News

openSUSE Announces Three New Tumbleweed Snapshots for 2019, Malware in Google Play Using Motion Sensors to Avoid Detection, Leaked Android Q Features, deepen 5.9 Released and ZFS On Linux 0.8 Coming Soon

News briefs for January 18, 2019.

Oracle Releases First Critical Patch Update of 2019, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora to Drop MongoDB, The Linux Foundation Announces Its 2019 Event Lineup, Firefox Closing Its Test Pilot Program and GoDaddy to Support AdoptOpenJDK

News briefs for January 17, 2019. Oracle released its first Critical Patch Update of the year this week, which addresses 284 vulnerabilities. eWeek reports that "Thirty-three of the vulnerabilities are identified as being critical with a Common Vulnerabilities Scoring System (CVSS) score of 9.0 or higher."

Keep Smart Assistants from Spying on You with Alias, Security Advisory for Old scp Clients, Major Metasploit Framework Release, Mozilla Working on a New Browser for Android and VirtualBox 6.0.2 Is Out

News briefs for January 16, 2019.

Participate in Fedora Test Day Today, Netrunner Announces Netrunner 19.01 Blackbird, Security Patch for GNOME Bluetooth Tools in Ubuntu 18.04, New Giant Board SBC from Groboard and Linspire Posts Development Roadmap for 2019-2020

News briefs for January 15, 2019. Today is Fedora Test Day for kernel 4.20. To participate, you just need to be able to download the test materials (which include some large files) and read and follow directions. See the wiki page for more information on how to participate.

Purism Announces Version 4 of Its Laptops, KDE Frameworks 5.54.0 Now Available, Debian 10 Default Theme Chosen, Linux Kernel 5.0-rc2 Is Out and Mozilla to Disable Flash in Firefox 69

News briefs for January 14, 2019.

Systemd Security Holes Discovered, GNOME 3.31.4 Released, Mozilla Launches Flexbox Inspector, Timesys Announces New Version of TimeStorm IDE and Clonezilla Live (2.6.0-37) Now Available

News briefs for January 11, 2019.

Minim Debuted the Minim Labs Free Router Security Platform, AWS Launched DocumentDB, Firefox CTO Eric Rescorla Awarded Levchin Prize, Red Hat Ansible Tower 3.4 Now Available and IoT DevCon 2019 Call for Papers

News briefs for January 10, 2019. Minim debuted Minim Labs at CES this week. This free version of the Minim router security platform has an open-source Linux-based "Unum" agent for protecting home automation devices, and it runs on Raspbian and OpenWrt Linux devices. See this LinuxGizmos post and the Minim Labs website for more information.

Qubes OS 4.0.1 Released, Plasma 5.14.15 Is Out, Software Freedom Conservancy Fundraiser, ClearCube Launches C3xPi Thin Client for RPi 3 Model B+ and Ubuntu Touch Announces OTA-7

News briefs for January 9, 2019. Qubes OS 4.0.1 was released today, marking the first stable point release in the 4.0 series. Updates include all 4.0 dom0 updates, Fedora 29 TemplateVM, Debian 9 Template VM, Whonix 14 Gateway and Workstation TemplateVMs, and Linux kernel 4.14. You can get Qubes 4.0.1 from the Downloads Page.

GitHub Announces that Free Accounts Now Can Create Private Repositories, Bash-5.0 Released, iPhone Apps Linked to Golduck Malware, Godot Game Engine Reaches 3.1 Beta, NSA to Open-Source Its GHIDRA Reverse-Engineering Tool

News briefs for January 8, 2019.

Linux 5.0-rc1 Released, Scratch 3 and Raspberry Pi, Phoronix Test Suite 8.6-Spydeberg Milestone 1 Is Now Available, Elteria Adventures Coming to Linux and Chromium Now Supports VAAPI in Fedora

News briefs for January 7, 2019.

