Linux Journal News

Linux Mint 19.2 "Tina" Cinnamon Now Available, IBM Has Transformed Its Software to Be Cloud-Native and Run on Any Cloud with Red Hat OpenShift, Icinga Web 2.7.0 Released, Google Rolling Out Android Auto Design Updates and Kernel 5.1 Reaches End of Life

Jill Franklin — Fri, 02 Aug 2019 13:29:23 +0000

News briefs for August 2, 2019.

Linux Mint 19.2 "Tina" Cinnamon was officially released today. This is a long-term support release that will be supported until 2023, and it brings updated software and many improvements. Go here to read about all the new features.

IBM yesterday announced it has transformed its software to be cloud-native and run on any cloud with Red Hat OpenShift. From the announcement: "Enterprises can now build mission-critical applications once and run them on all leading public clouds, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba and IBM Cloud and on private clouds. The new cloud-native capabilities will be delivered as pre-integrated solutions called IBM Cloud Paks." IBM also announced Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxOne, and consulting and technology services for Red Hat.

Icinga Web 2.7.0 was released this week. Improvements include Japanese and Ukranian language support, bonus functionality for Modules, an enhanced UI and much more. You can get the official packages from packages.icinga.com.

Google begins rolling out new Android Auto design updates. ZDNet reports that "the new Android Auto starts playing media and Google Maps as soon as the car starts. Maps will also show suggested locations. If a route has already been planned on a phone, Android Auto automatically adds the directions and displays routing information....Android Auto now also can use widescreen displays to give extra space for step-by-step navigation, media playback, and call controls. Changes to improve visibility include easier-to-read fonts and a new dark mode. Overall, the design changes are meant to get users on the road faster and allow easier management of apps with fewer taps."

Greg Kroah-Hartman recently announced that Linux kernel 5.1 has reached end of life: "Everyone should be moved to the 5.2.y kernel at this point in time. 5.1.y is now end-of-life."

Linux Mint

IBM

Cloud

cloud native

Canonical Announces the Availability of Xibo as a Snap, Chrome 76 Released, Viruses Discovered in LibreOffice, Pop!_OS 18.10 Reaches End of Life, and Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security Warns of Microsoft Office Online Privacy Risks

Jill Franklin — Thu, 01 Aug 2019 12:14:32 +0000

News briefs for August 1, 2019.

Canonical yesterday announced the availability of the Xibo open-source digital signage platform as a snap. From the announcement: "Xibo provides a comprehensive suite of digital signage products, with its Content Management System (CMS) at the heart of this experience-led offering. Xibo for Linux is completely free and natively built for the Xibo CMS, which can be installed on servers or combined with Xibo cloud hosting." You can download the Xibo snap here.

The Chrome team has promoted Chrome 76 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac and Linux. According to Softpedia News, "Highlights of the Chrome 76 release include Flash plugin blocked by default, Dark Mode support for websites, more improvements to the Payments API to allow merchant websites or web apps to respond when a user changes payment instruments, better support for PWAs (Progressive Web Apps), and the ability to control the 'Add to Home' screen mini-infobar."

Silent macro viruses have been discovered in LibreOffice. The Register reports that there's an "issue where documents can be configured to run macros silently on opening". The vulnerability was reported by Nils Emmerich and assigned CVE-2019-9848. According to The Register, "It appears that the supposedly fixed 6.2.5 is still vulnerable—confirmed by us." There is an updated bug report here. To fix it, "disable LibreLogo immediately if it is present and enabled in your build of LibreOffice."

System76 announces that Pop!_OS 18.10 has reached end of life and will no longer receive security updates. To keep your system secure and up to date, upgrade your OS to version 19.04.

Due to security and privacy risks, the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security is warning government institutions not to use Microsoft Office online or mobile apps. According to The Register, "A report from Privacy Company, which was commissioned by the ministry, found that Office Online and the Office mobile apps should be banned from government work. The report found the apps were not in compliance with a set of privacy measures Redmond has agreed to with the Dutch government."

Collabora Announces xrdesktop, Blender 2.8 Released, Arduino Selects Auth0 as Its Identity Management Platform of Choice, Microway Showcasing Its Data Science WhisperStation at PEARC19 and KDE Plasma Maintenance Update

Jill Franklin — Wed, 31 Jul 2019 13:14:55 +0000

News briefs for July 31, 2019.

