● 12.19.18

● Links 19/12/2018: VirtualBox 6.0, RawTherapee 5.5, Mir 1.1.0, LibreOffice 6.1.4 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 5:45 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• Over the last 10 months, a handful of friends and acquaintances have pulled me back into that realm. How? With their desire to dump That Other Operating System™ and move to Linux.

• This has been an interesting experience, in no small part because most of the people aren’t at all technical. They know how to use a computer to do what they need to do. Beyond that, they’re not interested in delving deeper. That said, they were (and are) attracted to Linux for a number of reasons—probably because I constantly prattle on about it.

• While bringing them to the Linux side of the computing world, I learned a few things about helping non-techies move to Linux. If someone asks you to help them make the jump to Linux, these eight tips can help you.

• 1. Be honest about Linux.

• Linux is great. It’s not perfect, though. It can be perplexing and sometimes frustrating for new users. It’s best to prepare the person you’re helping with a short pep talk.

• What should you talk about? Briefly explain what Linux is and how it differs from other operating systems. Explain what you can and can’t do with it. Let them know some of the pain points they might encounter when using Linux daily.

• If you take a bit of time to ease them into Linux and open source, the switch won’t be as jarring.

• The American dream has driven millions upon millions of people to come to a country filled with possibility and opportunity. Sometimes, you get caught up in the gears of enterprise and learn that the machinations of big business tend to run counter to that dream. But, sometimes, you start a company on an ideal and cling to that initial spark no matter what.

• That’s what Carl Richell did when he created System76. That was more than a decade ago, when the company’s goal was to sell computer hardware running open source operating systems. System76 has been a bastion of hope for Linux and open source fans, as they’ve proved, year after year, that the dream can be fulfilled, that Linux can be sold on the desktop and laptop space.

• Announced earlier this year as the thinnest, lightest, stunning, and most powerful mobile workstations powered by the Ubuntu Linux operating system, the new Dell Precision lineup includes the Dell Precision 5530, Dell Precision 3530, Dell Precision 7530, and Dell Precision 7730. And the first two are now finally getting the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) update.

• Roundup As Microsoft’s Xmas elves toiled long into the night on Santa’s Windows 10 upgrade, the software giant found time to unleash static Azure websites and an unfortunately worded blog in this week’s Microsoft round-up.

• Windows Update – a special Insider Ring of its own? (oh no isn’t) Sometimes it is hard not to feel sorry for Microsoft, as Windows corporate veep Michael Fortin kicked off a self-inflicted storm over the quality of Windows 10 updates.

• Certainly, it has been a bad year for Windows 10, with a major release accidentally deleting files, and smaller patches leaving Microsoft’s premium devices in a poorly state. Fortin, therefore, wanted to explain that the software giant really did care about quality and reiterated how it all works.

• As most right-minded Reg readers know, Microsoft emits “B” releases (aka Patch Tuesday) on the second Tuesday of each month. These bad boys are the ones the gang at Redmond really want you to install and contain security patches mixed into the fun.

• December and its holiday seasons are here but Chrome OS news has been somewhat slow in terms of new devices for the month. A new 14-inch Acer Chromebook 514 is on the way in the budget segment starting at $349 with moderate specs, having finally received its own landing page on the company’s site. However, despite being unveiled at IFA 2018 in August, that’s not quite ready for purchase yet. Aside from that device, the only news on the Chrome OS front has centered around at least one more LTE-enabled Chromebook made by CTL on the Sprint network and rather disappointing initial scores for the first, as-yet-unreleased Snapdragon reference board. Google’s Pixel Slate has landed on our top ten list after beginning to ship this month, knocking one other device from the ranking but for a high cost compared to other Chromebooks with comparable specs.

Server

• With over 350 attendees from over 115+ companies and more than 25 speakers by community members, upstream project leads, contributors, end users, and from Red Hatters, the OpenShift Commons Gathering in Seattle this past week was a great place to learn about the future of Kubernetes, OpenShift, and cloud native infrastructure.

• In addition to releasing VirtualBox 6.0, Oracle on Tuesday also released an updated version of their Linux kernel downstream geared for their RHEL-cloned Oracle Linux… Now available is Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 Update 1.

• This first update to Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 5 offers improved support for ARM64/AArch64 (64-bit ARM), cgroup2 updates, improved scheduler scalability, a variety of DTrace updates, updated NVDIMM subsystem functionality around PMEM and DAX, and various other changes. Also included with UEK R5U1 are a number of CVE security fixes.

• As 2018 draws to a close, I’ve spent some time thinking about the progress we’ve made with Red Hat OpenShift and where we’re going. Spoiler alert – it’s been an exciting year and I’m optimistic about 2019.

• Red Hat’s Sebastien Pahl Explains Kubernetes Operators at KubeCon 2018. Operators will be featured in OpenShift 4 currently in beta, which you can preview here: https://try.openshift.com/

• An Operator is a method of packaging, deploying and managing a Kubernetes application. A Kubernetes application is an application that is both deployed on Kubernetes and managed using the Kubernetes APIs and kubectl tooling. To be able to make the most of Kubernetes, you need a set of cohesive APIs to extend in order to service and manage your applications that run on Kubernetes. You can think of Operators as the runtime that manages this type of application on Kubernetes. http://coreos.com/operators The Operator Framework is an open source toolkit to manage Kubernetes native applications, called Operators, in an effective, automated, and scalable way. https://github.com/operator-framework

Audiocasts/Shows

• On this episode of This Week in Linux, we got a lot of application releases to talk about like Nextcloud, Firefox, Vivaldi, Kdenlive and more. We got an update for the Emby proprietary news we covered last week, there’s a fork. The kernel team are discussing the potential removal of the x32 Subarchitecture. There’s some possibilities that Intel could be Open-Sourcing the FSP and we’ll talk about what that could mean. Later in the show we’ll talk Security News related to a SQLite Bug, New Malware Families Discovered, Apple’s T2 Chip issues with Linux and yet another security hole found in Google+. Then we’ll round out the show with some Linux Gaming news including some great games on sale. All that and much more!

