• mesa 18.3.0-rc2

  The second release candidate for Mesa 18.3.0 is now available.

• Mesa 18.3-RC2 Released With RADV, Wayland & NIR Fixes

  The second weekly release candidate of Mesa 18.3 is now available for testing of these open-source OpenGL / Vulkan drivers.

  Mesa 18.3-RC2 comes with several RADV Radeon Vulkan driver fixes, Wayland WSI updates, a few Intel/NIR changes, some minor Android updates, Gallium Nine built with Meson now is linked against pthreads, and various other alterations.

Most data centers include Linux, but there are many Linux server distros to choose from. Deciding which one is the right fit for your data center can be confusing, but there are three main options: Ubuntu Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CoreOS.

Linux is flexible, reliable, agile and secure, which makes it a strong contender for enterprises and SMBs. If you want your Linux OS to cover a wide range of use cases, you cannot go wrong with Ubuntu Server 18.04. This Ubuntu version is a long-term support release, and it's capable of serving large scale-out needs, as well as some more specific workloads, such as database servers, web servers, lightweight directory access protocol servers and OpenStack.

Ubuntu Server supports the ZFS volume management/file system, which is ideal for servers and containers because it includes all the tools you need for containers and clustering, as well as snap universal package support. It is also certified as a guest on AWS, Microsoft Azure, Joyent, IBM, Google Cloud Platform and Rackspace.

When it comes to Linux server distros, Ubuntu Server has many customization options and few system requirements. Ubuntu Server is terminal-only; you can install a GUI desktop environment, but that can consume precious system resources.

Also: Docker invites elderly Windows Server apps to spend remaining days in supervised care

• Sony using open source emulator for PlayStation Classic plug-and-play

  ReARMed is a popular, modernized branch of the original PCSX emulator, which was actively developed from 2000 to 2003 for Linux, Mac, and Windows. A new branch called PCSX Reloaded picked up that development later in the decade, adding new features and fixing bugs and eventually leading to the ReARMed fork. The emulator supports network play and a "save rewind" feature that lets you easily reverse recent gameplay, two features that seem to be missing from the PlayStation Classic.

• Playstation Classic is using the open-source PCSX emulator in order to play its games

  A lot of console gamers were hyped when Sony announced the Playstation Classic. However, it appears that Sony has not developed its own emulator and instead it is using the open source PCSX emulator that most PC gamers have been using all these years.

  What ultimately this means is that the overall emulation may not be that “authentic” as some gamers may have expected. We’ve seen this happening in SNES classic and to be honest I was expecting Sony to put some more effort to it.

• PlayStation Classic Using Open Source Emulator, 50Hz Versions of Games in Europe

  The PlayStation Classic has always seemed like a bit of a hasty attempt by Sony to try and cash in on the popularity of the NES Classic Mini and SNES Classic Mini’s success. Which is fine, of course—the PlayStation brand has a history and a legacy that deserves to be celebrated, too.

  But the hastiness of the effort seems to have compromised it. The list of games on the hardware seems to be, well, not the best, while there are basic baffling decisions like the decision to not have the controllers be the DualShock controllers, instead reverting to the no-analog original controllers.

Ikey made his marks on Linux over the years by contributing to a variety of projects (not limited to the Brisk Menu and Linux Steam Integration). He worked on Linux Mint for while before starting his own Ubuntu based distro. After running into development limitations, Ikey created his own Linux distro from scratch. He did this all while working for Intel on their Linux distro. Last June, Ikey took the huge step of leaving his job at Intel to work full time on Solus.

Besides being involved with Solus full-time, Ikey joined the Late Night Linux podcast. In August of 17, the show covered a news story about the Krita project running into problems with the tax man. In that episode, Ikey revealed that he intended to make sure that Solus would not suffer a similar situation. In fact, he wanted to make sure that if something happened to him, the project would survive. Kinda prophetic

• Librem 5 Development Kits: we are getting there!

  A few weeks ago we published an update about the forthcoming of our Librem 5 development kits when we ran into some issues which caused delays. Today we’re bringing you another update on the hardware fabrication process, as well as some pictures and a video. At the same time as the last update got posted, I was on my way to California, where we are fabricating our development kit and base boards (we are bringing everything to life there, and shipping from that same facility).

  [...]

