News/13
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Jump to navigationJump to search- GStreamer 1.18 Is ReleasedThe latest GStreamer multimedia framework release supports Intel's SVT-HEVC Encoder, High Dynamic Range (HDR) video, the Audio Video Transport Protocol (AVTP), VA-API compositing, camera capture from Raspberry Pi camera and quite a long list of other new features.
- KnotDNS 3.0.0 Is ReleasedKnotDNS is a highly efficient DNS server developed by the Czech Republic's DNS name registry CZ.NIC. The latest version supports XDP sockets, DNS over HTTPS, DNSSEC validation and a lot more. It may be worth a look if you have a very busy website and you are hosting your own DNS servers.
- Newly Published Raccoon Attack Could Be Used To Do Man-In-The-Middle Attacks on TLS Connections Against Rare ServersA really scary Diffie-Hellman key exchange (DHKE) attack dubbed "Raccoon" could be used to perform a man in the middle attack and eavesdrop on TLS connections on web servers nobody bothered to update in over a decade. One in 100000 Internet-facing servers are vulnerable. The OpenSSL team has rated the vulnerability as "low" severity.
- Linux 5.9 Brings Hardware Accelerated Video Playback To 10+ Year Old AMD Graphics Cards Using The "amdgpu" Linux Kernel DriverAMD kicked off their HD 7000 series graphics cards with the launch of the Radeon HD 7970 code-named "Tahiti" in December 2011. Linux users are finally able to get working Hardware Video Decoding and Vulkan support on these and other older AMD graphics cards using the Linux kernel's "amdgpu" driver.
- The Benefits Of Having A Compressed zram Swap Device On LinuxThe zram Linux kernel module lets you create a compressed memory block device that can be used to create compressed memory-backed swap devices. There are some trade-offs, compile-times and things of that nature can be lower with a zram swap device but it could also result in a gigantic performance penalty. It seems that bigger seems better on real hardware with a slow HDD while smaller is better in virtual machines.
- KDE Plasma Will Default To Using The Wayland Display Server On Fedora 34Fedora 33, scheduled to be released next month, defaults to using the tried and true X display server for everything but GNOME. A Fedora proposal to move KDE Plasma to the Wayland display server in the next Fedora release, coming in six months time, has been approved.
- Inkscape 1.0.1 Is ReleasedThe first minor update to Inkscape 1.0, released in May, brings color-managed PDF export to Scribus, a new Selectors and CSS dialog object menu and interpolated gradients. It is almost like a 1.1-release. There is also a long list of 60+ bug-fixes.
- The Linux-Compatible RaspberryPi-like PicoRio Pygmy RISC-V SOC Could Be A Game-Changer For RISC-VBoards with the open RISC-V architecture has so far been extremely limited or overly expensive. There are some very cheap boards RISC-V boards like the Longan Nano out there, but 128KB Flash and 32KB SRAM put that in the microcontroller category, far below Single Board Computers. The joint American/Chinese venture RIOS aims to change that with their new PicoRio Pygmy SoC featuring a 64-bit quad-core RV64GC processor capable of running Linux.
- Libtorrent 2.0 Is Released With BitTorrent 2.0 SupportBitTorrent is an aging protocol which works fine but there are some small problems with it. For one, it uses SHA-1 hashes which are not very secure. The new BitTorrent v2.0 protocol solves that and several other problems. libtorrent v2.0 is the first library with BitTorrent v2.0 support. The git version of the popular qBittorrent can be built against it so we expect a new qBittorrent release in the near-future.
- Linux 5.9 rc4 ReleasedLinus Torvalds thinks the fourth Linux 5.9 release candidate was "bigger" than usual. He may be referring to a single commit titled "Pull tasklet API conversions" with 266761 lines removed and 713638 lines added to 12723 different files. The rest of the changes since rc3 are mostly smaller trivial fixes.
