Linux Action News 224

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

• 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.