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Linux Action News

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Linux Action News episodes

  • Linux Action News 219

    The Log4Shell vulnerability is making waves this week; we'll explain why and break down how it works.

    Plus, some good news for the Desktop and systemd-homed gets one step closer.

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    • GNOME 42 To Finally Allow Input Events To Happen Full-Rate
    — Up to now GNOME Shell has been compressing pointer motion events so they are synchronized to the monitor refresh rate, which can be anywhere from around 30 to 144 events per second depending upon display.
  • An Eventful Instant – GNOME Shell & Mutter
  • Do not throttle input in wayland event delivery
  • FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE Announcement
    • — The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/12 branch.
  • systemd 250 Is Coming With A Boat Load Of New Features
    • — systemd 250 is packing a rather large number of new features and changes across the board for this dominant Linux init system and service manager.
  • Log4Shell
    • — RCE 0-day exploit found in log4j2, a popular Java logging package
  • Apache - The ASF on Twitter
    • — “Did you know that Ingenuity, the Mars 2020 Helicopter mission, is powered by Apache Log4j? https://t.co/gV0uyE1ylk #Apache #OpenSource #innovation #community #logging #services
  • Tom (-) on Twitter
  • Kevin Beaumont on Twitter
    • — “Starting a new thread for log4j security vulnerability and fallout. Spoiler: although this emerged as a Minecraft issue (lol) there is going to be impacts across a wide range of enterprise software for some time.”
  • Log4jAttackSurface MEMES
    • 18 min
  • Linux Action News 218

    Industry-changing open-source project releases, and why the new CentOS Stream 9 might be more noteworthy than you realize.

    Special Guest: Carl George.

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    • Blender 3.0 Released
    — Blender Foundation announces the release of Blender 3.0, to mark the beginning of a new era for open source 2D/3D content creation.
  • Blender - YouTube
  • Blender 3.0 Shines As A Huge Update For This Leading Open-Source 3D Modeling Software
  • Blender 3.0 is out now with a visual refresh, huge new features
  • Firmware “Best Known Configuration” in fwupd
    • — These are used by server vendors to identify a known-working (or commercially supported) set of firmware on the machine. This is currently opt-in for each vendor to avoid the UI clutter on the components view, and so if you’re a vendor reading this post and realize you want this feature, let me know and it’s two clicks on the admin panel.
  • FWUPD Linux Firmware Updater Prepares “Best Known Configuration” Feature
  • Linux Vendor Firmware Service Serves Up 40 Millionth Download
  • Introducing CentOS Stream 9
  • CentOS Stream 9 Now Available To Live On The Bleeding-Edge Of RHEL9
  • EPEL 9 is now available
  • Carl George on Twitter
    • — "I've been explaining the relationship between @Fedora, @CentOS, and #RHEL for years, long before I was hired by Red Hat. It usually happened in the form of drawing on a dry-erase board. Of course, CentOS Stream changes things. 🧵"
    22 min
  • Linux Action News 217

    Fedora's massive endorsement this week that went unnoticed, why RISC-V mobile devices might be getting near, and the significant change coming to a critical open-source tool.

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    • The world’s first RISC-V phone might be just around the corner
    — The Sipeed Maix Amigo kit from 2020 was among the first RISC-V PDAs
  • A $16.90 Allwinner D1 Linux RISC-V board
  • Sipeed’s $17 LycheeRV Board Has Allwinner RISC-V Processor
  • LLVM Is Still Working On Relicensing, Needs Help Locating Some Past Contributors
    • — LLVM is seeking help in trying to track down some past individual contributors and organizations so they can proceed with their relicensing of the massive code-base.
  • LLVM relicensing - long tail - Google Sheets
  • The LLVM Project Blog
  • German state planning to switch 25,000 PCs to LibreOffice
    • — The north-German state of Schleswig-Holstein plans to switch to open source software, including LibreOffice, in its administration and schools.
  • Amazon Linux 2022 Released - Based On Fedora With Changes
    • — Amazon Linux / Amazon Linux 2 had been based on a combination of RHEL and Fedora packages while in today's Amazon Linux 2022 release they note it's explicitly based on Fedora.
  • amazon-linux-2022: Amazon Linux 2022
  • Announcing preview of Amazon Linux 2022
    • 19 min
  • Linux Action News 216

    Just how severe is this DNS cache poisoning attack revealed this week? We'll break it down and explain why Linux is affected. Plus, the feature now removed from APT, more performance patches in the Kernel, and a big batch of project updates.

