Note: Linux Action News will be off next week.

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:

• Debian 12 “bookworm” released — This release contains over 11,089 new packages for a total count of 64,419 packages, while over 6,296 packages have been removed as "obsolete". 43,254 packages were updated in this release. The overall disk usage for "bookworm" is 365,016,420 kB (365 GB), and is made up of 1,341,564,204 lines of code.
• Debian 12 is nearly ready, and reassuringly boring
• Debian 12 discussion on Hacker News
• Linux Foundation & RISC-V International Launch RISC-V Fundamentals Course — This course prepares IT professionals to write assembly language code for RISC-V processors and use high-level languages like C to develop applications for RISC-V-based systems.
• RISC-V Fundamentals Training Course — Learn everything you need to know about RISC-V, the open-source instruction set architecture that is predicted to become ubiquitous as it paves the way for the next 50 years of computing design and innovation.
• Help Us Test Evolution — If you’re a bit more advanced user who would like to help with testing and you use Evolution from Flathub, consider switching to the beta channel. You wouldn’t switch to something broken. Milan doesn’t let low quality releases out. It’s for rather rare bugs that would be great to identify and fix before they hit everyone, or for early feedback when UX changes are being done.
• Evolution Email App Wants Flatpak Beta Testers
• Nextcloud Hub 5 — Hub 5 builds on all the improvements we introduced earlier this year, including the Smart Picker and it’s AI integrations, the cool new Nextcloud Tables app and more.
• Nextcloud on Twitter — Announcing Hub 5: Self-hosted AI-powered digital workspace for everyone!

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:

• Those Using The XFS File-System Will Want To Avoid Linux 6.3 For Now
• XFS Metadata Corruption On Linux 6.3 Tracked Down To One Missing One-Line Patch — This is a bug fix that we thought just fixed a livelock on stripe aligned filesystems. I'm guessing that in certain circumstances instead of livelocking on repeated failed allocations, it results in a broken mapping being returned to the writeback code and hence misdirecting the writeback IO.
• Linux 6.3.5 Released With XFS Metadata Corruption Fix — Making Linux 6.3.5 a notable point release is that it has back-ported the fix for the XFS metadata corruption bug that was plaguing the Linux 6.3 point releases.
• Azure Linux - Microsoft revealed why it did not fork Fedora — Why did Microsoft create Azure Linux? “We needed a Linux distribution internally,” Perrin said. “We wanted a consistent platform for ourselves.” Now there is “one vendor to support the full AKS stack”.
• Plasma 6 is Wayland only - No X11 for Plasma 6 — With Fedora KDE and Kinoite being fully Wayland by default from login (since F38) to desktop (since F34), it's now time to work toward eliminating our dependency on the Xorg server for Plasma 6.0.
• Xorg server is deprecated since RHEL 9.0 — The X.org display server is deprecated, and will be removed in a future major RHEL release. The default desktop session is now the Wayland session in most cases.
• Fedora 36 Changes: Replace the fbdev drivers with simpledrm and the DRM fbdev emulation layer — This change replaces the legacy Linux frame buffer device (fbdev) drivers that are still used in Fedora, with the latest simpledrm driver and the DRM fbdev emulation layer.
• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS end of standard support — Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, codenamed ‘Bionic Beaver,’ is approaching the end of its standard five-year maintenance period on 31 May 2023.
• Let us serve you, but don’t bring us down — Tens of thousands of requests per second for our public domain OCR files were launched from 64 virtual hosts on amazon’s AWS services. This activity brought archive.org down for all users for about an hour.
• Internet Archive — Internet Archive is a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more.

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!

Special Guest: Brent Gervais.

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:

• curl 8.0.0 is Here — This a major version number bump but without any ground-breaking changes or fireworks. We decided it was about time to reset the minor number down to more a manageable level and doing it exactly on curl’s 25th birthday made it extra fun. There is no API nor ABI break in this version.
• Twenty-five Tears of curl — Taking curl this far and being able to work full time on my hobby project is a dream come real. curl is a huge part of my life.
• curl 8.0.0 with Daniel Stenberg [YouTube]
• curl 8.0.1: because I jinxed it
• Amazon Linux 2023 — When looking for a base to serve as a starting point for Amazon Linux 2023, Fedora was the best choice. We found that Fedora’s core tenets (Freedom, Friends, Features, First) resonate well with our vision for Amazon Linux.
• Paving the Road to Vulkan on Asahi Linux — Today we’re releasing a big update to our GPU drivers for Asahi Linux, so I wanted to talk to you about what we’ve been working on since then, and what’s next!
• Asahi Linux Continues Making Progress On Apple Silicon Graphics, Promising OpenGL Speed
• Canonical joins the confidential computing consortium — Confidential computing is here to give you back control over the security guarantees of your workloads. As the consortium explains, confidential computing aims to “protect data in use by performing computation in a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment.
• Introduction to Confidential Computing [YouTube]
• Hub 4 pioneers ethical AI integration for a more productive and collaborative future — Today, we are excited to announce a major step forward with Hub 4 – the very first on-premises collaboration platform to integrate intelligent features across its applications.
• Develop for Nextcloud — Write new applications, extend Nextcloud or integrate other software.
• Nextcloud Ethical AI Rating
• Berlin Meet Up — Friday, March 24, 2023

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:

• Announcing Fedora Linux 37 — Fedora Editions are flagship offerings targeted at a particular “market”. With Fedora Linux 37, we’re adding two new Editions.
• Fedora 37 Now Available With GNOME 43 Desktop, Official Raspberry Pi 4 Support
• Meta OSS’ Sapling — A new source control system with Git-compatible client.
• Get ready for Google Summer of Code 2023! — We are thrilled to announce the 2023 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and share the timeline with you to get involved! 2023 will be our 19th consecutive year of hosting GSoC.
• Google Summer of Code
• Rust in the Kernel Update — This patch series is the first batch of changes to upstream the rest of the Rust support.
• Rust Developers Preparing To Upstream More Code Into The Linux Kernel
• WSL 1.0 Released — Microsoft announces it is removing the Preview label and making WSL in the Microsoft Store "generally available".
• Release Notes for WSL kernel

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:

• The Ubuntu Summit Just Wrapped Up — Vulture Towers Central Europe are in Prague – which, handily, is also the location for Canonical's 2022 Ubuntu Summit.
• Ubuntu Summit 2022 - Day 1! - YouTube
• Ubuntu Summit 2022 - Day 2! - YouTube
• Ubuntu Summit 2022 - Day 3! - YouTube
• Microsoft .NET 7 Released With Better Linux Support — Microsoft .NET 7 brings improved performance, enhanced .NET support on Linux throughout, native support for ARM64, developer productivity enhancements, better cross-platform mobile/desktop app support, HTTP/3 improvements for cloud native apps, 64-bit IBM Power support on Linux, and a variety of other run-time improvements.
• Microsoft Launches a Microsoft Teams PWA on Linux — The PWA enables us to ship the latest Microsoft Teams features faster to our Linux customers and helps us bridge the gaps between the Teams desktop client on Linux and Windows.
• Khronos Unveils Kamaros — An open, royalty-free standard for controlling camera system runtimes in embedded, mobile, industrial, XR, automotive, and scientific markets.
• The Khronos Group Announces “Kamaros” As Their Newest Forthcoming API
• Fwupd 1.8.7 is a Big Update — Linux firmware updating utility fwupd 1.8.7 has been released adding support for new devices, as well as various improvements.
• Fwupd 1.8.7 Adds Support for More Star Labs Linux Laptops, Intel Discrete GPU
• Pat Gelsinger and Linus Torvalds talk Linux, open source, technology and more - YouTube — Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger sat down with Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux who is also known as “the godfather of Open-Source,” to talk about everything from the beginning of Linux to Linus’ advice for Intel and why he chose a penguin as the Linux mascot.

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:

• Microsoft Continues Improving Its Internal Linux Distro With Another Update — Microsoft has kept up with issuing one or more CBL-Mariner updates per month. This summer they rolled out CBL-Mariner 2.0 with many changes over its former 1.0 state, which continues to be maintained too. CBL-Mariner relies upon RPM SPEC files and other assets from Fedora, Photon OS, Openmamba, and Linux From Scratch. This week marked the release of CBL-Mariner 2.0 July 2022 Update 2.
• CBL-Mariner GitHub
• GitHub Moves to Guard Open Source Against Supply Chain Attacks — The popular Microsoft-owned code repository plans to roll out code signing, which will help beef up the security of open source projects.
• GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash — GitHub over the past week has tested the trust of its users by enacting policies that call into question its commitment to free speech and privacy.
• ‘It Doesn’t Change Anything’ Says Tornado Cash After Code Disappears From GitHub
• Projects impacted by Tornando cash ban — TIL the creator address of the Eth2.0 Deposit contract was funded with Tornado cash, created the contract and donated the rest to Wikileaks
• Samuel JJ Gosling on Twitter — “@TornadoCash For those looking to host the frontend locally, I’ve uploaded the source code to @IPFS as I suspected this happening. Disclaimer: I’m a contributor to tornado but you should still verify the source code.
• Lucas Garron on Twitter
• Privacy Statement Updates September 2022 by olholder
• IPFS Supported In FFmpeg 5.1, IPFS Devs Envision Support In More Open-Source Projects — July's release of FFmpeg 5.1 introduced native IPFS support for this distributed peer-to-peer protocol.
• IPFS.io
• Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS Delayed Due To An OEM Install Issue Leading To Broken Snaps — Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS had been due for release today but has now been pushed back by one week after discovering an installer issue that led to Snaps like the default Mozilla Firefox browser failing to launch once installed.
• Linux 5.20 Likely To Be Called Linux 6.0 — With Linus Torvalds' modern versioning after 19~20 point releases has been when he bumps to the next major version number... Linux 4.0 succeeded Linux 3.19 while Linux 5.0 came after Linux 4.20.
• An io_uring-based user-space block driver [LWN.net] — The ublk driver starts by creating a special device called /dev/ublk-control. The user-space server (or servers, there can be more than one) starts by opening that device and setting up an io_uring ring to communicate with it.
• Linus' kernel source tree

