Linux Action News

Google scrambles to repurpose Android Things, Microsoft wants to protect your Linux install really bad, and the first bank backed Crypto-coin makes a splash.

Plus Void Linux issues a warning, running Linux on ARM laptops built for Windows, and more.

Links:

• Google refocuses Android Things as a ‘platform for OEM partners’ — When Google announced Android Things at its 2015 I/O developer conference, it pitched it as a versatile, embedded, and open operating system designed to run on low-power and memory-constrained internet of things (IoT) devices with support for Bluetooth Low Energy, Wi-Fi, and the Weave protocol.
• Android Developers Blog: An Update on Android Things
• Now you can run Linux on (some) ARM laptops designed for Windows 10 on ARM — The folks behind the AArch64 Laptops open source project on github have come up with a way to install Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on some of the first Windows 10 on ARM laptops.
• aarch64-laptops
• Microsoft Developer: You Still Should Have Anti-Virus With Windows Subsystem For Linux — In CPU/system benchmarks we routinely see Windows 10 WSL with Ubuntu and other distributions performing very well, but when it comes to disk reads/writes, it's drastically slower than bare metal Linux installs and in some cases much slower still than dedicated virtual machines.
• What’s new for WSL in Windows 10 version 1903? – Windows Command Line Tools For Developers — The next Windows update is coming soon and we’re bringing exciting new updates to WSL with it. These include accessing the Linux file system from Windows, and improvements to how you manage and configure your distros in the command line.
• Red Hat Satellite to standardize on PostgreSQL backend — We are going to consolidate and use a single database, PostgreSQL. We began investigating a move to a single database upstream in Pulp as early as 2016.
• [Pulp-dev] Transition from Mongo to Postgre — MongoDB is great at what it does and a good fit for some use cases, but we learned that it's not the best fit for Pulp.

A week of nasty security flaws, and a lack of patches... For some of us. Raspberry Pi opens a physical store, our thoughts on the new LibreOffice interface, and the new round of nasty flaws hitting all versions of Android.

Plus new disk encryption coming to Linux, Intel releases their open source encoder for future video on the web, and more.

Links:

• Raspberry Pi opens IRL store — The store is located on the first floor in the Grand Arcade in the centre of Cambridge, UK.
• Security bug fixed in LibreOffice but not OpenOffice — Austrian researcher Alex Inführ publicly reported the vulnerability on Friday
• LibreOffice 6.2 has a new UI — LibreOffice 6.2 with NotebookBar, a significant major release of the free office suite which features a radical new approach to the user interface
• Android PNG vulnerability — A maliciously crafted PNG image could execute code smuggled within the file, if an application views it.
• Adiantum: encryption for the low end — Low-end devices bound for developing countries, such as those running the Android Go edition, lack encryption support because the hardware doesn't provide any cryptographic acceleration.
• Google Adiantum announcement
• Intel Releases Open Source Encoder for Next-Gen AV1 Codec — SVT-AV1 requires Skylake-generation or newer Xeon processors with at least 112 threads and at least 48GB of RAM for 10-bit 4K video encoding.
• The AV1 Video Codec - YouTube Talk — This talk will discuss the road from specification to production, the current state of AV1 deployment, and our own efforts to write an AV1 encoder in Rust, rav1e. It is intended for a technical audience, but does not require previous signal processing experience.

Firefox is standing out, Pine64 has a lot more cheap Linux hardware coming, and the good and the bad with the new Kodi Release.

Plus HP Joins LVFS, why you shouldn't expect a Raspberry Pi 4 in 2019, and more.

Links:

• Firefox 65 released — We’re happy to announce a new set of redesigned controls for the Content Blocking
• Next version of Firefox might warn users of software that performs MitM attacks — The Firefox browser will soon come with a new security feature that will detect and then warn users when a third-party app is performing a Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack by hijacking the user's HTTPS traffic.
• Mozilla halts Firefox 65 distribution on Windows — The organization released Firefox 65.0 for all supported operating systems a few days ago on January 29, 2019.
• CFR annoying some users
• HP joins LVFS — If you’ve got a Z2, Z6, Z8, Z440, Z640 or Z840 system then you might want to check for an update in the GNOME Software updates panel or using fwupdmgr update in the terminal.
• Pine64 to Launch $79 Linux Tablet, $199 PineBook Pro Laptop — Pine64, the company that gave us the $89 Pinebook Linux laptop, is branching out and is set to launch a Linux tablet this year for just $79. That's as well as a new Linux laptop, smartphone, camera, single board computers, and retro gaming kit.
• Pine64 forum announcement
• We won't see a Raspberry Pi 4 in 2019 — "I don’t have a route to do something this year," he told us. "I think we kind of understand what featureset we want [and] what would be involved in getting that featureset. I don’t think we have a  defined plan for turning that into a product yet."
• Kodi 18.0 Released — One of the big features of this release: support for gaming emulators, ROMs and controls.

Debian has a big fix, Chromium might block ads, Valve makes another big investment in Linux, and Google gets serious about bringing Fuchsia to market.

Plus we announce a new Linux podcast, and run down the many ways to run Ubuntu on Windows.

Links:

• Choose Linux - New JB Show — The show that captures the excitement of discovering Linux.
• Steam For Linux Now Lets You Play Windows Games From Other Stores — Users can now launch Windows games purchased on platforms outside of Steam from inside the Steam for Linux client.

Another troubling week for MongoDB, ZFS On Linux lands a kernel workaround, and 600 days of postmarketOS.

Plus our thoughts on the new Project Trident release, and Mozilla ending their Test Pilot program.