Collabora yesterday announced xrdesktop. This new open-source project "enables interaction with traditional desktop environments, such as GNOME and KDE, in VR. Sponsored by Valve, xrdesktop makes window managers aware of VR and is able to use VR runtimes to render desktop windows in 3D space, with the ability of manipulating them with VR controllers and generating mouse and keyboard input from VR." See the wiki for instructions on how to install xrdesktop.

Blender 2.80 has been released. This new version "features a redesigned user interface that puts the focus on the artwork that you create. A new dark theme and modern icon set were introduced. Keyboard, mouse and tablet interaction got a refresh with left click select as the new default. Quick Favorites menus provide rapid access to often-used tools." See the Release Notes for details.

Auth0 announces Arduino has selected Auth0 as its identity management platform of choice. Auth0 will be replacing Arduino's own Single Sign On solution for all of its public-facing web properties. From the announcment: "Arduino discovered its homegrown authentication solution would not scale to meet the rapidly developing needs of its growing global community, and reached out to Auth0. In addition to Single Sign On, Arduino will take advantage of Auth0's new Universal Login, which enables developers to completely customise their branded authentication experiences quickly, and Device Flow for browserless or input-constrained devices."

Microway is showcasing its Data Science WhisperStation, a Unique Ultra-Quiet NVIDIA Data Science Workstation, at PEARC19 in Chicago this week (ending on August 1st). From the press release: "Up to 10 times faster than CPU solutions from data preparation to result, the Data Science WhisperStation helps data scientists, analysts, and engineers transform massive datasets into insights in less time." You can learn more about PEARC here, and more about the Data Science WhispterStation here.

KDE released the fourth maintenance update to the latest KDE Plasma 5.16 desktop environment. The release adds three weeks' worth of new translations and a few bug fixes, which are small but important. See the full changelog for details.

Linux Ending Support for the Floppy Drive, Unity 2019.2 Launches Today, Purism Unveils Final Librem 5 Smartphone Specs, First Kernel Security Update for Debian 10 "Buster" Is Out, and Twitter Is Switching from Mesos to Kubernetes

Jill Franklin — Tue, 30 Jul 2019 14:02:06 +0000

News briefs for July 30, 2019

Linux won't support the floppy drive much longer. ZDNet reports that Linus Torvalds has "declared the floppy drive project 'orphaned'". The article quotes Linus: "Actual working physical floppy hardware is getting hard to find, and while Willy was able to test this, I think the driver can be considered pretty much dead from an actual hardware standpoint. The hardware that is still sold seems to be mainly USB-based, which doesn't use this legacy driver at all."

Unity 2019.2 launches today. From the Unity blog: "We have over 1000 developers dedicated to extending and improving Unity for you. In this release, you get more than 170 new features and enhancements for artists, designers, and programmers. We've updated ProBuilder, Shader Graph, 2D Animation, Burst Compiler, UI Elements, and many more." See this video for more details on all the new features, and go here to download.

Purism has unveiled the final specs for the Librem 5 Smartphone, which should begin shipping in Q3 2019 (Display: 5.7" IPS TFT screen @ 720x1440; Processor: i.MX8M Quad Core max. 1.5GHz; Memory: 3GB; Storage: 32GB eMMC internal storage—see the post for the rest). If you pre-order before July 31st, you'll get the early-bird discount price of $649.

The first kernel security update for Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" is now available. According to Softpedia News, the update addresses security flaw CVE-2019-13272. Jann Horn of Google Project Zero "discovered that the ptrace subsystem in the Linux kernel mishandles the management of the credentials of a process that wants to create a ptrace relationship, allowing a local user to obtain root privileges under certain scenarios". The issue affects older versions of Debian as well, so all users should update now.

Twitter is switching from Mesos to Kubernetes. Zhang Lei, Senior Technical Expert on Alibaba Cloud Container Platform and Co-maintainer of Kubernetes Project, writes "with the popularity of cloud computing and the rise of cloud-based containerized infrastructure projects like Kubernetes, this traditional Internet infrastructure starts to show its age—being a much less efficient solution compared with that of Kubernetes". See Zhang's post for some background history and more details on the move.

