Linux Action News Video

Microsoft makes a hard about-face, a significant fix for Ubuntu 22.04 is in the works, and the recent breakthrough by the Asahi Linux project.

Sponsored By:

• Kolide: User-centered, cross-platform endpoint security for teams that Slack.
• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Microsoft changes its mind about open source monetization — Microsoft was trying to do the right thing, but it turns out doing nothing is better.
• Giorgio Sardo on Twitter — To clarify our intent, we removed the previous mention to open source pricing. We're committed to building an open Store and enabling dev choice and flexibility. If there are intellectual property concerns about an app, please report it.
• An Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Fix Is Coming For A Very Annoying & Serious APT Problem — "installing the package libudev1 results in a large number of critical packages being removed and rendering the system essentially unusable."
• Bug #1974196 “Installing libudev1 on a new Jammy installation"
• Draft: Mark broken reverse depends for upgrade (!248) · Merge requests
• Drop-in, drop-out chats with Video Rooms in Element — This has been a long time coming and, frankly, we’re really excited to be introducing Video Rooms to you. It’s a major step towards richer video (and soon voice) rooms!
• SCALE 19x — SCaLE 19x is coming up July 28th - the 31st at the LAX Hilton. Promo code LAS50
• M2 is here! July 2022 Release & Progress Report — Welcome to another long overdue progress report! As usual, things have been busier than expected… and we have some big news! We’ve just released a new Asahi Linux update with Mac Studio, Bluetooth, and M2 support!
• Asahi Linux Update Brings Experimental Apple M2 Support

Why Google says we should all go rolling, Red Hat's got a new boss, Microsoft gets called out, and why it might be the year of Linux hardware.

Sponsored By:

• Kolide: User-centered, cross-platform endpoint security for teams that Slack.
• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• How Google got to rolling Linux releases for Desktops — Today, the life of a gLinux team member looks very different. We have reduced the amount of engineering time and energy required for releases to one on-duty release engineer that rotates among team members. We no longer have a big push to upgrade our entire fleet. No more need for multi stage alpha, betas and GAs for new LTS releases while simultaneously chasing down older machines that still were running Ubuntu Precise or Lucid.
• Red Hat names new CEO — In a move many will find surprising, Red Hat announced that Paul Cormier, the company's CEO and president since 2020, is stepping over to become chairman of the board. Matt Hicks, a Red Hat veteran and the company's head of products and technologies, will replace Cormier as president and CEO.
• KDE Announces Powerful Slimbook 4 Linux Laptop — The laptops are powered by AMD Ryzen 7 5700U processor with eight cores. They use USB-C for charging and power, like many other modern laptops. There are two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port, an HDMI port, and a wired Ethernet jack.
• System76 Launch Lite Teaser — Launch, but Lite. Launch Lite is the everyperson's keeb — comfortable, portable, and configurable.
• System76 Teases the Launch Lite Open-Source Configurable Keyboard, Coming July 14th
• AMD Is Hiring To Improve Its Linux Graphics Driver Installation Experience — In addition to their recent hiring for a open-source Linux GPU driver developer with multimedia experience, this week they have posted a new role looking for Linux build engineer(s) to focus on their graphics driver.
• Linux Build Engineer — Our team works on open-source GPU drivers for Linux. We are leading contributors to the Radeon Mesa graphics and multimedia drivers included in popular Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and Debian. Our software is used in exciting products such as the Tesla Model S and the Steam Deck.
• Matthew Garrett: Responsible stewardship of the UEFI secure boot ecosystem — So, to have Microsoft, the self-appointed steward of the UEFI Secure Boot ecosystem, turn round and say that a bunch of binaries that have been reviewed through processes developed in negotiation with Microsoft, implementing technologies designed to make management of revocation easier for Microsoft, and incorporating fixes for vulnerabilities discovered by the developers of those binaries who notified Microsoft of these issues despite having no obligation to do so, and which have then been signed by Microsoft are now considered by Microsoft to be insecure is, uh, kind of impolite?
• X.Org Server Hit By New Local Privilege Escalation, Remote Code Execution Vulnerabilities — CVE-2022-2319 and CVE-2022-2320 were made public this morning and both deal with the X.Org Server's Xkb keyboard extension not properly validating input that could lead to out-of-bounds memory writes. Hopefully though in 2022 you aren't relying on your xorg-server running as root.
• Many Old X.Org Components Saw New Releases This Weekend - Phoronix
• Boycott Wayland. It breaks everything! — tl;dr: Wayland is not ready as a 1:1 compatible Xorg replacement just yet, and maybe never will. Hence, if you are interested in existing applications to "just work" without the need for adjustments, then you may be better of not using Wayland at this point.
• X.Org Security Advisory: July 12, 2022

