An Easy Fix for a Stupid Mistake

I waited a long time for Mageia 7 and for OpenMandriva Lx 4. When both distros arrived, I was very happy. But new distros bring changes, and sometimes it is not easy to adapt. Mageia 7 has been rock-solid: it is doing a great job in my laptop and both in my daughter's desktop and in mine. There is one thing, though. I have been avoiding a strange mesa update that wants to remove Steam. OpenMandriva is also fantastic, but this new release provided options like rock, release, and rolling. When I first installed the distro, I chose rock because I was shying away from the rolling flavor. Eventually, I had to move to rolling because that was the only way in which I could manage to install Steam in both my laptop and desktop machines.

today's leftovers

• Clear Linux Is Being Used Within Some Automobiles

  Intel's speedy Clear Linux distribution could be running under the hood of your car. While we're fascinated by the performance of Intel's open-source Clear Linux distribution that it offers meaningful performance advantages over other distributions while still focused on security and offering a diverse package set, we often see it asked... who uses Clear Linux? Some argue that Clear Linux is just a toy or technology demo, but it's actually more.

• Radeon ROCm 2.7.2 Released

  Radeon ROCm 2.7.2 is now available as the newest update to AMD's open-source GPU compute stack for Linux systems. ROCm 2.7.2 is a small release that just fixes the upgrade path when moving from older ROCm releases, v2.7.2 should now be running correctly. This release comes after the recent ROCm 2.7.1 point release that had corrected some components from properly loading the ROC tracer library.

• How To Install Webmin on Debian 10 Linux

• GNOME Shell + Mutter Patches Pending For Wayland Fullscreen Compositing Bypass

  There's an exciting patch set to GNOME Shell and Mutter now pending for finally wiring up the full-screen unredirected display / full-screen bypass compositing for helping the performance of full-screen games in particular on Wayland. GNOME on X11 has long supported the full-screen compositing bypass so the window manager / compositor gets out of the way when running full-screen games/applications. That support under Wayland hasn't been in place and thus there is a performance hit for full-screen Wayland-native software. But now thanks to Red Hat's Jonas Ådahl, that infrastructure now appears to be ready.

• Xabber Server v.0.9 alpha is released

  After almost three years of research, planning and development we're proud to present the first public version of Xabber Server. Server is licensed under GNU AGPL v3 license, source code is available on GitHub. It is a fork of superb open source source XMPP server ejabberd by ProcessOne, with many custom protocol improvements an an all-new management panel.

• September Edition of Plasma5 for Slackware

  After a summer hiatus during which I only released new packages for KDE Frameworks because they addressed a serious security hole, I am now back in business and just released KDE-5_19.09 for Slackware-current. The packages for KDE-5_19.09 are available for download from my ‘ktown‘ repository. As always, these packages are meant to be installed on a full installation of Slackware-current which has had its KDE4 removed first. These packages will not work on Slackware 14.2. On my laptop with slackware64-current, this new release of Plasma5 runs smooth.

• Pen-testing duo cuffed for breaking into courthouse that hired them

  Later, the County official discovered that the two men were in fact, hired by the state court administration to try to "access" court records through "various means" to find out potential security vulnerabilities of the electronic court records.

  The state court administration acknowledged that the two men had been hired, but said they were not supposed to physically break into the courthouse.

• Satellite, GNU Radio and SDR talks released

  Mark M5BOP reports the complete set of amateur radio technical talks from this year's Martlesham Microwave Round Table is now available to watch on YouTube Videos of these MMRT 2019 talks are available: • Practical GNUradio - Heather Lomond M0HMO

• Destination Linux 138 - GNOME 3.34, Firefox 69, Librem 5, Chromebooks, Signal Messenger & more

  On DL 138 Gnome 3.34 Drops This Week, Super Grub2 Disk 2.04s1 Released, Firefox 69 Released, Purism Librem 5 Shipping, Chromebooks Targeting The Enterprise, Phantom 3D Coming To Linux

• Agile project management: 10 reasons to use it

  On the road to change, you’ll encounter fear and loathing. People will undoubtedly cling to old ways of working. Successfully making it to the other side will require commitment, passionate change agents, and unwavering leadership. You might wonder – is it really worth it? Leaders who have made the switch to agile project management say that it has delivered benefits both large and small to their organizations, from the rituals that bring their team together – like daily stand-ups – to the results that make their business stronger – like better end products and happier customers.