  The MIPI DSI display interface is of extremely important, and we can not order the final batch of PCBs before we know that the display (and touch controller) work perfectly. By doing the verification we also indeed discovered some problems, minor things that did not behave as expected and which we are now able to fix. Some other issues are simply mechanical issues that are hard to evaluate just from all the datasheets. And then other things happen, like parts not conforming to standards (like the M.2 WiFi/BT card, of which we got samples just a few days after doing the prototype order). For example, the M.2 card has some pretty thick components on the bottom layer and thus can not lay flush on the PCB (which had been an assumption we had when we designed the board), so we need to change the connector for the final boards.

• Purism Still Working On Librem 5 Developer Kits, Delayed To December

  The Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone was originally slated to launch in January 2019 and its developer kits were supposed to ship this past summer. Now it's looking like the Librem 5 Developer Kits will hopefully arrive in December.

  This summer the developer boards were delayed to at least August and in the months since have relayed various delays. Last month they said the kits would ship "very shortly following shipping delays while now that is turning into December.

This week is the first annual Fedora Appreciation Week. As an extension of the How Do You Fedora? series, this article presents how past interviewees appreciate Fedora. The Fedora Project defines four common values that it encourages all contributors and community members to uphold. Those values are known as the Four Foundations. One such value, Friends, represents the vibrant community of contributors and users from across the world, all working towards the same goal: advancing free software.

Like any community, the Fedora community evolves over time. Each contributor’s story is a little different.

Also: FAW 2018 Day 5: “Encouraging crazy ideas”

• Security updates for Friday

• Linux CryptoMiners Are Now Using Rootkits to Stay Hidden [Ed: This impacts already-cracked machines; unlike Windows, where rootkits come though official channels like CD-ROM (Sony)]

  As the popularity of cryptocurrency rises, so does the amount of cryptominer Tojans that are being created and distributed to unsuspecting victims. One problem for cryptominers, though, is that the offending process is easily detectable due to their heavy CPU utilization.

  To make it harder to spot a cryptominer process that is utilizing all of the CPU, a new variant has been discovered for Linux that attempts to hide its presence by utilizing a rootkit.

  According to a new report by TrendMicro, this new cryptominer+rootkit combo will still cause performance issues due to the high CPU utilization, but administrators will not be able to detect what process is causing it.

  "We recently encountered a cryptocurrency-mining malware (detected by Trend Micro as Coinminer.Linux.KORKERDS.AB) affecting Linux systems," stated a report by TrendMicro. "It is notable for being bundled with a rootkit component (Rootkit.Linux.KORKERDS.AA) that hides the malicious process’ presence from monitoring tools. This makes it difficult to detect, as infected systems will only indicate performance issues. The malware is also capable of updating and upgrading itself and its configuration file."

• Linux cryptocurrency miners are installing rootkits to hide themselves [Ed: By hiring Catalin Cimpanu CBS ZDNet basically imported the same misleading headlines and style as the sensationalist Bleeping Computer (above, where he came from). Because all CBS judges "success" by is clicks and ad impressions.]

Apple's long-awaited refresh of the Mac Mini includes a component called the "T2 Security Chip" which Apple touts as having "a Secure Enclave coprocessor, which provides the foundation for APFS encrypted storage, secure boot, and Touch ID on Mac," as well as integrating "the system management controller, image signal processor, audio controller, and SSD controller," which were separate components in previous Mac systems. Because of the extent to which T2 is involved with the boot sequence of this new hardware, Apple controls what operating systems can be loaded onto their hardware.

• Safely allow commands through SSH

  sshd(8) has a very nice feature that is often overlooked. That feature is the ability to allow a ssh user to run a specified command and nothing else, not even a login shell.

  This is really easy to use and the magic happens in the file authorized_keys which can be used to restrict commands per public key.

• HP Envy x360 Convertible Ryzen 2500u update

• How to get the size of Rust types with -Zprint-type-sizes

• How to Install OpenSSH Server from Source in Linux

• How to Install Open Source Social Network (OSSN) on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• How to Install Kali Nethunter on Mediatek Android Devices

• Android x86 Installation and Troubleshooting Procedures

• How to Unlock Xiaomi Devices on Linux and Mac

• How To Use Dropbox On Non-Ext4 Filesystems (Btrfs, Ext3, XFS, ZFS, Etc.) On Linux

• Removing Duplicate PATH Entries

• Install and Deploy Kubernetes on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

• Testing Qt on Emulated Architectures Using QEMU User Mode

One of the biggest risks with using proprietary applications is losing access to your digital content if the software disappears or ends support for old file formats. Moving your content to an open format is the best way to protect yourself from being locked out due to vendor lock-in and for that, the Document Liberation Project (DLP) has your back.

