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Jump to navigationJump to search- Richard Brown: Regular Releases are Wrong, Roll for your lifeopenSUSE Chairman Richard Brown made a really compelling argument for why a rolling release model is better than using "stable" packages that have to have fixes back-ported to them in a 35 minute video presentation at the joint openSUSE+LibreOffice Virtual Conference 2020 taking place this week.
- XFS Patches For Linux 5.10 Delays The Year 2038 Problem To 2486XFS patches for Linux 5.10 submitted by XFS file system maintainer Darrick J. Wong will delay the year 2038 problem for XFS by an additional 448 years. That should be enough to come up with a real long-term solution. The time-stamp patches were submitted as a part of a larger patch-set with a "large pile of new stuff".
- GCC 11 Will Be Set In Stone On November 15thDeveloper Richard Biener has announced that next major version of the GNU Compiler Collection will enter a feature-freeze on November 15th. There's currently a total of 572 regressions in GCC 11 that need to be fixed before the final version is released April/May 2021.
- Latest 20.41.18123 Intel NEO OpenCL Driver Claims "Production" OpenCL 3.0 Quality On All Intel CPUs Going Back To BroadwellIntel made their Neo Graphics Compute-Runtime OpenCL claim to have OpenCL 3.0 support on all chips going back to Broadwell in the v20.40.18075. The latest v20.41.18123 goes one step further by having that same claim in the release-notes. There's also a new
clinfowarning regarding the supposed OpenCL 3.0 support. - Plausible Analytics Switches From MIT To GNU AGPL License Due To CompetitionPlausible Analytics is a free software web analytics platform designed to run in a Docker container and a corporation based in Estonia, Europe. They discovered that developing web analytics software and giving it away for free results in competing corporations building services around said software in direct competition to your own services.
- Mesa 20.1.10 Is Released With A Handful Of Bug-FixesMesa 20.1.10 is a small bug-fix release for GNU/Linux distributions that have not yet upgraded to Mesa 20.2.0. There's not much to see, there's seven for the Intel graphics drivers and two on the AMD side.
- Distri: researching fast Linux package managementMichael Stapelberg was a Debian developer for 7 years before he abandoned in favor of Arch Linux it due to "antique tooling and slow changes". Arch's Pacman package manager isn't fast enough for him so he decided to develop Distri, a blazing fast package manager. He presented it at the Arch Conf 2020. The video presentation is 20 minutes with an additional 30 minutes of Q&A.
- Martin Dougiamas: Why Openness in Education is essentialYou probably never heard of Moodle - unless you are a student. Moodle is the worlds most widely used educational platform and it's free software available under the GNU GPL version 3. Martin Dougiamas, who originally wrote Moodle, held a talk explaining what Moodle is, what features it has, what's planned for the future and what proprietary software it competes with at the NextCloud 2020 conference that took place October 2nd to 3rd, 2020. The video is 36 minutes long and worth a watch if you want some insights into modern education systems.
- Why Schools Should Exclusively Use Free SoftwareEducational activities, including schools of all levels from kindergarten to university, have a moral duty to teach only free software.
- GamerOS: An Arch Linux based gaming OSVideo: Alesh Slovak missed Vavle's SteamOS so he created a new GNU/Linux operating system called GamerOS based on Arch Linux and some of the components from SteamOS. The idea is to have a OS that boots directly into Steam's Big Picture mode so you can sit on the couch and use a PC with a game-pad the same way you would use a gaming console. Alesh Slovak presented his new OS at the Arch Conf 2020 last weekend. His video presentation is about 45 minutes with Q&A.
- Kdenlive 20.08.2 Is Released With 17 Bug-Fixes And GPU Accelerated Video RenderingThe free multi-platform video editor Kdenlive got automatic scene splitting and hardware accelerated video rendering on the GPU in this release even though it it was released as just a minor version bump. There's also 17 bugs that have been fixed since 20.08.1 was released. GPU video rendering is twice as slow as CPU rendering, so it is, for now, a utterly useless new feature.