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:

• Microsoft changes its mind about open source monetization — Microsoft was trying to do the right thing, but it turns out doing nothing is better.
• Giorgio Sardo on Twitter — To clarify our intent, we removed the previous mention to open source pricing. We're committed to building an open Store and enabling dev choice and flexibility. If there are intellectual property concerns about an app, please report it.
• An Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Fix Is Coming For A Very Annoying & Serious APT Problem — "installing the package libudev1 results in a large number of critical packages being removed and rendering the system essentially unusable."
• Bug #1974196 “Installing libudev1 on a new Jammy installation"
• Draft: Mark broken reverse depends for upgrade (!248) · Merge requests
• Drop-in, drop-out chats with Video Rooms in Element — This has been a long time coming and, frankly, we’re really excited to be introducing Video Rooms to you. It’s a major step towards richer video (and soon voice) rooms!
• SCALE 19x — SCaLE 19x is coming up July 28th - the 31st at the LAX Hilton. Promo code LAS50
• M2 is here! July 2022 Release & Progress Report — Welcome to another long overdue progress report! As usual, things have been busier than expected… and we have some big news! We’ve just released a new Asahi Linux update with Mac Studio, Bluetooth, and M2 support!
• Asahi Linux Update Brings Experimental Apple M2 Support

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:

• How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops — Today, the life of a gLinux team member looks very different. We have reduced the amount of engineering time and energy required for releases to one on-duty release engineer that rotates among team members. We no longer have a big push to upgrade our entire fleet. No more need for multi stage alpha, betas and GAs for new LTS releases while simultaneously chasing down older machines that still were running Ubuntu Precise or Lucid.
• Red Hat names new CEO — In a move many will find surprising, Red Hat announced that Paul Cormier, the company's CEO and president since 2020, is stepping over to become chairman of the board. Matt Hicks, a Red Hat veteran and the company's head of products and technologies, will replace Cormier as president and CEO.
• KDE Announces Powerful Slimbook 4 Linux Laptop — The laptops are powered by AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor with eight cores. They use USB-C for charging and power, like many other modern laptops. There are two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, an HDMI port, and a wired Ethernet jack.
• System76 Launch Lite Teaser — Launch, but Lite. Launch Lite is the everyperson's keeb — comfortable, portable, and configurable.
• System76 Teases the Launch Lite Open-Source Configurable Keyboard, Coming July 14th
• AMD Is Hiring To Improve Its Linux Graphics Driver Installation Experience — In addition to their recent hiring for a open-source Linux GPU driver developer with multimedia experience, this week they have posted a new role looking for Linux build engineer(s) to focus on their graphics driver.
• Linux Build Engineer — Our team works on open-source GPU drivers for Linux. We are leading contributors to the Radeon Mesa graphics and multimedia drivers included in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and Debian. Our software is used in exciting products such as the Tesla Model S and the Steam Deck.
• Matthew Garrett: Responsible stewardship of the UEFI secure boot ecosystem — So, to have Microsoft, the self-appointed steward of the UEFI Secure Boot ecosystem, turn round and say that a bunch of binaries that have been reviewed through processes developed in negotiation with Microsoft, implementing technologies designed to make management of revocation easier for Microsoft, and incorporating fixes for vulnerabilities discovered by the developers of those binaries who notified Microsoft of these issues despite having no obligation to do so, and which have then been signed by Microsoft are now considered by Microsoft to be insecure is, uh, kind of impolite?
• X.Org Server Hit By New Local Privilege Escalation, Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities — CVE-2022-2319 and CVE-2022-2320 were made public this morning and both deal with the X.Org Server's Xkb keyboard extension not properly validating input that could lead to out-of-bounds memory writes. Hopefully though in 2022 you aren't relying on your xorg-server running as root.
• Many Old X.Org Components Saw New Releases This Weekend - Phoronix
• Boycott Wayland. It breaks everything! — tl;dr: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet, and maybe never will. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better of not using Wayland at this point.
• X.Org Security Advisory: July 12, 2022

Sponsored By:

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

• Nat Friedman quits as CEO of GitHub — GitHub CEO Nat Friedman announced today he's leaving the organization on November 15 and will be replaced by chief product officer Thomas Dohmke.
• GitHub gets a new CEO
• Google Will Now Pay $31,337 To $50,337 For New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities — Google is effectively tripling its previous reward amounts and promise to honor it for at least the next three months. They are hoping these $31,337 or $50,337 rewards will encourage more security researchers to explore the kernel and report their findings.
• Ubuntu is Building a New Firmware Updater App — This new GUI utility is being built using Flutter and Dart, further cementing Ubuntu’s commitment to go all in on Flutter for future desktop apps. The tool will be distributed as a Snap and provide a Ubuntu-style front-end to the fwupd tool and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service.
• canonical/firmware-updater
• Desktop Team Updates - Monday 1st November 2021 - Desktop / Team Updates
• Ubuntu Continues Work On Flutter+Dart Written Firmware-Updater Utility
• Asahi Linux Boots on M1 Pro — Linux on the M1 Pro status: boots to a shell with working USB ports Working: SMP, IRQs, IPIs, framebuffer console, DART, USB, USB-PD, I²C, GPIO. Next I'm looking at PCIe (WiFi & SD card reader).
• Apple M1 PCIe Driver Leads The PCI Changes For Linux 5.16
• WirePlumber in Fedora 35 — Today marks an exciting day as Fedora 35 has now been released, with WirePlumber as the default session manager for PipeWire!
• Master your PipeWire streams with WirePlumber | Linaro Virtual Connect Fall 2021
• LXQt 1.0.0 Desktop Environment Released After 8 Years of Development — The LXQt team proudly announced today the release and general availability of the LXQt 1.0.0 desktop environment as a major release bringing new features and improvements.
• LXQt 1.0 Released For Lightweight Qt5 Desktop
• Release 1.0.0 · lxqt/lxqt
• Red Hat to hire fewer senior engineers after budget frozen — Next year, IBM's Red Hat plans to cut back on hiring senior engineers in an effort largely aimed at controlling costs.
• Next year, IBM’s Red Hat plans to cut back on hiring senior engineers in an effort aimed largely at controlling costs. : linux
• The first fruits of CentOS Stream: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Enters Beta with Exciting New Features and Many Improvements

Plus, we try out Microsoft’s Linux distro, and some thoughts on our editorial style.

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:

• 5.15 Merge window — 3,440 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 5.15 development cycle.
• Amazon’s DAMON Merged Into Linux 5.15
• Linux 5.15 Hit By Some Early Performance Regressions
• AMD Posts New “AMD-PSTATE” CPUFreq Driver — Leveraging CPPC For Better Perf-Per-Watt
• Linux 5.15 Readies More Code For Compile & Run-Time Detection Of Buffer Overflows
• AMD Finally Releases Overdue Linux CPPC Driver
• OverlayFS On Linux 5.15 Improves Performance
• Linux 5.15’s New “-Werror” Behavior Is Causing A Lot Of Pain — That compiler flag addition makes all warnings be treated as errors, which in turn stops the kernel build.
• Re: [GIT PULL] ntfs3: new NTFS driver for 5.15 - Linus Torvalds
• Red Hat will officially support EPEL in the future — The new team is being formed and is expected to start work in October.
• History and Philosophy of EPEL - Fedora Project Wiki
• Microsoft Releases Its August Update For The CBL-Mariner Linux Distribution — One of the big fundamental changes with CBL-Mariner August 2021 is Microsoft now provides a public ISO to download of this Linux distribution.
• CBL-Mariner: Linux OS for Azure 1P services and edge appliances

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 5.14 set to boost future enterprise application security — A particular area of interest for both enterprise and cloud users is always security and to that end, Linux 5.14 will help with several new capabilities. Mike McGrath, vice president, Linux Engineering at Red Hat told TechCrunch that the kernel update includes a feature known as core scheduling, which is intended to help mitigate processor-level vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown
• Linux 5.14 Features Aplenty With New AMD GPUs, SmartShift, More Alder Lake, Core Scheduling
• QEMU 6.1 Released With RISC-V Improvements, AMD Emulation Fixes — RISC-V on QEMU has updates around OpenTitan platform support, support for VirtIO VGA, and a variety of other architecture improvements.
• PipeWire 0.3.34 Released — Bluetooth battery status support for head-set profile and using Apple extensions. aptX-LL and FastStream codec support was added.
• CodeWeavers still hiring for a ‘General Wine Developer' — CodeWeavers announced recently they need a bit of help on finding more developers, with a spot still currently open for a 'General Wine Developer' who will work on Wine and Proton.
• Microsoft, Google partner on eBPF — Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the new eBPF Foundation, which was unveiled August 12, plans to expand eBPF and extend it beyond Linux.
• eBPF Summit 2021
• The State & Future of eBPF - Thomas Graf
• eBPF for Windows - Dave Thaler (Microsoft)
• Linux On The Apple M1 Can Now Boot To The GNOME Desktop — Alyssa Rosenweig, who has been working on reverse engineering the Apple M1 GPU since January, has now posted a screenshot of "GNOME Shell on the Apple M1, bare metal."
• ‘Not great, but usable’: GNOME desktop boots on Asahi Linux for Apple M1
• 30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat
• Linux turns 30: ​Linus Torvalds on his “just a hobby” operating system
• Happy birthday – 30 Years of Linux
• Happy Birthday, Linux: From a Bedroom Project To Billions of Devices in 30 Years
• 30th Anniversary of Linux - Linux Foundation
• Happy birthday, Linux: From a bedroom project to billions of devices in 30 years • The Register
• Linode Joins Jupiter Broadcasting In Denver - YouTube
• Chris remains on the road! Track is trip live: colonytracker.live

Plus, why Western Digital might be to thank for your next ultimate Linux workstation.

