Linux Action News

Linux Action News

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Linux Action News episodes

  • Linux Action News 19

    Gnome users have something to celebrate, Purism and KDE are working together, and Manjaro has some hardware.

    Plus why we're not too worried about BlueBourne, the fight for public money to fund public code, and a new power tool for Firefox users.

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    • GNOME 3.26
    — The GNOME Project is excited to announce the release of version 3.26, the latest version of GNOME 3. The new version is the result of six months’ hard work by the GNOME community, and comes packed with improvements and new features.
  • GNOME 3.26 Release Notes
    • — GNOME 3.26 no longer shows status icons in the bottom-left of the screen. This prevents the status icon tray from getting in the way and is expected to provide a better overall experience.
  • Purism and KDE to Work Together
    • — Having full access to Purism's hardware platform is a dream for the KDE community.
  • Relevant Email 1
    • — One of the open questions for the phone is still which UX we will use,
    and Plasma Mobile would obviously be a perfect fit for this kind of
    project, since KDE and Purism share the same values, the UI is already
    done in large parts, and nothing would have to be developed from
    scratch (especially the Kirigami controls are great!).
  • Relevant Email 2
    • — To make clear our standpoint - both GNOME and KDE will be first class
    citizen on Librem5. So there is no favorite between two, but both are
    equal in this challenge.
  • BlueBorne
    • — The attack does not require the targeted device to be paired to the attacker’s device, or even to be set on discoverable mode.
  • Public Money, Public Code
    • — We want legislation requiring that publicly financed software developed for the public sector be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. If it is public money, it should be public code as well.
  • Multi-Account Containers extension for Firefox
    • — The Firefox Multi-Account Containers extension lets you carve out a separate box for each of your online lives
    27 min
  • Linux Action News 18

    Why AsteroidOS on your wrist is worth watching, what Project Treble means for future custom ROMs, Debian's Docker dominance, and why China might shut down Bitcoin exchanges.

    Plus how NGINX plans to make big money, Mozilla wants to reinvent online comments, and more.

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    • Connnect Watch smartwatch with AsteroidOS crowdfunding campaign begins
    — First unveiled in late August, the team behind the Connect Watch have launched a campaign on European crowdfunding site Ulule in hopes of raising about $33,000.
  • Sailfish meetup in Krakow
    • — We are inviting you to a meetup with our CEO, Mr. Sami Pienimäki in the city of Kraków on Thursday, September 14th for a round or two of beer!
  • What Project Treble Means for Future Custom ROM Development
    • — Because of the way the lower layer of Android was modularized, all Treble devices in the market will be able to boot a generic stock, AOSP Android build. This takes away most of the hassle of porting custom ROMs to an older device since a single, generic Android build can run on many devices.
  • Mozilla and the Washington Post Are Reinventing Online Comments
    • — Talk is developed by The Coral Project, a Mozilla creation that builds open-source tools to make digital journalism more inclusive and more engaging
  • Chinese government bans ICOs
    • — The ruling comes from China’s central bank, which issued a statement criticizing ICOs for “disrupting” the country’s financial order. The regulator described initial coin offerings as “a form of unapproved illegal public financing” that “raises suspicions” of fraud and criminal activity
  • Might shut down Bitcoin exchanges
    • — China’s Bitcoin exchanges said on Saturday they are still awaiting clarification from the authorities on a media report that they will be shut down.
  • WinBtrfs 1.0 Released For Supporting Btrfs On Windows
    • — Harmstone's WinBtrfs driver is a "reimplementation from scratch" of Btrfs for Windows that supports all major functionality as well as basic RAID 0/1/10/5/6, caching, Btrfs partition discovery, ACLs, symlinks and hardlinks, free-space cache, LZO/ZLib compression, balancing, scrubbing, TRIM/DISCARD, and much more.
  • A Breakdown of Operating Systems on Dockerhub
    • — It is clear that Debian is the most popular, with Alpine taking second place, and then a number of others each taking a smaller share.
  • NGINX releases application platform with new application server, centralized management tools
    • — Today, NGINX launched its new NGINX Application Platform, a suite of products which together, form a solution made up of application delivery, an application server, and policy-driven monitoring and management.
    26 min
  • Linux Action News 17

    An Ubuntu developer event is happening soon, 17.10 Beta 1 has dropped for most of the flavours, Reddit closes its source while Phoenix OS opens theirs, Google getting serious about kernel updates in Android, Essential need to up their game, Blockchain is serious business and Linux desktop marketshare hits a new high.

