Linux Action News

SUSE has a skunkworks distro in development, the transition Debian is struggling with, and some long-awaited improvements to Raspberry Pi OS.

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• openSUSE Developing “Adaptable Linux Platform” For Next-Gen SUSE Linux Enterprise — Another important point is that we intend to split what was a more generic, everything is closely intertwined into two parts: One smaller hardware enabling piece, a kind of "host OS", and the and the layer providing and supporting applications, which will be container (and VM) based.
• Update on next generation of SLE - openSUSE Mailing Lists
• An update to Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye — With this latest release, the default “pi” user is being removed, and instead you will create a user the first time you boot a newly-flashed Raspberry Pi OS image. This is in line with the way most operating systems work nowadays, and, while it may cause a few issues where software (and documentation) assumes the existence of the “pi” user, it feels like a sensible change to make at this point.
• PipeWire 0.3.50 — WINE applications using the JACK backend should no longer crash.
• OpenSSH 9.0 released — It is claimed to be primarily a bug-fix release, but it also switches to a new, quantum-computer-proof key-exchange protocol by default and includes a number of sftp changes, some of which may create some compatibility issues with scp.
• Reiser5 Issues New Development Release, Performance Numbers For Scaling Out — Shishkin published an new Reiser5 unstable snapshot today that targets Linux 5.16 kernel compatibility. Along with updating Reiser5 for newer kernel compatibility and other changes since its prior snapshot, Shishkin accompanied today's announcement with some benchmark numbers.
• New NVIDIA Open-Source Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Appears — Appearing with NVIDIA's latest Linux4Tegra code drop is a new open-source kernel graphics driver not previously published. This driver isn't based on the existing Nouveau driver but rather appears to be derived from their internal driver code-base with some copyright references going back to 90's.
• NVIDIA Publishes Signed Ampere Firmware To Finally Allow Accelerated Open-Source Support — Even with the signed firmware images, there are still complications around re-clocking the GPU to get off the rather low boot clock frequencies. Those complications around power management in the context of signed firmware images have meant the GTX 900 series and newer hasn't been able to operate with the open-source driver at its optimal clock frequencies...
• Debian still having trouble with merged /usr — The addition of the "/usr merge" feature has been something of longstanding mess in the Debian world. It seems like a relatively innocuous change, but ever since we first covered the feature introduction for Debian—more than six years ago—it has a been a recurring series of headaches within that community. Recent events have seemingly simply prolong...

The Linux kernel has some exciting updates this week, including a significant Asahi milestone and some good news for Android. Then we take openSUSE's new web-based installer for a spin.

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• Apple GPU drivers now in Asahi Linux — We’ve been working hard over the past two years to bring this new driver to everyone, and we’re really proud to finally be here. This is still an alpha driver, but it’s already good enough to run a smooth desktop experience and some games
• Asahi Linux Enables Early Apple GPU Driver Support - WIP OpenGL 2.1 + GLES 2.0
• Apple Silicon CPUFreq Driver Heading To Linux 6.2 — Sent in yesterday were the Arm CPUFreq updates to queue in the Linux power management tree ahead of the Linux 6.2 merge window.
• [GIT PULL] cpufreq/arm updates for 6.2 - Viresh Kumar
• Floppy Driver Update Ready For Linux 6.2 — This memory leak with the floppy disk driver has been in the mainline kernel since Linux 5.11
• Android memory safety vulnerabilities declined as Rust usage grew — Specifically, the number of annual memory safety vulnerabilities fell from 223 to 85 between 2019 and 2022. They are now 35% of Android’s total vulnerabilities versus 76% four years ago. In fact, “2022 is the first year where memory safety vulnerabilities do not represent a majority of Android’s vulnerabilities.”
• Google says Android runs better when covered in Rust
• Fedora 38 Cleared To Produce “Mobility Phosh” Spins — The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has provided their blessing to begin creating new x86_64 and AArch64 ISO images for mobile devices that feature the Phosh Wayland compositor.
• Ping bug potentially allows remote hack of FreeBSD systemsSecurity Affairs — A remote attacker can trigger the vulnerability, causing the ping program to crash and potentially leading to remote code execution in ping.
• D-Installer needs your help — Today we published a new prototype of D-Installer, fixing several bugs reported by early testers and improving the usage experience in some areas like the configuration of passwords and users. But beyond those improvements, a couple of new features deserve some attention.
• Bug 1205938 – D-Installer - Slowness initialization on real hardware
• GitHub - yast/d-installer: A service-based Linux installer
• openSUSE’s D-Installer Adds LVM...

Why we won't see a new Raspberry Pi until 2025, the first steps to Plasma 6 are being taken, and PipeWire gets a major Bluetooth upgrade.