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:

• Debian 11 “bullseye” Released — After 2 years, 1 month, and 9 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 11 (code name bullseye), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.
• Phoronix: Debian 11 “Bullseye” Released
• Debian Live install images
• Microsoft & Others Form The eBPF Foundation - Phoronix — For driving eBPF usage moving forward for these sandboxed programs within the Linux kernel, the eBPF Foundation has been formed with backing from The Linux Foundation, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix, Google, and others.
• Linux Foundation Press Release
• eBPF - Introduction, Tutorials & Community Resources
• RISC-V Developers Continue Working On KVM Support — This KVM RISC-V support has been led by Western Digital who remains very active with various elements of RISC-V Linux support.
• Progress Report: August 2021 - Asahi Linux
• Restore/upgrade firmware of iOS devices
• Apple M1 PCIe Driver Under Review For The Linux Kernel
• Elementary OS 6 Odin released on a ‘pay what you want’ basis • The Register
• Pantheon-tweaks: A system settings panel for the Pantheon desktop environment.

Plus Pwned Passwords goes open source, the public release of Fuchsia, and Valve's rumored Linux handheld.

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:

• After staff revolt, Freenode management takes over hundreds of IRC channels for ‘policy violations’ — All told, it appears something like 700 Freenode channels have been seized and re-permissioned, supposedly because the channels mentioned Libera Chat in violation of Freenode's advertising policy.
• Freenode IRC staff resign en masse after takeover by Korea’s “crown prince”
• IRC Announcement - Fedora Magazine
• Ubuntu, Wikimedia jump ship to the Libera Chat IRC network after Freenode channel confiscations
• One week of Libera Chat — It’s been an exciting first week, and we’d like to say a massive thank you for your support, enthusiasm, and patience as we continue to work to bring Libera.Chat up to full capacity. In these first few days, we’ve been able to reach 16,500 simultaneous connections and 20,000 registered accounts.
• kline󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 on mastodon: “andrew lee just seized over 700 channels on freenode”
• PSA: Ubuntu’s IRC Channels Have Moved from Freenode to Libera Chat
• Gentoo Freenode channels have been hijacked — Today (2021-05-26) a large number of Gentoo channels have been hijacked by Freenode staff, including channels that were not yet migrated to Libera.chat. We cannot perceive this otherwise than as an open act of hostility and we have effectively left Freenode.
• Pwned Passwords, Open Source in the .NET Foundation and Working with the FBI
• Pwned Passwords is now open source!
• Troy Hunt on Twitter RE: the news
• The FBI will feed compromised passwords to Have I Been Pwned — As Hunt explained, the FBI is involved into all sorts of investigations into digital crimes, such as botnets, ransomware, online child sexual exploitation and terrorism. The compromised passwords they find are often being used by crime rings, so the passwords' quick addition to the HIBP database would be extremely helpful. That said, the website doesn't have a way for the feds to quickly feed passwords into its database yet.
• Google is releasing Fuchsia OS, starting w/ 1st-gen Nest Hub — Google’s long-in-development, from-scratch operating system, Fuchsia, is now running on real Made by Google devices, namely, the first-generation Nest Hub.
• Here’s an easier way to try Fuchsia OS on your computer
• Linux Action Show 431
• Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC — On Tuesday, SteamDB operator Pavel Djundik spotted the change in Steam's code, which pointed to a new device named "SteamPal".
• New Audacity Owners Want a CLA — For those not yet aware, we are introducing a Contributor License Agreement (CLA), which contributors to Audacity will need to sign in order to contribute code to the project.
• Information About Our New Contributor License Agreement
• Nextcloud iOS app Open Sourced
• GitHub: nextcloud/ios/COPYING.iOS
• Nextcloud iOS app License Guidelines
• List of Open-Source iOS Apps
• Jami on the Mac App Store
• mediaU on the App Store
• Linux Game Development at Tesla? — Some of you might have heard, our dear technoking is bullish on games and making an awesome platform for all gamers in Tesla vehicles. The latest Model S on our website can give you a hint of what we're aiming for in terms of platform capability (sorry, can't divulge much more for now). The Tesla infotainment OS and platform software are based on a standard Linux, so of course, we're interested in helping the gaming community make Linux gaming excellent.

We'll share the history, the context, and where things stand now around the controversial research that led to the ban.

Plus Ubuntu 21.04 is out, and we try WSL's new GUI Linux app 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:

• Intentionally buggy commits for fame—and papers [LWN.net] — A buggy patch posted to the linux-kernel mailing list in early April was apparently the last straw for Greg Kroah-Hartman as it led to the planned reversion of a whole slew of commits with one thing in common: their origin at the University of Minnesota (UMN).
• An open letter to the Linux community [LWN.net] — We sincerely apologize for any harm our research group did to the Linux kernel community. Our goal was to identify issues with the patching process and ways to address them, and we are very sorry that the method used in the “hypocrite commits” paper was inappropriate.
• Re: [PATCH] SUNRPC: Add a check for gss_release_msg - Greg KH
• University duo thought it would be cool to sneak bad code into Linux as an experiment. Of course, it absolutely backfired • The Register
• Greg Kroah-Hartman bans University of Minnesota from Linux development for deliberately buggy patches | ZDNet
• Revertion of all of the umn.edu commits - Kees Cook
• Linus Torvalds Responds to Linux Banning University of Minnesota | Tom’s Hardware
• Statement from CS&E on Linux Kernel research - April 21, 2021 | Department of Computer Science and Engineering | College of Science and Engineering
• Security Research Ethics Review. What’s the subject, Kenneth? | by Dave Dittrich | Apr, 2021 | Medium
• Paper: Stealthily introducing vulnerabilities in open source software via hypocrite commits
• Ubuntu 21.04 Official Flavors Released, Here’s What’s New - 9to5Linux — Ubuntu 21.04 has been released and is available to download from the Ubuntu website.
• Ubuntu 21.04 is here | Ubuntu — Ubuntu 21.04 comes with native Microsoft Active Directory integration, Wayland graphics by default, and a Flutter application development SDK.
• LINUX Unplugged 402: Our Worst Idea Yet
• (Re)introducing the Community Team
• Fedora 34 To Release Next Week As A Very Exciting Update - Phoronix — After it was pushed back last week due to blocker bugs, on Friday it was determined that Fedora 34 is now in proper shape to officially ship next week.
• Red Hat Summit 2021 | About — Virtual again: April 27-28, 2021
• Microsoft enables Linux GUI apps on Windows 10 for developers - The Verge — Microsoft is starting to allow Windows 10 testers to access Linux GUI apps.
• Microsoft Posts WSLg Preview - GUI App Support With Windows Subsystem For Linux - Phoronix
• GitHub - microsoft/wslg: Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios
• GitHub - microsoft/CBL-Mariner: Linux OS for Azure 1P services and edge appliances
• Introducing Linux GUI apps running on Windows using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
• Watch Mars Ingenuity's First Flight! (VIDEO AND IMAGES) — Mars​ Perseverance​ has been a historic mission, now its chopper, Ingenuity is flying on Mars. Watch a recap right here and see the very first video and images of it up in the air.
• Open source goes to Mars 🚀 - The GitHub Blog — Today, we want to make the invisible visible. So, we have worked with JPL to place a new Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge on the GitHub profile of every developer who contributed to the specific versions of any open source projects and libraries used by Ingenuity.
• Open Source on Mars: Community powers NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter · The ReadME Project · GitHub — Today, nearly 12,000 developers will see a new badge on their GitHub profile celebrating their contributions to the specific versions of projects and libraries used by NASA to fly the Ingenuity Helicopter on Mars.
• Work Progresses Toward Ingenuity’s First Flight on Mars - NASA Mars
• We’re Getting Ready for Ingenuity’s Second Flight - NASA Mars
• We Are Prepping for Ingenuity’s Third Flight Test - NASA Mars
• Mars helicopter shares first aerial color photo and preps for Sunday flight - CNN
• NASA’s Mars helicopter completes second, higher flight – Spaceflight Now
• Ingenuity: Nasa's Mars helicopter makes it three from three — On Sunday, the little chopper rose to a height of 5m before speeding off laterally for 50m - half the length of a football field.

Plus the imminent problem KDE solved this week, 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:

• Initial Apple M1 SoC Support Aims For Linux 5.13 Kernel — This initial Apple M1 Linux port gets the UART, interrupts, SMP, and DeviceTree bits in place for offering basic functionality.
• “Challenge accepted”
• Ars: Apple M1 hardware support merged into Linux 5.13
• Official support for Linux on the M1 Macs could come as soon as June
• [GIT PULL] Apple M1 SoC platform bring-up for 5.13
• Asahi Linux on Twitter — Initial M1 support has been merged into the Linux SoC tree and will be coming to Linux 5.13!
• SiFive FU740 PCIe Support Queued Ahead Of Linux 5.13 — The HiFive Unmatched has a FU740 RISC-V SoC that features four U74-MC cores and one S7 embedded core, 16GB of RAM, USB 3.2 Gen 1, one PCI Express x16 slot (operating at x8 speeds), an NVMe slot, and Gigabit Ethernet.
• How to Secure phpMyAdmin
• Firefox Is Making WebRender The Default Rendering Engine On Linux This Month And There Is A Facelift Coming In May — The Firefox web browser is finally making the long-anticipated WebRender rendering engine the default on GNU/Linux when Firefox 88 is released later this month.
• uBlock Origin works best on Firefox — The Firefox version of uBO makes use of WebAssembly code for core filtering code paths. This is not the case with Chromium-based browsers because this would require an extra permission in the extension manifest which could cause friction when publishing the extension in the Chrome Web Store.
• Wayland Is Driving Fragmentation Around EDID Parsing - A Call To Fix That — Currently there is no de facto EDID parsing library for Linux but many different choices and most Wayland compositors rolling their own. Rather than exposing all of the parsed information from the kernel, there is now a call to have a more unified Linux EDID parsing library.
• vgpu_unlock — Unlock vGPU functionality for consumer-grade GPUs.
• Hacker figures how to unlock vGPU functionality intentionally hidden from certain NVIDIA cards for marketing purposes
• Announcing KDE’s Qt 5 Patch Collection — As Qt 5 support is drawing to a close, and we shift to Qt 6, we need to ensure that KDE products are as reliable as ever. To this end, KDE will be maintaining a set of patches with security and functional fixes so that we can enjoy good KDE Software still based on Qt5 until our software is reliably based on Qt 6.
• Mars Helicopter Flight Delayed to No Earlier than April 14 — During a high-speed spin test of the rotors on Friday, the command sequence controlling the test ended early due to a “watchdog” timer expiration.
• LUP 400 Beer Stein

