Debian: Rejections, LTS Work, and Bugfixes

• Thorsten Alteholz: My Debian Activities in February 2021

  FTP master This month I accepted 162 and rejected 28 packages, which is again a small increase compared to last month. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 291. Debian LTS This was my eightieth month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.

• RCBW 21.9 – jwiltshire.org.uk

  A recent upload of electrum suffers from the serious bug #981374. On the face of it this is just a missing package dependency: can you help with testing and preparing an updated package to fix this? You don’t need to be a Debian Developer to get stuck into this one!

Videos and Shows: KDE Community Edition PinePhone and This Week in Linux

• KDE Community Edition PinePhone Unboxing and First Try! - YouTube

  In this video I'm "unboxing" (or, rather, showing the box and its contents) of the pinephone, and trying it for my first time!

• This Week in Linux 141: GRUB 2 Security Flaw, Linux Mint to Force Updates?, Valve’s Steam Link

  On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’re going to try something different with the show. Let me know what you think of the changes. This episode is completely stacked with exciting news, we’ve got a ton of Distro News from Ubuntu, openSUSE, Linux Mint, SystemRescue, IPFire, and even Linux From Scratch. A vulnerability was found in GRUB 2 that lets someone bypass Secure Boot so we’ll talk about that and just how bad is it? The EU announced some great news related to Right to Repair. Valve has announced that Steam Link is now available on Linux and it’s a real game changer. We’ve also got some media production news to check out this week from Blender, Ardour and a new synthesizer called Vital. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

Hands-On with Raspup on Raspberry Pi 4: Puppy Linux for Tinkerers

If you never heard of Raspup before, let me tell you that it’s a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution built from the Woof-CE build system that was originally developed by Barry Kauler, the creator of Puppy Linux, and binary compatible with Raspbian (the official Raspberry Pi OS). As such, Raspup is a Puppy Linux port for Raspberry Pi. Raspup was created by Michael Amadio and it’s designed to run on ARMv7l hardware, specifically on the Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 1, Raspberry Pi 2, Raspberry Pi 3, Raspberry Pi 3+, and Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computers (SBCs).

Desktop Software: Thunar 4.16.4, Kate Themes, and XDG

• Thunar 4.16.4 Is Released

  The latest version of the Thunar file manager for the Xfce desktop environment has six bug-fixes and updated translations for four languages.

• Cross Platform Light & Dark Themes and Icons

  On the most Unices that use X11/Wayland and therefore are capable of running the full Plasma Desktop the state of light & dark themes and the accompanied icon themes is really good for KDE Frameworks based application. Just take a look at these two screenshots of a light and dark mode Kate running on GNU Linux/X11 & Plasma Desktop.

• Task-based menus for a file

  Just throwing this out for wider talk perhaps. I have been silently watching a list called xdg@lists.freedesktop.org. Now the list talks about freedesktop standards which basically is trying to have some sort of standards that all desktop environments can follow. One of the discussions on the specific list shared above is and was about ‘New MimeType fields in .desktop’ . It is a fascinating thread with many people giving loads of interesting view points. If you are into desktops even casually, you would enjoy the discussions thoroughly. [...] There are also lot of banking stuff that we cannot do on free software, especially in India as lot of powerful proprietary interests are there which make sure that no public API’s are available, or even if there is, it would be something half-done or after back and forth, they say, this is just for show, as had shared last year. I would probably add another section later to talk about it. From what little I know, in Europe the law mandates that there are public API’s not only for banking but wherever public money (read taxpayer money) is involved. Again, not all countries, but some more than others. At least, that is what I had seen over the years.