Google's Fuchsia OS to Support Android Apps, Linux Servers with Poorly Configured IPMI Cards Prone to Attack, LinuxGizmos' 2019 SBC Catalog Is Out, USB Type-C Becoming More Secure and Epic Games Not Planning to Provide a Linux Version of Its Store

News briefs for January 4, 2019.

Several Android Apps Transmitting Sensitive Data to Facebook without Permission, ExTiX Linux Announces Version 19.1 Build 181228, Peppermint 9 Respin-2 Released, Nextcloud Founder's 2019 Predictions and Some Security Updates

News briefs for January 3, 2019.

Google Gains Approval to Launch Project Soli, Sony's New 3D Sensors for Face Recognition, the GIMP Team Looks Back at 2018 and Shares Plans for 2019, Thunderbird Also Publishes a Retrospective and Look Forward, and xfce4-panel 4.13.4 Was Released

News briefs for January 2, 2019.

F2FS Filesystem Enhancements (for Pixel Devices), Wine HQ Dev Release, Gzip v1.10, VideoLan v3.0.5, KaOS Linux Distro v2018.12

To start things off, a ton of bug fixes alongside a few enhancements are coming to the F2FS filesystem (for Pixel devices) in the the Linux 4.21 kernel. Wine HQ just officially announced the development release of version 4.0 RC4 which also boasts numerous bug fixes. The release of Gzip version 1.10 has been announced on the Savannah community site.

Freescale and NXP PowerPC Microprocessors Protected Against Spectre, Chromebook to Support Dual-Boot Mode, Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night Game Kickstarted Campaign Cancels Linux Port

One year later, the Freescale and NXP PowerPC microprocessors are now protected against the variant 2 of the Spectre vulnerability.

Chrome OS To Test GPU Support for Linux Installed Apps, antiX Distro v17.3, OpenMandriva Project vLx4.0, Hummingboard CBi Released

It seems that Chrome OS will soon start testing GPU support for Linux installed applications. This is good news for those who wish to run applications that require a bit more horsepower (e.g. games). You can view the code commits to these changes here.

Temperature Monitoring Support for AMD Zen 2, PowerPC On-Chip Controller in 4.21 Kernel, Changes Coming in the MIPS Arena, 4MLinux Beta Release

Temperature monitoring support for the AMD Zen 2 microprocessor is hitting the 4.21 Linux kernel. The 4.21 kernel is also introducing the PowerPC On-Chip Controller (OCC), which reports sensor data ranging from temperatures to power. The same OCC hardware is available on IBM POWER platforms and more specifically, their POWER8 and POWER9 generation processors.

Linux 4.20 and GNU Linux-libre 4.20-gnu Released, Darktable 2.6 Now Available, New Version of SuperTux and GDB 8.2.1 Is Out

News briefs for December 24, 2018. Linux 4.20 was released yesterday. Of the release, Linux Torvalds writes, "let's face it, last week wasn't quite as quiet as I would have hoped for, but there really doesn't seem to be any point to delay 4.20 because everybody is already taking a break. And it's not like there are any known issues, it's just that the shortlog below is a bit longer than I would have wished for. Nothing screams "oh, that's scary", though."

KStars v3.0.0 Now Available, Malware Targeting IoT Devices Is Growing, Enhanced Privacy Settings for Mozilla's Latest Firefox Focus, Coreboot 4.9 Released and Pivotal Announces Pivotal Cloud Foundry Platform Version 2.4

News briefs for December 21, 2018. KStars v3.0.0 was released today after four months of development. Jasem's Ekosphere blog post lists all the new features including the XPlanet Solar System View developed by Robert Lancaster, significant improvements to FITS viewer GUI, scheduler improvements and more.

Qt Announces Qt for Python, All US Publications from 1923 to Enter the Public Domain in 2019, Red Hat Chooses Team Rubicon for Its 2018 Corporate Donation, SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP1 Released and Microsoft Announces Open-Source "Project Mu"

News briefs for December 20, 2018.

Linux Journal Week in Review

The Value of Open Source Journalism