News/5
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Jump to navigationJump to search- Nvidia Swallows ARM For $40 BillionAmerican computer giant Nvidia has announced that it will, as long rumored, be gobbling up the British chip designer Arm in a $40 billion deal with now former Arm owner SoftBank Group. Nvidia promises to build a "state-of-the-art AI supercomputer" using Arm processors.
- Improved Lenovo Laptop Hotkey Support Coming To Linux 5.10The Chinese Lenovo Group promised to Linux certify their laptops and make laptops with Linux available in a big announcement back in July. They have been offering one ThinkPad X1 model with Fedora pre-installed since mid-August. Linux 5.10 will have support for four additional hotkeys on that one laptops Lenovo sells with Fedora pre-installed thanks to RedHat developer Hans de Goede.
- Having A Hobby Will Make You HappySouth Korean pop idol Umji from GFriend has tested the latest in South Korean artificial intelligence technology using the NAVER Wave smart-speaker. It can't answer questions in any meaningful way and it won't play music when you ask it to but it can randomly and out-of-the-blue provide useful advice like "Having A Hobby Will Make You Happy".
- AMDVLK 2020.Q3.5 Alternative AMD Vulkan Driver Released With Four Game Specific Fixes And Sub-RADV PerformanceAMD has released a new version of their special "open source" Vulkan driver with game-specific fixes for Detroit: Become Human, Tropico 4, Doom 2016 and GTA IV. Vulkan API compliance is updated to Vulkan 1.2.152. Performance is overall slightly worse than what the latest Mesa RADV Vulkan driver provides and magnitudes worse in very specific GPU stress tests.
- The KDE Akademy Awards Winners 2020The KDE software project held their yearly Akademy event from September 4th to 12th. They ended the event by presenting Akademy Awards to notable developers and contributors within the KDE software community. Here are this year's winners.
- What sort of laws would give us real privacy?Honorary Doctor Richard Stallman argues that the surveillance imposed on us today "far exceeds that of the Soviet Union". He says laws against personal data collection is required to restore actual freedom in industrialized nations.
- Krita Paint Program Will Get SVG Mesh Gradients, Storyboard Docker, MyPaint Brush Engine And Dynamic Fill Layers Thanks To GSoC StudentsFour students have been working hard on new functionality for the already superb Krita painting program as part of Google's Summer of Code program this summer. Support for dynamic fill layers using Disney's SeExpr expression language has made it into the Krita 4.4 branch scheduled to be released later this month. Krita 5.0, coming next year, will additionally have support for mesh gradients, storyboard and the MyPaint brush engine thanks to these students hard work.
- Huawei Announces OpenHarmony Project With A BSD-Licensed HarmonyOS Source Code ReleaseChinese telecommunications giant Huawei has been working on a scalable operating system since at least 2013. Huawei has now released the source code for HarmonyOS under the 3 clause BSD license has part of their new OpenHarmony project. The new operating systems "liteos" kernel is currently limited to devices with just 128 MiB RAM. A closed-source Harmony OS 2.0 beta version with support for devices with up to 4 GiB memory will become available in December with OpenHarmony source-code coming in April 2021. OpenHarmony development boards are available for around $50 plus shipping.
- It Is OK To Not Use Firefox If You Are For Free SoftwareI am seeing more and more people advocating for Mozilla's Firefox browser. I was a fan of the browser myself, using since version 1.5 probably, although it seems like a few decades now. I loved it, until it become a little heavy, and I looked at other browsers. In that time I used mostly 2, qutebrowser and Brave. Both are FLOSS browsers.
- 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 a 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 often enough to create a unique fingerprint that can be used to track you across the web. The larger the site, the more like it is that it tries to track you using dirty tricks.