- Zvezdin Besarabov: How to organise your digital life in a privacy-preserving, machine-agnostic, and practical mannerZvezdin Besarabov held a talk at the Arch Conf 2020 last weekend where he shared what software he ended up using on his personal devices with after trying to find free software with a perfect balance between usability and privacy. He covers the GNU/Linux and the Android alternatives to less privacy-respecting commercial software for e-mail, calendar, contacts, task management, office applications, password management and cloud storage.
- Linux 5.9 Is Released With New Drivers, Improved AMD GPU Support, And Support The x86-64 FSGSBASE CPU InstructionsIt was a bumpy release-cycle for Linux 5.9 with one release candidate refusing to show anything graphical on Intel GPUs. The final 5.9 release doesn't have that problem. It has have quite a lot of new features such as support for upcoming AMD graphics cards, support for the FSGSBASE x86-64 instructions, a Corsair RGB hub and a lot more.
- Chris Down, Facebook: Linux memory management at scaleFacebook-employed Linux kernel engineer Chris Down held a 40 minute talk about memory management at the Arch Conf 2020 today. It was filled with useful insights, tips and strategies for Linux memory management using modern kernel frame-works like cgroups and tools like the
oomduserspace Out-Of-Memory killer. The memory management strategies that vastly improved Facebook's servers may benefit your servers or perhaps just your desktop or laptop. - AMD Hopes To Get Sensor Fusion Hub Driver For AMD Laptop Gyroscopes And Other Sensors Into Linux 5.10AMD's Sandeep Singh has submitted yet another revision of AMD's Linux HID driver for the Sensor Fusion Hub hardware in all AMD laptops based on Ryzen processors. That makes it eight in total. This could be the lucky revision that makes it into the Linux kernel when the Linux 5.10 merge window opens up on Monday.
- Arch Linux: Past, Present and FutureAllan McRae gave a very detailed overview of the 18 years of Arch Linux and Levente Polyak gave insights into the current state of Arch and it's potential future in a joint presentation at Arch Conf 2020 on October 10th, 2020. It's a great watch if you want to learn the history of Arch and know what changes it may potentially have in the future.
- How Arch Linux Manage Their Servers: "Infrastructure at Arch: Making servers go brrrrr"Sven-Hendrik Haaase gave an enlightening talk about the servers and the infrastructure used by Arch Linux to serve packages, The Arch Linux Wiki and the rest of the services the Arch Linux team provides at the Arch Linux Conf 2020 on Saturday October 10th, 2020. The video is about 30 minutes + 15 minutes of Q&A.
- Intel's latest NEO OpenCL Driver Claims Support For OpenCL 3.0 On All Intel Chips Going Back To BroadwellIntel's latest NEO OpenCL driver, now going by the name Compute-Runtime since it has gained support for more than just OpenCL compute, claims to have OpenCL 3.0 support on all Intel chips going back to Broadwell. It doesn't actually support OpenCL 3.0 on anything other than Intel's latest Tiger Lake chips, but it does claim to.
- LibreOffice 7.0.2 Is Released With 131 Bug-FixesThe latest minor LibreOffice-release has a really long list of 131 bug-fixes. Many of them are related to third party files that can be opened in LibreOffice such as .docx, .xlxs and .pptx. 18 bug-fixes are related to various crashes and the rest of the bug-fixes seem to be all over the place.
- Watch Arch Conf 2020 Live October 10th to 11th, 2020The annual Arch Linux conference take place virtually this weekend. You can tune in via live streams provided by either C3VOC (Chaos Computer Club) or Amazon Twitch and enjoy talks such as "Making servers go brrrrr", "Rolling your own security team for fun and no profit at all" and "Arch Linux: Past, Present and Future". The conference starts at 10.00 UTC (12.00 CET, 03:00 PDT).