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    • Ubuntu Rally in NYC
    — The Ubuntu Rally, taking place in New York City September 25th-29th, is a forward-thinking five day software hackathon attended by major software vendors, Ubuntu developers working at every level of the stack, and community contributors.
  • 17.10 Beta 1 of Ubuntu flavours released
    • — The first beta is available today for the Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" release for the flavors opting in to participate in this development milestone ahead of the official launch in October.
  • Reddit closes its source
    • — Open-source makes it hard for us to develop some features "in the clear" (like our recent video launch) without leaking our plans too far in advance. As Reddit is now a larger player on the web, it is hard for us to be strategic in our planning when everyone can see what code we are committing.
  • Phoenix OS urged to open source their kernel
    • — So a dedicated fan of the platform, Karol Putra, has created a Change.org petition in hopes that it will change their minds.
  • Petition update · Victory!
    • — It's most likely really the Phoenix OS kernel as it carries slight unique modifications in comparison to Android-x86 and it's forks
  • Google mandates 4.4+ kernel for Oreo
    • — Starting this year with smartphones which ship with Android Oreo, Google is requiring that all SoCs productized in 2017 must launch with kernel 4.4 or newer.
  • Essential underdelivers
    • — Essential – a device, marketing team, and CEO that seem to blur the lines between fact and fiction and possible and impossible
  • Then Essential royally screws up
    • — Dozens of customers replied with their personal information, but those emails didn’t just go to Essential. Instead, they went out to everybody who had received the original email.
  • Blockchain is big in big business
    • — Hundreds of projects have collectively raised more than a billion dollars through “initial coin offerings” (ICOs). There are now tokens funding every conceivable endeavor
  • Linux creeps above 3% browser marketshare
    • — According to Net Applications' Netmarketshare, the Linux market share on the desktop as judged by browser interactions may now be above 3%.
    26 min
  • Linux Action News 16

    New Linux hardware, Purism's Librem 5, and Jolla's €50 Sailfish ROM.

    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.

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    • 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.
    27 min
  • Linux Action News 15

    A big batch of Debian updates, Gnome turns 20, Joe's report from OggCamp, the Solus trifecta, encrypted ZFS comes to Linux finally, and Bitcoin is forking, again.

    Plus some thoughts on tiny Linux computers, the Linage survey and more.

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    • GNOME turns 20
    — There have been 33 stable releases since the initial release of GNOME 1.0 in 1999.
  • Debian turns 24
  • Raspbian Stretch has arrived for Raspberry Pi
    • — PulseAudio is therefore no longer installed by default, and the volume plugin on the taskbar will no longer start and stop PulseAudio.
  • Work on Debian for mobile devices continues
    • — Work on Debian for mobile devices, i.e. telephones, tablets, and handheld computers, continues. During the recent DebConf17 in Montréal, Canada, more than 50 people had a meeting to reconsider opportunities and challenges for Debian on mobile devices.
  • Lineage summer survey
    • — The survey is really simple and we won’t collect any sensitive information.
  • Solus 3 Released
    • — On behalf of the Solus team and community, we’re extremely proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 3. This is the third iteration of Solus since our move to become a rolling release operating system.
  • ZFS On Linux Adds Encryption Support
    • — This support allows creating and managing natively-encrypted datasets. There have been ZOL patches going back months for encryption
  • Bitcoin Is Forking. Again.
    • — Three months from now, there will likely be three different versions of bitcoin all attempting to prepare the currency for more traffic in different ways.
  • Henry Brade Call for a Fight Against SegWit2x on Twitter
    • — The SegWit2X hard fork scheduled for Nov is an attempted hostile corporate takeover of the #Bitcoin protocol.
    25 min
  • Linux Action News 14

    Flatpak and snap get the Solus boost, Ubuntu's community is getting a remake, and development on Ubuntu 17.10 has taken an interesting turn.

    Plus more good news for Firefox users, and why Google's "streaming OS updates" could be great for the Android ROM community.