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 our rundown of the feature-packed 5.11 release, a Fuchsia surprise, exciting hardware news, 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:

• Dev creeped out after he fired up Ubuntu VM on Azure, was immediately approached by Canonical sales rep — "The creepiest thing," he said, "[was] the direct contact on my private LinkedIn account" – which he noted did not share "the same corporate email.
• ＣｙｂｅｒＡｎｔａｎｉ on Twitter
• KDE Plasma 5.21 is Packed with New Features — KDE Plasma 5.21 is going to be released on February 16 and when it arrives it’ll bring a barrel load of changes and enhancements with it.
• This week in KDE — Plasma 5.21 approaches!
• Linux 5.11 Is Heavy On New Features, Improvements For 2021 — There are a ton of Intel and AMD changes, Syscall User Dispatch for helping some newer Windows games run under Wine, continued IO_uring advancements, many Btrfs file-system improvements, Lenovo contributed ThinkPad palm sensor detection support, and much more.
• Linux 5.11 - Linux Kernel Newbies
• Syscall User Dispatch Appears Destined For Linux 5.11 To Help Windows Games On Linux
• AMD Ryzen, EPYC 5~6% Faster Out-Of-The-Box With Linux 5.11
• Intel Xe Graphics Are Looking Great On Linux 5.11 With Nice Performance Uplift
• OpenLiteSpeed WordPress Server | Linode Marketplace
• System76 Begins Detailing Their Open-Source “Launch Configurable Keyboard” — Like the Thelio computers, System76 is going to be manufacturing their own keyboards at their facility in Denver, Colorado.
• Keyboards Go Open Source With System76’s ‘Launch Configurable Keyboard’
• system76/launch on GitHub — System76 Launch Configurable Keyboard
• System76 on Twitter — “The Launch keyboard PCB! #system76 #launch #keyboard #linux #comingsoon #sneakpeek"
• AMD Is Currently Hiring More Linux Engineers — Several of these new job descriptions do begin with, "step up into a new organization built to engage more strategically and deeply with the technical teams of our commercial customers."
• AMD “Green Sardine” Firmware Published For Linux Users
• Google Fuchsia OS could run Android & Linux apps ‘natively’ — This week, a proposal has been put forward for an alternative solution for Fuchsia to run programs meant for Linux and Android. Instead of running Linux itself, Fuchsia would gain a system called “Starnix,” which would act as a translator between instructions for the Linux kernel and instructions for Fuchsia’s Zircon kernel.
• [rfc] Running unmodified Linux programs on Fuchsia
• Fuchsia - Starnix Proposal
• Hacker News Comments — Running unmodified Linux programs on Fuchsia
• Homework: Uncovering a 24-year-old bug in the Linux Kernel
• Homework: Visual guide to SSH tunnels
• Homework: FOSDEM 2021 Videos

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 new Matrix goodies, why AWS is investing in Blender, 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:

• Google kills Android Things, its IoT OS, in January — Google announced it had basically given up on the project as a general-purpose IoT operating system in 2019, but now there's an official shutdown date thanks to a new FAQ page detailing the demise of the OS.
• Android Things Shutdown FAQ
• Ron Amadeo on Twitter — Oof, Google promised three years of updates when Android Things launched in May 2018, the actual support it delivered? One year, three months.
• Google, Qualcomm partner to bring 4 OS Android updates to new chipsets — The new plan is three years of major OS updates and four years of security updates.
• Qualcomm promises three years of Android updates for its entire SoC lineup
• Google acquires CloudReady OS to make PCs Chromebooks — Neverware lets you turn old PCs and Macs into Chromebook-esque devices through its CloudReady OS. While primarily aimed at schools and enterprises, a free “Home” edition for everyone is available. Google has now acquired Neverware and CloudReady with plans to integrate it with Chrome OS.
• Native Steam (Borealis) on Chrome OS likely arriving mid-2021
• GTK 4.0 Officially Released After More Than 4 Years of Development — The GTK development officially released today the next generation of the GTK toolkit, GTK 4.0, after being in development for more than four years.
• GTK 4.0 Toolkit Officially Released
• GTK 4.0 – GTK Development Blog
• Matrix.to: Reloaded — A challenge we regularly face is all the factors which make Matrix flexible and powerful as an open, secure decentralised protocol also increase the difficulty of getting started.
• Matrix.to — Create shareable links to Matrix rooms, users or messages without being tied to any app
• Introducing Cerulean — Alongside all the normal business-as-usual Matrix stuff, we’ve found some time to do a mad science experiment over the last few weeks - to test the question: "Is it possible to build a serious Twitter-style decentralised microblogging app using Matrix?"
• Google AMP gets a shock to its system as advisor quits, lawsuit claims foul play — Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages technology, known as AMP among web publishers, took a beating this week as an antitrust lawsuit filed by the Attorney General of Texas charged that the ad biz used AMP to hinder competition.
• I have resigned from the Google AMP Advisory Committee – Terence Eden’s Blog — I remain convinced that AMP is poorly implemented, hostile to the interests of both users and publishers, and a proprietary & unnecessary incursion into the open web.
• AWS joins the Blender Development Fund — AWS committed to a period of three years, specifically to support character animation tools development.

Plus our reaction to Microsoft's Android subsystem that's in the works.

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:

• Prolonged AWS outage takes down a big chunk of the internet — Amazon noted that the issues are only affecting one of its 23 geographic AWS regions. But the problem was significant enough to take out a large number of internet services.
• Geoff Belknap on Twitter — “I… can’t vacuum… because us-east-1 is down.”
• Canonical publishes LTS Docker Image Portfolio on Docker Hub — The LTS Docker Image Portfolio comes with up to ten years Extended Security Maintenance by Canonical.
• Vivaldi Integrates Email Client, Feed Reader, and Calendar in a Browser — The Vivaldi team announced that they are bringing an Email client, a Feed Reader, and a Calendar – all of these together in the latest Vivaldi technical preview release.
• Introducing Vivaldi Mail in Technical Preview
• How to use the built-in GPG feature for Thunderbird
• Systemd 247 Released With Experimental Out-of-Memory Daemon, New Credentials Capability — systemd 247 is very heavy on new features, and one big change for udev.
• [systemd-devel] systemd 247 released
• NTFS read-write driver GPL implementation by Paragon Software — The Paragon NTFS kernel driver patch is now on its 13th iteration
• Microsoft is working on an Android subsystem for Windows 10 — This new initiative is called 'Project Latte,' and similar to Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), will create a virtualized Android environment running directly within Windows 10.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Standing up for developers: youtube-dl is back — Today we reinstated youtube-dl, a popular project on GitHub, after we received additional information about the project that enabled us to reverse a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown.
• Remove cipher algorithm and mentions of copyrighted material
• GitHub reinstates youtube-dl library after EFF intervention
• $6 billion Linux deal? SUSE IPO rumored — SUSE, the major European Linux company, may soon be spun out in a $6 billion IPO.
• EQT Said to Plan IPO of $6 Billion Software Developer SUSE
• Canonical Saw ~$119M Revenue In 2019 But Still Operating At A Loss — Ubuntu maker Canonical Holdings Limited recently submitted their UK financial report for their fiscal year ending 31 December 2019. During the pre-COVID times they generated around 22% more revenue than 2018 but still operated at a loss albeit more narrowly than in prior years.
• Librem 5 Mass Production Phone Has Begun Shipping — Purism has begun shipping its mass-produced Librem 5 phone to customers.
• Servo’s new home — Servo was incubated inside Mozilla, and served as the proof that important web components such as CSS and rendering could be implemented in Rust, with all its safety, concurrency and speed.
• Mozilla Punts Servo Web Engine Development To The Linux Foundation
• Starting January 4, 2021, Google will block all sign-ins to Google accounts from embedded browser frameworks — The browser must identify itself clearly in the User-Agent. The browser must not try to impersonate another browser like Chrome or Firefox.
• Guidance to developers affected by our effort to block less secure browsers and applications

Plus what's new in Fedora 33, and an important youtube-dl update.

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:

• Fedora 33 is officially here! - Fedora Magazine — Fedora Workstation now uses BTRFS as the default filesystem.
• Fedora 33 Review: What’s New and How to Upgrade | FOSS Linux
• AWS Marketplace: Fedora 33 Cloud Base Images (x86_64) HVM
• Fedora IoT To Be Promoted To An Official Edition With Fedora 33 - Phoronix — Fedora IoT relies on RPM-OSTree for offering atomic updates and focuses on container-based workloads.
• Fedora IoT
• SiFive unveils plan for Linux PCs with RISC-V processors | VentureBeat — Developers can use the boards to test code for real-time operating systems, custom Linux distributions, compilers, libraries, and applications.
• The Heart of RISC-V Development is Unmatched - SiFive
• SiFive Is Launching The Most Compelling RISC-V Development Board Yet - Phoronix
• Check out their Chip Configurator
• James Prior from SiFive on Wendell’s show
• Codeplay joins the RISC-V foundation - SemiAccurate
• New installation options coming for Ubuntu on WSL | Ubuntu — Beginning in Windows 10 Insiders Preview build 20246 users can enable a complete WSL experience with simply: wsl.exe --install.
• Asking Microsoft to resign from the RIAA over youtube-dl takedown demand - Conservancy Blog - Software Freedom Conservancy — We call on Microsoft to resign from the RIAA and remove their conflict of interest in this matter. This is an important opportunity for Microsoft to stand up for the values of software freedom.
• RIAA Obtains Subpoenas Targeting 40 YouTube-Ripping Platforms & Pirate Sites * TorrentFreak
• Tzlil on Twitter — So the CEO of GitHub popped in #youtube-dl a few hours ago, looks like they are trying to get youtube-dl back, I hope this works out.
• New youtube-dl release: v2020.11.01.1

Plus, our thoughts on Apple's seeming abandoning of CUPS, the latest and greatest open source podcast player, and an important show update.

