steam Deck — Yang also confirmed on Twitter that when docked you can run Steam Deck games off of an external SSD.
Faster Zombies to Steam Deck: The History of Valve and Linux Gaming — Well, Valve and Linux Gaming together have come a very long way since the early blogs posts about getting Left 4 Dead 2 running fast on Linux to the new Steam Deck. But just how far have they come? Let's do a little reminiscing.
The Framework Laptop is now shipping, and press reviews — We’re excited to see the first press reviews go live for the Framework Laptop and the first orders land on your doorsteps today! With the FTC unanimously voting to enforce the Right to Repair just yesterday, our timing couldn’t be better for delivering a great, high performance, easy to repair product.
Framework Laptop pre-orders are now open
Two Googlers offer a tour & demo of Fuchsia OS — Rubber Duck Engineering, a weekly web show hosted by Fuchsia software engineer Adam Barth and Flutter engineer Eric Seidel, was able to record a dedicated episode teaching about the current state of Fuchsia OS.
[Video] Rubber Duck Engineering Episode #57 — A Tour of the Fuchsia Operating System

Linux Action News 198 Jul 17, 2021

Steam Deck looks impressive; we cover the details you care about and one aspect that concerns us.

Plus, how Microsoft just gave a boost to the Linux Desktop and more.

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Valve has formally announced the Steam Deck — Valve has now formally revealed the Steam Deck, a portable handheld gaming console powered by a new version of their Linux-based SteamOS operating system.
Valve Making Linux Anti-Cheat a Reality for Steam Deck Launch — Valve's newly-announced Steam Deck has a nice bonus for Linux gamers — it's helping to improve Linux anti-cheat by working with Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye to provide Proton support for their software.
Steam Deck FAQ: 31 Big Questions Answered - YouTube
First Hands-On With Valve’s Handheld Gaming PC - YouTube
Steam Deck :: Tech Specs
Valve has confirmed to me that we will have access to the Arch repository
Gabe Newell expects Steam Deck to sell ‘millions of units’ — "Our view is, if we're doing this right, we're going to be selling these in millions of units, and it's clearly going to be establishing a product category that ourselves and other PC manufacturers are going to be able to participate in."
Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 Officially Released — Ubuntu Touch OTA-18 is here as a maintenance update that plugs various annoyances and bugs to make the entire Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system more stable and reliable.
Amazon’s Elasticsearch fork OpenSearch hits prime time — Amazon has launched the first production-ready version of its Elasticsearch fork OpenSearch. This comes six months after Amazon’s AWS first revealed plans to fork Elasticsearch
Introducing OpenSearch
OpenSearch reaches 1.0 milestone
Windows 365 Cloud PC — Securely stream your Windows experience—including your personalized apps, content, and settings—from the Microsoft cloud to any device with your Windows 365 Cloud PC. Available August 2.
Microsoft reveals $31 per user per month price tag — Microsoft isn't sharing pricing for its just-announced Windows 365/ Cloud PC service until early August. But the pricing of one of its lower-end SKUs seemingly has leaked already.
Introducing a new era of hybrid personal computing — Windows 365 supports your business apps—Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform—line of business apps, and more. With Windows 365, we also stand by our promise of app compatibility with App Assure, a service that helps customers with 150 or more users fix any app issues they might run into at no additional cost.
Microsoft is bringing Windows to a web browser, and it will work on iPad and the Mac — Microsoft unveiled a new service called Windows 365, and it makes it possible for users to run a full version of Windows in a web browser on any device.

Linux Action News 197 Jul 11, 2021

Open Source's best hope for alternatives to Microsoft and Google gets a significant update this week, and we cover a plethora of new goodies coming to a Linux near you soon.

Plus, our take on the Audacity fork drama and the milestone reached this week that none of us have been looking forward to.

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Nextcloud Hub 22 Released — At a virtual presentation streamed worldwide, the Nextcloud team introduced the availability of Nextcloud Hub 22, the second major product launch this year.
Audacity fork maintainer quits after alleged harassment by 4chan losers who took issue with ‘Tenacity’ name • The Register — A disagreement over the project's name. Being unable to use the Audacity trademark, now owned by Muse Group, cookiengineer ran a poll to find a new name for the fork.
will you switch to temporary-audacity/audacity after the new audacity drama · Issue #72 · flathub/org.audacityteam.Audacity · GitHub
Stepdown as Maintainer of this Fork · Issue #99 · tenacityteam/tenacity · GitHub
Breakdown of All Data Collected By Audacity : linux
ocenaudio — Easy, fast and powerful audio editor
ardour — Any number of tracks and busses. Non-linear editing. Non-destructive (and destructive!) recording. Any bit depth, any sample rate. Dozens of file formats.
REAPER — REAPER is a complete digital audio production application for computers, offering a full multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, processing, mixing and mastering toolset.
Microsoft Edge Beats Firefox To Become the Third-Most Popular Browser — Microsoft Edge puts daylight between itself and Mozilla Firefox
Contribute to Fedora Linux Kernel 5.13 Test Week — Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Sunday, July 11, 2021 through Sunday, July 18, 2021
USB Low Latency Audio Support Re-Submitted For Linux 5.14 — Submitted on Friday as part of sound fixes was that work to reduce the latency at playback start with the usb-audio driver.
Experimental Rust Support Patches Submitted to Linux Kernel Mailing List
[PATCH 00/17] Rust support - ojeda
Samsung Posts Newest “KSMBD” Linux Patches For In-Kernel SMB3 Server — The focus remains on being able to deliver optimal performance and supporting more features like RDMA integration compared to what can be implemented efficiently in user-space with the likes of Samba.
Chromium OS Integrates CloudReady Installer — Ever wanted to have a Chrome OS experience on a device that isn’t a Chromebook or a Chromebox?
[CrOS] Add install cloudready shelf button · Gerrit Code Review
CloudReady Home Edition USB Installation | Neverware Install Guide
Google bought CloudReady, the largest ChromiumOS distribution | Ars Technica

Linux Action News 196 Jul 05, 2021

We try out Pop!_OS 21.04 and share our thoughts on the COSMIC desktop and our reaction to Audacity’s new troubling privacy policy.

Plus the good, the bad, and the impressive in the new Linux 5.13 release.

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System76 Blog — Pop!_OS 21.04: A Release of COSMIC Proportions — Pop!_OS COSMIC (Computer Operating System Main Interface Components) gives you the freedom to navigate your workflow via your mouse, keyboard, and/or trackpad.
Pop OS 21.04 Cosmic Desktop Brings Much Needed Productivity Boost
Pop!_OS 21.04 Released with New ‘Cosmic’ Desktop
Audacity Is Now A Possible Spyware, Remove It ASAP — The updated privacy policy page for Audacity includes a wide range of data collection mechanisms. It states for example that it can hand any user data to state regulators where it is located, which is basically Russia, USA and the EEA zone.
Audacity GitHub: Clarification of Privacy Policy
Audacity GitHub: New privacy policy is completely unacceptable!
Audacity Desktop Privacy Notice
GitHub - cookiengineer/audacity: Audacity Fork without any Sentry Telemetry or Crash Reporting.
HN Audacity Discussion
Fedora Audacity discussion
Google is moving away from APKs on the Play Store — Starting in August, Google will require that new Play apps will have to be published using the Android App Bundle format. Your phone will still download apps as APKs, but the app bundles will create APKs that are optimized for your device.
Linus Torvalds launches Linux kernel 5.13 after seven release candidates — “In fact," he said, "it’s one of the bigger 5.x releases, with over 16k commits (over 17k if you count merges), from over 2k developers.
Some 5.13 development statistics [LWN.net]
Linux Git: Merge tag ‘landlock_v34’
(2016) Sandboxing with the Landlock security module [LWN.net]
NFS is broken in Linux 5.13 — This made it into 5.13 final, and completely breaks NFSD for me. Existing mounts on clients hang, as do new mounts from new clients.
Ubuntu 20.10 End of Life Warning — Official support for Ubuntu 20.10 ends on July 22, 2021.

Linux Action News 195 Jun 27, 2021

The news this week that pushes Linux ahead in the enterprise, the challenges Windows 11 might bring, and we go hands-on with the new Debian-based TrueNAS SCALE.

Plus, our thoughts on WD Live users getting their data wiped and Rocky Linux's gold master.

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Rocky Linux 8.4 Available Now — The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is pleased to announce the General Availability of Rocky Linux 8.4 for x86_64 and ARM64.
Ubuntu-maker Canonical will support open source Blender on Windows, Mac, and Linux — The support offering will include Blender LTS releases across Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and macOS. Canonical’s engineers will engage directly with customers to provide comprehensive technical support to users by understanding, diagnosing and resolving issues as swiftly as possible.
Canonical Partners With Blender Around Paid LTS Application Support
Canonical Gives RISC-V a HiFive — Canonical have announced that its Ubuntu operating system now supports two RISC-V boards from SiFive, the HiFive Unleashed and HiFive Unmatched.
“I’m totally screwed.” WD My Book Live users wake up to find their data deleted — On its website, Western Digital advised customers to disconnect their My Book Live devices to prevent further attacks while the company investigates the mass wiping.
WD My Book NAS devices are being remotely wiped clean worldwide
Declarative Cloud Infrastructure Management with Terraform
Why Windows 11 is forcing everyone to use TPM chips — While Microsoft has required OEMs to ship devices with support for TPM chips since Windows 10, the company hasn’t forced users or its many device partners to turn these on for Windows to work. That’s what’s really changing with Windows 11, and combined with Microsoft’s Windows 11 upgrade checker, it has resulted in a lot of understandable confusion.
Windows 11 System Requirements: Will TPM 2.0 be mandatory for Windows 11 Build 21996?
TrueNAS SCALE 21.06-BETA Now Available! — With this first BETA, we kickoff the official pre-release testing cycles and prepare for a release version in the coming months. Users are encouraged to provide feedback on any issues found to our bug ticketing system so we can continue the work to make SCALE the best, most stable release possible.
SCALE 21.06-BETA.1
TrueNAS SCALE Announcement and Nightly Image Downloads
TrueNAS SCALE Release Plan
TrusNAS Developer Notes
TrueNAS SCALE 21.06 BETA ISO

Linux Action News 194 Jun 20, 2021

Linux's résumé got a nice boost this week; why Google is paying for more kernel development, and how CloudLinux might be pulling ahead of the CentOS pack.

Plus, our thoughts on Steam possibly coming to ChromeOS and the game-changing feature coming to ZFS.

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Rust in the Linux kernel just got a big boost from Google — The main goal of the push to bring Rust to Linux is to wipe out an entire class of memory-related security bugs in the kernel. This is important because, as Microsoft has recently highlighted, 70% of all bugs it fixes are memory-related. Historically, key Linux drivers that make up the kernel have been written in C, which is not memory-safe.
Supporting Miguel Ojeda’s Work on Rust in the Linux Kernel — While this is the first memory safety effort we’ve announced under our new Prossimo project name, our memory safety work began in 2020. You can read about our efforts to bring memory safety to curl and the Apache HTTP server, and to add improvements to the Rustls TLS library.
ZFS fans, rejoice—RAIDz expansion will be a thing very soon — OpenZFS founding developer Matthew Ahrens opened a PR for one of the most sought-after features in ZFS history—RAIDz expansion—last week. The new feature allows a ZFS user to expand the size of a single RAIDz vdev.
June 2021 FreeBSD Developer Summit - YouTube
openzfs Pull Request: RAIDZ Expansion feature by ahrens
ZFS 101—Understanding ZFS storage and performance
Systemd 249-rc1 Released — The first release candidate of systemd 249 is now available for testing with yet more new and improved features.
Systemd 249 release candidate includes better support for immutable OSes and provisioning images — The journey from RC1 to full release is likely to take a month or so, judging by past releases, so we can expect systemd 249 sometime in July.
CloudLinux releases UChecker security tool for Linux servers — This newly open-sourced program, part of the company's TuxCare security services, scans Linux servers for out-of-date libraries both on disk and in memory.
kernelcare.com — Live patching for Linux kernels & shared libraries, vulnerability scanners reporting & patch management assistance.
cloudlinux/kcare-uchecker — A simple tool to detect outdated shared libraries
Steam on ChromeOS: Not a Rumor Anymore — There are now some QA testers being hired to work on the “ChromeOS Steam Launch Team” to triage games, find defects and test performance in specific configurations.
🎉 nano-5.8 is released — "Why is it necessary to be special?"

Linux Action News 193 Jun 13, 2021

The premier Linux desktops get some futuristic new features, and we break down the seven-year-old vulnerability in your Linux box revealed this week.

Plus the critical kernel feature that lacks funding, and our take on helloSystem, a FreeBSD-based macOS alternative.

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Plasma 5.22 — Plasma 5.22 improves its stability and usability across the board.
KDE Plasma 5.22 Arrives with Miscellany of Usability Improvements
Plasma 5.22 arrives but I bet you’ll want 5.23 once I show you this – Adventures in Linux and KDE
GNOME 40.2 Released with Better Flatpak Support, Improved Screencasting, and More — The GNOME Project released today GNOME 40.2 as the second minor point release to the latest and greatest GNOME 40 desktop environment series.
GNOME 40.2 Release News
Privilege escalation with polkit — The vulnerability enables an unprivileged local user to get a root shell on the system. It’s easy to exploit with a few standard command line tools
Real-Time Support "PREEMPT_RT" For Linux Held Up Due To Lack Of Funding — These "RT" patches have long been maintained out-of-tree but it turns out that while in the past it was seemingly close for merging, that effort has stalled for lack of funding.
helloSystem Release r0.5.0 — This release is based on FreeBSD 12.2
helloSystem 0.5 Released For macOS-Inspired FreeBSD Desktop
FOSDEM 2021 - hello... again? — helloSystem is FreeBSD preconfigured as a desktop operating system. Its design follows the “Less, but better” philosophy. It is intended as a system for “mere mortals”, welcoming to switchers from a world in which a global menu bar exists, the Command key is used rather than Control, and applications are contained in .app bundles.
Bearded Tux Unisex Joggers - Jupiter Garage — Get ready for that 10K run or take it slow in your backyard—these joggers are sure to make you feel comfortable either way while making a low key statement that Linux is awesome.

Linux Action News 192 Jun 06, 2021

An old Linux distro gets a new trick, and all Linux users get a few excellent quality of life updates.

Plus, the new initiative that has Apple, Google, and Microsoft all working together.

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Linux Action News 191 May 31, 2021

Our reaction to the new Freenode developments, and Audacity's latest shock to the community.

Plus Pwned Passwords goes open source, the public release of Fuchsia, and Valve's rumored Linux handheld.

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After staff revolt, Freenode management takes over hundreds of IRC channels for ‘policy violations’ — All told, it appears something like 700 Freenode channels have been seized and re-permissioned, supposedly because the channels mentioned Libera Chat in violation of Freenode's advertising policy.
Freenode IRC staff resign en masse after takeover by Korea’s “crown prince”
IRC Announcement - Fedora Magazine
Ubuntu, Wikimedia jump ship to the Libera Chat IRC network after Freenode channel confiscations
One week of Libera Chat — It’s been an exciting first week, and we’d like to say a massive thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and patience as we continue to work to bring Libera.Chat up to full capacity. In these first few days, we’ve been able to reach 16,500 simultaneous connections and 20,000 registered accounts.
kline󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 on mastodon: “andrew lee just seized over 700 channels on freenode”
PSA: Ubuntu’s IRC Channels Have Moved from Freenode to Libera Chat
Gentoo Freenode channels have been hijacked — Today (2021-05-26) a large number of Gentoo channels have been hijacked by Freenode staff, including channels that were not yet migrated to Libera.chat. We cannot perceive this otherwise than as an open act of hostility and we have effectively left Freenode.
Pwned Passwords, Open Source in the .NET Foundation and Working with the FBI
Pwned Passwords is now open source!
Troy Hunt on Twitter RE: the news
The FBI will feed compromised passwords to Have I Been Pwned — As Hunt explained, the FBI is involved into all sorts of investigations into digital crimes, such as botnets, ransomware, online child sexual exploitation and terrorism. The compromised passwords they find are often being used by crime rings, so the passwords' quick addition to the HIBP database would be extremely helpful. That said, the website doesn't have a way for the feds to quickly feed passwords into its database yet.
Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub — Google’s long-in-development, from-scratch operating system, Fuchsia, is now running on real Made by Google devices, namely, the first-generation Nest Hub.
Here’s an easier way to try Fuchsia OS on your computer
Linux Action Show 431
Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC — On Tuesday, SteamDB operator Pavel Djundik spotted the change in Steam's code, which pointed to a new device named "SteamPal".
New Audacity Owners Want a CLA — For those not yet aware, we are introducing a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which contributors to Audacity will need to sign in order to contribute code to the project.
Information About Our New Contributor License Agreement
Nextcloud iOS app Open Sourced
GitHub: nextcloud/ios/COPYING.iOS
Nextcloud iOS app License Guidelines
List of Open-Source iOS Apps
Jami on the Mac App Store
mediaU on the App Store
Linux Game Development at Tesla? — Some of you might have heard, our dear technoking is bullish on games and making an awesome platform for all gamers in Tesla vehicles. The latest Model S on our website can give you a hint of what we're aiming for in terms of platform capability (sorry, can't divulge much more for now). The Tesla infotainment OS and platform software are based on a standard Linux, so of course, we're interested in helping the gaming community make Linux gaming excellent.

Linux Action News 190 May 22, 2021

Our take on the Freenode exodus, Linux Apps going public in Chrome OS, and Red Hat's desktop hiring spree.

Plus the new Firefox security features in beta, great news for F-Droid, and Apple transfers CUPS to a new home.

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Chrome OS’s Linux app support is leaving beta — Google announced at I/O that Linux on Chromebooks would finally be coming out of beta with the release of Chrome OS 91.
Android 12 will finally let alternative app stores update apps on their own — In Google's official blog post announcing Android 12 the company confirmed that it’s "delivering on [its] promise to make third-party app stores easier to use on Android 12."
Red Hat Is Hiring Even More Graphics Engineers — Red Hat is now hiring two more graphics engineers working on the Linux graphics drivers. This will be focusing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and upstream graphics drivers for the open-source code around Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA.
Senior Software Engineer - GPU Hardware Enablement
Software Engineer - GPU, Input and Multimedia
Principal Engineer - Hardware Enablement for Infotainment/Automotive
New opportunities in the Red Hat Desktop team — Christian F.K. Schaller — We also have flexibility for people who want to work remotely, so as long as there is a Red Hat office in your home country you can work remotely for us.
OpenPrinting Now Developing Upstream CUPS, Apple Bows Out — Apple has decided not to pursue feature development further on CUPS and upstream feature development has been effectively transferred to the OpenPrinting project.
Introducing Firefox’s new Site Isolation Security Architecture — Site Isolation builds upon a new security architecture that extends current protection mechanisms by separating (web) content and loading each site in its own operating system process.
Linux 5.13 Reverts + Fixes The Problematic University of Minnesota Patches — Linux kernel developers have finally finished reviewing all UMN.edu patches to address problematic merges to the kernel and also cleaning up / fixing their questionable patches.
Freenode IRC staff quit after new owner "seizes" control of network — Founded 26 years ago and home to some 80,000 users over 40,000 channels, the freenode is reportedly the largest IRC network and has enjoyed something of a rollercoaster history.
Freenode Debacle Prompts Staff Exodus, New Network — Through a complex series of events which actually started several years ago, control of Freenode has been taken from the community and put into the hands of an enigmatic and wealthy entrepreneur who claims his ultimate goal is to revolutionize IRC and return it to the forefront of online communication.
Upheaval at freenode — Evidently there has been a change of control within the volunteer-run organization that has led to the resignations of multiple different volunteers, at least in part due to a concern about the personal information of freenode users under the new management.
Freenode IRC staff resign en masse, unhappy about new management
Welcome to Libera Chat — We’re excited to announce the launch of Libera.Chat, and welcome you to a next-generation IRC network for free and open source software projects and similarly-spirited collaborative endeavours.
[HN comments] Welcome to Libera Chat
CentOS IRC channels moving to irc.libera.chat
Freenode IRC and Gentoo
Spaces: The next frontier — Spaces rethink groups in Element and Matrix, and today we’re launching public beta testing on Element Web, Desktop and Android (with iOS coming soon!).
[FOSDEM 202] Building massive virtual communities in Matrix — In this talk, we'll explain all the features we've been adding to let Matrix scale to support massive virtual communities such as FOSDEM itself, Mozilla, KDE and others.
JB Matrix Server

Linux Action News 189 May 15, 2021

Our reaction to System76's Launch keyboard, Google's new Fuchsia contributor that's a big name, and the repairable Linux Laptop with a few new tricks.

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Audacity’s new management hits rewind on telemetry plans following community outrage • The Register — "What wrong-footed us completely was that the news got out before we were ready to make an announcement about it." "It was a completely innocent mistake that ended up doing the announcing for us... in the worst way imaginable."
Actions we propose to take on PR #835 · Discussion #889 · audacity/audacity · GitHub
USPTO Audacity Trademark Assignment — Recorded: 12/29/2020
Samsung is now a contributor to Google’s Fuchsia OS - 9to5Google — Samsung’s “Flash-Friendly File System.” Better known as “F2FS,” the project is an alternative system for managing the files on a storage device, such as the built-in storage of a smartphone.
Ubuntu Touch OTA-17 Released for Ubuntu Phones with NFC Support, Many Improvements - 9to5Linux — According to UBports, NFC support can allow app developers to implement the ability to read and write NFC tags in their apps, as well as to communicate with another device that supports the NFC protocol.
Framework Laptop pre-orders are now open — A thin, lightweight, high-performance 13.5” notebook that can be upgraded, customized, and repaired in ways that no other notebook can.
Framework’s repairable laptop is up for preorder, starting at $999 | TechCrunch
Framework Laptop upgradable, repairable & modular laptop pre-orders opened for $799 and up - CNX Software
Launch Keyboard - System76 — The Launch Configurable Keyboard is engineered to be comfortable, fully customizable, and make your workflow more efficient.
Meet System76’s First Mechanical Keyboard
Launch's Firmware based on Qmk

Linux Action News 188 May 09, 2021

We start you off with the headlines that matter this week, then share our thoughts on Audacity's new owners proposing user tracking.

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Linux 5.10 LTS Will Be Maintained Through End Of Year 2026 — Linux 5.10 as the latest Long Term Support release when announced was only going to be maintained until the end of 2022 but following enough companies stepping up to help with testing, Linux 5.10 LTS will now be maintained until the end of year 2026.
Visual Studio Code April 2021
Native wayland support with newest electron — Use `--enable-features=UseOzonePlatform --ozone-platform=wayland`.
VMware Prepares Linux Driver For Next-Gen Virtual GPU — With SVGA v3 also comes the ability to enjoy 3D guest acceleration on 64-bit ARM.
Audacity ‘scared and excited’ to be bought and brought under Muse Group’s roof, promises to stay free and open source — Veteran audio editor Audacity has been purchased by Muse Group, although its new management has pledged to keep the platform free and open source.
‘A massive middle finger’: Open-source audio fans up in arms after Audacity opts to add telemetry capture
Audacity Telemetry and Why Free Software Means Better Privacy – Purism — The ultimate reason that free software means better privacy is the fact that users can remove any code that violates their privacy and use the rest.
The Audacity Pull Request
Policies/Telemetry Policy - KDE Community Wiki
[pdf] IEEE Statement — One of the PC members briefly mentioned a possible ethical concern in their review, but that comment was not significantly discussed any further at the time; we acknowledge that we missed it.
LKML: Kees Cook: Report on University of Minnesota Breach-of-Trust Incident — This report summarizes the events that led to this point, reviews the "Hypocrite Commits" paper that had been submitted for publication, and reviews all known prior kernel commits from UMN paper authors that had been accepted into our source repository. It concludes with a few suggestions about how the community, with UMN included, can move forward.

Linux Action News 187 May 02, 2021

A spicy mix of distro news, including Rocky Linux's first milestone release, and our follow-up on the University of Minnesota’s kernel ban.

Plus a major step in Apple M1 GPU support.

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FAQ: CentOS Stream Updates — CentOS Stream 9 will launch in Q2 2021 as part of the RHEL 9 development process.
Fedora Linux 34 is officially here! — Following the introduction of BTRFS as the default filesystem on desktop variants in Fedora Linux 33, we’ve introduced transparent compression on BTRFS filesystems.
Fedora 34 Changes
Gnome40
DefaultPipeWire
XwaylandStandalone
WaylandByDefaultForPlasma
BtrfsTransparentCompression
EnableSystemdOomd
Remove Support For SELinux Runtime Disable
UnifyGrubConfig
An update on the UMN affair — None of the three patches that contained real bugs were accepted by maintainers, though the reasons for rejection were not always the bugs in question. The paper itself has been withdrawn and will not be presented in May as was planned.
Owncast Streaming Application | Linode Marketplace | Linode
“Full disclosure” from the University of Minnesota — The researchers at the University of Minnesota have posted a description of the work they did as part of their "hypocrite commits" project. It includes a list of the buggy commits they posted and how they were handled.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 arrives — The latest version of Red Hat's flagship Linux operating system is designed to be deployed on the computing edge.
Rocky Linux 8.3 RC1 Released For This New RHEL Alternative — The first release candidate of Rocky Linux 8.3 is out, the project's inaugural release as a new binary-compatible alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Rocky Linux 8.3 Release Candidate 1 — The intent of a release candidate is for the community to test and validate expected functionality of Rocky Linux and report any bugs if present.
CentOS replacement distro AlmaLinux gets commercial support options — CloudLinux Inc has announced that it will offer commercial support for the AlmaLinux community distribution. The new support plans will include regular patches and updates for AlmaLinux's kernel and core packages, patch delivery SLAs, and 24/7 incident support.
Commercial Support for AlmaLinux OS from CloudLinux — CloudLinux Inc will start providing multiple support options for AlmaLinux OS in May 2021.
8.4 Beta of AlmaLinux Released — This is a BETA release and should not be used for production installations. The provided upgrade instructions should not be used on production machines, unless you don't mind if something breaks. 😉
Ubuntu Bug Breaks EFI on 21.04 Update With Older Machines — The exact nature of the hardware likely to fail is still unclear. Canonical software engineer Dave Jones suggested modern machines would be unaffected but older machines such as a ThinkPad 420 from 2011 and a MacBook Air from 2012 were affected by the bug.
elementary OS 6 Beta Available Today — Developers and testers, it’s the day you’ve been waiting for: elementary OS 6 Beta is available now! We first started talking publicly about elementary OS 6 in August of last year.
New Spectre Exploits Beat All Mitigations: Fixes to Severely Degrade Performance — Researchers from two universities have discovered several new variants of Spectre exploits that affect all modern processors from AMD and Intel with micro-op caches. Existing Spectre mitigations do not protect the CPUs against potential attacks that use these vulnerabilities.
PDF: I See Dead ﾂｵops: Leaking Secrets
M1 Mesa Driver Upstreamed — I’ve begun a Gallium driver for the M1, implementing much of the OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 specifications. With the compiler and driver together, we’re now able to run OpenGL workloads like glxgears and scenes from glmark2 on the M1 with an open-source stack. To top it off, the compiler and driver are now upstreamed in Mesa!
mesa - Add asahi Gallium driver

Linux Action News 186 Apr 25, 2021

The University of Minnesota has been banned from the Linux kernel.

We'll share the history, the context, and where things stand now around the controversial research that led to the ban.

Plus Ubuntu 21.04 is out, and we try WSL's new GUI Linux app support.

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Intentionally buggy commits for fame—and papers [LWN.net] — A buggy patch posted to the linux-kernel mailing list in early April was apparently the last straw for Greg Kroah-Hartman as it led to the planned reversion of a whole slew of commits with one thing in common: their origin at the University of Minnesota (UMN).
An open letter to the Linux community [LWN.net] — We sincerely apologize for any harm our research group did to the Linux kernel community. Our goal was to identify issues with the patching process and ways to address them, and we are very sorry that the method used in the “hypocrite commits” paper was inappropriate.
Re: [PATCH] SUNRPC: Add a check for gss_release_msg - Greg KH
University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired • The Register
Greg Kroah-Hartman bans University of Minnesota from Linux development for deliberately buggy patches | ZDNet
Revertion of all of the umn.edu commits - Kees Cook
Linus Torvalds Responds to Linux Banning University of Minnesota | Tom’s Hardware
Statement from CS&E on Linux Kernel research - April 21, 2021 | Department of Computer Science and Engineering | College of Science and Engineering
Security Research Ethics Review. What’s the subject, Kenneth? | by Dave Dittrich | Apr, 2021 | Medium
Paper: Stealthily introducing vulnerabilities in open source software via hypocrite commits
Ubuntu 21.04 Official Flavors Released, Here’s What’s New - 9to5Linux — Ubuntu 21.04 has been released and is available to download from the Ubuntu website.
Ubuntu 21.04 is here | Ubuntu — Ubuntu 21.04 comes with native Microsoft Active Directory integration, Wayland graphics by default, and a Flutter application development SDK.
LINUX Unplugged 402: Our Worst Idea Yet
(Re)introducing the Community Team
Fedora 34 To Release Next Week As A Very Exciting Update - Phoronix — After it was pushed back last week due to blocker bugs, on Friday it was determined that Fedora 34 is now in proper shape to officially ship next week.
Red Hat Summit 2021 | About — Virtual again: April 27-28, 2021
Microsoft enables Linux GUI apps on Windows 10 for developers - The Verge — Microsoft is starting to allow Windows 10 testers to access Linux GUI apps.
Microsoft Posts WSLg Preview - GUI App Support With Windows Subsystem For Linux - Phoronix
GitHub - microsoft/wslg: Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios
GitHub - microsoft/CBL-Mariner: Linux OS for Azure 1P services and edge appliances
Introducing Linux GUI apps running on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
Watch Mars Ingenuity's First Flight! (VIDEO AND IMAGES) — Mars Perseverance has been a historic mission, now its chopper, Ingenuity is flying on Mars. Watch a recap right here and see the very first video and images of it up in the air.
Open source goes to Mars 🚀 - The GitHub Blog — Today, we want to make the invisible visible. So, we have worked with JPL to place a new Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge on the GitHub profile of every developer who contributed to the specific versions of any open source projects and libraries used by Ingenuity.
Open Source on Mars: Community powers NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter · The ReadME Project · GitHub — Today, nearly 12,000 developers will see a new badge on their GitHub profile celebrating their contributions to the specific versions of projects and libraries used by NASA to fly the Ingenuity Helicopter on Mars.
Work Progresses Toward Ingenuity’s First Flight on Mars - NASA Mars
We’re Getting Ready for Ingenuity’s Second Flight - NASA Mars
We Are Prepping for Ingenuity’s Third Flight Test - NASA Mars
Mars helicopter shares first aerial color photo and preps for Sunday flight - CNN
NASA’s Mars helicopter completes second, higher flight – Spaceflight Now
Ingenuity: Nasa's Mars helicopter makes it three from three — On Sunday, the little chopper rose to a height of 5m before speeding off laterally for 50m - half the length of a football field.

Linux Action News 185 Apr 18, 2021

The major shift in the Linux landscape this week that was hardly noticed, and our thoughts on COSMIC from System76.

Plus Google adds its weight behind Rust in the Linux Kernel, and the new security features landing in WSL2.

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Dell to spin out remaining VMware stake, cements Friends With Benefits status for at least five years — The proposed transaction has been pitched as delivering value for shareholders, both in the short term and once the two corporations have less complicated structures that will let them compete more aggressively.
Dell Technologies Announces Planned VMware Spin-Off — Under terms of the planned spin-off, VMware will distribute a special cash dividend of $11.5 - $12 billion to all VMware shareholders, including Dell Technologies.
Dell Buys EMC For $67B In Largest Deal In Tech History
COSMIC to Arrive in June Release of Pop!_OS 21.04 — We’re providing a honed desktop user experience in Pop!_OS through our GNOME-based desktop environment: COSMIC. It’s a refined solution that makes the desktop easier to use, yet more powerful and efficient for our users through customization.
There’s no place like GNOME: System 76 introduces COSMIC desktop GUI for its Pop!_OS Linux — System76 said that it studied user behaviour and sought to refine key elements of the desktop accordingly.
pop-os/cosmic: — Computer Operating System Main Interface Components
Carl Richell on Twitter — Yes, indeed. Pop!_Shell will remain a separate extension.
Carl Richell on Twitter — Yes, tiling will remain a separate extension and can be used on other distros. COMIC can as well.
Carl Richell on Twitter — The is an extension that creates a unique GNOME UX while maintaining compatibility with GNOME and the GNOME app ecosystem and HIG.
Carl Richell on Twitter — Pop with the COSMIC desktop.
Carl Richell on Twitter — We’re currently developing and testing on X and Pop 21.04 will default to X as well. However, we may be able to shift over to Wayland for future releases with the recent nvidia news about Wayland driver support.
Google backs effort to bring Rust to the Linux kernel — "We feel that Rust is now ready to join C as a practical language for implementing the kernel."
Google Supports Getting Rust Into The Linux Kernel
HN: Linus Torvalds on Rust support in kernel
Linux 5.12 Diverted From Release To Allow An Extra Week Of Testing — Due to still a number of fixes landing this week, .Linus Torvalds decided to be safe and go for the extra round of testing.
The 12 Most Interesting Changes Of Linux 5.12
A bumpy 5.12 is due for release
Element Matrix Services launches bridging for Microsoft Teams — A single Microsoft Teams Bridge supports unlimited users across unlimited channels. Pricing is based on the number of active users using the bridge from MS Teams, at a cost of $0.50 per user per month. Traffic from Element (or any other Matrix-based client) is free.
HN: Will this bridge be be open source?
Servicing the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) 2 Linux kernel — We’ve just shipped the 5.10.16.3 WSL 2 Linux kernel version to Windows Insiders which brings exciting new changes: Support for the LUKS disk encryption, and some long-awaited bug fixes.
Microsoft Docs: Release Notes for WSL kernel
microsoft/WSL: Issues found on WSL
Hangover 0.6.5 Released For Running Windows Software On ARM64, POWER — Wednesday's release of Hangover 0.6.5 now allows for starting QEMU automatically if needed.

Linux Action News 184 Apr 11, 2021

Don't buy that M1-powered Apple machine just yet, solving Wayland-driven fragmentation, and why Firefox is about to get an upgrade on Linux.

Plus the imminent problem KDE solved this week, and more.

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Initial Apple M1 SoC Support Aims For Linux 5.13 Kernel — This initial Apple M1 Linux port gets the UART, interrupts, SMP, and DeviceTree bits in place for offering basic functionality.
“Challenge accepted”
Ars: Apple M1 hardware support merged into Linux 5.13
Official support for Linux on the M1 Macs could come as soon as June
[GIT PULL] Apple M1 SoC platform bring-up for 5.13
Asahi Linux on Twitter — Initial M1 support has been merged into the Linux SoC tree and will be coming to Linux 5.13!
SiFive FU740 PCIe Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13 — The HiFive Unmatched has a FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core, 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet.
How to Secure phpMyAdmin
Firefox Is Making WebRender The Default Rendering Engine On Linux This Month And There Is A Facelift Coming In May — The Firefox web browser is finally making the long-anticipated WebRender rendering engine the default on GNU/Linux when Firefox 88 is released later this month.
uBlock Origin works best on Firefox — The Firefox version of uBO makes use of WebAssembly code for core filtering code paths. This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers because this would require an extra permission in the extension manifest which could cause friction when publishing the extension in the Chrome Web Store.
Wayland Is Driving Fragmentation Around EDID Parsing - A Call To Fix That — Currently there is no de facto EDID parsing library for Linux but many different choices and most Wayland compositors rolling their own. Rather than exposing all of the parsed information from the kernel, there is now a call to have a more unified Linux EDID parsing library.
vgpu_unlock — Unlock vGPU functionality for consumer-grade GPUs.
Hacker figures how to unlock vGPU functionality intentionally hidden from certain NVIDIA cards for marketing purposes
Announcing KDE’s Qt 5 Patch Collection — As Qt 5 support is drawing to a close, and we shift to Qt 6, we need to ensure that KDE products are as reliable as ever. To this end, KDE will be maintaining a set of patches with security and functional fixes so that we can enjoy good KDE Software still based on Qt5 until our software is reliably based on Qt 6.
Mars Helicopter Flight Delayed to No Earlier than April 14 — During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a “watchdog” timer expiration.
LUP 400 Beer Stein

Linux Action News 183 Apr 04, 2021

The first CentOS clone is out, but it's the second part of their announcement that might be the most important.

Plus our reaction to SCO reigniting their decades-long fight with IBM and Red Hat, and the big news in GTK-land you might have missed.

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AlmaLinux Now Available For Download As RHEL/CentOS Alternative — As scheduled, AlmaLinux's initial release is available for download today from AlmaLinux.org. This initial AlmaLinux release is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 sources.
AlmaLinux OS on GitHub
AlmaLinux Repo
AlmaLinux Wiki
Shop Almalinux
CloudLinux Launches AlmaLinux, CentOS Linux clone
How to migrate CentOS to AlmaLinux and avoid downtime in your data center
AlmaLinux OS Homepage
IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos — Xinuos' lawsuit contends that IBM stole UnixWare and OpenServer code and incorporated it into the heart of its AIX, z/OS mainframe, and its midrange server operating systems.
SCO vs. IBM looks like it’s over for good
SCO slapped in latest round of eternal ‘Who owns UNIX?’ lawsuit
Judge spanks SCO in ancient ownership of Unix lawsuit
SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix
SCO keeps dying, and dying, and dying
SCO trading suspended in US
Xinuos sues IBM
SCO Linux FUD returns from the dead
Xinuos file suit against Red Hat and IBM
Canonical releases Ubuntu on Windows Preview with early builds, new tools for the brave — The setup is more user-friendly thanks to the Subiquity installer, and a utility called ubuntuwsl.
Announcing Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview
Super Sneaky Ubuntu Link
NVIDIA Proposes Mesa Patches To Support Alternative GBM Back-Ends — It looks like NVIDIA is finally taking the GBM route for supporting Wayland compositors with their proprietary driver...
Mesa GitLab WIP Merge request — GBM alternate backend discovery and loading
Introducing Libadwaita — This new libadwaita library intends to extend that concept by being the missing code part of Adwaita. and will be implemented as a direct GTK 4 continuation and replacement of libhandy.
OBS Studio Now Ready With Wayland Capture Support — Well-known GNOME developer Georges Stavracas has been working on allowing good and native Wayland support for OBS Studio with the last of that work being merged upstream today.
OBS Studio on Wayland – Georges Stavracas
Arch Linux Packages - archinstall 2.1.3-1
Arch Linux installer GitHub

Linux Action News 182 Mar 28, 2021

GNOME 40 is out and we chat with the project’s Executive Director about the technical and visual improvements in the new release.

Plus the facts around RMS’s return to the FSF board, and our analysis of the situation.

Special Guest: Neil McGovern.