The new movement to leave GitHub, an Ubuntu bug biting 22.04 users, the hardware platform Fedora might start taking seriously, and a major desktop dev departs Red Hat.

Sponsored By:

• Kolide: User-centered, cross-platform endpoint security for teams that Slack.
• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come! — Today, we take a stronger stance. We are ending all our own uses of GitHub, and announcing a long-term plan to assist FOSS projects to migrate away from GitHub.
• Roma, one of the first RISC-V laptops, may ship in September — As for the specs, the Roma laptop will, we're told, come with a quad-core RISC-V processor, an Arm security enclave core, a GPU/NPU accelerator for video and AI workloads, up to 16GB of LPDDR4 or LPDDR4X memory, and up to 256GB of storage.
• System76 Announces New Alder Lake Laptop With Coreboot Firmware — System76 has announced a new Lemur Pro laptop model that is now offering 12th Gen "Alder Lake" Intel processors while continuing to feature Coreboot firmware.
• System76.com
• Fedora May Finally Provide Official Support For The Raspberry Pi 4 — The hope with this change proposal is to provide more "official" support for Fedora Linux on the Raspberry Pi 4B / 400 / CM4 hardware.
• Changes/RaspberryPi4 - Fedora Project Wiki
• Fedora 37 Proposing To Allow Unrestricted Access To Flathub
• Fedora 37 Looks To Better Manage Its 175MB+ Of Linux Firmware Blobs
• Fedora 37 Gets A Batch Of New Features Approved
• New Ubuntu MATE Release — Improved compositor and video playback performance, zswap (lz4) by default & optimised image sizes
• Systemd Creator Lands At Microsoft — The prominent open-source developer responsible for several prominent projects joined Microsoft and is continuing his focus on systemd development.
• Lennart Poettering - systemd + PulseAudio Creator - Departed Red Hat
• Linode Now Supports Kali Linux
• Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Has A Change On The Way For Systemd-OOMD Being Kill-Happy With Apps
• ManagedOOMSwap docs
• Discussion: systemd-oomd issues on desktop
• 249.11-0ubuntu3.4 : systemd package : Ubuntu

Fedora gets serious about its server editions, our thoughts on Valve's increased Steam Deck production, and the surprising results of booting Linux on the Apple M2 SoC.

