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Web browser showdown: Chrome 74 vs Chromium 73 vs Firefox 66
Which web browser has the performance advantage on GNU/Linux? Here are some benchmarks of Firefox 66.0.5, Chromium 73.0.3683 and Chrome 74.0.3729 on two Intel-based laptops and a AMD desktop which will help you choose which one is better for you.
The Combined Performance Penalty of Intel CPU bugs Zombieload, Meltdown, Spectre and L1TF
'Zombieload is just the latest of a torrent of security holes in Intel CPUs found the last year. Each has required mitigations both at the firmware and kernel level and the sum of these is adding up. Some workloads are barely affected, others have a very real, measurable and noticeable slowdown.
Minor flaw found in Linux's RDS implementation
The Linux kernel was quietly patched with a fix in it's RDS implementation in version 5.0.8 and since there's a minor chance this could, in theory, be used to do a Denial of Service attack on a server it is now assigned CVE-2019-11815.
The South Korean government is to switching to Linux
The South Korean Ministry of the Interior and Safety announced that the South Korean government will start test-running Linux PCs and gradually roll out Linux across the government if no problems arise. The decision appears to be concerns regarding the cost of maintaining and using Windows 7 after free support ends in 2020.
Linux Kernel Developers are leveraging GPU vendors into Doing the Right Thing
The Linux kernel is mostly free as in freedom but there are proprietary closed-source binary firmware blobs used for GPU drivers, network drivers and other drivers. These binary blobs are inherently evil. Distributions like Guix use a "libre" kernel without them at a price: No binary GPU-blob means no hardware video decoding, no OpenGL, no Vulkan, no nothing. And WIFI drivers can't even connect you to a wireless network if you do not submit to the binary blobs.
New Xfce desktop, appfinder, configuration tool and panel released
A new version of Thunar was just the beginning of a rain of new Xfce desktop components begin released this weekend. There's a new version of xfce4-panel, xfce4-power-manager, libxfce4ui, xfce4-appfinder, xfdesktop, tumbler, xfce4-settings, xfconf and the window manager xfwm. There's many improvements and bug-fixes across the board. Most immediately noticeable is a fix for desktop icons on multiple monitor setups, the previous version limited them to just one monitor.
The Xfce team is proud to announce the release of Thunar 1.8.5
A new stable release of the lightweight yet powerful file manager Thunar is now available. It is primarily meant for the GTK-based Xfce desktop environment but can be used with on any desktop. Version 1.8.5 has many bug fixes and a whole lot of translation updates.
June 11th, 2004: New Kernel Crash-Exploit discovered
A Linux kernel bug allows a simple C program crash the kernel, effectively locking the whole system. The security hole affects both 2.4.2x and 2.6.x kernels on the x86 and x86_64 architectures.
HOWTO make Linux run blazing fast (again) on Intel CPUs
It's just been one security disaster after another for Intel the last few years. Meltdown, Spectre variant after variant and this week the "Microarchitectural Data Sampling" aka Zombieload attack have all required performance-degrading fixes and workarounds. There is no way around turning hyperthreading off to be safe from MDS/Zombieload and this is a rather high performance-price to pay. So what if you don't want to?
Steam Client Beta 1557957375 released with several Linux improvements
Valve released a new beta version of their Steam store on May 15th. It has quite a few general improvements and some Linux-specific ones. Steam In-Home Streaming has been re-named Steam Remote Play and it can now be used anywhere as long as the network connection is good enough.
Microarchitectural Data Sampling: The Latest Side-Channel Vulnerability In Intel CPUs
Another CPU side-channel attack vector similar to meltdown and spectre was disclosed this week. Microarchitectural Data Sampling ("MDS") allows software running on a machine to get access to potentially sensitive data it shouldn't be able to access. MDS can be abused to expose data from fill buffers, store buffers and load ports. New kernels with patches addressing this are available and everyone using Intel CPUs should upgrade.
