The Chrome Cast 50: Linux on Chromebooks and the future of Chrome OS tablets

This week on The Chrome Cast, we’re exploring a couple seemingly-unconnected ideas that actually tie into one another quite well. First up is the heightened interest in Linux apps on Chrome OS. While we’ve been tracking along with the development of Crostini since before it was actually a thing, it’s been a while since we’ve really dug into what Chromebooks are capable of with Linux. As part of that renewed effort, we’ve launched Command Line, where we are focusing more on what users can do and get done with Linux apps on their Chromebook. Another new show:

• 2020-02-28 | Linux Headlines

  The Open Source Initiative kicks a co-founder from its mailing lists, OBS faces backlash for receiving support from Facebook Gaming, and Collabora launches its version of LibreOffice for mobile.

Linux-powered module charges up the RISC-V PolarFire SoC

Aries’ “M100PFS” module runs Linux on Microchip’s RISC-V based PolarFire SoC with FPGAs up to 265K LE. Features include up to 8GB LPDDR4, up to 64GB eMMC, and support for up to 16x SERDES lanes. Aries Embedded announced one of the first compute modules equipped with the PolarFire SoC, a Linux-powered, FPGA-enabled RISC-V SoC from Microchip’s Microsemi unit (see farther below). The M100PFS has the same 74 x 42mm footprint as Aries’ similar M100PF module, which is equipped with the PolarFire FPGA without the Linux-ready RISC-V cores.

Android as a Desktop

• Android-x86 project lets you run Android 9 Pie on a desktop, laptop, or table

  The team at the Android-x86 project Abba released their latest version of an Android based desktop operating system, offering an open source platform that can run Android 9 Pie on a desktop, laptop, or tablet with an Intel or AMD processor. Today the team announced the public release of Android-x86 9.0, the first stable release for Android-x86 9.0 (pie-x86). The prebuilt images are now available to download from Foss Hub and OSDN, check out the links below. The latest release includes support for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors, hardware-accelerated graphics with support for OpenGL ES 3.x on Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA GPUs, as well as experimental Vulkan graphics support, together with an optional Taskbar launcher, although you can also use the default Android-style launcher if you prefer. Other supported areas within the Android desktop operating system include WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, camera, audio, and multitouch input.

• Android-x86 9.0 Offering Android Pie Experience on Computer Released

• Android is NOT Linux

  Android is NOT Linux Let's go over why Android is nothing like Linux. While it may use a Linux Kernel it is a completely different beast altogether.

OpenSUSE News Outsourced to Microsoft, Dominique Leuenberger's Report on Tumbleweed

• Moving to the new News [Ed: News outsourced to Microsoft then]

  In an effort to make contributing to openSUSE easier, openSUSE News has moved from being a Wordpress application to a Jekyll static site developed directly on Github. Now you too can write an article, or a series of articles, by sending pull requests to the openSUSE/news-o-o repository.

• Dominique Leuenberger: openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of the week 2020/09

  During this week we released 4 snapshots (0220, 0222, 0224 and 0226) – an average week from that perspective, yet there have been some interesting and well-awaited updates in these snapshots: zsh 5.8 Mesa 19.3.4 & Mesa 20.0 libcap 2.32 GNOME 3.34.4 KDE Plasma 5.18.1 LLVM 6 has been removed from the repository ncurses 6.2 Linux kernel 5.5.5 Mozilla Firefox 73.0.1: it will now launch in Wayland mode inside a Wayland session MariaDB 10.4.12