• 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.

• Chris is back from his trip to Denver to tour System76’s factory, and what he discovered while he was there was the last thing he was expecting.

• Katherine Druckman and Doc Searls talk to David Egts (@davidegts), Chief Technologist North America for the Public Sector at Red Hat (@redhatgov) about open source enthusiasm.

• The host of the Command Line Heroes podcast, Saron Yitbarek, kicks off each episode with a sound-studded description of an event that sets the stage for the topic of the episode. Sometimes it’s a speech from Al Gore, and sometimes its the Mars Curiosity Rover landing.

• Believe it or not, there’s more discussion about ZFS in this episode. (Klaatu has, oddly, completely forgotten that he’s actually running ZFS on OpenIndiana, and has been for months; more on this next month). Also, switching from Thunderbird to KMail.

Kernel Space

• The recently talked about work to improve/restore Linux networking performance around Retpolines is queued now in net-next for the upcoming Linux 4.21 kernel cycle.

• This patch series for the Linux kernel’s networking subsystem is about mitigating the Retpoline overhead introduced at the start of the year in order to address the Meltdown CPU security issue.

• I’m announcing the release of the 3.18.130 kernel.

• All users of the 3.18 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 3.18.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-3.18.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

• I’m announcing the release of the 4.4.168 kernel.

• All users of the 4.4 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 4.4.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.4.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st…

• Well, that’s more like it.

• This is a *tiny* rc7, just how I like it. Maybe it’s because everybody is too busy prepping for the holidays, and maybe it’s because we simply are doing well. Regardless, it’s been a quiet week, and I hope the trend continues.

• The patch looks pretty small too, although it’s skewed by a couple of bigger fixes (re-apply i915 workarounds after reset, and dm zoned bio completion fix). Other than that it’s mainly all pretty small, and spread out (usual bulk of drivers, but some arch updates, filesystem fixes, core fixes, test updates..)

Linux Foundation

• Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open source platform for in-vehicle technology, has announced that BearingPoint, BedRock Systems, Big Lake Software, Cognomotiv, and Dellfer have joined AGL and the Linux Foundation.

• “This has been an exciting year for AGL as open source software continues to gain momentum in the automotive industry,” said Dan Cauchy, Executive Director of Automotive Grade Linux at the Linux Foundation. “We’ve seen rapid growth in both our membership numbers and in the number of new AGL-based products and services coming to market. We look forward to working with our new members as we continue to expand the features and functionalities of the AGL platform.”

Graphics Stack

• Christopher Schaefer has released a new version of his VK9 project that is translating Direct3D 9 to Vulkan, similar to DXVK and in fact the original project in this space for handling D3D on toop of VLK.

• Just days after the NVIDIA 415.23 Linux driver release that was published to fix 4.20 kernel issues, the NVIDIA 415.25 driver is now available with new product support.

• The NVIDIA 415.25 is out today in order to formally introduce support for the new TITAN RTX and Quadro RTX 8000 graphics cards, the newest Turing-based products. The TITAN RTX is available beginning today from the NVIDIA store at $2499 USD meanwhile the flagship RTX 8000 card will retail for about $10k USD.

• In the beginning, Android did not really have a graphics stack. It was just pushing frames directly to framebuffers and hoping for the best, the approach worked for quite some time.

• However, over time, the usecases became more and more complex and a new graphics stack was necessary. About 6 years ago the Android team conducted a lot of research and quickly realized that the mainline kernel was far from being up to the job – it was lacking Atomic screen updates, explicit syncronization and support for low power hardware, among other things. Google was left with no other choice than to design their own graphic stack: Atomic Display Framework (ADF).

• Just days after the NVIDIA 415.23 Linux driver release that was published to fix 4.20 kernel issues, the NVIDIA 415.25 driver is now available with new product support.

• The NVIDIA 415.25 is out today in order to formally introduce support for the new TITAN RTX and Quadro RTX 8000 graphics cards, the newest Turing-based products. The TITAN RTX is available beginning today from the NVIDIA store at $2499 USD meanwhile the flagship RTX 8000 card will retail for about $10k USD.

• Fedora’s Silverblue initiative formerly known as Fedora Atomic Workstation currently doesn’t work with the NVIDIA binary driver, but that soon could change.

• For Fedora Silverblue to ultimately move forward and gain adoption, it will need to work with NVIDIA hardware and that means supporting their proprietary driver. It’s simply a fact with the open-source Nouveau driver not being good enough for the vast majority of NVIDIA GPU owners and these green graphics processors being found in many Fedora Linux boxes. Due to how Fedora Silverblue is currently composed, the NVIDIA proprietary driver doesn’t currently work but there are changes being worked on in order to support the binary blob’s workflow.

Benchmarks

• Last month Amazon rolled out their “Graviton” ARM processors in the Elastic Compute Cloud. Those first-generation Graviton ARMv8 processors are based on the ARM Cortex-A72 cores and designed to offer better pricing than traditional x86_64 EC2 instances. However, our initial testing of the Amazon Graviton EC2 “A1″ instances didn’t reveal significant performance-per-dollar benefits for these new instances. In this second round of Graviton CPU benchmarking we are seeing what is the fastest of five of the leading ARM Linux distributions.

• An Amazon EC2 a1.4xlarge instance with 16 cores / 32GB RAM was used for this round of benchmarking across the five most common ARM Linux distributions that were available at the time of testing on the Elastic Compute Cloud. The tests included:

• Amazon Linux 2 – The reference Amazon Linux machine image with the Linux 4.14 kernel and GCC 7.3.

• Stemming from the recent Radeon RX 590 Linux gaming benchmarks were some requests to see more 1080p gaming benchmarks, so here’s that article with the low to medium tier graphics cards from the NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon line-up while using the latest graphics drivers on Ubuntu 18.10.

• This round of benchmarking was done with the GeForce GTX 980, GTX 1060, GTX 1070, and GTX 1070 Ti using the newest 415.22 proprietary graphics driver. On the AMD side was using the patched Linux 4.20 kernel build (for RX 590 support) paired with Mesa 19.0-devel via the Padoka PPA while testing the Radeon RX 580 and RX 590.