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:

• Plasma 5.20: One absolutely massive release — A massive release, containing improvements to dozens of components, widgets, and the desktop behavior in general.
• KDE Plasma 5.20 is Here – And It's an Epic Update
• LibreOffice rains on OpenOffice's 20th anniversary parade — To mark the 20th anniversary of Apache OpenOffice, the project's main rival, LibreOffice, published a letter asking OpenOffice to tell its users to switch
• Google and Intel warn of high-severity Bluetooth security bug in Linux — The flaw resides in BlueZ, the software stack that by default implements all Bluetooth core protocols and layers for Linux. Besides Linux laptops, it's used in many consumer or industrial Internet-of-things devices. It works with Linux versions 2.4.6 and later.
• Intel Blows the Coms Again
• Greg K-H on Twitter — "They are now claiming you need a 5.10 kernel or newer to solve this. 5.10 will be released at the end of December 2020. Intel knows better, and knows how to do this properly, this feels malicious at this point..."
• CUPS Printing System Open-Source Development Has Seemingly Dried Up — The open-source CUPS code-base is now at a stand-still. There was just one commit to the CUPS Git repository for all of 2020.
• Has Apple abandoned CUPS?
• LPC 2020 - Open Printing MC - YouTube
• OpenPrinting News - September 2020
• Antennapod 2.0 Released — AntennaPod version 2 released with a range of new features, bug fixes and improvements. Below you’ll find an extensive list of highlights, with each time the Pull Request ID.
• AntennaPod
• AntennaPod - Apps on Google Play
• AntennaPod | F-Droid

Plus, the major re-architecture work underway for Chrome OS with significant ramifications for Desktop Linux.

Sponsored By:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Introducing GNOME 3.38: “Orbis” — GNOME 3.38 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, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 27896 changes, made by approximately 901 contributors.
• LINUX Unplugged 370: PipeWire Progress
• New GNOME versioning scheme — The next version of GNOME, due to be released in March 2021, will be GNOME 40.
• GNOME Extensions Rebooted Initiative — Extensions Rebooted is a collaborative effort to address the issues around the GNOME Shell extension ecosystem.
• Wiki · extensions-rebooted · GitLab
• What is LaCrOS for Chromebooks and why does it matter? — Google is decoupling the Chrome browser from Chrome OS on Chromebooks. And it’s using Linux to do this.
• Update on Firefox Send and Firefox Notes — today we are announcing the end of life for two legacy services that grew out of the Firefox Test Pilot program: Firefox Send and Firefox Notes.
• Firefox for Android LAN-Based Intent Triggering — The SSDP engine in Firefox for Android (68.11.0 and below) can be tricked into triggering Android intent URIs with zero user interaction. This attack can be leveraged by attackers on the same WiFi network and manifests as applications on the target device suddenly launching, without the users' permission, and conducting activities allowed by the intent.
• Mozilla rolls out Firefox 81 on Android
• Microsoft submits Linux kernel patches for a 'complete virtualization stack' with Linux and Hyper-V — Linux on Azure might no longer need Windows
• All Jupiter Broadcasting Shows

Plus, why "Works with Chromebook" might be great for Linux, and using your GPU to fight the Coronavirus.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• npm is joining GitHub — I’m excited to announce that GitHub has signed an agreement to acquire npm.
• The npm Blog — Next Phase Montage
• Microsoft's GitHub absorbs NPM into its code-hosting empire
• GitHub for mobile is now available
• LMDE 4 “Debbie” released! — LMDE is a Linux Mint project which stands for “Linux Mint Debian Edition”.
• Debian Project Leader Elections 2020 — Jonathan Carter Sruthi Chandran Brian Gupta
• Platform for Jonathan Carter
• Platform for Sruthi Chandran
• Works With Chromebook — You’ll begin to see the Works With Chromebook badge on certified accessories in the U.S., Canada and Japan.
• Chromebooks Accessories & Chargers
• Chrome OS to get native app for printing and scanning
• Upcoming Chrome and Chrome OS releases — Due to adjusted work schedules at this time, we are pausing upcoming Chrome and Chrome OS releases.
• PAPPL Is A New Printer Application Framework Made By The Founder Of CUPS — Michael Sweet, the lead developer of CUPS who had been at Apple for more than a decade since they acquired it, is now developing PAPPL as a printer application framework in addition to his work on the new LPrint project.
• Crowdsourced supercomputing project sets sights on coronavirus — Folding@home targets COVID-19, number of volunteer ‘folders’ skyrockets
• Thousands of These Computers Were Mining Cryptocurrency. Now They're Working on Coronavirus Research
• Gamers... assemble. It's time to join forces with @NVIDIAGeForce and @OfficialPCMR
• NVIDIA GeForce on Twitter: PC Gamers, let’s put those GPUs to work.
• Firefox 74.0 Released — Firefox now provides better privacy for your web voice and video calls through support for mDNS ICE by cloaking your computer’s IP address with a random ID in certain WebRTC scenarios.

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 a birthday gift to Raspberry Pi users, Collabora comes to mobile, and more.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Collabora brings smooth editing to Android and iOS — This release fully integrates the iOS and Android apps into our Collabora Office product family.
• The Story of Collabora Office for Phones
• Firefox continues push to bring DNS over HTTPS by default for US users — The rollout will continue over the next few weeks to confirm no major issues are discovered as this new protocol is enabled for Firefox’s US-based users.
• Firefox now defaults to DNS-over-HTTPS for US netizens and some are dischuffed about this
• The Facts: Mozilla’s DNS over HTTPs
• Securing Firefox with WebAssembly — RLBox, a new sandboxing technology.
• Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee's Solid, and Me — I have joined a company called Inrupt that is working to bring Tim Berners-Lee's distributed data ownership model that is Solid into the mainstream.
• Building a World-Class Team at Inrupt
• Microsoft's Azure Sphere, its Linux-based microcontroller plus cloud service, hits general availability — Microsoft is making its Azure Sphere secure IoT service generally available after several years of testing and previews.
• A birthday gift: 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 now only $35 — The fall in RAM prices over the last year has allowed us to cut the price of the 2GB variant of Raspberry Pi 4 to $35.
• The Raspberry Pi 4 gets a RAM upgrade

Plus a new report about open source security, and more.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Microsoft: Linux Defender antivirus now in public preview — We're aiming to protect the modern workplace environment across everything that it is, being Microsoft or non-Microsoft.
• Microsoft Threat Protection stops attack sprawl and auto-heals enterprise
• Microsoft's Word, Excel and PowerPoint now live under one App
• Microsoft Works - Wikipedia
• Firefox releases an Android app for its VPN service — The Firefox Private Network VPN is powered by Mullvad VPN. Mullvad VPN claims that it won’t log and monitor user data, unlike many other VPN services.
• The Private Internet Access Android app is being open sourced
• IVPN applications are now open source
• Tom Scott video about VPNs
• Android 11 Developer Preview — All the changes we found from Android 10 so far.
• npm struggling to fund FOSS devs — Funding free software is 'still a very unsolved problem' says co-founder
• The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science Release Census for Open Source Software Security — New analysis identifies most widely used software and uncovers critical questions for the future of securing one of the world’s greatest shared resources
• The Linux Foundation identifies most important open-source software components and their problems — In its latest study, the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative discovered just how prevalent open-source components are in all software and their shared problems and vulnerabilities.
• Most-used libraries revealed
• The Linux Foundation and Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science release census for open-source software security — Census II (run by Harvard) wanted to look at language-level packages. Their report discusses some of the challenges. One challenge of many is that the JavaScript environment strongly encourages tiny modules, with around 1/2 of all JavaScript packages having at most one function. As a result, when you start counting dependencies, there are *far* more dependencies in JavaScript (because each module does so little), and so JavaScript tends to dominate.

Plus, our take on the FSF's Upcycle Windows 7 campaign, and the clever Chrome OS strategy upgrade for education in 2020.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Rocket League will drop support for Mac, Linux versions in March | Ars Technica — Change comes eight months after Epic Games acquired the game's creators.
• Update on Refunds for macOS and Linux Players
• Support for macOS and Linux (SteamOS) – Psyonix Support
• Psyonix are ending support for Rocket League on both Linux and macOS (updated)
• Thanks to Psyonix dropping Linux support, we're getting anti-Linux statements like this from game devs again
• Wine 5.0 Released — This release represents a year of development effort and over 7,400 individual changes.
• Wine Is Approaching Six Million Lines
• Canonical introduces Anbox Cloud — The service is designed to offload workloads from x86 or Arm-based devices to containers in the cloud.
• The latest Chrome OS education devices will get updates for eight years — Previously, most Chrome OS devices recieved six years of software support.
• Chromebooks will now get up to eight years of Chrome OS updates
• Improving 40 million Chromebooks for education
• Upcycle Windows 7 — We call on them to release it as free software, and give it to the community to study and improve.
• Open Source Licenses in 2020: Trends and Predictions

