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LinuxReviews News Archive

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Dropbox will again support filesystems beyond ext4
The cloud storage service Dropbox dropped Linux support for all filesystems except ext4 back in 2018. The latest 77.3.127 beta version of their client lists support for a variety of other commonly used Linux filesystems - but there is no mention of nfs or ntfs.
GNU Parallel Ryugu released
Ole Tange has released another update to the GNU Parallel command-line utility for spawning multiple jobs in parallel. The new version promises 40% faster start-up on GNU/Linux systems by using a more efficient method of determining the parent shell. There's also bug fixes and manual page updates.
The BROWSER Act could give Americans Privacy Protections similar to those the EUs GDPR legislation guarantees
The BROWSER Act has little to do with web browsers and everything to do with preventing big technology from collecting personal information without consent. Senator Marsha Blackburn has been trying pass this bill which would give US citizens data protection rights similar to what the fascist unions GDPR legislation provides since 2017. She is attempting to get the bill passed on a regular basis.
SUSE has appointed Melissa Di Donato as new CEO
Swedish-owned Linux vendor SUSE, who controls the OpenSUSE "community" distribution, has named Melissa Di Donato as their new CEO. She has a background as a COO at SAP. That company's cloud revenue grew by 40% year-over-year according to their Q2 2019 quarterly statement. The vast majority of SAPs cloud services are built on SUSE technologies.
Mesa 19.1.3 released
The latest version of the Mesa graphics stack has a long list of fixes for Linux Vulkan users. There's also been some fixes for the NIR shader compiler backend. This is a bug-fix release, major updates like support for AMD Navi GPUs will not arrive until Mesa 19.2 which is scheduled to be release late August.
GOOGLE ENGINEER BLOWS WHISTLE: "Are we going to just let the biggest tech companies decide who wins every election from now on?"
Project Veritas has made another expose on Google's censorship and bias. A Senior Google Engineer is on camera stating that big tech is "dangerous" and "taking sides". The US congress recently held hearings on Google's search engine bias and censorship where Google executives assured the US congress that there is no such thing. Google engineer Greg Coppola thinks otherwise.
Biostar BIOSes enabling PCIe Gen 4 on AMD 400-series Motherboards are available
Taiwanese computer giant Biostar has released BIOS updates for several 400 series motherboards which enables fourth generation PCI Express on the first x16 slow as well as the M.2 NVMe slot if a Ryzen 3000 CPU is used.
Huawei is moving to promote their EROFS read-only filesystem from the kernel staging area
Huawei's read-only filesystem EROFS has been stuck in the kernel staging area for almost a year. It is in many ways similar to Squashfs; it's function is to provide a efficient space-saving read-only filesystem. Developer Gao Xiang feels that 10+ million Huawei phone installations is enough to demonstrate that EROFS is mature enough to be granted a proper place in the mainline kernel. We failed testing the Chinese technology.
Linux Kernel 5.3rc1 and new Stable branch Kernels released
The Linux Kernel team have released stable branch updates as well as the first release candidate for Linux 5.3. There are some interesting IRQ related fixes for 5.2.2, 5.1.19 and 4.19.60 and not much interesting fixed in 4.14.134 and 4.9.186. Support for AMD Navi GPUs is biggest high-light in 5.3rc1.
VLC video player has gaping security hole and there's no fix available
The Germans have discovered that the latest stable 3.0.7.1 version of the VideoLAN media player has a head-based buffer over-read in the demux code for mkv containers. Simply opening a carefully crafted video file using the mkv container is enough to have evil code executed on the system. The vulnerability affects both GNU/Linux and Windows machines.
Windows users of KDE applications: Do not uninstall.exe
The KDE Project has issued a Security Advisory which states that removal of KDE software which was installed using non-default parameters can result in random user data being deleted. KDE-related "uninstall.exe" files created before Julty 10th, 2019 have this problem.
Thunar 1.8.8 released
The latest version of the powerful Thunar file manager for the leading Linux desktop environment Xfce fixes six bugs. There is also translation updates for seven languages. There is nothing new in terms of features, just small fixes in preparation for the launch of Xfce 4.14 stable.
It's over, Kubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish is EOL
The Ubuntu Linux distributions non-LTS releases are supported for nine months and then you're on your own. Their KDE flavored variant Kubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish was released October 18th 2018 which means that it's life is over, it's done and there will be no more package updates. Users will have to move on.
Xfce Image Viewer Ristretto 0.8.5 released
The latest version of the Ristretto image viewer fixes some memory leaks and some minor bugs. It is still based on GTK 2 and it is still too cumbersome to use as a general-purpose image viewer. The new version does not fix the very fundamental problems with this particular image viewer.
New Steam Clients Available with Faster Game Downloads
Valve has released both a new stable and a new beta version of their immoral Digital Rights Management riddled game store. The new clients have better logic for choosing what servers it's clients use to download games and updates which should result in faster downloads for those who happen to live close to one of their servers. This is good news for those willing to trade freedom for hours or weeks of temporary entertainment.
User-friendly XMPP client Kaidan 0.4.1 released
A major update to the simple and easy to use XMPP/Jabber messaging program Kaidan was released one week ago following one and a half year of hard development word. That long-awaited 0.4.0 release had the minor problem of not being able to connect to the Internet on some Linux distributions. Version 0.4.1 has fixed that bug as well as some other minor issues discovered after the 0.4.0 release. Kaidan is available for Linux, Android, macOS and Windows.