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    • Snaps in Solus
    — Occurs to me that I likely have to make some kind of statement or whathaveyou about the whole "Solus adopting snaps" thing.
  • Ubuntu Community Hub Proposal
    • — I propose we replace the Community Portal with a dynamic and collaboratively maintained site. The site would raise the profile of conversations and content, to improve our onboarding and communication issues.
  • Ubuntu Artful Desktop Fit and Finish Sprint
    • — First up is the Desktop Fit & Finish Sprint on August 24th and 25th.
  • 50% CPU savings w/Hardware Accelerated Video Playback
    • — We’re testing some patches to Chromium 60 in Artful to enable video acceleration and we’re seeing roughly a 50% saving in CPU overhead when using VA API.
  • Nextcloud push into education
    • — Today we are very proud to officially announce the Nextcloud Education Edition, developed in collaboration with Moodle, DeiC, regio iT, the TU Berlin and Univention.
  • Firefox 55
    • — Performance changes include significantly faster startup times when restoring lots of tabs and settings that let users take greater control of our new multi-process architecture. We’ve also upgraded the address bar to make finding what you want easier, with search suggestions and the integration of our one-click search feature, and safer, by prioritizing the secure - https - version of sites when possible.
  • Firefox 55 Advanced Performance Features
    • — Firefox 55 introduces several new low-level capabilities that help improve the performance of demanding web applications
  • Epiphany gets Firefox Sync
    • — You can sync bookmarks, history, passwords, and open tabs with other Epiphany instances and as well as both desktop and mobile Firefox.
  • Photon UI
    • — Version 57 of Firefox is slated to be released sometime in November and the biggest user facing change is its new user interface.
  • Android 8.0’s “streaming OS updates” will work even if your phone is full | Ars Technica
    • — Starting with Android 8.0, the A/B system partition setup is being upgraded with a "streaming updates" feature. Update data will arrive from the Internet directly to the offline system partition, written block by block, in a ready-to-boot state.
    32 min
  • Linux Action News 13

    Surprising details in how Ubuntu's Gnome desktop is getting implemented, Krita hits some troubles but the community comes to the rescue, Bitcoin splits, Firefox sends, and Red Hat gives up on Btrfs.

    Plus Amazon accuses BLU of spying on Android users, and more!

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    • Krita Foundation in Trouble
    — This means that the tax authorities see the Foundation is as partly a company, partly as not a company.
  • The Krita community came to the rescue
    • — We didn’t expect the incredible response from all of you! A day later, over 500 awesome people have donated a total of €9562 (at the time of writing, check the fancy progress bar we’ve finally managed to create!). Fourteen people have joined the development fund, too!
  • More details about the GNOME experience in Ubuntu 17.10
    • — e will implement thus our modifications as a GNOME Shell mode
  • Some BLU phones still phoning home to China
    • — BLU released a software update to address the issue, but Kryptowire researchers told CNET recently that some BLU phones still are still running the offending software… and Amazon has responded by suspending sales of all BLU phone models until the issue is resolved
  • Or are They?
    • — The reason data is being sent to a Chines server is because BLU is using an over-the-air update service called Adups, which is based in China, and which allows some phone makers to request a lot of personal data from users’ phones. But after a related report from Kryptowire in 2016, BLU decided to start using Google’s OTA update service on newer devices.
  • Bitcoin Cash split
    • — It was created by Bitcoin supporters worried about growing congestion in the mainstream bitcoin network that has led to slow payment processing and high fees.
  • Firefox Send
    • — Send files through a safe, private, and encrypted link that automatically expires to ensure your stuff does not remain online forever.
  • Firefox Test Pilot
    • — Try out the latest experimental features
  • Red Hat gives up on Btrfs?
    • — The Btrfs file system has been in Technology Preview state since the initial release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Red Hat will not be moving Btrfs to a fully supported feature and it will be removed in a future major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
  • Red Hat acquires Permabit
    • — Permabit offers data de-duplication and compression software and recently cooked ready-to-run Linux kernel modules of its wares after previously focusing on sales to OEMs.
    30 min
  • Linux Action News 12

    A good week for desktop Linux with news from Ubuntu, Fedora & openSUSE.

    Plus our take on the pending death of Flash, some great work by the Debian project & Mozilla updates us on Project Common Voice.

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    • Ubuntu MATE 17.10 Alpha 2
    — We’re not happy, proud, pleased or ambivalent to announce this alpha. No, not us. The is our most “Super” alpha ever and we’re ecstatic to present this fine release for your distro delectation. Ubuntu MATE 17.10 is brimming with new toys to play with.
  • Uptake of Fedora 26 is really strong
    • — It's already surpassed F24 and those of you still on F23.
  • Boltron preview
    • — Fedora’s Modularity Working Group (and others) have been working for a while on a Fedora Objective.
  • openSUSE Leap 42.3
    • — “By avoiding major version updates in the base system as well as the desktops, the upgrade to Leap 42.3 is a rather unadventurous matter,” said Ludwig Nussel, openSUSE Leap release manager.
  • The death of Flash
    • — Adobe is planning to end-of-life Flash. Specifically, we will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats.
  • Some people don’t want it to die
    • — Open sourcing Flash spec would be a good solution to keep Flash projects alive safely for archive reasons.
  • Update on Debian Reproducible Builds Project
    • — At the start of 2015 it was safe to say that Debian was fairly alone in the quest for reproducible builds, and a relevant number of developers were unconvinced by the effort's goals. Thankfully, this is not true anymore.
  • More on Mozilla’s Project Common Voice
    • — Today’s speech recognition technologies are largely tied up in a few companies that have invested heavily in them.
    32 min
  • Linux Action News 11

    Android for the desktop might be dead, Google Glass is back, the latest Firefox usage data is devastating & the next Ubuntu is ready for a shakedown.

