• Major updated packages for Lx 3

  Good news for OpenMandriva Lx 3 users. While OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 in on the way, we keep taking care of OMLx 3.03. Developers crisb, itchka, and TPG have made available a long list of updated packages just released to our updates repositories after the normal testing.

  Updated packages include Firefox 61.0.1, Thunderbird 52.9.0, Plasma 5.12.6, Quassel 0.12.5, Qt5 5.9.6, Libre Office 6.0.5, Mesa 18.1.3 and number of other updated KDE packages.

• While Waiting for OpenMandriva Lx 4, OpenMandriva Lx 3 Users Get Lots of Updates

  While waiting for the forthcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4 operating system series, users of the current OpenMandriva Lx 3 release have received numerous updated packages.

  The OpenMandriva development team announced over the weekend that a long list of updated packages await users of the OpenMandriva Lx 3 operating system series, which include the recently released KDE Plasma 5.12.6 LTS desktop environment and Mozilla Firefox 61.0.1 web browser.

  "Good news for OpenMandriva Lx 3 users. While OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 in on the way, we keep taking care of OMLx 3.03. Developers crisb, itchka, and TPG have made available a long list of updated packages just released to our updates repositories after the normal testing," reads the announcement.

Open source had a moral purpose when it was fighting "The Borg", Microsoft, in the 1990s, but then it fell from view. You could say it has found its mojo again, only this time it is about loosening the grip of companies built on ever more intrusive personal data processing: Google and Facebook. One of the biggest but most promising challenges is creating an Android free of Google's data-slurping.

Four years ago there were four mobile platforms, but since Microsoft and BlackBerry withdrew, it's a duopoly of Apple and Google.

The creation of a new third platform – a Google-free Android – now looks feasible, given the Great Unbundling the European Commission is likely to order. But someone has to build the damn thing – and it's going to be a mammoth task.

• OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 Being Prepared With zSTD-Enabled Linux 4.16, Clang Pre-7.0, GCC 8

  OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 is being prepped for release soon. As covered previously, they are switching back from RPM5 to RPM4. In addition, they are picking up DNF package manager support over URPMI for package installation.

  Other work going into OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 includes a pre-7.0 snapshot of LLVM Clang, the GCC 8 code compiler that was newly released, and more. OpenMandriva Lx 4.0 is currently tracking the Linux 4.16 kernel and do have zSTD compression support enabled.

  While OpenMandriva talked about dropping 32-bit support, as of now i686 continues to be supported alongside x86_64, ARMv7, and AArch64.

• Fedora 30 Should Be Out In Just Under One Year

  Fedora 28 was released this week and it actually arrived on-time with its great feature-set. In planning ahead, Fedora's FESCo committee has already proposed an initial schedule for Fedora 30 that will arrive at this time next year.

  Fedora 29's schedule has already been set for having a beta release by mid-to-end of September, a final freeze in October, and getting the official release out by the end of October -- assuming no delays.

• Weekend Reading: Qubes

  Qubes OS is a security-focused operating system that, as tech editor Kyle Rankin puts it, "is fundamentally different from any other Linux desktop I've used". Join us this weekend in reading Kyle's multi-part series on all things Qubes.

• Red Hat Beefs Up Low-Code Offerings for Enterprises

  Red Hat, a provider of enterprise open source solutions, has introduced a decision management platform and low-code development tool intended to simplify the development and deployment of rules-based applications and services. Red Hat Decision Manager 7 is the next generation of the company’s business rules management offering, Red Hat JBoss BRMS, and is designed to enable organizations to quickly build applications that automate business decisions.

  “The notion of low-code development is less about eliminating code or cutting traditional programmers out of the application development process, and more about helping business and IT users to do what they need to do quickly and efficiently, and in a complementary manner,” said Mike Piech, vice president and general manager of middleware for Red Hat. “Ultimately, what low-code tools should offer - and what we have built with Red Hat Decision Manager - is not a platform geared toward one or the other, but rather a rich and tightly integrated feature set designed to provide a better user experience regardless of whether you are a business analyst or hard-core developer.”

• Stock to Watch – Red Hat Inc (NYSE: RHT)

• Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) – Hot Stock in the Spotlight

• Champlain Investment Partners LLC Boosts Position in Red Hat Inc (RHT)

• Fedora Podcast 002 — Ambassadors, the face of Fedora

  The Fedora Marketing Team is continuing with the Fedora Podcast and we have a new episode out. This ongoing series will feature interviews and talks with people who make the Fedora community awesome. These folks work on new technologies found in Fedora. Or they produce the distribution itself. Some work on putting Fedora in the hands of users.

• [Podcast] PodCTL #28 – Kubernetes Roles & Personas

• Emojis in vte

  It’s been one of those weeks when gnome-terminal and vte keep stumbling on some really weird edge cases, so it was a happy moment when I saw this on Fedora 27 Workstation.

• OpenMandriva Switching Back From RPM5 To RPM4

  It was seven years ago that Mandriva 2011 switched to using RPM5 from RPM4, but now for the next OpenMandriva release they are transitioning back to using RPM4 and with that making use of Fedora's DNF.

• Switching to RPMv4

  Cooker and 3.0 may be broken for upcoming days, as we need to adapt our docker builders and scripts to RPM4 and dnf.