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:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Wine on Wayland 2022 update: more games, more apps, more fun! — Significant improvement compared to last year is support for cross-process rendering, which is required by Chromium/CEF applications. Last year the driver was able to run Chrome with the "--in-process" command-line option. Chrome is now supported without any special flags, and is fully GPU accelerated on both OpenGL and Vulkan!
• A Wayland driver for Wine
• Wine on Wayland year-end update: improved functionality & stability
• Wine’s Wayland Driver Is Becoming Mature, May Aim For Upstreaming Early Next Year
• Linux 6.1 Released With MGLRU, Initial Rust Code — Linux 6.1 integrates the exciting Multi-Gen LRU (MGLRU) overhaul of the page reclamation code, the initial Rust programming language support
• The 6.1 kernel is out [LWN.net]
• Linux 6.2 Graphics Changes: Intel Arc Graphics Stable, Initial NVIDIA RTX 30 Acceleration
• Linux 6.2 Addresses Another “Tasty Target For Attackers”
• Linux 6.2 Expands Support For More Qualcomm Snapdragon SoCs, Apple M1 Pro/Ultra/Max
• Intel On Demand Driver Ready To Activate Your Licensed CPU Features With Linux 6.2
• Btrfs With Linux 6.2 Bringing Performance Improvements, Better RAID 5/6 Reliability
• CERN recommendation for Linux distribution — CERN and Fermilab jointly plan to provide AlmaLinux as the standard distribution for experiments at our facilities, reflecting recent experience and discussions with experiments and other stakeholders
• CERN, Fermilab select AlmaLinux as standard for big science
• AlmaLinux 9.1 - Now Available - AlmaLinux OS Blog
• Stephan Dörner (in English) on Twitter — CERN and Fermilab jointly plan to provide AlmaLinux as the standard distribution for experiments at our facilities
• GCC Rust “gccrs” Code Merged Into Mainline GCC 13 — Following last week's approval with the GCC Rust v4 patches for them to be merged, all of the "gccrs" code was upstreamed this morning for GNU Compiler Collection 13.
• PeerTube v5: the result of 5 years’ handcrafting — Five years later, we are releasing PeerTube v5, a tool used by hundreds of thousands people on a thousand interconnected platforms to share over 850,000 videos.
• Support Framasoft
• Settings Link Missing after 5.0 Upgrade

Sponsored By:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• 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:

• 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 37 Gets A Batch Of New Features Approved — Fedora 37 is working its way toward release before the end of October.
• The Performance Cost To A Proposed Fedora 37 CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS Change
• Fedora CoreOS Hopes To Become An Official Edition With Fedora 37
• Fedora 37 Looks To Ship With Stratis Storage 3.1 Support
• Fedora 37 Proposing To Allow Unrestricted Access To Flathub
• Fedora Magazine: Accessibility in Fedora Workstation — I am very happy to announce that Red Hat has just hired Lukas Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer, to lead our effort in making sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation has excellent accessibility support!
• Firefox 102 Available With Transform Streams, Geoclue On Linux — Firefox 102.0 isn't the most exciting end-user update but does have some developer additions like Transform Streams support and support for Geoclue with Firefox Linux builds for geolocation.
• Thunderbird 102 Released With Big Improvements To This Leading Open-Source Mail Client — Thunderbird 102 introduces a new address book implementation, a new spaces toolbar, a new import/export wizard, a redesigned message header, and other "quality of life" updates. There are also some extras with Thunderbird 102 like adding Matrix chat support.
• Matrix.org Security release: Synapse 1.61.1 — Today we're exceptionally releasing Synapse 1.61.1, which comes as a security release. Server administrators are encouraged to update as soon as possible.
• Synapse Release v1.61.1
• Synapse Advisory — URL previews of unusual or maliciously-crafted pages can crash Synapse media repositories or Synapse monoliths.
• Valve More Than Doubles Steam Deck Production, Q3 Reservations Starting Soon — Valve just tweeted out some great news for SteamDeck fans, saying it has more than doubled the number of Steam Decks being produced every week. The company also says it just sent out the last batch of Q2 reservation emails and is prepared to start kicking off Q3 reservations on June 30th 2022.
• Check Your Steam Deck Order Status
• Vim 9.0 — The main goal of Vim9 script is to drastically improve performance. This is accomplished by compiling commands into instructions that can be efficiently executed. An increase in execution speed of 10 to 100 times can be expected.
• Vim 9.0 Released With New Vim9 Script For 10~100x Execution Speed
• Linode Security Digest — June 20-26, 2022
• Apple M2 Enablement For Linux Begins With Good Progress — Hector Martin on Monday began his Linux M2 bring-up effort, including with a livestream of this reverse engineering / debugging / kernel hacking effort. Hector confirmed NVMe, USB, and SMC functionality are working for the M2 on the first day of the effort.
• M2 Asahi Linux bring-up YouTube Stream

