Linux and Free Software News #2

Software & Operating Systems Open Source & Web-Based
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Linux and Free Software News #2

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In This Weeks News

Eben Moglen Steps Down as General Council for the FSF

https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-announces-change-in-general-counsel

imgur

Eben Moglen who's represented the FSF for 23 years has stepped down as general council. He has (among other endeavors) represented and fought for legal issues around free software ever since getting involved, and has had a strong stance on freedom and privacy, running also the Software Freedom Law Center the provides pro-bono legal advice for free and open source projects.

If you've never heard him talk, your missing out. I really really encourage you all to listen to some of his talks, they put a great perspective on Free Software.

This particular quote from the video I've posted above says a lot about it all, why people make free software, and where some of the world at least, exists today.

But I do have one more thing to say; I do have one more kind of thanks to offer. And they are to me the deepest—and today at least—the most moving thanks of all. I cannot stand here before you without ending with my thanks to Richard Matthew Stallman. He invented the world I live in.

Years ago, Larry Lessig said that Richard Stallman had invented the twenty-first century. And I said, well, that may or may not be true, but any twenty-first century Richard Stallman did not invent is a twenty-first century I won’t consider it safe to live in. And that’s still true.

To my comrade, to my client, to my friend Richard Stallman: my deepest and most determined thanks. There is nothing, nothing in the world, that could ever divide us as much as we have been brought together by the dream that we have shared and that we continue to give our lives to. It could not have happened without one man’s thinking.

At Red Hat, there used to be—back in the old days before the Progress Energy Tower and all the wonderful things that have followed from Red Hat’s commercial success, back when it was just barely not Bob Young’s and fully Matthew Szulik’s—there used to be up on the wall in the reception area a painted motto. It said “Every revolution begins as an idea in one man’s mind,” which is a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

And deep in the American grain—as deep in the American grain as Ralph Waldo Emerson himself—is Richard Stallman, whose dream it was that made the revolution I’m still trying to kick down the road towards some finish line or other I won’t live to see. To him, to you, to all of us—to the people who have made this stuff, to the people who have shared the stuff, to the people who have rolled up the barbed wire and carried it away so we could all just do the work and not have to worry about it—to my friends, to my clients, to the lawyers who have inspired me to teach them, my deepest and most unending gratitude.

Distro News and News Snippets

Nvidia GNOME Software Integration into Fedora 25 (news snippet)

Negativo17 repo now have appStream metadata for their nvidia driver repository
Meaning you can now search for your nvidia drivers right in the software center. Yay for nvidia people. (you do need to add the repo though)

Native Linux firmware updates? That's a thing

So this isn't exactly new news. However its news to Dell XPS owners. Who if you have a XPS laptop and are using a distro that supports firmware updates (Fedora for example) though fwupd then you might have noticed a new firmware update sitting in gnome software center that was recently pushed by Dell.

That's cool. Hopefully this sees more progress over the coming years.

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2016/02/02/dell-firmware-updating-under-linux


https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2015/03/03/updating-firmware-on-linux/
https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2015/12/10/the-linux-vendor-firmware-service-welcomes-dell/

MESA 13.0 is released, what does it mean for you?

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/mesa-announce/2016-November/000264.html

MESA 13 brings some fairly large changes, especially good news for gamers.

Here's a quick paste of the change log for the lazy.

For the super lazy, what does this realistically mean?

For now nothing.. Distros wont ship with MESA 13 right away, and there is a few other pieces needed to solve the puzzle (they are also complete, but not all in repos).

What it means though is OpenGL 4.5 for open drivers (AMDGPU, Intel, Nouveau) and the start of open Vulkan support.

This release has huge amount of features, but without a doubt the biggest
ones are:
 - Vulkan driver for hardware supported by the AMDGPU kernel driver*
 - OpenGL 4.4/4.5 capability, yet the drivers may expose lower version due to
pending Khronos CTS validation.

 - OpenGL ES 3.1 on i965/hsw
 - OpenGL ES 3.2 on i965/gen9+ (Skylake and later)
 - More than a dozen GL extensions across the drivers

 - GLX: Windows-DRI support
 - EGL: support for EGL_KHR_debug support and KHR_no_config_context
 - EGL: official support for EGL_MESA_platform_surfaceless
 - EGL: improvements and fixes for the Wayland, Android and X11/DRI3 backends

 - VAAPI: H264 encode support
 - OMX: H265 decode support

Notes:
 - The Intel Vulkan driver json manifest file includes the CPU architecture as
part of its name.

 - libudev is no longer required by mesa - libdrm is used instead. Older
versions of libdrm may have bugs, so use the latest one available.

 - Building mesa with flex 2.6.2 is currently not possible. Please use 2.6.1
or older.

 - Some parts of mesa may still require third party tools - python2 for SWR,
xxd for Intel's aubinator. Please report bug if you see any more.



