Linux Action News

Linux Action News

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Linux Action News episodes

  • Linux Action News 59

    Projects once thought dead are now full of life, with new major releases and we kick the tires.

    Plus new commits suggest Fuchsia will support Linux apps, Fedora CoreOS is announced, and we look over the first public Ubuntu desktop metrics.

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    • Ubuntu Touch OTA 4 RC released
  • Android X86 8.1 RC released
  • Fuchsia will support Linux apps
  • Atari’s PR train goes off the rails
  • Welcome to Fedora CoreOS
  • A first look at desktop metrics
  • Ubuntu Data Usage Infographic
    • 31 min
  • Linux Action News 58

    Plasma Desktop has a new release so we cover new features and some bugs, Mycroft has an "opportunity" for you, and trouble at CopperheadOS.

    Plus Debian's call for help, and more.

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    • KDE Plasma 5.13 released
  • An opportunity to invest in Mycroft
  • Dockerhub malware
  • 5% of Monero has been mined with malware
  • Vulnerable devices shipped with ADB enabled
  • Debian seeking artwork for the 10.0 release
  • Rebble Auth Sign Up
    • 28 min
  • Linux Action News 57

    Free and open source developers are still freaking out about Microsoft buying GitHub, ReactOS reaches a major milestone, TrueOS appears to be forking, and changes are coming to the core of Plasma desktop team.

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

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    • 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
    • 28 min
  • Linux Action News 56

    Ubuntu-based Atari VCS crowdfunding is going very well, Endless employees are hit with layoffs, and why GNOME might be too fat for Pi.

    Plus the group trying to force Samsung to update its phone loses, and Essential says they are definitely, totally, not shutting down.

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    • Ubuntu-based Atari box doing very well on Indiegogo
    — Built on an open source Linux OS so you can add your own software and apps to customize your own platform.
  • Endless lays off several employees - Michael Hall on Twitter
    • — If anybody needs an energetic and experienced community manager or developer advocate, give me an email or DM, I'm suddenly on the market for a new opportunity
  • Endless lays off several employees - Emmanuele
    • — In completely unrelated news: if you're looking to hire a GTK/GNOME developer with strong opinions (and the battle scars to hold them up) on CI/CD, UX design, and dev methodologies, hit me up
  • Endless lays off several employees - Nuritzi Sanchez on Twitter
    • — .... I guess it’s my turn to announce that I’m looking for new opportunities as well! I’m a jack of all trades who loves building things from scratch and am passionate about the intersection of tech and social impact. DM me if you have any important world challenges to solve :)
  • GNOME too fat for the Pi
    • — If you try running the GNOME Shell today on the Raspberry Pi, it's a frustratingly slow experience. While some work is being done in addressing GNOME's GPU, CPU, and memory consumption, it might not ever be in a state to run smoothly on Raspberry Pi hardware.
  • Huawei locks down its bootloaders
    • — In order to deliver the best user experience and prevent users from experiencing possible issues that could arise from ROM flashing, including system failure, stuttering, worsened battery performance, and risk of data being compromised, Huawei will cease providing bootloader unlock codes for devices launched after May 25, 2018.
  • Samsung won't be forced to update old phones
    • — A consumer association had argued that Samsung should update its phones for at least four years after they go on sale.
  • Essential not shutting down
    • — The email details that Andy Rubin has no plans of shutting down the company. However, he said that the firm will work with banks to get some financial assistance and the company might be sold under the financing deal.
    32 min
  • Linux Action News 55

    openSUSE Leap 15 is released, along a new LXQt, the Essential Phone getting canceled, and why older Chrombooks might be receiving the big Linux apps update.

    Plus we'll explain what portable systemd services are, and the Android phones that recently shipped with Malware.

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    • openSUSE Leap 15 released
    — With a brand new look developed by the community, openSUSE Leap 15 brings plenty of community packages built on top of a core from SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 sources
  • LXQt 0.13 released
    • — The LXQt team is proud to announce the release of LXQt 0.13.0, the Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment.
  • Portable Services arrives in systemd
    • — "Portable Services" are supposed to be an incremental improvement over traditional system services, making two specific facets of container management available to system services more readily.
  • Next Essential phone cancelled
    • — Company cancels development of second version of smartphone
  • XDA lament the news
  • Some cheap Android phones shipped with malware
    • — The app consists of a dropper and a payload.
  • Linux apps coming to older Chromebooks
    • — Thanks to an issue found on Chromium’s public bugtracker, we have confirmation that containers won’t be limited to the handful of Chrome OS devices released with kernel 4.4.
    25 min
  • Linux Action News 54

    Asteroid OS reaches 1.0, and Joe gives it a go. GNOME developers consider removing the ability to launch binaries, but punt for now. And the lessons learned from malware in the Snap Store.