Support Linux Action News

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Amazon takes aim at MongoDB with launch of Mongo-compatible DocumentDB
• MongoDB "open-source" Server Side Public License rejected
• Redis Labs raises $60 million for its NoSQL database
• Redis Labs changes its open-source license — again
• Keeping Open Source Open – Open Distro for Elasticsearch
• Chef goes 100% open source
• Google jumps into gaming with Google Stadia streaming service
• Google Stadia will be missing many features for Monday’s launch
• Supporting choice and competition in Europe
• Presenting search app and browser options to Android users in Europe
• Android Developers Blog: Welcoming Android 10!
• Project Mainline is Google’s new way to speed up security updates in Android Q
• Adiantum: encryption for the low end
• All Chromebooks will also be Linux laptops going forward
• Google gives most Chromebooks an extra year of software support
• Google and fwupd sitting in a tree
• Phoenix joins the LVFS
• Please welcome HP to the LVFS
• LVFS Project Announcement
• Announcing the Open Sourcing of Windows Calculator
• Introducing Windows Terminal
• Microsoft Will Release Their Edge Web Browser For Linux
• Microsoft Teams is now available on Linux
• Announcing WSL 2
• Ubuntu 19.04 'Disco Dingo' Released with New Features
• Intel 32bit packages on Ubuntu from 19.10 onwards
• Statement on 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS
• Enhancing our ZFS support on Ubuntu 19.10
• Ubuntu 19.10 Released
• Will Cooke, the Director of Engineering for the Ubuntu desktop, has left Canonical
• Canonical announces Ubuntu Pro for Amazon Web Services
• Red Hat Opens the Linux Experience to Every Enterprise, Every Cloud and Every Workload with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
• Red Hat crosses US$3b annual revenue for first time
• Announcing the release of Fedora 30
• IBM Closes Landmark Acquisition of Red Hat for $34 Billion; Defines Open, Hybrid Cloud Future
• Introducing Fedora CoreOS
• Presenting CentOS Stream
• Fedora 31 is officially here!

Plus why Ubuntu is taking the Windows Subsystem for Linux so seriously.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Canonical announces Ubuntu Pro for Amazon Web Services — New premium Ubuntu images with extended security, kernel live patching and more
• Introducing the Ubuntu AWS Rolling Kernel
• Canonical Announces "Ubuntu Pro" For AWS
• Canonical makes Ubuntu for Windows SubSystem for Linux a priority
• Amazon Announces Graviton2 SoC Along With New 64-Core Arm Instances — The new Graviton2 SoC is a custom design by Amazon’s own in-house silicon design teams and is a successor to the first-generation Graviton chip. The new chip quadruples the core count from 16 cores to 64.
• Graviton pulse - Memory Alpha
• AWS Goes All In On Arm-Based Graviton2 Processors
• Firefox 71 Released — Native MP3 decoding on Windows, Linux, and macOS
• Firefox 71 Linux Performance Isn't Looking All That Great
• Firefox Private Network Beta
• Firefox VPN Sign Up
• Mozilla launches the next phase of its Firefox Private Network VPN beta
• Avast Online Security and Avast Secure Browser are spying on you
• Mozilla updates DeepSpeech with an English language model that runs 'faster than real time'

Also, our thoughts on the new Alexa Voice service coming to low-end IoT devices, and much more.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Contract for the Web officially launched — Inventor of web calls on governments and firms to safeguard it from abuse and ensure it benefits humanity
• Tim Berners-Lee launches Google and Facebook-backed plan to fix the web
• Mozilla and the Contract for the Web
• State of Mozilla 2018: Annual Report — This report details how Mozilla operates and includes details from our financial reports for 2018.
• Mozilla: Be Smart. Shop Safe. — How creepy is that smart speaker, that fitness tracker, those wireless headphones? We created this guide to help you shop for safe, secure connected products.
• Minimum Security Guidelines Explained — These three organizations proposed five minimum guidelines that companies making connected devices should reasonably be expected to satisfy.
• Introducing Alexa Voice Service Integration for AWS IoT Core, a cost-effective Alexa Voice on any type of connected device — VS for AWS IoT enables Alexa Built-in functionality on MCUs like ARM Cortex ‘M’ class with <1MB embedded RAM by offloading memory and compute tasks to a virtual Alexa Built-in device in the cloud
• Kali Linux 2019.4 released with Xfce by default — We are incredibly excited to announce our fourth and final release of 2019, Kali Linux 2019.4, which is available immediately for download.

Plus our thoughts on LVFS for Chromebooks, and the recent Monero hack.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Updates to the Mozilla Web Security Bounty Program — To celebrate the 15 years of the 1.0 release of Firefox, we are making significant enhancements to the web bug bounty program.
• GitLab: We are increasing bounties in our bug bounty program — Since we opened our bug bounty program to the public in December 2018, our community of external security researchers submitted 1,282 reports and we paid out $515,899 in bounties.
• Expanding the Android Security Rewards Program
• Google will pay $1.5 million for the most severe Android exploits
• Google and fwupd sitting in a tree
• Google To Require "Designed For Chromebook" Devices Support Fwupd Firmware Updates
• Debian init systems - what, another GR ? — Sam Hartman, the Debian Project Leader, has proposed a General Resolution (a plebiscite of the whole project) about init systems. In this posting I am going to try to summarise the situation. This will necessarily be a personal view but I will try to be fair. Also, sorry that it's so long but there is a lot of ground to cover.
• General Resolution: Init systems and systemd
• Open Invention Network Teams with IBM, Linux Foundation and Microsoft to Further Protect Open Source from Patent Trolls — Open Invention Network announced today it is partnering with IBM, the Linux Foundation and Microsoft to further protect open source software (OSS) from Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) leveraging low quality patents, also called patent trolls.
• IBM, Microsoft and Linux Foundation link arms to fight patent trolls with 'multimillion' scheme
• Official Monero website is hacked to deliver currency-stealing malware — GetMonero.org delivers Linux and Windows binaries that steal users' funds.

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 Telegram's cryptocurrency is definitely happening. Honest.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• exFAT in the Linux kernel? Yes! — It’s important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence. To this end, we will be making Microsoft’s technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate development of conformant, interoperable implementations. We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network’s Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN’s 3040+ members and licensees.
• The Initial exFAT Driver Queued For Introduction With The Linux 5.4 Kernel — Greg lived up to his talk and today committed the exFAT driver to staging-next. This nearly eleven thousand lines of new code did get the sign-off of Microsoft and with it being in the "-next" branch will be set for inclusion into the Linux 5.4 mainline code-base once Linux 5.3 is released.
• Chris Beard to step down as Mozilla CEO — This is a good place to recruit our next CEO and for me to take a meaningful break and recharge before considering what’s next for me. It may be a cliché — but I’ll embrace it — as I’m also looking forward to spending more time with my family after a particularly intense but gratifying tour of duty.
• Thunderbird 68 released — Thunderbird version 68.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as upgrade from Thunderbird version 60 or earlier. A future version 68.1 will provide updates from earlier versions. Note that add-ons are only supported if add-on authors have adapted them.
• What’s New in Thunderbird 68 — Thunderbird 68 focuses on polish and setting the stage for future releases. There was a lot of work that we had to do below the surface that has made Thunderbird more future-proof and has made it a solid base to continue to build upon. But we also managed to create some great features you can touch today.
• Chrome OS gets first Chromebook Enterprise devices, faster Admin Console, and managed Linux environments — Google today announced a slew of Chrome Enterprise updates, including a faster Google Admin console and managed Linux environments. The company also unveiled the first Chromebook Enterprise laptops: Dell’s Latitude 5300 for $819 and Latitude 5400 for $699.
• GNOME Firmware Updater — A few months ago, Dell asked if I’d like to co-mentor an intern over the summer. The task was to create a GTK “power user” application for managing firmware. The idea being that someone like Dell support could ask the user to run a little application and then read back firmware versions or downgrade to an older firmware version rather than getting them to use the command line.
• GNOME Foundation launches Coding Education Challenge — The GNOME Foundation, with support from Endless, has announced the Coding Education Challenge, a competition aimed to attract projects that offer educators and students new and innovative ideas to teach coding with free and open source software. The $500,000 in funding will support the prizes, which will be awarded to the teams who advance through the three stages of the competition. 
• Telegram will launch its Gram cryptocurrency by October 31 or bust — Telegram’s cryptocurrency— the Gram — may be going public after all. The encrypted messaging app company plans to deliver “the first batches” of the coin in the next two months, according to a report at The New York Times.

Plus our reaction to Android dropping dessert names, the Confidential Computing consortium, and more.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Today, 28 years ago Linus Torvalds announced Linux on comp.os.minix. — I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
• System76 announce new firmware updater — We’ve been working on the Firmware Manager project, which we will be shipping to all Pop!_OS users, and System76 hardware customers on other Debian-based distributions. It supports checking and updating firmware from LVFS and system76-firmware services, is Wayland-compatible, and provides both a GTK application and library.
• The Next Step in the OpenPOWER Foundation Journey — The OpenPOWER Foundation will now join projects and organizations like OpenBMC, CHIPS Alliance, OpenHPC and so many others within the Linux Foundation.
• IBM is moving OpenPower Foundation to The Linux Foundation
• Confidential Computing Consortium — Confidential computing focuses on  securing data in use. Current approaches to securing data often  address data at rest (storage) and in transit (network)but encrypting data in use is  possibly the most challenging step to providing a fully encrypted lifecycle for sensitive data.
• Confidential Computing Consortium Takes Shape
• The year-long rash of supply chain attacks against open source is getting worse — Backdoors snuck into 12 OSS packages were downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.
• Android to drop dessert names — So, this next release of Android will simply use the version number and be called Android 10. We think this change helps make release names simpler and more intuitive for our global community. And while there were many tempting “Q” desserts out there, we think that at version 10 and 2.5 billion active devices, it was time to make this change. 