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    • Linux has a serious security problem that once again enables DNS cache poisoning
    — We can actually guess the ephemeral port in the embedded UDP packet and package it in an ICMP probe to a DNS resolver. If the guessed port is correct, it causes some global resource in the Linux kernel to change, which can be indirectly observed. This is how the attacker can infer which ephemeral port is used.
  • Ubuntu Maker Canonical Planning To Vastly Improve Its Documentation
    • — This is a permanent, on-going commitment. It’s work that will never end. It has already started, and will become part of the fundamental Canonical discipline of making software.
  • The future of documentation at Canonical
  • APT 2.3.12 package manager released, will no longer let you break everything
    • — After the issues that happened with Linus from Linus Tech Tips breaking Pop!_OS during the switch to Linux challenge, the APT package manager has been upgraded to prevent future issues happening.
  • KDE Discover gets update to prevent you breaking your Linux system
    • — Another change to make things look a bit friendlier in Discover is if you have issues upgrading, it will instantly shove a load of technical details in your face. To normal consumers, that's clearly not going to do much to help and probably scare them away. Now, instead, it will provide a very clear and friendly message, with the option to get more details to report the issue.
  • Add support for list issue - Jens Axboe
    • — With the support in 5.16-rc1 for allocating and completing batches of IO, the one missing piece is passing down a list of requests for issue.
  • Linux 5.17 To Continue With I/O Optimizations, 5~6% Improvement Pending For NVMe
    • — With the merge window for 5.16 closed, time to submit for review some of the performance optimizations that didn't make this release. Here's batched issue for blk-mq with an NVMe implementation included. 5-6% improvement.
  • Linux 5.17 To Boast A Big TCP Performance Optimization
  • Linux 5.17 To Bring DRM Privacy-Screen Support, Intel VESA PWM Backlight Handling
    • — The Linux 5.16 merge window now past, an initial batch of changes from drm-misc-next has been sent in to DRM-Next for queuing until the Linux 5.17 cycle kicks off around the start of the new year.
  • Ubuntu Touch OTA-20 Released for Linux Phones, Here’s What’s New
    • — The UBports Foundation released today the Ubuntu Touch OTA-20 software update for Ubuntu Phone devices with various improvements and more bug fixes.
  • FWUPD 1.7.2 Released With Fixes, Faster & Smaller Daemon
    • — FWUPD 1.7.2 adds support for handling exported MTD block devices, tweaking the compiler flags to reduce the install size by around 300 Kb, speeding up the FWUPD daemon startup by ~40% by postponing some work, and a variety of fixes. The fixes range from a possible DFU crash to DLI download troubles and other device-specific corrections.
  • Alma and Rocky Linux release 8.5 builds, Rocky catches up with secure boot
    • — AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux, both of which provide community builds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), have released builds matching RHEL 8.5, with Rocky's work catching up with Alma by being signed for secure boot.
  • Proxmox VE 7.1 released!
    • — Proxmox VE 7.1 is based on Debian 11 but uses a newer Linux kernel, 5.13, QEMU 6.1, and OpenZFS 2.1.
  • Proxmox 7.1 release notes
  • Proxmox Downloads
    • 18 min
  • Linux Action News 215

    A desktop from Linux past has a surprising update this week, AlmaLinux pulls ahead of the pack, and Canonical ships software for the Apple M1.

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

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    • 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
    • 23 min
  • Linux Action News 214

    Significant changes at GitHub, Ubuntu starts work on a new desktop tool, why WirePlumber is a big deal, and we bust some Red Hat FUD.

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    • Nat Friedman quits as CEO of GitHub
    — GitHub CEO Nat Friedman announced today he's leaving the organization on November 15 and will be replaced by chief product officer Thomas Dohmke.
  • GitHub gets a new CEO
  • Google Will Now Pay $31,337 To $50,337 For New Linux Kernel Vulnerabilities
    • — Google is effectively tripling its previous reward amounts and promise to honor it for at least the next three months. They are hoping these $31,337 or $50,337 rewards will encourage more security researchers to explore the kernel and report their findings.
  • Ubuntu is Building a New Firmware Updater App
    • — This new GUI utility is being built using Flutter and Dart, further cementing Ubuntu’s commitment to go all in on Flutter for future desktop apps. The tool will be distributed as a Snap and provide a Ubuntu-style front-end to the fwupd tool and the Linux Vendor Firmware Service.
  • canonical/firmware-updater
  • Desktop Team Updates - Monday 1st November 2021 - Desktop / Team Updates
  • Ubuntu Continues Work On Flutter+Dart Written Firmware-Updater Utility
  • Asahi Linux Boots on M1 Pro
    • — Linux on the M1 Pro status: boots to a shell with working USB ports
    Working: SMP, IRQs, IPIs, framebuffer console, DART, USB, USB-PD, I²C, GPIO. Next I'm looking at PCIe (WiFi & SD card reader).
  • Apple M1 PCIe Driver Leads The PCI Changes For Linux 5.16
  • WirePlumber in Fedora 35
    • — Today marks an exciting day as Fedora 35 has now been released, with WirePlumber as the default session manager for PipeWire!
  • Master your PipeWire streams with WirePlumber | Linaro Virtual Connect Fall 2021
  • LXQt 1.0.0 Desktop Environment Released After 8 Years of Development
    • — The LXQt team proudly announced today the release and general availability of the LXQt 1.0.0 desktop environment as a major release bringing new features and improvements.
  • LXQt 1.0 Released For Lightweight Qt5 Desktop
  • Release 1.0.0 · lxqt/lxqt
  • Red Hat to hire fewer senior engineers after budget frozen
    • — Next year, IBM's Red Hat plans to cut back on hiring senior engineers in an effort largely aimed at controlling costs.
  • Next year, IBM’s Red Hat plans to cut back on hiring senior engineers in an effort aimed largely at controlling costs. : linux
  • The first fruits of CentOS Stream: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Beta
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 Enters Beta with Exciting New Features and Many Improvements
    • 18 min
  • Linux Action News 213

