News/28

Linus Still Based and Caches Are Faster than Direct IO
Linus Torvalds has been known to be a tad harsh when it has been required to stop gross incompetence from ruining the Linux Kernel. Many feared that the introduction of a CoC in Kernel 4.19 and the forced re-education camp he was subjected to had changed Linus' ability to firmly reject undesirable pieces of code. It would appear that his ability to clearly explain fundamental computing concepts when it is needed is very much intact.
Support for new Power-Saving CPU Instructions in a future Low-Power Mobile 10mm CPU Architecture from Intel code-named "Tremont" is being added to the Linux Kernel
A series of patches sent by Intel to the kernel mailing list with code adding support for new umonitor, umwait, and tpause user wait instructions got our attention since there are no such instructions on any x86-64 CPU we've heard of. They will be available on Skyhawk Lake and Elkhart Lake CPUs based on Intel's new Tremont micro-architecture sometime next year.
KDE Plasma 5.16.1 released
The KDE software project has released the first minor bug-fix update for the 16th iteration of the fifth generation KDE desktop. Sleep and Suspend were broken in an earlier release and these fairly essential features now work again. The power management module will also ignore applications requesting power management inhibition when the battery's critical.
The GNU Guix distribution is moving from gzip to lzip
The free as in freedom GNU/Linux distribution - guixSD is probably the best distro in the world - is changing their compression algorithm for pre-built binaries from the horribly inefficient but standardized gzip format to a little-known compression format called lzip. This will make updating using pre-built binaries a lot faster since the download-stage is the most time-consuming part of the update process and lzip archives are, on average, two thirds the size of gzip archives.
Richard Stallman to Visit Germany in July
The Free Software Foundation has today announced that the father of the free software movement, honorary doctor Richard Stallman, will be doing a speech on surveillance in Frankfurt, Germany on July 15th. The topic will be "Are we facing surveillance like in China?".
New Stable Kernel Series Releases 4.4.182, 4.9.182, 4.14.127, 4.19.52 and 5.1.11 Fixes Serious TCP Networking Vulnerabilities
This time there is actually a good reason to upgrade to one of these new releases of the stable kernel branches which were released just two days after the previous round of stable kernels: They fix three different TCP-based denial of service vulnerabilities which were identified by Netflix. And that's all there is in the patchsets for these new kernels. *BSD users should also pay attention, one of the vulnerabilities Netflix identified affects them.
New Kernels: 5.2-rc5, 5.1.10, 4.19.51 and 4.14.126 released
The stable kernels are, as always, tagged "All users of the _version_ kernel series must upgrade." but that's not really the case. We got Greg Kroah-Hartman to admit that it's just a standard boiler-plate which means absolutely nothing. That tag would be there even if the entire change-set consisted of fixing a spelling error in a documentation file.
KDEs GSOC students are making Good Progress towards Many Exciting Improvements
KDE got a lot of students as part of Google's Summer of Code this year and they are hard at work and making good progress on a wide range of projects. The digital painting program Krita is being ported to Android, digiKam is getting face recognition, KDE connect is getting Windows and Android versions and the video editor Kdenlive is getting a new title tool.
The Linux Kernel can Kill Your PC-Speaker
This isn't exactly news, it's been that way since at least 2007. Interestingly, the question "Is it possible to write a kernel module which, when loaded, will blow the PC speaker?" has been asked regularly on June 12th for more than a decade.
Xfce Screensaver 0.1.5 Now Available
The Xfce team is moving forward to a stable release of version 4.14 either late July or early August. A new version of the Xfce Screensaver as well as a new version of the Exo development library are the latest building-blocks to fall into place.
Snek version 1.0 Announced for Python-Like programming on Tiny Embedded Systems
Good news if you want to program on a really tiny SoC and MicroPython is way to big: There is an even smaller alternative for systems with just one or two kB of memory and little to no processing power. And it's now mature enough to be called version 1.0.
GIMP 2.10.12 now available
The latest version of GNU Image Manipulation Program (aka Green Is My Pepper) is mostly a bug-fix release which fixes some "annoying" bugs. There's also some improvements. Most notable is the ability to export TIFF files with layers.
VLC 3.0.7 released with a long list of Security Issues Fixed
It appears there were buffer overflow issues in just about every module in the VLC media player ranging from decoders to demuxers. These bugs were largely found thank to the European Commission's bug bounty program. There is not much else of interest to Linux users, the vast majority of improvements in this release are specific to the Android, macOS and Windows versions.
Mesa 19.1.0 is now available
The long-delayed major update to the Linux graphics stack has parallel shader compiling for all drivers and many new GL extensions for AMD and Intel GPUs. There is also a whole lot of new Vulkan features added, many of which are specific to AMD GPUs. The two blocker-bugs which cased this release to be delayed are finally resolved.
