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• 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 Google's surprise for Chromium users, and we go hands-on with Podman's docker-compose support.

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• KDE Plasma 5.21 Brings Low-latency Compositing, New Kickoff Menu, and Wallpaper — A major addition is a complete redesign of the main KDE Plasma Application Launcher.
• This week in KDE: new KWin compositing, new Kickoff, new recording level visualization! — This week KWin’s compositing code was almost totally rewritten! It should broadly reduce latency throughout all compositing operations, and also adds a user-facing control in the System Settings Compositing page so people can choose for themselves whether they prefer lower latency or smoother animations.
• Check out our interview with Nate Graham in LUP 385
• Plasma Gitlab MR: Add fingerprint manager
• Fedora Proposed Change: Wayland By Default For Plasma
• Xfce 4.16 Released — Today, after 1 year and 4 months of work, we are happy to announce the release of the Xfce desktop 4.16, a new stable version that supersedes Xfce 4.14.
• XFCE Nation on Twitter — Reminder to @ChrisLAS and @wespayne that Xfce 4.16 has been out since December 22nd but hasn’t been mentioned on @LinuxActionNews or @LinuxUnplugged.
• Xfce 4.16 Changelog
• Intel Preparing New Driver Option To Disable GPU Security Mitigations
• Wine 6.0 released — This release is dedicated to the memory of Ken Thomases, who passed away just before Christmas at the age of 51. Ken was an incredibly brilliant developer, and the mastermind behind the macOS support in Wine. We all miss his skills, his patience, and his dark sense of humor.
• Grab a Glass, Wine 6.0 Has Been Released
• The Wine team is proud to announce that the stable release Wine 6.0 — The core DLLs, including NTDLL, KERNEL32, GDI32, USER32, etc. are built in PE format. This should help a number of copy protection schemes that check that the DLL files on disk match the in-memory contents.
• CloudLinux readies CentOS Linux replacement: AlmaLinux — AlmaLinux will be a free, open-source, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 (and future releases). For CentOS users, the company promises Lenix will provide an uninterrupted way to convert existing CentOS servers with absolutely zero downtime or need to reinstall anything
• AlmaLinux is born!!
• AlmaLinux - Forever-Free Enterprise-Grade Operating System
• Using Podman and Docker Compose — Up to now, support for Docker Compose, the command-line utility that orchestrates multiple Docker containers for local development, was missing. With Podman 3.0 now in development upstream, we have begun to support Compose.
• Chromium Blog: Limiting Private API availability in Chromium — During a recent audit, we discovered that some third-party Chromium-based browsers were able to integrate Google features, such as Chrome sync and Click to Call, that are only intended for Google’s use. We are limiting access to our private Chrome APIs starting on March 15, 2021.
• PSA: Vanilla Chromium ending some of Google’s API access such as syncing and spelling check starting on March 15, 2021
• MacOS update enables third party OSes on M1 — It's happening... macOS Big Sur 11.2 beta 2 is out with full custom kernel support.
• iBoot - Wikipedia — iBoot is the stage 2 bootloader for all Apple products. It replaces the old bootloader, BootX.

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

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• 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 how you can start testing Plasma Mobile, Pursim aims for convergence, and Mycroft is back!

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• Plasma Mobile test ISOs — 44% poll participants wanting to test Plasma Mobile on their device, and/or as a virtual machine, or on real machine.
• Purism aims for convergence — Upon successful completion of our funding campaign, we started to look for a Designer to take care of the user experience for the Librem 5, and a web developer to help us improve the look & feel (and more technical parts) of our website in general. Today, I’m glad to finally welcome them publicly!
• Mycroft Mark 2 — What sets Mark II apart? It’s open source. This means your personal data stays private, you can customize your experience, and Mycroft is a neutral player in the voice game, allowing you to be confident in your personal preference of apps and skills.
• Ubuntu 18.04 to revert to Xorg by default — We have decided that we will ship Xorg by default, and that Wayland will be an optional session available from the login screen.
• Torvalds unhappy with Intel's response to Spectre — Instead of treating Spectre as a bug, the chip maker is offering Spectre protection as a feature.
• Are the BSDs dying? — Too few eyeballs on code is a security issue as vulnerabilities go unreported and unpatched. Can FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD survive?

Plus what happened to NHoS, and more!

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• Wine 3.0 Released — This includes in particular Direct3D 12 and Vulkan support, as well as OpenGL ES support to enable Direct3D on Android.
• Oneplus pwned — One of our systems was attacked, and a malicious script was injected into the payment page code to sniff out credit card info while it was being entered.
• ​Google moves to Debian for in-house Linux desktop — Google has officially confirmed the company is shifting its in-house Linux desktop from the Ubuntu-based Goobuntu to a new Linux distro, the DebianTesting-based gLinux.
• Meltdown and Spectre Linux kernel status — Some “enterprise” distributions did not backport the changes for this reporting, so if you are running one of those types of kernels, go bug the vendor to fix that, you really want a unified way of knowing the state of your system.
• Red Hat pulls microcode update — Which, er, sounds like Red Hat has given up and, to avoid any blame, has told its customers to just get whatever firmware your CPU maker is offering. And if it works, it works, and if it makes your box fall over, uh, don't look at Red Hat.
• Red Hat: We Didn't Pull CPU Microcode Update — "It's actually an encrypted, signed binary image, so we don't have the capability, even if we wanted to produce microcode. It's a binary blob that we cannot generate. The only people who can actually generate that are the CPU vendors."
• Ubuntu almost ready to patch against Spectre — This week we published candidate Ubuntu kernels providing mitigation for CVE-2017-5715 and CVE-2017-5753 (ie, Spectre / Variants 1 & 2) to their respective -proposed pockets for Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful), 16.04 LTS (Xenial), and 14.04 LTS (Trusty).  
• Skyfall and Solace: Meltdown and Spectre are just the beginning — Skyfall and Solace are two speculative attacks based on the work highlighted by Meltdown and Spectre. Full details are still under embargo and will be published soon when chip manufacturers and Operating System vendors have prepared patches.
• NHoS shut down — The small team behind an ambitious NHoS Linux project are calling it a day, citing receipt of a trademark infringement warning from the UK Department of Health's (DoH) "brand police" as the "final straw."

Plus we follow up on the lawsuit that could split the community, and then we eat some Bitcoin humble pie.

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• UBports release OTA 3 — This update brings some new features and bug fixes atop the Ubuntu Touch 15.04 base. New features include some new packages requested by the community, the default start page and search provider was changed over to DuckDuckGo, and not displaying the keyboard when working with multiple windows. This over-the-air update has also removed the Ubuntu Store from the App Scope.
• Ubuntu Touch working on Android app support — “Project Anbox”. Anbox - a shorted form of ‘Android-in-a-Box” - is a community effort which allows Android apps to execute in a container in a more native way rather than the more common approach of using an Android emulator,
• LEDE and OpenWrt merge — The merged project will use the code base of the former LEDE project.
• Fuchsia available for the Pixelbook — Fuchsia—which only started development in 2016—is Google's third operating system after Chrome OS and Android.
• 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. While programs are typically not permitted to read data from other programs, a malicious program can exploit Meltdown and Spectre to get hold of secrets stored in the memory of other running programs. This might include your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents.
• Law Center and Conservancy updates — Because the SFLC has amended its trademark cancellation petition with a fraud claim, the SFC's motion to toss the complaint must be refiled after the fraud issue been considered.