- Wine 5.19 Is Released With 27 Bug-FixesThe latest Wine Is Not An Emulator Windows API re-implementation has game-specific fixes for a long list of games including Beach Life, The Sims Complete Collection, Risk II, Earth 2150, Need for Russia, World of Warcraft, Avencast: Rise of the Mage, Mahjong Titans, Resident Evil HD and Fallout New Vegas. The vast majority of the new code in this release was written by the Codeweavers corporation.
- First UbuntuDDE Remix 20.10 Groovy Beta Is ReleasedUbuntuDDE Remix 20.10 Groovy Beta is a GNU/Linux distribution based on the Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla beta released last week. It features the latest version of the very user-friendly yet powerful Deepin Desktop Environment instead of the laughable and utterly useless tablet/smart-TV desktop environment Ubuntu's regular release ships with. This beta-release is primarily for testers. We tested it and we liked it.
- Beware People Who Enter Free Software Projects Only for Power TripsSociologists have long recognized the threat of insecure people in positions of power (imposters who overcompensate for a lack of qualifications). Overzealous moderators on a power trip are posing a threat to the integrity and atmosphere in Free software projects, where pressure, fear and vengeance become stronger motivators than something positive like altruism and enthusiasm (sharing one’s technical skills)
- Google Chrome 86 and Brave 1.13.82, Both Based On Chromium 86, Are Released With Security Enhancements And New FeaturesThere are many security enhancements, new APIs, background tab resource-limits, new CSS rules and other goodies in Chromium 86 and browsers based on that web browser such as Chrome 86 and Brave 1.13.82. Chromium 86 is slightly slower on Linux machines with Intel processors and Intel graphics and marginally faster on machines with AMD processors and AMD graphics.
- AMD Announces Four 5000-Series Ryzen CPUsAMD announced four new 5000-series Zen3 processors in a marketing presentation titled "Where Gaming Begins" today. The processors have 6 to 16 cores and base clocks between 3.4 and 3.8 GHz with boost clocks up to 4.9 GHz. TDP is listed as 105W for all but the 6-core model. The new processors will have a MSRP between $300 and $800 when they reach stores on November 5th, 2020. AMD claims the processors will have a 19% IPC performance uplift.
- GIMP 2.10.22 Is Released With AVIF Support And Improved Support For Many Other File FormatsGIMP 2.10.22 has a lot of new features for a minor version bump, most of which are related to image file formats. There's support for the AVIF image format based on the AV1 video format, 10 and 12 bit AVIF and HEIF images, better JPEG and WebP detection and better support for files from good old Paint Shop Pro.
- 3rd Ova Magica Tech Demo ReleasedDeveloper ClaudiaTheDev has released a third tech demo of a interesting new game called Ova Magica. The proprietary kick-starter funded game will be available for GNU/Linux, Windows and macOS. It is still in somewhat early stages of development, yet it is already playable with a small 3D world featuring a farm you can explore, good graphics and blob battle training.
- DXVK DirectX To Vulkan Translation Layer 1.7.2 ReleasedThe latest DXVK Direct3D 9 to 11 to Vulkan translation layer has seven game-specific fixes and some Direxct3D 9 fixes specific to AMD's AMDVLK Vulkan driver. DXVK can be used as an alternative to Wine's own wined3d DX 9-11 to OpenGL translation layer while we wait for Wine to get their own C-implemented DX 9-11 to Vulkan back-end ready.
- US-China DRAM Patent War Rumored To Be EscalatingThe Chinese memory manufacturer ChangXin Memory Technologies is making great progress ramping up its production of 8 GiB DDR4 and LPDDR4 DRAM chips. The memory cartel does not like competition from a new player. It is rumored that American Micron Technology is planning on launching a patent lawsuit against ChangXin in order to lock them out of the American market.
- U-Boot 2020.10 Is Released With Support For Lots Of New HardwareU-Boot is a lesser-known Germany boot loader that's actually quite widely deployed on things like embedded devices, Chromebooks, networking gear and SpaceX rockets. The latest v2020.10 has a rather long list of interesting changes considering that it's only been three months since the last v2020.07 release.
