Linux Action News 24

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.

• 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.