According to the DLP's homepage, "The Document Liberation Project was created to empower individuals, organizations, and governments to recover their data from proprietary formats and provide a mechanism to transition that data into open and standardized file formats, returning effective control over the content from computer companies to the actual authors."

Systemd (stylized as systemd) is a suite of software that provides fundamental building blocks for Linux. It’s a Linux-specific system and service manager, offering an init system used to bootstrap the user space and to manage system processes after booting. The software provides a standard process for controlling what programs run when a Linux system boots up. Systemd, was created by Red Hat’s Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers. It provides more than running core programs. It also starts a journal of system activity, the network stack, a cron-style job scheduler, user logins, and many other jobs.

systemd has courted a lot of controversy with some legitimate concerns about its design details (for example, the decision to use binary logs), and debate about whether it extends its reach too far. Nevertheless, this system and service manager has been adopted by many popular Linux distributions such as Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, openSUSE, and Arch. Why? Essentially, because it offers a fast boot-up, parallelizing the boot process, as well as being designed with security in mind with most daemons running at minimal privileges. It also unifies system objects, and offers a simple configuration file language.

If you haven’t heard about the RISC-V (pronounced “risk five”) processor, it’s an open-source (open-hardware, open-design) processor core created by the University of Berkeley. It exists in 32-bit, 64-bit, and 128-bit variants, although only 32- and 64-bit designs exist in practice. The news is full of stories about major hardware manufacturers (Western Digital, NVidia) looking at or choosing RISC-V cores for their product.

But why should you care? You can’t just go to the local electronics boutique and buy a RISC-V laptop or blade server. RISC-V commodity hardware is either scarce or expensive. It’s all still early in its lifespan and development, not yet ready for enterprise tasks. Yet it’s still something that the average professional should be aware of, for a number of reasons.

By now everyone has heard about the Meltdown and Spectre issues, and related “bugs” users have been finding in Intel and AMD processors. This blog is not about how hard CPU design is – it’s hard. Even harder than you realize. The fear created by these bugs was not that there was a problem in the design, but that users of these chips had no insight into how these “black boxes” worked, no way to review code that was outside their control, and no way to audit these processors for other security issues. We’re at the mercy of the manufacturer to assure us there are no more bugs left (ha!).

• Android apps will update while you're using them

• Android users now face forced app updates, thanks to Google's new dev tools

• Android's sharing menu will be redesigned to be much 'faster,' fixing is a priority

• 10 Android phone security tips you need to know

• Samsung has announced the Galaxy J4 Core, its second Android Go phone

• Samsung's second Android Go phone is the Galaxy J4 Core

• What you need to know before importing that exotic Chinese Android phone

• NIX Solutions Reviews 10 Security Concerns When Developing an Android App

With Mesa 18.3 feature development having wrapped up at the end of October, here are some benchmarks showing how the updated RadeonSI and RADV drivers are performing for this code that is now under a feature freeze before its official release around the end of November. AMD Radeon Vega and Polaris graphics cards were tested with a slew of NVIDIA graphics cards also tested on their respective driver to show where the Linux gaming GPU performance is at as we head into the 2018 holiday shopping season.

• Valve adds the new Steam Chat into Big Picture Mode

  It's taken Valve a while to get there but they've new added the new Steam Chat into Steam's Big Picture Mode.

  One thing to note, is that for the new key-binds to actually work on the Steam Controller, I had to go into Steam's settings and re-select the official Steam Controller config. Do this by going into Big Picture Mode > Settings > Base Configurations > Big Picture configuration and then simply select the official one again and apply it. I've opened an issue on the Valve GitHub for it.

• Silly spy agency sim Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?! is now out with Linux support

  Developer Daylight Studios continue their Linux support with their latest title, a silly spy agency sim Holy Potatoes! A Spy Story?!

• Road to your city, a city-builder that requires you to make people mad about Football

  Road to your city is certainly not what I expected when I first saw it. A city-builder where you make your own Football team and deal with all the issues that comes with it.

  On their IndieDB page, they announced a few days ago that it has been ported to a "Desktop GL project" and so it will now support Linux and Mac. Apparently it was highly requested, so it's nice to see a developer put the effort in for their followers.

• Stealth and hacking game 'OFF GRID' fully funded and heading to Linux

  OFF GRID, a stealth and hacking game about privacy and mass surveillance managed to get funded on Kickstarter and so it's coming to Linux.

