The latest version of North Korea's custom Linux distribution, Red Star OS - that one with the OS X style interface - has leaked onto the internet. While the guy who talked about technology in North Korea on the 31C3 conference said he didn't see anybody using Red Star seriously, it's an interesting distro to check out.
While we're making jokes about North Korea, it's easy to forget that regime puts millions of people in concentration camps to starve and murder them.
I found this one via HackerNews - a 2003 article on what Linux needs for "world domination", written by Hugh Fisher.
If Linux is to achieve world domination, it must have One Frickin' User Interface (1FUI): a single user experience / interface behaviour and a single underlying UI toolkit API / widget set. World domination means putting Linux into corporations, schools, PDAs, and cell phones. This will only happen with 1FUI, and if this upsets the nerds, too bad. History clearly shows that if a platform/system offers a choice of user interfaces, the potential users will choose a different system.
It's almost 2015 now, and it turns out he was right. That "1FUI" is called whatever Android has, and it has made Linux the dominant player in the next big computer revolution. Linux does great in servers, embedded stuff, supercomputing, and utterly owns mobile computing (Apple people, the world is bigger than the US, UK, and Australia).
Linux didn't need a 'year of desktop Linux' after all.
Linux Mint, one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions, has released the latest version in their 17.x series. Mint 17.x is a long term support series that will be supported through to 2019 and is binary compatible with Ubuntu 14.04. The launch of Linux Mint 17.1 includes a number of new features and small improvements. Software updating and kernel selection have been improved. The MATE desktop edition ships with two working window managers, Marco for basic funtionality and Compiz for visual effects. The Cinnamon edition of Mint also features some improvements, particularly more keyboard short-cuts and reduced memory usage. Both editions of Linux Mint feature a pastbin command which makes it easy to share image and log data on-line.
Quantum OS aims to build a new operating system based on Linux, with a user interface built on Qt and designed according to Google's Material Design guidelines.
We plan to develop the desktop shell and applications primarily using Qt 5 and QML, which will allow us to build highly polished and dynamic user interfaces and will work well for implementing Material Design. If possible, we will build the desktop shell in as much QML as possible built on top of the QtCompositor API, which provides a Qt framework for building a Wayland compositor.
As for the base system, they're still not sure if they're going for Ubuntu or Arch.
We plan to initially leverage an existing operating system, most likely Arch or Ubuntu. Arch is a strong possibility because of the simple packaging manager, lightweight base system, and the rolling release concept. Our goal is to base our work on the latest upstream versions available, with no patches or modifications, so our work will run on any base Linux distro that supports Wayland.
Version 3 of the Mageia distribution reaches its end of life on November 26, 2014. The developers of this user friendly Linux distribution are turning their efforts toward working on the upcoming Mageia 5 and urge users of Mageia 3 to upgrade their installations to continue receiving security updates. The Mageia blog reports:
As you all know, we can’t maintain Mageia releases forever. And it’s time to say goodbye to Mageia 3. After Wednesday the 26th of November, this release won’t benefit from any more security or bugfix updates. This will allow QA team to give more time for polishing our coming Mageia 5. So you have only one week left to upgrade to Mageia 4 if you want to keep an up-to-date system.
People who wish to upgrade their Mageia 3 installations without performing a fresh install of the operating system can follow the upgrade instructions on Mageia's website.
Since the MATE desktop forked away from the abanndoned GNOME 2 project many users have reported problems getting the Compiz compositing manager to work properly with the MATE desktop environment. The Linux Mint distribution plans to fix this issue in their upcoming 17.1 release.
The MATE edition sports out of the box support for the Compiz window-manager (which comes pre-installed, pre-configured and which you can switch to with a click of a button).
There are also plans to bring the latest version of the Cinnamon desktop to Linux Mint's Debian Edition. The next release of Mint's Debian Edition will be based on Debian's upcoming stable release, code name "Jessie". Details on developments happening across all editions of Linux Mint can be found in the project's latest blog post.
Members of the Mageia Linux community have been waiting for a few weeks now for a beta release of Mageia 5. Several delays have held back the Mageia 5 beta and the project's developers have posted an update explaining why. It seems the problems started when Mageia updated its copy of the RPM package manager.
The new RPM version introduced changes that were significant enough to break a lot of core packages during the mass rebuild, and lots of packages failed to build in a chain reaction.
Problems continued when another software update, this time the GNU C library, caused the distribution's system installer to stop functioning properly.
You may know that a Linux distribution release is basically an installer together with a set of packages. The latter were now starting to behave properly, but we were then faced with some issues in the installer regarding glibc (the GNU C library) and RPM. This delayed the beta for another week or so.