- GNUnet 0.13.3 Released With Hand-full Of Bug FixesThe latest GNUnet release has seven bug-fixes, most of which are small and unnoticeable. This is just a network back-end release, the latest GNUnet-GTK package with graphical programs is still 0.13.1 released in July. Those of you who participate in the GNUnet overlay network by running nodes may want to consider upgrading.
- Linux From Scratch 10.0 ReleasedLinux From Scratch is a book describing how to install a Linux system from scratch using any GNU/Linux system as a host. The first LFS version, written by Gerard Beekmans, was published in December 1999. The current LFS maintainer Bruce Dubbs has just released LFS 10.0 along with a new edition of Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS).
- Vulkan Applications Running On Linux With Older Mesa Versions Could Eat ALL Your RAMThe Mesa Vulkan Linux drivers had a very unfortunate bug that would cause Vulkan applications to fill all GPU memory, all system memory and eventually all of swap too if textures are shared between Vulkan and OpenGL using external memory. This is why our test of Chromium 84 with Vulkan enabled resulted in a disaster where all types of memory were filled. Mesa <=20.1.5, the upcoming Mesa 20.2 release and Mesa git have a fix.
- TUXEDO Computers Announces New High-End Polaris "Linux" Gaming LaptopsThe German computer company TUXEDO has launched two new high-end "Polaris" gaming laptops aimed at Linux gamers. The machines are available as variants with AMD Ryzen 5 4600H, AMD Ryzen 7 4800H and Intel Core i7-10750H processors combined with either a Nvidia GTX 1650 Ti or a Nvidia RTX 2060 Refresh GPU. The machines are not available without a dedicated Nvidia graphics card so proprietary binary blob drivers are required to use these machines.
- ARM announces Cortex-R82 Processor With Support For Up To 1 TiB RAMBritish chip-designer Arm has announced a new design for a Linux-capable 64-bit Cortex-R real-time processor that is capable of addressing up to 1 TiB of RAM. Hardware manufacturers can make models with up to 8 cores and Arm Neon machine learning capabilities.
- Linux Foundation Announces "Climate Finance Foundation"The Linux foundation has announced a new "Climate Finance Foundation" subsidiary with the goal of providing asset managers and multi-national corporations with "AI-enhanced open source analytics and open data to address climate risk and opportunity". The new subsidiary's founding corporate members are Allianz, Amazon, Microsoft and S&P Global.
- Linux Desktop Market Share Fell 0.88% In August 2020Data from Netmarketshare, based on web browser usage, indicate that the Linux desktop market share fell 0.88% to 2.69% in August. Their data is a bit questionable since 0.88% is just 0.01% off what Valve reported as the total Linux market share on their Steam gaming platform. It could be that one fourth of all Linux users lost interest after trying it for a few months. It is also possible that those Linux-users didn't exist in the first place.
- "Linusgate" Leaked: Over 250 Messages About Code of Conduct Complaints Against Linus TorvaldsDebian ‘canceling’ the founder of Linux is no “small potatoes”; and considering the reason (or what this is done for; an expression of an opinion) we probably should be alarmed about ramifications for free speech
- Intel Unveils Tiger Lake Laptop CPU Line-Up With Impressive Graphics Performance NumbersIntel has unveiled its 11th generation mobile processors. The new quad and dual-core mobile processors made on Intel's 10nm "SuperFin" process node have all-core turbo clock speeds between 3 and 4.3 GHz and max single core turbo speeds between 3.5 and 4.8 GHz. The claims Intel is making about their integrated Iris Xe graphics chips performance are aggressive. Their story is that the integrated gen12 Intel Xe graphics part of their top-of-the-line 1185G7 IPU laptop processor has 63% better performance than a AMD Ryzen 7 4800U processor.
- Endless OS 3.8.6 Is ReleasedThe latest Endless OS release has an updated Chromium browser, an updated App Center fixing a crash when switching categories on Endless Mini, an icon theme dependency fix and a fix for the very unfortunate GRUB2 buffer overflow vulnerability disclosed late July that allows anyone to "securely" boot anything with any stable GNU GRUB2 release.