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GNOME 40 Release Notes — GNOME 40 is the latest version of GNOME, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 24571 changes, made by approximately 822 contributors.
Feeling brave? GNOME 40 is here and you can have a poke around in the Fedora 34 beta
GNOME 40
GNOME 3.38.5 Released with Support for Handling Monitor Changes During Screencasts — Coming a month after the GNOME 3.38.4 point release the GNOME 3.38.5 update is here with more bug fixes and various improvements to make the GNOME 3.38 desktop environment series more stable, secure, and reliable.
Forthcoming OpenSSL release — This release will be made available on Thursday 25th March 2021 between 1300-1700 UTC.
CVE-2021-3450: CA certificate check bypass with X509_V_FLAG_X509_STRICT — Starting from OpenSSL version 1.1.1h a check to disallow certificates in the chain that have explicitly encoded elliptic curve parameters was added as an additional strict check.
Cloud CPU Benchmarking Report | Linode
Run Windows on Linode
RMS is Back — Free software advocate Richard Stallman is rejoining the board of the Free Software Foundation.
An open letter to remove Richard M. Stallman from all leadership positions
An open letter in support of Richard M. Stallman
Free software advocates seek removal of Richard Stallman and entire FSF board | Ars Technica
Statement on the Re-election of Richard Stallman to the FSF Board | Electronic Frontier Foundation
Free Software Community Condemns Richard Stallman’s Reinstatement to FSF Board of Directors
Richard Stallman returns to the Free Software Foundation
SUSE joins open source bodies calling for Stallman to go
From PS5 to Ford F-150: How a global chip shortage is 'impacting everything' — The biggest news in the automotive industry right now isn't new electric vehicles or Tesla CEO Elon Musk's latest comments. It's a major semiconductor shortage that's hurting automakers across the globe.
[Video] How The Global Computer Chip Shortage Happened

Linux Action News 181 Mar 21, 2021

Mobile Linux OSes are looking better than ever this week, a new effort to keep legacy applications running on Linux, and the signals indicating a Fuchsia release is nigh.

Plus a PSA for GNOME users, and a recently improved tool for the Raspberry Pi.

Special Guest: Dalton Durst.

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Ubuntu Touch OTA-16 Release — Today we are happy to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-16, our sixteenth stable update to the system!
Find your device: devices.ubuntu-touch.io — This list shows the devices which are currently under development in the Ubuntu Touch ecosystem. Mature devices have easy access to installation through the UBports Installer. Devices in an early state generally need to follow a manual installation procedure.
Ubuntu Touch Q&A 96
Extensions Rebooted: Porting your existing extensions to GNOME 40 — Since there have been significant changes in GNOME Shell – it will be important to understand where those changes are and how they might affect the various extensions that are out there.
Guide: Port Extensions to GNOME Shell 40
XWayland 21.1 Standalone Released To Offer Better X11 Client On Wayland Experience — With no one willing to step up and manage the X.Org Server 1.21 release Red Hat engineers are now moving ahead with standalone XWayland releases.
Cloud CPU Benchmarking Report
Google is preparing for Fuchsia’s first releases — For years now, we’ve been watching and waiting as Google has gradually developed their Fuchsia operating system from the ground up. Now evidence has appeared pointing to Google’s Fuchsia OS getting its first — and second — proper release.
Raspberry Pi Imager Now Lets You Control Advanced OS Features When Flashing Images — The biggest new feature in this release is the implementation of a hidden advanced options panel which lets you control additional features for the operating system you’re about to flash on an SD card or SSD drive.
GitHub: rpi-imager v1.6

Linux Action News 180 Mar 13, 2021

The A-Team assembled to make open source more trustworthy, why we might be about to find out how much SUSE is worth, and some essential project updates.

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Linux Foundation serves up free code-signing service — The Linux Foundation, with the support of Google, Red Hat, and Purdue University, is launching a service called sigstore to help developers sign the code they release.
Linux Foundation announces new open-source software signing service
Introducing sigstore — Installing most open source software today is equivalent to picking up a random thumb-drive off the sidewalk and plugging it into your machine.
rekor: Signature Transparency Log — Rekor's goals are to provide an immutable tamper resistant ledger of metadata generated within a software projects supply chain.
Fulcio: SigStore WebPKI — fulcio is a free Root-CA for code signing certs - issuing certificates based on an OIDC email address.
cosign: Container Signing — Container Signing, Verification and Storage in an OCI registry.
Diversity, Flexibility, and Linux: Prioritizing Generous Transfer
German software company SUSE targets pre-summer IPO — SUSE is targeting a pre-summer initial public offering in a deal that may value the private equity-backed company with German roots at 7-8 billion euros ($8.3-9.5 billion), people close to the matter said.
SUSE prepares for multi-billion Euro IPO
VirtIO Sound Driver Coming — The virtual sound driver for VirtIO has been queued up into the sound-next code ahead of the Linux 5.13 merge window this spring.
GNOME 40 Introducing Virtual Monitors — This headless native back-end that was merged today into GNOME 40's Mutter allows for running the native back-end atop a render node in a headless configuration without a physical display attached.
GRUB 2.06 Release Candidate Available For Testing — Among the changes coming with GRUB 2.06 are expanded Btrfs RAID support, LUKS2 encrypted disk support, the BootHole patches and other security work,
Progress Report Asahi Linux — To adapt the Apple world into a devicetree world, we are developing m1n1.
Current status of the Corellium team's effort — Wifi now works on Linux on the M1.

Linux Action News 179 Mar 07, 2021

Canonical reveals long-term Ubuntu plans that you might have missed, and the "double ungood" warning from Linus this week.

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Canonical: Flutter Is The Default Choice For Future Ubuntu Apps — Along with the new installer, Ken Vandine, Engineering Manager, Ubuntu Desktop, Canonical revealed that the out-of-the-box experience for devices preloaded with Ubuntu will also be powered by Flutter.
Ubuntu on Twitter — Flutter is the default choice for future Ubuntu apps. @kenvandine, Engineering Manager, is here to tell you about some of Canonical’s contributions to Flutter at #FlutterEngage.
Getting started with Flutter on Ubuntu
Version 2 of Google’s Flutter toolkit adds support for desktop and web apps
The Linode network model — As we worked on expanding our global network, three things were non-negotiable: maintaining vendor diversity, balancing flexibility and control, and incorporating Linux starting at the network level as much as possible.
Chrome (Chromium) release cycle shortened to 4 weeks, Chrome(ium) gets “Extended Stable” release every 8 weeks — We are excited to announce that Chrome is planning to move to releasing a new milestone every 4 weeks, starting with Chrome 94 in Q3 of 2021.
Chrome Moving To A 4-Week Release Cycle
(2019) Mozilla Shifting Firefox To A Four-Week Release Cycle
Linux Mint may start pushing high-priority patches to users — Besides looking for available updates, the Manager will also track cases where updates are overlooked. This will include metrics on when updates were last applied; when were packages last upgraded; and how many days have passed since a particular update was made available.
Linux Mint Finds Many Of Its Users Are Running Behind On Security Updates
Linux Mint emits fix for memory-gobbling Cinnamon
Update your computer! – The Linux Mint Blog
A warning about 5.12-rc1 — This merge window, we had a very innocuous code cleanup and simplification that raised no red flags at all, but had a subtle and very nasty bug in it: swap files stopped working right. And they stopped working in a particularly bad way: the offset of the start of the swap file was lost. Swapping still happened, but it happened to the wrong part of the filesystem, with the obvious catastrophic end results.
That Linux 5.12 Severe Data Corruption Bug Hits Intel CI Systems - Issue Caused By Swap File
Watch Out For Possible Data Loss On Early Linux 5.12 Kernels
Save the Date! | Container Plumbing Days — The Container Plumbing Days will be a 2-day event to investigate, discuss, hack, learn, and celebrate the “lower-level” open source container technologies, everything from the container runtime on down to the Linux kernel.

Linux Action News 178 Feb 28, 2021

Red Hat is still in damage control mode, a new hacker laptop called Framework makes bold promises, and what Google is spending money on in the Linux kernel.

Plus why we've recently switched back to Firefox, and more.

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Red Hat Announces Free “RHEL For Open-Source Infrastructure” — Eligible organizations will be able to enjoy no-cost RHEL for use within their infrastructure for continuous integration, web servers, and more.
Red Hat returns with another peace offering in the wake of the CentOS Stream affair: More free stuff
Red Hat Announcement — Extending no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux to open source organizations
Red Hat opens the door for both VMs tand containers in its latest OpenShift release
Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 Blurs The Line Between VMs And Containers — With OpenShift 4.7, Red Hat attempts to simplify the migration of virtual machines to containers.
Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 Is Now Available
OpenShift Container Platform 4.7 release notes
[Video] What’s new in Red Hat OpenShift 4.7
Introducing the Framework Laptop — We’re here to prove that designing products to last doesn’t require sacrificing performance, quality, or style.
Framework Laptop
Google Funds Linux Kernel Developers to Focus Exclusively on Security — Silva and Chancellor’s exclusive focus is to maintain and improve kernel security and associated initiatives in order to ensure the world’s most pervasive open source software project is sustainable for decades to come.
Latest Firefox release includes Multiple Picture-in-Picture and Total Cookie Protection — In today’s release, we added multiple picture-in-picture views, available on Mac, Linux and Windows, and includes keyboard controls for fast forward and rewind. Total Cookie Protection stops cookies from tracking you around the web by creating a separate cookie jar for every website.
Firefox 86.0 released
Total Cookie Protection
Firefox for Enterprise 86 Release Notes.

Linux Action News 177 Feb 21, 2021

We share some exclusive details about the Linux-powered gear that just landed on Mars, and the open-source frameworks that make it possible.

Plus a major new feature coming to a Linux distro near you.

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How NASA Designed a Helicopter That Could Fly Autonomously on Mars — This the first time we’ll be flying Linux on Mars. We’re actually running on a Linux operating system. The software framework that we’re using is one that we developed at JPL for cubesats and instruments, and we open-sourced it a few years ago.
The Perseverance Mars rover just took Linux to another planet
Ingenuity (Mars helicopter) on Wikipedia
Mars Helicopter on YouTube
Ingenuity helicopter phones home from Mars
SparkFun Electronics
Linaro Projects
Linaro on Wikipedia
Ivan Čukić on Twitter — Another @kdecommunity #KDE Mars landing a success!
Linux 5.12 Git Seeing New Code Land Following Winter Storm — While the first week of a new merge window is often one of the busiest times for Linus Torvalds in overseeing the Linux kernel, until last night there was no actual Linux 5.12 code being pushed into the Linux Git repository. Linus was offline most of the week due to winter storms preventing him from pushing to the Git repository and interacting much with the mailing list.
There Are Big Changes On The Horizon With Linux 5.12
Btrfs With Linux 5.12 Gets More Performance Improvements, Working Zoned Mode
XFS File-System With Linux 5.12 Has “A Lot Going On This Time”
IDMAPPED Mounts Aim For Linux 5.12 - Many New Use-Cases From Containers To Systemd-Homed - Phoronix — This patch series introduces idmapped mounts which has been in the making for some time. Simply put, different mounts can expose the same file or directory with different ownership.
NVIDIA continues tweaking their work for hardware accelerated Xwayland support — Performance should be fine in full-screen games, as long as the compositor supports the required zwp_linux_dmabuf_v1 interface.
Experimental Wayland Support For Wine Now Sees More Functionality Working — With the new "request for comment" patches, there is now working support for copy/paste, drag-and-drop, and the ability to change the display mode.
Apple M1 teaser — So OpenBSD boots multi-user on the new Apple M1 hardware. This still has some hacks in it that need to be fixed, so don't expect support for this in the tree right now. But a big thank you to those that contributed to the pool for getting us some hardware.

Linux Action News 176 Feb 14, 2021

Microsoft and Ubuntu's relationship is under a new spotlight this week.

Plus our rundown of the feature-packed 5.11 release, a Fuchsia surprise, exciting hardware news, and more.

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Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep — "The creepiest thing," he said, "[was] the direct contact on my private LinkedIn account" – which he noted did not share "the same corporate email.
ＣｙｂｅｒＡｎｔａｎｉ on Twitter
KDE Plasma 5.21 is Packed with New Features — KDE Plasma 5.21 is going to be released on February 16 and when it arrives it’ll bring a barrel load of changes and enhancements with it.
This week in KDE — Plasma 5.21 approaches!
Linux 5.11 Is Heavy On New Features, Improvements For 2021 — There are a ton of Intel and AMD changes, Syscall User Dispatch for helping some newer Windows games run under Wine, continued IO_uring advancements, many Btrfs file-system improvements, Lenovo contributed ThinkPad palm sensor detection support, and much more.
Linux 5.11 - Linux Kernel Newbies
Syscall User Dispatch Appears Destined For Linux 5.11 To Help Windows Games On Linux
AMD Ryzen, EPYC 5~6% Faster Out-Of-The-Box With Linux 5.11
Intel Xe Graphics Are Looking Great On Linux 5.11 With Nice Performance Uplift
OpenLiteSpeed WordPress Server | Linode Marketplace
System76 Begins Detailing Their Open-Source “Launch Configurable Keyboard” — Like the Thelio computers, System76 is going to be manufacturing their own keyboards at their facility in Denver, Colorado.
Keyboards Go Open Source With System76’s ‘Launch Configurable Keyboard’
system76/launch on GitHub — System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard
System76 on Twitter — “The Launch keyboard PCB! #system76 #launch #keyboard #linux #comingsoon #sneakpeek"
AMD Is Currently Hiring More Linux Engineers — Several of these new job descriptions do begin with, "step up into a new organization built to engage more strategically and deeply with the technical teams of our commercial customers."
AMD “Green Sardine” Firmware Published For Linux Users
Google Fuchsia OS could run Android & Linux apps ‘natively’ — This week, a proposal has been put forward for an alternative solution for Fuchsia to run programs meant for Linux and Android. Instead of running Linux itself, Fuchsia would gain a system called “Starnix,” which would act as a translator between instructions for the Linux kernel and instructions for Fuchsia’s Zircon kernel.
[rfc] Running unmodified Linux programs on Fuchsia
Fuchsia - Starnix Proposal
Hacker News Comments — Running unmodified Linux programs on Fuchsia
Homework: Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
Homework: Visual guide to SSH tunnels
Homework: FOSDEM 2021 Videos

Linux Action News 175 Feb 06, 2021

The story behind a Microsoft repo shipping in Raspberry Pi OS, Canonical updates a special version of Ubuntu, and a couple of milestones the Linux world hit this week.

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Raspberry Pi Users Mortified As Microsoft Repository That Phones Home Is Added To Pi OS — The latest update installs a Microsoft apt repository on any machine running Raspberry Pi OS, and does it without admin consent.
Microsoft repo secretly installed on all Raspberry Pi’s Linux OS
Microsoft repo installed on all Raspberry Pi’s
Eben Upton on Twitter — I can’t understand why you think this was a controversial thing to do. We do things of this sort all the time without putting out a blog post about how to opt out.
Ubuntu Core 20 Released For IoT/Embedded Linux Use-Cases — Ubuntu Core 20 is offered for x86_64 and ARM hardware and is backed by Canonical with ten years of support.
Containerize all the things with Ubuntu Core 20
Ubuntu Core
How to Deploy Guacamole with Marketplace Apps
Donating Docker Distribution to the CNCF — To make the project clearly an industry wide collaboration, hosting it in the CNCF was the obvious place, as it is the home of many successful collaborative projects, such as Kubernetes and Containerd.
Distribution — The toolkit to pack, ship, store, and deliver container content.
AlmaLinux, the CentOS Linux replacement, beta is out — AlmaLinux, the open-source enterprise-level Linux distribution created as an alternative to CentOS, has been released in beta with most Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages.
Google funds project to secure Apache web server with new Rust component — The module will be based on Rustls; a Rust open-source library developed as an alternative to the C-based OpenSSL project.
LKML: Hector Martin: [PATCH 00/18] Apple M1 SoC platform bring-up — This series brings up initial support for the Apple M1 SoC, used in the 2020 Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air models.
Hector Martin's Development Streams

Linux Action News 174 Jan 31, 2021

Google removes Matrix chat-client Element from the Play store, sudo has a major flaw with a long-tail, and Rocky Linux gets a boost.

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Element suspended on Google Play Store — At 2021-01-29 at 21:35 UTC Google suspended Element from the Play Store without warning or notification
Element sees fivefold increase in signups after Whatsapp privacy debacle — After Whatsapp’s announcement, rival app Telegram reported a 500% increase in users and Signal saw an 18-fold increase in download numbers, putting it on track to cross 1m new users each day.
Element team waiting hours — Update: we’re still waiting for a response from Google to our explanatory mail sent ~8 hours ago. Thanks all for your patience while we get this sorted...
New Linux SUDO flaw lets local users gain root privileges — The issue is a heap-based buffer overflow exploitable by any local user (normal users and system users, listed in the sudoers file or not), with attackers not being required to know the user's password to successfully exploit the flaw. The vulnerability was introduced in the Sudo program almost 9 years ago, in July 2011.
10-year-old Sudo bug lets Linux users gain root-level access
Buffer overflow in command line unescaping
Sudo vulnerability allows attackers to gain root privileges on Linux systems (CVE-2021-3156) - Help Net Security — "This vulnerability is perhaps the most significant sudo vulnerability in recent memory (both in terms of scope and impact) and has been hiding in plain sight for nearly 10 years."
New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities Patched in All Supported Ubuntu Releases
Mitre - CVE-2020-28374
Red Hat Customer Portal: CVE-2020-28374
Debian: CVE-2020-28374
Ubuntu: CVE-2020-28374
The killing of CentOS Linux: ‘The CentOS board doesn’t get to decide what Red Hat engineering teams do’ — Brian Exelbierd, responsible for Red Hat liaison with the CentOS project and a board member of that project, has told The Register that CentOS Linux is ending because Red Hat simply refused to invest in it.
Rocky Linux gets a new sponsor—Gregory Kurtzer’s startup, Ctrl IQ — Rocky Linux is to be a beneficiary of Ctrl IQ's revenue, not its source—the company describes itself in its announcement as the suppliers of a "full technology stack integrating key capabilities of enterprise, hyper-scale, cloud and high-performance computing."
Linux maintainer says long-term support for 5.10 will stay at two years unless biz world steps up and actually uses it — Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has responded to complaints that the current promise of two years for 5.10 is not enough, explaining that support is not automatic but requires commercial help.
Rust Game Server One-Click App Linode — A free-for-all battle in a harsh open-world environment.

Linux Action News 173 Jan 24, 2021

Why we don't think Red Hat's expanded developer program is enough, our reaction to Ubuntu sticking with an older Gnome release, and a tiny delightful surprise.

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New Year, new Red Hat Enterprise Linux programs: Easier ways to access RHEL — When we announced our intent to transition to CentOS Stream, we did so with a plan to create new programs to address use cases traditionally served by CentOS Linux.
Staying on GTK3 and GNOME 3.38 this cycle - Desktop - Ubuntu Community Hub — The topic of what to do about the new GNOME started being discussed and after some consideration, we decided to stick to GTK3 and GNOME 3.38 this cycle.
Welp, Ubuntu 21.04 Won’t Ship with GNOME 40 or GTK4 - OMG! Ubuntu!
Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch | AWS Open Source Blog — In order to ensure open source versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.
AWS, as predicted, is forking Elasticsearch | ZDNet
The Next Gen Database Servers Powering Let’s Encrypt - Let’s Encrypt - Free SSL/TLS Certificates — By going with AMD EPYC, we were able to get 64 physical CPU cores while keeping clock speeds high: 2.9GHz base with 3.4GHz boost. More importantly, EPYC provides 128 PCIe v4.0 lanes, which allows us to put 24 NVMe drives in a single machine.
Ubuntu Can Run on Apple Silicon, Devs Say It’s ‘Completely Usable’ - OMG! Ubuntu! — Developers at ARM virtualisation company Corellium have managed to get Ubuntu 20.04 up and running on the new Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
How We Ported Linux to the M1
[RFC PATCH 0/7] Linux on Apple Silicon [LWN.net]
Raspberry Pi Foundation launches $4 microcontroller with custom chip | TechCrunch — It has a dual-core Arm processor (running at 133MHz), 264KB of RAM, 26 GPIO pins including three analog inputs, a micro-USB port, and a temperature sensor.
Raspberry Pi Foundation Release Their Own Silicon, the Raspberry Pi Pico - 9to5Linux
Security Bulletin 1 - Home Assistant — It has come to our attention that certain custom integrations have security issues and could potentially leak sensitive information. Home Assistant is not responsible for custom integrations and you use custom integrations at your own risk.

Linux Action News 172 Jan 17, 2021

Impressive updates for some beloved open source projects, and AlmaLinux—a leading CentOS alternative—is born.

Plus Google's surprise for Chromium users, and we go hands-on with Podman's docker-compose support.

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KDE Plasma 5.21 Brings Low-latency Compositing, New Kickoff Menu, and Wallpaper — A major addition is a complete redesign of the main KDE Plasma Application Launcher.
This week in KDE: new KWin compositing, new Kickoff, new recording level visualization! — This week KWin’s compositing code was almost totally rewritten! It should broadly reduce latency throughout all compositing operations, and also adds a user-facing control in the System Settings Compositing page so people can choose for themselves whether they prefer lower latency or smoother animations.
Check out our interview with Nate Graham in LUP 385
Plasma Gitlab MR: Add fingerprint manager
Fedora Proposed Change: Wayland By Default For Plasma
Xfce 4.16 Released — Today, after 1 year and 4 months of work, we are happy to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.16, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.14.
XFCE Nation on Twitter — Reminder to @ChrisLAS and @wespayne that Xfce 4.16 has been out since December 22nd but hasn’t been mentioned on @LinuxActionNews or @LinuxUnplugged.
Xfce 4.16 Changelog
Intel Preparing New Driver Option To Disable GPU Security Mitigations
Wine 6.0 released — This release is dedicated to the memory of Ken Thomases, who passed away just before Christmas at the age of 51. Ken was an incredibly brilliant developer, and the mastermind behind the macOS support in Wine. We all miss his skills, his patience, and his dark sense of humor.
Grab a Glass, Wine 6.0 Has Been Released
The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 6.0 — The core DLLs, including NTDLL, KERNEL32, GDI32, USER32, etc. are built in PE format. This should help a number of copy protection schemes that check that the DLL files on disk match the in-memory contents.
CloudLinux readies CentOS Linux replacement: AlmaLinux — AlmaLinux will be a free, open-source, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 (and future releases). For CentOS users, the company promises Lenix will provide an uninterrupted way to convert existing CentOS servers with absolutely zero downtime or need to reinstall anything
AlmaLinux is born!!
AlmaLinux - Forever-Free Enterprise-Grade Operating System
Using Podman and Docker Compose — Up to now, support for Docker Compose, the command-line utility that orchestrates multiple Docker containers for local development, was missing. With Podman 3.0 now in development upstream, we have begun to support Compose.
Chromium Blog: Limiting Private API availability in Chromium — During a recent audit, we discovered that some third-party Chromium-based browsers were able to integrate Google features, such as Chrome sync and Click to Call, that are only intended for Google’s use. We are limiting access to our private Chrome APIs starting on March 15, 2021.
PSA: Vanilla Chromium ending some of Google’s API access such as syncing and spelling check starting on March 15, 2021
MacOS update enables third party OSes on M1 — It's happening... macOS Big Sur 11.2 beta 2 is out with full custom kernel support.
iBoot - Wikipedia — iBoot is the stage 2 bootloader for all Apple products. It replaces the old bootloader, BootX.

Linux Action News 171 Jan 10, 2021

We explain the recent Qt upset, and then go hands-on with the new PeerTube release.

Plus Wendell from Level1Techs joins us to discuss his thoughts on porting Linux to the Apple M1.

Special Guest: Wendell Wilson.

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LTS versions of Qt going closed-source — The Qt Company is making LTS releases commercial only and thus closed-source. "The problem is that these releases are in effect no longer maintained. If there is a security issue, or a fix needed to support some change in one of the target operating systems, open-source users will not get that fix other than in the not-ready version 6.0."
QT 5.15 Commercial-only LTS phase starts: Closing the 5.15 branch(es) on 5th January : linux
LTS versions of Qt going closed-source : linux
A shell UX update – GNOME Shell & Mutter — The new design has prompted a lot of interest and comment, which we’re all really thrilled about. In this post I wanted to provide an update of where the initiative is at. I also want to take the opportunity to answer some of the common questions that have come up.
Progress On The GNOME 40 Shell Continues At Full Speed - Phoronix
Dissecting the Apple M1 GPU, part I — A few weeks ago, I purchased a Mac Mini with an M1 GPU as a development target to study the instruction set and command stream, to understand the GPU’s architecture at a level not previously publicly understood, and ultimately to accelerate the development of a Mesa driver for the hardware. Today I’ve reached my first milestone: I now understand enough of the instruction set to disassemble simple shaders with a free and open-source tool chain, released on GitHub.
Early Work Is Underway On Reverse-Engineering The Apple M1 GPU
NVIDIA getting geared up to support hardware accelerated XWayland — NVIDIA’s Erik Kurzinger has submitted a Merge Request to the xserver GitLab titled “Xwayland: Support hardware accelerated rendering with the proprietary NVIDIA driver”, with the two patches included “intended to accompany upcoming support in the proprietary NVIDIA driver for hardware accelerated GL and Vulkan rendering with Xwayland”. Kurzinger continues to mention that once a driver is out with the needed hooks, this code should “just start working”.
NVIDIA Prepares XWayland OpenGL/Vulkan Acceleration Support
Xwayland: Support hardware accelerated rendering with the proprietary NVIDIA driver (!587) · Merge Requests · xorg / xserver · GitLab
PeerTube v3: it’s a live, a liiiiive ! – Framablog — Today we are releasing a major new version of PeerTube, our alternative to centralized video platforms like YouTube.

Linux Action News 170 Jan 03, 2021

A lot of open source development was packed into 2020, we recap some of the standout moments you should know about.

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Linux Action News 169 Dec 27, 2020

Our annual predictions episode kicks off with a review of what we got right and wrong for 2020, and then we speculate wildly about what could happen in 2021.

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Linux Action News 168 Dec 20, 2020

Another Google project meets an untimely demise, but we find the silver lining.

Plus new Matrix goodies, why AWS is investing in Blender, and more.

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Google kills Android Things, its IoT OS, in January — Google announced it had basically given up on the project as a general-purpose IoT operating system in 2019, but now there's an official shutdown date thanks to a new FAQ page detailing the demise of the OS.
Android Things Shutdown FAQ
Ron Amadeo on Twitter — Oof, Google promised three years of updates when Android Things launched in May 2018, the actual support it delivered? One year, three months.
Google, Qualcomm partner to bring 4 OS Android updates to new chipsets — The new plan is three years of major OS updates and four years of security updates.
Qualcomm promises three years of Android updates for its entire SoC lineup
Google acquires CloudReady OS to make PCs Chromebooks — Neverware lets you turn old PCs and Macs into Chromebook-esque devices through its CloudReady OS. While primarily aimed at schools and enterprises, a free “Home” edition for everyone is available. Google has now acquired Neverware and CloudReady with plans to integrate it with Chrome OS.
Native Steam (Borealis) on Chrome OS likely arriving mid-2021
GTK 4.0 Officially Released After More Than 4 Years of Development — The GTK development officially released today the next generation of the GTK toolkit, GTK 4.0, after being in development for more than four years.
GTK 4.0 Toolkit Officially Released
GTK 4.0 – GTK Development Blog
Matrix.to: Reloaded — A challenge we regularly face is all the factors which make Matrix flexible and powerful as an open, secure decentralised protocol also increase the difficulty of getting started.
Matrix.to — Create shareable links to Matrix rooms, users or messages without being tied to any app
Introducing Cerulean — Alongside all the normal business-as-usual Matrix stuff, we’ve found some time to do a mad science experiment over the last few weeks - to test the question: "Is it possible to build a serious Twitter-style decentralised microblogging app using Matrix?"
Google AMP gets a shock to its system as advisor quits, lawsuit claims foul play — Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages technology, known as AMP among web publishers, took a beating this week as an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Texas charged that the ad biz used AMP to hinder competition.
I have resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee – Terence Eden’s Blog — I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary & unnecessary incursion into the open web.
AWS joins the Blender Development Fund — AWS committed to a period of three years, specifically to support character animation tools development.

Linux Action News 167 Dec 13, 2020

We explain the major changes to CentOS this week and break down the top four criticisms.

Plus Google makes their Fuchsia intentions a bit more clear, and why Linux 5.10 is a BIG deal.

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Before You Get Mad About The CentOS Stream Change, Think About… — But, before you get angry, please read this. I’ve been surfing Twitter, Reddit, and HackerNews threads just like many others. I’ve gathered some major buckets of complaints which seem to come up, and I’d like to address each of them.
CentOS project lead disappears
Usage Statistics and Market Share of Linux for Websites, December 2020
Red Hat and the CentOS Project Join Forces to Speed Open Source Innovation
Transforming the development experience within CentOS
CentOS Project shifts focus to CentOS Stream
FAQ: CentOS Stream Updates
Google is opening Fuchsia OS development to the public — To both support developers and make the Fuchsia development process less skunkworks and more public, Google is opening Fuchsia’s bug tracker to the public.
Expanding Fuchsia’s open source model | Google Open Source Blog
Linux 5.10 LTS Released As One Of The Biggest Kernel Releases In A While
Linux 5.10 Released — Besides being the last kernel release of 2020, this is a significant milestone in that it's also a Long Term Support (LTS) kernel to be maintained for at least the next five years and also is a huge kernel update in general with many new features.
The 10 Most Interesting Features Of Linux 5.10

Linux Action News 166 Dec 06, 2020

Desktop Linux users saw a lot of new features land this week, and SUSE might just have a new cloud-winning strategy.

Plus Michael Larabel from Phoronix joins us to discuss the state of Linux hardware support in 2020.

Special Guest: Michael Larabel.

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Budgie 10.5.2 Desktop Environment Released with Support for the GNOME 3.38 Stack
Budgie 10.5.2 Released
KDE Plasma 5.20.4 Is Out with More Than 40 Bug Fixes and Improvements
Plasma 5.20.4 complete changelog
GNOME 3.38.2 Desktop Environment Is Out with Even More Improvements and Bug Fixes
3.38.2/NEWS
Cinnamon 4.8 Desktop Environment Released, This Is What’s New
New Raspberry Pi OS release — The traditional end-of-year new release of Raspberry Pi OS, which we launch today.
Raspberry Pi’s V3DV Vulkan Driver Now Supports Wayland — Raspberry Pi fans were celebrating that the V3DV driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for supporting this modern high-performance graphics/compute API atop the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer.
Should Red Hat be afraid of SUSE’s Rancher acquisition? — SUSE, a major Linux and cloud company, finalized its acquisition of Rancher Labs earlier this year.. Rancher, formerly a privately held open-source company, had over 37,000 active users and 100-million downloads of its flagship Kubernetes management program, Rancher.
Rancher Labs - Wikipedia
Network World
SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs - YouTube

Linux Action News 165 Nov 29, 2020

What caused the recent major AWS outage, the breaking changes that just arrived upstream, and a new mail client for Linux.

Plus our reaction to Microsoft's Android subsystem that's in the works.

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Prolonged AWS outage takes down a big chunk of the internet — Amazon noted that the issues are only affecting one of its 23 geographic AWS regions. But the problem was significant enough to take out a large number of internet services.
Geoff Belknap on Twitter — “I… can’t vacuum… because us-east-1 is down.”
Canonical publishes LTS Docker Image Portfolio on Docker Hub — The LTS Docker Image Portfolio comes with up to ten years Extended Security Maintenance by Canonical.
Vivaldi Integrates Email Client, Feed Reader, and Calendar in a Browser — The Vivaldi team announced that they are bringing an Email client, a Feed Reader, and a Calendar – all of these together in the latest Vivaldi technical preview release.
Introducing Vivaldi Mail in Technical Preview
How to use the built-in GPG feature for Thunderbird
Systemd 247 Released With Experimental Out-of-Memory Daemon, New Credentials Capability — systemd 247 is very heavy on new features, and one big change for udev.
[systemd-devel] systemd 247 released
NTFS read-write driver GPL implementation by Paragon Software — The Paragon NTFS kernel driver patch is now on its 13th iteration
Microsoft is working on an Android subsystem for Windows 10 — This new initiative is called 'Project Latte,' and similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), will create a virtualized Android environment running directly within Windows 10.

Linux Action News 164 Nov 22, 2020

The details behind youtube-dl's return to GitHub, our thoughts on the rumored SUSE IPO, and our concerns with Servo's new home.

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Standing up for developers: youtube-dl is back — Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.
Remove cipher algorithm and mentions of copyrighted material
GitHub reinstates youtube-dl library after EFF intervention
$6 billion Linux deal? SUSE IPO rumored — SUSE, the major European Linux company, may soon be spun out in a $6 billion IPO.
EQT Said to Plan IPO of $6 Billion Software Developer SUSE
Canonical Saw ~$119M Revenue In 2019 But Still Operating At A Loss — Ubuntu maker Canonical Holdings Limited recently submitted their UK financial report for their fiscal year ending 31 December 2019. During the pre-COVID times they generated around 22% more revenue than 2018 but still operated at a loss albeit more narrowly than in prior years.
Librem 5 Mass Production Phone Has Begun Shipping — Purism has begun shipping its mass-produced Librem 5 phone to customers.
Servo’s new home — Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed.
Mozilla Punts Servo Web Engine Development To The Linux Foundation
Starting January 4, 2021, Google will block all sign-ins to Google accounts from embedded browser frameworks — The browser must identify itself clearly in the User-Agent. The browser must not try to impersonate another browser like Chrome or Firefox.
Guidance to developers affected by our effort to block less secure browsers and applications

Linux Action News 163 Nov 15, 2020

The Ubuntu bug you need to patch, PayPal's Bitcoin support goes live, and a breaking change inbound to systemd.

Plus the Linux tech Greg KH is most excited about, and more.

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Ubuntu fixes bugs that standard users could use to become root — A handful of commands was all it took for untrusted users to become all-powerful.
Now-patched Ubuntu desktop vulnerability allows privilege escalation
How to get root on Ubuntu 20.04 by pretending nobody’s /home
Meet Proxmox Backup Server, a Debian-Based Open Source Enterprise Backup Solution — Proxmox launched today Proxmox Backup Server as a new edition of its Debian-based Linux distribution engineered to act as an enterprise solution for backing up and restoring physical hosts, virtual machines and containers.
Proxmox Roadmap
Proxmox Backup Server
Proxmox Backup Git Repo
PayPal's crypto trading goes live in the US — Customers will be able to trade up to $20,000 a week, rather than the originally announced $10,000.
Systemd catches up with bind events — Perhaps the real lesson here is that the community would be better served by closer relations between the kernel project and projects managing low-level utilities like systemd.
eBPF - The Future of Networking & Security — Cilium is an open source project that has been designed on top of eBPF to address the networking, security, and visibility requirements of container workloads. It provides a high-level abstraction on top of eBPF. Cilium is to eBPF what Kubernetes and container runtimes are to Linux kernel namespaces, cgroups, and seccomp
Linux App Summit 2020

Linux Action News 162 Nov 08, 2020

We review the Raspberry Pi 400. Then discover new features coming to Linux powered Dells.

Plus an important Let's Encrypt update, and the next billion-dollar tech coming to Linux.

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Raspberry Pi 400: the $70 desktop PC — The Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer Kit is the “Christmas morning” product, with the best possible out-of-box experience: a complete PC which plugs into your TV or monitor.
Raspberry Pi 400 - First Impressions
Raspberry Pi 400 review—the under-$100 desktop PC you didn’t know you needed
Dell is Adding Webcam and Microphone Kill Switches — Dell is adding new code in Linux kernel that will enable you to disable newer Dell system’s webcam and microphone with keyboard shortcuts. Why? Because privacy.
Dell Adding Hardware Privacy Driver For Linux
Let's Encrypt warns about a third of Android devices will from next year stumble over sites that use its certs — Expiration of cross-signed root certificates spells trouble
Standing on Our Own Two Feet - Let's Encrypt
Chrome will soon have its own dedicated certificate root store — Currently, Chrome uses the certificate root store part of each operating system. Google plans to manage its own list of "approved" certificates from now on, similar to Firefox.
BPF binaries: BTF, CO-RE, and the future of BPF perf tools — Two new technologies, BTF and CO-RE, are paving the way for BPF to become a billion-dollar industry.
What is eBPF?
eBPF: Put the Kubernetes Data Plane in the Kernel
LINUX Unplugged 293: Netflix's Gift to Linux

Linux Action News 161 Nov 01, 2020

A RISC-V development PC is in the works, we have the details and try to set expectations.

Plus what's new in Fedora 33, and an important youtube-dl update.

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Fedora 33 is officially here! - Fedora Magazine — Fedora Workstation now uses BTRFS as the default filesystem.
Fedora 33 Review: What’s New and How to Upgrade | FOSS Linux
AWS Marketplace: Fedora 33 Cloud Base Images (x86_64) HVM
Fedora IoT To Be Promoted To An Official Edition With Fedora 33 - Phoronix — Fedora IoT relies on RPM-OSTree for offering atomic updates and focuses on container-based workloads.
Fedora IoT
SiFive unveils plan for Linux PCs with RISC-V processors | VentureBeat — Developers can use the boards to test code for real-time operating systems, custom Linux distributions, compilers, libraries, and applications.
The Heart of RISC-V Development is Unmatched - SiFive
SiFive Is Launching The Most Compelling RISC-V Development Board Yet - Phoronix
Check out their Chip Configurator
James Prior from SiFive on Wendell’s show
Codeplay joins the RISC-V foundation - SemiAccurate
New installation options coming for Ubuntu on WSL | Ubuntu — Beginning in Windows 10 Insiders Preview build 20246 users can enable a complete WSL experience with simply: wsl.exe --install.
Asking Microsoft to resign from the RIAA over youtube-dl takedown demand - Conservancy Blog - Software Freedom Conservancy — We call on Microsoft to resign from the RIAA and remove their conflict of interest in this matter. This is an important opportunity for Microsoft to stand up for the values of software freedom.
RIAA Obtains Subpoenas Targeting 40 YouTube-Ripping Platforms & Pirate Sites * TorrentFreak
Tzlil on Twitter — So the CEO of GitHub popped in #youtube-dl a few hours ago, looks like they are trying to get youtube-dl back, I hope this works out.
New youtube-dl release: v2020.11.01.1

Linux Action News 160 Oct 25, 2020

Ubuntu 20.10 is out, with official Raspberry Pi 4 desktop support. We try it out and report back. And our thoughts on the youtube-dl takedown.

Plus Edge is out for Linux, and PayPal gets bitcoin fever.