• As some additional end-of-year kernel benchmarking, here is a look at the Linux 4.14 versus 4.20 kernel benchmarks on the same system for seeing how the kernel performance changed over the course of 2018. Additionally, Linux 4.20 was also tested a second time when disabling the Spectre/Meltdown mitigations that added some performance overhead to the kernel this year.

• On a Core i9 7980XE system, Linux 4.14.4 vs. 4.20 Git (with default Spectre/Meltdown mitigations and then again without) were benchmarked.

Applications

• So, as you can see, except for the printing step, pretty much the whole workflow is handled very easily by Linux and open-source photography software. Could I have done the whole thing in Linux? Yes and no. Depending on your printing needs, you could forego the printer entirely and use a local professional printing service. Many of those shops use the ROES system for the uploading and management of images to be printed. The ROES client is written in Java and is compatible with Linux. If you invest in a large format printer, you may have to investigate using a solution similar to what I have set up. Open-source software RIPs exist, but they have not been updated for more than a decade. Some commercial Linux solutions are available, but they are prohibitively expensive.

• Several months in development, VirtualBox 6.0 is finally here as the most advanced release of the widely used virtualization software that lets users run various operating systems in virtual machines on the same or different hosts. As expected, this is a major release that adds important new features to the application.

• Highlights of VirtualBox 6.0 include support for exporting virtual machines to Oracle Cloud infrastructure, much-improved HiDPI and scaling support for high-end displays, including better detection of displays, support for surround speaker setups for Windows 10 Build 1809 users, and Hyper-V support on Windows hosts for better performance.

• Oracle has released the much awaited VirtualBox 6.0, a popular virtualization software used for running different operating systems in a virtual machine. With its release, Oracle has brought some of the major changes in the user interface and has added a swathe of new features to the application.

• Amongst the most notable changes in VirtualBox 6.0 is support for exporting a virtual machine to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, a revamped user interface with improved HiDPI and scaling support for high-end displays, 3D graphics support for Windows guests and VMSVGA 3D graphics emulation on Linux and Solaris guests.

• RawTherapee provides you with a selection of powerful tools with which you can practise the art of developing raw photos. Be sure to read RawPedia to understand how each tool works so that you may make the most of it. A great place to start is the “Getting Started” article. Click on “Main page” in the top-left corner when you have finished reading that article to see all other articles.

• If you find a problem, don’t keep it to yourself. Find out how to write useful bug reports to get the problem fixed.

• Version 5.5 of the RawTherapee open-source RAW image editor that supports Linux, Windows, and macOS is now available for your photo editing needs.

• RawTherapee RAW image editor released version 5.5 last night with exciting new features. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 18.10, Ubuntu 18.04.

Proprietary

• I am only using btrfs for the last few years, without any problem. Drobox’s decision is based on supporting Extended file attributes and even so btrfs supports extended attributes, seems you will get this error:

• Using Google Drive on Linux is a pain and you probably already know that. There is no official desktop client of Google Drive for Linux. It’s been more than six years since Google promised Google Drive on Linux but it doesn’t seem to be happening.

Instructionals/Technical

• mv command in Linux is used for moving and renaming files and directories. In this tutorial, you’ll learn some of the essential usages of the mv command.

• Hello again for another installment in our 24-day-long Linux command-line toys advent calendar. If this is your first visit to the series, you might be asking yourself what a command-line toy even is. We’re figuring that out as we go, but generally, it could be a game, or any simple diversion that helps you have fun at the terminal.

• The word “tarball” is often used to describe the type of file used to back up a select group of files and join them into a single file. The name comes from the .tar file extension and the tar command that is used to group together the files into a single file that is then sometimes compressed to make it smaller for its move to another system.

• Tarballs are often used to back up personal or system files in place to create an archive, especially prior to making changes that might have to be reversed. Linux sysadmins, for example, will often create a tarball containing a series of configuration files before making changes to an application just in case they have to reverse those changes. Extracting the files from a tarball that’s sitting in place will generally be faster than having to retrieve the files from backups.

• Welcome back to another installment in our 24-day-long Linux command-line toys advent calendar. If this is your first visit to the series, you might be asking yourself what a command-line toy even is. We’re figuring that out as we go, but generally, it could be a game, or any simple diversion that helps you have fun at the terminal.

• Some of you will have seen various selections from our calendar before, but we hope there’s at least one new thing for everyone.

Games

• Black Mesa, the fan-made recreation of Half-Life has a fresh brew available for Linux gamers that should make it a better experience.

• Overland, a stylish strategy game where every single step counts is due for a full release next year and it’s looking good. It’s been quite some time since we talked about it, as we previously highlighted way back in 2016. Since then, it’s obviously had a lot of spit and polish.

• Jupiter Hell is a roguelike I’m following with great excitement, it’s serving a the spiritual successor to DRL (previously DoomRL, now called DRL since ZeniMax flexed their legal muscles) and it’s looking good.

• After a rather successful Kickstarter, where they managed to get over £70K in funding it’s coming along rather nicely.

• Geneshift, the GTA-inspired Battle Royale that also has an extra purchased for a campaign mode and more is currently free for 48 hours.

• While Warhammer 40,000: Gladius is a pretty good strategy game, it did feel somewhat limited. Things are about to get hectic, prepare your defences for the Tyranids.

• Tyranids will be released in the form of a DLC that will be available in January next year as a playable race. The developers say they will be “radically different” to play as due to their gameplay mechanics, although they haven’t yet gone into detail on what exactly is different.

• A developer from Bulwark Studios has detailed their plans to get Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus onto Linux and it sounds good.

• After releasing for Windows in November, they’ve pushed out a few patches to improve various aspects of the game. It seems like they’ve done well with it, since it’s sat at a “Very Positive” user rating with over one thousand users giving their thoughts.