New Kernels: 4.4.181, 4.9.181, 4.14.125, 4.19.50, 5.1.9 - just two days after the last kernels releases. And as always, You Must Upgrade NOW
It's not unreasonable to wonder if Greg Kroah-Hartman simply put "All users of the $stablebranch kernel series must upgrade" in a template at some point and simply forgot to remove it. This is the fourth release in a row carrying this scary demand.
Linux Kernel 5.0.15 broke Support for all Older Bluetooth Devices and there's no fix in sight
If you are using older or cheaper newer Bluetooth devices and you are wondering why they no longer work: it is because of a change in the kernel's way of aligning encryption keys which prevents devices using earlier versions of the Bluetooth standard from connecting.
Xfce4 Panel Stopwatch Plugin v0.3.1 released
The Xfce team is proud to announce a new version of the gtk3 port of the "stopwatch" panel plugin. This marks yet another milestone on Xfce's march towards a stable 4.14 release which is still on schedule to be released mid-August 2019.
New Kernels: 4.14.124, 4.19.49, 5.1.8 and 5.2-RC4. And as always, You Must Upgrade NOW
Stable branch kernels 4.14.124, 4.19.49 and 5.1.8 as well as a release candidate 5.2-rc4 for the upcoming 5.2 was released today. The kernels come with the "All users must upgrade" notice which has been attached to all the latest kernel releases. And there is, as always no indication or even a hint as to why we "must" upgrade NOW.
Ice Window Manager 1.5.5 released
Another minor point release in the 1.5.x branch of the IceWM window-manager is released. A few updated translation files is the only change since version 1.5.4 so there's not very much to get excited about if you are using the development-branch.
Kdenlive video editor version 19.04.2 released
A total of 77 bugs are fixed in the second minor release in the 19.04 series of the powerful and feature-rich KDE video editor Kdenlive. Compositing issues, misbehaving markers and grouping inconsistencies are among the more noticeable bugs fixed. There are also some improvements specific to the Wintoddler version.
Mesa 19.1.0 RC 5 and stable branch 19.0.6 available, 19.1.0 final is delayed
The who blocker bugs which has been in Mesa 19.1.0 release candidates since RC2 remain open. The latest stable branch release 19.0.6 was meant to be the last of the 19.0.x series but 19.1.0 is delayed due to the release-blocking bugs so there will be one last stable 19.0.7-release before the final version of 19.1.0 becomes available.
South Korean Government and Army will be switching to Linux
Both the South Korean government and it's army will be switching to a Linux distribution called Hamoni which is adopted to Korean conditions. Harmoni is essentially on Linux Mint with some custom PPA repositories on top. Most South Korean people do not use Linux but those in the government, military and educational institutions will soon enjoy the benefits of free software.
KDE will soon get a light-weight WYSIWIG markdown viewer
KDE's Google Summer of Code student Geon Son is working on a lightweight markdown WYSIWIG kpart built using pure C++, Boost and Qt. There's existing solutions based on webview but these have poor support for printing and other use-cases that go beyond simple web display.
Most popular LinuxReviews articles in May 2019
Looking at out statistics for the month of May reveals that much of our readership isn't what we expected it to be. Perhaps it's a failure on our part, or there's simply not that many people interested in GNU/Linux compared to one other subject we occasionally mention in our news coverage.
Krita 4.2.1 released
The first minor bug-fix release for the best digital painting program comes just one week after the big 4.2-release. That version brought some real performance-improvements and many new features. This minor point release is just a bug-fix release. Most importantly, the undo-list is no longer allowed to grow indefinitely - something which cased Krita to become slow after longer painting-sessions.
Firefox to offer "Tracking Protection" by default
The Mozilla Corporation urges you to hand them all your personal data for your "convenience" because handing all your password over to them is such "convenient". Having actual privacy-tools would be preferable to remote-control capabilities, telemetry and other spyware present in modern Firefox versions.
New Kernels, 5.1.7, 5.0.21 and 4.19.48 are released
This is the last release in the 5.0.x series. It's over, Linux 5.0 is done. The new kernels have the same "you must upgrade" notice as the previous kernels. Seeing that message attached to each new kernel-release is becoming a trend.
Sunmi's fabulous song "Gashina" has reached 100 million views on YouTube
Sunmi's had a string of great songs topping the charts the last few years including "24 Hours", "Heroine", "Siren" and "Gashina". Most of them have been seen by about 50 million views. It turns out "Gashina" is the most popular of her hits and it has now passed the 100 million view milestone.
Mageia 7 RC released
The Mageia Community have released what they hope will be the last release candidate before the final version of Mageia 7. It's got updated packages of everything from the kernel to mesa to Xfce. We tried it out and while it's nice it needs more polish.
The Tor network is either under attack by or very popular in Iran
The traffic-analysis resistant anonymizing Tor network's "user-base" Iran exploded the last two weeks bringing the amount of supposed users up from barely measurable to about 800.000 "people". There's roughly 83 million people in that country which would mean that one in a hundred people in Iran decided to use Tor all their web browsing the last two weeks.