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:

• 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.

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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.