AMD Navi Support is merged into the upcoming Linux Kernel 5.3
Linux kernel creator and architect Linus Torvalds has accepted the proposed Direct Rendering Management code required for AMD Navi GPU support from DRM maintainer Dave Airlie and merged it into the Linux kernel git tree. This ensures that the upcoming 5.3 version of the Linux Kernel will support these new GPUs. Kernel support is required for the Vulkan and OpenGL support the upcoming 19.2 version of the Mesa graphics stack will have for the newly released AMD Navi GPUs.
KDE Connect now lets you connect your Mac to Android phones and Linux desktops
KDE Connect is a multi-platform project for securely synchronizing and controlling one device from another. It has so far been been limited to synchronization between Linux desktops and Android phones. This technology is now available to Mac and Windows users thanks to KDEs Summer of Code students Weixuan Xiao and Piyush Aggarwal.
Happy birthday KDE Plama 5
The current iteration of the most advanced GNU/Linux desktop environment is five year old today; KDE Plasma 5.0 was launched July 16th, 2014. KDE itself is much older, it's launch date of October 14th, 1996 makes it 22 years old. Plasma itself is also older with the first version being introduced with KDE 4 on 23rd October 2007 - nearly 12 years ago.
Microsoft's Terms of Service Updated to be even more Draconian
Microsoft just spammed us informing that they are updating their terms of service. Their new terms are even more big-brother like than their previous terms. Their e-mail spam claims that you agree them reading your e-mails and sharing the content with contractors and partners just by using any of their products. You should absolutely resist and close your Microsoft accounts and remove all traces of Microsoft software from computing devices in your vicinity.
AntiX 19 beta 2 released
AntiX is a systemd-free Linux distribution forked off Debian with IceWM as the default desktop environment. It is essentially Debian with a really light-weight default configuration. The current stable 17.4 release is based on Debian Stretch. AntiX 19 is based on the newly released Debian 10 Buster. There is not much new since the first AntiX 19 beta was released, there's some new themes, icons and wallpapers included in the default installation and that's about it. The difference between 17.4 and the 19-series is huge.
AMD Admits Ryzen 3000 Series CPUs are Broken, promises BIOS update
AMD claims to have figured out why their new Ryzen 3000 CPUs are unable to produce random data when the RDRAND instruction is called. They promise that a BIOS update will be made available shortly. This is good news for those who want to run modern Linux distributions or Windows games like Destiny 2 on these chips since it is currently impossible to use any software which takes advantage of the RDRAND instruction on AMDs flawed new CPUs.
Mozilla's Firefox 68 vs Firefox 68 from Fedora: No difference. At all.
Curiosity will sometime result in a complete waste of time and that's exactly what benchmarking Firefox 68 directly from Mozilla vs the Firefox 68 update shipped by Fedora in that distributions repositories. There is absolutely no difference.
Kdenlive 19.04.3 released with a whole lot of bug-fixes
The latest stable version of the best free software video editor has a really long list of bug-fixes, 12 of which were causing crashes. Cursor tools now work as they should when hovering a timeline and the clip selection code, which previously would cause lags when working with lots of clips, is now a whole lot faster.
Linux Kernel 5.2 can't into Chromium VAAPI accelerated video on Intel i915
The annoyance when you just want to watch Oh My Girls new music video and you find that you can't because your shiny new kernel's got a broken driver for your Intel iGPU can be avoided by either not upgrading kernel 5.2 or by not using Chromium the VAAPI accelerated video patch.
Web Browser Showdown: Firefox 68 vs Chromium 75 vs Firefox Nightly
Chromium is the fastest web browser on Linux when it comes to everything and anything graphics-intensive. Is is not that clear-cut when it comes to overall performance and real-world use. What is clear is that both Firefox and Chromium appear to get slower with each new release and that is specially true if they are running on Intel hardware.
Finance Manager KMyMoney v5.0.5 Released
30 bugs have been eradicated since the last release of the double-entry bookkeeping program KMyMoney which is self-described as "the BEST Personal Finance Manager for FREE Users". It is similar to the more well-known commercial product Quicken. KMyMoney is cross-platform and the most important bugfix in this release is only for macOS users who could previously not open saved files.
GnuPG 2.2.17 released with An Easy Fix for the current Keyserver Signature Spam Problem
The GnuPG hackers have released a new version of GnuPG with a simple fix for the not-ongoing key-server signature spam problem: The new version will simply ignore all key-signatures received from key-servers. There is also a new "self-sigs-only" import option.
FreeBSD 11.3 released
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team have updated the ELF toolchain and the clang, llvm and compiler-rt utilities as well as OpenSSL and other system libraries. Desktop environments have also been updated. Devil OS 11.3 ships KDE Plasma 5.15.3 and GNOME 3.28 for those who use it as a desktop OS.
Firefox 68 esr released with better Dark Mode, redesigned addons dashboard and more enterprise-policies
This is both a regular release and a Extended Support Release which makes it more important than other releases since some distributions tend to use the ESR release for years. It is also the basis for Firefox re-brands like GNU IceCat.