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Ubuntu 20.10 Released, Now Available to Download — Ubuntu 20.10 rides atop the Linux 5.8 kernel, includes the GNOME 3.38 release, has new wallpapers, Active Directory integration (for enterprise users) in the installer, and carries a clutch of updated software, tools, and libraries.
Ubuntu 20.10 Flavours Released
Ubuntu 20.10 on Raspberry Pi delivers the full Linux desktop and micro clouds
How to build a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster using MicroK8s
Build a Raspberry Pi Desktop with an Ubuntu heart
Parallels Desktop for Chromebook Enterprise — It is the world’s first software that runs Windows directly on enterprise Chromebooks―enabling full-featured Windows apps including Microsoft Office and proprietary apps―even when there is not an Internet connection.
youtube-dl removed from GitHub by RIAA takedown notice — Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies on matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, audiovisual works and images, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet.
How the youTube-dl devs found out about DMCA takedown
Microsoft Edge arrives in preview form for Linux — The release officially supports Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora and openSUSE. Sadly, there is no love for Pi fans at present; the team are apparently "looking at Arm", but no release has been forthcoming.
We Go Hands on With Microsoft Edge for Linux
PayPal Launches New Service Enabling Users to Buy, Hold and Sell Cryptocurrency — Today announced the launch of a new service enabling its customers to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrency directly from their PayPal account, and signaled its plans to significantly increase cryptocurrency's utility by making it available as a funding source for purchases at its 26 million merchants worldwide.
PayPal and Venmo will offer and accept cryptocurrency for all online payments

Linux Action News 159 Oct 18, 2020

The new Plasma release makes a compelling argument for the workstation, why LibreOffice and OpenOffice can't seem to get along and a recently found bug in Linux that goes back to Kernel 2.6.

Plus, our thoughts on Apple's seeming abandoning of CUPS, the latest and greatest open source podcast player, and an important show update.

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Plasma 5.20: One absolutely massive release — A massive release, containing improvements to dozens of components, widgets, and the desktop behavior in general.
KDE Plasma 5.20 is Here – And It's an Epic Update
LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade — To mark the 20th anniversary of Apache OpenOffice, the project's main rival, LibreOffice, published a letter asking OpenOffice to tell its users to switch
Google and Intel warn of high-severity Bluetooth security bug in Linux — The flaw resides in BlueZ, the software stack that by default implements all Bluetooth core protocols and layers for Linux. Besides Linux laptops, it's used in many consumer or industrial Internet-of-things devices. It works with Linux versions 2.4.6 and later.
Intel Blows the Coms Again
Greg K-H on Twitter — "They are now claiming you need a 5.10 kernel or newer to solve this. 5.10 will be released at the end of December 2020. Intel knows better, and knows how to do this properly, this feels malicious at this point..."
CUPS Printing System Open-Source Development Has Seemingly Dried Up — The open-source CUPS code-base is now at a stand-still. There was just one commit to the CUPS Git repository for all of 2020.
Has Apple abandoned CUPS?
LPC 2020 - Open Printing MC - YouTube
OpenPrinting News - September 2020
Antennapod 2.0 Released — AntennaPod version 2 released with a range of new features, bug fixes and improvements. Below you’ll find an extensive list of highlights, with each time the Pull Request ID.
AntennaPod
AntennaPod - Apps on Google Play
AntennaPod | F-Droid

Linux Action News 158 Oct 11, 2020

NextCloud makes some significant changes, and we share our reaction; IBM is planning to split into two, but we have some questions, and Firefox may soon display sponsored "top sites."

Plus Nvidia's Jetson Nano release and the freaky future of low-level AI, and our thoughts on Coinbase's recent news.

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Nextcloud 20 Released — Nextcloud Hub 20 debuts Dashboard, unifies search and notifications, integrates with other technologies
Nextcloud bridging chat services in Talk — This allows users to connect a Talk conversion to one or more external services, like IRC, Slack, MS Teams or more. The administrator has to have enabled this feature and users can then simply configure it from the right-hand sidebar in Talk.
IBM to split into two companies by end of 2021 — As-yet unnamed “NewCo” will handle IBM’s “managed infrastructure services.”
IBM Jettisons Legacy Services To Focus On Hybrid Cloud
As IBM spins out legacy infrastructure management biz, CEO goes all in on the cloud
IBM’s “Cloud” Business (or Lack Thereof)
Nvidia unveils $59 Nvidia Jetson Nano 2GB mini — The Jetson Nano 2GB Developer Kit, announced this week, is a single-board computer – like the Raspberry Pi
Firefox may soon display Sponsored Top Sites on the New Tab Page — A recently added bug to Mozilla's bug tracking site Bugzilla indicates that Firefox may soon display sponsored top sites on the New Tab page. The bug requests that a preference is added to Firefox to disable sponsored top sites.
1668473 - Add pref UI for disabling sponsored top sites
A follow up to Coinbase being a mission focused company
Sixty Coinbase employees take buyout offer over “no politics” rule

Linux Action News 157 Oct 04, 2020

Quite a bit from Google this week, with new products and notable changes coming for developers and users.

Plus our take on DuckDuckGo's new fight.

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Open-source devs drown in DigitalOcean's latest tsunami of pull-request spam that is Hacktoberfest — Rewarding pointless patches with free swag leads to 'DDoS' against projects
One solution — @derekapp will close them for you automatically and mark them as invalid.
Require PRs be in a repo with hacktoberfest topic and be accepted by MattIPv4
Hacktoberfest presented by DigitalOcean — We’re making Hacktoberfest opt-in only for projects – which maintainers can do simply by adding the ‘hacktoberfest’ topic to a repository.
What is Google TV and how is it different from Android TV? — Google TV is a new interface for Android TV that is powered by Google's machine learning, Google Assistant and the Google Knowledge Graph. It also reorganizes your content to help make it easier for you to find what you want to work.
The new Chromecast with Google TV won’t officially support Stadia at launch
WireGuard announces a big Android update with Android TV support — WireGuard now has a slew of announcements, with support for Android TV through their app, pre-built kernel modules for popular phones, a Kotlin rewrite of the UI, and much more.
Unofficial LineageOS 17.1 brings Android 10 to NVIDIA SHIELD TVs — The unofficial LineageOS 17.1 build for NVIDIA Shield TVs allows users to run a heavily customizable, near-stock Android 10 experience on their Android TV boxes. I
Listening to Developer Feedback to Improve Google Play — Our policies apply equally to all apps distributed on Google Play, including Google’s own apps. We use the same standards to decide which apps to promote on Google Play, whether they're third-party apps or our own apps.
Android 12 will make it easier to install app stores — Google today announced it will make it easier to install and use third-party app stores with the release of Android 12 next year.
Apple v. Epic hearing: Judge hints at July 2021 trial
Google’s Search Preference Menu Eliminates DuckDuckGo — The Q4 2020 results of Google’s search preference menu auction have been released and, as we predicted, DuckDuckGo has been eliminated in most countries.
Atari VCS Backer Units are On the Way! — This shipment includes the one-time-only, Indiegogo-exclusive Atari VCS 800 Collector’s Edition model. Inspired by and designed as an homage to the original Atari 2600, there will only be 6,000 numbered and authenticated versions of this model.
Atari VCS backers on IndieGoGo might actually get their units soon

Linux Action News 156 Sep 27, 2020

Lenovo expands its Linux lineup in a big way, with 30 Ubuntu systems. And why Microsoft Edge on Linux might be more significant than you think.

Plus, the latest Mozilla project being spun-out, and how Timescale might have a solution for a self-sustaining open-source business in the cloud era.

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Lenovo expand enterprise desktop range preinstalled with Ubuntu — Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is certified across 30 of Lenovo’s ThinkPads and ThinkStations range
The September release and EndeavourOS ARM arrived — Our ARM branch is fully based on Archlinux ARM.
EndeavourOS ARM
Microsoft’s Edge browser is arriving on Linux in beta next month — The Linux preview is part of a bigger push to get businesses on Edge
Microsoft launches Chromium Edge release candidate — Microsoft is trying to position Edge and Bing as “the browser and search engine for business.”
Microsoft Edge for Linux will Ship With These Features Missing
Linux GUI apps are coming to Windows — GUI app support is still a work in progress, but Microsoft program manager Craig Loewen shared a GIF showing what it looks like when you launch an GUI application like the Nautilus file manager or GIMP image editor using a command in a Linux terminal window.
Researchers Say Microsoft Edge's Telemetry Has the Worst Privacy of Any Major Browser — A research paper suggests the data Microsoft Edge sends to its back-end servers has a persistent hardware-based identifier which could be used to find a user's identity.
Last phase of the desktop wars?
An Important Update on Mozilla WebThings — We are writing to inform you that the WebThings project is being spun out of Mozilla as an independent open source project.
Killed by Mozilla
Firefox usage is down 85% despite Mozilla's top exec pay going up 400%
Building a self-sustaining open-source business in the cloud era — We explain why we are making these changes, what this means for users, and why we think this is necessary for the open-source industry as a whole.

Linux Action News 155 Sep 20, 2020

We try out the new GNOME "Orbis" release and chat about Microsoft's new Linux kernel patches that make it clear Windows 10 is on the path to a hybrid Windows/Linux system.

Plus, the major re-architecture work underway for Chrome OS with significant ramifications for Desktop Linux.

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Introducing GNOME 3.38: “Orbis” — GNOME 3.38 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 27896 changes, made by approximately 901 contributors.
LINUX Unplugged 370: PipeWire Progress
New GNOME versioning scheme — The next version of GNOME, due to be released in March 2021, will be GNOME 40.
GNOME Extensions Rebooted Initiative — Extensions Rebooted is a collaborative effort to address the issues around the GNOME Shell extension ecosystem.
Wiki · extensions-rebooted · GitLab
What is LaCrOS for Chromebooks and why does it matter? — Google is decoupling the Chrome browser from Chrome OS on Chromebooks. And it’s using Linux to do this.
Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes — today we are announcing the end of life for two legacy services that grew out of the Firefox Test Pilot program: Firefox Send and Firefox Notes.
Firefox for Android LAN-Based Intent Triggering — The SSDP engine in Firefox for Android (68.11.0 and below) can be tricked into triggering Android intent URIs with zero user interaction. This attack can be leveraged by attackers on the same WiFi network and manifests as applications on the target device suddenly launching, without the users' permission, and conducting activities allowed by the intent.
Mozilla rolls out Firefox 81 on Android
Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches for a 'complete virtualization stack' with Linux and Hyper-V — Linux on Azure might no longer need Windows
All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows

Linux Action News 154 Sep 13, 2020

Our hands-on review of Android 11, and our thoughts on the possible consequences of Nvidia buying Arm Holdings for $40bn.

Plus why our long-term view for Mozilla took a turn for the worse this week, and two recent enterprise wins for Desktop Linux.

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Google starts uploading the Android 11 source code to AOSP — Google has officially released the stable version of Android 11 for its range of Pixel smartphones going back to the Pixel 2.
Android 11 Update Tracker
Here are all the hidden changes in Android 11
Google announces Android 11 Go Edition with support for 2GB RAM devices
SoftBank set to sell UK’s Arm Holdings to Nvidia — SoftBank is set to sell the UK’s Arm Holdings to US chip company Nvidia for more than $40bn
Introducing the Promoted Add-ons Pilot — This pilot program, which will run between the end of September and the end of November 2020, aims to expand the number of add-ons we can review and verify as compliant with Mozilla policies,
Access Linux filesystems in Windows and WSL 2 — WSL 2 will be offering a new feature: wsl --mount. This new parameter allows a physical disk to be attached and mounted inside WSL 2,
WSL Mount Limits
Ubuntu 20.10 Adding Active Directory Support To The Installer — The "Ubiquity" installer used by the Ubuntu desktop is set to feature Active Directory (AD) integration with the upcoming Ubuntu 20.10 release.

Linux Action News 153 Sep 06, 2020

The first Thinkpads loaded with Fedora go live, but there is a lot more to the story.

Plus, the new PinePhone options coming soon, our thoughts on recent Mozilla news, lessons from the GNOME Patent Troll, and AWS Bottlerocket.

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Lenovo begins rollout of Fedora Linux on their laptops, Ubuntu systems due soon — The first model appearing with Fedora as an option is the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8. Not only has it rolled out with Fedora, it's right there on the store and you can't miss it as it shows up first, as it's also the cheapest option for this model available right now.
HP Z series on Ubuntu — HP announced the launch of its Z series of laptops and workstations certified with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the latest additions to their popular professional workstation line.
PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition — I am thrilled to announce that the next Community Edition (CE) of the PinePhone will feature Manjaro.
Pinephone will ship with Manjaro next
LineageOS 17.1 adds support for the Google Pixel 2, Pixel 3a, Pixel 4 — Over the last couple of months, the team has added support for devices like the ASUS ROG Phone II, Google Pixel 3 series, Samsung Galaxy A7 2016, Xiaomi Mi A1, Samsung Galaxy J7 2015, OnePlus One, Sony Xperia XZ2, and many more.
Mozilla rolls out Firefox 80 for Android — Along with the changes mentioned above, Firefox 80 for Android also includes a bunch of security fixes.
Update on extension support in the new Firefox for Android
Lessons from the GNOME Patent Troll Incident — The key element Rothschild like trolls require is the presumption of validity of a granted patent.
Announcing the General Availability of Bottlerocket, an open source Linux distribution built to run containers — Bottlerocket is a free and open-source Linux-based operating system meant for hosting containers.
Bottlerocket on Github
AWS unleashes a new homegrown Linux
AWS introduces Bottlerocket: A Rust language-oriented Linux for containers — There's a new security-oriented Linux for containers in town from Amazon and its name is Bottlerocket. Instead of being built almost entirely in C, it includes many components written in Rust.

Linux Action News 152 Apr 05, 2020

WireGuard officially lands in Linux. We cover a bunch of new features in Linux 5.6 and discuss the recent challenges facing LineageOS.

Plus the PinePhone UBports edition goes up for pre-order, and our reaction to Huawei joining the Open Invention Network.

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Linux kernel 5.6 release announcement — This has a bit more changes than I'd like, but they are mostly from davem's networking fixes pulls, and David feels comfy with them. And I looked over the diff, and none of it looks scary. It's just slightly more than I'd have preferred at this stage - not doesn't really seem worth delaying a release over.
The Best Features Of The Linux 5.6 Kernel
WireGuard Christened As A Modern Secure VPN Alternative
WireGuard VPN makes it to 1.0.0 — It's a good day for WireGuard users—DKMS builds will soon be behind us.
WireGuard VPN review
PinePhone UBports Community Edition Pre-orders — Today we're pleased to announce the first PinePhone 'Community Edition', which will ship with Ubuntu Touch pre-installed.
PINEPHONE – “Community Edition: UBports” - PINE Store
Ubuntu Touch Q&A 72 — We are very pleased to announce that we are now working together with German phone startup Volla. They are joining us as a sponsor and will have a place on our Advisory Board. We expect that UT will be available as a pre-installed option with the new Volla phone.
Linux phones running postmarketOS can now run (some) Android apps — “Android in a Box” solution that basically installs Android in a container in a way that lets you run Android apps as if they were native apps.
LineageOS 17.1 based on Android 10 is now officially available — The team has also decided to jump up on the subversion, going from 17.0 to 17.1
Huawei signs non-aggression patent pact with membership of Open Invention Network — Chinese giant plays nice with open source
Press Release Details - Open Invention Network
Xbox co-creator Rob Wyatt sues Atari for failing to pay him for design of VCS console — Xbox co-creator Rob Wyatt has filed a lawsuit against Atari for failing to pay him for the design work he did in creating the Atari VCS console.
Game over: Atari VCS architect quits project, claims he hasn’t been paid for six months
Atari VCS: Managing the Unexpected — We believe it would be unfair to use the balance to fulfill only a small number of Indiegogo orders, so Atari’s plan is to ship to all backers at the same time when enough VCS units and peripherals are available.

Linux Action News 151 Mar 29, 2020

Mozilla puts your money where your mouse is and partners with Scroll to launch Firefox for a Better Web. We'll explain the details, and why it might just have a shot.

Plus we try out Plasma Bigscreen, cover Telegram's really bad news, and much more.

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Try our latest Test Pilot, Firefox for a Better Web, offering privacy and faster access to great content — Today we are launching a new Test Pilot initiative called Firefox Better Web with Scroll.
Scroll partners with Firefox to build a better internet
Scroll - a better internet
Firefox Better Web with Scroll
Firefox is launching a new test pilot with Scroll to pay web publishers
Plasma Bigscreen — Plasma BigScreen is a platform intended to use on smart TVs with big remote-friendly UI controls, and Voice activation. What technology did we use for it? Plasma (of course!) and Mycroft.
Plasma Bigscreen Homepage
Google Play’s malicious app problem infects 1.7 million more devices — Apps went undetected by Google and antivirus scanners.
Google Enlists Outside Help to Clean Up Android's Malware Mess — The newly formed App Defense Alliance will try to solve a malware problem that has bedeviled the Play Store since inception.
Chrome and Chrome OS release updates resume — Today we’re sharing an update as we’re now resuming releases with an adjusted schedule
Microsoft goes into Windows lockdown for builds from May — Microsoft on Tuesday said it has decided to halt Windows preview releases in May due to health concerns arising from the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis.
Federal court judge grants temporary injunction against Telegram — Judge sides with the SEC and says that Telegram's upcoming crypto is likely a security. It's barred from distributing Grams, the currency for its TON blockchain network, until trial.

Linux Action News 150 Mar 21, 2020

Why Debian is facing one of its most critical moments yet, Microsoft and GitHub buy npm, and our thoughts on Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 "Debbie."

Plus, why "Works with Chromebook" might be great for Linux, and using your GPU to fight the Coronavirus.

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npm is joining GitHub — I’m excited to announce that GitHub has signed an agreement to acquire npm.
The npm Blog — Next Phase Montage
Microsoft's GitHub absorbs NPM into its code-hosting empire
GitHub for mobile is now available
LMDE 4 “Debbie” released! — LMDE is a Linux Mint project which stands for “Linux Mint Debian Edition”.
Debian Project Leader Elections 2020 — Jonathan Carter Sruthi Chandran Brian Gupta
Platform for Jonathan Carter
Platform for Sruthi Chandran
Works With Chromebook — You’ll begin to see the Works With Chromebook badge on certified accessories in the U.S., Canada and Japan.
Chromebooks Accessories & Chargers
Chrome OS to get native app for printing and scanning
Upcoming Chrome and Chrome OS releases — Due to adjusted work schedules at this time, we are pausing upcoming Chrome and Chrome OS releases.
PAPPL Is A New Printer Application Framework Made By The Founder Of CUPS — Michael Sweet, the lead developer of CUPS who had been at Apple for more than a decade since they acquired it, is now developing PAPPL as a printer application framework in addition to his work on the new LPrint project.
Crowdsourced supercomputing project sets sights on coronavirus — Folding@home targets COVID-19, number of volunteer ‘folders’ skyrockets
Thousands of These Computers Were Mining Cryptocurrency. Now They're Working on Coronavirus Research
Gamers... assemble. It's time to join forces with @NVIDIAGeForce and @OfficialPCMR
NVIDIA GeForce on Twitter: PC Gamers, let’s put those GPUs to work.
Firefox 74.0 Released — Firefox now provides better privacy for your web voice and video calls through support for mDNS ICE by cloaking your computer’s IP address with a random ID in certain WebRTC scenarios.

Linux Action News 149 Mar 14, 2020

Solid releases from GNOME and Firefox, bad news for custom Android ROM users, and a new container distro from Amazon.

Plus Mozilla and KaiOS team up to bring the modern web to feature phones, and the surprising way Microsoft is shipping a Linux kernel.

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Firefox 74 arrives with stricter add-on rules, TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 disabled — Starting with Firefox 74, users will need to take explicit action to install the extensions they want, and will be able to remove previously sideloaded extensions when they want to.
Introducing GNOME 3.36: “Gresik” — GNOME 3.36 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, such as new login and unlock experience, and a dedicated app for managing extensions.
GNOME 3.36 Released with New Lock Screen, Better Performance — Six months of development later and the official GNOME 3.36 release is finally here, with source code available to download from the usual places.
Announcing Bottlerocket — Bottlerocket comes with a single-step update mechanism and includes only the essential software to run containers. These properties enable customers to use container orchestrators to manage OS updates with minimal disruptions, enabling better uptime for containerized applications and lower operational cost.
Docker: Helping You and Your Development Team Build and Ship Faster — How are we going to do this? By focusing on developer experience through Docker Desktop, partnering with the ecosystem, and making Docker Hub the nexus for all the integrations, configuration, and management of the application components which constitute your apps and microservices.
VMware Announces Expanded Portfolio of Products and Services to Help Customers Modernize Applications and Infrastructure — Tanzu, first introduced at the VMworld event in August 2019, is a portfolio of products centered on K8s. Also announced was vSphere 7, newly rearchitected using Kubernetes, and optimized to run both modern container-based and traditional virtual machine-based workloads.
KaiOS Technologies and Mozilla partner to enable a healthy mobile internet for everyone — This partnership bolsters the security and performance of KaiOS-enabled smart feature phones, as well as the platform’s developer tools, security, and available functions, including better Progressive Web App and WebAssembly support.
Magisk may no longer be able to hide bootloader unlocking from apps — Users have noticed that their bootloader-unlocked devices are failing SafetyNet’s Basic Integrity check even though they used Magisk to patch the boot image. According to Magisk creator John Wu, this is because Google may have implemented hardware-level key attestation to verify that the boot image has not been tampered with.
Kernels for WSL2 will come from Windows Update — WSL2 will soon be officially available as part of Windows 10, version 2004! As we get ready for general availability, we want to share one additional change: updating how the Linux kernel inside of WSL2 is installed and serviced on your machine.

Linux Action News 148 Mar 08, 2020

Let's Encrypt is forced to revoke customer certificates, the big change coming to FreeNAS, and the trick to running Android on an iPhone.

Plus our concerns about Debian's future, and the unfixable Intel flaw announced this week.

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Let’s Encrypt discovers CAA bug, must revoke customer certificates — On Leap Day, Let's Encrypt announced that it had discovered a bug in its CAA (Certification Authority Authorization) code.
Let’s Encrypt changes course on certificate revocation — Administrators are getting a little more time to replace affected certificates.
Check code loop blunder strikes
Let's Encrypt Has Issued a Billion Certificates
2020.02.29 CAA Rechecking Bug
Revoking certain certificates on March 4
5 years of Intel CPUs and chipsets have a concerning flaw that’s unfixable — Converged Security and Management Engine flaw may jeopardize Intel's root of trust.
New AMD Side Channel Attacks Discovered, Impacts Zen Architecture
Opposite of a Platform for DPL 2020 — I hope to be DPL again some year, but 2020 is the wrong year for me and for the project. So I will not nominate myself this year, but hope to do so some future year.
DPL elections 2019, congratulations Sam Hartman! — The Debian Project Leader elections just finished and the winner is Sam Hartman!
Bits from the DPL For December 2019
systemd v245 released, with homed stuff — A small new service systemd-homed.service has been added, that may be used to securely manage home directories with built-in encryption.
FreeNAS and TrueNAS are Unifying — With the 12.0 release coming in the latter half of the year, we will not only bring more features and improvements than any release that has come before it, we will also unify both products into a single software image and name!
Facebook is shifting its Libra cryptocurrency plans — The Libra project will now support existing currencies in addition to the proposed Libra token
Jailbreak your iPhone using a rooted Android phone and checkra1n — Checkra1n gained support for Linux, making it possible to jailbreak iOS 13 devices using a Linux computer.
Install Android 10 on your Apple iPhone 7 — Project Sandcastle, allowing you to run Android on your Apple iPhone 7.

Linux Action News 147 Mar 01, 2020

Bruce Schneier puts his name behind Solid, Firefox starts to roll out DNS over HTTPS as default, and Microsoft's Linux first device ships to customers.

Plus a birthday gift to Raspberry Pi users, Collabora comes to mobile, and more.

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Collabora brings smooth editing to Android and iOS — This release fully integrates the iOS and Android apps into our Collabora Office product family.
The Story of Collabora Office for Phones
Firefox continues push to bring DNS over HTTPS by default for US users — The rollout will continue over the next few weeks to confirm no major issues are discovered as this new protocol is enabled for Firefox’s US-based users.
Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this
The Facts: Mozilla’s DNS over HTTPs
Securing Firefox with WebAssembly — RLBox, a new sandboxing technology.
Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me — I have joined a company called Inrupt that is working to bring Tim Berners-Lee's distributed data ownership model that is Solid into the mainstream.
Building a World-Class Team at Inrupt
Microsoft's Azure Sphere, its Linux-based microcontroller plus cloud service, hits general availability — Microsoft is making its Azure Sphere secure IoT service generally available after several years of testing and previews.
A birthday gift: 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 now only $35 — The fall in RAM prices over the last year has allowed us to cut the price of the 2GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 to $35.
The Raspberry Pi 4 gets a RAM upgrade

Linux Action News 146 Feb 23, 2020

Microsoft Defender for Linux is in preview, Mozilla's VPN has a secret advantage, and why the community is calling out NPM Inc.

Plus a new report about open source security, and more.

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Microsoft: Linux Defender antivirus now in public preview — We're aiming to protect the modern workplace environment across everything that it is, being Microsoft or non-Microsoft.
Microsoft Threat Protection stops attack sprawl and auto-heals enterprise
Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint now live under one App
Microsoft Works - Wikipedia
Firefox releases an Android app for its VPN service — The Firefox Private Network VPN is powered by Mullvad VPN. Mullvad VPN claims that it won’t log and monitor user data, unlike many other VPN services.
The Private Internet Access Android app is being open sourced
IVPN applications are now open source
Tom Scott video about VPNs
Android 11 Developer Preview — All the changes we found from Android 10 so far.
npm struggling to fund FOSS devs — Funding free software is 'still a very unsolved problem' says co-founder
The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science Release Census for Open Source Software Security — New analysis identifies most widely used software and uncovers critical questions for the future of securing one of the world’s greatest shared resources
The Linux Foundation identifies most important open-source software components and their problems — In its latest study, the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative discovered just how prevalent open-source components are in all software and their shared problems and vulnerabilities.
Most-used libraries revealed
The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science release census for open-source software security — Census II (run by Harvard) wanted to look at language-level packages. Their report discusses some of the challenges. One challenge of many is that the JavaScript environment strongly encourages tiny modules, with around 1/2 of all JavaScript packages having at most one function. As a result, when you start counting dependencies, there are *far* more dependencies in JavaScript (because each module does so little), and so JavaScript tends to dominate.

Linux Action News 145 Feb 16, 2020

The week was packed with major project releases, we go through each of them and tell you what stands out.

Plus an update from Essential, and NetBSD's first big ask in ten years.

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KDE Plasma 5.18 Released
KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS Released, This is What's New
MATE 1.24 released
OpenShot 2.5.0 Released — Perhaps one of the most exciting changes in OpenShot 2.5.0 is our experimental support for hardware acceleration.
OpenShot Video Editor Just Got a Massive Update
Firefox 73.0 Released — Today’s Firefox release includes two features that help users view and read website content more easily, quickly.
Firefox ESR 68.5.0 Released
Tor Browser 9.0.5 Released — This release updates Firefox to 68.5.0esr, NoScript to 11.0.13, and on desktop, Tor to 0.4.2.6. We also added a new default bridge and backported a few improvements from the alpha series.
Tails 4.3 is out
An Update from Essential — We have made the difficult decision to cease operations and shutdown Essential.
Essential, Andy Rubin’s phone company, is shutting down
Andy Rubin’s smartphone startup, Essential, is dead
After just one phone, Essential Products ends
NetBSD fundraiser — We are trying to raise $50,000 in 2020
NetBSD 9.0 Released

Linux Action News 144 Feb 09, 2020

Why we're disappointed in the CoreOS Container Linux transition, Mycroft goes troll hunting and the complicated story brewing at the GNU Project.

Plus, a few community fundraisers.

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End-of-life announcement for CoreOS Container Linux — We know this timeline is aggressive. We've tried to provide the longest possible migration period consistent with our ability to maintain the OS
Glass Enterprise Edition 2 now available for developers
Mycroft's Position on Patent Trolls — We are going to litigate every single patent suit to the fullest extent possible including appealing any adverse decisions all the way to the Supreme Court.
GNU-FSF cooperation update — Our mutual aim is to work together as peers, while minimizing change in the practical aspects of this cooperation, so we can advance in our common free software mission.
GNU-FSF cooperation update — Free Software Foundation — working together for free software
The draft GNU Social Contract — I have been working with several other GNU Maintainers and volunteers to draft a GNU Social Contract which explains the key commitments we want from the GNU Project.
GNU Social Contract DRAFT
Jean Louis - Re: A GNU “social contract”?
Proposals for the new GNU/FSF relationship
Memorial Fund for Mark Greaves, PeppermintOS CEO — This is a tribute to Mark Greaves (PCNetSpec), Husband, Father, Peppermint CEO and distributor.
AppCenter for Everyone — This campaign will fund a one-week in-person development sprint to develop and deliver on these key areas.

Linux Action News 143 Feb 02, 2020

The upcoming Linux kernels are packed full of goodies, Qt changes its licensing terms, and Thunderbird gets a new home.

Plus our thoughts on IBM's CEO stepping down, and Google's new open-source security key project.

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Qt offering changes 2020 — Moving forward, Qt Long-Term Support (LTS) releases will be restricted to commercial customers.
Use our stuff for free and sell your application? That's Qt.
Qt LTS Releases To Be Restricted To Commercial Customers
About “Qt offering changes 2020” – Fading Memories
Nikolai Marchenko's message about TheQtCompany's presumed business model
Linux 5.5 Released — So this last week was pretty quiet, and while we had a late network update with some (mainly iwl wireless) network driver and netfilter module loading fixes, David didn't think that warranted another -rc. And outside of that, it's really been very quiet indeed - there's a panfrost driver update too, but again it didn't really seem to make sense to delay the final release by another week.
10 Best Features in Linux 5.5
Some 5.5 kernel development statistics
WireGuard + Multi-Path TCP Were Merged Tonight Into Linux 5.6
Indie VPN WireGuard gets the Torvalds seal of approval with inclusion in Linux kernel 5.6
Linus Torvalds pulled WireGuard VPN into the 5.6 kernel source tree
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Adds WireGuard Support
The Time Namespace Support Has Been Added To The Linux 5.6 Kernel
Linux 5.6 Is The First Kernel For 32-Bit Systems Ready To Run Past Year 2038
USB4 Support Lands In The Linux 5.6 Kernel
Staging Changes Lighten The Linux 5.6 Kernel By More Than Thirty Thousand Lines
Thunderbird’s New Home — As of today, the Thunderbird project will be operating from a new wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, MZLA Technologies Corporation.
Mozilla's email client lands in a new nest
Ginni Rometty is out as IBM CEO — Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat — which IBM acquired last year in a $34 billion megadeal — will become IBM's president on the same day.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty to step down — Under her tenure, IBM experienced 22 consecutive quarters of sales declines that ended in 2018. In the company’s latest quarter, sales dropped 3.9% year-over-year to $18 billion.
IBM Names Arvind Krishna CEO, Replacing Ginni Rometty
OpenSK: a fully open-source security key implementation — OpenSK, an open-source implementation for security keys written in Rust that supports both FIDO U2F and FIDO2 standards.

Linux Action News 142 Jan 26, 2020

The real reason Rocket League is dropping support for Linux, Wine has a massive release, and the potential for Canonical's new Android in the cloud service.

Plus, our take on the FSF's Upcycle Windows 7 campaign, and the clever Chrome OS strategy upgrade for education in 2020.

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Rocket League will drop support for Mac, Linux versions in March | Ars Technica — Change comes eight months after Epic Games acquired the game's creators.
Update on Refunds for macOS and Linux Players
Support for macOS and Linux (SteamOS) – Psyonix Support
Psyonix are ending support for Rocket League on both Linux and macOS (updated)
Thanks to Psyonix dropping Linux support, we're getting anti-Linux statements like this from game devs again
Wine 5.0 Released — This release represents a year of development effort and over 7,400 individual changes.
Wine Is Approaching Six Million Lines
Canonical introduces Anbox Cloud — The service is designed to offload workloads from x86 or Arm-based devices to containers in the cloud.
The latest Chrome OS education devices will get updates for eight years — Previously, most Chrome OS devices recieved six years of software support.
Chromebooks will now get up to eight years of Chrome OS updates
Improving 40 million Chromebooks for education
Upcycle Windows 7 — We call on them to release it as free software, and give it to the community to study and improve.
Open Source Licenses in 2020: Trends and Predictions

Linux Action News 141 Jan 19, 2020

Nextcloud's new release is so big it gets a rebrand, why Mozilla had a round of lay-offs, and the real possibility of Steam coming to Chrome OS.

Plus, the sad loss of a community member, and more.

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Peppermint project lead Mark Greaves has passed away. — His contributions to both Peppermint and to the desktop Linux world as a whole are incalculable and he will be sorely missed.
Mozilla lays off 70 as it waits for new products to generate revenue — Mozilla has a strong line of sight to future revenue generation, but we are taking a more conservative approach to our finances.
Readying for the Future at Mozilla
DigitalOcean is laying off staff, sources say 30-50 affected
Nextcloud Hub Announced — New generation of leading content collaboration platform integrates office document editing and collaboration apps, introduces workflows, rich work spaces, file locking and more
Nextcloud 18 Changelog
Huawei pitches its alternative to Google Play Store — Huawei Mobile Services wants to make a big splash in Europe, with thousands of apps already signed up
Huawei Quick Apps is Huawei's alternative to Google Instant Apps
Exclusive: Google is working to bring official Steam support to Chrome OS — The Chrome team is working—very possibly in cooperation with Valve—to bring Steam to Chromebooks.

Linux Action News 140 Jan 12, 2020

Are we overloaded with open source licenses? We consider a simpler future. Results from the Debian init vote are in, and why Amazon's new open source project might be worth checking out.

Plus, our reaction to Google's search ballot scheme launch.

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Bruce Perens quits Open Source Initiative amid row over new data-sharing crypto license — Distributed app platform's proposed agreement 'isn't freedom respecting,' he says
Debian Developers Decide On Init System Diversity: "Proposal B" Wins — In recent months there has been lots of differing views over how much Debian should care about systemd alternatives some five years after they decided to move to systemd in the first place.
Bing loses out to DuckDuckGo in Google’s new Android search engine ballot — Google will start offering EU users a choice for their default search engine
US Government-funded Android phones come preinstalled with unremovable malware — Phones were sold to low-income people under the FCC's Lifeline Assistance program.
Google scolded for depriving the poor of privacy as Chinese malware bundled on phones for hard-up Americans
Amazon’s AutoGluon helps developers deploy deep learning models with just a few lines of code — AutoGluon democratizes machine learning, and makes the power of deep learning available to all developers.
AutoGluon: Deep Learning AutoML
AutoGluon Documentation 0.0.1 documentation — Only Linux installation is supported for now (Mac OSX and Windows versions will be available soon). AutoGluon requires Python version 3.6 or 3.7.

Linux Action News 139 Jan 05, 2020

It's our annual predictions episode. We review how we did in 2019, and then set out to predict what we think will happen in 2020.

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Linux Action News 138 Dec 29, 2019

We review the major moments of the year's news, and discuss how they impacted our world.

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Linux Action News 137 Dec 22, 2019

Canonical releases a "mini-cloud" on your workstation, the KDE ecosystem has some big news, and the smart home might have just become more open.

Plus Firefox's new DoH partner, and signs of life from the Atari VCS.

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Firefox adds 2nd DoH partner — Program Committing to Data Retention and Transparency Requirements that Respect User Privacy
Apple, Google, and Amazon are teaming up to develop an open-source smart home standard
Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance to develop connectivity standard
Ikea previews its improved 2020 smart home experience
Z-Wave is making a huge change so it doesn’t get left behind in the smart home wars - The Verge — It’s turning into a fully open standard, according to Silicon Labs.
Canonical Releases Multipass 1.0 As "A Mini-Cloud On Your Workstation" — "a mini-cloud on your workstation using native hypervisors of all the supported plaforms (Windows, macOS and Linux), it will give you an Ubuntu command line in just a click ("Open shell") or a simple multipass shell command, or even a keyboard shortcut."
Krita Receives Epic MegaGrant — Epic, the makers of the Unreal game engine, have supported Krita with a $25,000 MegaGrant
A Kubuntu-Powered Laptop Is Launching In 2020 For High-End KDE Computing — A Kubuntu laptop is launching soon that is aiming for a high-end Linux laptop experience atop the KDE flavor of Ubuntu.
KDE Launch Video & Wallpaper Competitions with Linux PCs as Prizes
Guidance for Atari VCS Content Developers — Initial procedures announced for more independent game and app developers to start creating and planning now for earning a place in the Atari VCS storefront.

Linux Action News 136 Dec 15, 2019

The first desktop Office 365 app arrives, Ubuntu commits to current and future Raspberry Pi boards, and why the near-term future of Linux gaming looks a bit rocky.

Plus, our concerns with Google's clever long-term Fuchsia strategy.

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Microsoft Teams is now available on Linux — Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available for Linux users in public preview, enabling high quality collaboration experiences for the open source community at work and in educational institutions. Users can download the native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats.
Zulip 2.1: Open source team chat — Zulip is the world’s most productive team chat software, used by thousands of teams as an alternative to Slack, HipChat, Mattermost and IRC. Zulip's unique topic-based threading combines the immediacy of chat with the asynchronous efficiency of email-style threading, and is 100% free and open source software.
Why Zulip - The best group chat
Updated images of Ubuntu for the Raspberry Pi 2, 3 and 4 — With the new images, USB ports are now fully functional out of the box on the 4GB RAM version of the Raspberry Pi 4.
Eben Upton on Twitter — Raspberry Pi numbers get stale fast. We sold our thirty-millionth unit some time last week (we think Tuesday).
Eben Upton on Twitter — The average is much closer to $35. I believe we're at pretty much exactly one billion dollars.
Google's Fuchsia to support Chrome OS tablet 'Flapjack' — Chrome OS won’t be the only operating system this device supports, as Google’s Fuchsia OS team is also looking to support the “Flapjack” tablet.
Flutter gathers pace
Twitter wants to decentralize, but decentralized social network creators don’t trust it — Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey made a theoretically huge announcement: he wanted Twitter to stop being a self-contained platform and start delivering content from a decentralized system
A decentralized Twitter would bring the company back to its past
Twitter Makes A Bet On Protocols Over Platforms
DXVK To Enter Maintenance Mode — Not because it's considered feature complete and bug-free, but because the main developer considers that DXVK has become a "fragile, unreliable and frustrating maintenance nightmare".
Feral's Lead Vulkan Developer Leaves The Company For Sony
NVIDIA Looks To Have Some Sort Of Open-Source Driver Announcement For 2020 — Start looking forward to March when NVIDIA looks to have some sort of open-source driver initiative to announce -- likely contributing more to Nouveau

Linux Action News 135 Dec 08, 2019

Ubuntu Pro is a click away, and their kernel goes rolling on AWS. We process the range of announcements, while Mozilla cranks up the security and impresses us with DeepSpeech.

Plus why Ubuntu is taking the Windows Subsystem for Linux so seriously.