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Fedora 37 Gets A Batch Of New Features Approved — Fedora 37 is working its way toward release before the end of October.
• The Performance Cost To A Proposed Fedora 37 CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS Change
• Fedora CoreOS Hopes To Become An Official Edition With Fedora 37
• Fedora 37 Looks To Ship With Stratis Storage 3.1 Support
• Fedora 37 Proposing To Allow Unrestricted Access To Flathub
• Fedora Magazine: Accessibility in Fedora Workstation — I am very happy to announce that Red Hat has just hired Lukas Tyrychtr, who is a blind software engineer, to lead our effort in making sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Workstation has excellent accessibility support!
• Firefox 102 Available With Transform Streams, Geoclue On Linux — Firefox 102.0 isn't the most exciting end-user update but does have some developer additions like Transform Streams support and support for Geoclue with Firefox Linux builds for geolocation.
• Thunderbird 102 Released With Big Improvements To This Leading Open-Source Mail Client — Thunderbird 102 introduces a new address book implementation, a new spaces toolbar, a new import/export wizard, a redesigned message header, and other "quality of life" updates. There are also some extras with Thunderbird 102 like adding Matrix chat support.
• Matrix.org Security release: Synapse 1.61.1 — Today we're exceptionally releasing Synapse 1.61.1, which comes as a security release. Server administrators are encouraged to update as soon as possible.
• Synapse Release v1.61.1
• Synapse Advisory — URL previews of unusual or maliciously-crafted pages can crash Synapse media repositories or Synapse monoliths.
• Valve More Than Doubles Steam Deck Production, Q3 Reservations Starting Soon — Valve just tweeted out some great news for SteamDeck fans, saying it has more than doubled the number of Steam Decks being produced every week. The company also says it just sent out the last batch of Q2 reservation emails and is prepared to start kicking off Q3 reservations on June 30th 2022.
• Check Your Steam Deck Order Status
• Vim 9.0 — The main goal of Vim9 script is to drastically improve performance. This is accomplished by compiling commands into instructions that can be efficiently executed. An increase in execution speed of 10 to 100 times can be expected.
• Vim 9.0 Released With New Vim9 Script For 10~100x Execution Speed
• Linode Security Digest — June 20-26, 2022
• Apple M2 Enablement For Linux Begins With Good Progress — Hector Martin on Monday began his Linux M2 bring-up effort, including with a livestream of this reverse engineering / debugging / kernel hacking effort. Hector confirmed NVMe, USB, and SMC functionality are working for the M2 on the first day of the effort.
• M2 Asahi Linux bring-up YouTube Stream

Some highlights from Linus' recent fireside chat, Qt gets a new leader and a Linux botnet we should probably take seriously.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Akamai Warns Of “Panchan” Linux Botnet — The botnet introduces a unique (and possibly novel) approach to lateral movement by harvesting of SSH keys. Instead of just using brute force or dictionary attacks on randomized IP addresses like most botnets do, the malware also reads the idrsa and knownhosts files to harvest existing credentials and use them to move laterally across the network.
• Canonical Continues Working On Ubuntu’s Firefox Snap Performance — On the Ubuntu blog is a new post by Canonical's Oliver Smith about their latest efforts to improve the Firefox Snap performance and other outstanding issues with this sandboxed version of the Mozilla web browser.
• Lars Knoll Announces His Successor For Qt Chief Maintainer — The voting period for the new Chief Maintainer has ended yesterday. This means Volker Hilsheimer will be our new Chief Maintainer. Congratulations!
• New Chief Maintainer for the Qt Project
• Talisman: Debut of X — I've spent the last couple weeks writing a window system for the VS100. I stole a fair amount of code from W, surrounded it with an asynchronous rather than a synchronous interface, and called it X. Overall performance appears to be about twice that of W.
• X Window System Turns 38 Years Old — It was on 19 June 1984 that Bob Scheifler announced the initial X window system release "X1" at MIT.
• X Windows System Design Principles, a lecture by James Gettys
• A Political History of X - Keith Packard (LCA 2020)
• Linus Torvalds: Rust For The Kernel Could Possibly Be Merged For Linux 5.20 — Torvalds commented that real soon they expect to have the Rust infrastructure merged within the kernel, possibly even for the next release -- meaning Linux 5.20.
• Open Source Summit North America 2022: Keynote: Linus Torvalds
• How are we improving Firefox Snap performance? Part 2

We get the details behind Thunderbird acquiring K-9 Mail, share the best new features of Plasma 5.25, check-in on Ubuntu's RISC-V development status, and discuss Photoshop coming to Linux via the web.

