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Jump to navigationJump to search- 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.
- Python 3.9 Is ReleasedThe latest version of the Python programming language has a long list of new features and a lot of optimizations. Working with dictionaries, time-zones, strings and a lot more has become easier with new functionality and syntax simplification.
- The Fedora For Smartphones Is Being Revived With A PinePhone EditionThe Fedora mobility team is back after ten years of inactivity. They are currently developing a Fedora Smartphones edition for the PinePhone smartphone. Future versions could add support for other smartphones such as the Librem 5 and the OnePlus 5.
- Mesa Developers Debate Using Rust Code In MesaThe Mesa code-base does not have any code written in the Rust programming language. That could change. Alyssa Rosenzweig has taken the initiative to allow parts of Mesa to be written in Rust.
- Four Malicious Packages In The NPM Repository With Names Similar To Popular Packages Were Phoning User Data HomeBe careful what you
npm install. Four packages in the NPM repository, published by a single author, where caught sending device fingerprint information, IP and geo-location data to a public GitHub page upon installation. All of them used package names similar to popular and widely used NPM packages. - Free Software Foundation Turns 35The Free Software foundation was founded 35 years ago - on October 4th, 1985. The FSF plans on celebrating with a live video event broadcast from fsf.org on Friday afternoon. FSF is one of the few organizations that fight for true end-user freedom, not just vague concepts like "open source".
- Linux 5.9-rc8 Is Out With PCIe IDs for AMDs Upcoming Sienna Cichlid GPUsWe have examined the latest Linux 5.9 release candidate and found that it is actually possible to use it to boot and start X or Wayland on machines with Intel processors using Intel integrated graphics with this latest kernel release-candidate. That is an improvement since the total train-wreck disaster released as Linux 5.9-rc7.
- GIMP Starts Offering Nightly GIMP 3.0 Pre-Release Builds, But Only For WindowsThe GNU Image Manipulation community is rapidly moving forward to a big 3.0 release, using GTK+3, with a lot of development going on behind the scenes. It may not appear that way since the 2.10.x branch releases have been slow incremental releases with a few big and small features added for years now. Big things have been happening and the GIMP community is highlighting that by offering nightly snapshot builds of the upcoming GIMP 3.0 release. There's currently only nightly packages Windows users. Nightly Flatpak releases for GNU/Linux users are planned.
- Richard Matthew Stallman is Still Monitoring the Attacks on Software FreedomWatching without saying much, for now... Richard Stallman (RMS) is exploring new ways to deal with new threats to software freedom, even if it’s done mostly behind the scenes (dodging those hyenas who defamed him ‘out of office’ at MIT).
- KDE Launches MyKDE Identity ServiceThe KDE community has launched a second attempt at a "unified login system" for all KDE websites called MyKDE. The new system will replace the old "KDE Identity" "central account manager" because it was "severely outdated and hindering the upgrade of several other systems". KDE community members can use the new MyKDE identity system to login to KDE Wiki's and it will soon work on most of KDE's websites.
- Nmap 7.90 Is Released With 1,200 New Fingerprints And 70+ Bugs SquashedThe number one free software port scanning tool, as seen in movies like The Matrix Reloaded, Ocean's 8, Oliver Stone's 2016 Snowden film, Dredd, Elysium, Fantastic Four, The Bourne Ultimatium, Yippee Ki-Yay!, The Listening and Battle Royale, just got a lot better at identifying remote systems.
- AMDVLK v-2020.Q3.6 Is Released With Four Game-Specific FixesThe latest AMDVLK driver has one new Vulkan extension and game-specific fixes for Doom VFR, Baldur's Gate 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2. AMDVLK's performance is still worse, in some cases far worse, than what the RADV Mesa Vulkan driver from Mesa 20.2.0 offers. AMDVLK v-2020.Q3.6 does offer better compatibility so it may be worth installing it side-by-side the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver if you own a AMD graphics card.
- Linux Desktop Market Share Nearly Halved During September 2020Operating system statistics from NetMarketShare has GNU/Linux market share tumbling from 3.57% in July to 2.69% in August to 1.47% in September 2020. Meanwhile, the Steam Hardware Survey shows a modest +0.05% increase in September.
- Decentralized Social Networks vs. The TrollsDevelopers and users of the somewhat decentralized and very poorly connected collection of social networks called the "Fediverse" gathered at this years "ActivityPub Conference" last week. Derek Caelin presented an interesting video called Decentralized Social Networks vs. The Trolls at that conference. It is highly educational and worth a watch if you think free speech, traditional moral values, milk, Korean pop music, random hand gestures used for hundreds of years and being against child pornography being openly broadcast on Netflix is "hate speech" and "right wing extremism" that should be censored. It is also interesting if you just want to learn about the mind-set of the people with that kind of world-view.
- Linux Desktop Users Who Use Qt or KDE Software May Want To Hard-Code QT AUTO SCREEN SCALE FACTOR and XCURSOR SIZEPrograms using recent KDE Frameworks versions combined with recent Qt version like to randomly apply display scaling. The result is that some programs have their fonts and/or icons (depending no KDE Frameworks and Qt version) scaled while others are not scaled. Programs using Qt 5.15.1 also enjoy ignoring the systems mouse pointer size. One solution for anyone using anything using the ridiculously buggy recent Qt and KDE versions is to set
QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORto either 0 or 1, depending on your preference, andXCURSOR_SIZEhas an environment variable. - KDE Launches Plasma Widget Tutorial WebsiteThe KDE team has launched a new tutorial portal for developers and non-developers alike who want to learn how to make widgets for the KDE Plasma desktop environment. The site has many examples and a friendly introduction KDE Frameworks API. It s a nice resource if you want to make your first widget program and you know a little or even no C++.