Kernel 5.3-rc2 Is Out, Latte Doc v0.9 Officially Available, GitHub Blocking Developers from Certain Countries, the Khronos Group Announces the Public Release of OpenXR 1.0, and Netflix Joins the Academy Software Foundation

Jill Franklin — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 13:43:13 +0000

News briefs for July 29, 2019.

Linux kernel 5.3-rc2 is out. Linus Torvalds writes, "There are fixes all over, I don't think there's much of a pattern here. The three areas that do stand out are Documentation (more rst conversions), arch updates (mainly because of the netx arm platform removal) and misc driver fixes (gpu, iommu, net, nvdimm, sound ..). But there's a smattering of fixes all over (core kernel, netfilter, filesystems, you name it). I don't think anything stands out as particularly damning."

Latte Dock v0.9 stable is now officially available after a full year of development. This version includes many improvements and enhancements, such as new colors painting, new indicators, multiple layouts, flexible settings and more. You can get Latte Dock from download.kde.org or from store.kde.org.

GitHub confirms that it has blocked developers from certain countries in compliance with US export law. TechCrunch reports that "GitHub, the world's largest host of source code, is preventing users in Iran, Syria, Crimea and potentially other sanctioned nations from accessing portions of the service, chief executive of the Microsoft-owned firm said." The article also quotes a tweet from Nat Friedman over the weekend: "It is painful for me to hear how trade restrictions have hurt people. We have gone to great lengths to do no more than what is required by the law, but of course people are still affected. GitHub is subject to US trade law, just like any company that does business in the US."

The Khronos Group today announced "the ratification and public release of the OpenXR 1.0 specification together with publicly available implementations and substantial ecosystem momentum. OpenXR is a unifying, royalty-free, open standard that provides high-performance, cross-platform access to virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR)—collectively known as XR—platforms and devices." You can get the specification at Khronos.org or via GitHub.

Netflix has joined the Academy Software Foundation. According to the press release, Netflix has joined the ASWF—"a neutral forum for open source software development in the motion picture and media industries"—as a member. In addition, OpenTimelineIO has been accepted as a hosted project, and it's one of the first projects Netflix will contribute to. From the press release: "OpenTimelineIO (OTIO) is an Open Source API and interchange format that facilitates collaboration and communication of editorial data and timeline information between a studio's Story, Editorial, and Production departments all the way through Post-Production."

Academy Software Foundation

open source

OpenTimelineIO

Icinga 2 Version 2.11 Release Candidate Announced, Pinebook Pro Available for Pre-Order, Sailfish OS 3.1 Seitseminen Released, VirtualBox 6.0.10 Is Out, and It's National Sysadmin Day

Jill Franklin — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 14:05:18 +0000

News briefs for July 26, 2019.

The Icinga team announces a release candidate for Icinga 2 version 2.11. Main improvements in Icinga 2.11 include a rewritten network stack, improved cluster sync, self-healing and debugging docs, and much more. See the Icinga blog for more details.

The Pinebook Pro is now available for pre-order. It's FOSS reports that "The new Pinebook Pro is capable of playing 4K videos and performs as a decent low-end desktop computer like Raspberry Pi 4." It comes with Debian as the default OS, and Chromium OS and Android 9 also are available. It costs $199.99, and you can pre-order from here. Pine64 notes that "When fulfilling the purchase, please bear in mind that we are offering the Pinebook Pro at this price as a community service to PINE64, Linux and BSD communities. We make no profit from selling these units."

Sailfish OS Seitseminen is now available. Sailfish OS 3.1 is the biggest update since the launch of Sailfish 3 a year ago, and it's named after Seitseminen National Park. This version "brings redesigns to core apps such as People, Phone, Messages and Clock. Other areas that have been improved include; Document viewers, Email, Calendar, Dual SIM Card viewer information and Gallery gestures which have been improved." Security improvements include filesystem encryption support, "fingerprint authentication support for XA2 devices, updates to VPN to increase the security of your traffic from the first moment you use your phone and added protection to many system APIs and functionalities."

VirtualBox 6.0.10 was released recently. According to Softpedia News, this version fixes various issues and includes "some notable changes for Linux-based operating systems, especially Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux hosts, which received support for UEFI Secure Boot driver signing. Additionally, Linux hosts got better support for various kernels on Debian GNU/Linux and Fedora systems." Go here to download.