    Plus a quick look at Phoenix OS & the Ubuntu 18.04 survey!

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    • Android-Based Remix OS To Be Discontinued
    — Remix OS, the Android-x86 derived operating system for x86/ARM to run Android applications on PCs, is now being discontinued in its current form.
  • Phoenix OS Lives on
    • — Phoenix OS 2.1 includes a number of bug fixes and improvements including better hardware compatibility, an updated keyboard mapping feature, and the ability to remember window resizing settings after you reboot.
  • Google Glass gets a second chance in factories, where it’s likely to remain
    • — The major upgrades between the original Glass and the enterprise version are a better camera (with resolution upgraded from 5 megapixels to 8), extended battery life, faster Wi-Fi and processor, and a new red light that turns on when recording video. The electronics of Glass have also been made modular in the shape of a so-called Glass Pod, which can be detached and reattached to Glass-compatible frames, which can include things like safety goggles and prescription glasses.
  • Firefox marketshare revisited
    • — Based on this data, 22% fewer Firefox Desktop installations are active today than a year ago. This is a loss of 16 million Firefox installs in a year.
  • Ubuntu Artful Desktop July Shakedown
    • — Now is a great time to start exercising the new GNOME goodness that’s landed on our recent daily images! Please download the ISO, test it out on your own hardware, and file bugs where appropriate.
  • Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Desktop Default Application Survey
    • — Along with the switch from Unity to GNOME, we’re also reviewing some of the desktop applications we package and ship in Ubuntu. We’re looking to crowdsource input on your favorite Linux applications across a broad set of classic desktop functionality.
    31 min
  • Linux Action News 10

    With Chris away, Ryan joins Joe. A new release for Fedora, Yunit is now available for Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu is now an app in the Windows Store, Ryan gives us more details about System76's new OS, Ikey starts his new job at Solus and Beaker is a new browser that promises a truly decentralized web.

    Special Guest: Ryan Sipes.

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    • Fedora 26 is here! - Fedora Magazine
    — What’s new in Fedora 26?
    First, of course, we have thousands of improvements from the various upstream software we integrate, including new development tools like GCC 7, Golang 1.8, and Python 3.6. We’ve added a new partitioning tool to Anaconda (the Fedora installer) — the existing workflow is great for non-experts, but this option will be appreciated by enthusiasts and sysadmins who like to build up their storage scheme from basic building blocks. F26 also has many under-the-hood improvements, like better caching of user and group info and better handling of debug information. And the DNF package manager is at a new major version (2.5), bringing many new features.
  • Fedora 27 Might Do Away With 32-Bit Kernel Builds - Phoronix
    • — A controversial change being considered for Fedora 27 is doing away with the i686 kernel build thereby effectively dropping support for older x86 32-bit systems.
  • Yunit packages for ubuntu 16.04 LTS – yunit
    • — We are pleased to announce that Yunit is now available as an overlay repository for ubuntu 16.04 LTS xenial (64bit).
    The following have been tested and should work with an existing ubuntu 16.04, ubuntu gnome 16.04, lubuntu 16.04 and xubuntu 16.04 installation.
    They will not work in either kubuntu 16.04 or ubuntu mate 16.04 due to the updated Qt libraries,
  • Windows 10 loves Ubuntu | Ubuntu Insights
    • — Ubuntu 16.04 is now available as an app from the Windows Store for users running Windows Insider builds. The newly improved app is created by Canonical in collaboration with the Microsoft WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) team as a result of the work announced at Microsoft Build 2017 Conference
  • First day! | Solus on Patreon
    • — Well, we're here! Today is officially my first day working full time on Solus. And it's thanks to YOU, supporters of Solus, for making this possible!
  • System76 Blog — Pop!_OS Updates
    • — CalDav and CardDav work continues. The deeper we’ve dug the more hard coding we’ve found.
    We’re considering writing a new installer for GNOME and any DE that features user setup separate from OS installation. The further we went down the Ubiquity path, the more it seemed over-complicated.
    Automated firmware updates are coming to System76 laptops. With this feature, the System76 Driver will prompt that there’s an update available. Running the update will reboot your computer, install the firmware, and take you back to login.
  • A New Browser Is Making Peer-to-Peer Web Hosting More User-Friendly - Motherboard
    • — Billed as a "peer-to-peer web browser," the idea behind Beaker is to provide a simple way to build and host websites directly from the browser, which can then be visited by other users of the browser without the need for any intermediary hosting providers.
    31 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.