• Richard Garfield on 'Upkeep Kills' in Valve's card battler Artifact

  Keeping the hype train for Valve's new card battler, Richard Garfield has another blog post and video out. This time, covering what they call Upkeep Kills.

  I thought this was quite interesting, a nice little insight into some of the tactics you can employ. Since I don't play a lot of these card games myself, learning a little more about it was fun.

• The rather good top-down shooter Tesla vs Lovecraft is getting a 'For Science' DLC pack

  The For Science DLC pack for the manic top-down shooter Tesla vs Lovecraft sounds like it's going to be rather fun.

• The latest progress report for the PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 is out, impressive stuff

  RPCS3, the open source PlayStation 3 emulator is coming along nicely. The latest progress report goes over some recent work with various improvements.

  They've now managed to hit over 1,300 titles that you're able to actually get in-game now, although that doesn't mean they're playable just yet but progress is progress. Playable titles has risen to around 1,014 now too.

Some support improvements are on the way for Huawei's MateBook X, a lightweight ultrabook/laptop that aims to compete with the likes of Apple's MacBook Pro.

There are a new set of patches posted providing support for some important currently missing pieces of Linux support on the MateBooks. These patches allow the Huawei MateBook X to have working hotkeys on some models that currently are not supported and for the front speakers to actually work. Also with these patches albeit arguably less important is the microphone mute LED now working as well.

I’ve been a writer for more than 20 years. I’ve written thousands of articles and how-tos on various technical topics and have penned more than 40 works of fiction. So, the written word is not only important to me, it’s familiar to the point of being second nature. And through those two decades (and counting) I’ve done nearly all my work on the Linux platform. I must confess, during those early years it wasn’t always easy. Formats didn’t always mesh with what an editor required and, in some cases, the open source platform simply didn’t have the necessary tools required to get the job done.

Kdenlive 18.08.3 is out with updated build scripts as well as some compilation fixes. All work is focused on the refactoring branch so nothing major in this release. On the other hand in the Windows front some major breakthroughs were made like the fix of the play/pause lag as well as the ability to build Kdenlive directly from Windows. The next milestone is to kill the running process on exit making Kdenlive almost as stable as the Linux version.

In other news, we are organizing a bug squash day on the first days of December. If you are interested in participating this is a great opportunity since we have prepared a list of low hanging bugs to fix. See you!

Intrinsyc’s Android 8.0 driven Open-Q 670 HDK mobile development kit for the octa-core Snapdragon 670 SoC features a 5.65-inch touchscreen, 6GB LPDDR4, 6GB eMMC, WiFi, BT, GPS, NFC, and optional camera and sensor boards.

The 170 x 170mm, Mini-ITX form-factor Open-Q 670 HDK is one of Intrynsic’s Android mobile “open frame” kits with a smartphone like touchscreen. Most recently, these include the Open-Q 845, which taps the high-end, AI-enhanced Snapdragon 845. The similarly Android 8.0 powered Open-Q 670 HDK is built around Qualcomm’s somewhat less powerful, but still octa-core Snapdragon 670, which was announced in August.

• IBM's $34bn acquisition of Red Hat: Our take

  We take the long view on the tech giant's colossal acquisition of open-source software company Red Hat.

  Given its love of technology and innovation, the Leaders League news team was most intrigued by IBM’s announcement in late October that it was purchasing open-source software company Red Hat. Having had some time to think about it, we’ve written a recap that also points to the future.

  IBM’s move signifies a strong commitment (in the shape of a $34bn cash purchase) to keeping up at the cloud game, and there’s little doubt that this is where the future lies: even in the face of the GDPR, lawyers and industry bods alike are sanguine about the Internet of Things and the deep, broad possibilities of cloud storage. According to research and advisory firm Gartner, the hybrid cloud market will be worth $240bn by 2019.

• Making sense of IBM-Red Hat in the multi-cloud era

  Big Blue wants Red Hat because it is “the world’s leading provider of open-source cloud solutions, and the emerging leader in the platforms for hybrid cloud and multi-cloud,” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said in a conference call Monday.

  Red Hat Enterprise Linux is known for its CloudForms hybrid cloud management tool, based on the ManageIQ open source project.

  “This is about resetting the cloud landscape, and we will be the undisputed No. 1 leader in hybrid cloud,” Rometty said.

• Why IBM is taking a 'leap of faith' with Red Hat acquisition