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:

• Akamai Warns Of “Panchan” Linux Botnet — The botnet introduces a unique (and possibly novel) approach to lateral movement by harvesting of SSH keys. Instead of just using brute force or dictionary attacks on randomized IP addresses like most botnets do, the malware also reads the id_rsa and known_hosts files to harvest existing credentials and use them to move laterally across the network.
• Canonical Continues Working On Ubuntu’s Firefox Snap Performance — On the Ubuntu blog is a new post by Canonical's Oliver Smith about their latest efforts to improve the Firefox Snap performance and other outstanding issues with this sandboxed version of the Mozilla web browser.
• Lars Knoll Announces His Successor For Qt Chief Maintainer — The voting period for the new Chief Maintainer has ended yesterday. This means Volker Hilsheimer will be our new Chief Maintainer. Congratulations!
• New Chief Maintainer for the Qt Project
• Talisman: Debut of X — I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W.
• X Window System Turns 38 Years Old — It was on 19 June 1984 that Bob Scheifler announced the initial X window system release "X1" at MIT.
• X Windows System Design Principles, a lecture by James Gettys
• A Political History of X - Keith Packard (LCA 2020)
• Linus Torvalds: Rust For The Kernel Could Possibly Be Merged For Linux 5.20 — Torvalds commented that real soon they expect to have the Rust infrastructure merged within the kernel, possibly even for the next release -- meaning Linux 5.20.
• Open Source Summit North America 2022: Keynote: Linus Torvalds
• How are we improving Firefox Snap performance? Part 2

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 react to Facebook's Libra confirmation and the end of Google tablets.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Ubuntu to drop i386 architecture — he Ubuntu engineering team has reviewed the facts before us and concluded that we should not continue to carry i386 forward as an architecture. Consequently, i386 will not be included as an architecture for the 19.10 release, and we will shortly begin the process of disabling it for the eoan series across Ubuntu infrastructure.
• Proposal: Let's drop i386 May 9th 2018
• Proposal: Let's drop i386 May 14th 2018
• Wine devs worried — "I think not building packages for Ubuntu 19.10 would be the only practical option. It would probably be good to have a small explanation on the download page though. As I understand it, it would still be possible to run 32-bit executables on the Ubuntu 19.10 kernel, but we'd have to build and ship all our dependencies ourselves. I don't think we want to go there just yet."
• At least some games not working without 32-bit — Further to the recent announcement and subsequent discussion, I did a little testing over lunch on eoan 19.10 with all i386 packages removed and the i386 part of the repo disabled.
• Ubuntu NOT “dropping support for i386 applications” — What we are dropping is updates to the i386 libraries, which will be frozen at the 18.04 LTS versions. But there is every intention to ensure that there is a clear story for how i386 applications (including games) can be run on versions of Ubuntu later than 19.10.
• Petition · Dont remove 32 bit support in the next version of Ubuntu
• Test and run multiple instances of snaps
• OpenMandriva also dropping 32-bit
• New vulnerabilities may let hackers remotely SACK Linux and FreeBSD systems — Netflix researchers discovered 4 flaws that could wreak havoc in data centers.
• Linux devices vulnerable to ping of death attack
• Red Hat's take on TCP SACK PANIC
• Mattermost raises $50M — The capital infusion follows a $20 million series A in February and a $3.5 million seed round in February 2017 and brings the Palo Alto, California-based company’s total raised to roughly $70 million.
• Google says it’s done making tablets — The Pixel Slate won’t get a sequel, but the Pixelbook will
• Facebook's Libra confirmed — Facebook is planning to launch a cryptocurrency it hopes will “transform the global economy.”

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.