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:

• Valve expect to make ‘hundreds of thousands’ of Steam Decks next month — The good news is though, production is quickly ramping up. Yang mentioned how "in production terms it'll ramp very quickly, in the first month very quickly we'll be in the tens of thousands, by the second month we'll be in the hundreds of thousands and beyond that it'll grow even quicker".
• Steam Deck gets an OS update to help solve stick drift
• Bungie rejects Steam Deck’s Linux, threatens to ban Destiny 2 players there
• Collabora talk briefly about their work with Valve on SteamOS, Steam Deck — With its new “A/B” design, there are now two operating system partitions, with two different versions of SteamOS. When upgrading, a new operating system image is written to whichever partition is not currently in use, before rebooting the system. A specialized bootloader module then automatically selects the newer operating system and boots into it.
• Portable Linux gaming with the Steam Deck
• Linux kernel edges closer to dropping ReiserFS — The problem was that ReiserFS code in the kernel used some API calls that nothing else did, preventing them from being changed or enhanced. For now, one of the other ReiserFS developers has contributed a patch that removes the issue.
• CentOS New “AutoSD” Distribution Announced For In-Vehicle Linux Distro — CentOS Automotive Stream Distribution is their binary distribution that will serve as a public, in-development preview of Red Hat's upcoming in-vehicle operating system. CentOS formed their Automotive SIG last year with Red Hat working on a RHEL-based in-vehicle Linux platform that is yet to be publicly released.
• Future Intel Systems To Reportedly Be Even Less Friendly For Open-Source Firmware
• Zaolin on Twitter — For everyone wondering what’s @IntelSoftware planning for the Firmware Support Package 3.0 #fsp and USF is basically going fully closed-source on the firmware side. This means Intel’s #fsp decides to drop #OSF open-source firmware. It’s really a shame…
• Why RISC-V Is Succeeding
• Intel’s software-defined silicon set to debut in Linux 5.18 — The existence of software-defined silicon (SDSI) emerged in October 2021 when Intel staffers posted to the Linux Kernel mailing list with hints about new functionality that would allow users to purchase licenses that turned on capabilities physically present in processors, but which are not available to use out of the box.

Sponsored By:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Red Hat / Fedora Anaconda Installer Shifting To A Web Based UI — Anaconda has long been GTK-based but as part of modernizing it they are now looking at rewriting the UI to be a web browser-based UI that makes use of Red Hat's Cockpit project.
• Anaconda is getting a new suit – Fedora Community Blog
• GNOME Shell & Mutter Prepare For GNOME 42 Alpha With Exciting Improvements
• Linux Mint 20.3 released promising security updates until 2025 — Linux Mint has released version 20.3, codenamed 'Una,' as a long-term support version that will receive security updates until 2025.
• Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” Cinnamon released!
• Linux Mint is reverting Firefox to Mozilla config after partnership signed
• Jack Dorsey spearheads new fund to defend Bitcoin developers against legal action — In an email addressed to developers, sent early on January 12, Dorsey described the open-source community as “especially susceptible to legal pressure.”
• [bitcoin-dev] Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund
• Jupiter Extras: Road Trip Memories

Plus, the new tech in SteamOS 3 that might make it a great desktop OS.