All show stopping bugs have been fixed and Mageiia has finally pushed out their beta release for people to test. The upcoming launch of Mageia 5 is expected to take place at the end of January.
In the latest contest, not only did Linux dominate, but Linux showed that is slowly pushing out all its competitors. In the June 2014 Top 500 supercomputer list, the top open-source operating system set a new high with 485 systems out of the fastest 500 running Linux. In other words 97 percent of the fastest computers in the world are based on Linux.
With numbers like this, it's easy to forget that this project started with the words "just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu".
This hobby now dominates almost every field of computing - from mobile to supercomputing.
Linux kernel 3.15 has been released. This release resumes much faster in systems with hard disks, it adds support for cross-renaming two files atomically, it adds new fallocate(2) modes that allow to remove the range of a file or set it to zero, it adds a new file locking API, the memory management adapts better to working set size changes, it improves FUSE write performance, it adds support for the LZ4 algorithm in the zram memory compressor, it allows to load 64-bit kernels from 32-bit EFI firmware, it adds support for x86 AVX-512 vector instructions; it also adds new drivers; and many other small improvements. Here's the full list of changes.
Subgraph OS was designed from the ground-up to reduce the risks in endpoint systems so that individuals and organizations around the world can communicate, share, and collaborate without fear of surveillance or interference by sophisticated adversaries through network borne attacks.
Subgraph OS is designed to be difficult to attack. This is accomplished through system hardening and a proactive, ongoing focus on security and attack resistance. Subgraph OS also places emphasis on the integrity of installable software packages.
Strange how only a few years ago, I'd call this stuff paranoid.
Matthew Garrett:
So, in the face of a technical mechanism designed to enforce the author's beliefs about the copyright status of callers of this function, Oracle deliberately circumvent that technical mechanism by simply re-exporting the same function under a new name. It should be emphasised that calling an EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL() function does not inherently cause the caller to become a derivative work of the kernel - it only represents the original author's opinion of whether it would. You'd still need a court case to find out for sure. But if it turns out that the use of ktime_get() does cause a work to become derivative, Oracle would find it fairly difficult to argue that their infringement was accidental.
Aside from the obvious jab at Oracle for being an untrustworthy company, what I found interesting about this story is how legal concerns have crept all the way down to the very lowest levels of the Linux kernel.
It must be a nightmare to keep track of all this stuff and having to develop Oracle's DTrace for Linux. You can't just have fun coding away creating the best, most efficient, and most optimal code - nope, you have to code the best, most efficient legal workaround.
Tails is a live system that aims to preserve your privacy and anonymity. It helps you to use the Internet anonymously and circumvent censorship almost anywhere you go and on any computer but leaving no trace unless you ask it to explicitly.
This is what Snowden uses. Tails released version 1.0 a few days ago.
Some financial services companies are looking to migrate their ATM fleets from Windows to Linux in a bid to have better control over hardware and software upgrade cycles.
Pushing them in that direction apparently is Microsoft's decision to end support for Windows XP on April 8, said David Tente, executive director, USA, of the ATM Industry Association (ATMIA).
"There is some heartburn in the industry" over Microsoft's end-of-support decision, Tente said.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but when it comes to clear and well-communicated support cycles, they belong at the very top. This is the ATMIA's own fault for not properly getting ready for the future even though XP's EOL has been known years and years in advance, and has even been extended a few times.
Linux kernel 3.13 has been released. This release includes are nftables, the successor of iptables, a revamp of the block layer designed for high-performance SSDs, a power capping framework to cap power consumption in Intel RAPL devices, improved squashfs performance, AMD Radeon power management enabled by default and automatic AMD Radeon GPU switching, improved NUMA and hugepage performance , TCP Fast Open enabled by default, support for NFC payments, support for the High-availability Seamless Redundancy protocol, new drivers and many other small improvements. Here's the full list of changes.
"Joining the Linux Foundation is one of many ways Valve is investing in the advancement of Linux gaming," Mike Sartain, a key member of the Linux team at Valve said. "Through these efforts we hope to contribute tools for developers building new experiences on Linux, compel hardware manufacturers to prioritize support for Linux, and ultimately deliver an elegant and open platform for Linux users."
Mark my words: Valve will do for Linux gaming what Android did for Linux mobile. Much crow will be eaten by naysayers in a few years.
Pretty much for my entire career in Linux USB (eight years now?), we've been complaining about how USB device power management just sucks. We enable auto-suspend for a USB device driver, and find dozens of different USB devices that simply disconnect from the bus when auto-suspend is enabled.
For years, we've blamed those devices for being cheap, crappy, and broken. We talked about blacklists in the kernel, and ripped those out when they got too big. We've talked about whitelists in userspace, but not many distros have time to cultivate such lists.
It turns out it's not always the device's fault.
Fascinating bug.
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