    Plus the reality of EFail, Steam Link on Android, and another shoe drops for Ubuntu's 32bit support.

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    • AsteroidOS 1.0 released
    — AsteroidOS is built on standard Linux technologies including OpenEmbedded, opkg, Wayland, Qt5, systemd, BlueZ, and PulseAudio.
  • EFAIL
    • — EFAIL describes vulnerabilities in the end-to-end encryption technologies OpenPGP and S/MIME that leak the plaintext of encrypted emails.
  • GnuPG's Efail press release Response
  • Nautilus removes the ability to execute binaries
    • — Or, to put it another way, you won’t be able to double-click on programs, scripts or apps to launch them using Nautilus.
  • But then brings it back
    • — A few cases appeared that we need to support, specially for enterprise and content creators. Specifically, cases similar to #434
  • Steam Link on Android
    • — Stream PC games to your Android smartphone
  • Malware found in (and removed from) the Snap Store
    • — This situation marks the first major “security” issue in the Snappy packaging system. But although unwelcome this particular fail is not necessarily as frightening as it sounds at first, nor is is necessarily a fault with the Snappy format.
  • Kubuntu to drop 32-bit images
    • — I'm reluctant to do this, however, I do not have the time or technical knowledge required to do this on my own, and the Kubuntu Devels want Kubuntu to stop issuing i386 images.
  • Ubuntu 18.04 LTS is now on Windows 10
    • — Bionic beavering away on Windows
  • TechSNAP Episode 368: EFail Explained
    • 23 min
  • Linux Action News 53

    It's confirmed Linux apps are coming to Chrome OS. Google is finally putting pressure on OEMs to ship security patches, and we try Android of Things.

    Plus we get some clarity on CoreOS and Red Hat, and their strategy for cloud domination in the future.

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    • Linux apps on Chrome OS confirmed
    — Linux runs inside a virtual machine that was designed from scratch for Chromebooks.
  • It could be a while before Linux apps work well on Chrome OS
    • — There are other bits of glue, such as these in-container tools, to run whatever programs you want within a Linux VM within a Chrome OS container.
  • Google puts pressure on OEMs over Android patches
    • — “We’ve also worked on building security patching into our OEM agreements. Now this will really … lead to a massive increase in the number of devices and users receiving regular security patches.” – David Kleidermacher, Google’s head of Android platform security
  • Android Things is finally ready for devices
    • — Android Things is hitting its 1.0 release today after launching to developers at the end of 2016.
  • Android Things 1.0
  • Clarity on CoreOS and Red Hat
    • — As for CoreOS's existing customers? Breard promises that "No users or communities will be left behind."
  • Red Hat and Microsoft bring OpenShift to Azure
    • — With this new offering, you will be able to more easily move your applications between on-premises environments and Microsoft Azure. This is because they are leveraging a consistent container platform in OpenShift across the hybrid cloud.
  • WSL coming to Arm
    • — As spotted by the folks at Neowin, during a presentation at the MS Build developer conference this week, Microsoft also showed Ubuntu running on a Windows 10 on ARM computer, meaning that Ubuntu (and other Linux distros) will be among the 64-bit apps you can install on these computers.
    30 min
  • Linux Action News 52

    Fedora fights for the user, Ubuntu Flavours draw the line, and why we're worried small distributions are starting to collapse.

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    • Ubuntu MATE 18.10 - dropping i386 images
    — Less than 10% of Ubuntu MATE users are running the i386 (32-bit Intel) images.
  • 18.10 and beyond - 64bit images only | Ubuntu Budgie
    • — from the various reports and statistics we have observed from 16.04 budgie-remix all the way to you enthusiastic 18.04 trail-blazers, almost all of you are now using the 64bit ISO.
  • Lubuntu finally ready to move to LXQt
    • — Lubuntu 18.10 will be the first release to ship with LXQt as default desktop environment instead of LXDE, according to Simon Quigley.
  • Korora takes a “break”
    • — Korora for the forseeable future is not going to be able to march in cadence with the Fedora releases. In addition to that, for the immediate future there will be no updates to the Korora distribution.
  • Void Linux struggling as leader goes missing
    • — There still are multiple members to the Void Core Team and others working on this independent Linux distribution, but their project leader has "disappeared". There's been no contact since January but no "meaningful contact" in over one year.
  • Fedora 28 released
    • — The headline feature for Fedora 28 Server is the inclusion of the new Modular repository. This lets you select between different versions of software like NodeJS or Django
    34 min
  • Linux Action News 51

    Ubuntu 18.04 is out and we round up the new features, the flavours, and our first takes. The Librem 5 learns a new trick, and Linux apps on Chrome OS looks like a much bigger deal than first suspected.