    New Raspberry Pi hardware has a few surprises, the most impressive things in Linux 5.15, and our reaction to classic functionality under consideration for removal from Fedora.

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    • New product: Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W on sale now at $15
    — Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W uses the same Broadcom BCM2710A1 SoC die as the launch version of Raspberry Pi 3, with Arm cores slightly down-clocked to 1GHz, bundled into a single space-saving package alongside 512MB of LPDDR2 SDRAM.
  • Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W with Ubuntu Server 21.10 support is here
  • Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Launches As Newer, Faster $10 Single Board Computer
  • Microsoft Edge finally arrives on Linux – “Official” build lands in repos
    • — We’re happy to see Edge for Linux finally make Stable and Official status, because we find it handy to have two distinct browsers on any operating system platform we use.
  • Element One - Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place
    • — Element One is a huge step change. It’s a very affordable, unlimited usage way for people to have all of Matrix, WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram in one place - that’s a combined three billion users!
  • Element 1.9.1 - Chat Export is finally here!!
  • The 15 Most Interesting Linux 5.15 Kernel Features From NTFS3 To KSMBD
    • — Linus Torvalds went ahead and released Linux 5.15 today on Halloween rather than delaying the kernel for another week.
  • Linux 5.15 Released
  • Fedora considers removing NIS support
    • — The change proposal does note that: "For some users this change may be a bit disruptive and it may require some learning curve for switching to alternative solutions".
  • What is the support status of Network Information Service
    • — As seen from the RHEL8.3 release notes the yp rpms (ypserv, ypbind, yp-tools) have been marked as deprecated. Furthermore those components will no longer be available in RHEL-9.
  • Fedora 35 Cleared For Release Next Week
    • — Confirmation of Fedora 35 being ready to ship next week was announced today.
    24 min
  • Linux Action News 212

    Major performance milestones are being hit with new code inbound for Linux, Plasma and GNOME desktops are set to run Wayland on NVIDIA's binary driver, and why the SFC's new GPL fight could have implications for you.

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    • Newest Linux Optimizations Can Achieve 10M IOPS Per-Core With IO_uring
    — These optimizations today were primarily within the kernel's block / NVMe / IO_uring code but also some touching the memory management code. All of these optimizations he has been pursuing for achieving the best possible per-core I/O performance can be found via linux-block's perf-wip branch.
  • Jens Axboe on Twitter
    • — That’s it. 10M IOPS, one physical core. #io_uring #linux
  • Linux 5.15 Delivers Many Features With New NTFS Driver, In-Kernel SMB3 Server, New Hardware
    • — Here is a more detailed look at all of the Linux 5.15 changes coming for this next stable kernel.
  • Linux 5.15 Lands Memcg Performance Regression Fix
  • Apple Silicon PCIe Driver Queued For Linux 5.16
  • Linux 5.16 To Support The 2021 Apple Magic Keyboard
  • KDE Plasma Readies Its NVIDIA GBM Support, Fingerprint Authentication Added
    • — Initial support for the NVIDIA driver with KDE Plasma 5.23.2's GBM back-end. In conjunction with the NVIDIA 495 Linux driver beta exposing Generic Buffer Manager support, Plasma 5.23.2+ will play nicely with that new driver support on Wayland.
  • NVIDIA 495 Linux Beta Driver Released With GBM Support
  • Fedora 35 has Wayland + GBM + NVIDIA
  • Copyleft Compliance Projects - Software Freedom Conservancy
    • — Software Freedom Conservancy, a nonprofit organization focused on ethical technology, is filing the lawsuit as the purchaser of a product which has copylefted code. This approach makes it the first legal case that focuses on the rights of individual consumers as third-party beneficiaries of the GPL.
    14 min
  • Linux Action News 211

    We cover what's special about Plasma's 25th-anniversary edition, chat with CloudLinux's CEO, and detail why Apple supporting Blender is good for all of us.

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

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    • 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.
    20 min
  • Linux Action News 210

    Apple M1 Linux development reaches a key milestone and boots a usable desktop; Ubuntu reveals a new product, and the secret SUSE project that leaked this week.

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

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    • 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
    • 21 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.