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Jupiter Network Membership: Support the entire network, and get access to every member's special feed for every show on the network. Promo Code: thesignal

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• K9 mail to become Thunderbird on Android — Ultimately, K-9 Mail will transform into Thunderbird on Android.
• K-9 Mail – Open Source Email App for Android
• K-9 Mail joins the Thunderbird family
• Frequently Asked Questions: Thunderbird Mobile and K-9 Mail
• Ubuntu Working To Provide Good Support For The VisionFive Low-Cost RISC-V Board — The Starfive VisionFive is a currently $179 USD RISC-V board that is intended to run full-blown RISC-V Linux distributions.
• Fedora 37 Looks To Boost Its Cloud Posture As An Official Edition — Approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee this week is returning Fedora Cloud base to be listed as an official Fedora edition.
• Plasma 5.25 - Released — Plasma 5.25 brings new features and concepts to the desktop environment.
• 5 Neat New Features in KDE Plasma 5.25, Released Today
• Ventoy 1.0.76 — Ventoy is an open source tool to create bootable USB drive for ISO/WIM/IMG/VHD(x)/EFI files.
• Super UEFIinSecureBoot Disk: Boot any OS or .efi file without disabling UEFI Secure Boot
• Adobe Plans To Make Photoshop on the Web Free To Everyone — The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes the service as “freemium” and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop’s core functions.
• Photopea | Online Photo Editor

SUSE Enterprise is already switching to the new NVIDIA open kernel driver, a Matrix-powered Walkie-Talkie, and the details on Apple's Rosetta for Linux.

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Jupiter Network Membership: Support the entire network, and get access to every member's special feed for every show on the network. Promo Code: thesignal

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP4 Released - Switches To NVIDIA’s Open Kernel Driver — Notable with SLE 15 SP4, SUSE is already switching to using NVIDIA's open-source GPU kernel-mode driver that NVIDIA open-sourced last month
• openSUSE Leap 15.4 Released
• Element Call Beta 2 includes lots of exciting new updates! — In a walkie-talkie call, videos are disabled, and everyone is muted by default. To speak, press the ‘push-to-talk’ (PTT) button, either by pressing it on the screen or by holding the spacebar. The catch is that, just like a walkie-talkie or two-way radio, only one person can speak at a time. When someone else is speaking, your PTT button will be disabled, and if you try to push it you’ll hear a warning beep.

Our thoughts on NixOS' new GUI installer, winning hearts and minds one firmware update at a time, the performance bug that hit Linux 5.18, and preparation begins for the open-source NVIDIA driver.

Sponsored By:

• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.
• Jupiter Network Membership: Support the entire network, and get access to every member's special feed for every show on the network. Promo Code: thesignal

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• LVFS Has Served More Than 52 Million Firmware Files To Linux Users — LVFS has served up 52.1 million firmware files to end-users over its lifetime. There has also been over a 99% success rate on the firmware being deployed correctly to users.
• Fwupd 1.8.1 Released With Firmware Updating For More HP, Corsair, PixArt, Lenovo Devices
• A Fix Is On The Way For A Previously-Reported Linux 5.18 Performance Regression — Back during the Linux 5.18 merge window in March I wrote about a big NUMA benchmark performance regression I noticed and bisected.
• Nouveau Begins Shifting Around Code For Use By New Driver — "This just moves the codegen build into a separate library, this is just prep work for a future where another drivers wants to reuse this code. this isn't perfect for plugging into a vulkan driver, but doing that requires more in depth surgery."
• NVIDIA 515.48.07 Linux Driver Released As Stable With Open Kernel Driver Option
• Welcoming Rocket.Chat to Matrix! — We just wanted to take a moment to welcome Rocket.Chat to Matrix, given the recent announcement that they are switching to using Matrix for standards-based interoperable federation!
• Rocket.Chat Leverages The Matrix Protocol for Decentralized and Interoperable Communications
• AlmaLinux 9.0 Released — AlmaLinux OS 9.0 is based on upstream kernel version 5.14 and contains enhancements around cloud and container development and improvements to the web console.
• AlmaLinux 9 Now Available! - AlmaLinux OS Blog
• GPU Price-Performance Benchmarking Report
• NixOS 22.05 Released With New Graphical Installer — NixOS 22.05 builds atop the Nix 2.8 package manager, which brings better performance, general improvements, the experimental nix fmt command that applies a formatter defined by the flake output to the Nix expressions in a flake, and other additions.
• NixOS GUI Configuration Editor — A simple NixOS configuration editor application built with libadwaita, GTK4, and Relm4. The goal of this project is to provide a simple graphical tool for modifying and managing desktop NixOS configurations.
• NixOS - Blog → Announcements
• Calamares Installer — Calamares aims to be easy, usable, beautiful, pragmatic, inclusive and distribution-agnostic
• NixOS Calamares PR: fix calamares modules, add nixos modules, and add new iso by vlinkz
• NixOS/calamares-nixos-extensions: NixOS Calamares Extensions

The controversial Intel code now shipping in Linux, why F-Droid is getting more attractive for developers, and the rumor that could change the industry.