- 30% Of The Worlds Biggest Websites Track Visitors Using Web Browser FingerprintingMany of the worlds biggest websites have begun using web browser fingerprinting techniques as means to track users even if their web browsers have a strict cookie policy. A combination of screen resolution, graphics card capabilities and other device-specific information is often enough to create a unique fingerprint that can be used to track you across the web. The larger the site, the more likely it tries to track you using dirty tricks.
- Google Is Cracking Down On Fediverse Applications For AndroidAmerican computer giant Google is cracking down on several free software applications used to connect to social media services running the free Mastodon and Pleroma social media software. Google is objecting to there being "user-generated content" available to those who install free software social media apps from their Play Store.
- K-Pop Fans Are Outraged Over The 2020 Idol Star Athletics Championship Taking Place Without A Live AudienceThis years Idol Star Athletics Championship will take place during the Chuseok (추석) Korean Harvest festival holiday from September 30th to October 2nd this year. The event will take place without a live audience due to concerns over this springs slightly worse than average seasonal cold. Many Korean idol fans are very dissatisfied with this decisions.
- Linux 5.10 To Get Creative SoundBlaster AE-7 Audio Card DriverThe singaporean technology company Creative Technology Ltd, famous for their Sound Blaster series audio cards, is not a very Linux-friendly company. They do not provide any Linux drivers for their products themselves but they do sometimes respond to requests for help from Linux developers like Linux sound sub-system developer Connor McAdams who has, no thanks to Creative, written a driver for the Creative SoundBlaster AE-7 audio card that will be merged to Linux 5.10 as soon as the merge window opens in September.
- Wine 5.16 Released With 21 Bug-FixesThe latest
WineIsNot AnEmulator development release has application specific fixes for Cisco Quick VPN, AirDC++, Quake Champions, Armored Warfare, Tomb Raider I, The Bat!, Still Life and Toontown Corporate. There's also support for AVX instructions and updated Lithuanian translations in Wine 5.16.
- GNOME Internet Radio Locator 3.0.5 Is Released With More Radio StationsGNOME Internet Radio Locator is a radio streaming application that lets you tune into radio stations by clicking on them on a world map. The latest version has a lot more Norwegian radio station markers and two updated American radio stations and a Danish translation for the user-interface. The number of radios stations outside of Europe is still fairly limited in this release.
- SuperTuxKart 1.2 Is Released With Improved Carts, Better Gamepad Support, Improved Tutorials And MoreThe latest release of the best free kart racing game has new re-vamped Kiki, Pidgin and Puffy karts, a better tutorial for new users, greatly improved gamepad support thanks to SDL2, full IPv6 LAN and WAN support and greatly improved server performance for those running SuperTuxKart game servers. The ranking system has changed, but that is only server-side so online gameplay is still compatible with previous versions.
- Xfce 4.16pre1 Released With Client Side Decorations And Minor ImprovementsXfce 4.16 will be the next major release of the lightweight GTK-based Xfce desktop environment. It will be very different from previous versions. The lack of proper window titlebars, who have been replaced with useless client side decorations, is a immediately noticeable change in Xfce 4.16. The rest of the changes are less noticeable, it is otherwise mostly identical to Xfce 4.14. The first Xfce 4.15 preview-release is now available.
- Web Browser Benchmarks: Chromium 85 Places Firefox Even Further Behind Other Web BrowsersChromium 85 has a new WebHID API for gamepad support within web browsers, a declarative shadow DOM API, AVIF image decode support and, much more importantly, the Google-developed ANGLE library for graphics rendering. ANGLE makes Chrome 85, and other browsers based on Chromium 85 such as the Brave Browser, much faster on Linux leaving Firefox behind biting the dust.
- Meet The New Linux Foundation Technical Advisory BoardThe results from the 2020 Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board election are in. The boards new members consists of representatives from IBM/Red Hat, Google, Intel, Canonical and Facebook.