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Canonical announces Ubuntu Pro for Amazon Web Services — New premium Ubuntu images with extended security, kernel live patching and more
Introducing the Ubuntu AWS Rolling Kernel
Canonical Announces "Ubuntu Pro" For AWS
Canonical makes Ubuntu for Windows SubSystem for Linux a priority
Amazon Announces Graviton2 SoC Along With New 64-Core Arm Instances — The new Graviton2 SoC is a custom design by Amazon’s own in-house silicon design teams and is a successor to the first-generation Graviton chip. The new chip quadruples the core count from 16 cores to 64.
Graviton pulse - Memory Alpha
AWS Goes All In On Arm-Based Graviton2 Processors
Firefox 71 Released — Native MP3 decoding on Windows, Linux, and macOS
Firefox 71 Linux Performance Isn't Looking All That Great
Firefox Private Network Beta
Firefox VPN Sign Up
Mozilla launches the next phase of its Firefox Private Network VPN beta
Avast Online Security and Avast Secure Browser are spying on you
Mozilla updates DeepSpeech with an English language model that runs 'faster than real time'

Linux Action News 134 Dec 01, 2019

We share Mozilla's concerns over Contract for the Web, and try out Kali Linux's new tricks.

Also, our thoughts on the new Alexa Voice service coming to low-end IoT devices, and much more.

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Contract for the Web officially launched — Inventor of web calls on governments and firms to safeguard it from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity
Tim Berners-Lee launches Google and Facebook-backed plan to fix the web
Mozilla and the Contract for the Web
State of Mozilla 2018: Annual Report — This report details how Mozilla operates and includes details from our financial reports for 2018.
Mozilla: Be Smart. Shop Safe. — How creepy is that smart speaker, that fitness tracker, those wireless headphones? We created this guide to help you shop for safe, secure connected products.
Minimum Security Guidelines Explained — These three organizations proposed five minimum guidelines that companies making connected devices should reasonably be expected to satisfy.
Introducing Alexa Voice Service Integration for AWS IoT Core, a cost-effective Alexa Voice on any type of connected device — VS for AWS IoT enables Alexa Built-in functionality on MCUs like ARM Cortex ‘M’ class with <1MB embedded RAM by offloading memory and compute tasks to a virtual Alexa Built-in device in the cloud
Kali Linux 2019.4 released with Xfce by default — We are incredibly excited to announce our fourth and final release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.4, which is available immediately for download.

Linux Action News 133 Nov 24, 2019

Google, Mozilla, and GitLab make serious upgrades to their bug bounty programs, insights into Debian's renewed systemd debate, and how Microsoft and IBM are working together to fight patent trolls.

Plus our thoughts on LVFS for Chromebooks, and the recent Monero hack.

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Updates to the Mozilla Web Security Bounty Program — To celebrate the 15 years of the 1.0 release of Firefox, we are making significant enhancements to the web bug bounty program.
GitLab: We are increasing bounties in our bug bounty program — Since we opened our bug bounty program to the public in December 2018, our community of external security researchers submitted 1,282 reports and we paid out $515,899 in bounties.
Expanding the Android Security Rewards Program
Google will pay $1.5 million for the most severe Android exploits
Google and fwupd sitting in a tree
Google To Require "Designed For Chromebook" Devices Support Fwupd Firmware Updates
Debian init systems - what, another GR ? — Sam Hartman, the Debian Project Leader, has proposed a General Resolution (a plebiscite of the whole project) about init systems. In this posting I am going to try to summarise the situation. This will necessarily be a personal view but I will try to be fair. Also, sorry that it's so long but there is a lot of ground to cover.
General Resolution: Init systems and systemd
Open Invention Network Teams with IBM, Linux Foundation and Microsoft to Further Protect Open Source from Patent Trolls — Open Invention Network announced today it is partnering with IBM, the Linux Foundation and Microsoft to further protect open source software (OSS) from Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) leveraging low quality patents, also called patent trolls.
IBM, Microsoft and Linux Foundation link arms to fight patent trolls with 'multimillion' scheme
Official Monero website is hacked to deliver currency-stealing malware — GetMonero.org delivers Linux and Windows binaries that steal users' funds.

Linux Action News 132 Nov 17, 2019

Docker's surprising news, new nasty Intel vulnerabilities, and why Brave 1.0 changes the game.

Plus, our thoughts on the PinePhone BraveHeart limited edition, and Stadia's potentially rocky launch.

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Mirantis acquires Docker Enterprise — Mirantis, a prominent OpenStack and Kubernetes cloud company, has acquired Docker Enterprise product line, developers, and business.
What We Announced Today and Why it Matters
Docker’s Next Chapter: Advancing Developer Workflows for Modern Apps
Docker Restructures and Secures $35 Million
Container upstart's enterprise wing sold to Mirantis, CEO out, Swarm support faces ax
IPAS: NOVEMBER 2019 INTEL PLATFORM UPDATE (IPU) — “67 of the 77 vulnerabilities we are addressing were internally found by Intel”
MDS Attacks: Microarchitectural Data Sampling
Intel Fixes a Security Flaw It Said Was Repaired 6 Months Ago
Intel Failed to Fix a Hackable Chip Flaw Despite a Year of Warnings
PINEPHONE – “BraveHeart” Limited Edition Linux SmartPhone For Early Adaptor — The “BraveHeart” Limited Edition PinePhones are aimed solely for developer and early adopter. More specifically, only intend for these units to find their way into the hands of users with extensive Linux experience and an interest in Linux-on-phone.
Brave browser comes out of beta — The Brave open source browser fundamentally shifts how users, publishers, and advertisers interact online by giving users a private, safer, and 3-6x faster browsing experience, while funding the Web through a new attention-based platform of privacy-preserving advertisements and rewards.
Installing Brave on Linux
Google Stadia will be missing many features for Monday’s launch — Among the missing: 4K on PC, Achievement UI, Google Assistant, Family Sharing
The world is waiting for Google Stadia to flop
Microsoft’s xCloud preview now has 50 new games
Choose Linux 22: Finding Your Community — We talk about the best ways to get involved in open source communities, finding like-minded people, conference strategies, community hubs, and what happened to all the LUGs.

Linux Action News 131 Nov 10, 2019

Google steps up support for older Chromebooks, Microsoft Edge is coming to Linux, and the App Defense Alliance teams up to fight Android malware.

Plus Google Cardboard goes open source, and a neat machine-learning tool to pull songs apart.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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Google gives most Chromebooks an extra year of software support — Seven Chromebooks from Lenovo recently had their support lifespan extended, and now Google has updated the EOL date for 135 more models from several manufacturers. Most models received another year of support, others only got another six months, and some now have two more years.
What’s new in Chrome OS: Virtual Desks, simpler printing and more — Think of Virtual Desks as separate workspaces within your Chromebook. Use this feature to create helpful boundaries between projects or activities. If you’re working on multiple projects, you can dedicate a desk to each one. Open Overview and tap New Desk in the top right-hand corner of your screen to try out Virtual Desks.
Google Enlists Outside Help to Clean Up Android's Malware Mess — Today Google is announcing a partnership with three antivirus firms—ESET, Lookout, and Zimperium—to create an App Defense Alliance.
Open sourcing Google Cardboard — Today, we’re releasing the Cardboard open source project to let the developer community continue to build Cardboard experiences and add support to their apps for an ever increasing diversity of smartphone screen resolutions and configurations.
Access ESM, now free to the community, via the updated Ubuntu Advantage client — Canonical is happy to announce that all community users are entitled to a free Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure account for access to Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) and Kernel Livepatch* for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) for up to three machines, and up to 50 machines for all official Ubuntu Members.
Releasing Spleeter: Deezer Research source separation engine — We are releasing Spleeter to help the research community in Music Information Retrieval (MIR) leverage the power of a state-of-the-art source separation algorithm. It comes in the form of a Python Library based on Tensorflow, with pretrained models for 2, 4 and 5 stems separation.
Microsoft Will Release Their Edge Web Browser For Linux — Microsoft announced at their Ignite conference in Seattle that their Edge web-browser will see a Linux release

Linux Action News 130 Nov 03, 2019

Fedora arrives from the future, the big players line up behind KernelCI, and researchers claim significant vulnerabilities in Horde.

Plus, Google's new dashboard for WordPress and ProtonMail's apps go open source.

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Fedora 31 is officially here! — This release features GNOME 3.34, which brings significant performance enhancements which will be especially noticeable on lower-powered hardware. Fedora Server brings the latest in cutting-edge open source server software to systems administrators in an easy-to-deploy fashion.
Fedora 31 Performance Is Still Sliding In The Wrong Direction
Distributed Linux Testing Platform KernelCI Secures Funding and Long-Term Sustainability — "Testing is traditionally done only on the most common hardware. But because Linux runs on more hardware than any other operating system, it's important to also test it on all that hardware. The Linux Foundation's support is enabling us to expand the great work we started five years ago and sets us up for a bright future with a growing community,"
Hackers can steal the contents of Horde webmail inboxes with one click — Horde is one of the most popular free and open-source web email systems available. It’s built and maintained by a core team of developers, with contributions from the wider open-source community. It’s used by universities, libraries and many web hosting providers as the default email client.
Horde Webmail - XSS + CSRF to SQLi, RCE, Stealing Emails <= v5.2.22 — Horde Webmail - XSS + CSRF to SQLi, RCE, Stealing Emails <= v5.2.22
ProtonMail iOS app is open source - ProtonMail Blog — As part of our commitment to security, we are putting all of our software through rigorous, independent third-party audits.
Android App Soon
Site Kit is now available for all WordPress sites — Site Kit is Google’s official WordPress plugin

Linux Action News 129 Oct 27, 2019

GNOME decides to fight, Ubuntu's desktop director steps down, GitLab backs off its telemetry plans, and we've got the data on Google's Project Treble.

Plus, the latest Firefox has a new dashboard, and it looks like Disney+ won't work on Linux.

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GNOME files defense against patent troll — Agreeing to this would leave this patent live, and allow this to be used as a weapon against countless others. We will stand firm against this baseless attack, not just for GNOME and Shotwell, but for all free and open source software projects.
Will Cooke, the Director of Engineering for the Ubuntu desktop, has left Canonical — That's all folks! Eoan was my last #Ubuntu release and I am handing over the reigns to the ever awesome @m_wimpress. Expect 20.04 LTS to be amazingly amazing! Excited for my new gig @InfluxDB
Latest Firefox Brings Privacy Protections Front and Center Letting You Track the Trackers — Today we’re introducing a new feature that offers you a free report outlining the number of third-party and social media trackers blocked automatically by the Firefox browser with Enhanced Tracking Protection.
GitLab telemetry debacle — To make GitLab better faster, we need more data on how users are using GitLab.
Announcing $268 million in Series E funding
Google shows just how much Project Treble has improved OS Android adoption — Project Treble modularizes Android to make it easier for OEMs to update devices.
It looks like Disney Plus won’t work on Linux — Disney+ streaming uses draconian DRM, avoid

Linux Action News 128 Oct 20, 2019

A new Ubuntu has promise, Linux on Dex is dead, and our strong reaction to Google pulling two open-source apps from the Play Store.

Plus a big boost for ARM on Linux, and our thoughts on recent Red Hat news.

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Ubuntu 19.10 Released — Ubuntu 19.10 “Eoan Ermine” boasts an upgraded Linux kernel along with faster boot times, updated themes, and experimental ZFS file system support. Whether or not you upgrade, Ermine shows what to expect from Ubuntu’s next LTS release, due April 2020.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Codenamed The Focal Fossa, Arriving On 23 April
Canonical Pulled In $99M While Still Operating At A Loss
Ubuntu 19.10 Flavours Released
Ubuntu 19.10's Kernel Ships With A DoS / Arbitrary Code Execution Bug In The IPv6 Code
TechSNAP 414: Rooting for ZFS
IBM Misses Estimates as Red Hat Fails to Offset Declines — Red Hat included in results for first time since 2018 purchase.
Samsung ends Linux on DeX beta with Android 10 — Samsung will no longer provide support on future OS and device releases. The company also notes that users will not be able to perform a version rollback to Android 9 Pie once they have upgraded to Android 10.
Bare Metal Arm-Based EC2 Instances — Just like for existing bare metal instances (M5, M5d, R5, R5d, z1d, and so forth), your operating system runs directly on the underlying hardware with direct access to the processor.
Graboid: First-Ever Cryptojacking Worm Found in Images on Docker Hub — Unit 42 researchers identified a new cryptojacking worm we’ve named Graboid that’s spread to more than 2,000 unsecured Docker hosts.
Docker Containers Riddled with Graboid Crypto-Worm
andOTP removed from Google Play Store — andOTP was recently removed from the Google Play Store for violating their payment terms. This is most likely due to the fact that we offer in-app donation links that DO NOT use Googles In-App billing, which is against their terms.
andOTP - Android OTP Authenticator
WireGuard removed from Google Play Store — They said it was because we're in violation of their "Payments Policy", presumably because we have a link inside the app that opens the user's web browser to wireguard.com/donations/.
WireGuard commit reversed dev comments interesting
WireGuard - Apps on Google Play
WireGuard Restored In Android's Google Play Store

Linux Action News 127 Oct 13, 2019

Richard Stallman's GNU leadership is challenged by an influential group of maintainers, SUSE drops OpenStack "for the customer," and Google claims Stadia will be faster than a gaming PC.

Plus OpenLibra aims to save us from Facebook but already has a miss, lousy news for Telegram, and enormous changes for AMP.

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FSF and GNU — GNU decision-making has largely been in the hands of GNU leadership. Since RMS resigned as president of the FSF, but not as head of GNU ("Chief GNUisance"), the FSF is now working with GNU leadership on a shared understanding of the relationship for the future.
Joint statement on the GNU Project — Yet, we must also acknowledge that Stallman’s behavior over the years has undermined a core value of the GNU project: the empowerment of all computer users. GNU is not fulfilling its mission when the behavior of its leader alienates a large part of those we want to reach out to.
No radical changes in GNU Project — As Chief GNUisance, I'd like to reassure the community that there won't be any radical changes in the GNU Project's goals, principles and policies.
SUSE is dropping OpenStack and embracing Kubernetes — As we make these bold customer-driven investments and in order to maximize these opportunities, SUSE has carefully reviewed its business and has decided to cease production of new versions of SUSE OpenStack Cloud and to discontinue sales of SUSE OpenStack Cloud.
AMP is joining the OpenJS Foundation incubation program — After considering many options for a foundation that meets all of AMP’s needs, the OpenJS Foundation stood out as an ideal home for AMP.
Google Stadia will be “faster and more responsive” than local gaming hardware — Thanks to some precog trickery, Google believes its streaming system will be faster than the gaming systems of the near-future, no matter how powerful they may become.
Atari VCS architect quits project, claims he hasn’t been paid for six months — Retro console a mess, may never launch, sources allege
Atari disputes reports that its retro-inspired console is doomed
Open Libra — An open platform for financial inclusion. Not run by Facebook.
'Members' of OpenLibra Disavow Project Days After Its Devcon Unveiling
Facebook’s Libra Association crumbling

Linux Action News 126 Oct 06, 2019

Microsoft's CEO says Windows doesn't matter anymore, but do we buy it? Nextcloud 17 goes enterprise-grade and the Internet’s horrifying new method for installing Google apps on Huawei phones.

Plus, Google finds an Android zero-day in the wild, and the Document Collective's new approach to earn revenue for LibreOffice.

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Nextcloud 17 brings remote wipe, collaborative text editor — This release brings major new improvements, especially around security and team collaboration.
Starting The Document Collective — In particular, selling branded versions of LibreOffice in the macOS and Windows app stores has not been something that TDF could tackle. The TDF board of directors is looking to change that with the creation of a new entity, The Document Collective (TDC)
The Internet’s horrifying new method for installing Google apps on Huawei phones — Just make a Chinese website your device's remote administrator. It'll be fine!
Google finds serious Android zero-day — Vulnerability was patched in older Android OS versions, but resurfaced in newer releases.
Affecting devices from Samsung, Huawei, and Google itself
Microsoft doesn’t think Windows is important anymore — “The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us,” was the message from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella yesterday.
Microsoft Graph
Jupiter Extras: Reverse Proxy Basics

Linux Action News 125 Sep 29, 2019

CentOS Stream and 8 have quite a bit for us to talk about, Docker's struggles go public, and the GNOME Foundation is facing a patent fight.

Plus the best bit of Android 10 Go, Microsoft gives serious thought to bringing Edge to Linux, and Stallman's role at GNU comes into question.

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CentOS 8 Released — Hello and welcome to the first CentOS-8 release. The CentOS Linux distribution is a stable, predictable, manageable and reproducible platform derived from the sources of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
Presenting CentOS Stream — CentOS Stream will be a rolling-release Linux distro that exists as a midstream between the upstream development in Fedora Linux and the downstream development for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It is a cleared-path to contributing into future minor releases of RHEL while interacting with Red Hat and other open source developers. This pairs nicely with the existing contribution path in Fedora for future major releases of RHEL.`
Transforming the development experience within CentOS
Fedora and CentOS Stream — There’s not really been a consistent flow between the projects and product at all.
Docker is struggling financially — Docker CEO Rob Bearden sent an email to employees this week acknowledging challenges as the company tries to raise money.
GNOME Foundation facing lawsuit — The GNOME Foundation has been made aware of a lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC over patent 9,936,086. Rothschild allege that Shotwell, a free and open source personal photo manager infringes this patent.
Donate to GNOME
QR Code Patent Troll Sues Dickey’s Barbecue
Google announces Android 10 (Go edition) — Android 10 (Go edition) includes a new form of encryption, built by Google for entry-level smartphones, called Adiantum.
Gallery Go by Google Photos - Apps on Google Play
Android: Try OTA updates without committing — That’s why they unveiled Dynamic System Updates (DSU) in Android 10 to let developers try a barebones version of a new OS update without unlocking the bootloader or wiping data.
Sean Larkin on Twitter — "🚨🔥We on the @MSEdgeDev team are fleshing out requirements to bring Edge to Linux, and we need your help w/ some assumptions!🚨🔥 If you're a dev who depends on Linux for dev, testing, personal browsing, _please_take a second to fill out this survey! 📝 https://t.co/PCerGONmCG" / Twitter
Stallman intends to keep leading GNU — I am still the head of the GNU Project (the Chief GNUisance), and I intend to continue as such.
Stallman changes his mind and quits GNU leadership role? — I hereby step down as head of the GNU Project, effective immediately.
Richard Stallman Reportedly Steps Down As Head Of The GNU Project

Linux Action News 124 Sep 22, 2019

Richard Stallman resigns, we share our thoughts and discuss the future for RMS and the FSF.

Plus what systemd-homed is, why Debian is reconsidering init diversity, and some good news for CentOS.

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Richard Stallman resigns from the FSF
Richard Stallman resigns from MIT — I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT. I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.
A reflection on the departure of RMS - Thomas Bushnell — By my reckoning, I worked for RMS longer than any other programmer.
LINUX Unplugged 319: Positive in the Freedom Dimension
Debian reconsiders init diversity — In some ways dropping Elogind is a bigger decision. If we ever want to try something different than Systemd, we'll need something like Elogind.
Debian May Need To Re-Evaluate Its Interest In "Init System Diversity"
systemd-homed: systemd Now Working To Improve Home Directory Handling — Among the goals are allowing more easily migratable home directories, ensuring all data for users is self-contained to the home directories, UID assignments being handled to the local system, unified user password and encryption key handling, better data encryption handling in general, and other modernization efforts.
Lennart's Video: Reinventing Home Directories
Huawei confirms the new Mate 30 Pro won’t come with Google’s Android apps — Richard Yu, the CEO of Huawei’s consumer products division, revealed onstage at a press event in Germany this morning that the company has been forced to drop Google’s Mobile Services (GMS) license on the Mate 30 series of devices.
Huawei clarifies it has "no plans" to unlock the bootloader — Huawei has “no plans” to unlock the bootloader on Mate 30 series devices.
Oracle announces Oracle Autonomous Linux — Oracle Autonomous Linux provisions itself, scales itself, tunes itself and patches itself while running.
CentOS Linux 7 (1908) released — This release supersedes all previously released content for CentOS Linux 7

Linux Action News 123 Sep 15, 2019

Speed is the big story around GNOME 3.34, two new major Firefox security features start to roll out, and we explain the CentOS 8 delay.

Plus our thoughts on the PineTime, and more.

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GNOME 3.34 Released — Version 3.34 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance improvements and new features.
GNOME 3.34 Released with "Drastically Improved" Responsiveness
GNOME Firmware 3.34.0 Release — With the new fwupd 1.3.1 you can now build just the libfwupd library, which makes it easy to build GNOME Firmware (old name: gnome-firmware-updater) in Flathub
Please welcome Acer to the LVFS — Acer has now officialy joined the LVFS, promoting the Aspire A315 firmware to stable.
Firefox’s Test Pilot Program Returns with Firefox Private Network Beta — It originally started as an Add-on before we relaunched it three years ago. Then in January, we announced that we were evolving our culture of experimentation, and as a result we closed the Test Pilot program to give us time to further explore what was next.
Mozilla to gradually enable DNS-over-HTTPS later this month — Mozilla plans to enable support for the DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) protocol by default inside the Firefox browser for a small number of US users starting later this month.
Google Unveils DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) Plan
Wherefore Art Thou CentOS 8? — Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 was released on May 7th, 2019.
PineTime on Twitter — "This is the #PineTime (actual photo) - a #Linux smartphone companion and a side-project of ours. Are you a @real_FreeRTOS or @ArmMbed developer with an interest in smartwatches? - let us know. https://t.co/j7ygDWNqbD" / Twitter

Linux Action News 122 Sep 08, 2019

Android 10 has a lot we like while the PinePhone is real and closer than we thought.

Plus Red Hat's new desktop strategy, and what we think Mozilla is getting right.

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Welcoming Android 10! — Today we're releasing the Android 10 source code to Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and making it available to the broader ecosystem. We’re also starting the official Android 10 rollout to all three generations of Pixel devices worldwide.
Google Releases Android 10 With "Vulkan Everywhere", Privacy Improvements
The Verge Android 10 Review
Android 10 adds warnings for USB port contamination and overheating
The PinePhone is real & shipping soon — I am hereby happy to announce that the first PinePhones have now entered production and will start shipping to developers this month.
Firefox 69 released — As of today, Enhanced Tracking Protection will be turned on by default
Tor Blog: Browser Fingerprinting - An Introduction and the Challenges Ahead
Introducing Red Hat CodeReady Containers — CodeReady Containers brings a minimal, preconfigured OpenShift 4.1 or newer cluster to your local laptop or desktop computer for development and testing purposes.

Linux Action News 121 Sep 01, 2019

Microsoft continues to prove how much it loves Linux while Google tries to eat their lunch, mixed news from Mozilla, and good stuff from GNOME.

Plus Telegram's cryptocurrency is definitely happening. Honest.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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exFAT in the Linux kernel? Yes! — It’s important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence. To this end, we will be making Microsoft’s technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate development of conformant, interoperable implementations. We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network’s Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN’s 3040+ members and licensees.
The Initial exFAT Driver Queued For Introduction With The Linux 5.4 Kernel — Greg lived up to his talk and today committed the exFAT driver to staging-next. This nearly eleven thousand lines of new code did get the sign-off of Microsoft and with it being in the "-next" branch will be set for inclusion into the Linux 5.4 mainline code-base once Linux 5.3 is released.
Chris Beard to step down as Mozilla CEO — This is a good place to recruit our next CEO and for me to take a meaningful break and recharge before considering what’s next for me. It may be a cliché — but I’ll embrace it — as I’m also looking forward to spending more time with my family after a particularly intense but gratifying tour of duty.
Thunderbird 68 released — Thunderbird version 68.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as upgrade from Thunderbird version 60 or earlier. A future version 68.1 will provide updates from earlier versions. Note that add-ons are only supported if add-on authors have adapted them.
What’s New in Thunderbird 68 — Thunderbird 68 focuses on polish and setting the stage for future releases. There was a lot of work that we had to do below the surface that has made Thunderbird more future-proof and has made it a solid base to continue to build upon. But we also managed to create some great features you can touch today.
Chrome OS gets first Chromebook Enterprise devices, faster Admin Console, and managed Linux environments — Google today announced a slew of Chrome Enterprise updates, including a faster Google Admin console and managed Linux environments. The company also unveiled the first Chromebook Enterprise laptops: Dell’s Latitude 5300 for $819 and Latitude 5400 for $699.
GNOME Firmware Updater — A few months ago, Dell asked if I’d like to co-mentor an intern over the summer. The task was to create a GTK “power user” application for managing firmware. The idea being that someone like Dell support could ask the user to run a little application and then read back firmware versions or downgrade to an older firmware version rather than getting them to use the command line.
GNOME Foundation launches Coding Education Challenge — The GNOME Foundation, with support from Endless, has announced the Coding Education Challenge, a competition aimed to attract projects that offer educators and students new and innovative ideas to teach coding with free and open source software. The $500,000 in funding will support the prizes, which will be awarded to the teams who advance through the three stages of the competition.
Telegram will launch its Gram cryptocurrency by October 31 or bust — Telegram’s cryptocurrency— the Gram — may be going public after all. The encrypted messaging app company plans to deliver “the first batches” of the coin in the next two months, according to a report at The New York Times.

Linux Action News 120 Aug 25, 2019

More tools to keep your Linux box and cloud servers secure this week, OpenPOWER responds to Risc-V competition, and we ponder the year-long open-source supply chain attacks.

Plus our reaction to Android dropping dessert names, the Confidential Computing consortium, and more.

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Today, 28 years ago Linus Torvalds announced Linux on comp.os.minix. — I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
System76 announce new firmware updater — We’ve been working on the Firmware Manager project, which we will be shipping to all Pop!_OS users, and System76 hardware customers on other Debian-based distributions. It supports checking and updating firmware from LVFS and system76-firmware services, is Wayland-compatible, and provides both a GTK application and library.
The Next Step in the OpenPOWER Foundation Journey — The OpenPOWER Foundation will now join projects and organizations like OpenBMC, CHIPS Alliance, OpenHPC and so many others within the Linux Foundation.
IBM is moving OpenPower Foundation to The Linux Foundation
Confidential Computing Consortium — Confidential computing focuses on securing data in use. Current approaches to securing data often address data at rest (storage) and in transit (network)but encrypting data in use is possibly the most challenging step to providing a fully encrypted lifecycle for sensitive data.
Confidential Computing Consortium Takes Shape
The year-long rash of supply chain attacks against open source is getting worse — Backdoors snuck into 12 OSS packages were downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
Android to drop dessert names — So, this next release of Android will simply use the version number and be called Android 10. We think this change helps make release names simpler and more intuitive for our global community. And while there were many tempting “Q” desserts out there, we think that at version 10 and 2.5 billion active devices, it was time to make this change.

Linux Action News 119 Aug 16, 2019

We go hands-on with the big Xfce release that took four years and five months to develop. Kubernetes gets an audit that might just set a precedent, and Google has a new feature for AMP that has us all worked up.

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Xfce 4.14 released — After 4 years and 5 months of work, we are pleased to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.14, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.12.
Xubuntu Daily
Open Sourcing the Kubernetes Security Audit — The group created an open request for proposals, taking responsibility for evaluating the submitted proposals and recommending the vendor best suited to complete a security assessment against Kubernetes, bearing in mind the high complexity and wide scope of the project.
wg-security-audit at master · kubernetes/community · GitHub
Someone audited the Kubernetes source
Server-side rendering for AMP — AMP now officially supports a technique called server-side rendering (SSR) which you can apply to your AMP pages to make them load even faster. Our tests show increases of up to a whopping 50% on the popular FCP metric.
OSdisc.com Has Closed — In just the past couple days, a very popular Linux OS supply site has closed.

Linux Action News 118 Aug 09, 2019

Ubuntu integrates ZFS even further, NVIDIA starts publishing GPU documentation, and Harmony OS makes its debut.

Plus why you might actually want to use the new Dex, significant performance gains for a beloved project, and more.

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NVIDIA Starts Publishing GPU Hardware Documentation To Help Open-Source Drivers — NVIDIA is releasing more GPU hardware documentation at long last.
GitHub - NVIDIA/open-gpu-doc
Enhancing our ZFS support on Ubuntu 19.10 — We are going to enhance ZFS on root support in the coming cycles. Ubuntu 19.10 is a first-round towards that goal. We want to support ZFS on root as an experimental installer option, initially for desktop, but keeping the layout extensible for server later on.
Big performance improvements for LibreOffice — The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.3, a feature-rich major release of the LibreOffice 6 family with better performance, a large number of new and improved features, and enhanced interoperability with proprietary document formats:
You might actually want to use the new DeX on the Galaxy Note 10 — Among the many new updates and features coming with the Galaxy Note 10 and Note 10 Plus is a revamped take on DeX, Samsung’s desktop-like software that is powered by the phone.
Huawei officially reveals Harmony OS — Harmony OS is microkernel-based, like Google’s in-development Fuchsia OS.
Linux Journal Ceases Publication — On August 7, 2019, Linux Journal shut its doors for good. All staff were laid off and the company is left with no operating funds to continue in any capacity.
Linux Format - Print or Digital

Linux Action News 117 Aug 04, 2019

Manjaro's news starts us off and leads us into a bigger philosophical question about open source development.

Plus Gnome and KDE come together at the Linux App Summit, Mozilla's update on DNS-over-HTTPS, and the case for the VR desktop.

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Manjaro to ship FreeOffice by default — We will ship FreeOffice by default. This is possible since we partnered up with Softmaker. Enjoy the best compatibility to MS Office.
Manjaro backtracks — Manjaro will not be installing FreeOffice by default.
GNOME and KDE to co-host the Linux App Summit in November — The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. are proud to announce Linux App Summit 2019. The Linux App Summit will be held in Barcelona from November 12th to 15th, 2019.
An update on Android for search providers in Europe — Next year, we'll introduce a new way for Android users to select a search provider to power a search box on their home screen and as the default in Chrome (if installed).
Google will use a first-price sealed-bid auction
DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) Update — We want to understand how often users of Firefox are subject to these network configurations.
Contract for the Web is becoming a reality — Berners-Lee has called it many things since he announced it at the 2018 Web Summit: a contract, a “magna carta” and a Bill of Rights.
Browser vendors win war with W3C over HTML and DOM standards
Solid
Moving the Linux desktop to another reality — Today, we are very excited to announce a new open source project which enables interaction with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR.

Linux Action News 116 Jul 28, 2019

Fedora CoreOS is introduced and its future looks bright, VLC's president debunks security claims, Mozilla debuts an open-source router firmware and the Android flaw that might be our favorite in years.

Plus how Sailfish OS 3.1 is stepping things up, the first 16-core RISC-V chip is revealed, and more.

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Introducing Fedora CoreOS — A new Fedora edition built specifically for running containerized workloads securely and at scale.
VLC developer debunks reports of ‘critical security issue’ — Widespread reports of a ‘critical security issue’ that supposedly impacted users of VLC media player have been debunked as “completely bogus” by developers.
Android Phones Open to ‘Spearphone’ Eavesdropping — A Spearphone attacker can use the accelerometer in LG and Samsung phones to remotely eavesdrop on any audio that’s played on speakerphone, including calls, music and voice assistant responses.
Sailfish OS 3.1 released — Redesigns to core apps such as People, Phone, Messages and Clock. Other areas that have been improved include; Document viewers, Email, Calendar, Dual SIM Card viewer information and Gallery gestures which have been improved.
Mozilla debuts implementation of open source router firmware — Experimental builds of WebThings Gateway 0.9 are available on GitHub for the Turris Omnia router, with expanded support for routers and developer boards to come down the line.
Alibaba Reveals 16-core RISC-V Chip — Alibaba Group’s chip subsidiary, Pingtouge Semiconductor, this week announced what it claims is the most powerful RISC-V based processor

Linux Action News 115 Jul 21, 2019

We're pleasantly surprised by a new Linux distro, EvilGnome malware spies on Gnome Shell users, and more good news for MacBook Linux users.

Plus why RetroArch coming to Steam is a bit controversial, ubuntu-wsl is a cold drink for Windows users, and gpodder needs a new maintainer.

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EndeavourOS first stable release — We’re proud to present you our very first stable release of EndeavourOS.
RetroArch coming to Steam — But will this "completely free" release run afoul of Steam Community Guidelines?
Introducing ubuntu-wsl — “A collection of utilities for WSL” to let you create shortcuts on the Windows desktop with wslusc, start the default Windows browser with wslview, and do a few other things.
WSL - Ubuntu Wiki
EvilGnome: Rare Malware Spying on Desktop Users — We have named the implant EvilGnome, for its disguise as a Gnome extension. The malware is currently fully undetected across all major security solutions. EvilGnome is a rare type of malware due to its appetite for Linux desktop users.
Macbook keyboard and trackpad support coming to Linux 5.3 — Linux up to now hasn't had mainline support for the keyboard and trackpad on recent years of MacBooks: from MacBook8,1 or later or MacBookPro13 and MacBookPro14 models. These IDs roughly correlate to the MacBook systems since the end of 2015.
Maintainer for gpodder.net needed — Some effort is required to keep a website or web service running and up-to-date. I (the current maintainer) have enough time to keep the system up and running for now, but no time to do any improvements and other development.

Linux Action News 114 Jul 12, 2019

Another project breach raises significant questions, Fedora considers dropping Snaps in Gnome Software, and has the ISPA let Mozilla off the hook?

Plus Microsoft makes it into linux-distros, the Raspberry Pi 4 charger issue, and more.

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Server breach at Pale Moon project goes undetected for 18 months — Server breach at Pale Moon browser project goes undetected for 18 months.
Data breach post-mortem
Firefox addons outage post mortem — Sorry this took so long to get out; we’d hoped to have this out within a week, but obviously that didn’t happen. There was just a lot more digging to do than we expected. In any case, we’re now ready to share the results.
ISPA withdraws Mozilla Internet Villain Nomination and Category — In the 21 years the event has been running it is probably fair to say that no other nomination has generated such strong opinion.
Firefox 68 Released
Microsoft admitted to linux-distros list — I see no valid reasons not to subscribe Microsoft (or part(s) of it, see below) to linux-distros. The only voiced reasons not to, such as in Georgi Guninski's posting and in comments on some technology news sites that covered Microsoft's request, are irrelevant per our currently specified membership criteria.
On Microsoft request to access private linux bugs
Raspberry Pi 4 USB-C issues confirmed — The Pi's co-creator Eben Upton says that not every USB-C cable will power the Pi.
IBM Red Hat deal closes — IBM and Red Hat announced today that they have closed the transaction under which IBM acquired all of the issued and outstanding common shares of Red Hat for $190.00 per share in cash, representing a total equity value of approximately $34 billion.
Mathew Miller's comments
Fedora to drop snap plugin in gnome-software — In Fedora 31 I'll be disabling the snap plugin from GNOME Software.
Drop snap support (!253) · Merge Requests · GNOME
Canonical’s Robert Ancell calls the merge request “premature”
Remove GsAuth support. (!255) · Merge Requests — This used to be used in the Snap and Ubuntu Reviews plugins, but is now no longer required. The remaining usage in the Snap plugin is not a common case on desktop and not necessary to support anymore.

Linux Action News 113 Jul 07, 2019

We try out Debian 10 Buster and cover what's new. There is a fresh Linux distro for Chromebooks that is very appealing, and the ISPA calls Mozilla a villain.

Plus why Fucshia OS might be the most significant future threat to Linux.

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Debian 10 Buster released — We're happy to announce the release of Debian 10, codenamed buster.
Debian 10 buster release details
Debian and code names
GalliumOS 3.0 released — GalliumOS can be installed in place of ChromeOS, or in a dual-boot configuration alongside ChromeOS.
You Can Finally Read/Write To The SSDs On Newer Macs — This out-of-tree patch is against the current Linux 5.1 kernel and the write support should be considered particularly experimental, so be aware before trying to use this on a drive with any sensitive data.
Mozilla teases $5-per-month ad-free news subscription — Mozilla has started teasing an ad-free news subscription service, which, for $5 per month, would offer ad-free browsing, audio readouts, and cross-platform syncing of news articles from a number of websites.
Scroll
ISPA calls Mozilla a villain — The Internet Services Providers’ Association is pleased to announce the finalists for the 2019 Internet Hero and Villain.
ISPA doubles down
How to enable DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) in Firefox
Mozilla response in the register
No plans to enable DNS-over-HTTPS by default in the UK
Fuchsia gets a website — A couple of days ago and without fanfare Google went live with Fuchsia.dev, a developer site for its new operating system, currently called the Fuchsia Project.
Dr. Xu Zhongxing's speech: Fuchsia OS Introduction Complete Record and Slide Download — The world needs a new operating system. Linux only cares about the world of servers, like a boiler worker who specializes in working in a boiler room below the deck. In order to make up for the shortcomings of Linux, Android has a thick middle layer and is constantly making compromises.

Linux Action News 112 Jun 30, 2019

We've got the new Raspberry Pi 4 and share our thoughts, why Microsoft applied to join the linux-distros mailing list, and Ubuntu's 32-bit future is clarified.

Plus Mozilla's big plans Firefox on Android, and the future of Steam on Linux.

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Raspberry Pi 4 Released — Raspberry Pi 4 is now on sale, starting at $35. This is a comprehensive upgrade, touching almost every element of the platform. For the first time we provide a PC-like level of performance for most users, while retaining the interfacing capabilities and hackability of the classic Raspberry Pi line.
New version of Raspbian — We are actually releasing it slightly in advance of the official Debian release date. The reason for this is that one of the important new features of Raspberry Pi 4
Slightly faster than Stretch version
No USB boot yet
Reinventing Firefox for Android — Today we’re very happy to announce a pilot of our new browser for Android devices that is available to early adopters for testing as of now.
Firefox to get a random password generator
Microsoft applies to join linux-distros mailing list — Windows giant cheered on by Linux Foundation as it seeks membership of private security-focused message board.
Register's Coverage
Introducing people.kernel.org — Ever since the demise of Google+, many developers have expressed a desire to have a service that would provide a way to create and manage content in a format that would be more rich and easier to access than email messages sent to LKML.
Statement on 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS — We will put in place a community process to determine which 32-bit packages are needed to support legacy software, and can add to that list post-release if we miss something that is needed.

Linux Action News 111 Jun 23, 2019

Ubuntu sets the Internet on fire, new Linux and FreeBSD vulnerabilities raise concern, while Mattermost raises $50M to compete with Slack.

Plus we react to Facebook's Libra confirmation and the end of Google tablets.