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• Raspberry Pi 5 Not Launching Until After 2023 — Don't expect a Pi 5 next year [2023]" Upton then expands and explains that 2023 is a "recovery year".
• Eben Upton Interview: Raspberry Pi Availability & More! - YouTube
• Raspberry Pi Adds 100,000 Units to Supply Chain, Back to Pre-pandemic Levels in 2023 | Tom’s Hardware — In the blog post, Upton acknowledged the patience of the community and offers the 100,000 units, made up of Raspberry Pi Zero W, 3A+ and Raspberry Pi 4 2GB and 4GB for single-unit sale. We don't know the breakdown of how many of each model there will be, but Upton does indicate that it is likely that Raspberry Pi Zero W will come back into stock first.
• KDE Frameworks 5.101 Released — Per the plans laid out earlier this year at the Akademy developer conference, KDE Frameworks 5 feature development stops following the v5.101 release. KDE Frameworks 5 will now just see maintenance updates moving forward.
• Xfce 4.18 Released — After almost two years of work, we are happy to announce the release of Xfce 4.18 !
• Xfce 4.18 by muscaln · Pull Request #206282 · NixOS/nixpkgs
• PipeWire Bluetooth Improvements — Most exciting with today's PipeWire 0.3.62 release is now supporting Bluetooth offloading.
• Releases · PipeWire / wireplumber · GitLab
• Feature Preview: Gitea Actions — Gitea Actions goes beyond just DevOps and lets you run workflows when other events happen in your repository.
• act_runner — A runner for Gitea based on act.
• act — Run your GitHub Actions locally 🚀

More hardware acceleration comes to desktop Linux, Mozilla launches ambitious new projects, Unity 7 fans can rejoice & Jolla has an important update.

Plus we discuss the 2017 Linux Laptop Survey, the really fancy new trick Opus has pulled off in the latest release & more!

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• Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: June 23, 2017 — We’ve got hardware accelerated video decoding working in a Proof-Of-Concept using a GStreamer and VA-API pipeline. The result is 3% CPU usage to play an h264 4K 60FPS video on Haswell. 4K h265 HEVC is also playable but requires a Skylake or later processor.
• 2017 Linux Laptop Survey — So we've established this Linux Laptop Survey in conjunction with Linux stakeholders to hopefully gather more feedback that will be useful to many different parties -- this survey isn't just for our own benefit and enjoyment at Phoronix.
• Jolla Summer 2017: CEO's Update — It has been a while since our last update about the remaining Jolla Tablet refunds – we are committed to it and we will be progressing on it in a pace our financial situation permits us to do. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
• Mozilla launches Firefox Focus for Android — Like the iPhone and iPad version, the Android app is free of tabs and other visual clutter, and erasing your sessions is as easy as a simple tap.
• Firefox Focus uses the default Android WebView — Firefox Focus uses the default Android WebView. Barbara Bermes, product manager for Firefox Mobile at Mozilla, told eWEEK.
• Project Common Voice — Project Common Voice, a project to help make voice recognition open to everyone. Now you can donate your voice to help us build an open-source voice recognition engine that anyone can use to make innovative apps for devices and the web.
• Opus 1.2 — Speech quality improvements especially in the 12-20 kbit/s range + Improved VBR encoding for hybrid mode + More aggressive use of wider speech bandwidth, including fullband speech starting at 14 kbit/s + Music quality improvements in the 32-48 kb/s range + Generic and SSE CELT optimizations + Support for directly encoding packets up to 120 ms + DTX support for CELT mode + SILK CBR improvements + Support for all of the fixes in draft-ietf-codec-opus-update-06 (the mono downmix and the folding fixes need --enable-update-draft) + Many bug fixes, including integer wrap-arounds discovered through fuzzing (no security implications)
• Comparison between Opus versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 — Here's a comparison between Opus versions 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2 so you can hear for yourself how the quality has improved and how Opus now sounds in general. As an anchor (OK, and also to make us look good!), we've also included MP3 samples.

The real reason Rocket League is dropping support for Linux, Wine has a massive release, and the potential for Canonical's new Android in the cloud service.

Plus, our take on the FSF's Upcycle Windows 7 campaign, and the clever Chrome OS strategy upgrade for education in 2020.

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• Rocket League will drop support for Mac, Linux versions in March | Ars Technica — Change comes eight months after Epic Games acquired the game's creators.
• Update on Refunds for macOS and Linux Players
• Support for macOS and Linux (SteamOS) – Psyonix Support
• Psyonix are ending support for Rocket League on both Linux and macOS (updated)
• Thanks to Psyonix dropping Linux support, we're getting anti-Linux statements like this from game devs again
• Wine 5.0 Released — This release represents a year of development effort and over 7,400 individual changes.
• Wine Is Approaching Six Million Lines
• Canonical introduces Anbox Cloud — The service is designed to offload workloads from x86 or Arm-based devices to containers in the cloud.
• The latest Chrome OS education devices will get updates for eight years — Previously, most Chrome OS devices recieved six years of software support.
• Chromebooks will now get up to eight years of Chrome OS updates
• Improving 40 million Chromebooks for education
• Upcycle Windows 7 — We call on them to release it as free software, and give it to the community to study and improve.
• Open Source Licenses in 2020: Trends and Predictions