• Chris Lamb: Free software activities in November 2018

• Paul Wise: FLOSS Activities November 2018

• Socorro: November 2018 happenings

  Socorro is the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla's products like Firefox. When Firefox crashes, the Breakpad crash reporter asks the user if the user would like to send a crash report. If the user answers "yes!", then the Breakpad crash reporter collects data related to the crash, generates a crash report, and submits that crash report as an HTTP POST to Socorro. Socorro saves the crash report, processes it, and provides an interface for aggregating, searching, and looking at crash reports.

• Debian, Rust, and librsvg

  Debian supports many architectures and, even for those it does not officially support, there are Debian ports that try to fill in the gap. For most user applications, it is mostly a matter of getting GCC up and running for the architecture in question, then building all of the different packages that Debian provides. But for packages that need to be built with LLVM—applications or libraries that use Rust, for example—that simple recipe becomes more complicated. How much the lack of Rust support for an unofficial architecture should hold back the rest of the distribution was the subject of a somewhat acrimonious discussion recently.

  The issue came up on the debian-devel mailing list when John Paul Adrian Glaubitz complained about the upload of a new version of librsvg to unstable. Librsvg is used to render Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) images; the project has recently been switching some of its code from C to Rust, presumably for the memory safety offered by Rust. Glaubitz said that the new "Rust-ified" library had been uploaded with no warning when the package maintainer "knows very well that this particular package has a huge number of reverse dependencies and would cause a lot of problems with non-Rust targets now". The reverse dependencies are the packages that rely on librsvg in this case.

• Debian welcomes its new Outreachy intern

  Debian continues participating in Outreachy, and we'd like to welcome our new Outreachy intern for this round, lasting from December 2018 to March 2019.

  Anastasia Tsikoza will work on Improving the integration of Debian derivatives with the Debian infrastructure and the community, mentored by Paul Wise and Raju Devidas.

  Congratulations, Anastasia, and welcome!

For those with an ASUS Tinker Board, the Debian-based TinkerOS has an updated operating system release.

The Tinker Board that comes in at about twice the price of a Raspberry Pi but with significantly better performance has out an official operating system update. TinkerOS 2.0.8 pulls in the latest Mali graphics driver, is updated to the Linux 4.4.132 LTS kernel, now supports Wake-On-LAN from suspend-to-RAM, supports WiFi Direct, improves HDMI hot-plug detection, and has a number of other improvements.

• A Linux Noob Reviews: The Deepin 15.8 Installer

  As someone relatively new to Linux land, I may not seem like the ideal candidate to critically evaluate a Linux desktop OS installer. Then again, since beginning my regular Linux coverage I've been focused on relating to fellow beginners or people interested in making the jump from either Windows or macOS. And the first point of contact with any Linux distribution (beyond the website) is normally the installer. It's where you start to fall in love or begin to pull your hair out in frustration.

  Linux installers can be many things. Streamlined, elegant affairs taking mere minutes until you're up and running. They can be satisfying challenges. In some cases they can be complete deal breakers based on your skill level. They are the doorway to what could be your next daily driver, or the on-ramp to a continuing search.

  So in these reviews I'll show you every single step the installer guides you through, and point out the thoughtful touches that make the experience better than most. Or the potential barriers that could stop you in your tracks.

  Alright, let's talk about Deepin 15.8 and begin by getting in front of a ridiculous rumor that practically turned into a witch hunt. Yes, it's from China. No, that doesn't mean it's spyware. From what I've gathered, the developers had installed a traffic analytics tracking service into their Deepin Install app store (you can see that source code here). While the presence of traffics analytics in Deepin software can be debated, there was never anything malicious happening. And as of Deepin 15.8, it has been removed anyway.

• Deepin 15.8 Run Through

  In this video, we look at Deepin 15.8, the latest release of the Rolling Deepin, as normal I use VirtualBox for all my videos and Deepin is a bit stucky in it.

• Deepin 15.8 overview | Attractive and Efficient, Excellent User Experience

  Hiweed GNU/Linux) is a Debian-based distribution (it was Ubuntu-based until version 15 released in late 2015) that aims to provide an elegant, user-friendly and reliable operating system. It does not only include the best the open source world has to offer, but it has also created its own desktop environment called DDE or Deepin Desktop Environment which is based on the Qt 5 toolkit. Deepin focuses much of its attention on intuitive design. Its home-grown applications, like Deepin Software Centre, DMusic and DPlayer are tailored to the average user.