• For the Linux release, they’re going to put up an opt-in beta version “before the Christmas holiday” with an aim to release in full once the holiday period is over. See their post here on Steam for more info.

• Inspired by a love for games like Harvest Moon, Verdant Skies from Howling Moon Software is what they’re calling a ‘life simulation game’. Along with a recent update to the game on Friday, December 14th they also added a Linux version of the game.

• Frosty Fest is now live in Rocket League, giving you a chance to earn Snowflakes as you play online to redeem special winter-themed items.

• As always, it’s completely free. The in-game currency cannot be purchased and can only be earned simply by playing the game in online matches. It’s just a fun little event for players to earn some fun customisation items.

• The Long Dark, the survival game pitting you against the harsh environment and wildlife has a big free update out.

• As they’ve been talking about for a while, this update is the overhauled versions of Episodes One and Two. With a third episode due at some unspecified time.

• After little over a year in Early Access after a successful Kickstarter campaign, the surprisingly impressive ATOM RPG is about to release in full.

• Mark December 19th on your calendar, as ATOM RPG seems to have a few surprises ready for the full release. This will include a third global map, which takes place in a mutant-ridden metropolis named Dead city; plenty of new NPCs and quests; you can drive cars across the wasteland; new dungeons to explore; new traits for characters and a new end-game cinematic.

• If you’re in the mood for something new and GOG isn’t your thing with their big sale going on, Humble also have some interesting choices.

• There’s another 2K publisher sale going on right now, with top deals like Civilization VI (recently got a patch to make Linux online play cross-platform) has 75% off plus the Civilization VI: Rise and Fall expansion is currently 35% off. XCOM 2 is also 75% off and it’s easily one of my favourite strategy games. Even better with the War of the Chosen expansion with 50% off. Looking further, you would be pretty mad yourself to pass on Mad Max with 75% off!

• It seems to have released to thoroughly mixed reviews, with all sorts of issues. The big update has reduced loading time, adding in various optimisations, new and improved animations, an improved UI and so on. Sounds like they’re really putting in the effort to improve it, which is great. They’ve confirmed they’re working on many more improvements too!

• For those who love the idea of playing with drones, Liftoff is an interesting drone sim that’s available on Linux. Liftoff: FPV Drone Racing launched back in September, with it seeing Linux support at release.

• There’s a new release of the Pixel Wheels racing game. It now “remembers the best lap and best total time for each track and shows you a congratulation message when you reach the top 3 in either categories”, countdown now has sound and has several other new features. The game is available for Linux, Android, Windows and Mac, and you can get it from here.

• Oxygen Not Included, the excellent colony building sim from Klei has another update out. This time, they’re more focused on gameplay improvements than new shiny features.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• While the holiday season is upon us, the KDE development pace hasn’t slowed down with this past week seeing a number of exciting improvements to the Plasma desktop and KDE applications.

• KDE developer Nate Graham has posted his weekly summary of development happenings for the past week with some of the very latest highlights including:

• Another year has passed, winter has come so it’s time to celebrate the Qt Champions!

• Kdenlive, KDE Non-Linear Video Editor, released version 18.12 a few days ago with some crashes fixed and other improvements.

• FreeBSD 12 was released last week. I’m in the process of rebuilding my main workstation to all-flash (which means backups, disentangling ZFS pools, etc. etc.) and in the meantime installed 12-R to an older i3 I had lying around. KDE Applications 18.12 were released last thursday. Those are in ports, but haven’t made it around to the official packages yet. So here are some notes on almost-current KDE on almost-current FreeBSD:

• Installing modern KDE: from a freshly installed 12-R system, getting to a KDE Plasma desktop is a matter of installing two metapackages: pkg install xorg kde5 . That will leave you in a state where you need to link .xinitrc to startkde .. rather old-school. For purposes of having a pleasant setup, pkg install falkon quassel sddm as well.

• I found out about it when I was specifically looking for drawing and painting software that could run on Linux because I was about to make the change from Windows 10 to Linux but the only thing holding me back was the program that I would use to draw. Then I stumbled upon Krita and gave it a try and well, the rest is history.

• Metrics and telemetry are fundamental in any engineering activity to evaluate, learn and improve. They are also needed to consolidate a culture in which opinion and experience are continuously challenged, in which experimentation and evidence becomes the norm and not the exception, in which transparency rules so co-workers are empowered, in which data analysis leads to conversations so evaluations are shared.

• Open Source projects has been traditionally reluctant to promote telemetry, based on privacy concerns. Some factor that comes to my mind are helping to change this perception…

Distributions

• Slax is a portable Linux distribution that runs from USB, it aims to create a modular, modern and lightweight Linux distribution which can be carried anywhere in a USB stick. It’s also Debian-based, which allows you as a user to access tons of packages provided by Debian using the apt command.

• Slax 9.6 was released last November. So we downloaded the latest release and tried it, our experience with it was great so far, see our review below for a detailed tour in Slax.

Reviews

• Void is an independently-developed, rolling-release Linux distribution with a number of interesting characteristics, such as its own package management system (called XBPS), a custom init system (runit), integration of LibreSSL instead of OpenSSL in the base operating system, and support for several popular ARM-based devices as well as x86 images. The operating system is available in several editions, including Cinnamon, Enlightenment, LXDE, LXQt, MATE and Xfce. New Void users will also be able to choose whether to run the distribution with the GNU C Library or musl libc library. I opted to download the Xfce edition running on the GNU C Library for 64-bit machines; the ISO was 693MB in size.

• Booting from the Void media brought up the Xfce 4.12 desktop environment. The desktop is presented with a panel at the top of the screen which holds the application menu and system tray. At the bottom of the display is a dock where we can quick-launch applications. The desktop has a few icons for launching the Thunar file manager. If Void detects any disk partitions these will also be listed on the desktop for easy access. The theme is mostly grey and relatively plain.

New Releases

• This tool provides Yad based front-end for su (spsu) allowing users to give a password and run graphical commands as root without needing to invoke su in a terminal emulator.

• It can be used as a Gksu replacement to run any application as root.