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Ubuntu to drop i386 architecture — he Ubuntu engineering team has reviewed the facts before us and concluded that we should not continue to carry i386 forward as an architecture. Consequently, i386 will not be included as an architecture for the 19.10 release, and we will shortly begin the process of disabling it for the eoan series across Ubuntu infrastructure.
Proposal: Let's drop i386 May 9th 2018
Proposal: Let's drop i386 May 14th 2018
Wine devs worried — "I think not building packages for Ubuntu 19.10 would be the only practical option. It would probably be good to have a small explanation on the download page though. As I understand it, it would still be possible to run 32-bit executables on the Ubuntu 19.10 kernel, but we'd have to build and ship all our dependencies ourselves. I don't think we want to go there just yet."
At least some games not working without 32-bit — Further to the recent announcement and subsequent discussion, I did a little testing over lunch on eoan 19.10 with all i386 packages removed and the i386 part of the repo disabled.
Ubuntu NOT “dropping support for i386 applications” — What we are dropping is updates to the i386 libraries, which will be frozen at the 18.04 LTS versions. But there is every intention to ensure that there is a clear story for how i386 applications (including games) can be run on versions of Ubuntu later than 19.10.
Petition · Dont remove 32 bit support in the next version of Ubuntu
Test and run multiple instances of snaps
OpenMandriva also dropping 32-bit
New vulnerabilities may let hackers remotely SACK Linux and FreeBSD systems — Netflix researchers discovered 4 flaws that could wreak havoc in data centers.
Linux devices vulnerable to ping of death attack
Red Hat's take on TCP SACK PANIC
Mattermost raises $50M — The capital infusion follows a $20 million series A in February and a $3.5 million seed round in February 2017 and brings the Palo Alto, California-based company’s total raised to roughly $70 million.
Google says it’s done making tablets — The Pixel Slate won’t get a sequel, but the Pixelbook will
Facebook's Libra confirmed — Facebook is planning to launch a cryptocurrency it hopes will “transform the global economy.”

Linux Action News 110 Jun 16, 2019

Elders in the community show us how to properly build services, Huawei is reportedly working on a Sailfish OS fork and Apple joins the Cloud Native club.

Plus Facebook wants you to use their cryptocurrency, and CERN launches "The Microsoft Alternatives project".

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Mozilla says paid subscription service is coming to Firefox — The goal for Mozilla is to develop “diverse sources of revenue” so that it isn’t so heavily reliant on money it receives from search companies that pay to be featured in the browser.
New Firefox branding — The “Firefox” you’ve always known as a browser is stretching to cover a family of products and services united by putting you and your privacy first.
Apple joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the home of open-source projects like Kubernetes, today announced that Apple is joining as a top-level Platinum End User Member.
MAlt project — The Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) started a year ago to mitigate anticipated software license fee increases.
Huawei's struggle in the US has led to it cancel a new MateBook — Huawei CEO Richard Yu has confirmed an indefinite hold on the release of a new MateBook laptop.
Huawei may use Sailfish OS-based Aurora — Aurora OS is a Russian-made mobile operating system based on the open-source Sailfish OS Linux distribution developed by Finnish company Jolla.
Huawei's operating system in pipeline on 1 million phones? — In a smartphone supply chain report that Huawei has allegedly shipped 1 million smartphones with its self-developed "HongMeng" operating system onboard for testing.
Facebook’s cryptocurrency to debut next week backed by Visa, Mastercard, and others — Each will invest around $10 million to fund the development of the currency and will become part of the Libra Association, an independent consortium that will govern the digital coin independently of Facebook.

Linux Action News 109 Jun 09, 2019

Mozilla's master strategy becomes clear, CockroachDB surrenders to the software as a service reality, while Microsoft and Oracle link up.

Plus Google argues that keeping Huawei on their Android is better for all, and Chris gets sucked into Stadia.

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Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default — At Firefox, we’re doing more than that. We believe that in order to truly protect people, we need to establish a new standard that puts people’s privacy first.
Relicensing CockroachDB — But our past outlook on the right business model relied on a crucial norm in the OSS world: that companies could build a business around a strong open source core product without a much larger technology platform company coming along and offering the same product as a service. That norm no longer holds.
Microsoft and Oracle link up their clouds — Microsoft and Oracle announced a new alliance today that will see the two companies directly connect their clouds over a direct network connection so that their users can then move workloads and data seamlessly between the two.
Google is fighting to keep doing business with Huawei — Three sources told the Financial Times that Google's argument is that cutting ties with Huawei could pose a national security risk.
Stadia details announced — Stadia games run on custom Linux-based server hardware maintained by Google, promising "10.7 teraflops of power in each instance." Game audio and video is streamed from those servers to a user's device, and inputs are streamed from the user to the server over a network of what Google says are "7,500 edge nodes" around the world.

Linux Action News 108 Jun 02, 2019

Frankenstein Linux malware and a Docker bug that's blown out of proportion get our attention this week.

As well as the new GParted release, the Unity Editor for Linux and the Browser vendors struggle with the W3C's latest twist.

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HiddenWasp Linux malware — Fully developed HiddenWasp gives attackers full control of infected machines.
Docker Bug Allows Root Access to Host File System — The weakness is the result of a race condition in the Docker software and while there’s a fix in the works, it has not yet been integrated.
Contain yourself, Docker: Race-condition bug puts host machines at risk... sometimes
GParted 1.0 Released — This release of GParted includes a significant undertaking to migrate the code base from gtkmm2 to gtkmm3 (our GTK3 port).
GParted 1.0 Milestone After Almost 15 Years
Announcing the Unity Editor for Linux — A growing number of developers using the experimental version, combined with the increasing demand of Unity users in the Film and Automotive, Transportation, and Manufacturing (ATM) industries means that we now plan to officially support the Unity Editor for Linux.
Don't Be Famous: Securing a Kubernetes Cluster Study Group - YouTube

Linux Action News 107 May 26, 2019

Firefox has a new speed trick, openSUSE Leap has a time-traveling kernel while the project plans for the future, and we react to Antergros coming to an end.

Plus the ghost of Firefox OS lives on in the well-financed KaiOS, GitHub launches sponsors, and obvious uses for the new Google Glass 2.

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Latest Firefox Release is Faster than Ever — We applied many of the same principles of time management just like you might prioritize your own urgent needs.
Firefox 67 - Dark Mode CSS, WebRender, and more
Smooth video playback with AV1 decoder
It's not all beer and skittles for Firefox 67
openSUSE Leap 15.1 released — The release of Leap 15.1 improves YaST functionality and the installer.
openSUSE considers governance options — The relationship between SUSE and the openSUSE community is currently under discussion as the community considers different options for how it wants to be organized and governed in the future.
Antergos Linux Project Ends — We came to this decision because we believe that continuing to neglect the project would be a huge disservice to the community. Taking this action now, while the project’s code still works, provides an opportunity for interested developers to take what they find useful and start their own projects.
Endeavour, Antergos community's next stage — We are proud to announce our project, code name Endeavour! This is going to be a distro with you, the community in mind.
Manjaro claim >1M downloads so far this year
Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 drops to $999 — Google is today ready to officially unveil Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2, a followup with a faster processor, improved camera, and new Smith Optics frames.
KaiOS raises $50M, hits 100M handsets — The funding takes the total raised by KaiOS — which has now shipped 100 million devices across 100 countries — to $72 million.
Announcing GitHub Sponsors — We’re thrilled to announce the beta of GitHub Sponsors, a new way to financially support the developers who build the open source software you use every day.

Linux Action News 106 May 19, 2019

ZombieLoad's impact on Linux, AMP to start hiding Google from the URL, and the huge Linux switch underway.

Plus the impact of Google suspending business with Huawei, the recent ChromeOS feature silently dropped, and more.

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ZombieLoad Attack — After Meltdown, Spectre, and Foreshadow, we discovered more critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. The ZombieLoad attack allows stealing sensitive data and keys while the computer accesses them.
Understanding the MDS vulnerability: What it is, why it works and how to mitigate it
Understanding Microarchitectural Data Sampling (aka MDS, ZombieLoad, RIDL & Fallout) from Red Hat - YouTube
AMD Immune to Crippling MDS Vulnerabilities
AMP to start hiding google from the URL — Signed-Exchange is something which can help you show your own domain in AMP page URLs, with all the AMP-Cache capabilities intact.
A report from the AMP Advisory Committee Meeting
Dual booting Windows on Chromebooks dead — Project Campfire turned up in the Chromium world this past August.
Microsoft open-sources a crucial algorithm behind its Bing Search services — Microsoft today announced that it has open-sourced a key piece of what makes its Bing search services able to quickly return search results to its users
Microsoft AI lab experiments
South Korean government planning Linux migration as Windows 7 support ends — The Herald quotes the Interior Ministry as indicating that the transition to Linux, and the purchase of new PCs, would cost about 780 billion won ($655 million), but also anticipates long-term cost reductions with the adoption of Linux. The report doesn't mention a specific distro, instead "hopes to avoid building reliance on a single operating system."
Windows dual booting no longer looking likely on Pixelbooks
Google suspends business with Huawei — “Huawei will only be able to use the public version of Android and will not be able to get access to proprietary apps and services from Google,” the source said.
Command Line Threat Hunting Video

Linux Action News 105 May 12, 2019

RHEL 8 is released, we report from the ground of the big announcement, Microsoft announces WSL 2 with a real Linux kernel at the core, and details on their new open source terminal.

Plus Alpine Linux Docker images shipped for 3 years with root accounts unlocked, and Google's new attempt to send updates directly to your phone.

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RHEL 8 released — Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is the operating system redesigned for the hybrid cloud era and built to support the workloads and operations that stretch from enterprise datacenters to multiple public clouds.
Considerations in adopting RHEL 8
IBM's Red Hat acquisition moves forward — The Department of Justice has approved IBM's acquisition of Red Hat.
WSL 2 using LTS source from Kernel.org
Canonical announces support for Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2
WSL 2 deep dive - YouTube
All new Chromebooks will run Linux apps — Google has announced that all new Chromebook devices will be Linux ready.
Project Mainline is Google’s new attempt to send security updates directly to your phone — Google will start delivering some Android security updates through the Play Store
Alpine Linux Docker Images Shipped for 3 Years with Root Accounts Unlocked — This vulnerability appears to be the result of a regression introduced in December of 2015.
Alpine Linux's response to CVE-2019-5021
Gartner says 90% of blockchain supply chain initiatives will go nowhere — Research firm Gartner is unimpressed.
The Friday Stream

Linux Action News 104 May 05, 2019

Fedora 30 is out, we share our thoughts. Purism's new Librem One service is launched, we're rather skeptical and the reason might surprise you.

Plus the massive Firefox blunder, Canonical's new service, and a report from DockerCon.

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Fedora 30 Released — Fedora Workstation features GNOME 3.32 — the latest release of this popular desktop environment.
Purism launches Librem One — Librem One is a subscription service, using open standards and free software, and it is available for $7.99/mo, or $71.91/yr for the four services.
Librem One Affected By Nasty Security Bug On Launch Day
Todd attempts to save face — By putting services under a centralized brand, we make these decentralized services just as convenient to use as the big tech alternatives.
Firefox addon cert blunder — Late on Friday May 3rd, we became aware of an issue with Firefox that prevented existing and new add-ons from running or being installed.
Canonical consolidates open infrastructure support — Canonical today announced Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure, a consolidated enterprise security, compliance and support offering that covers the full range of open source infrastructure capabilities for up to 10 years.
Plans and pricing - Ubuntu Advantage Infrastructure
Ubuntu and Dell launch developer survey — Give us your feedback and help shape the Ubuntu desktop.
Docker introduces Docker Enterprise 3.0 with desktop integration, launches Docker Applications — 451 Research anticipates the app container industry will be worth more than $4.3 billion by 2022, and the competition is fierce.
Amazon Managed Blockchain hits general availability — Amazon told businesses that they “can quickly set up a blockchain network spanning multiple AWS accounts with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console,” doing away with what it describes as the typical cost and difficulty of creating a company network.
Microsoft launches a fully managed blockchain service
Facebook working on cryptocurrency-based payments platform

Linux Action News 103 Apr 28, 2019

Docker Hub gets hacked, Nextcloud 16 has a new feature to prevent hacks, and France's 'Secure" Telegram replacement gets hacked within an hour.

Plus who is spending $30m a month on AWS? Docker on ARM, and some LinuxFest Northwest thoughts.

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Docker Hub hack exposed data of 190,000 users — Docker Hub usernames, hashed passwords, GitHub and Bitbucket access tokens exposed in the hack.
Docker developers can now build Arm containers on their desktops — The main idea here is to make it easy for Docker developers to build their applications for the Arm platform right from their x86 desktops and then deploy them to the cloud (including the Arm-based AWS EC2 A1 instances), edge and IoT devices.
Neoverse N1 – Arm
Rancher looks to rope in Kubernetes users with new OS distro — It hasn’t been that long since Rancher announced k3s, a Kubernetes distribution for resource constrained environments. Just two months on, the project now gets its own operating system – k3OS.
Rancher Labs combined Linux with Kubernetes in new OS platform
Apple spends upwards of $30m a month on AWS — According to US media reports, Apple is spending upwards of $30m a month on procuring cloud services from Amazon Web Services
Nextcloud 16 introduces machine learning based security and usability features — Suspicious Login Detection uses a locally trained neural network to detect attempts to login by malicious actors.
France's 'Secure' Telegram Replacement Hacked in an Hour — The French government said that it still plans to require its use in lieu of WhatsApp and Telegram, for any informal communications between government employees, agencies and some handpicked non-governmental organizations.

Linux Action News 102 Apr 21, 2019

Ubuntu 19.04 is released we share our take, OpenSSH has an important release, and Mozilla brings Python to the browser.

Also WebThings is launched and we think it might have a shot.

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Ubuntu 19.04 'Disco Dingo' Released — Improved performance is what defines the ‘Disco Dingo’
Open infrastructure, developers and IoT are 19.04's focus — Ubuntu 19.04 integrates recent innovations from key open infrastructure projects – like OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Ceph – with advanced life-cycle management for multi-cloud and on-prem operations – from bare metal, VMware and OpenStack to every major public cloud.
Ubuntu 19.04 Flavours Available to Download
Introducing Mozilla WebThings — Project Things is graduating from its early experimental phase and from now on will be known as Mozilla WebThings.
WebThings Documentation
Pyodide — Pyodide is an experimental project from Mozilla to create a full Python data science stack that runs entirely in the browser.
OpenSSH 8.0 released — This release contains mitigation for a weakness in the scp(1) tool and protocol (CVE-2019-6111).
Presenting search app and browser options to Android users in Europe — Following the changes we made to comply with the European Commission's ruling last year, we’ll start presenting new screens to Android users in Europe with an option to download search apps and browsers.

Linux Action News 101 Apr 14, 2019

Google's important news this week, why Linux is fueling PowerShell Growth, and the Matrix breach that might be worse than it sounds.

Plus more good work by Mozilla, and the Chinese crackdown on Bitcoin mining.

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The 6 most important announcements from Google Cloud Next 2019 — Anthos is the new name of the Google Cloud Services Platform, Google’s managed service for allowing enterprises to run applications in their private data center and in Google’s cloud.
PowerShell growth fueled by Linux use — PowerShell Core usage has grown significantly in the last two years. In particular, the bulk of our growth has come from Linux usage
Teaching machines to triage Firefox bugs
Mozilla still on track to enable DNS-over-HTTPS by default in Firefox
Protections Against Fingerprinting and Cryptocurrency Mining Available in Firefox Nightly and Beta
Matrix suffers security breach — An attacker gained access to the servers hosting Matrix.org. The intruder had access to the production databases, potentially giving them access to unencrypted message data, password hashes and access tokens.
Archive of deleted GitHub Issues lodged by the hacker
Chinese government proposes ban on bitcoin mining — A Chinese ban on cryptocurrency mining would be a huge deal for the global bitcoin community.

Linux Action News 100 Apr 07, 2019

Chef goes 100% open source, and this recipe has an old twist, plus the real cost of abandoning the VMware lawsuit.

A new way to run Android apps on Linux using Wayland, Sailfish and Mer merge, and more.

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Chef goes 100% open source — “In the open core model, you’re saying that the value is in this proprietary sliver. The part you pay me for is this sliver of its value. And I think that’s incorrect,” he said. “I think, in fact, the value was always in the totality of the product.”
Chef’s Different Recipe
Linux developer abandons VMware lawsuit — For over 10 years, VMware was accused of illegally using Linux code in its VMware ESX bare-metal virtual machine hypervisor. After a German court dismissed the case, the Linux programmer behind the lawsuit has called it a day.
Court not happy case was initiated for ideological reasons — Since Hellwig's complaint was evidently motivated by idealistic motives - as the judge himself noted at the trial.
Conservancy statement
New way to run Android apps on Linux — It's now possible to run Android applications in the same graphical environment as regular Wayland Linux applications with full 3D acceleration.
Sailfish and Mer merging — Mer has served it’s purpose and can retire.
UBports Foundation finally created — We are very proud and excited to announce that we are about to be granted the status of an official foundation.
EU launches blockchain association — The International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) grew out of months of forums and roundtables held by the commission to create a strategy around the emerging technology.

Linux Action News 99 Mar 31, 2019

Mozilla’s new Android app, Google wants you to adopt AMP for Email, and our reaction to LVFS joining the Linux Foundation.

Plus Debian's generous gift, Red Hat crosses the $3B mark, and the Open Source Awards are nigh!

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Firefox Lockbox comes to Android — Today, we are excited to bring Firefox Lockbox to Android users, a secure app that keeps people’s passwords with them wherever they go.
AMP for email launched — Google today officially launched AMP for Email, its effort to turn emails from static documents into dynamic, web page-like experiences
Register with Google to send dynamic emails
Ubuntu 19.04 Beta is Now Available
Ubuntu MATE 18.04 Beta 1 for Raspberry Pi
Ubuntu Studio to Remain Officially Recognized Ubuntu Flavour — The release of Ubuntu Studio 19.04 will remain on-course. Beta is scheduled for March 28th, Release Candidate for April 11th, and Final Release scheduled for April 18th.
Red Hat crosses $3B revenue mark — Red Hat recorded revenue of US$2.9 billion for the last fiscal year which ended in February 2018.
LVFS joins Linux Foundation — The Linux Foundation welcomes the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) as a new project.
Handshake donates $300,000 USD to Debian — This significant financial contribution will help Debian to continue the hardware replacement plan designed by the Debian System Administrators, renewing servers and other hardware components and thus making the development and community infrastructure of the Project more reliable.
UK Open Source Awards 2019 — The Awards Event will be The Informatics Forum of the University of Edinburgh and will take place on Wednesday 12 June 2019.

Linux Action News 98 Mar 24, 2019

Is Linux gaming really being saved by Google's Stadia platform? We discuss the details and possibilities.

Plus good news for KDE Connect users, Intel begins work on next-generation open source video drivers, and much more.

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Google launches game streaming service called Stadia — Google CEO: "We're building a game platform for everyone."
Killed by Google - The Google Graveyard & Cemetery
How OpenXR could glue virtual reality’s fragmenting market together — “OpenXR since the beginning has had a lot of positive energy and urgency," Trevett continued. “I think people kind of realize everyone can benefit. Obviously it's not going to be magic, but I think it can make a difference, because everyone wins."
Intel Xe Graphics Being Part Of The First US Exascale Supercomputer Is Great For Linux — With Aurora expected to run Linux, this means the Linux driver support for Xe Graphics will have to be up to par by 2021.
Albert Vaca Cintora on Twitter — "KDE Connect has been removed from @GooglePlay for violating their new policy on apps that access SMS [1]. The policy has an explicit exception for companion apps (like KDE Connect), but it was removed anyway and *there's no way to talk to Google*."
Albert Vaca Cintora on Twitter — "To close this thread, I want to say that KDE Connect finally got approved, and SMS support is back in version 1.12.4, both on the Play Store and F-Droid! Thanks everyone who spread the voice (this thread got half a million impressions on Twitter!) and helped make it happen :D… https://t.co/OTLY5KJdI6"
Android Developers Blog: Providing a safe and secure experience for our users
Google forced into Android browser choice — Now we’ll also do more to ensure that Android phone owners know about the wide choice of browsers and search engines available to download to their phones. This will involve asking users of existing and new Android devices in Europe which browser and search apps they would like to use.
Antitrust: Commission fines Google €1.49 billion — Antitrust: Commission fines Google €1.49 billion for abusive practices in online advertising
EC fines Google €1.49bn for abusing ad market dominance
Google now pays more in EU fines than it does in taxes

Linux Action News 97 Mar 17, 2019

We try out the latest GNOME 3.32 release, and why it might be the best release ever. New leader candidates for Debian emerge, we experience foundation inception, and NGINX is getting acquired.

Plus Android Q gets an official Desktop Mode, the story behind the new Open Distro for Elasticsearch, and more!

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GNOME 3.32 Released — Version 3.32 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements, performance improvements and new features.
Leaderless Debian — What would happen if Debian were to hold an election and no candidates stepped forward? The Debian project has just found itself in that situation and is trying to figure out what will happen next.
Debian project leader candidates emerge
Foundations galore — The merger is supported by 30 corporate and end user members including Google, Microsoft, IBM, PayPal, GoDaddy, and Joyent.
New Red Team Project — The Linux Foundation has launched the Red Team Project, which incubates open source cybersecurity tools to support cyber range automation, containerized pentesting utilities, binary risk quantification, and standards validation and advancement.
CommunityBridge — The Linux Foundation today announced CommunityBridge – a new platform created to empower open source developers – and the individuals and organizations who support them – to advance sustainability, security, and diversity in open source technology.
Funded by Github
Understanding LF's New “Community Bridge” - Conservancy Blog
NGINX to be acquired — I’m incredibly excited that today we announced NGINX has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by F5.
Open Distro for Elasticsearch — We have therefore decided to partner with others such as Expedia Group and Netflix to create a new open source distribution of Elasticsearch named “Open Distro for Elasticsearch.”
Jeff Barr – Open Distro for Elasticsearch
Android finally getting desktop mode — The AOSP Launcher has a new component that, when launched, brings up a new Android desktop interface.
Here are the new Android Q features

Linux Action News 96 Mar 10, 2019

Free Software does what commercial can't this week, getting a Debian desktop on more Android devices gets closer, and PureOS promises Convergence but is there more beneath the surface?

Plus Microsoft open sources Windows Calculator, and a quick recap of SCaLE 17x.

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Ubuntu Touch OTA-8 Released — OTA-8 is primarily a stability improvement release as we continue to work on using upstream technologies in Ubuntu Touch, increasing our project output.
PureOS convergence — Purism’s PureOS showcasing adaptive convergent design
Announcing Maru 0.6 Okinawa — In Maru 0.6 Okinawa, the game completely changes, laying the foundation to run Maru on nearly any Android device.
Android app devs to get new monetisation method — Google Play is excited to announce rewarded products, a new product type now available in open beta in the Play Console.
Google Glass’ second-gen enterprise model leaks — Google’s not-quite-there vision of the future is getting a second enterprise model
Microsoft open-sources Windows Calculator — Today, we’re excited to announce that we are open sourcing Windows Calculator on GitHub under the MIT License.
calc.exe is now open source

Linux Action News 95 Mar 03, 2019

We sift Mobile World Congress to find just the best and most relevant stories, and discuss the Thunderclap vulnerability.

Plus we say goodbye to Koroa, find a reason to checkout GRUB nightlies, and how Android aims to kill passwords for good.

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LineageOS 16.0 released — We feel that the 16.0 branch has reached feature parity with 15.1 and is ready for initial release. With 16.0 being the most recent and most actively-developed branch, on March 1st, 2019 it will begin receiving builds nightly and 15.1 will be moved to weekly builds.
XDA Coverage of LineageOS 16.0
KaiOS now with 85M feature phones shipped — With 85 million phones now shipped in more than 100 markets with handset brands like Nokia and India’s Jio, KaiOS now has an expanded partnership to put more Google
KaiOS is doing well in US too
RISC-V Support Added To The GRUB Bootloader — As working towards this year's GRUB 2.04 update, we've known they have been on the finishing stretch for merging RISC-V support and as of this morning that milestone has been crossed.
RISC-V Support in the FreeRTOS Kernel
Bringing energy efficiency to IoT architecture
The Challenge Of RISC-V Compliance
Thunderclap and Linux — The authors built a "fake" network card2 and performed various DMA attacks and were able to temper with memory regions that their network card should have no access to whatsoever.
[announce] Struck by a Thunderbolt
[official site] Thunderclap
RIP Korora — "Our @kororaproject website has been redirected to @fedora as we do not have any new releases coming. Thank you for your support over the last 13 odd years."
We saw this coming

Linux Action News 94 Feb 24, 2019

Linus pops another hype bubble, we go hands on with the new OnionShare, and some insights into Redis labs changing its license... Again.

And why KDE joining the Matrix, along with others might be establishing a new open source standard.

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KDE is adding Matrix to its instant messaging infrastructure — KDE is adopting non-proprietary and decentralized instant messaging services and is now running its own community-managed instance of Matrix.
Matrix the basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger app
Interview with Matthew Hodgson: Matrix in the French State
New Release: OnionShare 2 — OnionShare is an open source tool for securely and anonymously sending and receiving files using Tor onion services.
Redis Labs changes its open-source license — again — “Some cloud providers have repeatedly taken advantage of successful opensource projects, without significant contributions to their communities.”
Arm unveils new Neoverse chips for data centers — Arm claims that the design provides as much as 2.5 times more processing power for certain server workloads than the previous Cortex-A72 architecture.
GCC 9 Compiler Support For The Arm Neoverse N1 + E1
Linus' doubts
Intel Confirms Apple Macs Will Switch to Arm CPUs by 2020, Says Report
Wine Developers Release Hangover Alpha — Hangover 0.4 is the first (alpha) release from this project for running x86/x86_64 Windows programs now on 64-bit ARM Linux distributions.
Linux Academy - Full Stack Ruby on Rails Developer (Remote)

Linux Action News 93 Feb 17, 2019

Google scrambles to repurpose Android Things, Microsoft wants to protect your Linux install really bad, and the first bank backed Crypto-coin makes a splash.

Plus Void Linux issues a warning, running Linux on ARM laptops built for Windows, and more.

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Google refocuses Android Things as a ‘platform for OEM partners’ — When Google announced Android Things at its 2015 I/O developer conference, it pitched it as a versatile, embedded, and open operating system designed to run on low-power and memory-constrained internet of things (IoT) devices with support for Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, and the Weave protocol.
Android Developers Blog: An Update on Android Things
Now you can run Linux on (some) ARM laptops designed for Windows 10 on ARM — The folks behind the AArch64 Laptops open source project on github have come up with a way to install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on some of the first Windows 10 on ARM laptops.
aarch64-laptops
Microsoft Developer: You Still Should Have Anti-Virus With Windows Subsystem For Linux — In CPU/system benchmarks we routinely see Windows 10 WSL with Ubuntu and other distributions performing very well, but when it comes to disk reads/writes, it's drastically slower than bare metal Linux installs and in some cases much slower still than dedicated virtual machines.
What’s new for WSL in Windows 10 version 1903? – Windows Command Line Tools For Developers — The next Windows update is coming soon and we’re bringing exciting new updates to WSL with it. These include accessing the Linux file system from Windows, and improvements to how you manage and configure your distros in the command line.
Red Hat Satellite to standardize on PostgreSQL backend — We are going to consolidate and use a single database, PostgreSQL. We began investigating a move to a single database upstream in Pulp as early as 2016.
[Pulp-dev] Transition from Mongo to Postgre — MongoDB is great at what it does and a good fit for some use cases, but we learned that it's not the best fit for Pulp.
(Red Hat dropped MongoDB in January)
Digitalocean launches Managed Databases for PostgreSQL — Starting with support for PostgreSQL, Managed Databases enables developers of all skill levels to quickly and easily spin up a high-performance database cluster that is worry-free and scalable
Void Linux loses control of .eu domain — We would like to warn people of a domain name that is no longer under Void Linux control. voidlinux.eu lapsed in its original registration, and was purchased by an unknown 3rd party before Void Linux could regain ownership.
J.P. Morgan Creates Digital Coin for Payments — J.P. Morgan this month became the first U.S. bank to create and successfully test a digital coin representing a fiat currency. The JPM Coin is based on blockchain-based technology enabling the instantaneous transfer of payments between institutional accounts.
JPMorgan is creating a cryptocurrency pegged to the dollar — The new cryptocurrency will be built atop JPMorgan's Quorum blockchain technology, a variant of Ethereum that has been modified to serve the needs of a major financial institution like JPMorgan.
Don’t Call JP Morgan Chase’s New ‘JPM Coin’ a Cryptocurrency

Linux Action News 92 Feb 10, 2019

A week of nasty security flaws, and a lack of patches... For some of us. Raspberry Pi opens a physical store, our thoughts on the new LibreOffice interface, and the new round of nasty flaws hitting all versions of Android.

Plus new disk encryption coming to Linux, Intel releases their open source encoder for future video on the web, and more.

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Raspberry Pi opens IRL store — The store is located on the first floor in the Grand Arcade in the centre of Cambridge, UK.
Security bug fixed in LibreOffice but not OpenOffice — Austrian researcher Alex Inführ publicly reported the vulnerability on Friday
LibreOffice 6.2 has a new UI — LibreOffice 6.2 with NotebookBar, a significant major release of the free office suite which features a radical new approach to the user interface
Android PNG vulnerability — A maliciously crafted PNG image could execute code smuggled within the file, if an application views it.
Adiantum: encryption for the low end — Low-end devices bound for developing countries, such as those running the Android Go edition, lack encryption support because the hardware doesn't provide any cryptographic acceleration.
Google Adiantum announcement
Intel Releases Open Source Encoder for Next-Gen AV1 Codec — SVT-AV1 requires Skylake-generation or newer Xeon processors with at least 112 threads and at least 48GB of RAM for 10-bit 4K video encoding.
The AV1 Video Codec - YouTube Talk — This talk will discuss the road from specification to production, the current state of AV1 deployment, and our own efforts to write an AV1 encoder in Rust, rav1e. It is intended for a technical audience, but does not require previous signal processing experience.

Linux Action News 91 Feb 03, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

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!

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Linux Action News 85 Dec 23, 2018

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

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

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

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.

Linux Action News 81 Nov 25, 2018

The Fuchsia bomb ticks closer, Valve's Steam Link end of life shocks us, and Amazon's new, rather obvious feature.

Plus the surprise use for Red Hat Enterprise, and an update on the Linux powered Atari VCS.

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Huawei testing Fuchsia on the Honor Play — A new commit in the Fuchsia source code has revealed that Huawei has managed to boot the Zircon kernel on the Honor Play.
Steam Link box discontinued — According to Valve, the inventory of Steam Links has fully depleted, meaning this one’s apparently gone for good.
Atari VCS update — Mostly unfiltered excerpts of some of Rob Wyatt’s internal notes to the Atari VCS team over the past several months of development that reveal some of the story around the origins of the Atari VCS Operating System.
Predictive Scaling for EC2, Powered by Machine Learning — Today we are making Auto Scaling even more powerful with the addition of predictive scaling. Using data collected from your actual EC2 usage and further informed by billions of data points drawn from our own observations, we use well-trained Machine Learning models to predict your expected traffic (and EC2 usage) including daily and weekly patterns.
Free continuous delivery service for open-source developers — “It’s free for the open-source community. So it’s an open source only offering. There’s no paid plan, and it’s only available to public GitHub repositories,”
America’s nuclear arsenal relies on supercomputer running RHEL — Sierra looks like an unassuming server farm, but is actually a massive connected hive of 190,000 processing cores.

Linux Action News 80 Nov 18, 2018

Mark Shuttleworth announced 10 years support of Ubuntu 18.04, but there's a catch. Why we're buying the new Raspberry Pi, and we have a laugh at folding Android screens.

Plus the new Red Hat Enterprise beta has modularity, why Canonical might be ready for investors, and the bad week for cryptocurrencies.

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New mid-range Raspberry Pi launched — TL;DR: you can now get the 1.4GHz clock speed, 5GHz wireless networking and improved thermals of Raspberry Pi 3B+ in a smaller form factor, and at the smaller price of $25.
Raspbian updated — Today we’re releasing a new update for Raspbian, including a multimedia player, updated Thonny, and more.
Kodak's new 3D printer has a Raspberry Pi inside
Android prepares for folding screens — The multi-resume feature now makes it possible for multiple apps to be open and actually be running at the same time. Google is now allowing manufacturers to keep all apps resumed/active when in multi-window.
Essential launches $149 clip-on headphone jack — It’s the $149 magnetic headphone jack adapter Essential promised way back in September 2017. The company first announced in June that the accessory would start shipping in the summer, but it apparently missed that deadline.
Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for 10 years — "I'm delighted to announce that Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for a full 10 years," said Shuttleworth
Ubuntu Advantage — $2,500 cart minimum applies.
Canonical looking for investors — Shuttleworth likens this program of getting the company ready to IPO to getting fit. “There’s no point in saying: I haven’t done any exercise in the last 10 years but I’m going to sign up for tomorrow’s marathon,” he said.
RHEL 8 beta released — Allows updating user space without breaking everything.
Cryptocurrency market tanks — Within one brutal hour yesterday, Bitcoin’s price plummeted by around $800. The coin is trading under $5,800 for the first time since its October 2017 boom
Linux Academy Black Friday Sale — Black Friday/Cyber Monday Sale is happening now! Transform your cloud skills here at Linux Academy. Take your career to the next level with hands-on cloud and Linux training.

Linux Action News 79 Nov 11, 2018

Ubuntu on select Samsung devices goes into beta, we cover the technicalities of Linux on the new Macs, one of our favorite desktop projects gets a big update, and the Librem 5 slips.

Plus it's the end of the line for the Nexus devices, and more!

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Booting Linux on new Macs — Apple's T2 security chip being embedded into their newest products provides a secure enclave, APFS storage encryption, UEFI Secure Boot validation, Touch ID handling, a hardware microphone disconnect on lid close, and other security tasks. The T2 restricts the boot process quite a bit and verifies each step of the process using crypto keys signed by Apple.
WSL gets new features — A slate of improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) feature in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update.
Samsung announce Linux on DeX — Samsung is announcing the beta launch of Linux on DeX which extends the value of Samsung DeX to Linux developers. Linux on DeX empowers developers to build apps within a Linux development environment by connecting their Galaxy device to a larger screen for a PC-like experience.
Linux on Dex
KDE Connect Updated — Android Oreo introduced some restrictions in regard to apps running in the background. In the future in order to be able to run in the background KDE Connect needs to show a persistent notification. The good news is that you can hide the notification. The (slightly) bad news is that we cannot do it by default. To hide the notification you need to long-press it and switch it off. Other notifications from KDE Connect are unaffected by this.
GSConnect updated — The GNOME Shell UI has been rewritten to better conform to design guidelines. Appearance is important to everyone and work will continue to improve usability for touchscreens, HiDPI and users requiring accessibility features.
Librem 5 slips again — I am reluctant to give a new timeline for shipping the dev kits… What we know is that our new PCB fabrication here in the USA will be 11 business days. We will make over 300 of these boards, which are pretty complex—we have over 160 different parts and more than 500 components in total per board. This takes some time, even with the amazing SMT machines placing tiny parts.
Nexus devices finally dead — An over-the-air (OTA) update, which is based on Android 8.1 Oreo, is now rolling out to both the Nexus 5X and the Nexus 6P (as well as to the Pixel/Pixel XL, the Pixel 2/Pixel 2 XL, and Pixel 3/Pixel 3 XL), bumping up both phones to the latest November security patches. But if Google’s update policies are to be followed here, then this will be the last update to be released to both Nexus phones, meaning that the Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P have now officially reached end-of-life (EOL) status. Furthermore, online and phone support for both devices is also being discontinued.

Linux Action News 78 Nov 04, 2018

The new Fedora has a neat trick, The Register's KDE klickbait, and GhostBSD impresses.

Plus Sailfish's release strategy gets refined, System76 announces their Thelio Linux hardware, and more.

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Fedora 29 released — This release is particularly exciting because it’s the first to include the Fedora Modularity feature across all our different variants. Modularity lets us ship different versions of packages on the same Fedora base. This means you no longer need to make your whole OS upgrade decisions based on individual package versions.
RHEL 7.6 released
The Register RHEL klickbait — KDE Plasma Workspaces (KDE), which has been provided as an alternative to the default GNOME desktop environment has been deprecated. A future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux will no longer support using KDE instead of the default GNOME desktop environment.
Jonathan Riddell explains things — It is a pity that RHEL users won’t be there to enjoy it by default. But, then again, they never really were. KDE is collaborative, open, privacy aware and with a vast scope of interesting projects after 22 years we continue to push the boundaries of what is possible and fun.
Sailfish 3 released — I’m happy to share with you that we have today released the first Sailfish 3 software release, and made it available for all Sailfish users who have opted-in for the early access updates.
GhostBSD 18.10 released — GhostBSD 18.10 is our first official release of GhostBSD with TrueOS under the hood, and the official desktop is MATE
Endless OS shipping on (more) Asus hardware soon — Kids get their own laptop great for school projects and a safe, virus-resistant space to explore, tinker and learn. Parents, prepare to reclaim your computers!
System76 release new desktop machines — Thelio, Thelio Major, Thelio Massive, and Thelio Io are OSHWA certified open source hardware. Licensed under GPL v3 and CC-BY-SA, everyone can learn from what we've created, adapt it, improve it, and make derivative works inspired by the Thelio design.

Linux Action News 77 Oct 28, 2018

Linus is back in charge with the whole world watching, IBM is buying Red Hat, and Pine64 says they’re working on a Plasma phone.

Plus Firefox has a new sales pitch for you, and how HTC's blockchain future is already fizzling out.

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Linus back in charge of the kernel — And with that, Linus, I'm handing the kernel tree back to you. You can have the joy of dealing with the merge window :)
Pine64 working on a KDE phone — It’s a confirmed news that Pine64 is considering a budget Linux smartphone running KDE Plasma.
HTC’s blockchain phone is ready for preorder
Firefox to suggest paid VPN service — A small, random group of US-based Firefox users will be presented with an offer to purchase a monthly subscription to a VPN service that’s been vetted and approved by Mozilla. After signing up for a subscription (billed securely using payment services Stripe and Recurly) they will be able to download and install the VPN software. Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android are all supported.
IBM to Acquire Red Hat — Red Hat to operate as a distinct unit within IBM’s Hybrid Cloud team

Linux Action News 76 Oct 21, 2018

The Cosmic Cuttlefish is out, and we share our quick take. Juno finally lands and this one sets the bar, MongoDB gets hip to the license changes, and watch out Linux... Here come the pros!

Plus we go over the newly publish Ubuntu statistics, and Google's new Android licensing scheme in Europe.

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Ubuntu 18.10 released — Ubuntu 18.10 introduces the GNOME 3.30 desktop and Yaru, the new community-developed default theme.
More Ubuntu statistics published — This report is generated from basic, non-identifiable system data that was provided by users when installing Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
elementary OS 5.0 Juno released — Juno is such an incredible release, and it’s here thanks to all of our supporters.
MongoDB makes change to license — The SSPL explicitly states that anybody who wants to offer MongoDB as a service — or really any other software that uses this license — needs to either get a commercial license or open source the service to give back the community.
Google changes Android licensing policy in Europe — Ad giant to charge for key applications amid license shakeup and antitrust fine
CoC Committee Added Plus Interpretation & Mediator — It turns out Greg KH was working in private with various kernel maintainers/developers on addressing their feedback and trying to come up with solutions to the contentious issues in private.