Last but not least, Happy SysAdmin Day!

PHP 7.4.0beta1 Released, HypriotOS 1.11.0 Now Available, ALA Asks LinkedIn Learning to Change Terms of Service that Jeopardize Privacy Rights, Red Hat Announces RHEL 8.1 Beta and The Forbidden Arts Coming to Linux

Jill Franklin — Thu, 25 Jul 2019 13:44:40 +0000

News briefs for July 25, 2019.

PHP 7.4.0beta1 has been released, marking the first beta of PHP 7.4. Go here to see the list of changes, and go here to download. Note that this is an early test version and not intended for use in production. The next release, Beta 2, is scheduled for August 8th.

HypriotOS 1.11.0, "the fastest way to get Docker up and running on any Raspberry Pi", is now available. This release features the latest Docker 19.03.0 Community Edition, is up to date with Raspbian Lite Buster and includes support for the entire Raspberry Pi family and more. See the release notes for further details.

The American Library Association urges LinkedIn Learning to change terms of service that impact user privacy rights. From the press release: "LinkedIn Learning—formerly Lynda.com, a platform used by libraries to provide online learning opportunities to library users—plans to make substantial changes to its terms of service that would significantly impair library users' privacy rights. Under LinkedIn Learning's new terms of service, a library cardholder will need to create a LinkedIn profile in order to access LinkedIn Learning. In addition to providing their library card number and PIN, users will have to disclose their full name and email address to create a new LinkedIn profile or connect to their existing profile. New users will have their LinkedIn profile set to public by default, allowing their full name to be searched on Google and LinkedIn."

Red Hat announces the availability of Red Hat Enterprise 8.1 beta. This release "improves manageability, adds new security enhancements and enables greater developer productivity. This release also includes updated drivers that deliver new features and bug fixes for supported hardware platforms."

The Forbidden Arts an action adventure platformer is coming to Linux. GamingOnLinux reports that the game is in Early Access on Steam with a release planned for Windows next month. The estimated release date for Linux is Q4 2019. The GamingOnLinux post notes that this game is interesting in that it combines 2D and 3D gameplay in one game: "As you explore dungeons you get the 2D platforming, while the world map has you run around in a 3D world."

FTC Announces $5 Billion Settlement with Facebook, First Preview Release of Fedora CoreOS Now Available, Red Hat Certificate System Achieves Common Criteria Certification, GNOME 3.33.4 Released and Summer Update on /e/

Jill Franklin — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 13:42:42 +0000

News briefs for July 24, 2019.

The Federal Trade Commission announces a $5 billion settlement with Facebook. CNN reports the deal resolves "a sweeping investigation by regulators into how the company lost control over massive troves of personal data and mishandled its communications with users. It is the largest fine in FTC history—and yet still only about a month's worth of revenue for Facebook."

The Fedora CoreOS team announces the first preview release of Fedora CoreOS, "a new Fedora edition built specifically for running containerized workloads securely and at scale". From the announcement: "It's designed specifically for running containerized workloads without regular maintenance, automatically updating itself with the latest OS improvements, bug fixes, and security updates. It provisions itself with Ignition, runs containers with Podman and Moby, and updates itself atomically and automatically with rpm-ostree." Note that only the testing stream is available at this time. You can download the Fedora CoreOS preview release here.

Red Hat Certificate System has achieved Common Criteria certification. This means that "Red Hat Certificate System has demonstrated conformance to an internationally recognized set of security and functionality standards. Certifying against these standards attests that Red Hat Certificate System, the operating system running it, and the underlying hardware platform, can meet the highly-regulated and security-conscious needs of governments and commercial organizations around the globe."

GNOME 3.33.4 was released today. Go here for the full list of updated modules and changes. Note that this release is a snapshot of development code and is primarily intended for testing purposes.

Gaël Duval has posted a summer update on /e/. Read the post to learn more about the status of the "unGoogled mobile OS" that's currently supported on 80 different smartphone models and the smartphones available for purchase with /e/OS preloaded that customers have just started receiving (in Europe only at this point).

