Linux Action News

Desktop Linux users saw a lot of new features land this week, and SUSE might just have a new cloud-winning strategy.

Plus Michael Larabel from Phoronix joins us to discuss the state of Linux hardware support in 2020.

Special Guest: Michael Larabel.

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• Budgie 10.5.2 Desktop Environment Released with Support for the GNOME 3.38 Stack
• Budgie 10.5.2 Released
• KDE Plasma 5.20.4 Is Out with More Than 40 Bug Fixes and Improvements
• Plasma 5.20.4 complete changelog
• GNOME 3.38.2 Desktop Environment Is Out with Even More Improvements and Bug Fixes
• 3.38.2/NEWS
• Cinnamon 4.8 Desktop Environment Released, This Is What’s New
• New Raspberry Pi OS release — The traditional end-of-year new release of Raspberry Pi OS, which we launch today.
• Raspberry Pi’s V3DV Vulkan Driver Now Supports Wayland — Raspberry Pi fans were celebrating that the V3DV driver is now officially Vulkan 1.0 conformant for supporting this modern high-performance graphics/compute API atop the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer.
• Should Red Hat be afraid of SUSE’s Rancher acquisition? — SUSE, a major Linux and cloud company, finalized its acquisition of Rancher Labs earlier this year.. Rancher, formerly a privately held open-source company, had over 37,000 active users and 100-million downloads of its flagship Kubernetes management program, Rancher.
• Rancher Labs - Wikipedia
• Network World
• SUSE to Acquire Rancher Labs - YouTube

We get you up to speed on two serious flaws, Linux's recent gaming loss, Ubuntu doubling down on RISC-V, and news from the Open Source Summit North America.

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• CVE - CVE-2023-28410 — Improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer in some Intel(R) i915 Graphics drivers for linux before kernel version 6.2.10 may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable escalation of privilege via local access.
• INTEL-SA-00886
• Intel Security Center
• New NetFilter flaw gives attackers root privileges — A new Linux NetFilter kernel flaw has been discovered, allowing unprivileged local users to escalate their privileges to root level, allowing complete control over a system.
• NVD - CVE-2023-32233
• Goodbye to Roblox on Linux — I’m sorry to be such a downer about this, but it’s the reality. We have to spend our time porting to and supporting the platforms that will grow our community.
• Proper support for the Linux platform - Feature Requests
• Ubuntu 23.04 Now Works on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V SBC — ”This partnership will provide users with a seamless development experience, allowing them to leverage the best of open source software and RISC-V through Ubuntu and VisionFive 2.”
• Canonical enables Ubuntu on StarFive’s VisionFive 2 RISC-V single board computer
• Open Source Summit North America — Open Source Summit is a conference umbrella, composed of a collection of events covering the most important technologies, topics, and issues affecting open source today.
• AWS open-sources snapshot fuzzing and policy authorization tools
• Schedule - Linux Foundation Events
• The Linux Foundation on Twitter

Android 10 has a lot we like while the PinePhone is real and closer than we thought.

Plus Red Hat's new desktop strategy, and what we think Mozilla is getting right.

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• Welcoming Android 10! — Today we're releasing the Android 10 source code to Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and making it available to the broader ecosystem. We’re also starting the official Android 10 rollout to all three generations of Pixel devices worldwide.
• Google Releases Android 10 With "Vulkan Everywhere", Privacy Improvements
• The Verge Android 10 Review
• Android 10 adds warnings for USB port contamination and overheating
• The PinePhone is real & shipping soon — I am hereby happy to announce that the first PinePhones have now entered production and will start shipping to developers this month.
• Firefox 69 released — As of today, Enhanced Tracking Protection will be turned on by default
• Tor Blog: Browser Fingerprinting - An Introduction and the Challenges Ahead
• Introducing Red Hat CodeReady Containers — CodeReady Containers brings a minimal, preconfigured OpenShift 4.1 or newer cluster to your local laptop or desktop computer for development and testing purposes.

Microsoft continues to prove how much it loves Linux while Google tries to eat their lunch, mixed news from Mozilla, and good stuff from GNOME.

Plus Telegram's cryptocurrency is definitely happening. Honest.

Special Guest: Wes Payne.

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• exFAT in the Linux kernel? Yes! — It’s important to us that the Linux community can make use of exFAT included in the Linux kernel with confidence. To this end, we will be making Microsoft’s technical specification for exFAT publicly available to facilitate development of conformant, interoperable implementations. We also support the eventual inclusion of a Linux kernel with exFAT support in a future revision of the Open Invention Network’s Linux System Definition, where, once accepted, the code will benefit from the defensive patent commitments of OIN’s 3040+ members and licensees.
• The Initial exFAT Driver Queued For Introduction With The Linux 5.4 Kernel — Greg lived up to his talk and today committed the exFAT driver to staging-next. This nearly eleven thousand lines of new code did get the sign-off of Microsoft and with it being in the "-next" branch will be set for inclusion into the Linux 5.4 mainline code-base once Linux 5.3 is released.
• Chris Beard to step down as Mozilla CEO — This is a good place to recruit our next CEO and for me to take a meaningful break and recharge before considering what’s next for me. It may be a cliché — but I’ll embrace it — as I’m also looking forward to spending more time with my family after a particularly intense but gratifying tour of duty.
• Thunderbird 68 released — Thunderbird version 68.0 is only offered as direct download from thunderbird.net and not as upgrade from Thunderbird version 60 or earlier. A future version 68.1 will provide updates from earlier versions. Note that add-ons are only supported if add-on authors have adapted them.
• What’s New in Thunderbird 68 — Thunderbird 68 focuses on polish and setting the stage for future releases. There was a lot of work that we had to do below the surface that has made Thunderbird more future-proof and has made it a solid base to continue to build upon. But we also managed to create some great features you can touch today.
• Chrome OS gets first Chromebook Enterprise devices, faster Admin Console, and managed Linux environments — Google today announced a slew of Chrome Enterprise updates, including a faster Google Admin console and managed Linux environments. The company also unveiled the first Chromebook Enterprise laptops: Dell’s Latitude 5300 for $819 and Latitude 5400 for $699.
• GNOME Firmware Updater — A few months ago, Dell asked if I’d like to co-mentor an intern over the summer. The task was to create a GTK “power user” application for managing firmware. The idea being that someone like Dell support could ask the user to run a little application and then read back firmware versions or downgrade to an older firmware version rather than getting them to use the command line.
• GNOME Foundation launches Coding Education Challenge — The GNOME Foundation, with support from Endless, has announced the Coding Education Challenge, a competition aimed to attract projects that offer educators and students new and innovative ideas to teach coding with free and open source software. The $500,000 in funding will support the prizes, which will be awarded to the teams who advance through the three stages of the competition.
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