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:

• Raspberry Pi OS hits the bullseye — Raspberry Pi announced the release of a new version of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian), which advances to the Debian 11 “bullseye” release.
• What’s new in RHEL 8.5 — Customers running Microsoft SQL Server on RHEL will see a number of enhancements to help configure, manage and operate RHEL more efficiently.
• Major Changes in 8.5
• Red Hat 8.5 released with SQL Server and .NET 6
• AlmaLinux OS 8.5 Stable Now Available — AlmaLinux OS 8.5 includes features and improvements to container tools to reduce friction and make the build and deploy processes more flexible, support for OpenJDK 17, additional OpenSCAP profiles for hardening and security compliance, new system roles, and Network Time Security (NTS) for NTP, amongst other additions and enhancement.
• Canonical Makes It Easier to Run Ubuntu VMs on Apple M1 Macs with Multipass — Multipass promises to offer Apple M1 MacBook developers interesting in developing apps for the Linux/Ubuntu desktop the fastest way to run Linux cross-platform, running a Ubuntu VM in as little as 20 seconds.
• Hector Martin on Twitter — Say hi to an M1 Pro 14" MacBook Pro running KDE Plasma 5 on Arch Linux ARM! Notch compatible! I made NVMe work today and decided it's time to properly install a distro ;)
• Hector Martin on Twitter: “It’s been running the glxgears demo (60% all-core CPU usage) all night, lid closed, no display sleep. It’s barely warm to the touch, and I can only hear the fan if I put my ear 15cm away from the vents. This is why I’m putting Linux on these machines :-) https://t.co/HPBDskirSf” / Twitter
• Big Btrfs Changes in the Works — I’m working on a large set of on-disk format changes to address some of the more painful parts of Btrfs’s design. There’s a lot of discrete changes here, but they’ll all go under the single umbrella of “extent-tree-v2.”
• On-Disk Format Changes Ahead To Improve “Painful” Parts Of Btrfs Design
• Steam Deck Release Pushed Back To February 2022 — For those that pre-ordered the Steam Deck your position in the queue remains, but is now all shifted back by approximately two months.
• Valve Shares New Steam Deck Details, Proton Update Available For Testing — Steam Deck will use an immutable root file-system, albeit can be changed for developers/enthusiasts wanting more control over the system state. The immutable root file-system approach is similar to the likes of Fedora Silverblue.
• Valve Says SteamOS 3.0 Will Be Available for Everyone to Download and Install
• Steam Deck Development Live Stream - YouTube
• Valve adds documentation for Steam Deck development, suggests Manjaro Linux for now

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

Sponsored By:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Plasma - 25th Anniversary Edition — Plasma - 25th Anniversary Edition brings new looks, features and enhancements to the classic free desktop.
• KDE Plasma 5.23 Released In Marking 25 Years Of KDE
• New Project: Kool Desktop Environment. Programmers wanted!
• Apple joins Blender Development Fund — The Blender Foundation, the organization behind the popular open source 3D creation tool “Blender”, today announced that Apple has joined the Blender Development Fund as a Patron Member to support continued core development for Blender.
• Apple Pledges Support for 3D Graphics Tool Blender
• Why I have decided to step down from the AlmaLinux OS Foundation Board — When we created the concept of AlmaLinux back in December, shortly after Red Hat announced EOL for CentOS 8, the most important part for us was to make it community-owned, not just "community-controlled".
• AlmaLinuxFoundation chair Igor Seletskiy ste down
• Announcing AlmaLinux OS 8.5 Beta
• How to Use a Block Storage Volume with Plex Media Server — Plex is a media server that allows you to store your media on a remote server and stream it to your devices. This guide shows how to attach a Block Storage Volume to an existing Linode in order to meet the demands of a growing media library.
• Ubuntu 21.10 is Now Available to Download — This release — the 35th Ubuntu release for those keeping count — is backed by 9 months of security updates, critical fixes, and select software updates.
• Ubuntu 21.10 Official Flavors Released, Here’s What’s New
• SeaGL 2021 Schedule Published! — We’ll see you Friday November 5 & Saturday November 6 for SeaGL 2021, all virtual! As always, SeaGL is completely free to attend and no registration is required.

Plus, the essential RISC-V code landing in the Linux kernel.