Linux Action News 75 Oct 14, 2018

Another fork is brewing, Microsoft hands over their patents of mass destruction leaving us with a few questions, and the best features of the new Plasma release.

Plus Google's new Linux hardware, Flatpaks have met their critic, and more.

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Ubuntu Touch OTA 5 released — While many have already joined the community on 16.04 with OTA-4, in addition to the long-term support of upstream Ubuntu development, OTA-5 will include a more stable experience, new tweaks, and new features to show off this next stage of Ubuntu Touch development.
Plasma 5.14 released — A lot of work has gone into improving Discover, Plasma's software manager, and, among other things, we have added a Firmware Update feature and many subtle user interface improvements to give it a smoother feel. We have also rewritten many effects in our window manager KWin and improved it for slicker animations in your work day. Other improvements we have made include a new Display Configuration widget which is useful when giving presentations.
User Error Episode 50: Understand The Hype — It seems to be all about Plasma these days so we want to know if the hype is justified.
Website criticises Flatpaks — To make matters worse, the users are misled to believe the apps run sandboxed. For all these apps flatpak shows a reassuring "sandbox" icon when installing the app
Redis modules forked — Redis put some of the program's code under the anti-open-source Common Clause license. Now, developers are counterattacking by forking the code.
Microsoft joins OIN — Joining OIN reflects Microsoft’s patent practice evolving in lock-step with the company’s views on Linux and open source more generally.
ChromeOS 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.
Restyling apps at scale

Linux Action News 74 Oct 07, 2018

Red Hat's Stratis project reaches a major milestone, Microsoft's Linux powered dev boards go up for sale, and Fedora's hunt for buggy hibernation under Linux has begun.

Plus Android App mirroring, how the islands of the clouds are getting bridged, and Chris channels his inner Shuttleworth.

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Red Hat's Stratis Storage Project Reaches Its 1.0 Stable Milestone — Stratis has been the Red Hat play two years in development for delivering next-gen Linux storage following their decision to abandon Btrfs support. Stratis offers ZFS and Btrfs like functionality and a lot of other new capabilities while this past week marked its first stable release.
Stratis Whitepaper
Red Hat Satellite integrated new, improved Ansible DevOps — Red Hat is adding Ansible DevOps capabilities to its Red Hat Satellite system management program.
hibernation — does it work for you? — We have had a long discussion about hibernate (suspend to disk) being unreliable. But there seems to be no hard data. Let's gather some!
Microsoft announces app mirroring to let you use any Android app on Windows 10 — The feature, which Microsoft is referring to as app mirroring and shows up in Windows as an app called Your Phone, seems to be work best with Android for now. Although Microsoft did announce the ability to transfer webpages from an iPhone to a Windows 10 desktop so you can pick up where you left off on mobile.
Microsoft’s Linux powered dev boards, Azure Sphere for sale — An OS purpose built for security and agility to create a trustworthy platform for new IoT experiences. Our secured OS builds security innovations pioneered in Windows into an HLOS small enough for MCUs.
Azure Sphere MT3620 Development Board — Azure Sphere MT3620 Development Kit_US Version
Microsoft open-sources Infer.NET AI code — Infer.NET, which is on GitHub right now, takes a model-based approach to machine learning. The developer gives the framework a model, and the framework then develops a machine-learning algorithm directly from the model provided.
Node.js and JS foundations looking to merge — “The Node.js Foundation and JS Foundation boards have met several times already to discuss a potential alignment of the communities. The Foundation leaders and key technical stakeholders believe that a tighter alignment of communities will expand the scope of the current Foundations and enable greater support for Node.js and a broader range of JavaScript projects,”

Linux Action News 73 Sep 30, 2018

Google's Project Zero criticizes Linux distros, Firefox can now tell you when you get pwned, and the growing elephant in the room about Azure.

Plus a new release of our favorite non-distro, GPL revoking debunking, and Android turns 10.

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Android turns 10 — This was an era in which Android devices were responding to Apple, and not vice versa as we find today.
Google's Project Zero criticises Linux distros for tardy kernel patches — Project Zero accuses Linux distributions of leaving users exposed to known kernel vulnerabilities for weeks.
CVE-2018-17182 in Ubuntu — As of 2018-09-26, fixes for this issue are applied to all kernels uploaded to RELEASE-proposed today. and should be released around Monday, Oct 1, 2018.
No, GPL can't be revoked — For anybody who has been concerned by the talk from a few outsiders about revoking GPL licensing, this new section in the Software Freedom Conservancy's copyleft guide is worth a read. Thus, anyone downstream of the contributor (which is anyone using the contributor’s code), has an irrevocable license from the contributor. A contributor may claim to revoke their grant, and subsequently sue for copyright infringement, but a court would likely find the revocation was ineffective and the downstream user had a valid license defense to a claim of infringement.
KDE neon Rebased on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS — The KDE neon team is proud to announce the rebase of our packages onto Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver". We encourage all users to upgrade now. The installable ISOs and Docker images have also been updated to run on 18.04.
At least half of Azure is running Linux — "it's about half now, but it varies on the day because a lot of these workloads are elastic, but sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." Microsoft later clarified, "about half Azure VMs are Linux."
Firefox can now tell you when you get pwned — Mozilla is taking this a step further by also letting you sign up for alerts for when your accounts appear in any (known) breaches in the future.
Mintcast needs new hosts — Rob and Isaac talk about ending their time doing the podcast and ask who would like to take over.
Linux Academy Job Openings

Linux Action News 72 Sep 23, 2018

Linus is taking a break from maintaining the kernel, AMP might be set free, and Firefox goes VR.

It’s also been a big week for Linux on Windows with Flatpaks and a new distro running on WSL, and a flawless Ubuntu VM experience.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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Firefox VR browser released — Mozilla announced back in April that it was developing Firefox Reality, a next-generation web browser specifically for standalone VR and AR devices, and now it’s actually here. Firefox Reality 1.0 is available today as a set of free downloads for HTC Viveport, Oculus Go, and Daydream headsets.
Google loosens grasp on AMP — we want to move to a model that explicitly gives a voice to all constituents of the community, including those who cannot contribute code themselves, such as end-users. The change we are proposing is based on months of research, through which we’ve decided to follow the lead of the Node.js project and move to a consensus-seeking governance model.
Mir reaches 1.0.0 — We’re pleased to announce the release of Mir 1.0.0. The main things to note with this release are support for the Wayland xdg-shell (stable) extension and improved facilities for customizing display layouts.
Ubuntu 14.04 to receive extended maintenance — With the End of Life of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in April 2019, and to support the planning efforts of developers worldwide, Canonical is announcing the availability of ESM for Ubuntu 14.04.
Running Ubuntu VMs on Windows made easier — Today we’re very pleased to announce that an optimised Ubuntu Desktop image is available from the Hyper-V gallery. This will give an optimum experience when running Ubuntu Desktop as a guest on a Windows 10 Pro desktop host.
First purpose-built distro available for WSL — WLinux is at its core a custom Linux distro built from Debian stable specifically for use on WSL.
Flatpak running on WSL — Windows Subsystem for Linux fans, rejoice! Flatpak can now ease your dependency blues. Sort of.
Linus takes a break and a new CoC for kernel devs

Linux Action News 71 Sep 16, 2018

Fedora want help testing their innovations, Mozilla continue to focus on mobile, Chrome OS gets a major new feature, and Microsoft almost stepped in it bigtime.

Plus new releases from nano and Nextcloud, huge news for Jupiter Broadcasting, and more.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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Give Fedora Silverblue a test drive — Fedora Silverblue is a new variant of Fedora Workstation with rpm-ostree at its core to provide fully atomic upgrades. Furthermore, Fedora Silverblue is immutable and upgrades as a whole, providing easy rollbacks from updates if something goes wrong. Fedora Silverblue is great for developers using Fedora with good support for container-focused workflows.
nano 3.0 released — GNU nano 3.0 "Water Flowing Underground" speeds up the reading of a file by seventy percent, roughly doubles the speed of handling ASCII text, changes the way words at line boundaries are deleted, makes wipe the next word and the preceding word...
Nextcloud 14 released — The upcoming Nextcloud 14 introduces a series of improvements to make Nextcloud even easier to use and also more accessible to people with visual disabilities.
Firefox Focus to switch to Gecko — In the next weeks, we’ll release a new version of Focus for Android, and for the first time, Focus will come bundled with Gecko, the browser engine that powers Firefox Quantum.
Chrome OS 70 brings native network file share support — Chrome OS will have its NativeSmb flag to set to enabled by default
Microsoft planned to try and stop users installing alternative browsers in Win10 but then backtracked
Jupiter Broadcasting Joins Linux Academy — As part of Linux Academy, we’re going to do more than create better content. We’re going to contribute back.
User Error is back! — User Error is back with a new set of hosts! We answer some #AskError questions and talk about whether the Linux desktop will ever make money. Plus we wonder if dockless bike sharing is a good idea and whether travel really is as great as everyone seems to think.

Linux Action News 70 Sep 09, 2018

Great new releases for GNOME and Tor, delays for the Librem 5, and Linus proves to be extremely important.

Plus some innovative tech gets an open source implementation, and NSA encryption removed from the kernel within weeks of inclusion.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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GNOME 3.30 Released — The latest version of GNOME 3 has been released today. Version 3.30 contains six months of work by the GNOME community and includes many improvements and new features.
Tor browser 8.0 released — Tor Browser 8.0, our first stable release based on Firefox 60 ESR, is now available from the Tor Browser Project page and also from our distribution directory. This release is all about users first.
Official Tor browser for Android released — Tor Project, the not-for-profit body behind the anonymizing Tor browser, has launched the first official Tor mobile browser app.
Librem 5 delayed — Purism has been working with the silicon vendor directly to evaluate the upcoming CPU for this silicon power management issue that would have a significant negative impact on the Librem 5’s battery life. Ultimately, this issue is going to lead to a three month delay in the production schedule for the final Librem 5 phone.
Debian-Based Android WiFi RTT Indoor Location Tracking — CompuLab have introduced WILD, the first WiFi RTT access point to allow for WiFi indoor location detection/tracking with supported Android 9 smartphones.
Speck to be removed from the kernel — The speck removal patch has been merged into the development crypto code base by subsystem maintainer Herbert Xu. The patch merged overnight strips the kernel of Speck.
Kernel Maintainer’s Summit moved continents to accommodate Linus — The Maintainer's Summit will take place in Edinburgh, on Monday afternoon, October 22nd.

Linux Action News 69 Sep 02, 2018

This week saw a huge release for UBports, proof that LMDE is still alive, and Mozilla earning a lot of respect.

Plus mixed news for Google, and a surprising blockchain fact.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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Ubuntu Touch OTA 4 Released — After eight months of work, the UBports Foundation is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu Touch OTA-4. This release features Ubuntu 16.04 as its base (previously 15.04), bringing security fixes and greater stability to unseen corners of the operating system.
LMDE 3 released — The team is proud to announce the release of LMDE 3 “Cindy” Cinnamon Edition.
Mozilla publishes Firefox user data — As an organization, Mozilla has always championed transparency, and today, it’s taking this one step further by pulling back the curtains on its internal data for how many people regularly use Firefox and how they use the browser.
Firefox to block tracking — In the near future, Firefox will — by default — protect users by blocking tracking while also offering a clear set of controls to give our users more choice over what information they share with sites.
Google hands off Kubernetes to the community with $9M donation — As a testament to Kubernetes’ maturity, we’re excited to take the next step, and are opening the Kubernetes project's cloud resources up to contributors. We’re funding this move with a $9 million grant of GCP credits
Blow for Google in Oracle Android case — Google will have to go to the US Supreme Court if it wants to contest the reversal of a verdict — in a long-running case with Oracle — that had found its use of 37 Java APIs in the Android mobile operating system was covered by fair use.
Blockchain is a lot older than you might think — the world’s oldest blockchain predates Bitcoin by 13 years and it’s been hiding in plain sight, printed weekly in the classified section of one of the world’s most widely circulated newspapers: The New York Times.

Linux Action News 68 Aug 26, 2018

Some massive free software milestones this week, Intel's Microcode benchmark snafu, and Windows games for Steam on Linux confirmed, so we give it a test.

Plus Venezuela ties its currency to a cryptocoin, and our reaction to Windows 95 getting stuffed inside an Electron app.

Sponsored By:

Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

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Flatpak reaches 1.0 — Flatpak 1.0 is the first version in a new stable release series. This new 1.x series is the successor to the 0.10.x series, which was first introduced in October 2017.
Venezuela ties its currency to a cryptocoin — It is supposed to be a liquid asset reflective of the price of oil, and there is of course a whitepaper that describes the system in broad strokes, though it lacks almost any real technical detail.
Linux turns 27 — Some FOSS fans consider the first public release of (prototype) code, which dropped on October 5, 1991, as more worthy of being the kernel’s true anniversary date. Others, ourselves included, take today, August 25, as the “birth” date of the project.
IRC Turns 30
Debian turns 25
GNOME turns 21
Intel Microcode update didn’t allow benchmarks — Since the microcode is running for every instruction, this seems to be a use restriction on the entire processor. Don’t run your benchmarker at all, not even on your own software, if you “provide” or publish the results.
Until they changed their mind
Windows games for Steam on Linux confirmed — What many people suspected turned out to be true, DXVK development was actually funded by Valve. They actually employed the DXVK developer since February 2018. On top of that, they also helped to fund: vkd3d (Direct3D 12 implementation based on Vulkan), OpenVR and Steamworks native API bridges, wined3d performance and functionality fixes for Direct3D 9 and Direct3D 11 and more.
Proton — Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on Linux and macOS operating systems. It uses Wine to facilitate this.
Windows 95 available as an Electron app — This is Windows 95, running in an Electron app. Yes, it's the full thing. I'm sorry.
Although this isn't exactly a new idea

Linux Action News 67 Aug 19, 2018

It seems Valve is working to make Windows games work on Linux, and LVFS turns its focus to NVMe drives.

Plus KDE 3 lives on, Endless ships on Asus, and major distros patch against Foreshadow.

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Linux Action News 66 Aug 12, 2018

We cover the noteworthy features of Android Pie, Lenovo joins The Linux Vendor Firmware Service, and Dropbox is ending support for non-Ext4 filesystems.

Plus big news for Flatpaks, the blockchain goes to work, and Open Source goes all Hollywood.

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Linux Action News 65 Aug 05, 2018

GNOME and elementary OS receive a large somewhat mysterious donation. Wireguard is coming to a Kernel near you, and Mozilla wants to talk about the Dweb.

Plus OpenWrt is alive and well, and Samsung has a new trick.

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Linux Action News 64 Jul 29, 2018

Slackware's founder runs into challenges, YouTube makes changes that slow down Firefox, while Firefox is cutting back on some features, and another German region dumps FOSS.

Plus some hard data on why it's time to drop 32-bit Linux, and Lubuntu's got a new direction.

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Linux Action News 63 Jul 22, 2018

Linux gains a world class media editor, Atari is making Chris nervous, and the Librem 5 hits some rocky waters.

Plus the EU fines Google over how they leverage Android, some follow up, and more.

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Linux Action News 62 Jul 15, 2018

Arch finds itself in the barrel, Ubuntu goes on a diet, and Python's leader for life has had enough, and steps down.

Plus Debian joins KDE's council of wizards.

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Linux Action News 61 Jul 08, 2018

SUSE is acquired and GNOME is hiring, and it might just be the summer of forks.

Plus how about a new package manager for your distro?

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Linux Action News 60 Jul 01, 2018

Gentoo's GitHub is compromised, and Google's writing big checks to the Linux Foundation to distract you from the Fuchsia elephant in the room.

Plus we try out AWS' new Linux WorkSpace, RISC-V's Linux first commitment looks a lot stronger this week, and why we think the STARTTLS Everywhere initiative is a great first step.

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Linux Action News 59 Jun 24, 2018

Projects once thought dead are now full of life, with new major releases and we kick the tires.

Plus new commits suggest Fuchsia will support Linux apps, Fedora CoreOS is announced, and we look over the first public Ubuntu desktop metrics.

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Linux Action News 58 Jun 17, 2018

Plasma Desktop has a new release so we cover new features and some bugs, Mycroft has an "opportunity" for you, and trouble at CopperheadOS.

Plus Debian's call for help, and more.

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Linux Action News 57 Jun 10, 2018

Free and open source developers are still freaking out about Microsoft buying GitHub, ReactOS reaches a major milestone, TrueOS appears to be forking, and changes are coming to the core of Plasma desktop team.

Plus we try out the new Devuan release, and more.

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Linux Action News 56 Jun 03, 2018

Ubuntu-based Atari VCS crowdfunding is going very well, Endless employees are hit with layoffs, and why GNOME might be too fat for Pi.

Plus the group trying to force Samsung to update its phone loses, and Essential says they are definitely, totally, not shutting down.

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Ubuntu-based Atari box doing very well on Indiegogo — Built on an open source Linux OS so you can add your own software and apps to customize your own platform.
Endless lays off several employees - Michael Hall on Twitter — If anybody needs an energetic and experienced community manager or developer advocate, give me an email or DM, I'm suddenly on the market for a new opportunity
Endless lays off several employees - Emmanuele — In completely unrelated news: if you're looking to hire a GTK/GNOME developer with strong opinions (and the battle scars to hold them up) on CI/CD, UX design, and dev methodologies, hit me up
Endless lays off several employees - Nuritzi Sanchez on Twitter — .... I guess it’s my turn to announce that I’m looking for new opportunities as well! I’m a jack of all trades who loves building things from scratch and am passionate about the intersection of tech and social impact. DM me if you have any important world challenges to solve :)
GNOME too fat for the Pi — If you try running the GNOME Shell today on the Raspberry Pi, it's a frustratingly slow experience. While some work is being done in addressing GNOME's GPU, CPU, and memory consumption, it might not ever be in a state to run smoothly on Raspberry Pi hardware.
Huawei locks down its bootloaders — In order to deliver the best user experience and prevent users from experiencing possible issues that could arise from ROM flashing, including system failure, stuttering, worsened battery performance, and risk of data being compromised, Huawei will cease providing bootloader unlock codes for devices launched after May 25, 2018.
Samsung won't be forced to update old phones — A consumer association had argued that Samsung should update its phones for at least four years after they go on sale.
Essential not shutting down — The email details that Andy Rubin has no plans of shutting down the company. However, he said that the firm will work with banks to get some financial assistance and the company might be sold under the financing deal.

Linux Action News 55 May 27, 2018

openSUSE Leap 15 is released, along a new LXQt, the Essential Phone getting canceled, and why older Chrombooks might be receiving the big Linux apps update.

Plus we'll explain what portable systemd services are, and the Android phones that recently shipped with Malware.

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openSUSE Leap 15 released — With a brand new look developed by the community, openSUSE Leap 15 brings plenty of community packages built on top of a core from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 sources
LXQt 0.13 released — The LXQt team is proud to announce the release of LXQt 0.13.0, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment.
Portable Services arrives in systemd — "Portable Services" are supposed to be an incremental improvement over traditional system services, making two specific facets of container management available to system services more readily.
Next Essential phone cancelled — Company cancels development of second version of smartphone
XDA lament the news
Some cheap Android phones shipped with malware — The app consists of a dropper and a payload.
Linux apps coming to older Chromebooks — Thanks to an issue found on Chromium’s public bugtracker, we have confirmation that containers won’t be limited to the handful of Chrome OS devices released with kernel 4.4.

Linux Action News 54 May 20, 2018

Asteroid OS reaches 1.0, and Joe gives it a go. GNOME developers consider removing the ability to launch binaries, but punt for now. And the lessons learned from malware in the Snap Store.

Plus the reality of EFail, Steam Link on Android, and another shoe drops for Ubuntu's 32bit support.

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AsteroidOS 1.0 released — AsteroidOS is built on standard Linux technologies including OpenEmbedded, opkg, Wayland, Qt5, systemd, BlueZ, and PulseAudio.
EFAIL — EFAIL describes vulnerabilities in the end-to-end encryption technologies OpenPGP and S/MIME that leak the plaintext of encrypted emails.
GnuPG's Efail press release Response
Nautilus removes the ability to execute binaries — Or, to put it another way, you won’t be able to double-click on programs, scripts or apps to launch them using Nautilus.
But then brings it back — A few cases appeared that we need to support, specially for enterprise and content creators. Specifically, cases similar to #434
Steam Link on Android — Stream PC games to your Android smartphone
Malware found in (and removed from) the Snap Store — This situation marks the first major “security” issue in the Snappy packaging system. But although unwelcome this particular fail is not necessarily as frightening as it sounds at first, nor is is necessarily a fault with the Snappy format.
Kubuntu to drop 32-bit images — I'm reluctant to do this, however, I do not have the time or technical knowledge required to do this on my own, and the Kubuntu Devels want Kubuntu to stop issuing i386 images.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now on Windows 10 — Bionic beavering away on Windows
TechSNAP Episode 368: EFail Explained

Linux Action News 53 May 13, 2018

It's confirmed Linux apps are coming to Chrome OS. Google is finally putting pressure on OEMs to ship security patches, and we try Android of Things.

Plus we get some clarity on CoreOS and Red Hat, and their strategy for cloud domination in the future.

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Linux apps on Chrome OS confirmed — Linux runs inside a virtual machine that was designed from scratch for Chromebooks.
It could be a while before Linux apps work well on Chrome OS — There are other bits of glue, such as these in-container tools, to run whatever programs you want within a Linux VM within a Chrome OS container.
Google puts pressure on OEMs over Android patches — “We’ve also worked on building security patching into our OEM agreements. Now this will really … lead to a massive increase in the number of devices and users receiving regular security patches.” – David Kleidermacher, Google’s head of Android platform security
Android Things is finally ready for devices — Android Things is hitting its 1.0 release today after launching to developers at the end of 2016.
Android Things 1.0
Clarity on CoreOS and Red Hat — As for CoreOS's existing customers? Breard promises that "No users or communities will be left behind."
Red Hat and Microsoft bring OpenShift to Azure — With this new offering, you will be able to more easily move your applications between on-premises environments and Microsoft Azure. This is because they are leveraging a consistent container platform in OpenShift across the hybrid cloud.
WSL coming to Arm — As spotted by the folks at Neowin, during a presentation at the MS Build developer conference this week, Microsoft also showed Ubuntu running on a Windows 10 on ARM computer, meaning that Ubuntu (and other Linux distros) will be among the 64-bit apps you can install on these computers.

Linux Action News 52 May 06, 2018

Fedora fights for the user, Ubuntu Flavours draw the line, and why we're worried small distributions are starting to collapse.

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Ubuntu MATE 18.10 - dropping i386 images — Less than 10% of Ubuntu MATE users are running the i386 (32-bit Intel) images.
18.10 and beyond - 64bit images only | Ubuntu Budgie — from the various reports and statistics we have observed from 16.04 budgie-remix all the way to you enthusiastic 18.04 trail-blazers, almost all of you are now using the 64bit ISO.
Lubuntu finally ready to move to LXQt — Lubuntu 18.10 will be the first release to ship with LXQt as default desktop environment instead of LXDE, according to Simon Quigley.
Korora takes a “break” — Korora for the forseeable future is not going to be able to march in cadence with the Fedora releases. In addition to that, for the immediate future there will be no updates to the Korora distribution.
Void Linux struggling as leader goes missing — There still are multiple members to the Void Core Team and others working on this independent Linux distribution, but their project leader has "disappeared". There's been no contact since January but no "meaningful contact" in over one year.
Fedora 28 released — The headline feature for Fedora 28 Server is the inclusion of the new Modular repository. This lets you select between different versions of software like NodeJS or Django

Linux Action News 51 Apr 29, 2018

Ubuntu 18.04 is out and we round up the new features, the flavours, and our first takes. The Librem 5 learns a new trick, and Linux apps on Chrome OS looks like a much bigger deal than first suspected.

Plus what's great about GIMP's biggest release in six years, and more.

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Ubuntu Touch will be an official option on the Librem 5 — While the Librem 5 will ship with Free Software Foundation-endorsed PureOS by default, utilizing GNOME across all devices, Purism will support customers who want to easily install Ubuntu Touch offering great diversity for users around the world.
Purism feel the icy breath of Intel on their neck — After receiving a courtesy request from Intel’s Director of Software Infrastructure, we have decided to remove this post’s technical contents while we investigate our options.
Chrome OS moves a step closer to proper Linux — A new Terminal app has been added to the app drawer, and clicking it opens a dialog explaining the feature.
Linux apps will look seamless in Chrome OS — First native Linux apps in Chrome OS, and they’ve opted for Adapta, a popular Material Design-inspired Gtk theme that can be used on many of your favorite GNU/Linux distributions.
Huge GIMP Update — GIMP 2.10 is the result of six years of work that originally focused on porting the program to a new image processing engine, GEGL. However the new version ships with far more new features, including new and improved tools, better file formats support, various usability improvements, revamped color management support, a plethora of improvements targeted at digital painters and photographers, metadata editing, and much, much more.
Ubuntu 18.04 released — Optimised for multi-cloud infrastructure, machine learning, AI and software development
18.04 flavours also released — Long-term support (LTS) releases of Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie and the (always magnificent) Ubuntu MATE are available to download.
Clear focus on cloud and containers — “Multi-cloud operations are the new normal” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical and founder of Ubuntu. “Boot-time and performance-optimised images of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on every major public cloud make it the fastest and most efficient OS for cloud computing, especially for storage and compute-intensive tasks like machine learning.”
Ubuntu 18.04 even runs on a Nintendo Switch — I've written a script to build a full Ubuntu Desktop image for the Switch
TechSNAP Episode 365: The Unfixable Exploit — ShofEL2, a Tegra X1 and Nintendo Switch exploit

Linux Action News 50 Apr 22, 2018

Trisquel has a new release, and Chris tries out the new ReactOS. Plus our thoughts on Microsoft announcing their own Linux, the German government switching to NextCloud, and the fix is in for Gnome Shell's infamous "Memory leak".

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Trisquel 8.0 LTS Flidas — The biggest internal change to the default edition is the switch from GNOME to MATE 1.12. The main reason for this change was that GNOME dropped support for their legacy desktop, which retained the GNOME 2.x user experience and didn't require 3D composition -- a feature that in many computers would still need non-free software to run at full speed. MATE provides a perfect drop-in replacement, it is very light and stable and it retains all the user experience design that we are used to from previous Trisquel releases.
ReactOS 0.4.8 released — The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.8 as we continue to work on releasing every three months.
German government goes open source with cloud firm Nextcloud — Seeks "construction of a private cloud for the federal government"
Microsoft's Next OS is Based on Linux, Not Windows — Microsoft announced a new operating system for IoT called Azure Sphere OS. But here’s the shocker: It’s based on Linux, not on Windows.
Google “pauses” Allo and creates yet another messenger — As we explain in our exclusive feature, the move is necessary because Google is going all in on Rich Communication Services, or RCS. The service will be branded “Chat” once carriers launch it, and Google wants to apply as many resources as possible to make sure that this time, finally, Android has a successful messaging app.
GNOME Shell memory leak fixed — There has been a widely reported memory leak in the latest version of GNOME Shell which upstream GNOME have been working on fixing. While they finalise their plans and merge patches we have decided to press on with including one of the patches which should fix the biggest issues.

Linux Action News 49 Apr 15, 2018

ZFS' first data loss bug comers to Linux, GameMode could have some serious potential, and Mozilla thinks the Internet is in bad shape.

Plus new research shows Android OEMs are lying about their patch levels, Lineage goes hard on "Play certification" and we have thoughts on all of it.

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GameMode is a new tool to optimize CPU performance — GameMode is an open-source tool intended to deliver the best performance out of their Linux games. GameMode does handy things like tells the CPU to automatically run in the performance governor mode rather than ondemand/powersave modes. GameMode consists of a daemon (gamemoded) and a library (libgamemode) so that games can tell the daemon when they would like to be put into performance mode, etc.GameMode currently relies upon systemd.
ZFS data loss bug patched — ZFS On Linux 0.7.8 is now available as an emergency release to deal with a possible data loss issue. The past few days there has been a busy bug report about unlistable and disappearing files.
Mozilla thinks the Internet isn't in a great shape — the Mozilla Foundation released a report that highlights the dangers posed to the entirety of the Internet ecosystem by the increasing concentration of control over how people experience the online world in the hands of companies like his.
Some Android OEMs lying about patch level — The problem, Nohl points out, is worse than vendors merely neglecting to patch older devices, a common phenomenon. Instead, it's that they tell users they install patches that they in fact don't, creating a false sense of security.
Lineage on Google Play Certification — Google Play Certification is Google’s way of ensuring that devices running with Google Play Services are in a known-good state. This is implemented via checking of SafetyNet, which you can read more about in our SafetyNet blogpost.

Linux Action News 48 Apr 08, 2018

The Linux kernel gets a spring cleaning, things are going well for RISC-V, and Linux-Libre is clearly prioritizing freedom over security with their recent update.

Steam Machines were pronounced dead and then alive this week, we'll try and clear things up, and Mozilla has a new project.

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Linux kernel to remove several old CPU architectures — The architectures which will become deprecated are Blackfin, CRIS, FRV, M32R, Metag, MN10300, Score and Tile. Although not being deprecated, the Unicore32 and Hexagon architectures are also at risk but their maintainers are working on improving the situation so their support can be continued.
RISC-V Support Continues Maturing Within The Mainline Linux Kernel — Linux 4.17 kernel include support for dynamic ftrace, clean-ups to their atomic and locking code, module loading support is now enabled by default, and other fixes.
Save money using RISC-V rather than Arm — According to a report published last week by The Information, more than 80 tech goliaths including Nvidia, Google, Qualcomm, Samsung and Tesla are working to adopt RISC-V technology. The main reason behind the push to adopt RISC-V is said to be the processor's open-source design, which will facilitate "a much cheaper way to build chips for new technologies like autonomous vehicles," says the source.
Debian now supports RISC-V — We've been working in the last few weeks to do a (second) boostrap of Debian for RISC-V, and after a few weeks of hard work it is now bootstrapped and has been imported into the Debian infrastructure,
Linux-Libre prioritises freedom over security — One of their new changes on top of this deblobbed kernel is dropping error messages that suggest users update their CPU micrcode.
Steam Machines disappear from Valve's site — Steam Machines no longer show up under the drop-down menu for "Hardware" on the main Steam store page. Promotional language and images for Steam Machines were also previously featured prominently on a hardware-focused landing page on the store (archived version), but that page now redirects to a simple search results page for the store's "hardware" category.
Steam Machines aren't dead yet — We've taken a lot of feedback and have been heads-down on addressing the shortcomings we observed.
TOR Messenger discontinued — “The adoption of Tor Messenger was low and the real need is for metadata-free alternatives"
Mozilla Brings Firefox to Augmented and Virtual Reality — We believe that the future of the web will be heavily intertwined with virtual and augmented reality, and that future will live through browsers. That’s why we’re building Firefox Reality, a new kind of web browser that has been designed from the ground up to work on stand-alone virtual and augmented reality (or mixed reality) headsets.

Linux Action News 47 Apr 01, 2018

ChromeOS comes to tablets, and we ponder why... Google removes Kodi from autocomplete results in an apparent bow to pressure, Firefox combats Facebook tracking, and Oracle vs Google is back for their biggest fight yet.

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ChromeOS now on tablets — The new Acer Chromebook Tab 10 is a 9.7 inch tablet that runs Google’s Chrome operating system, supports Android apps, and has no keyboard
The final nail in the Firefox OS coffin — the Firefox Marketplace is shutting down on March 30th, 2018, which means the handful of folks who actually have devices running Firefox OS won’t be able to download apps from the official app store after that.
Google removes Kodi from autocomplete — C: 30NEWS Google has banned the term "Kodi" from the autocomplete feature of its search engine. This means that the popular software and related suggestions won't appear unless users type out the full term. Google has previously taken similar measures against "pirate" related terms and confirms that Kodi is targeted because it's "closely associated with copyright infringement."
Facebook Container for Firefox — Prevent Facebook from tracking you around the web. The Facebook Container extension for Firefox helps you take control and isolate your web activity from Facebook.
Firefox Multi-Account Containers
Oracle vs Google case not dead — The Federal Circuit has ruled for a second time in Oracle v. Google, the software copyright lawsuit over Google’s Android platform. The new decision reverses the district court yet again and sends the case back for a third trial to determine damages for Oracle. In the last trial, Oracle sought almost $9 billion in damages.
Microsoft facilitating yet more distros on WSL — This sample allows distro maintainers to build WSL distro packages for the Microsoft Store and developers to create custom Linux distro packages for sideloading. You can find the distro launcher repo on GitHub.

Linux Action News 46 Mar 25, 2018

webOS is back, and the Linux Foundation has a Hypervisor for your car. Plus some of GNOME's performance issues, Firefox changes, and the hidden files in Bitcoin's blockchain.

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LG releases webOS Open Source Edition, looks to expand webOS usage — LG wants to expand the adoption of webOS and the company is working with the South Korean government to solicit business proposals from other companies interested in using webOS.
The Linux Foundation Announces an Open Source Reference Hypervisor Project Designed for IoT Device Development — ACRN is comprised of two main components: the hypervisor and its device model
Linux Foundation backs new ‘ACRN’ hypervisor for embedded and IoT
GNOME Shell memory leak — A number of Ubuntu users have reported that GNOME Shell 3.26.2, the version used in Ubuntu 17.10, has a “sneaky leak” that causes GNOME Shell’s memory usage to increase every minute following a Shell animation
A GNOME performance bug fixed — So, how can something as simple as updating the displayed time cause such a large increase in the time required to draw a frame?
Firefox Master Password System Has Been Poorly Secured for the Past 9 Years — For at past nine years, Mozilla has been using an insufficiently strong encryption mechanism for the "master password" feature.
Questionable changes coming to Firefox DNS queries — Nightly build fans' hostname lookups piped to Cloudflare in limited security feature trial
Firefox plan to start blocking ads — Mozilla intends to add basic ad filtering capabilities to its Firefox browser later this year, according to its recently updated roadmap.
Bitcoin blockchain contains more than transaction data — Boffins warn of legal risks from arbitrary data distribution
CryptoGraffiti - Bitcoin Blockchain Messages as Text

Linux Action News 45 Mar 18, 2018

Gnome's new tricks, our favorite thing about the Raspberry Pi 3B+, Eric Raymond's call for an open source UPS, and the US city that banned Bitcoin mining.

Plus Let's Encrypt rolls out wildcard certs, Firefox 59's new Linux feature, and why Wil Wheaton switched to Debian.

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GNOME 3.28 Released — One major new feature for this release is automatic downloading of operating systems in Boxes, which takes the work out of creating and running virtual machines – just pick the operating system that you want to create a virtual machine of, and Boxes will now download and install it for you.
GNOME 3.28 Release Notes
Firefox 59 released — We launched an entirely new engine in November, made significant improvements to graphics rendering in January, and are continuing to post performance gains and add features with this release. On Firefox for desktop, we’ve improved page load times, added tools to annotate and crop your Firefox Screenshots, and made it easier to arrange your Top Sites on the Firefox Home page. On Firefox for Android, we’ve added support for sites that stream video using the HLS protocol.
Firefox is a Snap
Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ — Alongside a 200MHz increase in peak CPU clock frequency, we have roughly three times the wired and wireless network throughput, and the ability to sustain high performance for much longer periods.
US city bans new Bitcoin mining — Plattsburgh, New York has imposed an 18-month moratorium on Bitcoin mining to prevent miners from using all the city’s cheap electricity.
Let’s Encrypt rolls out wildcard certs — Free "wildcard" certificates to enable secure HTTP connections for entire domains. In addition to a new version of the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol, an interface that can be used by a variety of client software packages to automate verification of certificate requests.
TechSNAP Episode 359
Eric Raymond's open source UPS — Last week, ESR opened up the work-in-progress on GitLab: the Upside project is currently defining requirements and developing a specification for a “high quality UPS that can be built from off-the-shelf parts in any reasonably well-equipped makerspace or home electronics shop”.
Wil Wheaton runs Linux — But about a week ago, something went wrong. Everything started slowing down like crazy, Chrome just quit working entirely, and even Firefox ran so slow, I felt like I was using a 386.

Linux Action News 44 Mar 11, 2018

OpenWatch is trying to free your wrist and empower modular smart watches, Fedora's solution to the IoT mess, and more AMP shenanigans from Google to take over the web.

Debian and Kali land on Windows 10's Linux Subsystem, and Noah joins Chris from SCaLE16x

Special Guest: Noah J. Chelliah.

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OpenWatch — Modular smartphone and smartwatch devices may be a niche idea, but it’s one that has a lot of passionate people behind it. The process of having to buy a brand new device just to upgrade or replace a single component feels very archaic. Unless you’re willing to pry apart a device yourself (or pay someone to do it), you’re forced to purchase a brand new device when something inside of it breaks.
Fedora IoT Edition — So what will be happening over the coming weeks (and months)? We’ll be getting the working group in place, getting an initial monthly release process in place so that people can start to have something to kick the tires with and provide feedback and drive discussion.
More AMP tyranny from Google — Google’s goal is to extend support in features like the Top Stories carousel to AMP-like content that (1) meets a set of performance and user experience criteria and (2) implements a set of new web standards. Some of the proposed standards in the critical path are Feature Policy, Web Packaging, iframe promotion, Performance Timeline, and Paint Timing.
GitHub makes open-source project licensing easier with an open-source program | ZDNet — GitHub has open sourced Licensed, an internal tool they've used to automate some of GitHub's open-source projects licensing process.
Debian & Kali Linux Are Now On Windows Subsystem for Linux — Joining Kali, Ubuntu, SUSE, and openSUSE on Windows WSL now is also Debian Linux.
SCALE 16x Report — SCaLE 16X – the 16th annual Southern California Linux Expo. Pasadena Convention Center.

Linux Action News 43 Mar 04, 2018

Developers are the new gold rush for OEMs and selling Linux is their way to get you to buy. Purism takes big steps to make their laptops more secure, the Linux kernel is ready for lockdown mode, and the new uses for Sailfish just might surprise you.

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Sailfish 3 and feature phones — Sailfish OS development never stops, not even for legacy devices. Sailfish 3 will be rolled out in phases during Q3/2018 for all licensees and customers.
Crostini - Linux App via Containers on ChromeOS — In other words, the Crostini/Terminal feature could be to Chrome OS what the Windows Subsystem for Linux is for Windows 10: a way that developers, power users, and Linux enthusiasts can run native Linux software on a device that’s not running a traditional Linux distribution.
Sailfish OS v3 will be on "feature phones" — It’s also coming to 4G-enabled feature phones.
Microsoft and Canonical collaborate on Ubuntu VMs — With only 3 mouse clicks, users will be able to get an Ubuntu VM running that offers clipboard functionality, drive redirection, and much more.
Purism makes their laptops more secure — As part of our goal to improve security we are excited to announce that we have successfully integrated Heads into our TPM-enabled coreboot-running Librem laptops.
Kernel secure boot lock down — Among the further restrictions that would be placed on the Linux kernel when running with UEFI Secure Boot enabled is blocking access to kernel module parameters that end up dealing with hardware settings, blocking access to some areas of /dev that could manipulate the kernel or hardware state, etc.
More Linux On Galaxy hype — Linux is installed as an “app” on Android, and when launched it shares the same Linux kernel powering Android.