Wine 4.0.1 is now available
The Wine team have announced an new maintenance release for the Wine compatibility layer which allows you to run Windows games and applications on Linux. This is a minor bugfix release which addresses a total of 44 bugs. There's also updated translations for Sinhala and Tamil.
Valve's released Proton 4.2-4 with RAGE 2 crash fix
The new version of the Valve's WINE version for Steam updates DXVK to v1.1.1, includes Vulkan support for No Man's Sky and it's also git a fix for Space Engineers.
Second Mesa 19.1.0 release candidate is now available with Radeon and Intel fixes and two bugs blocking a final release
Mesa 19.1.0 is scheduled to be released at the end of May but this could be delayed due to regressions shown by the piglit and cts-runner tests used to determine if there are bigger regressions in new code.
Videos from the LibrePlanet 2019 conference are now available
The Free Software Foundation has now made videos of the talks and lectures at the LibrePlanet 2019 conference, held March 23rd - 24th of this year, available for your viewing pleasure. Over 40 speakers were recorded which amounts to about 24 hours of video.
Laptops with Intel-based 10nm Ice Lake CPUs to be available mid-November
The i915 graphics driver for Ice Lake's Gen11 graphics is considered stable as of upcoming kernel version 5.2 and MESA git has tagged Gen11 graphics support as complete for both the i965 OpenGL driver and the ANV Vulkan driver. This means that Intel engineers have been working with Ice Lake samples for quite some time.
KDE Plasma has a new notification system ready
The KDE Plasma notification code has been completely rewritten from the ground up. It's now got a "Do Not Disturb" mode, ability to show "critical" notification in full-screen applications, intelligent history with grouping, better notification for file operations, multi-monitor support and advanced configuration in the "System settings" page.
D9VK 0.11 released with fixes and improvements
The second release of this Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9 is now available and comes less than a week after this project's initial release. There are performance improvements and bug fixes for those who are willing to do some tinkering in order to player older Windows-titles on Linux using WINE.
GNUnet 0.11.4 released
The GNU project's secure anonymous peer to peer file sharing network GNUnet has made another release for testers who are eager to try their vision of a secure overlay network for a secure and privacy-respecting Internet.
Gnome Commander 1.10.1 released with updated German and Spanish translations
The new version of the graphical "two-panel" file manager adds a menu entry for (un)selecting files with the same file name suffix, more translations and two bug-fixes. You may be familiar with it's style of doing things if you ever used the MS-DOS program Norton Commander or the still best ever CLI file-manager GNU Midnight Commander.
Kdenlive 19.04.1 released and available
The latest version of the best timeline video editor for Linux fixes 39 bugs, some of which were bad. The unacceptable timeline preview problems and rendering issues plaguing the 19.x.x series are fixed in this version. Users of the 19.x series are encouraged to upgrade.
Second print edition of "The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction" by William Shotts is now available in stores
The book was initially published in 2009 and has been gradually updated and modernized since. It covers subjects from What is the Shell to Regular Expressions, Text Processing and many other subjects.
Linux 5.1.1 released
The first point-release of Linux kernel 5.1 was released today without anything major standing out. There are some Bluetooth fixe, scsi fixes, some USB fixes and some small bugfixes for a few staging-drivers.
GNOME 3.32.2 released
3.32.2 is another bugfix in the stable GNOME series. There's specially many fixes for the Epiphany web browser and GNOME Shell.
GNU Guix 1.0.0 released
The GNU Project's Linux distribution Guix has reached the v1.0.0 milestone after seven years of development of this distribution and 35 years of developing the GNU tools that made it and all the other distributions like Fedora and Ubuntu possible. It is a great milestone for hard-core free as in software freedom enthusiasts.