Plus Mozilla's big plans Firefox on Android, and the future of Steam on Linux.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Raspberry Pi 4 Released — Raspberry Pi 4 is now on sale, starting at $35. This is a comprehensive upgrade, touching almost every element of the platform. For the first time we provide a PC-like level of performance for most users, while retaining the interfacing capabilities and hackability of the classic Raspberry Pi line.
• New version of Raspbian — We are actually releasing it slightly in advance of the official Debian release date. The reason for this is that one of the important new features of Raspberry Pi 4
• Slightly faster than Stretch version
• No USB boot yet
• Reinventing Firefox for Android — Today we’re very happy to announce a pilot of our new browser for Android devices that is available to early adopters for testing as of now.
• Firefox to get a random password generator
• Microsoft applies to join linux-distros mailing list — Windows giant cheered on by Linux Foundation as it seeks membership of private security-focused message board.
• Register's Coverage
• Introducing people.kernel.org — Ever since the demise of Google+, many developers have expressed a desire to have a service that would provide a way to create and manage content in a format that would be more rich and easier to access than email messages sent to LKML.
• Statement on 32-bit i386 packages for Ubuntu 19.10 and 20.04 LTS — We will put in place a community process to determine which 32-bit packages are needed to support legacy software, and can add to that list post-release if we miss something that is needed.

Plus Facebook wants you to use their cryptocurrency, and CERN launches "The Microsoft Alternatives project".

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Mozilla says paid subscription service is coming to Firefox — The goal for Mozilla is to develop “diverse sources of revenue” so that it isn’t so heavily reliant on money it receives from search companies that pay to be featured in the browser.
• New Firefox branding — The “Firefox” you’ve always known as a browser is stretching to cover a family of products and services united by putting you and your privacy first.
• Apple joins the Cloud Native Computing Foundation — The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, the home of open-source projects like Kubernetes, today announced that Apple is joining as a top-level Platinum End User Member.
• MAlt project — The Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) started a year ago to mitigate anticipated software license fee increases.
• Huawei's struggle in the US has led to it cancel a new MateBook — Huawei CEO Richard Yu has confirmed an indefinite hold on the release of a new MateBook laptop.
• Huawei may use Sailfish OS-based Aurora — Aurora OS is a Russian-made mobile operating system based on the open-source Sailfish OS Linux distribution developed by Finnish company Jolla.
• Huawei's operating system in pipeline on 1 million phones? — In a smartphone supply chain report that Huawei has allegedly shipped 1 million smartphones with its self-developed "HongMeng" operating system onboard for testing.
• Facebook’s cryptocurrency to debut next week backed by Visa, Mastercard, and others — Each will invest around $10 million to fund the development of the currency and will become part of the Libra Association, an independent consortium that will govern the digital coin independently of Facebook.

Plus Google argues that keeping Huawei on their Android is better for all, and Chris gets sucked into Stadia.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Firefox Now Available with Enhanced Tracking Protection by Default — At Firefox, we’re doing more than that. We believe that in order to truly protect people, we need to establish a new standard that puts people’s privacy first.
• Relicensing CockroachDB — But our past outlook on the right business model relied on a crucial norm in the OSS world: that companies could build a business around a strong open source core product without a much larger technology platform company coming along and offering the same product as a service. That norm no longer holds.   
• Microsoft and Oracle link up their clouds — Microsoft and Oracle announced a new alliance today that will see the two companies directly connect their clouds over a direct network connection so that their users can then move workloads and data seamlessly between the two.
• Google is fighting to keep doing business with Huawei — Three sources told the Financial Times that Google's argument is that cutting ties with Huawei could pose a national security risk.
• Stadia details announced — Stadia games run on custom Linux-based server hardware maintained by Google, promising "10.7 teraflops of power in each instance." Game audio and video is streamed from those servers to a user's device, and inputs are streamed from the user to the server over a network of what Google says are "7,500 edge nodes" around the world.

Plus there’s no avoiding how far off we were when it came to Bitcoin last year, but that didn’t stop us having a go again this year!

Support Linux Action News

Acquisitions, solid releases, a revolution for gaming, politics in the kernel community, Chrome OS coming of age, and more.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• IBM to Acquire Red Hat — Most significant tech acquisition of 2018 will unlock true value of cloud for business
• Red Hat to Acquire CoreOS — The world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire CoreOS, Inc.
• Welcome to Fedora CoreOS — This new thing will be “Fedora CoreOS” and serve as the upstream to Red Hat CoreOS.
• Red Hat's Stratis Storage Project Reaches 1.0 — Stratis 1.0 was quietly released last week with the 1.0 version marking its initial stable release and where also the on-disk meta-data format has been stabilized.
• Microsoft to acquire GitHub — Microsoft Corp. on Monday announced it has reached an agreement to acquire GitHub
• Microsoft joins OIN — Microsoft is joining the Open Invention Network (“OIN”), a community dedicated to protecting Linux and other open source software programs from patent risk.
• Microsoft’s Linux powered dev boards, Azure Sphere for sale — Azure Sphere is a solution for creating highly-secured, connected Microcontroller (MCU) devices, providing you with the confidence and the power to reimagine your business and create the future.
• Ubuntu 18.04 released — The 'main' archive of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS will be supported for 5 years until April 2023.
• Ubuntu 18.04 will be supported for 10 years — At OpenStack Summit in Berlin, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said in a keynote that Ubuntu 18.04 Long Term Support (LTS) support lifespan would be extended from five years to 10 years.
• Valve’s “Steam Play” uses Vulkan to bring more Windows games to Linux — Valve announced today a beta of Steam Play, a new compatibility layer for Linux, to provide compatibility with a wide range of Windows-only games.
• Steam Machines disappear from Valve's site — Valve is no longer highlighting Steam Machine hardware through the front page of its online Steam store, seemingly putting a final nail in the coffin of Valve's partnership with third-party PC builders.
• Steam Link box discontinued — According to Valve, the inventory of Steam Links has fully depleted, meaning this one’s apparently gone for good.
• Meltdown and Spectre — Meltdown and Spectre exploit critical vulnerabilities in modern processors. These hardware vulnerabilities allow programs to steal data which is currently processed on the computer.
• Linus takes a break and a new CoC for kernel devs — The revamped Linux code of conduct encourages behaviors like accepting constructive criticism gracefully, using inclusive language, and being respectful of “differing viewpoints and experiences.”
• Linux apps on Chrome OS confirmed — Support for Linux will enable you to create, test and run Android and web app for phones, tablets and laptops all on one Chromebook. Run popular editors, code in your favorite language and launch projects to Google Cloud with the command-line. Everything works directly on a Chromebook.
• Chrome OS tablet launched — The Pixel Slate is a Chrome OS tablet with a detachable keyboard cover that turns it into something very closely resembling a laptop.
• Chrome OS 70 brings native network file share support — Mr. Beaufort points to a Chromium Gerrit commit that gives details of the feature that shows M70 of Chrome OS will have its NativeSmb flag to set to enabled by default.

Plus Android App mirroring, how the islands of the clouds are getting bridged, and Chris channels his inner Shuttleworth.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Red Hat's Stratis Storage Project Reaches Its 1.0 Stable Milestone — Stratis has been the Red Hat play two years in development for delivering next-gen Linux storage following their decision to abandon Btrfs support. Stratis offers ZFS and Btrfs like functionality and a lot of other new capabilities while this past week marked its first stable release.
• Stratis Whitepaper
• ​Red Hat Satellite integrated new, improved Ansible DevOps — Red Hat is adding Ansible DevOps capabilities to its Red Hat Satellite system management program.
• hibernation — does it work for you? — We have had a long discussion about hibernate (suspend to disk) being unreliable. But there seems to be no hard data. Let's gather some!
• Microsoft announces app mirroring to let you use any Android app on Windows 10 — The feature, which Microsoft is referring to as app mirroring and shows up in Windows as an app called Your Phone, seems to be work best with Android for now. Although Microsoft did announce the ability to transfer webpages from an iPhone to a Windows 10 desktop so you can pick up where you left off on mobile.
• Microsoft’s Linux powered dev boards, Azure Sphere for sale — An OS purpose built for security and agility to create a trustworthy platform for new IoT experiences. Our secured OS builds security innovations pioneered in Windows into an HLOS small enough for MCUs.
• Azure Sphere MT3620 Development Board — Azure Sphere MT3620 Development Kit_US Version
• Microsoft open-sources Infer.NET AI code — Infer.NET, which is on GitHub right now, takes a model-based approach to machine learning. The developer gives the framework a model, and the framework then develops a machine-learning algorithm directly from the model provided.
• Node.js and JS foundations looking to merge — “The Node.js Foundation and JS Foundation boards have met several times already to discuss a potential alignment of the communities. The Foundation leaders and key technical stakeholders believe that a tighter alignment of communities will expand the scope of the current Foundations and enable greater support for Node.js and a broader range of JavaScript projects,”

Plus new releases from nano and Nextcloud, huge news for Jupiter Broadcasting, and more.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Give Fedora Silverblue a test drive — Fedora Silverblue is a new variant of Fedora Workstation with rpm-ostree at its core to provide fully atomic upgrades. Furthermore, Fedora Silverblue is immutable and upgrades as a whole, providing easy rollbacks from updates if something goes wrong. Fedora Silverblue is great for developers using Fedora with good support for container-focused workflows.
• nano 3.0 released — GNU nano 3.0 "Water Flowing Underground" speeds up the reading of a file by seventy percent, roughly doubles the speed of handling ASCII text, changes the way words at line boundaries are deleted, makes wipe the next word and the preceding word...
• Nextcloud 14 released — The upcoming Nextcloud 14 introduces a series of improvements to make Nextcloud even easier to use and also more accessible to people with visual disabilities.
• Firefox Focus to switch to Gecko — In the next weeks, we’ll release a new version of Focus for Android, and for the first time, Focus will come bundled with Gecko, the browser engine that powers Firefox Quantum.
• Chrome OS 70 brings native network file share support — Chrome OS will have its NativeSmb flag to set to enabled by default
• Microsoft planned to try and stop users installing alternative browsers in Win10 but then backtracked
• Jupiter Broadcasting Joins Linux Academy — As part of Linux Academy, we’re going to do more than create better content. We’re going to contribute back.
• User Error is back! — User Error is back with a new set of hosts! We answer some #AskError questions and talk about whether the Linux desktop will ever make money. Plus we wonder if dockless bike sharing is a good idea and whether travel really is as great as everyone seems to think.