Linux Action News 42 Feb 25, 2018

Open Source salvation from Android and iOS gets closer this week, an update on Ubuntu's metrics collection, and huge news for Signal and RISC-V Linux fans.

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LineageOS 15.1 is finally here — We’ve been working hard these months to get this new version available; the changes that were done in upstream (AOSP) are huge: Project Treble changed the way hardware is managed in Android, so all the OEM-abandoned platforms that are supported by Lineage had to be adapted for the new platform.
XDA article
Unity 8 running on 18.04
Ubuntu metrics collection will be opt-in when upgrading to 18.04 — ”Upgrading users would need to purposely “opt-in” to this behaviour, as that wasn’t explicitly asked in the past.
Collecting user data while protecting user privacy — The technique varies a lot in exactly how it’s applied, but the basic concept is that for any question, there’s a random chance that the answerer should lie in their response.
Signal Foundation is born thanks to $50M from WhatsApp co-founder — Today, we are launching the Signal Foundation, an emerging 501(c)(3) nonprofit created and made possible by Brian Acton, the co-founder of WhatsApp, to support, accelerate, and broaden Signal’s mission of making private communication accessible and ubiquitous.
First RISC-V board available to pre-order — HiFive Unleashed is the ultimate RISC-V developer board. Featuring the world’s first and only Linux-capable, multi-core, RISC-V processor – the Freedom U540 – the HiFive Unleashed ushers in a brand new era for RISC-V.
HiFive Unleashed launch FOSDEM 2018 Video
Tech Talk Today is back — Elon Musk bet the future of SpaceX on the Falcon Heavy launch. On Thursday SpaceX launched a pair of prototype satellites intended to form the basis for Starlink, a constellation of satellites that are designed to beam broadband internet down to Earth.

Linux Action News 41 Feb 18, 2018

A famous Solaris tool comes to Linux, Firefox is baking in ads, and Google wants to take over the web with AMP.

Plus Ubuntu's plans to collect user metrics, the Linux on Galaxy survey, and Plasma desktop on a Nintendo Switch.

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dtrace relicensed as GPLv2 — This changeset integrates DTrace module sources into the main kernel source tree under the GPLv2 license. Sources have been moved to appropriate locations in the kernel tree.
Firefox adding sponsored stories to the new tab page — What’s next? We recently started testing personalized recommendations, and we will soon experiment with showing an occasional sponsored story within the Pocket Recommendations section in New Tab Page in Firefox Beta. This will be shown to a small portion of U.S. users as we start to test.
AMP Stories and AMP for email — Starting with the Gmail Developer Preview of AMP for Email today, the new feature will allow users to perform simple tasks such as booking calendar appointments and checking into flights directly within the layout of the email.
Related
Ubuntu plans metrics collection — "We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it," explained Will Cooke, the director of Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical.
Ubuntu adds 'Minimal Install' option 18.04 — The new “minimal install” option appears in section of the installer that asks whether you want to install restricted codecs to enable multimedia playback alongside the main desktop.
Linux on Galaxy Survey — “In order to determine how to best design the product to meet your needs, we ask for a moment of your time to complete this Linux on Galaxy Survey.”
Plasma running on a Switch — Code execution is all the rage these days, but can your Switch do *this*?

Linux Action News 40 Feb 11, 2018

It's week of major project releases, elementary OS gears up for some contested changes, and Mozilla has a solution for the world's IoT mess.

Plus fail0verflow gets Linux on the Nintendo Switch, and our favorite new features of VLC 3.0.

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MATE 1.20 — The theme for this release has been stabilising the MATE Desktop by replacing deprecated code and modernising large sections of the code base. We’ve also improved our window manager (Marco) and added support for HiDPI. Along the way we’ve fixed hundreds of bugs. Squished ‘em dead!
Plasma 5.12 — Speed and memory improvements are the focus of this long-term release. The new Plasma LTS uses less CPU and less memory than previous versions. The process of starting the Plasma desktop is now significantly faster.
VLC 3.0 — Network browsing for distant filesystems (SMB, FTP, SFTP, NFS...)
Nextcloud 13 — This release brings improvements to the core File Sync and Share like easier moving of files and a tech preview of our end-to-end encryption for the ultimate protection of your data. It also introduces collaboration and communication capabilities, like auto-complete of comments and integrated real-time chat and video communication.
Android x86 7.1 — It’s a full port of Android, instead of being more of an application player like other solutions.
Bliss-x86 Oreo 8.x
Changes coming to elementary OS AppCenter — One of the primary goals of developing AppCenter Dashboard was to build a sustainable app ecosystem. I don’t think it’s a surprise to anyone that although the AppCenter ecosystem is growing, nobody can make a living on it yet. That’s what we mean when we say “sustainable”. Writing apps is a real, hard, full-time job. If we want to see more high-quality, Open Source apps then we need to prioritize getting third-party app developers paid.
Elementary OS Juno will be version 5.0, not 0.5 — Among them a small yet appreciable bump to the version number. Yes elementary OS 0.5 Juno will actually be elementary OS 5.0.
Announcing “Project Things” — We kicked off “Project Things”, with the goal of building a decentralized ‘Internet of Things’ that is focused on security, privacy, and interoperability.
Nintendo Switch runs Linux — According to fail0verflow, there’s a flaw in the boot ROM in Nvidia’s Tegra X1 system-on-a-chip. when your console starts, it reads and executes a piece of code stored in a read-only memory (hence the name ROM). This code contains instructions about the booting process.

Linux Action News 39 Feb 03, 2018

Red Hat shakes up the container world with its CoreOS purchase. Skype ships as a snap and Chris has a report from Canonical's recent development sprint.

Plus more hardware for Plasma Mobile, Matrix gets a big boost, and the FSF receives a large Bitcoin donation.

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Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS, Expanding its Kubernetes and Containers Leadership — Red Hat today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc., an innovator and leader in Kubernetes and container-native solutions, for a purchase price of $250 million
TechSNAP Episode 353: Too Many Containers — We introduce you to Kubernetes, what problems it solves, why everyone is talking about it, and where it came from. Also who shouldn’t be using Kubernetes, and the problems you can run into when scaling it.
LibreOffice 6.0 Released — The release of LibreOffice 6.0 marks the first major update to the productivity suite since the LibreOffice 5.4 release back in July 2017. It also coincides with the anniversary of the very first release of LibreOffice in January 2011.
How do I test Plasma Mobile? (part 2) — Currently there are two possible ways of testing Plasma Mobile on an actual mobile device, Using postmarketOS Installing Halium and a KDE neon-based rootfs
GNOME and KDE in PureOS: diversity across devices — If we were doing short-term planning it would be easy to “just use Plasma” for the Librem 5, but that would undermine our long-term vision of having a consistent look/feel across all our devices, where GNOME/GTK+ is already the default and what we’ve invested in.
Purism considering UBports for the Librem 5
Purism Might Develop An X11-Free Wayland Compositor — We also reviewed and evaluated compositing managers and desktop shells that we could use for a phone UI. We aim to use only Wayland, trying to get rid of as much X11 legacy as we possibly can, for performance issues and for better security. From our discussions with GNOME maintainers of existing compositors and shells, we may be better off igniting a new compositor (upstreamed and backed by GNOME) in order to avoid the X11 baggage.
Matrix receives large investment — We’re delighted to announce that our friends at Status have made a major strategic investment ($5M) in New Vector: the company which currently employs most of the Matrix.org core team.
FSF receives large Bitcoin donation — The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced it has received a record-breaking charitable contribution of 91.45 Bitcoin from the Pineapple Fund, valued at $1 million at the time of the donation.

Linux Action News 38 Jan 28, 2018

Ubuntu is switching back to Xorg, Linus calls out Intel, and are the BSDs dying?

Plus how you can start testing Plasma Mobile, Pursim aims for convergence, and Mycroft is back!

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Plasma Mobile test ISOs — 44% poll participants wanting to test Plasma Mobile on their device, and/or as a virtual machine, or on real machine.
Purism aims for convergence — Upon successful completion of our funding campaign, we started to look for a Designer to take care of the user experience for the Librem 5, and a web developer to help us improve the look & feel (and more technical parts) of our website in general. Today, I’m glad to finally welcome them publicly!
Mycroft Mark 2 — What sets Mark II apart? It’s open source. This means your personal data stays private, you can customize your experience, and Mycroft is a neutral player in the voice game, allowing you to be confident in your personal preference of apps and skills.
Ubuntu 18.04 to revert to Xorg by default — We have decided that we will ship Xorg by default, and that Wayland will be an optional session available from the login screen.
Torvalds unhappy with Intel's response to Spectre — Instead of treating Spectre as a bug, the chip maker is offering Spectre protection as a feature.
Are the BSDs dying? — Too few eyeballs on code is a security issue as vulnerabilities go unreported and unpatched. Can FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD survive?

Linux Action News 37 Jan 21, 2018

A major open source milestone, some OnePlus users compromised, Google switches to Debian, and we have Spectre and Meltdown updates.

Plus what happened to NHoS, and more!

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Wine 3.0 Released — This includes in particular Direct3D 12 and Vulkan support, as well as OpenGL ES support to enable Direct3D on Android.
Oneplus pwned — One of our systems was attacked, and a malicious script was injected into the payment page code to sniff out credit card info while it was being entered.
Google moves to Debian for in-house Linux desktop — Google has officially confirmed the company is shifting its in-house Linux desktop from the Ubuntu-based Goobuntu to a new Linux distro, the DebianTesting-based gLinux.
Meltdown and Spectre Linux kernel status — Some “enterprise” distributions did not backport the changes for this reporting, so if you are running one of those types of kernels, go bug the vendor to fix that, you really want a unified way of knowing the state of your system.
Red Hat pulls microcode update — Which, er, sounds like Red Hat has given up and, to avoid any blame, has told its customers to just get whatever firmware your CPU maker is offering. And if it works, it works, and if it makes your box fall over, uh, don't look at Red Hat.
Red Hat: We Didn't Pull CPU Microcode Update — "It's actually an encrypted, signed binary image, so we don't have the capability, even if we wanted to produce microcode. It's a binary blob that we cannot generate. The only people who can actually generate that are the CPU vendors."
Ubuntu almost ready to patch against Spectre — This week we published candidate Ubuntu kernels providing mitigation for CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753 (ie, Spectre / Variants 1 & 2) to their respective -proposed pockets for Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful), 16.04 LTS (Xenial), and 14.04 LTS (Trusty).
Skyfall and Solace: Meltdown and Spectre are just the beginning — Skyfall and Solace are two speculative attacks based on the work highlighted by Meltdown and Spectre. Full details are still under embargo and will be published soon when chip manufacturers and Operating System vendors have prepared patches.
NHoS shut down — The small team behind an ambitious NHoS Linux project are calling it a day, citing receipt of a trademark infringement warning from the UK Department of Health's (DoH) "brand police" as the "final straw."

Linux Action News 36 Jan 14, 2018

Barcelona is switching to FOSS the right way, Nextcloud launches peer-to-peer encrypted video calls, big changes are coming to Google's AMP, and why the BSD camp is laughing at Linux this week.

Plus Fedora's new "primary architecture", Ubuntu 17.10 is back, and more.

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Barcelona to switch to FOSS — According to the news report, the city plans to first replace all its user applications with alternative open source applications. This will go on until the only remaining proprietary software will be Windows where it will finally be replaced with a Linux distribution.
Nextcloud Talk — We’re very proud to announce today Nextcloud Talk, the first enterprise-ready, self-hosted communication technology giving users the highest degree of control over their data and communication.
AMP changes aren't good enough for some web devs — The Web is not Google, and should not be just Google.
Ubuntu 17.10 ISOs available again — The Ubuntu 17.10.1 ISO re-spin is for disabling the SPI kernel driver to avoid messing up select laptops.
lkml.org is hosted on a home connection — The site's backend is hosted on a machine at home which is waiting for someone to enter a luks passphrase after a power outage while on vacation.
Bad news for the fans of lkml.org — Bad news for the fans of http://lkml.org : the main board of the server somehow did not survive the outage :( Expect prolonged downtime while I source replacement parts.
Fedora might make AArch64 a primary architecture — Fedora developers are looking to promote their AArch64 / ARM64 / ARMv8 server offerings to being a "primary architecture" for this next Fedora release.

Linux Action News 35 Jan 07, 2018

We start with good news, fun speculation, and an open source success story. Then we get into Meltdown and Spectre.

Plus we follow up on the lawsuit that could split the community, and then we eat some Bitcoin humble pie.

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UBports release OTA 3 — This update brings some new features and bug fixes atop the Ubuntu Touch 15.04 base. New features include some new packages requested by the community, the default start page and search provider was changed over to DuckDuckGo, and not displaying the keyboard when working with multiple windows. This over-the-air update has also removed the Ubuntu Store from the App Scope.
Ubuntu Touch working on Android app support — “Project Anbox”. Anbox - a shorted form of ‘Android-in-a-Box” - is a community effort which allows Android apps to execute in a container in a more native way rather than the more common approach of using an Android emulator,
LEDE and OpenWrt merge — The merged project will use the code base of the former LEDE project.
Fuchsia available for the Pixelbook — Fuchsia—which only started development in 2016—is Google's third operating system after Chrome OS and Android.
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. While programs are typically not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programs. This might include your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents.
Law Center and Conservancy updates — Because the SFLC has amended its trademark cancellation petition with a fraud claim, the SFC's motion to toss the complaint must be refiled after the fraud issue been considered.

Linux Action News 34 Dec 19, 2017

Our top 4 predictions for Linux in 2018, and then we shift gears and give you the top 6 things we hope just might happen.

Plus we put hard numbers on the highs and lows of Bitcoin during 2018.

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Linux Action News 33 Dec 18, 2017

Chris and Joe look back at the big news stories of 2017, some notable trends, the changes that impacted Desktop Linux users, and the topics that dominated the community discussion.

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Arch Drops 32 bit — The decision means that February ISO will be the last that allows to install 32 bit Arch Linux. The next 9 months are deprecation period, during which i686 will be still receiving upgraded packages. Starting from November 2017, packaging and repository tools will no longer require that from maintainers, effectively making i686 unsupported.
Tails 3.0 will require a 64-bit processor — We have waited for years until we felt it was the right time to do this switch. Still, this was a hard decision for us to make.
Ubuntu 17.10 Will Drop The 32-bit Desktop ISO — There will no longer be any "ubuntu-desktop-i386.iso" produced. There is no longer any effective QA or testing being done on the Ubuntu i386 desktop image on actual 32-bit-only hardware.
Munich voted to return to Windows — Munich city council's administrative and personnel committee has decided to move any remaining Linux systems to Windows 10 in 2020.
WSL added new distros and became easier to install — At its Build 2017 developer conference today, Microsoft announced that Ubuntu has arrived in the Windows Store
Bitcoin Forked — It was created by Bitcoin supporters worried about growing congestion in the mainstream bitcoin network that has led to slow payment processing and high fees. Bitcoin Cash removes an important technical obstacle that has hampered the growth of the mainline Bitcoin network. In principle, that could allow Bitcoin Cash to become more widely used—and hence more valuable—in the long run.
And Forked Again — The trouble began earlier this year when a group of cryptocurrency upstarts cloned Bitcoin to create their own version, called Bitcoin Cash. The split, called a "hard fork," came after a long and acrimonious disagreement about how to get Bitcoin to handle more traffic failed to resolve amicably. Now, another group of Bitcoiners wants to create yet another version of the world's most popular digital money on October 25. They're calling it Bitcoin Gold.
And jumped around 20x in value this year — Bitcoin is now worth over $10,000. The cryptocurrency, which crossed the milestone for the first time since its creation in 2008, surged past $10,000 on Tuesday evening as it climbs toward $11,000, according to research site CoinDesk. Bitcoin has spiked 933 percent since the beginning of the year, when it traded at $968.23, reports the Wall Street Journal.
The Ubuntu announcement that dominated the year — This has been, personally, a very difficult decision, because of the force of my conviction in the convergence future, and my personal engagement with the people and the product, both of which are amazing. We feel like a family, but this choice is shaped by commercial constraints, and those two are hard to reconcile.
Cyanogenmod became Lineage OS — A new fork of CyanogenMod called Lineage OS is taking up the mantle, and it will keep most of what you loved about CyanogenMod.
Sailfish carried on — Today it’s our pleasure to announce all the details for Sailfish X, aka Sailfish OS for Sony Xperia X!
Android took a step towards solving the updates problem — With Android O, we've been working very closely with device makers and silicon manufacturers to take steps toward solving this problem, and we're excited to give you a sneak peek at Project Treble, the biggest change to the low-level system architecture of Android to date.
Librem 5 funded — This Monday, 14 days early, we have crossed a historic milestone.
Firefox OS officially died — Mozilla is shutting down its “connected devices” group, which was responsible for the failed smartphone operating system Firefox OS and, more recently, attempts to build the OS into devices like routers, streaming boxes, and even basic computers.
Mozilla acquired Pocket — Pocket will join Mozilla’s product portfolio as a new product line alongside the Firefox web browsers with a focus on promoting the discovery and accessibility of high quality web content.
Launched Firefox Focus — Firefox Focus allows you to browse the web without being followed by tracking ads which are notoriously known for slowing down your mobile experience.
Project Common Voice — Voice is natural, voice is human. That’s why we’re fascinated with creating usable voice technology for our machines. But to create voice systems, an extremely large amount of voice data is required.
Firefox Quantum — It’s by far the biggest update we’ve had since we launched Firefox 1.0 in 2004
Faced a lawsuit over their Yahoo deal — We recently exercised our contractual right to terminate our agreement with Yahoo based on a number of factors including doing what’s best for our brand, our effort to provide quality web search, and the broader content experience for our users.

Linux Action News 32 Dec 17, 2017

Mozilla violates users' trust, Amazon has a new Linux, OpenSSH is coming to Windows, and Intel blocks disabling of the Management Engine.

Plus an update on the Conservancy's fight with the Software Freedom Law Center and more.

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Introducing Amazon Linux 2 — Amazon Linux 2 provides a modern execution environment with LTS Kernel (4.9) tuned for optimal performance on Amazon Web Services (AWS), systemd support, and newer tooling (gcc 7.2.1, glibc 2.25, binutils 2.27).
Amazon Linux 2 Benchmarks — With Amazon AWS this week having released Amazon Linux 2 LTS I was excited to put this updated cloud-focused operating system through some performance tests to see how it stacks up with the more well known Linux distributions.
OpenSSH coming to Windows 10 — The software giant is now adding a native OpenSSH client to Windows 10. It’s available immediately as a beta option in the Fall Creators Update for Windows 10, and it’s easy to enable.
Not just the client — we also shipped OpenSSH's sshd server, but it's a little tricky to configure right now. Expect a blog post this week. * This is not production-ready in the current version of Windows 10 (hence the "(Beta)" in the label), but we hope to be soon.
Mozilla faces blowback after slipping Mr Robot plugin into Firefox — Firefox users noticed a strange new plug-in popping up in their browsers. A new plug-in called Looking Glass found its way into each instance of the new Firefox Quantum browser. It was disabled by default, but users were still alarmed to see a plugin they hadn’t installed.
Steve Klabnik on Twitter — I am pretty upset with my employer, @mozilla, today
Carol Nichols, Rus Dev on Twitter — "Mozilla wasn't paid for the Mr. Robot tie-in"
Intel to slap hardware lock on Management Engine code to thwart downgrade attacks — From version 12 onward, ME-equipped chips will defend against patch rollbacks.
Conservancy update on fight with Law Center — Today, Conservancy filed for summary judgment in SFLC's trademark cancellation action. As I understand from our lawyers, summary judgment is a mechanism to ask a Court to expediently handle a matter where the facts are straightforward and, as a matter of law, there is no plausible way that the party filing for summary judgment won't prevail.
TechSNAP reboot — Systems, Network, and Administration Podcast. Every week TechSNAP covers the stories that impact those of us in the tech industry, and all of us that follow it. Every episode we dedicate a portion of the show to answer audience questions, discuss best practices, and solving your problems.

Linux Action News 31 Dec 10, 2017

The Ghost of Yahoo and Mozilla go to battle, the right way to abandon a project, the coming UK Bitcoin crackdown, and Android GO is released to OEMs.

Plus the Intel ME situation that's much worse than previously known.

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Mozilla Files Cross-Complaint Against Yahoo Holdings and Oath — Yahoo Holdings and Oath filed a complaint against Mozilla on December 1, 2017, claiming that we improperly terminated the agreement between Mozilla and Yahoo. Today, in response, Mozilla filed a cross-complaint against Yahoo Holdings and Oath for breach of contract.
Mozilla tackles fake news — The boundaries between truth and fiction are becoming harder to define, in part because of the proliferation of fake news and other forms of misinformation. Mozilla wants to shed light on this by sponsoring public demonstrations, using mixed reality and other art media that make the power of misinformation and its potential impacts visible and visceral.
Classic Shell abandoned as open source — The source code is available at SourceForge, and the Classic Shell forum will remain online until the end of 2018 for folks that want to continue discussing the project.
UK and EU plan Bitcoin crackdown — The Treasury plans to regulate bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to bring them in line with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financial legislation. Traders will be forced to disclose their identities, ending the anonymity that has made the currency attractive for drug dealing and other illegal activities.
Android Go released to OEMs — Google’s stripped-down version of Android is ready for OEMs.
Mediatek announce Go optimized SoCs — MediaTek’s MT6739, MT6737, and MT6580 SoCs, among others, now have board support packages available to run Android Oreo (Go edition). This marks one of the first times that entry-level SoCs are ready to be used shortly after the latest version of Android.
Pwning Intel ME — The duo say they found a locally exploitable stack buffer overflow that allows the execution of unsigned code on any device with Intel ME 11, even if the device is turned off or protected by security software.

Linux Action News 30 Dec 03, 2017

Bitcoin breaks $10k and we ponder its true value, big companies join the compliance-first approach to GPLv2, we spot some red flags in the latest Raspbian x86 release, and Mozilla has a new open source project.

Plus Jolla gets in on the blockchain hype, and we clarify the Linux LTS situation.

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Bitcoin surges past $10k — Bitcoin has spiked 933 percent since the beginning of the year, when it traded at $968.23
Big companies join the compliance-first approach to GPLv2 — To provide greater predictability to users of open source software, Red Hat, Facebook, Google and IBM today each committed to extending the GPLv3 approach for license compliance errors to the software code that each licenses under GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 and v2.
LTS kernel support window clarified — Just because +Greg Kroah-Hartman is doing it for 4.4 does not mean that all LTS kernels from now on are going to be maintained for that long.
New x86 version of Raspbian Released — Today, we are launching the first Debian Stretch release of the Raspberry Pi Desktop for PCs and Macs, and we’re also releasing the latest version of Raspbian Stretch for your Pi.
LOL
Mozilla’s Open Source Speech Recognition Model and Voice Dataset — I’m excited to announce the initial release of Mozilla’s open source speech recognition model that has an accuracy approaching what humans can perceive when listening to the same recordings. We are also releasing the world’s second largest publicly available voice dataset, which was contributed to by nearly 20,000 people globally.
Mozilla still loaded — The State of Mozilla 2016 is our annual report. This report highlights activities for 2016 and is accompanied by detailed financials.
Jolla update — Sailfish X has been now out for six weeks

Linux Action News 29 Nov 26, 2017

Android tracking more invasive than previously known, Ubuntu wants your ideas for Mir, and Linus gets heated about Kernel security while we focus on the technical issue at the heart of the matter.

Plus a new magazine from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, several vulnerabilities in Intel's Management Engine, and more!

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Google collected location data from Android users who didn't know — In a nutshell, the whereabouts of every active Android phone and tablet in the world were tracked even with location services disabled and no carrier SIM card inserted.
Ubuntu want community input on Mir — However we’re also at the place where we need to reach out to the community and ask what are the aspects of your desktop that you value most, to help us figure out a direction for Mir.
New magazine from the Raspberry Pi Foundation - Hackspace — The first issue of HackSpace magazine is here! Join us as we explore thinking machines, build a trebuchet, learn how Arduino changed the world, see how far we can overclock a Raspberry Pi using liquid nitrogen, and much more…
Linus gets heated about kernel security — Linux Lord fires up over proposal to secure Linux by shutting down wonky processes
Then calmly explains his position — His long post on the matter suggested to security practitioners that “'Do no harm' should be your mantra for any new hardening work.”
Others act like children — So on the day of Kees' presentation, where he tried to drop a useless 0day on me and talk up how many upstream developers reviewed his code that did the same limitation *right*, I wrote an exploit of my own.
Vulnerability in Intel Management Engine — Remote attackers could launch commands on a host of Intel-based computers, including laptops and desktops shipped with Intel Core processors since 2015.

Linux Action News 28 Nov 19, 2017

Fedora goes modular, Firefox makes a quantum leap, and a Linux classic makes a come back.

Plus a big moment for the Kernel, Red Hat goes ARM, and OpenPlus has a backdoor with a twist.

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Fedora 27 released — The Workstation edition of Fedora 27 features GNOME 3.26. In the new release, both the Display and Network configuration panels have been updated, along with the overall Settings panel appearance improvement.
Firefox 57 arrives — It’s by far the biggest update we’ve had since we launched Firefox 1.0 in 2004
There's an option for people who don't like change — a fork of the Mozilla code-base pre-Servo/Rust... Basically for those not liking the direction of Firefox with v57 rolling out the Quantum changes, etc.
Ubuntu Unity 7 flavour might be on the horizon — A proposal to create a new community Ubuntu flavor which uses the Unity 7 desktop by default is gathering support within the Ubuntu community.
LTS kernel 4.14 released — Anyway, go out and test the new 4.14 release, that is slated to be the next LTS kernel - and start sending me pull request for the 4.15 merge window.
RISC-V support may be coming to 4.15 — RISC-V is hoping to see mainline with Linux 4.15. We've known for a while now about their mainline ambitions for 4.15 and a pull request was sent today, but it remains to be seen yet if Linus Torvalds will pull it for this merge window.
Red Hat announces ARM version of RHEL — Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 for ARM, the first commercial release for this architecture.
Oneplus backdoor — OnePlus accidentally left in place a diagnostic testing application made by Qualcomm. After decompiling this application, he discovered that it can be exploited to grant root access—effectively acting as a backdoor.

Linux Action News 27 Nov 11, 2017

New details show Linux on Galaxy phones further along than expected, Bitcoin's bad week explained, and CrossOver enables Windows apps, on ChromeOS.

Plus Canonical puts out a call for help, Munich votes to return to Windows, and Steam on Linux turns 5.

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SegWit2x Bitcoin fork called off — "Although we strongly believe in the need for a larger blocksize, there is something we believe is even more important: keeping the community together," Belshe said. "Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean blocksize upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin’s growth."
Eco friendly Bitcoin competitor announced — Cohen has just started a new company called Chia Network that will launch a cryptocurrency based on proofs of time and storage rather than bitcoin’s electricity-burning proofs of work. Essentially, Chia will harness cheap and abundant unused storage space on hard drives to verify its blockchain.
More Linux On Galaxy details — Described as a “Concept Demo”, the vid has a couple of interesting moments.
CrossOver enables Windows apps on ChromeOS — CodeWeavers has now announced the availability of their Wine-powered CrossOver software for Chrome OS.
Canonical wants volunteers to create art for Ubuntu — A new theme based on Adwaita, the default GNOME GTK theme.
Steam Linux client turns 5 — It was on 6 November 2012 when the Steam Linux beta roll-out began and gained more steam as the year came to a close.
Munich votes to return to Windows — That means, that Munich will transition to Microsoft Windows 10 in a 2 year phase (till 2020) on 29,000 pcs. The cost for this transition is actually confidential, but is estimated to be more than 100 million euros (more than 116 million US dollars).
Apple relicenses CUPS — The CUPS Common UNIX Printing System up to now had been developed under the GPLv2 license while now Apple will be switching it to the Apache 2.0 software license.

Linux Action News 26 Nov 05, 2017

It's a week of red flags and success. The Plasma Mobile project sets humble goals, Firefox learns new tricks, a TOR flaw for Linux users, and Canonical joins the Gnome Advisory Board.

Plus a new report claims every Bitcoin transaction uses as much energy as your house in a week, and two legal matters that may have long-term impacts on the Linux community.

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Plasma Mobile Roadmap — Our development strategy is to build a basic system and platform around our core values first and then extend this.
Librem 5 progressing with Plasma Mobile — In general, Plasma Mobile already provides a usable (albeit alpha-quality) mobile interface today. The Qt Quick/QML based Kirigami component library and interface guidelines also provide a nice framework for mobile application developers
Firefox to remove canvas fingerprinting — The Mozilla Foundation is boosting privacy in an upcoming version of its Firefox browser by removing the snooping capability called canvas fingerprinting, a method of tracking users across multiple websites.
Tor flaw: TorMoil — TorMoil threatens Mac and Linux versions of Tor browser; Windows and Tails not affected.
Canonical joins GNOME Foundation Advisory Board — The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce that Canonical, creator of the Ubuntu operating system, has joined the GNOME Foundation advisory board.
SCO vs. IBM Lives on — As Groklaw records, this case kicked off in 2003. The dispute centres on “Project Monterey” a joint effort by SCO and IBM to build a unified UNIX capable of running on several different microprocessor architectures. SCO – at that time known as the Santa Cruz Operation – sold versions of UNIX and tossed some of its source code into the Project Monterey mix, as did IBM. The parties signed a “joint development agreement” (JDA) to formalise the deal.
SFLC files a suit against Conservancy — This trademark action is in its early stages. SFLC filed a petition on September 22. Yesterday, we provided an answer that lists defenses that we plan to use.

Linux Action News 25 Oct 28, 2017

Big changes coming to Linux Mint, hope for ZFS upstream in Linux, and Mozilla helps out TOR. Plus how Russia may help legitimize cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and Solus makes a call for help.

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Mint to add Flatpak support — The project says the upcoming release of Linux Mint 18.3 will come with “full support” for Flatpak out of the box. This will include integration with the Linux Mint Software Manager.
Drop KDE edition — The Linux Mint crew has confirmed today they will be discontinuing future releases of their KDE spin following next month's Linux Mint 18.3 release.
Oracle Could Still Make ZFS A First-Class Upstream Linux File-System — Mark wants to see ZFS become a core part of Linux. He wants it to become "the file-system of Linux" and "that could happen" for "core Linux." He later said, "it's a possibility... but I can't say how strong of a possibility," that includes talking with Oracle lawyers about the code license of both ZFS and Solaris.
Open ZFS File-System Running On Windows
Google Play Protect isn't very good at spotting malware — When exposed to recent Android malware samples, six of the 20 software suites sampled correctly flagged every single one as evil and prevented them from running. Eight more managed a 99 per cent or higher hit rate. Google's own system, Play Protect, only detected 65.8 per cent of threats.
Mozilla helps out TOR and so can you — Today we’re launching our end-of-year crowdfunding campaign, “Powering Digital Resistance,” highlighting Tor’s work protecting essential human rights around the world. As part of this end-of-year campaign, Mozilla is matching donations up to a total of $500,000 -- so your donation to the Tor Project will go twice as far!
Solus looking for help with aesthetics for Solus 4 — If you wanna help us improve the default experience for the next ISO, or you've some mad creative skills, let us know!
Steam VR Marketshare Already Larger Than Steam Linux Marketshare — Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais‏ who is heavily involved in their Linux efforts as well as those around virtual reality has commented the VR market-share is already larger than the entire Steam Linux market-share.
Putin Will Require Cryptocurrency Miners to Register With the Government — After months of conflicting statements, Russia has finally outlined its plan for cryptocurrencies.

Linux Action News 24 Oct 22, 2017

The Linux desktop on Samsung phones, Intel ME disabled on Purism laptops, big Kernel news, and Ubuntu 17.10 is out.

Plus our brief thoughts on the new Ubuntu release, its various flavors, an important milestone, and the larger Open Source story.

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Samsung enable Linux on their phones — Linux desktops will become available if users plug their phones into the DeX Station, the device that lets a Galaxy 8 run a Samsung-created desktop-like environment when connected to the DeX and an external monitor
Purism Now Shipping Their Laptops With Intel ME Disabled — Purism has announced today all laptops to be shipping from their company will now have the Intel Management Engine (ME) disabled.
Purism partner with Nextcloud on end-to-end encrypted storage — Purism plans to include Nextcloud in the Librem 5 phone, as well as within PureOS for its Librem 13 and Librem 15 laptops. Additionally, Purism will be discussing with Nextcloud about a future Purism NAS that runs completely free software including Nextcloud and services.
LVFS/fwupd need donations — At the moment the secure part of the LVFS is hosted in a dedicated Scaleway instance, so any additional donations would be spent on paying this small bill and perhaps more importantly buying some (2nd hand?) hardware to include as part of our release-time QA checks.
Linux Kernel Community Enforcement Statement — It adopts the same termination provisions we are all familiar with from GPL-3.0 as an Additional Permission giving companies confidence that they will have time to come into compliance if a failure is identified. Their ability to rely on this Additional Permission will hopefully re-establish user confidence and help direct enforcement activity back to the original purpose we have all sought over the years – actual compliance.
Ubuntu 17.10 released — Under the hood, there have been updates to many core packages, including a new 4.13-based kernel, glibc 2.26, gcc 7.2, and much more. Ubuntu Desktop has had a major overhaul, with the switch from Unity as our default desktop to GNOME3 and gnome-shell.
Happy 13th Birthday — Ubuntu 4.10 ‘Warty Warthog’ wasn’t the most glamorous looking release, but it offered open-source enthusiasts of the day a simple, straightforward install from a single CD. The distro was notable for trying to “detect as much hardware as possible, simplifying the X install.” GNOME 2.8, Firefox 0.9, Evolution 2.0 and OpenOffice.org 1.1.2 were among the software assembled for the formative release.
Ubuntu MATE — After six months of tireless work we present Ubuntu MATE 17.10, by far the best release we’ve ever produced.
Xubuntu — Accelerated video playback with Intel hardware should now work more reliably out of the box.

Linux Action News 23 Oct 14, 2017

Fixing Steam on Linux for good, new toys for Fedora and Plasma users, OnePlus gets busted & the Librem 5 gets funded.

Plus some key project updates & more!

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Solus pushing forward Steam with Snaps — That snap, as some people have already guessed as much, will be the linux-steam-integration project, using a strict-mode LSI intercept module. We can also make various tweaks on top of that runtime to enforce ABI compatibility where it might be missing.
AAC will be supported in Fedora Workstation 27 — What we will be shipping in Fedora is a modified version of the AAC implementation released by Google, which was originally written by Frauenhoffer. On top of that we will of course be providing GStreamer plugins to enable full support for playing and creating AAC files for GStreamer applications.
Plasma 5.11 released — Plasma 5.11 brings a redesigned settings app, improved notifications, a more powerful task manager. Plasma 5.11 is the first release to contain the new “Vault”, a system to allow the user to encrypt and open sets of documents in a secure and user-friendly way, making Plasma an excellent choice for people dealing with private and confidential information.
5.12 aims for Wayland improvements — If we all just use Wayland and report and fix the bugs we run into I'm sure that 5.12 will be an awesome release on Wayland. So please help to make it happen!
KDE turns 21 — t was on 14 October 1996 that the "Kool Desktop Environment" was founded by Matthias Ettrich. At the time he wanted KDE to be a "consistent, nice looking free desktop-environment."
Fwupd 1.0 Released — fwupd now supports 72 different kinds of hardware, support for another ~12 devices is currently being worked on, many vendors continue using or exploring fwupd, and around 165,000 devices each month get updated firmware using fwupd with LVFS.
Oneplus collecting data in Oxygen OS — Moore discovered that some of the data being sent to OnePlus' servers included the phone's IMEI number, the phone number, MAC addresses, mobile network names and IMSI prefixes, Wi-Fi connection info, and the phone's serial number.
Say they'll stop — By the end of October, “all OnePlus phones running OxygenOS will have a prompt in the setup wizard that asks users if they want to join our user experience program.” Not only that, but he also stated that OnePlus “will no longer be collecting telephone numbers, MAC Addresses and WiFi information.
Librem 5 funded — 14 days early, we have crossed a historic milestone.
Purism Collaborates with Cryptocurrency Monero — The Monero Project is a grassroots, community-driven initiative that advocates for privacy on a global scale by producing several free libre open source software projects, with the flagship offering being Monero, a fungible and decentralized cryptocurrency.

Linux Action News 22 Oct 07, 2017

Google's new hardware fails to impress, Sailfish X becomes a reality, and the most disappointing thing about Munich's slide back to proprietary software.

Plus why Bitcoin Gold is the people's coin, Oracle advises the White House against FOSS, and ChromeOS gets a grownup Linux feature.

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Google Announce new Hardware — Google announced the new Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL; an interesting new camera called Google Clips; a new Google Home Mini and Max; a Pixelbook, and an updated Google Daydream.
Chrome OS gets a lot more interesting — This component, known as crosvm, runs untrusted operating systems along with virtualized devices. No actual hardware is emulated. This only runs VMs through the Linux's KVM interface.
Sailfish X becomes a reality — Jolla have released the Sailfish X product page and the Jolla shop (which at the moment is dedicated to the selling of Sailfish X).
First 64-bit RISC-V SOC released — The processor is intended for AI, machine learning, networking, gateways and smart IoT devices.
Oracle advises White House against FOSS — Silicon Valley is comprised of IT vendors most of which fail. The USG is not a technology vendor nor is it a start-up. Under no circumstance should the USG attempt to become a technology vendor
Munich starts move back to Microsoft products — "The city will use MS Exchange. It will be used for mail and calendar, so Kolab will not be used anymore," said the source, adding that the switch will take place in November.
Bitcoin Gold — The fork mainly seems to be a reaction to widespread ire directed at one Bitcoin mining giant in particular, China-based Bitmain. Bitmain was an important player in the Bitcoin Cash fork.

Linux Action News 21 Oct 01, 2017

Atari has a Linux powered console, some brief Ubuntu updates, and the biggest Kernel news in years.

Then we consider the recent smattering of opinion pieces on Microsoft's commitment to Open Source.