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:

• Asahi Linux On The Apple M1: “Usable As A Basic Linux Desktop” — With the progress made over the past month, "Asahi Linux is usable as a basic Linux desktop (without GPU acceleration)!"
• Progress Report: September 2021 - Asahi Linux
• Asahi Linux emits usable basic desktop on Apple’s M1
• Linux 5.16 KVM To Land RISC-V Hypervisor Support — Given that it's taken a while to freeze, there isn't yet any performant RISC-V processors out there actually implementing the complete extension and so for now and during development, it's been a function of running it on simulators.
• Canonical launches Ubuntu Frame, the foundation for embedded displays — Canonical announces the release of Ubuntu Frame, a solution that allows developers to easily build and deploy graphical applications for interactive kiosks, digital signage solutions, or any other products that require a graphical output.
• Ubuntu Frame is a secure display server for embedded systems
• Building graphical applications in embedded devices
• Software Engineer - Toolbox (containers / desktop / golang) — The Red Hat Desktop team is looking for a Software Engineer to join us. In this role, you will develop and maintain containerization technologies for software development like toolbox.
• SUSE Working on a CentOS Clone? — I like looking in dnf countme data to see the various distros requesting EPEL repos. There are often many weird distro names showing up in the single digits. But this one jumped out at me with 38 hits last week
• DNF Better Counting
• Index of /csv-reports/countme
• Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) — High-quality packages that have been developed, tested, and improved in Fedora available for RHEL and compatible derivatives such as CentOS and Scientific Linux.
• SUSE Has been Rebuilding RHEL Packages for Years
• Will Furnass on Twitter — “Interesting that CERN are proposing to adopt @CentOS Steam 8 for new systems"
• PowerPoint Presentation

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

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

Sponsored By:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Rocky Linux 8.4 Available Now — The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is pleased to announce the General Availability of Rocky Linux 8.4 for x86_64 and ARM64.
• Ubuntu-maker Canonical will support open source Blender on Windows, Mac, and Linux — The support offering will include Blender LTS releases across Linux distributions, Microsoft Windows, and macOS. Canonical’s engineers will engage directly with customers to provide comprehensive technical support to users by understanding, diagnosing and resolving issues as swiftly as possible.
• Canonical Partners With Blender Around Paid LTS Application Support
• Canonical Gives RISC-V a HiFive — Canonical have announced that its Ubuntu operating system now supports two RISC-V boards from SiFive, the HiFive Unleashed and HiFive Unmatched.
• “I’m totally screwed.” WD My Book Live users wake up to find their data deleted — On its website, Western Digital advised customers to disconnect their My Book Live devices to prevent further attacks while the company investigates the mass wiping.
• WD My Book NAS devices are being remotely wiped clean worldwide
• Declarative Cloud Infrastructure Management with Terraform
• Why Windows 11 is forcing everyone to use TPM chips — While Microsoft has required OEMs to ship devices with support for TPM chips since Windows 10, the company hasn’t forced users or its many device partners to turn these on for Windows to work. That’s what’s really changing with Windows 11, and combined with Microsoft’s Windows 11 upgrade checker, it has resulted in a lot of understandable confusion.
• Windows 11 System Requirements: Will TPM 2.0 be mandatory for Windows 11 Build 21996?
• TrueNAS SCALE 21.06-BETA Now Available! — With this first BETA, we kickoff the official pre-release testing cycles and prepare for a release version in the coming months. Users are encouraged to provide feedback on any issues found to our bug ticketing system so we can continue the work to make SCALE the best, most stable release possible.
• SCALE 21.06-BETA.1
• TrueNAS SCALE Announcement and Nightly Image Downloads
• TrueNAS SCALE Release Plan
• TrusNAS Developer Notes
• TrueNAS SCALE 21.06 BETA ISO

Plus our reaction to SCO reigniting their decades-long fight with IBM and Red Hat, and the big news in GTK-land you might have missed.