Plus we try out the new Devuan release, and more.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Microsoft to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion
• ReactOS Is Finally Able To Build Itself
• TrueOS to Focus on Core Operating System
• Project Trident
• Stepping down as maintainer
• Find your way to Plasma Mobile
• Devuan 2.0 released

Sponsored By:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• ChromeOS now on tablets — The new Acer Chromebook Tab 10 is a 9.7 inch tablet that runs Google’s Chrome operating system, supports Android apps, and has no keyboard
• The final nail in the Firefox OS coffin — the Firefox Marketplace is shutting down on March 30th, 2018, which means the handful of folks who actually have devices running Firefox OS won’t be able to download apps from the official app store after that.
• Google removes Kodi from autocomplete — C: 30NEWS Google has banned the term "Kodi" from the autocomplete feature of its search engine. This means that the popular software and related suggestions won't appear unless users type out the full term. Google has previously taken similar measures against "pirate" related terms and confirms that Kodi is targeted because it's "closely associated with copyright infringement."
• Facebook Container for Firefox — Prevent Facebook from tracking you around the web. The Facebook Container extension for Firefox helps you take control and isolate your web activity from Facebook.
• Firefox Multi-Account Containers
• Oracle vs Google case not dead — The Federal Circuit has ruled for a second time in Oracle v. Google, the software copyright lawsuit over Google’s Android platform. The new decision reverses the district court yet again and sends the case back for a third trial to determine damages for Oracle. In the last trial, Oracle sought almost $9 billion in damages.
• Microsoft facilitating yet more distros on WSL — This sample allows distro maintainers to build WSL distro packages for the Microsoft Store and developers to create custom Linux distro packages for sideloading.  You can find the distro launcher repo on GitHub.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Sailfish 3 and feature phones — Sailfish OS development never stops, not even for legacy devices. Sailfish 3 will be rolled out in phases during Q3/2018 for all licensees and customers.
• Crostini - Linux App via Containers on ChromeOS — In other words, the Crostini/Terminal feature could be to Chrome OS what the Windows Subsystem for Linux is for Windows 10: a way that developers, power users, and Linux enthusiasts can run native Linux software on a device that’s not running a traditional Linux distribution.
• Sailfish OS v3 will be on "feature phones" — It’s also coming to 4G-enabled feature phones.
• Microsoft and Canonical collaborate on Ubuntu VMs — With only 3 mouse clicks, users will be able to get an Ubuntu VM running that offers clipboard functionality, drive redirection, and much more.
• Purism makes their laptops more secure — As part of our goal to improve security we are excited to announce that we have successfully integrated Heads into our TPM-enabled coreboot-running Librem laptops.
• Kernel secure boot lock down — Among the further restrictions that would be placed on the Linux kernel when running with UEFI Secure Boot enabled is blocking access to kernel module parameters that end up dealing with hardware settings, blocking access to some areas of /dev that could manipulate the kernel or hardware state, etc.
• More Linux On Galaxy hype — Linux is installed as an “app” on Android, and when launched it shares the same Linux kernel powering Android.

Then we consider the recent smattering of opinion pieces on Microsoft's commitment to Open Source.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• New Atari console runs Linux — The Ataribox is powered by a ‘customised’ AMD processor and uses Radeon graphics. On the software side the machine runs a ‘customised’ version of Linux that has an “easy-to-use user interface”.
• Ubuntu 17.10 final beta — Artful Final Beta includes updated versions of most of our core set of packages, including a current 4.13 kernel
• Ubuntu 17.10 Will Drop The 32-bit Desktop ISO — There will no longer be any "ubuntu-desktop-i386.iso" produced. There is no longer any effective QA or testing being done on the Ubuntu i386 desktop image on actual 32-bit-only hardware.
• Announcing the XFree KWin project — The idea is to be able to start KWin/Wayland without XWayland support.
• 6 year LTS kernel — Linux LTS releases will now be maintained for six years.
• Nextcloud Introducing Native Integrated End-to-end Encryption — Nextcloud End-to-end Encryption keeps the server from ever seeing the data while still facilitating syncing between devices and sharing with other users.
• SQL Server lands on Linux for the first time — Microsoft hit a major milestone today with the official general availability of SQL Server on Linux.
• Microsoft Rolls Out A Preview Of The New Skype For Linux — This long-awaited Skype for Linux update brings screen sharing, group chat, and other features not recently available under the current Skype for Linux client. This new Linux client is part of their effort to "rebuild Skype from the ground up with cloud technology."
• Microsoft becomes a sponsor of the Open Source Initiative — As a premium sponsor, Microsoft joins the likes of Google, IGM, HPE, AdblockPlus, GitHub and Heptio as top sponsors of the project. Other sponsors at lower levels include RedHat, The Linux Foundation, Mozilla and HP.
• When Microsoft met SUSE: This Windows-Linux partnership gets stronger every day — Microsoft SQL Server, which just became available on Linux, is also available on SLES and SLES on Azure on October 2.
• Will Microsoft love Linux to death? Shuttleworth and Stallman. — "It certainly looks that way. But it won't be so easy to extinguish us, because our reasons for using and advancing free software are not limited to practical convenience," he said.

Plus Chris' quick take on Android Oreo, Google goes for Microsoft's heart, while Microsoft gets cozier with Red Hat and SUSE pretends not to be upset about it.

Sponsored By:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Ubuntu Budgie machines — UK-based computer outfit Nimbusoft is gearing up to sell two laptops and an all-in-one desktop PC pre-loaded with the aforementioned nimble, GNOME-based Ubuntu spin.
• Librem 5 — The Librem 5 phone will be the world's first ever IP-native mobile handset, using end-to-end encrypted decentralized communication.
• Jolla wants to try and sell a development ROM for €50 — Today it’s our pleasure to announce all the details for Sailfish X, aka Sailfish OS for Sony Xperia X!
• Android Oreo — Android Oreo brings with it a host of new features and improvements over Android Nougat. While not all of them would be immediately visible to end users, they would surely contribute towards the end experience of a mature smartphone OS.
• Chrome OS enterprise edition — The paid service will allow companies to manage multiple devices running Chrome, and includes support for Microsoft Active Directory and VMware Workspace One, as well as managed or custom storefronts in the Play service.
• Microsoft and Red Hat expand alliance to containers — Red Hat and Microsoft have expanded an alliance which was first announced about two years ago, with plans to help organisations more easily adopt the use of containers.
• SUSE pretends not to be butthurt — Asked where SUSE stood in view of the fact that Red Hat, whose revenue dwarfs that of the Germany company, would obviously be a preferred partner for Microsoft, a company spokesman said, pointing to the announcement of the deal: "I don't see where it says Red Hat is 'preferred'. Perhaps I'm missing something."
• and holds firm on Btrfs — SUSE is committed to btrfs as the default filesystem for SUSE Linux Enterprise, and beyond.

Plus Debian warns of Hyper Threading issues; and of course a bit more.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprise hit the Windows Store — Now OpenSUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 and OpenSUSE Leap 42 are available for installation from the Windows Store.
• System76 Announce Their Own Linux Distribution called Pop!_OS — System76 say their ‘operating system’ — they don’t call it a distribution — will be built and tailored to meet the needs to “professionals and makers that use their computers to create.”
• Canonical Promises Smooth and Easy Unity 7 to GNOME Shell Migration for Users — Probably the most important thing that the Ubuntu developers have worked on lately is a smooth and easy migration process from Unity 7 to GNOME Shell
• Mir 1.0 Now Aiming To Support Wayland Clients Directly — Mir 0.27 also will feature a new set of APIs to develop a "Mir platform" outside of Mir itself, which can be used for developing Mir-Wayland platform support without having to fork Mir itself.
• MATE Developers Are Considering Mir-Over-Wayland — MATE developer Martin Wimpress has shared that they are talking to Mir developers about how Mir could be used as a Wayland compositor.
• Debian Warns Of Hyper Threading Issue With Intel Sky/Kaby Lake CPUs — Intel Skylake and Kabylake (6th and 7th gen CPUs) could "dangerously misbehave" when Hyper Threading is enabled.

Welcome to Linux Action News's debut episode. It’s our goal to build the show you go to when you want to hear an informed discussion about what’s happening.

We kick things off with a busy news week.

Sponsored By:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Canonical starts IPO path — At OpenStack Summit, Canonical and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth revealed in an interview that the recent changes in the Linux and cloud power were to ready Canonical for an IPO.
• Microsoft is bringing Ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora to the Windows Store — With the new Fall Creators Update, users will be able to install Ubuntu, SUSE, and Fedora as apps on their device, allowing them to run Windows and Linux applications side-by-side without dual-booting.
• OpenWRT and LEDE agree on Linux-for-routers peace plan • The Register — The terms will see LEDE fold back into OpenWRT. Persisting with the latter name was deemed non-negotiable by the OpenWRT faction. The agreement also proposes closing the LEDE GitHub repo, rebuilding LEDE's web site so it ha OpenWRT branding and basically burying the LEDE brand. LEDE code will live on as OpenWRT will be required to keep forked trees available.
• Here comes Treble: A modular base for Android | Android Developers Blog — With Android O, we've been working very closely with device makers and silicon manufacturers to take steps toward solving this problem, and we're excited to give you a sneak peek at Project Treble, the biggest change to the low-level system architecture of Android to date.
• Google’s “Project Treble” solves one of Android’s many update roadblocks | Ars Technica — Project Treble" is a plan to modularize the Android OS, separating the OS framework code from "vendor specific" hardware code. In theory, this change would allow for a new Android update to be flashed on a device without any involvement from the silicon vendor. 
• Google’s “Fuchsia” smartphone OS dumps Linux, has a wild new UI | Ars Technica — Unlike Android and Chrome OS, Fuchsia is not based on Linux—it uses a new, Google-developed microkernel called "Magenta." With Fuchsia, Google would not only be dumping the Linux kernel, but also the GPL: the OS is licensed under a mix of BSD 3 clause, MIT, and Apache 2.0.