- AMD ROCm 3.8 Is ReleasedThe latest AMD Radeon Open Compute graphics stack offers absolutely dismal OpenCL performance in the LuksMark benchmark compared to the Mesa Clover OpenCL library from the newly released Mesa 20.2.0 graphics stack. It does have one thing going for it: It does support OpenCL 2.0, something Mesa Clover does not.
- YouTube Regrets - from Corbett ReportMozilla has launched a new campaign against YouTube called "YouTube Regrets". Investigative journalist James Corbett reports that their motives may be a bit questionable and points out some moral issues with Mozilla's desire to control and dictate what you can and can't see on the Internet. It seems a bit odd than an organization that claims to be for a free and open Internet would be in favor of something like that.
- Rockit Girl Wishes You A Very Happy Chuseok Harvest Festival HolidayToday is the first day of the South Korean Chuseok (추석) harvest festival holiday. Many South Korean pop and rock idols have made public statements wishing their fans a very happy Chuseok, including the lovely and very talented Han LeeSeul (한이슬) from Rockit Girl. We wish you a very happy Chuseok (추석) harvest holiday and we hope your days will be filled with lots of joy and happiness.
- Fake News Detector For Firefox Is Coming After The Harvest Festival HolidayThe excellent "Fake News Detector" web browser extension is currently only available for the NAVER whale and Microsoft Edge web browsers. "Fake News Detector" developer Suh Kwangho (서광호) from the SoundsGreat Research and Development department told us that this will change after the Korean Chuseok (추석) harvest festival holiday when a Firefox version will become available. He also told us about the motivation for creating the "Fake News Detector" and SoundsGreat's future plans for it.
- GNU grep 3.5 Is ReleasedThe latest version of GNU grep changes three output messages and the
--files-without-match(-L) has been changed so it succeeds when a file is selected, not when a file is listed. There's also six bug-fixes. - Mesa 20.2.0 Is ReleasedThere is a lot to of new features in the latest Linux graphics stack. Mesa 20.2 offers Vulkan 1.2 support, OpenGL 4.5 support for llvmpipe, faster NIR performance and the ACO shader compiler for Vulkan on AMD hardware is now the default shader compiler for the AMD RADV Vulkan driver.
- Linux 5.9-rc7 Is A Total Disaster On Machines With Intel GraphicsThe latest Linux 5.9 release candidate won't even let you start the X display server on machines with integrated Intel graphics. Running Linux on machines with integrated Intel graphics has been problematic since Linux 5.0. All those problems remained an issue with Linux 5.9-rc6. Linux 5.9-rc7 takes it one step further, it won't even let you get into a graphical environment without crashing the
i915kernel display driver for Intel GPU chips. It is a complete and utter disaster for people using integrated Intel graphics. - Linux 5.9 Will Be Delayed One WeekThe Linux 5.9 release cycle has not gone as smoothly as earlier release cycles. There has been some unfortunate virtual memory management issues and slab corruption issues during the 5.9 release cycle which are, hopefully, fixed in 5.9 rc7. Linus Torvalds wants to delay the final 5.9 release just to be sure those are gone. He neglected to mention that 5.9 rc7 introduced a regression that prevents certain Intel integrated graphics chips from being used as more than coasters.
- The GNU Operating System Turns 37Honorary Doctor Richard Stallman announced his total plan to create a free Unix-line operating system called GNU 37 years ago today. "I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu's Not Unix), and give it away free(1) to everyone who can use it.". The result of his hard work is the family of operating systems we now call GNU/Linux, or, in most cases, just Linux.
- From the FSF Bulletin: Trial by proprietary softwareThere has been so much to worry about during the COVID-19 pandemic, even just within the category of technology policy. At the FSF, our role is to worry specifically about the impact of software on human freedom. Software can be a tremendous tool for solving social and scientific problems, but only when the terms of its distribution and use allow everyone to inspect how it works, share copies of it, modify it for their own purposes, and share those improvements or tweaks with others.
- 42.9 GB Of Microsoft Source Code Leaked: Historicans Can Now Study The Source Code For MS-Dos 3.3 To Windows XPThe mother-lode of Microsoft source code hit the web today. A 42.9 GiB torrent with MS-DOS 3.3, MS-DOS 6, Windows NT 3.5 & 5, Windows CE 6 & 7, Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP, and some XBox code, can now be acquired from your local friendly BitTorrent site.
- Korean Trot Singer Kang Hye Yeon's Latest Cover Brings Attention To Lonely Single MothersMany single mothers struggle with trying to make ends meet because their husband left them with a child to raise on their own. South Korean pop sensation Kang Hye Yeon brings awareness to women in this very unfortunate situation with her new wonderfully performed cover of the tradition Korean trot song "Golden Grass - Mother's Song" (금잔디 - 엄마의 노래).
- Frictional Games Has Released Source Code For Two Amnesia Games As FOSS Under The GNU GPLv3Swedish Frictional Games AB has released the source code for their Amnesia: The Dark Descent (2010) and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs (2013) games as free open source software under the GNU GPLv3 license. The game assets have not been made available under any free license so the full games remain proprietary software.
- Vkd3d 1.2 Is ReleasedThe Wine team has released a new major version of their vkd3d DirectX 12 to Vulkan translation layer library used by Wine. Two years of hard work allows this vkd3d release to let you launch Mario Kart DX12. That is an improvement since vkd3d 1.1. You can now see the start menu, but you can't actually play the game. There's also support for tessellation shaders, stream output and a now publicly available libvkd3d-shader library in vkd3d 1.2.