Sponsored By:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• AlmaLinux Now Available For Download As RHEL/CentOS Alternative — As scheduled, AlmaLinux's initial release is available for download today from AlmaLinux.org. This initial AlmaLinux release is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 sources.
• AlmaLinux OS on GitHub
• AlmaLinux Repo
• AlmaLinux Wiki
• Shop Almalinux
• CloudLinux Launches AlmaLinux, CentOS Linux clone
• How to migrate CentOS to AlmaLinux and avoid downtime in your data center
• AlmaLinux OS Homepage
• IBM, Red Hat face copyright, antitrust lawsuit from SCO Group successor Xinuos — Xinuos' lawsuit contends that IBM stole UnixWare and OpenServer code and incorporated it into the heart of its AIX, z/OS mainframe, and its midrange server operating systems.
• SCO vs. IBM looks like it’s over for good
• SCO slapped in latest round of eternal ‘Who owns UNIX?’ lawsuit
• Judge spanks SCO in ancient ownership of Unix lawsuit
• SCO vs. IBM battle resumes over ownership of Unix
• SCO keeps dying, and dying, and dying
• SCO trading suspended in US
• Xinuos sues IBM
• SCO Linux FUD returns from the dead
• Xinuos file suit against Red Hat and IBM
• Canonical releases Ubuntu on Windows Preview with early builds, new tools for the brave — The setup is more user-friendly thanks to the Subiquity installer, and a utility called ubuntuwsl.
• Announcing Ubuntu on Windows Community Preview
• Super Sneaky Ubuntu Link
• NVIDIA Proposes Mesa Patches To Support Alternative GBM Back-Ends — It looks like NVIDIA is finally taking the GBM route for supporting Wayland compositors with their proprietary driver...
• Mesa GitLab WIP Merge request — GBM alternate backend discovery and loading
• Introducing Libadwaita — This new libadwaita library intends to extend that concept by being the missing code part of Adwaita. and will be implemented as a direct GTK 4 continuation and replacement of libhandy.
• OBS Studio Now Ready With Wayland Capture Support — Well-known GNOME developer Georges Stavracas has been working on allowing good and native Wayland support for OBS Studio with the last of that work being merged upstream today.
• OBS Studio on Wayland – Georges Stavracas
• Arch Linux Packages - archinstall 2.1.3-1
• Arch Linux installer GitHub

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

Sponsored By:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Red Hat Announces Free “RHEL For Open-Source Infrastructure” — Eligible organizations will be able to enjoy no-cost RHEL for use within their infrastructure for continuous integration, web servers, and more.
• Red Hat returns with another peace offering in the wake of the CentOS Stream affair: More free stuff
• Red Hat Announcement — Extending no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux to open source organizations
• Red Hat opens the door for both VMs tand containers in its latest OpenShift release
• Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 Blurs The Line Between VMs And Containers — With OpenShift 4.7, Red Hat attempts to simplify the migration of virtual machines to containers.
• Red Hat OpenShift 4.7 Is Now Available
• OpenShift Container Platform 4.7 release notes
• [Video] What’s new in Red Hat OpenShift 4.7
• Introducing the Framework Laptop — We’re here to prove that designing products to last doesn’t require sacrificing performance, quality, or style.
• Framework Laptop
• Google Funds Linux Kernel Developers to Focus Exclusively on Security — Silva and Chancellor’s exclusive focus is to maintain and improve kernel security and associated initiatives in order to ensure the world’s most pervasive open source software project is sustainable for decades to come.
• Latest Firefox release includes Multiple Picture-in-Picture and Total Cookie Protection — In today’s release, we added multiple picture-in-picture views, available on Mac, Linux and Windows, and includes keyboard controls for fast forward and rewind. Total Cookie Protection stops cookies from tracking you around the web by creating a separate cookie jar for every website.
• Firefox 86.0 released
• Total Cookie Protection
• Firefox for Enterprise 86 Release Notes.

Sponsored By:

