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:

• 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.

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.

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

Sponsored By:

• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!
• System76: System76 is better than ever, check out all the great stuff they're doing today and tell them Linux Action News sent you.
• 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:

• 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

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.

Sponsored By:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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.

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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.

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

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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

Plus the Kernel team's clever Spectre slowdown fix, Emby goes proprietary, Steam Link lives on, and more.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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