LINUX ENLIGHTENMENT OF THE WEEK (News) for Nov 22 - 28

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
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Distro Releases

  • The CRUX team have announced their latest offerings of their source based Operating System, CRUX 3.2. If you are running an older version of CRUX the team advises you not to upgrade via ports as it will temporarily break your system.

  • Netrunner linux released version 17 of their operating system on the 23rd. Netrunner is Kubuntu based and delivers Java, Flash and multimedia codecs out of the box. Version 17 is only availbe in 64 bit. If you want netrunner in 32 bit you have to keep using version 16 and wait for the 18th release. Plasma 5.4 is used by default.

  • Oracle 7.2 was release on the 26th of Nov. The RHEL based distro is available in 64 bit and 32 bit flavors. The distro comes with Oracles own kernel, which they call the "Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel".

BETA Distro Releases

  • Chapeau have announced Beta 2 of their upcoming release 23. Chapeau 23 is based upon Fedora Workstation 23. Chapeau aims to make Fedora easy for new users coming to Linux and in general to make Fedora easy out of the box.

Open Source News

  • Gnome designer Allan Day is pushing/working on a better design for Gnome's "Date & Time Selection" feature. The proposed changes will allow one to:

    • Select a specific time of day. To allow for the creation of appointments

    • Select a duration. Allowing one to create a timer
    • Select a specific date.
    • Use touch

  • Gnome will begin to make their DE compatible with GTK 3.19's new feature called GtkShortcutsWindow. This is something that allows one to view all of the possible short cuts that are usable inside an application. As of Nov 23, two core packages need to be brought into compliance:

    • gnome-control-center

    • gnome-shell

  • (cont'd) Their still are tons of other non core apps that need to be brought into compliance.

  • Linux Kernel 4.4 will add support for the Snapdragon 820 CPU. This will allow for fast ARM based picoboards running on Linux. Most of whats new in 4.4 are network/graphics driver updates.

  • Tab Groups is a new add-on for the Firefox web browser that will fill the gap in Firefox 45. Version 45 will remove the Panorama/Tab Groups feature. Don't expect the add on to get to many users as the reason why its getting killed by Mozilla is because of the lack of interest of the feature by Firefox users.

  • Jan Altenberg presented U-Boot optimizations at the Embedded Linux Conference that allowed for Linux to boot in 656ms off of an ARM9 CPU running Angstrom Linux off of NAND storage. The slides in his presentation can be viewed inside the link below.

  • On the 22 of Nov. Linux Torvalds released Linux Kernel 4.4-rc2.

  • GIMP turned 20 years old on Nov. 22.

  • Prey is a new tool that allows you to track your Linux laptop. A cool feature is that you can view the desktop and the webcam takes a picture anonymously, once you report the laptop missing inside the app. This way you can see the bad guy's face and what he/she is doing with your machine.

  • If you are planing on using AMD's new Crimson drivers, don't. Performance may be excellent on Windows, performance is sub-par and does worse then the Catalyst 15.9 drivers

Security Threats/Vulnerabilities

  • Gentoo users should stay far away from the package www-plugins/adobe-flash with versions less then 11.2.202.548 as their are multiple vulnerabilities inside the program. As of Nov.23 the team has no remedy to fix the problem. But as this type bug only affects versions less then 11.2.202.548 it is recommended to use a version newer then 11.2.202.548. This was made public on Nov. 17, but it is sad that they have no remedy as of yet to fix the problem. The bug allows a remote hacker to send random code and cause:
    • A DoS
    • Sensitive information to be obtained by the hacking party

Linux Hardware

Linux Games

Hatred, one of the most violent games currently in the STEAM library is coming soon to Linux.

Jobs/Volunteering

Sources

3 Likes
2

Thank you Goalkeeper. I may have to give 4.4 a try when the full version comes out. I've had problems with every Kernel after 3.16.

3

Me as well. Version 3.18.24 has horrible networking problems on my Realtek wifi card. I do not really update/upgrade my kernel often, on one of my computers I am still running kernel 2.6.13! Hopefully 4.4 will be better.

4

Mine is a video card issue. The desktop just locks up. I can't watch movies or play games. It's a bit of a problem...lol

5

That sounds like a major problem. Its too bad that you are not in school. Because if you were you could make an excuse more awesome then the, "the dog ate my homework."

Unfortunately graphics never seem to perform well on Linux. Especially Radeon or integrated graphics.

6

You didnt mention the first release of xf86-video-amdgpu

http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-driver-ati/2015-November/028287.html

This is the initial release of the xf86-video-amdgpu driver.

It was forked from the xf86-video-ati radeon driver and modified to
support the amdgpu kernel driver via libdrm_amdgpu, and by extension
the latest AMD GPU families Tonga, Carrizo, Iceland, Fiji and Stoney.

Some functionality was removed because it's not relevant for the GPUs
supported by the amdgpu kernel driver, but other than that the two
drivers are more or less on par with respect to functionality and bug
fixes.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to this release!

Should work with Linux 4.4

7

I don't know what their problem is. It's an intel card and aren't their drivers open sourced? I never used 3,17 but 3,18 gave me problems. My system got screwed up with bad updates and I did a fresh install. I didn't update anything but Firefox and it's running like a dream. It's like a new computer. I wish they weren't in such a rush to release this stuff. It's makes it harder on the end user.

1 Like
8

Intel may make great CPU's but not great GPU's or Linux software drivers.

9

Not sure if anything pertaining to Flash vulnerabilities is news anymore... HTML5 is the way to go

10

It's the driver in this case. It never did have a lot of power, but at least it used to work. I even tried Ubuntu 15.10 with the new Intel driver from their site. It was a lot better, but i tested it by leaving a game go dormant and within ten minutes it locked up:(