• There are new live/install iso images of SparkyLinux 5.6 “Nibiru” available to download. This it the 4th and the last this year iso image update of the rolling line, which is based on Debian testing “Buster”.

• SparkyLinux 5.6 is out, this is Sparky’s rolling release based on Debian Buster.

Screenshots/Screencasts

• In this video, we look at MX Linux 18 RC1, and it looks great! Enjoy!

Arch Family

• If you’ve looked at the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics in recent months, you might have noticed that the top place is currently occupied by Manjaro Linux, or simply Manjaro, an Arch Linux derivative that’s designed to work straight out of the box.

• We wanted to know the secret behind Manjaro’s success, which is how this detailed comparison came to life. Regardless of whether you’re a seasoned Arch Linux veteran with a desire to explore what other Linux distributions have to offer or you’re a Linux newbie who’s not sure which of the two distributions to use, this article is for you.

• It’s December. Almost the end to another year. Most of us will be preparing for the holidays and family time.

• Christmas is just around the corner and so is the New Year and with that Nate, the Team and I are happy to present the ArchLabs 2018.12 release. It has been almost six months since our latest release and this one brings a different approach.

• Jupiter Hell is a roguelike I’m following with great excitement, it’s serving a the spiritual successor to DRL (previously DoomRL, now called DRL since ZeniMax flexed their legal muscles) and it’s looking good.

• After a rather successful Kickstarter, where they managed to get over £70K in funding it’s coming along rather nicely.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• Aris Winardi giving a presentation at the openSUSE Asia Summit 2016 in Jakarta, Indonesia

• Aris Winardi, from Bogor, West Java, Indonesia, wants to inspire the openSUSE Community and Members to get involved in the Elections process and make it the best one yet.

• The goal is to encourage all from the Community who are Contributors to the Project to apply for and get their openSUSE Membership, which will give them the right to vote in the upcoming elections and also some extra recognition of the work they do to keep the Project alive.

• The content of the following article has been contributed by the Open Build Service (OBS) Team at SUSE. It is based on the two blog posts “OBS Is Revamping Its User Interface, Help Us to Make It Awesome” and “Revamped User Interface for Project, User and Group Pages“, originally published at the OBS web site and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

• Especially when we see large enterprises having their brand equity destroyed due to data breeches. But don`t be naïve, small companies might not get that kind of visibility but still, according to research, 60 percent of them who suffer a cyber breech are out of business in 6 months.

Fedora

• COPR is a collection of personal repositories for software that isn’t carried in Fedora. Some software doesn’t conform to standards that allow easy packaging. Or it may not meet other Fedora standards, despite being free and open source. COPR can offer these projects outside the Fedora set of packages. Software in COPR isn’t supported by Fedora infrastructure or signed by the project. However, it can be a neat way to try new or experimental software.

• I finally finished the 2018 edition of Fedora Handbook (aka Fedora Workstation Beginner’s Guide). Just a recap what the handbook is about: it’s a printed handbook that should give enough information to get a user from “knowing nothing about Fedora” to first steps in the system. It’s used as a giveaway at conferences and other events.

• The original handbook was written in Czech in 2015 and the English version released last year introduced only cosmetic changes, so even though the handbook has pretty generic info and is not specific to any Fedora release there were quite a lot of changes needed.

• With one of the recent Firefox releases (current version is 64), autoplay videos began to play again, although they start muted now [1]. None of the previously-working methods work (e.g. about:config media.autoplay.enabled), the documented preference is not there in 64 (promised for 63: either never happened, or was removed). Extensions that purport to disable autoplay do not work.

Debian Family

• as mentioned in my last blog post, I attended the Bug Squashing Party in bern two weeks ago. I think alltogether we were quite productive, as seen on the list of usertagged bugs. – here’s my personal list of release-critical bugs that I touched at the BSP or afterwards…

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Nautilus 3.30 has landed in Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo. The application has finally been updated after staying at version 3.26 for the past two Ubuntu releases.

• As many users are probably aware, Ubuntu 18.04 and 18.04 use an older version of Nautilus (3.26) because the default Gnome file manager lots its desktop icons functionality with version 3.28, and the Ubuntu devs wanted to keep this functionality.

• About a month ago, Desktop Icons, a Gnome Shell extension that brings back desktop icons in Gnome, was added to the Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo repositories. Thanks to this extension, the desktop icons functionality is no longer needed in Nautilus, so the default Gnome file manager was finally updated to the latest version (3.30) in Ubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo.

• We’re pleased to announce the release of Mir 1.1.0. The main thing to note with this release is a new package mir-graphics-drivers-nvidia with support for Nvidia binary “eglstream” drivers.

• There are also some bugfixes and some changes upstreamed by PostmarketOS developers building Mir on Musl and the UBports developers preparing to update the Mir version used by their Ubuntu Touch phones.

• The Canonical developers maintaining the Mir display server with its modern focus on being a Wayland compositor have just issued Mir 1.1.

• The primary addition with Mir 1.1 is the introduction of NVIDIA proprietary driver support by means of adding an EGLStreams KMS back-end that is compatible with the NVIDIA Linux driver architecture. If you are on the latest NVIDIA Linux drivers, it’s now possible to fire up Mir 1.1 and enjoy its functionality and Wayland support.

Flavours and Variants

Devices/Embedded

• Kontron’s Pico-ITX form-factor “pITX-iMX8M” SBC runs Linux or Android on a dual- or quad-core NXP i.MX8M SoC with Mini-DP and HDMI, 2x GbE, 2x USB 3.0, and M.2 expansion.

• The pITX-iMX8M is the first i.MX8M based product from Kontron and the second i.MX8M based Pico-ITX board we’ve seen after F&S’ armStone MX8M. Other SBCs to use this mid-range i.MX8 SoC — NXP also offers a higher-end, up to hexa-core i.MX8 QuadMax and lower-end, Cortex-A35 based i.MX8X – include Boundary Devices’ 136.7 x 87mm Nitrogen8M and Phytec’s sandwich-style, 100 x 100mm phyBoard-Polaris SBC.