Users of older Lenovo Ideapad and Yoga laptops watch out: Newer kernels will break your WIFI
Many older Lenovo laptops like the Lenovo Y560 had a hardware slider used to turn WIFI on and off. The Linux kernel firmware driver used for this slider was later re-used for all the newer models without a slider. A blacklist of machines without a hardware slider solved the problem of separating those with a hardware slider from those without. This blacklist has now been turned into a blank whitelist - which breaks WIFI on all the machines with a hardware slider for turning WIFI on and off.
Mesa 19.1.0 rc1 released with many new OpenGL features
Mesa 19.1 was branched off 4 days ago and RC1 is now available for those wanting to test the future GNU/Linux graphics stack. This release is specially interesting for those interested in Vulkan as many new extensions have become available.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 with focus on "the cloud" is now available
IBMs subsidiary Red Hat announced the general availability of RHEL 8 at the Red Hat Summin in Boston on May 7th. The new version of this server-focused distribution targets cloud customers with improved container support and "Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles" which automates a lot of common configuration tasks.
RDRAND stops returning random values on older AMD CPUs after suspend
Systemd versions past 239 will fail to start or restart any service after a suspend to RAM on the AX-XXXX and EX-XXXX series AMD APUs after they have been suspended. The root cause of this bug is a hardware bug in these AMD CPUs who will happily return -1 (0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF) instead of a random number after they have been suspended.
Linux 5.1 released after 13k code commits since 5.0
Linux 5.1 is now available with new hardware support, new ACPI support and support for HDCP 2.2 on Intel platforms as well as Spectre-related optimizations.
Web browser showdown May 2019: Who's the fastest, Chromium vs Firefox
Which web browser is the fastest and snappiest on GNU/Linux? Here's some extensive testing of Firefox and Chromium both with out of the box settings and performance-tuned settings for better performance.
Mozilla certificate screw-up disables all extensions, including those installed in people's browsers
Someone forgot to renew a security-certificate and it is currently impossible to download or update extensions in Firefox. Worse, many people are reporting that extensions they already have installed are disabled thanks to this blunder.
GNU Compiler Collection 9.1 released with OpenRISC and AMD Zen support
The latest version of the popular compiler used by most GNU/Linux distributions has a D language front-end and a back-end for Radeon GCN GPU targets. 9.1 is considered the first "stable" version of GCC in the ninth series although distributions like Fedora 30 were already using 9.0.
Fedora 30 released with GNOME 3.32, GCC 9 and LUKS2 for disk encryption
This latest Fedora release has Linux kernel 5.0, Mesa 19 and a lot of other updated packages compared to the previous release. It is now available in Workstation (GNOME), KDE, XFCE4, LxQt and a server flavor.
Free racing game SuperTuxKart version 1.0 released
The Mario Kart inspired racing-game SuperTuxKart has reached the 1.0 milestone after 12 years of development. New to version 1.0 is a networked multiplayer mode which works on LANs and servers on the Internet including ranked servers ran by the SuperTuxKart team.
Xfce 4.14 scheduled for release mid-August 2019
The popular traditional-looking GNU/Linux desktop environment has not seen a stable release since 2015. The developers have been working hard on the next version since that time and it is close to being ready.
Xubuntu 19.04 codenamed Disco Dingo is now available
Xubuntu 19.04 codenamed Disco Dingo is now available
Dell Launches "budget friendly" Ubuntu-Loaded Precision Laptop Starting At $700+ USD
Dell has had some more expensive Developer Edition laptop offerings in the XPS series for some time. They are now expanding with more budget-oriented Dell Precision 3540 Linux-laptops starting at seven hundred dollars.
Richard Stallman takes on Switzerland
The Free Software Foundation has announced that Richard Stallman, the creator of the GNU Project and the father of modern GNU/Linux distributions, will be speaking at an undisclosed location in Bienne, Switzerland on May 15, 2019.
2007-02-08: Tor 0.1.2.7-alpha is out
"This is the seventh development snapshot for the 0.1.2.x series. It makes rate limiting much more comfortable for servers, along with a huge pile of other bugfixes.