Sponsored By:

• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!
• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• Linux 5.18 Released With Intel SDSi, New CPU & GPU Features — Linux 5.18 brings the controversial Intel Software Defined Silicon (SDSi) functionality.
• Thoughts on software-defined silicon — Its purpose is to disable access to specific processor capabilities in the absence of a certificate from Intel saying otherwise.
• Statistics from the 5.18 development cycle
• Btrfs Gets Some Buttery Good Improvements With Linux 5.19 — David Sterba of SUSE has submitted the ~4k lines of code worth of feature changes for the Btrfs file-system driver in the Linux 5.19 kernel.
• Our build and release infrastructure, and upcoming updates — This work will be incrementally deployed as each bit is finished. So be patient, and you will notice releases happening faster and faster!
• Google Summer of Code (GSOC 2022) Highlights of FOSS Projects — Google announced the GSoC 2022 projects, and the list includes some exciting improvements to the mainstream foss projects such as GNOME, Xfce, LibreOffice, etc.
• Ubuntu 22.10 Makes PipeWire Default for Audio — “That’s right, as of today the Kinetic ISO (pending, not yet current since the changes were just made) has been updated to run only PipeWire and not PulseAudio […] you can look forward to this for Kinetic”
• Broadcom-VMware Deal Said to Be Ready as Soon as This Week — Broadcom Inc. could announce an agreement to acquire cloud-computing company VMware Inc. as soon as this week
• Broadcom’s Potential VMware Acquisition: 5 Things About Dell, Stock Prices And Hock Tan To Know
• Broadcom in Talks to Pay About $60 Billion for VMware
• Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger Has Mixed Feelings on a Broadcom-VMware Deal

Why Google's new open-source security effort might fall a bit short, the Arch snag this week, a big win for Right to Repair, and why you might soon have a new favorite filesystem.

Sponsored By:

• Ting: Save $25 off your first device, or $25 in service credit if you bring one!
• Linode: Sign up using the link on this page and receive a $100 60-day credit towards your new account.

Support Linux Action News

Links:

• New from Google Cloud: Assured Open Source Software service — Assured OSS enables enterprise and public sector users of open source software to easily incorporate the same OSS packages that Google uses into their own developer workflows.
• OSS-Fuzz — continuous fuzzing for open source software.
• Google will start distributing a security-vetted collection of open-source software libraries
• Shared success in building a safer open source community
• White House joins OpenSSF and the Linux Foundation in securing open-source software
• Software Freedom Conservancy right-to-repair lawsuit against California TV manufacturer Vizio, Inc. remanded to California State Court - Software Freedom Conservancy — "The ruling is a watershed moment in the history of copyleft licensing. This ruling shows that the GPL agreements function both as copyright licenses and as contractual agreements" says Karen M. Sandler, executive director of Software Freedom Conservancy.
• Arch Linux Temporarily Steps Back From WirePlumber After Snafu — With the recent attempt to switch to WirePlumber, that modern session manager was unconditionally taking over audio responsibilities even if the user had configured their system to use PulseAudio or ALSA directly.
• Arch Linux News — Undone replacement of pipewire-media-session with wireplumber.
• Bringing bcachefs to the mainline — Bcachefs is a longstanding out-of-tree filesystem that grew out of the bcache caching layer that has been in the kernel for nearly ten years. Based on a session led by Kent Overstreet at the 2022 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-management and BPF Summit (LSFMM), though, it would seem that bcachefs is likely to be heading upstream soon. He intends to start the process toward mainline inclusion over the next six months or so.
• bcachefs Principles of Operation