• Axiomtek’s fanless, IP67-protected “eBOX800-900-FL” computer runs Ubuntu on a Jetson TX2 module and offers -30 to 60°C support, 3Grms vibration resistance, M.2 NVMe expansion, and 2x GbE ports, including one with PoE.

• Axiomtek turned to the Arm-based Jetson TX2 module for its eBOX560-900-FL industrial edge AI computer and has now spun a larger (366.83 x 210 x 83mm) more rugged, wall- or VESA-mounted eBOX800-900-FL model designed for smart city, smart manufacturing, and smart transportation applications. It similarly runs Ubuntu 16.04.

• Wave Computing will follow in RISC-V’s path by offering its MIPS ISA as “open source” code without royalties or proprietary licensing. The MIPS Open initiative will focus on the development of SoCs for emerging IoT edge applications.

• The RISC-V Foundation, which promotes the development of processors built on a standardized, open source instruction set architecture (ISA) is widely seen as a potential threat to Arm’s proprietary RISC ISA juggernaut. Yet, it’s also affecting other computer architectures, from Intel’s x86 to fading, legacy platforms such as Power and MIPS. This week, Wave Computing, which acquired the MIPS chip business from Imagination Technologies in June, announced a MIPS Open Initiative to reinvigorate MIPS development by offering access to the most recent 32- and 64-bit MIPS ISA versions free of charge with no licensing or royalty fees.

• The “Adafruit Crickit HAT” is a Python-oriented RPi HAT add-on for robotics that includes servos, motor control, drive outputs, touch inputs, NeoPixel driver, 3W amp, and more.

• Adafruit has released a $35 robotics HAT add-on for any 40-pin Raspberry Pi board. The Adafruit Crickit (Creative Robotics & Interactive Construction Kit) HAT is designed for controlling motors, servos, or solenoids using Python 3. The board is limiting to powering 5V devices and requires a 5V power supply.

• Based on the newer and more powerful i.MX 8M 64-bit ARM boards, upgrading older devs kits based on the generic i.MX6 boards, the Librem 5 dev kits will soon arrive in the hands of early adopters as Purism needs all the help it can get from the community to continue and accelerate the development of its Linux-powered, privacy-focused phones, the Librem 5.

• The Librem 5 dev kit’s hardware is done and shipping! We are beyond excited for our backers to receive their dev kits before year-end. Our entire PureOS Librem 5 development team will getting the same dev kits, upgrading the generic i.MX 6 boards (which most of the demos you have seen have been based on) to the Purism i.MX 8M based dev kit.

• We aim from this point forward to have a community assisted development environment. There is still a lot of work required to make the dev kit truly functional for Librem 5 development, so we need your assistance. The frenetic pace of development continues and it’s astonishing how much we’ve accomplished in the two months since we’ve put the hardware together. But the path is still long and arduous.

• Axiomtek’s “OPS700-520” signage player complies with the OPS Plus spec, which adds a second high-speed combo connector. The compact, Intel 8th Gen based player supports Intel AMT 11.0 and Intel Unite.

• The OPS700-520 is the first Coffee Lake based signage system we’ve seen, as well as the first to offer Intel OPS Plus (or OPS+) compliance. Designed for multi-display applications such as interactive whiteboards (IWBs), digital signage, and video walls, the system is “among one of the most advanced and powerful digital signage players in the market,” claims Axiomtek.

Android

Free Software/Open Source

Events

• Gov zero summit is a decentralized, grass-roots civic tech community based in Taiwan. Built on the spirits of open source and activism, g0v aims to use technology in the interest of the public good, advocate information transparency and build tech solutions to promote civic engagement. I was lucky my talk got selected and got an opportunity to speak at the event.

Web Browsers

Mozilla

• My so far last BugBountyNotes challenge is called Can you get the flag from this browser extension?. Unlike the previous one, this isn’t about exploiting logical errors but the more straightforward Remote Code Execution. The goal is running your code in the context of the extension’s background page in order to extract the flag variable stored there.

• If you haven’t looked at this challenge yet, feel free to stop reading at this point and go try it out. Mind you, this one is hard and only two people managed to solve it so far. Note also that I won’t look at any answers submitted at this point any more. Of course, you can also participate in any of the ongoing challenges as well.

LibreOffice

• LibreOffice 6.1.4 comes one and a half months after version 6.1.3 with yet another layer of bug fixes across all the components of the office suite, including Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress, Base, and Math. However, it remains the choice of bleeding-edge users and early adopters until the LibreOffice 6.1 series matures enough to be offered to enterprises. A total of 126 changes are included, as detailed here and here.

• The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 6.1.4, the 4th minor release of the LibreOffice 6.1 family, targeted at tech savvy individuals: early adopters, technology enthusiasts and power users.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

Open Hardware/Modding

• Months after MIPS Technologies was acquired by Wave Computing, the company announced it’s working on open-sourcing the MIPS processor instruction set architecture.

• The MIPS ISA will be open-sourced with both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions opening up and will be free of any licensing or royalty fees as well as access to existing MIPS patents.

Programming/Development

• You can do as much as you can to modularize your code base, but how much confidence do you have in each of the modules? If one of the E2E tests fails, how would you pinpoint the source of the error? How do you know which module is faulty?You need a lower level of testing that works at the module level to ensure they work as distinct, standalone units—you need unit tests. Likewise, you should test that multiple units can work well together as a larger logical unit; to do this, you need to implement some integration tests.

• Chukwudi, or Chux as he is often referred to in more familiar circles, is the president of Python Nigeria (@PythonNigeria) and has served as part of the PSF’s Grants Working Group for several years. Some of the work he has done with the grants working group involves dealing with very delicate situations, as grant requests need to be authenticated and require due diligence to properly understand the local context for preparing and awarding a grant. According to Nicholas H. Tollervey, a fellow Grants Working Group member, Chux regularly contacts, researches and (where possible) visits in-person many of the requesters so the Grants Work Group has the context needed to be able to make an informed decision. All of this detail oriented work requires a great deal of interpersonal skill and effort, which Chux exerts freely as a credit to our larger Python community.

