Sponsored By:

• Kolide: Kolide can help you nail third-party audits and internal compliance goals with endpoint security for your entire fleet.
• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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!

Sponsored By:

• Kolide: Kolide can help you nail third-party audits and internal compliance goals with endpoint security for your entire fleet.
• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Kolide: Kolide can help you nail third-party audits and internal compliance goals with endpoint security for your entire fleet.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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.

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Previous Predictions: Linux Action News 169
• Year in Review: How we’re curating the web with you and our top Pocket features
• Mozilla expects to generate more than $500M in revenue this year
• Pocket and Slate Podcast Partnership Announcement
• Asahi Linux

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

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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.

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

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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

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

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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?"

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

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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

Plus a major step in Apple M1 GPU support.

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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

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.

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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

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

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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.

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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.

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Datadog: Datadog - the unified monitoring and analytics platform for comprehensive visibility into cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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.

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

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Datadog: Datadog - the unified monitoring and analytics platform for comprehensive visibility into cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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.

Sponsored By:

• Datadog: Datadog - the unified monitoring and analytics platform for comprehensive visibility into cloud, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments.
• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Linux Action News 166
• The AMD Radeon Graphics Driver Makes Up Roughly 10.5% Of The Linux Kernel
• The New Microsoft exFAT File-System Driver Is Set To Land With Linux 5.7
• The Linux Kernel’s Scheduler Apparently Causing Issues For Google Stadia Game Developers
• Torvalds’ Comments On Linux Scheduler Woes: “Pure Garbage”
• Thanks Oracle! New Patches Pending Can Reduce Linux Boot Times Up To ~49%
• Systemd Had A Pretty Big 2020
• Systemd-Homed Merged As A Fundamental Change To Linux Home Directories
• Linux Action News 163
• New Linux Features, Timely Hardware Support & More
• Red Hat Recommends Disabling The Intel Linux Graphics Driver Over Hardware Flaw
• A KVM Virtualization bug on Intel Processors because of Unfinished Code
• Intel Gen12/Xe Graphics Have AV1 Accelerated Decode - Linux Support Lands
• AMD Wowed Linux Users In 2020 With Their Fantastic Zen 3 CPUs, and Timely New Open-Source GPU Support
• Linus Torvalds Switches To AMD Ryzen Threadripper After 15 Years Of Intel Systems
• Balancing the needs around the CentOS platform – Blog.CentOS.org
• 2020 Was Another Interesting Year For Microsoft Around Open-Source/Linux
• WSL2 Reaching General Availability In Windows 10 v2004
• Microsoft President Brad Smith Acknowledges They Were Previously Wrong On Open-Source
• Microsoft Is Writing Its Own Wayland Compositor As Part Of WSL2 GUI Efforts
• Microsoft Edge Is Coming Out For Linux Next Month
• KDE Saw Its Wayland Support Stabilize Nicely In 2020, Much Polishing Throughout
• KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS Released After A Lot Of Polishing, New Features
• LINUX Unplugged 385: The 2020 Tuxies
• GNOME In 2020 Saw Many Optimizations, GTK 4.0 Released, GNOME 40 In Development
• GNOME OS Is Taking Shape But Its To Serve For Testing The Desktop
• GNOME Circle Officially Announced For Letting More Apps/Libraries “Join GNOME”
• GTK 4.0 Toolkit Officially Released
• ledger, a powerful command-line accounting system — Ledger is a powerful, double-entry accounting system that is accessed from the UNIX command-line. Ledger, begun in 2003, is written by John Wiegley and released under the BSD license. It has also inspired several ports to other languages.

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

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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