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

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• New Year, new Red Hat Enterprise Linux programs: Easier ways to access RHEL — When we announced our intent to transition to CentOS Stream, we did so with a plan to create new programs to address use cases traditionally served by CentOS Linux.
• Staying on GTK3 and GNOME 3.38 this cycle - Desktop - Ubuntu Community Hub — The topic of what to do about the new GNOME started being discussed and after some consideration, we decided to stick to GTK3 and GNOME 3.38 this cycle.
• Welp, Ubuntu 21.04 Won’t Ship with GNOME 40 or GTK4 - OMG! Ubuntu!
• Stepping up for a truly open source Elasticsearch | AWS Open Source Blog — In order to ensure open source versions of Elasticsearch and Kibana remain available and well supported, including in our own offerings, we are announcing today that AWS will step up to create and maintain a ALv2-licensed fork of open source Elasticsearch and Kibana.
• AWS, as predicted, is forking Elasticsearch | ZDNet
• The Next Gen Database Servers Powering Let’s Encrypt - Let’s Encrypt - Free SSL/TLS Certificates — By going with AMD EPYC, we were able to get 64 physical CPU cores while keeping clock speeds high: 2.9GHz base with 3.4GHz boost. More importantly, EPYC provides 128 PCIe v4.0 lanes, which allows us to put 24 NVMe drives in a single machine.
• Ubuntu Can Run on Apple Silicon, Devs Say It’s ‘Completely Usable’ - OMG! Ubuntu! — Developers at ARM virtualisation company Corellium have managed to get Ubuntu 20.04 up and running on the new Apple Silicon Mac Mini.
• How We Ported Linux to the M1
• [RFC PATCH 0/7] Linux on Apple Silicon [LWN.net]
• Raspberry Pi Foundation launches $4 microcontroller with custom chip | TechCrunch — It has a dual-core Arm processor (running at 133MHz), 264KB of RAM, 26 GPIO pins including three analog inputs, a micro-USB port, and a temperature sensor.
• Raspberry Pi Foundation Release Their Own Silicon, the Raspberry Pi Pico - 9to5Linux
• Security Bulletin 1 - Home Assistant — It has come to our attention that certain custom integrations have security issues and could potentially leak sensitive information. Home Assistant is not responsible for custom integrations and you use custom integrations at your own risk.

Plus the massive Firefox blunder, Canonical's new service, and a report from DockerCon.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Fedora 30 Released — Fedora Workstation features GNOME 3.32 — the latest release of this popular desktop environment.
• Purism launches Librem One — Librem One is a subscription service, using open standards and free software, and it is available for $7.99/mo, or $71.91/yr for the four services.
• Librem One Affected By Nasty Security Bug On Launch Day
• Todd attempts to save face — By putting services under a centralized brand, we make these decentralized services just as convenient to use as the big tech alternatives.
• Firefox addon cert blunder — Late on Friday May 3rd, we became aware of an issue with Firefox that prevented existing and new add-ons from running or being installed.
• Canonical consolidates open infrastructure support — Canonical today announced Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure, a consolidated enterprise security, compliance and support offering that covers the full range of open source infrastructure capabilities for up to 10 years.
• Plans and pricing - Ubuntu Advantage Infrastructure
• Ubuntu and Dell launch developer survey — Give us your feedback and help shape the Ubuntu desktop.
• Docker introduces Docker Enterprise 3.0 with desktop integration, launches Docker Applications — 451 Research anticipates the app container industry will be worth more than $4.3 billion by 2022, and the competition is fierce.
• Amazon Managed Blockchain hits general availability — Amazon told businesses that they “can quickly set up a blockchain network spanning multiple AWS accounts with a few clicks in the AWS Management Console,” doing away with what it describes as the typical cost and difficulty of creating a company network.
• Microsoft launches a fully managed blockchain service
• Facebook working on cryptocurrency-based payments platform

Plus the surprise use for Red Hat Enterprise, and an update on the Linux powered Atari VCS.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Huawei testing Fuchsia on the Honor Play — A new commit in the Fuchsia source code has revealed that Huawei has managed to boot the Zircon kernel on the Honor Play.
• Steam Link box discontinued — According to Valve, the inventory of Steam Links has fully depleted, meaning this one’s apparently gone for good.
• Atari VCS update — Mostly unfiltered excerpts of some of Rob Wyatt’s internal notes to the Atari VCS team over the past several months of development that reveal some of the story around the origins of the Atari VCS Operating System.
• Predictive Scaling for EC2, Powered by Machine Learning — Today we are making Auto Scaling even more powerful with the addition of predictive scaling. Using data collected from your actual EC2 usage and further informed by billions of data points drawn from our own observations, we use well-trained Machine Learning models to predict your expected traffic (and EC2 usage) including daily and weekly patterns.
• Free continuous delivery service for open-source developers — “It’s free for the open-source community. So it’s an open source only offering. There’s no paid plan, and it’s only available to public GitHub repositories,”
• America’s nuclear arsenal relies on supercomputer running RHEL — Sierra looks like an unassuming server farm, but is actually a massive connected hive of 190,000 processing cores.