    Plus what's great about GIMP's biggest release in six years, and more.

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    • Ubuntu Touch will be an official option on the Librem 5
    — While the Librem 5 will ship with Free Software Foundation-endorsed PureOS by default, utilizing GNOME across all devices, Purism will support customers who want to easily install Ubuntu Touch offering great diversity for users around the world.
  • Purism feel the icy breath of Intel on their neck
    • — After receiving a courtesy request from Intel’s Director of Software Infrastructure, we have decided to remove this post’s technical contents while we investigate our options.
  • Chrome OS moves a step closer to proper Linux
    • — A new Terminal app has been added to the app drawer, and clicking it opens a dialog explaining the feature.
  • Linux apps will look seamless in Chrome OS
    • — First native Linux apps in Chrome OS, and they’ve opted for Adapta, a popular Material Design-inspired Gtk theme that can be used on many of your favorite GNU/Linux distributions.
  • Huge GIMP Update
    • — GIMP 2.10 is the result of six years of work that originally focused on porting the program to a new image processing engine, GEGL. However the new version ships with far more new features, including new and improved tools, better file formats support, various usability improvements, revamped color management support, a plethora of improvements targeted at digital painters and photographers, metadata editing, and much, much more.
  • Ubuntu 18.04 released
    • — Optimised for multi-cloud infrastructure, machine learning, AI and software development
  • 18.04 flavours also released
    • — Long-term support (LTS) releases of Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie and the (always magnificent) Ubuntu MATE are available to download.
  • Clear focus on cloud and containers
    • — “Multi-cloud operations are the new normal” said Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical and founder of Ubuntu. “Boot-time and performance-optimised images of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on every major public cloud make it the fastest and most efficient OS for cloud computing, especially for storage and compute-intensive tasks like machine learning.”
  • Ubuntu 18.04 even runs on a Nintendo Switch
    • — I've written a script to build a full Ubuntu Desktop image for the Switch
  • TechSNAP Episode 365: The Unfixable Exploit
    • — ShofEL2, a Tegra X1 and Nintendo Switch exploit
    26 min
  • Linux Action News 50

    Trisquel has a new release, and Chris tries out the new ReactOS. Plus our thoughts on Microsoft announcing their own Linux, the German government switching to NextCloud, and the fix is in for Gnome Shell's infamous "Memory leak".

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    • Trisquel 8.0 LTS Flidas
    — The biggest internal change to the default edition is the switch from GNOME to MATE 1.12. The main reason for this change was that GNOME dropped support for their legacy desktop, which retained the GNOME 2.x user experience and didn't require 3D composition -- a feature that in many computers would still need non-free software to run at full speed. MATE provides a perfect drop-in replacement, it is very light and stable and it retains all the user experience design that we are used to from previous Trisquel releases.
  • ReactOS 0.4.8 released
    • — The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.8 as we continue to work on releasing every three months.
  • German government goes open source with cloud firm Nextcloud
    • — Seeks "construction of a private cloud for the federal government"
  • Microsoft's Next OS is Based on Linux, Not Windows
    • — Microsoft announced a new operating system for IoT called Azure Sphere OS. But here’s the shocker: It’s based on Linux, not on Windows.
  • Google “pauses” Allo and creates yet another messenger
    • — As we explain in our exclusive feature, the move is necessary because Google is going all in on Rich Communication Services, or RCS. The service will be branded “Chat” once carriers launch it, and Google wants to apply as many resources as possible to make sure that this time, finally, Android has a successful messaging app.
  • GNOME Shell memory leak fixed
    • — There has been a widely reported memory leak in the latest version of GNOME Shell which upstream GNOME have been working on fixing. While they finalise their plans and merge patches we have decided to press on with including one of the patches which should fix the biggest issues.
    33 min

About Linux Action News

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Weekly Linux news and analysis by Chris and Wes. The show every week we hope you'll go to when you want to hear an informed discussion about what’s happening.