Linux Kernel and Linux Foundation Leftovers

• Improve memset

  
  since the merge window is closing in and y'all are on a conference, I
  thought I should take another stab at it. It being something which Ingo,
  Linus and Peter have suggested in the past at least once.
  

• An Improved Linux MEMSET Is Being Tackled For Possibly Better Performance

  Borislav Petkov has taken to improve the Linux kernel's memset function with it being an area previously criticzed by Linus Torvalds and other prominent developers. Petkov this week published his initial patch for better optimizing the memset function that is used for filling memory with a constant byte.

• Kernel Address Space Isolation Still Baking To Limit Data Leaks From Foreshadow & Co

  In addition to the work being led by DigitalOcean on core scheduling to make Hyper Threading safer in light of security vulnerabilities, IBM and Oracle engineers continue working on Kernel Address Space Isolation to help prevent data leaks during attacks. Complementing the "Core Scheduling" work, Kernel Address Space Isolation was also talked about at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The address space isolation work for the kernel was RFC'ed a few months ago as a feature to prevent leaking sensitive data during attacks like L1 Terminal Fault and MDS. The focus on this Kernel ASI is for pairing with hypervisors like KVM as well as being a generic address space isolation framework.

• The Linux Kernel Is Preparing To Enable 5-Level Paging By Default

  While Intel CPUs aren't shipping with 5-level paging support, they are expected to be soon and distribution kernels are preparing to enable the kernel's functionality for this feature to extend the addressable memory supported. With that, the mainline kernel is also looking at flipping on 5-level paging by default for its default kernel configuration. Intel's Linux developers have been working for several years on the 5-level paging support for increasing the virtual/physical address space for supporting large servers with vast amounts of RAM. The 5-level paging increases the virtual address space from 256 TiB to 128 PiB and the physical address space from 64 TiB to 4 PiB. Intel's 5-level paging works by extending the size of virtual addresses to 57 bits from 48 bits.

• Interview with the Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO

  In this interview, Chip Childers, the CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation talks about some hot topics.

• Research Shows Open Source Program Offices Improve Software Practices

  Using open source software is commonplace, with only a minority of companies preferring a proprietary-first software policy. Proponents of free and open source software (FOSS) have moved to the next phases of open source adoption, widening FOSS usage within the enterprise as well as gaining the “digital transformation” benefits associated with open source and cloud native best practices. Companies, as well as FOSS advocates, are determining the best ways to promote these business goals, while at the same time keeping alive the spirit and ethos of the non-commercial communities that have embodied the open source movement for years.

• Linux Foundation Survey Proves Open-Source Offices Work Better

Releasing Slax 9.11.0

New school year has started again and next version of Slax is here too :) this time it is 9.11.0. This release includes all bug fixes and security updates from Debian 9.11 (code name Jessie), and adds a boot parameter to disable console blanking (console blanking is disabled by default). You can get the newest version at the project's home page, there are options to purchase Slax on DVD or USB device, as well as links for free download. Surprisingly for me we skipped 9.10, I am not sure why :) I also experimented with the newly released series of Debian 10 (code name Buster) and noticed several differences which need addressing, so Slax based on Debian 10 is in progress, but not ready yet. Considering my current workload and other circumstances, it will take some more time to get it ready, few weeks at least. Also: Slax 9.11 Released While Re-Base To Debian 10 Is In Development