I used to be quite the Linux enthusiast, trying new distributions almost daily, keeping up to date with news and software versions, just generally participating in the whole scene, though as a technical know-nothing really. I kinda got tired of it after a while and decided to settle on one distribution that would be low on bandwidth needs, extremely stable, and able to do all the things, admittedly a rather limited array of things, that I need it to do. I had been playing with Debian GNU/Linux’s Wheezy iteration (yes, they use “Toy Story” character names) since late 2011, when it was still the “testing” version, and noticed after a year or so that it was in a frozen state, largely set for final release, which ultimately happened, in typical molasses-slow Debian fashion, in early May of 2013. So I guess I’ve been using it as my one and only OS for the better part of two years, rarely if ever booting into any of the dozen or so other distributions I still have installed or into Windows 7. I have it fine tuned to my liking and it does every single thing I need it to do. It’s been reliable and stable, exactly as expected.

The Tails operating system is one of the most trusted platforms in cryptography, favored by Edward Snowden and booted up more than 11,000 times per day in May. But according to the security firm Exodus Intelligence, the program may not be as secure as many thought. The company says they've discovered an undisclosed vulnerability that will let attackers deanonymize Tails computers and even execute code remotely, potentially exposing users to malware attacks. Exodus is currently working with Tails to patch the bug, and expects to hand over a full report on the exploit next week.

This tenth point update is actually a very important one because it’s the last one in the life of this branch of the Debian distribution, which was released back in February 2011. The developers have announced that no more major updates will be made for Debian 6.x “Squeeze, but there are also some good news.

Only a month ago, the Debian devs also said that Debian will actually become an LTS release (long term support) and that the operating system will continue to receive security updates (different from the one released today) until February 2016. This would effectively mean that Debian 6.x will feature six years of support and that is more that even more that Canonical provides for Ubuntu.

The official description of BitKey says that it is a “self-contained read-only CD/USB stick with everything you need to perform highly secure air-gapped Bitcoin transactions.”

It is a side project of the developers of TurnKey Linux, a Debian-based distribution that provides a set of ready-to-use server virtual appliances.

For right now they have ported this unified Linux distribution to an MK808 mini-PC stick. At VolksPC.org isn't too much more information right now, but the page explains, "Many desktop distributions such as Debian are already available for ARM and x86. But Debian ARM does not support YouTube playback and because of a lack of drivers, HD video playback is just not possible. Android, on the other hand, does this very well and also has many applications not available on Debian. So we created a unified distribution that allows both Android and Debian LXDE/XFCE applications to run simultaneously at native speeds. On ARM, our distribution is based on a modified ARMHF Debian Wheezy rootfs."

Tails is a distribution based on Debian and Tor technologies whose purpose is to keep its users as anonymous as possible. Even though Tails is not exactly a new distribution and has been around for quite some time, it has become a lot more popular after Edward Snowden said that he used it to hide his footprints when he delivered the documents to various media outlets.

A while back we decided to move onto Ubuntu for our backend server deployment. The main reasons for this was a predictable release cycle and long term support by upstream (this decision was made before the announcement that the Debian project commits to long term support as well.) With the release of the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS we are now in the process of migrating our ~5000 servers to that distribution.

Building Linux Mint 17.1 on the same code base as Linux Mint 17, the developers have more time for improving the already existing Linux Mint specific applications and implement newer desktop environments until 2016, while security fixes will be implemented five years from now.

Also, by creating point releases, the users will be able to easily get the latest updates (if the systems use the same code base) from the command-line, by performing regular system upgrades, or get the Linux Mint 17.x images, which already contain the latest versions of the packages.

Debian 7.6 is just a maintenance update, like all the previous releases so far in the series. There is nothing out of the ordinary with this new version, but new users should get this version right from the start.

According to the changelog, Clonezilla Live 2.2.3-27 is an unstable release that uses packages from the Debian Sid software repositories as of July 8, 2014. It is powered by Linux kernel 3.14.10 and updates the Syslinux bootloader to version 6.03 Pre18.

APT 1.0.6 brings various fixes, among which we can mention one for an issue with the Plural-Forms fields, several encoding problems, and issues with the format specifier order in translations and unfuzzy DocBook translations.