Links:

• MongoDB removed from major distros — Red Hat won't use MongoDB in Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Fedora thanks to MongoDB's new Server Side Public License.
• ZFS On Linux Landing Workaround For Linux 5.0 Kernel Support — There's no word yet on how this would affect ZFS Linux performance for end-users.
• First release of Project Trident — This version is based off the 18.12-stable branch of TrueOS (FreeBSD 13-CURRENT), using the new TrueOS distribution framework with several add-ons by Project Trident itself.
• Android-x86 8.1-r1 (Oreo-x86) released — Add Taskbar as an alternative launcher which puts a start menu and recent apps tray on top of your screen and support freeform window mode.
• 600 days of postmarketOS — postmarketOS is aiming for a ten year life-cycle for smartphones
• Mozilla kills Test Pilot Program — So today, we are announcing that we will be moving to a new structure that will demonstrate our ability to innovate in exciting ways and as a result we are closing the Test Pilot program as we’ve known it.
• Mozilla Kills Default Support for Adobe Flash in Firefox 69

Choose your own Linux is coming to Chrome OS, GitHub private repos go free, LVFS gets another win, and Amazon released their MongoDB competitor DocumentDB.

Plus Homebrew comes to Linux, the recent Ethereum Classic attack, and more.

Links:

• Chrome OS may soon let companies choose their own distro for Linux apps — Device administrators will be able to designate a URL for Chrome OS to download the Linux distro from a hash to ensure the download was successful.
• Github offers free private repos — Today we’re announcing two major updates to make GitHub more accessible to developers: unlimited free private repositories, and a simpler, unified Enterprise offering.
• Homebrew comes to Linux — The most significant changes since 1.8.0 are Linux support, (optional) automatic brew cleanup and providing bottles (binary packages) to more Homebrew users.
• Amazon launches Mongo-compatible DocumentDB — The launch of AWS DocumentDB – a fully managed document database service – comes just months after MongoDB announced a new licence
• Phoenix joins the LVFS — Just like AMI, Phoenix is a huge firmware vendor, providing the firmware for millions of machines.
• Ethereum Classic suffers 51-percent attack — Rollback attack let attackers spend 88,500 previously spent coins.
• Coinbase Suspends Ethereum Classic

Raspberry Pi joins the RISC-V Foundation, MIPS is going open source, and Mozilla is experimenting with more ads in Firefox.

Plus the BSDs rebase their ZFS on the Linux implementation, the EU has bug bounties, and Thunderbird gets set to fly!

Links:

• Raspberry Pi joins RISC-V Foundation — We're excited to have joined the @risc_v Foundation as a silver member. Hoping to contribute to maturing the Linux kernel and @debian port for the world's leading free and open instruction set architecture.
• Raspberry Pi Touchscreen Driver Finally Being Mainlined — The Raspberry Pi 7-inch touchscreen retails for about $60 USD and with the Linux 4.21 should be playing nicely with the mainline kernel.
• MIPS to be open sourced — The MIPS Open initiative will help greatly expand the existing MIPS ecosystem comprised of thousands of developers and over 100 academic institutions worldwide by offering new opportunities to create innovative solutions from third-party tool vendors, software developers and universities.
• Wave Computing takes funding over $200 million
• EU Offers Bug Bounties For 14 Open Source Projects — As the bug bounty programs begin to roll out in January, security experts worry that the programs miss the mark on truly securing open source projects.
• Mozilla "experimenting" with more ads in Firefox. — “This snippet was an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner.”
• Thunderbird ready to fly into 2019 — Welcome to 2019, and in this blog post we’ll look at what we got accomplished in 2018 and look forward to what we’re going to be working on this year.
• FreeBSD admits that Linux is better (when it comes to ZFS) — In the past few years the vast majority of new development in ZFS has taken place in DelphixOS and zfsonlinux (ZoL). Earlier this year Delphix announced that they will be moving to ZoL. This shift means that there will be little to no net new development of Illumos.

We take a look back at our 2018 Linux predictions, and make some bold new ones for the year ahead.

Plus there’s no avoiding how far off we were when it came to Bitcoin last year, but that didn’t stop us having a go again this year!

It’s been a huge year for Linux and FOSS news, and we take a look at some of the major stories that shaped the industry over the last 12 months.

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

Links:

• 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.

Intel developers are working to open source the FSP, Fuchsia SDK and device repos show up in Android AOSP, and our BSD buddies have some big news.

Plus the pending removal of the x32 sub-architecture from Linux, why Uber is joining up with the Linux Foundation, and more.

Links:

• Intel Working On Open-Sourcing The FSP — Firmware support package (FSP) for initializing the Intel silicon - the CPU, memory controller, chipset.
• Intel introduces the deep learning reference stack — The Deep Learning Reference Stack is highly-tuned and built for cloud native environments.
• Uber brings Horovod project for distributed deep learning to Linux Foundation — Uber has used Horovod to support self-driving vehicles, fraud detection, and trip forecasting. Contributors to the project include Amazon, IBM, Intel, and Nvidia.
• The x32 subarchitecture may be removed — The x32 subarchitecture is a software variant of x86-64; it runs the processor in the 64-bit mode, but uses 32-bit pointers and arithmetic.
• Android Open Source Project now includes the Fuchsia SDK and a Fuchsia ‘device’ — This means that everyone who downloads AOSP, going forward, will download these two Fuchsia related repos.
• FreeBSD 12.0 released — The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE. This is the first release of the stable/12 branch.
• Ho, Ho, Ho - 12.0 | BSD Now 276