• This week we welcome Irina Truong (@irinatruong) as our PyDev of the Week! Irina has been a speaker at several Python conferences and is a maintainer for pgcli, a Python package that is a command-line interface to the Postgres database. You can see what else she has been up to over on Github. Let’s spend some time getting to know Irina!

• Welcome back to the multitas project which we have already created two features for this application in the previous articles 1) Remove duplicate files 2) Move file from one folder to another. In this chapter, we are just going to tidy up the buttons on the user interface before we continue to build the next task in the next chapter. What we are going to do here is to create a button container to keep all the buttons that we will use in our program. Below is the full source code which will result in this below outcome.

• To get started, take a look at the recent webinar ”Develop Your First Qt for Python Application’‘ on how to develop an application from scratch, based on Qt Widgets and different Python modules. You’ll also see some examples on how to continue developing with other Qt for Python components, such as QML and Shiboken.

Leftovers

Security

• At KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2018, Shopify and Google detail a Kubernetes security incident reported by a bug bounty security researcher that was quickly remediated before any harm was done.

• Logitech Options is an app that controls all of Logitech’s mice and keyboards. It offers several different configurations like Changing function key shortcuts, Customizing mouse buttons, Adjusting point and scroll behavior and etc. This app contained a huge security flaw that was discovered by Tavis Ormandy who is a Google security researcher. It was found that Logitech Options was opening a WebSocket server on each individual computer Logitech Options was run on. This WebSocket server would open on port 10134 on which any website could connect and send several various commands which would be JSON-encoded.

• I am extremely pleased to announce the public release of pwnedkeys.com – a database of compromised asymmetric encryption keys. I hope this will become the go-to resource for anyone interested in avoiding the re-use of known-insecure keys. If you have a need, or a desire, to check whether a key you’re using, or being asked to accept, is potentially in the hands of an adversary, I would encourage you to take a look.

Defence/Aggression

• Regular readers know I have largely steered clear of discussing Brexit for the three years its possibility then prospect has dominated the UK political agenda. I used to be enthusiastically pro-EU, as part of my general outlook of supporting international law and organisations. I was however shocked, deeply, by the enthusiastic support of all three institutional strands – council, commission and parliament – for the appalling Francoist paramilitary violence in Catalonia, and decided that the EU is no longer an institution I can support.

• The increasingly illiberal developments of the EU’s Third Pillar – including the abuse of arrest warrant procedure against Julian Assange and the internationalising of “Prevent” style Islamophobia – had already increasingly been worrying me. My reservations about the EU are therefore different to those of many. I particularly bemoan the loss of Freedom of Movement which I believe to have been one of the greatest achievements of civilisation in my lifetime. I remain incensed at the success of the elite in conning the deprived that their poverty is caused by immigrants, whereas it is caused by massive inequality of wealth.

• So I am conflicted on Brexit, but on balance would prefer to leave but stay part of the single market, thus retaining freedom of movement. My personal preferences aside, there is plainly a huge majority against leaving the EU in Scotland, so for Scotland to leave the EU at all at present would be wrong. It is my profound hope that the SNP will find the courage shortly to move on towards Independence.

• Police drones are expanding, but are the media asking questions?

• The NYPD, the nation’s largest police force, announced this week that they had purchased over a dozen flying robots to fly over Gotham, while promising that the new technology wouldn’t be used for any of the illegal spying shenanigans the police department has been caught up in time and time again. The announcement, however, was awkwardly timed, as the police department had already purchased drones—last December.

• Instead of asking the kinds of questions one might expect for a scandal-plagued agency obtaining expansive new surveillance powers—Why did you wait a year to announce the move? Was the public consulted? Are there oversight mechanisms to guard against misuse?—most media outlets questioned nothing, quoted generously from police officials and (at best) sprinkled in few concerns from legal organizations.

• Nearly a year after a judge rejected Santos Chirino’s case for asylum, his 18-year-old daughter and 19-year-old son returned to the very same courtroom to plead their own.

• “Your honor, this is a difficult case,” their father’s lawyer, Benjamin Osorio, told Judge John Bryant. “I represented their father, Santos Chirino Cruz. … I lost the case in this courtroom. … He was murdered in April.”

• As Maria Sacchetti described for The Washington Post, “Osorio paused, and the judge blanched and stammered.”

• “You said their father’s case — did I understand I heard [it]?” Bryant asked, eyes wide.

• “No,” Osorio said. “In this court. Not before your honor.”

• “Well good, because — all right, my blood pressure can go down now,” Bryant said. “Yeah. I mean. Okay.”

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• It’s not hard to find people in Washington with strong opinions about Wikileaks and its founder, Julian Assange. But good luck finding someone with an opinion about Assange that hasn’t flipped 180 degrees (and maybe back again) over the past ten years. Assange has managed the rare feat of becoming a pariah to both the left and the right, politicians and the press, “the masses” and their elected leaders. Foreign and domestic, coastal and “flyover,” red and blue—everyone seems to hate Assange (except for that time when they used to love him). As a result, Assange has become a poster boy for the importance of First Amendment protections. At its core, the First Amendment is an expression of “anti-majoritarian” rights—it is meant to protect social pariahs from persecution by political majorities. Popular people and popular ideas generally don’t need constitutional protection. Haters and lunatics and radicals? Their speech needs protection for the very reason that strong majorities reject it—it is so far outside the norm that ordinary politics will almost certainly persecute it.

• 1. I write a lot about the plight of Julian Assange for the same reason I write a lot about the Iraq invasion: his persecution, when sincerely examined, exposes undeniable proof that we are ruled by a transnational power establishment which is immoral and dishonest to its core.

• 2. Assange started a leak outlet on the premise that corrupt and unaccountable power is a problem in our world, and that the problem can be fought with the light of truth. Corrupt and unaccountable power has responded by detaining, silencing and smearing him. The persecution of Assange has proved his thesis about the world absolutely correct.