Furthermore, the application no longer cleans "/" in pkgArchiveCleaner and pkgAcquire::Clean, no longer parses invalid translation files, uses the Req.str() function in the debug output, and only displays DEB packages as upgradable if the CandidateVer option is equal with zero.

With the help of the Debian System Administrators, it’s now setup on tracker.debian.org!
This service is also managed by the Debian QA team, it’s deployed in /srv/tracker.debian.org/ (on ticharich.debian.org, a VM) if you want to verify something on the live installation. It runs under the “qa” user (so members of the “qa-core” group can administer it).

Parsix GNU/Linux 6.0r1, a live and installation DVD based on Debian, aiming to provide a ready-to-use, easy-to-install desktop and laptop-optimized operating system, has been released for testing.

The developers' ultimate goal is to offer customers an easy-to-use OS based on Debian's Wheezy branch, which employs a release of the GNOME desktop environment. The devs have made a few minor modifications to the desktop and now it's much easier to set it apart from other distros.

Our latest Debian GNU/Linux benchmarks following the recent GNU/kFreeBSD vs. GNU/Linux comparison are benchmarks of Debian GNU/Linux in its latest testing form for 8.0 "Jessie" compared to a stock Ubuntu 14.04 LTS plus with an assortment of updates.

From the same Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition system with 8GB of RAM, 64GB OCZ Vertex solid-state drive, and Radeon HD 4850 graphics, the following configurations were benchmarked:

- Debian GNU/Linux "Testing" of 8.0 Jessie with the Linux 3.14 kernel, X.Org Server 1.15.1, Mesa 10.1.4, GCC 4.8.3, and the default EXT4 file-system. It's worth noting that with the Linux 3.14 kernel in Debian testing the i7-3960X EE system defaulted to the P-State scaling driver with the powersave governor.

- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS with the Linux 3.13 stock kernel, Mesa 10.1.0, X.Org Server 1.15.1, and an EXT4 file-system.

- Ubuntu 14.04 LTS updated to the Linux 3.15 mainline kernel (from the mainline PPA) that besides bumping the kernel version forward also switches over from the ACPI CPUfreq ondemand governor to the Intel P-State performance governor.

- The updated Ubuntu 14.04 LTS + Linux 3.15 stack plus enabling the Oibaf PPA for tapping Mesa 10.3.0-devel.

- The most updated stack (ditto above) plus pulling down the GCC 4.9 kernel onto Ubuntu 14.04 to replace GCC 4.8.

All of these Debian and Ubuntu Linux benchmarks were carried out via the Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.

The press picked up the recent press release about Debian LTS but mainly to mention the fact that it’s up and running. The call for help is almost never mentioned.
It’s a pity because while it’s up, it’s not really running satisfactorily yet. As of today (2014-06-19), 36 packages in squeeze need a security update, yet squeeze-lts has only seen 7 updates.

There is no love between Linux and Windows users, but that doesn't stop Linux users to transform their operating system until it looks like the latest Windows 8. In fact, the WinAte theme is actually perfect for this task.

Five years ago Debian and most derivatives switched from the standard GNU C Library (GLIBC) to the Embedded GLIBC (EGLIBC). Debian is now about to take the reverse way switching back to GLIBC, as EGLIBC is now a dead project, the last release being the 2.19 one. At the time of writing the glibc package has been uploaded to experimental and sits in the NEW queue.

HP Helion uses its own version of Linux based on the the open-source Debian Linux operating system at its core, which is a shift away from Ubuntu Linux, the Linux distribution previous iterations of HP's cloud efforts had been using.

Also: HP Launches Helion Managed Services

As some good news for Debian users running a Radeon HD 7000 series or newer graphics card where the GLAMOR 2D acceleration support is required, GLAMOR support has been enabled within the Debian experimental repository.

For months users have been after having GLAMOR enabled within the Debian world since the support is required for the recent AMD "GCN" (HD 7000 / 8000 and Rx 200 series) hardware while it's an optional acceleration architecture for older AMD GPUs as well as an alternative to UXA and SNA for Intel graphics.

Mate is a Gnome 2 fork, created by the Arch Linux developers as a an alternative to Gnome Classic (Gnome 2), when the Gnome developers decided to create Gnome 3. Mate became very popular in a short time and now is used on many Linux systems. The latest version available is Mate 1.8, which has been released a while ago.