To check the full changelog, consisting of nearly 4000 commits from over 140
developers use the following command

 git log 12.0-branchpoint..mesa-13.0.0

Linux takes over 2% of the market share five months running

For the last five consecutive months Linux has had a 2.02%+ market share, it sounds small, but realistically this is a fairly massive chunk of the market (ive no numbers on hand.)

There's a joke here about slow and steady wins the race, but i'm not sure what it is. Come back to me in 4 years.

https://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=11&qpaf=&qpcustom=Linux&qpcustomb=0&qpsp=190&qpnp=25&qptimeframe=M

Red Hat 7.3 Released

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-powers-network-storage-performance-latest-version-red-hat-enterprise-linux-7?sc_cid=701600000011gf0AAA

The latest version of Red Hat was released this week.

Some changes that might be notable, are updates to selinux, and firewalld, MACsec, improved identify management, and among a number of other small but important changes... pidgin was introduced.

You can run it free by the way

If you were not aware, you can get a free license for Red Hat through their developer program. So if your interested in running Red Hat in a developer/workstation environment, have a look.

http://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/get-started/

VIM 25 years older

All you vim users, celebrate. VIMs 25 years old.

Community

Easy Chroot into Linux on a phone or tablet

Author: @The_Cable

A little shorter this week. Comments? :D

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any idea if i can get mesa 13 to work on mint 16 with 4.8.4

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Not off the top of my hear, if mint is compatible with ppa's you can look for a meta ppa with the latest mesa in it. (make sure you get llvm 3.9 as well)

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will have to dig on the ppa info. still new to mint and linux on a whole.
took me 3 days to get AMDGPU-pro working on mint 16 with 4.8.4 with my r9 290.
in hind sight i should be using Ubuntu for playing with this stuff but i didnt look into much before i grabbed a distro.
( takes me 2 days just to download a distro on my crap ass internet connection.)

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after a quick glance my mint debian does not support ppa. according to http://www.pcworld.com/article/2942171/how-to-use-ppas-to-install-bleeding-edge-software-in-ubuntu-and-linux-mint.html .
will keep looking. and many thanks for the work of making these posts.

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Woo! More Linux news. I like theses because I'm extremely lazy to look for Linux news myself, but hey Eden dose it for me!

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Thanks Eden, much appreciated!

Can't say I've heard of him, I'll be sure to look him up. I'm very interested in copyright of late so that video sounds like my jam. I'm not a programmer so I like discussions that are a layer removed from the nuts and bolts of software and a little more 'real world'.

Well an upward trend is an upward trend. A trickle can become a flood pretty quickly when you take away the damn. There's honestly not much keeping me from using Linux full time at the moment.

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I appreciate the time taken to compose these updates.

Thanks

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OK i want to be that guy that is going to ask the obvious question here.
for those who have been using Linux for ages know what i mean :p

2017 Year that Linux takes over the desktop?


But Dell taking interest in Linux is good but i assume that isn't Open Source Firmware? or is it just that they make it easier to update you're machine trough Linux and you not have to insert command line codes that if you type one char wrong you blow up you're system? :p
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Thanks Eden ! I especially liked the Eben Moglen video.

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@ red hat 4 free
y bother getting even free redhat while centos is exactly the same thing? >_>

too bad, we're seeing one another dat boi leaving town. He was a dick like everyone else in GPL community but still great guy. If its about GPL i'm all about Torvalds and Stallman.

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Cent OS is maintained by Cent OS team and Redhat supports Redhat directly. While Cent OS need to wait, But overall i think its indeed fair to say its basically the same (unless you really go in some details).

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but you will agree y bother with getting license for redhat for your server/s while you can get centos for free. Not to mention that IRC chats on centos is so lively you'll be amazed - most of the time you're going to get help faster. Unless you go through forums/jira

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Usually if you take a license from Redhat you got an entire department that needs computers and a network an Redhat then makes it work to you're needs. You don't get the license if you just own one PC. They offer more big network solutions and in that department they are pretty good, but if you know or are somebody with great knowledge of Linux its indeed cheaper not to do it.

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yea i know one person.

Me

and another senior admin that calls himself Chuck Norris.

we use centos for at least 100 of servers.

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Like @The_Cable said, there's almost no difference except for a few red hat commands, if you've never touched red hat but want to or are going to its a good things to have to be honest.

Using red hat or CentOS really depends on what you need. Its not a competition, Red Hat sponsors CentOS in a similar fashion to Fedora.

I've no idea what your trying to say.. :/

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Hes fairly unheard of oddly enough when you consider hes actually a fairly well known speaker and has worked with free software for decades. Id argue he can get a point across about the importance of things like copyleft far better than stallman.

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people like him are usually a-holes to everyone around them - and he knows he was/is, just listen to experience of making people follow his license, or at least appear as such on purpose. Mostly because they are very frank and have hidden agendas.

on redhat
yea, and thus I see no reason to go there, unless you need enterprise support from young hack boi's.
The changes are too small to care about them in production environments.