Feral Interactive Announces Commanders Update for Company of Heroes 2 for Linux, Participate in Fedora Test Week for Kernel 5.2, coreboot 4.10 Released, GNU Parallel 20190722 Released and EST Launches File Security for Linux v 7.0

Jill Franklin — Tue, 23 Jul 2019 13:51:29 +0000

News briefs for July 23, 2019.

Feral Interactive yesterday announced Company of Heroes 2 for macOS and Linux: Commanders update is now available. This update of the WWII strategy game has five new commanders. See the game's official blog for more details. If you already have Company of Heroes 2, you can update for free; otherwise, you can purchase it from the Feral Store for $19.99.

Participate in a Fedora test week for kernel 5.2. This kernel version was recently released with several security fixes and will be coming soon to Fedora. The test week runs from now through July 29. See the wiki page for links to the test images and more details on how to test.

coreboot 4.10 has been released This release comes eight months following the 4.9 release, and includes 2538 commit changes from 198 authors. From the announcement: "Most of the changes were to mainboards, and on the chipset side, lots of activity concentrated on x86. However compared to previous releases activity (and therefore interest, probably) increased in vboot and in non-x86 architectures. However it's harder this time to give this release a single topic like the last: This release accumulates some of everything."

GNU Parallel 20190722 ("Ryugu") has been released. You can download the shell tool for executing jobs in parallel here, and go here to read more about GNU Parallel.

ESET launches version 7 of its File Security for Linux product, which Help Net Security says "provides advanced protection to organisations' general servers, network file storage and multipurpose servers". The article notes that ESET File Security for Linux is "powered by the latest ESET LiveGrid technology and eliminates all types of threats, including viruses, rootkits, worms and spyware. Version 7.0 offers a host of advanced features, including real-time file system protection, tighter security and a real-time web graphical user interface (GUI)."

Kernel 5.3-rc1 Released; VLC Security Flaw Discovered; Melissa Di Donato Appointed CEO of SUSE; Dropbox Brings Back Support for ZFS, XFS, Btrfs and eCryptFS; and YugaByte Is Now 100% Open Source

Jill Franklin — Mon, 22 Jul 2019 14:27:37 +0000

News briefs for July 22, 2019.

Linux kernel 5.3-rc1 has been released. Linus Torvalds writes, "This is a pretty big release, judging by the commit count. Not the biggest ever (that honor still goes to 4.9-rc1, which was exceptionally big), and we've had a couple of comparable ones (4.12, 4.15 and 4.19 were also big merge windows), but it's definitely up there." He also notes that "...there's a lot to like in 5.3."

German cybersecurity watchdog CERT-Bund recently discovered a security flaw in the VLC media player 3.0.7.1. Softpedia News reports that "a successful exploit of the vulnerability allows for unauthorized disclosure of information, unauthorized modification of files, and disruption of service." See CVE-2019-13615 for specifics. A patch is in the works.

Melissa Di Donato has been appointed CEO of SUSE. From the press release: "Accomplished technology executive and former SAP leader, Melissa Di Donato, has been named chief executive officer of SUSE in a move that will herald the next phase of growth and momentum for the world's largest independent open source software company....Di Donato is highly regarded for her forward-thinking leadership style and is a passionate advocate for workplace diversity. This includes her role as Technology Group chair of the 30% Club—an organization with the goal of achieving 30 percent female directors on S&P 100 boards by 2020. She also holds prominent positions in other organizations, including Notion Capital, and is a trustee for charity Founders4Schools."

Dropbox brings back support for ZFS, XFS, Btrfs and eCryptFS. According to Linux Uprising, "it appears that this change has made it into the stable Dropbox client for Linux. This isn't directly mentioned on the Dropbox website, but after a fresh Dropbox installation that I performed on Ubuntu, the reported version is 77.4.131, which is a higher version number than the Dropbox beta version for which it was reported that it now supports ZFS and XFS on 64-bit Linux systems, and eCryptFS and Btrfs on all Linux systems. I also gave it a try on a Btrfs filesystem and folder syncing ran without running into any issues."

YugaByte is now 100% open source. dbta.com reports that "YugaByte, a provider of open source distributed SQL databases, announced that YugaByte DB is now 100% open source under the Apache 2.0 license, bringing previously commercial features into the open source core."