• 3. Anyone who offends the US-centralized empire will find themselves subject to a trial by media, and the media are owned by the same plutocratic class which owns the empire. To believe what mass media news outlets tell you about those who stand up to imperial power is to ignore reality.

• 4. Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its political and media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they’ll be far less likely to take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they’ll be far more likely to consent to Assange’s silencing and imprisonment. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you’re suspicious of him you won’t believe anything he’s saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it’s as good as putting a bullet in his head.

Privacy/Surveillance

• A fascinating new phishing attempt it making the rounds disguising itself as a receipt from the App Store, tricking unsuspecting users into coughing up all of their personal details. Here’s what you need to know and how to stay safe.

• Between around 2009 and 2013, the CIA’s online method of communicating with its human sources on the ground all over the world was tragically compromised — leading to the exfiltration, imprisonment or death of dozens of people spying for the agency, according to a November investigation by Yahoo News.

• The failure started when Iranian officials used a double agent to trace back a series of websites the CIA was using to communicate with its sources. Iran then located, detained and in some instances executed CIA sources it identified using this system. The problem then spread to China, where roughly 30 CIA sources were eventually executed. Once Iran and China were able to locate users of these covert CIA platforms in their own countries, sources told Yahoo News, they were very likely able to discover a large number of CIA sources using similar systems worldwide.

• But the fallout from that disaster, including internal battles at the CIA and struggles to replace and fix a complex web of interlocking technical systems, continues to rage on to this day, according to five former intelligence community sources familiar with the matter.

Civil Rights/Policing

• On December 9, 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 500-page executive summary of its 6,000-page report on the history of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. The report exposed just how brutal and ineffective the torture was, and the lengths to which the CIA went to hide that truth from the public.

• Four years have passed since the report was released—yet only three copies of the full report exist outside Senate Intelligence Committee’s vault, and what is available for public scrutiny is less than 10 percent of the report. The Committee voted only to release a heavily redacted executive summary and, since then, the CIA and its allies in Congress have sought to limit who has access to the report and who can read it in its entirety. The U.S. public, in other words, is still in the dark when it comes to this crucial chapter of its own recent history.

• To be sure, the ACLU has been doing heroic work filing Freedom of Information Act requests. And citizen-led groups—like my own organization, the North Carolina Commission of Inquiry on Torture—work hard to use what’s available in the public record to piece together details on the CIA’s rendition, detention, and interrogation program and inform the public. Nonetheless, the vast majority of what the Senate Intelligence Committee discovered in their investigation remains shielded from public inquiry.

• America’s Central Intelligence Agency conducted grisly experiments to create ‘remote controlled dogs’, with electrodes planted in their brains to ‘receive orders’.

• THE UNITED STATES is now in the midst of a grotesque canonization of one of its imperial saints, George Herbert Walker Bush. This week on Intercepted: an honest memorial service for an unrepentant warmonger who dedicated his life to militarism, war, coups, regime change, and the lies of “American exceptionalism.” Jeremy Scahill details the crimes of Bush, the sick propaganda of the corporate media memorials, and the trail of blood, death, and tears Bush leaves behind. Independent journalist Arun Gupta covers decades of Bush, from his time at the helm of the CIA to the presidency. Gupta discusses Bush’s support for Manuel Noriega and his eventual invasion of Panama, the pardoning of Iran-Contra criminals, the dirty wars in Central America, the support for Saddam Hussein, and the launch of the Gulf War. Acclaimed Iraqi poet and scholar Sinan Antoon describes his life under the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Saddam, the horrors of the Gulf War, and how Bush’s destruction of Iraqi civilian society led to the rise of ISIS.

• In early fall of 1976, after a Chilean government assassin had killed a Chilean dissident and an American woman with a car bomb in Washington, D.C., George H.W. Bush’s CIA leaked a false report clearing Chile’s military dictatorship and pointing the FBI in the wrong direction.

• The bogus CIA assessment, spread through Newsweek magazine and other U.S. media outlets, was planted despite CIA’s now admitted awareness at the time that Chile was participating in Operation Condor, a cross-border campaign targeting political dissidents, and the CIA’s own suspicions that the Chilean junta was behind the terrorist bombing in Washington.

• In a 21-page report to Congress on Sept. 18, 2000, the CIA officially acknowledged for the first time that the mastermind of the terrorist attack, Chilean intelligence chief Manuel Contreras, was a paid asset of the CIA.

• The CIA report was issued almost 24 years to the day after the murders of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and American co-worker Ronni Moffitt, who died on Sept. 21, 1976, when a remote-controlled bomb ripped apart Letelier’s car as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue, a stately section of Washington known as Embassy Row.

• The CIA created remote-controlled dogs by operating on their brains during a bizarre mind-control experiment, according to freshly declassified documents.

• During the top-secret 1963 project, researchers implanted a device inside six canines’ skulls and guided them through an open field, according to documents posted on The Black Vault, a website specializing in declassified government records.

• “Much of it remains classified for ‘national security’ reasons.” Gravitas Ventures has released a trailer for an indie documentary titled Drugs as Weapons Against Us, made by first-time filmmaker John Potash. The full title is actually Drugs as Weapons Against Us: The CIA War on Musicians and Activists, and it’s an examination of the CIA’s nefarious past when they manipulated musicians & activists to promote drugs for social control, particularly with the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. Some musicians that resisted these manipulations were killed. We’ve all heard these stories, and while some of it is true, some of it seems like they are drifting into conspiracy theory territory. Based on Potash’s book “Drugs as Weapons Against Us”, the film looks at evidence that the CIA targeted SDS, Black Panthers, Hendrix, Lennon, Cobain, Tupac, and other leftists. The footage in this trailer isn’t that impressive, I wish it looked better than it does.

Intellectual Monopolies

• The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has affirmed a $139.8 million jury verdict in favor of Sprint Communications against Time Warner for infringement of five Sprint patents related to VoIP technology. The appeals court concluded that the district properly admitted evidence relating to the jury verdict in an earlier, related case brought by Sprint against Vonage, another carrier offering VoIP service.

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