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New Atari console runs Linux — The Ataribox is powered by a ‘customised’ AMD processor and uses Radeon graphics. On the software side the machine runs a ‘customised’ version of Linux that has an “easy-to-use user interface”.
Ubuntu 17.10 final beta — Artful Final Beta includes updated versions of most of our core set of packages, including a current 4.13 kernel
Ubuntu 17.10 Will Drop The 32-bit Desktop ISO — There will no longer be any "ubuntu-desktop-i386.iso" produced. There is no longer any effective QA or testing being done on the Ubuntu i386 desktop image on actual 32-bit-only hardware.
Announcing the XFree KWin project — The idea is to be able to start KWin/Wayland without XWayland support.
6 year LTS kernel — Linux LTS releases will now be maintained for six years.
Nextcloud Introducing Native Integrated End-to-end Encryption — Nextcloud End-to-end Encryption keeps the server from ever seeing the data while still facilitating syncing between devices and sharing with other users.
SQL Server lands on Linux for the first time — Microsoft hit a major milestone today with the official general availability of SQL Server on Linux.
Microsoft Rolls Out A Preview Of The New Skype For Linux — This long-awaited Skype for Linux update brings screen sharing, group chat, and other features not recently available under the current Skype for Linux client. This new Linux client is part of their effort to "rebuild Skype from the ground up with cloud technology."
Microsoft becomes a sponsor of the Open Source Initiative — As a premium sponsor, Microsoft joins the likes of Google, IGM, HPE, AdblockPlus, GitHub and Heptio as top sponsors of the project. Other sponsors at lower levels include RedHat, The Linux Foundation, Mozilla and HP.
When Microsoft met SUSE: This Windows-Linux partnership gets stronger every day — Microsoft SQL Server, which just became available on Linux, is also available on SLES and SLES on Azure on October 2.
Will Microsoft love Linux to death? Shuttleworth and Stallman. — "It certainly looks that way. But it won't be so easy to extinguish us, because our reasons for using and advancing free software are not limited to practical convenience," he said.

Linux Action News 20 Sep 24, 2017

GNOME endorses the Librem 5, Replicant and UBports support more devices, Pipewire is major news for video on Linux, EFF walks away from W3C over DRM, Facebook reacts to community pressure, and Red Hat expands their Patent promise.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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GNOME officially on board for the Librem 5 — The GNOME Foundation is committed to partnering with Purism to create hackfests, tools, emulators, and build awareness that surround moving GNOME/GTK onto the Librem 5 phone.
Replicant expands list of supported devices — A few months have passed since the initial Replicant 6.0 release and it’s time for another one. This release more than doubles the number of supported devices and contains a few important fixes and improvements.
UBports release OTA 2 — The UBports project is excited to announce the immediate availability of Ubuntu Touch 15.04 OTA-2. This is a huge release for the Ubuntu Touch platform, bringing new supported devices, new features, and many bug fixes.
Launching Pipewire! — Pipewire is the latest creation of GStreamer co-creator Wim Taymans. The original reason it was created was that we realized that as desktop applications would be moving towards primarly being shipped as containerized Flatpaks we would need something for video similar to what PulseAudio was doing for Audio.
EFF quits W3C over Encrypted Media Extensions — In 2013, EFF was disappointed to learn that the W3C had taken on the project of standardizing “Encrypted Media Extensions,” an API whose sole function was to provide a first-class role for DRM within the Web browser ecosystem. By doing so, the organization offered the use of its patent pool, its staff support, and its moral authority to the idea that browsers can and should be designed to cede control over key aspects from users to remote parties.
Facebook finally caves on react.js license — Next week, we are going to relicense our open source projects React, Jest, Flow, and Immutable.js under the MIT license. We're relicensing these projects because React is the foundation of a broad ecosystem of open source software for the web, and we don't want to hold back forward progress for nontechnical reasons.
Red Hat Announces Broad Expansion to Open Source Patent Promise — The expanded Patent Promise, while consistent with Red Hat’s prior positions, breaks new ground in expanding the amount of software covered and otherwise clarifying the scope of the promise. Red Hat believes its updated Patent Promise represents the broadest commitment to protecting the open source software community to date.

Linux Action News 19 Sep 16, 2017

Gnome users have something to celebrate, Purism and KDE are working together, and Manjaro has some hardware.

Plus why we're not too worried about BlueBourne, the fight for public money to fund public code, and a new power tool for Firefox users.

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GNOME 3.26 — The GNOME Project is excited to announce the release of version 3.26, the latest version of GNOME 3. The new version is the result of six months’ hard work by the GNOME community, and comes packed with improvements and new features.
GNOME 3.26 Release Notes — GNOME 3.26 no longer shows status icons in the bottom-left of the screen. This prevents the status icon tray from getting in the way and is expected to provide a better overall experience.
Purism and KDE to Work Together — Having full access to Purism's hardware platform is a dream for the KDE community.
Relevant Email 1 — One of the open questions for the phone is still which UX we will use, and Plasma Mobile would obviously be a perfect fit for this kind of project, since KDE and Purism share the same values, the UI is already done in large parts, and nothing would have to be developed from scratch (especially the Kirigami controls are great!).
Relevant Email 2 — To make clear our standpoint - both GNOME and KDE *will* be first class citizen on Librem5. So there is no favorite between two, but both are equal in this challenge.
BlueBorne — The attack does not require the targeted device to be paired to the attacker’s device, or even to be set on discoverable mode.
Public Money, Public Code — We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well.
Multi-Account Containers extension for Firefox — The Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension lets you carve out a separate box for each of your online lives

Linux Action News 18 Sep 10, 2017

Why AsteroidOS on your wrist is worth watching, what Project Treble means for future custom ROMs, Debian's Docker dominance, and why China might shut down Bitcoin exchanges.

Plus how NGINX plans to make big money, Mozilla wants to reinvent online comments, and more.

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Connnect Watch smartwatch with AsteroidOS crowdfunding campaign begins — First unveiled in late August, the team behind the Connect Watch have launched a campaign on European crowdfunding site Ulule in hopes of raising about $33,000.
Sailfish meetup in Krakow — We are inviting you to a meetup with our CEO, Mr. Sami Pienimäki in the city of Kraków on Thursday, September 14th for a round or two of beer!
What Project Treble Means for Future Custom ROM Development — Because of the way the lower layer of Android was modularized, all Treble devices in the market will be able to boot a generic stock, AOSP Android build. This takes away most of the hassle of porting custom ROMs to an older device since a single, generic Android build can run on many devices.
Mozilla and the Washington Post Are Reinventing Online Comments — Talk is developed by The Coral Project, a Mozilla creation that builds open-source tools to make digital journalism more inclusive and more engaging
Chinese government bans ICOs — The ruling comes from China’s central bank, which issued a statement criticizing ICOs for “disrupting” the country’s financial order. The regulator described initial coin offerings as “a form of unapproved illegal public financing” that “raises suspicions” of fraud and criminal activity
Might shut down Bitcoin exchanges — China’s Bitcoin exchanges said on Saturday they are still awaiting clarification from the authorities on a media report that they will be shut down.
WinBtrfs 1.0 Released For Supporting Btrfs On Windows — Harmstone's WinBtrfs driver is a "reimplementation from scratch" of Btrfs for Windows that supports all major functionality as well as basic RAID 0/1/10/5/6, caching, Btrfs partition discovery, ACLs, symlinks and hardlinks, free-space cache, LZO/ZLib compression, balancing, scrubbing, TRIM/DISCARD, and much more.
A Breakdown of Operating Systems on Dockerhub — It is clear that Debian is the most popular, with Alpine taking second place, and then a number of others each taking a smaller share.
NGINX releases application platform with new application server, centralized management tools — Today, NGINX launched its new NGINX Application Platform, a suite of products which together, form a solution made up of application delivery, an application server, and policy-driven monitoring and management.

Linux Action News 17 Sep 03, 2017

An Ubuntu developer event is happening soon, 17.10 Beta 1 has dropped for most of the flavours, Reddit closes its source while Phoenix OS opens theirs, Google getting serious about kernel updates in Android, Essential need to up their game, Blockchain is serious business and Linux desktop marketshare hits a new high.

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Ubuntu Rally in NYC — The Ubuntu Rally, taking place in New York City September 25th-29th, is a forward-thinking five day software hackathon attended by major software vendors, Ubuntu developers working at every level of the stack, and community contributors.
17.10 Beta 1 of Ubuntu flavours released — The first beta is available today for the Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" release for the flavors opting in to participate in this development milestone ahead of the official launch in October.
Reddit closes its source — Open-source makes it hard for us to develop some features "in the clear" (like our recent video launch) without leaking our plans too far in advance. As Reddit is now a larger player on the web, it is hard for us to be strategic in our planning when everyone can see what code we are committing.
Phoenix OS urged to open source their kernel — So a dedicated fan of the platform, Karol Putra, has created a Change.org petition in hopes that it will change their minds.
Petition update · Victory! — It's most likely really the Phoenix OS kernel as it carries slight unique modifications in comparison to Android-x86 and it's forks
Google mandates 4.4+ kernel for Oreo — Starting this year with smartphones which ship with Android Oreo, Google is requiring that all SoCs productized in 2017 must launch with kernel 4.4 or newer.
Essential underdelivers — Essential – a device, marketing team, and CEO that seem to blur the lines between fact and fiction and possible and impossible
Then Essential royally screws up — Dozens of customers replied with their personal information, but those emails didn’t just go to Essential. Instead, they went out to everybody who had received the original email.
Blockchain is big in big business — Hundreds of projects have collectively raised more than a billion dollars through “initial coin offerings” (ICOs). There are now tokens funding every conceivable endeavor
Linux creeps above 3% browser marketshare — According to Net Applications' Netmarketshare, the Linux market share on the desktop as judged by browser interactions may now be above 3%.

Linux Action News 16 Aug 26, 2017

New Linux hardware, Purism's Librem 5, and Jolla's €50 Sailfish ROM.

Plus Chris' quick take on Android Oreo, Google goes for Microsoft's heart, while Microsoft gets cozier with Red Hat and SUSE pretends not to be upset about it.

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Ubuntu Budgie machines — UK-based computer outfit Nimbusoft is gearing up to sell two laptops and an all-in-one desktop PC pre-loaded with the aforementioned nimble, GNOME-based Ubuntu spin.
Librem 5 — The Librem 5 phone will be the world's first ever IP-native mobile handset, using end-to-end encrypted decentralized communication.
Jolla wants to try and sell a development ROM for €50 — Today it’s our pleasure to announce all the details for Sailfish X, aka Sailfish OS for Sony Xperia X!
Android Oreo — Android Oreo brings with it a host of new features and improvements over Android Nougat. While not all of them would be immediately visible to end users, they would surely contribute towards the end experience of a mature smartphone OS.
Chrome OS enterprise edition — The paid service will allow companies to manage multiple devices running Chrome, and includes support for Microsoft Active Directory and VMware Workspace One, as well as managed or custom storefronts in the Play service.
Microsoft and Red Hat expand alliance to containers — Red Hat and Microsoft have expanded an alliance which was first announced about two years ago, with plans to help organisations more easily adopt the use of containers.
SUSE pretends not to be butthurt — Asked where SUSE stood in view of the fact that Red Hat, whose revenue dwarfs that of the Germany company, would obviously be a preferred partner for Microsoft, a company spokesman said, pointing to the announcement of the deal: "I don't see where it says Red Hat is 'preferred'. Perhaps I'm missing something."
and holds firm on Btrfs — SUSE is committed to btrfs as the default filesystem for SUSE Linux Enterprise, and beyond.

Linux Action News 15 Aug 19, 2017

A big batch of Debian updates, Gnome turns 20, Joe's report from OggCamp, the Solus trifecta, encrypted ZFS comes to Linux finally, and Bitcoin is forking, again.

Plus some thoughts on tiny Linux computers, the Linage survey and more.

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GNOME turns 20 — There have been 33 stable releases since the initial release of GNOME 1.0 in 1999.
Debian turns 24
Raspbian Stretch has arrived for Raspberry Pi — PulseAudio is therefore no longer installed by default, and the volume plugin on the taskbar will no longer start and stop PulseAudio.
Work on Debian for mobile devices continues — Work on Debian for mobile devices, i.e. telephones, tablets, and handheld computers, continues. During the recent DebConf17 in Montréal, Canada, more than 50 people had a meeting to reconsider opportunities and challenges for Debian on mobile devices.
Lineage summer survey — The survey is really simple and we won’t collect any sensitive information.
Solus 3 Released — On behalf of the Solus team and community, we’re extremely proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 3. This is the third iteration of Solus since our move to become a rolling release operating system.
ZFS On Linux Adds Encryption Support — This support allows creating and managing natively-encrypted datasets. There have been ZOL patches going back months for encryption
Bitcoin Is Forking. Again. — Three months from now, there will likely be three different versions of bitcoin all attempting to prepare the currency for more traffic in different ways.
Henry Brade Call for a Fight Against SegWit2x on Twitter — The SegWit2X hard fork scheduled for Nov is an attempted hostile corporate takeover of the #Bitcoin protocol.

Linux Action News 14 Aug 12, 2017

Flatpak and snap get the Solus boost, Ubuntu's community is getting a remake, and development on Ubuntu 17.10 has taken an interesting turn.

Plus more good news for Firefox users, and why Google's "streaming OS updates" could be great for the Android ROM community.

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Snaps in Solus — Occurs to me that I likely have to make some kind of statement or whathaveyou about the whole "Solus adopting snaps" thing.
Ubuntu Community Hub Proposal — I propose we replace the Community Portal with a dynamic and collaboratively maintained site. The site would raise the profile of conversations and content, to improve our onboarding and communication issues.
Ubuntu Artful Desktop Fit and Finish Sprint — First up is the Desktop Fit & Finish Sprint on August 24th and 25th.
50% CPU savings w/Hardware Accelerated Video Playback — We’re testing some patches to Chromium 60 in Artful to enable video acceleration and we’re seeing roughly a 50% saving in CPU overhead when using VA API.
Nextcloud push into education — Today we are very proud to officially announce the Nextcloud Education Edition, developed in collaboration with Moodle, DeiC, regio iT, the TU Berlin and Univention.
Firefox 55 — Performance changes include significantly faster startup times when restoring lots of tabs and settings that let users take greater control of our new multi-process architecture. We’ve also upgraded the address bar to make finding what you want easier, with search suggestions and the integration of our one-click search feature, and safer, by prioritizing the secure - https - version of sites when possible.
Firefox 55 Advanced Performance Features — Firefox 55 introduces several new low-level capabilities that help improve the performance of demanding web applications
Epiphany gets Firefox Sync — You can sync bookmarks, history, passwords, and open tabs with other Epiphany instances and as well as both desktop and mobile Firefox.
Photon UI — Version 57 of Firefox is slated to be released sometime in November and the biggest user facing change is its new user interface.
Android 8.0’s “streaming OS updates” will work even if your phone is full | Ars Technica — Starting with Android 8.0, the A/B system partition setup is being upgraded with a "streaming updates" feature. Update data will arrive from the Internet directly to the offline system partition, written block by block, in a ready-to-boot state.

Linux Action News 13 Aug 06, 2017

Surprising details in how Ubuntu's Gnome desktop is getting implemented, Krita hits some troubles but the community comes to the rescue, Bitcoin splits, Firefox sends, and Red Hat gives up on Btrfs.

Plus Amazon accuses BLU of spying on Android users, and more!

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Krita Foundation in Trouble — This means that the tax authorities see the Foundation is as partly a company, partly as not a company.
The Krita community came to the rescue — We didn’t expect the incredible response from all of you! A day later, over 500 awesome people have donated a total of €9562 (at the time of writing, check the fancy progress bar we’ve finally managed to create!). Fourteen people have joined the development fund, too!
More details about the GNOME experience in Ubuntu 17.10 — e will implement thus our modifications as a GNOME Shell mode
Some BLU phones still phoning home to China — BLU released a software update to address the issue, but Kryptowire researchers told CNET recently that some BLU phones still are still running the offending software… and Amazon has responded by suspending sales of all BLU phone models until the issue is resolved
Or are They? — The reason data is being sent to a Chines server is because BLU is using an over-the-air update service called Adups, which is based in China, and which allows some phone makers to request a lot of personal data from users’ phones. But after a related report from Kryptowire in 2016, BLU decided to start using Google’s OTA update service on newer devices.
Bitcoin Cash split — It was created by Bitcoin supporters worried about growing congestion in the mainstream bitcoin network that has led to slow payment processing and high fees.
Firefox Send — Send files through a safe, private, and encrypted link that automatically expires to ensure your stuff does not remain online forever.
Firefox Test Pilot — Try out the latest experimental features
Red Hat gives up on Btrfs? — The Btrfs file system has been in Technology Preview state since the initial release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Red Hat will not be moving Btrfs to a fully supported feature and it will be removed in a future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat acquires Permabit — Permabit offers data de-duplication and compression software and recently cooked ready-to-run Linux kernel modules of its wares after previously focusing on sales to OEMs.

Linux Action News 12 Jul 29, 2017

A good week for desktop Linux with news from Ubuntu, Fedora & openSUSE.

Plus our take on the pending death of Flash, some great work by the Debian project & Mozilla updates us on Project Common Voice.

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Ubuntu MATE 17.10 Alpha 2 — We’re not happy, proud, pleased or ambivalent to announce this alpha. No, not us. The is our most “Super” alpha ever and we’re ecstatic to present this fine release for your distro delectation. Ubuntu MATE 17.10 is brimming with new toys to play with.
Uptake of Fedora 26 is really strong — It's already surpassed F24 and those of you still on F23.
Boltron preview — Fedora’s Modularity Working Group (and others) have been working for a while on a Fedora Objective.
openSUSE Leap 42.3 — “By avoiding major version updates in the base system as well as the desktops, the upgrade to Leap 42.3 is a rather unadventurous matter,” said Ludwig Nussel, openSUSE Leap release manager.
The death of Flash — Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
Some people don’t want it to die — Open sourcing Flash spec would be a good solution to keep Flash projects alive safely for archive reasons.
Update on Debian Reproducible Builds Project — At the start of 2015 it was safe to say that Debian was fairly alone in the quest for reproducible builds, and a relevant number of developers were unconvinced by the effort's goals. Thankfully, this is not true anymore.
More on Mozilla’s Project Common Voice — Today’s speech recognition technologies are largely tied up in a few companies that have invested heavily in them.

Linux Action News 11 Jul 22, 2017

Android for the desktop might be dead, Google Glass is back, the latest Firefox usage data is devastating & the next Ubuntu is ready for a shakedown.

Plus a quick look at Phoenix OS & the Ubuntu 18.04 survey!

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Android-Based Remix OS To Be Discontinued — Remix OS, the Android-x86 derived operating system for x86/ARM to run Android applications on PCs, is now being discontinued in its current form.
Phoenix OS Lives on — Phoenix OS 2.1 includes a number of bug fixes and improvements including better hardware compatibility, an updated keyboard mapping feature, and the ability to remember window resizing settings after you reboot.
Google Glass gets a second chance in factories, where it’s likely to remain — The major upgrades between the original Glass and the enterprise version are a better camera (with resolution upgraded from 5 megapixels to 8), extended battery life, faster Wi-Fi and processor, and a new red light that turns on when recording video. The electronics of Glass have also been made modular in the shape of a so-called Glass Pod, which can be detached and reattached to Glass-compatible frames, which can include things like safety goggles and prescription glasses.
Firefox marketshare revisited — Based on this data, 22% fewer Firefox Desktop installations are active today than a year ago. This is a loss of 16 million Firefox installs in a year.
Ubuntu Artful Desktop July Shakedown — Now is a great time to start exercising the new GNOME goodness that’s landed on our recent daily images! Please download the ISO, test it out on your own hardware, and file bugs where appropriate.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Desktop Default Application Survey — Along with the switch from Unity to GNOME, we’re also reviewing some of the desktop applications we package and ship in Ubuntu. We’re looking to crowdsource input on your favorite Linux applications across a broad set of classic desktop functionality.

Linux Action News 10 Jul 15, 2017

With Chris away, Ryan joins Joe. A new release for Fedora, Yunit is now available for Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu is now an app in the Windows Store, Ryan gives us more details about System76's new OS, Ikey starts his new job at Solus and Beaker is a new browser that promises a truly decentralized web.

Special Guest: Ryan Sipes.

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Fedora 26 is here! - Fedora Magazine — What’s new in Fedora 26? First, of course, we have thousands of improvements from the various upstream software we integrate, including new development tools like GCC 7, Golang 1.8, and Python 3.6. We’ve added a new partitioning tool to Anaconda (the Fedora installer) — the existing workflow is great for non-experts, but this option will be appreciated by enthusiasts and sysadmins who like to build up their storage scheme from basic building blocks. F26 also has many under-the-hood improvements, like better caching of user and group info and better handling of debug information. And the DNF package manager is at a new major version (2.5), bringing many new features.
Fedora 27 Might Do Away With 32-Bit Kernel Builds - Phoronix — A controversial change being considered for Fedora 27 is doing away with the i686 kernel build thereby effectively dropping support for older x86 32-bit systems.
Yunit packages for ubuntu 16.04 LTS – yunit — We are pleased to announce that Yunit is now available as an overlay repository for ubuntu 16.04 LTS xenial (64bit). The following have been tested and should work with an existing ubuntu 16.04, ubuntu gnome 16.04, lubuntu 16.04 and xubuntu 16.04 installation. They will not work in either kubuntu 16.04 or ubuntu mate 16.04 due to the updated Qt libraries,
Windows 10 loves Ubuntu | Ubuntu Insights — Ubuntu 16.04 is now available as an app from the Windows Store for users running Windows Insider builds. The newly improved app is created by Canonical in collaboration with the Microsoft WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) team as a result of the work announced at Microsoft Build 2017 Conference
First day! | Solus on Patreon — Well, we're here! Today is officially my first day working full time on Solus. And it's thanks to YOU, supporters of Solus, for making this possible!
System76 Blog — Pop!_OS Updates — CalDav and CardDav work continues. The deeper we’ve dug the more hard coding we’ve found. We’re considering writing a new installer for GNOME and any DE that features user setup separate from OS installation. The further we went down the Ubiquity path, the more it seemed over-complicated. Automated firmware updates are coming to System76 laptops. With this feature, the System76 Driver will prompt that there’s an update available. Running the update will reboot your computer, install the firmware, and take you back to login.
A New Browser Is Making Peer-to-Peer Web Hosting More User-Friendly - Motherboard — Billed as a "peer-to-peer web browser," the idea behind Beaker is to provide a simple way to build and host websites directly from the browser, which can then be visited by other users of the browser without the need for any intermediary hosting providers.

Linux Action News 9 Jul 09, 2017

New data gives us insight into recent bold moves by Linux hardware vendors Tuxedo and System76, Endless OS takes big steps to get closer to upstream, Mycroft's first major public appearances goes hilariously bad, and Mozilla's plans to tame IoT.

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Endless OS 3.2 Released, Rebases From GNOME Shell 3.8 To 3.22 — On the UI side, there are big updates to its desktop with the re-basing process from GNOME Shell 3.8 to GNOME Shell 3.22. Moving forward, they intend to re-base their desktop changes much more often to allow for a smoother transition to using the newer GNOME code in their operating system.
Tuxedo Announces Its Own Ubuntu Flavor — “What we have done is [deliver a] desktop that is strongly adapted to the needs of our users. With [our] own theme, own icons, own boot logo and […] the latest firmware, the latest NVIDIA drivers (if necessary) and Linux kernel 4.11 preinstalled! Not to mention our configuration adjustments on the GRUB and optimizations to other system-relevant files.”
2017 Linux Laptop Survey Results — There are 30,171 responses, a lot of data to now sift through while in this article is an overview of the initial findings.
These Videos of Mycroft Are Just Too Funny — As an intended open-source alternative to Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri and Google Home, the humble Mycroft AI has an awful lot of hype to live up to.
Youyota Sailfish OS 2-in-1 Tablet — The Youyota Tablet packs Quad-Core Intel chipsets, and runs on Sailfish OS.
Mozilla launches Project Things IoT framework on Raspberry Pi — Mozilla has now announced its own Project Things framework designed to pull together existing Web of Things specifications and code under a global framework comprised of device, gateway, and cloud components. As a starting point, it released a prototype version of a Things Gateway stack that runs on a Raspberry Pi.

Linux Action News 8 Jul 02, 2017

SUSE hits the Windows Store and we finally get some important classifications, System76 announces Pop!_OS and we do a deep analysis, and why Mir is back with a plan to support Wayland.

Plus Debian warns of Hyper Threading issues; and of course a bit more.

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OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise hit the Windows Store — Now OpenSUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and OpenSUSE Leap 42 are available for installation from the Windows Store.
System76 Announce Their Own Linux Distribution called Pop!_OS — System76 say their ‘operating system’ — they don’t call it a distribution — will be built and tailored to meet the needs to “professionals and makers that use their computers to create.”
Canonical Promises Smooth and Easy Unity 7 to GNOME Shell Migration for Users — Probably the most important thing that the Ubuntu developers have worked on lately is a smooth and easy migration process from Unity 7 to GNOME Shell
Mir 1.0 Now Aiming To Support Wayland Clients Directly — Mir 0.27 also will feature a new set of APIs to develop a "Mir platform" outside of Mir itself, which can be used for developing Mir-Wayland platform support without having to fork Mir itself.
MATE Developers Are Considering Mir-Over-Wayland — MATE developer Martin Wimpress has shared that they are talking to Mir developers about how Mir could be used as a Wayland compositor.
Debian Warns Of Hyper Threading Issue With Intel Sky/Kaby Lake CPUs — Intel Skylake and Kabylake (6th and 7th gen CPUs) could "dangerously misbehave" when Hyper Threading is enabled.

Linux Action News 7 Jun 25, 2017

More hardware acceleration comes to desktop Linux, Mozilla launches ambitious new projects, Unity 7 fans can rejoice & Jolla has an important update.

Plus we discuss the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey, the really fancy new trick Opus has pulled off in the latest release & more!

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Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: June 23, 2017 — We’ve got hardware accelerated video decoding working in a Proof-Of-Concept using a GStreamer and VA-API pipeline. The result is 3% CPU usage to play an h264 4K 60FPS video on Haswell. 4K h265 HEVC is also playable but requires a Skylake or later processor.
2017 Linux Laptop Survey — So we've established this Linux Laptop Survey in conjunction with Linux stakeholders to hopefully gather more feedback that will be useful to many different parties -- this survey isn't just for our own benefit and enjoyment at Phoronix.
Jolla Summer 2017: CEO's Update — It has been a while since our last update about the remaining Jolla Tablet refunds – we are committed to it and we will be progressing on it in a pace our financial situation permits us to do. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
Mozilla launches Firefox Focus for Android — Like the iPhone and iPad version, the Android app is free of tabs and other visual clutter, and erasing your sessions is as easy as a simple tap.
Firefox Focus uses the default Android WebView — Firefox Focus uses the default Android WebView. Barbara Bermes, product manager for Firefox Mobile at Mozilla, told eWEEK.
Project Common Voice — Project Common Voice, a project to help make voice recognition open to everyone. Now you can donate your voice to help us build an open-source voice recognition engine that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web.
Opus 1.2 — Speech quality improvements especially in the 12-20 kbit/s range + Improved VBR encoding for hybrid mode + More aggressive use of wider speech bandwidth, including fullband speech starting at 14 kbit/s + Music quality improvements in the 32-48 kb/s range + Generic and SSE CELT optimizations + Support for directly encoding packets up to 120 ms + DTX support for CELT mode + SILK CBR improvements + Support for all of the fixes in draft-ietf-codec-opus-update-06 (the mono downmix and the folding fixes need --enable-update-draft) + Many bug fixes, including integer wrap-arounds discovered through fuzzing (no security implications)
Comparison between Opus versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 — Here's a comparison between Opus versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 so you can hear for yourself how the quality has improved and how Opus now sounds in general. As an anchor (OK, and also to make us look good!), we've also included MP3 samples.

Linux Action News 6 Jun 18, 2017

More competition in desktop Linux, Debian 9, Tails 3, Firefox 54, FreeNAS 11 & OpenMediaVault 3 all get released.

We discuss the important bits of it all, follow up on questions last week & take an open source unicorn for a spin.

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Ikey going full time with Solus — In 4 weeks from today I will be moving to Solus as a full time developer.
Debian 9 Stretch Released — After 26 months of development the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 9 (code name Stretch), which will be supported for the next 5 years
Tails 3.0 is out — Tails 3.0, the first version of Tails based on Debian 9 (Stretch).
Firefox 54 finally goes multiprocess — Firefox has finally been outfitted with simultaneous multiple content processes, a UI process, and a GPU acceleration process
Disabled by default in Ubuntu — Firefox disables its’ new nifty memory saving magic if any enabled add-on doesn’t support it — and the ‘Ubuntu Modifications’ add-on that comes pre-installed in Firefox for Ubuntu doesn’t.
Ubuntu live patch update from Dustin Kirkland — Now, if you purposefully boot into an older kernel -- or -- you reboot sometime in that 3 week period before we release an updated kernelwith those flattened fixes -- then yes, absolutely, all of the live patches that apply to your kernel will be applied about 60 seconds after reboot.
UBports release first stable OTA — The UBports project is proud to announce Stable OTA-1 for all of our officially supported devices, minus the Nexus 5
FreeNAS releases version 11 — What's emerged is a new version of the product, based on FreeBSD 11-STABLE and packing the bhyve hypervisor so that FreeNAS boxen can host virtual machines.
FreeNAS 11.0 S3-compatible object storage services — It also gives users S3-compatible object storage services, which turns your FreeNAS box into an S3-compatible server, letting you avoid reliance on the cloud.
The FreeNAS S3 service uses Minio — The FreeNAS S3 service uses Minio to provide S3 storage hosted on the FreeNAS® system itself. Minio also provides features beyond the limits of the basic Amazon S3 specifications.
openmediavault 3 released — Complete refactored backend

Linux Action News 5 Jun 11, 2017

A look at the future of the Ubuntu desktop and one of its flavors, plus Docker aims to improve Linux security upstream with LinuxKit.

And an LXQt confession.

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Ubuntu 17.10 Begins Transition To GNOME Shell Desktop By Default — Those downloading the very latest Ubuntu desktop ISO of 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" for testing will find that it now boots to the GNOME Shell desktop and also provides an option for running GNOME on Wayland.
Ubuntu Switching to GDM — We’ve made the decision to switch to using GNOME Display Manager (GDM) instead of LightDM.
Ubuntu Works with GNOME to Improve HiDPI Support — Canonical is playing host to a ‘fractional scaling hackfest‘ in its’ Taipei offices this week. Both GNOME developers and Ubuntu developers are in attendance, ready to wrestle with
Lubuntu 17.10 Will Likely Launch with LXQt & LXDE Spins — Lubuntu maintainer and LXQt developer Simon Quigley is reporting on some of the upcoming highlights of the Lubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, due for release later this year on October 19, 2017.
Canonical Kernel Livepatch Service now available for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS! — Users of Ubuntu are welcome to enable the Canonical Kernel Livepatch Service on 3 systems running 64-bit Intel/AMD Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or now Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
GPG fundraiser — To continue supporting and improving GnuPG, we, the main GnuPG developers, are soliciting donations from the general public. Our primary goal is to raise 15 000 euros per month to fully fund 3 developers; our stretch goal is twice that, 30 000 euros per month.
Docker Aims to Improve Linux Kernel Security With LinuxKit — Within the LinuxKit effort there are a series of incubated projects that are focused on improving the security of Linux

Linux Action News 4 Jun 04, 2017

Two Linux desktop classics make big strides, Coreboot joins the Conservancy, and Toyota cars will soon run Linux. Plus newly announced Ambient OS will be open source, just like Android, and its creator Andy Rubin says they plan to take on the Amazon Echo and Google Pixel.

This is is an episode about playing to your strengths, and taking over markets.

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Plasma 5.10 Released — Simple by default, powerful when needed.
Xfce 4.14 edges closer (along with GTK 3) — Xfce 4.14 is a transitionnal release, where the main goal is to port all components to GTK+3.
Fedora 26 delayed — This latest delay pushes Fedora 26 final out to 11 July, assuming no further delays this release cycle.
Coreboot joins Conservancy — "By joining Conservancy, coreboot benefits from their project and community organization skills,"
Toyota to use Linux in its cars — The Linux Foundation's Automotive Grade Linux project is celebrating its first big-name user, after Toyota said it will employ the OS in the 2018 Camry model it will sell in the United States.
ChrisLAS: "@autogradelinux Is it possible for car manufactures to use AGL and also offer Android Auto or Apple CarPlay on top?"
2017 CES Demonstrator - [Automotive Linux Wiki] — Hardware spec for AGL demo machine at CES 2017.
Essential’s Ambient OS will be open source — Playground CEO Andy Rubin, whose new company Essential unveiled a new premium Android smartphone and Amazon Echo competitor today, says his company’s Ambient OS smart home platform will be open source.
Essential faces trademark dispute over name — Spigen, Inc. successfully registered the trademark (Reg. No. 5014095) as early as August 2016. It's an International Class. 9 mark, the category which relates to computers and scientific devices, including smartphones and accessories.

Linux Action News 3 May 28, 2017

NextCloud goes global, Devuan hits one, Solus keeps expanding, Firefox is trying, but Chrome has won. And more progress on Coreboot.

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Nextcloud announces Global Scale architecture as part of Nextcloud 12 — Achieve several orders of magnitude greater scaling. It is hard to scale the standard architecture to instances over hundred thousand users.
Devuan finally reaches 1.0.0 — There have been no significant bug reports since Devuan Jessie RC2 was announced only three weeks ago and the list of release critical bugs is now empty. So finally Devuan Jessie Stable is ready for release!
Debian Stretch is just weeks away. — We plan to release on 2017-06-17.
SteamVR Home Now Works Under Linux — SteamVR Home is a beta feature from Valve for making a social, interactive launcher experience in virtual reality. Those unfamiliar with SteamVR Home can learn about it via this earlier announcement.
SteamOS Brewmaster_beta gets huge update — SteamOS 2.115 also implements AMD Vulkan support. Please note that this will only work if you’re using Steam Beta Client.
Solus adds experimental KDE Plasma support — For the sake of clarity, please note that the Plasma Desktop from KDE is not officially supported at this moment in time. It is however a project that Peter is working on, and slowly building up to be something useful. This in itself was enabled by the vast amount of KF5 (KDE Frameworks) software required in the repositories already for the “Big Items” (Kdenlive, etc).
Firefox is Trying... — It’s because of our newfound internal confidence with Firefox that Mozilla has started to be more aggressive externally again. Firefox’s campaign launching today, called “browse against the machine”, is a perfect example.
Chrome has won — From these graphs it’s pretty clear that Firefox is not going anywhere. That means that the esteemed Fox will be around for many many years, albeit with an ever diminishing market share. It also, unfortunately, means that a turnaround is all but impossible.
More Coreboot progress for Purism — We are now pretty confident that we should be able to have coreboot firmware ready in time for factory preloading of the new inventory we’ll be shipping from in June.

Linux Action News 2 May 21, 2017

Ubuntu's Gnome plans start to form, and they want your input. The Linux subsystem is coming to Windows Server, and Mycroft is finally ready to ship.

Plus the Tizen surprise, elementary OS' pay-what-you-want AppCenter, and what's new Android O.

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Ubuntu Desktop Team Discuss Their Plans for GNOME in Ubuntu 17.10 — “may consider a few tweaks here and there to ease our users into the new experience
The Ubuntu Desktop Team Wants YOUR Feedback — The results of this survey will help inform and shape the Ubuntu desktop team’s approach to GNOME in Ubuntu 17.10.
OMG! UBUNTU! on Twitter: 16,000+ Ubuntu users have taken the survey — 16,000+ #Ubuntu users have taken the 17.10 GNOME desktop survey
Windows Server will add the Linux subsystem, join the Insider program — Microsoft announced that WSL will be included in Server later this year.
Will Linux distros run on Windows 10 S? — Just because an “app” comes from the Windows Store does NOT automatically mean that it’s safe & suitable for running in Windows 10 S. There are some apps that are not allowed to run on Windows 10 S, including all command-line apps, shells and Consoles.
New Release: elementary OS Loki 0.4.1 — This release comes with a brand new version of AppCenter with support for apps submitted to the AppCenter Dashboard. Welcome to elementary OS, third-party developers!
Loki's New AppCenter with Daniel Foré | Chris Interviews Daniel — Daniel Foré, elementary OS founder, joins Chris to chat about their new update to Loki, their pay what you want AppCenter, what the end of Unity means for them, and the future of the project.
Shipping Advance Prototype - Mycroft — This first version of Mark 1 is an advance prototype, perfectly suitable for developers or enthusiasts, yet it is not ready for the consumer market.
What’s New in Android: O Developer Preview 2 & More — New tools for developers to help create more performant apps, and an early preview of a project we call Android Go -- a new experience that we’re building for entry-level devices.
Samsung to extend Tizen OS to nearly all home appliances by 2020 — A new report says, though, that Samsung is looking to further increase Tizen adoption by bringing Tizen (or, in this case, Tizen RT) to nearly all of its home appliances by 2020.
Samsung to announce Tizen RT for smart home appliances — Samsung intends to announce a slimmed-down Tizen OS, called Tizen RT, for its washing machines and other smart home appliances at its Tizen Developer Conference (TDC) today, according to a new report.

Linux Action News 1 May 14, 2017

Canonical IPO is a go, Microsoft brings more Linux to Windows, OpenWRT, LEDE agree on Linux-for-routers peace plan & Google launches project Treble.

Welcome to Linux Action News's debut episode. It’s our goal to build the show you go to when you want to hear an informed discussion about what’s happening.

We kick things off with a busy news week.

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Canonical starts IPO path — At OpenStack Summit, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth revealed in an interview that the recent changes in the Linux and cloud power were to ready Canonical for an IPO.
Microsoft is bringing Ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora to the Windows Store — With the new Fall Creators Update, users will be able to install Ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora as apps on their device, allowing them to run Windows and Linux applications side-by-side without dual-booting.
OpenWRT and LEDE agree on Linux-for-routers peace plan • The Register — The terms will see LEDE fold back into OpenWRT. Persisting with the latter name was deemed non-negotiable by the OpenWRT faction. The agreement also proposes closing the LEDE GitHub repo, rebuilding LEDE's web site so it ha OpenWRT branding and basically burying the LEDE brand. LEDE code will live on as OpenWRT will be required to keep forked trees available.
Here comes Treble: A modular base for Android | Android Developers Blog — With Android O, we've been working very closely with device makers and silicon manufacturers to take steps toward solving this problem, and we're excited to give you a sneak peek at Project Treble, the biggest change to the low-level system architecture of Android to date.
Google’s “Project Treble” solves one of Android’s many update roadblocks | Ars Technica — Project Treble" is a plan to modularize the Android OS, separating the OS framework code from "vendor specific" hardware code. In theory, this change would allow for a new Android update to be flashed on a device without any involvement from the silicon vendor.
Google’s “Fuchsia” smartphone OS dumps Linux, has a wild new UI | Ars Technica — Unlike Android and Chrome OS, Fuchsia is not based on Linux—it uses a new, Google-developed microkernel called "Magenta." With Fuchsia, Google would not only be dumping the Linux kernel, but also the GPL: the OS is licensed under a mix of BSD 3 clause, MIT, and Apache 2.0.

Linux Action News 00 May 05, 2017

It's not even the first proper episode but Chris and Joe talk about kernel security, UEFI Secure Boot, the latest Raspberry Pi news, Nexus devices being abandoned and MP3 becoming (sort of) free.

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